The Blind Student
When Ernest D’Arcy left the University of ——, all the glorious possibilities of life seemed to unfold themselves invitingly before him. He was young, he was clever, he was ambitious. Unlike too many American students, he had not wasted the golden hours of college life in idleness, dissipation, or even social enjoyment. He had been a hard, indeed, an enthusiastic, student; but on commencement day, when his brow was bound with victorious wreaths, he felt rewarded for having scorned the seductive pleasures of youth, and rejoiced that he had lived laborious days and nights.
But D’Arcy did not consider his education finished because he had passed through the university brilliantly. He well knew that the college was only the vestibule to the temple of learning. Through this vestibule he had passed; and now he wished to enter the noble temple itself. But on its very threshold he found himself suddenly stopped. A dangerous disease attacked his eyes. The most eminent oculists were consulted at once; absolute rest alone could save him from total blindness. He was forbidden to read or write a line. This was indeed a terrible blow to the ambitious young student. His golden hopes left him; his sweet dream of fame faded away; his bright career was blighted in the very bud. Unsustained by the holy influence of religion, a deep and dangerous despondency seized him; he abandoned himself to despair, and could not follow the advice of Burke, “Despair, but work even in despair,” for the affliction that caused his despair prevented him from working. So depressed was he at times that he contemplated suicide as a happy relief.
The D’Arcy family were of Norman origin. The grandfather of Ernest escaped from France in the early days of the Revolution, bringing with him to the United States the fortune that had descended to him through a long line of ancestors. Like so many French gentlemen of the last century, M. D’Arcy had imbibed the fashionable scepticism of the time of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. After coming to America, he married a Catholic lady, and his scepticism gradually settled into a form of mild indifferentism. Ernest’s father was a devoted Catholic, but he died while his children were in their infancy. His wife was a Protestant, a woman of fashion, whose highest ambition was to be a leader of society. Her children, Ernest and his sister Mary, were brought up from their infancy on the Chesterfieldian model: to shine in society. To this end everything else was sacrificed. From the nursery they went to the dancing‐school, and had masters to teach them all those superficial accomplishments which make up a modern fashionable education. Ernest’s clever and original mind saved him from the evil effects of such an education. But, unfortunately, he did not escape a worse danger. With no one to direct his studies, at the susceptible age of seventeen he began to read the infidel French literature of the XVIIIth century, which formed a large part of his grandfather’s library. Fascinated by the diabolical wit of Voltaire, Ernest’s young and undisciplined mind mistook sophistry for argument, ridicule for reason, wit for wisdom. The fashionable religion of his mother had never possessed any charm or interest for him, and now, rejecting all belief, he became a free‐thinker.
Ernest entered the University of —— in his eighteenth year, eager for distinction and determined to succeed. Succeed he did; and when he graduated, four years later, he was the first student of the university and unanimously chosen the commencement orator. No student ever left the University of ——, which has been the Alma Mater of so many distinguished men, with a brighter future before him than Ernest D’Arcy. But it was a future for this world, and for this world alone. Fame was the god of his idolatry. His residence at the University of ——, which boasts the absence of all religious teaching, had strengthened his scepticism. But the scepticism of Ernest D’Arcy was a scepticism of the head, not of the heart. His natural love for the true, the beautiful, and the good had kept him pure, even at the most dangerous period of youth, when the blood is warm, the passions strong, and the will weak. While the heart is good and pure, however the head may err, there is always hope. The unbelief of Ernest D’Arcy was not the cold, heartless, satisfied unbelief of the hardened scoffer rejoicing in his infidelity. It was the natural result upon an eager and active intellect of an education without religion, a home without God.
The same year that Ernest left the university his sister “finished” at the Academy of the Visitation of ——. Mary D’Arcy was not a brilliant girl, but very sweet, gentle, and interesting. Three years at the convent school had removed all traces of her unfortunate home education. Mary’s most intimate friend at the convent was Edith Northcote, a young Catholic girl from the South. When they parted on distribution day, it was with the understanding that Edith should pass the next winter with Mary, and the two young ladies enter society together.
One morning, towards the end of October, Ernest was sitting in the library, surrounded by the most enchanting literature of the world, and not allowed to read a single line. D’Arcy was no sentimental dreamer or aimless student.
“To sleep away his hours In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy.”
He wished to be a man among men. His ambition was first to teach himself, and then to teach the world. He wished to elevate the tone of society; to raise it from its fallen state. His was no splendid dream of revolutionizing the social world; he had no fond hope of creating an Utopia out of this busy, bustling America of the XIXth century. But he knew that life was too precious to be dedicated solely to the one selfish, absorbing pursuit of wealth; that the entire surrender of mind and heart and life itself to the accumulation of money was corrupting our people and exercising a baleful influence over the whole nation. Our merchants rival the merchant princes of Italy in wealth and enterprise; why should they not rival them also in their princely tastes? The palaces, the gardens, the galleries, the libraries, of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, “all tell the story of great thoughts and noble tastes which gold and trade may nurture when nobleness and greatness deal with them.” We should take time to cultivate the beautiful as well as the useful; the poetical as well as the practical. The artist should be patronized as well as the artisan. Time should be given to the refinement, the grace, the sweetness of life. We have followed too long and too earnestly the false philosophy taught in “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” that money‐getting is a sort of secular religion, and “there will be sleeping enough in the grave.” Our American life is one long “fitful fever.” We give no time to rest. Repose, a cultivated leisure, is not idleness. An elegant essay on this subject—leisure(187)—by a distinguished Baltimore lawyer, should be read and pondered by our eager and restless people, who are devoured by their business as Actæon was by his own dogs. “I mean,” says this writer, “the rest which is won and deserved by labor, and which sweetens and invigorates it and furnishes its reward. Whence comes this doctrine, that life, to be anything, must be for ever in motion? There is no process of physical development which does not need and depend upon repose. To all the green and beautiful things that deck the earth—the flowers that give it perfume, and the fruits and foliage that make it glad—there is needful the calm sunshine and the peaceful shade, the gentle rain and the yet gentler dew. Not a gem that flashes but has been crystallized in the immovable stillness of the great earth’s breast. I believe that to be false philosophy which denies to individuals their seasons of leisure and meditation; teaching them that existence was meant to be nothing but a struggle.” Our very amusements are unwholesome and dangerous: the midnight “German,” the lascivious drama, the race‐course, the steamboat excursion, the political meeting. The priceless time of youth should have some better employment than dancing and novel‐reading. Our young men should be taught that life is too valuable, time too precious, to be frittered away in idle pleasures, in frivolous amusement, in heartless dissipation. Our young women should be taught that there is something nobler in life than the passing triumphs of the ball‐room, gay flirtations, and dazzling toilets.
Thoughts like these occupied Ernest D’Arcy on that bright October morning—thoughts that stirred his heart and mind, and made him eager for the glorious work. With a soul longing to “be up and doing,” he was compelled to sit idle in the golden prime of his manhood. These were the moments of his greatest despondency, when all the brightness seemed gone from his life, and all the hope from his soul. Sitting there in the library that morning, D’Arcy recalled the beautiful lines of Miss Procter in “My Picture”:
“He had a student air, With a look half sad, half stately, Grave, sweet eyes and flowing hair.”
The library‐door was opened, and there came in one who was always welcome—Mary D’Arcy.
“Ernest, I have a letter from Edith Northcote,” Mary said. “She will be here to‐morrow.”
“I am glad to hear it. From all you have told me about Miss Northcote, I think I shall like her.”
“I am sure of it,” returned his sister. “If you don’t, my opinion of your taste is gone for ever.”
“She is nothing of the bread‐and‐butter miss, I hope? I have all Byron’s antipathy, you know, for that class.”
“Byron himself could have found no fault with Edith on that ground,” said Mary.
“Well, I am relieved of no little apprehension,” said Ernest. “I have a perfect horror of the common run of girls, who haven’t an idea above the last novel and the last fashion.”
The next day Edith arrived, and her appearance certainly realized all of Ernest’s expectations. She was nineteen—an age when the sweet graces of girlhood still linger and lend an additional charm to the blooming woman. Her features were not regularly beautiful, but her face possessed a charm and an interest which no faultlessly beautiful face ever had. If a true woman’s soul, full of the sweetest sympathy, ever brightened and beautified a human face, it was that of Edith Northcote. Then, her voice was so sweet and cordial and warm—and what is more attractive than a low, sweet voice in woman? Edith was scarcely the medium height, but exquisitely formed, and perfectly natural and graceful in all her movements, in charming contrast with the trained glances and artificial manners of our fashionable society belles. Like Alexandrine, in A Sister’s Story, there was an air of refinement about this lovely girl as rare as it was delightful; she had all the freshness and fragrance of the rose without the rose’s thorns. Mrs. D’Arcy, who was a female Turveydrop in the matter of deportment, said she had never seen in any society manners so elegant and at the same time so sweet and natural as the manners of Edith Northcote. Such praise from such a woman was in itself fame.
Edith soon became the life and joy of the house; she was an elegant lady in the parlor, an intelligent companion in the library, and the charming, sweet girl everywhere. The influence of her bright presence pervaded the whole household. Even stately Mrs. D’Arcy yielded to the general enthusiasm, and declared that Mary was fortunate in having such a friend. But of all the family, Ernest felt the influence of Edith’s society the most. The library, where he had passed so many hours in gloom and despondency, was now brightened by her daily and hourly presence. She read beautifully, and with a voice and manner that threw a charm around everything. Her true, womanly heart sympathized deeply with Ernest in his great affliction, and she at once determined to do all in her power to relieve it. So it soon became the custom for Ernest and Edith to retire to the library every morning after breakfast, where she read the morning paper to him while he smoked his cigar. Then two or three hours were devoted to serious study. The books, so long neglected, were again resumed. The literary work, which Ernest loved so well, was again taken up. Edith was his librarian, his reader, his amanuensis. He had the true student’s dislike of any person touching his books and papers; but Edith’s touch seemed to have magic in it, for she could do what few ladies can ever do—put papers in order without putting them out of place.
But not only as his literary assistant was Edith serviceable to Ernest; she was his sweet and gentle companion, his kind and sympathetic friend, ever ready in all things to make him forget his blindness and his consequent dependence. Inspiring and stimulating him to renewed exertion, she also directed his ambition to the noblest ends. She opened a new life to the brilliant young student—a life full of love and sweetness and humanity. Her bright and joyous influence banished from his soul the dark despair that had been enthroned there so long, and again there was raised in his heart
“A hope That he was born for something braver than To hang his head and wear a nameless name.”
Edith found time for everything; duty, as well as pleasure, had each its allotted place in her daily life. Before the rest of the family were awake she was up and off to early Mass. In the winter twilight, when other young ladies were returning from the fashionable promenade, Edith could often be seen with a little basket on her arm, carrying delicacies to the sick, or more substantial food to relieve the necessities of Christ’s suffering children. Ernest sometimes accompanied her on these errands of mercy, and it was a new revelation to him to see Edith, so gay, sparkling, and fascinating in society, visiting the humble homes of the poor, cheering and comforting the sick and destitute. Her very presence seemed like a sunbeam in their dreary dwellings. Edith did not think she was performing any heroic virtue by these things. She knew she was only following the injunction of Him who loved the poor so well that he became like one of them. She knew the Catholic poor were the blessed inheritance of the Catholic Church. Many Catholic young ladies, delicately nurtured and fastidiously refined, are daily doing what Edith did.
Ernest was benefited by attending Edith on those missions of love. His warm heart was touched and all the latent sweetness of his nature brought out by the distress which he witnessed, and of which he had never dreamed amidst the luxuries of his own elegant home. There was one case that particularly interested him; unfortunately, there are many such in this age of boasted religious liberty. It was that of a Mrs. White. She was a woman of education and refinement, and had been accustomed to all the comforts of life in her father’s house. Early in life she married a poor but worthy young man. He was a clerk, and labored for his wife and children with an industry that knew no flagging. By constantly bending over his desk he literally worked himself into consumption. After lingering a few months, during which all his little savings were spent, he died, leaving his family in utter destitution. During his sickness he had been visited by several Catholic ladies, who attended to his wants with so sweet a charity that his heart was touched, and he longed to know more of a religion which taught such blessed humanity. As the Author of all truth has declared that he who seeks shall find, so Mr. White found the truth which he sought, and died a most beautiful and edifying death. His wife soon afterwards became a Catholic, converted by the example of the good ladies who had so kindly ministered to her dying husband. In the extremity of her distress Mrs. White appealed to her father, who had refused to have any intercourse with her since her marriage. What do you think was the answer of this father to a daughter whose only offence was that she had left father and mother to cleave to her husband? We blush for the humanity that could send to a grief‐stricken and desolate daughter so brutal a message as this:
“Now your chosen husband is dead, I will receive you back, provided you give up, at once and for ever, the Catholic religion, which you have recently professed. Otherwise, you may die as you have lived—a pauper and an outcast.”
And so she lived and died a pauper and an outcast; but, so living and so dying, her lot was more enviable than that of her cruel and unnatural father. Her last moments were comforted by the promise of Ernest D’Arcy to provide for her two children. The elder, a bright little fellow of thirteen, he placed in a lawyer’s office; the other, a boy nine years old, was admitted into a Catholic orphan asylum.
Thus visiting the sick and relieving the poor, and frequently meeting Catholic priests and Catholic Sisters in pious attendance on death‐beds, the conversation of Ernest and Edith naturally took a religious turn. One evening, after returning from one of their charitable visits, they were sitting in the library before the great wood‐fire (for Ernest would not allow that abomination, miscalled a modern improvement, a furnace‐flue, in his sanctum), as they generally did before tea. Ernest was unusually thoughtful that evening, so much so that Edith observed it and asked him the cause.
“I am thinking about you and myself—about all your goodness to me,” he said; “about what I was before I knew you, and what I may be by your noble example. Edith, the daily beauty of your life makes mine ugly. My father was a Catholic, and I am—nothing. The cold and fashionable religion of my mother neither satisfied my mind nor interested my heart. I became a free‐ thinker, an infidel, but never a scoffer at religion. I did not believe, because I did not know what to believe.”
“We must read together Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity—that magnificent tribute to the truth and beauty of the Christian religion,” Edith replied. “You know the story of his conversion: in his extreme youth he yielded to the gay scepticism which at the time controlled French society, and he, a son of the Crusaders, became a disciple of Voltaire, and wrote in the interest of infidelity. The death of Chateaubriand’s mother, whose last moments had been saddened by his scepticism, and whose last words were a prayer for his conversion, recalled him to a sense of that religion in which he had been educated. ‘I became a Christian,’ Chateaubriand wrote. ‘My conviction came from the heart. I wept and I believed.’ He resolved to devote to religion the eloquent pen which had been used against her. The result was his immortal work the Genius of Christianity. The beautiful style, the vast information, the glowing descriptions of art, scenery, poetry, and music cannot fail to delight and interest you.”
The next day Edith commenced Chateaubriand’s great masterpiece. As, day after day, the reading continued, Ernest grew deeply interested. He saw clearly demonstrated the noble and inspiring fact that “the Christian religion, of all the religions that ever existed, is the most favorable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement: from agriculture to the abstract sciences; from the hospitals for the reception of the unfortunate to the temples reared by the Michael Angelos and embellished by the Raphaels.”
Other books were read, all breathing the same divine spirit, the same exalted Christian charity, the same sweet human sympathy. The warm, tender heart of Ernest D’Arcy was fascinated by the beautiful and noble sentiments expressed in the volumes which were now a part of his daily reading. He compared them with the false philosophy of a Voltaire and the senseless sentimentality of a Rousseau, which taught how to destroy, but not how to save; whose end was the destruction, not the amelioration, of society. These books certainly opened a newer and a sweeter world to the student. But it must not be supposed that the young D’Arcy saw immediately the truth of Catholicity in all its divine beauty. Few, like S. Paul, are miraculously changed from the enemy to the friend of God’s church. Few, like Chateaubriand, can say: “I wept and I believed.”
With the opening of spring Edith returned home, and Earnest was again left alone with his books. But how changed seemed everything! The brightness was gone from the library. The pleasure was gone from his studies. He sadly missed her who had been his constant companion for so many months. Fortunately, about this time his eyes improved sufficiently to allow him to read for a short time every day. He continued the reading to which Edith had introduced him. This was some consolation to him, now that he was separated from her. But, alas! it was a consolation not long allowed to him. If that stern old moralist, Dr. Johnson, acknowledged that he found it easier to practise abstinence than temperance in wine, it will not be surprising that so ardent a student as Ernest D’Arcy found it absolutely impossible to practise temperance in reading when he read at all. And now he had a greater incentive to work than ever before. He felt that he must make himself worthy of the sweet girl whom he loved. The delicately refined nature of this perfect gentleman would not allow him to make a formal declaration of love to Edith while she was a guest in his mother’s house, but that unerring, never‐failing instinct which belongs to woman enabled her to see plainly that he was deeply, fondly interested in her. Nor was Edith insensible to the many attractive qualities of Ernest D’Arcy; his cultured mind, his noble heart, his high ambition, his exalted sentiments of honor and morality, claimed her enthusiastic admiration, while the romantic character of their constant intercourse pleased her girlish fancy.
D’Arcy’s Catholic reading had enchanted his impressible mind. As an historical institution, the church delighted and astonished him. He saw it rise triumphantly on the ruins of the empire of the Cæsars; he saw it conquer and civilize the barbarians of Germany and the North; he saw it tame the fierce passions of the Franks and Goths; he saw it in the middle ages standing between the people and princely despots; he saw it always on the side of right and always against wrong, always raising its powerful voice in favor of the oppressed; he saw it in the XVIth century successfully sustain itself against the most formidable religious revolution the world had ever known; he saw it in the XIXth century serene in the midst of tumbling thrones and political convulsions, teaching one faith and one doctrine, while heresy was broken into a thousand indistinguishable fragmentary sects.
With his mind fresh from these new and interesting studies, Ernest D’Arcy began to write the story of his mental life, which he called From Darkness to Light. Like Milton, he became so engrossed in his work that his eyes grew rapidly worse; and, like him also, he was unwilling to discontinue his studies, until at length study was impossible. Edith Northcote heard of this new trial through Ernest’s sister Mary; for Ernest himself was too manly, too considerate, to annoy Edith with his troubles. She determined at once to make a Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes to obtain the cure of Ernest’s eyes. She procured some of the celebrated miraculous water, and sent it to Ernest, telling him that on a certain day she would commence the Novena, requesting him to apply the water to his eyes each day, and say the prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes contained in the little book recently published. The account of the apparition greatly interested Ernest, and, though not yet a Catholic, he did not hesitate to comply with both of Edith’s requests.
Thousands of unrecorded miracles have been wrought by the water of Lourdes, and the restoration of Ernest’s eyes was one of them.(188) As the darkness left his eyes, the divine light of faith entered his soul; and he who had been both mentally and physically blind, now saw with the eyes of the body and saw also with the eyes of the soul. He saw the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of the Catholic religion; seeing, he believed; believing, he professed; professing, he practised. Ernest D’Arcy became a Catholic—a devout, a zealous, a fervid Catholic.
Ernest did not inform Edith by letter of the happy effects of the water of Lourdes. He visited her in her Southern home. Simply saying a friend wished to see her, he awaited her entrance with no little impatience. At length she appeared. Ernest advanced to meet her. The few words he spoke explained everything: “Edith, I am a Catholic.”
The next few weeks were the sweetest Ernest had ever known—sweeter than he had ever dreamed of. He had found what he had so long sought in vain—the true religion; and in finding the religion which was to make him happy in heaven, he also found the being who was to make him happy on earth.
Turning From Darwin To Thomas Aquinas
UNLESS in thought with thee I often live, Angelic Doctor! life seems poor to me. What are these bounties, if they only be Such boon as farmers to their servants give? That I am fed, and that mine oxen thrive, That my lambs fatten, that mine hours are free— These ask my nightly thanks on bended knee; And I do thank Him who hath blest my hive And made content my herd, my flock, my bee. But, Father! nobler things I ask from thee. Fishes have sunshine, worms have everything! Are we but apes? Oh! give me, God, to know I am death’s master; not a scaffolding, But a true temple where Christ’s word could grow.
The Future Of The Russian Church
By The Rev. Cæsarius Tondini, Barnabite.
III.
In presence of the melancholy reality of to‐day, and in expectation of a yet sadder morrow, those Russians who are sincerely attached to their church, and who have at heart the interests of their faith, will perhaps ask themselves if it be not needful to labor in some direct manner to deliver the Russian Church from a protection which has been so fatal to her.
The question is a very serious one; we do not venture to decide upon it.
As Catholic, and precisely because we are Catholic, we must, in a question of this kind, consider souls. Now, to work directly to overthrow the religious autocracy of the czars might easily, considering the actual circumstances of Russia, hasten this morrow we have been considering, and that without any efficacious remedy being at hand to accompany or to follow quickly upon so great an evil. If it were not to be feared that, under present circumstances, the overthrow of the official church would cause the unbelief of the higher classes to descend also among the lower, thus rendering it general, and endangering the existence of every faith in the Russian people, the question would be easy to answer; but so long as this doubt exists it is quite a case to which to apply the principle that of two evils we must choose the least. From this point of view we prefer the continuance of the present state of things, because it seems to us the lesser evil.
There exist, however, other doubts, and their existence is of an extreme gravity, in determining the attitude of Russians toward their church; they are these:
Will the czars, even should they change their policy and show themselves for the future true protectors and not masters, be able long to continue to the Russian Church the support of the laws?
Again: Will Russia much longer have the czars?
These doubts are not chimerical.
In the first place, it appears to us unlikely that the czars should be able to continue indefinitely to refuse liberty of conscience. Already, at this present time, the Russian authorities shut their eyes to many infractions of the laws relating to the different religious communions; the ever‐increasing and multiplied relations of Russia with other countries, and of her people with foreigners, and foreigners with Russians, might easily create serious embarrassments, and even give rise to political complications, if there were a desire to apply the religious laws in all their rigor.
Nevertheless, it seems to us equally difficult to imagine that Russia should, at one bound, arrive at declaring the civil law to be atheistical, and to repel all solidarity between material interests and the religious interests of the people. During some time Russia will probably offer to us the same spectacle as in England, the classic land of religious license, where every one, except the sovereign, is free to believe what he pleases, and where at the same time convenances and multiplied interests keep the official church standing. But the Anglican Church has a far different past and far other memories—above all, a very different literature—from the Russian Church. In continuing this comparison the reader will find an explanation of the vitality shown by the state‐church of England, and at the same time the motives which do not allow us to predict for that of Russia either able defenders or even a lingering death.
If, then, the Russians ought not to labor directly to overthrow the religious autocracy of the czars, seeing that, in present circumstances, the overthrow of this autocracy might be the cause of still greater disasters than those of the past, they nevertheless ought not to fold their arms and contemplate with indifference the probability that this overthrow may be brought about at no distant period by the mere force of circumstances.
There remains the other doubt: Will Russia much longer have the czars?
This doubt, considering the epoch in which we live, scarcely needs to be justified. What sovereign is there who can promise himself that he shall end his days upon the throne? One alone—the Pope, because even in a dungeon he is obeyed just as if he were upon a throne.
Let Russians who have at heart the interests of their faith boldly face this second doubt and the fears to which it gives rise. Never, perhaps, could history offer us a more remarkable spectacle than that of an orthodox church, and a perfect automaton; to‐day receiving speech, movement, and action from an orthodox emperor, and to‐morrow receiving them from the head of a Protestant government, perhaps a Jew, perhaps an atheist. In fact, the organization of a church reckoning nearly fifty millions of adherents cannot be changed in twenty‐four hours, especially if this organization is identified with the state to the degree of confusing herself with the latter. What will then become of the Synod we do not know, but neither do we know whether the new government will readily consent to lose the profit of so powerful an instrumentum regni as the church organized by the czars.
In presence of these eventualities, which, on account of the rapid march of modern revolutions, are far from improbable, and may take place any day, is there anything the Russians can do in order to save orthodoxy? There is one thing, and, we believe, one only. We will say what that is, though we greatly doubt whether it will be accepted; too many prejudices, too many objections, will oppose themselves to it; everything else will be tried, rather than have recourse to it; a great confidence especially will be placed in the triumph of the panslavist idea; but each new attempt will but prove this one plan to be the only efficacious one, and the ill‐ success of all the others will gradually lead minds to ally themselves to it. In the alternative of accepting this, or else of letting orthodoxy perish, Russians sincerely attached to their faith will not indefinitely hesitate. Besides, a Providence watches over states and peoples; in that Providence we place our trust, and it will not be in vain.
If, calling things by their names, we were to say plainly that this only way is the reunion of the Russian with the Catholic Church, a Russian who might do us the honor to peruse these pages would perhaps throw down the book, and, however well disposed he might be, would see nothing more in it than vain and dangerous imaginations. This alarm, however, would prove, more than anything else, the exceeding power of the words. We will endeavor to express the same idea in another manner; and, without flattering ourselves that we shall gain acceptance for it, we hope at least to obtain for it serious examination.
What is Russian orthodoxy? It is the collection of the dogmas accepted and taught by the Russian Church. Now, these dogmas, with the exception of some few misunderstandings,(189) are the same as those of the Catholic Church; the point which really separates the two churches is the denial, on the part of the Russians, of the jurisdiction of the Pope over the universal church. At the utmost, a real doctrinal disagreement should be admitted respecting the infallibility of the Pope defining ex cathedrâ on faith or morals. But however important this disagreement may be in the eyes of Catholics, it has no importance in the eyes of Protestants and rationalists. Those who admit no revelation would not certainly prefer orthodoxy merely because there is in it one article less to believe. As to Protestants, the difficult point is to make them admit a visible authority taught by God himself, and having the right and mission to explain the Scriptures and to make a practical application of them to our lives. Now, is it likely that, in their eyes, an authority residing in the dispersed church, without the necessary bond which unites the bishops to each other, would be much more acceptable than a central authority, always living, always ready to declare its oracles, and, by that very fact, independent of the obstacles which an inimical government or any other adversary might raise against it to prevent it from declaring itself? For the rest, the Spiritual Regulation will let Protestants know whether a church organized as is that of Russia at the present time can alone make a free word to be heard.
Protestants and rationalists are, then, common adversaries of the Russian and also of the Catholic Church. Common adversaries also, on doctrinal grounds, are all those who cannot be exactly classed with either Protestants or rationalists, but against whom the Russian Church will no less have to defend herself—Jews, Mahometans, and, lastly, the Raskolniks also, unless, indeed, a portion of the latter should not prefer to ally themselves to the Catholic Church rather than to the Synod, if only they can be persuaded that in becoming Catholics they do not by any means cease to be Russians. Now, when in the XVIIth century the heresy of Calvin was for a moment seated on the patriarchal throne of Constantinople in the person of Cyril‐Lucar, and when that patriarch had published his Orthodox Confession of the Christian Faith,(190) which was full of Calvinistic errors, the gravity of the danger to orthodoxy was then sufficiently powerful to render the Greeks far from being disdainful of the support offered to them by Catholics, and even by the Pope himself, for the purpose of guarding in safety the articles of the common faith.
Nothing was found too hard to be said against Catholics and Rome, because of their intervention in the deposition of the heretical patriarch and the condemnation of his doctrine. For their justification we may be permitted to refer the reader to a publication which, upon its appearance, had the importance of a great event, and this is No. 42 of the Tracts for the Times, which, in England, opened the way to the Catholic faith.(191)
This historical precedent will not, we hope, remain without its consequences in history. Already Catholic theologians unconsciously afford a solid support to orthodoxy, with regard to the defence of the dogmas which are common to us with the Russians. Our theological works find entrance into Russia, and are there studied and quoted; whilst it is rarely, if ever, that we find modern authors of the Greek Church quoted, unless it be to draw from them arguments against the primacy of the Pope, and to perpetuate the misunderstandings relating to the Procession of the Holy Ghost and to purgatory.
From the time of Peter the Great orthodoxy has done nothing but lose ground in Russia; neither the patriarchs of the East nor the other heads of the various branches of the Orthodox Church appear to be solely occupied with it. One might say that any heresy inspires them with less horror than the Catholic doctrine about the Pope, and that they consider the rejection of this doctrine a sufficient proof of a healthy orthodoxy. But the day will come when every Russian who loves orthodoxy above all else will no longer regard with so much horror as now a church which is far better calculated than the Greek Church to furnish him with arms wherewith to defend the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Real Presence, the sacraments, the veneration of Mary and the saints. The same horror with which we Catholics still inspire many orthodox Russians we formerly inspired Anglicans. Relations with us, and study, have disabused many credulous minds; in Russia, moreover, the double sentiment will operate in our favor of the danger to which orthodoxy will be exposed, and the insufficiency of the succor which can arrive to it from any quarter except the Catholic Church alone.
But Protestants, rationalists, Jews, Mahometans, and Raskolniks are not the only adversaries which the Russian Church must prepare to combat, and against whom she will find no help more efficacious than that which Catholics can afford. Among her adversaries she may reckon the government, atheism in the legislation, obstacles of every kind created against the propaganda of orthodoxy, compulsory irreligious instruction, unbelief and materialism “crowned” by the academies—in a word, all the constituted authorities upon which the people depend. Can the Russian Church promise herself that she will be able successfully to contend against such adversaries? No one will maintain that the past history of this church offers a certain guarantee that she will; her existence, especially since Peter the Great, has been too monotonous, and has had a sphere of action too circumscribed, to allow her to make trial of her strength. Alas! there is something more; however monotonous may have been her existence, it nevertheless offers one characteristic feature, and this is, the facility with which she has permitted the czars to impose their laws upon her, and to obtain from her that which nothing would have forced from the great doctors and fathers of the Greek Church. Now, if the Russian Church has been so feeble in presence of the czars, is it very certain that she would instantaneously recover her energy, were she to find herself face to face with a government inspired by principles the most hostile to Christianity, and the declared enemy, no longer of the whole Christian church only, but of Jesus Christ himself? We are no prophet; but, after all, it is not absolutely impossible that, at a period more or less distant, some Russian socialist may find himself seated in the place of the czars.
Thus the past history of the Russian Church is far from being a sure warranty that she will know how to wrestle with impious governments. What succor, in fact, can she expect from churches which, in presence of the sultan, and of the sovereigns of the other countries where they are established, have shown themselves fully as feeble as the Russian Church has been in presence of the czars? The sultan—to speak of him only—has not he himself settled the Bulgarian question? And, besides, will not these churches have enough to do to defend themselves at a time when political importance decides everything? What influence in the religious affairs of Russia can be exercised by little states occupying scarcely the third or fourth rank among the states of Europe?
Should the Russian Church accept the aid of the Catholic Church, it will be a very different matter. In the same way that history shows us the latter as having already had to deal, on doctrinal ground, with every sort of error, and of having fought against it, thus offering, with the weight of her experience, the aid of a science as vast as the variety of errors against which it has combated; so also has the Catholic Church already encountered, on practical ground, every sort of obstacle, and has passed through storms and tempests which would a thousand times over have submerged her were she not divine. The number, variety, and gravity of the struggles she has maintained also against governments and nations give her the right to repeat with a calm security, each time that the signs of a fresh persecution appear: Alios vidi ventos aliasque procellas—“Other tempestuous winds and other storms have I seen.” She possesses institutions born of these struggles and adapted to those of the future, which will also create new ones in their turn. Her missionaries and her priests present us with the spectacle of an army as numerous as it is varied, answering to all the needs of war and to all the possible eventualities of the field of battle. Still more: in the existence of the church warfare is, so to speak, the normal condition, and peace the exception; it thus follows that the powers of the Catholic Church are kept in continual exercise, and that the science of the means of victory is never reduced to simple memories.
This, from the history of the past, is what may be with certainty foreseen, whether with regard to the inefficiency of the help which the Russian Church may promise herself from the various branches of the orthodox communion, in a struggle against unbelief and impious governments, or with regard to the solid support which, in this case, she would find from the Catholic Church. But this prevision is not only justified by history. History has done nothing more than throw light upon that which had been foretold to us by a terrible declaration of Jesus Christ; and it is in this declaration that lies the deep reason and the true explanation of that which history causes to pass before our eyes. Omne regnum in seipsum divisum desolabitur—“Every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation” (S. Luke xi. 17), Our Lord has said.
The Orthodox Church is a divided kingdom—divided into as many branches as there are states in which she counts her adherents; divided to such a degree that, without the consent of sovereigns, no communication is possible between these divers branches; so divided that it is also the will of sovereigns which regulates and measures the relations which the bishops of the eparchies (dioceses) of one self‐same state may hold among themselves. The Orthodox Church is a kingdom divided against itself—so divided that nowhere is there to be found an authority which, being itself the source of jurisdiction, can terminate the litigations about jurisdiction without appeal; so divided that a little boldness and obstinacy sufficed to enable Greece to withdraw herself from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople; that a little boldness and obstinacy sufficed to gain the cause for Bulgaria, when, not long ago, she also shook off the authority of the same patriarch; and that a little boldness and obstinacy always suffice to enable the revolted definitively to shake off the yoke of their pastors.(192)
Alas! it is not even here that the desolation of this kingdom ends. Of the Orthodox Church it may be truly said that the desolation has no bounds. It has no bounds because already the principle has been established that the church of each state ought to be independent, and that each separate nation also ought to have its distinct and independent church. It is endless because to these principles—subversive of all order and all stability, and which make ecclesiastical jurisdiction depend no longer upon the laws and customs of the church, but on the chances of war, the valor of conquerors, and the craftiness of conspirators—the Orthodox Church can oppose nothing but vain protestations; it is endless because the very bishops themselves of the Orthodox Church take the lead in upholding these principles, and are the first to treat with contempt the complaints of those of their brethren whose jurisdiction is injured.
And, in fact, it was by invoking its political independence that the recently‐formed kingdom of Greece declared itself, in 1833, freed from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. This declaration was made and carried by all the bishops of the kingdom, assembled at Nauplia; not a single voice appears to have been raised to require that the patriarch should at least be first consulted. The patriarch appealed to the canons of the church, and protested—and they let him protest. For seventeen years he went on protesting, until at last, in 1850, his successor recognized the accomplished fact; had he not done so, he would have been allowed to protest to an indefinite period, as long as he might be inclined. It was by appealing to the principle of nationality (phyletism) that the Bulgarians shook off the authority of the same patriarch. Their bishops nominated an exarch, and long before the sultan had definitely settled this affair they gave no more heed to the patriarch’s protestations than for seventeen years had been given by the bishops of the Hellenic kingdom. In the hope of leading back the Bulgarians to obedience, the patriarch, in 1872, convoked a great council in the Church of S. George at Constantinople. He made his complaints against his rebellious children, and without apparently considering the effect which might be produced by the publicity given to his words, he there related that, having summoned the recalcitrant bishops to return to obedience, one of them had answered him, by the telegraph, that he should go and receive the reply from the exarch.
The council thereupon proceeded to excommunicate the Bulgarians, who had already so willingly excommunicated themselves, sure beforehand that they would none the less continue to be considered members of the Orthodox Church— a certainty which could not fail to be realized. The example of Greece had borne its fruit. Besides, this council was not œcumenical; amongst others, the Russian bishops did not sit there at all; a letter of the Synod had the mission of representing them, probably unknown to themselves, and certainly without their permission. By what right, then, could the council separate the Bulgarian nation from the whole church? By what right did it speak in the name of the whole church? It had so much the less right, also, from the fact that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cyril, who happened to be then at Constantinople, determinedly refused, for reasons which gave evidence of more than unwillingness, to appear at its sittings.(193)
Will it be said that the Bulgarians were excommunicated by virtue of the canons of the church; that the council applied to them an anathema already decreed by the fathers and the œcumenical councils against those who violated the canons? We have some acquaintance with these canons; and, if they are to be taken literally, we would not take upon ourselves to prove that the whole Orthodox Church has not long ago fallen under some excommunication pronounced by her own canons; such, at any rate, would be the case with regard to the Russian Church, which forms its principal portion. To escape this somewhat embarrassing conclusion, it becomes necessary to admit that the canons must be understood, as it is commonly expressed, cum grano salis, and that they are susceptible of a mild interpretation. It is this which the Bulgarians believe themselves to have done. They have found in the past history of their church several examples authorizing an interpretation of the canons conformable to their wishes; amongst others, that of Peter the Great, who, without ever ceasing to be considered orthodox, abolished the patriarchate of Moscow, instituted the Synod, made it the principal authority of the Russian Church, and declared himself to be the “Supreme Judge” thereof; after which he informed the Oriental patriarchs of what had happened, and demanded of them an approbation which he was fully determined to do without, in case it should be refused. The crime of the Bulgarians consisted in interpreting the canons as they had been interpreted by the numerous bishops who had not on that account been, by any means, expelled from the church; and if the letter of the Russian Synod, the mandatory of the Russian episcopate at the council of 1872, blamed them, besides that, in their revolt, they were sustained by Russia.(194) The Bulgarians called to mind that it was Russia, too, which had the most strenuously labored to induce the Patriarch of Constantinople to recognize the independence of the Church of the Hellenic kingdom as an accomplished fact. With memories such as these, the anathema of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 could scarcely disquiet the Bulgarians.
And this is not all. This council made a decision which is, in truth, a doctrinal decision by declaring that the exterior constitution of the church is independent of the principle of nationality, and in condemning the application of this principle to the church, as being contrary to the Scriptures and to the Fathers. By what right did this council, not being ecumenical, make a decision of this kind, and what value could it possess? Will it be said that this council did nothing more than define and affirm what was contained in the Scriptures and the Fathers? It was precisely this to which the Bulgarians would not agree, and of which the Patriarch of Jerusalem—to mention him only—was by no means convinced; in short, that which only a truly ecumenical council could authoritatively decide. In presence of a merely nominal doctrinal authority, it was perfectly natural that the Bulgarians should keep their own view of the matter.
But still more embarrassing by far would be the consequences resulting to the Orthodox Church if it were admitted that this council possessed a really doctrinal authority, and that its decisions were obligatory on the consciences of the orthodox faithful. In this case the Orthodox Church would have added yet another definition to those already recorded in the seven Ecumenical Councils allowed by her. This church has always boasted of having added nothing to the doctrine expressed in the seven Ecumenical Councils, in which, according to her, the Holy Ghost has deposited, once for all,(195) whatever it is necessary to believe. She is so persuaded that nothing can be added to them that she takes pleasure in recognizing in these councils the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven mysterious seals, spoken of by S. John—pillars and seals which will eternally remain seven in number, without any possible chance of reaching even to the number eight. Therefore it is that she throws in our faces our western councils and their definitions, and therefore that she reproaches us with new dogmas. But the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope—these two dogmas which the church has found in the Scriptures and in the Fathers—were they newer in the eyes of the Bulgarians than the dogma defined at the Council of Constantinople in 1872, that “the church, in her exterior constitution, is independent of the principle of nationality”—a dogma condemned, implicitly at least, by the previous practice of a large portion of the Orthodox Church?
Finally, why should the Bulgarians have submitted to the decision of a particular council—a decision, carried by the Greeks judices in causâ propriâ, when the Russian Church, as all the world knew, thought so lightly of the doctrine and practice of the whole Greek Church in a matter of far greater importance, the validity of baptism? Baptism by infusion is in fact recognized at St. Petersburg and Moscow as valid, while at Constantinople it is null and void. A Protestant or a Catholic baptized by infusion, who should ask to be received into the Orthodox Church, would be accepted unconditionally in Russia: but at Constantinople he would be required to be rebaptized. A Christian in the dominions of the czar, he would become a pagan at Constantinople; and yet this is one and the same church!(196)
Yes, the shock has been given. The Council of Constantinople of 1872 has not been able to hinder the defection of the Bulgarians, but it has attracted the attention of the Christian world to the fact that the Orthodox Church has no authority which can force consciences to reject as heretical the application to the exterior constitution of the church, either of the principle of nationality, or any other principle upon which might be based the political constitution of nations. And further, the acts of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 give evidence of the hesitation and uncertainty existing among the representatives of the orthodox faith(197) with regard to a question so momentous, and which concerns the very life of that church. The shock has been given. Error has a terrible logic. Where will the divisions, the sub‐divisions, and the parcellings‐out of the orthodox communion end?
And what consequences may result from the want of exterior unity, not only for the independence, but also for the faith, of the church, we have just glanced at; but it will be revealed by the Ecclesiastical Regulation in a manner more convincing and more sad.
Assuredly the future had not been foreseen when, in the Confession of the Orthodox Faith, the great catechism of the whole Oriental Church, it was considered sufficient to explain as follows the unity of the church:
“The church is one, ... according to the teaching of the apostle: For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ (2 Cor. xi. 2). For even as there is but one Christ, even so his spouse can be but one; as it is written in the fourth chapter of the Epistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians (iv. 5, 6): One Lord, one faith, one baptism: there is but one God, the Father of all.”(198)
Nor was the future any more foreseen when, in the catechism of Mgr. Philarete, the unity of the church was defined:(199)
“Q. Why is the church one?
“A. Because she represents one spiritual body, animated by one sole and only divine Spirit, and having one head only, who is Christ.”
Let us now turn away our gaze from the Orthodox Church, in which the terrible declaration of Jesus Christ finds only too fully its accomplishment. Another church appears before us. She is not a divided kingdom: on the contrary, if there be one characteristic mark by which she may be at once recognized by all who seek for her, it is the imposing unity of her exterior organization. The pope forms this unity. Let us ask of history what the pope has done for the church.
And history answers: The pope has saved the church. The pope alone has been able to hinder this church from breaking up, as the Orthodox Church has done, into so many national churches, at first under the protection, then under the authority, and finally under the rod, of sovereigns who were at first kings, then presidents of a republic, sometimes Robespierres. It is the pope, and the pope only, who has maintained, not merely the vague notion, but the living sentiment of Catholic fraternity—a sentiment which inspires the adversaries of the church with a fear which, in spite of themselves, they betray. It is the pope, and the pope alone, who has caused the sap of Christian piety to circulate in the whole Catholic world, by the honors of the altars accorded to the saints of every land, and by those institutions which, originating in one country, belong to all countries, as powerful, in the realization of their vast aspirations, as zeal and charity themselves. It is the pope who makes the treasures of virtue and learning which he discovers in any particular locality the common property of the world—in a word, it is the pope who causes the church always to survive, not only the enemies who desire her death, not only the false prophets who, for centuries past, have gone on announcing this death as imminent, but all kingdoms and all empires, their institutions, and even their remembrance. This is what the pope is for the Catholic Church.
Thus we see, on the one side, division, and, as its consequence, the dissolution foretold by Jesus Christ; on the other side, unity, and, with unity, victory and strength. This is the signification of the church having or not having a pope. Besides, the unity of government is so necessary to arrest the indefinite parcelling out of one church into a number of independent churches, and as a safeguard to the common faith, that each separate branch of the Orthodox Eastern Church has not been able to maintain its integrity without the aid of a supreme and central authority. Instead of the pope, this is a patriarch, or it is a synod, or it is the sovereign of the country, but everywhere and always the very adversaries of the Papacy themselves render an involuntary homage to the Catholic dogma which declares a visible head, a pope, necessary to the church.
Yes, a pope is necessary for the church—necessary to her existence, and necessary for the fulfilment of her mission.
Let us consider it with regard to the most powerful of the various branches of the orthodox communion—the Russian Church. Even could this church (by hypothesis) maintain herself alone, and could she continue her work without the operation of the laws; could she alone combat unbelief, and alone make head against impious governments, the pope would be none the less necessary for her. And why? Because the Russian Church calls herself Catholic; that is, universal. Now, it is not enough for a church which calls itself Catholic, and the one church of the Saviour of all, to be able to maintain her ground in that part of the world in which she is now enclosed; it is not enough that she should combat unbelief in the empire of the czars, nor that she should be able to resist an impious government which may succeed to theirs.
If she is Catholic, she ought, the Russian Church herself, to be equal to penetrating everywhere, and everywhere to maintain herself; to combat everywhere heresy and unbelief, and everywhere to sustain collision with the government. If she is Catholic, let her issue from the limits of the country of the czars, and at least attempt the conquest of Italy, Germany, France, England, all Europe; America, the whole world; let her, in the name of Jesus Christ, utter words of authority to the conquerors of the earth, brave the hatred which the consciousness of her rights would draw upon her, and dare to declare to crowned heads that all Christians belong to her; let her not confine herself to raising in capital cities Russian temples for the use of the Russian embassies, but let her require every government to recognize the orthodox worship; let her missionaries penetrate, whether welcomed or repelled, into all the countries of the earth with the sole credentials of the apostles, and, strong in this single right, let them return whither they are driven out, and sprinkle with their blood the soil wherein they sow the seed of orthodoxy. Then, and only then, will the Russian Church show herself Catholic; that is to say, universal; that is to say, the church of the Saviour of all. Until then in vain may she call herself Catholic while the title is denied by the fact.
But these things the Russian Church will never be able to accomplish without a pope.
From whom, in fact, will her priests hold their commission? To whom will they recur for counsel, protection, and support? In whose name will they speak to governments and kings? To whom will they refer the latter to authenticate the validity of their mission, to propose objections, or to lodge complaints? If we except Russia, Turkey, the Hellenic kingdom, Roumania, Servia, and some provinces of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, the rest of the world is missionary ground for the Orthodox Church, just as much as is China for the Catholic Church. Let us suppose the Russian Church wishing only to undertake the conversion of France. Paris already possesses a Russian temple; it is now the Synod, in concert with the government, which nominates the persons attached to this temple. When the official church shall have fallen, and all the Russian bishops shall be canonically equal, or at least independent of each other, to which among them will the charge of this mission belong?
Paris is a place to stimulate the zeal of many bishops. It is allowable to believe that a settlement will not be very quickly made. Let us suppose it made, however, and moreover that even there is established a college De Propaganda Fide Orthodoxâ at St. Petersburg or Moscow. What would be the attitude of the Greek Church of Constantinople? Will the latter possess, or will she not possess, the right to evangelize France, and there to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction? If it be allowed that she has this right, the same question presents itself also for the three patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem; it also presents itself for the Greek Church of the Hellenic kingdom, for the Church of Roumania, for that of Servia, for the Orthodox Church of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and even for that of Montenegro. Here is already an accumulation and intermingling of jurisdictions liable to give rise to numerous contests. Who shall decide amongst them? Will they come to a mutual agreement? But an agreement will be everlastingly impossible between the Greek and Russian Churches, at least so long as the question of the validity of baptism by infusion remains undecided. We will say Catholics are to be “converted” to orthodoxy: the Russian ministers will not rebaptize them. The Greek Church knows it—this church, as we have just said, which regards baptism by infusion as null. If the Greek Church consents that the Russian missionaries shall evangelize France, it declares, by that consent, that baptism is no longer necessary for belonging to the church. If, however, she opposes their so doing, who is to decide between them? And the simple ones who had previously let themselves be incorporated into the Russian Church—would they be very certain that they really belonged to the church? Which, then, will be the true missionaries?
We confine ourselves to this example. Let us apply ourselves carefully to realize, in imagination, what would be the situation of a church attempting to do without a pope that which must be done by a church believing herself divine, and invested by God with a commission to convert the world—wishing to do, without a pope, what is done by the Catholic Church every day. Then it will be easy to understand whether there can be a divine church without a pope.
And this pope, without which the Russian Church will never be the universal church of Jesus Christ nor fulfil the mission of that church—where would she seek him? Would she, on account of the needs created by her new situation, confer upon one of the bishops all the authority which is now concentrated in the hands of the Synod? Will she say to him, Help me to fulfil the mission of converting the world? But this charge, this part, would it not with greater right belong to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who, so powerful is the need of unity, has already declared, upon one solemn occasion, that on him rests the care of all the churches?(200) We are supposing in the Russian Church, and in the other branches of the orthodox communion, enough self‐denial to consent to this. But when this great event shall have been accomplished, what will have been done?
It will have been acknowledged before the face of all the world that it is not Rome who made the schism. It will have been confessed that during ten centuries it has been charged as a crime upon the Catholic Church that she has not sacrificed that which, after ten centuries of disasters, the Eastern Church has found it necessary to force herself to regain under pain of ceasing to exist. There will have been rendered to the Catholic Church the most splendid of testimonies, in confessing that she alone possesses the true sense of the words of Jesus Christ, and that the rock on which Jesus Christ has built his church is Peter.
Indeed, from that day forward there will be no more excuse for schism. Between a rock designated by men of the XIXth century, and that rock of which the manifest existence goes back to Jesus Christ himself, and has been pointed out by him, who that but knows how to read and write can hesitate for an instant?
Such, therefore, is the alternative: either the Orthodox Church will be forced to give herself a pope, to show that she is really that which she entitles herself, “Catholic,” or universal, and to fulfil the mission imposed by this name, or she will never be able to justify her appreciation of this title. What will happen in the former case, we have just said; if, on the contrary, the Orthodox Church delays to give herself a pope, the rapid march of events, and the revolutionary storm from which neither Russia nor the East will by any means be preserved, will, before very long, prove to us that it is not upon the sand that Jesus Christ has built his church.
To Be Concluded Next Month.
Burke And The Revolution
Bacon’s grand testamentary vindication of his life, “bequeathing his name and memory to foreign nations and his own countrymen after some time be passed over,” might have been written with even greater justice of himself—because free from any imputation of moral weakness—by the master‐ mind of the XVIIIth century in England in the domain of political philosophy—Edmund Burke, the illustrious orator and statesman, the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France. To‐day, when France, “incessantly agitated by a propaganda of the most pernicious doctrines,”(201) still vindicates the sagacity which foresaw the disastrous course of the Revolution, while England, which he saved from the same propaganda, uninterruptedly illustrates the “beneficial influence of the regular action of the public powers,” it may not be amiss to recall some of the opinions to which he gave utterance at the beginning of the storm. Burke’s genius, like Bacon’s, was indeed too refulgent not to be acknowledged even in his own day. But the burning questions upon the discussion of which and their solution, so far as human reason can go, he has built up an enduring fame—monumentum ære perennius—lighted up passions too gigantic and furious in the tremendous conflict then inaugurated to allow of contemporary justice being done to his labors. Nor did their negatory influence upon his fame end with his death; two allied causes have conspired to partially obscure the clear and immortal flame of his genius, even to our time:
First, the jealousy of the political and literary followers of Charles James Fox.
Second, the inimical spirit of the Revolution.
Burke, as it is well known, had to contend, during his parliamentary career, not only against the Tory prejudices of the country party, represented by such men as William Lord Bagot and Col. Onslow, but also against the ill‐concealed jealousy and oligarchical exclusiveness of his nominal allies, the Whig aristocracy. But this influence of caste, which in his lifetime placed over his head his political pupil, Charles Fox, as the representative of the Whig family compacts, has been succeeded since his death by a more acrimonious spirit of personal jealousy in defence of the fame of his younger rival. The partisans of Fox have never been able to forgive Burke’s renunciation of his alliance with the eloquent Whig leader; and so large a share of literary and political criticism during the last half‐century has come from the pens of that small but popular band of writers who took their inspiration from the traditions of Holland House, that the acknowledgment of Burke’s profound and prophetic genius has been unduly circumscribed by the desire of elevating the “great man” of the family. Macaulay and Earl Russell have given expression to this feeling; the former by covertly insinuating a doubt of Burke’s judgment, while lavishly extolling the splendor of his imagination; the latter by open denunciation of his course at the outbreak of the Revolution; Earl Russell with unconscious self‐satire quoting these lines from La Fontaine:
“L’homme est de feu pour le mensonge Il est de glace pour la vérité.”
The efforts of a powerful literary and family connection to elevate its idol, Charles Fox, at the expense of Burke, have had, however, but small effect in limiting the measure of the latter’s fame, compared with the hostile spirit of revolution animating the current periodical literature of England and America. If the apostles of the Revolution, who steal Burke’s thunder without acknowledgment, when it suits their purpose, against the despotism of power, could bury out of sight his protests against that worse despotism of unchained human passions, which is their ideal of liberty, they would gladly place him in their Pantheon. But the mind of the great political philosopher was too grandly comprehensive to be narrowed within the grooves of that fashionable “liberalism” which covers even the basest tyranny, if directed against the Catholic Church. His humanity was too broad and true not to be aroused into flaming denunciation of the abuse of power, whether it assumed the shape of “opulent oppression” in India or democratic priest‐slaughter in France. Hence it is that Burke holds but a half‐allegiance of the Liberal party; that his fame has been, as it were, truncated, so far as they have been able to effect it; and that his magnificent vindications of the cause of liberty, bounded by no limitations of race, government, or creed, are circumscribed in their minds by his ante‐revolutionary labors.
But it is not in the power of any class of critics, least of all of the light artillery of “liberalism,” to narrow or permanently diminish Burke’s kingdom over human thought. His fame will not be dependent upon the fashion of this or any single age. The consensus of humanity has crowned him among the Immortals. When Macaulay and Russell shall have become obscure names, the works of Burke will endure as monuments of our civilization. His place will be with Demosthenes and Cicero, and in the estimation of a more remote posterity he will probably overtop them both.
The long, lean figure, with spectacles on nose, once familiar to the caricaturists of the third George’s reign, has faded a good deal from the eyes of the present generation. We now turn over with a smile the prints of the “concealed Jesuit” from S. Omer’s, barrette on head, and long soutane clinging to his heels; or the more portly figure of the highwayman, blunderbuss in hand, waylaying, in company with North and Fox, the “savior of India” (Warren Hastings); or the “Watchman” of the constitution, in heavy cloak, lantern in hand, and spectacles on the formidable nose, ferreting out the revolutionary preacher, Dr. Price, in his midnight study. The gravers of Gilray and Sayer have yielded to those of the caricaturists for Punch. The figures of Gladstone, Disraeli, and Bright have supplanted those of Pitt, Fox, and Burke. The great orator and statesman has taken his place as a classic on the shelves of all libraries, but is popularly known only by a few rounded extracts from his speeches, or by Macaulay’s description of the entrance on the parliamentary stage of Lord Rockingham’s young Irish secretary, “who to an eloquence surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, and an industry that shamed the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which neither Pitt nor Grenville could lay claim.” But if Burke has shared the fate of all great writers not strictly popular in being conventionally admired but practically neglected by the general reader, no political author is more diligently studied by the “middlemen” of thought, the makers and leaders of public opinion. He is the private tutor of public teachers; the vade mecum of the orator and politician. Most of the questions of political ethics which have been the subjects of discussion during the present century have been profoundly treated of by him. Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the freedom of the press, ministerial responsibility, the relations of church and state, the abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of the criminal law—all have received from him their most ample and brilliant illustration.
Of all the events of his time, however, the Revolution of 1789 gave the chief exercise to his powers. Born in 1730, he was then at the zenith of his fame, in the full maturity of his massive yet acute intellect. Earl Russell’s senile complaint in his life of Fox of “the wreck of his (Burke’s) judgment” betrays only the dotage of his own. Advancing age had better fitted him for the contest. His mind had, as Macaulay truly says, bloomed late into flower, although the rhetoric of the essayist has caricatured the sterility of his youth. The giant trunk was now crowned with a luxuriant and graceful foliage, which added to its beauty, while it detracted nothing from its strength. The experience of “his long and laborious life,” the accumulated stores of his prodigious industry, furnished him with weapons of finest temper and irresistible force. Thus armed, stepping to the front as the champion of civilization and religion against the Giant Despair which had broken its bonds in Europe, it was with striking appropriateness that his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, applied to him, at the moment of his rupture with Fox and the opposition, the lines written under the engraving of 1790 from the portrait of 1775—lines in which Milton describes the faithful Abdiel striding forth, solitary, from amid the rebel host:
“So spake the fervent angel, but his zeal None seconded: ..... ...... Unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal; Nor number nor example with him wrought To move from truth, or change his constant mind, Though single. From amidst forth he passed Long way through hostile scorn, nor of violence feared aught; And with retorting scorn, his back he turned On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”
The efforts of Burke’s single mind at this critical moment decided the course of events in England. His speeches in Parliament and the publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France aroused a national feeling that all the efforts of the revolutionary propagandists were unable to stem; which Pitt followed rather than led; and which enabled England to carry on without flinching, to a triumphant close, the long and bloody war in national self‐defence into which she was driven by the aggressive spirit of the Revolution. Pitt only gave utterance to the national feeling when he declared at the close of Burke’s speech on the Army Estimates, in which he flung down the gauntlet to the Revolution, “that not only the present generation but the latest posterity would revere his name for the decided part he had that day taken.”
It was Burke’s fortune to witness the temporary triumph, but not the succeeding repulse, of the first outbreak of the Revolution. He died at the full tide of its fury. Yet the tremendous blows he dealt its principles, single‐handed, before all that was mortal of him was laid at rest at Beaconsfield, undoubtedly saved England from succumbing to its influence in his own day, and their conservative force is still felt in the government of that country. “This man,” said Schlegel, “has been to his own country and to all Europe—and, in a particular manner, to all Germany—a new light of political wisdom and moral experience. He corrected his age when it was at the height of its revolutionary fury; and without maintaining any system of philosophy, he seems to have seen further into the true nature of society, and to have more clearly comprehended the effect of religion in connecting individual security with national welfare, than any philosopher or any system of philosophy of any preceding age.” True words, and worthy of attention at this moment, when Germany has entered on a new and dangerous course of political action.
From the first mutterings of the revolutionary storm Burke had distrusted its character and future violence. Alarmed by what he had seen of the undisguised levity and scepticism of Parisian society during his visit to France in 1772, he had taken occasion in one of his speeches, as early as 1773, to point out “this conspiracy of atheism to the watchful eyes of European governments.” The outrages in the name of liberty which were simultaneous with its outburst determined his course, although his keen political vision had long before penetrated the hollowness of its professions. The old political gladiator, “in whose breast,” as he proudly and truly said of himself, “no anger, durable or vehement, had ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny”; whose potent voice had re‐ echoed across the Western ocean in support of the American colonist, had pleaded for the African slave and Hindoo laborer, and had instilled fresh hope, in the broken heart of the Irish “Papist,” roused himself now to his last and most powerful effort in defence of the fugitive French “aristocrat” and hunted priest.
“I have struggled,” he said, “to the best of my power against two great evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things—liberty and authority. I have struggled against the licentiousness of freedom, I have contended against the tyranny of power.” Nearly ten years before, in his speech on the Marriage Act, defending himself against the charges of “aristocrat” and “radical” which had been alternately levelled against him, he had predicted his course in these noble words:
“When indeed the smallest rights of the poorest people in the kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of pride countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should come to the last extremity, and a contest of blood, my course is taken. I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble. But if these people come to turn their liberty into a cloak for mischievousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, I would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and ferocious.”
Burke’s theory of true reform, illustrated by the honorable labors of his whole public career, was in fact so radically opposed to that of the French constitution makers that no standing‐ground common to both could be found. He foresaw plainly enough what were the secret aims and aspirations of the revolutionary leaders from the first, whatever might be their humanitarian professions; that whatever their changes of leaders or watchwords, their goal would always be the same—the destruction of existing society; not reparation, but ruin. He would have seen in M. Gambetta’s programme of a nouvelle couche sociale, enunciated at Grenoble in 1872, only a new reading of M. Marat’s schemes of universal confiscation in 1792. Neither would have found more favor in his eyes than in those of any English reformer from S. Thomas à Becket to Hampden. He believed with Bacon that there could be no wise design of reform which did not set out with the determination “to weed, to prune, and to graft, rather than to plough up and plant all afresh.” Sixty years afterwards another writer, after an elaborate and prolonged study of the ancien régime, and a lifetime’s experience of the results of the Revolution, arrived at the point from which Burke started. The writer was Alexis de Tocqueville. Those who are familiar only with the Democracy in America, the work of his inexperienced youth, would do well to read his Memoir and Letters by De Beaumont. Writing to M. Freslon in 1853, after the events of 1848‐51 had pretty well cured him of liberalism, he said:
“When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for hating the ancien régime, but few for loving the Revolution; for one sees that the ancien régime was rapidly sinking under the weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and manners, so that, with a little patience and good conduct, it might have been reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was the government of 1780 from that of 1750. One does not recognize the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Halfway down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order to get sooner to the bottom” (Memoir and Remains, vol. ii. pp. 242, 243, Eng. ed.)
Burke had an invincible distrust of the crude theories and rash speculations of the doctrinaires of the Revolution. “Follow experience and common sense,” he says in a hundred different ways; “these are the arguments of statesmen! Leave the rest to the schools, where only they may be debated with—safety.” “In politics,” he says, “the most fallacious of all things is geometrical demonstration.” Again: “The majors make a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory of truth depends upon the little minors of circumstances.” He compares the socialist theorist ready to plunge into the volcano of revolutionary experiment to the Sicilian sophist—ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit. The atrocious principles of the literary and philosophical guides of the Revolution seemed to him almost more portentous than the brutalities of the mob. “Never before this time,” he says, “was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.”
Remarkable sayings then, and true of experience anterior to his time. But had Burke lived in our day, he would have witnessed with astonishment the full development of the spirit he denounced, in the terrible spectacle of an aggressive infidel philosophy, and an almost universal infidel press, sometimes truculent, sometimes frivolous, but always shamelessly boastful of its pagan principles. He would have seen a school of pseudo‐philosophy professing its open design to destroy the foundations of revealed religion; filled with the spirit of the apostate Julian; as audacious and boastful as he, but destined to meet as shameful an end.
Let us compare, then, Burke’s theory of true liberty, and his opinion of what France might have gained by a large and loyal measure of reform, with the desperate counsels and futile outrages which followed the surrender of the movement by the French conservatives into the hands of the Jacobins. “You would,” he says, had such a course as he recommended been pursued, “have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and recognize that happiness is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.”
Burke’s frequent definitions of true liberty are as beautiful as they are true. “You hope, sir,” he says, writing to De Menonville, “that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse or oblivion of our natural faculties, and a ferocious indocility which is prompt to wrong or violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something a little better than a description of wild beast. To men so degraded a state of strong restraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery, that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions. You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me, then, to continue our conversation, and to tell you what that freedom is that I love. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. It is social freedom. It is that state of things in which the liberty of no man and no body of men is in a condition to trespass on the liberty of any person or any description of persons in society. The liberty, the only liberty, I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with virtue and order, but which cannot exist without them.”
“Am I,” he asks, in answer to the shibboleth of the “rights of man,”—“am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the case of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the knight of the ’sorrowful countenance.’”
If we turn from Burke’s satire upon the revolutionary actors to his opinions on its probable onward course and changing fortunes, we shall find a series of the most remarkable political prophecies on record. At a time when Fox and the opposition hailed the Revolution as already accomplished, with nothing before it but a future of ideal progress and happiness; when Pitt and the government seemed lulled into a still more fatal inaction, Burke proclaimed in decisive tones that the contest between socialism and all constituted governments had only begun. We group together a few of these remarkable predictions, which time has so amply verified: “He proposed to prove,” he said in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “that the present state of things in France is not a transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably supposed, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing future and, if that were possible, worse evils. That this is not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may be gradually mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be incapable of correcting itself by any length of time.” Again: “We are not at the end of our struggle or near it. Let us not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.” Predicting the changing features of the Revolution, he said: “In its present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may have to pass, as one of our poets says, ’through great varieties of untried being,’ and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and sword.” The very spirit of the Commune is thus foreshadowed in a letter to M. de Menonville, 1790: “But if the same ends should hereafter require the same course which had been already pursued, there is no doubt but the same ferocious delight in murder and the same savage cruelty will be again renewed.” Tous les évêques a la lanterne was the watchword of both outbreaks of the Revolution.
Compare with these sayings the remarks, fifty years later, of another observer, of great acuteness, but moulded in less heroic proportions than Burke. “This day fifty‐one years,” writes De Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, “the French Revolution commenced, and, after the destruction of so many men and institutions, we may say it is still going on. Is not this reassuring to the nations that are only just beginning theirs?”(202) De Tocqueville, it is well known, during the early part of his career, was tainted with the prevalent liberal Catholicism of his day in France. He wished to unite the church with the Revolution—chimerical task, of which advancing years and experience convinced him of the sinful folly! Happily for himself, he died a good Catholic in the bosom of the church.
“I scarcely dare hope,” he says, “to see a regular government, strong and at the same time liberal, established in our country. This ideal was, as you know, the dream of my youth, and likewise of the portion of my mature age that has passed. Is it possible still to believe in its realization? For a long time I thought (but long before February this belief had been much shaken) that we had been making our way over a stormy sea, on which we were still tossing, but that the port was at hand. Was I not wrong? Are we not on a rolling sea that has no shore? Or is not the land so distant, so unknown, that our lives and those of our children may pass away before it is reached, or, at least, before any settlement is made upon it?... I am indeed alarmed at the state of the public mind. It is far from betokening the close of a revolution. At the time it was said, and to this day it is commonly repeated, that the insurgents of June were the dregs of the populace; that they were all outcasts of the basest description, whose only motive was lust for plunder. Such, of course, were many of them. But it is not true that they were all of this kind; would to God that they had been! Such wretches are always a small minority; they never prevail; they are imprisoned or executed, and all is over. In the insurrection of June, besides bad passions, there were, what are far more dangerous, false opinions. Many of the men who attempted to overthrow the most sacred rights were carried away by an erroneous notion of right. They sincerely believed that society was based upon injustice, and they wished to give it another foundation. [Compare Gambetta’s nouvelle couche sociale.] Our bayonets and our cannon will never destroy this revolutionary fanaticism. It will create for us dangers and embarrassments without end. Finally, I begin to ask myself whether anything solid or durable can be built on the shifting basis of our society? Whether it will support even a despotism, which many people, tired of storms, would, for want of a better, hail as a haven? We did not see this great revolution in human society begin; we shall not see it end. If I had children, I should always be repeating this to them, and should tell them that in this age and in this country one ought to be fit for everything, and prepared for everything, for no one can count on the future.”(203)
A conversation apropos of a Benedictine survivor of 1789, given from Mr. Senior’s Journal (Memoir, vol. ii. p. 1), illustrates the final opinion of the author of Democracy in America upon the Revolution. It took place only one year before his death:
“And what effect,” I asked, “has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced on him (the Benedictine)? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the ancien régime as a golden age?” “He admits,” said Tocqueville, “the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that intellectually and morally we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. These seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self‐reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of our higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones, vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power seek it not for itself, not as a means of doing good to their country but as a means of getting money and flatterers.”(204)
What more remarkable testimony to Burke’s prophetic vision could be offered?
If any were needed, it would be found in an opposite quarter, in the revelations of Cluseret and his accomplices as to the premeditated burning of Paris and the destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871, viewed in connection with Burke’s positive and reiterated assertions that the worst excesses of 1789 were not the result of sudden passion, nor accidental, “as some believed or pretended to believe, but were systematically designed from the beginning.” It is known that among his correspondents in 1789‐90 were the notorious Tom Paine and the eccentric cosmopolite, Anacharsis Baron de Clootz, both of whom strove to enlist Burke in the defence of the revolutionary cause before he had decisively pronounced himself. Paine and Clootz, congenial birds of prey, had both flown to Paris (anticipating the course of their disciples in 1871), smelling the approaching carnage afar off; and from them there is reason to believe Burke gathered ample hints of the full measure of the revolutionary programme. Striking also is Burke’s remark that the revolutionary subdivision of France would induce a demand for communal or cantonal independence. “These commonwealths,” he says, “will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris”—a prediction wonderfully verified by the attitude of Lyons and Marseilles during the late war and the period of the Commune, as well as by the cantonal programme of the Spanish revolutionists.
Burke’s theory of the true basis of government was as moderate and well conceived as the revolutionary schemes were destructive and unsound. “We know,” he says, “and, what is better, we feel, that religion is the basis of society and the source of all good and all comfort. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than as he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing constitution of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.” His defence of the cause of religion in France, and his glowing tribute to the virtue and learning of the French clergy, then, as now, the mark of the deadliest shafts of the Revolution, are eloquent and inspiring, but too long to quote in this article.
Equally remarkable with Burke’s prophetic warnings of the successive crimes and follies of the Revolution and its offspring, the Commune, are his speculations on a supposed restoration of the monarchy. More than a quarter of a century after his death their wisdom was illustrated in the events of the inglorious reign of Charles X. His words are almost startling in their applicability to the present posture of French affairs, the Septennate, and the conflicting aspirations of the Comte de Chambord and the Prince Imperial:
“What difficulties,” he says, referring to a Restoration, in his letter on the policy of the allies, “will be met with in a country, exhausted by the taking of its capital, and among a people in a manner trained and actively disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is; who may have occupied themselves in revolving in their minds what they were to do if it fell to their lot to re‐establish the affairs of France. What support or what limitations the restored monarchy must have may be a doubt, or how it will settle or pitch at last; but one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt—that the settlement cannot be immediate, but that it must be preceded by some sort of power equal, at least in vigor, vigilance, promptness, and decision, to a military government. For such a preparatory government no slow‐paced, methodical, formal, lawyer‐like system; still less that of a showy, artificial, trifling, intriguing court, guided by cabals of ladies, or men like ladies; least of all a philosophic, theoretic, disputatious school of sophistry—none of these ever will, or ever can, lay the foundations of an order that will last.”
“A judicious, well‐tempered, and manly severity in the support of law and order”—this was Burke’s advice to princes. He advocated freedom of the press as understood in England; “but they indeed,” he said, “who seriously write upon a principle of levelling, ought to be answered by the magistrate, and not by the speculatist.” We conclude our quotations by the following portrait of the “Legitimate Prince”:
“Whoever,” says Burke, “claims a right by birth to govern there, must find in his breast, or conjure up in it, an energy not always to be expected, not always to be wished, in well‐ordered states. The lawful prince must have in everything but crime the character of an usurper. He is gone if he imagines himself the quiet possessor of a throne. He is to contend for it as much after an apparent conquest as before. His task is to win it. He must leave posterity to adorn and enjoy it. No velvet cushions for him. He is to be always—I speak nearly to the letter—on horseback. This opinion is the result of much patient thinking on the subject, which I conceive no event is likely to alter.”
Burke’s tremendous onslaught on the Revolution drew forth swarms of opponents in his own day, most of whom are now forgotten. More than emulating the besotted conceit of those early apologists of anarchy, “liberal” writers are still to be found so infatuated with hostility to the Catholic Church, so purblind to the experience of nearly a hundred years—of the bloody chapters of 1793, of 1830, of 1848, of 1851, of 1871—so unawakened by the ruin the same accursed spirit has wrought in Spain, as to be heard chanting the glories of the Revolution and bewailing the possibility of “a priestly reaction” as the “destruction of all that has been gained by the national agonies of the last century.” What has been gained which would not have been gained in the gradual progress of society? What rather has not been lost in national honor and domestic virtue and happiness which would have been retained “if men had not been quite shrunk,” as Burke said, “from their natural dimensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy”? Let a witness like De Tocqueville answer!
The great political philosopher’s warnings against the real spirit of the Revolution are still worthy the attention of all governments. Time has added to their value, not diminished it. “Against these, their ‘rights of men,’ let no government,” he says, “look for security in the length of its continuance or in the justice and lenity of its administration. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but on a question of competency and a question of title.”
His advice is vigorous and plain. “Never,” he says, “succumb to the enemy. It is a struggle for your national existence. If you must die, die with the sword in your hand! But I have no fear for the result!”
Robert Cavelier De La Salle. Concluded
On the 6th of April La Salle discovered that the river was running through three channels. The following day he divided his company into three parties, of which he led the one that followed the western channel; the Sieur de Tonty, accompanied by Father Membré, took the middle channel, and the Sieur Dautray took the eastern channel. Father Membré relates that these channels appeared to them “beautiful and deep.” The water began to get brackish; then two leagues further down it became perfectly salt; and now, O glorious sight!
“The sea! the sea! the open sea, The blue, the fresh, the ever free,”
was spread out before the eager and enchanted eyes of those brave and noble voyagers. Their first impulse was to return thanks to the King of kings for the protecting arm of his providence, that had thus guided them safely to this glorious consummation of their hopes; their second was to honor the King of France for his favor and protection. For these purposes, on the 9th of April, a cross and a column were erected with appropriate ceremonies. The entire company, under arms, joined with the minister of religion in chanting the hymn of the church, Vexilla Regis, and the Te Deum, and then followed a discharge of their muskets and shouts of “Long live the King!” The column bore the following inscription: “Louis the Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns; the 9th of April, 1682.” At the foot of a tree La Salle caused a leaden plate to be buried, bearing the arms of France and a Latin inscription commemorative of the first navigation of the Mississippi, from the Illinois to its mouth, by La Salle, Tonty, Membré, and twenty Frenchmen. An authentic act, in the form of a procès verbal, was drawn up by La Metairie, the notary of the expedition, and signed by La Salle, Father Membré, Tonty, and the other principal members of the company. La Salle took formal possession of the country, which he was the first to call Louisiana, for the King of France; also of the natives and people residing therein, the seas, harbors, and all the streams flowing into the Mississippi. The great river itself he called the St. Louis.
In the midst of their rejoicings they were suffering for food. They found some dried meat prepared by the Indians, of which they partook with relish, and, as the good missionary says, “It was very good and delicate.” What must have been their feelings when they discovered that they had partaken of human flesh! Scarcity of food compelled them to turn their canoes up‐stream. La Salle paid a visit to the hostile Quinipissas, with whom he resorted to his usual address to propitiate their friendship, and, though invited to a banquet, his men partook of it with their guns at their sides. A treacherous treaty of peace was entered into, but was used as a cover for an attack next morning upon the Europeans. But the ever‐ watchful La Salle was prepared for them. The two parties were engaged in a contest of two hours, in which the Quinipissas were worsted, and sustained a loss of ten men killed and many wounded. This is the only occasion in which the hostile dispositions of the natives did not yield to skill and diplomacy. His men, exasperated at the conduct of the treacherous natives, urged him to allow them to burn their village; but he adopted the wiser and more humane policy of refraining from alienating still more by unnecessary cruelty those whom he wished to make devout worshippers of the King of heaven and loyal subjects of the King of France. During the remainder of the return voyage, with the exception of the Koroas, who had now become allies of the Quinipissas, he met with the same hospitable treatment from the tribes on the banks of the river as he had received while going down. They were now regaled on the fresh green corn of the fields. La Salle with two canoes pushed forward from the Arkansas, in advance of his party, as far as Fort Prudhomme. Here he became dangerously ill, and could advance no further, and on the 2d of June was joined by the entire company. His malady became so violent that he was compelled to send Tonty forward to convey early information to the Comte de Frontenac of the great discovery. Father Membré remained with La Salle, doing all in his power to alleviate the sufferings of his cherished leader, whose illness continued forty days. The expedition by slow advances reached the Miami late in September, where they learned of several of Tonty’s military expeditions undertaken after he left the main body. Intending to make the voyage of the Mississippi again in the spring, and plant colonies along its shores, La Salle appointed Father Membré his messenger to the king; and this zealous man, accepting the commission with promptness, proceeded to Quebec, and on the 2d of October sailed for France, to lay before the French court accurate information of La Salle’s discoveries. During the next ten or twelve months La Salle remained in the Illinois country, cementing his friendly alliances with the Indians, and pushing forward his trading interests. Having seen Fort St. Louis completed, he left Tonty in command of it, and for his plan of colonization he substituted the project of applying to the French government for co‐operation in a much more extensive one. He reached Quebec early in November, and sailed for France to render an account of his fulfilment of the royal orders, and to enlist the good offices of the government in his future plans, and landed at Rochelle on the 23d of December, 1683.
The following allusion to La Salle’s services to France in extending the province of New France by the exploration of the Mississippi, by Gov. Dongan, of the rival English province of New York, is interesting. Alluding to a map of the country which he was sending home to his superiors, Gov. Dongan writes: “Also, it points out where there’s a great river discovered by one Lassal, a Frenchman from Canada, who thereupon went into France, and, as it’s reported, brought two or three vessels with people to settle there, which (if true) will prove very inconvenient to us, but to the Spanish also (the river running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina into the Bay of Mexico); and it’s believed Nova Mexico cannot be far from the mountains adjoining it, that place being in 36° North Latitude. If your lordships thought it fit, I could send a sloop or two from this place to discover that river.”(205)
La Salle now conceived the plan of approaching the mouth of the Mississippi by sea, exploring the country, and founding powerful colonies therein. The evil reports of his enemies had preceded him to France, and these were strengthened by the disparaging representations which De La Barre, Frontenac’s successor as Governor of Canada, had been sending home. But the Marquis de Seignelay, the son of the deceased minister Colbert, again favored La Salle’s enterprises, and secured for them the favor of the king. The government provided a fleet of four vessels for the expedition: the Joly, a royal ship, a frigate of thirty‐six tons, commanded by Capt. de Beaujeu, a Norman gentleman, who was also commander of the squadron; the Belle, of six tons, a present from the king to La Salle; the Aimable, a store‐ship of three hundred tons burden, on board of which were the goods, implements, and effects of the expedition; and the St. Francis, a ketch containing munitions and merchandise for San Domingo. M. de Chevalier d’Aire was lieutenant to Capt. de Beaujeu, and the Sieur de Hamel, a young gentleman full of fire and courage, his ensign. Father Le Clercq, the narrator of the expedition, exclaims: “Would to God the troops and rest of the crew had been as well chosen!”
A new commission was issued to La Salle, by which he was authorized to found colonies in Louisiana, and to govern the vast country and its inhabitants from Lake Michigan to the borders of Mexico. The commander of the squadron was to be subject to his orders, except in navigating the ships at sea—an arrangement which the jealous and sensitive mind of Beaujeu permitted to embitter him against La Salle, and which led to difficulties between them. Besides marines and one hundred soldiers, the company to embark in the expedition amounted to about two hundred and eighty persons, amongst whom were several persons of consideration. The Sieur Moranget, and the Sieur Cavelier, nephews of La Salle, the latter only fourteen years old; Planterose, Thibault, Ory, Joutel, Talon, a Canadian gentleman with his family, and some other families, consisting of men and young women, also joined the expedition as volunteers. One of La Salle’s first cares was to provide for the spiritual wants of his followers and colonists and the conversion of the heathen nations he expected to visit. For ten years the zealous Recollect Fathers had seconded and promoted the efforts of La Salle to Christianize the natives of the New World, and he now made it an essential point to obtain some of these holy men to accompany his great expedition. His application to their superior, the Rev. Father Hyacinth le Febvre, was cordially complied with, and accordingly Fathers Zenobe Membré, Anastace Donay, and Maxime Le Clercq were selected from this order for the task. M. Tronçon, superior of the Sulpitians, was not behind the Recollects in zeal for the good work, and accordingly three secular priests, Cavelier, the brother of La Salle, Chefdeville his relative, and Majulle, were chosen. These constituted the ecclesiastical corps of the expedition. Nothing was left undone, either by the superiors of the Recollects or of the Sulpitians, nor by the Holy See, for carrying the faith of Christ to those remote and benighted regions. Ample powers and privileges were conferred upon the good missionaries, so as to relieve them from the necessity in emergencies of resorting to the distant ordinary of Quebec.
But in selecting soldiers, artisans, and laborers, the most culpable disregard of duty was chargeable to the agents of La Salle, who, while he was engaged at Paris, filled up the ranks by receiving from the streets of Rochelle worthless vagabonds and beggars, who were wholly ignorant of the trades for which they were chosen. La Salle was only partially able to remedy this evil before sailing. Bancroft thus describes the composition of this part of the expedition: “But the mechanics were poor workmen, ill‐ versed in their art; the soldiers, though they had for commander Joutel, a man of courage and truth, and afterwards the historian of the grand enterprise, were themselves spiritless vagabonds, without discipline and without experience; the volunteers were restless with indefinite expectations; and, worst of all, the naval commander, Beaujeu, was deficient in judgment, incapable of sympathy with the magnanimous heroism of La Salle, envious, self‐willed, and foolishly proud.” La Salle arrived at Rochelle on the 28th of May, 1684, and during his stay of some weeks the unhappy misunderstanding between him and the commander of the squadron, which proved so great a drawback on the enterprise, began to manifest itself. The four vessels sailed from Rochelle on the 24th of July, but the breaking of one of the masts of the Joly in a storm caused them to put in at Chef‐de‐Bois, and finally, on the 1st of August, they set sail again, steering for San Domingo. During the voyage to San Domingo, La Salle and Beaujeu could not proceed together with cordiality or harmony, and the former was unfortunate in gaining the ill‐will of the subordinate officers and sailors by interfering to protect his own men from what he regarded as an absurd and unnecessary procedure. It was the custom among sailors to require all who had not before crossed the tropic to submit to the penalty of being plunged into a tub of water by their veteran companions for the amusement of others, or pay liberally for a commutation of the penalty. La Salle peremptorily forbade his men being subjected to this alternative; hence the hostility of those who failed to realize the usual fun or fine at their expense. After a prosperous voyage a storm overtook the squadron as they approached San Domingo. It was agreed that the Joly should put in at Port de Paix in the north of the island; but Beaujeu changed his course of his own will, and carried her to Petit Gonave, far to the south. In four days the Belle and Aimable, which had been separated from her by the storm, joined her there. The St. Francis was surprised and captured by two Spanish pirogues, which was a serious loss to the expedition and a sore affliction to La Salle.
At Petit Gonave La Salle did all in his power for the relief of the sick. He was, however, stricken down himself by a violent illness that for a while rendered his recovery hopeless. He recovered in time sufficiently to attend to the prosecution of the voyage. He and Fathers Membré and Donay, Cavelier, Chefdeville, and Joutel, were transferred to the Aimable, and thus the two commanders were happily separated. In their misunderstanding Beaujeu was greatly at fault in accepting a command inferior to that of La Salle, as he well knew it to be, and in embarrassing by his petulant and jealous course an undertaking which his instructions and his obvious duty obliged him to promote. La Salle, too, would have acted more wisely and discreetly in conciliating one whose good‐will and co‐operation were so necessary to his success. The squadron, now reduced to three vessels, sailed from Petit Gonave on the 25th of November.
After pursuing their course safely along the Cayman Isles, and anchoring at the Isle of Peace (pines), where they stopped to take in water, and at Port San Antonio, in the Island of Cuba, they entered the Gulf of Mexico on the 12th of December. Sailing ten days longer, they descried land at once from the Belle and Aimable. So utterly unknown was the latitude of the coasts, and so erroneous the sailing information given to them at San Domingo, that no one could tell where they were; but it was conjectured after much consultation that they must be in the Bay of Appalachee, which is nearly three hundred miles east of the Mississippi. On the contrary, they were near Atchafalaya Bay, about one hundred miles west of the main mouth of the Mississippi. Guided by the general opinion as to their locality, they now coasted to the westward, going still further from the object of their search. No information could be obtained from the natives on the shore, and finally, after twenty days’ sailing, it was ascertained that they were approaching the borders of Mexico, near Magdalen River and the Bay of Espiritu Santo. The Joly now came up, and the unfortunate misunderstanding between La Salle and Beaujeu was renewed, in consequence of the latter charging that he had been designedly left behind. The superior sailing capacity of the Joly, and Beaujeu’s evident indifference about keeping company with the other vessels, flatly contradicted this irritating charge. All now desired to return in the direction of the Mississippi, except Beaujeu, who would not go without a new supply of provisions. La Salle offered a supply of fifteen days, the best he could do; but Beaujeu rejected the offer as insufficient. In the meantime the vessels proceeded twenty miles along the coast, reaching the outlet of the Bay of St. Bernard, to which La Salle gave the name of St. Louis, now called Matagorda Bay. Joutel and Moranget were sent to explore the bay, and afterwards La Salle joined them at a river they could not cross without a boat. The pilots having reported insufficient depth of water, the Aimable was lightened and her captain ordered to run her into the bay. The pilot of the Belle, knowing the harbor, was sent to his assistance; but the captain of the Aimable refused him admittance on board, saying that he knew how to manage his own ship. The Aimable was soon upon a shoal. She bilged, and was a ruin. A portion of the cargo was saved, Beaujeu himself sending his boats to assist, but most of the implements and tools intended for the colony were lost. There was no doubt, says Joutel, of the treachery of the captain of the Aimable in this affair. La Salle from the shore had the mortification of seeing all his orders disobeyed, and witnessed this deplorable accident to the store‐ ship. He was embarking, in order to remedy the false movements of his vessels, when over a hundred Indians made their appearance. First putting them to flight, and then offering them the calumet, he made them his friends. He also gave them presents, purchased some of their canoes, and all seemed to promise a lasting friendship, from which great advantages would have resulted to the expedition. But, alas! all upon whom La Salle had to depend did not possess his prudence nor always follow his injunctions. By the imprudence of some of his men a serious difficulty sprang up with the Indians. A bale of blankets from the wreck of the store‐ship was thrown ashore and seized by the Indians. La Salle ordered his men to recover it by peaceable means; but they pursued just the opposite course, by demanding its restoration with pointed muskets. They became alarmed and fled, but returned at night, and, finding the sentinel asleep, attacked the camp, killing the Sieurs Ory and Desloges, two of La Salle’s most valued friends, two cadets, and dangerously wounding Moranget. This and the numerous other disasters which they encountered caused many a heart that started out full of hope and courage to falter or despond, and many talked of abandoning the enterprise. But La Salle’s example of calm determination and unflagging spirit sustained them under the appalling gloom and ill‐luck that seemed to hang over the adventure. But Beaujeu, whose hostility to La Salle and his enterprise increased with the misfortunes of the latter, now resolved to return to France. All the cannon‐balls were in his vessel, and he refused to deliver them, because it would be necessary to remove a part of his cargo in order to get them out. Thus the cannons were left with the colony, and the balls carried back to France. He took on board the treacherous captain and crew of the Aimable, and the 12th of March sailed for France. In the meantime the company left at the fort sustained a severe loss in the death of the Sieur de Gros from the bite of a rattle‐snake. Also, a conspiracy was set on foot in the fort, with the design of murdering Joutel, and then escaping with such effects as they could carry off. But the designs of these traitors were discovered in time to be defeated. The colony now consisted of about one hundred and eighty persons besides the crew of the Belle, and their own faithful guns were their only means of obtaining food in that vast and distant wild. A temporary fort was erected with the débris of the Aimable for their protection, and Moranget was left in command of it. La Salle, accompanied by Fathers Membré and Le Clercq, started out with fifty men to explore the shores of the bay, ordering the Belle to sail along to make soundings. Anchoring opposite a point—where a post was established, to which Hurier gave his own name (being appointed to the command of it), serving as an intermediate station between the naval camp and that which La Salle intended to establish further on—in their course a large river was discovered, to which La Salle gave the name of Vaches, or Cow River, from the great number of cows he saw on its banks; and here the intended station was erected. Holy Week and Easter intervening, were celebrated with solemnity and fervor by these Christian colonists in the wilderness, “each one,” as Father Membré remarks, “receiving his Creator.” About the middle of July the entire colony, with their effects and whatever could be of service, were transferred to this encampment from those of Moranget and Hurier, which were destroyed. Here the men were employed in cultivating the soil and in sowing seeds brought from France, which, however, did not succeed, either because they had been injured by the salt water or because the season was not suitable. They were next engaged in erecting a habitation and fort, which was a work of huge labor and hardship, as the trees for the timber had to be cut three miles off and dragged to the spot, and many of the men sank under the toil. The Sieur de Villeperdy and thirty others were carried off within a few days by disease contracted at San Domingo, and among them was the master‐ carpenter, whose services could not well be spared. While under these calamities the spirits of all around him were sinking, La Salle remained firm and cheerful. Setting them the example himself, he kept all the healthy men at work. He took the place of architect and chief carpenter upon himself, marked out the beams, tenons, and mortises, and prepared the timbers for the workmen. The fort occupied an advantageous position, was soon finished, mounted with twelve pieces of cannon, and supplied with a magazine under ground. It was called St. Louis, and placed under the command of Joutel. The insolence of the Indians compelled La Salle to give them a proof of his power. For this purpose he waged war upon them, but only with sufficient rigor to make them respect him and his companions. Among the captives was a very young girl, who was baptized, and died a few days afterwards; of whom Father Le Clercq said: “The first‐fruits of this mission, and a sure conquest sent to heaven.”
Detained some time by the sickness of his brother, La Salle did not resume his exploration of the bay till towards the last of October, when, putting his clothes, papers, and other effects on the Belle, he ordered the captain to sail along the western shore in concert with his movements. Wishing to ascertain how near the shore the Belle could approach, he sent the pilot and five men to make soundings, with instructions that all should return on board at night. Attracted by the peaceful beauty of the country, and proposing to cook and enjoy the supper on shore, the pilot and five men, leaving their arms and canoe at low water, advanced a gun‐ shot on the upland. After their supper they fell asleep. La Salle, becoming uneasy at their absence, went in search of them, and to his horror found them all lying on the ground murdered, their bodies half devoured by wild animals, and their arms and canoe destroyed. It was with sad hearts that the survivors paid the last honors to their slaughtered companions; for disasters followed in such quick succession that no one could foresee the time or circumstances of his own fate. Of the colony now described Bancroft remarks: “This is the settlement which made Texas a part of Louisiana. In its sad condition it had yet saved from the wreck a good supply of arms and bars of iron for the forge. Even now this colony possessed from the bounty of Louis XIV., more than was contributed by all the English monarchs together for the twelve English colonies on the Atlantic. Its number still exceeded that of Smith in Virginia, or of those who embarked in the Mayflower. France took possession of Texas; her arms were carved on its stately forest‐trees; and by no treaty or public document, except the general cessions of Louisiana, did she ever after relinquish the right to the province as colonized under her banners, and made still more surely a part of her territory because the colony found there its grave.”
La Salle now determined to seek the mouth of the Mississippi by land around the eastern part of the bay. Leaving provisions for six, he set out with his brother, the Sieur Cavelier, and twenty men. He explored in canoes every stream that might prove an outlet of the great river, and was enchanted with the beautiful region which he traversed. But all was in vain. After an absence of four months, and satisfying himself that none of the outlets of the Mississippi emptied into the bay, and after losing twelve or thirteen of his men, he returned in rags to Fort St. Louis. He now sent out a party in search of the Belle, whose long absence caused him great uneasiness; for in her were centred all his hopes of reaching the mouth of the Mississippi by sea, of procuring assistance from San Domingo, or of sending information of their forlorn condition to France, or, perhaps, in his extremest necessity, of saving his colony from a horrid death by famine or at the hands of the savages.
La Salle, with his characteristic courage and perseverance, now resolved to undertake a journey to the distant Illinois, in order to obtain relief from the faithful Tonty, whom he had stationed there on departing for France. He selected as his companions on this dangerous and toilsome journey his brother, Cavelier, Father Anastasius Donay, Father Le Clercq, Moranget, Behorel, Hurier, Heins, a German surgeon who joined him at San Domingo, and Nika, the Indian hunter, who was ever at his side, and others, making in all twenty persons. The preparations for this great journey consisted of four pounds of powder, four pounds of lead, two axes, two dozen knives, as many awls, some beads, and two kettles. They first repaired to the chapel, where the Divine Mysteries were celebrated and the blessing of heaven invoked upon their undertaking. Committing the colony left behind to the care of Joutel, La Salle and his companions set out on the 22d of April, 1686, from Fort St. Louis. Their route lay in a northeasterly direction and through a country of immense prairies and mighty rivers, inhabited by various Indian tribes, who were exceedingly friendly and hospitable; even the women, who were usually timid and undemonstrative, coming forward to greet the wayworn, mysterious travellers. In some instances they found that the Indians had had some intercourse with the Spaniards. La Salle and the zealous Father Donay endeavored on every occasion to instil into their minds some knowledge of the one true God. It is supposed by some that La Salle was attracted in this direction by the fame of the rich mines of Santa Barbara, the El Dorado of Northern Mexico. They found large quantities of wild cattle, which supplied them with meat. They crossed numerous rivers, such as the Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity, which they knew by different titles, and upon which they bestowed new names in honor of members of the party. They endured incredible exposure, hardship, and toil, and many faltered and gave out under their sufferings. In crossing the Brazos (which they called the river Misfortune) on a raft of canoes, with one‐half of his party, including his brother, La Salle and his companions were hurried violently down the current, and almost immediately disappeared from sight. The interval between this and evening was one of intense anxiety to those who witnessed the accident; but at nightfall the raft and its occupants were discovered safely disembarked on the opposite bank, their onward course having been providentially arrested by the branches of a large tree in the river. Those who remained on the other side had to cross over and join La Salle on a raft of canes, the men having to wade into the water and draw the raft ashore. Father Donay says: “I was obliged to put my Breviary in my cowl, because it got wet in my sleeve.” He also says: “We had not eaten all day, but Providence provided for us by letting two eaglets fall from a cedar‐tree; we were ten at this meal.” The manner in which they crossed these mighty rivers was to make one of the men swim to the other side and fell trees across the stream, while those who remained did the same, so that the trees from the opposite sides, meeting in the centre, formed a bridge, upon which they crossed. This was done more than thirty times during their journey. The Indians were in most instances friendly and hospitable, and La Salle’s discernment and prudence always enabled him either to conciliate their friendship in the first instance, or to overcome by force of character and courage any hostile feeling they might exhibit. Many of the tribes displayed evidences of civilization in their dress, implements, and dwellings, and in the ease and cordiality with which they received and entertained strangers. Horses were abundant among them, and La Salle procured several, which proved of great service. Among the Coenis Indians they found Spanish dollars and smaller coins, silver spoons, lace, and clothes of European styles. One of the Indians became so enamored with Father Donay’s cowl that he offered the father a horse in exchange, but the good religious preferred to walk rather than to part with the cherished habit of S. Francis. After crossing the Trinity River La Salle and his nephew, the Sieur Moranget, were attacked by a violent fever, which brought them very low and greatly retarded their march. Just before this four of the party, unable to endure the fatigues and hardships of the journey, deserted and retired to the Nassonis Indians; another was swallowed by a crocodile while crossing a river; and Behorel was lost. Their powder now began to give out; they had not advanced more than one hundred and fifty leagues in a straight line, and one thousand miles of travel lay before them; sickness, delay, and desertions had impaired their ability to proceed; and they had no food except what the chase afforded. Under these circumstances La Salle resolved to return to Fort St. Louis. The extreme terminus of their travel is supposed to have been midway between the Trinity and Red Rivers, near the head‐waters of the Sabine, and fifty or sixty miles northwest of Nacogdoches. On the return the party were greatly assisted by the horses procured from the Indians. After a full month’s march they arrived on the 17th of October, the feast of S. Bernard, and were welcomed by their friends at the fort with mingled feelings of joy and sadness. Father Donay remarks: “It would be difficult to find in history courage more intrepid or more invincible than that of the Sieur de La Salle; in adversity he was never cast down, and always hoped with the help of heaven to succeed in his enterprises, despite all the obstacles that rose against him.”
Sad events awaited La Salle on his return. In a few days he saw to his astonishment a canoe approaching in which were Chefdeville, Sablonnière, and some others from the Belle. In this fact he read the sad story of the vessel’s destruction, which was soon confirmed by their own lips. That vessel, his last hope, had, by the negligence of the pilot, stranded on the beach of the southern coast of the bay. The returning men, providentially finding a canoe on the shore, were able to escape. In the Belle were lost thirty‐six barrels of flour, a quantity of wine, the clothes, trunks, linens, and most of the tools. Among the few things saved were the papers and clothes of La Salle. The good Father Le Clercq closes his narrative of this sad accident, which completely disconcerted all of La Salle’s plans, with the remark: “His great courage, even, could not have borne up had not God aided him by the help of extraordinary grace.” “Heaven and man,” says Bancroft, “seemed his enemies; and, with the giant energy of an indomitable will, having lost his hopes of fortune, his hopes of fame; with his colony reduced to about forty, among whom discontent had given birth to plans of crime; with no Europeans nearer than the river Panuco, no French nearer than Illinois, he resolved to travel on foot to his countrymen at the north, and return from Canada to renew his colony in Texas.”
During his absence Joutel had been under the necessity of guarding against savage attacks upon his hunting parties from without, and against disaffection from those within, the fort. The false Duhaut returned to the fort, where he incited the men to mutiny—a task of no great difficulty among men who had endured so many disappointments and hardships. And though Joutel succeeded in suppressing the mutiny, disaffection lurked behind. But the routine of the fort was occasionally relieved by gayety and merriment, as was the case on the marriage of the Sieur Barbier to one of the young women who came out with the expedition. The gentleness, prudence, and experience of Father Membré went far to ameliorate the condition of the company and make easy the duties of Joutel. Before leaving them, La Salle provided for the greater comfort and accommodation of those at the fort. As he was about to depart he was again stricken down with illness, and was retarded ten weeks.
On his recovery La Salle selected from seventeen to twenty companions, amongst whom were Father Donay, Cavelier the priest, young Cavelier the nephew, Joutel, Moranget, Duhaut, Larcheveque, Heins, Liotel, Toten, De Marle, Teissier, Saget, and the Indian hunter Nika. La Salle addressed them in thrilling and encouraging words, and, as Father Donay says, “with that engaging way which was so natural to him,” and on the 12th of January, 1687, their simple preparations being made, it only remained for them to turn their steps northward,
“And, like some low and mournful spell, To whisper but one word—farewell.”
As they journeyed on they had to cross many large rivers—resorting to the same means as in their trip towards New Mexico—and to traverse vast prairies, to visit and be entertained by the Indian tribes on the route, to conciliate their friendship, to secure most of their food by hunting, and, in fine, encounter similar scenes and incidents as on their previous excursions. On the 15th of March they arrived at a place where La Salle had caused a quantity of Indian corn and beans to be buried, and he sent Duhaut, Heins, Liotel, Larcheveque, Teissier, Nika, and his footman, Saget, for it. The corn and beans had disappeared, discovered, probably, by the unerring scent of the Indians; but the gun of Nika supplied their place with two buffaloes. They sent Saget to request La Salle to allow them horses to bring the meat, and he accordingly despatched Moranget, De Marle, and Saget with two horses for that purpose. On arriving at the scene Moranget found that the meat, though quite fresh, had been smoked, and that the men had selected certain parts of it and set them aside for their own enjoyment, as was usual with them. In a moment of anger Moranget reproved them, took away both the smoked meat and reserved pieces, and threatened to do as he pleased with it. Duhaut, in whose heart an old grudge against Moranget still survived, became enraged, and adopted the guilty resolve of ridding himself of his enemy. He enticed Liotel and Heins into a conspiracy to murder not only Moranget, but also Saget and Nika, whose faithful gun had so often saved them from famine. Liotel was the willing instrument to do the horrid deed; at night, while they were buried in sleep, he despatched his victims. A blow extinguished the life of Nika; a second that of Saget; but Moranget lingered for two hours, “giving every mark of a death precious in the sight of God, pardoning his murderers, and embracing them,” till De Marle, who was not in the plot, was compelled to complete the bloody tragedy.
“Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell! That my keen knife see not the wound it makes; Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry, Hold! hold!”
The bloodthirsty desperadoes did not, alas! stop at this triple murder; adding treason to their horrid purposes, they resolved upon the death of their commander, the great and good La Salle, who had ever been to them a father no less than a leader. Three days elapsed, and the dark purpose was only the more firmly fixed in their guilty souls. In the meantime La Salle became alarmed for the safety of Moranget, and, as if anticipating what had happened, he asked in the encampment if Duhaut and his associates had not shown signs of disaffection. He resolved at once to go in search of his faithful friend. The remainder of this bloody tragedy we will give in the language of Father Donay, who was an eyewitness of it:
“Asking me to accompany him, he took two Indians and set out. All the way he conversed with me of matters of piety, grace, and predestination; expatiating on all his obligations to God for having saved him from so many dangers during the last twenty years that he had traversed America. He seemed to me particularly penetrated with a sense of God’s benefits to him. Suddenly I saw him plunged into a deep melancholy, for which he himself could not account; he was so troubled that I did not know him any longer. As this state was far from being usual, I roused him from his lethargy. Two leagues after we found the bloody cravat of his lackey (Saget), he perceived two eagles flying over his head, and at the same time perceived some of his people on the edge of the river, which he approached, asking them what had become of his nephew. They answered us in broken words, showing us where we should find him. We proceeded some steps along the bank to the fatal spot where two of these murderers were hidden in the grass, one on each side, with guns cocked; one missed M. de La Salle, the other at the same time shot him in the head. He died an hour after, on the 19th of March, 1687.
“I expected the same fate; but this danger did not occupy my thoughts, penetrated with grief at so cruel a spectacle. I saw him fall a step from me, with his face all full of blood; I watered it with my tears, exhorting him to the best of my power to die well. He had confessed and fulfilled his devotions just before we started; he had still time to recapitulate a part of his life, and I gave him absolution. During his last moments he elicited all the acts of a good Christian, grasping my hand at every word I suggested, and especially at that of pardoning his enemies. Meanwhile his murderers, as much alarmed as I, began to strike their breasts and detest their blindness. I could not leave the spot where he had expired without having buried him as well as I could, after which I raised a cross over his grave.
“Thus died our wise commander; constant in adversity, intrepid, generous, engaging, dexterous, skilful, capable of everything. He who for twenty years had softened the fierce temper of countless savage tribes was massacred by the hands of his own domestics, whom he had loaded with caresses. He died in the prime of life, in the midst of his course and labors, without having seen their success.”
It has not been precisely ascertained where the place of La Salle’s death is located; but it is supposed to have been on one of the streams flowing into the Brazos, about forty or fifty miles north of the present town of Washington, in the State of Texas.
As soon as Father Donay re‐entered the encampment, the good and apostolical Cavelier, the brother of the deceased, read the sad tragedy in his friend’s countenance, and exclaimed: “Oh! my poor brother is dead.” The grief of Cavelier, Joutel, and the other faithful companions of La Salle was uncontrollable. When the assassins entered the encampment to plunder the effects of their murdered commander, they found these faithful men on their knees, prepared for death. But the sight of the venerable Cavelier, and perhaps some regret at the deed they had committed, stayed their bloody work; and these were spared, on condition that they would not return to France, though they several times afterwards heard the murderers say among themselves that they must get rid of them, in order to save themselves from the avenging arm of justice. The assassins seized upon the effects of La Salle, elected Duhaut their leader, and resolved to return to the Coenis Indians. During several days they travelled together, these wretches treating the missionaries and friends of La Salle as servants, imposing upon them every hardship in crossing the many rivers they encountered. “Meanwhile,” says Father Donay, “the justice of God accomplished the punishment of these men, in default of human punishment.” A dispute arose between Duhaut and Heins over the stolen property of La Salle, in which the various guilty members of their party took the one side or the other. Heins, two days afterwards, seizing the opportunity, shot Duhaut through the heart with a pistol in the presence of the whole company. He died upon the spot. At the same moment Ruter shot Liotel, the murderer of Moranget, who survived several hours; and, while thus lingering, another fired a blank cartridge near his head, which set fire to his hair and clothes, and he expired amidst the flames. Heins now assumed command, and would have killed Larcheveque, a third member of the band of assassins, but for the intercession of Joutel. On reaching the Coenis camp they found these warriors about to start with a large army against the Kanoatins, and Heins, dressed in the rich mantle of La Salle, to the great disgust of his surviving relatives and friends, went with them to join in fresh deeds of carnage and crime. Father Donay, Cavelier the priest, Cavelier the nephew of La Salle, Joutel, De Marie, Teissier, and a young Parisian named Barthelemy, now took their departure for the Illinois, and, after journeying till the 24th of July, they were greatly relieved at beholding on the opposite side of the river a large cross and log hut, at the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi, and in a few moments they were united with a small detachment stationed there by Tonty. After remaining a few days for rest and refreshment, they started again on the 1st of August, and on the 14th arrived at Fort Crevecœur, where they were led immediately to the chapel, and chanted the Te Deum, in thanksgiving for their safe deliverance from so many dangers, to which others had fallen victims. Tonty was absent from the fort on their arrival, on a visit to the Illinois; but on his return he received them with great kindness, and supplied them with every assistance. They concealed from the faithful and devoted Tonty the death of his beloved friend and commander. In the spring of 1688 they left the fort for Quebec, whence they sailed for France in August, arriving there in October.
The fort in St. Bernard’s Bay was, after the death of La Salle, attacked by the Indians, and the whole company massacred except three sons and a daughter of Talon and a young Frenchman named Eustace de Breman, who were led into captivity. The Spaniards also, hearing of La Salle’s movements and of the presence of Frenchmen among the Coenis Indians, sent out a military force, who captured Larcheveque and Grollet, who were sent to Spain, where for some time they were confined in prison, and afterwards sent to Mexico to work in the mines. The Talons were rescued and sent to Mexico. The two elder brothers entered the Spanish navy, but were afterwards restored to their country by the capture of their vessel. The younger brother and his sister were retained some time in the service of the Viceroy of Mexico, and afterwards accompanied him to Spain. Nothing further is known of Breman and the others who were taken captives by the Indians.
The will of La Salle, bearing date the 11th of August, 1681, leaves his property to his cousin, M. François Plet, in gratitude for his kindness and the assistance he rendered to the great explorer in his expeditions.
The following notice of La Salle is given by a Catholic writer:
“Robert Cavelier de La Salle, the first explorer who navigated Ontario, Erie, Michigan, and Huron, deserves to be enumerated among the great captains. A native of Rouen, early employed in the colonies, he had been instigated by the reports of missionaries to seek, through the northern lakes, a passage to the Gulf of Mexico. Building a schooner on the Cayuga Creek, he ascended the lakes in 1679, chanting the Te Deum Laudamus. Carrying his boats over land from the Miami to a branch of the Illinois River, he forced or found his way into the upper Mississippi. For many years, with most heroic constancy, this soul of fire and frame of iron was devoted to the task of opening routes between the Gulfs of St. Lawrence and of Mexico, until he perished in his enterprise by the hands of two of his own unworthy followers, on an excursion into Texas, in 1687. The Catholic character of La Salle is marked in every act of his life. He undertook nothing without fortifying himself by religion; he completed nothing without giving the first‐fruits of the glory to God. He planted the cross wherever he landed, even for an hour; he made the western desert vocal with songs, hymns of thanksgiving and adoration. He is the worthy compeer of De Soto and Marquette; he stood, sword in hand, under the banner of the cross, the tutelary genius of those great States which stretch away from Lake Ontario to the Rio Grande. Every league of that region he trod on foot, and every league of its water he navigated in frail canoes or crazy schooners. Above his tomb the northern pine should tower; around it the Michigan rose and the southern myrtle should mingle their hues and unite their perfumes.”(206)
In reviewing the history of the last great enterprise of this remarkable man, we can but recognize three principal reasons of its failure: first, the inferior character of the men selected at Rochelle by his agents to accompany the expedition—a cause of disaster which the virtues and capacity of a Tonty, Joutel, and Moranget could not neutralize; second, the hostility and narrow‐minded jealousy of Beaujeu, upon whose co‐ operation so much depended; and, third, the misinformation in regard to the Gulf of Mexico which he received at San Domingo, and the prevailing ignorance of the times of the bearings of the coast and of the latitudes, which caused his expedition to miss the object of its search. Mr. Sparks, while according to him the possession of the highest qualities of mind and soul, considered him wanting in those qualities which are necessary in order to secure the hearty co‐operation of men, to win their affections as well as their obedience, and, by yielding a little to their weaknesses, secure the benefit of their faithful services. It may be said, however, that no man ever had more faithful, self‐sacrificing, and devoted followers than he, and those who did not sympathize with him were too ignorant and sordid to appreciate his noble character or his magnificent plans. The learned historian at the same time remarks that La Salle labors under the disadvantage of having to be judged from the accounts of others, not all of whom were his friends, and knew little of his plans; for “not a single paper from his own hand, not so much as a private letter or a fragment of his official correspondence, has ever been published, or even consulted by the writers on whose authority alone we must rely for the history of the transactions in which he was concerned.”
Mr. Sparks then pays the following well‐merited and eloquent tribute to the character and services of the illustrious commander:
“On the other hand, his capacity for large designs and for devising the methods and procuring the resources to carry them forward, has few parallels among the most eminent discoverers. He has been called the Columbus of his age; and if his success had been equal to his ability and the compass of his plans this distinction might justly be awarded to him. As in great battles, so in enterprises, success crowns the commander with laurels, defeat covers him with disgrace, and perhaps draws upon him the obloquy of the world, although he might have fought as bravely and manœuvred as adroitly in one case as in the other. Fortune turns the scale and baffles the efforts of human skill and prowess. In some of the higher attributes of character, such as personal courage and endurance, undaunted resolution, patience under trials, and perseverance in contending with obstacles and struggling through embarrassments that might appall the stoutest heart, no man surpassed the Sieur de La Salle. Not a hint appears in any writer that has come under notice that casts a shade upon his integrity or honor. Cool and intrepid at all times, never yielding for a moment to despair, or even to despondency, he bore the heavy burden of his calamities manfully to the end and his hopes expired only with his last breath. To him must be mainly ascribed the discovery of the vast regions of the Mississippi Valley, and the subsequent occupation and settlement of them by the French; and his name justly holds a prominent place among those which adorn the history of civilization in the New World.”
The Log Chapel On The Rappahannock
Erected A.D. 1570—The First Christian Shrine In The Old Dominion.
Virginia is proud of her antiquity. She assumes the title of Old Dominion; she was long styled the Mother of Presidents. But really her antiquity is greater than many know. Before the English settlers landed on the shores of the James, Stephen Gomez and other Spanish navigators had entered the waters of the Chesapeake and consecrated that noble sheet of water to the Virgin daughter of David’s line, as the Bay of St. Mary, or the Bay of the Mother of God.
The soldier of the cross followed hard on the steps of the explorer. As early as in 1536 St. Mary’s Bay is laid down on Spanish maps. Oviedo mentions it in 1537, and from that time pilots ranged the coast, David Glavid, an Irishman, being recorded as one who knew it best. All agree as to its latitude, its two capes, the direction of the bay, and the rivers entering into it, identifying beyond all peradventure our modern Chesapeake with the St. Mary’s Bay of the early Spanish explorers. Though his attention was called to it, the latest historian of Virginia, misled by a somewhat careless guide, robs his State of the glory which we claim for her. The sons of S. Dominic first planted the cross on the shores of the Chesapeake, and bore away to civilized shores the brother of the chief of Axacan or Jacan, a district not far from the Potomac. Reaching Mexico, this chief attracted the notice of Don Luis de Velasco, the just, upright, disinterested Viceroy of New Spain—one of those model rulers who, amid a population spurred on by a fierce craving for wealth, never bent the knee to Mammon, but lived so poor that he died actually in debt. This good man had the Virginian chief instructed in the Christian faith, and, when his dispositions seemed to justify the belief in his sincerity and faith, the chieftain of the Rappahannock was baptized, amid all the pomp and splendor of Mexico, in the cathedral of that city, the viceroy being his god‐ father, and bestowing upon him his own name, Don Luis de Velasco, by which the Virginia chief is always styled in Spanish annals.
Meanwhile, Coligny’s French Huguenots attempted to settle Florida, but their colony, which was doomed to early extinction from its very material and utter want of religious organization or any tie but a mere spirit of adventure, was crushed with ruthless cruelty by Pedro Melendez, a brave but stern Spanish navigator and warrior, in whose eyes every Frenchman on the sea was a pirate. Soon after accomplishing his bloody work, which left Spain in full possession of the southern Atlantic coast, Melendez, who had sent out vessels to explore the coast, began his preparations for occupying St. Mary’s Bay. The form of the northern continent was not then known; much indeed of the eastern coast had been explored, but so little was the line of the western coast understood that on maps and globes the Pacific was shown as running nearly into the Atlantic coast, as may be seen in a curious copper globe possessed by the New York Historical Society, but which once belonged to Pope Marcellus II. Believing that the Chesapeake, by the rivers running into it, would easily lead to the western ocean, Melendez spent the winter of 1565 studying out the subject with the aid of Don Luis de Velasco and Father Urdaneta, a missionary just arrived from China by the overland route across Mexico. Combining all the information, he was led to believe that, by ascending for eighty leagues a river flowing into the bay, it was necessary only to cross a mountain range to find two arms of the sea, one leading to the French at Newfoundland, the other to the Pacific. To many this will seem wild; but it is evident that Don Luis referred to the great trail leading from the Huron country through the territory of the Five Nations to the land of the Andastes on the Susquehanna, by which the last‐named tribe sold furs on the upper lakes, which went down to the French at Brest on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while the upper lakes were the arm of the sea stretching westward, as was supposed, to China. An adventurous Frenchman, Stephen Brulé, some few years later followed this trail from the St. Lawrence to the Susquehanna. Melendez, however, misinterpreted it. To his mind the upper waters of the Chesapeake, the Potomac and Susquehanna, then known as the Espiritu Santo and Salado, were to be the great carrying place of eastern trade.
Anxious to secure for his own country so important a pass, Melendez, in 1566, despatched to St. Mary’s Bay a vessel bearing thirty soldiers and two Dominican Fathers to begin a station in Axacan or Jacan, near the Chesapeake. These pioneers of the faith were escorted or guided by Don Luis de Velasco. Of these missionaries we seek in vain the names. Perhaps their fellow‐religious now laboring on the banks of the Potomac will be stimulated to trace up these early labors of the sons of S. Dominic; though we must admit that Spanish chronicles do not speak of them with praise. In fact, they assert that these missionaries, corrupted by an easy life in Peru, had no taste for a laborious mission in Virginia, though perhaps they learned the real state of affairs in that land, and, taught by Father Cancer’s fate, felt that the attempt would be fatal to all. Certain it is that the whole party took alarm. They forced the captain to weigh anchor, and, leaving the capes on either hand, steer straight to Spain. The Dominican missions in Spanish Florida, which began with the glorious epic of Father Cancer’s devoted heroism, closed with this feeble effort to plant the Gospel on the shores of the Chesapeake; yet they, too, like the earlier discoverers, undoubtedly consecrated to Mary and the Rosary the land which in its names, Virginia and Maryland, yet recalls the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom the bay was first consecrated.
Four years later saw Melendez himself in Spain, full of his projects, and bent on carrying them out. The sons of S. Ignatius Loyola, full of the early vigor of their institute, were in Florida. The new mission, begun in 1566, had already a martyr in Father Peter Martinez, of Celda, in the Diocese of Saragossa, who was shipwrecked on the coast, and put to death by the Indians not far from St. Augustine. It had its devoted laborers in Father John Rogel, of Pamplona, Father Sedeño, and Brother Villareal, who sought to win to Christ the Indians near St. Augustine and Port Royal, and who had established an Indian school at Havana to help the great work, Brother Baez being the first to compile a grammar. To extend these missions as far as the Chesapeake was a subject which Melendez laid before S. Francis Borgia, then recently made general of the order, after having acted as commissary of the Spanish missions. A letter of S. Pius V. encouraged Melendez, and with the co‐operation of these two saints the projected mission to the Chesapeake took form at last. Perhaps some of the clergy in Maryland and Virginia remember the personal interest of these saints in the field where they are now laboring; but we fear that the fact has been forgotten. Let us trust that more than one church of S. Pius V. will be monuments of his interest in the land where the next pope that bore his name established the first episcopal see on the coast—that of Baltimore—and religion has taken such gigantic steps under the fostering care of Popes Pius VII. and Pius IX.
When the founder of Florida was thus earnestly engaged in Spain in promoting the spiritual welfare of the colony, Don Luis de Velasco, the Virginian chief, was still beyond the Atlantic, a grave, intelligent man of fifty, well versed in Spanish affairs, to all appearance a sincere and correct Christian and a friend of the Spaniards. With every mark of joy he offered to return to his native land of Axacan, and there do all in his power to further the labors of the missionaries who should be sent to instruct his brother’s tribe. So powerful a coadjutor was welcomed by all, and ere long Don Luis stood on the deck of a staunch Spanish ship, with a band of Jesuits destined to reinforce those already laboring on the Florida mission. This pious party consisted of Father Luis de Quiros, a native of Xerez de la Frontera, in Andalusia, with Brothers Gabriel Gomez, of Granada, and Sancho de Zevallos, of Medina de Rio Seco, all selected for the great work by S. Francis Borgia himself. In November the vessel anchored before the Spanish fort Santa Elena, which stood on the island of South Carolina’s famous Port Royal, that still bears the name of the sainted mother of Constantine.
The Jesuit mission of Florida had been erected into a vice‐province under Father John Baptist Segura. This estimable religious was a native of Toledo, who had, while pursuing his theological course of study, entered the Society of Jesus at Alcalà on the 9th of April, 1566. S. Francis, who knew him well, entertained the highest esteem for Segura’s virtues and personal merit, and took him from the rectorship of the College of Vallisoleta in 1568 to assume the direction of the vice‐province of Florida. For two years had he labored with sad discouragement in the forbidding field among the Floridian tribes, cheered by letters of his superiors rather than by any hope of success that as yet seemed to dawn on his exertions.
He was at Santa Elena when Father Quiros arrived, bearing the instructions for the establishment of the new mission on the shores of the Chesapeake.
That missionary had become discouraged and disheartened. All his labors and those of his associate missionaries among the Calos Indians, on the southern coast of Florida, had proved utterly unavailing. No impression could be made on the flinty hearts of those treacherous and cruel tribes, which, indeed, to the end resisted the calls of divine grace. The labors of the Jesuit missionaries on the coast of South Carolina were scarcely more encouraging. The attempts to civilize and convert found hearers only as long as food and presents were given.
Father Segura resolved for a time to abandon the unpromising field, and turn all their energies to an Indian school at Havana, where children from the Florida tribes could be carefully instructed, so as to form a nucleus for future Christian bands in their native tribes. But the voice of S. Francis recalled him to sterner labors, and he resolved to go in person to the new field opened to them in Axacan, where the influence of Don Luis and the character of the tribes seemed to promise more consoling results. He accordingly directed the experienced Father Rogel to remain at Santa Elena in charge of the missions there, and selected eight associates for his new mission. These were Father Luis de Quiros, Brothers Gabriel Gomez and Sancho Zevallos, already mentioned, with Brother Peter de Linares and John Baptist Mendez, Christopher Redondo, and Gabriel de Solis, who with Alphonsus, destined to be the sole survivor, seem to have been four Indian boys from their school at Havana, and regarded as novices, trained already to mission work as catechists. Such was the missionary party that was to plant the cross in Axacan and open the way for Christianity to China by a new route.
With the influence and support of Don Luis they would need no Spanish aid; and as experience had shown them that soldiers were sometimes a detriment to the mission they were intended to protect, these devoted missionaries determined to trust themselves entirely, alone and unprotected, in the hands of the Indians.
On his side Don Luis made every promise as to the security of the persons of the missionaries confided to his care by the adelantado of Florida. “They shall lack nothing,” he declared. “I will always be at hand to aid them.”
On the 5th of August, 1570, this little mission colony sailed from Santa Elena, and in that enervating heat must have crept slowly enough along the coast and up the Chesapeake; for it was not till the 10th of September that they reached the country of Don Luis, which is styled in Spanish accounts Axacan or Jacan.
Where was the spot termed “La Madre de Dios de Jacan”?—Our Lady of Axacan (or, as we should write it, Ahacan or Hacan). Precisely where no map or document has yet been found to show. It was evidently near the Susquehanna (Salado) or the Potomac (Espiritu Santo), the two rivers at the head of the bay known to Melendez, and by which he hoped to reach China. That it could not have been the Susquehanna seems clear from the fact that, being to the eastward, it would not naturally be the shortest route; and, moreover, that river was in those days, and till far in the ensuing century, held by a warlike tribe of Huron origin, living in palisaded towns, while the tribe of Don Luis, who dwelt at Axacan, were evidently nomads of the Algonquin race.
We are therefore led to look for it on the Potomac, the Espiritu Santo of the early Spanish navigators. The vessel that bore the devoted Vice‐ Provincial Father Segura and two other Spanish vessels some time afterwards ascended this river for a considerable distance to a point whence they proceeded to the country of Don Luis, which, as letters show, lay on a river six miles off, and which they might have reached directly by ascending that river, though it was always passed by the pilots, being regarded, apparently, as less navigable and safe. The Rappahannock at once suggests itself as answering the conditions required to explain the Spanish accounts.
On the Potomac there is to this day a spot called Occoquan, which is near enough to the Spanish Axacan to raise a suspicion of their identity. Not far below it the Potomac and Rappahannock, in their sinuous windings, approach so closely as to increase the resemblance to the country described.
The land that met the eyes of the missionary pioneers in the wilderness of Virginia was not one to raise fond hopes or sustain delusions. A long sterility had visited Florida and extended even to the Chesapeake. Its effects were even more striking. Of all that the descriptions of Don Luis had prepared them to find in Axacan there was absolutely nothing to be seen. Just come from Florida and its vicinity, with its rich, luxuriant vegetation, with fruits of spontaneous growth, they beheld a less favored land, bare and parched with a six years’ sterility, with the starving remnants of decimated and thrice decimated tribes. The wretched inhabitants looked upon Don Luis, their countryman, as if sent from heaven, and, seeing him treated with honor, they received the Spaniards with every demonstration of goodwill, though they were so destitute that they could not offer the newcomers any fruit or maize.
With the winter fast approaching, it seemed almost madness for Father Segura and his companions to attempt to establish themselves in this unpromising land; but the previous failure of the Dominican Fathers, the almost chiding words of S. Francis Borgia, and the deep interest manifested by Melendez in the success of the attempt, apparently decided the question against all ideas of expediency or mere worldly prudence.
The researches of the late Buckingham Smith in the Spanish archives not only brought to light many points tending to fix the position of Axacan, but were also rewarded by finding two letters written at this point by these early apostles of Virginia. The father provincial wrote to the king; his associate, Father Quiros, addressed his letters to Melendez, and Father Segura added a few words, urging prompt relief. These last have fortunately thus reached us. Father Quiros wrote: “Seeing, then, the good‐ will which this people displayed—although, on the other hand, as I said, they are so famished that all expected to perish of hunger and cold this winter, as many did in preceding winters, because it is very hard for them to find the roots on which they usually sustain themselves—the great snows which fall in this land preventing their search—seeing also the great hope there is of the conversion of this people and the service of our Lord and his Majesty, and a way to the mountains and China, etc., it seemed to the Provincial Father Segura that we should venture to remain with so few ship‐stores and provisions, though we ate on the way two of the four barrels of biscuit and the little flour they gave us for the voyage.”
They resolved to stay, seeing no danger except that of famine; for they urged speedy relief. “It is very necessary that you should endeavor, if possible, to supply us with all despatch; and if it be impossible to do so in winter, at least it is necessary that in March, or, at the furthest, early in April, a good supply be sent, so as to give all these people wherewith to plant.”
The pilot of the vessel, short of provisions from the time lost on reaching Axacan, put the missionaries hastily ashore on the 11th of September, and the next day sailed, “leaving us in this depopulated land with the discomforts already described,” say the missionaries.
It was arranged between the missionaries and this pilot that, about the time of his expected return, they would have Indians on the lookout, apparently at the mouth of the river, who were to build signal‐fires to attract attention. On seeing these beacons he was to give them a letter for the missionaries.
The little band of Christians beheld the vessel hoist her sail and glide down the river. They stood alone in a wild land, far from aid and sympathy. Two priests, three religious, Don Luis, and four other Indian converts, formed the little Christendom. But their destination was not yet reached. Guided by Don Luis, they took up their march for the river six miles off, Indians bearing some of their scanty supplies, the missionaries themselves carrying their chapel service, books, and other necessaries. After this portage they embarked on the river—which they might have ascended, and which seems evidently the Rappahannock—and thus penetrated some two leagues or more further into the country to the villages of the tribe.
Yet, even before they left the banks of the Potomac they were called upon to commence their ministry. “The cacique, brother of Don Luis, having,” says Father Quiros, “a son three years old very sick, who was seven or eight leagues from here, as it seemed to him to be on the point of death, he was instant that we should go to baptize it; wherefore it occurred to the vice‐principal to send one of us by night to baptize it, as it was very near death.”
The Indians on the Rappahannock did not dwell in palisaded towns, like the Conestogas on the Susquehanna, and their kindred, the Five Nations, in New York. From the Spanish accounts they dwelt in scattered bands, each forming a little hamlet of a few cabins, each house in the midst of its rude garden; for they cultivated little ground, depending on the spontaneous productions of the earth: acorns, nuts, berries, and roots. Such were they when Smith described them thirty years later, when Powhatan, residing on the James, ruled over the scattered bands as far as the Rappahannock. It was evidently among that tribe, so well known to us by Smith’s descriptions, that Father Segura and his companions began their labors, and Powhatan may well have been a son of the cacique, brother of Don Luis.
The accounts of the subsequent proceedings of the little mission colony are derived from Alphonsus, one of the Indian boys, and are somewhat obscure. They make the journey to the hamlets of the tribe a weary one through wood and desert and marsh, loaded with their baggage, and living on roots, and not the short journey which Father Quiros anticipated. His letter stated that the Indian canoes were all broken; it was probably found impossible to attempt to repair them, and the whole party trudged on by the riverside to their destination.
The hamlet first reached was a wretched one, tenanted only by gaunt and naked savages, who bore the famine imprinted on their whole forms. Here amid the tent‐like lodges of the Indians, made of poles bound together and covered with mats and bark, Father Segura and his companions erected a rude house of logs, the first white habitation in that part of America—first church of the living God, first dwelling‐place of civilized men; for one end was devoted to their chapel, while the other was their simple dwelling. Here doubtless, before the close of September, 1570, the little community recited their Office together, and, under the tuition of Don Luis, began to study the language. Here, at this modest altar, the Holy Sacrifice was for the first time offered by the two priests. Nowhere on the continent to the northward were the sacred rites then heard, unless, indeed, at Brest, in Canada. Greenland, with its bishop and clergy and convents, was a thing of the past; Cartier’s colony, on the St. Lawrence, had been abandoned. The Chapel of the Mother of God, at Jacan, was the church of the frontier, the outpost of the faith.
As Father Segura had foreseen that he must winter there, and might not receive any supplies before March or April, he doubtless began, like his Indian neighbors, to lay up a store of provisions for the long winter. Acorns, walnuts, chestnuts, and chinquapins were regularly gathered by the natives, as well as persimmons and a root like a potato, growing in the swampy lands. Game must have been scarce on that narrow peninsula between two rivers, and they had no means of hunting. Though the rivers of Virginia teemed with fish, we find no indication that the missionaries were supplied with means of deriving any food from that source.
For a time Don Luis remained with them, showing all deference and respect to Father Segura. In his letter to Melendez Father Quiros gives the impression he had made upon them up to that time, and from which it is evident that they had no suspicion of his treachery. “Don Luis,” says he, “acts well, as was expected of him, and is very obedient to all that the father enjoins on him, with much respect as well for the provincial as for the rest of us that are here, and he commends himself earnestly to your worship, to all his other friends and masters.”
This good disposition may have been sincere at first, but, as too often happens in such cases, old habits returned; he became Indian with the Indians, rather than Spanish with the Spaniards. Ere long he abandoned the missionaries altogether, and went off to another hamlet, distant from it a day’s journey and a half.
The mission party were not yet sufficiently versed in the language to dispense with the aid of Don Luis as interpreter, and his influence was constantly needed among the lawless natives. Feeling this, Father Segura several times sent one of the young men to urge Don Luis to return, but he put them off constantly with false statements or unmeaning promises. In this way the winter wore away, with gloomy forebodings in the hearts of the pioneer priests in the log chapel on the Rappahannock. The only hope that cheered and sustained them was that the ship would speedily return from Santa Elena with the supplies they needed for themselves and the seed‐corn for the natives, whom they hoped to persuade to cultivate more, and depend less on the precarious means of sustenance. Meanwhile, as January, 1571, was drawing to a close, Father Segura resolved to make a last effort to move the heart of the recreant Don Luis. He sent Father Quiros, with Brothers de Solis and Mendez, to the hamlet where he resided, to make a last appeal. The priest, who had so long known him, endeavored to recall him to higher and better feelings. The unhappy man made many excuses for his absence, and continued to beguile the missionary with promises; but his heart was given up to deadly malice. He had renounced Christianity, and doomed its envoys to death. As Father Quiros and his two companions turned sadly away to depart from the place and rejoin their suffering companions, a shower of arrows whizzed through the air. Quiros and his companions fell, pierced by the sharp flinty arrows of the apostate and his followers. Virginia had its first martyrs of Christ. Their bodies were at once stripped and subjected to all the mutilations that savage fancy inspired.
Father Segura, with the three brothers and two other Indian youths, had spent the interval in prayer, anxiety deepening as no sign of Father Quiros appeared. On the fourth day the yells and cries that were borne on the chilly air announced the approach of a large party, and in a short time Don Luis appeared, arrayed in the cassock of Father Quiros, attended by his brother, the cacique, and a war party armed with clubs and bows. He sternly demanded from the missionaries their knives and axes used for chopping wood, knowing that with them alone could they make any defence. These were surrendered without remonstrance. Father Segura saw that the end was come. The long‐delayed ship would be too late. He prepared his companions to die. They doubtless gathered around the altar where the Holy Sacrifice had just been offered. Then the apostate gave a signal, and his warriors rushed upon the defenceless and unresisting mission party, and slaughtered all but Alphonsus, who was protected by a brother of Don Luis, more humane than that fallen man.
The bodies of his victims, Father Segura, Brothers Gomez, Linares, and Zevallos, and the Indian novice, Christopher Redondo, were then, we are told, buried beneath their chapel‐house. The shrine of the Mother of God was doubtless pillaged, perhaps demolished; the lamp of Christian light was extinguished, and pagan darkness again prevailed in the land.
As nearly as could be ascertained, the martyrdom of Father Quiros occurred on Sunday, the 4th of February, 1571; that of Father Segura a few days later.
Why had their countrymen in Florida so cruelly neglected them, in spite of the urgent letters taken back by the pilot? It was probably because, Melendez being absent, the letters were sent to Spain, and the pilot did not fully reveal the destitute condition in which he had left the mission colony. Brother Vincent Gonzalez was urgent to bear relief to the vice‐ provincial, but he was put off with the pretext that no pilot could be found to run along the coast from Port Royal to the Chesapeake. It was not till spring that the good brother succeeded in getting a vessel and some Spaniards to proceed to the relief of his superior, as to whose welfare great anxiety was now felt. They ran up the Potomac, and reached the spot where Segura had landed. Indian runners had descried the vessel when it entered the river, and, when the Spanish craft came to anchor, Indians were there to meet them, and the garb of the missionaries was seen in the distance. But the treacherous red men failed to lure them ashore with this device, although some came forward, crying, “See the fathers who came to us. We have treated them well; come and see them, and we will treat you likewise.”
On the contrary, suspecting treachery from the fact that the pretended fathers did not hasten down to meet them, the Spaniards not only avoided landing, but, seizing two of the treacherous natives, sailed back to Port Royal.
Melendez, soon after returning from Spain, heard their report, and with characteristic energy resolved to punish the crime. Taking a small but staunch and fleet vessel, with a sufficient force, he sailed in person to the Chesapeake in 1572, bearing with him Father Rogel and Brother Villareal. He evidently ran up the Potomac, as the other vessel had done, to the spot already familiar to the pilots. Here he landed the Spanish soldiers, and unfurled the standard of Spain on the soil of Virginia. Marching inland, this determined man soon captured several Indians. They were interrogated, and at once confessed that the whole mission party had been cruelly murdered, but they laid the blame of the terrible crime on the apostate Don Luis. Apparently, by one of them Melendez sent word to the tribe that he would not harm the innocent, but he insisted on their delivering up Don Luis. But that false Christian, on seeing the Spanish vessel, fled with his brother, the cacique, and all attempts to arrest them failed. The brother who had saved the Indian boy Alphonsus, however, came forward to meet Melendez, bringing to him the only survivor of Father Segura’s pious band. The adelantado received him with every mark of pleasure.
From this boy was obtained a detailed account of all that had happened after the departure of the vessel which left the missionaries on the bank of the Potomac. The statement is, of course, the basis of all the accounts we possess of the fate of the log chapel on the Rappahannock and the little Jesuit community gathered to serve it.
The Spanish commander arrested a number of Indians; and when Alphonsus had pointed out those concerned in the tragedy, Melendez hung eight of them at the yard‐arm of his vessel. Father Rogel prepared them all for death, instructing them, we presume, by the aid of the young survivor, and had the consolation of baptizing them.
After this summary act of retributive justice, the founder of St. Augustine, with his mail‐clad force, embarked, and the Spanish flag floated for the last time over the land of Axacan.
Father Rogel was loath to leave the country without bearing with him the precious remains of his martyred brethren; but Melendez could not venture so far from his ship, and his force was too small to divide. The Jesuit Father could bear away, as a relic, only a crucifix which had been in the log chapel. Divine vengeance is said to have overtaken those who profaned the sacred vessels, and especially an attempt to injure this crucifix; first one, then two others, having been struck dead. It was subsequently placed by Father Rogel in the College of Guayala.
Some thirty‐five years later an English colony entered a river, to which they gave the name of Mary Stuart’s son. The Indians from that river to the Rappahannock were ruled by Powhatan; and it is worthy of remark that Raphe Hamor, one of the earliest settlers, states that Powhatan’s tribe were driven from their original abode by the Spaniards. They were Algonquins, and did not come from Florida. They were, in all probability, the very tribe among whom Father Segura laid down his life. Powhatan, represented as then a man of sixty, might, at twenty‐five, have witnessed or taken part in the martyrdom.
Such is the history of the first community of the Society of Jesus in the Old Dominion, of which they were the first white occupants. Dominicans began the work by converting Don Luis, Jesuits followed it up by actual possession, by erecting a chapel, by instituting a regular community life, by instructing, baptizing, and hallowing the land by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
The flag of Spain and the flag of England have alike passed away, but on the banks of the Potomac Jesuit and Dominican are laboring side by side three hundred years after the martyrdom of Segura, Quiros, and their companions.
Fredericksburg, which cannot be far from the early Chapel of the Mother of God, revives its name in her Church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception; and other churches of the same invocation seem to declare that, as of old, so now we may say, “This is indeed the Blessed Virgin’s land.”
New Publications
A LETTER ADDRESSED TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF NORFOLK, ON THE OCCASION OF MR. GLADSTONE’S RECENT EXPOSTULATION. By John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 9 Warren Street. 1875.
This Letter has two aspects. It is a reply on behalf of the Catholics of England to Mr. Gladstone’s charge. It is also a polemical pamphlet respecting a domestic controversy with other leaders of the Catholic body in England. In its first aspect it is not only masterly in style and argument, and marked with the evidence of rare learning, as anything from the author’s pen is sure to be, but, to a certain point, conclusive and unanswerable. It proves that Mr. Gladstone’s appeal to English Catholics to separate themselves from the doctrine and polity of their spiritual sovereign, the Pope, is an arrow shot in the air. It proves that his charge against the Catholic hierarchy of having changed in spirit and principle, in dogma and in action, in attitude and in aims, is baseless and absurd. It refutes the charge that Catholics are intellectually and morally in a state of servile bondage. Several other minor and incidental things are proved, and on the whole it makes an important point in the controversy about the relation of the Catholic religion to civil sovereignty, and the civil rights and duties of the temporal order, as distinct from the spiritual. It does not, and could not be expected to, establish the great fundamental truth opposed to Mr. Gladstone’s error, viz., the positive Catholic doctrine of the relation of the church to the state, in se, and the firm, immovable basis which that doctrine places for just political sovereignty and corresponding subjection to rest on, while securing the divine rights of the church and her members, and the duties correlative to those rights.
It is Dr. Newman’s misfortune that a base and dishonest act of some one of the pestilent set of detectives of the press, or the other sneak‐thieves who prowled about the purlieus of the Vatican Council, filching secret information in order to make eligible paragraphs in newspapers, placed him in a position before the world embarrassing both to himself and to many of his warmest friends. The embarrassment of which we speak did not imply any falling away from the faith of a Catholic or the holiness of a religious priest. Yet it left a sentiment of disappointment, which the present pamphlet does not altogether remove, that Dr. Newman failed to add lustre to his arms, instead of merely preserving unstained what he had already acquired.
The fading impression of this disappointment would have been wholly effaced if Dr. Newman had not, in his reply to Mr. Gladstone, renewed it by a certain manner of vague and general expression of discontent with a number of his fellow‐Catholics considered by him as extreme or injudicious in their doctrine, or way of expressing it, or their measures for promoting the growth of the Catholic Church. There may, very well, be individuals deserving his severe language. We have occasion in this country to lament at extravagant representations of Catholic doctrines, harsh and unjust censure of persons or opinions, and other excesses on the part of individuals professing to be specially orthodox and devoted to the Holy See. We think, however, that Dr. Newman’s language will be understood to apply generally to those persons and those writers for the press in England and Europe who were active and zealous in promoting the definition of infallibility by the Vatican Council. If it is true that it has this extension, we feel bound to express our painful sense of the wrong done to a body of the best and truest advocates of the Catholic cause who are to be found among our ranks.
In respect to the infallibility and supreme authority of the Pope, we consider that Dr. Newman, whose doctrinal soundness was always really unquestionable, has given new and explicit evidence which must satisfy every careful reader of the pamphlet who is competent to judge of theological matters. We have carefully scrutinized every phrase and proposition, and find nothing which in our judgment is contrary to Catholic doctrine. In respect to the theological opinions and the tone of argument and expression of the venerable and illustrious author, we think he is sometimes open to criticism, as at least ambiguous, if not inaccurate; and in respect to one point, which does not occur as a direct statement of opinion, but as a record of a doubt in his mind expressed in a letter to a friend written several years ago, viz., the famous question of “moral unanimity,” that the position there taken is altogether untenable.
Dr. Newman frankly assumes the rôle of a “minimizer,” in which his confrère, Father Ryder, figured with so much ability in his controversy with Dr. Ward. We have always thought that Father Ryder proved fairly that his own positions, essentially considered, are within the limits of that liberty of opinion which the Catholic doctrine permits. To a certain extent we approve of “minimizing.” That is, we approve of not exacting as a test of orthodoxy, and as per se obligatory under pain of sin, belief in more than the law certainly requires. But we are most cordially hostile to the system of economy in teaching and practice, which inculcates and recommends only the minimum in doctrine, pious opinion, or devotion. We do not attribute the advocacy of such a system to Dr. Newman, yet we think it important to caution the readers of his pamphlet against drawing such an inference from his language.
In speaking of the Syllabus, in particular, we fear that he has spoken in such a way that some readers will infer that they may disregard it altogether. He says it has no dogmatic authority. That it has not, by itself, the quality of a complete and independent dogmatic document, we may concede. It is a supplement to a whole series of doctrinal pronouncements, of the nature of a catalogue of the errors condemned in them. Yet all the errors enumerated are really condemned by virtue of the sentence pronounced against them in the whole series of pontifical acts. It is not lawful for any Catholic to hold any one of them. Their interpretation is to be sought, by those who are competent to do so, in the original doctrinal pronouncements of the Holy Father, and by the rest of the faithful in the explanation of their pastors, and others who explain them under their sanction. So also, although a condemnation of some particular system of mixed education—e.g., in Ireland—does not involve infallibility, but only authority to which obedience is due, yet an ex cathedrâ judgment of the Pope defining as a general proposition that mixed education is dangerous, is an infallible judgment on a question of morals.
Moreover, although the condemnation of errors frequently leaves a margin for discussion respecting the full import and extent of the condemned error and the precise limits of the contradictory truth which is affirmed, there is always something positively and certainly decreed, over and above the fact that there is an error of some sort. Frequently, the meaning is obvious; and, at least generally, it is soon settled by the agreement of theologians, so far as its essence is concerned. We cannot criticise in detail every particular statement or expression in this pamphlet which, in our view, falls short of a clear and unmistakable and complete expression of correct theological doctrine. Dr. Newman’s particular line has led through so many caveats, exceptions, limitations, so much subtle balancing of opposite weights, and of what he consents to call “minimizing,” with which ordinary readers are not familiar, that he leaves the impression that truth, infallible teaching, the authority of the church, even the Catholic faith, is something to be afraid of, to be guarded against, somewhat as Englishmen feel about a standing army. We would prefer that, instead of being apparently so solicitous to assure weak brethren and timid converts that they need not believe so much as they are afraid of being made to, he would speak out with a more clear, ringing, and full note of his own peculiar, unequalled melody, to persuade and encourage them to believe and confide in the church of God and in their prelates, joyously, fearlessly, enthusiastically, with the noble spirit worthy of the children of God. We do not like to hear our enemies call Dr. Newman the head of a party of liberal Catholics in England, and set him over against his archbishop, and pervert his language into a weapon against the Council of the Vatican. We do not like to have to vindicate him from the praise of anti‐Catholic writers, and to qualify the approbation which we would like to give to the productions of his subtile and erudite genius by “minimizing” criticism. He once wrote of himself,
“Time was, I shrank from what was right, For fear of what was wrong.”
Something of the same mood seems to have come over his sensitive heart in his seclusion from active, ecclesiastical life, during the Council of the Vatican, and to have not quite withdrawn its penumbra. We are reminded of S. Gregory Nazianzen, complaining of councils and of S. Basil, as he went away weary from Constantinople into retirement; and of S. Colman, gathering up his relics to quit Lindisfarne and escape from S. Wilfrid. These were weaknesses of saints, but still weaknesses, and it was their heroism and not their weakness which made them worthy of our veneration. We trust that Dr. Newman will remember that there are some others to be thought of besides those who are weak in the faith and his own petite clientele in England; and that he will not close his career without one more deed of prowess, which shall discomfit the enemies of the Holy See and the Catholic faith, and show that his pennon still flutters beside those of his fellow‐champions.
FATHER EUDES, APOSTOLIC MISSIONARY, AND HIS FOUNDATIONS, 1601‐1874. By the Chevalier De Montzey. With a brief of approval from his Holiness Pius IX. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1874.
We have read this book with pleasure, and have been glad to learn something of the Congregation of Eudists—one which deserves especial honor for its loyalty to the Holy See and the glorious death of some of its members at the massacre of the Carmes in Paris during the French Revolution. The author, who is a grand‐nephew of Father Eudes and of the famous historian Mezeray who was his brother, is a soldier by profession, and his style has a freshness and novelty about it quite refreshing in hagiography, and contrasting very favorably with some other specimens, which reflect more credit on the piety than on the literary qualifications of their writers. Father Eudes was originally an Oratorian; but after the death of Father de Condren, when the Oratory became infected with Jansenism, he left it to found a new congregation of priests, living in community without religious vows, and devoted to missions and the instruction of young ecclesiastics in seminaries. He was a truly apostolic man, and his work was crowned with success. Dispersed by the French Revolution, his congregation has been since revived, and appears to be at present chiefly engaged in the work of secular education. The history of the French Oratory is both singular and instructive. An institute formed by Cardinal de Berulle, and including among its members such men as Malebranche, Massillon, Mascaron, Father de Condren, and Father Eudes, would seem to have promised a most complete success. Yet it perished utterly and ignominiously through the deadly contamination of Jansenism. It has been restored within a few years past, and is now as strongly marked by fidelity to the Holy See and to the spirit of its saintly founders as it was by faithlessness to both in the period of its dissolution. Yet its past history will ever remain a grave and warning lesson of the deadly effects of tampering or compromising with unsound doctrines, and deviating into new and dangerous ways. Father Eudes succeeded in accomplishing what the founders of the Oratory attempted but did not carry out, though at the cost of much persecution, and in a way comparatively obscure and humble. His character was an original and admirable one, his institute seems to have been judiciously and solidly organized, and we both trust and desire that his successors may carry out the excellent work which he commenced to the most ample results. We recommend this life particularly to all who are engaged in similar undertakings.
THE RELIGIOUS STATE ACCORDING TO THE DOCTRINE OF S. THOMAS. By Jules Didiot, D.D. Translated from the French. London: Burns & Oates. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
THE PERFECT LAY‐BROTHER. By Felix Cumplido, S.J. Same publishers.
THE MISTRESS OF NOVICES ENLIGHTENED UPON HER DUTIES. By M. L’Abbé Leguay. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.
The first of these three books, specially intended for religious, needs no other recommendation than its title. The second is considered by the Jesuits to be one of the best of its kind, and is equally useful for that most excellent class of religious persons, the Lay‐Sisters, as for brothers. The third will be welcome to the ladies in charge of the numerous and crowded novitiates which are the most beautiful feature in our American Catholic Church, and, from the recommendations it has received, we have no doubt will prove satisfactory, though we have not had time even to glance at its contents.
MARGARET ROPER. By Agnes Stewart. London: Burns & Oates. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Miss Stewart is one of our best female writers. The sketch she has given of Margaret Roper, in her usual felicitous style, is in the main historical, with a little fictitious coloring to give it life.
CHARACTERISTICS FROM THE WRITINGS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. Arranged by W. S. Lilly, with the author’s approval. New York: Scribner, Welford & Armstrong. 1875.
The American publishers have imported their edition at the retail price of $2.50. It is a London‐printed book, which is all that need be said for its typography. The selections are miscellaneous and made with taste and discrimination. The volume must be welcome to thousands of admirers of the matchless writings of a man who is one of the modern glories of English literature, as well as one of the brightest ornaments of religion and the church in the present century. One of the best portraits of Dr. Newman which we have seen, an admirably‐executed engraving from a recent photograph, is a welcome addition to the volume.
THE COMPLETE OFFICE OF HOLY WEEK, according to the Roman Missal and Breviary, in Latin and English. New and revised edition. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.
This little book will be found very useful to those of the laity who have an opportunity of attending the Holy Week services, and it will also be interesting to those who may wish to know what those services are which so occupy the church during the “Great Week,” as the work contains all the devotions of Holy Week, with the day and night office. There is an abundance of spiritual reading in the Scripture lessons and prophecies, so that those whose duties prevent them from attending the services may reap much profit by a perusal of the offices at home. Each day is preceded by an Introduction, explaining the meaning of the principal ceremonies. There is also added the ritual for the blessing of the holy oils, which is performed by the bishop on Holy Thursday.
PEACE THROUGH THE TRUTH. SECOND SERIES. PART I. By Rev. J. Harper, S.J. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This ponderous volume is employed with the topic of the Levitical impediments to matrimony, and its weight of learning and argument is in proportion to its size.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRITUALISM, AND THE PATHOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF MEDIOMANIA. Two Lectures. By Frederic R. Marvin, M.D., Professor of Psychological Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence in the New York Free Medical College for Women. Read before the New York Liberal Club, March 20 and 27, 1874. New York: Asa K. Butts & Co., Publishers, No. 36 Dey St. 1874.
Asa K. Butts & Co. have published this small book with a long title in a very cheap and economical manner, very well suited to its scientific and literary value. It is decidedly the production of a medio‐monomaniac.
ON THE WING: A SOUTHERN FLIGHT. By the Hon. Mrs. Alfred Montgomery, author of The Bucklyn Shaig, _Mine Own Familiar Friend_, The Wrong Man, etc. London: Hurst & Blackett. 1875.
Those of our readers who enjoyed this “flight” during the summer and autumn in the pages of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will need no assurance from us regarding the pleasure of the trip. To others we will simply say that the volume contains some admirably‐told travelling experiences, graphic descriptions of Italian life and scenery, together with romantic episodes in which sundry characters, real or imaginary, pass through a variety of piquant incidents.
ANNOUNCEMENT.—In addition to the new serial already commenced in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, we shall begin in the April number the publication of another story by the author of “Laughing Dick Cranstone,” “How George Howard was Cured,” etc.
[Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]