The Catholic World, Vol. 26, October, 1877, to March, 1878 (part 2 of 6)

The Catholic World, Vol. 26, October, 1877, to March, 1878 (part 2 of 6)

Compostella had now bishops worthy of their sacred dignity. In 1056 Cresconius, who then ruled the diocese, presided, at a council held there, in his quality of bishop of the Apostolic See. Rome thus exercised her influence, and this influence was so salutary that Pelago, a near successor of Cresconius, desired to give it a larger place in his church. He laid aside the Mozarabic Rite and adopted the Roman in the celebration of Mass and the recitation of the Canonical Hours, accepting at the same time all the Roman rules on important matters of sacerdotal discipline. And Compostella had not long to wait before receiving the recompense of her submission and good-will. In 1075, the same year in which Ferdinand took Toledo, the see of Santiago (for this had become the name of the town), which had hitherto been suffragan to Merida, was raised to the metropolitan dignity.

We have now reached the period in which, thanks to the liberality of the faithful, the cathedral of Compostella was not only raised from its ruins, but entirely rebuilt on a larger scale and with much greater splendor. Gemirez, the first archbishop of Santiago, was one of its greatest prelates.

The work of reconstruction, which had been commenced about the year 1082, he not only actively continued, but also proposed to the chapter to build cloisters and offices, as well as commodious lodgings for those who came on pilgrimage from distant lands, engaging for his part to pay a hundred marks of pure silver towards the expense.

The sole aim of this prelate was the glory of God and the honor of St. James, never his own worldly advantage; the people knew this, and that the use made of their offerings was always in conformity with their intentions. The times, however, were troubled, and the archbishop had his share of their disquiet.

Queen Urraca, the sister of Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, and widow of Raymond of Burgundy, claimed as her right, until her son should be old enough to reign, the government of Castile and the countries dependent on it, while her second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, repudiated these pretensions. Gemirez, whose influence was so great that he might be regarded as the real sovereign of the country, took the part of Urraca, and her cause prospered for a time, owing to the weight of his support; but she ruined her own case by her haughtiness and ambition; a rebellion broke out, and the prelate narrowly escaped falling a victim to the fury of the populace, who set fire to the cathedral. Happily, the solidity of its structure was such as to resist the flames, the interior wood-work and fittings, etc., only being destroyed, so that not many years afterwards, in 1117, we find the archbishop, in an address to his canons, able to speak of it as one of the richest and most beautiful as well as one of the most illustrious churches in the world.

In 1130 Gemirez ended his career, but not until he had lived to see the work far advanced towards its completion. We hear no more of its progress for forty years afterwards. The crosses of the consecration, which are still to be seen, are floriated at their extremities, and between the arms are the sun and moon above, and the letters [Greek: A Ô] below, some of them bearing also a date which appears to be that of 1154.

The pilgrims, who came in continuous multitudes, had innumerable perils to encounter on their way. The roads were bad; the countries through which they passed often so barren and thinly peopled that they were in danger of dying of hunger; the highways so infested with brigands that in those days they were avoided as those in the East had been in the time of Deborah, every one seeking rather the by-ways, which were also beset with obstacles of all kinds. St. Dominic of Calzada had done well to make roads and build bridges, but something was still wanting to his work, and that was the safety of those who travelled by them, and who were constantly liable to be attacked and despoiled by the infidels, to be taken captive, and condemned to slavery or death.

This state of things could not be allowed to continue. The Moors had their rabitos, or armed fakirs—a sort of warrior-monk—to protect their pilgrims and defend their frontiers; the religious and military orders of the Templars and Knights of St. John were covering themselves with glory in the East, and Spain could not fail to profit by these examples. The canons of St. Eloi had recently founded a chain of hospices, reaching from the frontiers of France to Compostella, specially destined for the reception of pilgrims, the most considerable being that of St. Mark, on the borders of Leon. These places of refuge, which were productive of the greatest good, were richly endowed by various princes; but even this was not enough: some brave noblemen of Castile resolved to devote their whole life to the defence and protection of the pilgrims. They placed their possessions in one common stock, and, joining the canons of St. Eloi, dwelt with them in a convent not far from Compostella. Being advised by Cardinal Jacinthus to go to Rome and obtain from the Pope the confirmation of their institute according to the rule of St. Augustine, they charged Don Pedro Fernandez de la Puente with this embassy, and obtained a bull, dated July 5, 1175, which regulated their manner of life, their duties, and their privileges, and created, under the title of Knights of St. James, a military order, of which Don Pedro was the first grand master. They wore a white tunic, with a red cross in the form of a sword on the breast. Their principal house was at first the hospice of St. Mark; but the castles and domains which were made over to them from time to time were so numerous that their riches became almost incalculable, and their influence and importance increased in proportion. They established themselves at Uclès, the better to carry on the warfare against the infidel, whose terror they had become. We soon find them a power in the state, the grand master taking rank with kings, and at times appearing to rule them. Even the simple knights had great privileges. It was not until the reign of Ferdinand that, owing to the skilful management of Isabella, the power and influence of the order began to decrease.

Our notice would be incomplete without a few words on the subject of the miracles which took place at the tomb or by the intercession of the apostle. The countless favors which have rendered many a chosen sanctuary justly illustrious will never be known; indeed, their absence would make the continual faith of the people—always asking and never receiving; always believing, and yet to be ever disappointed and deceived—not only inexplicable but impossible, whereas it was absolute and complete; but exaggeration, which, even in the world of ordinary facts, so frequently goes hand in hand with truth, plays still more freely with facts which are beyond and above the events of daily life, and, not being satisfied with the simple beauty of miraculous deliverances, it must fain make marvels still more marvellous—quit the domain of faith for that of myths and chimera. A MS. of the monastery of La Marcha is full of the recital of prodigies which a faith the most robust would nowadays find it difficult to accept; and Cæsar of Heisterbach tells us that a young man of Maestricht having been condemned and hung on a false accusation, commending himself to St. James, was preserved alive a whole month hanging from the gibbet, where his father found him safe and sound at the end of that time. Whereupon the people of Toulouse, jealous of the glory which the renown of this announcement gave to St. James of Compostella, attributed to their St. James a miracle exactly similar.

In numerous instances the accounts of the dead restored to life have nothing impossible or exaggerated about them, and often in their pathos and simplicity remind one of those mentioned in the Gospel narrative; for instance, a poor woman, by the intercession of St. James, obtained a son, who became not only her greatest comfort, but in time her only support. He fell ill and died. With a breaking heart the mother hastens to the apostle’s tomb, and in her agony of desolation mingles reproaches with her prayers and tears, asking the saint why he had won for her the blessing she had desired, only to let her lose it when her need was greatest, and herself a thousand times more sorrowful than before; and then, full of faith, entreated him to obtain from God the life of her son. Her prayer was granted, and, returning home, she found the youth restored. But of a very different character is the extraordinary legend related by Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, and which we quote as a curiosity. A certain pilgrim was on his way to Compostella to perform penance and obtain the pardon of a crime he had committed. On the road the enemy of mankind appeared to him under the form of St. James, and, telling him that his sin was far too great to be remitted by a simple pilgrimage, insisted that there was only one means of obtaining mercy, and that was by the sacrifice of his life; he must kill himself, and then all would be forgiven him. The pilgrim, who believed that he was listening to St. James in person and was bound to obey him, stabbed himself and died, a victim to the fraud of the demon. He appears before the tribunal of God, and there Satan claims him as his prey by a double title: first, because of the old crime, which had not been remitted; and, secondly, because of the new one of which he had been guilty in committing suicide. In vain the poor man pleads that he had acted in good faith and in the simplicity of his heart; he was in great danger of being condemned. But St. James hears what is going on and hastens to the scene. He does not intend that the evil one should take his form and name to deceive his pilgrims and then have all the profits, and pleads that the only way to do perfect justice in the affair is to put everything exactly as it was before Satan had so odiously meddled in the matter, and to send back the soul of the unfortunate man into his body again. This representation, being just, was acceded to, and the resuscitated pilgrim continued on his way to Compostella, where he confessed with great contrition and was absolved of all the sins of his past life.

We must, however, leave the realm of legend and return to historical facts. The anchoretic life was at an early period introduced into Europe from the East, and Spain appears to have been a land where hermits especially abounded. We often find them mentioned as coming on pilgrimage to Compostella, as St. Simeon and St. Theobald in the twelfth century, St. William somewhat later, and St. John the Hermit, who built near the cathedral a place of shelter for pilgrims, where he himself received them, rendering them all the offices of Christian hospitality.

Another William also came hither on pilgrimage, who was an illustrious personage, though not a hermit; this was the Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, whose past life had been anything but exemplary. In Normandy and elsewhere he had been guilty of grievous misdemeanors, for which he desired to do penance before his death; and, more than this, he did his utmost, by good and upright administration, to repair the evil he had done before. For this reason Hildebert, Bishop of Mans, was not well pleased at his setting out for Spain, and wrote to him as follows: “We are told, most noble count, that you have undertaken a pilgrimage in honor of Blessed James. We do not desire to deny the excellence of this, but whosoever is at the head of an administration is bound to obedience, nor can he free himself therefrom without deserting his post, unless, at least, he be called to one of greater usefulness. Wherefore, very dear son, it is an inexcusable fault in you to have preferred that which is not necessary before that which is—repose rather than labor, and, instead of duty, your own will.” But the great prelate would probably have been less severe could he have foreseen the holy death of Count William, who, on Good Friday, after having received the Blessed Sacrament, peacefully rendered up his soul to God before the altar of St. James.

About the same time a young maiden of Pisa, afterwards St. Bona, came to Compostella, and there received singular favors and graces. Sophia, Countess of Holland,[38] journeying thither also, fell into the hands of robbers, and through one whole night found that she had nothing to expect but spoliation and death. In the morning their resolution was changed; they threw themselves at her feet and entreated her pardon, allowing her to proceed unharmed on her way. After visiting the tomb of St. James the princess went to Jerusalem, there to spend the remainder of her life.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century pilgrims from all lands had become so numerous that it was frequently impossible, especially on the feast of the patron saint, for all to find even standing-room in the cathedral. The tumult was indescribable, and did not always end outside the doors. On some occasions there were not only blows but bloodshed, so that Pope Innocent III. wrote to the archbishop, saying that his church had need of reconciliation, and the ceremony was performed with water, wine, and blessed ashes.[39]

Alman-Zour, as we have previously mentioned, had caused the bells of Compostella to be carried to Cordova on the backs of Christian captives. In 1229 Ferdinand, who had united under his sway the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, made the conquest of Cordova, and, finding the bells in the great mosque, he inflicted retaliation on the infidels by compelling them to carry them, on their shoulders, back to the place whence they had been taken two hundred and sixty years before.

After Louis VII. of France had been on pilgrimage to Compostella, we hear of several other sovereigns from time to time who did the same, among whom was St. Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal. The Frieslanders, who had a great devotion to St. James, and attributed to his aid a victory they had gained over the Saracens, visited his tomb in immense numbers; the English did the same, and from the time of Edward I.’s marriage with Eleanor of Castile, having stipulated for the safe-conduct of their pilgrims, they arrived in such multitudes that the kings of France became uneasy at so great a concourse, and made an agreement with the king of England that his subjects should obtain permission of them before proceeding to Compostella. In 1434 this leave was granted to about two thousand five hundred persons.

These were the palmy days of pilgrims, who were not only well received at Santiago, whither they brought activity, riches, and life, but they were everywhere sheltered and protected. No cottager was too poor to offer them a resting-place or to share his loaf of hospitality with them. A pilgrim was not only a brother come from perhaps some far distant land to do honor to Monseigneur St. James, but he was also, in those days when postage was unknown, the walking gazette, who brought the news of other countries, and enlivened with his narratives and conversation the hearth of the poor as of the rich.

From the time of the Reformation pilgrimages began to decrease. England and Germany were the first to discontinue them. France showed herself less fervent as soon as the spirit of rationalistic philosophy had infected the upper classes of her people, after which the Revolution carried down the lower ranks into the gulf of irreligion. The wars of the empire, the spoliations of which Napoleon’s generals were guilty, and consequently the deadly hatred which they evoked against their nation in the heart of every Spaniard, struck the last blow at these pious journeyings. Only the inhabitants of the country continued to visit the shrine of their apostle, and even they by degrees lost the habit. Pilgrims are nowadays but few, excepting only on the feast of the patron, and they have ceased to be popular at Santiago. If they chance to be poor, the townspeople turn a deaf ear when they ask an alms “for the love of St. James”; or, should they be rich, seek only to turn them to account and to lighten their purses.

Although greatly fallen from its ancient splendor, Santiago, formerly the capital of Galicia, and now the simple chief town of a judicial circuit, still has importance in the ecclesiastical order. Her archbishop is, by right, the first chaplain of the crown, and her cathedral still subsists in its integrity. She has two collegiate and fifteen parochial churches, though her numerous convents, pillaged in 1807, and subsequently despoiled and suppressed, are at the present time inhabited dwelling-houses, destined to inevitable ruin, and throwing an additional shadow into the general air of melancholy which now hangs over this old city.

There are but few public buildings of antiquity or interest. The streets, with their dark and narrow archways, all start, like the threads of a spider’s web, from the one centre occupied by the cathedral. Everything wears an aspect that is sombre, damp, and cold, augmented by the hue that the granite, of which most of the edifices are built, takes under a climate of such humidity that it has given rise to the disrespectful saying that this city is the sink of Spain. And yet the site is picturesque. Seen from the neighboring heights, Santiago, itself also built upon an elevation, with its ancient buildings, walls, and towers, presents a very striking appearance, and to any one who mounts the towers of the cathedral the grand girdle of mountains encircling the horizon affords a spectacle that well repays the trouble of the ascent.

We are in the great square, and facing the western front, containing the principal entrance of the building, which occupies the middle of a long architectural line, having at its left the episcopal palace, melancholy enough and not in any way remarkable, and at its right the cloister, with its turrets and pyramidal roofs, and its long row of arched windows. This is not the cloister of Gemirez, of which nothing remains, but was built in the sixteenth century by Archbishop Fonseca, who furnished it with a fine library, and also added the chapter-house and other dependencies of the cathedral. The cloister is one of the largest in Spain, half Gothic in style, and half Renaissance.

This western entrance, between the cloister and the palace, is called El Mayor or El Real—the great or royal entrance; not that it merits the title from any particular artistic beauty, but rather from a certain effective arrangement. The four flights of steps, two large and two small, ascend very picturesquely from the square to the doors of the cathedral, allowing a procession to spread into four lines, while above rise the lofty towers, curiously adorned with columns, vases, balustrades, and little cupolas. You see at once that you are not beholding a work which dates from the construction of the building, although the towers are ancient up to the height of the church walls, but the upper portion is much more recent, and the same is evident of the façade, which occupies the space between the towers.

Proceeding onwards to the left, we follow a vaulted passage of the twelfth century, bearing the stamp of ancient simplicity, until we reach the Plaza San Martino, the north side of which is formed by the vast convent of St. Martin, where, on the centre of the front, are placed, mounted on their chargers, the two warrior saints of France and Spain. Here is the market-place, whither those should come who wish to study favorably the picturesque costumes of the peasants of Galicia, and, it might be added, to hear cries more shrill and louder vociferations than it would be supposed possible for ordinary human lungs to send forth. Before appearing at market the sellers of fruit and vegetables make an elaborate toilette, which must be not only neat but effective, those who are unable to comply with its requirements remaining at home. Side by side with the splendid fruits of Galicia, and fish from river and sea, rosaries, medals, and the scallop-shells of St. James are offered for sale.

The building forms a beautiful cross, of which the arms are nearly equal to the upright, the transepts having a great development. The arrangement follows that of most of the churches in Spain, the choir being in the nave and ending where the transept begins. The aspect of the latter is particularly grand, being less interrupted than the view along the nave, as the eye easily penetrates the light trellis-work which makes a passage across it from the choir to the Capilla Mayor. The rounded arches of the three roofs are evidently of the close of the eleventh or the commencement of the twelfth century. The pillars of the aisles, with their capitals sculptured in foliage, are light and graceful, contrasting pleasingly with the heavy mass of the edifice. The triforium, which runs round the nave, is composed of semi-circular arches, each containing two smaller ones which spring from a slender column in the centre. The east end remains as it was, with the chapels radiating from it, but the pillars and arches of the choir have undergone great alterations. The Silleria, or enclosure of the choir, is ornamented by a series of religious subjects carved by Gregorio Español in 1606. Many of the windows of the cathedral are very fine.

Beneath the Capilla Mayor is situated the great object of the pilgrimage—the subterranean chapel containing the tomb of St. James and those of two of his first disciples. The famous statue of the apostle is in the Capilla itself, above the great altar, which remains as it was in the time of Alman-Zour. This is a monumental altar of richly-wrought marble, ornamented with incrustations of silver, the working of which occupied no less than twenty years. It is surrounded by an enclosure of open metal-work, gilt, adorned with vine-branches and surmounted by an immense hojarasco, or canopy, which has little to recommend it in an artistic point of view, being carved and gilt in the height of the style churrigueresque. This serves as a dais to the statue, and is supported by four angels, about whose ponderous forms no remnant of celestial lightness lingers. Even the statue itself, before which kings and princes have knelt, is not free from the faults of style inevitable to the period. The apostle is seated, and holds in his right-hand the pilgrim’s staff, with a gilded gourd and wallet (cum baculo perâque), and in his left a scroll inscribed with the words, Hic est corpus Divi Jacobi Apostoli et Hispaniarum Patroni. He wears on his shoulders the pelerine, or pilgrim’s mantle, embroidered with gold and precious stones. This cape has the form of those worn by cardinals, and has replaced the ancient one of gold, which was carried off by Marshal Ney.

It is a high honor to be allowed to say Mass at the altar of the great patron. Bishops and canons only have the right. On grand occasions it is splendidly adorned; the four statues of kings which stand behind that of St. James then support another small image of the apostle of exceeding richness, having a nimbus of emeralds and rubies, and which is placed in a shrine of wrought gold and silver of wonderful delicacy. This beautiful custodia, which is nearly six feet high, was finished in 1544 by Antonio d’Arphe, and is in the style designated by the Spaniards Plateresque.

Pilgrims are admitted to pay their homage to St. James by mounting some steps behind the altar to kiss the cape or mantle of the apostle, as at Rome one kisses the foot of St. Peter. There is another resemblance also to St. Peter’s at Rome in the long range of confessionals, dedicated to different saints, and served by priests speaking different languages; for it is not until after confession and communion that the pilgrim can be allowed any right to the title, or receive his brevet or Compostella, which is a declaration written in Latin, and signed by the canon-administrator of the cathedral, that he has fulfilled all his duties. These documents are frequently found among family papers, and in certain cases constitute a title without which such or such possessions could not be claimed.

The treasures of St. James of Compostella were formerly renowned throughout the world; but there seems to have been some exaggeration respecting their immensity, as, from all the objects of which the French plundered the cathedral in 1809, they obtained no more than 300,000 francs. There still remain various rare and curious things—reliquaries, statues, sacred vessels, etc.—some of which are of great value and antiquity; amongst others a crucifix containing a fragment of the true cross, and which is of exquisite workmanship, being also one of the most ancient specimens of chasing known. The cross is wrought in gold filagree, enriched with jewels, and resembles that of Oviedo, which is said to be the work of angels. It bears the inscription: “Hoc opus perfectum est erâ LXOO. et duodecimâ. Hoc signo vincitur inimicus. Hoc signo tuetur pius. Hoc offerunt famuli Dei Adefonsus princeps et conjux.”

Among the chapels must be noticed the Capilla del Pilar, dedicated to Our Lady in memory of her apparition to St. James. This, which is behind the high altar, and rich in precious marbles and jasper, was founded by Arthur Monroy, a rich Mexican prelate, whose kneeling statue on his tomb has a fine and attractive expression. Many of the other chapels are also remarkable; that of the kings of France, of the Conception, of the Relics, etc.

Let us add to these riches of the old cathedral a large concourse of worshippers at all the services, a people profoundly religious, a magnificent ceremonial, the officiating archbishop surrounded by his clergy, grand and solemn music swelled by the multitudinous voices of the faithful; let us imagine a vast procession beneath these vaulted roofs, and the trembling light of the tapers illuminating the sombre walls as the seemingly interminable train of choristers, clergy, and people pass along, and we shall have evoked a scene which, though its like may be witnessed in other lands, still bears in Spain a peculiar stamp of gravity and fervor, and possesses the earnest features and the vigorous relief of which the Spanish artists knew the secret, and which they have reproduced on their canvas in warm shadows and golden lights.

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A SWEET REVENGE.

I.

Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte is a dull little town, situated in Cotentin, that long eastern strip of the coast of Normandy which extends directly in front of the lovely isles of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark. Cherbourg lies to the north of it, but we only mention that fact en passant; for the incident related in these pages occurred long before the Second Empire, long before Cherbourg attracted visitors to admire its naval displays, long before railways had shortened distances and brought the Cotentinians within daily hearing of their “ne plus ultra” of cities—inimitable Paris. The little towns then slumbered peaceably amidst their corn-fields and apple-orchards; and none slept sounder than Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, whose very existence was scarcely known beyond the limits of its native district. It was remarkable, indeed, for nothing; its church was old and fine, as most French provincial churches are; the open space around it formed the market-place, deserted and silent except on market-days; and the Grande Rue contained the one hostelry of the town—the Hôtel Royale—and various stores.

But there were also a few cross-streets, interspersed with flowery, bowery gardens, and it is in a house situated in one of these that our scene is laid. It was a plain, unpretending dwelling, but large and exquisitely neat. It had the widest local reputation of being the snuggest in winter, the coolest in summer, and the most hospitable at all seasons of any in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte—nay, in the whole stretch of Cotentin! The garden behind it, too, was famous; the owners, M. and Mme. Dupuis, cultivated it themselves with rare enthusiasm and taste. Alphonse Karr’s world-celebrated flowers would have been considered pale and scentless beside Mme. Dupuis’—at least, by the Cotentinians. And the fruits—the peaches and green-gages, the pears and grapes—it was not believed possible that the like could be found even in Paris. Let us add that, when in their first flush of ripeness and bloom, the greater portion of these carefully-tended flowers and fruits were culled by Mme. Dupuis’ own hands, and sent forth to carry light and beauty, perfume and freshness, into every sick-room of the little town.

The Dupuis were a thoroughly worthy couple; they had married young, for love, and had been blessed with an only child, a daughter, good and pretty as her mother, and, like her mother, wedded early and happily.

When the episode in their lives which is the subject of this little story took place, they had passed together thirty years of tranquil, uneventful felicity. M. Dupuis had shortly before sold his business—he was a notary—and was now enjoying a well-earned rest. He was a man of sixty, well-educated, intelligent, and still strong, active, and enthusiastic. His plump little wife had just completed her fifty-fifth year—she did not appear to be forty-five. She was of a deeper, more thoughtful nature than her husband, but nevertheless her sympathy with him was unbounded—she loved all he loved, the same people and the same things. She was the type of a true wife and of a true Christian.

Too modest and timid to have any personal pretensions, Mme. Dupuis’ great pride lay in her well-ordered home, her exquisitely clean house, her nicely-arranged kitchen, and, though last, certainly not least, in her cook and housemaid, whom she considered absolutely unparalleled in their several vocations. And it must be allowed that Jeannette and Marianne had, during twenty years, fully justified their mistress’ good opinion of them. During all this time the two women had constantly studied her every wish, and the result was the perfection of domestic economy.

The family party was completed by a large white Angora cat, promoted since the marriage of Mlle. Dupuis to the enviable position of “pet of the household,” and universally considered in Cotentin to be the most remarkable animal of its species.

II.

One winter’s evening, when the snow lay deep in the streets and the north wind whistled fiercely around the eaves, M. Dupuis’ dining-room looked particularly cheerful. The heavy tapestry curtains were drawn close before the windows, and a flaming wood fire showered sparkles of reflected light on the crystal and silver placed on the round dining-table, and lighted up the portraits of some sober-looking personages in powdered wigs which adorned the walls. The handsome tortoise-shell and copper clock, a masterpiece of the style Louis Quinze, standing on a hanging shelf above the sofa, was, perhaps, the best article of furniture in the room; the chimney-piece was too encumbered with porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, and china jars filled with artificial flowers and covered with great glass globes, for the taste of the present day. Fashion had slumbered in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte for many a long year. But there was light and warmth, and a pervading feeling of comfort, worth all the gilded, satin-covered chairs and lounges that Parisian taste can devise, all the Venetian mirrors and Sevres vases that luxury can afford. Mme. Dupuis’ dining-room was certainly rococo and provincial, incongruous in some respects, deficient in harmony, but what sincere, cordial hospitality those four walls had witnessed! what pleasant repasts! what real good, wholesome eating! what merry toasts had been drunk there in claret, in sherry, and champagne—wines as bright as Mme. Dupuis’ eyes, and as pure and unadulterated as her heart!

A second clock, a very ugly one it must be confessed, a representative of the bad taste of the First Empire, which stood in the centre of the already too encumbered mantel-shelf, marked five minutes past six, and Mme. Dupuis was seated at the head of her dining-table. She was neatly dressed in black silk; her dark brown hair, streaked here and there with silver threads, was arranged in simple bandeaux on each side of her temples, and a small lace cap trimmed with a few knots of pink ribbon concealed the paucity of the “back hair”; for Mme. Dupuis was behind her time. She had not “marched with her age,” and had not yet learned to wear a “switch.”

M. Dupuis, somewhat old-fashioned in his attire, but scrupulously neat, sat opposite to her. At an equal distance from each was placed a gentleman as old apparently as the ex-notary, but infinitely more pretentious in his style both of dress and manner. His coat and trowsers were of Parisian cut; his beard in the latest mode; his voice dictatorial—a man of the world evidently, and evidently also accustomed to think more of himself than of any one else. The little party was busily engaged in the agreeable duty of eating sundry “plats” which diffused a most appetizing odor. Marianne, madame’s right hand and faithful aid during many long years, waited at table, while the beautiful Angora sought its fortune around and under.

“Well, it happened just as I tell you,” said Mme. Dupuis, as she handed her guest a delicious-looking chop—“it happened just as I tell you, M. Rouvière. I believed that he had gone crazy—completely crazy; get down, puss! He came rushing up-stairs, four steps at a time, crying at the top of his voice, ‘It’s Tom! it’s Tom Rouvière, that fellow Tom!’ Excuse me, M. Rouvière, but that’s his word, you know. As for me, I followed, stumbling as I went along, killing myself trying to make him hear that it was much more likely to be M. du Luc in his new carriage; for I knew through Mme. le Rendu that M. du Luc was to dine to-day at Semonville, and, as he never passes through Saint-Sauveur without stopping to wish us good-day, I had every reason to believe....”

“O my dear Reine!” interrupted M. Dupuis, “what necessity is there for telling all that to Rouvière? He knows nothing about M. du Luc and Mme. le Rendu; how can all that interest him? Besides, you know that M. du Luc never has post-horses to his carriage, so it could not be he.”

“But I believed it was,” replied madame.

“Allons! never mind now, dear,” returned her husband, “but do keep your cat off; she is teasing Rouvière.”

“Puss! puss!” cried Mme. Dupuis, “come here and behave yourself, do. Now, George,” she continued, “you must acknowledge that it was much more natural that I should expect to see M. du Luc, our country neighbor, than M. Rouvière, whom I did not know, and from whom you had never heard for more than thirty years—really, now. What do you say, M. Rouvière? You shall be judge.”

M. Rouvière, who during this dialogue had been silently eating and drinking with evident appetite, looked up from his plate with an expression of impatience anything but flattering to the lady.

“Of course you are right, madame,” replied he sharply; “of course you are right. But, God bless me, madame, I really believe that your chops are fried with crumbs!”

Poor Mme. Dupuis started at this abrupt interpellation; her good-tempered smile vanished; one might have fancied there was a tear in her eye as she answered gently: “I am so sorry! It was I who made Jeannette crumb them. I thought they would be more delicate.”

“What heresy!” exclaimed Rouvière. “My dear lady, nobody now fries chops in crumbs, just as nobody now wears leg-of-mutton sleeves! Gracious heavens! Providence has granted you one of the very best articles of food that the culinary art is acquainted with—real, genuine, pré-salé mutton, pure Miels mutton—and you fry it in crumbs—you actually dare to fry it in crumbs! Parbleu! I have sailed round the world, but I had to come to Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte to see Miels mutton fried in crumbs.”

“How sorry I am!” cried poor Mme. Dupuis humbly. “Let me help you to some sole, M. Rouvière. We have a market for fish only once a week, but, as M. Dupuis is very fond of fish, I have made an arrangement with a fisherman from Porthail, so that we have a little extra ‘plat’ every Wednesday, and as, most fortunately, to-day happens to be Wednesday....”

“Oh! come, Reine,” interrupted M. Dupuis, who had been listening with a very vexed expression of countenance to what was passing between his wife and his friend, “don’t go on with all these details; what interest can they have for Rouvière? Well, Tom, tell me, now, where were you eight days ago at this very hour?”

“Eight days’ ago, George,” said Rouvière, and he stopped eating to reflect—“eight days ago I was in Dublin.”

“In Dublin!” exclaimed Dupuis admiringly. “What a fellow!”

“From Dublin,” continued M. Rouvière, “I went to London, and from London to Jersey, and from Jersey—here!”

“And was it when you got to Jersey that the happy thought occurred to you to come and stir up your old friend?” asked Dupuis; and his bright, soft eyes rested affectionately on Rouvière’s face.

“Yesterday morning, my dear boy,” replied Rouvière. “There was a map of Normandy hanging up in the hall of the hotel where I was staying, and I was looking at it almost mechanically, when suddenly I came across the name of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. ‘Saint Sauveur-le-Vicomte!’ I repeated two or three times to myself. ‘Isn’t that the name of the little town where George Dupuis used to live—my friend George? I’ve a mind to go and dine with him, if he be still alive.’”

M. Rouvière seemed to be looking for something on the table as he finished these words. Mme. Dupuis, watching every feature, anxiously inquired what he wanted.

“Some lemon, madame, for this sole,” replied he. “Marianne—I think I heard you call her Marianne,” he added, turning towards his hostess—“Marianne, haven’t you a lemon?”

“Here is one,” exclaimed Mme. Dupuis, rising hastily and running to the sideboard. “Now tell me, M. Rouvière,” she said with her pleasant smile, as she laid the lemon by his plate, “have you really been going up and down the highways and by-ways of the world during thirty long years, just like the Wandering Jew?”

“I have indeed, madame,” replied her guest, squeezing the lemon-juice out over his sole.

“You must have eaten some strange things in your travels,” continued the lady.

“I rather think so,” replied Rouvière, with his mouth full of fish; “things you never heard of! Marianne, my good girl, I smell coffee roasting in your kitchen. Now, nearly every one, especially here in the provinces, roasts it too much—all the aroma is driven off; run quick, that’s a good lass, and tell the cook—Jeannette, isn’t it?—that the coffee must only be toasted—just scorched. Do you understand, eh?”

“Yes, yes, I understand well enough,” muttered Marianne as she went out; “that fellow seems to like nothing!”

“My dear lady,” went on Rouvière, turning to Mme. Dupuis, “the very accident I feared for your coffee has happened to your chicken—it is cooked too much, or rather it has been cooked too fast. It is a great pity, for it was an excellent fowl!”

“Oh! dear, oh! dear,” exclaimed Mme. Dupuis, who was beginning to feel a kind of despair thus far unknown to her. All her dinners hitherto had been subjects of compliment; this was quite a new experience. “Oh! dear, oh! dear, how many misfortunes at one time. Pray excuse me, M. Rouvière; you came so unexpectedly, you know. We had no time to do things well. But do, pray, stay a few days with us, and you shall see. I promise you that everything shall be better.”

“Impossible, madame,” replied the guest, as he accepted a fine snipe done to a turn; “you are very kind, but at nine o’clock this evening I must be on the road again. Yes, madame, you may well say that I have eaten strange things,” he continued, raising his voice. “I’ve eaten kouskoussou under the Arab’s tent; curry—that incendiary curry—on the shores of the Ganges; I’ve dined off the frightful tripang in Java; and in China on swallows’ nests stewed in castor-oil!”

“Good gracious!” ejaculated Mme. Dupuis.

“What a wonderful fellow!” exclaimed M. Dupuis enthusiastically.

M. Dupuis was unwontedly silent; he was evidently exceedingly annoyed, and it was pitiful to see the deprecating glances his little wife directed towards him from time to time. He, however, kept his eyes fixed steadily on his plate.

“In Panama,” went on Rouvière, “I’ve eaten roasted monkey. But what need to enumerate? There’s nothing edible in creation that I have not swallowed. So that I believe I may say,” here he bowed thanks for a second snipe, “there does not exist a man under the firmament of heaven easier to satisfy than myself. The Rocky Mountain Indians—those Indians are most extraordinarily sagacious—the Rocky Mountain Indians, I say, gave me a surname while I was among them—‘Choc-ugh-tou-saw,’ which signifies good-humored stomach, because I was always satisfied with my dinner!”

“What a wonderful fellow!” reiterated Dupuis. “Come, Tom, try this Burgundy; your throat must be dry. What a wonderful fellow, to be sure!”

“Do let me prevail on you to take another snipe,” said Mme. Dupuis, holding up to the guest’s acceptance a third fine, fat bird; “I’m so glad to find that you like them!”

“No, madame, no, a thousand thanks. Yes, I don’t deny that I am fond of snipes, but, I’m sorry—I can’t deceive you—these are not just what they ought to be. In the first place, they have not been killed long enough; and, secondly, you have forgotten to pepper them—a process absolutely necessary with game. But, excuse me, for the last half-hour I’ve been looking at that covered dish, wondering what there is in it. I really don’t believe that I have ever felt more curiosity in the whole course of my life; excuse me, I must look into it.”

He raised the cover as he spoke, peering in with eyes and nose.

“In the name of all the saints, what is it?” he exclaimed, as he contemplated the contents and sniffed up the steam.

“My dear friend,” answered Dupuis, a little nervously, “it is something I had concocted on purpose for you—it is macaroni.”

“Macaroni! That macaroni!” shouted Rouvière, as if never more surprised in his life.

“Yes, M. Rouvière,” explained Mme. Dupuis, no longer smiling, poor little woman! “This dish was inspired by George’s friendship. He remembered that you were very fond of Italy, so I sent in haste to the grocer’s; he fortunately had still a small quantity of macaroni on hand, and then, with the help of my cookery-book—for Jeannette couldn’t manage it—I made you a plat à l’italienne.”

“A l’italienne!” repeated George’s old friend with a sneering laugh. “My dear, good lady, that’s not macaroni à l’italienne! Oh! no, no. However, who knows?—it may be good to eat all the same. Let us try!” So saying, M. Rouvière helped himself to a spoonful, while his hosts looked on anxiously.

“Well, how do you like it?” asked George, when the taster, after many grimaces, had got down a mouthful.

“Like it!” replied Rouvière, “why, not at all; you might as well try to masticate organ-pipes! It really is something remarkable; it’s fossil macaroni, petrified macaroni! The grocer who sold it to you deserves the jail; I shouldn’t wonder if he belonged to some secret society!”

“Marianne, quick! change M. Rouvière’s plate,” said Dupuis sharply—for the old servant was gazing at her master’s friend with a very unmistakable expression of disgust on her honest face. “My dear Tom,” he continued, “what a bad dinner you have made!”

“You are jesting,” replied Rouvière carelessly; “at all events, your wine is capital.”

“I don’t know what to say,” sighed poor Mme. Dupuis. “I feel ready to die with vexation. But, dear M. Rouvière,” with a pretty supplicatory gesture, “do, I beg and pray of you, do taste my rice-pudding.”

“Very willingly, my dear lady,” answered the terrible guest—“very willingly; only let me first finish eating these green peas, which have been very well preserved, and would be really perfect had the cook spared her butter a little!”

At this moment the church bells began to ring the Angelus, and Mme. Dupuis rose precipitately from the table.

“You will pardon my leaving you to finish dinner with George,” said she to Rouvière; “I shall be back long before you go.”

“Surely you are not going out such an evening as this!” exclaimed Rouvière. “Why, there’s a foot deep of snow in the streets!”

“My wife goes to church every evening, winter and summer, at the Angelus, no matter what the weather,” remarked George. “She has done so for nearly fifty years, and nothing will break her of the habit now.”

“Ah! very well,” returned Rouvière. “I hope you like your pastor, Mme. Dupuis?”

“Oh! yes, indeed I do,” replied the good little woman enthusiastically; “he is a most worthy man. Do stay twenty-four hours longer with us, M. Rouvière, and I will ask him to dine with us; you will be glad to know him, I am quite sure.”

“So am I,” returned her husband’s old chum, with the little sneering laugh which seemed to be natural to him; “but I must wait for another opportunity.”

“Now, George,” said Mme. Dupuis, as she tied her wadded hood and slipped on the cloak and india-rubber shoes which had been placed ready for her on a chair, “do beg your friend to taste the rice-pudding; and, M. Rouvière, do try my preserves. I make them myself, and I really believe that they are excellent. Good-by for the present!”

“Good-by, madame.”

“Hem! hem!” ejaculated Rouvière as the door closed behind the lady, “so! so! Now let us look at this rice. Your wife’s given to piety, eh, George?”

“Yes, she is a religious woman,” replied George slowly; then added, with some slight eagerness in his manner, “but she never imposes her opinions upon any one. She never teases me, I can assure you, although I do happen to be somewhat lukewarm about church matters. But tell me, Tom”—here M. Dupuis hesitated and appeared embarrassed—“don’t you find her very provincial, very rustic?”

“Oh! no, not at all,” answered Rouvière in a tone which seemed to imply the contrary of his words.

“Yes, you do—I know you do!” cried George passionately. “But what can you expect? It’s not her fault! She has lived in this hole all her life. And your unexpected visit has excited her—upset her. She really talked as if she did not know what she was saying—such nonsense, such silly gossip!”

“Oh! no, not at all,” repeated Rouvière, as he steadily devoured the rice-pudding.

“Parbleu! yes; don’t deny it!” cried Dupuis peevishly. “It made you nervous—I saw it did. It irritated me, I know: it really seemed as if she was trying to show you her defects. It vexed me more, too, because she really has many good qualities—admirable qualities, poor little woman!”

“My dear George,” returned Rouvière, pushing away his plate and coolly wiping his mouth with his napkin, “I don’t doubt it in the least; her rice-pudding is certainly delicious.”

Dupuis at this moment caught sight of the pretty Angora with one soft white paw laid in silent petition on his friend’s knee. His irritation, with difficulty kept under so far, instantly boiled over on the head of the innocent cat. “Get down!” he roared, “get down, you brute! I’ll drown that beast one of these days! Take that animal away,” he continued, turning angrily towards Marianne, who had just brought in the coffee; “if she comes into this room again, I’ll throw her out of the window!”

“Come to me, pussy,” said Marianne in an extra-gentle tone of voice, taking the cat in her arms and kissing it; “these Parisian gentlemen don’t like you, it seems. A regular Turk he is, too, turning the house topsy-turvy,” she muttered as she went out of the room, scowling over her shoulder at the visitor.

Rouvière had risen from the table during this episode, and, tongs in hand, was busy with the bright wood fire. He smiled maliciously when the cat was carried away, and, as if in very lightness of heart, broke forth in song:

“‘O bell’ alma innamorata! O bell’ alma innamorata!’ Tell me, George,” he interrupted himself to say, “have you a good theatre here in Saint-Sauveur?”

“A theatre? That’s an idea! Well, yes, we have a theatre once a year, on the fair-day at mid-Lent!”

“That’s too bad!” laughed Rouvière. “How on earth do you contrive to get through your evenings?”

“Well, in winter,” answered George, “we chat by the side of the fire, or my wife and I play at piquet; sometimes two or three neighbors come in, and then we have a game of whist!”

“Phew!” whistled the man of the world. “With the curé, I’ll swear,” said he presently with his customary mocking smile, as he planted himself comfortably with his back to the blaze and his coattails gathered up under his arms.

“Yes,” went on George simply, apparently unconscious of his friend’s sneer; “sometimes with the curé. And then in summer I water my garden, and Reine and I take a walk on the highroad up to the top of the hill, or in the wood by the river’s side; and then—well, everybody goes to bed early here.”

“Very moral, indeed!” sneered Rouvière again, picking his teeth.

By this time Marianne had cleared away the dinner things, and, after placing a provision of glasses and a bottle of brandy, another of rum, and a case of liqueurs on the table, had finally departed to dine in her turn with Jeannette, and to confide her observations on the obnoxious Parisian to her companion’s sympathizing ear.

III.

“So at last we are alone!” exclaimed Dupuis with a sigh of satisfaction, as the maid closed the door behind her. “Now, Tom, sit down and let us drink. Come and tell me what you think of this brandy. Here’s to your health, old friend!” filling himself a glass of old Cognac and tossing it off excitedly. “Do you know how many years it is since we last met, Tom? Five-and-thirty, Tom—five-and-thirty years!”

“Yes, parbleu!” said Rouvière, helping himself to the brandy. “I suppose it must be some thirty-five years since we parted in the diligence yard, Rue Montmartre. I remember that we swore eternal friendship and constant correspondence. The correspondence did not last long—less than two years, it seems to me—but our friendship, George, it smouldered under its ashes, but it kept alive, my boy!”

The two friends clasped each other’s hands for a moment silently.

“Your brandy is first-rate,” remarked Rouvière presently, as he finished his petit-verre.

“You like it? Bravo! Well, there are still some pleasant hours in life—aren’t there now, Tom?”

“I believe you,” answered the guest meditatively.

“Who should know it better than you, fortunate fellow as you are! But I say, Tom, how does it happen that you have not changed in the least? Not in the least, by Jove! You’ve remained young and handsome.... ‘I was young and handsome!’—do you remember how magnificently Talma used to say that? Your beard and moustaches might belong to an African lion! You make me think of Henri Quatre! But drink, Tom; you don’t drink!”

“My dear old George,” said Rouvière in a quiet, confidential tone of voice, and resting his two arms on the table, while he fixed his eyes on his friend’s flushed face—“my dear old George, what was your reason for burying yourself alive in Cotentin? Tell me.”

“Why do you ask me that, Tom?” cried Dupuis, who suddenly became serious. “You find me rusty, then?”

“No, no; but what was your reason? Tell me in confidence, you know.”

“Yes, I am rusty; I feel it!” said poor Dupuis mournfully. “I tell you what, Tom, the provinces of France deserve all that is said against them. They are like those springs of mineral waters which turn to stone every living creature you throw into them! What reason had I, do you ask? Gracious heavens! What is life, Tom, but a series of chances; some fatality gets you into a groove, and you are pushed on and on until you reach your grave. Try this rum, Tom.”

“Do you indulge in such prolonged libations every evening?” asked Rouvière.

“No, never. These are in honor of you.”

“So I suspected. This is the rum, isn’t it? Come, go on, George; I want to hear the rest of your Odyssey.”

“Well, Tom,” resumed his friend, taking a sip at his glass of rum and breathing at the same time a sigh which was almost a groan, “you remember that my prospects were pretty bright in Paris. I fully intended to buy that solicitor’s office where I was working—it had been offered to me on good conditions; but some family affairs called me home here, and here I stayed. I don’t know how it happened, but it is certain that I found a charm in this provincial life—in its futile comfort, its indolent habits, its tame monotony.”

Here poor Dupuis stopped, that he might give vent to an angry gust of self-reproach by punching the fire with the tongs; after a sip of rum he continued: “All these got possession of me, wound themselves around me like a net, and I remained their captive.”

His head bowed itself forward, and he sat gazing regretfully on the ugly clock in the middle of the chimney-piece.

“All right, George!” laughed Rouvière; “you don’t say it, but I suspect that Madame Dupuis had a good deal to do with this final catastrophe!”

“It is true, Tom,” replied the other, his countenance lighting up for a moment; “and you may believe it or not, as you like, but I swear that she was a charming girl! Moreover, my dear old mother was living then, and it was a great pleasure to her to have me settle here where we were all born. The long and the short of it was that I married, bought my father-in-law’s office, and all was over—the die was cast! Take some of the Kirschwasser, Tom,” he added hurriedly, as if his remembrances were too painful to be dwelt on.

“Presently,” said Rouvière, a smile flickering over his worldly-wise face; “but tell me, first, you’ve not stayed walled up in Saint-Sauveur, I hope, all these thirty-five years? You take a run to Paris every once in a while, don’t you?”

“Don’t mention it,” groaned Dupuis. “I’ve not seen Paris since I said good-by to you in the Rue Montmartre!”

“Phew!” whistled Rouvière, helping himself to the Kirschwasser. The friends remained silent for a time, gazing at the fire.

“But you used to like to travel,” exclaimed Rouvière, at last.

“And so I do still, my dear Tom; my taste has not changed in that respect, I can assure you. But what could I do? When I married, my idea was to work steadily for fifteen years, and then sell my business and live on what I had saved. I intended then to take a trip to Paris with my wife, after that to the Pyrenees—I always wished so much to see the Pyrenees! But it was not to be; as the old women say, Man proposes and God disposes. We had been married just five years when our daughter was born....”

“What’s that you say—you have a daughter?” interrupted his friend.

“A daughter and a granddaughter, Tom,” replied George, with an inflection in his voice that sounded very like pride, and a soft look in his eyes; “so you understand that I had to stick to my business for ten years more, that I might get her a dowry; and then, when at last I did sell out—well, I was old ... and I couldn’t think of anything pleasanter than just to stay quietly in my arm-chair! Didn’t I tell you that my life has been nothing but a chapter of accidents from beginning to end? Come, shall we have some punch, Tom? I’ll make it.”

“If you will. So you have a daughter! And she is married! Well married, I hope?”

“Well, yes; her husband is a sub-prefect.”

George’s voice again took a tone of gratified pride, which elicited a smile from his observant friend.

“A sub-prefect! Bravo, bravissimo! But you’re putting too much lemon into that punch.”

“Do you think so? And now, Tom, that I’ve made a clean breast of it—told you all—you must explain something to me that I never could comprehend: how have you contrived to make your modest fortune suffice for nearly half a century’s constant travel?”

“It is easy enough to explain,” said Rouvière, sitting up straight in his chair and becoming very animated and somewhat loud as he proceeded. “I began life with ten thousand francs a year in land; my first operation was to change my patrimony into bank-notes, by which means I doubled my income; then I invested it in the sinking funds, which trebled it. And then, freed from every narrow calculation, from every family tie, from every social trammel, I took my flight into space! Here’s to your health, my old friend George! Hip! hip! hurrah!”

“What a wonderful fellow!” cried George in a paroxysm of admiration, excited, very probably, much more by the brandy and the rum and the punch than by Rouvière’s comprehension of life and happiness. “What energy! what grandeur!”

“I consecrated my youth,” continued Tom in a declamatory style, “to distant adventures, reserving Europe for the autumn of life. My foot—this foot, this very foot, George, which now touches yours on this carpet—has left its print among those of the tiger and the elephant on the sands of India! Nay, it has even followed those terrible prowlers into their forests of bamboo, lofty and solemn as our cathedrals!”

“Ah! that was something like living!” ejaculated Dupuis, who listened with almost breathless interest.

“Two years later I arrived in Canton. What an arrival, ye gods! Never shall I forget the scene. It was a lovely summer night. The accession of the emperor of the Celestials to his ancestral throne was being celebrated. Our canoe could scarcely force its way among the junks and flower-boats, all of them decorated with innumerable paper lanterns. Fireworks of a thousand different hues were reflected, mingled with the stars, in the flowing river, and we could watch their rainbow tints playing on the porcelain temples that rise on its banks!”

“What a fairy-like sight! Happy, happy Tom!” murmured Dupuis.

“From China,” pursued Rouvière, after quaffing off his glass of punch, “I sailed for the Americas. I travelled about there for several years, going to and fro, from north to south, from the savannas to the pampas, from the great austere Canadian woods to the smiling Brazilian forests; sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, oftenest in a pirogue. My longest stay was in Peru. I could not tear myself away from that coquettish city of Lima!”

“Ha! ha! traître, gay deceiver! O Tom, Tom!” laughed Dupuis, shaking his head in ecstasy.

“I turned gamester, too. It is impossible for you, George, to conceive the immense attraction a gaming-table possesses in that land of gold and silver and jewels. One might almost fancy that one of those fabulous trees we read of in Oriental tales had been shaken over the green cloth! There is little or no regular coined money to be seen on it, but dull yellow ingots, bright golden spangles, fiery diamonds, and milk-white, lustrous pearls are heaped up there pell-mell! All the treasures of earth and ocean seem to be brought together on that table, tumbled and jostled in dazzling confusion! You can stay whole nights by that board—nights that fly like minutes—your eyes fascinated, your brain on fire! Twenty times in twenty-four hours you are raised to the throne of Rothschild—as often precipitated down, down to Job’s dunghill. You become bald, you may become mad, but you feel what life is—you live!”

“It is true, it is true!” cried Dupuis in a state of intense excitement; “you are right, Tom, there is no doubt of that. And to think that I have never played at anything but that blackguard whist at a sou the counter! But go on, Tom, go on; you really electrify me!”

“Everything has its end,” continued Rouvière, highly flattered by the effect he was producing; “there came a day of sadness and discouragement, and I took passage on board an American whaler bound for the south pole. Yes, my hand has touched the frozen limits of our globe; I have contemplated, with feelings akin to awe, those creatures with human-like faces, the morse, on their pedestals of ice, recumbent and dreamy as the sphinx of Thebes. And in the midst of those silent spaces, so strangely different from all I had hitherto seen, I experienced sensations that seemed to belong to another world. A kind of posthumous illusion of being in another planet took possession of me. Certainly I am much deceived if the days and nights I saw in those regions of ice do not resemble those in our pale satellite. What more shall I tell you, my dear friend? Three years after this I found myself in Rio Janeiro, whence I returned to Europe, after having literally described the whole circumference of our globe with the end of my walkingstick! And thus passed away my youth!”

M. Rouvière here threw himself back in his arm-chair, and stroked his beard with a sigh.

“Every king living might envy you, Tom!” cried Dupuis. “But tell me more. What have you been doing since then?”

“Since then, George,” said Rouvière with nonchalance, “I have not travelled; I have merely made excursions. First upon the Mediterranean—but, pshaw! it was like sailing on the basin in the Tuileries’ garden! I have visited all the countries on its shore. And by degrees, as I grew older, my circle became smaller, so that now I live entirely in Europe, going from city to city, according to the attraction of the moment. Indeed, I may say, my dear fellow, that Europe is my property, my domain!” Here the speaker began to wax warmer and louder. “Every festival given by nature or man in Europe is given to amuse me. For me Naples displays her bay and her volcano, and keeps open her grand theatre, San Carlos; for my recreation Paris adorns her boulevards and builds her opera-house; to amuse me Madrid has a Prado and bull-fights. All the great exhibitions were made for me, beginning with that of London. Evviva la libertà! Let’s drink!” So saying, he filled for himself a brimming bumper of punch, and tossed it off with a very self-satisfied smile.

“Tom!” cried Dupuis delightedly, “you are a genius! But you have said nothing about the great monuments—the Alhambra, the Coliseum, the Parthenon.”

“Pshaw! those are your friends!” retorted Tom with his peculiar sneer. “I’ve said nothing about them because they are dragged about everywhere. Who hasn’t seen them?”

There was a minute of silence, broken by an emphatic “Ah!” breathed not loudly but deeply by the excited listener. Starting from his seat, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, he began hurriedly to pace up and down the room. His friend glanced at him uneasily.

“What’s the matter? What annoys you?” he asked.

“O Tom, Tom!” cried George, still continuing his agitated walk, “I blush when I compare your life with mine. While your heart has counted each pulsation by some noble or beautiful emotion, mine has stupidly gone on ticking off the hours and days and years as calmly as a kitchen clock! Have I really lived, tell me?” He stopped in front of his friend, gesticulating violently. “I was born, and I have slept, and I have eaten; but what else? And what has been the result? My intelligence is extinguished; I have dried up; I have descended in the scale of being, until I have come to be on a level with the idiot of the Alps, with a shellfish, with an oyster!”

“Come, come, George, you’re going too far!” said Rouvière soothingly. “Even supposing that you no longer possess as much freshness of imagination, as much vivacity of wit, as you used to have....”

“I thought so! I knew it!” interrupted Dupuis, resuming his hurried walk backwards and forwards; “you acknowledge that you find me rusty!”

M. Rouvière rose slowly from his seat, and, after lighting a cigar, remained standing with his back against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on his friend, who paused in front of him at his first word.

“Listen to me, George,” said he seriously, caressing his moustache with his fingers as he spoke; “I will be frank with you. You know that I always used to be frank with you. The impression your house made on me when I first entered it was, I must confess, a sinister one. I seemed to breathe the air of a cemetery in it. I could have fancied that I was in one of those long-buried dwellings which the patient labor of enthusiastic antiquaries has restored to light and life. While the servant went to call you I could not prevent myself from examining, with a kind of wondering, stupid curiosity, the old-fashioned furniture, and the pictures, and those dismal tapestries worthy of figuring in a museum! I remembered the delicacy of your character, the elegance of your manners, your intelligent taste, your love of art; and positively I could not reconcile the bright memories I retained of you with the dull, insipid existence of which I had the evidence before my eyes. You came to me; I looked at you; you spoke. What was it? Was my sight affected, or my judgment biassed by the thoughts which were literally preying on me at that moment? I can’t tell what it was—I can’t explain—but your language astonished me! Your forehead actually seemed to me to have grown narrower! I wiped away a secret tear, and I sighed as I should have sighed had I been standing by your grave! I even half spoke the words, ‘This, then, is all that remains of my friend!’ You’re not offended, George?” added M. Rouvière, stopping short and looking inquiringly into his victim’s anxious, attentive face.

“Not a bit, Tom; not a bit,” replied George. “I tell you I felt that I had sunk; at least, I suspected it, and the suspicion was intolerable. I prefer the certainty.” He turned away with an attempt at a smile, and resumed his agitated walk up and down the room.

Rouvière applied himself to the fire, put on a new log of wood, shovelled up the glowing embers and ashes and threw them with much care and skill to the back, gazed on his work for a minute, and, finally assuming again his favorite pose, with his back leaning against the chimney-piece, started the conversation afresh in a lively, chatty tone.

“Let us change the subject,” said he. “You have sold your business; what do you think of doing now?”

“What do you expect me to do?” cried Dupuis vehemently. “I shall finish by dying!”

“Morbleu! you had better resuscitate. Let us talk seriously, George. When you married you created for yourself new duties, which you have fulfilled to the utmost, honestly and generously. You have provided amply for the future of your wife and daughter. What is there, then, to prevent you now from plunging yourself for two or three years into the vortex of life, and so awaken and reinvigorate your benumbed faculties? The facilities of travel nowadays are wonderful. In the space of two years you can run over the whole of Europe, and even explore a part of Asia and Africa. All the freshness and vivacity of thought you once possessed will return to you when you find yourself in contact with the most glorious creations of art and nature. In the course of two years—two years, mark you!—you can lay at rest for ever every one of those regretful feelings which are now eating out your heart and shortening your life! Choose now: suicide or travel? Remember that you are free in your choice—you are free to do as you like!”

“Pish!” cried George, turning on his heel and pursuing his walk. “Is it probable that at my time of life I shall set out alone to scour the highways of Europe?”

“But who wants you to go alone?” said Rouvière, going up to him and laying a hand on his shoulder. “Am not I ready to go with you? My experience, my post-chaise, my servant—everything I have is at your service, George!”

“Is it possible, Tom? Are you really in earnest?” exclaimed Dupuis, gratified beyond expression at this proof of his friend’s affection. “You really will accompany me?”

“I will lead you by the hand, my boy!” answered Rouvière gaily; and, falling into step with George, the two friends paced the room together. “I will spare you the torment of guides and ciceroni, and all that species of vermin which besets the tourist. No, don’t thank me,” he continued, when Dupuis began to express his gratitude. “The thought delights me as much as it does you. Your new impressions will revive mine of past days. And won’t it be delicious, George, to end our lives as we began them—participating in the same adventures, in the same pleasures, and even sharing our purses? Come, now, is it settled?”

“My dear friend,” replied Dupuis, with a slight hesitation in his voice, “I will confess to you that no project was ever more agreeable to me, but....”

“No buts! no buts!” cried Rouvière imperatively; “it is settled! We will go direct from this to Paris and wait there until the spring. The museums and theatres will help us to while away the time. I will take you behind the scenes; you shall hear Ristori and Patti! You used to love music!”

“I love it still,” said George, smiling; “I play the flute!”

“So much the better!” cried Tom with increasing animation, as they continued to pace the room side by side; “so much the better! You shall bring your flute with you. What was I saying? Oh! yes; well, the winter in Paris—that’s settled; but at the very beginning of spring we’ll cross the Pyrenees and spend three glorious months in Spain. Then we’ll take advantage of the summer to visit all the principal cities of Germany; and after that we’ll get down into Italy by Trieste and Venice. What do you say to this programme?”

“I say,” replied Dupuis, stopping in his walk and speaking in a strong, decisive tone—“I say that it opens Paradise to me. Give me a cigar, Tom. I say that you are right. I have lived long enough for others. I have offered up a sufficiently large portion of my life as a sacrifice. Bah! a man has duties towards himself.” He lighted his cigar and puffed vigorously for a minute or two. “Providence has conferred gifts on us,” he resumed, “for which we have to render an account. Intellect, imagination, the feeling of the beautiful—these are gifts which bind us. Savages only ought to be capable of such a crime as to allow these sacred flames to die out for want of nourishment!”

“Well said!” exclaimed Rouvière exultingly; “that’s my old George again! Now let us strike while the iron’s hot. Marianne!” He went towards the door to open it as he spoke.

“Hush! hush!” cried Dupuis, stopping him and speaking under his breath; “what do you want with her?”

“I want to tell her that you are going away to-night, and that she must look after your portmanteau. Marianne!” he called again.

“Hush, I beg of you!” repeated poor George earnestly. “Surely we are not going to start to-night?”

“At nine o’clock to-night,” answered Rouvière decisively; “you know very well that I ordered horses for nine o’clock.”

“Yes, I know,” said Dupuis, hesitating and embarrassed; “but the night is going to be deucedly cold—Siberian. I think we should do better to wait until to-morrow morning.”

“Now, just let me tell you this, George,” cried the other impatiently: “if you’re afraid of frosted fingers or toes, and of a night in a post-chaise, you’d better pull your night-cap over your ears at once and go to bed, and never talk again about travelling!”

“I’m afraid of nothing and of nobody,” replied poor Dupuis, driven to his wits’ end; “but the truth is this haste rather puts me out. I had reckoned upon two or three days to look about me and to make my preparations.”

“Preparations! What preparations?” cried Tom in a tone of indignant surprise. “You need a portmanteau and a few shirts and stockings, and you have an hour before you to get them together, and that’s more than time enough. Come, now, George, no childishness; if you defer your departure for two or three days, you know just as well as I do that you won’t go at all. I’ve no need to tell you what influences will be brought to bear on you, what obstacles will rise up before you, to unman you and break down your resolution. Believe me, my dear fellow, in such cases as this, however you yourself may suffer and make suffer, you must cut down to the quick or give up....”

“Once more you are right, Tom,” said Dupuis after a moment’s silent thought. “I’m your man; there’s my hand on it.”

“Marianne!” shouted Rouvière, shaking his friend’s hand with a will.

“No, no, don’t call Marianne,” cried Dupuis hurriedly, and getting between Rouvière and the door. “I know better than she does what I shall need. I shall pack my portmanteau myself as soon as my wife comes in. It’s just eight now,” looking at the clock; “she’ll not be long. Well,” he continued with some agitation, “I shall have to pass a few minutes—sad ones they will be, I know—but my conscience reproaches me with nothing; ... and after all, if my cup be filled with generous wine, what does it matter though the edge be a little bitter?... O Tom!” he continued after a moment’s pause, during which he seemed to have roused his courage, “what a perspective you have opened out before me—what a horizon! Granada! Venice! Naples! It is a dream!” He glanced at the clock and his voice fell. “Five minutes past eight! I would willingly give twenty-five louis to be a quarter of an hour older—a quarter of an hour! I know that I am very weak, but....”

“Shall I tell your wife for you?” interrupted Rouvière, who was watching him anxiously.

“Well, frankly, Tom, you would do me a service,” cried Dupuis eagerly.

“Go and pack your trunk, then, and I’ll settle the business.”

“There’s no danger of a scene,” said George, stopping short near the door; “you would be quite mistaken in your estimate of her character if you feared that.”

“I shall see,” returned his friend laconically.

“Tell her that I entreat her to keep calm. Tears might unman me, but could change nothing in my plans.”

“I’ll tell her. Go to your trunk.”

“I’m going, Tom.”

He opened the door, hesitated, then closed it again and came back to the fireplace, near which Rouvière was still standing.

“My dear friend,” said he softly, laying his hand on Tom’s arm, “you will be very gentle with her, will you not?”

A kind smile gleamed in the usually cold, sharp eyes of the traveller, as he looked in his friend’s anxious, agitated face.

“Don’t be afraid,” he replied; “but you—don’t you desert me when I’ve gone to the front.”

“Desert during the battle! You don’t know me, Tom!”

“Why, you see,” said Tom, “I should look wondrous silly if you did!”

“Tom Rouvière,” cried Dupuis solemnly, “permit me to assure you that my mind is made up, and that this evening at nine o’clock, come what will, I go with you. I pledge you my word of honor. Are you satisfied?”

“Go and pack your trunk!” laughed Rouvière, taking him by the shoulders and pushing him out of the room.

Left to himself, M. Rouvière returned to the chimney-piece and stood over the fire, rubbing his hands meditatively, and from time to time breaking out into words.

“Now then, Mme. Dupuis, it’s between you and me,” said he, half-aloud, with a kind of chuckle. “It’s very certain that my principal object is to make poor George something like himself again, but I really sha’n’t be sorry to try the effect of a thunder-bolt on that serene-looking lady!” Here M. Rouvière rubbed his hands gleefully and laughed heartily; picturing to himself, probably, the poor wife’s consternation and despair when he should announce the fatal news.

“I’m not a Turk,” he muttered presently—“far from it, I’m sure; until now I always believed, like every true Christian, that polygamy deserved the gallows; but, hang it! only think of a decent man condemned to perpetual communion with such a disagreeable creature as that old village sauce-pan! Such a life is clearly impossible!” A minute’s silent thought followed, and then M. Rouvière roused himself, and sat down before the fire to warm the soles of his feet. But not for long.

“I understood that woman,” he suddenly exclaimed, starting up from his seat and beginning to pace rapidly up and down the floor—“I understood her and judged her before I saw her! I knew her to be exactly what she is, from her cap to her shoes! She was always odious to me! Just see with what stupid symmetry all this furniture is arranged: two chairs here and two chairs there, everything square with its neighbor, all at equal distances—how wearisome! That old barometer, too, and these absurd curiosities”—he stopped, as he spoke, in front of the chimney: “a stuffed bird, a shell-box, spun-glass, and horrid cocoanut cups carved by galley-slaves! They absolutely give one the height and the breadth and the weight of the woman, both physically and morally. Poor George! an intelligent man, too. I was sorry for him,” he continued, taking a seat in front of the fire, “but I couldn’t help it. How I pegged into her all dinnertime! Ha, ha, ha! I was as disgusting as a Kalmuck! I really was ashamed of myself! but, the deuce take it! every one’s nerves are not made of bronze. M. du Luc! Mme. le Rendu! and her fish ... and her cat ... and her curé ... hang it! I couldn’t stand it.”

Here M. Rouvière interrupted his monologue for a minute to examine the toe of his boot; satisfied that it was intact, he resumed his train of thought.

“No, I really don’t believe that it would be possible to meet with a more perfect type of the humdrum existence, the narrow-minded ideas, and flat conversation prevalent in these provincial mole-hills than this dowdy female presents! That good fellow—how much he must have suffered before he learnt to bow his intellect beneath her imbecile yoke! God bless me! I know the whole story. He probably struggled hard at first, and then, little by little, he was bowed and bent and broken, as so many others have been, by the continued pressure of a feminine will! Thirty years’ martyrdom. But, ha! ha! Mme. Dupuis, your hour has come; he shall be avenged.”

Here M. Rouvière drew himself up straight in his chair and laughed merrily. “It reminds me,” continued he half-aloud, “of my battle with that old Indian woman when I stole her idol while she was asleep. What a good-for-nothing hussy she was! Extraordinary how much old women resemble one another all the world over.”

[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.]

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A GLANCE AT THE INDIAN QUESTION.[40]

Let us begin by considering the Indian himself. As soon as he is able to stand alone he commences that practice with the bow and arrow which makes him a good marksman before he is well in his teens. He is tied in his saddle before he can walk, and a horse becomes as much a part of his nature as if he were a Centaur. While yet a child he learns the subterfuges of the chase: the quiet, patient, breathless watchfulness, the stealthy, snake-like advance, which enable him in adult life to crawl, unseen and unheard, upon his unsuspecting victim, to take him at a disadvantage, surprise and kill him without the risk of a wound. From his earliest years he hears the warriors of his tribe relate their acts of treachery and blood, of rapine and violence, and boast of them as brave and glorious deeds. He is taught to consider treachery courage, robbery and murder honorable warfare, and the most renowned warrior the one who despatches his foe with the least possibility of danger to himself. For him revenge is a sacred duty. He hears shouts of savage laughter and applause greet the warrior who devises the worst tortures for the miserable captive. His initiation to the order of warriors is a terrible ordeal of physical suffering, which must be borne without flinching or murmuring to ensure the success of the candidate. The grossest sensuality is practised openly under his childish eyes. He learns to regard cunning and falsehood as virtues, and to look upon the warrior most skilled in the arts of deceit as the greatest hero of his tribe. Until he has committed some signal act of murder, treachery, or robbery, he is without influence among the braves or attractions for the squaws.

All is fair in the wars of Indians, either with the white man or foes of their own color. The Sioux kills the Crow—man, woman, or papoose at the breast—at sight. The Crow will brain the sleeping Sioux equally without regard to age or sex. A small party of Minneconjon Sioux went to the Tongue River Cantonment, last December, to surrender. They carried a flag of truce. Unfortunately, they rode into the camp of some Crow scouts which was situated within a few hundred yards of the cantonment. The Crows received them in a friendly manner, shook hands with them, and while with one hand they gave the pledge of amity, with the other they poured the contents of their revolvers into the breasts of the bearers of the white flag. The Crows could not understand the indignation of the officers and soldiers at such an act of treachery and cowardice (we regret to say that it was not without apologists and applauders among white frontiersmen), but they feared it enough to run away to their agency, where the leader in the bloody deed was the recipient of high honors. There he was the hero of the time.

HOW THE INDIAN IS CIRCUMSTANCED.

Next let us consider the circumstances in which this creature, so savagely nurtured and developed, is placed.

We find him in a district of country which he believes to be his by immemorial right of possession. It is the land of his fathers. The white man formally recognizes his claim by making solemn treaties for the transfer of portions of the Indian’s heritage. The land being his, the game is his. The Great Spirit created the buffalo for the sustentation of his red children. The buffalo-hunter enters the Indian’s domain, and slaughters the buffalo by tens of thousands for the robes, leaving the flesh to rot upon the plain. Thousands are wantonly destroyed by wealthy idlers who call themselves sportsmen. The buffalo supplies the Indian not only with food, but with raiment and shelter. It furnishes him the article of exchange which enables him to obtain the necessaries of his savage life. The diminution of the buffalo means privation, suffering, nakedness, starvation to the Indian and his family.

The white man by formal compact purchases from the Indian some certain district, and solemnly binds himself to respect the Indian’s remaining rights within certain prescribed limits, to keep trespassers from entering the now diminished territory, and to ensure it to him and his tribe for ever. But this does not stop the insatiate adventurer, who again crosses the newly-defined limit.[41] The government seems powerless to compel its citizens to respect its treaty obligations or to punish their infraction. The exasperated Indian kills some of the trespassers. Would it be astonishing that he should do so, even if he had been reared under the influences of Christianity instead of those of barbarism? Troops are now sent against the Indians. After the sacrifice of a greater or less number of brave soldiers the hostile tribe is subjected, compelled to return to a quasi-peaceful condition, and to consent to a further reduction of its territorial limits. Before the ink is dry with which the so-called treaty is written the adventurer again crosses the newly-designated boundary. Thus the process goes on ad infinitum, or until the Indian, driven from the last foot of his ancestral earth, starving, naked, the cries of his suffering women and children ringing in his ears, is compelled to accept any terms which will give him food and covering.

THE INDIANS ON THE RESERVATIONS.

The Indian is now taken to a reservation. Even his removal may be a transportation job by which some politicaster in New York or Boston or friendly Philadelphia, who never saw a hostile Indian, and who invests no money in the enterprise, makes a fortune. From this time on he is a means of money-making for a crowd of sharpers. A scanty supply of bad beef at a high price, a little coffee and sugar of the lowest grade, with sometimes indifferent flour, compose his ration. If he happens to be where he can occasionally kill a buffalo, a deer, or a wolf, his squaw dresses the skin, and he takes it to the trader’s store, where he barters it for a little sugar, coffee, or pemican to add to his meagre ration. He gets in exchange for his peltries what the trader chooses to give him. For a calf-robe or a wolf-skin he may get a few cupfuls of the coarsest sugar, or a tin cup worth about ten cents in New York. For a fair calf-robe the trader will ask three dollars! “We make every white man rich who comes to our country,” said Sitting Bull to Gen. Miles in the council which preceded the fight on Cedar Creek, in Montana, last October. The remark was not without truth, so far as Indian traders and reservation rings are concerned.

It is alleged that Indians on reservations have been compelled to kill some of their ponies to feed their families. We do not personally know this to be so, but we can well believe it. We do know that not three years ago the Kiowas and Comanches were without flour for months; that the beef issued to them was miserable. We have seen it stated and have been told time and again that rations have been drawn for numbers greatly exceeding those actually at the agencies; and, with the developments made through the honesty and courage of Professor Marsh still fresh in our memory, we can well believe it also. Is it a subject of special wonder that, being the victim of such a system, in addition to his peculiar training, the Indian should look upon deceit and robbery as not only justifiable but laudable?

WHAT WE ASK OF THE INDIAN.

All men are naturally tenacious of their rights of property; the more civilized the community the more sacred those rights. The Indian has the instinct of property very strongly developed. After we have subdued, swindled, and reduced him to the verge of starvation we say to him: “You must now surrender your horses and your arms.” The earliest ambition of an Indian is to possess a fire-arm. He will pay thirty to forty ponies for a good rifle. Ponies are his currency. If the government sells this rifle by auction, it will bring perhaps five to ten dollars. It is hard for the Indian to see his rifle carried off and his horse ridden away by some white hunter, “wolfer,” or trapper. He is very fond of his ponies. No consideration of value will induce him to part with a favorite horse. A friend of the writer saw a squaw, with tears in her eyes, cut a lock from the mane of her favorite pony before surrendering the animal to the representative of the government. Thus, we starve the Indian; we deprive him of his arms, with which he might kill game to eke out a subsistence; we take away his ponies, which furnish him food when he is reduced to extremity through our fault or failure. What Christian people would be content under such treatment? Can we be surprised that an untutored savage, who cannot understand our clashing of bureaus, our shifting of responsibility, or our red-tape refinements of official morality, should look upon the white man as the liar of liars and the thief of thieves, and, when he is on the war-path, should execute the wild justice of revenge on any of the race who happens to come within reach of his rifle? Can we be surprised if he leaves his reservation and chooses to fight to the last rather than be the patient victim of such a system of injustice and spoliation? It is not astonishing that the Indian should surrender only his poorest animals, should hide his magazine guns and rifles and give up only rusty old smooth-bores or arms for which he cannot procure fitting ammunition. In our every transaction with him we strengthen by example the lessons of deception he was taught in his childhood.

INDIAN LIFE AT AN AGENCY.

An Indian agency is not usually a school of morality. Interpreters, traders’ clerks, “squaw-men,” have what are euphemistically termed “Indian wives.” It is scarcely necessary to say that these are nothing more than concubines. These poor red slaves are usually purchased from their savage sires for a blanket, a cheap trinket, a pony, or a few cartridges. Sometimes they are presents given for the purpose of making interest with influential underlings. Agency life has no tendency to elevate the Indian. He lives in idleness and inaction. He has nothing to do and nothing to hope for. He has no future. He must occupy his time in some way, and he becomes a slave to gambling and sexual indulgence. Occasionally the young men, wearied by the monotony of such a life and ambitious of distinction, seize upon the first real or fancied wrong as a pretext for revolt, fly the agency, and go upon the war-path.

OUR INDIANS IN CANADA.

Why is it that the Indians who give us so much trouble become peaceable, and remain so, when they settle on the Canadian side of the border? There they receive no governmental aid, and are able to procure their own subsistence. We read of no outrages or robberies there. It is simply because the Indian’s rights are respected. He has been protected in his rights even against the greedy nephews of English statesmen who cast covetous eyes upon his lands. If he is guilty of offence, he is promptly and sternly punished. The arm of the military is not held back when offending Indians are within reach of punishment because a million or so has been appropriated to be expended for their benefit as soon as they can be reported peaceable, and because the vultures of the ring are a-hungering for the spoil.

THE FRONTIERSMAN AND THE INDIAN.

It is difficult for the honest frontiersman—the hardy pioneer who, with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other, hews himself a farm out of the wilderness—to be just toward the Indian. The memory of massacre of his neighbors or relatives, of outrage on defenceless women, stirs up, even in gentle breasts, a hatred of the red man which prompts an undying vendetta, which begets a feeling that a remorseless shedding of Indian blood to the very last drop would not be an adequate punishment for such atrocities. There is many a worthy and otherwise humane and law-abiding pioneer who believes that dead Indians are the only good ones; and such a feeling seizes even the strongest advocate of a humane policy when he sees the scalp of a white woman dangling from the girdle of a filthy savage. There are men on the frontier, otherwise brave and gentle-hearted, who would have no more scruple to shoot an Indian at sight than to kill a prairie-wolf. Peace is difficult to keep between two opposing elements imbued with corresponding sentiments toward each other. For this state of things the rapacious Indian rings, the violators of treaty stipulations, the ruthless adventurers, the horse-thieves, the murderers, fugitives from justice, respecting no laws, human or divine, who infest the Indian country, are mainly responsible. An American gentleman who spent two years recently in Manitoba told the writer that he found many of the Sioux who were engaged in the Minnesota massacre living there peaceful and contented. “Wearing a red coat,” said he, “I can travel alone from one end of the Territory to the other without danger of molestation.”

THE QUAKERS AND THE INDIANS.

The failure of the Quaker specific does not need to be dwelt upon. We have had under the Quaker management the most serious and bloody Indian wars that have afflicted the frontier for many years. Besides, there is scarcely a wild tribe of which some portion has not been in a state of hostility to a greater or less extent. There are itching palms among the Quakers as well as among the other religious denominations. What was needed was not men who made professions of peace—or “made-up Quakers,” who put on the Friendly drab for the occasion—but men who practised honesty and fair-dealing.

THE ARMY AND THE INDIANS.

The worst elements of society on the frontier—“wolfers,” buffalo-hunters, trappers, guides, scouts, contractors, venders of poisonous whiskey, and keepers of frontier gambling-saloons—may and generally do desire Indian wars; for to them they are a source of employment and profit. Territorial officials, their friends and clients, may desire a state of hostility, on account of the money it causes to be expended in their districts, especially if authority can be obtained to raise special forces. This, in addition to opportunities of profit, offers a means of augmenting and strengthening what is delicately termed “political” influence by a judicious distribution of patronage. It is not very long since a force was raised, in a certain frontier State, which, during an Indian war then raging, did not kill or capture an Indian, inflict or receive a scratch, or fire a shot. This force, which was in service only for a few months, cost the country at large nearly two hundred thousand dollars. This was very pleasant for the force, very profitable to the State. No doubt a repetition of the experience would be agreeable at any time. It was not very economical or beneficial to the country at large. But to suppose that the regular army desires wars with the Indian tribes is a very great mistake. Why should it? To the army Indian wars are neither sources of honor nor of profit. To it they only mean hard work, no glory, increased personal expenditures without additional pay. For our hard-worked little army receives no field allowances. A member of the non-combatant branches of the military establishment can effect more toward his advancement in one campaign in Washington than can the live, the real soldiers, the fighting men, in five lustres of laborious and dangerous field-service in the Indian country. Operations against hostile tribes, though attended by exposure, hardship, suffering, and dangers to which civilized warfare presents no parallel, with the possibility of death by indescribable tortures in the event of capture, are not considered “war” by certain gentlemen who sit at home at ease and enjoy, if they do not improve, each shining hour. Hundreds of brave men in blue may fall in Indian battle, crushed by the mere power of numbers; but this, forsooth, is not “war.” It is only wounds, or maiming for life without hope of recognition or reward, or death upon a battle-field to which glory is denied.

THE TRANSFER OF THE INDIANS TO THE WAR DEPARTMENT.

The transfer of the Indians to the War Department would be advantageous, for a time, both to the government and the Indian, but it would be ruinous to the army. The Indian Ring would eventually either effect the abolition of the army altogether—which would be bad enough—or fill it with the material of which Indian traders and reservation sharks are made—which would be still worse. The country cannot afford to risk the deterioration or destruction of a class of officials admitted on all hands to be among the most honorable and trustworthy servants of the government.

CAUSES OF INDIAN WARS.

The usual cause of Indian wars is want of good faith in carrying out the obligations of treaties. It is scarcely too much to say that we rarely, if ever, carry out treaty stipulations with Indians. The great majority of the people of the United States wish to treat the Indian not only fairly, but kindly, generously, magnanimously. Money enough is appropriated, if it were judiciously and honestly expended. But the sums appropriated seem to become small by degrees and wonderfully less before they reach the Indian. It is not the interest of the Indian Ring to have the Indian question settled.

The transgression of limits solemnly agreed upon has been already mentioned. The lawless classes enumerated above steal Indian ponies and do not scruple to kill an unoffending Indian occasionally. The Indian does not understand individual responsibility for crime. He holds the whole race or tribe accountable for the actions of one of its members, and avenges the killing of his brother on the first victim presented to him.

Indian wars have doubtless been caused by more than usually grasping traders whose rapacity has made the Indians discontented and driven them from the reservations. We have read, at least, of cases in which numbers have been fed on paper in excess of the actual number present on the reservation. We are told that in such cases, when an impending investigation has made discovery possible, the tribe is reported hostile and large numbers said to have left the agency. The Indians who have lived quietly on the reservation, utterly unable to comprehend the forcible measures about to be adopted, suspicious as Indians always are, and supposing they are all to be killed, leave the reservation and go upon the war-path.

THE FIRST STEP TOWARD PEACE.

The first step toward bringing the Indian to a permanently peaceful condition is to place in his country a military force strong enough to show him the utter madness of keeping up the war. In general, a show of sufficient force is all that is necessary to bring the Indian to subjection. No one understands the lesson of force better or applies it more readily than he. It is the only thing he respects or fears. Instead of doing this, however, we place in the Indian country meagre garrisons, barely able to protect themselves, and powerless for offensive operations. The Indian does not believe our statements of the numbers we could put in the field if we would. He thinks we are boasting, or—as he plainly calls saying anything that is not exact truth—lying. With the directness of mind of a child of nature, he takes a plain, logical view of the situation, and cannot imagine that we have strength and do not use it, or, at least, exhibit it. After the annihilation of Custer on the Little Horn in 1876, and the retirement of all forces from the country between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, except four or five hundred infantry, the Indians at certain agencies, who sympathized and held constant communication with the hostiles, thought they had succeeded in killing nearly all the white soldiers, and boasted that at length the Great Father in Washington would have to accede to their terms. There should be to-day 10,000 men in the Sioux country—6,000 infantry, 2,500 thoroughly drilled and disciplined light cavalry (not raw boys from the great cities who can neither ride nor shoot, mounted on untrained horses), and 1,500 light artillery with light steel guns easily transportable over rough country, but possessing considerable comparative length of range. Such a force would thoroughly complete the work done by the infantry amid the snow and ice of the past winter. It would be the most humane and least expensive mode of laying the indispensable foundation for further work toward the elevation and amelioration of the Indian’s condition. Such a force would drive all the Indians between the Yellowstone and the British line to their agencies, with little, if any, loss of life. If the humanitarians would end the war with the least possible shedding of blood, this is the way to do it. When such a display of force is made as makes resistance hopeless—and the Indian will be quick to see it—there will be an end of Indian wars and we may begin the work of civilization in earnest.

THE MODE AND EXTENT OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION.

We must not try to push the Indian forward too fast. There is no use in trying to make the adult Indian of to-day an agriculturist, or to take him far out of the sphere in which he was brought up. Once the writer happened to be in company with a gentleman who has given some thought to the Indian question, and has had some experience of the Indian character, when a feathered and beaded warrior made his appearance. He was richly dressed—scarlet cloth, eagle’s feathers, profusely-beaded moccasins. “It is nonsense to expect such a creature as that to dig in mud and dirt,” said our friend. “He would spoil his fine clothes and ruin his dainty moccasins.” And there was much wisdom in the remark. The best you can do with the adult Indian is to make him a stock-raiser. Give him good brood mares. Introduce good blood among his herds of ponies. Then find a market for his horses. Buy them for the cavalry. Let him raise a certain proportion of mules, and let the government buy them for the Quartermaster’s Department. Encourage him to raise beef-cattle enough at least for his own consumption; and if you can induce him to raise a surplus, buy the surplus for the Subsistence Department. Give the Indian a fair price for his produce. Dash down the monopoly of Indian trading. Allow any merchant of good standing to trade with the Indian, under proper restrictions as to exclusion of ammunition and spirituous liquors. Let the red man have the benefit of free-trade and competition. Ammunition should be furnished, when necessary, only by the Ordnance Department.

Let the red man also have the same liberty of conscience which is accorded to the white, the black, and even the yellow. Let there be no more parcelling out of Indians among jarring sects. Let them have missionaries of their choice.

Compel all children now under fourteen years to attend schools. Vary school exercises with the use of tools in the workshop or agricultural training in the field. Thus you may make some mechanics and some agriculturists out of the generation now rising. You will have more out of the next generation. But you cannot make an agriculturist out of the grown-up Indian, nor a mechanic. It is folly to attempt it. You cannot reconcile to our nineteenth-century civilization those who have grown up to maturity with the ideas, manners, and morals of the heroic ages. You can no more expect Crazy Horse to use the shovel and the hoe than you could Achilles and Tydides Diomed to plant melons or beans.

THE ONE GREAT REMEDY, AND THE HOPELESSNESS OF ITS APPLICATION.

The remedy of remedies is common honesty in our dealings with the Indian, backed by a force strong enough and always ready to promptly crush any attempt at revolt, and punish speedily and severely every act of lawlessness committed by an Indian. But too many are interested in keeping up the present system to warrant even the slenderest hope of any radical change. To put it in crude frontier terms: “There is too much money in it.” Politicasters, capitalists, contractors, sub-contractors, agents, traders, agency employés, “squaw-men”—or degraded whites who live in a state of concubinage with Indian women, and who are generally tools and touters for the traders—hosts of sinecurists and their friends, find “money in it.” The links of the ring are legion. It is too strong. It can shelve or crush any man with honesty and boldness enough to attack the system. It is too strong for the commissioner or the secretary. It is to be feared that it may prove too strong for the country.

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CHARLES LEVER AT HOME.

The man whose rollicking pen has made more dragoons than all the recruiting-sergeants in her Britannic Majesty’s service; who has “promoted” the “Connaught Rangers” and Faugh a ballaghs into corps d’élite; who has broken more bones across country than the six-foot stone walls of Connemara; whose pictures of that land “which smiles through her tears like a sunbeam in showers” are as racy of the soil as her own emerald shamrock; who has painted Irish girls pure as angels’ whispers, bright as saucy streamlets, and the “boys” a bewildering compound of fun, fight, frolic, and “divarshin”; whose career was as stainless as his success was merited, and whose memory is an heirloom—was born in the city of Dublin in the year of grace 1806. Graduating at Cambridge University, and subsequently at the U-niversity of Göttingen, his student-life betrayed no symptoms of the mental élan which was to distinguish him later on, and, save for its Bohemianism, was absolutely colorless, and even dull. The boy was not father to the man. Selecting the medical profession as much by chance as predilection, he succeeded, during the visitation of cholera in 1832, in obtaining an appointment as medical superintendent in the northwest of Ireland, in the districts of Londonderry and Coleraine, and for a time continued to “guess at prescriptions, invent ingredients,” and generally administer to the requirements of afflicted humanity. But the task was uncongenial, the life a dead-level, flavored with no spice of variety, uncheckered in its monotonous routine. It was a “bad billet, an’ no Christian man cud live in it, barrin’ a say-gull or a dispinsiry docthor.” Doctor Lever!—pshaw! Charley Lever; who ever thinks of the author of Harry Lorrequer as Doctor Lever? Nevertheless, his experiences at this period bore him rich fruit in the after-time, and in Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (The Fortunes of Glencore), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an institution of the past.

Charles Lever, however, was not destined to blush unseen or waste his sweetness on a country practice. Appointed to the Legation at Brussels, he bounded from the dreary drudgery of a dispensary to the glittering gayety of an embassy, from the hideous squalor of the fever-reeking cabin to the coquettish gravity of the palatial sick-room. In “Belgium’s capital” the cacoethes scribendi seized him, and the result was Harry Lorrequer. He awoke, and, like Lord Byron, found himself famous. The distinct portraiture, the brilliant style, the thoroughly Hibernian ensemble, claimed a well-merited success for the book, and, written at the right moment—how many good works have perished by being floated on an ebb tide!—the public, who had hitherto accepted Ireland through the clever but trashy effusions of Lady Morgan, and the more genuine metal of Maria Edgeworth and Samuel Lover, joyously turned towards the rising sun, and, seizing upon this genuine bit of shillelah, clamorously demanded a fresh sprig from the same tree. The wild dash, as exhilarating as “mountain dew,” the breezy freshness, the gay abandon of society and soldiering, the “moving accidents by flood and field,” acted upon the jaded palates of the British public like a tonic, and Harry Lorrequer, instead of being treated as an entrée, became respected as the pièce de résistance. Harry’s appearance on parade with the Othello blacking still upon his face; Miss Betty O’Dowd’s visit to Callonby on the “low-backed car”; her desire of disowning the nondescript vehicle, and its being announced by her shock-headed retainer as “the thing you know is at the doore”; the description of boarding-house life in Dublin sixty years ago; Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s, in Molesworth Street—the establishment is still in existence, and may be recognized in Lisle House; the “amateur hotel,” so graphically described by Mr. Lever; the picture of “dear, dirty Dublin” itself:

“Oh! Dublin, sure there is no doubtin’, Beats every city upon the say; ’Tis there you’ll see O’Connell spoutin’ And Lady Morgan making tay”;

a night at Howth; the Knight of Kerry and Billy McCabe—form a succession of sketches teeming with vivacity, humor, and wit, and dashed off with a pen which almost makes a steeplechaser of the reader, so exciting and so rapid is the pace.

To Lever’s official career at Brussels we are indebted for several diplomatic portraits, notably those of Sir Horace Upton (The Fortunes of Glencore) and Sir Shally Doubleton (A Day’s Ride); the former of “a very composite order of human architecture, chivalrous in sentiment and cunning in action, noble in aspiration and utterly sceptical as regards motives, deep enough for a ministerial dinner and fast enough for a party of young guardsmen at Greenwich,” and the latter who could receive a Foreign Office “swell” thus: “Possibly your name may not be Paynter, sir; but you are evidently before me for the first time, or you would know that, like my great colleague and friend, Prince Metternich, I have made it a rule through life never to burden my memory with what can be spared it, and of these are the patronymics of all subordinate people; for this reason, sir, and to this end, every cook in my establishment answers to the name of Honoré, my valet is always Pierre, my coachman Jacob, and all Foreign Office messengers I call Paynter.” Upon the small-fry of diplomacy Mr. Lever is occasionally very severe, and his pictures of life at Hesse Kalbbratonstadt and similar unpronounceable principalities are as amusing as they are possibly realistic.

The success of Harry Lorrequer set its author at quill-driving in the same direction, and Charles O’Malley, or The Irish Dragoon, was given to the world. The very name sounds “boot and saddle”—rings of the spur and clanks of the sabre. What a romance: the high-spirited lad who leads his rival to the jaws of the grave in the hunting-field, and follows him in a ride of death against the unbroken front of Cambronne’s battalions on the blood-stained field of Waterloo! What a picture of the old Peninsular days! What portraits of Le petit Caporal, as the French army loved to call Napoleon, of the “Iron Duke,” the gallant Picton, and the great captains of that eventful period! What glimpses of dark-eyed señoritas and haughty hidalgos; of lion-hearted sons of Erin charging to the cry of Faugh a ballagh, and leading forlorn hopes with saucy jokes upon their laughing lips; of “Connaught Robbers,” as the Connaught Rangers were jocosely called, on account of the number of prisoners which they invariably made, and for the most part single-handed; of Brussels the night before Waterloo; and of the Duchess of Richmond’s celebrated ball:

“There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.”

What pictures of old Ireland—of Daly’s Club-House, the resort of the Irish members in College Green, still standing, but now converted into insurance offices. “I never pass the old club,” said Sir Thomas Staples, the last surviving member of the Irish House of Commons, to the writer, “without picturing it as I remember it, when Grattan, and Curran, and Ireland’s best blood strolled in after a fiery debate, or rushed out on the whisper of that awful word, ‘division.’ Very little would restore Daly’s to its original shape; and who knows but it may yet be revived, if repeal of the Union be carried?” Sir Thomas Staples is dead some years, and the Home-Rule question had not come to the front whilst he was yet numbered amongst the living. Shall we behold an Irish Parliament sitting once again in College Green? Shall Daly’s club be restored to its former splendor? Shall we see Mr. Butt, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Mitchell Henry, with many other earnest sons of Ireland, enrolled amongst its members?

Who can forget the account of Godfrey O’Malley’s election, when, in order to avoid arrest for debt, he announced his own death in the papers, and, having travelled in the hearse to Connemara, reached his stronghold in the west, where bailiffs and process-servers foolhardy enough to cross the Shannon were compelled to eat their own writs under penalty of tar and feathers, and from whence he triumphantly addressed his constituents, appealing to their sympathies and support on the very powerful plea of having died for them? There is a story extant of Jackey Barrett which has not travelled far, if at all, beyond the walls of Trinity. Upon one occasion the vice-provost was dining off roast turkey in the glorious old Commons Hall, and next to him sat his nephew, the heir expectant to his enormous wealth. The turkey was somewhat underdone, and the nephew sent the drumsticks to be devilled. Some little delay occurred, which caused the vice-provost to observe to his kinsman with a malicious grin: “That devil is keeping you a long time waiting.” “Not half as long as you are keeping the devil waiting,” was the retort. Jackey never forgave him. What a creation is Mickey Free, that devoted, warm-hearted, rollicking Irish follower, that son of song and story, who, by his own account, sang duets with the commander-in-chief in the Peninsula, and wore a masterpiece of Murillo for a seat to his trousers! Mickey was quoted recently, during a debate in the British House of Commons on the Eastern question by Major O’Gorman, the jester-in-chief, vice Mr. Bernal Osborne, the rejected of Irish constituencies:

“For I haven’t a janius for work— It was never a gift of the Bradies; But I’d make a most illigant Turk, For I’m fond of tobacco and ladies.”

The House roared, and even Mr. Disraeli, that was, allowed his parchment visage to snap into smiling. Charles Lever informed the writer that he originally intended Mickey Free for a mere stage servant, who comes on with a tray or exits with a chair or a table; but upon discovering that Mr. Free had made his mark he wrote him up. “I never could give a publisher a complete novel all at once,” said Mr. Lever, “although I have been offered very large sums of money for one; I always wait to see how my public like me, and write from month to month, trimming my sails to suit the popular breeze.”

Charles O’Malley was a brilliant success. A spirit of martial enthusiasm inflated the minds of the rising generation, until to be a dragoon became the day-dream of existence, and many an embryo warrior who failed in obtaining a commission compromised with a cruel destiny by accepting the queen’s shilling. The charm of the book is complete; and for break-neck, dashing narrative, for wit, sparkle, and genuine Irish drollery, interspersed here and there with tender touches of pathos and soft gray tones of sorrow, Charles O’Malley stands unrivalled, and will hold its own when hundreds of so-called Irish romances shall have returned to the dust out of which they should never have emerged, even into a spasmodic vitality.

Perhaps the only smart thing ever uttered by King George III. was when he taxed Sheridan with being afraid of the author of the School for Scandal; and perhaps Lever was afraid of the author of Charles O’Malley, as he published Con Cregan, Maurice Tiernay, Sir Jasper Carew, and one or two other novels anonymously; but a quickwitted public, detecting the ring of the true metal, compelled “Harry Lorrequer” to stand revealed. Novel followed novel in quick succession, Ireland providing the mine from which he dug his golden ore; and although he carries his readers to fairer climes and sunnier skies, somehow or other he contrives to land them safely and soundly in the “ould counthry” at last. We have not space, nor is it our province, to deal with Lever’s works in detail. No modern productions of fiction have gained a greater or more popular reputation for their writer. By no Irish author is he equalled in Irish humor, by no author is he surpassed in unwearying narrative. The foreign tone infused into some of his later productions is due to his residence in Italy. “You wish to have nothing to do, Lever? There is eight hundred a year; go and do it,” said the late Lord Derby, bestowing the vice-consulship of Spezzia upon him. Later on he was promoted to Trieste.

For a time Charles Lever edited the Dublin University Magazine, then a coruscation of all that was brilliant in literature. He resided at the village of Templeogue, situated in the lap of the Dublin mountains, with Sugar Loaf at one extremity, and Mount Pelier, with its ruined castle renowned for the orgies of the infamously-celebrated “Hell-fire Club,” at the other. Templeogue Lodge was the Mecca towards which all “choice spirits” devoutly turned, and the wit, repartee, song, jest, and story circulated within its walls made the Noctes Ambrosianæ but dull affairs in comparison. “One little room rises to recollection, with its quaint old sideboard of carved oak, its dark-brown cabinets, curiously sculptured, its heavy old brocade curtains, and all its queer devices of knick-knackery, where such meetings were once held, and where, throwing off the cares of life—shut out from them, as it were, by the massive folds of the heavy drapery across the door—we talked in all the fearless freedom of old friendship.” There are a few still surviving who will recognize that room, and recall with a throb of painful pleasure the nights at the little lodge at Templeogue.

Lever was fond of portraying banished heroes, misanthropes—men who had dug their own graves, or, overtaken by some whirlwind of misfortune, “gave signs that all was lost.” The character of Lord Glencore is admirably drawn, and his life of torture in his mad cry for vengeance fearfully vivid. Luttrell of Arran is the story of a disappointed life, from out of which springs a bright flower of maidenhood—Kate, one of Lever’s most charming creations. Again, we have the Knight of Gwynne, over whose gentle head wave after wave of hard fortune pitilessly breaks, and, driven from the lordly home of his ancestors to a sheeling by the sad sea-wave, he is as cheerful in adversity as he was noble in prosperity. The portrait of the fire-eating Bagenal Daly is not overdrawn, and the introduction of Freeny the robber, although highly melodramatic, is not only possible but probable. Freeny’s “character” stood remarkably high. He would rob a rich miser to save a poor family from starvation, and his word was as good as his bond; ‘98 turned many a man upon the king’s highway who, but for being “out,” would have lived respecting and respected. The Martins of Cro’ Martin is another ghastly narrative of the wreck and ruin of a proud old Irish race. It is “an owre true” story. A few miles outside of the town of Galway, on the road to Oughterard, stand two gaunt pillars surmounted by granite globes. The gates have disappeared, as also the armorial bearings; but this was formerly the entrance to Ballinahinch, the seat of the “ould, anshint” Martins, and from that gate to Ballinahinch Castle was a drive of forty Irish miles. The castle, situated in one of the loneliest and loveliest valleys in Connemara, was maintained in a style of regal magnificence, the stables, marble-stalled, affording accommodation for sixty hunters. On an island, in the centre of a small lake opposite the castle, stands a desolate, half-ruined keep, within the four walls of which such of his retainers or neighbors as proved refractory were imprisoned by “The Martin” of the period. Recklessness and improvidence scattered the broad acres, mortgage overlapped mortgage, and every inch of the grand old estate became the property of the London Law Life Assurance Society. Notably the last of the family was Richard Martin, commonly known as “Humanity Dick,” in reference to a bill introduced by him into the British House of Commons for the repression of cruelty to animals. Upon the occasion of its introduction the English members essayed to cough him down. “I perceive,” said Mr. Martin, “that many of you seem troubled with severe coughs; now, if any one gentleman will cough distinctly, so that I may be able to recognize him, I can give him a pill which may, perhaps, effectually prevent his ever being again troubled with a cough on this side of the grave.” Mr. Martin’s prescription was at once effectual.

With “Humanity Dick’s” granddaughter perished the race; and her name is still breathed in Connemara as a prayer, as one “who never opened a cabin-door without a blessing, nor closed it but to shut hope within.” The farm-house where she was nursed is still fondly pointed out, and “Miss Martin’s lep”—she was a superb horsewoman—is proudly shown to every “spalpeen” of an Englishman who travels that wild, bleak, and desolate road between Oughterard and Clifden. Mr. Lever, with that magic all his own, has told the sad story. His Mary Martin is but the portrait of that fair young Irish girl who dearly loved “her people” unto the last, and who, in the bright blossom of her life, died an exile from that western home which was at once her idol and her pride. Where but in Ireland could this sad and solemn gathering around the bedside of a dying girl take place?

“And yet there was a vast multitude of people there. The whole surface of the lawn that sloped from the cottage to the river was densely crowded with every age, from the oldest to the very infancy; with all conditions, from the well-clad peasant to the humblest ‘tramper’ of the highroads. Weariness, exhaustion, and even hunger were depicted on many of their faces. Some had passed the night there, others had come long distances, faint and foot-sore; but, as they sat, stood, or lay in groups around, not a murmur, not a whisper, escaped them. With aching eyes they looked towards an open window where the muslin curtains were gently stirred in the faint air. The tidings of Mary Martin’s illness had spread rapidly; far-away glens down the coast, lonely cabins on the bleak mountains, wild, remote spots out of human intercourse, had heard the news, and their dwellers had travelled many a mile to satisfy their aching hearts.”

This is Ireland. This is the undying affection of the people for the “rale ould stock.” This is the imperishable sentiment, as fresh at this hour as the emerald verdure upon the summit of Croagh Patrick.

In A Day’s Ride: a Life’s Romance, Mr. Lever has given us Algernon Sydney Potts—one of those romantic visionaries who believe in destiny, bow to their Kismet, and, going with the tide, clothe the meanest accidents of life in dreamy panoply. The adventures which befall the Dublin apothecary’s son, from his ride in Wicklow to his imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, are as varied as they are exciting, and we are strongly inclined to believe that Lever, “letting off” a good deal of Bohemia, is at his best in the wild vagaries of this reckless day-dreamer. Tom Burke of Ours is a dashing military story, as is also Jack Hinton, the Guardsman. The O’Donoghue is charmingly written and is thoroughly Irish. That Boy of Norcott’s is unsatisfactory. Commencing in Ireland, it wanders from the old country with the evident intention of returning to it; but a change came o’er the spirit of the author’s dream, and it bears all the imprint of having been hastily written, a changed venue, and of being “hurried up” at its conclusion. Sir Brook Fosbrooke, on the other hand, bears traces of the utmost care, the details of character being worked out with microscopic minuteness. The old lord chief-justice is supposed to have been meant for Lord Chief-Justice Lefroy, of the Court of Queen’s Bench in Ireland, who died at a very advanced age a few years since, in full possession of the astounding legal acumen which marked his extended career at the bar, and subsequently upon the bench.

The writer spent a long-to-be-remembered day with Charles Lever in the April before his death. He was stopping in Dublin at Morrison’s Hotel, Dawson Street. We found him seated at an open window, a bottle of claret at his right hand and the proof-sheets of Lord Kilgobbin before him. It was a beautiful morning borrowed from the month of May; the hawthorns in the college park were just beginning to bloom, and nature was young and warm and lovely.

At the date of our visit he looked a hale, hearty, laughter-loving man of sixty. There was mirth in his gray eye, joviality, in the wink that twittered on his eyelid, saucy humor in his smile, and bon mot, wit, repartee, and rejoinder in every movement of his lips. His hair very thin, but of a silky brown, fell across his forehead, and when it curtained his eyes he would jerk back his head—this, too, at some telling crisis in a narrative when the particular action was just the exact finish required to make the story perfect. Mr. Lever’s teeth were all his own, and very brilliant, and, whether from habit or accident, he flashed them upon us in company with his wonderful eyes—a battery at once both powerful and irresistible. He spoke slowly at first, but warming to his work, and candying an idea in a short, contagious, musical laugh, his story told itself all too rapidly, and the light burned out with such a glare as to intensify the succeeding darkness. Like all good raconteurs, he addressed himself deferentially to his auditor in the beginning, and as soon as the fish was hooked, the attention enthralled, he would speak as if thinking aloud. Mr. Lever made great use of his hands, which were small and white and delicate as those of a woman. He made play with them—threw them up in ecstasy or wrung them in mournfulness, just as the action of the moment demanded. He did not require eyes or teeth with such a voice and such hands; they could tell and illustrate the workings of his brain. He was somewhat careless in his dress, but clung to the traditional high shirt-collar, merely compromising the unswerving stock of the Brummel period. “I stick to my Irish shoes,” he said, thrusting upwards about as uncompromising a “bit of leather” as we have ever set eyes on right under our nose, “and until a few years ago I got them from a descendant of the celebrated Count Lally, who cobbled at Letterkenny. There is no shoe in the world equal to the Irish brogue.”

“You are ‘taking time by the forelock,’ as we say in the play,” said the writer, pointing to the rough copy of the Cornhill Magazine, in which the story was running.

“Always at the heel of the hunt,” he replied. “This is the May number, and not corrected yet.”

“I consider Lord Kilgobbin as good as, if not better than, anything you have written.”

There was unutterable sadness in his tone and gesture as he said, with a weary sigh:

“Ah! I have been tilting the cask so long that the lees are coming out very muddy.”

“Which of your novels do you like best?” was asked.

“Well, my most careful work is Sir Brook Fosbrooke, but I prefer the Dodd Family Abroad, and all for the sake of Carry Dodd, who is my ideal of a pure, bright, charming Irish girl.”

Further on:

“You are the same reckless, rollicking, warm-hearted, improvident people as when I left you, and the lower orders entertain the same hatred of Saxon supremacy. I was walking down College Green yesterday, and as I stood opposite the old Parliament House, a troop of dragoons, in all their panoply of glancing helmets, blood-red coats, and prancing steeds, trotted past. A ragged, tatterdemalion carman was feeding a horse only fit for the knacker’s yard, attached to an outside car, with a wisp of hay.

“‘What regiment is that?’ I asked, partly from curiosity, partly for the sake of a conversation.

“‘Sorra a know I know,’ was the gruff response.

“‘Where are they going to?’

“Without raising his head, and giving a vicious chuck to the hay:

“‘To h—l, I hope.’

“I will give you another illustration,” continued Mr. Lever, “of how determinedly the lower order of my countrymen disparage anything and everything English. I was invited to spend some days with the late Lord Carlisle, twice your Lord Lieutenant, at Castle Howard, in Yorkshire. I had at that time an Irish servant, a son of Corny Delany, to whom grumbling was chronic. As we drove through the magnificent avenue beneath the extending branches of giant oaks and lordly elms, I observed to my follower: ‘What do you think of those trees?’

“‘I see thim.’

“‘Are they not splendid?’

“‘Och! threes is threes anywhere.’

“‘But the Howards are proud of these trees; they are the finest in England. Lord Carlisle sets great store by them.’

“‘Arrah, thin, why wudn’t he have the hoighth av fine threes? Shure hadn’t he the pick av the Phaynix Park?’

“I was dining with Judge —— on Sunday, who, as you know, is a very diminutive, shrivelled-up-looking little man,” continued Mr. Lever, “and he told me an amusing story. When attorney-general, he purchased an estate in Tipperary near Clonmel. Shortly after the purchase he resolved upon paying the place a visit to take a look at his recent acquisition. As he was proceeding with his agent through a boreen which led to mearings of his property, he overheard the following conversation between two old women:

“‘Wisha, thin, d’ye tell me that’s the new landlord, Missis Mulligan?’

“‘Sorra a lie in it, ma’am.’

“‘That dawny little bit av a crayture?’

“‘A leprechaun, no less.’

“‘Why, begorra, the boys might as well be shootin’ at a jacksnipe.’”

Mr. Lever’s conversational powers were simply marvellous; his anecdotes fell like ripe fruit from an overladen tree. In London his great delight was a night at the Cosmopolitan Club, Berkeley Square. This club is only open upon Wednesday and Sunday nights during the Parliamentary session. The members stroll in from eleven o’clock at night to about three o’clock A.M. Cabinet ministers, ambassadors of all nations, members of the legislature, eminent littérateurs, Royal Academicians, repair thither for a gossip; and here, amidst the best talkers in the world, Charles Lever stood pre-eminent. As the wits and raconteurs at Will’s Coffee House were silent whilst Joseph Addison talked Spectator, so the members of the Cosmopolitan maintained a breathless attention when Charles Lever talked Cornelius O’Dowd; and many a man has “dined out considerably” upon a mot, and has, perhaps, established a reputation, by the retailing of an anecdote recounted within the salons of the club by the inimitable and fascinating “Harry Lorrequer.” When the writer parted with Lever upon that evening, he felt justifiably elated at being enabled to amuse, if not astonish, the most brilliant man of the day, but, upon a rigid self-examination, was somewhat disappointed upon discovering that, instead of his having been engaged in entertaining Lever, Lever had been entertaining him, and that he had not uttered a single sentence out of the veriest commonplace. Such was the charm of Lever’s manner that he took you, as it were, from out yourself, and for the time infused his own groove of thought, causing your ideas to mingle with his and float joyously onward upon the glittering current of his conversation. Lever was a devoted worshipper of the “sad solemnities of whist,” playing rubber after rubber up to any and all hours. It is related that an eminent wearer of the ermine, a fellow of Trinity College, a gallant field officer, and Lever met, dined early, and played whist until the hour at which the train departed for Kingston by which “Harry Lorrequer” was to leave en route for London. “Come on to Kingston,” said Lever, “sleep at the Anglesea Arms Hotel, and I will not go until the morning boat.” They played all night and until one o’clock next day. Si non e vero e ben trovato, but the writer has the story from unimpeachable authority.

Charles Lever’s last novel, concluded shortly before his death, is Lord Kilgobbin. Let its unutterably sad preface speak for itself:

“To the memory of one whose companionship made the happiness of a long life, and whose loss has made me helpless, I dedicate this book, written in breaking health and broken spirits. The task that once was my joy and my pride I have lived to find associated with my sorrow. It is not, then, without a cause I say, I hope this effort may be my last.—TRIESTE, January 20, 1872.”

It is with a pang of regret that we peruse the Cornelius O’Dowd papers. They are tinged with that abominable spirit which is sending Italy at the present hour to perdition, and we greatly fear that Mr. Lever wrote them for the London market. He was no bigot, however; on the contrary, his life was passed amongst Catholics, and his dearest and best friends were of the true church; consequently, the pain is intensified when we come to stand face to face with the fact that these papers were, if not the outcome of a pecuniary necessity, at least the result of a craving for money, and the hollow effusions of a hirelingpen. His Italian sojourn led him gradually away from the more kindly tone towards Catholics which pervaded his earlier Irish novels.

Lever and Griffin have been compared as writers of Irish fiction. We would rather have been the author of The Collegians than of any work of Mr. Lever’s. There is a virgin simplicity in Gerald Griffin’s style that “Harry Lorrequer” could not touch; an atmosphere which he could not breathe; a purity which, while the morale of Lever’s writings is unimpeachable, is of that order that is so rarely attained by the most chaste and most elevated amongst our writers of fiction. Griffin’s Irish is not stagy—it is real; so, too, is Lever’s. But while the former paints the portrait, leaving the imagination of the reader to put in the finishing touches, the latter rubs in a laugh here or a keen thrust there, so as to dramatize the picture; and, while it is more vivid during perusal, the mind falls back upon the other for less exciting pabulum.

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ORDER.

FROM A POEM BY ST. FRANCIS D’ASSISI.

Our Lord Speaks:

And though I fill thy heart with warmest love, Yet in true order must thy heart love me; For without order can no virtue be. By thine own virtue, then, I from above Stand in thy soul; and so, most earnestly, Must love from turmoil be kept wholly free. The life of fruitful trees, the seasons of The circling year, move gently as a dove. I measured all the things upon the earth; Love ordered them, and order kept them fair, And love to order must be truly wed. O soul! why all this heat of little worth? Why cast out order with no thought or care? For by love’s warmth must love be governèd.

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THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN.

Situated in the wildest portion of the county of Mayo, Monamullin, at the date upon which this story opens, mustered about forty mud-cabins erected here and there, and in such positions as were deemed most suitable, having regard to the cruel winds from the ocean, and the “bit o’ ground” for the cultivation of the potatoes.

A cottage covered with a crisp amber thatch, and whitewashed to the color of the driven snow, held the post of honor in the village. It boasted a flower-garden in front and a vegetable patch in the rear. Moreover, it was guarded by a neatly-cropped privet hedge, while a little green gate admitted to a red-bricked pathway leading to a rustic porch adorned with roses that seemingly bloomed the whole year round, and a Virginia creeper whose leaves were now the hue of blood.

In the front garden, his head bared, the rays of the setting sun surrounding it as with an aureole, stalked a man attired in the black flowing soutane of a Catholic clergyman.

Father Maurice O’Donnell, the parish priest, was engaged in reading his office from a tattered and dog’s-eared breviary. Tall and thin almost to emaciation, there was yet a wiry swing in his gaunt frame that spoke of unfaded vigor, whilst the glowing fire in the dark blue eye told its own tale.

“Father Maurice” was loved and cherished by his little flock. His every want—and his wants were few enough—was anxiously anticipated. His patch of oats was tilled, weeded, cut, and stacked, his cottage thatched and whitewashed, his potatoes planted, his pony treated as common property in so far as fodder was concerned, while upon fast-days the “finest lump av a salmin” or the “illigantest” turbot, ever found its way to the back door of “The House,” as his humble abode was somewhat grandiloquently styled.

Maurice O’Donnell was wrapped up in his flock. In good sooth he was their shepherd. Night, noon, and morning found him ever watchful at “the gate in the vineyard wall.” He was the depositary of all their griefs, the sharer in all their joys—their guide, philosopher, and friend. In worldly matters he was simple as a child. Living, as he did, out of the world, he was perfectly contented to learn what was whirling round within it from the pages of the Nation, from the columns of which it was his practice to read aloud on Sunday afternoon to a very large muster, if not to the entire adult population, of Monamullin—in summer time seated in a coign of vantage by the sad sea-wave, in winter opposite a rousing turf fire laid on especially for the important occasion, and with a great display of ceremony by his housekeeper, “an ould widdy wumman” rejoicing in the name of Clancy, whose husband had been lost at sea in the night of “the great storm.”

Father Maurice never asked for money—he had no occasion for it. His solitary extravagance was snuff, and the most sedulous care was taken by the “boys” returning from Castlebar or Westport to fetch back a supply of “high toast,” in order that his “riverince’s box” might stand constantly replenished.

Upon this particular August evening Father Maurice was hurrying through his office with as much rapidity as the solemn nature of the duty would permit, as a drive of no less than seven honest Irish miles lay between him and his dinner.

The even tenor of his life had been broken in upon by an invitation to dine and sleep at the palatial residence of Mr. Jocelyn Jyvecote, a Yorkshire squire, who had purchased the old acres of the Blakes of Ballinacor, and who had recently expended a fabulous sum in erecting a castle upon the edge of a gloomy lake in the desolate valley of Glendhanarrahsheen. In his letter of invitation Mr. Jyvecote had said: “I am extremely desirous of introducing my youngest daughter to you, as she has taken it into her head to go over to your church; and, since you are so devoted to her interests, I beg of you to accept this invitation as you would undertake a little extra duty.”

To decline would be worse than ungracious, especially under the peculiar circumstances of the case, and it was with a heavy heart, and not without a keen debate with Mr. Lawrence Muldoon, the “warm” man of the village, in which the pros and cons were duly and gravely weighed, that the worthy priest replied in the affirmative. While Father Maurice was engaged in pacing his little garden, Mrs. Clancy, his housekeeper, was calmly preparing for a steady but copious enjoyment of her evening meal in the kitchen, which from floor to ceiling, from fireplace to dresser—shining again with crockery of the willow pattern—was, to use her own expression, “as nate as a new-biled egg.” A large brown earthenware teapot had just been promoted from the hob to a table “convaynient” to the window. A huge platter of stirabout, with a lump of butter oiling itself in the middle, stood within easy reach of her right hand, while a square of griddle-bread occupied a like position upon her left, and a wooden bowl full of jacket-bursted potatoes formed the near background.

Mrs. Clancy was strong upon tea, and in the village her opinion upon this as upon most other subjects was unwritten law. She was particularly fond of a dash of green through a full-flavored Pekoe, preparing the mixture with her own fair hands with a solemn gravity befitting so serious an undertaking. She was now about to try a sample of Souchong which had just arrived from Westport, and her condition of mind was akin to that of an analytical chemist upon the eve of some exceedingly important result.

Mrs. Clancy had seated herself in that cosy attitude peculiar to elderly females about to enjoy, to them, that most inviting of all meals, and had already ascertained, upon anxious reference to the teapot, that its contents had been sufficiently drawn, when the door was thrust somewhat violently open, and Murty Mulligan, the “priest’s boy,” unceremoniously entered the sanctum.

Murty was handy-man and factotum. He “swep out” the chapel, rang the bell, attended Mass, groomed the pony, dug the potatoes, landed the cabbage, and made himself generally useful.

Although designated a “boy,” he had allowed—not that he could claim any particular option in the matter—some forty-five summers to roll over his head, every one of which, in addition to their attendant winters, had been passed in the peaceful little village of Monamullin. His travels had never extended further than Westport, which he regarded as a vast commercial seaport—a Liverpool, in fact—and it was his habit to place it in comparison with any city of note that might come upon the tapis, extolling its dimensions and dilating upon its unlimited importance.

Murty’s appearance savored much of the stage Irishman’s. His eyes sparkled comically, his nose was tip-tilted—Mr. Tennyson will excuse the application of the simile—while his mouth was large and always open. His forehead was rather low, and his ears stood out upon either side of his head like the orifices of air-shafts. He was now arrayed in his bravest attire, as he had been told off to drive his reverence to Moynalty Castle. His brogues were as highly greased as his hair, and his Sunday—last Mass—clothes, consisting of a gray frieze body-coat with brass buttons, a flowered silk waistcoat, corduroy knee-breeches, and blue worsted stockings, looked as fresh as if they had been donned for the first time.

Not a little vain of the importance of his office, combined with the general effect of his appearance, he swaggered into the kitchen in a manner totally at variance with his usual custom, as Mrs. Clancy was every inch queen of this realm, and a potentate who exercised her prerogative with right royal despotism.

The “consait” was considerably taken out of Murty by being met with an angry, contemptuous stare and “What ails ye, Murty Mulligan?”

“It’s time for to bring round the yoke, ma’am,” replied Murty in an abashed and respectful tone, eyeing the teapot with a wistful glance, as he was particularly partial to a cup of the beverage it distilled, especially when brewed by Mrs. Clancy.

“Well, av it is, bring it round,” was the tart rejoinder.

“I dunna how far he’s upon his office,” said Murty.

“Ye’d betther ax, Murty Mulligan.”

“I dar’n’t disturb him, Mrs. Clancy, an’ ye know that as well as I do meself, ma’am.”

“Well, don’t bother me, anyhow,” observed the lady, proceeding to pour out a cup of tea.

“Is that the tay I brought ye from Westport, ma’am?” demanded Murty, upon whom the sight of the rich brown fluid and its pungent aroma were producing longing effects.

Mrs. Clancy took a preliminary sip with the sound of a person endeavoring to suck a coy oyster from a clinging shell.

“Sorra worse tay I ever wetted,” she retorted. “There’s no more substance in it nor in chopped sthraw. I’ll never take a grain o’ tay out o’ Westport agin—sorra a wan.”

“I done me best for ye, anyhow, ma’am. I axed Misther Foley himself for the shupariorest tay in the town, an’ he gim me what’s in that pot; an’, faix, it smells rosy an’ well.” And Murty sniffed, as if he would drive the aroma up through his nostrils out to the top of his head.

Mrs. Clancy turned to Murty with a frowning and ominous aspect, the glare of an intense irritation blazing in her face.

“Do ye know what I think ye done, Murty Mulligan? It’s me belief ye done it, an’ if ye tuk the buke to the conthrairy I wudn’t credit ye,” placing her arms akimbo and fixing him with her eye.

“What is it I done, Mrs. Clancy?” demanded Murty boldly, flinging his caubeen upon the floor and assuming a defiant attitude. “What is it I done, ma’am?”

The housekeeper regarded him steadily, while she said in a slow and solemn tone of impeachment:

“Ye got me infayrior tay, an’ ye tuk a pint out av the change.”

It was Murty’s turn to become indignant now.

“I’d scorn for to do the likes of so mane an action, Mrs. Clancy. There’s them that wud do the like, but I’d have ye know, ma’am, that me father’s son wud rather be as dhry as a cuckoo, ma’am, nor demane himself in that way. Yer sentiments, ma’am, is very hurtful to me feelin’s, an’ I’d as lieve ye’d call me a thief at wanst, ma’am, as for to run down me karakter in that a-way.”

“I don’t want for to call ye nothin’, but I repate that—”

“Don’t repate nothin’, ma’am. Av ye wur a man I’d give ye a crack in the gob for daarin’ to asperge me karakter, more betokin all for the sake av the filthy lucre av a pint of porther. Porther, indeed!” added Murty. “I’m goin’ to-day, ma’am, where I’ll get me fill av port wine, an’ sherry wine, and Madayrial wine, ma’am; an’ dickins resave the word I’ll tell ye av the goin’s-on at the castle beyant for yer thratemint av me this blessed evenin’, Mrs. Clancy.”

This threat upon the part of Murty threw the housekeeper into the uttermost consternation. The proceedings at Moynalty Castle were fraught with the deepest interest to her; for in addition to her personal curiosity, which was rampant, it was necessary that she should become acquainted with everything that took place, in order to retail her special knowledge to her cronies in the village, who awaited the housekeeper’s report in eager and hopeful expectation.

Had she burnt her boats? Had she cut down the bridge behind her?

Murty Mulligan’s tone was resolute.

“Murty, Murty avic! shure it’s only jokin’ I was—sorra a more,” she said in a coaxing way.

Murty grunted.

“Shure yer welkim to yer pint av—”

Murty confronted her:

“I tell ye, Missis Clancy, that I tuk nothin’, nayther bit, bite, nor sup, from the time I et me brekquest till I met Misther Fogarty’s own boy, and he thrated me. Av I tuk a pint out av yer lucre, ma’am, I’d say it at wanst, wudout batin’ about the bush.”

“That’s enough, Murty; say no more about the tay. They gev ye a bad matarial, Murty, an’ shure that’s none o’ you’re fault. Here,” she added, pouring out a saucerful—the saucer being about the dimensions of a large soup-plate—and presenting it to him; “put that to yer mouth an’ say is it worth three hapence an ounce?”

“Sorra a care I care,” growled Murty, but in a much softer tone.

“Thry it, anyhow,” urged the housekeeper.

“I don’t care a thraneen for tay, Mrs. Clancy,” said Murty, throwing a glance full of profound meaning towards a small press in which Mrs. Clancy kept a supply of cordials.

“Ah!” exclaimed that lady, “I see be the twist in yer eye that ye want somethin’ to put betune yer shammy an’ the cowld. Ye have a long road to thravel, Murty, so a little sup o’ ginger cordial will warm it for ye, avic.” And while the now thoroughly pacified Murty gently remonstrated, Mrs. Clancy proceeded to the cupboard, and, pouring a golliogue of the grateful compound into a tea-cup, handed it to Murty, who tossed it off with a smack that would have started a coach and four.

“So ye’ll stop the night at the castle?” observed the housekeeper in a careless tone.

“Yis, ma’am.”

“It’s a fine billet, Murty.”

“Sorra a finer. Shure it bates Lord Sligo’s an’ Mitchell Hinry’s beyant at Kylemore; an’ as for atin’ an’ dhrinkin’, be me song they say that lamb-chops is as plentiful as cabbages is here, an’ that there’s as much sperrits in it as wud float ould Mickey Killeher’s lugger.”

“It’s a quare thing for Misther Jyvecote for to be axin’ Father Maurice to a forrin’ cunthry like that, Murty.”

“Troth, thin, it is quare, ma’am; but, shure, mebbe he wants for to be convarted.”

“That must be it; an’ he’d be bet intirely, av Father Maurice wasn’t there for to back his tack. His sermon last Sunda’ was fit for the Pope o’ Room.”

“I never heerd the like av it. It flogged Europe. Whisht!” suddenly cried Murty, “who’s this comin’ up the shore?”

“It’s a forriner,” exclaimed the housekeeper, after a prolonged scrutiny—meaning by the term foreigner that the person who was now approaching the cottage was not an inhabitant of the village. “A fine, souple boy,” she added admiringly.

“It’s a gintleman, an’ he has a lump av a stick in his hand,” said Murty.

“Arrah! what wud bring a gintleman here, ye omadhawn?” observed Mrs. Clancy with some asperity.

“A thraveller, thin,” suggested her companion. “He’s a bag on his back.”

“Troth, it’s badly off he’d be for thravellin’, if he come here for to do the like.”

“He’s makin’ for the gate.”

“He’s riz the latch.”

“I’ll run out, Mrs. Clancy, and bring ye the hard word, while ye’d be axin’ for the lind av a sack.”

“Ay, do, Murty avic; an’ I’ll have a cup av Dimpsy’s tay wet be the time yer back.”

* * * * *

Father Maurice had just finished the perusal of his office, and was in the act of returning to the house, when the stranger approached him.

“Father Morris?” said the new-comer, lifting his hat.

“Maurice O’Donnell, at your service, sir,” replied the priest.

“I should apologize for addressing you so familiarly, reverend sir, but three or four persons of whom I asked my way told me that Father Morris was Monamullin, and that Monamullin was Father Morris.”

“My people invariably address me by my Christian name, and I beg, sir, as you are now within my bailiwick, that you will continue to do so.”

“As I am within your bailiwick, I must needs do your bidding, Father Maurice.”

Such a genial, happy voice! Such frank, kind blue eyes! Such a well knit, strong-built figure!

The priest gazed at a young man of about five-and-twenty, six feet high, with crisp brown curly hair, beard en Henri Quatre, broad forehead, and manly, sunburnt neck and face, attired in a suit of light homespun tweed, a blue flannel shirt very open at the throat, a scarlet silk tie knotted sailor fashion, and heavy shoes, broad-toed and thick-soled.

“My name is Brown,” he said. “I am an artist. I have walked over from Castlebar. I am doing picturesque bits of this lovely country—not your confounded beaten tracks, but the nooks which must be sought like the violet. I have very little money, and needs must rough it. This stick and knapsack constitute my impedimenta, and, like Cæsar, I have carried my Commentaries before now in my teeth while bridging a river by swimming it. I asked for the inn, and I was referred to Father Maurice.”

“I can answer for it, Mr. Brown, that you will find every house in Monamullin willing to shelter you; and, further, that you will find this to be possibly the best. I am unfortunately compelled to travel seven miles along the coast to-night, but will be back, please God, to-morrow; in the meantime my housekeeper will try what some broiled fish and a dish of ham and eggs can do towards appeasing what ought to be a giant’s appetite. And I can answer for the sheets being well aired, having pulled the lavender myself in which they are periodically enshrined.”

Father Maurice ushered his guest into the cottage with a welcome so genuine that Mr. Brown felt at his ease almost ere the greeting had died upon the priest’s lips, and proceeded to hang up his hat and knapsack with the air of a man who was completely at home.

The neat little parlor was cosily furnished. A genuine bit of Domingo mahogany stood in the centre of the room, and round it half a dozen plump horse-haired, brass-nailed chairs, with a “Come and sit on us, we are not for show” air about them peculiarly inviting. A venerable bureau, black as ebony from age, and brass-mounted, ornamented one corner, and opposite to it a plaster-of-paris bust of Pius IX. upon a fluted pedestal, while the recesses at either side of the fireplace were furnished with antique book-cases containing a well-thumbed library of ecclesiastical literature, the works of St. Augustine being prominently conspicuous. Over the mantel-piece hung a portrait of Daniel O’Connell, with the autograph of the Liberator in a small frame beneath, and at his right and left engravings, and of no mean order either, of Henry Grattan and John Philpot Curran. The walls were adorned with copies of the cartoons of Raphael, a view of Croagh Patrick from Clew Bay, a bird’s-eye glance at St. Peter’s, and an illuminated address from the inhabitants of Monamullin to their beloved pastor upon the completion of his thirtieth year on the mission—an address the composition of which conferred undying renown upon Tim Rafferty, the schoolmaster, and begat for the boy who wrote it a fame only second to that of the erudite pedagogue.

“You are delightfully snug here, Father Maurice,” observed his guest, seating himself and glancing admiringly round the apartment. “What a treasure of an antique bureau! Why, the brokers in London are giving any amount of money for such articles; we are all running mad over them. If you could get it whispered that Dean Swift or Joe Addison worked at that desk, it would be worth its weight in gold. It’s Queen Anne now or nothing.”

“You are an Englishman?”

“A base, bloody, and brutal Saxon!”

“We have one of your countrymen residing in this part of the country—a Mr. Jyvecote.”

The stranger started. “Any of the Jyvecotes of Marston Moor, in Yorkshire?”

“The Jyvecote, I believe. He came over here about ten years ago to shoot, taking poor Mr. Bodkin Blake’s Lodge in the valley of Glendhanarrahsheen, and—”

“Oh! do say that word again, it is so delightfully soft—a cross between Italian and Japanese,” burst in the artist.

“Glendhanarrahsheen,” repeated Father Maurice. “We have some softer than that. What think you of Tharramacornigaun? But, as I was saying, Mr. Jyvecote liked the valley so much that he brought his family over in the following year. Mr. Jyvecote was delighted with the place, and he bought the Lodge, extended it, and at length determined upon building a castle. This castle—Moynalty Castle he calls it—was completed about three years ago, the bare walls alone costing seventy thousand pounds. Except the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin,” added the priest, “there is nothing so grand in all Ireland.”

“I must walk over there some day. Which way does it lie?”

“It’s between us and Westport, along the coast, almost out upon a rock.”

“What a strange idea to put such a lot of money into such a corner!”

“Is it not? It’s completely out of the world. The nearest railway station is fifty miles.”

“Then I forgive Mr. Jyvecote. I take off my hat to him. I congratulate him. O my dear Father Maurice!” exclaimed the artist enthusiastically, “you who live in such tender tranquillity, with the moan of the sea for a lullaby, can know nothing of the ecstatic feeling attendant upon leaving steam fifty miles behind one. It is simply a new, a beatific existence! And so Jocelyn Jyvecote is within ten miles,” he added, more in the tone of a person engaged in thinking aloud than by way of observation.

“Are you acquainted with him?” asked the priest.

“Oh! yes—that is, very slightly.” There was a decided shade of embarrassment in his manner that would have struck an ordinary observer, but the simple-minded clergyman failed to notice it.

“The yoke’s at the doore, yer riverince, an’ if we don’t start at wanst we’ll be bet be the hill beyant Thronig na Coppagh,” shouted Murty Mulligan, thrusting his shock head into the apartment.

“How unfortunately this happens!” exclaimed the priest. “I have not slept out of this cottage for nearly thirty years, and the very night I could have wished to be here I am compelled to go elsewhere. However, Mr. Brown, I shall leave you in good hands, and before I start I must make you acquainted with my housekeeper.”

Murty had returned to the kitchen considerably baffled.

“He’s goin’ for to stop the night, Mrs. Clancy,” he reported to the expectant housekeeper.

“Who’s goin’ for to stop the night?”

“The strange gintleman above.”

“Where is he goin’ for to stop, I’d like for to know? Mrs. Dooly’s childre is down wud maysles. The gauger is billeted at Mooney’s—”

“He’s goin’ to stop here in this house. I heerd his riverince axin’ him.”

“Arrah, baithershin!” exclaimed Mrs. Clancy incredulously.

“It’s truth I’m tellin’ ye, ma’am.”

“Well, may—”

At this moment the voice of Father Maurice was heard calling, “Mrs. Clancy.”

“Yer wanted, ma’am,” cried Murty.

“I’m not fit for to be seen. Slip up an’ discoorse him, Murty avic, till I put on a clane cap an’ apron.”

“Mrs. Clancy, you will take good care of this gentleman, Mr. Brown, till I come back. Show your skill in frying eggs and bacon, and in turning out a platter of stirabout. Don’t let the hens cheat him of his fresh egg in the morning, and see that his bed is as comfortable as my own.” And seating himself upon one side of the low-backed jaunting-car, with Murty Mulligan upon the other, and with a courteous farewell to his guest, Father Maurice rapidly disappeared in the direction of the valley of Glendhanarrahsheen.

Mr. Brown stood in the middle of the road gazing after the car, his hands plunged into his breeches pockets, and a sweet little bit of meerschaum stuck in his handsome mouth.

“What a turn of the wheel is this?” he said to himself. “I wander here into the most out-of-the-way place in out-of-the-way Ireland, and I find myself treading on the kibes of the very man whom of all others I would least care to meet. I always thought that Jyvecote was in Kerry, near Valentia, where the wire dives for America. However, seven miles mean utter isolation here, and, by Jove! I’m too much charmed with this genial old clergyman and his genuine hospitality to think of shifting my quarters; besides I’ll paint him a holy picture, perhaps a Virgin and Child, which will in some small measure repay him. Nowhere in the world would one meet with such a reception, save in Ireland. Here I am taken upon trust, and believed to be an honest fellow until I am found out, completely reversing the social code. He places his house, his all, at my disposal, believing me to be a poor devil of an artist on tramp and ready to paint anything for bread and butter. Hang it all! it makes me feel low and mean to sail under the false colors of an assumed name, and yet it is better as it is—much better. Suppose I meet Mr. Jyvecote? He’d scarcely recognize me. I’ve not seen him since our stormy interview at Marseilles. Had I my beard then? No; it was on my way out to Egypt, and that’s exactly three years ago this very month. He had a lot of womankind with him. Per Bacco! I suppose he was making for this place.”

Mr. Brown strolled over to the beach, and, seating himself upon a granite boulder, smoked on and on, buried in thought. The sea was as still as a sea in a dream, and gray, and mystic, and silent. The hush that Eve whispers as Night lets fall her mantle was coming upon the earth, and the twinkling stars began to throb in the blue-black sky; not a speck was visible on the billowy plain save a solitary fishing-boat, which now loomed out of the darkness like a weird and spectral bark.

In such scenes, and in the awful quiet of such hours, images and thoughts that dare not die are deposited upon the silent shore of memory. The man who sat gazing out to sea with his hands clasping his knees was Sir Everard Noel, the fourth baronet of a good old Yorkshire family, and owner of a fine estate between Otley and Ilkley, in the North Riding of that noble county. He was five-and-twenty, and had been his own master ever since he attained his majority, until which momentous event he had been the victim of a peripatetic guardian and the Court of Chancery, his father having died while he was yet an infant, and his mother when he had reached the age of nineteen. Freed from the yoke of his guardian, who led him a tour of the world, and placed in possession of ninety thousand pounds, the accumulation of his minority, and with an income of ten thousand a year, he plunged into the giddy whirl of London fast life, and for a brief season became the centre of a set composed of the crème de la crème, the aurati juvenes of that modern Babylon. He was liberal to lavishness, was fascinated with Clubland and écarté, losing his money with a superb tranquillity, and addicted to turning night into day. He flattered the fair sex with the “homage of a devotee,” and broke hearts as he would nutshells. Intriguing dowagers fished for him for their “penniless lasses wi’ long pedigrees,” but somehow or other, after four seasons, during which he had had several hairbreadth escapes, he still was single, still healthy and heart-whole, but minus his ninety thousand pounds.

During his minority he had wooed Art, wisely and well, and even while the daze of deviltry was upon him he never totally neglected her. He painted with more than the skill of a mere amateur, and had even the best of it in a tussle with the art critic of the Times upon the genuineness of a Rembrandt which had burst upon the market, to the intense excitement of the cognoscenti. There was a good deal of the artist in his nature, and he was an immense favorite with the bearded Bohemians, knights of the brush, who voted him a good fellow, with the solitary drawback of being unavoidably a “howling swell.”

Four years of wasted life brought on satiety, and he turned from the past with a shudder, from the present with loathing. He wanted to do something, to be interested in something, and to shake off the sickening aimlessness of his every-day life that clung to him like a winding-sheet.

There came a day when the men in the smoking-room of the club asked each other, “Where the doose is Noel?” when wily matrons found their gushing notes of invitation unanswered; when toadies, hangers-on, and sycophants found his apartments in Half-Moon Street, Piccadilly, closed. There came a day when club and matron and toady thought of him no more. The wave of oblivion had passed over him and he was forgotten. Sic itur ad astra. Away from the fatal influences that had, maelstrom-like, sucked him into their whirl, new thoughts, new impulses, new aspirations burst into blossom, and his old love—Art—turned to him with the radiant smile of the bygone time.

There is red red blood in the veins at twenty-five, and white-winged Hope ever beckons onwards with soul-seductive gesture. He determined to seek change of scene and of thought. As Sir Everard Noel, the president of the Four-in-Hand Club; the owner of Katinka, the winner of the Chester Cup; the skipper of the Griselda, that won the queen’s prize at Cowes; the best rider with the Pytchley hounds, every hotel on the Continent, every village in Merrie England, would recognize him, and the old toadying recommence; but as plain Mr. Brown, an obscure artist, with a knapsack on his back, he would be free, free as a bird, and the summer morning this idea flashed across his mind found him once again a bright, happy, and joyous man.

Sir Everard Noel was a gentleman of warm temper and great energy, prone to sudden impulses and unconsidered actions. No sooner had he made up his mind to go upon the tramp than he started; and, considering that he would be less liable to recognition in Connemara than in Wales, made Galway the base of his supplies, and, knapsack on back, containing sketching materials and a change of flannel, a few days’ walking brought him to Monamullin in glorious health, splendid spirits, and prepared to enjoy everybody and everything.

“How much more delightful all this is,” he thought, “than the horrors I have passed through—horrors labelled pleasures! Faugh! I shudder when I think of them. Let me see, it’s ten o’clock; at this hour I would be about half-way through a miserably unwholesome dinner, spiced up in order to meet the requirements of a demoralized appetite, or yawning in an opera-box, with six or seven long, dreary hours before me to kill at any price, especially with brandy and soda. How delicious all this is! How fresh, how pure! What a dinner I ate of those rashers and eggs! And such tea! By Jove! that old lady must have a chest entirely for her own consumption. If my bed is as comfortable as it looks, I shall not awaken till the padre returns from Jyvecote’s. How disagreeable to meet Jyvecote or any of the lot! I never knew any of them but Jasper and the father. What a glorious old gentleman is Father Maurice—simple as a child, with the dignity of a saint. I had better get to bed now, as I shall begin on a Virgin and Child for him to-morrow; or, if his Stations are daubs, I can do him a set, though it will take me a deuce of a time. I must visit the chapel to-morrow; I suppose it’s very dingy.” And with a good stout yawn Mr. Brown—for we shall continue to call him by this name until the proper time comes—turned towards the cottage.

Mrs. Clancy met him at the door.

“I was afraid ye wor lost, sir,” she said as he entered the hall.

“Not lost, my good lady, but found. I suppose you lock the doors here earlier than this.”

“Lock!” she exclaimed almost indignantly—“lock indeed! There’s not a bowlt nor a bar nor a lock on the whole house. Arrah! who wud rob Father Maurice but th’ ould boy?—an’ he’d be afeard. He daren’t lay a hand on anything here, an’ well he knows it, God be good to us!”

“I suppose you’ve been a long time with Father Maurice, Mrs. Clancy.”

“Only sence me man—the Lord rest his sowl, amin!—was lost in the night av the great storm, nigh fifteen year ago—fifteen year come the fourteenth av next month, on a Frida’ night. He was a good man, an’ a fine provider, an’ wud have left me warm an’ comfortable but for the hard times that cum on the cunthry be raison av the famine. Ye might have heard tell of it, sir.”

“Oh! indeed I did.”

“Och! wirra, wirra! but it was an awful time, glory be to God! whin the poor craythurs was dyin’ by the roadsides and aitin’ grass to keep the sowles in their bodies, like bastes.”

“I was far away then, in China,” said Brown.

“That’s where the tay cums from; an’ very infayrior tay we’re gettin’ now, sir, compared wud what we used to get. I can’t rise more nor a cup out av two spoonfuls, an’ well I remimber whin wan wud give me layves enough for to fill a noggin. Are ye thinkin’ av Maynewth, sir?” asked Mrs. Clancy, exceedingly desirous of some clue as to the identity, habits, and occupation of her guest, as it would not do to face Monamullin with her finger in her mouth.

“Maynewth?” he replied. “What is Maynewth?”

“The collidge.”

“What college?”

“The collidge where the young priests is med.”

“Oh! dear, no, Mrs. Clancy,” he replied, laughing heartily. “I am a painter.”

“A painther!” she said in considerable astonishment.

“Yes, a poor painter.”

“Musha, now, but that flogs. An’ what are ye goin’ for to paint?”

“Anything that turns up.”

She thought for a moment, hesitated a little, scrutinized his apparel, hesitated again, and at length, “Wud ye be afther doin’ his riverince a good turn?”

“I should be only too delighted.”

“Thin ye might give the back doore a cupple o’ coats o’ paint afore ye go.”

The artist burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, long, loud, joyous, and rippling as that of a schoolboy’s, again and again renewed as the irritated puzzle written in the housekeeper’s face met his glance. At length he burst out after a tremendous guffaw:

“I am not exactly that sort of a painter, Mrs. Clancy, but I dare say I could do it if I tried; and I will try. I am more in that line,” pointing to the picture of Daniel O’Connell suspended over the mantel-piece.

The cloud of anger rapidly disappeared from Mrs. Clancy’s brow upon this explanation, and in a voice of considerable blandishment she half-whispered:

“Arrah, thin, mebbe ye’d do me a little wan o’ Dan for the kitchen, honey.”

After another hearty peal of laughter Mr. Brown most cordially assented, and, taking his chamber candle—a flaring dip—retired to his bedroom.

“Ma foi,” he gaily laughed, “this is homely. Do I miss my valet? Do I miss my brandy and soda? Do I miss my Aubusson carpet, my theatrical pictures, my Venetian mirror, or my villanous French novel? Not a bit of it. This is glorious; and what a tub I shall have in the morning in the wild Atlantic!”

* * * * *

Father Maurice’s guest was up, if not with the lark, at least not far behind that early-rising bird, and out in the gently-gliding wavelets, buffeting them with the vigorous stroke of a skilful swimmer. The ocean on this still, clear morning was beautiful enough to attract wistful glances from eyes the most blasé. The cloudless sky was intensely dark in its blue, as though the unseen sun was overhead and shining vertically down. The light did not seem of sea or land, but it shone dazzlingly on the low line of verdure-clad hills, on the cornfields in stubble, causing every blade to glisten like a golden spear, on the whitewashed cottages, on the bright green hedges, on the line of dark rock, and enveloping the mountains of Carrig na Copple in the dim distance in blue and silver glory. The colors of the sea were magical, in luminous green, purple, and blue; and out across the billowy plain great bands of purple stretched away to the sky line, as a passing cloud flung its shadows in its onward fleecy progress. The artist felt all this beauty, drinking it in like life-wine, till it tingled and throbbed in every vein.

After partaking of a breakfast the consumption of which would have considerably astonished some of his quondam London set, and having lighted his meerschaum, Mr. Brown set out for a stroll through the village, accompanied by half a dozen cabin curs, who, having scented the stranger, most courteously made up their minds to act as his escort. The inhabitants of the cabins en route turned out to look respectfully at him. Children timorously approached, curtsied, and, when spoken to, retreated in laughing terror. Matrons gazed and gossiped. A cripple or two touched their caps to him, and on every side he was wished “good-luck.” He was Father Maurice’s guest, and, as a consequence, the guest of Monamullin. Whitewash abounded everywhere; amber thatch covered the roofs; scarlet geraniums bloomed vigorously, their crimson blossoms resembling gouts of blood spurted against marble slabs. A shebeen or public-house was not to be seen; order and peace and happiness reigned triumphant.

“A few trees planted down this street—if I may call it so—would make this an Arcadian village. I must ask Father Maurice to let me have them planted. A fountain, too, would look well just opposite that unpretending shop. I wonder where the church can be?”

A man with a reaping-hook bound in a hay rope happened to be passing, to whom he addressed himself.

“Can you tell me where the church is?”

“Yis, yer honor; troth, thin, I can.”

“Where is it, please?”

“Av it’s Mass ye want, Father Maurice is beyant at Moynalty Castle.”

“I merely want to see it.”

“An’ shure ye can, sir; it’s open day an’ night.”

“But where is it, my man?”

“Where is it? Right foreninst ye, thin. Don’t ye see the holy and blessed crass over the doore?”

The chapel was a small, low, cruciform building, very dingy despite its whitewash, and very tumble-down-looking. It was surrounded by a small grass-plat and a few stunted pines. A rude cross with a real crown of thorns stood in one corner, at the foot of which knelt an old man, bare-headed, engaged in repeating the rosary aloud, and two women, who were rocking themselves to and fro in a fervor of prayer. Within the church the fittings were of the most primitive description. The floor was unboarded, save close to the altar-rails; a few forms were scattered here and there, and one row of backed seats occupied a space to the right. The altar, approached by a single step, was of wood, a golden cross ornamenting the front panel, and a series of gilded Gothic arches forming its background, while the tabernacle consisted of a rudely-cut imitation of a dome-covered mosque. A picture of the Crucifixion hung over the altar suspended from the ceiling, and, as this was regarded as a masterpiece of art by the inhabitants of Monamullin from time immemorial, we will not discuss their æstheticism here. The Stations of the Cross were represented by small colored engravings in mahogany frames, and the holy-water font consisted of a huge boulder of granite which had a large hole scooped out of it.

“This will never do,” said Mr. Brown, gazing ruefully at the several works of art. “What a splendid chance for me! I shall paint, as the old masters did, under direct inspiration. What a sublime sensation, when my picture shall have been completed, to witness the reverential admiration of the poor devout people here! I shall be regarded as a benefactor. Fancy my being a benefactor to anybody or anything! Heigh-ho!” he sighed, “what a glorious little Gothic church, a prayer in stone, a portion of the money I so murderously squandered would have built here!—that four thousand I flung last March into the mire in Paris. Faugh!” And, dragged back over the waves of Time, he sat down upon one of the wooden benches, overwhelmed by the rush of his own thoughts.

Of the length of time he remained thus absorbed he made no count. The dead leaves of the misspent past rustled drearily round his heart, weighing him down with a load of inexpressible sadness—a sadness almost amounting to anguish—and two hours had come and gone ere his reverie was broken.

Happening to raise his eyes towards the altar, he was startled by perceiving a female form kneeling at the railings, lithe, svelte, and attired in costly and fashionable raiment. As he gazed, the young girl finished her prayers, and, with a deep, reverential inclination in front of the altar, swept past him with that graceful, undulatory motion which would seem to be the birthright of the daughters of sunny Spain. She was tall, elegantly formed, and possessed that air of high breeding which makes itself felt like a perfume. Her bright chestnut hair was brushed tightly back from an oval face, and hung in massive plaits at the back of her head. Her eyes were soft brown, her complexion milk-white.

“What a vision, and in this place, too! That is the best of the Catholic religion. The churches are always open, inviting one to come in and pray. I wonder who she can be? Some tourist. Pshaw! your tourist doesn’t trouble this quarter of the globe. To see, to be seen, to dress, and wrangle over the bills at palatial hotels, means touring nowadays. Some county lady, over to do a little shopping; but there are no shops, except that miserable little box opposite, and they apparently sell nothing there but marbles, tobacco-pipes, kites, and corduroy. Ah! I have it: some inlander coming for a plunge in the Atlantic. I suppose I shall meet her pony phaeton as I pass up through the village. I seriously hope I shall. There is something very fetching about her, and it purifies a fellow to see a girl like that at prayer.”

Such were the cogitations of Mr. Brown as he emerged from the dingy little chapel. Brown was not a Catholic. He had been educated at Eton, and, although intended for Cambridge, his guardian took him to Japan when he should have been cramming for his degree. Of the religion as by law established in England, he paid but little attention to the forms and merely went to church during the season to hear some “swell” preacher, or because Lady Clara Vere de Vere gave him a rendezvous. But, with all his faults and follies, he was never irreverent, and his respect for the things that belong unto God was ever honest, open, and sincere.

He was doomed to be disappointed. No pony phaeton disturbed the stillness of the village street. The curs, which had patiently waited for him whilst he remained in the church, received him with noiseless but cheery tail-wagging as he came out, and marched at his heels as though he had been their lord and master. The children rushed from cabins and dropped their quaint little curtsies. The cripples doffed their caps, the matrons gazed at him and gossiped; and, although he lingered to say a few words to a passing fisherman, and somewhat eagerly scanned the surrounding country, no sign could he obtain of the fair young girl who had flashed upon him like a “vision of the night.”

“I shall never see her again,” he thought; “and yet I could draw that face. Such a mouth! such contour! I must ask the padre if he knows her, though that is scarcely probable; and yet she is one of his flock—at least, she is a Catholic, so there is some hope.”

He returned to the cottage, and encountered Father Maurice in the garden.

“I did not like to disturb you at your devotions, Mr. Brown,” he said, “but I was only going to give you five minutes longer, as the salmon grill will be ready by that time.”

“How did you ascertain I was in the church?” asked Brown, entering the hall and hanging up his hat.

“A beautiful young lady told me.”

“I saw her; who is she?” exclaimed the artist eagerly.

“I shall present you to her. Here she is. Mr. Brown, Miss Julia Jyvecote.”

[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.]

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THE TWO PROPHETS OF MORMONISM.

MR. T. B. H. STENHOUSE, one of the Scottish converts to Mormonism, was for a quarter of a century an elder and missionary of the church of the Latter-Day Saints. He is the author of the most complete and careful history of the Mormons in the English language. Although he has “outgrown” the faith of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and disbelieves the doctrines which he once preached, he writes of his former associates in a tone of moderation and good sense, and gives them more credit for sincerity than the rest of the world will be likely to concede them. In the introduction to his Rocky Mountain Saints he says:

“Whatever judgment may be passed upon the faith and personal lives of the Mormon Prophet and his successor, there will be a general recognition of a divine purpose in their history. Under their leadership the Mormon people have aided to conquer the western desert, and to transform a barren and desolate region of a hitherto ‘unknown country’ into a land that seems destined at no distant day to teem with millions of human beings, and which promises to stand pre-eminent among the conquests of the republic. It is doubtful whether any collective body of other citizens, unmoved by religious impulses, would ever have traversed the sandy desert and sage-plains, and have lived an age of martyrdom in reclaiming them, as the Mormons have in Utah. But this has been accomplished, and it was accomplished by faith. That was the Providence of the saints, and it must be conceded that, as a means subservient to an end, the Mormon element has been used in the Rocky Mountain region by the Almighty Ruler for developing the best interests of the nation, and for the benefit of the world at large.”

The fallacies hidden in these reflections will not escape the notice of any thoughtful Catholic reader. Mr. Stenhouse has got a feeble hold of a great truth, but, embarrassed by the materialistic ideas which form so important a part of the Mormon philosophy, he does not know how to apply it. We quote the passage as a striking illustration of the spirit in which too many of our countrymen are inclined to judge the history and character of the saints of the Great Salt Lake. Americans have a profound veneration for material prosperity, and hardly find it in their hearts to condemn a community which has built cities in the remote wilderness, planted gardens in the midst of the desert, taught brooks to run across the arid plains, and “developed the resources” of one of the least promising territories in our national domain. Any man, according to the popular theories of the emancipation of conscience, has a right to make a religion to suit himself; and whatever he may profess—unless, indeed, he should chance to concur with about 160,000,000 other persons in professing the doctrines of the holy Catholic Church, in which case there would be a fair presumption that he was dangerous to society—his fellow-citizens are bound to treat his creed respectfully and admit the purity of his motives.[42] Hence the world honors the founder of a new state, even though he may be also the founder of a false religion. There are 80,000 Mormons in Utah, and as a community they are rich and thrifty. It is not surprising that we have heard of late so much admiring comment upon the genius of Brigham Young, so many predictions that he will be reckoned hereafter among the great men in American history.

It may be worth while to clear our minds by a brief sketch of the rise and development of Mormonism. It is a phenomenon too important to be passed over, and it has a closer connection with the moral and intellectual tendencies of the time than most of us suspect. The general direction of Protestant theology has always been towards rationalism and materialism. Founded upon the denial of everything that man cannot perceive by his unaided natural powers, it leads irresistibly to the rejection of divine interposition in worldly affairs and of all manner of heavenly revelation. But the human mind can no more rest without belief in the supernatural than the human body can rest upon air. Superstition is consequently the offspring of infidelity. The extremes of negation produce a reaction of credulity; the worship of Baal alternates with the worship of God; we see Protestantism swaying perpetually to and fro between a cold philosophical scepticism and the wildest extravagances of fanaticism and imposture. A time of general negation and intellectual pride is followed by an epidemic of rhapsodies and convulsions. Prophets arise; spirits are seen in clouds of light; conventicles resound with the ravings of frenzied sinners and the shouting of excited saints; Swedenborg makes excursions in the body into heaven and into hell; the Shakers place Mother Ann on the throne of the Almighty; the Peculiar People look for the direct interference of God in the pettiest affairs of life, and demand a miracle every hour of the day. Mormonism was the product of such a season of spiritual riot. Fifty years ago animal magnetism and clairvoyance were at their height. The pride which refused to worship God stooped to amuse itself with ghosts and witches. The soul, emancipated from religion, became the slave of magic; and superstition, rejecting the revelations of a loving Creator, was almost ripe for the instructions of dancing tables and flying tambourines. Mesmer had excited the learned world with his mystic tubs; throngs of prophetic somnambulists had prepared the way for the oracles of Andrew Jackson Davis. In England there was even a more chaotic disturbance of minds than here. Multitudes on the one hand, disbelieving in a personal deity altogether, took refuge in pure scepticism. Multitudes on the other looked for the advent of the Lord in power and glory, to establish on earth in visible form the kingdom foretold by the inspired writers. The study of the prophecies became an absorbing passion of sectaries and enthusiasts. They muddled their brains with much reading of Isaias and the Apocalypse. They made it their mission to explain dark sayings; and having placed their own interpretation upon the divine predictions, they watched the sky for signs of their immediate fulfilment, and found in contemporary events a thousand confirmations of their crazy fancies, a thousand portents of the speedy coming of the Lord. There was no conceivable theological vagary for which they did not seek authority among the prophets. There was a wide-spread revival of the ancient belief in a terrestrial millennium, with a faith that it was close at hand. Edward Irving was setting England and Scotland aflame with fiery announcements of the Second Advent; fashionable society left its bed at five o’clock in the morning to hear him preach, for three hours at a stretch, on the impending accomplishment of what had been foretold; and although it was not until a few years later that William Miller organized in this country the first regular congregations of those who expected the speedy end of the world, and who sat in white robes listening for the judgment trump, there is no doubt that the general religious ferment which preceded this particular hallucination was felt simultaneously on both sides of the ocean, and presented on both sides the same essential characteristics.

Naturally this exciting period was also a season of powerful Methodistic revivals. These sensational experiences belong, like spiritualism and the other delusions which we have mentioned, to what has been called “inspirational” as distinguished from rationalistic Protestantism, and they are apt to run their course together. Between 1825 and 1830 the revival movement was carried to great lengths, and its excesses seem to have been most marked in Central and Western New York just at the time when Mormonism arose there. We speak of the revivals as Methodistic only by way of defining their character; they were by no means restricted to the Methodist denomination. The most famous revival preacher of the day was the Rev. Charles G. Finney, a Presbyterian; and any one who is curious about the spiritual uproar which he carried through the State with him is referred to the chapter on “Fanaticism in Revivals” in the Personal Reminiscences of Dr. Gardiner Spring, of the Brick (Presbyterian) Church in New York City.[43]

It was in such a time, equally favorable to delusions and impostures, that Joseph Smith, the inventor of Mormonism, made his appearance. The accounts of his early life are not satisfactory. His origin was obscure. His neighbors were ignorant. Little is on record except his Autobiography and a sketch by his mother, neither of which productions is entitled to much credit. It is evident, however, that he was caught up by the religious excitement which raged all around him. We are assured that on at least two special occasions during his boyhood he was “powerfully awakened” by Methodist revivalists. His writings abound with revival phraseology; his pretended revelations are full of the cant-terms of the camp-meeting; his code of doctrines bears traces of the denominational controversies which were most active in Western New York when he emerged upon the stage of history. In 1827 he was an illiterate and idle rustic of twenty-two years, living at Palmyra, in Wayne County, New York. His parents were shiftless and visionary people, who got drunk, and used the divining-rod, and dug for hidden treasures, and, according to their neighbors, stole sheep. Joseph was no better than the rest of the family. By natural disposition he was a dreamer and an adventurer. According to his own account, he began to see miraculous appearances in the air and to hear the voices of spiritual messengers as early as his fifteenth year. It was in one of his seasons of “awakening,” when, perplexed by the contradictions of rival sects, he went into a grove and asked the Lord which he should follow, in the firm persuasion that his question would be answered by some physical manifestation. We give the Mormon account of the result of his experiment:

“At first he was severely tempted by the powers of darkness, which endeavored to overcome him; but he continued to seek for deliverance, until darkness gave way from his mind. He at length saw a very bright and glorious light in the heavens above, which at first seemed to be at a considerable distance. He continued praying, while the light appeared to be gradually descending towards him; and as it drew nearer it increased in brightness and magnitude, so that by the time that it reached the tops of the trees the whole wilderness for some distance around was illuminated in the most glorious and brilliant manner. He expected to have seen the leaves and boughs of the trees consumed as soon as the light came in contact with them; but perceiving that it did not produce that effect, he was encouraged with the hopes of being able to endure its presence. It continued descending slowly, until it rested upon the earth and he was enveloped in the midst of it. When it first came upon him it produced a peculiar sensation throughout his whole system; and immediately his mind was caught away from the natural objects with which he was surrounded, and he was enwrapped in a heavenly vision, and saw two glorious personages, who exactly resembled each other in their features or likeness. He was informed that his sins were forgiven. He was also informed upon the subjects which had for some time previously agitated his mind—namely, that all the religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines, and consequently that none of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom. And he was expressly commanded to go not after them; and he received a promise that the true doctrine, the fulness of the gospel, should at some future time be made known to him; after which the vision withdrew.”[44]

Joseph, upon whose word alone this narrative rests, relates that when he came to himself he was lying on his back looking up into the clouds. He seems to have accepted cheerfully the condemnation of all existing religions, but the vision had no other practical effect upon him; as Orson Pratt confesses, his life continued to be unedifying, and his story of the celestial apparition was received with stubborn incredulity by those who knew his character and habits. It was three years before he professed to be favored with a second visit. Then, he says, a white and lustrous angel came into his room while he was at prayer, and told him that Heaven designed him for a great work. There was hidden in a certain place, to be revealed hereafter, a book written upon gold plates, which contained “the fulness of the everlasting gospel as delivered by the Saviour to the ancient inhabitants” of the American continent. This was the Mormon Bible, commonly known now as the Book of Mormon from the title of one of its divisions. In his Autobiography Joseph Smith states that the angel was Nephi, author of the First and Second Books of Nephi, which stand at the head of the Mormon scriptures; but in his Doctrine and Covenants he speaks of his visitant as Moroni, who wrote the last book in the collection and placed the gold plates where they were afterwards to be found. We do not know what explanation the Mormons offer of this singular discrepancy. The vision was repeated during the night, and Joseph was directed to search for the buried treasure in a hill near Manchester, a village about four miles from Palmyra, in the adjoining county of Ontario. He saw, as if in a dream, the exact spot in which he was to dig. He went to Manchester and found the plates, enclosed in a sort of box formed of stones set in cement. With them “there were two stones in silver bows (and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim), and the possession and use of these stones was what constituted seers in ancient or former times, and God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book”—an idea which Joseph borrowed, of course, from the Jewish high-priest’s “rational of judgment,” described in Exodus, chap. xxviii. Moroni (or was it Nephi?) would not allow the plates to be removed yet; but he gave Joseph a great many interesting and comfortable, though rather vague, instructions. He opened the heavens and caused him to see the glory of the Lord. He made the devil and his hosts pass by in procession, so that Smith might know them when he met them. Once a year Joseph was to return to the same spot and receive a new revelation. On the fourth anniversary of the discovery—that is, in September, 1827—the angel placed the plates and the Urim and Thummim in his hands, with a caution that he should let nobody see them. But he seems to have talked freely about his experiences; for, according to his own story, the whole country-side was up in arms to get the plates away from him. He was waylaid and chased by ruffians with clubs. He was shot at. His house was repeatedly mobbed; and when at last he removed to Pennsylvania in search of peace, carrying the plates in a barrel of beans, he was twice overtaken by a constable armed with a search-warrant, who failed, however, to find what he was looking for. Possibly the plates and the constable were equally fictions of Joseph Smith’s imagination.

Incredulous historians of Mormonism offer various explanations of the story which we have thus far recounted. They detect in Joseph Smith’s alleged visions a close resemblance to the trance state sometimes brought on by spiritual excitement among the Methodists and other sects who make strong appeals to the emotional nature; or they refer his supernatural exaltation to mesmeric clairvoyance; or they see in him merely a “spiritual medium,” a precursor of the rappers and table-tippers who became so common a few years later. Others, again, account for the whole case upon the theory of demoniac possession; while still others suppose that, having really discovered some sort of metallic tablets, the dreams of a disordered mind supplied him with the interpretation and the dramatis personæ.[45] It seems to us hardly necessary to discuss these various explanations, for there is no proof of the alleged facts. The whole narrative rests upon nothing but Joseph Smith’s word. It is the story told by him in after-years to account for the new gospel. There is none who shared with him the privilege of angelic visitations. There is none who saw the great light, who heard the mysterious voices, who even beheld Joseph himself at the moment of the alleged revelations. No one knows what became of the golden plates. The angel, said Joseph, came and took them away again. While they remained in the prophet’s hands they were kept from curious eyes. Prefixed to the Book of Mormon in the current editions is the “Testimony of Three Witnesses”—Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris—that they were permitted to see the plates, and that a heavenly voice assured them of the faithfulness of Smith’s translation; but all these three witnesses afterwards confessed that their testimony was a lie. To their certificate is appended the testimony of eight other witnesses—namely, Joseph’s father and two brothers, four of the Whitmer family, and a disciple named Page—who also profess to have seen the plates; but their connection with the beginnings of the Mormon Church makes it impossible to put confidence in their statement. We do not know the circumstances under which the sight may have been vouchsafed to them, and we certainly have no sufficient reason to believe their word.[46]

Thus far, then, Mormonism is a mere legend. In 1828 it becomes historical fact; and whatever may be thought of the prophet’s good faith in the matter of his early dreams and visions, we find it impossible to resist the conviction that henceforth he was only a conscious and daring impostor. From this time to the day of his death, in his acts and his writings, in his shrewdness, his ambition, and his reckless courage—planning new settlements, fabricating new Bibles, uttering forged revelations, nominating himself for President of the United States, assuming to command armies, running a wild-cat bank, debauching women—we can see nothing but a career of vulgar fraud. There was wild fanaticism in the foundation of the Mormon Church; but it was not on the part of Joseph Smith.

There is proof that about fifteen years before this pretended revelation an ex-preacher, named Solomon Spalding, a graduate of Dartmouth College, and a resident of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, offered for publication at a Pittsburgh printing-office a book called the Manuscript Found, in which he attempted to account for the peopling of America by deriving the Indians from the lost tribes of Israel. It was a sort of Scriptural romance, written in clumsy imitation of the historical books of the Old Testament, and it contained, among its other divisions, a Book of Mormon. Although announced for publication, it never appeared. The manuscript remained in the printing-office for a number of years. Spalding died in 1816. The bookseller died in 1826. Sidney Rigdon, one of the first disciples of Mormonism, was a compositor in the printing-office, and it seems to be pretty well established that he made a copy of the book and afterwards gave it to Smith. At any rate the Book of Mormon, when it came from the press in 1830, was immediately recognized as an adaptation of Solomon Spalding’s romance. A great many people had read parts of it during Spalding’s lifetime, and remembered not only the principal incidents which it narrated, but the names of the leading characters—Nephi, Lehi, Moroni, Mormon, and the rest—which Smith boldly appropriated. Spalding’s only object was literary amusement, with perhaps a little harmless mystification. The theological teachings incorporated with his pretended history were the additions of Smith and Rigdon. As it now stands the Mormon Bible purports to relate the wanderings of a Hebrew named Lehi, who went out from Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ, and, after travelling eastward eight years “through a wilderness,” came to the sea-coast, built a ship, got a mariner’s compass somewhere, set sail with his wife Sariah, his sons Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Joseph, and Jacob, the wives of the four elder sons, and six other persons, and in due time reached America. After the death of Lehi the Lord appointed Nephi to rule over the settlers, but Laman and Lemuel, heading a revolt, were cursed, and became the ancestors of the Indians. We shall not waste much time over this absurd and wearisome farrago, a mixture of Scriptural parodies, stupid inventions, and bold thefts from Shakspeare and King James’ Bible. It is intolerably verbose, dragging through fifteen books, stuffed with gross faults of grammar, anachronisms, and solecisms of every kind, and comprising as much matter as four hundred and fifty of these pages, or more than three entire numbers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. There are wonderful miracles and tremendous battles. Vast cities are created in North and South America. Nations wander to and fro across the continents. Priests, prophets, judges, and Antichrists, with names curiously constructed out of those in the Jewish Scriptures, appear and disappear like travesties of the persons in sacred history. The Nephites and the Lamanites hack and slay each other. A republican form of government is instituted, and is assailed by monarchical conspiracies. Nephi, Jarom, Omni, Mosaiah, Mormon, Moroni, Alma, Ether, and other leaders of the Nephites write the records of the people upon golden plates, and save them for Joseph Smith to find in due season. Seers give long-winded explanations of the divine purposes, and predict the incidents of the beginning of Mormonism, which had already taken place when Joseph Smith brought these predictions to light. The history of the Nephites is supposed to be contemporaneous with the history of the Jews, but entirely independent of it; their Scriptures are intended to supplement, not contradict, the holy Bible. The crucifixion of our Lord was announced to these American Jews by portents and prophecies, and afterwards the Saviour came to the chief city of the Nephites, showed his wounded hands and feet, healed the sick, blessed little children, and remained here forty days teaching Christianity. Gradually the Lamanites, or Indians, overcame the Nephites. In the year 384 a final battle was fought on the hill Cumorah (Ontario County, New York), where 320,000 Nephites were slain. This was the end of the pre-Columbian civilization of America, little or nothing being left of the Nephites except Mormon and his son Moroni, who completed the records on the gold plates and “hid them up” in the hill. Such, in brief outline, is the Mormon Bible. With the narrative of the descendants of Lehi, however, it contains an account of two other emigrations from Asia to America—namely, that of the Jaredites, who came here direct from the tower of Babel, and perished after they had stripped the continent of timber, and that of a party of Jews who followed Lehi at the period of the Babylonian captivity. The Jaredites came in eight small air-tight barges, shaped like a covered dish, loaded with all manner of beasts, birds, and fishes, and driven by a furious wind. The voyage lasted three hundred and forty-four days, so that, in spite of the miraculous gale astern, it was probably the slowest on record.

It would be an endless task to point out even a tithe of the huge blunders in this fraudulent volume. We read of Christians a century before Christ, of the Gospel and the churches six centuries before Christ, of three oceans lying between Asia and America, of pious Hebrews eating pork, of Jews long before the name of Jew was invented, of horses, asses, swine, etc., running wild all over the face of this continent in the time of the Jaredites, although it is certain that they were first introduced by the Spaniards. Nephi, in giving an account of the emigration of his father Lehi, says: “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying, Thou shalt construct a ship after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters. And I said, Lord, whither shall I go that I may find ore to molten, that I may make tools?... And it came to pass that I did make tools of the ore which I did molten out of the rock.” Nephi, like St. John, was unable to write down all the things that Jesus taught: “Behold, I were about to write them all, but the Lord forbid it.” Alma declares: “And it came to pass that whosoever did mingle his seed with that of the Lamanites did bring the same curse upon his seed; therefore whomsoever suffered himself to be led away by the Lamanites were called that head, and there was a mark set upon him.” Mormon is one of the most eccentric in syntax of all the scribes: “And Ammaron said unto me, I perceive that thou art a sober child, and art quick to observe; therefore when ye are about twenty-and-four years old I would that ye should remember,” etc. Nephi “saw wars and rumors of wars.” Alma writes: “And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent”! The language of the precious records is described as “reformed Egyptian,” and Nephi explains that it “consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians,” though upon what principle they are combined we are left to imagine. Pressed to exhibit a specimen of the mysterious characters, Joseph Smith gave what purported to be a fac-simile of a few lines to one of his disciples, who came to New York and submitted it to Prof. Anthon. “It consisted,” says Prof. Anthon, “of all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets, Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes; Roman letters inverted or placed sideways were arranged and placed in perpendicular columns; and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican calendar given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived.” Mormon says he would have written in Hebrew, if the plates had been large enough.

In giving the translation of the mysterious books to the world Joseph Smith, whose education had been sadly neglected, made use of an amanuensis. This at first was a farmer named Martin Harris. The prophet sat behind a blanket stretched across the room, and, thus screened from profane eyes, read aloud from the gold plates, by the miraculous aid of the Urim and Thummim, the sacred text, which the confiding Harris reduced to writing. The sceptical, of course, believe that what Smith held before him was no pile of metallic tablets, but merely the manuscript of Solomon Spalding, into which he emptied from time to time a great deal of rubbish of his own make. No one, however, succeeded in penetrating behind the blanket. The work had gone on for a year and a half, when Harris, tempted by his wife, embezzled the manuscript. This was a serious loss. Joseph could not reproduce it in the same words, and it would not do to risk discrepancies. “Revelation” came to his aid in this dilemma, and informed him that Harris had “altered the words” of the manuscript “in order to catch him” in the translation. The stolen pages were from the Book of Mormon; he must not attempt to replace them; he should let them go, for a narrative of the same events would be found in the Book of Nephi:

“And now verily I say unto you that an account of those things that you have written, which have gone out of your hands, are engraven upon the plates of Nephi; yea, and you remember it was said in those writings that a more particular account was given of these things upon the plates of Nephi. Behold they have only got a part or an abridgment of the account of Nephi. Behold, there are many things engraven on the plates of Nephi which do throw greater views upon my gospel; therefore it is wisdom in me that you should translate this first part of the engravings of Nephi, and send forth in this work.”[47]

Oliver Cowdery now became scribe, and the task was finished without further accidents, the Books of Nephi standing at the head of the volume, and the remnant of the Book of Mormon, which gives its title to the whole collection, coming near the end of the table of contents. Still, the wretched Harris was not altogether cut off for his sin. He owned a farm. When the translation was finished Heaven uttered, by the mouth of Smith, “a commandment of God, and not of man, to Martin Harris”: “I command thee that thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing of the Book of Mormon. And misery thou shalt receive if thou wilt slight these counsels—yea, even the destruction of thyself and property.” So Harris mortgaged his farm to pay the printer, and in 1830 appeared at Palmyra, New York, The Book of Mormon: an Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates taken from the Plates of Nephi. By Joseph Smith, Jr., author and proprietor.[48]

Instructed by John the Baptist, Smith and Cowdery now went into the river and baptized each other by immersion. Joseph then ordained Oliver to the Aaronic priesthood, and Oliver ordained Joseph. In April, 1830, the “Church of Christ” was organized at the house of Peter Whitmer in Fayette, Seneca County, New York, the company of the faithful consisting only of the prophet, his two brothers, his scribe, and two Whitmers; but in the course of the summer several other converts appeared, and Joseph became associated with three men of some ability and education, who gave the Mormon creed a doctrinal development which the founder himself was quite incapable of devising. These three were Sidney Rigdon, Orson Pratt, and Parley P. Pratt. They were devotees of the sensational and inspirational school, ready for any new form of spiritual extravagance, believers in visions, crack-brained students of the prophecies. Rigdon had been a preacher among the Campbellites—a sect whose fundamental doctrine it is that no precise doctrines are necessary. Read your Bible, say they, select your opinions from it, don’t allow infant baptism, but get yourselves baptized by immersion as often as you commit sin. Upon this broad foundation they can erect as many different systems of theology as they have congregations. Rigdon had outgrown the latitudinarianism and bibliolatry of the Campbellites, and at the time of Joseph Smith’s appearance he was preaching a religion of his own, rousing his little Ohio congregation with apocalyptic dreams and interpretations, and bidding them look for the instant coming of the Lord. Although his name does not appear in the roll of the first converts and apostles, it is certain that he was intimately associated with Smith from the beginning; it is certain that he embodied his peculiar views in the Mormon creed; it is suspected that he had more than a half-share in arranging the original machinery of imposture. Parley P. Pratt was likewise a Campbellite preacher, a man of ardent and passionate temperament, restless, eloquent, a brilliant albeit somewhat rude orator. Orson Pratt, inclining rather towards metaphysical speculations than prophecy and spiritual excitement, became the Mormon philosopher and controversialist, and to him are attributable the extraordinary materialistic doctrines which form so important a part of the new system.[49] When Smith and his companions began to preach it does not appear that they had any scheme of theology ready at hand. Moroni and the golden plates made up the sum of their first teachings. There was comparatively little doctrine of any kind in the Book of Mormon; but, as Joseph’s prophetic pretensions found acceptance, it became necessary for the prophet to announce some positive creed. In setting it forth, point after point, he appealed neither to history nor to reason; “revelation” taught him from day to day all that he wished to know; and so, little by little, he built up a mass of dogma in which it is impossible to discover any regular plan. The authoritative handbook of Mormon theology as it existed in Smith’s time is a small volume first published in 1835, entitled The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, carefully selected from the revelations of God, by Joseph Smith, President of said Church. It comprises two parts. The first consists of seven Lectures on Faith,[50] which need not detain us; the second and more important contains about one hundred “revelations,” addressed sometimes to Smith, sometimes to one or another of the disciples, sometimes to the church, and occasionally to sceptical Mormons who showed signs of becoming troublesome. They embrace counsels and instructions of all kinds, for the organization of the hierarchy, the preaching of the new gospel, the regulation of private business affairs, and the management of congregations. Here is a sample of a “revelation given in Kirtland, August, 1831”: “Let my servant Newel K. Whitney retain his store—or, in other words, the store yet for a little season. Nevertheless, let him impart all the money which he can impart, to be sent up unto the land of Sion.” A few days later the voice of heaven spoke through Joseph Smith again:

“And now verily I say that it is expedient in me that my servant Sidney Gilbert, after a few weeks, should return upon his business, and to his agency in the land of Sion; and that which he hath seen and heard may be made known unto my disciples, that they perish not. And for this cause have I spoken these things. And again, I say unto you, that my servant Isaac Morley may not be tempted above that which he is able to bear, and counsel wrongfully to your hurt, I gave commandment that his farm should be sold. I willeth not that my servant Frederick G. Williams should sell his farm, for I the Lord willeth to retain a stronghold in the land of Kirtland for the space of five years, in the which I will not overthrow the wicked, that thereby I may save some.”

There was a special revelation to the prophet’s wife, Emma, who never quite relished Joseph’s proceedings:

“Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God while I speak unto you, Emma Smith, my daughter; for verily I say unto you all those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my kingdom. A revelation I give unto you concerning my will, and if thou art faithful and walk in the paths of virtue before me, I will preserve thy life and thou shalt receive an inheritance in Sion. Behold, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady whom I have called. Murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the world, which is wisdom in me in a time to come. And the office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant, Joseph Smith, Jr., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words in the spirit of meekness.”

She was afterwards styled by the saints the Elect Lady, or “Cyria Electa,” and was “ordained” by Joseph as his scribe in the place of Oliver Cowdery. The dogmas to be found in this book are few and simple. The saints were taught to believe in “God the Eternal Father, and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost”; to believe that men will not be punished for original sin; that the four saving ordinances of the Gospel are faith, repentance, baptism, and the laying-on of hands for the Holy Ghost; that the church enjoys still, as it did in primitive times, “the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, etc.”; that the Bible, “as far as it is translated correctly,” and the Book of Mormon are both the word of God; that “the organization of the primitive church—viz., apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, etc.”—ought to be revived; and that Israel will be literally gathered and the ten tribes restored, Sion built on this continent, the personal reign of Christ established on earth, and the earth renewed in paradisaic glory. Finally, the book contains elaborate instructions for the establishment of a double priesthood; that of Melchisedech is the higher, and embraces the offices of apostle, Seventy, patriarch, high-priest, and elder; the other is that of Aaron, and includes bishop, priest, teacher, and deacon; it can only be held by the lineal descendants of Aaron, who are designated by revelation.

It will be seen how artfully this plan of a church was adapted to the purposes of Smith and Rigdon, supposing them to have been, as we have no doubt they were, arrant and conscious cheats. There was novelty and mystery enough in it to attract the fanatical, and there was not so very much after all to shock their common sense; while the doctrine of continuous revelation and the prophetic office left a door wide open for the introduction of other inventions as fast as they were found desirable. We shall see, further on, what monstrous blasphemies and absurdities were in reality adopted as the saints became strong enough to bear them.

Noyes, in his History of American Socialisms, speaks of Western New York as “the volcanic region” of spiritual and intellectual disturbance. Here sprang up Mormonism; here were first heard the ghostly rappers; here raged Millerism and Second-Adventism; here John Collins founded the Skaneateles community on the basis of “no God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat”; here arose the “inspired” Ebenezer colony, since removed to Iowa; here flourished all manner of Fourierite phalanxes, wild social experiments, and extravagant beliefs; here at the present day are found the Brocton community, with their doctrine of “divine respiration,” and the Perfectionists of Oneida, perhaps the worst of all the professors of free-love. In this region of satanic activity the Mormon preachers made disciples so fast that Smith was soon encouraged to undertake the “gathering of the tribes.” He had visited Sidney Rigdon at Kirtland, Ohio, early in 1831, and had a revelation commanding the saints in New York to follow him. But in June the town of Independence, in Jackson County, Missouri, was revealed as the site of the American Sion, and there some hundreds of the faithful, selling all that they had in the East, assembled and laid the foundation of a temple. With this event begins a phase of Mormonism—the political separation of the Latter-Day Saints from the Gentiles—which at once illustrates most forcibly its fanaticism and accounts for its temporal success. Henceforth the leaders had only to give the word of command, and the people went wherever the finger of the prophet pointed, sacrificed their lands and houses, broke off domestic ties, and marched through pain, starvation, and death into the parched wilderness. The settlement at Kirtland, however, was retained; a revelation even commanded the saints to build there a house for Joseph Smith “to live and translate in,” and another great temple for the Lord. This was fortunate, because the Mormons were soon expelled from Independence by a mob; and when Joseph, in obedience to revelation, raised an army of two hundred men, and, with the title of “commander-in-chief of the armies of Israel,” marched twelve hundred miles on foot to reinstate them, his expedition was dispersed by cholera and thunder-storms as soon as it reached the scene of action. The saints were never restored to the homes from which they had been driven out; yet to this day they look for a restoration. They refused all offers to sell their estates; they hold the Missouri title-deeds as the most precious of their inheritances; the city of the Great Salt Lake is only the temporary home of their exile; and Brigham Young, in his will, which was published the other day, after giving instructions for his funeral, says: “But if I should live to get back to the church in Jackson County, Missouri, I wish to be buried there.”

It is not our purpose to follow the persecuted fanatics in all their early migrations. Driven from place to place, they came, in 1840, to Hancock County, Illinois, where the owner of a large tract of wild land gave Smith a portion of it, in order to create a market for the rest. The prophet sold it in lots to his followers, at high prices, and there, on the bank of the Mississippi, the Mormons built the city of Nauvoo. It was revealed to them that they should build a goodly and holy “boarding-house,” and give Joseph Smith and his posterity a place in it for ever, and those who had money were commanded by name to put it into the enterprise (“Revelation given to Joseph Smith, Jan. 19, 1841”). They were to build a magnificent temple also; they were to organize a military force, known as the Nauvoo Legion; they were to create, in short, within the limits of Illinois, a theocratic state, with Joseph Smith at its head as mayor, general, prophet, church president, and inspired mouthpiece of the divine will. The city grew as if by magic. The legislature of Illinois granted it a charter of such extraordinary liberality that its officers became practically independent of all other authority. The apostles, sent all over America and England, preached with such zeal that in the course of six years no fewer than fifteen thousand believers were numbered in the Nauvoo community. Arrested several times for treason, for instigating an attempt at murder, and for other crimes, Joseph Smith was released by Mormon courts and set all “Gentile” laws at defiance. He was absolute in everything, organizing the government upon the most despotic principles, yet copying in some things the system and the phraseology of the Hebrew nation. His aides and counsellors received names and titles imitated from the Bible. Brigham Young was “the Lion of the Lord,” Parley P. Pratt was “the Archer of Paradise,” Orson Pratt was “the Gauge of Philosophy,” John Taylor was “the Champion of Right,” Lyman Wight was “the Wild Ram of the Mountains.” No one could deal in land or liquor except Joseph Smith. No one could aspire to political office or to church preferment without his permission. No one could travel abroad or remain quiet at home except by his consent. In Kirtland, with the assistance of Rigdon, he had started a bank and flooded the country with notes that were never redeemed. In Nauvoo he amassed what was, for that time and that region, the great fortune of $1,000,000. From the first gathering of the saints into communities he had made it a practice to use them in politics. He had given their votes to one party or another as interest dictated, and in 1844 he went so far as to offer himself for the Presidency of the United States, and sent two or three thousand elders through the States to electioneer for him.

As he grew in pride and prosperity the revelations multiplied, the faith became more and more extravagant, the ceremonies and ordinances of the church more cumbrous and more mystical. Moroni and Raphael, Peter and John, visited and conversed with him. He healed the possessed; he wrestled with the devil. The brethren began to prophesy in the temple; mysterious impulses stirred the congregations; “a mighty rushing wind filled the place”; “many began to speak in tongues; others saw glorious visions, and Joseph beheld that the temple was filled with angels, and told the congregation so. The people of the neighborhood, hearing an unusual sound within the temple, and seeing a bright light like a pillar of fire resting upon it, came running together and were astonished at what was transpiring.”[51] This diabolic manifestation, or alleged manifestation, reminds us of the scenes in the Irvingite congregations in London six years previously, when those brethren likewise prophesied in an unknown language. But the specimens of the Mormon “gift of tongues” which have been preserved for us are not calculated to inspire awe. “Eli, ele, elo, ela—come, coma, como—reli, rele, rela, relo—sela, selo, sele, selum—vavo, vava, vavum—sero, sera, seri, serum”—such was the style of the rhapsodies which inflamed the zeal of the Mormon saints.[52]

It was discovered that there was no salvation in the next world without Mormon baptism, and, to provide for the generations which preceded Joseph Smith, every saint was told to be immersed vicariously for his dead ancestors. There was incessant dipping and sputtering; the whole church for a season was in a chronic state of cold and dampness; and the recorders worked their hardest, laying up in the temple the lists of the regenerated for the information of the angels. The double hierarchy became so complicated that long study was needed to comprehend it. The church offices were multiplied. The authority of the president and the apostles grew more and more despotic. A travelling showman visited the West with some Egyptian mummies. Joseph Smith bought them, and, finding in the wrappings a roll of papyrus, he produced a miraculous translation of the hieroglyphics as the “Book of Abraham.” A fac-simile of the papyrus was taken to Paris in 1855 by M. Rémy and submitted to the Egyptologist Devéria, who found it to consist of a representation of the resurrection of Osiris, together with a funerary manuscript of comparatively recent date.

All who have studied the manufacture of American religions and social philosophies are aware how characteristic of these moral and intellectual rebellions is an attack upon the Christian law of marriage.[53] The inventions of Joseph Smith soon took the usual course, although it was probably not until near the end of his career that he became bold enough to contemplate the general establishment of polygamy. It appears that as early as 1838 he had a number of “spiritual wives” who cohabited with him, and Mr. Stenhouse asserts that “many women” have boasted to him that they sustained such relations with the prophet. This sort of license, however, was an esoteric doctrine, for the advanced believers only, not for the common people. Indeed, in 1842, although a practical plurality had been for some time enjoined by the illuminated, the doctrine was formally repudiated by a number of elders, apostles, and women, who declared that they knew of no other marriage than that of one wife to one husband. In 1845 an appendix on “Marriage” was added to the book of Doctrine and Covenants, in which occurs the following passage: “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.” Yet it is beyond all question that Joseph long before this had been involved in serious domestic difficulties on account of the jealousy of his true wife, Emma, and he was obliged to resort to “revelation” to pacify her. The “Revelation on Celestial Marriage,” which enjoins a plurality of wives as a service especially acceptable to God, purports to have been given at Nauvoo in 1843. It contains these sentences:

“And let mine handmaid Emma Smith receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me. And I command mine handmaid Emma Smith to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph and to none else. And again verily I say, let mine handmaid forgive my servant Joseph his trespasses, and then shall she be forgiven her trespasses.”

The revelation, however, was kept secret until long after Joseph’s death. Emma, if not satisfied, was quieted. The spiritual marriages went on, and even the initiated continued to deny them. John Taylor, the present head of the church, held a public discussion of Mormonism in the English colony at Boulogne in 1850, and stoutly denied the doctrine of polygamy, although he had at the time five wives in Utah.

It was polygamy that brought Joseph to his violent end. He had attempted to take the wife of a disciple named Law. The husband rebelled, and with one or two other malcontents established a paper called the Nauvoo Expositor, for the purpose of exposing the secret corruptions of the prophet and his chief associates. Only one number was printed. Joseph ordered the press to be destroyed and the type scattered. Law and his party appealed to the authorities of the county for redress. Writs of arrest were issued, and set aside by the Mormon courts. The government called out the militia to enforce the process. An armed conflict appeared inevitable, when the Mormon leaders surrendered, and Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, John Taylor, and Willard Richards were lodged in the county jail at Carthage. There, on the 27th of June, 1844, they were attacked by an armed mob. Hyrum was shot down at the first volley and almost instantly expired. Joseph, after defending himself with a revolver, attempted to escape by the window, and was killed by a discharge of musketry from the yard below.

In his lifetime the prophet was often denounced and resisted by his own followers; “revelation” repeatedly put down revolts; apostates in great numbers, including the very founders of the church, were cut off and given over to Satan for questioning the truth of Joseph’s inspired utterances. But his death healed all such quarrels. He became in the eyes of his fanatical followers the first of saints, the most glorious of martyrs. To this day even those who do not believe in Mormonism argue that Joseph must have believed in it, because for its sake he lived a life of persecution and submitted to a cruel death. The narrative which we have briefly sketched is enough to show the fallacy of this reasoning. Mormonism gave Joseph Smith wealth, power, flattery, and sensual delights. It found him a miserable, penniless country boy; it made him the ruler of a state, the autocrat of a thriving community, the head of a harem. There never was a time when the choice was offered him between worldly advantage on the one hand and fidelity to his creed on the other. To renounce his pretensions would have been the ruin of his fortunes. Having once entered upon the career of imposture, he had every temptation to persevere to the end. He was mobbed and exiled and imprisoned, not because he believed in the Book of Mormon, but because he warred upon existing social and political institutions; and there was nothing to make his death more sacred than that of any other cheat and libertine who is murdered by masked ruffians in a frontier settlement. After his death the twelve apostles ruled the church, waiting for the will of Heaven to designate by inspiration a new leader.[54] Sidney Rigdon claimed the prophetic office, but was rejected and driven forth. The prime mover in his excommunication was the senior apostle, to whom the accident of rank gave a practical precedence in all the affairs of the church. He taught the saints to be patient and expectant, to reverence Joseph as their chief for all eternity, to be governed by Joseph’s voice, to cease vexing themselves about Joseph’s successor. This was Brigham Young.

At length the time was ripe and the minds of the people were prepared. On the 24th of December, 1847, Brigham ascended the pulpit to preach. The Gentiles assert that he arranged his face and dress, modulated his voice, regulated his gestures, to imitate the departed prophet. The effect was electrical. The people believed that Joseph stood before them. Women screamed and fainted; men wept; cries resounded through the temple. Here was the successor of Joseph at last, and Brigham Young was made president of the church, and recognized as “prophet, seer, and revelator.” He was a man greatly inferior in education to some of the other leaders, and he had done little as yet to justify the preference now shown him. He was a native of Vermont, and one of the early converts. Before joining the church he had been a painter and glazier. In the church he was noted as a stanch, shrewd, hard-working, useful brother, not much troubled with visions or theological theories, rarely caught up by those tempests of spiritual madness which used to sweep through the congregations. He could not have devised the imposture which Joseph and Rigdon created. He could not have built up the elaborate system which they constructed out of Old-World religions and modern politics. He was fierce, and perhaps fanatical, but he had little imagination and little inventiveness. In the case of other early Mormons it was sometimes doubtful whether they were not occasionally deceived by their own impostures, hurried along by a spirit which they had raised and knew not how to control; but Brigham offered no cause for such suspicion. He left Mormonism a very different thing from what it was in 1840, yet he added nothing to it. A change had been going on insensibly ever since the saints gathered at Nauvoo; a further change had been begun by the preaching of Orson Pratt; and Joseph Smith had originated two great movements—the introduction of polygamy and the removal into the heart of the wilderness—which Brigham was to bring to their term. He is the developer, therefore, of other men’s ideas.

The notion that the Mormons were a chosen and inspired people, blessed with revelations not given to the rest of the world, and governed by the direct and special commands of Heaven, necessarily implied the establishment of an independent political community, and it was their disloyalty to the state rather than their immoralities which roused against them so often in the early times the anger of mobs and the animosity of the civil authorities. The experiment of creating a state within a state had failed, and Joseph Smith before his death had taken the first steps towards beginning a new settlement in the far West, and removing the whole body of his disciples to some remote and solitary region where neither the United States nor any other government would be likely to interfere with them. It was Brigham’s part to lead this extraordinary exodus. It began more than a year before his formal appointment as head of the church; it was hastened by the fact that warrants had been issued in Illinois for the arrest of a large number of prominent saints on a charge of manufacturing counterfeit money, and that, partly on this account, partly by reason of the prevalence of murders, thefts, arsons, and various other outrages in which the Mormons and their opponents were about equally implicated, Nauvoo appeared likely soon to be the theatre of a civil war. An exploring party had been sent to the Pacific coast in 1844. Early in February, 1846, the general migration began. Rarely has the world witnessed such a scene. The great temple at Nauvoo had just been completed with extravagant splendor. The city contained 17,000 inhabitants, and only a small fraction of their valuable property could be disposed of at any price. They abandoned all that they could not carry, sacrificed their lands and houses, collected about twelve hundred wagons, and, under the command of captains of fifties and captains of hundreds, crossed the Mississippi on the ice and moved into the wintry wilderness. We shrink from repeating the narrative of that horrible march. For more than two years they toiled westward, strewing the path with their dead. In winter they camped near Council Bluffs, and thence Brigham and a body of pioneers made their way across the Rocky Mountains. The first detachment reached the Great Salt Lake in July, 1847; the rest followed in the summer of 1848. It was a parched, desolate, rainless valley, but the wanderers hailed it as a haven of rest; they encamped on the bank of a small stream, rested their weary animals, and without loss of an hour began to plough the ground, sow the autumn crops, and build a dam and a system of irrigating canals. They had escaped from the United States, as they fondly believed, and were on the soil of Mexico, where they had no doubt they could maintain themselves against the feeble Mexican government. But “manifest destiny” was pursuing them. The boundaries of the United States were soon extended beyond this region by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; the discovery of gold in California destroyed the isolation of the new Sion; it was no longer a city hid in the desert, but a resting-place on a great route of travel; and the irrepressible conflict between the federal republic and the absolute theocracy has been steadily growing sharper and sharper ever since. Of the great multitude which set out from Nauvoo barely four thousand ever reached the Great Salt Lake, the rest having deserted or dropped by the way; but thousands of converts soon arrived from England, and in a very short time the community was again strong and prosperous. In 1849, just a year after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons formally declared themselves “free and independent,” and decreed the erection of the “State of Deseret,” whose imaginary boundaries enclosed the whole of Nevada and Utah, and large parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming. To this political fiction they have resolutely adhered; and even while recognizing, as a matter of prudence, the de facto organization of the United States Territory of Utah, they have always maintained the de jure existence of their free and independent state.[55] Brigham, of course, was chosen governor of Deseret, and he held that title to the day of his death, although, with his usual worldly shrewdness, he also accepted from Presidents Fillmore and Pierce the title of governor of Utah.

To understand, however, the opposition which soon developed into such alarming hostility between Deseret and the United States, we must look at the changes which had been taking place in Mormonism itself. Possibly the early disciples of Joseph Smith were in the main ignorant, peaceable, and well-meaning fanatics, but in twenty years their character had undergone a transformation. They first became quarrelsome, then dishonest, next licentious, and afterwards unspeakably cruel and bloodthirsty. Joseph Smith lived long enough to see the beginning even of this last stage of corruption, but it was Brigham Young who brought the budding immoralities into full flower. The “Revelation on Celestial Marriage” was brought forth at a public meeting in Salt Lake City on the 29th of August, 1852, and Brigham Young gave a history and explanation of it. The original manuscript was burned up by Joseph’s real wife, Emma; but Brigham had a copy.

“This revelation,” said he, “has been in my possession many years, and who has known it? None but those who should know it. I keep a patent lock on my desk, and there does not anything leak out that should not.... The principle spoken of by Brother Pratt this morning we believe in. Many others are of the same mind. They are not ignorant of what we are doing in our social capacity. They have cried out, Proclaim it; but it would not do a few years ago; everything must come in its time, as there is a time to all things. I am now ready to proclaim it.”

We do not read that any particular sensation was created by the announcement. Indeed, the practice had already become so common that a federal judge, a year before this date, had denounced it in a Mormon assembly, and made a somewhat remarkable appeal to the women to put a stop to the horrible practice:

“The women were excited; the most of them were in tears before he had spoken many minutes. The men were astonished and enraged, and one word of encouragement from their leader would have brought on a collision. Brigham saw this, and was equal to the occasion. When the judge sat down, he rose, and, by one of those strong, nervous appeals for which he is so famous among the brethren, restored the equilibrium of the audience. Those who but a moment before were bathed in tears now responded to his broad sarcasm and keen wit in screams of laughter; and having fully restored the spirits of the audience he turned to the judge and administered the following rebuke: ‘I will kick you,’ he said, ‘or any other Gentile judge from this stand, if you or they again attempt to interfere with the affairs of our Sion.’”[56]

Judge Brocchus, finding his life in danger, resigned his office and left the Territory. Once avowed, a belief in the doctrine was pronounced essential to salvation, and the practice of it was carried to a depth of bestiality which would horrify a Turk. All degrees of relationship were practically ignored. Incest and vicarious marriage became every-day affairs. The saints were taught that “when our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden he came into it with a celestial body and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him”;[57] and such blasphemies were coupled with the holiest of all names that the Christian shudders to think of them.

The formal adoption of the doctrine of polygamy, no longer as the personal peculiarity of a few leaders, but as the corner-stone of Mormon society, had a result which Brigham doubtless anticipated when he established it. The separation of the saints from the rest of Christendom was made complete and final. Gentile civilization had forced itself upon their mountain retreat, and in the daily contact with Christianity and common sense the Mormon imposture was not likely long to survive. But the institution of plural marriage placed between the Gentile and the Latter-Day Saint a barrier more formidable than snow-crowned sierras and alkali deserts. Social intercourse became impossible between the followers of the two rival systems. Contempt and horror on the one side bred hatred on the other. For the polygamous saint, moreover, judging after the manner of men, there was no repentance. He was tied for ever to the church, an outlaw from all Christendom, liable to a long imprisonment if he re-entered the pale of society, safe even in Utah only so long as he enabled the “Governor of Deseret” to defy the authority of the United States. The polygamist learned to place in the prophet all his hopes for this world and the next, and to accept all his utterances with the docility of a child. So Brigham became not only a more powerful man than Joseph Smith, but beyond doubt the most absolute ruler in the entire world.

It was now that the Mormon theology began to assume its most repulsive shape. Cut off from its early connection with a form of Christianity which, however corrupt, contained at least a remnant of the ancient faith, it sank with startling rapidity into the most dismal abysses of polytheism. To the materialistic doctrines which constituted the foundation and chief characteristic of the philosophy of Orson Pratt and other primitive expounders of Mormonism, was added an immense mass of crude and incongruous beliefs, not developed by any process of logic, but simply heaped on by agglomeration. Daily “revelations” brought forth daily inconsistencies and absurdities, under the weight of which the truths once professed by Smith were gradually buried and forgotten. Hence it is impossible to construct for Mormonism anything like a theological system. We can only state the isolated and often contradictory principles which are held by the saints at the present day, premising that although many of them can be traced more or less distinctly in the early literature of the sect, the most shocking of them were little, if at all, known until under Brigham Young the separation of the saints was completed. The most startling of Mormon dogmas, relieved of extraneous complications, is that God is only a good man, and that men advance by evolution until they become gods. There is no Creator, there is no creature, there is no immaterial spirit. What we call God, says one authority, is nothing but the truth abiding in man. What we call God, says Orson Pratt, is “a material intelligent personage, possessing both body and parts,” like an ordinary man. He has legs, which he uses in walking, though he can move up and down in the air without them. He cannot be in more than one place at a time. He dwells in a planet called Kolob. He was formed by the union of certain elementary particles of matter, self-moving, intelligent, and existing from all eternity. All matter is eternal. All substances are material. The souls of men were not created; they are from eternity, like God himself. God eats, drinks, loves, hates; his relations with mankind are purely human; he begets existences in the natural way.[58] Before he became God he was an ordinary man. He differs from other men now only in power. He is not omnipotent; he still increases and may continue to increase infinitely. As God is only an improved man, so man may come by gradual progress to know as much as God. Indeed, there are already innumerable gods. The first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” ought to read: “The Head God brought forth the gods, with the heavens and the earth.”[59] Each god rules over a world which he has peopled by generation, and the god of our world is Adam, who is only another form of the archangel Michael; “he is our father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.” The Mormons believe in a vague way in the Trinity—nay, in two Trinities, one composed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the other, and older, of “Elohim, Jehovah, and Adam.” The Father and Son have bodies of flesh and blood; they occupy space; they require time to move from place to place; but the Holy Spirit (which is the mind of the Father and the Son), although his substance is material, has no flesh and blood and permeates everything. After death the souls of the wicked will be imprisoned in the brutes. The saints will inhabit the planets, where they will have houses, farms, gardens, plantations of manna, and plenty of wives, and they will go on marrying and multiplying for all eternity. When this planetary system is filled up, new worlds will be called into existence, and in them the faithful, gradually developing into gods, will revel in the sensual delights of a Moslem paradise.

Surely no such mixture of pantheism, polytheism, and rank atheism was ever devised before; but we have not yet reached the worst. It was in 1852 that Brigham proclaimed the doctrine that Adam is God, and to be honored and revered as such. To this soon followed the announcement that Joseph Smith was God. In a year or two more the doctrine was taught, at first cautiously, but after 1856 publicly and officially, that the only God to whom this generation is amenable is BRIGHAM YOUNG!

The declaration of this appalling impiety was made in the midst of a tempestuous “Reformation” which historians will probably regard as the culminating point of Mormon fanaticism. In the autumn of 1856 one Jedediah Grant, who stood high in the Mormon priesthood, began to preach a revival in which the most remarkable practices were public “accusations of the brethren” and public “confessions of sin.” An uncontrollable madness seized upon the whole community. Preachers and penitents vied with one another in disgusting disclosures. The meetings resounded with wails and curses and slanderous charges. Men, women, and children, not satisfied with laying bare their hidden sins, accused themselves of crimes they had never committed, and called upon the church to punish and disgrace them. “Go to President Young,” was the cry of the preachers. “Give up all that you have to President Young—your money, your lands, your wives, your children, your blood.” “Brigham Young,” exclaimed Heber Kimball, “is my God, is your God, is the only God we shall ever see, if we do not obey him. Joseph Smith was our God when he was amongst us; Brigham Young is our God now.” The church authorities fanned the flame of excitement. They sent preachers into every ward and every settlement. Thousands of the saints placed all their property in Brigham’s hands.[60] Then they became inflamed with persecuting zeal. They sacked the houses of offenders, whipped and mutilated those who spoke evil of the church. From such outrages it was but a step to murder. At Brigham’s instigation the step was taken. In a discourse in the Tabernacle in February, 1857, he laid down a new law of love. We must love our neighbors as ourselves. But if we love ourselves, we must consent to the shedding of our own blood in order to atone for our sins and exalt us among the gods; so also it is true love to shed our neighbor’s blood for his eternal salvation. “I could refer you to a plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain in order to atone for their sins. The wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle being in full force, and the time will come when the law of God will be in full force. This is loving our neighbor as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; if he wants salvation, and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it!” “There are sins,” said he on another occasion while the “Reformation” was at its height, “that must be atoned for by the blood of the man. That is the reason why men talk to you as they do from this stand; they understand the doctrine and throw out a few words about it. You have been taught that doctrine, but you do not understand it.” Alas! understanding came soon enough. The Springville murders in March, 1857, were followed that summer by the appalling massacre at the Mountain Meadows of one hundred and twenty peaceable emigrants, men, women, and children, on their way to California. The midnight assassin went his rounds. The church executioners were despatched upon their awful missions. Sinners were sent on errands from which they never returned. Apostasy was punished by the knife or the bullet. A Welshman named Morris set up as a rival prophet, and was shot down in cold blood with a number of his deluded followers. Gentiles were put to death for presuming to dispute with Mormons over the title to property. A husband took his wife upon his knee and calmly cut her throat to atone for her sins.

“Men are murdered here,” said a federal judge to the grand jury—“coolly, deliberately, premeditatedly murdered. Their murder is deliberated and determined upon by church-council meetings, and that, too, for no other reason than that they had apostatized from your church and were striving to leave the Territory. You are the tools, the dupes, the instruments of a tyrannical church despotism. The heads of your church order and direct you. You are taught to obey their orders and commit these horrid murders. Deprived of your liberty, you have lost your manhood and become the willing instruments of bad men.”

Close upon the reign of terror established by the “Reformation” came the great Mormon rebellion, and the march of an army to Utah to install the territorial officers appointed by President Buchanan. Brigham thundered defiance from the pulpit; but on the approach of the troops he ordered the whole community to leave their homes and once more move out into the wilderness to build a new Sion. It is a wonderful illustration of the fanaticism and abject submission to which he had brought the people that this order was promptly obeyed. Before the “war” was settled by negotiation no fewer than 30,000 poor creatures took flight, and many of them, being utterly destitute, were never able to return. The frenzy of the Reformation era died out; the rebellion was quelled; but the doctrine of blood-atonement has not been abandoned, and to this day the soil of Utah is red with human sacrifices.

With such a savage and brutal paganism as the Mormon religion thus became under Brigham Young’s influence it is impossible that Christian civilization should ever be at peace. The steady resistance which it has offered to the authority of the United States needs no further explanation than we find in the constitution of the Mormon Church and the fundamental doctrines of the Mormon creed. There are chapters in the history of the Latter-Day Saints upon which we have not thought it necessary to linger. The organization of the Danites, and the long list of murders and other outrages preceding the open inculcation of human sacrifices, are among the most important of the events which we have thus passed over. They might be considered excrescences which time would perhaps remove. We have confined ourselves to the natural and logical consequences of the preaching of the two prophets; to the circumstances which throw light upon their personal characters; to the facts which may enable people to place a juster valuation than now seems to be current upon the elements which they have introduced into American society and the work which they have accomplished in the Rocky Mountain desert. Accepting even the most extravagant estimates of the material prosperity of the Mormon settlements, we think it must be admitted that their thrift is a curse to the world. And as for Brigham himself, cold, calculating, avaricious, sensual, violent, cruel, rolling in luxury, stretching out his hands on every side to grasp the property of his dupes, and pushing them on from crime to crime, from horror to horror, that he might the better amass money, he will take his place in history not only as a worse man than Joseph Smith, but as one of the most dangerous monsters ever let loose upon the world.

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TO THE WOOD-THRUSH.

How shall I put in words that song of thine? How tell it in this struggling phrase of mine? That strange, sweet wonder of full-throated bliss, The wild-wood freedom of its perfectness, Faint scent of flowers frail, strong breath of pine, The west wind’s music, and the still sunshine.

Could I weave sunshine into words, hold fast Day’s sunset glow that it might ever last, That clothes as with immortal robe each height, Rugged and stern ‘mid glare of noonday light, Softened beneath eve’s gracious glory cast— Like soul released, from strife to sweetness passed—

Were such power mine, so might I hope, perchance, In fitting speech to rhyme thy song’s romance, To sing its sweetness with a note as sweet As thine that makes this sunset hour complete— As voice beloved doth richest joy enhance, As swelling organ yearning soul doth trance.

There is no sorrow set in thy pure song; Thy notes to realms where all is joy belong. Thou callest—woods grow greener through thy voice, The stainless skies in deeper peace rejoice, All their best glories through thy singing throng— Voice of a life that ne’er knew thought of wrong!

No martyr life of conquered grief is thine, Whose happiness but through old tears can shine; So, sure, didst thou in Eden sing ere Eve, Our eldest mother, learned for life to grieve, When thought was fresh, and knowledge still divine, And in love’s light no shade of death did twine.

Our songs to-day grow sweetest through our pain; Our Eden lost, we find it not again. Even our truest, most enduring joy Earth’s twilight darkens with its dusk alloy. Soft, soft the shadow of thy heaven-dropt strain Only our weakness dims with sorrow’s stain.

Thou singst, O hermit bird! of Paradise, Not as lamenting its lost harmonies, Not as still fair through perfect penitence, But as unconscious in first innocence— Token of time thou art when sinless eyes Were homes for cloudless thoughts divinely wise.

All things that God found good seem yet to fill The few sweet notes that triumph in thy trill; All things that yet are good and purely fair Give unto thee their happy grace to wear. Sweet speech art thou for sunset-lighted hill; Yet day dies gladlier when thou art still.

And I, O rare brown thrush! that idly gaze Far down the valley’s mountain-shadowed ways— Where bears the stream light burden of the sky, Where day, like quiet soul, in peace doth die, Its calm gold broken by no storm-clouds’ blaze— Hearken, joy-hushed, thy vesper song of praise

That from yon hillside drops, strong carolling, A living echo thereto answering, Doubling the sweetness with the glad reply That drifts like argosy, joy-laden, by. Light grows my soul as thy uplifted wing; Heart knows no sorrow when it hears thee sing!

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THE GOD OF “ADVANCED” SCIENCE.

“The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.” None but fools attempt to blind themselves to the irrefragable evidence which compels the admission of a Supreme Being; and not even these can entirely succeed in such an endeavor. For it is only in the frowardness of their heart, not in the light of their reason, that they pronounce the blasphemous phrase; their heart, not their intellect, is corrupted; so that, notwithstanding the great number of avowed atheists who at different times have disgraced the human family, one might be justified in saying that a real atheist, a man positively convinced of the non-existence of God, has never existed.

What has led us to begin with this remark is an article in the Popular Science Monthly (July, 1877) entitled “The Accusation of Atheism,” in which the able but unphilosophical editor undertakes to show that although modern “advanced” science may not profess to recognize the God of the Bible, yet we have no right to infer that this “advanced” science is atheistical. The God of the Bible is to be suppressed altogether; but “advanced” scientists, who have already invented so many wonderful things, are confident that they have sufficient ability to invent even a new God. Our good readers may find it a little strange; but we are not trifling. The invention of a new God is just now the great postulatum of the infidel pseudo-philosophers. The less they believe in the living God who made them, the more would they be delighted to worship a mock-god made by themselves, that they might not be accused of belonging to that class of fools who have said in their heart: There is no God.

Prof. Youmans starts with the bright idea that if Dr. Draper had entitled his book “a history of the conflict between ecclesiasticism and science” instead of “between religion and science,” he would have disarmed criticism and saved himself from a great deal of philosophical abuse. We cannot see, however, how criticism could have been disarmed by the mere adoption of such a change. The whole of Dr. Draper’s work breathes infidelity; it falsifies the history of Christianity; it denounces religion as the enemy of science; and from the first page to the last it teems with slander and blasphemy; it is, therefore, a real attack upon religion. On the other hand, we must assume that Dr. Draper knew what he was about when he opposed “religion” to science; he said just what he meant; and this is, perhaps, the only merit of his production. If the title of the book were to be altered so as to “disarm criticism,” we would suggest that it should be made to read: A malicious fabrication concerning a fabulous conflict between religion and science.

Then Prof. Youmans proceeds to say that religious people “are alarmed at the advancement of science, and denounce it as subversive of faith.” This is not the case. Religious people are not in the least alarmed at the advancement of science, nor do they feel the least apprehension that science may prove subversive of faith; quite the contrary. They love science, do their best to promote it, accept thankfully its discoveries, and expect that it will contribute to strengthen, not to subvert, the revealed truths which form the object of theological faith. We admit, at the same time, that there is a so-called “science” for which we have no sympathy. Such a pretended “science” originated, if we do not mistake, in the Masonic lodges of Germany, whence it gradually spread through England and America by the efforts of the same secret organization. The promoters of this neoteric science boast that their cosmogony, their biology, their sociology, their physiology, etc., are “subversive” of our faith; which would be true enough, if their theories were not at the same time “subversive” of logic and common sense. But when we show that their vaunted theories cannot bear examination, when we point out the manifold absurdities and contradictions they fall into, when we lay open the sophisms by which their objectionable assertions are supported, and challenge them to make a reply, they invariably quail and dare not open their mouths, or, if they venture to speak, they ignore criticism with a convenient unconcern which is the best palliation of their defeat. As an example of this we may remind Prof. Youmans that we ourselves have given a refutation of Prof. Huxley’s lectures on evolution, and that we have yet to see the first attempt at a reply. We have also refuted a defence of Prof. Huxley written by Prof. Youmans himself in answer to Rev. Dr. W. M. Taylor, and we have shown how his own “scientific” reasoning was at fault in every point; but of course his scientific acuteness did not allow him to utter a word of reply. No, we are not afraid of a “science” which can be silenced with so little effort. Were it not that there is a prevailing ignorance so easily imposed upon by the charlatanism of false science, there would be no need whatever for denouncing it: it denounces itself sufficiently to a logical mind.

Prof. Youmans pretends that the difficulty of religious people with regard to advanced science is simply that of “narrowness or ignorance inspired by a fanatical earnestness.” We are greatly obliged by the compliment! Prof. Youmans is, indeed, a model of politeness, according to the standard of modern progress; but it did not occur to him that, before speaking of the “narrowness and ignorance” of his critics, he should have endeavored to atone for his own blunders which we pointed out in our number for April. To our mind, a man whose ignorance of logic and of many other things has been demonstrated has no right to talk of the ignorance of religious people. And as to “fanatical earnestness,” we need hardly say that it is in the Popular Science Monthly and in other similar productions of “scientific” unbelievers that we find the best instances of its convulsive exertions. But let us proceed.

“Atheism,” continues the professor, “has now come to be a familiar and stereotyped charge against men of science, both on the part of the pulpit and the religious press. Not that they accuse all scientific men of atheism, but they allege this to be the tendency of scientific thought and the outcome of scientific philosophy. It matters nothing that this imputation is denied; it matters nothing that scientific men claim that their studies lead them to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power, manifested through the order of nature, than the conceptions offered by theology. It is enough that they disagree with current notions upon this subject, and any difference of view is here held as atheism. In this, as we have said, the theologians may be honest, but they are narrow and bigoted.”

Mr. Youmans does not perceive the tendency of “scientific” thought to foster atheism. Not he! Darwin’s theory of development has for its principal object to destroy, if possible, the history of creation and to get rid of the Creator. This Mr. Youmans does not perceive. Tyndall, in his Belfast lecture, professes atheism as the outcome of scientific philosophy, and, though he has offered some explanations to screen himself from the imputation, he stands convicted by his own words. Of this Mr. Youmans takes no notice. Büchner ridicules the idea that there is a God, and teaches that such an idea is obsolete, contrary to modern science, and condemned by philosophy as a manifest impossibility. Mr. Youmans seems to hold that this is not genuine atheism. Huxley, to avoid creation, gives up all investigation of the origin of things as useless and unscientific, and the advanced thinkers in general are everywhere at work propagating the same view in their scientific lectures, books, journals, and magazines. Yet Prof. Youmans wishes the world to believe that the tendency of advanced scientific thought is not towards atheism! Is he blind? The man who writes Nature with a capital letter, who denies creation, who contributes to the best of his power to the diffusion of infidel thought, can hardly be ignorant of the fact that what is now called advanced science is, in the hands of its apostles and leaders, an engine of war against God. But he knows also that to profess atheism is bad policy, for the present at least. Science, as he laments in many of his articles, has not yet advanced enough in the popular mind; people are still “narrow” and “ignorant,” and even “fanatic”—that is, their religious feelings and conscientious convictions do not yet permit a direct and outspoken confession of the atheistic tendency of modern “scientific” thought. Hence he is obliged to be cautious and to put on a mask. Such are, and ever have been, the tactics of God’s enemies. Thus Prof. Huxley, in his lectures on evolution, while attacking the Biblical history of creation, pretends that he is only refuting the “Miltonian hypothesis.” The same Prof. Huxley, with Herbert Spencer and many others of less celebrity, endeavors to conceal his atheism, or at any rate to make it appear less repulsive, by the convenient but absurd admission of the Great Unknown or Unknowable, to which surely neither he nor any other scientist will offer adoration, as it would be an utterly superfluous, unscientific, and unphilosophical thing to worship what they cannot know. And Prof. Youmans himself follows the same tactics, as we shall see in the sequel. Hence we do not wonder that he considers Mr. Draper’s words “a conflict between religion and science” as unfortunate, and only calculated to provoke criticism and theological abuse. It would have been so easy and so much better to say “between ecclesiasticism and science.” This would have saved appearances, and might have furnished a plausible ground for repelling the accusation of atheism.

But, says Prof. Youmans, “this imputation is denied.” We answer that the imputation cannot be evaded by any such denial. If there were question of the intimate convictions of private individuals, their denial might have some weight in favor of their secret belief. Men very frequently do not see clearly the ultimate consequences of their own principles; and it is for this reason that an atheistic science does not always lead to personal atheism. As there are honest Protestants who believe on authority, though their Protestant principle sacrifices authority to private judgment, so also there are many honest scientists who, notwithstanding their admission of atheistic theories, believe in God. This is mere inconsistency after all; and it can only furnish a ground for judging of the views of individual scientists.

But our question regards the tendency of “advanced scientific thought” irrespective of the inconsistency of sundry individuals. This question is to be solved from the nature of the principles and of the conclusions of “advanced” science; and if such principles and such conclusions are shown to lead logically to atheism, it matters very little indeed that “the imputation is denied.” This the editor of the Popular Science Monthly must admit. Now, that atheism is the logical outcome of “advanced” science may be proved very easily. Dr. Büchner, in his Force and Matter, gives a long scientific argumentation against the existence of God. The science which led him to this profession of atheism is the “advanced” science of which Prof. Youmans speaks. Has any among the advanced scientists protested against Dr. Büchner’s conclusion? Have any of them endeavored to show that this conclusion was not logically deduced from the principles of their pretended science? Some of them may have been pained at the imprudent sincerity of the German doctor; but what he affirms with a coarse impudence they too insinuate every day in a gentler tone and in a more guarded phraseology. Their doctrine is that “whereas mankind formerly believed the phenomena of nature to be expressions of the will of a personal God, modern science, by reducing everything to laws, has given a sufficient explanation of these phenomena, and made it quite unnecessary for man to seek any further account of them.” Dr. Carpenter, from whom we have borrowed this statement, adds: “This is precisely Dr. Büchner’s position; and it seems to me a legitimate inference from the very prevalent assumption (which is sanctioned by the language of some of our ablest writers) that the so-called laws of nature ‘govern’ the phenomena of which they are only generalized expressions. I have been protesting against this language for the last quarter of a century.”[61]

Mr. Youmans himself implicitly admits that “advanced” science has given up the old notion of God; and he only contends that scientists, while disregarding the God of theology, fill up his place with something better. “Scientific men claim that their studies lead them to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power manifested through the order of nature than the conceptions offered by theology.” Our readers need hardly be told that this claim on the part of our advanced scientists is preposterous and ridiculous. For if the order of nature could lead to a conception of divine power higher or worthier than the conception offered by theology, it would lead to a conception of divine power greater and higher than omnipotence; for omnipotence is one of the attributes of the God of theology. But can we believe that Mr. Youmans entertains the hope of conceiving a power higher than omnipotence? How, then, can he make good his assertion? On the other hand, the God of theology is immense, eternal, and unchangeable, infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, infinitely good, infinitely perfect, as not only all theologians but also all philosophers unquestionably admit. Must we believe that our scientists will be able to conceive a higher intellect, wisdom, or goodness than infinite intellect, infinite wisdom, or infinite goodness? Will they imagine anything greater than immensity, or than eternity? The editor of the Popular Science Monthly has a very poor opinion indeed of the intellectual power of his habitual readers, if he thinks that they will not detect the absurdity of his claim.

But there is more than this. “Advanced” science has repeatedly confessed its inability to form a conception of God. The ultimate conclusion of “advanced” science is that the contemplation and study of nature afford no indication of what a God may be; so much so that the leaders of this “advanced” science, after suppressing the God of theology, could find nothing to substitute in his place but what they call “the Great Unknown” and “the Great Unknowable.” Now, surely, the unknowable cannot be known. How, then, can these scientists claim that their studies lead them “to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power”? Can they conceive that which is unknown and unknowable? Have they any means of ascertaining that a thing unknowable has power, or that its power is divine?

Let them understand that if their “Unknowable” is not eternal, it is no God; if it is not omniscient, it is no God; if it is not omnipotent, it is no God. And, in like manner, if it is not self-existent, immutable, immense, infinitely wise, infinitely good, infinitely perfect, it is no God. And, again, if it is not our Creator, our Master, and our Judge, it is no God, and we have no reason for worshipping it, or even for respecting it. How can we know that these and similar attributes can and must be predicated of the Unknowable, since the unknowable is not and cannot be known? If, on the contrary, we know that such a being is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immense, and infinitely perfect in all manner of perfections, then it is obvious (even to Prof. Youmans, we assume) that such a being is neither unknown nor unknowable. Thus the unknowable can lay no claim to “divine power” or other divine attributes; and therefore the pretended worshippers of the Unknowable vainly attempt to palliate their atheism by claiming that their studies have led them “to a higher and more worthy conception of the divine power than the conception offered by theology.”

As to Prof. Youmans himself, he tells us that the divine nature is “unspeakable and unthinkable.” This evidently amounts to saying that the divine nature is unknowable, just as Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and others of the same sect have maintained. The professor will not deny, we trust, that what is unthinkable is also unknowable, unless he is ready to show that he knows the square circle. Hence the remarks we have passed on the doctrine of his leaders apply to him as well as to them. It is singular, however, that neither he nor any of his sect has thought of examining the question whether the “Unknowable” has any existence at all. For if it has no existence, they must confess that they have not even an unknown God, and therefore are absolute atheists; and if they assume that it has a real existence, they are supremely illogical; for no one has a right to proclaim the existence of a thing unknown and unknowable. The existence of the unknowable cannot be affirmed unless it be known; but it cannot be known unless the unknowable be known; and this implies a manifest contradiction. To affirm existence is to affirm a fact; and Mr. Youmans would certainly be embarrassed to show that science, however “advanced,” can affirm a fact of which it has no knowledge whatever. Hence atheism is the legitimate result of the doctrine which substitutes the “Unknowable” in the place of the God of theology; and “it matters nothing” that this consequence is provisionally denied by Prof. Youmans. Were it not that the horror inspired by the impious pretensions of his fallacious science obliges him to keep within the measures of prudence, it is very likely that Prof. Youmans would not only not deny his “scientific” atheism, but even glory in its open profession. So long as this cannot be safely done he must remain satisfied with writing Nature with a capital N.

From these remarks we can further infer that Mr. Youmans’ complaint about the narrowness and bigotry of theologians is utterly unfounded. There is no narrowness in rejecting foolish conceptions, and no bigotry in maintaining the rights of truth. Theology condemns your doctrines, not because they “disagree with current notions,” but because they are manifestly impious and absurd. The views you encourage are atheistical. You admit only the Unknowable; and the Unknowable, as we have just proved, is not God. Hence the theologians are not “narrow” nor “bigoted,” but strictly logical and reasonable, when they condemn your doctrines as atheistical.

And now Prof. Youmans makes the following curious argument:

“It is surprising that they (the theologians) cannot see that in arraigning scientific thinkers for atheism they are simply doing what stupid fanatics the world over are always doing when ideas of the Deity different from their own are maintained. And it is the more surprising that Christian teachers should indulge in this intolerant practice when it is remembered that their own faith was blackened with this opprobrium at its first promulgation.”

Here a long passage is quoted from The Contest of Heathenism with Christianity, by Prof. Zeller, of Berlin, in which we are reminded that the primitive Christians were reproached with atheism because they “did not agree with the prevailing conceptions of the Deity,” and that “Down with the atheists” was the war-cry of the heathen mob against the Christians. This suggests to Mr. Youmans the following remarks:

“It would be well if our theologians would remember these things when tempted to deal out their maledictions upon scientific men as propagators of atheism. For the history of their own faith attests that religious ideas are a growth, and that they pass from lower states to higher unfoldings through processes of inevitable suffering. It was undoubtedly a great step of progress from polytheism to monotheism, ... but this was neither the final step in the advancement of the human mind toward the highest conception of the Deity, nor the last experience of disquiet and grief at sundering the ties of old religious associations. But if this be a great normal process in the development of the religious feeling and aspiration of humanity, why should the Christians of to-day adopt the bigoted tactics of heathenism, first applied to themselves, to use against those who would still further ennoble and purify the ideal of the Divinity?”

Thus, according to the professor, as the pagans were wrong and stupid in denouncing the Christians as atheists, so are the Christians both wrong and stupid in denouncing the atheistic tendency of “advanced” science; and the reason alleged is that as the pagans did not recognize the superiority of monotheism to polytheism, so the Christian theologians fail to see the superiority of the “scientific” Unknowable to the God of Christianity. Need we answer this? Why, if anything were wanting to prove that Prof. Youmans is laboring for the cause of atheism, his very manner of arguing may be regarded as a convincing proof of the fact. For, if his reasoning has any meaning, it means that as the Christians rejected the gods of the pagans, so Prof. Youmans rejects the God of the Christians; and this is quite enough to show his atheism, as he neither recognizes our God, nor has he found, nor will he ever find, another God worthy of his recognition; for, surely, the “Unthinkable” of which he speaks is not an object of recognition.

On the other hand, is it true that the history of Christianity “attests that religious ideas are a growth, and that they pass from lower states to higher unfoldings”? Does the history of Christianity attest, for instance, that our conception of God has passed from a lower to a higher state? But, waiving this, it requires great audacity to contend that the theory of the “Unknowable” and of the “Unthinkable” is an unfolding of the conception of God. We appeal to Prof. Youmans himself. A theory of natural science which would lay down as the ultimate result of human progress that what we call chemistry, geology, astronomy, mechanics, electricity, optics, magnetism, is something “unknowable” and “unthinkable,” would scarcely be considered by him an “unfolding” of science. For how could he “unfold” his thoughts in the Popular Science Monthly, if the subject of his thought were “unthinkable”? But, then, how can he assume that his theory of the “unthinkable” is an “unfolding” of the conception of God? God cannot be conceived, if he is unthinkable. We conceive God as an eternal, immense, omnipotent, personal Being. These and other attributes of Divinity, as conceived by us, constitute our notion of God; and this notion is as unfolded as is consistent with the limits of the human mind. But to “unfold” the conception of Divinity by suppressing omnipotence, wisdom, eternity, goodness, and all other perfections of the divine nature, so as to leave nothing “thinkable” in it, is not to unfold our conception, but to suppress it altogether.

As to the flippant assertion that the Christian conception of Divinity is not “the final step in the advancement of the human mind toward the highest conception of the Deity,” we might say much. But what is the use of refuting what every Christian child knows to be false? We conceive God as the supreme truth, the supreme good, and the supreme Lord of whatever exists; and he who pretends that there is or can be a “higher conception of the Deity” has himself to thank if men call him a fool.

We shall say nothing of “intolerant practices,” “stupid fanaticism,” or “bigoted tactics.” These are mere words. As to “the aspiration of humanity,” it may be noticed that there is a secret society that considers its aspirations as the aspirations of “humanity,” and, when it speaks of “humanity,” it usually means nothing more and nothing better than its “free and accepted” members. This “humanity” has doubtless some curious aspirations; but mankind does not aspire to dethrone God or to pervert the notion of Divinity.

Prof. Youmans accounts for “the aspiration of humanity” in the following manner:

“It cannot be rationally questioned that the world has come to another important stage in this line of its progression. The knowledge of the universe, its action, its harmony, its unity, its boundlessness and grandeur, is comparatively a recent thing; and is it to be for a moment supposed that so vast a revolution as this is to be without effect upon our conception of its divine control?”

This manner of arguing is hardly creditable to a professor of science; for, even admitting for the sake of argument that the knowledge of the universe is comparatively “a recent thing,” it would not follow that such a knowledge must alter the Christian conception of the divine nature. Let the professor make the universe as great, as boundless, and as harmonious as possible; what then? Will such a universe proclaim a new God? By no means. It will still proclaim the same God, though in a louder voice. For the harmony, beauty, and grandeur of the universe reveal to us the infinite greatness, beauty, and wisdom of its Creator; and the greater our knowledge of such a universe, the more forcible the demonstration of the infinite perfection of its Creator. Now, this Creator is our old God, the God of the Bible, the God to whom Mr. Youmans owes his existence, and to whom he must one day give an account of how he used or abused his intellectual powers. This is, however, the God whom the professor would fain banish from the universe. Is there anything more unphilosophic or more unscientific?

But the knowledge of the universe, from which we rise to the conception of God, is not “a recent thing.” Infidels are apt to imagine that the world owes to them the knowledge of natural science. We must remind them that science has been built up by men who believed in God. “Advanced” science is of course “a recent thing,” but it does not “constitute an important stage” in the line of real progress; for it consists of nothing but reckless assumptions, deceitful phraseology, and illogical conclusions. Three thousand years ago King David averred that “the heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.” Has advanced science made any recent discovery in the heavens or on earth which gives the lie to this highly philosophical statement? Quite the contrary. It is, therefore, supremely ridiculous to talk of a “vast revolution” whose effect must be “to purify the ideal of Divinity.” This vast revolution is a dream of the professor.

But he says:

“Is it rational to expect that the man of developed intellect whose life is spent in the all-absorbing study of that mighty and ever-expanding system of truth that is embodied in the method of Nature will form the same idea of God as the ignorant blockhead who knows and cares nothing for these things, who is incapable of reflection or insight, and who passively accepts the narrow notions upon this subject that other people put into his head? As regards the divine government of the world, two such contrasted minds can hardly have anything in common.”

This is a fair sample of the logical processes of certain thinkers “of developed intellect.” Our professor assumes, first, that Catholic theologians are “ignorant blockheads,” that they “know and care nothing” for natural truths, that they are “incapable of reflection or insight,” and that they “passively accept” what others may put into their heads. Would it not be more reasonable to assume that a “blockhead” is a man who asserts what cannot be proved, as a certain professor is wont to do? And would it be unfair to assume that the man who “knows and cares nothing” for truth is one who beguiles his readers into error, and, when convicted, makes no amends? We would not say that the professor is “incapable of reflection or insight,” for we think that no human being can be so degraded as to deserve this stigma; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Youmans “passively accepts” many absurd notions, for which he cannot account, except by saying that they “have been put into his head” by such “developed intellects” as Huxley’s, Darwin’s, Spencer’s, and other notorious falsifiers of truth.

Professor Youmans assumes also that our intellects cannot be “developed” enough to form a true conception of God, unless we apply to “the all-absorbing study of the method of Nature,” by which he means the conservation of energy, the indestructibility of matter, the evolution of species, and other cognate theories. This assumption has no foundation. To form a true conception of God it suffices to know that the universe is subject to continual changes, and therefore contingent, and consequently created. This leads us directly to the conception of a Creator, or of a First Cause which is self-existent, independent, and eternal. Modern science and “developed intellects” have nothing to say against this. It is therefore a gross absurdity to assume that the study of the method of nature interferes with the old conception of God.

A third assumption of the professor is that our notion of divine nature is “narrow.” It is astonishing that Mr. Youmans could have allowed himself to make so manifestly foolish a statement. Is there anything “narrow” in immensity? in omnipotence? in eternity? in infinite wisdom? or in any other attribute of the true God? And if our notion of God, which involves all such attributes, is still “narrow,” what shall we say of the professor’s notion which involves nothing but the “unthinkable”—that is, nothing at all?

The professor proceeds to say that if a man is ignorant and stupid his contemplation of divine things will reflect his own limitation. This is a great truth; but he should have been loath to proclaim it in a place where we find so many proofs of his own “limitation.” On the other hand, it is not from the ignorant and the stupid that our philosophers and theologians have derived their notion of God; and to confound the latter with the former is, on the part of a “developed intellect,” a miserable show of logic. The ignorant and the stupid, continues Mr. Youmans, “will cling to a grovelling anthropomorphism,” and conceive of the Deity “as a man like himself, only greater and more powerful, and as chiefly interested in the things that he is interested in.” To which we answer that the stupid and the ignorant of divine things are those who do not know God, and who maintain against the universal verdict of reason that God is “unknowable.” We defy Mr. Youmans to point out a stupidity and an ignorance of divine things which equals that of him who pretends to think of the “unthinkable.” This is even worse than “to cling to a grovelling anthropomorphism.” Of course our anthropomorphism is a poetic invention of the “developed intellect,” and therefore we may dismiss it without further comment.

“The profound student of science,” he adds, “will rise to a more spiritualized and abstract ideal of the divine nature, or will be so oppressed with a consciousness of the Infinity as to reverently refrain from all attempts to grasp, and formulate, and limit the nature of that which is past finding out, which is unspeakable and unthinkable.”

To understand the real meaning of this sentence we must remember that he who wrote it does not accept the God of theologians. Scientific men, as he has told us, claim that their studies lead them “to higher and more worthy conceptions” of the divine power than the conceptions offered by theology. It is obvious, therefore, that the “spiritualized and abstract ideal of the divine nature” to which the profound student of science is expected to rise is not the ideal recognized by theology. This is very strange; for if theology does not furnish the true ideal of divine nature, much less can such an ideal be furnished by the science of matter. Every science is best acquainted with its own specific object; and since God is the object of theology, the ideal of the divine nature is to be found in theology, not in natural science. Hence “the profound student of science” may indeed determine the laws of physical and chemical phenomena, speak of masses and densities, of solids and fluids, and of other experimental subjects without much danger of error, but he has no qualification for inventing a new ideal of divine nature. The ideal of a thing exhibits the essence of the thing; and the study of essences does not belong to the scientist, whose field is confined within the phenomena and their laws. The best scientists confess that they do not even know the essence of matter, though matter is the proper and most familiar object of their study. Yet these are the men who, according to Mr. Youmans, should know best the essence of God.

But we should like further to know how the “profound student” of advanced science will be able to rise to a “spiritualized” ideal of Divinity. The general drift of modern infidel science is towards materialism. It teaches that thought is secreted by the brain as water is by the kidneys, or, at least, that thought consists of molecular movements, and that the admission of a spiritual substance in the organism of man is quite unwarranted. How, then, can a science which rejects spiritual substances lead its “profound student” to a spiritualized ideal of Divinity? It is manifest, we think, that all this talk is mere jugglery, and the professor himself seems to have felt that it was; for he admits that the profound student of science may be “so oppressed with a consciousness of the Infinite as to refrain from all attempts to grasp and formulate and limit the nature of what is past finding out.” This last expression shows that Mr. Youmans has no ground for expecting that his profound student will rise to the ideal of the divine nature, as what is “past finding out” will never be found, and is not only “unspeakable,” as he declares, but also “unthinkable.” The profound student of science is therefore doomed, so far as Mr. Youmans may be relied on, to remain without any ideal of God. What is this but genuine atheism?

Mr. Youmans will reply that his profound student will not be an atheist, because he will feel “so oppressed with the consciousness of the Infinite.” But we should like to know how the profound student can have consciousness of what he cannot think of. And, in like manner, if the Infinite is unthinkable, how can the profound student know that it is infinite? These contradictions go far to prove that “ignorance” and “stupidity,” far from being the characteristics of Christianity, find a more congenial abode in the “developed intellects of the profound students of advanced science.”

As all errors are misrepresentations of truth, we cannot dismiss this point without saying a word about the truth here misrepresented. God is incomprehensible; such is the truth. God is unthinkable; this is the error. To argue that what is incomprehensible is also unthinkable, is a manifest fallacy. There are a very great number even of finite things which we know but cannot comprehend. For instance, we know gravitation, electricity, and magnetism, but our knowledge of them is quite inadequate. We know ancient history, though numberless facts have remained inaccessible to our research. We know the operations of our own faculties, but we are far from comprehending them. Comprehension is the perfect and adequate knowledge of the object comprehended. If the cognoscibility of the object is not exhausted, there is knowledge, but not comprehension; and as our finite intellect has no power of exhausting the cognoscibility of things, human knowledge is not comprehension, though no one will deny that it is true and real knowledge. In like manner, though we do not comprehend the infinite, yet we conceive it, and we know how to distinguish it from the finite. We know what we say when we affirm that the branches of the hyperbola extend to infinity, that the decimal division of ten by three leads to an infinite series of figures, that every line is infinitely divisible, that every genus extends infinitely more than any of its subordinate species, and the species infinitely more than the individual, etc. Thus the notion of the infinite is a familiar one among men; and when Mr. Youmans contends that the infinite is unthinkable, he commits a blunder, and every one of his readers has the right to tell him that such a blunder in inductive science is inexcusable.

Perhaps it may not be superfluous to point out, before we conclude, another fallacy of the “developed intellect” of the professor. He assumes that to form a conception of God is to limit the divine nature; for he declares that the profound student of science oppressed with the consciousness of Infinity ought reverently to refrain “from all attempts to grasp, and formulate, and limit the nature of that which is past finding out.” We would inform Mr. Youmans that the notion of a thing does not limit the thing, but simply expresses that the thing is what it is, whether it be limited or unlimited. In all essential definitions some notion is included, which expresses either perfection or imperfection. When we say that a being is irrational, we point out an imperfection, or a defect of further perfection; whereas when we say that a being is rational, we express a perfection of the being. Now, since all imperfection is a real limit, it follows that all denial of imperfection is a denial of some limit, and therefore the affirmation of every possible perfection is a total exclusion of limit. Thus omnipotence excludes all limit of power, eternity all limit of duration, omniscience all limit of knowledge, immensity all limit of space. We need not add that all the other attributes of God exclude limitation, as they are all infinite. It is evident, therefore, that we can “formulate” our notion of God without “limiting” the divine nature; and that those “profound students” of nature whose “developed intellect” is “oppressed with the consciousness of Infinity” strive in vain to palliate their atheism by “reverently (?) refraining from all attempts to grasp and formulate” the nature of the Supreme Cause.

We may be told that Prof. Youmans, though he rejects the “God of theology,” admits something equivalent—viz., Infinity, the consciousness of which he feels so oppressive. He also admits that “religious feelings may be awakened” in a mind so oppressed by the thought of Infinity, and insists that “religious teachers ought in these days to have liberality enough to recognize this serious fact, remembering that human nature is religiously progressive as well as progressive in its other capacities.” Would not this show that we cannot without injustice hold him up as a professor of atheism? We reply that the accusation of atheism preferred against the tendency of advanced science has been met by the professor in such a manner as to give it only more weight, according to the old proverb which says that

Causa patrocinio non bona pejor erit.

He does not believe in the God of theology. In what does he believe? In the “unthinkable”! This is sheer mockery. But the unthinkable is said to be infinite. This is sheer nonsense, as we have shown. Again, the unthinkable is said to awaken religious feelings. This is written for unthinkable persons. The professor, as we have already noticed, admires the grandeur of nature, and holds it to be “boundless,” and therefore infinite. This may lead one to suspect that the material universe—the sun, the planets, the stars, heat, light, electricity, gravity, and their laws—constitute the “Infinity” with the consciousness of which the professor is oppressed. If this could be surmised, we might regard him as a pantheist. This, of course, would not better his position, as pantheism is, after all, only another form of atheism. But if nature (or rather Nature, as he writes it) is his Deity, how can he affirm that such a nature is “unspeakable” and “unthinkable”? If nature is “unthinkable,” the science of nature is a dream; and if it is “unspeakable,” all the talk of the Popular Science Monthly is a fraud.

If Prof. Youmans wishes us to believe that “advanced” science does not tend to foster atheism, and that its foremost champions are not atheists, let him come forward like a man, and show that, after rejecting the God of theology and of philosophy, another God has been found, to whom “developed intellects” offer religious worship, and in whom their religious feelings are rationally satisfied. Let him give us, above all, his “scientific” reasons for abandoning the God of the Bible, in whom we “ignorant blockheads” have not ceased to believe; and let him state his “philosophic” reasons also, if he has any, that we may judge of the case according to its full merit. We need not be instructed about the “religious progressiveness” of mankind, or any other convenient invention of unbelievers; we want only to know the new God of “advanced” science, his nature and his claims. When Prof. Youmans shall have honestly complied with this suggestion, we shall see what answer can best meet his appeal to the “liberality” of religious teachers.

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A LEGEND OF DIEPPE.

A gloomy three days’ storm has prevailed all along the French coast. Dull gray clouds hide the blue vault of heaven and frown upon the tossing waters beneath. The fresh, invigorating air, remembered with delight by all who have ever been in Normandy, has given place to a damp, chilly heaviness, broken occasionally by fierce gusts of wind and rain. The fisher-boats are all in port, the small ones drawn up high on the beach, the larger securely anchored. But this is not due only to the storm. Even if it were the fairest of weather, no Dieppe fisherman would set sail to-day. It is All-Souls’ day—the feast of the dead, the commemoration of the loved and lost; and who is there that has not loved and lost? But among these simple Catholic souls one feels that the loved are never lost. The dead live still in the tender remembrance of those left behind. Tears shed in prayer for the departed have no bitterness.

But the heartless and ungrateful man who fishes to-day will be everywhere followed by his double—a phantom fisher in a phantom boat. All signs fail him, all fish escape his net. Again and again he draws it in empty. If he persist, at length he thinks himself rewarded. His net is so heavy he nearly swamps his boat in the endeavor to draw it in; and horrible to say, his catch is only grinning skulls and disjointed human bones.

At night, tossing on his sleepless pillow, he hears the ghostly “white car” rolling through the silent street. He hears his name called in the voice of the latest dead of his acquaintance, and dies himself before the next All-Souls’ day.

Spite of the bleak and rainy weather, all the good people of Dieppe, or rather of its fisher suburb, Le Pollet, are gathered together in church. Rude as it is, weather-beaten, discolored, gray-green, like the unquiet ocean it overlooks, Notre Dame du Pollet is still grand and picturesque. It has suffered both from time and desecration, as is seen by its broken carvings, empty niches, and ruined tombs. The altars are plain, the ornaments few and simple. On the wall of the Lady chapel hang two rusty chains—the votive offering, it is said, of a sailor of Le Pollet, once a slave to pirates. Miraculously rescued by Our Lady, he returned to his native place only to sing a Te Deum in her chapel and hang up his broken fetters therein; then, retiring to a neighboring monastery, he took upon himself a voluntary bondage which love made sweet and light.

It is the solemn Mass of requiem, and almost noon, though the sombre day, subdued yet more by stained-glass windows, seems like a winter twilight. The church is all in deep shadow, except the sanctuary with its softly-burning lamp, and its altar decked with starry wax-lights. Black draperies hang about the altar, black robes are upon the officiating priests. The slow, mournful chant of the Dies Iræ, sung by a choir invisible in the darkness, resounds through the dim, lofty aisles.

Motionless upon the uneven stone pavement kneel the people, a dark and silent mass, only relieved here and there by the gleam of a snowy cap or bright-colored kerchief; for the fisher-folk, and, indeed, all the peasantry of thrifty Normandy, dress in serviceable garb, of sober colors. There is one little group apart from the rest of the congregation; not all one family, for they are too unlike. They seem to be drawn together by some common calamity or dread. First is an old woman perhaps seventy years of age, and looking, as these Norman peasants usually do, even older than her years. The full glow of light from the altar falls upon her white cap, with the bright blue kerchief tied over it. A string of large beads hangs from her bony fingers. Her eyes, singularly bright for one so aged, are raised to the black-veiled crucifix, and tears glisten upon her brown and withered cheeks. Her arm is drawn through that of a slender young woman, and near them is a little girl, round and rosy. All three are dressed nearly alike, and all say their beads, though not with the same tearful devotion. Anxiety and weariness are in the young girl’s pale but pretty face; and the child looks subdued, almost frightened, by the gloom around her.

Behind them kneels a comely matron, a little child clinging to her gown; near her two fishermen, one old and gray-haired. The other, who is young, has an arm in a sling; he kneels upon one knee, his elbow on the other, and his face hidden in his hand.

They are two households over whom hangs the shadow of a calamity, perhaps all the greater because of its uncertainty. Two months ago Jacques Payen and his son sailed for the fishery. Jacques Suchet and his cousin, Charles Rivaud, completed the crew; for Jean Suchet, disabled by a broken arm, remained at home with his grandmother and sister. The season proved unusually stormy. Two fishing-boats of Le Pollet narrowly escaped the terrible rocks of the Norman coast; and one of these reported seeing a vessel, resembling that of the Payens, drifting past them in a fog, with broken mast and cordage dragging over the side. They hailed the wreck, but heard no reply, and concluded that the crew had been swept overboard, or possibly had escaped in their boat.

Weeks had passed since this vague but terrible intelligence had reached the stricken families. Old Mère Suchet had at once received it as conclusive. She wept and prayed for the bold young fishers, the hope and comfort of her old age. Not so Manon Payen. No one dared condole with her, not even her old father, Toutain. Life hitherto had gone so well with her! Her husband loved her; her son was her pride and delight; her rosy Marie and little toddling Pierre filled her cottage with laughter and sunshine. Grief was so new and strange and frightful. What! her husband and son taken from her at one blow? No, it could not be! It was too dreadful! God could not be so cruel! Besides, there were no better sailors than the Payens, father and son; none who knew the coast so well, with all its perils, its hidden rocks, and dangerous currents. Their vessel was new and strong; why should they be lost; they alone? Jean Pinsard was not positive it was their vessel he had seen; how could he tell in a fog? No; she was sure they were safe. They had put in to one of the islands. They would not risk a dangerous journey in stormy weather just to tell her, what she knew already, that they were safe.

To Mère Suchet’s Mathilde, the betrothed of Jacques Payen, how much better and clearer was this reasoning than the submissive grief of her pious old grandmother! Young people cannot easily believe the worst when it concerns themselves. Mathilde could not pray for the repose of the souls of lover, brother, and cousin. With the passionate, impatient yearning of a heart new to affliction, she besought the Blessed Mother for their safe return. Her brother Jean did not try to destroy her hopes, though he would not say he shared them.

As time passed on and brought no news of the absent, the hearts of these two poor women grew faint and sore; but they refused to acknowledge it to one another, or even to themselves. Their days passed in feverish, and often vain, endeavors to be cheerful and busy; their nights in anguish all the more bitter because silent and unconfessed. On All-Souls’ day old Toutain and Mère Suchet had wished to have a Requiem Mass offered for the lost sailors, but Mathilde wept aloud at the suggestion, and Manon forbade it instantly, positively, almost angrily.

Manon had borne up well through the sad funereal services of the church. She smiled upon her little ones, and returned a serene and cheerful greeting to the curious or pitying friends who accosted her. All day she had carried the burden of domestic cares and duties, while her heart ached within her bosom and cried out for solitude. Now, at night, alone with her sleeping babes, the agony of fear and pain, so long repressed, takes full possession of her sinking heart. Mingled with the roar of the treacherous sea she hears the voices of husband and son, now calling loudly for help, now borne away on the fitful wind. She sees their pale faces, with unclosed eyes, floating below the cruel green water, their strong limbs entangled in the twisted cordage. Now great, gleaming fish swim around them. Oh! it is too fearful. From her knees she falls forward upon her face and groans aloud. But on a sudden she hears a stir without—a sound of repressed voices and many hurrying feet. Hope is not dead within her yet; for she springs to the window with the wild thought that it is her absent returned. No, ’tis but a group of fishermen on their way to the pier; but Pinsard stops to tell her, with a strange thrill in his rough voice, that there is a fishing-boat coming into port!

Manon screams to her father to watch the little ones—she must go to the pier—then flies out into the night. It is not raining, and she returns to snatch her wakened and sobbing babe, and wrap him in his father’s woollen blouse. She does not know when Mathilde joins her; she is scarcely conscious of the warm, exultant clasp of her hand. Jean is there, too, agitated but grave.

As they turn the angle of the village street, before them lies the open bay. It is past midnight, but the pier is crowded. There, truly, coming on with outspread canvas, white in the struggling rays of a watery moon, is the missing ship! They know it well. Upon the broken, pebbly shore the two women kneel to thank God; but they can only lift up their voices and weep.

“They are not safe yet,” says Jean shortly. “The wind takes them straight upon the pier. They will need all our help.”

The crowd make way instantly for the breathless women. The light-house keeper stands ready with a coil of rope. The fishermen range themselves in line, tighten their belts, and wait to draw the friendly hawser. Great waves thunder against the long pier, sending showers of spray high above the pale crucifix at the end against which the women lean. Now the moon, emerging from a light cloud, sends a flood of pale radiance upon the vessel’s deck. It is they! Jacques Payen is at the helm; young Jacques stands upon the gunwale.

The light-house keeper throws his rope; the fishermen raise their musical, long-drawn cry. Jacques catches the rope, but in silence; and silently the crew make fast.

“It is their vow!” cries Manon, darting forward among the wondering men. “They will not speak until they sing Te Deum at Notre Dame for their safe return.”

Reassured, the men pull in vigorously, but to no effect. Again, and yet again, but the ship does not move. A moment since it came on swift as the wind; now it seems anchored for ever not fifty yards away. They can see plainly every object upon the deck, where the silent crew stand gazing towards the pier. Even Manon and Mathilde have seized the rope, and draw with the strength of terror. Breathless, unsteady, large drops of sweat standing upon their faces, they pause irresolute. Stretching her arms towards her husband, Manon holds out her babe.

A white mist rises out of the sea and hangs like a veil between them. Sad, reproachful voices rise out of the waves, some near at hand, others far out. An icy wind lifts the mist and carries it slowly away, clinging for a moment like a shroud around the crucifix. The cable falls slack in the strong hands that grasp it. The ship is gone—vanished without a sound; but far away echoes a solemn chorus, “Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you, my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath touched me.”

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ROMANCE AND REALITY OF THE DEATH OF FATHER JAMES MARQUETTE, AND THE RECENT DISCOVERY OF HIS REMAINS.

The bold and energetic exploration by the Canadian Louis Jolliet and the French Jesuit James Marquette, in which, embarking in a frail canoe, they penetrated to the Mississippi by the Wisconsin, and followed the course of the great river to the Arkansas, gives them and their important achievement a place in American history. It was an expedition carried out by two skilled hydrographers familiar with the extent and limit of American exploration, trained by education and long observation to map and describe the countries through which they passed. Their great object was to determine the extent of the river, its chief affluents, and the nature of the tribes upon it, as well as to decide whether it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific.

In New Mexico, the advanced outpost of the Spanish colonies, some definite knowledge of the interior structure of the continent prevailed; but to the rest of the world the great watershed of the Rocky Mountains, with the valley of the Mississippi and Missouri to the east and a series of rivers on the west, was utterly unknown. Marquette and Jolliet lifted the veil and gave the civilized world clear and definite ideas. The two learned explorers floated alone down the mighty river, whose path had not been traced for any distance since the shattered remnant of De Soto’s army stole down its lower valley to the gulf.

Father Marquette was not a mere scholar or man of science. If he sought new avenues for civilized man to thread the very heart of the continent, it was with him a work of Christian love. It was to open the way for the Gospel, that the cross might enlighten new and remote nations.

No missionary of that glorious band of Jesuits who in the seventeenth century announced the faith from the Hudson Bay to the Lower Mississippi, who hallowed by their labors and life-blood so many a wild spot now occupied by the busy hives of men—none of them impresses us more, in his whole life and career, with his piety, sanctity, and absolute devotion to God, than Father Marquette. In life he seems to have been looked up to with reverence by the wildest savage, by the rude frontiersman, and by the polished officers of government. When he had passed away his name and his fame remained in the great West, treasured above that of his fellow-laborers, Ménard, Allouez, Nouvel, or Druillettes. The tradition of his life and labors in a few generations, while it lost none of its respect for his memory, gathered the moss of incorrectness.

Father Charlevoix, travelling through the West in 1721, stopped on Lake Michigan at the mouth of a stream which already bore the name of “River of Father Marquette.” From Canadian voyagers and some missionary in the West he learned the tradition which he thus embodies in his journal:

“Two years after the discovery (of the Mississippi), as he was going from Chicagou, which is at the extremity of Lake Michigan, to Michilimackinac, he entered the river in question on the 18th of May, 1675, its mouth being then at the extremity of the lowlands, which I have noticed it leaves to the right as you enter. There he erected his altar and said Mass. Then he withdrew a little distance to offer his thanksgiving, and asked the two men who paddled his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour. At the expiration of that time they returned for him, and were greatly surprised to find him dead. They remembered, nevertheless, that on entering the river he had inadvertently remarked that he would end his journey there.

“As it was too far from the spot to Michilimackinac to convey his body to that place, they buried him near the bank of the river, which since that time has gradually withdrawn, as if through respect, to the bluff, whose foot it now washes and where it has opened a new passage. The next year one of the two men who had rendered the last tribute to the servant of God returned to the spot where they had buried him, took up his remains, and conveyed them to Michilimackinac. I could not learn, or have forgotten, the name this river bore previously, but the Indians now give it no name but ‘River of the Black-gown’; the French call it by the name of Father Marquette, and never fail to invoke him when they are in any peril on Lake Michigan. Many have declared that they believed themselves indebted to his intercession for having escaped very great dangers.”

Father Charlevoix’s fame as a historian gave this account the stamp of authority and it was generally adopted. Bancroft drew from it the poetical and touching account which he introduced into the first editions of his History of the United States.

Yet this was but romance. The real, detailed account of the missionary’s labors, the details which let us enter the sanctuary of his pious heart, were all the time lying unused in Canada. They were in the college of Quebec when Charlevoix was teaching in that institution as a young scholastic; but if he then already projected his history of the colony, no one of the old fathers seems to have opened to him the writings of the early founders of the mission. It was the same when he returned to make the tour through the country under the auspices of the government and with a view to its development.

The papers lay unnoticed, and when Louis XV.’s neglect of his American empire neutralized all the genius of Montcalm and the gallantry of his French and Canadian soldiery, the mission of the Jesuit Fathers was broken up. The precious archives were plundered; but some documents reached pious hands, who laid them up with their own convent archives, till the Society of Jesus returned to the land where it could boast of so glorious a career.

Among these papers were accounts of the last labors and death of Father Marquette and of the removal of his remains, prepared for publication by Father Dablon; Marquette’s journal of his great expedition; the very map he drew; and a letter left unfinished when the angel of death sheathed his sword by the banks of the Michigan River.

Father Felix Martin, one of the earliest to revive the old Canadian mission, received these treasures with joy, and has since gleaned far and wide to add to our material for the wonderful mission labors of the Jesuit pioneers. He has published many works, and aided in far more. With a kindness not easy to repay he permitted the writer to use the documents relating to Marquette in preparing a work on “The Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley.”

From these authentic contemporary documents we learn the real story of Father Marquette’s last labors. As he was returning from his voyage down the Mississippi, he promised the Kaskaskia Indians, who then occupied towns in the upper valley of the Illinois, that he would return to teach them the faith which he announced. His health, broken by exposure and mission labor on the St. Lawrence and the Upper Lakes, was very frail, but he had no idea of rest. Devoted in an especial manner to the great privilege of Mary—her Immaculate Conception—he named the great artery of our continent The River of the Immaculate Conception, and in his heart bestowed the same name on the mission which he hoped to found among the Kaskaskias.

To enter upon that work, so dear to his piety, he needed permission from his distant superior. When the permission came he took leave of the Mackinac mission which he had founded, and pushed off his bark canoe into Lake Michigan. The autumn was well advanced—for it was the 25th of October, 1674—and the reddening forests swayed in the chill lake winds as he glided along the western shore. Before he reached the southern extremity winter was upon him with its cold and snows, and the disease which had been checked, but not conquered, again claimed the frail frame. It could not quench his courage, for he kept on in his open canoe on the wintry lake till the 4th of December, when he reached Chicago. There he had hoped to ascend the river and by a portage reach the Illinois. It was too late. The ice had closed the stream, and a winter march was beyond his strength. His two men, simple, faithful companions, erected a log hut, home and chapel, the first dwelling and first church of Chicago. Praying to Our Lady to enable him to reach his destination, offering the Holy Sacrifice whenever his illness permitted, receiving delegations from his flock, the Kaskaskias, the winter waned away in the pious foundation of the white settlement at Chicago.

With the opening of spring Marquette set out, and his last letter notes his progress till the 6th of April, 1675. Two days after he was among the Kaskaskias, and, rearing his altar on the prairie which lies between the present town of Utica and the Illinois river, he offered up the Mass on Maundy Thursday, and began the instruction of the willing Indians who gathered around him. A few days only were allotted to him, when, after Easter, he was again stricken down. If he would die in the arms of his brethren at Mackinac, he saw that he must depart at once; for he felt that the days of his sojourning were rapidly closing. Escorted by the Kaskaskias, who were deeply impressed by the zeal that could so battle with death, the missionary reached Lake Michigan, on the eastern side. Although that shore was as yet unknown, his faithful men launched his canoe. “His strength, however, failed so much,” says Father Dablon, whose words we shall now quote, “that his men despaired of being able to convey him alive to their journey’s end; for, in fact, he became so weak and so exhausted that he could no longer help himself, nor even stir, and had to be handled and carried like a child. He nevertheless maintained in this state an admirable resignation, joy, and gentleness, consoling his beloved companions, and encouraging them to suffer courageously all the hardships of this voyage, assuring them that our Lord would not forsake them when he was gone. It was during this navigation that he began to prepare more particularly for death, passing his time in colloquies with our Lord, with his holy Mother, with his angel guardian, or with all heaven. He was often heard pronouncing these words: ‘I believe that my Redeemer liveth,’ or ‘Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of God, remember me.’ Besides a spiritual reading made for him every day, he toward the close asked them to read him his meditation on the preparation for death, which he carried about him; he recited his breviary every day; and although he was so low that both sight and strength had greatly failed, he did not omit it till the last day of his life, when his companions excited his scruples. A week before his death he had the precaution to bless some holy-water to serve him during the rest of his illness, in his agony, and at his burial, and he instructed his companions how to use it.

“On the eve of his death, which was a Friday, he told them, all radiant with joy, that it would take place on the morrow. During the whole day he conversed with them about the manner of his burial, the way in which he should be laid out, the place to be selected for his interment; how they should arrange his hands, feet, and face, and how they should raise a cross over his grave. He even went so far as to enjoin them, only three hours before he expired, to take his chapel-bell, as soon as he was dead, and ring it while they carried him to the grave. Of all this he spoke so calmly and collectedly that you would have thought he spoke of the death and burial of another, and not of his own.

“Thus did he speak to them as he sailed along the lake, till, perceiving the mouth of a river, with an eminence on the bank which he thought suited for his burial, he told them that it was the place of his last repose. They wished, however, to pass on, as the weather permitted it and the day was not far advanced; but God raised a contrary wind, which obliged them to return and enter the river which the father had designated.

“They then carried him ashore, kindled a little fire, and raised a wretched bark cabin for his use, laying him in it with as little discomfort as they could; but they were so depressed by sadness that, as they afterwards said, they did not know what they were doing.

“The father being thus stretched on the shore like St. Francis Xavier, as he had always so ardently desired, and left alone amid those forests—for his companions were engaged in unloading—he had leisure to repeat all the acts in which he had employed himself during the preceding days.

“When his dear companions afterwards came up, all dejected, he consoled them, and gave them hopes that God would take care of them after his death in those new and unknown countries; he gave them his last instructions, thanked them for all the charity they had shown him during the voyage, begged their pardon for the trouble he had given them, directed them also to ask pardon in his name of all our fathers and brothers in the Ottawa country, and then disposed them to receive the sacrament of penance, which he administered to them for the last time. He also gave them a paper on which he had written all his faults since his last confession, to be given to his superior, to oblige him to pray to God more earnestly for him. In fine, he promised not to forget them in heaven, and as he was very kind-hearted, and knew them to be worn out with the toil of the preceding days, he bade them go and take a little rest, assuring them that his hour was not yet so near, but that he would wake them when it was time—as, in fact, he did two or three hours after, calling them when about to enter into his agony.

“When they came near he embraced them again for the last time, while they melted in tears at his feet. He then asked for the holy water and his reliquary, and, taking off his crucifix, which he always wore hanging from his neck, he placed it in the hands of one of his companions, asking him to hold it constantly opposite him, raised before his eyes. Feeling that he had but a little while to live, he made a last effort, clasped his hands, and, with his eyes fixed sweetly on his crucifix, he pronounced aloud his profession of faith, and thanked the divine Majesty for the immense favor he bestowed upon him in allowing him to die in the Society of Jesus, to die in it as a missionary of Jesus Christ, and above all to die in it, as he had always asked, in a wretched cabin, amid the forests, destitute of all human aid.

“On this he became silent, conversing inwardly with God; yet from time to time words escaped him: ‘Sistinuit anima mea in verbo ejus,’ or ‘Mater Dei, memento mei,’ which were the last words he uttered before entering into his agony, which was very calm and gentle.

“He had prayed his companions to remind him, when they saw him about to expire, to pronounce frequently the names of Jesus and Mary, if he did not do so himself; they did not neglect this; and when they thought him about to pass away one cried aloud, ‘Jesus! Mary!’ which he several times repeated distinctly, and then, as if at those sacred names something had appeared to him, he suddenly raised his eyes above his crucifix, fixing them apparently upon some object, which he seemed to regard with pleasure; and thus, with a countenance all radiant with smiles, he expired without a struggle, and so gently that it might be called a quiet sleep.

“His two poor companions, after shedding many tears over his body, and having laid it out as he had directed, carried it devoutly to the grave, ringing the bell according to his injunction, and raised a large cross near it to serve as a mark for all who passed....

“God did not permit so precious a deposit to remain unhonored and forgotten amid the forests. The Indians, called Kiskakons, who have for nearly ten years publicly professed Christianity, in which they were first instructed by Father Marquette when stationed at La Pointe du St. Esprit, at the extremity of Lake Superior, were hunting last winter not far from Lake Illinois (Michigan), and, as they were returning early in the spring, they resolved to pass by the tomb of their good father, whom they tenderly loved; and God even gave them the thought of taking his bones and conveying them to our church at the mission of St. Ignatius, at Missilimakinac, where they reside.

“They accordingly repaired to the spot and deliberated together, resolving to act with their father as they usually do with those whom they respect. They accordingly opened the grave, unrolled the body, and, though the flesh and intestines were all dried up, they found it entire, without the skin being in any way injured. This did not prevent their dissecting it according to custom. They washed the bones and dried them in the sun; then, putting them neatly in a box of birch bark, they set out to bear them to our house of St. Ignatius.

“The convoy consisted of nearly thirty canoes in excellent order, including even a good number of Iroquois, who had joined our Algonquins to honor the ceremony. As they approached our house, Father Nouvel, who is superior, went to meet them with Father Pierson, accompanied by all the French and Indians of the place, and, having caused the convoy to stop, he made the ordinary interrogations to verify the fact that the body which they bore was really Father Marquette’s. Then, before they landed, he intoned the De Profundis in sight of the thirty canoes still on the water, and of all the people on the shore. After this the body was carried to the church, observing all that the ritual prescribes for such ceremonies. It remained exposed under his catafalque all that day, which was Whitsun Monday, the 8th of June; and the next day, when all the funeral honors had been paid it, it was deposited in a little vault in the middle of the church, where he reposes as the Guardian-Angel of our Ottawa missions. The Indians often come to pray on his tomb.”

We are not writing his life, and will not enter upon the supernatural favors ascribed to his intercession by French and Indians. His grave was revered as a holy spot, and many a pilgrimage was made to it to invoke his intercession.

The remains of the pious missionary lay in the chapel undoubtedly as long as it subsisted. This, however, was not for many years. A new French post was begun at Detroit in 1701 by La Motte Cadillac. The Hurons and Ottawas at Michilimackinac immediately emigrated and planted new villages near the rising town. Michilimackinac became deserted, except by scattered bands of Indians or white bush-lopers, as savage as the red men among whom they lived. The missionaries were in constant peril and unable to produce any fruit. They could not follow their old flocks to Detroit, as the commandant was strongly opposed to them and had a Recollect father as chaplain of the post. There was no alternative except to abandon Michilimackinac. The missionaries, not wishing the church to be profaned or become a resort of the lawless, set fire to their house and chapel in 1706 and returned to Quebec. The mission ground became once more a wilderness.

In this disheartening departure what became of the remains of Father Marquette? If the missionaries bore them to Quebec as a precious deposit, some entry of their reinterment would appear on the Canadian registers, which are extremely full and well preserved. Father Nouvel and Father Pierson, who received and interred them at the mission, were both dead, and their successors might not recall the facts. The silence as to any removal, in Charlevoix and other writers, leads us to believe that the bones remained interred beneath the ruined church. Charlevoix, who notes, as we have seen, their removal to Mackinac, and is correct on this point, was at Quebec College in 1706 when the missionaries came down, and could scarcely have forgotten the ceremony of reinterring the remains of Father Marquette, had it taken place at Quebec.

Taking this as a fact, that the bones of the venerable missionary, buried in their bark box, were left there, the next question is: Where did the church stand?

A doubt at once arises. Three spots have borne the name of Michilimackinac: the island in the strait, Point St. Ignace on the shore to the north, and the extremity of the peninsula at the south. The Jesuit Relations as printed at the time, and those which remained in manuscript till they were printed in our time, Marquette’s journal and letter, do not speak in such positive terms that we can decide whether it was on the island or the northern shore. Arguments have been deduced from them on either side of the question. On the map annexed to the Relations of 1671 the words Mission de St. Ignace are on the mainland above, not on the island, and there is no cross or mark at the island to make the name refer to it. On Marquette’s own map the “St. Ignace” appears to refer to the northern shore, so that their testimony is in favor of that position.

The next work that treats of Michilimackinac is the Recollect Father Hennepin’s first volume, Description de la Louisiane, published in 1688. In this (p. 59) he distinctly says: “Missilimackinac is a point of land at the entrance and north of the strait by which Lake Dauphin [Michigan] empties into that of Orleans” (Huron). He mentions the Huron village with its palisade on a great point of land opposite Michilimackinac island, the Ottawas, and a chapel where he said Mass August 26, 1678. The map in Le Clercq’s Gaspesie, dated 1691, shows the Jesuit mission on the point north of the strait, and Father Membré, in Le Clercq’s Etablissement, mentions it as in that position. In Hennepin’s later work, the Nouvel Découverte, Utrecht, 1697, he says (p. 134): “There are Indian villages in these two places. Those who are established at the point of land of Missilimackinac are Hurons, and the others, who are at five or six arpens beyond, are named the Outtaouatz.” He then, as before, mentions saying Mass in the chapel at the Ottawas.

The Jesuit Relation of 1673–9 (pp. 58, 59) mentions the “house where we make our abode ordinarily, and where is the church of St. Ignatius, which serves for the Hurons,” and mentions a small bark chapel three-quarters of a league distant and near the Ottawas. This latter chapel was evidently the one where Father Hennepin officiated in 1678 or, as he says elsewhere, 1679.

The relative positions of the Indian villages and the church thus indicated in Hennepin’s account are fortunately laid down still more clearly on a small map of Michilimackinac found in the Nouveaux Voyages de M. le Baron de La Hontan, published at the Hague in 1703. Many of the statements in this work are preposterously false, and his map of his pretended Long River a pure invention, exciting caution as to any of his unsupported statements. But the map of the country around Michilimackinac agrees with the Jesuit Relation and with Father Hennepin’s account, and has all the appearance of having been copied from the work of some professed hydrographer, either one of the Jesuit Fathers like Raffeix, whose maps are known, or Jolliet, who was royal hydrographer of the colony. The whole map has a look of accuracy, the various soundings from the point to the island being carefully given. On this the French village, the house of the Jesuits, the Huron village, that of the Ottawas, and the cultivated fields of the Indians are all laid down on the northern shore. In the text, dated in 1688, he says: “The Hurons and the Ottawas have each a village, separated from one another by a simple palisade.... The Jesuits have a small house, besides a kind of church, in an enclosure of palisades which separates them from the Huron village.”

The publication a quarter of a century ago of the contemporaneous account of the death and burial of Father Marquette, the humble discoverer of a world, excited new interest as to his final resting-place. The West owed him a monument, and, though America gave his name to a city, and the Pope ennobled it by making it a bishop’s see, this was not enough to satisfy the yearnings of pious hearts, who grieved that his remains should lie forgotten and unknown. To some the lack of maps laying down the famous spots in the early Catholic missions has seemed strange: but the difficulty was very great. Every place required special study, and the random guesses of some writers have only created confusion, where truth is to be attained by close study of every ancient record and personal exploration of the ground. Michilimackinac is not the only one that has led to long discussion and investigation.[62]

Where was the chapel on the point? A structure of wood consumed by fire a hundred and seventy years ago could scarcely be traced or identified. A forest had grown up around the spots which in Marquette’s time were cleared and busy with human life. Twenty years ago this forest was in part cleared away, but nothing appeared to justify any hope of discovering the burial-place of him who bore the standard of Mary conceived without sin down the Mississippi valley. One pioneer kept up his hope, renewed his prayers, and pushed his inquiries. The Rev. Edward Jacker, continuing in the nineteenth century the labors of Marquette—missionary to the Catholic Indians and the pagan, a loving gatherer of all that related to the early heralds of the faith, tracing their footsteps, explaining much that was obscure, leading us to the very spot where Ménard labored and died—was to be rewarded at last.

A local tradition pointed to one spot as the site of an old church and the grave of a great priest, but nothing in the appearance of the ground seemed to justify it. Yet, hidden in a growth of low trees and bushes were preserved proofs that Indian tradition coincided with La Hontan’s map and the Jesuit records.

On the 5th day of May, 1877, the clearing of a piece of rising ground at a short distance from the beach, at the head of the little bay on the farm of Mr. David Murray, near the main road running through the town, laid bare the foundations of a church, in size about thirty-two by forty feet, and of two adjacent buildings. The Rev. Mr. Jacker was summoned to the spot. The limestone foundation walls of the building were evidently those of a church, there being no chimney, and it had been destroyed by fire, evidences of which existed on every side. The missionary’s heart bounded with pious joy. Here was the spot where Father Marquette had so often offered the Holy Sacrifice; here he offered to Mary Immaculate his voyage to explore the river he named in her honor; here his remains were received and, after a solemn requiem, interred.

But Father Jacker was a cautious antiquarian as well as a devoted priest. He compared the site with La Hontan’s map. If these buildings were the Jesuit church and house, the French village was at the right; and there, in fact, could be traced the old cellars and small log-house foundations. On the other side was the Huron village; the palisades can even now be traced. Farther back the map shows Indian fields. Strike into the fields and small timber, and you can even now see signs of rude Indian cultivation years ago, and many a relic tells of their occupancy.

The report of the discovery spread and was noticed in the papers. Many went to visit the spot, and ideas of great treasures began to prevail. The owner positively refused to allow any excavation to be made; so there for a time the matter rested. All this gave time for study, and the conviction of scholars became positive that the old chapel site was actually found.

The next step towards the discovery of the remains of the venerable Father Marquette cannot be better told than by the Rev. Mr. Jacker himself:

“Mr. David Murray, the owner of the ground in question, had for some time relented so far as to declare that if the chief pastor of the diocese, upon his arrival here, should wish to have a search made, he would object no longer. Last Monday, then (September 3, 1877), Bishop Mrak, upon our request, dug out the first spadeful of ground. On account of some apparent depression near the centre of the ancient building, and mindful of Father Dablon’s words, ‘Il fut mis dans un petit caveau au milieu de l’église,’ we there began our search; but being soon convinced that no digging had ever been done there before, we advanced towards the nearest corner of the large, cellar-like hollow to the left, throwing out, all along, two to three feet of ground. On that whole line no trace of any former excavation could be discovered, the alternate layers of sand and gravel which generally underlie the soil in this neighborhood appearing undisturbed. Close to the ancient cellar-like excavation a decayed piece of a post, planted deeply in the ground, came to light. The bottom of that hollow itself furnished just the things that you would expect to meet with in the cellar of a building destroyed by fire, such as powdered charcoal mixed with the subsoil,[63] spikes, nails, an iron hinge (perhaps of a trap-door), pieces of timber—apparently of hewed planks and joists—partly burned and very much decayed. Nothing, however, was found that would indicate the former existence of a tomb, vaulted or otherwise. Our hopes began to sink (the good bishop had already stolen away), when, at the foot of the western slope of the ancient excavation fragments of mortar bearing the impress of wood and partly blackened, and a small piece of birch-bark, came to light. This was followed by numerous other, similar or larger, fragments of the latter substance, most of them more or less scorched or crisped by the heat, not by the immediate action of the fire; a few only were just blackened, and on one side superficially burned. A case or box of birch-bark (une quaisse d’escorce de bouleau), according to the Relation, once enclosed the remains of the great missionary. No wonder our hopes revived at the sight of that material. Next appeared a small leaf of white paper, which, being quite moist, almost dissolved in my hands. We continued the search, more with our hands than with the spade. The sand in which those objects were embedded was considerably blackened—more so, in fact, than what should be expected, unless some digging was done here after the fire, and the hollow thus produced filled up with the blackened ground from above. Here and there we found small particles, generally globular, of a moist, friable substance, resembling pure lime or plaster-of-paris. None of the details of our search being unimportant, I should remark that the first pieces of birch-bark were met with at a depth of about three and a half feet from the present surface, and nearly on a level, I should judge, with the floor of the ancient excavation. For about a foot deeper down more of it was found, the pieces being scattered at different heights over an area of about two feet square or more. Finally a larger and well-preserved piece appeared, which once evidently formed part of the bottom of an Indian ‘mawkawk’ (wigwass-makak—birch-bark box), and rested on clean white gravel and sand. Some of our people, who are experts in this matter, declared that the bark was of unusual thickness, and that the box, or at least parts of it, had been double, such as the Indians sometimes, for the sake of greater durability, use for interments. A further examination disclosed the fact that it had been placed on three or four wooden sills, decayed parts of which were extracted. All around the space once occupied by the box the ground seemed to be little disturbed, and the bottom piece lay considerably deeper than the other objects (nails, fragments of timber, a piece of a glass jar or large bottle, a chisel, screws, etc.) discovered on what I conceived to have been the ancient bottom of the cellar. From these two circumstances it seemed evident that the birch-bark box had not (as would have been the case with an ordinary vessel containing corn, sugar, or the like) been placed on the floor, but sunk into the ground, and perhaps covered with a layer of mortar, many blackened fragments of which were turned out all around the space once occupied by it. But it was equally evident that this humble tomb—for such we took it to have been—had been disturbed, and the box broken into and parts of it torn out, after the material had been made brittle by the action of the fire. This would explain the absence of its former contents, which—what else could we think?—were nothing less than Father Marquette’s bones. We, indeed, found between the pieces of bark two small fragments, one black and hard, the other white and brittle, but of such a form that none of us could determine whether they were of the human frame.[64]

“The evening being far advanced, we concluded that day’s search, pondering over what may have become of the precious remains which, we fondly believe, were once deposited in that modest tomb just in front of what, according to custom, should have been the Blessed Virgin’s altar. Had I been in Father Nouvel’s place, it is there I would have buried the devout champion of Mary Immaculate. It is the same part of the church we chose nine years ago for Bishop Baraga’s interment in the cathedral of Marquette. The suggestion of one of our half-breeds that it would be a matter of wonder if some pagan Indian had not, after the departure of the missionaries, opened the grave and carried off the remains pour en faire de la medicine—that is, to use the great black-gown’s bones for superstitious purposes[65]—this suggestion appeared to me very probable. Hence, giving up the hope of finding anything more valuable, and awaiting the examination by an expert of the two doubtful fragments of bone, I carried them home (together with numerous fragments of the bark box) with a mixed feeling of joy and sadness. Shall this, then, be all that is left us of the saintly missionary’s mortal part?

“I must not forget to mention a touching little incident. It so happened that while we people of St. Ignace were at work, and just before the first piece of bark was brought to light, two young American travellers—apparently Protestants, and pilgrims, like hundreds of others all through the summer, to this memorable spot—came on shore, and, having learned the object of the gathering with joyful surprise, congratulated themselves on having arrived at such a propitious moment. They took the liveliest interest in the progress of the search, lending their help, and being, in fact, to outward appearances, the most reverential of all present. ‘Do you realize,’ would one address the other with an air of religious awe, ‘where we are standing? This is hallowed ground!’ Their bearing struck us all and greatly edified our simple people. They begged for, and joyfully carried off, some little memorials. Isn’t it a natural thing, that veneration of relics we used to be so much blamed for?

“Some hundred and fifty or two hundred of our people witnessed the search, surrounding us in picturesque groups—many of them, though nearly white, being lineal descendants of the very Ottawas among whom Father Marquette labored in La Pointe du St. Esprit, and who witnessed his interment in this place two hundred years ago. The pure Indian element was represented only by one individual of the Ojibwa tribe.

“On Tuesday our children were confirmed, and in the afternoon I had to escort the bishop over to Mackinac Island. Upon my return, yesterday evening, a young man of this place entered my room, with some black dust and other matters tied up in a handkerchief. He had taken the liberty to search our excavation for some little keepsake, taking out a few handfuls of ground at a little distance from where the box had lain, in the direction of what I presume to have been the Blessed Virgin’s altar, and at about the height of the ancient cellar-floor. The result of his search was of such a character that he considered himself obliged to put me in possession of it. What was my astonishment when he displayed on my table a number of small fragments of bones, in size from an inch in length down to a mere scale, being in all thirty-six, and, to all appearances, human. Being alone, after nightfall, I washed the bones. The scene of two hundred years ago, when the Kiskakons, at the mouth of that distant river, were employed in the same work, rose up before my imagination; and though the mists of doubt were not entirely dispelled, I felt very much humbled that no more worthy hands should have to perform this office. So long had I wished—and, I candidly confess it, even prayed—for the discovery of Father Marquette’s grave; and now that so many evidences concurred to establish the fact of its having been on the spot where we hoped to find it, I felt reluctant to believe it. The longer, however, I pondered over every circumstance connected with our search, the more I became convinced that we have found what we, and so many with us, were desirous to discover. Let me briefly resume the train of evidence.

“The local tradition as to the site of the grave, near the head of our little bay; the size and relative position of the ancient buildings, both in the ‘French Village’ and the Jesuits’ establishment, plainly traceable by little elevated ridges, stone foundations, cellars, chimneys, and the traces of a stockade; all this exactly tallying with La Hontan’s plan and description of 1688—so many concurring circumstances could hardly leave any doubt as to the site of the chapel in which Marquette’s remains were deposited.

“The unwillingness of the proprietor to have the grave of a saintly priest disturbed proved very opportune, not to say providential. Within the three or four months that elapsed since the first discovery many hundreds of persons from all parts of the country had the opportunity to examine the grounds, as yet untouched by the spade. We had time to weigh every argument pro and con. Among those visitors there were men of intelligence and historical learning. I will only mention Judge Walker, of Detroit, who has made the early history of our Northwest the subject of his particular study, and who went over the grounds with the English edition of La Hontan in his hand. He, as well as every one else whose judgment was worth anything, pronounced in favor of our opinion. The balance stood so that the smallest additional weight of evidence would make it incline on the side of certainty as absolute as can be expected in a case like this.

“The text of the Relation, it is true, would make us look for a vault, or small cellar (un petit caveau), in the middle (au milieu) of the church. But if anything indicating the existence of a tomb in the hollow towards the left side and the rear part of the chapel were discovered, could we not construe those words as meaning ‘within the church’? Besides, it must be remembered that Father Dablon, who left us the account, was not an eye-witness at the interment; nor did he visit the mission after that event, at least up to the time of his writing.

“We know, then, that Marquette’s remains were brought to this place in a birch-bark box; and there is nothing to indicate that, previously to being interred, they were transferred into any other kind of receptacle. In that box they remained under the catafalco (sous sa representation) from Monday, June 8, to Tuesday, 9 (1677), and in it, undoubtedly, they were deposited in a vault, or little cellar, which may have previously been dug out for other purposes. The box was sunk into the ground on that side of the excavation which was nearest to the altar, or, at least, the statue of the Blessed Virgin, the most appropriate spot for the interment of the champion of Mary Immaculate. An inscription, on paper, indicating whose bones were contained in the box, might have been placed within it; of this the piece of white paper we found among the bark may be a fragment. The poor casket rested, after the Indian fashion, on wooden supports. It may have been covered with mortar or white lime, or else a little vault constructed of wood and mortar may have been erected over it. When the building was fired, twenty-nine years after the interment, the burning floor, together with pieces of timber from above, fell on the tomb, broke the frail vault or mortar cover of the box, burned its top, and crisped its sides. Some of the pagan or apostate Indians remaining in that neighborhood after the transmigration of the Hurons and Ottawas to Detroit, though filled with veneration for the departed missionary (as their descendants remained through four or five generations), or rather for the very reason of their high regard for his priestly character and personal virtues, and of his reputation as a thaumaturgus, coveted his bones as a powerful ‘medicine,’ and carried them off. In taking them out of the tomb they tore the brittle bark and scattered its fragments. The bones being first placed on the bottom of the cellar, behind the tomb, some small fragments became mixed up with the sand, mortar, and lime, and were left behind.

“Such seems to me the most natural explanation of the circumstances of the discovery. Had the missionaries themselves, before setting fire to the church, removed the remains of their saintly brother, they would have been careful about the least fragment; none of them, at least, would have been found scattered outside of the box. That robbing of the grave by the Indians must have taken place within a few years after the departure of the missionaries; for had those precious remains been there when the mission was renewed (about 1708?), they would most certainly have been transferred to the new church in ‘Old Mackinac’; and had this been the case, Charlevoix, at his sojourn there in 1721, could hardly have failed to be taken to see the tomb and to mention the fact of the transfer in his journal or history.

“Our next object, if we were to be disappointed in finding the entire remains of the great missionary traveller, was to ascertain the fact of his having been interred on that particular spot; and in this, I think, we have fully succeeded. Considering the high probability—à priori, so to say—of the Indians’ taking possession of the bones, the finding of those few fragments under the circumstances described seems to me, if not as satisfactory to our wishes, at least as good evidence for the fact in question as if we had found every bone that is in the human body. Somebody—an adult person—was buried under the church; buried before the building was destroyed by fire; and buried under exceptional circumstances—the remains being placed in a birch-bark box of much smaller size than an ordinary coffin—who else could it have been but the one whose burial, with all its details of time, place, and manner, as recorded in most trustworthy records, answers all the circumstances of our discovery?

“Sept. 7th.—Went again to the grave to-day, and, after searching a little while near the spot where that young man had found the bones, I was rewarded with another small fragment, apparently of the skull, like two or three of those already found. Two Indian visitors who have called in since declared others to be of the ribs, of the hand, and of the thigh-bone. They also consider the robbing of the grave by their pagan ancestors as extremely probable. To prevent profanation and the carrying off of the loose ground in the empty grave, we covered the excavation with a temporary floor, awaiting contributions from outside—we are too poor ourselves—for the purpose of erecting some kind of a tomb or mortuary chapel in which to preserve what remains of the perishable part of the ‘Guardian-Angel of the Ottawa missions.’

“I shall not send you this letter before having shown some of the bones to a physician, for which purpose I have to go outside.

“Sheboygan, Mich., Sept. 11.—M. Pommier, a good French surgeon, declared the fragments of bones to be undoubtedly human and bearing the marks of fire.”

The result is consoling, though not unmixed with pain. It is sad to think that the remains of so saintly a priest, so devoted a missionary, so zealous an explorer should have been so heathenishly profaned by Indian medicine-men; but the explanation has every appearance of probability. Had the Jesuit missionaries removed the remains, they would have taken up the birch box carefully, enclosing it, if necessary, in a case of wood. They would never have torn the birch-bark box rudely open, or taken the remains so carelessly as to leave fragments. All the circumstances show the haste of profane robbery. The box was torn asunder in haste, part of its contents secured, and the excavation hastily filled up.

The detailed account of the final interment of Father Marquette, the peculiarity of the bones being in a bark box, evidently of small size for convenient transportation, the fact that no other priest died at the mission who could have been similarly interred, leads irresistibly to the conclusion that Father Jacker is justified in regarding the remains found as portion of those committed to the earth two centuries ago.

It is now for the Catholics of the United States to rear a monument there to enclose what time has spared us of the “Angel Guardian of the Ottawa Missions.”

JOHN GILMARY SHEA.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

MISCELLANIES. By Henry Edward, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. First American Edition. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 9 Barclay Street. 1877.

The various papers contained in this assortment of miscellaneous articles from the pen of Cardinal Manning consist of addresses before several Academias or other societies, contributions to the Dublin Review, and short essays, most of which, we believe, have been before published in English magazines or newspapers, or in the form of pamphlets. They are on current topics of immediate interest, well adapted to the times, and written in a plain, popular style. One general tone of defence and explanation of the Catholic cause in respect to matters now of conflict and controversy between the Catholic Church and her opposers runs through them all, giving a real unity of purpose and objective aim to the collection, various and miscellaneous as are its topics. The most important and interesting papers, in which the force of the whole volume, of all the cardinal’s principal works, of the efforts of his entire career as a prelate in the church, is concentrated and brought to bear upon the central point of anti-Catholic revolution, are the first and last. The first one is entitled “Roma Æterna: a Discourse before the Academia of the Quiriti in Rome on the 2615th anniversary of this city, April 21, 1863.” The last one is entitled “The Independence of the Holy See,” and we do not know whether or not it was published before it appeared in the present collection. It has always been characteristic of the cardinal’s mind, and of the doctrinal or polemic expositions of Catholic truth put forth by him, to perceive and seize the principle of unity. While he was still an Anglican archdeacon he embraced and advocated general principles of Catholic unity, so far as he then apprehended them, with remarkable clearness and precision. These principles led him into the bosom of Catholic unity, and their complete and consequent development in all their conclusions and harmonious relations has been the one great aim and effort of his luminous and vigorous mind since he became a Catholic ecclesiastic, both as an orator and as a writer. This clear, direct view of the logical order and sequence of constitutive, Catholic principles made him one of the most thorough and firm advocates of the spiritual supremacy of the Holy See, before and during the sessions of the Vatican Council. The Papacy, as the very centre and foundation of Christianity, and therefore the principal point of attack and defence in the war between the Christian kingdom and the anti-Christian revolution, has been the dominant idea in the mind of Cardinal Manning. The indissoluble union of the papal supremacy with the Roman episcopate, and therefore the dependence of Christendom on the Roman Church as its centre, its head, the great source of its life, is the topic to which at present his attention is more specially directed. The Roman Church, and, by reason of its near and close connection, the Italian Church, as the permanent, immovable seat of the sovereign pontificate, is identified with the prosperity of Christendom. The head and heart of the Catholic Church are there, whereas other members of the great, universal society of Christians are only limbs, however great and powerful they may be. The logical and juridical mind of Cardinal Manning grasps in its full import the whole Roman and Italian question of present conflict as the vital one for all Christendom. And, as we have said, the first and last papers in his volume of Miscellanies are of permanent value and importance, on account of his clear and masterly exposition of this great controversy. We will quote a few salient paragraphs in illustration and confirmation of our opinion on this head:

“It is no wonder to me that Italians should believe in the primacy of Italy. Italy has indeed a primacy, but not that of which some have dreamed. The primacy of Italy is the presence of Rome; and the primacy of Rome is in its apostleship to the whole human race, in the science of God with which it has illuminated mankind, in its supreme and world-wide jurisdiction over souls, in its high tribunal of appeal from all the authorities on earth, in its inflexible exposition of the moral law, in its sacred diplomacy, by which it binds the nations of Christendom into a confederacy of order and of justice—these are its true, supreme, and, because God has so willed, its inalienable and incommunicable primacy among the nations of the earth.... The eternity of Rome, then, if it be not an exact truth, is nevertheless no mere rhetorical exaggeration. It denotes the fact that Rome has been chosen of God as the centre of his kingdom, which is eternal, as the depository of his eternal truths, as the fountain of his graces which lead men to a higher life, as the witness and guardian of law and principles of which the sanctions and the fruit are eternal.... I shall say little if I say that on you, under God, we depend for the immutability not only of the faith in all the radiance of its exposition and illustration, and of the divine love in all its breadth and purity and perfection; you are also charged with the custody of other truths which descend from this great sphere of supernatural light, and with the application of these truths to the turbulent and unstable elements of human society.... You are the heirs of those who renewed the face of the world and created the Christian civilization of Europe. You are the depositories of truths and principles which are indestructible in their vitality. Though buried like the ear of corn in the Pyramids of Egypt, they strike root and spring into fruit when their hour is come. Truths and principles are divine; they govern the world; to suffer for them is the greatest glory of man. “Not death, but the cause of death, makes the martyr.” So long as Rome is grafted upon the Incarnation it is the head of the world. If it were possible to cut it out from its divine root, it would fall from its primacy among mankind. But this cannot be. He who chose it for his own has kept it to this hour. He who has kept it until now will keep it unto the end. Be worthy of your high destiny for His sake who has called you to it; for our sakes, who look up to you as, under God, our light and our strength” (“Rom. Ætern.,” pp. 3–23). These words were spoken fourteen years ago, but they are reaffirmed now by their new republication, and the similar language of the closing paper of the volume.

In this last paper, on “The Independence of the Holy See,” the cardinal speaks more particularly and definitely of the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See. As the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, in his office as Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter, is closely bound to his Roman episcopate, and the unity of the church depends on the Roman Church, the “mother and mistress of churches,” so the peaceful and uncontrolled exercise of the supremacy depends on the freedom of the Pope in Rome. This freedom is secured only by complete independence, which requires the possession of both personal and political sovereignty as its condition. This citadel of all Catholic and Christian interests being now the very object of the most resolute and uncompromising attack and defence—the Plevna of the war between the Catholic religion and the anti-Christian revolution—the cardinal, as a wise leader and strategist, directs his principal efforts to sustain and advocate the right and necessity of the Pope’s temporal sovereignty. The spoliation of this temporal sovereignty has for its necessary effect, says the cardinal, “the disintegration and the downfall of the Christian world” (p. 860). Consequently, as the cardinal continually affirms, the redintegration and reconstruction of the Christian world require the restitution of that same sovereignty. “There is one hope for Italy. It is this: that Italy should reconcile itself to the old traditions of the faith of its fathers, and should return once more to the only principle of unity and authority which created it” (p. 848). “If the Christian world is still to continue, what is happening now is but one more of those manifold transient perturbations which have come through these thousand years, driving into exile or imprisoning the pontiffs, or even worse, and usurping the rightful sovereignty of Rome. And as they have passed, so will this, unless the political order of the Christian world itself has passed away” (p. 804).

In these last words is presented an alternative of the utmost consequence and interest. Is the perturbation and disintegration final or transient? If final, the church goes back to the state of persecution, the reign of Antichrist is at hand, and the end of the world draws near. When Rome falls, the world. If the Roman and Italian people, as such, have apostatized, or are about to apostatize, then the Roman Church, the foundation, sinking in the undermined and caving soil beneath it, will bring down the whole crumbling fabric of Christendom and of the universal world. If, therefore, there is any ground to hope that this evil day is not yet, but that there is a triumphant epoch for the church to be awaited, it is of the utmost consequence not to exaggerate the present revolution in Italy and Europe into a national and international apostasy, but to show that it is a revolution of a faction whose power is but apparent and temporary. This is the cardinal’s conviction, and a large part of his argumentation is directed to its proof and support. “Why, then, is this gagging law necessary in Italy? Because a minority is in power who are conscious that they are opposed by a great majority who disapprove their acts. They know, and are afraid, that if men speak openly with their neighbors the public opinion of Catholic Italy would become so strong and spread so wide as to endanger their power. And this is called disturbing the public conscience. The public conscience of Italy is not revolutionary, but Catholic; the true disturbers of the public conscience of Italy are the authors of these Italian Falck laws.... I know of nothing which has imposed upon the simplicity and the good-will of the English people more than to suppose that the present state of Italy is the expression of the will of the Italian people” (pp. 842–47).

We cannot exceed the limits of a notice by adding more extracts or giving the cardinal’s proofs and reasons. We trust our readers will seek for them in the book itself. As there is no one more intelligently and consistently Catholic and Roman in all his ideas than the cardinal, so there is no one who can so well explain and interpret the same to the English-speaking world. He is not only a prince of the Roman Church by his purple, but an intellectual and moral legate of the Holy See, by his wisdom, eloquence, and gentleness of manner, to all men speaking the English language, a sure teacher and guide to all Catholics, whose words they will do well to read and ponder attentively.

Before closing we cannot omit indicating one paper quite different from anything we have before seen from the cardinal’s pen. It is the one on Kirkman’s Philosophy without Assumptions, in which the eminent writer shows how much he has studied and how acutely he is able to discuss metaphysical questions. We may remark that this volume has been republished in a very handsome style and form, and we cannot too emphatically recommend it to an extensive circulation. The appendix, containing in Latin and English the late splendid allocution of Pius IX, whose thunder has shaken Europe, adds much to its value. This great document is one of the most sublime utterances which has ever proceeded from the Holy See. St. Peter never had a more worthy successor than Pius IX. He watches by the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, by God’s command, as the angels watched by the sepulchre of Christ. What better guarantee could we desire that the sovereignty and splendor of the Papacy will come forth in glory from the tomb of St. Peter when the long watch is ended?

BIBLIOTHECA SYMBOLICA ECCLESIÆ UNIVERSALIS. THE CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM. With a History and Critical Notes. By Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Biblical Literature in the Union Theological Seminary, New York. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1877.

In respect to the literary and typographical style of execution, this is a work worthy of commendation. Its intrinsic value for students of theology is chiefly to be found in the contents of the second and third volumes, where the author has collected the principal symbolical documents of the Catholic Church, both ancient and modern, of the Orthodox Orientals, and of the Protestant denominations classed under the generic term “Evangelical.” The original text is given, with English translations of documents from other languages. Among these documents, those appertaining to the Eastern Christians have a special interest and importance, because more rare and not so easily obtained as the others. As a book of reference, therefore, the Bibliotheca Symbolica deserves a place in every Catholic theological library. The author is a scholar of extensive erudition, and a very painstaking, accurate compiler, after the manner of the Germans, and he has fulfilled a laborious and serviceable task in gathering together and editing with so much thoroughness and accuracy the collection of authentic documents contained in these two bulky volumes, so well arranged and clearly printed as to make them most convenient and easy for reading or reference.

The first volume is not without some value as a historical account of the origin and formation of the symbolical documents contained in the other parts of the work, especially so far as relates to those emanating from Orientals and Protestants. One important service his scholarly accuracy has rendered to the cause of truth deserves to be particularly noted—the distinct light in which he has placed the agreement of the orthodox confessions of the East with the doctrine of the Catholic Church, exceptis excipiendis, and their diversity from the specific doctrines of Protestantism.

In his treatment of topics relating to the Catholic Church the partisan polemic appears, as we might expect. The author professes to follow the maxim that “honest and earnest controversy, conducted in a Christian and catholic spirit, promotes true and lasting union. Polemics looks to irenics—the aim of war is peace.” He expresses the wish to promote by his work “a better understanding among the churches of Christ.” He declares his opinion that “the divisions of Christendom bring to light the various aspects and phases of revealed truth, and will be overruled at last for a deeper and richer harmony of which Christ is the key-note” (preface). This sounds very well in general terms; yet when the author descends to particulars and practical questions, it is evident that whatever meaning his terms have is only equivalent to the truism that increase of knowledge is favorable to the cause of truth alone, and that the prevalence of truth over error through genuine science, sincere conviction, and conscientious obedience to known truth produces peace, harmony, and charity by uniting the minds of men in one faith. “Irenics,” in any proper sense, can refer only to parties who agree in substantials, but, through mutual or one-sided misunderstanding, are not aware of it, or to those who are in controversy about matters which do not really break unity of essential doctrine between the contending sides, but are carried on with too little moderation and candor by vehement disputants. There is no “irenics” in matters essential and obligatory between the right side and the wrong side, except the irenics of combat, and no peace except that which follows the victory of the one over the other. That an advocate of the truth of Christ should be honest and candid in his argumentation against error, and charitable toward the persons whose errors he attacks, is of course indisputable. Practically, when Dr. Schaff finds himself in face of the Roman Church, he is obliged to recognize that this view of the case is the only one possible. If the Catholic hierarchy, and all the heads or representatives of the different bodies of the so-called orthodox Christians, would consent to meet together and adopt a confession in which all should agree as embracing the essentials of Christianity, with a law and order which all should likewise consent to establish, a visionary believer in progress and the church of the future might with some plausibility argue that the evolution of a higher form of Christianity would be the result. But Dr. Schaff’s historical mind is too much accustomed to look at facts to be deluded by such a chimera. “The exclusiveness and anti-Christian pretensions of the Papacy, especially since it claims infallibility for its visible head, make it impossible for any church to live with it on terms of equality and sincere friendship.” We suppose that the view of these pretensions which claims for them a divine origin and sanction, and that which considers them “anti-Christian,” can hardly be called “various aspects and phases of revealed truth.” The “exclusiveness” of the claims is a point in which we both take the same view. The ecclesiastical friendship to which the doctor alludes he justly regards and proclaims an impossibility. While the Roman Church, and any other church not in her obedience, co-exist, there must be polemics. Irenics can succeed only when the Roman Church abdicates her supremacy, or any other church or churches, refusing submission to it, yield to her claims. The practical issue, therefore, is reduced to this: the old and long-standing controversy between Rome and Protestantism. Dr. Schaff comes forward as a champion of Protestantism and an assailant of what he is too wary to call by its legitimate name of Catholicism, and therefore nicknames after the manner of his predecessors in past ages, calling it “Romanism” and “Vatican Romanism.”

We agree, then, on both sides, that the polemics and controversy must be carried on. Yet, on the part of Dr. Schaff and those who fight with him, it appears that a considerable part of the ground we have been heretofore contending for is evacuated and given up to our possession. “And yet we should never forget the difference between Popery and Catholicism.” The issues, it appears, are a good deal narrowed, and that will facilitate our coming to close quarters and to decisive, polemical discussion, which we desire above all things. Dr. Schaff continues: “nor between the system and its followers. It becomes Protestantism, as the higher form of Christianity, to be liberal and tolerant even toward intolerant Romanism” (p. 209). Probably the collective terms in this clause are used distributively, as required to make it agree with the preceding sentence. This is graceful and dignified in Dr. Schaff. Our exclusiveness is indeed something hard to bear; we freely admit it. Our apology for it is that we are acting under orders from above and have no discretionary powers. Our own personal and human feelings would incline us to open the doors of heaven to all mankind indiscriminately, and give all those who die in the state of sin a purgatory of infallible efficacy to make them holy and fit for everlasting beatitude. Yet as we have not the keys of heaven, which were given to St. Peter with strict orders to shut as well as to open its gates, we can do nothing for the salvation of our dear friends and fellow-men, except to persuade them to take the king’s highway to the gate of the celestial city, and not follow the example of green-headed Ignorance in the Pilgrim’s Progress, who came by a by-road to the gate, and, on being asked by the Shining Ones for his certificate, “fumbled in his bosom and found none.”

We consider that we have not only the higher but the only genuine form of Christianity. Dr. Schaff thinks Protestantism is the higher form simply, and, therefore, that Protestants ought to be tolerant of our intolerance. This is the most dignified attitude he could assume. On our part, we agree with Ozanam that, in a certain sense, we ought to be tolerant of error—i.e., in the concrete, subjective sense, equivalent to tolerant of those who are in error, charitable, and, to those especially who are themselves honorable and courteous in their warfare, respectful.

Dr. Schaff himself evidently intends to act upon his own principles. Toward individuals whom he mentions he is careful to observe the rules of courtesy. In respect to his historical and polemical statements and arguments on Catholic matters in his first volume, we presume he speaks according to his opinion and belief; and if that were correct, his strong expressions would be justifiable, even though they might sometimes, on the score of rhetoric and good taste, lie open to criticism. To call the Papacy “a colossal lie” is not very elegant or even forcible, and is irreconcilable with the author’s own statements regarding mediæval Catholicism, as well as with the views of history presented by such men as Leo and other enlightened Protestants. All the efforts of the Jesuits to bring back schismatics to their former obedience to the Holy See are called “intrigues.” The author relies a great deal on strong language, vehement assertion, and a vague style of depreciation of the mental and moral attitude of Catholics, which is not sustained by reasoning, and, in our view, indicates the presence of much prejudice, as well as a want of adequate knowledge and consideration. Men who have a great aptitude for history and what may be called book-knowledge, among whom Dr. Döllinger is a notable instance, frequently fail signally in treating of matters where logic, philosophy, and accurate theology are required. Dr. Schaff seems out of his proper line when he leaves his purely literary work and begins to reason. His polemical argument against infallibility and the Immaculate Conception is a pretty good résumé of what has been said by others on that side, and of what can be said. It is all to be found in Catholic theologies, under the head of objections, and has all been answered many times over. The author adds nothing to his own cause by his own reasoning, and requires no special confutation. On the contrary, he weakens his cause and detracts from its plausibility by the futility of his assertions. We will cite one instance of this as an example. Speaking of the Immaculate Conception, he says: “This extraordinary dogma lifts the Virgin Mary out of the fallen and redeemed race of Adam, and places her on a par with the Saviour. For, if she is really free from all hereditary as well as actual sin and guilt, she is above the need of redemption. Repentance, forgiveness, regeneration, conversion, sanctification are as inapplicable to her as to Christ himself” (p. 111). This is one of the most illogical sentences we have ever met with. Let it be given, though not conceded as true, that the dogma places the Virgin Mary above the need of redemption. The illusion that she is therefore placed on a par with the Saviour is illogical and false. Adam, before the fall, was above the need of redemption, and the angels are above it. Are they on a par with the Saviour? He is God, they are creatures. Whatever he possesses, even in his humanity, he has by intrinsic, personal right; they possess nothing except by a free gift. Moreover, it would not follow that regeneration would be as inapplicable to her as to Christ himself. By the hypostatic union the human nature of Christ shares with the divine nature the relation of strict and proper filiation toward the Father, for he is the natural and only-begotten Son of God. But angels and men are only made sons by adoption, and by a supernatural grace which in men is properly called regeneration, because the human generation precedes, which merely gives them human nature. The Virgin Mary received only her human nature by her natural generation, and therefore needed to be born of God by spiritual grace to make her a child of God, and a partaker with Christ in that special relation to the Father which belonged to him as man by virtue of his divine personality. Moreover, sanctification is not inapplicable even to Christ, whose soul and body were made holy by the indwelling Spirit, and therefore, à fortiori, not to Mary, on the hypothesis that she needed no redemption. Repentance, forgiveness, conversion, are indeed inapplicable to her. They are, likewise, inapplicable to the angels, were so to Adam and Eve before the fall, and would have been so to their posterity, if the state of original justice had continued, unless they sinned personally and were capable of restoration to grace.

The freedom from original sin does not, however, imply that the Virgin Mary was above the need of redemption. The covenant of the first Adam was abolished, and therefore no right to grace could be transmitted from him to his descendant, the Virgin Mary. The attainder by which he and all his descendants were excluded from the privileges of children and the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven was reversed only by the redemption. If Christ had not redeemed mankind from the fall, the kingdom of heaven could not have been open to Mary. She owes, therefore, all her privileges as a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven to the redemption. Some of these are special and peculiar to herself, and one of these special privileges is that she was prevented from incurring the guilt of original sin by receiving sanctifying grace simultaneously with her conception and the creation of her soul. She was, therefore, redeemed in a more sublime mode than others, and is more indebted to the cross and Passion of Christ and the free grace of God than any other human being, and not at all on a par with Christ, who is indebted to no one but himself. Let this suffice in respect to the polemics of Dr. Schaff’s work. The reunion of all who profess Christianity on a new basis is as far off as ever—as remote as the discovery of a way of transit to the fixed stars. The learned doctor has prepared a valuable collection of documents useful to the student, but he has not proposed any substitute for the faith and law of the Catholic Church which is likely to supplant them, or even to prove acceptable to any large number of Christians under any name. Nevertheless, we regard amicably both himself and his work, and we are confident that it will have the good effect of promoting a wider and more catholic range of investigation among Protestant students of theology.

THE STANDARD ARITHMETIC, FOR SCHOOLS OF ALL GRADES AND FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES. No. 1. By James E. Ryan. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co.

Important changes have been made in arithmetical text-books within the last twenty years. Each new series of books presented a special claim for patronage. One contained several chapters previously omitted; another divided the subject into mental and written arithmetic; others followed the inductive to the exclusion of the analytic method. Each series may have been an improvement in some respects; but the gain has been theoretic and artistic rather than practical. The result has been to separate oral from written arithmetic; to increase the average number of books in a series to five; and to load the elementary works with intricate detail and useless puzzles.

As a rule, a child spends an hour a day of school-life in the study of arithmetic. This amount of time should suffice to teach the arithmetical processes necessary in ordinary business. Yet the majority of pupils never advance beyond the ground rules. This results from making the text-book the guide. So general is this custom that few teachers desire to run the risk of changing it, and the pupil is compelled to leave school before fractions have been reached. He carries with him the belief that there are two kinds of arithmetic, one mental, the other written; and while he may be able to explain an oral example, he can simply tell how the written example is done. The small number of pupils who reach the higher branches suffer from an overdose of commercial economy which can only be mastered when they come face to face with business affairs.

The text-books prepared by Mr. James E. Ryan afford a remedy for most of these defects. The elementary course contains all that can be taught to the mass of pupils. It includes the fundamental rules, fractions, decimals, denominate numbers, and percentage. Each division contains oral and written work, the same analysis being used in both cases. The mode of treatment is excellent. The book includes no more practice work than is absolutely necessary to secure facility and accuracy in calculation, while the analysis of each step is so clear that any pupil can easily comprehend it.

The chapters treating of fractions are cleared of obscure subdivisions, thereby dispensing with a mass of unnecessary rules for special cases. In addition to this improvement the rules for common and decimal fractions are made to correspond. Denominate numbers are treated with marked ability. Obsolete weights and measures are excluded. The various tables of the metric system are introduced in connection with the English standards.

A close examination of Mr. Ryan’s treatise will convince the most exacting teacher that it is an excellent arithmetic.

THE STANDARD ARITHMETIC, FOR SCHOOLS OF ALL GRADES AND FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES. No. 2. By James E. Ryan. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 9 Barclay St.

This volume begins with simple numbers and carries the pupil through the commercial rules. The amount of arithmetical knowledge requisite for business purposes has grown with the enormous growth of insurance, annuities, etc., so that it has become necessary to define the limits of school instruction. The author includes percentage, interest, discount, partial payments, exchange, profit and loss, commission or brokerage, insurance, duties, taxes, equation of payments, proportion, involution, evolution, mensuration, and progression in the regular course. The discussion of the equation, mechanics, specific gravity, builders’ measurements, gauging, alligation, life insurance, annuities, stocks and bonds, freights and storage, etc., is reserved for the appendix.

In the advanced portions of the work analysis and synthesis, or induction, as it is now called, are combined. The treatment of each subdivision is so unique that it is hardly fair to single out one for special praise. Equation of payments, however, is made somewhat conspicuous by the amount of condensation it has undergone. In six pages we obtain the information which is usually spread over twenty. It is safe to say that the best scholars leave school without a clear comprehension of this subject, partly because of the senseless rules laid down, but chiefly because of the number of them. The chapter on mensuration is remarkable. By it the author proves that a student may obtain all the knowledge of mensuration requisite for surveying without studying geometry.

Oral and written exercises are given under every rule, and the examples are so shaped as to test the pupil’s knowledge of principles. The appendix contains a mass of important work of the highest value to students qualifying themselves for active business. For this reason the volume is well adapted to the wants of high-schools and academies.

RECUEIL DE LECTURES, A L’USAGE DES ECOLES. Par une Sœur de St. Joseph. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1877.

This is a very useful addition to the Catholic Publication Society’s excellent series of school literature. There is probably no living language from which so much pleasure and profit can be derived as the French. Even if a person does not speak it with ease and fluency, it requires no vast amount of study to be able to read it as readily as one’s native tongue. The first requisite towards a knowledge of French is a good text-book and grammar. The little volume before us answers admirably the first of these requirements. It is interesting, clear, and constructed on an intelligent plan. The instructions for pronunciation at the beginning are short but excellent, and likely to rest in the memory. The exercises begin in a very simple manner. They are always sensible, and do not confuse words and phrases, and jumble them together after the Ollendorff plan, although they effect the same end, so far as the interchange of words, phrases, and ideas goes. As the lessons proceed, they gradually increase in difficulty, as they do in interest, the simpler exercises giving place to extracts from the best French authors.

We think the book in every way well adapted for youthful students of French who have a teacher.

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THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

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VOL. XXVI., No. 153.—DECEMBER, 1877.

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MR. FROUDE ON THE “REVIVAL OF ROMANISM.”[66]

“Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from among the evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (“Revival of Romanism,” sect. i. p. 95).

These questions, asked by Mr. Froude in his latest-published volume, are not new. They have been asked by many any time within the last quarter of a century. They are being asked with more urgency, if not more alarm, every day. They are questions worthy of an answer, if an answer can be given to them; worthy, certainly, of all consideration from serious-minded men. For, if founded in fact, they point towards a reversal of the three centuries of Protestant history; to the failure of Protestantism as a satisfactory system of belief; and, if not to a general return of Protestant nations to the Catholic Church, at least to the speedy and final approach to what keen writers and observers have long seen coming—to wit, the general recognition that between Catholicity and infidelity there stands no debatable ground for Christian men.

The suspicion has been gradually growing up in the Protestant thinking world—a suspicion that is fast hardening into a certainty—that Catholicity is advancing with giant strides, while Protestantism is surely, if sullenly, receding; worse still, that in spite of all Protestantism can do, in the pulpit, in the press, in the government, in the world at large, Catholicity is bound to advance, and the process of damming it up and shutting it off seems hopeless. “How to compete with the aggressions of Romanism” was, in various forms, one of the chief subjects of debate before the Evangelical Alliance assembled a few years back in this city. A similar subject excited the recent Pan-Presbyterian assembly at Glasgow. Indeed, it is safe to say that, wherever a Protestant assembly of any kind meets for amicable consultation and discussion, that everlasting skeleton in the closet, “Romanism,” will be exposed to view to remind the pleasant gentlemen assembled that they are doomed to die.

This is only a sign of the times. The times were, half a century ago, when such a sign was not visible; when Catholicity, as a real, living, active power, was, so far as Protestant countries were concerned, dead and damned beyond hope of redemption. There was a horror at the very mention of the name of Rome; a universal Protestant shudder at the thought of the pope; but Rome and the pope were things exploded with the Gunpowder Plot and other dark horrors of a by-gone day. In England the chief vestige of Catholicity and Catholic memories left showed itself in the annual celebration of Guy Fawkes’ day and the loyal burning of the pope in effigy.

To-day how changed is the position of Catholicity, not in England only, but in all English-speaking peoples; not in all English-speaking peoples only, but throughout the civilized world! Catholicity has experienced a vast “revival,” to use Mr. Froude’s expression; and to any one who has read Mr. Froude it will be easy to imagine how that writer would handle such a theme. Mr. Froude dislikes many things in this world, but of all things he dislikes Catholicity. It is hard for him to write calmly on any subject; on this particular subject he raves, even if he raves eloquently. His admirers, among whom for many things—particularly for the good service his peculiarly violent temper has done the Catholic cause—we beg to be numbered, will scarcely accuse him of that passionless tone that is supposed to belong to blindfolded and even-balanced justice. It is not passing beyond the bounds of fair criticism, but simply stating what ought now to be a sufficiently-established fact, to say that whenever Catholicity or anything belonging to it crosses Mr. Froude’s vision that vision is seared; the man is at once attacked by a species of literary insanity—a Popomania, so to say—that renders him incapable of cool judgment, and leads him to play havoc with all the instincts of good sense, the laws of logic, the impulses of good nature, and, we are sorry to add, the rules of honesty. Indeed, no man better than he affords an example of the remark of a keen French writer that “it is the happiness and the glory of Catholicity to be always served by its adversaries; by those who do not believe in it; ay, by those who pursue it with the bitterest animosity.”[67]

These, however, are only so many assertions on our part. Mr. Froude will afford us ample opportunity of justifying them.

We have no desire to be unjust to Mr. Froude. Indeed, he is so unjust to himself that an avowed enemy could wish for no better weapons of attack than those supplied by Mr. Froude against himself. It is singularly true that Mr. Froude is generally the best refutation of Mr. Froude. Still, to a man of his way of thinking, the questions set at the head of this article, which he so boldly puts and honestly attempts to face, must be in the last degree not only exasperating but seriously alarming. To a man who can see nothing more fatal in this world than Catholicity, the confessed advance of Catholicity, in face of, in spite of, and over all obstacles, must seem like the spread of a pestilence of the deadliest kind—a mental and moral pestilence: a darkness of the understanding, a deadening of the heart, a numbing of all man’s fine, free, and ennobling qualities, a wilful renouncing of

“The mighty thoughts that make us men.”

Of course we laugh at so preposterous an idea; but Mr. Froude has persuaded himself that Catholicity is all this, and we are trying our best to regard him honestly and as being honest. Nor does he stand alone in his persuasion. There are many who go with him in his estimate of Catholicity, and we have them in view quite as much as he in whatever we may have to say. And the first thing we have to say is this: Is there really a “revival of Romanism”? In what and where is it reviving? Of course we reject the term Romanism, as applied to Catholicity. Still, a wilful man may as well have his way, especially where his wilfulness costs nothing. We have a more important controversy with Mr. Froude than a quarrel over names and a haggling over words. If Romanists we must be from his point of view, why Romanists, in the name of peace, let us be, to the extent at least of an article. Some statisticians estimate us at 200,000,000. We can afford to be called names once in a while.

Surely Mr. Froude is mistaken. If it be true, as a very high authority[68] assured us a few years ago, that “in the kingdom of this world the state has dominion and precedence,” Catholicity, as a whole, fares very badly in the kingdom of this world, however high it may rank in the next. And strange as it may appear to Mr. Froude and to Prince Bismarck, Catholics have a singular liking for their own place in this world; they lay claim to at least as lawful a share of the things of this world as do Protestants; and they utterly and stubbornly refuse to live on sufferance. The attempt to make Catholics exist on sufferance, go a-begging for their lives, so to say, and eat and drink, and work and sleep, and play and pray by the gracious favor of certain princes of this world, occasions all the trouble between Catholics and the states governed by such princes. So when a “revival of Romanism” is talked about we naturally look to see how Catholics stand in the world; and the look is not encouraging.

The “kingdoms of this world” are all, or mostly all, dead-set against Catholicity. The Catholic Church is proscribed in Germany; proscribed in Russia; tied down in Austria and Italy; hounded in Switzerland; vexed and tormented in Spain and the states of South America. Looked at with the eyes of ordinary common sense, and from a merely worldly standipoint, the Catholic Church, under these governments, which are so strong and powerful, and play so large and important a part in the world, is in about as bad a condition as its worst wisher could desire. By the governments mentioned, with some inequality in the degree of severity, Catholicity is regarded and treated as at once a secret and an open foe, whom it requires every device and strain of the law and the resources of government to put down. What Emerson, in one of his latest and best utterances, has said of the assertion of “moral sentiment” is here exactly true of Catholicity: “Cities go against it; the college goes against it; the courts snatch at any precedent, at any vicious forms of law to rule it out; legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it, and vote it down. Every new assertion of the right surprises us, like a man joining the church, and we hardly dare believe he is in earnest.”[69]

The press is not only against it of its own accord, but is suborned to be against it. Its supreme Pastor has literally scarcely a roof to cover him in the states that through almost all the centuries of the Christian era belonged to the church, and such a roof as he has hangs on the word of a royal[70] robber, who, in turn, holds what he has and what he has so ill-gotten by the slenderest of tenures—the breath of a mob. The city that witnessed the divinization of paganism, its awful and just overthrow, the long agony of the Catacombs, the building up of Christendom on the pagan ruins, the glories of the “ages of faith,” is to-day one of the chief centres of the new paganism, which has for its deity nihilism. In all the world to-day no royal crusader is to be found to draw his sword for Christ and Christ’s cross. The race of Charles Martel, of Pepin, of Charlemagne, of Pelayo, of Godfrey de Bouillon, of St. Louis of France, of Scanderbeg, of Sobieski, of Don Juan of Austria, the race of heroes whose swords wrought miracles at Poitiers, at Jerusalem, at Acre, at Rhodes, at Malta, at Vienna, at Lepanto, seems to have died out, though a foe as terrible to Christianity as was ever the old pagan North and the Moslem South and East besieges and threatens now the citadel of the city of God. It is, perhaps, characteristic of the age that the only one to assume the title of royal champion of the cross should be the present Russian emperor. It is, perhaps, equally characteristic of the wicked assumption that it should have met with so fearful and unexpected a response at the hands of the wretched remnant of a power that true Christianity had crippled, and would have smote to the dust had not the division of Christendom lent allies from within the camp to the ancient foe. Does it not look like a just retribution?

The Catholic Church stands between two revolutions—the revolution from above and the revolution from below. Both alike have decreed its death. The Herods, the Pilates, and the rabble, foes in all else, are friends in this. Delenda est Roma Catholica!

This is no fancy picture. We are not speaking now of the church in herself—that consideration will come later—but of the church as she stands towards governments, or rather as they stand towards her. Even where some comparative freedom is allowed her it is doled out gingerly and grudgingly, or given under silent or open protest. The erection of a free Catholic university in France—that is, a university independent of the government: a government accused, too, of “clericalism”—is the signal for the French “republicans,” as writers on this side of the water insist on calling them, to be up in arms. Men laugh to-day at the English Ecclesiastical Titles Act and the turmoil created by it. Yet it moved liberal England in 1850 till the country rocked with the tumult of it. Its author was a liberal leader. He is still living, we believe, though it is hard to think of Earl Russell living and not using his well-remembered voice. At all events he was living a few years ago, and we heard him then—liberal as ever. He had promised to preside at a meeting at Exeter Hall, London, to express sympathy with Prince Bismarck and the German government in their contest with the Catholic Church—a contest that we shall have occasion to refer to in another place. At the last moment Earl Russell “caught a bad cold” and could not appear, but his place as chief speaker was nobly taken—by whom? By a free American citizen, the Rev. Joseph P. Thompson, D.D., formerly of the Church of the Tabernacle in this city; and his closing advice to Prince Bismarck—an advice thrice repeated—was to “stamp out” Catholicity.

These individual instances are only straws, but straws that betoken a great deal of wind somewhere. Such liberty as the Catholic Church has is only conceded to it when and where the very character and stability of the governments necessitate its concession. Under such circumstances, then, does it not sound strange and startling to be alarmed at a “revival of Romanism”?

So much for the dark side of the picture; and there is no denying that it is dark indeed. There is light, however, and the light is very strong and lovely. If the race of royal men and heroes whose swords were ever ready to be drawn in the cause of Christ seems to have quite died out, the race of true Catholics has not died with them. Royalty, at its best even, was generally and almost necessarily a treacherous ally to the church. The kings have gone from the church, but the people remain. In face of this universal, protracted, bitter, and resolute opposition to Catholicity on the part of so many great states, we find the church, as in the days of the apostles, adding daily to her number “those that should be saved.” Here, too, we find, as in all Christian history, the greatest and sharpest contrasts—those contrasts that it baffles human ingenuity to explain. The Catholic Church is to-day strongest where, according to human calculation, she ought to be weakest, and weakest where she ought to be strongest. She flourishes best in what three centuries of almost total estrangement have made to her foreign soil. This it is that so puzzles Mr. Froude.

“The proverb which says that nothing is certain but the unforeseen was never better verified than in the resurrection, as it were out of the grave, during the last forty years of the Roman Catholic religion. In my own boyhood it hung about some few ancient English families like a ghost of the past. They preserved their creed as an heirloom which tradition rather than conviction made sacred to them. A convert from Protestantism to Popery would have been as great a monster as a convert to Buddhism or Odin worship. ‘Believe in the Pope!’ said Dr. Arnold. ‘I should as soon believe in Jupiter’” (p. 93).

This is undoubtedly, in the main, a true picture of the result of three centuries of apostasy in England. As for Dr. Arnold, that learned gentleman probably understated his belief. He would, if anything, much sooner have believed in Jupiter than in the Pope. It would be interesting to know what he thought of, say, George IV., as the supreme head of the church of which Dr. Arnold was so distinguished an ornament, or of Queen Victoria. He is as good an example as any of modern refined and intellectual paganism, and his distinguished son is but the natural outcome of the influence of such a man’s character and teachings, as in another way was John Stuart Mill of his father.

“The singular change which we have witnessed and are still witnessing,” pursues Mr. Froude, “is not due to freshly-discovered evidence of the truth of what had been abandoned as superstition” (p. 93). In this, of course, we quite agree with Mr. Froude, though, perhaps, not exactly in the manner he would wish. The truth is the same to-day as it ever was. Superstition is the same to-day as it ever was. Without going into the matter very deeply just here, we merely hint that Mr. Froude’s “singular change” may not be quite so singular as he imagines. The change to which he alludes is the return of a great body of the English-speaking people to or towards what for three centuries England and England’s colonies had been educated to consider superstition, darkness, idolatry even. Certainly Rome has not changed within this period, as it will be seen Mr. Froude, with passionate vehemence, insists. We only throw out the hint, then, that possibly what was abandoned as superstition turns out on closer inspection not to have been superstition at all. Truth may be slow in coming, but once come it is very hard to close one’s eyes to it. For men who have eyes there is no exercise so healthy and manful as honestly to face a great difficulty. The modern keen spirit of investigation we are far from considering an unmixed evil, if, indeed, it be an evil at all. The closest inquiry is compatible with the firmest and most whole-hearted faith. The objections of sceptics to the doctrines of the church are, when not borrowed from the objections of the doctors of the church, puny in comparison with them. On men, however, who do not believe at all, the spirit of inquiry, when united to earnestness of purpose, is working good. Many nowadays, who have every whit as profound a distrust of Catholicity as Mr. Froude, are not content with taking for granted all that they have been taught to believe of Catholics and Catholicity. They go to Rome; walk about in it, read it, study it, much as they would enter upon the investigation of a disputed question in science; and, having examined to their hearts’ content, many of them stay in Rome, while most come back with at least respect for what they formerly detested and abhorred.

It is impossible even to mention a few of the names of distinguished Catholics within the century, many of them converts, and not be struck by their mental and moral eminence. The world cannot afford to sneer at men like Görres, Count von Stolberg, Frederic Schlegel, Hürter, Ozanam, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Louis Veuillot, Balmez, O’Connell, Brownson, Ives, Anderson, Bayley, Wiseman, Newman, Manning, Faber, Ward, Marshall, Allies, Mivart, and a host of others almost equally eminent, who were born leaders of men or of thought, who came from many lands, who filled every kind of position, and who, led by many different lights, traversing many stormy and dark and difficult ways, came at last to Rome, to rest there to the end as loyal and faithful children of the church. It is men like these who ennoble the human race and who leave a rich legacy of thought and act to all peoples and to all time. To say that such men, most of whom came from without, went deliberately over to the old “superstition” because it was superstition will not do. They found what they had esteemed darkness to be light.

This modern spirit of investigation has done and is doing another great service to the Catholic cause: it is helping to unravel the tangled skein of history, to explore dark places and drag buried truth to light. Lingard’s History of England, for instance, really worked, or more properly began, a revolution in English thought—a revolution which, unconsciously, Scott’s novels and poems helped greatly to popularize. The work set on foot by Lingard and the method adopted have been well followed up by others, and by non-Catholics. Men came to try and look at things dispassionately and fairly. The result was that certain rooted English opinions and prejudices began slowly to give way. The “glorious Reformation,” for instance, and the “great Reformers” in England appeared on closer inspection to be neither quite so “glorious” nor quite so “great” as before. It requires very exceptional mental, not to say moral, courage nowadays to present Henry VIII. as a reformer of religion, or “good Queen Bess” as really good, or as one whose “lordly nature was the pride of all true-hearted Englishmen.”[71] And like in character to the leaders were those who went with them in their measures of reform. The Reformation itself has come to be regarded by all intelligent minds, whatever be their estimate of Catholicity, as at least not an unmixed good. “The religious reform,” says Guizot,[72] “which was the revolution of the sixteenth century has already been submitted to the test of time, and of great social and intellectual perils. It brought with it much suffering to the human race, it gave rise to great errors and great crimes, and was developed amidst cruel wars and the most deplorable troubles and disturbances. These facts, which we learn both from its partisans and opponents, cannot be contested, and they form the account which history lays to the charge of the event.” The constant revelations coming to light through the publication of secret papers and such like make it perfectly plain that reform, to have been at all effectual, should have begun with the “Reformers” themselves. As an evidence of how thoroughly the sham and rottenness of the Reformation have been exposed, we find Sanders’ much-derided Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism now accepted on all sides as only too true.

Certain it is that a great idol of English Protestantism, if not quite overthrown, has been very much battered and bruised of late by iconoclasts who in other days would have knelt and worshipped before it. Protestant England is built on the Protestant Reformation; but if that turns out to have been on its religious side so very bad an affair, what becomes of those who pinned their faith to it? That is a thought that is working in men’s minds, and working good. That reform was needed in the church and kingdom of England prior to the Reformation no man will dispute. But real reformation should not be a sweeping out of one devil to introduce seven more unclean.

While the truth of history was thus slowly forcing its way out, there came a sudden shock to the mind of the English people—a shock so severe and stunning in its first effects as almost to lead to a reaction and a turning again into the old ruts. This was the deliberate desertion of all pretensions to alliance with the early church by some of the leaders—“the ablest” Mr. Froude styles them—of the Tractarian movement. These became converts to the Catholic faith, and, in the slang of the day, “went over to Rome.”

The falling away of these men from the Anglican Church can only be likened to a revolution, a yielding of some buttress of the British Constitution, which was thought to be as impregnable, as solid, as lasting as England itself. And yet “the intellect which saw the falsehood of the papal pretensions in the sixteenth century sees it only more clearly in the nineteenth,” says Mr. Froude. Possibly enough; a distinction, however, is to be drawn at “intellect.”

“More than ever the assumptions of the Holy See are perceived to rest on error or on fraud. The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge. Her history, in the light of critical science, is a tissue of legend woven by the devout imagination.”

We have thus far only quoted from the first of fifty-four pages, and already we pause to take breath. Mr. Froude has a peculiar manner of putting things. Such wholesale and sweeping assertions are only to be answered in a volume or by a simple denial. Of course, if the Catholic Church is all that Mr. Froude unhesitatingly sets her down to be, there is an end of the whole question. In that case the “revival of Romanism” is really a grave danger to the world; nay, the very existence of “Romanism”—i.e., of Catholicity—is a menace to human society. If the “papal pretensions” are “falsehood”; if “the assumptions of the Holy See” “rest on error and fraud”; if “the doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”; and if “her history is a tissue of legend,” men who commit themselves to the defence of such a monstrosity set themselves at once beyond the pale of civilization. Were Mr. Froude writing of the Turks or of the Mormons he could scarcely use language more strongly condemnatory. It is probable that, with his generous impulses, he would find “extenuating circumstances,” did he think any needed, for Mormon or Turk, which he could not concede to a Catholic.

When Mr. Froude visited this country recently on his ill-judged and, to him, disastrous mission—for a mission he called it—a critic (in the New York World, we believe) described his style, very happily it seemed to us, as feminine. Women are not supposed to sit down to serious questions of wide and general import as calmly and judiciously as men. They argue from the heart rather than the head. They like or they dislike, and woe betide the person or the cause that they dislike! Argument is thrown away on them. They make the most astounding statements with the easiest confidence; they have a happy faculty of inventing facts; they contradict themselves with placid unconsciousness, and everybody else with scornful rigor; for logic they have not so much a disregard as a profound contempt, and take refuge from its assaults in thin-edged satire. This, of course, is only true of them when they are out of their sphere and dealing with matters for which they have a constitutional incapacity.

Mr. Froude, however, is just this. Take any one sentence of those last quoted; look at it calmly; weigh it in the balance, and what do we find? Take this one: “The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” With this confident statement he leaves the matter. There is no doubt, no hesitation, no reservation at all on his part. A reasonable man will ask himself, however: “Is this stupendous statement true?” “The doctrines of the Catholic Church! What! all of them?” Apparently so; Mr. Froude, at least, makes no exception. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” is the primary article of the Catholic Creed. Has that only “gained increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”? Mr. Froude would hardly say so; indeed, in more places than one he takes occasion to sneer at the modern scientific gospel. Even if Mr. Froude himself said so, his Protestant readers who make any pretensions to Christian faith would scarcely agree with him. Belief in the Trinity of God is another doctrine of the Catholic Church; in Jesus Christ the God-Man, the Redeemer of the world; in the Holy Ghost; in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. All these are doctrines of the Catholic Church. Does Mr. Froude pretend to say that they have all been swept away by “the advance of knowledge”? If he did not mean to say this—as, indeed, we believe he did not—why did he say it? What are we to think of him? Is this sober writing and a right manner of approaching a serious question? In p. 93 he tells us that “the doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” In p. 95 he has already forgotten himself, and tells us that “the Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the Catholic Church,” which is the strongest kind of concession of what he had just before denied; and forgetting himself again, he tells us in a third place (p. 141) that the Protestant ministers “are at present the sole surviving representatives of true religion in the world.” This is only one of a multitude of instances in which Mr. Froude allows himself to run away with himself. Passion and prejudice narrow his mental vision, until at times it becomes so diseased as to result in moral as well as mental obliquity.

The same thing is observable in the sentence immediately following the passage last quoted: “Liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world, and has penetrated at last even the territories of the popes themselves” (p. 94).

Even Mr. Froude cannot absolutely blind himself to facts; at least, he cannot alter them. He may hate the Catholic Church as much as he pleases—and it pleases him to hate her very much—but the fact of his hatred cannot convert the persecution of her children into “liberty, spiritual and political.” Nor are we at all begging the question in giving the name of persecution to the treatment that Catholics are receiving at the hands, if not of “every government of the world,” at least of those previously enumerated. It is the word, as we shall show, applied to the anti-Catholic legislation in Germany by candid Protestants, countrymen of Mr. Froude, too, who hate the church and the Pope just as resolutely as he, but with more apparent show of reason. It is too late in the day to argue about this matter. There is no longer question to an honest mind as to whether the Catholics in Germany are or are not persecuted. There may still be question as to whether or not the persecution be necessary, but there is no dispute as to the fact. To talk of the “spiritual liberty” of Catholics in Germany to-day is simply to talk nonsense. But, lest there should be any possible doubt regarding the matter, it may be as well to freshen men’s memories a little on a point that is intimately connected with our whole subject; for what covers Germany covers every land where the struggle between the Catholic Church and the state is being waged.

The organs of English opinion have been very faithful in their allegiance to Prince Bismarck, who is such an experienced cultivator of public opinion. They are the bitter foes of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, they have some pretensions to principle, and, when there is no escape out of the difficulty, call white white, and black black. At all events they do not always call black white. In Germany, then, according to Mr. Froude, “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of the Catholic Church’s most desperate opposition.” While the struggle of the German government with the Catholics had as yet not much more than half begun the English Pall Mall Gazette discovered that

“There is no parallel in history to the experiment which the German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently, but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it almost takes one’s breath away.”

It may be only natural to find the apologist of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth describing the revival in modern times of “the memorable achievement of Englishmen” under Henry VIII. as “liberty, spiritual and political.” Yet the same “experiment” takes away the breath, not only of so cool a journal as the Pall Mall Gazette, but of a much cooler and more influential journal still.

“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become law,” says the London Times, “amount to a secular organization so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour, that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil power the control of all education, the imposition of its own conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office, the administration of all discipline, and at every point the right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany, without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the emperor.”

Mr. Froude is perfectly correct in saying that such measures have been carried “in spite of the church’s most desperate opposition,” but whether he is equally correct in styling the same thing “liberty,” spiritual or political, we leave to the judgment of honest readers. The London Spectator, writing at the same period, was in sore trouble as to the event.

“Is an age of the world,” it asks, “in which few men know what is truth or whether there be truth, one in which you would ask statesmen to determine its limits? We suspect that a race of statesmen armed with such powers as Prussia is now giving to her officials would soon cease to show their present temperance and sobriety, and grow into a caste of civilian ecclesiastics of harder, drier, and lower mould than any of the ecclesiastics they had to put down.... To our minds the absolutism of the Vatican Council is a trifling danger compared with the growing absolutism of the democratic temper which is now being pushed into almost every department of human conduct.”

We shall have occasion to show the results of the work of these “civilian ecclesiastics” on the Protestant Church in Germany, particularly in Prussia. Even at this early stage of the struggle the London Times confessed:

“We do not anticipate any retrogression in the development of Prussia, but it seems inevitable that there should be some check in the progress of change, some slackening in the audacity of legislation, some disposition to rest and be thankful.”

Of the same measure the Prussian correspondent of the London Times wrote:

“The Catholic dignitaries are not the only ecclesiastics opposed to the bill. The new measures applying not only to the Catholic Church, but to all religious communities recognized by the state, the Ober-Kirchenrath, or Supreme Consistory of the Protestant Church in the old provinces, has also thought fit to caution the crown against the enactment of these sweeping innovations.”

“The official papers openly accuse the Protestant clergy of becoming the allies of the Ultramontanes,” says the Pall Mall Gazette (April 12, 1873). “Herr Von Gerlach no longer stands alone as a Protestant opponent of the chancellor’s policy.”

“This rough-and-ready method of expelling Ultramontane influences ‘by a fork’ can hardly fail to suggest to a looker-on the probability that, like similar methods of expelling nature, it may lead to a reaction. Downright persecution of this sort (we are speaking now simply of the Jesuit law), unless it is very thorough indeed—more thorough than is well possible in the nineteenth century—usually defeats itself,” says the Saturday Review.

But why multiply quotations? Surely those given are enough to show that the leading organs of English opinion, representing every stripe of thought, are quite agreed as to what name should be given to what Mr. Froude calls the “liberty, spiritual and political,” in Germany. We leave the case confidently in their hands; and Mr. Froude apparently thinks the verdict has gone against him. He deplores the fact that “free England and free America ... affect to think that the Jesuits are an injured body, and clamor against Prince Bismarck’s tyranny. Truly, we are an enlightened generation” (p. 136).

What is here true of Germany is true also of Russia, Austria (in great measure), Italy, Switzerland, and other lands. So that if Catholicity is really reviving, as Mr. Froude alleges, it is reviving under the very shadow of death, and in face of the combined opposition of the most powerful governments. A revival under such circumstances ought to extort the admiration of Mr. Froude, who is as true a hero-worshipper as Carlyle, even if he be about equally happy in his selection of heroes. In the “Preliminary” to The English in Ireland Mr. Froude propounds his theories of might and right:

“A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to defend it, exists in nations as much as, and no more than, it exists in individuals.... In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our neighbors, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a natural right to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings. Among wild beasts and savages might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for ever tending to create might” (vol. i. pp. 1, 2).

As we are not now examining Mr. Froude’s theories on government, we only call attention to the very hazy nature of the views here expressed on a subject which of all things should be clear and definite. He uses the word right without telling us what he means by it, whether or not it has an absolute meaning and force. He speaks of “the superior part” and “the inferior part” without informing us in what sense the terms are used. Superior in what? Inferior in what? To any rational mind it is plain that, just because of the inequality of human beings “in ability and worthiness of character,” there must, under a divine dispensation, which Mr. Froude does not deny, be absolute rules of right and wrong for all alike, a moral code which shall extend to and determine all rights, natural or acquired. If not this, right and wrong become convertible terms, and right and might of course follow suit, which is really the outcome of Mr. Froude’s theory—a doctrine that impregnates and inspires all his writings.

“There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honorable courses; and the rights of man—if such rights there be—are not to liberty, but to wise direction and control” (p. 2).

A very plausible-looking doctrine, but a very dangerous one as here laid down. An example will serve to show the mischievous and vicious nature of it. According to Mr. Froude, to be a Catholic is “to live unworthily.” The comment suggests itself.

“Individuals cannot be independent, or society cannot exist.... The individual has to sacrifice his independence to his family, the family to the tribe,” etc. Why so? Would it not be truer as well as nobler to say that the individual uses his independence for his family?

“Necessity and common danger drive families into alliance for self-defence; the smaller circles of independence lose themselves in ampler areas; and those who refuse to conform to the new authority are either required to take themselves elsewhere, or, if they remain and persist in disobedience, may be treated as criminals” (p. 4).

Quite independent of the nature and claims of the “new authority,” so far as Mr. Froude enlightens us.

“On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the equivalent of superior merit.... As a broad principle it may be said that, as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature also has allotted superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems most to be taking it away” (pp. 4, 5).

We hold that “superiority of strength” belongs to “superiority of intellect and character,” but not in Mr. Froude’s sense. This sense is obviously that expounded by the third Napoleon in the preface to his Julius Cæsar—viz., that once Cæsar is established, it is a crime to go against him under any circumstances; which is equivalent to saying that whatever is, is right. It is forgotten by, or not known to, these writers that man is prone to evil from childhood; that the good has always a hard battle to fight; that it does conquer by force of “superiority of intellect and character,” but that it is often, and for a long time, borne down by the physical superiority of brute strength. The history of Christianity is the strongest instance we can offer of the truth of our position. Christianity has been struggling upwards for nineteen centuries; to human eyes it was often at the point of death; on those whom it subdued it conferred superiority of intellect and of character—a superiority which they sometimes turned against itself—and to-day it is struggling as fiercely as ever.

However, let us gauge Mr. Froude by his own standard: that superiority of strength goes with superiority of intellect and of character. It is a very convenient theory as so stated; but it is apt to work two ways. So long as it works for Mr. Froude it is very natural and explicable. As soon, however, as it turns to the opposite side it is to Mr. Froude a “phenomenon.” We are as little inclined to underrate as to overrate success, though very far from accepting it as the standard of right. One thing, however, will be conceded by all men: what succeeds in face of the most strenuous, long-sustained, and powerful opposition; in face of wealth, position, possession, numbers, resources, education, tradition—in a word, of all that goes to form and mould and fix peoples and their character, their history, their mode of thought, their national bent—what, we say, succeeds in face of all this must have something in it very much resembling Mr. Froude’s “superiority of intellect and of character.” It must have an immense vital force and strength and reality within it. It is hard for any man not to acknowledge that under such circumstances success approves itself; that it came because it deserved to come.

But this is just Mr. Froude’s “revival” of Catholicity—a fact which for him has no adequate explanation.

“The tide of knowledge and the tide of outward events,” he says, “have set with equal force in the direction opposite to Romanism; yet in spite of it, perhaps by means of it, as a kite rises against the wind, the Roman Church has once more shot up into visible and practical consequence. While she loses ground in Spain and Italy, which had been so long exclusively her own, she is gaining in the modern energetic races, which had been the stronghold of Protestantism. Her numbers increase, her organization gathers vigor. Her clergy are energetic, bold, and aggressive. Sees long prostrate are re-established; cathedrals rise, and churches, with schools, and colleges, and convents, and monasteries. She has taken into her service her old enemy, the press, and has established a popular literature. Her hierarchy in England and America have already compelled the state to consult their opinions and respect their pleasure; while each step that is gained is used as a vantage-ground from which to present fresh demands. Hildebrand, in the plenitude of his power, was not more arrogant in his claim of universal sovereignty than the present wearer of the tiara.”

This glowing passage suggests a variety of comments. In the first place, taking it as a statement of facts, it is, coming from Mr. Froude, a most marvellous testimony to the power and growth of the Catholic Church within the present century. Let us venture to paraphrase his outburst, and see how it runs:

Here are you whom we thought dead and buried under your weight of superstition, idolatry, absurdity, and fraud, an old fossil of mediæval times, deserted, neglected, despised, and contemned by the intelligence, wealth, and worth of the age, suddenly leaping into new life, and by a single miraculous stride coming right abreast of, if not ahead of, your foes. What have we that you have not? Energy is ours, yet you surpass us. Numbers are ours; you are stealing them from us. Knowledge and learning are ours; your teachers put ours to shame. We stole your sees, your cathedrals, your monasteries, your convents, your schools, your universities—all that you had of beautiful, and holy, and intellectual. You ask them not back, but set to work to build them anew. Ours is stolen property; yours is built on the free offerings of the poor. We invaded the domain of English literature; it was all ours; we poisoned its wells to you; we invented the newspaper to perpetuate the falsehoods that we wove about you. You have found an antidote to the poison; you win over our brightest intellects; you make a literature of your own which we are compelled to admire and read. You face us at every turn, and we may as well confess that you beat us at many.

This is really Mr. Froude’s picture, not ours. His words mean this or nothing. Will it not occur to anybody that for a church built on “superstition,” “falsehood,” “fraud,” “error,” “a tissue of legend,” etc., etc., Mr. Froude’s is indeed a strange showing—so strange that if the church were the direct opposite of all that he asserts it to be, it could hardly hope for more signal or deserved success? Does it ever occur to Mr. Froude that he may by some remote possibility be mistaken in his estimate of the Catholic Church? that it, if not right altogether, may at least be righter than he thinks?

To some minds, to many and to greater and broader minds than Mr. Froude’s, the doubt has suggested itself. Some, like Macaulay, face it, acknowledge the wonder of it, make no attempt to explain the wonder, and stand without for ever, still wondering. Others draw nearer and examine more closely, and finally enter in. Here is how Mr. Froude views it:

“What is the meaning of so strange a phenomenon? Is the progress of which we hear so much less real than we thought? Does knowledge grow more shallow as the surface widens? Is it that science is creeping like the snake upon the ground, eating dust and bringing forth materialism? that the Catholic Church, in spite of her errors, keeps alive the consciousness of our spiritual being and the hope and expectation of immortality? The Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the Catholic Church. Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from among the evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (p. 95).

Mr. Froude has put questions here each of which would take a volume to answer. We leave them to be pondered over by those for whom they are chiefly intended, and of whose conscientious consideration they are well worthy. For ourselves, we can have no doubt as to the answer to be given to each, but we are more concerned at present with Mr. Froude’s reply.

First among the causes which he assigns as having “united to bring about such a state of things” is the Tractarian movement in the Anglican Church, resulting from the “latitudinarianism of the then (1832) popular Whig philosophy.”

“The Whigs believed that Catholics had changed their nature and had grown liberal, and had insisted on emancipating them. The Tractarians looked on emancipation as the fruit of a spirit which was destroying Christianity, and would terminate at last in atheism. They imagined that, by reasserting the authority of the Anglican Church, they could at once stem the encroachments of popery and arrest the progress of infidelity. Both Whigs and Tractarians were deceiving themselves. The Catholic Church is unchanging as the Ethiopian’s skin, and remains, for good and evil, the same to-day as yesterday.”

Yes; “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever” is the church of God. It cannot be the church of God and be otherwise. If there was any deception Mr. Froude lays it at the right door. These men were “deceiving themselves.” The church gave no intimation of change, made no promises, held out no concessions, thought of no compromise in matter of teaching. She cannot do so; it is not in her power to do so.

It was the liberal philosophy that was chiefly instrumental in bringing the change about. Men had to choose between the fixed doctrines of the Catholic Church and the shifting doctrines and intolerable pretensions of the Anglican Church. They rejected both; they rejected revelation; they looked at man himself, and attached to him certain natural rights which are as well expressed in our Declaration of Independence as anywhere. They would, if they could, strike out the Catholics, as was attempted here. But it was impossible. They could not do it and be true to themselves and their principles. If liberty of thought, freedom of conscience, and the right to worship or not to worship God in your own way be natural rights of man, they necessarily attach to all, whether a man call himself Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Nihilist. It is a political and practical impossibility in these days of divided and clashing beliefs to profess liberty, yet seal the door to any special form of worship; and Catholicity of all beliefs is dreaded, because, when free and untrammelled, it has the tendency and the force to assimilate and receive all into its bosom. The result of this partial concession of freedom to Catholicity in England is thus pictured by Mr. Froude:

“The Tractarians’ principles led the ablest of them into that very fold against which they had imagined themselves the most efficient of barriers. From the day in which they established their party in the Anglican communion a steady stream of converts has passed through it into the Catholic ranks; while the Whigs, in carrying emancipation, gave the Catholics political power, and with power the respect and weight in the outer world which in free countries always attends it.”

It is the attainment of this power by Catholics that Mr. Froude so bitterly resents. It would be more satisfactory if he told us plainly what he would have done to Catholics. Would he deny them votes? To deny them votes is to deny them political life. And would he deny votes to Catholics only? Or would he grant votes, but compel them to use them in one way, and, if in one way, in which way? In a word, would he allow Catholics to exist at all as Catholics, would he force them into the old state of political slavery, or would he openly force them into Protestantism under the persuasion that Protestantism, no matter of what stripe, was better for them? Though he shrinks from saying so himself, the latter seems to be the only fair practical conclusion to be drawn from his words, and in passages already quoted he has given us the grounds on which he would act, and feel justified in acting: “The superior part has a natural right to govern the inferior part.” It is plain as between Protestantism and Catholicity which Mr. Froude considers “the superior part.” “The inferior part has a natural right to be governed.” “There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honorable courses.”

We must interpret Mr. Froude by himself, and, judging him by his own words, we are led irresistibly to the conclusion that had he the power he would do all that has been done in the past, and even go beyond it—for all measures have thus far proved ineffectual—to destroy Catholicity from the face of the earth.

And here we come to our final consideration in the present article. Mr. Froude’s observations amount practically to this: Set Catholicity and Protestantism side by side; give them each perfect freedom; Catholicity will infallibly gain, Protestantism will as infallibly lose. “The phenomenon,” he says plaintively, “is not confined to England.... In America, in Holland, in Switzerland, in France, wherever there is most political freedom, the power of Catholics is increasing.”

Well, what of it? The fault, still following Mr. Froude, if fault there be, must rest either with Catholicity, or with Protestantism, or with political freedom. If with Catholicity, it is its fault that “wherever there is most political freedom” its “power is increasing.”

If with Protestantism, it is its fault that, where Catholicity is placed on an equal political footing with it, its power decreases, while the power of Catholicity proportionately increases; and it is to be borne in mind that the power of numbers in the distinctively Protestant countries is altogether against the Catholics.

If the fault lie with political freedom itself, that with it the power of Catholics increases, what are we to say or do? That political freedom and Catholicity go hand in hand is the obvious comment, and that it is impossible to check the advance of Catholicity without at the same time contracting political freedom. We submit that this is the plain and logical deduction to be drawn from Mr. Froude’s words. It is no trick of verbiage. The fact is to himself a “phenomenon.” We are giving now no opinion of our own, but simply translating Mr. Froude, when we say that by his concession—Protestantism cannot stand by the side of Catholicity in a free air. It must go to the wall. This we have to reconcile with his other statement that “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world.” Where it has really invaded governments, by his own confession, “the power of Catholics is increasing.” Where it is cut off, there is Catholicity strangled, so far as human power can strangle it. But we shall show that even there it is the only religion with any vitality in it, and that all forms of religion which claim the name of Christian suffer with the Catholic Church and lose by her losses. We have thus far only treated the “revival” in a general way. In a future article we shall, in company with Mr. Froude, examine the specific causes which he assigns for the “revival.” sp 2

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1877.

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TO F. W. FABER.

Amico, io vivendo cercava conforto Nel monte Parnasso; Tu, meglio consigliato, cercalo Nel Calvario.

—Chiabrera’s epitaph at Savona. From the title-page of Father Faber’s Poems.

I.

True poet of all mountain sight and sound, Of barren glen where mighty echoes wake, Of eagle-haunted, crag-o’ershadowed lake Where loneliness in silent state sits crowned And shares her kingdom with no shallow heart: True lover of all nature’s solemn ways, The columned forest’s wind-waked song of praise— Sad chords wherein all deepest joy hath part— True reader of the primrose’ golden tale, Finding its glow but shadow of a light Wherein who seeks may find the Infinite, That doth its mystery so in least things veil— A seer thou seem’st in thy high mountain place, E’er with all holiest visions face to face.

II.

Yet wandering content in lowlier ways, By brambly lane and lawn-embroidered mere, By quiet river in whose waters clear The clustering willows and tall towers gaze Of minster-town whose ancient bells ring out And trail their music through thy thoughtful rhyme Like far-off echoes of an older time When trembled in their peal no note of doubt. Landless, yet holder of a royal fief In all the beauty by rich nature wrought— Each blossoming hedge-row with an earldom fraught, Wide duchies bound in every golden sheaf— Thine the unchallenged tenure of the whole, By right divine of unstained poet-soul!

III.

Still hearkening ever to that low heart-beat Of sorrowing earth, whose flowers fade in death, Whose silver-threaded rills grow faint for breath, Whose wounded birds cry out beneath thy feet. Not deaf thy human ear to any plaint Of our sad mother whom her sons make weep— Breaking with cries of hate her quiet sleep, Crowding in sunless ways their brothers faint. Nor dumb thy poet-voice to speak her woe— She that hath shivered when mankind stood mute Or flung harsh words of evilest repute, Veiling her face her Maker’s cross below. With filial love thy heart ’gainst hers is laid Who rears the hills, in keeping holds the dead.

IV.

Like cleansing waters touched with heavenly grace Thy mountain-consecrated words are shed, Lifting our souls to light unshadowèd, Guiding our footsteps in the holy trace Of Him who yet shall make the hills a way— Exalted paths trod by the clean of heart, Shrines for the holy-minded set apart Wherein profaner feet unheeding stray. All nature wins true loving from thy song— Fair not alone with her e’er-changing grace, But, lighting each dear feature of her face The thought of love enduring, pure and strong— True poet, in Parnassus’ shadow still Feeling the loadstone of blessed Calvary’s hill.

V.

To that sad mount how eloquent a guide! Not Hybla’s blossoms could so fair beguile The wandering bees as thy entreating wile Faint souls to climb that seeming arid side. With strength thou lead’st from seraph-haunted cave Where Infinite Might with infinite loving smiled From frail, sweet lips of Holy Mary’s Child; Anon where pitying palm-trees shadow gave To ease the weary exile of their Lord; On through the humble toil of patient years— Till, mingling with the Magdalen our tears, Our heart’s poor vase of precious ointment poured— We stand, God’s Mother near, with woe beside The love-pierced feet of Jesus Crucified.

VI.

The sweetest refuge any soul can know! Where all complaining stills its idle voice, And trembling joy bids sorrow soft rejoice Finding the living wand, whose staff below The living waters lie like mountain spring Defiled not in its source, whose shining face Gives to e’en homely herbs a resting-place, With heaven’s blue for their bright shadowing. Pure, living source! wherein who drinks shall thirst Not any more. Blest cup of Love Divine! About whose stem the thorny wreath doth twine, Grown soft for us since He hath borne it first. Cool draught! wherein no hidden drop of gall Makes heaven bitter, and earth’s promise all.

VII.

Shall poets change for bay the crown divine Wreathing the head of Him about whom throng Life’s tenderest flowers, who holds art’s perfect song In his pierced hands?—pure gift in holiest shrine!— From whose rent side the consecrating flood Doth cleanse the poet’s thought from earthly stain, Him king anointed o’er a grand domain By true inheritance of royal blood; In whose wide heart, broken for very love, Lies master-key to all true harmonies, So tuned, no base, discordant melodies Shall jar earth’s music saints shall sing above; So tuned, may wake in sweetness weakest string, Immortal anthems loyal echoing.

VIII.

So keyed thy sacred song, O poet true! With holy joy its very sorrow light, So glorified with that love infinite That shines as stars in heaven’s darkest blue: Washed clean thy earth-born lays in that pure flood— Thy cloudy mountains hide no fear save one Of loving awe; though in dark gorge the sun Falls not, e’en there the Eternal Dove doth brood. Thy mountain springs are pure, wherein we dare Drink as we will, not fearing, so bent down, We shall lose sight of heaven’s fairer crown And find but our own likeness resting there. Fresh with a dew bearing no stain of earth, Thy hill-paths lead unto our Father’s hearth.

IX.

With thee, my poet, lie our souls at rest In the soft glory of our Mother’s smile— The Maid Immaculate, who could beguile Her God to be a child on her pure breast. With thee we labor that our little life Shall learn to lose itself, that it be found In that far, other life eternal crowned ‘Mid hero-saints whose prayers were ours in strife; Humbly with thee, our dearest Lord before, Veiled in the little, pale, and helpless round Wherewith on earth he chooseth to be crowned, We bend with love that yearneth to love more. Fond children, at the Father’s feet we kneel, Finding the love his Spirit doth reveal.

X.

O poet! more than Crashaw, saint! forgive, If break my singing in unworthy praise; Pardon, if uncouth love in stammering lays, Seeking to thank, but give thee cause to grieve. Unspoken gratitude is burden sore When debt so passing strong of love is owed; Unworthy speaking but augments the load, Forgiveness making so love’s burden more. So much to thee I owe! Along my life Thy words like patient, wingèd seeds are sown, So long amid the dark and brambles grown, Yet winning bloom at last despite the strife. As once for him of Ars thy heart was shrine, So mine holds thee, O blessed of Love Divine!

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AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.

VIRGIL AND HORACE—II.

“Traduire Horace, et surtout le traduire en vers, est même devenu, depuis soixante ou quatre-vingts ans, et chez nous et en d’autres pays, une sorte de légère infirmité morale, et de douce maladie qui prend régulièrement un certain nombre d’hommes instruits au retour d’âge; c’est une envie de redevenir enfant, adolescent, de se reporter au temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” To translate Horace, says Sainte-Beuve, above all to translate him in verse, has become within the last sixty or eighty years, both in France and abroad, a kind of venial moral infirmity, a sort of mild fever, which periodically seizes a certain number of educated men as they find themselves growing old; and it has its source in the longing to renew our youth, to live over again the time of studies we were fond of.

Like all the sayings of that most delicate and spirituel of critics, this is so far true that most translations of Horace will be found, we think, to be the work of men advancing in life, and, in the majority of cases, to have grown up insensibly through a number of years. One does not sit down to a version of the Odes as to a version of the Æneid, beginning at the first line and going religiously through in order to the end. No; but we pick out an ode here and there, as the mood takes us and that fits the mood—some gay Ad Amphoram or Ad Asterien when we are young and sprightly, calidus juventâ; a nobler Ad Augustum or Ad Calliopen when we are older and graver, in the time of whitening locks—riding in the cars, it may be, walking in the street, smoking the after-dinner cigar; everywhere, in fact, that solitude gives us a chance to entertain the best of all good company. We turn it into such English as we can muster, and print it perhaps, or, better still, put it away in our portfolio; Horace must have had a prophetic eye on his coming translator when he gave that soundest of poetic counsels—unless Punch’s “Don’t” be sounder still:

“Nonumque prematur in annum Membranis intus positis”—[73]

we put it away to be taken up again and again, lingered over fondly, touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own reward. Like Joubert, il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de gloire; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a felicitous adjective will put him in good-humor for a week. And so, before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the Quem tu Melpomene semel or the Donec gratus eram tibi,” cried Scaliger, “than to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of these or any other of the Odes, cries our Horatian, than to be king of all Spain, with all Cuba libre to boot—

“Quam si Libyam remotis Gadibus jungas et uterque Pœnus Serviat uni.”[74]

Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only poets like Cowper and Montgomery, Chatterton and Byron,[75] essayists like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple, bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby” Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or atrium, prim John Evelyn is jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the Ad Sodales, i. 27, which that learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the Carmen Amabœum. In that modest cœnaculum we can greet these great men all on a familiar and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted to his penetralia, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the Ad Melpomenen, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the Ad Grosphum, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785 (he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious adaptation to his Indian experiences:

“For ease the slow Mahratta spoils And hardier Sikh erratic toils, While both their ease forego....

“To ripened age Clive lived renowned, With lacs enriched, with honors crowned, His valor’s well-earned meed. Too long, alas! he lived, to hate His envied lot, and died too late From life’s oppression freed.”

Another verse had perhaps a still more personal application; there is but a trace of it in the Latin:

“No fears his peace of mind annoy Lest printed lies his fame destroy Which labor’d years have won; Nor pack’d committees break his rest, Nor avarice sends him forth in quest Of climes beneath the sun.”

The fashion of fitting Horace to contemporary persons and events was much in vogue in Hastings’ time and earlier. Creech tells us in his preface that he was advised “to turn the Satyrs to his own times.” It was carried out to the fullest extent in the well-known Horace in London of Horace and James Smith.

Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of the Odes have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should feel inclined to pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s, have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr. Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking, amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“le temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his Æneid, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s, which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst possible version of the Odes, as one is half tempted to believe who remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the Dublin University Magazine long ago—how we relished that literary execution with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say, for admission to Bohn’s Library.[76] Great indulgence is certainly to be extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one must finally draw the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.

It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly says. “They are,” he adds, “mere vers de société invested by the language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s Greek or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to paint the perfume of a flower.

Now, it is true enough, whatever iconoclasts like Stendhal may pretend, that in poetry thought cannot be divorced from form; it is the indissoluble union of both that makes the poem. Try to fancy any really great passage of verse expressed in other words, even of the same speech, and you see at once how important form is. Take once more Shakspeare’s

“Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty,”

and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them. To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”[77] Yet it is none the less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm. One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry; though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of that immortal line,

“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,”

and the Latin

“Mens tua lumine Fulgebat, ut sidus, remote,”

missing, as we do, the “lovely marriage of pure words,” that in the English is itself a poem. But take such a bit of verbal daintiness as George Darley’s “Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,” with its peculiar and saisissant rhythm, the perfection of verbal music; or Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” where the poetry—and undeniable poetry it is—lies in a certain faint aroma of suggestion that seems to breathe from the very words, and try to reproduce the effect of them in other speech. As well try with earthly tools to rebuild Titania’s palace of leaf shadows and the gossamer, to weave her mantle on any mortal loom out of moonbeams and the mist.

Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these. The noble thought which lies embodied in the Justum et tenacem propositi virum we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget the cares of life,

“Quo pinus et ingens albaque populus Umbram hospitalem consociare amant Ramis, et obliquo laborat Lympha fugax trepidare rivo”

—what art can coax away from its native soil? Do we find it in Francis?—

“Where the pale poplar and the pine Expel the sun’s intemperate beam; In hospitable shades their branches twine, And winds with toil, though swift, the tremulous stream”;

or in Creech—though Creech is here luckier than usual?—

“Where near a purling Spring doth glide In winding Streams, and softly chide The interrupting Pebble as it flows”;

or in Prout?—

“While onward runs the crooked rill, Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;

or in Lord Lytton?—

“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”

Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation, with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far from Horace as can be:

“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”

It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.

To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s Ad Pyrrham, for example (Ode v.). The Ad Pyrrham is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many mitten-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the Ad Neæram (Epod. xv.) and the Ad Barinen (Carm. ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the Ad Pyrrham.

But how do the translators treat it? Take Milton’s famous version, which everybody knows:

“What slender youth bedewed with liquid odors Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair?

“Plain in thy neatness,” etc.

—’tis as solemn as a Quaker conventicle. Nor, with reverence be it said en passant, is it altogether free from graver faults; undeniably elegant as it is, this translation has had quite as much praise as it deserved. It is full of those Latin constructions Milton loved—“on faith and changed gods complain” for fidem mutatosque deos flebit, “always vacant” for semper vacuam, “unwonted shall admire” for emirabitur insolens, etc.—which are nowhere more out of place than in a translation from the Latin. Some, indeed, claim that they carry with them and impart a certain flavor of the original to those unacquainted with it; but this seems to us a view at once fallacious and superficial. The office of translation into any language is surely to reproduce the original in the idiom of that language as nearly as may be; and though the theory, like all theories, may be pressed to an excess—as we think Mr. Morris has pressed it, for example, in his translation of the Æneid—better that than such deformities as

“Always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee.”

It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant; it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized and involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he falls short of the full sense of his original. Potenti maris deo, the commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for simplex munditiis misses the entire significance of the latter word, which implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold hair. Ben Jonson’s

“Give me a look, give me a face That makes simplicity a grace,”

hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically. Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word vacuam we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea” for the very best version we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “oceano dissociabili.”

This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as “fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness lacking in that of Milton’s:

“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade, Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom Your yellow hair you braid.

“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change, Viewing the rough black sea With eyes to tempests strange,” etc.

So true, so simple! We are not much nearer to simplex munditiis than before. Martin is not here at his best, and Francis is unusually successful: “dress’d with careless art” and “consecrate the pictured storm” are felicities he does not always attain. Prout is chiefly noticeable for yielding to the almost irresistible temptation of a false beacon in intentata nites:

“I the false light forswear, A shipwreck’d mariner”;

and Leigh Hunt’s, though but a paraphrase, is surely a very happy one:

“For whom are bound thy tresses bright With unconcern so exquisite?”

and

“Though now the sunshine hour beguiles His bark along thy golden smiles, Trusting to see thee for his play For ever keep smooth holiday,”

admirably elude, if they do not meet, the difficulties of the Latin. But in none of these, nor in any other rendering we have seen, is there any trace of that nuance of sarcasm or polite banter we seem to taste in the original. The only American version we remember to have met with is not in this respect more successful:

“In thy grotto’s cool recesses, Dripping perfumes, lapped in roses, Say what lissome youth reposes, Pyrrha, wooing thy embrace? Braid’st for whom those tawny tresses, Simple in thy grace?

“Ah! how oft averted heaven Will he weep, and thy dissembling. And, poor novice, view with trembling O’er the erewhile tranquil deep, By the angry tempest driven, Billowy tumult sweep;

“Now who in thy smile endearing Basks, with foolish fondness hoping To his love thou’lt e’er be open, To his wooing ever kind, Knowing not the fitful veering Of the faithless wind?

“Hapless they rash troth who plight thee! On the sacred wall my votive Picture, set with pious motive, Shows I hung in Neptune’s fane My wet garments to the mighty Monarch of the main.”

It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us, at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the Ad Pyrrham, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.

Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well be abandoned at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his ode to Milton,

“Whose guardian-angels, Muriel, Abdiel, Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armory, Tow’r, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset,”

gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how different from the Horatian cadence:

“Æquam memento rebus in arduis Servare mentem, non secus in bonis Ab insolenti temperatam Lætitia, moriture Delli.”[78]

As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s Knife Grinder for our model or Mr. Swinburne’s

“All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close, and with eyes of iron, Stood and beheld me,”

we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:

“Scandit æratas vitiosa naves Cura, nec turmas equitum relinquit Ocior cervis, et agente nimbos Ocior Euro.”[79]

But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the metrical variety and richness of the Odes by a corresponding variety and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their command, for it is only during that period that English poets have begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language than his

“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child, Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”

The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of

“Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony”

in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. Suckling’s Session of the Poets, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.[80]

It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the Solvitur acris hiems (Carm. i. iv.):

“Now Venus loves to group Her merry troop Of maidens, Who, while the moon peeps out, Dance with the Graces round about Their queen in cadence; While far ’mid fire and noise Vulcan his forge employs, Where Cyclops grim aloft their ponderous sledges poise.”

A paraphrase that, not a translation; but not even Horace could find it in his heart to gainsay so graceful a paraphrase. Another effective metrical arrangement which shows off well Prout’s astonishing copiousness of rhyme is that of the Quum tu Lydia (i. 13):

“But where meet (thrice fortunate!) Kindred hearts and suitable, Strife comes ne’er importunate, Love remains immutable; On to the close they glide ‘mid scenes Elysian, Through life’s delightful vision.”

Mr. Martin is here somewhat closer and not less skilful in handling his metre:

“Oh! trebly blest, and blest for ever, Are they whom true affection binds, In whom no doubts or janglings sever The union of their constant minds; But life in blended current flows Serene and sunny to the close.”

Compare with these Francis, who is scarcely more literal than Prout, and not so literal as Martin:

“Thrice happy they whom love unites In equal rapture and sincere delights, Unbroken by complaints or strife Even to the latest hours of life.”

Is not the advantage in point of poetry altogether on the side of the moderns, and is it not largely due to their superior mastery of rhythm? The passage, it may be said, has been paraphrased by Moore in the lines,

“There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.”

Both Mr. Martin and Prof. Conington have given close and successful attention to this part of their task. But it was left for Lord Lytton to attempt something like a systematic imitation of the Horatian metres. His plan, as set forth in his preface, “was in the first instance to attempt a close imitation of the ancient measure—the scansion being, of course (as in English or German hexameters and pentameters), by accent, not quantity—and then to make such modifications of flow and cadence as seemed to me best to harmonize the rhythm to the English ear, while preserving as much as possible that which has been called the type of the original.” Something of this kind, no doubt, Milton had in view in the measure he took for his Ad Pyrrham, and which the Wartons and Professor Conington adapted to the same purpose after him, the latter, however, adding the embellishment or, as Milton himself had called it, the “barbarous jingle” of rhyme. Milton’s measure (well known as that of Collins’ “Ode to Evening”), which consists of two unrhymed iambic pentameters, followed by two unrhymed iambic trimeters—or, to be “more English and less nice,” of two ordinary blank-verses followed by two three-foot verses—resembles Horace’s metre, which the grammarians would tell us is the third Asclepiadian strophe, “rather,” says Prof. Conington, “in the length of the respective lines than in any similarity of the cadences.” Lord Lytton attempted something more, and with only partial success, though the task, it must be owned, was not an easy one. Horace, in the Odes and Epodes, uses eighteen different varieties of metre, ranging from the grave sadness of what is called the first Archilochian strophe, the lovely measure in which one of the loveliest of all the Odes is written (iv. 7)—

“Diffugere nives; redeunt jam gramina campis Arboribusque comæ,”[81]

to the quick sharpness of the first iambic strophe in which the poet mauls the unsavory Mævius. And not only this, but each of these metres is used by Horace to express widely differing moods of feeling. Thus, the same measure which in the beautiful lament for Quinctilius breathes the tenderest spirit of grief and resignation, serves equally well to guy Tibullus on his luckless loves, to sound “stern alarums” to the absent Cæsar, or to bid Virgil or Varius to “delightful meetings.” The Sapphic rises to the lofty height of the Carmen Seculare or stoops to chide a serving-boy for his super-serviceable zeal; is equally at home with an invocation to the gods or an invitation to dinner; while the Alcaic—what subject is there that in Horace’s hands the Alcaic cannot be made to sing?

This flexibility of the Latin metres Lord Lytton has recognized, and sought to meet by a corresponding variation of his own, “according as the prevalent spirit of the ode demanded lively and sportive or serious and dignified expression.” Thus, for the Alcaic stanza he employs “two different forms of rhythm”; one as in i. 9:

“See how white in the deep fallen snow stands Soracte; Laboring forests no longer can bear up their burden; And the rush of the rivers is locked, Halting mute in the gripe of the frost”;

the other as in i. 34:

“Worshipper rare and niggard of the gods, While led astray, in the Fool’s wisdom versed, Now back I shift the sail, Forced in the courses left behind to steer,”

or, with a slight modification, as in i. 35:

“Goddess who o’er thine own loved Antium reignest, Present to lift Man, weighted with his sorrows Down to life’s last degree, Or change his haughtiest triumphs into graves.”

For the Sapphic, likewise, he has two varieties; for the statelier odes three lines of blank-verse and what may be called an English Adonic; for “the lighter odes a more sportive and tripping measure.” Thus, for iv. 2 he gives us:

“Julus, he who would with Pindar vie Soars, with Dædalian art, on waxen wings, And, falling, gives his name unto the bright Deeps of an ocean”;

for iii. 14 a nearer approach to the Knife Grinder jingle:

“Nothing cools fiery spirits like a gray hair; In every quarrel ’tis your sure peacemaker: In my hot youth, when Plancus was the consul, I was less patient.”

Lord Lytton’s experiment is full of interest to Horatians—as, indeed, what translation is not?—even the worst, even the Rev. Mr. Sewell’s, may be of use in teaching the translator how not to do it—and his failures, which are many, are scarcely less instructive than his successes, which seem to us fewer than for so bold an essay could be wished; but both alike are suggestive of many possibilities. It is in the lighter odes that he is least satisfactory, and we doubt if these can be done full justice to without the aid of rhyme. Horace’s grace of form in these is so delicate and exquisite that it taxes all the resources and embellishments of our English verse to give any adequate idea of it. Take, as an illustration of Lord Lytton’s method, and as giving, perhaps, the measure of his success, his version of that delicious little landscape, Ad Fontem Blandusiæ (iii. 13):

“Fount of Blandusia, more lucid than crystal, Worthy of honeyed wine, not without flowers, I will give thee to-morrow a kid Whose front, with the budded horn swelling.

“Predicts to his future life Venus and battles; Vainly! The lymph of thy cold running waters He shall tinge with the red of his blood, Fated child of the frolicsome people!

“The scorch of the Dogstar’s fell season forbears thee; Ever friendly to grant the sweet boon of thy coolness To the wild flocks that wander around, And the oxen that reek from the harrow.

“I will give thee high rank and renown among fountains, When I sing of the ilex o’erspreading the hollows, Of rocks whence in musical fall Leap thy garrulous silvery waters.”

This is better because more literal than Joseph Warton’s unrhymed version in the Miltonian stanza, with which it may be compared:

“Ye waves that gushing fall with purest streams, Blandusian fount! to whom the products sweet Of richest wines belong, And fairest flowers of spring, To thee a chosen victim will I slay— A kid who, glowing in lascivious youth, Just blooms with budding horn, And, with vain thought elate, Yet destines future war; but, ah! too soon His reeking blood with crimson shall enrich Thy pure, translucent flood And tinge thy crystal clear. Thy sweet recess the sun in midday hour Can ne’er invade; thy streams the labor’d ox Refresh with cooling draughts And glad the wand’ring herds. Thy name shall shine, with endless honors graced, While in my shell I sing the nodding oak That o’er thy cavern deep Waves his embowering head.”

It would almost seem as if the author of this version had taken pains to rub out every Horatian characteristic. The pretty touch of the loquaces lymphæ is thus omitted, unless the first line be meant to do duty for it, while by such padding as “chosen victim” and “endless honors” Horace’s sixteen lines are diluted into twenty—a danger to which the unrhymed translator, constantly seeking by inversions and paraphrases to cover the baldness of his medium, is peculiarly liable. Whatever may be said to the contrary, rhyme compels conciseness, and helps to point quite as often as it entices to expansion. Prof. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Warton’s, but rhymed in alternate lines, will be found greatly superior to it, and is perhaps, on the whole, the best we have seen—better even than Mr. Martin’s, who cannot get his Latin into less than twenty-four octosyllabic lines. Instead of giving either, let us see if all that is essential in Horace cannot be given in the same number of lines of what is known as the Tennysonian stanza, which is somewhat less capacious than the Alcaics of the original, though, by a certain pensive grace, peculiarly fitted to render the sentiment of this delightful ode:

“Blandusian fount, as crystal clear, Of garlands worthy and of wine, A kid to-morrow shall be thine, Whose swelling brows, just budding, bear

“The horns that presage love and strife; How vainly! For his crimson blood Shall stain the silver of thy flood With all the herd’s most wanton life.

“The burning Dogstar’s noontide beam Knows not thy secret nook; the ox Parched from the plough, the fielding flocks, Lap grateful coolness from thy stream.

“Thee, too, ‘mid storied founts my lay Shall shrine: thy bending holm I’ll sing, Shading the grottoed rocks whence spring Thy laughing waters far away.”

Though terseness and fidelity are two of the chief merits claimed by the advocates of the unrhymed measures, it is just here that they oftenest fail; and Lord Lytton is no exception. Space permits us to give but few instances. “Trodden by all, and only trodden once,” is Lord Lytton’s version of calcanda semel, i. 28—seven English words for two Latin, and the sense then but vaguely given at best. Feriuntque summos Fulgura montes is in like manner diluted into

“The spots on earth most stricken by the lightning Are its high places.”

Awkwardness of style, too, is a much more frequent characteristic of Lord Lytton’s renderings than we should look for either from his own command of style or the freedom which disuse of rhyme is claimed to ensure. For instance, in ii. 2:

“Him shall uplift, and on no waxen pinions, Fame, the survivor,”

might surely have been bettered; and in the same ode a line in the stanza already quoted above, Latius regnes avidum domando Spiritum, is translated, “Wider thy realm a greedy soul subjected,” which would be scarcely intelligible without the Latin. “Bosom more seen through than glass” is by no means the neatest possible equivalent for per lucidior vitro, and such expressions as “closed gates of Janus vacant of a war,” “lest thou owe a mock,” “but me more have stricken with rapture,” are scarcely English.

Nevertheless, with all its faults and shortcomings, Lord Lytton’s essay is in some respects the most interesting translation of Horace that has yet appeared, and may pioneer the way to more fortunate results in the same direction. It has, at least, the raison d’être which Mr. Matthew Arnold denies to such translations as Wright’s and Sotheby’s Homer; it has a distinct and novel method of its own, and does not simply repeat the method and renew the faults and virtues of any predecessor. The American edition, it is worthy of remark, is printed in the old-fashioned way, with the Latin text to face the English—an innovation, or, more properly, a _re_novation, which will no doubt be welcome to lovers of the Venusian, whose love has outlived their memory, and who, though loyal to the spirit of our poet, are no longer so familiar with his letter as in the days, the far-off sunny days, when Horace was the heaviest task that life had yet laid upon us.

We have dwelt upon this subject at somewhat greater length than we intended; for to us it is full of a fascination we should be glad to hope we had made our readers in some sort share. But it has also a practical side which the most fanatical opponent of the classics, the most zealous upholder of utilitarian education, must recognize and admit. As a means of training in English composition, as an aid to discover the resources of our own tongue, there is no better practice than translating Horace into English verse, with due attention to his epithets. That, perhaps, may serve in some degree to reconcile the practical mind to his retention in the modern curriculum, even though Homer be kicked out of doors and Virgil sent flying through the window; for a practical man is none the worse equipped for business in being able to say what he means in “good set phrase.” To be sure it does not ask the pen of an Addison to write an order for a “hnd. trces. lard,” but we dare say if Mr. Richard Grant White were called upon to make out a bill of lading, he would do it none the worse for knowing all about the English language that is worth knowing, if not more than is worth telling. There are mysteries in our English speech that the Complete Letter-Writer, or even the “editorials” of the daily newspaper, do not quite explore, and some of these our old friend Horace may help us to find out. Fas est ab hoste doceri.

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THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN.

CONCLUSION.

Father Maurice sped upon his journey to Moynalty Castle. The dinner hour was eight o’clock, but he had delayed so long with his guest that it took the little pony her “level best” to do the seven miles within the necessary time.

“Av we wor wanst beyant the Mouladharb berrin’ groun’ I wudn’t care a thraneen; but sorra a step the little pony’ll pass it afther dark,” observed Murty Mulligan, bestowing a liberal supply of whip upon the astonished nag, whose habit it was to proceed upon her travels at her own sweet will, innocent of lash, spur, or admonition.

“Tut, tut! Nonsense, Murty! Push on.”

“It’s thruth I’m tellin’ yer riverince. We’re at it. See that, now—curse of Crummell on her! she won’t put wan foot afore the other,” adding, in a whisper full of consternation: “Mebbe she sees ould Casey, that was berried a Munda. He was a terrible naygur—”

“Jump down and take her head,” said the priest.

“Be the powers! I’ll have for to carry her, av we want to raich the castle to-night.”

Father Maurice dismounted, as did Murty, and, by coaxing and blandishment of every description, endeavored to induce the pony to proceed; but the animal, with its ears cocked, and trembling in every limb, refused to budge an inch.

“Och, wirra, wirra! we’re bet intirely. It’s Missis Delaney he sees, that died av the horrors this day month,” growled Mulligan.

“Silence, you jackass!” cried Father Maurice, “and help me to blindfold the pony.”

This ruse eventually succeeded, and they spun merrily along the road, the terrified animal clattering onwards at racing speed.

“This pace is dangerous, Murty,” said the priest.

“Sorra a lie in it, yer riverince.”

“Pull in.”

“I can’t hould her. She’s me hands cut aff, bad cess to her!”

“Is the road straight?”

“Barrin’ a few turns, it’s straight enough, sir.”

The words had hardly escaped his lips when the wheel attached to the side of the car upon which the priest was sitting came into contact with a pile of stones, the car was tilted upwards and over, Father Maurice shot into a thorn hedge, and Murty Mulligan landed up to his neck in a ditch full of foul and muddy water, while the pony, suddenly freed from its load, and after biting the dust, quietly turned round to gaze at the havoc it had made.

“Are ye kilt, yer riverince? For I’m murdhered intirely, an’ me illigant Sunda’ shuit ruined complately. Och, wirra, wirra! how can I face the castle wud me duds consaled in mud? How can I uphould Monamullin, an’ me worse nor a scarecrow? Glory be to God! we’re safe anyhow, an’ no bones bruck. O ye varmint!” shaking his fist at the unconscious cause of this disaster, “its meself that’ll sarve ye out for this. Won’t I wallop ye, ye murdherin’ thief, whin I catch a hould of ye!”

“Hold your nonsense, Murty. How near are we to the castle?”

“Sorra a know I know, yer riverince; the knowledgeableness is shuk out o’ me intirely.”

“The shafts are broken.”

“Av course th’ are.”

“Here, help me to shove the car over to the ditch and pile the cushions under this hedge. God be praised! neither of us is even scratched.”

A carriage with blazing lamps came along.

“Hi! hi! hi!” roared Murty, “we’re wracked here. Lind us a hand! We’re desthroyed be a villain av a pony that seen a ghost, an’ we goin’ to dine at Moynalty Castle.”

The carriage belonged to Mr. Bodkin, the senior member for the county, who was only too delighted to act the Good Samaritan; and as he, with his wife and daughter, was bound for the castle, which still lay two miles distant, the meeting proved in every respect a fortunate one.

The worthy priest was received by his host and hostess with the most flattering courtesy, and by Miss Julia Jyvecote as though he formed part and parcel of her personal property. He took Mrs. Jyvecote into dinner, and said grace both before and after.

Father Maurice was positively startled with the splendor and exquisite taste of the surroundings. The room in which they dined—not the dinner-room, but a delightful little snuggery, where the anecdote was the property of the table, and the mot did not require to be handed from plate to plate like an entrée—was richly decorated in the Pompeiian style, with walls of a pale gray, while the hangings were of a soft amber relieved by red brown. The dinner was simply perfect, the entourages in the shape of cut glass, flowers, and fruit—veritable poems—while the quiet simplicity and easy elegance lent an indescribable charm which fell upon the simple priest like a potent spell.

Every effort that good breeding combined with generous hospitality could make was called into requisition in order to render the timid, blushing clergyman perfectly at home; and so happily did this action on the part of his entertainers succeed that before the lapse of a few moments he felt as though he had lived amongst them for years.

Mrs. Jyvecote promised to send him flowers for the altar, and Julia to work an altar-cloth for him.

“I must go over and pay you a visit, father,” she said. “I am one of your parishioners, although I go to Mass at Thonelagheera.”

“I wish you would, my dear child; but I have no inducements to offer you, although at present perhaps I have.” And he narrated the arrival of the guest to whom Mrs. Clancy was playing the rôle of châtelaine during his absence.

“Why, this is quite a romance, Father Maurice. I must see your artist coûte que coûte, and shall drive over next week.”

But fate determined that she should drive over the next day.

When, upon the following morning, Father Maurice came to examine the condition of his pony, he found both the knees barked and the luckless animal unfit to travel.

“We couldn’t walk her home, Murty, could we?” he asked of his factotum.

“Och, the poor crayture couldn’t stir a step wudout tears comin’ to her eyes. Me heart is bleedin’ for her this minnit,” replied the wily Mulligan, sagaciously perceiving that so long as the pony remained at the castle he should abide with her; and as his reception in the servants’ hall had been of the same flattering description as that of his master up-stairs, he resolved to continue in such delightful quarters as long as he possibly could.

“Poor Rosy!” he cried, affectionately scratching the pony’s forehead, “shure it’s yerself that wud dance on yer head for his riverince, av ye wor able; but yer bet up, poor little wumman, an’ it’s rest ye want for a cupple o’ days, anyhow.”

When Father Maurice mentioned the predicament he found himself in, Mrs. Jyvecote instantly proposed sending him home in the carriage, since he could not be induced to prolong his stay; but Julia insisted upon driving him herself to Monamullin in her basket phaeton; and so, laden with flowers, hot-house pines, grapes, a hamper of grouse and a brace of hares, and under solemn promise to make another visit at no distant date, Father Maurice turned homewards under the “whip” of his newly-found and exceedingly charming parishioner.

As they jogged along by the sad sea-wave she told him the entrancing history of her conversion—of her meeting with Cardinal Manning at a garden party at Holland House, and of a casual conversation which led to so much.

Father Maurice felt as if he had a white-robed angel by his side, and revelled in the absorbing narrative until the phaeton stopped at the cottage gate. The pony was duly stabled, and, while the priest set forth to attend to a sick-call, Miss Jyvecote proceeded to the chapel, where she encountered his artist guest.

Brown started, despite himself, when Father Maurice mentioned her name.

“A parishioner of mine, Mr. Brown.”

“I—I saw you in the church just now,” muttered the artist. “It’s an awfully seedy—I mean it’s a very quiet little place.”

“I could pray more fervently in a church like that than in the Madeleine,” she replied in a soft, silvery voice.

“The Madeleine is too rowy, too many chairs creaking, too many swells, and all that sort of thing, you know.”

Insensibly the drawl of society had come upon him, and the slanginess of expression which passes current in Mayfair and Belgravia.

“Miss Jyvecote is going to brighten me up, Mr. Brown; she is going to work me an altar-cloth,” exclaimed the delighted priest.

“And I am going to paint you an altar-picture, a copy of Raphael’s Virgin and Child—that is, if you will kindly accept it,” he added, blushing to the roots of his hair.

“Oh! how charming, how generous,” cried Miss Jyvecote.

“My dear Mr. Brown,” said Father Maurice, crossing the room and taking his guest by the hand, “I am deeply, deeply sensible of the kindly, the noble spirit which actuates you to make this offer; but you are a young man, with a grand future before you, with God’s help, and by and by, when you have leisure, perhaps you will get a stiff letter from me calling on you to fulfil your promise. You’ll find me a very tough customer to deal with, I assure you.”

“He thinks I cannot afford it,” said Brown to himself; “and how delicately he has refused me!”

The entrance of Mrs. Clancy with a smoking dish of salmon cutlets turned the tide of the conversation, and in a few moments the artist found himself with Miss Jyvecote discussing the Royal Academy pictures of the last season, glorifying Millais, extolling Holman Hunt, raving over Leslie and Herbert, and ringing the changes over the pearly grays, changeful opals, amaranths, and primrose of Leighton. From London to the salon is easy transition, and from thence to the galleries of Dresden, Munich, and Florence. She had visited all, and to a purpose. He had lingered within their enchanting walls until every canvas became more or less a friend. There was a wonderful charm in this meeting. To Brown Miss Jyvecote was a listener freshly intelligent, naïvely sensible. To her the clever critiques of this high-bred yet humble artist savored of a romance written but unreal. It is scarcely necessary to say that when people drop thus upon a subject so charming, so inexhaustible, so refreshing the old Scytheman is utterly disregarded, and the sun was already sinking towards the west when Miss Jyvecote’s phaeton came to the gate.

“Have you any of your sketches here, Mr. Brown?” she asked, as she drew on her yellow dogskin driving-gloves.

“Only a few that I dashed off on my walk hither from Castlebar.”

They were glorious little bits of weather-worn granite, brilliant with gray, green, and orange lichens; luminous green seas and black rocks basking in the sunlight; fern-crowned inlets and cliffs glittering with bright wild flowers. She gushed over them. What girl does not gush over the sketches of a tall, handsome, earnest artist?

“Oh! if I might dare to ask you for one of them, Mr. Brown.”

“Take all,” he said.

She would not hear of this.

“They are your working-drawings, Mr. Brown?” selecting one, possibly the least valuable.

“Will you not require an escort, Miss Jyvecote, on your lonely drive?”

“Escort! No. In the first place, I shall probably not meet a human being; and, in the next, I should only meet a friend were I to encounter any one. I fear my prolonged visit has spoiled your work for to-day, Mr. Brown.”

“My work! You will hardly guess what I am pledged to do and the work I am about to commence. It is nothing less than a copy of the picture of Daniel O’Connell which hangs over the mantel-piece. It is for Mrs. Clancy, who is to adorn her kitchen wall with it.”

“Surely you are not in earnest?”

“Hélas! I am always in earnest, and so is Mrs. Clancy,” he added, laughingly narrating that worthy lady’s anxiety with reference to the artistic adornment of the back door.

“May we not hope to have the pleasure of seeing you at Moynalty? Father Maurice has promised us a visit. I’m sure my father will call and—”

“Pray do not trouble him. I never visit, and, as my stay here is only one of sufferance, I know not the moment I may be evicted by my ruthless landlord.”

“You should make an exception in our favor, Mr. Brown. We can show you a Claude, a doubtful Murillo, and a charming Meissonier. Our flowers, too, are worth coming to see—that is, they are wonderful for Connemara. Father Maurice, you must ask Mr. Brown to come over with you on Monday.”

“Of course, my dear child, of course. He’ll be enchanted with the castle. You’ll come, of course, Mr. Brown?” turning to our hero, who, however, remained silent, although brimming over with words he dared not speak.

“Then it’s au revoir, messieurs!” gaily exclaimed Miss Jyvecote, as she whirled rapidly away.

It would have surprised some of the artist’s London friends could they have peeped behind the scenes of his thoughts and gazed at them as naturalists do at working bees. It would have astonished them to hear him mutter as he watched the receding vehicle: “This is just the one fresh, fair, unspotted, and perfect girl it has been my lot to meet. Such a girl as this would cause the worst of us to turn virtuous and eschew cakes and ale.”

* * * * *

Mr. Brown had confided in one man ere dropping out of Vanity Fair. To this individual he now addressed himself, requesting of him to “drop down to O’Connor’s, the swell ecclesiastical stained-glass man in Berners Street, Oxford Street, and order a set of Stations of the Cross. You don’t know what they mean, old fellow, but the O’Connors will understand you. Let them be first class and glowing in the reds, yellows, blues, and greens of the new French school of colors. I don’t mind the price. Above all things let them have especially handsome frames of the Via Dolorosa pattern.” The letter went on to tell Mr. Dudley Poynter of his doings and the calm throb of the heart of his daily life. “There is not much champagne in it, Dudley, but there is a body that ne’er was dreamed of in your philosophy, or in that of the wild, mad wags of the smoking-room clique.”

Mr. Brown completed his copy of the Liberator, to the intense admiration of Father Maurice and the ecstasy of Mrs. Clancy. The worthy priest would not permit its being hung in the kitchen, though, but gave it the place of honor in the snug little sitting-room. It is needless to say that the entire population of Monamullin, including the cabin curs—who were now on terms of the closest intimacy with the artist—turned in after last Mass to have a look at the “picther o’ Dan.”

“Be me conscience! but it’s Dan himself—sorra a wan else,” cried one.

“I was at Tara, an’ it’s just as if he was givin’ Drizzlyeye [Disraeli] that welt about his notorious ancesthor, the impinitent thief on the crass,” observed another.

“Faix, it’s alive, it is. Look at the mouth, reddy for to say ‘Repale.’”

“There’s an eye!”

“Thrue for ye; there’s more fire in it than in ould Finnegan’s chimbly this minit.”

“Troth, it’s as dhroll as a pet pup’s.”

“Stan’ out o’ that, Mr. O’Leary, or ye’ll get a crack av his fist.”

“Three cheers for the painther, boys!”

These and kindred comments flung a radiated pleasure into the inner heart of the artist—that sanctum which as yet was green and fresh and limpid—while the eulogies, however quaintly and coarsely served up, bore the delicious fragrance which praise ever carries with it like a subtle perfume.

“The love of praise, howe’er concealed by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in every heart.”

Mr. Brown was enamored of his new existence—possibly with the child passion for toyland; but the passion endured, nevertheless, strengthening with each successive sunrise and maturing with every gloaming. An invitation, accompanied by a card, had arrived by special messenger for the artist, requesting the favor of his company, et cætera, et cætera, to which that gentleman responded in a polite negative, assigning no particular reason, but indulging in vague generalities. He had thought a good deal of Miss Jyvecote, and sat dreaming about her by the sea, his hands clasped around his knees and his beloved meerschaum stuck in his mouth—sat dreaming, and fighting against his dreams—fights in which fancy ever got the uppermost of the rude and real. A longing crept up out of the depths of his heart to see her once again, and to travel in the sunlighted path of her thoughts. One thing he was firmly resolved upon—not to leave Monamullin without another interview; though how this was to be brought about he did not very well see. Yes, he would see her just once more, and then stamp the whole thing out of his mind. He had been hit before, and had come smilingly out of the valley of desolation, and so he should again, although this was so utterly unlike his former experiences.

Father Maurice was charmed with his guest. He had never encountered anything like him—so bright, so genial, so cultured, so humble and submissive, and so anxious to oblige.

“Imagine,” said he in cataloguing his virtues to Larry Muldoon—“imagine his asking me to let him ring the bell for five o’clock Mass, and he a Protestant!”

The priest and his guest had long talks together, the latter drawing out his host—digging for the golden ore of a charming erudition, which lay so deep, but which “was all there.” Night after night did Father Maurice unfold from germ to bud, from bud to flower, from flower to fruit the grand truths of the unerring faith in which he was a day-laborer, the young artist drinking in the sublime teachings with that supreme attention which descends like an aureole. Father Maurice was, as it were, but engaged in thinking aloud, yet his thoughts fell like rain-drops, refreshing, grateful, and abiding.

The good priest, although burning with curiosity with regard to the antecedents of his guest, was too thorough a gentleman, had too great respect for the laws of broken bread and tasted salt, to ask so much as a single question. A waif from the great ocean of humanity had drifted into this little haven, and it should be protected until the ruthless current would again seize it to whirl it outwards and onwards. Miss Jyvecote betrayed her disappointment in various artless ways when Father Maurice arrived at the castle without the artist. “I’m sorry you didn’t fetch him along bon gré mal gré, father,” said Mrs. Jyvecote, “as papa goes to Yorkshire next week, and Juey can talk of no person but Mr. Brown.”

Miss Jyvecote blushed rosy red as she exclaimed: “What nonsense, mamma! You have been speaking a good deal more about him than I have. You rave over his sketch.”

“I think it immense.” Mrs. Jyvecote affected art, and talked from the pages of the Art Journal by the yard. “His aerial perspective is full of filmy tone, and his near foreground is admirably run in, while his sense of color would appear to me to be supreme.”

“Come, until I show you where I have hung it,” exclaimed Miss Juey, leading the priest up a winding stair into a turret chamber fitted up with that exquisite taste which a refined girl evolves like an atmosphere.

“You have really hung my guest most artistically. And such a frame! Where on earth did you get it?”

“I—I sent to Dublin for it—to Lesage’s, in Sackville Street.”

“I have no patience with the fellow for not coming over to see this joyous place,” said the priest, “and I really can’t understand his refusal.”

Miss Juey couldn’t understand it either, but held her peace.

According to Murty Mulligan’s veterinary opinion, the pony was still unfit to travel.

“It’s meself that’s watchin’ her like a magpie forninst a marrabone; but she is dawny still, the crayture! an’ it wud be a sin for to ax her to thravel for a cupple o’ days more, anyhow, your riverince.”

“Why, her knees are quite well, Murty.”

“But she’s wake, sir—as wake as Mrs. Clancy’s tay on the third wettin’—an’ I’m afeard for to thrust her; more betoken, yer riverince”—in a low, confidential tone—“she’s gettin’ a bellyful av the finest oats in the barony, that will stand to her bravely while she’s raisin’ her winther coat.”

Mr. Brown asked Father Maurice a considerable number of questions anent his visit, and was particularly anxious in reference to the departure of Mr. Jyvecote.

“He told me himself that he would leave Westport to-morrow by the night train for Dublin, in order to catch the early boat that leaves Kingston for Holyhead.”

Upon the following morning the artist, slinging his knapsack across his back, started in the direction of the Glendhanarrahsheen valley.

“I want to make a few sketches of the coast scenery about May Point,” he observed.

“There is better scenery in the Foil Dhuv, about two miles farther on; and, bless my heart! you’ll be quite close to Moynalty Castle, and why not go in and see their pictures, your own especially, in such a grand gilt Dublin frame?”

Simple priest! Artful artist!

It was a delightful morning that was shining over Monamullin as the artist quitted it en route to—May Point, of course. The sea, like a great sleeping monster, lay winking at the sun, and but one solitary ship was visible away in the waste—a brown speck in a flood of golden haze. If young gentlemen would only put the single “why?” to themselves in starting upon such expeditions, it might save them many a heartache; but they will not. Any other query but this one. What a talisman that small word in every effort of our lives!

Brown felt unaccountably joyous and brave, charmed with the present, and metaphorically snapping his fingers at the future. A morning walk by the deep and dark blue ocean summons forth this sensation. You bound upon air; champagne fills your veins; all the ills the flesh is heir to are forgotten, all the phantoms of care and sorrow are laid “a full fifty fathom by the lead.”

It is a glorious seed-time, when every thought bears luscious fruit.

He travels merrily onward, now humming a barcarolle, now whistling a fragment of a bouffe, until he reaches the gloomy defile known as the Valley of Glendhanarrahsheen. A turn of the sylvan sanded road brings him in sight of the lordly turrets of Moynalty; another turn, and lo! he comes upon no less a personage than Miss Jyvecote, who, with her married sister, a Mrs. Travers, are driving in the direction whence he had come. Juey was Jehu, and almost pulled the ponies upon their haunches on perceiving our hero.

“This is a condescension, Mr. Brown,” she said, presenting him to her sister. “Will you take a seat?”

“Thanks, no; I am about to ascend that mountain yonder,” pointing vaguely in the direction of the range known as the Twelve Pins.

“Then we shall expect you to luncheon at two o’clock.”

“I’m afraid not. I purpose returning by the other road.”

“What road? There is no other road.”

“Across country.”

“Then you do not intend honoring us with a visit?” Her tone was vexed, if not haughty.

Now, he had quitted Monamullin with no other intention than that of proceeding straight to the castle, and yet he replies in the negative. Let those better versed in the mysteries of the human heart than I am analyze his motives. I shall not endeavor to do so.

“Don’t you think you are acting rather shabbily?” she said, preparing to resume her drive.

He laughed.

“Au plaisir, then!” And with a stately salutation, courteous enough but nothing more, she swept onwards.

He watched the phaeton go whirling along the white road and disappear round a huge fern-covered boulder, and his vexation with himself grew intolerable.

“What an ass, what a brute I have been! What could I have been thinking about? Was I asleep or mad? Invited to the house, I actually refuse to pay the stereotyped visit. Why a counter-jumper would know better. How charming she looked! And that delicious blush when she met me! She seemed really pleased, too. What can she think of me? My chance is gone.”

He seated himself on the stump of a felled tree in his favorite attitude, having lighted his pipe.

“Might I thrubble yer honner for a thrifle o’ light or a bit of a match?” asked a passing peasant.

“With pleasure; take a dozen!”

The man looked puzzled; he had never seen wax vestas till now.

“They look mighty dawny, yer honner.”

“Do you belong to the castle?” asked our hero. Somehow or other the castle and its inmates were ever uppermost in his thoughts now.

“Yis, sir.”

“Is Mr. Jyvecote at home?”

“No, yer honner. I met him this mornin’ at Billy’s Bridge, makin’ hard for Westport.”

The cards all in his favor, and he wouldn’t play his hand! What did it mean? Would he go up to the castle, and, announcing himself to the châtelaine, pay that visit which conventionality demanded? No; he had swung into another current, and he would not alter his course. It was better as it was—ay, far better. And there came a sort of desolate feeling upon him, smiting him drearily like a dull ache. Had he seen the last of her? Was his life henceforth to be unlighted by the radiance of her presence? Here, in the mystic silence of Glendhanarrahsheen, came the revelation. Here did his own secret surprise him. He had allowed the image of this fair young girl to twine itself around his heart, till he now felt as if he could fling aside pride, reserve, past and future, just to hear her voice once more, to feel the tender pressure of her tiny hand.

And so he sat there dreaming, and fighting with his dreams, until his tobacco “gave out,” and until, shaking himself together, he summoned a supreme effort to help him on his road.

“It won’t do to be caught skulking here,” he thought.

The soft white shingle drawn from the brown-black waters of the lake muffle the sound of approaching wheels, and, ere he can return to a coign of vantage, the phaeton flashes past.

I have already stated that my hero was a young gentleman of warm temper, great energy, and prone to sudden impulses and unconsidered actions, and on this occasion he was true to his nature, for he shouted “Stop!” with the authoritative tone of a post-captain on a quarter-deck.

Miss Jyvecote pulled up.

The artist, glowing with a fierce excitement, plunged down the road and came up to the vehicle.

“Miss Jyvecote,” he pants, his handsome face flushed, his eyes flashing, “I don’t want you to think me a brute. I do not know why I acted so rudely this morning. I left Monamullin on purpose to come and visit you. Father Maurice says that open confession is good for the soul. You have it now. Do, please do forgive me.”

“Hand and glove,” she exclaims, holding out her coquettishly-gloved hand.

He jumped into the back seat, and, in a flutter of joyous commotion, was whirled to the grand entrance of the castle.

“You must first come and see my picture, Mr. Brown,” exclaimed Miss Jyvecote, leading the way to the turret chamber.

There was a courteous flattery in this that caused the heart of the artist to swell in admiring gratitude.

Later on they visited the gardens and the conservatories, tasting green figs and toying with luscious bunches of bursting grapes; and by and by came the presentation to Mrs. Jyvecote, who complimented him in pre-Raphaelite terms upon his greens, grays, opals, and blues.

“We want some one to continue the fascinating pages of Hook,” she said, “and I feel assured, Mr. Brown, that next year’s Academy will see you ‘on the line.’”

After luncheon they repaired to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Travers indulged in chromatic fireworks upon a superb Erard piano; and when she had risen the artist seated himself unasked, and sang a little love-song of Shelley’s in a baritone that would have pushed Mr. Santley a l’outrance. Song was one of Mr. Brown’s gifts, and his voice was cultivated to perfection. A deep, rich voice, sweet, sad words, with perfect enunciation of every syllable—ma foi, there are moments, and there are moments, and this was one of the latter in the life of Julia Jyvecote.

He sang Gounod’s Ave Maria as that sublime hymn has been rarely sung in a drawing-room—sang it with a religious fervor, and with a simple intensity of feeling that wrought its own magic. He felt his success, and smiled gravely to himself as he bent over the instrument, playing the closing chords ever so softly, until note after note fainted in sheer melody.

He was asked for Annabel Lee—for “that love that was more than love”—but refused. He possessed Tom Moore’s secret, and, having produced the desired effect, faded out like his own last notes. Mrs. Jyvecote tackled him upon art, Mrs. Travers upon music, and Miss Jyvecote was silent. Somehow or other in talking to her he was stupid and confused, while in conversing with the others he was at his best.

Pressed on all sides to stop for dinner and remain the night, he could scarcely refuse, although pleading dress and the probable anxiety of his host. The first point was settled by a declaration upon the part of his entertainers that it would be a treat to sit down in morning toilettes; the second by the despatching of a boy to Monamullin. Mr. Brown resigned himself to his fate and went with the stream.

How beautiful Miss Jyvecote looked in the mild radiance of the wax-lights which lit up the rooms at night—wax-lights everywhere—in the hands of Ninive dancing-girls, Dresden shepherdesses, oxidized silver sconces, and girandoles of quaint and cunning design. What rapture in being seated beside her, engaged in turning over the pages of a superb photographic album too heavy for her dainty lap, and resting upon his knees!

Why does he start and turn pale?

Why does Miss Jyvecote gaze at him, and with a merry laugh exclaim:

“Why, Mr. Brown, this photo is the very image of you.”

Beneath the photograph were the words:

“To Jasper Jyvecote from Ernest Noel.”

* * * * *

“Three days away from me! Why, it appeared three weeks,” exclaimed Father Maurice, as the artist returned to the cosy cottage of the amber thatch and snow-white walls. “I knew you would appreciate the Jyvecotes, and I felt that they would appreciate you. Have you taken any sketches?”

“One, the lake of Glendhanarrahsheen, which I mean to finish; and then, padre, I must say adios to Monamullin for many a long day.”

“Tut, tut, tut, man! we can’t do without you,” said the priest; “and mind you, Mr. Brown, I’m sure the ladies at Moynalty would have their likenesses done, and give you a good deal of money for them, too—probably as much as five pounds apiece.”

“Five pounds apiece,” thought the artist, “and Millais getting two thousand guineas for a single portrait!”

“And I’m delighted to tell you, my dear friend, that your O’Connell has already got you a job. Mr. Muldoon—you might have noticed his shop nearly opposite the chapel, a most flourishing concern—is anxious to have his likeness done, and will have his wife and mother painted also, as well as his five children and his collie; and if his maiden aunt comes over from Castlebar he’ll throw her in, provided you can draw her chaise. So I think,” added Father Maurice triumphantly, “I have been doing good business for you in your absence.”

“Splendid, my valued host! But before I can touch these commissions I must finish the lake.”

“Of course, of course; there’s no hurry. But, mind you, Muldoon is ready money, and all you young fellows in the world require a little of that—not that you want it here,” he cried hastily, lest his guest might suppose that anything was required of him; “but when you take a day in Westport, or perhaps as far as Sligo, you’ll want many little things that couldn’t be had here for all the gold in the Bank of Ireland.”

The three days Mr. Brown had spent at Moynalty completely riveted the fetters which might have been easily burst ere the iron had grown cold. He endeavored to persuade himself that this visit was a mere romantic episode in the career of an artist—a thing to be talked of in the sweet by-and-by, and to be remembered as a delightful halting-place in the onward journey. He tried to fling dust in his mind’s eye, and but succeeded in closing the eye to everything save the glorious inviting present. He floated on from day to day in a sort of temporary elysium—why call it a fool’s paradise?—so tranquil that it was impossible pain or sorrow could be its outcome. An intimacy sprang up in this wild, strange, isolated place that a decade of London seasons could never have brought to ripeness, and he felt in the entourages of the palatial dwelling as though he was in his own old home. He rode, walked, boated, drew, and sang with Julia Jyvecote. She, too, would seem to live in the present, in the subtle, delicious consciousness of being appreciated—ay, and liked. The small chance of ever enjoying a repetition of his visit lent a peculiar charm to every circumstance, and forbade those questionings as to who’s who with which the favored ones of fortune probe the antecedents of the standers at the gates which enclose the upper ten thousand.

From the accident of the photograph he was playfully christened Sir Everard, and it became a matter of amused astonishment how readily he accepted the title and how unvaryingly he responded to a call upon the name.

He quitted Moynalty in a strange whirl of conflicting thought.

“May we not hope to see you in London, Mr. Brown?” said Mrs. Jyvecote, graciously coming upon the terrace to bid him adieu. “We go over in April, and our address is 91 Bruton Street, Mayfair. I know how sorry Mr. Jyvecote will be to have missed you, especially as he arrives here to-morrow; and I am also confident that he would be anxious to serve you—although,” she added, with a caressing courtesy, “a gentleman of Mr. Brown’s gifts requires no poor service such as we could render him.”

“How long do you remain in Monamullin, Mr. Brown?” asked Mrs. Travers.

“Until I finish a sketch of the lake here which Miss Jyvecote intends to honor me by accepting.”

“Oh! then we shall see much more of you.”

“I am compelled to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis upon the hope, Mrs. Travers. My working-drawing is here, and—”

“Then if Mohammed will not come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. I’ll drive my sister over to service next Sunday, and see how the priest, the painter, and the picture are getting on.”

It was a great wrench to the artist to tear himself away, and the sans adieux that fluttered after him on the evening breeze seemed sad and mournful. Was the barrier between Mr. Jyvecote and himself utterly impassable? Could it not be bridged over? He could not assume the initiative. He would see Jyvecote and his whole race in—Yokohama first; and yet what would he not do to gain the love of the youngest daughter of the house! Anything, everything. Pshaw! any chance of wooing and winning such a girl should be through the medium of his title, his position, and by passing beneath the yoke of society. What sheer folly to think of her from the stand-point upon which he had been admitted to her father’s house! As the artist he was patronized, as the baronet he could be placed; and yet to win her as the artist would just be one of those triumphs which lay within the chances occasionally vouchsafed by the rosy archer. She had been silent, reserved, and had seemed shy of him. She spoke much of a man in the Guards, a chum of her brother Jasper; possibly this Guardsman was the man.

In musings such as these did Mr. Brown pursue his work, and the picture came to life beneath his glowing hands. The canvas, with all the necessary et cæteras, had arrived from Dublin, the good priest marvelling considerably at the pecuniary resources of his guest. “His little all,” he thought, “and he’s going to make it a present to my sweet parishioner.”

But a great surprise was in store for Father Maurice.

Mr. Brown had issued instructions to his London friend to forward the Stations of the Cross, free of all carriage, to the Rev. Maurice O’Donnell, P.P., Monamullin, Ballynaveogin, County Mayo.

This order was promptly complied with, and a lovely autumnal evening beheld the whole village, curs and all, turn out to speculate upon the nature of the contents of four gigantic wooden cases which were deposited in the little garden attached to the priest’s cottage. It were utterly useless to endeavor to describe the furore occasioned by the opening the boxes; the excitement rose to a pitch never realized in Monamullin since the occasion of the visit of the Archbishop of Tuam—the Lion of the Fold of Juda. Father Maurice fairly wept for joy; Mrs. Clancy insisted upon doing the Stations there and then; and as each picture was brought to light, from the folds of wrappers as numerous as those surrounding the body of an Egyptian mummy, a hum of admiration was raised by the assembled and reverential multitude. The good priest, never guessing the source from whence the splendid gift had emanated, endeavored to trace it to Miss Jyvecote—a belief which Mr. Brown sedulously sustained—and Father Morris, full of the idea, chanted whole litanies in her praises, scarcely ever ceasing mention of her.

“I’ll drive over to-morrow and tender her my most devoted gratitude. I’ll offer up Masses for her. I’ll—”

“She will be here to-morrow, father. Mrs. Travers is to drive her over. Don’t you think we ought to see about hanging the Stations? It will please her immensely to see them in their places in the church.”

A hanging committee was appointed and the work of suspending the pictures carried into instant execution. The mouldy little edifice was soon ablaze with gilding and glorious coloring, which, alas! but seemed to display its general dinginess more glaringly.

“My poor little altar may hide its diminished head,” said Father Maurice mournfully, brightening up, however, as he added: “But, sure, I’ll soon have Miss Jyvecote’s beautiful altar-cloth.”

The “castle people” arrived upon the following morning and were escorted by the artist to the church.

“You have come over upon an interesting occasion, Miss Jyvecote,” he said; “Father Maurice has received an anonymous gift of a set of Stations of the Cross, and he thinks that you can tell him something about them.”

Great was the astonishment of the simple priest when Miss Jyvecote disclaimed all knowledge of the presentation.

“Why, father, you must think me as rich as Miss Burdett-Coutts,” she cried. “These beautiful works of art have cost hundreds of pounds. Mr. Brown here will tell you how much they cost,” turning to that gentleman. How often a stray shot hits home! Mr. Brown had the receipted bill in his pocket at that particular moment.

“They are French,” he said, evading the question.

“Consequently more expensive, n’est ce pas?”

“They are not badly done.”

“They are on the borderland of high art, Mr. Brown. Why do you pooh-pooh them?”

Poor Father Maurice was fairly nonplussed. All his guesses anent the donor fell short, while his surmises died from sheer inanition. It could not be the cardinal. Might it be little Micky O’Brien, that ran away to sea and was now coming home a rich man? or Paudheen Rafferty, who was a thriving grocer in Dublin? For the first time in his life the parish priest of Monamullin felt uneasy, if not unhappy. What did it portend? Who could possibly take so serious an interest in the affairs of his little parish? Mr. Malachi Bodkin might have done so in the olden time, but the famine of ‘48 left him barely able to keep up Corriebawn. Sir Marmaduke Blake was a scamp who racked his tenants and spent his money in debauchery.

“I suppose I shall learn some day,” sighed the priest. “I must be patient, but I wish it was to-day.”

After luncheon—Father Maurice’s breakfast—the artist and Miss Jyvecote strolled along the shore. The sun seemed to shine with a certain sadness, the gray ocean to moan as if in pain, and the shadow of the “we shall not meet again” to hang over Julia and her companion as they seated themselves in a secluded nook surrounded by huge rocks—a spot in which the world seemed to cease suddenly.

“And so you think of leaving?” she said after a long silence, during which she drew eccentric circles in the sand with the tip of her parasol.

“My kismet says ‘yes,’ Miss Jyvecote.”

“Does your kismet say whither?”

“It points to that little village on the Thames called London.”

“We go to London next month, en route to Egypt. My sister Gussie—you never met her—who has been in Italy with my uncle, is recommended Egypt for her chest. Papa received letters yesterday.”

“How long do you think you will remain in London?”

“Only a day or two.”

“Might I hope to see you?”

“Why not? Our address is 91 Bruton Street, Mayfair.”

“Is—is Mr. Delmege, of the Guards, going to Egypt?”

She looked gravely at him, full into his eyes, as she replied, somewhat coldly:

“Not that I am aware of.”

His heart gave one great bound, as though a dull, dead weight had been suddenly removed.

“I hope to see your handicraft on the walls of the Academy when we return.”

“Sabe Dios!” he said, clasping his knees with his hands, and gazing out across the moaning sea.

“If you try you will succeed.”

“I have a very poor opinion of my own power of success in anything. I am colorless, purposeless.”

“Neither one nor the other. You have a noble profession, a glorious talent, and Father Maurice says you have a good heart. With three such friends as companions life is a garden of flowers.”

“And yet till within the last few days I have found it but a desert.”

Then silence fell upon both.

“Father Maurice will miss you dreadfully,” she murmured. She was very pale, and her dark eyes turned upon him with mournful earnestness. “He has become so much attached to you; and the poor little altar will miss your artistic grouping of the flowers. Do you know,” she added, “I shall say an Ave Maria when I visit the little church, and for your conversion?”

“Is that a promise, Miss Jyvecote?”

“It is.”

“Will you also”—he stopped suddenly short, and dug his heel into the sand.

“The shay is waitin’ for ye, Miss Jewel, and Missis Thravers is roarin’ murdher,” cried Murty Mulligan, thrusting his shock head between a cleft in the rocks.

Brown sprang to his feet and offered Miss Jyvecote his arm. Neither spoke during the walk to the cottage. “If you should hear of me through your brother, do not think ill of me,” he whispered, as he handed her into the phaeton.

“What do you mean?” she asked in as low a tone.

“Promise me that you will not forget Brown, the poor artist.”

“It is scarcely necessary,” she murmured, as she gave him her hand.

There was a blank at the priest’s home when the artist left. Father Maurice missed him sadly—missed his hit at backgammon, his gay gossip, and his cheery company.

“He was a rale gintleman,” said Mrs. Clancy; “he wanted for to give me a goolden soverin—mebbe th’ only wan he had—but I tuk a crukked ha’penny for luck, an’ it’s luck I wish him wherever he goes.”

“He was the nicest man, an’ the nicest-mannered man, I ever seen,” chimed in Murty; “an’ I’m in dhread that I spoke too rough whin he offered me menumeration.”

“He promised to come here next summer, and he will keep his promise,” said the priest.

* * * * *

Mr. Jocelyn Jyvecote was seated in the study at 91 Bruton Street, engaged in perusing the columns of the Times. He had slept well, breakfasted well, and was thoroughly refreshed after his journey, as he had arrived in town from the East upon the previous day.

A servant entered with a card upon a silver salver.

Mr. Jyvecote adjusted his eyeglass and leisurely lifted the tiny bit of pasteboard. “What does this mean?” he cried, letting it fall again. “Is the gentleman waiting?”

“In the ‘all, sir.”

“Show him in.”

A tall, high-bred-looking young man entered. His face was pale and he somewhat nervously stroked a Henri Quatre beard.

“May I ask to what I am indebted for this visit from Sir Everard Noel?” demanded Mr. Jyvecote haughtily.

“I shall explain the purport of my visit in a few words.”

“Pray be seated.”

“Thanks! Mr. Jyvecote, there was bad blood and bitter feud between you and my poor father about the Ottley Farm.”

“You need scarcely remind me of that, Sir Everard.”

“There is bad blood between us, Mr. Jyvecote. You claimed it in right of an old lease that could not be discovered when the case came before the court, and I retain possession of it by law. The last time that we met we met in hot anger, and—and I used expressions for which I am very seriously sorry. So long as that farm is in possession of either of us it will lead to bad feeling, and I came here to-day to tell you what I mean to do about it.”

A somewhat less stern frown appeared upon Mr. Jyvecote’s features as he listened.

“Last autumn accident threw me into the wildest portion of the west of Ireland, a place not unknown to you—Monamullin.”

“It is within seven miles of Moynalty Castle.”

“I am aware of that. I was the guest of one of the purest men that God Almighty ever made—Father Maurice O’Donnell.”

“Your estimate is just, Sir Everard.”

“His soul is in his work, and his simple heart is fragmentarily divided amongst his little flock. I found his church dingy, dilapidated, falling. He is worthy of a better building; he is worthy of anything,” cried the young man enthusiastically.

Mr. Jyvecote bowed assent.

“Well, sir, I purpose selling Ottley Farm, and devoting the proceeds towards building a new church for Father Maurice O’Donnell. I have an offer of three thousand pounds for the farm, and here are the plans, prepared by Mr. Pugin—pure Gothic,” extracting a roll of papers from his pocket and eagerly thrusting them into the hands of the other.

Mr. Jyvecote leisurely surveyed them, while the young man regarded him with the most eager scrutiny. Suddenly flinging them upon the table, Mr. Jyvecote rose, and, taking Sir Everard Noel’s hand, shook it warmly.

“Noel, you are a fine-hearted fellow, and a chivalrous one. There are not ten—pshaw! there are not two men in London who would patch up a feud as you are doing to-day. I am better pleased to see you in this fine form than the acquisition of ten farms. Give the dear old priest his church, and for my daughter’s sake—I am as stanch a Protestant as yourself—I’ll put up an altar. Come up-stairs now, and I’ll present you to her.”

At this particular moment Miss Jyvecote entered the study. Upon perceiving our hero she grew deadly pale and then flushed up to the roots of her hair.

“Mr. Brown,” she said holding out her hand.

“You are mistaken, Juey; this is an old enemy and a new friend—Sir Everard Noel.”

* * * * *

The church was erected at Monamullin and is a perfect gem in its way, the talent of “all the Pugins” being thrown into the design. At its altar Everard Noel received his First Communion, and at its altar he was united to Julia Jyvecote by the proud, happy, and affectionate Father Maurice O’Donnell.

“An’ only for to think o’ me axin’ a rale live baronet for to paint the back doore,” is the constant exclamation of the worthy Mrs. Clancy.

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RECENT POLEMICS AND IRENICS IN SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.

It is not always easy to draw the line, either in theology or philosophy, that divides the part which has been dogmatically or scientifically defined from that which remains open ground of discussion in the Catholic schools. Occasionally we are aided and favored by a new definition, made with supreme and final authority by the Holy See, which adds something, not to the immutability of truth itself, which is eternally incapable of the slightest alteration, but to the quantity of science as fixed and immutable in the conceptions of the understanding intellect. The authority of reason may also suffice to add to the quantity of certain science by inductions from facts made evident by experience, which have the force of demonstration. But the dogmatic definitions are not so numerous and frequent as some minds, impatient of discussion and difference of opinion, may desire. Rational demonstration, though fully sufficient to define scientific truth and terminate doubt in the understanding of those who clearly and distinctly apprehend it, is not always understood sufficiently for this purpose even by all intelligent, educated minds, at least for a considerable period. Discussion on important points is not, therefore, terminated between different Catholic schools, and agreement in doctrine established, as completely and speedily as might be desired by those who have a strong sense of the importance of unity in theological and philosophical doctrine. Some, who are animated by a polemical spirit, are disposed to claim for the doctrines of their own particular school a greater amount of dogmatic or scientific authority than that which is generally conceded to them. They are disposed to amplify the import of decisions or declarations made by the authority of the church, to magnify the authority of great doctors and masters in Catholic science, and to extend as far as possible the claim of metaphysical or moral certitude for the doctrines which they advocate. Others are animated by a more irenical spirit. They desire to moderate polemical ardor; to control the zeal for the triumph of particular systems, and the exaltation of individual masters in wisdom, within reasonable bounds; to harmonize all branches of science with each other; to observe the just limitations of dogmatic or scientific certainty; to extend the range of rational science by calm discussion which has only the attainment of truth in view; and, without compromising orthodox doctrine, to leave open and free to argument all that domain which has not been closed in by any final definition of competent authority. The polemical and irenical tendencies are not in real opposition. They are elements capable of combination with each other. We do not believe that differences of opinion among Catholic schools will ever be entirely terminated or controversy cease. Yet there is always an increasing approximation toward unity, and the irenical spirit aids this movement by diminishing misunderstandings and moderating controversial ardor. The Holy See not only at times decides and terminates controversies by a judgment, but also, at other times, refuses to pronounce judgment, and admonishes those who seek to stretch too far the import of her decisions to respect the liberty of opinion and discussion which she allows.

We have an instance of this in the subjoined documents respecting the philosophy of the venerable and holy Father Rosmini—a system which has at present a considerable following and is in very decided opposition to the ideological doctrine of the Thomist school, as well as to other parts of the common, scholastic teaching.

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ROSMINI’S WORKS, AND THE JUDGMENT OF ROME UPON THEM.

(The following is a translation of the official communication which appeared in the Osservatore Romano of June 20, 1876.)

MOST ILLUSTRIOUS MARQUIS:

In No. 136 of your esteemed journal, June 14, 1876, I have read with pain an article on a little work entitled “_Antonio Rosmini and the Civiltà Cattolica before the Sacred Congregation of the Index_, by Giuseppe Buroni, Priest of the Mission.”

You are well aware that the works of the distinguished philosopher Antonio Rosmini were made the subject of a most rigorous examination by the Sacred Congregation of the Index from 1851 to 1854, and that at the close of this examination our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., still happily reigning, in the assembly of the most reverend consultors and the most eminent cardinals, whose votes he had heard, and over whom he deigned, with a condescension seldom shown, to preside in person, after invoking with fervent prayers the light and help of Heaven, pronounced the following decree: “All the works of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, concerning which investigation has been made of late, must be dismissed; nor has this same investigation resulted in anything whatever derogatory to the name of the author, or to the praiseworthiness of life and the singular merits towards the church of the religious society founded by him.”

The author of the article referred to undertakes to discuss the meaning of the words Dimittantur opera, but, while professing to admit their force, he reduces it well-nigh to nothing. For he says: “We do not deny that Dimittantur is in a certain respect equivalent to Permittatur; but to permit that a work may be published and read without incurring ecclesiastical penalty has nothing whatever to do with declaring the work itself uncensurable.” Now, by these words one is led to suppose that the Sacred Congregation, or rather the Holy Father, by pronouncing that judgment, did nothing more than permit that the works of Rosmini may be published and read without incurring a penalty.

But I ask: What penalty did the editors and readers of Rosmini’s works incur before those works were subjected to so lengthened and accurate a scrutiny? None whatever. What, then, would the Sacred Congregation of the Index have done by such grave study and labors so protracted? Nothing whatever. And to what purpose would the judgment of the Holy Father have been given? To no purpose whatever. If, then, we do not wish to fall into these absurdities, we must say that the accusations brought against the works of Rosmini were false; that in these works nothing was found contrary to faith and morals; that their publication and perusal are not dangerous to the faithful. Who can ever suppose that the Holy Father has set free for publication works containing erroneous doctrines, and liberated the readers of them from penalty? To liberate from penalty the readers of books infected with error would be an act productive of greater injury than if a penalty were imposed or (assuming its previous existence) were maintained in full vigor.

I might touch on other points of the article in question, and show that its author has presumed to dive further than he ought into a matter which does not belong to him. But what I have said suffices to make it imperative on me to address this letter to you. As it may not be known to every one that the Master of the Sacred Palace does not, under existing circumstances, revise the journals, and as the character and fame of the Osservatore Romano might lead to a belief that he (the Master of the Sacred Palace) has approved of the article in question, I think it necessary to declare to you that I should never have given my consent to the publication of the same. Nay, I have to request that you will not, in future, receive any articles either on the sense of the judgment Dimittatur, or against the learned and pious Rosmini, or against his works, examined and dismissed.

I take this opportunity to remind all concerned that the Holy Father, from the time of the issuing of the Dimittantur opera, enjoined silence, and this in order that no new accusations should be put forward, nor, under any pretext, a way made for discord among Catholics: “That no new accusations and discords should arise and be disseminated in future, silence is now for the third time enjoined, on either party, by command of His Holiness.”

Who does not see that the seeds of discord are sown by traducing the works of Rosmini either as not being yet sufficiently examined, or as suspected of errors which were not seen either before or after so extraordinary an examination, or as dangerous; or by using expressions which take away all the value or diminish excessively the force and authority of a judgment pronounced with so much maturity and so much solemnity by the supreme Pastor of the church?

By this it is not meant to affirm that it would be unlawful to dissent from the philosophical system of Rosmini, or from the manner in which he tries to explain some truths, and even to offer a confutation of them in the schools; but if one does not agree with Rosmini in the manner of explaining certain truths, it is not on that account lawful to conclude that Rosmini has denied these truths; nor is it lawful to inflict any theological censure on the doctrines maintained by him in the works which the Sacred Congregation has examined and dismissed, and which the Holy Father has intended to protect from further accusations in the future.

Believe me, etc., etc.,

Your most obedient servant, FR. FRANCIS VINCENZO MARIA GATTI, Of the Order of Preachers, Master of the Sacred Apostolical Palace.

JUNE 16, 1876.

The following appeared in the Osservatore Cattolico of Milan, July 1, 1876:

The Sacred Roman Congregation of the Index, by a letter addressed to His Grace the Archbishop of Milan under date of June 20, 1876, and signed by His Eminence Cardinal Antonio de Luca, Prefect of the Congregation, and the Very Reverend Father Girolamo Pio Saccheri, of the Friars Preachers, Secretary, and delivered by his grace in person to one of the responsible editors of this journal in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28, has enjoined us:

“1. To maintain in future the most rigorous silence on the question of the works of Antonio Rosmini; because, in consequence of the authoritative decree of the Holy Father (That no new accusations and discords should arise and be disseminated in future, silence is for the third time enjoined on either party by command of His Holiness), it is not lawful—in matters pertaining to religion and relating to faith and sound morals—to inflict any censure on the works of Rosmini or on his person; the only thing upon which freedom is allowed being to discuss in the schools and in books, and within proper limits, his philosophical opinions and the merits of his manner of explaining certain truths, even theological. 2. To declare in an early issue of this journal that we have not rightly interpreted the sentence Dimittantur, which the Sacred Congregation of the Index thinks fit sometimes, after mature and diligent examination, to pronounce upon works submitted to its authoritative judgment.”

Full of reverence for the supreme authority of the Holy See, and wishing to be faithful to our duty as well as to the programme of this journal, we, the undersigned, responsible editors of the Osservatore Cattolico, in our own behalf and of all who have written in our columns on the question aforesaid, intend to declare and do hereby declare in the most docile and submissive manner possible, that

1. As to the silence now imposed we repeat and confirm what we said on occasion of reproducing in this journal the letter of the Master of the Sacred Palace to the editor of the Osservatore Romano—viz., that it shall be observed.

2. The sentence Dimittantur, as used by the Sacred Congregation of the Index was not rightly interpreted by us.

ENRICO MASSARA, Priest, DAVIDE ALBERTARIO, Priest, Editors of the Osservatore Cattolico.

MILAN, June 30, 1876.

Another and more recent instance is that of the controversy concerning the constitution of bodies. A letter of the Pope to Dr. Travaligni, president of a scientific society in Italy, commending the effort to bring physical and medical science into harmony with the scholastic philosophy, was interpreted as giving authoritative sanction to a certain doctrine of the Thomist school. A professor in the University of Lille wrote a letter to the Pope on the subject, setting forth the differences of opinion and the continued controversies respecting the constitution of bodies, and praying for a positive decision. In reply to this the professor and all others interested in these questions were instructed, in a letter written and published by order of the Holy Father, that the Holy See had defined nothing in the premises, and that a solution of difficulties should be sought for by scientific investigation and discussion. We have not space for the publication of this letter, but it may be found in one of the back numbers of the Catholic Review of Brooklyn (Sept. 22, 1877).

As for the Rosminian philosophy, we agree personally with Liberatore and the Thomist school in rejecting it as scientifically untenable. Nevertheless, we have heretofore distinctly avowed that in a dogmatic aspect it is free from censure, and we are glad to see the matter placed beyond question, and the controversy relegated to its proper sphere as one debatable only on purely rational grounds. The other question is one which has been extensively discussed in our pages, and which we regard as extremely interesting and important.

The doctrine proposed and elaborately discussed in the articles formerly published under the title “Principles of Real Being” has been attacked by a very learned and able writer in a German periodical published at St. Louis, on dogmatic as well as philosophical grounds. This is a convenient opportunity to state that we have in manuscript a very long and minute defence and vindication of the doctrine advocated in these articles, written by their distinguished author, who is well versed not only in scholastic theology and metaphysics, but also in mathematical and physical science. We refrained from publishing his reply to the attack of his antagonist, partly because the discussion was too subtle and abstruse for our readers, and still more from unwillingness to engage in dogmatic controversy when there is a risk of perplexing pious minds. In matters really dogmatic and pertaining to Catholic doctrine we want no compromise or attenuation. We desire only the restriction of the argument from authority within its actual limits, that the discussion of matters purely philosophical may be carried on by rational arguments alone, without accusations of heterodoxy on either side. In respect to the essence and integrity of the scholastic philosophy according to the system of the two great doctors, Aristotle and St. Thomas, we are in hearty concurrence with the great intellectual movement of the revival and restoration of this philosophy as the only true and scientific metaphysics to its ancient dominating position. We do not, however, consider that a blind submission to the authority even of St. Thomas is reasonable. An author who, like Liberatore, professedly aims at nothing more than an exact exposition of the doctrine of St. Thomas undoubtedly renders a service to metaphysical science and its students. The writer of this article esteems very highly all the philosophical works of this distinguished Jesuit, and has used by preference, for several years, his Institutiones Philosophicæ ad triennium Accommodatæ as a text-book of instruction. Yet we cannot approve of such a complete abdication of original and independent investigation and reasoning as a rule to be followed in philosophical teaching. We do not find that the system of the strict Thomists is proved in a manner entirely satisfactory and conclusive, in some of its details, particularly in that part which relates to the harmony of physical with metaphysical science. There is such a thing as progress and development in theology and philosophy. The opinions of private doctors are not final. Neither St. Augustine in dogmatic theology, St. Alphonsus in moral theology, nor St. Thomas in both these sciences and metaphysics, though declared by the Holy See doctors of the universal church, were competent to pronounce final judgments; since they were not rendered infallible by the superiority of their genius and wisdom, from which alone their authority is derived. Their private doctrine, inasmuch as it passes beyond the line of the Catholic doctrine contained in their works and having its own intrinsic authority, has only a claim to a respectful consideration, with a presumption in its favor. In the last analysis all its weight consists in the rational evidence or proof sustaining it, which is lessened or destroyed by probable or demonstrative proof to the contrary. The Jesuit school has always insisted on these principles. While recognizing St. Thomas as master, it has diverged from the teaching of the Dominican commentators on St. Thomas, both in theology and metaphysics. Whether Suarez and others diverged or not from the genuine doctrine of St. Thomas, in their controversy with writers of the Thomist school, is a matter of dispute. The question as to what is the real sense and import of the doctrine of St. Thomas or of Aristotle is distinct from the question of the material truth and evidence of any controverted proposition. The latter is much the more important of the two, and reason alone must decide it, so far as it can be decided, in the absence of any authoritative definition. If philosophy, therefore, is to make any progress, and if there is to be any real approximation to unity in philosophical doctrine among Catholics, the authority of reason and evidence must prevail over all human authority, and exclusive devotion to systems or great names must be abandoned, that truth may be investigated and brought to light.

The great motive urged by those who write in a specially irenical spirit is to strengthen the combination of forces in the Catholic intellectual army for the polemical contest against error and doubt. That the sophists of heresy and infidelity may be confuted and vanquished, that those who are erring and out of the way may be reclaimed, that honest seekers after truth may be guided to a successful discovery of this hidden treasure, is the great object of Catholic polemics. The great field of contest is the philosophical domain. It springs to view at once that agreement in philosophical doctrine is of the utmost importance for the success of the Catholic cause in this holy warfare. Among those who have labored most zealously and successfully toward this end, the distinguished Jesuit Father Ramière stands pre-eminent. In his most recent publication, L’Accord de la Philosophie de St. Thomas et de la Science moderne au sujet de la composition des corps, prepared with the aid of another Jesuit specially versed in the physical sciences, he has made a deeply-studied and masterly effort at harmonizing the peripatetic system with the results of experiment and induction in modern chemical science. It is the most subtile and acute piece of argumentation which has ever proceeded from his pen. The doctrine of Aristotle and St. Thomas has hitherto been generally supposed to be in a diametrical contradiction to that of modern chemistry in respect to the combination of elements in the compound substances. The peripatetic theory has been, on this account, abandoned by most of our modern authors and professors in philosophy. A few, however, among whom Liberatore and the editor of the Scienza Italiana are conspicuous, have exerted all their power of subtile analysis to defend the Thomist opinion. Another recent writer, Dr. Scheid of Eichstädt, has endeavored to maintain the same thesis in the most exclusive sense, and attempts to prove that the Thomist theory alone is either compatible with the dogmatic definitions of the church or adequate to give a satisfactory explanation of the facts established by chemical and physical experiments. On the contrary, Dr. Frédault, who is a French physician and an advocate of the general doctrine of the Thomist school on form and matter, maintains that it is inadmissible in respect to the constituent elements of compound substances. In order to facilitate the understanding of the subject of controversy, we will cite from Father Ramière’s appendix a part of the Exposé parallèle des deux systèmes prepared by a distinguished professor in a Catholic college of France at Father Ramière’s request.

_Peripatetic Chemical School. School._

I. WHAT IS A SIMPLE BODY?

It is a composition of It is a material first matter and substance endowed with substantial form. determinate forces.

II. WHAT IS A CHEMICAL BODY—FOR INSTANCE, WATER?

It is a composition of It is oxygen and hydrogen first matter and the combined in the aqueous substantial proportions of 88 to form. 11. The forces of the two components remain identical in the composition, although in the state of combination they do not manifest all their special characteristics.

III. HOW ARE THE SIMPLE BODIES EXTRACTED FROM A CHEMICAL COMPOUND?

At the moment of The force of the chemical decomposition the re-agent destroys the substantial form of the combination and union compound is destroyed of the simple bodies, and replaced by the dies, which return to substantial form of the their primitive state, components, which are and manifest anew their produced from their own proper forces in all proper non-existence their integrity. (ex nihilo sui); and the simple bodies recover their former proportions.

IV. WHAT IS AN ANIMAL BODY—THE BODY OF A MAN, FOR EXAMPLE—OR A PART OF SUCH A BODY, AS A BONE, ETC.?

This body is a The human body, like all composition of first bodies, is a matter and a composition of substantial form. In molecules and of parts man this substantial endowed with chemical form is the rational forces which are united soul, which gives to together by the mutual the matter its action of these forces; corporeity, or but, during life, these corporeal being. In forces are subjected such a way that a body, and subordinated to the taken in the vital force of the reduplicative soul, which penetrates sense—that is, inasmuch them, dominates them, as it is considered and unifies them in simply as body—is a their vital functions, composition of first and which gives to the matter and the soul, entire body the form of which latter gives to a human body, life, and the body its specific sensibility. material being. NOTE.—Form does not mean figure but the determining principle of the specific nature which this organized body possesses as a human body.

V.—WHAT PRODUCES DEATH IN THE ANIMAL BODY AND THE HUMAN BODY?

At the moment when the Death consists simply in soul departs from the the separation of the body there is produced soul and body, and does in it a new substantial not exact the form, the cadaverous production of any form, which by its substantial form. The union with the first chemical forces, which matter constitutes the are no longer dominated corpse. But when the by the soul, act dissolution of the freely, and the corpse proceeds dissolution of the gradually by the effect corpse is nothing but of corruption, the the natural result of cadaverous form is their action. succeeded by new substantial forms, produced from previous non-existence (_ex nihilo sui_), as numerous and different as are the substances resulting from corruption, the mephitic particles dispersed in the air being included.

The theory here presented under the name of the peripatetic, and claiming to be the genuine doctrine of Aristotle and St. Thomas, is frequently called the theory of substantial generations. Under that name it has been examined and opposed in the series of metaphysical articles in this magazine already referred to. It is necessary to explain, before proceeding further, that the term matter in scholastic philosophy denotes, not the complete material being or body, whether simple or compound, such as oxygen, water, iron, etc., but merely one element or component of the material substance—viz., the common, indeterminate element, which is the same in all, having a potency or receptivity for every possible determination, but no fixed and necessary union with any. It is the principle of extension, but not extended; the source of inertia and all that is passive, yet not a solid atom; the subject of qualities and active forces, but itself possessing no quiddity or quality, and not having existence, or the possibility of existence, except as joined with its compart, the active and determining element, joined with it in order to make any single material substance. This active element is called the substantial form, which is equally incapable of subsisting alone, and therefore has no separate being, yet is capable of giving its first being to matter, and thus constituting with it material substance. According to the peripatetic theory, as stated above, in chemical combinations which produce a new, compound substance, such as water, nothing remains of the components except the material substratum or first matter. The determining form which gave this matter its specific being as oxygen and hydrogen are destroyed, and a new form, the aqueous, springs forth to give the matter a new first being and constitute the substance water. There is, consequently, in this and every similar case, the generation of a new substance, in which the matter is pre-existent, but the substantial form is educed from the passive potency of the matter, [ex nihilo sui], or from utter previous non-existence.

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