book vii.:

“The faint winds breathe about the night, the moon shines clear and kind; Beneath the quivering, shining road the wide seas gleaming lie.... The fowl that love the river-bank and haunt the river-bed Sweetened the air with plenteous song and through the thicket fled.”

The rising of the Rutules in vii. 623 is an animated picture unmarred by too many of the mannerisms we have spoken of:

“... All Ausonia yet unstirred brake suddenly ablaze; And some will go afoot to field, and some will wend their ways Aloft on horses dusty-fierce; all seek their battle-gear. Some polish bright the buckler’s face and rub the pike-point clear With fat of sheep; and many an axe upon the wheel is worn. They joy to rear the banners up and hearken to the horn. And now five mighty cities forge the point and edge anew On new-raised anvils: Tibur proud, Atina stanch to do, Ardea and Crustumerium’s folk, Antennæ castle-crowned. They hollow helming for the head; they bend the withe around For buckler-boss; or other some beat breastplates of the brass, Or from the toughened silver bring the shining greaves to pass. Now fails all prize of share and work, all yearning for the plough; The swords their fathers bore afield anew they smithy now. Now is the gathering trumpet blown; the battle-token speeds, And this man catches helm from wall; this thrusteth foaming steeds To collar; this his shield does on, and mail-coat threesome laid Of golden link, and girdeth him with ancient trusty blade.”

Passages like this—and, indeed, there are many of them—only deepen our regret that Mr. Morris should let a whim of doubtful taste deprive us of what might have been otherwise the best rendering of the _Æneid_ yet. One other passage we will give, and then cease to tax longer the patience of the reader. It shall be the gallant picture of Turnus sallying forth to battle (xi. 486), which, as it is taken from the like description of Paris, near the end of the sixth _Iliad_, will permit us to compare Morris’ manner with Chapman’s:

“Now eager Turnus for the war his body did begird: The ruddy gleaming coat of mail upon his breast he did, And roughened him with brazen scales; with gold his legs he hid; With brow yet bare, unto his side he girt the sword of fight, And, all a glittering, golden man, ran down the castle’s height.[7] High leaps his heart, his hope runs forth the foeman’s force to face; As steed, when broken are the bonds, fleeth the stabling place, Set free at last, and, having won the unfenced open mead. Now runneth to the grassy ground wherein the mare-kind feed; Or, wont to water, speedeth him in well-known stream to wash, And, wantoning, with uptost head about the world doth dash, While wave his mane-locks o’er his neck, and o’er his shoulders play.”

Compare Chapman, _Iliad_ vi. 503 (Οὐδέ Πάρις δήθυνεν ἐν ὑψηλοῖοι δόμοιοιν):

“And now was Paris come From his high towers, who made no stay when once he had put on His richest armor, but flew forth; the flints he trod upon Sparkled with lustre of his arms; his long-ebb’d spirits now flow’d The higher for their lower ebb. And as a fair steed, proud, With full-giv’n mangers, long tied up, and now his head-stall broke, He breaks from stable, runs the field, and with an ample stroke Measures the centre; neighs and lifts aloft his wanton head, About his shoulders shakes his crest, and where he hath been fed, Or in some calm flood wash’d, or stung with his high plight, he flies Amongst his females; strength put forth his beauty, beautifies, And like life’s mirror bears his gait: so Paris from the tower Of lofty Pergamos came forth.”

Is not the modern older in style than the ancient?

We lay aside Mr. Morris’ book with a mingling of admiration and regret. The critical and poetical ability shown in it is of the first order—no man could have spoiled Virgil so thoroughly as we think Mr. Morris has in places who did not know him _au bout des ongles_, just as a clever parody shows true appreciation of an author—and its ingenuity is amazing. But one feels it to be a wasted ingenuity, and the predominant sentiment with which we leave the book is one of annoyance that a man should so wilfully do ill what his very errors prove him capable of doing so well. Yet for all that the book wins upon us as most of Mr. Morris’ work has a way of doing; and if one could but get reconciled to a Norseland Æneis, we should no doubt find it pleasant enough.

Perhaps we cannot better dismiss our subject than by saying, in the old-time fashion of comparison, that of these three translations Conington’s will probably be read for the story by those who know Virgil not at all; Mr. Cranch’s for its literalness by those who half know Virgil and are willing to know him better; and Mr. Morris’ for its very ingenuity of perversion by those who know Virgil so well that to see him in any new light, even a false light, only adds a fillip to their love for him.

Footnote 2:

Cf. what Joubert says of Racine: that “his genius, too, lay in his taste,” and that he is “the Virgil of the ignorant.”

Footnote 3:

“And stand and listen with arrected ears”—_atque arrectis auribus adsto_. We may add that to our mind Simmons’ version of this simile, which we regret not to have space to quote, is one of the very best.

Footnote 4:

Dr. Johnson never learned it. “His heroic lines,” he said of Cowley, “are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are often sweet and sonorous.”

Footnote 5:

“Eld the mouldy-dull, and empty of all sooth,” is Mr. Morris’ equivalent for “_verique effeta senectus_,” _Æn._ vii. 439.

Footnote 6:

Mr. Matthew Arnold’s remark to a like effect in his admirable essay on translating Homer was curiously anticipated by Tickell in the preface to his (or Addison’s) version of the first book of the _Iliad_, where he says the double epithets of the _Iliad_, “though elegant and sonorous in the Greek, become either unintelligible, unmusical, or burlesque in English.” He adds: “I cannot but observe that Virgil, that sunge in a language much more capable of composition than ours, hath often conformed to this rule.”

Footnote 7:

Mr. Morris here unaccountably sacrifices an opportunity. _Decurrens aureus arce_ the Latin is, and yet he gives us “castle” instead of “burg,” which, in his own translating dialect, is the true meaning of _arx_. To such shifts will rhyme reduce the ablest translators!

ST. CUTHBERT.

Behold the shepherd lad of Lammermuir Tending his small flock on the uplands bleak. Alone he seems, yet to his young heart speak Voices that none may hear except the pure. His dreaming eyes—where duller souls, secure Of earth alone, see naught—are quick to seek Angels howe’er disguised; and week by week The higher call within grows clear and sure. Now see him, humbly clad, with staff in hand, Thread the wild vales of Tweed and Teviot, To bear God’s Word through a benighted land, And bless with prayer each peasant’s lonely cot. Brave soul wert thou, though few thy worth may sing, Thou chosen saint of England’s noblest king.

PILATE’S STORY.

Caligula was reigning, C. Marcius was prætor at Vienne, in Dauphiny, when a litter, escorted by a number of cavaliers, one evening entered the triumphal gate of this metropolis of Gaul. Many gathered together at the unusual display. On the door of the modest little house before which they stopped, and which stood close by the Temple of Mars, was the name of F. Albinus in bright red letters. An old man, tall in stature, but now bent with age and fatigue, alighted from the litter, and, preceded by two of his attendant Hebrew slaves, entered the reception-room, where he was greeted by his friend, the master of the house.

After having bathed and received the usual attentions at the hands of the slaves, he proceeded with his host to the supper-room to enjoy the evening meal. The lamps were lighted, and Albinus was alone with the new guest, with whom he entered into conversation as soon as the dish of fresh eggs was placed before them.

“Many years have passed since we separated,” said Albinus; “let us empty a cup of Rhone wine to your return.”

“Yes, many years!” sighed the old man; “and cursed be the day whereon I succeeded Valerius Gratus in the government of Judea! My name is unlucky; a fatality is attached to all who bear it. One of my ancestors left the stamp of infamy on the name of Roman when he passed under the yoke in the Caudine Forks, after fighting against the Samnites; another perished in Parthia, fighting against Phraates; and I—I—”

The wine remained untasted, while his unbidden tears fell into the cup.

“Well! you—what have you done? Some injustice of Caligula exiles you to Vienne; and for what crime? I read your affair in the _tabularium_. You were denounced to the emperor by your enemy, Vitellius, the prefect of Syria; you punished a few Hebrew rebels who, after assassinating some noble Samaritans, entrenched themselves on Mount Garizim. You were accused of doing this out of hatred to the Jews.”

“No, no, Albinus; by all the gods! it is not the injustice of Cæsar which afflicts me.”

“What exactions did you impose?”

“None.”

“Did you carry off any Jewish women?”

“Never!”

“Did you gibbet any Roman citizens, as Verres did in Sicily?”

Pilate did not reply.

“I always took you to be good and sensible,” continued Albinus; “hence I did not hesitate to proclaim aloud in the city that your spoliation and exile were an outrage. It was never referred to the senate. The whole affair was evidently owing to some caprice of Vitellius.”

“Albinus, let us talk of other things. I am tired, having just arrived from Rome. Serious things for to-morrow, says the sage. This Rhone wine is exquisite.”

“Beware of it, Pontius; it disturbs the brain.”

“So much the better. But I am not afraid of it. I am accustomed to the wine of Engaddi; that is a potent Bacchus.”

“As you please. But tell me, you who come from Rome, what stirs men’s minds there? Have you aught to interest my ear?”

“The auguries are bad. I did not recognize Rome; she no longer goes forward, but steadily sinks!”

“What say you?”

“I say what is. From here you cannot detect the mysterious subterranean noise which rumbles as with the approach of that invisible, superior power now irresistibly pushing the empire to its ruin. Our gods are vanquished; they abandon us. Listen, Albinus; let me this evening throw a smile to your _Penates_, and no more words of what is sorrowful. Night is the mother of sadness, but the _triclinium_ counsels gayety. Tell the child to turn me a cup of wine of Cyprus, and ask the slave to bring my sandals and prepare my bed. I love not the gloom of night; let us haste to sleep, that the day may sooner come.”

Albinus bowed, and the desires of Pilate were complied with. As the slave approached him with a silver hand-basin for washing his hands, Pilate’s face turned pale as with fright, while the light of his eyes was terrible to behold.

The next day was the eve of the kalends of August. Pilate took a walk with Albinus in the Roman city of Vienne, and listened abstractedly to the conversation of his friend, who pointed out the various localities as they passed along, and the many splendid monuments rising on every side.

“There is left no trace of the domination of the Allobroges here,” said Albinus. “Since the death of Julius Cæsar they have ceased to disturb the city. Life is quiet and peaceable at Vienne, and you can spend here the years which the gods still grant you in secure contentment.

“Here before us is the palace of the emperors; it is not so grand, so sumptuous as that on Mount Palatine, but it is good enough for those who never visit it. Look to the left, and see the temple of Augustus and Livia; unless your eyes are weakened by the sun of Judea, you can read, from here, the inscription: _Divo Augusto et Liviæ_. Beyond is that dedicated to the Hundred Gods. If we go down to the river we can get a little fresh air on the bridge. Vienne, as you may have already remarked, is a very pleasant place of residence; the climate is quite mild, being so thoroughly sheltered by the surrounding mountains from the violence of the winds. We are only fifteen leagues from Lyons; and by the Rhone our away to both Marseilles and Arles is shortened. These three important cities are under the government of Vienne, as Tiberius has decreed; so thank fate, which has sent you to so pleasant a place of exile.”

Albinus remarked a look of trouble in the face of the old man, whose eyes were fixed on a point of dust in the direction of the river-bank, and from which were seen gradually to emerge horsemen with armor glistening in the sun.

“It is the prætor,” said Albinus; “he has been visiting the works at the amphitheatre. That is his daily ride.”

“Let us avoid the prætor,” said Pilate; “may he never know my face!”

As they reached the “Quirinal” street on the way back, they were met and separated by a crowd of idlers who, attracted by the trumpets, had gathered from every side to witness the passage of the prætorian escort. Pilate found himself isolated, and soon became an object of interest, as is the case with one who seeks alone to stem a popular current. His dress was enough to attract insulting remarks. For from his long sojourn in Judea Pilate had insensibly adopted Hebrew fashions in dress, gesture, and deportment. His very figure, black hair, and dark complexion (he was of Iberian origin) betrayed more the Hebrew than the Roman.

“Let the Jew pass; he is going to the synagogue,” said one at his side.

“Mothers! watch your little ones,” said another; “the wolf is out of the Quirinal.”

“We had better take him and crucify him,” muttered a third.

But nothing further was done to molest him, and Pilate passed safely through the crowd, with head sunk upon his breast and suppliant bearing, as far as the head of the street, where a different scene awaited him.

Seeing a house which closely resembled that of Albinus (for a number of them were similar in construction), and finding the door standing open, he hastily entered, glad to find its shelter at last, and closed the door behind him.

A fearful cry chilled the blood in his very veins; he heard his own name uttered, and thrust his fingers in his ears at the ominous sound.

The master and his family were at their daily labor, as basket-makers, beneath the interior peristyle called the _impluvium_. When he entered the master recognized Pilate, for he knew the more than famous name of the stranger whose exile to Vienne had been made public. “Pilate! Pilate!” he cried; and the women and children dropped their wicker-work as they, too, repeated this formidable name, stained with the blood of God himself. The family were Christians.

Pilate asked an asylum, but they did not understand him, as he spoke a sort of Hebrew-Latin and they were Gallic Allobroges. Still, as they caught the name of Albinus twice or thrice repeated, the father made signs to the rest of the family to be seated, and, as if recalling some divine precept of charity learned in the secret assembly of the faithful, he approached Pilate and quietly showed him the house of his neighbor Albinus. Pilate crossed the street and entered his friend’s house.

Albinus was not over-displeased when the rude crowd separated him from a companion whose appearance bade fair to compromise him before the public. Like a good courtier he prudently stayed to see the prætor, shouted _Vivat imperator!_ and praised the rare magnificence of the escort and the beauty of the horses; after which he quietly returned to his house, where he found his friend in an agony of despair.

“I am recognized,” cried Pilate as Albinus entered; “the little children pointed their fingers at me on the street. O Albinus! remember that our lips as very children uttered words of friendship; remember that we played together on the banks of the Tiber; that we have sat at the same banquets and raised our cups in the same libations. Remember the past and protect me beneath the inviolable shelter of thy roof. I seek a refuge beneath the sacred wings of thy hospitality.”

Albinus was too moved for utterance, and silently pressed the hands of Pilate.

“There are Christians, then, at Vienne also?” asked Pilate, as he passed his hand over his aching brow.

“Oh! yes, as there are everywhere,” replied Albinus, “except in our temples. You are afraid of those people, then?”

“Ah! yes, yes. I fear them. I fear everybody. Jews, Romans, Pagans—all are odious, terrible to me! The Romans see in me a criminal fallen into disgrace before Cæsar; the Jews, a severe proconsul who persecuted them; and the Christians, the executioner of their God!”

“Their _God_! their _God_! The impious wretches!”

“Albinus, have a care what you say!”

“They adore as a God that Jesus of Nazareth who was born in a stable and put to death on a cross?”

“They would not adore him if he had dressed in garments of velvet and lived in princely halls.... Albinus, I am about to submit my life to your judgment; you will see whether I am worthy of the hospitality which you offer me.”

Changing his seat for one more comfortable, Pilate continued:

“Albinus, order your doors to be closed, and let a slave watch at the porch, as when a young virgin first enters the doors of her spouse. The ear of Cæsar is everywhere on the alert. And now listen. All my misfortunes spring from the death of this man, this Nazarene. Tiberius cursed me because of him; Caligula now exiles me because of him; for this boldness of the Christian sect, which to-day threatens the empire, began at the foot of Calvary. If Jesus had not been put to death, his followers would never have crossed the Jordan nor the sea of Cæsarea. It is the death of that man which has made so many martyrs. But could I prevent that death?

“When I was about to set out as successor to Valerius Gratus, Sejanus summoned me to the Palatine and gave me his instructions. ‘You are intimate,’ he said, ‘with the Roman policy; hence a few words will do. Judea is a beautiful country; after completing its conquest we must strengthen its possession by a paternal government. Let all your care be to draw blessings down upon the Roman name. We have left the Jews a king of their own race, their temple, their laws, their religion. They are a brave and haughty race, with heroic deeds inscribed in their history, and which they well remember. Govern them wisely, that they may regard you more as a stranger visiting than as a master holding the reins.’

“I set out with my wife and my servants. When near the quarter of the _Tres tabernæ_ I met Tiberius, then returning from Pannonia. Recognizing the imperial escort, I immediately alighted to salute Cæsar. He had received at Brundisium my nomination, and confirmed it, and now, offering me his hand most graciously, he said:

“‘Pontius, you have a fine government; let your hand be firm and your speech conciliatory. Act in public matters according to your own good sense, and never forget the eternal maxim of the Romans:

‘Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.[8]

Go and be happy.’

“The auguries were favorable, you see.

“I reached Jerusalem, took solemn possession of the government, and gave orders for a splendid feast, to which I invited the tetrarch of Judea, the high-priest, and the other Hebrew dignitaries and princes of the people. At the appointed time not a guest appeared! This was a mortal affront. Some days later the tetrarch deigned to honor me with a visit, but he was cold and full of dissimulation. He pretended that their religion did not permit them to sit at our table nor offer libations with Gentiles. I thought best to accept this excuse graciously; but from that day the conquered were in declared hostility with the conquerors.

“Jerusalem was, at that time, the most difficult subject-city in the world to govern; the people were so turbulent that from day to day I was always expecting a sedition. To suppress this I had only a centurion and a handful of soldiers, so I wrote to the prefect of Syria to send me a reinforcement of troops, but he answered that he had hardly enough for himself. Ah! what a misfortune that the empire is so large; we have more conquests than soldiers.

“Among the thousand rumors which circulated about me there was one that attracted my special notice. Public rumor and my secret agents alike reported that a young man had appeared in Galilee with a remarkable sweetness of speech and a noble austerity of manner, and that he went about the city and the borders of the sea, preaching a new law in the name of the God who had sent him. I at first thought that this man intended to arouse the people against us, and that his words were preparatory to a revolt. But my fears were soon dissipated; Jesus the Nazarene spoke as a friend rather of the Romans than of the Jews. Passing one day, in my litter, near the pool of Siloe, I saw a large gathering of people, and remarked in the midst a young man standing with his back to a tree and quietly addressing the crowd. I was told that it was Jesus, but I could have guessed it at once, so different was he in appearance from those who listened. He seemed about thirty years of age, and the wonderful reddish-blond tint of his hair and beard gave a luminous appearance to his noble countenance. Never have I seen so mild a glance, so calm a face; he was a striking contrast to the dark skins and black beards of his auditors. From fear of disturbing the liberty of his speech by my presence I passed on, leaving my secretary to mingle with the crowd and hear his words. This man’s name was Manlius; he was grandson of that chief among the conspirators who awaited Catiline in Etruria, and, having dwelt many years in Judea, understood perfectly the Hebrew tongue. He was, moreover, sincerely devoted to my interests, and I could always trust him. On my return home I found Manlius awaiting me with a detailed account of the speech which Jesus had pronounced. Never in the Forum, never in the books of sages, have I met anything comparable to the maxims which had that day reached the ears of Manlius. One of those rebellious Jews such as abound at Jerusalem having asked if tribute were to be paid to Cæsar, Jesus answered him: ‘Render under Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, and unto God what is God’s.’

“Thence the great liberty which I gave to the Nazarene; it was doubtless in my power to arrest him at any time, put him on a galley, and send him to Pontus, but I should have felt myself acting against justice and good Roman sense. The man was neither seditious nor rebellious. I gave him, perhaps without his knowledge, the benefit of my protection; he was free to act, to speak to the people, to fill a whole square with his audience, to create a legion of disciples to follow him from city to desert, or lake to mountain, and never did an order from me interpose to trouble either orator or auditory. If some day—may the gods forefend!—if some day the religion of our fathers fall before the religion of Jesus, Rome will pay a noble tribute to her own generous toleration, and I, unhappy I! will be called the instrument of what the Christians call Providence—what we call fate.

“But this great liberty which Jesus enjoyed from my protection displeased the Jews—not the common people, but the rich and powerful. True, they were the very ones whom Jesus did not spare in his discourse, and that was for me an additional political reason for allowing him free speech. He told them—that is, the Scribes and Pharisees—that they were a race of vipers and no better than whited sepulchres. And another time he sharply criticised the ostentatious charity of the rich man, saying that the mite of a poor widow woman was far more precious to God. New complaints against the insolence of his speech came to me nearly every day. Deputations came with their griefs before my tribunal. I was told that he would be assaulted; that it would not be the first time that Jerusalem had stoned those who called themselves prophets; and that if the prætor refused them justice they would appeal to the emperor.

“So I was beforehand with them. I at once wrote letters to Cæsar, and the galley _Ptolemais_ carried them to Rome. My conduct was approved by the senate, but I was refused the reinforcement of troops which I asked, or at least I was given to hope that the garrison of Jerusalem should be strengthened after the war with Parthia was terminated. That was an interminable delay, for our wars with Parthia never end.

“Being too weak to repress a sedition, I determined to make a move which would pacify the city, without obliging me to make any humiliating concessions; so I at once sent for Jesus of Nazareth.

“He received my messenger with due respect, and came straightway to the prætorium.

“O Albinus! now that age has weakened every part of my bodily frame, and that my muscles in vain ask a little vigor from my thin and cold blood, I am not astonished if Pilate occasionally trembles; but I was younger then, and my Spanish blood, mingled with the Roman which coursed through my veins, was proof against any ordinary emotion of fear. When I saw the Nazarene enter my _basilica_, where I was walking, it seemed as if a hand of iron held me to the marble of the pavement. I thought I heard the very bucklers of gilt-bronze, dedicated to Cæsar, sigh as they hung against the columns. The Nazarene was as calm as innocence itself; he stood before me, with a single gesture, as if to say: Behold me. For some time I remained contemplating, with mingled terror and admiration, this extraordinary man, type of a physical perfection unknown to any of the innumerable sculptors who have given face and form to so many gods and heroes. ‘Jesus,’ said I at last, when my emotion had subsided—‘Jesus of Nazareth, for nearly three years I have allowed you freely to speak in public and everywhere, nor do I now regret it. Your words have ever been those of a true sage. I know not whether you have ever read Socrates or Plato, but there is in your language a majestic simplicity which raises you far above even those great philosophers. The emperor has been informed of it, and I, his humble representative at Jerusalem, count myself happy to have allowed you the toleration of which you are worthy. I must not, however, disguise from you that your words have provoked against you powerful and terrible enemies; be not astonished that you have thus become an object of hatred, for so was Socrates to those who encompassed his death. Your enemies are doubly irritated, against you and against me: against you, because of your sharp criticisms; against me, because of the liberty which I have allowed you. I am even accused of complicity with you to destroy what little civil power has been left to the Hebrews by Rome. I give you no commands, but I charge you seriously to spare the pride of your enemies, that they may not stir up against you a stupid populace, and that I may not be obliged to detach from these trophies the axe and the fasces, which should serve here only as an ornament and never as an occasion of fear.’

“The Nazarene answered me:

“‘Prince of the earth, thy words spring from a false wisdom. Tell the torrent to stop midway on the mountain-side, lest it uproot the trees of the valley. The torrent will tell thee it obeys the voice of God. He alone knows whither goeth the water of the impetuous stream. Amen, amen I say unto thee, before the roses of Sharon bud the blood of the just shall be shed.’

“‘I do not wish your blood to be shed,’ I exclaimed hastily. ‘You are more precious in my eyes, because of your wisdom, than all those turbulent and haughty Pharisees, who abuse our Roman patience, conspire against Cæsar, and mistake our forbearance for fear. The dolts!—not to know that the wolf of the Tiber sometimes conceals himself under an innocent fleece! But I will defend you against them; my prætorium is open to you as a place of refuge. You will find it an inviolable asylum.’

“He shook his head quietly with an air of godlike grace, and replied:

“‘When the day comes, there will be no shelter on earth, nor in the depths, for the Son of Man. The only asylum of the just is above. What is written in the books of the prophets must be accomplished.’

“‘Young man,’ said I, ‘I have just made you a request. I now give you a command. The preservation of order in the province confided to my charge requires it. I demand that the tone of your speech become more moderate. Beware of opposing my will! You know my intentions; go and be happy.’

“With these words my voice lost its severity and became mild again, for it seemed that a harsh word could not be uttered before this extraordinary being, who calmed the storms of the lake with a motion of his head, as his own disciples testified.

“‘Prince of the earth,’ said he, ‘I do not bring war to the nations, but charity and love. I was born the very day when Cæsar Augustus proclaimed peace to the Roman world. Persecution cannot come from me; I expect it from others, and do not flee before it. I go before it, in obedience to the will of my Father, who has appointed my way. Keep thy foolish prudence. It is not in thy power to stop the victim at the foot of the altar of expiation.’

“Saying these words, he disappeared like a luminous shadow behind the curtain.

“What could I do further? Fate could not be averted. The tetrarch who then reigned in Judea, and who has since died, devoured by worms, was a foolish and a wicked man. The chiefs of the law had chosen this man to be the tool of their hate and vengeance. To him the whole cohort addressed themselves in their thirst for vengeance against the Nazarene.

“Had Herod consulted only his passion, he would have put Jesus to death at once; but although he regarded his impotent royalty as a matter of importance, still he shrank from an act which might injure him with Cæsar.

“Some days later I saw him coming to the prætorium. He began a conversation with me on indifferent subjects, in order to conceal the true object of his visit; but, as he rose from his seat to go, he asked, with an air of indifference, what I thought of the Nazarene.

“I replied that Jesus seemed to me one of those grave philosophers such as arise among the nations from time to time; that his language was by no means dangerous; and that it was the intention of Rome to leave to this sage perfect liberty of speech and action.

“Herod smiled at me with malignity, and with an ironical gesture departed.

“The great feast of the Jews was near at hand, and their leaders determined to take advantage of the popular exaltation which is always manifested at the Paschal season. The city was crowded with a turbulent rabble, who shouted for the death of the Nazarene. My emissaries reported that the treasure of the Temple had been used to stir the popular feeling. The danger was imminent, and my very power was insulted in the person of my centurion, whom they hustled about and spat upon.

“I wrote to the prefect of Syria, then at Ptolemais, and asked for one hundred horse and as many foot-soldiers, but he reiterated his former refusal. I was alone, in a mutinous city, with a few veterans, too weak to suppress the disorder, and with no choice but to tolerate it.

“They had already seized Jesus, and the triumphant people, knowing that they had nothing to fear from me, and hoping, on the word of their leaders, that I would tacitly acquiesce in their designs, rushed after him through the streets, shouting: ‘Crucify him! crucify him!’

“Three powerful sects had coalesced in this plot against Jesus: first the Herodians and the Sadducees, who had a double motive—hatred against him and impatience at the Roman yoke. They had never forgiven me for entering the holy city with the banners of the empire; and although I made them an unwise concession in this matter, the sacrilege still remained in their eyes. Yet another grief stood against me, because I had wished a contribution from the treasures of the Temple towards certain buildings of public importance, and which had been coarsely refused. Then the Pharisees, who were the direct enemies of Jesus: they did not trouble themselves about the governor, but for three years they had angrily heard and endured the severe language of Jesus against their weaknesses. Too weak and pusillanimous to act alone, they eagerly embraced the quarrel of the Herodians and Sadducees. Besides these three parties, I had also to struggle against a crowd of those idle, worthless beings who are always ready to rush into a sedition out of love for disorder and a taste for blood.

“Jesus was dragged before the council of priests and condemned to death; after which Caiphas, the high-priest, made a hypocritical act of submission by sending the condemned man for me to pronounce the sentence and have it executed. My answer was that as Jesus was a Galilean it did not concern me; so I sent him to Herod. The wily tetrarch pretended great humility, protesting his remarkable deference for the lieutenant of Cæsar, and left the fate of the man to be determined on by me. My palace resembled a citadel besieged by an army; for at every moment the seditious crowd was reinforced by fresh arrivals from the mountains of Nazareth, the cities of Galilee, the plains of Esdrelon. It seemed as if all Judea had invaded Jerusalem.

“My wife was from Gaul, and had, like most women of her nation, the gift of reading the future. She now came, and, throwing herself in tears at my feet, exclaimed: ‘Beware of laying a violent hand on this man. His person is sacred. I saw him in a dream this night; he walked upon the waters, he rode upon the wings of the wind, he spoke to the tempest, to the palm-trees of the desert, to the fish in the waters, and they all responded to his voice. The torrent of the brook Kedron was as blood before me; the imperial eagles were in the dust, and the columns of this very prætorium were crumbled, while the sun was in darkness, as a vestal at the tomb. There is misfortune about us, Pilate; and if you do not believe in the words of the Gaul, listen hereafter to the maledictions of the senate and of Cæsar against the cowardly proconsul!’

“Just then my marble staircase trembled, as I may say, beneath the steps of the angry multitude. They had returned with the Nazarene. Entering the hall of justice, followed by my guards, I demanded in a stern voice of the crowd: ‘What will ye?’

“‘The death of the Nazarene!’ shouted the mob.

“‘What is his crime?’

“‘He has blasphemed; he has predicted the ruin of the Temple; he calls himself the Messias, the Son of God, and says that he is the King of the Jews!’

“‘The justice of Rome does not punish these crimes by death!’

“‘Seize him! Crucify him! crucify him!’

“Their ferocious cries seemed to shake the very foundations of the palace, and but one man amid all this tumult was calm: it was the Nazarene! One might have taken him for the statue of innocence in the temple of the Eumenides.

“After many useless efforts to withdraw him from the hands of the self-willed multitude, I had the fatal weakness to command what, at the time, occurred to me as the only thing that might perchance save his life. I ordered him to be beaten with rods, and, calling for a basin, washed my hands before the crowd, which, if not hearing my voice, might at least catch the allegorical meaning of my act.

“But they would have his life. Often in our civil troubles I have seen what an angry crowd can be capable of, but all my memories and experience of the past were effaced by what I saw then. I might almost say that Jerusalem was peopled by all the infernal spirits of Hades, and as they crowded about me there seemed an odor as of sulphur exuding from their bloodshot eyes and inhuman countenances. Their very movements were not as of men, but, like the waves of an angry sea, they rolled and dashed, in ceaseless undulations, from the prætorium to Mount Sion; yelling, shouting in a most unearthly manner, such as never in the troubles of the Forum or the seditions of the Pantheon assaulted a Roman ear.

“The day had slowly darkened, as in a winter evening, such as we saw it when the great Julius died—’twas also near the ides of March—and I, the mortified governor of a province in full and unrestrained rebellion, stood leaning against a column, gazing through the gray, unnatural light at the infuriated spirits who bore the innocent Jesus to his death.

“It became gradually quiet about me, for the whole population had followed to the place of execution, leaving the city as silent and as mournful as the tomb, even my very guards having disappeared, save the centurion alone. I, too, felt alone; isolated from the rest of mankind, and in my strangely-excited heart, I understood that what was passing around me pertained rather to the history of the gods than to that of men. The sounds brought by the wind from Golgotha announced to my horrified ear a death-agony such as never human nature underwent before. Dense leaden clouds shrouded the pinnacle of the great Temple, and thence seemed to envelop the vast city as with a veil of impenetrable darkness. Terrible signs of perturbation were manifest on earth and in the air, prodigious enough to make Dionysius the Areopagite exclaim: ‘Either the Author of nature suffers or the whole universe is being dissolved.’

“At the first hour of the night I wrapped myself in a cloak and walked down into the city towards the gate leading to Golgotha. The sacrifice was consummated! The attitude of the people was no longer the same, for the crowd re-entered Jerusalem, disorderly, of course, but silent and moody, as if filled with shame and despair. Fear and remorse were in every heart. My little cohort passed by, as silent as the populace; the very eagle had been draped as in mourning, and in the last ranks I heard some soldiers talking in a curious manner of things which I could not comprehend. Others were relating prodigies somewhat like those that have often terrified Rome by the will of the gods. Now and then I came across groups of men and women in grievous sadness as they moved over that sorrowful way, or as, in some cases, they turned back towards the mount of expiation, expecting, perhaps, some new prodigy.

“Returning to the prætorium, my own breast seemed to embrace all the desolation of this painful scene, and as I climbed the stairs I saw, by the lightning flash, the marble still covered with His blood. There stood, awaiting me in most humble attitude, an old man, accompanied by several women, sobbing in the darkness.

“Throwing himself at my feet, the old man wept.

“‘What do you ask, my father?’ I said in a mild voice. He answered:

“‘I am Joseph of Arimathea, and I come to beg, on my knees, the favor of burying Jesus of Nazareth.’

“Raising him up gently, I promised that his wishes should be complied with. At the same time I called Manlius, who went with some soldiers to superintend the burial, and to place a few sentinels over the grave, that it might not be profaned. A few days afterwards the grave was empty, and the disciples of Jesus published everywhere that their Master had risen again, as he had foretold.

“There now remained for me a last duty to perform: to send a full account of this extraordinary event to Cæsar, which I did that very night; and the minute relation which I gave was not yet completed when daylight appeared.

“The sound of trumpets drew me from my task, and, glancing towards the gate of Cæsarea, I saw an unusual stir among the soldiers and sentinels, and heard in the distance other trumpets playing Cæsar’s march; it was my reinforcement of troops, two thousand in number, who had, in order to arrive more promptly, made a night-march. ‘Oh! the great iniquity had to be completed,’ I cried, wringing my hands in despair. ‘They arrive the next morning to save a man who was sacrificed the day before. O cruel irony of fate! Alas! as the Victim said on the cross: ”All is consummated.“’

“From that moment, invested with abundant power, I set no limits to my hatred against the people who had forced me into both crime and cowardice. I struck terror into Jerusalem. And, as if further to excite my vengeance, I shortly afterwards received a letter from the emperor, wherein he blamed my conduct very severely. My official account of the death of Jesus had been read before a full senate, and had excited a profound sensation. The image of the Nazarene, honored as a god, had been placed in the sacred place of the imperial palace. The courtiers, who were opposed to me, seized the pretext to begin that long series of accusations which now, years after the death of Tiberius, have at last brought me to this city of exile, where my life is to go out in anguish and remorse.

“I have told you all, Albinus, and my words have opened to you my innermost soul; you will surely do me the justice to say that Pilate was more unfortunate than wicked.”

The old man ceased; tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks, while his fixed and hollow eyes seemed to gaze with fright upon some scene, invisible to other eyes, the lugubrious phantasm of an ever-present past. Albinus was wrapt in sombre thought, seeking in what manner of speech to simulate pity for his guest.

“Pontius,” said he, “your misfortunes are not ordinary ones, yet there may be a balm for the ulcers of your memory and heart. You must invoke the Fates, whose good-will may disarm the anger of the gods.”

Pilate gave such a smile, amid his tears, as distressed the prudent Albinus.

“The city is a bad place for you,” pursued Albinus; “hatred is at home in public assemblies, and Janus, who watches at the threshold, cannot protect the domestic hearth against violence from without. Why not ask of our mountains the quiet and peace which seem refused to you here? The air of the fields invites repose and counsels forgetfulness of canker care.”

“I fear to understand you,” said Pilate, turning suddenly pale and with quivering lips. “Yes, I am afraid I comprehend your meaning too well; like a serpent, you take a long turn to attain your end. You wish to close the door of your house against the old man!”

“The gods, whom I invoke, and who hear me,” said Albinus, “know that I have never violated the sacred laws of hospitality, but—”

“Yes,” interrupted the old man—“yes, towards others, but towards me you will find an excuse for violating them. I understand—do not finish! I must spare a friend the embarrassment of words which his lips refuse to utter. Albinus, I feel the spirit of a Stoic revive in me; the waxen torch flashes up yet once before going out. Listen; I am about to salute your _Penates_. I will depart.”

Albinus lowered his eyes and was silent.

“Well! well! your silence speaks, as Marcus Tullius says. I will call my servants.”

“Your servants?” said Albinus, as Pilate rose from his seat. “Your servants? You have none; they have fled from you!”

“It is well!” answered Pilate.

“One alone has remained faithful—an old soldier.”

“Ah! that is Longinus; I know him. Tell the servant to call Longinus, and permit me to blow out your lamp; the oil is exhausted, and here is the dawn.”

“Oh! blame me not, Pontius. Let not your farewell insult my household gods!”

“I blame you? No, I pity you. The blood of Rome weakens in every vein; there are no Romans now. Let altars be everywhere erected to Fear; the house of Albinus is built on the very threshold of the Temple of Mars!”

And Pilate uttered a loud, hard laugh, which ceased at the entrance of the soldier.

“May your fidelity be rewarded, Longinus! You did not follow the deserters. Albinus, do you know what this soldier did? He was in the spearmen; he was at Golgotha, at the foot of the gibbet, when the Nazarene died; he pierced his heart with his lance. Longinus will die a Christian. Have you girded on your sword, old soldier, my last friend?”

The soldier made a sign of assent.

“All is, then, ready.” And Pilate saluted Albinus.

* * * * *

An hour after these two men had reached midway the side of a mountain overlooking the city of Vienne. The sun was rising in all the calm beauty of a summer morn; its first rays glistened upon the gilt-bronze dome of the Temple of Victory and the marble roof of the Temple of the Hundred Gods. Mysterious night still reigned in the sacred woods which crowned the dwelling of the Immortals. The city, inclined towards the Rhone, seemed listening in unbroken silence to the harmonious murmurings of the stream; the hill-tops floated in an atmosphere of molten gold, while the noise of cascades, the song of birds, and the countless melodies of a fresh, delicious morning, rising from valley to mountain-top, filled all whose hearts were light with joy and gratitude to the Powers above.

Pilate halted, his eyes fixed on a dark chasm which, yawning, stood before him. In the depths below could be heard the mournful plash of waters, to the eye unseen; dense brush, interwoven with dwarf oaks and the wild fig, hung over and, half-concealing, yet increased the horrid abyss, and a piece of the rock, detached and hurled over, struggled and tossed awhile among the resisting vines before dropping into the gloomy waters to send up a series of ill-boding, mournful echoes.

Pilate smiled at the gulf of horror, then turned to contemplate the immense sublimity which surrounded his agony of despair; he thought of the death of the Nazarene—that death so calm amid the universal distress of nature—and wept bitterly.

“Longinus,” said he, “put up your sword; I do not need it. I can die without you; I do not wish you to soil your hands with my blood, for you are yet covered with another blood which will never be effaced. Yes, Longinus, the Sage of Golgotha was one of the superior intelligences; retain that belief. All who stained their hands with his blood have perished miserably; think of Herod and Caiphas. Tiberius likewise was suffocated in his bed at Capreæ, and I yet survive—I! See how I imitate them!”

And he threw himself into the abyss. Longinus heard the interlacing branches crack, but saw only the torn remnants of a toga here and there adhering to the thorny plants which grew upon the sides. He heard the dull bound of the body from rock to rock, and a last unearthly cry of agony, enhanced by echo, and fading to the splash of water as its disturbed surface leaped and glistened in the rays of the now penetrating sun.

So died the man under whom Christ suffered.

Footnote 8:

Spare the submissive and crush the haughty.

ON CALVARY.

SUGGESTED BY A PAINTING BY J. L. GÉRÔME.

In the strong sunshine lies Jerusalem, Undarkened yet by shadow of the doom That hideth in the terror-freighted gloom Lying afar along the low hills’ hem. Twinkle the silver-leavèd olive-trees, Resting in garish light ’neath heaven’s cloudy seas.

From Calvary’s Mount descends the winding train; Glitter the Roman eagles in the sun, Leading the soldiers and the people on To tread the city’s dolorous streets again, Whose blood-tracked stones would cry, had they but breath, “Woe! woe! Jerusalem, for this day’s deed of wrath.”

Almost unheeding passes on the crowd, Save, here and there, turned from the populace, Rests look of doubting or malignant face On That we see not in death’s anguish bowed. Wild cries of hate mount up and break the still And ominous glare that broodeth dumbly o’er the hill.

Our sad hearts hear the very footsteps fall, The horse-hoofs striking hard against the stones, And distant echoes of heart-broken moans— Jerusalem’s daughters mourning so the thrall Of Him, their fairest one, to death betrayed, The hands that blessed their little ones so sore arrayed.

Where is the dying King the cross uplifts? We cannot see him, and our upraised eyes Meet but the awful gloom in far-off skies, The lurid moon dull gazing through the rifts Of gathering darkness; here the waiting glare Of cruel sunshine making all the city fair.

Fain would we kneel with Magdalen and weep, Clasp wounded feet in passionate embrace, Win with the loved disciple word of grace, Vigil with God’s woe-stricken Mother keep: We cannot find Him, and blaspheming cries From that retreating train still in fierce chorus rise.

Is He not here? Lo! sadly looking down, Just at our feet a shadow strange we trace Falling across the sunlit grassy place— The likeness of three crosses darkly thrown, And His, the centre one, e’en so most fair Through semblance of a form divine it dim doth bear.

Here, ’gainst the sunshine traced, lie those bent knees That knew the sorrow of Gethsemani As trembled they ’neath its dread mystery; Here droops the thorn-crowned head in silent peace, And here, in the unswerving shadow lined, Are stretched the arms that bear the ransom of mankind.

So rests unseen the presence of the Lord Whose shadow seems as blessèd aureole, A holy writing on a sacred scroll, Rich oil from consecrated vessel poured— All merit his, the Infinite Son of God, Whose death so lightly falls on earth’s poor, soulless sod.

Within the painted shadow is no life, Save in the grassy sward whereon it falls. Beyond arise the city’s firm-built walls. With spring’s swift-coursing sap the boughs are rife Of the gnarled olives with their silver leaves Shining against the dusky veil the storm-wind weaves.

We see the wild-faced moon in skies far-off, The bare and weary light of undimmed sun, And Caesar’s glittering eagles leading on The thoughtless people, who, with jeer and scoff, An abject God in proud derision scorn, Alike from barren shade and living presence turn.

O weary thought! hath earth lost sight of Him? And do her children with dulled vision grope, With fain-believing heart and doubting hope, His cross a parable with meaning dim? A shadow resting in the feeble clasp Of them that fear the bitterness of truth to grasp?

Is all that sorrow of the Son of Man A dreary darkness shutting out the light? Poor human pain dwarfing eternal might? An o’ergrown bramble with its prickly span Piercing the delicate leaves of earth-born flowers, And blighting with harsh touch kind nature’s generous powers?

Alas! that men that Infinite Love should fear, Should dread its glory and its shade despise, Banish its semblance from imploring eyes, Give men but empty shadow to revere— Blind beggars leaving them unto whose cry None answereth when He of Nazareth goes by.

Of this sad modern world of ours to-day The artist’s picture seemeth counterpart, When men erase old lessons from the heart, Striving who farthest from the cross may stray— Swift, swift descending ’neath the eagles’ shine, Some longing face still turned to meet the gaze divine.

In her long-ordered way the earth moves on, The moon doth change with steady law her face, Swift-growing grass still hides our footsteps’ trace, And dew falls softly when the day is done: All nature’s tale seems old, but one thing strange— The Christ of God a shade the westering sun shall change!

Nay, fear not! Stand to-day as e’er of old The faithful Maries, who brave vigil keep, The loved disciple with a love as deep As in old days lay shrined in heart of gold; And rests God’s patience till from shadowed sod The piercing cry break forth, “This was the Son of God.”

A BISHOP’S LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE IN THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.[9]

The diocese of Paderborn is one of the largest in Germany. Its bishop, Dr. Conrad Martin, has just published a little work[10] which may vie with Silvio Pellico’s _Le mie Prigioni_, being an account of a three years’ banishment from his see. It is not “poetry _and_ truth,” remarks the writer of this pamphlet in his preface, “but only the truth which is written down in these pages.”[11] And true to his statement, the bishop tells us in dispassionate language of his captivity, of its joys and sorrows, of the friends who were so true to him in his adversity, of the whole Catholic Church, who shared his banishment in a measure, and of that most august prisoner whose sympathy is so freely given to his suffering brethren, and whose captivity is in itself, perhaps, a pledge that they too must taste of his own chalice.

With the presentiment of future events, or rather of the storm which was about to break over their pastor on account of the _Kulturkampf_, the people of Paderborn came in large numbers in the spring of 1874 to assure him of their love and devotion. The demonstration began on the 25th of March, when the train deposited five thousand pilgrims in the ancient city of Paderborn. They repaired to the bishop’s house, and terminated the meeting by simultaneously falling on their knees to recite aloud the Apostles’ Creed. These deputations lasted for two months, and on one occasion the number of deputies amounted to fifteen thousand. It is not an insignificant fact to see how well and bravely the flock stood by the pastor in his hour of need. But at last the cloud burst. Repeated infringements of the May Laws were laid to the bishop’s charge; and the fine in proportion rose to a sum altogether beyond his means, and a corresponding term of imprisonment was the only alternative. Here an unknown, and therefore doubly generous, benefactor interposed, and paid the money required without the bishop’s knowledge. But, to use his own simple language, Dr. Martin, “from higher considerations, thought he could not accept the benefit,” and protested against it,[12] whereas the local authority said that he could. At last an answer came from Berlin deciding that he should submit himself to imprisonment. As the bishop would not consent to that, force was used, and on the 4th of August, 1874, he was taken from his house through a dense crowd of sympathizers to his prison, where he was witness of a scene “not to be described by words.” Bouquets of flowers fell at his feet from all sides, and the steps leading up to the abode of his sorrow were thick with them. Two works had been near his heart as a pastor—the establishment of ecclesiastical institutions for the fitting education of the clergy, and the labor of love which is expressed by the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This touching devotion was therefore one of the first-fruits of his own workings, and it has become widely known through the world. But never before had the bishop of Paderborn shared the prison common to malefactors of every degree. The prisoner was then conducted to his two cells. One he describes as “certainly not roomy, but still not wholly unpleasant”;[13] the second was to serve merely as a bed-room. Loneliness is the prisoner’s trial, and when first the bishop heard the lock and key tell him of his utter solitude, sad thoughts pressed themselves upon him. Many years before he had paid a pastoral visit to this same prison, and his own encouraging words spoken then came home to him now. “Could you only have imagined then,” he said to himself, “that you yourself should be confined in the same dungeon, and come to need the recommendation to resignation and patience which you gave to those prisoners? Oh! what a change, what a comparison _then_ and _now_—_then_, when there was no _Kulturkampf_, but an undisturbed and joyous peace. _O tempora, o mores!_”[14] But the angel of consolation was at hand. The thought of that divine Providence whose care of us is so beautifully specified in Holy Scripture brought peace. “Every hair of our head is numbered.” The bishop determined upon active endurance, and during those first few hours of his imprisonment planned for himself an order of duties for the coming solitary days. That night the breaking of a pane of glass in his bed-room window, caused by the hurling of a stone from an unknown hand outside, was a little alarming, and, in spite of inquiries on the subject, it could not be discovered whether the missile was directed by a friend in a serenading spirit, or by a foe who might have taken umbrage at the demonstrations of intense affection on the part of the people of Paderborn.

For the rest the bishop, according to his own account, had small cause for complaint during his confinement at Paderborn.[15] His food was provided and sent from his house. He was allowed to read and write when and what he liked. Strict supervision was, however, exercised on his correspondence and on the visits which he received. These were permitted in the presence of a third person only, and letters might be read and sent under the same condition. The Holy Sacrifice, which was his daily refreshment, supplied many deficiencies in that lonely heart. But the “body of death” had still to suffer much from privation of air and exercise. It is true that once a day the prison bolt was withdrawn for an exercise of two hours in the court-yard. This had to be taken in common with the other prisoners, in a very limited space, so that the bishop often preferred to sit by an open window in his room, there to enjoy what air he could get.

On the 17th of August, the eighteenth anniversary of his episcopal consecration, the widowed cathedral of Paderborn was filled with an assembly of the bishop’s faithful children, who celebrated the occasion by heartfelt prayers for him to God. Flags adorned the houses of the Catholic inhabitants. But the pastor’s heart was further gladdened by the intelligence that from the very first day of his captivity a certain number of the faithful gathered every evening in the _Gaukirche_ to offer up the rosary for their oppressed church. And now, after the lapse of three years, the same practice is kept up, and who would be so presumptuous as to say that the divine Head of the whole body will not allow pleading so constant finally to bring about the desired end? It reminds us of that supplication of the infant church to remove Peter’s chains, or of a case which was brought before our personal observation in Germany.[16] Our Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist had been banished from his sanctuary through the working of the May Laws, but the villagers succeeded each other during the day in unremitting prayer before the altar where he once dwelt.

Upon the bishop’s six weeks of confinement followed eighteen of custody. The only distinguishable difference between the two consisted in the non-bolting of the prison-door from the exterior. On the outset he was saddened by the command to surrender his office as bishop. The summons came to him through the Oberpräsident von Kühlwetter, whose attitude to Dr. Martin from the beginning of the _Kulturkampf_ had been most hostile. One act in particular of the bishop’s seems to have roused the enmity of the non-Catholic party, but the principle of authority must fall to the ground where demands wholly contrary to his conscience are urged upon a spiritual ruler. The act in question had been a certain pastoral letter in the affair of the Old Catholics. The bishop replied immediately that “devotion to the Catholic Church had been his first love, and that it would be his last.” Ten days of respite were allowed for the reconsideration of the question, under the threat of ultimate expulsion from his dignity. But, thanks to an energetic nature and the quiet peace which is the fruit of a brave determination, it had small influence over the bishop. He labored to finish his work on the _Christian Life_, and time, which is so often the greatest trial of the prisoner, passed rapidly away. His feast-day was the next small event to break the monotony of his life. From his window he could see the festive appearance of some neighboring houses, and from far and wide came wishes of sympathy and affection. The telegraphic messages and letters of congratulation numbered over eight hundred on this day, and proved a provision of encouragement for several succeeding days. They were the flowers of persecution, and as such most dear to the bishop’s Catholic spirit.

Oppression does indeed often bring the work of the Lord to a timely and palpable development, and we may echo the prisoner’s words: “Would years of hard work have given evidence of so close a union as well as this short and fleeting sorrow?”[17] At the same time two other addresses reached him which were a source of particular joy: the one from a good number of Belgian noblemen, who thereby drew forth a remonstrance on the part of Prince Bismarck, the other from two imprisoned bishops of the far west who were themselves confessors of the faith, and protesting by their personal suffering against the evil spirit of Freemasonry. They were the bishops of Para and Pernambuco, who, profiting by the journey of a priest to Europe, took occasion to express their love and sympathy to the fellow-sufferer in Germany who was bearing the self-same testimony to Catholic truth as they themselves. Comfort, too, came from the Holy Father, who sent first a gold medal, and then, on the feast of St. Conrad, a telegraphic message of greeting and good wishes. But the price of these favors was suffering and greater suffering. The threat on the part of the secular power to depose the bishop was now carried out. Many and grievous had been his shortcomings, according to the standard established by the May Laws, and amongst the accusations brought against him was the erroneous charge that he alone amongst the German bishops had worked in favor of the Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council. Extensive quotations from his pastoral letters were given in the indictment, whilst the words he had addressed on various occasions to his faithful children, their constant devotion to him, the legal measures recently carried out, and the cause now pending were alleged as the ground why he could not continue to exercise his office. He was invited to appear on the 5th of January, 1875, to answer these charges, after which day, and having simply refused to accept the act of deposition, it was nailed to his door inside. There it remained quietly hanging, says the bishop with dry German humor, “without my casting one single glance upon its contents.”[18] The feast of Christmas, which occurred in the midst of these cares, found him not altogether joyless. The prison chapel bore for him a resemblance to the lonely grotto of Bethlehem.

The bishop fancied that after enduring his twenty-four weeks of imprisonment he might hope for fresh air and liberty. That hopefulness was rather surprising. Instead of the accomplishment of this expectation, his house was stripped of its furniture (which was afterwards sold), and he himself was conveyed on very short notice to the fortress of Wesel, it being explicitly stated that this penalty was the consequence of the before-mentioned pastoral regarding the Old Catholics. The same sympathizing crowd met him on his way to the station, and his private secretary accompanied him by choice to the scene of his new imprisonment. It was on the 20th of January, 1875, that the bishop entered on the two months’ penalty at Wesel, and there he seems on the whole to have been better off than at Paderborn. He could walk freely on the ramparts, and enjoy to a certain extent social intercourse with the other prisoners, who were in most cases priests of his own diocese. Three cells were assigned to him for his use; the third was an act of thoughtfulness on the part of the commandant, who had reserved it for the bishop’s daily Mass. If, indeed, it had not been for the Holy Sacrifice—for every day, Dr. Martin remarks, “holy” Masses were said up till ten o’clock by the imprisoned priests[19]—the fortress would have borne a resemblance to the middle state where souls are detained for a time on account of their sins. The supervision exercised was slight, beyond the visitation of all the cells twice every day. Once when the bishop was taking exercise on the ramparts which overlooked the Rhine—in itself like the face of an old friend to Dr. Martin—some of the faithful who descried him in the distance knelt for his blessing. The act, the bishop knew not how, was communicated to the commandant, who forbade him in writing to repeat it. At Wesel correspondence was free, and even newspapers of all kinds were permitted. Feelers were sent out by the government to test the bishop’s sentiments with regard to his civil deposition, but his consent could never be obtained. And he was cheered and supported by an address which was brought to him towards the middle of March by a nobleman on the part of his diocese. It contained these words: “It is true that your lordship as bishop has been deposed by the Royal Court of Justice in Berlin, but you are, and will remain, our bishop, and we will be faithful to you until death.”[20] Two thick volumes bore the signatures to this statement, and they numbered ninety-six thousand.

After his life in the fortress the bishop was refreshed by a little breathing-time in a friendly house in Wesel itself. His host had just married and taken his bride to Rome. On their return they brought to the exiled pastor a new token of sympathy from the Holy Father in the shape of another gold medal. The days passed pleasantly for the bishop, as far as that was possible out of his diocese, until he made the discovery that he had not yet paid the entire penalty of the famous pastoral. He was sentenced to another month’s imprisonment in the fortress. “I had always thought,” he writes, “that for one offence it sufficed to be punished once. But the powers of the state said no.”[21] Summer had come, and a return to the fortress in that season was no small penance. The sun’s penetrating rays made the prisoner’s little cells almost intolerable, and the bishop’s health began visibly to decline. He lost his appetite and his sleep, and the only remedy, according to the doctor, to produce return of vital power would have been change of air and a course of sea-baths. But for this desired end he learned from the mayor of Wesel that it would be necessary to undergo an examination from the district doctor, and to procure a written statement that such treatment was necessary. Moreover, it was enjoined that the place chosen for the cure should be at least twenty miles distant from the diocese of Paderborn. A Protestant district doctor was accordingly consulted, and his opinion exactly corresponded with the bishop’s own account of his state, whereupon Dr. Martin gave himself up to the pleasant hope of soon being able to leave Wesel. “I wished for haste the more,” he says, “as my state became worse from day to day. The continual agitation in which I was kept helped to aggravate things. For day after day I received tidings of new ruins which the unhappy _Kulturkampf_ worked in my poor diocese.”[22] In the autumn of 1873—that is, after the promulgation of the May Laws—the bishop had given faculties to four newly-ordained priests. This is the most natural and harmless action of a bishop, for what spiritual act can take place without that exercise of his jurisdiction? Pronouncing a priest competent for the care of souls is analogous to the action in law of giving a brief to a barrister. What if the church should require a barrister to present himself to the bishop for approbation before he received such a brief? But the May Laws completely confuse spiritual and temporal things. The bishop was accused of breaking article fifteen of those regulations, which runs that “spiritual rulers are bound to present such candidates as are about to receive a spiritual office to the _Oberpräsident_, whilst at the same time the office is specified.” If the barrister obtain briefs after he has been called, the bishop does not meddle with him; but because the priests in question _had_ exercised their faculties Berlin thought well to condemn the bishop to a further imprisonment of six months.

But now a new phase began in the life of Dr. Martin. Having “waited and waited” for the permission to follow out the cure which a disimpassioned authority had pronounced absolutely necessary, he resolved to act in spite of the law, and to fly from Wesel. He considered this course not only allowable, but even obligatory, seeing two principal reasons. His health was seriously endangered, if he could not have the required treatment, and that health belonged not to himself but to his diocese. Furthermore, in Wesel his movements were so closely watched that one single act of the pastoral office might give the government a plea for still more rigorous measures. Therefore on the 3d of August he wrote an official letter stating his intended departure from Wesel on the morrow; and so, as the clock struck the hour of midnight, he was quietly crossing the bridge over the Rhine, and on the following day, the 5th of August, he was received at the Castle of Neuburg by the family of Ausemburg. How full his heart was of his appointed work we may gather from the attempt to return to Paderborn. At Aix-la-Chapelle two railway authorities recognized him, and he was counselled by a valued friend to go back to Holland in “God’s name!” The document which reached him a few days later proved the soundness of the advice. It was from the Minister of the Interior at Berlin, announcing to him the fact that he was from henceforth an outlaw in the eyes of his country. The May Laws further exhausted their bitterness against him by the warrant which was issued from the district court in Paderborn for another imprisonment of six months. But it seems that these punishments did not affect the bishop’s peace of mind. Amidst tokens of universal love and devotion he was spending his time chiefly with the Ausemburg family, occupying his leisure with writing on religious subjects, amongst which one was Devotion to the Sacred Heart. After his fruitless attempt to join his bereaved flock he had directed his efforts in the first place towards his own physical restoration. After a three weeks’ cure in Kattwyk, which worked a wonderful change for the better in his state, he visited the bishops of Haarlem and Roermond, and rejoiced his spirit by witnessing some of the fruits of the new and vigorous Catholic life which has been promoted in Holland by the re-establishment of the hierarchy. Whilst Dr. Martin was with the bishop of Haarlem he received intelligence of the dreadful fire which the “dear Paderstadt” had sustained.

These peaceful days, however, were not of long duration. They were shortened by one of the bitterest experiences which a pastor can be called upon to endure—that is, an unfaithful friend. A priest of his diocese (the only one besides Mönnikes, he remarks) had gone over to the enemies of the church, and vainly had the bishop tried the power of loving exhortation. He was obliged at last to use that spiritual weapon which has ever been obnoxious to a world impatient of restraint, and to pronounce excommunication, fully conscious of the possible consequences of the step, and therefore prepared to accept them. The government of Holland was too weak to protect an exile. It gave way under more powerful pressure, and the bishop was ordered to leave.

“I prayed to God for light,” he says. “I asked St. Joseph (it was in March, 1876) to lead me where I should go.”[23] His steps were directed to Catholic Belgium; but whatever the character of the population may be, that of the policy of its government is rightly defined by the bishop as the effort to keep out of the way of Prince Bismarck’s complications, which effort is the _ne plus ultra_ of political wisdom. He was not, therefore, much astonished when he received orders to leave the Belgian frontier.

A homeless, houseless exile, the bishop once more wandered forth in strict _incognito_, we are not told where, but the place must have been wisely chosen, for there he remained in great retirement from April, 1876, till the following April. Then it was that Rome, the home of all Catholic hearts, once more awoke his desires; but, owing to the well-known sentiments of the Italian government, he was aware that the journey had its dangers for a bishop under the ban of the _Kulturkampf_. He set out, nevertheless, and on his journey through France experienced numberless consolations and the warmest reception from the French bishops. Persecution imprints on the heart the device, _Cor unum et anima una_.

On the 24th of May, 1877, the feast of St. Monica, he arrived in Rome for the fifth time. Men are trying to make even the Eternal City new, and as the bishop walked through the familiar streets he felt that the voice might indeed be the voice of Jacob, whilst the hands were the hands of Esau. The Colosseum, consecrated by remembrances so heart-stirring, now appeared to him as a dearly-loved face whence the spirit had fled. It is the nature of Rome to be the most conservative of cities, and never are natural laws overturned with comfort. These were the German bishop’s thoughts as again he compared what had been to what was, the more so as he found the improvement wholly exterior and material, and, along with finer streets in course of erection, was obliged to notice a lowering of moral tone in their inhabitants. Even the faces of the men he met seemed to have altered; for, he says, they are mostly not Romans, but a kind of heterogeneous mob gathered from all quarters of the globe.

When Pius VII. returned to Rome after the persecution which had threatened to annihilate his power, he invited his enemy’s family to partake of hospitality in that city, as the land of great misfortunes; but now the Holy Father, his successor, could offer nothing but an affectionate greeting to a bishop who had borne so noble a witness to the truth. The shadow of Pius IX.’s captivity must fall upon all his children. An exiled bishop sought refuge in Rome as the home of his father, and Rome could not give him what he sought. By the advice of several cardinals Dr. Martin changed his residence and went out only in secular dress, but not before he had been denounced by unfriendly papers as one who was under arrest. On the 24th of May, in consequence of continued persecution from the press, and in honest fear of more serious ill-treatment, strengthened by the loving farewell and the apostolical blessing of the Holy Father for himself and his diocese, the bishop of Paderborn set out for an unknown place of exile, happy at least in his resemblance to One who, coming unto his own, was not received by them.

The early church wrote the acts of her martyrs, in order that the remembrance of their deeds should never perish, and the church of the nineteenth century may be allowed to record the struggle of her confessors not only for a perpetual memorial of them, but also that others who are not in the fight may realize at once the presence of the battle-field and the nature of the warfare. We have seen that it exists; its nature cannot be better defined than by the words of him whose confessorship we are recording:

“The Papacy is in fact the one and only point round which the _Kulturkampf_ is raging, and I am convinced that if the ‘deposed’ and banished bishops were to break off their connection with the Papacy to-day, to-morrow they would be re-established in all their honors and privileges.... On the 3d of August last it was three years since I parted from my beloved flock. After God that flock is daily my first and last thought. My prayers, my anxieties, my studies, and my occupations of whatever nature belong to it. I will be true to it till death, and I hope by God’s grace that it will be true to me. Hours of temptation come upon me sometimes, it is true—hours when the painful doubt suggests itself whether I shall ever return to it. But I take courage to myself again through a trusting look up to God. He has counted every hair of our heads, and, if my return is in accordance with his providence, no _Kulturkampf_ will have power to prevent it. But should it be his good pleasure that I close my eyes to this world separated from my flock, I say with most humble resignation: May His will be done!

“But even supposing that all we ‘deposed’ and exiled bishops should die in banishment, the church, and the church in our German Fatherland, will finally conquer. He to whom all power in heaven and on earth is given is her protector; and, let her enemies be as numerous and powerful as it is possible to be, an hour will come when of them also it will be said: ‘They who sought after her life are dead.’”[24]

Footnote 9:

_Three Years of my Life._ By Dr. Conrad Martin, Bishop of Paderborn. Mainz, 1877.

Footnote 10:

_Drei Jahre aus meinem Leben._

Footnote 11:

_Ibid._ p. 3.

Footnote 12:

_Ibid._ p. 8.

Footnote 13:

_Ibid._ p. 14.

Footnote 14:

_Ibid._ p. 15.

Footnote 15:

_Ibid._ p. 16.

Footnote 16:

At Künigstein, in Nassau.

Footnote 17:

_Drei Jahre aus meinem Leben_, p. 23.

Footnote 18:

_Ibid._ p. 30.

Footnote 19:

_Ibid._ p. 37.

Footnote 20:

_Ibid._ p. 41.

Footnote 21:

_Ibid._ p. 45.

Footnote 22:

_Ibid._ p. 51.

Footnote 23:

_Ibid._ p. 83.

Footnote 24:

_Ibid._ pp. 160, 169.

MONTSERRAT.

O streams, and shades, and hills on high, Unto the stillness of your breast My wounded spirit longs to fly— To fly and be at rest; Thus from the world’s tempestuous sea, O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee!

—_Fray Luis de Leon._

No one visits Barcelona, or ought to visit it, without going to Montserrat, the sacred mountain of Spain, and one of the most extraordinary mountains in the world: the naturalist, to study its singular formation and the thousand varieties of its flora; the mere tourist, to visit its historic abbey and explore the wonderful grottoes with which the mountain is undermined; and the pilgrim, as to another Sinai, torn and rent asunder as by the throes of some new revelation, where amid awful rifts and chasms is enthroned its Syrian Madonna, like the impersonation of mercy amid the terrors of divine wrath. It is one of those wonderful places in Catholic Christendom around which centres the piety of the multitude. Hermits for ages have peopled its caves. The monks of St. Benedict for a thousand years have served its altars. Saints have kept watch around its venerable shrine. The kings and knights of chivalric Spain have come here with rich tributes to offer their vows. And the poor, with bare and bleeding feet, have, century after century, climbed its rough sides out of mere love for their favorite sanctuary.

Poets, too, have come here to seek inspiration. Several Spanish poets of note have celebrated its natural beauties and its legendary glory. Goethe could find no more suitable place than this wild, mysterious mountain for the scenery of one of the most wonderful parts of _Faust_—the scene where he makes the _Pater Ecstaticus_ float in the golden air, the hermits chant from their mystic caves, and the bird-like voices of the spirits come between like the breathings of a wind-swept harp.[25]

We took the Zaragoza railway, and in an hour after leaving Barcelona were in sight of the towering gray pinnacles that make Montserrat like no other mountain in the world. It rises suddenly out of the valley of the Llobregat more than three thousand five hundred feet into the air, and looks as if numberless liquid jets, sent up from the bowels of the earth, had suddenly been congealed into colossal needles or cones. These cones unite in a rocky base, about fifteen miles in circumference, which is cleft asunder by an awful chasm, at the bottom of which flows the torrent of Santa Maria. The base of the mountain is fringed with pines, but the cones are ash-colored and bare, being utterly devoid of vegetation, except what grows in the numerous clefts and ravines. This serrated mountain, standing isolated in a broad plain, strange and solitary, seems set apart by nature for some exceptional purpose. It looks like a vast temple consecrated to the Divinity. Even the Romans thought so when they set up their altars on its cliffs. It is the very place for the gods to sit apart, each on his own pinnacle, and talk from peak to peak, and reason high, and arbitrate the fate of man.

The sharp needles which give so peculiar an appearance to the mountain are mostly of a conglomerate stone composed of fragments of marble, porphyry, granite, etc., and not unlike the Oriental breccia. Some say that these enormous clefts have been produced by the agency of water or volcanic force; others, that the mountain, like Mt. Alvernia in Italy, where St. Francis received the sacred stigmata, was rent asunder at the great sacrifice of Mount Calvary, of which these profound abysses and splintered rocks are so many testimonials. Padre Francesco Crespo, in a memorial to Philip IV. on the Purísima Concepcion, says of it: “Astonishing monument of our faith, divided into so many parts in sorrowful proof of the death of the Creator!” And Fray Antonio, a Carmelite monk: “And in Montserrat is verified that which was spoken in St. Matt. xxvii.: And the earth did quake and the rocks were rent.”

We stopped at the station of Monistrol, two miles from the town of that name which stands at the very foot of the mountain, and walked along the banks of the Llobregat by an excellent road, often bordered with olives at the right, while the other side was overhung by cliffs fragrant with rosemary and wild thyme. We passed several cotton manufactories, for this is the region of contrasts: Industry is running to and fro in the fertile valley, while Contemplation kneels with folded palms on the rocky heights above. But what divine law is there that makes physical activity superior to moral, or productive of greater results, as so many would have us believe in these _cui bono_ days? Who knows what rich returns the cloud-wrapped altar above has rendered to these heavens? or how much the proud world owes to the solitary Levite who in the temple keeps alive

“The watchfire of his midnight prayer”?

Monistrol derives its name from monasteriolum—a little monastery, which was built here by the early Benedictines. It is said that Quirico, a disciple of St. Benedict, came to Spain in the sixth century, and, hearing of an extraordinary mountain in the heart of Catalonia, called Estorcil by the Romans, he came to see it and said to his disciples: “On this mount let us build a temple to the _Mater pulchræ dilectionis_.” His project was not realized till three centuries after, but he is believed to have built a small convent at the foot of the mountain.

It was late in the afternoon when we drew near the spot where St. Quirico and his disciples set up their altar, and the little white town of Monistrol lay closely hugged in at the foot of the mountain, behind which the sun sets by two o’clock, so that it was already in the shadow. On the outskirts we were surrounded by a swarm of swarthy gipsies ready to tell our future destiny for a _real_, as if we did not already know it! We crossed one of those bombastic bridges so common in Spain, as if there were a flood for the immense arches to span, and just beyond met the cura—a tall, thin man, with an abstract, speculative look, but who proved himself able to give good practical advice, which we followed by going to the little _posada_ hard by for the night, and awaiting the morning to ascend the holy mountain. It was a clean little inn, but as primitive as if it had come down from the time of St. Quirico. Not a soul could we find on presenting ourselves at the door, and it was only by dint of repeatedly shouting _Ave Maria Purísima!_ that a brisk little woman at length issued from some cavernous depth, as if called forth by our magical words. She gave us a dusky little room, with a crucifix and colored print of St. Veronica over the bed, and, after exploring the town, we took possession of it for the night while the tops of the mountain, that rose up thousands of feet directly behind the house, were still flushed with light.

The following morning was warm and cloudless, though in the middle of February. The _tartana_ came at ten o’clock—a wagon with a hood, drawn by three stout mules—and we set off with two men and three women, all Spanish, and all as gay as the crickets on the wayside. If their forefathers ascended the mountain with streaming eyes and unshod feet, they, at least, went up on stout wheels, and with many a song and quirk, though perfectly innocent withal. They were light-hearted laborers, released from toil, going with their lunch to spend a holiday at Our Lady of Montserrat’s. Just after starting we passed the little chapel of the Santísima Trinidad, built, as the tablet on it says, to commemorate the happy ending of the African war in 1860. We soon left Monistrol below us. The view at every moment became more extended as we wound up the steep sides of the mountain. At the right was always the towering wall of solid rock, while the left side of the road was often built up, or at least supported, by masonry. Vines and olives clung to the crags as long as they could find foothold, and here and there was an aloe on the edge of the precipice. The bells of Monistrol could be heard far below. The plain began to assume a billowy appearance, swelling more and more to the north till lost in the mountains. The air grew more exhilarating. In two hours’ time we came to a chapel with a tall cross before it, and nearly opposite suddenly appeared the abbey of Our Lady of Montserrat, seven or eight stories high, with a cliff rising hundreds of feet perpendicularly behind, divided by deep fissures, and terminating in needles that looked inaccessible, but where we could see a hermitage perched on the top like the nest of an eagle. There is no beauty about the convent, or pretension to architecture, but there is a certain austere simplicity about it that harmonizes with the mountain. The narrowness of the terrace has prevented its extending laterally, so it has been forced to tower up like the peaks around it. The mountain, as M. Von Humboldt says, seems to have opened to receive man into its bosom. But nearly everything is modern, and everywhere are ruins and traces of violence left by the French in their ravages of 1811. Passing through an arched gateway, we found ourselves in a close, around which stood several large buildings for the accommodation of pilgrims. These are of three classes, according to the condition of the visitor, and named after the saints, such as Placido, Ignacio, Pedro Nolasco, Francisco de Borja, etc. The poor have two houses for the different sexes, where they are lodged and fed gratuitously. Bread is distributed to them at seven in the morning; at noon, more bread with olla and wine; and at night the same. Pilgrims of condition sometimes go to receive the bread of charity, which they preserve as a relic. No one, rich or poor, is allowed to remain over three days without special permission. Even the better class of rooms are of extreme simplicity, containing the bare necessaries for comfort. They are paved with brick, and the walls are plastered, but not whitewashed. A man brought us towels, sheets, and a jug of water, and left us to our own devices. The visitor offers what he pleases on leaving. Nothing is required. Meals are obtained at a restaurant at fixed prices. After taking possession of our rooms we went to pay homage to Our Lady of Montserrat.

The first thing that struck us on entering the large atrium, or court, that precedes the church, was a marble tablet recording one of the greatest memories of Montserrat:

B. Ignativs—A—Loyola— hic-mvlta—prece—fletv- qve—Deo—se—virginiqve devovit—hictamqvam armis—spiritalib’— sacco—se—mvniens—perno- ctavit—hinc—ad—socie tatem—Iesv—fvndan dam—prodiit—an no M—D—XXII.—F. Lavren ne to. Abb. dedicavit. An. 1603.

For here it was that in 1522 came the chivalrous hero of Pampeluna, who had passed his youth in the court of Ferdinand V., trained in the practice of every knightly accomplishment, but now smitten down, like St. Paul, by divine grace, and come here in accordance with the principles of Christian chivalry in which he had been nurtured, to devote himself to Jesus and Mary as their knight. He laid aside his worldly insignia, and put on the poverty of Christ as the truest armor of virtue, and, on the eve of the Annunciation, kept his vigil of arms before the altar of Our Lady, whom he now chose as the _Señora de sus pensamientos_—“no countess,” as he said, “no duchess, but one of far higher degree”—and he hung up his sword on a pillar of her sanctuary as a token that his earthly warfare was over.

“When at thy shrine, most holy Maid, The Spaniard hung his votive blade And bared his helmèd brow, ‘Glory,’ he cried, ‘with thee I’ve done! Fame, thy bright theatres I shun, To tread fresh pathways now; To track thy footsteps, Saviour God! With willing feet by narrow road; Hear and record my vow.’”

So, in the _Book of Heroes_, Wolf-dietrich, “the prince without a peer,” stopped short in his career of glory, and, going to the abbey of St. George, laid his arms and golden crown on the altar and consecrated himself to God.

On the other side of the entrance is a similar tablet relating to St. Peter Nolasco, a knight of Languedoc, who, after serving in the religious wars of the times, ascended Montserrat on foot, and, when he arrived at the threshold of the house of Mary, fell on his knees, and in this position approached her altar, where he spent nine days in watching and prayer. It was during one of his prolonged vigils that he conceived the project of founding the celebrated Order of Mercy, which required of its members to give themselves, if need were, for the liberty of their brethren in bondage, and which in the course of about four hundred years (1218-1632) ransomed, at the price of millions, four hundred and ninety thousand seven hundred and thirty-six Christians (among whom was the great Cervantes) from the prisons of the Moors, where they had endured sufferings no pen could describe.

Dwelling on these saintly memories, we passed through the arcades of the court, green and damp with mould, and came to the church. The exterior, of the Renaissance style, is by no means striking. There are columns of Spanish jasper on each side of the door, with niches between for the twelve apostles, of whom only four remain. And over the entrance stands our Saviour giving his blessing to the pilgrim. There is a single nave of fine proportions, divided transversely by one of those iron _rejas_, or parcloses, peculiar to Spain, with a succession of chapels at the sides, by no means richly decorated. It was noon, and there was not a person in the large church. Divested of its ancient riches, and simply ornamented, it needed the crowds of pilgrims for whom it was intended to give it animation and effect. But the antique Virgin was there, in the centre of the retablo over the high altar, surrounded by lights, and we were glad of the silence and solitude that surrounded her.

The sacred image of Our Lady of Montserrat is believed to be one made by St. Luke the Evangelist at Jerusalem, and brought to Spain by St. Peter, and long preserved in a church erected by St. Paciano at Barcelona under the title of the Blessed Maria Jerosolimitana,[26] where it was still venerated in the time of San Severo, a bishop under the rule of the Goths. According to an old chronicle, it was to preserve it from the profanation of the Moors that, on the tenth of the kalends of May, 718, Pedro the bishop, and Eurigonio, a captain of the Goths, took the holy image of the Blessed Mary, and carried it to the mountain called Asserado, and hid it in a cave.

Amid all the wars and commotions of that age, it is not surprising that the remembrance of the holy statue became a dim tradition, and the precise spot of its concealment utterly forgotten. It was not till two centuries after that some young shepherds, guarding their flocks at the foot of the mountain, observed that every Saturday night, as soon as the darkness came on, a light descended from the heavens and gathered in a blaze around one of the lofty peaks. Their story was at first made light of at Monistrol, but, coming to the ear of the curate, a great servant of God and Our Lady, he resolved to ascertain its truth for himself. Accordingly, the next Saturday night, he set forth at an early hour with a number of people for the most favorable point of observation. As soon as it grew dark the supernatural light was seen, and a soft, delicious music heard issuing as from the depths of a cave. The curate did not venture to approach, but returned to consult the bishop of Vich, then residing at Manresa, the former place being in the hands of the Moors. This bishop, whose name was Gondemaro, took the curate and other members of the clergy, and, accompanied by several knights, ascended the mountain at the usual hour of the wonderful occurrence. They found the cliff enveloped in a cloud of fragrance. A shower of stars settled around the summit like a crown, and dulcet symphonies came forth from its bosom. This phenomenon lasted till midnight, when the music died away, the stars returned to their spheres, and silence and darkness resumed their empire.

The bishop passed the remainder of the night in dwelling on what he had witnessed, and at the first ray of dawn summoned the curate and requested him to take the necessary means for examining the place by daylight. He was not obliged to repeat the command. The curate took his parishioners, and, accompanied by the bishop, went in procession along the banks of the Llobregat, and up the sides of the mountain as far as practicable. Then he despatched several young shepherds, who could climb the rocks like goats, to explore the cliff. After no little fatigue and danger they discovered a cave on the edge of a precipice, and within it the sacred image of the Mother of God, surrounded by an odor like that of a garden of flowers. The joyful cries of the shepherds, repeated by all the echoes of the mountain caves, made known their discovery. The bishop took the statue in his arms, and, desirous of carrying it to Manresa, they went circling the wild peaks with songs of joy in the direction of Monistrol; but when he attempted to go past a certain place on the mountain his feet became fastened to the ground like iron to a loadstone. The Virgin had chosen the mountain for her abode, and would not abandon it. After the first moment of astonishment the bishop comprehended the meaning of the Soberana Señora, and a chapel was soon built to receive the statue, which he entrusted to the care of the curate of Monistrol.

But this was not the first chapel on the mountain. The oldest was that of San Miguel, on the other side of the ravine of Santa Maria, said to have been built out of the ruins of a temple of Venus. We went to see it that afternoon. It stands on a lofty ridge of the mountain to the north, commanding a magnificent prospect. Beneath is the whole valley of the Llobregat, but what below seemed like a vast plain here looked like the sea in a storm, in which wave after wave succeeded each other till lost in the Pyrenees. And these, capped with snow, looked like the foaming sea, run mountains high, all along the northern horizon. The whole country was dotted with villages. The river looked like a thread of silver winding through the surging valley. The sounds came up from below in a subdued murmur. At the right lay the Mediterranean, calm as a sea of crystal. Behind the chapel rose the tall cones, like the watch-towers of a vast fortress.[27] The solitude, the wildness, the awful depths over which we hung made a profound impression on us all. “How easy for the soul to rise to God in such a place!” we said. “Let us remain here the rest of our lives. With books to read, the chapel in which to pray, the mountain-side on which to meditate, and such a glorious view of God’s world around us, what more in this world could we ask for?” Every now and then came the peal of the convent bells. The air was fragrant with the balsamic odor of the shrubs. The glowing sun lit up mount and sea. And a certain melancholy about these gray peaks and unfathomable abysses, the ruined hermitages and violated chapels, and even the wintry aspect of yonder plain, gave them an additional charm. While sitting on the rocks a Spaniard came along with his daughter, and, entering into conversation, we learned that they were visiting the holy mountain for the last time together, she being on the point of entering a sisterhood. They both showed the most lively faith, and talked with enthusiasm of Montserrat, telling us how it had been rent asunder at the Crucifixion. After they had gone on in the direction of Collbato we sat a long time in silence, and then went slowly down the winding path, bordered with laurel, holly, heather, and shrubs of various kinds. On the way we met a long file of pupils from the abbey, ranging from ten to twenty years of age, all in gowns and leather belts like young monks. Two of the Benedictine fathers came behind them.

It was nearly night when we got back to the monastery, and as soon as we had dined we went to the church. It was wrapped in utter darkness, all but the sanctuary, which was blazing with lamps around the Madonna and the tabernacle. We knelt down in the obscurity close to the _reja_. In a short time thirty or forty students entered in their white tunics, and, encircling the altar, began the _Rosario_ in a measured, recitative way that was almost a chant. Then they gathered around the organ and sang the _Salve_ and _Tota pulchra es_ with admirable expression. The lateness of the hour, the vast nave shrouded in darkness, the blazing altar, with the black Madonna above in her golden robes after the Spanish fashion, the groups of worshippers motionless as statues, the venerable monks of St. Benedict in the choir, and the white-robed singers around the organ, gave great effect to the scene. We wished we might keep our vigil before the altar, like St. Ignatius; but one of the lay brothers, with a queer old lantern that must have been handed down from the Goths, began to hustle us out of the church as soon as the devotions were over, and we went stumbling through the dark court into the open air; and giving one look at the violet heavens, across which flashed a shooting-star, and to the tall black cliffs that overshadowed us, we went to our rooms, our hearts still under the influence of the music. The bells of the monastery kept ringing from time to time as long as we were awake, and they roused us again at an early hour the following morning, as if the _laus perennis_ were still kept up as in the olden time.

It was not yet day, but we hurried to the early Mass, which is sung with the aid of the students, followed by another chanted by the monks, and the sun was just rising out of the sea when we came from the church. As soon as breakfast was over we went to visit the cave of Fray Juan Garin, which is in the side of an enormous cliff it seemed fearful to live under. He was lying there in effigy, with his book and rosary, a water-jar at his feet, and a basket at his head, as if he had just gone to sleep. His legend, though not pleasing, is too closely connected with the early history of the mountain to be wholly omitted. It has been sung, too, by poets, and one scene, at least, in his life has been perpetuated in sculpture.

Fray Juan Garin is said to have been born in the ninth century of a noble family of Goths at Valencia, and in the time of Wifredo, Count of Barcelona, became a hermit on the lone heights of Montserrat. He is represented as a man of wasted aspect, with a long beard, who lived in the cave of an inaccessible cliff, and, when he went forth, carried a long staff in his hands, which were embrowned by the sun. Here he attained to such consummate sanctity that the very bells which hung between the two pillars before the ancient chapel of SS. Acisclo and Victoria rang out of their own accord whenever he approached. Every year he made a pilgrimage to the capital of the Christian world, and tradition says the bells of the Holy City spontaneously rang out at his arrival, like those of Montserrat. It would seem as if this holy hermit, regardless of the world, and by the world forgot, could have nothing to disturb his peace. But the great adversary had his evil eye on him, and resolved on his fall. For this purpose he turned hermit himself, as in the old rhyme, and put on a penitential robe and long white beard, which made such an impression on the count of Barcelona, when he presented himself before him, that he took his advice and brought his beautiful daughter Riquilda, who was thought to be possessed, to try the efficacy of Fray Juan’s prayers.

Meanwhile, the devil established himself in the very cave on the top of the cone above the monastery still known as the _Ermita del Diablo_, and soon after the two hermits met as if by accident.

They looked at each other, but without at first breaking the holy silence that set its seal on their contemplative life. At length the Diablo addressed Fray Juan, saying he was a great sinner who had come to the mountain three years previously to seek pardon of God for his innumerable offences in solitude and mortification, and expressing surprise that they had never met before. Garin at first repulsed his advances, as if by instinct, but the Diablo continued to speak with so much unction on the redoubled fervor that would result from a holy union of prayer and penitential exercises that Garin at length yielded, and finally let no day pass without meeting him and unveiling the innermost recesses of his heart.

We will not enter into the details of the tragedy which ended in the murder of the beautiful Riquilda. But when Fray Juan awoke to a sense of his crime, he was seized with so terrible a remorse that he once more set off for Rome to throw himself at the feet of him to whom are given the keys of earth and heaven, and confess his heinous sin. But the bells no longer rang out as he drew near. He was now

“A wretch at whose approach abhorr’d, Recoils each holy thing.”

Even the pope, with the power to him given to wash men’s sins away, had no ghostly word of peace for him. But he sent him not away in utter despair. He imposed on him by way of expiation to go forth from his presence like a beast of the earth, to live on the herbs of the field, and keep an unbroken silence till a sinless child a few months old—O power of innocence!—should assure him God had remitted his sin.

And Fray Juan submissively went forth from the Holy City on his hands and feet, and directed his weary course once more to Montserrat. Meanwhile, the Virgin, as Mr. Ticknor says, “appearing on that wild mountain where the unhappy man had committed his crime, consecrates its deep solitudes by founding there the magnificent sanctuary which has ever since made Montserrat holy ground to all devout Catholics.”[28]

In the course of time Fray Juan’s garments were worn out; exposed to the blazing sun of Spain, he grew swarthy of hue, and his body became covered with hair that made him look like a wild beast, for which, in fact, he was taken by the royal foresters, who fastened a rope around his neck and led him to Barcelona, where he was put in the stables of the count’s palace of Valdauris, and became at once the wonder and terror of the people.

Not long after the lord of Catalonia made a great feast to celebrate the birth of his son, now four or five months old, and one of the guests expressing a wish to see the curious beast from Montserrat, Fray Juan was led into the hall. As soon as he appeared the infant prince, speaking for the first time in his life, said: “Rise up, Fray Juan Garin; thou hast fulfilled thy penance. God hath pardoned thee.” And the penitent rose up and resumed his original form as a man.[29] He then threw himself at the count’s feet and confessed his crime. Wifredo could not refuse a pardon God had granted through his child. He ordered Fray Juan to conduct him to his daughter’s grave, and, followed by all the lords and knights of his court, he went to the mountain, and there, beside the newly-erected chapel of the Virgin, he found the tomb of the princess. When it was unsealed, to their amazement Riquilda opened her eyes and came forth from the grave. Around her neck was a slight mark, like a thread of crimson silk. As Faust says of Margaret:

“How strangely does a single blood-red line, Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife, Adorn her lovely neck!”

The overjoyed count took his daughter back to Barcelona, where an immense crowd came to see her whom the great _Madre de Dios_ had awakened from the sleep of death. One of the knights of the court, struck with her beauty, requested her hand in marriage, but Riquilda felt that after so strange a restoration to life, she ought to consecrate herself to God on the mount where the wonder had been accomplished.

Wifredo, who was a great builder of churches, determined to erect a magnificent convent on the mountain. Fray Juan worked on it with his own hands, and after its completion retired to a cave, where he penitently ended his days. The convent was peopled with nuns of noble birth, and Riquilda placed at their head. Eighty years after Count Borrell, who was now lord of Catalonia, fearful of a Saracen invasion, substituted monks and transferred the nuns to the royal foundation of Santa Maria de Ripoll.

This legend of a rude age, gross in some of its details, has been celebrated in several poems, one of which, still read and admired, takes a high place in Spanish literature. This is _El Monserrate_, by Cristóbal de Virues, a dramatic poet, who was a great favorite of Lope de Vega’s. Virues had served as a captain in the Spanish wars, and taken part in the battle of Lepanto. He belonged to an age when, as Mr. Ticknor says, many a soldier, after a life of excess, ended his days in a hermitage as rude and solitary as that of Garin.

The old counts of Barcelona made great donations to the convent of Montserrat, as well as the kings of Aragon after them. The monks were exempted from imposts and taxes, and made honorary citizens of Barcelona. They not only had possession of the mountain, but held feudal sway over several towns and lordships. The rule of St. Benedict is known to have been observed here in 987, when Prior Raymundo was at the head of the house. It was a dependence of the abbey of Ripoll until the fourteenth century, but on account of its miraculous Virgin, and the extraordinary history of its foundation, it at once acquired great celebrity, and not a day passed without numerous pilgrims. In the twelfth century there were so many that Don Jaime el Conquistador ordered all who went to the mountain to take with them the provisions necessary for their subsistence. These pilgrims, who were often from distant provinces, used to come with bare feet, sometimes with torches in their hands, or bearing heavy crosses, or scourging their bodies, or with a halter around their necks and manacles on their hands, as if they were criminals. And when the monks saw them coming in this manner, they went out to meet them, and released them from their vow by special authority from the pope, and brought them in before the holy image of the Mother of God, where their sighs and tears broke forth into piteous prayers.

These pilgrims had a kind of sacred character which prevented them from being cited before tribunals till they returned, except for crimes committed on the way, under a penalty of five hundred crowns. Leonora, the wife of Don Pedro el Catolico, was the first queen of Aragon to visit the sanctuary, and Don Pedro the Great the first king. The latter passed the night before the altar of Our Lady, imploring her aid against the French, who were invading Catalonia. Don Jaime and his wife Blanca came together and endowed the monastery, of which their son was then prior. Don Pedro el Ceremonioso came twice: on his way to the conquest of Majorca, and again at his return, when he presented a silver galley in thanksgiving for his success. Queen Violante, wife of Juan I., came here with bare feet, out of pure love for the Virgin, bringing with her rich gifts.

When Ferdinand the Catholic was nine years old his mother brought him to Montserrat and consecrated him to the Virgin. After the conquest of Granada he and Queen Isabella came here together, with Prince Juan, their son, Isabella, widow of Don Alonso of Portugal, Doña Juana, afterwards called _la Loca_, and others of the royal family. They brought with them the two young sons of the last king of Granada, who were baptized under the names of Juan and Fernando. In the retinue were the great Cardinal Mendoza and a number of prelates. On this or some other occasion their Catholic majesties presented two magnificent silver lamps to burn before Our Lady of Montserrat, and Queen Isabella gave twelve yards of green velvet, and two of brocade, to the sacristy.

It was about this time that thirteen monks from Montserrat were chosen to accompany Christopher Columbus in order to establish the faith in the new regions he might discover. At their head was Dom Bernardo Boil, a noble Catalonian, who was raised to the dignity of patriarch and papal legate. Columbus gave the name of Montserrat to an island he discovered in 1493, on account of the resemblance it bore to the holy mountain of Spain, and the first Christian church erected in America was called Nuestra Señora de Montserrat.

Charles V. came to Montserrat when nineteen years of age, accompanied by his tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards pope. They found the court full of soldiers, with lighted torches in their hands, and the Count Palatine at the head of an embassy to offer him the crown of Carlo Magno in the name of the electors of Germany. Charles went to prostrate himself at the feet of the Virgin, and the following day left for Barcelona, after giving the father abbot the title and privileges of _Sacristan Mayor_ of the crown of Aragon. He subsequently bestowed many gifts on the abbey, and gave it rule over the town of Olessa and other places. He visited it repeatedly, and not only remained several days at a time, but is even said to have tried the monastic life he afterwards embraced in the convent of Yuste. The third time he came here was in 1533, and on Corpus Christi day he walked in the procession with the monks, carrying a lighted candle in his hand. He liked to pass such great solemnities in a monastery, contributing by his presence and generosity to the brilliancy of the festival. He always invoked Our Lady of Montserrat before engaging in battle, and attributed to her his victories. He was at Montserrat when he received notice of the discovery of Mexico by Hernando Cortes, and when he heard of one of his important victories over the Moors. And on St. Margaret’s day, 1535, the parish of Santa Maria del Mar at Barcelona sent a deputation of twelve persons to the mountain, habited as penitents, to pray for the success of the royal arms. They united with the monks and hermits in a devout procession around the cloister, and made such prevailing prayer at the altar of Our Lady that Charles V. that very day took possession of Tunis. When the emperor, in 1558, found he was dying, he called for the taper blessed on the altar of Montserrat, and holding it in one hand, with the crucifix that had been taken from the dead hand of his mother Juana in the other, this great monarch, who, as he acknowledged to his kinsman, St. Francis Borgia, had never, from the twenty-first year of his age, suffered a day to pass without devoting some part of it to mental prayer, now slept for ever in the Lord.

Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V., likewise came here, and in her train the Marques de Lombay, afterwards Duke of Gandia, and Viceroy of Catalonia, now venerated on our altars under the name of San Francisco de Borja. With him was his wife, the beautiful Leonora de Castro, lady of honor to the empress. As a memorial of her visit, Isabella presented the church with a silver pax of artistic workmanship worth two thousand ducats, and a little ship garnished with diamonds valued at 10,800 _pesos_.

Some years after Doña Maria, daughter of Charles V., came here with her husband, Maximilian II., Emperor of Austria, to obtain a blessing on their marriage, and she spent several days here on her return to Spain. Her page, at that time, was the young Louis de Gonzaga, son of the Marquis of Castiglione, who afterwards entered the Society of Jesus, and is now canonized.

With this empress came also her daughter, the Princess Margarita, who prostrated herself at the feet of the Virgin and implored the grace of becoming the spouse of her divine Son. Tradition says the Virgin gently inclined her head in token of consent. At all events, the princess, after her prayer, took a dagger from one of the cavaliers, and with blood from her own veins thus wrote:

“I solemnly pledge myself to become the spouse of Christ, to whom I here offer myself, begging his Virgin Mother to be my mediator. In faith of which I subscribe myself,

“MARGARITA.”

She placed this vow in the Virgin’s hand, and afterwards fulfilled it by becoming a nun in the royal foundation of the Carmelites at Madrid under the name of Sr. Margarita de la Cruz. This interesting document was long preserved in the abbey, but disappeared when the house was ravaged under Napoleon.

Philip II., the monarch who boasted that the sun never set on his dominions, visited Montserrat four times, one of which was on Candlemas day, when he took part in the procession, devoutly carrying his taper. He presented Our Lady with a silver lamp weighing over a hundred pounds, and an elaborate retablo for her altar which cost ten thousand _ducados_.

Don John of Austria came here after the battle of Lepanto, and brought several flags taken from the enemy, as trophies to the Virgin of Montserrat, and hung up in the centre of the church the signal-lantern taken from the vessel of the Turkish admiral.

The abbey at this time was one of the richest in Spain. It was surrounded by ramparts and towers for defence. It had its courts and cloisters full of sculptures, and carvings, and tombs of precious marble, whereon knights lay in their armor, and abbots with mitre and crosier. But the church was too small for the number of pilgrims, and dim in spite of its seventy silver lamps. Abbot Garriga, one of the ablest men who ever ruled over the monastery, resolved to build a new one. This distinguished abbot rose from the humblest condition in life. When he was only seven years old his father, a poor man, ascended the mountain on an ass, with a kid in one pannier and his son in the other, and offered them both at the convent gate. The porter accepted the kid, but refused the boy. The father, however, persisted in leaving him, and the abbot, struck with his intelligence, gave him a place in the school. He received the monastic habit at the age of nine. While a novice he used to lament the inadequate size of the church, and predicted he should rebuild it. He subsequently became abbot, and fulfilled his prophecy, but he ended his days in the lofty hermitage of St. Dimas, where he had retired to prepare for eternity.

When the new church was completed, as the Virgin could not be removed under penalty of excommunication, the sanction of the pope had to be obtained. Philip III. came to take part in the ceremony, and with him a crowd of courtiers and Spanish grandees. On Sunday, July 11, 1593, the king and all the court went to confession and holy Communion in the morning. In the afternoon the sacred image was taken down from the place it had occupied for centuries, and clothed in magnificent robes, given by the Infanta Isabella and the Duchess of Brunswick. Then the procession was formed, preceded by a cross-bearer carrying a cross of pure silver, in which was set a piece of the Lignum Crucis surrounded by five emeralds, five diamonds, a topaz as large as a walnut, and a great number of pearls. Then came forty-three lay brothers, fifteen hermits, and sixty-two monks, chanting the _Ave Maris Stella_, each one carrying a wax candle weighing a pound. After them were twenty-four scholastics, and then the statue of Our Lady, borne by four monks in orders, wearing rich dalmaticas. Over it was a gorgeous canopy supported by noble lords. Behind followed Abbot Garriga and his attendants, and, after the peasant’s son, King Philip III., bearing a torch on which was painted the royal arms, and a long train of lords and ladies, the highest in the realm. With all this pomp the Madonna was borne up the nave of the new church, and, amid the ringing of bells and the chant of the _Te Deum_, was placed on her silver throne, given by the Duke of Cardona.

All the kings of Spain, down to the end of the eighteenth century, came here with their votive offerings. The church had a font of jasper, a _reja_ of beautiful workmanship that cost fourteen thousand ducats, and around the altar of the Virgin burned over two hundred costly lamps, the gifts of kings, princes, and nobles. She had four gold crowns studded with gems; one estimated at fifty thousand ducats, sent by the natives of Mexico converted to the faith. The monstrance for the exposition of the Host gleamed like the sun with its rays of sparkling jewels. Chalices were covered with rubies. There were golden candlesticks for the altar, and ornaments of amber and crystal, and vestments of cloth of gold embroidered with precious stones, and a profusion of other valuable things that may to Judas eyes seem uselessly poured out in this favored sanctuary.

To this wonderful church, for the gilding of which he had contributed four thousand crowns, came Don John of Austria in the seventeenth century, and, penetrating into the sanctuary, he placed his hands on the sacred altar, and in a distinct voice pronounced the following: “I swear and promise to maintain with my sword that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin from the first instant of her being,” which vow was repeated by all the knights in his train. There was formerly a painting in one of the chapels to commemorate this scene.

Many children of the first families of Spain used to be brought to Montserrat and consecrated to the Virgin. Sometimes they were even left here to pass their boyhood. Don John of Cardona, a Spanish admiral, who distinguished himself in the wars with the Turks, and at one time was viceroy of Navarre, was educated here, and said he valued the honor of being a page of Our Lady of Montserrat more than having been the defender of Malta against the infidel. He took for his standard her glorious image, and, when he died, was buried, at his own request, at her feet. So were many others, famous as soldiers or statesmen, reared on this secluded mountain. The pupils, as now, wore a semi-monastic dress. They daily recited the Office of the Blessed Virgin, sang at the early Mass, and ate in the monks’ refectory. Nor were they all nobles. There were peasants’ children, too, among them, but they were all reared together in that simplicity of life that seems traditional among the Benedictines. The divine words that for ever ennobled the innocence of childhood have done more to efface artificial distinctions in monastic houses than the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence has ever done in our beloved republic. But in Spain there has always been a certain courtesy towards the lower classes that has tended to elevate them, or, at least, to maintain their self-respect. It is said that the dignity of man in that country seems to rise in proportion as his rank descends.

Among the more recent memories of the school, it is told how, September 30, 1860, Queen Isabella II. came here with her son, now King Alfonso XII., then only three years old, and had him made a page of Our Lady of Montserrat, and he was clothed in the dress of the pupils in the presence of the court.

But to return to the history of the abbey. The day came when all its riches were suddenly swept away. Catalonia was the first to rise against the government of Napoleon. Montserrat, being considered almost impregnable, was made a depot of provisions and munitions of war. It was fortified, and bristled with cannon like a citadel. Suchet attacked the mountain. It was vigorously defended by three hundred Spaniards entrenched in the defiles, but the French succeeded in gaining possession of it. The monastery was blown up. The hermitages were ruined. The hermits were “hunted like chamois from rock to rock,” and the treasures of the church were carried off as spoils of war. All the testimonials of the faith of Spain that had been accumulating here for centuries were swept away: the gold and the jewels, the paintings and carvings, the Gothic cloister and the tombs of alabaster—all, all disappeared. Only one priceless jewel remained, around which all the others had been gathered—the ancient Madonna brought from the East, which was once more concealed in a cave, as in the time of the Moors.

Towards the close of our second day on Montserrat we passed through an avenue of cypresses behind the monastery, and came to a small terrace on the very edge of the precipitous mountain-side, around which was a wall adorned with great stone saints that were gray and mossy, and worn by the elements. Against the wall were seats, and, in the centre of the plot, a tank for gold fish, with a few plants and shrubs around it. Here is an admirable view to the northwest, and we stood leaning a long time against the wall, looking at the broad _Vega_ beneath, and the long range of Pyrenees that stood out with wonderful distinctness against the pure evening sky. Directly beneath us was Monistrol, and, beyond, Manresa, only three leagues off, but seemingly much nearer; and along yonder road winding through the Valley of Paradise, as it used to be called, must have gone St. Ignatius from Montserrat in his newly-put-on garments of holy poverty, which could not, we fancy, hide his courtly bearing or eagle glance.

Nothing could surpass the exquisite gradations of light and color that passed over the landscape while the sun was going down. The pleasant valley grew dim. Manresa receded, and her white walls soon looked like a ship at sea. A purple mist began to creep up the mountain-sides. The snowy summits were suffused with a blush of rosy light. The last gleam of the sun, now below the western horizon, flashed from peak to peak like signal-fires, and then died away. The purple hills grew leaden. The rosy peaks became paler and paler till they were actually livid, and finally faded away into mere fleecy clouds.

Then we walked reluctantly back through the tall, dark cypresses to the convent, and through the shadowy cloister to the church, which we found dark but for the usual cluster of lamps around the altar, suspended there—beautiful emblem of prayer—to consume themselves before God, in place of the hearts forced to live amid the cares of the world.

There is an old legend, embodied in a Catalan ballad, that tells how an angel one night ordered Fray José de las Llantias, a lay brother of Montserrat, now declared Venerable, to quickly trim the dying lamps lest the world be overwhelmed in darkness because of iniquity.

The next morning, after the usual offices, we went to receive the father abbot’s blessing and visit the treasury of the Virgin—no longer filled with countless jewels, but containing many touching offerings that tell of perils past, such as soldiers’ knapsacks and swords, sailors’ hats, innumerable plaits of hair, etc. Then we went up a winding stair, on which, at different turnings, three white angels pointed the way, to kiss Our Lady’s hand, according to the custom of pilgrims. Afterwards we took a guide, and went to visit several of the hermitages, most of which are still in ruins. That of the Virgin has been restored, and from below looks like a small château rising straight up from the edge of the precipice overhanging the ravine of Santa Maria. The ancient _Cueva_, or cave, where the Madonna was found, is now converted into a pretty chapel lighted by small stained windows. The adjoining cell has a balcony that hangs over the abyss, commanding a lovely view.

The hermitage of San Dimas, or Dismas, is on one of the most inaccessible peaks.

“Gistas damnatur, Dismas ad astra levatur,”

says the old Latin rhyme. This cell is now in ruins, but it was once fortified and had a drawbridge. Col. Green entrenched himself here in 1812 with a detachment of soldiers, and cannon had to be put on a neighboring height to dislodge him. It was in one of its chapels the great Loyola made his general confession, and to a Frenchman. In ancient times there was a den of robbers here, for which reason it was placed under the protection of the Good Thief when it was converted into a hermitage.

The hermitage of Santa Cruz is approached by a flight of one hundred and fifty steps cut in the solid rock. It is said to be so called because Charlemagne, when fighting against the Moors in the north of Spain, ordered a white banner, on which was a blood-red cross, to be set up on this peak. Here lived the Blessed Benito de Aragon for sixty-three years. The hermits generally lived to an advanced age, to which the pure air, as well as their simple life and regular habits, conduced. There are about thirteen of these hermitages scattered over the mountain. That of Santa Magdalena, one of the most picturesque, is two miles from the monastery. They are all built on a uniform plan. There is a chapel, and connected with it is a small house containing an antechamber, a cell with an alcove for a bed, and a kitchen. On one side there is a little garden with a cistern. The hermits made a vow never to leave the mountain. On the festival of St. Benedict they received the Holy Eucharist together and had dinner in common. On certain days in the year they descended to the abbey, and always took part in the great solemnities. Their director, appointed by the abbot, lived in the hermitage of San Benito. Their rule was very austere. They observed an almost continual fast, and their abstinence was perpetual. Fish, bread, and the common wine of the region constituted their food. Most of their time was passed in exercises of piety, varied by the culture of their little gardens. They were allowed no pets of any kind, but the birds of the air became so familiarized with their presence as to approach at a signal and eat from their hands. This was no small pleasure, for there are nightingales, goldfinches, robin red-breasts, larks, thrushes, etc., in abundance on the mountain. When ill they were removed to the infirmary at the abbey.

The most elevated hermitage is that of San Geronimo. The way to it lies along the edge of deep ravines, over steep cliffs, through narrow fissures—a rough, fatiguing, enchanting excursion. There is a fresh surprise at every instant, from the continual variety of nature. We gathered fragrant violets, daisies, the purple heather, delicate ferns, branches of holly and box, that grew in crevices along the mountain-paths. We were so fatigued when we arrived that we were glad to sit down against the crumbling walls of the hermitage, and eat our lunch, and take a draught from the cool cistern. The cell is on the brink of a gulf worn by torrents, into which it makes one giddy to look. Close by rises a tall cone which is the highest point of Montserrat. Here is a magnificent prospect of mountain, and sea, and four provinces of Spain. On the north is Catalonia and the glorious Pyrenees; at the east the blue Mediterranean, with the Balearic Isles in the distance; to the south the coasts of Castillon and Valencia; and to the west Lerida and the mountains of Aragon.

The hermit of San Geronimo was always the youngest, and as the others died he descended to a cell less exposed to the inclemency of the seasons, leaving his place to a new-comer. It is a solitary peak, indeed, to live on, and yet in sight of so vast a world. We were there at noon, when the sun was in all its splendor, lighting up the snows of the mountain and the waves of the sea. The wind began to rise with a solemn swell, giving out that hollow, ominous sound which De Quincey says is “the one sole audible symbol of eternity.” The holy mountain, shivered into numberless peaks; the abysses and chasms that separate them, only inhabited by birds of prey; the variety of aromatic plants that grow in the rich soil collected wherever it can find room; the exhilarating air; the marvels of creation on every side, seemingly “boundless as we wish our souls to be,” constitute an abode in which one would wish for ever to live. The lines of Fray Luis de Leon in his _Noche Serena_ might have been inspired by this very spot:

“Who that has seen these splendors roll, And gazed on this majestic scene, But sighed to ’scape the world’s control, Spurning its pleasures poor and mean, And pass the gulf that yawns between?”

Footnote 25:

Mr. Bayard Taylor.

Footnote 26:

This church is now that of San Justo y San Pastor which perpetuates the memory of the holy image by a chapel and confraternity of Our Lady of Montserrat, as well as by frequent pilgrimages to the mountain itself.

Footnote 27:

The Moors called Montserrat _Gis Taus_—the watch-peaks or towers.

Footnote 28:

_History of Spanish Literature._

Footnote 29:

There was formerly an old sculpture in this palace of the counts of Barcelona, representing the prince in the arms of his nurse, and the hermit of Montserrat at their feet. This is now in the museum of antiquities in the old convent of San Juan at Barcelona.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Tall, gaunt, with clear-cut and unmistakably New England features, and feet that would not admit of Cinderella slippers, is the _tout ensemble_ which Emerson photographed upon our retina when we heard him lecture recently. We liked his calm and self-poised manner. There was no heated concern when the Sibylline leaves on which his lecture was written became inextricably mixed. Paradoxically enough, his theme was “Orators and Oratory.” His high, shrill voice, his ungainly manners, and his utter absence of gesture make him the most unattractive of speakers. But there was a certain “fury in his words” which fastened the attention. The next thing to being an orator is to love oratory; and his reverence and admiration for the eloquent in speech pass his own eloquent expression.

Emerson’s sentences are so pointed that frequently the point is so fine as to be lost. His eloquence is anything but Asiatic, and, indeed, its terseness very much resembles affectation. He is called the American Carlyle, but his proper title is the American Montaigne. There is not an idea in Emerson that cannot be traced to the garrulous old Frenchman. The first reading of Emerson is an era in a young man’s life. The short, apothegmic sentences strike him with the force of proverbs. The happy quotation and illustration seem inspirations of genius. The misty transcendentalism has a roseate hue, in delightful contrast with the bald practicality of Watts’ hymns and orthodox sermons. The stimulating style, resultant from exquisite taste and the manly resolve to carry out Pope’s advice about the “art to blot,” is high perfection when compared with the weak and weary prosing of moral essayists. Yet there is nothing original in Emerson. He has contributed little or nothing to the body of ideas. Not even his poetry, which is supposed to be productive of ideas, presents anything new or striking. The passion for nature-worship, which Wordsworth carried to its highest expression, becomes tiresome and unnatural in Emerson’s short metre and careless versification.

What is the source of his power? Why do New England critics rave over him? Even J. Russell Lowell, who, with all the limitations of a narrowed culture, ranks respectably as a literary critic, cannot find words in which to laud the New England philosopher. _He_ finds the secret of his influence to consist in his “wide-reaching sympathy” and his being able to understand the use of a linchpin equally with the stellar influences. Lowell himself is under the witchery of mere words. His cultivated mind is drawn to the beautiful by acquired æsthetic taste. His estimate of Dante, as published in the _New American Cyclopædia_ and afterward in _Among my Books_, fills the thoughtful Italian student with amazement. He is a critic of words, and is childishly led by a bright figure or exquisite metaphor. Emerson, whilst seeming to disregard words, pays profound attention to their collocation and effectiveness. This school is not a school of thoughts but of words; and it is under this aspect that we intend examining it. It is the thorough embodiment of poor Hamlet’s objection to the book which he is reading: “Words, words, words.” We read and read, and are charmed with Thucydidean terseness and Solomonic wisdom; but when we begin to reflect “all the riches have escaped out of our hands.” It is about time to expose this wily old philosopher, who has been throwing rhetorical dust into the eyes of several generations. He may have a noble manhood; he may be sincere; but there can be no question that it is the _ignotum pro magnifico_ which has been the cheap cause of his popularity.

Thomas à Kempis tells us that “words fly through the air and hurt not a stone.” There is certainly no objection to a writer’s careful elaboration of his style. The study of words is a part of rhetoric. But there is a subtle and elusive application of words, outside of their obvious and generally-used meaning, which is at once a rhetorical and a logical vice. And as ideas fail, so words are sedulously cultivated. The style is the man, as Buffon did _not_ say; but what of an affected style? If there is any truth in the saying, it convicts Emerson of being stilted, unnatural, and affected. No man thinks by jerks and starts, and no man writes so. The fanciful and abrupt indicate either affectation or an unbalanced intellect. All the great philosophers write calmly and equably. The sustained strength of Plato, on whom Emerson professes to model himself, is in direct contrast with the abruptness of Seneca, who was a mass of conceit and hypocrisy. We have no quarrel with Mr. Emerson on account of his studied style; only, with Sydney Smith, we object to a discourse in which are hung out preconcerted signals for tears or excitement. It is quite easy to form a quaint style. The success of Charles Lamb’s imitation of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Bret Harte’s or Thackeray’s burlesques of popular novels, shows how quickly a ready writer can fall into a philosophical diction. Emerson attempts the epigrammatic. Like Pythagoras, he disdains reasons. The _ipse dixit_, he supposes, will suffice for his disciples. He contradicts himself on his very self-satisfactory theory of “not being in any mood long.” He admires opposite characters; but, to the credit of American good sense be it said—good sense even in a _philosophe_—he does not “boil over,” like Carlyle, in all sorts of oddities of hero-worship. The Yankee hard head which he has cannot be softened by all the philosophy and poetry in the world; and, notwithstanding his ethereal views, he drives a hard bargain.

Can we review this philosopher to the satisfaction of our readers, or must they peruse him themselves in order to form a vague idea of his system?

It may be Emerson’s boast that he has no system. This restlessness under any, even nominal, _régime_ is a characteristic of contemporaneous philosophy outside the church. There is liberty enough in the church; and, in fact, beyond it we see nothing but imprisonment, for nothing so practically chains the intellect of man as irresponsible freedom. It is like the liberty of the ocean enjoyed (?) by a mariner without sails or compass. A Catholic philosopher can speculate as much as he pleases. The security of the faith gives him a delightful sense of safe freedom. Like O’Connell’s driving a coach and four through an act of Parliament, he may go to the outermost verge of speculation. St. Thomas moves the most outrageous fallacies, speculations, and objections, and discusses them, too, with all the boldness of intellectual freedom. It is Dr. Marshall, we think, who shows that all intellectual activity and freedom are enjoyed within the spacious bounds of Catholic truth. Even in theology there are wide differences. The Catholic intellect is supposed to be completely bridled. We once read a powerful arraignment of our Scriptural proofs for purgatory, written by an eminent Protestant theologian. He must have been surprised to learn that Catholic theologians do not attach all importance to the Scriptural argument for purgatory. The different schools of Catholic theology argue _pro_ and _con_. as keenly as old Dr. Johnson himself would have desired, but without the slightest detriment to the unity of the faith. Nothing can be falser than the received Protestant notion that we are helplessly bound by a network of petty definitions and regulations. There are, however, great and immovable principles which are understood to guide and vivify the Catholic intellect. And such systemization is necessary to all knowledge. Without it a man’s mind, like Emerson’s, wanders comet-like, attracting attention by its vagaries, but is of no intelligible use to the universe, and gives no light, except of a nebulous and perplexing nature.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, of all American writers, had the true transcendental mind, ridicules it unsparingly. His doleful experience upon Brook Farm, when he attempted to milk a cow, may have had a practical awakening effect upon his dreams. In a little sketch entitled _The Celestial Railroad_, in which he whimsically carries out Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, he introduces Giant Transcendentalism, who has taken the place of Giant Pope, and Giant Despair, that interrupted Christian’s progress to the Delectable Mountains. Giant Transcendentalism is a huge, amorphous monster, utterly indescribable, and speaking an unintelligible language. This language, which Emerson strives to make articulate, we read with mingled amusement and astonishment in the German writers. Emerson is not a member of the _Kulturkampf_, like Carlyle. His mind does not take in their wild rhapsodies. His essay on Goethe (in _Representative Men_) is cold and unappreciative when compared with the Scotchman’s eulogies. We firmly believe that no healthy intellect can feed upon Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or even Kant, who was the most luminous intellect of the group. Emerson has not the stolid pertinacity of Herr Teufelsdröckh. His genius is French. He delights in paradox and verbal gymnastics. Carlyle works with a sort of furious patience at such a prosaic career as Frederick the Great’s. He gets up a factitious enthusiasm about German _Herzhogs_ and _Erstfursts_. Emerson would look with dainty disdain upon his Cyclopean work among big, dusty, musty folios and the hammering out of shining sentences from such pig-iron.

Whence his transcendentalism? We believe that it has two elements, nature-worship and Swedenborgianism. Of nature-worship we have very little. Like Thomson, the author of the _Seasons_, who wrote the finest descriptions of scenery in bed at ten o’clock in the morning, we are frightfully indifferent to the glories of earth, sea, and sky, whilst theoretically capable of intense rapture. This tendency to adore nature, and this intense modern cultivation of the natural sciences, we take as indicative of the husks of religion given by Protestantism. Man’s intellect seeks the certain, and where he cannot find it in the supernatural he will have recourse to the natural. The profound attention paid to all the mechanical and natural sciences, to the exclusion, if not denial, of supernatural religion, is the logical result of the absurdity of Protestantism. Perhaps Emerson’s poetic feeling has much to do with his profound veneration for fate, nature, and necessity, which are his true god, with a very little Swedenborgianism to modify them.

And here we meet him on his philosophy of words. A word, according to St. Thomas, should be the _adæquatio rei et intellectus_, for a word is really the symbol and articulation of truth. Where words convey no clear or precise idea to the mind they are virtually false. The terminology of Emerson falls even below Carlyle’s in obscurity. What does he mean by the one-soul? What by compensation? What by fate and necessity? _Explica terminos_ is the command of logic and reason; yet he maunders on in vague and extravagant speech, using terms which it is very probable he himself only partly or arbitrarily understands. He is not master of his own style. His own words hurry him along. This fatal bondage to style spoils his best thoughts. He seems to aim at striking phrases and ends in paradox. His very attempt to strengthen and compress his sentences weakens and obscures his meaning. The oracular style does not carry well. He is happiest where he does not don the prophetic or poetical mantle. When we get a glimpse of his shrewd character, he is as gay as a lark and sharp as a fox. He muffles himself in transcendentalism, but fails to hide his clear sense, which he cannot entirely bury or obfuscate. It seems strange to us that such a mind could be permanently influenced by the fantasies of Swedenborg, whom he calls a mystic, but who, very probably, was a madman. The pure mysticism of the Catholic Church is not devoid of what to those who have not the light to read it may seem to wear a certain air of extravagance, which, apparently, would be no objection to Emerson; but it is kept within strict rational bounds by the doctrinal authority of the church. We do not suppose that Emerson ever thought it worth his while to study the mystic or ascetic theology of the church, though here and there in his writings he refers to the example of saints, and quotes their sayings and doings. But it must be a strange mental state that passively admits the wild speculations of Swedenborgianism with its gross ideas of heaven and its fanciful interpretations of Scripture. Besides, Emerson clearly rejects the divinity of Jesus Christ, which is extravagantly (if we may use the expression) set forth in Swedenborgianism, to the exclusion of the Father and the Holy Ghost. He is, or was, a Unitarian, and his allusions to our Blessed Lord have not even the reverence of Carlyle.

Naturalism, as used in the sense of the Vatican decrees, is the proper word to apply to the Emersonian teaching. He has the Yankee boastfulness, materialistic spirit, and general laudation of the natural powers. His transcendentalism has few of the spiritual elements of German thought. He does not believe in contemplation, but stimulates to activity. In his earlier essays he seemed pantheistic, but his last book (_Society and Solitude_) affirmed his doubt and implicit denial of immortality. He appears to be a powerful personality, for he has certainly influenced many of the finer minds of New England, and, no doubt, he leads a noble and intellectual life. His exquisite æstheticism takes away the grossness of the results to which his naturalistic philosophy leads, and it is with regret that we note in him that intellectual pride which effectually shuts his mind even to the gentlest admonitions and enlightenments of divine grace.

It is a compliment to our rather sparse American authorship and scholarship that England regards him as the typical American thinker and writer. We do not so regard him ourselves, for his genius lacks the sturdy American originality and reverent spirit. But Emerson made a very favorable impression upon Englishmen when he visited their island, and he wrote the best book on England (_English Traits_) that, perhaps, any American ever produced. The quiet dignity and native independence of the book charmed John Bull, who was tired of our snobbish eulogiums of himself and institutions. Emerson met many literary men, who afterward read his books and praised his style. He has the air of boldness and the courage of his opinions. Now and then he invents a striking phrase which sets one a-thinking. He has also in perfection the art of quoting, and his whole composition betokens the artist and scholar.

There is a high, supersensual region, imagination, fantasy, or soul-life, in which he loves to disport, and to which he gives the strangest names. One grows a little ashamed of what he deems his own unimaginativeness when he encounters our philosopher “bestriding these lazy-pacing clouds.” He wonders at the “immensities, eternities, and fates” that seem to exert such wondrous powers. When Emerson gets into this strain he quickly disappears either in the clouds or in a burrow, according to the taste and judgment of different readers. There is often a fine feeling in these passages which we can understand yet not express. Sublime they are not, though obscurity may be considered one of the elements of sublimity. They are emotional. Emerson belongs rather to the sensualistic school; at least, he ascribes abounding power to the feelings, and, in fact, he is too heated and enthusiastic for the coldness and calmness exacted by philosophical speculation. Many of his essays read like violent sermons; and his worst ones are those in which he attempts to carry out a ratiocination. He is dictatorial. He announces but does not prove. He appears at times to be in a Pythonic fury, and proclaims his oracles with much excitement and contortion. It is impossible to analyze an essay, or hold on to the filmy threads by which his thoughts hang together. It is absurd to call him a philosopher who has neither system, clearness of statement, nor accuracy of thought.

It is a subject of gratulation that Emerson, who has been before New England for the past half-century, has wielded a generally beneficial influence. With his powers and opportunities he might have done incalculable harm; but the weight of his authority has been thrown upon the side of general morality and natural development of strength of character. We know, of course, how little merely natural motives and powers avail toward the building up of character; but it is not against faith to hold that a good disposition and virtuous frame of mind may result from purely natural causes. He has preached the purest gospel of naturalism, shrinking at once from the bold and impious counsellings of Goethe and from the muscularity of Carlyle. He has given us, in himself, glimpses of a noble character, and his ideals have been lofty and pure. New England could not have had a better apostle, humanly and naturally speaking. Its cultivated and rational minds turned in horror and disgust from its rigid Calvinism, its _outré_ religious frenzies, and its sordid and prosaic life. They found a voice and interpreter in Emerson. He marks the recoil from unscriptural, irrational, and unnatural religion.

Puritanism, always unlovely, despotic, and gloomy, began to lose its hold even upon the second generation of the Puritans. Its life will never be thoroughly revealed to the sunshiny Catholic mind. Perhaps its ablest exponent was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in the _Scarlet Letter_, revealed its possibilities and, in fact, actualities of hideousness. We have no fault to find with any elements of stern self-control or ascetic character that it might develop, but its effect on the intellect was darkening and crippling. The whole Puritan exodus from England was a suppressed and blinding excitement. The rebound from their harsh and unbending discipline was terrific. The frowning-down of all amusement, the irritating espionage over private life, the high-strung religious enthusiasm which it was necessary to simulate if not feel, the abnormal development of ministerial power and influence, and the baleful gloom of Calvinistic doctrine, were elements that had necessarily to be destroyed, or they would madden a nation. They could no more endure, if it were possible to extirpate them, than could a colony of rabid dogs. Human nature, as created by God, tends to preserve the primal type. It asserts its functions, its rights, its powers, and its aptitudes. After a century, in which religious intolerance ruled New England with a rod of iron, the long-pent-up storm burst with indescribable fury and scattered orthodoxy to the four winds. The people breathed more freely; the atmosphere cleared; there was a healthy interchange of sentiment. The predominance of public-school education, combining with the multiplication of books, developed that crude and half-formed culture which has characterized New England to the present day. The best-educated portion of the Union, filled with all the insolence of a little learning, aspired to rule the nation, and succeeded. Its ideas were zealously propagated. Wherever a Yankee settled he planted all New England around him. The peddler did not need religion, but the philosopher did. The culture of æsthetics engaged some; others went off into Socinianism. The doctrines of Fourierism had charms for many, among whom was Emerson. He longed for an ideal life. The country was not leavened then, as now, by the solid thought and practice of Catholicity. The mystic radiance and grace of the Adorable Sacrament did not sweetly pervade the whole atmosphere of the land. Satan was busy and jubilant. The strangest and most eccentric forms of religion sprang up like rank mushroom growths, with neither beauty nor wholesome nutriment. It was then that Emerson’s call to a high manhood seemed to have the right ring in it. At least, it attracted and fixed the wandering attention of New England. For many a winter he lectured, speaking great words, the heroic wisdom of old Plutarch and the practical sense and insight of Montaigne. His fine scholarship won the scholars and his homely maxims charmed the farmers. It was well that in that dreary, chaotic period there was a brave and bold speaker who did not entirely despair of humanity, even when he and his companions had broken adrift from their anchorage in the rotten and worn-out systems of Protestant theology.

The grace of the faith has thus far escaped the Concord philosopher, but who shall speak of the ways of God? The theologian will solve you quickly all questions in his noble science, except questions upon the tract of grace. There he hesitates, for the most intimate and personal communications of God with the soul take place in the mystery of grace. Every man has his own _tractatus de gratia_ written upon his own heart in the all-beautiful handwriting of God, sealing us, as St. Paul says, and writing upon us the mark that distinguishes us as his beloved. It is the miserable consequence of the New England system of early education, which inheres in a man’s very spirit, that it perversely misrepresents the Catholic Church. It is simply astounding how little Americans know about our divine faith. They have never deemed it worth their while to examine it, taking it for granted that all that is said against it is true. We remember, as a boy, reading Peter Parley’s histories, which were very popular in New England, and not a page was free from some misrepresentation of the church. Emerson classes “Romanism” with a half-dozen absurd theories; which goes to show that he has not even reached that point of culture which, according to its advocates, understands and embraces all the great creeds of humanity, in their best and most universal truth.

Mr. Emerson is now in the sere and yellow leaf, and it is to be feared that his intellectual pride, and that nauseating flattery which weak-minded people assiduously pay to men of great intellectual attainments, have left in him a habit of vanity which is fatal to truth. We have known very able men who were prevented from seeing the truth of Catholicity by the dense clouds of incense that their admirers continually wafted before their shrines. The fulness of divine faith which he lacks, and for which he seems mournfully to cry out, is in the happy possession of the humblest child of the Catholic religion; not, as he would think, merely instinctive or the result of education, but living and logical, the gift and grace of the Holy Ghost. Emerson is no theologian, though once a Protestant minister, which fact, however, would not argue much for his theology. But he has a heroic and poetic mind whose native strength manifests itself even in the very eccentric orbit through which it passes.

PAPAL ELECTIONS. III.

In view of the sad affliction which has so recently befallen the church in the demise of Pope Pius IX.—now of happy memory—we shall preface this article on papal elections with a brief account of the ceremonies that follow upon the death of a Sovereign Pontiff.

As soon as the pope has breathed his last amidst the consolations of religion, and after making his profession of faith in presence of the cardinal grand-penitentiary—who usually administers the last sacraments—and of the more intimate members of his court, the cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, accompanied and assisted by the right reverend clerks of the apostolic chamber, takes possession of the palace and causes a careful inventory to be made of everything that is found in the papal apartments.[30] He then proceeds to the chamber of death, in which the pope still lies, and, viewing the body, assures himself, and instructs a notary to certify to the fact, that he is really dead. He also receives from the grand chamberlain of the court—_Monsignor Maestro di Camera_—a purse containing the Fisherman’s ring which His Holiness had used in life. The cardinal, who, by virtue of his office of chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, has become the executive of the government, sends an order to the senator of Rome, who is always a layman and member of one of the great patrician families, to have the large bell of the Capitol tower tolled, at which lugubrious signal the bells of all the churches throughout the city are sounded. Twenty-four hours after death the body of the pope is embalmed, and lies in state, dressed in the ordinary or domestic costume, upon a bed covered with cloth of crimson and gold, the pious offices of washing and dressing the body being performed by the penitentiaries or confessors of the Vatican basilica, who are always Minor Conventuals of the Franciscan Order. It is next removed to the Sistine Chapel, where it is laid out, clothed in the pontifical vestments, on a couch surrounded with burning tapers and watched by a detachment of the Swiss Guard. On the following day the cardinals and chapter of St. Peter assemble in the Sistine and accompany the transport of the body to the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the Vatican basilica, where it remains exposed for three days, the feet protruding a little through an opening in the iron railing which closes the chapel, that the faithful may approach and kiss the embroidered slipper. The nine days of funeral services—_Novendialia_—which the Roman ceremonial prescribes for the pope now begin. These are his public obsequies. For the first six days the cardinals and prelates of the court and Holy See assemble daily in the choir chapel of the canons of St. Peter, where, the Office for the Dead being chanted, a cardinal says Mass; but during the remaining three days the services are performed around an elevated and magnificent catafalque which in the meanwhile has been silently erected in the great nave of the basilica. This structure is a perfect work of art in its way, every part of it being carefully designed with relation to its solemn purpose, and in harmony of form and proportions with the vast edifice in which it is reared. It is illustrated by Latin inscriptions and by paintings of the most remarkable scenes of the late pontificate, and adorned with allegorical statues. A detachment of the Noble Guard stands there motionless as though carved in stone. Over the whole is suspended a life-size portrait of the pope. A thousand candles of yellow wax and twenty enormous torches in golden candelabra burn day and night around it. On each of these three days five cardinals in turn give the grand absolutions, and on the ninth day a funeral oration is pronounced by some one—often a bishop, or always at least a prelate of distinction whom the Sacred College has chosen for the occasion. In former days the cardinal nephew or relative of the deceased had the privilege, often of great importance for the future reputation of the pontiff and the present splendor of his family, raised to princely rank, of selecting the envied orator. Ere this, however, the final dispositions of the pope’s body have been made. On the evening of the third day, the public having been excluded from the basilica, the cardinal-chamberlain, cardinals created by the late pope, clerks of the chamber and chapter of St. Peter, headed by monsignor the vicar—who is always an archbishop _in partibus_—vested in pontificals, assemble in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, in which the pope still lies in state. The body is then reverently enfolded in the gold and crimson cover of the couch, and taken up to be laid in a cypress-wood coffin, into which are also put three red purses containing medals of gold, silver, and bronze, as many of each sort as there were years of the pontificate, bearing the pope’s effigy on one side, and a design commemorative of some act of his temporal or spiritual government on the other. If there should be a relative of the late pope among the cardinals, he covers the face with a white linen veil, otherwise this last office of respect is performed by the major-domo. When the coffin has been closed it is placed inside of a leaden case, which is immediately soldered and sealed, while the metal is hot, with the arms of the cardinal-chamberlain and major-domo. A brief inscription is cut at once on the face of this metal case, giving simply the name, years of his reign, and date of death. The coffin and case are now enclosed in a plain wooden box, which is covered with a red pall ornamented with golden fringes and an embroidered cross, and carried in sad procession to the uniform temporary resting-place which every pope occupies in turn in St. Peter’s, in a simple sarcophagus of marbled stucco which is set into the wall at some distance above and slightly overhanging the floor of the church, on the left-hand side of the entrance to the choir chapel. A painter is at hand to trace the name of the pope and the Latin initials of the words High Pontiff—_Pius IX., P.M._ Before the pope’s body is taken up from the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, some workmen, under the direction of the prelates and officers of the congregation for the supervision of St. Peter’s—_Reverenda Fabrica di San Pietro_—have broken in the sarcophagus at the top and removed its contents (which in this case were those of Gregory XVI., who had been there since 1846) to the crypt under the basilica until consigned to the tomb prepared, but not always in St. Peter’s, either by the pope himself before his death[31] or by his family or by the cardinals of his creation, and the new claimant for repose takes his place there.

During the nine days that the obsequies of the pope continue the cardinals assemble every morning in the sacristy of St. Peter’s to arrange all matters of government for the States of the Church and the details of the approaching conclave. These meetings are called general congregations. At them the bulls and ordinances relating to papal elections are read, and the cardinals swear to observe them; the Fisherman’s ring and the large metal seal used for bulls are broken by the first master of ceremonies; two orators are chosen, one for the funeral oration and the other for the conclave; all briefs and memorials not finally acted upon are consigned to a clerk of the chamber, etc., etc. On the tenth day the cardinals assemble in the forenoon in the choir chapel of St. Peter’s, where the dean of the Sacred College pontificates at a votive Mass of the Holy Ghost, after which the orator of the conclave—who, if a bishop, wears amice, cope, and mitre—is introduced into the chapel, and, after making the proper reverences, ascends a decorated pulpit and holds forth on the subject of electing an excellent pontiff: the pope is dead; long live the pope; the Papacy never dies![32]

After the sermon and the singing by the papal choir of the first strophe of the hymn _Veni Creator_, the cardinals ascend in procession to the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican palace, where the dean recites aloud before the altar the prayer _Deus qui corda fidelium_, and afterwards addresses his brethren on the great business which they are about to engage in, exhorting them to lay aside all human motives and perform their duty without fear or favor of any man. All the persons who are to remain in conclave, as the prelates, custodians, conclavists or attendants on the cardinals, physicians, barbers, servants, are passed in review, and take an oath not to speak even among themselves of matters concerning the election. Every avenue leading into the conclave, except the eight loop-holes or windows, as mentioned in a former article, are carefully closed by masons; one door, however, is left standing to admit any late-coming cardinal, or let out any one expelled from, or for whatever cause obliged to leave, the conclave. It is locked on the outside by the prince-marshal, and on the inside by the cardinal-chamberlain, both of whom retain the key of their own side. The lock is so combined that it requires both keys to open the door. On the following day the cardinal-dean says a votive Mass _de Spiritu Sancto_, at which all the cardinals in stoles receive Holy Communion from his hands.... _Fervet opus_....

* * * * *

As soon as the cardinal upon whom the requisite two-thirds of all the votes cast have centred consents to his election, he becomes pope. This consent is absolutely necessary, and, although the Sacred College threatened Innocent II. (Papareschi, 1130-1143) with excommunication if he did not accept,[33] it is now admitted that no one can be constrained to take upon himself such a burden as the Sovereign Pontificate.

Thirty-eight popes, from St. Cornelius, in 254, to Benedict XIII., in 1724, are recorded in history as having positively refused to accept the election, although they were afterwards induced by various motives, however much against their own inclinations, to ratify it. As soon as he has answered in the affirmative to the question of the cardinal-dean, proposed in the following very ancient formula: _Acceptasne electionem de te canonicè factam in Summum Pontificem?_ the first master of ceremonies, turning to certain persons around him, calls upon them in an audible voice to bear witness to the fact.[34] The new pope then retires and is dressed in the ordinary or domestic costume of the Holy Father, three suits of which, of different sizes, are ready made, and disposed in the dressing-room for the elect to choose from. It consists of white stockings, cassock and sash with gold tassels, white collar and skull-cap, red mozzetta, stole, and shoes. He then takes his seat on a throne and receives the first homage—_adoratio prima_—of the cardinals, who, kneeling before him, kiss his foot and afterwards his hand, and, standing, receive from him the kiss of peace on the cheek. We see, from the ceremonial composed in the thirteenth century by Cardinal Savelli, that the present custom is not very different from the mediæval one; for, speaking of the pope’s election, he says: _Quo facto ab episcopis cardinalibus ad sedem ducitur post altare, et in ea, ut dignum est, collocatur; in qua dum sedet electus recipit omnes episcopos cardinales, et quos sibi placuerit ad pedes, postmodum ad osculum pacis._ The custom of kissing the pope’s foot is so ancient that no certain date can be assigned for its introduction. It very probably began in the time of St. Peter himself, to whom the faithful gave this mark of profound reverence, which they have continued towards all his successors—always, however, having been instructed to do so with an eye to God, of whom the pope is vicar. In which connection most beautiful was the answer of Leo X. to Francis I. of France, who, as Rinaldi relates (_Annal. Eccles._, an. 1487, num. 30), having gone to Bologna, humbly knelt before him and kissed his foot, _se lætissimum dicens, quod videret facie ad faciem Pontificem Vicarium Christi Jesu_. “Thanks,” said Leo, “but refer all this to God himself”—_Omnia hæc in Deum transferens, et omnia Deo tribuens_. To make this _relative_ worship more apparent a cross has always been embroidered on the shoes since the pontificate of that most humble pope, St. Gregory the Great, in the year 590. It is curious to read of the objection made to this custom by Basil, Tzar of Muscovy, to Father Anthony Possevinus, S.J., who was sent to Russia on a religious and diplomatic mission by Gregory XIII. in the sixteenth century. His eloquent defence of the custom, appealing, too, to prophecy,[35] is found in the printed account of his embassy (_Moscovia_, Cologne, 1587, in fol.)

When the pope is dressed in the pontifical costume he receives on his finger a new Fisherman’s ring, which he immediately removes and hands to one of the masters of ceremonies to have engraved upon it the name which he has assumed. The popes have three special rings for their use. The first is generally a rather plain gold one with an intaglio or a cameo ornament; this is called the papal ring. The second one, called the pontifical ring, because used only when the pope pontificates or officiates at grand ceremonies, is an exceedingly precious one. The one worn on these occasions by Pius IX., and which his successor will doubtless also use, was made during the reign of Pius VII., whose name is cut on the inside. It is of the purest gold, of remarkably fine workmanship, set with a very large oblong diamond. It cost thirty thousand francs (about $6,000), and has a contrivance on the inside by which it can be made larger or smaller to fit the wearer’s finger. (Barraud, _Des Bagues à toutes les Époques_. Paris, 1864.) The Fisherman’s ring, which is so called because it has a figure of St. Peter in a bark throwing his net into the sea (Matthew iv. 18, 19), is a plain gold ring with an oval face, bearing the name of the reigning pope engraved around and above the figure of the apostle, thus: _Leo XIII., Pont. Max_. On the inside are cut the names of the engraver and of the major-domo. The ring weighs an ounce and a half. It is the official seal of the popes, but, although the first among the rings, it is only the second in the class of seals, since it serves as the privy seal or papal signet for apostolic briefs and matters of lesser consequence, whereas the great seal of the Holy See is used to stamp the heads of SS. Peter and Paul in lead, and sometimes, but rarely, in gold, on papal bulls. This ring was at first a private and not an official one, as we learn from a letter written at Perugia on March 7, 1265, by Clement IV. to his nephew Peter Le Gros, in which he says that he writes to him and to his other relatives, not _sub bulla, sed sub piscatoris sigillo, quo Romani Pontifices in suis secretis utuntur_. From this it would appear that such a ring was already in well-known use, but it cannot be determined at what period it was introduced, or precisely when it became official, although it is certain that it was given this character in the fifteenth century; but another hundred years passed before it became customary to mention its use in every document on which the seal was impressed by the now familiar expression, “Given under the Fisherman’s ring,” which is first met with in the manner of a curial formula in a brief given by Nicholas V. on the 15th of April, 1448: _Datum Romæ, apud Sanctum Petrum, sub annulo Piscatoris, die xv. Aprilis, MCCCCXLVIII., pontificatus nostri II._[36]

Briefs are no more sealed with the _original_ ring, which is always in the keeping of the pope’s grand chamberlain, who, as we have said, delivers it to the cardinal-camerlengo on the pope’s decease, to be broken in the first general congregation preliminary to the conclave, according to a custom dating from the death of Leo X. A fac-simile is preserved in the _Secretaria de’ Brevi_ which serves in its stead; but since June, 1842, red sealing-wax, because too brittle and effaceable, is no longer used, but in its place a thick red ink or pigment is employed. _Briefs_ are pontifical writs or diplomas written on thin, soft parchment and more _abbreviated_ than bulls, and treating of matters of less importance, requiring, therefore, briefer consideration[37]—whence, perhaps, they derive their distinctive name, although it has been suggested that the word comes from the German _Brief_, a letter, and was introduced into Rome from the imperial court during the middle ages. They are signed by the cardinal secretary of briefs, and differ from bulls in their manner of dating and their forms of beginning and ending. Their heading always contains the name of the reigning pope and the venerable formula, _Salutem et apostolicam benedictionem_, which was first used by Pope John V. in the year 685. When the pope sends a brief to a person who is not baptized he substitutes for this form the other one, _Lumen divinæ gratiæ_. Both briefs and bulls are always dated from the basilica nearest to which the pope resides at the time; thus, we understand why the brief erecting the diocese of Baltimore was dated (6th of November, 1789) from St. Mary Major’s, although Pius VI. was then living at the Quirinal palace. Another of the very ancient and venerable forms used by the popes is _Servus servorum Dei_—Servant of the servants of God. It is a title first assumed by St. Gregory the Great in the sixth century as a hint to the arrogant patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster, who had taken the designation of _universal bishop_, which belongs only to the Roman Pontiff: “Whoever will be first among you shall be servant of all” (Mark x. 44).

As soon as the cardinal who has been elected gives his assent to the election, the cardinal-dean asks him what name he would wish to take. This custom of assuming a new name is very old, and has been much disputed about by writers on papal matters. The great Baronius has expressed the opinion in his _Ecclesiastical Annals_ that John XII., who was previously called Octavian, was the first to make the change, which he did probably out of regard for his uncle, who was Pope John XI. Cardinal Borgia has observed in this connection, as showing that the change of name was yet a singularity, that the pope used to sign himself _Octavian_ in matters relating to his temporal, and _John_ in those relating to his spiritual, government. Martinus Polonus started a fable that Sergius II., elected in 844, was the one who first changed his name, because known by the inelegant appellation of Pigsnout—_Bocca di Porco_; but the truth is, as Muratori says in one of his dissertations on Italian antiquities (_Antiquitatum Italic._, tom. iii. dissert. xli. p. 764), that Sergius IV. (1009-1012), and not Sergius II., had this only for a surname or sobriquet, as was commonly given in that age at Rome, but was baptized Peter. He changed his name, indeed, according to the custom then becoming established as a rule, but, as Baronius observes, not _ob turpitudinem nominis (Os porci), sed reverentiæ causa: cum enim ille_ PETRUS _vocaretur, indignum putavit eodem se vocari nomine, quo Christus primum ejus sedis Pontificem, Principem Apostolorum, ex Simone Petrum nominaverat_. It has long been usual for the new pope to take the name of the pope who made him cardinal. There have been, however, several exceptions even in these later times. In some special cases, as in the signature to the originals of bulls, the pope retains his original Christian name, but, like all sovereigns, he omits his family name in every case. There have also been exceptions to this change, and both Adrian VI. and Marcellus II. kept their own names—the only two, however, who have done so in over eight hundred years.

The word pope—in Latin _Papa_, and by initials _PP._—was once common to all bishops, and even to simple priests and clerics; but when certain schismatics of the eleventh century began to use it in a sense opposed to the supreme fatherhood of the Roman Pontiffs over all the faithful, clergy as well as people, it was reserved as a title of honor to the bishops of Rome exclusively. Cardinal Baronius says, in a note to the Roman Martyrology, that St. Gregory VII. held a synod in Rome against the schismatics in the year 1073, in which it was decreed “_inter alia plura, ut _PAPÆ_ Nomen unicum esset in universo orbe Christiano, nec liceret alicui seipsum, vel alium eo nomine appellare_.”[38] Another singularity about one of the pope’s titles deserves to be noted. The word _Dominus_ in Latin—lord—was originally used only of Almighty God, and a contracted form—_Domnus_—was employed in speaking of saints, bishops, and persons of consideration; but in course of time, although a vestige of the once universal custom still lingers in the _Jube Domne benedicere_ of the Office recited in choir, the term _Domnus_ came to be specially reserved to the Roman Pontiff, for whom we pray in the litany as _Domnum Apostolicum_. Cancellieri, who, as usual, has sought out an abstruse subject, gives everything that can be said upon the matter in his _Lettera sopra l’Origine Delle Parole Dominus e Domnus e Del Titolo Don che Suol Darsi ai Sacerdoti ai Monaci ed a Molti Regolari_. In Roma, MDCCCVIII.

Footnote 30:

The apostolic chamber, called in Rome the _Reverenda Camera Apostolica_, dates from the pontificate of Leo the Great, who constructed in the year 440 a small but elegant suite of chambers which served as a sanctuary for the bodies of the apostles SS. Peter and Paul until proper crypts, called _Confessions_, had been prepared for them beneath the high altars of their respective basilicas at the Vatican and on the Ostian Way. When these relics had been deposited in their present resting-places, the Leonine sanctuary was used, as a strong and venerable place, to contain the public treasury of the Holy See, which was given into the safe-keeping of certain officials called _camerarii_. Their successors are the present _chierici di camera_, who are eight in number and form one of the great prelatic colleges of Rome. The present institution was reorganized by Pope Urban V. in the fourteenth century. The cardinal-chamberlain is _ex officio_ its head, and it acts as a board of control over the finances.

Footnote 31:

It is known to all visitors to Rome that Pius IX. prepared a beautiful tomb for himself before the high altar of St. Mary Major’s.

Footnote 32:

Roman bibliophilists anxious to possess—what is rare indeed—a complete set (_una biblioteca_, as the Italians say) of the funeral orations pronounced over the popes, and of the hortatory discourses addressed to the Sacred College about to enter conclave, eagerly contend at book-sales for these pamphlets, which are always in the choicest Latin of the age, and sometimes have a sentimental value on account of the subsequent fortunes, or misfortunes, of their authors. They are much more than mere literary curiosities for book-worms to feed upon. The form of the title-page, excepting of course in proper names and dates, is about the same in all; for instance, _Oratio habita ad Collegium Cardinalium in funere Innocentii IX., Pont. Max., vi. Id. Januarii, 1592_: Romæ, 1592, in 4to: by Father Giustiniani, a famous Jesuit; and _Oratio habita in Basilica SS. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli pridie Kalend. Aprilis, 1721, ad Emos. et Rmos. cardinales conclave ingressuros pro Summo Pontifice eligendo_: Romæ, ex Typographia Vaticana, 1721, in 4to: by Camillo de Mari, Bishop of Aria.

Footnote 33:

Arnulfus of Seez apud Muratori, _Rerum Italicarum Scriptores_, tom. iii. p. 429, says that on this occasion the cardinals told the elect of their choice: _Si acquiescis, exhibemus obsequium; si recusas, exigimus de inobedientia pœnam_; and on his still hesitating _parabant excommunicationis præferre sententiam_.

Footnote 34:

This notarial function which the first master of ceremonies here performs is the reason why he is always an apostolic prothonotary; but his title to this prelatic rank rests entirely on _custom_, since he is not appointed by papal brief, as others are. It is by a similar analogy, although in matters theological, that the master of the Sacred Palace, who is always a Dominican, ranks with the auditors of the _Rota_.

Footnote 35:

“Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nurses: they shall worship thee with their face toward the earth, and they shall lick up the dust of thy feet.”—Isaias xlix. 23, which St. Jerome interprets of the apostles; but in Peter’s successors all honors and prerogatives continue. A very learned writer of the last century, Gaetano Cenni, has gone profoundly into the historical and antiquarian part of this singular and most venerable custom, in his dissertation _Sul Bacio De’ Piedi Del Romano Pontefice_, which is the thirty-fourth of the third volume of Zaccaria’s great collection of dissertations on subjects of ecclesiastical history—_Raccolta Di Dissertazioni Di Storia Ecclesiastica_.... Per cura Di Francesco Antonio Zaccaria, etc. Seconda edizione. Four vols. Rome, 1841.

Footnote 36:

The celebrated antiquarian Cancellieri has written with his usual diffuseness and erudition on this matter in a little work, _Notizie sopra l’Origine e l’uso dell’ Anello Pescatorio_, etc., etc., published at Rome in 1823.

Footnote 37:

Briefs, says the learned Benedictine Mabillon, _De Re Diplomaticâ_ (lib. ii. cap. xiv.), _brevi via, seu manu, remotis omnibus ambagibus, absolvuntur; quippe quæ a Pontifice, ut plurimum sponte et absque rei longa discussione conficiuntur_.

Footnote 38:

We had the good fortune once to pick up at a book-sale in Rome for a few cents a rare and curious little book on this topic, which gives the very marrow of the subject in a very agreeable form: _Lettera di A. L. Nuzzi, Prelato Domestico Del Sommo Pontefice Sull’ Origine ed Uso Del Nome PAPA_. Padova, 1 Settembre, MDCCXCVIII.

PALM SUNDAY.

Claiming the hill-crowned city as its own, The gray cathedral rears its rough-hewn front Like ancient fortress built to bear the brunt Of leaguering ram on e’er unyielding stone; Signing with holy cross the land it claims, Its walls protecting seek the infinite blue Grown, softly falling painted window through, High heaven brought down to shape life’s noblest aims.

In this strong fortress, safe from those salt waves Of doubt that curve and break and evermore repeat The weary lesson of life incomplete, Moaning and groping in unsunny caves, Beating against a rock that will not break, Flinging their bitter anger far on high, Seeking to chill the tender flowers that lie Close nestled to the rock for its warmth’s sake,

I kept sad feast one doubting April day, When robins’ song had drifted from the hills, When buds were bursting, and the golden bells Of town-nursed bloom were ringing ill away. With folded hands St. Helen’s glance beneath, I trod in thought the highway of the cross— Jerusalem’s triumph blending with her loss, The palm-bough changing for the thorny wreath.

And clasped the folded hands about the bough Of northern hemlock that as palm I bore, Listening the words of sorrow chanted o’er— The old evangel’s solemn voice of woe; O wondrous power of a passing breath! O tearful sweetness of that voice of God Breaking amid the clamor of the crowd Of Jews and soldiers hastening him to death!

Often the chant bad stirred my soul before In humbler church, till had familiar grown Almost each word and every varying tone That with each added year a new grace wore; But never grace so pitiful as this That filled the arches with all deep distress, With passionate sense of human guiltiness— Our God sore bruised for our infirmities!

Oh! blinding sweet the vision that awoke Within my soul to fill my eyes with tears! To-day was it, not in those long-past years, That Heart divine, with love unbounded, broke. Oh! blinding sweet in its strange melody The voice that, rending heart, called from the cross, In that dark hour of life’s bitterest loss, “_Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani!_”

O strong gray walls! blessed was that little space Ye left our souls with Christ on Calvary, Where hearts might weep their living cruelty, In their own depths Jerusalem’s lesson trace. O cross-boughed branch of spicy northern spruce That witness bore on that dim April day To faith no waves of doubt shall wash away, To love’s dear chains no envious state shall loose,

Blessing was ours who bore thee that gray morn Through all the heedless glances of the street, Through longing looks that knew thy meaning sweet, And spoken words of unbelieving scorn. Alas! for those, of eyes and heart both blind, Who in such symbol find but empty rite, Who, dazzled by a false and flickering light, See not the cross wherewith the palm is signed.

CATHEDRAL OF THE HOLY CROSS, BOSTON, MASS.

THE LATE Mr. T. W. M. MARSHALL.[39]

On the 14th of December, 1877, died, at the age of sixty-two years and a half, Mr. T. W. M. Marshall. He had borne a long and trying illness of many months with invariable patience and resignation, and gave up his soul to his Maker and Redeemer after a most Christian preparation. He has well deserved that some more explicit notice of his life and what he did in it should be made public than what has hitherto, so far as we know, been given in any native or American source of information. The following slight account is drawn up by one who has known him well for nearly a quarter of a century.

Mr. Marshall was born the 19th of June, 1815; was educated under Dr. Burnup at Greenwich and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Anglican Church by the bishop of Salisbury in 1842. In 1844 he published his _Notes on the Episcopal Polity of the Church of England_, for which he received the thanks of the then archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley. This was the prelate, it may be remarked, to whom the writers of the famous _Tracts for the Times_ dedicated their translation of what they called “this library of ancient bishops, Fathers, doctors, martyrs, confessors of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church,” with, as they added, “his grace’s permission, in token of reverence for his person and sacred office, and of gratitude for his episcopal kindness.” We mention this, because thanks from such a man in such an office for a work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England in 1844, when that polity was not a little canvassed, was an omen of good things to come for the writer, who was then nestled in a very small and poor cure among the Wiltshire downs, once a house of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. These prospects were blighted for ever by Mr. Marshall’s conversion in the following year, 1845. Indeed, he seems in that year to have committed two acts, one blameless and the other highly to be commended, which yet in their conjunction foreboded a life of no small anxiety in temporal matters; we mean to say that his marriage was followed in a few months by his reception into the church at Oscott by Dr. Wiseman. Thus the nest in the southern hills was lost just as he wanted its shelter most, and instead of the future protection of him whom the Tractarian dedication called “The most reverend Father in God, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England”—a patron, it may be added, of one hundred and seventy livings, besides canonries and options—Mr. Marshall, at the age of thirty, with a young wife, commenced a new life without a profession and without prospect, and with fifty pounds in his pocket. It may be said Mr. Marshall was true all his life long to the spirit which he thus showed at the first crisis of it.

It may be conjectured that the studies made by Mr. Marshall in composing his work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England predisposed his mind in the following year to seek admission into that world-wide community over which presides the head and source of the episcopate.

It was hardly possible that a clear and conservative and eminently logical mind such as that with which he was naturally endowed could have its attention fixed for so long a time as is requisite to compose a well-thought-out work upon the relations of the bishops to each other throughout the world, without coming to the conclusion that the Anglican episcopate rests on no definite basis whatever; without noticing that no one of its defenders has ever yet been able to state on what positive basis it claimed to stand. It exists, in fact, by reviling the Church of Rome, being itself nothing else but a fragment of Western Christendom severed by Tudor lust and despotism from the _compages_ of Christian unity to which it once belonged, and dragging on an existence in subjection to the state which eminently represents in ecclesiastical matters the insular pride and independence of the English mind. Its root is national, not Catholic; its soil human, not celestial; and for a thinking mind, such as Mr. Marshall’s, to examine its position could lead but to one result when it was accompanied by such honesty of purpose as, by the grace of God, Mr. Marshall possessed and manifested.

For let none misconstrue what Mr. Marshall was doing. To give up at thirty years of age, just married, with no private fortune, the profession of clergyman in the Church of England to become a Catholic layman, was an act not only of remarkable honesty but of superhuman courage. At thirty human life presents a long avenue of years. The prospect of traversing these in poverty and obscurity, with a young wife by your side, when the reasonable hope of honor and affluence has just been presented, is one which perhaps it requires greater trust in God, greater fortitude to meet, nay, to choose, than those, for instance, exhibited who heard themselves ordered to summary execution by the “abagi jussit” of the refined and philosophic Roman gentleman, Pliny the Younger, for having addressed their hymns in the early morning to Christ their God.

Anything, humanly speaking, more absolutely hopeless than Mr. Marshall’s position, after taking that step in 1845, as a married ex-clergyman convert, cannot be conceived. At that time private education offered no emolument, for pupils were entirely in the hands of institutions taught by priests or of individual priests; and as even now the services of a priest, well educated and intellectually gifted, are thought among Catholics in England to be adequately remunerated by the salary of one hundred pounds a year, what chance had a married convert to pick a living out of that mode of employing his brains? Much more was writing—that is to say, for Catholic objects—unremunerative. Brains are still at a fearful discount among Catholics in England. They are not paid as much as the lowest unskilled labor; and if this is true in 1878, judge how it was true in 1845. The writer believes that it was the very last time he saw Mr. Marshall when he complained bitterly of the inadequate remuneration that he received for writing. Then, further, for any occupation in the outside world, to be an ex-clergyman Catholic convert was the worst possible recommendation. The writer remembers a most distinguished author in Anglican history quitting the railway carriage in which he was sitting, in order not to converse with one who had lately deserted what was called “the church of his baptism”—as if Christian baptism was insular in its nature, and was a peculiar possession belonging to the “penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos.” Such is the lot which, for a whole generation since Mr. Marshall’s conversion in 1845, he and a host of others have voluntarily encountered. Mr. Marshall may be taken as a typical instance of the class. He may be spoken of freely now. He has run his course; he has kept the faith; he knows now fully, as none of us yet know, the wisdom of such a course; as he knew once, as none of us can more fully feel, the folly of such a course in the estimation of the world.

Most unexpectedly, however, and in a way that he could not the least have foreseen, this common lot of indigence and inaction, in which the _work_ of life and the _head_ which supports it are together taken away in the case of a married clergyman-convert, was terminated about three years after by his appointment as an inspector of schools in the government system of primary education. The Catholics were entering into that system in 1847, and, as a consequence of the rules and conditions obtained by the Catholic poor-school committee with reference to such entry, the appointment of a Catholic to the office of inspector by the government, whose nomination, however, was to be approved by the committee as representing the Catholic body, became necessary. The first so appointed was Mr. Marshall, and he held the office from 1848 to 1860. There cannot be a doubt that the functions which he there had to discharge were in certain respects functions which required great delicacy of touch. It was not without many suspicions that Catholic clergy admitted an officer of the government into their schools. That those who had been in old times forbidden every act of their ministry, pursued by ferocious spies of the state into their most secret lurking-holes, unearthed in order to be tortured by the race of Cecils and Walsinghams, and then hanged, drawn, and quartered—this in the first stage of the state’s enmity; then, in the second, who had been contemptuously ignored, and left to struggle with every trial of poverty, and to collect their scattered sheep in holes and corners—that the descendants and inheritors of such men, in whom the royal blood of Peter was flowing, should suspect at first the servants of a government which had done such things in hatred of Peter’s royal blood, this was most natural. We are convinced that during the five years in which Mr. Marshall was the only Catholic inspector of primary schools, he did much by courtesy, and yet more by his character as an uncompromising Catholic, to do away with this suspicion, and to lead an ever-increasing number of Catholic primary schools to accept inspection. By this conduct he indirectly raised greatly their standard of efficiency in secular instruction; and he commenced that union of the spiritual and the secular authority in the work of education which is now bearing great fruit, and which is incomparably fairer to the dearest interests of Catholics than the system existing in the primary schools of the United States. We think, indeed, that Mr. Marshall, in his anxiety to conciliate, may sometimes have pushed the limits of indulgence somewhat too far. It is honorable to him that he never spared in his reports to government the open commendation of religious teachers. Some of those reports contain the most enthusiastic praise of Catholic teaching which we remember to have read. And they were reports of a government official.

His occupation of inspector ceased in 1860; and being fully conversant with the circumstances which led to his quitting a post of honor and trust, which was then producing to him an income of eight hundred pounds a year, we must express our strong feeling that it was a great error of judgment on his part which led him so to act that it was possible to deprive him of this office. He was thus thrown back into all those difficulties of maintenance which he had so bravely encountered fifteen years before. It is true that Mr. Marshall was in fibre an author; the elementary character of the education he had to control, and the constant iteration of its petty details, besides the exclusion from his range of inspection of all those religious instructions in which he would naturally have taken a great interest—these things galled him. He fled for refuge to the more interesting subject of “Christian Missions,” on which he composed the well-known work published by him at Brussels in 1862, but which, in spite of the vast number of volumes which it required him to look over for his facts, he managed to compose before he quitted the inspectorship. If he could have had the place of a professor in some great Catholic institution, which would have afforded him a moderate income and a fitting subject on which he could have thrown the powers of his most active and apprehensive mind, that would have been to him an earthly elysium. But elysiums are not of the earth, at least not of nineteenth-century earth to Catholics in England. He gave up eight hundred pounds a year to be for the rest of his life a vigorous, witty, sarcastic, and trenchant Catholic champion and a wanderer on the face of the earth. From henceforth he was of those who have “no abiding city.” If he began this second stadium of his life with an act of imprudence which religion did not call for, which, in our individual judgment, we think it did not even justify, he traversed those seventeen years of bitter trial with the spirit of a confessor, and he ended them with the death of an humble, contrite, earnest Christian. He on whose words, defending Catholic doctrines, illustrating Catholic truths, excited multitudes in great cities have hung, who could make them thrill through with the emotions which he felt himself, died in a small room over a shop in an obscure outskirt of London, tended by an unwearied, uncomplaining affection which had been proof against every sorrow and every trial, and was the only earthly consolation left to him. In the eyes of the world it was a sad end of an agitated life. But we make bold to say that he is not sorry now for his choice; and that what he accepted rashly he transformed by endurance into matter for lasting reward, for the praise which does not pass away.

For in this last stadium of his life he showed most conspicuously that which we consider to have been the special honor of it. Let us state succinctly the remaining facts in that life, and then pass to a brief consideration of them. Mr. Marshall went in 1869 to the United States with his family, intending to settle there, which intention, however, he abandoned on a further acquaintance with the country. He lectured there during the winters of 1870-1 and 1871-2 on “The Liberty of the Catholic Church,” “St. Paul and Protestantism,” “Ireland’s Providential Mission,” in most of the large cities. In 1872 he brought out _My Clerical Friends_, and later on _Protestant Journalism_, reprinted from the London _Tablet_, for which he wrote a series of articles on Russia and on ritualism. It was the latter series which was brought to an abrupt termination by his illness in June, 1877. In 1866 he was decorated with the Cross of St. Gregory the Great by the Holy Father as a recognition of his services in the cause of the church; and in 1871 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. in the Jesuit College at Georgetown, near Washington. He broke down at the age of sixty-two. A life which, under less trying circumstances, might have been considerably prolonged, in the possession and exercise of those mental gifts with which he was richly endowed, was thus terminated before its natural time.

What is the lesson which it presents to us? We say without hesitation that the Cross of St. Gregory which the Holy Father presented to him hung on the breast of a true Christian knight. Not for gold nor earthly honor would he sacrifice one jot of Christian liberty. He preferred to be paid poorly for his work as a Catholic than to be paid richly, as he might have been, had he chosen to lay out the gifts of eloquence and clear reasoning and the power of satire which he possessed, in some of many non-Catholic causes. Had he even chosen to write, as many Catholics think themselves constrained to do, on secular subjects, merely taking care not to offend the spirit of the time—intensely anti-Catholic as that spirit is—had he written with all his energy and wit, not against his religion, but keeping it in his pocket, he would, we think, not have died at sixty-two nor in penury. But, so doing, he would not have been worthy of the Cross of St. Gregory; he would have been the world’s journeyman, not the Cross’s knight. Rather than so live, he has died _sans peur et sans reproche_, with his career shortened, as is the wont of knights; with his shield battered but stainless; with his lance unlowered. God grant many knights of such temper to his church in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for the times are coming when they will be wanted!

Footnote 39:

In our last number we published an article on the works of this illustrious Catholic layman by one closely connected with him. Immediately on receiving the sad news of Dr. Marshall’s death we wrote to his friend, Mr. T. W. Allies, who will be known to our readers as the author of _The Formation of Christendom_, asking him to prepare for THE CATHOLIC WORLD a more adequate notice than we had seen of one who had done so much for the Catholic cause. The result is the present article, which, though it comes after the other, will be none the less pleasing to our readers, coming from such a pen as that of Mr. Allies, and dealing as it does rather with the personal life and character than with the public work of its subject.—ED. C. W.

STRICTURES ON AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “POLITICAL RAPACITY OF THE ROMISH CHURCH.”

Following the advice once given by an old Anglican preacher to a newly-fledged brother, “When you have nothing else to say, pitch into the pope,” Rev. Mytton Maury contributes to the January number of the _American Church Review_ an article having for title “The Political Rapacity of the Romish Church.” Intrinsically the article hardly deserves a reply, owing to the recklessness with which it puts forth mere assertions and inferences as though they were facts; while yet it should, perhaps, under present circumstances, not be silently passed by without at least a statement of historical truth in regard to some of the events and their causes, which are therein so perverted as to seem to present a sort of partial foundation for deductions that are utterly false. The explicit aim of the article is to show that “in recent as in past times, the unalterable aim of the Church of Rome has been the establishment of its unconditional supremacy, as in things spiritual, so in things political.”

It is the old, often-exploded tale that took very well with the _gobemouches_ in the days when everything said against the church, true or false, was grist to the Protestant mill, but which cannot stand for a moment against a clear, full, and impartial examination of history. The gist of Mr. Maury’s argument is that, as the demeanor of the Papacy was intolerably overreaching and overbearing during the pontificate of Gregory VII., as the Church of Rome is always the same, as not even the gratitude which Pope Pius VII. owed (_teste_ Maury) to the Allied Powers who overthrew Napoleon was sufficient to make that pontiff bate a jot or tittle of the rights of the church, and as not even outrage, injustice, and spoliation were sufficient to induce Pius IX. to forget or barter any of the doctrines or claims of the church, so there is nothing to be expected of any future occupant of the Holy See but that he shall be politically a ravening wolf. _Q. E. D._ There pervades the article a curious after-taste of a once straight-forwardly-asserted but throughout-insinuated straining on the part of the church in these United States after political aggrandizement—a charge well suited in itself, could it only be made plausible, and we think intended, to catch the ears of the groundlings. Reference is made to a late pamphlet of Von Sybel, from which the writer would seem to have culled his one-sided statements; and we have in the meantime tried to procure that pamphlet, deeming it far better to examine the original than to refute mere _excerpta_. The _brochure_ in question has not yet been received, and we must content ourselves with a refutation of the ill-founded charges and an exposition of the baseless statements contained in Mr. Maury’s article.

There is an exquisite appropriateness in the fact that the charge of _political rapacity_ comes from a minister of that sect of which Henry VIII., half-Catholic, half-Protestant, and wholly beast, was the acknowledged supreme head, the so-called bishops of which sit in the British House of Lords, and owe their appointment to anybody, Jew or Gentile, who may happen to be prime minister. Lord Melbourne—by no means a model Christian, unless as entitled to the name by being an adept in profanity—leaves us ample testimony of the cliquing and caballing by which the appointments to vacant sees were secured, and puts on record a jocose saying that they (bishops and deans) just died to plague him. It is true that their presence in the Lords means nothing, and that they have no power but that of being a little obstructive. That, however, is not their fault. They would fain have more power, if they could. Even in their dioceses they have no sort of effective power belonging to a bishop. Neither clergy nor laity obey them even in spiritual matters, whether in England or in the United States; nor can we for our life see why, on Protestant grounds, in view of the utter nullity of their office, so far as its influence for good is concerned, they have not long ago been abolished, as much more valuable articles have been done away with. In political life other sinecures have in this century been got rid of. Irish disestablishment, which these bishops opposed to their utmost, will infallibly prove the precursor of a similar _fait accompli_ in England. If, after that, the members of their sect choose to maintain them, and even to add to their number, we can have no sort of objection, because then those who utterly repudiate their ministry will not, as now, be obliged to contribute to their support. They may, if they please, match the American army in the proportion of highly-paid, showy, and useless officials to the number of rank and file; in fact, they come in the United States pretty near doing so already. But that is not our business, since we do not pay for them; still, we cannot help having an opinion in the matter.

Again, an impartial observer might reasonably think that a preacher of a sect whose ministers, and, we suppose, their congregations, are of every persuasion or utter want of creed touching the essentials of faith, from the narrowest Calvinism to the most pronounced Puseyism—some of whose highest dignitaries deny the inspiration of Scripture, while others are Universalists, and others, again, denounce the doctrine of baptismal regeneration—a sect which has, in short, less claim to consistency either of faith or practice than any other of all Protestantism—would have enough to attend to in trying to find out what his church did believe and what he should preach, without travelling away to Rome and back to the days of “Hildebrand” for the purpose of raking up falsehoods or misapprehensions with which to bespatter or cast suspicion upon the Church of Rome. This is, perhaps, but a matter of taste; and Mr. Maury’s idea both of taste and duty differs from what ours would be in the same premises. In any case let us see what he has to say, giving his statements such credit as they may prove to deserve.

It is strange, by the way, how the ignorant and insane prejudice which exists among many Protestants against the church warps otherwise fair minds and kindly hearts in the consideration of any question in which she is a party or her rights are in question. We venture to say that if any government attempted the same sort of tyrannical interference at this day with the Jews, not to speak of any Christian sect, that Prussia is now striving to exercise over the Catholics of her dominion, a cry of righteous indignation against the wanton and palpable injustice would go up from all the rest of Christendom. We should, perhaps, except the Anglicans, who are less a sect of Christendom than a clique or set of recipients of government pap, with no fixed doctrinal or moral principles save an overweening idea of their own eminent respectability, a thorough knowledge of the buttered side of their own bread, and a keen appreciation of number one. They have become hereditarily accustomed to consider Anglicanism less as a scheme of doctrine and morals than as an institution for distributing government patronage among their ministers, and for securing in these a somewhat superior police in aid of the state. Yet some of the best minds even among these have been very outspoken in condemnation of the aggressions of Prussia upon the principles of religious freedom. Let us imagine even a George Washington appointing the rabbins who should minister to the adults, and the teachers who should instruct in Judaism the rising generation of Hebrews in this country. Is there anybody who does not see at a glance the wrong thereby done these people? Does any one need argument on the subject? Suppose, in addition, he were to claim the right to appoint the instructors in the rabbinical seminaries, to select schismatic or suspended rabbins for the purpose, and to insist on prescribing the curriculum of the establishment in which young men are instructed for their ministry. Would we not all consider them very unjustly treated, and do our utmost to rectify the wrong? Yet this is exactly what the Prussian government has for some years been attempting to do with the Catholics within their territorial limits; and the vast majority of Protestants either look on with indifference or actually encourage the efforts made for rendering the church but a subordinate bureau of government under Bismarck and Falk, of whom it would be exceedingly difficult to say whether they are Protestants, simply infidels, or downright atheists. What is certain is that they are not Catholics and that they hate the church. Not long since the body of a drowned man was being towed ashore in the East River, and a considerable crowd had gathered to see it, when some one on the edge of the dock remarked, “Oh! it’s only a negro.” Nobody took any further interest in the corpse, and the crowd dispersed at once, every one going his way. So, in this case, the idea seems to be that it is only the Catholics that suffer. But these gentlemen will find out, in the long run, that it is a blow at liberty of conscience (for which theoretically they express great regard), struck, it is true, at Catholics only as yet; they will find out, if any sect of Protestantism but holds together long enough, or ever believes anything with sufficient seriousness to imagine it vital, that the same Prussian government has just as strong an objection to any other decided conscience as to the Catholic. In the references that Mr. Maury makes to this struggle we will assume him to be honest; and, in so doing, we must also take for granted that he does not understand the nature of the contest between Prussia and her Catholic population, else he would not attempt to represent it as a flaming instance of “unsparing political rapacity” on the part of the church. The fable of the wolf and the lamb has rarely had a more apt illustration.

It will simplify matters very much if we state once for all at the outset that Mr. Maury entirely mistakes the ground held by the church or by Catholic writers on her behalf when he represents them as apologizing for what he calls _mediæval pretensions_, and deprecating any apprehensions as to their renewal. No Catholic writer takes any such ground; and as the salient instances adduced of such mediæval pretensions is the controversy about investitures, and the action of Pope Gregory VII. towards Henry IV. of Germany, which produced their meeting at Canossa, we, as Catholics, have no apology to make for either. As head of the church, Pope Leo XIII. must to-day protest just as strongly against the right of lay investiture in spirituals; and had he lived at that day, he could, as minister of the sacrament of penance, in view of the shameless debaucheries, atrocious cruelties, monstrous acts of injustice, and heinous sacrileges of Henry, not have done otherwise than impose on the emperor a penance that should be known of all men. The church has yet to learn that one of her members, though he may wear a crown, is any more exempt from her spiritual jurisdiction than if he were clad in corduroy and wielded the pick. St. James would seem quite to have agreed with her; and as before God in heaven, so there can be within the church of God no exception of persons. We accept, then, as crucial instances by which this alleged political rapacity of the church is to be tested, both the question of investitures and the excommunication and deposition of the Emperor Henry by St. Gregory. They really contain all that can or need be said on the subject at issue. If it be shown that only malevolence and ignorance of the times and circumstances could have twisted them to an apparent support of the accusation founded upon them, and not now for the first time brought against the church, we shall have accomplished our task. Apart from what he says on these matters, which are essentially but one transaction, the rest of Mr. Maury’s article is but _des paroles en l’air_.

In the middle ages and under the feudal system all the lands of each separate country were looked upon as belonging to the sovereign, and were held of him _in feudum_ (hence the name of that system)—on condition, namely, of certain services to be rendered. In no country had the feudatory process got such vogue and attained such magnitude as in that portion of the Holy Roman Empire now going by the name of Germany, about the beginning of the eleventh century. There is no Holy Roman Empire now. Each separate parcel of it has had perhaps twenty different forms of government since, and may within a hundred years have as many more. That emperor was at that time essentially the master of Christendom; and between him and the few smaller monarchs then existing there was no breakwater, no umpire, but the pope. Now, it came to pass in course of time that many bishops and abbots in Germany became possessed, by legacy, gift, purchase, or otherwise, in their own personal right or as appanages of their sees or abbeys, of farms, estates, demesnes and castles, to the possession of each of which was attached the condition of rendering at stated times some certain services to the sovereign as their liege lord. Many archbishops, bishops, and abbots there also were who were not simply ecclesiastical rulers but at the same time temporal lords. The people, who unfortunately had then and for ages afterward very little to say, or at least could say but little effectively, in regard to how they should be governed, have left on record an enduring monument of the view they entertained as to the difference between the rule of the secular knights and the ecclesiastical regimen in that most trustworthy of all forms, that evidence which cannot be forged—_i.e._, the proverb. To this day there is not a dialect of Germany that has not, in one form or other, the saying: “Unterm Krummstab ist gut leben”—_Happy the tenant whose landlord bears the crosier_. They were well cared for, kindly treated, and their complaints attended to by their clerical landlords, which, we all know, was far from being the case with the serfs and _villeins_ under the marauding knights. There was no reason for objection to the service or homage by which ecclesiastical persons, dioceses, or abbeys held those lands; and with the usual care of the church, which has always laid stress first on the physical well-being of the people and then on their moral improvement—deeming the former at least highly conducive to the latter, and esteeming it of no use to leave a moral tract in a house where there is no bread—the church, we repeat, for the benefit of the people, encouraged at that time the holding of these lands by ecclesiastics, and neither pope, prelate, nor people complained for over two hundred years of the acts of homage—observe that the homage of the middle ages is not our homage of to-day—by which those estates were held. And this, too, though the rulers of the church, having nearly all the prudence, wisdom, and learning then existing in Christendom, must have known, just as well as we do to-day, that every acre of land beyond what is indispensably necessary held by the church, and every building that can be utilized for any other than an ecclesiastical purpose, is simply an inducement to the extent of its value, a temptation to plunder, sure to be acted upon sooner or later by the civil government, until that one shall arise which the world has never yet seen, in which right shall ever be stronger than might.

But under Conrad II. and Henry III. the possession of these lands began to give rise to an abuse which had not been foreseen. Both these emperors were chronically in want of money. They were afflicted with a standing incapacity to pay what they borrowed; and there resulted, as a natural consequence, an exceeding hesitancy on the part of lenders to take the royal word in lieu of funds. The name was no doubt regal, imperial, and all that, but the paper to which was attached the signature or _thumb-mark_ of his imperial majesty was not what would now be denominated on ’Change gilt-edged; and money must be procured. In the words of another and later august emperor: _Kaiser bin i, und Knödel muss i hale_. So these emperors commanded on sundry occasions, when a bishop or abbot died, that the ring and pastoral staff, emblems and insignia of spiritual dignity and jurisdiction, should be brought to them. They appropriated the revenues during the vacancy of the diocese or abbey, prevented the canonical elections from being held, or refused to allow the prelates elect to exercise their functions. But to men of this stamp a lump sum of money in hand was of far more importance than a regularly-recurring income, and they began to give over the ring and crosier to that cleric (of course noble, and of course unfit) who could pay the highest price for them. This knave was then supposed to become bishop or abbot, so far, at least, as to have a right to the temporalities of the see or abbacy—generally all that such a man would care about. In this way dioceses were kept vacant for a series of years and flourishing monasteries went to ruin, since the pope would not (save where a deception was resorted to) permit the consecration of flagitious persons. We need not argue to show that this was simony of the basest sort. The thing had become so general in Germany, and the effect such, at the time of the accession of Henry IV., that, instead of the election of a bishop by the clergy of the diocese, or of an abbot by the monks of the monastery (which is the only canonical mode), the power of appointing and installing both had been seized by the emperor; and it may more readily be imagined than described in words what sort of men the purchasers were. Bishoprics and other prelacies were shamelessly put up at auction; and not merely the right to the temporalities (in itself sufficiently unjust) but the sacred authority itself was currently believed to be conferred by the investiture _per annulum et baculum_. It was only when things had come to this pass—one plainly not to be borne, unless with the loss of all ecclesiastical liberty and the grievous detriment of religion—that the Roman pontiffs, who had previously intervened but in special instances of complaint, deemed that the foul system must be plucked up by the roots. A more flagrant abuse, or one more imperatively demanding redress, it would be hard to find in all history.

Henry IV. made no scruple whatever of selling all ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder, and had already twice disposed in that way of the archiepiscopal see of Milan. He seems to have been a sort of prototype of Henry VIII. of England, but to have ruled over a people of a much less elastic conscience and possessing a stronger sense of religion. In the early part of his reign he sought by all means in his power to procure from the pope a divorce from his wife, Bertha, using the basest means for the purpose of tempting her into seeming criminality. He saw at the time a Gospel light beaming from the eyes of another Anne Boleyn of that day. The refusal of the pope, coupled with the threats of his subjects (we mean the nobility, for there were at that time no subjects in the modern sense), who were more willing to put up with his tyranny than to see the innocent empress treated as poor Katharine of Aragon subsequently was, caused him to desist; but he was a monster of lust, injustice, mendacity, and cruelty. Hildebrand, while yet cardinal, wrote to him that, should he ever become pope, he would surely call him to account for his tyranny, licentiousness, and for his making merchandise of benefices. Having been elected in 1073, Hildebrand assumed the tiara under the name of Gregory VII.; wrote at once to the Countess Mathilda not to recognize or countenance in any way the simoniacal bishops of Tuscany; to the archbishop of Mainz to the same effect concerning the intruding prelates of that country; and to Henry himself he addressed at intervals three several letters, warning him of the injury he was doing to religion by his uncanonical and simoniacal course toward the church of God, and exhorting him to desist from his detestable presumption. These several letters and all of them having proved of no effect, he issued his decree, the important words of which begin: _Siquis deinceps_.

This decree, repeated and confirmed in several Roman synods under St. Gregory, iterated and amplified by Victor III. in 1087, and reiterated by Urban II. in two councils, ended in an agreement between Paschal II. and the Emperor Henry V. that the emperors should cease henceforward to claim the right of investiture, while the bishops and abbots should give up the estates for which they owed service to the crown. It was found impossible to carry this agreement into effect, principally on account of the unwillingness of the people to accept the proposed change of masters; and the last-mentioned pope granted to the emperor that he might go through the form of investiture _per annulum et baculum_, “providing the elections of bishops and abbots were freely and legitimately held by the clergy and monks, _all stain of simony being removed_.” However, this agreement, notwithstanding that the liberty of the church was fairly guarded by its provisions, was regarded by the Catholic world as but a temporary repressal of the arrogant claims of the state, which would infallibly be but held in abeyance, to burst forth again under the pretext of the form by ring and crosier; and the agreement was recalled in 1112. The matter was at length finally settled, to the entire satisfaction of the church, by a convention at Worms between Callistus II. and Henry V., which mutual agreement was definitely sanctioned by the First Council of Lateran.

It would be hard to imagine anything more absurd in the face of history than the charge of rapacity, and that, too, _political_ rapacity, alleged against St. Gregory because he would not allow ecclesiastical benefices, abbacies, and bishoprics to be sold like meat in the shambles, and the miscreants who could gather together the largest sums of money to minister at the altar and bear rule over God’s people. That controversy was not excited on account of, or in opposition to, the homage exacted or the investiture conferred on the transfer of secular estates. Those ceremonies were both legal and right. Nobody objected to them then, nor would anybody object to them at this day if lands were held on feudal tenure. If Mr. Hayes chose to grant an estate to the archbishop of Cincinnati in trust for the church (the archbishop has no other use for it), on condition that the archbishop should appear on a certain day of every year and bow three times reverentially toward him, we suppose there is not a Catholic in the State of Ohio that would enter the smallest objection to the annual ceremony. But let Mr. Hayes, or any President of the United States, on the death of, say, the bishop of Columbus, send for or take his crosier and ring; still more, let him appoint some one (cleric or not), who is willing to pay for the billet, to the vacant see, and we promise that there would be unpleasant times and doings. There never has been but one legitimate way to preferment, high and low, in the church—that is, the canonical; and now, as in the days of the apostle, he that comes not in by the door, the same is a thief and a robber. As to the statement that the action of the pope, in abolishing investiture by ring and crosier, was in any sense a blow aimed at the independence of civil government, it is simply false; while it is manifest that neither the dignity, the liberty, nor even the very existence of the church was consistent with simony and the advancement of the most unworthy men to her dignities. The pope, whoever he might be, could not have acted otherwise than did St. Gregory; and had the latter not done as he was inspired by the Almighty to do, he could, when dying at Salerno, not have used those words which thrill one as do no other dying words, save those uttered from the cross: “_Dilexi_,” said the dying saint—“_dilexi justitiam et odi iniquitatem: propterea morior in exilio_.”

So far is the whole, or any portion, of the history of the church from lending even a semblance of color to the alleged political rapacity of the popes, or any of them, that the plain inference of the man who reads true history in order to find out truth will be that they invariably spurned every consideration of the kind. To keep what influence they held, or to gain any in future, their plan would have been to divorce those bestial monarchs whenever they desired it—to play (like Parker and the Elizabethan bishops) a perpetual minor accompaniment to the monarch’s fiddle. Had they done these things, leaving duty undone and right disregarded, there would have been fewer execrable, political anti-popes in history, fewer popes would have died in exile, and there would have been no trouble whatever about investitures. The complaisance displayed by Luther and Melanchthon toward the landgrave of Hesse, if shown by the pope toward the original head of Anglicanism, would have obviated the necessity for any outward change of religion in England herself. It must be admitted that conscience and not interest seems to have carried the day at Rome.

Under the head of this controversy about investitures, of which we have given the true, as Mr. Maury has given a false and garbled, history (principally from Mosheim, who seems to have manipulated every event simply with a view to favoring Protestantism), he has made incidentally several random and several false assertions. Observe that we do not attribute to him wilful falsehood; but his zeal outruns his judgment, and, if a statement seems to make in his favor, he is not sufficiently careful in verifying it; _e.g._, “In view of the fact that this church (the Catholic) is making rapid advances in the acquisition of political influence in the United States,” etc.

Here is a statement very glibly uttered and flatly untrue. The church, as such, neither has nor desires to have any political influence in this or in any other country; and we challenge the assertor to the proof of his slander. Her members have votes like other people; and there are probably in the United States within her communion (taking the ordinary statistics and ratio of voters to population) about a million voters. But they vote on both sides, like their neighbors; and whenever there are three parties the third always presents a sprinkling of Catholic voters. The proportion of Catholic office-holders in our country never has been in any sort of proportion to the Catholic population; nor do we mention the fact to complain of it. Our prayer is that they may be long kept out of the foul wallow. The only prominent official that we can for the moment recollect was Judge Taney. We believe there is one Catholic in the present Senate, but we doubt very much whether the present House of Representatives contains ten Catholic members. Men like James T. Brady and Charles O’Conor are not apt to be chronic office-holders. These alleged advances toward political aggrandizement, if made at all, have not been made in the dark or in a corner. They must be capable of being pointed out. Put your finger on them; show them to us. What are they? Where are they? Where were they made? We had occasion lately in these pages to insist that the statement was false by which Catholics were represented as all voting one way, or as voting under the direction of their priests and bishops; and we reproduce the words then used, viz.:

“But we appeal to the Catholic voters of this country, of American or foreign birth, to answer: Has your bishop or parish priest ever undertaken to dictate to you how you should vote? Has your vote, on whatever side given, interfered in the slightest degree with your status in the church? Do you know of a single instance in which one or the other of these things has taken place? We cannot lay down a fairer gage. If such things happen, they cannot occur without the knowledge of those among and with whom they are done. Had the proof been forthcoming, the country would have rung with it long ere this. We demand and defy the proof.”

We stand now by what is therein said, adding that people who are unwilling to be brought to law should not assert, at least in print, what they do not know to be true, or might, with very little pains, ascertain to be false. It will not do to make hap-hazard assertions, merely on the ground that they will be well received by a portion of the community, whether small or large. There are people who do not think that it is honest, and who characterize such conduct by a very harsh name. If a writer in the _Church Review_ chooses to address Episcopalians, and those alone, on matters connected with their own special organization, we shall care but very little what he says, and shall certainly not interfere. With them be it. But he shall not make sweeping, false statements about the Catholic Church, without being informed that, however it may have happened, these utterances lack the essential element of truth.

Again, he says: “They (the bishops and abbots) assumed the leadership of the soldiers of the district over which they had jurisdiction,” etc.

We did not imagine that there was any man at this day, pretending to an inkling of education, who did not know that it has at no time been lawful for a clergyman of the Church of Rome to bear arms. Clergymen bearing arms are excommunicated by the law of the church. Mr. Maury, in another part of his article, undertakes to give a definition of canon law which is misleading, and bears every appearance of having been culled from some writer who knew as little of the canon law as does Mr. Maury. The drill-master needs only to see a recruit take up a musket in order to state positively: “My lad, you never had a lesson on musket-drill in your life.” To us Mr. Maury’s uncouth and largely false definition of canon law is proof positive that he never opened a book on the subject in his life. And yet he undertakes deliberately to enlighten people upon its nature in print. Fie, Mr. Maury! Let us give you your first lesson on canon law, and it is this: Those clerics who enlist are irregular, and it is prescribed by canon law that “_they shall be punished by loss of their grade, as contemners of the holy canons and profaners of the sanctity of the church_.” Of course we, like others, have frequently read that little story, well befitting a Protestant ecclesiastical history, in which it is stated that a certain bishop of Beauvais was taken prisoner in arms, and that, on the pope’s interceding for him, the coat of mail in which the prisoner is said to have been clad was sent to His Holiness with the message: “_Discerne an hæc sit vestis filii tui._” It is more than probable that the story was made for the sake of the supposed jest. Certain it is that the attempt to trace it deprives it of any authority, while even as a fiction it shows on the part of its author what Mr. Maury has not—viz., a knowledge of the canon law on the subject. Did not a late bishop of Louisiana act as a major-general in the army? Now, canon law is not binding on members of that sect, nor are its ministers at all bound to know the canons, unless, indeed, they undertake to instruct others upon them, and then we humbly submit that things are different.

Once more: “It (the state) expressly limited its right to the temporal advantages belonging to the endowments, and made no claim to conferring the spiritual functions,” etc.

What the state actually did was this. It said: “We have sold to the highest bidder this see or that abbacy. We know full well that to be simony, and that the person on whom we have conferred the crosier and ring is _ipso facto_ excommunicated by reason of that simony. We also know him to be an unfit, and even a grossly immoral, person. But there he is; and you must either consecrate him or that prelature shall not be filled. At all events he shall have the revenues. He has bought and paid for them.” How any man of ordinary honesty, how any one not previously determined by his prejudices to make out a case, should talk of its “not suiting the views of the ambitious pontiff that the church should be subjected to the state even to this limited (_sic!_) extent,” is one of those things that must remain a mystery till the day when we shall be able to look back on the affairs and actions of this world with a clearer mental vision than any we have borne while in it. Mr. Maury’s sect, founded by a king, the doctrines of which (if it have any) are in England defined by a parliament and its practice decided by the courts, the convocation of which has for two hundred years not ventured to cheep, and then hardly above its breath, can of course endure, in view of the loaves and fishes, to be subject to the state in _all_ matters. But the church of God can only, like her Master, render to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and she does not deem conscience to be one of his perquisites. Instructive, if not edifying, reading in regard to the results brought about by the secular power’s appointment of bishops, deans, etc., may be found in the lives, autobiographic and otherwise, of the prime ministers of England. The doctrines of Anglicanism are now, notwithstanding parliaments and courts, just what they have been from the beginning—a series of incomprehensible shifts and evasions, a set of enigmas with no fixed response to any of them. The columns of the London _Times_ will show how “livings” are disposed of, canted at public sale, puffed into fictitious value by representations of the age of the present incumbent and the short-livedness of his family. If we must take instructions from anybody, surely ministers of such a sect as this are not the persons to be listened to either in matter of religion or of taste.

Further on, and in relation to the decree of Pope St. Gregory, we find: “It is impossible to conceive of (_sic_) presumption surpassing that which inspired this, or to imagine a more absolute disregard of the rights of sovereigns. It was a declaration of war by the church upon the state. Disobedience to it was absolutely unavoidable under the existing system of feudal tenure,” etc.

After what has been given of the history of this controversy it is but a work of supererogation to show that each one of the statements in these three sentences is a separate and distinct falsehood. St. Gregory excommunicated and debarred from entrance into the church the simoniacal holders of bishoprics or abbacies, as also every emperor, duke, marquis, count, knight, or other person who should presume to confer the investiture of a bishopric or other _ecclesiastical_ dignity; he finds no fault with the temporal homage or service due on account of secular estates, whether pertaining to the incumbent or to the prelature. Being head (not of a sect nor of _a_ church, but) of the church, he was not, like a titular archbishop of Canterbury, a mere figure-head, whose presence served to give a false show of authority to ecclesiastical decrees made by a collection of laymen, perhaps not even Christians; and his excommunication must consistently strike all the accomplices in a most nefarious work. It is impossible for a Catholic to conceive how the pope could have acted otherwise than he did, since the church knows to this day, and will till the end of time know, no different rules to apply to those of her members who are highest in temporal dignity from those which affect the poorest inmate of the almshouse. The state had now for nearly a century been making war upon the church; and as to the impossibility under feudal tenure of anything but disobedience to the decree of His Holiness, we see in point of actual fact that the matter was quietly and satisfactorily settled by the withdrawal on the part of the state of the offensive and impious claim to confer investiture _in spiritualibus_. No one found any fault with the purely temporal homage, and it was only when, by seizure and sale of cross and crosier (with which, according to the rude ideas of many people in that age, was involved the spiritual authority), the king put forth a claim to the power of appointing bishops, that the church withstood him to the face. He strove to usurp a spiritual power which never belonged to him or to any other temporal authority. We can all see in history what has been the fate of those sects of Protestantism which, for the sake of mere existence or of temporary courtly favor, have given up the rights and powers that would have been inherent in them, were they a church. Their doctrines are a mass of doubt and contradiction. Their ministry, having neither authority nor message to the world, consists of dumb dogs that bark not. Perhaps Anglicanism has been the most successful of them. Is there any thoughtful man, even among its own members, that can in reason look hopefully forward to its future?

But it will be objected: “All this, however satisfactory so far as it goes, only proves that Henry IV. attempted a very gross outrage against the church; and we freely admit that the pope could then, as he can, in case of necessity, now, excommunicate from the church. The church would be a sham if he could not. But how about the claim to the right of deposing kings, set up by the popes and carried out by St. Gregory against the emperor of Germany?” We entirely acknowledge the reasonableness of the question, not merely from the Protestant point of view, but from the general standpoint of our own days; and we propose to answer concisely (allotted space allowing nothing else) the question put, though a complete response thereto would require a separate book. Meantime, we refer such as wish a full and expansive treatise on the subject to M. Gosselin’s “Pouvoir du Pape au Moyen-Age.”

This power was not, nor was it ever claimed to be, inherent in the Papacy, but was simply the result of a necessity, alike felt and acknowledged by all in those turbulent and unruly times, for some tribunal of final arbitrament. It had its source in the common consent of all Christendom—in the fact that the popes were, in the language of Count de Maistre, “universally recognized as the delegates of that power from which all authority emanates. The greatest princes looked upon the sacred unction as the sanction and, so to speak, as the complement of their right.” Even the highest of all the monarchs of the middle ages, the German emperor, derived his august character and was regarded as emperor in virtue of the unction and coronation by the pope. It was “the public law of the middle ages,” as Fénelon has well explained; and it is the universal acquiescence in that law which explains the conduct of popes and councils in deposing incompetent or vicious rulers. “In exercising this power,” says M. Gosselin, “the popes but followed and applied the principles received, not merely by the mass of the people but _by the most virtuous and enlightened men of the age_.” We sometimes nowadays have sense enough to avoid a war by leaving the decision of a question to a convention of arbitrators, as in the case of the Geneva conference; sometimes to a single umpire, as the difficulty about the occupancy of the island of San Juan was submitted to the decision of the late king of Belgium. Several international disputes, which might doubtless otherwise have eventuated in war, have been left to the emperor of Brazil as arbiter. We know very well that the right to bind by such decisions is in no way inherent in the sovereignty of Brazil or of Belgium, but in the fact that mankind agrees to abide by their decision in the matters submitted to them. Now, in those days, while unfortunately, as history shows us but too many proofs, knaves and scoundrels existed as now, yet while feudalism lasted the theory was that civil society was completely swayed by the spirit of Christianity. All the new governments which had sprung up from the _débris_ of the Roman Empire were indebted both for foundation and nurture, during what may be termed their infancy and childhood, to the fostering care of the popes and bishops. Had it not been for the church, mankind would without doubt have relapsed into a state of barbarism. It is not, then, matter of surprise that common consent should, under those circumstances, have vested in the pope the right of deposing a sovereign in cases where no other remedy existed. Our sole remedy nowadays for such evils rests in the power of insurrection, which may or may not be successful, but must, in either case, be the cause of at least as much misery and far more actual bloodshed than the evils it was meant to remedy. There is room _extra ecclesiam_ for difference of opinion on the subject, and minds do, no doubt, honestly differ as to which of the two is the better plan. For our own part, while we utterly disclaim the remotest sympathy with the feudal system, yet we are not prepared to say that it was not the best possible in that age, and should most unhesitatingly give the preference, first, to papal intervention, as being least likely to be biassed, and, second, to any fixed and recognized, fairly impartial tribunal, rather than risk the doubts and undergo the horrors of rebellion, successful or otherwise. Far be it from us to wish to recall the middle ages with their utter disregard for the rights of the people, who, but for the popes, would have had none to put in a word in their behalf; and it was only under the feudal system that the public law of Europe could call for the interference of him whom all then believed the vicegerent of the Almighty. Laws, nationalities, customs, languages, and religion have all changed. What then was legal and desirable, nay, absolutely necessary, is no longer law; and the lapse of whole nations and of large parts of others from the faith of Christ has abrogated a custom which, like all other civil regulations, could but derive its authority from international consent. It may, however, “be doubted whether in a historical light,” to use the words of Darras, “the system of the middle ages was not quite equal to our modern practice.” But this troublesome and invidious duty thus thrown upon the popes was, however, never claimed to be an integral or essential part of their authority, but simply to attach temporarily to the office by law, consent, and necessity. Of course there were then, as there are now, men who imagined that the political system of their day would never change, and that the Holy Roman Empire and the feudal system would last for ever. It is well to remember that there is but one institution that is sure and steadfast among men—the church to which He has promised who can perform.

The right and duty of excommunicating professing Catholic kings and princes is, on the other hand, and always has been, inherent in the Papacy, to be exercised by the pope when all other means have failed, in case of stern necessity and for the good of the church. Such right is inseparable from his office, and can be exercised just as fully from the Catacombs or from a dungeon as from the high altar of St. Peter’s at Rome.

It astonishes us somewhat to find that the mind sufficiently clear to indite the following sentiments should have failed so completely to understand the nature of the struggle over the investitures, and should have seen but through a glass darkly the condition of governments, men, and things requiring the application of his doctrines to practice. Mr. Maury says, and says well:

“It is to be admitted that the intervention of the popes in foreign political affairs in early and mediæval European history was not unfrequently matter of moral necessity. The papal authority constituted for those periods the High Court of International Arbitration. Not seldom the pontiffs stood forth as the solitary champions of right and justice.... We cannot but make ample allowance for their interference; nay, in many cases we must admire it.... In the case of the popes themselves moral necessity must often be allowed to have more than justified their interference in the domestic policy of foreign governments,” etc.

We must hasten through the remainder of Mr. Maury’s article. A great portion of it strikes wide of the mark, having no application to the point at issue, which we understand to be the political rapacity of the “Romish” Church. The sketch of the career of Napoleon, his imprisonment of the pope, the theological opinions of the _canaille_ of generals that the Little Corporal gathered about him, and the action (not of the French people, but) of the rude rabble of the large cities at the time of the Revolution, would seem even to evince that the rapacity existed elsewhere. Again, it would be mere waste of ammunition to argue with an opponent who seriously maintains that gratitude for what he terms “the restoration of the Papacy” ought to have induced Pius VII., or any other pope, to govern the church thenceforward on such principles as would meet the approval of the so-called Holy Alliance. The man who can entertain such a notion has not the first rudimentary idea making toward a conception of what the church of God is, however well he may understand that of Queen Victoria.

Only two further points shall we briefly notice. One is the restoration of the Jesuits by Pius VII.—a fact upon which Mr. Maury lays great stress, as indicating the political rapacity of the church. The order had been suppressed by Pope Clement in 1773, not as having been proved guilty of any wrong whatever, but simply because their existence as an order, under the then circumstances and state of feeling in Europe, seemed to that pope and his council to give not cause but pretext for scandal to a certain portion of nominal Christendom. It is admitted that the prime movers in exciting this enmity against the Jesuits were the infidels in France, the Pombal faction in Portugal, the persons bearing in Spain the same relations to the monarch which were in France held by Madame de Pompadour, and those weak people who believe all that is diligently sounded in their ears from the rostrum or presented to their eyes by the press. Pope Clement deemed it the most prudent course to suppress the order, and he did so. It was their duty to obey, and they obeyed to the letter. Had he been a Protestant archbishop or bishop, would he have been so thoroughly obeyed? Would there even have been a pretence of obedience? Had the Jesuits been the wily knaves they are frequently represented as being, would they have disbanded on the instant? Has any association in history, we will not say so powerful, but even one-tenth part so numerous, so able, and so well disciplined, ever been extinguished by the myrmidons of the most powerful civil government? Had they been Protestants, we should at once have had a new and powerful sect. Had they been merely a conscienceless, oath-bound society, they could have gone on, despite all the civil governments on earth. Being Jesuits, they obeyed the mandate of the Vicar of God. Pius VII. deemed the time opportune for their revival. It may be that his experience of the favor shown to the usurping Napoleon during the period of his own imprisonment, and the manifest tergiversations of nearly all the higher French clergy at that unhappy time, caused him to long for the faithful Jesuits. Of this we know nothing. His right to restore them was just as clear as had been that of Pope Clement to suppress them. We propose neither to go into a eulogy of the Jesuits nor to defend them from the slurs and slanders cast upon them, mostly by those who know little more of them than the name. They need no eulogy from us, and are quite competent to defend themselves by word and pen. Mr. Maury (who seems to be an ardent Jesuit-hater; we know nothing of him but his article) is evidently one of those who fancy that the church is a political party, and that, on gaining an advantage over her opponents, she may bargain to shift principles and suit discipline to those who have been instrumental in bringing about the result. We quite agree with him, however, that, judging by all history, the church does not seem to regard herself in that light. Very many popes have died in exile. For seventy continuous years the head of the church was in captivity at Avignon. Pope Pius VII. was long a prisoner at Savona. For all that we know, the present pontiff may yet have to hide in the Catacombs. But neither in the past has there been, nor will there be found in the future, a pope who for personal duress or temporal domain (however clear his right thereto) will barter away one iota of the sacred deposit of faith and practice. The church leaves it to the politicians to seek foul ends by base means—to bargain that “in case you commit this forgery or that perjury for me, I shall, on attaining power, see that you are not only held guiltless but rewarded.” Were this her way of acting, she would be very unlike her Founder, and certainly would not be the institution with which our Saviour has promised to be till the consummation of the world. Mr. Maury would seem to think that he is making a point in charging the church with being true to her principles, with being changeless, with not giving way to feelings of gratitude (?) so far as, upon occasion, to give up her position as the conservatrix of faith and morals. He repeats the charge, under different forms, sundry times in the course of his article. Does he perchance not know that this is exactly the characteristic of the church in which Catholics glory? Did he never hear of the church before? Does she now come before his mental vision for the first time? One is really tempted to think so from the fact that he speaks of the pope’s styling himself “God’s vicar upon earth,” as though it were a new title never assumed until Pope Pius used it in his encyclical of March, 1814. If it will do Mr. Maury any good or save him future labor in writing, we can inform him that we Catholics would have neither faith nor confidence in a church that could sway and swerve, that allowed herself to be ruled by politicians or by heretics; and that we all believe Pope Leo XIII. to be, like his predecessor St. Peter, “God’s vicar here on earth.” Let him stop the first Catholic boy he meets who attends catechism class, ask him what is the pope, and he will get that answer in so many words.

The other point is this: Mr. Maury takes it very ill that the church should find fault with the Falk laws and the supervision that the German government claims and attempts to exercise over her in that country; while he asserts that no fault is found with the Bavarian government, which (he says) exercises the self-same jurisdiction over the church that Germany is now striving to carry out. The latter part of his statement is untrue. But, admitting that it were true, cannot even Mr. Maury see that there would be all the difference in the world between permitting to a Catholic ruler certain rights of supervision touching ecclesiastical matters, and giving the same rights to infidels, rationalists, transcendentalists, atheists—in any case to non-Catholics? Perhaps we should hardly expect this, since, unless our information be very incorrect, wardens or vestrymen, or both, may be, and often are, in his own sect, not mere non-communicants but of no profession of religion whatever. That such is the case in England we know; and Mr. Thackeray painted from life both the Rev. Charles Honeyman and Lady Whittlesea’s chapel, which is there depicted as a speculation of Sherrick, the Jewish wine-merchant. True, the Bavarian government has adopted a new constitution subsequent to the establishment of its concordat with the Holy See; and we are far from denying that things would be on a very unsatisfactory footing in Bavaria were the reigning house to become Protestant, or the government, by an accidental (and we admit possible) influx of free-thinkers, to determine to give trouble. This, however, has not yet taken place, and the proverb holds that it is unnecessary to greet his satanic majesty till one actually meets him. We doubt not but that any overt act against the freedom of the church will, in that country, be as promptly resented and rendered as thoroughly ineffective as has hitherto been the case in Prussia. All the power and influence of the German government has, so far, been unable to push the so-called Old Catholics into even a decent show of repute; and no Catholic in communion with the pope will ever lend himself to any such thing as the Bismarckian scheme of a German national church, or national church of any other empire, kingdom, or republic. An independent provincial church is to the mind of the Catholic an utter absurdity; and no proposition looking to any such end would for a moment be entertained at Rome. Catholics do not and cannot exist without being in communion with the pope, whosoever or wheresoever he or they may be. It seems grievously to vex Mr. Maury that in no single instance has the church allowed herself to be made, as has the legal sect in England, a mere tool in the hands of the state; and he takes pains to stigmatize what he ironically describes as the “gentle suavity” of Pope Pius and the Cardinal Consalvi, intimating that it was mere stratagem; but he forgets that there is no sort of hypocrisy in doing the best that can be done under given circumstances, providing always that no principle be given up. Even on his own showing the church has under no circumstances abandoned for a moment the principle that she should and must be entirely free from any control of the state _in matters spiritual_. Were it any one of the little sects that set up such claim for religious freedom as against governmental interference, a cry in its favor would go up along the line from Dan to Beersheba; but in the case of mother church it only furnishes a reason for an article on her political rapacity. Some original genius once remarked that consistency is a jewel. It certainly is very rare; and here is a radiant instance of it on the part of our opponents. The moment that the state presumes to trench upon the domain of conscience we must all obey God rather than man. _Usque huc et ne plus ultra._ Up to that point we stand ready to act and obey loyally as citizens. Beyond that line we neither can nor will be bound; and they who demand that we should put our consciences in the keeping of Reichstag, Parliament, or Congress know but little of human rights and less of the rightful domain of civil law.

A little reflection might have shown Mr. Maury the absurdity of his statement that Consalvi demanded of the Bavarian government the expulsion of the Protestant population of that country, then amounting to nearly a million. Surely Mr. Maury is joking! In the many centuries during which the popes have had full sway in the Eternal City, not one of them has ever proposed the expulsion of the Jews, a large number of whom have at all times resided in Rome. Mr. Maury represents Cardinal Consalvi as an eminently shrewd man, whereas he must have been little better than an idiot to entertain such an idea, much more to express it in writing, even to the dullest court in Europe. He never did do so. Surely this must be, like several other statements of the writer which we have not time at present to take up, a _lapsus pennæ_ into which haste in writing and zeal for “the good cause” betrayed him. Authority for it we have been utterly unable to find, though the account of the negotiations of that cardinal are in the main given with tolerable fulness in the books at our hand.

That system of religion is surely in a very bad way the hold of which on the minds and consciences of its adherents cannot be maintained without the aid of government; nor does it deserve the name of religion at all when its ministers are such as those must be who owe their appointment to the back-stair intrigues by which men attain political offices. The Roman Curia has shown both wisdom and a high sense of honor in persistently refusing, on principle, to recognize any other than the canonical election of her prelates. But it does seem somewhat hard that her unwillingness to curry favor with the various reigning houses and their ministries should be attributed to _political rapacity_. So far as the pope is concerned, he was just as much the head of the church under the persecution of Diocletian as in the days of Leo X., and is just as really and effectually the father of all the faithful to-day as on the day when the Papal States were restored to him by Pepin in 768. The minds of men have, however, become so accustomed to acts of injustice that they regard them with comparative indifference. The justice of the pope’s claim to the patrimony of St. Peter is infinitely clearer and of far more ancient standing than that of any sovereign in Christendom to the throne he occupies. Necessary to the existence of the Papacy those states certainly are not, save in the sense that he who is not a temporal sovereign must to a certain extent be a subject, and that an ill-disposed government, under or within control of which the pope may be, will always be in a condition to hamper him, and to put trammels on his intercourse with his people over the entire world. As it may well be doubted whether there ever was a period when the Holy Father was more firmly entrenched in the affections and confidence of his faithful children than now, when despoiled of territory, courtly pomp and splendor—all of which he might have retained had he been willing to stretch principle to compliance with iniquity—so a more unsuitable season could hardly, in the view of any impartial on-looker, have been selected for charging the church with political rapacity. Had she possessed that, or desired its results, her position, however high in a worldly point of view, would hardly have been so honorably glorious in the eyes of her faithful members.

THE DEATH OF PIUS IX. THE CONCLAVE AND ELECTION.

(FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD IN ROME.)

ROME, February 21, 1878.

He is no more! As a Christian, he loved justice with the charity of his divine Master; as a priest, his vows; as a bishop, his flock; as a Sovereign Pontiff, he kept the deposit of faith with a great, intelligent love. And we loved him dearly in life, as pontiff never was loved before, and shall ever think of him as the one colossal figure of justice, unmoved and immovable, of the nineteenth century. _In memoria æterna erit justus ille; ab auditione mala non timebit._

We thought, as we gazed upon his loving face on the Feast of the Purification, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his First Communion, that he never looked better. He looked younger, ’twas said by those present. His face had a glow that suggested his early manhood. His voice, too, was vigorous and robust as he addressed the parish priests, the heads of the religious orders, and the rectors of the colleges, who had presented him with the Candlemas taper, according to custom. And when he had thanked all present, and requested them to bear his thanks to the faithful for having offered up prayers to God and the Virgin Immaculate for his recent recovery from illness, he pronounced the sweetest little homily, so characteristic of Pius IX., on the necessity of giving religious instruction to the little ones. Alas! it was the sweetest song of the swan, because the last.

THE LAST HOURS.

Towards evening, on the 6th inst., it was observed by his physicians that the Holy Father was somewhat feverish. This excited no alarm, for such attacks seemed but the lingering traces of his recent illness. The Pope retired to bed at his usual hour, about ten o’clock. His rest, however, was not tranquil. He seemed to be oppressed in his breathing. About four o’clock on the morning of the 7th he was seized with a shivering chill, his breathing became quick and hard, his pulse excited. About half-past six o’clock the fever came on with greater force, producing an utter prostration of the august patient. His mental faculties remained clear and undisturbed, and at half-past eight he received the Viaticum with great devotion from the hands of his sacristan, Mgr. Marinelli. The malady became more intense, the catastrophe inevitable; so at nine o’clock he was anointed. Meanwhile, the news of the Pope’s sudden and dangerous illness had spread through the city, and the cardinals hastened to the Vatican. By order of the cardinal-vicar the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the churches of the city. That fact contained the dread significance that the Pope was dying. The Romans flocked to the churches and prayed fervently against the crisis, yet trembled at the thought that, when the Blessed Sacrament would be restored to the tabernacle, all would be over, well or ill. The cardinals and prelates assembled around the bed of the sufferer knew too well what the issue would be. He knew it himself, for, taking the crucifix from under his pillow, he blessed them. His suffering increased. At one o’clock p.m. Cardinal Bilio, the grand-penitentiary, began to repeat the last prayers of the church for the dying. The Holy Father pronounced distinctly, though with the greatest difficulty, the act of contrition. Then he subjoined in a voice that betokened great trust, _“In domum Domini ibimus”_—We will go into the house of the Lord. When the cardinal came to pronounce the last address to the departing soul, he hesitated at the word _proficiscere_ (depart); but the Pope added quickly, “_Si! proficiscere_”—Yes! _proficiscere_. When he had repeated the exhortation the cardinal knelt down and asked the dying Pope to bless the cardinals. There were present Cardinals Borromeo, Sacconi, De Falloux, Manning, Howard, and Franchi. He raised his right hand and made the triple sign of the cross. It was the last Apostolic Benediction imparted by Pius IX. At half-past two in the afternoon the rumor spread through the city that the Pope was dead. Telegrams to the same effect were sent to all parts of the world by the correspondents of the press. The secretary of the Minister of the Interior had caused a bulletin of the same tenor to be posted up in the vestibule of Parliament. But the agony of death had not even set in upon the venerable patient, though all hope of a change for the better was abandoned. At half-past three the struggle began in very earnest. It was a sight that brought copious tears to the eyes of the beholders—Pius IX. in his agony. Never more strongly than during those supreme moments did the youthful vitality of the Pontiff manifest itself. Two hours and a half of a death-agony is something we associate only with robust constitutions in the flower of manhood. At five o’clock the physician requested Cardinal Bilio to pronounce a second time the recommendation of the departing soul. He did so, and then, kneeling down, he began the rosary, giving out for contemplation the Five Sorrowful Mysteries. At the fourth—the carrying of the cross—he stopped, looked anxiously at the face of the Pontiff, stood up, and gazed still more eagerly upon those loving features. The eyes had closed sweetly, a pearly tear, just born, glistened on the lids, the lines of agonizing pain seemed to disappear perceptibly—it was all over, and the _Angelus_ bell rang out over a fatherless city, ay, a fatherless world.

HOW ROME RECEIVED THE NEWS.

The news created no excitement. There was no crowd to speak of in the Square of St. Peter. Only a few loiterers stood for a moment gazing up at the bronze doors which open into the Vatican; but they “moved on” at the quiet request of a policeman. There were no soldiers visible—nothing war-like, if exception be made to the bristling bayonets of the Swiss Guards. Soon after the _Ave Maria_ the bronze doors were closed, and the loiterers betook themselves across the Bridge of St. Angelo into the city. There all was quiet, too, save and except the theatres; _they went on performing_, though the authorities had a superabundance of time to order them to be closed. The two lesser theatres, in which Pulcinella gives nightly amusement to the unlaved of Rome, closed of their own accord on hearing of the Pope’s death. The other theatres received official notice to suspend performances until further notice, on the following day. During the day of Pius IX.’s suffering King Humbert and Queen Margherita sent repeatedly to the Vatican to inquire after his health. During the night the following notification from the cardinal-vicar of Rome was affixed to the churches:

“TO THE CLERGY AND PEOPLE OF ROME.

“Raffaele, of the title of _St. Croce in Gerusalemme_, cardinal-priest of the Holy Roman Church, Monaco La Valletta, Vicar-General and Judge-Ordinary of Rome and its district, Commendatory Abbot of Subiaco.

“The Majesty of God Omnipotent has called to himself the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius IX., of holy memory, as we have just been advised by the most eminent cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, to whom it belongs to give public testimony of the death of the Roman Pontiffs. At this announcement the Catholic people in every corner of the world, devoted to the great and apostolic virtues of the immortal Pontiff and to his sovereign magnanimity, will mourn. But above all let us weep profoundly, O Romans! for to-day has unfortunately ended the most extraordinarily glorious and prolonged pontificate which God has ever granted to his vicars on earth. The life of Pius IX., as Pontiff and as sovereign, was a series of most abundant benefits, both in the spiritual and temporal order, diffused throughout all the churches and nations, and especially upon his own Rome, where at every step monuments of the munificence of the lamented Pontiff and father are met with.

“According to the sacred canons, in all the cities and distinguished places solemn obsequies and suffrages shall be celebrated for the soul of the deceased hierarch, and every day, until the Holy Apostolic See be provided with a new chief, solemn prayers shall be offered up to implore from his divine Majesty a most speedy election of the successor of the never-to-be-sufficiently-lamented deceased.

“To this effect, 1. Notice is given that public and solemn funeral services will be celebrated in the patriarchal Vatican basilica by the chapter thereof, whither, as soon as possible, the body of the immortal Pontiff will be carried, and placed, according to custom, in the chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament. 2. It is ordained that in all the churches of this illustrious city, as well of the secular as the regular clergy, and privileged in any way, all the bells be rung in funeral notes for the space of an hour, from three to four, to-morrow. 3. As soon as the precious mortal remains of the Sovereign Pontiff be carried into the Vatican basilica, solemn obsequies shall be celebrated in the aforesaid churches. 4. The reverend clergy, secular and regular, are exhorted to offer up the unbloody Sacrifice in suffrage for the soul of the august deceased, as has always been done, and the communities of both sexes, as also all the faithful, are invited to recommend his blessed soul in their prayers. 5. Finally, it is prescribed that in each of the aforesaid churches, in the Mass and other functions, the collect _Pro Pontifice_ be added as long as the vacancy of the Apostolic See shall last.

“Given from our residence, February 7, 1878.

“R. CARD. MONACO, Vicar. ”PLACIDO CAN. PETACCI, Secretary.”

Soon after the soul of Pius IX. had departed his physicians returned to the chamber of the dead, now guarded by two of the Noble Guards—who never lose sight of the body until it is consigned to the tomb—and made a formal autopsy, which they couched in these terms: “We, the undersigned, attest that His Holiness Pope Pius IX., already affected for a long time by slow bronchitis, ceased to live, through pulmonary paralysis, to-day, February 7, at 5.40 p.m.—Dr. Antonini, physician; Dr. Ceccarelli, surgeon; Dr. Petacci, assistant; Dr. Topai, assistant.”

Dr. Ceccarelli then composed the body reverently on the bed, and covered it with a white cloth; whereupon it was carried into a neighboring chamber, looking north, towards the Belvedere wing of the palace. Detachments of the chapter of St. Peter’s kept a vigil, reciting psalms the night long. On the following morning, the 8th inst., Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, attended by Mgri. Casali del Drago and Della Volpe, Participating Secret Chamberlains of His Holiness, repaired to the apartment taken possession of the previous evening by Cardinal Pecci, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, and gave him a formal announcement of the death of the Pope. The cardinal, having put on robes of violet, which is the mourning of the church, repaired in procession with the rest to the room in which the venerable remains lay, to effect a solemn mortuary recognition. All knelt down and prayed for a while in silence. His eminence then recited the _De profundis_, and, standing up, he reverently raised the cloth from the face of the dead. Taking a little silver hammer from the hand of a master of ceremonies, he struck the forehead of the Pontiff with it thrice, pronouncing at each stroke, in a loud voice, the name of the Pope. After a momentary silence he turned to those present and said: _Papa vere mortuus est_—The Pope is indeed dead. The cardinal then tendered a request to Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, for the Fisherman’s ring, which was still on the finger of the Pope. The monsignore removed it and gave it to the cardinal, who wrote a receipt for it. Thereupon Mgr. Pericoli, Dean of the Apostolic Prothonotaries, knelt down and read the following attestation: “This morning, February 8, at eight o’clock A.M., the Most Eminent and Reverend Cardinal Pecci, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, accompanied by the College of Clerics of the Chamber, by Mgr. the Vice-Chamberlain, by Mgr. the Auditor of the Reverend Chamber, by the advocate-general of the Apostolic Chamber, by the procurator-general, and by the two secretaries and chancellors of the Chamber, repaired to the private rooms of His Holiness, in one of which he found on the death bed the corpse of his same Holiness.

“Having ascertained the death of the Holy Father, and recited opportune prayers in suffrage of the blessed soul, his aforesaid most reverend eminence made a request to the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber of His Holiness, for the Fisherman’s ring, which was immediately consigned by the same Mgr., the Master of the Chamber, to the most eminent chamberlain, who received it, with a view of presenting it in the first cardinalitial congregation (to be broken); for which ring his most reverend eminence gave an act of receipt to the aforesaid Mgr. the Master of the Chamber.

“Whereof, at the request of the most eminent and reverend chamberlain, a solemn act was drawn up, _rogated_ by the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgr. Pericoli, cleric of the Chamber, and Dean of the College of Apostolic Prothonotaries, the act being signed by the most eminent and reverend chamberlain, by the others above named, and by the two secret chamberlains of His Holiness, the Most Illustrious and Reverend Mgri. Casali del Drago and Della Volpe, in the quality of witnesses.

“According to the injunctions made by the eminent and reverend chamberlain to the clerics of the Reverend Apostolic Chamber, these assembled in the presence of his most reverend eminence, in an apposite congregation, and in the regular manner, divided among themselves the different offices.”

THE INTERREGNUM.

The supreme government of the church during the vacancy of the Apostolic See belongs to the cardinal-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, and to the deans of the three orders of cardinals—bishops, priests, and deacons. These are respectively Cardinal Pecci, Cardinal Amat, dean of the cardinal-bishops, Cardinal Schwarzenberg, dean of the cardinal-priests, and Cardinal Caterini, dean of the cardinal-deacons. Cardinal Simeoni’s office as Secretary of State ceased with the death of Pius IX., and will be discharged _ad interim_ by Mgr. Lasagni, secretary of the Council and of the Consistory. He retains the office of prefect of the apostolic palaces. Every day during the _Novendiales_ (that is, the nine days on which solemn obsequies are celebrated for the deceased pontiff) there is a congregation of the cardinals, whereat their eminences appear with the rochet uncovered, as a sign of jurisdiction. They are all popes _in fieri_. In consideration of this a cardinal always rides alone in his carriage during the vacancy. Moreover, during the conclave, in the general reunions of the cardinals, each one has a canopy erected over his seat. When the election takes place all the canopies are removed, save that which is over the seat of the pontiff-elect.

Immediately after the ceremony described, an extraordinary congregation of the cardinals was held in the palace of the Vatican. Object, the manner of celebrating the funeral services; and the question, Where is the conclave to be held? The first question was disposed of quickly, it being unanimously resolved to observe the constitutions as regards the funeral. The question of where the conclave should be held presented many difficulties, considering the political circumstances of the Holy See at present. The foreign cardinals, and Cardinal Manning in particular, supported the proposal of not holding the conclave in Rome, not only because little faith was to be placed in the Law of the Guarantees, but for the reason that it would be a new and powerful protest against the usurpations consummated by the Italian government. The Italians overruled these considerations, and constituted a majority in favor of holding the conclave in Rome. Cardinal Manning’s project of holding the conclave at Malta received thirteen votes.[40] Some city on the Adriatic coast of Austria was also proposed, but with little favor.

Pending this discussion the canons of St. Peter’s washed the body of the Holy Father in scented water, and then gave it to the physicians to be embalmed. This was on the evening of the 8th inst. They performed the operation in the traditional way, taking out the _præcordia_ and embalming them separately; afterwards the body. The _præcordia_, according to an old tradition, are interred in the parish church near which the pontiff dies; consequently those of Pius IX. will be buried in St. Peter’s. Had he died at the Quirinal, the church of SS. Vincenzo and Anastasio would receive them. The operation of embalming was brought to a successful termination on the morning of the 9th.

The city on the 8th presented a sad appearance. All the shops were closed, traffic for the most part was suspended, the Bourse was closed, and the soldiers marched to and from their regular stations without music. There were no amusements in the evening, and very few people to be seen in the streets. A shadow rested on the city. There was a great blank. Something was wanting—is wanting. The world seems strange, purposeless, and unutterably dreary without Pius IX.

THE DEAD PONTIFF.

After the embalming process his body was vested in the white cassock, the red cope bordered with ermine, and the _camauro_, or red cap, likewise bordered with ermine, placed on the head. He was then laid out on a modest catafalque, under a canopy, in one of the halls of the Vatican. The Roman nobles and persons of distinction were permitted to see him. Never have we seen death so beautiful as in Pius IX. His face, always aglow with a sweet smile, was now doubly sweet and restful. There was not a trace of pain left on it, and its beautiful whiteness seemed a supernatural glow which God had breathed there for his well-meriting servant. The hands, too, clasping his beloved crucifix, seemed to have a warmth about them which is not associable with death. Indeed, he seemed to sleep, did our Holy Father. Towards nightfall the body was habited in full pontificals, golden mitre, red chasuble, red satin gloves, gold-embroidered, and red satin slippers, also richly wrought in gold; and when darkness descended upon the Eternal City they carried Pius IX. down into St. Peter’s. The Swiss Guards formed themselves into a double line in the halls of the Vatican and along the _Loggie_ of Raphael, whose classic beauty, recently restored and enhanced, will bear testimony ages hence to the munificence of Pius IX. as a Mæcenas. Masters of the horse in their fantastic and quaint liveries, the canons of St. Peter’s bearing torches and chanting the psalms, mace-bearers robed in sable velvet, and a detachment of the Swiss, bearing their pikes reversed, preceded the bier. This was borne on the shoulders of the throne-bearers, and a square was formed around it by the Noble Guards in full uniform and the penitentiaries of St. Peter’s. They were followed by the domestic prelates of the papal household, and the secular and military officials, likewise in dress uniform. The cardinals succeeded, marching two abreast, bearing torches, and responding to the psalms as intoned by the clergy in advance. They were followed by a detachment of the Palatine Guard. The Roman nobles, and other personages of distinction, brought up the rear of the procession. The flaming torches lighting up the halls, the corridors, the regal stairway, down which the _cortège_ moved, the liveries of the servants, the uniforms of the soldiers, the robes of the priests, the purple of the cardinals, and, above all, that already heaven-lit face looking upwards, as if in placid and joyous contemplation of the Truth Eternal, the assertion and vindication of which was his dearest object in life, produced a sensation in the beholder which baffles description, there being no term of comparison to which we can liken it. And the muffled psalmody in those silent halls, inexhaustibly silent because of the circumstance and the hour, seemed to be, what it indeed was, the music of another and a tranquil sphere, where there is no “hostile domination,” no death.

The procession entered St. Peter’s, by an inner door communicating with the palace, at seven o’clock. It was met by the chapter of St. Peter’s, who led the way to the chapel of the canons in the right aisle. The bier was placed precisely within the iron railing of the chapel, so that the feet of the venerable Pontiff extended outside sufficiently far to allow the people to kiss the papal slipper. It gently inclined towards the railing, thus giving a perfect view of its precious burden even at a distance. It was covered with a red silk pall, delicately embroidered with gold thread. At either side hung a red cardinalitial hat of the primitive form, which used to be carried before His Holiness in grand processions.

At an early hour on Sunday morning, long before dawn, the steps of the great temple were crowded with people, waiting for the moment when the bronze doors would swing open and admit them to view the remains of their father. Detachments of the Italian soldiery had taken up positions within the vestibule and outside. Others marched around the basilica and entered by the sacristy door. They formed a double line from the door of entrance on the left, up along the corresponding aisle, across the nave, and down to the door of egress. Those stationed at the iron gates of the vestibule had a difficult task in trying to stem the onflowing and irresistible tide of thousands of people when the gate at last swung open. They acquitted themselves well, poor fellows, and as reverently too, both within and without the temple, as could be expected under the circumstances. As the people entered the temple at half-past six A.M. a solemn Mass of requiem had already commenced in the chapel of the canons. It was the first of the _Novendiales_. Throughout that day and the three following a continuous stream of people of all classes flowed into and out of St. Peter’s, and every individual paused, at least, to contemplate that figure lying in peaceful repose, a heavenly contrast, to the intelligent, against the pleasure-surfeited and revolting mass which defied the embalmer’s art, yet was enshrined at the Quirinal not a month since. And thou, Mark Minghetti, who didst abandon this sainted figure to serve that other in the name of liberty, forsooth, what has brought thee into St. Peter’s, and face to face with the holy dead? Speak, thou whose deeds for the past quarter of a century have been at cross-purposes with good faith; unbosom thy sentiments as thou didst linger at the catafalque of thy old and too-trusting master! Thou, too, Visconti Venosta, author of the notorious _Memorandum_ of 1870, wouldst gaze once more on the face of him thou conspiredst to betray? Many a traitor besides these two went there, and the exponents of their iniquity, the liberal papers, said that Pius IX. seemed to sleep, and commended the martial bearing of the four Noble Guards who stood erect and vigilant around the catafalque.

On Wednesday, the 13th, in the churches of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran, solemn obsequies were also celebrated, and every parochial church in the city was on that day the scene of pious suffrages for the soul of Pius IX. In the basilicas lofty catafalques were erected, surmounted by a tiara, and surrounded with blazing torches. That in the church of St. Mary Major bore, inscribed on its four sides, a pithy yet adequate panegyric of the Pontiff—_Religio, Fides, Spes, Caritas_.

THE LAST ACT.

It is Wednesday evening; the great aisles of St. Peter’s at seven o’clock are empty. The bronze doors are shut. Torches, blazing in the nave of the basilica, reveal to our gaze a procession of cardinals emerging from the door of the sacristy, and moving with measured and reverential steps to the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament; the domestic prelates of the papal household, already there; the canons in surplice—one of them, Mgr. Folicaldi, in black pontificals and a snowy mitre, attended by deacons and subdeacons of honor, also in black; the officials, civil and military, of the palace in full dress; the Noble Guards; the Swiss in burnished helmets and cuirasses; the little garrison of the Vatican; the gentlemen of the pontifical court, and the Roman nobles. All form themselves into a procession. The choir sings the _Miserere_. Eight canons take up the catafalque. The procession moves up past the bronze statue of St. Peter, around the tomb of the apostles, and down the further aisle, to the chapel of the canons. It is the funeral of Pius IX. The catafalque is placed in the middle of the chapel. Arranged in order on the floor are three coffins—one of cypress-wood, one of zinc, and a third of chestnut. The officiating prelate blesses the first, sprinkling it with holy water, and then incensing it. Meanwhile, the cardinals press around the bier, and reverently kiss that sacred right hand which had so often blessed them, and the feet of the Pontiff. All who can come near enough do likewise. Mgr. Ricci, major-domo, spreads a white cloth over the face of the Pontiff, thus hiding it for ever from the view of man. The canons take up the pall, with its precious burden, and place it in the coffin. When the body had been properly composed, Mgr. Macchi, Master of the Chamber, placed beside it three purses of red velvet, containing respectively as many medals, gold, silver, and bronze, as there were years of the pontificate of Pius IX. A violet ribbon was sealed crosswise over the body to the edge of the coffin, with four separate seals: that of the cardinal chamberlain, that of the major-domo of the palace, a third of the archpriest of St. Peter’s, and a fourth of the chapter. Two masters of ceremonies spread a red silk cloth over the body, and a third dropped at the feet a tin tube containing a roll of parchment, on which was written in Latin the eulogy of the Pontiff. The carpenters do the rest. On the lid of the zinc coffin there is the following inscription:

CORPUS. PII. IX. P.M. VIXIT. AN. LXXXV. M. VIII. D. XXVI. ECCLES. UNIVER. PRÆFUIT. AN. XXXI. M. VII. D. XXIII. OBIIT. DIE. VII. FEBR. AN. MDCCCLXXVIII.

When the workmen had closed the last coffin they carried it out of the chapel to a place on the left, where there was an opening in the wall high up. It was the temporary resting-place of Gregory XVI., and is of every deceased pope until he obtain permanent sepulture. It is surmounted by a marble sarcophagus adorned with a tiara. By means of ropes and pulleys they hoisted the coffin into the niche, and, after having walled up the aperture with bricks and cement, they laid on the outside a small slab of marble, with this inscription:

PIUS IX. P.M.

A cardinal was heard to say in a voice of emotion, as all quietly moved away: _Tanto nomini nullum par elogium_!

Two days after, the will of Pius IX. was opened by the cardinal-chamberlain in the presence of the relatives. It was written with his own hand, and dated in the year 1875. A few codicils were added since that date. He bequeathed 100,000 francs to the poor of Rome. He always loved them, and it was to perpetuate the memory of that love that a subscription was immediately opened after his death by the Italian Catholic journals, under the title of “Pius IX. Eternal in charity.” To this end, by the advice of the cardinal-vicar of Rome, a sumptuous church will be erected on the Esquiline, and dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Conception. Side by side with the church will rise up two extensive asylums for the poor, old and young, of both sexes.

THE CONCLAVE.

The funeral services performed by the Sacred College of Cardinals began in the Sistine Chapel on Friday morning, the 15th. They were attended by the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, by the Roman nobility, and persons of distinction who received invitations. A wish was expressed indirectly by the King of Italy to be present. The cardinal chamberlain took no notice of this indirect wish. The obsequies lasted for three days. After each service the Sacred College gave a reception to the diplomatic personages in the Hall of the Consistory. Pending these events, the preparations for the conclave were completed. The story of the Vatican above the apartments of the Holy Father was divided off into little cells for the cardinals and their attendants. The windows outside were covered with gratings, and the court of St. Damasus entirely walled up to prevent any communication with the outer world. Physicians, an apothecary, barbers, cooks, and bakers, were appointed. On Monday morning, the 18th, the Mass of the Holy Ghost was celebrated in the Pauline Chapel by Cardinal Schwarzenberg. All the cardinals and officers of the conclave were in attendance. The diplomatic corps assisted in stalls allotted to them. A Latin oration _De eligendo Summo Pontifice_ was read after the Mass by the Secretary of Briefs. This might be termed the formal inauguration of the conclave. At half-past four of the same evening the cardinals all, of the Holy Roman Church, with but three exceptions—their Eminences Cullen, McCloskey, and Paya y Rico—assembled in the Pauline Chapel, whence, having recited the usual prayers, they proceeded in procession to the Sistine Chapel, singing the _Veni Creator Spiritus_. There the sub-dean of the Sacred College, Cardinal di Pietro, read the Papal Constitutions on Conclaves, after all but the cardinals had been invited to withdraw. The reading of the constitutions was followed by a solemn oath, pronounced by the cardinals in a body, to observe them faithfully. This oath had previously been sworn in the presence of the cardinal-chamberlain, Pecci, by the patriarchs, archbishops, and auditors of the Rota, who were to mount guard at the cells of the cardinals to prevent their communicating each with the other. The marshal of the conclave, Prince Chigi, had also been sworn. The doors of the chapel were then opened, a cleric took up the processional cross, reversing the figure toward the cardinals, who followed, each one accompanied by a Noble Guard, and all entered the precincts of the conclave. Each cardinal entered the cell which had fallen to him by lot. That night, in company with the cardinal-chamberlain, and the deans of the three cardinalitial orders, and the apostolic prothonotaries, the marshal made a formal visitation of the cells and precincts of the conclave, after which the chamberlain consigned to him a purse containing the keys, and, with the other cardinals, retired to his cell. The doors of the cells and the general entrance of the conclave were locked, and a formal document attesting the operation was read and subscribed to. The reign of silence and communion with the Paraclete began. Pending the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, let us glance at the world outside.

ROME DURING THE CONCLAVE.

In deference to the conclave the government postponed the opening of Parliament until the 7th of March. Whether this was done from a sense of genuine reverence for so sacred and imposing an assembly, or with a view of showing their loyalty to the Law of the Guarantees, is not definitely known. But the fact aroused the indignation of the radicals. They at once proposed to organize a mass meeting of disapproval of the Guarantees, and, accordingly, demanded the required permission from the Minister of the Interior. He refused it. _Inde ira_. As may be supposed, speculations were rife in all circles as to the future Pontiff. It was hoped, and asserted pretty generally, that Cardinal Pecci would be elected. It was _feared_ by all Italians, liberals, conciliators, and non-compromittals, that Cardinal Manning, who is exceedingly unpopular in radical Italy, would, through some unexpected combination of circumstances, come out of the conclave a pontiff. It was reported that the Sacred College itself was divided into three parties—the conciliating, of which Cardinal di Canossa was supposed to be the exponent and hope; the extreme rigorists, of whom the favorite was the young Cardinal Parocchi, of Bologna; and the _statu-quoists_, represented by Cardinals Bilio and Simeoni.

On Tuesday, the 19th of February, an immense concourse of people, assembled in the Square of St. Peter’s, witnessed the traditional _sfumata_, or smoke, rising from a particular chimney of the Vatican, which signalized the burning of the votes at the first scrutiny in the Sistine Chapel. This meant no election. It has been ascertained since that Cardinal Franchi’s name was called out twenty times at that verification. On the following day, the memorable 20th, at half-past twelve p.m., the smoke again arose over the Vatican, and the multitude began to move away towards the Bridge of St. Angelo. Comparatively few people remained. But about an hour after they observed the window of the great balcony of St. Peter’s to open. An acolyte appeared bearing a cross, and then Cardinal Caterini, who, from old age, infirmities, and the emotion of the moment, could scarcely make himself heard to the following effect: _“Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam Eminentissimum et Reverendissimum Dominum Pecci, qui sibi nomen imposuit_

“_LEONIS DECIMI TERTII!_”

This announcement was received with cheers in the square below. The great bell of the basilica began to ring joyously, and every bell in the Eternal City re-echoed the glad news to the people, and hurried them in haste to St. Peter’s. Let us go back an hour in our narrative. The votes were counted at noon, and the name of Cardinal Pecci was read aloud _forty-four_ times, thus giving him the two-thirds majority required for election. The sub-dean of the Sacred College then opened the door of the chapel and ushered in the master of ceremonies. With the assistance of others, he lowered all the canopies which covered the seats of the cardinals, with the exception of number _nine_ on the gospel side of the altar. The sub-dean of the Sacred College, accompanied by Cardinals Schwarzenberg and Caterini, approached his Eminence Cardinal Pecci, and asked him if he accepted the election: “_Acceptasne electionem in Summum Pontificem?_” He replied that, albeit unworthy of the great charge, he would submit to the will of God. The sub-dean continued: “_Quomodo vis vocari?_” “_Leo Decimus Tertius_” was the reply. He was then conducted into the sacristy by two cardinal-deacons, Mertel and Consolini, and attired in the white cassock, red slippers bearing the cross, the rochet, red cope, stole, and white cap of the Sovereign Pontiff. Returning to the chapel, he received the homage of the Sacred College, after which Cardinal Schwarzenberg, just nominated pro-chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, placed upon his finger the Fisherman’s ring. The Pope immediately retired to his cell. The cardinals followed his example.

Meanwhile, the people had assembled in great numbers in the square and in the basilica, awaiting the appearance of His Holiness. It was not known whether he would give his blessing from the outer or the inner balcony of the temple. The traditional place was outside. Consequently, on the appearance of any one at the window of either balcony, there was a precipitous rush of the people in that direction. The noise in the basilica was like the roar of a storm-tossed sea. At last—it was half-past four o’clock—two prelates opened the window of the balcony which looks into the church, and hung over the railing some red bunting. Soon after the anthem _Ecce sacerdos magnus_ was heard, and then a powerful, robust voice, _Sit nomen Domini benedictum_. It reminded people of another voice which erst rang out benedictions with the clearness of a trumpet from the outer balcony. But the figure which now appeared was tall, spare, yet imposing, and the features, worn and wan with rigid austerities, were lit up by large, brilliant orbs, that beamed gladly on the excited people below. When he had pronounced the trinal blessing in a firm voice, a great, deafening cheer arose, startling the dormant echoes of the vast edifice, and sending them quivering from nave to transept, and thence aloft into the gigantic dome itself. Again and again did the _evvivas_ burst forth from every lip, and high, unmistakably pronounced above them all rang out the Saxon _hurrah_! Every difference, political and religious, was forgotten in that moment of joy. Jew from Ghetto, deputy from hostile Parliament, officer and private of invading army, dissenting Anglican from Albion, and downright, practical American joined in the shout of _Viva il Papa! Viva Leone!_ His Holiness stood for a moment gazing on the enthusiastic multitude, then motioned with his hands, as if to deprecate any demonstration, and moved away. He did not appear at the outer balcony. We forbear putting any construction on this circumstance. The conclave was opened formally in the evening by the marshal, and the cardinals retired at nightfall to their homes. The new Pontiff moved to his apartments, and the attendants read in the severe lines of thought which had settled on his brow that he wished to remain alone for the night.

Glad words of congratulation are exchanged in all circles throughout the city, and a universal, spontaneous confidence has sprung into existence; for the man who has just blessed the Catholic world as its father is pious, learned, and very severity itself in firmness.

The Church is no longer a widow.

Footnote 40:

The Roman Correspondent of the London _Tablet_, February 23, denies the truth of this “project” so far as Cardinal Manning is concerned.—ED. C. W.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

NEW IRELAND. By A. M. Sullivan, Member of Parliament for Louth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.

Mr. Sullivan has invented for his country a new name that is pregnant with meaning and significance. At least, the name is new to us, and it represents a great fact. The old Ireland, the land of confiscation and bitter penury, of enforced ignorance and compulsory poverty, of chronic revolution and periodical famine, the exercise-ground of political proscription and religious persecution, is passing away under our eyes. A new Ireland is indeed springing up in its place—by no means a land as yet flowing with milk and honey, and stripped of all that cumbered it and darkened its life before, but a land full of hopeful possibilities for all good in itself and for good to its neighbors and the world at large.

It was less to describe this hopeful and bright land, whose day has not yet come, but whose morning we see dawning in the east, than to set forth in a clear light the stages that led up to it, that, we take it, induced Mr. Sullivan to write his brilliant, most interesting, and valuable book, which, perhaps, no pen but his could have written, or at least written so well, with its series of graphic pictures, its passionate reasoning, flecked with the gayest humor and most mournful pathos. It is in itself an epitome of the Irish character, with a notable improvement. The despairing courage of a “forlorn hope” that marked such writings in the past has yielded here to a resolute and practical purpose, which of all things is the most striking and hopeful sign of a really new Ireland.

Ireland as it stands to-day presents a problem of the deepest interest not only to a thinking Christian man, but also to the student of political history. It, of all nations and peoples, has resolutely refused to follow after the _ignis fatuus_ of the revolutionary spirit of the age. This it has done in the face of the most pressing incentives to join hands with the agents of social and political disorder. From the first day of English rule in Ireland that country has been, perhaps, _the_ worst-governed country in the world; and this ill-government is only _beginning_ at last to cease. No better soil could have been offered as a battle-ground for the agents of evil. Yet, owing chiefly to the essentially conservative and Christian character of the Irish race, informed and strengthened by a true conception and grasp of the religion of Jesus Christ, the Irish people, as a people, has steadfastly refused to achieve right by doing wrong. For this the English government has to thank that religion which it was its avowed and persistent purpose to root out of the Irish heart, in which most wicked and revolting purpose it would certainly have succeeded long ago, were not God more powerful than all the force and machinations of man, inspired and guided by the spirit of evil. Ireland has at last shaken off some of the strongest chains that bound her, a bleeding nation, to her own earth; and she has succeeded in doing this by a persistent adherence to the right. She would not die, because Heaven made her immortal, and because the principle of immortality was grafted deep in her soul by an Almighty hand. She would not live at a gift; she would not accept a false life at a sacrifice of principle. She waited and suffered on. Her patience and her constancy, her virtue and her faith, have overcome all things. A new era opens before her. The question of questions is: What will she do with it?

Mr. Sullivan goes back in his narrative fifty years, and gives us the salient measures and movements that have affected the Irish people during that period. The state of education in Ireland fifty years ago, “O’Connell and Repeal,” “The Ribbon Confederacy,” Father Mathew and the temperance movement, the famine in “the black forty-seven,” the “Young Ireland” movement, agrarian crime and its causes, the land question, the “Tenant League” party, the “Phœnix” conspiracy, the Fenian movement, the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the “Home-Rule” movement—these form the chief headings of Mr. Sullivan’s chapters. They are all worthy of study, and must be studied in order to get a right view of the actual state of Ireland—not under the Tudors or the Stuarts or Cromwell, but here and now, within the knowledge of most of us. Much of what Mr. Sullivan has written was already sufficiently well known. It was well, however, to link all of these together, to weave them into a continuous narrative, and show how singularly one played into the other, how necessarily one was a sequel of the other, until the story is laid down at our own doors. We are thus enabled to see how this series of catastrophes, acting, apparently, independently of each other, wrought up secretly to the whole that is before us. The awful shocks that moved the nation, now this way and now that; that tossed it up as by a volcanic eruption; that shattered it and cast it to the ground as though by the convulsion of an earthquake, senseless and bleeding, and bereft of life; the storms that devastated it; the famine that decimated it—all were instruments of Heaven rudely, to all seeming, but surely working to a great end. Or, if the political philosophers prefer it, they were mighty and gigantic social and political forces working through the dark up and into freedom and light. They made Ireland a spectacle to the nations; they scattered her children over the world, bearing their crying wrongs to all lands; they welded together those who were left at home into a hard and compact mass; they shocked and shamed the power that was chiefly answerable for them into a sense of dawning justice. It was in such throes as these that the new Ireland had its birth.

It seems to us that never before was Ireland so well fitted to play a large part in history as it is to-day. It is now, to a great extent, certainly it is in the right way of being, its own master, its own law-giver, its own educator, its own priest. It has grasped the realities of political life and political power. These it has in its hands, and we do not well see how they can be taken from it. This fact ought to smother any smouldering fires of revolution that may be left, and it will smother them effectually, if the English legislature, as seems to us likely, can only rise to the fact that the best cure for discontent is to remove the discontent by removing its cause. We do not say that Ireland will leap at once into full national life, prosperity, and social happiness. That, even in a far from complete state, must be a work of time, and care, and struggle, not alone to the Irish but to all peoples. The Irish, however, have now in their own hands the adequate means of national representation; and this, it seems to us, is the great first step towards a true national life. Whether in after-years that life will have its centre in London or in Dublin seems to us a question hardly worth discussing just now. We like to take hold of actual facts and shape the future out of them. At present Ireland is represented in the English Parliament by a strong, resolute, and able body of Irishmen. These men may not be collectively or individually the ideals of political wisdom and sagacity. They may not have any great leader among them. They may be a little new in their harness yet. But their power, as a united body, is very great and undeniable, and it can be constantly exercised and increased. To expect that in a session or two they are going to wring from the English government repeal of the Union, or total separation, or even one-tenth part of the measures that Ireland needs in order to secure such prosperity as she has, or to advance it, or to do away with crying and cruel evils now existing, is to expect altogether too much. It is like expecting a city to be built in a day because some of the chief artisans and implements and material for the building are already on the ground.

Great and grave and manifold grievances still exist in Ireland. Steadfastness and patience and right political representation must succeed in removing these in time. Great dangers also threaten the country, not the least of which is the very freedom to which it is at last rising. The hardest problem in regard to freedom is to use it wisely and well. It would be a sad thing for the Irish people if on the altar of a new-found freedom they sacrificed their grand old conservative spirit, their deep sense of the supernatural, their reverence for the church and the things of God. For them to drift into the liberalism of the age would be to destroy them. They have gained what they now possess by having been steadfast Catholics and steadfast Irishmen. Let them so continue. We rejoice at the growing sympathy in political and social life between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. There is no harm in that; on the contrary, it is a great good. But to pass beyond that in matters vital to the faith would be wrong. To renounce, for instance, the right principles of education would be wrong. Let the Protestants go their way in all freedom, security, and peace, but let the Catholics also hold to their way, and insist on it.

Mr. Sullivan is least satisfactory in a point on which we are most deeply interested—the actual position of Ireland to-day, in its industries, its mode of life, its social condition, its educational status, its income, its outlay, how money circulates in the country, how the people are housed, fed, and clothed, compared with former years. These are matters on which, of all things, we desire as full and accurate information as could be obtained, for they are the outward and most visible signs of a people’s progress. Indeed, they are practically the only gauge by which to measure the actuality of that progress. But on this subject Mr. Sullivan gives us only a few rather hesitating words in his last chapter, with the consoling assurance that, “despite all disaster and difficulty, Ireland is marching on.” This is a very serious defect in a work dealing with “New Ireland,” and to remedy it we have applied to another quarter, as seen in the preliminary article on “Ireland in 1878” (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, March, 1878). This will be followed by others on the same subject, taking up just the matters which Mr. Sullivan has allowed to escape him.

With this exception, we heartily congratulate the author on his latest volume. He is himself one of the political chieftains who has nobly helped to make a new Ireland. He is a very able and ready man, whose value was at once recognized in the English Parliament, and whose services to his country and to the party which he materially helped to form have been of the most marked and important character. His life has been an honorable one, and he has well earned the fame that now attends him. No man who looks hopefully to the new Ireland can help following with sympathy and interest the future career of A. M. Sullivan.

DE ECCLESIA ET CATHEDRA; or, The Empire-Church of Jesus Christ. An epistle by the Hon. Colin Lindsay. Vols. i. and ii. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)

Mr. Lindsay, who is a Scottish convert of some ten years’ standing, and was formerly one of the principal lay-leaders in the ritualistic party, has already won a high reputation by a valuable work on St. Peter’s Primacy. The present one is original in its conception and different from any other on the same subject in its method of treating the topics indicated by the title. The grand principles and laws of the church and the Papacy are considered in their universal character as forming the ground-plan of the government of divine Providence over the human race from the beginning. It has a wide historical sweep, and embodies a great mass of solid learning and sound reasoning. The author is sometimes fanciful in his theories and occasionally deficient in theological accuracy of expression, as well as in his style and construction of sentences. These are but faults of minor importance, however, not seriously detracting from the great merits of his most interesting and instructive work. It is quite in the same line of argument with the articles on Historical Christianity we have lately published, and those who are interested in that important and very attractive aspect of religion will find the greatest profit and pleasure in perusing it. One most valuable and quite novel portion of the author’s exposition of the apostolic and divine institution of the Papal Supremacy, is his application of the principle of reserve contained in the discipline of the secret to the particular doctrine in question, as explaining the guarded and reticent manner in which the sacred writers and the early Fathers speak of those high prerogatives of the Christian hierarchy and its chief, which would give umbrage to the Jewish priesthood and the Roman emperors. Full justice could not be done to Mr. Lindsay’s comprehensive and elaborate production without making a long and careful analysis and review of his positions and his manner of supporting them. We trust many of our readers will gain a much better knowledge of its contents than we could possibly give them in this way, by making a careful study of the work itself. It contains a complete historical demonstration of that which we think will soon be as universally admitted as any other great fact of undisputed history—that Catholicity and Christianity are identical and convertible terms, and that ancient and modern Catholicity are one and the same identity in respect to all which pertains to their essence and integrity as the one, universal religion, whose continuity has remained unbroken since the creation, and is destined to be coeval with the world.

THE NABOB. From the French of Alphonse Daudet, author of _Sidonie, Jack_, etc. By Lucy H. Hooper. Author’s edition. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1878.

_Sidonie_ and _Jack_ have been briefly noticed in these columns. _The Nabob_ is a large advance upon either. Possessing all the characteristics that individualized those stories, it is larger in scope, firmer in touch, fuller in character, more vigorous and finished in execution. As far as writing, plot, and development go, it is a very remarkable book. We must say of it, however, as we said of its predecessors, it is not a pleasant story. There is a kind of hot-house effect about it, a forced process, so to say, that, while fascinating for the moment, is not natural and healthy. We breathe in an overcharged atmosphere. There is any quantity of intoxicating odors, of lights and flowers, and soft music and rich costumes and beautiful faces. But the light is not the blessed sunlight; the odors and flowers oppress us with their heaviness like those around a bier; the beautiful faces are painted, and we sigh for something fresh and free, even if it be not half so elegant or well “made up.” There is from the beginning a brooding sense of a storm coming, and the storm comes with awful and repulsive vehemence.

Doubtless the author meant to produce just such an effect and to achieve just such a result. If this were his chief intention he is to be congratulated on his success. He has given a highly dramatic story—melodramatic, in fact. There is wit enough and humor enough throughout; but even the wit is biting and the humor sour. The laughter has the sardonic tone of Mephistopheles, and an honest man shivers a little even while he joins in it. Every scene fits with niceness; the curtain always falls on a strong situation; there is not a dull incident throughout; and if nearly everybody in whom you have been interested gets murdered, or destroyed, or run away with, or debauched at the end, what will you have? A melodrama is a melodrama, and Paris is its paradise.

_The Nabob_ is a story of Parisian life, as Parisian life is popularly supposed to have been when Napoleon III. was the arbiter of Europe and Paris Europe’s capital—a capital, if the novelists are to be believed, of political, social, literary, scientific, and moral charlatanism. Doubtless this is true to a great extent; for the leader of it all had, unfortunately for France and himself, much of the charlatan in his disposition. There is everything there but honesty and purity; or if honesty and purity there be, they are kept severely in the background. Their garb is too homely, their faces are too fresh, for this garish light and exotic atmosphere. They are out of place in this fashionable dance of death, as we say here the scholar and the gentleman are out of politics. There is a wonderful duke and statesman—De Mora—whose habit is to give a bored half-glance to the affairs of France, and the rest of his time to dilettanteism and _amours_, looking all the while to a quack doctor’s globules to keep his eyes bright, his step elastic, and his nerves steady enough for an evening party. There is a sculptor—Felicia Ruys—full of the noblest aspirations, but whose bringing up has been bad. She has been among Bohemians from her infancy, and she is left alone among them, under the care of an old aunt, a famous dancer in her day, whose wonderful toes had turned the crowned heads of Europe. Felicia’s noble nature finds itself bound in by an iron barrier of wickedness. She is surrounded always by a vicious circle from which she sees no outlet or escape. Is it so wonderful that she mistakes her narrow circle for the universe, and sees nothing but wickedness in all the world? How many do this in real life!

There is the wonderful Nabob himself, risen from nowhere, to whom one of the strange turns of Fortune’s wheel sent a fabulous fortune gathered by his own hard and not too scrupulous hands in Algeria. He is ignorant, vulgar, low, without any very strong moral sense, but with a really kind and good heart: he goes to Paris with his millions, and his millions conquer Paris—as long as they last. All the charlatans circle around him. He is a rich man; he wants now to be a great and a distinguished man; and it is truly wonderful to see how many kind friends spring up to make this rich man great and distinguished in a day. Even the Duke de Mora condescends to sell him his cast-off pictures at ducal prices; the illustrious and philanthropic Dr. Jenkins—Jenkins the great—feeds him on his globules at fees that are fortunes; Felicia Ruys makes a bust of him, and would have married him only that he is stupid enough to have been burdened with a wife; Moessard, one of the vampires of the press, writes the Nabob up, and, when the Nabob at last closes his pocket, writes the Nabob down. And so they go on all of them, in a whirl of gold-dust and pearl-powder and moral filth that is their world until they are swept out, each in his or her way, on the strong eddy that is for ever noiselessly, silently, relentlessly sweeping off human lives into the vast and eternal hereafter.

Alphonse Daudet has all the gifts that a powerful novelist needs, and has cultivated them to the highest degree. He writes with that passionless tone of an intense but calm observer who sees things as they are, and sees deeper and farther than other men, and paints his picture with pitiless truth. He misses nothing that can add even incidental effect to the firm yet delicate stroke of his pencil. He writes with that apparent effortless ease which is really the result of the strongest effort in a man who is perfectly master of his work. He has even, we believe, that highest quality—a moral purpose in what he writes. But though he sees virtue and the possibilities of virtue even in his Paris, vice seems too strong for it and always to get the best of the bargain, even if in the end it goes out in darkness, disaster, and despair. This undertone of despair of the good is principally what imparts so unhealthy and morbid an air to his stories. Thackeray pictured bad enough people, and with an awful accuracy. But the devil never had it all his own way in Thackeray’s stories, as he has not in real life. He invariably came out of the fight with his tail between his legs, very limp and woe-begone, and in a disgraceful condition generally. There was rude health and pure blood in all Thackeray’s stories strongly set off against the other side. If M. Daudet could only muster moral pluck enough to make his virtuous people a little more robust and aggressive—and there are plenty of such virtuous people in Paris—his stories would gain rather than lose in tone and make much more pleasant reading than they do at present. After all, we tire of a crowd of “awfully wicked” people, going through all their wickedness for our special edification and instruction.

Miss Hooper’s translation is excellent.

THE CHURCH AND THE GENTILE WORLD AT THE FIRST PROMULGATION OF THE GOSPEL. Considerations on the Catholicity of the Church soon after her Birth. By the Rev. Aug. J. Thébaud, S.J. Vol. I. New York: Peter F. Collier. 1878.

We can do no more now than acknowledge the receipt of advance sheets of this first volume of a work that promises to be one of great value and importance. Father Thébaud needs no introduction to our readers. He is known to them as a man of wide and accurate knowledge, keen observation, and deep thought. These qualities are not conceded to him idly and for the sake of saying something graceful. They are too rare in these days, and are still more rarely found united in one person. Nothing, then, that comes from the pen of this learned Jesuit can be thought unworthy of careful attention by an intelligent Catholic reader. The title of the present volume gives some indication of the scope and aim of the work. These are still further set forth in the following words, which we quote from the preface:

“Her (the church’s) expansion took place instantaneously, as soon as the apostles began to preach. Thenceforth her universal sway on earth began, never to end until the last day, when she will be transferred to heaven. The whole world at the time was comprised in the three old continents. It is doubtful if there were already on this western hemisphere any of the nations which were found in it when it was discovered by Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century.... The church, therefore, became at once universal if she filled the greatest part of the old world, and subdued the chief nations that inhabited it. It can be proved at this time that her conquests in Asia went much further than was for a long time believed, and that she was rapidly spreading toward the Eastern ocean when Moslem fanaticism arrested her in her career. A like result follows an attentive study of her early progress in the interior of Africa. Of Europe all concede that she rapidly attained the leadership, and that she was afterwards mainly instrumental in giving birth to European civilization.

“But what renders more attractive the detail of all these considerations is the enumeration of the obstacles she had to surmount in so arduous a task as this. The main one was not only the natural opposition between the leanings of corrupt human nature and the doctrines of the Gospel, but in particular the extreme dissimilarities existing between the various races of man—dissimilarities in aptitudes, in thoughts and ideas, in language and manners, but especially in religion and worship. For the Gospel of Christ was preached not only at a time of a high civilization, but also of great corruption and religious disintegration. The primitive traditions of mankind were then nearly all forgotten; the pure religion and morality which existed at first had given place to the most degrading polytheism; and, worse yet, this polytheism had lost all the homogeneity it may have possessed formerly in many countries, and had become a mere jumble of absurd superstitions.

“This is, in a few words, the portraiture of humanity which met the apostles at every step, and which must be examined in detail to understand the difficulty of their task.”

We defer to a later number the criticism which a work of this kind demands.

THE VATICAN LIBRARY. New York: Hickey & Co. 1878.

The “Vatican Library” has been started by Mr. P. V. Hickey, the active and enterprising editor of the _Catholic Review_, with the aim of supplying the general Catholic public with the best Catholic works in the cheapest possible form. Such an object is on the face of it its own best recommendation. Two volumes from the “Library” have already reached us: a twenty-five-cent edition of Cardinal Wiseman’s beautiful story of _Fabiola_, one of those stories that is destined never to grow old, and an original story (price ten cents) entitled _The Australian Duke_. The latter we have not yet had an opportunity of examining. Both volumes are handsomely produced—very much more so, indeed, than many far more costly books. Quite a series is promised of “cheap, amusing, entertaining, and instructive Catholic literature.”

An attempt of this kind, seriously undertaken, and not in a haphazard fashion, cannot be too highly commended. Whatever tends to cheapen Catholic books—books, that is, that are really Catholic—and spread them abroad among the people is a good and noble work. More harm is probably done by cheap literature in these days than by any other means. The readiest and most effectual antidote to this universal literary poison is undoubtedly a literature such as the projectors of the “Vatican Library” aim at supplying. But they cannot work alone. Generous and earnest Catholics must help them generously and earnestly. It goes without saying that the attempt must prove a failure unless it is seconded on all sides. The purchase of a single copy of a ten cent book will not help the publishers very materially. The books are chiefly intended for those who have the will to read but not the means to purchase. In such a case it is for those who have the means to come forward and help their poorer brethren all they can by placing in their hands books that cost next to nothing, yet are in themselves a long delight and unceasing source of sound instruction.

LEO XIII. AND HIS PROBABLE POLICY. By Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, D. D. New York: Peter F. Collier. 1878.

This little biographical sketch of ninety-six pages has for title on the cover, “Who is the new Pope? and What is He Likely to Do?” As to who the new Pope is, Dr. O’Reilly gives a pleasing and picturesque sketch of him whom it has pleased Providence to call to the highest dignity in the church and on earth. The personal familiarity of the author with the scenes where the present Pontiff passed his early youth and strong and vigorous manhood add value to the charm of a brisk and stirring narrative. Those who wish to know the character of Leo XIII., what manner of man he is, and how he passed his life previous to being summoned to sit in the chair of Peter, will find Dr. O’Reilly’s sketch by far the best of any that we have thus far seen. Speculations as to the future policy of the Pontiff can hardly prove very satisfactory just yet. It may be as well for impatient men to wait a little, and not attempt to forestall the Holy Father. What his future policy may be can only be made plain by his own words and acts. He has thus far spoken very little and done very little. Indeed, he has scarcely had time to do either one or the other. His position is one where the most extreme caution and circumspection are needed, and it augurs well for his future “policy” that he is so very slow to declare any policy at all. The present state of Europe hardly admits of a hard-and-fast line of “policy” to be drawn by any one. It is enough for us to know that the church is safe in whatever hands it falls, so far as regards the deposit of faith. For the rest, the march of circumstance must greatly influence the actions of the supreme head of the church. Prayer is rather needed at this crisis than advice. These observations are not at all intended disparagingly of Dr. O’Reilly’s interesting _brochure_, but of a well-meant tendency manifesting itself, among our non-Catholic friends chiefly, to map out beforehand a convenient little policy for Leo XIII. which shall make everybody happy here and hereafter.

A FEW OF THE SAYINGS AND PRAYERS OF THE FOUNDRESS OF THE SISTERS OF MERCY. Edited by a member of the order, authoress of _Catherine McAuley, Venerable Hofoauer_, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.

A beautiful little book made up of beautiful maxims and prayers. Such a gem will, we are sure, meet with a welcome reception by religious of all orders. Its reading will also benefit those who are not religious.

“GHOSTS.” Father Walworth’s Reply to Robert G. Ingersoll. A Lecture delivered at St. Mary’s Church, Albany, Jan. 20, 1878. Albany: _Times_ Company Print.

THE HISTORY OF JOHN TOBY’S CONVERSION. With his Views on Temperance, the Liquor Trade, and the Excise Law. A Lecture by the Rev. C. A. Walworth. Albany News Company. 1878.

These are two excellent lectures, deserving of a wide circulation. The first is a plain, common-sense yet effectual and eloquent reply to a lecture by Mr. Ingersoll, who has recently gained some notoriety as a preacher of a very “cheap” and very “nasty” form of infidelity. Father Walworth’s is just the kind of argument to apply to men of average intelligence who are as open to the teachings of truth, when plainly presented to them, as they are apt to be carried away by a bold assault of scoffing infidelity. The lecture is a straightforward, manly, matter-of-fact defence of religion as against no-religion, none the less effective and thorough because the lecturer has contrived to conceal under the guise of a popular form of address the wide knowledge and learning which give its inherent force to what he says. Mr. Ingersoll ought to feel peculiarly flattered at being answered by a gentleman and a man of real power and culture.

The second lecture is the story, very tenderly and charmingly told, of a drunkard’s conversion. It brims over with real humor and flashes with “palpable hits”; while there is a touch here and there of pathos that brings tears to the eyes, and that could only be the outcome of a tender heart that loves its fellows and sorrows over the woes for which their vice and folly are chiefly answerable.

ST. JOSEPH’S MANUAL: Containing a selection of Prayers for Public and Private Devotion. With Epistles and Gospels for Sundays and Holydays. Compiled from approved sources. By Rev. James Fitton. Boston: Thomas B. Noonan & Co. 1877.

This is an old friend with a new and very pleasing face. The _St. Joseph’s Manual_, compiled by the skilful hand of Father Fitton, has long been, and is likely to continue long to be, a favorite prayer-book with Catholics. It is formed on an intelligent plan. It is a book of wise instruction as well as devotion. The first seventy pages are devoted to a clear and sound exposition of Catholic doctrine and practice. With regard to this valuable portion of the book we would offer two suggestions for future editions: 1. The English here and there would be better for a little trimming; 2. A special chapter on the dogma of Papal Infallibility, which might be made brief and concise as the rest, would do no harm. For the rest, the volume is everything that could be desired. It contains over eight hundred pages, printed in a large, clear type very grateful to the eye. The illustrations are, without exception, excellent. Indeed, the whole work reflects real credit on the publishers.

CANTUS ECCLESIASTICUS PASSIONIS D. N. JESU CHRISTI, secundum Matthæum, Marcum, Lucam et Joannem, editus sub auspiciis Sanctissimi Domini nostri Pii Papæ IX., curante Sacrorum Rituum Congregatione. Fasciculi III. Chronista, Christus, Synagoga. MDCCCLXXVII. Ratisbonæ, Neo Eboraci et Cincinnatii sumptibus, chartis et typis Frederici Pustet, S. Sedis Apost. et Sacr. Rit. Cong. Typographi.

These three superb volumes exhibit the same elegance and taste in composition that mark all the ritual and choral works edited by Mr. Pustet, and for which his house has earned a so deservedly high reputation. Besides the chant of the Passion as appointed for Palm Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Good Friday of the Holy Week, the second volume contains a form of chant for the _Lamentations_, and the third volume the chant of the _Exultet_.

THE WAY OF THE CROSS. Drawn by N. H. J. Westlake, F.S.A. With a letter of approbation by His Eminence Cardinal Manning. Devotions by St. Alphonsus Liguori. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1878.

A very beautiful little volume, whose title explains itself. It is brought out in a tasteful and convenient form, and is admirably adapted for the Lenten season. The name of Mr. Westlake is sufficient guarantee for the superiority of the drawings.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXVII., No. 158.—MAY, 1878.

THE DESTINY OF MAN IN A FUTURE LIFE.

Doctrine and speculation concerning the destiny of man in that future which follows the termination of his earthly life, have always held a most important place in all religions and systems of philosophy. Nothing interests the human mind so much, when it escapes in any degree from the spell of present, sensible preoccupations, and is awakened to the sentiment of its own perennial nature and duration. The recent agitation of the public mind in England and the United States concerning retribution in a future life has shown how universal and deeply seated is the anxiety to know what lies beyond the veil which separates the period of existence on this side, from the endless duration on the other side, of the common grave into which all human generations descend. The question of eternal punishment has occupied the pulpits and the press, as the one most deeply disturbing the general mind of that great mass of men whose traditions and beliefs are derived from Christianity, although they are themselves actually separated from the great Christian body, the Catholic Church. That which strikes the mind of an instructed Catholic most forcibly in all this discussion is the want of clear and settled principles in philosophy and theology, the lack of the requisite premises and data, the absence of any sure criterion for deducing certain conclusions, testing and determining doctrines and opinions. The controversy seems to be interminable, for all those who have no lawful and unerring external criterion in authority. And it really is so. For this reason, we regard it as the only practicable way for a Catholic to take in treating of this subject, that he should present the doctrine of revelation as defined and declared by the church; and resort to reason and the Holy Scripture, only to refute objections to the Catholic doctrine from these sources, and to present corroborative proofs and explanations, in so far as these can be found and their validity as certain or probable established.

We do not propose to discuss directly the subject of the reality and the nature of eternal punishment. There is a previous question respecting the destiny for which man was originally created, upon which depends the whole solution of the subsequent one concerning the necessity or contingency of its attainment. We must know what this destiny is, and what are the means ordained by the Creator for securing its fulfilment, before we can know whether there is a danger of final and irretrievable failure on the part of those who are placed in the way of attaining their end, involved in the very nature of these means.

In plain words, is there a heaven for man hereafter, and what is the way to obtain it? The doctrine of hell is the shadow of the doctrine of heaven, and follows it necessarily, when it is rightly presented.

The idea of heaven is that of a state of endless and perfect beatitude, in the possession of the sovereign good, and of every kind of inferior good suited to the nature of man. This idea is absolutely incompatible with every form of atheism, which does not acknowledge the existence of the sovereign good. It is entirely above the scope of philosophy and natural theology. For, although God, the sovereign and infinite good, is manifested by the light of reason, as the first and final cause of all things, the light of reason does not disclose the possibility of a light intrinsically superior to the natural light, by which the created spirit can see God in his essence, and thus obtain the sovereign good as its own proper possession. Much less can it discover any reason why man should be regarded as destined to such an elevation above his own natural mode of knowledge. The utmost that can be proved by pure philosophy is the possibility of a perfect and permanent state, in which the ideal of humanity only partially realized in this life is brought into complete and actual existence. It is certainly most consonant with the dictates of sound reason to expect that God will bring all reasonable creatures to a state of permanent felicity, unless they voluntarily thwart his benevolent purposes. But it does not seem possible to determine with certainty whether this benevolent will of God determines him to put an end to all moral and physical evil in the universe or not, from arguments of pure reason. The whole subject of the existence of evil must remain covered with obscurity, so long as it is considered in the light of mere rational philosophy. It is only by the light of divine revelation that the dealings of God with the human race become intelligible, and we are able even to reason about the future destiny of man in a satisfactory manner. Even those who profess to be guided by this light, if they follow the rule of private judgment, fail to obtain clear and consistent ideas. The proper idea of the heaven for which men were created, if not lost, is obscured in the minds of the greater part of those who profess to be Christian believers and yet reject the authority of the Catholic Church. All other doctrines connected with this fundamental one are similarly obscured and perverted, rendering the theology which rests on them absurd or inadequate.

It is supernatural beatitude which the revelation of God proposed by the Catholic Church discloses to faith as the end for which man was created. By its very essence and definition it is infinitely beyond and above the end which human nature spontaneously aspires to attain, in which it finds the perfection and scope corresponding to its essence and its capabilities. To attain this end it needs grace, or a supernatural mode of being and acting, elevation above every nature excepting only the divine, transformation, and, in a sense, deification. Such a destiny for a mere creature, especially one which is lowest in the intellectual order, would be inconceivable, and incredible, unless explicitly revealed by God. Even when it is made known by revelation, its intrinsic possibility cannot be apprehended or proved by reason. It is one of the mysteries which is above reason, and the utmost we can do by a rational argument is to prove that it has been revealed by God, and therefore rationally demands our assent to its truth because of the divine veracity. We can, however, by a rational argument, prove that such an elevation of a created nature must necessarily be supernatural and cannot be effected by any evolution of a natural capacity, or expansion of the intrinsic being even of a pure spirit, although it were to increase in intelligence by an indefinite progress for ever.

Cognition is a vital act, immanent in the intelligent spirit, determined in perfection by the essence of the spirit itself, and incapable of transcending its limits as a created and finite being. By this act other beings are received into and united with the intelligent being, according to the mode of the recipient; that is, ideally, by a representation through which they are perceived and known as objects in their own proper reality outside of the subject. This representation cannot exceed the capacity of the intelligence which is its active recipient. The idea by which a created spirit receives God into itself and unites itself to him, cannot represent his essence and produce immediate cognition, because the essence of God absolutely and infinitely transcends all genera and species of created beings. The highest angel can perceive no essence which intrinsically transcends his own, and must therefore represent God to himself by and through himself, that is, analogically and by abstractive not intuitive cognition. His intellectual vision is as utterly incompetent to perceive the essence of God, as the sensible vision of man is to see a pure spirit, or his finger to touch the points of an argument. The indefinite increase of the power of sensible vision will never bring it any nearer to spiritual vision, and, in like manner, the indefinite increase of intelligence will never bring it any nearer to divine intuition. The essence of a created spirit is finite and its intellectual light is finite. Its immediate intelligible object is within the limits of its created nature. As the mind of man cannot rise to any natural knowledge of God except by discursive reasoning from first principles on the works of God, that is, by the argument from effects to the first cause, so the purely spiritual being cannot rise above his own intellectual cognition of God as the cause and first principle of his own intelligent nature. It is vain, therefore, to think that it is the grossness of the body, or the body itself, which hinders the human spirit from seeing God. Separated from the body, and elevated to an equality with the highest angel, it could never possess itself of an intelligible object outside of its own supreme genus as a created spirit, outside the limit of created and finite being.

It is evident that all the perfection and felicity of an intelligent being is measured and determined by its intelligence. It possesses the object in which it voluntarily rests as its chief good by cognition, and according to the mode of its cognition. No creature, therefore, by its nature, can rise to that state of immediate communion with God which is properly called friendship, which demands as its basis a similitude and equality resulting from a real filiation, such as the creative act cannot impart to a being brought into existence out of nothingness. The possession of the sovereign good belongs exclusively to the nature of God. To the created nature is due only a participation and imitation of that sovereign good within its own specific and finite limits of being. The heaven in which God eternally dwells in his own infinite beatitude is not therefore the natural term and end of man’s future destiny, nor of the natural destiny of any higher order of creatures. The distance dividing the most perfect beatitude of created nature from that of the uncreated and creative nature is equally infinite with the distance between the essence of God and created essences. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit alone have natural society, each person of the Blessed Trinity with the other persons, in unity of intelligence and volition, in the possession of the divine essence, the sovereign good, the absolute beatitude.

A created spirit cannot be raised to this divine level, unless God so unites his divine essence with the essence of his creature, in an interior and vital union penetrating to its very centre and the seat of its intelligent and vital action, that in the essence of God present to it as immediately as it is present to itself, it sees as through a divine medium that same divine essence as its immediate object, without losing its own proper act and distinct individuality.

That God can and does thus elevate created nature we know by divine revelation. Jesus Christ is true God and true man in two distinct natures and one person for ever. All the blessed in heaven are affiliated to God after his likeness, in an inferior degree which leaves them in their distinct personalities. This state of glory is properly speaking what is called the kingdom of heaven. Annexed to it, as the proper inheritance of those who share in the royalty of the Son of God, is every kind of the most perfect natural beatitude, in the possession and enjoyment of everything which the universe contains, according to the different natures of men and angels.

It is evident, without any reasoning on the subject, that in proposing this supernatural and purely gratuitous beatitude to created beings, God might select whom he pleased as the recipients of so great a grace, and prescribe any conditions which are possible and reasonable for securing its permanent possession. It is perfectly consonant with justice and goodness, that it should be made a prize and reward of merit, and that a state of trial and probation should be appointed for those who were permitted to aspire to this reward. Divine revelation, whose teachings are confirmed by universal experience, makes known to us, that in fact God did place the angels, and afterwards mankind, in a state of probation for this supernatural destiny. A probation must be real and not illusory. It involves the possibility and danger of failure. It must have a prescribed period for each individual and for the whole number. When this period is finished, those who have failed are by the very terms of the probation finally excluded from the hope of retrieving their loss. Divine revelation informs us that the probation of the angels was terminated long ago, and resulted in the winning of eternal beatitude by a certain number and the loss of it by the others. One among the chiefs of the angelic hierarchy rebelled against God and drew after him many other spirits, and with these fallen angels for his ministers and associates, he has continued and will continue on the earth the revolt he began in another sphere, until the day appointed for the final judgment. He has continued it on this earth, by seducing men to join in his rebellion, and making war against Jesus Christ and his kingdom, the universal church. The conditions of human probation are of a very special and peculiar nature, in accordance with the specific nature of mankind, which is extremely different from that of the angels. The angels, as pure spirits and having a simple, intellectual essence, were created singly, and in the actual possession from the first instant of existence of their complete being. Man was made a rational animal, by the law of his nature increasing numerically by generation, and progressing from an inchoate state to his perfection through gradual and successive stages of growth. The first progenitors of the race alone, were immediately created, in full maturity of perfection, and endowed with all the natural and supernatural gifts suitable for their high destination, to be transmitted to their offspring. Their disobedience and fall entailed on themselves and their descendants the loss of the supernatural destiny and of all the gifts and privileges connected with it. Nevertheless, the human race was restored again by another dispensation, which is that of the Redeemer Jesus Christ. All those who receive from him the grace which he merited by his atonement, and do not wilfully and finally reject this grace, obtain in the end a complete resurrection to the glory and beatitude of heaven. The rest of mankind are for ever excluded from the kingdom of heaven. This is a summary of first principles and fundamental truths pertaining to the very essence of Christianity. In so far as the destiny of mankind is concerned, the first constitution of human nature in the person of the common progenitor of the race in the state of grace and integrity, with a right to the kingdom of heaven; the ruin of the whole human race by the sin of Adam; the redemption of the race through Jesus Christ; are the sum of the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, of the traditional doctrine concurrent with it, and of the common belief of all generations of men who have professed to make this doctrine their rule of faith, especially those who have lived in the full light of Christianity. It is idle to pretend to call any doctrine different from this by the name of Christianity, for the whole world knows that this is of the very essence of the genuine, historical religion which acknowledges Jesus Christ as its founder. Those who reject it, and yet call themselves Christians, are only philosophers, professing a merely natural religion, partly constructed from materials borrowed from Christianity and altered to suit their own private notions, but really in its fundamental principles and distinctive character nothing more than a system of rationalism. The traditional and orthodox Christianity has invariably taught that all men naturally descending from Adam and Eve need salvation, and can receive it only through an act of gratuitous mercy on account of the merits of the divine Redeemer. No man is entitled by the rights of his natural birth to heaven, or capable of obtaining a right to it by any exertion of his natural powers. All are under a doom of exclusion from the kingdom of heaven. That future state, with all its circumstances of locality and other adjuncts and environments, to which all are destined by virtue of this doom, is called in the authorized language of the Catholic Church _Infernum_, in the English language, _Hell_. The doctrine of hell as an eternal state is therefore necessarily the shadow which must accompany the doctrine of heaven. It is impossible for any one to believe in salvation by grace through Jesus Christ, without implicitly at least acknowledging that all men might have been left under the doom of destination to the infernal state, without any prejudice to the justice or the goodness of God. The case is not one whit altered, if one supposes that all men are actually saved because Christ died for all. If the mercy of God were universal, it would still remain evident that mercy is not identical with justice. It could not be argued that any man has a natural right to salvation, because salvation is bestowed as a boon upon all men. It is vain, therefore, to argue on _à priori_ grounds, that all men must eventually be saved. In truth, it has never been a doctrine of traditional and orthodox Christianity, that the simple fact of redemption placed every one of the human race in the possession of an inalienable right to final salvation. That many never recover the lost right to heaven, and that many who have obtained it lose it again irretrievably and for ever, is the common and universal doctrine of Christians. The efforts made to twist the language of Christ and the apostles into a contrary sense are so futile, that only a fixed determination to force the Holy Scripture into agreement with one’s own private opinions and feelings can account for them. The doctrine of the Catholic Church is unalterably determined. The fallen angels were not redeemed by Jesus Christ, and for them there is no restoration to the place which they have forfeited. Of men, all, be their number greater or smaller, who have been regenerated by the grace of Christ, and have passed out of this life in the state of grace, will obtain the kingdom of heaven, and the remainder will be forever excluded. The notion of an ἀποκατάστασις or future restitution of all angels and men, proposed as a mere theory by Origen, and alluded to by one or two other Catholic Fathers of the early ages as a possible conjecture, was universally reprobated and condemned by the church as soon as it attracted general attention. There is no doubt as to the Catholic faith on this matter.

The recent discussion has turned chiefly on the question of moral probation, the cause and reason of the mutability and liability to error in the intellect and perversion in the will of rational beings, and the manner and extent of their passing through the state of mutability to a state of permanent stability in good or evil. The errors of Origen were derived from the Platonic philosophy. So far as the _Periarchon_ really presents his fanciful conjectures, we must consider them as vagaries of a man who, although richly endowed with intellectual gifts and moral virtues, was destitute of a truly rational and Christian philosophy, and therefore unable to think consistently, when he ventured beyond those primary doctrines of the faith which were clearly known to him. We perceive the same cause of aberration and incoherence in most of the current statements and expositions of theological opinion which appear in our modern publications. It would seem that Origen considered it to be a necessary law of creation, that God must create all souls alike, and in an elementary state, with a most capricious and uncontrollable liberty to choose good or evil, so that they were for ever liable to indefinite mutations of character and condition, and could never become stable in one fixed position. His state of restitution was no more permanent and eternal than the previous one of degradation. There is no eternal heaven possible, according to his hypothesis, or rather that of the _Periarchon_, any more than an eternal hell. Our modern Protestant religious writings are affected by a similar tendency to a chaotic confusion of ideas. It would be an endless task to attempt to follow them through the maze of conflicting and incoherent reasonings with which they contend mutually, and strive to construct some sort of rational and credible eschatology. It is only in Catholic theology based on dogmas of faith, and a philosophy in harmony with this theology derived from the ancient masters of intellectual science, that a remedy for this chaotic state of things can be found. We cannot do more at present than merely state a few sound and certain principles, without attempting to reproduce the arguments by which they have been often and fully demonstrated.

The first principle we lay down is, that God can impart his own immutability of intelligence and will to intelligent beings. It is because his intelligence is infinite that God is immutable, that is, can never change his mind. His will necessarily conforms to his intelligence, and he therefore is, and is in full possession of, the sovereign good, by his self-existing essence.

The intelligent creature participates in this intelligence, in that degree of being which God gives him. The object of the spontaneous and natural act of intelligence is the real verity of being, and by his intelligent nature he can never be deceived. The object perceived by the intelligence contains in it the good, toward which the will moves by a spontaneous and natural act. It is only necessary that the object be so placed before the intellect that it compels assent, to make all error, voluntary or involuntary, impossible. The good which is thus perfectly presented necessarily draws the will to itself, and thus immutability in good is produced. Error in the intellect is an accident and a defect in nature, and all perversion of will or evil choice is a consequence of error. The liability of sinning is therefore no necessary adjunct of the spontaneity or liberty of will which is an attribute of intelligent beings. It is removed by making the intelligence perfect. It is easy, therefore, for God to make any intelligent being immutably good, even from the beginning of his existence, since it is easy for him to give to nature any degree of perfection, within the purely natural order.

In the supernatural order, the gift of the intuitive vision of the divine essence imparts to the recipient the knowledge and possession of the sovereign good, with which it is immovably united by a spontaneous and necessary act. It can no more lose its beatitude than it can lose its essence. It is as impossible for one of the blessed to be changed into a sinner, as for an angel to become an ape.

Liability to error and sin belongs, therefore, not to any necessary order of things, resulting from natural and necessary laws which God is obliged to follow in creation and providence, but it is a condition of defectibility pertaining to a law of probation which God has established by his sovereign will.

This defectibility supposes an equilibrium or indetermination of the will in respect to contraries which is overcome by a self-determining power. Such an equilibrium can only exist, when opposite objects, in which some good corresponding to the spontaneous tendency of the will is contained, are presented to the intellect as desirable and worthy of choice; in such a way that the motives for choice balance each other. The will must follow the intellect, and therefore an error in the choice must be preceded by an erroneous judgment, which is possible only when the object presented to it does not compel assent. Moral probation requires that there should be an obligation, arising from the eternal law of God or a positive command, to choose one of the opposite objects and reject the other. It is this which makes these objects contrary to each other in a moral respect, and is the reason why liberty of choice between them is called the liberty of contrariety, and the determination to the one is a virtuous, while that to the other is a vicious act. It is easy to understand this liberty of contrariety and the moral discipline which is requisite for its due control and direction, in respect to human nature. From its complex constitution, the sensible good is often opposed to the rational good, and reason, which ought to govern, is easily deceived by the imagination. In the case of pure spirits, it is more difficult to see how they can be subject to any illusion, or capable of undergoing any moral probation. In the natural order, they are perfect, and cannot err in the apprehension of that which is truly desirable as their chief good. They are not, therefore, capable of probation in the moral order of pure nature. But in the supernatural order, the object proposed to them being presented in an obscure, supernatural light, which does not compel assent, there is room for a suspension of the act of consent, and a power of rejecting the sovereign good by a voluntary self-determination, in adhering to the inferior object which they naturally comprehend and love. In fact, it was in this way that the fallen angels sinned and rebelled against God. In like manner, Adam, who was elevated to a perfect state like that of the angels, and enjoyed absolute dominion over all sensible concupiscence, underwent a supernatural probation, in which he fell through the seduction of Eve, who was the instrument of the demon, who had previously made her the victim of his diabolical sophistry.

The only moral order which is known to exist as an order of probation, in reference to an ultimate destination and end of intelligent creatures, is the one which is supernatural. If we conjecture that the universe is filled with intelligent beings who are neither angels nor human beings, we have no need and no reason to imagine that they are subject to a moral probation with the trials and pains connected with the order under which angels and men were constituted. The great problem of the reason of probation is one which is restricted within the sphere of those beings who have been constituted by the Creator in the order of a supernatural destiny. The difficulty of the problem arises exclusively from the moral and physical evil which is an incident of probation. In itself, the sufficient reason for probation is obvious and evident. The origin and nature of evil really present no insoluble difficulty, when the principles of sound theology and philosophy are understood. The difficulty consists in accounting for the permission of sin and misery in view of the known attributes of infinite goodness and almighty power in God. If the final conclusion of the vicissitudes and temporary evils of the state of probation were a universal ἀποκατάστασις, including the eternal abolition of evil in the universe and the attainment in general and in each individual of a permanent good of the highest order, to which the temporary conflict of good and evil was a necessary means, the human reason might be completely satisfied. But, although in general, and in a multitude of individuals, this is really the predestined and certain result, it is not the case with another multitude, the whole number, namely, of those who finally forfeit the sublime destiny to which they had an original right, but which they have lost irrecoverably. There is a repugnance in the human mind to the contemplation of permanent and eternal evil in the universe, and this is much increased by the human sensibilities, and natural sympathy with those of our own kind who suffer even the consequences of their own violation of the eternal law. This repugnance causes the effort to find a way of escape, or at least of mitigating the severe integrity of the truth by resorting to some kind of fatalism. These efforts are all futile and foolish. It is absurd to question the infinite goodness or the infinite power of God. The fact that moral and physical evil exists, is only too well known by experience. There is but one way to account for it, which is that God permits it as incident to the law of moral probation. We can have no knowledge of the finality of evil except from the divine revelation. And, that revelation having made known to us that the decision of destiny for each individual at the term of his probation is irreversible, it is reasonable, as well as imperative in respect to faith, to assent to the judgment of God because of his own knowledge and veracity, whether we can or cannot understand how and why that judgment is consistent with his goodness.

There is no prohibition placed on the exercise of intellect and reason in seeking to understand these revealed doctrines, provided we respect the authority which God has established as our extrinsic rule and criterion of truth. Under this regulation, reason can go very far toward solving the problem of the origin, nature, and reason of evil.

The origin of evil is in the abuse of free-will by intelligent beings who are placed by the Creator in a state of probation. Its nature is merely privative, consisting in deficiency and disorder. The sufficient reason for permitting it is either that it is a necessary incident to any order of moral probation, or to such an order as the one actually established, in view of the greater glory of God and the greater general good of the universe. The evil condition, or state of deficiency and privation, into which intelligent beings are degraded in consequence of their abuse of the power of free choice, is the natural consequence of their voluntary sin, and is, in itself, permanent and irremediable. Since the order of probation is supernatural, and the power of efficaciously electing the sovereign good is a grace freely given by God, sin, which is a supernatural death, is eternal in its duration and consequences, unless God restores the lost state of grace by his divine power. He can easily do it, and it is therefore vain to attempt, as it were, an apology for the Almighty, by pretending that he actually does all that is possible, to restore the fallen, and to bring every intelligent being to the perfection for which he was originally destined. It is by the will of the Almighty, that each one who has been placed in a state of probation, if he passes out of that state with the guilt of sin upon him, is for ever deprived of the grace which is absolutely necessary for expiation and restoration. The probation of angels ended long ago, and those who sinned were left without any offer of pardon and reconciliation. The pardon which is offered to men, is offered to them as a gratuitous act of mercy on the part of God, which is available so long as they live and have the use of reason and free-will. Probation ceases with death, and all merit and demerit become eternal. The doom awarded to merit is eternal reward, to demerit eternal punishment. The final privation of that good which is the reward of merit, and of that grace which is necessary for making the least movement toward it, is a penalty which God has annexed to sin. This is the Christian and Catholic doctrine, and to deny it is equivalent to a complete renunciation of the genuine Christian religion. The recent developments of the extent to which this fundamental tenet of orthodox Protestantism is disbelieved or doubted among the various sects, are an evidence that their dogmatic and historical basis is crumbling and passing away with unexpected rapidity. The genuine dogmatic system of Protestantism is Calvinism. And although the Calvinistic system retains a number of the fundamental articles of Catholic faith, its omissions and additions and perversions make it as a whole self-contradictory and absurd. The principle of private judgment logically results in rationalism, and no such system as Calvinism can long stand a rational test. All other theological systems which have sprung up as modifications of the Luthero-Calvinistic system are too incoherent and incomplete to be permanent. An irresistible current is sweeping away all these fabrics hastily built upon the sand, leaving only a confused _débris_ of truths and errors to the amazement of mankind. While this breaking up of old and general beliefs and convictions is in many respects lamentable and dangerous, we recognize, nevertheless, that there is a divarication in the irresistible logical current which is sweeping them into the sea of oblivion. The tendency of the general mind is not exclusively destructive. There is a yearning and an effort toward universal truth, and a deeply-seated conviction that this truth is really contained in Christianity rightly understood, which makes a strong and wide counter-current, bearing away from the tide that sets so strongly toward materialism and atheism. We recognize in the views and arguments more or less rationalistic which have been recently put forth in respect to the future destiny of the human soul, a revival of ethical and theological ideas in respect to the relation of the soul toward God, which are more in harmony with the Catholic faith than those of the old Protestant belief. The intrinsic, inherent good qualities and state of the soul itself, its voluntary determination to the good, its actual perfection in spiritual excellence and virtue, are acknowledged to be the ground and measure of the relation of friendship with God, and the want of this subjective fitness and worthiness is confessed to be a necessary cause of a corresponding alienation. The state of interior rectitude, integrity, and likeness to God, is acknowledged to be the necessary qualification of congruity and condignity in the soul, which gives it an aptitude to receive from the Creator that permanent and perfect enjoyment of its highest good which constitutes its everlasting beatitude. Sin is acknowledged to be the supreme evil of the soul which deprives it of its true good and degrades it below the order in which its proper excellence and felicity are placed. Therefore, the whole question of the final restoration of all intelligent beings who have lapsed from good, is resolved into a question respecting the cessation or the perpetual continuance of a moral order, under which renovation is possible, and the possibility sure to become actual, by a necessary and eternal law, in every individual instance. What is the criterion by which those who maintain this ἀποκατάστασις intend to determine its truth or falsity? It must be either divine revelation distinctly and certainly made known, or pure human reason. Every one who thinks logically must select between the two. As we have before said, we judge it by the criterion of revelation. What is the Christian, that is, what is the Catholic doctrine, founded on the veracity of God, clearly declared, and unalterable? We have already stated it, and it is known to all men. Those who still profess that they have in the Scriptures interpreted by their own private judgment an infallible rule of faith, are bound to demonstrate that their doctrine is clearly taught in the Scriptures, or is at least compatible with what is taught in them. It is open to any Catholic writer to discuss the matter with them on that ground if he thinks fit to do so, and it may be of some utility. It is equally suitable to discuss the question on purely philosophical grounds with those who do not admit revelation. But, as this is not our present purpose, we confine ourselves to the statement of what is the Catholic doctrine, and merely affirm that it is impossible to bring any conclusive argument against it, either from Scripture or from reason. It is really only the objections from reason which have any weight in the minds of men. Now, it is impossible to prove from reason that God may not propose to intelligent creatures a supernatural end to be attained by their voluntary operation under a moral law, and fix definite limits to their probation; or that it is not just to leave those who have misused their liberty by turning away from their prefixed end, in the permanent state of privation of their sovereign good. Nor is it possible to prove that penalties are not justly inflicted as a retribution for violations of law, in the state which succeeds the term of probation. It is God alone who is the judge of the nature and quantity of retribution which is due according to justice to individual demerits. Reason is not qualified to criticise the divine judgment which has decreed an eternal penalty for sin. The only rational mode of inquiring into the penalty for sin in the future life, is by seeking to ascertain what the divine revelation actually discloses and teaches on this momentous subject. This is determined with certainty by the Catholic rule, and taking all that is contained in this certain doctrine as a point of departure and a regulating principle, a theological and philosophical exposition of its relations with the other known principles and doctrines of revelation and reason manifests its harmony with all these truths, in a sufficiently clear light to command a firm rational assent. If all difficulties and obscurities are not completely removed, many misconceptions and apparent objections are dissipated, while the obscurity which finally remains is shown to be a necessary accompaniment of the dim light, by which the human mind, in its present condition, perceives these remote objects of eternity; and to make part of that limitation of knowledge which is an element of our moral discipline.

It is a demonstrable truth, contained in the first principles both of natural and revealed theology, that God has made all things for good, and that he will not permit the abuse of free-will by his creatures to thwart the final attainment of the end he has proposed, by causing permanent disorder in the universe. St. Thomas teaches that the punishment of the future life is decreed for this very reason. “It pertains to the perfect goodness of God, that he should not leave anything inordinate in existing things. Now, those things which exceed their due quantity are comprehended in the order of justice which reduces all things to equality; but man exceeds his due measure of quantity when he prefers his own will to the divine will by satisfying its desires inordinately; and this inequality is removed, when man is compelled to suffer something contrary to his own will according to God’s established order” (_Con. Gent._, iii. 146). F. Liberatore, commenting on this text, says: “Punishment is therefore a certain reaction of reason and justice for the restoration of the disturbed order. The argument which demonstrates the necessity of a sanction for the natural law, shows also that when God punishes those who commit mischievous acts he is not impelled by a movement of vengeful ire, but only by the love of goodness and order. For retribution, which proceeds from the order of justice according to the quality of the works done, imports in its very notion the concept of rectitude and goodness” (_Eth._, c. iii. art. 2).

In respect to the essential nature of the punishment, the same author lays down the proposition: “That the punishment of retribution for the impious consists principally in the loss of their ultimate end. By those good works which are commanded by the law, man puts himself on the road which leads straight to his end. For virtuous actions are a kind of steps by which a man walks toward this end; while on the other hand by vicious actions he deflects from his end and goes in an altogether opposite direction. Therefore, when the time destined for the journey has expired, it will necessarily follow that the one who has travelled by the road leading to his end should attain his end. Again, it is necessary for a similar reason that the one who through disregard of his end has followed a road leading in an entirely opposite direction should be deprived of the attainment of his end. It is a contradiction to assert that a way leading to a certain term does not lead to it; and equally absurd to say that this same term is reached by a way which leads directly away from it. Therefore, it necessarily follows that at least the loss of the ultimate end should follow the violation of the natural law and be, as it were, a certain internal and natural sanction for it. But the loss of the end inflicted in view of the acts which one has committed has the nature of a punishment.

“Nevertheless, that by no means suffices for a complete retribution corresponding to the works done; but a positive infliction of punishments according to the diversity existing between individuals is requisite. Therefore they are not all to be made to receive an exactly equal punishment (which would happen if they were only deprived of the attainment of their end), but to be chastised by a greater or lesser positive punishment according to the quality of their transgressions. This is required for still another reason, viz., that by their vicious acts they have not only despised their end but also positively disturbed the right order.” (_Ibid._)

The reproach of dualism, and of a failure to establish a final subjugation of evil by good and of disorder by the triumph and domination of order, made against the orthodox doctrine, is shown by these arguments, in connection with other well-known principles of Catholic theology and philosophy, to be groundless. There is no dualism in God, for his creative act, and all that he does for bringing it to its ultimate term, proceeds from love diffusive of the good of being in a wise and benevolent order. There is no dualism in the essence and being of intelligent creatures, in respect to God or each other. Their essence is good, and all nature whatsoever is essentially good. No evil substance does or can exist. Evil is privation and disorder. The temporary disorder, which is permitted as an incident to the liberty of a state of probation and movement toward a stable order, is rectified in the final ordination of all things under the supremacy of sovereign law. The loss of some good, which might have been added to the actual sum of good if all had attained their end, is compensated by the greater good which God has brought out of evil. Reason and order and law are vindicated and satisfied, by the compulsory subjection and homage of those who have refused to give their concurrence and pay their just tribute of obedience and labor freely. Privation does not disfigure the spiritual universe in which all that is requisite to consummate order and beauty exists, any more than empty space disfigures a stellar system. The good has therefore a complete and universal triumph, which leaves no deordination in the universe.

Disorder is only in the moral order of liberty in the election of contraries, by which the permanent order of those who exercise this power is determined. Those who rise above the moral order go to a higher order which is permanent; those who fall below it go to an order beneath which is permanent. The moral order passes away, and with it all conflict between opposing moral forces. Those who have fallen below their proper destiny receive precisely what is due to them and results naturally from their voluntary choice. Whatever is superadded to the misery naturally involved in the state of alienation from God and the frustration of their proper end, is directed to remove and prevent but not to perpetuate and increase deordination; and thus eternal punishment, whatever its nature, qualities, and instrumentalities may be, really restricts the limits of evil. It is the _bonum honestum_ and not the _bonum delectabile_ which is the just and reasonable object of the primary and direct complacency of intelligent beings. The _bonum delectabile_ is secondary. That which is most contrary to this highest good is the revolt of free-will against the will of God. When the term allowed by the Almighty for the rebellion of Lucifer to run its course has been reached, it will be suppressed by that act of sovereign power, which places each one of those who have merited exclusion from heaven in a fixed and unchangeable state, precisely suited to his character. No further disturbance of the moral order is possible, no further privation can be incurred, no new injuries can be attempted against any of God’s creatures. Those who suffer, actually endure nothing beyond the retribution justly due to the demerits of their state of probation, and their suffering compensates in the order of the _bonum honestum_ for their offences against that order, restoring the disturbed equilibrium of justice. It is an effect of the divine goodness frustrated (in respect to them) of its intention, and deprived of its due quality as _bonum delectabile_ by their own voluntary opposition to the benevolent will of God. Socrates and Plato taught that it is better even for the one who deserves punishment to undergo it than to remain in impunity. Assuredly it is better for the common order which he has violated. Impunity for great political frauds is the greatest of disorders in a community, and the punishment of the criminals is a reparation to the public honor and the sanctity of right, which adds decorum to a state. This is in virtue of an eternal and universal law, and holds good in the supreme order, with which the ethical constitution of human society is in an analogical resemblance. Justice reduces all things to equality, by subjugating the inordinate wills of created beings under the coercive force of the reaction of reason and order against their rebellion. The inequality removed by this violent reaction is measured by the voluntary and free excesses of the rebels and transgressors against the sovereign will of God. Beyond this measure, there is no violence done to the spontaneous desires and natural tendency to good intrinsic to the essence of every intelligent being. Unless there is an inequality caused by voluntary contrariety to the divine will, there is no opposition, and therefore there must be a perfect harmony and equality of proportion between the eternal order and the wills of those who are subject to it. Therefore, there is no such thing possible as pain, discontent, deficiency from the _bonum honestum_ and _bonum delectabile_ of nature, in the eternal world, except that which is the retribution for voluntary transgressions.

The thousands of millions of human beings who never attain the use of reason, never run the risks of probation, and pass into the eternal state without merit or demerit, enjoy the good of being which is consonant to their nature in whatever actual condition it exists. Those whose nature is regenerate, and spontaneously seeks the sovereign good of the supernatural order, go immediately into the kingdom of heaven. Those whose nature is not regenerate possess an immortality in which they enjoy the natural good of being. There is no such thing as fatality, calamity of chance, misfortune, or deordination of any kind in the true ἀποκατάστασις and restitution of all things, which succeeds the present inchoate, temporary order. It is the absolute and universal and eternal reign of God by his eternal law, which is identified with the physical and spontaneous laws of being, and gives liberty of action within the ordained circumference, without any possibility of escape from the orbit assigned to each individual existence.

We return now to that which we proposed at the beginning as a primary question, not for those who are already certain by Catholic faith, but for inquirers into the mystery of human destiny beyond the veil. Is there a heaven, and what is the way by which it can be attained? Modern rationalism presents at best nothing higher that the eternal state into which human nature fell by the transgression of Adam, and from which we are redeemed by Christ. This species of philosophical and semi-Christian Theism, which is respectable in pagans and those who are in a similar condition of dim enlightenment, has no intellectual foundation which can stand or give support, in opposition to the clear Christian revelation. The firm assent to its really sound and rational principles and their logical conclusions, inexorably demands a further assent, to the physical, moral, and metaphysical demonstration by which the certain truth of Christianity is made evident to reason. A consistent and thorough rejection of Christianity reacts with irresistible logical violence against the first premises of natural theology. The prevailing rationalism is materialistic and atheistic. The contrary of Catholic faith, the real error of the age, the logical alternative of genuine undiluted Christianity, is anti-spiritual, anti-theistic Nihilism. To those who have a repugnance for the hell which is the shadow of heaven in Catholic doctrine, the night-side of the supernatural, this system cannot be very attractive; unless they are in despair, and already so unhappy and hopeless that existence seems to them an intolerable evil. In this system there is nothing besides hell. Hell is the necessary, eternal reality, the only being. The negation of all eternal good, of all beatitude whether natural or supernatural, is the one, fundamental dogma of Pessimism.

The aspiration and longing for beatitude which cannot be wholly extinguished in any human soul, and which manifests its vehemence even in the most gloomy and despairing utterances of scepticism, is strong and vivid among the multitude of half-believers, whose Christian descent has left in their minds, as an heirloom, some indistinct idea of the heaven of Christian theology. Even though they practically seek to satisfy their thirst for the true good by the pleasures of the present life, they wish to cherish the hope of a higher future happiness in the next world. Therefore, they eagerly welcome any plausible teaching or speculation which seems to make a happy immortality their sure ultimate destiny, and are glad to think they run no risk of losing it, and need not give themselves trouble to find the way to gain it. Conscience, and the moral sense which has had a semi-Christian education, will not permit those who still cling to their traditional religion to believe that the majority of adults are actually fit for perfect happiness, or capable of passing out of this life at once into heaven, without undergoing some thorough transformation of character. The view presented by the most reasonable and high-toned of the writers and preachers who have recently advocated universal salvation, or a doctrine tending in that direction, places a prospect of indefinite trial and suffering before those who have sinned during their mortal career, as awaiting them hereafter. Its happy termination in the heaven promised to the good is something which is inferred by their own reasonings and conjectures, but which cannot be proved with certainty by reason, much less shown to be a promise of the divine word. Over against this there is the general belief of mankind; the general consent of those who have read the Holy Scriptures in the interpretation of their plain and obvious sense; and the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning, which she will certainly never change. It is much more reasonable to take the authority of the church as the criterion of truth in regard to this momentous matter than to decide it by private reasonings or private interpretations of Christian doctrine. The Catholic doctrine proposes a heaven of supernatural beatitude and glory to every one, and points out a sure way by which any one may secure it, no matter how much he may have sinned in the past. It is the most rational course to begin at once to follow the road which leads to the right end, and leave with God the responsibility of administering his own just and sovereign laws by giving to each one that retribution which he has deserved.

NOTE.—The reader is referred for a more full exposition of the relation of the supernatural to the natural order, and the other principal topics belonging to the subject of the future destiny of man, to the following works: _Aspirations of Nature_, by the Rev. I. T. Hecker; _Problems of the Age_ and _The King’s Highway_, by the Rev. A. F. Hewit; _Catholicity and Pantheism_, by the Rev. J. de Concilio; _The Knowledge of Mary_, by the same author; and _Catholic Eschatology_, by H. N. Oxenham.

LINES. SUGGESTED BY ST. FRANCIS DE SALES’ TREATISE ON THE “LOVE OF GOD.”

O precious book! in lines of fire I see Upon each page the record of a soul Which soared above the clouds, serenely free, Which read with eagle eye the mystic scroll; To whose ecstatic love th’ Eternal Three Sublime and hidden mysteries did unroll. A heart, a living heart, is throbbing here! A heart whose every fibre[41] thrilled to One Unknown to human wisdom, yet most clear To him, whose spirit, as a luminous sun, Caught from the splendors of high heaven’s sphere, A light for centuries set in shadows dun. O shadows dark and sad! with prophet-gaze Did he foresee your baneful, blinding cloud Enwrap man’s reason, soul, and heart? the ways Of God enveloped in a death-like shroud Of folly, prejudice, and pride? Amaze Had seized that noble soul! Yet he had bowed ’Neath persecution’s fury; toiled with heart Undaunted, while upraised were savage hands To strike, as Jews of old, the deadly dart. Through sufferings borne with joy he won those bands, Through burning zeal and (his own heavenly art) Divinest meekness, which all power commands.

What secret charm had he so early learned Which made a joy of pain? of sacrifice His life-long pleasure? Soul and heart had burned Within love’s fiery crucible where dies Nature and self and sense; for God he yearned; For God and souls were poured his nightly sighs. Thou sacred volume, fruit of years of prayer, Of holy contemplation, seraph love, Dost unto me this hidden charm declare; With his own life each word is interwove. His holy pen would oft, methinks, repair To Calvary’s shade or to the olive grove, And, deep within the Wounded Side, would seek The living flame, as strong as death, which breathes In each dear line. Methinks he still doth speak, And with celestial sweetness still bequeathes His dying legacy of love; his meek And gentle lessons in the soul inwreathes Like flowers, the garden of the Spouse to grace.

O zeal inflamed and generous! No rest While heart and hand the path to heaven may trace For souls brought back on Calvary’s bleeding crest; No rest while he one tender lamb may place, All bruised, for healing on the Saviour’s breast. No sweet repose of prayer and love while pure And virgin hearts, aspiring heavenward, pine For light and guidance in the way obscure And thorny leading to the mystic shrine— The “inner temple,” where God, throned secure, Binds fast the soul in his embrace divine. No rest for him while still on earth the fire His Master brought remains unkindled; while One human heart, Grief’s trembling, deep-toned lyre, Vibrates not to his Master’s touch with smile Of peace, ev’n while the chords are breaking; higher, And higher still! the sacrificial pile Awaits a host of generous souls who mount With ardor at his word; new strength endows, And, like the phœnix,[42] they from Light’s own Fount Draw odorous flames of love; while sacred vows Bind them, like Isaac, hand and foot, who count The sword and fire but pleasure with their Spouse.

O priceless heritage of poet-saint! What wisdom born of Heaven adorns each page! To fancy seems some master-hand to paint; To intellect speaks philosophic sage; Passion impulsive yields to sweet constraint, And heart and will bow down in every age. Strange spell which o’er the soul it casts! the strong, Clear message more like ancient prophet’s tone; Again, to his full gaze as mysteries throng, Its breathings are the loved disciple’s own; And now it rises like th’ ecstatic song Of some grand seraph veiled before the throne!

Footnote 41:

If I knew there was one fibre in my heart which was not all God’s I would instantly pluck it out.—_St. Francis de Sales._

Footnote 42:

St. Francis draws many beautiful illustrations from this mythical bird. The ancients asserted that when age had exhausted the strength of the phœnix it built a funeral-pile of aromatic gums and wood on the top of some high mountain, and, ascending it when the sun was in his meridian splendor, lit the pile by the fanning of its wings, and was consumed to ashes. From these ashes sprang another phœnix.

CONRAD AND WALBURGA.