BOOKS.
Welcome, my books, my golden store!
Your leaves my eyes, my hands explore;
With you my sweetest hours have flown—
My best of life with you alone.
When none in the wide world could cheer,
Your wisdom dried the bitter tear;
When summer skies were fresh and blue,
None could rejoice with me like you.
What living voice may speak among
Your silent and time-hallowed throng?
For you, the best of every age,
I quit the world's degenerate stage.
Translation from Ranzan.
From The Month.
THE ANCIENT FACULTY OF PARIS.
At the corner of the Rue de la Bûcherie and the old Rue des Rats, now known by the more dignified appellation of the Rue de l'Hôtel Colbert, may still be seen, unless the unsparing hand of "modern improvement" has very recently swept it away along with so many other memorials of the past, a dirty, dilapidated building topped by a round tower, which you might take for some old pigeon-house. The half-obliterated inscription upon an escutcheon on one of the facades of the edifice indicates, however, some heretofore high and venerable destination—Urbi et orbi salus. If curiosity lead you to penetrate into the interior of this dismal edifice, you find yourself, after mounting a damp staircase, in a great circular hall, divided into four irregular compartments. Above some empty niches hollowed in the thickness of the wall runs a wide cornice, the now-defaced sculptures of which represent alternately the cock—Esculapius's bird and emblem of vigilance—and the pelican nourishing its young, the type of self-sacrifice—watchfulness and unselfish charity, the two great duties incumbent on the professor of the healing art. You stand, in fact, in the midst of the ancient amphitheatre of the Faculty of Medicine. There studied, and there, in their turn, taught, the great anatomists of the seventeenth century, Bartholin, Riolan, Pecquet, Littre, Winslow. This building was an old adjunct to a large and handsome hotel belonging to the medical body, containing their chapel, library, laboratory, a vast hall for solemn disputations, with minor saloons for the daily lectures, etc., with the addition of a large court and botanical garden. It was abandoned long before the Revolution, and not a trace of all this corporate glory of the medical faculty now remains. The quarter of Paris in which it stood, known formerly as the Latin quarter, long preserved a peculiar stamp and physiognomy. Here were the colleges of St. Michel, of Normandy and Picardy, of Laon, Presles, Beauvais, Cornouailles, and that long succession of churches, convents, colleges, and high toppling houses, filled with a studious youth, which formerly crowded the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue de la Harpe. All these and many other sanctuaries of religion and of science, so intimately connected in the middle ages, clustered around the faculty. Here, in fact, was the centre of the university of Paris, whose origin is lost in the obscurity investing the early mediaeval period. The methodical classification under the head of faculties of the different studies pursued at that celebrated institution dates, however, from the close of the twelfth century. These faculties formed independent companies, attached to their common mother, the university, like branches to the parent stem.
Disregarding all apocryphal pretensions to antiquity, we cannot assign an earlier date for the formation of the medical body into an independent corporation than the year 1267. About that time we find the faculty in possession of its statutes, keeping registers and affixing to documents its massive silver seal. The term Faculty of Medicine, it must be observed, is modern. The title Physicorum Facultas, or Facultas in Physica, was long preserved. Whatever we may think of the empirical practice and dogmatic character of the medical art in those times, we cannot but see in this an [{497}] indication that natural science was even then the recognized basis of medicine. We have here, if not a principle clearly understood and habitually followed, at least an intuition and a kind of programme of the future. A memorial of the old designation survives in our own country in the title of physician, while in the land where it originated it has been discontinued.
Born in the cloister, medicine long retained an ecclesiastical character. Most of the doctors in early times were canons; and those who were neither priests nor even clerks were still bound to celibacy; a regulation which remained in force long after councils had decreed the incompatibility of the exercise of the medical profession with the ecclesiastical state.
The general assemblies of the faculty were held sometimes round the font of Notre Dame, sometimes at St. Geneviève des Ardents, sometimes at the Priory of St. Eloi; while, for the ordinary purposes of instruction, it shared fraternally with the faculty of theology the alternate use of some common room with a shake-down of straw in the Quartier St. Jacques. But by-and-bye riches began to pour in, chiefly through the means of the legacies of members of the medical corps or other well-wishers; and, thanks to the liberality of Jacques Desparts, physician to Charles VIl., the corporation of doctors was finally installed in the abode we have just described. To the general worth and respectability of the body in the fifteenth century we have the testimony of Cardinal d'Estoutteville, who, in 1452, was deputed by the Pope to reorganize the university of Paris, and who found less to reform in the faculty of medicine than in any other department. Indeed, no change of much importance was introduced, with the exception of the revocation of the law of celibacy, which the cardinal pronounced to be both "impious and unreasonable."
Independence of spirit and great reverence for its own traditions were characteristic of the medical body from its earliest beginnings. It loved to describe itself as veteris disciplinae retentissima. In those days men gloried in their respect for antiquity. In common with all the different bodies which composed the university of Paris, the medical corporation possessed great privileges—exemption from all taxation, direct or indirect, from all public burdens, from all onerous services or obligations. When we sum up all the advantages enjoyed by this and other favored bodies and classes in the middle ages, the reflection naturally suggests itself—what must have been the condition of the poor, who possessed no privileges and bore all the financial burdens? In the days, however, when standing armies in the pay of government had no existence, when the king himself was a rich proprietor with large personal domains, when national debt and its interest were things unheard of, the ordinary imposts, as distinguished from all arbitrary and accidental exactions, were, of course, very much lighter than those of modern times. Liberty in those days assumed the form of privilege; and its spirit was nursed and kept alive within the bosom of these self-ruling corporations, and in none more remarkably than in that of medicine. The esprit de corps naturally existed with peculiar strength in a body not merely organized for purposes of instruction, but exercising a liberal profession, of which it had the monopoly. [Footnote 69] Hence a minute internal legislation imposed upon all its members, and willingly accepted in view of the interests of the body. Its alumni were aspirants to a life-long membership; whereas with us the medical man's dependence upon the faculty virtually ceases the day he takes his doctor's degree. He has nothing more to ask or to receive from it; his affair is now with the public; [{498}] and the sense of brotherhood with his colleagues in the profession is lost, it is to be feared, not unfrequently in a feeling of rivalry. But it was otherwise in the olden time. The day which now sends forth the full-fledged doctor to his independent career drew the tie closer which bound him to his order, in which then only he began to take his solemn place. The honor and the interest of each member thus became common property, and unworthy conduct was punished by summary exclusion from the body.
[Footnote 69: It is probably this peculiarity which caused the medical to be considered as pre-eminently the faculty. Its practice brought it into intimate contact with the world at large; and this has also doubtless led to the exclusive retention, in this instance, of a designation common in its origin to other departments of learning.]
Unfortunately this esprit de corps had its bad as well as its good results. It produced a certain narrowness of mind, a love of routine, and no slight attachment to professional jargon. It is not that the faculty was actually the enemy of all progress, but progress must come from itself. As no association of men, however, can enjoy a monopoly of genius, useful and brilliant discoveries emanating from other quarters had to encounter the hostility of the chartered body. This spirit was exemplified in its animosity toward surgery, long a separate profession, in its prejudice against the doctrine of the circulation of the blood, because an English discovery; against antimony, because it originated with the rival Montpelier school; against quinine, because it came from America. To these subjects we may hereafter recur; in the meantime we note them as instances of medical bigotry, which exposed the profession to just ridicule, but which has drawn down upon it censure and disesteem of perhaps a somewhat too sweeping character. It would be unfair to judge the ancient faculty solely from its exhibitions of foolish pedantry and blind prejudice; and it is our object on the present occasion to give a slight sketch of its constitution and internal government, such as may enable the reader to form a juster and more impartial view both of its faults and of its substantial merits. Indeed, without some solid titles to general esteem, it would seem improbable that the faculty should have attained to the high position which we find it occupying in the seventeenth century.
One accidental cause, no doubt, of the importance of the doctors during the whole period which we are considering was their small relative number. From a computation made by a modern member of the medical profession in France, [Footnote 70] to whom we are indebted for our facts, the average number of doctors in the capital from the year 1640 to the year 1670 did not exceed 110. Compared with the population of Paris, which is reckoned at 540,000 souls, this gives one doctor for every 4,900 of the inhabitants. The medical corps is now 1,830 strong, while the population has risen only to 1,740,000. Great as is this increase of population, greater, we see, proportionally has been that of the medical practitioners, who are at present as 1 to 940. If sickness was as prevalent in the seventeenth century as it is now, and recourse to physic and physicking as frequent, we can imagine that the faculty must have necessarily occupied a distinguished position. Many offices now undertaken by public institutions or by government devolved, also, at that time on the faculty, which to the best of its ability supplied the want of sanitary regulations, and exercised a kind of medical police, including the supervision of articles of diet. All this must have helped to swell their importance. A large proportion of the doctors received during this selected period of thirty years were Parisians; and nothing is more common than the perpetuity of the profession in certain families. This circumstance must have combined with the corporate reverence for their traditions to intensify their attachment to a received system, and to strengthen that spirit of union which is a source of power. The respect which the lower bench paid to the upper, and the young to the ancient [{499}]—and by "young" we mean young in their degree, not in years—must have contributed toward the same result. It required ten years of doctorate to qualify a man to take his place amongst this venerable class; and the statutes are prolix on the subject of the respect due to the ancients from their juniors on the bench; a respect which was to be marked by every external act of deference.
[Footnote 70: Maurice Raynaud, Docteur en Médecine, Docteur ès Lettres. Les Médecins au temps de Molière.—Moeurs, Institutions, Doctrines. Paris, 1862. Didler.]
But the first and great tie which bound all the members together was religion. To profess the Catholic faith was long an essential condition of admission to the examinations. The faculty gave an energetic proof in 1637 of the importance it attached to this fundamental rule, when it withstood the pressing solicitations of the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans; in favor of a certain Brunier, the son of his own physician and a Protestant, although the prince condescended to address a flattering letter to the dean of the faculty, signing himself "Votre bon ami, Gaston," and although his request was backed by a royal injunction. The sovereign must needs bow to the authority of the statutes, respectfully but firmly urged in contravention of his regal pleasure. Yet this would seem to have been a closing effort, for in 1648 we find four Protestant doctors on the lists. Every year there was a solemn mass on St. Luke's day, at which all the members were bound to be present, and which even at the commencement of the seventeenth century was still sung by the doctors of the faculty. After mass the statutes were publicly read. There was a like obligation, with a penalty for its neglect, to attend an annual mass for deceased doctors, and another for benefactors, as also to accompany the bodies of their brethren to the grave.
The head of the corporation was the dean. His powers were extensive, and the honor paid to him unbounded. He was the "guardian of the discipline and statutes" of the faculty, vindex disciplinae et custos legum; he was at once its foremost champion and its highest dignitary. He was also its historian, entering in its great registers all facts interesting to the corporation which occurred during the course of his administration. The account of each diaconate is headed thus:
"In Nomine Omnipotentis Dei, Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Incipit commentarius rerum in decanatu . . . gestarum."
Amongst other topics judged worthy of registration is a necrologic notice of members deceased during the period. Take as a specimen, which marks at the same time the high estimation in which the diaconate was held, the account given of Merlet's death in 1663. He was the "ancient of the company," and had been remarkable for the zeal he exercised in its behalf. The then dean, the illustrious Antoine Morand, pays the venerable doctor a visit just before he expires; and the dying man breaks out in a kind of Nunc dimittis—"Now I can die contented, since it has been given me to behold once more the dean of the faculty." Valot, the king's physician, who had come to see the patient, expresses in language of much reverence his hope that Merlet may still live to illustrate the supreme dignity in which he stands amongst them. The "patriarch" with his last breath energetically refuses such excessive honors. He confesses that he holds a high rank as ancient of the school, but not the highest. "To the dean alone," he says, "belongs supreme honor." "Sublime words," observes Morand in his funeral notice: "veritable song of the dying swan, proceeding from a man truly wise and endowed with all perfection! May he rest in the peace of the Lord." Of course, it is a dean who is speaking. The charge was indeed a weighty one, both externally and internally; for in spite of general respect, the medical corporation, like most privileged bodies, had active enemies. Every two years a fresh election took place on the first Saturday after All Saints'. The dean deposed the insignia of his dignity and gave a report of the state of affairs to [{500}] the assembled doctors, who, as usual on all solemn occasions, had previously attended mass. All their names were then placed in two urns; one containing those of the ancients, the other those of the juniors. The dean shook the urns, and drawing three names from the first and two from the second, proclaimed them aloud. The five doctors thus chosen by lot as electors, and, as such, themselves ineligible, swore to nominate the worthiest, and retired to the chapel to implore the divine aid. They then elected by a majority of their number three doctors, two ancients and one junior. Amidst solemn silence, the dean once more drew the lot, and the name which came forth was proclaimed dean for the next two years. The professors, who for long years were but two in number, were also chosen biennially, and by a similar combination of lot and election. Some good must have arisen from the liability under which every practitioner of the medical art lay of being called on to teach it. Another not unwise regulation was that which, reversing the order observed in the case of the dean, placed in the professional urn two junior names against one ancient. Long practice of teaching is apt to wear out the powers of the most able. Considering the times, the elements of instruction were abundantly supplied. The bachelors were not permitted to do more than comment upon and expound the ancients, and their programme was furnished to them. The professors took the higher and more original branches; they alone could dogmatize from the great pulpit of the amphitheatre (ex superiore cathedrâ). The teaching embraced, according to the quaint phraseology of the day: 1. natural things, viz., anatomy and physiology; 2. non-natural things—hygiene and dietetics; 3. things contrary to nature—pathology and therapeutics. In the year 1634 a course of lectures on surgery, delivered in Latin, and exclusively for the medical students, was added—a practical course of surgery in French already existed for the barber apprentices; and the faculty began to perceive that if they would keep their supremacy over the barber-surgeons, it would be as well to know as much as their disciples.
The oath taken by the professors is remarkable, especially the exordium: "We swear and solemnly promise to give our lessons in long gowns with wide sleeves, having the square cap on our heads, and the scarlet scarf on our shoulders." This we see was their first duty. Their second engagement was to give their lessons uninterruptedly, and never by deputy, save in case of urgent necessity; each lecture to last an hour at least, and to be delivered daily, except in vacation time, which extended from the vigil of St. Peter and St. Paul, the 28th of June, to that of the exaltation of the cross, the 13th of September, and on festival days, which were pretty numerous, including also certain other solemnities, as well as the vigils of the greater feasts, when the schools were closed, causa confessionis, as the statutes have it.
Practical instruction was much more meagre than the oral, but this is hardly to be imputed as a fault. Anatomy cannot be learned except by dissection, and no bodies but those of criminals were procurable. The faculty had to look to crime to help on its progress in this study. When an execution took place, the dean received formal notice, and convoked the doctors and students on the occasion "to make an anatomy," as it was called. When the faculty was at peace with the surgeons, the latter were favored with an invitation. By a strange prejudice, theory and practice, as we have noticed, were kept distinct. The learned professor would have demeaned himself by becoming an operator, while the acting surgeon was condemned to be a mere intelligent machine, and was formally interdicted from being initiated in the higher mysteries of the profession. It was a barber who generally filled this inferior office, and he not unfrequently would display more knowledge than his masters; for which [{501}] offense he was sure to be severely reprimanded. "Doctor non sinat dissectorem divagari, sed contineat in officio dissecandi"—"Let not the doctor suffer the dissector to stray beyond his province, but keep him to his duty of dissecting." This is one of the rules laid down in the statutes. He was to work on and hold his tongue. But not only was the barber condemned to silence—a hard sentence, some will say, on one of his loquacious profession—but he was to receive no pay. For remuneration he was to look to his brethren of the razor. There were more facilities for the study of botany than for any other practical branch of the medical science. Beside the garden in the Rue de la Bûcherie, the doctors had afterward the use of the Jardin Royal founded by Richelieu; and these advantages do not seem to have been by any means neglected. Clinical instruction was peculiarly defective. Absorbed by erudition, philosophy, and the interminable disquisitions of the schools, our medical forefathers seem to have forgotten that experimental knowledge can be obtained only by the bedside of the sick. Most of the students had never seen a single patient before they reached the honors of the baccalaureate. After this they attached themselves to some doctor, whom they followed on his rounds, in order to learn the application of what they had theoretically mastered, and were by him introduced to his clients, much as was the practice in the days of ancient Rome. The poor sufferer's room was thus not unfrequently turned into a pedantic lecture-hall. We instinctively recall to mind Molière's two Diafoiruses, father and son, stationing themselves each on one side of the unhappy patient, and discoursing in pompous medical phraseology of the character of his pulse and of the humors of his body. [Footnote 71] The practical and, as such, the most important department of medical science received, it must be confessed, the least attention. All the prizes, whether of honor or emolument, which the future held out, tended to concentrate zeal and emulation on dialectics. It seemed as if the medical art were designed for the benefit of the doctors rather than the doctored, and that it was of more importance to be able to descant learnedly upon a malady than to cure it. To figure advantageously at one of those solemn public sittings of the medical body, which were often graced with the presence of members of the high aristocracy and of the magisterial body; to be able to deliver a brilliant harangue, and confound an opponent by a well-timed and well-chosen quotation—such was the highest ambition of the student. To preside with distinction over the discussion of a thesis—such was the battle-field on which the doctor hoped to win his laurels. If he acquitted himself with applause, he had gained a victory which raised him higher in his own esteem, and in that of the world at large, than the most successful practice of his profession could possibly do. The first two articles of the statutes contain this spirit in a condensed form, and may be regarded as the abridged decalogue of the faculty, summing up their duty toward God and toward man: 1. the divine offices shall be celebrated with the customary forms, and in the usual places, at the same hours and on the same days as heretofore; 2. the medical students shall frequently attend public disputations and dissertations.
[Footnote 71: "Duriuscule repoussant, et même un peu capricant." "L'intempérie de son parenchyme splénique et l'état de ses méats cholidoques. ">[
The process through which the student had to pass in order to make his way to his degree of licentiate was a trying ordeal. The examination for the bachelor's degree, after a few previous solemnities, including the usual attention first to religion, next to dress and formal state, lasted a week, during which the candidate might be questioned not only by the regular examiners on the usual round of the natural, the non-natural, and the unnatural, but by any doctor present, each having the right to propose a certain number of questions. In conclusion, the aspirant [{502}] had to comment on some aphorism of Hippocrates. When the examiners gave in their report, votes were taken, and a favorable majority, secured to the aspirant his degree. The new bachelors swore to keep the honorable secrets, and observe all the practices, customs, and statutes of the faculty; to pay homage to the dean and to all the masters; to aid the faculty against all opponents and all illicit practitioners, and to submit to the punishments which it might inflict; to assist in gown at all the masses ordered by the faculty, coming in at least before the epistle, and remaining till the end; and, finally, to assist at all the academic exercises and disputations of the schools during two years, where they were to maintain some theses on medicine or hygiene, observing good order and decorum in conducting their argument.
Their great ordeal was now to come. One is amazed to read of the succession of tilts they had to run in the intellectual tourney of these two probationary years; how from St. Martin to the Carnival they had to maintain, always in full dress and before a large assembly, their quodlibetary [Footnote 72] theses of physiology or medicine; how from Ash-Wednesday to vacation time it was the turn of the Cardinal theses, so called from their institution by Cardinal d'Estoutteville. These chiefly related to hygienic questions. It is from among these latter that most of those puerile and absurd queries have been extracted which have drawn down so much ridicule on the faculty. It is scarcely possible to imagine that such questions as the following can have been intended for serious discussion: Are heroes the children of heroes? Are they bilious? Is it good to get drunk once a month? Is woman an imperfect work of nature? Is sneezing a natural act? It is only fair, however, to remember that by far the greater number of the subjects proposed were of a very different character, and such as might profitably be considered at the present day. But if the frequent occurrence of these intellectual jousts was trying to the combatant, their interminable length was perfectly appalling. From six o'clock to eight he had to stand a preliminary skirmish with the bachelors. For the next three hours he had to encounter nine doctors, who successively entered the lists, each bringing his fresh vigor to bear on the exhausted candidate. The sitting ended with a general assault, in which all present had liberty to take a share and overwhelm the poor bachelor with a very hail-storm of interrogatories, to which he had to reply single-handed. During the Cardinal theses the debate was still hotter and more prolonged. From five in the morning till midday, the candidate was plied with questions by the bachelors, all ready to pounce upon him at the slightest flaw in his argument or the merest slip of his tongue. As a climax of cruelty, during the quodlibetary examinations he was bound to furnish his persecutors with refreshment in an adjoining apartment, of which he alone was forbidden to partake. The sound of the great clock striking twelve must have been a joyful reprieve to the athlete in the ring; the wonder is that any constitution could stand the probationary two years during which this process was energetically kept up.
[Footnote 72: So called because selected at pleasure.]
At the close of this period the candidates were subjected to private examination before the doctors, in order to ascertain their practical capacity and personal qualifications for exercising the medical art. Great strictness prevailed on all points which nearly concerned the honor and interests of the faculty; and if the candidate had ever practiced any manual art, including surgery, he was bound on oath to renounce it for the future. Then followed a separate private examination by each individual doctor as to a thousand personal details affecting the competence of the applicant. A secret scrutiny then decided on the admissibility, not as yet the admission, of [{503}] the candidates to the honors and privileges of actual members of the faculty. The spirit of the old days was preserved even in the seventeenth century, and the licentiates had to receive ecclesiastical sanction and a quasi-ordination. They proceeded accordingly in procession to the house of the chancellor of the academy, to whom they were presented by the dean, who, on their request, fixed a day for their reception. This form was one of the most cherished traditions of the university. Gallican as was the spirit of that body, it gloried in tracing its privileges and constitution to the Holy See; a cheap homage, which entailed no inconvenience, and of which at times it knew how to avail itself in its contests with the king and the parliament. The chancellor, who was a canon of the metropolitan see of Paris, had long enjoyed sovereign jurisdiction over the schools; and although in the seventeenth century his power was purely nominal, no one disputed his right upon this occasion to represent the sovereign Pontiff, the supreme teacher of the Catholic world. Other curious ceremonies attended the solemn admittal to the licentiate. All the high functionaries of state, and other important personages, were invited to attend the schools on an appointed day, in order to learn from the paranymph the names and titles of the medical practitioners whom the faculty were about to present to the city—nay, to the whole world: "Quos, quales, et quot medicos urbi, alque adeo universo orbi, medicorum collegium isto biennio sit suppeditaturum." The paranymph, as is well known, was, among the Greeks, the friend of the bridegroom, who accompanied him in his chariot when he went to fetch home the bride. Now it was held that the new licentiate was about to espouse the faculty, much as the Doge of Venice married the sea. The friend of the spouse, the paranymph, was in fact the dean, who presented the young spouses to the chancellor with a complimentary address. That dignitary invited the assembly to repair on a fixed day to the great archiepiscopal hall, which upon this occasion was thrown open to all the notabilities of the capital, who attended to add honor to the solemnity. Then the list of the candidates was read out in their order of merit, as previously decided after a strict inquiry by the doctors. They immediately fell on their knees, bareheaded, in an attitude of deep recollection, to receive the apostolic benediction given by the chancellor in these terms: "Auctoritate Sanctae Sedis Apostolicae, qua fungor in hoc parte, do tibi licentium legendi, interpretandi, et faciendi medicinam hic et ubique terrarum, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. " A question was then proposed by this dignitary to the licentiate first in the order of merit, who was bound to give proof of his competency by solving it on the spot. As the chancellor was not a doctor, and as the assembly was miscellaneous, this query was usually religious or literary, and, to judge from the recorded questions, rather curious and subtle than profitable. The whole assembly forthwith repaired in a body to the cathedral to thank our Blessed Lady for the happy conclusion of a work begun under her auspices. With his hand stretched over the altar of the martyrs, the chancellor murmured a short prayer, the purport of which was calculated to remind the newly-elected that, belonging henceforth as they did specially to the Church, they ought to be prepared to sacrifice themselves in all things, even to their very life: usque ad effusionem sanguinis. It depended entirely upon the licentiates themselves whether or no they were ultimately decorated with the doctor's cap, which conferred the full privileges at once of the medical corporation and of the university to which it belonged; and although a few, from modesty or other causes, declined to aim at this honor, with by far the greater number it was the consequence and complement of the licentiate. The degree of licentiate introduced the recipient to the public; [{504}] that of doctor admitted him into the very sanctuary of the faculty. Accordingly it was conferred, not less ceremoniously, but more privately. It was, so to say, a family affair. Although, as we have said, there was no further examination respecting medical competency, another minute inquiry was made into the life and morals of the applicant, which was followed, if the scrutiny proved satisfactory, by a preparatory act called the Vesperie, because it took place in the afternoon. At this sitting, the president addressed the candidate in a solemn discourse, intended to impress him with a high sense of the dignity of the healing art, and of the maxims of honor and probity which ought to guide its professors. The ordeal of questions was not altogether closed; for we find the president proposing a query, and entering into a discussion with the candidate, who had thus still something to undergo before he passed on from the class of the questioned to the more enviable rank of the questioners.
Upon the great day, the doctor in posse, preceded by the mace-bearers and bachelors, with the president on his left, and followed by the doctors in esse selected to argue with him, proceeded to the hall of the great school. The grand apparitor then addressed him thus: "Sir candidate for the doctorate, before you are initiated, you have to take three oaths,"—"Domine doctorande, antequam incipias, habes tria juramenta. " The three oaths were: 1. to observe the rights, statutes, laws, and venerable customs of the faculty; 2. to assist the day following the feast of St. Luke at the mass for deceased doctors; 3. to combat with all his strength against the illicit practitioners of medicine, whatever might be their rank or their condition in life. "Will you swear to observe these things?"—"Vis ista jurare?"—asked the grand apparitor; and the candidate replied with that memorable Juro ("I swear") which was Molière's last word. [Footnote 73] The president, after a brief address, turned toward him with the doctorial square cap in his hand, and making with it the sign of the cross in the air, placed it on the head of the candidate, to which he then administered a slight blow with two of his fingers, and forthwith bestowed upon him the accolade. The recipient was now duly dubbed doctor. He made immediate use of his new powers by asking a question of one of the doctors present. The president had then a tilt with the doctor who had presided at the Vesperie, and the sitting was closed by the new doctor's delivering a discourse of thanksgiving to God, to the faculty, and to his friends and relations present. The statutes enjoin that this speech should be elegant. We may conceive that the notion of elegance entertained by the faculty differed considerably from that which the word suggests to our minds. On the St. Martin's Day following the recently-chosen doctor did the honors of his new grade by presiding over a quodlibetary thesis. This was a sort of bye-day, being out of course. It was called the "acte pastillaire," in allusion probably to the sugary wafers presented to the dean stamped with his likeness, or to the bonbons, of which there was a general distribution on the occasion. The next day the new doctor was entered on the registers, and took his place on the junior bench for ten years.
[Footnote 73: The great comic dramatist played the part of Argan on the first representation of his play of the Malade Imaginaire, now always performed on the anniversary of his death. He had probably long had within him the seeds of a mortal complaint; and after pronouncing the word Juro in his character of Bachelor of Medicine taking his degree, which is the object of the famous ceremonial ballet succeeding the comedy, he was seized with a suffocating attack, and left the playhouse only to expire shortly afterward.]
Every one must be struck with the close resemblance which the famous ceremony in Molière's Malade Imaginaire bears to those scholastic solemnities. Who, indeed, would now remember these antiquated customs of an age from which we are drifting more rapidly in habits of thought and [{505}] in manners than even the stream of time is carrying us, if the comic dramatist had not conferred upon them the immortality of ridicule? Yet it may well be questioned if it were not for Molière's ludicrous picture, from which we have formed our notions and judgment of the old faculty, whether, did we now for the first time discover in some old forgotten document the record of these proceedings, our impression might not be widely different; whether we might not see as much in them to command our respect as to provoke us to laughter. Old-fashioned ways—that is, ways which no longer reflect the ideas and feelings of the day—always lend themselves specially to ridicule. In Molière's time society was beginning to divest itself of its mediaeval garb, and men's minds were being formed, not always to their advantage, on a new type. The old type, however, was so strongly impressed on the medical corporation—in which the traditionary spirit was peculiarly powerful—that the garb, which, as we know, follows rather than precedes a change, still sat naturally on the venerable body of doctors. So entirely was this the case, that where, as individuals, they were more or less under the influence of the Spirit of the day, in their professional capacity they had as it were a second self, clinging tenaciously in all that concerned the faculty to ancient ideas and forms. Of this combination the well-known Guy Patin, to whom we may hereafter have occasion to allude, was a curious example. It is difficult to look upon men performing acts, to them most serious, however absurd in our eyes, as purely ridiculous. Assuredly they have their respectable side. Neither is it easy to believe that all these good doctors, indefatigable as we have seen them, and enthusiastically devoted as they were to their calling, were all such pedantic idiots as Molière has painted them. It is a well-known fact that the inimitable piece of buffoonery to which we have alluded was concocted in the salon of Madame de la Sablière, a noted rendezvous of the "beaux esprits" of the day. Molière furnished the canvas and laid-in the colors of the first painting; but his witty friends had each some lively touch to contribute. It is probable that two or three of the medical profession—men who were more or less sceptical as to the perfection of every saying and doing of the faculty, and with whom Molière is known to have lived in habits of intimacy—were present at these meetings, and supplied many of the technical expressions. It does not follow that these physicians were actuated by any spite against their order, any more than Cervantes hated chivalry, to which, while quizzing its eccentricities and exaggerations, he unwittingly gave a fatal blow.
One remark forcibly suggests itself, when we consider the hyperbolical praise which the medical body so liberally administered to itself, and with which Molière has made us familiar in passages of his comedies which can scarcely be considered as caricatures. We are apt severely to censure as grossly servile and almost idolatrous the flattery with which the men of letters and courtiers of Louis XIV.'s reign dosed the monarch. But some abatement must be made of this harsh judgment when we find the reception of an obscure bachelor to his degree made the occasion of a prodigal expenditure of the most exaggerated metaphors. He is a new star, a pharos destined to shed its light on the latest posterity; he is the compendium of all virtue, talent, and glory; he equals, if he does not surpass, all the heroes of antiquity. And if such were the eulogies bestowed on a successful candidate for the honors of the faculty, what was the laudation reserved for the faculty itself, the source of all this splendor? Hyperbole went mad. We find, for instance, an orator taking as his text, "The physician is like to God." He sets forth this resemblance in the attributes of power, beneficence, mercy: physicians are [{506}] the ministers and the "colleagues" of God. But this is not enough. The orator kindles as he proceeds: all comes from God; ergo, evil as well as good. "But from you, medical gentlemen," he exclaims, "comes nothing but good. Doubtless God is just in afflicting us, and has his reasons. But still evil is evil, and medicine is always salutary." (Rather a bold assertion!) The conclusion is, that we should owe more to the physician than to God, seeing that, while the Lord wounds, the physician heals, did we not after all owe to him the physician himself.
One lost trait to complete this sketch of the old customs of the faculty. Molière has hinted at it in the closing line of the exordium of his comic president:
"Salus, honos, et argentum,
Atque bonum appetitum. "
The culinary and gastronomic side of the medical physiognomy is not the least curious. Brillat-Savarin, who has made a classified catalogue of gourmands, places physicians under the head of gourmands by virtue of their profession. It is, he says, in the nature of things. Everything contributes to make them gluttons. The hopes and the gratitude of patients combine to pamper them. They are crammed like pigeons, and at the end of six months have become irretrievable gourmands. There seem to be reasonable grounds for this accusation. In what may be called the heroic age of the faculty—the palmy days of medical ceremonial, which had already begun to decline in Molière's time, although the ancient forms were in the main preserved—corporation repasts were frequent. After every examination the doctors dined; after every thesis they dined—on this latter occasion at the expense of the successful candidate. On St. Luke's Day they dined; and again when the accounts were given in, and when a dean was elected. When a chair of botany was erected; a "botanic banquet" ensued as a matter of course. But it would be too tedious to enumerate all these feastings, since almost everything furnished the pretext for an entertainment. At one time, the faculty even officially appointed two of their number to taste the wines before their repasts. Under the pretence of hygienic considerations, questions appertaining to what may be styled transcendental cookery were of frequent occurrence; and it was gravely debated whether salad ought to be eaten at the first course, and potatoes at the second; whether it were good to eat nuts after fish, cheese after meat, etc.
We will conclude with some reflections of a more pleasing character as to the spirit which animated the old faculty. Some of its statutes are memorials of the virtuous principles which, in spite of all absurdities of form, were held in honor by their body. For instance, the doctors were enjoined to cultivate friendship with one another. They were never to visit a patient without an express invitation. The juniors were always to rise before the ancients, and the ancients were to protect the juniors, and treat them with kindness. The secrets of the sick were sacred; and no one was to reveal what he had seen, heard, or so much as suspected in a patient's house. Gravity, mildness, and decorum were to reign in their assemblies, where each was to speak in his proper order and without interrupting others. Disorderly behavior, recriminations, and abusive language are to be banished for ever from the faculty. These regulations are admirable; and at any rate bear witness to the sound views of the body of whose collective wisdom they were the expression. Indeed the great strength of the faculty resided in its attachment to its salutary moral laws. Mere formalism would never have possessed such vitality and endurance. When we penetrate into the life of this old society, we meet with a tone of genuine uprightness, manliness, and candor quite refreshing to the mind. We may add that [{507}] most of the great liberal professions—the bar, the magistracy, and the educational bodies of the seventeenth century—make the same favorable impression upon us. They exhibit the bourgeoisie of the day in a respectable light, as manifesting in no ordinary degree the qualities of probity, disinterestedness, and the family spirit, with all the sober virtues and homely charities which appertain to it.
We naturally know less of the life of the students; but it was probably moulded upon that of their elders and superiors. Even Molière's pompous Thomas Diafoirus, with whose rejection by Angélique for the handsome, rich, and agreeable Cléante the reader of course heartily sympathizes, is by no means a contemptible personage; and when divested of his priggish solemnity, and of all those ludicrous accidental qualities which go to make up the caricature, it cannot be denied that he is a well-principled, sober, and industrious youth. It is, therefore, no unreasonable conclusion to draw, that such was the general character of the body of aspirants to the honors of the venerable doctorate.
CONTINUED
From The Lamp.
ALL-HALLOW EVE; OR, THE TEST OF FUTURITY.
BY ROBERT CURTIS.
CHAPTER XX.
For many hundred yards total silence prevailed among our pedestrians. Even Kate Mulvey seemed at a loss what first to say, or whether she ought to be the first to say anything.
Winny, seeing that her poor dog was getting on famously, was rather pleased, "since the thing did happen," that it had been brought to so satisfactory an end after all; and by whom? Her poor dog might have been killed, and would, undoubtedly, but for Emon-a-knock's fortunate arrival at the last moment, and his prompt and successful assistance. There was poor Bully-dhu now, walking to all appearances almost as well as ever, and tied up in his handkerchief. She was glad that the road had become by this time comparatively deserted, for she was timid and frightened, she knew not why. Perhaps she was afraid she might meet her father. She was thinking with herself, too, how far Emon would come with them, and who they might meet who knew them, before he turned back. Emon-a-knock's heart was wishing Kate Mulvey at "Altha Brashia," but his head was not sorry that she was one of the party, for common-sense still kept his heart in subjection.
Thus it was that silence prevailed for some time. Bully-dhu was the first to break it. Whether it was that the whiskey had got into his head, or, as the present fashion would say, that he was "screwed," I know not; but he felt so much better, and had so far recovered his strength and spirits, that he had almost pulled the handkerchief from Emon's hand, and cut an awkward sort of a rigadoon round Winny, barking, and looking up triumphantly in her face. Could it have been that while the others had been thinking of these other things, he had been deluding himself with the notion that he had been the victor in the battle?
"Poor fellow," said Winny, patting him on the head, "I do think there's nothing very bad the matter with you [{508}] after all. Emon, I am beginning to believe you."
"I hope you will always believe me, Winny Cavana," was his reply, and he again sunk into silence.
She could not think why he called her Cavana, and "yet her color rose;" I believe that is the way your experienced novelists would express it in such a case.
A longer silence now ensued. None of the three appeared inclined to talk—Emon less than either. Kate Mulvey, who had always plenty to say for herself, seemed completely dumb—foundered, I was going to add, but I find the word will do as well, perhaps better, in its purity. But, notwithstanding their silence, they were shortening the road to Rathcash. Winny was framing some pretty little speech of thanks to Emon for the trouble he had taken, and for his kindness; but she had so often botched it to her own mind, that she determined to leave it to chance at the moment of parting. Kate had no such excuse for her silence, and yet she was not without one, which to herself quite justified it.
Some few desultory remarks, however, were made from time to time, followed by the still "awkward pause," until they had now arrived at the turn in sight of Kate Mulvey's house.
Emon was determined to go the whole way to the end of the lane turning up to Winny Cavana's. He had not sought this day's happiness; he had studiously avoided such a chance; but circumstances had so far controlled him, that he could not accuse himself of wilful imprudence. Emon knew very well that if a fair opportunity occurred, he would in all probability betray himself in an unequivocal manner to Winny, and he dreaded the result. Up to the present he was on friendly and familiar terms with her; but once the word was spoken, he feared a barrier would be placed between them, which might put an end to even this calm source of happiness. That he loved Winny with a disinterested but devoted love, he knew too well. How far he might hope that she would ever look upon his love with favor, he had never yet ventured to feel his way; and yet his heart told him there was something about herself, which, if unbiassed by circumstances, might bid him not despair. But her rich old father, who had set his heart upon a marriage for his daughter with Tom Murdock, and a union of the farms, he knew would never consent. Neither did he believe that Winny herself would decline so grand a match when it came to the point.
Emon had argued all these matters over and over again in his mind; and the fatal certainty of disappointment, added to a prudent determination to avoid her society as much as possible, had enabled him hitherto to keep his heart under some control.
Kate Mulvey, though "book-sworn" by Winny, if she did not exactly repeat any of the confidential chat she had with her friend about Tom Murdock and himself, felt no hesitation in "letting slip" to Emon, for whom she had a very great regard, a hint or two just casually, as if by accident, that Tom Murdock "was no great favorite" of Winny Cavana's—that the neighbors "were all astray" in "giving them to one another"—that if she knew what two and two made, it would all "end in smoke;" and such little gossiping observations. Not by way of telling Emon, but just as if in the mere exuberance of her own love of chat. But they had the desired effect, now that Emon was likely to have an opportunity of a few words with Winny alone, for Kate was evidently preparing to turn up to her own house when they came to the little gate.
Emon had heard, even in his rank of life, the aristocratic expression that "faint heart never won fair lady;" and a secret sort of self-esteem prompted him to make the most of the fortuitous circumstances which he had not sought for, and which he therefore argued Providence might have thrown [{509}] in his way, "What can she do," thought he, "but reject my love? I shall know the worst then; and I can make a start of it. I'm too long hanging about here like a fool; a dumb priest never got a parish; and barring his acres and his cash—if he has any—I'm a better man than ever he was, or ever will be."
These were his thoughts as they approached the gate, and his heart began to tremble as Kate Mulvey said:
"Winny, dear, I must part with you here. I saw my father at the door. He came to it two or three times while we were coming up the road; and he made a sign to me to go in. I'm sure and certain he's half-starved for his dinner, waiting for me!"
"Well, Kitty, I suppose I can't expect you to starve him out-and-out, and I'll bid you good-bye. I'm all as one as at home now, I may say. Emon—I—won't bring you any further."
"You're not bringing me, Winny; I'm going of my own free will."
"Indeed, Emon, you have been very kind, and I'm entirely obliged to you for all your trouble; but I won't ask you to come any further now."
Kate's father just then came to the door again; and she, thinking that matters had gone far enough between Emon and her friend in her presence, bid them a final good-bye, and turned up to her father, who still stood at the door, and who really did appear to be starving, if one could judge by the position of his hands and the face he made.
The moment had now arrived when Emon must meet his fate, or call himself a coward and a poltroon for the remainder of his natural life, be it long or short.
He chose the least degrading and the most hopeful alternative—to meet his fate.
As Winny held out her hand to him, and asked him to let out the dog, he said:
"No, Winny; I'll give him up to you at the end of the lane; but not sooner."
Winny saw that remonstrance would be no use. She did not wish to quarrel with Emon, and she knew that at all events that was no time or place to do so.
They had not advanced many yards alone, when Winny stopped again, as if irresolute between her wishes and her fears. She had not yet spoken unkindly to Emon, and she had tact enough to know that the first unkind word would bring out the whole matter, which she dreaded, in a flood from his heart, and which she doubted her own power to withstand.
"Emon," she said, "indeed I will not let you come any further—don't be angry."
"Winny, you said first you would not ask me, and now you say you will not let me. Winny Cavana, are you ashamed of any one about Rathcash, or Rathcashmore, seeing you walking with Emon-a-knock?"
"You are very unjust and very unkind, Emon, to say any such thing. I never was ashamed to be seen walking with you; and I'm certain sure the day will never come when you will give me reason to be ashamed of you, Emon-a-knock;—there now, I seldom put the two last words to your name, except when I wish to be kind. But there is a difference between shame and fear, Emon."
"Then you are afraid, Winny?"
"Yes, Emon, but it is only of my father—take that with you now, and be satisfied, but don't fret me by persevering further. Let the dog go—and good-bye."
All this time she was counting the pebbles on the road with her eyes.
"No, Winny, I'll not fret you willingly; but here or there it is all the same, and the truth must come out. Winny, you have been the woodbine that has twined itself and blossomed round my heart for many a long day. Don't wither it, Winny dear, but say I may water and nourish it with the dew [{510}] of your love;" and he would have taken her hand.
"Not here, Emon," she said, releasing it; "are you mad? Don't you see we're in sight of the houses? and gracious only knows who may be watching us! Untie your handkerchief and give be the dog. For goodness sake, Emon dear, don't come any further."
"No, Winny, I'd die before I'd fret you. Here's the dog, handkerchief and all: keep it as a token that I may hope."
"Indeed, Emon, I cannot—don't ask me."
Emon's heart fell, and he stooped to untie the handkerchief in despair, if not in chagrin, at Winny's last words.
But Bully-dhu appeared to know what his mistress ought to have done better than she did herself. It was either that, or Emon's hand shook so, that when endeavoring to untie the knot, the dog got loose, "handkerchief and all," and, turning to his mistress, began to bark and jump up on her, with joy that he had gained his liberty, and was so near home. Winny became frightened lest Bully-dhu's barks might bring notice upon them, and she endeavored to moderate his ecstacy, yet she felt a sort of secret delight that she was in for the handkerchief in spite of herself. She was determined, therefore, not to send poor Emon-a-knock away totally dejected.
"There, Emon dear; for God's sake, I say again, be off home. I'll keep it in memory of the day that you saved my poor dog from destruction—there now, will that do?" and she held out her hand.
"It is enough, Winny dear. This has been the happiest day of my life. May I hope it has only been the first of a long life like it?"
"Now, Emon, don't talk nonsense, but be off home, if you have any wit —good-bye;" and this time she gave him her hand and let it lie in his.
"God bless you, Winny dearest, I oughtn't to be too hard on you. Sure you have raised my heart up into heaven already, and there is something now worth living for." And he turned away with a quick and steady step.
"She called me 'dear' twice," he soliloquized, after he thought she had fairly turned round. But Winny had heard him, and as she took the handkerchief from Bully-dhu's neck, she patted him upon the head, saying, "And you are a dear good fellow, and I'm very fond of you."
Emon heard every part of this little speech except the first word, and Winny managed it to perfection; for though she had used the word "and" in connection with what she had heard Emon say, she was too cunning to let him hear that one small word, which would have calmed his beating heart; and the rest she would fain have it appear had been said to the dog, for which purpose she accompanied the words with those pats upon his head. She spoke somewhat louder, however, than was necessary, if Bully-dhu was alone intended to hear her.
Emon saw the transaction, and heard some of the words—only some. But they were sufficient to make him envy the dog, as he watched them going up the lane, and into the house.
It might be a nice point, in the higher ranks of life, to determine whether, in a "breach of promise" case, the above passages could be relied on as unequivocal evidence on either side of a promise; or whether a young lover would be justified in believing that his suit had been successful upon no other foundation than what had then taken place. But in the rank of life in which Winny Cavana and Edward Lennon moved, it was as good between them as if they had been "book-sworn"—and they both knew it.
Before Winny went to her bed that night she had washed and ironed the handkerchief, and she kept it ever after in her pocket, folded up in a piece of newspaper. It had no mark [{511}] upon it when she got it, but she was not afraid, after some time, to work the letters E. A. K. in the comer, as no one was ever to see it but herself, not even Kate Mulvey.
Old Ned Cavana, after returning from prayers, determined to rest himself for some time before taking a tour of the farm, and lay down upon an old black sofa in the parlor. There is no shame in the truth that an old man of his age soon fell fast asleep. The servant-girl looked in once or twice to tell him that the spotted heifer had cut her leg jumping over a wall, as Jamesy Doyle was turning her out of the wheat; but she knew it would not signify; and not wishing, or perhaps not venturing, to disturb him, she quietly shut the door again. He slept so long, that he was only just getting the spotted heifer's leg stuped in the farm-yard while the scene already described was passing between Winny and young Lennon upon the road. Were it not for that same heifer's leg he would doubtless have been standing at the window watching his daughter's return. Upon such fortuitous accidents do lovers' chances sometimes hang! This was what Winny in her ignorance of her father's employment had dreaded; and hence alone her anxiety that Emon should "be off home, if he had any wit."
On this point she found, however, that all was right when she entered. Her father was just coming in from the farm-yard, "very thankful that it was no worse;" a frame of mind which we would recommend all persons to cultivate under untoward circumstances of any kind.
Of course Winny told her father of the mishap about poor Bully-dhu's battle; she "nothing extenuated, nor set down aught in malice," but told the thing accurately as it had occurred; and did not even hide that young Lennon—she did not call him Emon-a-knock—had ultimately rescued the poor dog from destruction. She did not think it necessary to say how far he had accompanied them on their way home.
"He's a smart young fellow, that Lennon is, an' I'm for ever obliged to him, Winny, for that same turn. There would be no livin' here but for Bully-dhu. I believe it was Emon himself gev him to us, when he was a pup."
"It was, father; and a very fine dog he turned out."
"The sorra-betther, Winny. If it wasn't for him, as I say, betune the fox an' the rogues, we wouldn't have a goose or a turkey, or a duck, or a cock, or a hen, or so much as a chikin, in the place, nor so much, iv coorse, as a fresh egg for our breakfast. Poor Bully, I hope he's not hurt, Winny;" and he stooped down to examine him. "No, no," he cried, "not much; but I'm sure he's thirsty. Here, Biddy, get Bully a dish of bonnia-rommer, and be sure you make him up a good mess afther dinner. That Emon-a-knock, as they call him, is a thundering fine young man; it's a pity the poor fellow is a pauper, I may say."
"No, father, he's not a pauper, and never will be; he's well able to earn his living."
"I know that, Winny, for he often worked here; an' there's not a man in the three parishes laves an honester day's work behind him."
"And does not spend it foolishly, father. If you were to see how nicely he was dressed to-day; and—beside all the help he gives his father and mother."
She was about to add a remark that work was just then very slack, as it was the dead time of the year, but that there was always something to be done about the farm; but second thoughts checked the words as they were rising to her lips; and second thoughts, they say, are best.
Old Ned here turned the conversation by "wondering was the dinner near ready."
Winny was not a little surprised, and a good deal delighted, to hear her father talk so familiarly and so kindly [{512}] of Emon. There never was a time when her father's kind word of him was of more value to her heart. Perhaps it would be an unjust implication of hypocrisy on the old man's part to suggest that he might have only been "pumping" Winny on the subject. She felt, however, that she had gone far enough for the present in the expression of her opinion, and was not sorry when a touch of the faire gurtha put her father in mind of "the dinner."
We, who, of course, can see much further than any of our dramatis personae, and who are privileged to be behind the scenes, could tell Winny Cavana—but that we would not wish to fret her—that Tom Murdock was looking on from his own window at the whole scene between her and young Lennon on the road; and that from that moment, although he could not hear a word that was said, he understood the whole thing, and was generating plans of vengeance and destruction against one or both.
CHAPTER XXI.
Matters were now lying quiet. They were like a line ball at billiards which cannot be played at, and there was nothing "to go out for" by any of the players in this double match. But occasionally something "comes off," in even the most remote locality, which creates some previous excitement, and forms the subject of conversation in all ranks. Sometimes a steeple-chase, "five-sovereigns stakes, with fifty or a hundred added," forms a speculation for the rich; with a farmer's class-race for twenty pounds, without any stakes, for horses bona fide the property, etc.
A great cricket-match once "came off" not very far from the locality of our story, when Major W—n lived at Mount Campbell, between the officers of the garrison at Boyle and a local club. We belonged to the major's province of constabulary at the time, and, as members, were privileged to take part therein. The thing was rather new in that part of the world at the time, but had been well advertised in the newspapers for the rich, and through the police for the poor; and the consequence was—the weather being very fine—that a concourse of not less than a thousand persons were assembled to witness the game. There can be little doubt that some of the younger portion, at least, of our dramatis personae in this tale were spectators upon the occasion. It was within their county, and not an unreasonable distance from the homes we are now writing of.
January and February had now passed by in the calm monotony of nothing to excite the inhabitants of the Rathcashes. Valentine's Day, indeed, had created a slight stir amongst some of the girls who had bachelors, or thought they had; and many a message was given to those going into C.O.S., to "be sure and ask at the post-office for a letter for me," "and for me," "and for me." A few, very few indeed, got valentines, and many, very many, did not.
It was now March, and even this little anxiety of heart had subsided on the part of the girls; some from self-satisfaction at what they got, and others from disappointment at what they did not.
During this time Tom Murdock had seen Winny Cavana occasionally. It would be quite impossible, with one common lane to both houses, and those houses not more than three hundred yards apart, that any plan of Winny's, less than total seclusion, could have prevented their sometimes "coming across" one another; and total seclusion was a thing that Winny Cavana would not subject herself to on account of any man "that ever stepped in shoe-leather." "What had she to him, or to be afraid of him for? Let him mind his own business and she'd mind hers. But for one half hour she'd never shut herself up [{513}] on his account. Let him let her alone."
Tom Murdock was not without a certain degree of knowledge of the female heart, nor of a certain amount of tact to come round one, in the least objectionable way; at all events, so as not to foster any difference which might have taken place. He did not appear to seek her society, nor did he seek to avoid it. When they met, which was really always by accident, he was civil, and sufficiently attentive to show that he harbored no ill-will against her, and respected her enough to make it worth his while not to break with her. He was now certain of a walk home with her on Sundays from mass. On these occasions her father was generally with her, but this Tom considered rather to be wished for than otherwise, as he could not venture, even if alone, to renew the forbidden subject. But he knew the father had approved of his suit, and his wish was now to establish a constant civility and kindness of manner, which would keep him at least on his side, if it did not help by its quietness to make Winny herself think better of him.
What had passed between Winny and Emon was not likely in a human heart to keep up the constrained indifference which that young man had burdened himself with toward her. He had, therefore, upon two or three Sundays ventured again to go to the chapel of Rathcash.
It is not very easy to account for, or to explain how such minor matters fall out, or whether they are instinctively arranged impromptu; but upon each occasion of Emon having re-appeared at Rathcash chapel, Tom Murdock's walk home with Winny was spoiled; more particularly if it so happened that her father did not go to prayers.
Emon-a-knock was never devoid of a considerable portion of self-esteem and respect. Though but a daily laborer, his conduct and character were such as to have gained for him the favorable opinion and the good word of every one who knew him; and apart from the innate goodness of his disposition, he would not lose the high position he had attained in the hearts of his neighbors for the consideration of any of those equivocal pleasures generally enjoyed by young men of his class. He felt that he could look old Ned Cavana or old Mick Murdock straight in the face, rich as they were. He felt quite Tom Murdock's equal in everything, mentally and physically. In riches alone he could not compare with him, but these, he thanked God, belonged to neither mind nor body.
Thus far satisfied with himself, he always stopped to have a few words with Winny, when chance—which he sometimes coaxed to be propitious— threw him in her way. Even from Rathcash on Sundays he felt entitled now, perhaps more than ever, to join her as far as his own way home lay along with hers, and this although her father was along with her. If Tom Murdock had joined them, which was only natural, living where he did, Emon was more determined than ever to be of the party, chatting to them all, Tom included; thus showing that he was neither afraid of them nor ashamed of himself.
The first Sunday after the dog-fight was the first that Emon had gone to the chapel of Rathcash for a pretty long time. But, as a matter of course, he must go there on that day to inquire for poor Bully-dhu, and to ascertain if Winny Cavana had recovered her fright and fatigue. We have seen that Winny had told her father sufficient of the transaction of poor Bully's mishap to make it almost a matter of necessity that he should allude to it to Emon, if it were merely to thank him for "the trouble he had taken" in saving the dog. When Winny heard the words her father had used, she thought them cold—"the trouble he had taken!" her heart suggested that he might have said, and said truly, "the risk he had run."
But, Winny, there had really been no risk; and recollect that you had [{514}] used the very same word "trouble" to Emon yourself, when you knew no more of his mind than your father does now.
Tom had walked with them on this occasion, and old Ned's civility to "that whelp"—a name he had not forgotten—helped to sour his temper more than anything which had passed between Winny Cavana and him. But all these things he was obliged to bear, and he bore them well, upon "the-long-lane-that-has-no-turning" system.
But now a cause of anticipated excitement began to be spoken of in the neighborhood; how, or why, or by whom the matter had been set on foot, was a thing not known, and of no consequence at the time. Yet Tom Murdock was at the bottom of it—and for a purpose.
There existed not far from about the centre of the locality of our story a large flat common, where flocks of geese picked the short grass in winter, and over which the peewit curled with a short circular flap, and a timid little hoarse scream, in the month of May. It consisted of about sixty acres of hard, level, whitish sod, admirably adapted for short races, athletic sports, and manly exercises of every kind. It formed a sort of amphitheatre, surrounded by low green hills, affording ample space and opportunity for hundreds, ay thousands, of spectators to witness any sport which might be inaugurated upon the level space below.
Upon one or two occasions, but not latterly, hurling-matches had come off upon Glanveigh Common. At one time these hurling-matches were very common in Ireland, and were considered a fair test of the prowess of the young men of different parishes. Many minor matches had come off from time to time, but they were of a mixed nature, got up for the most part upon the spot, and had not been spoken of beforehand—they were mere impromptus amongst the younger lads of the neighborhood. The love of the game, however, had not died out even amongst those of riper years; and there were very many men, young and old, whose hurls were laid up upon lofts, and who could still handle them in a manner with which few parts of Ireland could compare. Amongst those Tom Murdock was pre-eminent. He had successfully led the last great match, when not more than twenty years of age, between the parishes of Rathcash and Shanvilla, against a champion called "Big M'Dermott," who led for the latter parish. He was considered the best man in the province to handle a hurl, and his men were good; but Tom Murdock and the boys of Rathcash had beaten them back three times from the very jaws of the goal, and finally conquered. But Shanvilla formally announced that they would seek an early opportunity to retrieve their character. The following Patrick's Day would be three years since they had lost it.
Tom Murdock thought this a good opportunity to forward a portion of his plans. A committee was formed of the best men in Rathcash parish to send a challenge to the men of Shanvilla to hurl another match on Glanveigh Common upon Patrick's Day. Tom Murdock himself was not on the committee; he had too much tact for that. "Big M'Dermott" had emigrated, leaving a younger brother behind him—a good man, no doubt; but as the Shanvilla boys had been latterly bragging of Emon-a-knock as their best man, Tom had no doubt that the challenge would be accepted, and that young Lennon, as a matter of course, would be chosen as their champion. Had he doubted this last circumstance, he might not have cared to originate the match at all. He had not forgotten the poker-and-tongs jig about four months before. His humiliation on that occasion had sunk deeper into his heart than any person who witnessed it was aware of; and although never afterward adverted to, had still to be avenged. If, then, at the head of his hundred men, he could beat back young Lennon with an equal number twice out of thrice before the assembled parishes, it would in [{515}] some degree wash out the humiliation of his defeat in the dance.
Upon the acceptance of this challenge not only the character of the Shanvilla boys depended, but their pride and confidence in Emon-a-knock as their best man.
At once, upon the posting of the challenge, with the names of the committee, upon the chapel-gate of Rathcash, a counter-committee was formed for Shanvilla, and, taking a leaf from their opponents' book, their best man's name was left out. But he at the same time accepted the leadership of the party, which was unanimously placed upon him.
Thus far matters had tended to the private exultation of Tom Murdock, who was determined to make Patrick's Day a day of disgrace to his rival, for since the scene he had witnessed with the dog and the handkerchief he could no longer doubt the fact.
The whole population of the parishes were sure to be assembled, and Winny Cavana, of course, amongst the rest. What a triumph to degrade him in her eyes before his friends and hers! Surely he would put forth all his energies to attain so glorious a result. He would show before the assembled multitude that, physically at least, "that whelp" was no match for Tom Murdock—his defeat Pat the poker-and-tongs jig was a mere mischance.
The preliminaries were now finally settled for this, the greatest hurling-match which for many years had come off, or was likely to come off, in the province. Rathcash had been victorious on the last great occasion of the kind, just three years before, when Tom Murdock had led the parish, as a mere stripling, against "Big M'Dermott" and his men. The additional three years had now given more manliness to Tom's heart, in one sense at least, and a greater development to the muscle and sinew of his frame than he could boast of on that occasion. He was an inch, or an inch and a half, over Emon-a-knock in height, upwards of a stone-weight heavier, and nearly two years his senior in age. His men were on an average as good men, and as well accustomed to the use of the hurl, as those of Shanvilla—their hurls were as well seasoned and as sound, and their pluck was proverbially high. What wonder, then, if Tom Murdock anticipated a certain, if not an easy, victory?
As hurling, however, has gone very much out of fashion since those days, and is now seldom seen—never, indeed, in the glorious strength of two populous parishes pitted against each other—it may be well for those who have never seen or perhaps heard of it, to close this chapter with a short description of it.
A large flat field or common, the larger the better, is selected for the performance. Two large blocks of stone are placed about fifteen or twenty feet apart toward either end of the field. One pair of these stones forms the goal of one party, and the other pair that of their opponents. They are about four hundred yards distant from each other, and are generally whitewashed, that they may the more easily catch the attention of the players. A ball, somewhat larger than a cricket-ball, but pretty much of the same nature, is produced by each party, which will be more fully explained by-and-bye. The hurlers assemble, ranged in two opposing parties in the centre between the goals. The hurls are admirably calculated for the kind of work they are intended to perform—viz., to puck the ball toward the respective goals. But they would be very formidable weapons should a fight arise between the contending parties. This, ere now, we regret to say, has not unfrequently been the case—leading sometimes to bloodshed, and on, a few occasions to manslaughter, if not to murder. The hurl is invariably made of a piece of well-seasoned ash. It is between three and four feet long, having a flat surface of about four inches broad and an inch thick, turned at the lower end. Many and close searches in those days have been made through the woods. [{516}] and in cartmaker's shops, for pieces of ash with the necessary turn, grown by nature in the wood; but failing this fortunate chance, the object was pretty well effected by a process of steaming, and the application of cramps, until the desired shape was attained. But these were never considered as good as those grown designedly by nature for the purpose.
The contending parties being drawn up, as we have said, in the centre of the ground, the respective leaders step forward and shake hands, like two pugilists, to show that there is no malice. Although this act of the leaders is supposed to guarantee the good feeling of the men as well, yet the example is generally followed by such of the opposing players as are near each other.
"A toss" then takes place, as to which side shall "sky" their ball. These balls are closely inspected by the leaders of the opposite parties, and pronounced upon before the game begins. There is no choice of goals, as the parties generally set them up at the end of the field next the parish they belong to. Whichever side wins "the toss" then "skies" their ball, the leader throwing it from his hand to the full height of his power, and "the game is on." But after this no hand, under any circumstances, is permitted to touch the ball; an apparently unnecessary rule, for it would be a mad act to attempt it, as in all probability the hand would be smashed to pieces. The game then is, to puck the ball through the opponents' goal. Two goal-masters are stationed at either goal, belonging one to each party, and they must be men of well-known experience as such. Their principal business is to see that the ball is put fairly between the stones; but they are not prohibited from using their hurls in the final struggle at the spot, the one to assist, the other to obstruct, as the state of their party may required.
Sometimes a game is nearly won, when a fortunate young fellow on the losing side slips the ball from the crowd to the open, where one of his party curls it into the air with the flat of his hurl, and the whole assembly—for there is always one—hears the puck it gets, sending it half-way toward the other goal. The rush to it then is tremendous by both sides, and another crowded clashing of hurls takes place.
When the ball is fairly put through the goal of one party by the other, the game is won, and the shouts of the victors and their friends are deafening.
CHAPTER XXII.
A hurling match in those days was no light matter, particularly when it was on so extensive a scale as that which we are about to describe—between two large parishes. They were supposed, and intended to be, amicable tests of the prowess and activity of the young men at a healthy game of recreation, as the cricket-matches of the present day are that of the athletic aristocracy of the land. In all these great matches, numbers of men, women, and children used to collect to look on, and cheer as the success of the game swayed one way or the other; and as most of the players were unmarried men, it is not to be wondered at if there were many young women amongst the crowd, with their hearts swaying accordingly.
It had been decided by the committees upon the occasion of this great match, that a sort of distinguishing dress—they would not, of course, call it uniform—should be worn by the men. To hurl in coats of any kind had never in this or any other parish match been thought of. The committee left the choice of the distinguishing colors to the respective leaders, recommending, however, that the same manner should be adopted of exhibiting it. It was agreed that sleeves of different colors should be worn over the shirt sleeves, with a broad piece of ribbon tied at the throat to match.
Tom Murdock had chosen green for his party, and not only that, but [{517}] with a determination to make himself popular, and to throw his rival as far as possible into the background, had purchased a sufficient quantity of calico and ribbon to supply his men gratis with sleeves and neck-ties.
Poor Emon-a-knock could not afford this liberality, and he felt the object with which it had been puffed and paraded on the other side for a whole week previous. He was not afraid, however, that his men would think the less of him on that account. They knew he was only a laboring man, depending upon his day's wages; and many of those who would wield the hurl by his side upon the 17th of March were well-to-do sons of comfortable farmers. Many, no doubt, were laboring boys like himself, and many servant-boys to the farming class.
A deputation of Shanvillas had waited on Emon-a-knock to ascertain his choice of a color for their sleeves and ribbon.
He thought for a few moments, and then taking a red pocket-handkerchief from his box he said, "Boys, this is the only color I can think of. It is as good as any."
"I don't like it, Emon," said M'Dermott, the next best man in the parish.
"Why so, Phil?" said another.
"Well, I hardly know why. It is too much the color of blood. I'd rather have white."
"Don't be superstitious, Phil a-wochal," said Emon; "white is a cowardly color all over the world, and red is the best contrast we can have to their color."
"So be it," said Phil.
"So be it," re-echoed the rest of the deputation; "sure, Emon has a right to the choice. Lend us the handkerchief, that we may match it as near as possible."
"And welcome, boys; here it is; but take good care of it for me, as it is the only one I have now. "
The deputation did not know, but the readers do, that he had given the fellow to it—off the same piece—to Winny Cavana with the dog. Hence his emphasis upon the last word.
No time was lost by the deputation when they left Emon. They had scarcely got out of hearing, when Phil M'Dermott said, "Boys, you all know that Tom Murdock has bestowed his men with a pair of sleeves, and half a yard of ribbon each. Now if he was as well liked as he lets on, he needn't have done that; and in my opinion he done it by way of casting a slur upon our man's poverty. Tom Murdock can afford a hundred yards of green calico and fifty yards of tuppenny ribbon very well;—at least he ought to be able to do so. Now I vote that amongst the best of us we bestow our man with a pair of silk sleeves, and a silk cap and ribbon, for the battle. There's my tenpenny-bit toward it."
"An' I second that vote, boys; there's mine," said another.
"Aisy, boys, an' listen to me," broke in a young Solon, who formed one of the deputation. "There's none of us that wouldn't give a tenpenny bit, if it was the last he had, to do what you say, Phil; but the whole thing—sleeves, ribbon, and cap—won't cost more than a couple of crowns; an' many's the one of the Shanvilla boys would like to have part in it. I vote all them that can afford it may give a fippenny-bit apiece, an' say nothing about it to the boys that can't afford it. If we do, there isn't a man of them but what id want to put in his penny; and I know Emon would not like that. It wouldn't sound well, an' might be laughed at by that rich chap, Murdock. Here's my fippenny, Phil."
There was much good sense in this. It met not only the approbation of the whole deputation, but the pockets of some, and was unanimously adopted. The necessary amount of money was made up before an hour's time; and a smart fellow—the very Solon who had spoken, and who was as smart of limb as he was of mind—was despatched forthwith to C.O.S. for three yards of silk and two yards of ribbon, to match as nearly as possible [{518}] Emon-a-knock's handkerchief, which was secured in the crown of his cap.
The very next afternoon—for Shanvilla did not sleep on its resolve— there was no lion in the street for them;—the same deputation walked up to Emon's house at dinner-hour, when they knew he would be at home. He had just finished, and was on his way out, to continue a job of planting "a few gets" of early potatoes on the hill behind the house, when he met them near the door.
M'Dermott carried a paper parcel in his hand.
"Well, boys," said Emon, "what's the matter now? I thought we settled everything yesterday morning."
"You did, Emon a-wochal; but we had a trifle to do after we left you. I hope you done nothing about your own sleeves as yet."
"No, Phil, I did not; but never fear, I'll be up to time. But I don't wish to change the color, if that's what brought you."
"The sorra change Emon; it is almost too late for that now. But some of the boys heerd that Tom Murdock is givin' his men, every man of 'em, sleeves an' ribbon for this match. We don't expect the likes from you, Emon; and we don't mind that fellow's puffery and pride. We think it better that the Shanvilla boys should present their leader with one pair of sleeves than that he should give a hundred pairs to them. We have them here, Emon a-wochal; an' there isn't a boy in the parish of Shanvilla, or a man, woman, or child, that won't cheer to see you win in them."
"An' maybe some one in the parish of Rathcash," whispered Solon to Phil.
Here Phil M'Dermott untied his parcel and exhibited the sleeves, finished off in the best style by his sister Peggy. What would fit Phil would fit Emon; and she was at no loss upon that point.
"Here they are, made and all, Emon. Peggy made them on my fit; and we wish you luck to win in them. Faix, if you don't, it won't be your fault nor ours. Here's your hankicher; you see there isn't the differ of a milthiogue's wing in the two colors."
Perhaps it was the proximity to Boher-na-milthiogue that had suggested the comparison.
"Indeed, boys, I'm entirely obliged to you, and I don't think we can fail of success. It shall not be my fault if we do, and I'm certain it won't be yours. But I'm sorry—"
"Bidh a hurst, Emon; don't say wan word, or I'll choke you. But thry them on."
Emon's coat was forthwith slipped off his back and thrown upon the end of a turf-stack hard by, and Phil M'Dermott drew the sleeves upon his arms, and tied them artistically over his shoulders.
"Dam' the wan, Emon, but they were med for you!" said Phil, smoothing them down toward the wrists.
"Divil a word of lie in that, any way, Phil," said Solon. "Tell us something we don't know."
"Well, I may tell them that you have too much wit in your head to have any room for sense," replied M'Dermott, seemingly a little annoyed at the remark.
Solon grinned and drew in his horns.
"They are, indeed, the very thing," said Emon, turning his head from one to the other and admiring them. He could have wished, however, that it had been a Rathcash girl who had made them instead of Peggy M'Dermott. "But I cannot have everything my own way," sighed he to himself.
M'Dermott then quietly removed Emon's hat with one hand, while with the other he slily placed die silk cap jauntily upon his head. There was a general murmur of approbation at the effect, in which Emon himself could not choose but join. He felt that he was looking the thing.
After a sufficient time had been allowed for the admiration and verdict of the committee as to their fit and appearance, Phil M'Dermott took them [{519}] off again, and, folding them up carefully in the paper, handed it to Emon, wishing him on his own part, and that of the whole parish, health to wear and win in them on Patrick's Day— "Every man of as will have our own colors ready the day before," he added.
Emon then thanked them heartily, and turned into the house, to show them to his father, and the deputation returned to their homes.
TO BE CONTINUED. [Page 697]
Translated from the German.
MALINES AND WÜRZBURG.
SKETCH OF THE CATHOLIC CONGRESSES HELD AT MALINES AND WÜRZBURG.
BY ANDREW NIEDERMASSER
CHAPTER IV.
CHARITY.
Himioben, in a speech delivered at the convention of Salzburg, September 24, 1857, spoke as follows: "All grumblers and pessimists should strive to understand that we live in a great age—great because it is destined to witness the triumph of the truth. I feel that it is a great age, and I thank God for the happiness of living in the nineteenth century. Except the age of the apostles and that of Constantine, no period in the history of the Church can compare with the present."
Notwithstanding my frequent and intimate intercourse with some of the most extreme pessimists in Germany, I own I am convinced of the correctness of Himioben's opinion. The first and principal reason of this conviction is the heroic achievements of Christian charity, of which every part of the globe has been the scene in our days. Where such deeds are done as those which we have witnessed and heard of so often, God's kingdom on earth must flourish. The rays of Christian charity illuminate the whole world.
We cannot deny that the century beginning with the year 1764 and closing in 1864 has been an age of spoliation for the Church. The suppression of the Society of Jesus by King Joseph Emmanuel, of Portugal, in 1759, was followed by a similar measure in France in November, 1764. On April 3, 1767, the Spanish, and on the 20th of November, 1767, the Neapolitan, Jesuits met with the same fate. Joseph II. of Austria, who was chosen Emperor of Germany in 1764, suppressed 700 monasteries in his hereditary dominions, whilst the champions of the French Revolution were still more ruthless in the work of destruction. In Germany most of the Church property was secularized, under circumstances of great cruelty, in 1803. On May 28, 1824, the King of Portugal decreed the suppression of all religious orders in his kingdom. In 1835 the Spanish government confiscated the property of 900 monasteries, and a royal decree, dated March 9, 1836, pronounced the same doom on all the remaining religious houses in Spain. Since 1860 the Sardinians have suppressed at least 800 convents, and the remaining Church property will doubtless fare in the same manner, for the rapacity of these sacrilegious robbers is never appeased. On the 28th November, 1864, the Czar of Russia ordered 125 of the 155 Polish convents to be [{520}] closed, and the monks were treated with great cruelty.
Truly this age of enlightenment can boast of glorious exploits. Sacrilegious robbery has been the order of the day throughout Europe, and civilized governments have trampled under foot rights that have been sanctioned during many successive ages. But their efforts have proved abortive, for the Church flourishes more and more, and develops new seeds of life. The religious orders and congregations of the nineteenth century rival in purity, austerity, and holy zeal the monks of the most prosperous ages of the Church, and devoted disciples of Christian charity are countless as the stars of the firmament, whilst their activity cannot fail to elicit the admiration of every impartial witness. Charity has engaged, in a particular manner, the attention of the Catholic re-unions; it is their proper province—even more so than science and art. It is the culminating point of their activity; for what is religion but practical love of God and our neighbor? Art is the proper object of our fancy; science, of our intellect; and charity, of the will—and free will is the distinguishing characteristic of the human soul. Art requires facility; science, thought; but charity supposes action, the real living act which always turns the balance. Truth must not only be proved, but felt; science and art are the necessary fruits of true religion; science is not the light, but is to give testimony of the light. The object of art is the beautiful; of science, the true; and of charity, the good; but the beautiful, the true, and the good are the three highest categories—the indispensable conditions of intellectual activity—the connecting links between the intellect and God, who is the fountain-head and prototype of all being, as well as the last end of human investigation and aspirations. If it is true that the intellect can find repose only in the unity of three relations, and that we meet with the emblem of the Trinity in all places, then I know not where this trinity finds a more perfect expression than in art, science, and charity. Whoever has comprehended these three, has grasped everything of which man is capable, and an assembly of men who occupy themselves with art, science, and charity is at all times of great importance, for it bears a truly universal character.
Let not the reader expect that I will enter into all the details of the proceedings of the general conventions concerning the subject of Christian charity. To do this would require a book even more voluminous than Bishop Dupanloup's work on Christian charity. At Malines alone how many great and weighty questions were discussed by the first and second sections ("OEuvres Religieuses" and "Economic Chrétienne"), not to speak of the fifth section, which treated of similar subjects. We shall mention a few of the questions proposed. "What," it was asked, "can a layman do to preserve the people in the faith of their ancestors, to induce them to observe the laws of God and the Church, and to teach them to resist strenuously every attack of infidelity?" It was recommended to establish in every city conferences of men, and to explain for them the principal truths of our faith. It was further agreed that, during Lent, the people should have an opportunity of following some spiritual exercises and thus refreshing their souls. Good books, likewise, are to be furnished to the poor at a moderate price. The assembly next debated what measures should be taken to revive pilgrimages not only to Rome and Jerusalem, but also to the places of pilgrimage existing in every country— shrines with the history of which the people should be made familiar. Then followed a discussion on the prevention of abuses, so that every pilgrimage may preserve its religious and edifying character. It was decided to foster all societies whose object is the assembling, edification, and instruction of apprentices and journeymen. How, [{521}] it was asked, are the meetings in the evenings to be carried on? how the religious exercises on Sundays? how are sick members to be visited? etc. The Malines congress also declared that it is the duty of the state to fix by law the age at which children may be allowed to work in factories and mines; to procure healthy dwellings for the workmen; to determine the duration of a day's work; and to see that males and females work in separate apartments. The congress sought to impress on owners of factories the obligation devolving on them to take care of the children of their employees, to provide for their laborers when sick, not to force women suckling infants to work—in short, to treat their employees in a Christian manner. Jean Dollfus, of Mühlhausen, and Lowell in America, were proposed as models worthy of imitation. Amietus Digard and Audigaime, of Paris, placed at the disposition of the central committee the results of their long experience. De Riancey, of Paris, was the zealous advocate of the "Patronage," which he wishes to be founded on charity and freedom, and to spread over every country. It was urgently recommended to establish clubs for journeymen in Romanic countries. Count Lemercier and Marbeau, of Paris, submitted to the consideration of the central committee an elaborate paper on the amelioration of the social condition of the laboring classes, insisting particularly on the necessity of providing them with suitable dwellings; this paper proved of great value in preparing the programme. The debate on the best way of checking the habits of intemperance which are now unfortunately becoming so general among all classes of the laborers, was unusually interesting. During the present century no one has done more to attain this desirable end than Father Matthew in Ireland, who has probably thereby conferred even greater benefits on his countrymen than the great O'Connell. Nor were the prisoners neglected at Malines; the congress declared itself in favor of solitary confinement, and at the same time recommended most earnestly societies for aiding discharged convicts. In short, these men were occupied with all that might prove beneficial to their neighbor.
Among the most prominent speakers in the second section were de Riancey, Count Lemercier, Perin, Jacobs, of Antwerp, Dognée, Lenormant, Digard, Beslay, Jean Casier, F. de Robiano, Count Legrelle, de Richecourt, de Gendt, Vandenest, and especially Viscount de Melun, who, together with Marbeau and Baudon, is the leading spirit of every charitable undertaking in Paris.
In the first section, of which, as before mentioned, Count Villermont was chairman, the proceedings were very animated, nay, at times solemn and grand; the most active members were de Hemptinne, of Ghent, the jurist Wauters, of Ghent, Lamy, of Louvain, de Haulleville, of Brussels, O'Reilly, of Ireland, the Bollandist fathers Gay, Boone, and de Buck, Lemmens, Abel Le Tellier, Count Edgar du Val de Beaulieu, Abbé Kestens, of Louvain, Abbé Géandre, Abbé Geslin, of Kersolon in France, editor of "L'Ouvrier," F. Van Caloen, F. Antoine, Demulliez, Terwecoren, Abbé Gaultier, of Brussels, Fassin, of Verviers, Chevalier Van Troyen, Bosaerts, Verspeyen, Abbé Battaille, de Caulincourt, Paga Sartundur, of Madrid, Malengié, Peeters Beckers, de la Royère, Viscount d'Authenaisse, Devaux, Putsaert, and some others whose names have escaped my memory—all of them edifying Christians, men of strong and sound intellect, seeing the realities of life, and of feeling hearts, sympathizing with the joys and loves of their fellow-men, and taking cognizance of their necessities. They will long be remembered and blessed by the posterity of those to whose spiritual and corporeal wants they have attended.
The religious orders, which in modern times have been so often mocked at and slandered, found many warm [{522}] defenders at Malines. Baron von Gerlache devoted the most brilliant passage of his opening speech to their defence. Woeste, a lawyer of Brussels, delivered a masterly discourse on religious communities before a full meeting of the congress. Many speakers touched on the same theme, and Count Villermont made it the special order of the day. This subject was exhausted by the able speeches of de la Royère, Verspeyen, O'Reilly, Count du Val de Beaulieu, Viscount d'Authenaisse, Lamy, Viscount de Kerckhove, Ducpetiaux, and others.
The Würzburg general convention passed a resolution in favor of religious orders, and at Frankfort the "Broschürenverein" will shortly publish a pamphlet on this subject. The Malines congress also resolved to encourage popular works on the origin, the nature, and the spread of religious orders, and to give a fair exposition of the manifold benefits they have conferred on mankind. It was also recommended to publish the lives of the founders of these societies, to give an account of their history in schools and other educational institutions, and, by means of the pulpit and the press, to make known as widely as possible the principles of religious orders. In this way the members of these societies will be compensated to some extent for the countless slanders and calumnies which are continually heaped on them. The laymen present at Malines pledged themselves to pass no opportunity of rendering them a service, and defending their rights; of showing them reverence, and of spreading more and more their communities.
For the sake of completeness, I shall mention the names of a few who spoke at Malines in the fifth section, Religious Liberty, where many important questions were discussed. It is impossible to enter into details concerning all, for who can be present in five places at the same time? Beside, there were assembled at Malines and Würzburg more than 7,000 delegates, so that I cannot give even the names of all. In a grand painting the artist does not represent all his figures in full; he contents himself with giving us an outline of their features. Dechamps and Neut, men of great merit and able to control the most animated debate, presided in this section. Dumortier, of Brussels, and Coomans, of Antwerp, both veteran members of the Belgian parliament, managed admirably the details of business. Senator Della Faille and Count de Thenx, as well as Cardinal Sterex, made many valuable suggestions from the rich fund of their experience. The young and able jurist, Woeste, of Brussels, Digard, of Paris, and the journalist Lasserre were the most active members of this section. Here, too, spoke Don Almeida, of Portugal, an orator sweet and strong as the wines of his native country, and one of the most handsome men in the congress. Here, also, we renew our acquaintance with Ducpetiaux, Dognée, of Villers, Verspeyen, Geslin, of Kersolon, and Abbé Géandre. To these names we may add those of Don Ignatio Montes de Oca, grand almoner of the Emperor of Mexico, Abbé Pacquet, professor of the University of Quebec, in Canada, Canon Rousseau, Jalheau, Stoffelt, Collinet, Landrien, de Smedt, Baron von Montreuil, Chevalier Schouteste, Nellaroya, Wigley, of London, Ch. Thellier, of Poncheville, and Abbé Huybrechts. Abbé Mullois, of Paris, is well known in Germany. In this section we also noticed Generals de Capiaumont, Baron Grindl, and Lamoy, whose remarks were always received with applause.
Le Camus, of Paris, represented the "Society for the Diffusion of Good Books," founded in 1862 by Viscount de Melun. More than 12,000 good books have already been distributed. The executive committee consists of eighteen members, who are assisted in their charitable labors by another committee of fifty.
And now we shall bid farewell to Malines.
The German conventions have called into existence many charitable institutions. Foremost among these is the Society of St. Boniface, founded at Regensburg in 1849. Even long before, Count Joseph von Stolberg had visited every part of the German empire to enlist the sympathies of high and low for the noble object of this society, and had thus prepared the way for its establishment. At Regensburg he was elected president, and thus crowned his labors. Since its institution the society has founded 67 missionary parishes, 114 chapels, and 98 schools for about 100,000 Catholics in northern Europe. Forty-two of these stations are entirely maintained by the association, whilst most of the remaining ones receive considerable pecuniary assistance. Much, however, remains to be done; many stations will go to ruin unless speedy aid is afforded them. All Catholic Germany must contribute, by its exertions, its prayers, and its sacrifices, to bring to a successful issue the greatest of our national undertakings, the reunion of all Germany in the one true faith.
An annual report of the results achieved by this society is presented to the general conventions. At Würzburg Canon Bieling spoke in the name of Bishop Conrad Martin, of Paderborn, who by his great work has created an immense sensation among the German Protestants. Great exertions are making to spread the society of St. Boniface; may they prove successful.
At Würzburg the Hungarian Society of St. Ladislaus was represented by Canon Kubinszky, and the Bavarian Missionary Society by Monsignore Baron von Overkamp.
I must next speak of the St Joseph's Society. It was founded at Aix-la-Chapelle for the purpose of enabling the German Catholics living at Paris, London, Havre, and Lyons to secure places of divine worship. Canon Prisac, of Aix-la-Chapelle, is the business manager of the society, and is assisted in his labors by Laurent Lingens and others. During the first two years of its existence the society accomplished very little.
The missionaries of the poor Catholic Germans in the great emporiums of England and France have already been three times in our midst. For years the pastor of the Germans in London, Rev. Arthur Dillon Purcell, has done everything in his power to establish the German mission in that city on a sure basis, and his efforts have at last been crowned with success. Although an Englishman by birth, he speaks our mother tongue very fluently and without fault. His speeches will not inspire enthusiasm, but will convince and obtain their end. At Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1862, the German mission in London was represented by Adler, missionary priest of the diocese of Würzburg, and at Frankfort, in 1863, by Böddinghaus, of Münster. The Jesuit father Modeste has thrice urged the claims of the Germans in Paris. He is a native of Lorraine, and, therefore, speaks French and German equally well. His speeches are carefully prepared, and produce a great sensation, for they are addressed not only to the mind but also to the heart. The Lazarist Müllijans, a native of Cologne, spoke for the German mission in the Quartier St. Marceau, which has been committed to his care. Abbé Braun, who has done much for the Germans in Paris, was likewise present at the Würzburg meeting. Father Lambert, of Havre, a pious and devoted priest, privately represented to us the misery of the German emigrants in the French seaport. But of what use are these cries for help, unless we are willing to make some sacrifice? Will not twenty-five million German Catholics do something for their poor forlorn brethren?
In the third place, I must mention the journeymen associations. There are at present more than 400 of these in Germany, and a few in Switzerland and Belgium. Of late, similar [{524}] societies have been established at Bucharest, Rome, Paris, London, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee. The prefects of the society at Cologne, Vienna, and Munich have lately received special marks of esteem from the Holy Father in recognition of their services, whilst the Emperor Francis Joseph has honored the Vienna association by his presence, and the young King of Bavaria, Louis II., has accepted the protectorship of all the Bavarian associations. The second general convention at Mayence earnestly recommended these societies, but Kolping of Cologne was the instrument chosen by God to undertake and carry out the great work. Of Kolping it may truly be said that he has the welfare of mankind at heart, and thousands will bless his name. In his own way, he is one of the foremost social reformers of the nineteenth century. At Würzburg he convened many of the prefects from every part of Germany, and secured the future of the societies by the introduction of the religious element. Kolping is not only a powerful speaker, but also a journalist, and one of the most popular writers in Germany. Gruscha, of Vienna, has often taken Kolping's place at the general conventions. As an orator, Gruscha seems to exert a magic power over his hearers, and it is useless to combat his views, for he carries everything before him. Gruscha is general-prefect of all the journeymen associations in Austria. Alban Stolz, the founder of the Freiburg association, has spared no pains to promote Kolping's undertaking. He is the most eminent and successful popular writer in Germany. His pamphlets attract universal attention, and his almanacs are read by thousands. Stolz does not approve of everything done by the Catholic conventions, still he has been present at several of them; for instance, at Aix-la-Chapelle and Frankfort. Müller, of Berlin, is one of the most energetic prefects; he succeeded in founding for the Catholics at Berlin a splendid club-house. He publishes an able religious weekly, and an excellent almanac, founds new missions every day, and does all in his power to extend the kingdom of Christ in the north of Germany. He is a talented and interesting speaker, although his style is not very harmonious or elegant. George Mayr, of Munich, general-prefect of more than a hundred associations in Bavaria, and a general favorite, has built, probably, the finest club-house in Germany. The most zealous promoter of this enterprise was Dr. Louis Merz, of Munich, who spared neither labor nor sacrifice whenever there was question of furthering the interests of the Church: his memory is enshrined in the hearts of all his friends.
The memorial submitted by Kolping to the German bishops was signed by the following diocesan prefects: Beckert, of Würzburg, Pohholzer, of Augsburg, J. Weizenhofer, of Eichstädt, Benkcr, of Bamberg, Schaeffer, of Treves, G. Arminger, of Linz, B. Hölbrigl, of St. Pölten, Max Jäger, of Freiburg, F. Riedinger, of Spires, F. Nacke, of Paderborn, and the prefects, Jos. Mayr, of Innsbruck, F. Höpperger, of Agram, and C. Ziegler, of Rottenburg.
To mention more names would be tedious, but I hope and trust that God will reward in a special manner the prefects of these societies. For the last few years the social question has occupied the attention of the Catholic conventions, and Rossbach, of Würzburg, Vosen, of Cologne, and Schüren, of Aix-la-Chapelle, have delivered interesting discourses on this subject.
The reading-room associations and social clubs or casinos next demand a notice. We are justly proud of possessing four hundred Catholic journeymen associations, but we will have more reason to boast when there will be in Germany two or three hundred casinos, all united together by the closest ties, and particularly when we will again possess several purely Catholic universities, and when our [{525}] scholars and educated men will form reunions such as that established by five hundred students of Louvain in Belgium previous to the congress of 1864.
Adams, a lawyer of Coblenz, has, so to say, identified himself with these clubs. The affairs of the casino in his own native city are conducted by him with extraordinary skill, and to his exertions chiefly the Rhenish Casino Union, which will be shortly joined by many cities in the Rhenish countries, owes its existence. Adams is an able and pleasing speaker, full of confidence in the future and in the power of sound principles. May Adams become to the social clubs in Germany what Kolping is to the journeymen associations.
Falk, of Mayence, has accomplished very much for the social club of his native city. To him belongs the credit of securing for the Mayence Reading-room Association the celebrated "Frankfurter Hof." On the twentieth of November, 1864, when the casino of the "Frankfurter Hof" was solemnly inaugurated, President Falk delivered his most successful speech, for Falk, although a mechanic, is an orator by no means to be despised by the enemies of the Church. His words are like the blows of a hammer, and his voice sounds like the rolling thunder. Falk's speeches are not distinguished by any artistic merit, but there is something in them which calls forth immense applause, and he generally leaves the tribune amidst deafening cheers.
In Belgium more than twenty casinos have been established since 1863. At the beginning of 1865, Germany could boast of almost fifty similar associations. Let us spare no exertions to promote the welfare of these clubs, and we will soon have a league of Catholic gentlemen extending not only from the Danube to the Rhine, but from the Adriatic to the German ocean.
We must also devote a few words to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Among its most energetic members are Lawyer Lingens, of Aix-la-Chapelle, one of the most regular and active Members of the German conventions, and Von Brentano, a merchant of Augsburg, who is a very eloquent speaker. I must not forget to mention Baudon of Paris, general-president of all the societies of St. Vincent de Paul in France; Legentil also and Meniolle, of Paris, deserve to be noticed.
The energetic and pious Capuchin, Father Theodosius of Chur, in Switzerland, a powerful man of immense stature, will close this array of the champions of charity. He has made many attempts to solve the social question from a Christian point of view, and has displayed incomparable ingenuity in alleviating the miseries of his fellow-men. He has founded congregations, built convents, for them, and established seminaries and colleges which are model institutions; but, above all, he has brought the blessing of God on the Swiss factories, and has introduced contentment and happiness among the working classes. His success in prevailing upon the Swiss capitalists to conduct their factories upon Catholic principles is certainly one of the sublimest triumphs of Christian charity.
The congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, founded by Father Theodosius about twelve years ago in Chur-Ingenbohl, numbers already 112 houses, spread over Switzerland, Bohemia, Austria, Sigmaringen, and Baden.
Among the most prominent Catholics of Switzerland are Sigwart Müller, of Uri, the venerable Councillor Haudt, of Lucerne, Charles von Schmid, of Bödstein, the leader of the Catholics in Aargau, Von Moos, of Lucerne, Engineer Müller, of Altorf, Dean Schlumpf, of Zug, Canon Fiala, of Solothurn, an excellent archaeologist, Canons Winkler and Tanner, of Lucerne, both eminent theologians, P, Segesser, of Lucerne, Canon Keller, of St. Gall, James Baumgartner, the [{526}] ablest Swiss statesman, F. Gallus-Morel, of Einsiedeln, the journalists Schleineger in Aargau, Reding and Eberle in Schwyz, the historian Kopp, of Lucerne, Muelinen, and Burgener, the learned Dr. Schmeitzl, pastor in Glarus, Director Greith, of St. Gall, the painter Deschwander, and the publisher Benzigcr. Count Theodore von Scheerer is the leading spirit of the Catholic societies in Switzerland, and admirably fitted to be the president of the general conventions of the Swiss "Piusverein." 'Mermillod, of Geneva, who for the past eighteen years has incessantly toiled in the vineyard of the Lord, has lately been appointed bishop by Pope Pius IX. Bishop Marilley, of Lausanne, is a modern confessor of the Church, whilst Bishop Greith, of St. Gall, is an eminent scholar.
CHAPTER V.
CONCLUSION.
Not all the doings of the Catholic conventions deserve our approbation, nor is all that is said there worthy of praise. At the sixteen general conventions held since 1848, many absurd and trifling measures have been proposed. Silence is a virtue unknown to many delegates, and conciseness is a quality not to be found in the remarks of many a speaker. These gentlemen should remember the wise old saw, "Ne quid nimis," especially when about to address an assembly. Braggadocio should be mercilessly put down. Some persons there are who every year regale the convention with the self-same concretions; others speak when there is no occasion whatever for opening their mouths; whilst others again are unacquainted with parliamentary rules, and cannot clothe their ideas in suitable language. Many a speaker has been carried away by his enthusiasm, and exposed himself to ridicule; others were mercilessly hooted from the tribune; whilst not a few delivered productions which bore a strange resemblance to an ignis fatuus or an over-done beefsteak. At Malines many words were wasted in mutual compliments, and there was a tendency in several of the orators to court applause by piquant and exaggerated expressions. We must expect that among several thousand delegates there will be many insignificant men, whose chief merit consists in opening now and then the floodgates of their trashy eloquence. Were I to permit myself to indulge in malicious remarks, I might enumerate a long list of singular characters, who were living examples of the faults in question.
For these and other reasons the duties of the presiding officer at the general conventions are by no means easy, still, thus far there has been no want of able presidents, and many of them were chosen from among the nobility. The following gentlemen were honored with this office: Chevalier von Buss; Count Joseph von Stolberg; Baron von Andlaff, who presided both at Linz and at Munich; Baron Wilderich von Ketteler, who was chosen chairman at Münster and at Frankfort; Maurice Lieber, who was elected president at Breslau and at Salzburg; Chevalier von Hartmann presided at Mayence; Count O'Donnell, of Vienna, at Linz and at Prague; Count Brandis, at Aix-la-Chapelle and Freiburg; Councillor Zell at Vienna; A. Reichensperger at Cologne; and Baron von Moy at Würzburg. Germany may justly be proud of these men—men of agreeable manners, distinguished not only by their social position but also by their literary taste and nobility of character, each of whom can boast of an honorable career.
It may not be inappropriate to mention in this place some of the noblemen who graced by their presence the Catholic conventions. Prominent among these were Don Miguel, duke of Braganza, and the young prince, Don Miguel, Prince Charles of Loewenstein-Werthheim, and Prince Charles of [{527}] Isenburg; Count von Hompesch, of Rurich, Count Augustus von Spee, of Heltorf, Count Schaesberg, Baron Felix von Leë, of Missen, Count Hoensbroich, and Baron von Halberg-Broich, of Aix-la-Chapelle, represented the Rhenish nobility; whilst Westphalia was represented by Count von Vischering, the Counts Max and Ferdinand von Galen, the Barons von Schorlemer, the Count von Stolberg, Baron von Twickel, Baron von Ketteler, Baron von Hereman, Baron von Oer, Baron von Drüffel, and others.
Of the Austrian nobles I shall mention Count von Migazzi, Baron von Mayerhofer, a field-marshal of the empire, Count Adolphus Lewis von Barth-Barthenheim, Count Maurice von Fries, Count Henry von Hoyos-Sprenzenstein. Count Henry von O'Donnell, Chevalier von Hartmann, Baron von Stillfried, of Salzburg, a very zealous and energetic man, and Count Frederick von Thun. Count von Thun was chosen vice-president at Würzburg, and delivered a speech. Tall and of a commanding figure, a thorough-bred nobleman, a diplomat well acquainted with the ways of the world, a man of refined manners, a Catholic distinguished by his living faith and his ardent love for the Church, as well as by his intimate knowledge of every shade of religious life, Count Thun appeared as the representative of the Austrian nobility, which, for the most part, is still animated by truly Catholic sentiments, and of the mighty empire, as a delegate from imperial Vienna, where Catholicity is daily acquiring new vigor, and as the bearer of an illustrious name, which reminds every Catholic of the concordat between Francis Joseph and the Pope, which has been so beneficial to the Church in its results. Among the German Church dignitaries Dr. Baudri, coadjutor-bishop of Cologne, is especially distinguished by his zeal for the success of the conventions, many of which he has opened by a glowing discourse. Archbishop Gregory and Bishop Ignatius, of Regensburg, spoke at Munich, and Bishop Wedekind, of Hildestein, at Aix-la-Chapelle. The apostolic words of Bishop von Stahl will always ring in the memory of his hearers. The Bishop of Limburg, Peter Joseph Blum, was represented at Frankfort by his vicar-general, Dr. Klein. Dr. Götz, dean of the cathedral at Würzburg, deserves great praise for his efficient arrangements at the last general convention. I may still notice Buchegger, vicar-general at Freiburg, Canon Broix, of Cologne, Krabbe, dean of the cathedral at Münster, Dean Schiedemayr, of Linz, Canon Wiery, of Salzburg, Canon Freund, of Passau, Schmitt, vicar-general at Bamberg, Abbot Mislin, of Groswardein, Provost Pelldram, of Berlin, Canon Henry Szajbely, of Gran, Abbot Michael von Fogarasy, of Grosswardein, Canon Michael Kubinsky, of Kalocza, Canon Dr. Molitor, of Spires, Canon Dr. Malkmus, of Fulda, Provost Nübel, of Soest, Dr. Stadler, dean of the Augsburg cathedral, Provost Kalliski, of Gnesen, Canon Büchinger, of Gratz, Strehle, of Freiburg, Dr. Häusle, of Vienna, and Müller, of Munich. The general conventions were also attended by Bishop Mermillot, of Geneva, one of the best pulpit orators in Europe, and by the Roman prelate, Monsignore Nardi, who is able to speak in four languages. The Catholic congresses were marked by several grand and imposing scenes. It was a glorious sight to behold 5,000 men, from every part of the known world, walk in procession to the cathedral of St. Rombau at Malines, but it was no less edifying to see hundreds of delegates making a pilgrimage from Salzburg to Maria Plain, and paying their devotions to the Mother of God. We can never forget the dedication of the column erected in honor of the Blessed Virgin, which took place at Cologne on the 8th of September, 1858, in presence of the whole congress. The enthusiastic welcome extended to the Bishop of Orleans at Malines defies all description, but the reception of the Hungarian prelates by the Viennese convention (Sept. 21, 22, 1853) was still more solemn. By [{528}] his speech delivered on the evening of Sept 2, 1864, Father Felix produced a profound impression. Döllinger, too, at the Munich convention in 1861, called forth a storm of applause by his well-known declarations. Unique in its kind was the scene in the Kaiser-saal at Aix-la-Chapelle already described. When, after the discourse of Father Felix on Sept 2, 1864, the Redemptorist father Dechamps, and the Carmelite, F. Hermann, weeping tears of joy, thankfully embraced the Jesuit, and a Belgian bishop, joining the group, shook hands with the three religious, no heart remained unmoved. At Würzburg, also, on the 14th Sept., 1864, a solemn, touching scene took place, which joined in bonds of the sincerest friendship the Catholic Hungarians and Germans. Von Majer, a Hungarian lawyer and land-owner, had charmed all of us; his manly and chivalrous appearance, the romantic costume of his country, and his able speech, did not fail to produce an overpowering effect; Vice-President Adams expressed the opinion of the assembly, and then followed cheer upon cheer for the noble Hungarian.
Now and then there appears a speaker who possesses the talent of a demagogue, and causes a great though transient sensation. A Tyrolese, Greuter, now a member of the Austrian "Reichsrath," is an orator whom I delight to hear; he spoke at Salzburg and Aix-la-Chapelle. At Würzburg, likewise, a speaker of the same class, Brummel, a lawyer of Baden, addressed the assembly. I transcribe an account of his speech, which I wrote at the time. "After F. Modeste had left the tribune, amid thundering applause, a tall, stately figure, betraying at once the military career of the speaker, took the floor. The hero who now confronts us fought at the side of Pimodan and La Moricière for the Holy Father; distinguished himself at Castelfidardo; took part in the defence of Ancona; and for six months was held a captive by the Piedmontese. It is Brummel, of Baden. His voice sounds like the clarion's shrill tones summoning an army to battle. His speech is a violent attack on the shameful abuses existing in Baden. He combines force of expression with warmth of feeling, unflinching bravery, and a burning hatred of everything base, with a childlike love for the Church and the truth. He was the Tancred in the crusade against the self-styled saviors of the people of Baden, and nobly did battle for the venerable and much persecuted Archbishop of Freiburg, Hermann von Vicari."
Having thus concluded these unpretending sketches, those of my readers who have been disappointed will indulgently consider that it was written to assist a Catholic congregation to build a church. But thus to extend the divine worship is more pleasing to the Almighty than to write a good book.
From The Literary Workman.
ST. ELIZABETH.
"Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it to me."
A shrill and joyous summons
At Wartburg's postern rang.
And lightly from his panting steed
The princely Landgrave sprang.
Comes forth his stately mother
To meet him in her pride,
But the quick glance of Louis seeks
The sweet face of his bride.
Then scornful spoke the Landgravine,
"Fair son, thy lady sweet
Hath cares too urgent thus in haste
Thy coming step to greet.
Upon thy couch so stately,
Within thy chamber fair,
A vile and loathsome leper
She tends with pious care."
A wrathful man was Louis,
Yet not a word he said,
But up the castle's echoing stair
In quivering haste he sped—
Within her silent chamber,
As o'er the couch she hung,
Her lord's returning bugle
Had all unheeded rung.
In silent ecstacy she knelt,
Her heart so hushed in prayer.
It thrilled not at his longed-for step,
Now echoing on the stair.
With hasty hand young Louis tore
The coverlid aside—
The lifeless form before him lay
Of Jesus crucified,
Bleeding and pale, as in the hour
When for our sins he died.
"See, mother, see the Leper
She brings to be our guest,
Whom only she prefers to me—
May his dear name be blest
Elizabeth, sweet sister.
Still bring such guests to me;
Sinful and all unworthy
I am of him and thee;
Yet train me in thy patient love
His guest in heaven to be."
From The Month.
DR. PUSEY ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.
It is just twenty years since the great movement in the Anglican Church, which took its rise and its name from the University of Oxford and the "Tracts for the Times," was broken, as it were, into two streams of very different direction by the submission of Mr. Newman to the Catholic Church. It happens that the circumstances of the last year and a half have brought the history of the movement prominently before the world; and they have occasioned an interesting set of publications from men of eminent position, whose names were at the time hardly less watchwords than at present. No one of the few most conspicuous Oxford leaders of thought who belonged in any sense to the Tractarian party has yet been removed by death. Dr. Pusey is still at Christ Church, Mr. Keble still at Hursley; but Mr. Newman has become the founder of the English Oratory of St. Philip Neri, and Archdeacon Manning is the present Catholic archbishop of Westminster. These four names were more than any others in the mouths of the adherents of the Oxford movement twenty years ago. Archdeacon Wilberforce lived in the country, and had, we believe, hardly begun to publish that series of theological treatises which soon after made his name second to none in the Anglican Church as a writer on doctrine: Isaac Williams, loved and venerated by all who knew him, had left Trinity and was occupied on his "Commentary on the Gospels" without taking any further part in the movement: the influence of Charles Marriott was hardly felt except by his immediate acquaintance. There were of course others whose position—such as that of Mr. Oakeley and Mr. Dodsworth in London —gave them much influence in particular places; but, speaking broadly, and without reference to the actual connection of individuals with the "Tracts"—in which, we think, Archdeacon Manning took no part at all—the four names we have just mentioned might be said to constitute the High-Church Quadrilateral. It must be remembered, moreover, that among the Anglicans, whose church had at that time not even so much liberty to speak in convocation as has since been allowed to it, and whose bishops were probably unanimous in nothing except in suspicion of Tractarianism, personal influence went for far more than is ever the case among Catholics. Whether they liked it or not, the position and responsibilities of party leaders were thrust upon the persons we have named; veneration and confidence haunted them, and their words were made into oracles. A little later than the time of which we are speaking, an enthusiastic admirer—now a colonial bishop—dedicated a volume of sermons to the three first, under the name of the three valiant men of David's band, who had broken through the ranks of the enemy to fetch water from the well of Bethlehem, the fountain of ancient doctrine; one of the three, he plaintively added in his dedication, was taken prisoner by the enemy in the attempt! This was after the submission of Dr. Newman.
Recent circumstances, as we have said, have drawn from three of these four distinguished persons declarations of opinion and feeling with regard to the Anglican establishment which it may well be worth while to place [{531}] side by side. The first in point Of time was Dr. Newman, in his celebrated "Apologia pro Vita suâ," in the appendix to which he had occasion to speak his mind about Anglicanism. The passage will be fresh in the memories of most of our readers; and it has been preserved as part of a note in the second edition of the "Apologia" lately published by Dr. Newman as the "History of my Religions Opinions." It contains, as a passage from Dr. Newman was sure to do, most that can be said for or against the establishment in the happiest words:
"When I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church" [after becoming acquainted with Catholicism], "for which I had labored so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and aesthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities."
He then says that, looked at as a human institution, it is great:
"I recognize in the Anglican establishment a time-honored institution, of noble historical memories—a monument of ancient wisdom, a momentous arm of political strength, a great national organ, a source of vast popular advantage, and, to a certain point, a witness and teacher of religious truth: . . . . but that it is something sacred; that it is an oracle of revealed doctrine; that it can claim a share in St. Ignatius and St Cyprian; that it can take the rank, contest the teaching, and stop the path of the Church of St. Peter; that it can call itself 'the Bride of the Lamb'—this is the view which simply disappeared from my mind on my conversion, and which it would be almost a miracle to reproduce. I went by, and, lo! it was gone; I sought it, but its place could nowhere be found, and nothing can bring it back to me. And as to its possession of an episcopal succession from the time of the apostles—well, it may have it; and if the Holy See ever so decide, I will believe it, as being the decision of a higher judgment than my own; but for myself, I must have St. Philip's gift, who saw the sacerdotal character on the forehead of a gaily-attired youngster, before I can by my own wit acquiesce in it; for antiquarian arguments are altogether unequal to the urgency of visible facts."
Dr. Newman then expresses his sense of the benefits he received by being born an Anglican, not a Dissenter, and so having been baptized and sent to Oxford:
"And as I have received so much good from the Anglican establishment itself, can I have the heart, or rather the want of charity, considering that it does for so many others what it has done for me, to wish to see it overthrown? I have no such wish while it is what it is, and while we are so small a body. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of the many congregations to which it ministers, I will do nothing against it. While Catholics are so weak in England, it is doing our work; and though it does us harm in a measure, the balance is in our favor" (p. 342).
Here is a plain, definite view about the establishment—giving it certainly not less than its full meed of praise as a human institution, and acknowledging benefits providentially received in it with all the warmth of a most affectionate heart, which never lets a single touching memory fade away. But its claim to a divine origin and supernatural character is set aside as a palpably absurd one. Without questioning whether it be heretical or schismatical or both, Dr. Newman declares that he cannot even believe its orders to be valid unless the Holy See declares them so to be. But Dr. Newman does not wish for the destruction of the establishment until the Catholic ministry is numerous enough to supply its place as the teacher of the mass of the population—an office at present discharged by Anglicans, not indeed adequately, not without many shortcomings and some errors, but still better [{532}] than might be the case if no such institution existed.
In expressing his own views about the establishment, Dr. Manning was obliged in the course of last year to speak at greater length, and to explain more in detail the Catholic doctrine with regard to baptized persons involuntarily outside the pale of the visible Church. The occasion of his declaration was the judgment of the Privy Council on the case of the "Essays and Reviews." This last of the series of similar decisions of the same tribunal, the ultimate court of appeal for Anglicans in matters of doctrine, naturally gave an opportunity for reviewing the gradual retirement of the High-Church party from the bold ground which they had taken up in 1850, at the time of the Gorham case. The facts only required to be pointed out; the mere narrative spoke more forcibly than any possible commentary. History, either political or ecclesiastical, scarcely contains such another example of a set of high-minded and earnest men having so ostentatiously to shrink from their implied pledges, and belie their most solemn declarations. Immediately after the Gorham decision the leaders of the High-Church party published a series of resolutions, the purport of which was that the Church of England would be "eventually" committed to heresy unless she "openly and expressly" rejected the erroneous doctrine sanctioned by the decision. The consequences were drawn out, involving the loss on the part of the Church of England of the office and authority to witness and teach as a member of the universal church; and it was said that she would thus become "formally separated from the Catholic body, and be no longer able to assure to her members the grace of the sacraments and the remission of sins." Dr. Manning's task was therefore easy; here were men who had pledged themselves in this way in 1850, and, as far as in them lay, pledged the party of which they were leaders. What were they doing in the Church of England in 1864, after fourteen years in which she had not only not cleared herself from the Gorham judgment, but acquiesced in it? She had spoken in convocation on a number of subjects, never on this; she had moreover seen a controversy on the Lord's Supper within her pale, the issue of which was thought a triumph to the High-Church party—not because it proscribed the heretical doctrine held by the larger number of clergy in the Church, but because it just shielded their own doctrine from being proscribed in turn; finally, the "Essays and Reviews" had appeared, and their writers also had been protected from proscription by the crown in council. Dr. Manning might well say that it seemed as if Providence had been mercifully striving to open men's eyes to the position of the Church of England. On the ground taken by the resolutionists of 1850, she had forfeited whatever claim she ever had to allegiance over and over again.
This is hard truth; but it was not urged by Dr. Manning in a hard way, nor with the intention of taunting with their inconsistencies men of whom he has always spoken with respect and affection. The only important matter, after all, is, whether the High-Church party, whose opinions were expressed by the resolutions lately referred to, have in reality receded from their former ground. This is a very serious question; because, unless it can be answered in the negative, it involves an abandonment on their part, not of this or that particular doctrine, but of the whole Catholic idea of a church. The resolutions of 1850 proceeded on the hypothesis that a church that tolerated heresy became itself guilty of it; and that the Church of England was responsible for the acts of the courts to which she submitted without protest. From a Catholic point of view, a very grave change must have come over a set of men who held this principle, if they afterward contented themselves with a church that tolerates heresy on [{533}] the ground that it also tolerates orthodoxy; that its prayers are orthodox, that its formularies admit of an orthodox sense. Yet it seems quite impossible to draw from the declarations of Dr. Pusey and others anything but an acknowledgment that such a change has taken place. It is not therefore a question as to their view of the present effect of the Gorham decision or any other, but as to their view of the character of the Church in which they hope to be saved.
Dr. Manning's pamphlet was noticed by Dr. Pusey, in a preface placed by him before a legal statement as to the immediate effect of Lord Westbury's decision in the case of the "Essays and Reviews." This preface, like many of Dr. Pusey's brochures, was marked by considerable strength of language against those whom he was assailing, and contained distinct threats that he and his friends might set up a free church if their demands for a reconstitution of the court of appeal were disregarded. It was implied that the chancellor had acted from "the pure love of the heresy, and the desire of throwing open to unbelief an article of faith against which rationalism rebels," at the price "of breaking off churches of the colonies from the Mother Church" (no colonial churches are named), "and familiarizing devoted minds among us at home to thoughts of organic severance from the Church whose discipline is fettered by such a tribunal;" and so on. "The Church of England has necessarily more tenacity than the Scotch establishment. For, having a divine original" [origin?], "it is an organic body, and knows more of the value of intercommunion, not indeed as a condition absolutely necessary, but as the natural fruit of divine unity. It is then the more remarkable when members of the Church of England begin to speak (as they have) of a free church. Our extension in the colonies, which has so enlarged the Church and its episcopate, makes such a rent possible, even though not one bishop in England should join it. And 'if ever there should be a rent in the Church of England,' said one, 'the rent in Scotland would be nothing to it.'" At the end of the preface, men were urged to league together as in the days of the Anti-Corn-Law agitation: no candidate was to receive support at the next election who would not pledge himself to do his best to bring about a change in the court of appeal. And a note was appended, suggesting that "no church should be offered for consecration, no sums given for the building of churches, which by consecration should become the property of the present Church of England, no sums given for endowment in perpetuity, until the present heresy-legalizing court shall be modified."
It must surely have occurred to Dr. Pusey, as it did to so many of his readers, that this threatening language accorded very ill with another passage in his pamphlet, in which he avowed his retirement from the threats he had joined in making in 1850. No fair-minded man can doubt that the resolutions to which we have alluded implied a threat of secession from Anglicanism, unless the Church of England cleared herself from the Gorham decision. Unless she cleared herself, the resolutionists declared she would "eventually" be bound. Dr. Pusey in explanation says that he wished the word to be "ultimately." We can see no great difference between the two. He then (p. 17, note) says that the resolutions were modified so as to be made acceptable to him; all the more, we suppose, is he responsible for their wording, having signed them. He also says that the difference between the line of action adopted by the different persons who signed them is to be accounted for by the fact that some of them thought that the judgment, in itself, committed the Church of England; others, that it did not. Surely men must be judged by their words. We may think as we please of the conduct of those who afterward left [{534}] the Church of England, or of those who remained in it; but it cannot be doubted that, as far as these resolutions are concerned, the former acted consistently, the Latter inconsistently, with them. Moreover, in the page we are quoting, Dr. Pusey seems to us to retire altogether from his position, without saying so openly. He tells us that when he signed the resolutions, "not having a parochial cure, and worshipping mostly in a cathedral where baptism did not enter into the service, I felt the value of the baptismal office as a witness to truth rather than as a teacher of it." Since that time he has come to realize more distinctly "the value of the Prayer-book, speaking, as it does, to the hearts of the people in their own tongue, in teaching and impressing on the people the doctrines which it embodies." This seems to us to imply, that as long as the formularies used in public offices speak an orthodox language, the Church may in other ways be committed to heresy without losing her character. On the same ground, as long as the words of consecration are used in the "Lord's Supper," any doctrine whatever may be taught concerning it. At all events, this is all that Dr. Pusey says as to his adherence to or disavowal of the resolutions of 1850. He cannot be surprised if his threats in 1864 have been taken as worth no more than his declarations fourteen years ago—if the politicians on whose will the decision of these questions depends have found out that the bark of the High-Church leaders is worse than their bite.
"Hi motus animorum, atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt."
So long as the Bible is read and the Prayer-book used, they will impress on the people the doctrines which they embody; and the Essayists and Reviewers and Dr. Colenso will labor so entirely in vain to pervert them, that no court at all will be necessary to punish the propagators of false doctrines. At all events, it may fairly be presumed that the threats about a free church are worth just as much, and no more, as the threats about secession.
But our immediate subject is the course of the controversy about the Anglican establishment. Some expressions in Dr. Pusey's preface, in which he said that some Catholics "seemed to be in an ecstasy at this victory of Satan" (the decision of the Privy Council as to the "Essays and Reviews") appear to have suggested attacks on Dr. Manning with reference to his "Crown in Council," in which he was said to have rejoiced in the troubles of his former friends, and to be merry over the miseries of the Church of England. The same kind of charge has often been made against Catholics, especially converts; and it is in the nature of things that it should be made. Every "trouble" in the Church of England of the kind of which we are speaking, while it weakens it as a teacher of fragments of Catholic truth, weakens also its hold on the minds of many who have hitherto been in the habit of making it the object of that allegiance and that obedience which the instincts of every Christian heart urge it to pay to the one mother of the children of God. So far, therefore, as the Gorham case or the Denison case, or the question of the "Essays and Reviews" and the Colenso decision, tend to expose the true and simply human character of the institution that calls itself the Church of England, so far, many good and loyal souls are set free from a delusion, and their affections transferred to their right and legitimate object. This, in the case of individuals, is a matter of rejoicing. On the other hand, on the grounds stated so clearly by Dr. Newman, it is no matter of rejoicing that a body which has to teach so large a number of baptized souls all that they will ever know of Catholic truth should have the truths that it yet retains diminished in number and in certainty, and should lose all power of preserving them from corruption.
Dr. Manning's letter to Dr. Pusey contains a clear and calm statement of the doctrines on which the feelings of Catholics toward bodies like the Church of England are based. Dr. Pusey had declared that he knew that "a very earnest body of Roman Catholics rejoice in all the workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church of England," and had contrasted them with others who are in "ecstasy at the victory of Satan." It became necessary therefore to state in what sense a Catholic can admit that the Holy Ghost works in the Church of England. No Catholic, then, by denying utterly and entirely anything like the character of a church to the Church of England, denies thereby the workings of the Holy Ghost or the operations of grace among those who are its members; nor when these operations are affirmed and rejoiced in is any affirmation thereby made that the Church of England is in any sense whatever a church at all. Dr. Manning states in full the reasons why we affirm the workings of the Holy Ghost among the English people; and these parts of his pamphlet—indeed, the whole of it—are extremely valuable, as a clear statement of truths which it is very difficult to get Englishmen generally to understand, on account of their prevalent ignorance or misconception of the doctrine of grace. The truths in question, we need hardly say, enable Catholics to rejoice heartily in the effects of grace among the Dissenters, not less than among Anglicans. Dr. Manning has a few pages also on the specific truths that have been preserved by Anglicanism, and the fear with which he regards the process of undermining the Christianity of England which is going on. He also explains how naturally he rejoices at conversions, which are to him the bringing of souls from the imperfect to the perfect knowledge of the truth; and sums up by an argument to prove that the Anglican establishment, instead of being, as Dr. Pusey had called it, "the great bulwark against infidelity in this land," is in reality responsible for that infidelity; as having been the source of the present spiritual anarchy in England; as having weakened even those truths which it retains by detaching them from others and from the divine voice of the Church, which is the guarantee of their immortality; and as being a source of unbelief by the denial of the truths it has rejected and also of the perpetual and ever-present assistance of the Holy Ghost to preserve the Church from error. We may add, having quoted Dr. Newman on the subject of Anglican orders, that Dr. Manning speaks with equal clearness as to their entire invalidity.
Dr. Pusey's controversial appearances are generally rather late in the day: the method of his mind is inductive, and he rejoices above all things in the accumulation of a vast amount of materials, which he does not always succeed in clearly arranging or lucidly epitomizing. He has taken a year to answer Dr. Manning's short pamphlet of less than fifty pages, or rather a part of it. The volume teems with undigested learning; and a very large share of it is taken up with a long postscript and a set of notes. It will not be our business at present to do more than state concisely in what the answer to Dr. Manning consists, and endeavor to draw out from the pages of Dr. Pusey what his idea is of the Anglican Church, and what his own position in her.
There is nothing in direct answer to Dr. Manning's explanation of the doctrine as to the working of the Holy Ghost outside the visible Church—an explanation which of course places the Anglican Church on the same ground with the Dissenting sects. The satisfactory answer to this would of course be some proof that the Anglicans have orders and sacraments, and that grace is given through them, not merely to the dispositions of the individual who receives it. Dr. Pusey, of coarse, maintains the [{536}] validity of Anglican orders, but he adds nothing to the controversy, except the remark that the form of consecration used in the case of Parker was taken from that used in the case of Chichele a century before. As the controversy does not turn solely upon the form used in Parker's consecration, the fact adduced by Dr. Pusey has little to do with it. [Footnote 74]
[Footnote 74: Practically speaking, it is surely a matter of surprise that so few Anglicans should have interested themselves in ascertaining what is thought about their orders by others than themselves. No portion of the Catholic Church (as they consider it) has ever been persuaded to acknowledge them in any way. It is of course their business to obtain their acceptance, not ours to disprove them; all the more, as so very large a number of those who have borne these orders have never believed in their sacramental character. Dr. Pusey says (p. 278), "I do not believe that God maintains the faith where there is not the reality." He is speaking directly of the real presence. By how large a proportion of the bishops and clergy and laity of the Church of England since the Reformation has it been believed, even with all the force of the old Catholic traditions to maintain it? And as to the priesthood and its correlative, the sacrifice, a strong argument, on Dr. Pusey's own ground, against their existence in Anglicanism, might be found in the fact that all practical belief in them has so completely died out in the mass of the people. If there had been the reality, there would have been the faith; and so it is with Eastern heretics and schismatics.]
With regard to the other point, it is of course impossible, or very difficult, to prove the connection between the effect of a supposed means of grace and that supposed means itself, independent of the subjective dispositions and belief of the recipient. Dr. Pusey has no proofs which would not equally show that any one who thought himself a priest was one, and that any one who thought he received a sacrament from him would receive it. But the statement of Dr. Manning on which Dr. Pusey fastens more particularly is that which accuses the Anglican establishment of being the "cause and spring of the prevailing unbelief." Dr. Pusey remarks first that there is plenty of unbelief everywhere. That is true; and everywhere it can be traced to some cause; the charge is, that the Reformation has produced it in England, which was free from it before. Dr. Manning's first proof—that Anglicanism rejects much Christian truth—is met by a statement of the amount of truth which both communions hold. In this part of his argument Dr. Pusey seems to us to avoid the real question at issue. Dr. Manning speaks of the formularies of the Church of England, no doubt, as well as of her practical teaching, such as it has been for the last three hundred years, and such as it is throughout the length and breadth of England at this day. But in a question as to the amount of truth with which she claims to be "the great bulwark against infidelity," it is obvious that her formularies must be judged according to the sense commonly attached to them, and according to the interpretation of them supplied by the ordinary teaching of her clergy. Every one knows that various senses have been applied to the Anglican formularies; and it was the object of the celebrated No. 90 of the "Tracts for the Times" to prove that, in some cases, it was the intention of the compilers of the articles to allow men of various schools to sign them. Still, it is going far beyond this to put forward the so-called "Catholic" interpretation of the formularies as the sense of the Church of England. It would be untrue even if we consider the matter as a simply literary question; much more is it in the highest degree unfair to put forward this interpretation in a controversy which turns upon what actually has been and is taught by her. If a foreigner—as unacquainted with the real teaching of Anglicanism as Dr. Pusey is with that of Catholicism—were to take up this book and believe what he finds in it, he would, we venture to say, derive a totally false impression of the doctrine of the English Church as it lies on the face of her formularies, and as it has always been understood and acted upon by nine-tenths of her clergy and people. He would find an assurance that she holds the three creeds, which would give him to understand that she interpreted them in the same sense as the Catholic Church. [{537}] He would learn with surprise that there is no difference between Anglicans and Catholics on justification. "There is not one statement in the elaborate chapters on justification in the Council of Trent which any of us could fail in receiving," says Dr. Pusey. He would find that Dr. Manning had quite falsely said that "the Church of England sustains a belief in two sacraments, but formally propagates unbelief in the other five." In fact, that the Church of England holds all seven to be sacraments, with only a difference in dignity. Still more to his astonishment, he would read that the Church of England does not, in particular, object to extreme unction; she "only objects to the later abuse of it," which is not the Catholic practicer—namely, the custom of not administering it except to the dying. Then, if some one told him that the Church of England has discontinued the practice altogether, and that any one would be called a simple papist who attempted to introduce it in any way, he might naturally be inclined to find fault with the treacherous guide who had so misled him. It is the same with other points. Dr. Pusey tells us that the Church of England does not deny the infallibility of general councils or of the Church. His reasoning on this last head is so good a specimen of his method, that we may dwell on it for a moment. One of the articles teaches, that as the other churches have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred —even in matters of faith. Dr. Manning sums this up, very naturally, as a statement that all churches have erred. "The article," says Dr. Pusey, "was a puzzle to me when young." He supposed, it seems, that the condemnation must have been meant to fall on doctrinal decrees. "The two clauses, being put antithetically, must correspond. On further information, I found that there were no canons of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch that were intended; then it followed—the same principle of the correspondence of the two clauses—that neither were canons of the Church of Rome spoken of. The article moreover does not say that the Church of Rome is in error in the present, but hath erred in time past."
It is strange to see so much ingenuity wasted in a hopeless cause. Dr. Pusey remembers perfectly that the attempt to put forward the interpretations for which he contends, not as the sense or teaching of the Church of England, but as a sense of her articles barely tolerated by her in certain individuals of Catholic opinions whom she wished to retain, as others, in her service, was met many years ago by an outcry such as has not been heard in our day in England, save in the case of the Catholic hierarchy. And yet he thinks it fair and just to argue as if the Church of England not only allowed such interpretations, but as if the views which they embody were her regular teaching, so that she has a right to claim that she has put forward boldly in face of the infidelity around her those portions of Christian truth to which they relate. Her people then are, and always have been, really taught that there are seven sacraments, that there is a real presence on the altar, that there is a eucharistic sacrifice, that the Church is infallible, and so on. And as he speaks of her ministers being vowed to banish and drive away strange doctrine, his position implies that any heresy which might contradict these great Catholic truths could not be permitted within her pale. And now, suppose he was taken at his word; suppose, in consequence of this so-called Eirenicon, negotiations were opened and emissaries sent from Rome to the bishops and convocation of the English Church to treat of reunion. What would be the first step of the Anglican authorities, those who really have a right to speak for their communion, and who would be backed by the great body of the clergy and laity in the country? It would certainly be to repudiate the false face put upon their teaching by Dr. Pusey, and to [{538}] declare that their Church had always been, and meant to be, thoroughly and simply Protestant on the points at issue.
If, therefore, Dr. Pusey cannot answer Dr. Manning's charge except by attributing to the Church of England the ordinary and regular teaching, as against infidelity, of doctrines which she practically disclaims—even if it be allowed that she does not formally proscribe them—it is clear that he thinks little better of that ordinary and regular teaching as it is in fact than Dr. Manning himself. His book is in reality more a long excuse of himself and others for remaining in her than anything else. This is quite a different question. She may tolerate Catholic opinions in her ministers, and Catholic interpretations of her articles. Her defenders have then to give an account of what sort of church it is which can compromise truth by purposely ambiguous formularies, and allow side by side in her pulpits men who must consider each other as heretics. But Dr. Manning's question relates to her actual teaching as a "bulwark against infidelity;" and Dr. Pusey knows very well that for every clergyman who teaches more sacraments than two, or the eucharistic sacrifice, there are twenty who deny them.
Perhaps the most elaborate part of Dr. Pusey's volume is that in which he endeavors to prove that the unity of the visible church need not be visible, and that it is sufficiently secured by orders and sacraments, "through its union with Christ, as head, by the sacraments, and the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost." He naively asks, How can we be said to deny the indissoluble unity of the Church when we cannot approach communion without repeating the Nicene Creed? Certainly, few people could ever be convicted of false doctrine if the repetition of the creed in public service was enough to absolve them. In this part of the work, however, Dr. Pusey more than ever leaves out of sight the real nature of the charge which he has undertaken to answer—the charge of having denied the indissoluble unity of the Church, its visible head, and its perpetual voice. The question is, whether these truths can be considered as a part of the system which the Church of England teaches and defends. Here, of course, there is more divergence as to the doctrine between the two controversialists; and Dr. Pusey answers only by a theory of his own. But in fact, even if he fairly represents Anglicanism, he cannot escape the charge, as to the unity of the Church, any more than that as to its infallibility. He really maintains that for all practical purposes the Church was infallible up to the division of East and West—we meet in his pages that phrase of which his friends are so fond, the "Holy Undivided Church." Now it is difficult to find what infallible teacher Dr. Pusey acknowledges; to what he would submit a conclusion, we will say, as to the Immaculate Conception, which he has drawn by his own reason from his study of Scripture or the fathers. His position may be understood from the following passage:
"This, I understand, is a favorite formula with Dr. Manning—'By whom does God the Holy Ghost speak? By the Roman Church? or by the Eastern? or by the Anglican?' I have been wont to say, by all concurrently, in so far as they teach the same faith which was from the beginning, which is the great body of all their teaching; and, if need require, they could at this day declare concurrently any truth, if it should appear that it had not as yet been sufficiently defined, against some fresh heresy which should emerge" (p. 84).
The faith of Christians is therefore proposed to them by an authority on which they are bound to receive it; but that authority has in the first place to be tested by Christians themselves, who must decide by their own reason—for they can have no other guide—whether in any particular point the three churches teach the same faith which was from the beginning. [{539}] Further this authority cannot speak at all precisely on those points as to which Christians must most desire its guidance—those points on which these three churches differ. Dr. Pusey speaks of his reciting the Nicene Creed. On what authority does he believe that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son? He may think that the Eastern faith comes to much the same thing as the Western; but that is a conclusion of his own reason. And we must leave to our readers to make out for themselves the way in which he tries to show that the churches could still act concurrently, if the occasion were to arise; especially in the very obvious and, according to the Anglican teaching, perfectly possible case, that one of these three churches themselves should be the victim of the new heresy, which, according to him, would constitute the occasion for a new definition. [Footnote 75]
[Footnote 75: We are not, of course, answering Dr. Pusey's book; but we cannot help quoting a single passage from the treatise "On the Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost," lately published by his grace the Archbishop of Westminster, which simply destroys the whole theory on which Dr. Pusey reasons. Few things of the kind can be more refreshing than to turn from the pages of Dr. Pusey to the clear, bright, simple, and precise statements of Dr. Manning. It is like breathing pure country air after groping about in a London fog; and the fanciful and unsubstantial images that bewilder the readers of the Eirenicon vanish like so much mist and vapor as the majestic outlines of the Church, as sketched by the archbishop, take possession of the mind. No one who reads this book will need any other answer to that of Dr. Pusey. On the point before us the archbishop says: "There are some who appeal from the voice of the living Church to antiquity, professing to believe that while the Church was united was infallible; that when it became divided it ceased to speak infallibly; and that the only certain rule or faith is to believe that which the Church held and taught while yet it was united, and therefore infallible. Such reasoners fail to observe that since the supposed division and cessation of the infallible voice there remains no divine certainty as to what was then infallibly taught. To affirm that this or that doctrine was taught then where it is now disputed, is to beg the question. The infallible Church of the first six centuries—that is, before the division—was infallible to those who lived in those ages, but is not infallible to us. It spoke to them; to us it is silent. The infallibility does not reach to us; for the Church of the last twelve hundred years is by the hypothesis fallible, and may therefore err in delivering to us what was taught before the division. And it is certain that either the East or the West, as it is called, must err in this, for they contradict each other as to the faith before the division. I do not speak of the protests of later separations, because no one can invest them with an infallibility which they not only disclaim for themselves, but deny anywhere to exists" (pp. 74, 75).]
It is clear that, according to Dr. Pusey, we must ascertain what the "Undivided Church" taught for ourselves, and then receive it on her authority. Far more than this in reality; for we are to find out for ourselves negative conclusions as well as positive. There is what he speaks of as a vast practical system in the Catholic Church, the honor paid to our Blessed Lady, and other things of that kind, which penetrate the daily life and the ordinary thoughts of the great mass of her children. On this Dr. Pusey sits in judgment, and declares it to be alien to the teaching of the "Undivided Church," because he does not find it himself in the fathers. We do not see that he places his objections to it on the authority of his own Church. This leads us to our question, what, to him, is Anglicanism? Is he content to be its dutiful child, to catch its genuine spirit, to echo without further question its definitions, to "rest and be thankful" with whatever it may give him? We believe that no one who has ever known anything about the subject has suspected Dr. Pusey of any intention to secede from the Anglican Church: this makes it all the more strange that he should give it so wavering and niggardly an allegiance. Other people openly avow that they simply put up with it as a convenient lodging-place for men of no particular opinions; it exacts little, leaves them pretty much alone, and yet furnishes them handsomely with the outward paraphernalia of a church. Like the Roman Senate in the old story about Tiberius, it admits the gods of all nations easily into its Pantheon. One set of opinions alone it objects to, because they are so exclusive! Except in that case, its courts always shield the persecuted. Mr. Gorham is attacked for a heresy, and they shield him; Mr. Denison for a truth, and they absolve him; even the "Essays and Reviews" do not deprive their authors of this comprehensive protection. Its toleration gives, as a statesman expressed it, "general [{540}] satisfaction." Who can refuse to be loyal, when the yoke is so light?
"Quod si nec nomen, nec me tua forma teneret,
Posset servitiam mite tenere tuum;"
and so Dr. Pusey himself seems to feel, save in those moods of rebelliousness which now and then come over him. We have seen how he once almost pledged himself to secede if the Gorham judgment was not disavowed. He was too old then to be excused on the plea of youthful impetuosity; at all events, the fit passed away: the baptismal service contents him. We have seen the threats he threw out more than a year ago about a free church if the court of appeal were not modified: that mood too has passed away. His present book speaks in the most contented manner: "Essay and Reviewism a passing storm," is the title that runs along the top of one of his pages; and he speaks of "the bright promise of the year of ingathering which the Lord has blessed!" He has forgotten his despair of last year, and boldly proposes to the Catholic Church terms on which reunion may be made,—terms, we venture to say, which would be rejected at once by every authority of the Church of England itself. Still, with all this, we do not see in his book any indication that, except as to the validity of Anglican orders, he really thinks much better of Anglicanism than Dr. Manning or Dr. Newman. Its authority is nothing to him; and they, on the other hand, do not deny that, though a mere human institution, it teaches many truths which might otherwise be untaught. He is ready to leave it if it "accepts heresy;" but it seems that what is heresy, and what is its acceptance, must be left to himself to decide. This is the language of one party in a contract or a compromise to another; not that of a pupil to a teacher, a child to a parent—above all, not that of a Catholic to his Church. He does not aver that "the Church of England is the best possible bulwark against infidelity," but only "as a matter of fact, that it is at this moment, under God's providence, a real and chief bulwark against it." He complains of Dr. Manning's statement that she "rejects much Christian truth" in a way that looks very much as if he thought she rejected some and he only defends her even then by putting an entirely strange face upon her. He hoists a false flag, and fights for her under it.
We are unwilling to speak personally of an amiable and excellent man; but Dr. Pusey, if there are few exactly like him, is still in his way a representative man; and his work shows thus the position of many others beside himself. It is obvious that he is really in the Church of England because he has nowhere else to go. He is loyal to her, not because he loves and admires her, but because he thinks he can find no other resting-place. Deeply versed in the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament, and with a large acquaintance with some of the fathers, he has studied them under that fatal disadvantage which consists in the entire ignorance of the living system in which the authors whom he has read lived and breathed. The fathers especially, if they are studied without a knowledge of the ever-living Church, are certain to be misunderstood and to convey inadequate ideas of their own practice and belief. The Church alone explains and completes their testimony. It is exactly the everyday life, the things and customs and ideas that are too familiar to be chronicled, that must ever be unknown to those who have a merely literary knowledge of any system or any set of men. The strange thing is that any reasonable man should suppose it to be otherwise. Dr. Pusey, if we may judge from the opening of his postscript, really seems to think that if St. Augustine were to arrive to-morrow in London, he would go to worship in St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, rather than at Moorfields or Warwick Street—St. Augustine, who, in a well-known passage, [{541}] has pointed out the unfailing mark which the common sense of mankind has fixed upon the true Church by the simple popular use of the name Catholic!
The result of Dr. Pusey's thought and study may be summed up in two simple heads. The first is an attitude of mind utterly and entirely alien from that which is the first condition of the relation of a Catholic to the Church. He has never been taught by a church, guided by a church, moulded by a church; he is self-educated and self-reliant; he has made his own teacher for himself, and has never sat at the feet of any other, except of the author of a book of which he was himself the interpreter. Speaking of the possibility of "secession" in his own case, he tells us, "I have always felt that I could have gone in on no other way than that of closing my eyes and accepting whatever was put before me" (p. 98). What a revolution that would be! This attitude of simple, uncriticising, ungrudging docility and obedience, is a thing which to him is a perfect novelty. It is one thing to take our faith from an abstraction of our own brain; quite another to receive it from a living reality, outside and independent of ourselves. This is the first thing that strikes us in men like Dr. Pusey, as their minds are reflected in books such as that before us. The second is an amount of misconception, misunderstanding, and positive ignorance of the Catholic system, which would be simply unintelligible did we not consider the great disadvantages under which any one in his position must have studied it. He is not one of the more rabid school of Anglican controversialists; his character and habits of mind are quite alien from wilful misrepresentation and conscious unfairness. And yet there is hardly a fair statement in his book on matters which belong to Catholicism; and there are many most provoking misstatements, as well as many most ludicrous and childish blunders. The book presents an easy victory to any moderately-informed Catholic theologian who may take the trouble to refute it. This has not been our purpose at present. We have been content with pointing out that his defence of Anglicanism really condemns it, because it implies that he cannot defend it without misrepresenting it. In a future article we may deal with him as a controversialist, and point out, by way of specimen, some few of the mistakes into which he has fallen in his attack on the Catholic Church.
From The Literary Workman.
IRELAND BEFORE CHRISTIANITY.
The ignorance of true Irish history that prevails, and the absurdity of the things given as facts to a large mass of moderately educated people, is painfully surprising. For instance, it is generally believed among a great number of people, and it is taught to them in books, that Ireland was a land of desolate bogs, and forests filled with wolves, and inhabited by lawless savages, till converted to a "sort of Christianity" by the English, of which Christianity the remarkable part was that it had nothing to do with the Pope. Many people believe St. Patrick to have been an Englishman; others think he was a Welshman, and a few bold spirits of the present day declare that they can prove him to have been an excellent Protestant. Savages, bogs, wolves, and desolation, having been taken [{542}] compassion upon by the English, they subjugated the people, taught them, gave them laws, and in the reign of Henry II. of England attached Ireland to the British crown, when that country began to have a history. Before that date, that is, before the twelfth century, for Henry II. ascended the throne in 1154, Ireland had had no history worth remembering or worth noting. This is a short summary of the chief points of the Protestant belief on that matter. And although true knowledge concerning many things has struck root and spread amazingly of late years, there is so much still to learn about Ireland, and the history of that country is at once so interesting and so edifying, that "Papers on Irish History" are offered to the readers of the "Workman" with a conviction that they will find a welcome both in that country and in England.
In looking back to the earliest years of the history of Ireland, our instructor is tradition. It is a very curious thing, however, to see that the old tales, which have passed with many for poetic fables, have assumed in these days a remarkable importance, because in so many instances science is proving tradition to be truth. Speaking of Ireland, Camden says: "If what the Irish historians relate be true, this island was not without reason called Agygia or most ancient, by Plutarch. For they begin their histories from the remotest period of antiquity, so that compared with them all other nations are of modern date, and but in a kind of infancy. They tell us that one Caesarea, granddaughter to Noah, lived here before the flood, and that afterward came Bartholanus (Partholanus), a Scythian, 300 years after the flood, and waged fierce war with the giants. Long after this, Nemethus, the Scythian, landed, and was presently driven off by the giants. Afterward, Dela, with some Greeks, made themselves masters of the island; then Gaothelus with his wife Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, arrived here, and called the island from her Scotia, and from him Gaothela, and this at the time of the Israelites' departure out of Egypt. A few ages after, Hiberus and Hermione (or as the Irish called them, Ever and Erimon), sons of Milesius, king of Spain, led some colonies into this island, which had been depopulated by a plague. These stories I neither mean to affirm nor refute, making all due allowance for antiquity." Then Camden gives his own opinion in these words: "That this island was originally inhabited upon the general dispersion of mankind, I have not the least doubt." And at this date, no one who may be quoted as understanding the subject, has any doubt of the immense antiquity of the Irish; an antiquity which, in fact, defies calculation. But it is in some measure proved by the discovery in Ireland of those weapons which are the earliest weapons of defence used by man. They are flints chipped into a shape like the head of a spear. They were used before men knew how to use metal; and they belong to that earliest time which geologists have called by the name of the stone age. Geologists have divided the early ages into three: the stone, the bronze, and the iron period. In the stone age, Ireland had a people, and the celts, or flint stones chipped into a form like a spear head, were their weapons.
The debated point of whether or not Ireland was peopled from England, is one which is of little interest. There was a time in the history of man when people could have walked over from France to England, and when Ireland was joined to Wales. Strange as this may read to some persons, it is less strange than the greater instance of, for example, Australia being found peopled, and yet parted from the rest of the world by a great sea. The people of Australia had not gone there in vessels. They had got there by land; and whether, by the gradual work of time, during which the land sunk, and the sea [{543}] flowed in over it, and by this means gave islands to the world, or whether by enormous convulsions rocks shivered, and the land was rent apart and sunk, as between us and France, where the chasm may be said to be filled in by the water that makes the Straits of Dover—however it was done, whether suddenly or not, the researches of modern science have settled that these things occurred, and that the people who were our forefathers in this manner were separated from each other. Accepting this theory as a truth, it is idle to ask whether Ireland was peopled from this country or not. But in the presence of such a theory, no person can any longer laugh at Ireland's traditional antiquity; it is more reasonable to accept it, and to allow that they have proved their ancient and hereditary intelligence by preserving history.
And this theory of the manner in which islands were divided from continents is, in fact, constantly proving itself before our eyes. Not to go out of England, we may see the progress of such a change now in Lincolnshire. The reason why the great embankments against the sea are necessary there, and have become more than ever necessary of late years, is, that the land is sinking; and but for the preventions that science and labor effect, a part of Lincolnshire would become an island.
There are now a few words to be said about the name Scotia, as applied to Ireland. The Romans called all the far "western people" Scots, or Scythians. It meant a people who sailed—a maritime people—they learnt the word in these countries, for it is Teutonic, or northern Celtic; and we use the word ourselves when we speak of a boat scudding over the waves.
That the people from Spain came to Ireland, and that the existing Irish are their descendants, is not disputed. Hiberus and Hermione, called by the Irish Ever and Erimon, left their names in Hibernia, from the Spanish for one brother, and in the Irish Erin for the other. But yet Hibernia is a comparatively modern name; and Ireland is the ancient Scotia, called Ierne by the Roman poet Claudian and other Roman writers, and Ivvorna by Diodoms Siculus, and many beside.
One word more about the rude flint weapon called everywhere a celt. It took its name undoubtedly from the people who used it. It was the weapon of the northern or Celtic nations. When Celts are found they indicate to us the existence of the men who used them, and their state of civilization. Wherever they are found they are called by this name, and their name is derived from the northern people.
Ireland has always been considered a most healthy country, and in Campbell's Philosophical Survey of Ireland, Dr. Rutty tells us, "The bogs are not injurious to health, and agues are very unfrequent here." And again, these "bogs are not, as may be supposed from their blackness, masses of putrefaction, but, on the contrary, are of such a texture as to resist putrefaction above any other substance we know of." Of such assertions we have now constant proof, and the durability of the beautiful and often highly polished ornaments made out of Irish bogwood is too well known to dwell upon.
The people seem to have been, in very early times, great feeders of sheep, cattle, and pigs. But the richness of the soil of this beautiful island yields to the labor of the scientific former great gain.
Very curious speculations have arisen as to the gold that has been found in Ireland. It remains a mystery. Mr. O'Connor, in his dissertations on the history of Ireland, says, "that, soon after the arrival of the Scots from Spain, we read of Uchadan of Cuala, who rendered himself famous by his skill in the fabrication of metals." This places the civilization of Ireland very far back; and taken together with the early renown of the Irish in music, puts them at once in a [{544}] position of their own. When a people are musicians and workers in gold, Silver, and other metals, they have advanced a good way in what is meant by the word civilization. Their music is described as being of the most affecting and tender kind; and they seem to have met together, as afterward at Tara, for such accomplished recreations before anything of that kind would have been understood in England.
It will be interesting to give, from "Gough's Additions" to Camden's account of Ireland, some notes of the buried gold that has been found:
"In the bog near Cullen, in the county of Tipperary, in 1732, a laborer found a piece of worked gold, a little less than half the size of a small egg. It weighed 3 ozs. 4 dwts. and 7 grs."
"In 1739, a boy found a circular plate of beaten gold, about eight inches in diameter, which, lapped up in the form of a triangle, enclosed three ingots of gold, which they say could not weigh less than a pound; for the boy no sooner brought them home than his mother, a poor widow, gave them to a merchant, on whose land she had a cabin, as brass to make weights."
This is one of the great many instances in which large pieces of gold were sold as brass. Gold was found in these lumps, and in thin plates, as follows:
"1742. A child found on the brink of a hole a thin plate of gold. 1747. A girl found in the turf-dust a thin plate of gold, rolled on another, which when extended was 14 inches long, and a quarter of an inch broad; of which a fellow standing by took about half from her; what he left weighed 6 dwts. 13 grs. Soon after, an apprentice girl found 1 oz. 5 dwts. of the same kind, rolled after the same manner, in a sod of turf as she made the fire."
Vessels of a "yellow metal," as the people said, were frequently found in this bog. They used to sell them for brass. One was four-sided, and 8 inches high, with a handle on each side; the sisters who possessed it sold it to a tinker, who mended a pot and gave thirteenpence for it. The page of Irish history which the sight of these vessels, and the consideration of their shape and workmanship, might have revealed, has been, doubtless, lost with them in the melting pot.
From The St. James Magazine.
THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.
In the elementary works for the instruction of young people we find every day frequent mention of the Colossus of Rhodes. The statue is always represented with gigantic limbs, each leg resting on the enormous rocks which face both sides of the entrance to the principal port of the island of Rhodes, and ships in full sail pass easily, it is said, between its legs; for Pliny the ancient tells us that its height was seventy cubits.
This colossus was reckoned among the seven wonders of the world, the six others being, as is well known, the suspended gardens of Babylon, devised by Nitocris, wife of Nebuchadnezzar; the pyramids of Egypt; the statue of Jupiter Olympicus; the mausoleum of Halicarnassus; the temple of Diana at Ephesus; and the pharos of Alexandria, erected in the year of Rome 470, and completely destroyed by an earthquake A.D. 1303.
Nowhere has any authority been found for the assertion that the Colossus of Rhodes spanned the entrance to the island, and admitted the passage of vessels in fall sail between its wide-stretched limbs. No old drawing even of that epoch exists, when the statue was yet supposed to be standing; several modern engravings may be seen, but they are mere works of the imagination, executed to gratify the curiosity of amateur antiquarians, or to feed the naive credulity of the ignorant.
A century ago, the Comte de Cayius, a distinguished French archaeologist, found fault with his countrymen for admitting this fiction into the schoolbooks [Footnote 76] for young people; but he sought in vain to trace its origin.
[Footnote 76: "Memoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions," t. xxiv., p. 369]
Vigenère, in his "Tableaux de Philostrate," is supposed to have been the first who ventured to make an imaginary drawing of the colossus. He was followed by Bergier and Chevreau, [Footnote 77] the latter adding a lamp to the hand of the statue.
[Footnote 77: "Histoire du Monde," iv., p. 319.]
The greater number of French dictionaries, Rollin, in his "Ancient History," and even some encyclopaedic dictionaries, have adopted the fiction of their predecessors.
A fictitious Greek manuscript, quoted by the mythologist Dachoul, [Footnote 78] further adorns the colossus by giving him a sword and lance, and by hanging a mirror round his neck.
[Footnote 78: "Religion des Anciens Romains," p. 211.]
The Comte Ghoisel-Grouffier, in his picturesque "Journey through Greece," published about the year 1780, declares the colossus with the outstretched legs to be fabulous. He says: "This fable has for years enjoyed the privilege so readily accorded to error. It is commonly received, and discarded only by the few who have made ancient history their study. Most people have accepted, without investigation, an assertion which is unsupported by any authority from ancient authors." Nevertheless, the Belgian, Colonel Rottiers, and the English geologist, Hamilton, [Footnote 79] do not yield to this respectable authority, but endeavor to place the site of the statue at the entrance to one of the smaller harbors of the island, scarcely forty feet wide. Rottier goes still further, and gives a superb engraving of the colossus under the form of an Apollo, the bow and quiver on his shoulders, his forehead encircled by rays of light, and holding a beacon flame above his head.
[Footnote 79: "Researches in Asia Minor," etc. London, 1842.]
Polybius is the first among the ancient writers who mentions the Colossus of Rhodes, in enumerating the donations received by the inhabitants of the island after the fearful earthquake they experienced in 222 or 224 b.c. We quote the passage: "The Rhodians have benefited by the catastrophe which befel them, owing to which not only the huge colossus, but also a number of houses and a portion of the surrounding walls, were demolished." Then follows a list of the rich gifts they received from all parts. Among the benefactors Polybius mentions the three kings, Ptolemy III. of Egypt, Antigone Doson, of Macedonia, and Seleucus, of Syria, father of Antiochus. The ancient Pliny records that the colossus, after having stood for sixty-six years, was overthrown by an earthquake, and that it took the artist Charès de Lindos, to whom the Rhodians had intrusted its construction, twelve years to complete his task.
The tendency in art to produce grand effects by colossal works became perceptible twenty-five year's before Phidias; for we find that 463 years before Christ the inhabitants of Syracuse caused a huge statue to be erected to Jupiter Eleutherius, after the death of the tyrant Thrasybulus. This tendency was an indication of the decline of art, traceable during and after the period of Alexander the Great.
But to return to the colossus. One Philo-Byzantius wrote a short treatise on the seven wonders of the ancient world, about 150 years B.C. [Footnote 80] In it he [{546}] gives an explanation of the construction of the colossus, but nowhere speaks of the extended legs, under which vessels in full sail entered the port. On the contrary, he mentions one sole pedestal, which was of white marble. Moreover, the statue was said to be 105 feet in height, and the harbor entrance, according to modern researches, was 350 feet wide; it could not, therefore, possibly reach across this space. Lastly, if the statue had stood at the entrance of the port, the earthquake must have overthrown it into the sea; whereas Strabo and Pliny tell us that its fragments remained for a considerable time imbedded in the earth, and attracted much attention by their wonderful size and dimensions.
[Footnote 80: It was reprinted with a Latin translation, by J. C. Orelli, at Leipzic, in 1816. Strabo also mentions the colossus as one of the seven wonders of the world.]
Now this is the real truth concerning the colossus:
Toward the year 305 B.C., Demetrius Poliorcetes laid siege to Rhodes, and the inhabitants defended themselves with so much bravery that, after a whole year of struggle and endurance, they forced the enemy to retire from the island. The Rhodians, by whom the sun-god (Helios) was worshipped as their patron (having emerged from the waves of the AEgean Sea), inspired by sentiments of devotion, and excited by fervent gratitude for so signal a proof of the divine favor, commanded Charès de Lindos to erect a colossal statue to the honor of their deity. An inscription explained that the expenses of its construction were defrayed out of the sale of the materials of war left by Demetrius on his retreat from the island of Rhodes. This statue was erected on an open space of ground near the great harbor, and near the spot where the pacha's seraglio now actually stands; and its fragments for many years after its destruction were seen and admired by travellers. This explanation is still further supported by the fact, that a chapel built on this ground in the time of the Knights of Rhodes is named Fanum Sancti Joannis Colossensis.
We have seen that Strabo, who wrote and travelled during the reigns of the first two Roman emperors, was the earliest author after Polybius who mentioned the fall of the Colossus of Rhodes, and that very concisely. Pliny enters into somewhat fuller details, and speaks of the dimensions of the mutilated limbs. "Even while prostrate," says he, "this statue excited the greatest admiration. Few men could span one of its thumbs with his arms; and each of its fingers was as large as an ordinary full-sized statue. Its broken limbs appeared to strangers like caverns, in the interior of which enormous blocks of stone were seen."
From this time we find no further mention whatever of these fragments; but it is curious that toward the end of the second century several writers speak of a colossal statue at Rhodes as still existing. It is possible that one was again constructed, but of smaller dimensions. Indeed, Leo Allazzi tells us that the Colossus of Rhodes was reconstructed and completed under the Emperor Vespasian; but later Greek authors give us nothing in support of this opinion.
A long time after the fall of the Roman empire the island of Rhodes was conquered by the general-in-chief of the Caliph Othman, in the seventh century of the Christian era; and then mention is once more made of a colossus in metal. "This last memorial of a glorious past was not respected by the conqueror," says the Byzantine history. "The general took down the colossus which stood erect on the island, and transported the metal into Syria, and sold it to a Jew, who loaded 980 camels with the materials of his purchase."
We should refer any who may be curious for further details on the Colossus of Rhodes to a remarkable work on the subject by Carl Ferdinand Lüders, in which the fiction of the gigantic outstretched limbs is completely disposed of; but with such an array of learned accessories, more germanico, that few will perhaps read it throughout.
From The Month.
PUBLIC LIFE OF ST. CATHARINE OF SIENA.
No one can expect to find the history of the Church free from vicissitude; as it has its bright and glorious periods, so also it has its times of gloom and darkness, when a superficial observer might almost interpret the disastrous character of the more salient facts that meet his eye, as the evidence of a suspension of the vital activity and healthy vigor of the whole body. But the life of the Church is essentially internal, and depends on the free action of divine grace, penetrating and animating the whole community—an action that is perpetually kept up by the most common and unobtrusive ministrations of sacramental strength, which are going on in full frequency and efficacy, while the political fortunes of the hierarchy, or of the supreme power, are crushed by oppression or persecution; or even while scandals are seen in high places—when bishops become courtiers, when cardinals are truckling to kings and emperors, and popes are in captivity or exile. And it often happens that these dark times are most prolific of the noblest fruits of the interior life; and that at such seasons the choicest treasures of the Church—the souls on whom great and special graces have been bestowed—are providentially brought out into unusual prominence, so as to exercise great influence and give a character to the period, or a direction to some of its most important transactions. Even if it be not so, at all events we have only to go a little below the surface in order to find plentiful indications of the rich veins that are contained in no soil but one. Thus, in Italy, at the time in which this paper treats, there were a number of saintly souls, whose names have since taken rank in the calendar of the Church. The secular historian sees little more than a set of quarrelsome states, restless in their mutual discord and aggressive ambition, and distracted, ever and anon, by the most furious domestic strife, which would slake itself with nothing but blood. St. Andrew Corsini once showed his audience, as he was preaching in the Piazza of Fiesole, looking down on Florence, an immense flight of hawks, kites, and other ravenous birds, battling with one another over the city. They represented, he told them, the number of evil spirits that were engaged in stirring up the inhabitants to intestine discord. Florence was not worse, but rather better, and more thoroughly Catholic, than its neighbors; yet when we take up such a life, for instance, as that of St. Giovanni Colombini, of Siena, the founder of the Gesuati, we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of calm and fresh simplicity, of happy peace, fervent devotion, and loving faith; and it is only by the chance mention of public calamities—the sufferings of the peasants, whose fruit-trees had been cut down by the German "company"' of marauders, and the like—that we are reminded of the Italy of the day, with its endless disturbances and hopeless insecurity. We have not merely the beautiful picture of Giovanni himself, and his immediate followers and friends; of his good wife, for instance, who begged him to read her pious book while she kept him waiting a few minutes for his dinner, and who, though he had at first thrown it on the floor in a fit of impatient anger, could not persuade him to leave it, when all was ready, till he had read to the end the story of St. Mary of [{548}] Egypt. She had prayed that he might be more given to almsgiving than he was, and then had to complain that she had prayed for a shower, not for a deluge, when he began to give away everything in the house; and she had to yield at last to his saintly fervor, and release him altogether from the obligations of the married life. It is not only Francesco Vincenti, the other rich and noble gentleman of Siena, who caught up the example of Giovanni, began to give great alms, dress shabbily, and serve the poor, and at last joined him in giving up the world altogether, and placing himself under religious obedience; or Giovanni's cousin Catarina, the first of the nuns whom he established, whom he could not persuade to embrace the state of poverty, though she had given up the idea of marriage, till he called her to a little window in the wall between their two houses, one night, as she was going up to bed with her lamp lit, and talked to her in so heavenly a strain that her heart was perfectly changed; and when she turned to go away at last, she found that she had been listening all night, and the morning rays were streaming through the shutters, though, as he bade her observe, the little stock of oil in her lamp was unconsumed. These might be accidents of piety and simple faith in particular families; but we cannot so account for the great number of followers that enlisted themselves under Giovanni—so many, that the worthy magistrates of Siena thought fit for a time to banish him and his companions from the city, lest every one should join them; nor for the ready and enthusiastic welcome that he met with wherever he went throughout Tuscany, the joy with which his preaching was received, and the rapid fruit that it produced. The beautiful account of him and his early followers, written in the century after his death by Feo Belcari, is full of details and anecdotes that seem to prove the powerful hold that faith and religion retained upon the mass of the population in those seemingly black and miserable days. The mere number of his followers, as we have said, is an evidence of this, the proofs to which the novices were put were very severe indeed; yet when Urban V. came from France to Italy, Giovanni went to meet him at Corneto with a company of seventy, all of whom had joined him within two years. The same conclusion is forced upon us when we take up the life or the letters of the still more famous child of the same fair city, St. Catharine of Siena, of whose public influence we hope to give presently some short account. The family of religious disciples whom she collected around her in the course of her short life, from all ranks and classes, could never have been furnished save by a population thoroughly penetrated with religious feeling, and familiar with the loftiest principles of faith. Her own home, too, is a charming picture. There is the good pious father, "a man simple and without guile," as Father Raymond tells us, "fearing God, and keeping free from vice;" a man so moderate in speech, that for no occasion whatever, of disturbance or trouble that was given him, did unbecoming words escape his lips; rather, when others of his family felt bitterly, and he heard them break out into angry words, he set himself at once, with a joyous countenance, to comfort them, saying, "Ah, God give you good luck! don't fret yourself, or say things like that, which don't befit us." He let himself be injured and brought to the brink of ruin by a false charge, and yet would never allow any one in his presence to speak against his accuser, leaving his cause entirely to God; and in due time all was wonderfully set right. His large family of children were brought up with so much modesty, and with so great a hatred of anything licentious, though only in word, that one of the daughters, whom he had given in marriage to a young man who had lost his parents when a child, and learnt bad language from the chance companions he had picked up, made herself ill with [{549}] grieving over her husband's bad habit in this respect, and could never be well or happy till he had given it up. We hear less of the rest of the family. Catharine was one of twenty-five children; but though they opposed for a while her resolution not to marry, and tried to make her give up her excessive penances, they seem to have been good, fervent Christians; and her mother, with her natural love for her child, struggling against the sacrifice of giving her up entirely to the service of God, is delightful in her simplicity, and her character gives a charming air of truthfulness and reality to the whole picture. But there is no reason for supposing that the family of the good Jacomo and Lapa were far above the level of their neighbors in virtue and piety, except in the instance of the one chosen soul whose wonderful graces and history have alone saved them from being altogether forgotten, like the mass of their daily companions in the streets and the churches of Siena. What we are told of them reveals that which escapes the notice of the superficial historian—the daily life of a Catholic people, however politically unsettled, and subject to violent outbreaks natural to its hot temperament and passionate disposition—though the character of the Siennese was said to be comparatively gentle and sweet—still thoroughly leavened and penetrated by the faith that had been handed down through an unbroken succession of generations, since the city's first martyr consecrated its soil by his blood. Such, in general, was the population of Italy, and, of course, of great parts of Europe, at that time; and such a population constitutes a resource, as it were, for the Church, that it must take, it would seem, many generations thoroughly to corrupt or to destroy. From the depths of such a people springs ordinarily the ever-fresh crop of eminent saints, who form the chief glories and supports of the Church in their successive generations; and the wide extent to which the principles of Christian faith and practice influence the mass from which they themselves rise, makes it possible for them to gather followers around them, to touch the springs of public action and thought, and to exercise the wonderful influence upon the men of their day which is so strange an enigma to the uncatholic historian. [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: Thus Dr. Milman ("Latin Christianity," t. v., p. 891-2) is fairly upset by what he calls a "most extraordinary letter" of St Catharine. It is that in which she relates her assistance of Nicola Tuldo, when under sentence of death and on the scaffold. He adds at the end of his note: "St. Catharine had the stigmata. And this woman interposed between popes, princes, and republics." We may see, perhaps, whether she "interposed," or was entreated to do so; whether her influence was sought by herself, or forced on her by others. ]
The singularly beautiful life of St. Catharine of Siena, written by her friend and confessor, Raymond of Capua, gives us as perfect an account as we could wish to have of the personal and, as it were, private history of the saint, and sets her character before us in the freshest colors, like a picture of Fra Angelico. But it is deficient in that very part of her life to which it is our purpose more particularly to attend. The public influence exercised by St. Catharine was fresh in the recollection of those for whom Fr. Raymond wrote: they wished to be told the antecedents, as it were, of a person whom they had seen brought forward by Providence in so remarkable a manner to support the papacy in an hour of severe trial. A complete life of St. Catharine would have to include a great many points which have been omitted by Raymond; and much that he has mentioned or alluded to would have to be fixed more accurately as to time and place. Nor could any one hope to draw up such a work with success without the fullest acquaintance with the ample collection of her letters. It is from these last that many most important features of her public life would have to be drawn. [Footnote 82] We owe them, probably, to [{550}] the care with which her disciples or secretaries copied them before they were sent, for it is hardly likely that they could have been otherwise recovered from the persons to whom they were addressed.
[Footnote 82: One of the best sketches of St Catharine's action on public matters with which we are acquainted is contained in the introduction to M. Caltier's recent translation of her letters into French. The "Histoire de Ste. Catharine," published many years ago by M. Chavin de Malan, contains a great deal of extraneous matter, and does not scene to as to use the letters as they might have been used. M. Christophe, in his "Histoire de la Papauté pendant le XlVe Siècle," falls entirely in giving sufficient importance to the saint. There is a good Italian "Storia di Sta. Catarina da Siena," by Fr. Capecelatro, an Oratorian, published a few years ago, in which much use is made of the admirable notes of Fr. Buramacchi to Gilgli's edition of the letters.]
It is not easy to say at what precise time the public action of Catharine began. She was in the twenty-fourth year of her age at the time of the death of Urban V. She had already passed, for about four years, from that life of prayer, mortification, and contemplation with which her saintly career had begun, to one of greater intercourse with others; and she had already brought about some very wonderful conversions, of which Fr. Raymond has given us an account. She had in several cases been successful in obtaining reconciliations between families hostile to one another through the hereditary feuds and traditions of revenge which have always had so baneful an effect on Italian society; but it does not appear that she had had any personal intercourse with Urban V., or any of the great prelates or princes of the time; and perhaps her fame had not travelled far beyond the frontiers of Tuscany. Giacomo Orsini, who passed through Siena in the year following the death of Urban to receive the dignity of cardinal from Gregory XI., may have made her acquaintance in her native town, and carried the report of her wonderful sanctity to the court of Avignon. The next year, 1372, we find her already in correspondence with important persons. War had again broken out between the Holy See and the restless Barnabo Visconti. Barnabo had usurped the dominion of Reggio, a fief of the Church, and had proceeded to other excesses, such as to force Gregory XI. to excommunicate him in 1371. War was now declared; but it was at first favorable to the Milanese tyrant. A league was then organized against him, in which the emperor, the King of Hungary, and the Count of Savoy took part. John Hawkwood, moreover, with his famous English lances, was engaged on the Pontifical side. The success was now chiefly on the side of the league, and Visconti once more betook himself to intrigues and negotiations at Avignon, where he obtained a truce in 1374. We find St. Catharine writing, in 1372, to two great French prelates, the Cardinal Pierre d'Estaing, who had just been appointed legate at Bologna; and the Abbot of Marmontier, a relation of the Pope, who was sent at the same time to govern Peragia and discharge the office of nuncio in Tuscany. Her letters to the cardinal seem to show that she was already known to him. The first contains little but spiritual exhortation, though there is a hint at the end to the saints favorite subject at this time, the crusade against the infidels. In the second she speaks strongly for peace among Christians. The letter to the abbot—who afterward became a cardinal, and died on the schismatical side—is evidently an answer to a letter from him, asking advice for himself and also for the Pope. St. Catharine urges him to prevail on the Holy Father to put down the nepotism that prevailed among high ecclesiastics, to discourage the luxurious worldliness of the prelates, and to choose good and virtuous men as cardinals. A little later we find her writing to the truculent Barnabo himself, the man who made papal legates eat the missives of excommunication which they were charged to deliver to him—who declared that he was Pope in his own dominions, and dressed up a mad priest in mock vestments to excommunicate the Pope in return, and made the monasteries under his rule take charge of his hounds. This letter, again, was in answer to a message brought to Siena from Barnabo by [{551}] one of his servants. Catharine sets before him the crime he has been guilty of in going to war with the Pope, and exhorts him to make amends for it by taking part in the crusade. The letter seems to have been written after the peace granted to Visconti in 1374. The same date, or perhaps an earlier one, seems to belong to a long letter of the saint to Beatrice della Scala, the wife of Barnabo, in which that lady is urged to become more religious herself, and thus to influence her husband, especially to peace and obedience toward the Holy Father. This letter, also, is in answer to a message.
Catharine's life became still more active than before about this time. She was sent for to Florence by the general of her order, and seems to have gone about to several other cities, such as Pisa and Lucca, and to have exercised great influence everywhere. Her presence had before this begun to attract crowds wherever she went: they came to speak to her, to consult her about the affairs of their souls or their family troubles; and her burning words wrought numberless conversions. The B. Raymond, speaking of this part of her life, tells us in his simple way, "If all the limbs of my body were turned into so many tongues, they would not be enough to relate the fruit of souls which this virgin plant, that the heavenly Father hath planted, did produce. I have sometimes seen a thousand persons or more, men and women, come at the same time, as if drawn by the sound of some unseen trumpet, from the mountains or from the villages in the territory of Siena, to see or to hear Catharine. These persons—I don't say at her words, but even at the mere sight of her—were suddenly struck with compunction for their misdeeds, bewailed their sins, and ran to the confessors, of whom I was one; and so great was the contrition with which they made their confessions, that no one could doubt that a great abundance of grace had descended from heaven upon their hearts. This happened not once or twice only, but very often. For this reason Pope Gregory XI., of happy memory, who was both consoled and rejoiced at this great fruit in souls, granted letters apostolic to me and to my two companions, giving us power to absolve all those who came to see Catharine and to confess their sins, in all the cases for which the bishops of the dioceses had faculties. And that truth, that neither deceives nor can be deceived, knows well that many came to find us out who were laden with great sins, and who had never before made confession, or never received as it ought to be received the sacrament of penance. We—that is, my companions and myself—often remained fasting till evening, and were too few to hear all those who wished to confess; and indeed, to declare my own imperfection, and the influence of this holy virgin, so great was the throng of people wishing to confess that many times I found myself quite worn out and wearied by the excess of fatigue. But Catharine went on praying incessantly; and when the holy prey was won, she rejoiced fully in the Lord, as one who had won a victory, ordering her other sons and daughters to wait upon us, who were tending the nets that she had spread. No pen can express the abundance of the joy in her mind, nor even the signs of gladness that she gave, which indeed gave us so much internal delight as to make us forget the recollection of any sadness whatever we had to undergo." [Footnote 83]
[Footnote 83: Legenda, ii. ch., 7.]
Gregory XI. seems before his election to have been well acquainted with St. Bridget, for he was the cardinal through whom she had wished to communicate to Urban V. the message that she had received to deliver to him. He kept up a correspondence with her as long as she lived, and received some tremendous warnings from her about the return of the Holy See to Rome. At the time of which [{552}] we are speaking, 1374, in the fifth year of his reign, he sent St. Bridget's confessor to Catharine to recommend himself to her prayers. This may have been the opening of the intercourse between them. Of the fourteen letters to Gregory that remain to us, none seem to bear an earlier date than 1376. [Footnote 84] It does not appear certain, therefore, whether she had any direct influence upon the Pope's desire to set on foot a new crusade, which he urged on with much vigor about the time of the peace granted to Visconti. But it was one of St. Catharine's three darling projects; the other two being the reform of the prelacy and the restoration of the papacy to Rome. The fact that her confessor and friend, Fr. Raymond, was appointed to preach the crusade seems to imply that she had been in communication with Gregory upon the subject. We have already said that she proposed to Barnabo himself to take the cross. The idea of sending all the turbulent spirits in Europe to fight against the Turks was not a new one; Urban V. had proposed it to the "companies" who ravaged France and even insulted him by exacting a ransom for Avignon; but the freebooters naturally preferred the less dangerous, though less glorious, life that they were living in France. They were at last persuaded to enlist against Peter the Cruel. In St. Catharine's time there was a proposal of the same kind, with regard to the "bands" in Italy, whom we shall presently see the instruments of the greatest possible mischief to that unhappy country. We have a letter from her to Sir John Hawkwood, from which it appears that he and his followers had actually Engaged to serve in the crusade. Other letters on the subject of the same expedition show that she was now in a position to address herself with effect to the sovereigns of great states. She writes at this time to Queen Joanna of Naples, and to the queen-mother of Hungary, in hopes of her assistance in persuading her son, King Louis. But if the peace with Barnabo had made the crusade once more possible, fresh troubles soon ensued in Italy which prevented it, and which occasioned the still greater prominence of St. Catharine as an earnest advocate of peace.
[Footnote 84: Four of these letters (7-10) were written while Catharine was at Avignon, and were only to be found in Latin among the papers of B. Raymond, who was, it appears, interpreter between the saint and the Pope, who did not understand her Tuscan dialect. M. Chavin de Malan (ii., 369) conjectures that the first three of them may be summaries of conversations that passed at Avignon, taken down afterward by B. Raymond. But internal evidence is against this supposition; and it is not at all unlikely, as the opposition to her influence was so strong, that the Pope preferred that she should communicate with him by letter.]
The disturbances were not, this time, the work of the Visconti. Barnabo turned them to his own advantage, but he was not their author. Historians concur in attributing a feeling of general discontent with the internal administration and external policy of the pontifical government in Italy to the conduct of the French legates. We find very strong charges against them; for example, in the chronicle of St. Antoninus, written in the following century; but it may be questioned whether he did more than repeat what he found in other Florentine writers; and, in this case, the testimony of a Florentine is hardly to be admitted without suspicion. But it is very likely that many of the charges of tyranny, ambition, extortion, and luxury are not unfounded. Still, the internal administration of the States of the Church had been settled by Albornoz, and his system might have carried the government through without an outbreak, even under the trial of administrators quite unworthy to succeed him, had it not been for the suspicions that arose, in cities external to the pontifical territory, that its governors aimed at the subjugation of their neighbors. It thus seemed to become their interest not only to defend themselves, but to anticipate the danger by raising revolts in the States of the Church. It is quite clear that Gregory XI. had no such design [{553}] himself, and that he would not have tolerated it in his subordinates. Neither are the acts of the latter such as cannot be explained on other grounds. But what is clear to us at a distance was not necessarily so clear to the contemporaries of St. Catharine. Certain measures of the legate at Bologna, and of the governor of Perugia, had an unfortunate look. In the first place, it seems that the diplomacy of that time did not insist, in the case of a confederacy of a number of powers against a common enemy, that peace should not be made by one member of the league without the consent of the remainder. The peace with Barnabo had been made, it appears, without the concurrence of Florence, Pisa, Siena, and the other allies of the Pope. Another cause of soreness was a measure adopted about the same time by the Cardinal Legate of Bologna, which pressed hardly upon Tuscany. The last two years had been years of great scarcity in that part of Italy, and he now forbade the exportation of grain from the Legation. He was no doubt afraid of relieving his neighbors at the risk of suffering himself. But there was more to come. Sir John Hawkwood and his followers had to be discharged on account of the peace; they were no sooner dismissed than they invaded the Florentine territory, attempted to make themselves masters of Prato, and ravaged the country up to the gates of Florence itself. Thus soldiers, only a few days before in the pay of the Holy See, were attacking one of its allies with fire and sword. It looked very like an attempt to enslave Tuscany. At the same time Siena had a complaint of the same sort against the abbot of Montmajor at Perugia. The powerful family of the Salimbeni were at that time in exile from Siena, the last revolution of which city had put the supreme power into the hands of the popular party. The pontifical governor of Perugia leagued himself with the exiles, and thus appeared to be aiming at the destruction of the liberties of Siena.
Ergo omnis furiis surrexit Etruria justis. Nothing had indeed been done which did not admit of explanation; And, if his legates had really been guilty of aggression, Gregory XI. could, have readily disavowed them. Indeed, he ordered the edict against the exportation of grain from the Romagna to be revoked; in which, however, the cardinal at Bologna refused to obey him. But this conciliatory order came too late. Under such provocation men, and especially Italians, would not wait for explanations. They were jealous of their liberties, and they hated the idea of foreign domination; the representatives of the pontifical government at the time were foreigners to them, and seemed to be seeking to enslave them. Florence flew to arms: she had been long devoted to the Holy See; now she gave herself over to the rule of the faction within her, who had ever been the minority, because they were the enemies of the Pope; and these men, feeling themselves still in reality the weaker party, lost no time in plunging into the most frantic excesses, that they might alienate their country from the Holy Father beyond hope of reconciliation, and wreak their own vengeance on their personal enemies so fully as to leave them no chance of again recovering their power. Hawkwood was soon disposed of; he was bought off for a large sum. The movement in Florence became a revolution, with all its accompaniments of blood, spoliation, and terror. The inquisitors were massacred, the prisons destroyed; the prior of the Carthusians, who presented himself as papal envoy with overtures of reconciliation, was torn to pieces, and his flesh thrown to the dogs. The clergy were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Pope; the nomination of benefices assumed by the magistrates of the republic. These, however, were all changed; a committee of eight, a sort of Comité du Salut Publique—called, in derision, the Eight Saints—seized the helm of government; it was a [{554}] complete reign of terror. But they were not content with turning Florence against the Pope; they sent envoys throughout the whole of Tuscany and Umbria, inviting all the cities to join in league against the pontifical government, and bearing with them red banners inscribed with the word "Libertas." The conduct of the French governors had but too well prepared the subjects of the Pope for these invitations. Citta di Castello led the way; Perugia, Narni, Viterbo, Montefiascone followed; before the end of 1375 nearly the whole of the pontifical territory, the Patrimony, the Duchy of Spoleto, and the March of Ancona, were in open revolt. All that Albornoz had done for the Holy See seemed to have been done in vain. Bologna, almost alone, remained faithful; but even there the government of the legate was very insecure.
It was felt at Avignon that something was now to be dealt with very different even from a war against the Visconti. Some "companies" of Bretons were then ravaging or ransoming cities in the south of France, under two famous captains of the day, Jean de Malestroit and Silvestre de Bude; they were enlisted under the flag of the Church, and prepared to descend on Italy. But Gregory XI. determined to try the method of conciliation before letting them loose. He sent envoys to Florence, who offered terms to which no prudent person could make objection. Perugia and Citta di Castello were to be free, but the Florentines were to cease in their revolutionary propaganda in the States of the Church, and particularly in Bologna. The "eight saints" had all that was reasonable and good in Florence against them, and they dared not openly refuse to entertain terms such as these. But they sent secret instructions to their commander in the field while the negotiations were being carried on; he marched on Bologna, raised the people in revolt, and made the legate a prisoner. They succeeded in their ulterior object: the Papal envoys left Florence without concluding any peace.
After this fresh provocation, nothing remained for the Pope but to attack the Florentines with every weapon at his disposal. The Breton companies were ordered to march, under the general command of the Cardinal Robert of Geneva, a man, it seems, with more of the soldier than the priest about him, who was to be, within three years from the time that he began his expedition, the first of the miserable line of Antipopes who opposed themselves to the legitimate successors of Gregory XI. His present campaign was distinguished chiefly by two events, neither of which cast credit on the pontifical cause: a treaty he made with Visconti (who had before allied himself with the Florentines), by which the Guelfic party in the north of Italy were sacrificed to the enmity of the tyrant; and the awful sack and massacre of Cesena by the Breton troops. But the Pope used spiritual weapons also against offenders like the Florentines; and in their case the temporal consequences of the solemn excommunication under which they fell made themselves far more swiftly and keenly felt than in that of a great seigneur like Barnabo. Their merchants and agents were in every country of Europe: the sentence of the Pope exposed them everywhere to confiscation, imprisonment, and slavery; their commerce was ruined, and it is said that the immediate loss to the city amounted to three million florins. At all events, early in the year 1376, and but a few weeks aft«r they had chosen not to avail themselves of the moderate overtures made by the Papal envoys, the Florentines began to desire peace. It is probable that there had always been but a narrow majority in favor of the violent measures of which we have spoken; now, the great misfortunes of the state made even its revolutionary rulers look about them for a mediator, for their first attempt at negotiation had proved a failure. They had sent two [{555}] ambassadors to Avignon; but instead of apologizing for their undeniable aggressions, they laid all the blame on the pontifical delegates, and were dismissed by Gregory with a confirmation of their sentence. A mediator, therefore, was necessary; and instead of asking the kind offices of the emperor, or the king of France, or some other of the sovereigns of Europe, they determined to seek the help of Catharine of Siena.
Catharine had been in the midst of the tumult, doing what she could to maintain peace. It seems that Gregory XI. had begged her to go to Lucca, where she was held in great veneration, to keep that city from joining the league against the Church. She had also exerted her influence at Pisa, and seems to have succeeded in both places, though with some difficulty. From Pisa she wrote the first of her series of letters to the Pope. She was still there when the magistrates of Florence invited her to undertake their cause. She visited the city, conversed with the principal men of all parties, and it was agreed that they should send another and a humbler embassy to Avignon, on condition that she should precede the envoys, and endeavor to soften the heart of the Holy Father toward his rebellious children. She was already sending letters to Avignon imploring peace, and urging the Pope to return to Rome, and to raise the standard of the crusaders, in order to unite all discordant elements by directing them to a common object. She had sent her most intimate confidant and confessor, Father Raymond, to plead the cause of the Florentines; and soon followed him herself, accompanied by a number of her "disciples," arriving at Avignon about the middle of June, 1376.
As is so often the case in the lives of the chosen instruments of Providence, Catharine was to do a great work at Avignon, but not the work for which she apparently went there. She was received by the Pope with the greatest kindness and distinction; she was even intrusted by him with full powers to make peace with the Florentines. But Gregory XI. knew the men with whom he was dealing better than she. The government of Florence was still in the hands of the eight; they did not really desire peace, at least on any terms that the Pope could grant them. They had yielded to the vast majority of their fellow-citizens in seeming to wish for what would be in reality the end of their own power. The envoys delayed their journey to Avignon: when they did arrive, and Catharine proposed to use the full powers the Pops had given her, they replied that they had no authority to treat with her; nor were they more honest in their dealings with the Pope himself. The time, then, for the particular task that Catharine had undertaken was not yet come; but she was at Avignon now, at the side of Gregory XI., and she was to decide him to a step far more important than the granting a peace to Florence.
The character of Gregory XI. is so constantly represented in the same colors by historians of every grade, that it would seem almost rash to suppose that they could all have been mistaken in the picture. It has a softness and beauty about it that are extremely touching, when viewed in the light of his many misfortunes and early death, overshadowed as it was by the threats of the still greater troubles from which it saved him. He had been marked out for high ecclesiastical dignity from the very first, and was but eighteen when his uncle, Clement VI., made him cardinal. His career after his elevation justified his premature advancement; he made himself famous for learning, and even more so for his tender piety and the unsullied purity of his life. His humility and sweetness won all hearts: perhaps the more because his frail health, his pale countenance, and evident delicacy of constitution, gave a kind of plaintive charm to his very [{556}] appearance. Though he was barely forty years of age at the death of Urban V., he had been elected Pope after the conclave had lasted but a single night. He had refused at first, but at last had been forced to accept the crown of St. Peter as a matter of duty. He was then only in deacon's orders. No one has ever questioned the purity of his aims, or even the rightness of his views and the soundness of his judgment. We have already said, with regard to one great paramount question of the time, that he had secretly vowed to take back the papacy to Rome, if he ever should be elected pope. But, inheriting as he did the traditions of Clement VI., surrounded in France by noble and powerful relatives, and by cardinals almost exclusively his fellow-countrymen, and with health and constitution that were almost sure to be ruined at once by the air of Rome, everything seemed to forbid him to make the effort that was required. The earlier years of his reign had passed away, not indeed without many thoughts and even declarations on the subject, but without any steps being taken to put the design in execution. In 1374 he had announced his intention of visiting Rome to the emperor; in the following January he had written in the same sense to Edward III. and to other kings of Europe. But that summer and autumn saw the outbreak at Florence, and the great revolution that arrayed almost the whole of the Ecclesiastical States in rebellion against the Church; and the advocates of the French residence of the papacy must have thought themselves safe now that Italy had risen against Gregory. He was not, like Urban V., a pope elected from outside the College of Cardinals, with little sympathy and but few ties with them. He was of one of the great Limousin families, the nephew of the most brilliant of the Avignon popes, surrounded by powerful relatives, all of whom were interested in keeping him where he was. The quiet security of Provence suited him, and he was one of those gentle characters, not wanting in ordinary firmness and decision, which still are more fitted for tranquil times than for days of disturbance, and are more capable of suffering and of patience than of initiating bold measures and breasting the waves of a great emergency. Family and personal influence had much weight with him; not from any active ambition or spirit of nepotism, so much as that it had become at Avignon a matter almost of course that many of the splendid prizes in the gift of the Popes should be bestowed on their relatives. He himself owed his position originally to that custom. At a time when reform was much needed in the prelacy, and many abuses and scandals existed which required to be sternly rebuked and punished, he could see what was wanting more easily than carry it out with a severity alien to his nature. He was influenced by the atmosphere around him. In the same way, notwithstanding his own strong inclination to grant peace on any terms to the Florentines, he seems to have yielded as to his actual policy to the more violent and relentless counsels of the French cardinals, headed by Robert of Geneva, who led the Breton companies over the Alps. It might well have been thought that such a pontiff would not now act against the advice and the wishes of all around him, and that the actual state of Italy would be enough to make him adjourn indefinitely his promised journey to Rome.
To such a character it is sometimes everything to have support and companionship—the mind and the voice of another, however inferior, that seem to give body and life to thoughts and designs not new indeed, but which seemed before to belong rather to the world of dreams and imaginations than of possible realities; to change wishes and longings into practical resolutions; to chase away phantom difficulties, and nerve the will to efforts and sacrifices which the conscience [{557}] has long prompted. With all of us our own ideas and designs seem sometimes to date their real existence from the moment that we found they were shared by some one else. In the case of Gregory XI., he seems, before the arrival of Catharine at Avignon, to have been almost alone in his wish to return to Italy; and he had already seen something of St. Bridget, and learnt from intercourse with her what the personal influence of great sanctity might be. Catharine at once won his perfect confidence, and her presence gave him the courage to follow out the course which he had long felt to be the right one. It is this which makes it historically true that she had so great a part in the final return of the Holy See from Avignon. It is easy to find reasons why Gregory should have returned; it is easy to show that there was danger that an attempt might be made by the Romans to give their city a bishop of their own creation; or, on the other hand, that Gregory had intended to take the step long before he took it. If these things are alleged to show that the influence of St. Catharine has been exaggerated by her historians, they are beside the point. Her providential mission at Avignon was not to put new considerations before the mind of Gregory, but to strengthen his will to act upon considerations already familiar to him.
The esteem in which the Pope held her was not only manifested by the reception he gave her, and by his inviting her even to speak in public as to what she thought to be required for the best interests of the Church; it also shielded and defended her from the dislike with which her unwelcome presence was viewed by many a magnificent prelate and many a brilliant official of the court of Avignon. The reforms that she spoke of as so necessary, and the return to Rome that she recommended, were equally distasteful to them. Three of the most learned prelates asked leave of the Pope to visit her, and began to catechise her most severely both as to her presumption in coming as the envoy of Florence, and as to her preternatural gifts of prayer and her extraordinary mode of life. But they left her overwhelmingly convinced of her sanctity and wonderful gifts. The fine ladies about the court—the sisters, nieces, and relations of the Pope and the cardinals—looked on her with instinctive dread. Some of them even tried to patronize and make her the fashion; but she either exhorted them plainly to conversion, or turned from them with that stern silence with which her Master received the overtures of the blood-stained paramour of Herodias. One of them—a niece of the Pope— knelt beside her in apparent devotion, as she was rapt in prayer before communion, and plunged a needle or bodkin into her bare foot, to see whether she could feel it. When her state of abstraction ceased, Catharine could hardly walk, and her sandal was full of congealed blood. The French king heard of her influence with the Pope, and sent his brother, the Duke of Anjou, to dissuade Gregory from listening to her; but Catharine won the respect and admiration of the duke, prevailed on him to offer himself for the crusade, and suggested him to the Pope as its captain-in-chief. Then an attempt was made to influence Gregory by means of the deference that he paid to the advice of saintly souls. A forged letter was sent him—as it appears, in the name of the holy Peter of Aragon—telling him that if he went to Italy he would be poisoned. Catharine showed him that the letter was not such as a servant of God would write, and that poison could be given him in France as well as in Italy. After all, the Pope still hesitated; he made preparations and issued orders, but it was with slowness and reluctance; and at any time a change might come over the state of affairs in Italy that might be the occasion of indefinite delay. One day again he asked her opinion. She said she was a poor weak woman; how should she [{558}] give advice to the sovereign Pontiff? "I do not ask you to counsel me," he replied, "but to tell me what is the will of God." Again she excused herself; and Gregory again urged her, commanding her at last, by virtue of her obedience, to tell him what she knew of God's will as to the matter. She bowed her head—"Who knows the will of God better than your holiness, who have promised him by vow to return to Rome?" Gregory had never revealed his vow to living soul; and from that moment his determination was taken. Still the opposition was great and powerful. The cardinals urged him with the example of an excellent Pope, Clement IV., who had never done anything without the approval of the Sacred College. Catharine met their arguments, she even went so far as to urge the Pope to depart secretly, so obstinate and so influential was the party that wished to retain him in France. At length, on September 13, 1376, amid the remonstrances of his family and the tears of his aged father, as well as the sullen complaints of the whole court, Gregory XI. left Avignon. Catharine had remained to the last, and then went on foot with her companions to Genoa, whither the Pope was to pass by sea. It seemed as if every kind of influence that could beat down his courage was to be allowed to work upon the failing heart of Gregory. Everything that could be turned into a bad omen was carefully noted. His horse refused to let him mount; then it became so restive that another had to be brought. As he passed by Novis, Orgon, and Aix to Marseilles, everywhere the inhabitants were in tears and gloom. Marseilles itself, when he came to embark, was the scene of a grand explosion of grief. Then there came the terrors of a dangerous voyage, from the extremely severe weather encountered by the fleet. The grand master of the Knights of St. John himself took the helm of the galley in which the Pope sailed—a weather-beaten veteran, accustomed to perils of all sorts, who had to exert all his skill under the storm that came on as they made across toward Genoa. They were obliged to put into Villafranca for some days. It was not till the 18th of October, sixteen days after leaving Marseilles, that Genoa was reached. Here the Pope was met by bad news from Rome and from Florence; the Florentines, alarmed at his approach, were preparing for the most desperate hostilities; the Romans seemed quite unwilling to put the government of the city into his hands. A consistory was held (the greater number of the cardinals were with the Pope), and the resolution was adopted not to proceed further with the journey. All seemed lost; but Catharine with her company was in Genoa. The Pope sought her out—it is said, by night; and from her calm and fervent words gained fresh strength and courage to pursue his journey to the end. [Footnote 85]
[Footnote 85: See Capecelatro, "Storia di Santa Catarina," lib. v., p. 222, 2d ed.]
So, after ten days spent at Genoa, the fleet once more put to sea, to be driven again into Porto Fino, where the feast of All Saints was kept. It arrived at Leghorn on the 7th of November, and there again lingered ten or eleven days. As far as Piombino all went well. When the galleys left that port, another storm—the most violent of all they had met with—arose, and drove them back shattered and disabled; three cardinals were seriously ill, one of whom died at Pisa a few days later. At last Corneto was reached on December 6, more than two months after the departure from Marseilles. Gregory remained there for several weeks to regain his strength, and then sailed up the Tiber, landing near the basilica of St. Paul on January 17, 1377, the day before the feast of the Roman Chair of St Peter. His entrance was a triumph that seemed to promise him every security for peace and tranquillity; and the joy and devotion of the Romans may [{559}] have taken away for the moment the mournful feelings with which he had turned his back on France. Thus, a year and a half after the revolution at Florence, which, had caused so rapid and widespread a defection among the cities of the Pontifical States, and seemed to threaten the very existence of the temporal power of the Church, these very events, which might have seemed likely to furnish reason for the prolonged exile of the papacy, brought about, under the providence of God, the fulfilment of the resolution to return to Rome which the Pope had so long delayed to accomplish. The instrument of the deliverance of the Holy See from its dangerous position was the envoy of its rebellious children, the humble maiden from Siena.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.
Primeval night had repossess'd
Her empire in the fields of peace;
Calm lay the kine on earth's dark breast;
The earth lay calm in heaven's embrace.
That hour, where shepherds kept their flocks,
From God a glory sudden fell;
The splendor smote the trees and rocks.
And lay like dew along the dell.
God's angel close beside them stood:
"Fear naught," that angel said, and then,
"Behold, I bring you tidings good:
The Saviour Christ is born to men."
And straightway round him myriads sang
Loud song again, and yet again,
Till all the hollow valley rang
"Glory to God, and peace to men."
The shepherds went and wondering eyed,
In Bethlehem born, the heavenly stranger.
Mary and Joseph knelt beside:
The Babe was cradled in the manger!
From The St. James Magazine.
LAW AND LITERATURE.
Notwithstanding the seeming incongruity, there subsists a very intimate connection between law and literature. To the legal profession, more than any other, we are indebted for the magnitude and splendor of our literature. Nor is it only with one or two branches or divisions of literature that the connection exists. On the contrary, there is scarcely a single department in which the legal profession is not represented. History, biography, philosophy, metaphysics, poetry, the drama, fiction, oratory, criticism, and even theology, have all been contributed to by men who at one time or other were connected with the legal profession. Nor is the literature which has emanated from that source of a superficial or evanescent nature. Much of it has passed away, and is now almost unknown; but a great deal still remains, forming some of the best and most endurable of our classics. And these contributions have been—and still are being—made in spite of the opposition and discountenance of the legal profession itself.
There is an opinion very prevalent among the public generally, and the legal profession in particular, that the study of literature is at variance and inconsistent with the study of law; that the more the former is indulged in, the more the latter will decline. In support of this opinion we are told that very few men have distinguished themselves in both avocations; that men of great literary attainments have seldom risen to eminence in the legal profession. That is, no doubt, true; but I attribute it to a very different cause. I consider that the study of literature must have a beneficial effect upon a lawyer, provided that it is made subservient to the business of his profession.
The duties which lawyers are called upon to discharge are many and various, and consequently a vast deal of general knowledge is indispensable to the formation of a really good lawyer. It is not sufficient that he is well versed in legal principles and precedents. Without these he cannot succeed in his profession; but they are not the only requisites. There are many cases in which legal principle and precedent are only of secondary importance. It is when he is called upon to deal with such cases that the lawyer feels the advantages of varied information. If he is ignorant of almost everything but law, he must be painfully aware of his utter incompetence to do justice to his client. He is compelled to grope his way like a man in the dark; he wanders at random, stumbling over everything that lies in his path, and ends, it may be, by falling into a ditch from which he vainly attempts to extricate himself—every attempt only causing him to sink deeper—and is at last compelled to call for help. But it is different with the man who, in addition to his legal knowledge, is possessed of much general and varied information. He can always see his way, and, if assistance is necessary, he knows where to seek for, and seldom fails in obtaining it. It is only to a lawyer of this latter stamp that any man with his eyes open would intrust the care of interests which involved other than strictly legal questions.
Now if it be true that a large amount of general knowledge is necessary to the formation of a really good lawyer, then it must be admitted that the study [{561}] of literature is an indispensable part of his professional education. The arts and sciences are all represented in literature; and it is only in the study of literature that the requisite general information can be gained. The error appears to me to consist in confounding the term literature with amusing literature. This confusion of terms is very common; but it is also very absurd. When I speak of "literature," I use the word in its most comprehensive sense; and if I were to be understood as meaning solely "amusing literature," my meaning would be grossly perverted. There is no ground for accepting a limited interpretation unless the term used is expressly qualified.
Ease, fluency, and polish, not only in speaking, but also in writing, are likewise indispensable to a lawyer, particularly in the higher walks of the profession. In order to attain these requisites, conciseness, concentration, and arrangement of thought must be diligently studied. There is nothing which tends more to the acquirement of such qualities than the careful examination of them as displayed in the writings and speeches of others, and the frequent expression of our own thoughts, both in writing and in speech. Law treatises, it need scarcely be said, are not conspicuous as models of either ease, fluency, or polish; and therefore the lawyer who aspires to these accomplishments must seek elsewhere for his models. In this respect, also, the study of literature is beneficial to the lawyer; and if attentive reading be accompanied with frequent careful writing and speaking, he cannot fail ultimately to gain the objects of his desire. If the members of the legal profession would bestow more pains than they do to the acquisition of a good style of writing and speaking, the advantages which would accrue to them would greatly outweigh all the trouble incurred. I have seen letters and even pleadings written, and heard speeches delivered, by men of eminence in the legal profession, which displayed either the grossest carelessness or the most lamentable ignorance of the rules, not only of composition, but also of grammar; and such as would have been almost inexcusable in a schoolboy. It is a common notion that elegance is not required, and is out of place in law papers and in letters. I for one cannot agree in that opinion. An elegant style is always desirable. It is preposterous to assert—as many people do—that attention to style begets a habit of neglecting the substance for the sake of the shadow. On the contrary, an elegant style adds to the effect both of speech and writing; and therefore it ought to be cultivated by every lawyer.
So much for the general objection that the study of literature is incompatible with the study of law. I think I have said quite sufficient to show that it ought to form a part of the education of every lawyer. But with reference to the proof of the assertion, that men of distinguished literary attainments have seldom risen to eminence in the legal profession, I could name many men who have rendered themselves conspicuous for their literary abilities, and, at the same time, gained the highest honors of their profession. Yet I admit that overwhelming evidence of a contrary nature might easily be adduced; but I do not admit the reason to be that the one profession is incompatible with the other. I maintain the reverse. The reason why comparatively few lawyers have risen to eminence, both in literature and in law, appears to me to be simply this, that whenever their literary leanings became known, the opportunity was denied them of distinguishing themselves in their profession; the consequence of which was that they abandoned the study of law altogether, and betook themselves to the more agreeable and less laborious occupation of literature. And it must also be borne in mind that law is not always studied with the view of engaging in its practice; but often with the [{562}] sole purpose of gaining admission to the bar for the sake of its social advantages, or with the aim of acquiring such a knowledge as will be useful in legislative discussion.
I now proceed to consider the causes which lead to the intimate connection between law and literature. I do not think they are difficult of explanation. Speaking generally, it may be said that the lawyers who have distinguished themselves in literature have been for the most part members of the bar. Comparatively few have been members of the other branches of the profession. In England intending barristers must be students of an inn of court for three years, [Footnote 86] during which time they are not permitted to engage in any business. In Scotland, too, every applicant for admission into the faculty of advocates must have graduated either in arts or in laws; or undergo an examination in Latin, Greek (or in his option, in lieu of Greek, two of the following languages, viz., French, German, Italian, and Spanish), ethical and metaphysical philosophy, and logic or (in his option) mathematics, beside an examination in the civil law and the law of Scotland; and one year must be passed without an occupation. Having been called to the bar, a few years generally elapse before much business is intrusted to them, and often it never comes at all. During all this time something must be done—An occupation of some kind must be found either for pleasure or to kill time; or it may be to earn a means of subsistence. Literature—to which their previous training inclines them—is the only employment which is available; and accordingly literature is resorted to. A taste for letters is thus fostered. Its gratification has a twofold advantage, it affords both pleasure and profit. It becomes a habit, and is indulged in on every available occasion. There is always plenty of leisure, at least for many, years, and that leisure is devoted to literature. The employment is so seductive that in many cases its legal votaries are drawn away from their regular studies—which unfortunately often happen not to be profitable in a pecuniary sense— and adopt literature as a profession. Even lawyers with a large practice can occasionally find time for indulging in literary pursuits. During vacation they have plenty of leisure, and as they are accustomed to constant hard work in session, they experience a want and a craving whenever the have nothing to do, and this they endeavor to satisfy by devoting themselves to literature. Many of the most eminent men at the bar occupy the greater portion of their spare time in literary studies.
[Footnote 86: Now, before being admitted as students they must have passed a public examination at an university, or undergo an examination in Latin, English language, and English history.]
The practice of law eminently qualifies a man for attaining distinction in literature. It engenders rapidity of thought, systematic arrangement of arguments and ideas, and facility of expression. Lawyers in the enjoyment of any considerable practice are almost constantly called upon to form their opinion and give it expression, apparently without time for even the most superficial reflection. Continual exercise renders these easy to them. In setting forth their arguments both in written and in oral pleadings they are trained to habits of carefulness and close reasoning; because they know very well that any inconsistencies or false reasoning will at once be discovered by the judges whom they are addressing, or by the opposite counsel. What would impose upon a jury, or upon an ordinary reader or listener, will not impose either upon the judges or opposing counsel. They are thus led to say what they wish to say in the clearest manner, and in the way which is most likely to succeed in gaining the object in view. As they are compelled to avoid false reasoning and inconsistencies themselves, so they are ever on the outlook for them on the part of [{563}] an opponent—it becomes, in fact, a habit. Again, the various duties which they are called upon to discharge enable them to pass from one subject to another with ease and readiness, and compel them to acquire a vast amount of general information which is carefully stored up for future use. The habits thus engendered and constantly exercised, either in written pleading or in oral debate, are easily transferred to literature when that is indulged in. As perspicuity, arrangement, and close reasoning are the very qualities which lead to literary success, and as these are more exercised and consequently more perfect among lawyers than among any other class of men, the reason why they occupy such an eminent position in literature is easily understood.
There are two departments of literature to which the foregoing observations are applicable only to a limited extent—poetry and fiction. In many respects poetry and fiction are analogous: and the old adage, "Poeta nascitur, non fit," may, therefore, with almost equal propriety, be applied to the writer of fiction. However true it may be that the poet is born, there can be no doubt that the development of the poetic faculty is quite as much a matter of hard study and practice as the development of any other inborn faculty. The study of law is the opposite of poetical; but this very antagonism begets in the lawyer, by comparison, a keener relish for and appreciation of poetry, when he turns to it in his hours of leisure. And if he is gifted with the "faculty divine," the delight taken in its cultivation will be greater, because it is to him a relief from the dry details of his ordinary pursuits. He sees, too, so much of human life—of character and passion—in the course of his professional career, that he is enabled to delineate with truth, with strict adherence to reality, the feelings and emotions which he attempts to exhibit in the creatures of his imagination. These, combined with the habits of continuity of thought and forcible expression engendered by his professional studies, must contribute in no slight degree to his success as a poet or novelist. I do not mean to say that any lawyer may write a good novel or poem if he will only apply himself to the task. All I assert is that if he is gifted with the poetic faculty, his professional studies, when properly attended to, will contribute materially to his success as a poet or novelist.