Thus, again do the discoveries of later ages verify the

traditions of early Christian history. That SS. Dorotheus,

Sophronius, and Gaudentius possessed reliable evidence for their

statement that St. Thomas died at Calamina, we can no longer

doubt. That the original framer of "The Legend of St. Thomas"

recited events which, in his day, were well known, and could be

easily substantiated, is almost beyond dispute. The wondrous

tales of heroism, built out of the deeds of martyrs and apostles

and evangelists are not all foolish dreams. The "Legends of the

Saints" are not, as the wiseacres of the day would lead us to

believe, altogether idle words.

{522}

Men, who could traverse sea and land, without companions, without

aid, converting nations, building churches, founding hierarchies,

setting their faces ever farther on, looking for no human

sympathy, having no mother-country, toiling for ever toward the

martyr's crown, were not the men to fabricate childish stories,

full of false visions and falser miracles. Nor were those who

stood day by day on the brink of doom; who, in the morning, woke

perhaps to meet the lions, perhaps the stake, but certainly the

burden of the cross of Christ; who lay down at night without hope

of day, the men to listen to wild tales of falsehood from some

cunning tongue. Traditions of those early days were all too often

written in blood. They come to us sealed with the lives of

saints. They have stood the test of ages of investigation. They

remain, to-day, monuments, engraved in many languages, and on

many lands, asserting the achievements of our fathers, while

modern science adds to ancient story the corroboration of her

undeniable deductions, and vindicates the traditions of Christian

antiquity both from the sneers and the indifference of

self-exalted men.

It is almost needless to remark, as the conclusion of this

sketch, that modern missionaries, who would rival the success of

St. Thomas, can fairly expect it from no less exertion, no less

singleness of heart. Those who from this or other countries sally

forth, with missionary societies behind them to supply their

needs, burdened with the double cares of family and church, with

boards of directors at home, as well as consciences within, to

satisfy, with a support to some extent conditioned on their

apparent success, can scarcely be expected to compete with him

who, bidding farewell to home and friends, goes out alone,

wifeless and childless, looking to God for everything, and

seeking nothing but an endless crown. The history of missions

proves, by indisputable statistics, which of these two methods is

effective, which has borne with it the divine prestige of

success, and which remains, in spite of persecutions and

oppressions, vigorous and undismayed after the conflicts of

eighteen hundred years. If it were a simple question of policy,

between the Catholic Church and her opponents, the event would

indicate her wisdom. If it were one of precedent, she has the

whole apostolic college, and the missionaries of fifteen

centuries upon her side. But if the touchstone of the Master be

still reliable, and we may know his workmen by their fruits, then

does this history of the great missionary church bear witness,

that not only her vocation but her operations are divine, and may

assure her children, that, though heaven and earth should fail,

no jot or tittle of her power or triumph can ever pass away. The

throne of Peter may be smitten by the thunderbolt of war; the

hoary head of his successor may be bowed with grief; the triple

crown may once more be trampled under the feet of men; the

faithful may again be overwhelmed with fear; but, in the far

wilderness, beyond the glittering deserts, across the frozen and

the burning seas, her sons are gathering strange nations to her

bosom, over whom, in her coming days of victory and peace, she

may renew her joy.

For the same Lord who bade her go into the whole world and teach

all his commandments gave, in the same breath, its people to her

baptism; and he who promised her the nations for her inheritance,

and the uttermost parts of the earth for her possession, was the

same God who said to St. Peter, "Super hanc petram aedificabo

ecclesiam meam, et porta inferi non prevalebunt."

-------

{523}

Beethoven, His Boyhood.

I.

One October afternoon, in 1784, a boat was coming down the Rhine

close to that point where the city of Bonn sits on its left

shore. The company on board consisted of old and young persons of

both sexes, returning from an excursion of pleasure.

The company landed full of gayety and mirth, the young people

walking on before, while their seniors followed. They adjourned

to a public garden, close on the river side, to finish the day of

social enjoyment by partaking of a collation. Old and young were

seated ere long around the stone table set under the large trees.

The crimson faded in the west, the moon poured her soft light

glimmering through the leafy canopy above them, and was reflected

in full beauty in the waters of the Rhine.

"Your boys are merry fellows," said a benevolent-looking old

gentleman, addressing Herr van Beethoven, a tenor singer in the

electoral chapel, pointing at the same time to his two sons, lads

of ten and fourteen years of age. "But tell me, Beethoven, why

did you not bring Louis with you?"

"Because," answered the person he addressed, "Louis is a

stubborn, dogged, stupid boy, whose troublesome behavior would

only spoil our mirth."

"Ah!" returned the old gentleman, "you are always finding fault

with the poor lad, and perhaps impose too hard tasks upon him. I

am only surprised that he has not, ere this, broken loose from

your sharp control."

"My dear Simrock," replied Beethoven, laughing, "I have a remedy

at hand for his humors--my good Spanish cane, which, you see, is

of the toughest. Louis is well acquainted with its excellent

properties, and stands in wholesome awe thereof. And trust me,

neighbor, I know best what is for the boy's good. Carl and Johann

are a comfort to me; they always obey me with alacrity and

affection. Louis, on the other hand, has been bearish from his

infancy. As to his studies, music is the only thing he will

learn--I mean with good will; or, if he consents to apply himself

to anything else, I must first knock it into him that it has

something to do with music. _Then_ he will go to work; but

it is his humor not to do it otherwise. If I give him a

commission to execute for me, the most arrant clodpoll could not

be more stupid about it."

Here the conversation was interrupted, and the subject was not

resumed. The hours flew lightly by. It struck nine, and the

festive company separated to return to their homes.

Carl and Johann were in high glee as they went home. They sprang

up the steps before their father, and pulled the door-bell. The

door was opened, and a boy about twelve years old stood in the

entry with a lamp in his hand. He was short and stout for his

age, but a sickly paleness, more strongly marked by the contrast

of his thick black hair, was observable on his face. His small,

gray eyes were quick and restless in their movement, very

piercing when he fixed them on any object, but softened by the

shade of his long, dark lashes. His mouth was delicately formed,

and the compression of the lips betrayed both pride and sorrow.

It was Louis Beethoven.

{524}

He came to meet his parents, and bade them "Good-evening."

His mother greeted him affectionately. His father said, while the

boy busied himself fastening the door, "Well, Louis, I hope you

have finished your task."

"I have, father."

"Very good; to-morrow I will look and see if you have earned your

breakfast." So saying, the elder Beethoven went into his chamber.

His wife followed him, after bidding her sons good night, Louis

more tenderly than any of them. Carl and Johann withdrew with

their brother to their common sleeping apartment, entertaining

him with a description of their day of festivity. "Now, Louis,"

said little Johann, as they finished their account, "if you had

not been such a dunce, our father would have taken you along; but

he says he thinks that you will be little better than a dunce all

the days of your life, and self-willed and stubborn besides."

"Don't talk about that any more," answered Louis, "but come to

bed."

"Yes, you are always a sleepy-head!" cried they both, laughing;

but in a few moments after getting into bed both were asleep and

snoring heartily.

Louis took the lamp from the table, left the apartment softly,

and went up-stairs to an attic chamber, where he was wont to

retire when he wished to be out of the way of his teasing

brothers. He had fitted up the little room for himself as well as

his means permitted. A table with three legs, a leathern chair,

the bottom partly out, and an old piano which he had rescued from

the possession of the rats and mice, made up the furniture, and

here, in company with his beloved violin, he was accustomed to

pass his happiest hours.

The boy felt, young as he was, that he was not understood by one

of his family, not even excepting his mother. She loved him

tenderly, and always took his part when his father found fault

with him; but she never knew what was passing in his mind,

because he never uttered it. But his genius was not long to be

unappreciated.

The next morning a messenger came from the elector to Beethoven's

house, bringing an order for him to repair immediately to the

palace, and fetch with him his son Louis. The father was

surprised; not more so than the boy, whose heart beat with

undefined apprehension as they entered the princely mansion. A

servant was in waiting, and conducted them, without delay or

further announcement, to the presence of the elector, who was

attended by two gentlemen.

The elector received old Beethoven with great kindness, and said,

"We have heard much, recently, of the extraordinary musical

talent of your son Louis. Have you brought him along with you?"

Beethoven replied in the affirmative, stepped back to the door,

and bade the boy come in.

"Come nearer, my little lad," cried the elector graciously; "do

not be shy. This gentleman here is our new court organist, Herr

Neefe; the other is the famous composer, Herr Yunker, from

Cologne. We promised them both they should hear you play

something."

{525}

The prince bade the boy take his seat and begin, while he sat

down in a large easy-chair. Louis went to the piano, and, without

examining the pile of notes that lay awaiting his selection,

played a short piece, then a light and graceful melody, which he

executed with such ease and spirit, nay, in so admirable a

manner, that his distinguished auditors could not forbear

expressing their surprise, and even his father was struck. When

he left off playing, the elector arose, came up to him, laid his

hand on his head, and said encouragingly, "Well done, my boy! we

are pleased with you. Now, Master Yunker," turning to the

gentleman on his right hand, "what say you?"

"Your highness," answered the composer, "I will venture to say

the lad has had considerable practice with that last air to

execute it so well."

Louis burst into a laugh at this remark. The others looked

surprised and grave. His father darted an angry glance at him,

and the boy, conscious that he had done something wrong, became

instantly silent.

"And pray what were you laughing at, my little fellow?" asked the

elector.

The boy colored and looked down as he replied, "Because Herr

Yunker thinks I have learned the air by heart, when it occurred

to me but just now while I was playing."

"Then," returned the composer, "if you really improvised that

piece, you ought to go through at sight a motive I will give you

presently."

Yunker wrote on a paper a difficult motive, and handed it to the

boy. Louis read it over carefully, and immediately began to play

it according to the rules of counterpoint. The composer listened

attentively, his astonishment increasing at every turn in the

music; and when at last it was finished, in a manner so spirited

as to surpass his expectations, his eyes sparkled, and he looked

on the lad with keen interest, as the possessor of a genius

rarely to be found.

"If he goes on in this way," said he in a low tone to the

elector, "I can assure your highness that a very great

contrapuntist may be made out of him."

Neefe observed with a smile, "I agree with the master; but it

seems to me the boy's style inclines rather too much to the

gloomy and melancholy."

"It is well," replied his highness, smiling; "be it your care

that it does not become too much so. Herr van Beethoven," he

continued, addressing the father, "we take an interest in your

son, and it is our pleasure that he complete the studies

commenced under your tuition, under that of Herr Neefe. He may

come and live with him after to-day. You are willing, Louis, to

come and live with this gentleman?"

The boy's eyes were fixed on the ground; he raised them and

glanced first at Neefe and then at his father. The offer was a

tempting one; he would fare better and have more liberty in his

new abode. But there was his _father!_ whom he had always

loved; who, in spite of his severity, had doubtless loved him,

and who now stood looking upon him earnestly and sadly. He

hesitated no longer, but, seizing Beethoven's hand and pressing

it to his heart, he cried, "No, no! I can not leave my father."

"You are a good and dutiful lad," said his highness. "Well, I

will not ask you to leave your father, who must be very fond of

you. You shall live with him, and come and take your lessons of

Herr Neefe; that is our will. Adieu! Herr van Beethoven."

From this time Louis lived a new life. His father treated him no

longer with harshness, and even reproved his brothers when they

tried to tease him. Carl and Johann grew shy of him, however,

when they saw what a favorite he had become.

{526}

Louis found himself no longer restrained, but came and went as he

pleased; he took frequent excursions into the country, which he

enjoyed with more than youthful pleasure, when the lessons were

over. His worthy master was astonished at the rapid progress of

his pupil in his beloved art.

"But, Louis," said he one day, "if you would become a great

musician, you must not neglect everything besides music. You must

acquire foreign languages, particularly Latin, Italian, and

French. Would you leave your name to posterity as a true artist,

make your own all that bears relation to your art."

Louis promised, and kept his word. In the midst of his playing he

would leave off, however much it cost him, when the hour struck

for his lessons in the languages. So closely he applied himself,

that in a year's time he was tolerably well acquainted not only

with Latin, French, and Italian, but also with the English. His

father marvelled at his progress not a little; for years he had

labored in vain, with starvation and blows, to make the boy learn

the first principles of those languages. He had never, indeed,

taken the trouble to explain to him their use in the acquisition

of the science of music.

In 1785, appeared Louis' first sonatas. They displayed uncommon

talent and gave promise that the youthful artist would, in

future, accomplish something great, though scarcely yet could be

found in them a trace of that gigantic genius whose death forty

years afterward filled all Europe with sorrow.

"We were both mistaken in the lad," Simrock would say to old

Beethoven. "He abounds in wit and odd fancies, but I do not

altogether like his mixing up in his music all sorts of strange

conceits; the best way, to my notion, is a plain one. Let him

follow the great Mozart, step by step; after all, he is the only

one, and there is none to come up to him--none!" And Louis'

father, who also idolized Mozart, always agreed with his neighbor

in his judgment, and echoed, "None!"

It was a lovely summer afternoon about 1787; numerous boats with

parties of pleasure on board were passing up and down the Rhine;

numerous companies of old and young were assembled under the

trees in the public gardens, or along the banks of the river,

enjoying the scene and each other's conversation, or partaking of

the rural banquet.

At some distance from the city, a wood bordered the river; this

wood was threaded by a small and sparkling stream, that flung

itself over a ledge of rocks, and tumbled into the most romantic

and quiet dell imaginable, for it was too narrow to be called a

valley. The trees overhung it so closely that at noonday this

sweet nook was dark as twilight, and the profound silence was

only broken by the monotonous murmur of the stream.

Close by the stream half sat, half reclined, a youth just

emerging from childhood. In fact, he could hardly be called more

than a boy; for his frame showed but little development of

strength, and his regular features, combined with an excessive

paleness, the result of confinement, gave the impression that he

was even of tender years. His eyes would alone have given him the

credit of uncommon beauty; they were large, dark, and so bright

that it seemed the effect of disease, especially in a face that

rarely or never smiled.

{527}

A most unusual thing was a holiday for the melancholy lad. His

whole soul was given up to one passion--the love of music. Oh!

how precious to him were the moments of solitude. He had loved,

for this, even his poor garret room, meanly furnished, but rich

in the possession of one or two musical instruments, whither he

would retire at night, when released from irksome labor, and

spend hours of delight stolen from slumber. But to be alone with

nature, in her grand woods, under the blue sky, with no human

voice to mar the infinite harmony--how did his heart pant for

this communion! His breast seemed to expand and fill with the

grandeur, the beauty, of all around him. The light breeze

rustling in the leaves came to his ear laden with a thousand

melodies; the very grass and flowers under his feet had a

language for him. His spirits, long depressed and saddened,

sprang into new life, and rejoiced with unutterable joy.

The hours wore on, a dusky shadow fell over foliage and stream,

and the solitary lad rose to leave his chosen retreat. As he

ascended the narrow winding path, he was startled by hearing his

own name; and presently a man, apparently middle-aged and dressed

plainly, stood just in front of him. "Come back, Louis," said the

stranger, "it is not so dark as it seems here; you have time

enough this hour to return to the city." The stranger's voice had

a thrilling though melancholy sweetness; and Louis suffered him

to take his hand and lead him back. They seated themselves in the

shade beside the water.

"I have watched you for a long while," said the stranger.

"You might have done better," returned the lad, reddening at the

thought of having been subjected to espionage.

"Peace, boy," said his companion; "I love you, and have done all

for your good."

"You love me?" repeated Louis, surprised. "I have never met you

before."

"Yet I know you well. Does that surprise you? I know your

thoughts also. You love music better than aught else in the

world; but you despair of excellence because you cannot follow

the rules prescribed."

Louis looked at the speaker with open eyes.

"Your masters also despair of you. The court-organist accuses you

of conceit and obstinacy; your father reproaches you; and all

your acquaintance pronounce you a boy of tolerable abilities,

spoiled by an ill disposition."

The lad sighed.

"The gloom of your condition increases your distaste to all

studies not directly connected with music, for you feel the need

of her consolations. Your compositions, wild, melancholy as they

are, embody your own feelings, and are understood by none of the

connoisseurs."

"Who are you?" cried Louis in deep emotion.

"No matter who I am. I come to give you a little advice, my boy.

I compassionate, yet I revere you. I revere your heaven-imparted

genius. I commiserate the woes those very gifts must bring upon

you through life."

The boy lifted his eyes again; those of the speaker seemed so

bright, yet withal so melancholy, that he was possessed of a

strange fear. "I see you," continued the unknown solemnly,

"exalted above homage, but lonely and unblessed in your

elevation. Yet the lot of such is fixed; and it is better,

perhaps, that one should consume in the sacred fire than that the

many should lack illumination."

"I do not understand you," said Louis, wishing to put an end to

the interview.

{528}

"That is not strange, since you do not understand yourself," said

the stranger. "As for me, I pay homage to a future sovereign!"

and he suddenly snatched up the boy's hand and kissed it. Louis

was convinced of his insanity.

"A sovereign in art," continued the unknown. "The sceptre that

Haydn and Mozart have held shall pass without interregnum to your

hands. When you are acknowledged in all Germany for the worthy

successor of these great masters--when all Europe wonders at the

name of _Beethoven_--remember me.

"But you have much ground to pass over," resumed the stranger,

"ere you reach that glorious summit. Reject not the aid of

science, of literature; there are studies now disagreeable that

still may prove serious helps to you in the cultivation of music.

Contemn not _any_ learning: for art is a coy damsel, and

would have her votaries all accomplished! Above all--_trust

yourself_. Whatever may happen, give no place to despondency.

They blame you for your disregard of rules; make for yourself

higher and vaster rules. You will not be appreciated here; but

there are other places in the world; in Vienna--"

"Oh! if I could only go to Vienna," sighed the lad.

"You _shall_ go there, and remain," said the stranger; "and

there too you shall see me, or hear from me. Adieu, now--_auf

Wiedersehen_." ("To meet again.")

And before the boy could recover from his astonishment the

stranger was gone. It was nearly dark, and he could see nothing

of him as he walked through the wood. He could not, however,

spend much time in search; for he dreaded the reproaches of his

father for having stayed out so late. All the way home he was

trying to remember where he had seen the unknown, whose features,

though he could not say to whom they belonged, were not

unfamiliar to him. It occurred to him at last, that while playing

before the elector one day a countenance similar in benevolent

expression had looked upon him from the circle surrounding the

sovereign. But known or unknown, the "auf Wiedersehen" of his

late companion rang in his ears, while the friendly counsel sank

deep in his heart.

Traversing rapidly the streets of Bonn, young Beethoven was soon

at his own door. An unusual bustle within attracted his

attention. To his eager questions the servants replied that their

master was dying. Shocked to hear of his danger, Louis flew to

his apartment. His brothers were there, also his mother, weeping;

and the physician supported his father, who seemed in great pain.

Louis clasped his father's cold hand, and pressed it to his lips,

but could not speak for tears.

"God's blessing be upon you, my son!" said his parent. "Promise

me that throughout life you will never forsake your brothers. I

know they have not loved you as they ought; that is partly my

fault; promise me, that whatever may happen you will continue to

regard and cherish them."

"I will--I will, dear father!" cried Louis, sobbing. Beethoven

pressed his hand in token of satisfaction. The same night he

expired. The grief of Louis was unbounded.

It was a bitter thing thus to lose a parent just as the ties of

nature were strengthened by mutual appreciation and confidence;

but it was necessary that he should rouse himself to minister

support and comfort to his suffering mother.

To Be Continued.

-------

{529}

Lecky On Morals. [Footnote 155]

[Footnote 155: _History of European Morals, from Augustus

to Charlemagne_. By William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, M.A.

London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.]

Mr. Lecky divides his work into five chapters. The first chapter

is preliminary, and discusses "the nature and foundations of

morals," its obligation and motives; the second treats of the

morals of the pagan empire; the third gives the author's view of

the causes of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of

Christianity in the empire; the fourth the progress and

deterioration of European morals from Constantine to Charlemagne;

and the fifth the changes effected from time to time in the

position of women. The author does not confine himself strictly

within the period named, but, in order to make his account

intelligible, gives us the history of what preceded and what has

followed it; so that his book gives one, from his point of view,

the philosophy and the entire history of European morals from the

earliest times down to the present.

The subject of this work is one of great importance in the

general history of the race, and of deep interest to all who are

not incapable of serious and sustained thought. Mr. Lecky is a

man of some ability, of considerable first or second hand

learning, and has evidently devoted both time and study to his

subject. His style is clear, animated, vigorous, and dignified;

but his work lacks condensation and true perspective. He dwells

too long on points comparatively unimportant, and repeats the

same things over and over again, and brings proofs after proofs

to establish what is mere commonplace to the scholar, till he

becomes not a little tedious. He seems to write under the

impression that the public he is addressing knows nothing of his

subject, and is slow of understanding. He evidently supposes that

he is writing something very important, and quite new to the

whole reading world. Yet we have found nothing new in his work,

either in substance or in presentation, nothing--not even an

error or a sophism--that had not been said, and as well said, a

hundred times before him; we cannot discover a single new fact,

or a single new view of a fact, that can throw any additional

light on European morals in any period of European history. Yet

we may say Mr. Lecky, though not an original or a profound

thinker, is above the average of English Protestant writers, and

compiles with passable taste, skill, and judgment.

We know little of the author, except as the author of the book

before us, and of a previous work, on _Rationalism in

Europe_, and we have no vehement desire to know anything more

of him. He belongs, with some shades of difference, to a class

represented, in England, by Buckle, J. Stuart Mill, Frank Newman,

and James Martineau; and of which the _Westminster Review_

is the organ; in France, by M. Vacherot, Jules Simon, and Ernest

Renan; and, in this country, by Professor Draper, of this city,

and a host of inferior writers. They are not Christians, and yet

would not like to be called anti-Christians; they are judges, not

advocates, and, seated on the high judicial bench, they

pronounce, as they flatter themselves, an impartial and final

judgment on all moral, religious, and philosophical codes, and

assign to each its part of good, and its part of evil.

{530}

They aim to hold an even balance between the church and the

sects, between Christian morals and pagan morals, and between the

several pagan religions and the Christian religion, all of which

they look upon as dead and gone, except with the ignorant, the

stupid, and the superstitious. Of this class Mr. Lecky is a

distinguished member, though less brilliant as a writer than

Renan, and less pleasing as well as less scientific than our own

Draper.

The writers of this class do not profess to break with Christian

civilization, or to reject religion or morals, but strive to

assert a morality without God, and a Christianity without Christ.

They deny in words neither God nor Christ, but they find no use

for either. They deny neither the possibility nor the fact of the

supernatural, but find no need of it and no place for it. They

concede providence, but resolve it into a fixed natural law, and

are what we would call naturalists, if naturalism had not

received so many diverse meanings. In their own estimation, they

are not philosophers, moralists, or divines, but really gods, who

know, of themselves, good and evil, right and wrong, truth and

error, and whose prerogative it is to judge all men and ages, all

moralities, philosophies, and religions, by the infallible

standard which each one of them is, or has in himself. They are

the fulfilment of the promise of Satan to our mother Eve, "Ye

shall be as gods."

Mr. Lecky, in his preliminary chapter, on the nature and

foundation of morals, refutes even ably and conclusively the

utilitarian school of morals, and defends what he calls the

"intuitive" school. He contends that it is impossible to found

morals on the conception of the useful, or on fears of punishment

and hopes of reward; and argues well, after Henry More, Cudworth,

Clark, and Butler, that all morality involves the idea of

obligation, and is based on the intuition of right or duty; or,

in other words, on the principle of human nature called

conscience. But this, after all, is no solution of the problem

raised. There is, certainly, a great difference between doing a

thing because it is useful, and doing it because it is right; but

there is a still greater difference between the intuitive

perception of right and the obligation to do it. The perception

or intuition of an act as obligatory, or as duty, but is not that

which makes it duty or obligatory. The obligation is objective,

the perception is subjective. The perception or intuition

apprehends the obligation, but is not it, and does not impose it.

The intuitive moralists are better than the utilitarians, in the

respect that they assert a right and a wrong independent of the

fact that it is useful, or injurious, to the actor. But they are

equally far from asserting the real foundation of morals;

because, though they assert intuition or immediate perception of

duty, they do not assert or set forth the ground of duty or

obligation. Duty is debt, is an obligation; but whence the debt?

whence the obligation? We do not ask why the duty obliges, for

the assertion of an act as duty is its assertion as obligatory;

but why does the right oblige? or, in other words, why am I bound

to do right? or any one thing rather than another?

Mr. Lecky labors hard to find the ground of the obligation in

some principle or law of human nature, which he calls conscience.

But conscience is the recognition of the obligation, and the

mind's own judgment of what is or is not obligatory; it is not

the obligation nor its creator.

{531}

This mistake proceeds from his attempt to found morals on human

nature as supreme law-giver, and is common to all moralists who

seek to erect a system of morals independent of theology. Dr.

Ward, in his work on _Nature and Grace_, commits the same

mistake in his effort to find a solid foundation in nature of

duty, without rising to the Creator. All these moralists really

hold, as true, the falsehood told by Satan to our first parents,

"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil;" that is, in order

to know good or evil ye shall not need to look beyond your own

nature, nor to recognize yourselves as subject to, or dependent

on, any authority above or distinct from it. It is the one

fundamental error that meets us in all Gentile philosophy, and

all modern philosophy and science, speculative, ethical, or

political, that holds itself independent of God. The schoolmen

understood by morals, when the term means duty, or anything more

than manners and customs, what is called Moral Theology, or the

practical application of speculative and dogmatic theology to the

offices of life, individual, domestic, and social or political.

Natural morality meant that portion of man's whole duty which is

prescribed by the natural law and promulgated by reason, as

distinguished from revelation. They based all morals on the great

principle of theology, and therefore they called theology the

queen of the sciences. We have made no advance on them.

In morals, three things--first, the obligation; second, the

regula or rule; third, the end--are essential, and must be

carefully distinguished. Why am I bound to do one thing rather

than another? that is, why am I bound at all? What am I bound to

do, or to avoid? For what end? These three questions are

fundamental and exhaustive. The intuitionists hold that all

morals involve the idea or conception of duty; but they omit to

present the reason or ground of duty or obligation, and therefore

erect their moral fabric without any foundation, and make it a

mere castle in the air. They confound conscience with obligation,

and the rule or law with the reason or motive for observing it.

Suppose we find in human nature the rule or law; we cannot find

in it either the obligation or the motive, for the simple reason

that human nature is not independent, is not sufficient for

itself, does not belong to itself, and has in itself neither its

origin nor its end, neither its first nor its final cause. The

rule--_regula_--is the law, and the law prescribes what is

to be done and what is to be avoided; but it does not create the

obligation nor furnish the motive of obedience. Mr. Lecky himself

maintains that it does not, and is very severe upon those who

make an arbitrary law the ground of moral distinctions, or the

reason of duty. The law does not make the right or the wrong. The

act is not right because commanded, nor wrong because prohibited;

but it is commanded because it is right, and prohibited because

it is wrong. Whence then the obligation? or, what is it that

transforms the right into duty? This is the question that the

independent or non-theological moralists, no matter of what

school, do not and cannot answer.

There is no answer, unless we give up the godship of man, give

Satan the lie, and understand that man is a dependent existence;

for an independent being cannot be bound or placed under the

obligation of duty, either by his own act or by the act of

another. If man is dependent, he is created, and, if created, he

belongs to his Creator; for the maker has a sovereign right to

that which he makes.

{532}

It is his act, and nothing is or can be more one's own, than

one's own act. Man, then, does not own himself; he owes himself,

all he is, and all he has, to his Creator. As it has pleased his

Creator to make him a free moral agent, capable of acting from

choice, and with reference to a moral end, he is bound to give

himself, by his own free will, to God to whom he belongs; for his

free will, his free choice, belongs to God, is his due; and the

principle of justice requires us to give to every one his due, or

what is his own.

Here, then, in man's relation to God as his creator, is the

ground of his duty or obligation. It grows out of the divine

creative act. Deny the being of God, deny the creative act, deny

man is the creature of God, and you deny all obligation, all

duty, and therefore, according to Mr. Lecky's own doctrine, all

morals.

The irrational cannot morally bind the rational. All men are

equal, and no man, no body of men has, or can have, a natural

right to bind or govern another. Only the Creator obliges, as the

owner of the creature; and if I owe myself, all I am and all I

have, to God, I owe nothing to another in his own right, and only

God has any right over me, or to me. Here is at once the basis of

obligation and of liberty, and the condemnation of all tyranny

and despotism. From this, it clearly follows that every system of

morals that rests on nature, the state, or any thing created, as

its foundation, is not and of itself cannot be obligatory upon

any one, and that without God as our creator, and whose we are,

there is and can be no moral obligation or duty whatever.

Pantheism, which denies the creative act, and atheism, which

denies God, both alike deny morals by denying its basis or

foundation. Either is fatal to morals, for obligation is only the

correlative of the right to command. Having found the ground of

obligation, and shown why we are morally bound, the next thing to

be considered is the rule by which is determined what we are

bound to do, and what we are bound to avoid. Mr. Lecky makes this

rule conscience, which, though he labors to prove that it is

uniform and infallible in all ages and nations, and all men, he

yet concedes varies in its determinations as to what is or is not

duty according to the circumstances of the age or nation, the

ideal or standard adopted, public opinion, etc. That is,

conscience assures us that we ought always to do right, but

leaves us to find out, the best way we can, what is or is not

right. Conscience, then, cannot be itself the rule; it is a

witness within us of our obligation to obey God, and the judgment

which we pass on our acts, usually, in practice, on our acts

after they are done, is at best only our judgment of what the

rule or law is, not the rule or law itself. The rule or

_regula_ is not conscience, but the light of conscience,

that by which it determines what is or is not duty; it is the law

which, according to St. Thomas, is "quaedam est regula et mensura

actuum, secundum quam inducitur ad agendum, vel ab agendo

retrahitur;" [Footnote 156] or, in the sense we here use the

term, the rule, or measure of duty prescribing what is to be

done, and what avoided.

[Footnote 156: _Summa_ primae secundae, quest. xc. art.

I. incorp.]

It is, as St. Thomas also says, an _ordinatio rationis_, and

as an ordination of reason, it can be only the rule or measure of

what is obligatory to be done or to be avoided. It defines and

declares what is or is not duty, it does not and cannot make the

duty, or create the obligation. The author and his school

overlook the fact that reason is perceptive, not legislative.

{533}

They confound the obligation with the rule that measures and

determines it, and assume that it is the reason that creates the

duty. They are psychologists, not philosophers, and see nothing

behind or above human reason, man's highest and distinguishing

faculty. Certainly without reason man could not either perform,

or be bound to perform, a single moral act; and yet it is not the

reason that binds him; and if he is bound to follow reason, as he

undoubtedly is, it is only because reason tells him what is

obligatory, and enables him to do it.

Since only God can bind morally, only God can impose the law

which measures, defines, or discloses what independent of the law

is obligatory. The rule of duty, of right and wrong, is therefore

the law of God. The law of God is promulgated in part through

natural reason, and in part through supernatural revelation. The

former is called the natural law, _lex naturalis;_ the

latter, the revealed law, or the supernatural law. But both are

integral parts of one and the same law, and each has its reason

in one and the same order of things, emanates from one and the

same authority, for one and the same ultimate end. There are, no

doubt, in the supernatural law, positive injunctions, and

prohibitions, which are not contained in the natural law, though

not repugnant thereto; but these have their reason and motive in

the end, which in all cases determines the law. All human laws,

ecclesiastical or civil, derive all their vigor as laws from the

law of God, and all the positive injunctions and prohibitions of

either are, in their nature, disciplinary, or means to the end,

in which is the reason or motive of the law. Hence there is, and

can be, nothing arbitrary in duty. Nothing is or can be imposed,

under either the natural law or the supernatural law, in either

church or state, in religion or morals, that does not immediately

or mediately grow out of our relation to God as our creator, and

as our last end or final cause. As a Christian I am bound to obey

the supreme Pastor of the church, not as a man commanding in his

own name, or by his own authority, but as the vicar of Christ,

who has commissioned him to teach, discipline, and govern me. As

a citizen I am bound to obey all the laws of my country not

repugnant to the law or the rights of God, but only because the

state has, in secular matters, authority from God to govern. In

either case the obedience is due only to God, and he only is

obeyed. It is his authority and his alone that binds me, and

neither church nor state can bind me beyond or except by reason

of its authority derived from him.

The law is the rule, and is prescribed by the end, in which is

the reason or motive of duty. The law is not the reason or motive

of duty, nor is it the ground of the obligation. It is simply the

rule, and tells us what God commands, not whence his right to

command, nor wherefore he commands. His right to command rests on

the fact that he is the Creator. But why does he command such and

such things, or prescribe such and such duties? We do not answer,

because such is his will; though that would be true as we

understand it. For such answer would be understood by this

untheological age, which forgets that the divine will is the will

of infinite reason, to imply that duties are arbitrary, rest on

mere will, and that there is no reason why God should prescribe

one thing as duty rather than another. What the law of God

declares to be duty is duty because it is necessary to accomplish

the purpose of our existence, or the end for which we are

created. Everything that even God can enjoin as duty has its

reason or motive in that purpose or end. The end, then,

prescribes, or is the reason of, the law.

{534}

The end for which God creates us is himself, who is our final

cause no less than our first cause. God acts always as infinite

reason, and cannot therefore create without creating for some

end; and as he is self-sufficing and the adequate object of his

own activity, there is and can be no end but himself. All things

are not only created by him but for him. This is equally a truth

of philosophy and of revelation, and even those theologians who

talk of natural beatitude, are obliged to make it consist in the

possession of God, at least, as the author of nature. Hence, St.

Paul, the greatest philosopher that ever wrote, as well as an

inspired apostle, says, Rom. xi. 36, "Of him, and by him, and in

him are all things;" or, "in him and _for_ him they

subsist," as Archbishop Kenrick explains in a note to the

passage. The motive or reason of the law is in the end, or in God

as final cause. The motive or reason for keeping or fulfilling

the law is, then, that we may gain the end for which we are made,

or, union with God as our final cause. This is all clear, plain,

and undeniable, and hence we conclude that morals, in the strict

sense of the word, cannot be asserted unless we assert God as our

creator and as our last end.

Mr. Lecky and his school do not, then, attain to the true

philosophy of morals, for they recognize no final cause, either

of man or his act; and yet there is no moral act that is not done

freely _propter finem_, for the sake of the end. We do not

say that all acts not so done are vicious or sinful, nor do we

pretend that no acts are moral that are not done with a distinct

and deliberate reference to God as our last end. The man who

relieves suffering because he cannot endure the pain of seeing

it, performs a good deed, though an act of very imperfect virtue.

We act also from habit, and when the habit has been formed by

acts done for the sake of the end, or by infused grace, the acts

done from the habit of the soul without an explicit reference to

the end are moral, virtuous, in the true sense of either term;

nor do we exclude those Gentiles who, not having the law, do the

things of the law, of whom St. Paul speaks, Rom. ii. 14-16.

Mr. Lecky overlooks the end, and presents no reason or motive for

performing our duty, distinguishable from the duty itself. He

adopts the philosophy of the Porch, except that he thinks it did

not make enough of the emotional side of our nature, that is, was

not sufficiently sentimental. The Stoics held that we must do

right for the sake of right alone, or because it is right. They

rejected all consideration of personal advantage, of general

utility, the honor of the gods, future life, heaven or hell, or

the happiness of mankind. They admitted the obligation to serve

the commonwealth and to do good to all men, but because it was

right. The good of the state or of the race was duty, but not the

reason or motive of the duty. The professedly disinterested

morality on which our author, after them, so earnestly insists,

closely analyzed, will be found to be as selfish as that of the

Garden, or that of Paley and Bentham. The Epicurean makes

pleasure, that is, the gratification of the senses, the motive of

virtue; the Stoic makes the motive the gratification of his

intellectual nature, or rather his pride, which is as much a

man's self as what the apostle calls concupiscence, or the flesh.

{535}

Intellectual selfishness, in which the Stoics abounded, is even

more repugnant to the virtue of the actor than the sensual

selfishness of the votary of pleasure. We care not what fine

words the Stoic had on his lips, no system of pagan morals was

further removed from real disinterested virtue than that of the

Porch.

Mr. Lecky denounces the morality of the church as selfish, and

says the selfish system triumphed with Bossuet over Fénélon; but

happily for us he is not competent to speak of the morals

enjoined by the church. He does not understand the question which

was at issue, and entirely misapprehends the matter for which

Fénélon was censured by the Holy See. The doctrine of Fénélon, as

he himself explained and defended it, was never condemned, nor

was that of Bossuet, which, on several points, was very unsound,

ever approved. Several passages of Fénélon's _Maxims of the

Saints_ were censured as favoring quietism, already condemned

in the condemnation of Molinos and his adherents--a doctrine

which Fénélon never held, and which he sought in his

_Maxims_ to avoid without running into the contrary extreme,

but, the Holy See judged, unsuccessfully. His thought was

orthodox, but the language he used could be understood in a

quietistic sense; and it was his language, not his doctrine, that

was condemned.

The error favored by Fénélon's language, though against his

intention, was that it is possible in this life to rise and

remain habitually in such a state of charity, or pure love of God

for his own sake, of such perfect union with him, that in it the

soul no longer hopes or fears, ceases to make acts of virtue, and

becomes indifferent to its own salvation or damnation, whether it

gains heaven or loses it. The church did not condemn the love of

God for his own sake, nor _acts_ of perfect charity, for so

much is possible and required of all Christians. The church

requires us to make acts of love, as well as of faith and hope,

and the act of love is: "O my God! I love thee above all things,

with my whole heart and soul, because thou art infinitely amiable

and deserving of all love; I love also my neighbor as myself for

the love of thee; I forgive all who have injured me, and ask

pardon of all whom I have injured." Here is no taint of

selfishness, but an act of pure love. Yet though we can and ought

to make distinct acts of perfect charity, it is a grave error to

suppose that the soul can in this life sustain herself,

habitually, in a state of pure love, that she ever attains to a

state on earth in which acts of virtue cease to be necessary, in

which she ceases from pure love to be actively virtuous, and

becomes indifferent to her own fate, to her own salvation or

damnation, to heaven or hell--an error akin to that of the

Hopkinsians, that in order to be saved one must be willing to be

damned. As long as we live, acts of virtue, of faith, hope, and

charity, are necessary; and to be indifferent to heaven or hell,

is to be indifferent whether we please God or offend him, whether

we are united to him or alienated from him.

It is a great mistake to represent the doctrine the church

opposed to quietism or to Fénélon as the selfish theory of

morals. To act from simple fear of suffering or simple hope of

happiness, or to labor solely to escape the one and secure the

other, is, of course, selfish, and is not approved by the church,

who brands such fear as servile, and such hope as mercenary,

because in neither is the motive drawn from the end, which is

God, as our supreme good.

{536}

What the church bids us fear is alienation from God, and the

happiness she bids us seek is happiness in God, because God is

the end for which we are made. Thus, to the question, "Why did

God make you?" the catechism answers, "That I might know him,

love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy _with

him_ for ever in the next." _With him_, not without him.

The fear the church approves is the fear of hell, not because it

is a place of suffering, and the fear of God she inculcates is

not the fear of him because he can send us to hell, but because

hell is alienation from God, is offensive to him: and therefore

the fear is really fear of offending God, and being separated

from him. The hope of happiness she approves is the hope of

heaven, not simply because heaven is happiness, but because it is

union with God, or the possession of God as our last end, which

is our supreme good.

Here neither the fear of hell nor the hope of heaven is selfish;

for in each the motive is drawn from the end, from God who is our

supreme good. It therefore implies charity or the love of God.

And herein is its moral value. It may not be perfectly

disinterested, or perfect charity, which is the love of God for

his own sake, or because he is the supreme good in himself; but

to love him as our supreme good, and to seek our good in him and

him only, is still to love him, and to draw from him the motive

of our acts. The church enjoins this reference to God in which,

while she recognizes faith and hope as virtues in this life, she

enjoins charity, without which the actor is nothing.

If Mr. Lecky had known the principle of Catholic morals, and

understood the motives to virtue which the church urges, he would

never have accused her of approving the selfish theory, which

proposes in no sense God, but always and everywhere self, as the

end. He will allow us no motive to virtue but the right; that is,

in his theory, duty has no reason or motive but itself. No doubt

his conception of right includes benevolence, the love of

mankind, and steady, persevering efforts to serve our country and

the human race; but he can assign no reason or motive why one

should do so without falling either into the selfishness or the

utilitarianism which he professes to reject. The sentimental

theory which he seems to adopt cannot help him, for none of our

sentiments are disinterested; all the sentiments pertain to self,

and seek always their own gratification. This is as true of those

called the higher, nobler sentiments as of the lower and baser,

and, in point of fact, sentimentalists, philanthropists, and

humanitarians are usually the most selfish, cruel, heartless, and

least moral people in society. Men who act from sentimental

instead of rational motives are never trustworthy, and are, in

general, to be avoided.

Mr. Lecky maintains that right is to be done solely because it is

right, without any considerations of its particular or general

utility, or regard to consequences. But he shrinks from this, and

appeals to utility when hard pressed, and argues that

considerations of advantage to society or to mankind, or a

peculiar combination of circumstances, may sometimes justify us

in deviating from the right--that is, in doing wrong. He contends

that it may be our duty to sacrifice the higher principles of our

nature to the lower, and appears shocked at Dr. Newman's

assertion that "the church holds that it were better for sun and

moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the

many millions of its inhabitants to die of starvation in extreme

agony, _so far as temporal affliction goes_, than that one

soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one venial

sin, tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal

one poor farthing, without excuse."

{537}

This is too rigid for Mr. Lecky. He places duty in always acting

from the higher principles of our nature; but thinks there may be

cases when it is our duty to sacrifice them to the lower! He

supposes, then, that there is something more obligatory than

right, or that renders right obligatory when obligatory it is.

But this doctrine of doing right for the sake of the right is

utterly untenable. Right is not an abstraction, for there are no

abstractions in nature, and abstractions are simple nullities. It

must be either being or relation. If taken as a relation, it can

be no motive, no end, because relation is real only in the

related. If being, then it is God, who only is being. Your

friends, the Stoics, placed it above the divinity, and taught us

in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius that it binds under one and the

same law both God and man. But an abstraction which is formed by

the mind operating on the concrete can bind no one, for it is in

itself simply nothing. The weaker cannot bind the stronger, the

inferior the superior, or that which is not that which is. But

there is no being stronger than God or above him; for he is, in

every respect, supreme. Nothing can bind him, and right must

either be identified with him or held to grow out of the

relations of his creatures to himself. In the first case, right

is God, or God is right; and the obligation to do right is only

the obligation to do what God commands. Right, as being, cannot

exist distinct from God, and can bind men only in the sense in

which God himself binds them. Their sovereign, in such case, is

God, who, by his creative act, is their lord and proprietor. But

right and God are not identical, and, consequently, right is not

being, but a relation. What binds is not the right or the

relation, but he who, by his creative act, founds the relation.

Rejecting, then, right as an abstraction, we must understand by

the right what under this relation it is the duty of the creature

to do. Right and duty are then the same. Ask what is man's duty;

the answer is, what is right. Ask what is right, and the answer

is, whatever is duty.

But right does not make itself right, nor duty itself duty. Here

is the defect of all purely rationalistic morals, and of every

system of morals that is not based, we say not on revelation, but

on theology, or the creative act of God. Right and duty are

identical, we grant; but neither can create its own obligation,

or be its own reason or motive. To say of an act, it is duty

because it is right, or it is right because it is duty, is to

reason, as the logicians say, in a _vicious_ circle, or to

answer _idem per idem_, which is not allowable by any logic

we are acquainted with. We must, then, if we assert morals at

all, come back to theology, and find the ground of obligation or

duty--which is simply the right or authority of God to command

us--in our relation to God, as our creator or first cause, and

the reason or motive in our relation to him as our last end or

final cause.

No doubt the reason why the rationalistic moralists in modern

times are reluctant to admit this is, because they very

erroneously suppose that it means that the basis of morals is to

be found only in supernatural revelation, and is not

ascertainable or provable by reason. But this is a mistake,

growing out of another mistake; namely, that the creative act is

a truth of revelation only, and not a truth of science or

philosophy. The creative act is a fact of science, the basis,

rather, of all science, as of all life in creatures, and must be

recognized and held before revelation can be logically asserted.

{538}

That God is, and is our creator, our first cause, and our final

cause, are truths that do not depend on revelation to be known;

and the theological basis of morals which we assert, in

opposition to the rationalistic moralists, is within the province

of reason or philosophy. But the rationalists, in seeking to

escape revelation, lose God, and are forced to assert a morality

that is independent of him, and does not suppose or need him in

order to be obligatory. They are obliged, therefore, to seek a

basis of morals in nature, which in its own right has no

legislative authority; for nature is the creature of God, and is

nothing without him.

The intuition of right, obligation, duty, which, according to our

author, is the fundamental principle of morals, is only, he

himself maintains, the immediate apprehension of a principle or

law of human nature, or of our higher nature, from which we are

to act, instead of acting from our lower nature; but our higher

nature is still nature, and no more legislative than our lower

nature. Nature being always equal to nature, nothing is more

certain than that nature cannot bind nature or place it under

obligation.

Besides, when the author places the obligation in nature, whether

the higher or the lower, he confounds moral law with physical

law, and mistakes law in the sense in which it proceeds from God

as first cause for law in the sense in which it proceeds from God

as final cause. The physical laws, the natural laws of the

physiologists, are in nature, constitutive of it,

indistinguishable from it, and are what God creates: the moral

law is independent of nature, over it, and declares the end for

which nature exists, and from which, if moral nature, it must

act. It is supernatural in the sense that God is supernatural,

and natural only in the sense that it is promulgated through

natural reason independently of supernatural revelation. Natural

reason asserts the moral law, but asserts it as a law _for_

nature, not a law in nature. By confounding it with physical

laws, and placing it in nature as the law of natural activity,

the author denies all moral distinction between it and the law by

which the liver secretes bile, or the blood circulates. He holds,

therefore, with Waldo Emerson that gravitation and purity of

heart are identical, and, with our old transcendentalist friends,

that the rule of duty is expressed in the maxims, Obey thyself;

Act out thyself; Follow thy instincts. No doubt they meant, as

our author means, the higher instincts, the nobler self, the

higher nature. But the law recognized and asserted is no more the

moral law than is the physical law by which the rain falls, the

winds blow, the sun shines, the flowers bloom, or the earth

revolves on its axis. Physical laws there are, no doubt, in human

nature; but the theologians tell us that an act done from them is

not an _actus humanus_, but an _actus hominis_, which

has no moral character, and, whatever its tendency, is neither

virtuous nor vicious.

Mr. Lecky, as nearly all modern philosophers, denies God as final

cause, if not as first cause. The moral law has its reason and

motive in him as our final cause, and this is the difference

between it and physical law. The pagan Greeks denied both first

cause and final cause, for they knew nothing of creation; but

being a finely organized race and living in a country of great

natural beauty, they confounded the moral with the beautiful, as

some moderns confound art with religion. The author so far agrees

with them, at least, as to place duty in the beauty and nobility

of the act, or in acts proceeding from the beauty and nobility of

our nature--what he calls our higher nature.

{539}

We do not quarrel with Plato when he defines beauty to be the

splendor of the divinity, and therefore that all good, noble, and

virtuous acts are beautiful, and that whoever performs them has a

beautiful soul. But there is a wide difference between the

beautiful and the moral, though the Greeks expressed both by the

same term; and art, whose mission it is to realize the beautiful,

has of itself no moral character; it lends itself as readily to

vice as to virtue, and the most artistic ages are very far from

being the most moral or religious ages. The mistake is in

overlooking the fact that every virtuous or moral act must be

done _propter finem_, and that the law, the reason, the

motive of duty depends on the end for which man was made and

exists.

But the author and his school have not learned that all things

proceed from God by way of creation, and return to him without

absorption in him as their last end. Morals are all in the order

of this return, and are therefore teleological. Not knowing this,

and rejecting this movement of return, they are forced to seek

the basis of morals in man's nature in the order of its

procession from God, where it is not. The intuition they assert

would be something, indeed, if it were the intuition of a

principle or law not included in man's nature, but on which his

nature depends, and to which it is bound, by the right of God

founded in his creative act, to subordinate its acts. But by the

intuition of right, which they assert, they do not mean anything

really objective and independent of our nature, which the mind

really apprehends. On their system they can mean by it only a

mental conception, that is, an abstraction. We indeed find men

who, as theologians, understand and defend the true and real

basis of morals, but who, as philosophers, seeking to defend what

they call natural morality, only reproduce substantially the

errors of the Gentiles. This is no less true of the intuitive

school, than of the selfish, the sentimental, or the utilitarian.

Cudworth founds his moral system in the innate idea of right, in

which he is followed by Dr. Price; Samuel Clarke gives, as the

basis of morals, the idea of the fitness of things; Wollaston

finds it in conformity to truth; Butler, in the idea or sense of

duty; Jouffroy, in the idea of order; Fourier, in passional

harmony--only another name for Jouffroy's order. But these all,

since they exclude all intuition of the end or final cause, build

on a mental conception, or a psychological abstraction, taken as

real. The right, the fitness, the duty, the order they assert are

only abstractions, and they see it not.

It is the hardest thing in the world to convince philosophers

that the real is real, and the unreal is unreal, and therefore

nothing. Abstractions are firmed by the mind, and are nothing out

of the concrete from which they are generalized. A system of

philosophy, speculative or moral, built on abstractions or

abstract conceptions of the true, the right, the just, or duty,

has no real foundation, and no more solidity than "the baseless

fabric of a vision." Yet we cannot make the philosophers see it,

and every day we hear people, whose language they have corrupted,

talk of "abstract principles," "abstract right," "abstract

justice," "abstract duty," "abstract philosophy," "abstract

science;" all of which are "airy nothings," to which not even the

poet can give "a local habitation and a name." The philosophers

who authorize such expressions are very severe on sensists and

utilitarians; yet they really hold that all non-sensible

principles and causes, and all ideas not derived from the

senses, are abstractions, and that the sciences which treat of

them are abstract sciences.

{540}

Know they not that this is precisely what the sensists themselves

do? If the whole non-sensible order is an abstraction, only the

sensible is real, or exists _a parte rei_, and there is no

intelligible reality distinct from the sensible world. All

heathen philosophy ends in one and the same error, which can be

corrected only by understanding that the non-sensible is not an

abstraction, but real being, that is God, or the real relation

between God and his acts or creatures. But to do this requires

our philosophers to cast out from their minds the old leaven of

heathenism which they have retained, to recognize the creative

act of God, and to find in theology the basis of both science and

morals.

Mr. Lecky proves himself, in the work before us, as in his

previous work, an unmitigated rationalist, and rationalism is

only heathenism revived. He himself proves it. He then can be

expected to write the history of European morals only from a

heathen point of view, and his judgments of both heathen and

Christian morals will be, in spite of himself, only those of a

respectable pagan philosopher and in the latter period of pagan

empire, and attached to the moral philosophy of the Porch. He is

rather tolerant than otherwise of Christianity, in some respects

even approves it, lauds it for some doctrines and influences

which it pleases him to ascribe to it, and to which it has no

claim; but judges it from a stand-point far above that of the

fathers, and from a purely pagan point of view, as we may take

occasion hereafter to show, principally from his account of the

conversion of Rome, and the triumph of the Christian religion in

the Roman empire.

But we have taken up so much space in discussing the nature and

foundation of morals, to which the author devotes his preliminary

chapter, that we have no room for any further discussion at

present. What we have said, however, will suffice, we think, to

prove that rationalism is as faulty in morals as in religion, to

vindicate the church from the charge of teaching a selfish

morality, and to prove that the only solid basis of morals is in

theology.

----------

Faith.

Faith is no weakly flower,

By sudden blight, or heat, or stormy shower

To perish in an hour.

But rich in hidden worth,

A plant of grace, though striking root in earth,

It boasts a hardy birth:

Still from its native skies

Draws energy which common shocks defies,

And lives where nature dies!

Oratory, Birmington. E. Caswall.

-------

{541}

Religion Emblemed In Flowers.

"Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,

God hath written in the stars above;

But not less in the bright flowerets under us

Stands the revelation of his love.

And with childlike, credulous affection

We behold their tender buds expand--

Emblems of our own great resurrection,

Emblems of the bright and better land."

Of all the poetic and suggestive traditions that linger with us

from the early ages--those ages when art revived through

religion, and symbolized the truths of eternity by the creation

and application of such esthetics which, under the dominion of

heathendom, had been perverted to purely sensual enjoyment--of

all these traditions, then, we find few more beautiful in their

various types, more elevating in their idealization, or which

form a stronger connecting link between the soul's aspirations

and our material enjoyment, than those frailest children of the

beautiful that belong to the floral kingdom. Coeval with the

creation, the solace, companions, and delight of our first

parents, they shared the punishment, likewise, of man's

transgression, in the flood; but when the waters subsided, they

were the chosen symbols to announce to Noah the cessation of

omnipotent vengeance, and the first to greet the weary wanderers,

as their feet again touched the earth; raising their lowly heads

from around the tree-roots, and through the rocky fissures, as

emblems of the life immortal that springs from decay.

Among those which seem to be the chosen ones, as most expressive

of religious sentiment, both in the Old and New Testament as well

as in early legendary lore, are the rose, the lily, the olive,

and the palm.

To each of these has been given a significance, from the earliest

times, that has made them cherished with our households and

associated with our faith. Although the rose was perverted by the

heathen into a type of sensual love and luxury, yet, through the

marvellous beauty and variety of its creation, it was reclaimed

by the Christian poets, to be the attendant of the pure and holy,

wherever an ornament was needed to paint a moral victory, or

glorify decay.

That this flower was largely cultivated by the Jews, and used in

their religious festivals as an ornament, is made clear by the

frequent use we find of it, as a simile in the Bible. Solomon, in

his song, compares the church to the "rose of Sharon and lily of

the valley." Again, in the book of Wisdom, we see their

appreciation in the admonition, "Let us crown ourselves with

rosebuds ere they be withered." Also, in Ecclesiasticus, occurs

this metaphor, "I was exalted like a palm-tree in Engaddi, and as

a rose-plant in Jericho." Again, "Hearken to me, ye holy

children, and bud forth as roses growing by the brook."

It was a belief among the Jews, according to Zoroaster, says

Howitt, "that every flower is appropriated to a particular angel,

and that the hundred-leaf rose is consecrated to an archangel of

the highest order." The same author relates, that the Persian

fire-worshippers believe that Abraham was thrown into a furnace

by Nimrod, and the flames forthwith turned into a bed of roses.

{542}

In contradistinction to this in sentiment is the belief of the

Turk, who holds that this lovely flower springs from the

perspiration of Mohammed, and, in accordance with this creed,

they never tread upon it or suffer one to lie upon the ground.

I think it was Solon who held the theory that the rose and the

woman were created at the same time, and in consequence thereof,

there sprang up a contest among the gods, as to which should be

awarded the palm of superior beauty. Certainly there may yet be

traced a close resemblance between these native queens, not only

in the matter of beauty, but also in the variety and fragility

for which the rose, above all others, is distinguished.

Everywhere has God planted this exquisite work of his hand. In

the bleak polar regions, where the days of sunshine are so short,

and so few, there is seen among the first breathings of the

summer zephyrs the "_Rosa rapa_," its slender stem covered

with pale double flowers, lifting its head to greet those

ice-bound prisoners as they issue from the stifling air of their

winter huts. Degraded as are that people in their tastes, the

magic of these silent messengers from God is so forcible, that

they greet them with a poet's joy, and deck their heads and rough

sealskin clothing with their tender blossoms. Even to the

broken-hearted Siberian exile, there come a few short days in his

life when these frail comforters rise from the frozen earth to

greet him, like messengers from his lost home and friends. ... It

is not to be wondered, then, with all the associations of Eden

ever clinging about these eloquent voices, that the early

Christians transferred their ornamental and suggestive beauties

from the saturnalian rites of heathendom to the honor of God and

his saints. Hence it is, that, in so many of the beautiful

legends that have come down to us, we find these frail memorials

so often associated as types of some noble deed accomplished, or

the given reward of some heavy human sacrifice. To those who look

upon these legends as myths, or simply religious fairy tales, we

can only say, with Mrs. Jameson, that we most sincerely pity all

such sceptics from our heart; for, where they outstrip the bounds

of even miraculous probability, there may yet be found in their

pages both entertainment and instruction. And after all, why

should not religion have her fairyland, as well as material life?

Why should not the soul enjoy the privilege of an occasional

transport into a world of poetical visions, as well as the

imagination, which finds in the fairy-dreams of childhood only a

dim vista of annual blooms, upon which the breath of heaven can

never blow? Weary with the turmoil of life, with the noise and

whirl of the shifting scenes that open continuously upon a vista

of pain, and sorrow, and unrealized hopes, such legends recall to

the soul auroral gleams of childhood's purity, and transport her

into fields that are redolent with the flowers of that eternal

land where earthly woes can never come. In this Dodona grove, the

soul hallows the heart; the impossible becomes the real; and as

all the aspirations for the higher life possess it, the skies

seem to open, we catch a flutter of the angels' robes, the

perfume of the flowers of paradise, and a glimmer even of the

golden gates shoots radiantly across the uplifted, tear-dimmed

eye; and we feel, for these few moments at least, that God and

heaven are very nigh, ay! even in our heart of hearts.

{543}

What matters it, then, if it be not all truth, since it serves

the purpose, and for the time being decks the soul in regal

splendor, and makes the unattainable and dim worth the longest

toil and hardest battle that the short span of human life can

compass? In those early ages, when the heathen idols were

tottering on their thrones, and the voice of Pan had died out in

a mighty wail at the sound of a feeble infant's cry--in those

dawning Christian days there was felt the need of mental food of

a nourishing and elevating kind for the masses. Heretofore, they

had been kept occupied by public games, periodical saturnalian

revels, gladiatorial combats, and other heathen abominations, in

order to allow the philosopher to pursue his subtle theories in

quiet, and the wheels of government to run smoothly on. As years

and numbers, however, increased the Christian fold, and the first

fervor began to abate under the influence of human passions and

the need of life's varieties, it became evident that some food

was necessary to meet the hunger of the craving mind. The time

and thoughts of the philosophers and theologians were too deeply

engrossed with the abstruse problems of the day--the esoteric and

exoteric--to give other time beyond that of the soul's immediate

requirements to the ignorant. Hence it was, that, as human blood

was poured out like water, in libations to the true God, when

beauty and innocence, rank and lowliness, wealth and poverty,

found a common centre wherein to pray and suffer--hence it was,

that the religious, poetic heart of the people idealized and

beatified these deeds of heroic sanctity; and the church, while

striving to repress extravagance, yet welcomed and fostered a

taste which she saw, in her mighty wisdom, would be productive of

elevating thought and emulative example. "And it is a mistake,"

says Mrs. Jameson, "to suppose that these legends had their sole

origin in the brains of dreaming monks. The wildest of them had

some basis of truth to rest on, and the forms which they

gradually assumed were but the necessary results of the age which

produced them. They became the intense expression of that inner

life which revolted against the desolation and emptiness of the

outward existence; of those crushed and outraged sympathies which

cried aloud for rest, and refuge, and solace, and could nowhere

find them." Mrs. Jameson disclaims any idea of treating these

legends save in their poetic and artistic aspect. But as religion

is the root from whence all have their source, so it is

insensibly transmuted throughout the whole work. And how could

she do otherwise, Protestant though she was? For the great trunk,

the massive column, around which all these delicate fibres of

poesy cling, is religion. Without such support, they would fall,

and be trailed in the dust, and long, long ere this, their

ephemeral life would have been crushed out, as were the oracular

voices of the marble gods.

This literature, then, "became one in which peace was represented

as better than war, and sufferance more dignified than

resistance; which exhibited poverty and toil as honorable, and

charity as the first of virtues; which held up to imitation and

emulation self-sacrifice in the cause of good, and contempt of

death for conscience' sake--a literature in which the tenderness,

the chastity, the heroism of woman, played a conspicuous part;

which distinctly protested against slavery, against violence,

against impurity in word and deed; which refreshed the fevered

and darkened spirit with images of moral beauty and truth,

revealed bright glimpses of a better land, where the wicked cease

from troubling, and brought down the angels of God with shining

wings, and bearing crowns of glory, to do battle with the demons

of darkness, to catch the fleeting soul of the triumphant martyr,

and carry it at once into a paradise of eternal blessedness and

peace." [Footnote 157]

[Footnote 157: Mrs. Jameson's _Legendary Art_.]

{544}

Under the influence, then, of these new inspirations, art

likewise revived, and the brush and the chisel lent the aid of

their immortal touch to give force and perpetuity to these

creations; and birds, and flowers, and the elements were

introduced as types or allegories of the subjects thus

interpreted. Each one possessed a significance and symbolism that

united the soul to the eternal source of these gifts, and kept

alive in the common heart those principles which the people could

admire if not emulate. The rapidity with which artists multiplied

at this period belongs to the marvelous. God needed artisans for

his work, and truly the old masters seemed, judging from their

deeds and spirit, to have risen, like Adam, from the clay

moulding of the almighty hand. Possessed by a sense of the lofty

nature of their calling, they not only strove for perfection in

detail, but also for a religious spirit, which should so inspire

the work as to move every heart to piety, and embody for

instruction the full force of the solemn truths therein

portrayed. They emerged from the impure influences of the old

religion and literature, like the chrysalis, into the golden-hued

glory that shone in the lives of the ancient patriarchs and

prophets; in the auroral beams that hung like sea-foam over the

angels as they walked or talked as God's messengers on earth,

until, bathed in a glory borrowed from the very smile of the

Creator, they saw the divine Son descend like the morning star,

and dwell upon earth among men.

In all their work a confession of faith lay embodied; and feeling

themselves called to this vocation, hearing the voice and seeing

in the enthusiasm of their fervor the burning bush, they purified

themselves by prayer, and fasting, and long meditation upon the

subject that was to grow into life under the glowing tints of the

brush or the magic stroke of the chisel. This mystical spirit so

elevated and ennobled the soul-work of those grand old masters

that faults in mechanical execution and anachronisms in details

are, even to this day, overlooked, for the sake of that _con

amore_ zeal which pervades the vital treatment of their

subjects. Fra Angelico, a Dominican monk, devoted his art life

exclusively to the religious mysticism of his subjects. "Whenever

he painted Christ upon the cross," says Jarves, "the tears would

roll down his cheeks as if he were an actual eyewitness of his

Saviour's agony. There is a celestial glow in all his beatified

faces that seem to radiate from his own soul." Lippo Dalmasio, an

early painter of Bologna, was also noted for his piety in art.

"He never painted the holy Virgin without fasting the previous

evening, and receiving absolution and the bread of angels in

the morning after; and, finally, never consented to paint for

hire, but only as a means of devotion." [Footnote 158]

[Footnote 158: Lord Lindsay's _Christian Art_.]

Add to these, Luini, of Milan; Francia, of Bologna; Gentile and

John Bellini, of Venice; Fra Bartolomeo, the Florentine monk, and

friend of Savonarola; Perugino, and finally, Raphael--and we have

the list of those who led the vanguard in the perpetuity of those

heaven-toned idealizations that yet greet the eye with their

beauty and animate the heart with emotions of grateful homage.

{545}

"Such art has left us, and can never again be revived until

artists believe and pray as did those men of old; until they

can see and feel as they did at all hours, amid their

rejoicings or as they slept, holy personages, saints, and

virgins, apostles and evangelists, martyrs, and the symbolized

faith for which they died. Virtues, and not graces; angels, and

not muses; types of spiritual truths, and not expressions of

sensuous beauty or lustful passion--these were their daily

intellectual food. Amid all things--in church, shop, or

bedroom; on the roadside and by the palace; at every street

corner, and over every threshold--were the figures of the

Redeemer and his holy mother to direct their thoughts still

higher heavenward. Religion, at all events, in its external

form, and as _believed_, was confessed by all men and in

all places. Youth were taught to rely on spiritual powers for

their earthly support and sole sustenance. Charity, faith, the

due subjection of the body to the development of its perfect

strength, humanity, the succor of the oppressed, the relief of

the unfortunate, _devoir_, duty to all men--such were the

doctrines of chivalry in the middle ages." [Footnote 159]

[Footnote 159: _Art Hints_, by Jarves.]

Apart from the palm and olive, we find no mention in the New

Testament of flowers, save that exquisite simile of the lilies,

made by our Saviour himself; and there can be found no other

instance wherein such an illustration is rendered with more

beautiful pathos and force. That he appreciated these frail

emblems is not only made apparent in this, but is further proved

by his choice of the calm repose and soothing influence of these

silent sympathizers on Gethsemane's night of woe. No human

companionship, no human eye or voice, could aid him then, in that

fearful contest of humanity over divinity, as did nature's

voiceless comforters--the flowers that were bent down by the

weight of their tears, the great shifting sky above, with the

eloquent calm of its silver stars, through which floated clear

and luminous the angel comforters. Our Saviour proved in all the

suffering episodes of his life that lovely groves, and dim

funereal forests speak more forcibly to a heart in pain than do

the wilder and grander convulsions of nature.

"It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty,

the deep, the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be

sought ere it can be seen, and loved ere it is understood;

things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary

eternally; which are never wanting, and never repeated; which

are to be found always, yet each found but once--it is through

these that her lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the

blessing of beauty given." [Footnote 160]

[Footnote 160: Ruskin's _Modern Painters_. ]

Nowhere have these beautiful accessories in life's pilgrimage

been more glowingly and successfully used, not only as an

abstract religious emblem, but as a divine allegorical poem, than

in the representations of the life and attributes of the blessed

Virgin. To this type of all that was pure and noble in woman; to

the humanity which was a link in the chain of divinity, a

partaker of all human woes, and yet the chosen of the Godhead--to

her were specially dedicated those early labors in revived art,

and of which she was the inspiration. Herein, as elsewhere, we

find the historical, mystical, and devotional treated with every

conceivable adjunct that can typify a being so elevated and

benign. The beauty and variety of the rose, the purity and

fragrance of the lily, were devoted to her special honor,

wherever her name was venerated and loved. Even before it was

safe for the early Christians to make an open profession of

faith, they expressed their devotion to the mother conjointly

with the Son, in the darkness and solitude of the catacombs.

{546}

Therein it was, that the first Christian artist dared give life

to his heart's belief; and therein it was, that her image with

that of her divine Son and the apostles were impressed upon the

walls and sarcophagi of that grand subterranean temple.

As the Annunciation was the door through which all future

blessings flowed, so it became a most fruitful theme to the faith

and imagination of those great religious artists whose work was a

labor of love; and we find it treated from the fifth to the

sixteenth century by Byzantine, Italian, Spanish, and German art

with a variety, beauty, and significance that only an enshrined

saint could inspire. In the earliest representations of this

subject, the angel appeared holding a sceptre, but this mark of

authority gradually gave way to the more symbolic lily. This was

introduced universally, either held in the hand of the angel as

he salutes her, or seen growing in a pot placed in some part of

the room. Others again, represent an enclosed garden, upon which

the Blessed Virgin is looking from a window. In all, from the

crudest to the most finished, some floral adjunct gives beauty

and significance to the subject. The Assumption--that fitting

climacteric of a life whence sprung the Eternal Word--was

likewise a theme of devotional and sublimated art-worship, which

gathered pathos and beauty from the belief that her body was

worthy the care of the seraphim and cherubim, who transported it

with angelic harmonies into the home of her glorified Son. Here,

too, we find, according to the legend, her floral emblems

springing up in the tomb from whence her incorruptible body had

just been raised.

In an Annibale Carracci, the apostles are seen below, one of whom

is lifting, with an astonished air, a handful of roses out of the

sepulchre. In another, by Rubens, one of the women exhibits the

miraculous flowers held up in the folds of her dress. Dominico di

Bartolo, who painted in 1430, (according to Mrs. Jameson,) omits

the open tomb, but clothes the holy mother in a white robe

embroidered with golden flowers.

From the time of the Nestorian heresy, when the title of _Dei

genitrix_ was denied the Blessed Virgin, her votaries became

even more zealous to corroborate her right to the title and

privileges of mother of the man-God; and under the influence of

this test of devotion and faith sprang those multitudinous

representations of the woman glorified, as the enthroned Madonna.

From thence the descent was natural and gradual to those

characteristics which distinguished her life in its daily

ministrations to her divine Son; and so touchingly natural, so

beautiful in their tenderness, are many of these more human

portraitures, that the coldest heart cannot withhold its homage,

though it may its devotion. Even Mrs. Jameson, herself a

Protestant, says, "We look, and the heart is in heaven; and it is

difficult to refrain from an _Ora pro nobis_." In a large

number of these inspirations of faith and love, we meet the

various floral emblems that typify her beauty and purity. Some of

the earliest representations are found in many of the old Gothic

cathedrals, executed in sculpture. She is therein portrayed in a

standing position, bearing the child on her left arm, while in

the right hand she holds a flower, or sometimes a sceptre. In a

holy family in the academy of Venice, by Bonifazio, "The virgin

is seated in glory, with her infant on her knee, and encircled by

cherubim. On one side an angel approaches with a basket of

flowers on his head, and she is in the act of taking these

flowers and scattering them on the saints who stand below."

{547}

The Arcadian and pastoral life, with which many of the Italian

artists environ the mother and child, is certainly both poetical

and natural. Mrs. Jameson gives many instances of this treatment;

among them, one by Philippino Lippi, which is a beautiful idea.

"Here," she says, "the mystical garden is formed of a balustrade,

beyond which is seen a hedge, all in blush with roses. The virgin

kneels in the midst and adores her infant; an angel scatters rose

leaves over him, while the little St. John also kneels, and four

angels, in attitudes of devotion, complete the group." "But a

more perfect example," continues the same author, "is the Madonna

of Francia in the Munich gallery, where the divine infant lies on

the flowery turf, and the mother standing before him, and looking

down on him, seems on the point of sinking on her knees in a

transport of tenderness and devotion. With all the simplicity of

the treatment, it is strictly devotional. The mother and her

child are placed within the mystical garden enclosed in a

_treillage_ of roses, alone with each other, and apart from

all earthly associations, all earthly communions."

Those who are familiar with the Raphael series of Madonnas will

recall, in this connection, his exquisite pastoral _La

Jardinière_. There is also one similarly entitled by a French

artist, though differently treated. The virgin is enthroned on

clouds, and holds the infant, whose feet rest on a globe. Both

mother and child are crowned with roses; and on each side, as if

rising from the clouds, are vases filled with roses and lilies.

Titian has also left many beautiful and some exaggerated works of

the Arcadian school. There is an old Coptic tradition which is

very beautiful, and bears somewhat on this subject of nature's

aid in glorifying these two lives. Near the site of the ancient

Heliopolis, there still stands a very pretty garden, in which

(runs the tradition) the holy family rested in their flight into

Egypt. Feeling oppressed with thirst, a spring of fresh water

gushed at their feet, and on being pursued into their retreat by

robbers, a sycamore-tree opened, and hid them from sight. "The

spring still exists," says a recent traveller, "and the tree yet

stands, and bears such unmistakable marks of antiquity as to make

this tradition and faith of the present generation of Coptics at

least plausible." But these floral emblematical tributes are as

inexhaustible as are the sentiments of love, homage, and tender

pity that fill the heart from the contemplation of the _Mater

Dei Genitrix_ down to the appealing anguish of the

_Dolorosa_. "Thus in highest heaven, yet not out of sight of

earth; in beatitude past utterance; in blessed fruition of all

that faith creates and love desires; amid angel hymns and starry

glories," we will leave enthroned the "blessed amongst women,"

and turn to other legends, wherein the saints who followed her

stand crowned with flowers celestial, awaiting a share of our

praise and veneration.

Part Second.

In Thuringia, one of the provinces of Germany, the traveller is

attracted by a species of rose that is universally cultivated by

the poorest peasant, as well as the richest land-owner. When the

question as to its origin is asked, the answer invariably is,

"Oh! that is the rose of the dear St. Elizabeth, our former

queen; and was grown from one of the sprigs given to her by the

angels."

{548}

One might as well try to turn the faith of these simple people

from their belief in the sanctity of her life as from the truth

of the miraculous roses. According to Montalembert and others,

thus runs the substance of the legend. Elizabeth loved the poor,

and was specially devoted to relieving their necessities,

frequently carrying with her own hands goods of various kinds, to

distribute among them. At one season, there was a great scarcity

of crops throughout the land, and caution and economy in the use

of the royal stores had been advised even in the palace.

Elizabeth could not bear to know of unrelieved suffering among

her people; so, by close economy in her own wants, she managed to

furnish food for many others. On one occasion, a very pressing

case of necessity reached her; and not wishing to encourage her

servants in disobedience to the general command, she started

alone on her errand of mercy, with some lighter articles of food

concealed in the folds of her dress. Just as she reached the back

steps of the chateau, however, she met her husband, with several

gentlemen, returning from the chase. Astonished to see his wife

alone, and thus burdened, he asked her to show him what she was

carrying; but as she held her dress in terror to her breast, he

gently disengaged her hands, and behold! "It was filled with

white and red roses, the most beautiful he ever saw."

Wandering in thought over these scenes wherein the air is

redolent with their fragrance, the form of the young and lovely

Dorothea, with the radiant boy-angel at her side, rises in

diaphonous light before the vision. We see her as she stands

confronting her heathen judge Fabricius, who longs to possess her

charms; and to his command, "Thou must serve our gods or die."

she mildly answers, "Be it so; the sooner shall I stand in the

presence of _Him_ I most desire to behold." Then the

governor asked her, "Whom meanest thou?" She replied, "I mean the

Son of God, Christ, mine espoused. His dwelling is in paradise;

by his side are joys eternal, and in his garden grow celestial

fruits, and roses that never fade." And resisting all

temptations, all entreaties, she went forth to torture and to

death. "And as she went," (continues the legend,) "a young man, a

lawyer of the city, named Theophilus, who had been present when

she was first brought before the governor, called to her

mockingly, 'Ha! fair maiden, goest thou to join thy bridegroom?

Send me, I pray thee, of the fruits and flowers of that same

garden of which thou hast spoken. I would fain taste of them!'

And Dorothea, looking on him, inclined her head with a gentle

smile, and said, 'Thy request, O Theophilus! is granted.' Where

at he laughed aloud with his companions; but she went on

cheerfully to death. When she came to the place of execution, she

knelt down and prayed; and suddenly at her side stood a bright

and beautiful boy, with hair bright as sunbeams. In his hands, he

held a basket containing three apples and three fresh-gathered

fragrant roses. She said to-him, 'Carry these to Theophilus; say

that Dorothea hath sent them, and that I go before him to the

garden whence they came, and await him there.' With those words,

she bent her neck, and received the stroke of death. Meantime,

the angel went to seek Theophilus, and found him still laughing

in merry mood over the idea of the promised gift. The angel

placed before him the basket of celestial fruit and flowers,

saying, 'Dorothea sends thee these,' and vanished."

{549}

Amazement filled the mind of Theophilus, and the taste of the

fruit and fragrance of the roses pervaded his soul with a new

life, the scales of darkness fell, and he proclaimed himself a

servant of the same Lord that had won the heart of the gentle

maiden. Carlo Dolci, Rubens, and Van Eyck have given the most

poetical illustrations of this subject. Many other artists have

also treated it, but more coldly.

With the name of St. Cecilia arise visions of angels poised in

mid-air, enthralled by seraphic music, which, through the power

of its voluminous sweetness, has pierced even the gates of

heaven. But the flowers of paradise, as well as its celestial

harmonies, are also associated with the name of this beautiful

virgin--flowers that were sent to her bridal-chamber, as a reward

for her angelic purity and the eloquence which had moved her

young heathen husband to respect her vow of chastity. Returning

from the instructions of St. Urban, to whom she had sent him, he

heard the most enchanting music, and on reaching his wife's

chamber he "beheld an angel, who was standing near her, and who

held in his hands two crowns of roses gathered in paradise,

immortal in their freshness and perfume, but invisible to the

eyes of unbelievers. With these he encircled the brows of Cecilia

and Valerian; and he said to Valerian, "Because thou hast

followed the chaste counsel of thy wife, and hast believed her

words, ask what thou wilt, it shall be granted thee."

I stood, early one morning late in the month of June, looking

sadly upon the dead, white, upturned face of one who had seemed

to walk, while on earth, more with angels than with men. A

mystery of sadness had enveloped her life, but, like the cloud in

the wilderness, it proved a power that drew her in the footprints

of the "Man of sorrows." As I meditated upon the calm

etherealized beauty that now absorbed the old earthly pain, and

wondered what this secret of a heart-life could have been, her

mother entered with tear-dimmed eyes, and placed upon her brow of

auburn hair, through which glinted here and there a streak of

gray--"dawn of another life that broke o'er her earthly

horizon"--in her hands, and over the white fleecy robes, crowns

and sprays of mingled crimson and white roses, all glistening

with the morning dew.

"Red roses for the dead!" I exclaimed in surprise. "White alone

can surely typify such a life and death as hers."

"So you think, my friend, because you with others saw only the

outward calm that marked her way. But I--I who loved her so, knew

and saw the thorn-crown that pressed her brow, and the hard

stones and barbs that strewed every step of her way through

life--I place them then here, because she loved them, and because

they express, in conjunction with their sister's whiteness, the

sorrow and purity of the angelic life now closed to pain and open

only to joy.

"Well done of God, to halve the lot,

And give her all the sweetness;

To us, the empty room and cot;

To her, the heaven's completeness.

For her to gladden in God's view;

For us to hope and bear on.

Grow, Lily, in thy garden new

Beside the rose of Sharon."

I turned away sadly, marvelling upon the mystery of this life now

closed so happily, and involuntarily arose to my mind the

exquisite legend of the sultan's daughter.

{550}

I.

"Early in the morning,

The sultan's daughter

Walked in her father's garden,

Gathering the bright flowers,

All full of dew.

And as she gathered them,

She wondered more and more

Who was the master of the flowers,

And made them grow

Out of the cold, dark earth.

In my heart,' she said,

'I love him; and for him

Would leave my father's palace

To labor in his garden.'

II.

"And at midnight

As she lay upon her bed,

She heard a voice

Call to her from the garden,

And, looking forth from her window,

She saw a beautiful youth

Standing among the flowers;

And she went down to him,

And opened the door for him;

And he said to her,'O maiden!

Thou hast thought of me with love,

And for thy sake

Out of my father's kingdom

Have I come hither.

I am the master of the flowers;

My garden is in paradise,

And if thou wilt go with me,

Thy bridal garland

Shall be of bright red flowers.'

And then he took from his finger

A golden ring,

And asked the sultan's daughter

If she would be his bride.

And when she answered him with love,

His wounds began to bleed,

And she said to him,

'O Love! how red thy heart is,

And thy hands are full of roses.'

'For thy sake,' answered he,

'For thy sake is my heart so red,

For thee I bring these roses.

I gathered them at the cross

Whereon I died for thee!

Come, for my father calls,

Thou art my celestial bride!'

And the sultan's daughter

Followed him to his father's garden." [Footnote 161]

[Footnote 161: _Golden Legend_, by Longfellow.]

Throughout all the early church legends, we find whatever is pure

and beautiful in sentiment and exalted in art carefully

cherished, and constantly presented to the contemplation of the

votary in some glowing form that could act as a counterpoise to

the corrupting influence of heathen passions and pursuits.

When the holy mother stood on Calvary, her heart steeped in agony

unutterable, not the least cause of her anguish was to see the

waste of those precious drops of blood as they bedewed the hard

insensible ground. But behold! as she gazes, and her tears fall,

delicate bell-shaped crimson blossoms spring up, and absorb the

human dew; and thus, through these frail beautifiers of suffering

and consolers of grief, the heart of the mother was comforted,

and the soul is drawn to look upward, away from the agonizing

ignominy of the cross to the beatified glory to which he is

translated at the price of so much woe.

Thus also, in the horrid details of the early martyrdoms, we

constantly meet these compensating, suggestive metaphors of the

glory won. The painful agony of the downward crucifixion of St.

Peter, the waste of blood from that congested head, springs into

a fountain of clear gurgling water, from which flows healing for

all suffering flesh that seek its miraculous aid. As St. Grata

bears the decapitated head of her friend St. Alexander to the

tomb, lo! flowers spring up as the blood falls, and are gathered

by the mourners to deck his grave.

Among the little band that followed Mother Seton more than fifty

years ago, in her divine mission of self-abnegation and Christian

love, was a delicate young woman whose life had been spent in

ease, amid the devoted love and admiration of a large family

circle. Dreamy and poetical by nature, her talent, then rare

among American women, was revered and looked up to by seven young

brothers as something marvellous; and no implement more fatiguing

than the pen or needle was ever allowed to weary her dainty

fingers. One day as she sat amid her flowers and books, conning a

new inspiration, suddenly the open door of heaven seemed to stand

before her, and she felt a voice saying, "He who would come after

me must take up his cross and follow me."

{551}

And believing that her heavenly spouse had called, she closed her

books, and turned her face steadfastly away from her weeping

friends, and went cheerfully forth to privation and labor.

Faithful to her new vows, religion yet did not forbid the

exercise of the talent God had given her; only now her themes had

become more exalted, and the love and perennial sublimity of

heaven took the place of the perishable and annual blooms of

time. The privations and labors spent in the service of suffering

humanity soon reduced her delicate frame to patient helplessness;

but the beauty and love of God in his works and ways triumphed

over all her bodily infirmities, and her strength was never too

frail to raise a _sursum corda_ in his praise. Whitsuntide

of 1813 rose in the light of a glorious May morning, and the

sufferer lay panting for breath, after a night of exhausting

hemorrhage, and she knew that the angel, with palm in hand, stood

by her side ready to conduct her to God. In blissful hope of the

fruition that now dawned upon all those past sacrifices, labors,

and sufferings, she fell, to the music of those unseen,

undulating wings, into a sweet sleep. Mother Seton, who had left

the sufferer's bed for a breath of the fresh morning air, just

then returned from the garden, bearing in her hand the first rose

of the season, knowing how refreshing and suggestive such a gift

would be to the weary sufferer. Rejoiced to find her in repose,

she gently laid the flower upon her bosom, above the white,

folded hands, and quietly left the room. The fitful fever sleep

was soon ended, and as Mary opened her eyes, first the fragrance,

then the beauty of this heavenly symbol, caught her eye. Wasted

and dying though the earthly tenement was, the soul, the poet's

soul, yet glowed with vital power; and raising from a little

table at her side a pencil and paper, she thereon breathed her

last pean of poetic utterance in these lines:

"The morning was beautiful, mild, and serene,

All nature had waked from repose;

Maternal affection came silently in,

And placed on my bosom a rose.

"Poor nature was weak, and had almost prevailed,

The weary eyelids were closed;

But the soul rose in triumph, and joyfully hailed

The sweet queen of flowers--the rose.

"Whitsuntide was the time, the season of love:

Methought the blest spirit had chose

To leave for awhile the mild form of a dove,

And come in the blush of a rose.

"Come, Heavenly Spirit, descend on each breast,

And there let thy blessing repose,

As thou once didst on Mary, thy temple of rest;

For Mary's our mystical rose.

"Oh! may every rose that blooms forth evermore,

Enkindle the spirit of those

Who see it, or wear it, to bless and adore

The hand that created the rose."

When Mother Seton returned, she found the lines with the rose

still lying on her bosom; and looking into the sweet upturned

face, she saw the signet of death stamped upon the luminous eyes,

and knew by her short, heavy breathing that ere long she would be

singing her songs in the rose-gardens of paradise.

Suggestive of peace and lowliness as are these creations, yet

even they have been perverted by the passions of man into

insignia of blood and shame. The thirty years' war of the houses

of York and Lancaster make the white and red rose ever associated

with the sorrows and humiliations, the heroic endurance, and true

womanly nobility of Margaret of Anjou. We see her as she stands

under her rose-banner, on the heights of Tewksbury, with

dauntless courage in her heart, and a mother's wild prayer upon

her lips; standing there, amid the wild havoc, unflinchingly,

until the wailing, weird blast of the trumpeters tells her that

her beautiful white rose is broken at the stem, and its leaves

scattered, trampled, and bathed in the life-blood of her only

son.

{552}

Tracing, then, these exquisite adumbrations throughout the

spiritual aspect of life, is it strange that we have learned to

look upon these frail children of the beautiful as one of the

connecting links with heaven? Of such every heart has its

conservatory; every home its storehouse of withered, scentless

mementoes, that recall, when the gates of the sanctuary are

unbarred, memories deep and voiceless, and faces whose beauty has

paled, like them, in dust. Here is the remnant of a cross of

white _immortelles_. It was taken from the breast of a loved

one who died far away in a foreign land, among strangers. It was

sent with the last spoken words to comfort and uplift the heart

of the mourners; and as we lift it from the sacred casket, the

echo of those words seems to take form in the rustle of its

blighted leaves, and the old, subdued sorrow breaks out afresh

before the multitudinous memories and images evoked by a withered

flower.

Here lie together a sprig of orange blossom and a white rosebud,

double memorial of a happy bridal and an early grave. Ere the

perfume of the orange blossom had faded from her brow, the white

rose lay on her pulseless heart. Ere the echo of the wedding

march had died on the air, it was merged into a requiem dirge of

woe.

Ah this spray of brown leaves! what memories lie folded in its

veins! A picture of a lone, far away grave rises, and by its side

kneel a wife and daughter, come from a great distance to pay some

tribute to a beloved one's last resting-spot in a land of

strangers. Desolate looked the bare, uncultivated mound; but at

the head some tender stranger's hand had placed a plain wooden

cross to mark the spot for the absent ones, and planted a wild

rose which twined its arms over and around the cross in graceful

beauty, as if to offer a poor substitute for the visits of loving

friends. How warmly the prayers of the widow went forth for that

unknown one who had thus filled the place and thoughtfulness of

the absent!

A prisoner walks rapidly up and down the parapet of the Capitol

prison in Washington, the wild throbbings of his heart keeping

time to the tramp, tramp of his restless feet, which long for

space, for liberty, and the sound of the brother voices that send

their wild echo from the other side of the Potomac. Suddenly the

laughter of a child's voice sounds above him, and, as he in

surprise raises his eyes, lo! a cherub head looks from a window

down upon him, and the little hands drop at his feet a half-blown

rose.

"War's wild alarum call" suddenly dies out, and the soldier's

dream of glory gives place to the man's warm love. The wide blue

sea no longer rolls between him and home, and over and above the

din of battle floats the voice of mother and sister in loving

prayer for the absent one, who, impelled by a noble people's cry

for aid, hastened to the rescue, and found instead of the

_élan_ of battle the cold, dark walls of a prison home. Lo!

the power and pathos of a little child and a fragile flower

within the walls of a dungeon.

A father kneels in grief unutterable by the soulless body of a

little daughter. In the agony of his rebellious grief, he prays

to God to send him one ray of comfort, one gleam of light, to see

and know that the transition is at least well for her. As he

raises his head, his eyes fall upon the family Bible, and with

the prayer still in his heart he opens its leaves, and his

finger, as if guided by an angel, falls upon these lines, "And he

took the damsel by her hand, and said unto her, I say unto thee,

arise."

{553}

With the sacred verse, there came shining down into his heart a

clear, sweet perception of the fact that at that very moment our

Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is the resurrection and the life,

was raising up out of her cold and lifeless form that beautiful,

spiritual body in which little Lucy will exist as an angel for

ever. He plucked some white and green leaves from the flowers

which lay in the dead child's hands, and placed them on that

verse of the sacred volume.

"Years have passed away, and they are there still, pale and

withered, sacred little mementoes of the consolation which came

like a voice from heaven in his hour of need. When he is

haunted by sorrowful memories, and falls into states of

desolation and despair, he opens that holy book, and kisses

those faded leaves, and his spirit is sometimes elevated into

that mount which the three disciples ascended with their Lord,

and there, by the permission of the same Redeemer who makes

every child an image of himself, he sees the body of his little

daughter transfigured in glory!" [Footnote 162]

[Footnote 162: _Our Children in Heaven_, by W. H.

Holcombe, M.D. ]

In a white alabaster box, yellowed by the mould of years, are

lying, side by side, a crisp, golden curl, a sprig of lily of the

valley, and a tuberose. Through the mist of tears that fill the

eye rise the angelic features of a little girl, the first-born of

her mother. The joyous laughter, the music of the little feet,

the endless activity of the waxen fingers, ere they closed

lifelessly over those tender lily sprays, all take form and life

in presence of these mute memorials. Other children God sent to

console the mother for the loss of this little one, and long,

long years have ripened them into men and women, and sent them

forth to fill the various missions of life that separate them

from mother and home. But to the long and early lost, the

maternal heart now yearningly turns, as still, above all others,

the child of her love. No stronger earthly ties stand between

them even now; the _mother_ holds her place supreme

_here_, and feels that for her, above all others on earth,

those little hands are folded in prayer, and that sweet-toned

voice raised in songs of supplication.

"Yet still, in all the singing,

Thinks haply of her song,

Which in that life's first springing

Sang to her all night long."

Comforted by such memories,

she kisses the mute and withered

mementoes, and, as she folds them

again reverently, lovingly away in

their casket, she prays that

"When her dying couch about

The natural mists shall gather,

Some smiling angel close shall stand

In old Correggio's fashion,

And bear a _lily_ in his hand

For death's annunciation."

-------

{554}

Catholicity And Pantheism.

Number Seven.

The Finite.--Continued.

We pass to the next question: What is the end of the exterior

action of God?

God is infinite intelligence. An agent who acts by understanding

must always act for a reason, which is as the lever of the

intelligence. This reason is called the end of the action.

Therefore, the external act, being the act of an infinite

intelligence, must have an end, an object, a reason. So far

everything is evident; but a very difficult question here arises:

What can the end of the exterior action be? In the first place,

it cannot be an end necessarily to be attained; for the necessity

of the end would imply also the necessity of the means, and the

external act in that supposition would become necessary. But

suppose the end not necessary. God, in that case, would be free

to accept it; and in that supposition he would either act without

a reason, or have another reason or object for accepting an end

not necessary to be attained; which second reason would, in its

turn, be either necessary or not necessary. If the former, the

same inconvenience would exist which we have pointed out before;

if the latter, it would require a third reason to account for the

second; and so on _ad infinitum_. The answer to this

difficulty consists in the following doctrine. The reason by

which an agent acts may be twofold: one, efficient or

determining; the other, qualifying the action without determining

it. Ontologically speaking, every intelligent agent must act for

a reason, but not always be determined to act by the reason. This

is eminently true when the agent or efficient cause is the first

and universal agent. In this case there would be a contradiction,

if the first and universal agent were to act by a reason

determining him to the act. For then the predicate would destroy

the subject; that is, if the first and universal agent were to

act by a determining reason, he would no longer be first, but

second agent; no longer universal, but particular. Because in

that case the final cause would move him, and thus he would

neither be the first nor the cause of everything. This theory

resolves the question of the end of the external act. There

exists neither an intrinsic reason on the part of the agent to

determine him to act outside himself, nor an exterior reason on

the part of the term to impel him to act, as we have already

demonstrated. Consequently, there can be no determining reason

for the external act, and the act must determine itself. The

efficient or determining reason of the external act is the choice

of the act which is absolute master of itself; it lies in its

liberty: and here applies with strict truth that saying, "Stat

pro ratione voluntas." And necessarily so, since the first agent

either determines himself without any efficient reason, or he is

determined by the reason; and in that case he is no longer first,

but second. But then God acts outside himself without any reason?

Without any efficient and determining reason, independent of his

own act, it is granted; without a sufficient reason to make the

act rational, it is denied.

{555}

If there be a reason which qualifies the act, it is sufficient

and rational. Now, for instance, to create finite substances is

to create substantial good; hence the act of creating them must

be good, and therefore rational. And since every finite being, or

its perfection, is good, inasmuch as it resembles the infinite

goodness and perfection of God, it follows that, as St. Thomas

says, the goodness of God is the end of the external act.

_Divina bonitas est finis omnium rerum_.

The determination of the end of the exterior act, which is the

goodness of God, as we have explained it, gives rise to another

question, which has occupied the highest intellects among

philosophers and theologians, and of which we must speak, to pave

our way to lay down the whole plan of the exterior action of God,

as proclaimed by the Catholic Church.

Finite beings are capable of indefinite perfection. An assemblage

of finite beings would form a cosmos, or universe; and as they

are capable of indefinite perfections, we may suppose an

indefinite number of these, one more perfect than the other, all

arrayed in beautiful order in the intelligence of the Creator, in

which the intelligibility of all possible things resides. The

question arises here, suppose God has determined to act outside

himself, which of the whole series of the ideal worlds residing

in his intelligence shall he choose? Can he choose any of them?

Is he bound to choose the best?

The reader will remark that this question is different from that

of the end of creation. The one establishes that God cannot be

forced by any reason to act outside himself, else he would not be

the first and universal cause. The other question that is

proposed now, supposes that God has determined freely and

independently of any reason to act outside himself, and asks

whether God can choose any of the possible ideal worlds residing

in his intellect, or is he forced to choose the best in the

series?

Some philosophers, among whom are Leibnitz and Malebranche,

contend that God is absolutely free to create or not to create;

but once he has determined to create, he is bound to choose the

best possible cosmos in the series. We shall let them expound

their system in their own words.

"God," says Leibnitz, "is the supreme reason of things, because

those which are limited, like everything which comes under our

vision and experience, are contingent and have nothing in them

which may render their existence necessary; it being manifest

that time, space, and matter, united and uniform in themselves,

and indifferent to everything, may receive every other movement

and figure and be in another order. We must, therefore, seek

for a reason for the existence of the world, which is the whole

assemblage of contingent beings, and seek it in that substance

which carries within itself the reason of its own existence,

and which is consequently necessary and eternal.