Many would not dare to believe in a miracle nowadays, not even if it

happened to themselves. They take their ground beforehand. Since

miracles are impossible, any special one must of necessity be

false--either a fraud or a delusion. They know from the beginning what

the result of inquiring into this one must be--why give themselves

unnecessary trouble? Such minds choose their own side, and implicitly

choose the consequences that follow.

Others pretend to examine, but do it with a resolute and unshakable

predetermination that this must _not_ be found out to be a miracle.

They foster a prejudice which may blind their eyes to the light; and

they, too, make themselves equally responsible for their conclusion

and its consequences.

But if any one--Catholic, Protestant, or Rationalist--will examine it

seriously and candidly, no matter how closely and patiently--nay, the

more closely and patiently, the more surely--he will come to the same

inevitable conclusion to which such an examination has heretofore led

so many other candid and intelligent inquirers: _Digitus Dei est hic_:

The Finger of God is here.

----------

THE NEW SCHOOL OF HISTORY.

If the ghost of Tacitus could return from the Acherontic shades, learn

the English language, and spend a few weeks in reading the most

popular modern works in that branch of letters of which he was in his

day the conspicuous ornament, he would rend his toga in despair, and

mourn over the ruin of one of the noblest of the sciences. The

“dignity of history” was not an unmeaning phrase when kings, consuls,

and military commanders moved with stately pace through the polished

pages, and uttered the most heroic of sentiments in the most formal of

addresses. Ancient authors would have deemed it the grossest indecency

to quote familiar language from the lips of any historical character,

or to let the world imagine that men who concerned themselves with 550

the destinies of states, behaved even in moments of relaxation like

the men who buy and sell in the shops, and confine their cares to

commonplace domestic matters. And yet what could be more absurd than

to suppose that generals addressed their armies amid the heat of

battle in a speech regularly compounded of exordium, argument,

exhortation, and peroration; or that great men wore the grand manner

to bed with them, and put on civic crowns before they washed their

faces in the morning? It is not so very many years since Cato used to

be represented on the English stage in a powdered wig and a

dress-sword, which was not more incongruous than the spectacle

presented by all the old statesmen and fighting characters of

antiquity, mouthing orations, and posing themselves in the best of the

classical histories. Perhaps it was something to be thankful for that,

in the eclipse of learning during the disturbed middle ages, the art

of writing history after the heroic manner was lost. The chroniclers

of feudal times devoted infinite pains to the reeord of facts--as well

as the record of many things that were not facts--but knew little of

the graces of literary composition, and cared nothing for the dignity

of history. They stripped off the heavy robes, and showed us the

deformed and clumsy figures underneath. Lacking literary culture and

the fine art of discrimination, they left us only the bare materials

of history instead of the historical structure itself. Industrious but

injudicious collectors, they were sometimes amusingly garrulous,

sometimes provokingly uninteresting; but their labors were invaluable,

and modern scholars owe them a debt which can never be repaid. It is

only within a hundred years that English writers have tried to combine

the merits of the ancient and the mediæval schools, discarding the

cumbrous and delusive garments in which Herodotus and Livy used to

wrap up the Muse Clio, and draping the bare skeletons of the annalists

with comely mantles. There was a portentous dulness in most of the

earlier essays in the reviving art, scarcely interrupted until Hume

embodied his sceptical philosophy in a history of England, and the

infidel Gibbon threw a lurid splendor over the chronicles of the

declining empire. Both these eminent writers brought to their work an

elegance of style worthy of the classical period, and a vigor of

thought so different from the unreflecting industry of their plodding

predecessors, that the falsehood underlying their narrative was not

readily perceived, or was too easily pardoned. Boldness of theory, and

in Gibbon a sardonic wit, added interest to the charms of the

well-told story. But Hume and Gibbon, as well as many of their less

distinguished contemporaries, labored under a radically wrong theory.

They accommodated historical narrative to the illustration of

preconceived principles, instead of deducing the principles from the

facts; and left us, consequently, volumes of sophistical argument,

rather than chronicles of actual occurrences and pictures of actual

society.

It was not until Macaulay arose in England, and Prescott in the United

States, that the modern school of historical writing was fairly

developed. Macaulay explained his own theory when he said that “a

perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to

make his narrative affecting and picturesque, yet must control it so

absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds,

and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.” 551

William H. Prescott, though he sometimes trusted authorities who did

not deserve his confidence, and was swayed by religious prejudice and

an inability to comprehend the spirit of Catholic faith, came nearer

to the perfection of Macaulay’s ideal than any previous writer. His

imagination adorned the romantic tales of conquest and adventure in

the New World with a splendor till then unknown; yet no one could

charge that he had been led away by the temptations of a too luxuriant

fancy, or had heightened the effect of his narrative by a single touch

unauthorized in the musty chronicles from which he drew his material.

Prescott’s earlier histories are stories in which the actors stand

forth with as much distinctness, and incidents follow one another with

as much rapidity and as close connection, as in a well-constructed

novel. In his unfinished _Philip II._, he entered upon a wider field,

which required a different treatment. It was no longer sufficient to

tell a story well; he had to paint the manners of an age, the life and

character of a nation, and to unravel the network of intrigue which

constitutes the political history of Europe during a long and stirring

period of time. That he did this, so far as his labors extended, with

consummate art, no American reader needs to be told. But the system

which he pursued was carried to a greater length by Macaulay--the best

type, upon the whole, of the new school of historians of whom we

purposed speaking in this article. Macaulay assumed that history ought

to show us not merely the revolutions of dynasties, the clash of

armies, and the intrigues of cabinets, but the daily life and

conversation of all ranks of the people, from the prince to the

peasant. It ought to teach us their habits of thought and their mode

of speech. It ought to open for us their private homes, their

workshops, and their churches. It ought to depict national habits and

character, or it could not explain national tendencies and

aspirations. To do this, it must pick up a multitude of little things

which the older writers thought beneath the dignity of history. It

must invade the province of the poet and the novelist. Otherwise, he

who would understand the reign of King James must read half of it in

Hume and half in _The Fortunes of Nigel_.[116] Macaulay made many

mistakes in the execution of this noble plan. He picked up too many

things which were not so much undignified as untrustworthy. The

sketches of society which he drew with such a masterly hand may have

been true in their general effect; but he blundered in details.

Besides, he was as hot a partisan as Hume, as inveterate a theorist as

even the author of _The Decline and Fall_.

Whatever his mistakes and shortcomings, Macaulay rendered an

invaluable service to literature by the impetus which his brilliant

example gave to the new principles of historical composition. He may

be said to have dealt the finishing blow to the old style, and shown

us how a minute, faithful, and vivacious story ought to be set before

the world--how the historian must draw his materials, not only from

state-paper offices and formal chronicles, but from gossiping diaries,

ballads, pamphlets, and all other sources in which are preserved

traces of the condition of society and the domestic annals of the

people. The period which he undertook to illustrate offered peculiar

advantages for the development of his plan. It was a period when a

great change was taking place in English customs and ways of thought. 552

The revolution, which not only exchanged one dynasty for another, but

metamorphosed the very system of English government, merely followed

in the path of a remarkable intellectual and social transformation,

without which the political reversal would have been impossible. The

events of the reign of James II. could not be explained under the old

plan of writing history on stilts. They were incomprehensible except

by one who could mingle familiarly with the English people, and learn

by what steps they had reached their new departure. Only one period in

the history of England showed changes of equal importance. That was

the period which witnessed England’s apostasy from the Catholic faith;

and it is the period which one of the latest and most brilliant of

English historians has chosen for the subject of a work planned (if

not executed) after Macaulay’s model.

Mr. James Anthony Froude attempted to trace the development of the

English nation, from the day of Henry’s formal separation from the

communion of the Holy See to the final establishment of Protestant

ascendency at the death of Elizabeth. This is by no means the task he

has accomplished, but it is the task he set himself at the beginning

of his work. He purposed to show the processes by which a people,

devotedly and even heroically faithful to the Roman See, became first

schismatic and then heretical; how their character under the change of

faith took on a new color; how the foundations of the English

supremacy over Ireland and Scotland were laid in blood and crime; and

how the maritime ascendency which has lasted three hundred years was

established by the daring and enterprise of English sailors during the

latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. Never had historian a more tempting

theme. If Mr. Froude had been a man of philosophical spirit, acute

insight, industry, and literary honesty, he might have produced a work

that for brilliancy would have rivalled Macaulay’s, and for dramatic

interest would have been almost unequalled in our language. There was

no lack of material. Since Hume and Lingard--one the most misleading,

the other the driest of modern English historians--had treated the

same period, an immense store of records and official documents had

become accessible to scholars. The British State-Paper Office abounded

with historic wealth which the earlier writers did not know. The

archives of Simancas disclosed secrets long unsuspected, and

unravelled mysteries that had long baffled investigators. And from a

thousand sources new light had been thrown upon the social condition

of England, new illustrations given of the tendency of English

thought, new explanations offered of the development of English

strength and English character.

In his first volume, Mr. Froude seemed to appreciate the nature of his

task, and to go about it with something of the proper spirit. He set

before us a lifelike picture of England in the early part of Henry’s

reign, and displayed admirable art in reproducing the manners, the

conversation, and the tendencies of the common people, as well as the

superficial characteristics of the chief actors in the historical

drama. But even in the first volume he showed the glaring faults which

vitiated all his later labors, and, increasing as the work went on,

made his history at last one of the worst that the present generation

has produced. Fired with the zeal of a blind partisan, he forgot all

his earlier purposes and all his earlier pictorial art in the

enthusiasm of a fierce religious bigotry. It became his object to 553

describe a conflict for the possession of England between the powers

of darkness and the powers of light. On the one hand stood the Pope of

Rome and his agents, Catharine of Aragon, Wolsey, Mary Tudor, Philip

of Spain, and the Queen of Scots. On the other, arrayed beneath the

banner of civil and religious liberty, fought those bright beings,

Henry VIII., Anne Boleyn, and Queen Elizabeth. Naturally, when

Elizabeth at last triumphed in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Mr.

Froude declared the battle over, and dropped his unfinished,

ill-proportioned story. One qualification he certainly had. He shrank

from no paradox. He carried his theory boldly over the most serious

obstacles, and took even the nastiest fences in the life of Henry

without an instant’s hesitation. The most fervent Anglicans were

amazed at Mr. Froude’s admiration for the bluff, carnal-minded king,

and wondered how he was to justify the new views of history which he

set forth with such alluring boldness. It was not long before he

taught them his method. “It often seems to me,” says Mr. Froude, in

one of his collected essays, “as if history was like a child’s box of

letters, with which we can spell any word we please.” Of course, when

the historian takes the liberty of leaving out facts which do not

please him, disarranging sequences which conflict with his

preconceived theories, and giving his own peculiar coloring to

incidents without caring what coloring actually belongs to them, it is

indeed easy enough to make history spell whatever he pleases. At the

very outset, Mr. Froude had an opportunity to try his skill in

accommodating facts to theories. He began his story with Henry’s

project for a divorce; and his starting-point was the assumption that

the king’s scruples were thoroughly conscientious, and no thought was

given to Anne while he believed himself legally married to Catharine.

To maintain this, the historian resorted to his characteristic

vices--suppression and misrepresentation. He concealed the origin of

Henry’s intercourse with Anne Boleyn, bringing her on the stage some

years too late, with the air of one introducing a fresh arrival; and

he grossly distorted the contemporary records from which he professed

to quote. The king’s distaste for Catharine, he says, had risen to its

worst dimensions before he ever saw Anne Boleyn. He adds that her

first appearance at court was in 1525--which is an error, for she came

to the court in 1522; and yet it was not until 1527 that we find Henry

agitating the question of a divorce. That Mistress Anne during these

five years was otherwise employed than in fascinating his majesty, Mr.

Froude apparently wishes us to infer from the story that she was

engaged to Lord Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland.

Lord Percy, to quote our author’s words, “was in the household of

Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long

romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was

ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself.” This, if

Cavendish said it, would indeed afford a fair presumption that Anne

was not at that time (the date is given by other authorities as 1524

or 1525) the object of the royal attentions. But Cavendish really says

something very different. He declared that _the king sent for Lord

Northumberland, and ordered him to interrupt the affair_. Mr. Froude

could not help seeing this statement if he read Cavendish at all, and

we do not understand how he is to be acquitted of gross and

intentional misrepresentation in making his authority convey a meaning 554

diametrically opposed to the one intended. After this, Mr. Froude goes

on with the story of the divorce as if Anne had no existence, and she

does not appear again upon the scene until the stage has been nearly

cleared for her.

This is a fair specimen of literary dishonesty or recklessness from

the first volume. Later instalments of the work, especially those

devoted to the Queen of Scots, have been dissected by an able hand in

the pages of this magazine. The series of papers in which Mr. James F.

Meline examined in our columns Froude’s account of Mary Stuart, have

now been incorporated with much additional matter in a volume entitled

_Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Latest English Historian_.[117] No more

thorough scarification of a literary offender has been published

within our recollection. Mr. Meline has traced the historian’s

authorities with admirable patience, disclosed his falsifications, his

misconceptions, his suppressions, and his interpolations, and utterly

demolished the case which Elizabeth’s advocate made against the

unfortunate Mary. It is common to meet with uneducated people who

cannot tell a story correctly, or repeat the words of a conversation

without grossly distorting their meaning. Partly from defects of

memory, partly from an intellectual deficiency which prevents them

from apprehending things exactly as they are, such persons invariably

misreport what they have seen and heard. What such people are to

society, Mr. Froude seems to be to history. The _Saturday Review_ says

that he has not “fully grasped the nature of inverted commas.” If he

quotes a state paper, he leaves out essential passages, and inserts

statements which rest upon no authority but his own. He gives his

conjectures as if they were recorded facts. He disingenuously combines

unconnected facts so as to bear out his private conjectures.

These are serious charges to bring against a writer of history; but

they are all proved by Mr. Meline’s book. We do not purpose reviewing

the whole story of the Queen of Scots, or reviving the endless

controversy upon her innocence, so soon after the task has been

performed in the pages of THE CATHOLIC WORLD by the author of the

savage little volume now before us. But we shall select and arrange

from this record a few specimens of Mr. Froude’s sins, that our

readers may judge for themselves how little claim this latest English

history has to an honorable place on their library shelves.

1. Mr. Froude begins early to prepare our minds for Mary’s imputed

profligacy. “She was brought up,” he says, “amidst the political

iniquities of the court of Catharine de Medicis.” The fact is that

Mary never was at the court of Catharine de Medicis at all. Catharine

had no court, no influence, no position in history, until after Mary

had left France. And, besides, Mary and Catharine cordially detested

each other.

2. On the authority of Knox’s _History of the Reformation_, he relates

that Knox had labored to save the Earl of Murray from the dangerous

fascinations of his sister Mary, “but Murray had only been angry at

his interference, and ‘they spake not familiarlie for more than a year

and a half.’” But Knox gives an entirely different version of the

quarrel. He writes that he had urged Murray to legalize by act of the

parliament the confession of faith as the doctrine of the Church of 555

Scotland, but Murray was more intent upon his private interests--“the

erledom of Murray needed confirmation, and many things were to be

ratified that concerned the help of friends and servants--and the

matter fell so hote betwixt the Erie of Murray and John Knox, that

familiarlie after that time they spack nott together more than a year

and a half.” There is nothing about Mary’s influence over her brother;

the influence was all on the other side.

3. Mr. Froude assumes to quote from a dispatch of Randolph’s to Cecil

a description of Mary’s luxurious habits. “Without illness or

imagination of it, she would lounge for days in bed, rising only at

night for dancing or music; and there she reclined with some light

delicate French robe carelessly draped about her, surrounded by her

ladies, her council, and her courtiers, receiving ambassadors and

transacting business of state. It was in this condition that Randolph

found her.” (_Randolph to Cecil_, Sept. 4, 1563.) There is no such

description in the dispatch. On the contrary, Mary is represented at

this period, both by Randolph and by other authorities, as

industrious, active, energetic, and capable, but at the same time in

bad health.

4. Mr. Froude thus travesties Randolph’s account of the return of

Bothwell (1565): “Suddenly, unlooked for and uninvited, the evil

spirit of the storm, the Earl of Bothwell, reappeared at Mary’s court.

She disclaimed all share in his return; he was still attainted; yet

there he stood--none daring to lift a hand against him--proud,

insolent, and dangerous.” And he adds that “the Earl of Murray, at the

expense of forfeiting the last remains of his influence over his

sister, summoned Bothwell to answer at Edinburgh a charge of high

treason.” What Randolph really says is this: “The Queen misliketh

Bothwell’s coming home, and has summoned him to undergo the law or be

proclaimed a rebel.” It was the Queen therefore, and not Murray, who

“summoned him to answer.” Moreover, Bothwell did not appear at court,

but sought refuge among his vassals in Liddesdale.

5. Mr. Froude speaks of Lennox having “gathered about him a knot of

wild and desperate youths--Cassilis, Eglinton, Montgomery, and

Bothwell.” If he had read his authority (Randolph) with decent care,

he would have seen that these were not the friends of Lennox, but, on

the contrary, the strongest dependence of Murray and Argyle

_against_ Lennox. Moreover, Eglinton and Montgomery are one and the

same person.

6. A blunder which has already excited some discussion is Mr Froude’s

statement, on the authority of a letter from Randolph to Cecil,

October 5, 1565, that Mary, “deaf to advice as she had been to

menace,” said she would have no peace till she had Murray’s or

Chatelherault’s head.” There is no such letter. It appears, however,

from a letter of Randolph’s, dated October 4, that Mary was “not only

uncertain as to what she should do, but inclined to clement measures,

and so undecided as to hope that matters could be arranged.” The

document to which Mr. Froude refers is a letter from the Earl of

Bedford, who was not at Mary’s court, but at Alnwick, on the English

side of the border, and who consequently had no such opportunities as

Randolph for knowing the temper of the Scottish Queen. But even

Bedford does not say what Mr. Froude reports. The earl merely relates

the substance of information brought back from the rebel camp by one

of his officers. According to this man, Murray and the other rebel

lords are dissatisfied with the little that England is doing to help 556

them, and _they_ say, “There is no talk of peace with that Queen, but

that she will first have a head of the duke or of the Earl of Murray.”

7. One instance of Mr. Froude’s incorrigible propensity to blunder in

that peculiar manner which is vulgarly called “going off at

half-cock,” deserves to be mentioned, not for its importance, but

because it is amusing. He describes Mary on a furious night-ride of

“twenty miles in two hours,” at the end of which she wrote “with her

own hand” a letter to Elizabeth, “fierce, dauntless, and haughty,”

“the strokes thick, and slightly uneven from excitement, but strong,

firm, and without sign of trembling.” It is a pity to spoil such a

picturesque passage; but the very letter which Mr. Froude seems to

have examined with such care contains the Queen’s apology for

_not_ writing it with her own hand, because she was “so tired and ill

at ease,” and mentions, moreover, that the twenty-miles ride occupied

five hours, not two.

8. In his account of the murder of Darnley, Mr. Froude pursues a

singularly devious course, through which his reviewer follows him with

inimitable pertinacity. The historian accepts without reserve the most

notoriously untrustworthy authorities, distorts evidence, throws in a

multitude of artful suggestions, and suppresses in a manner that is

downright dishonest every circumstance that tells in Mary’s favor. We

have no space to recapitulate here the numberless blunders and

perversions of which he is convicted by Mr. Meline; but some of them

are too ludicrous to be passed over. For instance, Mr. Froude finds it

suspicious that Mary should have “preferred to believe” that she

herself was the object of the lords’ conspiracy, though a dispatch from

Paris had conveyed “a message to her from Catharine de Medicis that

_her husband’s life was in danger_.” The message was not from

Catharine de Medicis, but from the Spanish ambassador in France, and

wanted her to “take heed to herself,” for there was “some notable

enterprise in hand against her.” Not a word is said of her husband.

9. It is again mentioned, as confirmation of her guilt, that “she sent

for none of the absent noblemen to protect her,” and that “Murray was

within reach, but she did not seem to desire his presence.” Now, Mr.

Froude’s own authorities show that Mary _did_ send for many of the

absent noblemen, and in particular that she twice sent for Murray, who

would not come.

10. When Elizabeth sent Killigrew to Scotland to inquire into the

circumstances of the murder, _Murray_ (as Killigrew himself relates)

entertained the English ambassador at dinner, and invited to meet him

Huntly, Argyle, Bothwell, and Maitland--all of them among the

murderers of Darnley. This was strong circumstantial evidence of

Murray’s guilt. Mr. Froude accordingly (referring to Killigrew as his

authority) suppresses all mention of Murray, who gave the dinner and

presided at it, and states that Killigrew “was entertained at dinner

by the clique who had attended her [Mary] to Seton”--thus implying

that Mary, instead of Murray, was in league with Bothwell and the

others to prevent his getting at the truth. The whole substance of

Killigrew’s letter is most outrageously misrepresented. Mr. Meline

gives the original and the false version side by side.

But we must pause. We cannot follow Mr. Meline in his admirable

discussion of the authenticity of the famous casket letters, or his

exposure of the extraordinary misstatements with which Mr. Froude has 557

loaded this portion of his book. With the question of the innocence of

the Queen of Scots, we are not now concerned. Our business is rather

with the innocence of the Queen of Scots’ most notorious modern

accuser. And whatever may be thought of the honesty of Mr. Froude’s

motives, whether we decide that he blunders through sheer incapacity,

or lies with malice aforethought, we believe candid students will

admit that his reputation as a historical writer has been utterly

ruined, and that his work will be remembered hereafter as a disastrous

literary failure.

[116] See Macaulay’s _Essay on History_.

[117] _Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Latest English

Historian._ By James F. Meline. New York: The Catholic

Publication Society.

----------

VENITE ADOREMUS.

It comes to us, as a messenger of peace and love, a memory of home, a

voice of the past, with the echo of unforgotten joys, and the

_refrain_ of ever-silent sorrows; with the sacred thoughts of

that most touching feast, Christmas, of that most tender mystery, the

Infant-God; with the human thoughts of friends gone from us and loved

ones far away--_Venite adoremus_!

It conjures up pictures before us of a happy, ignorant childhood,

peaceful as a meadow-brook--a young life passed amid smiling hills,

and fruitful vales, and woods where the honeysuckle twines round the

old gnarled hawthorns, and the oak spreads its green, trembling tent

over carpets of wild hyacinths. There, before the mind’s eye, rises

the vision of a house, gray and picturesque, a broad, lovely terrace,

and oriel windows looking down and beyond it into a sloping orchard.

At the back, leaning on the grassy bank, dotted by firs and elms,

lilacs and guelder-rose, and fragrant syringa and gold-blooming

laburnum, stands a gaunt old tower, clad in dark purple-berried ivy--a

ghost tower, the haunt of mystery, overshadowing the little cloister

and the tall, gray roof of the chapel. But it is winter, and I have

been forgetting that the _Venite adoremus_ is a snow-flower of devotion,

a “Christmas rose,” not a red June rose, regal in its dusky, velvety

mantle of richest, warmest color; for now we hear the chant of the

holy Christmas song, and the tapers are lighted on the stone-carved

altar, where, on each side of the niched reredos, white angels kneel

with their eternal torches, ever still, ever adoring, like some

heavenly exile bound to earth’s temples by a divine spell, of which

art holds the key. Above, the Annunciation is blazoned forth on the

pictured window; but you cannot see it now, the night blots out its

fairness. Angels, again, on the frescoed wall, bear scrolls, whose

silent voices chant a ceaseless _Gloria_ to the Babe in the

tabernacle--_Laudamus te_, _Benedicimus te_, _Adoramus te_, _Glorificamus

te_--and the rest of the narrow chapel is dark and voiceless, save

where a taper glimmers on the desk of the little, humble harmonium,

round which stand reverentially the few singers, whose only guerdon is

the smile of the unseen but not unfelt God. Dark and dusky red are

the hangings that tapestry the wall, bearing over their surface thick 558

growths of the white fleur-de-lis; while above the simple benches of

stained wood, at the back, rises a long, dark gallery. It was there I

heard the first Midnight Mass I ever heard in my life.

_Venite adoremus!_ It brings back visions of a mother’s patient,

doting love; of a gathering of friends; of pleasant, hushed talk of

ghosts and spectres; of long, dark corridors, where the wind moaned

like a soul in pain; of oriel windows, many-paned, through which came

the distant sound of young owls hooting mournfully in the snow-covered

plantations.

How kind a mother the church is! Are not all her feasts as many days

of remembrances given to the past joys of home? Are they not a

faultless calendar of our hopes and fears for years past? When the

children, with earnest, unsuspicious gravity, debated upon the

arrangements of the “crib,” what excitement! what interest! When the

parents and the old retainers closed one room in mysterious silence,

and decorated the glittering Christmas-tree, what wonderment! what

whisperings!--and on the revelation, what delight! When piles of

blankets and warm clothing were distributed among the poor, what

curiosity to see which child got the petticoat Eleanor hemmed, or the

jacket Frances put together!

All this is in the voice of the _Venite adoremus_ as it sounds faintly

now through a half-opened door, a Sunday surprise in a house hardly

given to much solemnity--a house far away from the old gabled

homestead and the snow-veiled chapel-roof.

But it has other scenes to show, other memories to waken. It tells of

a Southern church, gaudy and bedizened, full of frivolous worshippers,

whose Christmas vigil has been kept in the ball-room they have

hurriedly left to listen to the operatic orchestra preparing its

musical pyrotechnics for the dread moment of the Elevation. But pass

we on to more congenial remembrances. It tells of a simple,

white-washed chamber, a prison-ward in the Holy City, where reclaimed

and forgiven women are worshipping the divine Babe, who has wrought

their salvation and sent them in their hour of need to the arms of his

earthly angels, the Sisters of Mercy; it tells of a high dignitary of

the Vatican, leaving his purple magnificence to come among the city

prisons, and spend with them a more edifying Christmas than the

display of the public churches promised his humble devotion. _Venite

adoremus!_ It swells up in sweet woman-tones from some recess of

faithful memory, but the halls through which the hymn was borne that

Christmas night echo only to the heavy tramp of the sentinel now, if

not to worse, the blasphemies of the ungodly trooper.

It brings the mediæval glories of St. Mark’s to the mind of a lover of

that unique basilica--that petrified dream of the heavenly Jerusalem,

with its curious barbaric wealth, its golden mosaics, its Byzantine

spoils of victories that were not merely the victories of civilization

over decay, but the triumphs of faith over superstition. The glorious

church is full, dark masses of human beings sway about its

broad-reaching nave, and here and there, like fire-flies, like

heart-stars, shine the little _cerini_--the rope-like coils of wax,

the picturesque forerunners of garish gas-jets and dream-dispelling

coronas. The Mass in Venice is not a real Midnight Mass, however,

since, by special permission, it is celebrated at five o’clock in the

afternoon of the vigil. It is sad to hear profane music even in this

consecrated spot, whose dim, suggestive beauty seems to inherit the 559

vague and solemn halo of the veiled lamps of the Holy of Holies in the

temple of Jerusalem; but corrupted taste certainly does reign in the

Venetian basilica, and a Mass full of modern Italian _fioritura_ is

annually performed in it at the festival of Christmas. Still, the mind

sees beyond the unhappy aberrations of the modern Euterpe out into the

long vista of past centuries, when graver and nobler strains rang

through the low-vaulted temple, and the stern and silent heads of the

state came in procession to grace the triumph of the new-born Saviour.

From Venice to Geneva there is a wide gulf, but the _Venite adoremus_

bridges over that.

Once again Christmas comes round, and the same world-wide chant rises

in the now half-converted stronghold of Calvinism. It leads us towards

the older town, far from the noisy port hotels, into a winding

labyrinth of steep, ill-paved streets, through rows of old houses,

every one of which seems to have a history of its own, and whose

old-fashioned windows, and wide portals opening into silent

court-yards, remind one of time-worn parchment bindings round poems

for ever new. But is this analogy not a little true? for is not the

poem of the human heart as old and as changeless as the ancient

romances of long-dead bards, and yet do we ever tire of its

repetition, any more than we are weary of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of

Homer and Virgil?

_Venite adoremus!_ It lures us on to a dark church, dedicated to St.

Germain, where there is nothing beautiful to strike the eye, nothing

artistic to make the heart beat. Plain and even unsightly, tawdry and

faded, as all churches are whose history lies between the dreaded

persecution of the sixteenth century and the Gothic revival of the

nineteenth, St. Germain yet possesses that untold charm which the

Italians so broadly but accurately describe by the word _simpatico_.

Sympathy! yes, that is it. It breathes on us from every corner; it is

the atmosphere of the little church; it softens every incongruity, and

sweetly blinds us to every defect. After all, such churches,

inartistic as they may be, are no unfit representatives of the church

militant, while our glorious blossoms of stone, born of the Moses-like

rod of Pugin, are types of the unfathomable beauty and jubilant repose

of the church triumphant.

In this Midnight Mass at Geneva it was touching to see the crowds that

flocked to the church through drifting snow and biting wind--real

Christmas weather--and, without any attraction in the shape of noted

preacher or imposing ceremonial, filled the church as full as the

generous heart-blood does the bosom of the Christian martyr. Hundreds

of silent worshippers were assembled there, and, when the last Gospel

of the Mass had been said, the priests returned, in alb and stole, to

give communion to the eager congregation. Hardly one present seemed to

have left the church, and gradually the vast body of the faithful

broke, like successive waves, at the foot of the altar. For one whole

hour was this scene enacting, and no music was heard meanwhile, and,

though few rules were enforced and little order reigned, yet the sight

was as widely suggestive as any more carefully arranged

demonstrations. Somehow these artless, unpremeditated outpourings of

the heart of Christendom have a far higher power to interest, a far

subtler charm to entrance, and leave a higher impression and a more

healthful influence behind, than those wonderful pageants which from 560

year to year draw thousands of curious spectators to Rome. Here is

everyday Christianity; here is the inner working of that silent,

God-wielded mechanism whose outward robes and draperies only come to

us in the shape of those glittering festas; here is the real work, the

real core of things, the heart whose pulsation alone gives meaning to

all that external magnificence, the sun of which those ceremonies are

the radiance, the consuming fire of which that glorious ritual is but

the outgoing heat and the coruscant light. And when we think of the

darker and varied aspects, the inner complications of the lives of

those who were crowding round the altar-rails of St. Germain, what a

wonderful, manifold history, what a spiritual landscape of infinite

shades of the most delicate pencillings, do we not see! Side by side

kneel souls whose life-paths run in opposite channels: here is Martha,

the busy household angel, whose faith is inwoven in her every daily

movement, her every thought, though it be of toil and anxiety; there

is the pensive Magdalen, whose sadness is her soul’s beauty, whose

memory brings before her even more tokens of merciful forgiveness and

unwearied love than of her own little past, her sins and her

hard-heartedness; there kneels the widow whose child has just been

given back to her from the very portals of death, and whose only altar

for many dreary months has been the darkened chamber and the curtained

sick-bed. Close to her is a maiden whose life is one long act of pure

preparation for the bridal feast, the marriage supper of the Lamb, and

who, when next Christmas-chimes sound, will hear in them the glad

knell that proclaims her death to the outside world, and her life-long

vow of obedience to her Spouse. Here is a Monica, wrestling in prayer

for a wayward son whose hopeless lapse from the narrow path of virtue

is the heaviest cross her Saviour could have chosen for her burden;

there again is the bride, kneeling by the side of the simple, joyous,

boyish bridegroom, with whom she is just beginning a new stage on the

road to eternal bliss. So rough, so uniform, so commonplace is the

aspect of the crowd, that these things are only visible to spiritual

sight, to the eye of the soul; and, if visible even to our darkened

organs of spiritual understanding, how much more clearly and far more

touchingly to the eye of eternal Wisdom and fathomless Love! What a

rose-garden is a church full of humble communicants before the sight

of God! How fragrant and varied the blossoms to his illumined

perception! Men in every stage of conversion--those who have just

timidly set their foot on the first round of Jacob’s mystic ladder;

those who have struggled so far that they can dare to look down one

moment, and measure the death from which God’s love has raised them,

in order to gain additional grace to correspond with his future and

more rapid calls heavenward; those who have left all sin and danger so

far behind that they look upon them calmly, as one sees the rolling

clouds far below from the crisp-breathing atmosphere of the highest

mountains; those whose conversation is in heaven, and whose thoughts

are silent angels walking ever with them as the living messengers of

God. Such are the miracles of grace that crowd the lowly church; the

mysteries that we can only guess at beneath the crust of materiality

which we see; the wonders that jostle us in the swaying throng, and of

which we have so little knowledge that we hardly even suspect what

angel’s robe has swept past our own garments a moment ago. 561

And as this scene fades away, while the silence is again broken by the

sweet song of home, _Venite adoremus!_ we see another and a last

picture dawning from the gray mist of memory.

Not far from the old home where the first Midnight Mass of our

childhood entranced our imagination is another house--a home, too, in

some sense, yet not the home that the mother hallowed in the dear,

olden days, for now she is only present in the spirit, and she never

even saw the first Christmas snows in this new and stately hall.

But a church, fair and carven, stands above her grave, and her loving

heart is the first stone, the foundation-stone of the new shrine.

Close above her resting-place is the altar, and close below, the

organ. There Christmas is enthroned again, the _Venite adoremus_ echoes

once more through wreathed arches and festooned pillars; there again a

small household and a few newly-converted children of the faith of old

England kneel in silent prayer, and mingle thoughts of the foundress

of the church with those of the new-born King whose praises, whose

_Gloria_, she is now singing in heaven. Thus the soul-stirring Christmas

hymn links the past with the present, the memories of foreign lands

with the dear thoughts of home, and binds them together as a sheaf of

golden straw to lay in the crib of the Babe of Bethlehem.

_Venite adoremus!_ It has been sung to our infancy when the nurse

rocked the cradle where slept the first-born; it has cheered our early

childhood when the young mother-voice taught it to us at the Christmas

fireside; it has thrilled our heart in youth when, far from the old

home, we have listened to its solemn, familiar strains; it will stir a

chord of memory through each succeeding year as our early associations

grow dim and our path waxes more lonely; it will breathe a sweet

farewell and echo in our ears on our very deathbed, linking the

thought of our first earthly home to that of our expected eternal one

in the bosom of our Jesus and the arms of our new-found, glorified

Mother.

Those who are dear to us on earth, those who grew up round the same

hearth, and knelt peacefully at the same father’s knee, and held his

hand the day the mother-angel winged her way to her God, can never

forget the _Venite adoremus_, the Christmas pledge of undying love

and indissoluble union, which they learned and sang together for long,

long years of joy, nor can they dream that, however far apart, that

hymn does not make the heart beat and the eye grow dim with tears even

as in the days of old; while--O happier thought even than that!--they

never can forget that as on earth, so will it be hereafter, that the

crown of song will lack no jewel, will miss no note, of _all_ that

once were in it, and that for ever and for ever _one_ will be the

undiminished chorus of father and mother, brethren and sisters, in the

halls of the “Everlasting Christmas.” _Venite Adoremus! venite

adoremus Dominum!_

----------

MR. CLARKE’s LIVES OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS.[118] 562

“Like stars to their appointed heights they climb.”--SHELLEY.

The remark had become trite in the mouths of Europeans, that America

has no history. Such was the inertness of our countrymen in the

department of American history; such the want of works recounting the

thrilling story of early adventure and colonization, the struggles of

feeble colonies for existence and permanence, their long and steadfast

preservation of free institutions inherited from the mother-country,

and their gallantry in defending them against an unnatural mother; the

birth and growth of a vast and mighty republic, maintaining at once

order and liberty amid the convulsions and revolutions of European

dynasties and empires, and eliciting from a European monarch, whose

crown was afterwards torn from his head, the remark addressed to an

American Catholic bishop, who told him of free and peaceful America,

“Truly, that people at least understand liberty; when will it be

understood among us?”--all these things remained so long an untold

story, that it was believed but too generally that America was without

a history to record. The subsequent works of Bancroft, Irving,

Prescott, Parkman, and others have pretty effectually dispelled the

delusion.

But it seems to have been equally thought, among the historians of the

church, that her career in America was also devoid of historical

interest, so few and meagre were our published records and histories.

In the general histories of the church, such as that by Darras,

commencing with the earliest ages, and coming down to our own times,

with but slight general allusions to America, no mention whatever is

made of the rise and progress of the church in the United States. In

the American edition of Darras, there is an Appendix, written for the

purpose by an American author, Rev. Charles I. White, D.D., giving a

_Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Catholic Church in the

United States of America_, and intended to supply, in some measure, the

omission.

In our article on Bishop Timon, in THE CATHOLIC WORLD of April, 1871,

we remarked: “Sketches of local church history, more or less complete,

have occasionally appeared--sketches, for instance, like _The Catholic

Church in the United States_, by De Courcy and Shea; and Shea’s _History

of the Catholic Missions_ among the Indian tribes of America, and

Bishop Bayley’s little volume on the history of the church in New York.

But a work of a different kind, broader in its design than some of these

excellent and useful publications, more limited in scope than the dry and

costly general histories, still awaits the hand of a polished and

enthusiastic man of letters.”

When we penned these lines, though we knew of Mr. Clarke’s long-continued

and unwearied labors in that department of American Catholic 563

literature, had cheered at times his earnest and faithful studies, and

had, by his kindness, been able to spread before our readers some of his

interesting and admirably prepared biographical papers, such as the

_Life of Governor Dongan of New York_, in THE CATHOLIC WORLD of

September, 1869, and the _Memoir of Father Brébeuf, S.J._, in the July

and August numbers, 1871, still we scarcely hoped that we should see

our desires so soon realized, or that we should so soon have occasion

to hail the appearance of the splendid work now before us, the fruits

of his accomplished pen and energetic industry, in the two handsomely

printed and elegantly bound volumes, _The Lives of the Deceased Bishops

of the Catholic Church in the United States_. The production of such

a work, prepared during the broken and fleeting moments of leisure

snatched from a life devoted to professional duties, and to an active

participation in the Catholic and public-spirited enterprises of our

busy metropolis, is something for which we, as a Catholic journalist

devoted to literature, may be permitted to express our own thanks, and

those of the Catholic community, and at the same time to commend it as

an instance of successful literary toil in a rich but uncultivated

field, and as, what we hope and believe it will be, a reward for long

and painstaking researches, careful collation, and fine literary

study. There were but few published works, as we have remarked, from

which to draw the facts and information necessary for such a book.

Hence the author had to seek, in a great measure, his materials from

the archives of the various dioceses, the unpublished correspondence

and journals of the deceased prelates, their pastoral letters and

addresses, from the Catholic serial publications and newspapers of the

last half-century (a task of great and protracted labor and fatigue),

from the personal recollections of surviving friends, co-laborers, and

colleagues of the bishops, from family records, from his own

correspondence with numerous witnesses of the growth of the church and

of the labors of our apostolic men, and even from the silent but

sacred marble records of the tomb. The frequency with which the author

cites, among his _authorities_, unpublished documents and original

sources of information, which were in many cases the individual

narratives of living witnesses, committed to writing at his request,

and for this work, is a proof of the industry and labor with which

this work has been prepared, and give us the means of appreciating the

services thus rendered to our American Catholic literature, in

securing and preserving from decay, oblivion, or total loss many

valuable but perishable traditions and documentary materials. We will

refer to two only, among many instances throughout these richly stored

pages, of valuable documents thus given to the public; these are the

royal charter of King James II., guaranteeing liberty of conscience to

the Catholics of Virginia in 1686, and the beautiful and touching

letter addressed by Archbishop Carroll, in 1791, to the Catholic

Indians of Maine, the remnants of the pious and faithful flock of the

illustrious and martyred Rale--for the publication of both of which we

are indebted to Mr. Clarke.

Mr. Clarke has devoted many years to these valuable and excellent

studies and compositions, and those who have read our Catholic

periodical literature during the last fifteen years, will remember his

_Memoirs_ of Archbishops Carroll and Neale, of Bishops Cheverus and

Flaget, of the Rev. Prince Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, of Fathers 564

Andrew White and Nerinckx, of Governor Leonard Calvert, Charles

Carroll of Carrollton, Commodore John Barry, the father of the

American navy, and Judge Gaston; which were published in 1856 and 1857

in _The Metropolitan_ of Baltimore. The favor with which these papers

were received at the time, and the earnest recommendations of

prelates, priests, and laymen, have, as we have learned, induced the

author to enlarge his plans and undertake a series of works, which

will give the American Church a complete biography of ecclesiastics

and laymen, and, at the same time, literary monuments of classic taste

and scholarship. The present book of the prelates will, as we rejoice

to learn, be followed by the second work of the course, containing the

lives of the missionaries of our country, such as White of Maryland,

Marquette, Jogues, and Brébeuf of New York, Rale of Maine, the

missionaries of the Mississippi Valley, of distinguished priests in

later times, and of the founders of our religious houses, male and

female. The remaining work of the series, more interesting probably

than even the preceding ones, because not the least attempt has so far

been made in that direction, will contain the lives of distinguished

Catholic laymen, who have rendered signal services to our country,

such as Calvert, Carroll, and Taney of Maryland, Iberville of

Louisiana, Dongan of New York, La Salle and Tonty, explorers of the

Mississippi River, Barry of Pennsylvania, Vincennes of Indiana, Gaston

of North Carolina, and many others. The whole will form a complete

series of Catholic biographical works, issued in the appropriate order

of bishops first, priests and religious second, and finally of

statesmen, captains, explorers, and jurists. We cannot withhold the

expression of our pleasure at the prospect of results such as these in

a department of literature which it has ever been one of the objects

of THE CATHOLIC WORLD to encourage, promote, and cherish.

That valuable materials exist in the country for all of these important

works, we feel quite sure. We hope care will be taken of them and that

they will be freely placed at the service of our Catholic historians

and authors. Their publication would be the best means of preserving

them, while rendering them useful to the present generation. We will

give an incident in the experience of Mr. Clarke, in preparing his

_Lives of the Bishops_, related by him to us, as an evidence of the

danger to which valuable historical matter is constantly exposed of

being lost and destroyed. He applied, in one instance, to the

custodians of the papers relating to the Catholic history of an

important diocese and state, and was informed that the diocesan papers

and documents had been for many years locked up in a strong chest or

safe, before and for some time after the death of the first bishop,

and, on being opened and examined, they were found to be in a state of

complete decay from the damp, fell to pieces when handled, and that

scarcely a line of the writing was legible. Other cases are related of

valuable materials for American Catholic history lost or sent out of

the country. We observe, in the first volume before us, a new and

appropriate feature--a distinct and separate return of thanks by the

author to a long list of prelates, priests, and laymen who have

supplied him with materials or aided him in his labors. The appeal he

makes, in his preface, for the assistance of such as possess materials,

has our cordial sympathy; and we hope the appeal will not be made in 565

vain.

The book of prelates, whose appearance we now hail with so much

pleasure, is the most important and valuable contribution yet made to

our American Catholic biographical literature. It covers the ground of

our entire church history to the most recent times, possesses the

peculiar interest which attaches to personal and individual narrative,

and is free, as we have said, from the dryness of the general history.

Its pages teem with an ardent love of country and of our American

institutions, and with a devotion to true liberty, which well accord

with the traditions and education of one of the descendants of the

Catholic pilgrims of Maryland, who constitute the theme of an honored

chapter in our history, illustrating the magnanimity of a dominant

Catholic majority in times when toleration was not the fashion, the

harmony between Catholicity and liberty, and an unflinching faith

through generations of Protestant persecution. Praise is freely

bestowed, where praise was due, to our country and to our countrymen;

and reproof is administered in the spirit of true affection, whenever

there are errors or abuses to be corrected, or where there is

conflict, in the civil or political order, with the sacred rights of

religion and of conscience.

The antiquity of the Catholic Church in America, her struggles and

triumphs, are well worthy of the study of all. Her struggles have ever

been against vice and error, and in favor of liberty and virtue. Her

triumphs have been the conquest of souls for heaven. No impartial mind

can study the career of the Catholic Church in the United States

without being convinced of the purity of her motives, and the

sacredness of her aims. Her conservatism, her sacraments, her defence

of Christian marriage, her labors for religious education, her

chastening influence over the consciences of her children, of which

every day’s record affords examples, her maintenance of law and order,

have made her in the past, what they will prove in the future, the

mainstay of society, of liberty, and of the republic. Her growth in

our midst has been the work of Providence, not of man; a growth which,

as our author shows, has proportionately far outstripped that of the

republic. While the country has increased from thirteen states to

thirty-seven states and eleven territories in ninety-five years, the

church has increased from one bishopric to sixty-four bishoprics, six

vicariates apostolic, and four mitred abbots in eighty-one years. The

population of the country has increased from 2,803,000 to about

40,000,000, while the children of the Catholic Church have increased

from 25,000 to 5,500,000. The increase of the general population of

the country has been 1,433 per centum in ninety-five years, and that

of the church has been 22,000 per centum in eighty-one years. The

Catholic clergy have increased from twenty-one priests in 1790 to

about four thousand eight hundred priests in 1871; they dispense the

blessings of religion in 4,250 churches and 1,700 chapels.

After giving these statistics, the preface proceeds thus:

“To Rome, the capital of the Christian world, Eternal City,

destined in our hopes and prayers and faith to be restored to us

again as the free and undesecrated Mistress and Ruler of

Churches, and to the Sovereign Pontiffs therein, Vicars of Christ

on earth, we turn with love and gratitude for the care,

solicitude, and support bestowed upon our churches, and for the

exemplary prelates bestowed upon them by the Chief Bishop of the

church. To our venerable hierarchy, bishops and priests, and 566

to the religious orders, both male and female, we render thanks

for their labors, their sacrifices, their sufferings, and their

suffrages.

“To our prelates, especially, is due under God the splendid

result we have but faintly mentioned. They were the founders of

our churches, the pioneers of the faith, and the chief pastors of

our flocks. In poverty and suffering they commenced the work, and

spent themselves for others. A diocese just erected upon the

frontiers, in the midst of a new and swarming population, to

anticipate and save the coming faithful, the hope of a future

flock, an outpost upon the borders of Christianity and

civilization--such was the frequent work and vigilant foresight

of the Propaganda and of the Councils of Baltimore--such the

charge confided to a newly consecrated bishop. To the religious

enterprise and untiring providence of the Catholic Church, in her

prompt and vigorous measures for the extension of the faith in

this country, may well be applied the striking lines of Milton:

‘Zeal and duty are not slow;

But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait.’

--_Paradise Regained._

“To assume the task of creating, as it were, building up, and

governing the infant churches thus confided to their care, was

the work that was faithfully and zealously performed by our

bishops. It was no uncommon thing for a bishop to be sent to a

diocese where there was scarcely a shrine or a priest; where he

not only had no friends or organized flock to receive him, but

where he had not even an acquaintance; where he would not meet a

face that he had ever seen before. In some instances, he had to

enter a diocese rent with disunion or schism among the people; in

others, he was compelled to reside out of the episcopal city by

reason of disaffection prevailing within. In other cases, such

was their poverty that they had not the necessary means to

procure an episcopal outfit, to provide a pectoral cross and

crosier, or to pay their travelling expenses to their dioceses.

In many cases the humble log-cabins of the West were their

episcopal palaces and cathedrals; and frequently church,

episcopal residence, parish school, and theological seminary were

all under the same contracted roof. In the midst of such

difficulties, we behold examples of humility, patience,

cheerfulness, zeal, charity, love, poverty, and untiring labor. A

study of such examples, and of lives so good, so heroic, has led

us to undertake the work now presented to the public, in order to

repeat and continue their holy influences, to preserve the memory

of such deeds, to render a tribute to those honored names, and to

rescue, as far as we could, our Catholic traditions from oblivion

or total loss. We applied to ourself, and yielded to the spirit

of, the poet’s appeal:

‘Spread out earth’s holiest records here,

Of days and deeds to reverence dear;

A zeal like this what pious legends tell?’”

The two volumes contain the lives of fifty-six American bishops, and

to the second volume is affixed an appendix containing the lives of

three prelates of other countries, who have a special connection with

the American Church. The first volume, to which we will confine our

present writing, contains the lives of twenty-nine prelates, a list of

whom, with the dates of their consecration or appointment, and the

religious orders to which they belonged, where such was the case, will

in itself prove interesting.

The antiquity of our church in America is strikingly illustrated in

this volume--an antiquity equal to that of the church in some of the

old countries of Europe, extending back to the ages of faith, when the

church was fighting her battles with paganism, and before the time

when altar was raised up against altar by the Protestantism of the

sixteenth century, and before the more modern phases of infidelity and

communism had declared war against all altars and all religion. In the

tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the Northmen of Iceland, hardy

adventurers on the seas, pushed their exploits beyond the continent of

Europe, and landed colonies on the shores of this continent. Coming

from their ice-clad homes, our extreme north-eastern regions were to

them a country of enchanting verdure, and received the name of 567

Greenland; and, pushing their cruises farther south, they entered our

own Narragansett Bay, where, seeing the country festooned with vines

teeming with grapes, they called it Vinland. Our poet Longfellow,

aptly quoted by Mr. Clarke, has celebrated some of the exploits of

Vikings and Northmen on sea and shore. They were the freebooters and

highwaymen of the ocean;

“Joining the corsair’s crew.

O’er the dark sea I flew

With the marauders;

Wild was the life we led,

Many the souls that sped.

Many the hearts that bled,

By our stern orders.”

At the time of which the poet sings, both Iceland and Greenland were

pagan. The mother-country owed her conversion to missionaries from

Ireland, and she, in turn, sent out devoted priests, who converted her

colonists in Greenland and Vinland to the faith. Convents and churches

arose and resounded with the praises of God, chanted in Latin hymns

three centuries and a half before Columbus discovered America.

Pre-eminent among the Catholic missionaries was Eric, who, in the

beginning of the twelfth century, commenced his exalted labors at

Greenland, and afterwards particularly along the banks of Narragansett

Bay. The site of the present city of Newport and its vicinity were the

virgin fields of his apostolic labors. So important did these

Christian colonies become, that a bishopric was erected at Garda, the

episcopal city of Greenland, and Eric was consecrated its first bishop

by Lund, a bishop of Scandinavia. He visited again his cherished flock

at Vinland, to whom he was devoted, and, rather than leave them, he

resigned his mitre and crosier, went into the ranks of the clergy, and

gave his life for his flock--the first of American martyrs.

The colonies of the Northmen were swept away, and the record of them,

even, faded from the histories and traditions of mankind.

“I was a Viking old:

My deeds, though manifold,

No skald in song has told,

No saga taught thee.”

A glowing tribute is paid by the author to the Catholic faith and

genius of Columbus, the unrivalled discoverer of America. In the very

generation in which Columbus lived, the church established a bishopric

within the present limits of our republic. Among the ambitious and

hardy captains of that day was Pamphilo de Narvaez, who, in attempting

the conquest of Florida, aspired to add to the Spanish crown a realm

equal in extent and wealth to Mexico, and to rival the fame of Cortéz

by his own exploits. The Franciscans were at his side, seeking a

holier conquest, fired by no earthly ambition, but by a heavenly zeal.

A bishopric was erected for Florida as the expedition was about to

sail from the ports of Spain, and Juan Juarez, who had already won the

title of one of the Twelve Apostles of Mexico, was appointed, in 1526,

Bishop of Rio de las Palmes. He spent his brief sojourn in Spain in

securing ample provision for his future flock, and in obtaining royal

guarantees for the liberty and kind treatment of the natives. No time

was left for his consecration; he hastened on board the fleet, and

rushed to the spiritual relief of his children, whom he knew and

“loved only in Christ.” After the disastrous termination of the

expedition, he and his companions suffered shipwreck, and are believed

to have perished of hunger--the second martyr of our church. Well has

our author said of him, that he gave up his own life that he might 568

bestow upon others life eternal; and that he who died of hunger for

God’s sake was greatly rewarded by that same God with celestial

feasts, and replenished with seraphic delights; and has aptly applied

to him those beautiful words of the Canticle:

“Esurientes implevit Bonis.”

We have dwelt briefly, but with particular pleasure, upon these the

first two lives of the volume, because of their peculiar interest and

beauty, but they must be read at length in the work itself to be duly

appreciated. We rejoice that they have now been rendered a classic

story in our language--an enduring monument in our literature.

We had marked out several extracts from the interesting and important

life of Archbishop Carroll, and from the lives of other eminent

prelates, for insertion, but the want of time and space deprives us

and our readers of this pleasure. We reserve the remaining space

allotted to this article for three extracts, the first of which is the

historical sketch given by Mr. Clarke of an event which reflects

untold honor and glory upon the American Catholic episcopate. The

honor and merit of originating the Society for the Propagation of the

Faith, which has ever since been and is now spreading the Gospel

throughout the world, is due to an American prelate. Bishop Dubourg,

of New Orleans, is the recognized founder of that illustrious society.

And now we will let the author speak for himself:

“The most brilliant and fruitful service rendered by Bishop

Dubourg to the church, not only in America, but throughout the

most remote and unenlightened portions of the world, was the

leading part he took in founding the illustrious ‘Association for

the Propagation of the Faith.’ It has been well said that ‘the

establishment which M. Dubourg, while on his return to Louisiana

from Italy, made at Lyons, is of itself enough to immortalize his

name. He there formed, in 1815, the Association for the

Propagation of the Faith. This single institution, which conveys

benedictions unnumbered to millions, and which daily sounds the

glad tidings of a Saviour to those who are seated in the silence

of death, becomes a monument sufficient to eternize the memory of

Dubourg, and to shed a full ray of brightness on any college

associated with his name.’”

The following extract, from the _Life of Archbishop Eccleston of

Baltimore_, relates to interesting and stirring events in the life

of our Holy Father, Pius IX., and the history of our country and

church, which are made to reflect upon events transpiring in our own

times:

“The adjournment of the Sixth Council was soon followed by the

death of Pope Gregory XVI. and the election of Pope Pius IX. The

remarkable events that ensued are a part of the history of our

age. Loud, long, and enthusiastic were the plaudits that greeted

the first acts of the noble and saintly Pius IX. from every

portion of the world, and especially from the United States.

Popular meetings in the principal cities sent the most respectful

and laudatory addresses to the Holy Father, and Congress sent a

minister to congratulate him on his course and to reside at his

court. It seemed as though the Protestant world were prepared to

hail the return of the glorious ages of faith, when the Sovereign

Pontiff was the universally recognized Father and arbiter of the

Christian world. The loyalty of Catholics was manifested by the

obedience of their souls and submission of their hearts to him

whom they recognized as the Vicar of Christ on earth. To their

Protestant fellow-citizens was left the work of giving utterance

to the public voice of congratulation and praise. The address of

a public meeting held in New York by six thousand persons, and

presided over by the mayor, contained the following remarkable

passage:

“‘And more formidable than all these, you must have girded

yourself to encounter, and by God’s help to overcome, that 569

fickleness and ingratitude of multitudes just released from

benumbing bondage, which could clamor in the wilderness to be led

back to the flesh-pots of Egypt; which, among the contemporaries

and even the followers of our Saviour, could leave him to bear in

solitude the agony of the cross; and which in your case, we

apprehend, will yet manifest itself in unreasonable expectations,

extravagant hopes, impetuous requirements, and in murmurings that

nothing has been earnestly intended, because everything has not

been already accomplished.

“The address of the Philadelphia meeting, held January 10, 1848,

contained the following earnest words: ‘May the Almighty grant

you length of life, strength of heart, and wisdom from on high,

in order to bring to a happy conclusion the beneficent reforms

which you have begun! May he inspire the princes and people of

Italy with the courage and moderation necessary to second your

efforts! May he raise up to you successors, who will continue to

extend the influence of peace and justice on earth; and the time

will come when the meanest of God’s poor will, if oppressed, be

able to summon the most powerful of his oppressors to appear at

the bar of united Christendom; and the nations will sit in

judgment upon him, and the oppressor, blushing with shame, shall

be forced by their unanimous and indignant voice to render

justice to the oppressed.’

“Similar addresses were sent from nearly every city of any

importance in the Union to the Holy Father. But soon the

prophetic language of the New York meeting was realized; the

clamor of the disappointed populace was raised against their

father and best friend; Count Rossi, his secretary, is

assassinated, and the Holy Father himself is a fugitive from

Rome. It was then that the devotion of Catholics manifested

itself towards the Supreme Pontiff, and many and heartfelt were

the testimonials of loyalty and affection received by the exile

of Gaeta from his children throughout the world. The Catholics of

the United States were not behind their brethren in these

demonstrations, and the hope was entertained that the Holy Father

would accept an asylum in our midst.... How vividly do the

present wrongs of that same Holy Father, and of that same holy

church, recall the events of his glorious pontificate! When, oh!

when, will the Catholic peoples of the world demand of their

governments the restoration of the capital of Christendom, and

the liberty of the Vicar of Christ?”

As we were about to close our article, our eye fell upon the following

fine passages in the _Life of Dr. England, First Bishop of

Charleston_, and we yield to the temptation of transferring them to

our columns, both as a tribute to that illustrious prelate and as

specimens of Mr. Clarke’s style:

“The great struggle of Bishop England’s life in this country

seems to have been to present the Catholic Church, her doctrines

and practices, in their true light before the American people. In

his effort to do this his labors were indefatigable. His means of

accomplishing this end were various and well studied. He

endeavored, from his arrival in the country, to identify himself

thoroughly with its people, its institutions, its hopes, and its

future. He was vigilant and spirited in maintaining and defending

the honor and integrity of the country, as he was in upholding

the doctrines and practices of the church. In his oration on the

character of Washington, he so thoroughly enters into the

sentiments of our people, and participates so unreservedly in the

pride felt by the country in the _Pater Patriæ_, that his

language would seem to be that of a native of the country. There

was no movement for the public good in which he did not feel an

interest, and which he did not, to the extent of his

opportunities, endeavor to promote. His admiration for the

institutions of the country was sincere and unaffected. Though no

one encountered more prejudice and greater difficulties than he

did, he, on all occasions, as he did in his address before

Congress, endeavored to regard the prejudices and impressions

entertained by Protestants against Catholics as errors, which had

been impressed upon their minds by education and associations,

for which they themselves were not responsible. In his writings

and public sermons and addresses, he travelled over the wide

range of history, theology, and the arts, in order to vindicate

the spotless spouse of Christ against the calumnies of her

enemies. If Catholic citizens and voters were attacked on the 570

score of their fidelity to their country and its institutions,

Bishop England’s ready pen defended them from the calumny and

silenced their accusers. If a Catholic judge or public officer

was accused of false swearing or mental reservation in taking the

official oath, he found an irresistible and unanswerable champion

in the Bishop of Charleston. He found the church in the United

States comparatively defenceless on his accession to the See of

Charleston, but he soon rendered it a dangerous task in her

enemies to attack or vilify her; and many who ventured on this

mode of warfare were glad to retreat from the field, before the

crushing weapons of logic, erudition, and eloquence with which he

battled for his church, his creed, and his people....

“Bishop England visited Europe four times during his episcopacy,

for the interests and institutions of his diocese, visiting Rome,

most of the European countries, and his native Ireland, which he

never ceased to love. He was sent twice as apostolic delegate

from the Holy See to Hayti. He obtained from Europe vast

assistance for his diocese, both in priests, female religious,

and funds. It was proposed to translate him to the bishopric of

Ossory in Ireland, but he declined. The highest ecclesiastical

dignity, with comfort, luxury, friends, and ease, in his native

country, could not tempt him to desert his beloved church in

America. He had become an American citizen and an American

prelate, and he resolved to continue to be both as long as he

lived. At Rome he was consulted on all matters relating to the

ecclesiastical affairs of this country. The officials of the

Eternal City were astounded at the great travels and labors of

Bishop England. They heard him appoint from the Chambers of the

Propaganda the very day on which he would administer confirmation

in the interior of Georgia. The cardinals, in their wonder at all

he accomplished, and the rapidity of his movements, used to call

him ‘_il vescovo a vapore_,’ or the ‘steam bishop.’ We have

seen with what an insignificant force he commenced his episcopal

labors. He increased the churches of his diocese to over sixteen,

and lef behind him a well-organized and appointed clergy, and

numerous ecclesiastical, religious, educational, and charitable

institutions. The Catholic families of his diocese might have

been counted, at the time of the erection of the See of

Charleston, on one’s fingers; at the bishop’s death they were

counted by thousands. But the good he accomplished was not

confined to his own diocese. His elevating and encouraging

influence was felt throughout this country, at Rome, and in many

parts of the Catholic world.”

His dying words to his clergy, and through them to his flock, were as

follows:

“Tell my people that I love them; tell them how much I regret

that circumstances have kept us at a distance from each other. My

duties and my difficulties have prevented me from cultivating and

strengthening those private ties which ought to bind us together;

_your_ functions require a closer, a more constant intercourse

with them. Be with them--be of them--win them to God. Guide,

govern, and instruct them. _Watch as having to render an account

of their souls, that you may do it with joy, and not with

grief._ There are among you several infant institutions which

you are called on, in an especial manner, to sustain. It hast

cost me a great deal of thought and of labor to introduce them.

They are calculated to be eminently serviceable to the cause of

order, of education, of charity; they constitute the germ of

what, I trust, shall hereafter grow and flourish in extensive

usefulness. As yet they are feeble, support them--embarrassed,

encourage them--they will be afflicted, console them.

“_I commend my poor church to its patrons--especially to her to

whom our Saviour confided his in the person of the beloved

disciple: ‘Woman, behold thy Son; Son, behold thy mother.’_”

The second volume contains the lives of thirty American bishops, and,

in the Appendix, the lives of Right Rev. Charles Augustus de

Forbin-Jansen, Bishop of Nancy, France, who visited this country in

1840, and rendered signal services to religion while here; of Right

Rev. Edward Barron, who volunteered from this country for the African

mission, was made Bishop of Africa in 1845, and died at Savannah,

Georgia, in 1854, “a martyr of charity”; and of Cardinal Bedini, whose 571

visit to this country is in the recollection of our readers.

We cannot close our notice without again commending, in the most

emphatic manner, this record of the labors of the self-denying

prelates who were the means, under God, of planting the church in our

beloved country--not only for its historical interest, and as an

addition to our permanent Catholic literature, but for the incentive

it furnishes to others, both cleric and lay, in their several spheres,

to be unremitting in their efforts to extend the faith, thus happily

transferred to our soil, to every nook and corner of this favored land.

[118] _Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church

in the United States, with an Appendix and an Analytical

Index._ By Richard H. Clarke, A.M. In two vols. Vol. I.

New York: P. O’shea. 1871.

----------

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE VICAR OF CHRIST; or, Lectures upon the Office and Prerogatives

of our Holy Father the Pope. By Rev. Thomas S. Preston, Pastor of

St. Ann’s Church, New York, and Chancellor of the Diocese. New York:

Robert Coddington, No. 366 Bowery. 1871.

We have here another series of the excellent Advent Lectures of F.

Preston, which have done so much good in the instruction of the

faithful and the conversion of numbers of persons to the true faith.

Carefully prepared and solid discourses on the great Catholic

principles, dogmas, doctrines, laws, and rites--in fact, on all the

topics of religion universally--are especially necessary and useful in

our time and country. Besides the additional good accruing to that

which has been done by the preaching of these discourses through their

more general dissemination among the laity, their publication is a

great benefit to the clergy, as giving examples of the best kind of

preaching, and furnishing a stimulus and a help to efforts of the same

kind.

The present series of lectures on the Pope is fully equal to the

former publications of the author in ability and excellence, if not

superior to them. The subject, at any rate, makes it far the most

interesting and important of any. F. Preston has merited well of the

church by his zealous and efficient devotion to the cause of the Pope

and the Holy See, and his continual efforts to instruct the Catholic

laity in sound doctrine in this most essential matter. In this volume

he has given us a lecture on the supremacy, another on the Papal

infallibility, a third on the temporal sovereignty, and a fourth on

the Pontificate of Pius IX. At the end, the decrees or constitutions

of the Vatican Council and several recent allocutions of the Holy

Father are given in Latin and English; and the whole is concluded by a

carefully and critically prepared chronological list of the Sovereign

Pontiffs, in which we are glad to see the Avignonian and Pisan

claimants of the tiara relegated to their proper place on one side,

while the succession is continued through the Roman line, which is

unquestionably the true one. The lecture on infallibility is

especially marked by solid learning and ample citations from the

fathers, proving conclusively that this article of the faith was

explicitly held and taught from the beginning. The style is grave and

serious, copious and flowing, and warmed with a spirit of fervent love

to the souls of men. It is the style, not of a mere essayist, but of 572

a preacher. It is, therefore, far more pleasing and popular in its

character than that of most books on the same topic. Every Catholic in

the United States ought to read it, and we doubt if any book has been

published on the Pope equally fitted for general circulation in

England and Ireland. Neither is there any so well fitted to do good

among non-Catholics. We hope no pains will be spared to give it a wide

and universal circulation.

It is most important and necessary that all Catholics should be fully

instructed in the sovereign supremacy and doctrinal infallibility of

the Pope, and the strict obligation in conscience of supporting his

temporal sovereignty.

Mr. Coddington has published this volume in a superior manner, with

clear, open type, on very thick and white paper, and adorned it with

an engraved portrait of the beloved and venerable Pius IX. Once more

we wish success to this timely and valuable series of lectures, and

thank the reverend author in the name of the whole Catholic public for

his noble championship of the dearest and most sacred of all

causes--that of the Vicar of Christ.

ANTIDOTE TO “THE GATES AJAR.” By J. S. W. Tenth thousand. New York:

G. W. Carleton & Co. 1872.

Mr. Carleton appears to be convinced that “_de gustibus non est

disputandum_” by a bookseller, but rather that provision is to be made

for all tastes. On the back of this little pious pamphlet we find

advertised _The Debatable Land_, by Robert Dale Owen; _The Seventh

Vial_, containing, we conjecture, a strong dose, by Rev. John Cumming;

_Mother Goose with Music_, by an ancient, anonymous author; _At Last_,

a new novel, by Marian Harland, etc. The _Antidote_ is a rather weak

and quite harmless dose, done up in pretty tinted paper. The writer

naively asks, on p. 23: “Who would not like to fly away in the tail of

a comet?”--a question which any little boy would answer in the

affirmative, but cruelly dashes our hopes to the ground by telling us

that “all this is mere conjecture.” Again, on p. 26, he gravely

reasons thus: “As to families in heaven living in houses together, as

if they were on earth, that is simply impossible. When children marry

here, they leave their parents, and have homes of their own; their

children do likewise, and so on _ad infinitum_. Those who would live

together in heaven would be only husbands and wives and the unmarried

children. And as to the married who are not all happily united here,

are they to be tied together for ever whether they like each other or

not?” The little pamphlet is concluded by two pieces of poetry, one of

which is pretty good, the other one of those cantering hymns which are

such favorites at the week-evening prayer-meeting:

“We sing of the realms of the blest,

That country so bright and so fair,

And oft are its glories confessed;

But what must it be to be there?”

The doctrine of Miss Phelps’s antagonist is more orthodox than hers,

without doubt, so far as it goes, but it is presented in such a way as

rather to provoke a smile than to convince or attract the mind of any

one who is not already a pious Presbyterian. Our Presbyterian and

other Evangelical friends contrive to make religion as sad and gloomy

as a wet afternoon in the country. Even heaven itself has but small

attractions for those who are not depressed in spirits, when described

in the doleful strain which is supposed to be suitable to piety. Miss

Phelps, as well as other members of the gifted and cultivated Stuart

family, and many of similar character and education, revolted from the

dismal system of Puritanism. She yearned after a brighter and more 573

beautiful religion, which has in it something else than the valley of

the shadow of death. Her striving to realize this ideal produced

_Gates Ajar_ and other similar works, whose immense popularity proves

both her own power as a writer and also a widely-felt sympathy with

the sentiments of her own mind. It is the Catholic theology alone

which presents the true and complete doctrine respecting the beatific

vision, the glorified humanity of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints,

the angelic hierarchy, and the relation between the visible and

invisible worlds; together with that element of the poetic and the

marvellous after which the mind, the imagination, and the heart crave

with an insatiable longing. We are tempted to close the present

exercise, after the manner of the little book before us, with a few

verses from an old hymn, written by one of the persecuted Catholics of

Lancashire, at the close of the sixteenth or the beginning of the

seventeenth century. The whole hymn may be found in the _Month_ for

September and October:

“Hierusalem, my happie home,

When shall I come to thee?

When shall my sorrowes have an end?

Thy ioyes when shall I see?

“Thy walls are made of precious stones,

Thy bulwarks diamonds square,

Thy gates are of right orient pearle,

Exceedinge riche and rare.

“Thy turrettes and thy pinnacles

With carbuncles doe shine;

Thy verie streets are paved with gould

Surpassinge cleare and fine.

“Thy houses are of ivorie,

Thy windoes cristale cleare,

Thy tyles are made of beaten gould

O God, that I were there!

“Thy gardens and thy gallant walkes

Continually are greene;

There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers

As noewhere else are seene.

“Quyt through the streetes with silver sound

The flood of life doth flowe,

Upon whose bankes on every syde

The wood of lyfe doth grow.

“Hierusalem, my happie home!

Would God I were in thee!

Would God my woes were at an end,

Thy ioyes that I might see!”

THE PRISONERS OF ST. LAZARE. Edited by Mrs. Pauline de Grandprè.

Translated from the French by Mrs. E. M. McCarthy. New York:

Appleton & Co.

In this volume we have a rambling, desultory description of the prison

of St. Lazare in Paris, and its inmates. It is a prison for women

guilty of every variety of crime, and they are even incarcerated here

on suspicion. But the majority of its occupants are women who have

fallen from virtue more or less criminally. Two great unsolved

questions of the age force themselves upon the attentive reader of

this volume, filled with the pitiful tale of woman’s sin and shame:

What can be done to succor unfortunates who have been ensnared and

drawn away from the paths of virtue, and have a desire to return to an

honest life; and what are the legitimate and proper employments of

women outside of the family?

We are not competent to answer thoroughly either of these questions,

which for many years have exercised the politician as well as the

philanthropist; we can only express our opinion. We have no such place

in this country as St. Lazare, but we have the abandoned women and

their needs. Ah! that word abandoned expresses the state of the public

mind toward those who have thus fallen; but the Catholic Christian

cannot suffer any soul for whom Christ died to be abandoned, and the

Catholic Church answers the first of these questions by opening her

arms to the penitent, and offering her the refuge of “Houses of the

Good Shepherd,” established in most of our large cities. By the

support and multiplication of this order, whose lifework is to receive

and help these poor children of sin, is the most effectual way in

which Catholic women can reach the class in whose interest this book

was written. We do not believe that women discharged from a prison

like St. Lazare could be preserved from future danger in an institution 574

like the one proposed in the appendix to this volume. No place but a

strictly religious house, in our opinion, could be a house of moral

convalescence to these poor creatures. There is one way in which

American Catholic women can lessen the number of these miserable

outcasts. Watch over your servants, know where they spend their

evenings, take them by the hand and give them loving, maternal advice

as to their company, and endeavor to bring them often to confession

and communion. The providence of God has committed these young girls

to your care, and who knows but their souls may be required of you,

negligent mistresses, in that day when we must all stand before the

judgment-seat of Christ? With regard to the employments of women,

should not women be allowed to do any honest business that they can do

well? Many new openings have been made for her of late years in

telegraphic and photographic offices and stores. But, after all, to

touch the root of this matter, why should not woman be so trained that

she could, in any emergency, have a resource and support herself? A

great deal would be gained if children were brought up to feel that

“it is working, and not having money, that makes people happy.” “It is

a noteworthy fact,” says the author of _The Prisoners of St. Lazare_,

“that three-quarters of the inmates are without knowledge of a trade

or of any means of making a livelihood for themselves. The support of

husband or father failing, then destitution followed, and then vice.”

PROPHETIC IMPERIALISM; or, The Prophetic Entail of Imperial Power.

By Joseph L. Lord, of the Boston Bar. New York: Hurd and Houghton.

1871.

Mr. Lord writes like a thorough gentleman, a point which we notice in

this distinct and emphatic manner because it is a somewhat rare

phenomenon in literature of this class. He writes, also, like a

well-trained and cultivated scholar and thinker. It is, therefore, a

pleasant task to read what he has written, more pleasant from the fact

that his essay is a short one, and his thoughts are briefly as well as

lucidly and elegantly set forth. Moreover, although a Boston lawyer,

Mr. Lord really reverences the Holy Scriptures and believes the

prophets. His spirit is pious and fervent, though sober, and he is

alike free from cant and from unbelieving flippancy. The peculiar

theory of Mr. Lord regarding the fulfilment of what we may call the

imperial prophecies is not contrary to orthodox doctrine, and is in

fact held by him in common with some Catholic writers, although

diverse from the one held by the generality of sound interpreters. So

far as all the empires preceding that of Christ are concerned, he

agrees with the common interpretation. In respect to this last, he

holds to a personal descent and earthly empire of our Lord. This is an

hypothesis which, in our eyes, has no probability whatever. It is not

wonderful, however, that a person who does not see the earthly empire

of Christ in the reign and triumph of his Vicar and the Roman Church,

should be driven to look for a personal descent and reign of the Lord

in the latter times. In this respect, Mr. Lord agrees with a number of

eminent Protestant writers, who, being disgusted with the fruits of

the Reformation, and not so happy as to see the glories of the

Catholic Church, fly for consolation to this brilliant but, as we

think, baseless hypothesis.

Mr. Lord differs from most American Protestants in the very

disrespectful esteem in which he holds democracy. It is curious to

observe the very enthusiastic and adulatory language in which a number

of divines express their conviction of the truth of his theory,

imperialistic as it is from top to bottom. They withhold their names, 575

however, from a motive of prudence. Mr. Lord’s arguments have not

convinced us that his theory is correct, but they prove their author

to be worthy of esteem.

EAST AND WEST POEMS. By Bret Harte. Boston: James R. Osgood &

Company (late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood & Co.). 1871.

Many of those who have enjoyed Bret Harte’s fugitive pieces have felt

a vague suspicion that the word poetry was scarcely adequate to

express their character. The sketches from nature have been

unquestionably graphic, and, in some cases, not devoid of real humor

or pathos--all which has led to their being considered by many as

evidences of genius capable by its touch of ennobling humble and

insignificant subjects. The volumes, however, which have succeeded one

another since Mr. Harte has left California, persuade us that he not

only calls his rhymes poetry, but sincerely believes them to be such,

and takes for granted that everybody who knows anything at all agrees

perfectly with him. We fear that there has been a mistake somewhere.

Either the public have been betrayed into an incautious endorsement of

the author’s opinion of his own work, or the author has mistaken the

character of the sensation which he has created.

He seems to be just as eager as ever in his efforts to astonish the

world; and we know not how many more volumes of “poems” we may expect

before the public and he come to an understanding. For our own part,

the present is just one more than we are prepared to welcome. In spite

of kindly dispositions, we are painfully impressed with the fact that

the mistake we have alluded to lies with the author. We are also

unpleasantly relieved from a doubt as to whether the character of his

doggerel is, in all cases, due to the subject, and forced to conclude

that there is a congeniality between the writer and his themes which

is the secret of his success. We wish him well, and none the less in

desiring space wherein to administer to the present volume the

castigation which it deserves. In so doing, we would not deny him a

certain amount of genuine talent, such as is shown in certain places

in the “Greyport Legend” (pp. 7-10), or the “Lines on a Pen of Thomas

Starr King” (pp. 65,66), or “A Second Review of the Grand Army” (pp.

95-99); nor would we be disposed to carp at a certain slovenliness

which mars the beauty of other serious poems, but which did not

detract from their merit on the occasions for which they were

written--as was the case with the “Address” (pp. 78-81), and the poem

of the “Lost Galleon” (pp. 82-93)--the latter, if we mistake not,

having been composed for a social reunion of the Alumni of the Pacific

Coast. But nothing could induce us to excuse the reckless vulgarity

displayed in such pieces as “A White Pine Ballad” (p. 155); “In the

Mission Garden” (p. 21). There is also enough nonsense in such lines

as the “California Madrigal” (p. 127), “A Moral Vindicator” (p. 165),

_et alibi passim_, to make the deliberate addition of “Songs

without Sense” (p. 168), unwarrantably superfluous.

The author is not sufficiently aware of the distinction between

coarseness and originality, or else prefers notoriety to fame. We

cannot consent to the admission of his book into respectable libraries

or drawing-room bookstands, still less to a place in American

literature. If he should ever recognize and prune his defects, and

cultivate a little more respect for those for whom he writes, as well

as love for the purity of the idiom in which he deals, we shall be

happy to give him that praise which would be at present most unmerited

and inopportune.

SERMONS BY THE FATHERS OF THE CONGREGATION OF ST. PAUL. Vol. VI. New 576

York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1871.

For obvious reasons, we have taken occasion to speak of this volume

without the knowledge of the responsible editor. The great pressure on

our columns this month, which has compelled the omission of several

valuable articles already in type, will not permit, however, more than

a passing notice. We have always considered these annual volumes as

models of wise, simple, and earnest instruction, and see no reason to

change our opinion in the present instance. Indeed, there is, perhaps,

increased reason, during these troublous times, to admire the bravery

with which our Paulist Fathers meet the various questions demanding

solution, and we therefore take pleasure in commending the work to the

attention of all interested in homiletic literature. C.

TO AND FROM THE PASSION PLAY, IN THE SUMMER OF 1871. By the Rev. G.

H. Doane. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1872.

This elegant volume contains not only an accurate description of the

Passion Play--a spectacle to which, of course, none but a Catholic can

do justice--but also a great deal of interesting matter about a number

of things and places that the author saw on his journeys to and fro.

As regards Paris, we have a sketch of some of the deeds of the

Commune, and, in particular, the murder of the late archbishop.

It is worthy of remark that, when Father Doane describes whether a

place or an incident, he avoids that elaboration and artifice which

pall upon the reader in many books of travel, and gives us his

thoughts and impressions in an easy and happy style. We congratulate

him on his literary efforts; and thank him cordially for affording us

so much valuable information in so pleasant a manner.

The “Catholic Publication Society” has in press, and will publish

immediately, _The Pastoral Address of the Archbishops and Bishops of

Ireland on the School Question_. It will be got out in a 12mo

pamphlet, and will be sold for $3 per 100 copies.

The “Catholic Publication Society” will also publish, early in January,

_The Liquefaction of the Blood of St. Januarius_; _Lentent Sermons_,

from the Italian of Rev. Paul Segneri, S. J.; and _Sermons on

Ecclesiastical Subjects_, Vol. II., by Archbishop Manning.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

From CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO., New York: The Holy Bible according to

the Authorized Version (A.D. 1611), with an explanatory and

critical commentary, and revision of the Translation, by Bishops

and other Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F. C. Cook,

M.A., Canon of Exeter. Vol. I., Part I. Genesis-Exodus. 8vo, pp.

xii., 928.

From HURD & HOUGHTON, New York: The Last Knight: A Romance-Garland,

from the German of Anastasius Grün. Translated with Notes by John

O. Sargent. 8vo, pp. vi., 200.--The Church Idea: An Essay toward

Unity. By Wm. R. Huntington, Rector of All Saints’, Worcester.

12mo, pp. 235.

From ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston: Songs of the Sierras. By Joaquin

Miller. 12mo, pp. 299.

From CARLTON & LANAHAN, New York: The Mission of the Spirit; or, The

Office and Work of the Comforter in Human Redemption. By Rev. L. R.

Dunn. 12mo, pp. 303.

From J. B. LIPPINCOTT, Philadelphia: The Resurrection of the

Redeemed; and Hades. By James Boggs. 12mo, pp. 145, 69.

From HOLT & WILLIAMS, New York: Art in Greece. By H. Taine.

Translated by John Durand. 12mo, pp. 188.

From PATRICK DONAHOE, Boston: The Four Great Evils of the Day. By

Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. 18mo. pp. 207.--Review of

a “Treatise on Infant Baptism” by Thos. H. Pritchard, D.D. Part I.

By Rev. J. V. McNamara, Pastor of St. John’s Roman Catholic

Church, Raleigh, N.C. Paper, pp. 46.

From ROBERT CLARKE & CO., Cincinnati: Who is the Pope? And Who is

Pius IX. among the Popes? By F. X. Weninger, D.D., S.J. Paper,

pp. 15.

From THE FREE PRESS ASSOCIATION, New York: Appeal to the People of

the State of New York, adopted by the Executive Committee of

Citizens and Taxpayers for the Financial Reform of the City and

County of New York, etc. Paper, pp. 16.

From D. APPLETON & CO., New York: Philosophy of Style: An Essay. By

Herbert Spencer, author of “First Principles of Philosophy,” etc.

Pp. 55.

International Congress on the Prevention and Repression of Crime,

including Penal and Reformatory Treatment. By E. C. Wines, LL.D.,

Commissioner of the United States. Paper, pp. 28.

THE 577

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XIV., No. 83.--FEBRUARY, 1872.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

REV. S. T. HECKER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at

Washington, D. C.

THE DUTIES OF THE RICH IN CHRISTIAN SOCIETY.

NO. I.

IN REFERENCE TO COMMUNISM.

Under the foregoing title, we propose to present to the careful

attention of the wealthy class of American citizens a series of essays

on some topics which concern them very nearly. We intend to make each

one short, that it may be easily read, and that the reader who is

interested in the matters we discuss may have time to think over each

topic by itself. We address them principally to Catholics, and shall,

therefore, always take for granted and appeal to Catholic principles

and doctrines. Yet we are convinced that others not Catholics will

find a great deal in them which they must acknowledge to be true, and

likely to do them good, if they are at all earnest and conscientious.

Since we expect to say some things to the rich, and to those who are

by other advantages besides wealth in an elevated social position,

which will be severe, and perhaps to some unpalatable, we may as well

begin by placing a guard against a possible misunderstanding of our

intent. No careful reader of our magazine can suppose that we would

sympathize with or encourage any movement hostile to the just rights

or reasonable privileges of the wealthy class. Moreover, we cherish a

deep respect for all the hierarchical institutions of the political

and social order, as well as for their more sacred and elevated

counterparts in the ecclesiastical system. We recognize the necessity,

even in our republican commonwealth, of a certain elevated social

class, in which men of wealth must unavoidably have an eminent

position. Whatever we have which can check our ultra-democratic

tendencies, infuse a conservative spirit into our public opinion, give

dignity, decorum, and stability to our institutions, elevate and

refine our social tone, and add a becoming splendor to our

civilization, calls forth our sympathies, and receives our deliberate

and reasoned approbation. Whatever censures, therefore, we may

pronounce upon the vices, follies, and delinquencies of the rich and 578

the otherwise highly placed in social rank, and whatever admonitions

we may address to them respecting the duties and dangers of their

position, must be taken as coming from a friend, not only to

themselves as individuals, but to their class. With these

preliminaries, we address ourselves to our task.

We have placed the title “In Reference to Communism” at the head of

our first article for one special reason. Communism threatens the

wealthy class with a war of extermination. It is obvious, therefore,

that the rich have more need to reflect on the duties and dangers of

their position, at the present time, than they have ever had before.

So, then, we call their attention at the outset to the war which the

fanatics of revolution are preparing for them, in order that our words

may have more weight, and that they may give more serious thought to

the subjects we intend to discuss with them. And here we will explain

that we employ the single terms “rich,” “rich people,” etc., for

convenience’ sake, including under this designation other

qualifications besides moneyed wealth, and other persons besides those

who possess great fortunes; namely, all those who possess any species

of privilege or power which gives them social dignity and influence.

We say, then, to the rich: your class, your privileges, your

possessions, your lives, are threatened by an enemy whose character is

disclosed by the bloody orgies of the Paris Commune. What application

do we make of this grave and alarming fact? Simply this. The rich

members of society ought to reflect seriously on all the questions

which relate to their position in the commonwealth. They ought to

think of their duties, to examine their own delinquencies, to consider

the line of conduct they ought to adopt, to use their power and

influence rightly and rationally, to educate their children carefully,

and in every way to prevent and defeat the nefarious plots of the

party of revolution. We say, earnestly and emphatically, that there is

now a special necessity and obligation to use wealth, education,

intellectual power, social influence, political power, moral and

religious force, to avert the dangers which threaten society, and to

promote its solid and firm establishment on a right basis. Moreover,

the self-interest of the rich demands this of them most imperatively.

All their private and personal interests depend on the peace and good

order of society. Their own safety demands of them that they should

work for the salvation of political and social order, when they are in

danger, just as they would bear a hand at the pumps on board a leaking

ship, or man the batteries of their own beleaguered city. Hostility

between the wealthy and the laborious classes is a great evil in

society. When the hostility of the masses against the aristocracy

becomes violent, and tends to produce a revolution and an exterminating

war of the former against the latter, there is a deadly sickness in

the body politic which threatens its dissolution. This state of things

exists at present in Christendom. We are not so deeply affected as yet

in this country; but we are not altogether sound or safe from the

infection, and there is reason enough to be on the alert to protect

ourselves from it. The rich have duties toward society in general, and

toward its several classes and individuals in particular. And they

have, at the present time and in present circumstances, a special

obligation to give these duties careful attention.

All this would he strictly true and sufficient to arouse the rich to a 579

greater vigilance in fulfilling the duties of their high position,

even if they were free from blame, as a class, for the disorders and

evils of modern society; but, if they are chiefly to blame for these

evils through their past neglect and delinquency, there is an

additional and imperative motive in this fact for a strenuous effort

on their part to repair the past in the present and the future by a

redoubled fidelity and energy. We think they are to blame. It is our

deliberate judgment that communism, and the whole mass of social

disorders which have lately come to the surface of the body politic

under this loathsome and deadly form, are principally to be traced to

the abuse of power and wealth by the governing classes. Kings, nobles,

rich men, authors, politicians, have, in part by their gross abuse of

the trust committed to them, and in part by their neglect and

indifference, generated the moral _petroleum_ to which demagogues

and leaders of revolution, the Mazzinis, Garibaldis, Karl Marxes,

Dombrowskis, and Raoul Rigaults, have applied the torch. There have

been many great and good things done by kings, and by the members of

the political, social, and intellectual aristocracy. There have been

many admirable and excellent persons, many heroes and saints, among

these elevated classes in society. Nevertheless, on the whole, they

have been, especially for the past three centuries, grievously

delinquent, and continually becoming worse; and even more extensively

delinquent by neglect than by positive criminality. The greatest part

of the miseries and crimes which darken the annals of history may be

traced to kings and their associates in government. Their ambition,

their selfish policy, their unjust or unnecessary wars, their disregard

of the happiness of the common people, their haughtiness of demeanor,

their personal vices and corrupting example, have been the fruitful

causes of misery and vice among their subjects. They have reacted

against themselves by producing hatred and contempt of thrones and

kings, of authority and government. The aristocracy have followed

closely the royal example set before them. And the men of genius and

intellectual culture, the princes and rich men of the realm of arts

and letters, since the fatal epoch of the _renaissance_ of paganism,

have prostituted their heaven-born gifts to the service of every

destructive error and every corrupting vice. The greater number of

those who have not positively aided the work of ruin have been

apathetic and indifferent, and have not positively aided the work of

salvation, at least with the zeal and energy which might justly be

expected from them.

Moreover, kings, nobles, and the wealthy class have made war on the

church. They have revolted against the Holy See, enslaved the

hierarchy and the clergy, and despoiled the church.

They have robbed and well-nigh suppressed the monastic orders. In this

way, they have sapped and undermined the foundations of their own

stability; for it is the principle of religious obedience and

reverence, first of all toward God, and then secondarily toward all

powers established and sanctioned by the law of God, which is the

source of the sentiment of loyalty. The rebellion of the state against

the church must, therefore, terminate in the rebellion of the lower

against the higher classes in the state. The monastic institution was

the strongest of all links between rich and poor, great and humble, by

reason of the fact that its members belonged to both classes at the

same time. The destruction of monasticism, therefore, resulted 580

necessarily in a hostility of these two classes toward each other. So

it has come about that the aristocracy, excited by kings against the

church, turned next against the kings, the commercial and middle

classes turned against the aristocracy, and now the masses are turning

against the men of wealth, or, as their own leaders express it,

against “the supremacy of cash.” The condition of the laboring classes

is, at best, in many respects a hard one. It is a great and an arduous

thing which is required of them; to submit patiently to the supremacy

of the higher classes. Religion alone makes their position tolerable;

religion, binding together both the superior and the inferior classes

in divine love. The hierarchy and the aristocracy must be recognized

by the people as holding their high position for the common good of

all, and as working with a self-denial equal or superior to their own;

that is, as really _laborers_ in another sphere of action, but with a

common end in view, in order that they may contentedly acquiesce in

the inequality of rank, wealth, and social privileges which prevails

in society. So soon as the people are convinced, whether wrongly or

rightly, that the privileges of their spiritual or temporal superiors

are mere privileges of a caste, which despises, rules, and taxes the

people for its own selfish aggrandizement and pleasure, they begin to

hate them with a deadly hatred. The Catholic people are content that

the Pope govern, rebuke, and punish them; that he possess the wealth

and splendor of a spiritual and temporal sovereign; that he reign as

the vicegerent of God on earth--because they believe that all this is

for their own highest good. They are content that bishops and priests

possess all the honors and privileges of their office, and willing to

sustain them in these, for the same reason. Take away this belief, and

it is not long before they begin not only to withhold their

contributions, to withdraw their allegiance, to refuse obedience, to

lose respect and love for their spiritual superiors, but to cry out

for their overthrow and even clamor for their blood. It is the same in

respect to the secular privileged classes. And, at the present moment,

since the greatest amount of external and material privilege,

splendor, and worldly good in general has passed into the hands of the

wealthy class, it is this class which is most immediately exposed to

the brunt of the attack which is directed against caste and privilege.

We will quote the language of one of the official organs of the

International Society, the _Egalité_ of Geneva, in order to show with

the utmost clearness what is their spirit and aim:

“When the social revolution shall have dispossessed the

_bourgeoisie_, in the interests of public utility, as the

_bourgeoisie_ dispossessed the nobles and the clergy, what will

become of them?

“We cannot answer with positive certainty, but it is probable

that the new order of things will give them, to borrow an

expression from one of our friends, an infinitely more precious

wealth, that of labor, well paid, at their discretion; so that

they may be no longer obliged to live by the labor of others, as

they have hitherto lived. In case some of them should be

incapable of labor, which will happen to a good many, seeing that

_hitherto they have never learned the use of their ten fingers,

what then_? Well, then they will be given tickets for soup.

“‘But that is too little,’ the _bourgeois_ will howl.

“‘Too little!’ the workman will reply--‘too little to have work,

at your discretion, well paid, and soup for the invalids! The

deuce! You are hard to please. We could have been well satisfied

with such terms formerly.’”[119]

This is the unavoidable conclusion, and the practical as well as 581

unavoidable conclusion, to which the whole mass of the people must

come, unless they are convinced that the rich labor more usefully for

the common good, and for the good of the poor, by means of their

wealth with its attendant privileges, than they would by manual labor.

They cannot be convinced of this, unless rich and poor alike recognize

the truth of religious and Christian principles, and act on them

practically. On the materialistic, anti-theistic ground, you cannot

get a foothold against communism. It is all a waste of words to show

that civilization, art and science, social and political splendor,

national greatness, etc., require the concentration of wealth in a few

hands. What does the poor man care for these, if this life is all,

material good the _summum bonum_, and he himself miserable? His

condition becomes insupportable, and he would rather burn the world

with petroleum than bear it. It is very true that his desperate

efforts will make his condition far worse. But he will not listen to

you when you try to prove this to him, and, if you should even

convince him, you would only render him more desperate. He must

believe that he is under the government of God, that he has been

redeemed by Christ, that heaven is opened to him by faith, that this

world is a place for gaining merit by labor and suffering, that the

difference in rank, wealth, and privilege is ordered by God for the

good of all and every one, if he is to be contented with his lot. For

him is the Pope, the bishop, the priest, the splendid church, the

glittering vestments and chalices. For him, too, is government, for

him is commerce and trade, for him science and art, for him are some

men rich. The church and the state are necessary for his good, and

both church and state have need of men in whose hands wealth and power

are deposited.

If the people are to be convinced of this, they must see that their

spiritual and temporal superiors are convinced of it, and act

accordingly. The rich as well as the poor must act on Christian

principles--act as men who have a trust committed to them for the

common good. They must, in a word, be zealous _laborers_ in their own

sphere. And it is especially incumbent on them, at the present time,

to do everything possible to ameliorate and elevate the condition of

that class of society who are not merely doomed to a life of manual

labor, but to a life of misery and degradation. The people have been

taught that they possess political sovereignty, and universal suffrage

has given them the right and power to exercise it. Can they be

expected, then, to remain content for ever with a sovereignty which is

united with a state of social abjectness and misery? Is it safe or

prudent to neglect, despise, or insult them; or to swindle them and

defraud them of their rights, and at the same time to flaunt before

their eyes the gaudy insignia of what they believe to be ill-gotten

wealth? Especially when we consider that they read the newspaper every

day. We leave it to our rich merchants and our educated men to think

over and answer to themselves these questions.

For ourselves, we are convinced that the only safety for the wealthy

class, and for society, is to be found in a return to purely Christian

and Catholic principles. And we shall proceed to give our views more

definitely and in detail upon the part which devolves on the rich in

this work of social regeneration, in our future articles.

[119] See the _Dublin Review_, Oct., p. 459.

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THE HOUSE OF YORKE. 582