CHAPTER I.

OUR IMPRESSIONS.

It is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these, we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the church.

We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.

To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe, all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and perfectly inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief--namely, that the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which comprises the church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing, can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the church for which we were unprepared--as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff--still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault--either intellectually our fault (which is rather a misfortune than a fault) or spiritually (which is from our negligence and lukewarmness)--if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is ever ready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: “You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”[242]

He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is he in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air.[243] But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are his precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the divine Voice in the church.

There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother, the church, lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in its mother’s lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the “everlasting arms,”[244] and therefore we “dwell in safety and alone”--alone as regards those outside the church, who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity to doubt the church is the same as to say that God is a liar.

If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it absolutely impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief, we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this: that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a sail on the mast of a vessel which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.

The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the color of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast and their possible variety so great that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beyond our capacity, and would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of one even of his fellow-beings? He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.

We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short--if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term--to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.

It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition of _viator_, or pilgrim.[245] It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight--the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.

We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.

To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.

In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]--not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?

Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood which he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence--a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.

There was an eternity in which the Son of God--he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity--dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.

We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian--a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”

In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be--if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that the QUI EST, the “I am,” filled it--this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.

We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.

The generality of persons, in thinking of time in relation to eternity, represent to themselves a long, long ago, blind past, and then an interminable but partially appreciable future, and time lying as a sort of sliced-out period between the two, which slice is attached to the eternity behind and the eternity in front, and about which we have the comfort and satisfaction of being able to write history and chronicle events, either on a large or a small scale. We treat it as we should do a mountain of gold, which we coin into money, and we conveniently cut it up into ages, years, months, days, and hours. It is our nature so to do, and we cannot do otherwise. It is the condition of our being. But as it will not be always the condition of our being, there are few things we are more constantly exhorted to than the attempt to raise our imagination, or rather our faith, as much as possible out of these conventional and arbitrary trammels, and dispose ourselves for that other state which is our ultimate end, and where there are no years and no days.

In point of fact, time is only an imperfection of our being--an absolutely necessary imperfection, because our being is finite, and our state is a probationary state; and probation implies not only that succession which is necessary in every finite being, but change and movement in respect to things which are permanent in a more perfect state. Our condition in time has not inaptly been compared to that of a man looking through the small aperture of a camera-obscura, which only permits him to behold a section of what is passing. The figures appear and vanish. But the window is thrown wide open in eternity, and he sees the whole at once. He is, therefore, under a disadvantage so long as he is in the camera-obscura, viewing the landscape through a small hole. And this is our position, judging of eternity through the aperture of time. Even now we have a wonderful power of adding to our time, or of shortening it, without any reference to clocks or sun-dials, and which, if we think about it, will help to show us that time is a plastic accident of our being.

When we have been very much absorbed, we have taken no note of time, and the hours have flown like minutes. During that interval we have, as it were, made our own time, and modified our condition with reference to time by our own act. Time, therefore, is plastic. Were we by some extraordinary and exceptional power to accomplish in one day all that actually we now take a year to effect, but at the same time intellectually to retain our present perception of the succession of events, our life would not really have been shorter for the want of those three hundred and sixty-four days which we had been able to do without. Life is shorter now than it was in the days of the patriarchs. But possibly the perception of life is not shortened. Nay, rather, from the rapidity with which events are now permitted to succeed each other, partially owing to the progress of science and to man’s increased dominion over material force, the probability is that our lives are not abstractedly much, if at all, more brief than Adam’s nine hundred and thirty years. All things now are hastening to the end. They have always been hastening. But there is the added impetus of the past; and that increases with every age in the world’s history.

Now, let us imagine life, or a portion of life, without thought--that is, without the act of thinking. Immediately we find that it is next door to _no thing_, to no time, and no life. We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it--that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual power which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera-obscura, by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity which lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest reasonable and possible importance to the brute creation. It is an open question, in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless, it is obvious that brutes perceive only or chiefly by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perception of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjects to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life, we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[247] All we have said tends to prove that the existence of time is a relative existence; it is the form or phase of our own finite being. It is an aspect of eternity--the aspect which is consistent with our present condition. For time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As finite spirits we cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in grace. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life, which is illimitable, in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. This is possible only in God himself, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. But the created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement of increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. Time, therefore, will continue to exist while creatures continue to exist.

Having arrived at this conclusion we cannot refuse ourselves the satisfaction of pointing out one obvious deduction--namely, that if time has, in itself, only a relative existence, it is impossible it can ever put an end to the existence of anything else. It is inconceivable that the _non est_ can absorb, exterminate, annihilate, or obliterate any one single thing that has ever had one second of real existence, of permitted being, of sentient, or even of insentient, life. God can annihilate, if he so will (and we do not think he will), but time cannot. Time can hide and put away. It can slip between us and the only reality, which is eternity; that is the condition of God, the QUI EST. Wait awhile, and time will have, as it were, spread or overflowed into eternity. It will hide nothing from our view. It will be “rent in two from the top to the bottom,” from the beginning to the end, like the veil of the Temple, which is its symbol. And then will appear all that it has hitherto seemed, but only seemed, to distinguish. We shall find it all in the inner recesses of eternity. What cause, in point of fact, have we for supposing that anything which _is_ shall cease to exist? Why, because we no longer behold certain objects, do we imagine them to be really lost for ever? Is this a reasonable supposition on the part of beings who are conscious that once they themselves were not, and yet believe that they always shall be? Why should the mere diversity in other existences make us apprehend that the missing is also the lost, and that we have any substantial cause for doubting that all which exists will go on existing? Do we anywhere see symptoms of annihilation? It is true we see endless mutations, but those very mutations are a guarantee to us of the continuousness of being. All material things change: but they only change. They do not ever in any case go out and cease to be. If this be true of merely material things, how absolutely true must it be of the immaterial; and how more than probable of that which is partly one and partly the other, of that far lower nature of the brutes, which have a principle of life in them inferior to ours and superior to the plants, and of which, since we do not believe their sensations to be the result of certain fortuitous atoms that have fashioned themselves blindly after an inexorable law, and independently of an intelligent Lawgiver, we may reasonably predicate that they too will have a future and, in its proper inferior order, an advanced existence. Everywhere there is growth--through the phases of time into the portals of eternity.

The idea in the eternal Mind, of all essences, the least as well as the greatest, was, like the Mind that held it, eternal--that is, exempt from all limit of succession. The past, present, and future are the progressive modes of existence and of our own perceptions rather than the properties of the essences themselves. Those essences had a place in the Eternal Idea; they occupy an actual place as an actual existence in the phases of time, and they go on in all probability--may we not say in all certainty?--in the endlessness of the Creator’s intention. Let no one misunderstand this as implying that matter was eternal in any other sense than its essence being an object of the idea of the eternal God, it was always clearly present to the eternal Mind. Its actuality, as we know it, dates from this creation of the crude, chaotic mass. But once formed, and then fashioned, and finally animated, we can have no pretence for supposing that any part of it will ever cease to be. Nor can we have any solid reason for supposing that what has once been endowed with sentient life will ever be condemned to fall back into the all but infinitely lower form of mere organic matter, any more than we have reason to suppose that at some future period organic matter will be reduced to inorganic matter, and that out of this beautiful creation it will please God to resolve chaos back again, either the whole or in any one the smallest part. We have nothing to do with the difficulties of the question. They are difficulties entirely of detail, and not of principle; and they concern us no more than it concerns us to be able to state how many animalcula it took to heave up the vast sierras of the western hemisphere. The details may well puzzle us, and we cannot venture on the merest suggestion. But the principle is full of hope, joy, and security, which in itself is a presumption in its favor. If we would but believe how God values the work of his own hands; if we would but try to realize how intense is creative love, what much larger and deeper views we should have of the future of all creation, and of the glory that is prepared for us! Even the old heathen religions began by taking larger and more accurate measure of these questions (though they necessarily ended in error) than too many of us do with all the light of the Gospel thrown upon them. The animism of the heathens, which makes no distinction between animate and inanimate existence, but lends a soul to each alike, had in it a sort of loving and hopeful reverence for creation which is often wanting to us who alone truly know the Creator. In their blind groping after faith it led them to fetichism, and further on, as a fuller development of the same notion, to pantheism, and then to the ever-renewed and quite endless incarnations of Buddha. But these errors took their rise originally from a respectful and tender love of that beautiful though awful nature which man found lying all around him; external to himself, yet linked to himself, and beneath the folds of which he hoped to find the hidden deity.

If these reflections have at all enabled us to understand the nature of time, and to shake off some of the unreasonable importance we lend to it in our imaginations--making of it a sort of lesser rival to eternity, fashioning it into an actual, existing thing, as if it were an attribute of God himself, instead of being, what it is, a state or phase imposed upon us, and not in any way affecting him--we shall have done much to facilitate the considerations we wish to enlarge upon. Eternity is “perpetually instantaneous.” It is the _nunc stans_ of theology. Time, on the contrary, is the past, present, and future of our human condition--the _nunc fluens_ of theology.

With this truth well rooted in our minds, we will now turn to the investigation of some of those impressions to which we referred at the beginning of this section, and endeavor to throw light upon them from out of the additional knowledge we acquire of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being through the simple process of clearing away some of our false impressions with respect to time. We had in our modes of thought more or less hemmed in the Eternal, with our human sense of time, and subjected even him to the narrowing process of a past, present, and future. Now we are about to think of ourselves only in that position, and to contemplate him in eternity, dealing with us through the medium of time, but distinctly with a reference to eternity, and only apparently imposing on himself the conditions of time in order to bring himself, as it were, on a level with us in his dealings with us.

Strange as it may appear, out of the depths of our stupidity we have fabricated a difficulty to ourselves in his very condescensions, and, looking back from our present to the past, we find ourselves puzzled at certain divers revelations of God made to mankind in gone-by times; just as, in the weakness of our faith, we are sometimes troubled with doubts about our own condition, and that of those about us, in that future which must come, and which may not be far off to any one of us.

The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob--is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine, and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer--is he the same?

Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.

If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.

Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.

Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.

It will aid us in our search if we, first of all, endeavor to qualify that act.

Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.

Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.

What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and I defy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.

You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the QUI EST. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.

If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of Time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us.

Now, we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of time, and to our consequent view of the divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us.

TO BE CONTINUED.

MISSIONS IN MAINE FROM 1613 TO 1854.

“THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH.”

To the historical student the following paper can have but trifling value, as the writer makes no pretension to originality of matter, and seeks but to bring within the grasp of the general reader, in a condensed form, the gist of many books, a large number of which are rare, and almost inaccessible.

It is hoped, however, that there are many persons who will read with interest a paper thus compiled from undoubted authorities, who have neither the time nor the inclination to consult these authorities for themselves. These persons will learn with wonder of the self-abnegation of the French priests who went forth among the savages with their lives in their hands, with but one thought in their brains, one wish in their hearts, one prayer on their lips--the evangelization of the Indians.

As Shea says: “The word Christianity was, in those days, identical with Catholicity. The religion to be offered to the New World was that of the Church of Rome, which church was free from any distinct national feeling, and in extending her boundaries carried her own language and rites, not those of any particular state.”

The Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit bore the heat and burden of the day, and reaped the most bountiful harvest in that part of North America now known as the State of Maine; and the first mission in that neighborhood was planted at Mt. Desert, and called St. Sauveur. A hotel at Bar Harbor is so named, but not one in a hundred of the numerous guests who cross its threshold knows the reason of the French name of their temporary abiding-place.

This reason, and the facts connected therewith, we shall now proceed to give to our readers. In 1610 Marie de Médicis was Regent of France. The king had been assassinated in the streets of Paris in the previous month of May. Sully was dismissed from court. All was confusion and dissension. Twelve years of peace and the judicious rule of the king had paid the national debt and filled the treasury.

The famous Father Cotton, confessor of the late king, was still powerful at court. He laid before the queen the facts that Henri IV. had been deeply interested in the establishment of the Jesuit order in Acadia, and had evinced a tangible proof of that interest in the bestowal of a grant of two thousand livres per annum.

The ambitious queen listened indulgently, with a heart softened, possibly, by recent sorrows, and consented to receive the son of the Baron Poutrincourt, who had just returned from the New World, where he had left his father with Champlain. Father Cotton ushered the handsome stripling into the presence of the stately queen and her attendant ladies. Young Biencourt at first stood silent and abashed, but, as the ladies gathered about him and plied him with questions, soon forgot himself and told wondrous tales of the dusky savages--of their strange customs and of their eagerness for instruction in the true faith. He displayed the baptismal register of the converts of Father Fléche, and implored the sympathy and aid of these glittering dames, and not in vain; for, fired with pious emulation, they tore the flashing jewels from their ears and throats. Among these ladies was one whose history and influence were so remarkable that we must translate for our readers some account of her from the Abbé de Choisy.

Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville had been famed throughout France, not only for her grace and beauty, but for qualities more rare at the court where her youth had been passed.

When Antoinette was La Duchesse de Rochefoucauld, the king begged her to accept a position near the queen. “Madame,” he said, as he presented her to Marie de Médicis, “I give you a Lady of Honor who is a lady of honor indeed.”

Twenty years had come and gone. The youthful beauty of the _marquise_ had faded, but she was fair and stately still, and one of the most brilliant ornaments of the brilliant court; and yet she was not altogether worldly. Again a widow and without children, she had become sincerely religious, and threw herself heart and soul into the American missions, and was restrained only by the positive commands of her mistress the queen from herself seeking the New World.

Day and night she thought of these perishing souls. On her knees in her oratory she prayed for the Indians, and contented herself not with this alone. From the queen and from the ladies of the court she obtained money, and jewels that could be converted into money. Charlevoix tells us that the only difficulty was to restrain her ardor within reasonable bounds.

Two French priests, Paul Biard and Enémond Massé, were sent to Dieppe, there to take passage for the colonies. The vessel was engaged by Poutrincourt and his associates, and was partially owned by two Huguenot merchants, who persistently and with indignation refused to permit the embarkation of the priests. No entreaties or representations availed, and finally La Marquise bought out the interest of the two merchants in the vessel and cargo, and transferred it to the priests as a fund for their support.

At last the fathers set sail, on the 26th of January, 1611. Their troubles, however, were by no means over; for Biencourt, a mere lad, clothed in a little brief authority--manly, it is true, beyond his years--hampered them at every turn. They arrived at Port Royal in June, after a hazardous and tempestuous voyage, having seen, as Father Biard writes, icebergs taller and larger than the Church of Notre Dame. The fathers became discouraged by the constant interference of young Biencourt, and determined to return to Europe, unless they could, with Mme. de Guercheville’s aid, found a mission colony in some other spot.

Their zealous protectress obtained from De Monts--who, though a Protestant, had erected six years before the first cross in Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec--a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia, and soon sent out a small vessel with forty colonists, commanded by La Saussaye, a nobleman, and having on board two Jesuit priests, Fathers du Thet and Quentin.

It was on the 1st of March, 1613, that this vessel left Honfleur, laden with supplies, and followed by prayers and benedictions.

On the 16th of May La Saussaye reached Port Royal, and there took on board Fathers Massé and Biard, and then set sail for the Penobscot. A heavy fog arose and encompassed them about; if it lifted for a moment, it was but to show them a white gleam of distant breakers or a dark, overhanging cliff.

“Our prayers were heard,” wrote Biard, “and at night the stars came out, and the morning sun devoured the fogs, and we found ourselves lying in Frenchmans Bay opposite Mt. Desert.”

L’Isle des Monts Déserts had been visited and so named by Champlain in 1604, and Frenchman’s Bay gained its title from a singular incident that had there taken place in the same spring.

De Monts had broken up his winter encampment at St. Croix. Among his company was a young French ecclesiastic, Nicholas d’Aubri, who, to gratify his curiosity in regard to the products of the soil in this new and strange country, insisted on being set ashore for a ramble of a few hours. He lost his way, and the boatmen, after an anxious search, were compelled to leave him. For eighteen days the young student wandered through woods, subsisting on berries and the roots of the plant known as Solomon’s Seal. He, however, kept carefully near the shore, and at the end of this time he distinguished a sail in the distance. Signalling this, he was fortunate enough to be taken off by the same crew that had landed him. On these bleak shores the colonists decided to make their future home, and, with singular infelicity, selected them as the site of the new colony. It is inconceivable how Father Biard, who had already spent some time in the New World, could have failed to suggest to La Saussaye and to their patroness that a colony, to be a success, must be not only in a spot easily accessible to France, but that a small force of armed men was imperative; for, to Biard’s own knowledge, the English had already seized several French vessels in that vicinity.

On these frowning shores La Saussaye landed, and erected a cross, and displayed the escutcheon of Mme. de Guercheville; the fathers offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and gave to the little settlement the name of St. Sauveur.

Four tents--the gift of the queen--shone white in the soft spring sunshine. The largest of these was used as a chapel, the decorations of which, with the silver vessels for the celebration of the Mass and the rich vestments, were presented by Henriette d’Entraigues, Marquise de Verneuil.

The colonists labored night and day to raise their little fort and to land their supplies. Their toil was nearly over, the vessel, ready for sea, rode at anchor, when a sudden and violent storm arose.

This storm had been felt twenty-four hours earlier off the Isles of Shoals by a fishing vessel commanded by one Samuel Argall. Thick fogs bewildered him, and a strong wind drove him to the northeast; and when the weather cleared, Argall found himself off the coast of Maine. Canoes came out like flocks of birds from each small bay. The Indians climbed the ship’s side, and greeted the new-comers with such amazing bows and flourishes that Argall, with his native acuteness, felt certain that they could have learned them only from the French, who could not be far away. Argall plied the Indians with cunning questions, and soon learned of the new settlement. He resolved to investigate farther, and set sail for the wild heights of Mt. Desert. With infinite patience he crept along through the many islands, and, rounding the Porcupines, saw a small ship anchored in the bay. At the same moment the French saw the English ship bearing down upon them “swifter than an arrow,” writes Father Biard, “with every sail set, and the English flags streaming from mast-head and stern.”

La Saussaye was within the fort, Lieut. la Motte on board with Father du Thet, an ensign, and a sergeant. Argall bore down amid a bewildering din of drums and trumpets. “Fire!” cried La Motte. Alas! the gunner was on shore. Father du Thet seized and applied the match.

Another scathing discharge of musketry, and the brave priest lay dead. He had his wish; for the day before he left France he prayed with uplifted hands that he might not return, but perish on that holy enterprise. He was buried the following day at the foot of the rough cross he had helped to erect.

La Motte, clear-sighted enough to see the utter uselessness of any farther attempt at defence, surrendered, and Argall took possession of the vessel and of La Saussaye’s papers, from among which he abstracted the royal commission. On La Saussaye’s return from the woods, where he had retreated with the colonists, he was met by Argall, who informed him that the country belonged to his master, King James, and finally asked to see his commission. In vain did the French nobleman search for it. Argall’s courtesy changed to wrath; he accused the officer of piracy, and ordered the settlement to be given up to pillage, but offered to take any of the settlers who had a trade back to Virginia with him, promising them protection. Argall counted, however, without his host; for on reaching Jamestown the governor swore that the French priests should be hung. Useless were Argall’s remonstrances, and finally, seeing no other way to save the lives of the fathers, he produced the commission and acknowledged his stratagem.

The wrath of Sir Thomas Dale was unappeased, but the lives of the priests were, of course, safe. He despatched Argall with two additional ships back to Mt. Desert, with orders to cut down the cross and level the defences.

Father Biard was on board, as well as Father Massé; they, with refined cruelty, being sent to witness the destruction of their hopes.

This work of destruction completed, Argall set sail for Virginia. Again a storm arose, and the vessel on which were the ecclesiastics was driven to the Azores. Here the Jesuits, who had been so grossly ill-treated, had but a few words to say to be avenged. The captain of the vessel was not without uneasiness, and entreated the priests to remain in concealment when the vessel was visited by the authorities. This visit over, the English purchased all they needed, and weighed anchor for England. Arrived there, a new difficulty occurred; for there was no commission to show. The captain was treated as a pirate, thrown into prison, and released only on the testimony of the Jesuit Fathers, who thus returned good for evil.

Father Biard hastened to France, where he became professor of theology at Lyons, and died at Avignon on the 17th of November, 1622. Father Massé returned to Canada, where he labored without ceasing until his death, in 1646.

With the destruction of St. Sauveur, the pious designs of Mme. de Guercheville seem to have perished. At any rate, the most diligent research fails to find her name again in the annals of that time. Probably the troubled state of France made it impossible for her to provide the sinews of war, or of evangelization. Nevertheless, the good seed was planted, and zeal for the mission cause again revived in Europe, particularly in the Society of Jesus. Young men left court and camp to share the privations and life of self-denial of the missionaries. Even the convents partook of the general enthusiasm, and Ursuline Nuns came to show the Indians Christianity in daily life, ministering to the sick and instructing the young.

Many years after the melancholy failure of the mission at Mt. Desert, an apparent accident recalled the Jesuit Fathers to the coast of Maine.

In 1642 there was a mission at Sillery, on the St. Lawrence, where had been gathered together a large number of Indian converts, who lived, with their families about them, in peace and harmony under the watchful care of the kind fathers. Among these converts was a chief who, to rescue some of his tribe who had been taken prisoners, started off through the pathless wilderness, and finally reached the English at Coussinoe, now known as Augusta, on the Kennebec.

There the Indian convert so extolled the Christian faith and its mighty promises that he took back with him several of the tribe. These were baptized at Sillery, and became faithful servants of our Lord Jesus Christ. In consequence of the entreaties of these converts, Father Gabriel Drouillettes was sent to the lonely Kennebec.

Here he built a chapel of fir-trees in a place now known as Norridgewock, a lovely, secluded spot. Some years before Father Biard had been there for a few weeks, so that the Indians were not totally unprepared to receive religious instruction. Father Drouillettes was greatly blessed in his teaching, and converted a large number, inspiring them with a profound love for the Catholic faith, which the English, twenty years before, had failed to do for the Protestant religion. He taught them simple prayers, and translated for their use, into their own dialect, several hymns. The savages even learned to sing, and it was not long before the solemn strains of the _Dies Iræ_ awakened strange echoes in the primeval forests.

Even the English, biassed as they were against the Catholics, watched the good accomplished by the faithful servant of the great Master, and learned to regard his coming as a great blessing, though at this very time the stern Puritans at Plymouth were enacting cruel laws against his order.

When the Indians went to Moosehead Lake to hunt and fish, Father Drouillettes went with them, watching over his flock with unswerving solicitude. But the day of his summons to Quebec came, and a general feeling of despair overwhelmed his converts. He went, and the Assumption Mission was deserted; for by that name, as it was asked for on that day, was this mission always designated.

Year after year the Abnakis--for so were called the aborigines of Maine--sent deputations to Quebec to entreat the return of their beloved priest, but in vain; for the number of missionaries was at that time very limited. Finally, in 1650, Father Drouillettes set out with a party on the last day of August for the tiresome eight days’ march through the wilderness; the party lost their way, their provisions were gone, and it was not until twenty-four days afterwards that they reached Norridgewock.

From a letter written at this time by Father Drouillettes we transcribe the following: “In spite of all that is painful and crucifying to nature in these missions, there are also great joys and consolations. More plenteous than I can describe are those I feel, to see that the seed of the Gospel I scattered here four years ago, in land which for so many centuries has lain fallow, or produced only thorns and brambles, already bears fruit so worthy of the Lord.” Nothing could exceed the veneration and affection of the Indians for their missionary; and when an Englishman vehemently accused the French priest of slandering his nation, the chiefs hurried to Augusta, and warned the authorities to take heed and not attack their father even in words.

The following spring Father Drouillettes was sent to a far-distant station, and years elapsed before he returned to Quebec, where he died in 1681, at the age of eighty-eight.

About this time two brothers, Vincent and Jacques Bigot, men of rank and fortune, left their homes in sunny France to share the toil and privations of life in the New World. They placed themselves and their fortunes in the hands of the superior at Quebec, and were sent to labor in the footprints of Father Drouillettes. During their faithful ministrations at Norridgewock, the chapel built by their predecessor was burned by the English, but was rebuilt in 1687 by English workmen sent from Boston, according to treaty stipulations. And now appears upon the scene the stately form of one of the greatest men of that age; but before we attempt to bring before our readers the character and acts of Sebastian Râle, we must beg them to turn from Norridgewock, the scene of his labors and martyrdom, to the little village of Castine. For in 1688 Father Thury, a priest of the diocese of Quebec, a man of tact and ability, had gathered about him a band of converts at Panawauski, on the Penobscot. This settlement was protected by the Baron Saint-Castine. This Saint-Castine was a French nobleman and a soldier who originally went to Canada in command of a regiment. The regiment was disbanded, and Saint-Castine’s disappointed ambition and a heart sore from domestic trials decided him, rather than return to France, to plunge into the wilderness, and there, far from kindred and nation, create for himself a new home.

After a while the baron married a daughter of one of the sachems of the Penobscot Indians, and became himself a sagamore of the tribe. The descendants of this marriage hold at the present day some portion of the Saint-Castine lands in Normandy.

Twice was the French baron driven from his home by the Dutch; twice was the simple chapel burned by them. In 1687 Sir Edmund Andros was appointed governor of New England, and in the following year, sailing eastward in the frigate _Rose_, he anchored opposite the little fort and primitive home of Saint-Castine. The baron retreated with the small band of settlers to the woods. Andros, being a Catholic, touched nothing in the chapel, but carried off everything else in the village. In 1703 the war known as Queen Anne’s war broke out. Again Saint-Castine was attacked by the English, and his wife and children carried off as prisoners, but were soon after exchanged. From this time the name of Baron Saint-Castine appears in all the annals of the time, as the courageous defender of his faith and of its priests. Father Râle, at Norridgewock, turned to him for counsel and aid, and never turned in vain. From Castine on to Mt. Desert the shores are full of historical interest; for there were many French settlements thereabouts, the attention of that nation having been drawn to that especial locality by a grant of land which M. Cardillac obtained of Louis XIV. in April, 1691. This grant was evidently made to confirm possession. A certain Mme. de Grégoire proved herself to be a lineal descendant of Cardillac, and in 1787 acquired a partial confirmation of the original grant.

Relics of the French settlers are constantly turned up by the plough in the vicinity of Castine, and in 1840 a quantity of French gold pieces were found; but of infinitely more interest was the discovery there, in 1863, of a copper plate ten inches in length and eight in width. The finder, knowing nothing of the value of this piece of metal, cut off a portion to repair his boat. This fragment was, however, subsequently recovered. The letters on the plate are unquestionably abbreviations of the following inscription: “1648, 8 Junii, S. Frater Leo Parisiensis, in Capuccinorum Missione, posuit hoc fundamentum in honorem nostræ Dominæ Sanctæ Spei”--1648, 8th of June, Holy Friar Leo of Paris, Capuchin missionary, laid this foundation in honor of Our Lady of Holy Hope.

In regard to this Father Leo the most diligent research fails to find any other trace. The plate, however, was without doubt placed in the foundation of a Catholic chapel--probably the one within the walls of the old French fort. Father Sebastian Râle sailed in 1689 for America. After remaining for nearly two years in Quebec, he went thence to Norridgewock. He found the Abnakis nearly all converted, and at once applied himself to learning their dialect. To this work he brought his marvellous patience and energy, and all his wondrous insight into human nature. He began his dictionary, and erected a chapel on the spot known now as Indian Old Point. This chapel he supplied with all the decorations calculated to engage the imagination and fix the wandering attention of the untutored savage. The women contended with holy emulation in the embellishment of the sanctuary. They made mats of the soft and brightly-tinted plumage of the forest birds and of the white-breasted sea-gulls. They brought offerings of huge candles, manufactured from the fragrant wax of the bay-berry, with which the chapel was illuminated. A couple of nuns from Montreal made a brief sojourn at Norridgewock, that they might teach the Indian women to sew and to make a kind of lace with which to adorn the altar. Busied with his dictionary and with his flock, Father Râle thus passed the most peaceful days of his life; but this blessed quiet ended only too soon.

In 1705 a party of English, under the command of a Capt. Hilton, burst from out the forest, attacking the little village from all sides at once, finishing by burning the chapel and every hut.

About the same time the governor-general of New England sent to the lower part of the Kennebec the ablest of the Boston divines to instruct the Indian children. As Baxter’s (the missionary) salary depended on his success, he neglected no means that could attract.

For two months he labored in vain. His caresses and little gifts were thrown away; for he made not one convert.

Father Râle wrote to Baxter that his neophytes were good Christians, but far from able in disputes.

This same letter, which was of some length, challenged the Protestant clergyman to a discussion. Baxter, after a long delay, sent a brief reply, in Latin so bad that the learned priest says it was impossible to understand it.

In 1717 the Indian chiefs held a council. The governor of New England offered them an English and an Indian Bible, and Mr. Baxter as their expounder.

The Abnakis refused them one and all, and elected to adhere to their Catholic faith, saying: “All people love their own priests! Your Bibles we do not care for, and God has already sent us teachers.”

Thus years passed on in monotonous labor. The only relaxation permitted to himself by Father Râle was the work on his dictionary. The converts venerated their priest; their keen eyes and quick instincts saw the sincerity of his life, the reality of his affection for them, and recognized his self-denial and generosity. They went to him with their cares and their sorrows, with their simple griefs and simpler pleasures. He listened with unaffected sympathy and interest. No envious rival, no jealous competitor, no heretical teacher, disturbed the relations between pastor and flock. So, too, was it but natural that they should look to him for advice when they gathered about their council-fires.

The wrongs which the Eastern Indians were constantly enduring at the hands of the English settlers kindled to a living flame the smouldering hatred in their hearts, which they sought every opportunity of wreaking in vengeance on their foe. Thus, like lightning on the edge of the horizon, they hovered on the frontier, making daring forays on the farms of the settlers.

It was not unnatural that the English, bristling with prejudices against the French, and still more against Catholics, should have seen fit to look on Father Râle as the instigator of all these attacks, forgetting--what is undeniably true--that Father Râle’s converts were milder and kinder and more Christian-like than any of their Indian neighbors. The good father was full of concern when he heard that a fierce and warlike tribe, who had steadily resisted all elevating influences, were about settling within a day’s journey of Norridgewock. He feared lest his children should be led away by pernicious examples; so he with difficulty persuaded some of the strangers to enter the chapel, and to be present at some of the imposing ceremonies of the mother church. At the close of the service he addressed them in simple words, and thus concluded:

“Let us not separate, that some may go one way and some another. Let us all go to heaven. It is our country, and the place to which we are invited by the sole Master of life, of whom I am but the interpreter.” The reply of the Indians was evasive; but it was evident that an impression was made, and in the autumn they sent to him to say that if he would come to them they would receive his teachings.

Father Râle gladly went at this bidding, erected a cross and a chapel, and finally baptized nearly the whole tribe.

At this time Father Râle wrote to his nephew a letter, in which he says: “My new church is neat, and its elegantly-ornamented vestments, chasubles, copes, and holy vessels would be esteemed highly appropriate in almost any church in Europe. A choir of young Indians, forty in number, assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and chant the divine Offices for the consecration of the Holy Sacrament; and you would be edified by the beautiful order they preserve and the devotion they manifest. After the Mass I teach the young children, and the remainder of the morning is devoted to seeing those who come to consult me on affairs of importance. Thus, you see, I teach some, console others, seek to re-establish peace in families at variance, and to calm troubled consciences.”

Another letter still later, in speaking of the attachment of the converts to their faith, says: “And when they go to the sea-shore in summer to fish, I accompany them; and when they reach the place where they intend to pass the night, they erect stakes at intervals in the form of a chapel, and spread a tent made of ticking. All is complete in fifteen minutes. I always carry with me a beautiful board of cedar, with the necessary supports. This serves for an altar, and I ornament the interior with silken hangings. A huge bear-skin serves as a carpet, and divine service is held within an hour.”

While away on one of the excursions which Father Râle thus describes, the village was attacked by the English; and again, in 1722, by a party of two hundred under Col. Westbrook. New England had passed a law imposing imprisonment for life on Catholic priests, and a reward was offered for the head of Father Râle. The party was seen, as they entered the valley of the Kennebec, by two braves, who hurried on to give the alarm; the priest having barely time to escape to the woods with the altar vessels and vestments, leaving behind him all his papers and his precious Abnaki dictionary, which was enclosed in a strong box of peculiar construction. It had two rude pictures on the lid, one of the scourging of our Blessed Lord, and the other of the Crowning of Thorns. This box is now in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, while the dictionary itself is at Harvard.

Father Râle saved himself by taking refuge in a hollow tree, where he remained for thirty-six hours, suffering from hunger and a broken leg.

With wonderful courage Father Râle built up another chapel, and writes thus, after recounting the efforts of the English to take him prisoner: “In the words of the apostle, I conclude: I do not fear the threats of those who hate me without a cause, and I count not my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus.”

Again, over the council-fires, the Indian chiefs assembled. They decided to send an embassy to Boston, to demand that their chapel, which had been destroyed by the English, should be rebuilt.

The governor, anxious to secure the alliance of the tribe, listened patiently, and told them in reply that it belonged properly to the governor of Canada to rebuild their church; still, that he would do it, provided they would agree to receive the clergy he would choose, and would send back to Quebec the French priest who was then with them. We cannot forbear repeating here the unequalled satire of the Indian’s reply:

“When you came here,” answered the chief, “we were unknown to the French governor, but no one of you spoke of prayer or of the Great Spirit. You thought only of my skins and furs. But one day I met a French black-coat in the forest. He did not look at the skins with which I was loaded, but he said words to me of the Great Spirit, of Paradise and of hell, and of prayer, by which is the only path to heaven.

“I listened with pleasure, and at last begged him to teach and to baptize me.

“If, when you saw me, you had spoken to me of prayer, I should have had the misfortune to pray as you do; for I was not then able to know if your prayers were good. So, I tell you, I will hold fast to the prayers of the French. I will keep them until the earth burn up and perish.”

At last the final and fatal effort on the life of Father Râle was made, in 1724.

All was quiet in the little village. The tall corn lay yellow in the slanting rays of an August sun, when suddenly from the adjacent woods burst forth a band of English with their Mohawk allies. The devoted priest, knowing that they were in hot pursuit of him, sallied forth to meet them, hoping, by the sacrifice of his own life, to save his flock. Hardly had he reached the mission cross in the centre of the village than he fell at its foot, pierced by a dozen bullets. Seven Indians, who had sought to shield him with their bodies, lay dead beside him.

Then followed a scene that beggars description. Women and children were killed indiscriminately; and it ill became those who shot women as they swam across the river to bring a charge of cruelty against the French fathers.

The chapel was robbed and then fired; the bell was not melted, but was probably afterward buried by the Indians, for it was revealed only a few years since by the blowing down of a huge oak-tree, and was presented to Bowdoin College.

The soft, dewy night closed on the scene of devastation, and in the morning, as one by one the survivors crept back to their ruined homes with their hearts full of consternation and sorrow, they found the body of their beloved priest, not only pierced by a hundred balls, but with the skull crushed by hatchets, arms and legs broken, and mouth and eyes filled with dirt. They buried him where the day before had stood the altar of the little chapel, and sent his tattered habits to Quebec.

It was by so precious a death that this apostolical man closed a career of nearly forty years of painful missionary toil. His fasts and vigils had greatly enfeebled his constitution, and, when entreated to take precautions for his safety, he answered: “My measures are taken. God has committed this flock to my charge, and I will share their fate, being too happy if permitted to sacrifice myself for them.”

Well did his superior in Canada, M. de Bellemont, reply, when requested to offer Masses for his soul: “In the words of S. Augustine, I say it would be wronging a martyr to pray for him.”

There can be no question that Sebastian Râle was one of the most remarkable men of his day. A devoted Christian and finished scholar, commanding in manners and elegant in address, of persuasive eloquence and great administrative ability, he courted death and starvation, for the sole end of salvation for the Indian.

From the death of Father Râle until 1730 the mission at Norridgewock was without a priest. In that year, however, the superior at Quebec sent Father James de Sirenne to that station. The account given by this father, of the warmth with which he was received, and of the manner in which the Indians had sought to keep their faith, is very touching. The women with tears and sobs hastened with their unbaptized babes to the priest.

In all these years no Protestant clergyman had visited them, for Eliot was almost the only one who devoted himself to the conversion of the Indians, though even he, as affirmed by Bancroft, had never approached the Indian tribe that dwelt within six miles of Boston Harbor until five years after the cross had been borne, by the religious zeal of the French, from Lake Superior to the valley of the Mississippi.

But Father Sirenne could not be permitted to remain any length of time with the Abnakis. Again were they deserted, having a priest with them only at long intervals.

Then came the peace of 1763, in which France surrendered Canada. This step struck a most terrible blow at the missions; for although the English government guaranteed to the Canadians absolute religious freedom, they yet took quiet steps to rid themselves of the Jesuit Fathers.

A short breathing space, and another war swept over the land, and with this perished the last mission in Maine. In 1775 deputies from the various tribes in Maine and Nova Scotia met the Massachusetts council. The Indians announced their intention of adhering to the Americans, but begged, at the same time, for a French priest. The council expressed their regret at not being able to find one.

“Strange indeed was it,” says Shea, “that the very body which, less than a century before, had made it felony for a Catholic priest to visit the Abnakis, now regretted their inability to send these Christian Indians a missionary of the same faith and nation.”

Years after, when peace was declared, and the few Catholics in Maryland had chosen the Rev. John Carroll--a member of the proscribed Society of Jesus--as bishop, the Abnakis of Maine sent a deputation bearing the crucifix of Father Râle. This they presented to the bishop, with earnest supplications for a priest.

Bishop Carroll promised that one should be sent, and Father Ciquard was speedily despatched to Norridgewock, where he remained for ten years. Then ensued another interval during which the flock was without a shepherd.

At last a missionary priest at Boston, Father (afterward Cardinal) Cheverus, turned his attention to the study of the Abnaki dialect, and then visited the Penobscot tribe.

Desolate, poor, and forsaken as they had been, the Indians still clung to their faith. The old taught the young, and all gathered on Sundays to chant the music of the Mass and Vespers, though their altar had no priest and no sacrifice.

Father Cheverus, after a few months, was succeeded by Father Romagné, who for twenty years consecrated every moment and every thought to the evangelization of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes. In July, 1827, Bishop Fenwick visited this portion of his diocese, and in 1831 sent them a resident missionary. A beautiful church stood at last in the place of Romagné’s hut, and two years later Bishop Fenwick, once a father in the Society of Jesus, erected a monument to Father Râle on the spot where he was slain a hundred and nine years before. From far and near gathered the crowd, Protestant as well as Catholic, to witness the ceremony. The monument stands in a green, secluded spot, a simple shaft of granite surmounted by a cross, and an inscription in Latin tells the traveller that there died a faithful priest and servant of the Lord. Bishop Fenwick became extremely anxious to induce some French priest to go to that ancient mission, and a year later the Society of Picpus, in Switzerland, sent out Fathers Demilier and Petithomme to restore the Franciscan missions in Maine. They conquered the difficulties of the Abnaki dialect with the aid of a prayer-book which the bishop had caused to be printed, and in this small and insignificant mission Father Demilier toiled until his death, in 1843.

The successor of Bishop Fenwick resolved to restore the Abnaki mission to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, by whom it had been originally founded. Therefore, since 1848, the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys have been under the care of the Jesuits, who in that year sent out from Switzerland Father John Bapst to Old Town, on the Penobscot--a short distance from Bangor--where he ministered faithfully to the Abnakis until he nearly lost his life in a disgraceful Know-Nothing riot in 1854.

As we find ourselves thus at the conclusion of our narration, incidents crowd upon our memory of the wondrous sacrifices made by the Catholic clergy in the old missions of Maine; but we are admonished that our space is limited.

Little attention, however, has been paid to the fact that to these Catholic priests alone under God is due the evangelization of the many Indian tribes which formerly haunted our grand old forests. Of these tribes, only a few of the Penobscots are left, and these cling still to the cross as the blessed symbol of the faith first brought to them, “as a voice crying in the wilderness,” by Fathers Biard and Du Thet at St. Sauveur in 1613.

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

The first attempts to introduce the Christian religion into Prussia were unsuccessful. S. Adalbert, in 997, and S. Bruno, in 1009, suffered martyrdom whilst preaching the Gospel there, and the efforts of Poland to force the conquered Prussians to receive the faith only increased the bitterness of their anti-Christian prejudices. Early in the XIIth century Bishop Otto, of Bamberg, made many conversions in Pomerania; and finally, in the beginning of the XIIIth, the Cistercian monk Christian, with the approval and encouragement of Pope Innocent III., set to work to convert the Prussians, and met with such success that in 1215 he was made bishop of the country. The greater part of the people, however, still remained heathens, and the progress of Christianity aroused in them such indignation that they determined to oppose its farther advance with the sword. To protect his flock Bishop Christian called to his aid the knights of the Teutonic Order; in furtherance of his designs, the Emperor Frederic II. turned the whole country over to them, and Pope Gregory IX. took measures to increase their number, so that they might be able to hold possession of this field, now first opened to the Gospel. Pope Innocent IV. also manifested special interest in the welfare of the church in Prussia; he urged priests and monks to devote themselves to this mission, supported and encouraged the bishops in their trials and difficulties, and exhorted the convents throughout Germany to contribute books for the education of the people. But circumstances were not wanting which made the position of the church in Prussia very unsatisfactory. The people had for the most part been brought under the church’s influence by the power of arms, and consequently to a great extent remained strangers to her true spirit. The Teutonic Order, moreover, gave ecclesiastical positions only to German priests, so as to hold out inducements to the people to learn German; though, as a consequence, the priests were unable to communicate with their flocks, except by the aid of interpreters.

The grand master, too, had almost unlimited control over the election of bishops, which was the cause of many evils, especially as the Order gradually grew lax in the observance of the rule, and lost much of its Christian character. Unworthy men were thrust into ecclesiastical offices, the standard of morality among the clergy was lowered, and the people lost respect for the priesthood. It is not surprising, in view of all this, that the religious sectaries of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries should have found favor in Prussia, and made converts among her still half-pagan populations.

In 1466 the Teutonic Order became a dependency of the crown of Poland. There was no hope of its freeing itself from this humiliating subjection without foreign aid; and with a view to obtain this, the knights resolved to choose their grand master from one or other of the most powerful German families. First, in 1498, they elected Frederic, Duke of Saxony; and upon his death, in 1510, Albrecht, Margrave of Brandenburg, was chosen to succeed him.

Albrecht refused the oath of supremacy to Sigismund, King of Poland, who thereupon, in 1519, declared war upon him.

To meet the expenses of the war, Albrecht had the sacred vessels of the church melted down and minted; but he was unable to stand against the arms of Poland, and therefore sought the mediation of the Emperor of Germany, through whose good offices he was able to conclude, in 1521, a four years’ truce. He now went into Germany, where Luther was already preaching the Protestant rebellion, and asked aid from the Imperial Parliament, which was holding its sessions at Nuremberg; and as this was denied him, he turned with favor to the teachers of the new doctrines. The Teutonic Order had become thoroughly corrupt, and Leo X. urged Albrecht to begin a reformation _in capite et membris_; but the grand master sought the advice of Luther, from whom he received the not unwelcome counsel to throw away the “stupid, unnatural rule of his Order, take a wife, and turn Prussia into a temporal hereditary principality.” Albrecht accordingly asked for preachers of the new doctrines, and in 1526 announced his abandonment of the Order and the Catholic Church by his marriage with the daughter of the King of Denmark. Acting upon the Protestant principle, _cujus regio illius religio_--the ruler of the land makes its religion--he forced the Prussians to quit the church from which they had received whatever culture and civilization they had.

At his death, in 1568, Lutheranism had gained complete possession of the country.

A few Catholics, however, remained, for whom, early in the XVIIth century, King Sigismund of Poland succeeded in obtaining liberty of conscience, which, however, was denied to those of Brandenburg Frederic William, the second king of Prussia, and the first to form the design of placing her among the great powers of Europe by the aid of a strong military organization, in giving directions in 1718 for the education of his son, afterwards Frederic the Great, insisted that the boy should be inspired with a horror of the Catholic Church, “the groundlessness and absurdity of whose teachings should be placed before his eyes and well impressed upon his mind.”

Frederic William was a rigid Calvinist; and if he tolerated a few Catholics in his dominions, it was only that he might vent his ill-humor or exercise his proselytizing zeal upon them. He indeed granted Father Raymundus Bruns permission to say Mass in the garrisons at Berlin and Potsdam, but only after he had been assured that it would tend to prevent desertions among his Catholic soldiers, and that, as Raymundus was a monk, bound by a vow of poverty, he would ask no pay from his majesty.

In 1746 permission was granted the Catholics to hold public worship in Berlin, and the S. Hedwig’s church was built; in Pomerania, however, this privilege was denied them, except in the Polish districts.

During the XVIIIth century congregations were formed at Stettin and Stralsund. In the principality of Halberstadt the Catholics were allowed to retain possession of a church and several monasteries, in which public worship was permitted; and in what had been the archbishopric of Magdeburg there were left to them one Benedictine monastery and four convents of Cistercian Nuns. These latter, however, were placed under the supervision of Protestant ministers.

Frederic the Great early in life fell under the influence of Voltaire and his disciples, from whom he learned to despise all religion, and especially the rigid Calvinism of his father. He became a religious sceptic, and, satisfied with his contempt for all forms of faith, did not take the trouble to persecute any. He asked of his subjects, whether Protestant or Catholic, nothing but money and recruits; for the rest, he allowed every one in his dominions “to save his soul after his own fashion.” He provided chaplains for his Catholic soldiers, and forbade the Calvinist and Lutheran ministers to interfere with their religious freedom, for reasons similar to those which had induced his father to permit Raymundus Bruns to say Mass in the garrison at Berlin. He had certainly no thought of showing any favor to the church, except so far as it might promote his own ambitious projects. His great need of soldiers made him throw every obstacle in the way of those who wished to enter the priesthood, and his fear of foreign influence caused him to forbid priests to leave the country. His mistrust of priests was so great that he gave instructions to Count Hoym, his Minister of State, to place them under a system of espionage. Catholics were carefully excluded from all influential and lucrative positions. They were taxed more heavily than Protestants, and professors in the universities were required to take an oath to uphold the Reformation.

Notwithstanding, it was in the reign of Frederic the Great that the Catholic Church in Prussia may be said to have entered upon a new life. For more than two hundred years it had had no recognized status there; but through the conquest of Silesia and the division of Poland, a large Catholic population was incorporated into the kingdom of Prussia, and thus a new element, which was formally recognized in the constitution promulgated by Frederic’s immediate successor, was introduced into the Prussian state. Together with the toleration of all who believed in God and were loyal to the king, the law of the land placed the Catholic and Protestant churches on an equal footing. To understand how far this was favorable to the church we must go back and consider the relations of Prussia to Protestantism.

What is known as the Territorial System, by which the faith of the people is delivered into the hands of the temporal ruler, has existed in Prussia from the time Albrecht of Brandenburg went over to the Reformers. Protestantism and absolutism triumphed simultaneously throughout Europe, and this must undoubtedly be in a great measure attributed to the fact that the Protestants, whether willingly or not, yielded up their faith into the keeping of kings and princes, and thus practically abandoned the distinction of the spiritual and temporal powers which lies at the foundation of Christian civilization, and is also the strongest bulwark against the encroachments of governments upon the rights of citizens. Duke Albrecht had hardly become a Protestant when he felt that it was his duty (“_coacti sumus_” are his words) to take upon himself the episcopal office. This was in 1530; in 1550 he treated the urgent request of the Assembly to have the bishopric of Samland restored as an attack upon his princely prerogative.

His successor diverted to other uses the fund destined for the maintenance of the bishops, and instituted two consistories, to which he entrusted the ecclesiastical affairs of the duchy.

During the XVIIth century Calvinism gained a firm foothold in Prussia. It became the religion of the ruling family, and Frederic William, called the Great Elector, to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness, sought in every way to promote its interests, though he strenuously exercised his _jus episcopale_, his spiritual supremacy over both the Lutherans and the Calvinists.

His son, Frederic, who first took the title of King of Prussia (1700), continued the policy of his father with regard to ecclesiastical affairs. “To us alone,” he declared to the Landstand, “belongs the _jus supremum episcopale_, the highest and sovereign right in ecclesiastical matters.”

The Lutherans wished to retain the exorcism as a part of the ceremony of baptism; but Frederic published an edict by which he forbade the appointment of any minister who would refuse to confer the sacrament without making use of this ceremony. In the same way he meddled with the Lutheran practice of auricular confession; and by an order issued in 1703 prohibited the publication of theological writings which had not received his imprimatur.

His successor, Frederic William, the father of Frederic the Great, looked upon himself as the absolute and irresponsible master of the subjects whom God had given him. “I am king and master,” he was wont to say, “and can do what I please.” He was a rigid Calvinist, and made his absolutism felt more especially in religious matters. It seems that preachers then, as since, were sometimes in the habit of preaching long sermons; so King Frederic William put a fine of two thalers upon any one who should preach longer than one hour. He required his preachers to insist in _all their sermons_ upon the duty of obedience and loyalty to the king, and the government officials were charged to report any failure to make special mention of this duty. Both Lutherans and Calvinists were forbidden to touch in their sermons upon any points controverted between the two confessions. No detail of religious worship was insignificant enough to escape his meddlesome tyranny. The length of the service, the altar, the vestments of the minister, the sign of the cross, the giving or singing the blessing, all fell under his “high episcopal supervision.”

This unlovely old king was followed by Frederic the Great, who, though an infidel and a scoffer, held as firmly as his father to his sovereign episcopal prerogatives, and who, if less meddlesome, was not less arbitrary. And now we have got back to the constitution which, after Silesia and a part of Poland had been united to the crown of Prussia, was partially drawn up under Frederic the Great, and completed and promulgated during the reign of his successor; and which, as we have already said, placed the three principal confessions of the Christian faith in the Prussian states--viz., the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Catholic--on a footing of equality before the law. Now, it must be noticed, this constitution left intact the absolute authority of the king over the Reformed and Lutheran churches, and therefore what might seem to be a great gain for the Catholic Church was really none at all, since it was simply placed under the supreme jurisdiction of the king. There was no express recognition of the organic union of the church in Prussia with the pope, nor of the right of the bishops to govern their dioceses according to the ecclesiastical canons, but rather the tacit assumption that the king was head of the Catholic as of the Protestant churches in Prussia. The constitution was drawn up by Suarez, a bitter enemy of the church, and in many of its details was characterized by an anti-Catholic spirit. It annulled, for instance, the contract made by parents of different faith concerning the religious education of their children, and manifested in many other ways that petty and tyrannical spirit which has led Prussia to interfere habitually with the internal discipline and working of the church.

As the Catholic population of Prussia increased through the annexation of different German states, this constitution, which gave the king supreme control of spiritual matters, was extended to the newly-acquired territories. Thus all through the XVIIIth century the church in Prussia, though not openly persecuted, was fettered. No progress was made, abuses could not be reformed, the appointment of bishops was not free, the training of the priesthood was very imperfect; and it is not surprising that this slavery should have been productive of many and serious evils.

The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, which caused social and political upheavals throughout Europe, toppled down thrones, overthrew empires, and broke up and reformed the boundaries of nations, mark a new epoch in the history of Prussia, and indeed of all Germany, whose people had been taught by these disastrous wars that they had common interests which could not be protected without national unity, the want of which had never before been made so painfully manifest.

After the downfall of Napoleon, the ambassadors of the Allied Powers met in Vienna to settle the affairs of all Europe. Nations, provinces, and cities were given away in the most reckless manner, without any thought of the interests or wishes of the people, to the kings and rulers who could command the greatest influence in the congress or whose displeasure was most feared. Germany demanded the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine, but was thwarted in her designs by Great Britain and Russia, who feared the restoration of her ancient power.

Prussia received from the congress, as some compensation for its sufferings and sacrifices during the Napoleonic wars, the duchies of Jülich and Berg, the former possessions of the episcopal sees of Cologne and Treves, and several other territories, which were formed into the Rhine province. On the other hand, it lost a portion of the Sclavonic population which it had held on the east; so that, though it gained nothing in territory, it became more strictly a German state, and was consequently better fitted gradually to take the lead in the irrepressible movement toward the unification of Germany.

In the Congress of Vienna it was stipulated that Catholics and Protestants should have equal rights before the law. The constitutional law of Prussia was extended to the newly-acquired provinces and “all ecclesiastical matters, whether of Roman Catholics or of Protestants, together with the supervision and administration of all charitable funds, the confirming of all persons appointed to spiritual offices, and the supervision over the administration of ecclesiastics as far as it may have any relation to civil affairs, were reserved to the government.”

In 1817, upon the occasion of the reorganization of the government, we perceive to what practical purposes these principles were to be applied. The church was debased to a function of the state, her interests were placed in the hands of the ministry for spiritual affairs, and the education of even clerical students was put under the control of government.

It was in this same year, 1817, that the tercentennial anniversary of the birth of Protestantism was celebrated. For two centuries Protestant faith in Germany had been dying out. Eager and bitter controversies, the religious wars and the plunder of church property during the XVIth and early part of the XVIIth centuries, had given it an unnatural and artificial vigor. It was a mighty and radical revolution, social, political, and religious, and therefore gave birth to fanaticism and intense partisan zeal, and was in turn helped on by them.

There is a natural strength in a new faith, and when it is tried by war and persecution it seems to rise to a divine power. Protestantism burst upon Europe with irresistible force. Fifty years had not passed since Luther had burned the bull of Pope Leo, and the Catholic Church, beaten almost everywhere in the North of Europe, seemed hardly able to hold her own on the shores of the Mediterranean; fifty years later, and Protestantism was saved in Germany itself only by the arms of Catholic France. The peace of Westphalia, in 1648, put an end to the religious wars of Germany, and from that date the decay of the Protestant faith was rapid. Many causes helped on the work of ruin; the inherent weakness of the Protestant system from its purely negative character, the growing and bitter dissensions among Protestants, the hopeless slavery to which the sects had been reduced by the civil power, all tended to undermine faith. In the Palatinate, within a period of sixty years, the rulers had forced the people to change their religion four times. In Prussia, whose king, as we have seen, was supreme head of the church, the ruling house till 1539 was Catholic; then, till 1613, Lutheran; from that date to 1740, Calvinistic; from 1740 to 1786, infidel, the avowed ally of Voltaire and D’Alembert; then, till 1817, Calvinistic; and finally again evangelical.

During the long reign of Frederic the Great unbelief made steady progress. Men no longer attacked this or that article of faith, but Christianity itself. The quickest way, it was openly said by many, to get rid of superstition and priest-craft, would be to abolish preaching altogether, and thus remove the ghost of religion from the eyes of the people. It seems strange that such license of thought and expression should have been tolerated, and even encouraged, in a country where religion itself has never been free; but it is a peculiarity of the Prussian system of government that while it hampers and fetters the church and all religious organizations, it leaves the widest liberty of conscience to the individual. Its policy appears to be to foster indifference and infidelity, in order to use them against what it considers religious fanaticism. Another circumstance which favored infidelity may be found in the political thraldom in which Prussia held her people. As men were forbidden to speak or write on subjects relating to the government or the public welfare, they took refuge in theological and philosophical discussions, which in Protestant lands have never failed to lead to unbelief. This same state of things tended to promote the introduction and increase of secret societies, which, in the latter half of the XVIIIth century, sprang up in great numbers throughout Germany, bearing a hundred different names, but always having anti-Christian tendencies.

To stop the spread of infidelity, Frederic William II., the successor of Frederic the Great, issued, in 1788, an “edict, embracing the constitution of religion in the Prussian states.” The king declared that he could no longer suffer in his dominions that men should openly seek to undermine religion, to make the Bible ridiculous in the eyes of the people, and to raise in public the banner of unbelief, deism, and naturalism. He would in future permit no farther change in the creed, whether of the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This was the more necessary as he had himself noticed with sorrow, years before he ascended the throne, that the Protestant ministers allowed themselves boundless license with regard to the articles of faith, and indeed altogether rejected several essential parts and fundamental verities of the Protestant Church and the Christian religion. They blushed not to revive the long-since-refuted errors of the Socinians, the deists, and the naturalists, and to scatter them among the people under the false name of enlightenment (_Aufklärung_), whilst they treated God’s Word with disdain, and strove to throw suspicion upon the mysteries of revelation. Since this was intolerable, he, therefore, as ruler of the land and only law-giver in his states, commanded and ordered that in future no clergyman, preacher, or school-teacher of the Protestant religion should presume, under pain of perpetual loss of office and of even severer punishment, to disseminate the errors already named; for, as it was his duty to preserve intact the law of the land, so was it incumbent upon him to see that religion should be kept free from taint; and he could not, consequently, allow its ministers to substitute their whims and fancies for the truths of Christianity. They must teach what had been agreed upon in the symbols of faith of the denomination to which they belonged; to this they were bound by their office and the contract under which they had received their positions. Nevertheless, out of his great love for freedom of conscience, the king was willing that those who were known to disbelieve in the articles of faith might retain their offices, provided they consented to teach their flocks what they were themselves unable to believe.

In this royal edict we have at once the fullest confession of the general unbelief that was destroying Protestantism in Prussia, and of the hopelessness of any attempt to arrest its progress. What could be more pitiable than the condition of a church powerless to control its ministers, and publicly recognizing their right to be hypocrites? How could men who had no faith teach others to believe? Moreover, what could be more absurd, from a Protestant point of view, than to seek to force the acceptance of symbols of faith when the whole Reformation rested upon the assumed right of the individual to decide for himself what should or should not be believed? Or was it to be supposed that men could invest the conflicting creeds of the sects with a sacredness which they had denied to that of the universal church? It is not surprising, therefore, that the only effect of the edict should have been to increase the energy and activity of the infidels and free-thinkers.

Frederic William III., who ascended the throne in 1797, recognizing the futility of his father’s attempt to keep alive faith in Protestantism, stopped the enforcement of the edict, with the express declaration that its effect had been to lessen religion and increase hypocrisy. Abandoning all hope of controlling the faith of the preachers, he turned his attention to their morals. A decree of the Oberconsistorium of Berlin, in 1798, ordered that the conduct of the ministers should be closely watched and every means employed to stop the daily-increasing immorality of the servants of the church, which was having the most injurious effects upon their congregations. Parents had almost ceased having their children baptized, or had them christened in the “name of Frederic the Great,” or in the “name of the good and the fair,” sometimes with rose-water.

But the calamities which befell Germany during the wars of the French Revolution and the empire seemed to have turned the thoughts of many to religion. The frightful humiliations of the fatherland were looked upon as a visitation from heaven upon the people for their sins and unbelief; and therefore, when the tercentennial anniversary of Protestantism came around (in 1817), they were prepared to enter upon its celebration with earnest enthusiasm. The celebration took the form of an anti-Catholic demonstration. For many years controversy between Protestants and Catholics had ceased; but now a wholly unprovoked but bitter and grossly insulting attack was made upon the church from all the Protestant pulpits of Germany and in numberless writings. The result of this wanton aggression was a reawakening of Catholic faith and life; whilst the attempt to take advantage of the Protestant enthusiasm to bring about a union between the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia ended in causing fresh dissensions and divisions. The sect of the Old Lutherans was formed, which, in spite of persecution, finally succeeded in obtaining toleration, though not till many of its adherents had been driven across the ocean into exile.

As the Congress of Vienna had decided that Catholics and Protestants should be placed upon a footing of equality, and as Prussia had received a large portion of the _secularized_ lands of the church, with the stipulation that she should provide for the maintenance of Catholic worship, the government, in 1816, sent Niebuhr, the historian, to Rome, to treat with the Pope concerning the reorganization of the Catholic religion in the Prussian states. Finally, in 1821, an agreement was signed, which received the sanction of the king, and was published as a fundamental law of the state.

In this Concordat with the Holy See there is at least a tacit recognition of the true nature of the church, of her organic unity--a beginning of respect for her freedom, and a seeming promise of a better future. In point of fact, however, in spite of Niebuhr’s assurance to the Holy Father that he might rely upon the honest intentions of the government, Prussia began almost at once to meddle with the rights of Catholics. A silent and slow persecution was inaugurated, by which it was hoped their patience would be exhausted and their strength wasted. And now we shall examine more closely the artful and heartless policy by which, with but slight variations, for more than two centuries Prussia has sought to undermine the Catholic religion. In 1827 the Protestants of all communions in Prussia amounted to 6,370,380, and the Catholics to 4,023,513. These populations are, to only a very limited extent, intermingled; certain provinces being almost entirely Catholic, and others nearly wholly Protestant. By law the same rights are granted to both Catholics and Protestants; and both, therefore, should receive like treatment at the hands of the government.

This is the theory; what are the facts? We will take the religious policy of Prussia from the reorganization of the church after the Congress of Vienna down to the revolution of 1848, and we will begin with the subject of education. For the six millions of Protestants there were four exclusively Protestant universities, at Berlin, Halle, Königsberg, and Greifswalde; for the four millions of Catholics there were but two _half universities_, at Bonn and Breslau, in each of which there was a double faculty, the one Protestant, the other Catholic; though the professors in all the faculties, except that of theology, were for the most part Protestants. Thus, out of six universities, to the Catholics was left only a little corner in two, though they were forced to bear nearly one-half of the public burdens by which all six were supported. But this is not the worst. The bishops had no voice in the nomination of the professors, not even those of theology. They were simply asked whether they had any objections to make, _on proof_. The candidate might be a stranger, he might be wholly unfitted to teach theology, he might be free from open immorality or heresy; and therefore, because the bishops could _prove_ nothing against him, he was appointed to instruct the aspirants to the priesthood.

At Breslau a foreign professor was appointed, who began to teach the most scandalous and heretical doctrines. Complaints were useless. During many years his pupils drank in the poison, and at length, after he had done his work of destruction, he was, as in mockery, removed. Nor is this an isolated instance of the ruin to Catholic faith wrought by this system. The bishops had hardly any influence over the education of their clergy, who, young and ignorant of the world, were thrown almost without restraint into the pagan corruptions of a German university, in order to acquire a knowledge of theology. At Cologne a Catholic college was made over to the Protestants, at Erfurt and Düsseldorf Catholic _gymnasia_ were turned into mixed establishments with all the professors, save one, Protestants.

Elementary education was under the control of provincial boards consisting of a Protestant president and three councillors, _one_ of whom might be a Catholic in Catholic districts. In the Catholic provinces of the Rhine and Westphalia, the place of Catholic councillor was left vacant for several years till the schools were all reorganized. Indeed, the real superintendent of Catholic elementary education was generally a Protestant minister.

There was a government _Censur_ for books of religious instruction, the headquarters of which were in Berlin, but its agents were scattered throughout all the provinces. All who were employed in this department, to which even the pastorals of the bishops had to be submitted before being read to their flocks, were Protestants. The widest liberty was given to Protestants to attack the church; but when the Catholics sought to defend themselves, their writings were suppressed. Professor Freudenfeld was obliged to quit Bonn because he had spoken of Luther without becoming respect.

Permission to start religious journals was denied to Catholics, but granted to Protestants; and in the pulpit the priests were put under strict restraint, while the preachers were given full liberty of speech. Whenever a community of Protestants was found in a Catholic district, a church, a clergyman, and a school were immediately provided for them; indeed, richer provision for the Protestant worship was made in the Catholic provinces than elsewhere; but when a congregation of Catholics grew up amongst Protestants, the government almost invariably rejected their application for permission to have a place of worship. At various times and places churches and schools were taken from the Catholics and turned over to the Protestants; and though Prussia had received an enormous amount of the confiscated property of the church, she did not provide for the support of the priests as for that of the ministers.

At court there was not a single Catholic who held office; the heads of all the departments of government were Protestants; the Post-Office department, down to the local postmasters, was exclusively Protestant; all ambassadors and other representatives of the government, though sent to Catholic courts, were Protestants.

In Prussia the state is divided into provinces, and at the head of each province is a high-president (Ober-Präsident). This official, to whom the religious interests of the Catholics were committed, was always a Protestant. The provinces are divided into districts, and at the head of each district was a Protestant president, and almost all the inferior officers, even in Catholic provinces, were Protestants.

Again, in the courts of justice and in the army all the principal positions were given to Protestants. In the two _corps d’armées_ of Prussia and Silesia, one-half was Catholic; in the army division of Posen, two-thirds; in that of Westphalia and Cleves, three-fifths; and, finally, in that of the Rhine, seven-eighths; yet there was not one Catholic field-officer, not a general or major. In 1832 a royal order was issued to provide for the religious wants of the army, and every care was taken for the spiritual needs of the Protestant soldiers; but not even one Catholic chaplain was appointed. All persons in active service, from superior officers down to private soldiers, were declared to be members of the military parish, and were placed under the authority of the Protestant chaplains. If a Catholic soldier wished to get married or to have his child baptized by a priest, he had first to obtain the permission of his Protestant curate. What was still more intolerable, the law regulating military worship was so contrived as to force the Catholic soldiers to be present at Protestant service.

Let us now turn to the relations of the church in Prussia with the Holy See. All direct communications between the Catholics and the Pope were expressly forbidden. Whenever the bishops wished to consult the Holy Father concerning the administration of their dioceses, their inquiries had to pass through the hands of the Protestant ministry, to be forwarded or not at its discretion, and the answer of the Pope had to pass through the same channel. It was not safe to write; for the government had no respect for the mails, and letters were habitually opened by order of Von Nagler, the postmaster-general, who boasted that he had never had any idiotic scruples about such matters; that Prince Constantine was his model, who had once entertained him with narrating how he had managed to get the choicest selection of intercepted letters in existence; he had had them bound in morocco, and they formed thirty-three volumes of the most interesting reading in his private library. Thus the church was ruled by a system of espionage and bureaucracy which hesitated not to violate all the sanctities of life to accomplish its ends. The bishops were reduced to a state of abject dependence; not being allowed to publish any new regulation or to make any appointment without the permission and approval of the Protestant high-president, from whom they constantly received the most annoying and vexatious despatches.

The election of bishops was reduced to a mere form. When a see became vacant, the royal commissary visited the chapter and announced the person whom the king had selected to fill the office, declaring at the same time that no other would receive his approval.

The minutest details of Catholic worship were placed under the supervision and control of Protestant laymen, who had to decide how much wine and how many hosts might be used during the year in the different churches.

We come now to a matter, vexed and often discussed, in which the trials of the church in Prussia, prior to the recent persecutions, finally culminated; we allude to the subject of marriages between Catholics and Protestants.

When, in 1803, Prussia got possession of the greater part of her Catholic provinces, the following order was at once issued: “His majesty enacts that children born in wedlock shall all be educated in the religion of the father, and that, in opposition to this law, neither party shall bind the other.” Apart from the odious meddling of the state with the rights of individuals and the agreements of parties so closely and sacredly related as man and wife, there was in this enactment a special injustice to Catholics, from the fact that nearly all the mixed marriages in Prussia were contracted by Protestant government officials and Catholic women of the provinces to which these agents had been sent. As these men held lucrative offices, they found no difficulty in making matrimonial alliances; and as the children had to be brought up in the religion of the father, the government was by this means gradually establishing Protestant congregations throughout its Catholic provinces. In 1825 this law was extended to the Rhenish province, and in 1831 a document was brought to light which explained the object of the extension--viz., that it might prove an effectual measure against the proselyting system of Catholics.

The condition of the church was indeed deplorable. With the name of being free, she was, in truth, enslaved; and while the state professed to respect her rights, it was using all the power of the most thoroughly organized and most heartless system of bureaucracy and espionage to weaken and fetter her action, and even to destroy her life. This was the state of affairs when, in the end of 1835, Von Droste Vischering, one of the greatest and noblest men of this century, worthy to be named with Athanasius and with Ambrose, was made archbishop of Cologne.

The Catholic people of Prussia had long since lost all faith in the good intentions of the government, of whose acts and aims they had full knowledge; and it was in order to restore confidence that a man so trusted and loved by them as Von Droste Vischering was promoted to the see of Cologne. The doctrines of Hermes, professor of theology in the University of Bonn, had just been condemned at Rome, but the government ignored the papal brief, and continued to give its support to the Hermesians; the archbishop, nevertheless, condemned their writings, and especially their organ, the _Bonner Theologische Zeitschrift_, forbade his students to attend their lectures at the university, and finally withdrew his approbation altogether from the Hermesian professors, refusing to ordain students unless they formally renounced the proscribed doctrines.

By a ministerial order issued in 1825, priests were forbidden, under pain of deposition from office, to exact in mixed marriages any promise concerning the education of the offspring. A like penalty was threatened for refusing to marry parties who were unwilling to make such promises, or for withholding absolution from those who were bringing up their children in the Protestant religion. To avert as far as possible any conflict between the church and the government, Pius VIII., in 1830, addressed a brief to the bishops of Cologne, Treves, Münster, and Paderborn, in which he made every allowable concession to the authority of the state in the matter of mixed marriages. The court of Berlin withheld the papal brief, and, taking advantage of the yielding disposition of Archbishop Spiegel of Cologne, entered, without the knowledge of the Holy See, into a secret agreement with him, in which still farther concessions were made, and in violation of Catholic principle. Von Droste Vischering took as his guide the papal brief, and paid no attention to such provisions of the secret agreement as conflicted with the instructions of the Holy Father.

The government took alarm, and offered to let fall the Hermesians, if the archbishop would yield in the affair of mixed marriages; and as this expedient failed, measures of violence were threatened, which were soon carried into effect; for on the evening of the 20th of November, 1837, the archbishop was secretly arrested and carried off to the fortress of Minden, where he was placed in close confinement, all communication with him being cut off. The next morning the government issued a “Publicandum,” in which it entered its accusations against the archbishop, in order to justify its arbitrary act and to appease the anger of the people. Notwithstanding, a cry of indignation and grief was heard in all the Catholic provinces of Prussia, which was re-echoed throughout Germany and extended to all Europe. Lukewarm Catholics grew fervent, and the very Hermesians gathered with their sympathies to uphold the cause of the archbishop.

The Archbishop of Posen and the Bishops of Paderborn and Münster announced their withdrawal from the secret convention, which the Bishop of Treves had already done upon his death-bed; and henceforward the priests throughout the kingdom held firm to the ecclesiastical law on mixed marriages, so that in 1838 Frederic William III. was forced to make a declaration recognizing the rights for which they contended. But the Archbishop of Cologne was still a prisoner in the fortress of Minden. Early, however, in 1839, health began to fail; and as the government feared lest his death in prison might produce unfavorable comment, he received permission to withdraw to Münster. The next year the king died, and his successor, Frederic William IV., showed himself ready to settle the dispute amicably, and in other ways to do justice to the Catholics. A great victory had been gained--the secret convention was destroyed--a certain liberty of communication with the Pope was granted to the bishops. The election of bishops was made comparatively free, the control of the schools of theology was restored to them, the Hermesians either submitted or were removed, and the Catholics of Germany awoke from a deathlike sleep to new and vigorous life.

An evidence of the awakening of faith was given in the fall of 1844, when a million and a half of German Catholics went in pilgrimage, with song and prayer, to Treves.

Nevertheless, many grievances remained unredressed. The _Censur_ was still used against the church; and when the Catholics asked permission to publish journals in which they could defend themselves and their religious interests, they were told that such publications were not needed; but when Ronge, the suspended priest, sought to found his sect of “German Catholics,” he received every encouragement from the government, and the earnest support of the officials and nearly the entire press of Prussia; though, at this very time, every effort was being made to crush the “Old Lutherans.”

The government continued to find pretexts for meddling with the affairs of the bishops, and the newspapers attacked the church in the most insulting manner, going so far as to demand that the religious exercises for priests should be placed under police supervision. We have now reached a memorable epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in Prussia--the revolution of 1848, which convulsed Germany to its centre, spread dismay among all classes, and filled its cities with riot and bloodshed. When order was re-established, the liberties of the church were recognized more fully than they had been for three centuries.

GARCIA MORENO.

FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

I.

The atrocious assassination of Garcia Moreno, the President of the republic of Ecuador, has filled the minds of all good people with the deepest grief and horror. The liberals are the only ones who have mentioned it in their journals with indifference. One of them headed his announcement of it, “A victim of the Sacred Heart”--alluding, with blasphemous irony, to the act of consecration of his people to the Adorable Heart of our Lord which this truly pious ruler had made. But with the exception of these reprobates--who, hating God, cannot love mankind--no one who has any admiration of moral greatness can help deploring the death of this extraordinary man--a death the more deplorable on account of its coming, not from a natural cause, but from a detestable conspiracy concocted by the enemies of all that is good, who abhorred equally the wisdom of his government and the soundness of his faith. The London _Times_ has a despatch from Paris of October 5 with the following communication: “It appears, from authentic information which we have received, that Garcia Moreno, lately President of the republic of Ecuador, has been assassinated by a secret society which extends through all South America, as well as Europe. The assassin was selected by lot, and obtained admission to the palace at Quito. One of his accomplices, an official, who was arrested after the murder, was assured by the president of the court-martial, before his trial, that he would be pardoned if he turned state’s evidence. ‘Be pardoned?’ said he. ‘That would be of no use to me; if you pardon me, my comrades will not. I would rather be shot than stabbed.’” This decision of the society to kill him was known to Moreno, and he informed the Pope of it in a letter, which we will shortly give.

This illustrious man had governed the republic of Ecuador for about fifteen years--first as dictator, and afterwards, for two consecutive terms, as president; and to this office he had just been re-elected for a third term by an unanimous vote. He had taken charge of the state when it was in an exceedingly miserable condition, and by his lofty genius, practical tact, and perseverance, but above all by his piety and confidence in God, had completely renovated and restored not only the morals of the people, but also the whole political administration, and made the country a perfect model of a Christian nation. He was intending to complete the work which he had begun, and was able to rely confidently on the co-operation of his people, whose reverence and love for him were unbounded. But all this was intolerable to the liberals of our day; they could not bear that in a corner of the New World the problem should be solved, which they are trying to make so perplexing, of harmony between the state and the church; of the combination of temporal prosperity and Catholic piety; of obedience to the civil law and perfect submission to ecclesiastical authority. This was an insufferable scandal for modern liberalism,[248] especially because such a good example might do much to frustrate the plans of this perverse sect in other countries.

The Masons, therefore, resolved to murder this man, whom they had found to be too brave and determined to be checked in any other way; for all the attempts they had made to intimidate him or to diminish his popularity had been entirely without effect. Moreno anticipated the blow, but, far from fearing it, was only the more persuaded to persevere in his undertaking, regarding it as the greatest happiness to be able to give his life for so holy a cause. In the last letter which he wrote to the Supreme Pontiff before his assassination are these words: “I implore your apostolic benediction, Most Holy Father, having been re-elected (though I did not deserve it) to the office of president of this Catholic republic for another six years. Although the new term does not begin till the 30th of August, the day on which I take the oath required by the constitution, so that then only shall I need to give your Holiness an official notification of my re-election, nevertheless I wish not to delay in informing you of it, in order that I may obtain from Heaven the strength and light which I more than any other one shall need, to keep me a child of our Redeemer and loyal and obedient to his infallible Vicar. And now that the lodges of neighboring countries, inspired by Germany, vomit out against me all sorts of atrocious insults and horrible calumnies, and even secretly lay plans for my assassination, I require more than ever the divine assistance and protection to live and die in defence of our holy religion and of this beloved republic which God has given me to govern. How fortunate I am, Most Holy Father, to be hated and calumniated for the sake of our divine Saviour; and what unspeakable happiness would it be for me if your benediction should obtain for me the grace to shed my blood for him who, though he was God, yet shed his own on the cross for us!” This heroic desire of the fervent Christian was granted. He was murdered by the enemies of Christ, in hatred of his zeal for the restoration of the Christian state and of his fervent love for the church. He is truly a martyr of Christ. Are not S. Wenceslaus of Bohemia and S. Canute of Denmark numbered among the holy martyrs, for the same cause? Both of them were killed in the precincts of the temple of God; and Moreno was carried back to the church from which he had only just departed, to breathe out his noble soul into the bosom of his Creator.

II.

The object of Masonic civilization is society without God. The results which it has succeeded in achieving, and which it deems of such importance, are the separation of the state from the church, liberty of worship, the withdrawal of public charities from religious objects, the exclusion of the clergy from the work of education, the suppression of religious orders, the supremacy of the civil law, and the setting aside of the law of the Gospel. Only by these means, according to the Masons, can the happiness of the people, the prosperity of the state, and the increase of morality and learning be attained. These are their fundamental maxims. Now, the difficulty was that Moreno had practically shown, and was continuing to show more completely every day, that the peace, prosperity, and greatness of a nation will be in proportion to its devotion to God and its obedience to the church; that subjection to God and his church, far from diminishing, ensures and increases, the true liberty of man; that the influence of the clergy promotes not only the cause of morality, but also that of letters and science; that man’s temporal interests are never better cared for than when they are subordinated to those which are eternal; and that love of country is never so powerful as when it is consecrated by love of the church.

A man of the most distinguished talents, which had been most fully cultivated at the University of Paris, Moreno had in his own country occupied the most conspicuous positions. He had been a professor of the natural sciences, rector of the university, representative, senator, commander-in-chief of the army, dictator, and president of the republic. In this last office, in which he would probably have been retained by the nation through life, he showed what genius sanctified by religion can accomplish. His first care was to establish peace throughout the country, without which there can be no civil progress; and he succeeded in doing so, not by compromises, as is now the fashion--not by making a monstrous and abnormal amalgamation of parties and principles--but by the consistent and firm assertion of the principles of morality and justice, and by the open and unhesitating profession of Catholicity. His success was so marked that Ecuador very soon arrived at such a perfect state of tranquillity and concord as to seem a prodigy among the agitated and turbulent republics in its neighborhood.

With the exception of some local and ineffectual attempts at revolution during his first presidency, which were quelled by placing some of the southern provinces in a state of siege for fifty days, Ecuador was undisturbed by sedition during the whole of his long government. This was partly due to the splendor of his private and public virtues, which dissipated the clouds of envy and hatred, and gained for him the esteem even of his political opponents. He was chaste, magnanimous, just, impartial, and so well known for clearheadedness that the people often stopped him on the streets to decide their disputes on the spot, and accepted his opinion as final. His disinterestedness seems fabulous when we think of the immoderate cupidity prevailing among modern politicians. In his first six years he would not even draw his salary, being content to live on the income of his own moderate fortune. In his second term he accepted it, but spent it almost entirely in works of public utility. And in such works he employed the whole of his time. When any one endeavored to persuade him not to shorten his life by such continual labor, he used to say: “If God wants me to rest, he will send me illness or death.”

Owing to this unwearying assiduity and his ardent love for the good of his people, he was able to undertake and finish an amount of business that would appear incredible, were not the evidence too strong to admit of doubt. In No. 1,875 of the _Univers_ there is a catalogue of the principal enterprises which he carried through in a brief period. They are as follows:

A revision of the constitution.

The paying of the customs to the national treasury, instead of to the provincial ones, as formerly.

National representation for the country as well as the cities.

The establishment of a fiscal court, and the organization of the courts of justice.

The foundation of a great polytechnic school, which was partially entrusted to the Jesuits.

The construction and equipment of an astronomical observatory, which was built and directed by the Jesuits. On account of the equatorial position of Quito, Garcia Moreno, who was well versed in the mathematical sciences, wished to make this observatory equal to any in the world. He bought most of the instruments with his own private funds.

Roads connecting different parts of the country. Garcia Moreno laid out and nearly completed five great national roads. The principal one, that from Guayaquil to Quito, is eighty leagues in length. It is paved, and has one hundred and twenty bridges. It is a solid and stupendous work, constructed in the face of almost insuperable difficulties.

The establishment of four new dioceses.

A concordat with the Holy See.

The reformation of the regular clergy; the restoration among them of a common and monastic life.

The reconstruction of the army. The army had been a mere horde, without organization, discipline, or uniform; the men hardly had shoes. Moreno organized them on the French system, clothed, shod, and disciplined them; now they are the model as well as the defence of the people.

The building of a light-house at Guayaquil. Previously there had been none on the whole coast.

Reforms in the collection of the customs. Frauds put an end to, and the revenues trebled.

Colleges in all the cities; schools in even the smallest villages--all conducted by the Christian Brothers.

Schools for girls; Sisters of Charity, Ladies of the Sacred Heart, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, of Providence, and Little Sisters of the Poor.

Public hospitals. During his first presidency Moreno turned out the director of the hospital at Quito, who had refused to receive a poor man and was very negligent of his duties, and made himself director in his stead. He visited the hospital every day, improved its arrangements, and put it in good working order. He performed in it many acts of heroic charity.

The maintenance and increase of lay congregations and orders. He was an active member of the Congregation of the Poor.

The establishment of four museums.

The Catholic Protectory, a vast and magnificent school of arts and trades, on the plan of S. Michele at Rome, and conducted by the Christian Brothers.

Postal conventions with various foreign states.

The embellishment and restoration of the cities. Guayaquil, and especially Quito, seemed as if they had been rebuilt.

And he accomplished all this, not only without increasing the taxes, but even diminishing some of them. This is the reason why he was so much beloved by the people; why they called him father of his country and saviour of the republic. But it was also this which was his unpardonable sin, which had to promptly receive a chastisement which should serve as a warning for his successors, that they might not dare to imitate his manner of government. For such a course as his was sure to ruin the credit of Masonry in the popular mind.

III.

Moreno loved his country, and worked so hard for its good, because he was truly and thoroughly religious. Every one who really loves God loves his neighbor also; and he who loves God intensely loves his neighbor in the same way, because he sees in him the image of God and the price of his blood.

When he was a student in Paris he was admired for his piety. In his own country, amid the continual cares and heavy responsibilities of his office, he always found time to hear Mass every morning and say the rosary every night. In his familiar conversation he spoke frequently of God, of religion, of virtue, and with such fervor that all who heard felt their hearts touched and moved by his words. Before beginning the business of the day, he always made a visit to the church to implore light from the Source of all wisdom; and he had just left it, as we have said, when he met the ambuscade which was prepared for him. This religious spirit produced in him a great zeal for the glory of God, and that devotion to the Vicar of Christ which in him so much resembled the affection of a child for his father. Let it suffice to say that when he had to arrange the concordat with the Holy See, he sent his ambassador to Rome with a blank sheet signed by himself, telling him to ask his Holiness to write on it whatever seemed to him right and conducive to the good of the church and the true welfare of the nation. Such was the confidence which he reposed in the Pope, with whom politicians are accustomed to treat as if he were an ambitious and designing foreign prince, instead of being the father of all the faithful. When the revolution entered Rome in triumph through the breach of Porta Pia, Garcia Moreno was the only ruler in the world who dared to enter a solemn protest against that sacrilegious invasion; and he obtained from his Congress a considerable sum as a monthly subsidy and tribute of affection to his Holiness.

But his piety toward God and his filial love to the church can best be seen from the message to Congress which he finished a few hours before his death, and which was found on his dead body, steeped in his blood. Although it is somewhat long for the limits of an article, we think that we ought to present it to our readers as an imperishable monument of true piety and enlightened policy, and as a lesson for the false politicians of the present day and of days to come.

The message is as follows:

“SENATORS AND DEPUTIES: I count among the greatest of the great blessings which God has, in the inexhaustible abundance of his mercy, granted to our republic, that of seeing you here assembled under his protection, in the shadow of his peace, which he has granted and still grants to us, while we are nothing and can do nothing, and only give in return for his paternal goodness inexcusable and shameful ingratitude.

“It is only a few years since Ecuador had to repeat daily these sad words which the liberator Bolivar addressed in his last message to the Congress of 1830: ‘I blush to have to acknowledge that independence is the only good which we have acquired, and that we have lost all the rest in acquiring it.’

“But since the time when, placing all our hope in God, we escaped from the torrent of impiety and apostasy which overwhelms the world in this age of blindness; since 1869, when we reformed ourselves into a truly Catholic nation, everything has been on a course of steady and daily improvement, and the prosperity of our dear country has been continually increasing.

“Ecuador was not long ago a body from which the life-blood was ebbing, and which was even, like a corpse, already a prey to a horrible swarm of vermin which the liberty of putrefaction engendered in the darkness of the tomb. But to-day, at the command of that sovereign voice which called Lazarus from the sepulchre, it has returned to life, though it still has not entirely cast off the winding-sheet and bandages--that is to say, the remains and effects of the misery and corruption in which it had been buried.

“To justify what I have said, it will suffice for me to give a short sketch of the progress which has been made in these last two years, referring you to the various departments of the government for documentary and detailed information. And that you may see exactly how far we have advanced in this period of regeneration, I shall compare our present condition with that from which we started; not for our own glory and self-gratulation, but to glorify Him to whom we owe everything, and whom we adore as our Redeemer and our Father, our Protector and our God.”

Here follows an enumeration of all the improvements which had been made. He continues:

“We owe to the perfect liberty which the church has among us, and to the apostolic zeal of its excellent prelates, the reformation of the clergy, the amendment of morals, and the reduction of crimes; which is so great that in our population of a million there are not enough criminals to fill the penitentiary.

“To the church also we owe those religious corporations which produce such an abundance of excellent results by the instruction of childhood and youth, and by the succor which they give so liberally to the sick and to the destitute. We are also debtors to these religious for the renewal of the spirit of piety in this year of jubilee and of sanctification, and for the conversion to Christianity and civilization of nine thousand savages in the eastern province, in which, on account of its vast extent, there are good reasons for establishing a second vicariate. If you authorize me to ask the Holy See for this foundation, we will then consult as to what measures to take to promote the commerce of this province, and to put an end to the selfish speculations and the violent exactions to which its poor inhabitants have been a prey by reason of the cruelty of inhuman merchants. The laborers, however, for this field are not now to be had; and that those which we shall have may be properly trained, it is right that you should give a yearly subsidy to our venerable and zealous archbishop, to assist him in building the great seminary which he has not hesitated to begin, trusting in the protection of Heaven and in our co-operation.

“Do not forget, legislators, that our little successes would be ephemeral and without fruit if we had not founded the social order of our republic upon the rock, always resisted and always victorious, of the Catholic Church. Its divine teaching, which neither men nor nations can neglect and be saved, is the rule of our institutions, the law of our laws. Docile and faithful children of our venerable, august, and infallible Pontiff, whom all the great ones of the earth are abandoning, and who is being oppressed by vile, cowardly, and impious men, we have continued to send him monthly the little contribution which you voted in 1873. Though our weakness obliges us to remain passive spectators of his slow martyrdom, let us hope that this poor gift may at least be a proof of our sympathy and affection, and a pledge of our obedience and fidelity.

“In a few days the term for which I was elected in 1869 will expire. The republic has enjoyed six years of peace, interrupted only by a revolt of a few days in 1872 at Riobamba, of the natives against the whites; and in these six years it has advanced rapidly on the path of true progress under the visible protection of divine Providence. The results achieved would certainly have been greater if I had possessed the abilities for government which unfortunately I lack, or if all that was needed to accomplish good was ardently to desire it.

“If I have committed faults, I ask pardon for them a thousand times, and beg it with tears from all my countrymen, feeling confident that they have been unintentional. If, on the contrary, you think that in any respect I have succeeded, give the honor of the success, in the first place, to God and to his Immaculate Mother, to whom are committed the inexhaustible treasures of his mercy; and, in the second place, to yourselves, to the people, to the army, and to all those who, in the different branches of the government, have assisted me with intelligence and fidelity in the fulfilment of my difficult duties.

“GABRIEL GARCIA MORENO.

“QUITO, August, 1875.”

That is the way that a really Catholic ruler can speak, even in this XIXth century. It seems, while we read his words, as if we were listening to Ferdinand of Castile or some other one of the saintly kings of the most prosperous days of Christianity. With great justice, then, did the government of Ecuador, when it published this message--which was found, as we have said, on Moreno’s dead body--append to it the following note:

“The message which we have just given is the solemn voice of one who is dead; or, better, it is his last will and testament actually sealed with his own blood; for our noble president had just written it with his own hand when he was assailed by his murderers. Its last words are those of a dying father who, blessing his children, turns for the last time toward them his eyes, darkened by the shadow of death, and asks pardon of them, as if he had been doing anything during all their lives but loading them with benefits. Deeply moved and distressed by grief, we seek in vain for words adequate to express our love and veneration for him. Posterity no doubt will honor the undying memory of the great ruler, the wise politician, the noble patriot, and the saintly defender of the faith who has been so basely assassinated. His country, worthily represented by their present legislators, will shed tears over this tomb which contains such great virtues and such great hopes, and will gratefully record on imperishable tablets the glorious name of this her son, who, regardless of his own blood and life, lived and died only for her.”

This splendid eulogy is an echo of the eternal benediction and a reflection of the brilliant crown which we cannot doubt that God has given to this his latest martyr.

IV.

The reader will see that this message of Garcia Moreno contains a true and genuine scheme of Christian government which he applied in the republic of Ecuador, in direct opposition to the ideas and aspirations of modern liberalism. Every point of it is in most marked contrast to the liberalist programme. At some risk of repetition, we will here make a short comparison between the two, on account of the importance of the conclusions which all prudent men can draw from it.

Moreno begins with God, and puts him at the head of the government of his people; liberalism would have the state atheistic, and is ashamed even to mention the name of God in its public documents. Moreno desires an intimate union between the state and the Catholic Church, declaring that the social order must be founded on the church, and that her divine teaching must be the rule of human institutions and the law of civil laws; liberalism, on the other hand, not only separates the state from the church, but even raises it above her, and makes the civil laws the standard in harmony with which the ecclesiastical laws must be framed. It even would subject the most essential institutions of the church to the caprice of man. Moreno desires full liberty for the bishops, and ascribes to this liberty the reform of the clergy and the good morals of the people; liberalism wants to fetter episcopal action, excites the inferior clergy to rebellion against their prelates, and endeavors to withdraw the people from the influence of either. Moreno not only supports but multiplies religious communities; liberalism suppresses them. Moreno respects ecclesiastical property, and promotes by the resources of the state the foundation of new seminaries, saying that without them it will not be possible worthily to fill the ranks of the sacred ministry; liberalism confiscates the goods of the church, closes the seminaries, and sends the young Levites to the barracks, to be educated in the dissipation and license of military life. Moreno confides to the clergy and to the religious orders the training and instruction of youth; liberalism secularizes education, and insists on the entire exclusion of the religious element. Moreno removes from his Catholic nation the wiles and scandals of false religion; liberalism promulgates freedom of worship, and opens the door to every heresy in faith and to every corruption in morals. Moreno, finally, sees in himself the weakness inherent in man, and gives God credit for all the good which he accomplishes; while liberalism, full of satanic pride, believes itself capable of everything, and places all its confidence in the natural powers of man. The antagonism between the two systems is, in short, universal and absolute.

Now, what is the verdict of experience? It is that the application of Moreno’s system has resulted in peace, prosperity, the moral and material welfare of the people--in a word, social happiness. On the contrary, the application of the liberalist system has produced discord, general misery, enormous taxation, immorality among the people, and public scandals, and has driven society to the verge of destruction and dissolution. The liberty which it has given has been well defined by Moreno; it is the liberty of a corpse, the liberty to rot.

And at this juncture the infamous wickedness and the despicable logic of the liberalist party can no longer be concealed. It has laid it down as certain that the principles of the middle ages, as it calls them--which are the true Catholic principles, the principles affirmed by our Holy Father Pius IX. in his Syllabus--are not applicable to modern times, and can no longer give happiness to nations. But here is a ruler, Garcia Moreno by name, who gives the lie to this grovelling falsehood, and shows, by the irresistible evidence of facts, that the happiness of his people has actually come simply from the application of these principles. What is the answer of the liberalist sect to this manifest confutation of their theory? First, it endeavors to cry down its formidable adversary by invective and calumny; and then, finding that this does not suffice to remove him from public life, it murders him. This is the only means it has to prove its thesis; and, having made use of it, it begins to shriek louder than before that Catholic principles cannot be adapted to the progress of this age. No, we agree that they cannot, if you are going to kill every one who adapts them. What use is it to argue with a sect so malicious and perverse? O patience of God and of men, how basely are you abused!

A REVIVAL IN FROGTOWN.

There was quite an excitement in Frogtown. The Rev. Eliphalet Notext, “The Great Revivalist, who had made more converts than any other man in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the United States and Territories, and the British Provinces of North America,” was to “open a three weeks’ campaign” in the town.

Now, Frogtown prided itself on being the wickedest little town in the West. Its inhabitants claimed for it the enviable distinction of being “the fastest little village of its size in the United States”--a weakness common to most small towns. This pride in vice is a widespread weakness. The lean and slippered pantaloon will wag his fallen chaps and give evident signs of pleasant titillation when some shank-shrunken contemporary tells “what a rascal the dog was in his youth.”

Well, the Frogtowners flattered themselves that Brother Notext would find their burgh a very hard nut to crack. Brother Notext was not a theologian. He was not a scholar. He was not a preacher. In truth, he was almost illiterate. But he understood the “business” of getting up revivals. He knew how to create a sensation. He could, at least, achieve a success of curiosity, as the French say.

He began with the newspapers, of course. He contrived to have them say something about him and his “work” in every issue. He was not particular whether what they said of him was favorable or unfavorable. Indeed, he rather preferred that some of them should abuse him roundly. Abuse sometimes helped him more than praise. It made some people his friends through a spirit of contradiction. It appealed to the pugnacious instincts of some “professors of religion.” It enabled him to hint that the inimical editors were papal myrmidons, Jesuit emissaries, etc., etc.

The Rev. Eliphalet was really an excellent organizer. He had been originally the business manager of a circus. His advertisements, his posters, his hand-bills, in his old occupation, were prepared with all the gorgeous imagery of the East. He did not forget his old tactics in his new profession. Immediately on his arrival in Frogtown he grappled the newspapers. He begged, bullied, or badgered the editors until they noticed him. He set the Christian Juveniles and the kindred societies to work, with whom, of course, there was no difficulty. In a couple of days he succeeded in drawing around him the clergymen of every denomination, except the Episcopalian and Unitarian. Some of these, however, went much against their will. The Episcopalian minister--a gentle, amiable man--was very loath at first; but the pressure brought to bear upon him was too strong. He finally succumbed and joined in what was called a Union Christian Meeting of all the Protestant congregations. This important point achieved, Mr. Notext had three of the “best workers” in each congregation selected. These he sent among the people to raise the sinews of war, without which no campaign, whether sacred or profane, can be conducted to a successful issue. Mr. Notext’s terms were reasonable--only three hundred dollars a week and found. A man must live; and when a man works hard--as Mr. Notext undoubtedly did--he must live well, or he cannot stand the strain on his physical and mental strength. Then, there were blank weeks when he had no revival in hand, and probably a hotel bill to pay. Taking these things into consideration, any reasonable person will allow that three hundred dollars a week and found was not an exorbitant price.

Mr. Notext had a large tent which the profane said had been formerly used in his old business. It was pitched in a vacant lot within the city limits, and could accommodate about fifteen hundred persons. Mr. Notext prevailed on the clergymen who united with him to close their churches on the first Sunday of his revival. On the previous Friday he gathered around him a number of male and female enthusiasts. Accompanied by these people, organized in squads and led by the regular revival practitioners who did what is profanely termed the “side-show” business in all Mr. Notext’s tours, he sang hymns in front of every drinking-saloon in the town. The instrumental accompaniment to the singing was furnished by a melodeon, which was carried about in a one-horse cart.

On Sunday the union meetings began, and, notwithstanding a heavy rain, the tent was full. A large platform had been erected inside, and near the door was a table on which were exposed for sale a great variety of contributions to religious literature, all by one author, who had evidently tried every string of the religious lyre. There were collections of hymns by the Rev. Mr. Notext; tracts by the Rev. Mr. Notext; sermons by the Rev. Mr. Notext; tales for the young by the Rev. Mr. Notext; appeals to the old by the Rev. Mr. Notext; reasons for the middle-aged by the Rev. Mr. Notext, etc., etc. There were photographs, in every style, of the Rev. Mr. Notext, as well as likenesses of remarkable converts who had been remarkable rascals until they “got religion” through the efforts of the Rev. Mr. Notext.

On the platform were seated the shepherds of most of the flocks in Frogtown. Some among them, it is true, did not seem quite at home in that situation, but they had to be there. In the centre of the platform was an organ, which furnished the instrumental music. On each side of the organ seats were arranged for a volunteer choir. Fully half those present were children.

The Rev. Eliphalet Notext was introduced to the audience by the minister of the Methodist church. The revivalist was a stout, fair-haired, fresh-colored, rather pleasant-looking man, inclined to corpulency, evidently not an ascetic, and gifted with no inconsiderable share of physical energy and magnetism.

“I wish all persons who can sing to come on the platform and occupy the seats to the right and left of the organ,” he began.

No movement was made in response to this call. It was repeated with a better result. A dozen young ladies summoned up enough courage to mount the platform.

“This will never do!” cried Mr. Notext. “I want every person present who can sing right here on this stand. We can’t get along without music and plenty of it.”

“Brethren,” he continued, turning toward the clergymen on the platform, “you know the singers in your congregations; go among them and send them up here. Everybody must put his shoulder to the wheel in the great work of bringing souls to Jesus.”

The brethren meekly did as they were bid. They soon succeeded in filling the seats reserved for the singers. These numbered about one hundred.

“That’s more like it,” said Mr. Notext approvingly. “Now, my friends, we will begin by singing a hymn. I want everybody to join in.” (A nod to the organist, who began to play.)

The singing was rather timid at first, but, led by Mr. Notext, the singers rapidly gained confidence, and soon rolled forth in full chorus. Having fairly launched them, their leader, after the first verse, left them to take care of themselves. The singing was really good. The rich volume of harmony drowned the commonplace melody and the vulgar words. Thus Brother Notext was successful in the production of his first effect. It was evident that he depended much on the singing. There is nothing like a grand mass of choral music to excite the sensibilities. After two or three hymns, the revivalist had his audience in a highly emotional condition. “I want all the children together in front!” shouted Mr. Notext. “_Ad_ults [the accent on the first syllable] will retire to the back seats. Don’t stop the music! Keep up the singing! Go on! go on!” Then he ran to the organ, whispered something to the organist, and led off with

“Oh! you must be a lover of the Lord, Or you won’t go to heaven when you die,”

leaving the singers to sing it out for themselves after the first two or three lines.

It took some time to get all the children to the front. If the music flagged, Mr. Notext shouted to the singers to “keep it up.” From time to time he would rush to the organ, pick up a hymn-book in a frantic manner, and lead off with a new hymn, waving his hands in cadence, but, with a due regard for his lungs, not singing a note more than was absolutely necessary to start the other singers afresh.

The fathers and mothers of the little ones, softened by the music, looked with moistened eyes on their children as the latter took their seats. The American people are very fond of children when they are old enough to walk and talk and be interesting. Mr. Notext was alive to this fact. Even the worst criminal or the most cynical man of the world cannot help being touched while music charms his ears and his eyes look on the beautiful spectacle of childish innocence. Mr. Notext evidently knew the more amiable weaknesses of human nature. He appealed to the senses and the affections, and won over the fathers and mothers through the children.

“Now, my little friends,” said Mr. Notext, “I wish you all to keep perfectly silent while I am talking to you. This first meeting is especially for you.”

There was considerable buzzing among the little ones.

“I must have silence, if I am to do anything with these children,” said Mr. Notext rather testily, and in a tone which showed that he would not scruple to apply the birch to his little friends if they did not keep quiet. “The slightest noise distracts their attention. There are some boys to the right there who are still talking! I wish some one would stop them.”

A softly-stepping gentleman with long hair and green goggles went to the designated group, remonstrated with, and finally succeeded in silencing, them. Then Mr. Notext began his sermon to the children. He told the story of the Passion in a manner which, though it inexpressibly shocked Christians of the old-fashioned kind who happened to be present, was exceedingly dramatic--“realistic” in the highest degree, to borrow a word from the modern play-bill. Suddenly he broke off and said rather excitedly:

“There is a boy on the fourth bench who persists in talking. I must have absolute silence, or I cannot hold the attention of these children. The slightest noise distracts them and takes their minds away from the picture I am endeavoring to present to them. It is that red-haired boy! Will somebody please to take him away?” Several pious gentlemen bore down on the poor little red-haired urchin, and all chance of “getting religion” was taken away from him for the nonce by his summary removal. When silence was restored, Mr. Notext resumed the story. When describing how the divine Victim was buffeted and spat upon, he administered to himself sounding slaps on the face, now with the left hand, now with the right. He placed an imaginary crown of thorns on his head, pressed the sharp points into his forehead, and, passing the open fingers of both hands over his closed eyes and down his face, traced the streams of blood trickling from the cruel wounds. Tears already rolled down the cheeks of the little ones. When he reached the nailing to the cross, he produced a large spike, exhibited it to the children, and went through the semblance of driving it into his flesh. An outburst of sobs interrupted him. Some of the children screamed in very terror. The desired effect was produced. Many fathers and mothers, touched by the emotion and terror of their children, wept in sympathy with them.

“Now the music!” shouted Mr. Notext, stamping with impatience, as if he wanted a tardy patient to swallow a Sedlitz-powder in the proper moment of effervescence. “Now the music!” And he led off with

“Oh! you must be a lover of the Lord, Or you won’t go to heaven when you die!”

He shouted to the “workers” to go among the people and ask them to “come to Jesus.” A crowd of “workers,” some professional, some enthusiastic volunteers, broke loose upon the audience. They seized people by the hands. They embraced them. They inquired: “How do you feel now? Do you not feel that Jesus is calling you?” They begged them to come to Jesus at once. They asked them if they were “Ker-istians.”

One of the workers met two gentlemen who entered together and were evidently present through curiosity. Of the first, who seemed to be a cool, keen, self-poised business man, the worker asked the stereotyped question:

“Are you a Ker-istian?”

“Of course, of course,” said the self-possessed business man.

The worker passed on, perfectly satisfied with the off-hand declaration. He repeated the question to the gentleman’s companion, who, possessed of less assurance, hesitated and humbly replied:

“I trust so.”

The worker immediately grappled the sensitive gentleman, much to his mortification, and it was some time before he succeeded in effecting his escape, regretting, doubtless, that he had not made as prompt and satisfactory a profession of faith as that of his companion.

The “inquiry meeting,” as the exercises toward the close were named, was continued until late in the afternoon. When the children were dismissed, they were instructed to beg their parents to come to Jesus--to entreat them, with tears if necessary, until they consented. A Presbyterian gentleman of the old school, describing his sensations after the meeting was over, said:

“I cannot deny that I was affected. I felt tears coming to my eyes--why, I could not tell. The effect, however, was entirely physical. My reason had nothing to do with it. It condemned the whole thing as merely calculated to get up an unhealthy excitement, which, even if not injurious, would be fleeting in its effect. I noticed some nervous women almost worked up into spasms. As to the children, they were goaded into a state of nervousness and terror which was pitiable to see. I can only compare my own condition to that of a man who had drunk freely. While the effect lasted I was capable of making a fool of myself, being all the while aware that I was doing so. Sunlight and air have dispelled the intoxication, and now nothing remains but nausea.

“I am disgusted with such claptrap, and ashamed of myself for having been affected by it, however temporarily and slightly.”

The progress made on the first Sunday of the revival was duly chronicled in the newspapers of the day following. It was announced that hundreds of children had been awakened to a sense of their sinful condition. A little girl--four years old--had recognized that she was thoroughly steeped in sin. She had had no idea of the condition of her soul until she was roused to it by Mr. Notext’s preaching. She was now perfectly happy. She had experienced religion. She knew she was forgiven. She had gone to Jesus, and Jesus had come to her. She had sought Mr. Notext’s lodgings, leading her father with one hand and her mother with the other.

Charley Biggs--the well-known drunken alderman--was among the converted. He had “got religion,” and was resolved henceforth to touch the time-honored toddy nevermore.

A belated “local” of one of the newspapers, while returning to his lodgings on the previous evening, had his coat-tail pulled, much to his surprise, by a little girl about six years old.

“Please, sir,” she asked, “do you know Jesus?”

The “local” was struck dumb.

“O sir!” she continued, “won’t you please come to Jesus?”

This was enough. The hard heart-of the “local” was touched. He sobbed, he wept, he cried aloud. He fell upon his knees. The little girl fell on hers. They sang:

“Come to Jesus, Come to Jesus, Come to Jesus just now,” etc.

When the “local” rose, after the conclusion of the singing, he took the little girl’s hand and went whither she led him. He, too, had “got religion”--somewhat as one gets a _coup de soleil_ or a stroke of paralysis.

The opposition dailies mildly called attention to the purely emotional character of the effects produced. They expressed their fears that the moral and physical result of factitious excitement on minds of tender years might be the reverse of healthy. The next day the melodeon was carted about again and the singing continued on the sidewalks and in front of the drinking-saloons. Mr. Notext’s machinery was in full blast. The meeting on the second evening was devoted principally to grown people. The tent was full. The choir was strengthened by additional voices, and the music was good of its kind.

After half a dozen hymns had been sung, Mr. Notext began his sermon--by courtesy so-called. He first spoke of the number of persons he had converted at home and abroad. For he had been “abroad,” as he took care to let his audience know. He had been the guest and the favored companion of the Duchess of Skippington, of the Earl of Whitefriars, of Lord This and Lady That, and the Countess of Thingumy. In Scotland and in Ireland immense crowds followed him and “got religion.” He converted three thousand people in a single town in Ireland. Since the meeting on the previous day, many children, and many adults as well, had visited him at his lodgings. Some who came to the tent “to make fun” went away full of religion. He would now let a dear little friend of his tell his own story in his own way.

A red-haired youngster, about thirteen, was introduced to the audience as the nephew of a prominent and well-known official in a neighboring town. (It was afterwards stated, by the way, that the official in question had not a nephew in the world. No doubt the youngster imposed on Mr. Notext.) If ever there were a thoroughly “bad boy,” this youngster was one, or--as may be very possible--his face belied him atrociously. Mr. Notext placed his arm dramatically--affectionately, rather--around the young rogue’s neck, and led him to the front of the platform. The boy looked at the audience with a leer, half-impudent, half-jocular, and then gave his experiences glibly in a very harsh treble:

“When first I heard that Rev. Mr. Notext was going to get up a revival, I joked about it with other boys, and said he couldn’t convert me; and the night of the first meeting I said to the other boys--who were bad boys, too--for us to go along and make fun. And so we did. And I came to laugh at Mr. Notext and to make fun. And somehow--I don’t know how it was--I got religion, and I was converted; and now I am very happy, and I love Mr. Notext, and I am going with him to Smithersville when he gets through here. And I am very happy since I was converted and became a good boy.” (Sensation among the audience, and music by the choir in response to Mr. Notext’s call.)

Another juvenile convert was brought forward. He repeated substantially the same story as his predecessor, though more diffidently. (More music by the choir.)

Mr. Notext now told the affecting story of “little Jimmy.” Little Jimmy was a native of Hindostan. He lived in some town ending in _an_. There was in that town a missionary school. Jimmy’s master was a very bad man--cruel, tyrannical. He forbade Jimmy to go to the mission-school. But Jimmy went, nevertheless, whenever he could. The master was a true believer in the national religion of Hindostan. He believed that Jimmy would go to perdition if he left his ancestral faith to embrace the national religion--or rather the governmental religion--of Great Britain. Jimmy would return from his visits to the mission-school in a very happy mood, singing as he went:

“Yes, I love Jesus, Yes, I love Jesus, I know, I know I do,” etc.

Mr. Notext gave an operatic rendering of the scene of Jimmy going home singing the above words. One day the master heard Jimmy, and was roused to a state of fury. He forbade the boy to sing the song. But Jimmy would sing it (Mr. Notext did not say whether Jimmy sang the hymn in English or Hindostanee). Then the brutal master took an enormous cowhide--or the Hindostanee punitive equivalent thereto--and belabored poor Jimmy. But Jimmy continued to sing, though the tears rolled down his cheeks from pain. And the master flogged; and Jimmy sang. And still the master flogged and flogged. And still Jimmy sang and sang and sang. It was like the famous fight in Arkansas, wherein the combatants “fit and fit and fit.” But there must be an end of everything--even of an Arkansas fight. The struggle lasted for hours. Exhausted nature finally gave way, and poor little Jimmy died under the lash, singing with his last breath:

“Yes, I love Jesus, Yes, I love Jesus, I know, I know I do.”

“Now, my friends,” said Mr. Notext, “I want you all to stand up for Jesus and sing poor little Jimmy’s song.” And Mr. Notext led off. The choir followed his example; but the audience remained seated.

“I want to know,” said Mr. Notext rather testily, “how many Christians there are in this assembly. I want every one of them to stand up!”

Several persons now stood up, and gradually the action began to spread, like yawning in a lecture-room. There were still many, however, who had not hearkened to Mr. Notext’s summons to stand up. He called attention to them, and bade some of the brethren go to them and talk them into an erect position. Some of the recalcitrants, evidently to avoid importunity, stood up. The rest also stood up, and hurriedly left the tent, followed by an angry scowl from Mr. Notext. After a little hesitation, he said: “We will now once more sing little Jimmy’s hymn.” And when the hymn was sung, the meeting dispersed.

Next morning the friendly newspapers chronicled the wonderful success of Mr. Notext’s efforts. The number of converts was miraculously large. Two thousand persons had stood up for Jesus. The meetings were continued during the week. The _modus operandi_ was about the same. Mr. Notext repeated himself so often that interest began to languish and his _coups de théâtre_ to grow flat and stale. When he was at a loss for words to continue one of his disjointed discourses, he took refuge in music and hymns.

“Brethren, let us sing:

“Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus just now,” etc.

When his vulgar and often unintentionally blasphemous exhortations failed to hold the attention of his hearers, and Morpheus was making fight against him in sundry corners of the tent, he would suddenly call in his loudest tones on all present to stand up for Jesus. In cases of very marked inattention, he would summon his hearers, and particularly the children, to write down their names for Jesus in a large book kept for that purpose by the great revivalist. This stroke generally roused the audience pretty thoroughly. But when the children had written their names in the book three or four times, they began to grow tired of the practice, thinking that, if these writing lessons were continued, they might as well be at school.

In the beginning of the second week there were unmistakable signs of impending collapse. The revival received a momentary impulse, however, from the opposition of another “Reverend Doctor,” who challenged Mr. Notext to controversy. This aroused the natural desire to witness a “fight” which lives in the human heart. But the desire was not gratified, owing to Mr. Notext’s refusal to accept the challenge. His failure to exhibit a proper polemical pugnacity was a very great detriment to him. Indeed, the end of the second week showed a marked falling off in the number of persons present at the nightly meetings. Then the sinews of war began to fail. The weekly wage of the great revivalist could not be raised, though he thrice sent back “the best workers” in all the congregations to make additional efforts to raise the stipulated sum.

The Rev. Dr. Notext did not tarry very much longer in Frogtown. He had barely turned his back upon the little town before every trace of the “great tidal wave of the revival” (as the journals called it) had disappeared. The youthful converts had gone back to their peg tops, their kites, and their china alleys, and Alderman Charley Biggs was again taking his whiskey-toddies in the time-honored way.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE.

The President’s message, so far as it deals with the school question and the taxation of church property, is the sequel to the speech which he delivered at Des Moines. The article on that oration which appeared in our last number was, to some extent, an exposition of our views on the school question.

We are sure that those views, when carefully examined, will be found to contain the only solution in harmony with the spirit of free institutions. We are willing to submit to the fairness of our fellow-citizens, and to wait until time and thought have matured their judgment on the following questions:

1. Who has a right to direct the education of children--their parents or the government?

2. Whether, in a republic whose form of government depends more than any other upon the virtue of its citizens, it is better to have moral instruction given in abundance, or to have this species of instruction restricted to the narrowest limits?

3. Whether it is the design of a free government to legislate for all, or whether public institutions--the common schools, for instance--are to be directed only for the benefit of certain classes?

4. Whether moneys raised by taxation for the common good should not be so applied as to satisfy the conscientious demands of all citizens?

5. Whether taxation otherwise directed than for the good of all is not a violation of the maxim, “Taxation without representation is tyranny”?

6. Whether Catholics have or have not shown zeal for education, both primary and scientific?

7. Whether they have or have not shed their blood in defence of the nation, or furnished any of its great leaders in peace and war?

8. Whether any instance can be shown in which they have entered or inhabited any country on equal terms with Protestants and infidels, and have abused their power to hamper or persecute their fellow-citizens?

9. Whether, in paying their taxes and supporting their own schools to the best of their power, peacefully discussing the question of public welfare and their own rights, Catholics are acting as loyal citizens or as factious disturbers of good-will and kindly feeling among neighbors?

10. Finally, whether, in consideration of the foregoing, our views are not entitled to respectful consideration?

We have no doubt whatever that when the thoughtful and just men of our day and race have duly pondered upon these subjects, we shall fully agree with their deliberate reply.

At no time in the history of our country will it be found that Catholics have introduced religion into the arena of political discussion, and any attempt to do so will meet with failure. In this they are in perfect accord with the principles underlying our institutions and the genuine spirit of this country. If, at this moment, the rancor of ancient bigotry and fanaticism or modern hatred of Christianity has attempted to awaken a political conflict on religious grounds, while it refuses to admit a calm consideration of Catholic claims, we appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.

In the meantime, we shall assume, that there are those who wish to hear more with regard to our principles and convictions. We shall endeavor to remove all obscurity on the questions now under discussion, and to reply to whatever reasonable objections may be made against our principles.

With regard to the taxation of church property, we await the action of the political world. Some politicians, whose “vaulting ambition” is of that kind which “o’erleaps itself,” would introduce this question into political discussion in order to draw off the attention of the American people from the real, present issues in their politics. We ask for no innovations; but if such be made, let there be no discrimination. We stand before the law as do all other religious denominations. “Let us have peace” were the memorable words spoken at a memorable time by a man who to a large extent held the future of this country in his hands. Those words held, and hold still, the germs of the wisest policy. We repeat them now, and add, if we cannot have peace, let us at least have fair play. If the projectors and advocates of this innovation suppose that, in the event of its being carried out, they will thereby worst the Catholic Church, their action in the end will be found to resemble that of the man who cut off his nose to spite his neighbor.

Since these words were written, four letters have appeared in the New York _Times_ under the heading, “Should Church Property be Taxed?” and over the signature of George H. Andrews. The writer is not a Catholic. His clear, concise reasons against the taxation of church property, as recommended by the President in his message, will have the more weight with non-Catholic readers on that account. It is singular, yet natural, to see how his argument strengthens our own position on the question in a number of ways, particularly as regards the suicidal policy of many who, through hatred or fear of the Catholic Church, may be induced to commit themselves to a measure which would prove an irreparable mischief to their own church or churches. Passing by the many able and suggestive points in Mr. Andrews’ letters, we take just such as more immediately bear on the thoughts thrown out by ourselves.

By the census of 1870 the value of all kinds of church property in the United States belonging to the leading denominations was placed as follows:

Methodist, $69,854,121 Roman Catholic, 60,935,556 Presbyterian, 53,265,256 Baptist, 41,608,198 Episcopalian, 36,514,549 Congregational, 25,069,698 Reformed, 16,134,470 Lutheran, 14,917,747 Unitarian, 6,282,675 Universalist, 5,692,325 Others, 24,000,000 ------------- $354,324,595

“From these it appears,” says Mr. Andrews, “that the relative proportion of each denomination to the whole is substantially as follows:

“Methodist, one-fifth of the aggregate; Roman Catholic, one-sixth of the aggregate; Presbyterian, one-seventh of the aggregate; Baptist, one-ninth of the aggregate; Episcopalian, one-tenth of the aggregate; Congregational, one-fourteenth of the aggregate; Reformed, one-twenty-second of the aggregate; Lutheran, one-twenty-third of the aggregate; Unitarian, one-fifty-ninth of the aggregate; Universalist, one-sixtieth of the aggregate.”

And here is the case in a nutshell: “To me it seems obvious,” comments Mr. Andrews, on reviewing his figures, “that the expectation is that those who belong or are allied to other sects will, from dislike to or fear of the Roman Catholic Church, impose a burden upon it, even if in doing so they are obliged to assume an equal burden themselves; or, in other words, that the owners of $294,000,000 of church property will subject it to taxation in order to impose a similar tax upon the owners of $60,000,000 of church property. So that the adherents of every other sect, at variance among themselves about sundry matters of doctrine and practice, essential and non-essential, can be brought to act in concert, and to give effect to a common spirit of hostility to Roman Catholic doctrine, to Roman Catholic exclusiveness, Roman Catholic aggression, and Roman Catholic influence, by placing a tax upon Roman Catholic Church property--in effect, arousing a spirit of persecution, qualified by the condition imposed by the Constitution, that the would-be persecutor must share in the penalty he may succeed in imposing upon the object of his dislike.” Which is precisely what we have characterized as “cutting off one’s nose to spite a neighbor.”

May we presume to ask whether the taxation of church property will reduce the expenses of the general government, render its officials more honest, and purify our legislative halls? These are the duties of the hour. Here are the issues of our politics. But a profound silence regarding them reigns in the official utterance. Are the projectors of the new policy afraid to face them? Does their conscience make cowards of them? Or is it that they are playing the part of the cuttle-fish?

Up to this period the state and all religious denominations have advanced peaceably to prosperity, and there have been no real grounds of complaint on any side. At least we have heard of none publicly. What, then, has brought about this sudden change? Who has called for it? Why should it be sprung upon us at this moment? No danger threatens from this quarter. There is not visible on our political horizon even the “cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.” Catholics, when only a handful, never dreamed of objecting to the exemption from taxation of the property of other religious denominations, or to the aid which their benevolent institutions received. Can it be the rapid development of Catholicity here which has prompted the proposed innovation? Are these exemptions, which have been handed down from the time of our fathers, to be altered because Catholicity has had her share in the common progress? Let truth and error grapple on a fair and open field. Is there fear that truth will be worsted in the struggle?

If the exemption of church property from taxation be so great an evil and danger to the country, those whom Americans generally are content to regard as their great statesmen must have been very short-sighted men after all to pass by, one after another, so glaring an evil. For the growth of church property is not a thing of to-day. In his message the President says that he believes that “in 1850 the church property of the United States which paid no tax, municipal or State, amounted to about eighty-three million dollars. In 1860 the amount had doubled. In 1875 it is about one thousand million dollars.”

Mr. Andrews questions the estimate for 1875 on the ground that it is too high. But let that pass. The following table, given by Mr. Andrews, shows the increase in value, according to the census, of the property of the ten principal churches for the last twenty years:

1850 1860 1870 Methodist, $14,825,670 $33,683,371 $69,854,121 Roman Catholic, 9,256,753 26,744,119 60,985,556 Presbyterian, 14,543,780 24,227,359 53,265,256 Baptist, 11,620,855 19,789,378 41,608,198 Episcopalian, 11,375,610 21,665,698 36,514,549 Congregational, 8,001,995 13,327,511 25,069,698 Reformed, 4,116,280 4,453,820 16,134,470 Lutheran, 2,909,711 5,385,179 14,917,747 Unitarian, 3,280,822 4,338,316 6,282,675 Universalist, 1,718,316 2,856,095 5,692,325 ------------- ------------- ------------- $81,649,797 $156,470,846 $330,324,595

The gradation, it will be seen, has been pretty steady, and is comparatively no more marked in 1870 than it was in 1860, or than it was, probably, in 1850. In that year, however, the Catholics were led by four religious bodies, and almost equalled by one. Ten years later they stood second, and after another ten years second still. Surrounded as they are by jealous foes, they offer fair game, therefore, to men in search of political prey. All was right so long as the others reaped an advantage over Catholics; but the moment there appears any prospect of Catholics reaping an advantage equally with the rest, the cry is: The country is in danger, and can only be saved by taxing church property. Who so blind as not to see through this flimsy pretext?

Not Mr. Andrews certainly, and no words of ours could be more forcible than his. “Discarding all circumlocution,” he writes, “it is as well to get down at once to the bottom fact, which is that whatever euphemistic phrases may be resorted to, a desire to obstruct the growth and circumscribe the influence of the Roman Catholic Church gives whatever vitality it may possess to the proposition to tax church property.”

But supposing this change to be made, is it to be imagined for a moment that the progress of the church will be stopped by it? That is futile. If, though so few in numbers and at a great disadvantage, the church was able to raise herself to her present position; if, when the exemptions were all in favor of other denominations, Catholics were able to make so great a progress, is it to be supposed that by these changes, and by placing other denominations on an equality with Catholics, the advancement of the Catholic Church is to be retarded?

We have been trained in the stern school of poverty. We are accustomed to sacrifice. Our clergy do not receive high salaries. The personal expenses of his Eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop are much less than those of many a clerical family in New York City. Wherever we have arms to work with, the church of God shall not lack all that is necessary to give it dignity, even if we have to pay taxes for it besides. In Ireland the priests and people have shared their crust in the midst of the famine, and in fear of death, until within a few years. In Germany we are now about to part with our property, under the wicked injustice of the state, rather than submit to its interference in the affairs of conscience. Is any person foolish enough to imagine that a few dollars, more or less, of taxation is going to dishearten or frighten us? If you want to make our people more liberal, if you want to see grand Catholic churches and the cross overtopping roof and spire in every city, just put us on our mettle. Persecution is our legacy. Martyrdom is our life. The cross on our brows is no empty symbol. These are our feelings. We have no alarm whatever.

These proposed innovations are only the entrance of a wedge that, driven home, will disturb the foundations of our government; will create religious strife, and blast the hopes of freedom, not only in this country, but all the world over. They count, however, without their host who think that the American people are prepared to enter on such a career; and the politicians who hope to ride into power by awakening the spirit of fanaticism and religious bigotry among us, if their names be held in memory at all, will at no remote period be pointed out with the finger of scorn and contumely as the disturbers of that peace and harmony which ought always to reign in a just people, and which it is the true policy of all government and the duty of all citizens to foster and maintain. We say nothing at the present regarding the unconstitutionality of these proposed innovations, and of the secret banding together of men to carry them out.

A NIGHT AT THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF SAINT-GENEST.

It is near midnight. I am alone in my cell, awaiting the mysterious guide who brought me hither, and who will return to call me for the office of Matins.

I listen to every sound, seeking to understand its language. During the first hour I still heard steps from time to time in the distance; then I half opened my door and looked outside. At the end of the cloister a white figure appeared, carrying a small light in its hand. It approached at a slow pace, stopped near a pillar, and disappeared under the arches.

Sometimes I have seen other shadows pass along, and have heard a few low-spoken words, … bells which answered each other; then, little by little, everything is extinguished and silent.… There is not another sound, another breath; … but still I listen, and cannot cease to listen.

Is it indeed myself who am in this monastery? Was I, only to-day, yet in the midst of the living? Can one single day comprise so many things? This which is just ending has been so full, so strange, that I cannot well recount all that has happened in it.

And yet it was but this morning that I was at Aix, in the midst of light and noise and gayety.… The children were gambolling around me! All at once some one said: “Suppose we go to the Grande Chartreuse!” It was said just as one would say anything else. We set out, as if for an ordinary excursion, a party of pleasure. Mme. B---- had provisions in readiness, which were increased by the additions of other members of the party, and we start in the midst of lively speeches and merriment.

So long as we proceed along the valley this is all very well. The road rises and descends, running through the vineyards, skirting the rocks, while the warm breath of the south gently moves the surrounding verdure. Then, after piercing the flank of the mountain, it slopes down toward the plains of Dauphine, discovering a horizon all bathed in light.

It is after passing Saint Laurent, at the foot of the _Desert_, and in perceiving the entrance of the gorge, that one begins to understand something more; … it is then that jesting is silenced and gayety grows grave.

Then, on arriving at the Guiers-Mort, we become altogether dumb. Already we had ceased to laugh; we now ceased to speak, but regarded with a sort of stupefaction this road without issue, which seemed to end in chaos. The mountains rose defiantly before us, overlapping and mingling with each other, and here and there barring the way with huge masses of precipitous rock; the gigantic trees seem to rise to the clouds, and torrents from unknown heights fall as if from heaven, while the rocks crowd upon, before, around, and seem to say, “No farther shall you go.” As we come to a turn, it seems as if all progress were indeed at an end; two immense blocks fallen across each other completely close the horizon.… We approach them, however, and it opens again, the rocks forming a sort of Titanic vaulted roof overhead, and falling again in the form of three bridges, one above the other, the horses continuing to climb a road which the eye cannot take in.

And whilst one is lost in these abysses, what a perfect dream of splendor begins to break overhead! Meadows of the most exquisite green seem as if suspended far above us, silvery rocks jutting out from among their black firs, gigantic oaks grasping the heights of the precipices, their crowns of verdure glittering in the wind.… It is a fantastic apparition. One has visions in one’s childhood of unknown regions, of enchanted forests guarded by genii, but one never thought to contemplate these marvels in reality.

Then, all at once, the mountains separate, the torrents disappear, and in the midst of a gorge rise battlements and spires.… It is the monastery. There it stands, guarded by these lofty sentinels, in this sombre amphitheatre, which would be desolation itself if God had not scattered there all the magical beauties of his creation.

There is not a village, not a cottage, not a wayfarer--nothing; there is La Chartreuse. No solitude can be compared to that!

On the summit of St. Bernard and of the Simplon monasteries destined for the relief of travellers present themselves to the passage of the nations. In the sandy deserts the most isolated convents find themselves in the road of the caravans; but here this road conducts to nothing--it is a silent gorge; it is the Valley of Contemplation; it is the greatest solitude that one can imagine.

And when from those heights one has seen the gradual approach of night; seen these masses of rock and of verdure enfolded in the vast shadows; and, at the summons of the monastery bell, has seen the last of the white robes descend from the mountain, he feels that it is one of those moments in a life which will never be forgotten. Then, after having stayed awhile to contemplate this scene, I rose and came to knock at this door, which has been to so many others as the gate of the tomb.… A Carthusian monk brought me to my cell, went his way in silence, and since then I have been left to my reflections.

There are, then, men who in the morning were in their homes, in the midst of their friends, in life, and stir, and the noise of the outer world.… They have climbed this mountain, they have sought this _Desert_, have knocked at this gate; it has closed upon them, … and for ever.

They have, as I, sat down at this table; they have gazed at the walls of their cell, and have said to themselves: “Behold henceforth my horizon.” Then they have heard the sound of these bells, the echo of these litanies, and they have said to themselves: “We shall henceforth hear no other voice.”

You see, one reads these things in the works of poets, one sees them represented in the drama; but one must find one’s self actually in a real cell, and one must sleep there, to conceive anything of the reality of a monastic life.

To awake here in the morning; to rise and eat, alone, the food which comes to you through a little wicket, like that of a prisoner; to meet, when one traverses the cloister, other shadows who salute you in silence; to go from the church to the cell, from the cell to the church, and to say to one’s self that it is always and always to be the same!

Always!… All through life; or rather, there is no more life, no more space, no more time. It is the beginning of eternity. One is on the threshold of the infinite, and it seems as if all this nature had only been created to give these men a beginning of eternal repose.

Always alone! The thought crushes one. No more to receive anything from without; to nourish one’s self with spiritualities alone; to meditate, contemplate, and pray. To pray always: … to pray for those who never pray themselves; to pray for those who have shattered your life, and who, may be, have led you hither; … to pray for those who have despoiled your monastery and outraged your habit--even for the impious ones who come to insult you in your very hospitality! And for all this one thing alone suffices: faith.

A bell has rung; it is the hour of Matins. Some one knocks at my door. I open, and they conduct me to the little stall reserved for travellers. At first the obscurity is so great that it is difficult to distinguish anything. The church is empty, and none of the tapers are lighted. Then a door opens in the distance, and the monks enter in procession, each holding a long dark-lantern, of which the slanting gleams dimly lessen the darkness of the chapel. They repair to their stalls, and the Office begins.

It consists principally of a monotonous psalmody of an implacable rhythm, of which one scarcely perceives the first murmurs, and which seems as if it would never end. I gaze at these tall white figures, these motionless heads.… What has been the drama of life to each one? What changes, without and within, have led them there? What have they suffered? And do they suffer still? What has the rule of their order done for them?--and still the psalmody goes on.

At times they rise, uttering what seems to be a sort of lamentation; then they fall prostrate, with their arms stretched out before them; all the lights disappear; there is nothing but darkness and silence; it seems as if man himself were extinguished. After which the lights reappear, the psalmody recommences, and thus it continues.

* * * * *

When the rising sun shone upon the summits of the rocks, I rose from my pallet, exclaiming: “The light at last! Hail to the light!” I open my window and look out.… There is no other place like this; such as it was in the night, such is it in the day. In vain may the sun mount above the horizon to bring warmth into this gorge--the monastery remains cold and, as it were, insensible; in vain his rays dart upon the walls, glitter on the spires, and set the rocks on fire.… There are living men, but one does not see them, one does not hear them; only a wagon drawn by oxen crosses the meadow, followed by a monk, and some beggars are approaching the monastery gate.

Then, without guide or direction, I plunge into the forest in search of the Chapel of S. Bruno. This forest is of incomparable beauty; neither Switzerland nor the Pyrenees contain anything like it. Prodigious trees rise to an immense height, wrapping their gigantic roots about the rocks. In the midst of the waters which murmur on every side unknown vegetations luxuriate, sheltering at their feet a world of ferns, tall grass, and mosses, every dewy feather and spray being hung, as it were, with precious stones, upon which the sun darts here and there rays of gold and touches of fire. There is here a wild enchantment which neither pen nor pencil ever can depict; and in the midst of these marvels rises, from a rock, the Chapel of S. Bruno. There it was that the visions appeared to him, and there he caused a spring of water to flow forth; but to me the most wonderful of all the miracles of his legend was that of his getting there at all--the fact of his reaching the foot of this desert, hatchet in hand, cutting down the trees which barred his entrance, wrestling with wild animals, the masters of this forest, and having no other pathway than the torrent’s bed; ever mounting upwards, in spite of the streams, in spite of the rocks, in spite of everything; never finding himself lost enough, but ever struggling higher and higher still. The miracle is, too, that of his having fixed himself at last upon that spot, and to have called companions around him, who constructed each his little hermitage about his own; that of having, in God’s name, taken possession of these inaccessible mountains, all of which are surmounted by a cross, and to have founded an order which spread itself over the whole Christian world, and which is still existing.

But the hour of departure has arrived. At the moment of quitting this solitude we again reflect. France and Italy lie spread out beneath our feet; … that is to say, passions, hatred, strife.… Why should we descend again? Why resume the burden of ambitions, rivalries, the harness of social conventionalities? To what purpose is it, since the end at last must come alike to all?

We look around, we reflect, and then, after having well meditated, we all descend.

At the foot of the desert we find again huts, then cottages, by and by a village. With movement and life we find our speech again, and with speech discussion. Overwhelmed until then by the wild beauty of all around us and by the majesty of its silence, the sceptics only now recommence the criticisms which were cut short the evening before: “What services do these monks render to mankind? To what purpose do they bury themselves upon those heights, when there is so much to be done below?”

I answer nothing. These are difficult questions. Later we shall know which has chosen the better part, those who act or those who pray; only I remember that whilst thirty thousand Israelites were fighting in the plain, Moses, alone on the mountain, with his arms stretched out towards heaven, implored the God of armies. When his arms fell through weariness, the Amalekites prevailed; and when he raised them, Israel was victorious; and seeing this, he caused his arms to be supported, until the enemies of Israel were overcome.

While we are debating we cross Saint Laurent, Les Echelles, and the Valley du Guiers. Here is Chambéry _en fête_, with its flags, its concourse of _francs-tireurs_, and bands of music; but although we have returned to outer life, we have brought away with us something of the solitude we have left, where it seems as if the earth ended.

Believe me, reader, and do not forget my words when you visit these lands. The sight of La Grande Chartreuse is one of the most powerful emotions here below. To whatever religion you may belong, if your soul can be moved by the thought of the life to come, you will preserve an imperishable remembrance of a night spent in this monastery, and will feel that you are not altogether the same man that you were when you entered its walls.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

LES ETATS-UNIS CONTEMPORAINS, OU LES MŒURS, LES INSTITUTIONS ET LES IDEES DEPUIS LA GUERRE DE LA SECESSION. Par Claudio Jannet. Ouvrage précédé d’une Lettre de M. Le Play. Paris: E. Plon. 1876.

The author of this volume has read carefully and seriously a large number of works, by different American, French, and English writers, devoted to an explanation of the institutions of the United States, and to the history and social condition of the country. He shows also a remarkable acquaintance with the magazines and newspapers of the United States, so far as they bear on the subjects of which he treats. His book, indeed, must have cost him years of assiduous labor.

M. Jannet gives a just and impartial exposition of the laws and political principles of our country, as also of its present social condition. Rarely, if ever, has a foreigner displayed so conscientious a study of all that goes to make up American civilization. He professes to have entered upon his study and his work without any preconceived theory--a profession not unusual with authors, and for the most part, probably, honestly made. It is one thing, however, to profess, another thing to adhere to the profession. Were it possible for authors to adhere strictly to the profession made by M. Jannet, literature and all of which it treats would certainly not suffer therefrom: But he who imagines he has attained to so just and fair a position is the least free from illusion. The position is simply unattainable, and M. Jannet is scarcely to be blamed if he has not quite reached his ideal.

Two classes of authors have written about the United States. The one sees almost everything in _couleur de rose_, the other in a sombre hue. M. Jannet belongs to the latter class. Throughout his volume he fastens upon every symptom that threatens the existence or the welfare of the republic. As an enumeration of these symptoms it is exact, and its perusal would do no harm to our spread-eagle orators.

M. Jannet has evidently aimed at counterbalancing the influence of writers, French writers particularly, who have exaggerated the good side of American political society. He seems fearful lest their tone of thought should have too great a preponderance in France, and influence its present transition-state too powerfully in the direction of the United States. Whether or not this was called for is not a question for us to consider. The book, regarded as an impartial exposition of the present condition of the United States, resembles the picture of an artist, the background of which is painted with a Preraphaelite exactness, while the foreground is left unfinished, and the whole work, consequently, incomplete. Had the obvious purpose of the book been proclaimed at the beginning, we should have read it with a more favorable eye.

In his last chapter, however, M. Jannet holds out some hope for the future of the American Republic. In our present commercial depression, in the recent success of the Democratic party, in the number of families who have preserved the primitive virtues and customs of our forefathers, and in the progress of Catholicity he sees a ground for this hope, and concludes his work by saying: “Men are everywhere prosperous or unfortunate, according as they observe or despise the divine law. All their free will consists in choosing between these two terms of the problem of life, and all the efforts of the spirit of innovation only break against, without ever being able to destroy, the eternal bounds set by God to the ambitious feebleness of the creature. Therein lies the lesson that the young republic of the New World sends from beyond the ocean and across the mirage of its rapid prosperity to the old nations of Europe, too inclined to believe in the sophisms of the great modern error, and to mistrust their own traditions.”

M. Jannet’s work is worthy of a more extended notice, which will be given it at a later date. The book may be ordered directly from the publisher in France.

THE PUBLIC LIFE OF OUR LORD. II. Preaching of the Beatitudes. By H. J. Coleridge, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is a new volume in the series which is intended, when complete, to include the entire life of Jesus Christ. We have already commended the preceding volume, and can only, at present, renew the expression of our concurrence in the unanimous verdict of competent judges, which awards a very high meed of praise to Father Coleridge’s work, so far as it is as yet given to the public.

It is likely to become extensive when fully completed, since the present volume is filled up with the author’s introductory remarks on the missionary life of Our Lord, and the exposition of one portion of the Sermon on the Mount--to wit, the Beatitudes. It is a work which is, strictly speaking, _sui generis_ in our language, and indeed in all modern literature, and one hard to describe in such a way as to give an accurate notion of its quality and scope to a person who has not read some portion of its contents. The author has drawn from the most various and from the purest sources, and has himself meditated in a very attentive and minute manner upon the rich materials furnished him by the sacred lore of his studies. He proceeds leisurely, quietly, carefully, like the patient illuminator of a manuscript text, filling his pages with large and small figures, all elaborately finished. The present volume gives us a sketch of Galilee, the scene of the preaching and miracles of our divine Redeemer during his first year of public ministry, which makes at once the idea of that ministry, of its extraordinary laboriousness, its extent, and the multitude of wonderful works comprehended within its brief period, ten times more vivid than it can be made by a mere perusal of the Gospel narrative. In this respect it is especially interesting and instructive for those who are themselves engaged in missionary labors. We have a picture placed before our minds of the real nature of Our Lord’s public life and ministry, and grouped around it are other pictures, as illustrations, from the lives of the great missionary saints. When the author approaches to his principal theme in this volume--the Sermon on the Mount--he makes the whole scene and all its circumstances appear before us like a fine dioramic view. He is not, however, of that meretricious school to which Renan and Beecher have given a false and momentary _éclat_, as unworthy of the divine subject as the homage of another class of witnesses on whom Our Lord frequently imposed silence. The poetic, literary, and picturesque charms of Father Coleridge’s style are subservient to his theological, doctrinal, and moral exposition of sacred truths. It is the pure doctrine of the Scriptures, and of the fathers, doctors, and saints of the church, which we are invited and allured to drink from the ornamented chalice.

THE HOLY WAYS OF THE CROSS; OR, A SHORT TREATISE ON THE VARIOUS TRIALS AND AFFLICTIONS, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR, TO WHICH THE SPIRITUAL LIFE IS SUBJECT, AND THE MEANS OF MAKING A GOOD USE THEREOF. Translated from the French of Henri-Marie Boudon, Archdeacon of Evreux. By Edward Healy Thompson, M.A. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Whoever, after reading the title of this book, thinks that a treatise of this kind would be useful and helpful, and wishes to find such a book as may really do the service promised by the title, will probably be satisfied with the book itself. It is standard and approved, and has been well translated by Mr. Thompson, whose preface contains some excellent and timely remarks of his own.

THE STORY OF S. PETER. By W. D. S. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This little book purports to be a simple sketch of the life of the Prince of the Apostles. It will serve to recall the principal events in his life, and therefore will possess a certain amount of interest for Catholic readers. The binding, type, and paper are neat and elegant. The object of the book is evidently pious, and therefore we shrink from criticising it too minutely. The style also is pleasing and readable. It is to be regretted, however, that the author did not take a little more pains with his task. It is a good thing to have plenty of books on Catholic subjects; and those who are gifted with power, and who can command the leisure, are, to a certain extent, bound to write. But they are also bound to study consistency and order, and, in sending forth their productions, to show a proper respect for those who are expected to buy them. Good-will does not excuse slovenliness, and we heartily wish that “W. D. S.” had shown a deeper sense of this truth. The fact that a book is small and easily read does not free the writer from a thorough analysis of his subject and employment of all sources of information regarding it. The present work is serviceable as an introduction to a real treatise on the position and office of S. Peter. It is nothing more; and we are sorry that it is not.

LEHRBUCH DES KATHOLISCHEN UND PROTESTANTISCHEN KIRCHENRECHTS. Von Dr. Friedrich H. Vering. Herder, Freiburg. 1875.

A number of the most learned Catholic theologians of Germany have combined together to prepare a complete theological library. The present volume on canon law makes the fifth thus far issued. This library is one which will be very valuable to German priests or those who read German. The names of Hergenröther, Scheeben, and other writers of similar rank who are contributors sufficiently guarantee its excellence.

ACTA ET DECRETA CONCILII VATICANI. Collectio Lacensis, tom. iii. Herder, Freiburg. 1875.

These and other publications of the Herder publishing house are imported by the enterprising firm of the Benzigers. The first is a convenient and carefully edited text of the acts of the Vatican Council, to which is appended a list of all the episcopal sees and prelatures called _nullius_ in the entire Catholic Church. The second is one portion of the magnificent collection of modern councils published at Maria-Laach, and contains the acts of British and North American councils held during the past century, or, to speak more precisely, from 1789 to 1869.

CALDERON’S GROESSTE DRAMEN RELIGIOESEN INHALTS. Uebersetzt von Dr. F. Lorinser. 3d vol. Herder, Freiburg. 1875.

We cannot speak from personal knowledge of the merit of this translation. Readers of German literature who cannot read Calderon in the original will no doubt be pleased to find some of his great dramas in a German dress, and be sufficiently interested in them to ascertain for themselves how far the great poet has been successfully reproduced.

VOLKSTHUEMLICHES AUS SCHWABEN. Von Dr. Anton Birlinger. Herder, Freiburg. 1861.

We have here in two volumes a miscellaneous collection of every kind of _folk-lore_, in prose and verse, mostly very short pieces which must be very amusing for children and others who like to entertain themselves with curious odds and ends of this sort.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE EUCHARIST, AND OTHER DOCTRINES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH EXPLAINED AND VINDICATED. By the Rev. Charles B. Garside. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is a very thoughtful and learned treatise on the Sacrifice of the Mass, and, though not directly controversial, it is a very lucid and satisfactory vindication of the Catholic doctrine on the Holy Eucharist considered as a sacrifice.

The volume contains also essays on “Definitions of the Catholic faith, Existence of the church in relation to Scripture, Tradition as a vehicle of Christian doctrine, The Atonement and Purgatory,” and other subjects, all of them well written, and some, such as the one on “Definitions of the Catholic Faith,” occupied with discussion of questions which are frequently talked of at the present, and upon which it is important to have clear and accurate notions.

THE PERSECUTIONS OF ANNAM: A History of Christianity in Cochin China and Tonking. By J. R. Shortland, M.A. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

We read an account a few days since of four hundred Catholic priests who four years ago were transported from Poland to Siberia by the Russian government; three hundred have died, and the others can survive but a little while. It was only a paragraph in a newspaper. The martyrs die as of old, and we scarcely hear of their sufferings. The missionary work of the church, too, is almost forgotten by her children who are living at ease and in comfort; and yet it is carried on in all quarters of the globe. Our brothers, if we be worthy to call them by this name, are toiling, suffering, dying for Christ and the souls of men in far-off countries of which we seem not to care even to know anything. Here is a book, most interesting and consoling, full of edifying facts and heroic examples, written clearly and simply. It is a history of Christianity in Cochin China and Tonking; and as these two countries form the Empire of Annam, and the history of the church is always one of persecution, of triumph through suffering, the book is entitled _The Persecutions of Annam_. For centuries Europeans have been excluded from this country, into the interior of which the only strangers who have penetrated have been Catholic missionaries, and they have gone at the risk of their lives. For two hundred and fifty years the apostles of the church have been laboring in Annam, and whoever will read this book will be struck with wonder at the work they have done and the sufferings they have endured. Never anywhere have there been more barbarous or cruel persecutions, and never have they been borne with more heroic fortitude and simple trust in God.

And then what a wealth of instruction in the lives of these Annamite converts! From 1615 down to our own day thousands and hundreds of thousands have received the faith, and, rather than forfeit it, hundreds and thousands have endured every torment, death itself. Their warm piety, their intelligent faith, their dauntless courage, put us to shame.

The last persecution broke out in 1858, and raged until the Christians were relieved by the arms of France, in consequence of which a treaty of peace was signed in June, 1862, which was soon followed by a decree granting religious worship; and we may hope that the soil which has drunk the blood of so many martyrs will yet become the vineyard of Christ.

But we must refer our readers to the book itself, and close this brief notice with the wish that some one of our Catholic houses in this country may republish this most interesting chapter of Catholic history.

THE AMERICAN STATE AND AMERICAN STATESMEN. By William Giles Dix. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 171. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1876.

It is refreshing in these days to meet with a non-Catholic writer like Mr. Dix, who takes his stand on Christianity and the law of Christ as the foundation of all right law and government. There is a class, and a large class, of patriots among us who seem, unconsciously indeed, to resent the idea that Almighty God had anything at all to do with the growth and development of this country. To this class of men Mr. Dix’s book will be a sharp reminder that there is a God above us who rules all things, and that religion and governments did actually exist in the world at large--and in the New World, for the matter of that--before the _Mayflower_ touched these shores. The book deals with just what its title indicates: the American state and American statesmen. Among the statesmen dealt with are Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and several of the historic names that have lent a lustre to Congress. But the larger and graver portion of the book deals with the constitution of the States in themselves and their relation to the States as a whole or nation. Mr. Dix is a strong and earnest advocate for his views; but his views in the present matter are almost diametrically opposed to the general feeling of Americans. “Are the United States a nation?” he boldly asks in the final chapter of the book, and his answer is “yes” and “no.” In a word, he is strongly in favor of the centralization of sovereignty as opposed to the local independence of States. As long as federalism exists, says Mr. Dix, practically, so long is the nation exposed to disorder and a renewal of the civil war.

So important a question, it is needless to remark, is scarcely to be settled in a book-notice; is, indeed, beyond books altogether. It is a growth. The country and government alike are a growth, and a growth that will not be forced. They are just entering on the hundredth year of a life that has been seriously threatened, and, notwithstanding the theatrical thunder which is being heard just now of politicians resolved to make “a hit,” we cannot but look to the development of this growth with hope and confidence. At the same time, it is the part of all who are concerned to guard that growth well, to see that no weeds spring up around it, to let in light and air and freedom, and to keep off all noxious influences that would threaten the life of the parent stem. In the desire to do this, such chapters as “Christianity the Inspirer of Nations,” “Materialism the Curse of America,” and “America a Christian Power,” which seem to us the strongest chapters in Mr. Dix’s book, will be found full of eloquent suggestion and sound, even solemn, advice. The book, as a whole, will be found a very interesting one. The writer is a bold man, who certainly has the courage of his convictions, which he never hesitates to express openly. The book overruns with apt illustration and an extraordinary eloquence. Indeed, there is a fault in parts of too great eloquence, compensated for over and over again by passages full of terseness, purity, and strength.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BY CONSTABLE AND GILLIES. (Bric-à-Brac Series.) Edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1876.

This volume completes the first Bric-à-Brac Series. The publishers announce an extensive sale--proof only of its being suited to certain literary tastes. We have not been able to pronounce a very favorable opinion upon the merits of the series. In turning over the leaves of a college sheet the other day, we came upon an extract from the letter of a young lady at one of our fashionable seminaries, in which, counselling her sisters to high resolves and noble aims, she says: “Instead of getting a new hat this term, let us buy a Bric-à-Brac.” We think this is good evidence of the value of these volumes as literary works. They are admirably suited for boarding-school misses. But what the authors and scholars who are gossiped about would say at being brought down to this level is another question. On the whole, we would advise this young lady to buy a new hat instead. The hat will serve a useful if not a very exalted purpose in covering her head; the “Bric-à-Brac” will fill it with frivolous and untrustworthy chit-chat.

This volume treats, under distinct heads, of forty-six persons--including a majority of the poets, novelists, historians, linguistic scholars, and essayists of Scotland at the beginning of this century, with a sprinkling of English and German _savants_, including Goethe--in a little over three hundred small duodecimo pages. That is to say, it gives an average of seven pages to each author. These seven pages are devoted almost exclusively in each instance to trivial personal anecdotes. From this simple inventory, therefore, it will be easy to form an accurate notion of what the young lady gains mentally as an equivalent for the loss of her new hat.

Considerable space is given, however, to one or two worthies. Of these, William Godwin, the revolutionary propagandist, holds the first place, and with him incidentally his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_. This precious pair are handled with great tenderness and unction.

The rest of the volume is made up chiefly of reminiscences of the small literary stars who twinkled round Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh at the beginning of the century, and stole something from the reflection of his brightness, but who are now for the most part forgotten.

IN DOORS AND OUT; OR, VIEWS FROM THE CHIMNEY CORNER. By Oliver Optic. Boston: Lee & Shepard. 1876.

Excellent stories, all of which might have been drawn from actual life, are to be found in this volume. Like all of Oliver Optic’s books, it may be safely placed in the hands of young people. Some of the sketches, such as “Good-for-Nothings,” might be read with as much profit as amusement by grown-up persons, especially those who are continually complaining about servant-girls.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXII., No. 132.--MARCH, 1876.

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.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

II

One of the most mischievous prejudices of our day is the popular theory that the cure for all evils is to be sought in the intellectual education of the masses. Those nations, we are told by every declaimer, in which the education of the people is most universal, are the most moral, the richest, the strongest, the freest, and their prosperity rests upon the most solid and lasting foundation. Make ignorance a crime, teach all to read and write, and war will smooth its rugged front, armies will be disbanded, crime will disappear, and mankind will have found the secret of uninterrupted progress, the final outcome of which will surpass even our fondest dreams.

This fallacy, which has not even the merit of being plausible, is, of course, made to do service in M. de Laveleye’s pamphlet on the comparative bearing of Protestantism and Catholicism on the prosperity of nations.

“It is now universally admitted,” he informs us (p. 22), “that the diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress.… The general spread of education is also indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… In short, education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

He then goes on to declare that in this matter of popular education Protestant countries are far in advance of those that are Catholic; that this is necessarily so, since “the Reformed religion rests on a book--the Bible; the Protestant, therefore, must know how to read. Catholic worship, on the contrary, rests upon sacraments and certain practices--such as confession, Masses, sermons--which do not necessarily involve reading. It is, therefore, unnecessary to know how to read; indeed, it is dangerous, for it inevitably shakes the principle of passive obedience on which the whole Catholic edifice reposes: reading is the road that leads to heresy.”

We will first consider the theory, and then take up the facts.

“The diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress. Education is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty. Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

Enlightenment is, of course, of the mind, and means the development, more or less perfect, of the intellectual faculties; and education, since it is here considered as synonymous with enlightenment, must be taken in this narrow sense.

Progress is material, moral, intellectual, social, political, artistic, religious, scientific, literary, and indefinitely manifold. Now, it is assumed that the diffusion of enlightenment is not merely promotive, but that it is an essential condition of progress in its widest and fullest meaning. This is the new faith--the goddess of culture, holding the torch of science and leading mankind into the palace of pleasure, the only true heaven.

By conduct, we have already said, both individuals and nations are saved or perish; and we spoke of the civilized. Barbarous states are destroyed by catastrophes--they die a violent death; but the civilized are wasted by internal maladies--_suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit_. They grow and they decay, they progress and they decline. At first poverty, virtue, industry, faith, hopefulness, strong characters and heroic natures; at last wealth, corruption, indolence, unbelief, despair, children too weak even to admire the strength of their fathers, too base to believe that they were noble. Public spirit dies out; patriotism is in the mouths of politicians, but, like the augurs of Rome, they cannot speak the word and look one another in the face. The country is to each one what he can make out of it, and the bond of union is the desire of each citizen to secure his own interests. The bondholders love their country, and the _sans-culottes_ are disloyal; class rises against class, civil discord unsettles everything, revolution succeeds revolution, and when the barbarian comes he holds an inquest over the corpse. It generally happens, too, that those civilizations which spring up quickest and promise most fair are fated to die earliest; as precocious children disappoint fond mothers. If the teaching of history is a trustworthy guide, we are certainly safe in affirming that civilized states and empires perish, not from lack of knowledge, but of virtue; not because the people are ignorant, but because they are corrupt.

The assumption, however, is that men become immoral because they are ignorant; that if they were enlightened, they would be virtuous.

“The superstition,” says Herbert Spencer (_Study of Sociology_, p. 121), “that good behavior is to be forthwith produced by lessons learned out of books, which was long ago statistically disproved, would, but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct; by observing that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubble-companies, in ‘cooking’ of railway accounts and financial prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from the dishonesty of the uneducated; by observing how amazingly little the teachings given to medical students affect their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their information.”

It is not knowledge, but character, that is important; and character is formed more by faith, by hope, by love, admiration, enthusiasm, reverence, than by any patchwork of alphabetical and arithmetical symbols. The young know but little; but they believe firmly, they hope nobly, and love generously; and it is while knowledge is feeble and these spontaneous acts of the soul are strong that character is moulded. The curse of our age is that men will believe that, in education, to spell, to read, to write, is what signifies, and they cast aside the eternal faith, the infinite hope, the divine love, that more than all else make us men.

“The true test of civilization,” says Emerson, “is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops--no, but the kind of man the country turns out.” Is there some mystic virtue in printed words that to be able to read them should make us men? And even in the most enlightened countries what do the masses of men know? Next to nothing; and their reading, for the most part, stupefies them. The newspaper, with its murders, suicides, hangings, startling disclosures, defalcations, embezzlements, burglaries, forgeries, adulteries, advertisements of nostrums, quack medicines, and secrets of working death in the very source of life, with all manner of hasty generalizations, crude theories, and half-truths jumbled into intellectual _pot-pourris_; the circulating library, with its stories, tales, romances of love, despair, death, of harrowing accidents, of hair-breadth escapes, of successful crime, and all the commonplaces of wild, reckless, and unnatural life--these are the sources of their knowledge. Or, if they are ambitious, they read “How to get on in the world,” “The art of making money,” “The secret of growing rich,” “The road to wealth,” “Successful men,” “The millionaires of America,” and the Mammon-worship, and the superstition of matter, and the idolatry of success become their religion; their souls die within them, and what wretched slaves they grow to be!

In the newspaper and circulating library God and man, heaven and earth--all things--are discussed, flippantly, in snatches, generally; all possible conflicting and contradictory views are taken; and these ignorant masses, who, in the common schools, have been through the Fourth Reader, and who know nothing, not even their own ignorance, are confused. They doubt, they lose faith, and are enlightened by the discovery that God, the soul, truth, justice, honor, are only nominal--they do not concern positivists. Can anything be more pitiful than the state of these poor wretches?--neither knowing nor believing; without knowledge, yet having neither faith nor love. God pity them that they are communists, internationalists, _solidaires_; for what else could they be? No enthusiasm is possible for them but that of destruction.

Religion is the chief element in civilization, and consequently in progress. For the masses of men, even though the whole energy of mankind should spend itself upon some or any possible common-school system, the eternal principles which mould character, support manhood, and consecrate humanity will always remain of faith, and can never be held scientifically. If it were possible that science should prove religion false, it would none the less remain true, or there would be no truth.

What children know when they leave school is mechanical, external to their minds, fitted on them like clothes on the body; and it is soon worn threadbare, and hangs in shreds and patches. Take the first boy whom you meet, fourteen or fifteen years old, fresh from the common school, and his ignorance of all real knowledge will surprise you. What he knows is little and of small value; what is of moment is whether he believes firmly, hopes strongly, and loves truly. Not the diffusion of enlightenment do we want so much, but the diffusion of character, of honest faith, and manly courage.

Man is more than his knowledge. Simple faith is better than reading and writing. And yet the educational quacks treat the child as though he were mere mind, and his sole business to use it, and chiefly for low ends, shrewdly and sharply, with a view to profit; as though life were a thing of barter, and wisdom the art of making the most of it.

Poor child! who wouldst live by admiration, hope, and love, how they dwarf thy being, stunt thy growth, and flatten all thy soaring thoughts with their dull commonplaces--thrift, honesty is the best policy, time is money, knowledge is wealth, and all the vocabulary of a shop-keeping and trading philosophy. Poor child! who wouldst look out into the universe as God’s great temple, and behold in all its glories the effulgence of heaven; to whom morning, noon, and night, and change of season, golden flood of day and star-lit gloom, all speak of some diviner life, how they stun thy poetic soul, full of high dreams and noble purposes, with their cold teaching that man lives on bread alone--put money in thy purse! And when thou wouldst look back with awe and reverence to the sacred ages past, to the heroes, sages, saints of the olden times, they come with their gabble and tell thee there were no railroads and common schools in those days.

Is it strange that this education should hurt the nation’s highest interests by driving in crowds, like cattle to the shambles, our youths from God and nature and tilling of the soil to town and city, or, worse, into professions to which only their conceit or distaste for hard labor calls them? What place for morality is there in this Poor Richard’s Catechism--education of thrift and best policy? We grow in likeness to what we love, not to what we know. With low aims and selfish loves only narrow and imperfect characters are compatible.

Science, when cherished for itself--which it seldom is and in very exceptional cases--refines and purifies its lovers, and chastens the force of passion; though even here we must admit that the wisest of mankind may be the meanest, morally the most unworthy. But for the great mass of men, even of those who are called educated, the possession of such knowledge as they have or can have has no necessary relation with higher moral life. Their learning may refine, smooth over, or conceal their sin; it will not destroy it. The furred gown and intertissued robe hide the faults that peep through beggars’ rags, but they are there all the same. There may be a substitution of pride for sensuality, or a skilful blending or alternation of the finer with the coarser. Vice may lose its grossness, but not its evil. And herein we detect the wretched sophistry of criminal statistics, which deal, imperfectly and roughly enough, with what is open, shocking, and repulsive. The hidden sins that “like pitted speck in garnered fruit,” slowly eating to the core of a people’s life, moulder all; the sapping of faith, the weakening of character, the disbelief in goodness; the luxury, the indulgence, the heartlessness and narrowness of the rich; the cunning devices through which “the spirit of murder” works in the very means of life,

“While rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen”

--cannot be appreciated by the gross tests of numbers and averages. The poor, by statistics as by the world, are handled without gloves. In the large cities of civilized countries, both in ancient and in modern times, we have unmistakable proof of what knowledge can do to form character and produce even the social virtues. These populations have had the advantage of the best schools in the most favorable circumstances, and yet in character and morality they are far beneath the less educated peasantry. Sensual indulgence, contempt of authority, hatred and jealousy of those above them, make these the dangerous classes, eager for socialistic reforms, radical upheavals of the whole existing order; and were it not for the more religious tillers of the soil, chaos and misrule would already prevail. In Greece and Rome it was in the cities that civilization first perished, as it was there it began--began with men who had great faith and strong character, but little knowledge; perished among men who were learned and refined, but who in indulgence and debauch had lost all strength and honesty of purpose.

In the last report of the Commissioner of Education some interesting facts, bearing on the relation of ignorance to crime, are taken from the Forty-fifth Annual Report of the inspector of the State penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

“It is doubted if in any State, or indeed in any country,” says the commissioner, “forty-four volumes containing the annual statistical tables relating to the populations of a penal institution, covering nearly half a century, can, on examination, be regarded as more complete.”

The number of prisoners received into the institution from 1850 to 1860 was 1,605, of whom 15 per cent. were illiterate, 15 per cent. were able to read, and 70 per cent., or more than two-thirds, knew how to read and write; from 1860 to 1870, 2,383 prisoners were received into the penitentiary, and of these 17 per cent. were illiterate, 12 per cent. could read, and about 71 per cent. could read and write.

Of the 627 convicts who were in the penitentiary during the year 1867, 62 per cent., or five-eighths of the whole number, had attended the public schools of the State, 25 per cent., or two-eighths, had gone to private institutions, and 12 per cent., or one-eighth, had never gone to school.

But, as we have said, statistics deal with crime, and chiefly with the more open and discoverable sort, not with morality; whereas nations are destroyed not so much by crime as by immorality.

The thief is caught and sent to the penitentiary; but the trader who adulterates or gives short measure, the banker who puts forth a false or exaggerated statement, the merchant who fails with full hands, the stock-gambler who robs thousands, Crédit-Mobilier men and “ring” men generally who plunder scientifically, Congressmen who take money for helping to swindle the government, getters-up of “bubble companies”--salted diamond-fields and Emma Mines--compared with whom pickpockets and burglars are respectable gentlemen--these know not of penitentiaries; prisons were not built for such as they. The poor man abandons his wife, without divorce marries another, and is very properly sent to State prison. His rich and educated fellow-citizen gets a divorce, or is a free-lover, or keeps a harem, and for him laws were not made. Even that respectable old dame Society only gently shakes her head. We must not expect too much of gentlemen, you know. The ignorant girl falls, commits infanticide, and is incarcerated or hanged--heaven forbid that we should attempt to tell what she would have done had she been educated!--at any rate, she would not have gone to prison, though her guilt would not have been less.

Has the very great diffusion of enlightenment among our people during the hundred years that we have been an independent nation made them more moral and more worthy?

“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops--no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

The Yankee is smarter than the Puritan--is he as true a man? Is the inventor of a sewing-machine or a patent bedstead as worthy as he who believes in God and in liberty against the whole earth with all his heart and soul, even though the heart be hard and the soul narrow? What compensation is there in all our philanthropies, transcendentalisms, sentimentalities, patent remedies for social evils, for the loss of the strong convictions, reverent belief, and simple dignity of character that made our fathers men? Do we believe in the goodness and honesty of men as they did, or is it possible that we should? What can come of beliefs in oversouls, whims, tendencies, abstractions, developments? If we were shadows in a shadow-land, this might do.

Look at a famous trial where the very aroma and fine essence of our civilization was gathered: What bright minds, keen intellects! Poetry, eloquence, romance; the culture, the knowledge, the scientific theories, of the age--all are there. And yet, when the veil is lifted, we simply turn away heart sick and nauseated. Not a hundred statistical prison reports would reveal the festering corruption and deep depravity, the coarse vulgarity and utter heartlessness that is there, whatever the truth may be, if in such surroundings it can be found at all.

In Laing’s _Notes of a Traveller_ (p. 221) we find a most striking example of almost incredible corruption united with great intellectual culture. “In this way,” he says, “we must account for the singular fact that the only positively immoral religious sect of the present times in the Christian world arose and has spread itself in the most educated part of the most educated country in Europe--in and about Königsberg, the capital of the province of Old Prussia. The Muckers are a sect who combine lewdness with religion. The conventicles of this sect are frequented by men and women in a state of nudity; and to excite the animal passion, but to restrain its indulgence, is said to constitute their religious exercise. Many of the highest nobility of the province, and two of the established clergy of the city, besides citizens, artificers, and ladies, old and young, belong to this sect; and two young ladies are stated to have died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement. It is no secret association of profligacy shunning the light. It is a sect--according to the declarations of Von Tippelskirch and of several persons of consideration in Königsberg who had been followers of it themselves--existing very extensively under the leadership of the established ministers of the Gospel, Ebel and Diestel, of a Count von Kaniz, of a Lady von S----, and of other noble persons.… The system and theory of this dreadful combination of vice with religion are, of course, very properly suppressed.… The sect itself appears, by Dr. Bretscheider’s account of it, to have been so generally diffused that he says ‘it cannot be believed that the public functionaries were in ignorance of its existence; but they were afraid to do their duty from the influence of the many principal people who were involved in it.’”

But we are not the advocates of ignorance. We will praise with any man the true worth and inestimable value of education. Even mere mental training is, to our thinking, of rare price. Water is good, but without bread it will not sustain life. Wine warms and gladdens the heart of man; but if used without care, it maddens and drives to destruction. We are crying out against the folly of the age which would make the school-room its church, education its sacrament, and culture its religion. It is the road to ruin. Culture is for the few; and what a trumpery patchwork of frippery and finery and paste diamonds it must ever remain for the most of these! For the millions it means the pagan debauch, the bacchanal orgy, and mere animalism.

“The characters,” wrote Goethe--who was pagan of the pagans and “decidirter Nicht-Christ”--“which we can truly respect have become rarer. We can sincerely esteem only that which is not self-seeking.… I must confess to have found through my whole life unselfish characters of the kind of which I speak only there where I found a firmly-grounded religious life; a creed, which had an unchangeable basis, resting upon itself--not dependent upon the time, its spirit, or its science.”

This foundation of a positive religious faith is as indispensable to national as to individual character, and without it the diffusion of enlightenment cannot create a great or lasting civilization. Religion ought to constitute the very essence of all primary education. It alone can touch the heart, raise the mind, and evoke from their brutish apathy the elements of humanity, especially the reason; and it is therefore the one indispensable element in any right system of national education. A population unable to read or write, but with a religious faith and discipline, has before now constituted, and may again constitute, a great nation; but a people without religious earnestness has no solid political character. Religion is the widest and deepest of all the elements of civilization; it reaches those whom nothing else can touch; but for the masses of men there can be no religion without the authoritative teaching of a church.

And now let us return to M. de Laveleye. “The general spread of education,” he says (p. 23), “is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

In view of the facts that constitutional liberty has existed, and for centuries, in states in which there was no “general spread of education,” and that “the diffusion of enlightenment” is found in our own day to co-exist with the most hateful despotisms, we might pass on, without stopping to examine more closely these loose and popular phrases; but since the fallacies which they contain form a part of the culture-creed of modern paganism, and are accepted as indisputable truths by the multitude, they have a claim upon our attention which their assertion by Mr. Gladstone’s friend could not give them.

There is no necessary connection between popular education and civil liberty, as there is none between the enlightenment and the morality of a people. This is a subject full of import--one which, in this age and country, ought to be discussed with perfect freedom and courage. Courage indeed is needed precisely here; for to deny that there is a God, to treat Christ as a myth or a common man, to declaim against religion as superstition, to make the Bible a butt for witticisms and fine points, to deny future life and the soul’s immortality, to denounce marriage, to preach communism, and to ridicule whatever things mankind have hitherto held sacred--this is not only tolerable, it is praiseworthy and runs with the free thought of an enlightened and inquiring age. But to raise a doubt as to the supreme and paramount value of intellectual training; of its sovereign efficacy in the cure of human ills; of its inseparable alliance with freedom, with progress, with man’s best interests, is pernicious heresy, and ought not to be borne with patiently. In our civilization, through the action of majorities, there is special difficulty in such discussions, since with us nothing is true except what is popular. Majorities rule, and are therefore right. With rare eloquence we denounce tyrant kings and turn to lick the hands of the tyrant people. Whoever questions the wisdom of the American people is not to be argued with--he is to be pitied; and therefore both press and pulpit, though they flaunt the banner of freedom, are the servants of the tyrant. To have no principles, but to write and speak what will please the most and offend the fewest--this is the philosophy of free speech. We therefore have no independent, and consequently no great, thinkers. It is dangerous not to think with majorities and parties; for those who attempt to break their bonds generally succeed, like Emerson, only in becoming whimsical, weak, and inconclusive. It is not surprising, then, that the Catholics, because they do not accept as true or ultimate what is supposed to be the final thought and definite will of American majorities on the subject of education, should be denounced, threatened, and made a Trojan Horse of to carry political adventurers into the White House.

Nevertheless, the observant are losing confidence in the theory, so full of inspiration to demagogues and declaimers, that superstition and despotism must be founded on ignorance. In Prussia at this moment universal education co-exists with despotism. Where tyrannical governments take control of education they easily make it their ally.

Let us hear what Laing says of the practical results of the Prussian system of education, which it is so much the fashion to praise.

“If the ultimate object,” he says, “of all education and knowledge be to raise man to the feeling of his own moral worth, to a sense of his responsibility to his Creator and to his conscience for every act, to the dignity of a reflecting, self-guiding, virtuous, religious member of society, then the Prussian educational system is a failure. It is only a training from childhood in the conventional discipline and submission of mind which the state exacts from its subjects. It is not a training or education which has raised, but which has lowered, the human character.… The social value or importance of the Prussian arrangements for diffusing national scholastic education has been evidently overrated; for now that the whole system has been in the fullest operation in society upon a whole generation, we see morals and religion in a more unsatisfactory state in this very country than in almost any other in the north of Europe; we see nowhere a people in a more abject political and civil condition, or with less free agency in their social economy. A national education which gives a nation neither religion, nor morality, nor civil liberty, nor political liberty is an education not worth having.… If to read, write, cipher, and sing be education, the Prussian subject is an educated man. If to reason, judge, and act as an independent free agent, in the religious, moral, and social relations of man to his Creator and to his fellow-men, be the exercise of the mental powers which alone deserves the name of education, then is the Prussian subject a mere drum boy in education, in the cultivation and use of all that regards the moral and intellectual endowments of man, compared to one of the unlettered population of a free country. The dormant state of the public mind on all affairs of public interest, the acquiescence in a total want of political influence or existence, the intellectual dependence upon the government or its functionary in all the affairs of the community, the abject submission to the want of freedom or free agency in thoughts, words, or acts, the religious thraldom of the people to forms which they despise, the want of influence of religious and social principle in society, justify the conclusion that the moral, religious, and social condition of the people was never looked at or estimated by those writers who were so enthusiastic in their praises of the national education of Prussia.”

In spite of the continued progress of education, there is even less liberty, religious, civil, and political, in Prussia to-day than when these words were written, thirty years ago.

Nothing more dazzles the eyes of men than great military success; and this, together with the habit which belongs to our race of applauding whoever wins, has produced, especially in England and the United States, where Bismarck is looked upon, ignorantly enough, as the champion of Protestantism, a kind of blind admiration and awe for whatever is Prussian. “Protestant Prussia,” boasts M. de Laveleye, “has defeated two empires, each containing twice her own population, the one in seven weeks, the other in seven months”; and in the new edition of Appleton’s _Encyclopædia_ we are informed that these victories are attributed to the superior education of her people. As well might the tyranny of the government and the notorious unchastity and dishonesty of the Prussians be ascribed to their superior education. Not to the general intelligence of the people, but to the fact that the whole country has been turned into a military camp, and that to the one purpose of war all interests have been made subservient, must we seek for an explanation of the victories of Sadowa and Sedan.

Who would pretend that the Spartans were in war superior to the Athenians because they had a more perfect system of education and were more intelligent or had a truer religion? Or who would think of accounting in this way for the marvellous exploits of Attila with his Huns, of Zingis Khan with his Moguls, of Tamerlane with his Tartars, of Mahmood, Togrul-Beg, and Malek-Shah with their Turkish hordes?

In fact, it may be said, speaking largely and in general, that the history of war is that of the triumph of strong and ignorant races over those which have become cultivated, refined, and corrupt. The Romans learned from their conquered slaves letters and the vices of a more polished paganism. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world. The wild and rugged north is ever rushing down upon the soft and cultured south: the Scythian upon the Mede, the Persian, and the Egyptian; the Macedonian upon Greece, and then upon Asia and Africa; the Roman upon Carthage, and in turn falling before the men of the North--Goth, Vandal, Hun, Frank, and Gaul; the Mogul and the Tartar upon China and India; the Turk upon Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa; and to-day, like black clouds of destiny, the Russian hordes hang over the troubled governments of more educated Europe. Look at Italy during the middle ages--the focus of learning and the arts for all Christendom, and yet an easy prey for every barbarous adventurer; and in England the Briton yields to the Saxon, who in turn falls before the Norman. It would be truer to say that Prussia owes her military successes to the ignorance of her people, though they nearly all can read and write. Had she had to deal with intelligent, enlightened, and thinking populations, she could not have made the country a camp of soldiers.

The Prussian policy of “blood and iron” has been carried out, in defiance of the wishes of the people as expressed through their representatives, who were snubbed and scolded and sent back home as though they were a pack of schoolboys; yet the people looked on in stolid indifference, and allowed the tax to be levied after they had refused to grant it.

We will now follow M. de Laveleye a step farther.

“With regard to elementary instruction,” he says, “the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic. England alone is no more than on a level with the latter, probably because the Anglican Church, of all the reformed forms of worship, has most in common with the Church of Rome.”

If any one has good reason to praise education, and above all the education of the people, certainly we Catholics have. The Catholic Church created the people; she first preached the divine doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of all men before God, which has wrought and must continue to work upon society until all men shall be recognized as equals by the law. She drew around woman her magic circle; from the slave struck his fetters and bade him be a man; lifted to her bosom the child; baptized all humanity into the inviolable sacredness of Christ’s divinity; she appealed, and still appeals, from the tyranny of brute force and success, in the name of the eternal liberties of the soul, to God. Her martyrs were and are the martyrs of liberty; and if she were not to-day, all men would accept accomplished facts and bow before whatever succeeds.

The barbarians, who have developed into the civilized peoples of Europe, despised learning as they contemned labor. War was their business. The knight signed his name with his sword, in blood; the pen, like the spade, was made for servile hands. To destroy this ignorant, idle life of pillage and feud, the church organized an army, unlike any the world had ever seen, unlike any it will ever see outside her pale--an army of monks, who, with faith in Christ and the higher life, believed in knowledge and in work. They became the cultivators of the mind and soil of Europe.

“The praise,” says Hallam, speaking of the middle ages, “of having originally established schools belongs to some bishops and abbots of the VIth century.”

Ireland is converted and at once becomes a kind of university for all Europe. In England the episcopal sees became centres of learning. Wherever a cathedral was built a school with a library grew up under its shadow. Pope Eugenius II., in a council held in Rome in 826, ordered that schools should be established throughout Christendom at cathedral and parochial churches and other suitable places. The Council of Mayence, in 813, admonishes parents that they are in duty bound to send their children to school. The Synod of Orleans, in 800, enjoins the erection in towns and villages of schools for elementary instruction, and adds that no remuneration shall be received except such as the parents voluntarily offer. The Third General Council of Lateran, in 1179, commanded that in all cathedral churches a fund should be set aside for the foundation and support of schools for the poor. Free schools were thus first established by the Catholic Church. The monasteries were the libraries where the arts and letters of a civilization that had perished were carefully treasured up for the rekindling of a brighter and better day.

As early as the XIIth century many of the universities of Europe were fully organized. Italy took the lead, with universities at Rome Bologna, Padua, Naples, Pavia, and Perugia--the sources

“Whence many rivulets have since been turned, O’er the garden Catholic to lead Their living waters, and have fed its plants.”

The schools founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the IXth and Xth centuries had in the XIIth grown to be universities. At Oxford there were thirty thousand, at Paris twenty-five thousand, and at Padua twenty thousand students. Scattered over Europe at the time Luther raised his voice against the church were sixty six universities.

“Time went on,” says Dr. Newman, speaking of the mediæval universities; “a new state of things, intellectual and social, came in; the church was girt with temporal power; the preachers of S. Dominic were in the ascendant: now, at length, we may ask with curious interest, did the church alter her ancient rule of action, and proscribe intellectual activity? Just the contrary; this is the very age of universities; it is the classical period of the schoolmen; it is the splendid and palmary instance of the wise policy and large liberality of the church, as regards philosophical inquiry. If there ever was a time when the intellect went wild, and had a licentious revel, it was at the date I speak of. When was there ever a more curious, more meddling, bolder, keener, more penetrating, more rationalistic exercise of the reason than at that time? What class of questions did that subtle metaphysical spirit not scrutinize? What premise was allowed without examination? What principle was not traced to its first origin, and exhibited in its most naked shape?… Well, I repeat, here was something which came somewhat nearer to theology than physical research comes; Aristotle was a somewhat more serious foe then, beyond all mistake, than Bacon has been since. Did the church take a high hand with philosophy then? No, not though that philosophy was metaphysical. It was a time when she had temporal power, and could have exterminated the spirit of inquiry with fire and sword; but she determined to put it down by _argument_; she said: ‘Two can play at that, and my argument is the better.’ She sent her controversialists into the philosophical arena. It was the Dominican and Franciscan doctors, the greatest of them being S. Thomas, who in those mediæval universities fought the battle of revelation with the weapons of heathenism.”[249]

To find fault with the church because popular education in the middle ages was not organized and general as it has since become would be as wise as to pick a quarrel with the ancient Greeks for not having railroads, or with the Romans because they had no steamships. Reading and writing were not taught then universally as they are now because it was physically and morally impossible that they should have been. Without steam and the printing-press, common-school systems would not now be practicable, nor would the want of them be felt. We have great reason to be thankful that the art of printing was invented and America discovered before Luther burned the Pope’s bull, else we should be continually bothered with refuting the cause-and-effect historians who would have infallibly traced both these events to the Wittenberg conflagration.

All Europe was still Catholic when gunpowder drove old Father Schwarz’s pestle through the ceiling, when Gutenberg made his printing-press, when Columbus landed in the New World; and these are the forces which have battered down the castles of feudalism, have brought knowledge within the reach of all, and some measure of redress to the masses of the Old World, by affording them the possibility and opportunity of liberty in the New. These forces would have wrought to even better purpose had Protestantism not broken the continuity and homogeneity of Christian civilization. The Turk would not rest like a blight from heaven upon the fairest lands of Europe and Asia, nor the darkness of heathenism upon India and China, had the civilized nations remained of one faith; and thus, though our own train might have rushed less rapidly down the ringing grooves of change, the whole human race would have advanced to a level which there now seems but little reason to hope it will ever reach.

But to come more nearly to M. de Laveleye’s assertion that the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic, with the exception of England, which in this matter is at least up to the standard of Catholic countries. In the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874 there is a statistical account of the state of education in foreign countries which throws some light upon this subject.

The school attendance, compared with the population, is in Austria as 1 to 10; in Belgium, as 1 to 10½; in Ireland, as 1 to 16; in Catholic Switzerland, as 1 to 16; in England, as 1 to 17. In Bavaria it is as 1 to 7, upon the authority of Kay, in his _Social Condition of the People in England and Europe_. Catholic Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Ireland have proportionately a larger school attendance than Protestant England. England and Wales (report of 1874), with a population of 22,712,266, had a school population of 5,374,700, of whom only about half were registered, and not half of these attended with sufficient regularity to bring grants to their schools. Ireland, with a population of 5,411,416, had on register 1,006,511, or nearly half as many as England and Wales, though her population is not a fourth of that of these two countries. “The statistical fact,” says Laing, speaking of Rome as it was under the popes, “that Rome has above a hundred schools more than Berlin, for a population little more than half that of Berlin, puts to flight a world of humbug about systems of national education carried on by governments and their moral effects on society.… In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain, the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals, is at least as generally diffused and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body as in Scotland. It is by their own advance, and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the popish (_sic_) priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our Presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age. Education is in reality not only not repressed, but is encouraged, by the popish church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands, and ably used.”[250]

Professor Huxley’s testimony is confirmatory of this admission of Laing. “It was my fortune,” he says, “some time ago to pay a visit to one of the most important of the institutions in which the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in these islands are trained; and it seemed to me that the difference between these men and the comfortable champions of Anglicanism and Dissent was comparable to the difference between our gallant Volunteers and the trained veterans of Napoleon’s Old Guard. The Catholic priest is trained to know his business and do it effectually. The professors of the college in question, learned, zealous, and determined men, permitted me to speak frankly with them. We talked like outposts of opposed armies during a truce--as friendly enemies; and when I ventured to point out the difficulties their students would have to encounter from scientific thought, they replied: ‘Our church has lasted many ages, and has passed safely through many storms. The present is but a new gust of the old tempest; and we do not turn out our young men less fitted to weather it than they have been in former times to cope with the difficulties of those times.’”[251]

“It is a common remark,” says Kay, “of the operatives of Lancashire, and one which is only too true: ‘Your church is a church for the rich, but not for the poor. It was not intended for such people as we are.’ The Roman church is much wiser than the English in this respect.… It is singular to observe how the priests of Romanist (_sic_) countries abroad associate with the poor. I have often seen them riding with the peasants in their carts along the roads, eating with them in their houses, sitting with them in the village inns, mingling with them in their village festivals, and yet always preserving their authority.”[252]

With us, too, the masses of the people are fast abandoning Protestantism. There is no Catholic country in Europe in which the social condition of the masses is so wretched as in England, the representative Protestant country. For three hundred years, it may be said, the Catholic Church had no existence there. The nation was exclusively under Protestant influence; and yet the lower classes were suffered to remain in stolid ignorance, until they became the most degraded population in Christendom.

“It has been calculated,” says Kay, writing in 1850, “that there are at the present day, in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who cannot read and write.” That was more than half of the whole population at that time. But this is not the worst. A population ignorant of reading and writing may nevertheless, to a certain extent, be educated through religious teaching and influence; but these unhappy creatures were left, helpless and hopeless, to sink deeper and deeper beneath the weight of their degradation, without being brought into contact with any power that could refine or elevate them; and if their condition has somewhat improved in the last quarter of a century, this is no more to be attributed to Protestantism than the Catholic Emancipation Act or the Atlantic cable.

THE SEVEN FRIDAYS IN LENT

First, thy most holy Passion, dearest Lord, Doth set the keynote of our love and tears; And then thy holy Crown of Thorns appears-- Strange diadem for thee, of lords the Lord! The holy Lance and Nails we clasp and hoard: What pierced thee sore heals sin-sick souls to-day; Then thy Five Wounds we glorify for aye-- Hands, feet, and broken Heart, beloved, adored. Now tears of bitter grief flow fast like rain: Our Lord’s most Precious Blood for us flows fast. Alas! what tears of ours, what love, what pain, Can match that tide of blood and love and woe? Mother, we turn to thy Seven Griefs at last; Teach us to stand, with thee, the cross below.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.