III.
While the Catholic element was increasing at the rate of 80, 125, and 109 per cent, every ten years, other religious denominations showed an increase of only twenty or twenty-five per cent. Some remained stationary, and a few even lost ground. Whence comes this continued and increasing disparity in the development of different portions of the same people? The principal reason assigned for it is the immense emigration from Ireland to America. As the number of Catholics in the United States when the emigration began was very small, every swarm of fresh settlers added much more to their ratio of increase than to that of other denominations. Ten added to ten gives an increase of 100 per cent.; but the same number added to 100 gives only ten per cent. At first sight, this seems a sufficient explanation; but we shall find, when we come to examine it, that it does not really account for our increase. If the growth of the American Catholic Church were the result wholly of immigration, we should find that as the number of Catholic inhabitants increased, the apparent effect of this immigration would be diminished. In other words, the ratio of increase would gradually fall to an equality with that of other denominations. But, so far from this being the case, the difference between our ratio of increase and that of the Protestant sects is as great as ever--is even growing greater. The ratio which was ten per cent. a year between 1830 and 1840, rose to 12.50 per cent, a year between 1840 and 1850, and was 10.09 per cent, between 1850 and 1860. There are other causes, therefore, beside European emigration to which we must look for an explanation of Catholic progress in America. If we study with a little attention the extent to which immigration has influenced the development of the whole population of the country, and the exact proportion of the Catholic part of this immigration, we shall find confirmation of the conclusions to which we have been led by the simple testimony of figures. Immigration has never furnished more than six or seven per cent. of the decennial increase of the population of the United States, the growth of which has been at the rate of thirty-five per cent, during the same period. Immigration, therefore, contributed to it only one-fifth. Again, of these immigrants, including both Irish and Germans, not more than one-third have been Catholics. Moreover, we must take account of the considerable number of members that the Church has lost in the course of their dispersion all over the country.
Clearly, then, the influence of immigration is not enough to account for the rapid progress of the faith. A careful analysis of the Catholic population at different tunes, and in different places, enables us to specify two other causes.
1. The Catholics are principally distributed at the North among the free states, where the population increases much faster than it does at the South; and the Catholic families, it has been observed, multiply much faster than the others, in consequence, no doubt, of their more active and regular habits of life, sustained morality, respect for the marriage tie, and regard for domestic obligations. This difference in fecundity is quite perceptible wherever the Catholic element [{14}] is strong—as in Canada, and the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc., and, among the Southern states, in Louisiana, Maryland, and Missouri.
2. Another cause of increase is the conversion of Protestants—a cause which operates slowly, quietly, and, at first, imperceptibly, but with that constant and uniform power—reminding us of the great operations of nature—which is almost always the sign of a Providential agency. Eloquent theorists and brilliant writers on statistics, preferring salient facts and striking phenomena—what they call the great principles of science—too often overlook or despise those obscure movements which act quietly upon the human conscience. Yet how much more powerful is this mysterious action—like the continual dropping of water—than the showy effects which captivate so many thinkers, whose organs of perception seem dazzled by the glow of their imagination! Such was the nature of the invisible operation which was inaugurated by the preaching of the martyrs of the faith whom the French Revolution cast forth like seed all over the world. The rules of political economy had nothing to do with it. It acted in the secret chambers of men's hearts and the retirement of their meditative moments, and it has gone on without interruption to the present moment, increasing year by year. The Church seizes upon the convictions of grown men; reaches the young by her admirable systems of education; impresses all by her living, persuasive propagandism, made beautiful by the zeal and devotion and holiness of her missionaries. Simple and dignified, without the affectation of dignity— austere, without fanaticism—their presence alone roots up old prejudices, while their preaching and example fill the soul with new lights and with anxieties which nothing but their instructions can set at rest. Thus, wherever they go, the thoughts and comparisons which they suggest multiply conversions all around them. You have only to question a few Catholic families in the older states about their early religious history, and you will see how important an element in the prosperity of the Church is this force of attraction—so important, that the following statement may almost be taken as a general law: Wherever a Catholic priest establishes himself, though there be not a Catholic family in the place, it is almost certain that by the end of a time which varies from five to ten years, he will be surrounded by a Catholic community large enough to form a parish and support a clergyman. This rule seems to us to have no exception except in some of the southern states. We have no hesitation in stating it broadly of even those parts of New England in which the anti-Catholic feeling is now strongest.
We shall presently have occasion to show that the only thing which prevents the American Church from increasing, perhaps doubling, the rapidity of its progress, is the scarcity of ecclesiastics and missionaries, from which all the dioceses are suffering.
We have explained the important part which converts have played in this progress. The inquiry naturally arises: Whence come so many conversions? What are the causes which generally lead to them? These are delicate and difficult questions. We have no wish to speak ill of the Protestant clergy. Most of them are certainly honorable men, estimable husbands and good fathers; but we cannot help observing that they lack the sacerdotal character so conspicuous in the Catholic priest. Their ministry and their teaching cannot fully satisfy the soul; and whenever a calm and unprejudiced comparison is drawn between them and the Catholic clergy, it is strange if the former do not suffer by the contrast, and behold their flocks, little by little, passing over to the side of the Church. This comparison is one motive which often leads Protestants, not precisely into [{15}] the bosom of the faith, but to the study of Catholic doctrine; and this is a step by no means easy to persuade them to take; for, of every ten Protestants who honestly study the faith, seven or eight end by becoming Catholics. The Americans are a people of a strong religious bent. Nothing which concerns the great question of religion is indifferent to them. They study and reflect upon such matters much more than we skeptical and critical Frenchmen. The conversions resulting from such frequent consideration of religious matters ought, therefore, to be far more numerous in America, and even in England, than in other countries.
There are doubtless many other causes which contribute to the same result. Among them are mixed marriages, which generally turn out to the advantage of the Church, especially in the case of educated people in the upper ranks in society. Not only are the children of these marriages brought up Catholics, but almost always, as experience has shown us, the Protestant parent becomes a Catholic too.
The excellent houses of education directed by religious orders are another active cause of conversions. If elementary education is almost universal in the United States, it is nevertheless true that the higher institutions of learning are exceedingly defective. The colleges and boarding-schools founded under the direction of the Catholic clergy, though inferior to those of France in the thoroughness of the education they impart and the amount of study required of their pupils, are yet vastly superior to all other American establishments in their method, their discipline, and the attainments of their professors. The consequence is that they are resorted to by numbers of Protestant youth of both sexes. No compulsion is used to make them Catholics; no undue influence is exerted; the press, free as it is, rarely finds excuse for complaint on this score; but facts and doctrines speak for themselves. The good examples and affectionate solicitude which surround these young people, and the friendships they contract, leave a deep impression on their minds, and plant the seed of serious thought, which sooner or later bears fruit. Various circumstances may lead to the final development of this seed. Now perhaps a first great sorrow wakens it into life; now it is quickened by new ideas born of study and experience; in one case the determining influence may be a marriage; in another, intercourse with Catholic society; and not a few may be moved by the falsity of the notions of Catholicism which they find current among Protestants, and which their own experience enables them to detect. This motive operates oftener than people suppose, and generally with those who at school or college seemed most bitterly hostile to the faith. In tine, those who have been educated at Catholic institutions are less prejudiced and better prepared for the action of divine grace, which Providence may send through any one of a thousand channels.
And lastly, Catholicism acts upon the Americans through the medium of the habits and customs to which it gradually attaches them, the result of which is that in the growth of the population the Church makes a constant, an insensible, and what we might call a spontaneous increase. It is a well-known fact that the Catholic families of North America, as a general rule, are distinguished by a character of stability, good order, and moderation which is often wanting in the Yankee race. Now this turns to the advantage of the Church; for it is evident that a people which fixes itself permanently where it has once settled, which concentrates itself, so to speak, has a better chance of acquiring a predominance in the long run than one of migratory habits, always in pursuit of some better state which always eludes it. This truth is nowhere more apparent than in a county of Upper Canada where we spent nearly three years. The county of Glengarry was settled [{16}] in 1815 by Scotchmen, some of whom were Catholics. The colony increased partly by the natural multiplication of the settlers, partly by immigration, until about 1840, when immigration almost totally ceased, all the lands being occupied. The population was then left to grow by natural increase alone. The Protestants at that time were considerably in the majority; but by 1850 the proportions began to change, and out of 17,576 inhabitants 8,870 were Catholics. In 1860 the majority was completely reversed, and in a population of 21,187 there were 10,919 Catholics; in other words, the latter, by the regular operation of natural causes, had gained every year from one to two per cent, upon the whole. It would not be easy to give a detailed explanation of this fact; we are only conscious that some mysterious and irresistible agency is gradually augmenting the proportion of the Catholic element in American society and weakening the Protestant.
American society might be compared to a troubled expanse of water holding various substances in solution. The solid bottom upon which the waters rest is formed by the deposit of these substances, and day after day, during the moments of rest which follow every agitation of the waves, more and more of the Catholic element is precipitated which the waters bring with them at each successive influx, but fail to carry off again. It is by this human alluvium that our religion grows and extends itself; and if this growth is wonderful, it may be that the effect of the infusion of so much sound doctrine into American society will prove equally astonishing and precious.
Great stress has often been laid upon the good qualities of the American people, but comparatively few have spoken of their faults; not because they had none, but because their faults were lost sight of in the brilliancy of their material prosperity. But recent events have led to more reflection upon this point; so it will not astonish our readers if we point oat one or two, such as the decay of thoughtful, systematic, methodical intelligence among them, in comparison with Europeans; their narrowness of mind; their inaptitude for general ideas; and their sensibly diminishing delicacy of mind. These defects show an unsuspected but serious and rapid degeneracy of the Anglo-American race, and the decline has already perhaps gone further than one would readily believe. If Catholicism, which tends eminently to develop a spirit of method and order, broadness of view and delicacy of sentiment, should combat successfully these failings, it would render a signal service to the United States in return for the liberty which they have granted it.
But Catholics, we should add, are indebted to the United States for something more than simple liberty. They have there learned to appreciate their real power. They have learned by experience how little they have to fear from pure universal liberty, how much strength and influence they can acquire in such a state of society. There is this good and this evil in liberty—that it always proves to the advantage of the strong; so that when there is question of the relations between man and man, it must be a well-regulated liberty, or it will result in the oppression of the weak. But the case is different when it comes to a question of discordant doctrines: man has everything to gain by the triumph of sound, strong principles and the destruction of false and specious theories. In such a contest, let but each side appear in its true colors, and we have nothing to fear for the cause of truth. The United States will at least have had the merit of affording an opportunity for a powerful demonstration of the truth; and great as are the advantages which the Catholic Church can confer upon the country, she herself will reap still greater advantages by conferring them; for it will turn to her benefit in her action upon the world at large.
In fact, the experience of the Church [{17}] in America has doubtless gone for something in the familiarity which religious minds are gradually acquiring with the principles of political liberty; and thus the growth of American Catholicism is allied to the world-wide reaction which is now taking place after the religious eclipse of the last century. This transformation of the United States, in truth, is only one marked incident in the intellectual revolution which is drawing the whole world toward the Catholic Church—England as well as America, Germany as well as England, even Bulgaria in the far East. The foreign press brings us daily the signs of this progress; and nothing can be easier than to point them out in France under our own eyes. But unfortunately we have been too much in the habit, for the last century, of leading a life of continual mortification, too conscious that we were laughed at by the leaders of public opinion. We crawled along in fear and trembling, creeping close to the walls, dreading at every step to give offence, or to cause scandal, or to lose some of our brethren. Accustomed to see our ranks thinned and whole files carried off in the flower of their youth, we stood in too great fear of the deceitful power of doctrines which seemed to promise everything to man and ask nothing from him in return. And therefore many of us still find it hard to understand the new state of things in which we are making progress without external help. This progress, however, inaugurated by the energy of a few, the perseverance of all, and the overruling hand of divine Providence, is unquestionably going on, and may easily be proved. We have only to visit our churches, attend some of the special retreats for men, or look at the Easter communions, to see what long steps faith and religious practice have taken within the last forty years. The change is most perceptible among the educated classes and in the learned professions. We have heard old professors express their astonishment in comparing the schools of the present time with those of their youth. It was then almost impossible to find a young man at the École Polytechnique, at St. Cyr, or at the École Centrale, with enough faith and enough courage openly to profess his religion; now it may be said that a fifth or perhaps a fourth part of the students openly and unhesitatingly perform their Easter duty. We ourselves remember that no longer ago than 1830 it required a degree of courage of which few were found capable to manifest any religious sentiment in the public lyceums. Voltairianism—or to speak better, an intolerant fanaticism—delighted to cover these faithful few with public ridicule; while now, if we may believe the best authorized accounts, it is only a small minority who openly profess infidelity. We can affirm that in the School of Law the change is quite as great, and it has begun to operate even in that time-honored stronghold of materialism, the School of Medicine.
But what must strike us most forcibly in the examination of these questions is the fact, already pointed out by the Abbé Meignan, that the progress of religion has kept even pace with the extension of free institutions. Wherever the liberal régime has been established, the reaction in favor of religion has become stronger, no doubt because liberty places man face to face with the consequences of his own acts and the necessities of his feeble nature. Man is never so powerfully impelled to draw near to God as when he becomes conscious of his own weakness; never so deeply impressed with the emptiness of false doctrines as when he has experienced their nothingness in the practical affairs of life. The violence of external disorder soon leads him to, reflect upon the necessity of solid, methodical, moral education, such as regulates one's life, and such as the Church alone can impart. And therefore the great change of sentiment of which we have spoken is perceptible chiefly among the educated and liberal classes, while with the ignorant and [{18}] vulgar infidelity holds its own and is even gaining. The educated classes, more thoughtful, knowing the world and having experience of men, see further and calculate more calmly the tendency of events; with the common people reason and plain sense are often overpowered by the violence of their temperament and the impetuosity of their passions. Ignorance and inordinate desires do the rest, and they imagine that man will know how to conduct without knowing how to govern himself.
Whatever demagogues may say, history proves that the head always rules the body. The period of discouragement and apprehension is past. We shall yet, no doubt, have to go through trials, and violent crises, and perhaps cruel persecutions; but we may hope everything from the future. And why not? If we study the history of the Jewish people, we shall see how God chastises his people in order to rouse them from their moral torpor, and raise them up from apparent ruin by unforeseen means. Weakness, in his hand, at once becomes strength; he asks of us nothing but faith and courage. We have traced his Providence in the methods by which he has stimulated the growth of the American Church—methods all the more effectual because, unlike our own vain enterprises, they worked for a long time in silence and obscurity. These Western bishoprics remained almost unknown up to the day when, the light bursting forth all at once, the world beheld a Church already organized, already strong, where it had not suspected even her existence.
There is a magnificent and instructive scene in Athalie, where the veil of the temple is rent, and discloses to the eyes of the terrified queen, Joas, whom she had believed dead, standing in his glory surrounded by an army. Even so, it seems to us, was the American Church suddenly revealed in all her vigor to the astonished world, when her bishops came two years ago to take their place in the council at Rome. And the same progress is making all over the globe. Noiseless and unobtrusive, it attracts no attention from the world; it is overlooked by Utopian theorists; it goes on quietly in the domain of conscience; but the day will come when its light will break forth and astonish mankind by its brightness. Such are the ways of God!
NOTE.—The greater part of the materials for the preceding article were written or collected during the course of a journey which we made in the United States in 1860. Since then the progress of Catholicism has necessarily been somewhat checked by the events of the lamentable civil war which is desolating the country; but the check has been far less serious than might have reasonably been apprehended. Religion has been kept apart from political dissensions and public disorders; it has only had to suffer the common evils which war, mortality, and general impoverishment have inflicted upon the whole people. If all these things are to have any bad effect upon the progress of the Church, it will be in future years, not now. In fact, all the documents which we have been able to collect show that the numbers of both the faithful and the clergy, instead of falling off, have gone on increasing. In thirty-eight dioceses there are now 275 more priests than there were in 1860; from the five other sees, namely, those of New Orleans, Galveston, Mobile, Natchitoches, and Charleston, we have no returns. This increase is confined almost entirely to the regions in which the Church was already strongest; elsewhere matters have remained about stationary.
Of this number of 275 priests added to the Church in the course of three years, 251 belong to the following fourteen dioceses, namely: Baltimore, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Brooklyn, Albany, Alton, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Vincennes, and Hartford. The last-named belongs to the [{19}] Northeastern or New England group, all the others to the Central and Western. Thus fourteen dioceses alone show nine-tenths of the total increase, and the others divide the remaining tenth among them in very minute fractions. From some states, it is true, the returns are very meagre, and from others they are altogether wanting; but the disproportion is so strong as to leave no doubt that the future conquests of the Church in the United States will be gained, as we have already said, principally in the Middle and Western States.
E. R.
From The Month.
THE ANCIENT SAINTS OF GOD.
A FRENCH OFFICER'S STORY.
BY THE LATE CARDINAL WISEMAN.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
We often practically divide the saints into three classes. The ancient saints, those of the primitive age of Christianity, we consider as the patrons of the universal Church, watching over its well-being and progress, but, excepting Rome, having only a general connection with the interests of particular countries, still less of individuals.
The great saints of the middle age, belonging to different races and countries, have naturally become their patrons, being more especially reverenced and invoked in the places of their births, their lives, and still more their deaths; whence, St. Willibrord, St. Boniface, and St. Walburga are more honored in Germany, where they died, than in England, where they were born.
The third class includes the more modern saints, who spoke our yet living languages, printed their books, followed the same sort of life, wore the same dress as we do, lived in houses yet standing, founded institutions still flourishing, rode in carriages, and in another generation would have traveled by railway. Such are St. Charles, St. Ignatius, St. Philip, St. Teresa, St. Vincent, B. Benedict Joseph, and many others. Toward these we feel a personal devotion independent of country; nearness of time compensating for distance of place. There is indeed one class of saints who belong to every age and every country; devotion toward whom, far from diminishing, increases the further we recede from their time and even their land. For we are convinced that a Chinese convert has a more sensitive and glowing devotion toward our Blessed Lady, than a Jewish neophyte had in the first century. When I hear this growth of piety denounced or reproached by Protestants, I own I exult in it.
For the only question, and there is none in a Catholic mind, is whether such a feeling is good in itself; if so, growth in it, age by age, is an immense blessing and proof of the divine presence. It is as if one told me that there is more humility now in the Church than there was in the first century, more zeal than in the third, more faith than in the eighth, more charity than in the twelfth. And so, if there is more devotion now than there was 1,800 years ago toward the Immaculate Mother of God, toward [{20}] her saintly spouse, toward St. John, St. Peter, and the other Apostles, I rejoice; knowing that devotion toward our divine Lord, his infancy, his passion, his sacred heart, his adorable eucharist, has not suffered loss or diminution, but has much increased. It need not be, and it is not, as John the Baptist said, "He must increase, and I diminish." Both here increase together; the Lord, and those who best loved him.
But this is more than a subject of joy: it is one of admiration and consolation. For it is the natural course of things that sympathies and affections should grow less by time. We care and feel much less about the conquests of William I., or the prowess of the Black Prince, than we do about the victories of Nelson or Wellington; even Alfred is a mythical person, and Boadicea fabulous; and so it is with all nations. A steadily increasing affection and intensifying devotion (as in this case we call it) for those remote from us, in proportion as we recede from them, is as marvellous—nay, as miraculous—as would be the flowing of a stream from its source up a steep hill, deepening and widening as it rose. And such I consider this growth, through succeeding ages, of devout feeling toward those who were the root, and seem to become the crown, or flower, of the Church. It is as if a beam from the sun, or a ray from a lamp, grew brighter and warmer in proportion as it darted further from its source.
I cannot but see in this supernatural disposition evidence of a power ruling from a higher sphere than that of ordinary providence, the laws of which, uniform elsewhere, are modified or even reversed when the dispensations of the gospel require it; or rather, these have their own proper and ordinary providence, the laws of which are uniform within its system. And this is one illustration, that what by every ordinary and natural course should go on diminishing, goes on increasing. But I read in this fact an evidence also of the stability and perpetuity of our faith; for a line that is ever growing thinner and thinner tends, through its extenuation, to inanition and total evanescence; whereas one that widens and extends as it advances and becomes more solid, thereby gives earnest and proof of increasing duration.
When we are attacked about practices, devotions, or corollaries of faith—"developments," in other words—do we not sometimes labor needlessly to prove that we go no further than the Fathers did, and that what we do may be justified from ancient authorities? Should we not confine ourselves to showing, even with the help of antiquity, that what is attacked is good, is sound, and is holy; and then thank God that we have so much more of it than others formerly possessed? If it was right to say "Ora pro nobis" once in the day, is it not better to say it seven times a day; and if so, why not seventy times seven? The rule of forgiveness may well be the rule of seeking intercession for it. But whither am I leading you, gentle reader? I promised you a story, and I am giving you a lecture, and I fear a dry one. I must retrace my steps. I wished, therefore, merely to say that, while the saints of the Church are very naturally divided by us into three classes—holy patrons of the Church, of particular portions of it, and of its individual members—there is one raised above all others, which passes through all, composed of protectors, patrons, and nomenclators, of saints themselves. For how many Marys, how many Josephs, Peters, Johns, and Pauls, are there not in the calendar of the saints, called by those names without law of country or age!
But beyond this general recognition of the claims of our greatest saints, one cannot but sometimes feel that the classification which I have described is carried by us too far; that a certain human dross enters into the composition of our devotion; we perhaps nationalize, or even individualize, [{21}] the sympathies of those whose love is universal, like God's own, in which alone they love. We seem to fancy that St. Edward and St. Frideswida are still English; and some persons appear to have as strong an objection to one of their children bearing any but a Saxon saint's name as they have to Italian architecture. We may be quite sure that the power and interest in the whole Church have not been curtailed by the admission of others like themselves, first Christians on earth, then saints in heaven, into their blessed society; but that the friends of God belong to us all, and can and will help us, if we invoke them, with loving impartiality. The little history which I am going to relate serves to illustrate this view of saintly intercession; it was told me by the learned and distinguished prelate whom I shall call Monsig. B. He has, I have heard, since published the narrative; but I will give it as I heard it from his lips.
CHAPTER II.
THE FRENCH OFFICER'S FIRST APPEARANCE.
On the 30th of last month—I am writing early in August—we all commemorated the holy martyrs, Sts. Abdon and Sennen. This in itself is worthy of notice. Why should we in England, why should they in America, be singing the praises of two Persians who lived more than fifteen hundred years ago? Plainly because we are Catholics, and as such in communion with the saints of Persia and the martyrs of Decius. Yet it may be assumed that the particular devotion to these two Eastern martyrs is owing to their having suffered in Rome, and so found a place in the calendar of the catacombs, the basis of later martyrologies. Probably after having been concealed in the house of Quirinus the deacon, their bodies were buried in the cemetery or catacomb of Pontianus, outside the present Porta Portese, on the northern bank of the Tiber. In that catacomb, remarkable for containing the primitive baptistery of the Church, there yet remains a monument of these saints, marking their place of sepulture. [Footnote 5] Painted on the wall is a "floriated" and jewelled cross; not a conventional one such as mediaeval art introduced, but a plain cross, on the surface of which the painter imitated natural jewels, and from the foot of which grow flowers of natural forms and hues; on each side stands a figure in Persian dress and Phrygian cap, with the names respectively running down in letters one below the other:
SANCTVS ABDON: SANCTVS SENNEN.
The bodies are no longer there. They were no doubt removed, as most were, in the eighth century, to save them from Saracenic profanation, and translated to the basilica of St. Mark in Rome. There they repose, with many other martyrs no longer distinguishable; since the ancient usage was literally to bury the bodies of martyrs in a spacious crypt or chamber under the altar, so as to verify the apocalyptic description, "From under the altar of God all the saints cry aloud." This practice has been admirably illustrated by the prelate to whom I have referred, in a work on this very crypt, or, in ecclesiastical language, Confession of St. Mark's.
[Footnote 5: See Fabiola, pp. 362, 363.]
One 30th of July, soon after the siege of Rome in 1848, the chapter of St. Mark's were singing the office and mass of these Persian martyrs, as saints of their church. Most people on week-days content themselves with hearing early a low mass, so that the longer offices of the basilica, especially the secondary ones, are not much frequented. On this occasion, however, a young French officer was noticed by [{22}] the canons as assisting alone with great recollection.
At the close of the function, my informant went up to the young man, and entered into conversation with him.
"What feast are you celebrating today?" asked the officer.
"That of Sts. Abdon and Sennen," answered Monsignor B.
"Indeed! how singular!"
"Why? Have you any particular devotion to those saints?"
"Oh, yes; they are my patron saints. The cathedral of my native town is dedicated to them, and possesses their bodies."
"You must be mistaken there: their holy relics repose beneath our altar; and we have to-day kept their feast solemnly on that account."
On this explanation of the prelate the young officer seemed a little disconcerted, and remarked that at P— everybody believed that the saints' relics were in the cathedral.
The canon, as he then was, of St. Mark's, though now promoted to the "patriarchal" basilica of St. John, explained to him how this might be, inasmuch as any church possessing considerable portions of larger relics belonging to a saint was entitled to the privilege of one holding the entire body, and was familiarly spoken of as actually having it; and this no doubt was the case at P—.
"But, beside general grounds for devotion to these patrons of my native city, I have a more particular and personal one; for to their interposition I believe I owe my life."
The group of listeners who had gathered round the officer was deeply interested in this statement, and requested him to relate the incident to which he alluded. He readily complied with their request, and with the utmost simplicity made the following brief recital.
CHAPTER III.
THE OFFICER'S NARRATIVE.
"During the late siege of Rome I happened to be placed in an advanced post, with a small body of soldiers, among the hillocks between our headquarters in the villa Pamphily-Doria and the gate of St. Pancratius. The post was one of some danger, as it was exposed to the sudden and unsparing sallies made by the revolutionary garrison on that side. The broken ground helped to conceal us from the marksmen and the artillery on the walls. However, that day proved to be one of particular danger. Without warning, a sortie was made in force, either merely in defiance or to gain possession of some advantageous post; for you know how the church and convent of St. Pancratius was assailed by the enemy, and taken and retaken by us several times in one day. The same happened to the villas near the walls. There was no time given us for speculation or reflection. We found ourselves at once in presence of a very superior force, or rather in the middle of it; for we were completely surrounded. We fought our best; but escape seemed impossible. My poor little picket was soon cut to pieces, and I found myself standing alone in the midst of our assailants, defending myself as well as I could against such fearful odds. At length I felt I was come to the last extremity, and that in a few moments I should be lying with my brave companions. Earnestly desiring to have the suffrages of my holy patrons in that my last hour, I instinctively exclaimed, 'Sts. Abdon and Sennen, pray for me!' What then happened I cannot tell. Whether a sudden panic struck my enemies, or something more important called off their attention, or what else to me inexplicable—occurred, I cannot say; all that I know is, that somehow or other I found myself alone, unwounded [{23}] and unhurt, with my poor fellows lying about, and no enemy near.
"Do you not think that I have a right to attribute this most wonderful and otherwise unaccountable escape to the intercession and protection of Sts. Abdon and Sennen?"
I need scarcely say that this simple narrative touched and moved deeply all its hearers. No one was disposed to dissent from the young Christian officer's conclusion.
CHAPTER IV.
THE EXPLANATION.
It was natural that those good ecclesiastics who composed the chapter of St. Mark's should feel an interest in their youthful acquaintance. His having accidentally, as it seemed, but really providentially, strolled into their church at such a time, with so singular a bond of sympathy with its sacred offices that day, necessarily drew them in kindness toward him. His ingenuous piety and vivid faith gained their hearts.
In the conversation which followed, it was discovered that all his tastes and feelings led him to love and visit the religious monuments of Rome; but that he had no guide or companion to make his wanderings among them as useful and agreeable as they might be made. It was good-naturedly and kindly suggested to him to come from time to time to the church, when some one of the canons would take him with him on his ventidue ore walk after vespers, and act the cicerone to him, if they should visit some interesting religious object. This offer he readily accepted, and the intelligent youth and his reverend guides enjoyed pleasant afternoons together. At last one pleasanter than all occurred, when in company with Monsignor B.
Their ramble that evening led them out of the Porta Portuensis, among the hills of Monte Verde, between it and the gate of St. Pancratius— perhaps for the purpose of visiting that interesting basilica. Be it as it may, suddenly, while traversing a vineyard, the young man stopped.
"Here," he exclaimed, "on this very spot, I was standing when my miraculous deliverance took place."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite. If I lived a hundred years, I could never forget it. It is the very spot."
"Then stand still a moment," rejoined the prelate; "we are very near the entrance to the cemetery of Pontianus. I wish to measure the distance."
He did so by pacing it.
"Now," he said, "come down into the catacomb, and observe the direction from where you stand to the door." The key was soon procured.
They accordingly went down, proceeded as near as they could judge toward the point marked over-head, measured the distance paced above, and found themselves standing before the memorial of Sts. Abdon and Sennen.
"There," said the canon to his young friend; "you did not know that, when you were invoking your holy patrons, you were standing immediately over their tomb."
The young officer's emotion may be better conceived than described on discovering this new and unexpected coincidence in the history of his successful application to the intercession of ancient saints.
SANCTI ABDON ET SENNEN, ORATE PRO NOBIS.
From The Lamp.
A PILGRIMAGE TO ARS.
I went to Lyons for the express purpose of visiting the tomb of the Curé of Ars; for I knew the village of Ars was not very far from that city, though I had but a vague idea as to where it was situated or how it was to be reached. I trusted, however, to obtaining all needful information from the people at the hotel where I was to pass the night; and I was not mistaken in my expectations; but I must confess, to my sorrow, that I felt for a moment a very English sort of shamefacedness about making the inquiry. Put to the waiter of an English hotel, such a question would simply have produced a stare of astonishment or a smile of pity. A visit to the tomb of the Duke of Wellington at St. Paul's, or a descent into kingly vaults for the wise purpose of beholding Prince Albert's coffin, with its wreaths of flowers laid there by royal and loving hands these things he would have sympathized with and understood. But a pilgrimage to the last resting-place of a man who, even admitting he were at that moment a saint in heaven, had been but a simple parish-priest upon earth, would have been a proceeding utterly beyond his capacity to comprehend, and he would undoubtedly have pronounced it either an act of insanity or one of superstition, or something partaking of the nature of the two. I forgot, for a moment, that I was in a Catholic country, and inquired my way to Ars with an uncomfortable expectation of a sneering answer in return. Once, however, that the question was fairly put, there was nothing left for me but to be ashamed of my own misgivings.
"Madame wished to visit the tomb of the sainted Curé?—mais oui. It was the easiest thing in the world. Only an hour's railway from Lyons to Villefranche; and an omnibus at the latter station, which had been established for the express purpose of accommodating the pilgrims, who still flocked to Ars from every quarter of the Catholic world."
I listened, and my way seemed suddenly to become smooth before me. Later on in the evening, I found that the housemaid of the hotel had been there often; and two or three times at least during the lifetime of the Curé. I asked her for what purpose she had gone there; whether to be cured of bodily ailments or to consult him on spiritual matters? "For neither one nor the other," she answered, with great simplicity; "but she had had a great grief, and her mother had taken her to him to be comforted." There was something to me singularly lovely in this answer, and in the insight which it gave me into the nature of that mission, so human, and yet so divine, which the Curé had accomplished in his lifetime. God had placed him there, like another John the Baptist, to announce penance to the world. He preached to thousands—he converted thousands—he penetrated into the hidden consciences of thousands, and laid his finger, as if by intuition, upon the hidden sore that kept the soul from God. Men, great by wealth and station, came to him and laid their burden of sin and misery at his feet. Men, greater still by intellect, and prouder and more difficult of conversion (as sins of the intellect ever make men), left his presence simple, loving, and believing as little children. For these he had lightning glances and words of fire; these by turns he reprimanded, exhorted, and encouraged; but when the weak and sorrowful of God's flock came to him, he paused in his apostolic task to weep over them and console them. And so it was with [{25}] Jesus. The great and wealthy of the earth came to him for relief, and he never refused their prayers; but how many instances do we find in the gospel of the gift of health bestowed, unasked and unexpected, upon some poor wanderer by the wayside, or the yet greater boon of comfort given to some poor suffering heart, for no other reason that we know of than that it suffered and had need of comfort! The cripple by the pool of Bethsaida received his cure at the very moment when he was heartsick with hope deferred at finding no man to carry him down to the waters; and the widow of Nain found her son suddenly restored to life because, as the gospel expressly tells us, he was "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow."
The heart of the Curé of Ars seems to have been only less tender than that of his divine Master; and in the midst of the sublime occupation of converting souls to God, he never disdained the humble task of healing the stricken spirit, and leading it to peace and joy.
"My husband died suddenly," the young woman went on to say, in answer to my further questions; "and from affluence I found myself at once reduced to poverty. I was stunned by the blow; but my mother took me to the cure; and almost before he had said a word, I felt not only consoled, but satisfied with the lot which God had assigned me." And so indeed she must have been. When I saw her, she was still poor, and earning her bread by the worst of all servitude, the daily and nightly servitude of a crowded inn; but gentle, placid, and smiling, as became one who had seen and been comforted by a saint. She evidently felt that she had been permitted to approach very near to God in the person of God's servant, and every word she uttered was so full of love and confidence in the sainted curé that it increased (if that were possible) my desire to kneel at his tomb, since the happiness of approaching his living person had been denied me.
The next morning I set off for Villefranche. It is on the direct line to Paris, and at about an hour's railroad journey from Lyons. When I reached it, I found three omnibuses waiting at the station, and I believe they were all there for the sole purpose of conveying pilgrims to Ars. One of the conductors tried every mode of persuasion—and there are not a few in the vocabulary of a Frenchman—to inveigle me into his omnibus. "I should be at Ars in half an hour, and could return at two, three, four o'clock—in short, at any hour of the night or day that might please me best." It was with some difficulty I resisted the torrent of eloquence he poured out upon me; but, in the first place, I felt that he was promising what he himself would have called "the impossible," since a public conveyance must necessarily regulate its movements by the wishes of the majority of its passengers; and in the next, I had a very strong desire to be alone in body as well as in mind during the few hours that I was to spend at Ars.
At last I found an omnibus destined solely for visitors to Villefranche itself, and the conductor promised that he would provide me a private carriage to Ars if I would consent to drive first to his hotel. Cabaret he might have called it with perfect truth, for cabaret it was, and nothing more—a regular French specimen of the article, with a great public kitchen, where half the workmen of the town assembled for their meals, and a small cupboard sort of closet opening into it for the accommodation of more aristocratic guests. Into this, bon gré, mal gré, they wished to thrust me, but I violently repelled the threatened honor, and with some difficulty carrying my point, succeeded in being permitted to remain in the larger and cooler space of the open kitchen until my promised vehicle should appear. It came at last, a sort of half-cab, half-gig, without a hood, but with a curiously contrived harness of loose ropes, and looking altogether [{26}] dangerously likely to come to pieces on the road. Luckily, I am not naturally nervous in such matters, and, consoling myself with the thought that if we did get into grief the "bon curé" was bound to come to my assistance, seeing I had incurred it solely for the sake of visiting his tomb, I was soon settled as comfortably as circumstances would permit, and we set off at a brisk pace.
The country around Villefranche is truly neither pretty nor picturesque; and though we were not really an hour on the road, the drive seemed tedious. Our Jehu also, as it turned out, had never been at Ars before; so that he had not only to stop more than once to inquire the way, but actually contrived at the very last to miss it. He soon discovered the mistake, however, and retracing his steps, a very few minutes brought us to the spot where the saint had lived forty years, and where he now sleeps in death. His house stands beside the church, but a little in the rear, so it does not immediately catch the eye; and the church, where his real life was spent, is separated from the road by a small enclosure, railed off, and approached by a few steps. We looked around for some person to conduct us, but there was no one to be seen; so, after a moment's hesitation, we ascended the steps and entered the church. If you wish to know what kind of church it is, I cannot tell you. I do not know, in fact, whether it is Greek or Gothic, or of no particular architecture at all; I do not know even if it is in good taste or in bad taste. The soul was so filled with a sense of the presence of the dead saint that it left no room for the outer sense to take note of the accidents amid which he had lived. There are two or three small chapels—a Lady chapel, one dedicated to the Sacred Heart, and another to St. John the Baptist. There is also the chapel of St. Philomena, with a large lifelike image of the "bonne petite sainte" to whom he loved to attribute every miracle charity compelled him to perform; and there is the confessional, where for forty years he worked far greater wonders on the soul than any of the more obvious ones he accomplished on the body. All, or most of all, this I saw in a vague sort of way, as one who saw not; but the whole church was filled with such an aroma of holiness, there was such a sense of the actual presence of the man who had converted it into a very tabernacle in the wilderness—a true Holy of Holies, where, in the midst of infidel France, God had descended and conversed almost visibly with his people—that I had neither the will nor the power to condescend to particulars, and examine it in detail.
My one thought as I entered the church was, to go and pray upon his tomb; but in the first moment of doubt and confusion I could not remember, if indeed I had been told, the exact spot where he was buried. The chapel of St. Philomena was the first to attract my notice, and feeling that I could not be far wrong while keeping close to his dear little patroness, I knelt down there to collect my ideas.
The stillness of the church made itself felt. There were indeed many persons praying in it, but they prayed in that profound silence which spoke to the heart, and penetrated it in a way no words could have ever done.
I was thirsting, however, to approach the tomb of the saint, and at last ventured to whisper the question to a person near me. She pointed to a large black slab nearly in the centre of the church, and told me that he lay beneath it. Yes, he was there, in the very midst of his people, not far from the chapel of St. Philomena, and opposite to the altar whence he had so many thousands of times distributed the bread of life to the famishing souls who, like the multitude of old, had come into the desert, and needed to be fed ere they departed to their homes. Yes, he was there; and with a strange mingling of joy and sorrow in the thought I went and knelt down beside him.
Had I gone to Ars but a few years before, I might have found him in his living person; might have thrown myself at his feet, and poured out my whole soul before him. Now I knelt indeed beside him, but beside his body only, and the soul that would have addressed itself to mine was far away in the bosom of its God. Humanly speaking, the difference seemed against me, and yet, in a more spiritual point of view, it might perhaps be said to be in my favor.
The graces which he obtained for mortals here he obtained by more than mortal suffering and endurance—by tears, by fastings, and nightly and daily impetrations;—now, with his head resting, like another St. John, on the bosom of his divine Lord, surely he has but to wish in order to draw down whole fountains of love and tenderness on his weeping flock below. And certainly it would seem so; for however numerous the miracles accomplished in his lifetime, they have been multiplied beyond all power of calculation since his death.
Later on in the day, when the present curé showed me a room nearly half full of crutches and other mementos of cures wrought—"These are only the ones left there during his lifetime," he observed, in a tone which told at once how much more numerous were those which cure had made useless to their owners since his death.
I had not been many minutes kneeling before his tomb, when the lady who had pointed it out to me asked if I would like to see the house which he had inhabited in his lifetime. On my answering gladly in the affirmative, she made me follow her through a side-door and across a sort of court to the house inhabited by the present curé. This house had never been the abode of M. Vianney, but had been allotted to the priests who assisted him in his missions. The one which he actually inhabited is now a sort of sanctuary, where every relic and recollection of him is carefully preserved for the veneration of the faithful. We were shown into a sort of salle à manger, sufficiently poor to make us feel we were in the habitation of men brought up in the school of a saint, and almost immediately afterward the present curé entered. He had been for many years the zealous assistant of the late curé; and, in trying to give me an idea of the influx of strangers into Ars, he told me that, while M. Vianney spent habitually from fifteen to seventeen hours in the confessional, he and his brother priest were usually occupied at least twelve hours out of the twenty-four in a similar manner. Even this was probably barely sufficient for the wants of the mission, for the number of strangers who came annually to Ars during the latter years of the curé's life was reckoned at about 80,000, and few, if any, of these went away without having made a general confession, either to M. Vianney himself, or, if that were not possible, to one or other of the assisting clergy.
It was pleasant to talk with one who had been living in constant communication with a saint; and I felt as if something of the spirit of M. Vianney himself had taken possession of the good and gentle man with whom I was conversing. Among other things, he told me that the devout wish of the saint had of late years been the erection of a new church to St. Philomena; and he gave me a fac-simile of his handwriting in which he had promised to pray especially for any one aiding him in the work. The surest way, therefore, I should imagine, to interest him in our necessities—now that he is in heaven—would be to aid in the undertaking which he had in mind and heart while yet dwelling on earth. Even in his lifetime there had been a lottery got up for raising funds; and as money is still coming in from all quarters, his wish will doubtless soon be accomplished. I saw a very handsome altar which has been already presented, and which has been put aside in one of the rooms of the curé until the church, for which it is [{28}] intended, shall have been completed. M. le curé showed me one or two small photographs, which had been taken without his knowledge during the lifetime of the saint; and also a little carved image, which he said was a wonderful likeness, and far better than any of the portraits. Afterward he pointed out another photograph, as large as life, and suspended against the wall, which had been procured after death. It was calm and holy, as the face of a saint in death should be, and I liked it still better in its placid peace than the smile of the living photograph. Even the smile seemed to tell of tears. You know that he who smiles is still doing battle—cheerfully and successfully indeed, but still doing battle with the enemies of his soul; while the grave calmness of the dead face tells you at once that all is over—the fight is fought, the crown is won; eternity has set its seal on the good works of time, and all is safe for ever.
I could have looked at that photograph a long time, and said my prayers before it—it seemed to repose in such an atmosphere of sanctity and peace—but the hours were passing quickly, and there was still much to see and hear concerning the dead saint. I took leave, therefore, of the good priest who had been my cicerone so far, and sought the old housekeeper, who was in readiness to show me the house where M. Vianney had lived. We crossed a sort of court, which led us to a door opposite the church. When this was opened, I found myself in a sort of half-garden, half-yard, in the centre of which the old house was standing.
It is hard to put upon paper the feelings with which a spot the habitation of a saint just dead is visited. The spirit of love and charity and peace which animated the living man still seems brooding over the spot where his life was passed, and you feel intensely that the true beauty of the Lord's house was here, and that this has been the place where his glory hath delighted to dwell. The first room I entered was one in which the crutches left there by invalids had been deposited. It was a sight to see. The crutches were piled as close as they could be against the wall, and yet the room was almost half full. The persons who used those crutches must have been carried hither, lame and suffering, and helpless as young children; and they walked away strong men and cured. Truly "the lame walk and the blind see;" and the Lord hath visited his people in the person of his servant.
My next visit was made to the salle à manger, where M. Vianney had always taken the one scanty meal which was his sole support during his twenty-four hours of almost unbroken labor. It was poverty in very deed—poverty plain, unvarnished, and unadorned—such poverty as an Irish cabin might have rivalled, but could scarcely have surpassed. The walls were bare and whitewashed; the roof was merely raftered; and the floor, which had once been paved with large round stones, such as are used for the pavement of a street, was broken here and there into deep holes by the removal of the stones. During his forty years' residence at Ars, M. Vianney had probably never spent a single sou upon any article which could contribute to his own comfort or convenience; and this room bore witness to the fact. How, indeed, should he buy anything for himself, who gave even that which was given to him away, until his best friends grew well-nigh weary of bestowing presents, which they felt would pass almost at the same instant out of his own possession into the hands of any one whom he fancied to be in greater want of them than he was? I stood in that bare and desolate apartment, and felt as if earth and heaven in their widest extremes, their most startling contrasts, were there in type and reality before me. All that earth has of poor and miserable and unsightly was present to the eyes of the body; all that heaven has of bright [{29}] and beautiful and glorious was just as present, just as visible, to the vision of the soul. It was the very reverse of the fable of the fairy treasures, which vanish into dust when tested by reality. All that you saw was dust and ashes, but dust and ashes which, tried by the touchstone of eternity, would, you knew, prove brighter than the brightest gold, fairer than the fairest silver that earth ever yielded to set in the diadem of her kings! My reflections were cut short by the entrance of one of the priests, who invited us to come up stairs and inspect the vestments which had belonged to the late curé, and which were kept, I think, apart from those in ordinary use in the church. There was a great quantity of them, and they were all in curious contrast with everything else we had seen belonging to M. Vianney. Nothing too good for God; nothing too mean and miserable for himself—that had been the motto of his life; and the worm-eaten furniture of the dining-room, the gold and velvet of the embroidered vestments, alike bore witness to the fidelity with which he had acted on it. The vestments were more than handsome—some of them were magnificent. One set I remember in particular which was very beautiful. It had been given, with canopy for the blessed sacrament and banners for processions, by the present Marquis D'Ars, the chief of that beloved family, who, after the death of Mdlle. D'Ars, became M. Vianney's most efficient aid in all his works of charity. The priest who showed them to us, and who had also been one of the late curé's missionaries, told us that M. Vianney was absolutely enchanted with joy when the vestments arrived, and that he instantly organized an expedition to Lyons in order to express his gratitude at the altar of Notre Dame de Fourrière. The whole parish attended on this occasion. They went down the river in boats provided for the purpose, and with banners flying and music playing, marched in solemn procession through the streets of Lyons, and up the steep sides of Fourrière, until they reached the church of Notre Dame. There the whole multitude fell on their knees, and M. Vianney himself prayed, no doubt long and earnestly, before the miraculous image of Our Lady, seeking through her intercession to obtain some especial favor for the man who, out of his own abundance, had brought gifts of gold and silver to the altar of his God.
I asked the priest for some information about the granary which was said to have been miraculously filled with corn. He told me he had been at Ars at the time, and that there could be no doubt that the granary had been quite empty the night before. It was, I think, a time of scarcity, and the grain had been set aside for the use of the poor. M. Vianney went to bed miserable at the failure of his supplies; but when he visited the granary again early the next morning, he found it full. It was at the top of his own house, I believe, and was kept, of course, carefully locked. Nobody knew how it had been filled, or by whom. In fact, it seemed absolutely impossible that any one could have carted the quantity of grain needed for the purpose and carried it up stairs without being detected in the act. The priest made no comment on the matter; indeed, he seemed anything but inclined to enlarge upon it, though he made no secret of his own opinion as to the miraculous nature of the occurrence. As soon as he had answered my inquiries, he led us to the room which had been the holy curé's own personal apartment. It was, as well as I can remember, the one over the dining-room. No apostle ever lived and died in an abode more entirely destitute of all human riches. It was kept exactly in the same state in which it had been during his lifetime—a few poor-looking books still on the small book-shelf, a wooden table and a chair, and the little bed in the corner, smoothed and laid down, as if only waiting his return from the confessional for the [{30}] few short hours he gave to slumber—if, indeed, he did give them; for no one ever penetrated into the mystery of those hours, or knew how much of the time set apart apparently for his own repose was dedicated to God, or employed in supplicating God's mercies on his creatures.
The history of that room was the history of the saint. A book-shelf filled with works of piety and devotion; a stove, left doubtless because it had been originally built into the room, but left without use or purpose (for who ever heard of his indulging in a fire?); a table and a chair—that was all; but it was enough, and more than enough, to fill the mind with thought, and to crowd all the memories of that holy life into the few short moments that I knelt there. How often had he come back to that poor apartment, his body exhausted by fasting, and cramped by long confinement in the confessional, and his heart steeped (nay, drowned, as he himself most eloquently expressed it) in bitterness and sorrow by the long histories of sins to which he had been compelled to listen—sins committed against that God whom he loved far more tenderly than he loved himself! How often, in the silence and darkness of the night, has he poured forth his soul, now in tender commiseration over Jesus crucified by shiners, now over the sinners by whom Jesus had been crucified! How often has he (perhaps) called on God to remove him from a world where God was so offended; and yet, moved by the charity of his tender human heart, has besought, almost in the same breath, for the conversion of those sinners whose deeds he was deploring—the cure of their diseases and the removal or consolation of their sorrows! Like a mother who, finding her children at discord, now prays to one to pardon, now to another to submit and be reconciled, so was that loving, pitying heart ever as it were in contradiction with itself—weeping still with Jesus, and yet still pleading for his foes.
The mere action of such thoughts upon the human frame would make continued life a marvel; but when to this long history of mental woe we add the hardships of his material life—the fifteen or seventeen hours passed in the confessional, in heat and cold, in winter as in summer; the one scanty meal taken at mid-day; the four hours of sleep, robbed often and often of half their number for the sake of quiet prayer—when we think of these things, there is surely more of miracle in this life of forty years' duration than in the mere fact that it won miracles at last from heaven, and that God, seeing how faithfully this his servant did his will here on earth, complied in turn with his, and granted his desires.
No one, I think, can visit that spot, or hear the history of that life, as it is told by those who knew him as it were but yesterday, without an increase of love, an accession of faith, a more vivid sense of the presence of God in the midst of his creatures, and a more real comprehension of the extent and meaning of those words, "the communion of saints," which every one repeats in the creed, and yet which few take sufficiently to their heart of hearts to make it really a portion of their spiritual being—a means of working out their own salvation by constant and loving communication with those who have attained to it already. Thousands will seek the living saint for the eloquence of his words, the sublimity, of his counsels, the unction of his consolations; but, once departed out of this life, who visits him in his tomb? who turns to him for aid? who lift their eyes to heaven, to ask for his assistance thence, with the same undoubting confidence with which they would have sought it had he been still in the flesh beside them? In one sense of the word, many; and yet few indeed compared to the number of those to whom "the communion of saints" is an article of faith, or ought at least to be so, in something more than the mere service of the lip. It was amid some such [{31}] thoughts as these that I left the town of Ars, grieved indeed that I had not seen the holy curé in his lifetime, and yet feeling that, if I had but faith enough, I was in reality rather a gainer than a loser by his death. He who would have prayed for me on earth would now pray for me in heaven. He who would have dived into my conscience and brought its hidden sins to light, would obtain wisdom and grace for another to put his finger on the sore spot and give it healing. He who would perhaps have cured me of my bodily infirmities, could do so (if it were for the good of my soul) not less efficiently now that he was resting on the heart of his divine Lord. God had granted his prayers while he was yet upon earth—a saint indeed, and yet liable at any moment to fall into sin—would he refuse to hear him now that he had received him into his kingdom, and so rendered him for ever incapable of offending? I hoped not, I felt not; and in this certainty I went on my way rejoicing, feeling that it was well for this sinful world that it had yet one more advocate at the throne of its future Judge, and well especially for France that, in this our nineteenth century, she had given a saint to God who would have been the glory of the first. For truly the arm of the Lord is not shortened. What he has done before, he can do again; and, therefore, we need not wonder if the miracles of the Apostles are still renewed at the tomb of this simple and unlettered, priest, who taught their doctrines for forty years in the unknown and far-off village of which Providence had made him pastor.
From Once A Week.
THE THREE WISHES.
The Eastern origin of this tale seems evident; had it been originally composed in a Northern land, it is probable that the king would have been represented as dethroned by means of bribes obtained from his own treasury. In an Eastern country the story-teller who invented such a just termination of his narrative would, most likely, have experienced the fate intended for his hero, as a warning to others how they suggested such treasonable ideas. Herr Simrock, however, says it is a German tale; but it may have had its origin in the East for all that. Nothing is more difficult, indeed, than to trace a popular tale to its source. Cinderella, for example, belongs to nearly all nations; even among the Chinese, a people so different to all European nations, there is a popular story which reads almost exactly like it. Here is the tale of the Three Wishes.
There was once a wise emperor who made a law that to every stranger who came to his court a fried fish should be served. The servants were directed to take notice if, when the stranger had eaten the fish to the bone on one side, he turned it over and began on the other side. If he did, he was to be immediately seized, and on the third day thereafter he was to be put to death. But, by a great stretch of imperial clemency, the culprit was permitted to utter one wish each day, which the emperor pledged himself to grant, provided it was not to spare his life. Many had already perished in consequence of this edict, when, one day, a count and his young son presented themselves at court. The fish was served as usual, and when the [{32}] count had removed all the fish from one side, he turned it over, and was about to commence on the other, when he was suddenly seized and thrown into prison, and was told of his approaching doom. Sorrow-stricken, the count's young son besought the emperor to allow him to die in the room of his father; a favor which the monarch was pleased to accord him. The count was accordingly released from prison, and his son was thrown into his cell in his stead. As soon as this had been done, the young man said to his gaolers—"You know I have the right to make three demands before I die; go and tell the emperor to send me his daughter, and a priest to marry us." This first demand was not much to the emperor's taste, nevertheless he felt bound to keep his word, and he therefore complied with the request, to which the princess had no kind of objection. This occurred in the times when kings kept their treasures in a cave, or in a tower set apart for the purpose, like the Emperor of Morocco in these days; and on the second day of his imprisonment the young man demanded the king's treasures. If his first demand was a bold one, the second was not less so; still, an emperor's word is sacred, and having made the promise, he was forced to keep it; and the treasures of gold and silver and jewels were placed at the prisoner's disposal. On getting possession of them, he distributed them profusely among the courtiers, and soon he had made a host of friends by his liberality.
The emperor began now to feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Unable to sleep, he rose early on the third morning and went, with fear in his heart, to the prison to hear what the third wish was to be.
"Now," said he to his prisoner, "tell me what your third demand is, that it may be granted at once, and you may be hung out of hand, for I am tired of your demands."
"Sire," answered his prisoner, "I have but one more favor to request of your majesty, which, when you have granted, I shall die content. It is merely that you will cause the eyes of those who saw my father turn the fish over to be put out."
"Very good," replied the emperor, "your demand is but natural, and springs from a good heart. Let the chamberlain be seized," he continued, turning to his guards.
"I, sire!" cried the chamberlain; "I did not see anything—it was the steward."
"Let the steward be seized, then," said the king.
But the steward protested with tears in his eyes that he had not witnessed anything of what had been reported, and said it was the butler. The butler declared that he had seen nothing of the matter, and that it must have been one of the valets. But they protested that they were utterly ignorant of what had been charged against the count; in short, it turned out that nobody could be found who had seen the count commit the offence, upon which the princess said:
"I appeal to you, my father, as to another Solomon. If nobody saw the offence committed, the count cannot be guilty, and my husband is innocent."
The emperor frowned, and forthwith the courtiers began to murmur; then he smiled, and immediately their visages became radiant.
"Let it be so," said his majesty; "let him live, though I have put many a man to death for a lighter offence than his. But if he is not hung, he is married. Justice has been done."
From The Month.
EX HUMO.
BY BARRY CORNWALL.
Should you dream ever of the days departed—
Of youth and morning, no more to return—
Forget not me, so fond and passionate-hearted;
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.
There, where the fretful lake in stormy weather
Comes circling round the reddening churchyard pines,
Rest, and call back the hours we lost together,
Talking of hope, and soaring
Beyond poor earth's confines.
If, for those heavenly dreams too dimly sighted,
You became false—why, 'tis a story old:
I, overcome by pain, and unrequited,
Faded at last, and slumber
Under the autumn mould.
Farewell, farewell! No longer plighted lovers,
Doomed for a day to sigh for sweet return:
One lives, indeed; one heart the green earth covers—
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.
From The Dublin Review.
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA.
S. Clementis Alexandrini Opera Omnia
. Lutetiae. 1629.
Geschichte der Christlicher Philosophie, von
Dr. Heinrich Ritter. Hamburg: Perthes. 1841.
If any country under the sun bears the spell of fascination in its very name, that country is Egypt. The land of the Nile and the pyramids, of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies—the land where art and science had mysterious beginnings before the dawn of history, where powerful dynasties held sway for long generations over the fertile river-valley, and built for themselves mighty cities—Thebes, the hundred-gated, Memphis, with its palaces, Heliopolis, with its temples— and left memorials of themselves that are attracting men at this very day to Luxor and Carnak, to the avenue of sphynxes and the pyramids— Egypt, where learning
Uttered its oracles sublime
Before the Olympiads, in the dew
And dusk of early time—
the land where,
Northward from its Nubian springs,
The Nile, for ever new and old,
Among the living and the dead
Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled—
Egypt seems destined to be associated with all the signal events of every age of the world. Israel's going into and going out of Egypt is one of the epic pages of Holy Scripture; Sesostris, King of Egypt, left his name written over half of Asia; Alexander, the greatest of the Greeks, laid in Egypt the foundation of a new empire; Cleopatra, the captive and the captor of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, killed herself as the old land passed away for ever from the race of Ptolemy; Clement and Origen, Porphyry and Plotinus, have left Egypt the classic land of the Church's battle against the purest form of heathen philosophy; St. Louis of France has made Egypt the scene of a glorious drama of heroism and devotion; the pyramids have lent their name to swell the list of Napoleon's triumphs; and the Nile is linked for ever with the deathless fame of Nelson.
In the last decade of the second century, about the time when the pagan virtues of Marcus Aurelius had left the Roman empire to the worse than pagan vices of his son Commodus, Egypt, to the learned and wealthy, meant Alexandria. What Tyre had been in the time of Solomon, what Sidon was in the days of which Homer wrote, that was Alexandria from the reign of Ptolemy Soter to the days of Mahomet. In external aspect it was in every way worthy to bear the name of him who drew its plans with his own hands. Its magnificent double harbor, of which the Great Port had a quay-side six miles in length, was the common rendezvous for merchant ships from every part of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and its communications with the Red Sea and the Nile brought to the warehouses that overlooked its quay the riches of Arabia and India, and the corn and flax of the country of which it was the capital. The modern traveller, who finds Alexandria a prosperous commercial town, with an appearance half European, half Turkish, learns with wonder that its 60,000 inhabitants find room on what was little more than the mole that divided the Great Port from the Eunostos. But it should be borne in mind that old Alexandria numbered 300,000 free citizens. The mosques, the warehouses, and the private dwellings of the present town are built of the fragments of the grand city of Alexander. The great conqueror designed to make Alexandria the capital of the world. He chose a situation the advantages of which a glance at the map will show; and if any other proof were needed, it may be found in the fact that, since 1801, the population of the modern town has increased at the rate of one thousand a year. He planned his city on such vast proportions as might be looked for from the conqueror of Darius. Parallel streets crossed other streets, and divided the city into square blocks. Right through its whole length, from East to West—that is, parallel with the sea-front—one magnificent street, two hundred feet wide and four miles in length, ran from the Canopic gate to the Necropolis. A similar street, shorter, but of equal breadth, crossed this at right angles, and came out upon the great quay directly opposite the mole that joined the city with the island of Pharos. This was the famous Heptastadion, or Street of the Seven Stadia, and at its South end was the Sun-gate; at its North, where it opened on the harbor, the gate of the Moon. To the right, as you passed through the Moon-gate on to the broad quay, was the exchange, where merchants from all lands met each other, in sight of the white Pharos and the crowded shipping of the Great Port. A little back from the gate, in the Heptastadion, was the Caesareum, or temple of the deified Caesars, afterward a Christian church. Near it was the Museum, the university of Alexandria. Long marble colonnades connected the [{35}] university with the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. On the opposite side of the great street was the Serapeion, the magnificent temple of Serapis, with its four hundred columns, of which Pompey's Pillar is, perhaps, all that is left. And then there was the mausoleum of Alexander, there were the courts of justice, the theatres, the baths, the temples, the lines of shops and houses—all on a scale of grandeur and completeness which has never been surpassed by any city of the world. Such a city necessarily attracted men. Alexandria was fitly called the "many-peopled," whether the epithet referred to the actual number of citizens or to the varieties of tongue, complexion, and costume that thronged its streets. The Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Jews, each had their separate quarter; but there were constant streams of foreigners from the remote India, from the lands beyond the black rocks that bound the Nile-valley, and from the Ethiopic races to which St. Matthew preached, where the Red Sea becomes the Indian Ocean. At the time we speak of, these discordant elements were held in subjection by the Roman conquerors, whose legionaries trod the streets of the voluptuous city with stern and resolute step, and were not without occasion, oftentimes, for a display of all the sternness and resolution which their bearing augured.
Alexandria, however, in addition to the busy life of commerce and pleasure that went on among Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Africans, was the home of another kind of life, still more interesting to us. Ptolemy Soter, who carried out Alexander's plans, was a man of no common foresight and strength of character. He was not content with building a city. He performed, in addition, two exploits, either of which, from modern experience, we should be inclined to consider a title to immortality. He invented a new god, and established a university. The god was Serapis, whom he imported from Pergamus, and who soon became popular. The university was the Museum, in which lived and taught Demetrius of Phalerus, Euclid, Stilpo of Megara, Philetas of Cos, Apelles the painter, Callimachus, Theocritus, Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, and a host of others in philosophy, poetry, geometry, astronomy, and the arts. Here, under successive Ptolemies, professors lectured in splendid halls, amid honored affluence. All that we have of the Greek classics we owe to the learned men of the Museum. Poetry bloomed sweetly and luxuriantly in the gardens of the Ptolemies; though, it must be confessed, not vigorously, not as on Ionic coast-lands, nor as in the earnest life of Athenian freedom—save when some Theocritus appeared, with his broad Doric, fresh from the sheep-covered downs of Sicily. The name of Euclid suggests that geometry was cared for at the Museum; Eratosthenes, with his voluminous writings, all of which have perished, and his one or two discoveries, which will never die, may stand for the type of geography, the science for which he lived; and Hipparchus, astronomer and inventor of trigonometry, may remind us how they taught at the Museum that the earth was the centre of the universe, and yet, notwithstanding, could foretell an eclipse almost as well as the astronomer royal. In philosophy, the university of Alexandria has played a peculiar part. As long as the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt, the Museum could boast of no philosophy save commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, consisting, in great measure, of subtle obscurities to which the darkest quiddities of the deepest scholastic would appear to have been light reading. But when the Roman came in, there sprang up a school of thought that has done more than any other thing to hand down the fame of Ptolemy's university to succeeding ages. Alexandria was the birthplace of Neo-Platonism, and, whatever we may think of the philosophy itself, we must allow it has bestowed fame on its alma [{36}] mater. At the dawn of the Christian era, Philon the Jew was already ransacking the great library to collect matter that should enable him to prove a common origin for the books of Plato and of Moses. Two hundred years afterward—that is, just at the time of which we speak— Plotinus was listening to Ammonius Saccas in the lecture-hall of the Museum, and thinking out the system of emanations, abysms, and depths of which he is the first and most famous expounder. Porphyry, the biographer and enthusiastic follower of Plotinus, was probably never at Alexandria in person; but his voluminous writings did much to make the Neo-Platonist system known to Athens and to the cities of Italy. In his youth he had listened to the lectures of Origen, and thus was in possession of the traditions both of the Christian and the heathen philosophy of Alexandria. But his Christian studies did not prevent him from being the author of that famous book, "Against the Christians," which drew upon him the denunciations of thirty-five Christian apologists, including such champions as St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The Neo-Platonist school culminated and expired in Proclus, the young prodigy of Alexandria, the ascetic teacher of Athens, the "inspired dogmatizer," the "heir of Plato." Proclus died in 485, and his chair at Athens was filled by his foolish biographer Marinus, after which Neo-Platonism never lifted up its head.
Between the time when Philon astonished the orthodox money-getting Hebrews of the Jews' quarter by his daring adoption of Plato's Logos, and the day when poor old Proclus—his once handsome and strong frame wasted by fasting and Pythagorean austerities—died, a drivelling old man, in sight of the groves of the Academe and the tomb of Plato, not far from whom he himself was to lie, many a busy generation had trodden the halls of the Museum of Alexandria. All that time the strife of words had never ceased, in the lecture-hall, in the gardens of the departed Ptolemies, round the banquet-table where the professors were feasted at the state's expense. All that time the fame of Alexandria had gathered to her Museum the young generations that succeeded each other in the patrician homes and wealthy burghs of Syria, Greece, and Italy. They came in crowds, with their fathers' money in their purses, to be made learned by those of whose exploits report had told so much. Some came with an earnest purpose. To the young medical student, the Alexandrian school of anatomy and the Alexandrian diploma (in whatever shape it was given)—not to mention the opportunity of perusing the works of the immortal Hippocrates in forty substantial rolls of papyrus—were worth all the expense of a journey from Rome or Edessa. To the lawyer, the splendid collections of laws, from those of the Pentateuch to those of Zamolxis the Scythian, were treasures only to be found in the library where the zeal of Demetrius Phalerius and the munificence of Ptolemy Philadelphus had placed them. But the vast majority of the youth who flocked to the Museum came with no other purpose than the very general one of finishing their education and fitting themselves for the world. With these, the agreeable arts of poetry and polite literature were in far greater request than law, medicine, astronomy, or geography. If they could get a sight of the popular poet of the hour in his morning meditation under the plane-trees of the gardens, or could crush into a place in the theatre when he recited his new "Ode to the Empress's Hair;" or if they attended the lecture of the most fashionable exponent of the myths of the Iliad, and clapped him whenever he introduced an allusion to the divine Plato, it was considered a very fair morning's work, and might be fitly rewarded by a boating party to Canopus in the afternoon, or a revel far into the night in any of those thousand palaces of vice [{37}] with which luxurious Alexandria was so well provided. And yet there is no doubt that the young men carried away from their university a certain education and a certain refinement—an education which, though it taught them to relish the pleasures of intellect, in no wise disposed them to forego the enjoyments of sense; and a refinement which, while imparting a graceful polish to the mind, was quite compatible with the deepest moral depravity. Pagans as they were, they were the fairest portion of the whole world, for intellect, for manliness, for generosity, for wit, for beauty and strength of mind and body—natural gifts that, like the sun and the rain, are bestowed upon just and unjust. Their own intercourse with each other taught them far more than the speculations of any of the myth-hunting professors of the Museum. They crowded in to hear them, they cheered them, they would dispute and even fight for a favorite theory that no one understood, with the doubtful exception of its inventor. But it was not to be supposed that they really cared for abysms or mystical mathematics, or that they were not a great deal more zealous for suppers, and drinking bouts, and boating parties. These latter employments, indeed, may be said to have formed their real education. Greek intellect, Greek taste, wit, and beauty, in the sunniest hour of its bloom, mingled with its like in the grandest city that, perhaps, the earth has ever seen. The very harbors, and temples, and palaces were an education. The first rounding of the Pharos—when the six-mile semicircle of granite quay and marble emporia burst on the view, with the Egyptian sun flashing from white wall and blue sea, and glancing and sparkling amidst the dense picturesque multitude that roared and surged on the esplanade—disclosed a sight to make the soul grow larger. The wonderful city itself was a teaching: the assemblage of all that was best and rarest in old Egyptian art, and all that was freshest and most lovely in the art of Greece, left no corner of a street without its lesson to the eye. Indoors, there was the Museum, with its miles of corridors and galleries, filled with paintings and sculptures; outside, the Serapeion, the Caesareum, the exchange, the palace, the university itself, each a more effective instructor than a year's course in the schools. And after all this came the library, with its 700,000 volumes!
In the year of our Lord 181, ships filled the Great Port, merchants congregated in the exchange, sailors and porters thronged the quays; crowds of rich and poor, high and low, flocked through the streets; youths poured in to listen to Ammonius Saccas, and poured out again to riot and sin; philosophers talked, Jews made money, fashionable men took their pleasure, slaves toiled, citizens bought and sold and made marriages; all the forms of busy life that had their existence within the circuit of the many-peopled city were noisily working themselves out. In the same year, Pantaenus became the head of the catechetical school of the patriarchal Church of Alexandria.
It was the time when those who had lived and walked with the Apostles had passed away, and when the third generation of the Church's rulers was already growing old. St. Irenaeus was near his glorious end; St. Eleutherius, of memory dear to Britain, had just closed his pontificate by martyrdom, and St. Victor sat in his place. The echoes of the voice of Peter had hardly died out in Rome and Antioch; the traditions of Paul's bodily presence were yet living in Asia, in Greece, and the Islands; and the sweet odor of John's life still hung about the places where his sojourning had been: many a church of Greece and Egypt and of the far East had the sepulchre of its founder, an Apostle or an apostolic man, round which to pray. It was the age of the persecutions, and the age of the apologies. In every [{38}] city that was coming about which from the first had been inevitable. The Church was laying hold of human learning, and setting it to do her own work. In fixing upon Alexandria as the spot where, at this period, the contest between Christian science and Gentile learning, Gentile ignorance and Gentile brute force, was most interesting and most developed, we must pass by many other Churches, not in forgetfulness, though in silence. We must pass by Rome, the capital of the world, not because there were not learned men there whom Jesus Christ had raised up to battle with heathen philosophy; for it was but a few years since Justin Martyr had shed his blood for the faith, and Apollonius from his place in the senate had spoken his "apology" for his fellow Christians. But the enemies which the Gospel had to meet at Rome were not so much the learning and science of the heathen as his evil passions and vicious life; and the sword of persecution, at Rome hardly ever sheathed, kept down all attempts at regularity or organization in public teaching. We must pass by Athens, still the intellectual capital of the world, not because there were not at Athens also worthy doctors of the wisdom of the cross—witness, to the contrary, Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher, who presented his apology to Marcus Aurelius. But Athens, though at the end of the second century and long afterward she was the mother of orators, poets, and philosophers, seems to have been too thoroughly steeped in the sensuous idolatry of Greece to have harbored a school of Christianity by the side of the Porch and the Lyceum. If the same was true of Athens then as a century afterward, her smooth-tongued, "babbling" sophists, and her pagan charms, must have had to answer for the soul of many a poor Christian youth that went to seek learning and found perdition. We pass by Carthage, in spite of Tertullian's great name; Antioch, notwithstanding Theophilus, whose labors against the heathen still bore fruit; Sardis, in spite of Melito, then just dead, but living still in men's mouths by the fame of his learning, eloquence, and miracles; and Hierapolis, in spite of Apollinaris, who, like so many others, approached the emperor himself with an apology. All over the Church there were men raised up by God, and fitted with learning to confront learning, patience to instruct ignorance, and unflinching fortitude to endure persecution—men in every way worthy to be the instruments of that great change which was being wrought out through the wide world of the Roman empire.
But at Alexandria, the school of Christianity existed under interesting and peculiar conditions. St. Mark had landed on the granite quay of the Great Port with Peter's commission; he had been martyred, and his successors had been martyred after him; and for a long time Christianity here, as everywhere else, had been contemptuously ignored. It spread, however, as we know. In time, more than one student, before he attended his lecture in the splendid halls of the Museum, had given ear to a far different lesson in a different school. The Christian catechetical school of Alexandria is said to have been founded by St. Mark himself. If so, it is only what we might naturally expect; for wherever heathens were being converted, there a school of teachers had to be provided for their instruction; and we read of similar institutions at Jerusalem, at Antioch, and at Rome. But the catechetical school of Alexandria soon assumed an importance that no other school of those times ever attained. Whether it was that the influence of the university gave an impetus to regular and methodical teaching, or that the converts in Alexandria were in great measure from a cultivated and intellectual class, it appears to have been found necessary from the earliest times to have an efficient school, with a man of vigor and intellect at its head, capable of maintaining his position even when compared [{39}] with the professors of the university. The first of the heads or doctors of the school of whom history has left any account, is Pantaenus. Pantaenus is not so well known as his place in Church history and his influence on his age would seem to warrant. He was appointed to his important post at a time when Christians all over the world must have been rejoicing. The fourth persecution was just dying out. For twenty years, with the exception of the short interval immediately after the miracle of the Thundering Legion, had Marcus Aurelius, imperial philosopher of the Stoic sort, continued to command or connive at the butchery of his Christian subjects. What were the motives that led this paragon of virtuous pagans to lower himself to the commonplace practices of racking, scourging, and burning, is a question that depends for its answer upon who the answerer is. Philosophers of a certain class, from Gibbon to Mr. Mill, are disposed to take a lenient, if not a laudatory, estimate of his conduct in this matter, and think that the emperor could not have acted otherwise consistently with his principles and convictions, as handed down to us in his "Meditations." Doubtless he had strong convictions on the subject of Christianity, though it might be questioned whether he came honestly by them. But his convictions, whatever they were, would probably have ended in the harmless shape of philosophic contempt, had it not been for the men by whom he was surrounded. They were Stoics, of course, like their master, but their stoicism was far from confining itself to convictions and meditations. They were practical Stoics, of the severest type which that old-world Puritanism admitted. As good Stoics, they were of all philosophers the most conceited, and took it especially ill that any sect should presume to rival them in their private virtues of obstinacy and endurance. It is extremely probable that the fourth persecution, both in its commencement and its revival, was owing to the good offices of Marcus Aurelius's solemn-faced favorites. But, whatever be the blame that attaches to him, he has answered for it at the same dread tribunal at which he has answered for the deification of Faustina and the education of Commodus.
However, about the year 180, persecution ceased at Alexandria, and the Christians held up their heads and revived again, after the bitter winter through which they had just passed. Their first thoughts and efforts appear to have been directed to their school. The name of Pantaenus was already celebrated. He was a convert from paganism, born probably in Sicily, but certainly brought up in Alexandria. Curiously enough, he had been a zealous Stoic, and remained so, in the Christian sense, after his conversion. There is no doubt that he was well known among the Gentile philosophers of Alexandria. Perhaps he had lectured in the Museum and dined in the Hall. Probably he had spent many a day buried in the recesses of the great libraries, and could give a good account of not a few of their thousands of volumes. He must have known Justin Martyr—perhaps had something to say to the conversion of that brilliant genius, not as a teacher, but as a friend and fellow-student. He may have come across Galen, when that lively medical man was pursuing his researches on the immortal Hippocrates, or entertaining a select circle, in the calm of the evening, under one of the porticos of the Heptastadion. No sooner was he placed at the head of the Christian school than he inaugurated a great change, or rather a great development. Formerly the instruction had been intended solely for converts, that is, catechumens, and the matter of the teaching had corresponded with this object. Pantaenus changed all this. The cessation of the persecution had, perhaps, encouraged bolder measures; men would think there was no prospect of another, as men generally think when a long and difficult trial is over; so the Christian schools were to be opened [{40}] to all the world. If Aristotle and Plato, Epicurus and Zeno, had their lecturers, should not Jesus Christ have schools and teachers too? And what matter if the Christian doctrine were somewhat novel and hard—was not Ammonius the Porter, at that very time, turning the heads of half the students in the city, and filling his lecture-room to suffocation, by expounding transcendental theories about Plato's Logos, and actually teaching the doctrine of a Trinity? Shame upon the Christian name, then, if they who bear it do not open their doors, now that danger is past, and break the true bread to the hungry souls that eagerly snatch at the stones and dry sticks that others give! So thought Pantaenus. Of his teachings and writings hardly a trace or a record has reached us. We know that he wrote valued commentaries on Holy Scripture, but no fragment of them remains. His teaching, however, as might have been expected, was chiefly oral. He met the philosophers of Alexandria on their own ground. He showed that the fame of learning, the earnestness of character, the vivid personal influence that were so powerful in the cause of heathen philosophy, could be as serviceable to the philosophy of Christ. The plan was novel in the Christian world—at least, in its systematic thoroughness. That Pantaenus had great influence and many worthy disciples is evident from the fact that St. Clement of Alexandria, his successor, was formed in his school, and that St. Alexander of Jerusalem, the celebrated founder of the library which Eusebius consulted at Jerusalem, writing half a century afterward to Alexandria, speaks with nothing less than enthusiasm of the "happy memory" of his old master. If we could pierce the secrets of those long-past times, what a stirring scene of reverend wisdom and youthful enthusiasm would the forgotten school of the Sicilian convert unfold to our sight! Doubtless, from amidst the confused jargon of all manner of philosophies, the voice of the Christian teacher arose with a clear and distinct utterance; and the fame of Pantaenus was carried to far countries by many a noble Roman and many an accomplished Greek, zealous, like all true academic sons, for the glory of their favorite master.
After ten years of such work as this, Pantaenus vacated his chair, and went forth as a missionary bishop to convert the Indians. Before passing on to his successor, a few words on this Indian mission, apparently so inopportune for such a man at such a time, will be interesting, and not unconnected with the history of the Christian schools.
In the "many-peopled" city there were men from all lands and of all shades of complexion. It was nothing strange, then, that an embassy of swarthy Indians should have one day waited on the patriarch and begged for an apostle to take home with them to their countrymen. No wonder, either, that they specified the celebrated master of the catechisms as their dignissimus. The only wonder is that he was allowed to go. Yet he went; he set out with them, sailed to Canopus, the Alexandrian Richmond, where the canal joined the Nile; sailed up the ancient stream to Koptos, where the overland route began; joined the caravan that travelled thence, from well to well, to Berenice, Philadelphus's harbor on the Red Sea; embarked, and, after sailing before the monsoon for seventy days, arrived at the first Indian port, probably that which is now Mangalore, in the presidency of Bombay. This, in all likelihood, was the route and the destination of Pantaenus. Now those among whom his missionary labors appear to have lain were Brahmins, and Brahmins of great learning and extraordinary strictness of life. Moreover, there appears to be no reason to doubt that the Church founded by St. Thomas still existed, and even flourished, in these very parts, though its apostolic founder had been martyred a hundred years before. It was not so unreasonable, then, that [{41}] a bishop like Pantaenus should have been selected for such a Church and such a people. Let the reader turn to the story of Robert de' Nobili, and of John de Britto, whose field of labor extended to within a hundred miles of master in human learning when the the very spot where Pantaenus probably landed. St. Francis Xavier had already found Christians in that region who bore distinct traces of a former connection with Alexandria, in the very points in which they deviated from orthodoxy. De' Nobili's transformation of himself into a Brahmin of the strictest and most learned caste is well known. He dressed and lived as a Brahmin, roused the curiosity of his adopted brethren, opened school, and taught philosophy, inculcating such practical conclusions as it is unnecessary to specify. De Britto did the very same things. If any one will compare the Brahmins of De Britto and De' Nobili with those earlier Brahmins of Pantaenus, as described, for instance, by Cave from Palladius, he will not fail to be struck with the similarity of accounts; and if we might be permitted to fill up the picture upon these conjectural hints, we should say that it seems to us very likely that Pantaenus, during the years that he was lost to Alexandria, was expounding and enforcing, in the flowing cotton robes of a venerable Saniastes, the same deep philosophy to Indian audiences as he had taught to admiring Greeks in the modest pallium of a Stoic. Recent missionary experience has uniformly gone to prove that deep learning and asceticism are, humanly speaking, absolutely necessary in order to attempt the conversion of Brahmins with any prospect of success: and the mission of Pantaenus seems at once to furnish an illustration of this fact, and to afford an interesting glimpse of "Christian Missions" in the second century. But we must return to Alexandria.
The name that succeeds Pantaenus on the rolls of the School of the Catechisms is Titus Flavius Clemens, immortalized in history as Clement of Alexandria. He had sat under Pantaemus, but he was no ordinary scholar. Like his instructor, he was a convert from paganism. He was already master in human learning when the grace came. He had sought far and wide for the truth, and had found it in the Catholic Church, and into the lap of his new mother he had poured all the treasures of Egyptian wisdom which he had gathered in his quest. Athens, Southern Italy, Assyria, and Palestine had each been visited by the eager searcher; and, last of all, Egypt, and Alexandria, and Pantaenus had been the term of his travels, and had given to his lofty soul the "admirable light" of Jesus Christ. When Pantaenus went out as a missioner to India, Clement, who had already assisted his beloved master in the work of the schools, succeeded him as their director and head. It was to be Clement's task to carry on and to develop the work that Pantaenus had inaugurated—to make Christianity not only understood by the catechumens and loved by the faithful, but recognized and respected by the pagan philosophers. Unless we can clearly see the necessity, or, at least, the reality of the philosophical side of his character, and the influences that were at work to make him hold fast to Aristotle and Plato, even after he had got far beyond them, we shall infallibly set him down, like his modern biographers, as a half-converted heathen, with the shell of Platonism still adhering to him.
It cannot be doubted that in a society like that of Alexandria in its palmy days there were many earnest seekers of the truth, even as Clement himself had sought it. One might even lay it down as a normal fact, that it was the character of an Alexandrian, as distinguished from an Athenian, to speculate for the sake of practising, and not to spend his time in "either telling or hearing some new thing." If an Alexandrian was a Stoic, never was Stoic more demure or more intent on warring against his body, after Stoic [{42}] fashion; if a geometrican, no disciple of Bacon was ever more assiduous in experimentalizing, measuring, comparing, and deducing laws; if a Platonist, then geometry, ethics, poetry, and everything else, were enthusiastically pressed into the one great occupation of life—the realizing the ideal and the getting face to face with the unseen. That all this earnestness did not uniformly result in success was only too true. Much speculation, great earnestness, and no grand objective truth at the end of it—this was often the lot of the philosophic inquirer of Alexandria. The consequence was that not unfrequently, disgusted by failure, he ended by rushing headlong into the most vicious excesses, or, becoming a victim to despair, perished by his own hand. So familiar, indeed, had this resource of disappointment become to the philosophic mind, that Hegesias, a professor in the Museum, a little before the Christian era, wrote a book counselling self-murder; and so many people actually followed his advice as to oblige the reigning Ptolemy to turn Grand Inquisitor even in free-thinking Egypt, and forbid the circulation of the book. Yet all this, while it revealed a depth of moral wretchedness which it is frightful to contemplate, showed also a certain desperate earnestness; and doubtless there were, even among those who took refuge in one or other of these dreadful alternatives, men who, in their beginnings, had genuine aspirations after truth, mingled with the pride of knowledge and a mere intellectual curiosity. Doubtless, too, there was many a sincere and guileless soul among the philosophic herd, to whom, humanly speaking, nothing more was wanting than the preaching of the faith. Their eyes were open, as far as they could be without the light of revelation: let the light shine, and, by the help of divine grace, they would admit its beams into their souls.
There are many such, in every form of error. In Clement's days, especially, there were many whom Neo-Platonism, the Puseyism of paganism, cast up from the ocean of unclean error upon the shores of the Church. Take the case of Justin Martyr: he was a young Oriental of noble birth and considerable wealth. In the early part of the second century, we find him trying first one school of philosophers and then another, and abandoning each in disgust. The Stoics would talk to him of nothing but virtues and vices, of regulating the diet and curbing the passions, and keeping the intellect as quiet as possible—a convenient way, as experience taught them, of avoiding trouble; whereas Justin wanted to hear something of the Absolute Being, and of that Being's dealings with his own soul—a kind of inquiry which the Stoics considered altogether useless and ridiculous, if not reprehensible. Leaving the Stoics, he devoted himself heart and soul to a sharp Peripatetic, but quarrelled with him shortly and left him in disgust; the cause of disagreement being, apparently, a practical theory entertained by his preceptor on the subject of fees. He next took to the disciples of Pythagoras. But with these he succeeded no better than with the others; for the Pythagoreans reminded him that no one ignorant of mathematics could be admitted into their select society. Mathematics, in a Pythagorean point of view, included geometry, astronomy, and music—all those sciences, in fact, in which there was any scope for those extraordinary freaks of numbers which delighted the followers of the old vegetarian. Justin, having no inclination to undergo a novitiate in mathematics, abandoned the Pythagoreans and went elsewhere. The Platonists were the next who attracted him. He found no lack of employment for the highest qualities of his really noble soul in the lofty visions of Plato and the sublimated theories of his disciples and commentators; though it appears a little singular that, with his propensities toward the ideal and abstract, he should have tried so many masters before he [{43}] sat down under Plato. However, be that as it may, Plato seems to have satisfied him for a while, and he began to think he was growing a very wise man, when these illusions were rudely dispelled. One day he had walked down to a lonely spot by the sea-shore, meditating, probably, some deep idea, and perhaps declaiming occasionally some passage of Plato's Olympian Greek. In his solitary walk he met an old man, and entered into conversation with him. The event of this conversation was that Justin went home with a wonderfully reduced estimate of his own wisdom, and a determination to get to know a few things about which Plato, on the old man's showing, had been woefully in the dark. Justin became a convert to Christianity. Now, Justin had been at Alexandria, and, whether the conversation he relates ever really took place, or is merely an oratorical fiction, the story is one that represents substantially what must have happened over and over again to those who thronged the university of Alexandria, wearing the black cloak of the philosopher.
Justin lived and was martyred some half a century before Clement sat in the chair of the catechisms. But it is quite plain that, in such a state of society, there would not be wanting many of his class and temperament who, in Clement's time, as well as fifty years before, were in search of the true philosophy. And we must not forget that in Alexandria there were actually thousands of well-born, intellectual young men from every part of the Roman empire. To the earnest among these Clement was, indeed, no ordinary master. In the first place, he was their equal by birth and education, with all the intellectual keenness of his native Athens, and all the ripeness and versatility of one who had "seen many cities of men and their manners." Next, he had himself been a Gentile, and had gone through all those phases of the soul that precede and accompany the process of conversion. If any one knew their difficulties and their sore places, it was he, the converted philosopher. If any one was capable of satisfying a generous mind as to which was the true philosophy, it was he who had travelled the world over in search of it. He could tell the swarthy Syrian that it was of no use to seek the classic regions of Ionia, for he had tried them, and the truth was not there; he could assure him it was waste of time to go to Athens, for the Porch and the Garden were babbling of vain questions—he had listened in them all. He could calm the ardor of the young Athenian, his countryman, eager to try the banks of the Orontes, and to interrogate the sages of Syria; for he could tell him beforehand what they would say. He could shake his head when the young Egyptian, fresh from the provincial luxury of Antinoë, mentioned Magna Graecia as a mysterious land where the secret of knowledge was perhaps in the hands of the descendants of the Pelasgi. He had tried Tarentum, he had tried Neapolis; they were worse than the Serapeion in unnameable licentiousness—less in earnest than the votaries that crowded the pleasure-barges of the Nile at a festival of the Moon. He had asked, he had tried, he had tasted. The truth, he could tell them, was at their doors. It was elsewhere, too. It was in Neapolis, in Antioch, in Athens, in Rome; but they would not find it taught in the chairs of the schools, nor discussed by noble frequenters of the baths and the theatres. He knew it, and he could tell it to them. And as he added many a tale of his wanderings and searchings—many an instance of genius falling short, of good-will laboring in the dark, of earnestness painfully at fault—many of those who heard him would yield themselves up to the vigorous thinker whose brow showed both the capacity and the unwearied activity of the soul within. He was the very man to be made a hero of. Whatever there was in the circle of Gentile philosophy he knew. St. Jerome calls [{44}] him the "most learned of the writers of the Church," and St. Jerome must have spoken with the sons of those who had heard him lecture—noble Christian patricians, perchance, whose fathers had often told them how, in fervent boyhood, they had been spell-bound by his words in the Christian school of Alexandria, or learned bishops of Palestine, who had heard of him from Origen at Caesarea or St. Alexander at Jerusalem. From the same St. Alexander, who had listened to Pantaenus by his side, we learn that he was as holy as he was learned; and Theodoret, whose school did not dispose him to admire what came from the catechetical doctors of Alexandria, is our authority for saying that his "eloquence was unsurpassed." In the fourth edition of Cave's "Apostolici," there is a portrait that we would fain vouch to be genuine. The massive, earnest face, of the Aristotelian type, the narrow, perpendicular Grecian brow, with its corrugations of thought and care, the venerable flowing beard, dignifying, but not concealing, the homely and fatherly mouth, seem to suggest a man who had made all science his own, yet who now valued a little one of Jesus Christ above all human wisdom and learning. But we have no record of those features that were once the cynosure of many eyes in the "many-peopled" city; we have no memorial of the figure that spoke the truths of the Gospel in the words of Plato. We know not how he looked, nor how he sat, when he began with his favorite master, and showed, with inexhaustible learning, where he had caught sight of the truth, and, again, where his mighty but finite intellect had failed for want of a more "admirable light;" nor how he kindled when he had led his hearers through the vestibule of the old philosophy, and stood ready to lift the curtain of that which was at once its consummation and its annihilation.
But the philosophers of Alexandria, so-called, were by no means, without exception, earnest, high-minded, and well-meaning. Leaving out of the question the mob of students who came ostensibly for wisdom, but got only a very doubtful substitute, and were quite content with it, we know that the Museum was the headquarters of an anti-Christian philosophy which, in Clement's time, was in the very spring of its vigorous development. Exactly contemporary with him was the celebrated Ammonius the Porter, the teacher of Plotinus, and therefore the parent of Neo-Platonism. Ammonius had a very great name and a very numerous school. That he was a Christian by birth, there is no doubt; and he was probably a Christian still when he landed at the Great Port and found employment as a ship-porter. History is divided as to his behavior after his wonderful elevation from the warehouses to the halls of the Museum. St. Jerome and Eusebius deny that he apostatized, while the very questionable authority of the unscrupulous Porphyry is the only testimony that can be adduced on the other side; but, even if he continued to be a Christian, his orthodoxy is rather damaged when we find him praised by such men as Plotinus, Longinus, and Hierocles. Some would cut the knot by asserting the existence of two Ammoniuses, one a pagan apostate, the other a Christian bishop—a solution equally contradicted by the witnesses on both sides. But, whatever Saccas was, there is no doubt as to what was the effect of his teaching on, at least, half of his hearers. If we might hazard a conjecture, we should say that he appears to have been a man of great cleverness, and even genius, but too much in love with his own brilliancy and his own speculations not to come across the ecclesiastical authority in a more or less direct way. He supplied many imposing premises which Origen, representing the sound half of his audience, used for Christian purposes, whilst Plotinus employed them for revivifying the dead body of paganism. The brilliant sack-bearer seems to have been, at the very least, a liberal [{45}] Christian, who was too gentlemanly to mention so very vulgar a thing as the Christian "superstition" in the classic gardens of the palace, or at the serene banquets of sages in the Symposium.
The question, then, is, How did Christianity, as a philosophy, stand in relation to the affluent professors of Ptolemy's university? That they had been forced to see there was such a thing as Christianity, before the time of which we speak (A.D. 200), it is impossible to doubt. It must have dawned upon the comprehension of the most imperturbable grammarian and the most materialist surgeon of the Museum that a new teaching of some kind was slowly but surely striking root in the many forms of life that surrounded them. Rumors must long before have been heard in the common hall that executions had taken place of several members of a new sect or society, said to be impious in its tenets and disloyal in its practice. No doubt the assembled sages had expended at the time much intricate quibble and pun, after heavy Alexandrian fashion, on the subject of those wretched men; more especially when it was put beyond doubt that no promises of reward or threats of punishment had availed to make them compromise their "opinions" in the slightest tittle. Then the matter would die out, to be revived several times in the same way; until at last some one would make inquiries, and would find that the new sect was not only spreading, but, though composed apparently of the poor and the humble, was clearly something very different from the fantastic religions or brutal no-religions of the Alexandrian mob. It would be gradually found out, moreover, that men of name and of parts were in its ranks; nay, some day of days, that learned company in the Hall would miss one of its own number, after the most reverend the curator had asked a blessing—if ever he did—and it would come out that Professor So-and-so, learned and austere as he was, had become a Christian! And some would merely wonder, but, that past, would ask their neighbor, in the equivalent Attic, if there were to be no more cakes and ale, because he had proved himself a fool; others would wonder, and feel disturbed, and think about asking a question or two, though not to the extent of abandoning their seats at that comfortable board.
The majority, doubtless, at Alexandria as elsewhere, set down Christianity as some new superstition, freshly imported from the home of all superstitions, the East. There were some who hated it, and pursued it with a vehemence of malignant lying that can suggest only one source of inspiration, that is to say, the father of all lies himself. Of this class were Crescens the Cynic, the prime favorite of Marcus Aurelius, and Celsus, called the Epicurean, but who, in his celebrated book, written at this very time, appears as veritable a Platonist as Plotinus himself. Then, again, there were others who found no difficulty in recognizing Christianity as a sister philosophy—who, in fact, rather welcomed it as affording fresh material for dialectics—good, easy men of routine, blind enough to the vital questions which the devil's advocates clearly saw to be at stake. Galen is pre-eminently a writer who has reflected the current gossip of the day. He was a hard student in his youth, and a learned and even high-minded man in his maturity, but he frequently shows himself in his writings as the "fashionable physician," with one or two of the weaknesses of that well-known character. He spent a long time at Alexandria, just before Clement became famous, studying under Heraclian, consulting the immortal Hippocrates, and profiting by the celebrated dissecting-rooms of the Museum, in which, unless they are belied, the interests of science were so paramount that they used to dissect—not live horses; but living slaves. He could not, therefore, fail to have known how Christianity was regarded at the Museum. Speaking of Christians, then, in his works, he of course retails a good deal of [{46}] nonsense about them, such as we can imagine him to have exchanged with the rich gluttons and swollen philosophers whom he had to attend professionally in Roman society; but when he speaks seriously, and of what he had himself observed, he says, frankly and honestly, that the Christians deserved very great praise for sobriety of life, and for their love of virtue, in which they equalled or surpassed the greatest philosophers of the age. So thought, in all probability, many of the learned men of Alexandria.
The Church, on her side, was not averse to appearing before the Gentiles in the garb of philosophy, and it was very natural that the Christian teachers should encourage this idea, with the aim and hope of gaining admittance for themselves and their good tidings into the very heart of pagan learning. And was not Christianity a philosophy? In the truest sense of the word—and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria—it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in the days of Clement. Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, the ultimate wisdom. What the Hebrew preacher meant when he said, "Wisdom is better than all the most precious things," the same was intended by the Alexandrian lecturer when he offered to show his hearers where wisdom was to be found. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at the same time the necessary ground of all-important practice. In our days the child learns at the altar-rails that its end is to love God, and serve him, and be happy with him; and after many years have passed, the child, now a man, studies and speculates on the reasons and the bearings of that short, momentous sentence. In the old Greek world the intellectual search came first, and the practical sentence was the wished-for result. A system of philosophy was, therefore, in Clement's time, tantamount to a religion. It was the case especially with the learned. Serapis and Isis were all very well for the "old women and the sailors," but the laureate and the astronomer royal of the Ptolemies, and the professors, many and diverse, of arts and ethics, in the Museum, scarcely took pains to conceal their utter contempt for the worship of the vulgar. Their idols were something more spiritual, their incense was of a more ethereal kind. Could they not dispute about the Absolute Being? and had they not glimpses of something indefinitely above and yet indefinably related to their own souls, in the Logos of the divine Plato? So the Stoic mortified his flesh for the sake of some ulterior perfectibility of which he could give no clear account to himself; the Epicurean contrived to take his fill of pleasure, on the maxim that enjoyment was the end of our being, "and tomorrow we die;" the Platonist speculated and pursued his "air-travelling and cloud-questioning," like Socrates in the basket, in a vain but tempting endeavor to see what God was to man and man to God; the Peripatetic, the Eclectic, and all the rest, disputed, scoffed, or dogmatized about many things, certainly, but, mainly and finally, on those questions that will never lie still:—Who are we? and, Who placed us here? Philosophy included religion, and therefore Christianity was a philosophy.
When Clement, then, told the philosophers of Alexandria that he could teach them the true philosophy, he was saying not only what was perfectly true, but what was perfectly understood by them. The catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the Museum. Clement himself had been an ardent philosopher, and he reverently loved his masters, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, whilst he had the feelings of a brother toward the philosophers of his own day. He became a Christian, and his dearest object was to win his brethren to a participation in his own good fortune. [{47}] He did not burn his philosophical books and anathematize his masters; like St. Paul, he availed himself of the good that was in them and commended it, and then proclaimed that he had the key of the treasure which they had labored to find and had not found. This explains how it is that, in Clement of Alexandria, the philosopher's mantle seems almost to hide the simple garb of the Christian. This also explains why he is called, and indeed calls himself, an Eclectic in his system; and this marks out the drift and the aim of the many allusions to philosophy that we find in his extant works, and in the traditions of his teaching that have come down to us. If Christianity was truly called a philosophy, what should we expect in its champion but that he should be a philosopher? Men in these days read the Stromata, and find that it is, on the outside, more like Plato than like Jesus Christ; and thus they make small account of it, because they cannot understand its style, or the reason for its adoption. The grounds of questions and the forms of thought have shifted since the days of the catechetical school. But Clement's fellow-citizens understood him. The thrifty young Byzantine, for instance, understood him, who had been half-inclined to join the Stoics, but had come, in his threadbare pallium, to hear the Christian teacher, and who was told that asceticism was very good and commendable, but that the end of it all was God and the love of God, and that this end could only be attained by a Christian. The languid but intellectual man of fashion understood him, who had grown sick of the jargon of his Platonist professors about the perfect man and the archetypal humanity, and who now felt his inmost nature stirred to its depths by the announcement and description of the Word made flesh. The learned stranger from Antioch or Athens, seeking for the truth, understood him, when he said that the Christian dogma alone could create and perfect the true Gnostic or Knower; he understood perfectly the importance of the object, provided the assertion were true, as it might turn out to be. Unless Clement had spoken of asceticism, of the perfect man, and of the true Gnostic, his teaching would not have come home to the self-denying student, to the thoughtful sage, to the brilliant youth, to all that was great and generous and amiable in the huge heathen society of the crowded city. As it was, he gained a hearing, and, having done so, he said to the Alexandrians, "Your masters in philosophy are great and noble: I honor them, I admire and accept them; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge. Come to us, then, and we will show what is wanting in them. Listen to these old Hebrew writers whom I will quote to you. You see that they treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them, whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and much more, is our inheritance. The truth, which you seek, we possess. 'What you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you.' God's Word has been made flesh—has lived on this earth, the model man, the absolute man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you." But here he stopped. The "discipline of the secret" allowed him to go no further in public. The listening Christians knew well what he meant; his pagan hearers only surmised that there was more behind. And was it not much that Christianity should thus measure strength and challenge a contest with the old Greek civilization on equal terms, and about those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which it especially prided itself?
But the contest, never a friendly one, save with the dullest and easiest of the pagan philosophers, very soon grew to be war to the knife. We have said that the quiet lovers of literature among the heathen men of science were perfectly ready to admit the Christian philosophy to a fair share [{48}] in the arena of disputation and discussion, looking upon it as being, at worst, only a foolish system of obtrusive novelties, which might safely be left to their own insignificancy. But, quite unexpectedly and startlingly for easy-going philosophers, Christianity was found, not merely to claim the possession of truth, but to claim it wholly and solely. And, what was still more intolerable, its doctors maintained that its adoption or rejection was no open speculative question, but a tremendous practical matter, involving nothing less than all morality here and all happiness hereafter; and that the unfortunate philosopher, who, in his lofty serenity, approved it as right, and yet followed the wrong, would have to undergo certain horrors after death, the bare suggestion of which seemed an outrage on the dignity of the philosophical character. This was quite enough for hatred; and the philosophers, as their eyes began to open, saw that Crescens and Celsus were right, and accorded their hatred most freely and heartily.
But Christianity did not stop here. With the old original schools and their offshoots it was a recognized principle that philosophy was only for philosophers; and this was especially true of Clement's most influential contemporaries, the Neo-Platonists. The vulgar had no part in it, in fact could not come within the sphere of its influence; how could they? How could the sailors, who, after a voyage, went to pay their vows in the temple of Neptune on the quay, or the porters who dragged the grain sacks and the hemp bundles from the tall warehouses to the holds of Syrian and Greek merchantmen, or the negro slaves who fanned the brows of the foreign prince, or the armorers of the Jews' quarter, or the dark-skinned, bright-eyed Egyptian women of the Rhacôtis suspected of all evil from thieving to sorcery, or, more than all, the drunken revellers and poor harlots who made night hideous when the Egyptian moon looked down on the palaces of the Brucheion—how could any of these find access to the sublime secrets of Plato or the profound commentaries of his disciples? Even if they had come in crowds to the lecture-halls—which no one wanted them to do, or supposed they would do—they could not have been admitted nor entertained; for even the honest occupations of life, the daily labors necessary in a city of 300,000 freemen, were incompatible with imbibing the divine spirit of philosophy. So the philosophers had nothing to say to all these. If they had been asked what would become of such poor workers and sinners, they would probably have avoided an answer as best they could. There were the temples and Serapis and Isis and the priests—they might go to them. It was certain that philosophy was not meant for the vulgar. In fact, philosophy would be unworthy of a habitation like the Museum—would deserve to have its pensions stopped, its common hall abolished, and its lecture-rooms shut up—if ever it should condescend to step into the streets and speak to the herd. It was, therefore, with a disgust unspeakable, and a swiftly-ripening hatred, that the philosophers saw Christianity openly proclaiming and practising the very opposite of all this. True, it had learned men and respected men in its ranks, but it loudly declared that its mission was to the lowly, and the mean, and the degraded, quite as much as to the noble, and the rich, and the virtuous. It maintained that the true divine philosophy, the source of joy for the present and hope for the future, was as much in the power of the despised bondsman, trembling under the lash, as of the prince-governor, or the Caesar himself, haughtily wielding the insignia of sovereignty. We know what its pretensions and tenets were, but it is difficult to realize how they must have clashed with the notions of intellectual paganism in the city of Plotinus—how the hands that would have been gladly held out in friendship, had it come in respectable [{49}] and conventional guise, were shut and clenched, when they saw in its train the rough mechanic, the poor maid-servant, the negro, and the harlot. There could be no compromise between two systems such as these. For a time it might have seemed as if they could decide their quarrel in the schools, but the old Serpent and his chief agents knew better: and so did Clement and the Christian doctors, at the very time that they were taking advantage of fair weather to occupy every really strong position which the enemy held. The struggle soon grew into the deadly hand-to-hand grapple that ended in leaving the corpse of paganism on the ground, dead but not buried, to be gradually trodden out of sight by a new order of things.
It must not, however, be supposed that the Christian school of Alexandria was wholly, or even chiefly, employed in controversy with the schools of the heathen. The first care of the Church was, as at all times, the household of the faith: a care, however, in the fulfilment of which there is less that strikes as novel or interesting at first sight than in that remarkable aggressive movement of which it has been our object to give some idea. But even in the Church's household working there is much that is both instructive and interesting, as we get a glimpse of it in Clement of Alexandria. The Church in Alexandria, as elsewhere, was made up of men from every lot and condition of life. There were officials, civil and military, merchants, shop-keepers, work-people—plain, hard-striving men, husbands, and fathers of families. In the wake of the upper thousands followed a long and wide train—the multitude who compose the middle classes of a great city; and it was from their ranks that the Church was mainly recruited. They might not feel much interest in the university, beyond the fact that its numerous and wealthy students were a welcome stimulus to trade; but still they had moral and intellectual natures. They must have craved for some kind of food for their minds and hearts, and cannot have been satisfied with the dry, unnourishing scraps that were flung to them by the supercilious philosophers. They must have felt no small content—those among them who had the grace to hearken to the teachings of Clement—when he told them that the philosophy he taught was as much for them as for their masters and their betters. They listened to him, weighed his words, and accepted them; and then a great question arose. It was a question that was being debated and settled at Antioch, at Rome, and at Athens, no less than at Alexandria; but at Alexandria it was Clement who answered it. "We believe your good tidings," they said; "but tell us, must we change our lives wholly and entirely? Is everything that we have been doing so far, and our fathers have been doing before us, miserably and radically wrong?" They had bought and sold; they had married and given in marriage; they had filled their warehouses and freighted their ships; they had planted and builded, and brought up their sons and daughters. They had loved money, and the praise of their fellow-men; they had their fashions and their customs, old and time-honored, and so interwoven with their very life as to be almost identified with it. Some of their notions and practices the bare announcement of the Gospel sufficiently condemned; and these must go at once. But where was the line to be drawn? Did the Gospel aim at regenerating the world by forbidding marriage and laying a ban on human labor; by making life intolerable with asceticism; by emptying the streets and the market-places, and driving men to Nitria and the frightful rocks of the Upper Nile? And what made the question doubly exciting was the two-fold fact, first, that in those very days men and women were continually fleeing from home and family, and hiding, in the desert; and secondly, that there were in that very city congregations of [{50}] men calling themselves Christians, who proclaimed that it was wrong to marry, and that flesh-meat and wine were sinful indulgences.
The answer that Clement gave to these questionings is found mainly in that work of his which is called Paedagogus, or "The Teacher." The answer needed was a sharp, a short, and a decisive one. It needed to be like a surgical operation—rapidly performed, completed, with nothing further to be done but to fasten the bandages, and leave the patient to the consequences, whatever they might be. Society had to be reset. We need not repeat for the thousandth time the fact of the unutterable corruptness and rottenness of the whole pagan world. It was not that there were wanting certain true ideas of duty toward the state, the family, the fellow-citizen: the evil lay far deeper. It was not good sense that was wanting; it was the sense of the supernatural. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was the formula that expressed the code of popular morality; and because men could not "eat and drink" comfortably and luxuriously without some sort of law, order, and mutual compact, it followed as a necessary consequence that there must be law, order, and compact. It was not, therefore, that Clement had merely to hold up the Gospel and show them its meaning here and its application there. He had to shift the very groundwork of morality, to take up the very foundations of the moral acts that go to make up life as viewed in the light of right and wrong. He had to substitute heaven for earth, hereafter for here, God for self. And he did so—in a fashion not unknown in the Catholic Church since, as indeed it had been not unknown to St. Paul long before. He simply held up to them the crucifix. Let any one turn to the commencement of the Paedagogus, and he will find a description of what a teacher ought to be. At the beginning of the second chapter he will read these words: "My children, our teacher is like the Father, whose Son he is; in whom there is no sin, great or small, nor any temptation to sin; God in the figure of a man, stainless, obedient to his Father's will; the Word, true God, who is in the Father, who is at the Father's right hand, true God in the form of a man; to whom we must strive with all our might to make ourselves like." It sounds like the commencement of a children's retreat in one of our modern cities to hear Clement proclaim so anxiously that the teacher and model of men is no other than Jesus, and that we must all become children, and go and listen to him and study him; yet it is a sentence that must have spoken to the very inmost hearts of all who had a thought or care for their souls in Alexandria; and one can perceive, in the terms used in the original Greek, a conscious adaptation of epithets to meet more than one Platonic difficulty. It was the reconciliation of the true with the beautiful. The Alexandrians, Greek and Egyptian, with their Greek longings for the beautiful, and their Egyptian tendings to the sensible, were not put off by Clement with a cold abstraction. A mathematical deity, formed out of lines, relations, and analogies, such as Neo-Platonism offered, was well enough for the lecture-room, but had small hold upon the heart. Christianity restored the thrilling sense of a personal God, which Neo-Platonism destroyed, but for which men still sighed, though they knew not what they were sighing for; and Christianity, by Clement's mouth, taught that the living and lovely life of Jesus was to be the end and the measure of the life of all. They were to follow him: "My angel shall walk before you," is Clement's own quotation. And having thus laid down the regenerating principle—God through Jesus Christ—he descends safely and fearlessly into details. Minutely and carefully he handles the problems of life, and sets them straight by the light of the life of Jesus.
These details and these directions, [{51}] as left to us by Clement in the Paedagogus, are only what we might anticipate from a Christian teacher to his flock; and yet they are very interesting, and disclose many facts that are full of suggestion to one who reads by the light of the Catholic faith. Who would not like to hear what Clement said to the Church of Alexandria about dress, beauty, feasting, drinking, furniture, conversation, money, theatres, sleep, labor, and housekeeping? We know well that there must have been ample scope for discourse on all these topics. The rich Alexandrians, like the rich Romans, and the rich Corinthians, and the rich everywhere, were fearfully addicted to luxury, and their poorer neighbors followed their example as well as they could. But there were circumstances peculiar to Alexandria that enabled it to outdo the rest of the world in this matter; putting Rome, of course, out of the question. It was the market for India; and seeing that almost everything in the way of apparel came from India, Alexandria had the pick of the best that the world could afford, and seems not to have been behindhand in taking advantage of its privilege. Nobody enjoyed more than the Alexandrian— whether he were a descendant of the Macedonian who came in with the Conqueror, or a parvenu of yesterday grown great by his wheat-ships or his silk-bales—to sweep the Heptastadion, or promenade the Great Quay, or lounge in the gardens of the Museum, in what ancient tailors and milliners would call a synthesis of garments, as ample, and stiff, and brilliant as Indian looms could make them. Then, again, Alexandria was a university town. Two hundred years of effeminate Ptolemies and four hundred of wealthy students had been more than enough to create a tradition of high, luxurious living. The conjunction of all that was to be got for money, with any amount of money to get it with, had made Alexandria a model city for carrying out the only maxim which the greater number even of the philosophers themselves really understood and practically followed: "Let us eat and drink!" Again, a navigable river, a rainless sky, and a climate perhaps the finest in the world, offered both inducements and facilities for parties of pleasure and conviviality in general. It is true the river was only a canal: one thing was wanting to the perfection of Alexandria as a site for an empire city, viz., the Nile; but that the canal was a moderate success in the eyes of the Alexandrians may be inferred from the fact that Canopus, where it finished its short course of thirteen or fourteen miles, and joined the Nile, was a perfect city of river-side hotels, to which the boats brought every day crowds of pleasure-seekers. Very gay were the silken and gilded boats, with their pleasant canopies and soothing music; and very gay and brilliant, but not very reputable, were the groups that filled them, with their crowns of flowers, their Grecian attitudinizing, and their ingenious arrangements of fan-working slaves. This was the population which it was Clement's work to convert to purity and moderation.
It is very common with Clement's modern critics, when making what our French allies would call "an appreciation" him, to set him down as a solemn trifler. They complain that they cannot get any "system of theology" out of his writings; indeed, they doubt whether he so much as had one. They find him use the term "faith" first in one sense and then in another, and they are especially offended by his minute instructions on certain matters pertaining to meat, drink, and dress. To any one who considers what Clement intended to do in his writings, and especially in the Paedagogus, there is no difficulty in seeing an answer to a difficulty like this. He did not mean to construct a "system of theology," and therefore it is no wonder if his critics cannot find one. He did not even mean to state the broad, general principles of the Gospel: his hearers knew these well enough. What he did mean to do was, [{52}] to apply these general rules and principles to a variety of cases occurring in everyday life. And yet, as a matter of fact, it is to be observed that he always does lay down broad principles before entering into details. In the matter of eating, for instance, regarding which he is very severe in his denunciations, and not without reason, he takes care to state distinctly the great Catholic canon of mortification: "Though all things were made for man, yet it is not good to use all, nor at all times." Again, in the midst of his contemptuous enumeration of ancient wines, he does not forget to say, "You are not robbed of your drink: it is given to you, and awaits your hand;" that which is blamed is excess. He sums up what he has been saying against the voluptuous entertainments then so universal by the following sentence—a novelty, surely, to both extremes of pagan society in Alexandria—"In one word, whatever is natural to man must not be taken from him; but, instead thereof, must be regulated according to fitting measure and time."
In deciding whether Clement was a "solemn trifler," or not, there is another consideration which must not be omitted, and that is his sense of the humorous. It may sound incongruous when speaking of a Father of the Church, and much more of a reputed mystical Father like Clement, but we think no one can deny that he often supplements a serious argument by a little stroke of pleasantry. As many of his sentences stand, a look or a smile would lighten them up and make them sparkle into humor. Paper and ink cannot carry the tone of the voice or the glance of the eye, and Clement's voice has been silent and his eye dimmed for many a century; but may we not imagine that at times something of archness in the teacher's manner would impart to his weighty words a touch of quaintness, and the habitually thoughtful eye twinkle with a gleam of pleasantry? He would be no true follower of Plato if it were not so. Who shall say he was not smiling when he gave out that formal list of wines, of eatables, and of scents most affected by the fashionables of those days? He concludes an invective against scandalous feats by condemning the universal crown of roses as a "nuisance:" it was damp, it was cold; it hindered one from using either his eyes or his ears properly. He advises his audience to avoid much curious carving and ornamenting of bed-posts; for creeping things, he says, have a habit of making themselves at home in the mouldings. He asks if one's hands cannot be as well washed in a clay basin as in a silver one. He wonders how one can dare to put a plain little loaf on a grand "wing-footed" table. He cannot see why a lamp of earthenware will not give as good a light as one of silver. He alludes with disgust to "hissing frying-pans," to "spoon and pestle," and even to the "packed stomachs" of their proprietors; to Sicilian lampreys, and Attican eels; shell-fish from Capo di Faro, and Ascrean beet from the foot of Helicon; mullet from the Gulf of Thermae, and pheasants from the Crimea. We hear him contemptuously repeat the phrases of connoisseurs about their wines, the startling variety of which we know from other sources besides his writings: he speaks of the "scented Thasian," the aromatic "Lesbian," the "sweet wine of Crete," the "pleasant Syracusan." The articles of plate which he enumerates to condemn would be more than sufficient to furnish out a modern wedding breakfast. To scents he gives no quarter. We have heard a distinguished professor of chemistry assert, in a lecture, that wherever there is scent on the surface there is sure to be dirt beneath; and, from the well-known fact that in Capua there was one whole street occupied by perfumers, he could draw no other inference than that Capua must have been "a very dirty city." It would appear that Clement of Alexandria was much of this opinion. He gives a picture of a pompous [{53}] personage in a procession, "going along marvellously scented, for the purpose of producing a sensation, and yet underneath as foul as he could be." He enumerates the absurd varieties of ointments in fashion, and orders them to be thrown away. He is indignant at the saffron-colored scented robe that the gentlemen wore. He will have no flowing or trailing vestments; no "Attic buskins," no "Persian sandals." He complains that the ladies go and spend the whole day at the perfumer's, the goldsmith's, and the milliner's, just as if he were speaking of "shopping" in the nineteenth century, instead of A.D. 200. He blames the men for frequenting the barbers' shops, the taverns, and the dicing-houses. It is amusing in these days to read of his denunciations of shaving. He has no patience with "hair-haters:" a man without the hair that God gave him is a "base sight." "God attached such importance to hair," he says, "that he makes a man come to hair and sense at the same time." But, in reality, this vehement attack on the "smooth men," as he calls them, points to one of the most flagrant of heathen immoralities, and reveals in the context a state of things to which we may not do more than allude. He condemns luxury in furniture, from "beds with silver feet, made of ivory and adorned with gold and tortoise-shell," down to "little table-daggers," that ancient ladies and gentlemen used indifferently to their food and to their slaves. All this is not very deep, but it is just what Clement wanted to say, and a great deal more useful in its place and connection than a "system of theology." We may add that it is a great deal more interesting to us, who know pretty well what Clement's "system of theology" was, but not so well what were the faults and failings of his Christian men and women in those far-off Alexandrian times.
There is another epithet bestowed upon Clement, more widely and with better authority than that of "trifler." He is called a mystic. He deals in allegorical interpretations of Holy Scripture, in fanciful analogies, and whimsical reasonings; he was carried away by the spirit of Neo-Platonism, and substituted a number of idle myths for the stern realities of the Gospel. It is not our business at present to show, by references, that this accusation is untrue; but we may admit at once that it is not unfounded, and we maintain that it points to an excellence, rather than a defect, in his teaching. From the remarks made just now, the reader will be prepared to expect that a teacher in Alexandria in Clement's days must have been a mystic. It was simply the fashion; and a fashion, in thought and speech, exacts a certain amount of compliance from those who think or speak for the good of its followers. Neo-Platonism was not extant in his time as a definite system, but ever since the days of Philon its spirit had been the spirit of the Museum. Nature, in its beauty and variety, was an allegory of the soul so said the philosophers, and the crowd caught it up with eagerness. The natural philosopher could not lecture on Aristotle De Animalibus without deducing morals in the style of AEsop. The moralist, in his turn, could hardly keep up his class-list without embodying his Beautiful and his Good in the aesthetical garb of a myth—the more like Plato, the better. The mathematician discoursed of numbers, of lines, and of angles, but the interesting part of his lecture was when he drew the analogy from lines and numbers to the soul and to God. Alexandria liked allegory, and believed, or thought she believed, that the Seen was always a type of the Unseen. Such a belief was not unnatural, and by no means hopelessly erroneous; nay, was it not highly useful to a Christian teacher, with the Bible in his hand, in which he would really have to show them so many things, per allegoriam dicta? Clement took up the accustomed tone. Had he done otherwise, he would have been strange and old-fashioned, whereas he [{54}] wanted to get the ear of his countrymen, and therefore thought it no harm to fall in with their humor for the mythical; just as good Father Faber preached and wrote like a modern Englishman, and not like an antique Douai controversialist, or a well-meaning translator of "Sermons from the French." But, say the objectors, Clement's interpretation of Scripture is so very forced and unnatural. The whole subject of allegorical interpretation of Sacred Scripture is too wide to be entered upon here; but that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, has an allegorical sense, no one denies, and the decision of what is the true allegorical sense depends more upon the authority of the teacher than upon the interpretation itself. In the time of Clement, when the Gnostics were attributing the Old Testament to the Evil Principle, there was a special necessity for a warm and loving acknowledgment that it was the voice and the teaching of God to man; and it is no wonder, therefore, that he allows himself, with the brilliant fancy of an Athenian, even if sometimes with the fantasticalness of an Alexandrian, to extract meanings out of the sacred text which our sober eyes could never have discovered. As it is, we owe to his mysticism no small portion of the eloquence and beauty of his writings; we may instance that charming passage in the Paedagogus where he alludes to the incident related in the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis—"Abimelech, King of the Palestines, looking out through a window, saw Isaac playing with Rebecca his wife." Isaac represents, the little one of Christ, and is interpreted to be joy; Rebecca is patience; the royal Abimelech signifies heavenly wisdom. The child of Jesus Christ, joyful with a joy that none but that blessed teacher can give, lovingly sports with his "helpmate," patience, and the wisdom that is from above looks on and wonderingly admires. The beauty of conception and perfection of form that is inseparable from true Greek art, whether in a statue or a medal, an epic or an epigram, is by no means wanting to the first of the Greek Fathers. A reader who should take up the Paedagogus for no other than literary reasons would not be disappointed; he would receive, from his reading, a very high idea of the wisdom, the eloquence, and, above all, the saintly unction of the great Catholic doctor and philosopher who first made human science the handmaid of Christian theology.
The witnessing to the truth before heathen philosophers and the teaching the children of the faith might have fully employed both the zeal and the eloquence of Clement. But there was another and a sadder use for words, in the task of resisting the heresies that seemed to grow like foul excrescences from the very growth of the Church herself. Alexandria, the city of Neo-Platonism, was also with nearly as good a title the city of Gnosticism. To examine the history of Gnosticism is not a tempting undertaking. On the one side, it is like walking into a fog, as dense and unpleasant as ever marked a London November; on the other, it is to disturb a moral cess-pool, proverbially better left alone. Of the five groups of the Gnostic family, which seem to agree in little beside worshipping the devil, holding to "emanations," and owing their origin to Simon Magus, the particular group that made Alexandria its headquarters acknowledged as its leading names Basilides, Valentine, and Mark, each of whom outdid the other in the absurdity of his ravings about eons, generations, and the like, and in the abominableness of his practical licentiousness. Valentine and Mark were contemporaries of Clement, if not personally (Valentine is said to have died A.D. 150) at least in their immediate influence. No one can tell satisfactorily what made these precious followers of Simon Magus spend their days in patching up second-hand systems out of the rags of cast-off Oriental mysticism. No doubt their jargon appeared somewhat less [{55}] unnatural in their own days than it does in ours. They lived nearer the times when the wrecks of primeval revelation and history had been wrought into a thousand fantastic shapes on the banks of the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Nile, and when, in the absence of the true light, men occupied themselves with the theatrical illuminations of Bel, Isis, and Vishnu. But these Gnostics, in the clear dawn of the Gospel, still stuck to the fulsome properties of the devil's play-house. Unsavory and dishonest, they deserve neither respect for sincerity nor allowance for originality; they were mere spinners of "endless genealogies," and, with such a fig-leaf apron, they tried to conceal for a while the rankness of the flesh that finally made the very pagans join in hounding them from the earth. The infamous Mark was holding his conventicles in Alexandria about the very time that Pantaenus and Clement were teaching. To read of his high-flown theories about eons and emanations, his sham magic, his familiarity with demons, his impositions on the weaker sex, and the frightful licentiousness that was the sure end of it all, is like reading the history of the doings of the Egyptian priests in the Serapeion rather than of those who called themselves Christians. And yet these very men, these deluded Marcosians, gave out to learned and unlearned Alexandria that they alone were the true followers of Christ. We may conceive the heart-breaking work it would be for Clement to repel the taunts that their doings brought upon his name and profession, and to refute and keep down false brethren, whose arguments and strength consisted in an appeal to curiosity and brute passion. And yet how nobly he does it, in that picture of the true Gnostic, or Knower, to which he so often returns in all his extant works!
But philosophers, faithful, and heretics do not exhaust the story of Clement's doings. It lends a solemn light to the memorable history we are noting, to bear in mind that the Church's intellectual war with Neo-Platonist and Gnostic was ever and again interrupted by the yells of the blood-thirsty populace, the dragging of confessors to prison, and all the hideous apparatus of persecution. Which of us would have had heart to argue with men who might next day deliver us to the hangman? Who would have found leisure to write books on abstract philosophy with such stern concrete realities as the scourge and the knife waiting for him in the street? Clement's master began to teach just as one persecution was ceasing; Clement himself had to flee from his schools before the "burden and heat" of another; these were not times, one would suppose, for science and orderly teaching. Yet our own English Catholic annals can, in a manner, furnish parallel cases in more than one solid book of controversy and deep ascetical tract, thought out and composed when the pursuivants were almost at the doors. So true it is that when the Church's work demands scientific and written teaching, science appears and books are written, though the Gentiles are raging and the peoples imagining their vain things.
Here, for the present, we draw to a close these desultory notes on the Christian Schools of Alexandria. They will have served their purpose if they have but supplied an outline of that busy intellectual life which is associated with the names of Pantaenus and Clement. There is another name that ought to follow these two—the name of Origen, suggesting another chapter on Church history that should yield to none in interest and usefulness. The mere fact that in old Alexandria, in the face of hostile science, clogged and put to shame by pestilent heresies, ruthlessly chased out of sight ever and again by brute force— in spite of all this, Catholic science won respect from its enemies without for a moment neglecting the interests of its own children, is a teaching that will never be out of date, and least of all at a time like ours, and in a country where learning [{56}] sneers at revelation, where a thousand jarring sects invoke the sacred name of Christ, and where public opinion—the brute force of the modern world, as the rack and the fagot were of the ancient—never howls so loudly as when it catches sight of the one true Church of the living and eternal God.
From The Lamp.
JEM M'GOWAN'S WISH.
"I wish I were a lord," said Pat M'Gowan, a lazy young fellow, as he stretched over his grandmother's turf-fire a pair of brawny fists that were as red as the blaze that warmed them.
"You wish to be a lord!" answered Granny M'Gowan; "oh, then, a mighty quare lord you would make; but, as long as you live, Pat, never wish again; for who knows but you might wish in the unlucky minute, and that it would be granted to you?"
"Faix, then, granny, I just wish I could have my wish this minute."
"You're a fool, Pat, and have no more sense in your head than a cracked egg has a chance of a chicken inside of it. Maybe you'd never cease repenting of your wish if you got it."
"Maybe so, granny, but for all that I'd like to be a lord. Tell me, granny, when does the unlucky minute come that a body may get their wish?"
"Why, you see, Pat, there is one particular little bit of a minute of time in every twenty-four hours that, if a mortal creature has the unlucky chance to wish on that instant, his wish, whether for good or for bad, for life or death, fortune or misfortune, sickness or health, for himself or for others, the wish is granted to him; but seldom does it turn out for good to the wisher, because it shows he is not satisfied with his lot, and it is contrary to what God in his goodness has laid down for us all to do and suffer for his sake. But, Pat, you blackguard, I see you are laughing at your old granny because you think I am going to preach a sermon to you; but you're mistaken. I'll tell you what happened to an uncle of my own, Jem M'Gowan, who got his wish when he asked for it."
"Got his wish—oh, the lucky old fellow!" cried Pat. "Do, granny, tell me all about him. Got his wish! oh, how I wish I was a lord!"
"Listen to me, Pat, and don't be getting on with any of your foolish nonsense. My uncle, Jem M'Gowan, was then something like yourself, Pat— a strapping, able chap, but one that, like you too, would sooner be scorching his shins over the fire than cutting the turf to make it, and rather watching the potatoes boiling than digging them out of the ridge. Instead of working for a new coat, he would be wishing some one gave it to him. When he got up in the morning, he wished for his breakfast; and when he had swallowed it, he wished for his dinner; and when he had bolted down his dinner, he began to wish for his supper; and when he ate his supper, he wished to be in bed; and when he was in bed, he wished to be asleep—in fact, he did nothing from morning to night but wish, and even in his dreams I am quite sure he wished to be awake. Unlucky for Jem, his cabin was convenient to the great big house of Squire Kavanagh; and when Jem went out in the morning, shivering with cold, and wishing for a glass of whisky to put spirits in him, and he saw the bedroom windows of Squire Kavanagh closed, and knew that the squire was lying warm and snug inside, he always wished to be Squire Kavanagh. Then, when he saw the [{57}] squire driving the horse and the hounds before him, and he all the while working in the field, he wished it still more; and when he saw him dancing with the beautiful young ladies and illigant young gentlemen in the moonlight of a summer's evening, in front of his fine hall-door and under the shade of the old oak-trees, he wished it more than ever. The squire was always coming before him; and so happy a man did he seem that Jem was always saying to himself, 'I wish I was Squire Kavanagh,' from, cockcrow to sunset, until he at last hit upon the unfortunate minute in the twenty-four hours when his wish was to be granted. He was just after eating his dinner of fine, mealy potatoes, fresh-churned buttermilk, and plenty of salt and salt-butter to relish them, when he stretched out his two legs, threw up his arms, and yawned out, 'Oh, dear, I wish I was Squire Kavanagh!'
"The words were scarce uttered when he found himself, still yawning, in the grand parlor of Kavanagh House, sitting opposite to a table laid out with china, and a table-cloth, silver forks, and no end of silver spoons, and a roaring hot beefsteak before him. Jem rubbed his eyes and then his hands with joy, and thought to himself, 'By dad, my wish is granted, and I'll lay in plenty of beefsteak first of all.' He began cutting away; but, before he had finished, he was interrupted by some people coming in. It was Sir Harry M'Manus, Squire Brien, and two or three other grand gentlemen; and says they to him, 'Kavanagh, don't you know this is the day you're to decide your bet for five hundred pounds, that you will leap your horse over the widest part of the pond outside?'
"'Is it me? says Jem. 'Why, I never leaped a horse in my life!'
"'Bother!' says one; 'you're joking. You told us yourself that you did it twenty times, and there's the English colonel that made the bet with you, and he'll be saying, if you don't do it, that the Irish are all braggers; so, my dear fellow, it just comes to this—you must either leap the pond or fight me; for, relying upon your word, I told the colonel I saw you do it myself.'
"'I must fight you or leap the pond, is it?' answered Jem, trembling from head to foot.
"'Certainly, my dear fellow,' replied Sir Harry. 'Either I must shoot you or see you make the leap; so take your choice.'
"'Oh! then, bring out the horse,' whimpered Jem, who was beginning to wish he wasn't Squire Kavanagh.
"In a minute afterward, Jem found himself out in the lawn, opposite a pond that appeared to him sixty feet wide at the least. 'Why,' said he, 'you might as well ask me to jump over the ocean, or give a hop-step-and-a-leap from Howth to Holyhead, as get any horse to cross that lake of a pond.'
"'Come, Kavanagh,' said Sir Henry, 'no nonsense with us. We know you can do it if you like; and now that you're in for it, you must finish it.'
"'Faix, you'll finish me, I'm afeerd,' said Jem, seeing they were in earnest with him; 'but what will you do if I'm drowned?'
"'Do?' says Sir Henry.' Oh, make yourself aisy on that account. You shall have the grandest wake that ever was seen in the country. We'll bury you dacently, and we'll all say that the bouldest horseman now in Ireland is the late Squire Kavanagh. If that doesn't satisfy you, there's no pleasing you; so bring out the horse immediately.'
"'Oh! murder, murder!" says Jem to himself; 'isn't this a purty thing, that I must be drowned to make a great character for a little spalpeen like Squire Kavanagh? Oh, then, it's I that wish I was Jem M'Gowan again! Going to be drowned like a rat, or smothered like a blind kitten! and all for a vagabond I don't care a straw about. I, that never was on a horse's back before, to think of leaping over an ocean! Bad cess to you, Squire Kavanagh, for your boastin' and your wagerin'!'
"Well, a fine, dashing, jumping, rearing, great big gray horse was led up by two grooms to Jem's side. 'Oh, the darling!' said Sir Harry; 'there he goes! there's the boy that will win our bets for us! Clap him at once upon the horse's back,' says he to the grooms. The sight left Jem's eyes the very instant he saw the terrible gray horse, well known as one of the most vicious bastes in the entire country. If he could, he'd have run away, but fright kept him standing stock-still; and, before he knew where he was, he was hoisted into the saddle. 'Now, boys,' roared Sir Harry, 'give the horse plenty whip, and my life for it he is over the pond.'
"Jem heard two desperate slashes made on the flanks of the horse. The creature rose on his four legs off the ground, and came down with a soss that sent Jem up straight from the saddle like a ball, and down again with a crack fit to knock him into a hundred thousand pieces, not one of them bigger than the buttons of his waistcoat. 'Murder!' he shrieked; 'I wish I was Jem M'Gowan back again!' But there was no use in saying this, for he had already got his wish. The horse galloped away like lightning. He felt rising one instant up as high as the clouds, and the next he came with a plop into the water, like a stone that you would make take a 'dead man's dive.' He remembered no more till he saw his two kind friends, Sir Harry M'Manus and Squire Brien, holding him by the two legs in the air, and the water pouring from his mouth, nose, and every stitch of his clothes, as heavy and as constant as if it was flowing through a sieve, or as if he was turned into a watering-pot.
"'I'm a dead man,' says he, looking up in the face of his grand friends as well as he could, and kicking at the same time to get loose from them. 'I'm a dead man; and, what's worse, I'm a murdered man by the two of you.'
"'Bedad, you're anything but that,' said Sir Harry. 'You're now the greatest man in the county, for, though you fell into the pond, the horse leapt it; and I have won my bet, for which I am extremely obliged to you.'
"After shaking the water out of him, they laid him down on the grass, got a bottle of whisky, and gave him as much as he chose of it. Jem's spirits began to rise a little, and he laughed heartily when they told him he had won 500 from the English colonel. Jem got on his legs, and was beginning to walk about, when who should he see coming into the demesne but two gentlemen—one dressed like an officer, with under his arm a square mahogany box, the other with a great big horsewhip. Jem rubbed his hands with delight, for he made sure that the gentleman who carried the box was going to make Squire Kavanagh—that is, himself—some mighty fine present.
"'Kavanagh,' said Sir Harry, 'you will want some one to stand by you as a friend in this business; would you wish me to be your friend?'
"'In troth, I would,' says Jem. 'I would like you to act as a friend to me upon all occasions.'
"'Oh, that's elegant!' said Sir Harry. 'We'll now have rare sport.'
"'I'm mighty glad to hear it,' Jem replied, 'for I want a little sport after all the troubles I had.'
"'Oh, you're a brave fellow,' said Sir Harry.
"'To be sure I am,' answered Jem. 'Didn't I leap the gray horse over the big pond?'
"The gentleman with the box and whip here came up to Jem and his friends; and the whip-gentleman took off his hat, and says he, 'Might I be after asking you, is there any one of the present company Squire Kavanagh?'
"Jem did not like the looks of the gentleman, and Sir Harry M'Manus stepped before him, and said—'Yes; he is here to the fore. What is your business with him? I am acting as his friend, and I have a right to ask the question.'
"'Then, I'll tell ye what it is,' said [{59}] the gentleman. 'He insulted my sister at the Naas races yesterday.'
"'Faix,' says Jem, 'that's a lie! Sure, I wasn't near Naas races.'
"The word was hardly out of his mouth when he got a crack of a horsewhip across the face, that cut, he thought, his head in two. He caught hold of the gentleman, and tried to take the whip out of his hand; but, instead of the strength of Jem M'Gowan, he had only the weakness of Squire Kavanagh, and he was in an instant collared; and, in spite of all his kicking and roaring, lathered with the big whip from the top of his head to the sole of his foot. The gentleman got at last a little tired of beating him, and, flinging him away from him, said 'You and I are now quits about the lie, but you must give me satisfaction for insulting my sister.'
"'Satisfaction!' roared out Jem, as lie twisted and turned about with the pain of the beating. 'Bedad, I'll never be satisfied till every bone in your ugly body is broken.'
"'Very well,' said the gentleman. 'My friend, Captain M'Ginnis, is come prepared for this.'
"Upon that, Jem saw the square box opened that he thought was filled with a beautiful present for him; and he saw four ugly-looking pistols lying beside each other, and in one corner about two dozen of shining bran-new bullets. Jem's knees knocked together with fright when he saw Captain M'Ginnis and Sir Harry priming and loading the pistols.
"'Oh! murder, murder! this is worse than the gray horse,' he said. 'Now I am quite sure of being killed entirely.' So he caught hold of Sir Harry by the coat, and stuttered out, *Oh, then, what in the world are ye going to do with me?'
"'Do?' replied his friend; 'why, you're going to stand a shot, to be sure.'
"'The devil a shot I'll stand,' said Jem. 'I'll run away this minute.'
"'Then, by my honor and veracity, if you do,' replied Sir Harry, 'I'll stop you with a bullet. My honor is concerned in this business. You asked me to be your friend, and I'll see you go through it respectably. You must either stand your ground like a gentleman, or be shot like a dog.'
"Jem heartily wished he was no longer Squire Kavanagh; and as they dragged him up in front of the gentleman, and placed them about eight yards asunder, he thought of the quiet, easy life he led before he became a grand gentleman. He never while a laboring boy was ducked in a pond, or shot like a wild duck. But now he heard something said about 'making ready;' he saw the gentleman raise his pistol on a level with his head; he tried to lift his arm, but it stuck as fast by his side as if it was glued there. He saw the wide mouth of the wicked gentleman's pistol opened at his very eye, and looking as if it were pasted up to his face. He could even see the leaden bullet that was soon to go skelpin' through his brains! He saw the gentleman's finger on the trigger! His head turned round and round, and in an agony he cried out—'Oh, I wish I was Jem M'Gowan back again!'
"'Jem, you'll lose half your day's work,' said Ned Maguire, who was laboring in the same field with him. 'There you've been sleeping ever since your dinner, while Squire Kavanagh, that you are always talking about, was shot a few minutes ago in a duel that he fought with some strange gentleman in his own demesne.'
"'Oh," said Jem, as soon as he found that he really wasn't shot, 'I wouldn't for the wealth of the world be a gentleman. Better to labor all day than spend half an hour in the grandest of company. Faix, I've had enough and to spare of grand company and being a gentleman since I have gone to sleep here in the potato-field; and Squire Kavanagh, if he only knew it, had much more reason, poor man, to wish he was Jem M'Gowan than I had to wish I was Squire Kavanagh.'
"And ever after that, Pat," concluded the old lady, "Jem M'Gowan went about his work like a man, instead of wasting his time in nonsensical wishings."
"Thankee, granny," yawned Pat M'Gowan, as he shuffled off to bed. "After that long story, I don't think I'll ever wish to be a lord again."
From Chambers's Journal.
THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL.
The tunnel through the Alps at present being pierced to connect the railway system of France and Italy, has acquired the title of the "Mont Cenis Tunnel;" but its real position and direction have very little in common with that well-known Alpine pass. On examining a chart of the district which has been selected for this important undertaking, we shall observe that the main chain of the Cottian Alps extends in a direction very nearly East and West, and that this portion of it is bounded on either side by two roughly parallel valleys. On the North we have the valley of the Arc, and on the South the valley of the Dora Ripari, or, more strictly speaking, the valley of Rochemolles, a branch of the Dora. The Arc, flowing from East to West, descends from Lanslebourg to Modane, and from thence, after joining the Isere, empties itself into the Rhone above Valence. The torrent Rochemolles, on the other hand, flowing from West to East, unites itself with the Dora Ripari at Oulx, descends through a narrow and winding valley to Susa, and thence along the plain to Turin. The postal road, leaving St. Michel, mounts the valley of the Arc as far as Lanslebourg, then turns suddenly to the South, passes the heights of the Mont Cenis, and reaches Susa by a very steep descent. On mounting the valley of the Arc, and stopping about eighteen miles West of Mont Cenis, and a mile and a half below the Alpine village of Modane, we arrive at a place called Fourneaux. Here, at about three hundred feet above the level of the main road, is the Northern entrance of the tunnel; the Southern entrance is at the picturesque village of Bardonnêche, situated at about twenty miles West of Susa, in the valley of Rochemolles.
The considerations which decided the Italian engineers upon selecting this position for the contemplated tunnel, were principally the following: first, it was the shortest route that could be found; secondly, the difference of level between the two extremities was not too great; and, thirdly, the construction of the connecting lines of railway—on the North, from St. Michel to Fourneaux, and on the South, from Susa to Bardonnêche were, as mountain railways go, practicable, if not easy. The idea of a tunnel through the Alps had long occupied the minds of engineers and of statesmen both in France and Italy; but it is to the latter country that we must give the credit of having worked the idea into a practical shape, and of having inaugurated one of the most stupendous works ever undertaken by any people. To pierce a tunnel seven and a half English miles long, by ordinary means, through a hard rock, in a position where vertical shafts were impossible, would be an exceedingly difficult, if not, in a practical point of view, an impossible undertaking, not only on account of the difficulties of ventilation, but also on account of the immense time and consequent expense which it would entail. It was evident, [{61}] then, that if the project of a tunnel through the Alps was ever to be realized, some extraordinary and completely new system of mining must be adopted, by means of which not only a rapid and perfect system of ventilation could be insured, enabling the miners to resume, without danger, their labors immediately after an explosion, but which would treble, or at least double, the amount of work usually performed in any given time by the system hitherto adopted in tunnelling through hard rock. To three Piedmontese engineers, Messrs. Grandis, Grattoni, and Sommeiller, is due the merit of having solved this most difficult problem; for whether the opening of the Alpine tunnel take place in ten or twenty years, its ultimate success is now completely assured.
A short review of the history of this undertaking, and a summary of the progress made, together with a description of the works as they are conducted at the present time, derived from personal observation, cannot fail to be interesting to English readers.
Early in 1857, at St. Pier d'Arena, near Genoa, a series of experiments was undertaken before a select government commission, to examine into the practicability of a project for a mechanical perforating-engine, proposed by Messrs. Grandis, Grattoni, and Sommeiller, for the more rapid tunnelling through hard rock, and with a view to its employment in driving the proposed shaft through the Alps. This machine was to be worked by means of air, highly compressed by hydraulic or other economical means; which compressed air, after performing its work in the perforating or boring machines, would be an available and powerful source of ventilation in the tunnel. These experiments placed so completely beyond any doubt the practicability of the proposed system, that, so soon as August of the same year, the law permitting the construction of the tunnel was promulgated.
At this time, absolutely nothing had been prepared, with the exception of a very general project presented by the proposers, and the model of the machinery with which the experiments had been made before the government commission; we cannot, therefore, be much surprised on finding that some considerable time elapsed before the new machinery came into successful operation, the more particularly when we consider the entire novelty of the system, and the unusual difficulties naturally attending the first starting of such large works, in districts so wild and uncongenial as those of Fourneaux and Bardonnêche. Fourneaux was but a collection of mountain-huts, containing about four hundred inhabitants, entirely deprived of every means of supporting the wants of any increase of population, and where outside-work could not be carried on for more than six months in the year, owing to its ungenial climate. Nor was the case very different at Bardonnêche, a small Alpine village, situated at more than thirteen hundred metres (4,225 feet) above the level of the sea, and populated by about one thousand inhabitants, who lived upon the produce of their small patches of earth, and the rearing of sheep and goats, and with their only road of communication with the outer world in a most wretched and deplorable condition. Under these circumstances, we can imagine that the task of bringing together large numbers of workmen, and their competent directing staff, must have been by no means easy; and that the first work of the direction, although of a nature really most arduous and tedious (requiring, above all, time and patience), was also of a nature that could scarcely render its effects very apparent to the world at large for some considerable time. Again, it was necessary in this time to make the detailed studies not only of the tunnel itself, but of the compressing and perforating machinery on the large scale proposed to be used. This machinery had to be made and transported through a country abounding in difficulties. Then, as might be [{62}] expected, actual trials showed serious defects in the new machines for the compression of air; and, in perfecting the mechanical perforators, unexpected difficulties were encountered, which often threatened to prove insurmountable. The total inexperience and unskilfulness of the workmen, and the necessity of giving to them the most tedious instruction; accidents of most disheartening and discouraging kinds—all tended to delay the successful application of the new system.
The first important work to be undertaken was the tracing or setting out of the centre line of the proposed tunnel. It was necessary first to fix on the summit of the mountain a number of points, in a direct line, which should pass through the two points chosen, or rather necessitated by the conditions of the locality, for the two ends of the tunnel in the respective valleys of the Arc and of Rochemolles; secondly, to determine the exact distance between these two ends; and thirdly, to know the precise difference of level between the same points. These operations commenced toward the end of August, 1857. Starting from the Northern entrance at Fourneaux, a line was set out roughly in the direction of Bardonnêche, which line was found to cut the valley of Rochemolles at a point considerably above the proposed Southern entrance of the tunnel. On measuring this distance, however, a second and corrected line could be traced, which was found to be very nearly correct. Correcting this second line in the same manner, always departing from the North end, a third line was found to pass exactly through the two proposed and given points. The highest point of this line was found to be very nearly at an equal distance from each end of the tunnel, and at but a short distance below the true summit of the mountain-point, called the "Grand Vallon." The line thus approximately determined, it was necessary to fix definitely and exactly three principal stations or observatories—one on the highest or culminating point of the mountain, perpendicularly over the axis of the tunnel; and the other two in a line with each entrance, in such a manner that, from the centre observatory, both the others could be observed. At the Southern end, owing to the convenient conformation of the mountain, the observatory could be established at a point not very far from the mouth of the tunnel; but toward the North, several projecting points or counterforts on the mountain necessitated the carrying of the Northern observatory to a very considerable distance beyond the entrance of the gallery—not, however, so far as not to be discerned clearly and distinctly, and without oscillation, by the very powerful and excellent instrument employed. These three points permanently established, remain as a check for those intervening, and serve as the base of the operations for the periodical testing of the accuracy of the line of excavation.
The first rough tracing out of the line was completed before the winter of the year 1857, and it was considered sufficiently correct to permit the commencement of the tunnel at each end by the ordinary means—manual labor. In the autumn of 1858, the corrected line was traced, and the observatories definitely fixed, and all other necessary geodetic operations completed. Contemporaneously was undertaken a careful levelling between the two ends, taken along the narrow path of the Colle di Frejus, and bench-marks were established at intervals along the whole line. All the data necessary for an exact profile of the work were now obtained. The exact length of the future tunnel was found to be twelve thousand two hundred and twenty metres, or about seven and a half English miles; and the difference of level between the two mouths was ascertained to be two hundred and forty metres, or seven hundred and eighty feet, the Southern or Bardonnêche end being the highest. Under these circumstances, it would have been easy to have established a [{63}] single gradient from Bardonnêche down to Fourneaux of about two centimètres per mètre—that is, of about one in fifty. But a little reflection will show, that in working both ends of the gallery at once, in order to effect the proper drainage of the tunnel, it would be necessary to establish two gradients, each inclining toward the respective mouths, and meeting in some point in the middle. This, in fact, has been done, and the two hundred and forty metres' difference of level has been distributed in the following manner: From Bardonnêche, the gradient mounts at the rate of 0.50 per one thousand mètres—that is, one in two thousand as far as the middle of the gallery; here it descends toward Fourneaux with a gradient of 22.20 mètres per one thousand, or about one in forty-five. The highest point of the Grand Vallon perpendicularly over the axis of the tunnel is 1615.8 mètres, or 5251.31 feet.
The difficulties encountered in the carrying out of these various geodetic operations can scarcely be exaggerated. It is true that nothing is more easy than to picket out a straight line on the ground, or to measure an angle correctly with a theodolite; but if we consider the aspect of the locality in which these operations had to be conducted, repeated over and over again, and tested in every available manner with the most minute accuracy, we shall be quite ready to accord our share of praise and admiration to the perseverance which successfully carried out the undertaking. In these regions, the sun, fogs, snow, and terrific winds succeed each other with truly marvellous rapidity, the distant points become obscured by clouds, perhaps at the very moment when an important sight is to be taken, causing most vexatious delays, and often necessitating a recommencement of the whole operation. These delays may in some cases extend for days, and even weeks. To these inconveniences add the necessity of mounting and descending daily with delicate instruments from three thousand to four thousand feet over rocks and rugged mountain-paths, the time occupied in sending from one point to another, and the difficulty of planting pickets on elevated positions often almost inaccessible. All these inconveniences considered, and we must admit the unusual difficulties of a series of operations which, under other circumstances, would have offered nothing peculiarly remarkable.
As has already been pointed out, the excavation of the gallery at both ends had already been in operation, by ordinary means, since the latter part of the year 1857; this work continued without interruption until the machinery was ready; and the progress made in that time affords a valuable standard by which to measure the effect of the new machinery. In the interval between the end of 1857 and that to which we have now arrived, namely, the end of 1858, many important works had been pushed forward. At Bardonnêche, the communications had been opened, and bridges and roads constructed for facilitating the transport of the heavy machinery. Houses for the accommodation of the workmen had been rapidly springing up, together with the vast edifices for the various magazines and offices. The canal, more than a mile and a half in length, for conveying water to the air-compressing machines, was constructed, and the little Alpine village had become the centre of life and activity. At Fourneaux, works of a similar character had been put in motion; only here the transport of the water for the compressors was more costly and difficult, the water being at a low level. At first, a current derived from the Arc was used to raise water to the required height, but afterward it was found necessary to establish powerful forcing-pumps, new in their details, which are worked by huge water-wheels driven by the Arc itself. Early in the month of June, 1859, the first erection of the compressing machinery was commenced at Bardonnêche. The badness of the season, however, and [{64}] the Italian campaign of this year, delayed the rapid progress, and even caused a temporary suspension of this work. The results obtained by the experiments which had previously been made on a small scale at St. Pier d'Arena, failed completely in supplying the data necessary to insure a practical success to the first applications of the new system; numberless modifications, both in the compressing-engines and in the perforating-machines, were found necessary; and several months were consumed in experimenting with, modifying, and improving the huge machinery; so that it was not before the 10th of November, 1860, that five compressors were successfully and satisfactorily at work. On the 12th, however, two of the large conducting-pipes burst, and caused a considerable amount of damage, without causing, however, any loss of life. This accident revealed one or two very serious defects in the manner of working the valves of the engine; and in order to provide against the possibility of future accidents of the same nature, further most extensive modifications were undertaken.
By the beginning of January, 1861, the five compressors were again at work; and on the 12th of this month the boring-engine was introduced for the first time into the tunnel. Very little useful result was, however, obtained for a long and anxious period, beyond continually exposing defects and imperfections in the perforators. The pipes conducting the compressed air from the compressing-machines to the gallery gave at first continued trouble and annoyance; soon, however, a very perfect system of joints was established, and this source of difficulty was completely removed. After much labor and patience, and little by little, the perforating-machines became improved and perfected, as is always the case in any perfectly new mechanical contrivance having any great assemblage of parts. Actual practice forced into daylight those numberless little defects which theory only too easily overlooks; but there was no lack of perseverance and ingenuity on the part of the directing engineers; one by one the obstacles were met, encountered, and eventually overcome, and the machines at last arrived at the state of precision and perfection at which they may be seen to-day. About the month of May, 1861, the work was suspended for about a month, in consequence of a derangement in the canal supplying water to the compressors; and it was considered necessary to construct a large reservoir on the flank of the mountain, to act as a deposit for the impurities contained in the water, and which often caused serious inconvenience in the compressors. In the whole of the first year 1861, the number of working days was two hundred and nine, and the advance made was but one hundred and seventy metres (five hundred and fifty feet), or about eighteen inches per day of twenty-four hours, an amount less than might have been done by manual labor in the same time. In the year 1862, however, in the three hundred and twenty-five days of actual work, the advance made was raised to three hundred and eighty metres (one thousand two hundred and thirty-five feet), giving a mean advance of 1.17 metres, or about three feet nine inches per day. In the year 1863, the length done (always referring to the South or Bardonnêche side) was raised to above four hundred metres; and no doubt this year a still greater progress will have been made.
At the Fourneaux or Northern end of the tunnel—owing to increased difficulties peculiar to the locality—the perforation of the gallery was much delayed. A totally different system of mechanism for the compression of air was necessitated; and it was not before the 25th of January, 1863, that the boring-machine was in successful operation on this side, or two years later than at Bardonnêche. The experience, however, gained at this latter place, and the transfer of a few skilful workmen, soon raised the advance [{65}] made per day to an amount equivalent to that effected at the Southern entrance. Thus, on the South side (omitting the first year, 1861) since the beginning of 1862, and on the North side since the beginning of 1863, the new system of mechanical tunnelling may be said to have been in regular and successful operation.
In the beginning of September of this year were completed in all three thousand five hundred and seventy metres of gallery. From this we deduct sixteen hundred metres done by manual labor, leaving, for the work done by the machines, a length of nineteen hundred and seventy metres. From this we can make a further deduction of the one hundred and seventy metres executed in the first year of experiment and trial at Bardonnêche, so that we have eighteen hundred metres in length excavated by the machines in a time dating from the beginning of 1862 at the South end, and from the beginning of 1863 at the North end of the tunnel. Thus, up to the month of September, 1864, we have in all four years and six months; and eighteen hundred metres divided by 4.5 gives us four hundred metres as the rate of progress per year at each side, or in total, eight hundred metres per year. Basing our calculation, then, on this rate, we find that the eight thousand six hundred and fifty metres yet to be excavated will require about ten and a half more years; so that we may look forward to the opening of the Mont Cenis tunnel at about the year 1875. The directing engineers, who have given good proof of competency and skill, are, however, of opinion that this period may be considerably reduced, unless some totally unlooked-for obstacles are met with in the interior of the mountain. As has been indicated above, sixteen hundred metres in length of the tunnel was completed by manual labor before the introduction of the mechanical boring-engines, in a period of five years at the North and three years at the South side, equal to four years at each end; and eight hundred metres in four years gives us two hundred metres per year, or just one-half excavated by the machine in the same period.
In using the machines, up to the present time, a perfect ventilation of the tunnel has been secured by the compressed air escaping from the exhaust of the boring-engines; or by jets of air expressly impinged into the lower end of the gallery to clear out rapidly the smoke and vapor formed by the explosion of the mine. It should be remembered, moreover, that in working a gallery of this kind, where vertical shafts are impossible, by manual labor, a powerful and costly air-compressing apparatus would have been necessary for the ventilation of the tunnel alone, so that the economy of the system, as applied at the Mont Cenis over the general system of tunnelling in hard rock, is evident. I propose, in the second portion of this article, to give a short description of the machinery employed and the system of working adopted, both at the South and North ends of the Mont Cenis gallery.