Chapter XIV…

Chapter XIV

At seven o'clock everything was still quiet.

From time to time Dr. Lorquin opened a window of the great hall and looked abroad. Nothing was stirring; even the fires had gone out.

Louise, seated near her father, gazed sadly and tenderly upon him. She seemed to fear that she would never again see him, and her reddened eyes showed that she had been weeping.

Hullin, though firm, showed signs of emotion.

The doctor and the Anabaptist, both grave and solemn in their manner, were conversing, and Lagarmitte, behind the stove, listened thoughtfully to their words.

"We have not only the right, but it is our duty to defend ourselves," the doctor was saying. "Our fathers cleared these woods and cultivated the land. They are now rightfully ours."

"Doubtless," answered the Anabaptist; "but it is written, Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not spill thy brother's blood!"

Catherine Lefevre, whom this view of matters annoyed, turned suddenly from her work, saying:

"Then if we believed as you do, we would let the Germans and Russians drive us from house and home. Your religion is a famous one for thieves! The Allies ask nothing better, I am sure. I do not wish to insult you, Pelsly; you have been brought up in these notions; but we will defend you despite yourself. I love to hear of peace, but not when the enemy is at our doors."

Pelsly remained mute from astonishment, and Doctor Lorquin could not repress a smile.

At the same moment the door opened, and a sentry entered, crying:

"Master Jean-Claude, come! I believe they are advancing."

"I am coming, Simon," answered Hullin, rising. "Embrace me, Louise. Courage, my child; fear not, all will go well."

He clasped her to his bosom and his eyes filled with tears. She seemed more dead than living.

"Be sure," said he to Catherine, "to let no one go out or approach the windows."

He rushed from the house to the edge of the plateau, and cast his eyes toward Grandfontaine and Framont, thousands of feet below him.

The Germans had arrived the evening before, a few hours after the Cossacks. They had passed the night, to the number of five or six thousand, in barns, stables, or under sheds, and were now clustering like ants, pouring from every door in tens and twenties, and hurrying to buckle on knapsacks, fasten sabres, or fix bayonets.

Others--cavalry--Uhlans, Cossacks, hussars, in green, gray, and blue uniforms, faced with red or yellow, with caps of waxed cloth or lamb-skin, were hastily saddling their horses or rolling their blankets.

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Trumpets were sounding at every street-corner, and drummers were tightening their drum-cords. Every phase of military life seemed there.

A few peasants, stretching their heads out of their windows, gazed at all this; women crowded at the garret-windows, and innkeepers filled flasks.

Nothing escaped Hullin, and such scenes were not new to him, but Lagarmitte was petrified with wonder.

"How many they are!" he cried.

"Bah!" returned Hullin; "what does that matter? In my time, we annihilated three armies of fifty thousand each of that same race in six months, and we were not one to four. Rest easy, however; we shall not have to kill all these; they will fly like hares. You will see."

These judicious reflections uttered, he turned back to the abatis, and the two followed a path which had been made in the snow a couple of days before. The snow, hardened by the frost, had become ice, and the trees formed an impassable barrier. Below lay the ruined road.

As he appeared, Jean-Claude saw the mountaineers from Dagsberg in groups, twenty paces distant from each other, in round holes like nests which they had dug for themselves. These brave fellows were seated on their haversacks, their fox-skin caps pulled down over their heads and their muskets between their knees. They had only to rise to view the road fifty yards beneath them at the foot of a very slippery slope.

"Ha, Master Jean-Claude! When is the work to begin?"

"Easy, my boys; do not be impatient; in an hour you will have enough to do."

"So much the better."

"Aim well at the height of the breast, and don't expose yourselves more than you can help."

"Never fear for us, Master Jean-Claude."

"Do not forget to cease firing when Lagarmitte winds his horn; we cannot afford to lose powder."

He found Materne at his post, lighting his pipe; the old man's beard was frozen almost solid.

"They seem to be in no hurry to attack," said Jean-Claude. "Can it be that they will take another route through the mountains?"

"Never fear it," answered the old man. "They need the road for their artillery and baggage. Listen! The bugles are sounding, 'Boots and saddles.' But do you know, Hullin," asked the hunter with a low chuckle, "what I saw a while ago in Grandfontaine? I saw four Austrians knock old Dubreuil, the friend of the Allies, down and thrash him well with sticks, the old wretch! It did my heart good. I suppose he refused some of his wine to his good friends."

Hullin listened to no more; for, happening to cast his eyes to the valley, he saw a regiment of infantry debouching on the road. Beyond, in the street, cavalry were advancing, five or six officers galloping in front.

"At last!" cried the old soldier, his face lighting up with a look of fierce determination--"at last!"

And dashing along the line, he cried:

"Attention, men of the Vosges!"

Lagarmitte followed with his bugle. Ten minutes after, when the two, all breathless, had reached the pinnacle of the rock, they saw the enemy's column fifteen hundred feet beneath them, about three thousand strong, with their long white coats, canvas-gaiters, bear-skin shakos, and red mustaches, their young officers, sword in hand, curveting in the intervals between the companies, and from time to time turning round and shouting hoarsely, "Forvertz! forvertz!" while above the line the bayonets flashed and glittered in the sun.

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They were pressing on to the abatis at the pas de charge.

Old Materne, too, saw the Germans advancing, and his keen eyes could even note the individuals of the mass. In a moment he had chosen his quarry.

In the middle of the column, on a tall bay horse, rode an old officer, wearing a white peruke, a three-cornered hat heavily laced with gold, and a yellow sash. His breast was covered with ribbons, and his thick black plumes danced merrily as he cantered on.

"There is my man!" muttered the hunter, as he slowly brought his piece to his shoulder.

A report, a wreath of white smoke, and the old officer had disappeared. In a moment the whole line of intrenchments rattled with musketry; but the Austrians, without replying, pressed steadily upward, their ranks as regular and well aligned as if they were on parade; and to speak truth, many a brave mountaineer, mayhap the father of a family, as he saw that forest of bayonets come on, thought that perhaps he might better have remained at home in his village than have shouldered his rifle for its defence. But as the proverb says, the wine was drawn, naught but to drink remained!

When two hundred paces from the abatis, the enemy halted, and began a rolling fire, such as the mountain echoes had never before replied to. Bullets hailed on every side, cutting the branches, scattering the icicles, and flattening themselves on the rocks; their continued hiss was like the humming of a swarm of bees. All this did not arrest the fire of the mountaineers, and soon both sides were buried in thick gray smoke; but at the end of ten minutes more, the drums beat out the charge, and again the mass of bayonets dashed toward the abatis; and again the cry of "Forvertz! forvertz!" rang out, but now nearer and nearer, until the firm earth trembled beneath the tramp of thousands of feet.

Materne, rising to his full height, with quivering cheeks and flashing eyes, shouted, "Up! up!"

It was time. Many of the Austrians, almost all of them students of philosophy, or law, or medicine, gathered from the breweries of Munich, Jena, and other towns--men who fought against us because they believed that Napoleon's fall would alone give them freedom--many of these intrepid fellows had clambered on all-fours over the frozen snow and hurled themselves upon the works. But each who climbed the abatis was met by a blow from a clubbed musket, and flung back among his comrades.

Then did the strength and bravery of old Rochart the wood-cutter show themselves. Man after man of these children of the Vaterland did he stretch upon the whitened earth. Old Materne's bayonet ran with blood. The little tailor, Riffi, loaded and fired into the mass with the cool courage of a veteran, and Joseph Larnette, Hans Baumgarten, whose shoulder was pierced by a ball, Daniel Spitz, who lost two fingers by a sabre stroke, and a host of others, will be for ever honored by their countrymen for their deeds that day. For more than a quarter of an hour the fight was hand to hand. Nearly all the students had fallen, and the others, veterans accustomed to retiring honorably, turned to retrace their steps. {476} At first they retreated slowly; then faster and faster. Their officers urged them to the attack once more, and seconded their words with blows from the flat of their swords, but in vain; bullets poured among them from the abatis, and soon all order was lost; the retreat was a wild rout.

Materne laughed grimly as he gazed after the flying foe, lately advancing in such proud array, and shook his rifle above his head in joy.

At the bottom of the slope lay hundreds of wounded. The snow was red with blood, and in the midst of heaps of slain were two young officers yet living, but crushed beneath the weight of their dead horses.

It was horrible! But men are oftentimes savage as the beasts of the forests. Not a man among the flushed mountaineers seemed to have a thought for all the misery he saw before him; it even seemed to rejoice many.

Little Riffi, carried away by a sublime ardor for plunder, glided down the steep. He had caught a glimpse of a splendid horse, that of the colonel whom Materne had shot, which, protected by a corner of the rock, stood safe and sound.

"You are mine!" cried the tailor, as he seized the bridle. "How astonished my wife Sapience will be!"

All the others envied him as he mounted his prize; but their envy was soon checked when they saw the noble animal dash at full speed toward the Austrians. The little tailor tugged at the bridle, and shouted, and cursed, and prayed, but all to no purpose. Materne would have fired, but he feared that in that wild gallop he might kill the man, and soon Riffi disappeared among the enemy's bayonets.

All thought he would be massacred at once, but an hour later they saw him pass through the street of Grandfontaine, his hands bound behind his back, and a corporal following with uplifted cane.

Poor Riffi! He did not long enjoy his triumph, and his comrades at length laughed at his sad fate as merrily as if he had been a Kaiserlik. Such is the nature of man; as long as he feels no ill himself, the troubles of others affect him little.

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Chapter XV

The mountaineers were wild with exultation; their triumph knew no bounds, and they looked upon each other as so many heroes.

Catherine, Louise, Doctor Larquin, all who had remained at the farm, rushed out to greet the victors. They scanned the marks of bullets, gazed at the blood-stained slope; then the Doctor ordered Baumgarten and Spitz to the hospital, although the latter insisted on still remaining at his post.

Louise distributed brandy among the men, and Catherine Lefevre, standing on the edge of the slope, gazed at the dead and wounded. There lay old and young, their faces white as wax, their eyes wide and staring, their arms outstretched. Some had fallen in attempting to rise, and the faces of some wore a look of fear as if they yet dreaded these terrible blows which the clubbed rifles had dealt. Others had dragged themselves out of the range of fire, and their route was marked by tracks of blood.

Many of the wounded seemed resigned to their lot, and only seeking a place to die; others gazed wistfully after their regiment, which they could discern on its way to Framont--that regiment with which they had quitted their native village, with which they had till then safely braved the toils and dangers of a long campaign, but which now abandoned them to die, far from friends and home, surrounded by an infuriated foe. {477} And they thought how a trembling mother or sister would ask their captain or their sergeant, "Did you know Hans, or Kasper, or Nickel, of the first or second company?" And how coldly would come the reply: "Let me see; it is very likely. Had he not brown hair and blue eyes? Yes, I knew him; we left him in France near a little village, the name of which I forget. He was killed by the mountaineers the same day as the stout major, Yeri-Peter. A brave fellow! Good evening."

Perhaps, too, some among them thought of a pretty Gretchen or Lotchen, who had given them a ribbon, and wept hot tears at their departure, and sobbed, "I will wait for you, Kasper. I will marry no one but you!" Thou wilt wait long, poor girl!

All this was not very pleasant, and Mother Lefevre's thoughts, as she gazed, wandered to Gaspard. Hullin, however, soon came with Lagarmitte to where she stood, and cried exultantly:

"Hurrah, boys! you have seen fire, and those Germans yonder will not boast much of this day's work."

He ran to embrace Louise, and then ran back to Catherine.

"Are you satisfied, Mother Lefevre? Fortune smiles; but what is the matter?"

"Yes, Jean-Claude, I am satisfied; all goes well; but look yonder upon the road; what a massacre!"

"War is war," replied Hullin gravely.

"Is there no way of helping that poor fellow there--the one looking up at us with his large blue eyes? O heaven! they pierce my very heart! Or that tall, brown-haired one binding his arm with his handkerchief?"

"Impossible, Catherine! I am sorry; but we should have to cut steps in the ice to descend; and the Austrians, who will be back in an hour or two, would make use of them in their next attack. But we must go and announce our victory through the villages, and to Labarbe, and Jerome, and Piarette. Holla! Simon, Niklo, Marchal! carry the news to our comrades. Materne, see that you look sharp, and report the least movement."

They went together to the farmhouse, and Jean-Claude met the reserve as he passed, and Marc-Dives on horseback in the midst of his men. The smuggler complained bitterly of having had no part in the fight; he felt disgraced, dishonored.

"Bah!" said Hullin, "so much the better. Watch on our right; if we are attacked there, you will have enough to do."

Dives said nothing; his good humor could not so easily be restored; nor that of his men--smugglers like himself--who, wrapped in their mantles, and with their long rapiers dangling from their sides, seemed meditating vengeance for what they deemed a slight.

Hullin, unable to pacify them, entered the farm-house. Doctor Lorquin was extracting the ball from the wound of Baumgarten, who uttered terrible shrieks.

Pelsly, standing at the threshold, trembled in every limb. Jean-Claude demanded paper and ink to send his orders to the posts, and the poor Anabaptist had scarcely strength to go for them. The messengers departed, proud enough to be the bearers of the tidings of the first battle and victory.

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A few mountaineers in the great hall were warming themselves at the stove, and discussing the details of the fight in animated tones. Daniel Spitz had his two fingers amputated, and sat behind the stove, his hand wrapped in lint.

The men who had been posted behind the abatis before daybreak, not having yet breakfasted, were--each with a huge piece of bread and a glass of wine--making up for lost time, all the time shouting, gesticulating, and boasting as much as their full mouths would allow them to, and every now and then, when some one would speak of poor Riffi and his misfortunes, they were ready to burst their sides laughing.

It was eleven o'clock, when Marc-Dives rushed into the hall, crying:

"Hullin! Hullin! Where is Hullin?"

"Here!"

"Follow me--quick!"

The smuggler spoke in a strange tone. A few moments before, he was furious at not having taken part in the battle; now he seemed triumphant. Jean-Claude followed, sorely disquieted, and the hall was cleared in a minute, all feeling that Marc's hurry was of grave portent.

To the right of Donon stretches the ravine of Minières, through which roars a torrent which rushes from the mountain-side to the depths of the valley.

Opposite the plateau defended by the partisans, and on the other side of the ravine, five or six hundred feet distant, rose a sort of terrace with very steep sides, which Hullin had not deemed it necessary to occupy, as he was unwilling to divide his forces, and saw also that the position could be easily turned under cover of the fir forest, if the enemy should occupy it.

Imagine the brave old man's dismay when, from the farm-house door, he saw two companies' of Austrians climbing up the side with two field-pieces, which, dragged up by strong ropes, seemed to hang over the precipice. They were pushing at the wheels, too, and in a few moments the guns would be on the flat top. He stood for an instant as if struck by lightning, and then turned fiercely on Dives.

"Could you not tell me of this before?" he cried. "Was it for this I ordered you to watch the ravine? Our position is turned! Our retreat is cut off! You have lost all!"

All present, even old Materne, shrank from the flashing eyes bent upon the smuggler, and he, notwithstanding his usual cool audacity, could not for some moments reply.

"Be calm, Jean-Claude," said he at last; "it is not so bad as you think. My fellows have yet done nothing, and as we want cannon, those shall be ours."

"Fool! Has your vanity brought us to this? You must needs fight, boast--and for this you sacrifice us all! Look! they are coming from Framont, too!"

Even as he spoke, the head of a new column, much stronger than the first, appeared, advancing from Framont toward the abatis at the double-quick. Dives said not a word. Hullin, conquering his rage in the face of danger, shouted:

"To your posts, all! Attention, Materne!"

The old hunter bent his head, listening.

Marc-Dives had recovered all his coolness.

"Instead of scolding like a woman," said he, "you had better give me the order to attack those yonder from the cover of the woods."

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"Do so, in heaven's name," cried Hullin. "Listen, Marc! We were victorious, and your fault has risked all the fruits of our victory. Your life shall answer for our success."

"I accept the terms."

The smuggler, springing upon his horse, threw his cloak proudly over his shoulder, and drew his long, straight blade. His men followed the example. Then, turning to the fifty mountaineers who composed his troop, Dives pointed with his sword to the enemy, and cried:

"We must have yon height, boys. The men of Dagsberg shall never be called braver than those of the Sarre. Forward!"

The troops dashed on, and Hullin, still pale from the effects of his anger, shouted after:

"Give them the steel!"

The tall smuggler, on his huge and strong steed, turned his head, and a laugh broke from his lips. He shook his sword expressively, and the troops disappeared in the wood.

At the same moment the Austrians, with their two guns--eight-pounders--reached the level top, while the Framont column still pressed up the slope. Everything was as before the battle, save that now the mountaineers were between two fires.

They saw the two guns with their rammers and caissons distinctly. A tall, lean officer, with broad shoulders and long, flaxen mustaches, commanded. In the clear mountain air they seemed almost within reach, but Hullin and Materne knew better; they were a good six hundred yards away, further than any rifle could carry.

Nevertheless, the old hunter wished to return to the abatis with a clear conscience. He advanced as near as possible to the ravine, followed by his son Kasper and a few partisans, and, steadying his piece against a tree, slowly covered the tall officer with the light mustaches.

All held their breath lest the aim might be disturbed.

The report rang out, but when Materne placed the butt of his rifle again on the ground, to see the effect of his shot, all was as before.

"It is strange how age affects the sight," said he.

"Affects your sight!" cried Kasper. "Not a man from the Vosges to Switzerland can place a ball at two hundred yards as true as you."

The old forester knew it well, but he did not wish to discourage the others.

"Well, well," he replied, "we have no time to dispute about it. The enemy is coming. Let every man do his duty."

Despite these words, so calm and simple, Materne too was sorely troubled. As he entered the trench, the air seemed full of sounds of dire foreboding, the rattling of arms, the steady tramp of a trained multitude. He looked down the steep and saw the Austrians pressing on, but this time with long ladders, to the ends of which great iron hooks were fastened.

"Kasper," he whispered, "things look ill--ill indeed. Give me your hand. I would like to have you and Frantz near me! Remember to do your part like a man."

As he spoke, a heavy shock shook the defences to their foundations, and a hoarse voice cried, "O my God!"

Then a fir-tree, a hundred paces off, bent slowly and thundered into the abyss. It was the first cannon-shot, and it had carried off both old Rochart's legs. Another and another followed, and soon the air was thick with crushed and flying ice, while the shrieking of the balls struck terror to the stoutest hearts. Even old Materne trembled for a moment; but his brave heart was soon itself again, and he cried:

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"Vengeance! vengeance! Victory or death!"

Happily, the terror of the mountaineers was of short duration. All knew that they must conquer or die. Two ladders were already fixed, despite the hail of bullets, and the combat was once more foot to foot and hand to hand, fiercer and bloodier than before.

Hullin had seen the ladders before Materne, and once more his wrath against Dives arose; but he knew that anger then availed naught, and he sent Lagarmitte to order Frantz, who was posted on the other side of Donon, to hasten to the farm with half his men. The brave boy, warned of his father's danger, lost not a moment, and already the black slouched hats were seen climbing the mountain-side. Jean-Claude, breathless, the sweat pouring from his brow, ran to meet them, crying:

"Quick, quick! or all is lost!" He trembled once more with rage, attributing all their misfortunes to the smuggler.

But where was Marc-Dives? In half an hour he had made his way around the ravine, and from his steed saw the two companies of Austrians drawn up at ordered arms, two hundred paces behind the guns, which still kept up their fire upon the intrenchments. He turned to the mountaineers, and in a low voice, while the thunder of the cannon echoed peal upon peal from the valley, and the shouts and shrieks and clatter of the assault rose beyond it, said:

"Comrades, you will fall upon the infantry with the bayonet. I and my men will do the rest. Forward!"

The whole troop advanced in good order to the edge of the wood, tall Piercy of Soldatenthal at their head.

They heard the Werda [Footnote 157] of a sentinel. Two shots replied; then the shout of "Vive la France!" rang to heaven, and the brave mountaineers rushed upon the foe like famished wolves upon their prey.

[Footnote 157: "Who goes there?"]

Dives, erect in his stirrups, looked on and laughed.

"Well done!" he said. "Charge!" The earth shook beneath the shock. Neither Austrians nor partisans fired; for a while nothing was heard but the clash of bayonets or the dull thud of the clubbed muskets as they fell; then shrieks and groans and cries of rage arose, and from time to time a shot rang out. Friend and foe were mixed and mingled in the savage fray.

The band of smugglers, sabre in hand, sat all this while gazing at the fight, awaiting their leader's signal to engage.

It came at last.

"Now is our time," cried Marc. "One brave blow, and the guns are ours."

And forth from the cover of the wood, their long mantles floating behind in the wind, every man, in his fiery impatience, bending over his saddle-bow, and pointing his long, straight rapier straight forward, broke the bold riders.

"The point, my lads! the point! never mind the edge!" shouted Dives.

In a moment they were on the pieces. Among Marc's troop were four old dragoons who had seen the Spanish wars through, and two veteran cuirassiers of the guard, whom love of danger had attached to the smuggler. The rammers and short sabres of the artillerymen could avail but little against their well-aimed thrusts, each one of which brought a man to the earth.

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Marc's cheek was blackened with the powder of a pistol fired within six inches of his head; a bullet passed through his hat; but his course was not staid until his sword pierced the old officer with the light mustache through and through, at one of the cannons. Then, rising slowly in his saddle until his tall form sat erect, he gazed around, and said sententiously:

"The guns are ours!"

But the scene was terrible; the mêlée on the high plateau; the shrieks, the neighing of horses, or their cries of agony; the shouts of rage; men casting away their arms in a wild flight for life, an inexorable foe pursuing; beyond the ravine, ladders crowded with white uniforms and bristling with bayonets; mountaineers defending themselves with the fierce courage of despair; the sides of the slope, the road, and the foot of the abatis heaped with dead, or wounded writhing in anguish; still further away, the masses of the enemy advancing, with musket on shoulder, and officers in the midst urging them on; old Materne, on the crest of the steep, swinging his clubbed rifle with deadly effect, and shouting for his son Frantz, who was rushing at full speed with his command to the fight; Jean-Claude directing the defence; the deafening musketry, now in volleys, now rattling like some terrible hailstorm; and, rolling above all, the vague, weird echoes of mountain and valley. All this was pressed into that one moment.

Marc-Dives was not of a contemplative or poetic turn of mind, however, and wasted no time in useless reflections upon the horrors of war. A glance showed him the position of affairs, and, springing from his horse, he seized one of the levers of the guns, and in a moment had aimed the yet loaded piece at the foot of the ladders. Then he seized a match and fired.

Strange cries arose from afar off, and the smuggler, gazing through the smoke, saw a bloody lane in the enemy's ranks. He shook both his hands above his head exultingly, and a shout of triumph arose from the breastworks.

"Dismount!" he cried to his men. "Now is our time for action! Bring cartridges and balls from your caissons. Load! We will sweep the road! Ready! Fire!"

The smugglers applied themselves to the work, and shot after shot tore through the white masses. The fire enfiladed the ranks, and the tenth discharge was at a flying foe.

"Fire! fire!" shouted Marc. And the partisans, re-enforced by Frantz, regained the position they had for a moment lost.

And now the mountain-side was covered only with dead, wounded, and flying. It was four o'clock in the evening, and night was falling fast. The last cannon-shot fell in the street of Grandfontaine, and, rebounding, overturned the chimney of the "Red Ox."

Six hundred men had perished. Many of the mountaineers had fallen, but many more of the Kaiserliks. Dives's cannonade had saved all; for the partisans were not even one against ten, and the enemy had almost made himself master of their works.

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Chapter XVI

The Austrians, crowded in Grandfontaine, fled toward Framont, on foot and on horseback, flinging their knapsacks away, and looking behind as if they feared the mountaineers were in hot pursuit.

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In Grandfontaine, in a sort of spirit of revenge, they broke whatever they could lay hands on, tore out windows, crushed in doors, demanded food and drink, and insulted the people by way of payment. Their imprecations and cries, the commands of their officers, the complaints of the inhabitants, the heavy tramp of feet across the bridge of Framont, and the agonized neigh of wounded horses, all rose in a confused murmur to the abatis.

On the side of the mountain, arms, shakos, knapsacks, dead--all the signs of a rout--were alone seen. Opposite appeared Marc-Dives's guns, ready to open fire anew in case of a new attack.

The partisans had gained the day; but no shout of triumph rose from their intrenchments. Their losses had been too cruel. Silence had succeeded the tumult of battle--silence, deep and solemn--and those who had escaped the carnage gazed earnestly at their fellows, as if wondering to see them yet alive. A few called aloud for friends, some for brothers, who replied not. Then search began throughout the length of the works for Jacob, or Philippe, or Antoine.

And the gray shades of night were falling fast over mountain and valley, and lending a strange mystery to the horrid picture; and men came and went without knowing one another.

Materne wiped his bloody bayonet, and called his boys in hoarse tones:

"Kasper! Frantz!"

And seeing them approach in the half-darkness, he asked:

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

The voice of the old hunter, harsh as it was, trembled.

"We are all three again together; God's mercy be thanked!" he murmured.

And he, who was never known to weep, embraced his boys, while the tears rained down his cheeks, and they, no less moved, sobbed like little children.

But the old man soon recovered himself and cried with a forced gayety:

"We have had a rough day, lads; let us take a cup of wine--I am thirsty."

Throwing a last glance at the bloody slope, and seeing that the sentries whom Hullin had stationed at intervals of thirty paces were all at their posts, the old man led the way to the farm-house.

They were passing carefully through the corpse-piled trench, when a feeble voice exclaimed:

"Is that you, Materne?"

"Ah poor Rochart! Pardon! forgive me if I hurt you," said the old hunter, bending over the wounded man; "how comes it that you are still here?"

"Because I cannot move hence; inasmuch as I have no legs," answered the other with a mournful sort of merriment.

The three hunters stood silent for a moment, when the old wood-cutter continued:

"Tell my wife, Materne, that behind the cupboard, in a stocking, she will find six crowns. I saved them in case either of us should fall sick; but I have no further need--"

"Perhaps--perhaps--you may live yet, old friend," interrupted Materne. "We will carry you from here, at all events."

"It is not worth while," returned the wounded man. "An hour more, and you can carry me to my grave."

Materne, without replying, signed to Frantz to help him, and together they raised the old wood-cutter from the ground, despite his wish to be left alone. Thus they arrived at the farm-house.

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All the wounded who had strength enough to drag themselves to the hospital were there. Doctor Lorquin and a fellow-surgeon, named Despois, who had come during the day to his assistance, had work enough on hand; and as Materne and his sons with their piteous load traversed the dimly-lighted hall, they heard cries which froze the blood in their veins, and the dying wood-cutter almost shrieked:

"Why do you bring me here! Let me die in peace. They shall not touch me!"

"Open the door Frantz," said Materne, his forehead covered with a cold sweat, "open quick!"

And as Frantz pushed open the door, they saw, on a large kitchen-table in the middle of the low room, with its heavy brown rafters, Colard, the younger, stretched at full length, six candles around him, a man holding each arm, and a bucket beneath. Doctor Lorquin, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a short wide saw in his hand, was about cutting off the poor fellow's leg, while Desbois stood by with a sponge. Blood dripped into the bucket, and Colard was pale as death. Catherine Lefevre was near, with a roll of lint, and seemed firm; but the furrows in her cheeks were deeper than usual, and her teeth were tightly set. She gazed on the ground so as not to see the misery around.

"It is over!" said the doctor at length, turning round.

And casting a glance at the new-comers he added:

"Ah! you here, Father Rochart?"

"Yes; but you must not touch me. I am done for; let me die in peace."

The doctor took up a candle, looked for a moment at the old man's wounds, and said with a grimace:

"It was time, my poor Rochart; you have lost a great deal of blood, and if we wait any longer, it will be too late."

"Do not touch me!" shrieked the old man. "I have suffered enough!"

"As you wish. We will pass to another."

He looked at the long line of mattresses. The two last were empty, although deluged with blood. Materne and Kasper placed their charge upon the last, while Despois went to another of the wounded men, saying:

"It is your turn, Nicholas."

Then they saw tall Nicholas Cerf lift a pale face and eyes glittering with fear.

"Give him a glass of brandy," said the doctor.

"No, I would rather smoke my pipe."

"Where is your pipe?"

"In my vest."

"Good; and your tobacco?"

"In my pantaloons pocket."

"Fill his pipe, Despois. This man is a brave fellow--I like to see such. We will take off your arm in two times and three motions."

"Is there no way of preserving it, Monsieur Lorquin--for my poor children's sake? It is their only support."

"No, the bone is fractured and will not reunite. Light his pipe, Despois. Now, Nicholas, my man, smoke, smoke."

The poor fellow seemed after all to have little wish to do so.

"Are you ready?" asked the doctor.

"Yes," answered the sufferer in a choking voice.

"Good! Attention, Despois; sponge!"

Then with a long knife he cut rapidly around the arm. Nicholas ground his teeth. The blood spirted; Despois tied something. The saw ground for two seconds, and the arm fell heavily on the floor.

{484}

"That is what I call a well-performed operation," observed Lorquin.

Nicholas was no longer smoking; the pipe had fallen from his lips. They bound round what remained of his arm with lint, and replaced him on his mattress.

"Another finished! Sponge the table well, Despois, and then for the next," said the doctor, washing his hands in a large basin.

Each time he said, "Now for the next," the wounded men groaned with fear. The shrieks they heard and the glittering knives they saw were enough to strike a chill to their hearts; but what could be done? All the rooms of the farm-house and of the barn were crowded. Only the large hall remained clear, and so the Doctor could not help operating under the eyes of those who must a little later take their turn.

Materne could see no more. Even the dog, Pluto, who stood behind the doctor, seemed to tremble at the horrible sight. The old hunter hastened to breathe the cold air without, and cried:

"And to think, my boys, that this might have happened to us!"

"God is good," said Frantz, "and why should we let sights even like these affright us from our duty? We are in his hands."

A murmur of voices arose to their right.

"It is Marc-Dives and Hullin," said Kasper, listening.

"Yes, they have just come from the breastwork they made behind the fir-wood for the cannon," added Frantz.

They listened again. Footsteps approached.

"You are embarrassed with your three prisoners," said Hullin, in short tones. "You return to Falkenstein to-night; why can you not take them with you?"

"But where shall I put them?"

"Parbleu! In the prison of Abreschwiller; we cannot keep them here."

"I understand, Jean-Claude. And if they attempt to escape on the way, I will plant my rapier between their shoulders."

"You must!"

They reached the door, and Hullin, seeing Materne, cried joyously:

"You here, old friend? I have been seeking you for an hour. Where were you?"

"We were carrying old Rochart to the hospital."

Jean-Claude dropped his head sadly; but his joy at the result of the day's battle soon gained the upper hand, and he said:

"Yes, it is mournful, indeed. But such is the fortune of war. Are you or your sons hurt?"

"Not a scratch."

"Thank Heaven! Materne, those who passed through this day's work may well rejoice."

"Yes," cried Marc-Dives, laughing, "I saw old Materne ready to beat a retreat; without those little cannon-shots, things would have had a different ending."

Materne reddened and glanced angrily at the smuggler.

"It is very possible," he answered; "but without the cannon-shots at the beginning, we should not have needed those at the end, and old Rochart and fifty brave fellows would yet have legs and arms--a thing which would not have hurt our victory."

"Bah!" interrupted Hullin, who saw a dispute likely to arise. "Quit this discussion. Every man has done his duty."

Then addressing Materne, he added:

{485}

"I have sent a flag of truce to Framont, to tell the enemy to remove their wounded. They will arrive in about an hour, doubtless, and you must order our outposts to let them advance; but without arms, and with torches. If they come otherwise, fire on them."

"I will go at once," replied the old hunter.

"Return with your sons, and have supper with us at the farm-house, when you have carried out your orders."

"Very well, Jean-Claude."

Hullin ordered Frantz and Kasper to have large bivouac-fires lighted for the night, and Marc to have his horses fed and to go at once for more ammunition, and, seeing them depart on their way, he entered the farm-house.

----------

Translated From The French.

The Unity Of Scientific And Revealed Truth. [Footnote 158]

[Footnote 158: A discourse pronounced by the Archbishop of Malines on his first pastoral visit to the city and university of Louvain.]

I have not been able to come among you as soon as I desired. The duties of my office, and especially the difficulties which always surround one's initiation to a new sphere of duties, are the causes of this delay. Had I the leisure, my first visit after my entrance into this vast diocese would have been to Louvain--to Louvain, so celebrated for its glorious traditions--to Louvain, which has ever remained true to them. To the attraction of great historical remembrances are joined in my case ties of a more intimate nature. This pulpit recalls to my mind the days of a ministry which must always be dear to my heart, and which was far less onerous than that which has replaced it; for if in those days I spoke of the cross, it was surely without carrying the one which now weighs upon my shoulders. Yet it is with joy that I address for the first time, as pastor of their souls, the children of this city, twice blessed by the Church for the signal services she has rendered to the Christian world, both by her ancient university, and by the one which lives again in our time with so much lustre.

Louvain bears a great title, because she symbolizes a great thing--the unity of science and faith. How, then, my brethren, can I avoid speaking of her, and of that unity which men now strive to banish from the schools of learning? Everywhere it seems as if some invincible power had given the command to expel Christianity from our schools in the name of science. I gladly seize, therefore, the first opportunity which has been offered me to consider this question, because it deeply interests the living minds of the age, because it is one of the great cares of our social life, and because here the two interests are united in one place: the interests of science, because I speak of Louvain; the interests, of religion, because I speak from this sacred pulpit.

{486}

Not always in their efforts against the unity of science and religion do we find our opponents frankly declaring war upon Christianity. No; its enemies prefer to extinguish it by stratagem. They wisely fear the love of parents for their offspring; and while they are eager to destroy the faith of the one, they hope to accomplish their task without the knowledge of the other. It is on this account that they have sought and found the proper word to conceal their design, and this word is neutrality in teaching. I wish, then, to show you two things:

First. That neutrality in teaching, as far as it regards the Christian religion, is evidently impossible; that a teacher must unavoidably declare himself for or against the Christian faith, even as Christ himself said, "He that is not for me is against me."

Second. Science cannot declare itself against the Christian faith without denying itself, without being unfaithful to its own principle, which is reason, and without renouncing the very conditions of a free, perfect, and progressive science.

May the Mother of Science and Faith, Mater Agnitionis, obtain for us from the incarnated Wisdom the light which we need!

I.

When I speak of instruction, I do not intend to designate certain branches of study in particular, but I refer to the whole course of teaching in each of its three degrees. I affirm, then, that neutrality in teaching is an evident impossibility, so far as it regards Christianity in each of these three degrees, and more especially in the highest grade of instruction. This could be demonstrated by running over a great number of the various branches of study; but in order to be more concise, though not less conclusive, I will speak of only two among them, history and morals, upon which no school can be silent. They will suffice to convince you that the school which is not Christian is necessarily antichristian, and that it will ever be impossible to be neutral.

Let us begin with history. If the Christian religion were a mythology, certainly we could separate it from the teaching of history, and banish it to the domain of fable; but Christianity before as well as after the Incarnation is a great historical fact; nay, it is the greatest fact of history. This fact is a living one in that religious society which embraces every nation. This living fact speaks and affirms itself divine; not divine in man who accepts it, but divine in that which constitutes its essence, in its doctrine, in its worship, and in its doctrinal and sanctifying power.

Christian teaching affirms that Christianity is a divine fact. Anti-Christian instruction denies it. What, then, can neutral instruction be? If it neither affirm nor deny, necessarily it doubts, and consequently it must teach doubt. But is not the teaching of doubt formally antichristian? The divine Author of Christianity teaches us that, in the presence of the proofs of his mission, doubt is inexcusable: "If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin: but now they have no excuse for their sin." (John xv. 22.)

We will see, in a few moments, why this doubt is inexcusable; but we only affirm a self-evident truth when we declare neutrality to be impossible, because he who is not for the faith is necessarily against it, and to teach doubt is only another way to deny truth. But perhaps it will be said that neutral instruction will say nothing concerning this matter; that it will pass by the fact of the Christian religion in silence; and that, without relegating it to the domain of mythology, it will quietly ignore its existence. {487} Now, the absurdity of this position is still more manifest, for Christianity is linked to everything in this world. We cannot take a step in history without meeting with it; if you search the annals of antiquity, of the first centuries of the Christian era, of the middle ages, or of modern times, at every age alike you will see Christianity before you, and everywhere it governs all other things from its lofty height.

The pretence of silence in this matter is therefore one of two things: it is either nonsense or it is hypocrisy. It is nonsense when it is said, as I have recently been informed it is in a certain classic work adopted by our schools, that it will contain no question about sacred history, nor about the history of the church, whether of the old or the new alliance, because these questions are all beyond the scope of history. The chain of facts which a Bossuet has unrolled in his discourse upon universal history--that marvellous chain of facts beyond the scope of history! The expectation of redemption among all the people of the globe, which is proved by the universality of expiatory sacrifices, and by foreshadowings which redemption can alone make intelligible; the establishment of Christianity in its last and definite form, its civilizing influence, its trials, its long-continued struggles, its triumphant existence--these are all beyond the scope of history! This pretended silence, then, is not nonsense, it is hypocrisy; it is only, like the neutrality which it defends, the hollow mask of infidelity.

Again, neutrality is not less impossible in the sphere of morals than in history. What is morality? It is the science of duty. By itself, it is the science of means furnished by reason to overcome our passions. Therefore to morals belong these absorbing questions: Why have the passions revolted against reason? Why does not the same beautiful harmony reign in the moral as in the physical order? Why are there, as it were, two men within us, and why do we know what we ought to do, and why do we follow the opposite? What is the cause of this deep-seated evil, which is only too well known to us all? What is the remedy for it? Where shall we find the strength to conquer this interior revolt? Where are the arms with which we can triumph?

He who knows not this knows nothing. But faith has positive answers for these fundamental questions. It teaches us that the revolt of passions in human nature is the first result of the revolt of the human mind against God; that the soul, which did not wish to submit to its Creator and its Master, has rightly suffered the uprising of its own slaves, the senses and the appetites; that, if it would vanquish them, it must humiliate its pride, lament its evil deeds, implore the grace of God, pray to obtain again its lost strength. It teaches us that by prayer we seize familiarly the divine armor, "armaturam Dei orantes" and that only by its aid can we hope to combat and to triumph. This is Christian teaching. And will not that teaching be antichristian which denies what Christianity, in this respect, declares to be true? Certainly it must, because in the teaching of morals, to be silent concerning the necessity of grace and of prayer, by which man freely obtains grace, is to make an avowed profession of antichristianity. To say nothing of the grace which strengthens our nature; to say nothing of grace, which not only strengthens, but elevates nature above itself; to say nothing of the life of grace, as if, when compared with the physical and intellectual life, there was not a far more noble life, which all men have experienced, since no one is completely abandoned by its merciful inspirations--this is not a neutral course; it is antichristian, formally antichristian.

{488}

I might prove to you here that instruction upon morals is not only antichristian when it is silent concerning the means given us by faith to conquer these passions, but also when it refuses to recognize the great motives for fulfilling our duties, for these motives are so many Christian truths. I might show, or rather recall the fact, that these truths have transformed private and public morality, that they have begotten modern civilization; and those are indeed blind and ungrateful who enjoy the fruit of this civilization, while they would miserably tear the fair tree from the hearts of their Christian countrymen.

But I must be satisfied with placing these arguments before you; and I am the more readily contented with this sketch, because I know that it is not requisite to say everything, in order to be understood. I am convinced that I have said enough to make it clear, both to your reason and to your conscience, that instruction must be Christian, or it will become antichristian; that science is necessarily either for or against the holy faith; and that its pretended neutrality is only an unmeaning word. Hence it follows that the organization of public instruction on the basis of a deceitful neutrality is in reality the affirmation of antichristianity in the state. [Footnote 159]

[Footnote 159: In Belgium, there is a society which bears the title of The League of Instruction. This society is free to organize antichristianity in its schools, but always defraying its own expenses, and at its own risk and peril. This society has become dissatisfied, because its members know that they cannot gain the confidence of the people; hence they have sought to remove the obstacles by imploring the protection of the state.]

II.

It remains for us to see that, when science declares against the Christian faith, it really denies its own principle, that is to say, reason. And why? Because it is reason which invokes the light of faith, and it is reason which recognizes it. It is reason which invokes the light of faith. For what is reason? Reason is that one of our powers which reaches after truth; it is that faculty which is ever forcing us to search out the "why" of things. It has even the same name as its object, for the reason and the "why" of anything are one. Again, we only act reasonably when we know why we are acting. Even in our most insignificant actions, we always propose to ourselves an intention, an end which determines them. In order, therefore, to live reasonably, we must know why. It is necessary to know the why, or the end, of life, so that the first words of our catechism answer the first question of reason. Why are you in the world? Is it only to go to the cemetery? Has man been placed upon the earth only that he may be thrown into a grave? Humanity will never accept this doctrine. The generations of the human race kneel at the tombs of their ancestors and protest against this monstrosity--the miserable and absurd system of those who clamorously desire a liberty of the human mind, which can only terminate in corruption and worms. The human conscience and human reason unite in declaring that life is only a journey, that its end is beyond the tomb, and that to die is to attain it. But what do we attain? Where do we arrive? {489} Here reason searches, and trembles while she seeks. She looks, and feels that she is powerless to penetrate single-handed into the abyss of the future life. The learned and the ignorant are equally baffled, and can only say, "It is necessary to return to the other world, in order to know what really is done there." The gospel tells us the same; no one has penetrated the heavens except he who came from them: "No one has ascended into heaven, except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven."

Let us try then, brethren, to discover what reason asks, and justly asks. It asks the "why" of life; it does not care to exist without knowing "why" and knowing it with certainty. It can obtain certitude in many other spheres of thought; but it wishes to be assured upon this far more than upon any other question. Let us, then, state how reason has certitude in some other matters, and how it wishes and can attain it in this.

We know the things of the exterior world with certainty, and reason tells as to admit that which is well attested by the senses. We know the things of the interior world, of that world which is within our own breasts, because reason tells us to admit what is revealed by our self-consciousness. We know the great mass of truths of the intellectual world with certainty, for our reason tells us that we must acknowledge the truths proclaimed by evidence. We know that which is passing upon the earth in the present day. We know events which occur in distant quarters of the world, and we know the facts which are separated from us by long intervals of time, because our reason tells us that history and the testimony of mankind are reliable grounds of certitude.

But that which we wish to know more than all these things is the end of our own existence; and we wish to know this precisely, because we are reasonable beings. Our reason longs to know more of the meaning of our creation; it desires to know what is true in regard to our end, because this truth must be divine and eternal. But to be certain of divine truth, must not reason be willing to obey the voice of God? To be certain of eternal truth, must we not accept the testimony of eternity? The testimony of God was implored in every age, and from this it comes that faith, which is the acceptance by human reason of God's revelation, is a constant, perpetual, universal fact, even as the fact of reason itself. It is ridiculous to urge against the truth of revelation the various religions which claim to be revealed; for the counterfeits of revelation do not prove more against it than the perversion of reason proves against reason. The wanderings of reason do not compel us to deny the truth of human reason, so neither do the misrepresentations and counterfeits of revelation force us to deny its truth. We have seen, therefore, what reason requires; let us see how it recognizes revelation when it meets with it.

There is a certain manner of speaking indifferently of all religions which is used as a cloak to hide the desire to confound them. This is common in the world of letters among men of scanty science. But serious science, like a sincere conscience, discovers divine revelation, in spite of its human alterations, by certain signs and characteristic marks which are unmistakable. These signs have been multiplied by Providence with love; but I wish to insist here upon that token which has not only followed past ages in their course, but has, if I may so speak, grown with their growth: that grand characteristic which reveals the author of nature, and which assures us of the giver of revelation, is unity. {490} The unity of nature reveals God as the creator, the harmony of the heavens and of the earth recount the glory of their author: "The heavens explain the glory of God." It is the chant of the unity of space. But the unity of time is not less splendid than the unity of worlds; it is the harmony of centuries in Jesus Christ, who has revealed God as the author of revelation. Nature and revelation are, then, the two great works in which God is revealed by the same sign--queenly and all-powerful unity! The unity of time in Jesus Christ, and in him alone, is a fact without a parallel; more easy for us to rejoice in than to depict. Yet here is the master-stroke of a great pencil: "These are great facts, clearer than the light of the sun itself, which make us know that our religion is as old as the world, and demonstrate that he only could be its author who, holding all things in his hand, has been able to begin and continue that which holds all centuries in its embrace. To be expected, to come, to be adored by a posterity which will last through every age, is the character of him whom we adore, Jesus Christ, yesterday, to-day, and to endless ages, the same." This, then, is the manifest sign of divine revelation, the unity of time in Jesus Christ.

St. Augustine spoke of this sign, considering it, however, under only one of its aspects, when he answered those persons who envied the good fortune of those who conversed with the risen Christ: "The apostles saw one thing, but they believed another; and because they saw, they believed that which they did not see. They saw Jesus Christ risen, the head of the Church, but they did not yet see this body, this Universal Church, which Jesus Christ announced to them," this marvellous and almost incredible Catholicity, extending over every country, with its unbloody sacrifice of the great invisible Victim, with the manifestation of conscience and remission of sins, with its perpetuity to the end of time, with its centre of unity established by these words: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The apostles saw none of these things, and how could they believe in such apparently incredible promises? But they were in the presence of the risen Christ; they had seen him dead and crucified, they saw him living and glorious, and it is from his mouth that they received the promise of that which they did not see. "They have seen the head," says St. Augustine, "and they have believed in the body; we see the body, and we believe in the head. We are like them, because we see, and therefore we believe that which we do not see."

It is necessary for us to recall here what St. Thomas Aquinas says upon this point: "No one believes, unless he sees what is necessary to be believed." It is because we are reasonable that we are believers. It is also because we are believers, we are Christians; and it is as Christians and children of Catholicity that we love with the same affection faith and science, the plenitude of science, the liberty and progress of science. The plenitude of science, for, without its harmony with the sphere of faith and the truths which surround our faith, science must always be incomplete.

{491}

There is a science to-day which calls itself "positive" meaning that it is founded on well-attested facts. It is indeed good to rely upon facts. Facts should undoubtedly be the basis of natural science. Still the natural sciences are not the only ones which should be sustained by facts. The moral order, as well as the physical, appears to be a magnificent assemblage of facts. Humanity with its reason, its conscience, its sublime inclinations, its immortal yearnings--is not humanity a grand fact? Then this great fact must be considered as it really exists, in its entirety, and not as mutilated by the false spirit of a system. If the order of facts to which positivism would limit us were the only order, do you know what humanity would be? An ant which disputes with the grains of sand. But humanity will never allow itself to be thus dishonored.

To the moral fact of humanity corresponds that which we have seen triumph over centuries--the fact of revelation. I say it corresponds to them, because Christian revelation offers the only satisfactory reply to questions which philosophers have always asked and never answered. I say it corresponds, because Christian revelation has alone thrown a flood of light upon the mysteries of the positive state of humanity, and it alone affirms that it bears a sovereign remedy for the moral disorder of our nature: "Come to me, and I will refresh you." Do we really possess science, then, if, in the presence of these two great facts and of this divine appeal to experience, we obstinately close our eyes and shut our ears? Have we science when, without investigation, we assert as the first condition the gratuitous denial of the possibility of the things that were to be examined? What is really this pretended scientific position? It is the attitude of fear. If science would be perfect, it must investigate every order of facts, investigate their character, declare their harmony. It is when it states the harmony of the facts of the natural order with the facts (I say facts) of the supernatural order, the harmony of the actual condition of the human race with the revelation which enlightens its depths, then it is that science becomes perfect, or at least always tends more and more toward perfection. The very names which represent this harmony are, as you are well aware, the greatest names of science.

But will science be free, some one asks, if it is bound by revelation? Does it cease to be free because it is bound by nature? That which troubles certain minds on this point is due to a false and pitiable notion of liberty. In what respect is liberty everywhere distinguished from license? In this, that liberty always moves within the sphere of law, and license always beyond it. In the order of science, the law is the truth established. The liberty of science is not, then, absolute in its independence, as has been recently declared by an academician. No; liberty is not the independence of science, for it consists precisely in the fact of its dependence upon truth. The servitude of science, on the contrary, consists in its dependence upon opinion. Indeed, it is not the freedom of the human mind, but license, mother of servitude, which pretends to-day to reduce everything to opinion. This pretence is the negation of science. To possess science is to know with certainty; to have only opinions is to doubt; and to submit to doubt is slavery. The true man of learning never asserts when he is ignorant; but science does not require less certainty, and only becomes science when she can attain it. Science is therefore science only because the truth controls it, and by controlling it, preserves it from the servitude of opinion, so that this shining sentence of our Lord concerns also the learned: "The truth shall make you free."

{492}

"But does not experience show that in bearing the yoke of truth we are sure to yield to illusions?" I answer, is it not proven that those who resist the evidence of a divine order, whether in the work of revelation or in the work of nature, bend beneath every breath that passes, turning to every wind of doctrine, yield to every caprice of intellect, and frame their convictions according to the phrases which are daily set forth by the press of both hemispheres? Have you never met with one of these slaves? They are ready to believe anything that is affirmed without evidence, provided it is contrary to the faith, and they are willing to accept any theory as a demonstrated fact, so long as it can be used against Christianity. What is this but the credulity of incredulity?

The notion of progress is not less false among them than that of liberty. Do they not say every day that faith is incompatible with progress, because revelation is immutable? Is not nature also immutable? Is the immutability of nature an obstacle to the progress of natural science? Why, then, is the immutability of revelation, which we have seen clothed with the same divine sign as nature--why, then, is this immutability an obstacle to the progress of the moral sciences? Is it not concerning the progress of these sacred sciences that Pius IX. has recently adopted the words of Vincent of Lerins, and made them his own? "Progress exists, and it is very great; but it is the true progress of faith, which is not constant change. It must be that the intelligence, the science, the wisdom of all ages, as well as of each one in particular, of all ages and centuries of the whole church, should, like individuals, increase and make great, very great progress; so that posterity may have the good fortune to understand that which antiquity venerated without comprehending; so that the precious stones of divine dogma may be cut, exactly adapted, wisely ornamented, that they may enrich us with their grace, their splendor, and their beauty, but always of the same kind, that is to say, the same doctrine, in the same sense and with the same substance, so that, when we use new terms, we do not say new things." You understand then, my brethren, that the immutability of revelation does not offer a greater obstacle to the progress of sacred science than the immutability of nature places in the way of the natural sciences.

The popes were not only the friends of the progress of the sacred sciences; they were the most ardent supporters of all science, as well as of the progress of letters and arts. The facts which prove this are so numerous that I shall content myself with recalling those which concern you more directly. Who founded the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England? The popes. Who founded the universities of Paris, Bologna, Ferrara, Salamanca, Coimbra, Alcala, Heidelberg, Prague, Cologne, Vienna, Louvain, and Copenhagen? Again the popes. Who instituted the professorships of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic Languages at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca? A pope--Clement V. By whom, during two centuries, were sustained, encouraged, recompensed, the works of savants which finally led to the knowledge of the system of the world? By the popes and the cardinals of the holy Roman Church. This is what those ignore who do not blush to perpetuate the fabulous condemnation of Galileo by the Church. {493} Neither the Church nor the sovereign pontiffs have ever condemned Galileo. Galileo was condemned by a tribunal of theologians, who soon withdrew this condemnation to give astronomy the same liberty which was granted to Galileo himself, whose sombre prison is only a romance. Where was this system of the movement of the earth adopted by Copernicus, and then first taught by Galileo? At Rome, in 1495, by Nicholas de Cusa, professor in the Roman University, forty-eight years before the birth of Copernicus, and one hundred and thirty-nine before that of Galileo. Nicholas de Cusa defended at that time this system in a work, dedicated to his professor, Cardinal Julian Cesarini. Pope Nicholas V. raised Nicholas de Cusa to the cardinalate, and named him Bishop of Brixen, in Tyrol. Again, it was at Rome, toward the year 1500, that Copernicus explained and defended this system before an audience of two thousand scholars. Copernicus was made Canon of Königsberg. Celius Calcagnini, who taught the system of Cusa and Copernicus, in Italy, about 1518, was appointed apostolic prothonotary by Clement VIII., and confirmed in this position of honor by Paul III.; it was to Paul III. that Copernicus dedicated his work De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. At last, when the renowned Kepler, who developed and completed the system of Copernicus, was on this account persecuted by the Protestant theologians of Tübingen, the Holy See used its utmost endeavors to place in the University of Bologna this savant, so Christian in his ideas, and who had not merely embraced the system of Galileo, but had given it an immense weight by the authority of his immortal discoveries. If I insist on this episode, it is because bad faith is stubborn in its efforts to find an argument against the conduct of the popes in the great history of the moral progress of science. The Church never fears the light. She knows and teaches that the light of reason and the light of faith come from the same source. She knows that one of these truths will never contradict the other, and that among the proofs of revelation we must not forget its harmony with the sciences. The sects cannot withstand the presence of science; never has pagan or mussulman become a savant without losing his poor, bewildering faith. It is not so of the true religion. From Clement of Alexandria and Origen to Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Kepler, and De Maistre, to say nothing of our contemporaries, science and faith have dwelt together in the greatest minds of Christendom.

Continue this glorious tradition, young men of the Catholic university, and remain always worthy of your Alma Mater! Become truly men, and you will be men the more powerful and useful the more faithful Christians you are.

And you, city of Louvain, be justly proud of remaining, through your university, the object of noble envy to the nations which surround you. Ireland has taken you for her model; France and Catholic Germany look upon you, and endeavor that they too may possess something which resembles you. Never cease to be yourself, the city of science and of religion, that your children, ever faithful to these two lights, may be consoled, during their life and at the hour of death, by the thought that their love has never divided these two great things which have been united by the infinite wisdom of God.

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{494}

The Story Of Marcel, The Little Mettray Colonist.

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Chapter XI

"Wide o'er the brim, with many a torrent swelled, And the mixed ruin of its banks o'erspread, At last the roused-up river pours along, Resistless, roaring, dreadful." Thomson.

The first inundations of the Loire with which we are acquainted have been made known to us by the celebrated historian and bishop St. Gregory of Tours, who has left detailed accounts of eight dreadful disasters that occurred in the space of eleven years; that is, from 580 to 591. In the archives of France there is preserved an edict of Louis le Debonnaire, son and successor of Charlemagne, who, touched by the piteous complaints made to him by the inhabitants of Touraine and Anjou, whose harvests were in constant danger from the sudden risings of the river, ordered the building of dams and embankments, which, modified by some of his successors and strengthened by others, became at last the magnificent structures we behold them at the present day, between Blois and Tours.

Nevertheless, the capricious river has never yet during all these long centuries been kept for any time within its bed. Its devastations were fearful in 1414, and again in 1615, when the sudden melting of the enormous masses of snow which had fallen on the surrounding country during the winter caused so frightful a catastrophe that it has since been known in French history as the "Deluge of Saumur." The beginning of the seventeenth century saw ten risings of the Loire in ten years; and the Duke of Saint-Simon has left us, in his celebrated memoirs, a notice of one in 1708, which was the cause of much misery. In more modern times, France has had, every eight or ten years, to deplore some dreadful misfortune arising from the same source, and the more favored portions of that beautiful land have been compelled repeatedly to come to the aid of the ruined population of the basin of the Loire, whose farm-houses had been swept away by the flood, their harvest-fields devastated, their cattle drowned, and who, too often, alas! had also had to weep over irreparable losses far more bitter than these--the life of dear ones lost in the surging waters.

About five years after Marcel's admission into the Mettray Colony, one of the most terrible of these visitations overtook the inhabitants of the banks of the picturesque stream. A long continuation of rainy weather had swollen the Cher and the Allier, both tributaries of the Loire, and the river, rising suddenly, broke through its strong embankments and spread itself over the country. The local authorities, of every degree and station--prefect, subprefect, and mayors--with the soldiers, engineers, and townspeople of Tours, all hastened to the relief of the drowning villages and farms, and all did their duty; but even among these courageous men the young Colonists distinguished themselves by their energy and self devotion.

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The inundation had commenced in the night, and when daylight revealed the extent of the disaster, the director assembled the youths.

"Boys," cried he, "the Loire has risen, the country is under water, and hundreds of families are in danger of their lives. Boys, the oldest and strongest of you must go and help to save them!"

The lads looked at one another an instant in silence, then broke forth in a cry that rang far and near, "Long live Demetz! Long live our director!" a cry that was a perfect explosion of gratitude and of pride; for the poor fellows fully comprehended all that their wise and good director meant them to understand--his confidence in their honor, their honesty, and their courage.

And well they justified his trust in them! More than a hundred were soon actively at work raising dikes and clams, propping houses, and carrying succor to the distressed.

Marcel, Polycarpe, and one of their companions, a young baker, named Priat, to whom both of them were much attached, were among the foremost in these labors. They had gone with some others to carry help to a village containing about twenty families; it was situated only two hundred yards from the river, and completely surrounded by water. An immense quantity of wood--wrecks from other villages swept away by the flood--drifted about in the streets, and was dashed incessantly against the water-soaked walls of the houses, shaking them terribly; two, indeed, had fallen in the night and been washed away. On the roofs, or leaning from the upper windows of the tottering dwellings, were to be seen the frightened inhabitants imploring aid; the mothers holding out their little ones and praying for pity. It was a heart-breaking sight, and the noise of the ever-rising and surging river, of the wind and pouring rain, of the shocks of the drift-wood, increased the terrors of the scene. Nor was it possible to approach near enough to the houses to save any of the unfortunates shrieking for help; for every boat belonging to the place had either been swamped or had been torn from its moorings by the overwhelming current and carried away.

"Let us run to Saint-Pierre," cried Polycarpe, after he and his companions had contemplated the fearful spectacle for a few moments with consternation. "We may find a boat there!"

He started off as he spoke, followed by half a dozen of the Colonists. Marcel did not accompany them, for he had heard cries of distress from the windmill, a short distance off, and had hastened thither with three or four more. The water at this point was quite seven feet deep, and the building evidently giving way. There seemed to be no possibility of saving the miller and his wife and child, for the flood rushed so fiercely around the mill that the most experienced swimmer would not have ventured into it. Marcel was gazing in hopeless pity at the fated building, when a man on horseback trotted into the midst of the group of despairing spectators. A sudden thought struck the boy.

"Give me that horse!" cried he; "quick, give me that horse!"

"What do you mean, youngster?" asked the man, somewhat surprised by the imperative tone and unexpected demand of the stranger.

"For God's sake, lend me your horse; every moment that we lose may cost a life!"

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As he spoke he turned toward the mill, where the unfortunate family could be seen at the window, stretching forth their imploring hands and crying for help. The traveller got off his horse without another word, and, quick as lightning, Marcel was in the saddle and spurring the animal forward into the water. Before his surprised companions well comprehended what he intended to do, they saw him breasting the furious current and struggling to reach the windmill.

They saw him reach it at last, and then the miller letting down his wife to him by a rope passed under her arms. The poor woman held her child clasped closely to her bosom, and though she clung to her deliverer with a grasp that almost strangled him, she seemed to think only of her babe, whispering to it as Marcel urged the panting horse back again to the land, "Thou art saved, my little one, thou art saved!"

The brave boy placed the mother and child in safety in the hands of the admiring spectators of his courage and self-devotion; then, without staying for a moment's breathing or rest, forced his unwilling horse again into the flood.

This time the owner of the good beast made some indignant remonstrances. "Both boy and horse will be lost," cried he; "they are both, tired now; they can never fight against the current!"

"Why don't the miller throw himself into the water and swim? He's fresh and the others aren't."

"Suppose he don't know how," answered one of the bystanders; "and if he did, do you think he could stem that torrent?"

"Why, he'd be carried down the Loire to the sea, just like a piece of straw," said another.

"The horse, the horse, look how he strains! he's giving way! he's lost his footing!" cried half a dozen at this instant.

For a moment the strong, high-spirited animal was hurried along by the foaming, eddying stream, then with a mighty effort recovering himself he reached the mill, and the miller had just time to drop down and cling with a death-grip to the pale, intrepid rider, when the building toppled over and was carried away!

Cries and tears of joy hailed them as they approached the dry land; the young Colonists surrounded their heroic companion, and presently bore him off to Mettray for a change of clothing and some refreshment; his trembling frame told how much he needed them. But the family he had saved so gallantly did not let him depart before they had thanked him with tears of gratitude, while the owner of the noble horse pressed his hand in both of his and swore to be his friend through life.

"You're a brave fellow, and I honor you," cried he. "I'll be your friend, and a true one, or my name's not Charles Rodez!"

The poor miller with his wife and child were taken to a house prepared to receive and succor the unfortunate victims of the inundation. Food and warm clothing and beds were here ready for the half-starved and half-drowned families that were arriving continually--poor, despairing people who had most of them lost their little all, and some of them a father, or husband, or child.

Scarcely had Marcel, cold and wet, but very happy, been borne off in triumph by his comrades, when there appeared on the road, coming toward the village, a great truck drawn by two horses, and loaded with a large boat and its oars.

Polycarpe and his friend Priat had been successful in their search, and were now returning at the head of the little band of Colonists who had followed them to Saint-Pierre.

{497}

The people in the water-logged houses of the village fairly screamed with hope and joy when they saw the procession, and then the boat taken off and launched. A dozen Colonists were eager to jump in, but Polycarpe and Priat were given the precedence, and they, with another well-grown youth, presently pushed off into the fast and furious stream. It was hard work to keep clear of the drifting beams that were hurled along, rather than carried, by the current through the narrow streets of the village; harder still to get the boat near enough to each tottering house to take off the frightened family from the roof or out of the windows.

Once, indeed, it came near being swamped, with eight persons on board, by the sudden falling of a wall of the house from which they had just been saved. Polycarpe's quick eye saw the coming danger in time to give such a vigorous pull with his oar that the boat sprang forward just out of reach of the stones and beams, but she was so violently rocked by the concussion of the falling materials with the water that it seemed a miracle that she did not capsize.

And once, too, the brave boy missed his footing as he climbed on a roof to take off a lame old man, and fell headlong into the water. An admirable swimmer and diver, he did not lose his presence of mind, but passed under the boat and came up on the other side; he was soon hauled in by poor Priat, who was more frightened and affected by this accident than by any other event of that terrible day.

All day long the work of rescue went on. When the three rowers were exhausted with fatigue, three others took their places. There was not one among the young Colonists who hung back or shirked the danger; not one who did not give proof of courage and Christian charity. The boat went and came, until, at last, one after another, all the poor peasants were in safety. When night fell, not a house of the village was left standing, but not a life had been lost.

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Chapter XII

"Not always full of leaf, nor ever spring, Not always endless night, nor yet eternal day; The saddest birds a season find to sing, The roughest storm a calm may soon allay. Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all, That man may hope to rise, and fear to fall."

Southwell.

The services rendered by the young Colonists during the inundation attracted unusual attention to the Colony, and visitors from Tours, and even from Paris, flocked in numbers to Mettray every Thursday and Sunday. The afternoons of these two days were set apart for the public, who were permitted to be present at the boys' gymnastic exercises, and for whose pleasure the band of the military establishment performed its best pieces.

On one of these occasions, about a couple of months after the events we have endeavored to describe in the preceding chapter, Marcel remarked a gentleman whose countenance he seemed to remember, who appeared to be looking at him, almost examining him, with much attention. Toward the close of the exercises, he perceived the same gentleman in conversation with one of the head-officers of the place. Presently they came to him.

"Marcel," said the officer, "this gentleman wishes to ask you a few questions."

"I want to ask you, my boy, if you recollect ever to have seen me before!" said the gentleman, with an encouraging smile.

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"Yes, sir," replied Marcel; "I believe that I have. I think that you are the Commissary of Police in the Rue des Noyers."

"I was; I see that I am not mistaken either. I never did forget a face that struck me. You are the boy who, some years since, found a bag of Napoleons in the street and brought it to me. Am I not right?"

"Yes, sir," said Marcel, looking down.

"Well, my good fellow, your honesty saved a poor man from a broken heart; but he was very ill for a long time from the dreadful emotions of that night, and circumstances prevented my seeking you out immediately, and so it happened that, when I did go to the address you gave me, I only learnt that the woman with whom you lived was dead, and no one could tell me anything about you. I suspect that no one would. Perhaps I was recognized to be the Commissary of Police, and inspired no great confidence. But I am glad to see you again, my boy. I have just learned something of your history, and I rejoice to find that I was not mistaken in the opinion I formed of you that night that you brought me the bag. I often regretted that you received no reward. I don't know how it happened either. You're a brave fellow, too, as well as an honest one, they tell me. Shake hands, will you?"

He took Marcel's hand as he spoke; the boy burst into tears; the past returned so vividly to his recollection at that moment; the commissary's long speech brought back so much that had almost been forgotten, so much misery and shame and sin, that the different present overpowered him. The good-natured visitor patted him on the shoulder in a kind, fatherly manner, his eyes glistening with sympathy.

"Come," said he presently, "tell me what you intend to do when you leave the Colony. I hear that your time will soon be out now. What trade have you learned?"

"I am a gardener," replied Marcel. "I always loved flowers, and I should like to cultivate them."

"Quite right," said his new-found friend. "Well, I shall look out for a place for you. And now, my boy, remember that I am your friend, a sincere one, and be sure to write to me in any emergency. This is my address, M. de Morel, Rue du Luxembourg, Paris; take care of this card, and do not forget to let me know two or three months before you leave the Colony."

He gave Marcel his card, with another cordial shake of the hand, and, returning to his party, shortly after left the establishment.

Marcel had a long talk with the father of the family and Polycarpe that evening. They both agreed that the promised influence of M. de Morel was a bright prospect for Marcel's future career.

"This friendship, however, is not absolutely necessary for your prosperity hereafter, Marcel," said the father. "You know well that Mettray never abandons her children. Our good director would find you a suitable situation, and continue to watch over your interests. But still I think you must do as this kind gentleman wishes. It is a pleasant and useful thing to have friends; one cannot have too many good ones!"

"You will get acquainted with the poor clerk, very likely," remarked Polycarpe. "Wouldn't you be glad to know him? I should, I think."

"Yes, I think I should too," answered Marcel thoughtfully.

{499}

The friends went to bed that night very happy; Marcel to dream of that future garden, the aim of all his ambition, in which he wandered, hand in hand with the poor clerk, until the clarion sounded; Polycarpe to fancy himself marching, drums beating, colors flying, at the head of a regiment of Zouaves!

There is not a pleasanter place in Paris than the Garden of Plants--the people's delight and the people's own!

Who that has seen it in spring can forget its magnificent avenues of linden-trees, fragrant with the delicious perfume of the tassel-like blossoms; its grand old chestnut-trees, covered with spikes of creamy-white or rose-colored flowers; its lilac-bushes, its pear-trees, white with blossoms, as if they had been snowed on! And then the twitter of birds, mingled with the bleating of sheep and goats, and the soft lowing of cows! Delightful sights and sounds in the very heart of poor old Paris, close by the door of the hospital! 'Tis there that the pale Parisian workman spends his holiday with his wife and children; 'tis there the little ones learn to love and be gentle to God's creatures.

How pleasant it is in the warm summer-time, when the shady avenues are crowded with bands of happy children, jumping the rope or playing at hide-and-seek behind the thick trunks of the old trees planted by Buffon, while their smiling mothers sit near with their sewing. How beautiful then are the gay parterres of bright-colored flowers so skilfully grouped, so harmoniously contrasted! How interesting the rich botanic garden, where so many strange exotic plants, each with its common as well as scientific name legibly inscribed near it, can be freely and conveniently studied by all!

Who that has climbed the little hill, on whose summit stands the Cedar of Lebanon, and rested beneath the glorious spreading branches, has not felt it a heart-warming sight to watch the crowds of hard-working people rambling with their children amidst the trees and flowers of this magnificent garden; here stopping to feed the patient elephant, who seems to pass his life begging for bits of bread; here contemplating, with some aversion perhaps, the clumsy hippopotamus bathing its unwieldy form in its tank; then making a long pause before the monkeys' palace, where some twenty of those natural gymnasts excite roars of laughter by their tricks; and then again before the great cage of the many-colored parrots, that look to the delighted children like giant flying-flowers? And as they stroll along, the goats and sheep, and soft-eyed gazelles and fawns, that beg by the way, get each a few crumbs of black bread and many caresses; and the boys jest en passant with the bear at the bottom of his pit--"Old Martin" they call him--and they bribe him to climb the great pole placed expressly for him, with a bit of crust; and the little girls pity the eagle as they pass by his narrow grated prison. Sitting there under the cedar, the eye falls almost involuntarily on a group of pretty houses, nestled together in a corner not far from the Museums of Natural History. They are the residences of many of the professors attached to the Garden of Plants--professors of botany, of comparative anatomy, of mineralogy and geology, of natural history, etc.--men of world-wide reputations, whom the privileged inhabitants of Paris may hear lecture on these various sciences, in well-ventilated, well-warmed halls, twice every week, for nothing.

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In an out of the way nook, but quite near to the homes of these celebrated men, there was one quaint, old-fashioned little house which, in the spring of the year 1859, had been appropriated as the dwelling of one of the head-gardeners, a young man of great intelligence in his profession, and who had lately been appointed to the situation.

It was a very little house, it is true, but large enough for the tenant and his young, newly-made wife, who thought it, for her part, the sweetest nest ever built. It was covered with climbing roses; they could scarcely be shut out by the windows and doors, so that it had received the name of "The House of the Roses." Outside, it needed no other ornament to be beautiful; inside, its charms were neatness, cheerfulness, cleanliness, and quiet.

But the afternoon that we present it to our readers the little house was in a bustle, for wife Gabrielle and her maid Marie were preparing a dinner far more elaborate than was usual in that simple household, and very anxious were the two little women that every dish should be worthy of the occasion, for the banquet was to feast the return of an old friend from the war in Italy.

The master of the house had but just got home from his daily occupations when there came a vigorous ring at the door, and he ran to open it.

"Marcel!"

"Polycarpe!"

The two friends threw themselves into each other's arms, unable to utter another word.

"How well and happy you look!" exclaimed Polycarpe at last, laying his hand caressingly on his friend's shoulder and gazing affectionately at him.

"And you, Polycarpe, what a tremendous fellow you are with your turban and your great beard!" returned Marcel, looking with admiration at the supple, sinewy form of the handsome Zouave, on whose broad chest shone the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

The blushing young wife received her husband's old friend with a cordiality that soon put the soldier quite at his ease, and by the time the dinner was ended they were chatting together as if they were acquaintances of ten years' standing.

"Now, Marcel," said Polycarpe, when the happy trio were quietly seated in the little salon through whose open windows the fresh roses peeped in, perfuming the soft evening air--"now, Marcel, you must tell me something more about yourself than the few letters I have received from you have contained."

"First, let me tell you something, Monsieur Polycarpe," cried Gabrielle. "Let me tell you that I shall be grateful to you, and love you as a brother to my dying day, for having saved Marcel from being a soldier."

"Madam," replied the Zouave, laughing, "you must love me as your brother, but you owe me no gratitude. Why, I had always wished to be a soldier, and it was the most natural thing in the world that I should exchange my good number for Marcel's bad one. But that drawing for the conscription is really a dreadful ordeal!"

"Thank God that you have come back to us!" ejaculated Marcel softly.

"Oh! that horrible battle of Solferino!" cried Gabrielle with a shudder. "When Marcel knew that you had been engaged in it, I thought that he would go distracted, until he was assured of your safety."

"He ought to have seen us Zouaves, how ready we were for the fight; not a man among us who would have backed out!"

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"It was because I knew your impetuosity, Polycarpe," said Marcel, "that I despaired of ever seeing you again."

"Well, my friend!" said the soldier, pressing his friend's hand, "here I am, safe and sound, with two legs and two arms; there is many a brave man who came back from Solferino who cannot say that!"

"I have always been lucky," continued he after a short pause; "I entered the army a simple soldier, without a single friend, and yet here I am with the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and next month I shall get my epaulettes!"

"I am not surprised, not in the least surprised. You acted like a hero in Italy, I know, or you would not have been decorated! We shall see you a captain soon!" And Gabrielle clapped her little hands with delight at the thought.

"Come, Marcel," cried Polycarpe, laughing, "I shall become too vain if I listen to your wife any longer. Come, tell me; when we parted, you for Paris, and I for the army, how did you get on?"

"It will be a twice-told tale to you, Polycarpe, for you must have received my letters!"

"Never mind! There are gaps in what I know of your doings, and they must be filled up."

"Well, then, after that painful parting with our friends at Mettray, I proceeded to Paris, and went immediately to see M. de Morel; he was just as cordial as he had given me reason to believe he would be, and one of the very first things he did was to take me to see Gabrielle's father."

"Do you know who he was, Monsieur Polycarpe, or is that one of the gaps you mentioned?" interrupted Gabrielle, smiling.

"Oh! no, that is not a gap," replied the soldier. "I know that it was your father who lost the bag of gold Marcel was so fortunate as to find."

"What a dreadful remembrance that night is to us all even now! I was very young then, but I can perfectly recollect my poor father's despair, and my mother's bitter weeping. I have never since heard of a sum of money being found, without picturing to myself the loser's agony, and some such scene of wretchedness as I witnessed in my own home!"

"Monsieur Tixier received me as if I were his son," continued Marcel.

"Well, you were to be!" said Gabrielle archly.

"But I certainly never should have dared to have thought of such a thing then," replied her husband, smiling. "I saw Mademoiselle Gabrielle sitting at work by her mother's side; but I little dreamt that that fair young girl would ever be my wife!"

"How glad we were to see him, you can imagine, Monsieur Polycarpe! We had wanted for years to prove our gratitude to him! But you know we had never been able to find him. In the street where he used to live they told father that Pelagie Vautrin was dead, and the family with whom Marcel lived had moved."

"You can understand how that happened, Polycarpe," continued Marcel, "for you know that your unfortunate father was never seen again after that day when we so hastily fled the house. And then your mother and Loulou left the neighborhood."

"Poor father, poor mother, both gone!" sighed the soldier. "How often have I hoped to possess a decent home of my own that I might save them from a miserable old age! They are both gone, for I cannot help believing that my father is dead."

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"Loulou will be a comfort to you; the good sisters in Rue St. Jacques have brought her up well. She is a good, industrious girl, and an excellent needlewoman. Gabrielle has had her to spend the day with us twice, and we are very fond of her."

"Madame Gabrielle, how can I thank you! What kind, good friends you are to me!" The brave Zouave hid his face for a moment in his hands; when he raised it, his cheeks glistened as if they had just been washed with tears.

"Go on, Marcel, what happened after you had made the acquaintance of M. Tixier?"

"Very shortly after, M. de Morel succeeded in getting me a place in the staff of gardeners attached to the Garden of Plants, and here I have worked steadily on while you have been fighting my battles, Polycarpe."

"You have fought your own, Marcel, and manfully too!"

"Happy years they have been--my profession pleased me, and I made many friends, and as time went on I was promoted, until, at last, six months ago, I was appointed one of the head-gardeners, with a good salary and this little house rent free."

"And then, Monsieur Polycarpe, my good father, who had known for a long time that Marcel and I loved one another dearly, made him understand that my mother would be happy to call him her son!"

"Yes, when my way was clear before me, my good friend bestowed on me the best little wife that ever man was blessed with; and where do you think we went for our wedding trip?"

"Where? Why, to Mettray, of course," cried Polycarpe excitedly.

"Yes, to Mettray. We staid with Rodez at Tours; he was very kind to us, and took us to see all our friends. First of all, Priat; he is foreman to the richest baker in the town, and is very highly esteemed by his master. He was very glad to see me again, and we talked a great deal of you and of the Zouaves."

"Good fellow! I shall go to see him, one of these days!" exclaimed Polycarpe.

"Yes, do. Then we went to Mettray. How my heart beat when I caught sight again of the chapel steeple! I saw many new faces, but our kind director, and the good abbe, and the father of our family were there just the same, all well, and so glad to see me, and so glad to know that I was prosperous and happy; and they admired my little wife so much!"

"Enough, enough, Marcel!" interrupted Gabrielle, brightly blushing and smiling.

"Marcel," said Polycarpe after a short silence, "I have been on the battle-field, my comrades falling by hundreds around me, while I was spared; I have seen death in its most fearful shapes, and human suffering inconceivable to the imagination of those who have not witnessed it, and I have escaped, unhurt, untouched; but I declare to you that when the battle was over and the danger past, I never felt that overpowering gratitude that fills my heart when I remember Mettray. For, after all, what is physical pain, what is the loss of this life compared to that corruption of the heart and conscience that was ours when we first entered the Colony? I do not believe that I have ever closed my eyes in sleep since I quitted that saving home before praying, 'God bless the founders of Mettray!'"

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Protestantism A Failure. [Footnote 160]

[Footnote 160: 1. Failure of Protestantism, and Catholicism the Remedy: Four Discourses delivered by the Rev. F. C. Ewer, D.D., in Christ Church, Fifth avenue, New York. Reported in the New York Times, 1868. 2. Dr. Ewer's Reply to Dr. Adams and Others, in Defence of his Discourses on the Failure of Protestantism, and Catholicism the Remedy. Reported in the New York World, November 16th, 1868.]

Dr. Ewer is a Protestant Episcopal minister of Christ Church in this city, and is, we are assured, no ordinary man. Afflicted in early life with doubts of the truth of revealed religion, but subsequently getting the better of them, he joined the Protestant Episcopal Church, became an Episcopalian minister in California, whence he was called to the pastorate of Christ Church in this city. He is, we are told, a man of great ability, of genuine eloquence, and a true pulpit orator. He appears to be an honest and earnest-minded man, who took seriously the church pretensions of Episcopalians, treated the Episcopal Church as a real Christian church, in which he might hold, develop, and defend what he regarded as real church principles.

But he found that he had counted without his host, that is, without his vestry, with whom the principal power in Episcopalian churches is lodged. His vestry or wardens complained of his preaching, and censured his doctrine as tending Romeward, or as not sufficiently Protestant. Like a brave man, he answered their complainings by these four discourses, in which he distinctly asserts the failure of Protestantism as a religious system, and "Catholicism" as the remedy. Nothing could be more startling to a Protestant congregation, and it seems to have startled to a considerable extent the whole American Protestant public. But we are bound to say, if any one imagines that in these discourses Dr. Ewer rejects Protestantism for the church in communion with the Roman Apostolic See, he is very much in error. Dr. Ewer, in the train of the Oxford Tracts, the Puseyites, and the Ritualists, disclaims Protestantism, proves unanswerably that it was a blunder, and is as a religion a disastrous failure; but the Catholicity he looks to for a remedy is of a very different stamp from ours, and whether it be a genuine Catholicity or not, he claims to be as far from being a Romanist as he thinks he is from being a Protestant. Rome, he says, failed in the fifteenth century, as Protestantism has failed in the nineteenth.

That Protestantism was a sad blunder, and has proved a disastrous failure, Catholics have proved over and over again; and on this point Dr. Ewer has said no more nor better than they had said before him. He has said no more than was said by the Oxford men, or than is said every day by the Ritualists, who are so strong in the English Church that its authorities do not dare condemn, and are obliged to tolerate them. The Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, lately in session in this city, could not by any means be induced to take any action against them, or to do anything to favor the party in the church opposed to them. The Anglican Church, or a considerable portion of it, would, if it could, like to get rid of the name of Protestant, and assume that of Catholic. It is growing ashamed of its origin and principles, and it has many noble members who are doing their best to bring its doctrine and form of worship up to the level of Catholicity. {504} Dr. Ewer indeed says nothing of Protestantism that all thinking men do not see and know as well as he. Protestantism was always more political and national than religious. It originated chiefly with the princes of the sixteenth century, who were opposed, for secular reasons, to the pope, or wished to frighten him in order to bring him to their terms; and it relied wholly on the civil power to diffuse, protect, and defend it. Now, when the civil powers are abandoning it as no longer necessary to their purposes, and giving partial or complete liberty to Catholics, it is able to make a show of sustaining itself only by forming an intimate alliance with the unbelief and naturalism of the age. It is not an insignificant circumstance that, when recently the attempt, for political purposes, was made in England to revive the "No Popery" cry, once so effective, it wholly failed. The Protestant mind in the Protestant world is evidently drifting away from the Reformation, even if not drifting toward the church.

But though the part of Dr. Ewer's discourses which so effectually prove the failure of Protestantism as a religious system is the part most satisfactory to us, we must for various reasons confine the remarks we design to make chiefly to the remedy proposed. The error, nay, the blunder, the author assures us, was in breaking away from the One Holy Catholic Church of the Bible and the Creed, and setting up in its place the Bible interpreted, by the private spirit or private judgment, almost inevitably tending to discredit the Bible, and to develop in pure rationalism or naturalism; the remedy, of course, must be in the return to this One Catholic Apostolic Church with its divinely instituted priesthood, its august sacrifice, its sacraments, sacred rites, and plenary authority in matters of faith and discipline. This, if asserted by us, would be very intelligible to all the world, and would mean a return to the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, or church in communion with the Apostolic See of Rome, the See or the Chair of Peter. But Dr. Ewer takes great pains to have us understand that this is not his meaning, and that in rejecting Protestantism he is far from accepting Romanism, or Roman Catholicity. The puzzle, then, is to determine what, which, or where is the One Catholic Apostolic Church which he proposes as the remedy of the widespread evils of Protestantism.

Is it the Roman Church? No. That is a Catholic Church, but not the Catholic Church. Is it the Greek or Oriental Church? No. That is a catholic church, but not the Catholic Church. Is it the Anglican? No. That, again, is a catholic church, but not the Catholic Church. These, the doctor says, near the conclusion of his second sermon, are particular and local churches, not the one universal church itself, but holding from it and subordinate to it. Where, then, is this universal church? He answers, in the same sermon, a little further on, "We must go deeper and broader" than these particular and local churches "to find the Catholic Church, down to the great foundation on which the three stand; down out of the differences of the brothers to the unity of the family, to find the ground upon which we stand as Catholics, not as Romanists, not s Greeks, not as Anglicans, far less as Episcopalians." {505} But is this catholic church which underlies alike the three particular churches an organ or organism distinct from them, with a centre of unity, life, and authority, independent of them, but on which they themselves depend for their church unity, authority, and life? Not at all. If we understand the author, the Catholic Church is in what these three particular or local churches have in common, in what they agree in holding, or what remains after eliminating their differences. In order not to do the author any injustice, we quote nearly at length, in his own words, the answer he gives in his fourth discourse to the question, "What is the Catholic Church?"

"Now, a church is an organism. The Catholic Church must be an organism universal over space and universal back through time to Christ. Suppose, now, I go to the Methodists again. I find there an organism; but in looking back I find it was arranged about the time of John Wesley, one hundred years ago. Before his day there was no such church organism. I pass then to the Presbyterians. There I find a different organism. But in looking back I find it dates its origin only about three hundred years ago. That will not answer, then. Very well, I try the Congregationalists, and, in fact, each and all of the modern Protestant organizations. Avowedly they do not, any of them, run back into the dreadful mediaeval times--those dark ages. Whatever these Protestant organisms may be, then, they must each and all be set aside, as, at any rate, not Catholic organisms either in space or in time, and therefore not Catholic at all. Well, suppose I come to our church. I find it, as an organism, with its bishops, priests, and deacons, its ritual form of worship, its altars and sacraments, its conventions and synods, its dioceses and parishes, running back in the history of England into mediaeval times; yea, still further back through the early days of old Britain and up even to the apostles. I seem to strike something Catholic here. But be not in haste. Suppose I go to the Roman Church. I find that I can trace its life back also interruptedly to the apostles. Suppose I go to the Greek Church. I find the same peculiarity of continued existence back to the apostles there. Here, then, in the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches, we have reached something which it will do at least to pause upon for further investigation.

"But have a care. When we look a little more closely into the Anglican organization as a whole and consider it part by part, and when we examine the Roman organization in like manner, and the Greek, we find that each of the three differs from the other two in certain respects. Rome has a pope and a cultus of St. Mary the ever-Virgin; these are not parts of the Greek (?) or of the Anglican organisms. Though we have paused here, then, though the Catholic Church must be hereabouts somewhere, nevertheless, when we have reached our church, we have not yet reached the Catholic Church we are in search of; when we go to Rome, we have not yet reached that Catholic Church; and equally, when we go to the Greeks, we have not reached the object of our search. For we find that neither of these three organisms, when taken as a whole, and in all its minutiae, is accepted by the other two. Shall we go elsewhere, then? There is nowhere else to go.

"Let us look, then, more closely still here. As we examine, we find that, although the three--Anglican, Greek, and Roman-- thus differ in some respects, they are marvellously alike in all others. All three have a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons. All have the holy altar of the tremendous sacrifice as the central object in their churches. All have robed clergy. All have saints' days and identical ecclesiastical seasons. All have a ritual form of worship. All have parishes, dioceses, and provinces, All (?) date their life back into the first century. All have stately ceremonials and processions; the Greeks the most glorious, the Romans less, and the Anglicans the least.

"All acknowledge the authority of general councils. All have the same apostolic succession and the same sacraments. Here, then, I begin to find the Catholic Church. Those few peculiarities in which the Greek, the Anglican, and the Roman differ from each other are merely local; all those many peculiarities in which the three are at one shape out for me visibly, solidly, and sharply the great Catholic Church; one in space as in organism, and one in time; to be found equally in Russia, and Italy, and England, and America, and Mexico, and Germany, and Brazil--everywhere; to be found, too, in the nineteenth century, and equally in mediaeval time, and also in the earliest days, unchanged and unchangeable. {506} And everything in the Anglican, Greek, and Roman bodies which the three hold in common, and which has been held in them, everywhere, always, and by all, is Catholic. Anything else, any peculiarity which we have that Rome and the Easterns have not, or which Rome has, but the Greeks and we have not, or which the Greeks have, but Rome and we have not, is merely local, partial, and not Catholic."

This is explicit enough. Take all that any one of the three holds in which the other two agree, and you have the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. Eliminate from all three the points in which they differ, which are assumed to be trifling, and take their points of agreement, and you will have what the preacher calls "Catholicism," and which he proposes as the remedy for the evils of Protestantism. Extend the rule so as to include all professedly Christian churches, denominations, or sects which professedly recognize a Christian church and a Christian ministry, and it will be the view of the Catholic Church generally taken by Protestants. No Protestant sect has ever had the audacity to claim to be itself alone the visible Catholic Church of the Creed; and none of the older Protestant sects deny that there is, in some sense, a visible Catholic Church. In the early Protestant teaching, if not in the later, there is recognized one visible Catholic Church, which is what all professedly Christian communions agree in holding, or which alike underlies them all. In this sense, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Methodists and Baptists, Lutherans and Calvinists, have always been as strenuous asserters of the Catholic Church and of Catholicity as is Dr. Ewer himself. We see, then, in Dr. Ewer's "Catholicism," nothing that need startle a Protestant or especially gratify a Catholic. In principle, at least, he asserts a very common Protestant doctrine, and in no sense necessarily breaks, except in words, with the Protestant Reformation.

But be this as it may, it is certain that Dr. Ewer admits no catholic body or organic centre of unity and catholicity distinct from the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches, and independent of them, and recognizes no catholicity but what these three churches agree in maintaining and possess in common. Neither of them, he contends, is by itself alone the Catholic Church; each is a catholic church, but no one of them is the Catholic Church herself. Whence, then, their quality of catholic churches? Particular or local churches are catholic because they hold from, depend on, and commune with a catholic centre of unity, life, and authority, which is distinct from and independent of themselves. This is not the case with the three churches named; they hold from and depend on no common organic centre, recognize no organic source of life independent of themselves, are subordinated to no authority not each one's own, commune with no centre of unity which each one has not in itself, and not even with one another. They are each complete in themselves, and are therefore not three inferior churches, subordinate to one supreme catholic apostolic church, but, if churches at all, three distinct, separate, and independent churches. If, then, no one of them is the one holy catholic apostolic church, no one of them is even a catholic church, and Dr. Ewer fails entirely to recognize any Catholic Church at all.

{507}

The author is deceived in his assumption that these three churches are particular or local churches, subordinated to the universal church. St. Mary's church, which is my parish church, is a catholic church, if the see of Rome is the Catholic Apostolic See; for it depends on it, and through the bishop of the diocese communes with that see, and through that see with every other particular catholic church, thus establishing in the unity and catholicity of the See of Rome, or, as the fathers said, the See of Peter, the unity and catholicity of all particular or local churches in communion with it. By coming into communion with St. Mary's church, one comes into communion with the one universal church, is in the catholic communion, and is a Catholic; but nothing of the sort can be affirmed either of the Greek Church or of the Anglican. They acknowledge no subordination to any other organic body in existence; they depend respectively on no ecclesiastical authority or organic centre independent of themselves; they commune neither with each other nor with the Church of Rome, which holds them to be both in schism, and one of them in heresy. Certain Anglican ministers would willingly commune with the Greek Church, but it repels them, and declares that sect to be not even a church. The three churches named cannot, then, be particular churches holding from a common centre of unity, and Dr. Ewer must take one of them as the Catholic Church and exclude the other two, or have no Catholic Church at all.

The fact that there are certain points, if you will, essential points, of agreement between these three bodies, does by no means make them one body. Agreement is not identity. Great Britain and the United States speak the same language; adopt the same Common Law, which governs their respective courts; agree to a great extent in their usages, manners and customs, and civil institutions; and throughout they have a far closer resemblance to each other than has the Anglican Church to either the Greek Church or the Roman Church; and yet, are they not one nation, with one national authority, and having one and the same national life. Eliminate from New York and New Jersey the points in which they differ, and retain only the points in which they agree, and would they be one state under one and the same state government? Not at all, because they are separate organizations, and, as states, are each independent of the other. The Eastern churches were once in communion with Rome under the supremacy of the Apostolic See, and then were one with the Roman Church; but having separated from that see, they are churches in schism indeed, but de facto independent. There was, down to the sixteenth century, a Catholic Church in England in communion with the Church of Rome or the Apostolic See; but the so-called Church of England is not its continuation, and, in the judgment of both the Roman Church and the Greek Church, is not a church at all, for it has no orders, no priesthood, no sacrifice; its so-called bishops and clergymen are only laymen, but for the most part educated, refined, and highly respectable laymen, devoted to the elegant pursuits of literature and science, the cultivation of private and public morals, and the interests and well-being of their families. But not to insist on this at present, we may affirm that, even supposing Anglicans have an episcopate, and that it resembles the Greek and Roman episcopates, it is no more identical with them than the government of Great Britain is identically that of Italy, Prussia, or Austria. These three states are all limited monarchies; they also all have parliamentary governments, and place the sovereignty in the nation, not in a particular family. {508} But they are not one and the same monarchy, nor one and the same government, for they are politically separate and independent. It will not do to answer this by saying that each of these three episcopates hold equally from Jesus Christ, and are one in him; for that would either suppose the church to be in her unity and catholicity invisible, and without any visible organ or manifestation; or else that Christ has three churches, or three bodies, which the author can admit no more than we, for he professes to hold or believe ONE Holy Catholic Apostolic Visible Church.

In the beginning of the extract from Dr. Ewer's fourth discourse, the church is declared to be "an organism." An organism, we need not tell a man like him, is a living body, not a simple aggregation of parts, or an organization which, having no life in itself, depends on the mechanical, electric, or chemical arrangement of its several parts. In every living body or organism, there is and must be--as the older physiologists, and even the most recent and eminent, like M. Virchow, of Berlin, and M. Claude Bernard, of Paris, tell us, and by their researches and discoveries have proved--an original central cell, from which the whole organism proceeds, in which its vital principle inheres, and which is the type, creator, originator, and director of all its vital phenomena. The whole life, evolution, and course of the organism is originated and determined by this original central cell--this germ, or ovule, without which no organic life or living body is possible. This primitive cell or germ is never spontaneously generated, but is always generated by a living organism which precedes and deposits it, according to the old maxim, omne vivum ex ovo. [Footnote 161]

[Footnote 161: See a very learned and scientific essay in Le Correspondant, for October 25th, 1868, De l'Idée de Vie dans la Physiologie Contemporaine, by Dr. Chauffard, known to our readers by a very able essay On the Present Disputes of Philosophy, translated and published in this magazine for November last, though the types made us call him Dr. Chauf_ai_d instead of Dr. Chauff_a_rd.]

It is the origin and law of the unity, evolution, or growth of the organism, and is the type and generator of all the innumerable cells which form the whole cellular system of the entire organism, whether normal or abnormal.

What we insist on here is that there is no organism without this original central cell or germ, and that this central cell, whence the unity of the organism is generated by a pre-existing organism, that is, by ancestors of the same species, and is neither self-generated nor made up by any possible mechanical or physico-chemical action or combination of parts, as Messrs. Virchow and Bernard have demonstrated. This principle or law of all organic life is universal, and applies to the church as an organism, notwithstanding her supernatural character, as to any of the organisms studied and experimented upon by physiologists in the natural order. The Creator does not work after one law in the natural order, and another and diverse or contradictory law in the supernatural order; and herein we discover the reason of the perfect accord of all the Creator's works, the perfect harmony of revelation and real science, and the aid revelation gives to science, and, in return, the aid that real science gives to the interpretation and clearer understanding of revelation. God is one, and works always after one and the same law in all orders, and is never in contradiction with himself.

{509}

The essential error of the non-catholic church theory is, that it denies the central cell or germ whence is evolved or produced the whole church organism, and assumes that the church derives her life from her members, and that she is constituted in her unity and catholicity as a living body by the combination of the several parts, or that the central cell is created by the organism, not the organism by the central or organic cell, which is as much as to say, multiplicity can exist without unity to produce it, or that dead or unliving parts can generate life and activity! No one need be surprised that men of clear heads and logical minds, trying to remove, on Protestant principles, the discrepancies between science and the Protestant religion, should rush into materialism and atheism. The principle the Protestant adopts in his non-catholic church theory is precisely the principle on which Mr. Herbert Spencer proceeds when he ascribes all the phenomena of life, or of the living organism, to the mechanical, electric, and chemical arrangement of material atoms. The same principle applied in theology leads inevitably to atheism; for, multiplicity given as prior to and independent of unity, no argument in favor of the divine existence can have any validity, nay, no argument to prove that there is a God can be conceived. Such is the terrible injury the non-catholic or Protestant church theory has done and is doing to both religion and science.

Dr. Ewer, no doubt, intends to reject, and honestly believes that he has rejected, this destructive theory, which, universally applied, results in nihilism; but we fear that he has not. He includes the one catholic church in what he calls the three particular churches--the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican. Each of these, he says, is a catholic church, but no one of them is the Catholic Church. Whence, then, do they or can they derive their character of catholic? The Catholic Church, according to him, is an organism. If an organism, it must have a central cell, an organite, or organic centre, originated not by itself, from which all in the organism proceeds, or in which, in the language of St. Cyprian, all "takes its rise," and therefore on which all the parts depend. This central cell, which in the church we may call the central see or chair, and which the fathers, whether Greek or Latin, call the Chair of Peter, and since it is the origin of all the parts, is evidently prior to them and independent of them. They do not constitute it, but it produces, sustains, and governs them. On no other conditions is it possible to assert or conceive the unity and catholicity of the church as an organism. Particular churches are Catholic by holding from and communing with this central see or the organic centre, not otherwise.

But Dr. Ewer acknowledges no such central cell or central see. His organism has no organic centre, and consequently is no organism at all, but a simple union or confederacy of equal and independent sees. Rome, Constantinople, or Canterbury is no more a central see or organic centre of the church than any other see or diocese, as Caesarea, Milan, Paris, Toledo, Aberdeen, London, or Armagh, and to be in the unity of the church there is no particular see, mother and mistress of all the churches, with which it is necessary to commune. The several sees may agree in their constitution, doctrine, liturgy, and discipline, but they are not integrated in any church unity or living church organism. This is the theory of the schismatic Greeks, and of Anglicans and Protestant Episcopalians, and is simply the theory of independency, as much so as that of the New England Congregationalists, but it admits no organic unity. {510} It is also the theory which Dr. Ewer himself appears to assert and defend. By what authority is he able to pronounce any one of the three churches named a catholic church, since no one of them holds from a catholic centre, or a central unity, for he recognizes no such centre or unity? The only unity of the church he can admit is that formed by the combination of the several parts, a unity formed from multiplicity. He holds that we need a great catholic reformation, a combination of the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches, which shall "evolve unity from multiplexity." Here, it seems to us, is an unmistakable recognition, as the basis of his catholicity, of the non-catholic church theory, and a virtual denial of the unity and catholicity of the church; for from multiplicity can be evolved only totality, which, so far from being unity, excludes it altogether.

Recognizing no central see, centre and source of the unity and catholicity of the church, how can Dr. Ewer determine what churches are in schism or what are in union, what are catholic and what are not? What criterion of unity and catholicity has he or can he have? He says the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican are catholic, and he confines the Catholic Church to them. But how can he call them catholic, since they have no common organic centre, and have no intercommunion? We can find in his discourses no answer to this question but the fact that they have certain things in common. Why confine the Catholic Church, then, to these three alone? Why exclude Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and the Swiss, the Dutch, and the German Reformed communions? All these have something in common with the Roman, Greek, and Anglican communions, and even profess with them to believe the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. The Methodists have bishops, priests or elders, and deacons, as the Anglicans, and adopt the same articles of faith. The churches named have presbyters, and so have Presbyterians, the continental Reformed, and the Lutheran churches; some of the Lutheran churches even have bishops. There is something in common between these and the churches the author claims to be catholic. Why, then, does he exclude them from the list of communions of which the Catholic Church is composed? Or why, indeed, exclude any one who professes to hold the Christian church and the Apostles' and Nicene creeds? And why not reject as non-catholic everything which all these do not agree in holding? Does he not say that catholic means all, not a part, and why exclude from the all any who acknowledge Christ as their Lord and Master, and profess to be members of his church? The author has no criterion in the case but his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice. He has no other rule, having rejected the apostolic or central see, for interpreting the quod semper, quod ubique, et ab omnibus creditur of St. Vincent of Lerins. The all with us means all those, and those only, who are, and always have been, in communion with the central or Apostolic See, and obedient to its supreme authority; but Dr. Ewer, who admits no such see, has, and can have, no authority for not including in the all, the omnibus, all who profess to follow Christ or to hold and practise the Christian religion. His catholicity is, then, the creature of his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice; and his catholic church is founded on himself, and is his own arbitrary construction or creation. This is not the rejection of Protestantism, but is rather Protestantism gone to seed.

{511}

Throughout the whole of Dr. Ewer's reasoning, except where he is simply following Catholics in pronouncing and proving Protestantism a blunder and a failure, and answerable for the rationalism and unbelief in revealed religion now so prevalent among scientific, intelligent, clear-headed, and honest-minded men, there is the implied assumption that catholicity precedes the church, and that we are to determine not what is catholic by the church, but the Catholic Church by what we have, without her, determined to be catholic. This is not a Catholic but a Protestant method. We must first find the One Catholic Apostolic Church, and from her learn what is catholic, and who are catholics and who are not. This is the only scientific rule, if we acknowledge a Catholic Church at all.

If the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches are no one of them the Catholic Church, they can be catholic, that is, be in the catholic organism, only by communing with the organic centre from which the life, activity, and authority of the organism proceeds, in which is the source and centre of the unity and catholicity of the church. But all particular churches in communion with the organic centre, and obtaining their life from it, exist in solido, and commune with one another. The three churches named do not commune with one another; they are, as we have seen, three distinct, separate, and independent bodies, and foreigners to one another. Then only one of them, if any one of them, can be a catholic church. The other two must be excluded as non-catholic. What the author has to determine first of all, since he restricts the Catholic Church to the three, is, in which of these three is the original, organic, or central cell, or central see, whence all the others proceed, or from which they take their rise. But instead of doing this, he denies that any one of the three is the Catholic Church, and contends that it is all three in what they hold in common or agree in maintaining. The meaning of this is, that no one of them contains the organic cell, that there is no central organic see, as we hold the See of Peter to be, and therefore no church organism one and catholic. But this is to deny the Catholic Church, not to assert it. In attempting to include in the One Catholic Apostolic Church non-catholic and foreign elements, Dr. Ewer, therefore, manifestly loses the Catholic Church itself.

Dr. Ewer, notwithstanding his vigorous onslaught upon Protestantism, remains still under the influence of his Protestant training, and has not as yet attained to any real conception either of unity or of catholicity. Unity is indivisible; catholicity is illimitable, or all that is contained in the unity; and both are independent of space and time. The unity of the church is her original and central organic principle, or principle of life; the catholicity of the church is inseparable from her unity, and consists in the completeness of this organic principle, and in its being always and everywhere the complete and only principle of church life. The unity of the faith is in the fact that it, like the church, has its central principle out of which all in it grows or germinates, and on which all in it depends; the catholicity of the faith is in the fact that this faith is complete, the whole faith, and is always and everywhere believed and taught by the One Catholic Church, is always and everywhere one and the same faith, always and everywhere the truth of God. The catholicity of the church depends in no sense on diffusion in space or the number of her members. {512} The church is catholic, not because she is universally diffused in space, but because she is the one only church, and includes in her organism all that is essential to the church as the church, or the mystic body of Christ, to the entire church life for all men and for all times. Catholic means all, rather than universal, or universal only because it means all; and hence the church was as truly catholic on the day of Pentecost as she is now, or would be were all nations and all men included in her communion, as the human race, in the order of generation, was as complete and entire when there was no individual but Adam, as it will be when the last child is born. Time has no effect on either the unity or catholicity of the church; for she is always living in her unity and catholicity, an ever-present church, in herself the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. She is in time and space, but not of them, nor, in her internal organism, affected by the accidents of either. The primitive church, the mediaeval church, and the church of to-day are identically the same, and the distinctions these terms imply are distinctions only in things externally related to her, not in herself. Such must be the church if one and catholic, holy and apostolic.

The central life of the church, the source of all the vitality, force, and authority of the organism, of which--to use the figure we have already so many times used--the central cell is the organ, and which gives it all its generative force and governing power, is Jesus Christ himself, who is the forma of the church, as the soul is the forma of the body, or its organic principle; for the church is the body of Christ, and is nothing without him, and if separated from him would instantly die, as does the body when separated from the soul. But we are treating of the church, in which the unity of Christ is made manifest in her visible unity, and therefore of the visible, not of the invisible church. That the invisible unity might be manifested, St. Cyprian argues, in his De Unitate Ecclesiae, Christ established a central chair, the Chair of Peter, whence all might be seen to take its rise from one. This chair, the visible centre of unity, is to the church organism, as we have seen, what the central or organic cell is to every organism or living body in the natural order; but Jesus Christ, whom it manifests or represents in the visible order, is the living force and generative power of the central chair, as the soul is of the organic cell of the human organism. So much we must affirm of the Christian church, if we call it, as Dr. Ewer does, "an organism."

This organic central cell generates or produces not many organisms, but one only. So the Chair of Peter, the central cell of the church organism, can generate only one organism. Christ has one body and no more. That only can be the Catholic Church in which is, as its centre, the Chair of Peter, or, as we have before said, the organic central see, which may justly be called the Holy See, the Apostolic See, "the mother and mistress of all the churches," as in the living body the original central organic cell is the mother and mistress of all the secondary or inferior cells generated in the evolution of the organism. Here, again, theology and physiology coincide in principle.

We may now ask, Does the Greek schismatic church, as we call it, contain this central organic see? Certainly not; for she admits no such see, or, if she does, she confesses that she contains it not, and the Roman Church does. {513} The Greek schismatic, as we call him, recognizes no church unity in the sense we have explained. He recognizes only diocesan, metropolitan, or patriarchal unity. Does the Greek Church, then, commune with this central see? No. For it communes with no see or church outside of itself. How is it with the Anglican Church? It does not any more than the Greek Church claim to possess it. It does not pretend to find it in the see of Canterbury, York, Dublin, or Armagh, and indeed denies both the necessity and existence of such see. She denounces the Roman see because she claims to be it; and Dr. Ewer tells us, in his reply to Mr. Adams, that the Protestant Reformation rendered noble service to the Anglican Church by delivering it from papal tyranny and oppression. Well, then, does the Anglican Church commune with the central or organic see, or Chair of Peter? No. For she communes with no see beyond herself. Then she is not the, or even a, catholic church. There remains, then, only the Roman Church, which is and must be the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, if such church there is; for it can be no other. The reverend doctor's attempt, then, to find a catholic church which is not the Roman Church, or a catholicity which is "broader and deeper" than what he, as well as other Protestants, calls "Romanism," seems, like Protestantism itself, to have failed.

Dr. Ewer would evade the force of this conclusion, which the common sense of mankind unhesitatingly accepts, by resorting to what is known as "the branch theory." The Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not one or another of them exclusively the Catholic Church, but they are catholic churches, because branches of the One Catholic Church. But branches suppose a trunk. Where there is no trunk there are and can be no branches; for the trunk produces the branches, not the branches the trunk. Where, then, is the trunk of which the three churches named are branches, especially since the author says we are not to look beyond them for the Catholic Church? We let him answer in his own words:

"Permit me to close this part of my discourse by an illustration of the Catholic Church. We will take, for the sake of simplicity, a tree. For eight feet above the soil its trunk stands one and entire. Somewhere along the ninth foot the trunk branches into two main limbs. We will call the eastern the Greek limb, and the western we will call the Latin. Six feet further out on the Latin limb, that is to say, fifteen feet from ground, that western limb subdivides into two vast branches. The outmost of the two we will call the Anglican branch, the other we will call the Roman. These two branches and the Greek limb run up to a height of nineteen and a half feet from the ground. There they are, the three great boughs, each with its foliage, Anglican at the west, Roman in the centre, Greek at the east. If now you shield your vision from all but the top of the tree, there will appear to you to be three disconnected tufts of vegetation; but lo! the foliage and the flowers are the same. But remove now the shield from before your eyes, and behold in the whole tree a symbol of the Catholic Church--one organism from root to summit."

This assumes that the trunk is the primitive undivided church, or the church prior to the separation of the Eastern churches from the jurisdiction of the Roman see. But does that undivided church, the trunk church, still exist in its integrity? No. For if it did, there would be no difficulty. It ceased to exist in the ninth century, and now there is no undivided church. Then that has fallen into the past. Then there is no present living trunk, but branches only. Branches of a trunk that has ceased to live can be only dead branches. The alleged branches communicate with no living root, and have no intercommunion; they therefore are not and cannot be one living organism. The author himself half concedes it, for he continues:

{514}

"A church that is one like the trunk of that tree for the first nine centuries--that the Western subdividing at the fifteenth century into Anglican and Roman. As a fact, the unity of the organism is not broken; intercommunion between its three parts is simply suspended for a time--suspended until that differentiation shall take place in God's one church which, as Herbert Spencer so admirably shows, is the law of all growth; a differentiation which means, in its last issue, not a complete sundering, but the eventual unity of multiplexity, the harmony of co-ordinate parts. Did it not mix the metaphor somewhat, I would go on and complete the illustration by supposing sundry branches of this tree to be cut off from time to time and inserted into vases of water standing round about the great tree. Being without root, those cut longest ago are all dead; while only the most recently cut are green with a deceptive life, themselves soon to wither and die. These cut branches, standing trunkless and rootless about the living tree, would be apt symbols of the Protestant sects.

"We have found, then, what the Catholic Church is."

There can be no suspension of intercommunion of the branches so long as their communion with the root, or organic cell, through the trunk, is not suspended; for through communion with that they intercommune. But any interruption of that communion is not only the suspension, but the extinction of intercommunion. The restoration of intercommunion once extinct cannot be affected except by a living reunion of each with the root or organic cell of the organism. Probably, then, the author has been too hasty in exclaiming, "We have found what the Catholic Church is." He seems to us to have found neither unity nor catholicity.

Dr. Ewer seems to forget that the church never has been and never can be divided. Has not he himself said that she is one, and does he need to be told that one is indivisible, or that its division would be its death? The tree with successive branches which he adduces in illustration is, no doubt, a living organism; but it can illustrate only the unity and catholicity of the central and ruling see, and the particular churches holding from it. Branch churches are admissible only as particular churches produced by and dependent on the organic centre, or apostolic see, mother and mistress of all the churches of the organism. But we have already shown that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not particular churches, for they are independent bodies, subordinate to or dependent on no organic centre which each has not in itself. As the Catholic Church is one, not three, and as we have shown that it is neither the separated Greek Church nor the Anglican, it must be the Roman See and its dependent churches, in which is the primitive, original, productive, and creative life of the church, since, as we have seen, it can be no other. We have refuted the "branch theory" in refuting the author's assumption that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches hold from and are subordinate to the one universal church, which, as independent of them, has no existence.

The failure of the author to find the Catholic Church is due to the fact that, from first to last, though he calls the church one, he really recognizes no church unity, since he recognizes no visible centre of unity whence emanates all her life, activity, and authority. Till the ninth century the East and West were united, and the church was one; but it had no centre of unity at Rome any more than at Antioch, at Alexandria, or Constantinople, in the successor of St. Peter in the See of Rome any more than in any other patriarch or bishop. {515} Hence no church could be convicted of schism, unless its bishop refused to commune with another, or another refused to commune with him; but which was the schismatic was indeterminable, unless the whole church should come together in General Council and settle the question by vote. This is the author's theory of unity, a unity which has no visible centre. It is the common Anglican theory, and appears to some extent to be that of the schismatical Greeks. But this theory makes the unity of the church a mere collective federative unity, or an aggregation of parts, which is simply no unity at all, and at best only a union. The unity of the church implies that all in the church proceeds from unity, and is generated, upheld, and controlled by it. The unity is the origin of the whole organism, and what does not proceed from it or grow out of it is abnormal--a tumor, or an excrescence to be exscinded. Hence the impossibility of arriving at the unity of the church by aggregating the parts which have lost it or have it not. It is impossible to assert the unity of the church without asserting a central see, and its bishop as its visible manifestation. There is, we repeat, no organism without the central cell, and no visible organism without a visible centre of unity. The author would do well to study anew the treatise De Unitate Ecclesiae of St. Cyprian, to which we have already referred.

There is and can be no visible unity of the church without a central see, the centre and origin of unity, life, and authority; and when you have found that see, you have found the Catholic Church, but not till then. Every see, or particular or local church in communion with that see; and dependent on it, is in the unity of the church and catholic; and every one not in communion with it is out of unity and not catholic, nor any part of the Catholic body. Admitting that there is the Catholic Church, the only question to be settled is, Which is that See? Reduced to this point, the controversy is virtually ended. There is and never has been but one claimant. Rome has always claimed it, and nobody in the world has ever pretended or pretends that it is any other. Constantinople and Canterbury have disputed the supremacy over the whole church of its pontiff; but neither claims nor ever has claimed to be itself the central organic see, the visible centre of the church organism, and organ of its life and authority.

With no recognized central and ruling see with which all, in order to be in unity, must commune, and with only particular, or rather independent and isolated, churches in existence, without any intercommunion one with another, and all of which, as separate and independent churches, have failed, how can those several branches, which are only trunkless, be restored, "unity evolved from multiplexity," and intercommunion re-established? If there is an organic see, the centre of unity, mother and mistress of all the churches, particular churches that have failed can easily be restored if they wish. They have only to abjure their schism or heresy, be reconciled with that see, submit to its authority, and receive its teaching. They are thus reincorporated by the mercy of God into the church organism, and participate in its unity and the life that flows from it. But on the author's church theory, we can see no possible way in which the separate bodies can be restored to the unity of the church. {516} Unity cannot be constructed or reconstructed from multiplicity; for there can be no multiplicity where there is no unity. Multiplicity depends on unity, which creates or generates and sustains it. Suppose we grant for the moment the Catholic Church is no one of the three churches, yet is not separable from or independent of them, and, in fact, underlies them, but inorganic, or having only these for its organs. How shall they be brought into organic unity? By a General Council? Where is the authority to convoke it, to determine who may or who may not sit in it, and to confirm its acts? You say, Summon all the bishops of the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican bodies. But who has authority to summon them, and why summon these and no others? Who shall say? It is the same question we have had up before. Why extend or why confine the Catholic Church to the three churches named? Where there is no recognized centre of authority, that is to say, no recognized authority, there is authority to admit or to exclude. It is necessary that authority define which is the Catholic Church, before you can say what organizations it includes or excludes, or what prelates or ministers have the right to be summoned as Catholic prelates or ministers, and what not.

A nation disorganized, as the author assumes the church now is, though he trusts only temporarily, can reorganize itself; for the political sovereignty resides always in the nation, or, as we say, in modern times, in the people. The people, as the nation, possess, under God, or rather from him, the sovereign power to govern themselves, which they can neither alienate nor be deprived of so long as they exist as an independent nation or sovereign political community. When the old government which, as legal, held from them, is broken up or dissolved, they have the inherent right to come together in such way as they choose or can, and reconstitute government or power in such manner and vest it in such hands as they judge best. But the church disorganized cannot reorganize itself; for the organic power does not vest in the church as the faithful or the Christian people. Authority in the church is not created, constituted, or delegated by the Christian people, nor does it in any sense hold from them. Church power or authority comes immediately from God to the central see, and from that see radiates through the whole body; for the author agrees with us that the church is an organism. Hence we recognize the Council of Constance as a General Council only after it was convoked by Gregory XII., who was, in our judgment, the true Bishop of the Apostolic See, and hold legal only the acts confirmed by Martin V. The disorganization of the church is, then, its dissolution or death. It has no power to raise itself from the dead. If the central see could really fail, the whole organism would fail. The church is indefectible through the indefectibility of the Holy See, and that is indefectible because it is Peter's See, and our Lord promised Peter that, however Satan might try him, his faith should not fail: "Satan has desired to sift thee as wheat; but I have prayed the Father that thy faith fail not." The prayer of Christ cannot be unanswered, and is a promise. The attacks on the Holy See have been violent and continual, but they have never been successful. Our Lord's prayer has been effective, and Peter's faith has never failed. No doubt there is the full authority to teach and to govern in the church; but this authority is not derived from the faithful nor distributed equally among them, but resides primarily and in its plenitude in the Holy See, and therefore in the bishop of that see, or the pope, Peter's successor, in whom Peter lives and continues to teach and govern the whole church. {517} All Catholic bishops depend on him, and receive from him their jurisdiction, and by authority from God through him govern their respective dioceses. The church is papal in its essential constitution, not simply episcopal; for we have seen that it is an organism, and can be an organism only as proceeding from an organic centre, or central see, on which its unity and catholicity depend. The Apostolic See cannot be separated from the Sedens; for without him it is empty, incapable of thinking, speaking, or acting. It is, then, it seems to us, as utterly impossible to assert the church as really one and catholic, without asserting the pope, or supreme pastor, as it would be to assert an organism without asserting a central organic cell. The failure of the pope would be the failure of the whole church organism, with no power of reorganization or reconstruction left--an important point in which the church and the nation differ. The overlooking of this point of difference is the reason why our catholicizing Anglicans suppose that the church, though disorganized, is able to reorganize herself. The reorganized church, if effected, would be a human organization, not a divine organism as created by our Lord himself. But the church, as we have seen, has never been disorganized, and could not be without ceasing to exist, and cease to exist it cannot, if catholic. The organic centre from which the whole organism is evolved and directed has remained at Rome ever since Peter transferred thither his chair from Antioch, and the particular churches holding from it and continuing subject to it are integral elements of the catholic organism, which is as perfect, as complete, and as entire as it was when the Oriental churches acknowledged and submitted to the supremacy of the successor of Peter, or when the church in England was in full communion with the Apostolic See of Rome. The separation of these from the Roman communion, though it destroyed their unity and catholicity, did not break the unity and catholicity of the organism; it only placed them outside of that organism, and cut them off from the central see, the source of all organic church life. The revolt of the Anglo-American Colonies from Great Britain, in 1776, and the Declaration of their Independence of the mother-country, did not break her unity or authority as a nation, and indeed did not even deprive her of any of her rights over them, though it enfeebled her power to govern them, till she herself acknowledged them to be independent states.

The author seems to suppose that the Greeks and Anglicans, in separating from Rome, broke the unity of the church, and carried away with them each a portion of her catholicity, so that there now can be no One Catholic Church existing in organic unity and catholicity, save in reminiscence and in potentia, unless these two bodies are reunited with Rome in one and the same communion. But the Greeks and Anglicans had both for centuries recognized the authority of the Apostolic See, as the centre of unity and source of jurisdiction. When the Greeks separated from that see and refused to obey it, they took from it neither its organic unity nor its catholicity; they only cut themselves off and deprived themselves of both. The same may be said of Anglicans in separating from Rome and declaring themselves independent. {518} They deprived themselves of unity and catholicity, but left the original church organism in all its integrity, and only placed themselves outside of it. The separation in both cases deprived the church of a portion of her population, and diminished her external power and grandeur, but took away none of her rights and prerogatives, and in no respect impaired, as we have already said, the unity or catholicity of her internal organism. All that can be said is that the separated Oriental churches and Anglicans, not the church, have lost unity and catholicity, and have ceased to be Catholics, even when agreeing with the church in her dogmas and her external rites and ceremonies.

There is, then, on the side of the church, no broken unity to be healed, or lost catholicity to be restored. If the Oriental churches wish to regain unity and catholicity, all they have to do is to submit to the jurisdiction of the Apostolic See, and renew their communion with the mother and mistress of all the churches. Not having lost their church organization, and having retained valid orders or the priesthood and the august sacrifice, they can return in their corporate capacity. There is in their case only a schism to be healed. The Anglicans and Episcopalians stand on a different footing; for they have not even so much as a schismatic church, since the Episcopalians hold from the Anglicans, and the Anglicans from the state. They have no orders, no priesthood, no sacrifice, no sacraments--except baptism, and even pagans can administer that--no church character at all, if we look at the facts in the case, and therefore, like all Protestants, can be admitted to the unity of the church only on individual profession and submission. There is much for those out of unity to do to recover it and to effect the union in the Catholic communion of all who profess to be Christians, but nothing to render the church herself one and catholic. Her unity and catholicity are already established and unalterable, and so are the terms of communion and the conditions of church life. No grand combination, then, is needed to restore a divided and disorganized church.

But if the church were disorganized and a restoration needed, no possible combination of the several disorganized parts would or could effect it. The disorganization could not take place without the loss by the whole organism of the organic centre, and that, once lost, can be recovered only by an original creation, by our Lord, of a new church organism, which, even if it were done, would not restore us the Catholic Church; for it would not be a church existing uninterruptedly from the beginning, and there would be a time since the Incarnation when it did not subsist, and when there was no church. The author assumes that unity may be evolved from "multiplexity," which is Protestant, not Catholic philosophy; without unity there can be, as we have said, no multiplicity, as without the universal there can be no particulars. The universal precedes the particulars and generates them, and when it goes they go with it. Unity precedes multiplicity, and produces, sustains, and directs it. This is implied in every argument used, or that can be used, by philosophers and theologians, to prove the existence of God and his providence. Atheism results from the assumption that multiplicity may exist by itself, independently of unity; pantheism, from the assumption that unity is a dead, abstract unity, like that of the old Eleatics, not a concrete, living, and effective unity, and the denial that unity creates multiplicity. {519} Physiology is refuting both by its discoveries, confirming what has always been affirmed in principle by traditional science, the fact that there is no organism or living body, in either the animal or vegetable world, without the original central cell, born of ancestors, which creates or generates and directs all the vital phenomena, normal or abnormal, of the organism, as has already been stated, thus placing science and the teaching of the church in harmony.

Dr. Ewer probably does not in his own mind absolutely deny the present unity on which depends the catholicity of the church; but he supposes it is in some way involved in multiplicity, so that it needs not to be created, but to be evoked from the existing "multiplexity" which now obscures it and prevents its effectiveness. But this we have shown is not and cannot be the case, because the unity not only produces, but directs or governs the manifold phenomena of the church, and must therefore be always distinct from and independent of them. Also, because so long as unity and catholicity remain, no disorganization or confusion requiring their evolution can take place, except in the parts exuded or thrown off by the organism, severed or exscinded from it, that is, only in what is outside of the One Catholic Church, and forming no part of the catholic body. That schismatics and heretics lack unity and catholicity, is, of course, true; but they cannot obtain either by an evolution from such organization as they may have retained when the separation took place, or may have subsequently formed for themselves, but must do it, if at all, by a return to the organic centre, where both are and have never ceased to be, on the terms and conditions the Holy See prescribes.

Dr. Ewer maintains that the Catholic Church is restricted to the Roman, Greek, and Anglican Churches, and consists in what these have in common or agree in holding. These, he maintains, have all failed, have taught and still teach grievous errors, set up false claims, and one or more of them at least have fallen into superstitious practices; yet he contends that the universal church has not failed. But as the universal church has no organic existence independent of these, has no organs of speech or action, no personality but in them, how, if he is right in his theory, can he maintain that the whole church has not failed? If he held that the unity and catholicity of the church were in the central or organic see, he might hold that particular churches have failed, and that the One Catholic Church has not failed. Then he could assert, as we do, that the organism remains, acts, teaches, and governs through its own infallible organs, in its own individuality, or the supreme pontiff who is its personality or person. But on his theory, the failure of each of the three parts which comprise the whole church, it seems to us, must carry with it the failure of the whole.

Dr. Ewer's difficulty would seem to grow out of his wish to be a Catholic and remain in the Anglican or Episcopalian communion in which he is a minister, or to return from Protestantism to Catholicity without any change of position. This would be possible, if holding, on private judgment, Catholic dogmas, and observing, on no authority, Catholic forms of worship, constituted one a member of the Catholic Church. But he should understand that what he wishes is impracticable, and that all his efforts are labor lost. {520} So long as a man is in a communion separated from the present actual living unity of the church, he can become a Catholic only by leaving it, or by its corporate return to the Holy See and submission to the supreme pontiff.

A corporate return is practicable in the case of the Eastern churches; but even in them the individual who is personally aware of the schismatic character of his church should abandon it for unity at once without waiting for its corporate return; but in the case of Anglicans and Episcopalians, as in the case of all Protestant communions, the return must be individual and personal.

We are surprised at Dr. Ewer's statement that the Greek Church has no cultus of St. Mary ever-Virgin, as we are that many Anglicans, like Dr. Pusey, who object to the Roman Church on account of that cultus, should seek communion with the schismatic Greeks, with whom that cultus is pushed to an extreme far beyond anything in the Latin Church. The truth is, that all that offends Protestants in the Church of Rome, except the papacy, exists in even a more offensive form in the Greek schismatic Church. The schismatic Greek bishops exercise over their flocks a tyranny which is impracticable in the Roman Church, where the papal authority restricts that of bishops and tempers their administration of their dioceses.

But it is time to bring our remarks to a close. We are unable to recognize the Catholicity we profess in that proposed by Dr. Ewer. The one holy catholic apostolic church he sets forth does not appear to us to be the church of the fathers, nor the one of which we are an affectionate if an unworthy son. In our judgment, Dr. Ewer is still in the Protestant family, and following private judgment as his rule, though denouncing it. He has not grasped the central, or, as Dr. Channing would say, the "seminal" principle of the Catholic Church. Yet he seems to be well disposed, and to be seeking it, and has made large strides toward it. We think his discourses are not only brilliant, bold, and energetic, but fitted to have great influence in turning the public mind toward the Catholic Church. We have given our reasons why we do not admit that he has as yet found that church; but still we think his discourses will help many to find it, though he himself may not find it. He has, as yet, strong prejudices against the Church of Rome, and is undeniably anti-papal. But still there can be no doubt that he would like to feel himself a Catholic, and have done once for all with Protestantism. Dr. Ewer stands not alone. There are large numbers in his communion, and other Protestant communions, who think and feel as he does, who, from the top of Mount Pisgah, have obtained--if not the clear vision Moses had--at least some glimpses, more or less confused, of the promised land, and are attracted and charmed by what they see of it. We have a feeling of respectful tenderness toward these men, and of great sympathy with their trials and struggles. While we must tell them the truth in firm and manly tones, treat them as men, not as children, we would, on no account, say or do anything to wound their susceptibilities, or to create an impression that we do not take a deep and lively interest in their efforts to arrive at Catholicity. The spirit is working in them to bring them to light and life. They are not against us, and to some extent are with us. We would, for their sakes, they were wholly with us, and we never cease to pray God that they may find the haven of security and rest it has pleased him that we should find for ourselves. {521} We once were one of their number, thought and felt with them, struggled with them, and we can have for them only words of encouragement and hope. In what we have said we have had only the desire to assist them to find and understand the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.

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The Evening Primrose.

Of twilight and fresh dews, Most odorous flower, thou art the child; Adorning evening's pensive hues With splendors mild.

A vesper acolyte, Born, but for this one night, To swing thy golden censer of perfume, While stars the tranquil firmament illume, For heaven's delight.

Thy term of service, fleet, Creative wish doth meet; A swift existence; but which this rare grace Of ceaseless worship, filling life's brief space, Crowns as complete.

Thy blissful vigil keep, Rapt flower, while others sleep: Adoring angels claim thee from above A dear companion in their task of love; And I would fain present, With worshipful intent, Thy dewy blossoms on my evening shrine; A contrite homage; sighing to repair, With the accepted incense of thy prayer, For sloth like mine.

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{522}

Heremore-Brandon; Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

"Howe'er it be, it seems to me 'Tis only noble to be good; Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter I

Four little boys: two of them had soft fair hair, and were dressed in the finest cloth; the other two had very bushy heads, and were dressed in whatever they could get. It was early Christmas morning, and the two rich boys were sitting by the window of a handsome brown-stone house, and they had each a stocking plump full of dainties; the two poor boys were calling the morning papers on the stone-cold sidewalk, and if they had any stockings at all, you may be very sure they were plump full of holes.

"An't he funny," remarked the smaller of the two in the house, looking at the larger of the two in the street; "an't he too funny!" And between laughing and eating, little Fred came near choking himself. "See his old coat, Josie, it trails like Aunt Ellie's blue dress! And such a queer old hat; don't it make you laugh, Josie?"

"I have seen so many of 'em," explained Josie.

"What are you laughing at, Fred," asked their sister Mary, coming up to them.

"Those newsboys," he answered, and imitated their "Times, 'Erald, Tribune! Here's the 'Erald, Times, Tribune!" so perfectly that their father thought it was a real newsboy calling, and cried out to them from another room to "hurry up and bring a Herald," at which command the children rushed eagerly into the hall, and tugged with their united strength to open the doors, each anxious to be the first to speak to the odd-looking newsboys, and also to be the fortunate one to take the paper to their father. In the mean time, the two newsboys had not been unmindful of the faces behind the plated window.

"I say, Jim," said the big boy, who was about twelve or thirteen years old, "did you ever see the beat of that young 'un there? Don't you choke yerself, youngster, f'fear you'd cheat a friend from doing that same when you're growed up.--Ere's the 'Erald! Tribune! Times!--George! Jim, I wish to thunder there'd some new papers come up. An't yer tired allers a hollerin' out them same old tunes?--Times! 'Erald! Tribune!--How d'ye s'pose a feller'd feel to wake up some of these yere mornin's in one o' them big houses?"

"Heerd tell of stranger things 'n that, Dick," replied Jim, who read the weekly papers. "'Turn again, Whittington, Lord-Mayor of London,' as the cat said! Turned out true, too."

"You'd better get a cat, Jim, you're such a stunnin' feller; shouldn't wonder if you'd turn out alderman some of these days!" At which, for no apparent reason, Dick laughed until every rag was fluttering.

"They wants a paper; better 'tend to yer business," answered Jim, at which the other newsboy instantly grew grave, and, shuffling his old shoes across the street, mounted the steps where the children were waiting and calling for him.

{523}

"I want a New York Herald," said Fred very grandly.

"Han't got no 'Eralds," answered the newsboy.

Fred rushed into the house saying, "His Heralds are all gone."

"Tribune, then, and don't keep the door open," instructed the rough voice from some invisible spot. Mary shut the door all but a little crack. "Papa wanted a Herald," she said; "you ought to have one when my papa wants it."

"Thought I had, but couldn't help it; 'Erald's got a great speech to-day, and I've sold 'em all."

"Do you sell papers every day?" Mary asked.

The bushy head made a sort of bow, as the poor newsboy looked at the fair-haired little girl on the stoop, who condescended to question him.

"Yes, miss," he answered, "since ever I wasn't bigger'n a grasshopper."

"An't he funny?" said Fred.

"Don't you get tired?" asked Mary.

"Well, I can't say I doesn't, 'specially sometimes."

"An't you glad it's Christmas?" Josie asked, as questions seemed the fashion.

"I kinder am," replied the newsboy.

"Did you have many presents?" questioned Mary.

"Me? Bless you, who'd give 'em to me, miss?"

"Didn't you hang up your stocking last night?" Fred asked.

The newsboy seemed much amused at the question; for it was plain that he could hardly keep from laughing right out.

"Well, no, I didn't," he answered. "Don't think things would stick in one long, if I did!"

"Do you put your money in a savings bank? By and by you'd have enough to build a house maybe, if you were careful," said Josie.

"Jim and me likes takin' it out in eatin' best," answered Dick.

"Why don't you bring me that paper?" cried their father's voice. And the two boys ran hastily into the house.

"You may have my candy," said Mary in a stately way. "I can have plenty more." And she put her store of dainty French candy into the boy's hand, and, while he was still looking at her in amazement, followed her brothers into the house and shut the door.

"Just you pinch me, Jim," Dick said, joining his companion. "Drive in hearty, now. An't I asleep?"

"Well, I dunno; what yer got there?"

"She give it to me."

"Who's that?"

"Her on the steps; didn't you see her?"

"You tell that to the marines! Guess you took it."

"No, I didn't," Dick said indignantly. "I never took nothin' as warn't mine yet."

"Let's have a look," said Jem, reaching out his hand for the package; but Dick would not let him touch it. "I'm going to keep it always to remember her," he said.

"Guess you want ter eat it yerself," Jem said. "I wouldn't be so mean."

"I an't gen'rally called mean," Dick answered with great dignity.

"Don't you wonder, Jim," said Dick, as they made friends and passed on--"don't it seem curious how some folks is rich and purty like them there, and others is poor and ugly like me and you, Jim?"

"George! speak for yerself, if ye like. Guess I'd pass in a crowd, if I'd the fine fixin's!"

{524}

"S'posin' me and you had dandified coats and yeller gloves, and the fixin's to match, s'pose anybody'd know we was newsboys?" Dick asked thoughtfully.

"I rayther think," said Jim, "we'd be a deal sight handsomer'n some of them chaps as has 'em now."

"Let's save our money and try it, Jim."

"'Nuff said," answered Jim, laughing. And the newsboys in their queer garments, and with their light hearts, passed out of sight of Mr. Brandon's brown-stone house and fair-haired children.

But not out of all remembrance. The children had a party that Christmas afternoon; and when they were tired of romping, and were seated around the room, the girls playing with their dolls; the Catholic ones telling the others in low voices about the flowers and lights, and the wonderful manger which they had seen at Mass that morning; and the boys eagerly listening to the stories of faraway lands, which one of the older people was telling, little Mary knelt in an arm-chair, and looked out of the window at the people hurrying through the driving rain and snow, and at the street-lamps glaring through the wet and cold. Her kind little heart had been very light, and a strange joyousness had surrounded her all day, making her more gentle than ever, so that she had not spoken one hasty word, or once hesitated to take the lowest part in any of the plays. Though she did not know it, the little infant Jesus had smiled on her that morning when she was kind to the poor, homeless newsboy; and now she understood--for charity had enlarged her mind--more distinctly than she ever had before, that there were many cold and desolate children for whom there were no earthly glad tidings that day, yet who were as much God's own as the little ones grouped around her father's pleasant parlors. Then, just as she did the best she could, and prayed in her heart for the children of the poor, she thought she saw the newsboy to whom she had spoken in the morning standing close to the railing by the window; but before she could be sure of it, the servant lighted the gas; she heard the children calling her for a new game, and she ran lightly away. But there was one crouched in the cold outside, who wondered at the sudden light and glow within; and as the bewildered newsboy saw her dancing past the lighted windows, it seemed to him that it was not so far, after all, to the heaven and the angels of whom he had heard; for the "glad tidings" had come to Dick, even Dick, and they woke up the good, the will to do right, which is in every heart, and which did not sleep again in him, even when the little, uncared-for, outcast head rested on the stone steps that Christmas night.

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Chapter II

Very little idea had poor Dick of right or wrong. No fond mother took him to her heart when he was a toddling wee one, just big enough to half understand, and between her kisses told him of angels and saints, of heroes and martyrs, and of that Queen Mother up in heaven, dearer than them all, who never forgot those who once had loved her, and of the beautiful world with its flowers and fruits, its great rivers and high mountains, its delicious green and its glorious blue, which a good Father had given to men for their enjoyment. No loving sister, with bright eyes and tender voice, tossed him in her strong young arms, and sang to him how knights and warriors, the great and good of earth, and loved of heaven, had all been children once like him, only never half so sweet and dear. {525} No noble father, true in the midst of trials, ever watched with anxious care that those little feet should walk only in the straight and narrow path. So it was a hard thing for poor Dick, when he rubbed his brown hands through his bushy, uncombed hair the next morning, and pushed the worn old hat over his still sleepy eyes, to know just what to do to find the temple of Fortune. At times, though, he had followed the crowd of noisy boys and girls whom you may see around the doors of any Catholic church at about nine o'clock on Sunday mornings, and had listened with a critical air, and slightly supercilious, from some dark corner near the door, to the talking and the prayers which he did not wholly understand, but portions of which he did once or twice take into his "inner consciousness" and fully approve. In some way, he then seemed to feel that which made him less rough in all his answers, readier in all his responses to the call for papers, not always gently called for; and, though he knew not why, there were fewer wicked words on his lips that day than for many a day before.

It happened that he kept his eyes open and grew thoughtful, and did not forget his wish to be better; so that, from being a newsboy, he became an errand-boy in a book-store, where he learned to be honest and to tell the truth, which was a rapid advance in his education; for you know it is more than some people have learned who have lived to be six times Dick's age. Sometimes a little lady came to that very store to choose her picture-books and Christmas stories; and it was his place to open the door for her; or perhaps some one would call out, "Dick, a chair for this lady," and then he was as happy as a prince. Sometimes he would be sent home with her purchases, and mounted the steps, entered her father's house, and always felt "good" again; for always the same picture of a little girl in blue, with fair hair, and her hands full of dainty French candy, and a ragged newsboy, dirty and amazed, would be there before him.

Christmas had come and gone more than once, and it was coming again, when Dick turned up the gas in a mere closet of a room very high up in a dingy boarding-house, and made a ghost of a fire in an old rusty stove. It wouldn't seem to us a very enlivening prospect; for the room was but slightly furnished, and the stove smoked, while the wind beat at the not overclean windows, on which there were no curtains to shut out the dark and cold. But Dick seemed to think it something very luxurious; for he rubbed his hands before the blue apology for a flame, and sat down on the broken wooden stool, with as much zest as that with which I have seen grand people sink into a great arm-chair after a walk.

"Christmas eve again," he said to the fire, for it was his only companion. "Let me look at you, Mr. Coals, and see what pictures you have for me to-night. How many nights, worse nights than this, I have been glad to crouch under an old shed, or in some alley, and now to think, thanks to the good God, I have a fire of my own! Poor little bare feet on the icy pavement to-night, I wish I had you round my jolly old stove. When I am rich, I will!" Then he laughed at the idea. "But I won't wait until I am rich, or I would never deserve to have the chance."

"How are you, Dick?" said a cheery voice, though deep and rough, at the door. And a man came into the room, which either his figure, or his coat, or his voice, or the flute under his arm, seemed to fill to such an extent that the very corners were crowded.

{526}

"How are you, Dick? It's blowing a hurricane outside, and you're as cold as Greenland here. It may do for you, but not for me; old blood is thin, my boy, old blood is thin." At which Dick laughed heartily, while putting more coal on the fire; for Carl Stoffs was in the prime of life, hale and hearty, weighing at least two hundred pounds, I am sure, and with a round face, very red, but also very solemn, for Carl Stoffs was a German every inch of him. The stove grew very red also under his vigorous hands; but whether from anger or by reflection I will not attempt to say. "And now," he said, seating himself on the wooden chair, Dick having given it up to his guest, while he occupied a box instead--"and now, how are you, boy? Ready for merry Christmas, eh? You'll come to us to-morrow, so says my wife. In America, you all do mind your wives; mine tells me to bring you."

"Then I must, I know," Dick said, looking at the other, who was near three times his size. "I would have a poor chance in opposing you!" But Carl Stoffs knew well how gratefully the friendless boy accepted the thoughtful invitation.

"Now, shall we have some music," said he, as he drew out his flute, and, without waiting an answer, put it to his mouth, and brought forth such rich, full tones from the instrument that Dick, as he stared at the now bright fire, seemed to be in a land of enchantment.

"You are the only man, from the queen of England down, whom I really envy," said Dick, in one of the pauses. "You can have music whenever you wish it; I am only a beggar, grateful for every note thrown in my way. Were you out, last night?"

"Yes, all night in Fourteenth street, at the rich Brandons. Madam is very gay, this winter."

"I wish I were a musician," said Dick. "It must be jolly to see all the dancing and the bright dresses!"

"And the pretty ladies, eh? who don't mind you no more than if you were a stick or a stone. Indeed, my boy, you'd soon get tired of it; it seems so grand at first, the beautiful picture all in motion; but your eyes--they ache after a little. Too much light, my boy, too much light." And the musician went long journeys up and down his wonderful flute before he spoke again. "They'll go music-mad over some fool at the piano; but you play until your own music makes you wild, and never one thinks or cares about you. Last night, I played only for one. She was always dancing, and she seemed to go on the wings of the music just as it said to her go. I was not tired last night."

Awaiting no answer, he turned again to his flute, and all through the dingy, crowded house rang a joyous "Gloria in excelsis." Rough captives of labor heard it, and answered to it, knowing well the glad tidings, the most glorious ever sung, and yet sung to kings and shepherds alike. The old sinners heard it, and thought of the strange days when even they were young and innocent.

"Finis," cried the German, rising slowly, and putting on his shaggy overcoat. "I promised my wife that I would be home at nine, and, as do all the people here, I mind my wife; but it is one inconvenient thing. You will come to us after Mass, to-morrow?"

"You are too good to me. When I am rich, perhaps I shall know how to thank you."

{527}

"You should think yourself rich now. You are young; there is no riches like that."

"I wish I were older, though," sighed Dick.

"Never say that, never, never. The poorest youth is better than the richest age," said the German earnestly. I shouldn't wonder if Mr. Stoffs had just found his first gray hair, and was speaking under its influence. At all events, he did not convince Dick, who said, with equal earnestness and more quickness:

"I must say it: every day seems too long, every hour goes too slowly, until I can get at my life's work. This waiting for it kills me."

"My friend, do you call this waiting?" laughed the German. "Was it waiting and doing nothing that changed you from--"

"But think," interrupted Dick, "of what ought to have-been. Some day--some day I will get my hand to the plough, you'll see! At least," a little ashamed of the seeming conceit, "I hope you will."

"And what makes you care?"

"I think it's born in us all to like to be active--to be doing something. Indeed, it's about the only legacy my poor parents left me. It may be, for I know nothing of them, that they were just the same as other people, out of whom bitter poverty has taken all pride and ambition; but I can't think it, somehow."

"Do you really know nothing of them?"

"Nothing. I have a little sealed box, with an injunction on the outside of it that I am not to open it until I am of age. I don't know where I first got it, nor from whom it came. It may be some trick to tease me for years, and disappoint me at last, for all I know; and still I have always kept it, for it is all I have. And I think it came from them."

"It may tell you something wonderful," said his visitor, laughing. For it was easy for him to understand that some young mother, who even in her poverty had found the means of reading and believing stones of princes in disguise, and countesses in cellars, disowned and disinherited, all for true love's sake, had made a mystery of leaving a lock of her hair, and perhaps a cheap wedding-ring, to her boy; and he could not forbear a little ridicule of the folly. "It may tell you something wonderful. If it gives you possession of half of New York, don't forget your friends, will you, Dick?" And then, buttoned up to his chin, and with his cap covering half his face, and looking just like Santa Claus, Carl Stoffs bundled his cherished flute under his arm, and obediently went home to his wife.

Dick lingered a moment, after he left, before closing the door. The room was not wholly his own; but his companion had a father and a mother in New Jersey, and he had gone home to them, with something in his pockets for the children's Christmas; so for that night Dick was in undisputed possession. The passages were dark and cold; the snow had got through some of the broken windows, and lay in several little hills on the entry floor; the sash rattled, and Dick shivered, as he stood irresolute at the door of his room. But the irresolution did not last long. He bundled up, as well as his scanty wardrobe permitted, closed the door firmly behind him, and went down the creaking, broken stairs, and through the dreary passages, where he could see the snow huddling up to the dark window-panes, as if it were a white bird trying to get in and beating its wings against the dirty glass. Dick had not far to walk, after leaving the house, before he found that which he had come out to find--somebody without a shelter from the storm. {528} And I should not wonder if any night, however bitter and cold, that you or I should take a notion to go out on the same errand, we should not have to go far for equal success, and that even if we started from the most delightful dwelling-place in all New York.

Under the remains of some broken steps, or more truly by the side of them, for they were too broken to shelter a kitten, two dark figures were lying close together. In one of the pauses of the storm, when the street-lamp had a chance to shine a little, Dick could see that the figures were those of two boys asleep. He did not wait long to rouse them. One woke up at once, cross, and, if I must tell the truth, with some very wicked words on his lips.

"Get up, and come with me," said Dick.

"What yer want 'long o' me? I an't doing nothin'," he muttered.

"I know that; but I will give you a better place to sleep in. Come."

Bad words again. "I an't done nothin' to you. Le' me 'lone."

"I want you to come home with me. Did you ever hear of a newsboy called Big Dick? That's me."

"I an't afeard o' nothin'. H'ere goes!" And the poor little fellow, still believing the other was "chaffing," got on his feet. "Do you want t'other? He an't worth nothin', but he'll keep dark."

"Yes, both of you. Hurry him up; it is a terrible night."

"Come along, Joe. Where's yer spunk? I an't afeard o' nothin'."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," said Dick, as gently as the roaring storm would let him. "Don't talk now, but come on. I'll take you to a room with a fire in it," added Dick, in spite of himself feeling that he was bon prince to the little newsboys.

"Come on, Joe," urged the other, dragging and pushing the little newsboy, who was hardly more than a baby, but who seemed to whimper, sleepy and frightened, as no doubt he was, until, as quietly as the old stairs would permit, and almost holding their breath, they followed Dick to his room.

"An't this bully, now?" said Jack in an undertone, when he stood before the fire in the lighted room, and Joe, with round, staring eyes, but not a word of complaint or fear, had been put on the wooden chair. "I say, now, Joe an't much, but he'll never blab; but I'se all right. What yer want us to do, now, sir?"

"To get warm," answered Dick. "I was once a newsboy, and slept under stoops and sheds, like the rest of them; but now I've got a fire of my own, and I wanted company; so I went out and got you and Joe, and now make yourselves at home for tonight. Here's some crackers and cheese, and when you've had something to eat you can go to sleep here. It's better than out there, isn't it?"

The newsboy stared at Dick, and grunted something which sounded very much as if he did not believe a word that his host had said. The other sat silent, stolid, and seemingly ready to hear anything. He ate his share of the crackers and cheese greedily, but with a watchful eye on the giver. The warmth, however, soon proved too much for his vigilance, and, though his eyes were still fixed on Dick's face, they were heavy and expressionless. At last, Dick took him up, undressed him, and laid him in his bed in the corner; and then, for the first time, Joe's tongue was loosened. "There, now," he said, as he lay exactly as Dick had placed him, "I are dead and gone at last. Twasn't no lies about t'other world; they wasn't a foolin' on us, after all. Here an't no more Heralds and Tribunes. I are dead and gone at last!" And so rejoicing, Joe's eyes closed securely, and it is likely he dreamt of angels, if he dreamt at all, until morning came.

{529}

"He an't much," said Jack, whom this act of Dick's, together with the fire and the food, had made less incredulous and more confidential. "He's a soft 'un; he an't got the right pluck. He'll never be nobody."

"Is he your brother?" asked Dick. "Do yer think I'd have him for my brother? He's a youngster, come from nobody don't know where. He was fetching up in my quarters last winter, and didn't know his name nor nothin'; so we gives him a start, us fellers, and he's stuck on to me ever since."

Then Dick asked more about his new friend's life, and told him a little his own, and a story or two that he thought suited to his understanding; and, having won the child to believe a little in his good intentions, had the satisfaction of seeing him at his ease, and willing to go to sleep with Joe in the corner. When this was accomplished, Dick put out the fire and the light, and lay down on the floor to sleep soundly and well, until the joy-bells from the great city churches should wake his guests and himself to the glad tidings that Christmas had come again.

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