There is another chapel of _Pitié_ near Puycasquier, the ancient

_Podium Asterii_—the height of Astier—an old town of the middle ages.

This is a votive chapel called _Notre Dame de Gaillan_, built to

commemorate the cessation of a pestilence that once raged in the

neighborhood, where on Whitmonday a dozen parishes around still come

in procession to hear Mass, deposit their offering, and place under

the protection of Mary their hopes for the coming harvests. It stands

a short distance from the town, hidden in a deep, narrow valley

between two streams, in the centre of a churchyard where lie whole

generations of the dead. It is a long, narrow chapel with arches of

the fourteenth century, not beautiful in style or ornament, but dear

to a grateful people, who come here in procession on the

twenty-seventh of April to fulfil the vow of their fathers when

delivered from the plague. One would think the benefit only of

yesterday, from the enthusiasm manifested when this day comes. The

bells ring out joyfully from the very dawn. All the men, women, and

children in the vicinity gather together, and, under the guidance of

their _curé_, proceed to _Notre Dame de Gaillan_, the glory of

Puycasquier, chanting the litany as they go. As soon as they reach the

edge of the hill, where they can look down on their beloved sanctuary,

they all fall on their knees and chant three times the invocation:

_Sancta Maria, Mater Pietatis, ora pro nobis!_ The _Libera_ is sung as

they pass through the graves in the churchyard, and the priest intones

the _Oremus_ when he comes to the door, and gives the absolution. Then

they enter the church with the joyful _Regina cœli, lætare_, as if

calling on the Virgin of Sorrows to rejoice over the resurrection of

her Son at a season when all nature rises to newness of life. There is

now a solemn pause of silent prayer. At eight o’clock precisely the

priest reverently takes down the miraculous Virgin from its niche, and

places it on a kind of trestle amid a profusion of flowers beneath a

rich canopy. The litany is begun, and four notables of the town carry

the statue to the churchyard gate, where it is received by four

ploughmen whose privilege alone it is to carry the Virgin on these

important occasions. Followed by the people in procession, accompanied

by the local authorities in official array, and frequently escorted by

the national guard under arms, they climb the heights of Puycasquier,

winding around the hill till they arrive at the opposite side of the

town, which they enter and proceed to the church, singing the martyrs’

hymn in honor of SS. Abdon and Sennen, the patrons of the parish—two

noble Persians, martyred in the early ages, who are honored in four

country churches at about equal distances from Auch, devotion to whom

became popular in France after their bodies were brought to Soissons

in the time of Louis le Débonnaire. The Virgin of Gaillan is thus

borne all around the parish, and then reinstated in her niche with

acclamations.

Among other usages peculiar to Puycasquier which have come down from

ancient times are two that are somewhat curious. On Easter Eve, at one

o’clock in the afternoon, the mayor and sub-mayor, in all the majesty

of their village consequence set off by their official regalia,

proceed in solemn state to the presbytery, accompanied by all the town

officers, the bells ringing, as is due, at a _haute volée_. The

_curé_, thus notified, stands ready to receive them in the wide-open

door. He invites them to enter, and hastens to present wine as a proof

of his hospitality, which is drunk to the peace and happiness of the

people under their rule. The two magistrates now pray the _curé_ to

accompany them to the church to sing the _Regina cœli_, and, placing

themselves at his side, they escort him through the crowd, which by

this time has assembled, to the holy place, where, in surplice and

stole and pluvial, he intones the Easter hymn, which is caught up by

the whole congregation. The _curé_ then places himself once more

between the powers that be and proceeds to the chapel of Gaillan,

followed by a crowd of all ages and conditions in holiday attire, full

of animation and joy, but not immoderate in their gayety. The _Libera_

and _Regina cœli_ are here chanted as on the twenty-seventh of April,

after which they return to the parish church to sing the latter a

third time at the Virgin’s altar. The day of the Resurrection thus

duly announced, the _curé_ is conducted by the mayor to the residence

of the latter, where the table is loaded with cakes of all kinds,

especially the _tourteau_[50] and _paëte_,[51] by no means

unacceptable to appetites sharpened by so long a walk in the fresh

mountain air. There is then an exchange of Gascon wit still more

savory, with which the festival ends.

Another custom no less ancient and peculiar is connected with the Mass

at Gaillan on St. Agatha’s day, which at least one member out of every

family in the parish attends, to implore a blessing on the fruits of

the earth. Before beginning the Holy Sacrifice, the _curé_ solemnly

blesses the loaves brought by his parishioners, and after the Mass is

over they cut them in pieces, and, going to their fields, bury them

here and there in the ground, setting up a little cross, often a mere

thornbush twisted into proper shape.

_Picasqué_, _petito bilo_, _gran clouqué_—Puycasquier, small town,

great belfry—is a proverbial expression associated with the town on

account of the fine old tower, visible all over the neighboring

country. It was fortunately spared when the place was ruined by the

Huguenots three centuries ago. Around its base are held great fairs

several times a year, the resort of all the people in the vicinity.

The baptistery of the parish church has a curious font of lead which

is very ancient—probably more than a thousand years old, from the

style. It is cylindrical in form and covered with bas-reliefs like the

lead font at Strassburg. There is a swan—emblem of the purity of the

soul after baptism. An archer stands ready to attack it as soon as it

issues from the regenerating waters, but the arrow he lets fly so

vigorously is received by a lion _passant_ in his shoulder, which

marches resolutely on, undisturbed by the evil adversary. It is the

Lion of the tribe of Judah, who saves the soul by his power and

bleeding wounds.

The votive chapel of _Notre Dame de la Croix_, at Marciac, is another

pious monument of Mary’s protection during a great pestilence. Over

the doorway is the following inscription:

Marciacam cum dira lues subverteret urbem,

Ipsamet hanc jussit mater sibi Virgo dicari

Sub crucis auspiciis gnatique insignibus ædem.[52]

It is a pretty church, with an altar of jasper and tabernacle of white

marble, over which is the Mother of Sorrows holding the body of the

crucified Saviour. It was built at the repeated instances of a poor

woman, who was at first treated as visionary or mad, because she

asserted a divine mission for the cessation of the pestilence, which

had carried off eight hundred and four persons in a short time. Her

persevering piety was at length rewarded by the foundation of the

chapel and the deliverance of her townsmen from the plague, which is

to this day commemorated. Pope Innocent XI. encouraged the devotion to

_Notre Dame de la Croix_ by granting many privileges to those who went

there to pray and perform some good work.

There is a chapel of _Notre Dame de Pitié_ at Condom called the

_Piétat_, now belonging to the _Filles de Marie_, but formerly to the

Brothers of St. John of God, who served the sick. Near it is a

miraculous spring called the _Houn dou Teou_, where pilgrims go to ask

deliverance from their infirmities.

Near the historic _Château de Lavardens_ is the chapel of _Notre Dame

de Consolation_ in the woods, quiet and solitary, surrounded by

graves. The pensive and the sorrowful love to come here to pray

undisturbed before the simple altar of Mary, Consoler of the

Afflicted. It is one of the stations for the processions in Rogation

Week. It is the very place to implore peace for the soul—and to find

it!

There is another _Notre Dame de Pitié_ at Aubiet, an obscure village

on the right bank of the Arrats, about twelve miles from Auch. The

houses are poorly built, the streets narrow and irregular, with

nothing remarkable but the fine tower of the ancient church. It never

was a place of much importance, except in a religious point of view,

and has never recovered from its almost entire destruction by the

Huguenots in the sixteenth century. In fact, it is only noteworthy for

its religious associations and picturesque situation on a hill

overlooking the fertile valley of the Arrats, which comes from

Mauvezin on the one side, and goes winding through a delicious

country, girt with vine-clad hills, towards Castelnau-Barbarens on the

other. Though small, the town is ancient, and figures under the name

of _Albinetum_ in the old legend of St. Taurin, who was martyred some

time in the fourth century in the Bois de la Verdale at the west of

the town—a spot now marked by a cross and an old mutilated bust of the

saint. A graveyard is near, where the villagers come to repose around

the place watered by the blood of the holy bishop who converted their

forefathers ages ago. How venerable the religious traditions of a

country which extend back to the first ages of Christianity, and how

good to pray at the tombs of those who lived so near the apostolic

times!

Small as Aubiet has always been, it formerly had five churches—a proof

of the religious spirit that animated the people; but most of them

were destroyed by the Huguenots in the sixteenth century. Among these

was the parish church, in which was a chapel of the Five Wounds, built

and endowed by the father of Père de Mongaillard, the Jesuit annalist

of Gascony; and the church of St. Nicolas, where was established a

confraternity of Blue Penitents under the patronage of _Monsieur St.

Jerome_. Nor was the hospital connected with this church spared,

though the holy asylum of human miseries, where there were numerous

beds for the poor.

SS. Abdon and Sennen are venerated as the special patrons of the

place. Père de Mongaillard, who lived in the seventeenth century,

tells us that, in his day, the people called upon all the musicians of

the country around to contribute to the pomp of the festival of these

saints, on which solemn Mass and Vespers were sung and a procession

made through the town. The day always ended with a great repast and

public rejoicings. These customs have been perpetuated, more or less,

to this day.

The most remarkable church at Aubiet is that of _Notre Dame de Pitié_,

which dates from the year 1499. It was providentially spared by the

Huguenots and became the parish church. The people, mourning over so

many ruined sanctuaries, gathered with fresh devotion around the altar

of Our Lady of Pity, with whom they were brought into closer

companionship. This altar is still in great repute. The church has

recently been repaired, and in one of its windows is depicted St.

Taurin in pontifical robes with the martyr’s palm in his hand.

Father Mongaillard relates some curious customs connected with this

church. One of the altars was dedicated to St. Eutrope, where a

portion of his relics was enshrined and regarded with great

veneration. The people brought wine for the priest to plunge a relic

of the saint therein, and then carried it to the sick, especially to

those suffering from dropsy or violent colic, who often found relief—a

custom also common at Marciac, where there is a chapel to _Sent

Estropi_, crowded with people on the last of April. This devotion is

now discontinued. St. Eutrope of Saintes was one of the early apostles

of the country. Notker, a monk of St. Gall, says he was consecrated

bishop and sent into Gaul by St. Clement, the successor of the

apostles.

Another singular custom at Aubiet was that of the boys of the place,

who always assembled around the high altar to hear Mass, and the

instant the priest elevated the Host cried repeatedly, in a loud

voice: “_Segnour Diou, misericordie!_”—Mercy, O Lord God!—so that

their exclamations, as discordant as they were singular, could be

heard by the passers-by, and produced a profound impression on their

minds.

The same father relates another practice in this church. When a child

was brought for baptism, the priest poured the regenerating waters on

its head three times, and the largest bell was rung to announce the

event to the whole parish and admonish the people to pray for the new

lamb of Christ’s flock. If a boy, the bell was struck nine times, very

nearly as for the Angelus; if a girl, six times were thought

sufficient. And when it sounded, every one within hearing cried

heartily: “God bless thee!”

Aubiet formerly had many clergy, and religious services were conducted

with a splendor scarcely to be found now in the largest cathedrals.

This was principally owing to a celebrated confraternity of the

Blessed Sacrament, which was organized in 1526 by Cardinal

Clermont-Lodève, archbishop of Auch, at the request of eighteen

priests of the town, who, with uncovered heads and robed in their

surplices, presented themselves for the purpose before that prelate

when he came to make his pastoral visit. The act of foundation still

exists. Every Thursday a solemn Mass was to be sung with deacon and

sub-deacon in honor of _Corpus Domini_, and on the first Thursday of

every month the Blessed Sacrament was to be carried in procession

around the church of _Notre Dame de Pitié_.

This institution became very popular, for it was an outburst of faith,

love, and reparation; and numerous legacies and foundations were made

all through that century for its support by people of every condition.

One of the priests, foremost in founding the confraternity, was the

first to show his pious liberality. This was Jehan Jourdan, the elder,

a venerable old man, who, in 1626, appeared before the assembled

clergy of the place and begged them to accept, out of his devotion to

the Holy Eucharist, the sum of two hundred and twenty crowns, that

Mass might be offered in perpetuity at the altar of Our Lady of Pity

for the welfare of the donor and his relatives during their lives and

the repose of their souls after death.

This same Jehan, the elder, in his last will and testament, likewise

founded seven votive Masses on every Friday in the year—one in honor

of God the Father; another of the Holy Ghost; the third, of the Holy

Trinity; the fourth, of _Notre Dame de Pitié_; the fifth, of St.

Joseph; the sixth, for the dead; the seventh, in honor of the Holy

Name of Jesus. The latter was to be sung with deacon and sub-deacon.

All the chaplains were to assist devoutly at its celebration, and if

any one failed to attend he was obliged to pay a fine of olive-oil for

the lamps. No one was to be appointed chaplain unless a native of the

place and _doctus in musicâ, et non aliter_.

Another remarkable foundation is still to be seen in an old Latin will

of a notary at Aubiet. He requests to be buried before St. Peter’s

altar in the church of Our Lady of Charity (as it was sometimes

called). Among his curious legacies are nine _sous_ for nine requiem

Masses for his soul, showing what was the customary fee in those days.

He also founds a solemn Mass of requiem at St. Peter’s altar every

Wednesday, for himself and all his relatives who have died in a state

of grace, for which purpose he bequeaths various lands.

Pierre Lacroix, in a will of the sixteenth century also, leaves a

certain sum for his funeral expenses. Six torches are to burn around

his bier, and eighty priests were invited to aid in the service. They

are to have bodily refreshments: _habeant refectionem corporalem_. On

the ninth day after his death all the priests of Aubiet are to

assemble to pray for his soul. They are to receive _duas duplas_—two

doubles—but no refreshments. At the end of the month the eighty

priests are again to be invited, who are to sing Mass for his soul;

six torches, of half a pound each, to burn meanwhile. They are to be

provided with bodily refreshments. At the end of the year the eighty

are again to be summoned, and this time they are to have eight liards

each _pro labore et pœna_, but nothing to refresh the body.

The lord of Beaupuy, who during his life always had three Masses a

week celebrated, leaves at his death a legacy of seven and a half

sacks of wheat a year from his lands at St. Mézard, with one-third of

the produce of the vineyards, to be delivered to two priests, each of

whom is to say one Mass a week for his soul.

Jehan Cavaré, a man of considerable distinction at Aubiet, makes

several rich bequests and foundations to the different chapels of the

place. At his funeral two wax torches of half a pound each are to

burn. To the attendant priests _qui cantabunt_ he gives three

_doubles_ and no bodily refection. If they do not sing, nothing is to

be given them.

One hundred poor are to be fed on Good Friday with a loaf, wine, and

_one sardine_ each. The same obligation is imposed at All Saints, but

this time there is no mention of the sardine.

Thirty crowns are to be given to two girls of irreproachable morals at

Aubiet on the day of their marriage; and a woollen gown, all made, is

to be given to twelve widows or poor single women of Mauvezin.

“Moved,” as he says, “by the grace of God and love for the church of

_Notre Dame de la Charité_,” he also founds seven Masses a week in

perpetuity in the chapel of the Blessed Sebastian, martyr. He also

founds seven other daily Masses—one of them on Saturday, _de lacrymâ

Christi_, in honor of the Holy Tears of Christ. For all these services

he leaves numerous lands and revenues.

These and many other foundations, extraordinary for a small country

village, express the reaction against the innovations of the age, and

are remarkable proofs of the deep faith and piety of the people. And

they are only examples of similar cases throughout the country, the

records of which it does the heart good to ponder over. How pious are

the formulas with which such bequests are made: _In remissionem

peccatorum suorum—Pro remedio animæ suæ et animarum parentum suorum,

et aliorum pro quibus deprecare tenetur_, etc. Everywhere they express

devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and to some saint in particular, as

well as to all the inhabitants of the heavenly country in general.

This was in accordance with the traditions of the country, where the

heart naturally turns to Jesus in the arms of Our Lady of Pity at the

awful moment of death. St. Bertrand of Comminges, when his end drew

near, had himself transported to the chapel of the Virgin and breathed

out his soul at the foot of her altar. Bernard de Sariac, a

distinguished bishop of Aire, founded on his death-bed a chapel in

honor of _Notre Dame de Pitié_. The old lords of the country show, by

the solemnity of their last bequests, their faith in Mary’s powerful

assistance at the supreme hour of death. William, Count of Astarac, in

his legacy to _Notre Dame de Simorre_ in 940, says: “Inspired by God

and the hope of Paradise, and in order to increase my reward in the

day of judgment, I give the most holy Virgin the following lands in

Astarac.” Raymond de Lavedan, in 1253, left this clause in his will:

“I give my land to St. Mary with all it bears towards heaven and

contains in its depths.” There are a thousand similar examples of

illustrious barons of the olden times whose tombstones in the Virgin’s

chapel in many instances remain an enduring testimony of their

devotion to Mary, though the building itself is demolished.

The confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament at Aubiet only admitted

thirteen of the most notable persons of the town. Among other

obligations, they had to accompany the Holy Eucharist when carried to

any of the members who were ill, bare-headed, wearing surplices, and

bearing lighted torches in their hands; to assemble in like robes on

the first Thursday of every month; to follow the divine Host in

procession; and every Thursday to attend a Mass of the _Corpus Domini_

under the penalty of a fine. One peculiarity of this Mass was the

_Kyrie Eleison_, which they sang with a thousand modulations:

KYRIE, _Pater æterne, fontana Deitas, ex quo manant flumina

rerum_, ELEISON![53]

KYRIE, _fons co-æternæ lucis et claritas, lucem formans

primo dierum_, ELEISON![54]

KYRIE, _fons superne, redundant bonitas, panem mittens de

cœlo verum_, ELEISON![55]

CHRISTE, _lucis fons, lux de luce prodiens; Dei pinguis

mons, quo pascente vivit esuriens et impletur pane vivente_,

ELEISON![56]

CHRISTE, _cordium via, vita, veritas; cibus mentium, in quo

sistit summa suavitas et satietas consistit_, ELEISON!

CHRISTE, _sumptio tui sacri corporis est refectio vires

præbens immensi roboris, et molesta salutis demens_,

ELEISON!

KYRIE, _decus amborum, Patris Natique, et duorum non duplex

Spiritus; quo spirante lux datur morum_, ELEISON![57]

KYRIE, _qui veritatis lumen es diffusum gratis, dictus

Paraclitus, dans solamen his desolaris_, ELEISON!

KYRIE, _sana palatum, quo gustamus panem gratum et missum

cœlitus, in Marid per te formatum_, ELEISON![58]

This is an example of the _tropus_ or _farcius_, so common in the

middle ages, which is a paraphrase or extension of the liturgy by

inserting additional words between the important parts—as at the

_Gloria in Excelsis_, the _Sanctus_, the _Agnus Dei_, etc.—the word

_farsus_, _farcius_, or _farcitus_, as it was differently written by

the monks of the middle ages, being derived from the Latin _farcire_,

used by Pliny the naturalist, Apicius, and Cato the agriculturist, in

the sense of filling, distending, enriching. Pope Adrian II. is said

to have instituted these _farci_ to be sung in monasteries on solemn

festivals. They were the _festivæ laudes_ of the Romans. Others

attribute them to the Greek church. These _farci_ were of three kinds

in France: the usual liturgy being expanded by inserting additional

words in Latin; or the text was Greek and the paraphrase in old

French; or, again, the latter was in the vulgar tongue of Oil and Oc.

These paraphrases in the vulgar tongue became popular, not only in

France, but in England and Germany. From them was derived the

proverbial expression, _Se farcir de Grec et de Latin_—that is, to

have the head full. These _tropes_ or _farcies_ of mixed French and

Latin are still very common in southwestern France, especially in the

popular Noëls, which are often rude lines in _patois_ alternate with

Latin, after the following style:

Born in a manger

_Ex Mariâ Virgine_,

On the chilly straw

_Absque tegumine_.

It is not surprising that, with daily High Masses and a perpetual

round of imposing services, the people of Aubiet should feel the

change when the place became impoverished, the number of priests

diminished, and most of the churches destroyed at the invasion of the

Huguenots. We are told that when the vicar was unable to sing High

Mass on the festival of St. John the Baptist in 1623, there was

universal murmuring, and the magistrates drew up a solemn protest

against so unheard-of a scandal, which document is still extant.[59]

But the church of _Notre Dame de Pitié_, although profaned, was left

standing. The admirable confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament soon

revived, and with it many of the former solemnities. Père de

Mongaillard tells us the _Kyrie eleison farci_ was still chanted in

his time.

We find a similar confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament at Touget,

another village of Gascony, which suffered horribly from the religious

wars. It was for a long time in possession of the Huguenots, who

abolished the Catholic religion and ruined the churches. To repair

these profanations the association was established, the statutes of

which are still extant in the Gascon tongue. By these we learn that

there were nine chaplains in honor of the nine choirs of angels;

twelve laymen in honor of the twelve apostles; seventy-two other lay

members in memory of the seventy-two disciples (husband and wife being

counted as one); and seven pious widows in honor of the seven Dolors

of the Blessed Virgin. They were all to be natives of the place, but

“no ruffian, renegade, public usurer, or vicious person admitted among

them.” Every Thursday all the members were to attend High Mass in the

parish church, robed in their surplices. They were to accompany the

Host in solemn procession through the village, at stated times, tapers

in hand; sing the Office of the Dead before the door of any deceased

member, and attend the requiem Mass for his soul. These and various

other pious obligations were encouraged by the bishop of Lombez, who

granted certain indulgences of _vray perdon_, especially on the

festivals of St. Germain, St. George, St. Vincent, and St. Fritz,

whose relics were honored in the church.

Such is the spirit of love, sorrow, and reparation which perfumes a

few of the countless chapels of Our Lady of Pity in southwestern

France, where so many hearts have forgotten their own grief before

that of Mary! In all these sanctuaries, wan and desolate, she seems to

plead for the nation. So pleads she all over the earth. Every mystery

of religion is perpetuated in the church. Christ is always crucified

somewhere on the earth. Mary is always sorrowing over his bleeding

wounds.

We have seen her weeping over the door of many a tabernacle in Italy,

as if over the Saviour wounded anew in the sacrament of his love. Who

can turn away from the affecting appeal in this day of profanations in

that unhappy land, where the very angels of the church veil their

faces before the agony of the divine Sufferer—before Mary’s woes?…

Around the altar sacred to her grief let us echo the ancient _Planh_

referred to at the beginning of this article:

“I conceived thee without corruption; to-day my heart is

broken with grief: thy Nativity was exempt from all

suffering; now is the day of my travail—

“Alas! my Son, on account of thy torments!

“When thou wert born the shepherds came singing with joy,

dancing to the sound of their pipes; now traitorous and

cruel Jews come to seize thee with horns and cries, staves

and swords.

“Alas! my Son, loving and beautiful.”

_Ay filh! amaros e bel!_

[48] “Woe on woe! grief on grief! Heaven and earth have lost

their lord, and I my son; the sun its clearness; Jews

have slain him, to their great dishonor. Alas! my son,

what mortal grief!”

[49]

Say, say an orison

To the Virgin of the Garaison,

Ye who in this spot solace seek from pain,

Pilgrims so good,

’Neath sorrows bowed,

That your hearts may open up to hope again.

Here while you stay,

Say with love, say,

Oh! say an orison

To the Virgin of the Garaison.

[50] The _tourteau_ is a round cake with a hole in the

centre, made particularly for Palm Sunday.

[51] The _paëte_ is a kind of biscuit for the Pascal

season.

[52] When a dire pestilence came nigh destroying the city of

Marciac, the Virgin Mother herself commanded this

temple to be dedicated to her under the powerful

protection of the cross and of her Son.

[53] O Lord, Father eternal, Fountain of the Deity, whence

flow all things, have mercy!

[54] O Lord, Fount and clearness of co-eternal light, who

didst make light on the first of days, have mercy!

[55] O Lord, Fount supernal, goodness overflowing, sending

down true bread from heaven, have mercy!

[56] O Christ, Fountain of light, light from light

proceeding; fruitful mount of God, on which feeding the

hungry liveth and is filled with living bread, have

mercy!

[57] O Christ, the way, the life, the truth of hearts; the

food of minds, wherein abides the sweetest sweetness

and fulness is contained, have mercy!

O Christ, the taking of thy sacred Body is a

refreshment, giving mighty strength, and removing every

obstacle to salvation—have mercy!

O Lord, the beauty of both, of the Father and the Son,

and the spirit of each, yet not twofold, by whose

breath the light of all right things is given, have

mercy!

[58] O Lord, who art the light of truth, freely spread

abroad, thou who art called the Paraclete, giving

consolation to those who are desolate, have mercy!

O Lord, purify our taste, that so we may enjoy the

gracious bread sent down from heaven, formed by thee in

Mary’s womb—have mercy!

[59] “In the year 1623, and the 24th of June, in the town of

Aubiet in Armagnac, in front of the parish church of

said place, before noon, in the reign of the most

Christian prince, Louis, by the grace of God King of

France and Navarre, appeared before me the undersigned

royal notary, and in presence of the witnesses whose

names are hereunto affixed, Messrs. Jehan Gaillan,

Jehan LaMothe, Jehan Gelotte, and Caillard Mailhos,

consuls of said Aubiet, and Jehan Belloc, syndic, who,

speaking and addressing his words to M. Jehan Castanet,

priest and vicar of said church of Aubiet, represented

to him, for want of a rector in said Aubiet, that from

all time and all antiquity it had been the custom to

celebrate in the parish church High Mass with deacon

and sub-deacon on solemn days like the present; and

whereas, because there was no one to aid him in

performing the office, the divine service was omitted,

the said consuls and syndic protest against the said

Castanet, vicar aforesaid, etc.

“The said Castanet affirmed that he did everything in

his power, but had no one to aid him.”

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

III.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—ABUNDANCE.

We have adverted to the indirect government of the creation by God—to

the government which he condescends to administer first through the

primary laws which he has stamped upon the universe; and, secondly,

through the moral and physical activity with which he has endowed

mankind.

We are making vast and rapid strides in this day towards discovering

and unravelling these primary laws. At the present moment we seem to

have got ourselves somewhat into a tangle of knowledge, which

threatens to asphyxiate us with the overpowering perfume of its lavish

blossoms, like that of the exuberant growth of the tropical flora.

We are caught as in the meshes of a net, and are hardly allowed time

to solve one problem and satisfy ourselves with a conclusion before

some new tendril of the ever-growing parasite has flung another

flowering coil of verdure around us and arrested our steps once more.

We have come upon the time long ago predicted by the Archangel Michael

to the prophet Daniel: “_Plurimi transibunt, et multiplex erit

scientia_.”[60] We are dazzled and bewildered; and some timid souls

are like ostriches, which hide their heads in the sand, preferring not

to see and know, and hoping that their ignorance and the ignorance of

the multitude generally will serve as a dam to the coming flood, and

leave us freed from a torrent of questions which, if once they are

there, must be answered. It is to be regretted that these persons

cannot learn to possess their souls in patience, and to watch calmly

and intelligently the progress of this gigantic growth of science,

assured that it will all arrange and classify itself in time, in

perfect harmony with what they know to be true and enduring, and which

they so dishonor by their apprehensions.

However, since this is too much to expect of many, there is nothing

for it but to allow such people to keep themselves in peace in the way

that suits them best; only not permitting them to discourage others

from investigation and reverent inquiry. St. Thomas tells us that the

end of all science is contained within the end of all theology and is

subservient to it. Theology, therefore, ought to command all other

sciences and turn to its use those things of which they treat. But we

shall not arrive at this virile steadfastness until the real study of

theology has become more general. There is very little in our modern

education or habits of thought to teach that calm gaze into the depths

of the divine mysteries which imparts such strength of mental vision

that the soul ceases to be dazzled by the false light of falling

stars. The robust vigor of the studious habits of old has ceased from

among us, and the modern mind is attenuated and enfeebled by a vast

variety of subjects indifferently explored, many of them received on

trust and without inquiry, and all smoothed down to one dead-level of

superficial thought and inadequate expression. Not that for a moment

we would imply that mere habits of study are all that is needed. These

habits may exist, and do exist to a great extent; but the silence and

the solitude do not exist, and the studies themselves have long ago

ceased to be of a nature to clear the mind for the gradual, patient,

interiorly-evolved contemplation of the eternal truths which lie at

the bottom of all things. The old scholastic philosophy and theology

laid the only real foundation of all speculative knowledge, and built

for us, for all future time, that solid fabric of theological truth in

the received and authorized teaching of the great doctors of the

church which, like a mighty magnet attracting to itself strong bars of

iron, will draw within its own embrace all other truth and all other

science, because “the end of science is _within the end of theology_.”

Meanwhile, if we would not find ourselves swamped in the torrent of

surmises, partial discoveries, inverted reasonings, and unreverential

decisions, we must go back to the spirit and method of the ages which

produced the deeply metaphysical thinkers and theological writers of

old. The flood of events pours on, and the concussion of each tears

through our daily life and ploughs up the hours and the days in

hurried disorder, leaving no time for seed to develop in the fallow

soil, for the green blade to strengthen and the harvest to ripen.

Modern inventions speed the latest intelligence into the innermost

recesses of our homes, and we live like people in a house without

doors or windows, open to every blast; while the age, whose needs seem

most to call for contemplative recluses, on the contrary stamps

contemplation out of the heart of man, and substitutes the paramount

necessity for outward activity. There is no solace, there is no rest,

but in prayer. There is no consolation but in cultivating thought in

the hidden recesses of our minds, and, amid the racket of life, to go

deep down into the silent caverns of our souls and dwell in an inner

solitude with thoughts of eternal truth. The tendencies of the age

have added a new difficulty to the treatment of many of the questions

more or less inextricably mixed up with any largely philosophical

views of the union of science with divine truth.

We have perverted our language because thought, of which language is

the clothing, is perverted. We dare not handle questions that in

themselves are pure, because we have allowed necessary words to

represent unnecessary indelicacy. No word that expresses a necessary

fact is in itself evil; but woe to the imagination which makes it so!

Purity is always dignified. But if you take the white roses of

innocence to crown a wanton, white roses will fall into disrepute; and

this is what we have done with language. Words no longer only mean the

thing they represent. They have been made to insinuate the foul

underflow of evil fancy that corruption has poured forth. How shall we

cleanse the source, that we may once more use language of strength and

purity? How shall we again become manly and brave, and yet avoid the

charge of being coarse and too outspoken? Only by going back to the

noble candor of the great thinkers of old, and by trying to see things

as they are in the mind of God, and not as they are in fallen man; by

looking at the laws of creation as they came from the hands of the

Creator, before man had written his running commentary of evil and

sin, and thus defiled the glorious page. There are two forms of

purity. The one is the purity of ignorance. The intellect that knows

nothing of the species cannot predicate the accidents; and no doubt

blank ignorance is better than an evil imagination. But there is

another and a higher purity; it is the purity of an informed mind

which, from the sublime heights of science, or, better far, from the

depths of union with God in the all-pervading sense of his presence,

has acquired that faculty of viewing subject-matter in the abstract

which leaves no association of imagination or fancy to drag it down

into the lower nature and so defile it. The more truly scientific a

mind becomes, the more will it inhabit those cool, serene heights of

passionless intellect. But the first, the truest, the absolutely sure

science of theology is the one royal road to the habit of mind which

can, as it were, stand outside its lower nature and contemplate facts

and truths in their essential nature, divested of human contact or

defilement; or, where both must be recognized, can eliminate the law

from its abuse, and trace back the former to the bosom of the Creator;

for “to the pure all things are pure.” This seems to be the faculty

which is more and more dying out amongst us.

It is probable that some of the hurry and absence of precision and of

tenacious research which characterize the modern form of mind may be

the natural result of the sudden rush of new discoveries which have

taken us, as it were, by surprise and carried us off our feet. By

degrees it is probable we shall, as a race, accept the changes in our

condition, and shall become gradually adapted to the varied forms of

life imposed upon us by the vast and multiplied combinations which

every day are extending our power over the external world and opening

new paths for activity and enterprise. Doubtless this power will

increase rather than diminish, and at the same time take less hold

upon us in a revolutionary way, and we shall lose some of that flurry

and excitement which now characterize us—much in the way that the

young colt of a week old starts no more than does the old mare when

the engine rushes down the railway that skirts the field; and yet when

railways first began both were alike alarmed.

But for the present we have lost much of our original moral and

intellectual dignity. Upon such questions as interest us we are

excited and flurried. Those which we do not affect to understand we

cannot seriously listen to; and between the bustling activity of the

first and the listless frivolity of the last it is not an easy task to

bring forward old truths with new faces, old facts with a fresh moral,

lest those who listen should persist in viewing the question from the

wrong side, and in taking scandal where no scandal was meant.

We have set ourselves the task of investigating the chief attributes

of God’s government of creation and its uniformity of design in

complexity of action. To do this we must condescend to the primary and

natural law which he imposed on our world when he called it out of

chaos; and we must endeavor to explain what were the special

characteristics of that law, and what light it throws upon the

attributes of Him who gave it.

The three chief characteristics which we discover in the government of

creation are abundance, patience or longanimity, and progression. The

first command which the Creator uttered over the first recorded living

and moving creatures of his hand was, “Increase and multiply.” This

was the initial law of all that we see and know in the external world;

and as no temporal law or material condition exists in God’s creation

without its spiritual intention and inner meaning, this law is typical

of what is beyond sight and belongs to the domain of faith. In

attempting to define that command we find it conveys an impression,

wider than the heavens and more diffused than the ambient air, of

generosity, benevolence, and paternity. It is the law of “our Father

who is heaven.” It beams upon us like the genial warmth of the

noontide sun. It shadows us like the stretching boughs of a large

forest perfumed with the dews of earth. It was spoken first to the

products of the water and the denizens of the air; and again it was

spoken over the two first beings created “after His own image and

likeness.”

Wherever there is life, even life in its lowest form—and so low that

science hesitates to pronounce upon it as being life, and stands

uncertain how to designate evident growth without equally evident

life, like the unintelligent but absolutely accurate formation of

crystals—there too the law reigns of “increase and multiply.”

Attraction and affinity declare the law, and carry it on, while

repulsion is but the inverse of the same; and though, for aught we

know, and judging by induction, there is not one molecule added on our

earth to the original chaotic matter, and all reproductions are

composed of the same elements passing through varied forms and phases,

nevertheless the same impulse governs all living things and everywhere

represents the large, lavish benevolence of the God of life.

The animal creation is the unreasoning and innocent embodiment of the

natural law, and carries out its mandates unconscious of the why and

the wherefore; whereas in fallen man the natural law has overlapped

the moral law, and the latter has become warped by the pressure of the

former, making all things discordant. As abundance is one of the

characteristics of the natural law, so the modes and forms of its

execution lie at the very root of all creation. The Spirit of God, the

brooding Dove, moved over the face of the waters. The same image of

incubation and consequently of imparted heat (motion and heat being

allied as reciprocal cause and effect), was in the mind of the old

Egyptians when they carved a winged world amongst their mystic signs.

So sacred, so holy, so full of deep-hidden meaning was the idea as it

lay from all eternity in the divine Mind, that it was through the four

thousand historic years which preceded the birth of the God-Man the

mode through which God taught the chosen people to expect the

Redeemer. It became the hope of every maiden to form one link in the

long chain which was to lead up to the Messiah. It sanctified all the

ties of domestic life and made them less a necessity than a high moral

duty.

So universal was the sentiment that many, in the tenacity of their

desire to carry on the holy tradition, and too earthly to perceive the

sin of doing wrong that good might come, thrust aside the law of

conscience rather than fail in what weighed upon them as an

overwhelming necessity—to continue the natural line—that perhaps they,

too, might form one of those from whose loins should spring the

Saviour of the world. It was thus that a dignity was imparted to

natural ties which surpassed among the Israelites the same sentiment

among the Gentiles, but which was but a foreshadowing of their sacred

and sacramental state in the church of God.

“Wisdom is justified by her children”; and all that God has ordained

must reach its ultimate perfection in his church before it can pass

into another phase. “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle

shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.”[61]

As all things in creation are by and for him, as all culminate in him,

so when the prophecies were accomplished, and Mary, the immaculate and

virgin daughter of the House of David, had, through the operations of

the Holy Ghost, become the Mother of God—the law “increase and

multiply” having thus ascended to its mystical fulfilment and ultimate

development—so from henceforth did it confer a new and more holy

character on natural ties by consecrating them as the type and image,

of what is spiritual.

The one end in view had survived through all, despite man’s ignorance,

infirmity, and sin; and that end once attained, the sinless Mother

clasping to her bosom the Infant God who was from all eternity in the

bosom of the Father, from that moment all that was human had a new and

divine element in it. All creation, all life, all we have and are,

became in a special way “holy to the Lord.” “Know ye not that ye are

the temple of God? If any man violate the temple of God, him will God

destroy. All things are yours, the world, or life, or death, or things

present, or things to come: all are yours: and ye are Christ’s, and

Christ is God’s.”[62]

Through long centuries man had failed to comprehend even while he felt

the underlying mystery of creation. He looked on the fair fields of

nature with undiscerning eyes. He hardly guessed at the enigma of the

outer world as leading upwards to something nobler; and therefore he

dragged the image of God down into the mire of his own existence. He

even sought the Deity in what was below himself, worshipping, not men

and heroes, but beasts and creeping things; because, being dominated

by the idea of the great and all-pervading force of the laws of life

and nature, the lower creation presented a more simple and abstract

image of their potency. The idea of the principle of life haunted him

like a dark and perplexing riddle. Its magnitude weighed upon him. Its

universality perplexed him. He had not the light of truth in its

plenitude to illumine the dark places of the earth. He could only make

guesses at the typical meaning of creation; and as the whirr of life

rushed ceaselessly around him without bringing any answer to his

questionings, it became a relief to embody the idea which obseded him

in the obscurity of inarticulate being, as affording, if not some

solution, at least an absolutely simple and vulgar manifestation of

the great fact, until the very scarabei became sacred; and with

inverted moral sense, in lieu of seeking for transcendent and pellucid

truth in what was above him, he dug down into the very miseries of his

own degradation in his attempt to describe the incomprehensible, and

that to a degree which we cannot pollute these pages by expressing.

Thus had man covered over with the veil of his iniquities and the

thick darkness of his ignorance all the sanctities of life, until the

church of God revealed to him that Christ is the head of the church,

as the husband is the head of the wife, and placed matrimony among the

sacraments; because as a sacrament only is it holy to the Lord, and

because, as a sacrament, it is typical of that highest and most divine

union of Christ with his church—that union which is her strength, her

inviolability, her guarantee, and her ever-enduring and indisputable

infallibility.[63]

How little did poor fallen humanity dream of the sanctity and dignity

of common life until the church turned the full light of revelation on

the laws of our being and taught us what those laws prefigured in the

Eternal Mind! It is not until St. Paul wrote by inspiration that

astonishing chapter to the Ephesians that the laws of being were

really less awful in their hidden sanctity. They were never in

themselves mean, miserable, and degraded. It is true the state of

matrimony only foreshadowed a sacrament; for under the old law there

were no sacraments in the specific sense in which we now use the term

in the Catholic Church. It was holy under the old law, and it may be

said to have had a sacramental character; and that character was the

anticipation of what it was to become when it should be raised into

one of the seven sacraments of the church, and the type of Christ as

head of the church. But at that time mankind was still in darkness.

Humanity could not earlier review the expression of the mystery. Only

the Gospel could open their eyes to the full understanding of the

sacramental principle which alone makes life holy, and, O sorrowing,

suffering hearts! which alone to you can make it endurable.[64]

See how the beneficent thought of God has touched all our common lot!

See what flowers blossom amid the thorns, what gems of light sparkle

in the dark ways of life, ennobling all, beautifying because

sanctifying all, and enabling us, while the heavy burden of sorrow,

disappointment, regrets, and even ruined hope, may seem to take all

the color out of life, and to send us back to a treadmill existence

and a gray, despairing twilight, to realize that nothing can alter the

fact that we are holy to the Lord, and that in our daily, hourly lot,

as husbands, wives, sons, daughters, masters, and servants, we are

carrying on the ceaseless weaving of that web of sacred typical life

which has from all eternity been in the mind of God as the law of our

natural being, and in one form or another envelops, like the husks of

the sweet nut, the gradually-ripening sanctity of those who, even in

this life, are to touch on perfect union with their Creator.

Can any one seriously doubt that, if a greater and more hallowed

veneration for the laws of our natural existence became more general

and more intense, they would, in their typical and sacramental

character, develop further heights of holiness—not as the exceptional

ways of a few miraculous saints, but as the table-land of all

humanity? As it was the hardness of heart in the Israelites which

compelled Moses to give a law of divorce, so may it not be our

hardness of heart, lessened indeed, but not yet melted, which leaves

us so often such mere commonplace appreciation of natural ties, and

thus fails to realize in them all that they possess and can yield?

Jesus is our father, our brother, our friend, our master, and our

spouse. These titles are taken from our common life. But the abstract

idea which these titles express by subdivision and restriction dwelt

for ever in the mind of God as the form and fashion he would give to

human life in his foreknowledge of the divine Incarnation, for which

end _solely_ do all things exist. What further thoughts can we need to

make us tender over our own duties and our own condition? What a noble

origin there is to all that we are apt to look upon as an encumbrance,

a failure, a mere unfortunate accident! Our ties enchain us; then let

us hug our chains, and find in wearing them “the freedom wherewith

Christ has made us free.” All our life is a God-directed education of

our souls; and the fashion of our human life is the mould which God

has prepared for us each as individuals, save always where there is

sin or its proximate occasion, or where a higher vocation—that sublime

infringement of the common law—comes to impel the soul to forsake all

and follow the divine Spouse. Then all else melts before the furnace

of divine love; the intermediate, ordinary steps which lead others to

God through the sanctities of common life are cleared at one bound,

and God puts in his claim to do what he will with his own.

To resume all in a few words: all we see around us, from the soil

beneath our feet, through the vegetable and animal worlds, even to

ourselves, is the working out of the first law of increase and

multiply. Consequently, this being, as we have already said, the

representative idea of the creation, its sacredness lies in that very

fact, and dates not merely from the new dispensation nor from the old,

but from the Eternal Mind before creation was. We have arrived at the

facts which prove this representative idea by the aid of natural

science, of which the old spiritual writers knew next to nothing, and

who consequently, looking at nature through the black mists of man’s

defilement, sometimes took distorted views of laws and facts the

exquisite harmony of which come out in the deductions of modern

research, and so establish the claim we are now making to the absolute

beauty and sanctity of all the fashion of human existence as leading

up by typical forms to spiritual truths. The witness of this like a

golden thread in the dim web of patriarchal times may be found in the

fact that it was the eldest son who officiated as the priest of the

family, thus blending the natural and spiritual by making the former

the basis of the latter. This was the reason of the envy and malice of

Joseph’s brethren. He was not the first-born; and yet it was for him

that his father made the sacerdotal coat of many colors. Therefore did

they dip the coat in the blood of a kid, as in mockery of his

sacerdotal character, given him by his father, but not acknowledged by

his brethren.

Little did they dream that while, in the full exercise of their own

free-will, they gave license to their thoughts of hatred, they were

enacting as in a type the one great fact of the universe, the world’s

one important history, the tragedy of all creation, when he who,

though in his human nature he is the younger born of God’s children,

holds, and for ever shall hold, sacerdotal rank over the elder and

fallen Adam.

They who said, “See whether it be thy son’s coat or not,”[65] were the

forefathers of those who exclaimed, “Let Christ the king of Israel

come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.”[66] They

mocked at the father who claimed to have made his younger son the

priest of his house, and their descendants declared of the great

Priest of our race that “he ought to die because he made himself the

Son of God.” In both cases their pretensions were turned into ridicule

and treated as a crime. They dipped the sacerdotal coat of Joseph in

the blood of a kid; but the great High-Priest they covered with his

own blood, in derision of his claim to be their King and their God.

And through it all, through the good and the evil, the adaptive

government of God worked out his ultimate designs, turning the

wickedness of men to his own glory and hiding the secrets of his

providence beneath the course of events, the incidents of common life,

the history of a people, of a tribe, of a family. We look back on the

long-drawn-out story and understand somewhat of the underlying

mystery. But while it was going on it was but little even guessed at.

God is unchangeable, the same for ever and ever. What he did then does

he not do now?—for his church, his bride, above all, but also for all

humanity, all the wide universe according to its measure, as it can

bear it, when it can receive it; leading on by degrees so slow that to

us they seem almost imperceptible, but which widen and spread like the

rings on the surface of the water when a stone has been flung into its

depths.

Our range of vision is so narrow, and our knowledge of even the past

so limited and so full of inaccuracies, that we can do little more

than guess at the manifold unrolling of the divine intentions. We know

enough to fill us with hope as to the ultimate destination of all

creation, and of ourselves as the children of God. We know not the

future, save faintly as faith reveals it. Even of the past we know but

dimly and in broken lines. To one only of the children of men, so far

as the Holy Scripture informs us, was the past fully and entirely made

known, so far as that was possible to a mortal man supernaturally

sustained to bear it. How many in the hallowed, bold, and rash moments

of inarticulate prayer have ventured in their lesser degree to say

with Moses, “Show me thy glory”! As the thought grows upon us of God’s

wonderful ways and of his unutterable love and beneficence, we too

long to know with certain knowledge something of that Glory which the

great lawgiver intuitively felt would be at once the knowledge of all

and the consummation of every desire. “Show me thy glory.” Hear the

answer: “Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me, and

live. Thou shalt stand upon the rock. And when my glory shall pass, I

will set thee in a hole in the rock, and thou shalt see my back parts:

but my face thou canst not see.”[67] And thus Moses saw the back parts

of Him who is from all eternity, through the aperture of time. He had

revealed to him the far-off intention of creation. He looked back, in

God, to the time before time “when he had not yet made the earth, nor

the rivers, nor the poles of the world; when Wisdom was with him

forming all things, playing before him at all times, playing in the

world, and whose delights were to be with the children of men.”[68]

The back parts were beheld by him, and even this he could not have

endured in his feeble flesh had not the Eternal “right hand protected

him.” All that the past could teach him in the flash of one moment was

then made known to him. What floods of light, knowledge, and divine

hope and expectation must that wonderful backward view have imparted

to Moses, the man singled out of all mankind to read the past! But

even with the strength which knowledge such as that must have

conferred upon him, still he could not see the face of God and live.

We are using weak human words, because they alone are given us. It was

the forward look of God which Moses could not see and live. It was the

unutterable Glory that is prepared for us in the future, with and

through Jesus, that not even the man who had conversed with God as man

speaks with his fellow-man, face to face, could see and live. Its

stupendous and exceeding brightness, would have shattered his being as

the flash of lightning shatters the oak; even as our Lord revealed to

one of his chosen saints that, could she perfectly realize his immense

love for the souls of men, that moment of intense joy would snap the

frail thread of her life with its excessive ecstasy. What Moses saw he

tells us not. No word escapes him of that transcendent vision. He

neither tells us of its nature nor of its effects upon himself. But

who could marvel if, having had it, he was henceforth the meekest of

men? What could ever again disturb the serene patience of him who

could divine so much of the future from having seen all the past? And

how impossible it must have been for any torments of pride to ruffle

the calm serenity of one who was humbled to the very dust by the

unutterably lavish and surpassing developments of love and grace and

glory which his vision of the past bade him anticipate in that future

which even he who had borne to see the past could not gaze upon and

live!

As “the end of all science is contained within the end of all

theology,” so the seeing the glory of God would be the knowledge of

all history taken in its widest and fullest meaning; for if history

could be truly written, whether as the life of an individual, the

history of a nation or of the whole world, it would be the unravelling

of the hidden providence of God working through all events to his own

greater glory. The perfect sight is the perfect knowledge; and that

cannot be obtained save through the “light of Glory,” which is the

beatific vision. The perfect knowledge of God would be the knowledge

of all things, not only of all science, but of all facts; for all are

contained in him. The use of our faculties in the acquirement of

knowledge or in its exercise is like the gathering up of fragments

caught from the skirts of his garments as we follow slowly in his

mighty footsteps; and the closer we get to him in our patient toil,

the brighter is the lustre and the sweeter the perfume still left upon

these shreds of the divine passage through the mazes of creation and

the heaped-up centuries of time.

[60] Daniel xii. 4.

[61] Matthew v. 18.

[62] 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17, 22, 23.

[63] Ephesians v. 23, 32.

[64] This statement, if its terms are taken in a strict,

theological sense, is not correct. In the sense that

matrimony under the old law was holy, and foreshadowed

a sacrament, it may be called sacramental. There were

no sacraments, in the specific sense in which we now

use the term in the Catholic Church, before Christ

instituted them.—ED. C. W.

[65] Gen. xxxvii. 32.

[66] Mark xv. 32.

[67] Exodus xxxiii. 18-23.

[68] Prov. viii. 22-36.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE STUDENT’S HAND-BOOK OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Containing sketches, biographical and critical, of the most

distinguished English authors, from the earliest times to

the present day, with selections from their writings, and

questions adapted to the use of schools. By Rev. O. L.

Jenkins, A.M., late president of St. Charles’s College,

Ellicott City, Md., and formerly president of St. Mary’s

College, Baltimore. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 564. Baltimore: John

Murphy & Co. (New York: The Catholic Publication Society.)

1876.

This book has many excellencies. The author shows himself thoroughly

versed in his subject. He writes with elegance, occasionally with

force, as in the remarks on the influence of the Protestant

Reformation on literature. His taste is true and his judgment sound.

In fact, judging by the work itself, he would seem possessed of the

qualities fitted to make him an admirable compiler of a literary

manual.

The first sentence of the author’s preface explains the object of the

book: “The compiler of this work has long felt the necessity of some

text book of British and American literature which, in its general

bearing, would be free from sectarian views and influences, and, in

the extracts, be entirely unexceptionable in point of morality.” This

sentence is open to misinterpretation. It is plain, however, from the

general plan of Father Jenkins’ work, as well as from numerous

passages in it, that he has had in view from the beginning to restore

to the Catholic Church, the inspirer of the highest literature, the

mother of Christian art, and the fosterer of the sciences, her

rightful place in English letters. In most of the text-books used in

schools her influence on thought and literature is altogether ignored

and herself in too many instances derided. It is clear, then, what the

learned author meant by freeing his book from “sectarian views.” While

giving their lawful place to all writers, of whatever manner of belief

or no belief, he had for his direct object the pruning out of all

anti-Catholic and immoral passages, and the insertion of established

Catholic authors who are systematically excluded from ordinary

text-books.

No object could be better calculated to confer more lasting benefit on

the minds of the young generation growing up around us, for whom

chiefly the present work is intended. We open the book with eagerness,

therefore, and turn over page after page with interest, often with

admiration, until we come up to the present century, when, especially

within the later half of it, Catholic literature in England and the

United States has, from a variety of causes, received a new and

remarkable impulse. It is hardly too much to say that Catholic

questions are among the chief questions of the day here as well as in

England; they have been such for the last fifty years; they promise to

be such for at least fifty years to come; and Catholic writers to-day

hold their own in every branch of literature. After three centuries of

silence, of death almost, the church has risen again among these

peoples who went astray, the voice of truth is heard, and its

utterances are manifold. Surely there is reason to expect that due

notice of such awakening, of such signs of life and hope, be taken in

a literary text-book, which, after all, can only hope to make its way

in Catholic schools. Yet here, in this crucial point, Father Jenkins’

work is singularly and lamentably defective. Whether or not he

intended to supply the deficiency is not known to us; but those who

took up the work after his death ought to have supplied it.

We turn to the book, and what do we find? The only Catholic writers of

the century who are found worthy a place in this Catholic manual are,

to take them as they occur: Dr. Lingard, Thomas Moore, Cardinal

Wiseman, Dr. Newman, Aubrey de Vere, in England and Ireland; Bishop

England, Robert Walsh, and Archbishop Spalding, in America. And these

are all!

Where is Dr. Brownson? His name occurs in a casual note of the

author’s, in the same way as the names of Griswold, Cleveland, or Reid

occur. Where is Dr. Pise, Dr. Huntington, George H. Miles, Dr. White,

Colonel Meline, John G. Shea, Dr. R. H. Clarke, Archbishop Hughes—they

simply run off the pen—together with dozens of others, many of whose

names will not need recalling to the readers of this magazine? We

shrink from extending the catalogue of the absent to England and

Ireland.

Writers conspicuous by their absence are by no means restricted to the

Catholic faith. Among strange omissions are the following: Southwell

is in, but not Crashaw; Shakspere, but not Massinger, or Beaumont and

Fletcher; Addison, but not Steele; all the earlier novelists are

absent. The dramatists of the reign of Charles II. are ignored.

Goldsmith is remembered, but Sheridan is forgotten. Scott is in, but

Burns is out. Moore and Byron, and even Rogers, find their place; but

Shelley and Keats are nowhere to be found. Dickens and Thackeray are

here, but Bulwer Lytton is absent; and so the list goes on.

The book is supposed to reach up to the present day. The writers on

political philosophy, the scientists, the theologians, many of the

writers on history known to us as living among us still and destined

to live long after us, are altogether omitted. Not a hint even of

their existence is given. The “compiler,” as he styled himself, says

in the preface that “whatever has relation to our common humanity, and

interests all men alike, whether it be fictitious or real, in poetry

or in prose, comes within the appropriate province of literature. Even

popularized science is not excluded.” And he adds, strangely enough in

the light of the chief defect we have noticed: “If, in the early

periods, the name of an eminent divine or scholar is introduced whose

writings might seem to belong rather to the department of science than

belles-lettres, it is because he ranks among the few men of his epoch

who were remarkable for intellectual vigor and general knowledge.”

This being so, where are the English, Irish, and American Catholic

theological, philosophical, and polemical writers of the last

half-century?

Of course a work of this kind, which aimed at doing justice to our

Catholic writers of the present century, would quite overrun the

limits of an ordinary text-book of English literature. Still, the

addition of two or three hundred pages devoted just to this subject is

necessary to complete what in its present form is, for the purposes

for which it was intended, quite incomplete.

THE EDEN OF LABOR, THE CHRISTIAN UTOPIA. By T. Wharton

Collens, author of _Humanics_, etc. Philadelphia: H. C.

Baird, Industrial Publisher, 810 Walnut Street.

LABOR AND CAPITAL IN ENGLAND, FROM THE CATHOLIC POINT OF

VIEW. By C. S. Devas, B.A., Lecturer on Political Economy at

the Catholic University College, Kensington. London: Burns &

Oates, Portman Street.

These two publications may be combined in one notice. They treat of

the same subject, essentially in the same spirit, though looking at it

in different lights. Both deal with that momentous struggle between

labor and capital which has shaken the world in all ages; both profess

to find the solution of the economic problems of the day in the

teachings of Christianity as interpreted by the Catholic Church; but

one invokes the aid of the imagination in portraying what labor might

be if all men were just and charitable; the other confronts the actual

position of labor in England. Each is equally valuable in its own way,

and both are champions of the rights of labor.

Mr. Collens’ work, _The Eden of Labor_, is the fruit of much thought

upon the subject, a powerful imagination, and a feeling heart for

those who labor. The author pictures Adam as founding a patriarchal

empire after the fall, in which, under wise and equitable laws, labor

was universally rewarded by competency and happiness. In the

description of this antediluvian Utopia—of its system of government

and society, of its condition and rewards of labor, of its land

tenure, its trade, foreign and domestic, and its currency—the author

gives himself the opportunity of promulgating his conception of the

true doctrines of political economy. In this he takes issue with the

liberal school of political economists which recognizes Adam Smith as

its founder. He denounces its teachings as framed solely in the

interest of the selfish and tyrannical employer of labor, and as

leading irresistibly to the robbery and enslavement of the

over-matched laborer. While admitting the truth of Adam Smith’s law

that “labor is the true measure of exchangeable values,” the author

strenuously argues that he (Smith) and his disciples nullify the just

results of that axiom by defending the specious but unchristian

doctrine of “supply and demand,” which results in the supremacy of

might over starvation, and by losing sight of their original

affirmation of the common right of all to the use of “natural values,”

which the liberal economists in the end surrender absolutely to the

capitalist.

As a foil to his picture of the “Eden of Labor,” Mr. Collens gives, in

his description of Nodland, or the empire of Cain, a history of the

enslavement and misery of labor, and the corruption and tyranny of the

“money lords,” consequent upon the surrender of society to purely

selfish instincts, and its abandonment of laws which Adam had derived

from his original intercourse with God. This second part may be

regarded as a satire upon our modern civilization. An ingenious

monogram representing Labor, half-starved, drawing a miserable

subsistence from the reservoir of “Natural Values,” which at the same

time feeds the plethora of Capital, is prefixed to the work and fully

explained by the author in the appendix.

Philosophers from Plato to Sir Thomas More have sought, in their

descriptions of Utopia under different names, to portray a

commonwealth in which justice should reign and labor receive its

rightful reward. In following the steps of those illustrious thinkers

Mr. Collens has the opportunity of presenting to his readers, with

freshness of treatment and originality of plan, his solution of the

labor questions specially affecting this age. The danger besetting

works of this kind, where the author is dissatisfied with the existing

order of things, and feels a strong sympathy with oppressed labor, is

that they insensibly verge towards the vindication of the theories of

communism and the revolutionary rights of man. We are convinced that

no conclusions could be more opposed, or even abhorrent, to Mr.

Collens’ mind than these. His preface, written on “the Feast of the

Holy Name of Jesus,” and the whole spirit of his work, bespeak him a

fervent Catholic; but, if followed to a logical and forcible

conclusion, it would be difficult to distinguish the goal to which the

doctrines embodied in the author’s denunciation of the “appropriators

of natural values” would lead from that seen at the end of

Proudhon’s—“_La propriété, c’est le vol._” This, however, is a defect

inherent in all Utopias—not of their own nature, but from the fallen

condition of man. With this caution we can safely recommend Mr.

Collens’ work as both interesting and instructive.

Professor Devas’ pamphlet is on a more ordinary plane of authorship.

It is historical and practical in the sense, as to the latter word, of

treating of the existing facts of labor in England and their remedies.

But we are not of those who would confine the meaning of the word

“practical” solely to results immediately before us. A work like that

of Mr. Collens, depending largely upon the imagination and

investigating first principles, may be practical in the highest and

most extensive sense, so far as it influences the original sources of

human action. In his special treatment of the subject, however,

Professor Devas has written a very able treatise. It is a reprint of

three articles originally published in the _Month_, two of them

containing the substance of a paper read before the Academia at

Westminster. The first treats of labor and capital in general; the

second, of the economic powers in manufacturing industries; the third,

of their relative positions in agriculture. In his first article

Professor Devas discusses the question whether contracts should be

left to competition or a fair rate of wages—_justum pretium_—fixed,

and, if so, how and by whom. He holds a middle view between the

liberal economists who will listen to nothing but the rule of “supply

and demand,” and the socialist school which denounces all competition

and would have the state fix a compulsory rate. He cites the

Nottingham hosiery trade as a case in point where wages are not fixed

by competition, but by tariff determined upon at a periodical meeting

of masters and workmen, in which the state of the market and all

attending circumstances are mutually considered, and suggests this

example as a mode of arriving at the _justum pretium_ in all trades.

In his chapter on manufacturing industries Professor Devas takes the

bold ground of defending trades-unionism, not in its details but in

its general principles. He is of opinion that the trades unions have

been one of the chief agents in alleviating the condition of the

working classes and raising the rate of wages in England during the

last forty years. In this latter conclusion he is supported by Dr.

Young in his recently published work on _Labor in Europe and America_.

In spite of the fact that the large strikes in England and upon the

European Continent have been in the majority of special cases

unsuccessful, the general result, according to Dr. Young, has been an

advance of wages during the last twenty years. The effects of

trades-unionism in Europe may be likened to the flow of the tide,

which, repulsed as to each successive wave, yet gains slowly upon the

beach. This advance, however, is not always aided by strikes; on the

contrary, they have frequently postponed it, by the exhaustion of the

struggle, for many years. Their potential combination, or what

O’Connell, in a different agitation, called “moral force,” has been a

more successful factor in obtaining justice for them.

ORDO DIVINI OFFICII RECTANDI, ETC., 1876. Baltimoræ: Apud

Fratres Lucas, Bibliopolas.

Whether by the word “_rectandi_” the compiler of this guide for the

clergy would imply that the principal duty devolving on them with

regard to the Office is its correction rather than its recitation, we

are unable to say. We do not, it is true, find the verb “_recto_” in

the dictionary, but feeling confident, from the Ciceronian style

displayed in other parts of the _Ordo_, that it must be good Latin,

especially as it has appeared two years in succession, presume that it

must be the dictionary which is at fault, and cannot suggest any other

meaning for the word.

Whether that is its meaning or not, however, it certainly well might

be.

We do not profess to have made a thorough examination of the book. It

is full of misprints, as usual, of which the one just mentioned and

the familiar “_Resurect_.” are good examples. Whether the putting of

St. Anicetus for St. Anacletus, which was also noticed last year, can

be considered as such seems rather doubtful.

There are some trifling omissions which really ought to be supplied.

The anniversaries of the consecration of about forty of the bishops of

the United States are passed by in silence. For what special reason

the remainder are given it is hard to imagine, unless it be to remind

those who use the _Ordo_ that they ought to take notice of such an

anniversary and find out when it occurs; but, unfortunately, it has

just a contrary effect, for every one who sees the anniversary of

another diocese noticed expects to be similarly reminded of his own,

and only remembers that he has not been when the time has gone by.

The law according to which the feast of St. Leo varies between the 3d

and the 7th of July is a matter of curious speculation. From its

occurrence for two successive years on the 3d we are inclined to

cherish the hope that it has finally settled down upon that day.

Why cannot we have an _Ordo_ that would be creditable to the compiler

and the publishers, and in which confidence could be placed? More care

is all that is needed.

This notice has been delayed till this month on account of more

important matter. It will probably do as much good now as if it had

been published at an earlier date.

SERMONS BY FATHERS OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS. Vol. III.

London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (For sale by The Catholic

Publication Society.)

It is somewhat rare to meet with sermons that will bear publication.

The circumstances attending their delivery, the authoritative

character of the priest, the sacredness of the time and place, tend to

disarm the critical faculty and dispose the hearers to a favorable

impression. Not so, however, when they are given to the world in

book-form, to be subjected to the cool criticism of the closet.

Sermons that can stand this test are certainly worthy of praise; and

this merit, we are happy to say, belongs to the volume before us. The

selected sermons are by Fathers Kingdon, Purbrick, Coleridge, Weld,

and Anderdon—names already familiar to many of our readers. Their

subjects are such inexhaustible themes as the Passion of Our Lord, the

Holy Eucharist, Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, etc., treated mainly

in their devotional and practical bearings. They thus form a

collection of spiritual reading rendered particularly attractive by

many excellencies of style and expression. Regarded merely as sermons,

they are models in their conformity to the accepted canons of this

branch of composition. The subjects are clearly divided, with an easy

transition from point to point. The style throughout is graceful and

flowing, and there are many passages full of eloquence—a kind of

eloquence not merely ornamental but practical in its effects. The

secret of it lies in that warmth and earnestness which can proceed

only from those who are animated by a fervid zeal for the good of

souls.

FATHER SEGNERI’S SENTIMENTI; OR, LIGHTS IN PRAYER.

Translated from the Italian by K. G. London: Burns & Oates.

1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Father Segneri is one of the greatest of the distinguished preachers

of the seventeenth century. His name is frequently met in the Italian

dictionaries, as an authority of the language. His sermons are based

upon the classic models of eloquence. Though not as exhaustive as

those of the great French masters of sacred oratory, they are more

forcible in rhetoric and more luxuriant in style. We have a great

desire to see the complete works of Father Segneri rendered into

English, and those who have read the volume of his sermons, lately put

forth by the Catholic Publication Society, will doubtless welcome

anything bearing his name.

The little book before us is made up of pious reflections found among

the papers left by Father Segneri, and evidently intended for his own

private perusal. They give us a glimpse of the tender religious,

seeking obscurity, craving the higher gifts, while the world applauds

his brilliant and conspicuous talents. This contrast is always

pleasing. The _Sentimenti_ reveal how far this holy man had advanced

in virtue, and how well founded is the reverence which has ever been

felt for his sanctity.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES: French Political Leaders. By Edward King.

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s. 1876.

These are bright and readable sketches of various prominent Frenchmen

of the day. Whether all of those whose biographies are given may be

fitly designated “political leaders” is for the reader to satisfy

himself and the future to determine. Mr. King does not aim at profound

reflection. He cuts skin-deep and passes on. The title of the book

seems to us suggestive of something more serious than this. The

political leaders of France will influence more than France, and it

would be worth considering who and what are the French political

leaders of the day. Of what stuff are they made? Whither are they

tending? In what do they lead? Is it a lead backwards or forwards? Mr.

King passes such questions by, and contents himself with more or less

interesting biographies of those whom he takes to be political

leaders. Among them we find Henri Rochefort, but fail to find Louis

Veuillot. Mr. King is like all non-Catholic writers—least at home when

he comes across a Catholic. Among his leaders Mgr. Dupanloup, the

Bishop of Orléans, very properly holds a place. We scarcely recognize

the bishop, however, as painted by Mr. King. One sentence will suffice

to show our meaning: “The haughty mind which sneered at the Encyclical

Letter [which Encyclical Letter?] and the Syllabus became one of the

most ardent defenders of illiberal measures.” By “illiberal measures”

Mr. King seems to mean freedom of education in France, of which Mgr.

Dupanloup has been a lifelong, and recently a successful, advocate.

“The haughty mind which sneered at the Encyclical Letter and the

Syllabus” is something new to us, particularly as Mgr. Dupanloup, long

previous to the Council of the Vatican, wrote a pamphlet in defence of

the Syllabus for which he received the special thanks of the Holy

Father. It is to be hoped that all Mr. King’s biographies are not

equally as accurate as that of Mgr. Dupanloup.

FIVE LECTURES ON THE CITY OF ANCIENT ROME AND HER EMPIRE

OVER THE NATIONS, THE DIVINELY-SENT PIONEER OF THE WAY FOR

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. A supplement to the student’s usual

course of study in Roman history. By Rev. Henry Formby,

London: Burns, Oates & Co.

In these lectures Father Formby essays the proof of what many a

well-read student would at first hearing pronounce as a thesis

exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of demonstration—viz., that

the Roman Empire, the arch-persecutor of the church of God, drunk with

the blood of ten millions of martyrs, and nursing-mother of every

heathen idolatry, had, in spite of these seeming contradictory

characteristics, a divine mission, fulfilled especially by her

universal empire and the singular part she played in the formation of

the political and social life of the nations of the world.

The learned author signalizes among other marks of the divine

providence shown in the history of the mistress of nations, which

point her out as a pioneer of the kingdom of Christ, the following

remarkable classes of services rendered by her to the accomplishment

of that work:

1. “The formation of the nations of the world into a political unity

of government, in which there existed a great deal to foreshadow and

prepare the minds of men for the future church; while every eye was

taught to look up to the city of Rome, not only as the centre of all

political action, but as supreme in religion, as well as the fountain

of all civil honor and dignity.

2. “The preliminary mission of the Roman Empire to civilize the

nations, and to promote among them education and the cultivation of

literature and the arts of life, the care of which was to become, in a

far higher and more effective manner, part of the mission of the

future church.

3. “The mission of the Roman Empire to inculcate and preserve among

the nations the knowledge of a certain number of the doctrines and

virtues forming part of the original revelation which Noah brought

with him out of the ark.

4. “The advantage, for the formation of the Christian society, of the

firm establishment of the outward framework of good public order, of

municipal liberties, and of the general peace of the world, including

the necessary security for life and prosperity.”

These are weighty considerations, and worthy of a much more extended

development than the author gives in the lectures before us. His

thesis affirmed as probable (and we deem it no less), Roman history

would need to be re-written, and by one who should be not only an

historian, but a philosopher and a Christian. The perusal of these

lectures cannot fail to interest the student, and particularly those

who pretend to study the philosophy of history.

POPULAR LIFE OF DANIEL O’CONNELL. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 294.

Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

Public attention in these days is being more and more turned to

O’Connell and the work he wrought. No later than last year the Holy

Father held him up as a guide to Catholics in their conflict with

powers leagued together against the church, against Catholic rights,

and, as a matter of consequence, against all right. The more the great

Irish leader’s life is studied, the more evident becomes the fact that

freedom, liberty, right, were not to him merely national but universal

claims. What he demanded for his own he would have granted to all, and

in claiming his own he asked no favor; he called for none of what are

known as heroic remedies; he appealed simply to the spirit of all

sound laws and the sense of right that is in the conscience of all

men. It would be well if, in future lives of him, this great, this

greatest perhaps, feature of O’Connell’s character were brought out in

stronger relief. For it is just this that makes him more than a leader

of his people; it makes him a leader of all peoples who have wrongs to

right and abuses to abolish. The small volume before us tells the

story of O’Connell’s life in the conventional manner. “Popular” is on

the title-page, and there is no reason why the “life” should not be

popular. It “has been compiled from the most authentic sources,” says

the preface modestly enough, and in this the value of the book is

rated in a line. It is a compilation, and no more. As a compilation

there is no especial fault to be found with it. On the contrary, the

various parts are stitched cleverly together, so as to make a

sufficiently interesting narrative. Compilations, however, are

becoming too numerous nowadays, and the literature in which shears and

paste-pot play the chief part is growing into a school, and a school

that cannot be commended. It is not encouraging to open what the

reader takes to be a new book, and find in it page after page of

matter that has been writ or told a thousand times already.

ELMWOOD; OR, THE WITHERED ARM. By Katie L. 1 vol. 16mo, pp.

233. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1876.

The title of this story, though sufficiently thrilling, gives but a

faint indication of the chamber of horrors that lies concealed between

the pleasant-looking covers. The title of the first chapter is

“Midnight,” and it begins as follows: “W-H-I-R-R! groaned the old

clock. The sound rang throughout the immense corridor, reverberating

like the moan of a lost soul.” Three lines lower down, “A wild,

unearthly yell” breaks “with fearful distinctness on the midnight

silence.” Chapter III. begins: “Silence! Gloom! Remorse! Anguish!

Alone! all alone!” and so on. We spare the reader the prolonged agony.

The story might be called a series of paroxysms, and, were it only

intended as a caricature of the dime novel, would be one of the most

successful that was ever written. Murder glares from every page, and

agony reverberates along every line. There is an abundance of “tall,

slight figures robed in white,” “ethereal oil-lamps,” “howling

tempests,” “deathly faintnesses,” thrilling “ha! ha’s!” “blue

chambers,” “north-end chambers,” “awful arms,” “blood-stained hands,”

poison, murder, despair, agony, death. There are the usual heroes with

the conventional marble brow and clustering curls around it, and the

heroines, tall and stately, sylph-like and sweet, blonde or brunette,

according to order. Everybody is Maud, or Elaine, or Edwin, or

Herbert. One quite misses Enid, Gawain, Launcelot, and Guinevere. Of

course there is no special quarrel with nonsense of this kind, beyond

the regret that there should be found persons not only to think and

write it, but sane persons to publish and propagate it. When, however,

we find religion dragged in to give it a kind of moral flavor—dragged

in, too, in the most absurd and reprehensible fashion—what might be

passed over as a foolish offence against good sense and good taste

becomes a matter of graver moment, to be utterly condemned as

irreverent and harmful, however unintentional the irreverence and harm

may be. It is necessary to be severe about this kind of literature.

Uninstructed Catholics who, by whatever misfortune, have access to

paper and types, do a world of harm, though they themselves may be

actuated by the best motives possible. This book would do no more harm

to sensible persons than cause a laugh, possibly a shudder, at its

tissue of absurdities. But falling into the hands of non-Catholics, it

would by many be taken as the natural outcome of Catholic teaching,

and disgust them with everything connected with the Catholic name. The

preface to the book speaks of “the moral conveyed in the following

pages,” which, it says, “is too obvious to need particular

specification.” Possibly; nevertheless, we thought it our duty to

specify it above. The preface adds that the book was written “during

some of the sweetest hours” of the writer’s life, “in the midst of the

most charming surroundings, and solely for the eyes of a few friends.”

It is to be deeply regretted, for the writer’s own sake, that one, at

least, of her few friends had not the courage and kindliness to deter

her from “sending forth upon its new and unexpected mission” a book

that can only bring pain to the author and pain to those who feel

bound to condemn it.

THE SCHOLASTIC ALMANAC FOR 1876. Edited by Professor J. A.

Lyons, Notre Dame, Ind. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co. 1876.

This is modelled on the _Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac_, the

first of the kind published in this country, only it is not

illustrated. Its literary matter is very good, and in its paper,

press-work, etc., it is a creditable publication.

THE SPECTATOR (SELECTED PAPERS). By Addison and Steele. With

introductory essay and biographical sketches by John

Habberton. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

This is the first of a series to be made up of selections from the

standard British essayists. The present volume contains careful

selections from the _Spectator_. Those who care to see what journalism

was in the days when Addison and Steele were journalists will welcome

this series, so well begun in the elegant volume before us. It is to

be feared that Addison or Steele would stand a poor chance of

employment in the present “advanced” stage of journalism.

Nevertheless, our editorial writers would do neither themselves nor

their readers much harm in trying to discover what is the special

charm that lingers about the pages of these dead-and-gone magazines.

When they have made the discovery, they will be in a fair way to make

it worth the while of an enterprising publisher, say a century hence,

to wade through the pages of their journals for the purpose of

unearthing the author of such and such articles, with a view to giving

them again to the world.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 134.—MAY, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1876.

THE ROOT OF OUR PRESENT EVILS.

When Mr. Dickens repaid the hospitality which he had received by his

extremely humorous satires of this country, he called the attention of

all Americans to the extent to which our national vanity was likely to

blind us. Mr. Chollop’s opinion to the effect that “we are the

intellect and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur, and the

flower of moral force,” has been secretly cherished by many better

men.

The conviction of ordinary Americans is that our system of government

is so evidently perfect, and the course of our development so

manifestly healthy, that nothing but sheer blindness can account for

any suspicion as to their future stability. To those who question the

success of our future we are wont to reply by a smile of genuine pity,

or by pointing to the results already achieved and the difficulties

which have been surmounted. We have fused the most incongruous

race-mixture into one homogeneous nation. We have occupied a

continent, and laid the foundations of a great empire upon a

comprehensive and stable adjustment of all the functions of

government. We have eliminated the vast system of human slavery from

which our ruin had been predicted. We have overcome the most powerful

assault upon the integrity of our national existence; and any violent

attempt upon our government seems at present to be both impossible of

occurrence and hopeless of success.

It cannot be denied, however, that recent events have awakened in the

minds of earnest and patriotic Americans a sense of uneasiness and

anxiety very different from any similar feeling in the past. The

professional politician sees in the corruption lately developed in

Washington simply the evidence of decay manifested by a powerful

organization which has enjoyed unlimited power and survived the issues

which brought it into existence. He would persuade the people that a

“rotation” is all that is necessary in order to restore things to an

honest and sober condition. Less thoughtful men demand a return on the

part of officials “to the simplicity of our forefathers,” and applaud

blindly every effort at retrenchment. All observant writers and

thinkers deprecate any such impossibility and are quite clear as to

the folly of attempting it. The _Nation_, March 16, says: “We confess

that there is to us something almost as depressing in this kind of

talk as in the practice, in which many of our newspapers indulge, of

drawing consolation for the present corruption of this republic from

the reflection that the corruption of the English monarchy one hundred

and fifty years ago was just as great; because both one and the other

have a tendency to turn people’s minds away from real remedies and

throw them back on quackery.”

The feeling exhibited by this writer is not confined to himself; and

the protest which he makes against disguise and quackery is extended

much further than he himself has carried it. For the most part careful

observers are willing to postpone the question of treatment until the

public is settled as to what the malady really is. We are shaken out

of our customary habit of mind by witnessing the disgrace and infamy

which cover our present administration. Everybody feels that something

ought to be done. But to pay particular attention to this portion of

the body politic, without examining how far the disease extends and

what is its source, is simply to run the risk of suppressing a symptom

instead of curing a disorder.

The slightest attempt at candid observation reveals clearly that

corruption is not confined to Washington. A few years ago it was

supposed to be limited to a certain class of local politics; then it

was restricted to the city of New York. Now it is proved to extend

from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and to exist in every circle of

society. The suspicion which once attached to the “ward politician”

now hangs about our representatives and senators. Dishonesty in

commercial transactions perpetrates renewed outrages. We shall soon

have to establish fresh associations to insure our insurance companies

and to guarantee our banks. The medical profession feels called upon

to issue tracts in order to guard against the physical degeneracy of

the entire race.

To deny that there is a pronounced, marked, and universal decadence in

morality is simply to stultify all faculties of observation and to

contradict the testimony of every sense. It is not necessary to repeat

the list of scandals which are daily appearing, or to appeal to the

conviction, which prevails everywhere, that we have seen but a small

portion of those which really exist. It is the common sentiment that

the next century will witness either a complete and radical reform of

the present state of things, or else a condition far worse than the

enemies of this country have ever yet predicted.

Startling as this conviction may appear, the only thing which ought to

surprise us is that the present disorder has not been foreseen and is

not now more fully understood. It would have been easy to predict the

increase of wealth and the consequent increase of luxury in our midst.

No sane person can doubt that these sources of temptation will be

greater in the future. The presence of wealth, the possibility of

attaining it, will call forth all the activity of the rising

generation, and the keenness of the struggle, in which all are free

within the limits of the law, will tend constantly to lower the

standard of honesty. The strictness of party discipline, the disgust

which the mass of citizens have for attending to the details of

politics, offer the widest scope for unprincipled adventurers. There

are few careers in which quackery, fraud, and imposture cannot secure

those fruits for the possession of which honesty and labor are forced

to suffer and to strive.

It does not involve a cynical view of mankind to decide that where the

occasion of sin abounds wickedness will increase and prove

destructive, unless adequate means are taken to preserve the purity of

a nation.

This restraining influence in the history of nations hitherto has been

religion, which is supposed to furnish motives and to supply the

strength and means of combating these evil tendencies, and of defining

and consolidating public morality.

The religion under profession of which the older portions of the

republic developed was professedly Christian and retained much of the

traditional morality of the middle ages. There was no particular form

of Protestantism which succeeded in impressing itself permanently upon

the growing republic, although some connection of church and state was

universally recognized in the early State constitutions. The rigid

forms of Puritanism and Quakerism were well calculated to preserve

frugality and simplicity of life as long as they could be maintained

in rigidity. But no system of mere forms or external restraint could

suffice for the direction of a civilization which, still in its

infancy, presents so much richness and luxuriance of growth. Neither

the austerity of the Roundhead nor the dignity of the Cavalier could

hope to remain as the type upon which the American character was to be

moulded. The external habiliments of the early generations were bound

to disappear, as they have disappeared. But their principles—_i.e._,

the beliefs of Protestantism—were to remain and to form the intellect

and conscience of the American people. However great the influence of

Southern statesmen upon our external constitution, the New England

mind has wrought most powerfully upon the popular sentiment of the

country. This action has been manifold.

The stock in trade, to use a homely comparison, with which

Protestantism assumed its duty of providing for the moral and

intellectual necessities of the American people was contained in the

principles of the so-called Reformation.

In addition to the theory of private judgment, which was retained,

with the utmost inconsistency, the early religion of this country

reposed upon two fundamental and mischievous errors which were

inherited from the authors of the Reformation. These were the heresies

of justification by faith alone and the total depravity of human

nature. If any proof were wanting of the strength and permanence of

the religious instinct in man, it would appear in the fact that such

monstrous delusions could so long receive the assent of those who

professed at the same time perfect freedom of belief. These disgusting

caricatures of Christian dogma have almost lost their control over

human reason, and will remain only to demonstrate the needs of man and

his weakness when acting in abnormal ways and under false traditions.

But the fruit which they have borne will not speedily perish. After

crystallizing into a system and founding institutions for perpetuating

its growth, the Calvinism of New England assumed all the proportions

and manners of an established sect. The preachers were intellectually

well worthy of the position which they enjoyed. Great eloquence, rich

thought, and all the scholarship of which they were possessed were

wasted in elaborate sermons proving, or attempting to prove, their

dark and malignant creed. A large mass of the people, however, not

attracted by the airs of Calvinism, were repelled by the heavy and

metaphysical style of the Calvinistic pulpit.

Before the separation of the colonies from the mother country New

England Calvinism had become sufficiently dry and devoid of sentiment

to prepare the way for a more emotional religion. Thousands of eager

souls drank in the enthusiasm of Asbury, Coke, and the other apostles

of Wesleyanism. The founders of Methodism in America, though obliged

to adopt some articles of faith as distinctive of their organization,

owed their success to the fact that, discarding all reasoning, they

appealed to religious emotion, and were mainly instrumental in

founding that school of theology whose doctrine is that it matters

little what one does or believes, provided one _feels_ right.

Emotionalism has run its course and dies out in the Hippodrome,

whither the official teachers of evangelicalism have led their

congregations to receive from the ministrations of two illiterate

laymen that spiritual stimulant which can no longer be obtained from

educated preachers in the fashionable meeting-house.

While the ancient organizations of Puritanism continued, with more or

less dilution of its original doctrines, another movement had arisen

in the very heart of Calvinism. The Unitarian movement has proved a

complete reaction against what are called the doctrines of the

Reformation. It has resulted in the extinction of the religious

sentiment. Its popular summary is to the effect, that it makes little

difference what one feels or believes, provided he _does_ right. From

the society of the Free Religionists back to the original shades of

Calvinism is a gloomy road for even the imagination to travel, but no

one can pass over it in fancy without perceiving the utter

impossibility of persuading one who has once emerged from, ever to

return to, the earlier darkness.

To continue in a creed which involved blasphemy against the goodness

of God and the denial of all the natural sources of morality, or to

surrender one’s self to religious emotion without any solid

intellectual principle, or else to place individuals in entire

dependence upon their private perceptions of religious and moral

truth, and finally pass from one degree of scepticism to another—one

of these three alternatives was proposed as the occupation of the

American intellect during the most active period of national growth.

The Egyptian darkness which Calvinism brings upon any thoughtful soul

was the inheritance of the religious youth of the country. What virtue

can exist when total depravity is daily preached? What bar does it put

to the passions of man to know or to believe that his salvation does

not depend upon his good life? What conception of the universe can he

form who sees in it only the work of what a popular preacher has

called an “infinite gorilla”? Nothing is more pathetic than the

history which we have of minds whose natural goodness vainly struggled

against these detestable heresies. And if the religious heart of New

England found in its creed nothing but discouragement, what was the

effect of that religion upon the popular mind? Is it not mainly to its

influence that all that is repulsive and hard in the Yankee character

is to be attributed?

But, on the other hand, what has been left by the decay of emotional

religion? It might have been prophesied with safety that the result

would be simply a reaction. So far as can be observed, it is nothing

more or less. The writer was not a little amused at reading lately in

a Methodist paper an editorial charging strongly against the present

style of revivals, under the heading of “Religious Fits.” The editor,

in the course of his remarks, very bluntly asserted that religious

fits are not much better than any other kind of fits—a proposition

which sums up the vital weakness of Methodism. And when a whole nation

or a large class is reduced to this condition, the recovery from the

fit will be attended with great disaster. “The religion of gush,” as

it has been forcibly styled, is fatal to morality. It is an attempt to

feed a starving man upon stimulants. The appearance of strength which

it gives is simply an additional tax upon the system. Emotional

religion may succeed in quieting women who are secluded in domestic

life, or even the weaker sort of men who are occupied solely in

teaching it; but for the common mass, who are daily exposed to

temptation, it is, at most, a salve with which the wounds inflicted

upon conscience are plastered over. There is nothing in it to

discipline the soul before trial, and nothing to repair its weaknesses

after it has fallen.

With regard to the results of the naturalistic revolt against

Calvinism there is little to be said. The charming writers who have

given it prestige are not its product but its cause. In so far as they

assert the dignity of human reason against Calvinism, to this extent

they are in harmony with our natural instincts and have tended to

produce a wholesome influence. But even transcendentalism is past its

wane, and will be known in the future only by its literary reputation.

Free religion has developed no permanent constructive idea. Its

principal effect will be to obliterate whatever of Christianity has

clung to the tradition of New England Protestantism. Its mission will

be accomplished when all connection between the past and present shall

have been effectually broken. It leaves us only a considerable amount

of scientific knowledge which we should possess without it. Its

morality staggers through the wide range extending from free love and

spiritism into the undefined vacuity which it supposes to lie between

these bolder theories and old-fashioned uprightness. Like emotional

Protestantism, it is wholly incapable of withstanding any strain or of

guiding and controlling the absolute individualism which it has

created. If the Congregational pastor of Plymouth Church affords a sad

example of the impotence of emotional pietism, the unfortunate

plaintiff in the lawsuit against him is no less a melancholy instance

of the aberrations of the last phase of American Protestantism.

There is little affectation of concealment, on the part of thoughtful

Americans, of the conviction that our national growth and the success

of our government are subject to the universal laws according to which

past empires have risen and perished. It is to be hoped that the

success with which we have been blessed so far will not blind our eyes

to this truth. We must have a solid basis of morality, or we are

doomed to fall into such a condition as will make our absolute

extinction a desirable thing. Whence is this new life to come? Is

there anything in American Protestantism which can reverse its steady

process of decay and disintegration? Has it any principles which can

arrest for one moment the popular tendencies? We are unable to see in

it even a “serviceable breakwater against errors more fundamental than

its own”; quite the contrary. Its dogmatic front only serves to

disgust those who mistake it for Christianity. Protestantism never

converted a nation to Christianity or formed one. It could do neither

even if it had an opportunity. In its latitudinarian aspect it

directly fosters the present vagueness of moral convictions; while its

emotional tendency only justifies the substitution of sentiment for

reason and nullifies all attempts to subject the feelings to the

judgment.

However one may be disposed to prefer the paganism which universally

pervades our era to the unlovely fanaticism of earlier times,

experience, both past and present, forbids the indulgence of any hope

of future success springing from it.

It is hard to imagine what thought has been expended upon this subject

by those who profess to see the way out of our present difficulties

through a lavish system of public education. We hear declamations on

this subject which fill us with bewilderment. If the public schools

were able to furnish the people with sound moral instruction, we could

understand something of the enthusiasm which describes them as the

sources of national morality and as the salvation of the future. God

knows we have no desire to cut off one ray of light; but the present

moment is not one in which to indulge in madness. The sooner it is

understood that our system of education is destroying the generation

that is subjected to its influence, the better. It stands to reason

that the great need of the hour is to save our children from its

evils. Our public education barely succeeds in exaggerating all the

moral and physical degeneracies of the day. To develop the desire and

capacity for action and enjoyment, without providing means of guiding

and restraining within wholesome limits the power thus produced, is

simply to court disaster. We are suffering at present from aversion to

hard labor and a quiet life from the unbridled desire of wealth and

pleasure, from the absence of well-defined moral sentiment. The

present system of education, so vehemently applauded, is an

aggravation of all the morbid tendencies of our condition. This

complaint will not receive much attention coming from this source, but

it is finding universal utterance from the medical profession, and its

justice will speedily appear to the most casual observer.

There is nothing in paganism, however brilliant its science or art,

that can restore the health of a race which is morally corrupt. The

“positive stage of development,” as it is styled by a certain class of

modern writers, is an age of decrepitude. If the analogy be true which

they hold to exist between the life of man and the development of a

race, we must expect death as soon as the “positive” era has been

attained. The muscular epoch has passed. The age of delusions has left

the mind incapable of anything but observing facts; the demand for

artificial stimulants has exhausted the brain of the nation; and the

body politic, though surrounded with luxury, is moribund beyond the

power of recovery.

While we do not fully accept the analogy of positivism, we are

convinced that neither Protestantism nor paganism can raise the nation

from the slough in which it seems about to settle. Nor will it be

saved by the infusion of fresh blood, as was the ancient world

according to some ingenious writers. The Hun and Vandal and Goth would

never have changed their originally savage state had they not met in

the world that they destroyed an indestructible power which, after

surviving the assaults of both Roman and barbarian, by its subtle

constructive faculty altered the face of the earth. This power was

Christianity, whose work of universal civilization was so fatally

marred by the religious catastrophe of the sixteenth century.

Now that the false Christianity of our forefathers has developed its

utter worthlessness as a guide, it will be well to inquire whether the

religious system, which is historically identified with Christianity,

contains any of those elements of stability so lacking in our

civilization.

It is not to be expected that such a discussion, even if resulting

favorably to Catholicity, will be sufficient to convert the American

people to its faith, but it will greatly conduce to removing

misconceptions and ignorance on the part of many of our

fellow-citizens with regard to the relative merits of Catholicity and

Protestantism.

No system can ever prove efficient which is unable to maintain its own

integrity. No intellectual movement can hope to exert any large

practical influence after it has lost its unity. Protestantism, having

begun with a denial of the need of authority, was soon forced to

contradict itself in practice in order to preserve its existence. But

the principle which had given it life could not be disregarded, and

the germ of discord, involved in the idea of a teaching body without

any claim to be believed save what private conscience might be willing

to concede to it, continued to produce disintegration without end.