"Monster!" groaned Père Jacques, and hurried from her presence.

All that day he and Mlle. Adrienne stayed at home with their door

and window barred and bolted; but night came, and the domiciliary

visit was still a threat. Next day, however, the little door stood

open as usual, and Père Jacques was to be seen hammering away at the

dilapidated legs of a table that he was mending for a neighbor at

the rate of twenty-five centimes a leg; but Mlle. Adrienne was not

there. Had Père Jacques put an end to his agony by actually killing

her, as he had threatened, and so saved her from the ignoble fate

of the shambles? Or had he, haunted by the phantom of hunger which

was now staring at him with its pale spectral eyes from the near

background, yielded to the old man's love of life, and sold his

friend to prolong it and escape himself from a ghastly death? Most

people believed the latter alternative, but nobody knew for certain.

When Mlle. Adrienne's name was mentioned, Père Jacques would frown,

and give unmistakable signs of displeasure. If the subject was

pressed, he would seize his stick, and, making a _moulinet_ over his

head with it, prepare an expletive that the boldest never waited to

receive. One day he was caught crying bitterly in his now solitary

home, and muttering to himself between the sobs, "Ma pauvre fille!

Mlle. Adrienne! Je le suivrai bientôt--ah les coquins, les brigands,

les monstres!" This was looked upon as conclusive. The monsters in

question could only be the Shylocks of the abattoir who had tempted

him with blood-money for Mlle. Adrienne. When curiosity was thus

far satisfied, the gamins ceased to worry Père Jacques; the lonely

old man became an object of pity to everybody, even to the gamins

themselves; when they met him now they touched their caps, with

"Bonjour, Père Jacques!" and spared him the cruel jeer that had been

their customary salutation of late: "Mlle. Adrienne à la casserole!

Bon appétit, Père Jacques!"

The days wore on, and the weeks, and the months. Paris, wan and pale

and hunger-stricken, still held out. Winter had come, and thrown

its icy pall upon the city, hiding her guilty front "under innocent

snow;" the nights were long and cold, the dawn was desolate, the

tepid noon brought no warmth to the perishing, fire-bound multitude.

No sign of succor came to them from without. In vain they watched and

waited, persecuting time with hope. The cannon kept up its sobbing

recitative through the black silence of the night; through the white

stillness of the day. Hunger gnawed into their vitals, till even

hope, weary with disappointment, grew sick and died.

One morning, the neighbors noticed Père Jacques's door and window

closed long after the hour when he was wont to be up and busy. They

knocked, and, getting no answer, turned the handle of the door; it

was neither locked nor barred, merely closed, as if the master were

within; but he was not; the little room was tenantless, and almost

entirely stripped; the mattress and the scanty store of bed-clothes

were gone; the iron bedstead, a table, a stool, and two cane chairs,

were the only sticks of furniture that remained; the shelves were

bare of the bright pewter tankards and platters that used to adorn

them; the gilt clock with its abortion of a Pegasus bestrid by

a grenadier, which had been the glory of the chimney-piece, had

disappeared. What did it all mean? Had the enemy made a raid on

Père Jacques and his property during the night, and carried away the

lot in a balloon? Great was the consternation, and greater still the

gossip of the little community, when the mysterious event became

known through the quartier. What had become of Père Jacques? Had he

been kidnapped, or had he been murdered, or had he taken flight of

his own accord, and whither, and why? Nothing transpired to throw any

light on the mystery, and the gossips, tired of guessing, soon ceased

to think about it, and, like many another nine days' wonder, Père

Jacques's disappearance died a natural death.

A day came at last when the mitrailleuse hushed its hideous shriek,

the cannon left off booming, the wild beasts of war were silent.

Paris cried, "Merci!" and the gates were opened. The city, like a

sick man healed of a palsy, rose up, and shook herself and rubbed

her eyes, and ate plentifully after her long fast. Many came back

from the outposts who were wept over as dead. There were strange

meetings in many quartiers during those first days that followed

the capitulation. But no one brought any news of Père Jacques.

There were too many interests nearer and dearer to think of, and,

in the universal excitement of shame and vengeance and rare flashes

of joy, he and Mlle. Adrienne were forgotten as if they had never

been. But when, on the day of my return to Paris, my conversation

with my concierge was interrupted by the cheering of the crowd in

the Rue Billault, and when the cause of the hubbub was made known,

the fact that both Père Jacques and his _idée_ were well remembered

and, as the newspapers put it, universally esteemed by a large circle

of friends and admirers, was most emphatically attested. Nothing,

indeed, could be more gratifying than the manner in which their

resurrection was received. The pair looked very much the worse for

their sojourn in the other world, wherever it was, to which they had

emigrated. Mlle. Adrienne's appearance was particularly affecting.

She was worn to skin and bone; and certainly, if Père Jacques,

yielding to the pangs of hunger, had sacrificed his _idée_ to his

life, and taken her to the shambles, she would not have fetched more

than a brace of good rats, or, at best, some ten francs, from the

inhuman butchers of the Rue Valois. She dragged her legs, and shook

and stumbled as if the weight of her attenuated person were too much

for them. Even her old enemies, the gamins, were moved to pity, while

Père Jacques, laughing and crying and apostrophizing Mlle. Adrienne

in his old familiar way, cheered her on to their old home. How she

ever got there is as great a marvel as how she lived to be led there

to-day; for, what between physical exhaustion and mental anxiety--for

the crowd kept overpowering her with questions and caresses--and what

between the well-meant but injudicious attentions of sundry little

boys who kept stuffing unintermitting bits of straw and lumps of

sugar into her mouth, it is little short of a miracle that she did

not choke and expire on the macadam of the Rue Billault.

Many an ass has been lionized before, and many a one will be so

again. It is a common enough sight in these days, but never did hero

or heroine of the tribe bear herself more becomingly on the trying

occasion than Mlle. Adrienne. As to Père Jacques, he bore himself

as well as he could, trying hard to look dignified and unconscious,

while in his inmost heart he was bursting with pride. While he and

Mlle. Adrienne ambled on side by side, some facetious person remarked

that Père Jacques looked quite beside himself. This, indeed, was a

great day for him and his ass. Yet, notwithstanding that his heart

was moved within him and softened towards all men--nay, towards all

boys--he could not be induced to say a word as to where he had been,

or what he had done, or how he and Mlle. Adrienne had fared in the

wilderness, or what manner of wilderness it was, or anything that

could furnish the remotest clue to their existence since the day when

they had separately disappeared off the horizon of the Rue Billault.

Provisions were still too dear, during the first fortnight after the

capitulation, to allow of Père Jacques resuming his old trade of

apples or cauliflowers; besides, Mademoiselle Adrienne wanted rest.

"Pauvre chérie! il faut qu'elle se remette un peu de la vache

enragée," he remarked tenderly, when his friends condoled with him on

her forced inactivity. He would not hear of hiring her out for work,

as some of them proposed. Mère Richard came and offered a fabulous

price for the loan of her for three days, with a view to a stroke

of business at the railway station, where food was pouring in from

London. Père Jacques shook his fist at the carnivorous old woman, and

warned her never to show her unnatural old face in his house again,

or it might be worse for her.

A PIE IX.

Le Verbe créateur en paraissant sur terre

Erigea son église, auguste monument.

Il appela Simon du fameux nom de Pierre

Et de son édifice en fit le fondement:

Des volontés du Christ sacré dépositaire,

Interprète et gardien du dernier Testament

Pie inspiré d'en haut et par l'église entière

En achève le dôme et le couronnement.

Pie obtient en ce jour (glorieux privilége!)

De régner a l'égal du chef du saint collége.

Des droits de l'Eternal et de l'humanité

Contre l'erreur du jour défenseur intrépide,

Calme au sein des périls, d'une main sûre il guide

La barque de Céphas au port de Vérité.

NEW YORK, June 17, 1871.

THE SECULAR NOT SUPREME.[156]

Dr. Bellows is the well-known pastor of All Souls' Church, and

editor of the _Liberal Christian_ in this city, a distinguished

Unitarian minister, with some religious instincts and respectable

literary pretensions. As a student in college and the Divinity

School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was full of promise, and a

great favorite of the late Hon. Edward Everett, himself originally

a Unitarian minister and pastor of Brattle Street Church, Boston.

The Hon. E. P. Hurlbut was formerly one of the judges of the Supreme

Court of this state, a lawyer by profession, with a passably clear

head and a logical mind, who knows, if not the truth, at least what

he means, and neither fears nor hesitates to say it. His pamphlet,

as far as it goes, expresses, we doubt not, his honest thought, but

his thought is the thought of a secularist, who admits no order above

the secular, and holds that no religion not subordinate to and under

the control of the civil power, should be tolerated. Both he and Dr.

Bellows are from instinct and education hearty haters of the Catholic

Church; but while he is content to war against her from the point

of view of pure secularism or no-religion, that is, atheism, the

reverend doctor seeks to clothe his hatred in a Christian garb and to

war against Christ in the name of Christ.

Dr. Bellows, as a Liberal Christian, and though a Protestant

hardly allowed by his more rigid Protestant countrymen to bear the

Christian name, has a double battle to fight: one, against the

Evangelical movement, at the head of which is Mr. Justice Strong, of

the Supreme Court, to amend the constitution of the United States

so as to make orthodox Protestantism the official religion of the

republic, which would exclude him and his Unitarian, Universalist,

and Quaker brethren; and the other, against the admission of the

equal rights of Catholics with Protestants before the American state.

Catholics greatly trouble him, and he hardly knows what to do with

them. According to the letter of the constitution of the Union and

of the several states, unless New Hampshire be an exception, they

are American citizens, standing in all respects on a footing of

perfect equality with any other class of citizens, and have as much

right to take part in public affairs, and to seek to manage them

in the interests of their religion, as Protestants have to take

part in them in the interests of Protestantism; but this is very

wrong, and against the spirit of the constitution; for the nation

is a Protestant nation, the country was originally settled by and

belongs to Protestantism, and Catholics ought to understand that

they are really here only by sufferance, that they do not in reality

stand in relation to public questions on a footing of equality with

Protestants, and have really no right to exert any influence in

regard to the public policy of the country not in accordance with

the convictions of the Protestant majority. He tells us, in the

discourse before us and more distinctly still in the columns of the

_Liberal Christian_, not to aspire as citizens to equality with

Protestants as if we had as much right to the government as they

have, and warns us that if we do we shall be resisted even unto blood.

The occasion of his outpouring of wrath against Catholics is that

they have protested against being taxed for the support of a system

of sectarian or godless schools, to which they are forbidden in

conscience to send their children, and have demanded as their

right either that the tax be remitted, or that their proportion of

the public schools be set off to them, to be, as to education and

discipline, under Catholic control. Dr. Bellows allows that the

Catholic demand is just, and that by making it a question at the

polls they may finally obtain it; but this is not to his mind, for

it would defeat the pet scheme of Protestants for preventing the

growth of Catholicity in the country, by detaching, through the

influence of the public schools, their children from the faith of

their parents. Yet as long as any religion, even the reading of the

Bible, is insisted on in the public schools, what solid argument

can be urged against the demand of Catholics, or what is to prevent

Catholic citizens from making it a political question and withholding

their votes from the party that refuses to respect their rights of

conscience and to do them justice? Dr. Bellows says that we cannot

legally be prevented from doing so, but, if we do so, it will be

the worse for us; for if we carry our religion to the polls the

Protestant people will, as they should, rise up against us and

overwhelm us by their immense majority, perhaps even exterminate us.

To prevent the possibility of collision, the reverend doctor

proposes a complete divorce of church and state. He proposes to

defeat the Evangelicals on the one hand, and the Catholics on the

other, by separating totally religion and politics. Thus he says:

"It is the vast importance of keeping the political

and the religious movements and action of the people

apart, and in their own independent spheres, that

makes wise citizens, alike on religious and on civil

grounds, look with alarm and jealousy on any endeavors,

on the part either of Protestants or Catholics, to

secure any special attention or support, any partial

or separate legislation or subsidies, from either the

national or the state governments. I have already told

you that Protestants, representing the great sects in

this country, are now laboring, by movable conventions,

to mould public opinion in a way to give finally a

theological character to the constitution. In a much

more pardonable spirit, because in accordance with

their historical antecedents, their hereditary temper,

and their ecclesiastical logic, the Roman Catholics in

this country are, in many states, and every great city

of the Union, using the tremendous power they possess

as the make-weight of parties, to turn the public

treasure in a strong current into their own channels,

and thus secure an illegitimate support as a religious

body. It is not too much to guess that more than half

of the ecclesiastical wealth of the Roman Catholic

Church in America, against the wishes and convictions

of a Protestant country, has been voted to it in

lands and grants by municipalities and legislatures

trading for Irish votes. The Catholic Church thus has

a factitious prosperity and progress. It is largely

sustained by Protestants--not on grounds of charity and

toleration, or from a sense of its usefulness (that

were well privately done), but from low and unworthy

political motives in both the great parties of the

country. Now that Roman Catholics themselves should

take advantage of their solidarity as a people and a

church, and of the power of their priesthood, with

all uninformed and some enlightened communicants, to

turn the political will into a machine for grinding

their ecclesiastical grist, is not unnatural, nor

wholly unpardonable. But it is fearfully dangerous

to them and to us. Their success--due to the sense of

the Protestant strength which thinks it can afford to

blink their machinations, or to the preoccupation of

the public mind with the emulative business pursuits

of the time, or to the confidence which the American

people seem to feel in the final and secure divorce of

church and state--their unchecked success encourages

them to bolder and more bold demands, and accustoms the

people to more careless and more perilous acquiescence

in their claims. The principle of authority in

religion, which has so many temperamental adherents in

all countries; the inherent love of pomp and show in

worship, strongest in the least educated; a natural

weariness of sectarian divisions, commonest among lazy

thinkers and stupid consciences--all these play into

the hands of the Romanists, and they are making hay

while the sun shines.

"There are no reviews, no newspapers in this country,

so bold and unqualified; none so unscrupulous and

so intensely zealous and partisan; none so fearless

and outspoken as the Catholic journals. They profess

to despise Protestant opposition; they deride the

feeble tactics of other Christian sects; they are more

ultramontane, more Roman, more Papal, than French,

German, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian believers; they

avow their purpose to make this a Roman Catholic

country, and they hope to live on the Protestant enemy

while they are converting him. They often put their

religious faith above their political obligation,

and, as bishops and priests, make it a duty to the

church for their members to vote as Catholics rather

than as American citizens. Not what favors the peace,

prosperity, and union of the nation, but what favors

their church, is the supreme question for them at every

election; and American politicians, for their predatory

purposes, have taught them this, and are their leaders

in it.

"Now, as an American citizen, I say nothing against

the equality of the rights of the Roman Catholics and

the Protestants; both may lawfully strive, in their

unpolitical spheres, for the mastery, and the law

may not favor or disfavor either; nor can anything

be done to prevent Roman Catholics from using their

votes as Roman Catholics, if they please. It is

against the spirit, but not against the letter of the

constitution. At any rate, it cannot be helped; only,

it may compel Protestants to form parties and vote as

Protestants against Roman Catholic interests, which

would be a deplorable necessity, and lead, sooner

or later, through religious parties in politics, to

religious wars. The way to avoid such a horrible

possibility--alas, such a threatening probability for

the next generation--is at once to look with the utmost

carefulness and the utmost disfavor upon every effort

on the part of either Protestants or Catholics to mix

up sectarian or theological or religious questions with

national and state and city politics.

"Every appeal of a sect, a denominational church,

or sectarian charity of any description, to the

general government, or state or city governments, for

subsidies or favors, should be at once discountenanced

and forbidden by public opinion, and made impossible

by positive statute. The Protestant sects in this

country should hasten to remove from their record any

advantages whatsoever guaranteed to them by civil

law to any partiality or sectarian distinction. The

most important privilege they enjoy by law in most of

the states is the right of keeping the Bible in the

public schools. It is a privilege associated with the

tenderest and most sacred symbol of the Protestant

faith--the Bible. To exclude it from the public schools

is to the religious affections of Protestants like

Abraham's sacrifice of his only son. When it was first

proposed, I felt horror-stricken, and instinctively

opposed it; but I have thought long and anxiously upon

the subject, and have, from pure logical necessity and

consistency, been obliged to change--nay, reverse my

opinion. Duty to the unsectarian character of our civil

institutions demands that this exclusion should be

made. It will not be any disclaimer of the importance

of the Bible in the education of American youth, but

only a concession that we cannot carry on the religious

with the secular education of American children, at the

public expense and in the public schools. So long as

Protestant Christians insist, merely in the strength

of their great majority, upon maintaining the Bible in

the public schools, they justify Roman Catholics in

demanding that the public money for education shall be

distributed to sects in proportion to the number of

children they educate. This goes far to break up the

common-school system of this country, and, if carried

out, must ultimately tend to dissolve the Union, which

morally depends upon the community of feeling and the

homogeneity of culture produced by an unsectarian

system of common schools."--_Church and State_, pp.

16-19.

But this proposed remedy will prove worse than the disease. The

state divorced from the church, wholly separated from religion, is

separated from morality; and the state separated from morality, that

is, from the moral order, from natural justice inseparable from

religion, cannot stand, and ought not to stand, for it is incapable

of performing a single one of its proper functions. The church,

representing the spiritual, and therefore the superior, order, is

by its own nature and constitution as independent of the state as

the soul is of the body; and the state separated from the church, or

from religion and morality, is like the body separated from the soul,

dead, a putrid or putrefying corpse. Exclude your Protestant Bible

and all direct and indirect religious instruction from your public

schools, and you would not render them a whit less objectionable

to us than they are now, for we object not less to purely secular

schools than we do to sectarian schools. We hold that children should

be trained up in the way they should go, so that when old they will

not depart from it; and the way in which they should go is not the

way of pure secularism, but the way enjoined by God our Maker through

his church. God has in this life joined soul and body, the spiritual

and the secular, together, and what God has joined together we dare

not put asunder. There is only one of two things that can satisfy us:

either cease to tax us for the support of the public schools, and

leave the education of our children to us, or give us our proportion

of the public schools in which to educate them in our own religion.

We protest against the gross injustice of being taxed to educate the

children of non-Catholics, and being obliged in addition to support

schools for our own children at our own expense, or peril their souls.

We do not think Dr. Bellows is aware of what he demands when he

demands the complete divorce of church and state, or the total

separation of religion and politics. The state divorced from the

church is a godless state, and politics totally separated from

religion is simply political atheism, and political atheism is simply

power without justice, force without law; for there is no law without

God, the supreme and universal Lawgiver. Man has no original and

underived legislative power, and one man has in and of himself no

authority over another; for all men by the law of nature are equal,

and have equal rights, and among equals no one has the right to

govern. All governments based on political atheism, or the assumption

that politics are independent of religion, rest on no foundation, are

usurpations, tyrannies, without right, and can govern, if at all,

only by might or sheer force. To declare the government divorced

from religion is to declare it emancipated from the law of God, from

all moral obligation, and free to do whatever it pleases. It has no

duties, and under it there are and can be no rights; for rights and

duties are in the moral order and inseparable from religion, since

the law of God is the basis of all rights and duties, the foundation

and guarantee of all morality. The state, divorced from religion,

would be bound to recognize and protect no rights of God or man,

not even those natural and inalienable rights of all men, "life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is going further in

the direction of absolutism than go the doctor's dear friends the

Turks, whom he so warmly eulogizes in his letters from the East, for

even they hold the sultan is bound by the Koran, and forbidden to do

anything it prohibits.

Dr. Bellows, doubtless, has no intention of divorcing the state

from morality, and does not see that his proposition implies it. He

probably holds that morality is separable from religion, for with him

religion is simply sentiment or opinion; but in this he falls into

the common mistake of all Liberal Christians, and of many Protestants

who regard Liberal Christians as no Christians at all. Morality

and religion are inseparable, for morality is only the practical

application in the several departments of life of the principles of

religion. Without religion morality has no foundation, nothing on

which to rest, is a baseless fabric, an unreality. Deny God, and you

deny the moral law and the whole moral order, all right, all duty,

all human accountability. The separation of all political questions

from all religious questions, which the reverend doctor demands, is

their separation from all moral questions, and is the emancipation

of the state from all right and all duty, or the assertion of its

unrestricted power to do whatever it pleases, in total disregard of

all moral and religious considerations. Is this the doctrine of a

Christian?

This surely is not the relation of church and state in America, and

derives no support from the American order of thought. With us,

the state is instituted chiefly for the protection of the natural

rights of man, as we call them, but really the rights of God, since

they are anterior to civil society, are superior to it, and not

derived or derivable from it. These rights it is the duty of civil

society to protect and defend. Any acts of the political sovereign,

be that sovereign king or kaiser, nobility or people, contrary to

these antecedent and superior rights are tyrannical and unjust, are

violences, not laws, and the common-law courts will not enforce

them, because contrary to the law of justice and forbidden by it.

The American state disclaims all authority over the religion of its

citizens, but at the same time acknowledges its obligation to respect

in its own action, and to protect and defend from external violence,

the religion which its citizens or any class of its citizens choose

to adopt or adhere to for themselves. It by no means asserts its

independence of religion or its right to treat it with indifference,

but acknowledges its obligation to protect its citizens in the free

and peaceable possession and enjoyment of the religion they prefer.

It goes further, and affords religion the protection and assistance

of the law in the possession and management of her temporalities, her

churches and temples, lands and tenements, funds and revenues for the

support of public worship, and various charitable or eleemosynary

institutions. All the protection and assistance the benefit of which

every Protestant denomination fully enjoys, and even the Catholic

Church in principle, though not always in fact, would be denied, if

the divorce Dr. Bellows demands were granted, and religion, having

no rights politicians are bound to respect, would become the prey of

lawless and godless power, and religious liberty would be utterly

annihilated, as well as civil liberty itself, which depends on it.

The chief pretence with Dr. Bellows for urging the complete divorce

of church and state, is that Catholics demand and receive subsidies

from the state and city for their schools and several charitable

institutions. Some such subsidies have been granted, we admit,

but in far less proportion to Catholics than they to Protestants

or non-Catholics. The public schools are supported at the public

expense, by the school fund, and a public tax, of which Catholics

pay their share, and these schools are simply sectarian or godless

schools, for the sole benefit of non-Catholics. The subsidies

conceded to a few of our schools do by no means place them on an

equality with those of non-Catholics. We by no means receive our

share of the subsidies conceded. The aids granted to our hospitals,

orphan asylums, and reformatories are less liberal than those to

similar non-Catholic institutions. So long as the state subsidizes

any institutions of the sort, we claim to receive our proportion of

them as our right. If the state grant none to non-Catholics, we shall

demand none for ourselves. We demand equality, but we ask no special

privileges or favors. The outcry of the sectarian and secular press

against us on this score is wholly unauthorized, is cruel, false, and

unjust. It is part and parcel of that general system of falsification

by which it is hoped to inflame popular passion and prejudice against

Catholics and their church.

Underlying the whole of the doctrine of this discourse is the

assumption of the supremacy of the secular order, or that every

American citizen is bound to subordinate his religion to his

politics, or divest himself of it whenever he acts on a political

question. This, which is assumed and partially disguised in Dr.

Bellows, is openly and frankly asserted and boldly maintained in

Judge Hurlbut's pamphlet. The judge talks much about theology,

theocracy, etc., subjects of which he knows less than he supposes,

and of course talks a great deal of nonsense, as unbelievers

generally do; but he is quite clear and decided that the state should

have the power to suppress any church or religious institution that

is based on a theory or principle different from its own. The theory

of the American government is democratic, and the government ought

to have the power to suppress or exclude every church that is not

democratically constituted. Religion should conform to politics,

not politics to religion. The political law is above the religious,

and, of course, man is above God. In order to be able to carry out

this theory, the learned judge proposes an important amendment to

the constitution of the United States, which shall on the one hand

prohibit the several states from ever establishing any religion by

law; and, on the other, shall authorize Congress to enact such laws

as it may deem necessary to control or prevent the establishment or

continuance of any foreign hierarchical power in this country founded

on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican institutions. He

says:

"The following amendment is proposed to Article I.

of the amendments to the Constitution of the United

States. The words in italics are proposed to be added

to the present article:

"ART. I. _Neither_ Congress _nor any state_ shall make

_any_ laws respecting an establishment of religion, or

prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the

freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of

the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the

government for a redress of grievances. _But Congress

may enact such laws as it shall deem necessary to

control or prevent the establishment or continuance of

any foreign hierarchical power in this country founded

on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican

institutions._

"It is assumed that there is nothing in the

constitution, as it stands, which forbids a _state_

from establishing a religion, and that no power is

conferred on Congress by the constitution to forbid

a foreign hierarchical establishment in the United

States. If such a power be needed, then the proposed

amendment is also necessary."--_Secular View_, p. 5.

This proposed amendment, like iniquity, lies unto itself, for

while it prohibits Congress and the several states from making

any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting

the free exercise thereof, it gives to Congress full power to

control or prevent the establishment or the continuance--that is,

to prohibit--the free exercise by Catholics of their religion,

under the flimsy pretence that it is a foreign hierarchy founded on

anti-republican principles. The hierarchy is an essential part of our

religion, and any denial of its freedom is the denial of the free

exercise of his religion to every Catholic, and of the very principle

of religious liberty itself, which the constitution guarantees.

We of course deny that the Catholic hierarchy is a foreign hierarchy

or anti-republican, for what is Catholic is universal, and what is

universal is never and nowhere a foreigner; but yet, because its

Supreme Pontiff does not reside personally in America, and its power

does not emanate from the American people, Protestants, Jews, and

infidels will hold that it is a foreign power, and anti-republican.

The carnal Jews held the Hebrew religion to be a national religion,

and because the promised Messiah came as a spiritual, not as a

temporal and national prince, they rejected him. Infidels believe

in no spiritual order, and consequently in no Catholic principle or

authority; Protestants believe in no Catholic hierarchy, and hold

that all authority in religious matters comes from God, not through

the hierarchy, but through the faithful or the people, and hence

their ministers are _called_, not _sent_. It would be useless,

therefore, to undertake to prove to one or another of these three

classes that the Catholic hierarchy is at home here, in America, as

much so as at Rome, and, since it holds not from the people, that

it is not founded on anti-republican or anti-democratic principles.

The only arguments we could use to prove it lie in an order of

thought with which they are not familiar, do not even recognize,

and to be appreciated demand a spiritual apprehension which, though

not above natural reason, is quite too high for such confirmed

secularists as ex-Judge Hurlbut and his rationalistic brethren, who

have lost all conception, not only of the supernatural order, but

of the supersensible, the intelligible, the universal reality above

individual or particular existences.

For Catholics there are two orders, the secular and the spiritual.

The secular is bound by the limitations and conditions of time and

place; the spiritual is above and independent of all such conditions

and limitations, and is universal, always and everywhere the same.

The Catholic hierarchy represents in the secular and visible world,

in the affairs of individuals and nations, this spiritual order,

on which the whole secular order depends, and which, therefore, is

an alien nowhere and at home everywhere. The Catholic hierarchy

is supernatural, not natural, and, therefore, no more a foreigner

in one nation than in another. But it is only the Catholic that

can see and understand this; it is too high and too intellectual

for non-Catholics, whose minds are turned earthward, and have lost

the habit of looking upward, and to recover it must be touched by

the quickening and elevating power of grace. We must expect them,

therefore, to vote the Catholic hierarchy to be in this country a

foreign hierarchy, although it is nowhere national, and is no more

foreign here than is God himself.

The Catholic hierarchy is not founded on democratic principles,

we grant, but there is nothing in its principles or dogmas

antagonistical to republican government, if government at all; but

since it holds not from the people, nor in any sense depends on them

for its authority, non-Catholics, who recognize no power above the

people, will vote it anti-republican, undemocratic, antagonistical to

the American system of government. It is of no use to try to persuade

them to the contrary, or to allege that it is of the very essence

and design of religion to assert the supremacy of an order which

does not hold from the people, and is above them both individually

and collectively, or to maintain in the direction and government of

human affairs the supremacy of the law of God, which all men and

nations, in both public and private matters, are bound to obey, and

which none can disobey with impunity. They will only reply that this

is repugnant to the democratic tendencies of the age, is contrary to

the free and enlightened spirit of the nineteenth century, denies

the original, absolute, and underived sovereignty of the people, and

is manifestly a return to the theocratic principle which humanity

rejects with horror. To an argument of this sort there, of course,

is no available answer. The men who use it are impervious to logic

or common sense, for they either believe in no God, or that God is

altogether like one of themselves; therefore, in no respect above

themselves.

It is very clear, then, if Judge Hurlbut's proposed amendment

to the constitution were adopted, it would be interpreted as

giving to Congress, as the Judge intends it should, the power to

suppress, according to its discretion, the Catholic hierarchy,

and, therefore, the Catholic Church in the United States, and that,

too, notwithstanding the very amendment denies to Congress the

power to prohibit to any one the free exercise of his religion! How

true it is, as the Psalmist says, "Iniquity hath lied to itself."

The enemies of the church, who are necessarily the enemies of God,

and, therefore, of the truth, are not able to frame an argument or

a law against the church that does not contradict or belie itself;

yet are they, in their own estimation, the _enlightened_ portion of

mankind, and Catholics are weak, besotted, grovelling in ignorance

and superstition.

There is little doubt that the amendment proposed by Judge Hurlbut

would, if adopted, effect the object the Evangelical sects are

conspiring with Jews and infidels to effect, so far as human power

can effect it--that is, the suppression of the Catholic Church in the

United States, and it is a bolder, more direct, and honester way of

coming at it than the fair-seeming but insidious amendment proposed

by Mr. Justice Strong, of the Supreme Court of the United States, and

his Evangelical allies. It is now well understood by non-Catholic

leaders that the growth of the church cannot be prevented or retarded

by arguments drawn from Scripture or reason, for both Scripture and

reason are found to be on her side, and dead against them. They see

very clearly that if she is left free with "an open field and fair

play," it is all over with her opponents. They must then contrive in

some way, by some means or other, to suppress the religious freedom

and equality now guaranteed by our constitution and laws, and bring

the civil law or the physical power of the state to bear against the

church and the freedom of Catholics. That it is a settled design

on the part of the leading Protestant sects to do this--and that

they are aided by Unitarians and Universalists, because they know

that Protestant orthodoxy would soon go by the board if the Catholic

Church were suppressed; by the Jews, because they hate Christianity,

and know well that Christianity and the Catholic Church stand or

fall together; and by unbelievers and secularists, because they

would abolish all religion, and they feel that they cannot effect

their purpose if the Catholic Church stands in their way--no one can

seriously doubt. We include the Jews in this conspiracy, for we have

before us the report of a remarkable discourse delivered lately in

the Hebrew synagogue at Washington, D. C., by the Rabbi Lilienthal,

of Cincinnati, entitled "First the State, then the Church," which

is directed almost wholly against the Catholic Church. We make an

extract from this discourse, longer than we can well afford room for,

but our readers will thank us for it:

"Of all the questions which demand our serious

consideration, none is of more importance than the

one, 'Shall the state or the church rule supreme?'

All over Europe, this question is mooted at present,

and threatens to assume quite formidable proportions.

There is but one empire across the ocean in which

this problem, so far, has been definitely settled by

virtue of autocratic might and power. It is Russia.

When, in the seventeenth century, the Patriarch of

Moscow had died, and the metropolitans and archbishops

of the Greek Church met for the purpose of filling

the vacancy, Peter the Great rushed with drawn sword

into their meeting, and, throwing the same on the

table, exclaimed, 'Here is your patriarch.' Since

that time the Czar is emperor and pope at once; and,

very significantly, the 'Holy Synod,' or the supreme

ecclesiastical court of Russia, is presided over by a

general, the representative of the Czar. And hence

the Emperor Nicholas used to say: State and church are

represented in me; and the motto ruling the Russian

government was autocracy, Russian nationality, and the

Greek Church.

"But everywhere else in Europe this question agitates

the old continent. In Great Britain, Gladstone works

for the enfranchisement of the church; the Thirty

nine Articles, so renowned at Oxford and Cambridge,

are going to be abolished, and High Churchmen and

Dissenters prepare themselves for the final struggle.

Italy, so long priest-ridden, has inscribed on her

national banner the glorious words, 'Religious

liberty,' and means to carry them out to the fullest

extent, in spite of all anathemas and excommunications.

Spain, though still timid and wavering, has adopted

the same policy. Austria has thrown off her concordat,

and inserted in her new constitution the same modern

principle; and the German Empire has fully recognized

the equality of all citizens, without difference of

creed or denomination, before the courts and tribunals

of resurrected and united Germany.

"But daily we hear of the demands of the clergy, made

in the interests of their church. Since the last

Œcumenical Council has proclaimed the new dogma of

Papal infallibility, the bishops want to discharge

all teachers and professors, both at the theological

seminaries and universities, who are unwilling to

subscribe to this new tenet of the Roman Church. The

Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen even asked for the names

of all those men who at the last election of members

for the German Parliament did not vote for those men

he had proposed as candidates. The government is now

bound to interfere, but nobody can tell how this coming

conflict between church and state will be decided.

"This is the aspect of the old continent. What is the

prospect in America, in our glorious and God-blessed

country? Of course, religious liberty, in the fullest

sense of the word, is the supreme law of the land. It

is the most precious gem in the diadem of our republic,

it is warranted and secured by our constitution.

"The immortal signers of the Declaration of

Independence; those modern prophets and apostles of

humanity; those statesmen who thoroughly appreciated

the bloody lessons of past history, knew but too well

what they were doing when they entirely separated

church and state, and ignored all sectarian sentiments

in the inspired documents they bequeathed to their

descendants. The denominational peace that heretofore

characterized the mighty and unequalled growth of

the young republic bears testimony to their wisdom,

foresight, and statesmanship.

"But, alas! our horizon, too, begins to be clouded. The

harmony that heretofore prevailed between the various

churches and denominations begins to be disturbed.

Then we had in the last two years the conventions

at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. The men united there

meant to insert God in our constitution, as we have

him already on our coins, by the inscription, 'In God

we trust.' They intend to christianize our country,

against the clear and emphatic spirit and letter of the

constitution. And I must leave it to the learned judge

of the Supreme Court of the United States who presided

over those meetings, to decide whether this future

Christian country hereafter shall be a Catholic or a

Protestant country.

"The Roman Catholic press and pulpit are not slow in

answering this question. With praiseworthy frankness

and manliness they declare the intentions of their

church. Father Hecker says: 'In fifteen years we will

take this country and build our institutions over the

grave of Protestantism.... There is, ere long, to

be a state religion in this country, and that state

religion is to be Roman Catholic.' Bishop O'Connor, of

Pittsburg, says: 'Religious liberty is merely endured

until the opposite can be carried into effect without

peril to the Catholic world.' The Archbishop of St.

Louis says: 'If the Catholics ever gain, which they

surely will, an immense numerical majority, religious

freedom in this country will be at an end.' And the

Pope speaks of the 'delirium of toleration, and asserts

the right to punish criminals in the order of ideas.'

"This language is plain, unequivocal, and cannot be

misinterpreted. Still, I am not an alarmist. I have too

much faith in the sound common sense of the American

people that they should barter away their political

birthright for any theological or clerical controversy.

They are too much addicted to the policy of 'a second

sober thought,' that, after having first of all taught

the human race the invaluable blessings of religious

liberty, they should discard them just now, when the

whole civilized world is imitating the glorious example

set by our great and noble sires.

"But, 'vigilance being the price of liberty,' in the

face of this assertion it is not only right, but

an imperative duty, to enlighten ourselves on this

all-important subject, so that we may take our choice,

and perform our duties as true, loyal citizens and

true, loyal Americans."

This is very much to the purpose, and if it shows that the rabbi is

no friend of Protestant Christianity, it shows that his principal

hostility is to the Catholic Church, as the body and support of

Christianity. He exults, as well he may, over the falling away from

the church of the old Catholic governments of Europe, for one of the

chief instruments in effecting that apostasy has been precisely his

Hebrew brethren, the great supporters of the anti-Catholic revolution

of modern times; and his slanders on the Catholic Church are in the

very spirit of the Evangelical Alliance, even to the false charges

he brings against distinguished individual Catholics. The assertion

that "Father Hecker says, 'In fifteen years we will take this country

and build our institutions over the grave of Protestantism,'" as that

other assertion, "There is or ought to be a state religion in this

country, and that state religion is to be Roman Catholic,'" Father

Hecker himself assures us, is false. He never did, nor with his

views ever could, say anything of the sort. Bishop O'Connor, late of

Pittsburg, never did and never could have said, "Religious liberty is

merely endured until the opposite can be carried into effect without

peril to the Catholic world." We happen to know that his views were

and are very different; and if they were not, he is too shrewd to

commit the blunder of saying anything like what is falsely attributed

to him, or to disclose such an ulterior purpose. We may say as much

of the sentiment attributed to the Archbishop of St. Louis. The

archbishop never uttered or entertained it. Something like what is

ascribed to him was said, many years ago, by Mr. Bakewell, in _The

Shepherd of the Valley_, a paper published at St. Louis, but he was

assailed by the Catholic press all over the country, and, if he did

not retract it, at least endeavored to explain it away, and to show

that he meant no such thing. The archbishop never said it, and was

no more responsible for it than was the Rabbi Lilienthal himself.

No Catholic prelate and no distinguished Catholic layman even has

ever proposed any amendment to the constitution in regard to the

relations of church and state in this country, or has expressed any

wish to have the existing constitutional relations changed, or in

any respect modified. The church is satisfied with them, and only

asks that they be faithfully observed. She opposes the separation of

church and state in the sense of releasing the state from all moral

and religious obligations, for that would imply the subjection of the

church to the state, and prove the grave of religious freedom and

independence, which she always and everywhere asserts with all her

energy against kings, emperors, nobilities, and peoples--against Jew,

Pagan, Mussulman, schismatic, and heretic, and it is for this that

they conspire against her and seek her destruction.

The rabbi says, "First the state, then the church," which is as

absurd as to say, "First man, then God." The state represents

simply a human authority, while the church, or the synagogue even,

represents--the first for the Catholic, the second for the Jew--the

sovereignty of God, or the divine authority in human affairs, and the

rabbi in his doctrine is false alike to Moses and to Christ, and as

little of an orthodox Jew as he is of a Christian believer. Yet he

agrees perfectly with Judge Hurlbut and Dr. Bellows in asserting the

supremacy of the state or secular order, and the subordination of the

spiritual order. We do not know whether the rabbi means to approve

or censure the assumption, by Peter the Great, of the headship of

the Russian Church and his government of it by the sword; but Peter

only acted on the principle, "First the state, then the church," and

the slavery of the Russian Church to the state is only an inevitable

consequence of that principle or maxim. The Russian Church, governed

by the Holy Synod, itself governed by the Czar, presents a lively

image of the abject position religion would be compelled to hold in

every country if the doctrine of the total separation of church and

state, and the independence and supremacy of the state, advocated by

one or another of the three men we are criticising, were to prevail

and to be embodied in the civil code.

But let this pass. It is clear that the rabbi, and therefore the

Jews, so far as he represents them, are to be included in the

great conspiracy against the liberty and equality of Catholics, or

religious liberty recognized and guaranteed by the American states.

Catholics are to be put down and their church suppressed by the

strong arm of power. To prepare the American people for this proposed

revolution in the American system, this suppression of religious

liberty, a system of gross misrepresentation of Catholic faith and

practice, of misstatements, calumnious charges, and downright lying

respecting the church, is resorted to and persisted in as it was by

the reformers in the sixteenth century. "Lie, lie stoutly," Voltaire

said, though it was said long before him; "something will stick." We

do not like to say this, but truth will not permit us to soften our

statement or to use milder terms. There is nothing too harsh or too

false for the anti-Catholic press and the anti-Catholic preachers

and lecturers to say of our holy religion, and nothing can be more

unlike the Catholic Church than their pretended representations of

her--too unlike, indeed, even to be called caricatures, for they

catch not one of her features. Even when the anti-Catholic writers

and speakers tell facts about Catholics or in the history of the

church, they so tell them as to distort the truth and to produce the

effect of falsehood, or draw inferences from them wholly unwarranted.

We must, then, be excused if we sometimes call the systematic

misrepresentation of our religion, our church, and ourselves by its

true and expressive name, even though it may seem harsh and impolite.

The batteries they discharge against the church are not to be

silenced by bouquets of roses.

The public has become too well informed as to Catholic doctrines and

usages to permit the repetition, with much effect, of many of the old

charges and calumnies. Only the very ignorant can be made to believe

that the church is the Babylonian sorceress who makes the nations

drunk with the wine of her fornications; that she is "the mystery of

iniquity"; that the Pope is "the man of sin," or Antichrist; that

our nunneries are brothels, and their vaults are filled with the

skeletons of murdered infants, of which Luther discoursed to his

friends with so much unction in his Tischreden over his pot of beer.

These things are a little out of date, and do not gain the ready

credence they once did. The age is all for liberty, for progress,

for enlightenment; so the anti-Catholic tactics change to suit the

times. James I. of England, as did the politicians of France opposed

to the Ligue, charged the church with being hostile to monarchy and

the divine right of kings. The charge now is that she is opposed to

republicanism, and denies the divine right of the people, or, more

strictly, of the demagogues. She is said to be a spiritual despotism,

the foster-mother of ignorance and superstition, the enemy of science

and of progress, of intelligence and liberty, individual and social,

civil and religious. Her religious houses are dens of cruelty and

tyranny, and if she is permitted to continue and spread her peculiar

institutions over this country, American democracy will be destroyed,

and American liberty be but a memory, etc., etc.

The cry is not now, the truth is in danger, the Gospel is in danger,

religion is in danger, but the republic is in danger, democracy is

in danger, liberty is in danger. The church, the moment she gets the

power, will, it is argued, abolish our political system, establish

a monarchy, abolish religious liberty, and cut the throats of all

heretics and infidels, or send them to the stake to be consumed in

a fire of green wood, as Calvin did Michael Servetus. And there

are not wanting fools enough to believe it or dishonest men enough

to pretend to believe it when they do not, though it is evident

that the republic is likely to pass away, if things go on in the

political world as they are now going, and be succeeded by anarchy

or a military despotism long before the majority of the people will

cease to war against the church as anti-democratic. But the point

to be noted here is that all these charges assume the supremacy of

the secular order, and allege not that the church is false, is not

the church of God, but that she is hostile to democracy or democratic

institutions; in other words, that she does not conform to popular

opinion, for democracy is nothing but popular opinion erected into

law. Now, as we do not believe that popular opinion, inconstant as

the wind, is infallible, or that the secular order is supreme, we are

not sure that it would be a fatal objection to the church even if

what is alleged against her were well founded. The arguments against

the church of this sort are drawn from too low a level to command any

intelligent respect, and they are all based on a false assumption.

Politics are not higher than religion; the state is not above the

church; the secular order is not above the spiritual; and it is only

atheism that can assert the contrary. To a terrible extent, the

supremacy of the secular is the doctrine of our age and country; but

Catholics hold it to be both false and dangerous, as incompatible

with the liberty and independence of religion, with natural morality,

and even with the existence of natural society, as it is with the

sovereignty of God. It is the doctrine of the European revolutionists

and communists, and is sapping the life and threatening the very

existence of our American republicanism--has already reduced our

government to be little else than an agency for promoting the private

interests of business men, bankers, manufacturers, and railroad

corporations. Our elections are becoming a wretched farce, for the

monopolists govern the government, let what party may succeed at the

polls. The State governments cannot control them, and the General

Government just as little.

We will not so dishonor the church or insult religion as to undertake

to refute these popular charges against her, and to prove that her

authority is not incompatible with the existence and salutary working

of republican government. The charges are addressed to ignorance and

prejudice; we take higher ground, and maintain that civil society

can no more dispense with the church, than the body with the soul.

The secular is insufficient for itself, and needs the informing life

and vigor of the spiritual. The political history of France since

1682, especially since 1789, proves it to all men who are capable

of tracing effects to their causes. There is no form of government

more in need of the church than the republican, founded on the modern

doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the maxim, the majority must

rule. The habit of regarding power as emanating from the mass, as

derived from low to high, tends itself to debase the mind, to destroy

that respect for law, and that reverence for authority, without which

no government performs in a peaceable and orderly way its legitimate

functions. The American people see nothing divine, nothing sacred

and inviolable, in their government; they regard law as an emanation

of their own will, as their own creation, and what creator can feel

himself bound to reverence and obey his own creature? We need the

church to consecrate the government, to give the law a spiritual

sanction, to create in us habits of reverence, of submission,

and docility, and to impress us with the conviction that civil

obedience is a moral duty, and that we must be loyal to legitimate

authority for conscience' sake. We need the church to teach us that

in obeying the laws not repugnant to the divine law, we are obeying

not men, which is slavery, but God, which is freedom, and the very

principle of all freedom. We need her to create in us high and holy

aspirations, to produce in us those high and disinterested virtues,

without which civil government is impotent for good, and powerful

only for evil. No man who believes not in the sovereignty of truth,

in the supremacy of right, and feels it not his duty to obey it at

all hazards, has the temper demanded in a republic, and only the

church can create it.

A government built on interest, however enlightened, on sentiment,

however charming, or public opinion, however just, is a house built

on the sand. It rests on nothing fixed and permanent, is without

stability or efficiency, and tends always to fall and bury the people

in its ruins. We see this in our own political history. It would be

difficult to find a government more corrupt than ours, that taxes

the people more heavily, or that does less for the public good, the

advantages we had at the start being taken into the account. The

good that has been done, the great things accomplished, have been

accomplished by the people in spite of the government, and our record

as a nation can hardly put that of Prussia or Russia to shame.

We do not choose to dwell on this aspect of the case, although much

more might be said. We love our country, have been bred to love

republicanism, and have the success of the American experiment at

heart. The evils which the liberals charge to the union of church

and state, and hold the church responsible for, spring, as every

impartial and intelligent student of history knows, not from

the union but from the separation of church and state, and the

unremitting efforts of the civil power to usurp the functions of

the spiritual power, and to make the church the accomplice of its

policy. The terrible struggles of the pope and emperor in the middle

ages had this cause and no other. The pope simply sought to maintain

against the emperor the freedom and independence of the church, the

kingdom of God on earth, that is, true religious liberty. It is to

the partial, in some countries the complete, triumph of the secular

over the spiritual, that we must attribute the unsettled, disorderly,

and revolutionary state of contemporary society throughout the

civilized world, the hatred or contempt of authority both divine

and human, the depression of religion, the decline of intellectual

greatness, the substitution of opinion for faith, a sickly

sentimentalism for a manly and robust piety, free-loveism or divorce

_ad libitum_ for Christian marriage, and the general abasement of

character.

The evils are very real, but the more perfect divorce of the state

from the church would not cure or lessen, but only aggravate and

intensify them; nay, would to all human foresight render them

incurable. The state without religion or moral obligation is impotent

to redress social evils or to elevate society, and Protestantism,

which holds from the people, and depends for its very breath of

life on popular opinion, is no less impotent than the state.

Protestantism, having retained some elements of religion from the

church, may, we readily concede, do something to retard the fall

of a nation that accepts it, but when a Protestant nation has once

fallen, become morally and politically corrupt, rotten to the core,

it has no power to restore it; for it has no principle of life to

infuse into it above and beyond that which it already has. Resting

on human authority, holding from the nation or people, its life is

only the national life itself; and, of course, when the national life

grows weak, its own life grows weak, and when the national life

is extinct, its own life becomes extinct with it. Cut off from the

church of God, and therefore from Him who is "the way, the truth, and

the life," it cannot draw new supplies of life from the Fountain of

Life itself, with which to revive and reinvigorate the fallen nation.

This is wherefore there is no hope for our republic under

Protestantism. There has been a sad falling-off in the virtue,

the honesty, the integrity, the chastity, and public spirit of

our people in the last fifty years. The old habits formed under

Catholic discipline and influences are wearing out, if not worn

out; intellectual culture may be more general, though even

that may be questioned, but it is less generous, thorough, and

profound; meeting-houses may be increased in greater proportion

than the population itself, but theology is less studied--is less

intellectual, less scientific, and is more superficial; and religion

has less hold on the conscience, and less influence on life, public,

private, or domestic; and we may say, generally, that in all save

what belongs to the material order, our republic has a downward

tendency. Now, since Protestantism has nothing more or higher than

the republic, and no recuperative power, how, then, can it possibly

arrest this downward tendency and turn it upward, and save the

nation? Archimedes wanted something whereon to stand outside of the

world in order to move it. This Protestantism has not, for it rests

on the world, and has nothing above the world or outside of it, and

in fact is only the world itself. To every one who understands the

great law of mechanic force, which has its analogue in the great

principle of moral or spiritual dynamics, it is clear that the hope

of the republic is not and cannot be in Protestantism, and there is

just as little in the civil order, for that, divorced from the church

and without any moral obligation, is precisely that which needs

saving. The union of the various Protestant sects in one organic

body, if it were possible, would avail nothing; for the whole would

be only the sum of the parts, and the parts having no supermundane

life, the whole could have none.

Hence we say that whatever hope there is for our republic is in the

growth and predominance of the Catholic Church in the minds and

hearts of the American people; and there is a well-grounded hope for

it only in the prospect that she may before it is too late become the

church of the great majority. The church has what Archimedes wanted,

and Protestantism has not--the whereon to stand outside and above the

world. She lives a life which is not derived from the life of the

world, and is in communion with the Source of life itself, whence

she may be constantly drawing fresh supplies, and infusing into the

nation a life above the national life in its best estate, and which,

infused into the nation, becomes for it a recuperative energy, and

enables it to arrest its downward tendency, and to ascend to a new

and higher life. It is not without a reason, then, founded in the

nature of things, that we tell our countrymen that Protestantism may

ruin the republic, but cannot save it, any more than it can the soul

of the individual; and that, instead of crying out against the church

like madmen, as hostile to the republic, they should rather turn

their eyes toward her as their only source of help, and learn that

she can and will save the republic, if they will only allow her to do

it.

Yet we urge not this as the motive for accepting the teaching of

the church and submitting to her authority and discipline. Our Lord

says to us, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all

these things shall be added unto you," but he does not bid us or

permit us to seek the kingdom of God and his justice for the sake of

"these things," or the _adjicienda_; he forbids us to be solicitous

for them, since it is for them that the heathen are solicitous. The

only motive for a man to become a Catholic, to believe what she

teaches and to do what she commands, is that she is the kingdom of

God on earth, and that it is only in so doing that he can possess

"his justice," please God, or attain to eternal life. Christ did

not come, as a temporal prince, to found--as the carnal Jews,

misinterpreting the prophecies, expected--an earthly kingdom, or to

create an earthly paradise; but he came as a spiritual prince to

establish the reign of his Father on earth in all human affairs, and

over all men and nations, and whatever temporal good is secured is

not the end or reason of his kingdom, but is simply incidental to

it. It is no reason why I should or should not be a Catholic because

the church favors or does not favor one or another particular theory

or constitution of civil government, but the fact that she does

not favor a particular form of civil polity, if it be a fact, is

sufficient reason why I should not favor it, for it proves that such

form is repugnant to the sovereignty of God and the supremacy of his

law. As a matter of fact, however, the church has never condemned

any particular form of civil polity or erected one form or another

into a Catholic dogma, and a man may be a monarchist, a republican,

or a democrat, as he pleases, and at the same time be a good and

irreproachable Catholic, if he hold the political power subordinate

to the divine sovereignty.

The church is necessary to sustain a republican form of government,

but it is also necessary to sustain any other form, as a wise, just,

and efficient civil government. The error of those we are combating

is not in that they are democrats or anti-democrats, but in holding

that the state or secular order is sufficient for itself, can stand

of itself without the aid of religion or the church, has no need of

the spiritual, and has in fact the right to brush religion aside as

an impertinent intermeddler whenever it comes in its way, or seeks

to dictate or influence its policy. This is a gross error, condemned

by all religion, all philosophy, and all experience. It is the old

epicurean error that excludes the divine authority from the direction

or control of human affairs, and in its delirium sings,

"Let the gods go to sleep up above us."

It is at bottom pure atheism, nothing more, nothing less. It is a

pure absurdity. Can the creation stand without the creator? Can the

contingent subsist without the necessary? Can the body live and

perform its functions without the soul which is its principle of

life; the dependent without that on which it depends? In the whole

history of the world, you will not find an instance of a purely

atheistical state, or a state held to be completely divorced from

the spiritual order. There is no instance in all history of a state

without some sort of religion, even an established religion, or

religion which the state recognizes as its supreme law, and does its

best or worst to enforce. We here, as well as in England, as well as

at any time in any European country, have an established religion

which the law protects and enforces on all its citizens, only it is a

mutilated religion, a religion without dogmas, and called morality.

If not so, whence is it the law punishes murder or arson, and forbids

polygamy, or the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes? Even Jacobins

erect their jacobinism into a religion, and make it obligatory on the

state to persecute, to exterminate all who dare oppose it. Have we

not seen it despoil the Holy See of its independence and possessions,

confiscate the goods of the church, exile holy bishops from their

sees and their country in Italy, and within a few weeks shoot down

the Archbishop of Paris and a large number of priests and religious,

suspend public worship, desecrate and plunder the churches, and

banish all religion but their jacobinism from the schools? No state

tolerates any religion hostile to its own established religion, and

the most intolerant and cruel persecutors in the world are precisely

those who clamor loudest for religious liberty.

There is no such thing as a complete divorce of church and state

practicable in any country on earth. The only question is, Shall the

state be informed and directed by the infallible and holy church of

God, or by the synagogue of Satan? No man who is at all competent

to pass a judgment on the question but agrees with the Syllabus

in condemning not the distinction, but the separation of church

and state; but the forms of the union of the two powers, whose

harmonious action is necessary to the normal state of society, may

vary according to circumstances. In countries where the state refuses

to recognize frankly and fully the freedom and independence of the

spiritual order, it may be necessary to regulate the relation of

church and state by concordats; in others, where the state recognizes

the independence of the spiritual order, and holds itself bound

to protect the rights of the religion adopted by its citizens,

as hitherto with us, no concordats are necessary, for the state

does not claim any competence in spirituals. In this country the

relation between the two powers has, with a few exceptions, been

satisfactory, and the church has been free. But there is on foot a

formidable conspiracy against her freedom, and it is beginning to be

maintained pretty determinedly that the majority of the people, being

Protestant, and the people being the state, have the right and the

duty as the state to sustain Protestantism, and outlaw and suppress

the church.

FOOTNOTE:

[156] 1. _Church and State in America._ A Discourse given at

Washington, D. C., at the installation of Rev. Frederic Hinckley as

Pastor of the Unitarian Church, January 25, 1871. By Rev. Henry W.

Bellows, D.D. Washington, D. C.: Philp & Solomons. 1871. 8vo, pp. 22.

2. _A Secular View of Religion in the State, and of the Bible in the

Public Schools._ By E. P. Hurlbut. Albany: Munsell. 1870. 8vo, pp. 55.

DRAMATIC MORALISTS IN SPANISH AMERICA.

The truth is slowly dawning, at least to curious minds, that the

people of the southern half of our New World have tastes not

dissimilar to our own. Indeed, they seek other arts than those of

revolution, and, here and there, have other stages and actors than

those which represent the _pronunciamiento_, with all its malicious

bombast and insignificant "sound and fury." We can count poets,

novelists, painters, sculptors, scientists in the ranks of the most

distinguished men of our nearest sister republic. Cuba, too, rejoices

in the genius of her philosophic scholar, Caballero de la Luz, and of

her poets, Heredia and Gertrudiz de Avellañeda, with the same spirit

which Mexico brings to her admiration of the scientific versatility

of Siguenza, the quaint ideality of Sor Juana Inez, and the literary

culture of Carpio and Pesado. Nevertheless, such facts as these have

aided but little in forming the common estimate of Spanish-American

peoples, who are to some of us scarcely more than a Bedouin rabble

fighting problematic wild-beasts in the shape of pronouncers, and

struggling through clouds of desert-dust and battle-smoke to the

light of freedom. That great rude reserve of race, the Indians,

without which the business of one-half the continent could not be

carried on, seems to be swept out of our moral consideration as with

a broom; yet we must think hopefully of a race which has produced

an artist so extraordinary as Cabrera and a ruler so enduring and

persistent as Juarez--hopefully, at all events, of their mere

abilities, if mother church does not teach us to look with a

shrewder and kindlier eye upon their moral capabilities. In more than

one country of Spanish America we find Indians among presidents,

judges, governors, congressmen, writers, artists; and this being the

case, historically or actually, why should it be a matter of surprise

that Spanish America, with whatever Old World culture she may possess

in union with native aptitude, should have some claims upon our

attention on the score of taste and intelligence? Part of these

claims we propose to set forth.

The present writer has sat in the orderly theatres of Vera Cruz and

Mexico, and seen performances substantially as good as those of

our northern capitals. The _Zarzuelas_, or operettas, of Barbieri

and Gatzambide were as pleasant in 1868-69 to their hearers in the

southern republic as the French comic opera to New Yorkers, and

nevertheless seemed decent and spirited; besides, the Mexicans had

the good fortune to enjoy Gatzambide's personal direction of his

_Zarzuelas_, and Gatzambide (now deceased) was one of the most

popular musicians of Spain. Another celebrity the Mexicans honored

in the person of José Valero, a gentlemanlike Spanish actor, whose

superior in versatile genius as tragedian and comedian it would

be difficult to find anywhere. Entertainments were plentiful in

Moctezuma's city, though subsisting, so to speak, upon diminished

rations. Round about all these flickering pleasures flowed the

strange dark tide of Mexican life--its ragged multitude, its

concealed miseries, its settled and common melancholy, not to

be dissipated by any class of illusions, not to be shaken off in

a day, or a year, or any brief term of years. Nevertheless, the

misfortunes of a war-worn people found as tasteful and respectable

a solace as their theatres could afford. Their scholars were even

encouraged to revive and celebrate some ancient glories of the

Mexican stage; and at the opening of a season they crowned the bust

of one of the fathers of the Spanish drama, whom with reason they

regard as among the greatest of the small band of very eminent

Mexicans. This laurelled bust was but one of a number to be seen in

the various theatres, in several instances perpetuating the memory

of Mexico's own dramatic authors. On the occasion referred to, poems

by well-known poets--and, among the rest, if the writer remembers

correctly, an eloquent composition by the highly-esteemed blind poet,

Juan Valle--preluded the revival of that celebrated comedy, _La

Verdad Sospechosa_, or, The Truth Suspected.

JUAN RUIZ DE ALARCON.

The author of this play was Alarcon, that thoughtful writer who, on

the Spanish stage, ranks with Lope, Calderon, Moreto, and Tirso.

Strange as it may appear to those who doubt whether any good can

come out of Mexico, he was born and bred in that mysterious country.

What his countrymen do not know of their great artist, Cabrera, they

are able to tell of their chief literary glory--namely, the place

and date of his baptism. Documents found in the royal university of

Mexico established the several facts that Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y

Mendoza was baptized in that city on the 2d day of October, 1572,

and received the grade of licentiate or lawyer from the university.

It was for some time asserted that he was born at Tasco (for whose

church Cabrera is said to have painted extraordinary works); but

Chalco, not far from the capital, has also laid claim to the honor

of his birth. He is represented as short, ugly, and humpbacked. To

improve his fortunes, he sought the literary life of Madrid, but his

first efforts were deemed of little importance. By the year 1621 he

had written eight acted comedies, of which _Las Paredes Oyen_ (The

Walls Hear) is esteemed the best, as also one of the finest in any

language. In spite of his physical imperfections his genius won him

admirers, socially as well as otherwise. In 1628, he became clerk

to the Council of the Indies, and held his office till his death in

1639; so that it seems our author was a contemporary of Shakespeare,

Webster, Jonson, and other great lights of the English drama. His

comedies are lauded as forming a system of practical philosophy,

inasmuch as they give a delightful verification of the proverbial

wisdom of his time, and preach capital sermons from common texts.

"Luck and Labor," "The World's Favors," "No Evil that does not come

for Good," "Before you Marry see what you are about," "The Truth made

Suspicious," are the suggestive titles of some of his dramas, which

appear to have lost nothing of their peculiar excellence by pointing

morals. It was Alarcon who said:

To kill an enemy is argument

Of fearing him; but to despise and spare him

Is greater chastisement, for while he lives

He is a witness of his own defeat.

He that kills, victory abbreviates,

And he that pardons makes it the more great,

As meanwhile that the conquered lives

The conqueror goes on conquering.

To give to comedy a conscience and a purpose is the distinguishing

design of Alarcon; but, while the public of Madrid never failed to

perceive the moral of his humor, they could yet heartily laugh at the

wit of his dialogues and the genuine comicality of his situations.

In his plays cool reason walked hand in hand with sentiment and

pleasantry, as they do in some of the most admired comedies of our

own stage. The delight with which the Mexicans witnessed _La Verdad

Sospechosa_ proved that to Alarcon belonged not merely the ingenuity

by which men are amused, but something of that magic by which their

own wit and humor are excited. Alarcon could give logic to a whim,

a fancy, or a passion. In the _Prueba de las Promesas_ his lover

expostulates:

If Beauty's faithful lover I have been,

Esteeming though despised; loving, abhorred;

What law allows to thee, what text approves

That thou shouldst hate me because I do love thee?

An apology for woman made by a servant in _Todo es Ventura_ (Luck is

Everything) may be translated thus:

What is it that we most condemn in maids?

Inconstancy of mind? We taught them so.

The love of money? It's a thing in taste--

Or let that righteous fellow throw a stone

Who is not guilty of the self-same fault.

Of being easy? Well, what must they do,

If no man perseveres and all get tired

At the fourth day of trying? Of being hard?

Why do we thus complain when we, too, all

Run to extremes? If difficult our suit

We hate it, and if easy we despise.

In _Ganar Amigos_ (To Gain Friends) Don Fernando has killed the

brother of Don Fadrique, and seeks and obtains refuge with the

latter, who, however, does not know him. Don Fadrique, though at

length made aware of the truth, faithfully keeps the pledge he has

given the slayer of his brother. Seeing this, Don Fernando gratefully

exclaims:

The earth whereon thou stand'st shall be my altar.

_Fadrique._ Rise, sir; give me no thanks, as do I not

This deed for you, but for my honor's self,

For I have plighted unto you my word.

In the comedy of _Mudarse por Mejorarse_ (To Change for the Better;

or, more literally, to Change in order to Better One's Self), a

certain Don Garcia, who was to marry Doña Clara, falls in love with

her niece Leonor; whence this dialogue:

_Leonor._ Is it, perchance, Don Garcia,

The custom in Madrid to fall in love

With niece and aunt at one and the same time?

_Garcia._ At least, if so divine a niece comes there

As you, the custom is to leave the aunt.

_Leonor._ A bad one, then.

_Garcia._ It is not to be called

Bad, if such matter be the occasion.

_Leonor._ How can a reason be for changefulness?

_Garcia._ One's self to better is the best of reasons.

_Leonor._ Well, there's a law of constancy: to what

Doth it oblige, whereunto doth it reach,

If it be right one beauty to forswear

For a greater? Constancy's not to love

Unchangeably the love more beautiful;

To love the best what firmness do we need?

He constant is who doth despise the more

Happy occasion.

_Garcia._ I confess, sweet lady

That's to be constant, but it's to be foolish.

_Leonor._ Then cannot you in one who'd be discreet

Have confidence, as change is to be excused

By gain of fairer subject?

_Garcia._ It is clear.

_Leonor._ Well, be it so; and for I think thee, sir,

A man judicious, and thou leav'st my aunt

To make thyself the better so by me,

Pray do excuse me of thy love, since must

I give thy suit resistance till I know

If I've another and a fairer niece.

The discreet Leonor, compromised by the entangling suit of Don

Garcia, is compelled to admit the attentions of a gallant and rich

marquis, with whom at last she falls in love. The following passage

explains the rest:

_Garcia._ How, cruel one,

Hast changed so soon?

_Leonor._ Yes, for the better.

_Mencia_ (_aside_). She gave't him, then, with his own flower.

_Garcia._ Ungrateful, is not thy disdain enough

Without the aggravation--making him,

The marquis, better?

_Leonor._ Wilt deny the improvement?

Although in blood thou'rt equal, yet between

Little and ample fortune, and between

Your worship and your lordship--?

_Garcia._ Yea, I grant:

But what effect hast given thy words,

Thy promise, tyrant, if thou hast all changed

By taking better subject? Where's constancy

If thou hast liked me only when thou couldst not

_Better_ thyself? She only constant is

Who doth despise the opportunity.

_Leonor._ I do confess to thee, Don Garcia,

That's to be constant, but it's to be foolish.

Here is the "retort courteous" in its most charming humor. The

gallant grace and wit of these dialogues are evidence of the original

art with which Alarcon could make his comedy a study of life, and

compel his auditors to think somewhat after they ceased to laugh.

This is the function of eminent high comedy, though we may not ask

that it shall elaborate a severe or intrusive moral, and though we

admit its possession, as in Shakespeare, of the liveliest poetic

qualities. Another passage, this time from the famous _Verdad

Sospechosa_, wherein Don Beltran reprimands his son, Don Garcia, for

the vice of habitual lying, will further elucidate the method of

Alarcon:

_Beltran._ Are you a gentleman, Garcia?

_Garcia._ --I believe

I am your son.

_Beltran._ --And is it, then, enough,

To be my son to be a gentleman?

_Garcia._ I think so, sir.

_Beltran._ --What a mistaken thought!

Consists in acting like a gentleman

To be one. What gave birth to noble houses!

The illustrious deeds of their first authors, sir.

Without consideration of their births, the deeds

Of humble men honored their heirs. 'Tis doing

Good or ill makes gentleman or villain.

_Garcia._ That deeds give nobleness I'll not deny,

But who will say birth does not also give it?

_Beltran._ Well, then, if honor can be gained by him

Who was born without it, is't not certain that,

Vice versa, he can lose it who was born

With it?

_Garcia._ --'Tis true.

_Beltran._ --Then if you basely act,

Although my son, no longer you will be

A gentleman. So if your habits shame

You here in town, an ancient crest will not

Signify, nor noble ancestors serve.

What is't report says to me? That your lies

Are all the talk of Salamanca. Now,

If't affronts noble or plebeian but

To _tell_ him that he lies, what is't to lie

Itself? If honorless I live the while

On him who gave the lie I take not full

Revenge--is your sword long enough or breast

So stout that you esteem yourself all able

To have revenge when all the city says

You lie? Is't possible a man can have

Such abject thoughts that unto vice he can

Live subject without pleasure, without gain?

A morbid pleasure have the sensual,

The power of money draws the covetous;

The taste of viands have the gluttonous;

A purpose and a pastime hath the gambler;

The homicide his hate, the thief his aim;

Fame with ambition cheers the warrior;

In short, doth every vice some pleasure give

Or profit--but for lying, what remains

But infamy and contempt?

Who could preach with more wit a brief sermon like this than Alarcon?

It is no small honor to the dramatist born in Mexico that the great

Corneille, who, if we may credit the biographers of Alarcon, partly

translated and partly imitated _La Verdad Sospechosa_ in his famous

_Menteur_, could avow that he would give two of his best plays to

have invented the happy argument of the Spanish original. Molière

and Voltaire were also among the admirers of the Spanish comedy,

which Corneille at first judged to be the work of Lope de Vega. Of

the general merits of Alarcon, the following estimate by his German

critic, Schack, which we find in a Mexican notice of the dramatist,

will doubtless suffice: "Happy in painting comic characters in order

to chastise vice, as in the invention and development of heroes to

make virtue adorable; rapid in action, sober in ornament; inferior

to Lope in tender respect of feminine creations, to Moreto in

liveliest comedy, to Firso in travesty, to Calderon in grandeur and

stage effect, he excelled all of them in the variety and perfection

of his figures, in the tact of managing them, in equality of style,

in carefulness of versification, in correctness of language." To

this large and discriminating praise we may add George Ticknor's

comprehensive dictum: "On the whole, he is to be ranked with the

very best Spanish dramatists during the best period of the National

Theatre."

SOR JUANA INEZ DE LA CRUZ.

It would not be proper to dismiss from the list of Spanish-American

dramatic writers Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, although the subjects to

which this pious woman yielded her inventive imagination were mainly

or wholly religious. She wrote, be it remembered, in that remarkable

seventeenth century when a muse of religion walked through the scenes

of the stage as well as through the gardens of the convent. Then

were the patriarchs and apostles, the prophets and saints, the chief

personages of a peculiar drama; and events and circumstances of the

divine tragedy inspired such compositions as the Loas and Autos. It

is upon one of these latter compositions that her merit as a dramatic

writer rests; and we are glad to confirm in great part an opinion of

her genius hitherto expressed by us, by here recalling the judgment

of that eminent European critic of Spanish literature, Bouterwek,

the more especially as our own Spanish scholar, Ticknor, seems to

have inflicted such ungracious disparagement upon the subject of our

notice: "Much as Inez de la Cruz was deficient in real cultivation,"

says Bouterwek, "her productions are eminently superior to the

ordinary standard of female poetry.... The poems of Inez de la

Cruz breathe a sort of masculine spirit. This poetic nun possessed

more fancy and wit than sentimental enthusiasm, and whenever she

began to invent her creations were on a bold and great scale. Her

poems are of very unequal merit, and are all deficient in critical

cultivation. But in facility of invention and versification Inez de

la Cruz was _not inferior to Lope de Vega_; and yet she by no means

courted literary fame.... In her dramatic works the vigor of her

imagination is particularly conspicuous. The collection of her poems

contains no comedies properly so-called, but it comprises a series

of boldly conceived preludes (loas) full of allegorical invention,

and it concludes with a long allegorical auto, which is _superior to

any of the similar productions of Lope de Vega_. It is entitled _El

Divino Narciso_, a name by which the author designates the heavenly

bridegroom.... It would be impossible to give a brief and at the same

time intelligible sketch of this extraordinary drama. With regard to

composition, it is very unequal; in some respects offending by its

bad taste, and in others charming by its boldness. Many of its scenes

are so beautifully and romantically constructed that the reader is

compelled to render homage to the genius of the poetess, while at the

same time he cannot but regret the pitch of extravagance to which

ideas really poetic are carried. There is one peculiarly fine scene,

in which human nature, in the shape of a nymph, seeks her beloved,

the real Narcissus, or the Christian Saviour." The pastoral passage,

which in our notice of the writings of Sor Juana we laid before our

readers, would seem to justify the best praises of our literary

historian, Bouterwek. Ticknor, on the other hand, speaks of her as

a remarkable woman, and not as a remarkable poetess; and, upon the

whole, our thanks for the appreciative reburnishing of the ancient

fame of an American genius--which, had it shone in Massachusetts

three hundred years ago, would be deemed a very rare jewel among

Northern scholars--are due rather to the European Bouterwek than

the American Ticknor. The latter observes that she was born at

Guipuzcoa; her Mexican biographer says at San Miguel de Nepantla, not

far from the city of Mexico, one of whose convents she seems to have

directed latterly. Time, place, the inferior standard of feminine

culture, and the prevalence of a false poetic school, may account for

Sor Juana's defects; for the rest, the issue (a large one) is between

Bouterwek and Ticknor.

EDWARD GOROSTIZA.

After Alarcon, the principal lights of the actual Mexican stage are

Gorostiza, Calderon, and Galvan; and, indeed, whatever original

triumph that stage has enjoyed is almost if not quite limited to

these few excellent though not glorious names. We cannot with

propriety name that extraordinary woman, Sor Juana Inez de la

Cruz, in the list of Mexico's dramatists, although, along with

other poetry, she wrote some religious pieces in dramatic form.

Nevertheless, the credit which remains to the literature of the

country, after its few phenomenal names are omitted, is not

inappreciable. Concerning Gorostiza, Madame Calderon de la Barca

wrote: "Don José Eduardo Gorostiza, a native of Vera Cruz, is the son

of a Spanish officer, and when very young went to Spain, where he was

known politically as a liberal. He was distinguished as a writer of

theatrical pieces, which have been and still are very popular. One of

his pieces which we saw the other evening at the theatre--_Con Tigo

Pan y Cebolla_ (With Thee, Bread and Onions)--is delightful." Let us

add to Madame Calderon's brief notice that Gorostiza won the rank of

lieutenant-colonel in the war against Napoleon; that in 1823, while

an exile from Spain in London, he wrote for the _Edinburgh Review_;

and that since then, as minister to England and to the United States,

and as secretary of state and finance, he has been eminent in the

politics of his native land. In 1836, he was made intendant-general

of the army, and during the war between Mexico and the United States

took an active and heroic part in the defence of Churubusco. His

efforts as a director of the poor-house, as a friend of education,

and as the founder of a house of correction, are also deemed worthy

of record. He died in 1851, at the age of sixty-two.

The best known of Gorostiza's comedies are those called _The Intimate

Friend_, _Last Year's Fashions_, _Don Dieguito_, and _Pardon for

All_, the last being mentioned by his biographer as celebrated. In

the play of _Don Dieguito_, which may serve as well as any other

to exhibit the character of Gorostiza's plots, Don Anselmo, a

rich uncle, sends his nephew and heir, Don Dieguito, to Madrid to

complete his education. While there, Dieguito falls in love with

Doña Adelaida, whose father, Don Cleto, is a lawyer. Don Anselmo

goes to Madrid to attend the wedding of his nephew, but does not

like the family of his son's _fiancée_, and, accordingly, he schemes

to break off the match. The mother, Doña Maria, sees from a worldly

point of view the great advantage of her daughter's marriage with Don

Dieguito. But now Anselmo tells her that _he_ intends to marry, which

excites her fear that his nephew will inherit nothing from him. She,

therefore, proposes to her husband that Doña Adelaida shall marry

the uncle, Anselmo, instead of the nephew, Dieguito. Don Simplicio,

a friend of Don Cleto, endeavors to effect a general reconciliation

of interests, and bring about the marriage of the young couple; but,

finding that father and mother alike wish to break off the match,

joins them in insulting the apparently hapless Dieguito. Don Anselmo

at once perceives that his nephew has been fooled, and that the

family of his betrothed would be glad to cast off Dieguito in order

to capture his uncle's wealth. He concludes, therefore, to make his

exit on the very day of the proposed marriage, taking with him his

disenchanted nephew. When the day arrives, he announces that he has

been ruined by the shipwreck of a vessel from Vera Cruz, and that he

is compelled to return to his old business of selling pork, beans,

chocolate, and sausages to make good his loss. Don Dieguito, though

asked to return to his allegiance as a lover, declares that he is no

fool, and prefers a wife who will not speculate at the expense of

good faith, but will look after her children. As Don Anselmo has told

the family of Doña Adelaida that his principal loss is in a cargo of

chocolate, that spirited young lady vows she will not drink chocolate

again; and the play ends in amusing recriminations.

FERNANDO CALDERON.

The next of our dramatists, Fernando Calderon, was born in 1809,

and died at the age of thirty-six, having been a colonel, a state

legislator, a magistrate, and the secretary of the government of

Zacatecas, as well as an industrious writer. The most striking of

his dramas are: _The Tourney_, _Anne Boleyn_, and _The Return of

the Crusader_, which, says one of his admirers, are full of noble

and chivalrous sentiments and spirited action. Calderon's talent

was nothing if not dramatic; for even his lyrics, and especially

his _Soldier of Liberty_, are characterized by a personal fire and

animation. His plays, remarkable for warmth of sentiment, and his

poems, chiefly lyrical, gained for him not only in Mexico, but in

other Spanish-American republics, a degree of favor not often enjoyed

by writers in the southern part of the New World. One of his most

admired passages is the soliloquy of Isabella in _The Tourney_:

And this is life. Seeing the sable bier

Profoundest cowardice the mortal moves,

When is the tomb the sole asylum where

True peace abides. Where is the life that knows

Not weight of woe? For ever in torment,

For ever in tears, so runs our human fate

From infancy unto decrepit age.

Child, man, and most unfortunate womankind,

Pursue the magic and illusory shade

Which they call happiness, yet never find.

The gray-beard sad, complaining of his age,

Youth would enjoy; but, imbecile, forgets

The tortures that afflict his junior.

Life is a fever, a remediless fever,

It is a frenzy violent and mad.

Alas! its pleasures pass us like a flash,

Whence follows gloom of soul with rain of tears

Yet ever springs desire and fervid hope

To cheat our souls with what can never be.

Care and vacuity, and ephemeral joy.

These make themselves our poor reality.

So fades our youth, and our declining life's

A dismal light of undeception cast

Upon the narrow confines of the tomb....

The black cloth ... and the coffin miserable ...

Thus darkly flows the tide of life. Alas!

My end draws near, for which my spirit hopes,

As the wrecked sailor for a happy shore.

O cause of all my mourning my heart's balm,

Not thou, not even thou, wouldst me console:

None grieve for one that is already dead.

Albert! Albert! shalt thou o'er my grave

Pour out thy tears until our patient souls

Unite within the pure eternity.

With good reason is this thoughtful and feeling soliloquy prized by

Calderon's countrymen, whose vicissitudes have taught them peculiar

sympathy with the tristful mood to which he lends expression. The

tone and style of the passage are tragic in a most dignified sense,

and reflect much credit upon Mexican literature. A supplement to

the views of mortality and eternity set forth in _The Tourney_ is

contained in a fragment written by Calderon in 1825; and as it may

interest a Northern public to know what a Mexican poet thinks of the

future state, we extract from it these hopeful lines:

Cold and coward spirits

Shun the thought of death

With unbelieving fear,

Vain-thinking that within the grave

Have love and joy their end.

Dullards! who believe not

The eternity divine!

The disembodied spirit

Ascends to regions high

Of freedom and of bliss,

And love's sweet sentiment,

A seed sown in our souls,

Doubt not God's hand doth guard it

And lead it up to him.

The soul but breathes in love,

Which is its essence and its food,

And without love would die.

RODRIGUEZ GALVAN.

More praiseworthy, in some respects, than any of the modern poets of

Mexico, is Rodriguez Galvan, the last of our trio of dramatists. He

died in 1842, in his twenty-sixth year, after having without social

advantages acquired a high reputation as a lyrical and dramatic

writer. "At eleven years," says his biographer, "he was placed under

the care of his uncle, in a book-store at the capital," and there his

nightly studies made up for the impediments of his daily occupation,

and "his happy disposition and love for work supplied the want of

masters and fortune." An epical fragment entitled "The Fallen Angel,"

and his poems, "The Tomb," and "The Girandole," together with his

dramas, "Muñoz" and "The Viceroy's Favorite," are mentioned as the

most noted of his productions. A specimen of his dramatic style is

the following piece of satire on the modern stage, from _El Angel de

la Guarda_:

Let's think upon my comedy, and on

Its plan. Hard, cruel hard, on all who are

Romantic. Here's a coxcomb come from Rome

Or Paris; next, an old man, ignorant,

Foolish, his friend a most judicious fellow;

A fine romantic maid who weeps and shrieks

In Turkish; then, three hundred obscene gags

To make the people laugh; a prudish dame

Who speaks French badly. Here's the knot.

And the conclusion? Why, a whistle from

The second prompter.

--Or, I will erect

Like to a gallows a cadaverous drama

Shock-full of hangings and adulteries,

In which _the seven infants_ shall be shown

The children of a king of Acapulco.

This nauseous food I'll call a play-romance,

And I'll divide it into four square parts,

Which further I'll divide in five full acts,

The scene in Aragon, the fifteenth century.

My sources shall be dramas of Dumas

And Hugo, the immoral ones of course.

What does it matter? I translate them mine.

A stupid fellow comes out and drinks in

Half of a tub of poison--gives the rest

Straight to his maid, because a vain old man

Comes with a trumpet-tongue to blow and blow

In his poor ears. The ignorant hind don't know

For two hours whether he is dead or not,

And in the place of calling upon God

He makes a long discourse. This is the way

They make our plays, and in this age of taste

Calderon, Moreto, Alarcon, Lope,

Are only mules; and in the theatre

Their works shed slumber by the bucketful.

It would require, perhaps, an intimate knowledge of the Mexican stage

as it was thirty years ago to appreciate the special application of

these lines; but it is plain that the young dramatist conceived a

genuine contempt for a bloodthirsty and iniquitous drama. What, then,

must a writer of his promise and aspirations have felt regarding

that more bitter melodrama acted all round him?--what must any

poet with a tolerable amount of contemplative wisdom have thought

of that political madness of which Mexico has been so long the

victim? Certainly, it robbed them, as it robbed others, of peace

and recompense; but war respects the stage even when it destroys

better institutions, and it is probable that the dramatic culture of

Mexico is as well preserved as any of which it can boast. To Galvan

is ascribed the first effective production on the Mexican stage of

Mexican subjects. Whether the following fable bears a more than

ordinary social meaning, we cannot say; but it is an instance of the

poet's lively manner:

THE SELFISH DOG.

With pike and lantern at sundown,

A grim night-watchman of the town

Follows a lean dog as he flees

By order of the high police,

Who persecute the dogs and tramps,

And take up drinking, murdering scamps,

But tolerate the robbers. Well,

What matter? I've my tale to tell.

The starveling, feeling insecure,

Because a stranger, poor, demure,

Said, "Feet, what do I want you for?"

So, in a princely courtyard door,

Without "Good-day!" or e'en explaining,

"I must go in because it's raining,"

Or sending up his card at all,

As etiquette requires on call,

Or does not--really, I don't know--

He rudely entered. So I'd go

Myself. But a cur thereabout

Barked hard at him, "Get out! get out!

This is a noble's palace, sir,

A place not meet for starving cur."

Our friend replies, "My fine-tailed brother,

But for this night--" "No, no!" says t'other.

"I am pursued!" "Then leave this ground."

"I'm dying with hunger." "Wretched hound,

How can a fine, superior person

Live tail to tail with a base cur's son?"

And insult after insult giving,

He barks with fury past believing,

This high-born, proud, patrician growler,

And bullies the plebeian prowler.

Well, the sad creature, turning tail,

Escaped, for wonder, else would fail

My story like a peacock shorn.

Where now's my moral? Hark, nor scorn:

Soon after this a dog forlorn

Lost himself in the chase, and met

Some wolves whose teeth were sharply set,

And quite prepared to munch and gobble him.

All sorts of fearful fancies trouble him,

When, in this plight, his eye sees plain in

The kennel of the other canine.

Lo, what an accident! But these

Accidents pass for verities

And mightily the public please.

Now the patrician barks for aid,

And t'other dog puts out his head,

But, seeing 'tis the courtier,

He shuts the door, that low-bred cur,

And growls: "Stop there! didst ever see

A dog of noble family

With a poor cur keep company?"

With this the hungry wolves arrive

And eat the grandee dog alive.

Has the tale pleased you? No? And why?

I've spent an hour and half to try,

Hunting up rhymes--so scarce in Spanish.

Some opulent fellow, proud and clannish

Spelling through this little story

(For reading's not a common glory

Among the magnates of the day),

Will, doubtless, furiously say:

"See what sad insipidity!"

But some poor dog in misery

Will raise his head, perhaps, and sigh,

"The simple fabulist don't lie."

Now friend and critic both have I.

There is nothing in Galvan's story except his way of telling it,

which is certainly vivacious; but we esteem it for some flashes of

satirical meaning cast upon a state of society of whose animal life

the "hungry dog" is so commonplace an object. Not, however, in his

plays, which, if we may credit his Mexican critic, sometimes reveal a

certain immaturity, did Galvan find his very happiest expression. He

wrote the most touching and charming lyric which, after much search,

we have been able to find in Mexican literature. It was, we are led

to think, in 1842, when, as one of a "legation extraordinary" to

South America, he sailed for Havana, there to die of fever, that he

wrote the tender "Farewell to Mexico" which his countrymen love to

repeat:

Upon the deck with longing

I watch the lonely main,

And on my fate I ponder

And muse in doubt and pain

To thee I yield my fortunes,

O Holy Maid above!

Adieu, my own dear country,

Adieu, thou land of love!

Far in the western waters

The red sun hides its light,

And now at last 'tis buried

Beneath the billows' might.

The roaring sea announces

The weary day's decline:

Adieu, beloved country,

Adieu, thou land of mine!

AVELLAÑEDA AND MILANES.

There is more of this excellent lyric, but we let it pass in order to

bring to a moment's attention a few of the most distinguished Cuban

and South American dramatic writers. We nowhere discern the evidence

of a luxurious dramatic growth among our tropical contemporaries; but

as, in the most advanced and varied circles of our own literature,

the drama holds but an inferior modern regard, we cannot deem this

fact as peculiarly indicative. Almost chief among the writers of Cuba

is Doña Avellañeda, to whom we owe the novels of _Sab_, the _Baroness

of Youx_, the American romance of _Guatimozin_, and the _Undine of

the Blue Lake_. She wrote four dramas, one of which, her tragedy of

_Alfonso Munio_, is said to have made her famous. For one of her

poems she received a crown of gold laurels from the lyceum of Madrid,

and her Catholic devotion was signally manifested by her poem of the

_Cross_ and her Biblical drama of _Saul_. Surely, a most prolific,

industrious, and vigorous writer was La Avellañeda, as her countrymen

admiringly call her, notwithstanding her Isabellist attachments.

To the name of Avellañeda let us add that of José Jacinto Milanes

as among the ornaments of Cuban literature. His drama of _Conde

Alarcos_, founded upon the celebrated Spanish tradition of the

name, is noted by Ticknor for its passionate energy. Milanes seemed

to delight in the themes and scenes of his own country; but his

usefulness as a writer was cut short, we are informed, by a wasting

infirmity.

SANSON, MAGARINOS, AND MARQUEZ.