It is still a vexed question whether a disease that is capable of

self-propagation can ever be generated _de novo_. It is maintained, on

the one hand, that such an occurrence is as impossible as the

spontaneous generation of plants or animals; while, on the other hand,

it is argued that the poison of certain diseases capable of

self-propagation may, under certain favorable conditions, be produced

independently of any pre-existing cases of the disease. The comparison

of a fever-poison with a spore or ovum is an ingenious, but a most

delusive, argument. An epidemic disease springing up in a locality

where it was before unknown, and where it is impossible to trace its

introduction from without, is said to be not more extraordinary than

the development of fungi in a putrid fluid. The argument, however, is

founded on a pure assumption, for there is not a tittle of evidence to

show that a fever-poison is of the nature of a spore or ovum. Air

saturated with the poisons of various contagious diseases has been

condensed and submitted to the highest powers of the microscope, but

nothing approaching to a small-pox spore, or a typhus ovum, has yet

been discovered. It is true that certain contagious diseases, such as

scarlet-fever and smallpox, can in most instances be traced to

contagion; but, with regard to others, such as typhoid or enteric

fever, it is in most instances utterly impossible to account for the

_first cases_ in any outbreak on the theory of contagion, while, at

the same time, there is direct evidence that the contagious power of

the disease is extremely. The question is no doubt beset with many

difficulties, and constitutes one of the most intricate problems in

medical science. It is one, however, which can never be solved by

entering on the discussion with a preconceived theory as to the close

analogy, if not identity, of a fever-poison with an animal or

vegetable ovum, nor by assuming that the laws which regulate the

propagation of one contagious disease are equally applicable to all.

Nature's facts are too often interpreted by human laws, rather than by

the laws of nature. In the case before us, the natural history of each

disease must be studied independently, and our ideas as to its origin

and mode of propagation must be founded on the evidence furnished by

that study alone, and irrespective of the laws which seem to regulate

the origin and propagation of other diseases with which it has no

connection whatever, except in the human mind. At the present moment,

when the subject of epidemics is attracting so much attention, it may

be interesting to call attention to the more important diseases

comprised under that head, and to point out some of the main facts

connected with their origin and distribution. {422} The principal

epidemic diseases, then, are: small-pox, scarlet-fever, measles,

typhus, relapsing fever, Oriental plague, yellow fever, diarrhoea,

typhoid or enteric fever, cholera, dysentery, ague and remittent

fevers, influenza, the sweating sickness, and the dancing mania.

1. _Small-pox_ the most loathsome of all diseases, is believed to have

prevailed in India and China from time immemorial. About the middle of

the sixth century it is supposed to have been conveyed by trading

vessels from India to Arabia, and the Arabian army at the siege of

Mecca, in the year 569, was the first victim of its fury. From Arabia

it was imported into Europe by the Saracens, and there is evidence of

its existence in Britain before the ninth century. Before the

introduction of vaccination, small-pox was one of the chief causes of

mortality in all the countries where it prevailed, and even now it

occupies a prominent place in our mortuary returns. During the

twenty-four years 1838-61, 125,352 of the population of England and

Wales, and 21,369 of the population of London, _died_ of small-pox;

or, in other words, one in seventy-five of the total deaths in England

and Wales, and one in sixty-three of the total deaths in London, were

due to this disease. Small-pox is not confined to any race or quarter

of the globe. At the present day its appearance can, in the great

majority of instances, be traced to contagion. It is evident, however,

that it must at one time have had an origin, and it is reasonable to

infer that what happened once may happen again. Small-pox is known to

attack many of the lower animals as well as man, and there are grounds

for believing that it originated among the former, and by them was

communicated to the human species. A careful study of epizootics--our

ignorance of which has been disclosed by the present cattle plague

--may ultimately reveal the mode of origin of the poison of small-pox.

The disease varies greatly in its prevalence at different times. In

other words, it is sometimes epidemic, at others not. Some of these

epidemics are local; others are widely extended. All exhibit a gradual

rise, culmination, and decline, the decline being always less rapid

than the advance. It is difficult to account for the occurrence of

these epidemics. They are independent of hygienic defects, season,

temperature, or any meteorological conditions of which we are

cognizant. They are probably due to causes tending to depress the

general health of the population, and so to predispose it to the

action of the poison. For nearly two centuries it has been a common

observation that epidemics of small-pox have co-existed with epidemics

of other contagious diseases. The gradual accumulation also in a

district of unprotected persons, owing to the neglect of vaccination,

will also predispose to the occurrence of an epidemic, after the

introduction of the poison. In fact, to the neglect, or careless

performance, of vaccination, is entirely due the occurrence of

epidemics of small-pox at the present day.

2. _Scarlet Fever_.--The early history of scarlet fever is obscure,

for the disease was long confounded with measles and small-pox, but it

is generally supposed that, like small-pox, it came originally from

Africa, and was imported into Europe by the Saracens. It has been

known to prevail in Britain for the last two centuries; but although

it is only of late years, from the reports of the Registrar-General,

that we have been able to form an accurate idea of the extent of its

prevalence, there can be no doubt that it has increased greatly during

the present century, and that it now occupies that pre-eminence among

the causes of mortality in childhood which was formerly held by

small-pox. During twenty-four years (1838 to 1861 inclusive) 375,009

of the population of England and Wales, and 58,663 of the inhabitants

of London, died of scarlet fever, or about one in every twenty-four

deaths that occurred in England during the period in question {423}

was due to this disease. The mortality from scarlet fever, in fact,

exceeds the mortality from small-pox and measles taken together.

Scarlet fever is known to prevail over the whole of the continents of

Europe and America, but it is nowhere so common as in Britain. In

France it is a rarer disease than either measles or small-pox. In

India it is said never to occur. In most instances it is not difficult

to trace the occurrence of scarlet fever to contagion; and from the

remarkable indestructibility of the poison and its tendency to adhere

to clothes, furniture, and even to the walls of houses, there can be

little doubt that the disease has a similar origin in many instances,

where the mode of transmission of the poison cannot be traced. How the

poison first originated is yet a mystery; but there is some

probability in the view, which has many able advocates, that it

originated in horses or cattle, and by them was communicated to man.

If this be so, it is reasonable to hope that investigations as to the

occurrence of the disease in the lower animals may lead to a discovery

productive of as great benefits to the human race as vaccination. At

intervals of a few years scarlet fever spreads as an epidemic: but its

ordinary prevalence, in this country is greater than is generally

imagined. The causes of these epidemic outbursts are unknown. Many

circumscribed outbreaks can no doubt be traced to the importation of

the poison into a population of persons unprotected by a previous

attack; but why the poison should be introduced into numerous

localities at one time, and not at others, is difficult to determine.

It is tolerably certain, however, that at all times the prevalence of

the disease is independent of overcrowding, bad drainage, or of any

appreciable hygienic or meteorological conditions.

3. _Measles_ was long confounded with scarlet fever, and, like it, is

supposed to have been originally imported from the East. During

twenty-four years (1838-1861) this disease destroyed 31,595 of the

population of London, and 181,868 persons in England and Wales. It is

known to occur in all parts of the world, and is highly contagious.

There is no evidence that any hygienic defects or meteorological

conditions can generate the poison of measles. Hildenbrand, a great

authority, thought it might arise where numbers of men and cattle were

confined together in close, unventilated buildings; and in later times

American and Irish physicians have described a disease corresponding

in every respect with the measles, which appeared to arise from

sleeping on old musty straw, or from the inoculation of the fungi of

wheat straw. Measles in England is much less of an epidemic disease

than either small-pox or scarlet fever. The number of deaths which it

causes in years when it is most prevalent, is rarely much more than

double what it causes in years when it is at least prevalent. Although

often most fatal in winter, there is no proof that its prevalence is

influenced by season.

4. _Typhus Fever_ has been well known for upward of three centuries,

and there are grounds for believing that from remote ages it has

prevailed in most parts of the world under favorable conditions. It is

impossible to estimate the precise extent of its prevalence, inasmuch

as many other diseases are included under the designation "typhus," in

the reports of the Registrar-General; but it is the acknowledged

scourge of the poor inhabitants of our large towns. There is no

evidence that typhus, such as we see it in this country, has as yet

been observed in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, or the tropical

parts of America. Even in Britain it is confined, for the most part,

to the large towns, and to the poorest and most densely crowded parts

of them. It is a disease almost unknown among the better classes,

except in the case of clergymen and doctors who visit the infected

poor. {424} It is undoubtedly contagious; but in a spacious dwelling

with a free ventilation, it almost ceases to be so. There is also

ample evidence that the poison may be generated _de novo_; and the

circumstances under which this occurs are overcrowding, with defective

ventilation and destitution. Hence it is that the disease was formerly

so apt to show itself in prisons and ships, and that, even at the

present day, it is so common an attendant on warfare and so prevalent

in the wretched hovels of the poor. This was the disease that before

the days of Howard was never absent from our prisons and hospitals,

and that decimated the armies of the first Napoleon and of the allies

in the Crimea. "If," says an able writer on fever in the last century,

"any person will take the trouble to stand in the sun, and look at his

own shadow on a white plastered wall, he will easily perceive that his

whole body is a smoking dunghill, with a vapor exhaling from every

part of it. This vapor is subtle, acrid, and offensive to the smell;

if retained in the body, it becomes morbid; but if re-absorbed, highly

deleterious. If a number of persons, therefore, are long confined in

any close place not properly ventilated, so as to inspire and swallow

with their spittle the vapors of each other, they must soon feel its

bad effects. Bad provisions and gloomy thoughts will add to their

misery, and soon breed the _seminium_ of a pestilential fever,

dangerous not only to themselves, but also to every person who visits

them or even communicates with them at second-hand. Hence it is so

frequently bred in gaols, hospitals, ships, camps, and besieged towns.

A _seminium_ once produced is easily spread by contagion." But if

overcrowding produces typhus, why is it that the disease prevails in

the epidemic form, and then in a great measure disappears? The

explanation is in this way. All the great epidemics of typhus have

occurred during seasons of famine or of unusual destitution. One of

the most common consequences of general destitution is the

congregation of several families in one house, in consequence of their

inability to pay their rents, and of the concentration in the large

towns of many of the inhabitants of country districts. Famine

pre-disposes to typhus by weakening the constitution; and it also

tends to produce it, in so far as it causes an unusual degree of

overcrowding. It has been the custom with many writers to refer

epidemics of typhus to some subtle "epidemic influence;" and thus,

where a failure of the crops has been followed by typhus, both of

these disasters have been ascribed to a common atmospheric cause. But

of such atmospheric influences, capable of producing typhus, we know

nothing; their very existence is doubtful, and the employment of the

term has too often had the effect of cloaking human ignorance, or of

stifling the search after truth. If typhus be due to any "epidemic

influence," why does this influence select large towns and spare the

country districts? why does it fall upon large towns in exact

proportion to the degree of privation and overcrowding among the poor?

in large towns, why does it indict the crowded dwellings of the poor

and spare the habitations of the rich? and why did the varying

prevalence of typhus among the French and English troops in the Crimea

correspond, exactly to the varying degree of overcrowding in either

army? Moreover, famine _artificially_ induced by warfare, by

commercial failures, by strikes, or by any cause that throws large

bodies of men out of employment, is equally efficacious in originating

epidemics of typhus, as famine from failure of the crops.

5. _Relapsing Fever_ is so called from the fact that after a week's

illness there is an interval of good health for a week, followed by a

second attack. It is contagious, and is epidemic in a stricter sense

than even typhus. Although sometimes more prevalent in this country

than any other fever, it may disappear for so many years that {425} on

its return it has more than once been thought to be a new malady. For

upwards of ten years not a case of it has been observed in Britain,

but it has constitute the chief component of many of the greatest

epidemics of fever which has devastated this country and Ireland, and

it was one of the diseases composing the "Russian Plague," which in

the spring of the present year caused such unnecessary alarm in this

country. It usually prevails in the epidemic form in conjunction with

typhus, and it is connected in its origin more directly with

protracted starvation and the use of unwholesome food than even the

latter disease. Hence, in this country, it is familiarly known as

"Famine Fever," and in Germany as "_Hungerpest_."

6. _Oriental Plague_ is still met with in Egypt and in other eastern

countries; but in the middle ages it frequently overran the whole of

Europe and invaded England, and, from the extent of its ravages, it

was known as the "_Black Death_," and the "_Great Mortality_." The

Great Plague of London, of 1665, is a familiar fact in history. Since

then the disease has not been met with in this country. But British

typhus is merely a modified form of Oriental plague, or, in other

words, plague is merely typhus complicated with numerous abscesses

beneath the skin. Cases of typhus are occasionally met with in this

country, corresponding in every respect with true plague. Both

diseases appear under similar circumstances, but those which generate

plague are of a more aggravated character than those which suffice to

produce typhus. The disappearance of plague from London,

notwithstanding our vastly increased communications with Egypt, has

been chiefly due to the better construction of our dwellings since the

"Great Fire" of 1666. "It is probable," says an able writer on the

plague, "that if this country has been so long forsaken by the plague

as almost to have forgotten, or at least to be unwilling to own, its

natural offspring, it has been because the parent has been disgusted

with the circumstances under which that hateful birth was brought to

light, has removed the filth from her doors in which it was matured,

and has adopted a system of cleanliness fatal to its nourishment at

home. But if ever this favored country, now grown wise by experience,

should relapse into former errors, and recur to her odious habits, as

in past ages, it is not to be doubted that a mutual recognition will

take place, and she will again be visited by her abandoned child, who

has been wandering a fugitive among kindred associates, sometimes in

the mud cots of Egypt, sometimes in the crowded tents of Barbary, and

sometimes in the filthy kaisarias of Aleppo."

7. _Yellow Fever_ is a contagious fever with a limited geographical

range. Its geographical limits, as regards the new world, are from

about 43° N. lat. to 35° S. lat; and in the old world from 44° N. to

8° or 9° S. lat. It is a common disease on board our ships stationed

in the West Indies and off the west coast of Africa. As in the case of

typhus, overcrowded and defective ventilation are the main causes

which favor its origin and propagation, and, indeed, it is still a

subject for investigation whether yellow fever may not be typhus

modified by climate and other circumstances. One of the most recent

and best authorities [Footnote 64] on the disease thus writes:

"Overcrowding in the between-decks of steamships seems to be the

principal cause of the extreme fatality of the disease in the navy.

What in this respect is true of typhus may with equal force be said of

yellow fever. There is no such powerful adjuvant to the virulence of

the poison, and to its power of propagation, as an unrenewed

atmosphere, loaded with human exhalations."

[Footnote 64: Dr. Gavin Milroy, President of the Epidemiological

Society.]

8. _Diarrhoea_ is always more or less prevalent in this country during

the summer and autumn. There is no {426} reason to believe that

epidemic diarrhoea is contagious, but there is a direct ratio between

its prevalence and the temperature of the atmosphere and the absence

of ozone. As the temperature rises the cases increase in number, and

as it falls they diminish, and the disease is always most prevalent in

very hot seasons. Diarrhoea may be due to many different causes, but

its epidemic prevalence in autumn is chiefly accounted for by the

absorption into the system of the products of putrefaction of organic

matter, either in the form of gaseous effluvia or through the vehicle

of drinking-water.

9. _Typhoid or Enteric Fever_ is very commonly confounded with typhus,

with which, however, so far as its origin is concerned, it has nothing

in common. It is not, like typhus, confined to the poor, but it

prevails among rich and poor alike; and, indeed, there are some

reasons for believing that the rich and well-fed are more prone to be

attacked by it than the destitute. It is the fever by which Count

Cavonr, several members of the royal family of Portugal, and our own

Prince Consort, came to their untimely end. It differs also from

typhus in the circumstances that its origin and propagation are quite

independent of overcrowding with defective ventilation, and are so

intimately connected with bad drainage that by some physicians the

fever is now designated _pythogenic_, or fever born of putridity. It

is asserted by some writers that the poison of enteric fever is never

generated in obstructed drains, but that the drains are merely the

vehicle of transmission of the poison from an infected person. But if

this were so, enteric fever must needs be a most contagious disease,

whereas all experience goes to show that it rarely spreads, even under

the most favorable circumstances. The disease, in fact, is so slightly

contagious that many excellent observers have doubted if it be so at

all. It is probable that certain meteorological conditions, such as a

high temperature, a defective supply of ozone, or a peculiar

electrical state, may be necessary for the production of the poison of

enteric fever; and thus, nuisances which are offensive to the senses

may exist for a long time without producing the disease. The necessity

of a high temperature is undoubted, and is itself a strong alignment

against the view which makes drains merely the vehicle of transmission

of the poison. It is well known that enteric fever, like ordinary

diarrhoea, becomes epidemic in this country every autumn, and almost

disappears in spring, while the autumnal epidemics are always greatest

in seasons remarkable for their high temperature. Enteric fever is

much later in commencing and in attaining the acme of its autumnal

prevalence than diarrhoea, showing that a longer duration of hot

weather is necessary for its production; but, when once produced, a

more protracted duration of cold weather seems necessary for its

destruction.

10. _Cholera_.--Epidemic cholera is generally described as having

originated at Jessore, in the delta of the Ganges, in the year 1817,

and as having spread thence over Hindostan, and ultimately to Europe.

Since 1817 Europe has been visited by three great epidemics of

cholera, viz.: in 1832, in 1848-9, and in 1854; and at the present

moment it is threatened with a fourth. During the past autumn the

disease has appeared at Ancona and Marseilles, and at many other

places in the basin of the Mediterranean. In England and Wales cholera

destroyed 53,273 lives in 1849, and 20,097 in 1854. Although the great

epidemics of cholera have appeared to take their origin in India, and

gradually to have spread to Europe, following often the lines of human

intercourse, the evidence in favor of its being a very contagious

malady is small. The attendants on the sick are rarely attacked; and,

on the other hand, the disease has often appeared in isolated

localities, where it was impossible to believe that it was imported.

It is a remarkable {427} circumstance, also, that some of the greatest

epidemics which have occurred in India, as that of 1861, have shown no

tendency to travel to Europe, notwithstanding the constant

communication that exists. Even on the supposition, then, that cholera

is of necessity imported from India, there must be something as yet

unknown to us that favors its transmission at one time and not at

another. But it is very doubtful if the disease is imported in the

manner generally believed. Unequivocal cases of "Asiatic cholera" have

been met with almost every year in the intervals of the great

epidemics; and, as Dr. Farr has observed, it is highly probable that

true cholera has always existed in England. The researches of the late

Dr. Snow render it highly probable that the disease often arises from

drinking water impregnated with the _fermenting_ excreta of persons

suffering from the disease; and if this be so, from what we know of

other diseases, it is not unreasonable to infer that, in certain

conditions of the atmosphere, the poison of cholera may be generated

during the fermentation of the excreta of healthy persons. It can

readily be conceived how the necessary meteorological conditions might

originate in the East and gradually extend to this country, and thus

lead to the supposition that the disease has been propagated by a

specific poison.

11. _Dysentery_.--Epidemics of dysentery are confined to tropical

countries, and need not occupy much attention at present. Atmospheric

states which unduly or suddenly depress the temperature of the surface

of the body are the most common exciting causes. They are most apt to

take effect in the case of persons whose constitutions have been

weakened by long exposure to extreme heat, to malaria, or to other

debilitating causes. There is no positive evidence that dysentery is

contagious.

12. _Agues and Remittent Fevers_ are now but little known, and

scarcely ever fatal, in this country. Many years ago, however, they

were among the most common and the most fatal diseases of Britain.

James I. and Oliver Cromwell both died of ague in London. The

disappearance of ague has been in direct relation to the drainage and

cultivation of the soil, and this remark applies not only to England,

but to all parts of the globe. The fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridge

are almost the only parts of England where agues arc now known; but in

many countries, and particularly in the tropics, where the vegetation

is very rank, they are still the most common of all diseases. Agues

are not contagious, but result from the _malaria_ given off during the

evaporation from marshy uncultivated land. These malaria may be wafted

to a considerable distance by the wind. A high temperature and rank

vegetation seem to favor their production and to increase their

virulence.

13. _Influenza_.--Severe and widespread epidemics of influenza have

been observed in various parts of the world, from time immemorial. In

the present century the disease has been epidemic in this country in

1803, 1831, 1833, 1837, and 1847. On each occasion it has been

particularly fatal in aged and debilitated persons, and it has often

been followed by an increased prevalence of other epidemic diseases.

Influenza is not contagious, but depends on some unknown condition of

the atmosphere. Sudden alternations of temperature have been thought

to favor its origin.

14. _The Sweating Sickness_.--This remarkable and very fatal disease

is happily now unknown in this country; but in the middle ages many

great epidemics of it were observed, and nowhere were they more common

than in England. Many of the epidemics were in fact confined to

England. There are records of five distinct visitations of the disease

during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, viz., in 1485, 1506,

1517, 1529, and 1551. The disease attacked all classes alike, and

{428} was often fatal within a few hours. From the accounts handed

down to us it is impossible to form any accurate idea as to the causes

of its origin and extension; but the prevalent opinion at the time

seems to have been that it was due in the first instance to

atmospheric influences.

15. _The Dancing Mania_.--The present brief summary of the principal

epidemic diseases would not be complete without alluding to the

dancing mania of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The effects

of the _Black Death_ of the fourteenth century had not yet subsided,

and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when

we are told by Hecker a strange delusion arose in Germany, which took

possession of the minds of men, and, in spite of the divinity of our

nature, hurried away body and soul into the magic circle of the

wildest superstition. It was a convulsion which in the most

extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the

astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since

which time it has never reappeared. It was called the dance of St.

John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it

was characterized, and which gave to those affected, whist performing

their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the

appearance of persons possessed. It was propagated by the sight of the

sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and

the neighboring countries. While dancing, the infected persons were

insensible to external impressions, but were haunted by visions, their

fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out. Some

asserted that they felt as if immersed in a stream of blood, which

obliged them to leap so high; while others saw the heavens open, and

the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary. The accounts of the

dancing mania collected by Hecker at first sight seem almost fabulous,

but cease to be so when we recollect the practices of certain modern

religious sects and the accounts of the so-called "revivals" in the

middle of the nineteenth century.

From the preceding summary, it is obvious that epidemic diseases vary

greatly in their nature.

1. First we have diseases, such as small-pox, scarlet fever, and

measles, which at the present day can only be traced to contagion, and

some of which probably took their origin in the lower animals.

2. There are diseases, such as typhus, relapsing fever, enteric fever,

and probably also plague, yellow fever, and cholera, which are capable

of propagation by contagion in varying degrees, but which may also

originate from the neglect of sanitary laws, aided by certain

meteorological conditions.

3. A third class, including agues, remittent fevers, and diarrhoea are

not at all contagious, but arise from malarious exhalations.

4. A fourth class, including influenza, dysentery, and, perhaps, the

sweating sickness, are also not contagious, and, arise from certain

atmospheric conditions.

5. The dancing mania differed from all other epidemic diseases in

being purely mental, and in depending on the mere sight of a

disagreeable nervous malady.

------

{429}

Translated from Etudes Religieuses, Historiques, et Littéraires, par

des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus.

ANGLICANISM AND THE GREEK SCHISM.

In a previous number we made our readers acquainted with a certain

project of union between the Anglican and the Russo-Greek Churches.

[Footnote 65] The Russian as well as the English journals have since

spoken much of this project, and seemed to think that it was on the

eve of ending. There is one difference, however, to be observed in the

language held by the organs of the two countries. The Russian journals

gave us to understand that the Anglicans would renounce the Protestant

doctrines which form a prominent portion of their belief, to adopt

purely and simply the orthodox faith such as it is expressed in the

symbolical books of the Eastern Church. The Anglicans did not place

themselves in the same point of view. They would not change belief;

they admitted that both sides should remain as they now are, but that

there would be _intercommunion_ between the two Churches; that is to

say, that the Anglicans should be allowed to participate in the

sacraments of the Greek Church, and reciprocally.

[Footnote 65: "_Etudes_" May, 1865. _Vide_ "CATHOLIC WORLD," Vol.

I., No. 7, October, 1865. ]

A certain Mr. Denton, rector of one of the largest Anglican parishes

in London, was especially animated by these thoughts. He went to

Servia and asked Mgr. Michael, metropolitan of Belgrave, to admit him

to communion in his quality of priest of the Church of England. Mgr.

Michael refused; but Mr. Denton, nowise discouraged, betook himself to

travelling all over Servia, and at last found an archimandrite who

appeared to be more accommodating than the metropolitan. After having

communicated in this way in the Servian Church, the Rev. Mr. Denton

returns to England triumphantly announcing that the _intercommunion_

was an accomplished fact. Great rejoicings there were, to be sure, in

the little coterie. There could be no doubt, whatever, that all was

happily arranged.

But behold, Mgr. Michael, informed of what had taken place, removed

the archimandrite and struck him with ecclesiastical censures. The joy

that had prevailed in Mr. Denton's camp was changed to mourning. On

the other hand, the Anglicans who form no part of the coterie, enjoy

exceedingly the reverend gentleman's discomfiture.

As for us, we are well pleased to see that Mgr. Michael does not seem

disposed to follow the footsteps of Cyril Lucar.

But another check was reserved for the famous project. The archpriest

Joseph Wassilief, chaplain to the Russian embassy in Paris, after

having shown himself rather favorable to the contemplated union, has

just laid down, with as much wisdom as firmness, the conditions of the

proposed treaty. "However much explanations may be avoided, they will

forcibly recur, sooner or later," he justly observes in the _Christian

Union_, 24th September, 1865. And, resting on this principle, he

passes in review the three questions of the procession of the Holy

Ghost, the invocation of saints, and prayer for the dead; he then

shows that it is not possible to establish _intercommunion_ between

the two Churches until they have come to an agreement on all these

points; Among other things, he shows that the Church has always, been

careful {430} to preserve the entire deposit of doctrine, and that she

has not permitted herself to establish a difference between what is

fundamental and what is secondary. He concludes with these wise words:

"Charitable in our explanations, we are bound to be very candid one

with the other. If rigorous discussions on all points of divergence

appear to retard the final agreement, they secure its solidity and

duration; whilst reservations, though accelerating the agreement,

would leave therein a germ of weakness and instability."

We attach the more importance to this declaration because the

authority of the archpriest Joseph Wassilief is enhanced by the

consideration shown him by the synod. Latterly there was a vacancy in

the ranks of that assembly, which forms the supreme council of the

Russian Church. There was question of replacing the chaplain-general

of the armies by land and sea. Three names were proposed to the

sovereign's choice: that of M. Wassilief was one of the three. He has

not been appointed; but, in proposing him, the synod sufficiently

testified that it would have wished to see him seated in its midst,

raised to the highest dignity to which, in Russia, a member of the

secular clergy can pretend.

After the energetic act of the metropolitan of Belgrade and the words

of the archpriest Wassilief, it remains for us to quote the _Levant

Herald_ an English and Protestant journal published at Constantinople.

In its number of the 20th September, 1865, that paper endeavors to

make the Anglican clergy understand that they flatter themselves with

a delusive hope if they believe in the possibility of a union, or even

of an alliance, between the two communions.

It results from all we have just said that if the Anglo-Americans have

entertained the project of Protestantizing the Greek Church, they must

perceive that the enterprise is more arduous than they had supposed.

The Russians, on their side, must see that it is not so easy to make

the Anglican Church enter into the bosom of theirs. As to establishing

the _intercommunion_ between the two churches without having come to

an agreement on questions of faith, it is a dream which the archpriest

Wassilief must have dispelled once and for ever.

------

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

REASON IN RELIGION.

By Frederic Henry Hedge. Boston: Walker, Fuller & Company, 245

Washington St. 1863. pp. 458.

The author of this work, who is a professor in Harvard University,

enjoys a deservedly high reputation as an accomplished scholar and

writer, and is looked upon by numbers of intelligent and thoughtful

persons, especially in Massachusetts, as their most revered and

trusted guide in religious matters. On that account whatever he writes

is worthy of consideration. In the work before us he has not attempted

a systematic treatise on the topic indicated in his title, but has

thrown together a series of essays touching on it and its kindred

topics, indicating difficulties more than aiming at solving them, and

suggesting a method by which anxious minds may separate a certain

modicum of belief which is practically certain and safe from that

which is doubtful, and wait patiently until they can get more truth by

the slow progress of science.

Any one who looks in this work for metaphysical solutions which are

satisfactory or plausible of the great theological problems will be

disappointed. The author sees too clearly the want of sufficient data,

and the want of a sufficient criterion in his system, to attempt to

dogmatize much. We think this {431} course more sensible and honest

than the opposite. At the same time, it lays open the defects of his

system; but so much the better, and so much the more hope of getting

at the truth. He cannot satisfy, however, either the consistent

rationalist or the consistent believer in revelation. On the

rationalistic side he has received a severe criticism from the

_Christian Examiner_. To a Catholic the positively theological part of

his work has but little interest. Some incidental topics are handled

with considerable acuteness and ability, as, for instance, the quality

of sin and evil, the relation between spirit and matter, the

compensations of providence, etc. The impartial testimony of such a

bold and subtle critic as the author in favor of certain facts and

doctrines--_e.g._, miracles, the resurrection, future punishment,

etc., is of value. There are half truths, incidental thoughts,

scintillations of light, through the book, which show how much the

author's merits are his own, and his defects those of the system he

was trained in. The style in which he writes has many most admirable

and peculiar qualities, fitting it to be the vehicle of the highest

kind of thought. Nevertheless, although we do not question the

author's scholarship in his own proper field of study, what he says of

specially Catholic questions and matters appears to us commonplace,

superficial, and sometimes quite gratuitously introduced. Through a

want of care in studying up the Catholic question, he has made one or

two quite remarkable mistakes. One of these is in speaking of the

synod of Valentia as if it were a general council. Another is the

statement that Pope Hildebrand (St. Gregory VII.) has not been

canonized. These remarks are by the way, for we are not attempting to

follow Dr. Hedge over the area covered by his essays for the purpose

of controverting his positions.

The real point of interest it a work like this is the author's thesis

respecting the source and criterion of religious truth. If we differ

here, there is very little use in discussing the particular

conclusions or inferences we draw respecting doctrine. While the

difference continues, it is better to keep the discussion upon it; if

we ever come to an agreement, it will be comparatively easy to proceed

with the discussion of specific doctrines.

Although Dr. Hedge does not proceed by a formal analytic method, yet

he has a thesis, and states it intelligibly in his chapter on "The

Cause of Reason the Cause of Faith." In philosophy he is a Kantian,

and in theology he adopts the system condemned in the late encyclical

of Pius IX. under the name of "moderate rationalism." According to

him, we cannot get the idea of God, or of spiritual truths, from pure

reason. All we know of these truths comes from revelation, and the

truths of revelation are subject to the critical judgment of reason,

which cannot originate, but can approve or reject, conceptions of

spiritual truth.

There are two rather serious objections to this theory. The first is,

that it destroys reason by denying to it either the original intuition

of God, or the capacity of acquiring the idea of God by reflection;

without which it has no capacity of apprehending or judging of the

conception of God proposed to it by revelation. The second is, that it

destroys revelation, making it identical with the conscience or moral

sense; that is, individual and subjective. What is this revelation or

inspiration in the spiritual nature of an individual? Is it his reason

or intelligence elevated and illuminated? That cannot be; for then

reason and revelation are identical, and the proposition that we know

nothing of spiritual truths by reason would be subverted. What then is

it? We can conceive of nothing in the spiritual nature of man which is

not reducible to intelligence or will. It must be will, then. But will

is a blind faculty. It is a maxim of philosophy, "Nil volitum, nisi

prius cognitum." The will cannot choose the supreme good unless the

intelligence furnishes it the idea of the supreme good. You cannot

have a revelation without first establishing sound rationalism as a

basis. Reason may be indebted for distinct conceptions even of those

truths which it is able to demonstrate to an exterior instruction

given immediately by Almighty God through inspiration. But it must

have the original idea or intuition in itself which is explicated by

this instruction and is its ultimate criterion of truth. If by

revelation is understood merely the outward assistance given to the

mind to develop its own idea and attain the full perfection of reason,

there is no sense in distinguishing revelation from {432} philosophy,

science, or the light of reason itself, since all alike come from God.

A revelation, properly so called, is a manifestation of truths above

the sphere of reason--truths which reason cannot demonstrate from

their intrinsic contents. In this case, reason can only apprehend the

evidence of the fact that they are revealed, that they are not

contrary to any truths already known, and that they have certain

analogies with truths perceived by reason. But they must be accepted

as positively and absolutely true only on the authority of revelation.

You must therefore be a pure rationalist, and maintain that we have no

knowledge of any truth beyond that which the educated intelligence of

man evolves from its own primitive and ultimate idea; or you must

accept revelation in the Catholic sense, as proposed by an extrinsic

authority. Dr. Hedge gives us no basis for either science or faith.

There cannot be a basis for faith without one for science; and give us

a basis sufficient for science, we will demonstrate from it the truth

of revelation.

We conclude by quoting one or two remarkable passages, which show that

the author instinctively thinks more soundly and justly than his

theory will logically sustain him in doing:

"The mass of mankind must receive their religion at second-hand, and

receive it on historical authority, as they receive the greater part

of all their knowledge."

"We want a teacher conscious of God's inpresence, claiming attention

as a voice out of the heavens. We want a doctrine which shall

announce itself with divine authority; not a system of moral

philosophy, but the word and kingdom of God. Without this stamp of

divine legitimacy, without the witness and signature of the Eternal,

Christianity would want that which alone gives it-weight with the

mass of mankind, and the place it now holds in human things." (pp.

64, 242.)

Well spoken! spoken like a philosopher, like a Christian, like a

Catholic! Apply now Kant's and Dr. Hedge's principle of _practical

reason_. They say, Mankind feel the need of a God, therefore there is

and has always been a God. So we say, Mankind feel and always did feel

the necessity of an infallible church, of a distinct, positive,

dogmatic faith. Therefore they exist, and always did exist. Only in

the Catholic Church are these wants realized; therefore the Catholic

Church is the true Church of God.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, ETC.

Edited by the Oblate Fathers of St. Charles. London: Longmans &

Company. 1864.

This is the most superb work on spiritual subjects in our English

Catholic literature. Mr. Lewis has made his translation in such a

manner as to merit the highest encomium from the late Cardinal

Wiseman, who has written the preface to the edition. The paper,

typography, and mechanical execution are in the highest style of

English typographical art. The fathers of St. Charles deserve the

thanks of the entire English-speaking Catholic and literary world for

this costly and noble enterprise which they have achieved.

It is needless to say that the works of St. John of the Cross are

among the highest specimens of genius and spiritual wisdom to be found

in the Spanish language or any other. St. John was a poet of the first

order, and an equally great philosopher. In this view alone his works

are worthy of profound study. The base of his doctrine is the deepest

philosophy, and its summit is ever varied and enlightened by the glow

of poetic fervor. It is philosophy and poetry, however, elevated,

purified, and hallowed by sacred inspiration, and derived not merely

from human but from divine contemplation. As a book for spiritual

reading and direction, it is most proper for a certain class of minds

only, who have difficulties and inward necessities for which they

cannot find the requisite aid in the ordinary books of instruction. It

is also the best guide for those who have the direction of persons of

this character.

We learn that the Messrs. Appleton have in press, and will soon

publish "The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost," by the Most Rev. H.

E. Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, which has just been issued by

the Longmans, of London.

----------

{433}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. II., NO. 10--JANUARY, 1866.

----

Translated from Le Correspondant

LEIBNITZ AND BOSSUET. [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: "_Oeuvres de Leibnitz, publiées pour la prémière fois

d'après les Manuscrits's, avec des notes et une introduction,_" par

A. Foucher de Carcil. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Tomes. I. et II.]

Every friend of letters must greet with sincere pleasure the literary

enterprise of M. de Careil in undertaking a complete edition of the

writings of Leibnitz, a large part of which has hitherto remained

unpublished and even unknown, and especially to make that great genius

live anew for us in all his fulness and integrity. No greater literary

undertaking ever seduced the imagination of a young erudite, is better

fitted to attract the sympathy of the European republic, or more

difficult of execution. For it was precisely the peculiarity of

Leibnitz that, while he labored to embrace with a firmness of grasp

never equalled the whole of moral and physical nature, all things

real, ideal, or possible, in one and the same system, he uniformly

abstained from giving, in his writings, to that system its full and

entire development. Possessing the amplest and most complete mind that

ever lived, he took no care to give to any of his works the seal of

completeness and perfection. The inventor of so many methods,

mathematical and metaphysical, he never arranged his ideas in a

methodical order. He leads his readers, with a rapid and firm step,

through a labyrinth of abstract conceptions and boundless erudition,

but he suffers no hand but his own to hold the guiding thread. He has

left us numerous tracts and fragments of great value indeed, but no

work that reveals the unity of his system, and gives us a summary of

his doctrines. There is no _summa_ of the Leibnitzian science and

philosophy. We might say that, by a sort of coquetry, while he sought

to know and explain everything in nature, he took care that the secret

of his own heart should not for a moment escape him.

Hence it becomes important to bring together and arrange in their

natural order his scattered members, so as to give them the cohesion

they lack, to combine his several personages, the philosopher, the

moralist, the geometrician, the naturalist, the erudite, the

diplomatist, and the courtier, in one living being, and present the

giant armed at all points as he came forth from the hands of his

Maker. Hence also the difficulty {434} of the task. It requires to

accomplish it the universality of tastes, if not of faculties,

possessed by the model to be reconstructed. It presents one of those

cases in which to reproduce nature it is almost necessary to equal

nature, and to resuscitate is hardly less difficult than to create.

Only a Cuvier is able to collect and put in their place the gigantic

bones and powerful fins of Leviathan.

_Ab Jove principium_. M. de Careil begins with theology. These two

volumes placed at the head of his edition are taken up with writings

some of which had already been printed, others had remained in

manuscript, but all subjected to a careful revision and enriched by

learned notes, which pertain exclusively to matters of religion. If

the ancient classification, which gave to theology the precedence of

all other matters, had not every claim to our respect, we might,

perhaps, permit ourselves to find fault with this arrangement of the

works of Leibnitz, which will cause, I am sure, some surprise to the

learned public. His theological writings were his first neither in the

order of time nor in the order of merit. He did not open his brilliant

career with religious discussions, nor was it by them that he was

chiefly distinguished, or left his deepest trace. He made in theology,

no discoveries as fruitful as the infinitesimal calculus, and gave it

no problems that have fetched so many and so distant echoes as his

theories of optimism and monadology. Why, then, open the series with

those writings which did not begin it, and which do not give us its

summary, and give the precedence to works, merely accessory and of

doubtful value, over so many others which earlier, more constantly,

and more gloriously occupied his laborious life?

There is still another objection to this distribution of matters which

M. de Careil has made. The theological writings of Leibnitz consist

almost exclusively in his correspondence, and are parts of the

negotiation for the reunion of the different Christian communions of

which, for a brief time, he was the medium. Correspondences are

admirable means of gaining an insight into the private and personal

character of men whose public life and works are already known, but

taken by themselves they are always obscure and difficult to be

understood. The reason is, that people who correspond are usually

mutual acquaintances, and understand each other by a hint or half a

word. They are familiar with contemporary events, and waste no time in

narrating them, or in explaining what each already knows. Facts and

ideas are treated by simple allusions, intelligible enough to the

correspondents, but unintelligible to a posterity that lacks their

information. The correspondence of Leibnitz, which M. de Careil

publishes, is far from being free from this grave inconvenience.

Leibnitz appears in it in the maturity of his age, and the full

splendor of his renown. He speaks with the authority of a philosopher

in full credit, and of a counsellor enjoying the confidence of an

important German court. His correspondents treat him with the respect

due to an acknowledged celebrity, and even a power. In the course of

the discussion he is carrying on he introduces many of his well known

metaphysical principles, but briefly, as ideas familiar to those whom

he addresses, and less for the purpose of teaching than of recalling

them to the memory.

His manner of writing, of rushing, so to speak, _in medias res_, takes

the inexperienced reader by surprise, and appears to conform to the

adventurous habits of dramatic art much more than to the sound rules

of erudition, which proceeds slowly, with measured step, marking in

advance the place where it is to plant its foot. Few among us are

sufficiently acquainted with the facts in detail of the life of

Leibnitz, or know well enough the secret of his opinions, to be able

to render an account to {435} ourselves of the part we see him--a

lay-citizen--playing among emperors, kings, princes, and prelates, or

the relation that subsists between his system of monads and scholastic

theology. Hence it often happens that we neither know who is speaking,

nor of what he is speaking. This frequently causes us an embarrassment

to which M. de Careil is himself too much a stranger to be able

sufficiently to compassionate it. He has lived ten years with Leibnitz

in the Library of Hanover, his habitual residence, and he knows every

lineament of the face of his hero, and--not the least of his

merits--deciphers at a glance his formless and most illegible scrawl.

We are not, therefore, astonished that in his learned introductions

and his notes, full of matter, he makes no account of difficulties

which we in our ignorance are utterly unable to overcome.

But we are convinced that the knowledge the editor has acquired by his

invaluable labors would have been far more available to his readers if

he had condensed it into a detailed biography, such as he only could

write, than as he gives it, scattered at the beginning of each volume,

or in a note at the foot of each page. An historical notice,

comprising the history of the intellect as well as of the life of

Leibnitz, an exposition of ideas as well as of facts, and the

arrangement of the didactic works according to the order of their

subjects and their importance, followed by the fragments and

correspondence, the order adopted by nearly all collectors of great

polygraphs, would, it seems to us, have been much better, and simply

the dictate of reason and experience. Introduced by M. de Careil into

the monument he erects not by the front, through the peristyle, but by

a low, side door, we run at least great risk of not seizing the whole

in its proportions.

I confess that I have also a personal reason for regretting the

arrangement adopted by M. de Careil. I had occasion formerly, among

the sins of my youth, to examine, with very little preparatory study I

admit, and in documents by no means so abundant and so exact as those

which are now placed within our reach, the negotiations pursued by

Leibnitz for the union of Christian communions, which take up the

whole of these two volumes. From that examination, along with that of

a small tract naturally attached to it, I came, on the religious

opinions of the great philosopher, to certain conclusions which I set

forth in the 32d number of the first series of this periodical, which

M. de Careil, even then deeply engaged in this study of Leibnitz, has

felt it his duty, in a discussion marked by great urbanity, to combat.

It is my misfortune to persist in those conclusions, and more

strenuously than ever in consequence of the new light which seems to

me to be furnished by this publication, and to which I cannot dispense

myself from briefly recurring. In so doing I fear that I shall appear

to some readers to have sought or to have accepted too readily an

occasion for resuming a discussion of little importance, and which

probably few except myself remember. M. de Careil, I hope, will do me

the justice to acquit me of a thought so puerile. Nobody would have

been more eager than myself to admire, in the picture he presents us,

the figures which naturally occupy the foreground; but if the eye is

forced to pause at first on some insignificant detail, it perhaps is

not a defect of taste in the spectator; may it not be a defect of

skill in the artist?

I.

These reserves made, we proceed to examine, with some care, the

changes rendered necessary, by this new and complete edition, in the

opinion previously adopted by the biographers of Leibnitz in regard to

the religious negotiation of which he was for a moment the accredited

medium, and in which we find mingled the great name of Bossuet.

Several important {436} points are much modified by the documents now

brought to light for the first time.

We learn, in the outset, that the negotiation for the union of the

Protestant communions with the Holy See was far more important than is

commonly thought, and was continued for a much longer time. The

earliest documents in relation to it published by M. de Careil date

from 1671, whilst the previous editors of Leibnitz and Bossuet suppose

that the first overtures were made only in the year 1690, a difference

of twenty years; and it appears from these documents, hitherto

perfectly unknown, that it was precisely during those twenty years

that success came the nearest being obtained, and that the highest

influences were employed to obtain it.

During this period, from 1670 to 1690, the Catholic revival of the

seventeenth century was at its apogee, and nearly all the German

sovereigns were animated by a strong desire to effect the religious

pacification of their subjects. The wounds caused by the Thirty Years'

War were hardly closed by the peace of Westphalia, and every one felt

the mortal blow which religious dissension had struck to the Germanic

power by breaking the old unity of the empire. Beside, all eyes were

turned toward France, where religion and royalty seemed to move on

together in perfect harmony, and displayed an unequalled splendor.

France, under her young monarch, Louis XIV., was at once the object of

envy and of dread; and the re-establishment of religious unity in

Germany, torn by mutually hostile communions, seemed to the sovereign

princes the only means of resembling France, and at the same time of

resisting her power.

When, therefore, Rogas Spinola, confessor to the empress, the wife of

Leopold I., at first Bishop of Tina, afterward of Neustadt, a man of

mild temperament and sound sense, became the intermediary agent of the

general desire for peace, and after having sounded the leading

Protestant theologians, went to Rome to ascertain the extent of the

concessions to which the maternal authority of the Church could

consent, he was warmly supported not only by his own sovereign, the

emperor, but also by fourteen other reigning sovereigns of Germany,

some of them Catholic and others Protestant. Such was the strange

religious confusion in the German States that in more than one the

sovereign was Catholic and the nation Protestant, or the sovereign was

Protestant and the nation Catholic. In the former condition was the

Elector of Hanover, John Frederic of Brunswick, of whom Leibnitz was

librarian and private secretary. This prince could not fail to enter

with zeal into a plan which promised to fill up the gulf between him

and his Protestant subjects.

If the propositions of which Spinola was the bearer were warmly

supported in Germany, they were no less warmly supported at Rome. The

interest which the chief of the Church could not fail to take in the

re-establishment of Catholic unity, was greatly enhanced at the time

by the special need which that wise and prudent pontiff, Innocent XI.,

felt of creating in Europe allies for the Holy See against the

offensive pretensions of France. At Rome as in Germany Louis XIV. was

the target and the bugbear. That most Christian king, who consented to

protect the faith in his own kingdom on the condition of tacitly

subjecting it to his royal will, took strange liberties, as everybody

knows, with the common Father of the faithful. Innocent XI., almost

besieged in his palace by the arms of France, and seeing his bulls

handed over, by magistrates sitting on _fleurs de lis_, to the common

hangman to be publicly burned, was strongly tempted to seek in

converted schismatics, and in prodigal sons returning to the fold, a

support against the arrogant pretensions of the _elder_ son of the

Church. {437} Spinola, therefore, was everywhere well received. Rome

listened to him, entered into his views, even annotated the bases of

the negotiation he was charged to transmit, and for several years the

winds on both sides of the Alps blew in favor of peace.

Leibnitz, holding relations with both Spinola and the principal

Protestant doctors, serving as the medium of intercommunication

between them, and frequently taking his pen to give precision to their

respective views, was already the king-bolt of the negotiation, and

very early in its prosecution. Bossuet's name began to be mentioned.

The controversies of this great prelate with the French Protestants,

his writings, strongly marked by a doctrine at once so firm and

enlightened, and which placed Catholic truth on so broad and so solid

a foundation, were more than once used to smooth the way to reunion,

either by solving difficulties or by reconciling differences. Twice he

was even directly solicited to give his advice, and to put his own

hand to the work; but he gave vague and embarrassed answers, and

refused to accept the overtures made to him. Wherefore? Is it

necessary to think, as M. Foucher de Careil leaves it to be

understood, that the King of France viewed with an evil eye a reunion

not likely to turn to his profit, or to strengthen his influence, and

that as on other occasions the submission, a little blind, of the

subject to his sovereign, arrested with Bossuet the accomplishment, I

will not say of the duty, but of the desire of the Catholic bishop?

Such was the first phase of this remarkable negotiation, related, or

more properly exhumed, with details very curious and perfectly new.

The characters, the parts, the motives, of the various actors in the

scene are fairly set forth and analyzed by M. de Careil, and we

congratulate him on having added a new and piquant page to the

diplomatic history of the seventeenth century. A single gap, however,

very important and very easy to fill he has left, which renders his

exposition a little obscure and uncertain. We nowhere find the text of

the propositions, the instruments, to speak the language of cabinets,

which made during twenty years the bases of the negotiation. They were

in great number, M. de Careil informs us, drawn up under different

circumstances, and by different authors. The Protestant theologians

assembled at Hanover, and especially the most illustrious of them,

Gerard Molanus, abbot of Lockum, drew up, collectively or

individually, complete plans or _methods_, as they called them, of

reunion, in which they expressed at the same time their views and

their wishes, the sacrifices which they believed their communions

would consent to make, and those which they expected from Rome in

return for the re-establishment of unity. The Bishop of Neustadt, on

his part, produced several compositions of the same kind, the titles

of which, as given by M. de Careil, are, _Regulae circa Christianorum

omnium eccesiasticam reunionem--Media conciliatoria incitantia,

praestanda ad conciliationem._ And, in fine, under the name of

_Propositiones novellorum discretiorum et praecipuorum_, he himself

made a methodical abstract, in twenty-five propositions, or heads of

chapters, of the views and wishes of Protestants, a capital document,

which was discussed and corrected at Rome in a congregation of

cardinals, and sent back to Germany with an approbatory brief of His

Holiness. Leibnitz had it under his eye, and copied it with his own

hand at Vienna, carefully marking the corrections and additions made

by the Sacred College, and we understand M. Foucher de Careil to have

had personal knowledge of the copy taken by Leibnitz.

It is difficult, therefore, to explain why M. de Careil has thought it

necessary to subject our curiosity to the veritable punishment of

Tantalus by simply mentioning the existence of a document of such

great importance {438} without reproducing it. That he should believe

it his duty not to swell his volume--though the previous editors of

Leibnitz and Bossuet did it--by inserting the private lucubrations of

Protestant theologians, we can, in rigor, comprehend, but not approve.

As in almost all the letters he has published, especially those of

Molanus, these writings are discussed and commented on, it would, we

think, have much facilitated the clear understanding of the subject,

to have given at least the more important of them _in extenso._ But

after all, the reformed doctors the most accredited spoke only in

their own private names, for themselves alone, without any authority

to bind their contemporary co-religionists, and _a fortiori_ without

any authority to bind their Protestant posterity. Little imports it to

know what Molanus or any other Protestant in 1680 thought of the

points in controversy between the Church and the Reformation. But an

act of the Court of Rome, discussed in a congregation, and clothed

with the pontifical sign-manual--an official decision defining the

maximum of concessions either as to language or practice which the

Church could make to her separated children in order to bring them

back to her bosom, Protestant propositions in their origin, indeed,

but, as says M. de Careil--in a note written, I know not wherefore, in

Italian--_accommodate secundo il gusto di Roma_(modified to suit the

taste of Rome), is a document of a value very different, and yields in

historical interest only to its dogmatic importance. It would be a

document to place by the side of the most celebrated Professions of

faith, and even above them, and to present, along with the excellent

_Exposition_ by Bossuet, to all those troubled souls, so numerous in

Protestant communions, who discern the truth only through the mists of

prejudice, or misconceive it when stated to them in terms the real

sense of which has for them been distorted or perverted from their

childhood.

What Leibnitz in various places, and M. de Careil after him, show us

of the propositions submitted to Rome, increases not a little our

desire to know precisely what she replied to them. It seems from all

that is told us, that the process or method of affecting reunion

uniformly, or very nearly so, indicated by the Protestant doctors, was

to place in two distinct categories the several points of difference

which separate the Protestant communions from the Catholic Church;

then place in the first category all the questions on which agreement

may be hoped either by way of accommodation, if matters of simple

disciplinary usage, if susceptible of modification; or by way of

explanation, if points of dogmatic dispute turning on words rather

than on ideas. On all these, agreement being easy, it should be

immediately effected and proclaimed. In the second category must be

placed all disputed questions too important, or on which minds are too

embittered, to admit of their settlement by previous explanation.

These must not be treated immediately, but be left in suspense, and

reserved for discussion and final settlement in a future council.

Meanwhile the Protestant doctors, pastors, ministers, and their flocks

must be received into the Roman communion on the simple declaration

that they acknowledge the infallibility of the Church in matters of

dogma, and the promise, beforehand, that when she has freely decided

with certainty, clearness, precision, and without ambiguity or

equivocation, the several points reserved for adjudication, they will

accept her decisions and offer no resistance to her decrees.

Such was the method proposed, which Leibnitz calls by turns the method

of _mutual tolerance, abstraction, suspension,_and to which he reverts

so frequently, and on which he insists with so much complaisance,

under so many forms, and in so many different writings, that it is

hardly possible not to regard him as its inventor. In his {439} view,

this method has the merit of cutting off with a single stroke the

interminable debates in which the sixteenth century was consumed, and

of making the peace of nations no longer depend on the quibbling

spirit of theologians. We shall soon briefly examine whether this

abridgment of controversies might not have the inconvenience of

leaving out the truth, or of spurning it aside; but for the moment we

would simply remark that the method suggested or eagerly adopted by

Leibnitz involved, with him, a grave consequence, so obvious that

nobody can mistake it.

The questions proposed to be placed in the second category, or the

points of controversy too important to be treated in advance, and to

be reserved for discussion and settlement in a council to be convoked

and held after reunion, had every one of them already been examined,

one by one, discussed, and determined without appeal, in the

celebrated assembly whose fame still filled all Europe, and whose

decrees were read from the pulpits of more than half of Christendom.

During twenty-five years, athwart the intrigues of courts, the ravages

of war, and even the unchained plagues of heaven, three times

interrupted, but as often resumed, the whole cause of the Reformation,

dogmas and discipline, had been presented and argued at Trent.

Judgment was there rendered on all the counts in the indictment, and

the Reformation was henceforth _res judicata_. Consequently, to

propose to reserve and open anew for discussion, were it only the

least point of doctrine, was to forfeit the whole work of Trent, and

to declare that great assembly illegal and all its decrees vacated.

The Protestant proposition amounted, then, simply to this: Annul the

Council of Trent, and convoke a new council in which Protestants _en

masse_ will have the right to sit!

Under what form was such a proposition presented to Rome? What

impression on Rome did it make? Was there really found a Catholic

bishop to support it? Was it really discussed in a Congregation of

Cardinals? Was it really included in the list of propositions admitted

to discussion by the Papal brief whose existence is enigmatically

revealed to us? If we understand certain phrases of M. de Careil, all

these questions must be answered in the affirmative. He himself firmly

believes that this project was accepted by the Bishop of Neustadt; he

even believes that it was not discouraged at Rome; and that, the

suspension of the Council of Trent was counted among the concessions

which the bishop returned from Rome authorized to lead the

Protestants, who had charged him with their interests, to hope would

be granted.

It is certainly very embarrassing for us to question an assertion by

M. de Careil, who seems to speak with the documents before him, while

we, in the darkness in which he leaves us, can reason only from

conjecture. We can only express our deep surprise, and ask him, if he

is quite sure of having carefully read what he relates, or duly

reflected on what he asserts? What, the Court of Rome authorized a

bishop to promise Protestants, in its name, the suspension of the

Council of Trent! Rome, with a stroke of the pen, pledged herself to

permit the destruction of the work to which she had, during four

glorious pontificates, devoted the persistent perseverance which she

owed to the Holy Ghost, and all the traditional resources of her

policy--the work which, in reaffirming the immovable foundations of

the Christian faith, had at the same time drawn tighter, to the profit

of the Holy See, the loosened bonds of the hierarchy! Rome exposed

herself to see effaced, on the one hand, those dogmatic decrees in

which the magnificence of the language rivals the depth of the ideas,

and which have taken rank in the admiration of the world by the side

of the Nicaean symbol, and on the other, those canons of discipline

for which she had {440} maintained with the great Catholic powers a

persistent struggle from which nothing could divert her, no, not even

the fear of seeing France follow in the footsteps of England! And for

what this condescension? For a negotiation of doubtful success, and

the success of which, were it certain, would have restored to her

communion only Germany, leaving outside of Catholic unity the

Protestant centres of London, Geneva, and Amsterdam! Moreover, under

what form would such a concession be made? By a confidential act, by a

secret power given to an obscure agent! The Council of Trent would

have been thus disavowed in the shade by one Congregation of

Cardinals, whilst another, instituted expressly to give it vigor,

continued, as it does still at Rome itself, to comment and develop it

in public, and while at the foot of all altars the decisions of that

great council received the solemn adhesion of all those whom the

episcopal investiture raised to the rank of judges of the faith!

M. de Careil must not think us too difficult, if we hesitate to admit

on his bare word, or even on that of Leibnitz, the reality of so

strange a fact. Leibnitz was a party interested, and very deeply

interested, in the success of a project for which he had a paternal

affection, and his testimony is here too open to suspicion of at least

involuntary illusion for us to receive it as conclusive proof.

Leibnitz, beside, whatever was his intimacy with the Bishop of

Neustadt, doubtless did not know thoroughly the confidential

instructions of the plenipotentiary with whom he negotiated. The

slightest affirmation of the bishop himself would have incomparably

more weight with us, but that prelate, from whom M. de Careil

publishes several documents, so far from ever mentioning any such

engagement, takes special care, on the contrary, to avoid giving any

personal opinion of his own on any of the plans presented to him. He

takes care to remark to Leibnitz, in a special letter, that in the

whole matter he acts only as a simple reporter, guards himself from

supporting any proposition made to him, and simply promises the

Protestant theologians to labor to secure a favorable reception to any

overtures they might make consistent with Catholic principles. _Ego_,

says he, _nullibi causae susceptae agam doctorem, sed simplicem apud

utramque partem solicitatorum. . . Nihil aliud polliceor quam quod . .

ego theologicam et tam favorabilem ac principia nostra patiantur,

approbationem procurare laborabo_. Such a promise, which lends itself

indeed to everything, engages assuredly to nothing, and if it in some

measure explains the hopes which Leibnitz cherished, it is far from

sufficing to remove our doubts.

Till a contrary proof--and I mean by a contrary proof an authentic and

official document, not such or such an allusion, or _it is said_,

collected at random from a private correspondence--I shall continue

to believe that the suspension of the Council of Trent, all though

making an essential part, and constituting, as it were, the keystone

of the Protestant plan of pacification, was never conceded in

principle at Rome, probably was never entertained; that Bishop Spinola

was never authorized to treat on that basis, and that if he did not

wholly refuse to converse on that point, it was in order not to

discourage benevolent dispositions which he judged it wise to manage.

He also may have hoped that when the Protestants had taken the great

step of admitting the infallibility of Catholic authority, they would

be led easily, by means of some historical explanations, to agree that

the aid of the Holy Ghost did not fail the sessions of Trent, any more

than any of the grand assizes of the Christian Church. If I am

deceived in this negative conclusion, nothing would have been more

easy for M. de Careil than to prevent my error by a more complete

publication.

The sequel of events will show why I attach so much importance to the

{441} establishment of the truth on this point. Let us resume,

therefore, with M. de Careil the thread of the narrative. In spite of

the general desire in 1670 to effect an understanding between

Protestants and Catholics, and perhaps because of the ardor of that

desire, all parties avoided explaining themselves fully on delicate

points, and the negotiation and the _irénique_, as M. de Careil calls

it, dragged itself along and reached no result. Twenty years after it

continued still, languishing, indeed, but not abandoned. The Bishop of

Neustadt was still living, hoping, laboring, and travelling

constantly, intent on effecting peace; the Protestant doctors

continued to pile up notes upon notes, and blackened any quantity of

paper; but if in the theological world the affair remained on foot,

though not advancing, in the political world the favor which had

sustained it was singularly cooled. The spirit of resistance to the

preponderating influence of Louis XIV., more determined than ever, had

suddenly changed its course, and sought no longer its support in

Catholicity, but, on the contrary, in the most advanced party of the

Reformation, which suddenly raised up a champion of European

independence. The Protestant chief of a petty maritime republic,

elevated by a daring movement to the throne of a great monarchy--the

grandson of William the Taciturn, became master of the heritage of the

Stuarts, rallied around his standard all the hopes of national freedom

and all the animosities caused by oppression. Beside, from the fatal

edict of 1685, which brutally thrust out of France a whole peaceable

people, brought up under the shelter of the laws in the ignorance of

an hereditary error, the armies, the councils, and the large

industrial towns of all Europe became gorged with French exiles, who

united in the same execration Louis XIV. and the Church in which they

saw only the bloody image of her implacable minister. On this stormy

sea of excited passion and intense hatred the humble project of union,

which Spinola and Leibnitz had so much difficulty in keeping afloat in

calm weather, had little chance of surviving.

The princes abandoned it as no longer serving their political

interests. But other auxiliaries, however, offered themselves, endowed

with less power indeed, but hardly less brilliancy. These were no

other than great ladies, delighting in the commerce of the learned,

and retaining in their convents or the interior paths of piety the

habits of a cultivated education, and sometimes pretensions to

political ability. In the seventeenth century, especially in France

after the Fronde, it is well known that theology often became the

refuge of those high-born beauties whom scruples or repentance kept

aloof from the pleasures of the court, whilst the jealous despotism of

the sovereign would no longer permit them to make a figure on the

theatre of public affairs. Several of these elegant, noble, and even

royal lady-theologians were attracted by the report of the negotiation

in which Leibnitz took part, and perhaps by the renown of that

negotiator himself, and in the hope either of aiding in dressing the

wounds of Europe, or at least of securing so precious a conquest in

the net of faith, opened communications and displayed in their

correspondence with him those severe graces of which their piety had

not despoiled them. The Abbess of Maubuisson; Louise Hollandine,

sister of the palatiness, Anne of Gonzaga; that celebrated princess

herself; the sprightly Madame de Brinon, for a long time the confidant

of Madame de Maintenon at Saint-Cyr, but whose enterprising spirit

could not be anywhere contented with a subordinate part; in fine, the

queen of the _Précieuses_, Mademoiselle Scudéry, who neglected no

opportunity of shining in an epistolary correspondence, and who was by

no means sorry to show that her merit could surpass the limits of the

Carte de him, such are the {442} unexpected figures which M. de Careil

makes pass before us, and in painting them he borrows some colors from

the palette of the great philosopher of our days, M. Cousin, who has

devoted himself to the good fame of the ladies of the seventeenth

century. In the train of the ladies appear the literary gentlemen of

their society, accustomed to make with them, in courteous jousts, the

assaults of wit. As the friend of Madame de Brinon, for instance, we

see intervene the historian of the French Academy, the best pen of the

royal cabinet, the celebrated Pellisson. All these epistles, very

numerous, in which the variety of tone relieves the monotony of

subject, form the most agreeable part of the new publication--too

agreeable, indeed, for seriousness is sadly wanting, and more still in

Leibnitz himself than in his graceful correspondents. A tone of subtle

badinage, a mistimed display of literary and philosophical erudition,

the pleasure of discussing without care to conclude, are, unhappily,

but too apparent in everything that emanates from his pen during this

second period. We might say that he took pleasure in prolonging a

situation which procured him advances so flattering, and in which,

without pledging himself to any one, he could let himself be lulled by

sweet compliments from the most beautiful mouths in the world.

However that might be, this slumber, sustained by such sweet words,

was all at once rudely broken. Madame de Brinon, the most active brain

of the feminine congress, seeing that after all they talked much and

said nothing, and that, by a supple and undulating argumentation,

Leibnitz always escaped at the decisive moment, and retarded more than

he advanced a solution, formed the project of calling to her aid a

more vigorous athlete, who could grapple with him body to body. She

addressed herself to Bossuet, and this time the Bishop of Meaux found

more leisure and more freedom of action. The political situation had

changed. Coming out from that cold distrust in which he intrenched

himself in the beginning, he requested to have communicated to him the

documents of the negotiation, especially the writings of Molanus, and

made it his duty to give his own views of the matter. The entrance of

this great man upon the scene, a long time announced, a long time

expected, and who appeared, as in certain tragedies, as the hero of

the third act, has, in M. de Careil's publication, all the effect of a

theatrical surprise.

No sooner, in fact, has he opened his mouth, than a puff of his stiff,

strong speech tumbles down the frail scaffolding on which Leibnitz had

placed his hopes of the peace of Christendom. Placing his finger at

once on the weak spot in the system, he has no difficulty in showing

that, however disguised, the real proposition returns always to the

demand that the Church shall suffer to be called in question points

already adjudicated, and tolerate doubt where she has already defined

the faith. Now, if such condescension is possible in the order of

human decrees, which, providing for local and transitory interests,

may and ought to yield to differences of time and place, it would be

absurd to suppose it possible in the order of eternal truths,

proclaimed by an authority conceded to be infallible. Infallibility

carries with it immutability as a necessary consequence. The mirror of

an unalterable truth can reflect only a single image; the echo can

repeat only a single sound. Comment, explain, as much as you please,

clothe the old faith with new forms if you will, smooth the paths

which conduct to it by removing all offensive terms which are a

stumbling-block to the weak, save self-love the humiliation of a

position disavowed by treating error as a misunderstanding which is

now enlightened, even charity exacts in this respect all that dignity

permits; but to alter, attenuate, or {443} merely to debate the truth

transmitted can in no sense be permitted without killing with the same

blow both the Church and the truth, without either denying the truth

or that the Church has always been its interpreter.

Such was the reasoning, perfectly simple, and the principle of the

infallibility of the Church once admitted, unanswerable, which Bossuet

with his well known majesty, and from the height of his episcopal

dignity, urged in reply to the method supported by Leibnitz. Was

Leibnitz taken by surprise? Had he seriously thought of becoming a

Catholic without submitting in the process to this consequence? Such a

defect of logic in a rival of Newton is not supposable. But he was

neither accustomed to be treated so loftily, nor in a humor to march

so directly to the point. A cry of astonishment and despite

involuntarily escaped him, sharp complaints of _the haughtiness of M.

de Meaux, of the tone of superiority which eloquence and authority

give to great men,_and bitter denunciations of the exclusive spirit

and obstinacy of theologians, betray this sentiment, very natural, and

as it would seem even in some measure contagious, for M. de Careil,

now and then making himself one with his hero, suffers himself to be

gained by it. All good Catholic as he would be, he himself also in his

two introductions regrets that the conciliating spirit and eclectic

methods of Leibnitz were not accepted. Conciliation is an excellent

thing, and pleases me much, some say, pleases me too much, and I have

been more than once accused of carrying in religious matters my love

for it a little too far; but there are limits fixed in the very nature

of things, and which a little common sense will always, I hope,

prevent me from transgressing. Who says _Church_, says permanence in

the truths of faith; and who says _Catholics_, says a union of men who

think alike of those truths. Now what, stripped of all ambiguity of

language, would have been the practical effect of the proposition of

Leibnitz, if it had been carried into execution? The points of

doctrine (and what points! the most important not only for faith but

also for reason, affecting the basis as the supreme destiny of the

soul) touching the accord of grace and free will, the conditions of

eternal salvation, the mysterious operations of the sacraments, taught

in the Christian pulpit from the very cradle of Christian antiquity,

and for more than a hundred years clothed in new and more precise

forms, would have been at a single dash erased from the catechism and

suspended in doubt till the uncertain action of a future council! The

Church would have suffered an interrogation point to be placed

indefinitely before affirmations which she had only the day before

imposed on the faithful under sanction of an anathema! Meanwhile, the

faithful, divided on the very foundations of their belief, would have

met before the same altar to repeat the same prayers while

understanding them in contradictory senses, and to receive the same

sacraments while holding entirely different views of their value and

efficacy! What in this strange _interim_ would have become of the

dignity and stability of Catholic doctrine? And what were the utility

of an external and nominal union which could only cover a real

internal difference?

To sustain himself, if not his firm and piercing genius, in an

illusion which held him captive and would not relax its grasp,

Leibnitz had two, only two, arguments in his repertory; but he had the

art to make them take so many different forms, and to make with these

two arms so many passes and counter-passes of logic and erudition,

that more than an entire volume is taken up by M. de Careil with the

writings which contain them, and which may be read even now without

other fatigue than that produced by their continual dazzle. Faithful

to our task of reporter, we must strip these two arguments of the

brilliant garments with which his luxurious {444} eloquence adorns

them. Divested of their flesh, so to speak, stripped naked, and

subjected to the treatment to which the scholastics subject all

arguments to ascertain their value, these two arguments are very

simple and easily comprehended. In the first place, they consist in

denying the antiquity, and therefore the authority, of the Council of

Trent. Leibnitz in this respect only repeats the allegations of all

Protestant doctors, and which were old even in his time. The number of

prelates present at that assembly was relatively small, and were taken

almost exclusively from the churches of Spain and Italy, and as

several Catholic sovereigns refused to publish the council in their

respective states, because some of its disciplinary canons appeared to

strike at their temporal rights, there had been no opportunity to heal

its original defect by the assent of the Church dispersed.

In the second place, granting that the Council of Trent had the

character and authority which are questioned, it was in good faith and

in the sincerity of their hearts that Protestants refused to

acknowledge them. They in whose names Leibnitz was charged to

negotiate gave manifest proofs of that good faith in adhering

beforehand to the decision of a future council, and consequently in

rendering full homage to the principle of ecclesiastical authority.

Now error, if sincere, is not heresy, and has only its appearance. It

is only voluntary, deliberate, and obstinate rebellion that makes the

heretic. A man who submits in advance to the authority of truth, and

waits only a knowledge of it to arrange himself under its banner,

counts from that moment among those to whom the Church may open her

maternal bosom.

These few sentences embrace--every attentive reader will be convinced

of it--the substance of the whole argumentation, extended by Leibnitz,

enriched and enlivened by a thousand piquant expressions, through many

years, in a series of more than a hundred letters. It needs fewer

words still, after Bossuet, to expose in its poverty and nakedness the

ground-work concealed by the richness and splendor of the ornaments.

What mattered it, in reality, to examine whether the Council of Trent

in its origin or at any moment of its duration had united a full

representation of the universal Church? To what good to seek if it had

received in its text and in every part official promulgation by the

political power in each sovereign state? One fact was certain, and

that was enough. At the time when Leibnitz was writing, the doctrine

defined by the Fathers of Trent on all the points controverted between

Catholics and Protestants was, without a single exception, the law in

all the churches of the Catholic world. From the basilica of Michael

Angelo to the humblest village church, under the purple as under the

serge soutane, every pontiff, every cardinal, every bishop, every

parish priest, in the confessional as in the pulpit, scrupulously

conformed to its language. If the consent of the Church is not

recognizable by such signs, by what signs could it be recognized? Only

they whom Trent condemned persisted in withholding their adhesion to

its decrees. But Arius protested also against Nicaea, and it has never

depended on a few voices raised by spite or chagrin to disturb the

harmony of symbols with which the concert of nations makes resound the

vaults of the universal Church.

What, again, avails it to allege the good faith, the involuntary

ignorance, of Protestants in resisting the Council of Trent? That good

faith, if real, may excuse them in the eyes of God, who reads the

heart; it opens not the doors of the visible Church, which can admit

to her external communion only those who make an explicit profession

of her doctrine. Where, in fact, should we be, what chimera would be

the authority of the {445} Church, and in what smoke would vanish the

obedience of the faithful, if every man could at pleasure retrench

this or that article from the _Credo_, under the pretext that he could

not in his conscience recognize in it the marks of divine revelation?

Certainly it is obstinacy in error that makes the heretic, for a just

God can punish only the adhesion of the will to error. So in that

terrible and solemn day which will rend the veil which covers the

inmost human conscience, not only of those in separated Christian

communions, but even those in the darkness of paganism and idolatry,

many souls may be discovered who for their constant fidelity to the

feeble gleams of light vouchsafed them, will have deserved to have

applied to them the merits of the sacrifice of the Son of God. More

than one Queen of Saba will come up from the desert to accuse the

children of Abraham of a want of faith, and in that supreme moment the

Church will recognize more than one

"Enfant qu'en sol sein elle n'a point porté."

(Child which she has not brought forth.)

But it is given to no one to anticipate that hour of mystery and

revelation, and so long as here below, and knowing one another only by

words and external acts, it is, by our beliefs that we must, at least

externally, as to the body, if not to the soul, separate ourselves.

Sole certain guide to salvation, sole confidant of the mysteries of

grace, the Church damns not in advance all those whom she excludes,

any more than she saves all those whom she admits; but she can

relinquish to nobody a single one of the articles of faith, nor

knowingly allow a single farthing to be subtracted from the deposit

confided to her keeping.

Against these two fixed points, imperturbably sustained by the hand of

Bossuet, the inexhaustible dialectics of Leibnitz, always repulsed,

ever returning anew to the charge, beats and breaks, without

relaxation, precisely as the waves of the ocean against the rock. The

contrast between the flexibility of one of the adversaries and the

immobility of the other is about all the interest that, in the midst

of continual repetitions, is offered by this interminable debate. We

subjoin, however, to conclude our analysis, the recital of two

inventions of doubtful loyalty imagined by Leibnitz to give the change

to his adversary, and which out of respect for the memory of so great

a man we will call not artifices, but with M. Foucher de Careil simply

expedients.

The first consisted in passing over the head of Bossuet, in order to

crush him with the heavy hand of his sovereign, Louis XIV.

Europe knew, or at least believed that it knew, both Bossuet and Louis

XIV. It knew that the one suffered from temperament, and the other

from principle, hardly any limit to the royal authority. The

susceptibility of the monarch and the conscience of the subject being

of one accord, Leibnitz thought that by disquieting the monarch he

could easily bring the subject to reason. So in a note, ably and

skilfully drawn up, addressed to the Duke of Brunswick, who was to

send it to the French king, he represented that the work of peace at

the point reached was arrested by an obstacle in reality more

political than religious; that the Council of Trent, which was the

real stumbling-block, interested Rome in her struggle with the

temporal powers far more than in her controversies with heresy. Hence

an intervention of the royal authority to remove that obstacle, so far

from being an invasion of the domain of faith, would be only a very

proper act defensive of the legitimate attributes of the temporal

authority, only a continuation and a consequence of the struggle

against ultramontane pretensions instituted and sustained by all the

parliaments of France, and for the clergy something like a

supplementary article to the declaration of 1682. Let the king make

felt in this languishing {446} negotiation that hand which nothing in

Europe can resist. Let him pronounce one of those sovereign words

which have so often fetched an echo even in the sanctuary, or let him

simply join to the theologians and bishops, too submissive by their

quality to the spiritual authority, an ordinary representative of the

regalian rights--a lawyer, a statesman, or a magistrate, and all will

speedily return to order, and march rapidly toward a solution.

Numerous adulations of the wisdom of the king, and even of his

theological knowledge, followed by honeyed insinuations against the

Bishop of Meaux, terminate this singular appeal to the secular arm,

the discovery of which will hardly count among the titles to glory of

philosophy, and which, moreover, was no more successful than

estimable.

The king, old, weary of those religious discussions which were the

plague of his reign, and even to his last days the chastisement of his

intolerable despotism, communicated the note to Bossuet without

comment, perhaps even without having paid it the least attention.

Bossuet, strong in the solidity of his arguments, declared himself

perfectly willing to receive such lay associate as should be chosen,

and Leibnitz, having no reason after that to desire what Bossuet so

little dreaded, the proposition fell through, and left no trace.

The other snare was not less adroit, but more innocent. In his

attachment to his favorite plan, Leibnitz could not persuade himself

that it could possibly be resisted by any reasons drawn from

conscience alone. The party taken, the point of honor, scholastic

obstinacy, were, it seemed to him, the principal reasons for rejecting

his plan. It was with Catholics a matter of vanity not to yield to

demands made by Protestants. But what they refused from the hand of a

stranger, they would, perhaps, accept more willingly from the hand of

a friend, a member of their own communion. A pious fraud would relieve

the plan of all suspicion of heresy. A consultation, for example, of a

supposed Catholic doctor, who should show himself favorable to it,

would, perhaps, be all that was required to disarm prejudice, and the

flag would pass the merchandise. The great philosopher, therefore, set

himself at work. Assuming the paternal tone and authoritative air of a

Catholic priest, taking care that no expression smacking of heresy

should escape his lips, playing a part, so to say, with all the

gravity in the world, and, without a single smile, produced in eight

or ten pages that little document which he entitled _Judicium Doctoris

Catholici_, and which, proceeding from principles in appearance the

most Catholic, and advancing in ways the most orthodox, arrived at the

foot of the Council of Trent itself, to mine in silence its very

foundation. If M. de Careil had not this time conscientiously printed

the entire text of this discovery, we should find it very hard to

believe that a mind so great could descend to such a puerile game, and

of which we seek in vain the fruit he evidently hoped. With whom,

then, did Leibnitz imagine he had to do? Do people disguise their

ideas, as they counterfeit their voices? Is the Church a citadel so

poorly guarded that one can enter it by stratagem, by simply turning

his cockade or dissembling his uniform? Took he Bossuet for an

imbecile sentinel who could be imposed upon by passports so evidently

forged?

For the honor of Leibnitz and of philosophy we would pass over in

silence this crotchet of misplaced gaiety, if M. de Careil did not

force us to pause on it for a moment longer before including, by

attaching to it an undue importance, by pretending to see in it the

solution of a literary problem, which we formerly made a subject of

some observations. A few words will dispose of this incident, which

beside is not wholly foreign to the principal object of our present

reflections.

{447}

Beyond the controversy with Bossuet, which, during the lifetime of

Leibnitz, made, in fact, very little noise, and the partial

publication of which was already ancient, there exists, as is known,

wholly in the handwriting of that great man, a small work on religious

questions, which remained unknown up to his death and even for a long

time after, and which was discovered and published only at the

beginning of the present century. When this little work, baptized, I

know not by whom, _Systema Theologicum_, for the first time saw the

light, it was perceived, not without surprise, that on all the points,

even those on which in his known writings Leibnitz was the furthest

removed from the doctrines of the Church, his conclusions conformed to

the purest Catholic teaching. From that arose a great discussion among

the learned, all astonished, some agreeably, some disagreeably, to

find in Leibnitz this posthumous and unexpected evidence of orthodoxy.

Commentaries, conjectures, explanations, were called forth in

abundance, often ingenious, but rarely impartial, each writer

interpreting the tract after his own manner--Protestants anxious to

keep Leibnitz in their ranks, and Catholics intent on conquering him

for theirs. I myself hazarded some conjectures on the subject, but

timidly, as was proper on such a matter, and without much expectation

of making them prevail, the first to acknowledge their insufficiency,

and persuaded that the existence of the _Systema Theologicum_, like

the birth-place of Homer, and the name of the author of the

_Imitatione Christi_, would remain a sort of biblical quadrature of

the circle, destined to supply for ever to the learned a subject of

discussion, and to students a thesis.

If we believe M. de Careil, the mystery is now unveiled; the new

discovery explains the old; the _Judicium Doctoris Catholici_ is the

key to the _Systema Theologicum_, of which it is substantially only a

rough sketch, and the first edition. In the one as in the other,

Catholicity is only a borrowed vestment, momentarily worn by Leibnitz

to disguise his uniform of a negotiator. It was a _ruse_ not of war

but of diplomacy. On the plan of pacification the success of which he

was bent on securing, Leibnitz, in order to beguile the malevolent, by

a premeditated design impressed pressed on it the Catholic seal

instead of the Protestant stamp. He was no more a Catholic when he

wrote the _Systema Theologicum_ than he was when he prepared, to

deceive the vigilant eye of Bossuet, the _Judicium Doctoris

Catholici_; he only wished to appear one in order to secure a full

hearing for the conditions on which he could become a Catholic.

[Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: A similar view, in some respects, to this is taken and

urged with much plausibility by Dr. Guhrauer In his German work

which formed the basis of J. M. Mackie's "Life of Godfrey William

von Leibnitz," published at Boston by Gould, Kendall & Lincoln,

1845; and the refutation of it, indirectly given by the Prince de

Broglie in the text, is by no means unwelcome.--THE TRANSLATOR.]

The natural consequence of such a supposition has been for M. de

Careil to make the _Systema Theologicum_ figure by the side of the

_Judicium Doctoris,_at such a date as he judged the most convenient,

for example, among the documents of the negotiation of which he was

drawing up a statement (_procès verbal_). But since one of these

documents was, in his view, only the detailed reproduction of the

other, it seems to us he should have placed them in face of each

other, so as to facilitate their comparison. We regret that he has not

so placed them, for we are convinced that even he himself, in

re-reading them in connection for the press, would have had no

difficulty in perceiving that the assimilation imagined has not the

least foundation in fact. Although signed by the same hand, the two

documents, which he would confound, do not in any manner whatever bear

witness to the same state of mind, or to having been both designed to

aid a common object. Everything in them differs, not merely in tone,

which in one is {448} grave and full of emotion, subtle and light in

the other, but, above all, in the plan and very substance of the

argument. The _Judicium_ is a series of arguments, very brief, which

tend directly to a foregone conclusion, namely, the pacification of

the schism, and as the means of effecting it, the suspension of the

Council of Trent. Not an idea, not a word, that does not tend directly

to this conclusion, nor the slightest effort to dissemble it. It is a

skilful, but adroit pleading against the Council of Trent. The

_Systema_, on the contrary, is a detailed exposition, often eloquent,

of the entire Catholic faith, point by point, dogma after dogma, of

those which Protestants reject as well as of those which they admit

with the Church. And what authority does this dogmatic exposition

appeal to as its support? The oftenest is to the Council of Trent

itself, openly invoked, on the ground that the voice of the universal

Church is the invariable rule of faith. The Council of Trent in every

line is called holy, venerable, and sometimes even _the Council_, by

way of eminence. After this, what place would M. de Careil give to

this writing in a negotiation, the precise object of which was to

efface that council from the memory of the faithful, and the annals of

the Church? A singular pleasure assuredly Leibnitz must have found in

belying himself, in playing a ridiculous farce, and of doubtful

morality, only to end in yielding to his opponent the ground disputed

between them!

Till M. de Careil responds to this difficulty, to which we had

previously invited his attention, we must continue to guard ourselves

against confounding works so dissimilar in their tone, design, and

substance as the _Judicium_ and the _Systema_, and continue also to

see in the one only a pastime without value, which ought not to have

occupied even the waste moments of a great man, and still less cause

the loss of that time so well filled by his editor; and in the other,

on the contrary, the expression of a sincere conviction, very proper

to throw light on the nature of the beliefs of the soul that conceived

it. It is of the state of that soul, and of those beliefs, that it

remains for us to say a few words, by attempting to enlighten the

confused impressions produced by the voluminous papers of which we

have just finished the analysis.

II.

Three things, I think, must have struck those who have had the

patience to follow me in this long exposition: 1. The singularly

narrow ground on which Leibnitz consented to place the negotiation; 2.

This perseverance in pursuing it; 3. This resistance to bringing it to

a conclusion. Cantoned in very narrow quarters, he maintained himself

there with obstinacy, reanimating the combat whenever it slackened,

but escaping from every solution whenever it approached.

They, for example, who, attracted by the antithesis of the two great

names, should imagine that they were about to hear debated between the

last of the Fathers and the ancestor of modern philosophy the great

question everywhere agitated in the sixteenth century, and on which

the future of society depends--they who should expect to see a mortal

struggle in the listed field between a champion of free inquiry and a

representative of authority, would, I fear, be greatly disappointed.

Not a word of the mutual relations of faith and reason, of the rights

of private judgment, or of the principle of authority, is, I think,

met with in the whole twelve hundred pages comprised in these two

volumes; and for the very simple reason, that the terms to which the

discussion was restricted raised no question of the sort between the

two opponents. Faithful to the constant traditions of the Church, and

imbued with the rules of the Cartesian method, Bossuet contested none

of the prerogatives of {449} reason in the order of our natural

powers; Christian by profession, Leibnitz recognized in faith the

right to reveal and to impose on man knowledge superior to

nature--pretending to become and even to be a Catholic _in potentia_

and _in voto_, Leibnitz declared himself ready to seek the rule of

faith, not in the mute text of a book, but in the living voice of an

organized Church, and this Church he distinctly acknowledged to be in

the hierarchy of pastors whose head is the Roman Pontiff. Consequently

there was and could be no debate either on the existence or the

composition, the mode of action or the seat, of the ecclesiastical

authority. There was between them only a simple and humble question of

fact--of history. Certainly the Church has the plenary right to be

heard and obeyed when she speaks; but did she speak in the Council of

Trent? The contest Leibnitz sustained went no further than this, and

rose no higher. Persons in our day, curious in theology and

metaphysics, those who take an interest in reconciling free will with

grace, or the foreknowledge of God, those who like to carry either the

torch of dogma or the scalpel of analysis into the very depths of the

soul, will find very little satisfaction in reading them. None of the

psychological or moral problems raised by the Reformation, and with

which it had troubled men's minds, and filled the schools with the

_serf_-will of Luther, nor the foreordination of Calvin, nor the

subtle distinctions in regard to the intrinsic nature of moral evil

and the effects of original sin, obtained from Leibnitz, from first to

last, even so much as a simple allusion. On the concurrence of the

divine action and that of the human will in the work of moral progress

and the hope of eternal salvation, he thought and spoke as the Church.

His criticisms affect the form of the Council of Trent rather than the

substance of its decisions. It is the competency of the court to which

he pleads, rather than its decrees. Aside from the canon of the

Scriptures, which, for the Old Testament, he would restrict to the

Hebrew books properly so-called, and exclude therefrom the books in

Greek transmitted only by the Septuagint, I am aware of no dogmatic

point, defined at Trent, which creates with him any serious

difficulty. And even on this subject of the canonicity of the sacred

books, he has nothing that resembles that audacious criticism to which

Richard Simon, in the seventeenth century, opened the way, and which,

a very few years after, all Germany was to rush into and level and

broaden. It was not the criticism of our days, which pretends to an

imprescriptible right over the entire text of the Scriptures, and to

serve as the ground of all certainty, moral and philosophical. The

criticism of Leibnitz takes not such lofty airs. It is restricted to

some accessory parts of the Old Testament, and presumes not to go

beyond. And when Bossuet, adopting a method familiar to logicians

(though not always prudently employed), would push it to the extreme,

to absurdity even, and prove that its principles logically carried out

would ruin entirely the Holy Scriptures, Leibnitz recoils, frightened

at the last word of his own logic.

Leibnitz, having never been accused of a narrow or timid mind, of any

lack of boldness in his principles or of force in deducing from them

their logical consequences, it is necessary to believe that if he

avoided the debate between the Reformation and the Church under its

grander aspects, it was solely because he was separated from Catholic

beliefs only by the narrow trench which he himself has traced, and

because his own Protestantism, so to speak, was neither longer nor

broader. Certainly he can be very little of a Protestant who

acknowledges all the councils _less_ one alone, and even all the

decrees of that one save a single exception--who speaks as a Catholic

of the Church, of tradition, of the priesthood, and of the sacraments.

That to these sentiments, so near to those of a Catholic, {450}

Leibnitz joined the sincere desire to take the final step; that,

having reached the threshold, he was strongly pressed to cross it, we

must believe, in order not only not to throw doubt on his often

repeated protestations, which have every appearance of being made in

good faith, but to account for his perseverance, meritoriously

displayed on more than one occasion to sustain or revive, against all

hope, the flickering flame of the languishing negotiation. Neither the

growing coldness of the powers of the earth, who after having started

it abandoned it midway, nor the haughtiness of Bossuet, a little

contemptuous, which exposed without any mercy the vanity of his

projects, succeeded in discouraging him. He was proof against all

disgusts; he knocked at every door, and the crooked methods he adopted

to open or turn them, not according to the rules of loyal warfare,

attest at least an ardent desire to enter the place. Yet, in spite of

this agreement on principles, this heartfelt desire for union, and the

feeble distance which remained for him to traverse to become a

Catholic, Leibnitz never in his life traversed it. The end of the

discussion found him just where he was at its beginning, always

debating, never advancing. When the reasoning of Bossuet became urgent

and victorious (and it will be admitted that with the choice of

ground, and the advantages conceded him, one needs not to be a Bossuet

to conquer)--whenever it took a turn _ad hominem_, and passed from the

general interests of Protestantism to the particular duties of

individual conscience--whenever the question was no longer of

concluding a treaty of peace between two hostile powers, but of

articulating the submission of a believer, Leibnitz drew back, and

escaped. The tone becomes sharp and sour, recriminations are mingled

with reasoning, subterfuges retract the concessions. Broad and easy in

regard to principles, he haggles at consequences. What are we to think

of that alternation, of those constant advances followed by as

constant retreats? What was the after-thought back of the exterior

motives of that intermittent resistance? For no one can be persuaded

that a man of a serious character, and a mind which stops not at

trifles, admitting in the outset the necessity and the right of an

infallible authority in matters of faith, could remain a Protestant,

that is, a rebel to that acknowledged authority, because the bishops,

united at Trent, admitted _Ecclesiasticus_ and _Macchabees_ into the

canon of the Scriptures.

The moral problem being curious and complex, every one has a right to

offer his own solution. I formerly, in this periodical, offered mine,

and I shall hold to it till a better and a more satisfactory solution

is discovered. In my judgment, all is explained, if we suppose that

Leibnitz became a Catholic in intellect and by study, yet remained a

Protestant by force of habit, interest, and self-love. The first part

is not even a supposition, but a fact. For, waiving the disputed value

of the _Systema Theologicum_, the documents which we have before us

contain alone avowals amply sufficient to prove it. When one admits

the concurrence of free will and the divine will in the work of

salvation, the mysterious virtue and efficacy of the sacraments, the

transubstantiation of the elements in the eucharist--when one

recognizes the sacred character of the priesthood, the Primacy by

divine right of the bishops of Rome, and, above all, the infallibility

of the Church (and Leibnitz accords all this to Bossuet, always by

implication, and often under the form of explicit concession), one is

willingly or unwillingly a Catholic, or at least has lost all right

not to be one. In such a case the defect is in the will, not the

intellect. Let nothing be said here of invincible ignorance, for never

was there ignorance more vincible, more completely conquered,

subjected, drowned in floods of light, than in the case of Leibnitz.

{451}

Remains, then, only the second part of the hypothesis, which I confess

is less clearly demonstrated, as well as less charitable; but it

perfectly meets the facts in the case, and perhaps, when the first

part is once conceded, it, better than any other explanation, saves

the dignity and loyalty of Leibnitz.

If it was true, as we hold, that Leibnitz, agreeing with the Church in

all the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith, was retained

outside of her communion by the fear of losing the high position which

he had gained in the ranks of Protestants and with their princes,

nothing more simple than that, to satisfy at the same time his

conscience and his interests, he should labor earnestly and

perseveringly to effect a reconciliation of his party and his

protectors with the Church. If it was true that he felt himself bound

by strong and respectable ties which attach men to the monuments, and

to the forms of worship, which received their first vows and dictated

their first prayers, it is very natural that he should hesitate to go

alone, to take his seat in churches unknown to his childhood, and that

he should, instead, seek at first to reconstruct the broken down

altars of the temples of the middle ages which had seen his birth. If

finally the _proud weakness_ attached to the royalty of science as to

every other royalty, made him dread to change the part of an

accredited doctor of one party for that of a penitent and neophyte of

another, who can be astonished that, to spare himself the painful

transition, he should wish to pass out with arms, baggage, and all the

honors of war, instead of submitting to conditions, and enter into the

Church with head erect, followed by a retinue of nations, and have

therefore a right to as much gratitude as he gave of submission?

The persistence of Leibnitz in a forlorn negotiation finds in this at

least a probable explanation. His insistence on points of little

importance is less easy to understand. These points, of which he knew

well what to think, are those without which, according to his

knowledge of the Protestant courts and schools, no peace was possible

either to be concluded or even proposed. He knew how completely and

irrevocably Protestant princes and doctors were pledged by their word

and their self-love (_amour-propre_) against the Council of Trent,

from which they fancied they had been unjustly excluded. Many of them

were on the point of reaching by their own reason and study dogmatic

conclusions analogous to those of Trent; but the date and seal of that

council affixed to any formulary presented for their signature made

them instinctively recoil. It was in their name much more than in his

own, or rather to manage their pretensions much more than to

tranquillize his own conscience, as he allows us in more than one

place to perceive, that he insisted with invincible obstinacy that

this obstacle to peace must be removed. He acted as a negotiator who

follows his instructions and speaks for others, much more than as a

doctor who decides, or a philosopher who discusses, on his own

account. In the new council whose convocation he called for, he

thought all low in himself, the dogmas of Trent, after an apparent

discussion, would be re-established on the more solid basis of a more

general agreement, and not having that quick sense of the dignity of

the Church which belongs only to her children, he felt no repugnance

to the adoption of expedients borrowed from political prudence, and

wholly out of place in the Church of God.

Thus may be resolved, it seems to me, in the most simple manner in the

world, the apparent contradictions in the conduct of Leibnitz, and be

discovered the secret of his obstinacy in protracting a fruitless

discussion, instead of either candidly breaking it off or boldly

bringing it to its logical conclusion. He had postponed the day of his

personal conversion to the day constantly hoped, constantly announced

as near, of a general reconciliation. {452} It would have cost him too

much to move before that day came; but it cost him hardly less to own

to himself that come it would not. Hence, with him, a prolonged state

of indecision, which, as human life is short, and death always takes

us by surprise, had naturally no termination but that of his life

itself. We in this have, I think, explained that other problem

presented by the _Systema Theologicum_. If we have rightly seized his

state of mind, nothing was more natural than that we should find among

the papers of Leibnitz a profession of Catholic faith, and there can

be nothing astonishing in the fact that it remained unfinished and

unpublished. From the moment in which the doctrines contained in that

tract became his real belief, it was very natural that he should

reduce them to writing, and, from the moment when he had subjected the

publication of his conversion to a condition always hoped for, but

never realized, it was more natural still that he should keep the

writing by him as the witness of the fact of his conversion. At what

point of his life, therefore, did he confide to paper the interior

state of his mind? It is impossible, but at the same time wholly

unimportant, to determine. Probably it was in one of those moments of

sincerity and recollection in which the soul, detaching herself from

all worldly considerations, places herself face to face with the

problems of her eternal destiny; or, indeed, may have been at a time

when, in the vein of hope, and believing that he was on the eve of

concluding ecclesiastical peace, he wished to draw up before-hand, in

readiness for the event, its manifesto and programme. Little imports

it. As soon as he thought as a Catholic, there were a thousand

circumstances in his life in which he must have spoken and written as

he thought. The moment in which he would have expressed himself with

the least frankness was most likely that in which, being made the

plenipotentiary of the Protestants, and charged to treat for them, he

felt it his duty to put forth in their name pretensions to which in

his own heart he attached no importance. Leibnitz the negotiator must

necessarily have been more difficult, and set a higher price on his

submission, than Leibnitz the philosopher, so that, in opposition to

the assertion of M. de Careil, his sincere work would be the _Systema

Theologicum:_ his diplomatic work would be the correspondence of which

we have made the analysis.

The advantage of Bossuet in the debate is that in his case no such

questions can be raised, and no such subtle distinctions be called

for. Bossuet the bishop and Bossuet the diplomatist are one and the

same person, and speak one and the same language. Knowing perfectly

whence he starts, whither he can go, what he is permitted to abandon,

and what he must hold fast; very liberal in the part which he gives to

reason, very precise in what he asserts in the name of authority;

marking with a steady hand the limits of what can be changed in the

Church, and what is as immutable as she herself, he has no occasion,

when he has once laid down his principles, to withdraw any concession,

or to shrink from any logical consequence; possessing an erudition

less varied, an argumentative ability less flexible than that of

Leibnitz, Bossuet, in his letters, carries the day by his rectitude

and precision. We say, however, and without wrong to the great

prelate, that his cause was too nearly gained in advance. All the

principles are conceded him in the outset, and the slightest logical

pressure suffices to force out the necessary conclusions. Leibnitz

found at times his hand heavy, and complained of it; but he himself

armed that powerful hand with the instrument which it set at work,

without management indeed, but also without forcing its action.

This privileged situation, which gives to Bossuet his preponderance in

the struggle, takes, however, from that struggle a large part of the

interest which otherwise it might have had for {453} us, and deprives

us of the instruction that might have been derived from it. We

assuredly have little chance of seeing pitted against each other

combatants of their stature, and less still, if it be possible, of

seeing a debate carried on under like conditions. There is no longer a

Bossuet in the Church; but still less, perhaps, are there Protestants

and philosophers who, like Leibnitz, recognize infallibility in

principle, and the inspiration of three-fourths of the canon of

Scripture. That kind of enemies is gone, and left no heirs. Those whom

we now encounter make to our forces a less stiff resistance. The very

image and shadow of authority have disappeared from the Protestantism

of our age, each day more and more dissipated in the thousand shades

of private judgment. With unbounded free inquiry and unbridled

criticism, controversy can no longer find a starting-point in any

dogma or in any text, and, in fact, has ceased to be possible. The

enemy escapes by the want of a body to be grappled with. Happily,

another sort of combat can be waged, another sort of victory be hoped

for. Doctrines, remote from one another, to be disputed in their

principles, may still be compared in their effects. It is henceforth

by their respective fruits, rather than by arguments, by their

respective action on society and on souls, that, before an uncertain

public, must be judged the principle of authority in matters of faith

and that of private judgment. On this new soil, as on that of pure

intelligence, God permits the efforts of man to concur in the triumph

of his cause. If he wills, then, for the honor of his Church, to raise

up Bossuets to take his cause in hand, there ought to be, for the

honor of her nature, Leibnitzes to meet them, and measure themselves

with them.

PRINCE ALBERT DE BROGLIE.

--------

From The Month.

SAINTS OF THE DESERT.

BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D.

1. Abbot Antony said: I saw the nets of the enemy lying spread out

over the earth; and I cried out, "Alas, who shall escape these?" And a

voice answered, "Humility."

2. It is told of Blessed Arsenius, that on Saturday evening he turned

his back on the setting sun, and, stretching out his arms toward

heaven, did not cease to pray till the sun rose before his face in the

morning.

3. Abbot Agatho was zealous to fulfil every duty.

If he crossed a ferry, he was the first to take an oar.

If he had a visit from his brethren, his hand was first, after prayer,

to set out the table.

For he was full of divine love.

4. The novice of Abbot Sisoi often had to say to him, "Rise, father;

let us eat." He used to make answer, "Are you sure we did not eat just

now, my son?"

The novice replied, "Quite sure, my father." Then the old man said,

"Well, if we did not eat, come, let us eat."

5. A president came to see Abbot Simon; and some clerks, who got to

him first, said to him, "Now, father, get ready! Here comes the

president for your blessing; he has heard a great deal about you."

"_I_ will get ready," said the abbot. So he took some bread and

cheese, and began munching at the door of his cell.

"So _this_ is your solitary!" said the president, and went away again.

------

{454}

From St. James's Magazine.

'TIS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.

Has sorrow cast thy spirit down,

And crush'd thy hopes Elysian?

Be not disheartened by her frown.

Nor heedless of thy mission.

But go forth gaily on thy way--

The bonds of care dissever,

And pluck the roses while you may;

'Tis better late than never!

Doth love consume with pensive woe

Thy heart whence hope has fleeted--

As sunbeams melt away the snow

They never could have heated?

Come, wreathe thy brow with laurel-leaf--

Be wise as well as clever,

And learn a nobler lore than grief;

'Tis better late than never!

For life's a stand-up fight, I ween.

With poverty and labor,

And many a hero there has been

Who never drew a sabre.

So buckle bravely to the strife.

How perilous soever.

And win some glory for thy life;

'Tis better late than never!

Or hast thou, worn in folly's wars,

Forgot the land that bloometh

Beyond the cedars and the stars.

Where sorrow never cometh?

Oh, do not for a phantom fly

From Paradise for ever,

But turn thy trusting eyes on high;

'Tis better late than never!

GREAT LORD OF HEAVEN! CREATION'S KING!

Whose vineyard open lies,

Thou deemest not a worthless thing

Man's tardy sacrifice;

Still sanctify the work we've wrought,

And every fond endeavor.

This blessed creed thyself hast taught--

'TIS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

--------

{455}

From The Month.

CONSTANCE SHERWOOD:

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.

CHAPTER XIX.