Use And Abuse Of The Novel…

Use And Abuse Of The Novel

If the question were put to us—What class of books, viewed merely as reading, without tutelage or commentary of any kind, had the greatest influence in moulding and training the thoughts, aspirations, mode of life, of the mass of readers in these days?—we should, notwithstanding the slur and sneer which it is fashionable for clever writers to cast upon them, answer unhesitatingly—Novels.

This answer, we have no doubt, might shock the sensibilities of some of our readers, as it might very cordially agree with those of a not insignificant body of others. Without going into a dry analytical discussion of the pros and cons of the question, we will adopt the easier course of taking at the outset everything we want for granted, and allowing the truth of it to emanate from the body of our article; merely premising that, if it be true, Catholics have too much neglected, are far too weak in, this very important collateral branch of modern education.

Every age, every cycle, every period in the history of the world has its distinctive features, its proper individualities, its representative men, systems, or facts, strongly and clearly marked. Ours is the iron age. Our province is matter. Our tastes are material. The world seems, strangely enough, to be working backwards. We began with intellect: we finish with matter. The signs of the past are stamped with intellect or the intellectual. The development of the present is steam and electricity. If we ask the ages, What have you given us? the answer comes rolling down out of the dim mountain of the past: Homer, Phidias, Apelles; the alphabet, the geometrical figure, the science of numbers; Plato and Aristotle; Virgil and the historians; the practical greatness of Rome; the great faith of the new‐born middle ages; the Crusades, the Gothic order, the great masters, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. We have our distinctive mark; the one indicated: the mastery over the material world. In the intellectual order, if we look for one, we must set it in the daily newspaper and the novel. These are the peculiar intellectual development of the XIXth century. Against the names of Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, we pit those of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Eugene Sue, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and her kin.

Surely this is rank heresy. Is not this the age of the rationalists, the free‐thinkers, “the swallowers of formula,” of Hegel, Cousin, Comte, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Thomas Carlyle? All these are nothing to the purpose. Thinkers, dreamers, idealists, doubters, belong to all ages. The novelists belong to ours alone, as surely as do the steamboat, the railway, the electric telegraph, the daily press, the penny post.

In saying this, we are not blind to the fact that novels and romances were written long before our century dawned. Cervantes and Le Sage are old enough; the Romaunts are older still. De Foe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, are names of a bygone century. But novelism, to use the word in a new sense, considered as a science—for such it has practically become—as the most popular branch of literature known in these days, with men and women of genius devoted to its pursuit, with an ever‐increasing progeny spreading and growing, and stifling each other out of life, is an intellectual phase proper of to‐day.

Philosophic historians trace the decline of peoples and periods in the decline of their literature; in its tone, its style, its subjects, and manner of treatment. If this test be applied to us, what a show should we make! But happily the test, though in the main a true one, is not an infallible one. The facility opened up by the invention of printing for writers of every shade of opinion to express their thoughts upon any given subject at any length and in any quantity, provided only they pay the printer, must weaken to some extent the theory that writers are the exact reflex of the times and peoples for and among whom they write. Still there rests the significant fact that to‐day the novel, and particularly the worst form of it, is the book of the period; the most popular, widely read, best paid class of literature that we possess—a fact which tells its own tale of our intellectual and moral advance.

The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear‐sighted, manly, and truth‐loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray‐haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates’ spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about her husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the Delectus; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the Symposia passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline’s conspiracy about; the effect of the quousque tandem speech related by an eye‐ witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.

These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!

Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third‐ rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.

As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?

A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one’s bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author’s secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas fils, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas fils is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas fils; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage‐knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas fils will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband’s infidelity. But probably such a high‐minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.

Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.

Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play‐ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind’s eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air‐drawn as Macbeth’s. We can commit cold‐blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far‐reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never will run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well‐known form, if we have. And if the never‐running‐smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!

The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.

But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.

“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a great genius, so early led astray!

The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him, from the crop‐haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin’s ideal man to the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady poisoners with the floating locks and sea‐green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady who makes novel‐reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men look to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel‐struck, novel‐bred, only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her tea.

All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded, save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”

What a field, then, is the novelist’s!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own.

Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair‐haired, open‐ hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night. Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from the grafting.

The grafting is the mother’s voice, the father’s example, the companions around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story‐books for Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a more serious work.

One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of friends, Robinson Crusoe, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat‐skin cap, a parrot, a Man Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle, tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him good‐bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way, notching the giant trunks with our six‐bladed penknife, shooting the buffalo with our pop‐guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by’r Lady! Here we are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was! The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk; the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business; his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the mêlée and bearing all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O’Malley waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to‐day. What a race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.

Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy. If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what is known as the Dime Novel and those blood‐and‐thunder weeklies with the terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature, boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by great Christian heroes, by the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children’s books written by Protestants. The production of children’s stories has grown into a science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the columns of the London Times devoted to as critical an examination of this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars, detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here, then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be filled up.

But our article deals not alone with children and children’s books. We purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational novel.

What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of Rasselas had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling Rasselas a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:

Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek‐ coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.

What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the Arabian Nights; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe‐encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night‐shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice‐told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder‐workers of the age.

Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth‐rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green‐room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera‐ singer, the ankles of a danseuse, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin‐mill; the prize‐ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming‐table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.

Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple‐hearted, simple‐mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop‐haired, steeple‐crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.

There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue‐books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing‐room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle‐gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!

Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine‐inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven‐born gift into the lowest of animal passions.

It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to‐day threaten to turn the world topsy‐turvy—the so‐called theory of Woman’s Rights—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first‐born, Free Love.

We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the New York Herald, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.

But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?

As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy’s “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare’s, and partaking of the great master’s “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss‐ trooper or a crusader, a free‐lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good‐naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess‐mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.

“What’s that ’ere beggar, Jack?”

“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can’t say exactly, but I expect it’s one o’ them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”

Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti‐Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow‐men.

From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.

They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high‐minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death’s‐head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray‐hairs, his asses or black‐ legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft‐hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro‐table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray’s world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.

In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer’s way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.

And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above‐mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single‐handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing‐room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in Sybil; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves’ and harlots’ dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God’s Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never‐ending, never‐wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to‐day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life’s journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.

To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to‐day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.

Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of The House of Yorke. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock‐down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.

Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and true love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self‐ denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul‐conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well‐told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.

Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.(114)

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas of Aquin. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the saint is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan’s best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint’s personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world’s course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private aside with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene‐painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the moralizing element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint’s life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half‐century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the Vie de Rancé contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men’s thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word revolution, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.

It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general romanesque tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well‐meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.

The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre‐eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.

Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:

“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.

Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint’s father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.

The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large‐ minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine, deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S. Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But we must pass it over. S. Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled “S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover, the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of his life.

“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth’s stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses, he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye; and those events or influences which excited the minds of others, and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys from his high crag, with half‐unconscious eye, the world of woods below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded, as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and rugged mountain, with the far‐distant ranges of the snowy Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace.... Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious, when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self‐forgetting and self‐restrained. A character with such a capability of asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self‐ repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless. But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind. Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light, peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical, with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught. There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart, seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say: ‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true! Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has been touched on and partially developed already. The reader, adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S. Victor’s—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole, follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize the aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and self‐forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self‐distrust and self‐forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God’s high majesty awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world; Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is, bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31‐48.)

The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the Greeks,

“Full in the midst, high‐towering o’er the rest,”

his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the quelling power that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle‐field; and his place in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer, a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:

“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen, first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident, he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents, the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived, for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry aloud, ‘Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed determinantis!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one after another, he started objections, created a hundred labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle arguments, but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i. 321, 322).

How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He spoke in the class‐hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old; and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow‐ religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But the writer of the Summa must have been great even in his lifetime. That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is fairly permitted to the serious biographer.

But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers by asking with childish meditative face, “What was God?” His quiet determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat, had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when the Angelical discussed:

“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent simply on the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity, the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way, giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine quies and benignitas into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools. And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the great lesson of self‐control, not only by the undeviating practice of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as an ‘ignominy’ (ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57‐59).

The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety. But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official. At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable, his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological discussion was “humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio.”

The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing‐ point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to be a saint. Each heard the other speak, and the spirit of one was the spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure, has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure’s children; and we have before us as we write the Cursus Theologiæ of a venerable bearded Capuchin, considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with S. Augustine, “præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister”—the great master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that the Jesuit theologians, even the many‐sided Suarez, have looked up to S. Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of conciliation. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only half‐way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary, the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the scholastic and Thomistic method of distinction. The distinguo of the tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its distinguo is the touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored‐up learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre‐ eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.

“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely bearing he advances, a mighty‐looking man, built on a larger scale than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already. Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow, the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well‐ chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so imperial a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty, of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring canvas” (ii. 108, 109).

The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much more of Prior Vaughan’s narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas’ holy distress of mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate. But the following paragraph must be transcribed:

“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him, as silently, after the day’s work, he retires to his cell, seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take from its hiding‐place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it, striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate self‐seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).

S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty‐eight years old. He was called away a little before his great work, the Summa, was completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the Summa stood still in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his companion Reginald, Non possum! “I cannot! Everything that I have written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came in, he set out, at the pope’s call, to attend the general council at Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.

“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth, close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and, turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘This is the place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to Reginald in presence of them all: ‘Hæc est requies mea in sæculum sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam—This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).

The whole of this last scene of the great saint’s pilgrimage is admirably and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict, should return to S. Benedict to die!”

We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and fulness of the author’s style, leave the impression of one whose heart is strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students, upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess; and there is no one who is more sure of the world’s attention and reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S. Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred science. “In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in corpore subdito peccatis.” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “mens purgatissima” than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels’ hands, with his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that dictated the Commentaries on Aristotle were ready to break forth with the Lauda Sion and the Pange Lingua. If he taught in the daytime, he chastised his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life, with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”

Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks of all English‐speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is, we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a museum. He is a man to know, not merely to know about; a man who taught in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel’s life here below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle, the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that Prior Vaughan’s S. Thomas may make its way into the hearts of earnest men, and it is our conviction that it will make its way, and that men will be the better for it.

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To S. Mary Magdalen

’Mid the white spouses of the Sacred Heart, After its Queen, the nearest, dearest, thou. Yet the auréola around thy brow Is not the virgins’. Thine a throne apart. Nor yet, my Saint, does faith‐illumined art Thy hand with palm of martyrdom endow: And when thy hair is all it will allow Of glory to thy head, we do not start. O more than virgin in thy penitent love! And more than martyr in thy passionate woe! How should thy sisters equal thee above, Who knelt not with thee on the gory sod? Or where the crown our worship could bestow Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?

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God’s Acre

In all countries and in all creeds, the dead have claimed the affectionate notice of the living. The idea of housing them, deifying them, propitiating them, of remembering them in some way, however diverse, has always been a prominent one. The belief in the soul’s immortality seems to have been even more clear to the ordinary mind of the natural man than that of a Supreme and Almighty Being. When Christianity appeared, the departed had a place assigned them among the members of the church, and were commemorated as absent brethren gone before their fellows one stage further on the last great journey; when the Reformation disfranchised human nature in the XVIth century, and levelled all its hallowed aspirations with the brute instincts of the animal kingdom, the dead, though divorced from communion with the living, were yet remembered, and placed in two categories—the elect, or the precondemned. Another life was even then believed in, and later branches of the reforming sects all condescended at least to theorize on the future state of disembodied spirits. It remained for our times to foster the cruel _un_belief that dooms our loved ones, not even to everlasting perdition, but to absolute annihilation. It was hard enough in Puritan days for a pious though mistaken mind to bring itself to the belief that possibly the loved companion of childhood, the chosen mate of youth, the venerable parent, the upright teacher, was one of those predestined to eternal torments, one of the holocausts to the greater glory of God; but how far harder now for a fond heart, a clinging nature, to see in those it loves so many perishable puppets, without future and without hope! But happily there is a haven to which these storm‐tossed souls may come with the precious freight of their love and their unerring Catholic instincts. Their companions and brethren are not gone into trackless chaos, they are not absorbed into that monstrous “nothing” of which a false philosophy has made a bewildering bugbear. Every year the church protests against such revolting doctrines on the day which she publicly consecrates to prayers for and remembrance of the departed. This festival is like a spiritual harvest‐home; coming as it does just at the close of the ecclesiastical year, it marks an epoch in the life of the church suffering; and various “revelations” made to saints, as well as the collective belief of the faithful, agree in considering it a day of liberation and rejoicing among the souls in Purgatory. “God’s Acre” (according to the touching and suggestive German idiom) is reaped on that auspicious day, though, like Boaz, the Divine Reaper leaves yet a few ears of corn to be gleaned into heavenly rest by the prayers of the faithful on earth.

Before we go further into our own beautiful view of the future life, let us stop to see how other races and religions have treated the dead.

Of the Egyptians, it is difficult to speak except at too great a length, and, not having at hand sufficient authority, we can only set down what our recollection will supply. The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will no doubt remember some interesting articles published a few months since regarding the ancient civilization of Egypt, in which copious reference was made to the esteem and respect paid to the dead in that country. The singular custom of pledging the embalmed body of a father or ancestor, on the receipt of a loan, was noticed; also the dishonor attaching to the non‐redemption of such a pledge. A learned English author, speaking incidentally of Egyptian embalming, mentions that the word mummy is derived from “mum,” which, he says, is Egyptian for wax. Representations of the embalming process have been found on tombs and sarcophagi, in which the men engaged in it are seen wearing masks with eagles’ beaks, probably iron masks, thereby denoting of what a poisonous and dangerous nature this absolutely incorruptible embalmment must have been. The Pyramids are perhaps the most imposing funeral monuments ever raised to the memory of mortals, and even the famous Mausoleum of Artemisia can have had no more massive or eternal an aspect.

To pass from the cradle of older civilization to the land whose original peopling has sometimes been attributed, though we believe inaccurately, to Egyptian enterprise, the America of the Aztec and the Red Indian, we find in Parkman’s Jesuits in America some lengthy details on the funereal customs of the Huron tribe, now extinct. He says that “the primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, but not always in a state of future punishment or reward. Nor was the good or evil to be rewarded or punished (when such a belief did exist) of a moral nature. Skilful hunters, brave warriors, men of influence, went to the happy hunting‐ grounds, while the slothful, the weak, the cowardly, were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.... The spirits, in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and when night came hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.” The public ceremony of exhuming the dead, of which some interesting details are given further on, was supposed to be the occasion of the beginning of the other life. The souls “took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the greater number believed that they journeyed on foot ... to the land of shades, ... but, as the spirits of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly homes, where the living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin doors, and the weak voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn‐fields.... The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom. The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead as dancing joyously.... According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of endless festivity, ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the drum.... Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving rocks which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the pilgrims who endeavored to pass. The Hurons believed that a personage named Oscotarach, or the Head‐Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according to which, however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner.”

Le Clerc, in his Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, tells a curious story, which is mentioned in a foot‐note by Parkman. It was current in his (Le Clerc’s) time among the Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick, and bears a remarkable likeness to the old myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. “The favorite son of an old Indian died, whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade through a shallow lake, several days’ journey in extent. This they did, sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the water. At length, they arrived and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war‐club upraised, but, presently relenting, changed his mind and challenged them to a game of ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn, tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The bereaved father now begged hard for his son’s soul, and Papkootparout at last gave it to him in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing it hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert it into the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue, of their journey, there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in it, gave his son’s soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being curious to see it, she opened the bag, upon which it escaped at once, and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the abodes of the living.”

These superstitions, although they may make us smile, yet attest, through their rude simplicity, the natural and deep‐rooted existence in all races of a belief not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the possibility of communication with the departed. The Buddhist doctrine of transmigration is but a distorted version of the truth we call purgatory, that is, a state of temporary expiation and gradual cleansing. The Egyptian practice of embalming the dead and often of preserving the bodies of several generations of one’s forefathers in the family house, is another consequence of the primeval belief in the soul’s immortality. Everywhere reverence for the dead implied this belief and symbolized it, and even the custom of placing in the mouth of the Roman dead the piece of money, denarius, with which to pay their passage over the Styx, is referable to the true doctrine of good works being laid up in heaven and helping those who have performed them to gain the desired entrance into eternal repose.

The following minute description of the Indian feast of the dead, of which mention has already been made, is interesting, and is condensed from the account given by Father Brebœuf: “The corpses were lowered from their scaffolds and lifted from their graves. Each family claimed its own, and forthwith addressed itself to the task of removing what remained of flesh from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed with tears and lamentations, were wrapped in skins and pendent robes of beaver. These relics, as also the recent corpses, which remained entire, but were likewise carefully wrapped in furs, were carried to one of the largest houses, and hung to the numerous cross poles which, rafterlike, supported the roof. The concourse of mourners seated themselves at a funeral feast, the squaws of the household distributed the food, and a chief harangued the assembly, lamenting the loss of the deceased and praising their virtues. This over, the mourners began their march for Ossonané, the scene of the final rite. The bodies remaining entire were borne on litters, while the bundles of bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives, like fagots. The procession thus defiled slowly through the forest pathways, and as they passed beneath the shadow of the pines, the mourners uttered at intervals and in unison a wailing cry, meant to imitate the voices of disembodied souls, ... and believed to have a peculiarly soothing effect on the conscious relics that each man carried. The place prepared for the last rite was a cleared area in the forest, many acres in extent. Around it was a high and strong scaffolding of upright poles, with cross‐poles extended between, for hanging the funeral gifts and the remains of the dead. The fathers lodged in a house where over a hundred of these bundles of mortality hung from the rafters. Some were mere shapeless rolls, others were made up into clumsy effigies, adorned with feathers, beads, etc. In the morning (the procession having arrived over night at Ossonané) the relics were taken down, opened again, and the bones fondled anew by the women, amid paroxysms of grief. When the procession bearing the dead reached the ground prepared for the last solemnity, the bundles were laid on the ground, and the funeral gifts outspread for the admiration of the beholders. Among them were many robes of beaver and other rich furs, collected and preserved for years with a view to this festival. Fires were lighted and kettles slung, and the scene became like a fair or caravanserai. This continued till three o’clock in the afternoon, when the gifts were repacked, and the bones shouldered afresh. Suddenly, at a signal from the chiefs, the crowd ran forward from every side towards the scaffolding, like soldiers to the assault of a town, scaled it by the rude ladders with which it was furnished, and hung their relics and their gifts to the forest of poles which surmounted it. The chiefs then again harangued the people in praise of the departed, while other functionaries lined the grave throughout with rich robes of beaver skin. Three large copper kettles were next placed in the middle, and then ensued a scene of hideous confusion. The bodies which had been left entire were brought to the edge of the grave, flung in, and arranged in order at the bottom by ten or twelve Indians, stationed there for the purpose, amid the wildest excitement and the uproar of many hundred mingled voices. Night was now fast closing in, and the concourse bivouacked around the clearing.... One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold, chanced to fall into the grave. This accident precipitated the closing act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. All around blazed countless fires, and the air resounded with discordant cries. The naked multitude, on, under, and around the scaffolding, were flinging the remains of their dead, relieved from their wrappings of skins, pell‐mell into the pit, where were discovered men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them, arranged the bones in their places with long poles. All was soon over; earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided into a funereal chant, so dreary and lugubrious that it seemed like the wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition.”

These processions and ceremonies relating to the bones of the dead remind us of the singular custom observed at the Capuchin Convent of the Piazza Barberini in Rome. The skeletons of the dead monks are robed in the habit of the order and seated in choir‐stalls round the crypt, until they fall to pieces, or are displaced by a silent new‐comer to their ghostly brotherhood. The bones which are thus yearly accumulating are formed into patterns of stars and crosses on the walls of the crypt and surrounding corridors, while the skulls are often heaped up in small mounds against the partitions. The convent is strictly enclosed, and is only accessible to men during the rest of the year, but on All Souls’ day and during the octave, the public, men and women alike, are allowed to visit this strange place of entombment. Crowds flock to see it, especially foreigners. Hawthorne, in his Marble Faun, has described it in terms that make one feel as if his impression were vivid enough to supply the place of a personal one on the part of each of his readers.

The ancient Roman customs and beliefs concerning the dead are well worth noticing, as embodying the essence of the utmost civilization a heathen land could boast. It is said that the Romans chose the cypress as emblematic of death because that tree, when once cut, never grows again. The facts of natural history are sometimes disregarded by the ancient poets, but it is not with that that we now have to deal, but with the false idea symbolized by this choice. The Romans, nevertheless, fully believed in an after‐life, though one modelled much on the same principle as their life on earth. The unburied and those whose bodies could not be found were supposed to wander about, unable to cross the river Styx, and their friends therefore generally built them an empty tomb, which they believed served as a retreat to their restless spirits. Pliny ascribes the Roman custom of burning the dead to the belief that was current amongst the people, that their enemies dug up and insulted the bodies of their soldiers killed in distant wars. During the earlier part of the Republic, the dead were mostly buried in the natural way, in graves or vaults. Some very strange ceremonies are recorded in Adams’ Roman Antiquities concerning the funeral processions, which usually took place at night by torch‐light. (This was chiefly done to avoid any chance of meeting a priest or magistrate, who was supposed to be polluted by the sight of a corpse, as in the Jewish dispensation.) After the musicians, who sang the praises of the deceased to the accompaniment of flutes, came “players and buffoons, one of whom, called archimimus (the chief mimic), sustained the character of the deceased, imitating his words or actions while alive. These players sometimes introduced apt sayings from dramatic writers.” Actors were also employed to personate the individual ancestors, and Adams’ commentator adds in a foot‐note: “A Roman funeral must therefore have presented a singular appearance, with a long line of ancestors stalking gravely through the streets of the capital.” Pliny, Plautus, Polybius, Suetonius, and others are the authorities quoted on this curious point. It is said by some authors that, in very ancient times, the dead were buried in their own houses; hence the origin of idolatry, the worship of household gods, the fear of goblins, etc. Relations also consecrated temples to the dead, which Pliny calls a very ancient custom, which had its share in contributing to the establishment of idol‐worship. In the Book of Wisdom(115) we find a reference to this in these words: “For a father, being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son, who was quickly taken away, and him who then had died as a man, he began now to worship as a god, and appointed him rites and sacrifices among his servants. Then in process of time, wicked custom prevailing, this error was kept as a law.” Adams tells us that “the private places of burial of the Romans were in fields or gardens, usually near the highway (such as the Via Appia near Rome, the Via Campana near Pozzuoli, the Street of Tombs at Pompeii), to be conspicuous and remind those who passed of mortality. Hence the frequent inscriptions—Siste, viator,(116) Aspice, viator.”(117) Games of gladiators were frequently held both on the day and the anniversaries of great funerals; and on the pyre slaves and clients were sometimes burnt with the body of their deceased master, as also all manner of clothes and ornaments, and, “in short, whatever was supposed to have been agreeable to him when alive.” As the funeral cortége left the place where the body had been burnt, they “used to take a last farewell, repeating several times Vale, or Salve æternum,”(118) also wishing that the earth might lie light on the person buried, as Juvenal relates, and which was found marked on several ancient monuments in these letters, S.T.T.L.(119) “This is a very remarkable instance of the dead being considered, in one sense, as conscious, sentient beings, and evidently has an origin which can hardly be disconnected from some remote or indistinct recollection of the true religion.”

Adams goes on to say that “oblations or sacrifices to the dead were afterwards made at various times, both occasionally and at stated periods, consisting of liquors, victims, and garlands, as Virgil, Tacitus, and Suetonius tell us, and sometimes to appease their manes, or atone for some injury offered them in life. The sepulchre was bespread with flowers, and covered with crowns and fillets. Before it there was a little altar, on which libations were made and incense burnt. A keeper was appointed to watch the tomb, which was frequently illuminated with lamps. A feast was generally added, both for the dead and the living. Certain things were laid on the tomb, commonly beans, lettuce, bread, and eggs, or the like, which it was supposed the ghosts would come and eat. What remained was burnt. After the funeral of great men,... a distribution of raw meat was made to the people.”

“Immoderate grief was thought to be offensive to the manes, according to Tibullus, but during the shortened mourning that was customary, the relations of the deceased abstained from entertainments or feasts of any sort, wore no badge of rank or nobility, were not shaved, and dressed in black, a custom borrowed (as was supposed) from the Egyptians. ‘No fire was ever lighted, as it was considered an ornament to the house.’ ”

The common places of burial were called columbaria, from the likeness of their arrangement to that of a pigeon‐house, each little niche scooped out in the walls holding the small urn in which the ashes of the dead were deposited. These columbaria, Adams tells us, were often below ground, like a vault, but private tombs belonging to wealthy citizens were in groves and gardens; as, for instance, that of Augustus, mentioned by Strabo, who calls it a hanging garden supported on marble arches, with shrubs planted round the base, and the Egyptian obelisks at the entrance. The tomb of Adrian, now the Castel S. Angelo, was a perfect palace of wealth and art, and supplied many a later building with ready‐made adornment before it became what it now is, a fortress. The tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Via Appia, was also used as a mediæval stronghold, and looks more fit for such a use than for its former funereal distinction.

From ancient and imperial, we now pass to modern and Christian Rome, so undistinguishable in the chronology of their first blending, so widely apart in the moral order of their succession.

The subject of the catacombs and the early inscriptions on Christian graves is one so widely known and so copiously illustrated by many learned works, both English and foreign, that it would be superfluous to say much about it. Yet Cardinal Wiseman is so popular an author, and Fabiola so standard a novel, that we may be forgiven for drawing a little on treasures so temptingly ready to our hand. There is in the first chapter of the second part of Fabiola an interesting reference to the old established craft of the fossores, or excavators of the Christian cemeteries. Cardinal Wiseman says that some modern antiquarians have based upon the assertion of an anonymous writer, contemporary with S. Jerome, an erroneous theory of the fossores having formed a lesser ecclesiastical order in the primitive church, like a lector or reader. “But,” he adds, “although this opinion is untenable, it is extremely probable that the duties of this office were in the hands of persons appointed and recognized by ecclesiastical authority.... It was not a cemetery or necropolis company which made a speculation of burying the dead, but rather a pious and recognized confraternity, which was associated for the purpose.” Father Marchi, the great Jesuit authority on ancient subterranean Rome, says that a series of interesting inscriptions, found in the cemetery of S. Agnes, proves that this occupation was continued in particular families, grandfather, father, and sons having carried it on in the same place. The fossores also transacted such rare bargains as were known in those days of simplicity and brotherly love, when wealthy Christians willingly made compensation for the privilege of being buried near a martyr’s tomb. Such an arrangement is commemorated in an early Christian inscription preserved in the Capitol. The translation runs thus: “This is the grave for two bodies, bought by Artemisius, and the price was given to the fossor Hilarus—that is ... (the number, being in cipher, is unintelligible.) In the presence of Severus the fossor, and Laurentius.”

Cardinal Wiseman, jealous of Christian traditions, particularly notes that the theory of the subterranean crypts, now called catacombs, ever having been heathen excavations for the extraction of sand, has been disproved by Marchi’s careful and scientific examination. He then describes the manner of entombment used in these underground cemeteries: “Their walls as well as the sides of the staircases are honeycombed with graves, that is, rows of excavations, large and small, of sufficient length to admit a human body, from a child to a full‐grown man.... They are evidently made to measure, and it is probable that the body was lying by the side of the grave while this was being dug. When the corpse was laid in its narrow cell, the front was hermetically closed either by a marble‐slab, or more frequently by several broad tiles put edgeways in a groove or mortise, cut for them in the rock, and cemented all round. The inscription was cut upon the marble, or scratched in the wet mortar.... Two principles, as old as Christianity, regulate this mode of burial. The first is the manner of Christ’s entombment; he was laid in a grave in a cavern, wrapped up in linen, embalmed with spices, and a stone, sealed up, closed his sepulchre. As S. Paul so often proposes him for the model of our resurrection, and speaks of our being buried with him in baptism, it was natural for his disciples to wish to be buried after his example, so as to be ready to rise with him. This lying in wait for the resurrection was the second thought that regulated the formation of these cemeteries. Every expression connected with them alluded to the rising again. The word to bury is unknown in Christian inscriptions: ‘deposited in peace,’ ‘the deposition of ...’ are the expressions used; that is, the dead are left there for a time, till called for again, as a pledge or precious thing, entrusted to faithful but temporary keeping. The very name of cemetery suggests that it is only a place where many lie, as in a dormitory, slumbering for a while, till dawn come and the trumpet’s sound awake them. Hence the grave is only called the ‘place,’ or more technically ‘the small home,’(120) of the dead in Christ.”

The old Teutonic Gottes‐Acker, the acre or field of God, denotes the same eminently Christian idea; the dead are thus likened to the seed hidden in the ground for a while, to ripen into a glorious spiritual harvest when the last call shall be heard. We have read somewhere, in an English novel whose name has escaped our memory, the same beautiful idea most poetically expressed. It was something to this effect: “We put up a stone at the head of a grave, just as we write labels in the spring‐time for the seeds we put into the earth, that we may remember what glorious flower is to spring from the little gray, hidden handful that seems so insignificant just now”—a Catholic thought found astray in a book that had nothing Catholic about it save its beauty and poetry; for beauty is a ray of truth, and truth is one and Catholic. One other remark is worth remembering about the early Christian inscriptions on the tombs of the departed. There is generally some anxiety to preserve a record of the exact date of a person’s death, and, in modern days, if it happened that there was no room for both the day and the year, no doubt the day, would be left unnoticed, and the year carefully chronicled. “Yet,” says Cardinal Wiseman, “while so few ancient Christian inscriptions supply the year of people’s deaths, thousands give us the very day of it on which they died, whether in the hopefulness of believers or in the assurance of martyrs. Of both classes annual commemoration had to be made on the very day of their departure, and accurate knowledge of this was necessary. Therefore it alone was recorded.”

O ages of faith! when it was the ambition of Christians to be inscribed in the Book of Life, instead of leaving names blazoned in gold in the annals of an earthly empire!

Prayers for the dead were in use among the primitive Christians, and in one of the inscriptions mentioned by Cardinal Wiseman the following reference to these prayers is found: “Christ God Almighty refresh thy spirit in Christ.” That this hallowed custom is akin to the natural feelings of a loving heart is self‐evident; the coldness of an “age of philosophy” alone could doubt it. Well might it be called the age of disorganization and not of philosophy (which is “love of wisdom”), for the wisdom that seeks to pull down instead of building up is but questionable. The disorganization of political society which we see at work through the International and the Commune; the disorganization of moral society which we behold every day increasing through the ease with which the marriage‐ tie is dissolved, and the hold the state is claiming on children and even infants; the disorganization of religious society which we find in the ever‐multiplying feuds of sects, like gangrene gradually eating away an unsound body; these are all fitting companions to that most ruthless severing of this world from the next which pretends to isolate the dead from the spiritual help and sympathy of the living, and to dwarf in the souls of men what even human laws commanded, or at least protected, concerning their bodies. The want of our age is a want of heart; heartlessness and callousness to the most sacred, the most natural feelings, is shown to a fearful extent among our modern mind‐emancipators and reformers. On the one hand, nature is held up as a god to which all moral laws are to be subject, or, rather, before whose fiat they are to cease to exist, while, on the other, nature (in everything lawful, touching, noble, generous) is told that she is a fool, and must learn to subdue “childish” aspirations and outgrow “childish” beliefs!

But the belief of a communication between the living and the departed is not only a natural one; it is also Biblical. S. Matthew speaks of the middle state of souls when he mentions the strict account that will have to be rendered of “every idle word.”(121) S. Paul says that “every man’s work ... shall be tried in fire: and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”(122) S. Peter makes mention of “the spirits in prison,”(123) and S. John, in the Apocalypse, implies a state of probation when he says that “there shall not enter into it [the New Jerusalem] anything defiled or that worketh abomination, or maketh a lie.”(124) In the Second Book of Machabees, one of the most national of the Jewish records, and the most favorite and consolatory of the religious books held by the Jews as infallible oracles, the whole doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the departed is most plainly adverted to.

After a great battle and victory, Judas Machabeus searches the bodies of his slain warriors, and finds that some of them had appropriated heathen votive offerings made to the idols whose temples they had burnt at Jamnia a short time before. Upon this discovery, according to the sacred text, which is here too precious a testimony to be condensed, he, “making a gathering, sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection. (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.) And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.”(125)

It may not perhaps be generally known that, among the Jews, the custom of praying for the dead exists, and has always existed uninterruptedly. Some of the supplications are very beautiful, and we do not hesitate to give them here, as an interesting corroboration of the assertions we have made throughout.

The chief prayers for the dead are contained in the “Kaddisch” for mourners, which forms part of the evening as well as the morning service for the Jewish Sabbath. Although the dead are not mentioned by name, it is to them alone that the prayers apply, as we understand from persons of that persuasion. The text is the following:

“May our prayers be accepted with mercy and kindness; may the prayers and supplications of the whole house of Israel be accepted in the presence of their Father who is in heaven, and say ye Amen. [The congregation here answer Amen.] May the fulness of peace from heaven with life be granted unto us and to all Israel, and say ye Amen.” “My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. May he who maketh peace in his high heavens bestow peace on us and on all Israel. And say ye Amen.”

During these prayers, the mourners stand up and answer. Other invocations mention “the soul of my father” or “mother,” etc., as the case may be. In the service for the dead read over the corpse, these words occur: “O Lord our God, cause us to lie down in peace, and raise us up, O our King, to a happy life. I laid me down fearless and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustained me.” All through the Old Testament we constantly find “sleep” used as a synonym for death. Scattered through the morning and evening services of the Hebrew liturgy there are invocations, frequently repeated, referring to the dead, such as these: “Thou, O Lord, art for ever powerful; thou restorest life to the dead, and art mighty to save. Thou art also faithful to revive the dead: blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead.” God is also said “to hold in his hands the souls of the living and the dead,” thus giving at least equal prominence to the departed and those they have left in their place. The Jews believe and hope that their prayers on earth benefit and refresh their lost brethren, and pray daily for them. The bodies of the departed are plainly dressed in a linen shroud without superfluous ornamentation, but many of the old ceremonies and purifications enjoined in the old law are now dispensed with. The old manner of burial was in a cave or spacious sepulchre in a field or garden, and the body was wrapped in spices, which were often burnt around it. The double cave of Mambre, bought for Sarah by Abraham, stood at the end of a field, and the sepulchres of the kings were also in a field. The garden where Our Lord was laid is another instance of the universality of this custom. In the Second Book of Chronicles(126) we read of King Asa that “they buried him in his own sepulchre which he had made for himself in the city of David: and they laid him on his bed full of spices and odoriferous ointments, which were made by the art of the perfumers, and they burnt them over him with great pomp.” This burning (of spices) is often mentioned throughout Holy Writ. Rachel, says the Book of Genesis,(127) was buried “in the highway” that led to Bethlehem, and Jacob erected a pillar over her sepulchre; Samuel, “in his own house at Ramatha”; and Saul, beneath an oak near the city of Jabes Galaad, the inhabitants of which place provided for his burial, and fasted seven days in sign of mourning for their sovereign. Joram, king of Juda, was punished for his misdeeds by exclusion from the sepulchre of his fathers, “and the people did not make a funeral for him according to the manner of burning [spices], as they had done for his ancestors.”(128) Ozias, being a leper, a disease which came upon him in punishment for having usurped sacerdotal functions, was buried “in the field” only “of the royal sepulchre.” Thus we see the immense importance attached to the place of burial under the old Jewish dispensation, and how it was an eternal disgrace to be expelled in death from the neighborhood of one’s family and their hereditary place of entombment. This feeling has continued very strong in most civilized and in all savage races; the graves of their forefathers are even more symbolical of home and fatherland to the wandering desert tribes of different nations, than what we should call their hearths and firesides. In later times, how often have we not seen gorgeous and imposing buildings, especially cathedrals and abbeys, built over the shrine of a dead king or bishop, canonized by that popular veneration whose last expression was the public honor decreed them by the Roman Pontiff? In places where these monuments are not dedicated to the sainted dead whose shrines they guard, we often find them burdened with the condition of Masses being perpetually offered within their walls for the soul of the dead founder; others are memorial churches to friends or relations of the founder. Public charities, doles of bread and money, annual distributions of clothing, hospitals, schools, or municipal institutions, etc., spring chiefly from the desire of the survivors to have their loved ones remembered to all future ages, while sometimes a generous testator himself will take this simple and practical means of recommending himself to the prayers of unborn generations. Family names are perpetuated in remembrance of the departed; family records are valuable only in proportion as they embody a proof of longer or shorter descent from the distinguished dead. There is no test of success or popularity so sure as that of death, and no one can tell which of our living friends will be known to and loved by future nations, and which other will be passed by in obscurity and silence, until long after our exit and their own from this present life‐ scene. Real life is centred in the dead, it revolves around them, it depends on them. They are the root of which we are the leaves and flowers. The life of fame is theirs, while only the life of struggle is ours; they are victors calmly bearing their palms, umpires gently encouraging their successors, but we are only striving competitors, who know not and never will know our fate till we have gone with them beyond the veil.

Germany is, above all, the home of these beautiful traditions of an unbroken communion between the souls who have left earth and those who remain behind. There are the churchyards most loved, and the anniversaries of deaths most remembered, even among Protestants. It is a custom in Germany to wear black and to keep the day holy every recurring anniversary, were it twenty, forty, fifty years after the death of a relative or beloved friend. The cemeteries are always blooming with every flower of the season, the crosses or headstones always hung with wreaths of immortelles. In Catholic German countries, such as Bavaria, the festival of All Souls’ is one of the most interesting, because the most individual of the ecclesiastical year. We happened to be in Munich on one of these occasions, and had been there for a week previous, visiting the galleries and inspecting the art‐manufactures for which that city is world‐famous. But rich as it is in such treasures, the hand of its old King Louis—the grandfather of the present sovereign, and whom in his retirement we have met at Nice some few years before his death—has effaced much of its mediæval stamp, and attempted to varnish it over with a Renaissance coating very uncongenial to the northern character of its people and the northern mistiness of its atmosphere. Here we have again the wretched imitation in plaster of the marble Parthenon and Acropolis; the cold stuccoed pillars looming like huge bleached skeletons through a November fog, and yet supposed to represent the sun‐tinted columns of exquisite workmanship that rear themselves against the purple sky of Greece; the vast desert‐looking streets which, bordered by “Haussmann” palaces, seem intended for future rather than present habitation, and each of which, if cut into a dozen equal parts, would furnish any capital with twelve good‐sized public squares; above all, a stuccoed church, dazzlingly, painfully white, the Theatiner‐Kirche, a sort of S. Paul’s (London) without the smoky coat thrown over it by the chimneys of the busy city. Then, turning with relief to the little that is left of the old town, we find a few quaint streets leading to the cathedral, a plain but grand building, very fairly “restored” and adorned with the distinctive Munich statues of angels and saints, which are now sold all over the world, as the worthy substitutes of plaster‐of‐Paris images of the Bernini type of sculpture. A very interesting old triptych stands over the altar, with its strange medley of figures forming a striking and novel reredos. A procession was slowing winding its way down the aisles as we entered the cathedral one afternoon, and though the congregation was not numerous it was very devout. A few comfortable‐looking old houses and quiet streets surround the cathedral, and form quite an oasis in the midst of the modernized city. Indeed, the monotonous stretch of apparently uninhabited mansions was really wearying to look at, and we began to think that King Louis had built his town as if he expected its population to increase at a Chicagoan rate! It is true the season of fêtes had not come, and, according to the recognized phrase, “all the world” had left Munich for the country villas and hunting‐boxes in its neighborhood, but on the day of All Saints, the vigil of All Souls, how magically the scene changed! After Mass in the Royal Chapel, which, by the way, is beautifully decorated with frescoes of mediæval saints on a gilt background, we started for the great “Gottes‐Acker” (churchyard.) We had been told that this was worth seeing, and so it proved. The desert seemed to have blossomed like the rose. The road leading to the cemetery was crowded with carriages, carts, horsemen, and foot passengers. Every one, especially those on foot, carried wreaths of immortelles and small lanterns. The carriages were mostly laden with wreaths. Every one looked cheerful, but great quiet prevailed throughout the crowd. It seemed to us that until the dead called for a visit, the living in Munich must have been well hidden, so great were now the numbers that incumbered the hitherto lonely road. All were going in the same direction, and once there the scene was almost festive. Military bands (the best, we believe, next to the Austrian) were stationed near the cemetery gates. The “Gottes‐Acker” itself is an immense square, the length being about twice the breadth of the inclosure. Round the four sides runs a covered cloister, under which are all the graves, monuments, and vaults of the more wealthy part of the Munich population. Each of these was a perfect forest of evergreens and hot‐house plants, artistically heaped up around a vessel of holy water, from which any pious passer‐by was free to sprinkle the grave while repeating a prayer for its occupant. The large square in the centre was crossed and recrossed by narrow paths between the serried files of graves. Nearly all were distinguished by a cross, of stone, marble, wood, or metal. To these the wreaths and lamps were hung, and here and there a kneeling figure might be seen. Within the covered cloister a dense crowd promenaded slowly, while the bands played unceasingly, not always, however, appropriately. It was a striking scene, the like of which we do not remember to have ever witnessed elsewhere. At Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, the cemetery is similar to this in construction and arrangement, though it is, of course, smaller in size. Night fell gradually as we were admiring this peculiar expression of national idiosyncrasy, but the crowd did not seem to grow less dense. It was a remembrance worth carrying away from that old Munich whose spirit, though outwardly imprisoned in a pseudo‐classic shape, lives yet in the simple Christian instincts of its laboring classes. At this time, when it threatens to become another Wittenberg, have we not also seen the unconscious and magnificent protest of its inveterately Catholic feelings in the unique Passion Play, that worthily kept relic of the heroic ages of faith and chivalry? Kings and philosophers cannot change the world as long as peasants like those of Ammergau, and artisans such as work in the Munich manufactories—that should not be degraded to comparison with the materialistic establishments of Manchester or Sheffield—are yet to be found bearing through the present times the banner of their forefathers’ undying traditions. There is more simple faith among the German people, including also the Slavic and Hungarian races, than among some other modern Christian nations, and no doubt there must be a hidden law of gracious compensation in this fact, since the same country has been the cradle and the teacher of almost every modern heresy and philosophical (sic) aberration. No doubt the faith of the masses is intimately connected with their wonderful love of home and fatherland, their domestic instincts, their love of quiet family gatherings. All this easily leads to great love and tenderness for the departed, and it reads almost more like a German than a French saying, that “the dead are not the forgotten, but only the absent.”(129) Love for the dead and a reverent, prayerful remembrance of them are as much bulwarks to the morality of the living, as they are spiritual boons to the departed themselves. We would not speak ill of an absent friend, or break our word with one who had gone on a long journey; even a short earthly distance seems to make a pledge more sacred. How much more when the distance is the immeasurable breadth of the valley of the shadow of death! We all of us remember promises once made to those who have fallen asleep in Christ: those promises will be guardian angels to us, if we keep them; they will be so many drops of refreshing dew to those who are perhaps suffering at this moment for the unfulfilled promises once made by them in life. Shall we whose faith includes the communion of saints as a vital dogma, and whose humble hope it must ever be to become one of the church suffering after having done our weak share in the cause of the church militant—shall we be no better for this belief than are those who have it not? Let the dead be guides to us, while we are helps to them; let us each remember that besides the angel we have at our side, there is another spirit who rejoices or grieves for and with us—a company of spirits perhaps, but seldom less than one.

Mother or father, sister, brother, husband, wife, or child, that spirit from its prison looks sadly and lovingly earthward, marking our every step from its own patient haven of suffering sinlessness. No longer racked by the personal fear of falling away, no longer haunted by the possibility of temptation, it concentrates its loving anxiety on the soul whom it will perchance precede to heaven, but on whom it is yet dependent; let us not grieve it, let us not willingly or knowingly wound it, but rather let us take heed that we fit ourselves to go and bear it company in the new and glorious God’s‐Acre to which we hope to be called when that “which was sown in mortality shall be raised in immortality, and that which was sown in dishonor and weakness shall be raised in glory and in power.”

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Personal Recollections Of The Late President Juarez Of Mexico

I. The President In The Reception‐Room.

We saw President Juarez for the first time in the fall of 1865. He was then temporarily established with his government in the town of El Paso, on the northern frontier of Chihuahua, and within almost a stone’s throw of American soil. Fort Bliss, Texas, then recently reoccupied by the Union troops, was not more than ten minutes’ distance from the Plaza of El Paso.

The prospects of the Mexican Republic were not then very bright; the treasury was almost exhausted, the government was barely on Mexican soil, and on the American side of the Rio Grande it was generally looked upon as a question of time when President Juarez would have to seek safety on our own side of the boundary. It is needless to say that he would have been received by the Americans of that region with right royal hospitality.

American sympathy and material aid were looked for, and Americans were very popular with all the followers of the Mexican president.

Shortly after the arrival of President Juarez and his cabinet in El Paso, we joined a party of American gentlemen who paid him a visit. The party comprised, we think, nearly all the Americans of any standing about El Paso. There were the American consul, the collector of customs, three or four army officers from Fort Bliss, some local civil officials, and one or two leading business men.

President Juarez and his cabinet occupied a house on the Plaza—a large building constructed in the usual Mexican fashion. On announcing ourselves as a party of American citizens desirous of paying their respects to the chief of a sister republic, we were immediately ushered into a room where we found President Juarez with most of the members of his cabinet—notably his successor Señor Lerdo de Tejada, then Secretary of State, and Señor Yglésias, Secretary of the Treasury—now also named for the presidency—rather a sinecure office at the time.

We were presented in turn to the president by Señor Yglésias, the only person present attached to the president who spoke English. President Juarez spoke neither English nor French. He shook hands cordially with each of us, and expressed through Señor Yglésias the very great pleasure it gave him to receive our visit. We were sufficiently familiar with the Pueblo type to recognize Juarez immediately on entering.

President Juarez was low in stature, rather stout, but dignified, and at the same time easy in his manners. The Pueblo Indian was marked in every lineament of his face—the aquiline nose, the small bright black eyes, the straight cut mouth showing no trace of redness in the lips, the coal‐black hair, the swarthy complexion. Yet he was, as it were, an Indian idealized; his forehead was high, capacious, and the light of intellectual cultivation illuminated his face. He was dressed in plain black.

The secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, is evidently, judged merely from externals, a man of great intellectual ability. His skin is as white as that of the fairest daughter of the Anglo‐Saxon. A forehead, so high as to seem almost a monstrosity, and of a marble whiteness, towered above a face that gleamed with the glance of the eagle.

Señor Yglésias was of a darker complexion than his colleague in the cabinet. He seemed to be in rather indifferent health. The expression of his face was remarkably gentle and pleasing. We have already said that he acted as interpreter. He spoke English with a very marked accent, but with great care and correctness. We happened to be seated next him on a sofa, President Juarez being on his right. He told us that he learned to speak English in the city of Chihuahua, and that he had never been a day in an English‐speaking country.

Notwithstanding that President Juarez did not speak English, and the necessity of an interpreter naturally causes some embarrassment, yet his manners were so pleasant and affable that he placed us at our ease at once. He spoke about our war, and asked with much interest about our great military leaders, Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. He seemed to feel some sympathy with Gen. McClellan. A very pleasant half‐hour was spent in conversation on these and kindred subjects. It was at length interrupted by the entrance of a péon bearing a tray with quite a generous number of bottles of champagne on it.

We were invited to partake of the Green Seal. We stood around the table, President Juarez standing at the head. Toasts were drunk to the lasting friendship of the two North American republics, to the independence of Mexico, etc. The péon, who was not a very bright specimen of his tribe, exerted himself to his utmost to open the bottles sufficiently fast. In his tremulous hurry he got within point‐blank range of the president, and a peculiarly excited bottle going off prematurely, discharged about half its contents into the president’s shirt‐bosom. Juarez looked at the poor péon—whose swarthy face grew sickly pale, and who seemed about to sink to the ground with terror and confusion—neither in sorrow nor in anger. He took no notice whatever of the incident, but went on talking cheerfully as before. Such an accident happening to most men would have been laughable in the extreme. It did not seem to us to place Juarez in a ludicrous position at all, his self‐command was so perfect, his dignity so thoroughly preserved.

After all the patriotic toasts proper to the occasion had been drunk, we took our leave. The president again shook hands with us, again expressed, through Señor Yglésias, his gratification at meeting American citizens and officers, and hoped that he should receive further visits from us.

We departed very greatly prepossessed in favor of the Mexican president. We agreed in thinking that there was a simplicity and honesty of purpose about him which made him the best man for the difficult position of chief magistrate of the struggling republic in her great hour of trial.

II. The President In The Ball‐Room.

Some time after the visit just described, President Juarez gave a ball in honor of the anniversary of Mexican independence. We had the honor, in common with some other Americans, of receiving an invitation to the ball, which, of course, we accepted.

There were four American ladies in our party—two the wives of infantry officers stationed at Fort Bliss, the post surgeon’s wife, and the wife of one of the leading citizens of Franklin. We were all invited to pass the night—or such portion of it as would remain after the close of the ball—at the mansion of a lady, a native of El Paso, of American descent.

We were bestowed in three or four vehicles, and forded the Rio Grande successfully a little before dark. We found El Paso in festal array. The cathedral was covered with shining lamps from foundation to steeple. The Plaza was brilliantly illuminated, and crowds of both sexes were already assembling for the grand open‐air baile of the profanum vulgus. Class lines of demarcation are very sharply drawn in El Paso, and the gente fina alone were admissible to the president’s ball.

We dined at the Señora L——’s, where we had the pleasure of meeting several Mexican officers of high rank. Among them were General Ruiz, the Postmaster‐General (another sinecurist just then), and other staff officers, whose names we have forgotten. A little son of one of the officers at Fort Bliss—a child of five or six, who spoke Spanish very well, having passed nearly all his little life in New Mexico, only remaining sufficiently long in New York to set all doubts at rest as to his being born in the Empire State—became a very great favorite with the Mexican officers.

Between ten and eleven P.M. our vehicles were again in requisition, and away we went to the ball. It was given in the spacious house of a wealthy citizen, the front of which was brilliantly illuminated. A guard of Mexican soldiers was posted in front of the house, and lined the long hall leading to the ball‐room. Their pieces were at order, and they saluted the chief officers by striking the butt of their muskets against the ground. They were dressed in gray jackets, like the undress of the New York National Guard, white cross belts, white trousers, and a leather cap, somewhat Hussar shape.

We had the honor of giving an arm to one of the four American ladies on entering. Arrived at the door of the ball‐room, four white‐vested and kid‐ gloved Mexican gentlemen offered an arm each to the four American ladies, bowing at and smiling most sweetly on us the while. At first, we were disposed to resist “the deep damnation of this taking off.” The ladies hesitated and drew back. The situation would have become remarkably comic; but Don Juan Z——, well‐known to all Americans who visit El Paso, seeing the critical state of affairs, came to us and whispered that it was the costumbre del pais—the custom of the country. We submitted, but, we fear, not with a good grace. By the way, we only saw our American ladies at a distance for the rest of the evening. The Mexican gentlemen took entire charge of them. Don Juan informed us that we were expected to take our revenge among the señoras and señoritas.

The ball‐room was very tastefully arranged. The placeta, or open square in the centre of all Mexican houses, on which all the rooms in the building open, was roofed and floored for the ball‐room. The window‐ curtains were hung outside the window of the house; mirrors, paintings, etc., were hung on the outer walls, making the illusion that you were inside the house instead of outside of it, complete. American and Mexican flags were festooned around the walls. The music, softly and sweetly played, was placed in a side room, entirely out of sight. No braying cornet flayed your ears, and no howling fiddler, calling out the figures from a position dominating everything and everybody, gave you an attaque de nerfs. The fiddlers would be heard, not seen. The waltz, the national dance of Mexico, was, of course, the terpsichorean pièce de résistance; but a fair number of quadrilles were sprinkled through the programme, in compliment to the Americans.

We have seen many balls in the Empire City—some given under “most fashionable auspices”—but we must in justice declare that we have seen none which surpassed the Mexican President’s ball. There may have been more glare, more glitter, more diamonds, if you will, but there certainly was not more good taste, more elegance and refinement, more genuine good‐ breeding and gentlemanly and ladylike good‐humor. There was no rushing, steam‐engine fashion, the length of the ball‐room; knocking couples to the right and left, and tearing dresses, without even an apology. The ladies were richly but not gaudily dressed, and made no barbaric display of golden ornaments, as their New Mexican sisters are wont to do on bailé occasions. The gentlemen—except the army officers—wore the traditional black dress‐coat and pantaloons, with white vest and gloves, clothes and gloves fitting admirably, for the gente fina of El Paso got both from Paris. The army officers were, of course, in full uniform, the American uniform looking rather sombre compared with the red‐leg top trousers, with broad gold or silver stripes, and the magnificent gold‐embroidered sashes of the Mexican general and field officers. By the way, the lowest officer in rank of the Mexicans in the ball‐room was a colonel. The only captains and lieutenants admitted were the Americans. Juarez’ son—“the image of his father”—though somewhat shorter in stature, in the undress uniform of a second lieutenant of artillery was in the vestibule with the guard.

The president, with his cabinet and staff, was already in the ball‐room when we arrived. After being dispossessed of our fair companions, we were ushered to the portion of the room in which the president sat. We paid our respects in turn, and were kindly and cordially welcomed. Juarez was dressed in plain black, except his gloves, which, of course, were white.

The male portion of the American party then broke ranks, and spread themselves through the ball‐room, enjoying themselves each after his fashion; some in the fascinating “see‐saw” of the Spanish dance, others in the apartments off the ball‐room where exhilaration of a different kind was provided.

We passed a very agreeable hour with Signor Prieto, a Mexican poet and orator of distinction. Signor Prieto was then known as the “Henry Clay” of Mexico. He spoke French very well. He told us with just pride that he considered the highest recognition his efforts had received was the translation of one of his poetical pieces by our American patriarch‐poet, William Cullen Bryant.

Just before supper‐time, an official came with President Juarez’ compliments, to say that President Juarez and the members of his cabinet would take the American ladies in to supper, and requesting the American gentlemen to take in Mexican ladies. We immediately sought our friend Don Juan T——, and begged him to find us some Mexican lady who could talk either English or French. He found compliance with our request impossible, but gave into our charge the Señora S——, a magnificent beauty of the Spanish type, with coal‐black hair and large lustrous black Juno‐like eyes—fendus en amande. The other gentlemen of the American party were soon provided with supper partners, and we began our march for the supper‐ table, President Juarez taking in Mrs. Capt. O——; the secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, Mrs. Capt. B——; the secretary of the treasury, Mrs. Dr. S——; and the secretary of war, Mrs. W——, of Texas. The first table was for the president and cabinet, with the American party. The supper was rather a solemn affair. It consisted of nine courses, though the courses seemed as like each other as railway stations on the plains. All seemed to be desiccated, and reminded us somewhat of what we had read about Chinese feasts. When a course was served to every guest, the President looked down the table to his right and bowed; he then looked to his left and bowed. Then, and not before, knives and forks were observed, and the guests attacked the viands. This repeated nine times was not calculated to impart gaiety to the repast. It was slow, but ended at last, and we retired in the same order in which we entered, making way for the ladies and gentlemen of the second table.

After the supper, President Juarez sat for over an hour with the American ladies, chatting pleasantly with them in the simplest Spanish phrases he could devise. Seeing him chatting away and laughing gaily, no one could have imagined that he had the cares of a tottering government with an empty treasury upon his shoulders.

Capt. O—— asked us to go out with him and have a look at the great bronco, the public fandango, on the Plaza. As we passed out through the hall, the Mexican guard—now lying on their arms—jumped up and brought their muskets to the ground with a crash to salute our companion, much to his discomposure, as he wished to go out without attracting attention.

The great fandango was a sight worth seeing. A leviathan Spanish dance wound its way around and through the Plaza, filling to overflowing the market‐place, the sidewalks, and the arcades. Swarthy Mexicans with immense sombreros, with cigarettes of corn‐husks in their mouths, abandoned themselves to the swaying movements of the slow waltz, their dark‐eyed partners—often partners in the cigarette as well as the dance—now moving with a graceful languor, now dashing out with wild and unrepressed vigor to the clattering of a thousand castanets.

Unusual gambling facilities were to be found everywhere, of course. Cake merchants, fried hot cakes in the open air, lemonade, vino del pais, fresh queso, fruits, puros, were to be had for the paying.

Having seen sufficient of the great unwashed fandango, we returned to the ball‐room. Our companion was again the object of another demonstration of respect on the part of the guard. “I wish,” said he, “those fellows would go to sleep; this begins to be unpleasant.”

A waltz was in full gyration when we returned to the ball‐room. We took chairs and sat near the door chatting. Suddenly we became aware that some one stood behind us, placing a hand on either chair. Looking round, we saw that it was President Juarez. We immediately arose, but he insisted on our being seated, and resumed his former attitude. He talked with us for half an hour, in Spanish well adapted to our limited knowledge of the language, and which we had no difficulty in understanding.

During the evening, from time to time, we had received invitations from the president to drink wine with him—invitations which, of course, we did not refuse. Many patriotic toasts and sentiments were offered on both sides. It must have been in one of those festive moments that an enthusiastic gentleman of our party slapped the president on the back, called him “Ben” (Juarez’ Christian name was Benito), said he was “a brick,” and bade him “never say die” till he was dead! We were not a witness to this scene. It was described to us by members of our party.

Between two and three P.M. the president’s party left the ball‐room. Shortly after, the American clans were gathered, we got our fair ones back again, and set out for the hospitable dwelling of the Señora L——.

There was plenty of bustle and activity there. It seemed to us that half the people at the ball must have been guests of this house. All the rooms opening on the large placeta were turned into lodging‐rooms. There was hurrying to and fro with lights in hand, putting every one in his place. Some people put themselves in other people’s places. Notably our enthusiastic friend, who had taken up his quarters in a room intended for F—— and his new Spanish bride. He was found by the happy pair, just as happy as they were, sleeping the sleep of the just. In the meantime, the partner of his joys and sorrows sat solitary and alone in the room intended for her and her spouse, on the other side of the placeta, wondering at his absence and anxiously awaiting his return. This complication, however, was settled by transferring the lady to the room in which lay her sleeping lord, and bestowing the F——s in the room she had occupied.

After a good breakfast, we set out on our return to the Land of the Free, forded the Rio Grande at about noon, under a September sun—no contemptible luminary about latitude 32°, let us assure the reader. We sought our casas, darkened up our respective rooms, and shut the venetian blinds to keep out the flies, and having turned night into day, proceeded to turn day into night.

New Publications.

ELEMENTS OF LOGIC. Designed as a Manual of Instruction. By Henry Coppée, LL.D., President of the Lehigh University. Revised edition. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co. 1872.

President Coppée has carefully excluded from this edition of his Logic everything which could give offence to a Catholic. The main part of the work, treating of formal logic, is of course substantially the same with other treatises of this kind, and is written in a clear, simple style, well adapted to an elementary text‐book. But here our approbation must cease. The history of logic is altogether defective. The author advocates the doctrine derived by Hamilton from Kant, that our rational knowledge is merely “conditioned,” which is pure scepticism, and confounds Christian philosophy with theology, which is effectually to subvert both sciences. Teachers may find some useful assistance from this book in explaining the laws of thought; but it is altogether unfit to be placed in the hands of Catholic pupils. We reiterate the desire we have so often expressed, that some competent person would translate one of our standard Latin text‐books of logic, for the use of pupils and teachers who cannot read them in the original language.

THE POCKET PRAYER‐BOOK. Compiled from approved sources. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is certainly the most complete little manual we have seen, and, although it contains 650 pages, is small enough for the pocket; and gives, among other things, the three indulgenced litanies, the entire Mass in Latin and English, Vespers, and the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays throughout the year. The type, moreover, is singularly large and good. Thus the book supplies a long‐felt want; and ought to become very popular amongst Catholic men, for whose especial benefit it was compiled. There is another edition without the Epistles and Gospels, which fits the vest pocket, and can therefore be made emphatically a daily companion.

ENGLAND AND ROME. By the Rev. W. Waterworth, S.J. London: Burns & Lambert. 1854. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A COMMENTARY BY WRITERS OF THE FIRST FIVE CENTURIES ON THE PLACE OF S. PETER IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, AND THAT OF S. PETER’S SUCCESSORS IN THE CHURCH. By the Very Rev. J. Waterworth, D.D., Provost of Nottingham. London: Richardson. 1871. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The reader will perceive, if he takes notice of the titles of these two books, that they are by two different authors, both bearing the name of Waterworth. They are brothers, and one of the two is a Jesuit, the other being a dignitary of the Catholic Church in England. The work whose title stands first in order at the head of this notice, is not a recent publication, having been issued as long ago as 1854. We think it, however, not unsuitable to recall attention to it as a work specially useful at the present time. About one‐third of the volume is taken up with a very solid and scholarly disquisition on the general topic of the Papal supremacy. Its principal and special topic is, however, the relation of the church in England to the Holy See from the year 179 to the epoch of the schism of Henry VIII. It is handled with great learning and ability, and the sophisms and perversions of those disingenuous or ill‐informed controversialists who pretend to establish the original independence of the British Church are scattered to the winds.

The work of Dr. Waterworth, the Provost of Nottingham, was published last year. This learned divine is the author of the celebrated treatise entitled The Faith of Catholics, and is well known as a most profound and accurate patristic scholar. The present volume was prepared by him for the press before the publication of the Decrees of the Vatican Council; but its issue having been delayed by an accident, the author took the opportunity of making a re‐examination of its contents, with special reference to the objections raised by Dr. Döllinger, and of adding some new prefatory remarks. The result of his revision did not suggest to him the necessity of any alteration whatever, or show anything in the cavils of the petulant old gentleman, who has so completely stultified himself by retracting the deliberate convictions of his better days, worthy of any special refutation.

As for Dr. Waterworth’s work itself, it is quite unique in English Catholic literature, and different from the other works on the Papal supremacy, able and learned as these are, which we have hitherto possessed. It is literally an exhaustive collection of all the sayings of fathers and councils on the two topics discussed, during the first five centuries of the Christian era, by one who has mastered the whole of this vast body of literature. One hundred and seven fathers and councils are quoted, and copious tables at the end of the volume place the whole array of authorities in a convenient order for reference under the eye of the reader. It is needless for us to expatiate on the value of such a work, or to say anything more to recommend it to the attention of all who wish to study this great subject of the Papal supremacy.

THE TROUBLES OF OUR CATHOLIC FOREFATHERS, RELATED BY THEMSELVES. First Series. Edited by John Morris, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

One of the outward and by no means the least significant signs of the revival of religion in England is the appearance in rapid succession of a most useful class of books, having for their main object the vindication of the character and constancy of the Catholics of that country during and subsequent to the so‐called Reformation. We have had occasion elsewhere to refer to Father Morris’ work on the Condition of Catholics under James I. The book before us may be considered a continuation of that exceedingly interesting contribution to history, and, as it is the first of a series, we may expect at an early day others equally valuable from the same painstaking and indefatigable student.

Until lately, with very few exceptions, historical works relating to Great Britain have been the composition of prejudiced, anti‐Catholic writers, each in his turn guilty of the same omissions while servilely copying the misrepresentations of his predecessors; so that the public mind has at length become impressed with the conviction that, when the tocsin of rebellion against God’s law was sounded by Henry Tudor, the people of the whole of his dominions arose in hostile opposition to the authority of the church. None but a critical few, familiar with foreign contemporary authorities, were aware that, while the nobles who hungered for the spoils of convents and monasteries, and the suppliant courtiers, lay and ecclesiastical, whose fortunes depended upon the smiles of the sovereign, basely bowed down before the brutal passions of Henry and Elizabeth, the mass of the people, particularly the educated and moral middle class, held firmly to the faith, braving persecution, poverty, imprisonment, and even death, in defence of Catholicity. England, in fact, can count her thousands of uncanonized martyrs, priests and laity, men and women, who, in common with their co‐religionists of the Continent, fell victims to the lust, cupidity, and inhumanity of the “Reformers.” Some of their most glorious achievements will probably never be recorded in this world, but there is every hope that, through the exertions of such conscientious searchers as this learned Jesuit, a flood of light will be thrown ere long on the darkest, but not least edifying, days of the Christian Church in England. Heretofore this noble work has been delayed for various reasons. Contemporary documents were either in the hands of the Government, or were scattered among many convents and private libraries, and from long neglect had become almost forgotten; and it required so much industry as well as knowledge to search for and utilize them, that until lately no one was found equal to the task. Besides, the English Catholics of the last generation were so few and so lukewarm that it was difficult to find a publisher willing to risk his money and his reputation in bringing out books that were considered neither profitable nor politic. A change has come over the spirit of their dream, as the appearance of late of so many Catholic works, well printed and handsomely bound, from some of the first publishing houses in Europe, amply testifies; and the ancient faith is fast regaining its power in what, for three centuries, has been considered the stronghold of dissent. While of primary interest to English readers, works of this character will also have peculiar attractions for Americans, many of whom by blood and affinity are as much heirs to the virtues and courage of the British Catholics of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries as those born on that soil. No historical library in our language would be complete without such works as those of F. Morris, containing as they do original, authentic documents which hitherto have never appeared in print, in whole or in part. Such documents, carefully annotated, and modernized only as regards their obsolete orthography, are the true materials of history, worth an infinity of commentaries and second and third hand statements filtrated through the minds of ignorant or partial writers.

The present volume contains the memoirs of Mother Margaret Clement; a sketch of the history of the Monasteries of SS. Ursula and Monica at Louvain; an account of the dissolution of the Carthusian Monastery of the Charter House, London, and the execution of several of its monks, in the reign of Henry VIII.; a detailed narrative of the imprisonment of Francis Tregian for sixteen years; some additional particulars relating to the missions of Fathers Tesimond and Blount; the trial of the Rev. Cuthbert Clapton, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, as related by himself, and the correspondence of that official with his government from A.D. 1638 to 1643; with several interesting details of the sufferings and persecution of some noble Catholic families. These documents were procured in various places—in the Public Record Office; S. Mary’s College, Ascott; Stonyhurst; the Archives de l’Etat, Brussels; S. Augustine’s Priory, Abbotsleigh; Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, and in numerous private MS. collections; each original being preceded by a short but comprehensive introduction from the pen of the learned editor.

PETERS’ CATHOLIC CLASS BOOK: A Collection of copyright Songs, Duets, Trios, and Choruses, etc., etc. Compiled and arranged by William Dressler. New York: J. L. Peters.

The first half of this work is a reproduction of ballads of sentiment of no special merit, issued, as the foot‐notes ingeniously advertise to the purchaser, “in sheet‐music form, with lithograph title‐page,” by the publisher. The latter half is chiefly a reprint of so‐called religious songs which persistently return to us under one or another guise in publications of this class, like poor relations, and with as hearty a welcome as such visitors proverbially receive.

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has fixed upon the 5th of November as the publication day of The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1873: over 35,000 copies have already been ordered by the different booksellers. The Society has just published an edition of The Little Manual of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Spiritual Bouquet, formerly published by John P. Walsh, of Cincinnati; and will soon issue in book‐ form Fleurange, by Mrs. Craven; Col. Meline’s translation of Hubner’s Life of Sixtus V.; Myrrha Lake, or Into the Light of Catholicity. All‐ Hallow Eve and Unconvicted will appear early in November. Canon Oakeley’s work on Catholic Worship is in press, and will be published uniform with his excellent treatise on The Mass.

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