The Catholic World, Vol. 13, April to September, 1871

by Various

MARY BENEDICTA.

We were at school together. We little dreamed, either of us, in those mischief-loving days of frolic and fun, that she was one day to be a saint, and that I would write her story.

Yet look well at the face. Is there not something like a promise of sainthood on the pure, white brow? And the eyes, blue-gray Irish eyes, with the long, dark lashes throwing a shadow underneath, "diamonds put in with dirty fingers," have they not a spiritual outlook that speaks to you with a promise—a revelation of some vision or growth of some beauty beyond what meets your gaze? Yet, though it seems so clear in the retrospect, this prophetic side of her beauty, I own it, never struck me then.

I am going to tell her story simply, with strict accuracy as to the traits of her character—the facts of her life and her death. I shall tell the bad with the good, neither striving to varnish her faults nor to heighten, by any dramatic coloring, the beautiful reality of her virtues. The story is one calculated, it seems to me, to be a light and a lesson to many. The very faults and follies, the strange beginning, so unlike the end, all taken as parts of a whole in the true experience of a soul, contain a teaching whose sole eloquence must be its truth and its simplicity.

I said we were at school together, but, though in the same convent, we were not in the same class. Mary (this was her real Christian name) was a few years older than I. Her career at this time was one of the wildest that ever a school-girl lived through. High-spirited, reckless, setting all rules at defiance, she was the torment of her mistresses and the delight of her companions. With the latter, her good-nature and good temper carried her serenely above all the little malices and jealousies that display themselves in that miniature world, a school; and, at the same time, her spirit of independence, while it was constantly getting her into "scrapes," was so redeemed by genuine abhorrence of everything approaching to meanness or deceit that it did not prevent her being a universal favorite with the nuns. One in particular, who from her rigorous disciplinarianism was the terror of us all, was even less proof than the others against the indomitable sweet temper and lovableness of her rebellious pupil. They were in a state of permanent warfare, but occasionally, after a hot skirmish carried on before the public, viz., the second class, Mother Benedicta would take the rebel aside, and try privately to coax her into a semblance of apology, or mayhap a promise of amendment. Sometimes she succeeded, for the refractory young lady was always more amenable to caresses than to threats, and was, besides, notwithstanding the war footing on which they stood, very fondly attached to Mother Benedicta, but she never pledged herself unconditionally. This was a great grievance with the mistress. She used to argue, and threaten, and plead by the hour, in order to induce Mary to give her "word of honor," as the phrase was amongst us, that she would observe such and such a prohibition, or obey such and such a rule—silence was the chronic casus belli—but all to no purpose.

"No, sister, I promise you to try; but I won't promise to do or not to do," she would answer, undefiantly, but quite resolutely.

It was a common thing for Mother Benedicta to say, after one of these conferences which ended, as usual, in the cautious, "I'll try, sister," that, if she could once get Mary to promise her outright to mend her ways, she would never take any more trouble about her. "If she pledged her word of honor to be a saint, I believe she would keep it," observed the nun, with a sigh.

I mention this little incident advisedly, for, though at the time we, in our wisdom, thought it must be pure perversity on the part of our mistress that made her so pursue Mary on the subject, considering that we were all in the habit of pledging our words of honor any given number of times a week with no particular result, I lived to see that in this individual instance she was guided by prophetic insight.

She never succeeded, however, in inducing Mary to commit herself during the four years that she was under her charge. It was war to the end; not to the bitter end, for the strife did not weaken, nay, it probably strengthened the enduring attachment that had sprung up between them. By way of sealing irrevocably and publicly this attachment on her side, Mary added the nun's name to her own, and even after she left school she continued to sign herself Mary Benedicta. When the time came round for frequenting the sacraments, it was the sure signal for a quarrel between the two belligerents. There was no plea or stratagem that Mary would not have recourse to in order to avoid going to confession. Yet withal she had a reputation in the school for piety—a queer, impulsive sort of piety peculiar to herself, that came by fits and starts. We had an unaccountable belief in the efficacy of her prayers, and in any difficulty she was one of those habitually appealed to to pray us out of it; not, indeed, that we were actuated by any precise view as to the spiritual quality of the prayers, only impressed vaguely by her general character, that whatever she did she put her heart in and did thoroughly. Mother Benedicta used to say that her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament would save her. But this devotion consisted, as far as we could see, in an enthusiastic love for Benediction; and as Mary was passionately fond of music, and confessed a weakness for effective ceremonial, Mother Benedicta herself occasionally had misgivings as to how much of the devotion went to the object of the ceremony and how much to its accessories, the lights, the music, and the incense. At any rate, once over, it exercised no apparent control over her life. The rules of the school she systematically ignored; the rule of silence she looked upon with special contempt as a bondage fit for fools, but unworthy of rational human beings. To the last day of her sojourn in the school, she practically illustrated the opinion that speech was of gold and silence of brass, and left it with the reputation of being the most indefatigable talker; the most unruly and untidy subject, but the sweetest nature that ever tried the patience and won the hearts of the community.

When she was about eighteen, her father sent her to the Sacré Cœur, in Paris, to complete her education, which, in spite of considerable expense on his part, and masters without end, was at this advanced period in a sadly retrograde state, the little she had learned at school in Ireland having been assiduously forgotten in the course of a year's anarchical holiday, when reading of every sort and even her favorite music were set aside for the more congenial pastimes of dancing, and skating, and flying across country after the hounds.

I was then living in Paris, and Mary was placed under my mother's wing. We went to see her on the Jours de Parloir, and she came to us on the Jours de Sortie. But it did not last long. As might have been expected, the sudden change from a life of excitement and constant out-door exercise to one of seclusion and sedentary habits proved too trying to her health, and after a few months the medical man of the convent declared that he was not prepared to accept the responsibility of taking charge of her, and strongly advised that she should be sent home.

We communicated this intelligence to her father, begging at the same time that before he came to remove her she might be allowed to spend a month with us. The request was granted and Mary came to stay with us.

That we might lose as little as possible of each other's company while we were together, she shared my room. We spent the mornings at home; I studying or taking my lessons, she reading, or lolling about the room, watching the clock, and longing for the master to go and set me free, that we might go out.

My mother, who only in a lesser degree shared my affection for Mary, and was anxious to make her visit as pleasant as possible, took her about to all the places best worth seeing in the city—the picture-galleries, the palaces, the museums, and the churches. The latter, though many of them, even as works of art, were amongst the most interesting monuments for a stranger, Mary seemed thoroughly indifferent to. When we entered one, instead of kneeling a moment before the sanctuary, as any Catholic does from mere force of habit and impulse, she would just make the necessary genuflexion, and, without waiting for us, hurry on round the building, examine the pictures and the stained glass, and then go out with as little delay as might be. This did not strike my mother, who was apt to remain all the time at her prayers, while I walked about doing the honors of the church to Mary; but it struck me, and it pained and puzzled me.

She was too innately honest to attempt the shadow of prevarication or pose even in her attitude, and her haste in despatching the inspection of every church we entered was so undisguised that I saw she did not care whether I noticed it or not. Once, on coming out of the little church of St. Genevieve, one of the loveliest shrines ever raised to the worship of God by the genius of man, I said rather sharply to her, for she had beaten a more precipitate retreat than usual, and cut short my mother's devotions at the tomb of the saint:

"Mary," I said, "one really would think the devil was at your heels the moment you enter a church, you are in such a violent hurry to get out of it."

She laughed, not mockingly, with a sort of half-ashamed expression, and turning her pure, full eyes on me.

"I hate to stay anywhere under false appearances," she said, "and I always feel such a hypocrite kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament! I feel as if I would choke if I stay there over five minutes."

I felt shocked, and I suppose I looked it.

"Don't look at me as if I were possessed of the devil," she said, still laughing, though there was a touch of sadness, it struck me, in her voice and face. "I mean to be converted by-and-by, and mend my ways; but meantime let me have my fun, and, above all, don't preach to me!"

"I don't feel the least inclined," I replied.

"I suppose you think I'm gone beyond it. Well, you can pray for me. I'm not gone beyond the reach of that!"

This was the only serious conversation, if it deserves the name, that we had during the first week of her visit. She enjoyed herself thoroughly, throwing all the zest of her earnest nature into everything. The people and their odd French ways, the shops and their exquisite wares, the opera, the gay Bois with the brilliant throng of fashion that crowded round the lake every day at the hour of promenade—the novelty of the scene and the place altogether enchanted her, and there was something quite refreshing in the spirit of enjoyment she threw into it all.

One evening, after a long day of sight-seeing, we were invited by a friend of hers to dine at the table d'hôte of the Louvre. It was the grande nouveauté just then, and Mary was consequently wild to see it. We went, and during dinner the admiration excited by her beauty was so glaringly expressed by the persistent stare of every eye within range of her at the table that my mother was provoked at having brought her and exposed her to such an ordeal. But Mary herself was blissfully unconscious of the effect she was producing; indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say she was unconscious of the cause. Certainly, no woman ever had less internal perception or outward complacency in her beauty than she had. This indifference amounted to a fault, for it pervaded her habits of dress, which were very untidy, and betokened a total disregard of personal appearance. The old fault that had been one of Mother Benedicta's standing grievances was as strong as ever, and it was all I could do to get her to put on her clothes straight, and to tie her bonnet under her chin instead of under her ear, when she came out with us.

But to return to the Louvre. It had been settled that after dinner we should walk across to the Palais Royal, and let Mary see the diamond shops illuminated, and all the other wonderful shops; but during dinner she overheard some one saying that the Emperor and Empress were to be at the Grand Opera that night. Her first impulse was to take a box and go there. But my mother objected that it was Saturday, the opera was never over before midnight, and consequently we could not be home and in bed before one o'clock on Sunday morning.

With evident disappointment, but, as usual, with the sweetest good temper, Mary gave way. Her friend then proposed that, before going to the Palais Royal, we should walk on to the Rue Lepelletier, and see the Emperor and Empress going in to the Opera. There was no difficulty in the way of this amendment, so it was adopted.

On coming out of the Louvre, however, we found, to our surprise and discomfiture, that the weather had been plotting against our little programme. The ground, which was frozen dry and hard when we drove down from the Champs Elysées less than two hours before, had become like polished glass under a heavy fall of sleet; the horses were already slipping about in a very uncomfortable way, and there was a decided disinclination on the part of pedestrians to trust themselves to cabs. Fate had decreed that Mary was not to see the Emperor on any terms that night. It would have been absurdly imprudent to venture on the macadam of the boulevards, and increase the risk of driving at all by waiting till the streets were so slippery that no horse could keep his footing on them. There was nothing for it but to go straight home, which we did, the horse snailing at a foot-pace all the way.

It was a memorable night this one of which I am chronicling a trivial recollection—trivial in itself, but weighty in its consequences.

It was the 14th of January, 1858.

We went to bed, and slept, no doubt, soundly. None the less soundly for the thundering crash that, before we lay down, had shaken the Rue Lepelletier from end to end, making the houses rock to their foundations, shattering to pieces every window from garret to cellar, and reverberating along the boulevards like the roar of a hundred cannon. The noise shook half Paris awake for that long night. The people, first merely terrified, then lashed to a frenzy of horror and of enthusiasm, rushed from their houses, and thronged the boulevards and the streets in the vicinity of the Opera. In the pitch darkness that followed simultaneously with the bursting of Orsini's bombs, it was impossible to know how many were murdered or how many wounded. There had been a great crowd of curieux and strangers as usual waiting to see their majesties alight—the street was lined with them. Were they all murdered, blown to the four winds of heaven, in that explosion that was loud enough to have blown up half Paris? Of course, popular fear and fury exaggerated the number of the victims enormously, and the night resounded with the shrieks and lamentations of women, the plunging and moaning of horses, wounded or only frantic with terror, and the passionate cries of Vive l'Empereur! intermingled with curses on the fiends who, to secure the murder of one man, had sacrificed the lives of hundreds.

While this ghastly tumult was scaring sleep and silence from the city close to us, we slept on, all unconscious of the cup of trembling to which we had stretched out our hand, and which had been so mercifully snatched away from us.

It was only next morning, on going out to Mass, that the concierge stopped us to tell the news of the attempt on the Emperor's life.

And we had been vexed and felt aggrieved with the rain that drove us home, and prevented our going to stand amongst those curieux in the Rue Lepelletier!

Mary did not hear of it till we met at breakfast. I never shall forget the look of blank horror on her face as she listened to the account of what had happened on the very spot where we had been so bent on going.

Although this attack of Orsini's comes into my narrative simply as a datum, I cannot resist making a short digression toward it.

Most of my readers will remember the singular stoicism displayed by the Emperor at the moment of the explosion. One of the horses was killed under his carriage, which was violently shaken by the plunging of the terrified animals, and a splinter from one of the bombs, flashing through the window, grazed him on the temple. In the midst of the general panic and confusion of the scene, the equerry rushed forward, and, taking the Emperor by the arm, cried hurriedly:

"Come out, sire! Come out!"

"Let down the steps," observed his master with unruffled sang froid, and quietly waited till it was done before he moved.

He entered the Opera amidst deafening cheers, and sat out the representation as coolly, and to all appearances with as much attention, as if nothing had occurred to disturb him, now and then quietly drawing his handkerchief across the splinter-mark on his forehead, from which the blood was oozing slightly.

Next day a solemn Te Deum was celebrated at the Tuileries. The Empress wished the little prince, then a baby in arms, to be present at the thanksgiving for her own and his father's miraculous preservation. The child was carried into the Salle des Maréchaux, where the court and the Corps Diplomatique were assembled, and immediately put out his hands, clamoring for his father to take him. The Emperor took him in his arms, and the child, looking up at his face, noticed the red mark on the temple.

"Papa bobo!"[29] he lisped, and put up his little hand to touch it.

The hard, sphynx-like face struggled for a moment; but the child's touch had melted the strong man. He clasped him to his heart, and literally shook with sobs.

These details, which were probably never written before, were told to me by one who was present at the attempt the previous night, and at the Te Deum Mass next day.

That night, when we were alone, Mary and I talked over the diabolical crime that had within four and twenty hours shaken the whole country like an earthquake, and over the merciful interposition that had arrested us on our way to what might have been for us, as it was for many, a certain and horrible death. Mary, though she said little on this latter point, was evidently very deeply impressed, and what she did say carried in it a depth of religious emotion that revealed her to me in quite a new light.

It was agreed that she would go to confession next day, and that we were to begin a novena together in thanksgiving for our preservation.

"Mary," I said impulsively, after we had been silent a little while, "why have you such a dislike to go to the sacraments? I can't understand how, believing in them at all, you can be satisfied to approach them so seldom."

"It isn't dislike; it is fear," she answered. "It's precisely because I realize so awfully the power and sanctity of the Blessed Sacrament that I keep away. I believe so intensely in it that, if I went often to holy communion, I should have to divorce from everything, to give up my whole life to preparation and thanksgiving. I know I should. And I don't want to do it. Not yet, at any rate," she added, half-unconsciously, as if speaking to herself.

I shall never forget the effect her words had on me, nor her face as she uttered them. The night was far spent. The emotions of the day, the long watch, and perhaps the flickering of our bedroom candle that was burning low, all conspired to give an unwonted pallor to her features that imbued them with an almost ethereal beauty. I always think of her now as she sat there, in her girlish white dressing-gown, her hands locked resting on her knees, her head thrown back, and her eyes looking up, so still, as if some far beyond were breaking on her gaze and holding it transfixed.

Nothing broke on mine. In my dull blindness I did not see that I was assisting at the beginning of a great mystery, a spectacle on which the gaze of angels was riveted—the wrestling of a soul with God: the soul resisting; the Creator pleading and pursuing.

She left us at the end of January to return home. We parted with many tears, and a promise to correspond often and pray for each other daily.

For a time we did correspond very regularly—for nearly a year. During this period her life was an unpausing whirl of dissipation. Balls, visits, operas, and concerts during the season in town were succeeded in the country by more balls, and hunting, and skating, and the usual round of amusements that make up a gay country life. Mary was everywhere the beauty of the place, the admired of all admirers. Strange to say, in spite of her acknowledged supremacy, she made no enemies. Perhaps it would have been stranger still if she had. Her sweet, artless manner and perfect unconsciousness of self went for at least as much in the admiration she excited as her beauty. If she danced every dance at every ball, it was never once for the pleasure of saying she did it, of triumphing over other girls, but for the genuine pleasure of the dance itself.

Her success was so gratuitous, so little the result of coquetry on her side, that, however much it might be envied, it was impossible to resent it.

I am not trying to make out a case for Mary, or to excuse, still less justify, the levity of the life she was leading at this time. My only aim is to convey a true idea of the spirit in which she was leading it—mere exuberance of spirits, the zest of youth in the gay opportunities that were showered upon her path. She was revelling like a butterfly in flowers and sunshine. The spirit of worldliness in its true and worst sense did not possess her; did not even touch her. Its cankerous breath had not blown upon her soul and blighted it; the worm had not eaten into her heart and hardened it. Both were still sound—only drunk; intoxicated with the wine of life. She went waltzing through flames, like a moth round a candle; like a child letting off rockets, and clapping hands with delight at the pretty blue blaze, without fear or thought of danger. There was no such thing as premeditated infidelity in her mind. She was not playing a deliberate game with God; bidding him wait till she was ready, till she was tired of the world and the world of her. No, she was utterly incapable of such a base and guilty calculation. She had simply forgotten that she had a soul to save. The still, small voice that had spoken to her in earlier days, especially on that night of the 15th of January, stirring the sleeping depths, and calling out momentary yearnings toward the higher life, had altogether ceased its pleadings. How could that mysterious whisper make itself heard in such a din and clangor of unholy music? There was no silent spot in her soul where it could enter and find a listener. But Mary did not think about it. She was inebriated with youth and joy, and had flung herself into the vortex, and raced round with it till her head reeled. On the surface, all was ripple and foam, rings running round and round; but the depths below were sleeping. The one, the visible hold that she retained on God at this time was her love for his poor. Her heart was always tender to suffering in every form, but to the poor especially. As an instance of this, I may mention her taking off her flannel petticoat, on a bitter winter's day, to give it to a poor creature whom she met shivering at the roadside, and then running nearly a mile home in the cold herself.

After about a year our correspondence slackened, and gradually broke down altogether. I heard from her once in six months, perhaps. The tone of her letters struck me as altered. I could not exactly say how, except that it had grown more serious. She said nothing of triumphs at archery meetings or of brushes carried off "at the death;" there seemed to be no such feats to chronicle. She talked of her family and of mine, very little of herself. Once only, in answer to a direct question as to what books she read, she told me that she was reading Father Faber, and that she read very little else. This was the only clue I gained to the nature of the change that had come over her.

At the expiration of about two years, a clergyman, who was an old friend of her family, and a frequent visitor at the house, came to Paris, and gave me a detailed account of the character and extent of the change.

The excitement into which she had launched on returning home, and which she had kept up with unflagging spirit, had, as might have been expected, told on her health, never very strong. A cough set in at the beginning of the winter which caused her family some alarm. She grew thin to emaciation, lost her appetite, and fell into a state of general ill-health. Change of air and complete rest were prescribed by the medical men. She was accordingly taken from one sea-side place to another, and condemned to a régime of dulness and quiet. In a few months the system told favorably, and she was sufficiently recovered to return home.

But the monotony of an inactive life which was still enforced, after the mad-cap career she had been used to, wearied her unspeakably. For want of something better to do, she took to reading. Novels, of course. Fortunately for her, ten years ago young ladies had not taken to writing novels that honest men blush to review, and that too many young ladies do not blush to read. Mary did no worse than waste her time without active detriment to her mind. She read the new novels of the day, and, if she was not much the better, she was probably none the worse for it. But one day—a date to be written in gold—a friend, the same who gave me these particulars, made her a present of Father Faber's All for Jesus. The title promised very little entertainment; reluctantly enough, Mary turned over the pages and began to read. How long she read, I cannot tell. It might be true to say that she never left off. Others followed, all from the same pen, through uninterrupted days, and weeks, and months. She told me afterward that the burning words of those books—the first especially, and The Creator and the Creature—pursued her even in her dreams. She seemed to hear a voice crying after her unceasingly: "Arise, and follow!"

Suddenly, but irrevocably, the whole aspect of life was changed to her. She began to look back upon the near past, and wonder whether it was she herself who had so enjoyed those balls and gaieties, or whether she had not been mad, and imagined it, and was only now in her right mind. The most insuperable disgust succeeded to her love of worldly amusement. She cared for nothing but prayer and meditation, and the service of the poor and suffering. An ardent longing took possession of her to suffer for and with our Divine Master. Yielding to the impulse of her new-born fervor, she began to practise the most rigorous austerities, fasting much, sleeping little, and praying almost incessantly. This was done without the counsel or cognizance of any spiritual guide. She knew of no one to consult. Her life had been spiritually so neglected during the last two years that direction had had no part to play in it. There was nothing to direct. The current was setting in an opposite direction. The supernatural was out of sight.

Under cover of her health, which, though it was fairly recovered, still rendered quiet and great prudence desirable, Mary contrived to avoid all going out, and secretly laid down for herself a rule of life that she adhered to scrupulously.

But this could not go on long. As she grew in the ways of prayer, the spirit of God led her imperceptibly but inevitably into the sure and safe high-road of all pilgrims travelling toward the bourn of sanctity and aiming at a life of perfection.

The necessity of a spiritual director was gradually borne in upon her, as she said to me, while at the same time the difficulty of meeting with this treasure, whom St. Teresa bids us seek amongst ten thousand, grew more and more apparent and disheartening.

Her father, a man of the world and very little versed in the mysteries of the interior life, but a good practical Catholic nevertheless, saw the transformation that had taken place in his daughter, and knew not exactly whether to be glad or sorry. He acknowledged to her long after that the first recognition of it struck upon his heart like a death-knell. He felt it was the signal for a great sacrifice.

Mary opened her heart to him unreservedly, seeking more at his hands perhaps than any mere father in flesh and blood could give, asking him to point out to her the turning-point of the new road on which she had entered, and to help her to tread it. That it was to be a path of thorns in which she would need all the help that human love could gather to divine grace, she felt already convinced.

Her father, with the honesty of an upright heart, confessed himself inadequate to the solving of such a problem, and bravely proposed taking her to London to consult Father Faber.

Mary, in an ecstasy of gratitude, threw her arms round his neck, and declared it was what she had been longing for for months. Father Faber had been her guide so far; his written word had spoken to her like a voice from the holy mount, making all the dumb chords of her soul to vibrate. What would he not do for her if she could speak to him heart to heart, and hear the words of prayer-inspired wisdom from his own lips!

They set out in a few days for London; but they were not to get there. The promise that looked so near and so precious in its accomplishment was never to be fulfilled. They had no sooner reached Dublin than Mary fell ill. For some days she was in high fever; the medical men assured the panic-stricken father that there was no immediate cause for alarm; no remote cause even, as the case then stood; the patient was delicate, but her constitution was good, the nervous system sound, although shaken by the present attack, and apparently by previous mental anxiety. The attack itself they attributed to a chill which had fallen on the chest.

The event justified the opinion of the physicians. Mary recovered speedily. It was not judged advisable, however, to let her proceed to London. She relinquished the plan herself with a facility that surprised her father. He knew how ardently she had longed to see the spiritual guide who had already done so much for her, and he could not forbear asking why she took the disappointment so coolly.

"It's not a disappointment, father. God never disappoints. I don't know why, only I feel as if the longing were already satisfied; as if I were not to go so far to find what I'm looking for," she answered; and quietly set about preparing to go back home.

But they were still on the road of Damascus. On the way home, they rested at the house of a friend near the Monastery of Mount Melleray. I cannot be quite sure whether the monks were giving a retreat for seculars in the monastery, or whether it was being preached in the neighboring town. As well as I remember, it was the latter. Indeed, I doubt whether women would be admitted to assist at a retreat within the monastery, and, if not, this would be conclusive. But of one thing I am sure, the preacher was Father Paul, the superior of La Trappe. I don't know whether his eloquence, judged by the standard of human rhetoric, was anything very remarkable, but many witnesses go to prove on exhaustive evidence that it was of that kind whose property it is to save souls.

To Mary it came like a summons straight from heaven. She felt an imperative desire to speak to him at once in the confessional.

"I can give you no idea of the exquisite sense of peace and security that came over me the moment I knelt down at his feet," she said, in relating to me this stage of her vocation. "I felt certain that I had found the man who was to be my Father Faber."

And so she had.

All that passes between a director and his spiritual child is of so solemn and sacred a nature that, although many things which Mary confided to me concerning her intercourse with the saintly abbot of La Trappe might prove instructive and would certainly prove edifying to many interior souls, I do not feel justified in repeating them. If I were even not held back by this fear of indiscretion, I should shrink from relating these confidences, lest I should mar the beauty or convey a false interpretation of their meaning. While she was speaking, I understood her perfectly. While listening to the wonderful experiences of divine grace with what she had been favored, and which she recounted to me with the confiding simplicity of a child, her words were as clear and reflected her thoughts as luminously as a lake reflects the stars looking down into its crystal depths, making the mirror below a faithful repetition of the sky above. But when I tried to write down what she had said while it was quite fresh upon my mind, the effort baffled me. There was so little to write, and that little was so delicate, so mysteriously intangible, I seemed never to find the right word that had come so naturally, so expressively, to her. When she spoke of prayer especially, there was an eloquence, rising almost to sublimity, in her language that altogether defied my coarse translation, and seemed to dissolve like a rainbow under the process of dissection. The most elevated subjects she was at home with as if they had been her natural theme, the highest spirituality her natural element. The writings of St. Teresa and St. Bernard had grown familiar to her as her catechism, and she seemed to have caught the note of their inspired teaching with the mastery of sainthood. This was the more extraordinary to me that her intellect was by no means of a high order. Quite the contrary. Her taste, the whole bent of her nature, was the reverse of intellectual, and what intelligence she had was, as far as real culture went, almost unreclaimed. Her reading had been always of the most superficial, non-metaphysical kind; indeed, the aversion to what she called "hard reading" made her turn with perverse dislike from any book whose title threatened to be at all instructive. She had never taken a prize at school, partly because she was too lazy to try for it, but also because she had not brain enough to cope with the clever girls of her class. Mary was quite alive to her shortcomings in this line, indeed she exaggerated them, as she was prone to do most of her delinquencies, and always spoke of herself as "stupid." This she decidedly was not; but her intellectual powers were sufficiently below superiority to make her sudden awakening to the sublime language of mystical theology and her intuitive perception of its subtlest doctrines matter of great wonder to those who only measure man's progress in the science of the saints by the shallow gauge of human intellect.

"How do you contrive to understand those books, Mary?" I asked her once, after listening to her quoting St. Bernard à l'appui of some remarks on the Prayer of Union that carried me miles out of my depth.

"I don't know," she replied with her sweet simplicity, quite unconscious of revealing any secrets of infused science to my wondering ears. "I used not to understand them the least; but by degrees the meaning of the words began to dawn on me, and the more I read, the better I understood. When I come to anything very difficult, I stop, and pray, and meditate till the meaning comes to me. It is often a surprise to myself, considering how stupid I am in everything else," she continued, laughing, "that I should understand spiritual books even as well as I do."

Those who have studied the ways of God with his saints will not share her surprise. In our own day, the venerable Curé d'Ars is among the most marvellous proofs of the manner in which he pours out his wisdom on those who are accounted and who account themselves fools, not worthy to pass muster amongst men. But I am anticipating.

Her meeting with Father Paul was the first goal in her new career, and from the moment Mary had reached it she felt secure of being led safely to the end.

Those intervening stages were none the less agitated by many interior trials; doubts as to the sincerity of her vocation; heart-sinkings as to her courage in bearing on under the cross that she had taken up; misgivings, above all, as to the direction in which that cross lay. While her life-boat was getting ready, filling its sails, and making out of port for the shoreless sea of detachment and universal sacrifice, she sat shivering; her hand on the helm; the deep waters heaving beneath her; the wind blowing bleak and cold; the near waves dashing up their spray into her face, and the breakers further out roaring and howling like angry floods. There were rocks ahead, and all round under those foaming billows; sad havoc had they made of many a brave little boat that had put out to sea from that same port where she was still tossing—home, with its sheltering love and care; piety enough to save any well-intentioned soul; good example to give and to take; good works to do in plenty, and the body not overridden by austerities against nature; not starved to despondency; not exasperated by hunger, and cold, and endless vigils, and prayer as endless. It was a goodly port and safe, this home of hers. See how the deep throws up its prey on every side! Wrecks and spars, the shattered remnants of bold vessels, and the lifeless bodies of the rash crew are everywhere strewn over the waters. "Take heed!" they cry to her as she counts the records one by one. "This is an awful sea, and bold must be the heart, and stout and iron-clad the boat that tempts the stormy bosom. We came, and perished. Would that we had never left the port!"

Mary never argued with the storm. She would fall at the feet of Him who was "sleeping below," and wake him with the loud cry of trembling faith, "Help me, Master, or I perish!" and the storm subsided.

But when the wind and the waves were hushed, there rose up in the calm a voice sweet and low, but more ruthlessly terrible to her courage than the threatening fury of ten thousand storms. She was her father's oldest and darling child; she had a brother, too, and sisters, all tenderly loved, and cousins and friends only less dear; she was a joy and a comfort to many. Must she go from them? Must she leave all this love and all the loveliness of life for ever?

Mary's vocation, notwithstanding its strongly marked supernatural character, was not proof against these cruel alternations of enthusiastic courage, and desolate heart-sinkings, and bewildering doubts. Nay, they were no doubt a necessary part of its perfection. It was needful that she should pass through the dark watch of Gethsemani before setting out to climb the rugged hill of Calvary.

All this history of her interior life she told me viva voce when we met. In her letters, which were at this period very rare and always very uncommunicative, she said nothing whatever of these strifes and victories.

But her adversaries were not all within. A hard battle remained to be fought with her father. His opposition was active and relentless. He had at first tacitly acquiesced in her consecration to God in a religious life of some sort; but he believed, as every one else did, that to let her enter La Trappe would be to consign her to speedy and certain death; and when she announced to him that this was the order she had selected, and the one which drew her with the power of attraction, that she had struggled in vain to resist, he declared that nothing short of a written mandate from God would induce him to consent to such an act of suicide. In vain Mary pleaded that when God called a soul he provided all that was necessary to enable her to answer the call; that her health, formerly so delicate when she was leading a life of self-indulgence, was now completely restored; that she had never been so strong as since she had lived in almost continual abstinence (she did not eat meat on Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday); that the weakness of nature was no obstacle to the power of grace, and there are graces in the conventual life that seculars did not dream of, nor receive because they did not need them.

In answer to these plausible arguments, the incredulous father brought out the laws of nature, and reason and common sense, and the opinion of the medical men who had attended her in Dublin, and under whose care she had been more or less ever since. These men of natural science and human sympathies declared positively that it was neither more nor less than suicide to condemn herself to the rule of St. Bernard in the cloister, where want of animal food and warmth would infallibly kill her before the novitiate was out. They were prepared to risk their reputation on the issue of this certificate.

Mary's exhaustive answer to all this was that grace was always stronger than nature; that the supernatural element would overrule and sustain the human one. But she pleaded in vain. Her father was resolute. He even went so far as to insist on her returning to society and seeing more of the world before she was divorced from it irrevocably. This check was as severe as it was unexpected. Though her disgust to the vanities of her former life continued as strong as ever, while her longing for the perfect life grew every day more intense and more energizing, her humility made her tremble for her own weakness. Might not the strength that had borne her bravely so far break down under the attack of all her old tempters let loose on her at once? Her love of pleasure, that fatal enemy that now seemed dead, might it not rise up again with overmastering power, and, aided by the reaction prepared by her new life, seize her and hold her more successfully than ever? Yes, all this was only too possible. There was nothing for it but to brave her father, to defy his authority, and to save her soul in spite of him. She must run away from home.

Before, however, putting this wise determination into practice, it was necessary to consult Father Paul. His answer was what most of our readers will suspect:

"Obedience is your first duty. No blessing could come from such a violation of filial piety. Your father is a Christian. Do as he bids you; appeal to his love for your soul not to tax its strength unwisely; then trust your soul to God as a little child trusts to its mother. He sought you, and pursued you, and brought you home when you were flying from him. Is it likely he will forsake you now, when you are seeking after him with all your heart and making his will the one object of your life? Mistrust yourself, my child. Never mistrust God." Mary felt the wisdom of the advice, and submitted to it in a spirit of docility, of humble mistrust and brave trust, and made up her mind to go through the trial as an earnest of the sincerity of her desire to seek God's will, and accomplish it in whatever way he appointed.

She had so completely taken leave of the gay world for more than a year that her reappearance at a county ball caused quite a sensation.

Rumor and romance had put their heads together, and explained after their own fashion the motive of the change in her life and her total seclusion from society. Of course, it could only be some sentimental reason, disappointed affection, perhaps inadequate fortune or position on one side, and a hard-hearted father on the other, etc. Whispers of this idle gossip came to Mary's ears and amused her exceedingly. She could afford to laugh at it as there was not the smallest shadow of reality under the fiction.

Her father, whose parental weakness sheltered itself behind the doctors and common sense, did not exact undue sacrifices from her. He allowed her to continue her ascetic rule of life unmolested, to abstain from meat as usual, to go assiduously amongst the poor, and to devote as much time as she liked to prayer. There were two Masses daily in the village church, one at half-past six, another at half-past seven. He made a difficulty at first about her assisting at them. The church was nearly half an hour's walk from the house, and the cold morning or night air, as it really was, was likely to try her severely. But after a certain amount of arguing and coaxing Mary carried her point, and every morning long before daybreak sallied forth to the village. Her nurse, who was very pious and passionately attached to her, went with her. Not without hesitating, though. Every day as regularly as they set out Malone entered a protest.

"It's not natural, Miss Mary, to be gadding out by candle-light in this fashion, walking about the fields like a pair of ghosts. Indeed, darlin', it isn't."

The nurse was right. It certainly was not natural, and, if Mary had been so minded, she might have replied that it was not meant to be; it was supernatural. She contented herself, however, by deprecating the good soul's reproof and proposing to say the rosary, a proposal to which Malone invariably assented. So, waking up the larks with their matin prayer, the two would walk on briskly to church.

Once set an Irish nurse to pray, and she'll keep pace with any saint in the calendar. Malone was not behind with the best. The devout old soul, never loath to begin, when once on her knees and fairly wound up in devotion, would go on for ever, and, when the two Masses were over and it was time to go, Mary had generally to break her off in the full tide of a litany that Malone went on muttering all the way out of church and sometimes finished on the road home.

But if she was ready to help Mary in her praying feats, she highly disapproved of the fasting ones, as well as of the short rest that her young mistress imposed on herself. Mary confessed to me that sleep was at this period her greatest difficulty. She was by nature a great sleeper, and there was a time when early rising, even comparatively early, seemed to her the very climax of heroic mortification. By degrees she brought herself to rise at a given hour, which gradually, with the help of her angel guardian and a strong resolve, she advanced to five o'clock.

During this time of probation, her father took her constantly into society, to archery meetings, and regattas, and concerts, and balls, as the season went on. Mary did her part bravely and cheerfully. Sometimes a panic seized her that her old spirit of worldliness was coming back—coming back with seven devils to take his citadel by storm and hold it more firmly than ever. But she had only to fix her eyes steadily on the faithful beacon of the Light-house out at sea, and bend her ear to the Life-bell chiming its Sursum Corda far above the moaning of the waves and winds, and her foolish fears gave way.

No one who saw her so bright and gracious, so gracefully pleased with everything and everybody, suspected the war that was agitating her spirit within. Her father wished her to take part in the dancing, otherwise he said her presence in the midst of it would be considered compulsory and her abstention be construed into censure or gloom. Mary acquiesced with regard to the square dances, but resolutely declined to waltz. Her father, satisfied with the concession, did not coerce her further.

So things went on for about a year. Father Paul meantime had had his share in the probationary action. He knew that his patient's health was not strong, and taking into due account her father's vehement and up to a certain point just representations on the physical impossibility of her bearing the rule of St. Bernard, he endeavored to attract her toward an active order, and used all his influence to induce her to try at any rate a less austere one before entering La Trappe. Animated by the purest and most ardent love for the soul whose precious destinies were placed under his guidance, he left nothing undone to prevent the possibility of mistake or ultimate regret in her choice. He urged her to go and see various other convents and make acquaintance with their mode of life. Seeing her great reluctance to do this, he had recourse to stratagem in order to compel her unconsciously to examine into the spirit and rule of several monastic houses that he held in high esteem. One in particular, a community of Benedictines, I think it was, he thought likely to prove attractive to her as uniting a great deal of prayer with active duties toward the poor, teaching, etc., and at the same time of less crucifying discipline than that of Citeaux. He gave her a commission for the superioress, with many excuses for troubling her, and begging that she would not undertake it if it interfered with any arrangement of her own or her father's just then.

Mary, never suspecting the trap that was laid for her, made a point of setting out to the convent at once. The superioress, previously enlightened by Father Paul, received her with more than kindness, and, after discussing the imaginary subject of the visit, invited her to visit the chapel, then the house, and finally, drawing her into confidential discourse, explained all about its spirit and manner of life.

Mary, in relating this circumstance to me, said that, though the superioress was one of the most attractive persons she ever met, and the convent beautiful in its appointments, rather than enter it she would have preferred spending the rest of her days in the dangers of the most worldly life. Everything but La Trappe was unutterably antagonistic to her. Yet, with the exception of Mount Melleray she had never seen even the outside walls of a Cistercian convent, and the fact of there not being one for women in Ireland added one obstacle more in the way of her entering La Trappe.

When Father Paul heard the result of this last ruse, he confessed the truth to her. Noways discouraged, nevertheless he persisted in saying that she was much better fitted for a life of mixed activity and contemplation than for a purely contemplative one, and he forbade her for a time to let her mind dwell on the latter as her ultimate vocation, to read any books that treated of it, even to pray specially that she might be led to it. To all these despotic commands Mary yielded a prompt, unquestioning obedience. She was with God like a child with a schoolmaster. Whatever lesson he set her, she set about learning it. Easy or difficult, pleasant or unpleasant, it was all one to her cheerful good-will. Why do we not all do like her? We are all children at school, but, instead of putting our minds to getting our lesson by heart, we spend the study-hour chafing at the hard words, dog-earing our book, and irreverently grumbling at the master who has set us the task. Sometimes we think in our conceit that it is too easy, that we should do better something difficult. When the bell rings, we go up without knowing a word of it, and stand sulky and disrespectful before the desk. We are chided, and turn back, and warned to do better to-morrow. And so we go on from year to year, from childhood to youth, from youth to age, never learning our lesson properly, but dodging, and missing, and beginning over and over again at the same point. Some of us go on being dunces to the end of our lives, when school breaks up, and we are called for and taken home—to the home where there are many mansions, but none assuredly for the drones who have spent their school-days in idleness and mutiny.

To Father Paul, the childlike submission and humility with which Mary met every effort to thwart her vocation were no doubt more conclusive proof of its solidity than the most marked supernatural favors would have been.

At last her gentle perseverance was rewarded, grace triumphed over her father's heart, and he expressed his willingness to give her up to God.

In the summer of 1861, we went to stay at Versailles, and it was there that I received from Mary the first definite announcement of her vocation. She wrote to me saying that, after long deliberation and much prayer and wise direction, she had decided on entering a convent of the Cistercian order. As there was no branch of it in Ireland, she was to come to France, and she begged me to make inquiries as to where the novitiate was, and to let her know with as little delay as possible. I will not dwell upon my own feelings on reading this letter. I had expected some such result, though, knowing the state of her health, it had not occurred to me she could have joined, however she might have wished it, so severe an order as that of the founder of Citeaux.

I had not the least idea where the novitiate in France was; and, as the few persons whom I was able to question at once on the subject seemed to know no more about it than I did myself, the hope flashed across my mind that there might not be a convent of Trappistines at all in France. But this was not of long duration.

We had on our arrival at Versailles made the acquaintance of a young girl whom I shall call Agnes. My mother was already acquainted with her parents and other members of the family; but Agnes had either been at school or absent visiting relations, so from one cause or another we had never met till now. She was seventeen years of age, a fair, fragile-looking girl, who reminded most people of Schaeffer's Marguerite.

Agnes had a younger sister at the Convent of La Sainte Enfance, not far from her father's residence, and she asked me one day to come and see this sister and a nun that she was very fond of. I went, and, being full of the thought of my sweet friend in Ireland, I immediately opened the subject of Citeaux with the pretty talkative little nun who came to the parlor with Agnes's sister.

"What a singular chance!" she exclaimed, when I had told as much of my story as was necessary. "Why, we have at this moment a community of Cistercian nuns in the house here! Their monastery is being repaired, and in the meantime we have permission from the bishop to harbor them. See," she went on, pointing to a row of windows whose closed Persiennes were visible at an angle from where we sat, "that is where our mother has lodged them. You can speak to the prioress, if you like, but of course you cannot see her."

I was more struck by the strange coincidence than overjoyed at being so near the solution of my difficulty. I could not, however, but take advantage of the opportunity. Sister Madeleine, which was the little nun's name, ran off to ask "our mother's" permission for me to speak with their Cistercian sister, and in a few minutes returned with an affirmative.

I was led to the door of the community-room, and, through a little extempore grating cut through the panel and veiled on the inside, I held converse with the mother abbess.

A few words assured me that Sister Madeleine had been mistaken in supposing her guests to be the daughters of St. Bernard. They were Poor Clares—an order more rigorous, even, than the Trappistines; bare feet, except when standing on a stone pavement or in the open air, when the rule is to slip the feet into wooden sandals, are added to the fasting and perpetual silence of Citeaux. Of this latter the abbess could tell me nothing—nothing, at least, of its actual existence and branches in France, though she broke out into impulsive and loving praise of its spirit and its saintly founder, and the rich harvest of souls he and his children had reaped for our Lord.

Here, then, was another respite. It really seemed probable that, if, in a quarter so likely to be well informed on the point, there was no account to be had of a Trappistine convent, there could not be one in existence, and Mary, from sheer inability to enter La Trappe, might be driven to choose some less terrible rule.

Mary meantime had set other inquirers on the track of St. Bernard, and soon learned that the novitiate was at Lyons. The name of the monastery is Notre Dame de toute Consolation.

After some preliminary correspondence with the abbess, the day was fixed for her to leave Ireland and set out to her land of promise.

She came, of course, through Paris. It was three years since we had met. I found her greatly altered; her beauty not gone, but changed. She looked, however, in much better health than I had ever seen her. Her spirits were gone, but there had come in their place a serenity that radiated from her like sunshine. We went out together to do some commissions of hers and the better to escape interruption, for this was in all human probability to be our last meeting on earth, and we had much to say to each other.

We drove first to Notre Dame des Victoires, where, at her constantly recurring desire, I had been in the habit of putting her name down for the prayers of the confraternity, and we knelt once again side by side before the altar of our Blessed Lady.

From this we went to the Sacré Cœur, where Mary was anxious to see some of her old mistresses and ask their prayers. Perseverance in her vocation, and the accomplishment of God's will in her and by her, were the graces she was never weary asking for herself, and imploring others to ask for her. Her greediness for prayers was only equalled by her intense faith in their efficacy. She could not resist catering for them, and used to laugh herself at her own importunity on this point.

The sister who tended the gate gave us a cordial greeting; but, when she heard that Mary was on her way to La Trappe, her surprise was almost ludicrous. If her former pupil had said she was going to be a Mohammedan, it could not have called up more blank amazement than was depicted in the good sister's face on hearing her say that she was going to be a Trappistine.

The mistress of schools and another nun, who had been very kind to her during her short stay at the Sacred Heart, came to the parlor. I was not present at the interview, but Mary told me they were quite as much amazed as the sœur portière.

"It only shows what a character I left behind me," she said, laughing heartily as we walked arm in arm. "My turning out good for anything but mischief is a fact so miraculous that my best friends can hardly believe in it!"

It was during this long afternoon that she told me all the details of her vocation which I have already narrated. She seemed transcendently happy, and so lifted by grace above all the falterings of nature as to be quite unconscious that she was about to make any sacrifice. She was tenderly attached to her family, but the pangs of separation from them were momentarily suspended. Her soul had grown strong in detachment. It had grown to the hunger of divine love. Like the Israelites, she had gone out into the desert where the manna fell, and she had fed upon it till all other bread was tasteless to her.

When I expressed surprise at seeing her so completely lifted above human affections, and observed that it would save her so much anguish, she answered quickly, with a sudden look of pain:

"Oh! no it will save me none of the suffering. That will all come later, when the sacrifice is made. But I always seem to have supernatural strength given me as long as it remains to be done. I took leave of Father Paul and my dear old nurse, and all the friends that flocked to say good-by, almost without a tear. I felt it so little that I was disgusted with myself for being so heartless while they were all so tender and distressed; but when it was all over, and the carriage had driven out on the road, I thought my heart would burst. I didn't dare look back at the house, lest I should cry out to them to take me home. And I know this is how it will be to-morrow."

"And have you thought of the possibility of having to come home after all?" I asked.

"Yes, I have a great deal of it. It is possible my health may fail, or that I may have mistaken the will of God altogether in entering La Trappe," she answered, with a coolness that astonished me.

"What a trial that would be!" I exclaimed. "What a humiliation to come out, after making such a stand about entering!"

She laughed quite merrily.

"Humiliation! And what if it were! I don't care a straw if I go into ten convents, and come out of them one after another, so long as I find out the right one in the end. What does anything signify but finding out God's will!"

There was no mistaking the perfect sincerity of her words. It was as clear as sunlight—the one thing necessary, the one thing she cared one straw about, was finding out the will of God. Human respect or any petty human motive had simply gone beyond the range of her apprehension.

"And the silence, Mary?" I said, smiling, as the memory of her old school-day troubles came back on me. "How will you ever keep it? To me it would be the most appalling part of the discipline of La Trappe."

"Well, is it not odd?" she replied. "It is so little appalling to me that I quite long for it. Sometimes I keep repeating the words, 'Perpetual silence!' over and over to myself, as if they were a melody. It was it, I think, that decided me for La Trappe instead of Carmel, where the rule allows them to speak during recreation. It seems to me the hush of tongues must be such a help to union with God. Our tongues are so apt to scare away his presence from our souls."

We came home to dinner. While we were alone in the drawing-room, she asked me to play something to her. She had been passionately fond of the harp, and stood by me listening with evident pleasure, and when I was done began to draw out the chords with her finger.

"Does it not cost you the least little pang to give it up for ever—never to hear a note of music for the rest of your life, Mary?" I said.

"No, not now. I felt it in the beginning; but the only music that has a charm for me now is silence."

We parted, never to meet again, till we meet at the judgment-seat.

On her arrival at Lyons, the fatigue and emotions of the journey told on her. An agonizing pain in the spine to which she was subject after any undue exertion obliged her to remain at the hotel, lying down on the sofa nearly all day.

The following morning, her father took her to the monastery. Like Abraham, he conducted his child to the mount of sacrifice, and with his own hand laid the victim on the altar; but no angel came to snatch away the sacrificial knife and substitute a meaner offering for the holocaust. He left her at the inner gate of La Trappe.

She wrote to me some weeks after her entrance.

"I was less brave at parting with my beloved ones than I ought to have been," she said; "but, on account of the pain that kept me lying down in the midst of them nearly all the previous day, I had not been able to pray as much as usual, and so I had not got up strength enough for the trial-time. I seemed to have let go my hold on our Lord a little and to be leaning on them for courage; but, when I had been a few hours before the Blessed Sacrament, the pain calmed down, and I began to realize how happy I was. I am in great hopes that I have found the will of God."

One trifling incident which gave innocent delight to Mary I must not omit to mention.

She was asked on entering what name she wished to bear in religion, and on her replying that she had not thought of one and would rather the prioress chose for her, "Then we shall call you Mary Benedicta," said the mother. "The saint has no name-sake amongst us at present."

The only thing that disappointed her in the new life was the mildness of the rule and the short time it allotted for prayer!

It may interest my readers and help them to estimate the spirit of the novice to hear some details of the rule that struck her as too mild.

The Trappistines rise at 2 A.M. winter and summer, and proceed to choir, chanting the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. Mass, meditation, the recital of the divine office, and household work, distributed to each according to her strength and aptitude and to the wants of the community, fill up the time till breakfast, which is at 8. The rule relents in favor of those who are unable to bear the long early fast, and they are allowed a small portion of dry bread some hours sooner. I think the novices as a rule are included in this dispensation. The second meal is at 2. The food is frugal but wholesome, good bread, vegetables, fish occasionally, and good, pure wine. Fire is an unknown luxury, except in the kitchen. The silence is perpetual, but the novices are allowed perfect freedom of converse with their mistress, and the professed nuns with the abbess. They converse occasionally during the day amongst each other by signs. They take open-air exercise, and perform manual labor out-of-doors, digging, etc. In-doors, they are constantly employed in embroidering and mounting vestments. Some of the most elaborately wrought benediction-veils, copes, chasubles, etc., used in the large churches throughout France, are worked by the Trappistines of Lyons.

They retire to rest at 8. Their clothing is of coarse wool, inside and outside.

Mary described the material life of La Trappe as in every sense delightful; the digging, pealing potatoes, and so forth, as most recreative and not at all fatiguing. After her first Lent, she wrote me that it had passed so quickly, she "hardly knew it had begun when Easter came."

Her only complaint was that it had been too easy, that the austerities, "which were at all times very mild," had not been more increased during the penitential season.

My third letter was on her receiving the holy habit.

"I wish you could see me in it," she said. "I felt rather odd at first, but I soon grew accustomed to it, and now it is so light and pleasant. I am so happy in my vocation I cannot help being almost sure that I have found the will of God."

This was the burden of her song for evermore: to find the will of God! And so in prayer and expectation she kept her watch upon the tower, her hands uplifted, her ears and her eyes straining night and day for every sign and symbol of that blessed manifestation. She kept her watch, faithful, ardent, never weary of watching, rising higher and higher in love, sinking lower and lower in humility. She had set her soul like a ladder against the sky, and the angels were for ever passing up and down the rungs, carrying up the incense of the prayer, which, as soon as it reached the throne of the Lamb, dissolved in graces, and sent the angels flying down earthward again.

The world went on; the wheel went round; pleasure and folly and sin kept up their whirl with unabating force. All things were the same as when Mary Benedicta, hearkening to the bell from the sanctuary, turned her back upon the vain delusion, and gave up the gauds of time for the imperishable treasures of eternity. Nothing was changed. Was it so indeed? To our eyes it was. We could not see what changes were to come of it. We could not see the work her sacrifice was doing, nor measure the magnitude of the glory it was bringing to God. Poor fools! it is always so with us. We see with the blind eyes of our body the things that are of the body. What do we see of the travail of humanity in God's creation? The darkness and the pain. Little else. We see a wicked man or a miserable man, and we are filled with horror or with pity. We think the world irretrievably darkened and saddened by the sin and the misery that we see, forgetting the counterpart that we do not see—the sanctity and the beauty born of repentance and compassion. We see the bad publican flaunting his evil ways in the face of heaven, brawling in the streets and the market-place; we do not see the good publican who goes up to the temple striking his breast, and standing afar off, and sobbing out the prayer that justifies. We forget that fifty such climbing up to heaven make less noise than one sinner tearing down to hell. So with pain. When sorrow crushes a man, turning his heart bitter and his wine sour, we find it hard to believe that so much gall can yield any honey, so much dark let in any light. We cannot see—oh! how it would startle us if we did—how many acts of kindness, how many thoughts and deeds of love, are evoked by the sight of his distress. They may not be addressed to him, and he may never know of them, though he has called them into life; they may all be spent upon other men, strangers perhaps, to whom he has brought comfort because of the kindliness his sorrow had stirred in many hearts. Some miser has been touched in hearing the tale of his distress, and straightway opened his purse to help the Lazarus at his own door. A selfish woman of the world has foregone some bauble of vanity and given the price to a charity to silence the twinge that pursued her after witnessing his patient courage in adversity. There is no end to the small change that one golden coin of love, one act of heroic faith, one chastened attitude of Christian sorrow, will send current through the world. It would be easier to number the stars than to count it all up. But the bright little silver pieces pass through our fingers unnoticed. We do not watch for them, neither do we hear them chime and ring as they drop all round us. We do not listen for them. We listen rather to the wailing and the hissing, hearkening not at all to the rustle of angels' wings floating above the din, nor to the sound of their crystal tears falling through the brine of human woe and lamentation.

One more virgin heart is given up to the Crucified—one more victory won over nature and the kingdom of this world. One more life is being lived away to God in the silence of the sanctuary. Who heeds it? Who sees the great things that are coming of it?—the graces obtained, the blessings granted, the temptations conquered, the miracle of compassion won for some life-long sinner, at whose death-bed, cut off from priest or sacrament, the midnight watcher before the tabernacle has been wrestling in spirit, miles away, with mountains and seas between them. Only when the seven seals are broken of the Book in which the secrets of many hearts are written shall these things be made manifest, and the wonders of sacrifice revealed.

Mary Benedicta was drawing to the close of her novitiate. So far her health had stood the test bravely. She had passed the winters without a cough, a thing that had not happened to her for years. The pain in her spine that had constantly annoyed her at home had entirely disappeared.

Every day convinced her more thoroughly that she had found her true vocation, and that she was "doing the will of God." Her profession was fixed for the month of December. She wrote to me a few lines, telling me of her approaching happiness, and begging me to get all the prayers I could for her. Her joy seemed too great for words. It was, indeed, the joy that passes human understanding. I did not hear from her again, nor of her, till one evening I received a letter from Ireland announcing to me her death.

Till within a few days of the date fixed for her vows, she had been to all appearance in perfect health. She followed the rule in its unmitigated rigor, never asking nor seemingly needing any dispensation. She attended choir during the seven hours' prayer, mental and vocal, every day. There were no premonitory symptoms of any kind to herald in the messenger that was at hand. Quite suddenly, one morning, at the first matins, she fainted away at her place in the choir. They carried her to the infirmary, and laid her on a bed. She recovered consciousness after a short time, but on attempting to rise fell back exhausted. The infirmarian, in great alarm, asked if she was suffering much. Mary smiled and shook her head. Presently she whispered a few words to the abbess, who had accompanied her from the choir, and never left her side for a moment. It was to ask that she might be allowed to pronounce her vows at once.

Was this, then, the summons? Yes. She was called for to go home. The joy-bells of heaven rang out a merry peal. The golden gates turned slowly on their hinges. The Bridegroom stood knocking at the door.

A messenger was dispatched in haste to the archbishop for permission to solemnize her profession at once. Monseigneur Bonald granted it, and sent at the same time a special apostolic benediction to the dying child of St. Bernard.

That afternoon Mary pronounced her vows in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and surrounded by the sisterhood, weeping and rejoicing.

An hour later, summoning her remaining strength for a last act of filial tenderness, she dictated a few lines of loving farewell to her father. Then she was silent, calm, and rapt in prayer. Her eyes never left the crucifix. The day past and the night. She was still waiting. At daybreak the Bridegroom entered, and she went home with him.

---

THE LORD CHANCELLORS OF IRELAND[30]

The most indefatigable student of the history of Ireland is, at some time or another, sure to become wearied of, if not positively disgusted at, the interminable series of foreign and domestic wars, base treachery, and wholesale massacre which unfortunately stain the annals of that unhappy country for nearly one thousand years; and were it not that the study of profane history is a duty imposed upon us not only as an essential part of our education, but as a source rich in the philosophy of human nature, there are few, we believe, even among the most enthusiastic lovers of their race or the most industrious of book-worms, who would patiently peruse the long and dreary record of persistent oppression and unfaltering but unavailing resistance.

The few centuries of pagan greatness preceding the arrival of St. Patrick, seen through the dim mist of antiquity, appear to have been periods of comparative national prosperity; and the earlier ages of Christianity in the island were not only in themselves resplendent with the effulgence of piety and learning which enshrouded the land and illumined far and near the then eclipsed nations of Europe, but were doubly brilliant by contrast with the darkness that subsequently followed the repeated incursions of the merciless northern Vikings, to whom war was a trade, and murder and rapine the highest of human pursuits.

The ultimate defeat of those barbarians in the early part of the eleventh century brought little or no cessation of misery to the afflicted people; for, with the death of the Conqueror, the illustrious King Brian, in the moment of victory, no man of sufficient statesmanship or military ability appeared who was capable of uniting the disorganized people under a general system of government, or of compelling the obedience of the disaffected and semi-independent chiefs. The evils of the preceding wars were numerous and grievous. The husbandman was impoverished, commerce had fled the sea-ports before the dreaded standard of the carrion Raven, learning had forsaken her wonted abodes for other climes and more peaceful scenes, and even the religious establishments which had escaped the destroyer no longer harbored those throngs of holy men and women formerly the glory and benefactors of the island. It was in this disintegrated and demoralized condition that the enterprising Anglo-Normans of the following century found the once warlike and learned Celtic people; and as the new-comers were hungry for land and not overscrupulous as to how it was to be obtained, the possession of the soil on one side, and its desperate but unorganized defence on the other, gave rise to those desultory conflicts, cruel reprisals, and horrible butcheries which only ended, after nearly five hundred years of strife, in the almost utter extirpation of the original owners.

Had the Norman invasion ended with Strongbow and Henry II., or had it been more general and successful, as in England, the evil would have been limited; but as every decade poured into Ireland its hordes of ambitious, subtle, and landless adventurers, who looked upon Ireland as the most fitting place to carve their way to fame and fortune, new wars of extermination were fomented, and the wounds that afflicted the country were kept constantly open. To facilitate the designs of the new-comers, the mass of the people were outlawed, and the punishment for killing a native, when inflicted, which was seldom, was a small pecuniary fine. The efforts of the "Reformers" to convert by force or fraud the ancient race and the bulk of the descendants of the original Anglo-Normans, who vied with each other in their attachment to the church, perpetuated even in a worse form the civil strife which had so long existed between the races, and terminated, at the surrender of Limerick, in the complete prostration of the nation. But it was only for a while. The extraordinary revival of the faith in Ireland, and its substantial triumphs in recent years, almost make us forget and forgive the persecutions of "the penal days," and not the least of these auspicious results is the appearance of the noble book before us, written by a distinguished gentleman of the legal profession of the ancient race and religion.

In his voluminous work, Mr. O'Flanagan, avoiding all matter foreign to his subject, and touching as lightly on wars and confiscations as possible, while relating succinctly and carefully the lives of the numerous lord chancellors of Ireland, necessarily gives us a history of English policy and legislation in that country in an entirely new form, and fills up in its historical and legal records a hiatus long recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. In ordinary histories, we see broadly depicted the effects of foreign invasion and domestic broils: in the Lives, we are permitted to have a view of the most secret workings of the viceregal government and of the managers of the so-called Irish Parliament; of the causes which governed British statesmen in their treatment of the sister kingdom, and the motive of every step taken by the dominant faction of the Pale, supported by the wealth and power of a great nation, to subdue a weak neighboring people, who, though few in numbers, isolated and disorganized, possessed a high degree of civilization and a vitality that rose superior to all defeat. The book has also this advantage, that, while it supplies the links that bind causes with effects and develops in a critical spirit the true philosophy of history, it neither shocks our sensibilities uselessly with the perpetual narration of mental and physical suffering, nor tires us with vain speculations on what might have been had circumstances been different. The author is content to accept the inevitable, and deals exclusively with the subject in hand.

The partial success of Strongbow in conjunction with the Leinster troops induced Henry II. to project a visit to Ireland, partly from a fear that his ambitious subject might be induced by the allurements of his newly acquired greatness to forget his pledge of fealty and allegiance, and partly in the hope that his presence with an armed retinue would so overawe the native princes that their entire submission would follow as a matter of course. He therefore landed at Waterford, in 1172, and after visiting Lismore, where a provincial synod was being held, entered Dublin on the 11th of November of that year. But though he remained in that city during the greater part of the winter, surrounded by all the pomp of mediæval royalty, his blandishments were only partly successful in winning any of the prominent chieftains to acknowledge his assumed title of Lord of Ireland. He rested long enough, however, to establish a form of provincial government for the guidance and protection of the Anglo-Normans, and such of the Irish of Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Wexford, and of the surrounding counties as acknowledged his jurisdiction, and these became what was long afterwards known as the English Pale. The head of this system was the personal representative of the monarch, appointed and removed at his pleasure, and called at various times lord deputy, viceroy, chief governor, and lord-lieutenant, and in case of his absence or death a temporary successor was to be chosen by the principal nobles of the Pale, until his return or the appointment of his successor by the king. In the year 1219, during the reign of Henry III., the laws of England were extended to the Anglo-Norman colony, and a chancellor in the person of John de Worchely was appointed to assist the viceroy in the administration of the laws and public affairs.

The office of chancellor, or, as he was afterwards styled, lord high chancellor, was known to the Romans, and many of its peculiar duties and powers are directly derived from the civil law. In England, its establishment may be considered as contemporary with the Norman conquest, and from the first it assumed the highest importance in the state. "The office of chancellor or lord keeper," says Blackstone, "is created by the mere delivery of the great seal into his custody, whereby he becomes the first officer in the kingdom and takes precedence of every temporal peer. He is a privy counsellor by virtue of his office, and, according to Lord Ellismore, prolocutor of the House of Lords by prescription. To him belongs the appointment of all the justices of the peace throughout the kingdom. Being formerly, usually, an ecclesiastic presiding over the king's chapel, he became keeper of his conscience, visitor in his right of all hospitals and colleges of royal foundation, and patron of all his livings under the annual value of twenty pounds, etc. All this exclusive of his judicial capacity in the Court of Chancery, wherein, as in the Exchequer, is a common law court and a court of equity."[31] In Ireland, while the chancellor exercised the same functions within a more contracted sphere, his political power and duties were more directly and frequently felt. The viceroys, particularly those of the early periods, were generally soldiers expressly deputed to hold the conquests already gained, and to enlarge by force of arms the possessions of the Anglo-Norman adventurers. They were little skilled in the arts of government, and, from their short terms and frequent removals, knew little of and cared less for the people they were temporarily sent to govern.[32] The chancellors, on the contrary, were the reverse, being from the first up to the reign of Henry VIII., with a few exceptions, ecclesiastics, generally men well versed in law and letters, and having been usually at an early age selected from the inferior ranks of the English clergy and promoted to the highest positions in the church in Ireland, as a preliminary step to their appointment to the most important judicial and legislative office in the colony, they had every inducement to become familiar with its affairs and with the dispositions and influence of the people among whom their lot in life was cast. "Learned men were those chancellors," says O'Flanagan, "for the most part prelates of highly cultivated minds, attached to the land of their birth, while exercising important sway over the destinies of Ireland."

For the first two hundred years after the creation of the office of chancellor, very little can be gleaned by the author of the Lives, except the mere names, date of patents, and a few dry facts usually connected with well-known historical events. The destruction by fire of St. Mary's Abbey in Dublin, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and of the Castle of Trim, in both of which valuable public records were kept, accounts to some extent for this paucity of materials, while, as he says, "others were carried out of the country, and are met with in the State Paper Office, the Rolls Chapel, Record Office, and British Museum, in London; others are at Oxford. Several cities on the Continent possess valuable Irish documents, while many are stored in private houses, which the recent commission will no doubt render available"—a sad commentary upon the way in which everything relating to the history of the country has been neglected by that government which so frequently parades its paternal inclinations.

The want of judicial business during this period was amply compensated for by repeated but vain efforts to reconcile the different factions into which the colonists of the Pale were divided, and to prevent the followers of the rival houses of Ormond and Kildare from open warfare whenever the slightest provocation was offered by either side. While the power of England was expended in foreign wars or in the internecine struggles of the Roses, her grasp on the dominion of Ireland was becoming every day more relaxed, and it was only by the judicious pitting of one party against another, by alternate threats and bribes, that even the semblance of authority could be maintained at all times. Thus, in 1355, Edward III., writing to the Earl of Kildare, uses the following emphatic words:

"Although you know of these invasions, destructions, or dangers, and have been often urged to defend these marches jointly with others, you have neither sped thither nor sent that force of men which you were strongly bound to have done for the honor of an earl, and for the safety of those lordships, castles, lands, and tenements, which, given and granted to your grandfather by our grandfather, have thus descended to you. Since you neither endeavor to prevent the perils, ruin, and destruction threatening these parts, in consequence of your neglect, nor attend to the orders of ourselves or our council, we shall no longer be trifled with," etc.

This was strong language, but fully justified by the unsettled condition of affairs in and outside the Pale. Chancellor de Wickford, Archbishop of Dublin, who was appointed in 1375, found that his sacred calling and official dignity were no protection to him even in the vicinity of the capital, and was therefore allowed a guard of six men-at-arms and twelve archers, while the lord treasurer had the same number. Nor was this precaution taken against the Irish enemy alone, for we find that Thomas de Burel, Prior of Kilmainham, when chancellor, while holding a parley with De Bermingham at Kildare, was, with his attendant lords, taken prisoner. The lay noblemen were ransomed, but the prior was kept a prisoner only to be exchanged for one of the De Berminghams then confined in Dublin Castle. This family seem to have held the judicial officers somewhat in contempt, for we read at another time that Adam Veldom, Chief Chancery Clerk, was captured by them and the O'Connors, and obliged to pay ten pounds in silver for his release. When John Cotton, Dean of St. Patrick's, was appointed chancellor in 1379, and commenced his tour, accompanied by the viceroy, from Dublin to Cork, he was allowed for his personal retinue, independent of his servants and clerks, not very formidable opponents, it is to be presumed, "four men-at-arms armed at all points, and eight mounted archers," a circumstance which shows that the Irish and many of the Anglo-Irish of the country had very little reverence for the person of even an English chancellor.

In 1398, Dr. Thomas Cranley was sent over to Dublin as its archbishop and chancellor of the colony, and from his high position and known ability it was expected that he would not only remedy the disorders of the Pale, but bring back the great lords to a sense of their duty to the king, and devise measures for the collection of his revenues, which these noblemen did not seem inclined to pay with the alacrity befitting obedient subjects. After several years of fruitless endeavors to effect these objects, he was obliged to write to King Henry IV. for funds to support his son, who was then acting as viceroy. "With heavy hearts," says the chancellor, speaking for the privy council, "we testify anew to your highness that our lord, your son, is so destitute of money that he has not a penny in the world, nor can borrow a single penny, because all his jewels and his plate that he can spare of those that he must of necessity have, are pledged and be in pawn. All his soldiers have departed from him, and the people of his household are on the point of leaving him." And he further significantly adds, "For the more full declaring of these matters to your highness, three or two of us should have come to your high presence, but such is the danger on this side that not one of us dare depart from the person of our lord." This was indeed a sad condition for the son of the reigning monarch and his council to find themselves in, while the Talbots, Butlers, and Fitzgeralds were feasting on the fat of the land surrounded by thousands of their well-paid followers. Again, in 1435, when Archbishop Talbot was chancellor, the council through that prelate addressed a memorial to the king, in which the following remarkable passage occurs:

"First, that it please our sovereign lord graciously to consider how this land of Ireland is well-nigh destroyed and inhabited with his enemies and rebels, insomuch that there is not left in the northern parts of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, that join together out of subjection of the said enemies and rebels, scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, as a man may surely ride or go, in the said counties, to answer to the king's writs and to his commandments."

This extraordinary admission, made two hundred and sixty-six years after the landing of the Normans, would be almost incredible did it rest on less weighty authority. This was the time for the Irish people to have regained their freedom, and, had they had half as much of the spirit of nationality and organization as they possessed of valor and endurance, a decisive blow might easily have been struck that would have for ever ended the English power in their island. But the propitious moment was allowed to pass, and dearly did they pay in after-times for their supineness and folly.

The dissensions were not confined to the natives. The quarrels and bickerings of the nobles and officials of the Pale seemed to invite destruction. Rival parliaments were held; viceroys who were attached by policy or affection to the houses of York and Lancaster contended in the Castle of Dublin for the legitimacy of their respective factions; and even the Lord Chancellor Sherwood, Bishop of Meath, and the members of the privy council, whose office and duty it was to preserve the peace between all parties, were found the most turbulent; "the chancellor and chief-justice of the king's bench requiring the interposition of the king to keep them quiet, while the Irish so pressed upon the narrow limits of the English settlements that the statute requiring cities and boroughs to be represented by inhabitants of the same was obliged to be repealed upon the express ground that representatives could not be expected to encounter, on their journeys to parliament, the great perils incident from the king's Irish enemies and English rebels, for it is openly known how great and frequent mischiefs have been done on the ways both in the south, north, east, and west parts, by reason whereof they may not send proctors, knights, nor burgesses."[33] Such was the condition of Ireland in A.D. 1480, just three centuries after the advent of Henry II. to her shores.

One of the principal duties of the Irish lord chancellors, even to the very moment of its extinction, was the management of the Irish parliament. The body that for so many centuries bore that pretentious title, but which never spoke the voice of even a respectable minority of the people, is said to have owed its origin to the second Henry, though according to Whiteside, who follows the authority of Sir John Davies, no parliament was held in the country for one hundred and forty years after that king's visit.[34] Except in an antiquarian point of view, the matter is of little importance, as such gatherings in Ireland, even more so than those of England, could not at that time be called either representative or deliberative bodies, for their members were not chosen by even a moiety of the people, and they were mere instruments in the hands of the governing powers, who moulded them at will when they desired to impose new taxes or unjust laws on the people, ostensibly with their own sanction. From the days of Simon de Montfort to those of George IV., the English parliamentary system has been an ingeniously devised engine of general oppression under the garb of popular government.

Of the ancient parliaments, the most famous was that held at Kilkenny during the chancellorship of John Trowyk, Prior of St. John, in 1367, at which was passed the statute bearing the name of that beautiful city. Though the name only of the chancellor, who doubtless was the author ex officio, has come down to us, that delectable specimen of English legislation is doubtless destined to survive the changes of time, and expire only with the language itself. It prohibited marriage, gossipred, and fostering between the natives and the Anglo-Irish under penalty of treason, also selling to the former upon any condition horses, armor, or victuals, under a like penalty. All persons of either nationality living in the Pale were to use the English language, names, customs, dress, and manner of riding. No Irishman was to be admitted to holy orders, nor was any minstrel, story-teller, or rhymer to be harbored. English on the borders should hold no parley with their Irish neighbors, except by special permission, nor employ them in their domestic wars. Irish games were not to be indulged in, but should give place to those of the English, as being more "gentlemanlike sports." Any infraction of these provisions was to be punished with rigor, for, says the preamble to the act, "many of the English of Ireland, discarding the English tongue, manners, style of riding, laws, and usages, lived and governed themselves according to the mode, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies," etc., whereby the said "Irish enemies were exalted and raised up contrary to reason." This enactment is perhaps without a parallel in the history of semi-civilized legislation, if we except that passed at a parliament held at Trim in 1447, and for which we are indebted to no less a person than the Archbishop of Dublin, lord chancellor at that period. It enacts "that those who would be taken for Englishmen (that is, within the protection of law) should not wear a beard on the upper lip; that the said lip should be shaved once at least in every two weeks, and that offenders therein should be treated as Irish enemies." As no provision was inserted in the statute providing for the supply of razors, or mention made of the appointment of state barbers, we presume it soon became inoperative.

By such penal legislation it was weakly supposed the evils of the country could be cured most effectually, but, unfortunately for the lawmakers, it was easier to pass statutes than to enforce them. On the mass of the people they had no effect whatever, except, perhaps, to bind them faster to their ancient laws and customs, and he would have been a bold officer indeed who would have attempted to carry them out, even among the Anglo-Irish families outside of the Pale; for we find that, at a parliament held in Dublin in 1441, under the supervision of Archbishop Talbot, a strong request was made to the king to furnish troops for the defence of the colony, the privy council having some time previously represented "that the king should ordain that the Admiral of England should, in summer season, visit the coasts of Ireland to protect the merchants from the Scots, Bretons, and Spaniards, who came thither with their ships stuffed with men of war in great numbers, seizing the merchants of Ireland, Wales, and England, and holding them to ransom."[35]

The selfish but sagacious policy of Henry VII. had done so much to remedy the evils inflicted on England by the wars of the Roses that when his son, Henry VIII., ascended the throne in 1509, he found a united and contented people, a well-filled treasury, and a subservient parliament. The character of this notorious ruler is too well known to need comment, and the effects of his crimes are still perceptibly felt by the country that had the misfortune to have given him birth. His influence on Irish affairs, though more disastrous in its immediate results, has happily long since been obliterated. Dr. Rokeby, Bishop of Meath, and afterward Archbishop of Dublin, first appointed chancellor in 1498, was retained in his office by the new king. He is represented as a man of marked piety and learning, but he would have been unfitted to fill an office under the English crown had he allowed any scruples of conscience to stand between him and the behests of his royal master. What these were may be judged from a passage in a private letter from Henry to his viceroy. "Now," he writes, "at the beginning, political practices may do more good than exploits of war, till such time as the strength of the Irish enemy shall be enfeebled and diminished; as well by getting their captains from them, as by putting division among them, so that they join not together"[36]—an advice eminently suggestive, but by no means new, for the policy of arraying the Irish against each other had been practised long before with fatal effect. Rokeby held the great seal for twenty-one years, and his long term was marked by his successful efforts to reconcile the hostile Anglo-Irish factions, his negotiations with the native chiefs, for the purpose of inducing them to acknowledge the sovereignty of Henry, and the consequent extension of the functions of the courts over the greater part of the island. The success of the first and last of these measures was mainly due to the personal efforts of the lord chancellor, and the submission of the Irish party resulted from the loss of the battle of Knocktough, in 1504, and the favorable promises held out by the chancellor and viceroy, inducements, it is needless to say, which were never fulfilled. He was succeeded by the two St. Lawrences, father and son, of whom nothing notable is recorded, but that they were laymen and natives of the soil; and by Archbishop Ingle, who, however, held office for but one year.

The next ecclesiastical chancellor was Dr. Alan, commissioned in 1528. This distinguished official was remarkable not only for his great mental capacity, but as a not unfavorable sample of the English political churchmen of the era immediately preceding the so-called "Reformation"—men who, by their laxity of faith and worldly ambition, paved the way for the subsequent grand march of heresy and immorality. Born in England in 1476, he studied with credit both at Oxford and Cambridge, and at an early age entered the priesthood. His varied acquirements and experience of mankind gained him, in 1515, the degree of doctor of laws and the confidence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, then Lord Chancellor of England, by whom he was sent to Rome on a special mission. On his return, he was appointed chaplain to Cardinal Wolsey, and judge of his legantine court. In both capacities he appears to have given satisfaction, particularly in the latter, in which he materially assisted the ambitious cardinal in suppressing certain monasteries, and appropriating the revenues, it is more than suspected, to his own and his patron's use. For these services he was rewarded with the archbishopric of Dublin and the Irish chancellorship. His two great vices, avarice and the love of intrigue, became now fully developed. When not begging for increase of salary or emoluments, he was writing scandalous letters to his friends at the English court, complaining of the conduct of the viceroy, the unfortunate Earl of Kildare, and it was mainly through his instrumentality, supported by Wolsey, that that nobleman was called to England and committed to the Tower of London. His next step was to circulate a false report that the earl had been executed. This led, as he anticipated, to the rebellion of Kildare's son and deputy, better known as Silken Thomas, and a number of Irish chiefs with whom the Fitzgeralds were allied, and, upon its suppression, to the confiscation of vast estates in Leinster and Munster. But Alan did not live long enough to behold the result of his sanguinary policy. Alarmed at the storm he had raised, he endeavored to escape from the country, but the elements seem to have conspired against him, for he was cast ashore near Clontarf, and, on being discovered by some of Thomas's followers, he was put to death. He was succeeded as chancellor by Cromer, Archbishop of Armagh, who was, however, shortly after deprived of his office for his unflinching opposition to Henry's absurd pretensions of being considered "Head of the Church." It was of this prelate that Browne, the king's Archbishop of Dublin, wrote to Lord Henry Cromwell, in 1635, "that he had endeavored, almost to the hazard and danger of his temporal life, to procure the nobility and gentry of this nation to due obedience in owning his highness their supreme head, as well spiritual as temporal; and do find much oppugning therein, especially by his brother Armagh, who hath beene the main oppugner, and so hath withdrawn most of his suffragans and clergy within his see and diocese."[37]

Unable to coerce or cajole the Pope, Henry at length threw down the gauntlet to the Holy Father, and, emboldened doubtless by the ready submission of the English, resolved to enforce his new ideas of religion on the people of Ireland. The parliament of that country, pliant as ever, voted him king of Ireland and head of the church, and would as willingly have conferred on him any other title, no matter how far-fetched or absurd, had he desired it. Archbishop Browne, of Dublin, was a Christian after the king's own heart, and, in his way, as consistent and as zealous a reformer; and with the chancellor, Lord Trimblestown, at the laboring-oar, the task of converting the Irish to the new faith was considered quite easy. Here and there a stubborn recusant was anticipated, but were there not monasteries and nunneries enough to be confiscated, and lands and revenues to be given away, to satisfy those benighted adherents to the old faith? A grand tour of proselytism throughout the country was therefore projected, and the lord chancellor, the archbishop, and the other members of the privy council sallied out, accompanied by their men-at-arms, procurants, clerks, and retainers, to expound the Gospel according to King Henry, and to enforce their doctrines, if all else failed, by the carnal weapons of the lash and halter. They visited in succession Carlow, Kilkenny, Ross, Wexford, and Waterford, where they are mindful to acknowledge "they were well entertained." The archbishop on Sundays "preached the word of God, having very good audience, and published the king's injunctions and the king's translation of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, the Articles of Faith, and the Ten Commandments in English," while on week-days the chancellor took his share of the good work; for, continues the report, "the day following we kept the sessions there (Waterford) both for the city and the shire, where was put to execution four felons, accompanied by another, a friar, whom, among the residue, we commanded to be hanged in his habit, and so to remain upon the gallows for a mirror to all his brethren to live truly."[38] This judicious mixture of preaching and hanging, the Lord's Prayer and the statute of Kilkenny, it was thought, would have a salutary effect on the souls and bodies of unbelievers, and was a fitting form of introducing the Reformation to the consideration of the Irish people.

The war on the faith of the nation having been thus openly and auspiciously inaugurated, we must henceforth look upon the chancellors of Ireland not only as the persistent defenders of the English interest in that country, but as the most dangerous because the most insidious and influential enemies of Catholicity.

Sir John Alan was appointed chancellor in 1539, and in the following year we find him at the head of a royal commission for the suppression of religious houses. The authority to the commissioners sets forth, with a mendacity never surpassed in a state paper, and rarely paralleled, even in the worst days of anti-Catholic persecution, the following pretexts for striking a deadly blow at the bulwarks of charity, religion, and learning:

"That from information of trustworthy persons, it being manifestly apparent that the monasteries, abbies, priories, and other places of religious or regulars in Ireland are, at present, in such a state that in them the praise of God and the welfare of man are next to nothing regarded, the regulars and others dwelling there being addicted, partly to their own superstitious ceremonies, partly to the pernicious worship of idols, and to the pestiferous doctrines of the Roman Pontiff, that unless an effectual remedy be promptly provided, not only the weak lower order, but the whole Irish people, may be speedily infected to their total destruction by the example of these persons. To prevent, therefore, the longer continuance of such religious men and nuns in so damnable a state, the king, having resolved to resume into his own hands all the monasteries and religious houses, for their better reformation, to remove from them the religious men and women, and cause them to return to some honest mode of living, and to true religion, directs the commissioners to signify this his intention to the heads of religious houses," etc.[39]

It is unnecessary to say that this measure of wholesale spoliation was promptly and thoroughly carried out. The thousand ruins that dot the island attest it, and the title-deeds of many a nobleman's broad acres bear date no earlier than this edict of the greatest monster that ever disgraced the British throne.

From this time forth, the lord chancellors found their best passport to royal favor in devising measures for the destruction of the popular faith. Being generally needy adventurers, with nothing but their legal knowledge and facile consciences to begin the world with, they neither loved the country nor respected the people, and their titles and wealth depended simply on their zeal for Protestantism. Of the hundreds of penal laws which disgrace the statute-book of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, every one of them owes its inception and enactment to one or another of those subtle-minded officials who, as the head of the lords, president of the privy council, and the dispenser of vast judicial and executive patronage, had a potent influence in all public affairs. They continued industriously to carry out the designs of Henry during the successive reigns of his worthy daughter Elizabeth, the Stuarts, William, Anne, and the House of Brunswick. Even when the fears of foreign invasion in 1760, and the noble resistance of the fathers of our republic some years later, had awakened the fears of the British authorities and induced them to relax somewhat the chains of the Catholics, the voice of the lord chancellors was still for war. Apart, however, from this spirit of intolerance which seemed to be naturally attached to the office, it must be confessed that from the days of Henry the great seal was held by many able lawyers and distinguished statesmen, some of whom were not unknown in the world of letters as authors and liberal patrons of learning and science. The names of Curwan, Loftus (who founded Trinity College University), Boyle, Porter, Butler, Cox, Broderick, Bowles, and many others, occupy honored positions in the legal annals of Great Britain and Ireland, and their lives, full of incident and variety, are fully and fairly placed before us by Mr. O'Flanagan.

The treaty of union in 1800, by which Ireland lost her parliament, and legislatively became a province, deprived the Irish chancellors of much of their original political power; though, strange as it may appear, this object was effected mainly through the exertions of Lord Clare, who at that time held the office. In this man's character, distinguished as it was for many private virtues, and for every public vice that it is possible to conceive, were united the good and bad qualities of all his predecessors, joined to a wonderful mental capacity which far surpassed them all. Born in Ireland, he was of English extraction and more than English in feeling, and, though of an exemplary Catholic stock, he was the son of an apostate clerical student, a most violent Protestant and a rancorous proscriptionist. A profound jurist and an upright judge in purely legal matters, his anti-Catholic prejudices seemed totally to have warped his judgment whenever the question of religion presented itself, and, though a steadfast friend in private of those who agreed with or did not care to differ from him, he never failed to carry into official life the hatreds and animosities engendered in political struggles or domestic intercourse. A powerful orator, full of strong legal points, logical propositions, and keen, and sometimes coarse, sarcasm, he ruled his party with a rod of iron, and, when persuasion and threats failed, he hesitated not to use bribes and cajolery. His mental energy was equal to any amount of labor, and his physical courage was beyond question, even in a country and age where bravery was ranked among the highest of virtues. Such was John Fitzgibbon, first Earl of Clare, born near Dublin in 1749, a man pre-eminently fitted by Providence to adorn his country and benefit mankind, but who perverted his great gifts and employed them with too much success in destroying that country's remnant of independence, and in devising new methods of persecution for his Catholic relatives and countrymen. He died in the plenitude of his power in 1802; his name when mentioned is reprobated by all good men in the nation he betrayed; his title, so ingloriously won, is extinct; and his bench in Chancery and his seat in the House of Lords are filled by one of that race and creed which he so cordially detested and so ruthlessly persecuted.[40] Sic transit gloria mundi.

Mr. O'Flanagan brings down his Lives to the time of George IV., but this latter portion of his valuable collection of biographies belongs more to the domain of law than of history. Indeed, the entire work is full of curious and interesting information which will be highly prized by the legal profession. What the late Lord Campbell has done so well for the English chancellors, the author has endeavored to do for those of Ireland, and with equal success, notwithstanding the scarcity of materials and the loose manner in which the Irish records have been kept. One of the most attractive features of this book is the total absence of passion or prejudice in the narrative of events and estimation of character; but every necessary circumstance is detailed in a plain, lucid, and intelligible style, and with something of judicial gravity and impartiality befitting so important a subject. As far as the author's own political predilections are concerned—and we suspect that they are by no means intensely national—the tone of the book may be said to be colorless, a peculiarity in modern biography which, while it may detract from its vivacity, will certainly add much weight to its value as an authority. We are promised a sequel to the chancellors, containing the lives of the lord chief-justices, which we hope will soon appear, for the more light that is shed on those darkened pages of Ireland's history, the better for the cause of truth, justice, and humanity.

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