At the end of a month Mme. Durand obtained the consent of Madeleine,

but she said nothing to her of her son's secret, of their meeting, of

the letter, of the feelings so long cherished, nor of the protection

of Mary, who had brought together these two Christian souls. This she

left for him to relate one day when he was alone with his betrothed.

She listened much affected, and you may be surprised to learn that she

forgot to ask for the lost letter and the medal of the Virgin.

Mme. Durand saw the good abbe and the sister at the Patronage, and

they approved the marriage. The consent of the soldier brother was

asked and obtained.

The marriage was to take place in a few days. "Beg pardon," says

Antoine, "these two young people were made for each other--a fine

match really. You will not believe me, but I love them as if they were

my own children."

Lucien came to Paris for the wedding. From the first he made a

conquest of Antoine. It turned out that Antoine too had served in the

110th. The two heroes talked of their campaigns. One related the

battle of Champaubert, the other that of Solferino. The medal of St.

Helena fraternized with the Italian medal; they drank to the laurels

of the old 110th, to the triumphs of the new. The veteran and the

conscript became the best friends in the world.

The great day arrived. The abbe blessed the union and Antoine gave

away the bride. He straightened his bent figure; he put a new ribbon

in his medal. He was prouder than on the evening of Champaubert, when

Napoleon said, "Soldiers of the 110th, you are heroes?" Brother

Lucien, with his corporal's badge and his Italian medal, added much to

the brilliancy of the cortege. Mesdames Durand and Antoine put on

their richest dresses. What shall we say of Madeleine in her bridal

dress? of her veil, and the wreath upon her auburn tresses? of the

sweet face reflecting the purity of an innocent heart and a chaste

love? of the tears which flow when the heart is too full? of the

sacred hour when this Christian couple unite in a common prayer?

Now they are married they do not seek pleasures abroad. Their

happiness is found in their daily labor, their evening conversation,

or reading; on Sunday, after mass, a walk to the Tuileries, while

their mother at their side smiles on their love. Their hearts are

drawn so near together that {703} they beat in unison, they think and

feel at the same time. At last a child makes one more joy in this

joyous house--one stronger bond between these united souls. Such is

their pure affection: a love which age can never wither, a love born

of a prayer, and blest by God.

Jacques has reaped the fruit of his labor; he has paid all the debts

of the past, and ease and plenty have returned to the household. He

hopes to be soon taken into partnership with his employer.

They do not wish to leave the old house in the Rue du

Four-Saint-Germain, so filled with sweet memories, but they have taken

a lower floor, they have a large apartment, and are almost rich. The

poor have their share of their riches.

Lucien, the soldier, has entirely reformed, and has risen to the rank

of sergeant. Perhaps he may yet wear an officer's epaulettes.

Old Antoine grows old, but his heart remains young; his figure is more

bent, but he still straightens it when he speaks of Napoleon, and

relates to our friends the battle of Champaubert. He was the godfather

of the little boy. "A fine child," said he "Beg pardon, we will make a

general of him." "I am willing, I am sure," said Madeleine, "but we

must first make him a Christian."

------

From The London Review.

CATHOLIC PROGRESS IN LONDON.

There are few questions upon which there exists a greater variety of

opinion, and with regard to which such contradictory statements are

published, as upon the increase of Roman Catholicism in the

metropolis. There are those on one hand who believe that it has made

no progress at all, and that the rumors of "conversions," and even

those Roman Catholic buildings which have of late years sprung up in

such abundance around us, are not to be taken as proofs of such an

increase in the numbers of Roman Catholics as the latter at least seem

to indicate. Others believe without doubting that the Catholic Church

is silently and energetically spreading its ramifications over the

metropolis, and that there is hardly a household of any respectability

in which its agents, in some form or other, have not contrived to get

a footing; while there are persons who go so far as to assert that

many of the Protestant clergy themselves are the direct emissaries of

Rome, doing her work, and doing it consciously--nay, doing it under

compact--while receiving the pay of the National Church. We believe

that the truth will be found to lie between these extreme views. Not

only has the Church of Rome gained ground in London, but it is

steadily progressing, even at the present time, though by no means at

such a rate, except in certain parishes, as to occasion the slightest

danger to the Protestant cause, if only a moderate amount of energy

and good will is shown by the Reformed denominations in securing their

flocks within their own folds. We have already stated our belief that

the fact of a clergyman holding High or Low Church views is not in any

manner whatever necessarily connected with the increase of Catholicism

among his congregation, but that such increase is owing either to the

lack of a sufficient staff of the Protestant clergy to {704} repel its

advances, or to the apathy or inefficiency of the incumbent, or, as

may be especially shown in some wealthy districts, to that mysterious

want of power in the clergy of the Church of England over the minds of

the rich and influential of their parishioners. And that this view is

not without some basis in fact, will be seen when we have described

the present relative position of the Catholic and Anglican Churches in

the wealthy, aristocratic, and populous parish of Kensington,

comprising as it does the three wards of Notting-hill, Kensington, and

Brompton.

Formerly, for the accommodation of the whole of the Roman Catholics of

the parish of Kensington, there was but one small chapel near the High

street, which appeared amply sufficient for the members of that creed.

But ten or twelve years ago a Roman Catholic builder purchased, at an

enormous price, a plot of ground about three acres in extent beside

the church of the Holy Trinity, Brompton. For a time considerable

mystery prevailed as to the uses it was to be applied to; but, shortly

after the buildings were commenced, they were discovered to be for the

future residence and church of the Oratorian fathers, then established

in King William street, Strand. As soon as a portion of the building

was finished, the fathers removed to it from their former dwelling;

and the chapel, a small and commodious erection, was opened for divine

service. At first the congregation was of the scantiest description;

even on Sundays at high mass, small as the chapel was, it was

frequently only half filled, while, on week days, at many of the

services, it was no uncommon circumstance to find the attendances

scarcely more numerous than the number of priests serving at the

altar. By degrees the congregation increased, till the chapel was

found too small for their accommodation, and extensive additions were

made to it; but these, again, were soon filled to overflowing, and

further alterations had to be made, till at last the building was

capable of holding without difficulty from 2,000 to 2,500 persons. It

is now frequently so crowded at high mass that it is difficult for an

individual entering it after the commencement of the service to find

even standing room. In the meantime the monastery itself, if that is

the proper term, was completed--a splendid appearance it presents--

and we believe is now fully occupied.

The Roman Catholic population in the parish, or mission, under the

spiritual direction of the fathers of the Oratory, now comprises

between 7,000 and 8,000 souls. The average attendance at mass on

Sundays is about 5,000, and the average number of communions for the

last two years has been about 45,000 annually. But in addition to this

church, Kensington has three others, St. Mary's, Upper Holland street,

St. Simon Stock, belonging to the Carmelite Friars, and the church of

St. Francis Assissi in Notting Hill. Of monasteries, or religious

communities of men, it has the Oratorians before mentioned, and the

Discalced Carmelites, in Vicarage place. Of convents of ladies, it has

the Assumption in Kensington square, the Poor Clares Convent in Edmond

terrace, the Franciscan Convent in Portobello road, the Sisters of

Misericorde, 195 Brompton road, and the Sisters of Jesus, 4 Holland

villas. Of schools, the Roman Catholics possess, in the parish of

Kensingtion, the Orphanage in the Fulham road, the Industrial School

of St. Vincent de Paul, as well as the large Industrial Schools for

girls in the southern ward. All these schools are very numerously

attended, the gross number of pupils amounting to 1,200, those of the

Oratory alone being 1,000. The kindness and consideration shown by the

Roman Catholic teachers to the children of the poor is above all

praise, not only in Kensington, but in all localities where they are

under their charge.

It might be imagined from this account of the Roman Catholic

institutions in Kensington, that a general {705} rush had been made

upon that parish, and that the surrounding districts were

comparatively free from Roman Catholics. Such, however, is very far

from being the case. In the union of Fulham and Hammersmith we have

the Roman Catholic church of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the church of

the Holy Trinity, Brook-green, and the church of Our Lady of Grace,

Turnham-green. Of monasteries there are the St. Mary's Training

College and the Brothers of Mercy, and for ladies there is the order

of the Good Shepherd. Of charities and schools they have the Holy

Trinity alms-houses on Brook-green, a home for aged females, a refuge

for female penitents, most admirably managed and producing a most

beneficial effect, an excellent reformatory for criminal boys, the

large industrial schools of St. Vincent de Paul, and a home, St.

Joseph's, for destitute boys. In Bays-water there is the cathedral of

St. Mary's of the Angels (of which the celebrated Dr. Manning is the

superior) and the convent of Notre Dame de Sion. In Chelsea there is

the church of St. Mary's, Cadogan terrace, a convent for the Sisters

of Mercy, another for the Third Order of Servites, as well as two well

conducted and numerously attended schools.

In the united parishes of St. Margaret's and St. John's, Westminster,

a few years since, the priests opened their campaign with considerable

energy. In addition to their church in the Horsferry road, which was

opened in 1813, they erected those of St. Peter's and St. Edmond's in

Palace street, the superior priest of the latter being the celebrated

Father Roberts, a man not only respected for the energy he shows in

the cause of his religion, but beloved by all classes for his

philanthropy. To these some schools and convents were added, the most

celebrated of the latter being that of the Sisters of Charity in

Victoria street. At first the priests seemed to be sanguine of success

in the parish; but their advance was met by men of as much ability,

courage, and energy as themselves.

On the Surrey side of the water the Catholic Church has the

magnificent cathedral dedicated to St. George, in St. George's Fields;

the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Parker's road, Dockhead,

Bermondsey; the church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception,

Trinity road, Rotherithe; that of Our Lady of La Salette and St.

Joseph, Melior street, Southwark; and the church of the Sacred Heart

of Jesus, Windham street, Camberwell; beside several others in

Peckham, Clapham, Lambeth, and the surrounding districts. Of

communities of men there are the Capuchines at Peckham and at Clapham,

the Redemptorists, and the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Of

convents they have the Religious of the Faithful Virgin at Norwood,

which also comprises an orphanage; the order of the Sisters of Mercy

in Bermondsey; the order of the Sisters of the Christian Retreat, St.

Joseph's, Kennington; the Little Sisters of the Poor, Fentiman road,

Lambeth; beside one or two others of minor importance. It should also

be remarked that all these establishments, with one or two exceptions,

have sprung up within the last ten or twenty years. Of the numbers of

the congregations of the different churches it would be difficult to

form a just idea, but they are certainly very great; that properly

attached to St. George's cathedral alone we have been assured, on most

reliable Roman Catholic authority, amounting to 12,000 or 13,000. The

number of children attending the schools is doubtless proportionably

great.

In the north-eastern portion of the metropolis, we find the Roman

Catholics, although they have lately built several new churches, are

fully occupied in holding their own ground without exerting themselves

to make converts. And here, opposed as we are to their creed on

doctrinal points, it would be unjust to withhold our meed of praise to

the exertions of the priests in relieving the temporal miseries of

{706} their poor. It would be difficult to imagine charitable efforts

carried on more indefatigably or nobly. Few who have not visited and

personally inspected the different courts and alleys in the

neighborhood of Spitalfields, Bethnal-green, St. George's-in-the-East,

and Ratcliffe Highway, inhabited as they are by the poor Irish, can

have an idea of the abject poverty which reigns in them, or the amount

of patience, courage, and Christian feeling necessary to relieve it.

Yet all this is cheerfully performed by the Roman Catholic priesthood,

their energies appearing to increase in proportion as the difficulties

and dangers before them become greater. It would perhaps be an

injustice to their body in this district to select any for notice in

preference to the rest; but we cannot refrain from making special

mention of the labors of the Rev. Father Kelley, of Ratcliffe Highway,

and the Rev. Father Chaurain, of Spitalfields, into the results of

whose exertions we have made personal investigation.

In the northern districts of the metropolis, especially in Islington

and its surrounding neighborhoods, the Roman Catholics appear to have

made considerable progress. They have lately built several new

churches as well as houses for religious communities, both for men and

women. That their progress in the metropolis is not solely the result

of the High-Church practices in the establishment may be presumed from

the fact that, although the inhabitants of Islington and its vicinity

are particularly noted for their attachment to Low-Church principles,

Catholicism has gained more ground there than in localities where

Puseyism is dominant. In the north-western districts it does not

appear to have increased, though the churches are well attended, and

the congregations apparently very numerous. That of one of the

largest, Our Lady's church, in St. John's Wood, is 6,000, and the

children in the schools 600. In the central districts of London Roman

Catholic churches are very numerous and proportionately well attended;

those in Moorfields, and those in the neighborhood of Covent Garden

and Piccadilly, being particularly so.

One of the most effective means employed by the Roman Catholics to

make the conversions is the opening of schools for the education of

children of the poor; nor do they hesitate to admit that these schools

are not only open to the children of their own persuasion, but to all

who may choose to avail themselves of them. This is clear from the

speech of the late Cardinal Wiseman at the Roman Catholic Congress

held at Malines in the autumn of 1863. Speaking of the hundreds of

ragged children, scarcely knowing their parents, he had been

accustomed to meet in the different lanes and alleys of the poorer

London localities, he says: "We are doing all we can to gather these

poor little outcasts together, and to give them Christian training.

The schools in which they are taught, and to which I am at present

alluding, are themselves situated in a truly fearful spot, Charles

street, Drury lane. We owe them in a great measure to the great zeal

of the fathers of the Oratory. Their cost has been no less than

L12,000. The Religious Sisters from Tournay, with a devotion truly

heroic, have undertaken the care of the girls' school. For some time

past we have had the consolation of seeing increased, by 1,000 a year,

the number of children attending our schools for the poor; there still

remain 17,000 poor children who attend no school."

The Catholic Church judges rightly that a few years hence the children

under its care will not only augment the number of adult members of

its faith, but will proportionately swell their ranks in the next

generation. Nor is this danger to the Protestant cause to be despised.

All their schools are admirably managed, and the children in them are

treated with the greatest kindness and consideration. We have visited

several, and in all we remarked a great affection and {707} respect

existing in the minds of the pupils for their teachers, the latter not

considering that their duties are over when the classes are dismissed,

but afterward entering into their amusements and occupations with

great patience and good humor. We lately visited unexpectedly the

school alluded to by Cardinal Wiseman, and although lessons were over

we found one of the masters in the large play-room busily employed in

instructing a dozen of the most ragged urchins it would be possible to

find in that squalid and impoverished locality in the mysteries of

spinning peg-tops. Such acts of kindness to children are not forgotten

when they grow up, and a better means of binding them to their faith

when adults it would be impossible to imagine.

In Gate street, Lincoln's Inn-fields, is another school of the same

description. We have watched its progress since its establishment, and

marked the great increase in the number of its scholars. It commenced

with very few, but must now number several hundreds. Those in

Drury-lane have more than four hundred children, among whom, perhaps,

not ten before the buildings were erected were receiving any

instruction whatever. All the Roman Catholic charities appear to be

admirably managed; their orphanages especially so. Those of the

Sisters of Charity in Victoria street, Westminster, and Norwood,

considering the comparatively small means at the disposal of their

priesthood, are perfect models of what institutions of the kind ought

to be; at the same time, it must not be imagined that the Roman

Catholic charities in London are solely of a description calculated to

obtain converts to their creed. Their reformatories for fallen women

and their exertions for the relief of the sick are worthy of the

highest praise. An hospital, with a church attached, solely for

chronic and incurable diseases, has for some time been established in

Great Ormond street, at the expense of a gentleman of wealth. The

hospital is under the care of the prioress and sisters of the Order of

St. John of Jerusalem, and we never saw an infirmary of the kind

better managed. A large staff of nuns nurse the sick; and not only are

their numbers greater in proportion to those of the patients than in

any of our metropolitan hospitals, but their attention and kindness to

those under their charge might serve as a model to many of our

Protestant institutions of a similar character.

----

{708}

From Chambers's Journal.

A VANISHING RACE.

The residence of Captain C. F. Hall in the arctic regions, and his

explorations among the solemn and majestic wastes surrounded by the

"hyperborean seas," have invested the Esquimaux with a degree of

interest which they had never previously excited. The savage

inhabitants of the more beautiful and fertile regions of the earth

have been observed by travellers with close and careful attention,

which leads to hopeful efforts for their civilization. As the map of

the world is opened up to our comprehension, new schemes and prospects

for the advance of the human race are opened with it; savans, artists,

missionaries, merchants, gird themselves to the contest with the

material and moral conditions of the peoples yet, though the world's

day has lasted so long, in their infancy, whose unknown future may

contain histories as brilliant as those of the civilizations of the

present and the past. But there is a race who have not excited such

hopes, who have not given rise to such exertions--a race whose life of

unimaginable hardship gives them a mysterious resemblance to the

phantoms of mythological belief, and places them beyond the reach of

the sympathies of civilization by its physical conditions, the

amelioration of which is impossible. Beyond the stern barrier which

nature has set in the northernmost part of her awful realm, behind the

terrible rampart of snow and ice, and storm and darkness, these

creatures of her wrath, rather than of her bounty, dwell. To reach

their land, the traveller must leave behind him every familiar object,

and abandon every habit or need of ordinary life. He must bid farewell

to green trees, to fertile fields, to the crops which give food to man

and beast, to the domestic animals, to every mode of conveyance, to

every implement of common use, to food and clothing such as even the

poorest and roughest sons of a less terrible clime may command; to the

thousand voices of nature, even in its secluded nooks, It is a mockery

to speak of the arctic regions as the land of the Esquimaux, for

nowhere on the earth is man less sovereign. Here nature is indeed

grand beyond conception, but also terrible, implacable, and

impenetrable. She sets man aside in her awful scorn; he is a thing of

no moment, a cumberer of the ice-fields, learning the simple lessons

whereby he supports his squalid existence from the brutes, which are

lordlier than he, inasmuch as the ice-slavery is no chain of servitude

to them; and heedless of him, of his terrible hunger and destitution,

of his hopeless isolation, she builds her ice-palaces upon the seas,

and locks the land in her glittering ice-chains, and flings her

terrific banners of flame wide against the northern sky; and sends her

voice abroad, without a tone of pity in its vibrations, sounding

through the troubled depths of the waters and the rent masses of the

many-tinted icebergs. Nature is indeed beautiful in her northern

strongholds, but her beauty shows only its terrible aspects, its dread

grandeur. The face of the mighty mother does not soften into a smile

for the feebleness of her youngest-born offspring, but is fixed in its

awful sublimity. There is no point of contact between this ice-kingdon

and European civilization, and men of our race and tongue shrink from

it with an appalled sadness, for has it now been the tomb of many of

our brave and beloved? Three centuries ago it earned that evil

reputation, which, in the then elementary state of geographical

knowledge, and the general prevalence of superstition, assumed a weird

and baleful form. It has but increased {709} in degree, though

differing in kind, in our days, and we think of the arctic regions as

the sepulchre of the beloved dead, the land toward which the heart of

England yearned, and which kept pitiless silence through long years of

hope deferred. But of its people we do not think; we are satisfied to

have but a vague notion of them; to wonder, amid the many marvels of

that mighty problem--the distribution of the human race--how human

beings ever found their way to those dreadful fastnesses, more cruel

in their exaction of human suffering than the desert and the forest.

This indifference gives way when we learn what manner of people these

are whom we call Esquimaux, a word which signifies "eaters of raw

food," but who call themselves _Innuit_, or "the people," and explain

their own origin by a story which is a pleasing testimony to the

common possession of self-conceit by all nations. They say that the

Creator made white men first, but was dissatisfied with them, regarded

them as worthless unfinished creatures, and straightway set about

making the Innuit people, who proved perfectly satisfactory.

Captain Hall lived among this strange race for two years and a half,

and he is about to return and prosecute his researches in Boothia and

King William's Land. This time, his object is to trace the remnants of

the Franklin expedition, which--as he finds the history of the few

events which have ever marked the progress of time in that distant

land handed down by oral tradition with extraordinary distinctness--he

has no doubt of being able to do. His first journey was in search of

relics of the Frobisher expedition, and was as successful as it was

daring, patient, and persevering. His experiences were strange in all

respects, and in many most revolting; but we owe much to this

cheerful, courageous, simple-hearted American gentleman, who has

revealed the Esquimaux to us as Captain Grant has revealed the African

tribes, and oriental tourists the dwellers in the deserts. There is

poetical harmony in the stern conditions of life among the Innuits;

there is the impress of sadness and of sterility upon them all. Time

itself changes its meaning in a land where

"The sun starts redly up

To shine for half a year,"

and dim wintry twilight lasts throughout the other half, and hunger is

the normal state of the people. The traveller's route is to be traced

on the map, which is mere guess-work hitherto, up the western side of

Davis's Strait; and once away from Holsteinborg, the journey assumes

all its savage features. The terrible icebergs rear their menacing

masses in the track of the ship; the sun pours its beams upon them,

and bathes them in golden light; they appear in fantastic shapes of

Gothic cathedral, of battlemented tower, of clear single-pierced

spire, of strong fenced city, of jewel-mountain, of vast crystal

hills; and so, as the voyager leaves art and civilization behind,

their most supreme forms flash a mirage-like reminiscence upon him,

intensifying the contrast of the prospect, and luring him to a frantic

and futile regret.

A grand and terrible confusion reigns around; the voyager shrinks from

the overwhelming scene, where ranges of mountains, islands, rocks,

castles, huge formless masses, and gorgeous prismatic lights, surround

that laboring speck upon the mystic sea, of whose littleness he is so

small an atom; and a strange sense, which is not fear, but awe, comes

to him with the knowledge that nothing of this sublime confusion is

real, on the horizon or beyond it. For all the time of his stay in the

arctic regions he is to be surrounded by contradictions, by the

sublimest manifestations of nature, by the lowest conditions of

humanity, by gorgeous and majestic optical delusions, and by the

hardest and most grovelling facts of daily existence; he must share,

to their fullest extent, the relentless physical needs of the {710}

people, and live, if he would live at all, in close contact with

them--and yet his solitude must be inwardly profound and

unapproachable; his purposes unintelligible to his associates; and

their language, elementary in itself, dimly and scantily comprehended

by him even in its most sparing forms. All this without any of the

alleviations of life among savages in southern countries--without the

warmth, which, if sometimes oppressive, is ordinarily

grateful--without the rich and genial beauties of nature--without the

resources of sport without the natural fruits of the earth--without

the intellectual occupation of speculating upon development, of

ascertaining capabilities, or of investigating sources of wealth. The

civilized dweller in arctic regions has none of these. He beholds,

with admiration so solemn as to be painful, the unapproachable dignity

and hard implacable stillness of nature; but he never dreams of

treasure to be wrested from the cells of the ice-prison; he seeks the

dead--the dead of centuries ago--the dead of a decade since, to be

found, it may be, incorporated with their frozen resting place; for

the fiat of nature arrests decay in these terrible regions, where

death and life are always at close gripes with one another. While the

mind is ceaselessly impressed with sadness and solemnity, the body

asserts its claim to superiority; it will not be forgotten or

neglected, for cold encompasses it with unrelaxing menace of death,

and hunger preys upon the vitals, whose heat wanes rapidly in the

pitiless climate, and which crave for the nutriment so hard to

procure, so repulsive when procured.

Toil is the law of the ice-clad land--toil, not to wrest from the

bosom of the earth her children's sustenance, but to tear from the

amphibious creatures, from whom they have learned how to shelter

themselves from the cold, and whose skins cover them, the unctuous

flesh, which they devour raw in enormous quantities. The Innuit are,

on the whole, a gentle people, driven by the relentless need and

severity of their lives into close and peaceful companionship. They

have no king, no government, no law, no defined religion, no property;

they have, for all these, custom--the oldest law; they are animated by

the same spirit that dictated the reply once made to one who sat by

Jacob's well: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and we

worship." As "the old Innuits" did, so do their successors. They have

no bread, no medicine, no household furniture; they are poor human

waifs upon the wide white bosom of the frozen seas; and they have, no

help or resource but in the seal, the walrus, the white bear, the

rein-deer, and the wonderful Esquimaux dogs, which are by far the

noblest living creatures in all those sterile wastes. From the seal

they have learned to make the _igloo_, which is the house of the

Innuit. They eat the flesh of this animal, and drink its fresh warm

blood; they kill its young, and eagerly swallow the milk of the

mother, found in the stomach of the baby seal. When the sudden summer

comes, and the snow melts, and leaves the surface of the ice bare,

they are houseless; the igloo melts away; their home is but of frozen

water, and suddenly it disappears. Then they have recourse to the

_tupic_, which is a huge sheet of skins hung across a horizontal pole,

supported at either end. Their bed is a snow platform, strewn with the

moss which is the rein-deer's food, and covered with skins. Their

choicest dainties are the fat of the _tuktoo_, or rein-deer, the

marrow procured by mashing the bones of the legs, and the thick,

white, unctuous lining of the whale-hide.

The interior of an igloo presents a picture more repulsive than that

of any African hut or Indian wigwam, more distressing to human

feelings and degrading to human pride. The igloo is a dome-shaped

building, made of ice-blocks, with an aperture in the roof, and a rude

doorway at one side, closed {711} with ice-blocks, when the inmates

are assembled. The snow platform which forms the bed is occupied by

the women and the stranger. Men and women are clad in skins, put

together with neatness and ingenuity. The dress of the sexes differs

only in two particulars; that of the women is furnished with a long

tail, depending from the jacket, and has a sort of hood, in which

loads and children are carried. The life of the infant is preserved by

its naked body being kept in contact with that of the mother. One

household implement they possess--it is a stone lamp; something like

a trough, with a deep groove in it, in which the dried moss, used as a

wick, floats in the seal oil, expressed by the teeth of the women from

lumps of blubber, which they patiently "mill" until the precious

unguent is all procured. But this lamp too often fails them, and

darkness and hunger take up frequent abode with the Innuit. Days and

nights are passed by the men, sitting singly, in death-like stillness

and silence, by the hole which they have found, far under the snow, at

which the seal will "blow." It is strange and terrible to think of

those watches, in the midst of the desolation, under that arctic sky,

with the cold dense fog now swooping, now lifting, in the enforced

stillness, with famine gnawing the watcher, and famine at home in the

igloo, and the chance of food depending on the sureness of one

instantaneous stroke, down through the snow, through the narrow

orifice in the ice, into the throat of the animal with the sleek skin,

and the mournful human eyes, which vainly implore mercy from raging

hunger.

When the Innuit brings the seal to the igloo, a crowd invades the

narrow space, for the simplest hospitality prevails, and the long

watch, the skilful stroke, do not constitute sole ownership of the

prize. The skin is stripped off the huge unsightly carcass, and a

horrible scene ensues. The flesh is torn or cut with the stone knives

in large lumps, and having been first licked by the women, to remove

any hairs or other adhesive matter, is distributed to the party, and

devoured raw; the blood is drunk, the bones are mashed, the entrails

are greedily eaten, the dogs sharing in all; and the blubber is made

to yield its oil by the disgusting process already described. One

turns silenced from the picture; from the sights, and sounds, and

scents; from the vision of dark faces, eager with gluttonous longing,

gathered round the red, flaring light; from the skin-clothed bodies,

reeking with grease and filth, and the foul exhalations of the

mutilated animal; from the lumps of flesh torn by savage hands, and

crammed dripping into distended mouths; from the steaming blood, and

the human creatures who rapturously quaff it in the presence of the

white man, who sits among them and feeds with them, whose heart yearns

with dumb compassion for them, who has wonderful scientific

instruments in his pockets, and his Bible in his breast. As the seal

teaches the Innuits the art of housing themselves, so the white bear

teaches them how to kill the walrus, their most plentiful and frequent

food, when the ice is drifting, and the unwieldy creatures lie upon

the blocks close inshore; then the bear climbs the overhanging

precipice, and taking a heavy block in his deft forepaws, he hurls it

with rare skill and nicety of aim upon the basking monster below. So

brutes train men in those dreadful regions, and not men brutes. The

life of the Innuits is full of such contradictions. And their deaths?

From the contemplation of these one turns away appalled, for they die

in utter solitude.

When Captain Hall first heard of this horrible custom, he started off

at once to see its truth; and having removed the blocks with which the

doorway had been built up, entered an igloo, and found a woman who

had yet many days to linger thus fastened up in her living tomb.

Again, hearing that a woman had been abandoned to die, at a great

distance, he set forth, {712} and having reached the spot with immense

difficulty and danger, he managed to remove the snow and the block

which closed the hole in the top of the igloo, lowered himself into

it, and found the woman dead, and frozen as hard as her bier and her

tomb, with a sweet serene smile upon the marble face. So this is the

close of a life of toil and privation--the withdrawal of every kindred

face, the fearful solitude of the ice-walls, the terrible arctic

darkness and silence, and the frozen corpse lying unshrouded, naked,

beneath the frozen skins, until the resurrection. Surely the angel of

death is an angel of mercy there, and does his errand gently, bearing

away the lonely, terrified spirit to the city of gold, the gates of

pearl, the jasper sea, the land where there is no darkness, physical

or mental, for evermore. The earth, always pitiless to them, which

never feeds them from her bosom, does not suffer her dead children of

the Innuit people to sleep their last sleep in her lap. Their graves

are only blocks of ice piled around and above the corpses, which

remain unharmed, unless when the blocks melt, as they sometimes do,

and the wolves, dogs, or bears gain access to the frozen remains. The

Innuits are dying out; disease is making havoc among them;

consumption, formerly unknown, is thinning their numbers by its slow,

furtive, murderous advance; their children are few, and fewer still

are reared; and the long story of awful desolation draws to a close.

Who can regret it? Who can do aught but desire that the giant wastes

of the arctic regions should be left to the soulless creatures of God;

that the great discord between them and human life has ceased to

trouble the harmony of creation; that the mystery of such an existence

is quietly laid at rest, among the things which "we know not now, but

which we shall know hereafter?"

--------

MISCELLANY.

SCIENCE.

_A New Kind of Mirror.--The Chemical News_ states that M. Dode, a

French chemist, has introduced platinum mirrors, which are greatly

admired, and which present this advantage, that the reflecting metal

is deposited on the outer surface of the glass, and thus any defect in

the latter is concealed. The process, which is patented in Paris, is

described as follows: Chloride of platinum is dissolved in water, and

a certain quantity of oil of lavender is added to the solution. The

platinum immediately leaves the aqueous solution and passes to the

oil, which holds it in suspension in a finely divided state. To the

oil so charged the author adds litharge and borate of lead, and paints

a thin coat of this mixture over the surface of the glass, which is

then carried to a proper furnace. At a red heat the litharge and

borate of lead are fused, and cause the adhesion of the platinum to

the softened glass. The process is very expeditious. A single baking,

M. Dode says, will furnish 200 metres of glass ready for commerce. It

would take fifteen days, he says, to coat the same extent with mercury

by the ordinary plan.

_African Silkworm_.--A silkworm before unknown in Europe has been

introduced into France from Senegal, and without suffering from change

of climate. It yields a richer silk than that of any other worm known

to naturalists, and its cocoons are twice the ordinary weight. It is

to be tried in Algiers, and if successful there, this new and rich

silk may become in time an important article of commerce.

_Science in a Balloon_.--Mr. Glaisher has {713} given, in a lecture at

the Royal Institution, a _resume_ of his scientific experiments in

balloons. Tables recording the decline of temperature with elevation,

show that when the sky was clear a more rapid decline took place than

when the sky was cloudy. Under a clear sky, a fall of 1 deg. takes place

within 100 feet of the earth, but at heights exceeding 25,000 feet it

is necessary to pass through 1,000 feet of vertical height to obtain a

fall of 1 deg. in temperature. At extreme elevations, in both states of

the sky, the air became very dry, but as far as his experiments went,

was never quite free from water. From ascents made before and after

sunset, Mr. Glaisher concludes that the laws which hold good by day do

not hold good by night; indeed, it seemed probable that at night, for

some little distance, the temperature may increase with elevation,

instead of decreasing. From experiments made on solar radiation with a

blackened bulb thermometer, and with Herschel's actinometer, it was

inferred that the heat rays from the sun pass through space without

loss, and become effective in proportion to the density or the amount

of water present in the atmosphere through which they pass. If this be

so, the proportion of heat received at Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and

Saturn may be the same as that received at the earth, if the

constituents of their atmospheres be the same as that of the earth,

and greater if the amount of aqueous vapor be greater, so that the

effective solar heat at Jupiter and Saturn may be greater than at

either the inferior planets, Mercury or Venus, notwithstanding their

far greater distances from the sun. This conclusion is most important

as corroborating Professor Tyndall's experiments on aqueous vapor.

Experiments on the wind showed that the velocity of the air at the

earth's surface was very much less than at a high elevation. A

comparison of the temperature of the dew point, as shown by different

instruments, gave results proving that the temperatures of the dew

point, as found by the use of the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and

Daniell's hygrometer, are worthy of full confidence as far as the

experiments went.

_The Eruption of Mount Etna_.--At a recent meeting of the Paris

Academy of Sciences, an important letter was read from M. Fouque to M.

Saint-Claire Deville on the eruption of Etna, which has presented

several phenomena of great scientific interest.

The eruption commenced at half-past ten on the evening of January 31.

On the previous day two successive shakings of the earth had been

noticed. Just before the eruption began a violent earthquake was felt,

the wave travelling to the north-east; after this, slight oscillations

continued until about 4 A.M. Large flames now rose from a point on the

north-east side of Etna 5,500 feet above the snow line, and lava began

to flow rapidly. In two or three days the lava traversed a space of

19,000 feet, with a width of from 10,000 to 12,000, and a variable

thickness, but often reaching to the depth of 30 or 60 feet. After

destroying for some distance everything in its passage, the current of

lava struck one of the old craters, and then bifurcated. The stream on

the west side moved very slowly, and, becoming subdivided, it nearly

ceased to move; the stream on the east side fell over a deep and

precipitous valley, which it soon filled, being then able to continue

its progress, until finally it was stopped by a lava mound of a

previous eruption.

The number of the craters is seven; of these five form a vast

elliptical enclosure, the major axis of which is directed toward the

north-east. A deep fissure, 1,500 feet in length, opened from the base

of a former crater, Frumento, to the nearest of the present cones.

This chasm, M. Fouque shows, was probably formed by the shock at the

commencement of the eruption. This fissure, and also a depression of

the crater Frumento, is in a right line with the major axis of the

ellipse formed by the craters. The same general fact has been several

times noticed in previous eruptions.

The vapors attending an eruption have been divided into the dry,

containing chiefly chloride of sodium and no water, the acid, which

contain a large amount of watery vapor, the alkaline, and the

carbonic. The first indicates the maximum, and the last the minimum of

volcanic action. Each of these varieties of vapor, succeeding in their

order, were noticed at this eruption. M. Fouque found the dry vapor

upon the still incandescent lava; the acid vapor in those parts where

the temperature was over {714} 400 deg.; the alkaline, where the

temperature was lower, but generally over 100 deg.; and finally, carbonic

acid has been detected in one of the adjacent old craters, which was

at the ordinary temperature. The first three varieties of vapor were

thus found upon the same transverse section of the lava, less than 150

feet distant from each other. In all these vapors the atmospheric air

which accompanied them was deprived of part of its oxygen, generally

containing only from 18 to 19 per cent., and in some alkaline vapors

the proportion was still less.

In this eruption there was a remarkable absence of sulphur and its

compounds; chemical tests as well as the sense of smell could detect

no trace of them. The eruption indeed was characterized by the absence

of the compounds of sulphur and the abundance of the compounds of

chlorine. Hydro-chlorate of ammonia, which was found in abundance, has

generally been regarded as exclusively belonging to the alkaline

vapors; but here it has been discovered among the other varieties,

whilst the alkaline vapors were distinguished by the carbonate rather

than by the hydrochlorate of ammonia.

At the present time, M. Fouque writes, the eruption is most active in

the four lowest craters; these throw liquid lava into the air, and

emit a nearly colorless smoke; the three superior craters eject

solidified lava and black stones, at the same time pouring out a dense

smoke charged with aqueous vapor and brown-colored ashes.

The three higher craters produce every two or three minutes a very

loud report resembling the rolling of thunder; the four lower craters,

on the contrary, send forth a rapid succession of ringing sounds,

which it is impossible to count. These sounds follow each other

without any cessation, and are only to be compared to the noise

produced by a series of blows from a hammer falling on an anvil. If

the ancients heard these noises in former eruptions, it is easily

conceivable how they imagined a forge to exist in the centre of the

volcano, with Cyclops for the master workman. The lava is black, rich

in pyroxene, and strongly attracted by a magnet. Since the

commencement of the eruption, the central crater of Etna has emitted

white vapors, which continually cover its summit. Several good

photographs of the eruption have been taken by M. Berthier, who

accompanied M. Fouque in his explorations, which were by no means

unattended with danger.

M. Saint-Claire Deville then made some observations on this paper. He

explained the almost entire absence of sulphur by the fact that M.

Fouque only examined the vapors from the lava. These nearly always

contain chlorine for their electro-negative element, and scarcely

show, and that not until later, sulphuretted and carbonic vapors.

After the eruption of Vesuvius in 1861, very light deposits of sulphur

were found covering the hydrochlorate of ammonia, which shows that the

former body is not absent from the lava. The existence of

hydrochlorate of ammonia in the emanations does not necessarily

exclude that of the vapors of hydrochloric and sulphuric acids.

_Magnetism of Iron-clad Ships_.--Staff-Commander Evans, of the British

navy, and Mr. Archibald Smith, who have devoted themselves for several

years to investigations into the character of the magnetism of

iron-built and armor-plated ships, have embodied the results of their

studies in an interesting paper read at a recent meeting of the Royal

Society. It is well known that iron ships have been very difficult to

navigate because of the disturbing effect of the iron upon the

compass, and serious accidents have happened in consequence. But

underwriters, and the whole naval profession, will be glad to hear

that the difficulty and risk are now greatly lessened, if not entirely

removed. For the results established by the paper in question

are--That it is no longer necessary to swing a ship in order to

ascertain the compass deviation, or error, seeing that it is possible

to determine the various forms of error by mathematics; that an iron

ship should always be built with her head to the south; if built head

north, there is such a confused amount of magnetism concentrated in

the stern as to have a violent disturbing effect on the compass; that

if, after building, a ship is to be armor-plated, the head, during the

fixing of the plates, should be turned in the opposite direction--

that is, to the north; and that especial pains should be taken while

building an iron ship to provide a {715} suitable place for the

standard-compass. Beside these particulars, the shot and shell stowed

in the vessel, the iron water-tanks, and, indeed, all the iron used in

her interior fittings, are to be taken into account; and it is

satisfactory to know that the influence exerted on the compass by any

one or all of these conditions can be ascertained, and allowed for, as

in the other cases above mentioned.

_"Gyges" Explained_.--The London _Reader_ gives the following

explanation of a curious experiment in optics which has been performed

at one of the London theatres under the name of "Eidos AEides," and

reproduced in New York under the appellation of "Gyges." It consists

in causing an actor or an inanimate object which is in full view of

the audience at one moment to disappear instantly, and then to

reappear with the same rapidity. The means by which this is

accomplished are very simple, and are to some extent similar to those

used in exhibiting "Pepper's Ghost." A sheet of plain unsilvered glass

is placed upon the stage, either upright or inclined at a suitable

angle, at the place where the actor or object is to disappear. This

glass is not perceived by the audience, and it does not interfere with

their view of the scenery, etc., behind the plate. A duplicate scene

representing that part of the back of the stage covered by the glass

is placed at the wing, out of sight of the spectators. With the

ordinary lighting of the stage the reflection of this counterfeit

scene in the glass is too faint to be observed; but when a strong

light is thrown upon the scene, the stage lights being lowered at the

same time, the image becomes visible. This duplicate scene being an

exact _fac-simile_ of the background of the stage, the change is not

noticed by the audience, the only difference being that they now see

by reflection that which they saw a moment previously by direct

vision. The actor, standing a sufficient distance behind the glass, is

completely hidden from view, and he is again rendered visible by

turning down the light on the false scene and allowing the stage

lights to predominate. When "Eidos AEides" was being performed at Her

Majesty's Theatre, it was, however, possible, with a good opera-glass,

to distinguish the outline of the figure behind the plate. The effects

produced may of course be modified. An actor may be made to appear

walking or flying in the air, or dancing on a tight-rope, by eclipsing

or obscuring a raised platform on which he may be placed.

------

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FALL OF WOLSEY

TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH.

By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

Volumes I. and II. 8vo., pp. 447 and 501. New York: Charles Scribner &

Company.

In these two luxurious volumes we have the first instalment of an

important work upon the most important period of English history. Six

other volumes are to follow. Mr. Froude is a thorough good Protestant.

His main purpose in this history seems to have been the glorification

of the English reformers. For the worst sovereigns of the house of

Tudor he displays an enthusiastic admiration which, one is tempted to

believe, is half genuine sentiment, and half love of paradox.

Catholics, of course, he could not have expected to satisfy; but he

has gone too far to please even the members of his own Church. Of

Henry VIII., whose apologist he has appropriately been called, he

draws a flattering portrait:

"If Henry VIII.," he says, "had died previous to the first agitation

of the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the

heaviest misfortunes which had ever befallen the country; and he would

have left a name which would have taken its place in history by the

side of that of the Black {716} Prince or of the conqueror of

Agincourt. Left at the most trying age, with his character unformed,

with the means at his disposal of gratifying every inclination, and

married by his ministers when a boy to an unattractive woman far his

senior, he had lived for thirty-six years almost without blame, and

bore through England the reputation of an upright and virtuous king.

Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is

said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the

handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and

amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner remained majestic.

No knight in England could match him in the tournament except the Duke

of Suffolk; he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any

yeoman of his guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing

vigor by a temperate habit and by constant exercise." His state papers

and letters lose nothing by comparison with those of Wolsey and

Cromwell. He was an accomplished musician; he wrote and spoke in four

languages; he was one of the best physicians of his age, an engineer,

and a theologian. "He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his

religious duties,' being present at the services in the chapel two or

three times a day with unfailing regularity, and showing to outward

appearance a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and

purity of his life." In private he was good-humored and good-natured.

But "like all princes of the Plantageuet blood, he was a person of a

most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general nobly

directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his

character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties

with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to

contend." "He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to

be one of the greatest of men. With all his faults about him he was

perhaps the greatest of his contemporaries."

Mr. Froude does not believe that the king's scruples respecting the

validity of his marriage with Catharine of Aragon were inspired by his

affection for Anne Boleyn. "They had arisen to their worst dimensions

before he had ever seen Anne Boleyn." But Mr. Froude's narrative of

the king's early intercourse with Anne is extremely unsatisfactory,

not to say disingenuous. How long Henry may have cherished his

scruples in secret, our author affords us no means of guessing; but

the earliest intimation which he finds of an intended divorce was in

June, 1527. It was in 1525, he says, that Anne came back from France

and appeared at the English court. This is an error, and is

inconsistent with other statements in the same chapter; the date was

1522; and almost immediately afterward the king began to pay Anne

marked attention. Her celebrated love-passage with Lord Percy took

place in 1523. Mr. Froude speaks of it as follows: "Lord Percy, eldest

son of Lord Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been

engaged to her. He 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." Now what will be thought of our author's

honesty when we say that Cavendish repeats again and again that the

match was broken off _by command of the king?_ Lord Northumberland did

not appear in the matter at all until Wolsey, by his majesty's orders,

had remonstrated with the young nobleman, and threatened him with dire

consequences if he should persist in a pursuit which was displeasing

to his sovereign. Mr. Froude carefully suppresses all allusion to

intercourse between the king and his fair favorite, until the project

of the divorce was well advanced,--not discussing or discrediting the

statements of other historians respecting Henry's early passion for

Anne Boleyn; but simply putting them behind his back, as matters of

which it did not suit his purpose to take notice. This fashion of

writing may do for romance, but not for history.

In demanding a divorce from his first queen, Henry has, as we might

suppose, Mr. Froude's full approval:

"It may be admitted, or it ought to be admitted, that if Henry VIII.

had been contented to rest his demand for a divorce merely on the

interests of the kingdom; if he had forborne, while his request was

pending, to affront the princess who had for many years been his

companion and his queen; if he had shown her that respect which her

{717} high character gave her a right to demand, and which her

situation as a stranger ought to have made it impossible to him to

refuse, his conduct would have been liable to no imputation, and our

sympathies would without reserve have been on his side. . . . . His

kingdom demanded the security of a stable succession; his conscience,

it may not be doubted, was seriously agitated by the loss of his

children; and looking upon it as the sentence of heaven upon a

connection the legality of which had from the first been violently

disputed, he believed that he had been living in incest and that his

misfortunes were the consequence of it. Under these circumstances he

had a full right to apply for a divorce."

With all its faults, Mr. Froude's book tells many wholesome truths in

a very forcible manner. Here is an admission which from such an

out-and-out Protestant we should hardly have looked for; he is

speaking of religious persecution:

"We think bitterly of these things, and yet we are but quarrelling

with what is inevitable from the constitution of the world. . . . The

value of a doctrine cannot be determined on its own apparent merits by

men whose habits of mind are settled in other forms; while men of

experience know well that out of the thousands of theories which rise

in the fertile soil below them, it is but one here and there which

grows to maturity; and the precarious chances of possible vitality,

where the opposite probabilities are so enormous, oblige them to

discourage and repress opinions which threaten to disturb established

order, or which, by the rules of existing beliefs, imperil the souls

of those who entertain them. Persecution has ceased among ourselves,

because we do not any more believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in

matters of faith is necessarily fraught with the tremendous

consequences which once were supposed to be attached to it. If,

however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us, making murder a

religious service; if they gained proselytes, and the proselytes put

their teaching in execution, we should speedily begin again to

persecute opinion. What teachers of Thuggism would appear to

ourselves, the teachers of heresy actually appeared to Sir Thomas

More, only being as much more hateful as the eternal death of the soul

is more terrible than the single and momentary separation of it from

the body. There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn

conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this:

that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws,

so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were

led by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the

execution of those laws; while others of harder nature and more narrow

sympathies enforced them without reluctance, and even with

exultation."

The following extract from an account of the feelings of the mass of

the English people during the early stages of the divorce affair, must

be rather unpalatable to the High-Church Episcopalians:

"They believed--and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only leading member of

the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not under the

same delusion--that it was possible for a national church to separate

itself from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to crush or

prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental system

could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those

mysteries were dispensed should minister in golden chains. This was

the English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the

second Henry, and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a

thing of words and paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew

well that an ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation

of doctrine; that plain men could not and would not continue to

reverence the office of the priesthood, when the priests were treated

as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own.

He was not to be blamed if he took the people at their word; if he

believed that, in their doctrinal conservatism, they knew and meant

what they were saying; and the reaction which took place under Queen

Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried and failed, and the

alternative was seen to be absolute union with Rome, or a forfeiture

of Catholic orthodoxy, proves after all that he was wiser than in the

immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy had succeeded, and

if, {718} strengthened by success, he had introduced into the Church

those reforms which he had promised and desired, he would have

satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation."

From an introductory chapter on the social condition of England in the

early part of the sixteenth century, we extract the following graphic

passage, as an example of Mr. Froude's fascinating style. Doubtless

most of our readers will agree with us in wishing that so graceful a

pen had been more worthily employed:

"The habits of all classes were open, free, and liberal. There are

two expressions, corresponding one to the other, which we frequently

meet with in old writings, and which are used as a kind of index,

marking whether the condition of things was or was not what it ought

to be. We read of 'merry England';--when England was not merry,

things were not going well with it. We hear of the 'glory of

hospitality,' England's pre-eminent boast,--by the rules of which all

tables, from the table of the twenty-shilling freeholder to the

table in the baron's hall and abbey refectory, were open at the

dinner hour to all comers, without stint or reserve, or question

asked: to every man, according to his degree, who chose to ask for

it, there was free fare and free lodging; bread, beef, and beer for

his dinner; for his lodging, perhaps, only a mat of rushes in a

spare corner of the hall, with a billet of wood for a pillow, but

freely offered and freely taken, the guest probably faring much as

his host fared, neither worse nor better. There was little fear of

an abuse of such licence, for suspicious characters had no leave to

wander at pleasure; and for any man found at large, and unable to

give a sufficient account of himself, there were the ever-ready

parish stocks or town gaol. The 'glory of hospitality' lasted far

down into Elizabeth's time; and then, as Camden says, 'came in great

bravery of building, to the great beautifying of the realm, but to

the decay' of what he valued more.

"In such frank style the people lived, hating three things with all

their hearts: idleness, want, and cowardice; and for the rest,

carrying their hearts high, and having their hands full. The hour of

rising, winter and summer, was four o'clock, with breakfast at five,

after which the laborers went to work, and the gentlemen to

business, of which they had no little. In the country every unknown

face was challenged and examined,--if the account given was

insufficient, he was brought before the justice; if the village

shopkeeper sold bad wares, if the village cobbler made 'unhonest'

shoes, if servants and masters quarrelled, all was to be looked to

by the justice; there was no fear lest time should hang heavy with

him. At twelve he dined; after dinner he went hunting, or to his

farm, or to do what be pleased. It was a life unrefined, perhaps,

but colored with a broad, rosy English health."

THE AMERICAN ANNUAL CYCLOPEDIA AND REGISTER OF

IMPORTANT EVENTS OF THE YEAR 1864.

8vo., pp. 838. New York: D. Appleton & Company.

The Annual Cyclopedia grows more and more valuable and interesting

every year. The present volume is a great improvement upon all that

have gone before it. The course of events has been unusually varied

and startling, and the topics suggested by it appear to have been for

the most part selected with good judgment and treated by competent

writers. We have under the head of "Army Operations" an admirable

history of Sherman's great march and of Grant's campaign in the

wilderness, both illustrated with maps. The article on the "Army of

the United States" abounds in information respecting the number of

troops, organization, supplies, department and corps commanders, etc.,

such as everybody wants to have, but nobody knows where to look for.

Under the titles of "Confederate" and "United States Congress" we have

a complete political history of our country during the last year,

while the condition and progress of the several foreign states are

treated in their proper places. A great deal of interesting matter is

given in the articles on the "Anglican" and "Greek" Churches,

"Commerce" and "Commercial Intercourse," "Diplomatic Correspondence

and Foreign Relations," "Finances of the United States," "Freedmen,"

"Freedom of the Press," "Geographical Explorations and Discoveries,"

"Literature and Literary Progress," "Military Surgery and Medicine"

(profusely illustrated), "Navy," "Ordnance," "Petroleum," etc., etc.

{719} Under the head of "Public Documents" is the most correct

translation of the Pope's Encyclical and syllabus of errors condemned

that has yet appeared in this country. Biographical sketches are also

given of the most distinguished men who died during the course of the

year.

SONGS FOR ALL SEASONS. By Alfred Tennyson. With illustrations by D.

Maclise, T. Creswick, S. Eytinge, C. A. Barry, H. Fenn, and G.

Perkins. 16mo., pp. 84. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

HOUSEHOLD POEMS. By Henry W. Longfellow. With illustrations by John

Gilbert, Birket Foster, and John Absolon. 16mo., pp. 96. Boston:

Ticknor & Fields.

The series of "Companion Poets for the People," of which these two

volumes are the first issues, deserves special commendation as an

example of the way in which cheapness and elegance may be combined.

For half a dollar Messrs. Ticknor & Fields offer us a neat little

book, printed in the best style of typography, on rich tinted paper,

with a clean broad margin, and some twelve or fifteen wood-cuts by

reputable artists. The selections appear to have been made with good

judgment, and include some late pieces of both Tennyson and Longfellow

which are not to be found in previous editions of their works.

THE HISTORY OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION IN GERMANY AND

SWITZERLAND, AND IN ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND, THE NETHERLANDS,

FRANCE, AND NORTHERN EUROPE.

IN A SERIES OF ESSAYS, REVIEWING D'AUBIGNE, MENZEL, HALLAM,

BISHOP SHORT, PRESCOTT, RANKE, FRYXELL, AND OTHERS.

By M.J. Spalding, D.D., Archbishop Baltimore. Fourth revised edition,

Two volumes in one. 8vo., pp. 494 and 509. Baltimore: John Murphy &

Company.

We welcome this new and improved edition of the best antidote that has

yet been prepared for English readers to the common misrepresentations

of Protestant historians of the reformation. Archbishop Spalding's

book has been so long before the public, and has been received with

such general favor, that it would be superfluous at this late day to

enter upon a general examination of its merits. It will prove a

valuable guide to the student of English and continental history; he

will find here the chief points made against the Church, by the long

list of writers named in the title-page, taken up and answered by a

prelate of high reputation for sound and thorough scholarship. Dr.

Spalding of course does not deny that there were abuses in the 16th

century which ought to have been abolished; but he contends that the

gravity and extent of these disorders have been greatly exaggerated;

that they generally originated in the world and its princes, not in

the Church; most of them being due to the fact that bad men were

thrust into high ecclesiastical places by worldly-minded and

avaricious sovereigns; that there was a lawful and efficacious remedy

for all such evils, which consisted in giving to the popes their due

power and influence in the nomination of bishops and in the

deliberations of general councils; in a word, that "reformation within

the Church, and not revolution outside of it, was the only proper,

lawful, and efficacious remedy for existing evils;" and finally, "that

the fact of Christians having at length felt prepared to resort to the

desperate and totally wrong remedy of revolution was owing to a train

of circumstances which had caused faith to wane and grow cold, and

which now appealed more to the passions than to reason, more to human

considerations than to the principles of divine faith and the

interests of eternity."

THE YEAR OF MARY; OR, THE TRUE

SERVANT OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

Translated from the French of Rev. M. d'Arville, Apostolic

Prothonotary. Edited, and in part translated, by Mrs. J. Sadlier.

12mo. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham.

This is a work intended for the use either of private persons or of

confraternities, sodalities, and similar associations formed in honor

of the Blessed Virgin. The matter is distributed into exercises, the

number of which is fixed at seventy-two, because our Lady is supposed

to have lived seventy-two years on earth. One exercise is appropriated

to each of the Sundays and principal festivals of the year.

{720}

The reverend author writes with simplicity and unction, and has given

us a really devout book. The translation seems to be very well done.

CEREMONIAL, FOR THE USE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Published by order of the First

Council of Baltimore, with the approbation of the Holy See. Third

edition, carefully revised and considerably enlarged. With

illustrations. 12mo., pp. 534. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet.

This book is almost indispensable to clergymen, and very convenient

for laymen who wish to understand the beautiful ceremonies which the

Church has appointed for the various festivals and services of the

ecclesiastical year. It was originally compiled by Bishop Rosati, of

St. Louis, and formally adopted by the council of Baltimore in 1852.

The extensive additions which are now published with it were made by

direction of the late Archbishop Kenrick, of Baltimore. They consist

of the ceremonies of low mass, low mass for the dead, and the manner

of giving holy communion within the mass or at other times;

instructions for the priest who is obliged to say two masses, from the

decrees of the sacred congregation of rites, approved under the

present pope; the manner of singing mass without deacon and

sub-deacon, and the vespers without cope-bearers, in accordance with

approved usages of the best-regulated churches in Italy; the mode of

giving benediction with the blessed sacrament, in which the ceremonial

of bishops and the various decrees of the sacred congregation of rites

are strictly followed; Gregorian notes to guide the celebrant and

sacred ministers in singing the prayers, gospel, epistle, confiteor,

etc.

The illustrations, intended to show the proper form of various church

utensils, church furniture, etc., constitute a valuable feature of the

book.

MEDITATIONS AND CONSIDERATIONS FOR A RETREAT OF

ONE DAY IN EACH MONTH.

Compiled from the writings of Fathers of the Society of Jesus, by a

Religious. Published with the approbation of the Most Rev. Archbishop

of Baltimore. 18mo., pp. viii., 154. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet.

This little book is designed for the use not only of religious

communities, but of persons in the world who may feel disposed to

devote a day now and then exclusively to the affairs of their souls.

The exercises consist of three meditations and a "consideration," for

each month in the year, arranged after the manner of the exercises of

St. Ignatius.

STREET BALLADS, POPULAR POETRY,

AND HOUSEHOLD SONGS OF IRELAND.

16mo., pp. 312. Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

The poems contained in this little volume are by a great number of

authors, and of course of very different degrees of merit. Most of

them are of a patriotic nature; a good many are amatory; and two or

three seem to have no business in the collection at all. For example,

Lieut-Colonel Halpine's "April 20, 1864," is a poem of the American

rebellion. Mr. John Savage's "At Niagara" is certainly neither a

street ballad nor a household song, nor is it part of the popular

poetry of Ireland any more than of our own country. We dare say,

however, that nobody will feel disposed to quarrel with the editor for

including these spirited pieces, as well as others we might mention,

which do not properly belong under the categories mentioned in the

title-page.

Among the best known writers whose names appear in the table of

contents are William Allinghain, Aubrey De Vere, Samuel Fergusson,

Lady Wilde, Gerald Griffin, and Clarence Mangan.

THE MONTH OF MARY, FOR THE USE OF ECCLESIASTICS.

Translated from the French. 32mo., pp. 207. Baltimore: John Murphy &

Company.

This little manual is intended exclusively for ecclesiastics,

especially students in theological seminaries. It sets forth, for each

day of the month, some trait of the life of the Blessed Virgin, first

as an object of veneration and love, secondly, as a model of some

virtue of the clerical state, and finally, as a motive of confidence.

It is brief, suggestive, and practical.

_The Man without a Country_ (Boston: Ticknor & Fields) is a reprint in

pamphlet form of a remarkable narrative which appeared originally in

_The Atlantic Monthly_.

----------

{721}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. I., NO. 6. SEPTEMBER, 1865.

From The Dublin Review.

THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA.--ORIGEN.

_Origenis Opera Omnia_. Ed. De la Rue, accurante J. P. MIGNE. Paris.

_Origenes_, Eine Darstellung seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, von Dr.

REDEPENNING. (Origen: A History of his Life and Doctrine. By Dr.

REDEPENNING). 1841. Bonn.

In a former article we have given some account of the labors and

teaching of Pantaenus and Clement in the twenty years after the death

of Marcus Aurelius (180-202), during which the Church enjoyed

comparative peace. Commodus was not a persecutor, like his philosophic

father. Personally, he was a signal instance of the total break-down

of philosophy as a training for a prince imperial; for whatever

advantages the most enlightened methods and the most complete

establishment of philosophic tutors could afford were his, probably to

his great disgust. But the Church has often found that an imperial

philosopher is something even worse than an imperial debauchee.

Pertinax and Didius Julianus, who succeeded Commodus, had little time

either for philosophy or pleasure, for they followed their

predecessor, after the violent fashion so popular with conspirators

and Praetorians, in less than a twelvemonth. Septimius Severus, the

first, and, with one exception, the only Roman emperor who was a

native African, during the earlier years of his reign protected the

Christians rather than otherwise. How and why he saw occasion to

change we shall have to consider further on.

During these twenty years of tranquillity the great Church of

Alexandria had been making no little progress. Her children had not

been entirely undisturbed. The populace, and sometimes the

magistrates, often did not wait for an imperial edict to set upon the

Christians, and the commotions that followed the death of Commodus

were the occasion of more than one martyr's crown. We learn from

Clement of Alexandria, speaking of this very time of comparative

quiet, that burnings, beheadings, and crucifixions took place "daily;"

whereby he seems to point to some particular local persecutions. But

the Alexandrian Church, on the whole, was left in peace, and was

rapidly extending herself among the student population of the city,

among the Greeks, but, above all, among the poorer classes of the

native Egyptians. Christianity seems to have spread in Egypt with a

{722} rapidity almost unexampled elsewhere, and historians have taken

much pains to point out that this was the effect of the considerable

agreement there is between the asceticism of the early Church and that

of the native worship. Without discussing the point, we may note that

rapidity of extension was the rule, not the exception, when an apostle

was the missionary; and that the Alexandrian Church was founded by

direct commission from St. Peter, and, therefore, shared with Rome and

Antioch the distinction of being the mother-city of Christianity.

Moreover, the Nile valley, which above the Delta is nowhere more than

eleven miles in width, contained a teeming population, the whole of

which was thoroughly accessible by means of the river itself. For

nearly five hundred miles every city and town, every least village and

hamlet, stood right on the banks of the great water-way; and it is

probable that half the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and the Thebaid were

often floating on its bosom at one and the same time. The high road

that was so serviceable for traffic and pleasure could be made of

equal service to religion. How unweariedly the successors of St. Mark

must have traversed it from end to end may be read in the history of

those lauras and hermitages that at one time were to be found wherever

its rocky barriers were indented by a sandy valley, and wherever the

old builders of Thebes and Memphis had left a quarried opening in the

limestone. There was not a stronger contrast between these monastic

dwellings and the bosom of the gay river than there was between

Egyptians Christian and Egyptians pagan. If the Church's converts

rushed into the deserts and the caves, it was not especially because

they liked them, but because there was absolutely no other means of

getting out of a society not to be matched for immorality except,

perhaps, by pagan Rome at its very worst. Of the number of Christians

in Alexandria itself at the commencement of the third century we can

only form an approximate judgment. On the one hand, Eusebius tells us

that the Church had spread over the whole Thebaid. As the Thebaid was

the southern division of Egypt proper, and, therefore, the most

distant from Alexandria, we may safely say as much, at least, for the

Delta and Middle Egypt. On the other hand, we are told by Origen that

the Christians in the city were not so numerous as the pagans, or even

the Jews. This will not appear surprising if we recollect that the

Alexandrian Jews were more numerous, as well as richer and more

powerful, than any other Jewish community in the world. We know enough

to be quite sure that the Alexandrian Church was working quietly but

vigorously. From the heads of the Catechetical school down to the

humblest little child that was marked out by baptism in the great city

of sin, there was a great work going on. The impulse that Pantaenus

and Clement were giving was felt downward and around, and when Origen

begins to rise on the scene, we can mark what an advance there has

been even in the short twenty years since the death of Marcus

Aurelius.

Septimus Severus had reigned for ten years, as we said above, before

he began to persecute. He was undoubtedly an able and vigorous

emperor; he could meet his enemies and get rid of his friends, bribe

the Praetorians and slaughter his prisoners of war, with equal

coolness and generally with equal success. In the course of a reign of

twenty years he seems to have visited with hostile intent the greater

part of his extensive empire, from the Syrtes of Africa, where he was

born, to the banks of the Euphrates, and thence to Britain, where he

died, at York, A.D. 211. At the time we speak of (198) he had just

concluded a brilliant campaign against those pests of the Roman

soldiery, the Parthians; and having then engaged the Arabs, still in

arms for a chief whose head he had had the pleasure {723} of sending

to Rome twelve months before, had got rather the worst of it in two

battles. It was between this and the year 202 that he visited

Alexandria. There can be no doubt he must have been received at

Alexandria with no little triumph by one class of its citizens. Some

six years before, he had restored to the Greek inhabitants their

senate and municipal privileges. The Greeks, who, as far as intellect

went, were the indisputable rulers of Alexandria, must have been

highly elated at being now restored to civil importance; for though

their senate was little more than an ornament, and their municipal

rights confined to holding certain assemblies for the discussion of

grievances, still, to have a recognized machinery of wards and tribes,

and to be called "men of Macedon," as of old, was not without

advantage, and was, indeed, all that their fathers had presumed to

seek for, even in the days of the lamented Ptolemies. We cannot doubt,

therefore, that by the Greeks Severus was received with much

enthusiasm, and he, on his part, seems to have been equally satisfied

with his reception, for we find that he enriched Alexandria with a

temple of Rhea, and with public baths which he named after himself.

But more came of this visit than compliments or temples. It was an

hour of favor for the Greeks; the chief among them were also the

chiefs and ruling spirits of the university; we know they must have

come across Christianity during the preceding twenty years in many

ways, but chiefly as a teaching that was gaining ground yearly among

their best men; as philosophers, we know they loathed it; as

worshippers of the immortal myths, they were burning to put it down.

Does it seem in any way connected with these facts that Severus at

this very time changes his policy of mildness, and issues a decree

forbidding, under severest penalties, all conversions to Christianity

or Judaism? There is something suggestive in the juxtaposition of

facts, and it is not at all impossible that the commencement of the

fifth persecution was a compliment to Clement of Alexandria. Severus,

indeed, must have frequently come into contact with Christianity

himself during the three or four years he spent in Syria and the East;

he could not have visited Antioch, Edessa, and Caesarea without being

obliged to notice the development of the Church. The Jews, too, had

given him a great deal of trouble, which may account for that part of

the edict which affected them, and perhaps the Montanist fanatics had

helped to irritate him against the name of Christian. However these

things may be, the prohibition, though apparently moderate in its

scope, was the signal for the outburst of a tremendous persecution.

Laetus, the prefect of Alexandria, was so zealous in his work, that it

is impossible not to suspect that he was acting under the very eye of

his imperial master. He was not content with torturing and slaying in

the city itself, but sent his emissaries up the Nile to the very

extremity of the Thebaid to hunt up the Christians and send them by

boatloads to the capital for judgment and punishment. Numbers of the

Alexandrian Christians fled to Palestine and elsewhere on the first

intimation of danger. Pantaenus, who had returned from his Indian

mission, had perhaps already left Alexandria; but Clement was at the

head of the Catechisms, and he was of the number of those who fled.

The great school was for a time broken up. The functions of the Church

were suspended for want of ministers, or prevented by the

impossibility of meeting in safety. It was taught in the Alexandrian

Church that if they were persecuted in one city, they should flee into

another; and, just at this time, the Motanist error, that it was

unlawful to flee from persecution, caused this teaching to be acted

upon with less hesitation than usual; and so, in the year 202,

Christians in Alexandria, from being a comparatively flourishing

community, became a proscribed and secret sect.

{724}

It would be very far from the truth, however, to suppose that the

teachings of the Catechetical school had not been able to form

martyrs. We know that multitudes stood up for their faith and shed

their blood for it at Alexandria, during the first years of this

persecution, and this amidst horrors so unusual even with persecutors,

that it was thought they portended the coming of the last day. The

name of Potamiana alone will serve to raise associations sufficient to

picture both the heroism of the confessors and the enormities of the

tyrants. But there is another name with which we are more nearly

concerned at present. Leonides, the father of Origen, was one of those

Christians who had not fled from the persecution. He was an inhabitant

of Alexandria, a man of some position and substance, and when the

troubles began he was living in Alexandria with his wife and family.

It was not long before he was marked down by Laetus and dragged to

prison. The martyr's crown was now within his grasp; but he left

behind him in his desolate home another who was burning to share it by

his side. His son, Origen, was not yet seventeen when his father was

torn away by the Roman soldiers, and, in spite of the entreaties of

his mother, he insisted upon following him to prison. His mother

finally kept him beside her by a device which may raise a smile in

this generation. She "hid all his clothes," says Eusebius, and so

compelled him to stop at home. But his zeal was all aroused and on

fire, and, indeed, in this, the earliest incident known to us of his

life, we seem to read the zeal and fire of the man that was to be. He

sent a message to his father in these words, "Be sure not to waver on

_our_ account." The exact words seem to have been handed down to us,

and Eusebius, who gives them, probably received them from Origen's own

disciples in Caesarea of Palestine. The boy well knew what would be

the martyr's chief and only anxiety in his prison. The thought of the

wife and seven young children whom he was leaving desolate would be a

far bitterer martyrdom than the Roman prisons. But Leonides gloriously

persevered, confessed the faith, and was beheaded, while the whole of

his property was confiscated to the emperor.

Origen, as we have said, was not quite seventeen years old at his

father's martyrdom, having been born about the year 185. Both his

father and mother were Christians, and apparently had dwelt a long

time in Alexandria. He had therefore been brought up from his infancy

in that careful Christian training which it is the pride and joy of a

good and earnest Christian father to bestow upon his son. The traces

of this training, as we find them in Eusebius, are touching in the

extreme. Leonides, to whom the teachings of Clement had made the Holy

Scriptures a very fountain of life and sweetness, made them the

principal means of the education of his son. Every day the child

repeated to his father a portion of the holy books, and was instructed

according to his capacity. Knowing what, in after life, was to be

Origen's connection with the Holy Scriptures, we are not surprised to

find that his father soon began to experience some difficulty in

answering his questions. The boy, with true Alexandrian instinct, was

not content with the bare letter of the book; he would know its hidden

meaning and prophetic sense. Leonides discouraged these questions and

speculations, not, it would seem, because he disapproved of them, but

because he sensibly thought them premature in so young a child. But in

the secret of his heart he was full of joy to see the ardor,

eagerness, and amazing quickness of his dear child, and often, when

the boy was asleep, would he uncover his breast and reverently kiss

it, as the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is of very great importance

for the right comprehension of the great Origen to bear in view this

picture of his tender youth, and to reflect that he was no convert

from heathenism, no {725} Christianized philosopher, whose early

notions might from time to time be expected to crop up in the field of

his orthodoxy, but a Christian child, born and bred in the Church's

bosom, brought up by a father of unquestioned ability, who died a

martyr and is honored as a saint. Origen began to think rightly as

soon as he could think at all; his early education left him nothing to

forget. As he grew up and began to be familiar with Alexandria the

beautiful, he received that subtle education of the eye and

imagination that every Alexandrian, like every Athenian, succeeded to

as an heirloom. But with the heathen philosophers he had nothing to

do, and it may be questioned whether he ever entered the walls of the

Museum. His father had not neglected to teach him the ordinary

branches of Greek learning. He attended the lectures of Clement, those

brilliant and winning discourses, half apology, half exhortation, that

he himself was afterward to emulate so well. He heard Pantaenus, also,

after the venerable teacher had returned from his Indian mission. We

may be sure that he dreaded worse than poison the society of the pagan

youth of the university; this his subsequent conduct proves. But he

had his circle of friends, and among them was a young man, somewhat

older than himself, who was hereafter to leave an undying name as St.

Alexander of Jerusalem. Thus, by ear and eye, by master and by

fellow-student, by his father's labor, and by the workings of his own

wonderful intellect and indomitable will, he was formed into a man.

His education came to a premature end; but his father's martyrdom,

though to outward seeming it left him a destitute orphan, really

hardened the boy of seventeen into the man and the hero.

"When his father was martyred," continues Eusebius, writing, in all

probability, from the relation of those who had heard Origen's own

account, "he was left an orphan, with his mother and six young

brothers and sisters, being of the age of seventeen. All his father's

property was confiscated to the emperor's treasury, and they were in

the utmost destitution; but God's providence took care of Origen." A

rich and illustrious lady of Alexandria received him into her house.

Whether this lady was professedly a Christian, a pagan, or a heretic,

history does not say. She can hardly have been a pagan, though it is

not impossible that a philosophic and liberal pagan lady should have

taken a fancy to help such a youth as Origen. It is not likely that

she was a heretic, for in that case Origen would never have entered

her door. Thanks to the Gnostics, heretics in those days were looked

upon in Alexandria as more to be dreaded than pagans. She was

probably, by outward profession at least, a Christian, "illustrious,"

says the historian, "for what she had done, and illustrious in every

other way." What she had done we are not permitted even to guess; but

one fact in her history we do know, and it is very significant. She

had living in her house, on the footing of an adopted son, one Paul, a

native of Antioch, and one of the chiefs of the Alexandrian heretics.

It is certain that Origen's patroness must have had either very

uncertain or very easy notions of Christianity, if she could lend her

house, her money, and her influence to an arch-heretic, who had come

from Syria to trouble the Church of Alexandria, as Basilides and

Valentine had come before him. Gnosticism had probably lost ground in

the city, under the eloquent attacks of St. Clement. This Paul was a

man of great eloquence, and his reputation attracted great numbers to

hear him, not only of heretics, but also of Christians. He came from

Antioch, the headquarters of an unknown number of Gnostic sects, and,

with the usual instinct of false teachers, he had "led captive" this

Alexandrian lady. Mark, of infamous memory, had already done the same

thing by others, and perhaps by her, and Paul had succeeded to his

position and was now {726} the rival of the head of the Catechisms.

Such a state of things makes it easier to understand why St. Clement,

in his _Stromata_, calls those who lean to heresy "traitors to

Christ," and compares perverts to the companions of Ulysses in the sty

of Circe, and why he makes the very treating with heretics to be

nothing less than desertion in the soldier of Christ. It does seem a

little strange, at first sight, that the uncompromising Origen should

have consented to receive assistance from one whose orthodoxy must

have been in such bad odor. The difficulty grows less, however, if we

consider the circumstances. It was in the very heat of a terrible

persecution, when the canons of the Church must have been suspended.

Origen had lost his father, and had nowhere to turn for bare

subsistence. We can hardly wonder if, in such a strait as this, he

asked few questions when the charitable lady wished to take him in.

But when the grief and agitation of his orphaned state had somewhat

subsided, and when the persecutors had begun to slacken their fury, we

may suppose that he began to examine the harbor of his refuge, and

that it pleased him not. He was under the same roof as Paul of

Antioch, a heretic and a leader of heretics; but never, young as he

was, could he be induced to associate with him in prayer, or in any

way that could violate the canons of the Church, as far as it was

possible to keep them in such times. "From his childhood," says his

biographer, "he kept the canons, and execrated the teachings of

heretics;" and he tells us that this last phrase is Origen's own. And

it seems that he took the most energetic measures to get away from a

companionship that he must have loathed. He had been well instructed,

as we have said, by his father in the ordinary branches of education.

After his father's death he again applied himself to study with

greater ardor than before, for he had an object in view now. It was

not long before he was offering himself as a public teacher of those

sciences that are designated by the general term "_Grammatica_." It

was the first public step in a life that was afterward to be little

less than the entire history of the Eastern Church. He was not yet

eighteen, but there was no help for it. He must have bread, and he

could not eat of the loaf that was shared by Paul of Antioch. Early

writers lay much stress on this first exhibition of orthodox zeal in

him who was afterward to be the "hammer" of heretics, from Egypt to

Greece. Certain it is that his conduct as a boy was the same as his

sentiments when he was in his sixtieth year. "To err in morals," he

wrote in his commentary on Matthew, at Caesarea, forty years after his

first essay as a teacher of grammar,--"to err in morals is bad, but to

err in dogma and to contradict Holy Writ is much worse." If in after

life he was to be so singularly earnest and so unaffectedly devout, so

enthusiastic for the Gospel, so eager in exploring the depths of

sacred science, and so unwavering in his faith, all this was but the

growth and development of what was already springing in his soul in

those early years of his trials and zeal. The strong will was already

trying its first flights, the sensitive heart was being schooled to

throw all its motive power into duty, and the quick, clear

apprehension and the wonderful memory for which he was to be so

famous, were already beginning to show what they would one day be.

Origen was now a teacher of grammar and the sciences, but he had not

kept school for many months when his teachings took a turn that he can

hardly have anticipated. His text-books were the common pagan

historians, poets, and philosophers that have been thumbed by the

school-boy from that generation to this. It was no part of Origen's

character to leave his hearers in error when plain speaking would

prevent it; and so it happened that his exposition of his author often

took in hand not merely the parts of speech, but the doctrine. Though

he was only {727} school-master by profession, his scholars soon found

out he was a Christian, and a Christian of uncommon power and

clear-sightedness. The Catechetical school was closed; masters and

scholars were scattered in flight or in concealment. It was not long,

therefore, before the young teacher found himself applied to by first

one heathen and then another, who, under other circumstances, would

have applied to the school of the Catechisms. Among these were

Plutarchus, who soon afterward showed how a young Alexandrian student

could die a glorious martyr; and Heraclas, his brother, who, after his

conversion, left everything to remain with his master, became his

assistant and successor in his catechetical work, and finally died

Patriarch of Alexandria. These were the first-fruits of his zeal for

souls. Many others followed; and as the persecution was somewhat

abating, Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, looking round for men to

resume the work of the schools, saw no one better fitted to be

intrusted with its direction than Origen himself. He was accordingly,

though not yet eighteen, appointed the successor of Clement.

Laetus, prefect of Alexandria, who had exerted himself so strenuously

to please Severus when the persecution commenced, had now been

recalled; probably he had reaped the reward of his zeal, and was

promoted. His successor, Aquila, signalized his entering upon office

by an activity that outdid that of Laetus himself. The persecution

that had calmed down a little toward the end of the first year and

when Laetus was leaving, now raged with redoubled fury. We have

already said that the authoritative tradition, and, in great measure,

also the practice, of the Alexandrian Church was flight at a time like

this. Origen, however, was very far from fleeing; never at any time of

his life did he display such fearless baldness, such energetic

contempt for the enemy, as during these years of blood, from 204 to

211. There was no prison so well-guarded, no dungeon so deep, that he

could not hold communication with the confessors of Christ. He went up

to the tribunals with them, and stood beside them at the interrogatory

and at the torture. He went back with them in a sort of defiant

triumph, after sentence of death had been pronounced. He walked

undauntedly by their side up to the stake and the beheading block, and

kissed them and bade them adieu when it was time for them to die. It

is no wonder that Eusebius sets down his own safety to a miraculous

interposition of the right hand of God. Once, as he stood by a dying

martyr, embracing him as he expired, the Alexandrian mob set on him

with stones and nearly killed him; how he escaped none could tell.

Again and again the persecutors tried to seize him; as often ("it is

impossible," says the historian, "to tell how often") was he delivered

from their hands. He was nowhere safe: no sooner did the mob get a

suspicion of where he was than they surrounded the house, and hounded

in the soldiers to drag him out. He fled from house to house; perhaps

he was assisted to escape by some of his numerous friends; perhaps he

hid himself, as St. Athanasius in the next century did, in some of

those underground wells and cisterns with which every house in

Alexander's city was provided, and then sought other quarters when the

mob had gone off. But it was not long before he was again discovered.

The numbers that came to hear him soon let the infuriated pagans know

where their victim was, and he was again besieged and hunted out.

Once, St. Epiphanius relates, he was caught, apparently by a

street-mob, and some of the low Egyptian priests as their leaders. It

was near the Egyptian quarter of the city; perhaps, even, he was

visiting some poor native convert in the dirty streets of the Rhacotis

itself. If so, the name of Origen would have been enough to empty the

whole quarter of its pariah race, and bring them yelling and cursing

into the {728} Heptastadion. They showed him no mercy; they abused him

horribly; they beat him and bruised him; they dragged him along the

ground. But before killing him outright, the idea seized them that

they should make him deny his religion, and at the same time make a

shameful exhibition of himself. There must have been Greeks in the

crowd, for Egyptians would never have had patience to spare him so

long. The Serapeion, however, was at hand, and thither they dragged

him. As they hauled him along, "they shaved his head," says St.

Epiphanius--that is, they tried to make him look like the Egyptian

priests, who were distinguished by a womanish smoothness of face; and

we may imagine that they did it with no gentle hands. When at length

the rushing mob had surged up the steps of the great temple, their

victim in the midst of them, they set him on his feet, and gave him

some palm branches, telling him to act the priest and distribute them

to the votaries of Serapis. The palm, we know, was a favorite tree

with the Egyptian priests; it was sculptured and painted on the walls

of their huge temples, and it was borne in the hands of worshippers on

solemn festivals. On the present occasion there were, probably,

priests of one rank or another standing before the vestibule of the

Serapeion, ready to supply those who should enter. It was, therefore,

the work of a moment to seize the stock of one of these ministers, and

force Origen to take his place. If they anticipated the pleasure of

seeing the hated Christian teacher humiliated to the position of an

_ostiarius_ of an idolatrous temple, they were never more mistaken in

their lives. Origen took the palms, and began without hesitation to

distribute them; but, as he did so, he cried out in a voice as loud

and steady as if neither suffering nor danger could affect him, "Take

the palms, good people!--not the palms of idols, but the palms of

Christ!" How he escaped after this piece of daring, we are only left

to conjecture. Perhaps the Roman troops came suddenly on the scene to

quell the riot; and as they hated the dwellers in the Rhacotis almost

as much as the latter hated Origen, the neighborhood of the Serapeion

would have been speedily cleared of Egyptians. However it came about,

Origen was saved.

Meanwhile, he saw his own scholars daily going to death. The young

student Plutarchus fell among the first victims of Aquila's new vigor;

Origen was by his side when he was led to execution, was recognized by

the mob, and once more narrowly escaped with his life. Serenus,

another of his disciples, was burnt; Heraclides, a catechumen, and

Hero, who had just been baptized, were beheaded; a second Serenus,

after enduring many torments, suffered in the same way. A woman named

Heraeis, one of his converts, was burned before she could be baptized,

receiving the baptism of fire, as her instructor said. Another who is

numbered among his disciples is Basilides, the soldier who protected

St. Potamiana from the insults of the mob, and whom she converted by

appealing to him three nights afterward. We are told that the

brethren, and we know who would be foremost among the brethren in such

a case, visited him in prison as soon as they heard of his wonderful

and unexpected confession. He told them his vision, was baptized, and

the following day died a martyr. Probably it was Origen who addressed

to him the few hurried words of instruction there was time to say.

"All the martyrs," says Eusebius, "whether he knew them or knew them

not, he ministered to with the most eager affection." His reputation,

it may well be conceived, suffered no diminution as these things came

to be known. The horrors of the persecution could not keep scholars

away from him, nor prevent increasing numbers from coming to seek him.

Many of the unbelieving pagans, full of admiration for a holiness of

life and a heroism they could not comprehend, came to his {729}

instructions; and even literary Greeks who had gone through the

curriculum of the Museum, and were deeply versed in Platonic myths and

Pythagorean theories of mortification, came to listen to this fearless

young philosopher, in whom they found a learning that could not be

gainsaid, combined with a practical contempt for the things of the

body that was quite unknown in their own schools.

The persecution seems to have died down and gone out toward the year

211, nine years after its commencement. Origen's labors became the

more extraordinary in proportion as he had freer scope for pursuing

them. The feature in his life at this time, which is most

characteristic of the time and the city, and which more than anything

else attracted the cultivated heathens to listen to him, was his

severe asceticism. Times of persecution may be considered to dispense

with asceticism; but Origen did not think so. It was a saying of his

master, St. Clement, and, indeed, appears to have been a common

proverb in that reformed school of heathen philosophy which resulted

in Neo-Platonism, "As your words, so be your life." A philosopher in

Alexandria at that time, if he would not be thought to belong to an

effete race of thinkers who had long been left behind, or who only

survived in the well-paid and well-fed professorships of the

university, was of necessity a man whose strict and sober living

corresponded to the high and serious truths which he considered it his

mission to utter. St. Clement did not forget this, either in principle

or in practice, when he undertook to win the heathen men of science to

Christ. Origen, born a Christian, made a teacher apparently by chance

and in the confusion of a persecution, cared little, in the first

instance, for what pagan philosophy would think of him. The fact that

all who pretended to be philosophers pretended also to asceticism may,

indeed, have caused him to embrace a life of denial more as a matter

of course. But the holy gospels and the teachings of Clement were the

reasons of his asceticism. It is amazing that Protestant writers, when

they write of the asceticism of the early Church, can see in it

nothing but the reflection of Buddhism, or Judaism, or of the tenets

of Pythagoras, and that they always seem nervously glad to prove by

the assistance of the Egyptian climate or the Platonic hatred of

matter, that it was not the carrying out of the law of Christ, but

merely a self-imposed burden. Climate, doubtless, has great influence

on food, and English dinners would no more suit an Egyptian sun than

would the two regulation _paximatia_ of the Abbot Moses in Cassian be

enough for even the most willing of English Cistercians. But why go to

climate, to Plato, to Pythagoras, and to Buddha, to account for what

is one of the most striking recommendations of the gospels? We need

not stop to inquire the reason, but we may be sure that a child who

had been taught the Holy Scriptures by heart would not be unlikely to

know something of their teaching. His biographer tells us expressly,

with regard to several of his acts of mortification, that they were

done in the endeavor to carry out literally our Lord's commands. And

yet it is very remarkable, and a trait of the times, that Eusebius, in

describing his mode of life, uses the word philosophy three times

where we should use asceticism. Origen, soon after being appointed

head of the Catechetic school, found he could not do his duty by his

hearers as thoroughly as he could wish, on account of his other

occupation of teacher of grammar. He therefore resolved to give it up.

It was his only means of subsistence, but he might reasonably have

expected "to live by the gospel" as long as he was in such a post as

chief catechist. If he had expected this he would not have been

disappointed, for there would have been no lack of charity. But he had

an entirely different view of the matter. He would be a burden {730}

to no one, and would live a life of the strictest poverty. Simple,

straightforward, and great, here as ever, we may conceive how he would

appreciate the fetters of a rich man's patronage. But, if we may trust

the utterances of his whole life, his love for holy poverty was such

that, while it makes some refer once more to Pythagoras, to a Catholic

it rather suggests St. Francis of Assisi. "I tremble," he said thirty

years afterward, "when I think how Jesus commands his children to

leave all they have. For my own part, I plead guilty to my accusers

and I pronounce my own sentence; I will not conceal my guiltiness lest

I become doubly guilty. I will preach the precepts of the Lord, though

I am conscious of not having followed them myself. Let us now at least

lose no time in becoming true priests of the Lord, whose inheritance

is not on earth but in heaven." Such language from one who can hardly

be said to have possessed anything during his whole life can only be

explained on one hypothesis. In order, therefore, at once to secure

his independence in God's work, and to oblige himself to practise

rigorous poverty, he made a sacrifice which none but a poor student

can appreciate. He sold his manuscripts, and secured to himself, from

the sale, a sum of four oboli a day, which was to be his whole income.

This sum, which was about the ordinary pay of a common sailor, who had

his food and lodging provided for him, was little enough to live upon;

but miserable as it was, Origen must have paid a dear premium to

obtain it. Those manuscripts of "ancient authors" were probably the

fruits and the assistance of his early studies; he must have written

many of them under the eye of his martyred father. He had "labored

with care and love to write them out fairly," we are told, and

doubtless he prized them at once as a scholar prizes his library and a

laborious worker the work of his hands. For many years, probably until

he went to Rome in 211, he continued to receive his twopence or

threepence every day from the person who had bought his books. But we

cease in great part to wonder how little he lived on when we know how

he lived. In obedience to our Lord's command, and in opposition to the

prevailing practice of all but the poorest classes, he wore the tunic

single, and as for the pallium, he seems either to have dispensed with

it altogether, or only to have worn it whilst teaching. For many years

he went entirely barefoot. He fasted continually from all that was not

absolutely necessary to keep him alive; he never touched wine; he

worked hard all day in teaching and visiting the poor; and after

studying what we should call theology the greater part of the night,

he did not go to bed, but took a little rest on the floor. This

"vehemently philosophic" life, as Eusebius calls it, reduced him in

time, as might have been expected, to a mere wreck; insufficient food

and scanty clothing brought on severe stomachic complaints, which

nearly caused his death. It is not to be supposed that his disciples

and the Church in general looked on with indifference whilst he

practised these austerities. On the contrary, he was solicited over

and over again to receive assistance and to take care of himself; and

many were even somewhat offended because he refused their well-meant

offers. But Origen had chosen to put his hand to the plough, and he

would not have been Origen if he had turned back. It is probable,

indeed, that he somewhat moderated his austerities when his health

began to give way seriously; but hard work and hard living were his

lot to the end, and the name of Adamantine, which he received at this

time, and which all ages and countries have confirmed to him, shows

what the popular impression was of what he actually went through. As

might have been expected, a man of such singleness and determination

had many imitators. We have seen that the very pagan philosophers came

to listen to him. {731} The young scholars whom he instructed, and

many of whom he converted, did more than listen to him; they joined

him, and imitated as nearly as they could what Eusebius again calls

the "philosophy" of his life. It was no barren aping of externals,

such as might have been seen going on a little way off at the Museum;

he, on his part, taught them deep and earnest lessons in the deepest

and most earnest of all philosophies; they, on theirs, proved that his

words were power by the severest of all tests--they stood firm in the

horrors of a fearful persecution, and more than one of them witnessed

to them by a cruel death.

As long as the persecution lasted, anything like regularity and

completeness in a work like that of Origen was clearly impossible. But

a persecution at Alexandria, though generally furious as long as it

lasted, happily seldom lasted very long. Popular opinion was, no

doubt, very bitter against Christianity. But popular opinion was one

thing; the will of the prince-governor another. Moreover, the popular

opinion of the Greek philosophers was generally diametrically opposed

to that of their Roman masters, and the beliefs and traditions of the

Rhacotis tended to the instant extermination of the Jews; and though

these four antagonistic elements could, upon occasion, so far forget

their differences as to unite in an onslaught against the Christians,

yet, before long, quarrels arose and riots ensued among the allied

parties to such an extent that the legionaries had no choice but to

clear the streets in the most impartial manner. Again, it is quite

certain that the Christian party included in it not a few men of rank;

and, what is more important, of power and authority. This we know from

the trouble St. Dionysius, one of Origen's scholars, afterward had

with many such persons who had "lapsed" in the Decian persecution. As

everything, therefore, depended on the humor of the governor, and as

the governor was, as other men, liable to be influenced by bribes

suggestions, and caprice, a furious persecution might suddenly die

out, and the Church begin to enjoy comparative peace at the very time

when things looked worst. Until the year 211, "Adamantius" taught,

studied, prayed, and fasted amidst disturbance, martyrdoms, and

fleeings from house to house; but that year wrought a change, not only

in Alexandria, but over the whole world. It was simply the year of the

death of Septimus Severus at York, and of the accession of Caracalla

and Geta; but this was an event which, if precedents were to be

trusted, invited all the nations that recognized the Roman eagle to be

ready for any change, however unreasonable, beginning with the senate,

and ending with the Christians. It was, probably, in this same year,

211, that Origen took advantage of the restoration of tranquillity to

visit the city and Church of Rome. It would seem that this episode of

his journey to Rome has not been sufficiently considered in the

greater part of the accounts of his life. Protestant writers, as may

be expected, pass it over quietly, either barely mentioning it, or, if

they do put a gloss upon it, confining themselves to generalities

about the interchange of ideas or the antiquity and renown of the

Roman Church. But there is evidently more in it than this. Origen was

just twenty-six years of age: though so young, he was already famous

as a teacher and a holy liver in the most learned of cities, and one

of the most ascetical of churches. His work was immense, and daily

increasing. On the cessation of the persecution, the great school was

to be reorganized, and put once more into that thorough working order

which had made it so effective under Pantaenus and Clement. Yet, just

at this busy crisis, he hurries off to Rome, stays there a short time,

and hurries back again. In the first place, why go at all? What could

Rome or any other church give him that he had not already at

Alexandria? Not scientific learning, certainly; not a systematic {732}

organization of work; not reverence for Holy Scripture; not the method

of confuting learned philosophy. Again: why go specially to Rome? Was

there not a high road, easy and comparatively short, to Caesarea of

Palestine, and would he not find there facilities enough for the

"interchange of thought?" For there, about fifteen years before, had

assembled one of the first councils ever held since the council of

Jerusalem. Was there not Jerusalem, the cradle of the Church? It was

then, indeed, shorn of its glory, both spiritual and historical; for

it was subject, at least not superior, to Caesarea, and was known to

the empire by the name of Aelia Capitolina; but its aged bishop was a

worker of miracles. Was there not Antioch, the great central see of

busy, intellectual Syria, the see of St. Theophilus, wherein saintly

bishops on the one hand, and Marcionite heresy and Paschal schism on

the other, kept the traditions of the faith bright and polished? Were

there not the Seven Churches? Was there not many a "mother-city"

between the Mediterranean and the mountain ranges where apostolic

teachings were strong yet, and apostolic men yet ruled? Origen's

motive in going to "see Rome" is given us by himself, or, rather, by

his biographer in his words; but, unfortunately, in such an ambiguous

way that it is almost useless as an argument; he wished, says

Eusebius, "to see the very ancient Church of Rome." The word we have

translated "very ancient" ([Greek text]) may also mean, as we need not

say, "first in dignity." It is hardly worth while to argue upon it,

but it will not fail to strike the reader that Jerusalem and Antioch,

not to mention other sees, were both older than Rome, if age was the

only recommendation. Origen's visit to Rome, then, is a very

remarkable event in his life, for it shows undoubtedly that the chief

of the greatest school of the Church found he required something which

could only be obtained in Rome, and that something can only have been

an approach to the chief and supreme depositary of tradition. He was

at the very beginning of his career, and he could begin no better than

by invoking the blessing of that rock of the Church of whom his

master, Clement, had taught him to think so nobly and lovingly. We

shall see that, many a year after this, in the midst of troubles and

calumnies, when his great life was nearly closed, the same see of

Peter received the professions and obedience of his failing voice, as

it had witnessed and blessed the ardor of his youth. He was not,

indeed, the first who, though already great in his own country, had

been drawn toward a greatness which something told them was without a

rival. Three-quarters of a century before Rome had attracted from

far-off Jerusalem that great St. Hegesippus, the founder of church

history, whose works are lost, but whose fame remains. A convert from

Judaism, he left his native city, travelled to Rome, and sojourned

there for twenty years, busily learning and committing to writing

those practices and traditions of the Roman Church which he afterward

appears to have disseminated all over the East, and which he conveyed,

toward the end of his life, to his own Jerusalem, where he died. From

Assyria and beyond the Tigris the "perfume of Rome" had enticed the

great Tatian--happy if, on his return, he had still kept pure that

faith which, at Rome, he defended so well against Crescens the cynic.

A great mind and a widely cultivated genius found the sphere of its

rest in Rome, when St. Justin finished his wanderings there and sealed

the workings of his active intellect by shedding his blood at the

bidding of the ruling clique of Stoics--_"philosophus et martyr"_ as

the old martyrologies call him. A famous name, too, is that of Rhodon,

of Asia, well known for his steady and able defence of the faith

against Marcionites and other heretics. These, and such as these, had

come from the world's ends to visit the great apostolic see before

Origen's day dawned. But there were others, and as great, whom {733}

he may actually have met in the city, either on a visit like himself,

or because they were members of the Roman clergy. There was the great

Carthaginian, Tertullian, who, for many years, lived, learned, and

wrote in Rome; his works show how well he knew the Roman Church, and

how often afterward he had occasion, in his polemical battles, to

allude to the _"Ecclesia transmarina"_ as Africa called Rome. A

meeting between Origen and Tertullian is a very suggestive idea; the

only misfortune is, that we have no warrant whatever for supposing it

beyond the bare possibility. But by naming Tertullian we suggest one

view, at least, of the ecclesiastical society which Origen would meet

when he visited Rome. Another celebrated man, whom there is more

likelihood that Origen did meet, is the convert Roman lawyer, Minucius

Felix, who employed his recognized talents and trained skill in

vigorous apologetic writings, one of which we still possess. A third

was the priest Caius, one of the Roman clergy, famed as the adversary

of Proclus the Montanist, unless he had already started on his

missionary career as regionary bishop. Finally, there was St.

Hippolytus, who, like Caius, was from the school of St. Irenaeus, and

had come from Lyons to Rome, where he seems to have been no unworthy

representative of his teacher's zeal against heretics. Nearly every

step of the life of St. Hippolytus is encumbered by the ruin of a

learned theory or the useless rubbish of an abandoned position; but he

as far as we can conjecture, the chief scientific adviser of the Roman

pontiffs in the measures they took at this time regarding Easter and

against the Noetians. Until scientific men have settled their disputes

as to who was the author of the _Philosophumena_, or Treatise _against

All Heresies_, little more can be said about St. Hippolytus. The

Treatise itself, however, whose recovery some twenty years ago excited

so much interest, must have had an author, and it is nearly certain

the author must have been one of the Roman clergy at this very time.

It is still more certain that the matters therein discussed must

represent very completely one view of Church matters at Rome in the

early part of the third century; and, therefore, even if Origen did

not meet the author in person, he must have met many who thought as he

did. Now it is rather interesting to read the _Philosophumena_ in this

light, and to conjecture what Origen would think of some of its views.

The leading idea of the work, which is not even yet extant complete,

is to prove that all heresies have sprung from Greek philosophy. This

it attempts to do by detailing, first, the systems of the

philosophers, then those of the heretics, and showing their mutual

connection. The scandalous attack on St. Callistus, in the ninth book,

may or may not be an interpolation by a later hand; if not, the author

must have been much more ingenious than reputable. There is no denying

the historical and literary value of the Treatise; but where it

professes to draw deductions and to give philosophical analyses of

systems, it seems of comparatively moderate worth. For instance, the

author's analysis and appreciation of the philosophy of Aristotle is

little better than a libel on the great _"maestro di lor chi sanno;"_

and Basilides, though doubtless a clever personage in his way, can

hardly have taken the trouble to go so far for the small amount of

philosophy that seasons his fantastical speculations. But a general

opinion resembling the opinion maintained in the Treatise seems to

have been common in the West; and when Tertullian says of the

philosophy of Plato that it was _"haereticorum omnium

condimentarium,"_ he was doubtless expressing the idea of many beside

himself. To Origen, fresh from the school of Clement and the

atmosphere of Alexandria, such language must have sounded startling,

to say the least, and we cannot help feeling he would be rather {734}

sorry, if not indignant, to hear the great names he had been taught to

think of with so much admiration and compassion unfeelingly

caricatured into a relationship of paternity with such men as the

founders of Gnosticism. He does not appear to have been very familiar

yet with the Greek systems; they had not come specially in his way,

though he had heard of them in the Christian schools, and there is

little doubt that he had already seen the necessity of studying them

more closely, as he actually did on his return to Alexandria. What

effect the views of the Western Church had on his teaching, and how he

treated the philosophers, we shall have to consider in the sequel.

Meanwhile, his stay at Rome was over; he had studied the faith and

heresy, discipline and schism, church organization and sectarian

rebellion, in the most important centre of the whole Church, and his

school at Alexandria was awaiting him, to reap the benefit of his

journey.