SILENT GRIEF.
You bid me raise my voice,
And pray
For tears; but yet this choice
Resteth not with me. Too much grief
Taketh the tears and words that give relief
Away:
Though I weep not, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart
You like not this dead, calm,
Cold face.
So still, unmoved, I am.
You think that dark despair begins
To brood upon me for my many sins'
Disgrace:
Not so; within, silent and apart,
Hopes and trusts my heart.
Down underneath the waves
Concealed
Lie in unfathomed graves
A thousand wrecks, storm never yet—
That did the upper surface madly fret—
Revealed.
Wreck'd loves lie deep; tears, with all their art,
Ne'er could show my heart.
Complaint I utter not.
I know
That He who cast my lot,
In silence also bore His cross.
Nor counted lack of words or tears a loss
In woe.
Alone with Him, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart.
Original.
THE GODFREY FAMILY;
OR, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
CHAPTER I.
MR. GODFREY AND HIS FAMILY.
About the time the events of the era 1792 were creating a panic throughout the European world, an English gentleman sat at breakfast with his wife and children in a noble mansion on the south eastern coast of his native island. The newspaper was unfolded with more than usual interest, for the Honorable Mr. Godfrey's sister had married a French nobleman, and the daily accounts from France struck every day new terror to the heart of this gentleman. Until now, he had been what is termed a liberal in his politics, and, alas! an unbeliever in his religion, and had prided himself on bringing up his family free from all bigotry and superstition; he had kept up correspondence with men of science all over the world, and fondly hoped that the reign of intellect "would emancipate the world from evil." His children had been brought up under all these influences, and thus far with success to his scheme. Accustomed from infancy to refinement, elegance, domestic happiness, and intellectual culture, these young people felt that in their case goodness and happiness were synonymous. All that was beautiful they loved, for they had cultivated tastes; all that was noble in sentiment they admired, for their father prided himself, and taught them to pride themselves, on their noble ancestry, whose deeds of daring and renown he was never weary of recounting. Fame, honor, and glory were their idols. Brought up among such genial influences as foster agreeable manners and bring out the most lovable of earth's dispositions, together with an intellectual expression of beauty, and a poetic appreciation of nature's charms, it was little wonder that they mistook strong impulses for principle, thought themselves firm in integrity of purpose, and were disposed fearlessly to launch their vessel on the ocean of life, secure that intelligence and high aims would guard them for ever against shipwreck. But now a change seemed pending. The fear engendered by the French Revolution had somewhat revolutionized Mr. Godfrey's mind, he was becoming more cautious in his theories, and more morose in his temper than he had ever been before. His wife hesitated ere she asked: "Any news of the countess to-day?"
"No; though affairs are getting more desperate every hour. Would she and the count were safe in England."
"But, in that case, their estates, would be confiscated, would they not?"
Mr. Godfrey rose uneasily and paced the room. "What is the world coming to?" he said.
A loud ring at the outer gate prevented reply; it was early for visitors at the front entrance. They paused, and listened; soon a servant announced "M. de Villeneuve."
"M. de Villeneuve! why, what can bring him here? Where have you shown him to?"
"He is in the library, sir."
Mr. Godfrey hastened to receive his visitor. "I thought you were in America," he said, after the first greetings were over.
"I went back to France to finish arranging some affairs for my father; [{31}] and well for me that they were settled before these scenes of blood had crazed the populace, or we should have lost everything."
"And now———"
"Now, everything of ours has been favorably disposed of, and my father and his family are settled in America without loss of property; my father is delighted at the prospects of the new world, where every man is to be EQUAL before the laws; you know he is an enthusiast."
"Yes, but it is an untried experiment yet, and France is presenting a very fearful spectacle at this moment in endeavoring to follow in the track."
"It is of that I came to speak to you. You have relations there?"
"My sister—do you know anything about her?"
"I and some other friends brought her and her husband's daughter across the Channel last night."
"Last night! across the Channel! And her husband——"
"Has perished by the guillotine!"
"Great God!" Mr. Godfrey hid his face in his hands. "My poor sister! how did she bear it? where is she? how did you come?"
"We came over in an open fishing boat—the Countess de Meglior, Euphrasie, the priest of the old chateau, and myself; it was all we could do to escape detection. I, of course, passed unnoticed, as an American citizen; but the Countess of Euphrasie and M. Bertolot had to disguise themselves and to suffer many hardships. The countess now lies ill in the little inn at New Haven; she sent me on to tell you of her situation."
"My poor sister! My poor sister! Has she lost all?"
"Nearly so. The estate is confiscated, and save a little money and a few jewels she was able to save nothing; indeed she was too much terrified to think. Mademoiselle de Meglior had been sent for on the first alarm from the south of France, where she had been educated; she arrived in time to throw herself into her father's arms as the officers were taking him from his house; and in less than a week he was no more. Secret intimation was sent to the countess that she and her daughter were both denounced, and they fled, as I have told you."
To hasten to his sister's aid was, of course, the first thing to be thought of. It was some days before the countess was sufficiently recovered to be able to be removed to her brother's house; and even after removal she was for a long time confined to her room.
Euphrasie, her step-daughter, tended her most assiduously, but the poor lady could scarcely be comforted. To have, lost everything at once—husband, estate, wealth, power, and position, and to be reduced to depend upon a brother's bounty—it was not wonderful that she should feel her situation acutely. She had lived exclusively for this world's honors; every duty of domestic life had given place to her love of the court and its pleasures. Euphrasie, brought up at the convent and under the guardianship of her paternal grandmother, was almost as much a stranger to her as the nieces to whom she was now newly introduced.
. . . . . .
It was a long time ere the Countess de Meglior rallied sufficiently to appear in the drawing-room of the mansion, and meantime her step-daughter, Euphrasie, was simply her slave. Madame never considered her welfare, or seemed to think she was in any way concerned in the misfortune that bad overtaken them; yet never, perhaps, was a child more fondly attached to a father than had been our heroine. Although since the death of her own mother she had for the most part resided away from him, yet her father's frequent visits to his ancestral chateau, and the still more frequent correspondence with his mother and daughter, had kept up a warm interest. At the death of her grandmother she had received her education at a neighboring convent, for her step-mother [{32}] declined taking charge of her. She was summoned home at last in consequence of the troubles of the times; arrived in time to be torn by force from the arms of her father, into which she had thrown herself; passed days of agonizing suspense, which were terminated only by hearing of his death.
Paris was no longer safe; advertised of her own proscription, Madame de Meglior, almost in a state of frenzy, excepted the kind offices of M. de Villeneuve, and, with the old family chaplain, had fled the country, taking with her Euphrasie, with whom she so suddenly became aware she was connected, though a stranger alike to her character and disposition.
Euphrasie, though overwhelmed by the blow, was constrained to hide her own emotions, the better to console one who seemed so inconsolable as the countess, her step-mother. Truly, the poor girl did feel she was as a stranger in a strange land. Until the storm broke forth which drove the nuns from the convent, and let infidelity and irreligion like "the dogs of war" loose over the fated kingdom, Euphrasie had dwelt in happy ignorance of all grosser evil, and with light and merry heart, chastened by earnest piety, pursued her innocent way; but suddenly awakened by such horrors to the knowledge of crime, vice, and their concomitant miseries, she shrank from entering into a world which contrasted with the abode she had left, seemed to her over-excited imagination filled with mysterious terrors, and fraught with indescribable dangers.
She met, then, the advances of her entertainers with constraint; kept the young people absolutely at a distance, and would more willingly shut herself up in the apartment of her peevish, unloving stet-mother, to whom she manifested the affection and paid the respect of a daughter, than join with Adelaide or Annie either in study or amusement.
Adelaide, the eldest daughter of Mr. Godfrey's family, was within two months of her eighteenth year—Eugene, the only son and heir, was then sixteen—while her sister Annie was but a year younger; and the merry, laughing Hester had scarcely counted thirteen years. With the compassionate eagerness of youth they crowded round Euphrasie, whom they persisted in saluting as "cousin," and were not a little chagrined to find their advances met in so chilling a manner; they spared no pains to distract her from her moodiness, or hauteur, or ill-temper, or whatever it might be, that made her so different from themselves. Yet moodiness it scarcely could be, for the young French girl was cheerful in society, so far as the expression of her countenance went; and when surprised in solitude, a calm serenity sat on her youthful brow, and she bore the ill-temper of the countess with wonderful sweetness; her mother's impatience, indeed, seemed but to increase her patience, and the harshness she underwent served but to make her more gentle. She was a mystery to her animated young friends, who, loving a life of excitement and intellectual progress, could not understand how Euphrasie could exist in so stupid and monotonous a course.
Yet was the young French girl far from being deficient in those branches of accomplishments which are especially feminine. She played and sang with taste and feeling, but I the airs were generally of a solemn character. She loved, also, to exercise her pencil, but it was to delineate the head of the thorn-crowned Saviour, of the penitent Magdalene, or of, "Mary, highly favored among women." Earthly subjects and earthly thoughts had no attraction for her, yet there were moments when, as if unconsciously, she gave utterance to fancies which startled her young companions. She would walk with them by the sounding shore, and while they were busy gathering and classifying shells and sea-weed and geological specimens, she, too, would seem to study' and listen and learn a lesson, but a far [{33}] different lesson from the one they sought. The young ladies Godfrey were scientific, though in a playful way; there was aim, object, utility, in short, in all their seekings. "Knowledge is power," was the axiom of the family; and the members of it might fairly challenge the world for the consistency with which they sought to carry that axiom into practice. But Euphrasie would wonder and ponder, and philosophize unconsciously. She did not decompose the fragments of the mighty rocks with acids as her young friends did; she did not classify and dissect the lovely flower; but she stood in mute wonderment at the base of the rocks, and heard their disquisitions on its strata having been once liquid and gradually consolidating, and said: "What a wondrous history! what a sight for the angels to behold the atomic attraction forming the worlds grand order! A true theory of geology would be like a chapter of the life of God—a true revelation of his spirit to man."
"Yes," said Adelaide; "science will yet and if superstition from the earth."
"Superstition!" said Euphrasie. "Yes! if superstition means false views of God's relation to the human soul. True science is mystic, and must reveal God interiorly; but true science can scarcely be attained by guesses or dissection. You destroy a beauteous flower by pulling it to pieces, but I do not see how its separate petals and crushed leaves can speak so plainly to the soul as the living plant on the stem, or how your anatomy is a revelation."
"Nay, we discern the uses of the different parts thereby, and admire the structure, seeing how each organ fulfils its office duly, in minuteness as in grandeur."
"But your long words," said Euphrasie; "do they too reveal God? To me they hide him in a cloud of dust. I feel the order, I love the beauty, I am elevated by the grandeur of creation, because nature is a metaphor in which God hides himself and reveals himself at once, but I distrust a mere human key. How can we be sure of systems, unless we spend a life in verification? Did not Pythagoras teach astronomy in the Copernican fashion? and yet the world did not receive the teaching till centuries after. The world receives the theory of Copernicus now on trust; would it be wise to spend a life in verifying it?"
"Have you any other key?" asked Annie.
"There is a key to the lesson which nature teaches," said Euphrasie, in a low tone; "but not so much as to its formation as to its being a manifestation of God. We must not speak of these things; they are too high for us."
"Nay," said Eugene; "they are the very things to speak about, especially if, as you say, they lead to higher things; my idea of science is utility. The old Magian astrologers, the Chaldean sages and Eastern sophists, studied cloudy myths and wrapped up their theories in a veil of obscurity; but the modern idea is usefulness; an abridgment of man's toil, and promotion of his comfort. Do you reject all human research?"
"I reject nothing that God has given," said Euphrasie; "but truth is one, error is many. The science first to be taught, is how to discover truth—the next, how to apply it. You say the ancients applied science to other purposes than we; if they applied it to learn the qualities of their own souls, and we apply it to the comfort of our bodies merely, which is the highest object?"
"What, then, would you do?" said Adelaide, a little impatiently; "shut up our books, and sit and dream on the sea-shore on matters beyond all practical use?"
Euphrasie answered very gently, as she rose to walk to the seaside, "I am not a teacher, ma cher cousine, but I think mind has its laws as well as matter, and as on the government of our minds so much depends, even in [{34}] our researches after material knowledge, it is likely that the science of mind is more important than that of matter, and necessary for the truth-seeker to study first. But I am getting quite out of my depth; let us go and throw pebbles into the sea."
. . . . . .
Mrs. Godfrey was a kind-hearted and very reasonable woman, in the way in which she understood reasoning. She was bent on rousing her young inmate to energy and action. She was but a girl, she said—a girl of seventeen could not have been so spoiled by the insipidities of a convent as to be beyond reclaiming for the tangible world surrounding her; or was it that her thoughts were with the dead, and that the deep sorrow she had undergone had penetrated to the depths of her being? Whatever the cause, Mrs. Godfrey was dissatisfied with the result, and her motherly warmth of heart yearned to comfort the young orphan in her desolation. She let a few weeks pass away in hopes of witnessing a change, but when none came, or seemed likely to come, she thought it her duty to remonstrate with Euphrasie, the more so as the countess being now recovered sufficiently to join the family circle, Euphrasie had no plausible excuse for passing hours together in the solitude of her own chamber.
"It is not good for you, my dear, to be so much alone," said Mrs. Godfrey to her, as one day she intruded on the young girl's privacy. "Rouse your energies to some good purpose, and employ your mind in some definite pursuit; it is very injurious, I assure you, to let your faculties lie dormant so long."
Euphrasie laid aside the embroidery on which she had been employed, and answered meekly, "What shall I do to please you, my dear madam?"
"Why, exercise your mental faculties—study."
"I am most willing to do so, madam; but what shall I begin?"
"Why, languages if you will; but you know enough of these, perhaps; your own language and that of this country may content you. Or will you study German and Italian?"
"I will, if you wish it, though I confess I have no great inclination. It seems to me as if to learn different names for the same thing were not very profitable; and unless I had occasion to visit the countries in which these languages are spoken, I think it would be time thrown away."
"How time thrown away? Could you not read the literature of the languages? That will expand your mind."
"Literature? Do you mean poetry and fiction—such as your daughters read? I do not care for them. I want to study truth."
"Truth? Yes, but fiction may be covert truth. Tales show us mankind as they are. Literature has a refining tendency, and gives us elegance of taste."
"I should defer to your opinion, madam," replied Euphrasie, with a resigned air; "and when you wish, I will begin."
"Yes," said Mrs. Godfrey, "but not as a punishment; it is as a source of attraction, of interest, that I wish you to cultivate literary tastes."
"I cannot feel interest, madam, in that which will unfit me for my duty."
"Unfit you for your duty! what do you mean?"
"Pray, madam, pardon me; I, of course, defer to you."
"I want no deference, child, save what your reason gives. Explain your meaning."
"I only mean, dear madam, that too much refinement and elegance might make us forget our inherent weakness; teach us to set too high a value on exterior accomplishments, and to forget the tendency to sin ever abiding within us."
"The girl is raving! Now, Euphrasie, do you honestly believe in the corruption of your heart?"
"I know I am prone to evil in many ways, and that I must keep a constant watch over all my dispositions. I suppose I do not know the extent of evil in my own heart—that were a rare grace, vouchsafed to few—but I see nothing in myself to lead me to suppose that I am naturally better than the men who murdered my father."
"Do you feel disposed to murder, then?"
"No; but the very indignation I often feel at their crimes teaches me not to trust myself. Did we give way to our passions, and had we power, who can tell what we should do? Nero showed good dispositions when he began his reign. Alfred the Great was a licentious youth till Almighty God chastened him by adversity, and humbled him through life by inflicting him with an incurable disease, which kept him ever mindful of his former delinquencies."
"Do yon think that disease was a good to Alfred?"
"Decidedly; it helped to keep him mindful of the ever-present Deity whom his former life had offended, and probably prevented his relapsing into sin."
"You foolish child! his disease was probably occasioned by the hardships he had undergone during his campaign; it was the natural consequence to damp and wet and bad living. You must study science, Euphrasie; that will rid you of all these foolish notions."
"I will study what you please, madam," replied Euphrasie.
But Mrs. Godfrey's endeavors to make her young protégé comprehend results as inevitable signally failed, to her own great astonishment. The girl pursued easily and willingly the course of study marked out for her; was somewhat amused by chemical and other experiments, but could never be brought to declare them necessary results in the absolute sense. "The action of the same spirit that established these relationships" said she "might at will disturb them; even as the chemical relationship between two substances is disturbed by the presence of a third substance more potent in its affinities."
"What, then, is a natural law?" demanded Mrs. Godfrey.
"A natural law," replied Euphrasie, "is the ordinary mode in which Divine Providence causes one portion of insentient matter to act on another portion of insentient matter."
Her instructor would object to this. "Nay, but there are natural laws affecting mind also."
"Doubtless," said Euphrasie, "there are ordinary modes of acting upon mind, both by the action of matter and by the action of other minds; but as the special object of this life is to reunite, to re-bind man to his Creator, supernatural means are ever at work to effect this object, and of these we can predicate nothing certain."
"Supernatural nonsense, child—who put this precious style of reasoning into your head?"
"Does not religion mean re-binding, madam? Was not man severed from God by disobedience? Was not the whole spirit of religion, both before and since our Lord's advent, founded on the fact that the mercy of God wished to provide a remedy for that fatal act of Adam and Eve? And has not insentient nature ever been made to depart from her ordinary rules, when such departure could forward the cause for which Christ died?"
Mrs. Godfrey was silenced. She did not wish to avow her scepticism and infidelity, but in secret she rejoiced that her own children were free from such a bar to improvement.
The arrival of a box of books as a present to Euphrasie from M. de Villeneuve, who, in a note addressed to the countess, asked her permission "to be allowed to present to the daughter of his departed friend a few works which, he believed, would suit her taste, and which she would be scarcely likely to find in Mr. Godfrey's library, valuable as that library was in many respects," came to help the enemy's [{36}] cause in Mrs. Godfrey's view of the case, for among the works were selections from St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, from Bede, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others of the fathers of the church. "I did not know you read Latin, cousin," said the girls in surprise. "Nor do I, except church Latin," said Euphrasie. "I learnt church Latin on purpose to study these books, which my father had promised me as soon as I could read them. M. de Villeneuve must have heard of this promise from M. Bertolot. It was very kind in him to send them to me."
"I wonder you did not say 'it was a special providence'," bantered Annie; but Eugene looked at her beseechingly and reprovingly, so she said no more.
In spite of the new attraction, Euphrasie continued to study the course appointed by Mrs. Godfrey, but in learning thus there was so evidently a want of appreciation of the importance of the study—science seemed to her so very little higher than a game of ball with a little child—that her instructors were fairly discomfited, and inclined to turn her over to the musty old fathers she had the bad taste to prefer to their intelligent elucidations.
The young people, too, were annoyed, for they could not attribute to stupidity the indifference she manifested, and that indifference seemed felt as a tacit reproach of their own eagerness.
"She is not only not stupid,"' said Adelaide, the oldest of the girls; "she is absolutely clever; she intuitively comprehends what it takes me hours to make out. I began to explain algebra to her, and before a month was up, she knew more of it than I did myself; and when I spoke to her of this new discovery of locomotive power, which has taken us so long fully to comprehend, she gave me what she calls the course of the ordinary sequences of matter, in proof that the invention must succeed, if this course of sequences be properly applied; and that then we may travel without horses as fast as we can reasonably wish; 'but,' she added, 'it will be worth no one's while to perfect such an invention, for, travel as fast as we may, we cannot run away from ourselves by any material means.'"
"She is a monomaniac," said Mr. Godfrey; "sensible on all points but one."
"Unless," urged Eugene, "it be true, as she once said, that there is higher science than the science of matter, and that that science is the necessary one for us to study."
"Et tu, Brute," shouted the father indignantly. "Now, children, let us have no such trash in my own family. Pity your young friend, and withhold your censure. Remember, she was brought up in superstition and ignorance. It cannot be expected that her mind should awaken at once to the beauty of the physical law. But for yourselves, after the pains that have been taken to keep your minds unfettered by the trammels of superstition, it were a disgrace indeed to see you yield to any such worn-out fancies. The close of the eighteenth century must witness higher thoughts."
"The close of the eighteenth century has witnessed terrific doings over the water," said Eugene.
"Yes, and see there the effects of superstition," answered his father. "Had those poor wretches been taught an enlightened philosophy instead of an abject superstition, the reaction would not have produced such awful results."
"Do you then believe, father, that when Euphrasie throws off her religion, she will become such as these men are?"
"No; Euphrasie is better educated already, even from her intercourse with us; besides, she is refined and elegant."
"But so they say is Robespierre. A Frenchman, and one not friendly to him, said to me the other day that his house is the very picture of simple elegance. Besides, the Roman emperors were excessive in their luxurious magnificence at the very time they [{37}] were murdering by wholesale. Nero sang to his lyre the Siege of Troy while Rome was burning. What if it were true that he set the city on fire merely to revel in the luxury of a new sensation, and to realize the emotion he deemed he ought to feel at such a catastrophe?"
"Why, Eugene," said Hester, laughing, "you, too, are growing metaphysical. What will come next?"
"Why, next we will inquire how far metaphysics are true when they teach that mental sensation and moral power are distinct from each other, and that a man may be consequently imaginatively great—capable of every grand mental sensation—and be morally weak; nay, the very slave of his lowest propensities. We have many examples of this."
"So says Euphrasie; and therefore she insists that what we call mental culture is at best but of secondary value, well enough as an assistant agent, but not to be considered as a principal means in attaining the ultimatum of life."
"Euphrasie is a simpleton," said Mr. Godfrey.
Eugene rose to quit the room. He was considering within himself whether Euphrasie were not in the right.
CHAPTER II.
THE EARTHLY UTOPIA, AND THE LOST EMPIRE.
In a little country town where society is scarce, it often happens that people associate together whose rank is dissimilar, for the mere sake of relieving ennui of solitude. Thus in Estcourt a half-pay captain, his wife, the clergyman and his family, the lawyer, the doctor, and their incumbrances, were occasionally admitted as visitors to Estcourt Hall, as Mr. Godfrey's residence was called; and here, though somewhat restrained by being found in such aristocratic society, opinions were sometimes broached which plainly manifested that "the spirit of the time" was working even in that remote district.
St. Simon, Fourrier, Owen, had not then developed the social system which is now endeavoring to sap the foundations of all that antiquity held in solemn reverence; but the principles of socialism to which these men afterwards gave a "shape" were even then fermenting in the minds of many. Disturbed spirits were questioning the rights of landed proprietors, while the sudden introduction of machinery was raising a faction among the displaced artisans. Ominous signs were visible on the political horizon, and perhaps an English "reign of terror," that would have vied in horror with that of France, would have been inaugurated, had not the threatened invasion of the island by Napoleon united all classes anew to repel the foreign foe.
Certain it is that, early in the nineteenth century, it was found necessary to have government agents in many a petty country town in England to watch the progress of disaffection, and five or six shopkeepers could hardly assemble together without the fact being recorded, and inquiries set on foot respecting the purport of their meeting. Rebellious spirits were mysteriously pressed to man the royal navy, and the magistrates not only connived at such kidnapping, but frequently designated the individuals whom it was desirable to remove.
This process, comparatively easy when it concerned apprentices, journeymen, or those belonging to the laboring population, could not be brought to bear upon obnoxious members of the gentry with equal facility. Now, Alfred Brookbank was one of these. His father was rector of Estcourt, and, independently of his living, was proprietor of a pretty landed estate, the whole of which by right of primogeniture was to fall to the eldest eon, a careless, unprincipled prodigal, who had already involved his family in pecuniary embarrassment [{38}] by his reckless expenditure, and brought disgrace on his father's cloth by his loose morality.
His brother Alfred was the reverse of this—astute, aspiring, ambitious, he was smitten with the prevailing mania, and at times talked loudly of the folly and injustice of sacrificing the interests of a whole family to one selfish fool. The girls, too, whose fortunes had been injured by the elder brother's extravagance, lent no unwilling ear to the doctrine of equal participation of property.
Alfred Brookbank was gifted with an eloquent tongue, an insinuating manner, and a gentlemanly deportment. His figure was good, and his features, without being handsome, were agreeable from their animated expression. He was a general favorite; and being prudent enough to avoid the expression of his opinions before the elder branches of the family, it was seldom that he was suspected of spreading sedition and disaffection among the young.
Of Mr. Godfrey's three daughters, the second one, Annie, was, at this period of our tale, by far the most susceptible of these novel ideas. She professed that she would follow truth wherever it should lead her, even though it involved the relinquishment of her own superior rank in society. Mr. Godfrey only laughed at such protestations from a girl of seventeen, well knowing they would not stand the test of experience; but however harmless might be her sallies, he had not calculated on one result of freedom of opinion; Annie began to take pleasure in Alfred Brookbank's attentions, and to feel flattered when he expatiated to her on the beauty of such a system of co-operative industry as would banish vice and misery from the globe and renew the golden era.
"Is it to be wondered at," said Alfred, "that revolutions take place in blood, when property is so unequally divided? nay, when oftentimes the property is in the possession of the fool, while the wise man has to get his living by hard labor? Look at the rationale of the thing! One man holds wealth, as it is called, and on the strength of it he must compel fifty men to work for him, while be fives at his ease—the roasted pigeons flying into his mouth, crying, 'come eat me!'"
"But some one must work," argued Annie.
"You mean to say," replied Alfred, "that food most be raised and clothing furnished. True. But how many are employed in really useful labor, compared with those whose occupations might be dispensed with without loss to society, and those who are mere appendages of wealth—mere creatures of idleness—men who, by forestalling their master's wants, make him dependent on themselves; who, by surrounding him with luxuries, effeminate him; and who, by pandering to his pleasures, surfeit him, at the same time that by doing these things they degrade themselves; for why should one man be a mere appendage to another?"
"But if all must work," said Annie, "all cannot work in the same way. We most have hewers of wood and drawers of water, as well as poets and philosophers. A community needs a head, as well as hands and feet. Suppose you were elected head of a community, you would need servants to do the manual labor?"
"True, but I would not badge them for it," answered Alfred, glancing at the liveried servants, who were then bringing in refreshments. "All men must work for the common weal; therefore, all labor is honorable; and no man need lord it over another, as if himself were made of porcelain, and the other of earthenware. An American philosopher has lately calculated that in order to supply the world with necessaries, if each grown individual were to work four hours a day, the whole population of the world might be far better provided for than it is now."
"And what would they do with their spare time?" asked Annie.
"What but improve their minds, and employ their energies in loftier labors—what but grow out of the drudge into the man! Oh! we have yet to learn the wonders that are to be achieved by a well-regulated community. Men are scarcely men yet. Half of them are slaves to the mere bread-winning to support their bodies, and the other half are seeking phantoms—they are trying to find pleasure in lording it over their fellows, or they are driven to excess by the mere necessity of passing away time. It is an unfair position to place a man in, to set him above that reciprocal dependence which binds man to man as equals. It is a practical injustice to individuals to sever them thus from their kind, and prevent their feeling their brotherhood." Alfred continued, warming with his subject:
"There are, deep seated in the human heart,
A thousand thrilling, yearning sympathies—
A thousand ties that bind us to our kind—
A thousand pleasures only there enjoyed
In cheering intercourse with fellow-man.
'Tis thus the voice of nature speaks aloud,
Proclaims from pole to pole the heav'n-born truth:
'Ye are the children of one only God.
Learn to acknowledge your fraternity.'
I think you have not seen my poem on Human Brotherhood, Miss Annie?"
"I have not, but to judge from the specimen you have just quoted, I should like very much to read it. These truths seem so evident now, it is wonderful they have not been discovered before."
"They have been discovered, though not acted on. The fact is that men's minds have been so trammelled with superstition, they have been afraid to tread out of the beaten track. They have been afraid to reason, I scarce know why, even on their own grounds. Yet matters are mending in this respect. I was present the other day when an indignant orator thus addressed his audience:
Shall he, the Author of life and light, who has given to man, as the reward of the use of reason, the power of traversing the trackless deep, and of drawing down the lightning innocuous from the skies—shall he deny to his creature the privilege of using his own gift on themes that more immediately concern man's happiness? Oh no! believe it not! Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of light, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.' The audience he was addressing shouted applause; so you see the people's cause is progressing, and even Scripture is called in to aid this desirable change."
"I wish Euphrasie could hear you speak," said Annie; "she might begin to believe that there is some good in human learning, and that it can promote true happiness. I must introduce you to her more particular acquaintance."
"No; if she is a votary of ignorance, pray don't. I dislike silly unideaed girls—they are the pest of society."
"But Euphrasie is neither; she is only original and opinionated. Ideas seem to grow with her indigenously; for no one can tell how she gets them; but they are very crude, and directly contrary to the spirit of progression. I wish you would convert her."
"I doubt it would be difficult, and, to say the truth, I do not wish to attempt it. She is not my taste at all. I prefer animation, zeal, sympathy. She looks like a marble statue of Contemplation; well enough in its way, but possessing no interest for me, who am all for practical life."
"Euphrasie is a great thinker, and thought aids practice. You had better enlist her on your side; for there is no saying how much she might assist you, if once she could be brought to see how happy a paradise you have planned for the human race."
But Alfred was by no means anxious for this. He evidently felt that Euphrasie would not listen to him. Perhaps he feared that she would set Annie against himself, and mar his own schemes in her regard; [{40}] for different as was their rank in life, and improbable as it was that Mr. Godfrey should condescend to ally himself with aught save the high aristocracy, this young man intended, if possible, to secure an interest in Annie's affections. Not that he loved her; his self-love was so absorbing that it was almost impossible for him to love any one save himself; but he thought such an alliance would forward his ambitious projects, and enable him to begin life under favorable auspices.
Annie had no idea whatever beyond the amusement of the passing hour, and was more intent just now on making a convert of the young refugee than in paying regard to the homage tendered her by Alfred. Euphrasie was a difficult subject to deal with; but there are some minds to whom difficulty is an incentive.
She was one day sitting in the library with Eugene, intent in depicting on canvas the glories of the "Golden Era." Euphrasie entered, and sat down to some work. Annie called to her:
"Now, my dear Euphrasie, come to me. You are a judge of painting; tell me what you think of my picture."
Euphrasie drew near. "It is very pretty," she said, "but what does it represent? Those peasants resting under the fig-trees, those vine-dressers plucking the beautiful grapes, have very graceful figures, and most happy and intelligent faces; but what do they belong to?"
"To the new Utopia," said Annie, "where all are intelligent and beautiful, and where discord enters not."
Euphrasie looked dreamily in Annie's face, and said doubtingly: "Heaven? This is no picture of heaven."
"No; it is an earthly paradise, ma chère amie. One need not die in order to enjoy it," laughingly rejoined Annie.
"Oh! a fancy piece," said Euphrasie; "well, it is very pretty, but I am no judge of fiction;" and she sat down.
"Fiction or not, I cannot let you off so," said Annie; "do you not think it would be very pleasant to dwell with a goodly number of intelligent people, each taking his own share of work, and aiding in making life happy—all good, all instructed and accomplished?"
"Pleasant? Yes, very pleasant I have lived with such," said Euphrasie; "but their happiness was of a very different kind to that which is delineated here."
"You have lived with such! Where, in the name of wonder?" asked Annie.
"In France," said Euphrasie.
"And what sort of happiness was theirs?" asked Eugene, now thoroughly roused.
"I cannot tell you—that is, I could not make you understand. Excuse me," said Euphrasie, evidently sorry she had said so much.
"And why not? why could we not understand?" asked brother and sister, both in a breath.
"Because your principles are so different."
"Nay, then, explain the principles, ma chère. You have excited our curiosity; you must gratify it now."
"Nay, I know not how. The principles belong to the interior life, and on that I cannot speak."
"Why not? are you sworn to secrecy?" asked Annie. Eugene looked his request for information, but spoke not.
"Not so," said Euphrasie; "but, in the first place, I am no teacher; and, in the second, there are some subjects which can only be approached with reverence, and I am afraid—" she hesitated.
"You are right, mademoiselle," said Eugene; "we have too little reverence."
Euphrasie looked distressed. But Annie broke in with—"But we can be reverent, and we will be reverent when the case demands it. Tell us your principles, dear Euphrasie."
The young girl, with evident reluctance, said:
"My friends held that the soul had been originally endowed with power over the mental faculties, as also over the senses and the appetites of the body, and all inferior nature; and that that empire had been lost through man's fault. They believe that no lasting, no high enjoyment can be procured until that empire has been regained."
"What kind of empire do you mean?" said Annie.
"As thus," replied Euphrasie. "We will our foot to tread here or there, and it obeys us. We will our hands to grasp or to work, and it is done. But when we will our feelings to be calm, or our appetites to keep within certain limits, they do not always obey. We resolve, and find that our resolutions fail. We determine, and do not act. When children, nay, when grown people, are taxed with doing wrong, they reply, 'I could not help it.' This is a confession of failure in self-government, or, as might be said, a proof of empire lost."
"That is, supposing it admitted such empire once existed. But do you seriously think that perfect self-government may be acquired, or, as you say, regained?"
"At least a near approach to it may, if the proper means are used."
"And those means?"
"Are too serious for me to mention; besides, they are paradoxical in appearance; for, though impossible to mere humanity, they are nevertheless possible. But you must carry your inquiry to a better teacher than I am;" and Euphrasie rose to depart.
"No; we have no other teacher near us, and I shall not let you go until you have told me what I want to know;" and Annie laid her hand somewhat forcibly on the young stranger's arm, and compelled her to reseat herself.
"Well, then," faltered out the poor girl, "when the soul was in possession of its pristine empire, it had also the power of communion with high spiritual intelligences—nay, with the highest—even with the creative intelligence. The same fault that lost man the high empire over all inferior natures, and over his own appetites and passions, by disturbing the equilibrium which primarily existed in the higher part of his soul, also severed the bond of that high spiritual communion; and that bond must be reunited ere the empire be restored to him. Man of himself cannot reunite that severed bond, nor can he be happy without such reunion; because the higher part of man's soul was created for such high spiritual communion, and can no more be content without it than could our inferior senses without the gratification they require. But what he cannot do will be done for him, if he prepare himself duly. He must build the altar of sacrifice, lay on the wood, prepare the victim. Fire from heaven will then descend for his enlightenment, for his purification, and more than he had lost may be regained."
"You speak oracularly, ma belle amie, but I want something more tangible yet. Tell me some of the practical rules observed by your friends; may be I shall better understand your sybilline wisdom then."
Euphrasie shook her head. "They are too minute," she said. "You might even think them childish." But Annie had not yet relaxed her grasp, and appeared determined to be satisfied; so Euphrasie continued: "Nevertheless, if you will promise to let me go immediately after, I will give you one of their rules of action."
"One, only one?"
"One will be enough at a time. When you have solved one rule, it will be the time to ask for more."
"Solved one rule? What do you mean by that?"
"There is a body and a soul to every religious rule—the letter and the spirit. Observance must be yielded to both. I can only give you the body. God only can teach you to understand the spirit of it."
"Well; proceed with your enigma."
"You promise to let me go, whether you understand it or not."
"Yes, provided the rule is practical," said Annie.
"Well, then," said Euphrasie, "one reason that my friends were so happy together—that though there were fifty of them, there was no quarrelling, no ill will, no envy—was, that they constantly endeavored, each one of them, to choose for herself the poorest things; in her diet, the poorest fare; in her clothes, the coarsest habit; in her employment, the most humbling functions."
"Impossible!" said Annie. "Stay, cousin!" But Euphrasie had already made her escape, and her reluctance to dwell on these subjects in that presence was so evident that Annie did not choose to pursue her, and she was left to conjecture whether the young French girl had been playing on her credulity or not. The mere fact that fifty ladies had been guided practically by such a principle as that given, was clearly beyond her belief. Not so, however, did Eugene decide. His interest in their young and mysterious inmate was ever on the increase. Each word she uttered was gathered up as food for thought. The ideas were new to him, and, not only so, they were contrary to those in which he had been educated, and he had but a faint glimmering of their meaning. Yet they worked strangely within him, and fain would he have sought explanation from that pale sybil, but that for to-day she had forbidden it.
When Annie also had left the apartment, he walked up and down in deep thought repeating to himself:
"Man has lost the empire over himself and over inferior nature."
"Man has lost the power of high spiritual communion."
"But these may be regained."
"If this be true, any privation or sacrifice may be undergone for their repossession; too small the price, whatever the cost. But then, how can contentment with the meanest things, or filling the humblest offices, assist this conclusion? And this is but one rule; are the others of a like fashion?" The young man was fairly mystified; that the oracle had emitted truth, he doubted not; but a clue to the meaning of that truth was wanting, and where should he find that clue?
CHAPTER III.
THE "MARIAGE DE CONVENANCE."
There was a visible excitement in the house; even Mr. Godfrey, ever so solemn, and latterly so inclined to severity, put on a cheerful appearance; people outside the family were guessing at the cause. For a long time, guessing was the only thing they could do; even Madame de Meglior was not in the secret until one morning she received a letter from M. de Villeneuve, which appeared to contain some news, for she said to Mr. Godfrey, who happened to be the only one present: "Brother, can this be true?"
"Can what be true, my good sister?" was the question returned.
"That the Duke of Durimond is coming here to marry Adelaide?"
"Why should it not be true?"
"Why, the duke is an old man!"
"Not at all; he was quite young when he made proposals for Adelaide; surely you remember them."
"Remember them! Do you mean the agreement you made at the dinner-table, when Adelaide was two years old."
"The agreement was made before, between his father and me; it was ratified, then, by himself; he had just come of age."
"And that is sixteen years ago. Will you give Adelaide to a man of seven-and-thirty?'
"Why not, if she makes no objection?"
"Has she ever seen him?"
"Yes, she saw him in town last winter; 'twas there he renewed his offer; but, in fact, we have always corresponded. The duke is fond of the arts; 'twas he sent those fine pictures you admire so much."
"He can't know whether he likes Adelaide or not, and she never struck me as being in love all this time."
"Pshaw! The duke has proposed; Adelaide is satisfied. The marriage was agreed upon years ago; what would you have? I thought you' knew the world by this time."
This was taking madame by her foible, so she said no more. Mrs. Godfrey was simply quiescent: she was not accustomed to oppose her husband's will, and, incredible as it may seem, the young girl herself offered no objection to the marriage announced to her. To deck her brow with a coronet had charms enough for the deeply fostered pride of that young heart to induce her to forego the prospect of love, sympathy, and domestic happiness; she simply coveted rank and power. The duke had immense revenues; he offered ample settlements: what mattered it that he was thirty-seven, and she but sweet eighteen? Marriages occurred every day in which the disparity was more glaring. What mattered it that she had scarcely seen the noble duke; that she knew little of his private life, or of his tastes and feelings? He was a nobleman of high birth; he paid her courtly compliments, presented her with a magnificent casket of jewels; pleaded his long absence on the Continent in excuse for his apparent want of attention to herself; and urged his long friendship and unbroken correspondence with her father as a plea for hurrying on his happiness; and thus, almost unwooed, the fair Adelaide was won. Poor girl, the chief idea in her head was that she should like to be a duchess; and thus both she and her father contrived to overlook the fact that but little allusion had been made to the proposed alliance in the sixteen years' correspondence on art and science that had been maintained between the gentlemen. The matter had been settled years ago. There was little occasion for the world to interfere, if the parties concerned were satisfied. The father's scientific friend was necessarily a fitting husband for the daughter. And so the preparations went forward. The house was filled for a time with dress-makers and bandboxes, and when these were dismissed, there came guests to witness the bridal. Among these was the Comte de Villeneuve, whom we have already introduced to our readers; a friend of both families was the comte, and had been a friend too of the late Comte de Meglior. This made him welcome also to Madame de Meglior and Euphrasie; indeed he treated the latter with distinguished attention, and she seemed more at her ease with him than with any person at the Hall. M. de Villeneuve was thirty-five years of age, but good-looking and animated, and Madame de Meglior was in some slight degree uneasy at first at the evident friendship he evinced for Euphrasie, for she did not approve of disproportionate marriages, and she thought Adelaide's example a bad one. Gradually, however, she became so absorbed in the duties imposed upon her by Mrs. Godfrey of directing the embellishments, that she forgot to look after the object of her solicitude in the subject which suited her better. Living as she had been wont to do in the gay circles of Parisian exclusives, she was regarded as a very oracle of fashion and elegance, and consequently she willingly took the lead in planning the arrangements for the bridal day.
The young people were in a puzzle, Annie especially. It was the first act of unblushing worldliness she had ever witnessed. She felt as if she did not know the world she lived in. She looked at her mother; there was no joy on her face; she looked at Adelaide; already the young girl had [{44}] assumed her rank; the calm hauteur, the majestic politeness, with which she received her guests, astonished every one. Adelaide was born to command, every one felt it; none more so than Annie, who had been so fondly attached to that sister from whom she felt already severed.
"O Euphrasie!" she said to her cousin, as they were walking together in the grounds that surrounded the house, "you must be my sister when Adelaide is gone; it will be so dreary to have no one of my own age to love and talk to; will you not try to love me?"
"I love you already, dear; you must not talk in that way—how can I do other than love you?"
"I was afraid you thought me a reprobate whom it was a sin to love." This was said half playfully, but the tears started to Euphrasie's eyes.
"You a reprobate! a sin to love you who have been so kind to the poor orphan girl! O Annie! have I really been so ungrateful as to give you this idea?"
"No, dear, no! not so; but I seriously thought you deemed all human nature utterly depraved, and did not wish to form strong attachments with those not of your creed."
"If human nature were utterly depraved, how could it hear the voice of God in the soul? and if you here were utterly depraved, would you have opened your house and your heart to the wandering outcast?"
"Then you do not think religion essential to goodness? How is that, then?"
"Man was made in the image of God, my dear Annie, and even his natural qualities bear witness to this, unless, indeed, he become utterly depraved."
"You do not, then, exclude us from your heaven," said Annie, embracing her. "I am so glad; you will be my friend and sister, Euphrasie."
Euphrasie warmly returned the embrace, and said: "I have no heaven to exclude you from, dear Annie, but if you wish for eternal bliss, you must offer your natural qualities to him who alone can stamp eternity upon them."
"And how shall I do that, dear?"
"Pray to God, and he will teach you."
"I would rather have your teaching just now; tell me, if you believe human nature to be good, what is meant by 'original sin,' as it affects us. I know the story of Adam and Eve, but not what it means."
"Adam was created with certain natural qualities, even as the inferior animals were, adapted to the part he was to perform as lord of earth; these qualities were good, nay, in Adam perfect. They are transmitted to us, shorn of their brightness by the fall, but still they are good, though imperfect now. Natures differ in individuals, but some have very high qualities, very lofty aspirations. Have you not noticed this?"
"Well, I used to think so, but—"
"But what?"
"No matter what; tell me, what are we to do with our high qualities more than cultivate them, and act upon them?"
"Bring them under supernatural action, that they may be purified, refined, and stamped with the seal of immortal truth."
"Is this your religion?"
"I know no other."
The approach of M. de Villeneuve, who was gathering flowers for Hester to make into bouquets, prevented further conversation. The merry girl was making garlands, and flung them round Euphrasie and Annie as they approached. "Now sit down here," she said, "and I will crown you both as victims to the sacrifice. M. de Villeneuve shall be the priest. What deity will you offer these victims to, monsieur? They are ready bound."
"That is a serious question; we must take time to consider, and luckily here comes Eugene to solve the question for us. What divinity rules here, young man? your sister wants to offer up these two victims to the genius of the place."
"Indeed, it were difficult to say; ours is a pantheistic worship just now, and we will defer the rite until we know what star is in the ascendant. What beautiful ceremonies those old worshippers used to have! We might raise an altar to Flora, I think, just to use to advantage Hester's flowers."
"Mademoiselle Euphrasie would find a use for your flowers, without going to a heathen goddess," said M. de Villeneuve. "All beauty symbolizes good with her, and all nature reveals some truth."
"What a splendid idea, monsieur!" said Annie. "How did you know that it was Euphrasie's? did she tell you so?"
"Not in words, but I know her of old; to her there was a spirit in every flower, a mystic word in every form. Matter was the expression of mind, its language in a certain sense; and she was ever inquiring its meaning."
"You are laughing at me, monsieur," said Euphrasie; "but those were pleasant days at the old chateau, when you used to scold me because I would not reason, but only enjoy."
"Nay," said Annie, "by monsieur's account you did reason, and very beautifully too. Some people want hard words and long-drawn deductions for apprehension of what to others is inspiration. I like the inspiration best."
"It is the easiest, at any rate," said Eugene.
"To those to whom it comes," said the Frenchman; "the materialism of our day stifles inspiration; men see only in rocks and stones a moneyed value. Niagara is valued less than a mill-turning stream. Inspiration is no longer believed in."
. . . . . .
The wedding-day approached, and all were busy trying to make a show of gladness, which, however, they but imperfectly succeeded in effecting; but what was wanting in hilarity was more than compensated for in dignity and magnificence. M. de Villeneuve acted as groomsman, Annie and Hester as bridesmaids, Euphrasie excused herself on account of her mourning habit, which she declined to remove; she was not visible during the whole day and one or two subsequent ones. And now the hour was come which was to place a coronet on that fair brow; but could the courtly bridegroom have seen how little he entered into the thoughts of his young bride, perchance he had been but half pleased, even though she was as stately and as fair as his great pride demanded. But love, esteem, or mutual respect entered into the thoughts of neither during the time that the Bishop of Chichester was marrying them by special license, in the drawing-room at Estcourt Hall.
This same arrangement was a great disappointment to the townspeople. They had been desirous of witnessing the ceremony, and were not well-pleased that the duke had not honored the church with his presence. The duke, however, liked not to be gazed at, and the sight-seers had no opportunity of gratifying their curiosity till the bridal party left the house.
The public entrance was besieged by expectant congratulators, who waited to shower bouquets over the blooming bride. But here again they were doomed to disappointment; for, to avoid this publicity, which was distasteful to them, the bridal party walked through that portion of the splendid grounds which had been specially decorated for the occasion, and entered their carriages at the opposite side of the park. They were, however, obliged to pass through part of the town, and shouts of "they come—they come!" resounded as the carriages made their appearance. The road lay down a deep hollow, on the turn leading to which stood a small inn. The road was so steep that the drivers necessarily checked the horses, in order to pass safely down the declivity. At the cry raised of "they come [{46}]—they come!" a woman elegantly dressed ran out of the inn, and gazed wildly at the carriages. At that moment the duke put his head out of the window to see what occasioned the delay, caught the eye of the woman, turned pale, and hastily bade the coachman drive on.
The woman shrieked, rather than said, "Tis he! O my God!" and fell to the ground in a fainting fit.
The bystanders raised her—the carriage passed; but the spirit of the crowd seemed changed, they scarcely knew why; they crowded round the woman; they questioned her; and each seemed eager to afford her help. But, as soon as her strength permitted, she withdrew without gratifying their evident curiosity, merely apologizing for her passing weakness, and deliberately saying she would recover best when alone. The style, the manner, the elegance of the stranger interested them all, and with difficulty did they persuade themselves to abandon their inquiries. The groups which had collected to congratulate the bride were now occupied in discussing the appearance of the stranger, and many surmises were hazarded as to her connection with the newly wedded pair.
Meantime that lady ordered a post-chaise to be got ready, and, ere half recovered, entered it, to the great discomfiture of the gaping crowd, whom she thus left to their conjectures.
The landlord was now besieged with questions, but he could tell nothing of importance. The lady came the previous evening; gave her name as Mrs. Ellwood; made many inquiries concerning the family at Estcourt Hall, and had the duke's person described to her; seemed restless, agitated; went out, and hovered round Mr. Godfrey's residence till nightfall; then returned and locked herself immediately in her bed-chamber. In the morning she rose late, ate little or nothing, but sat watching and listening intently, till she issued forth to enact the scene described. The townspeople shook their heads, and wished Miss Godfrey, now the Duchess of Durimond, might not be the worse for it. Adelaide had been very popular among them, and the public festivities on the occasion of her wedding were not so mirthful as, but for this incident, they would you have been.
The inmates of the hall, however, were as yet in happy ignorance of the ominous conjectures raised respecting the fate of the fairest and cleverest daughter of their house. The incident we have related came to their knowledge as an accidental circumstance, altogether unconnected with the wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey were well pleased at their daughter's accession to rank and power, and the merry Hester laughed delightedly at the anticipation of shortly visiting the ancient castle of which her sister was now mistress, promising herself much interest and delight in rambling amid the ancient chambers, which had been the scene of famed historic deeds. Annie was pondering whether her sister's rank could consist with the newfangled ideas of liberty and equality that the times were teaching. She was wondering whether high rank were a fetter or a privilege—a relic of man's ignorance or a help to man's advancement, Eugene hoped that the "old man" would use his sister well. He had not been pleased with his new brother-in-law; he was too courtly, too stately for friendliness, and altogether the whole affair had looked too much like bartering youth, beauty, and intelligence for rank and wealth. He had entertained high ideas of woman's purity, of woman's devotedness, of woman's disinterestedness, and what was he to think? His beautiful, his gifted, his cultivated sister had sold herself for a ducal coronet! Was it true, then, as Shelley sings, "that all things are venal, and that even a woman's heart may be put up in an auction mart?"
Soon after the wedding, the young man sought but did not obtain permission to go abroad. In default of this he went to Cambridge, and said to himself he intended to find out TRUTH.
The society of an English University is very various. Almost any disposition may suit itself there. The boisterous, the idle, the reckless, the gay, the meditative, and the sober, with the refined and the sentimental, alike are there, and it is of no small importance to a young man to be well introduced on the outset. Mr. Godfrey, himself a Cambridge man, could not fail to procure every advantage for his son, and that son felt himself entitled to stand proudly on his father's position, not only as a country gentleman, but as a scientific man, for, as we have already hinted, the Honorable Mr. Godfrey was an exception to the ordinary stamp of the English country gentlemen of that day. He cared more for his library than he did for his hounds and horses, and though he himself was far from being a profound searcher into nature's secrets, he was a great patron of science and of scientific men. Eugene had then little to fear from friendlessness; he was well cared for, and his friends were sober, well-conducted men.
But accompanying him to college was one whose society he would not willingly have sought.
Frederic Morley, son of the lawyer at Estcourt, had early given evidence of a studious disposition, and his father wished to bring him up to the church, as, by means of Mr. Godfrey's patronage, he hoped to push him into some church preferment. The young man, however, was in fact a sentimentalist, a transcendentalist, too refined, too sensitive, for this world of stern reality. Petted at home as a poet, he held himself superior to common influences, prided himself on having a fine mind, on possessing elegant and cultivated tastes, and affected disgust at the coarse, homespun ideas of ordinary people. He wrote pathetic tales of unrealities; touching verses of despairing affection, with which it was his delight to draw forth tears of sympathy from young lady audiences.
A more uninteresting companion Eugene Godfrey could scarcely have met; yet as his disposition was naturally kind and urbane, and as Morley was without friends or acquaintances in the university, he continued his friendship to him, and endeavored to direct his attention to earnest themes and loftier subjects. This, however, was unwelcome to so clever a person as Morley believed himself to be. He wanted no direction even from the cleverest. All he sought for was appreciation, sympathy. He could think for himself, and guide himself. The study of Aristotle's Ethics was in his case soon supplanted by Paine's Age of Reason and Volney's Ruins of Empires. The coarseness of the former author he termed "wit" and the sophistry of the latter passed with him for "wisdom." Eugene felt sorry for these freaks, for in indulging them Frederic Morley was throwing away his livelihood; he endeavored to reason with him, and then he became vexed that he had so few efficient arguments to bring forward, and none but interested motives to present. Was he to tell Frederic to be a hypocrite, and to study theology for a "living?" He felt rather than knew the foolish boy was pursuing a phantom, and was urged forward by very selfish motives, yet he could not explain his own ideas, vague, mysterious, and undefined as they were.
"There is a fire
And motion in the soul, which will not dwell
In its own narrow being; but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire,
And but once kindled, quenchless evermore."
This Eugene felt, but why he felt it, or how to satisfy it, he knew not. The words of Euphrasie, "that perhaps there is a science of mind, more worth than all the science of matter," recurred continually, for in that science must lie the solution of every difficulty that beset him. How could he learn this science? how investigate this truth, if truth it were? And he wandered hour after hour on the banks of the Cam, in profound meditation burying himself in the thickets near to avoid observation.
"O truth!" exclaimed he aloud one day, in the intense excitement of his feelings—"O truth! if ever thou deignest to visit mortals, reveal thyself to me; teach me the way, and by all that is holy or dear to me, I swear to follow thee!"
He was leaning against a tree; the drops stood on his forehead, caused by the depth of his emotion, and suddenly the answer came: "PRAY, child of aspirations, bow in prayer."
Eugene started; looked around; no form was visible, but again the words were repeated: "Pray, seeker for truth, pray! it will come to thee."
CHAPTER IV.
MAGNETIC INFLUENCES.
"Behold he prayeth."
"Pray, pray!" repeated Eugene; "what is prayer? Is it to hold communion with a higher being? To be raised above the mists of this murky earth? If so, how glad I should be to pray!" and involuntarily he exclaimed: "O mighty Being, who rulest all, if indeed thou wiliest to communicate with man, instruct me how to approach thee; my mind is dark and sad. Oh! teach me truth." Eugene Godfrey was sincere; he wished for truth; but educated in scornful intellectual supremacy, educated to tolerate religion as a means of keeping in order the lower classes, it was difficult for him to comprehend how "faith" could exist otherwise than as a beautiful poetic fancy, to be classed with the imagery of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
The real, the sentient, had been his study, and till the horrors of the French Revolution turned his mind to consider how man could influence man by higher motives than merely getting "good things for one's self," he had been satisfied to leave these themes unthought of. But now they were forced upon him. Events unprecedented in the annals of the world bade him lay aside physical science and tun to study mental and moral influences. He had heard enough in the little town to which he belonged to feel sure that the multitude must be cared for, most be looked to. He saw his father uneasy at every commotion, lest the English aristocracy should likewise be sent on their travels. He saw Alfred Brookbank hating his own brother, because that brother stood between him and a property; and his sister—his fearless sister, accomplished, beautiful, the very epitome of a refined lady—he dared not think of her! Oh! for a motive to raise these groveling aims! Oh! for purity, heroism, good. But for the vision of Euphrasie, all would have been darkness then. Such were Eugene's thoughts as he bent his steps to his chambers and sat down in his easy chair to indulge in this absorbing reverie.
How long he sat he scarcely knew, but at length he became conscious that he was not alone. He had forgotten to "sport his oak" (as closing the outer door was called by the students) in token that he wished to be alone, and Frederic Morley had entered, and, perceiving him so engrossed, had quietly seated himself without speaking, till Eugene gave signs of life.
"Ah, Morley, is that you? how long have you been there?"
"I scarcely know, Mr. Eugene; I have been watching your absent thoughts. You were so still, I might have supposed you magnetized, but I suppose the great wizard would not take so great a liberty with you."
"What wizard?" asked Eugene.
"Have you not heard, then? There is a man here who can throw a person into a trance, and make him reveal all kinds of secrets," answered Frederic.
"Pshaw!" said Eugene.
"Nay," answered Frederic, "I will tell you what I saw. I was at Mrs. Moreton's yesterday evening, singing duets with Isabel, and young Moreton came in with a tall, dark-haired, mustachioed, whiskered fellow, with eyes [{49}] like lighted coals, they were so large and piercing. Where Moreton picked him up, I could not find out, but he was evidently fascinated with him. He introduced him laughingly to his mother as a great wizard, and they interrupted the music to hear him talk. He was grandiloquent enough, told tales of spirits and influences that haunt me still; but more than this, he insisted that mind can influence mind irrespective of matter; that the old tales of magic were true, and the deeds wrought by men of wondrous power, who had found the key to nature's nighty secrets—only nature with him does not mean inert matter as we mean by it, but matter and intelligences who act upon matter. The universe, he says, is peopled by wondrous forms, and these forms can be communicated with by a privileged soul. Oh, he is a mighty man!" and Frederic shuddered.
"And you have no more sense than to believe such a cock-and-bull story as that? Fie, Morley, I am ashamed of you!"
"But let me tell you what I saw with my own eyes. He first threw Isabel into a trance, from which neither Mrs. Morley, nor her brother, nor i could awaken her. Then when Mrs. Morley grew frightened, he assured her there was no danger, that she was only bewitched by his art, and that he would make her talk as he pleased. Then he put her brother's hand in hers, and bade him think of the walk he had taken that afternoon, of the people he had met and spoken to; he did so, and the wizard bade the girl speak, and she recounted the events of the walk from his leaving college to his meeting with the wizard, and their entering the room in which we were—all, as her brother declared, correctly. The wizard then disenchanted her, and she slowly roused herself, pale and listless, but quite unconscious of what had passed."
"I have heard of animal magnetism before, quietly responded Eugene.
"Have you? But do you know its power? It is absolutely frightful. He lifted my arm before I knew what he was about, passed his hand two or three times above and below it, and there it remained fixed horizontally from the shoulder, without my having power to move it up or down. Young Moreton tried to put it down for me, but he could not; and there I stood fixed till it pleased the wizard to unloose the spell he had cast around me."
"Yours was not an agreeable position, truly," said Eugene, "but he did not hurt you; you are safe and sound now."
"Yes, but the most wonderful is yet to come. Little Helen Moreton came into the room to bid her mamma good-night. Seeing the stranger, she was shy, and went to the window-curtains to hide. Mrs. Moreton called her, but she looked out for a minute, seemed to take a greater dislike to the stranger than before, and hid again. Mrs. Moreton was annoyed, and the wizard said: 'Do you want her, madam? If so, I will bring her to you.' But Mrs. Moreton replied, 'Oh no! if you go near her she will shriek and cry; she is so shy.' 'Nay,' said the man, 'I will stand here, and here she shall come without a shriek, and lie down at my feet.' What he did we could not find out, for he seemed perfectly still. The window-curtain unfolded, and apparently against her will the child came forward. She caught at a chair, as if determined to resist the influence, but that seemed to urge her forward; she let it go, and then grasped the table with both hands, as if determined to resist. She pouted, she frowned, she strove to keep her place, but keep it she could not. Step by step she came and laid herself quietly down at the wizard's feet. Mrs. Moreton almost shrieked, but the child lay as if she dared not leave until the magician gave permission."
"Well, and what do you infer from all this?" asked Eugene.
"I hardly know; I am terrified; what if it is true, as this man says, that weak minds must obey the strong; that resistance is useless? I should not like to become the slave of a spirit such as his."
"You believe him to be a wicked man?"
"I do, yet I know not why; I should not like to meet him when unprotected."
"Why, Morley, you astonish me; I could not conceive you so weak. These fears are unworthy a noble mind."
"But what are we to do if such theories be true?"
"They are not true—at least not in the way you state them. There are protecting, counteracting influences for the weakest. I cannot explain all this to-night; but all history, all experience go to prove that the 'race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong' —that bad power is often overcome by weak means. I will repeat to you a piece of advice I received myself to-day, and which I intend to take. It is one you must often have received, for your father intends you for the church. Pray, Morley, to the highest of all intelligences, to the greatest of all powers. The strongest will then be invoked to your aid."
"Pray? Are you serious, Mr. Eugene?"
"I am serious; why doubt it?"
"An advice so contrary to the spirit of the age! why, it is the last to be expected."
"Perhaps so; but listen: That mind is not matter, your experience proves, as does that of most people. What mind is, perhaps we do not know; but that mind acts upon mind, irrespective of space and obstacles, we feel. Listen! you know my family; a family less superstitious scarcely exists. We are too much wedded to cause and effect lightly to believe. My grandfather was as little credulous as my father. Now hear what happened to him. He had a brother to whom he was fondly attached, and by whom he was as fondly loved. Their correspondence was constant. That brother went to India, as an officer. One night about twelve o'clock, as my grandfather was going to sleep, having sat up later than usual, the curtains at the foot of the bed were with drawn, and his brother, pale, but in full regimentals, appeared and said, 'Good-by, Frank.' My grandfather related the circumstance at breakfast next morning, and noted it down in writing, being confident that he was not asleep. After due time the Indian mail arrived, giving an account of the brother's death on the field of battle at the exact hour and day specified. Ere his spirit winged its flight, we know not whither, it had communicated with the being it loved best on earth."
Frederic turned pale. "What do you infer from this?" he asked.
"Simply this," returned Eugene; "that 'there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' and this influence of mind on mind is one of them. If the Supreme Ruler have made a law that man, to be assisted by him, must pray to him, must put himself in communication with him, who are we that we should refuse the means? If you fear the evil spirit in a man, try if there be no good spirit capable of protecting you. The universal testimony of mankind is in favor of supernatural agencies. We should ponder well ere we throw from us such aid."
Frederic smiled, and rose to take his leave. Advice so different from what he had expected was scarcely likely to be well received. He had no answer ready, so he left the narrow-minded religionist to his own crude fancies.
And Eugene closed the oaken door, and returned, and for the first time of his life knelt down to beseech light from the Author of light—light to guide him through these wearisome shoals of doubt and darkness—light to show him something more than how to render matter subservient to animal comfort—light to enlighten the [{51}] inward feeling. Good and evil, what are they? Mind and matter—which is the true reality? What are we to live for—the animal life, or the spiritual? And is the purely spiritual distinct from the purely intellectual as well as from the animal? Is there a soul, the functions of which are different, distinct, from those of the body, and to the knowledge of which mere intellect cannot arrive? What is nature? What is revelation? How do they act upon each other? What is the office, what the aim of each? Revolving these themes, it was deep in the night ere the young man sought his couch.
TO BE CONTINUED.
ORIGINAL.
INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH.
Our age is more sentimental than intellectual, more philanthropic than Christian, more material than spiritual. It may and no doubt does cherish and seek to realize, with such wisdom as it has, many humane and just sentiments, but it retains less Christian thought than it pretends, and has hardly any conception of catholic principles. It studies chiefly phenomena, physical or psychical, and as these are all individual, particular, manifold, variable, and transitory, it fails to recognize any reality that is universal, invariable, and permanent, superior to the vicissitudes of time and place, always and everywhere one and the same. It is so intent on the sensible that it denies or forgets the spiritual, and so engrossed with the creature that it loses sight of the creator.
Indeed, there are not wanting men in this nineteenth century who deny that there is any creator at all, or that anything has been made, and maintain that all has been produced by self-development or growth. These men, who pass for the great scientific lights of the age, tell us that all things are in a continual process of self-formation, which they call by the general name of progress; and so taken up are they with their doctrine of progress, that they gravely assert that God himself, if God there be, is progressive, perfectible, ever proceeding from the imperfect towards the perfect, and seeking by unremitting action to perfect, fill out, or complete his own being. They seem not to be aware that if the perfect does not already really exist, or is wanting, there is and can be no progress; for progress is motion towards the perfect, and, if the perfect does not exist there can be no motion towards it, and in the nature of the case the motion can be only towards nothing, and therefore, as St. Thomas has well demonstrated, in proving the impossibility of progress without end, no motion at all. Nor do they seem any more to be aware that the imperfect, the incomplete, is not and cannot be self-active, or capable of acting in and from itself alone, and therefore has not the power in itself alone to develop and complete itself, or perfect its own being. Creatures may be and are progressive, because they live, and move, and have their being in their Creator, and are aided and sustained by him whose being is eternally complete who is in himself infinitely perfect. They forget also the important fact [{52}] that where there is nothing universal, there can be nothing particular, that where there is nothing invariable there can be nothing variable, that where there is nothing permanent there can be nothing transitory, and that where there is no real being there can be no phenomena, any more than there can be creation without a creator, action without an actor, appearance without anything that appears, or a sign that signifies nothing.
Now the age, regarded in its dominant tendency, neglects or denies this universal, invariable, persistent, real, or spiritual order, and its highest and most catholic principles are mere classifications or generalizations of visible phenomena, and therefore abstractions, without reality, without life or efficiency. It understands not that throughout the universe the visible is symbolical of the invisible, and that to the prepared mind there is an invisible but living reality signified by the observable phenomena of nature, as in the Christian economy an invisible grace is signified by the visible sacramental sign. All nature is in some sense sacramental, but the age takes it only as an empty sign signifying nothing. Hence the embarrassment of the Christian theologian in addressing it; the symbols he uses and must use have for it no meaning. He deals and must deal with an order of thought of which it has little or no conception. He is as one speaking to a man who has no hearing, or exhibiting colors to a man who has no sight, He speaks of the transcendental to those who recognize nothing above the sensible—of the spiritual to men who are of the earth earthy, and have lost the faculty of rising above the material, and piercing beyond the visible. The age has fallen, even intellectually, far below the Christian order of thought, and is apparently unable to rise even in conception to the great catholic principles in accordance with which the universe is created, sustained, and governed.
Nobody in his senses denies that man is progressive, or that modern society has made marvellous progress in the material order, in the application of science to the productive arts. I am no laudator temporis acti; I understand and appreciate the advantages of the present, and do not doubt that steam navigation railroads, and lightning telegraphs, which bid defiance to the winds and waves, and as it were annihilate space and time, will one day be made to subserve higher than mere material interests; but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that in many and very important respects, the modern world has deteriorated instead of improving, and been more successful in losing than in gaining. The modern nations commonly regarded, at least by themselves, as the more advanced nations, have fallen in moral and religious thought below the ancient Greeks and Romans. They may have more sound dogmas, but they have less conception of principles, of the invisible or spiritual order, excepting always the followers of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, whose absurd materialism is revived with hardly any disguise by the most approved thinkers of our own age. The Gentiles generally held catholic principles, but misapprehended and misapplied them, and thus fell into gross idolatry and degrading and besotting superstition; but the moderns while retaining many Catholic dogmas have lost the meaning of the word principle. The Catholic can detect, no doubt, phases of truth in all the doctrines of those outside the church, but the Christianity they profess has no universal, immutable, and imperishable principle, and degenerates in practice into a blind and fierce fanaticism, a watery sentimentality, a baseless humanitarianism, or a collection of unrelated and unmeaning dogmas, which are retained only because they are never examined, and which can impart no light to the understanding, infuse no life into the hearty and impose no restraint on the appetites and passions.
Having fallen below the conception of a order above the visible and phenomenal, and sunk to complete Sadduceeism, which believes in neither angel nor spirit, the age makes war on the church because she asserts such order, and remains fast anchored in it; because she is immovable and invariable, or as her enemies say, stationary, unprogressive, and therefore hostile to progress. She has, it is said, the insolence to attempt to teach and govern men and nations, instead of gracefully submitting to their views and wishes, and bestowing her blessing on their exertions for the liberty and progress of society. The age denies her to be the church of God, because she fails to prove herself to be the church of man, holding simply from a human authorities. It denies her divine origin, constitution, and authority, because she is stable, cannot be carried away by every wind of doctrine, does not yield to every popular impulse, and from time to time resists individuals, civil rulers, the people even, and opposes their favorite theories, plans, and measures, whenever she finds them at war with her mission and her law. It applauds her, indeed, to the echo, when she appears to be on the side of what happens to be popular, but condemns her without mercy when she opposes popular error, popular folly, popular injustice, and asserts the unpopular truth, defends the unpopular cause, or uses her power and influence in behalf of neglected justice, and please with her divine eloquence for the poor, the wronged, the downtrodden. Yet this is precisely what she should do, if the church of God, and what it would be contrary to her nature and office on that supposition not to do.
The age concedes nothing to the unseen and eternal. In its view religion itself is human, and ought to be subject to man, and determinable by society, dictated by the people, who in the modern mind usurp the place of God. It should not govern, but be governed, and governed from below, not from above; or rather, in its subversion of old ideas, it holds that being governed from below is being governed from above. It forgets that religion, objectively considered, is, if anything, the revelation and assertion of the divine order, or the universal and eternal law of God, the introduction and maintenance in the practical affairs of men and nations of the divine element, without which there would and could be nothing in human society invariable, permanent, or stable—persistent, independent, supreme, or authoritative. The church is simply the divine constitution and organ of religion in society, and must, like religion itself, be universal, invariable, independent, supreme, and authoritative for all men and nations. Man does not originate the church. She does not depend on man, or hold from him either individually or collectively; for she is instituted to govern him, to administer for him the universal and eternal law, and to direct and assist him in conducting himself in the way of his duty, to his supreme good, which she could not do if she held from and depended on him.
The point here insisted on, and which is so far removed from the thought of this age, is, that this order transcending the phenomenal and the whole material or sensible universe, and which in the strictly philosophical language of Scripture is called "the Law of the Lord," is eminently real, not imaginary, not factitious, not an abstraction, not a classification or generalization of particulars, nor something that depends for its reality on human belief or disbelief. Religion which asserts this divine order, this transcendental order, is objectively "the Law of the Lord," which, proceeding from the eternal reason and will of God, is the principle and reason of things. The church, as the divinely constituted organ of that law, is not an arbitrary institution, is not an accident, is not an afterthought, is not a superinduction upon the original plan of the Creator, but enters integrally into that plan, and is therefore founded in the [{54}] principle, the reason, and the constitution of things, and is that in reference to which all things are created, sustained, and governed, and hence our Lord is called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
But this our age does not conceive. For it the divine, the invariable, the universal, and the eternal are simply abstractions or generalizations, not real being. Its only conception of immensity, is space unlimited—of eternity, is time without end—of the infinite, the undefined, and of the universal, totality or sum total. Catholic, in its understanding, means accepting or ranking together as equally respectable the doctrines, opinions, views, and sentiments of all sects and denominations. Christian, Jewish, Mahometan, and Pagan. He, in the sense of modern philosophers, has a catholic disposition who respects all convictions, and has no decided conviction of his own. Catholicity is held to be something made up by the addition of particulars. The age does not understand that there is no catholicity without unity, and therefore that catholicity is not predicable of the material order, since nothing material or visible is or can be strictly one and universal. The church is catholic, not because as a visible body she is universal and includes all men and nations in her communion; she was as strictly catholic when her visible communion was restricted to the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles as she is now, or would be if all the members of the race were recipients of her sacraments. She is catholic because she is the organ of the whole spiritual order, truth, or reality, and that order in its own intrinsic nature is one and universal. All truth is catholic, because all truth is one and invariable; all the dogmas of the church are catholic, because universal principles, always and everywhere true. The law of the Lord is catholic, because universally, always and every where law, equally law for all men and nations in every age of the world, on earth and is heaven, in time and eternity. The church is catholic, because she holds under this law, and because God promulgates and administers it through her, because he lives and reigns in her, and hence she is called his kingdom, the kingdom of God on earth, a kingdom fulfilled and completed in heaven. It is this order of ideas that the age loses sight of and is so generally disposed to deny. Yet without it there were no visible order, and nothing would or could exist.
The principal, reason, nature, or constitution of things is in this order, and men must conform to it or live no true, no real life. They who recede from it advance towards nothing, and, as far as possible, become nothing. The church is independent, superior to all human control, and persistent, unaltered, and unalterable through all the vicissitudes of time and place, because the order in which she is founded is independent and persistent. She cannot be moved or harmed, because she rests on the principle, truth, and constitution of things, and is founded neither on the individual man, the state, nor the people, but on God himself, the Rock of Ages, against which anything created must rage and beat in vain. "On this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The church is therefore, by her own divine constitution, by the very principle and law of her existence, indefectible. No weapon forged against her shall prosper. The wicked may conspire for her destruction, but in vain, because they conspire to destroy reality, and all reality is always invincible and indestructible. They cannot efface or overthrow her, because she is founded in the truth and reality of things, or what is the same thing, in the unalterable reason and will of God, in whom all creatures have their principle—live, move, and have their being.
They who oppose the church in the name of humanity or human progress, cannot succeed, because she is indivisible, and they would utterly defeat themselves if they could. They would deprive the human race of the law of God, which makes wise the simple and strengthens the weak, and deprive men and nations of the truth and reality of things, the very principle of all life, and of the very means and conditions of all progress. Man no doubt is progressive, but not in and by himself alone. Archimedes demanded a pou sto, a whereon to rest his fulcrum outside the earth, in order to move it, and there is no conceivable way by which a man can raise himself by a lever supported on himself. How is it that our philosophers fail to see the universal application of the laws which they themselves assert? All progress is by assimilation, by accretion, as that hierophant of progress, Pierre Leroux, has amply demonstrated, and if there is no reality outside of man or above him, what is there for him to assimilate, and how is he to become more than at any given time he already is? Swift ridiculed the philosophers of Laputa, who labored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, but even more ridiculous are they who pretend that something may be assimilated from nothing, or that a thing can in and of itself make itself more than it is. Where there is nothing above man with which he does or may commune, there is for him no possibility of progress, and men and nations can never advance beyond what they are. This is so in the nature of things, and it is only what is implied in the maxim, Ex nihilo nihil fit.
An institution, no matter by what sacred name called, founded by savages, embodying only what they are, and worked by them, would have no power to elevate them above their savage state, and could only serve to perpetuate their savagery. The age speaks of the applications of science to the productive arts, of the marvels of the steam-engine, steamboats, the locomotive, and the magnetic telegraph, and boasts that it renders mind omnipotent over matter. Vain boast, poor philosophy. We have in those things gained no triumph over matter, no control over the forces of nature, which are as independent of our reason and will as ever they were, as the first steamboat explosion will suffice to convince the most skeptical. We have subjected none of the forces of nature; we have only learned in some few instances to construct our machinery so as to be propelled by them, as did the first man who built a mill, constructed a boat, or spread his sails to catch the breeze. We alter not, we control not by our machinery the forces of nature, and all the advantage we have obtained is in conforming to them, and in suffering them, according to their own laws, or laws which we have not imposed on them, to operate for us. The principle is universal, catholic, and as true in the moral or spiritual as in the mechanical or physical world.
Man does not create, generate, or control the great moral and spiritual forces on which he depends to propel his moral and spiritual machinery. They exist and operate independently alike of his reason and his will, and the advantages he derives from them are obtained by his placing himself within the sphere of their influence, or, to be strictly correct, by interposing voluntarily no obstacle to their inflowing, for they are always present and operative unless resisted. Withdraw him from their influence, or induce him obstinately to resist them, which he may do, for he is a free moral agent, and he can make no more progress than a sailing ship at sea in a dead calm. These forces are divine, are embodied in the church as her living and constitutive force—are in one sense the church herself, and hence men and nations separated from her communion and influence are thrown back on nature alone, and necessarily cease to be progressive. We may war against this as much as we please, but we cannot alter it, for the principle on which it rests is a universal and indestructible law.
Individuals and nations separated by schism or heresy from the visible communion of the church do not become at once absolutely and in all respects unprogressive, for they are carried on for a time by the momentum she baa given them, and besides, they are not, as she continues to exist, absolutely beyond or outside of the sphere of her influence, though indirect and reflected. But from the moment of the separation their progress begins to slacken, their spiritual life becomes sickly and attenuated, and gradually they lose all that they had received from the church, and lapse into helpless and unassisted nature. This, which is demonstrable à priori, is proved by the experience of those nations that separated from the church in the sixteenth century. These nations at first retained a large portion of their old Catholic culture, and many of the habits acquired under the discipline and training of the church. But they have been gradually losing them ever since, and the more advanced portions of them have got pretty clear of them, and thrown off, as they express it, the last rag of Popery. Indeed this is their boast.
In throwing off the authority of the church, they came in religious matters under the authority of the state, or the temporal sovereign or ruler—a purely human authority, without competency in spirituals—and thus lost at once their entire religious freedom, or liberty of conscience. In Catholic nations the civil authority has always, or almost always, been prone to encroach on the authority of the church, and to attempt to control her external discipline or ecclesiastical administration; but, in the nations that were carried away by the so-called reformation, the civil authority assumed in every instance complete control over the national church, and prescribed its constitution, its creed, its liturgy, and its discipline. This for them completely humanized religion, and made it a department of state. It is true these nations professed to recognize the Bible as containing a divine revelation, and to be governed by it; and this would have been something, even much, had they not remitted its interpretation to the civil magistrate, the king, the parliament, the public judgment of the people, or the private judgment of the individual, which made its meeting, as practically received, vary from nation to nation, and even from individual to individual.
This sacrificed, in principle, the sovereignty of God and the entire spiritual order, departed to a fearful distance from the truth and reality of things, and if it retained some of the precepts of the Christian law, it retained them as precepts not of the law of God but as precepts of the law of man, enjoined, explained, and applied by a purely human authority. In process of time, the authority of the state in religious matters was found to be usurped, tyrannical, and oppressive, and the thinking part of the separated nations asserted the right of private judgment, or of each believer to interpret the Holy Scriptures for himself. Having gone thus far, they went still farther, and assert for everyone the right to judge for himself not only of the meaning, but of the inspiration, authenticity, and authority of the Scriptures, though the civil government in none of these nations, except the United States, not in existence at the time of the separation, has disavowed its authority in spirituals. Practically, the doctrine that each individual judges for himself is now generally adopted.
The authority of the Scriptures has followed the authority of the church, and is practically, when not theoretically, rejected. It was perhaps asserted by the reformers at first for the purpose of presenting some authority not precisely human, which no Catholic would deny, as offset against that of the church, rather than from any deep reverence for it, or profound conviction of it« reality. But, be this as it may, it counts for little now. The authors of Essays and Reviews, and the Anglican bishop of Natal, take hardly less liberty with the [{57}] Scriptures than Luther and Calvin did with the church. The more advanced thinkers, if thinkers they are, of the age go further still, and maintain not only that a man may be a very religious man, and a true follower of Jesus Christ, without accepting either the authority of the church or that of the Bible, but without even believing either in the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Schleiermacher, the great Berlin preacher, went thus far in his Discourses on Religion, addressed to the Cultivated among its Despisers; and equally far, if not farther, in the same direction, go the rising school or sect called Positivists. Religion is reduced to a spontaneous development—perhaps I should say, to a secretion of human nature, implying no reality above or distinguishable from human nature itself.
It is not pretended that all persons in these nations have as yet reached this result; but as there is a certain logic in error as well as in truth, all are tending and must tend to it. What is called progress of religious ideas or religious enlightenment is not held to consist in any accession to our stock of known truth, in penetrating farther into the world of reality, and attaining a firmer grasp of its principles, nor in a better understanding of our moral relations and the duties growing out of them, but in simply casting off or getting rid of so-called Popery—of everything that has been retained in the nations, and the sects into which they divide and subdivide, furnished by the Catholic Church in which the reformers had been reared, and in reducing men and nations to the nakedness and feebleness of nature. The more advanced portion are already seen sporting in puris naturalibus, heedless alike of shame and winter's cold. The others are following more or less rapidly in the same direction; for there is no halting-place between Catholicity and naked naturalism, and men must either ascend to the one or descend to the other. But those who choose to descend can find no resting-place even in naturalism, for nature, severed from Catholicity, is severed from its principle, is severed from God, from the reality and truth of things, and is therefore unreal, nothing, Hence the descent is endless. Falsehood has no bottom, is unreal, purely negative, and can furnish no standing. Men can stand only on the true, the real, and that is Catholicity, the order represented in society by the church. Those who forsake the church, Catholicity, God, forsake therefore the real order, have nothing to stand on, and in the nature of the case can only drop into what the Scripture calls "the bottomless pit."
We hear much of the ignorance, superstition, and even of idolatry of Catholics, nothing of which is true; but this much is certain, that those who abandon the church, and succeed in humanizing religion, making it hold from man and subject to his control, do as really worship gods of their fashioning as did the old worshippers of gods made of wood and stone, because their religion is really only what they make it, and fall into as gross an idolatry and into as besotted and besotting a superstition as can be found among any heathen people, ancient or modern.
It is easy therefore to understand why the church sets her face so resolutely against modern reformers, liberals, revolutionists, in a word, the whole so-called movement party, professing to labor for the diffusion of intelligence and the promotion of science, liberty, and human progress. It is not science, liberty, or progress that she opposes, but false theories substituted for science, and the wrong and destructive means and methods of promoting liberty and progress adopted and insisted on by liberals and revolutionists. There is only one right way of effecting the progress they profess to have at heart, and that is by conforming to truth and reality, for falsehood is impotent, and nothing can be gained by it. She opposes the movement party, not as a movement party, not as a party of light, liberty, [{58}] and progress, but as a party moving in the wrong direction, putting forth unscientific theories, theories which amuse the imagination without enlightening the understanding, which if they dazzle it is only to blind with their false glitter, which embraced as truth to-day, must be rejected as falsehood to-morrow, and which in fact tend only to destroy liberty, and render all real progress impossible. As the party, collectively or individually, neither is nor pretends to be infallible, the church, at the worst, is as likely to be right as they are, and the considerations presented prove that she is right, and that they are wrong. There is no science but in knowing the truth, that which really is or exists, and there is no real progress, individual or social, with nature alone, because nature alone has no existence, and can exist and become more than it is only by the gracious, the supernatural assistance of God, in whom all things live, move, and have their being.
A great clamor has been raised by the whole movement party throughout the world against the encyclical of the Holy Father, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864, and even some Catholics, not fully aware of the sense and reach of the opinions censured, were at first partially disturbed by it; but the Holy Father has given in it only a proof of his pastoral vigilance, the fidelity of the church to her divine mission, and the continuous presence in her and supernatural assistance of the Holy Ghost. The errors condemned are all aimed at the reality and invariability, universality and persistency, of truth, the reality of things, the supremacy of the spiritual order, and the independence and authority of the divine law, at real science, and the means and conditions of both liberty and progress. In it we see the great value of the independence of the church,—of a church holding from God instead of holding from man. If the church had been human or under human control she would never have condemned those errors, because nearly all of them are popular, and hailed as truth by the age. Man condemns only what man dislikes, and the popular judgment condemns only what is unpopular. It is only the divine that judges according to truth, and without being influenced by the spirit of the age, or by what is popular or unpopular. If the church had been human, she would have been carried away by those errors, and proved herself the enemy instead of the friend, the protector, and the benefactor of society.
These remarks on the divine character and independence of the church are not inappropriate to the present times, and may serve to calm, comfort, and console Catholics amidst the national convulsions and changes which, without the reflections they suggest, might deeply afflict the Catholic heart. The successes of Italy and Prussia in the recent unjustifiable war against Austria, and the humiliation of the Austrian empire, the last of the great powers on which the church could rely for the protection of her material interests, have apparently given over the temporal government of this world to her enemies. There is at this moment not a single great power in the world that is officially Catholic, or that officially recognizes the Catholic Church as the church of God. The majority of Frenchmen are or profess to be Catholics, but the French state professes no religion, and if it pays a salary to the Catholic clergy, Protestant ministers, and Jewish rabbis, it is not as ministers of religion, but as servants of the state. The Russian state is schismatic, and officially anti-papal; the British state, as a state, is Protestant, and officially hostile to the church; Italy follows France; and Prussia, which at the moment means Germany, is officially Protestant and anti-Catholic; and so are Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Belgium and our own great Republic profess officially no religion, but give freedom and protection to all religions not held to be contra bonos mores. Spain and Portugal, no longer great powers, and [{59}] most of the Central and South American states, officially profess the Catholic faith, but they count for next to nothing in the array of nations. Hellas and the Principalities, like Russia, are schismatic, and the rest of the world, including the greater part of Asia and all of Africa, is Mahometan or pagan, and of course hostile to the church.
I have not enumerated Austria, for what is to be her fate no one can now say; but as a portion of her population belong to the Greek schismatic church, and a larger portion still are Protestants, the most that can be expected of her is that she will, in regard to religion, assume the attitude of France and Italy. There is then really no power on which the church can now rely for the support of her external and material interests. I will not say that the triumph of Prussia is the triumph of Protestantism, for that would not be true; but it is, at least for the moment, the success of the party that denounced the papal encyclical, and would seem to be a complete victory, perhaps a final victory, over that system of mixed civil and ecclesiastical government which grew up on the downfall of the Roman empire and the conversion of the barbarian nations that seated themselves on its ruins. It is the total and final destruction of the Christian empire founded, with the aid of the Pope and bishops, by Charlemagne and his nobles, and not unlikely will end in the complete severance of all official union of church and state—alike the official union between the state and the heretical and schismatic churches, and between the state and the Catholic Church; so that throughout the civilized world the people will be politically free to be of any religion they choose, and the state of no religion.
This result is already reached in nearly all the nations hitherto called Catholic nations, but not in the officially Protestant and schismatic nations; and for a long time to come the anti-Catholic or anti-papal religions, schismatical, heretical, Mahometan, and pagan religions, will be retained as official or state religions, with more or less of civil tolerance for Catholics. For the moment, the anti-papal party appears to be victorious, and no doubt believes that it is all over with the Catholic Church. That party had persuaded itself that the church, as a ruling body, was of imperial origin—that the papal power had been created by the edicts of Roman emperors, and that it depends entirely on the civil authority for its continuance. Hence they concluded that, if the church could be deprived of all civil support, it must fall. They said, the church depends on the papacy, and the papacy depends on the empire; hence, detach the empire—that is, the civil power—from the papacy, and the whole fabric tumbles at once into complete ruin. It is not improbable that, to confound them, to bring to naught the wisdom of the wise, and to take the crafty in their own craftiness, Providence has suffered them to succeed. He has permitted them to detach the empire, that they may see their error.
The successful party have reckoned without their host. They have reasoned from false premises, and come necessarily to false conclusions. The church is, undoubtedly, essentially papal as well as episcopal, and the destruction of the papacy would certainly be her destruction as the visible church; but it is false to assume that the papacy was created by imperial edicts and depends on the empire, for it is an indisputable historical fact that it existed prior to any imperial edict in its favor, and while the empire was as yet officially pagan, and hostile to the church. Hence it does not follow that detaching the empire from the papacy will prove its destruction. The church was as papal in its constitution when the whole force of the empire was turned against it, when it sought refuge in the catacombs, as it is now, or was in the time of Gregory VII. or Innocent III., and is as papal in this country, where it has no civil [{60}] support or recognition, as in Spain, or the Papal States themselves. The very principal, idea, and nature of the church, as we have set them forth in asserting the independence and supremacy of the spiritual order, of which she is the organ, contradict in the moat positive manner the dependency of the papacy on the empire.
The church as a visible body has, no doubt, temporal relations, and therefore temporal interests susceptible of being affected by the changes which take place in states and empires, and it is not impossible, nor improbable, that the recent changes in Europe may more or less deeply affect those interests. The papacy has itself so judged, and has resisted them with all the means placed at its disposal. These changes, if carried out, if completed, will affect in a very serious manner the relations of the papacy with temporal sovereigns, or, to use the consecrated term, with the empire, and many of its regulations and provisions for the administration of ecclesiastical affairs will certainly need to be changed or modified, and much inconvenience during the transition to the new state of things will no doubt be experienced. All changes from an old established order, though in themselves changes for the better, are for a time attended with many inconveniences. The Israelite's escaping from Egyptian bondage had to suffer weariness, hunger, and thirst in the wilderness before reaching the promised land. But whatever temporal changes or inconveniences of this sort the church in her external relations may have to endure, they are accidental, and by no means involve her destruction, or impair her power or integrity as the church of God, or divinely instituted organ of the spiritual order.
There is no question that the party that regards itself as having triumphed in the success of Italy and Prussia is bitterly hostile not only to what it calls the papal politics, but to the Catholic Church herself, and will not be satisfied with simply detaching the empire from her support, but will insist on its using all its power and influence against her. That party, indeed, demands religious liberty, but religious liberty, in its sense of the term, is full freedom for all religions except the Catholic, the only true, religion. Error, they hold, is harmless when reason is free, but truth they instinctively feel is dangerous to their views and wishes, and must for their safety be bound hand and foot. But suppose the worst; suppose the civil power becomes actively hostile to the church, prohibits by law the profession and practice of the Catholic religion, punishes Catholics with fines and imprisonment, fire and sword, the dungeon and the stake, the church will be no worse off than she was under the pagan emperors, hardly worse off than she was under even the Arians. The empire under the Jew and the Gentile exerted its utmost fury against her, and exerted it in vain. It found her irrepressible. The more she was opposed and persecuted, the more she flourished, and the blood of the martyrs fattened the soil for a rich growth of Catholics. Individuals and nations may be, as they have been, detached from her communion, and many souls for whom Christ died perish everlastingly, which is a fearful loss to them, and society may suffer the gains acquired to civilization during eighteen centuries to be lost, and moral and intellectual darkness gather anew for a time over the land, once enlightened by the Sun of righteousness, for God governs men as free moral agents, not as machines or slaves; but the church will survive her persecutors, and reconquer the empire for God and his Christ. Is she not founded on the Rock of Ages, and is it not said by him who is truth itself, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her?
It would be impossible to subject the church to a severer ordeal than she has time and again passed through, and it is not likely that her children will be exposed to greater trials than [{61}] those to which they were subjected in the fifth and sixth centuries by the subversion of the Roman empire by the pagan and Arian barbarians, or to suffer heavier calamities than were inflicted on them by the so-called reformation in the sixteenth century. The Protestants of today cannot be fiercer, more intolerant or fanatical than they were in the age of Luther and Calvin; and the infidels of to-day cannot be more envenomed against the church, or more bloodthirsty and brutal, than were the infidels in the French revolution; and all these the church has survived.
The well-being of society, its orderly, peaceful, and continuous progress, requires, as the Holy See has constantly maintained, the co-operation and harmonious action of the church and the empire or republic, but the church has seldom found the empire ready and willing to co-operate with her, and the record of the struggles between her and it fills more than a brief chapter in ecclesiastical and civil history. In point of fact, the church has usually found herself embarrassed and oppressed by officially Catholic states, and most of the popular prejudices that still exist against her owe their origin neither to her doctrines nor to her practices, but to the action of secular governments officially Catholic. In the last century, her bitterest enemies were the sovereigns of officially Catholic states; the most generous friends of the Holy See were states officially heretical or schismatic, as Russia, Great Britain, Sweden, and Prussia. Austria is humiliated and suffering now for being in the way of the anti-papal aggression, and every generous-hearted man sympathizes with her noble-minded and well-disposed if not able emperor, and it is no time to speak of her past shortcomings; but this much may be said, she has seldom been a generous supporter of the Holy See, and sometimes has been its oppressor.
Governments, like individuals, seldom profit by any experience but their own; yet experience has proved, over and over again, that governments the most powerful cannot, however determined on doing so, extirpate Catholicity by force from their dominions. Pagan Rome, once the haughty mistress of the world, tried it, made the profession of the Christian faith punishable with death, and death in the most frightful and excruciating forms, but failed. England, with all her power, with all her Protestant zeal, aided by her intense national prejudices, though she emulated the cruelties of the Caesars and even surpassed the Caesars in her craft and treachery, has never been able to extinguish the Catholic faith and love of the Irish people, the great majority of whom have never ceased to adhere to the Catholic religion. The church thrives under persecution, for to suffer for Christ's sake is a signal honor, and martyrdom is a crown of glory. The government can reach no farther than to the bodies and goods of Catholics, and he who counts it an honor to suffer, a crown to die, for his faith, fears nothing that can be done to those, and is mightier than king or kaiser, parliament or congress. The Christians, as Lactantius well says, conquered the world not by slaying but by being slain. Woe to him who slays the Catholic for his religion, but immortal honor and glory to him who is slain! Men are so constituted that they rarely love that which costs them nothing, no sacrifice. It is having suffered for our native land that hallows it in our affections, and the more we suffer for the church, the more and the more tenderly do we love her. St. Hilary accuses the Arian Constantius of being a worse enemy to the church then Nero, Decius, or Diocletian, for he seduced her prelates by favors, instead of enabling them to acquire glory in openly dying for the faith.
The civil power can never uproot Catholicity by slaying Catholics, or robbing the church of her temporalities. Impoverish the church as you will, you cannot make her poorer than she was [{62}] in our Lord himself, who had not where to lay his head, nor than she was in the twelve apostles when they went forth from that "upper room" in Jerusalem to conquer the world. She has never depended upon the goods of this world as the means of accomplishing her mission, and her possessions have often been an embarrassment, and exposed her to the envy, cupidity, and rapacity of secular princes. If deprived by the revolution of the temporalities of her churches, and left destitute, so to apeak, of house or home, she can still offer up "the clean oblation," as she has often done, in private houses, barns, groves, catacombs, caverns in the earth, or clefts in the rocks.
The church has frequently been deprived of her temporal possessions and of all temporal power, but the poor have suffered by it more than she. She is really stronger in France today than she was in the age of Louis XIV., and French society is, upon the whole, less corrupt than in the time of Francis I. Religion revives in Spain in proportion as the church losers her wealth. There are no countries where the church has been poorer than in Ireland and the United Slates, and none where her prosperity has been greater. Let matters, then, take the worst turn possible, Catholics have little to fear, the church nothing to apprehend, except the injury her enemies are sure to do themselves, which cannot fail to afflict her loving heart.
Yet, whatever may be the extent of the changes effected or going on in the states and empires of Europe, I apprehend no severe or prolonged persecution of Catholics. The church in this world is and always will be the church militant, because she is not of this world, and acts on principles not only above but opposed to those on which kings and kaisers and the men of this world act. She therefore necessarily comes in conflict with them, and could render them no service if she did not. Conflicts there will be, annoyances and vexations must be expected; but in all the European states as well as our own, if we except Sweden and Denmark, there is too large a Catholic population to be either massacred, exiled, or deprived of the rights of person and property common to all citizens or subjects. The British government has been forced to concede Catholic emancipation, and all appearances indicate that she will be forced ere long to place Catholics in all respects on a footing of perfect equality with Protestants before the state. Prussia, should she, as is possible, absorb all Germany, will have nearly as many Catholic as Protestant subjects, and though she may insist on remaining officially Protestant and anti-Catholic, she will find it necessary to her own peace and security to allow her Catholic subjects to enjoy liberty of religion and equal civil rights. The mass of the Italian people are Catholic, and will remain Catholics; and these are not times when even absolute, much less constitutional, sovereigns can afford to is the it's and convictions of any considerable portion of their people.
The anti-papal party may prove strong enough to deprive the Holy Father of his temporal sovereignty and make Rome the capital of the new kingdom of Italy; that is undoubtedly laid down in the programme, and is only a natural, a logical result of Napoleon's campaign of 1859 against Austria and Napoleon holds that the logic of events must be submitted to. He said in 1859 that there were two questions to be settled, the Italian question and the Roman question. As the former has been settled by expelling the Austrians from Italy, so the latter is likely to be settled by the deprivation of the Pope as temporal sovereign—the plan of settlement being evidently to secure to the anti-papal party all it demands. Austria humiliated cannot interpose in behalf of the temporal sovereignty, and is reported to have abandoned it; Napoleon will not do it, unless compelled, for he has been the determined but politic enemy of that sovereignty ever [{63}] since, with his elder brother, he engaged in a conspiracy, in 1831, to destroy the papal government; and Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, all anti-Catholic states, will abandon the papal throne to the logic of events. Under the providence of God, it depends on the Italian people whether the Holy Father shall retain his temporal sovereignty or not, and what they will do nobody can say. They are capable of doing anything hostile to the Pope one moment, and next falling on their knees before him, and, with tears in their eyes, begging his absolution.
But beyond the rights of the Supreme Pontiff as sovereign of the Roman state, I cannot apprehend any serious attacks on the papacy; or after the first fury has passed, even on ecclesiastical property. Much hostility for a time will be displayed, no doubt, against the monastic orders, and where they have any property remaining in their possession. It, not unlikely, will be confiscated, and the right of the church to be a proprietor legally denied or not recognized, yet property dedicated to religious uses still will be passably secure under the general law protecting citizens and their rights of property, to make gifts inter vivos, and testamenary bequests. The law will gradually become throughout Europe what it is with us. The civil law in the United States knows nothing of the canons of the Church establishing religious orders, or of the vows taken by the religious; it takes no cognizance of the church herself, it recognizes in her no proprietary rights, and gives her no standing in the courts, and yet nowhere is ecclesiastical property better protected or more secure, and nowhere are religious orders more free in person or more secure in property. This proceeds from the right of property secured to the citizens, and the right of the church, and of religious orders, not as proprietors, but, if I may so speak, as recipiendaries, or their right to receive enjoy eleemosynary gifts, grants, and bequests in whatever form made, which the courts protect according to the will of the donors or testators. There may be great inconveniences resulting from the inevitable changes taking place, great wrong is pretty sure to be done. The church has a valid right to be a proprietor, and it is a great crime and a great sin to rob her of any of her possessions; but she can carry on, and in most countries long has carried on, her mission without the law recognizing any proprietary rights.
Present appearances indicate that the church throughout the world will be thrown back, as she was in the beginning, on her internal resources as a spiritual kingdom; that she will cease to be the official church any nation—at least for a time, if not for ever; and that she will not henceforth govern or protect her children as civil life communities, states, or empires through their civil rulers, but simply as Catholics, individual members of her communion, through her own spiritual ministry, her bishops and prelates alone, without any official relation with the state. She can then exercise her full spiritual authority over her own members, as the independent kingdom of God on earth, free from all entangling alliances with the shifting policies of nations.
It is not assumed that the changes recent events have produced, or are producing, were desirable, are not evil, or are not brought about by evil passions, and from motives which every lover of truth and right does and must condemn; all that is argued is, that the church can survive them, and with less detriment to her material interests than her enemies have contemplated. Nothing that has taken place is defended, or defensible; but who can say that God in his gracious providence will not overrule all to the glory of his church and the good of them that love him? Who knows but he has given the victory to his enemies for the very purpose of confounding them, and showing them how vain are all their strivings against him and the order he has established? That is very victory, seemingly so [{64}] adverse and so afflicting to the Catholic heart, may prove to be the means of emancipating the church from her thraldom to the secular powers officially Catholic, but really anti-Catholic in spirit, and of preparing the way for her to labor more effectually than ever for the advancement of truth, the progress of civilization, and the salvation of souls! It is the prerogative of God to overrule evil for good, and the church, though immovable in her foundation, inflexible in her principles, and unchanging in her doctrines, has a wonderful capacity of adapting herself to all stages of civilization, and to all the changes in states and empires that may take place; she is confined within no national boundaries, and wedded to no particular form of civil government—she can subsist and carry on her work under Russian autocracy or American democracy, with the untutored savage and the most highly cultivated European, and is equally at her ease with the high and the low, the learned and the unlearned, the rich and the poor, the bond and the free. The events which, to all human judgment, seem adverse often turn out to be altogether in our favor. "All those things are against me," said the patriarch Jacob, when required to send his son Benjamin down to Egypt, and yet the event proved that they were all for him. When the Jews with wicked hands took our Lord and slew him, crucified him between two thieves, they, no doubt, thought that they had succeeded, and that it was all over with him and his work; but what they did was a means to the end he sought, for it was only in dying that he could accomplish the work he came to do.
The detachment of the empire from the church, which has been effected for purposes hostile to her, and with the hope of causing her destruction, perhaps will prove to her enemies that she does not rest on the state, that the state is far more in need of her than she of it, and show in a clear and unmistakable light her independence of all civil support, her inexhaustible internal resources, her supernatural energy and divine persistence. The empire detached from her and abandoning her to herself, or turning its force against her, will cease to incumber her with its official help, will no longer stand as an opaque substance between her and the people, intercepting her light, and preventing them from beholding her in her spiritual beauty and splendor. The change will allay much political hostility, remove most of the political prejudices against her, and permit the hearts of the people to turn once more towards her as their true mother and best friend. It may in fact tend to revive faith, and prepare the nations to reunite under her divine banner. Be this as it may, every Catholic knows that she is in herself independent of all the revolutions of states and empires, of all the changes of this world, and feels sure that she is imperishable, and that in some way the victories of her enemies will turn out to be their defeat, and the occasion of new triumphs for her.