The Catholic World, Vol. 15, Nos. 85-90, April 1872-September 1872 / A Monthly Magazine

by Various

II.

What has art to do with morals? With what propriety shall a poet play the moralist? His purpose is distinct, his method is radically different, is his object ever identical? We know that it is not always so. In the face of outward nature the truthful artist is forbidden to read humanity. Hardly is Wordsworth suffered to discover here divinity. The Greek sculptor sought beauty, not goodness, in the daughters of men, and the lines that grew beneath his fingers breathe the harmony of grace, not the harmony of character. Does the application of these rigorous principles bound the sphere of genuine art? Do the good and the beautiful nowhere cohere and interfuse? They may—in the ideal. For what is beauty in things which disclose design but the reflex of perfection? And what is goodness but the perfection of the heart? In the scheme of ethics, vice is ugliness, error a discord, and weakness disproportion, character means equipoise, and virtue expresses harmony. But how shall art or ethics discern a moral symmetry, and crown a spiritual perfection, without a right conception of man’s nature, of his place and purpose, his relation to the universe and to God? So far as he portrays the heart, the poet must be a moralist. Within this domain the truest art will utter the purest morals.

It is a blessed law by which he who aims to please is constrained to edify. For reason is a disinherited prince, and the estate is too often squandered before he comes to his own. Pride rears the head against precept. The imagination flutters and beats her bars, until experience has clipped her wings. The ideal republic could ill afford to dispense with poets, for there is no lesson like the modest lesson of a lovely life. To our gaze perhaps the influence seems wholly lost, and yet may be only latent. This is sure, that virtue has still a foothold in the heart that keeps an altar to the beautiful. We know how many seeds of goodness, what germs of aspiration, are flung broadcast by the poet’s hand. Who will say that his random sowings may not stir in a genial hour, strike root in the depths of motive, and blossom in act and life? No thoughtful mind has failed to recognize the insight of Sidney’s words in his Defence of Poesy: “For even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, yet will be content to be delighted, which is all the good-fellow poet seems to promise, and so steal to see the form of goodness, which, seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they had taken a medicine of cherries.”

The ethical standard is sensitive to the influence of climate and of race. The Italian and the German recognize the same virtues, but write them in different scales referred to a national key-note. The growth of knowledge and the expansion of sympathy determine a deeper change. From the age of Pericles to the age of Napoleon, the ideal of character has undergone alterations which have penetrated the essence and affected the type. Of certain virtues which fired the heart of an Athenian, we have kept nothing but the names, and we have canonized others of which he had no conception. The attitude of the individual man toward nature and society is constantly shifting under the pressure of ideas. The wave of inquiry which rose in civic revolution has swept in widening circles over the whole surface of opinion, and now dashes on the primal verities which declare the origin and destiny of man. The mind is active, but the heart of the age is perplexed and sad. She ponders painfully the riddle of the painful earth. She is lost in the great forest, the new paths are uncertain, the old to her seem overgrown. She is troubled with a vague unrest, beset with dark misgivings, by results she loathes to accept, doubts which she longs to silence, and hopes she dare not forego. Her mood is too grave and earnest for blithe and heedless carol. She cannot pause to hear the idle singer of an empty day. The music which holds her ear must be attuned to serious sympathy, must echo her own self-questionings, and breathe her aspirations. She puts aside from her lip the cup of distilled water, and turns to the mineral spring that savors of the rugged earth.

De Musset is not more essentially a child of the age than Tennyson. Both inherited in rare perfection the exquisite sensibility and high tension of the nervous system which are developed by modern life. In both the violence of emotion is succeeded by prolonged depression. Their joy is often rapture, and their sorrow anguish, but the prevailing tone is a dreamy languor that betrays fatigue. Their intellects were plunged in the same bath of learning, and tempered in the furnace of the time. They unite in regretting the trustful past, and complain that they were born too late into a sick and decrepit world. They pace together the shore of life, and gaze with wistful eyes over the expanse of ocean. But here the parallel ends. Their roads diverge in youth. Each obeys a different impulse, and learns a different lesson. The one hears a growing harmony in the voices of science, and perceives an increasing purpose in the movement of mankind. The other bows the head in stupor before the howling storm. Tennyson has a kindly glance and a cheery word for his fellow-men, they are his brothers, his co-workers, ever reaping something new. De Musset loads the heart with a sense of utter misery, and paralyzes the will by the infusion of his self-contempt. He is half-indignant that his spirit should be still haunted by a sublime aspiration, and confesses almost with a groan:

“Une immense espérance a traversé la terre.”[60]

It is in another mood that Tennyson hails the promise which he sees in the aspiration of the soul:

“What is it thou knowest, sweet voice? I cried,
A hidden hope, the voice replied.”

There are few words more painful to read than the prayer in “L’Espoir en Dieu.” The passionate queries are wrung from a breaking heart. We offer a rude but passably close translation of two stanzas. The poet demands:

“Wherefore in a work divine
So much of discord tarrieth?
To what good end disease and sin?
O God of justice! wherefore death?

“Wherefore suffer our unworth
To dream, and to divine, a God?
Doubt hath laid desolate the earth,
Our view is too narrow or too broad.”

Compare the rooted faith and serene calm of the poem to “In Memoriam:”

“Thine are these orbs of light and shade,
Thou madest life in man and brute,
Thou madest death, and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull that thou hast made.

“Thou wilt not leave him in the dust,
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die,
And thou hast made him, thou art just.”

Much, no doubt, of the peculiar spirit that pervades the work of either poet may be traced to the social atmosphere in which he moved. Much also is only to be explained by the history of his life. Behind the “In Memoriam,” an unselfish and ennobling sorrow weeps and prays above a cherished grave. “In Rolla,” remorse sobs bitterly amid the ruins of a wasted life. The song has betrayed the singer. The one is the laureate of hope: the other, a prophet of despair. Tennyson is a night-worn pilgrim whose kindling eye has caught the glimmer of a lovely dawn; De Musset, a tired swimmer whose drowning cry leaps toward us from the gates of death. The poetry of De Musset is a convex lens which draws to a fiery focus the doubts and longings of the time; Tennyson’s, a stained rose-window, that subdues the flaring sunlight to a mild and tender radiance.

While man’s moral nature is developed and determined by his attitude toward society and his Maker, it is also profoundly affected by his attitude toward women. The relative position of woman has been rather raised than lowered by the movement of modern thought. Much has been deciphered by speculation, and much dissected by science, but the deep significance of the female character remains intact. In the fine atmosphere which nourished the musings of Richter, two earthly forms move freely, the maiden and the wife. In the long process of comparative anatomy, the beautiful first reveals itself in the sweet instinct that binds a mother to her offspring. Then first does the fire of Prometheus fairly catch the clay. The noblest instinct and the noblest aspiration have one element in common—the abnegation of self. Perhaps the one is but a reflex of the other. It is certain that the highest art has done the fullest justice to women. Let us measure Byron and Tennyson by this standard. To Byron, woman was an exquisite instrument which responds in perfect tune to the master-touch of passion. To Tennyson, she is an embodied spirit, who inspires and tempers man while she seems to obey his impulse. It is a shallow criticism which would excuse Byron’s low conception by an unfortunate experience. If personal experience be narrow, why not look beyond it? If the feet stumble in the mire, the eyes may still be lifted. The fact is, an irresistible instinct compels a genuine artist to discern and to preach the truth. His life may prove a rebel, but his work will pay tribute to Cæsar.

The author of “Godiva,” of “Enid” and “Elaine” is eminently the poet of woman. It is especially worthy of remark that he should have maintained a distinct and lofty ideal throughout the Arthurian cycle. In the mediæval myths, the lineaments of the female character were sometimes clouded by the admixture of masculine traits. Through the Carlovingian romance that lives in Ariosto’s verse, there roves an unsexed and warlike virgin, whom the poet means us to admire; at whom we smile in secret. Tennyson has read woman’s nature with an insight too fine and delicate to place her in so false an attitude. There is no Bradamant in the “Idylls of the King.”

The unswerving justice of true genius finds consummate expression in the treatment of “Guinevere.” The wrong-doing of imperial beauty was a dangerous theme, and we may guess how it would have been handled by the author of “Parasina.” In the original legend the queen commanded sympathy, but she is now positively degraded by her preference for a meaner soul. It is Arthur’s doom, and no merit of hers, that he loves her still. There is little likelihood that a modern Francesca will borrow impulse or pretext from her story. It is amusing to find the lovers of Haidee and Gulnare scandalized by “Vivien.” If ever a vile nature was scorched and shrivelled by the flame of an honest wrath, that poem affords the spectacle. In wily Vivien, vice is neither condoned nor glozed, but simply stripped and gibbeted. The pure air which breathes throughout the “Idylls” is condensed in the lines of “Guinevere,” which declare the great purpose of the king. We may say with assurance that no other English poet, except Wordsworth, would have written them.

Tennyson has spoken words of comfort to many English hearts, and inspired with a noble purpose many English lives. His spirit has crossed the seas. To him and Wordsworth the youth of America owe much that they will not speedily forget. Other benefactors may receive some form of recompense, but how shall we repay a poet? It is not praise, but thanks we would offer Alfred Tennyson. Rare artist, and high teacher, sweet voice, pure heart, there are many who admire, and not a few who love him.

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HOW THE CHURCH UNDERSTANDS AND UPHOLDS THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.

SECOND ARTICLE.
AGES OF THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH.

When the Christian religion had triumphed over idolatry, the principle of evil took refuge in heresy, and vigorously began a new attack upon the church. As women had once sealed their faith with their blood, so now they came eagerly forward to preach it by their learning. The centuries which produced the fathers of the church produced women also, to whom these great lights of the true faith were mainly indebted for their early education. The same circumstances also created women who, on the throne and in the council-chamber, governed turbulent nations and guided fierce passions, according to the rules of justice, honesty, and religion.

The mother of St. Gregory Nazianzen, Doctor of the Church, was Nonna, and is honored as a saint. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, says: “She drew down the blessing of heaven upon her family by most bountiful and continual alms-deeds; ... yet, to satisfy the obligation of justice which she owed to her children, she, by her prudent economy, improved at the same time their patrimony.”

Here, therefore, in the fourth century, we find a woman commended for her practical knowledge of business and her skill in managing property. Ventura relates that, as soon as her son Gregory came into the world, she placed the Scriptures in his infant hands, and ever after inculcated in her teaching the greatest love and reverence for sacred learning. Nonna’s other children were both canonized, one of them, Gorgonia, having led the most exemplary life in the holy state of matrimony. (La Donna Cattolica, vol. i. pp. 431, 432.) St. Basil, who counted among his ancestry many martyrs of both sexes, was the son of St. Emelia, and the great-nephew of St. Macrina the Elder, of whom he says himself that he “counts it as one of the greatest benefits of Almighty God, and the truest of honors, to have been brought up by such a woman.” His elder sister, also named Macrina, was greatly instrumental in conducting his education. When after his death his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, went to visit their sister, and open his heart to her concerning their common sorrow, he found her dying, it is true, but so vigorous in mind that her discourse on the providence of God and the state of the soul after death was no less striking than comforting. He could hardly believe, says Ventura, that it was not a doctor of the church, a learned theologian, who was speaking to him; and so much did he treasure his sister’s words that he compiled his admirable Treatise of the Soul and The Resurrection chiefly from the matter furnished by her discourse. Macrina’s funeral was an ovation, and the bishop of the diocese held it an honor to be present thereat.

Olympias, the widow of Nembridius, the treasurer of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, flourished about the end of the fourth century, and was the friend and helper of St. John Chrysostom. His letters to her are part of his published works, and Nectarius, his predecessor in the Patriarchal chair of Constantinople, often consulted her on matters of ecclesiastical importance. When Chrysostom was persecuted and banished, she did not escape vexatious notice from heathen and heretical rulers; but through all, her fortitude would have done credit to the bravest man. The great patriarch charged her to continue, during his absence, “to serve the church with the same care and zeal” (Ventura, Donna Cattolica, p. 443), and elsewhere in his works says emphatically that “women, as well as men, can take part in any struggle for the cause of God and of the church.” (Epistle 124, to the Italians.) In a letter to her, he says that her presence was required at Constantinople to encourage the persecuted brethren, and in another he bids her exert all her resources to save the Bishop Maruthas from the abyss (he having given signs of yielding to heresy). Further on, in the same letter, he gives her instructions, almost amounting to a diplomatic and official mission, with regard to the request of the King of the Goths for a bishop and missionary in place of Aubinus the Apostle, who had just died, after converting many thousand of these barbarians. When St. Chrysostom sent a messenger to the Pope St. Innocent, at the beginning of the persecutions at Constantinople, he gave him letters of recommendation to none but a few Roman ladies—Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias.

The influence of Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, upon her wayward son, is so well known that it is almost superfluous to dwell on it; and St. Jerome, eminently a learned saint, was scarcely less connected with holy and well-taught women. He himself tells us that it was especially his friend and spiritual daughter Paula who engaged him in the study of the Old and New Testaments, and who induced him to translate the former from the original Hebrew. Rohrbacher, in his Ecclesiastical History, corroborates this statement; and Capefigue, in his Four First Ages of the Church, says that “the pure society of women had imparted to Jerome a heartfelt exaltation, a deep enthusiasm for all purity and nobility in themselves.” We learn from Butler (Lives of the Saints) that Marcella, one of the many matrons under St. Jerome’s instruction in Rome, made great progress in the critical learning of the Holy Scriptures, and learned in a short time many things which had cost him abundance of labor (vol. ix.). Other women, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were collected under his guidance; almost all are now canonized saints, and were celebrated even in their own day for their skill and erudition. The great Paula was the most illustrious among them, and he tells us of her as also of five or six others that they were as well acquainted with Hebrew as with Latin and Greek. To the daughter-in-law of St. Paula, Jerome wrote a letter full of minute and seemingly trivial details, concerning the education of her little daughter, who afterwards became St. Paula the Younger. It is of such quaint interest, and so calculated to give a high idea of the importance attached by the great doctor of the church to the minutiæ of a little girl’s daily life, that we cannot resist the temptation of quoting a few extracts from it:

“Let her be brought up as Samuel was in the temple, and the Baptist in the desert, in utter ignorance of vanity and vice; ... let her never hear bad words nor learn profane songs; ... let her have an alphabet of little letters made of box or ivory, the names of all which she must know, that she may play with them, and that learning may be made a diversion. When a little older, let her form each letter in wax with her finger, guided by another’s hand; then let her be invited, by prizes and presents suited to her age, to join syllables together.... Let her have companions to learn with her, that she may be spurred on by emulation.... She is not to be scolded or browbeaten if slower, but to be encouraged that she may rejoice to surpass, and be sorry to see herself outstripped and behind others, not envying their progress, but rejoicing at it while she reproaches herself with her own backwardness. Great care is to be taken that she conceive no aversion to studies, lest their bitterness remain in after-years. A master must be found for her, a man both of virtue and learning: nor will a great scholar think it beneath him to teach her the first elements of letters.... That is not to be contemned without which nothing great can be acquired. The very sounds of letters and the first rudiments are very different in a learned and in an unskilful mouth. Care must be taken that she be not accustomed by fond nurses to pronounce half-words, as it would prejudice her speech. Great care is necessary that she never learn what she will have afterwards to unlearn. The eloquence of the Gracchi derived its perfection from the mother’s elegance (of speech). No paint must ever touch her face or hair.” He is no less sensible and moderate in physical instructions than strict in things of the spiritual order. He says: “She should eat so as always to be hungry, and to be able to read or sing psalms immediately after meals. The immoderate long fasts of many displease me. I have learned by experience that the ass, much fatigued on the road, seeks rest at any cost. In a long journey, strength must be supported, lest, by running the first stage too fast, we should fall in the middle. In Lent, full scope is to be given to severe fasting.” He advises the young girl, when old enough, to read the works of St. Cyprian, the epistles of St. Athanasius, and the writings of St. Hilary. These are grave and abstruse studies, requiring much time and application, and as fully up to the standard of a modern male education as any woman could desire. St. Jerome himself was living at Bethlehem when he wrote this letter, and while recommending her mother to send little Paula to St. Paula the Elder for her later education, he himself promises to instruct her, adding that “he should be more honored by teaching the spouse of Christ than the philosopher [Aristotle] was in being preceptor to the Macedonian King.” It was the elder Paula who built St. Jerome the monastery of Bethlehem, in which he spent a great part of his life. She governed a monastery of women not far from it. St. Jerome, in his panegyric of her life, addressed to her daughter Eustochium, expresses himself in the following unequivocal language: “Were all the members of my body to be changed into tongues, and each fibre to utter articulate and human sounds, even then I could not worthily celebrate the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula.” As soon as her husband’s death left her the free use of a magnificent fortune, she liberated all the numerous retinue of slaves that formed not only her household but her possessions. Hundreds of Christian masters and mistresses did the same, and treated their freed retainers as brethren and sisters in the faith, long before the philanthropy of modern times had begun to envelop in a halo of unusual heroism the sacrifice of slave property. From a noble Roman matron, placed by her birth in an assured position of great prominence, she became a voluntary exile and wanderer for the sake of planting the faith more firmly in the East. St. Jerome describes, in words full of sympathetic admiration, her pious visits to the Holy Places of Judea. She also made a pilgrimage to the home of monasticism, the Thebaïd and the Lybian desert. Humble as she was, fame followed and surrounded her. Pilgrims to Jerusalem counted her as one of the most consoling and admirable of the objects that claimed their devotion. Macarius, Arsenius, Serapion, famous lights of the church and patriarchs of the eremitical life, came from long distances and inaccessible solitudes to confer with her. At Jerusalem, she founded places of shelter and entertainment for the many pilgrims who flocked there; both at Rome and in the East, she was the mother and the idol of the poor, whose wants she relieved untiringly, and for whose sake she was often not only penniless, but in debt. Her last illness was like a royal levee, and bishops and patriarchs hastened to her bedside; her funeral, says Ventura, was almost a canonization. Bishops carried her body to its tomb, and for seven days sacred hymns and psalms echoed ceaselessly in the church of the Holy Grotto at Bethlehem, where the funeral service was performed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Capefigue calls her the “most remarkably erudite woman of her age,” and her instincts of faith and learning alike made her intuitively aware of the artifices of the heretic Palladius, whose well-concealed Origenism she unmasked and denounced in presence of St. Jerome, when the wolf would have put on sheep’s clothing and deceived her simple nuns. Paula’s daughters—Blesilla, the learned and accomplished widow; Eustochium, the celebrated virgin to whom many of St. Jerome’s works are addressed or dedicated; Paulina, the model wife to whose influence over her saintly husband the first hospitals in the West are due—and their sister-in-law, Læta, the happy mother of the younger St. Paula, are all canonized saints of the church, and each of them the just pride of their sex in the respective walks of life to which they were destined. Fabiola, another of St. Jerome’s scholars, was the foundress of the first hospital absolutely established in Rome.

The church has never been chary of tendering graceful homage to the influence and ability of woman, and perhaps no more singular or flattering proof of this can be found than the pictorial honor which, Ventura assures us (Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 466), was offered by St. Gregory the Great to St. Sylvia, his mother. She was represented as sitting by his side, robed in white, and crowned with the mitre worn by doctors of theology, while the left hand held an open Psalter, and the right was raised with two fingers extended, in the attitude of benediction.

St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who was born and died in the fourth century, owed his early training of piety and solid learning to his mother, who was left a widow during his infancy, and to his elder sister Marcellina, to whom later on Christendom became indebted for the three admirable books he wrote on The State of Virginity. Another of his famous works is a treatise on Widowhood. In one of his books on Virginity he meets the common though worn-out argument that virginity is a foe to the propagation of the human race. As this bears upon our general subject, though it be not immediately akin to it, we will stop to quote it. “Some complain,” he says, “that mankind will shortly fail if so many are consecrated virgins. I desire to know who ever wanted a wife and could not find one? The killing of an adulterer, the pursuing of waging war against a ravisher, are the consequences of marriage. The number of people is greatest where virginity is most esteemed. Inquire how many virgins are consecrated every year at Alexandria, all over the East, and in Africa, where there are more virgins than there are men in this country [Italy].” And Butler, in his Life of St. Ambrose, goes on to explain: “May not the French and Austrian Netherlands, full of numerous monasteries, yet covered with populous cities, be at present esteemed a proof of this remark? The populousness of China, where great numbers of new-born infants are daily exposed to perish, is a terrible proof that the voluntary virginity of some is no prejudice to the human race. Wars and the sea, not the number of virgins, are the destroyers of the human race, as St. Ambrose observes; though the state of virginity is not to be rashly engaged in, and marriage is not only holy, but the general state of mankind in the world.” Not only did St. Ambrose occupy his mind and pen with the concerns of holy and spotless women, but he did not think it beneath his dignity to write for those unhappy virgins who had fallen from their vows and thus been reft of their most precious heirloom. In the third book of his work on Virginity, he pays the following homage to Christian woman, such as she was in his age: “I have been a priest but three years,” he says, “and my experience has not been long enough to teach me what I have written. But what my own experience could not teach, the sight of your conduct has suggested. If, in this work, you find any flowers of thought, know that I have gathered them from your own lives. I do not so much give you precepts, as I draw examples from the behavior of living virgins, and set them before the eyes of the world. My discourse has only reproduced the image of your virtues. It is but the portrait of your own life, so grave and earnest, which you will see here, beaming with light as reflected from a mirror. If you find grace in these words, it is you who have inspired my mind with it. All that is good in this book belongs to you.” (Third book on Virgins.) What more graceful tribute, more appreciative homage, could man render to the opposite sex? Yet he who wrote this was a great and powerful bishop, a doctor of the church, a profoundly learned man, whose influence was spread through kingdoms, and whose advice was sought and followed by emperors. Here is yet another example of the distinguished part played by woman in affairs of the highest public importance. Capefigue, in his Four First Ages of the Church, says that in the churches of Rome might be seen the most noble matrons of the city, “who gave the first and greatest impulse to all Christian sentiments.” This was at the end of the fourth century, and the two Melanias were then foremost among the active and energetic women mentioned. The elder Melania, whose fortune was immense, and who was married early by her father, the Consul Marcellinus, became a widow after a few years of married life, and thereafter devoted herself to the church. She travelled to Egypt and Palestine in the interests of the persecuted Patriarch Athanasius, whom she protected and supported with all the moral influence and temporal means at her command. The zealous and open protectress of more than five thousand Christians, the harborer of priests and bishops driven from their sees and parishes during the Arian persecutions of the Emperor Valens, she was herself cast into prison by the Governor of Jerusalem, to whom she spoke thus boldly and fearlessly: “Do not think to despise me because I wear poor garments: I might wear the robes of a princess, did I choose to do so. Do not think to intimidate me by your threats, for I have sufficient influence to protect me against the slightest aggression on your part. I tell you this, and give you this advice, that you may not through ignorance commit any error that might lead you into danger.” The courageous woman was released, and continued her ministrations of mercy. Her granddaughter, St. Melania, married young to a noble Roman, the descendant of the great Publicola, and the son of the Prefect of Rome, was even a more prominent personage than the elder Melania. After the birth and death of two children, she and her husband renounced their high position, freed eight thousand slaves, and sold their immense possessions in several parts of the Roman Empire for the benefit of the poor. They then retired to a quiet country solitude in Campania, and with several associates began leading “the perfect life” which we have so often seen attempted in vain in this age by refined and earnest souls without the bosom of the church. Here, their chief occupation was the study and the propagation of the Scriptures and other solid works of learning and faith. The works of the fathers were foremost among the latter, and Ventura says with truth that we may well thank woman when we read these admirable treatises, for without her help, care, and zeal they would be considerably less in number than they are. The love of the Scriptures and of Biblical lore seems thus to have been a distinctive mark of the sex in the early days of the church.

Melania and her companions after a time left Italy, and settled in Africa near Hippo, and there became the most active allies of St. Augustine. They also journeyed through Spain, Palestine, and Asia Minor, always in the interests of the faith, founding monasteries and schools, and assisting the poor and the persecuted. After her husband’s death, Melania, having been wrecked on the coast of Sicily, and having found several thousand Christians in bondage to barbarian idolaters, she redeemed and freed them all. At one time she held a high post at court, and exerted herself successfully in favor of orthodoxy. When the Nestorian heresy was making great progress in Asia and Africa, she uncompromisingly combated it by her influence and social talents, by the persuasion of her manner and the force of her arguments, as Ribadeneira testifies in the sketch he wrote of her life. Ventura asserts that she confounded Pelagius himself, who by all manner of arts endeavored to win her to his side; and it is known that, when St. Augustine failed to convert Volusian, the Prefect of Rome, and uncle to Melania, this heroic woman, according to Baronius, undertook to convince him, and succeeded most triumphantly. Melania’s funeral at Jerusalem was the occasion of lavish homage to the power and influence of her sex; bishops and confessors were eager to show their respect and admiration, and the Christian world proved once more that “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

Marcella, one of St. Jerome’s spiritual daughters, and whose funeral eulogy he wrote, was, according to this great saint’s own words, “the greatest glory of the city of Rome.” When Alaric and his Goths invaded Rome, her house was broken into, and herself cruelly beaten and disfigured. All her reply was, “My gold I have given to the poor: you will find nothing in my possession but the tunic I wear.” She collected many holy and learned women around her, and her house was the rallying point of all Christians. All good works received their impetus from her, and she was often consulted by bishops and priests on questions of Biblical learning, after St. Jerome, who had taught her the Scriptures, had left Rome. Although consecrated virgins of both sexes abounded in her time, as yet no distinct community under a recognized rule had been formed in Rome. She undertook to establish the monastic life in the capital of the empire, and was the first to reduce to order the elements of which such a community might be formed. With the advice of St. Athanasius, and some fugitive priests of Alexandria, who took refuge in Rome in 340, during the Arian persecution in the East, Marcella gave up a country-seat of hers for a monastery, and adopted for the future religious the rule of St. Pachomius. The men followed her example, and assembled in concert to found communities of their own. Rome vied with the Thebaïd for sanctity and learning, and this was the work of a woman. When, in the seventh century, St. Benedict, the reformer and patriarch of all religious orders in Europe, reduced monasticism in the West to the state in which we know it in our own days, he was only, says Ventura (Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 488), walking in the path which the heroic women of Christendom had hewn out before him in imitation of the hermits and anchorites of the East. But Marcella shines no less as a pillar of orthodoxy than as the institutrix of Western monachism. When the Origenists, through the aid of the cunning Rufinus and the intriguing Macarius, who disseminated skilfully veiled errors in Rome, began to attack the integrity of the Christian faith, Marcella left her solitude, and came to the capital to confront the heresiarchs. The following details are all vouched for by St. Jerome in the funeral eulogy addressed by him to her friend and scholar Principia: “The faith of the Roman people had been weakened on many points.... The new heresy had made many victims, even among priests and monks.... The Sovereign Pontiff himself, Siricius, who was as conspicuous for holy simplicity as for sanctity of life, and who judged of others by the candor of his own soul, seemed for a moment to have become the dupe of the hypocrisy of these new pharisees. The orthodoxy of the bishops Vincent, Eusebius, Paulinian, and Jerome had even been suspected, and, when they cried out that the wolf was in the fold, no one vouchsafed to listen to them. In this grave emergency, in presence of much coldness, indifference, and weakness on the part of men, God made use of the far-sightedness, the zeal, the courage of a woman to keep the faith intact in Rome. Marcella, more eager to please God than men, resisted the Origenist heresy publicly, vigorously, and efficaciously. She it was who by the very testimony of those who had first been deceived by the new errors and then abjured them, convinced every one of the real nature of the heretical doctrine. She stimulated the zeal of the Sovereign Pastor by proving to him how many souls had already gone astray.... She was the first to point out to him the disguised impieties of the garbled translations of Origen’s book on Principles, which Rufinus had translated and altered, and was now selling everywhere. She often summoned the heretics to come and justify themselves in Rome, but they dared not answer, and preferred being condemned as absent and contumacious, rather than be publicly confounded by a woman. At last, when a general condemnation was pronounced upon their doctrines, it was chiefly the result of Marcella’s vigilance.” Here, therefore, is a woman exerting a guiding influence on the destinies of the church by her learning, subtleness, and eloquence. If the women of the early centuries achieved such successes with the natural weapons of their sex and position, why do our sisters of the present day desire a reorganization of society, and a new accession of hitherto unknown and unnatural weapons? Why indeed but because the order of society sanctioned and regulated by the church has been subverted by the Reformation; the holy charter of woman abolished; and elegant and veiled Islamism, or in some instances a coarse and degrading barbarianism, inculcated and forcibly brought into action concerning woman, and the sex gradually forced out of its legitimate orbit, with its capabilities dwarfed, its intellect narrowed, its talents sneered at, and its affections repressed? The broad river of woman’s influence, flowing so calmly and majestically through the centuries of the church’s undisturbed unity, has been dammed up by the Protestant tradition of the last three hundred years, till it has broken forth again as a turbulent torrent, devastating where it once fertilized, disturbing where once it conciliated. In its new form and its strange aggressiveness, it now horrifies mankind, where in early days, in its legitimate sphere, it guided the greatest statesmen, orators, and saints, and gravely helped them on the road to heaven, to science, and to happiness. But we are digressing, for we have undertaken to speak of facts, not to declaim about theories. We have much ground to travel over yet before we come to the end of the list of glorious women who have made the church, so to speak, their panegyrist, and the world their debtor. We have once before mentioned the Roman ladies, Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias, to whom St. Chrysostom recommended his envoys and their mission to Pope St. Innocent. Demetrias was the daughter of the Consul Olibrius and of St. Juliana; Proba was her grandmother on her father’s side. The two widows, having converted their husbands, consecrated their after-lives to the education of Demetrias. St. Augustine was their friend and counsellor, and wrote them letters that are among the most prominent of his works. One to Proba is on the efficacy and the nature of prayer; another to Juliana treats of the advantages and duties of widowhood. When Demetrias announced her intention of remaining a virgin, the holy joy of the family knew no bounds, and the day of her formally receiving the veil was a festival for all Rome. St. Jerome honored her with a discourse which has come down to us in the shape of a Letter to Demetrias, followed by a treatise on Virginity, and not only did he interrupt for this purpose the grave commentaries on the Scriptures in which he was engaged, but he also addressed to the parents of the virgin such congratulations as rang throughout Italy, and made the holy and happy trio the envy of every matron and maiden in the Christian world. (Ventura, Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 520.) The heresiarch Pelagius so little understood the importance of woman that he took the trouble to address to Demetrias a letter so long that it almost forms a book, which is still extant, and was intended to instil into her mind his insidious errors. St. Augustine, however, cautioned her against Pelagius, and bid her keep staunch to “the faith of Pope Innocent.”

There was one sphere which more than any other was christianized and influenced for good by women, and indeed could not have been otherwise sanctified—the sphere of the imperial court, both in Rome and in Constantinople. We have already seen empresses and relatives of the Cæsars becoming Christians and often martyrs, but it remained for the women of the fourth and fifth centuries to make the palace into a sanctuary and add the lustre of a heavenly crown to the majesty of an earthly sceptre. Constantine, under whose auspices Christianity first emerged from the Catacombs, was the gift of woman to the church. His mother Helena, his wife Fausta, and his mother-in-law Eutropia (the two latter being respectively the wife and daughter of Maximian-Herculeus) were zealous and devoted Christians, and to their influence are due the toleration and subsequently the favor with which the faith was treated by Constantine. Eusebius relates that Eutropia on her pilgrimage to the Holy Places found idols and sacrificial rites still flourishing near the famous oak of Mambre, where tradition places the scene of the visit of the three angels to Abraham. She wrote to her son-in-law in unconcealed indignation, and thus procured after a time the destruction of the shameful altars. Later on we find the emperor building a church on the identical spot. The progress of the Empress Helen through Palestine is as an ovation to the faith, and a record of churches built and monasteries founded in every Holy Place. She constantly besought her son’s aid and munificence in these undertakings, and extended the protection of his name to all Christian establishments in the East. We owe to her piety and energy the most solemn and the greatest of the memorials of the Passion, the Holy Cross on which our Lord suffered and died. It is likewise to her, a woman, that we owe one of the most beautiful of Christian churches, that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, as well as one of the most interesting basilicas of Rome, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where a portion of the august relic of the cross was deposited. Her charities were numberless, her foundations magnificent. She alleviated the condition of those who were condemned to the mines, and freed many from chains and slavery. The city of Drepanum in Bythinia, where St. Lucian the martyr had died for his God, she so beautified and endowed in his honor that after her death her son changed its name to Helenopolis. Even the fame of the local and municipal life of many cities can be traced to the influence and activity of woman, and further on we shall see how some of her sex have laid colleges, schools, and universities under eternal obligations. Constance, the daughter of Constantine, was the first convert of the imperial family, and exercised no little influence over her father. She assembled numbers of holy virgins, and consecrated herself with them in a state of virginity to the service of God and the poor. When Constantius, her brother, became emperor, and, favoring Arianism, called himself head of the church, while he exiled Pope Liberius, hundreds of the Roman ladies united in a deputation to protest against this illegal act. As long as the anti-Pope Felix remained in Rome, these same women utterly scorned his authority, and encouraged the people to refuse to hold communion with him. This firm attitude of the women of Rome had its reward, and Pope Liberius was at length recalled when the emperor perceived that the forced schism was likely to result in sedition against himself. Maximus, Emperor of the West, through the influence of his Christian wife, became the friend and protector of St. Martin of Tours; and Theodosius, the contemporary of St. Ambrose, was mainly guided in his wise and, upon the whole, salutary administration by his wife Placidia and his daughter Pulcheria. But his granddaughter, also named Pulcheria, and justly honored as a saint, was pre-eminently the glory of the Eastern Empire and the honor of her sex as well as of her order. Her reign was the triumph of the church, the golden age of justice, the realization of a Christian Utopia. When the tranquillity of the age was disturbed, it was through the decline of her influence and the triumph over her of her many enemies. When her father Arcadius died and left his throne to his son Theodosius, she was chosen not as regent, but as Augusta, or co-ruler and empress, with her brother, and moreover was entrusted with the care and responsibility of his education. The historian Rohrbacher, ever eager to extol the sex says of her: “It was a marvel, the equal of which has never been known either before or since, and which God wrought in those days for the glory of woman, whom his grace sanctified and his wisdom inspired—that a maiden of sixteen should govern successfully so vast an empire.” Pulcheria reduced the imperial household to a degree of order and decorum more resembling a college than a court; her brother’s masters were all chosen and approved by her, and the utmost respect was paid by her both to the laws and the prelates of the church. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, speaks of her and her reign in these terms: “The imperial council was, through her discernment, composed of the wisest, most virtuous, and most experienced persons in the empire: yet, in deliberations, all of them readily acknowledged the superiority of her judgment and penetration. Her resolutions were the result of the most mature consideration, and she took care herself that all orders should be executed with incredible expedition, though always in the name of her brother, to whom she gave the honor and credit of all she did. She was herself well skilled in Greek and Latin, in history and other useful branches of literature, and was, as every one must be who is endowed with greatness of soul and a just idea of the dignity of the human mind, the declared patroness of the sciences and of both the useful and polite arts. Far from making religion subservient to policy, all her views and projects were regulated by it, and by this the happiness of her government was complete. She prevented by her prudence all revolts which ambition, jealousy, or envy might stir up to disturb the tranquillity of the church or state; she cemented a firm peace with all neighboring powers, and abolished the wretched remains of idolatry in several parts. Never did virtue reign in the oriental empire with greater lustre, never was the state more happy or more flourishing, nor was its name ever more respected even among barbarians, than whilst the reins of the government were in the hands of Pulcheria.” Ventura is not less explicit in praise of this great woman. After mentioning the different studies embraced in the plan of education which Pulcheria had traced for her brother, he says: “In these arrangements, both the subject-matter which was to occupy the young prince’s attention, and the time he was to spend in each occupation, were so judiciously and admirably managed that such a plan of education seemed rather the work of an experienced philosopher than that of a young girl of sixteen.... Theodosius possessed neither a generous soul nor exalted intellect; in fact, his was a nature scarcely above mediocrity. Pulcheria, however, by her enlightened efforts, succeeded in producing unexpected results from so thankless a field of labor.” (Donna Cattolica, vol. ii. pp. 23, 24.) Exiled and disgraced by the machinations of her frivolous sister-in-law, the Empress Eudocia, and the ambitious Chrysaphius, one of the courtiers, she left Constantinople and retired into the country, no more downcast in adversity than she had been elated in prosperity. Eudocia and Chrysaphius, unable to draw St. Flavian, the Patriarch of Constantinople, into their conspiracy against the noble exile, became violent partisans of Eutyches and his new heresy. Between the years 447 and 450 of the Christian era, the condition of the empire was perfectly chaotic; the heresies of the Eutychians, the Nestorians, and the Monothelites disturbed the public peace; morality was forgotten; the court became an assembly of intriguers; Theodosius himself was no longer obeyed at home or respected abroad. St. Leo the Pope, scandalized and grieved at such excesses, wrote to the emperor, the clergy, and the people of Constantinople, but reserved his most remarkable mission for Pulcheria. He says, “If you had received my former letters, you would certainly have already remedied these evils, for you have never failed the Christian faith, nor the clergy her guardians,” and towards the end of his letter he adds: “In the name of the blessed apostle St. Peter, I constitute you my special legate for the advancement of this matter before the emperor.” Referring to this magnificent elogium, the historian Rohrbacher remarks that, “when the Pope writes to the Emperor Theodosius, one would think he was addressing a woman; when, on the contrary, he writes to the ex-empress, one would imagine he was speaking to a man,” upon whose energy he could depend. In 450, the Emperor of the West, Valentinian, and his mother and wife, Placidia and Eudoxia, came to Rome, where the Pope entrusted them with the task of admonishing by letter the weak-minded Theodosius and his heretical followers. Thus was the power of woman and her influence in state affairs recognized and honored by the church from end to end of the Christian world. Pulcheria, urged by the entreaties of all these great and holy personages, boldly went to the court, reproached her brother, and by her firmness opened his eyes and restored peace, orthodoxy and morality in the distracted empire. Her brother’s death in 450 left her, by the universal consent of the people, once more ruler of the vast realm she had already so much benefited. Now again she evinced consummate wisdom in her choice of Marcian, the most renowned soldier and most talented statesman of the empire, to be her husband and fellow-ruler. Under condition of preserving her early vow of perpetual chastity, she admitted him to an entire participation of her life and counsels, and together, with a strong yet gentle hand, they upheld and protected the fathers of the Council of Chalcedon. After three years of a wise and virtuous reign, Pulcheria died, lamented by the thousands of the poor and destitute whom she had never ceased to relieve, and honored by the church as the “guardian of the faith, the peace-maker, the defender of orthodoxy,” as the Chalcedonian fathers expressed it. The historian Gibbon, whose testimony can hardly be deemed interested, has thus outlined the history of her reign: “Her piety did not prevent Pulcheria from indefatigably devoting her attention to the affairs of the state, and indeed this princess was the only descendant of Theodosius the Great who seems to have inherited any part of his high courage and noble genius. She had acquired the familiar use of the Greek and Latin tongues, which she spoke and wrote with ease and grace in her speeches and writings relative to public affairs. Prudence always dictated her resolves. Her execution was prompt and decisive. Managing without ostentation all the intricacies of the government, she discreetly attributed to the talents of the emperor the long tranquillity of his reign. During the last years of his life, Europe was suffering cruelly under the invasion and ravages of Attila, King of the Huns, while peace continued to reign in the vast provinces of Asia.” (History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi. chapter xxxii.)

The holy Pope St. Gregory the Great did not owe less to the influence and friendship of woman than Pope St. Leo. Among his many and remarkable letters, those addressed to the Empress Constantina and the Princess Theoclissa, wife and sister of Maurice, Emperor of the East, are not the least admirable. The emperor being both imbecile and miserly, and of a nature utterly despicable, the only bulwark of orthodoxy against the heretics lay in the strenuous and continued efforts of these two women in favor of the church. When Phocus, a general of Maurice, freed the indignant empire from its supine and debased ruler, his wife the Empress Leontia took the place of the former princesses, and continued their work of protecting the faith of the Councils. In the West, where the Lombards were successfully laying the foundation of the future power they were destined to wield, it was chiefly to a woman that Gregory the Great looked to defend the interests of religion, and saw among these half-reclaimed barbarians the seeds of Christian chivalry. Theodolinda was his pupil and correspondent, and by her care the future King of the Lombards, Adoloaldus, was baptized and brought up a Christian. In the matter of the great expedition which resulted in the final conversion of England, the same Pope testifies by his letters that Bertha, the wife of King Ethelbert, and Brunehault, Queen of the Franks, were chiefly instrumental in aiding and countenancing St. Augustine in his mission. He says to Brunehault: “We are not ignorant of the help you have afforded our brother Augustine.... It must be a source of great rejoicing to you that no one has had a greater share in this work than yourself. For, if that nation [the Saxons] has had the blessing of hearing the Word of God and the preaching of the Gospel, it is to you, under God, that they owe it.”

The throne of Constantinople was to be honored yet by another sainted empress, the worthy successor of Pulcheria, and, like her, an able ally of the Pope and the orthodox patriarch of her own capital. Once more, through the vices and indifference of men, a heresy had arisen and flourished, the heresy of the Iconoclasts. Great persecution had been suffered by the faithful, during the reign of Leo, the husband of our heroine Irene, and the new heretics, had completely triumphed. At his death, his widow became regent for her young son. The clergy, the nobility, and especially the army, were arrayed on the side of the Iconoclasts. Irene was as prudent in action as she was zealous in heart. The persecutions against the followers of the Pope were first merely suspended, thought and speech were once more free, and gradually a reaction began to take place. The patriarchal see of Constantinople becoming vacant by the death of Paul, the finally repentant abettor of the unhappy heresy, it was Irene who proposed the election of Tarasius, the most popular, most pious, and most talented man among her subjects. He, too, was the product of a wise and holy woman’s training, and the name of his mother, Eucratia, is among the saints. Having thus paved the way, the empress wrote to Pope Adrian about the year 786, and begged him to assemble a general council to further the interests of religion and cement the peace of Christendom. The council, which was the second of Nicea, took place according to this suggestion, upon which the Pope, through his legates, formally congratulated the empress. The utmost success having attended the sittings of the council, and the faith having been triumphantly vindicated against the Iconoclasts and their errors, the empress sent to entreat the assembled fathers to hold one final and ceremonial sitting in Constantinople itself. She procured an efficient guard among the orthodox cohorts of the imperial army, and prepared an immense hall in the palace for the gathering of the council. Ventura describes the scene thus: “The Pope’s legates waived their right of precedence in favor of Irene, and the astonishing spectacle was seen of a woman, accompanied by a child twelve years old (her son), presiding over one of the most august assemblies of the church. The sitting was opened by a discourse by the empress, in which she spoke, both in her son’s name and in her own, with so much eloquence, warmth, and grace, that the greatest emotion was manifested throughout the assembly; tears of joy flowed from the eyes of all present, and the last words of Irene were followed by the most heartfelt acclamations.... The enthusiasm was at its height, when, in the assembly and also to the people without, the decree or definition of faith made by the council was read, and the empress claimed her right to be the first to sign it.... It must never be forgotten that this great council, as well as its consequences, which put an end to a great heresy and restored Catholicism in the East, was the thought and work of a woman, and that it was a woman-sovereign (un empereur-femme) who alone by her discreet and courageous zeal knew how to blot out and destroy the scandals caused by three men-sovereigns and even a great number of bishops themselves.” (Donna Cattolica, vol. ii. pp. 55, 56.)

Before the Empire of the East became totally degraded, another sovereign, another woman, lent it the glory of her reputation. The Iconoclasts, profiting by the treacherous support of succeeding emperors, again renewed their hostilities against orthodoxy, but were speedily checked once more by a brave Christian woman, the Empress Theodosia, widow of Theophilus, and of whom Rohrbacher says: “If in the West the temporal sovereigns were insignificant, in the East they were detestable. There was but one exception, and that was a woman, the Empress St. Theodosia. She began her reign after the death of her unworthy husband—whom she had succeeded, however, in converting on his death-bed—by threatening the heretical patriarch, Lecanomantes, with the condemnation of the coming council unless he consented to vacate his see and renounce his errors. He refused, and the council assembled within the walls of the imperial palace. The Iconoclast heresy was again solemnly denounced, and the previous Council of Nicea confirmed. For the countenance and protection afforded by her to the church, the empress only asked as a reward that the prelates should pray for the forgiveness of the sin of heresy which her husband had committed. Theodosia celebrated this new victory of the church with becoming solemnity, and instituted in its honor a festival, which is observed to this day under the name of the ‘festival of orthodoxy.’ When Methodius, the holy Patriarch of Constantinople, died, she replaced him by St. Ignatius, the friend of the Pope, St. Nicholas I. She made peace with the Bulgarians, whom the Pope was interested in converting to the faith, and seconded his efforts by procuring the conversion of the captive Bulgarian princess, sister to King Bogoris, whom she afterward freed and sent back to her brother. This princess became the Clotildis of her people, and, together with Formosus, the Pope’s legate, and St. Cyril, Theodosia’s envoy, effected the conversion of the whole Bulgarian nation in 861.”

Other Danubian tribes also owed their conversion to Theodosia; she sent missionaries to the Khazars and the Moravians, whose chief specially addressed himself to her for instruction. Her son Michael, when he came to the throne, renewed the horrors of the pagan empire of Caligula and Domitian, persecuted his mother and sisters, exiled and deposed the Patriarch Ignatius, and put the heretic Photius into his place. One of his captains, Basil, put a violent end to his infamous reign, and, though inexcusable in the eyes of the ecclesiastical law, yet redeemed his act by the utmost deference to Theodosia and devotion to religion. The empire breathed again, and Theodosia’s counsels procured another general assembly of the church at Constantinople, when Photius was condemned and the rightful patriarch reinstated in his authority. After the death of the empress, the heresy of Photius revived and spread, and, schism becoming more or less general, the empire began to degenerate, until its very name, the “Lower Empire,” became a synonym for all degradation and hopeless ruin. Ventura, who says truly that real sanctity is impossible in the bosom of voluntary schism, attributes the degeneracy of the Empire of the East to the want of strong and generous women, such as those whom we have briefly sketched in this article, and asserts that the very accumulation of evils which this scarcity of holy women has heaped upon the church during some of the darkest periods of her history, is in itself a proof of the paramount importance of woman in the work of the propagation and protection of true religion.

We are now close upon the mediæval times, when the glory of the sex shone forth again in the West, and counted as many champions as there were kingdoms to convert, universities to endow, courts to reform, and infidel powers to overthrow. The influence of woman began to be recognized in society as it had always been in the church; chivalry taught men to place the honor of woman next in their estimation to faith in God, and equal with loyalty to their king and patriotism to their country. We can find no more beautiful, no more Catholic, expression of this sovereignty of woman’s pure and ennobling influence, as consecrated by the church’s approbation, and guarded by all that is noblest and most generous in man, than the following extract from a modern poet, whose inspiration, like that of all true artists, is drawn perforce from the legends of Catholic antiquity. The poet of the Holy Grail is also the poet of woman; the legends of the deeds of the prowess of knights, whose names are perchance but myths as to actual history, but nevertheless are human types of the exalted ideal of the old Catholic days, are inevitably mingled with legends of the vows of holy chastity, and the pure and stainless lives of many of those renowned heroes of the field and tournament. Let the following serve as an introduction to our next article, which will treat chiefly of the great women of the Middle Ages:

“For when the Roman left us, and their law
Relaxed its hold upon us, and the ways
Were filled with rapine, here and there a deed
Of prowess done redressed a random wrong.
But I was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their head,
In that fair Order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.
I made them lay their hands in mine, and swear
To reverence the king as if he were
Their conscience and their conscience as their king,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad, redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
And all this throve.... I wedded thee,
Believing, lo! mine helpmate, one to feel
My purpose, and rejoicing in my joy.”

Tennyson, Idylls of the King.

---

DEVOTA.

Sweet image of the one I love,
To whom your infant years were given
(And still the faithful colors[61] prove
A constancy not all in heaven):

To me a violet near a brink,
Far-hidden from the beaten way,
And where but rarest flowerets drink
A freshness from the ripples’ play:

A lily in a vale of rest,
And where the angels know a nook
But one shy form has ever prest—
A poet with a poet’s book.

But poet’s book has never said
What I, O lily, find in you:
’Twas never writ and never read,
Though always old and always new.

And ah, that you must change and go—
The violet fade, the lily die!
Let others joy to watch you grow;
Let others smile: so will not I.

Yet smile I should. Is heaven a dream?
In sooth, he needs to be forgiven
Who matches with the things that seem
A deathless flower, that blooms for heaven.

And while he mourns the onward years
That sweep you from the things that seem,
Let faith make sunshine on his tears:
’Tis heaven is real, and earth the dream.

---

THE CARESSES OF PROVIDENCE.
FROM LA CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

Very recently, the Liberal Italian party, finding that their Catholic opponents were in no wise damaged by arguments drawn from a denial of God’s concern in human affairs, has changed its tactics, and proposes now to convert us clericals by appeals to our religious sensibilities. We are assaulted by a theological attack ad hominem, which they tell us is so conclusive that, if we do not acknowledge ourselves beaten, it is because we have lost our reason and renounced the faith.

“You believe,” say they, “in the providence of God. You recognize his hand in all the events of life, and you profess to bless and bow to the divine decrees. Well, then, Providence, you perceive, has smiled graciously on us and on our work—a work which you execrate and detest. Providence is plainly on our side. He declares himself for us and against you. Submit, then, to his decrees. Lay aside this idle expectation of the triumph of your cause, which is evidently opposed to the holy will of God. Accept accomplished facts. Reconcile yourselves with Italy, our glorious new kingdom, and cease, amid your noisy professions of religion, to rebel against the will of the Most High.”

Such in its naked substance is the argument to which the Liberals now exultingly resort; more especially since the breach of Porta Pia and the successful picking of the locks of the Quirinal. They hope in this way to convict us of apostasy from the faith, and (what they deem still more atrocious) of an unpardonable outrage against the laws of “the human understanding.”

“It seems incredible,” they go on to say, “that, after such positive proofs of a special protection vouchsafed by Providence to regenerate Italy, the clerical party should cling so stubbornly to the hope of a resuscitation of the past—a past which, were it not already irrevocably condemned by the logic of events, would be condemned by their own theory of an all-seeing and all-wise God.” This is the language in which the Jewish journal L’Opinione, after taking Roman ground at the close of the year just elapsed, expressed this very formidable argument. They had already uttered it some hundred times before. Many sheets of less importance had got up an industrious echo to this cry; and one in particular, a petty Florentine print, undertakes to celebrate the new year by magnifying “the caresses of Providence” bestowed upon the little darling angel, Italy, born, as everybody knows, of the wonderful shrewdness of the Italian people and their undying love of liberty—a liberty, by the way, which never fails to exemplify itself by a free and strenuous appropriation of a weaker neighbor’s earthly goods. Strange indeed it is that men, who never were known as professed believers in any other divinity than Mammon, should now, after having derided for years, and with every mark of blasphemous scorn, “the finger of God,” suddenly assume the office of apostles of a new idea of Christian Providence. Strange it is that only now, after the plunder of a city gained by battering down walls and picking locks with forged keys—that these men, we say, should chant the praises of the God they had defied, and defend his holy decrees against the “scandalous negations” of the Catholic Church. Strangest is it of all, that the prince of these extraordinary apostles should be no other than the so-called Jew proprietor of the Opinione—who is not even a Jew; for he has always shown that he believes as little of the Old Testament as he does of the New.

But—

“To what infamies untold
Hast thou man’s nature not controlled,
Thou execrable greed of gold!”

Solid or not, this argumentum ad hominem has for a certain class of minds an air of great plausibility. At all events, it might be well to look into it a little; for we may thereby throw some light upon several important truths which nowadays need special illumination. We let in the argument, therefore, as the new Jewish and infidel philosophers present it; and we propose to give them, in a nutshell, the proper answer to it. They will then understand why Catholics not only refuse to surrender to this showing, but, on the contrary, see in it reason to stand firm to their first faith, and to cherish unceasing hopes of the speedy triumph of their cause.

Yes, gentlemen, we Catholics believe, with all our heart and soul, in the holy providence of God. In this Providence we recognize the origin and order of all created things. We make it indeed our glory that we bless and humbly worship its adorable decrees. We confess, therefore, without reserve, that what you choose to call its “loving caresses” are really yours by divine appointment; and the very decree which to you is the source of so much joy, and to us of so much mourning, we adore as the undoubted manifestation of his most holy will. All this we freely admit as truth, as unquestionable, unanswerable truth. But while, in these explicit terms, we confess this Catholic verity, we deny, in equally explicit terms, that what you choose to call “caresses” are in any sense such to you, or that the palpable proofs of that “special protection” of which you make so vain a boast are proofs of anything but the very opposite; nay, so false is it, that the caresses you claim are marks of divine approval, that the very assertion is a blasphemy most insulting to the sovereign providence of God. To prove these propositions is an easy thing to any one who knows his catechism; and the understanding of them easier still to any one who believes as well as knows. To him who either does not know his Christian primer, or, knowing it, will not believe, they may seem incapable of either proof or comprehension. Should such a case present itself, the fault is certainly not ours. A poet tells us that:

“Of winds the sailor ever loves to speak,
Of arms the soldier, and the boor of swine;
The astronomer, of planet, moon, and stars;
Of palaces and piers, the architect;
The juggling necromancer prates of ghosts,
And the old harper of his well thrummed strains.”

If so, why is it that this Jew, instead of sticking like a worthy Hebrew to his stock-list, takes to teaching us the Christian catechism? And why is it that this worshipper of Voltaire, instead of chanting hymns to Venus, reads us a lecture on what he knows about the purposes of God? Sutor ne ultra crepidam.

Nevertheless, we proceed to explain the propositions advanced above.

Catholics acknowledge that every event, be it favorable or unfavorable to their prayers, is consistent with the providence of God. To Providence they refer evil as well as good, with this difference, that good and unblamable evil they ascribe to the decrees of his sovereign direction, but blamable evil they ascribe to his permissive decree. In a word, they believe and confess that God wills positively all that comes to pass without taint of moral evil, and wills negatively (that is, he does not preclude) what comes to pass so tainted by cause of man’s abuse of his free-will. They nevertheless hold and profess that whatever evil he permits, that also is ordained to good; so that nothing enters into those most just and wise decrees that does not aim effectively at the final design of the creation and redemption of mankind; which design in this life is the church militant, and, in the next, the church triumphant, the central point of his extrinsic glorification.

The reason, then, that Catholics hold and profess that God does not and cannot decree, otherwise than permissively, moral evil—that is, disobedience, injustice, or briefly sin—is that he neither participates nor can participate in evil of this nature which is essentially opposed to his infinite sanctity. He would, in fact, participate therein if he willed it positively and not merely negatively; whereas, permitting it only, he in no wise participates, though he allows man, whom he had created free, to make an evil use of the gift of liberty. He does not hinder him, because neither is he so obliged, nor can the divine hindrance of human freedom be exacted by the nature of man left free. With all this, God is in no wise the less able to secure for himself, always and in every case and from every human being, the external glory which he reserved to himself when he created man. Because, he who shall not glorify in heaven an infinite mercy granted to the good use of the free-will, shall glorify in hell an infinite justice merited by the abuse of this same free-will. Hence the Almighty will not be shorn of the least shadow of that glory, for which, among other things, he drew man out of the abyss of nothingness.

Catholics, moreover, believe and confess that the effects of moral evil are invariably directed by Almighty God to the good of mankind. They serve to punish in order to amend, or else to exercise in order to confirm. St. Augustine remarks, with his usual perspicacity, that the life of a bad man is often prolonged not only to afford an opportunity for his amendment, but to serve as an occasion of sanctification to the good. Ne putetis gratis esse malos in hoc mundo, et nihil boni de eis agere Deum. Omnis malus aut ideo vivit ut corrigatur, aut ideo vivit ut per illum bonus exerceatur.[62]

Hence it is that Catholics, in all emergencies, even in the most calamitous, nay, even in those caused by the worst iniquities of unscrupulous men, do not fail to adore the goodness and justice of Almighty God, and to acknowledge the inscrutable dispositions of his most holy will. But they never think of imputing to him the sins and transgressions of the wicked. These he neither wills nor is he capable of willing them. He permits them only as subserving his mercy or his justice.

It follows, then, that, in order to decide whether the easy successes of certain definite transactions are successes due to divine approbation, and palpable proofs of his gracious protection, or whether rather they are not facilities that Providence permits for the punishment of the wicked and for the chastening of the virtuously minded, it is essential to see first whether these definite acts are right or wrong, meritorious or sinful; that is, conformable or unconformable to the law of eternal justice, and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, certain it is that in those transactions which the enemies of Christ regard as sanctioned by the manifest “caresses” of Almighty God, Catholic Christians see nothing but acts of iniquity and sin; and accordingly, while they accept them as permitted by God for reasons and results full of justice and mercy, they nevertheless esteem it the height of blasphemy to look upon such outrages, however successful for the moment, as “caresses” bestowed by Providence upon the very men who at other times deny his existence or treat his word with open scorn and contempt.

We have thus, as briefly and as lucidly as we could, and with the Christian catechism for our guide, explained to these Jews who are no Jews, and to these philosophers who are no philosophers, the sense of the propositions we affirm.

Perhaps they will now require of us to prove that the acts referred to are acts of iniquity and sin. This is very much like asking us to prove that the sun is shining, when it is evidently blazing at mid-day. We let pass that the highest authority on earth has pronounced, again and again, that the acts are simply acts most sinful and sacrilegious. We let pass that the concurrent testimony of all minds endowed with natural rectitude of judgment (not excluding Protestants nor Israelites nor Turks) has confirmed and reconfirmed the condemnations spoken already by Pope, by church, and by the entire Catholic world. It is enough that the authors and prime movers of these outrages proclaimed and stamped them as dishonorable and base before they perpetrated them, and even in the very act of their perpetration. Can these apostolic gentlemen, now so anxious for the conversion of the Catholic Church, be ignorant, for instance, that two of the Subalpine ministry, Visconti-Venosta and Lanza, declared the invasion of Rome and the usurpation of the Papal power acts of barbarism destitute of every semblance of right? And are they not aware that they so avouched just one short month before both invasion and usurpation were consummated by burglary and breach?

Who can hope, then, to persuade a Catholic that these successful shells, pick-locks, and jimmies have not been instruments of the most iniquitous wrong-doing, seeing that these two men, in the face of heaven and earth, averred its baseness themselves only a few weeks before the formal consummation of the act? Perhaps, too, our converters have never heard how their divine Camillo Cavour said one day to their other divine Massimo d’Azeglio, who has recorded it ad perpetuam rei memoriam: “If what we are doing for Italy, you and I had done for ourselves, what a precious pair of big balossi we should have been!” The Opinione knows too well the sense of the Subalpine word balosso that we should put it into good Italian. The editor and his pharisaical colleagues have learned, no doubt, the lovely dialect of the northern masters they have chosen for Italy and for themselves. They can teach us, we dare say, the full force of this fine word balosso; that it means all that is contained in the words scamp, scoundrel, robber, rascal, villain, ruffian, knave. Can Catholics, then, be easily persuaded that the facts accomplished by Azeglio and Cavour for the regeneration of Italy have been free from sin and iniquity, seeing that these two divines have stigmatized them as the acts of men bad enough to be balossi? For be it observed that Azeglio himself admits that what is criminal in private life is no less criminal in public;[63] showing (though we are losing time in the attempt to throw light upon the sun) that our apostolic friends, in order to justify the accomplished facts resorted to for Italy’s new birth, have been obliged to invent a modern social law the converse of the ancient one ordained by God himself.

If this be admitted, what can prove more incontestably that the acts complained of were acts of sin and iniquity; sin being any act contrary to God’s commands, and iniquity an act opposed to the justice he enjoins?

But Catholics may go further, and say to the apostles of our conversion that not only are the means used for the regeneration of Italy sinful and iniquitous, but that the end itself aimed at by the ringleaders of this pretended regeneration is absolutely antichristian and diabolical, being nothing less than the demolition of the Catholic Church and the annihilation of the kingdom of God among men. Of course, the end is simply absurd, and rendered impossible by the excess of its absurdity. But nevertheless, though it cannot exist as a thing attainable, it does exist as a thing conceivable, and as such inspires the mad career of Masonry, which pursues it with satanic rage and open ostentation as the main objective point of the machinations of the sect.

Mazzini, to whom the regenerators are indebted for their grand idea, aimed as far ago as 1834 at the abolition of the temporal power, without regard to cost. His argument was that the downfall of this power carried with it, as a necessary consequence, the emancipation of the human race from the thraldom of the spiritual power. “The Vicars of Christ” he called “Vicars of the Spirit of Evil, to be exterminated, never to be restored.”[64] Visconti-Venosta, a member of the present Italian cabinet, wrote to Mazzini, in 1851, that the rallying-cry of the regeneration should be, “Down with the Monarchy, down with the Papacy.”[65]

Ferrari, the philosopher of the movement, proclaimed in 1853 that the end it proposed was the stamping out of Pope and Emperor, of Christ and Cæsar; the four tyrannies that Machiavelli had delivered over to Italian hate.[66]

To make this matter short, though we might go on for ever, the more rabid partisans of the regeneration do not blush to say that the essential end of the great Italian movement is the emancipation of human consciences from the authority of the church, by laying prostrate the colossus against whom Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. ineffectually strove. They aim, in a word, at the radical destruction of the entire Catholic Church; to which end, nationality, unity, political liberty itself, were always to be regarded as nothing more than the means.[67]

These preliminaries being understood, our free-thinking friends ought to see that their argument, derived from what they call “providential protection” to their sacrilegious acts, strikes the Catholic mind as a shocking blasphemy, because it makes our blessed Lord an accomplice in detestable transactions, and an instigator to the worst of crimes—a deliberate plotter, in short, of the ruin of that church which is the masterpiece of his wisdom, and the object of his infinite love. We have no objections to their saying that the anger of God has unchained their barbarous allies, and for a time has left them free to do their worst against the children of the church. They may say all this, and Catholics will assent and even approve—not the animus, but the words. They will exclaim with St. Jerome of old, when the barbarians of that day were making havoc of the things of God: Peccatis nostris barbari fortes sunt[68]—“In our sins the barbarians are strong.” But let them not venture to say that Almighty God, because he allows them a fatal facility of blasphemous impiety, protects and even caresses this impiety. For religious men will answer them: Yes, he protects and caresses you, as he protected and caressed the crucifiers of his only-begotten Son.

And here we entreat the Israelitish editor of the Opinione to pay strict attention to what we have to say, inasmuch as it concerns him in his nationality; since he is an Israelite by nature and nation, and Italian only by the place of his accidental birth.

The synagogue, sustained by the coalition of Pharisees and Sadducees, undertook to regenerate Judea by taking the life of Jesus, Son of God, true God and true Man. The great sin of Jesus Christ in the eyes of the synagogue was similar to that of the church of Jesus in the eyes of the Masonic Order. He was the Son of God and the Word of Truth, as the church is his spouse and the organ of the truth.

But there stood many obstacles in the way of compassing his death. First, there needed a lawful sanction, and there was none. Secondly, it was necessary to take him captive, a very dangerous undertaking, for he was always surrounded by throngs of devoted followers and friends. Thirdly, it was necessary to keep the people in good humor, or, as Jesus was their principal benefactor, they might rebel against this public execution. Fourthly, it was necessary to ascertain that the Romans, who had cognizance of capital cases in Palestine, would connive at his trial for life and at his sentence to death. Fifthly, they had to risk the display of his miraculous power, for his miracles surpassed all that had ever been seen in Israel. It must be admitted that these difficulties were very formidable. Yet what happened? Everything was made easy. The sanction of law was found in a tissue of lies and political misindictments, successful beyond all expectation. His capture proved the easiest imaginable, through the unexpected treachery of one of his own disciples, who sold him for a bauble. The populace was led with wonderful facility not only not to rise to his rescue, but in a solemn plébiscite to save the robber Barabbas at his expense, and to sentence him to an ignominious death. The Romans made some show, through Pilate, in his defence; but after five times declaring him innocent of every charge, condemned him to the cross, following the will of the synagogue to the last; and finally Jesus, though challenged with insult to the exercise of his supernatural powers, abstained mysteriously from their use, and did nothing to withdraw himself from torture or death. Could any greater facility of consummation be imagined than was here shown in the accomplishment of this tremendous deicidal act? But will our Israelitish apostle have the heart to undertake to win over Italian Catholics to the belief that the wonderful success of the crucifixion (permitted, as it undeniably was) is to be construed as a caress bestowed by Providence upon a corrupt and apostate synagogue, and as a palpable and unmistakable proof of his protection of the bloody and treacherous council that sentenced him to death?

Between the Jewish sacrilege directed against the adorable Person of the Incarnate Word, and the Italian sacrilege against the Vicar of that Word, there is but this distinction: that the Person aimed at in the former was God present in his human nature, and the Person aimed at in the latter was God present in his church.

In the days of Pontius Pilate and Caiphas, the Jews slew the material body of our Blessed Lord: the latter-day Jews, in these days of Lanza and Visconti-Venosta, would, if they could, slay the Spiritual Body of the same Jesus Christ. And do you dare, wretched Pharisees, to ask of us Catholic believers to recognize in the facilities that have attended until now this monstrous sacrilege of yours, this second deicidal act, the smiles of an approving Providence, and the marks of a divine protection accorded to the prompt success of your heaven-defying crime?

The capital error of the gross and impious sophism now the subject of our comment, consists evidently in the assumption that easy and unexpected success (in operations ordinarily of a very arduous character) is a sure note of the divine approval, even when the accomplished facts are manifest breaches of the Decalogue.

A proposition of this sort, if it had the least value, would serve to sanction any atrocity, however monstrous, provided it were only successfully and rapidly achieved.

Such wretches as Passatori, Ninco Nanchi, Carusi, and Troppmann ought in this view to be regarded as protected and caressed by Divine Providence. Every prosperous villain would only have to quote to his judges the argument of the Opinione to conciliate their approbation, and to obtain from them not only an acquittal, but an honorable testimonial in high praise of these favorites of heaven.

True it is, however, that a striking and brilliant success dazzles the judgment of men without faith, or of men with faith as sensual as their flesh.

We Catholics, on the contrary, are rich in the possession of a divine promise which keeps us cheerful and buoyant with hope in the face of what seems like the final triumph of the wicked. And this is more especially true when we have to deal with those who plot against the church and its visible Head, adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus. Nobody that we know of has set this promise in a truer light than P. Paul Segneri, and we take the liberty to transcribe here for our readers two or three passages of his, which are just so much gold to the purpose we have in view.

“‘The prosperity of fools,’ says Solomon, ‘shall destroy them.’ He does not say ‘destroys them,’ but ‘shall destroy them.’ Why so? Because the prosperity of the wicked does not always produce immediately its disastrous effects. Sometimes the reverse comes after long delay. Wait patiently. You will see the end of what seems to begin so well. Have you never read in the Book of Job how that the Almighty takes pleasure in defeating the machinations of the impious? He brings their counsellors to a foolish end.” Not to a bad beginning. No; all seems prosperous at first. It is the end that is disastrous. He lets them raise aloft their mighty tower of Babel. But afterwards, in the confusion of their pride, they disperse and are gone. He lets them build up the beautiful towers of Siloe; but these fall, and the builders are buried beneath the ruins. For want of this reflection, many men wonder at the prosperity of the wicked. Even the prophets themselves address God sometimes with tender reproaches. They almost accuse him, I might say. We are apt to look too much at the beginning of things, and not, like holy David, at the end. Donec intelligam in novissimis eorum. As much as to say, they are so taken up with gazing upon the comely golden head of their tall Babylonian colossus, that they have not thought of lowering their eyes to see its brittle legs of clay. Now hear me, and witness the establishment of the truth. If ever since the birth of Christ there was a race of men who rose by unscrupulous arts to enormous wealth and power, it was doubtless the Greek emperors, tyrants as they may well be called. Now answer me, Have there ever existed empires which have furnished subjects for tragedy more truly horrible than theirs?

“Nicephorus succeeded at first by the employment of dishonest means to usurp the imperial power, driving away the right inheritress, Irene. What then? Crushed by a series of misfortunes, he began to look upon himself as a modern Pharaoh, hardened by defeats. Finally, vanquished and slain by the Bulgarians, his enemies made a drinking-cup of his skull, and out of joy or derision used it as such in the diversions of the camp. Stauratius by illegitimate alliances, and Leo the Armenian by repeated high-handed rebellions, succeeded in establishing themselves in the height of power. How long was it before these two men died under the blows of the assassin, the former in war, and the latter at the altar he had profaned? Michael the Stammerer was so fortunate as to step, in his famous conspiracy, from the dungeon to the throne; demanding there the worship of his subjects, the chain still on his neck and the fetters on his feet. Intoxicated by his success, he compelled a holy virgin to share his bed. All Sclavonia revolted, his entire army deserted him; nor yet repenting, he was literally devoured by a malady the most disgusting. Theophilus was successful in suppressing, for reasons of state, the veneration of sacred images; but almost immediately after, on being shamefully defeated by the Saracens, died of rage and intense mortification. Michael III., regarded as another Nero on account of his licentiousness and cruelty, succeeded so far as to put his mother and guardians out of the way, in order to reign without opposition or control. He ended his ‘prosperous’ career by kindling against himself the hatred of his subjects, and encountered rebellion after rebellion, in the last of which, in the midst of a drunken debauch, he paid the forfeit of his life. Alexander attained a sort of success in plundering the holy altars, and in appropriating the gold thus obtained to his own private use; but very soon thereafter he was seized with a sudden madness, and he had not held out a year when he ended his life in a fearful vomiting of blood. What shall I say of Romanus I.? He too was successful to all appearance; for, by a stratagem of wonderful adroitness, he expelled the legitimate possessor from the patriarchal see of Constantinople, and placed in it a mere child, his own son. The year following he himself was driven from the imperial throne by another son, and banished to a lonely isle for life. So also fared it with Romanus II. Impelled by the lust of dominion, he took the life of his own father by poison. His own life was taken very shortly after, and by the self-same means. Michael Paphlagonius, by infamous devices, carried his point of usurping the throne. Seized suddenly with demoniacal obsession, he could obtain no repose. Exorcisms and almsgivings were tried in vain. He died as he lived, with his agony unrelieved. Michael Calaphates was ‘successful’ in driving the empress into exile, that he might reign alone; but the people rose against him at once, stoned him, deprived him of sight, and dragged him through the city streets more dead than alive. Diogenes and Andronicus, two usurpers who had ‘succeeded’ in their treason, one by a courtesan’s vile aid, the other by the arm of an assassin, came to the same lamentable end.

“Now answer me! Can you look upon as truly successful the wicked arts which brought these bad men to power? Speak out! Would you be willing to enjoy their ‘prosperity’ if with it you had to accept its reverse? Is there any one so stupid as to envy their short-lived ‘good luck’? Rest assured that such has ever been the fate of those who attain for a time their unhallowed ends by iniquitous means. ‘The prosperity of fools will destroy them.’ Doubt it not, my friends. The prosperity of fools will most assuredly destroy them. It is hardly worth while to labor longer in the proof. All writings, all ages, all powers, attest in unison this truth, that ‘Justice exalteth a nation’; and this other, that ‘Injustice leadeth a nation to misery and ruin.’ These are the words of one who was the wisest among men; and elsewhere he says, ‘Man shall not be strengthened by wickedness’; and, again, ‘The unjust shall be caught in their own snares’; and then, again, ‘They who sow iniquity shall reap destruction.’”

Thus, by examples drawn from the annals of the Byzantines (a race dear to our modern liberals), the eloquent Segneri points out the end which, according to Holy Writ, awaits the criminal successes of the wicked. If he had chosen to embrace a wider range of history, he might have compiled an endless catalogue of examples the most frightful; commencing with the dreadful success of the crucifixion of our ever blessed Lord, of which the sequel was as dreadful a retribution. The synagogue nailed the Messiah to the cross, under the pretext that otherwise the Romans would come and occupy Jerusalem. And precisely because they did this wicked thing, the Romans took Jerusalem and levelled it to the ground. So that the very success of the Jews, which, execrable as it was, the Opinione would have adored as a protecting caress bestowed by Providence upon Sion, ended simply in bringing upon the guilty city a horrible siege and irremediable ruin.

We content ourselves, for our part, in citing the Roman Cæsars, who, in the first three centuries, renewed ten different times, and with all the incidents of success, the bloody persecution of the followers of Christ. All of these, without a single exception, came to a wretched end. When the fourth century arrived to witness the triumph of Christianity, the descendants of the persecuting emperors were found extinct by foul or violent deaths; the series closing with Maximin breathing his last amid the agonies of poison and the blasphemous howlings of despair, and with Candidianus (the adulterous son of Galerius, adopted by Valeria, Maximin’s wife) murdered by Licinius along with another brother, a sister in tender age, and finally Valeria herself. It thus appears that the massacre of the Christians, which our modern Caiphases would have celebrated as an edifying “divine caress,” had this one effect after all, viz., to bring around the lasting triumph of the persecuted cause. It was the children of the slaughtered ones who were victorious in the end; the progeny of the slaughterers died suffocated in the blood which their guilty fathers had shed.

We might easily continue these examples, and recount, for instance, the end to which a career of successful iniquity at last conducted Julian the Apostate, the idol and exemplar of our Italian regenerators. We might enlarge on the fates of Astolphus and Desiderius, whose “patriotism” they so much admire. We might with still more force bring out contemporary cases, the case of Cavour, for example, withdrawn suddenly away by an ominous death in the flower of life from the hosannas of the people he had misled; the case of Farini, Cavour’s right-hand man, struck also in life’s prime by a shocking frenzy which urged him to acts incredibly revolting, and soon after to a most painful death; the case of Fanti, the plunderer of Umbria, who, before he could die, was tortured for a year with all the agonies of death; the case of Persano, the bombarder of Ancona, who, after making shipwreck on the sea of Lissa of his rank and reputation, avenged himself of fortune by publishing the infamies of the successful revolution. And to these we might add the cases of Pinelli, of Valerio, of La Farina, and of a hundred others equally conclusive. We might even quote examples among the living; of a certain regenerator, who, in spite of his impious successes, roams incessantly from place to place seeking a rest he cannot find—condemned, it would seem, to endure the torments of Caina, Antenora, and Ptolomea in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, and to realize in himself the fate described by Alberigo:

“This boon the sufferer hath, if boon it be—
Ofttimes to know the pangs of parting breath,
Ere Atropos shuts down the shears of death.”

To be brief, we shall confine ourselves to the two most distinguished and most successful persecutors of popes—Frederick II., a mediæval emperor of Germany, and Napoleon the First, a French emperor of the modern sort. Both of these men, in the studied outrages they inflicted, the one upon Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., the other on Pius VII., were encouraged by such marvellous successes that our Israelitish proselytizer would have had them canonized as the very Benjamins of Providence. Suffice it to say that Frederick II. had his political Cæsarism preached into right divine by the most learned jurists of his day, just as Napoleon I. made the most powerful monarchy of Europe kneel down and adore his bloodier Cæsarism of the sword. Both the one and the other returning from their triumphs, carried fortune, to all appearance, chained for ever to their cars. The more they raged against Christ’s Vicar, the more their victory seemed complete. The greater the number of excommunications they incurred, the easier seemed to be their subsequent encroachments. It was after the last papal censure that Frederick gained the adhesion of several powerful barons in Rome. It was after the Pope’s worst imprisonment that Napoleon won his greatest battles, making them the subjects of the most vainglorious boasts, that he had thus received from the God of armies special marks of approbation—“caresses,” as the Opinione calls them, when bestowed upon the enemies of the church.

Yet where did they end, these lucky sacrileges, this prodigious and prolonged prosperity of crime? Both these men outlived their glittering fortunes. The false magnificence and grandeur for which they had thrown away their souls, turned to ashes in their grasp.

King Henry, Frederick’s eldest son, dies in prison, leaving a son who was struck dead by a blow from an unknown hand. Enzio, his bastard offspring, created by him King of Sardinia, after twenty-five years of imprisonment in a cage of iron dies a miserable death. Ezzelino, his son-in-law closes with a horrible end a life, if possible, of greater horror. His great champion, Thaddeus of Suessa, is slain with every accompaniment of contempt. Pier delle Vigne, his evil genius, has his eyes thrust out, and commits suicide in his despair. Frederick himself, after surviving all these horrors, is strangled by Manfredi, another of his base-born sons, who, after bathing his gory hands in the blood of Conrad, Frederick’s lawful son, is himself stretched dead on the field of a dishonorable strife. To close this interminable tragedy, Corradino, the last scion of the hated tyrant, ends on a felon’s scaffold his seventeen short years of life. With this unfortunate youth the dynasty of Frederick is closed. The empire passes over into other hands, and Rodolph of Hapsburg reigns, the first of a better line.

The fall of Napoleon I. is still remembered as an event of recent date. Elated with his continual victories, he invaded Russia with the most formidable army the world ever saw. Warned that he had the fate of the excommunicated to encounter, he asked in scorn whether his soldiers would drop their muskets at the sight of a Papal Bull. Forced to retreat after a show of vain success, famine and frost decimated his ranks, and his soldiers’ frozen fingers refused to hold the interdicted arms. Unable to contend against fast-increasing numbers, he found himself by a strange fatality compelled to renounce the crown in the very palace at Fontainebleau which he had turned into a prison for the Pope. The Holy Father had quitted it to resume the throne. The fallen emperor left it to accept in Elba an asylum which he begged as a shelter in his friendless old age. Leaving his place of refuge, in a mad attempt to resuscitate his fortunes, he incurred at Waterloo a ruin the most disastrous ever known. Stripped of every resource, he was dragged to a prison-cell on a miserable island, scarcely noticeable in its vast expanse of sea. From this inhospitable rock, he was permitted to contemplate the plenary restoration of the mysterious Papal power, and simultaneously the downfall of all the thrones he had presented to his brothers and next of kin. After spending, in desolate captivity, the five years he had decreed of prison to the blameless Pius VII., he gave up his tortured soul to meet the just displeasure of his God. What more striking confirmation can we ask of the truth of those awful words, “They who sow injustice” sooner or later “shall reap its bitter fruits”?

It would not do to pass without notice the still living and speaking case of Napoleon III. Who but he has been the foremost leader of the regenerators of unhappy Italy? The Gog and Magog of our Italian pharisees! And are not these the men who fell down and worshipped the divine prosperity of their master’s eighteen years of empire? Have they not claimed it as a miracle of God’s favor, a long and lasting “caress” of Providence, the possible failure of which it would be impious to suspect? Have they not sung and celebrated, time and again, the famous victory of Solferino as a prodigy sent from heaven to show that the Almighty took the side of Italy, and had declared against the Pope?

Well, now, what has become of this epopee of miraculous prosperity, this note of ruin to Catholic Christianity, to the claims of the Holy See, and (as justly we might say) to the repose and peace of Europe? It came to naught in Sedan, in a military defeat and a dynastic misfortune the most appalling that ever was known or written of in the world.

And it so came to naught precisely because of the “success” at Solferino. That victory of Napoleon’s, chanted so loudly and so often by the pious Jew editor of the Opinione as an unmistakable revelation of God’s decision in favor of Bonaparte and his new Italy—that victory (when the hour of Sedan had come) was plainly seen as the manifest cause of his every subsequent reverse. Who can help perceiving now that, had not Austria lost the battle of Solferino, won by France that Italy might be “made,” Austria would not have lost the battle at Sadowa, achieved by Prussia that Germany might be “made”? And had not Austria lost at Sadowa, is it not plain that Napoleon would never have been dragged down into the horrible catastrophe of Sedan? In this catastrophe we find the meaning of the “approving smile” at Solferino. The “caress,” we are told, was intended for the third Napoleon. For whom, then, was intended the crushing dispensation at Sedan?

Will our kind converters to the new reading of the ways of Providence reflect maturely on this matter? All genuine Christian gentlemen, all admitted men of honor (except a few who were misled), regarded the war of 1859, so well characterized by the victory of Solferino, as iniquitous in its motives and as anti-Christian in its scope. It was looked upon by all as a magnum latrocinium, a godless scheme of robbery; but it had what its perpetrators called “a great success.” Eleven years roll by, and what do we see?

Napoleon III., at first so splendidly victorious by the force of an act of larceny that dispossessed four princes and displaced the Pope, is caught at last like a weasel in a trap, dethroned in his turn, driven off in scorn, steeped to the lips in indelible disgrace; all his marshals and generals, without a solitary exception, ignominiously humbled, soundly beaten, and detained in durance vile by a logical rebound from their first Italian success; all his army, four hundred thousand strong, lately invincible, now led into exile or captivity, to shiver with cold or to wince under the epithets of scorn. Victorious France, in retribution for her “new idea” of nationality, and to set the good example, yields up the costly tribute of two of her wealthiest provinces; just the number she had stolen from Italy, on the strength of the “new idea,” as her due for allowing Piedmont to absorb the entire peninsula within her ravenous maw.

How is it possible not to recognize, in this unprecedented drama, the real lesson of divine retaliation, the exclusive right of Providence to repay—to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life, when such extremity is required? Who will hesitate to say with the poet:

“The sword of God is strict, and cuts amain.
But still in stated measure, time, and place,
Till all things find their equal own again.”

And in this most memorable reverse of Napoleon III., we invite our apostolic interpreters of Providence to note a special fact. The fallen emperor not only lives to realize the forfeiture of all his fame, differing herein from those who die before the loss, but has to endure the bitterness of witnessing the demolition of all the proud creations of his reign. He had raised France to the pinnacle of earthly greatness, had just crowned, as he himself phrased it, the glorious edifice his genius had successfully constructed. France is now dismembered, dilapidated, a mass of melancholy ruin; reduced to chaos militarily, morally, politically, and to a great extent materially, if this last trait be deemed of much account.

He had decorated the palaces of St. Cloud and the Tuileries with munificence more than Asiatic. They are stripped to the bare walls. He rose, on the wings of the plébiscite, from obscurity to a throne. The plébiscite is now an obsolete absurdity. The treaty of Paris, which crowned the triumphs of the East; the Chinese victories and ovations at Canton and Palikao; the Mexican Empire, the fruit of so much toil and treasure, the price of the good name and fame of France; the Prague conventions, intended to defeat the growth of Prussia into a vast and consolidated Germany—of all these magnificent enterprises not a trace. In short, the countless dazzling exploits of the prosperous reign of the third Napoleon have vanished for ever like so many dissolving views. One work, one only work survives—the Subalpine government of Italy, to lick which hideous monster into shape the unhappy monarch threw recklessly away his honor and his crown. We might pursue this train of thought to its logical conclusion, but we refrain. Too strict an application of the laws of logic might bring us into conflict with other laws which we prefer not to provoke. But we may perhaps venture to request our pious friends of the “Regeneration” to undertake the argument themselves—an argument which runs on almost of itself, being one of the kind which dialecticians call reasoning from analogy. Let them look to it well, and say if there be not better ground to be anxious about the life of their Italy than there is to be solicitous about converting Catholics to the modern dogma, that the voice of an accomplished fact is no less than the voice of God; that the lucky consummation of a crime is itself the signal of the divine applause. Let them reflect that not a fact, which ceases afterwards to be a fact, can come into being or go out of it, without, at least, the permissive sanction of Almighty God. Let them pause and consider that the series of events, opened by Providence in 1859, is not absolutely or finally closed. Let them ever bear in mind that, when least it is expected, Providence may complete the line of this analogy by dissolving into nothingness the only remnant left of all the Napoleonic creations. The world and the ages will then believe that not a single one of the supposed marks of the divine “caress,” claimed by Italy’s regenerators, was really a mark of favor; but simply one of the many illustrations of the way in which the scorner is caught in the midst of his devices: In insidiis suis capientur iniqui.

In what we have advanced, we have, as seems to us, fairly and fully refuted the boastful syllogism of our adversaries. We shall conclude by exhorting them to lay aside all hope of converting Catholics by a show of blasphemous successes or an appeal to the longest impunity of crime. Go on, gentlemen! Enjoy your fortune! Vaunt as loudly as you will the triumphs you have secured over us, over the church, over the rights of the Holy See. Do all this, and welcome. But when you come to tell us that Providence is “caressing your cause,” and ask our adhesion to this impiety, we warn you to desist. Satan himself would not dare to give utterance to such an insult, or even to harbor such a thought. Providence has allowed you, in the abuse of your own free-will, a certain measure of easy success; as he allowed it to the synagogue, to the Cæsars, to Julian the Apostate, to Desiderius, and to all such of your predecessors as were permitted for a time to triumph over Christ and his commandments. And this he has allowed to you, not as to his loved ones, but as to his persecutors, that you may be the rod of his justice against the sins of the world. He will make this to yourselves, if you repent not, a snare and a delusion; to the church, an assurance of greater exaltation; and to all of us, a call to better service and obedience. We as Catholics know that we must bow beneath your blows. We bear the pain of them in peace, because faith teaches us that even scourges are wielded by God, and that his hand is to be kissed as much when it strikes as when it strengthens. For this reason we can accept you as you are. And yet we see in you no higher mark than that of our flagellators and the exercisers of our patience; but be warned in time. God makes use of his scourges, and then destroys them. We have made this plain to you by innumerable examples. Beware! for the prosperous days of God’s scourges end invariably in misfortune and disaster. Beware, for the good times of the enemies of Jesus Christ and his church have ever been as pitfalls with a covering of roses; yokes of iron masked by a drapery of flowers. On the contrary, from her greatest tribulations the church has ever issued brighter, lovelier, and more radiant than before. She numbers as many victories as battles, as many prisoners as foes. All the promises of God are for her and against you, and all history attests that of these promises not a syllable has failed. The church is our mother; her cause is our own. We have, therefore, no fear for the result. You may scorn us, you may strip us, you may deny us the protection of the laws. You may tear us limb from limb during the brief occasion of your power. But conquer us, no! In all eternity, you cannot. God has ordered it that we shall be your victors. Rallying close to the Vicar of the King of heaven, and faithful to the call of his immortal Spouse, we shall announce to you, with front uplifted, that we have conquered you; or (if that better pleases you) that Christ has conquered you through us. Laugh to your hearts’ content at this faith of ours. All your predecessors have done as much. Yet who triumphed in the end? So certain are we of the victory that we scarce dare hasten it by our desires. The thought of the bolts of divine wrath impending over you appalls us, and we abstain, out of pity for you, from asking what Dante, on a like occasion, prayed for in these words:

“O God! when wilt thou give me to be blest
To see thy vengeance, which, long hid, made sweet
The sacred anger garnered in thy breast?”

Purg., c. xx.

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NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Little Pierre, the Pedlar of Alsace; or, The Reward of Filial Piety. Translated from the French by J. M. C. With 27 illustrations. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 236. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 9 Warren Street. 1872.

The French can write charming stories, as every one knows. Little Pierre is one of the best we have seen in a long time—such a one as enchants a child, and makes him or her unwilling to lay it aside for supper or bed. It leads one through the romantic scenes of Alsace and the country of the Rhine, has plenty of stirring adventures, and, what is best of all, ends in a capital and satisfactory manner: Pierre and his little sister happily married, the old lady comfortable, Pierre a well-to-do merchant at Niederbronn. The illustrations, twenty-seven in all, which have been recut from the originals for the American edition, are uncommonly well executed. Little Pierre is destined to become an intimate friend of our young folks, to say nothing of Christine and Lolotte. Perhaps the most comical scene in the book is where Little Pierre is put by Madame Frank in the top of a Christmas-tree, with the name of little Cecile pinned on his breast. The most touching scene is the finding of little Lolotte in the wood, with her eyes bandaged and her hands tied. We advise our young readers not to rest until they get possession of this pretty book.

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The Men and Women of the English Reformation, from the Days of Wolsey to the Death of Cranmer. Papal and Anti-Papal Notables. By S. H. Burke, author of “The Monastic Houses of England.” 2 vols. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is a work which fairly answers its title, and we have in its two handsome duodecimo volumes sketches and descriptions so graphic of the men and women of the English Reformation as to place them most vividly before us.

Beginning with the unlovely correspondence of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn, and recounting many interesting details of the divorce question, the narrative passes on to a review of the leading incidents and the principal personages of the reign of Henry. The political murders of Sir Thomas More and of Bishop Fisher, the death of Queen Katharine, and the fall of Anne Boleyn, are described with fresh details of interest drawn from newly opened sources of historic information.

On the subject of “Clerical Reformers and their Spouses,” there is a very readable chapter, and, with a full disquisition upon the “Religious Institutions of Old England,” we have startling statements concerning the character of the “Monastic Inquisitors” under that arch-villain, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s Secretary of State, as will open the eyes of such as are unaware of the depth of infamy fathomed by the scoundrels who stole or wasted the wealth of England’s grand mediæval charities and robbed the poor and the sick of their sole heritage of succor and consolation. At the sight of the suffering entailed by the destruction of the monasteries, those glorious asylums of religion, charity, and learning, even as enthusiastic a panegyrist of the Reformation as Froude cannot help exclaiming: “To the universities, the Reformation had brought with it desolation. To the people of England it had brought misery and want. The once open hand was closed. ... The prisons were crowded.... Monks and nuns pointed with bitter effect to the fruits of the new belief, which had been crimsoned in the blood of thousands of the English peasants.”

The second volume gives us the principal events and personages of the end of the reign of Henry VIII. and of the reigns of Edward VI. and of Mary Tudor; and effective use is made not only of authentic documentary evidence which has come to light within the past seven years, but also of the important, because impartial, testimony of distinguished Protestant writers, such as Hook, Maitland, Brewer, Blunt, and Stephenson. We commend the work as one of exceeding interest.

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The Life of Marie-Eustelle Harpain, the Sempstress of St. Pallais, called “The Angel of the Eucharist.” Second edition. London: Burns, Oates, & Co.; New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is one of the most interesting lives which we have read. The lives of the saints always should be interesting, but often the methodical and dry way in which they are, as we may say, constructed, has a discouraging effect upon the reader greater than that which the heroic virtues of their subjects can produce. This is not the case with this memoir of one whom we may be allowed to call a saint, though she has not yet been recognized as such by the church, always prudent, and especially so with regard to canonizations. Marie-Eustelle died in 1842, at the age of 28, and belongs entirely to this nineteenth century, which is so ignorant of its true glories. Her life is quite imitable in most respects, as well as admirable, which is an additional reason for reading a book that is so very readable.

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The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. With twenty-one Illustrations, from original designs by D. Mosler, H. Warren, and J. H. Powell, engraved by Holman and Bale. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

The Rev. Mr. Formby, whose zeal, learning, and taste have so enriched the library of Catholic books for the young, gives here a popular work on the Parables, which will be wonderfully attractive. The Parables are all given in full, with fine illustrations to fix them on the mind, and explanations of their spiritual sense, drawn from the holy fathers. These beautiful lessons of our Lord cannot be too deeply impressed on minds to serve as subjects of meditation, and, well understood, they will prove sources of many graces. Outside the church, they remain to most “mere parables, not unfrequently indeed admired, and even quoted, beautiful in their way as anecdotes, but without in the least disclosing their true meaning.”

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The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church; or, The Seven Pillars of the House of Wisdom. A Brief Explanation of the Catholic Doctrine of the Seven Sacraments, in connection with their corresponding types in the Old Testament. Illustrated with sixteen original designs by J. Powell, engraved on wood by the brothers Dalziel. By the Rev. Henry Formby, Priest of the Diocese of Birmingham. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Another of Mr. Formby’s charming books, “not meant as a book of piety alone, but rather intended as a book of general popular knowledge.” He saw clearly the want of our time. “The whole tone and spirit of modern civilization is built upon the denial that there either is or can be anything superior to itself, or, indeed, anything that is not of its own order of things in the world.” “The young mind cannot be too soon made aware of the contradiction between the world and our Lord, and cannot be too soon and too effectually brought up to love and abide by all that our divine Lord has taught, and made firmly to disregard and despise all that is contrary to it in the world’s doctrine, from the knowledge that our Lord is greater than the world.”

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The School Keepsake, and Monitor for After Life. By Rev. H. Formby. With illustrations. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This perfectly beautiful little gift for the young leaving school is one so attractive in itself that it cannot fail to be kept; so sound, so clear, so distinct in its matter, that it cannot but be such a help as will gladden the guardian angel watching over the child as it steps from the school into the busy world.

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The Devotion of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin. Translated by the Rev. Henry Formby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

A devotion approved by the highest authority, commended by the example of saints, and one full of consolation and piety, is here presented in a form that will give it currency among many who had overlooked it. No one can sorrow with Mary over the sorrows of Jesus without a return on self, and a sense of what our sins, the cause of all, demand on our part.

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School Songs, to which music is adapted. Complete volume containing—Part I., The Junior School Song-Book; Part II., The Senior School Song-Book. Edited by the Rev. Henry Formby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Amid the abundance of bad books, it is delightful to find a miniature volume like this of 200 pages, containing hymns, nursery rhymes, ballads, and minor poems suited to the young selected with care. The young must laugh and play; they will sing hymns sometimes, touching ballads sometimes, nonsense sometimes; give them all this to sing, but keep them from the immoral and low, slangy songs that even our music stores are now flooding the land with. We hope this little collection will sell by the thousand. It is cheap and it is good.

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Wild Flowers of Wisconsin. By B. J. Dorward. Edited by his son. Milwaukee: Catholic News Co.

The productions of our author, under the signature of “Porte Crayon,”[69] have long been favorites of the Western public. The late Dr. J. V. Huntington, a poet and critic of no ordinary ability, sought him out and secured his contributions to the St. Louis Leader. His poems are characterized by a beautiful simplicity and spontaneity, genuine sentiment, and native good sense. Other poets may exhibit the delicate touch of the artist in elaborate and polished images, but the efforts of writers like the present must be the inspiration of the moment, and the less forethought they show, the more are they enhanced in value. To change the figure, the wild flowers lose their hues and fragrance if subjected to hot-house processes. The former excite our admiration, the latter elicit our sympathy, and perhaps live longer in the memory by those “touches of nature which make the whole world kin.”

We bespeak a welcome to these flowers of song on the part of those who love poetry in its native simplicity, who set a proper estimate on all that is gentle, pure, and kind in the sentiments of our common nature, noble and sublime in our common faith, and would cultivate an indigenous literature worthy of the name.

Among many gems of thought and feeling, we can only particularize: “To a Bird in Church,” “By the Rivulet,” “To the Memory of Dr. J. V. Huntington,” “St. Mary’s of the Pines,” “The Datura,” and “A Soldier’s Funeral.”

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A Sister’s Story. By Mrs. Augustus Craven. Translated from the French, by Emily Bowles. Fourth American edition. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 539. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

It is with pleasure that we announce the appearance of a fourth American edition of this exquisite and charming book, whose reputation and circulation have become world-wide. Even the publications most hostile to our holy religion have been compelled to eulogize it, although evidently feeling very uneasy about its great and increasing popularity among non-Catholic readers. The great discovery of a forgery in one part of the history which the New Englander fancied itself to have made, is known to a great part of the reading public. This supposed forgery was a profession of faith by the subject of the story, differing in form from one given in a French edition (14th of Didier, Paris), which the New Englander rather hastily concluded to be the genuine and authentic form which Mrs. Craven had published. The New Englander did not, however, express any suspicion that this forgery had been perpetrated by the American editors—on the contrary, disclaimed any such suspicion. Refinement of language, cautiousness in making infamous charges against persons of high character, and similar marks which denote gentlemanly and conscientious principles in a literary man, are, however, unhappily too rare among the conductors of the “Moral Spouting Horns” of the American press. Following those instincts by which they are usually impelled, and imitating a long series of precedents furnished by those who have been their precursors in their honorable trade, several of these papers, the Independent leading off, accused the American editors and publisher of the work with having forged a “profession of faith” to suit themselves. Says the Independent of Jan. 15:

“The creed of this good Catholic was not half papistical enough to suit these American editors; so they have introduced into it not only what she did believe, but what, in their judgment, she ought to have believed. We desire to call the attention of The Catholic World and the Tablet to this translation. It is possible there may be some explanation of what seems to be an astonishing piece of literary knavery. If there be, we should be glad to hear of it.”

To this the publisher, in the “Literary Bulletin” of The Catholic World for April, replied that—

“The Catholic Publication Society’s edition is printed exactly, word for word, from the first London edition, published by the respectable house of Bentley, in three volumes. If any deviation from the French was made, ‘The Catholic Publication Society’ did not make it, but followed the London edition in good faith, knowing the high source from which it emanated. But as the writer in the New Englander quotes from the fourteenth French edition, how does he know that the alteration may not have been made in that or previous French editions? We have written to the translator [Miss Bowles] in reference to this matter.”

But this did not seem to satisfy the Independent, for in its issue of April 4 it reiterates its accusation of forgery as follows:

“Let us ask once more (this makes three times) what our Catholic neighbor thinks of that forgery in one of the books of ‘The Catholic Publication Society’ which was exposed in the January number of the New Englander. We have looked in vain in the columns of the Tablet for a denunciation of this pious fraud, and our diligent questioning has failed to elicit from that usually fair journal any reply.”

The Chicago Advance is another paper that took particular pleasure in re-echoing the “forgery”; but, unlike the Independent, it notices the denial put forth in the “Bulletin” of The Catholic World, and says:

“The World at last notices the forged prayer in the ‘Sister’s Story,’ brought to light by the New Englander, but affirms that ‘The Catholic Publication Society’ reprinted it verbatim from Bentley’s London edition; and rather improbably suggests that the alteration may have been made in one of the later French editions of the original. Meanwhile, the editor says that the translator [Miss Bowles] has been written to about it. We want The World to be sure to publish her reply.”

To which we reply: Here is the letter.

“5a Davies St., Berkeley Sq.,

London, W., March 18th, 1872.

“Sir: The ‘Profession of Faith’ in the first edition (3 vols.) of A Sister’s Story was the correct one, given me by Mrs. Craven herself. I think she said it was incorrectly given in Didier’s editions, having been copied from those commonly used. She was very particular in writing it out herself for A Sister’s Story. Mr. Bentley published the one vol. edition in a singular manner, without referring to me at all, and I never knew why he had shortened the ‘Profession.’ I have never compared the editions, but possibly there are other mistakes.

“Your obed’t serv’t,

“Emily Bowles.”

We do not think it necessary to add anything to the above. The newspapers which have published remarks similar to those we have quoted cannot make any apology which will entitle them to notice on our part, and we take leave of them until we are compelled to refute some new libel.

Mr. P. Donahoe announces for early publication: Six Weeks Abroad, in Ireland, England, and Belgium, by Father Haskins; Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New England, by Father Fitton; Catholic Glories of the Nineteenth Century: The Old God, translated from the German; Conversion of the Teutonic Race, by Mrs. Hope, as well as several others.

“The Catholic Publication Society” announce for early publication, in addition to the books already announced, Canon Oakeley’s two books, namely, Ceremonial of the Mass and Catholic Worship. Also, Aunt Margaret’s Little Neighbors; or, Chats about the Rosary.

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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

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VOL. XV., No. 87.—JUNE, 1872.

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

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DUTIES OF THE RICH IN CHRISTIAN SOCIETY.

NO. V.
PRIVATE DUTIES.

That part of our subject which is included under the title of the present article is the most difficult, complicated, and extensive of the several divisions under which we have classed the various and weighty duties of the rich. A volume of the most carefully prepared sermons, or a copious moral treatise, from the hand of a master of spiritual and moral science, could alone do justice to the demands of such a theme. The question to be answered, and it is one which harasses many a heart and conscience, is, How shall one live and govern his household amid the abundance of temporal goods, so as to make his state in life subserve the great end to which a Christian must direct all his thoughts and actions? The solution of this problem is theoretically and practically difficult. The language of Jesus Christ and the apostles in respect to the difficulty is startling, and even terrifying. Our Lord said: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. For it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The efforts which some critics have made to soften and diminish this fearful declaration of Christ by changing “camel” into “cable,” or making the “needle’s eye” to be a gate of the city, so-called, are frivolous and futile. The figure is that of a laden camel before the eye of a small needle, through which his driver is essaying to make him pass. And its force consists precisely in the utter and extravagant absurdity of the image which it presents to the mind. It is intended to represent that which is violently contrary to the laws of nature, and, therefore, impossible. And it is this impossibility which is taken to illustrate the difficulty of a rich man entering the kingdom of God. What follows elucidates and completes the idea which our Lord intended to present before the minds of all his followers. His astounded listeners exclaimed, “Who then can be saved?” To whom he replied: “The things that are impossible with men are possible with God.”[70] The power of God, some philosophers tell us, can compress the substance of a camel into such small dimensions that it can pass through the eye of a needle. By that almighty power, and that alone, Christ teaches, can a rich man with his substance pass through the narrow gate of the kingdom of God.

St. James addresses to the rich the following terrible invective: “Go to now, ye rich men, WEEP AND HOWL for your miseries that shall come upon you.”[71] Similar passages might be multiplied, and the comments and applications of the successors of the apostles, in a similar strain, have filled the pages of the fathers and doctors of the church, and resounded from the chair of truth, from the days of the apostles to our own. Great numbers of the rich have been impelled by the force of these alarming declarations to seek for perfection and salvation by following the counsel which our Lord gave to the rich young man. Let those who have the opportunity and the vocation to do the same imitate their example; we will not dissuade them, and let parents and others beware of dissuading, much more hindering, any who are dependent on them from obeying such a divine call. This is one of the duties of the rich, which we will specify here in passing, that we may not be obliged to recur to it hereafter—to give their best and dearest, their sons and daughters, the most gifted, the most gracious, the most loved, as Jephte gave his daughter, a sacrifice to God and the church, whenever the Lord honors them by the demand. But it is not our purpose to persuade any to follow the evangelical counsels. We are speaking of the way of keeping God’s commandments in a state of riches in the world. There must be a way of living a perfect life; and gaining heaven, not merely “so as by fire,” but with the abundant merit which wins a bright crown—in spite of the possession of riches, and even by means of those riches. Wealth is not an evil, but the abuse of wealth. Temporal goods are not in themselves an obstacle to perfection and salvation, but the sins and vices which are caused by attachment to them, and the self-indulgence for which they afford the facility. The possession of wealth increases a person’s responsibilities and dangers, but at the same time augments his power of doing good and acquiring merit. Human nature, left to itself, ordinarily swells up, through the possession of either material or intellectual riches, to such a huge bulk of pride, avarice, and sensuality, that it is like a laden camel, or, as we may say, like an elephant with a tower full of armed men on its back; and in this condition, submission to the law of Christ is like passing through the eye of a fine cambric needle. But God, with whom those things are possible which are impossible to men, has not left human nature to itself. Through the Incarnation and the cross, through regenerating and sanctifying grace, through the aids of the Holy Spirit, Catholic faith, the sacraments, the examples of the saints, Catholic principles and education, the ennobling, purifying power of religion—human nature can be kept, in the state of abundance and prosperity, as well as in that of poverty and adversity, from the contamination of worldliness and iniquity. Even more, it can glorify its state, and turn it to the best and highest use, by the practice of the most exalted Christian virtues. The proof of this may be seen in the fact that this has been done in many thousands of instances, and is being done now in every part of Christendom.

The principles upon which Christian sanctity in the great, the noble, and the wealthy is based, are all summed up by the Apostle St. James in this short sentence: “Let the brother of low condition glory in his exaltation, but the rich in his being low,”[72] which is more literally translated, “in his humility.” Humility entitles the rich man to claim all the special blessings which are so frequently and emphatically promised in the New Testament to the poor. It is poverty of spirit, or interior detachment from temporal goods for the love of God, and not mere exterior poverty, which fits a person for the kingdom of God. The poor and lowly, if they are possessed of Catholic faith, have so little of that which makes the present life brilliant and attractive that they are forced by a happy kind of necessity to find everything in the church and their religion. They find their nobility in their baptism, their glory in the sign of the cross and their Catholic profession, their treasure in the blessed sacrament, their palace with its picture gallery and service of gold and silver in the church, their royal audiences at the ever open court of the King and Queen of heaven, their gala-days and spectacles in the festivals and processions and ceremonies of the ecclesiastical year, their ideal vision of coming happiness in heaven. They are “rich in faith,” and “glory in their exaltation” as the “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.” The rich must do voluntarily what the poor do from necessity. They must quit the position in their own esteem which human pride loves so dearly to take, of superiority over others on account of accidental and temporal advantages, and come down to the common level at the foot of the cross, where pride of rank and power, pride of intellect, and pride of wealth are alike annihilated, to make way for a true and lasting exaltation in the Son of God.

Here, then, is the first duty of the rich—to adopt inwardly, profess openly, and act out consistently the same principles of Catholic faith which are common to all Christians, and to place their glory, their treasure, their heart’s affection, their end in life, their hope of happiness, not in the transitory things of this life, but in the kingdom of God; “because as the flower of the grass they shall fade away.”

These transitory things, however, do last for a little while, and, although worthless as a final end and object to live for, are necessary and valuable as means. Private interpretation of the Scripture might deduce from it that Christ intended to do away with all power, rank, human science, art, commerce, wealth, and civil or social polity, with marriage and the family even, and thus extinguish this present world and this life to make way for the next. This is not the interpretation of the church or the way of Catholic practice. All these worldly, transitory things are retained and made use of, notwithstanding that “the figure of this world passeth away.” The rich man who is resolved to be a perfect Christian needs, therefore, to know not only what esteem he is to place on wealth and other temporal things in reference to the real and final good, but how practically to use them for the attainment of the same, and for helping his dependents and others to attain it. The more we go into detail in regard to this matter, the more difficult it becomes to draw lines and lay down practical rules. A sound and well-directed conscience must at last be the guide of each one, and it is a sufficient though not strictly infallible guide to those who are instructed in good general principles.

One general principle which may be useful as a rule for application to a great many particular cases is this: Those indulgences which gratify the more refined and intellectual tastes may be more freely made use of than those which gratify the senses. Another principle, closely allied to this, is the following: Whatever has an honorable or useful end is allowable; whatever merely gratifies a selfish passion must be condemned and avoided. To apply these principles as rules in certain important particular cases, let us begin with the rich man’s house. The first fault and folly to be avoided is extravagance. He ought not to embarrass his estate and prejudice the interests of his family by spending more money on his houses and the decoration of his grounds than he can afford. If he does, his motive is ostentation, or some other inordinate passion, and therefore worthy of condemnation. That there has been a vast amount of extravagance in this respect in our country within the past thirty years is obvious to every one. The outside show of our towns and cities indicates an amount of wealth certainly four times greater than really exists. A man who is governed by Christian principles, with which common sense and sound reason always coincide in so far as they are competent to judge of what is right, will, of course, avoid all extravagance. More than this, he will not take the lead in splendor and magnificence of buildings and furniture, even if he has wealth enough to do so without extravagance. On the contrary, he will choose to be rather behind than before his compeers in this respect. We are not speaking now of princes and magnates, but of private citizens. There is no fitness, especially in a republic, in making private residences palaces. It is proper to provide for all the conveniences of domestic life. Moreover, architectural beauty in the construction of houses, and taste and elegance in their furniture, give decorum to life, and innocent and refining pleasure to those who behold them, and a means of living to a large class of persons who are especially fitted for a kind of work which demands artistic taste and skill. We cannot draw the line precisely where mere useless and luxurious pomp, show, and splendor begin. We can only say that a man thoroughly imbued with Christian principles and sentiments will be very anxious and careful to keep on the safe side of it, so far as he is able to do so. But whatever degree of costliness and splendor may be suitable or permissible in the residence of any Catholic gentleman, whether he be a plain, private citizen in our democratic republic, or a nobleman, prince, or monarch elsewhere, everything should be made to conform not to a pagan, but a Christian and Catholic, ideal. All that is even bordering on heathen voluptuousness should be rigidly excluded. Works of Catholic art should adorn the walls even of the most public and splendid apartments. Every private room should have its crucifix, its Madonna, its vase of holy water, its prie-dieu, and books of prayer and devotion. An oratory, fitted up with the utmost elegance and costliness that is suitable to the circumstances, should be the shrine and chief ornament of the house. The library and other receptacles for books should be pure of all that is tainted and corrupting, and filled up with everything which Catholic literature can furnish, both in English and in the other languages which the members of the highly distinguished circle we have the honor of addressing are supposed to know. In a word, the elegancies and ornaments of life should be made to minister to intellectual cultivation, to the education of the higher and more refined tastes of the soul; and these should be made all subservient to that which is highest of all—the culture and improvement of the spirit in the knowledge and love of the Supreme Truth and the Infinite Beauty.

Just at the moment of writing down these thoughts, we have come across a beautiful sketch of the family of Count Stolberg, in the pages of a German periodical. It is so appropriate as an illustration that we will postpone any further continuation of our subject, and finish the present article with a translation of the sketch alluded to.[73]

“It is singular (writes Count Stolberg) that I cannot remember ever to have heard in the house of my parents such words as money, competency, economy, expense, saving. At that time luxury had not yet become the fashion; and, even if it had been, the house of our parents was like an island. We lived separate from others, although scarcely adverting to the fact that our life was so retired. There was just as little said about making ourselves comfortable as about money and fashion. The modern luxury in chairs and sofas with all its ingenious contrivances was altogether unknown to us. All the articles of furniture, our dress, and the table were good and befitting our rank; but we might have said about all these things what Cyrus said at the table of Astyages about the customs of the Persians: ‘I do not know whether at that time all people remained longer children, or whether we ourselves only remained so.’ Count Stolberg’s father died in the year 1765, and the last anxious wish of his heart was that ‘his children might walk in the way of the Lord.’ How much, writes the count, this desire occupied the hearts of both my father and my mother! I can still hear my mother say that she envied no one so much as the mother of the seven Macchabees; that she was the most fortunate of mothers. It was her solitary wish, prayer, and effort that she might one day be able to say, ‘Lord, here are we, and the children whom thou hast given us’—it was the soul of her entire plan of education.

“At the father’s death, the countess gave his Bible to the young Count Frederic, and wrote in it the following words: ‘This Bible, which your blessed father used on the very day of his death, consoling himself with the words, “Thou hearest, O Lord! the longing of those who cry to thee, their heart is sure that thou dost give ear to them,” must prove a great blessing to you, and continually stimulate you to love the Word of God, to venerate it, to make it the rule of your life, as he did, and to seek consolation in it to the end of your life. For this, may the Triune God give you his grace and benediction!’

“The mother’s testament to her children, which was found after her death, in 1773, in her writing-desk, was as follows: ‘Dear children, cling to the Saviour, to his merits, to his faithful heart; and do not love the world or what is in the world. For all is passing, and but mere dust of the earth. Nothing can last with us through life and in death but the blood of Jesus, the grace of God, communion and friendship with him. Seek for this; do not rest until you possess it; and then hold it fast; this will help you through until we are with him; oh! let not one, not one remain behind. I will always watch over you, and will hasten to meet you with open arms when you come after me. Watch and pray!’

“We can understand without difficulty from this how Count Stolberg could say, ‘Christ, the Saviour of the world, was the guiding star of my youth. Our parents desired nothing more earnestly than that we should seek him, love him, and confess him before the whole world. I have always regarded that as my highest duty, which necessarily led me into the Catholic Church.’”

In this sketch of Count Stolberg’s parents and early home, we see the old-fashioned simplicity and piety of the best sort of the ancient Lutheran nobility of Germany. There is a sombre and austere character in the picture, partly belonging to the national temperament, but chiefly due to that shadow of sadness which Protestantism in its more earnest phase casts over the practice of virtue and religion. The count himself, as is well known to all, while preserving all that was good and truly Christian in the principles and habits given him by his early education, cast aside its sectarian prejudices and errors to embrace the Catholic religion. In him, as the model of a perfect Christian gentleman and scholar, to quote again the language of the writer in Der Katholik,

“was gloriously fulfilled the wish expressed by Lavater (a Protestant) in a letter to the count. ‘Become an honor to the Catholic Church! Practise virtues which are impossible to a non-Catholic! Do deeds which will prove that your change had a great end, and that you have not failed to gain it. You have saints, I do not deny it: we have none, at least none like yours. Be to all Catholics and non-Catholics a shining example of that virtue which is the most worthy of imitation and of Christian holiness.’”

We have been tempted into a digression which will, we trust, not be ungrateful to our readers, and find that we have not been able to bring our series of short articles to a close in the present number, as we had hoped to do. We must therefore resume the same subject after another month, and we trust that our gentle readers, upon their summer excursions, will find time and inclination to listen to one more brief moral instruction.

---

ON THE TROUBADOURS OF PROVENCE.

True hearts, that beat so fast, but now are still,
The gracious days will never come again
Ye loved and sang; your tender accents will
Linger no more on the warm lips of men!
Alas! your speech lies with ye in the grave!
Yet where Montpellier’s skies their balm impart,
And Barcelona wooes the southern wave,
The student cons your pages when his heart
Hungers for solace. Take it in kind part,
Count it not loss, dear hearts, but loyalty,
If I like him, though with a ruder hand,
Am fain to cull your flowers too sweet to die,
To waft their fragrance to a distant land,
And bid them blossom ’neath a colder sky.

---

THE HOUSE OF YORKE.

CHAPTER XXX.
EDITH’S YES.

In the opinion of their old friends in Boston, the Yorke family had lost something during their sojourn in the wilderness. It was not that they were less charming, less kind, less well-bred, but they were not so orthodox in religion. Mrs. Yorke, it is true, resumed her regular attendance at Dr. Stewart’s church; but her husband seldom accompanied her now, and, it was ascertained, absented himself with her permission.

“I would not have him go for my sake, when he does not wish to go for his own,” she remarked tranquilly.

The time had been when Mrs. Yorke would have been horrified at such a defection, and would have called in the doctors of the church to exhort the backslider. She was evidently growing lax in her religious principles.

Melicent always accompanied her mother, and had the true down-drawn, regulation countenance; but Clara was seldom seen in their pew, and boldly answered, when questioned on the subject, that she sometimes went to the Catholic churches to hear the music. “I go wherever I can hear Wilcox play the organ,” she said. “I never tire listening to him. Others play difficult music with dexterity, and you admire their skill; but he plays the same, and you forget that there is any skill in it. Such bewitching grace! Such laughter running up and down the keys! Such picturesque improvisations! He played last Sunday something that called up to me a scene in Seaton—that bit of meadow on East Street, Edith. There was some sort of musical groundwork, soft and monotonous, with little blossoming chords springing up everywhere, and over it all swam a lovely, meandering melody with the vox humana. When the bell rang, at the Sanctus, he caught the sound, and ran straight up into the stars, as though some waiting angel had flown audibly up to heaven to announce the time of the consecration. It is delightful to hear him. In his graver music, and his choruses, I do not so much distinguish him from others; but he is the only organist I know who gives an idea of the play of the little saints and cherubim in heaven, their dancing, their singing, their swift flights to the earth and back again, and all their exquisite loves, and pranks, and delights—their very worship like the worship of birds and flowers.”

Not a word about doctrines, about the iniquities of Rome, the superstition of Papists, the idolatry of the Mass!

What wonder if these good people, who considered it blasphemy to associate cherubic music with any more rapid motion than that of the semibreve and minim, should think Miss Clara Yorke in a dangerous way? It was hoped, however, that when Dr. Stewart and Melicent were married, his influence would recall her to a sense of duty.

The doctor did try, carefully, though, warned by his wife, and by some sharp, though tacit, rebuffs from Mr. Yorke and Edith. He spoke one day philosophically of the obnoxious Review, as though there were no question of truth, but merely of cleverness in handling certain subjects, and, in a careless à propos, offered Mr. Yorke the loan of certain volumes, which, he privately believed, would triumphantly controvert the controversialist. The doctor had not read any of these Catholic authorities.

“Thank you!” Mr. Yorke replied. He wished to be friendly, and really liked the doctor when he let theology alone. Besides, he was dining there, and could not be disagreeable.

After dinner, Melicent slipped out of the room a few minutes; and when her father went home, she said sweetly, “By the way, papa, I put up those books the doctor spoke of to you, if you like to take them now. They lie on the hall table.”

“Let them lie!” replied Mr. Yorke, with a glance and an emphasis which were not even doubtful.

He might permit Dr. Stewart to exhort him, but he would not be schooled by his own daughter.

There was but little to tell of the family for a while. Mr. Yorke employed a part of his time in attending to Carl’s and Edith’s pecuniary affairs, everything being entrusted to his management. Patrick was his assistant occasionally, and was also Edith’s coachman; for the only carriage they kept belonged to Edith.

Betsey was Mrs. Yorke’s special dependence. She was a sort of housekeeper, as well as nurse. When the lady was ill, no one else could lift, and serve, and watch as Betsey could; and when she was in low spirits, Betsey could scout her vapors very refreshingly, when the others increased them, perhaps, by indulgence. On all her little journeys, Betsey accompanied Mrs. Yorke. Her quaint, country ways were a constant source of amusement, her faithful affection and sturdy good sense a staff to lean on.

Mrs. Yorke had, at the last moment, concluded not to bring the young Pattens to Boston, but had secured them places with the family who had taken her house. “I do not approve of children being separated from their parents,” she had said, “and being placed in such different circumstances that their childish associations seem discordant to them. I know no situation more cruel than that where a child is ashamed of its parents’ poverty and ignorance. Besides, I think it my duty to rescue these poor Catholic girls.”

So Mary and Anne had been brought to Boston, and were now living in a blissful state of affectionate gratitude toward their employers, and rapture with their church.

In Seaton, Catholics were still in an almost Babylonish captivity. Their church had been burned a few weeks after the Yorkes left town; but toward spring they had a priest—not Father Rasle—who came once in two months, and said Mass for them in a private house. He was not molested.

Edith had not forgotten her friends there, and, among other gifts, had sent to Mrs. Patten a small library, chiefly of controversial books. So Boadicea was now investigating the Catholic religion. She examined it severely and critically, through a pair of round-eyed, horn-bowed spectacles, missing not a sentence, nor date, nor word of title-page in those volumes. She meant to show everybody that she was searching the subject in an exhaustive manner, and that the doctors of the church would have to exert themselves to the utmost, and bring all their learning and eloquence to bear, if they wished to convince her. But, underneath this vain pretence, her heart yearned to enter that fold where her lost little one had found refuge, and where she had seen such examples of Christian endurance and charity.

And so, with no event in the family save Melicent’s marriage, the winter and summer passed away, and another winter came. In that winter, Edith had news of an event for which she had been looking and longing ever since Carl went away. His letters had all been addressed to his mother, but in one of them, about Christmas-time, came a note for Edith. He was in Asia, and his letter was dated at Bangkok. He had been across Cambodia, from the Menam to the Mekong, as far as the country of the savage Stiens. “And here, in this wild place, my dear Edith,” he wrote, “I gave up, and was baptized. I had thought, while talking with Monsignor Miche, vicar-apostolic of the mission to Cambodia and Laos, that, as soon as I should reach Europe, I would enter the church. Indeed, while I heard this, an accomplished gentleman, tell of the persecution he had suffered when he was a simple missionary in Cochin-China, the imprisonment, the beating with rods which cut the flesh so that blood followed, the asking for and taking himself the blows intended for a companion too frail to bear more—a story, Edith, which carried my mind back to St. Paul, yet which was told with a boyish gaiety and simplicity—while I heard this, my impulse was to throw myself at his feet, and ask to be baptized by his consecrated hand. But, you know, enthusiasm does not often overcome me; and, since he did not urge me then, the good minute went. When, afterward, he exhorted me, I promised him that I would not long delay. But, when I reached the Stien country, over that miserable route of swamps, cataracts, and forests filled with wild beasts, and found another soldier of Christ living there, in that horrible solitude, sick, suffering, but undismayed, my Teutonic phlegm deserted me. The chief citizens of Father Guilloux’s republic are elephants, tigers, buffaloes, wild boars, the rhinoceros; and the most frequent and intimate visitors at his house of bamboos are scorpions, serpents, and centipedes. And yet, all the complaint this heroic man made was that he had but few converts. The savages are so joined to their idols, he said. Edith, tears ran down my face. My whole heart melted. ‘Father,’ I said, ‘here is a savage convert, if you will take him. I cannot stay one hour longer out of the church which gives birth to such children!’ And so I was baptized. And, my sweet girl, I thought then that, if the time should ever come when I should be so happy as to make Edith my wife, I should like to have the same saintly hands join us. I told Father Guilloux of you, and he sends you his blessing. You see I have heard all about Mr. Rowan.

“And now I turn my face homeward, though my route will not be very direct. Since I am here, where I shall probably never come again, I think it best to carry out my programme. But the intention of it is somewhat different; for I find that a Catholic does not need to travel abroad to find out how men should be taught and governed.

“I am sure that you pray for me constantly; and, believe me, your name has been as constantly uttered by me during the whole length of my wanderings, and is strung, Edith on Edith, like a daisy-chain, two-thirds round the world.”

It was thus Carl first told Edith his wishes; and, from the moment of that reading, she considered herself betrothed to him.

She carried her letter to her aunt, who already knew from her own letter that Carl had entered the church and, placing it open in her hand, knelt before her while she read it.

Mrs. Yorke took the hands that trembled in her lap, and gazed into the fair face uplifted to hers. Edith’s cheeks were like crimson roses, her beautiful eyes shone through tears, her lips were parted by the quickened little breaths that told of her quickened heart-beats.

“There is no mistake this time?” Mrs. Yorke asked, smiling. “You say yes with all your heart?”

“Aunt Amy,” Edith exclaimed, “I’m one yes from head to foot, and the gladdest yes that ever was spoken!”

CHAPTER XXXI.
CLARA’S CHAPTER.

The second summer after their return to Boston, Clara went down to spend in Seaton with Hester; and, late in July, the ship Edith Yorke, Captain Cary, came sailing up Seaton River. The captain had made a prosperous voyage to India, and, having nothing else to do just now, had come down to Maine for a load of barrel-staves and boxes. To his mind, the fresh pine and ash made a pleasing contrast to his rich Eastern cargo.

Hester and her husband immediately made him at home with them. Their house was not so full but there was room for him, if he could live in the house with six boys.

“You can, perhaps, bear it better, since they are sure to be very fond of you,” Mrs. Hester said. For the boys had clustered about the sailor before he had been ten minutes with them.

Mrs. Cleaveland was wont to say that the masculine element in hers and her mother’s immediate descendants would be rather overpowering were its members not the salt of the earth.

“Poor little mamma was quite alarmed,” she said. “She protested that, if Melicent’s husband or mine called her mother, she would leave the country. So they are careful how they address her. Now, I am made of sterner stuff, and nothing else makes me so proud as to have all these boys call me mother.”

Hester’s boys presented rather an imposing array. There were Major Cleaveland’s eldest, Charles and Henry, college-students of twenty and twenty-two years of age, healthy, honest lads, not very clever, but full of energy and good sense. They were favorites at college, where the renaissance of muscle had destroyed the old empire of hollow chests and pale cheeks, and established as the watchword mens sana in corpore sano. Next to these was Eugene, now a slender youth of fifteen, cleverer than his brothers, but somewhat effeminate in character.

Then came Hester’s three boys, Philip, Carl, and Robert. The last, an infant a year old, had been named by Edith for her father, and he was, consequently, her dearest pet.

“And now my troubles begin all over again,” soliloquized Clara, as she prepared to meet the sailor. “Captain Cary’s sudden flight seemed to cut the Gordian knot; but his coming back makes the affair more double-and-twisted than ever.”

She went to meet him, however, with an air of pleasant ease which betrayed no sign of complicated emotions, and asked of his adventures, and told all that had chanced to them during his absence, in the most friendly manner.

Nor was the sailor less dignified, though the blush that overspread his face when she first appeared showed a momentary agitation.

But this highly proper and decorous demeanor did not last long. Before many days, Mrs. Cleaveland perceived that her boys were not the chief attraction which Captain Cary found in her house. It was plain that he was devoted, heart and soul, to Clara; and it was plain, also, that Clara was fully aware of that devotion, and made her sport of it, so Hester thought.

It was true, the young woman did take a very high hand with her colossal admirer. She snubbed him, ordered him about, made him dance attendance, fetch and carry, and, altogether, tyrannized over him outrageously. And he bore it all with the magnanimous patience of a great Newfoundland dog petting and bearing with the freaks of a captious child. But he grew sober and silent, and lost his smiles day by day.

Sometimes Clara’s mood changed, and there would be little flits of sunshine, momentary gleams of kindness and penitence; but her victim learned that he could not depend on the continuance of such friendliness.

One day she had treated him so much worse than usual that, instead of staying to bear her raillery, he left the room, and went out into the garden where the children were playing. Clara seated herself in the window presently, and watched him, saw him set little Bob-o’-Lincoln, as they called the baby, on his shoulder, so that the child could reach the branch of a tree, saw him gently restrain and persuade Philip from throwing stones at the birds, and talk to Carl and Philip, when they came to blows about something, till they kissed each other. And through it all she read in his face the indication of a heart sad and ill at ease.

A yellow-bird flew over the garden, and dropped a pretty feather down. “Oh! that is what Aunt Clara likes,” cried Philip, running to pick it up. “She puts ’em in her books for marks.”

He carried it to the sailor, who fastened it carefully in his button-hole, posy-wise. Even the children had perceived that what Aunt Clara liked was a matter of interest to their new friend.

A servant came out to call the children in to their early supper; and Captain Cary, catching sight of Clara in the window, went to her with the little feather in his hand. “Philip says you make book-marks of these,” he said, and offered it to her.

There was no sign of coldness or resentment, neither was there any of subservience. It was the patience and affection of a tender and generous heart, and the self-respect of one who is not humbled by the pettishness of another.

Clara dropped her eyes as she took the little offering. “Yes,” she said gently; “and see the passage I am going to mark with it.”

The book she held was Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, open at the dialogue between Æschines and Phocion.

The sailor bent his head and read: “Your generosity is more pathetic than pity or than pain;” and, looking up quickly into her face, to see what she meant, saw her eyes humid.

His face brightened a little, but he said nothing. He was like a traveller among the Alps, who knows that a breath may bring the avalanche upon him.

After a few weeks of this hide-and-seek, Hester was moved to expostulate with her sister, whose conduct had astonished her. For, however gay and reckless Clara might be in talk, exaggerating on one side when she saw people lean too much to the other, and often saying what she did not mean, taking for granted that she was too well known to have her jests taken for earnest—in spite of this liveliness and effervescence of spirits, she had never been guilty of the slightest frivolity in her intercourse with gentlemen. Mrs. Yorke had taught her daughters, or had cherished in them the pure feminine instinct, to treat with careful reserve any man who should show a marked preference for them, unless that preference was fully reciprocated. Hester, therefore, felt herself called on to admonish.

“I must say, Clara, I think you do wrong,” she said. “Any one can see that the captain sets his life by you, and you treat him cruelly.”

“Do you wish me to marry him?” Clara asked in a cold voice.

“Why, no!” exclaimed her sister. “You two are not at all suited to each other. But I would have you treat him kindly.”

“If I treat him kindly, he will think I like him,” Clara said quickly.

“Oh! I don’t mean very kindly, but with calm friendliness,” answered her preceptress.

“Calm friendliness!” repeated the culprit with emphasis. “Oh! the airs that these little married kittens put on! Hester, seat yourself there, and look me in the face, while I lecture you. Fold your hands, and attend to me. Now, allow me to remind you of two or three little facts. Firstly, I am two years older than you. Secondly, I am not a staid married woman with six boys, and I won’t try to act as if I were. Thirdly, you don’t know as much about this business as you think you do. Fourthly, women who have a great facility for being shocked on all occasions are, according to my observation, very likely to be shocking women. Fifthly, if you wish well to Captain Cary, you should wish to have him cease to care about me; and the surest way to attain that end is to treat him just as I am treating him. No man can long desire a vixen for a wife. Sixthly”—and sixthly, Clara began to cry.

Hester, who never could bear to be blamed, had been herself on the point of crying, but, seeing her sister’s tears, concluded not to.

“Why, what is the matter, Clara?” she asked in distress.

“The matter is that I am tired of being criticised,” answered her sister, wiping her eyes. “I am tired of having people tell me what I mean, instead of asking what I mean. I am tired of having people whom I know to be not so good as I am, set themselves up to be better.”

“I never meant to set myself up to be better than you, Clara,” Hester began pitifully. “I—”

“Bless me! Are you here still?” exclaimed Miss Yorke, with a laugh “I’d forgotten you. I was not talking to you at all, you little goose! The truth is, Hester, I am getting as nervous as a witch. You mustn’t bother me.”

Clara did seem to be nervous, and unlike herself.

Having failed in her attempt to admonish her sister, Mrs. Cleaveland took occasion soon after to comfort the sailor.

“You must not mind if Clara seems a little hard sometimes,” she said with gentle kindness. “She does not mean to hurt your feelings. It is only her way. I know she thinks very highly of you.”

“Oh! I understand her pretty well,” he replied gravely. “Clara has a good heart, and she never gives me a blow but she is sorry for it afterward. I don’t blame her. I suppose she sees that I rather took a liking to her”—he blushed up—“and that’s the way she makes me keep my distance. I understand Clara. She suits me.”

He said this with a certain stateliness. Not even Clara’s sister might blame her to him.

“Rather took a liking,” was Captain Cary’s way of expressing the fact that he had surrendered the whole of his honest, generous heart.

There were fires in the woods about Seaton that summer, and, August being very dry, they increased so as to be troublesome. From Major Cleaveland’s house, which stood on the hill-top west of the village, they could see smoke encircling nearly all the horizon by day; and by night flames were visible in every direction but the south, where the sea lay. The air was rank with smoke, cinders came on the wind when it rose, and vegetation turned sooty. Crops were spoiling, farm-houses were threatened, and large quantities of lumber were burned. People looked every day more anxiously for rain, prayers were offered in the churches for it, and still it did not come. The blue of the sky changed to brazen, the silver and gold of moonlight and sunlight became lurid, the springs began to dry up. Sometimes the day would darken with clouds, and they looked up hopefully, and watched to see the saving drops descend. But week followed week, and the refreshing messengers passed by on the other side. More than once, when the sun was in the west, it showed them through that canopy of smoke the dense black peaks and rolling volumes of the thunder-cloud, and at night they could see the beautiful lightning crinkling round the horizon, and hear the music of far-away thunder that came down with pelting rain on distant hills; but still their land was dry, their throats and eyes inflamed, and the fires crept nearer.

Major Cleaveland came home to tea one night with an anxious face. “They are afraid the fire will reach Arnold’s woods to-night,” he said; “and, if it does, Marvin’s house must go, and there is danger that some part of the town may burn. The wind is very high from the northwest.”

Mr. Marvin, Mrs. Yorke’s tenant, had purchased her house and land, and lived there, but the woods still bore their old name of Arnold’s woods.

Later in the evening, while they sat looking out at the baleful glow that grew every moment brighter in the northwest, Charles and Henry Cleaveland came up from the village with later news. Half the men in the town, they said, had gone out beyond Grandfather Yorke’s place to fight fire. The firemen were all there, and Mr. Marvin had his furniture packed ready to send away from the house at a moment’s warning.

“And those poor Pattens!” Clara asked anxiously. “Have they wit enough to save themselves? Has any one thought of them?”

The boys had heard no mention made of the Pattens. They supposed that, if the family had common sense, they had left their house by this time, for every one said that, unless there should be a shower with that wind, the fire was not two hours distant.

Captain Cary leaned from the window, and looked overhead. The only sign of sky was a cluster of stars in the zenith. All else was smoke. “This wind will bring a shower pretty near, at least, before the night is over,” he said. “It isn’t a wind out of a clear sky.”

“I must know about those poor creatures!” Clara exclaimed. “They are so shut in that they would not be able to see which way to go, if the fire should come upon them; and I am afraid no one will think of them. Charley, if you will have the buggy out, I will drive over to Mr. Marvin’s.”

“All right!” says Charley promptly.

Captain Cary had already risen. “I’ve been thinking that I’d go over and help the men a little,” he remarked, with a moderate air, as if he had been in the habit of fighting fire every day of his life for recreation.

“But you will have to change your clothes,” Clara said. “That linen will never do. Now, see which will be dressed first. I must take off this organdie, of course. Hester, take out your watch and count the minutes.”

She flew off merrily, her rose-colored cloud of skirts filling the doorway as she went through, and Captain Cary walked quietly after, one of his strides equal to three of her small steps. In ten minutes they were heard again, opening the doors of their rooms at the same moment, and Clara appeared in a plaided waterproof suit, and a sailor hat set jauntily over the rich black coils of her hair, and laughingly claimed the victory. “We opened our doors at the same instant,” she said; “but I stopped to button my gloves, and he has no gloves on. Never say again that a lady cannot dress as quickly as a gentleman.”

Captain Cary displayed a pair of thick boots, for which he had exchanged his summer shoes. “May I be allowed to see what you have on your feet?” he asked.

She put out a foot clad in the thinnest stocking, and a low kid slipper.

“I appeal!” said the sailor.

“And I give up!” she answered. “Now let me see if you are prepared to go into Gehenna. Are those clothes all wool?”

She made him turn round, tried with her own fingers the texture of his sleeve, ordered him to button his coat tightly at neck and wrists, so that no sparks could get in, and gave him a woollen scarf, which she commanded him to tie about his face at the proper time. Then they went out together, dropping their laughter at the door. For the wind blew in their faces a hard gale, and over the northwestern horizon glowed an angry aurora, and in the zenith still hung that cluster of stars.

They drove over to Mr. Marvin’s almost in silence. Carts partly filled with furniture stood at the avenue-gate, and trunks and packages had been set out on the steps, ready to be taken away. Two little children stood in the door, crying with fear, while a servant tried vainly to pacify them.

“Their mother told me to take them out to the village, to the Seaton House,” she said to Clara. “And they don’t want to go.”

Mrs. Marvin was up in the cupola, watching the progress of the fire.

Clara reassured the little ones, put them and the girl into the buggy with Charles Cleaveland, and sent them back home with him.

“But how are you to get back, Aunt Clara?” he asked.

“Oh! in the same way the people out here do,” she answered. “I shall not be alone. Drive along, Charley. The horse won’t bear this smoke much longer. He begins to dance now.”

As soon as they had gone, she started off through the woods. Captain Cary had already preceded her, thinking that she meant to await him at the house.

Down in the wood-path all was darkness, only a faint reflected light showing where the path lay; but the tree-tops shone as if with sunset, and the sky hung close, in a deep-red canopy. Now and then the light steps of some wild creature, driven from its forest home, flitted by, and its fleet shape was dimly seen for an instant. The voices of men were heard, and the sound of axes, not far away.

When she reached the opening where the Pattens’ house was built, the whole scene burst upon her sight. The open square of ten acres was as light as an illuminated drawing-room. Volumes of red smoke poured over it, dropping cinders, which men and boys ran about trampling out as soon as they fell. Some men were at work digging a trench along the furthest side of the opening, others felled trees, others dragged them away, and others sought for water, and threw it about the barrier they were making. They worked like tigers, for, scarcely two miles distant, the fire was leaping toward them like a courser, or like that flying flame that brought the news from Ilium to Mount Ida.

Clara’s eyes searched the space. “Do you know where the Pattens are?” she asked of some one who stood near, but without looking to see who it was.

“Here we be!” said a piteous voice in reply.

She turned her glance at that, and beheld Joe, with his children clustered about him, standing beside the path. A large bundle lay on the ground by them, containing their valuables, probably, and they were all looking back, with the light in their faces.

She asked him where his wife was.

“She’s there fighting fire among the men,” answered Joe, with an accusing gesture toward the workers. “I told her that it was my place to be there, but she sent me off. She thinks now that I and the children are down at the village; but I am going to stay to protect my wife. It shall never be said that I deserted her in the hour of danger.”

“Have you seen Captain Cary?” was the next question.

“That ’ere big sailor? Lor, yes! He’s been working like ten men. There he is, chopping down a tree.”

Miss Yorke drew her mantle over her head, as a protection against the cinders, and walked forward. The sky in front of her was like the mouth of a furnace from which a fiery blast is rushing, and the tree-trunks in the forest opposite showed a faint glimmer of light beyond them. Some of the workers were retreating at that last sign. The wind caught a burning branch, and bore it almost to her feet. The men stopped to trample it out, then ran. Not more than half their number remained.

“Good heavens!” she cried excitedly, “will he never start?”

As she spoke, a drop of water fell on her face. She looked up, and another and another fell.

On the very frontier of the battleground, midway between the woods that were on fire and those they tried to save, stood a tall maple, its arms outstretched, as if inviting the enemy. Captain Cary was cutting that tree down, swinging the axe rapidly in resounding strokes. A few courageous men still lingered near, working with renewed hope as they felt the scattering drops, and perceived that the wind began to lull. But they gave a cry of alarm, and fled also; for a fiery crest was suddenly lifted above the forest, and the enemy was upon them. No one was left but Captain Cary, and his work was not done. If there was a chance of checking the fire, it was in having that tree down.

It bent slightly under the heavy strokes that smote it, and, as it bent, a long, flickering tongue of flame shot across the space, and curled around its topmost tuft of foliage, and devoured it in a twinkling. Twigs, boughs, branches, all as dry as tinder, kindled instantly, and the whole tree, wrapped in flame, toppled over, and fell.

With a cry of terror, Clara Yorke lifted her face, that she might not see that man perish; and, looking upward, saw the redness vividly threaded with a blinding white light. Then there were a rattle and a rumble, and the rain came down in torrents.

“God be thanked!” said a deep voice near by.

There stood Captain Cary, panting, blackened, scorched, torn, wiping his face on his sleeve, and looking to see how much more effectually fire could be fought by the powers of heaven than by the powers of earth. The flames cowered down from the tree-tops under that tumultuous descent, the brands and cinders died out, hissing, and streams of water pursued the fire that fled along the ground.

“Providence arrived just in time,” observed one of the men who had gathered about him.

The sailor looked at him with a reproving glance. “Providence always does arrive in time,” he said reverently.

Here Mrs. Patten, looking like one of those witches we see in the play of Macbeth, not even lacking the long pole, made her appearance about as mysteriously as those witches do.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “since the hour of peril has gone past, and you must be fatigued by your exertions, I hope that you will take shelter from the rain in my poor mansion. You shall be welcome to such humble hospitality as I can offer you.”

They were nearly in darkness now, having only such light as came from the frequent flashes overhead.

The sailor thanked her politely. “I shall be glad if you can lend me a lantern,” he said; “for I want to get through to Mr. Marvin’s as soon as I can. Somebody is there waiting for me.”

Mrs. Patten led the way, and the others followed. In the semi-darkness, a smaller figure, which Captain Cary had not noticed before, came close to his side, and slipped a hand in his arm; and the “somebody” who should have been waiting for him at Mr. Marvin’s said quietly, “You see, I cannot walk very well without help, for I have lost one of my slippers.”

The sailor’s heart had not given such a jump when the burning tree fell and just missed him, as it gave at the sound of that voice.

“You here!” he exclaimed. “What did you come for?”

“To see the fire,” replied Miss Yorke.

“And you are barefoot?”

“Oh! no,” she said cheerfully. “I have a Lisle-thread stocking, what there is left of it, between my right foot and the sticks, and stones, and briers, and thistles, and—so forth.”

He groaned out, “Oh! you poor little dear!” and seemed on the point of saying something he was afraid to say, hesitated, almost stopped, then stammered, “I suppose it would be impudent to offer to carry you as far as the house, but I hate to have you walk that way.”

“Oh! thank you!” answered Miss Clara. “I could not think, though, of receiving so much assistance from any one but my husband, or the one who is to be my husband.”

The sailor swallowed a great sigh, and they walked on, Clara hobbling fearfully.

“I wish that he were here now, whoever he may be,” she said in a plaintive voice, after a minute. “For, really—”

Her escort said not a word.

In a few minutes they reached the log-house, where Joe and the children had already arrived; and, waiting only for the men to wash the soot from their faces and hands, and to find a shoe which Miss Yorke could keep on her foot, they set out again, with a lantern.

At Mr. Marvin’s they found Major Cleaveland’s carriage awaiting them, and in twenty minutes they were at home, without having spoken a word on the way.

But when they reached there, Clara looked anxiously at her companion. “Can’t I do anything for you?” she asked.

He thanked her gravely. No, he needed nothing. She had better see to herself.

She made a movement to leave the room, and did not go. She lingered, looking to see what was the matter with him. He was in a deplorable condition as to his clothing, his hair was singed, his hands and face blistering in places; but that did not seem to be the trouble. Neither was he angry. The deep thoughtfulness of his expression forbade that supposition.

She chose to say, though, “I hope you are not offended about anything.”

He seemed surprised, and recollected himself. “Why, no!” he answered. “Have I been cross? Excuse me! I was thinking of something.” He looked at her earnestly. “There is something I would like to know—not because I am curious, or want to interfere in any person’s private affairs, but because I think it might settle my mind to know. I’ll tell you what it is, and I hope you’ll believe that I don’t mean any offence, though it may sound impudent. You must know, Miss Clara”—his eyes dropped humbly—“that I took a liking to you at first. Of course I wasn’t such a fool as to expect anything from you; but what you said back there in the woods to-night showed me that I am a greater fool than I thought I could be. Do you want me to stop now?”

“No,” Clara answered gently. “I would like to hear what you have been thinking of, and to say anything I can to quiet your mind.”

“Well,” he went on, “I should feel better to know if you have any man in your eye that you like. It’s none of my business,” he added hastily, “but it might do me good to know the truth.”

Clara blushed to the forehead, but her laughing glance was raised to his face.

“Yes, Captain Cary,” she said, “I have a man in both my eyes whom I like and esteem.”

He was silent a moment. Perhaps his sunburnt face grew a shade paler.

“That’s all I want to know,” he said then. “I thank you for telling me; and I wish you every happiness that earth and heaven can give.”

He bowed, and took a step toward the door.

“Oh! you great stupid!” she cried out in a voice of ringing impatience, and with a laugh that seemed to be on the verge of crying.

The sailor turned at that, and drew himself up with proud indignation. For the first time his eyes flashed on her, and she saw how lofty he could be in self-assertion.

“Miss Yorke,” he said, “I’m but a rough man, not learned nor polite enough to be the husband of an accomplished lady like you; but I’m an honest man, and I won’t be scorned by any woman. My love may not be fit for your taking, but it’s too good for your mocking. I know what I am worth!”

“You do not!” she exclaimed. “You don’t know anything about it!”

He looked severely down upon her, but said nothing.

“I didn’t mean to mock you, nor treat you with any disrespect,” she said. “You misunderstand me, Captain Cary.”

His face softened. “I suppose I do,” he replied. “You have a laughing way, but I know you don’t mean any harm. Forget my rough talk, and forget all I have said to you to-night.”

He went toward the door again.

“I shall not forget it,” she said. “I shall never forget that one of the best of men liked me, yet was capable of deserting me because I would not offer myself to him.”

He looked round as if he thought she had lost her senses. “Why, Miss Clara, what do you mean?”

She clasped her hands, and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Did you ever,” she asked, addressing, apparently, a wreath of stucco faces there—“did you ever witness such obtuseness?”

He stared at her a moment, standing; then he sat down, and continued looking at her intently.

“And did you ever witness such inconsistency?” she continued, still to the stucco faces. “He pretends to like me, and in the same breath tells me that he won’t have me—as if I had asked him to!”

“Miss Clara!”

She glanced at him disdainfully, and returned to her communication with the ceiling. “I shall not, however, break my heart for him.”

Over the sailor’s weather-beaten face a soft, uncertain light was stealing, as you may sometimes see the morning light steal over the face of a rugged bluff, covering it with beauty.

“Clara,” he said—she had heard him speak to the little ones in that low voice—“do you mean to say that you will marry me?”

“Captain Cary,” she replied, with an expression of excellent candor and good sense, “how am I to marry a man who won’t ask me?”

Then Captain Cary asked her.

A week after that she was at home with her family; and the first day, after dinner was over, when they sat quietly alone, she told her story to her father and mother.

They could scarcely believe her in earnest, and fifteen minutes were taken up with exclamations and expressions of incredulity. Clara received it all with patience, and, at length, succeeded in convincing her parents that, with their consent, she meant to become Miss Clara Cary, “which will be the first alliteration I ever purposely committed,” she said.

It happens too frequently that persons of an original turn of mind are less understood by their familiar associates, and even by their own families, than by strangers, and that those to whom they naturally look for appreciation give it only when the example is set them from abroad.

With all their affection for her, Clara’s parents often mistook her, because they took for granted that they knew her perfectly, and, therefore, never paused to examine. The consciousness of this involuntary injustice on their part had increased her natural impatience, and made her disinclined to explain herself; and, with a perversity for which, they were half to blame, she sometimes said what they evidently expected her to say, rather than what she meant. It was not surprising, therefore, that the first reasons she gave for her choice were superficial ones.

She liked brave, manly men, she said; and Captain Cary would give her just that life of adventure which she would most delight in. With him, that pretty old myth of women looking to men for protection in danger would be realized.

“Why, papa,” she said, “when I go out with any of the nice young men I know, if a dog barks, or a cow shakes her head at us, my escort is more frightened than I am. I shall call the captain Jason, and myself Medea—with a difference. There will be no Creusa. We will go after the golden fleece, and bring it home to put under little mamma’s feet. We will gather something for you in every sea, and from under every sky,

‘As we sail, as we sail.’”

Mr. and Mrs. Yorke neglected to observe the one significant sentence: “There will be no Creusa.” They did not object to the sailor on account of his character or wealth, they said. They did not even object because they would be so much separated from their daughter, though that would be a grief to them; but they thought the two incongruous in tastes and habits, and feared that Clara was mistaking that for a serious and lasting affection which was only a temporary artistic enthusiasm for a unique specimen of mankind.

“I do not choose Captain Cary because he is rough, as you call it, but in spite of his roughness,” Clara said. “Our tastes are not as dissimilar as you imagine, though. He has great delicacy of feeling and perception, and he is as true a gentleman as I ever knew. I have always looked more to the spirit than the letter, and I can perceive and admire a good mind and heart in spite of some outward defects. I trust and believe in him entirely. If he is not honest, then no one is. He is magnanimous and truthful. I don’t care if he does not know Latin and Greek. One may know too much of them. He pretends to nothing, and he never appears ignorant. I’m not ashamed of him.”

“I did not know you were so much in earnest, Clara,” her father said, looking at her with a smile of approval. “If you are really satisfied with him, I have not a word to say against your marrying him. Only I thought you would prefer a person who was more literary and enthusiastic. Captain Cary is rather taciturn, and very sober.”

“But he can be roused,” Clara replied with animation; “and when he is, it is something lyric. You remember, papa, Villemain’s definition of the true ode, as distinguished from the conventional one: ‘L’émotion d’une âme ébranlée et frémissante comme les cordes d’une lyre.’ It is no little factious stir at every touch, and snapping at a blow, but ‘smitten and vibrating’ grandly on great occasions.”

Mrs. Yorke gave a little sigh of expiring opposition. “One of my chief objections,” she said, “was that it would look so bizarre. If you do not care for that, then it is nothing.”

“Mamma,” Clara replied, “you would be astonished to know how little thought I give to the opinions of the Rose-pinks and Priscillas and pasteboard highnesses.”

And so the matter was tacitly settled.

But later, when Mr. and Mrs. Yorke sat together in the falling twilight, Clara came in softly behind them, pushed a footstool between their chairs, and sat there, holding a hand of each.

“Papa, mamma,” she said, “I want you to be satisfied that I am doing nothing without thought, and that I have chosen wisely. I tell you truly, Captain Cary is the only Protestant gentleman I know whom I can marry, and would not be afraid to marry. Look how the world is going. See what a frightful change has come over Boston since we can remember. Why, I have heard stories of some of our old acquaintances, people whom we thought respectable, which have sickened me. Your other two daughters have married good men, whom they can trust; but they are old-fashioned men, old enough to be their wives’ fathers instead of husbands. But of that class of men from whom you would think I might properly choose, would you dare to have me choose? I would not dare. Marriage has no longer any sacredness, except among Catholics. Other men desert or divorce their wives for nothing, and do the most horrible things. I should think that one-half the Protestant married ladies would look on their husbands with terror and distrust; and I wonder how any girl dares to marry. The weddings I’ve seen lately, instead of seeming happy occasions to me, have seemed most sad and painful. I heard a lady say this summer that in fifty years, or less, there would be no marriage outside the Catholic Church.”

“Charles, it is but too true,” the mother said. “I am terrified when I think of what is so evidently coming. It was the thought of this which reconciled me to Carl’s being a Catholic.”

“I wish we were all Catholics!” Clara exclaimed. “Not that I know or think much of theology; but it is better to believe too much than too little, and they are on the safe side. If we were wrecked, and our ship going to pieces, we would be glad of any vessel to pick us up. We wouldn’t quarrel with the cut of her jib.”

Mr. Yorke smiled. “See how she already draws her illustrations from the sea!” he said, and passed over her wish. “Well, Amy, she has proved herself a sensible girl, has she not? and deserves that we not only consent, but applaud.”

The mother’s answer was a silent embrace.

If the thought of either parent glanced with a momentary longing toward that strong inviolate church, against which the fiercest powers of hell beat in vain, which seems now to loom an ark indeed, while the rising waves of sin are submerging all beside, they said nothing.

Of the shock Melicent felt on learning of this engagement, we do not speak. Edith received the news with delight.

Edith had also other sources of pleasure. She had good news from Seaton. Mass was said there now once a fortnight, without any disturbance; and Mrs. Patten, with all her family, had been baptized. After that fire, which had so nearly swept away their home, and had put their lives in peril, the poor woman hesitated no longer. She had vowed that night, in the midst of her terror, that, if her life was spared, she would ask to be admitted to the church the first time the priest came again; and she kept her vow. Edith carefully read the long letter written to her descriptive of the occasion, and, through all its absurdities, rejoiced to see the spirit of a sincere faith and obedience.

This baptism excited a good deal of comment in Seaton. It was said that Boadicea had taken a stick to her husband to assist his conversion, and that, at the beginning, poor Joe was no more a Catholic than Sganarelle the wood-cutter was a doctor; but, however that may have been, he certainly became afterward a most exemplary Catholic, as far as he went. And it is likely that He who sees through all outward forms, and scorns only the scorner, received these humble penitents with a welcome as fatherly as that accorded to any illustrious convert.

Through Father John, Edith had frequent news of her childhood’s friend, and all she heard was such as to fill her with contentment. He did not wish to hold direct communication with the world, but to pursue his studies with but two thoughts in his mind—a God to serve and adore, and a world full of sinners to save for God’s sake.

Mrs. Rowan-Williams, seeing that her son was not despised and cast down, but rather elevated higher, and being convinced that, in some way she could not comprehend, he was entirely satisfied and happy, took comfort. She could not, however, any longer attend on a church where his belief and profession might at any time be traduced, and gradually, from staying at home on Sundays, began to go to his church, to listen with curiosity, then with interest, then with growing admiration, and, at last, to feel happy and at home there.

And in the spring, Carl was coming home.

“Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet!
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet.”

But not in idle wishing was the winter passed. There was work, lightened by joyful anticipations, work persevered in in spite of doubts and fears, and work dear and joyful for its own sake. And thus the spring was earned.

The snows melted, the robins returned, tiny green leaves appeared, and there came a day when they sat with their windows open. Every one who passed by looked smiling; no one was sad that day, it seemed, so delightful is the coming of spring. Up-stairs Clara went about from room to room, singing snatches from a hymn to joy. Mrs. Yorke and Edith, sewing and talking in the parlor below, smiled to each other as they heard her.

“Joy, thou spark of heavenly brightness,
Daughter from Elysium!
Hearts on fire, with steps of lightness,
On thy holy ground we come.
Thou canst bind all, each to other,
Custom sternly rends apart,
All mankind are friend and brother,
When thy soft wing fans the heart.”

A letter had come from Clara’s Jason that morning. He was at Havana when he wrote, and about sailing for England. In the fall he would return to America, and then he and his lady were to sail in search of the golden fleece.

The aunt and niece spoke softly together of her hopes and their own, of their poor, of their friends, of the robins that twittered just outside the windows, of the rose-vines that were so forward, of the rainbows of crocuses in the yard, of the unexpected help they had received in some benevolent projects of their own.

“People are so much better than one thinks,” Edith said. “It is delightful how much goodness there is, and how kind almost any one will be if approached in the right way. I have great hopes of the world. There’s nothing like trying to be a saint one’s self. If we should all try, there wouldn’t be a sinner on earth. If I should try, perhaps some one else would, and then, may be, some other person would be excited to try, and so it would go on round the world. It seems to me that cheerfulness, and kindness, and a helping hand, and a looking at the bright side, and a determination to find a bright side, and, altogether, a persistent shining, is what is wanted. Light is good, and joy is good, and pain is good only because it may be the birth of delight. Great is gladness, if the Lord is behind it!”

“All mankind are friend and brother,
When thy soft wing fans the heart,”

sang Clara, in the room above; then stopped, with a little outcry.

The two below glanced through the window, and saw a gentleman in the street, near their steps. He walked slowly, looking straight on, so that they saw his profile. They dropped their work, and gazed at him steadily. Mrs. Yorke put her hand to her heart, Edith held her breath, and two red, red roses bloomed in her cheeks. Up-stairs, Clara made not a sound.

This gentleman’s step was light and firm, his figure graceful and manly, his face sunburnt, and the bright spring sunshine found golden lights in his hair and long moustache.

At the step he paused, then turned and came up, rapidly now, taking off his hat, and looking eagerly, since he had ventured to look at all.

Clara came flying down the stairs, and reached the parlor-door, with her arms twined around the new-comer, leading him in triumph. Mrs. Yorke, without rising from her chair, stretched her hands out to her son.

“O Lord! let me never forget thee!” sighed Edith, waiting her turn. “Let me never forget thee!”

CHAPTER XXXII.
EXEUNT OMNES.

It is spring again, and ten years have passed since that sunny April day when we saw Carl Yorke come home from his travels—ten years lacking a month, for it is early in March. The afternoon is as still as any afternoon can be in a city. Not a twig trembles on the bare trees, not a spray swings on the dry vines that drape all the balcony railing. The sky is of a uniform gray, and so thick that it seems to contain a deluge of snow. But the day is not a gloomy one. The shadow seems protecting and tender, as when the small birds are covered in the nest beneath the downy breast of the mother-bird.

Standing on the pavement in front of Mrs. Yorke’s drawing-room windows, one can catch glimpses of warmer color within, bright curtains and cushions, and the soft crimson glow that comes from an open fire.

A tall, broad-shouldered man comes to one of these windows, nearly filling it, and looks out at the sky. He has a long beard streaked with gray, and thick black hair streaked with gray is pushed back from his sober, sunburnt face. While he makes his observations on the weather, a slight figure of a woman comes to his side, drawing more closely about her a white Shetland shawl, and giving a dainty little shiver. She has a delicate face, and the hair that shows under the black lace scarf she wears is a bright bronze, mingled with silver.

“Then you do not think we shall have a great storm, Rudolf,” she says, with another shiver. Mrs. Amy Yorke likes warmth and warm colors, and only to see such a day chills her.

“No, dear!” (Captain Cary always calls his mother-in-law “dear,” being forbidden on his peril to call her mother). “This great parade of getting up a storm seldom amounts to much. When it’s going to storm, it storms, and doesn’t stop to threaten. We may have a little flurry, though, but it will be fair weather to-morrow.”

“I do not care on our account,” Mrs. Yorke says. “We are all very happy and comfortable, thank God! but I pity the poor.”

They retire, and presently another gentleman approaches the window, and looks out. At first glance, one might think that Mr. Yorke has not changed in ten years. The hair is scarcely more gray, the face scarcely more wrinkled. But the second glance detects a certain pallor of age, which has displaced the former bilious tint. A young woman, dressed in gay, outlandish-looking silk, comes to his side. A profusion of black curls are gathered back from her brunette face, and fastened with a garnet chain, and a band of large garnets, en cabochon, is clasped round her neck.

“Papa,” she says, “what do you see overhead?”

“Clouds,” replies Mr. Yorke.

She gives his arm a little squeeze. “Oh! but I don’t mean that.”

“What! you are playing Polonius to me?” asks Mr. Yorke. “Well, it is neither like a camel, nor a weasel, nor a whale; it is a tent.”

“Oh! papa!” cries Clara, “put on your spectacles, your second-sighted ones. You have no eyes at all. In that sky I see crops for the fields, billows of grass, heaps of leaves for the trees, foaming torrents for all the brook-channels, and no end of violets, dandelions, buttercups, and ‘other articles too numerous to mention.’”

Both turn their heads, with an affectionate smile, as Mr. Yorke’s youngest daughter takes his other arm, and leans against his shoulder.

Hester’s dress is black. Not a tinge of color nor an ornament breaks the sombre monotony of her costume. But a white ruche at the throat and wrists shows that her widow’s weeds have been long worn, and the smile on her lips, though plaintive, is not without a dawn of returning contentment. It is now three years since Hester took her children, and came back to live with her father and mother.

Why should we stand on the pavement? Open, sesame! We enter. The whole family are gathered, and it is a gala-time; for Captain Cary and his wife have just returned from their last voyage, and are going to settle down in a home with foundations more stable than green, wind-rolled waves; and, a greater event still, Carl and his wife have just arrived from a four-years’ sojourn abroad. The family are all very proud of Carl—not because he has represented his country at a foreign court, not even because he has done so with singular ability, but because he has been so truly just and honorable as to have offended prejudiced partisans on both sides, and won the applause of the few who believe that a man need not blush to be called a traitor to his party, so long as he is true to God.

“I am glad to see you with the minority, sir,” Mr. Yorke had said in welcoming him home; “and to see that you can stand there quietly, as well as firmly. I am tired of splutter.”

“I hope, sir,” Carl replied, smiling, “that you would not object to my being with the majority, if the majority were right.”

Mr. Yorke shrugged his shoulders, and made one of his favorite quotations: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.”

But, though forced to resign his position, Carl is not without a vocation. He speaks and writes; and, such is the charm of his tongue and pen, persons most severely castigated by them listen and read with a sort of pleasure. If one must be dissected, there is surely a certain satisfaction in finding the hand skilful and the scalpel bright.

There is, indeed, danger that Carl might be too sharp, were it not for his wife. But Edith is his first reader, and often, through her influence, a sentence is softened, a sarcasm struck out.

“Love is stronger than hate,” she would say. “You have done only half the good you might do, if, in convincing a man’s reason, you at the same time inflame his will against you. You may make him hate a truth of which he was before ignorant.”

This is one of the couples which rests the heart to see in this world of discordant matches. Every taste and instinct is so in harmony that all the smaller business of life goes on without that jar which, in so many lives, makes a wrangle of pettinesses, and withdraws the attention from all that is noble. And, in higher characteristics, there is only that difference which enables each one to correct the mistakes of the other.

Edith Yorke, at thirty-one, has not yet lost, she probably never will lose, the simple earnestness of her childhood. It is the same bud blossomed, and so fresh and lovely is she, they call her the Rose of Yorke. She was much admired abroad. No other lady had combined so sweet a stateliness, and such wit, with incorruptible piety.

“I think,” she said, “that the reason why, while I kept my place in society, I never once yielded to any pernicious dissipation or extravagance, was because I was constantly afraid that I should.”

The evening shuts in, the curtains are drawn, and the room is in a glow. The wind has risen suddenly, and the snow is coming down, beating sharply with its tiny lances on the window-panes. But the family only feel more keenly the delight of being all together and at home.

“How cosy it is!” exclaims Clara, with a sigh of immense content, as she hears the doors and windows rattle. “One feels so comfortable in-doors when one knows that everybody out-doors is uncomfortable.”

Mrs. Yorke, seated in her own especial chair, with Captain Cary beside her, talks over housekeeping affairs with him, commends his wish to live in the suburbs instead of the city, and does not doubt that he will find fanning a delightful occupation.

Mrs. Yorke cannot now be made to acknowledge that she ever objected to the sailor as a son-in-law. “Why, what should we do without him?” she asks. “We should feel quite lost without this dear Hercules of ours.”

Somewhat withdrawn, at one side, Carl is talking to Hester about her boys. He advises her to send them to a private Catholic school, and she has almost consented. She will ultimately consent. Opposite them, Edith and Melicent talk together. Doctor Stewart is kept at home by a rheumatism, which will not allow him to brave March storms, and no one very much regrets his absence, least of all the doctor himself. His efforts to prevent the whole family from toppling over into Catholicism have not been agreeable to them nor to him, and in their intercourse they feel a constant restraint. But Melicent is highly pleased by the cordial interest with which Edith has inquired concerning all her husband’s symptoms, and, wishing to say something complimentary in return, observes, “I am charmed with your little girl. She will be a great belle some day.”

“God forbid!” Edith exclaimed involuntarily.

Melicent recollected herself. “Yes, to be sure, it is a position full of temptations. Still, she cannot help being admired.”

Edith’s face was very serious. “It is my dearest hope that my Eugénie may be a religious,” she said, with a soft suffusion of her eyes. “She would be such a lovely offering! Of course, I cannot tell what the will of God may be; but if it should be this, I shall be happy.”

“But how would Carl like it?” Melicent asked.

“When I first mentioned it to him, he recoiled,” was the answer. “But when he thought more of it, he became reconciled, and now he desires it as much as I do. We both feel that we would like to present unspotted to God that which is to us most sweet and precious. It may be the partial fondness of parents for their only child, but it seems to us that she is too beautiful for anything else.”

There was a chorus of children’s voices from the next room, where Betsey Bates and a French bonne were entertaining the little ones, and presently the door was opened, and a little boy came in, went to Mrs. Amy Yorke, and leaned on her lap. This child’s face told at once who he was. Brown, ruddy, black-eyed, with thick black hair which constantly fell over his forehead, gay and daring was this four-year-old sailor. He was ocean-born and ocean-bred, he had played with babes of all nations, chattered childish words in many a tongue, and was at home everywhere. His mother privately called him Captain Kidd; and his father had often sung to him the ballad of that wicked sailor, when they sat on deck as their ship cleaved the wave, and the fresh breeze sang in the rigging.

But, when night came on, there was one song that the child always asked for, and his mother always sang before he slept. Many a distant sea had heard that tender evening hymn to the Virgin, Ave Sanctissima, which the mother sang in a tremulous voice, mindful of home, and of the many dangers in her path. And, after a while, it became a tacit understanding, that, when at evening he saw the boy in his mother’s arms, with his blooming cheek laid close to hers, and their black locks flowing indistinguishably together, Captain Cary should come and stand, with bared head, beside the two, and listen as though to a prayer while the hymn was sung. Gradually his prejudices had worn away; and when he saw that mother and son, so dear to him, and so inseparable, he recognized the sacred and indissoluble union of the Divine Son with his Immaculate Mother. “Besides,” the sailor reasoned in his own mind, “there must be something more than commonly good in that religion which claims such devotion from Dick Rowan and Edith Yorke, and which my Clara thinks as good as any, and a little better.”

“I am glad that we are going to have a real home for the child, and make a citizen of him,” his father said, as the boy went slowly toward the door again. “Clara and I have been a little too easy with him, I am afraid.”

“It is odd,” Mrs. Yorke remarked, “that of my daughters, Hester, the softest, should be quite strict with her children, while Clara, whom I should have thought would need a warning not to be so, is almost too indulgent.”

“I could have told you that,” Captain Cary answered, glancing across the room to where his wife talked with her father. “Clara’s heart melts only too readily, I always knew. I never mistook her disposition. And, if she is literary, she can darn stockings the most neatly, and make a room look prettier, and get up the best little supper of any woman I know.”

Charlie Cary, loitering toward the door, had scarcely reached it, when it was pushed open, and—was it a human child, or a fairy, who entered, and flitted across the room into Edith Yorke’s arms? A little girl of five years, softly white and dainty, golden-haired and hazel-eyed, and so exquisite in shape that one examined her with delight. Her motions were full of a captivating grace, her voice silvery-fine. She was vowed to the Virgin, and wore only white and blue.

Charlie stopped inside the door to stare at her. He always did follow her about, and watch her, as though she were some strange, rare bird. He seldom volunteered to speak to her, and touched her with timid care, like something he feared to break.

Carl Yorke crossed the room, and leaned on the back of his wife’s chair. One could not see a more perfect group.

Edith bent over the child, her braids of shadowed gold touching the pure gold ringlets. “What does mamma’s little girl want?” she asked.

The child, smilingly aware that all eyes were upon her, but too much accustomed to love to be abashed by their gaze, lisped out her question: “Isn’t Philip, and Charlie, and all of ’em got guardian-angels?”

“Yes, my love!” answered Edith.

“There!” cried the child, with a glance of sparkling triumph at Charlie.

She ran to him, and put her white arms around his neck in a hug of congratulation, then, as light as air, whisked herself behind him.

“You’s got an angel, and he stands just so, and tells you what to do,” she said.

She stood on tiptoe, showing a pink and white face beside his, and two tiny hands on his shoulder. Then, with a bewitching laugh, she ended her pantomime, and ran back to her mother.

Charlie did not take it well. “I haven’t got any old angel,” he said doggedly. “My mother tells me where to go, and Ave Sanctissima takes care of us nights.”

A vivid red shot across Clara’s face as she drew the boy to her. “It is true, Charlie, and I will tell you all about it soon,” she said.

Should Edith’s child, should any other mother’s child, go guarded by angels, and upheld by a religious trust, and her son be like a heathen? All she had taught him had been such as pleased her fancy only. Sanctissima had been but a beautiful object to paint and sing, not a real being to whom honor was due. “I’ll have Father Rasle baptize this child before he is a week older!” she resolved.

Edith held out her hand to the boy, and looked at him with a beaming smile. “Come, darling, and tell me about Sanctissima,” she said.

“I’ve no objection,” Captain Cary said later that night, when his wife asked his permission to have their child baptized by a priest. “But you needn’t fret, Clara, at the boy’s speaking so. It is more natural that a little yellow-haired girl should take to religion, than that a great bouncing boy should.”

Father Rasle, it should be said, was at this time the pastor of a city church.

This little scene ended, “I am glad to see, Clara,” her father said, “that in what you write lately, you employ less pure color for your men and women, and use secondaries and tertiaries more. There is, of course, a vast difference between the good and bad; but in this life, whatever they may become in the next, all are human.”

“And yet,” she replied, “I am sometimes criticised for putting spots on the sun, and giving an amiable trait to my villain. The pretext for the criticism is that perfect examples and perfect warnings are wanted. I think, however, that the spots on the sun give most offence.

‘And if Jove err, who dare say Jove doth wrong?’”

“Nevertheless, stick to your tertiaries,” Mr. Yorke said, with a decided nod. “The lump of glass that, seeing a flaw in the diamond, went and smashed itself all to pieces, would have smashed itself to pieces if it had not seen the flaw in the diamond. It merely used that as a pretext for what it was predetermined to do. It is one thing to admire an ideal character, and another thing to imitate it; and many a lazy and insincere moralist would be delighted to have you paint all your good characters so extremely good that he could at once prove his piety by applauding, and his modesty by not striving to emulate. There are, of course, exceptions, dear souls who love to look at unadulterated goodness; but they are so charitable they will forgive you the spots on the sun, and so truthful they will not require you to be false in order to please them. My belief is that those persons do great good whose occasional missteps excite our courage to imitate the virtues by which they retrieve themselves. There are other stronger beings, who are outwardly without a fault; but they are exceptional, about in the proportion of salt to your porridge. Suppose that I were advised to go to the top of a high mountain. ‘I cannot go,’ I say. My mentor points to a man who stands on the summit. ‘Perhaps he was born there,’ I reply. ‘Not so!’ says mentor. ‘He climbed: see the steps!’ ‘But,’ I still object, ‘he must be so much stronger than I am. I should fall before I were half-way up.’ ‘He was as weak as or weaker than you,’ says my adviser; ‘and he fell after a dozen steps, and fell again and again; yet, there he is!’ Don’t you see that if anything would take me up the mountain-top, that would? No, Clara, I think that, in the long run, it’s best to tell the truth. There may be ignorant souls who will thrive for a while on pretence; but let them once find out that you have once pretended, no matter how good the motive, and, from their very ignorance, they will never be able to trust you again. If you want to be politic, honesty is the best policy.”

“If people wouldn’t classify one so!” sighed the young woman pathetically. “The science and order that are abroad appall me. You cannot say nor do the smallest thing, but instantly somebody pounces on you, and pins a label on your back before you can take breath. One would think that we were dried specimens. Say that you sometimes fancy your departed friends may hear you speak, you are without delay set down as a spiritist, a table-tipper, a planchette-roller, a spirit-seer, and everything that follows; say that you think Catholics, and even priests, have some little chance of being saved, presto! you are a Papist, you are a Jesuit, you are going to poison Protestants, you want the Pope to be president of the United States, you are going to muzzle the press, shut up the public schools, destroy the Bible, put an end to free speech, etc.; send Bridget to get your husband’s slippers, instead of going after them yourself, and oh! you woman’s-rights woman, you! How you are going to abuse your husband! How you are going to let him eat cold dinners, wear ragged stockings, and come to grief generally! Labelled you must be, if you put your nose above the earth. And how your dear friends like to pin on the little pieces of paper, and give you a pat at the same time, so that the pin shall prick! There’s Miss Minerva, who wants to pick me to pieces, and, at the same time, keep up a reputation for charity, goes round telling everybody, and me among them, that I am impressionable, using the word in a tone that makes it mean unprincipled, of no stability, frivolous, inconstant; and that, because I have eyes and a heart, I was delighted to find in a newspaper, not long ago, a little extract which I am going to send her: ‘A strong mind is more easily impressed than a weak one; you shall not as easily convince a fool that you are a philosopher, as a philosopher that you are a fool.’ Papa, I insist on being eclectic!”

“Take breath, my daughter, take breath!” said Mr. Yorke apprehensively.

Mrs. Clara took breath, and switched the last part of the conversation off the track. “A propos of colors!” she said. “You remember I always liked to find out the relations of things, and had the idea of a trinity in everything, before I heard of Delsarte. And, by the way, I do not think that the theory is original with him. It seems to me I have heard it before. You know how he does; groups everything in threes, the parts of which are co-existent, co-efficient, and co-necessary, and, as an instance, gives space, motion, and time, neither of which can be computed without the aid of the other two. See how I figure my Trinity with the three colors: the color which signifies the Father is blue, the contemplative color, the color of infinite space in which the creation floats, the intellectual color, the color of faith; the ensign of the Son is red, which is sacrifice and love; yellow is for the Holy Spirit, and is the illuminating color. It is also the color chosen by the Pope, who is the human voice of the Holy Spirit. United, these three form white, which is the seal of the Trinity. White is rest, peace, and bliss.”

“You are, then, a Catholic!” Mr. Yorke said, looking with keen eyes into his daughter’s face.

She blushed, and was embarrassed. “Æsthetically, papa!”

He dropped his eyes, and a slight frown settled on his forehead.

“Papa,” she said earnestly, “there is nothing else!”

He smiled, but said nothing.

“Would you be displeased if I should be one in earnest?” she asked.

“I should be glad!” her father replied, and rose abruptly to meet Melicent, who was going home.

The others withdrew, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Yorke with Edith and Carl. They gathered closely together before the fire, the parents sitting between their children, and, with hand clasped in hand, talked lovingly and seriously far into the night.

When they parted, all had shed tears, but they were not tears of sorrow.

“Good-night, my dear parents,” Edith said, embracing them. “You have made me happy for all my life, and yourselves happy for all eternity. I do not wonder that you find it hard to take such a step, and renounce before the world the religion which you have professed all your lives. You are not cowards; you have been willing to suffer that Catholics might have their rights; but, you know, ‘obedience is better than sacrifice.’”

“Perhaps it is a whim,” Mrs. Yorke said; “but I would like to be baptized by that dear young man I used to love so, Mr. Rowan.”

“Young man!” Carl said, smiling. “He and I are about the same age, and I am forty-three.”

“Forty-three!” echoed his mother in surprise. “And I am over sixty! Charles, we are entering on our service at the eleventh hour. We will not wait for Mr. Rowan. Let us not delay beyond to-morrow.”

“Good-night, children!” said Mr. Yorke. “Yes, Amy.”

The next day was Sunday, and Carl and Edith went to High Mass. Captain Cary’s “flurry” had passed with the night, and not a cloud was to be seen. Little heaps and drifts of snow hid under fences and trees, but the pavement was wind-swept. The sun shone joyously, and, not far from it, a waning moon dissolved in its light.

There was the dear old church again, and, just going in under the portal, Mrs. Rowan-Williams. She took holy water, and bowed before entering her pew. The same hands were on the organ-keys, the same soprano, bright as a sunbeam, broke through the cloud of bass and alto, the same slow wreath of white-robed boys curled silently, like incense, about the sanctuary, there were the same faces at the altar. It was like coming home again.

But, before the Veni Creator, who was this coming from the sacristy, palm to palm, draped in folds of spotless whiteness, and showing, even now, through his measured steps, a familiar swing and freedom? The chestnut hair, cut short, exposed the forehead, the face was slightly thin, but bright and healthy.

The glance this priest cast over the congregation, as he went toward the pulpit, was peculiar. It took in the number of his hearers, but you would say that he saw their souls, not their bodies. So many waiting souls to whom he was to carry a message. Self so completely annihilated that even humility was forgotten, he went on, wrapped in calm obedience, to speak the word that was given him.

The subject of the sermon was the uses of pain; the argument, that all real good comes through pain. The speaker’s voice was so clear and strong that it was heard without effort on his part or the listener’s, his tone was conversational, and his illustrations came naturally from his old sea-life.

Real confidence in God can be shown, he said, only when we are blind, and cannot see how our sufferings are to lead to any good end. Then trust is possible, is deserving, is saving. Then we learn quickly the lesson that God would teach us, and take a higher place. Our Master does not put back any soul. If it remain long in the region of trouble, it must be through its own stubbornness.

“We all suffer too much, because we afflict ourselves in trying to escape pain, when we cannot escape it. The chalice of this bitter sacrament is never empty, and never set aside. Friends and foes alike give it into our hands, our dearest and kindest press it to our lips, unaware, or in their own despite; the messenger of God presents it. It is useless to struggle, for we cannot escape; it is foolish to struggle; for in the bottom of that cup of bitterness is a heavenly draught of sweetness.

“Lessons are on every side, the whole creation preaches to us. Even the building of a ship is like the building of a saint. The pine and the oak grow in the forest, they grow in rain and sunshine, they swing their branches in the wind, and rock the birds to rest. What is their end? To grow, and then to decay, and feed the roots of succeeding trees with their crumbling remains. They grow only to decay, and wish no better, and know no better, and, if better come, it must come from some outside, wiser will.

“When the woodman appears, he is an object of terror, fancy, the Manichee would tell you. At the blows of the axe, the whole tree shivers, it trembles in every leaf, it falls with a groan. But its tortures are not ended. The saw, the plane, the shave, the auger, the adze, do each their work; and the mourning tree says, ‘I was made to be tormented. I am covered with ruin, and good shall no more come to me.’ Ah, then, how happy seem the far-away, peaceful woods! how dear the little nests that have been clipped off, and the intertwining branches of neighboring trees!

“But we are not like the tree. We know what hand lays us low, and clips off the unruly wishes, the foolish, twittering hopes.

“Look at the home of the iron! It lies in darkness and mystery underground, and hears the small streams trickle down or bubble up. It knows and wishes no better. The miner comes with his pick, the dark ore is dazzled with alien sunshine, is tortured by fire. In its agony it becomes more terrible than fire, and presses and glows to destroy. It replies with sparks to the blows of the hammer.

“Oh! for the cool dark, the whispering stream, the moveless rock and earth! Its pain is to no end but that it may suffer, and ruin has come.

“But we are not like the senseless iron. We know what Divine Miner digs us out of our abasement, shows us the light of truth, and moulds us into shape.

“At last the ship is built; its different elements are united into one harmonious being; and then it fancies that it understands all. It exults over the dull tree standing with its roots in earth, over the brutish ore buried in the darkness. It stands in its stocks, and grows in beauty, looks at the shining river that flows and sings for ever, and sees the children play, and the days go by.

“But the end is not yet. Some summer morning the workmen come to strike its props away. The tide comes up, and its song is the song of the siren; a crowd gathers to mock at its ruin. It was raised, then, only to be more cruelly cast down. One support after another is struck away, prop after prop falls. The ship shudders, it has learnt nothing from its lesson, it moans, it slips slowly, then rapidly, then it plunges—whither? Into annihilation? No! into its own proper element at last, into the bosom of the deep. The tides bear it up, the winds of heaven wing its course; at last it is of use.

“Take comfort, brethren, in your pain. He who permits it knows well how hard it is to bear. When you are nailed to your cross, the glorified flesh of the Man-God remembers its own agony. And, suffer not only trustingly, and with resignation, but suffer with courage. If you shrink and cover your eyes, you have hidden a ghost in your life. When a sorrow comes to you, look it in the face; and, by-and-by, the mask shall fall off, and you will see the face of an angel.”

We have given but a sketch. The words are dry, but the sermon was full of life.

When Carl and his wife walked homeward, Edith did not speak for a long time. Whenever her husband looked at her, she was gazing straight forward, and seemed absorbed in thought.

“Well, Edith,” he said at length, “what is it?”

She looked up into his face with those eyes so childlike still.

“I was wondering, Carl,” she said, “how I could ever have presumed to call him Dick!”

And so we leave our Edith, as we found her, wondering.

---

FRAGMENTS OF EARLY ENGLISH POEMS ON THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

To Catholics ... it is a joy and a solace to look back into past centuries, and remember that there were days when our poets drank of a purer fount than that of Castaly; and made it their pride to celebrate in their verse, not Dian nor Proserpine, but the Immaculate Queen of Heaven. Of Chaucer’s devotion to this theme, I have already spoken, but other poets before his time delighted in dedicating their verses to her who, as she inspired the most exquisite designs of the artist’s pencil, has also claimed not the least beautiful productions of the poet’s pen. Thus, one sings of her as ‘Dame Lyfe,’ and describes how

“As she came by the bankes, the boughs eche one,
Lowked to the Ladye, and layd forth their branches,
Blossoms and burgens (new shoots) breathed ful swete,
Flowres bloomed in the path where forth she stepped,
And the gras that was dry greened belive.”

Others, according to their quaint fashion, mixed up English and Latin rhymes in a style which, barbarous as it is, is certainly not deficient in harmony. One little poem, ascribed to a writer in the reign of Henry III., commences thus:

“Of all that is so fayr and bright,
Velut maris stella;
Brighter than the day is light,
Parens et puella.
I crie to The, Thou se to me,
Levedy, preye the Sone for me,
Tam pia,
That Ich mote come to The,
Maria.”

—Christian Schools and Scholars.

---

THE LEGENDS OF OISIN, BARD OF ERIN.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

VI.
OISIN’S GOOD CONFESSION.

Not seldom, crossed by bodings sad,
In words though kind yet hard
Spake Patrick to his guest, Oisin;
For Patrick loved the Bard

In whose broad bosom, swathed with beard
Like cliffs with ivy trailed,
A Christian strove with a pagan soul,
And neither quite prevailed.

Silent as shades the shadowing monks
O’er cloistral courts might glide;
But the War-Bard strode through the church itself
Like hunter on mountain-side.

Yea, sometimes, while his beads he told,
Fierce thoughts, a rebel breed,
Burst up from the graves of his warriors dead,
And he stormed at priest and Creed.

His end drew nigh. ’Twas after years
Had proved stern warnings vain,
When dying he lay on his wolf-skin bed,
And murmured a warlike strain.

The Saint drew near: he gazed; then spake,
“A fair child died one day:
Four weeks had passed; yet, changeless still,
Like a child asleep he lay.

“They could not hide him in the ground
Though hand and heart were chill,
For round his lips the smile avouched
The soul was in him still.

“Then lo! a man of God came by
And stood beside the bier,
And spake, ‘A pagan house is this;
And yet a saint lies here!

“‘God shaped this child his praise to sing
To a blind and pagan race;
And till that song is sung, in heaven
He may not see God’s face.’

“Then thrice around that child he moved
With circling censer-cloud,
And touched with censer fire his tongue,
And the dead child sang aloud.

“Oisin! like larks beside thy Lee,
So loud he sang his hymn:
And straight baptized he was, and died;
And, dead, his face grew dim.

“So then, since Christ had caught to heaven
The fair soul washed from sin,
A little grave they dug, and laid
The little saint therein.

“And ever as fell the night, that grave
Shone like the Shepherds’ star,
With happy beam that homeward drew
The wanderer from afar.

“Oisin! thy Land is as that child!
Thou call’st her dead—thy Land;
For cold is Fionn, thy sire; and he,
He was her strong right hand!

“And cold is Oscar now, thy son:
Her mighty heart was he—
Oisin! let dead at last be dead;
Let living, living be!

“Her great old Past is gone at last:
Her heavenlier Future waits,
Yet entrance never can she find
Till Faith unbars the gates.

“Prince of thy country’s songful choir!
Thou wert her golden Tongue!
Sing thou her New Song—‘I believe!’
Give thou to God her Song!

Then suddenly that old man stood,
And made his arms a cross:
Within his heart a light that changed
The earth to dust and dross:

And, pierced by beams from those two hands
Of Jesus crucified,
His Erin of two thousand years
Held forth her hands, and died:

For all her sceptres by a Reed
That hour were overborne;
And all her crowns went down, that hour,
Before the Crown of Thorn.

As shines the sun through snowy haze
Oisin’s white head forth shone:
“In God the Father I believe,”
He sang, “and Mary’s Son:”

And, onward as the swan-chaunt swept
Adown the Creed’s broad flood,
In radiance waxed his face, as though
He saw the face of God.

Then Patrick, with his wondering monks,
Knelt down, and said, “Amen,”
While slowly dropped a sun that ne’er
Saw that white head again.

The rite complete, the old man sank,
And turned him on his side:
Next morning, as the Lauds began,
“My Son,” he said, and died.

---

A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR.

PART III.
ON THE BOULEVARDS.

Summer had come, and was nearly gone. Paris was deserted. As autumn approached, lifting its fiery finger over the city, the flaneurs disappeared. All those who could flee, fled. The faubourg had fled long ago to its châteaux. The Chaussée d’Antin and the Champs Elysées were fleeing aux eaux or aux bains de mer and the boulevards, with their glittering shops and cafés and theatres, were left to the mercy of the tourist. Perhaps the tourist would retort that he was left to the mercy of the boulevards. And, perhaps he would be right. Chignoned sirens, who dwelt in glass cases surrounded by millions of glass vials ranged in rhythmic color from the ceiling to the floor, so as to make the sirens look as much as possible like the centre point of an elaborate kaleidoscope, smiled through their crystal shell at the reckless being who stood outside to peep and wonder. The door stood open. He might not hear the siren’s, “Entrez, monsieur!” but there was no being deaf to her smile; it drew him irresistibly.

“Would monsieur not like just to ‘gouter’ our last novelty, ‘cerise à la Victor Noir?’ Would he not very much like to take some little souvenir home to madame?”

Of course monsieur would. Weak mortal! He unbuttons his coat, and straightway the bees which had sipped abundantly of native porte-monnaies the rest of the year, alight on the purse of the tourist, and suck it, if not dry, as nearly dry as they can.

Busy “dead season,” when stale bonbons and faded finery are brought out, christened by new names, and sold to the barbarians across the Channel. Paris does not want any more of it, but Londres, that city which the English in their ignorance of the French language call Lon-don—Londres will find it charming!

Gaily, busily the bees were plying their task. The long white lines of Haussmann barracks glared shadowless in the fierce vertical sun; gilded railings and balconies flashed in gingerbread magnificence; the dome of the Invalides rose up against the cloudless blue and blazed like a burning mount; the red heat poured down from the zenith on the miles of asphalte that meander through the city, and pelted it till it softened and gave under your foot like india-rubber. Even the lordly chestnuts of the Tuileries, so carefully tended, so abundantly watered, were burnt brown and red, and were shedding their leaves from exhaustion; not a vestige of green was anywhere visible. The fountains were playing, but even they had a tired, worn-out look, and the water seemed to go on splashing lazily from mere force of habit; the flag was still floating above the palace, the gray old palace blinking with its myriad glass eyes in the sultry noon; the broad walks were deserted, no little feet went pattering on the gravel, no merry child-laughter rang through the shade to scare the swallows from their cool siesta; the whole scene, lately so animated and bright, had a weary, day-after-the-ball look that was premature in the first days of July.

The bees of the boulevard were buzzing loud, and bestirring themselves to good purpose. But, hark! What noise is that? Not the cannon’s opening roar, nor “the car rattling o’er the stony street,” but a sound that jars upon the lively hum, and makes the hive suspend labor and hush itself to listen. It comes from the Corps Législatif, first a faint surging sound, then a clamor as of the waves rising and lashing themselves up for a tempest. Louder it grows, and nearer. It crosses the tepid waters of the Seine, lying low between its banks; it reaches the boulevards. At first the cries are indistinguishable, a torrent of human voice, rolling and heaving and rushing like the roar of a cataract, drowning all sense in its senseless frenzy. On it comes, gathering strength in its march, waking up the echoes of the trottoir, and making the crisp leaves quiver and drop, and fly along the dusty pavement before the vociferating multitude like straws before a bellows.

“What is it? Is it a revolution?” cried Berthe, as the horses, laying back their ears, threatened mischief, and obliged the footman to get down and hold them.

“I don’t know, madame,” said the man, looking up the Rue de la Paix at the stream that was pouring along the boulevards, to the sound of beating drums, and blaring trumpets, and all manner of Parisian excitableness in the shape of noise. “It’s more likely une démonstration patriotique; the horses don’t seem to like it, or else we might drive up close and see.”

But Berthe’s curiosity was not proof against a certain mistrust of the sovereign people. The noise might mean nothing more aggressive than a démonstration patriotique, but in Paris patriotism has many moods and phases, and innumerable modes of expressing itself, and its attitudes, if always effective from a dramatic point of view, are not always agreeable to come close to, and, whatever the character of this particular one might be, Berthe preferred admiring it from a respectful distance.

“Turn back, and drive home by the Champs Elysées,” she said.

But the tide had risen too rapidly. The Rue de Rivoli was flooded. It had caught the delirium of the boulevards, and was sending back their echoes with frantic exultation. Cabs and omnibuses were seized with the sudden insanity, private coaches caught it, foot-passengers, gamins, and bourgeois, and messieurs les voyageurs careering on the top of omnibuses, all en masse caught it, and shouted as one man: “Vive la France! vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!” Ladies and gentlemen, reclining in soft-cushioned carriages, started suddenly into effervescence, waved hats and handkerchiefs, and cried: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin!” Horses neighed, and dogs barked, and the very paving-stones shook to the popular passion. All Paris shouted and shrieked till the city, like a huge belfry, rang with thundering salvos: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!”

Berthe’s horses, scared anew by the uproar that was now close upon them, played their part in the general row by plunging and prancing, and eliciting screams of terror from the adjacent women and children, while the coachman brandished his whip, and the footman whirled his hat in the air, and shouted with all their might: “A Berlin! à Berlin!” A troop of gamins laid violent hands on a Savoyard who was grinding away “Non ti scordar di me,” to the delight of the concierge in the nearest porte-cochère, and, dragging him to the fore, bade him at once strike up the Marseillaise. Luckily for his limbs, the despotic command was within the limits of the Savoyard’s instrument. He turned its handle, and began vigorously grinding out the Republican chant. Every man, woman, and child within ear-shot took up the chorus, “Marchons! marchons!” till the palpitating air throbbed and thrilled with the passionate voices of the multitude.

Berthe was not long proof against the magnetic current that was whirling round her. First terrified, then bewildered, then electrified, she caught the intoxication, and yielded to its impulse: “Vive la France! Vive la guerre!” And the fair hand waved its snowy little flag from the window as the carriage moved slowly past the Tuileries gardens.

Emerging into the broad space of the Place de la Concorde, the horses seemed to breathe more freely, and, quickening their step, tore at full speed up the Champs Elysées.

“What possessed me to shout and cheer with those madmen?” said Berthe, soliloquizing aloud, and laughing at the absurdity of her recent behavior. “I must have gone mad myself for the moment. Vive la guerre indeed! Heaven help us! We shall hear another cry by-and-by, when the widows and orphans and sisters of France hear at what price her new laurels have been bought. Thank God I have no brothers!”

“Madame la Marquise de Chassedot is waiting, madame,” said François, as Berthe entered.

“Has she been waiting?”

“A short half-hour, madame.”

“What can she have to say?” thought Berthe.

Madame de Chassedot rose to meet her “with eyes that had wept,” and extended her hands with an air that asked less for greeting than for sympathy.

“Vous ange de la peine, madame!” exclaimed Berthe, her ready kindness going forth at once to the sufferer.

The two ladies were not friends. They had met at Madame de Beaucœur’s and Madame de Galliac’s; but only once had there been a personal interchange of visits; Madame de Chassedot had called on Berthe to thank her for the kindness she had shown to their young kinswoman, Hélène de Karodel, “whom the family had indeed of late lost sight of, but with whom they were delighted to renew cousinship,” the marquise declared effusively, and as a proof of this she was carrying off Hélène to the country to spend the vacation with them. Berthe did not inform her that it had taken all her own influence to induce the high-spirited young lady to accept the hospitality so tardily offered. She returned Madame de Chassedot’s visit; the latter soon left for the country, and they had not met since.

“Oui, j’ai du chagrin,” said the marquise holding Berthe’s hand, as she sat down beside her.

Berthe’s first thought was of Edgar. But the mother was not in mourning. Whatever it was, the worst had not yet come.

“Your son is ill?” she said.

Madame de Chassedot shook her head. Then, after a pause, during which she gave battle to her emotion, she looked at Berthe, and said:

“He’s going to get married!”

“What! And is not that precisely what you wanted him to do!” exclaimed Berthe.

“I wanted to make the match myself; but now he goes and does it instead,” replied the marquise.

“Ah! It is a mésalliance, then!”

The fact was startling certainly, but less so than it might have been, owing to certain rumors that prepared the public to believe in any extravagance coupled with Edgar de Chassedot’s name.

“Oh! mon Dieu, non! A thousand times no!” cried his mother with quick resentment. “Edgar a fait des bêtises, but he is incapable of dishonoring himself. Oh, no! The girl is of an excellent family, she is even our own cousin.”

“It is her principles, then, or her—character that you object to?” said Berthe with some hesitation.

“O dear! no. She is as pious as a seraph, and brought up like a lily!” exclaimed the marquise.

“Is she a hunch-back, then, or lame, or blind, or what?”

“She is a beggar! A beggar who has not a sou to buy her own trousseau. It is a beggar who has stolen the heart of my son!” And tears of bitter, disappointed motherhood flowed down the cheeks of the marquise.

“And her name is—?”

“Mademoiselle de Karodel!”

“What! Hélène? Hélène de Karodel, that brave, true, gentle creature is going to be your son’s wife! And you in tears, and not of joy! And you call her a beggar! A woman whose love, since your son has been lucky enough to win it—and Hélène is not a girl to marry him if he had not—would be a prize for a prince! And you, a Christian mother, weep over it, and expect to be pitied! Really, madame, if it were not laughable, it would be deplorable, not on your son’s account, but on your own!”

Madame de Chassedot was so staggered by this unexpected sortie that she was actually struck dumb. “Do you know,” she said, after a pause, looking steadily at Berthe, and bringing out her words with slow emphasis—“do you know, madame, that my son has four millions of patrimony, and that he could have married any girl in France?”

“As to his marrying any girl in France, admitting that they were one and all ready to marry Monsieur de Chassedot, was he ready to marry them?” demanded Berthe significantly; “and as to his four millions, they are the very reason why he should marry a girl who had none. A woman who is as well born as himself, who is, you admit, pure as a lily, and pious as an angel, and, moreover, quite graceful and beautiful enough to satisfy your pride and his, and to make her an ornament as well as a treasure in your son’s house—a wife who will rescue him from much that I should fancy would have given you greater cause for tears than his marriage with such a woman as Hélène de Karodel. Candidly, chère marquise, I am so far from sympathizing with you that, if I had heard this news in any other way, my first impulse would have been to fly to you with my congratulations.”

Madame de Chassedot’s tears were flowing still, but perhaps less bitterly; she was going to speak when a noise of steps in the ante-chamber made her rise hastily, and look round for a means of escape.

“Into my bedroom!” said Berthe, pulling aside the portière.

The marquise pressed her hand, and disappeared through the cloud of blue satin just as the drawing-room door opened, and Hélène de Karodel, holding out her arms with a cry of joy, rushed into Berthe’s.

It was something of a disappointment to Hélène to find that Berthe already knew her secret. But there was much left to tell still. Most of the tale was told with blushes and smiles, and tears that had no brine in them. Her marriage was to take place in a fortnight. Edgar, from family reasons, chose to precipitate the dénouement, and his young Bretonne fiancée had come up to town to make the few bridal preparations that he could not possibly make for her.

It happened unluckily to be Berthe’s day, so the usual stream of visitors began soon to pour in, and broke up the tête-à-tête of the two friends.

The war was the topic of every tongue; but there was no mistaking for enthusiasm the animation with which it was discussed. Some indignantly repudiated and denounced the government, and protested that, so far from being a popular war, it was universally condemned as senseless, iniquitous, and ill-timed, and that there were not ten men in France who would cry Vive la guerre! unless they were paid for it. Others, who had been on the boulevards an hour ago, thought differently.

“There are madmen to be found in every city who are glad of an opportunity to bark, and bray, and howl, and demean themselves after the usual manner of madmen,” said the Austrian habitué, “and Paris can muster as good a roll of lunatics on as short notice as any city in Europe; but I don’t believe there were ten sane men on the boulevards this morning who cried Vive la guerre!”

“I can assure you,” said Berthe, “I saw hundreds of comme-il-faut-looking men, to all appearance in their right mind, who were crying it frantically; so much so that I got quite carried away, and actually shook my handkerchief, and shouted with the rest of them.”

“Why did you shout, madame?” inquired the Austrian.

“Because, I tell you, I was carried away, I could not help myself. The excitement was catching.”

“Of course it was. Most fevers are, especially malignant ones; and if you asked nine-tenths of the crowd why they shouted, the answer, if they spoke the truth, would be precisely the same; they could not help themselves, the excitement was catching. If an arsenal blows up, who is to blame, the powder, the matches, or yourself who fired the train? You might just as logically blame the powder for blowing up, as the French people for marching and bugling and Vive-la-guerring when they hear the sound of the trumpet.”

“Do you agree with monsieur?” asked Berthe addressing a quiet-looking military man who had been listening in silence to the conversation. “Are the people not really glad of the war?”

“It is difficult to say yet,” replied the soldier. “With the people, all depends on how it turns out; success alone is in the right.”

“But you do not contemplate such an absurd alternative as the non-victoriousness of the French arms?”

There was a prompt general protest from the company. The military man alone stroked his moustache with a meditative air, and was silent.

“Answer me, I pray you, commandant,” pursued Berthe. “You are not afraid of our troops being beaten?”

“Our troops are matches, if not masters, of the best troops in Europe,” replied the commandant proudly.

“And our generals? We have no lack of good ones surely?”

“Not of veterans,” was the evasive rejoinder.

“Oh! the young ones will rise up as soon as they are wanted. We shall have a new generation of heroes that will eclipse in glory the vieux de la Vieille themselves. As for you, you will come back to us a marshal of France,” declared Berthe merrily.

The prophecy elicited gentle cheering and congratulations from the ladies, while the men approved in their own way, joking the commandant, and dubbing him Monsieur le Maréchal on the spot.

“If it be not a futile or indiscreet question to put, may I ask what you are going to war for?” demanded Mr. Clifford, addressing himself to the company in general.

“For security of the dynasty,” replied a Legitimist.

“For the honor and security of France,” said the commandant.

“Do you separate them, M. le Commandant!” exclaimed the Legitimist with mock horror. “I arraign you, de par l’Empereur, for high treason against France!”

The circle laughed, and the Commandant, not caring to challenge the persifleur, laughed good-humoredly, too.

“Shall I tell you, monsieur, why we are going to war?” said the Deputy de la Gauche to Mr. Clifford. “We are going to war to désennuyer Paris. If Paris goes on much longer ennuying herself as she has done for the last six months, she will make a revolution!”

“That may be quite true,” returned his colleague of the Droite; “but the preventive is rather violent; some milder form of excitement might be invented for the ennui of Paris than that of taking her to Berlin for a distraction. It is hardly a sufficient reason for plunging the whole nation into war. No, I prefer to think we are going to fight for the honor of France, and it may be for her aggrandizement.”

“Yes,” said Madame de Beaucœur, “M. le Maréchal will win his bâton by taking the Rhine for us!”

“Bravo,” cried in chorus the Legitimist, the Droite, and the Gauche. “Le Rhin! le Rhin! Vive le Rhin!”

“I will be willing to shake hands with ce gaillard lâ, and to cry Vive l’Empereur myself, if he comes back with the Rhine in his pocket,” declared the Legitimist with desperate patriotism.

And the sentiment was echoed by every one present. Orleanist, Bourbonist, Bonapartist, and Republican all united in a common thirst for the blue waters of the Rhine, and avowed themselves ready to vote the war, whatever its motive, a wise war and a righteous, if it gave the Rhine to France. All with one exception: the old academician shook his head, and muttered some broken sentences in which the words, démence, fanfaronnade, ruine du commerce, feu follet de la gloire, décadence des mœurs, jour de rétribution, etc., were audible through the general hubbub.

“What a people, mon Dieu!” murmured the philosopher to himself, as, descending the softly carpeted stairs, cries of “A Berlin! A Berlin dans six semaines! Vive le Rhin! Vive la guerre!” followed him through the open door of Berthe’s apartment; “fitful as the wind, passing from reason to madness, from heroism to absurdity, as the weathercock turns with the breeze.” The word that touches our vanity, touches every chord in our nature, and sets us in a blaze, just as the spark fires the powder-flask. Quel peuple? Mon Dieu, quel peuple!

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REVIEW OF DR. STÖCKL’S PHILOSOPHY. [74]

We have already called attention to the necessity of providing sound philosophical text-books and manuals in the vernacular tongues, particularly the English, with which we are specially concerned. We have also expressed our conviction that the only philosophy which has any claim or fitness to be adopted in our places of education is the scholastic philosophy. Those who are capable of studying this philosophy in the more extensive and elaborate works of our great Catholic authors, have all they need for prosecuting their studies to any degree they please. More elementary treatises and compendiums in the Latin language are also at hand for those who can make use of them with facility. But those who cannot do so need to have books in their own language, and made level to their mental capacity and actual knowledge. And even those who are able to study in Latin text-books may derive great assistance from a good manual written in their own vernacular, for many reasons which are obvious, especially if they are not perfect in their knowledge of Latin. Besides this, there are many persons whose education is already completed, who would derive great pleasure and profit from a book of this kind. The English and American educated world is so unfamiliar with the ancient philosophy of the Catholic schools, that there is need of an interpreter who can make it intelligible, and domesticate it in our vernacular scientific literature. Numbers of educated persons, and even clergymen, who are converts and have received a Protestant collegiate education, or, if old Catholics, have not been thoroughly taught philosophy according to the scholastic method, have derived their information on the subject mostly from the miscellaneous philosophical literature of England and America, and perhaps, also, of France and Germany. In this miscellaneous literature there is much that is valuable, and even of great value, the product of highly gifted and cultivated minds imbued with sound and elevated principles, containing a vast amount of truth and conclusive argument. There is wanting, however, the scientific precision, definiteness and fixedness of terminology, and completeness, which are found only in the masters and disciples of the scholastic method. Protestants, and to a great extent Catholics also, have been at sea in philosophy ever since the unfortunate epoch of the Lutheran schism. The evil began in that fresh outbreak of paganism, miscalled renaissance; a revolt against the science and the civilization founded by the Holy See, the hierarchy, and the monastic orders, the only truly Christian science and civilization; a retrograde movement of the most fatal sort under the name of progression. The vain and frivolous scholars of that period brought St. Thomas and the scholastic theology and philosophy into contempt among the crowd of their followers. They affected to be Platonists, because the philosophy of Plato was at that time something strange and novel, and afforded them the chance of displaying their knowledge of Greek. The leaders of the religious revolt of the age of Leo X., at which time the disorder culminated, pretended to go back to the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and the Fathers; where they could evade the contest with scholastic theology, and make a show of learning and pure Biblical and patristic doctrine for a considerable time. The scholastic theology has, however, fully avenged itself. It has defeated the enemies of the church who have attacked the Catholic faith from without. Within the church, it has established its supremacy, and subdued all those who have professed and endeavored to substitute a new system of theology for the old, while retaining the dogmas of faith. The pitiable and abortive effort to produce a new renaissance, which occasioned so much both of scandal and ridicule during the time of the Vatican Council, was marked by a specially violent assault on St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus, the two great doctors of the church in dogmatic and moral theology respectively. The result has been the triumph of both. The Angel of the Schools has gone up to a pinnacle of honor and glory above that which he had ever before attained, and it is safe to predict that his supremacy as the master of sacred science will never more be seriously questioned. The great champion of the thoroughly Roman teaching in doctrine, piety and morals, has been crowned with the doctorate at the petition of a vast body of the men highest in learning and office in the church. The great theological controversies are substantially finished and settled, and Catholic theology is very nearly complete. Philosophy is now the great field for intellectual activity, and that consolidated union in philosophical teaching which has been secured in theology is the end toward which the efforts of all the ardent and loyal lovers of the divine Truth should be directed.

This end can be secured only by following the same principles and methods in philosophy which have effected and secured unity and uniformity in theological doctrine. The scholastic philosophy must accompany the scholastic theology. This is obvious, without entering into the intrinsic merits of the question. No other system has that authority, that general prevalence, that scientific precision and completeness, that sanction of the rulers of the church, the great teaching orders, and the body of directors and professors of seminaries and strictly Catholic colleges, which are requisite for producing unity and uniformity in instruction. Those who do not follow the scholastic philosophy are divided into small parties holding the most opposite opinions and mutually hostile to each other; and these parties are again subdivided into smaller sections. The subject matter of this difference is not the mere corollaries and remote conclusions, or the high speculative questions of philosophy, not essentially affecting its substance; as is the case with the differences among strict adherents to scholastic theology and philosophy; but the very substance, the first principles, the guiding rules of philosophy itself. What likelihood is there that any one of these systems will ever conquer for itself sufficient territory or unite a sufficient number of suffrages to become the reigning doctrine? The history of the disputes which have gone on within and without the church during three centuries, since the decay of the influence of scholastic philosophy, may answer the question. Either we must give up the hope of attaining unity, and let philosophy degenerate into a mere theme of endless discussion among rival parties, like doctrine among the Protestants, or we must range ourselves under the banner of the ancient and still numerous and powerful school of the Angelic Doctor.

The first of these alternatives we must decidedly reprobate, as contrary to the Catholic sense, and incompatible with the respect which is due to the judgment and authority of the church. It is evident that philosophical instruction is regarded in the church as highly important and necessary, and as an essential part of Catholic education, more especially for those who are preparing for the study of theology. The sense of its importance is increasing instead of diminishing. Everywhere longer time and greater pains are bestowed upon it, and we have been told that it is the desire of the Sovereign Pontiff that the theological course should rather be shortened if necessary, than that philosophy should fail to receive its adequate proportion of the time allotted to the curriculum of the ecclesiastical seminary. All this implies that philosophy, like theology, is a true science, having its certain principles, methods, and doctrines. And if this is so, we are to look for it where the queen of sciences, whose herald and prime minister it is—Catholic theology—announces her magisterial teaching, and not in any particular school set up by private authority. In fact, the scholastic philosophy is an intimate and essential part of scholastic theology, which would be decomposed if its other elements were separated from this one, and be resolved into a mere collection of dogmas and doctrines without logical coherence. We may infer, therefore, from the express sanction which the church has given to scholastic theology, her approbation of scholastic philosophy. This tacit and implied approbation is also manifested in her practical action. The Holy See, the greater number of bishops, and the body of those ecclesiastics in high positions of authority who have control over strictly Catholic colleges, sanction and establish the teaching of scholastic philosophy, encourage works and authors professing to follow it, and in many ways repress and discourage whatever is contrary to it. More than this, the Holy See, during the reigns of our present Sovereign Pontiff and his illustrious predecessor, Gregory XVI., has repeatedly intervened by acts of supreme authority, in which books, authors, systems, and propositions have been censured and condemned on account of their teaching philosophical errors contrary to the received doctrine, and either subversive of or dangerous to the faith. The Fathers of the Council of the Vatican were occupied during several months with discussions upon fundamental questions of philosophy, the result of which is visible in the decrees of the Council. The doctrines which all Catholics are obliged to hold and teach have thus been to a certain extent defined and declared, and the limits marked beyond which they are forbidden to stray. We have occasion, at present, to specify only two of the erroneous doctrines which have been thus condemned, viz.: that which is called Traditionalism, and another commonly known under the name of Ontologism. We notice these, because both errors arose among sincere Catholics, and were the chief cause of dissension concerning philosophical doctrines in our own ranks, so that their condemnation has had a direct effect towards unity in teaching, especially as most of the principal persons concerned submitted obediently to the decision of authority. The first of these errors was an extreme anti-rationalism, tending to subvert and sweep away all philosophy, and upon this we have no need to enlarge. The second was of far greater import, as it professed to be a new and perfect philosophy, and was the most formidable antagonist which the scholastic philosophy has ever had to encounter. The question is still a living one, and the discussion of it is not yet over. Moreover, it relates to the very foundation of philosophy and theology, and has the most wide-reaching relations, wherefore we feel it to be necessary to be very careful and exact in what we say on the subject. That ontologism which we call an error is a certain ideological doctrine professing to be a true scientia entis, or science of being, and to be, therefore, the true and only real metaphysic. It has received its name from this profession of its advocates, and from common usage, for the want of one more specific and definite. It must not be supposed, however, that it is called an error on account of its being ontological, as if there were no true ontology, since this latter is the most essential part of philosophy itself. Nor is it correct to say that the doctrine of all those who call themselves ontologists by way of distinction from those whom they call psychologists, but whom we prefer to designate rather as Platonists in distinction from Peripatetics or Aristotelians, is a condemned error. The condemned error, as we understand it, after carefully examining and reflecting upon the matter for several years, is a false and heterodox ontological doctrine, which radically and principally consists in the affirmation of a natural power in the created intellect to know God in himself, as infinite and necessary being, or in any other ideal aspect. The essence of the error consists in that part of the affirmation which is expressed by the term in himself, denoting that the very idea which is the object of the divine intelligence and is identical with it, and is really the divine essence itself considered as intelligible, is the idea of the created, and specifically of the human, intellect. The falsity of the doctrine consists in this, that it substitutes an imaginary intuition of God, which has no existence, for the real intuition of the connatural object of the created intellect; and an explicit cognition of God explicated from this intuition for that cognition which human reason is actually capable of attaining, by discursion from self-evident truths which the developed intellect possesses as its first principles. It therefore overturns true philosophy and natural theology, and destroys the very cause which its advocates are most anxious to promote. It is heterodox, because its logical consequences annihilate the distinction between the natural light of reason and the supernatural lights of faith and glory, and, by ascribing to the natural condition of the creature that which belongs only to its deific condition, tend to annihilate the essential difference between the Word of God and the creatures of God, the Only Begotten Son of God and his adopted sons; thus introducing pantheism by a covert road, into which Platonists and mystics have always been in danger of straying unawares. The authors and advocates of this doctrine have been, at least in many cases, holy men of orthodox faith, who have strenuously denied its logical consequences. Wherefore, the condemnation of their opinions has been made in a very gentle and considerate manner, and their personal character as Catholics has not been compromised, unless they have shown a spirit of contumacious resistance to the authority of the Holy See. They have not fallen into heresy, but into philosophical error, and that in good faith, and before the authority of the church had given judgment. Several of the most distinguished among them have made a formal recantation of their doctrine, others have done the same tacitly, and we may take it as a settled fact that the ontologism condemned at Rome is banished for ever from the Catholic schools.

It is equally certain, however, that there is an ideology, distinct from that of the Thomist school, and frequently called ontologism, which is not condemned. Its advocates profess to find it in St. Augustine. It is probably contained in the doctrine of St. Bonaventura. It is the doctrine taught in the later and more mature works of the great and saintly Cardinal Gerdil, who was in his youth a disciple of Malebranche the author of the theory of the vision in God. And it is still maintained, under various forms, by a considerable number of most respectable persons in the church. Rosmini is well known as the author of a system which bears an affinity to it, and, in a general sense, it may be said to include all those Catholic teachers and disciples of philosophy who are Platonists rather than Aristotelians. It is certain, we say, that this ideology, distinct alike from that of the Thomists and the pure ontologists, is not condemned. This is proved by the answers given to queries on the subject by persons connected with the Roman congregations, by the fact that the doctrines in question are openly advocated in lectures and published works under the eye of the Sovereign Pontiff, and by the express or tacit admission of the opponents of ontologism. We have been informed also by a distinguished prelate who was present at the discussions of the Vatican Council, that such was the general understanding of the bishops there assembled.

This ideology gives the human intellect an idea created by an immediate illumination of God, and preceding all apprehension and perception of particular, finite objects. It may be an idea of God, of the infinite, of being, of the necessary and universal, under any aspect, or under many distinct aspects; or it may be an assemblage of ideas representing both the infinite, and finite exterior objects. According to St. Bonaventura, it is an idea representing God; according to Rosmini it is idea of ens in genere. But in whatever way this theory of innate ideas may be expressed, the intellectual object is always an image, something created with and in the mind, and even where it represents God, or the archetypal ideas of God, it is not identified with the uncreated ens of which it is the created image. The theory is therefore free from the censures of the church. It is necessary, however, for those who still adhere to the Platonic ideology to be very careful and accurate in their expressions, in order to avoid the likelihood of being understood by their readers to teach condemned propositions. The looseness of language which is more or less found in the more ancient authors; in all authors not familiar with the scholastic method, unless they have a precise terminology of their own, which is another difficulty in the way of understanding them; and the abstruseness of the subject itself, produce a great deal of misunderstanding. There is a great deal of obscurity in the writings of Plato whenever he speaks of ideology, and his disciples have inherited the same. It has been quite possible, therefore, for writers whose doctrine is sound to use the language and adopt many of the ideas of the celebrated authors of the ontologistic party, without really apprehending the nature and bearings of that erroneous doctrine which was at the bottom of their whole system. These authors have frequently expressed their ideas under terms and forms of expression borrowed from St. Augustine, St. Bonaventura, Gerdil, Fénelon, and other well-known doctors, prelates, and theologians. Very few of them have elaborated their doctrine with sufficient completeness and precision to make it easy to be understood. Those who have done so have been the occasion of its precise formulation and condemnation in the famous seven propositions. But, now that the supreme authority in the church has distinctly specified what errors of ontologism must be rejected as dangerous to faith, it is specially important that every Catholic writer should be precise, accurate, and clear in his language, so that he may not be misunderstood even by the ordinary student or reader of philosophical essays. The supreme, infallible authority of the Holy See has not, in condemning certain errors, prescribed or defined what precisely is the true ideological doctrine. Catholic philosophers must therefore seek to come to as close an agreement as possible by the way of reason. In order to do this, it is necessary that the method and terminology sanctioned by ancient and general usage should be strictly adhered to, since, otherwise, endless discussion will be the only result. We think, moreover, as we have already said, that this agreement can only be effected by means of the ideology of St. Thomas. The church has not, indeed, formally approved it, but, in our opinion, she has condemned that which is its only logical alternative. Therefore, we trust in the power of reason and logic to bring all master-minds into agreement with St. Thomas, and in the authority of these teachers and leaders to secure the adhesion of the great majority, who must ever be their disciples. It is, we believe, ignorance or misapprehension of the scholastic philosophy, as taught in the school of St. Thomas, which has been the occasion of the attempt made by so many highly gifted and noble-hearted men to fabricate out of Platonism a better ideology. Disgust at nominalism, sensism, and psychologism, abhorrence of the scepticism into which Hume and Kant sought to resolve all knowledge and belief, have driven them to seek for a self-subsisting, objective foundation of the ideal, separate from and independent of the sensible. Irresistible logic has impelled them by degrees toward the ultimatum which the pure ontologists have reached; and which is simply the affirmation of God existing in his attribute of absolute being, the infinite, or archetypal truth, beauty, and goodness, to which Gioberti adds in the creative act; as the immediate ideal object of the intellect. They have supposed that this is the only alternative of the opposite extreme, and have put aside the scholastic ideology as halting between the two upon untenable ground. The opinion which they have of its inconsistency and insufficiency is distinctly expressed in the oft-repeated assertion that it is mere psychologism. This term properly denotes any system which makes ideas mere subjective modes of the mind. It is obvious that every species of semi-ontologism, every theory of innate ideas, every system shaped out of Platonic elements, which separates ideas from the sensible as the centre of their concretion and their focus of visibility to the human intellect, without locating them in God, is psychologism. But it is not true of the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas, that it reduces ideas to this condition of subjectivity, no better than that of the phantoms which arise in the imagination of the sleeper or the day-dreamer. In this philosophy, the intelligible object has a reality exterior to the mind, which it directly perceives, and by which as a medium it attains self-evident and demonstrated truths, having their foundation in the eternal truth, in the infinite, in absolute being, in the Word, in God; who is the object of the mediate intellectual vision of the mind, as the apostle declares. Invisibilia ipsius; per ea quæ facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur. His invisible perfections are disclosed to our sight, being perceived by the intellect through those things which are made. Videmus nunc per speculum. We see even now, although only in a mirror. The scholastic philosophy is not identical with any merely sensistic, conceptualistic, or empirical system. It does not reduce ideas to mere abstractions, make philosophy a mere induction from the results of experience, or the knowledge of God by reason the sum of an aggregate mass of probabilities. It is not in any wise a system of subjectivism. On the contrary, it is objective in the highest sense of the term, and truly ontological, the real scientia entis, and not an imaginary one like that of the so-called ontologists. If this be so, the whole ground of the prejudice against the Catholic peripatetic philosophy falls away, and there is no reason to desert the common teaching of the schools for any other doctrine, either ancient or modern.

The four great masters in philosophy are Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. Plato is rather a teacher of theology and ethics than of metaphysics. His doctrine concerning God, the immortality of the soul, and the moral ideal, is in many respects purer and more sublime than that of his pupil. Yet Aristotle deserves par excellence the title of the heathen philosopher. The name of the dæmon given to him by his fellow-pupils on account of his wonderful intellect well expresses what he really was—the greatest intellectual prodigy that has appeared in human history, the real creator of logical and metaphysical science. St. Augustine followed Plato rather than any other heathen philosopher, and does not appear to have been acquainted with the works of Aristotle. Yet his philosophy as a whole was original; it was chiefly his theology under a rational aspect; it was by no means a complete and distinct system. St. Thomas, with the Aristotelian system as a plan and basis, built the vast and sublime structure of a Catholic philosophy. Although it may be true that he derived his knowledge of Plato chiefly from Aristotle, and the latter may have misrepresented his master; yet, through St. Augustine, he obtained all that was really valuable in Plato purified and improved; and has thus incorporated into his system everything, whether pagan or Christian, which tradition had brought down to his time. As Aristotle is the dæmon, St. Thomas is the angel of philosophy. It is difficult to compare his natural gifts with those of Aristotle in such a way as to make a relative estimate of the genius of the two men. But in actual wisdom, enlightened as he was by revelation and the Christian luminaries of the ages which preceded him, and elevated above the natural capacities of man by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, he is like the bright mid-day sun compared to the pale orb of night. All other stars in the firmament must be content to shine as lesser lights, and the brightest among them are only his planets. Metaphysical genius of the highest order is the rarest of gifts. Clement of Alexandria thought that the Greek philosophy had not arisen without a special act of the divine providence which was preparing the way for Christian theology. When we consider the wonderful work accomplished by Aristotle, and the manner in which his philosophy has become blended with the theology of the church, we cannot fail to recognize the hand of God making use of the human intellect in its most consummate perfection as the servant of the Eternal Word in his mission as the teacher of divine truth. Much more must we recognize the same divine hand in the genius and work of St. Thomas. God does his work once for all. The apostles finished their special work, the fathers finished theirs, and we can have no more apostles or fathers of the church. The doctors have done their work, and, although they may have left room for successors, yet this is not in the sense that their work is to be done over again. We do not believe there can ever arise another St. Thomas to reconstruct more perfectly the edifice of theology and philosophy in those parts which he has built, and these are its essential and principal parts. Of theology we need not speak particularly. Of philosophy, the principal parts are those which give a scientific exposition of the rational basis of theology; that is, which treat scientifically of the objective reality of the intelligible which the human intellect perceives by its natural power; of the first principles of reason; of self-evident and demonstrable truth; of the process by which the mind ascends from the knowledge of things to the knowledge of their highest and creative cause, from the creature to the Creator, from the visible and ideal world to God, from the knowledge of God through the creation to the knowledge of God through revelation. It is precisely here, as we have shown, that the dispute lies between scholastic philosophy and ontologism. And it is precisely what we claim for scholastic philosophy, that it gives us the true science of ideology and theodicy, which satisfies reason and accords with faith, and is really that which is implicitly and confusedly possessed by the common sense of all men, especially of all Christians, in proportion to the degree in which reason is developed and instructed. This has been proved in the most thorough and ample manner by F. Liberatore in his great work Della Conoscenza Intelletuale, F. Kleutgen in his Philosophie der Vorzeit, and F. Ramière in his Unité de l’Enseignement Philosophique, as well as in other recent works of the same kind.

We will endeavor to give a statement as succinct and clear as possible of the scholastic theory, in order that its opposition to every form of sensism, idealism, and ontologism may be apparent.

In thought or cognition, we find by analysis these three, the subject, the object, and the intellectual light; as in vision we have the visual faculty, light, and the visible object. The subject is the human intellect; the primary, immediate object is the intelligible in the sensible, or the essences of sensible things; the light is intelligence. It is a primary maxim that nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the sense. Sensible experience is therefore the starting point of thought. The thought itself is the result of an active operation of the intellect upon a passive impression which it receives from the object. This active operation produces a similitude of the object (species) in the mind, by which it becomes cognizant of the object itself as distinct from and extrinsic to the subject. The intelligible essence which is in the sensible object is distinguished and made the object of apprehension by the process of abstraction. In this intelligible essence, or what is called in common parlance “the nature of things,” are contained the fundamental notions which are the first germs of all intellectual processes, the first product of the act of abstraction which is the beginning of intellectual activity in the infant. In these notions are given the first principles, the self-evident principles, the axioms of reason; and with these reason is able to start the discursive process, by which it demonstrates conclusions from premises, which in the last analysis are intellections a priori and self-evident. By this reasoning process, the existence and attributes of God are proved from the rational and material universe by the principle of causality, which is one of the self-evident principles. Self-consciousness begins as soon as the mind takes note of itself as acting, and thus the subject becomes objective to itself without any need of a species or impressed similitude of itself, because it is itself, and present to itself, and more vividly cognizant of itself in acting than of anything exterior to itself. The notions derived from reflection on its own operations are thus added to those which are derived by abstraction from sensible objects. The immediate perception terminates only on particular individual objects, but the notions obtained by abstraction are universal, whence it is necessary to define in what consists the objective reality of these universals. The universal is defined by Aristotle as that which is one, but having aptitude to be contained in many. That is, it is genus, with whatever is included under genus, to wit, species, differentia, essential and accidental propriety. For instance, the notion of man is the notion of a nature which is one, but apt to be contained in an indefinite number of men. It includes the genus animal, the species rational animal, the differentia rationality, the essential propriety, or the entire human constitution, mental and physical, and, in respect to the varieties of race, the accidental proprieties which distinguish each one from the others. All particular and individual objects of cognition can be classed under these five predicaments of the universal. The universal itself has its formal existence and reality, as universal, only in the intellect. It is a conception of the mind, formed by abstraction from the concrete and particular. It is not, however, a mere abstract conception, but an abstractive conception. An abstract conception is one in which a quality is considered as separated by thought from any particular subject in which it has residence, as goodness or sweetness. An abstractive conception, as that of the human species, is one formed from the consideration of men actually existing, in whom the species is actually individualized. The conception has, therefore, its foundation in the real object of mental intuition, the individual man, and in him the whole that is contained in the universal conception really exists. The conception is universal, because the intellect perceives the intrinsic possibility of an indefinite multitude of men in the very essence of man, as made known by the existence of any one man in particular. This possibility is something necessarily and eternally true, which is disclosed to the intellect by means of its outward expression and realization in the human race. That is to say, it is a thought which has been expressed and communicated, by an intelligence in which the possibility eternally and essentially subsists, to the human intelligence. The foundation of the universal conception is therefore in God. It is in God as archetype of man, as the reason of the possibility of man’s nature, and the cause of his existence. But the idea in God is totally different from the conception in the mind of man. God understands the possibility of the existence of man in the vision of his own essence, as imitable in this particular form, and of his own creative power. But man cannot see this idea as it is in God; he cannot compare the human type with its archetype. He can only produce an afterthought of the divine thought itself, a copy or imitation of the divine idea, which is wholly inaccessible to his immediate vision, and is only known to him inasmuch as it is manifested through the created type.

Let us take another example, that of a triangle. The figure drawn on the blackboard is the sensible object. The conception of a triangle is the intelligible object formed by abstraction, and universal. In this conception are contained the general notions of a point, a line, an angle; and in these notions are involved several self-evident principles or axioms. From these are demonstrated the various mathematical propositions of trigonometry. It is easy to see that, in the intellectual process of the pupil’s mind, the genesis and development of the act of cognition of mathematical truth is precisely what has been above described. In an intelligent and well-developed mind, many of the steps of the process may be made with such ease and rapidity that they appear to be instantaneous, and the conceptions gained are so clear and evident that they appear like innate or intuitive ideas. But they are not so, and this is made manifest enough in the case of dull or slow-minded pupils. The conception of the triangle, with all the mathematical truth which it contains, is necessary, universal, and eternal. It has, therefore, its foundation in necessary being, or in the divine intelligence. But it is in God in an eminent mode, and formally only in the human intellect. Geometrical truth is founded in the essence of God, who is the archetype of the triangle and of every other geometrical figure. But that which the triangle imitates the human intellect cannot see; the divine idea in which mathematical truth as apprehended by us is eminently contained is inapprehensible by any created mind; and the procession of the divine thoughts expressed in quantity and its relations in a manner intelligible to us, from the divine essence, is as much above our understanding as the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. It is impossible to think of mathematical conceptions except as having objective verity, and equally impossible to think of them as identical with the ideal being of God; they must be, therefore, as St. Thomas teaches, concrete only in particular quantities, but in their universality, conceptus mentis cum fundamento in re.

It is the same with the conceptions of time and space. These conceptions come from the apprehension of things which succeed or coexist with each other. Real time and space are relations of real and finite things. Ideal time and space are necessarily conceived as illimitable. It is equally evident that these conceptions of illimitable time and space are not purely subjective categories of the mind, and that they are not, in the formality which they have in our mind, either eternal realities in themselves or identical with God. They have a foundation in the divine essence, which we can demonstrate to be nothing else than the infinite possibility of being imitated in created existences. But this is a conclusion of reason, and not an intuition of the divine essence as infinite archetype. In our minds, the conceptions represent space and time as boundless extended locality and boundless successive duration, as Locke and Clarke have so clearly set forth, and as every one knows by his own reflections. As conceptions of the universal, they have their existence, therefore, only in the mind, while their foundation is in reality. They presuppose and demand an eternal thinker and an eternal thought; we can see immediately neither the thought nor the thinker as they are in themselves, but we behold both mediately by the conceptions of the universal and the necessary; which reflect in our minds the eternal thought of the eternal thinker, the eternal idea of the eternal God.

In point of fact, ontologists are obliged to admit that the process of the act of the cognition of the infinite is historically the same in substance with that which we have just explained. Their immediate ideal intuition is something involute and out of the reach of consciousness, until contact with sensible objects, reflection, experience and instruction bring it into the state of evolution. On the one hand, this proves that it has no existence, except in their own imagination. An innate or intuitive idea of God would make his infinite splendor to shine on the mind with such incessant and dazzling splendor, that the sunlight would appear as darkness, and finite things as nonentities, before it. It would be impossible to doubt or to forget it, if it existed. On the other hand, this shows that the scholastic theory of the origin of ideas and knowledge adequately expresses everything which they can reasonably desire in respect to the relation of the intellect to the infinite, or real and necessary being, as the object of cognition. The idea of the infinite and the knowledge of God are virtually in the intellect, because the light of reason, a participation of the divine light, gives it the potentiality which can be reduced to act by union with the intelligible object. The theory which ascribes to the newly created soul something besides its rational capacity, which it brings with it as a kind of form to vivify the sensible object, or keeps as a distinct ideal object within itself, is wholly unnecessary and superfluous. It is, moreover, not in accordance with the true doctrine respecting the human soul as forma corporis. It belongs rather to that imperfect philosophy which ascribes to the soul in this life a separate and independent subsistence, into which the body does not enter as an integral part of the personality, but which it merely serves as a machine. The scholastic doctrine preserves the unity of the essence and the operation of man, as a rational animal. That an intellectual operation should begin from our senses, and the mind commence its existence in its rudimental body as a tabula rasa, is in accordance with our humble position in the natural order. The capacity for gaining knowledge by the slow process of experience and discursion is all that we have any right to claim for ourselves. It is enough for us that we are rational, that “the light of God’s countenance is signed upon us” by the impress of an image of his intelligence upon our souls; and that we are enlightened by “that light which enlighteneth every man coming into this world” by receiving the power to know God as manifested in his works. We are certainly a “little lower than the angels,” who have no natural vision of God in his essence, and how are we essentially inferior to them, except in the necessity of beginning the process of intellectual cognition from the apprehension of sensible objects? It still remains true that God is both the author and the object of knowledge even in the natural order, and that we naturally tend to the contemplation of his being and perfections. But this process carried on for eternity could never bring us to a point where we could obtain the faintest glimpse of an intuitive vision of the divine essence. The capacity to attain to this vision is wholly gratuitous and supernatural, a gift of grace, an elevation of our nature above itself, and above the angelic nature to a similitude with the divine nature. The actual vision is reserved for the state of glory in which the blessed see God in himself and all things in God. The scholastic philosophy is therefore in conformity with Catholic theology, and a proper preparation for studying and understanding this sublime science. Every other system is either in discord with it, or deficient in the perfect logical concord which ought to make the inferior harmonize completely with the superior science.

The revival of scholastic philosophy, and the general consent with which, in all parts of the world, those who lead in the great work of Catholic education and instruction are uniting together in promoting its study and exposition, are a most hopeful sign for the coming age. It is especially encouraging to witness this revival in Germany; and to see the powerful and heavily panoplied champions of orthodox theology and sound philosophy coming forth from the German schools, to meet and overthrow the boastful giants of that land of colossal intelligence and learning; who defy the armies of the living God and aim at an imperial domination over the world of science, as its statesmen and warriors do over the political world. They are but giants of condensed cloud, like the genii of Arabian fable who escaped from the bottles of King Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon subdued these genii, and it is the true wisdom, sapientia, which must subdue the cloudy giants of critical, historical, and philosophical sophistry; the Bruno Bauers, Strausses, Döllingers, Kants, Hegels, and Büchners, who make war on the old Bible, the old church, the old religion, the old philosophy, the old God of Germany and Christendom. A nephew of Hegel and pupil of Feuerbach asked the latter what was to be done next, since the Kantian philosophy had ended in the complete dissolution of all science. The reply was, that we must return to common sense. The pupil followed the advice by returning to the old God and the old religion. To bring back the next generation to this old religion, and to educate in it the youth who have received it by their baptism in the church, is the great task of Catholic teachers. This can be done only by the aid of the old philosophy. The attempts made everywhere, but especially in Germany, to do this by a new philosophy and a new theology are all failures, and end only in betraying the whole cause of the church to the enemy. Those Catholic scholars of Germany who are sound and strong alike in their faith and in their science are beginning to see this, and are returning to the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor as the only fit companion to theology, the true wisdom in the rational order. Those who become the interpreters and teachers of this wisdom to the young are the most valuable and efficient of all laborers in the field of divine philosophy. They need to be thoroughly learned both in theology and philosophy, and at the same time to have a special gift for teaching and explaining doctrine in a condensed, lucid, and attractive manner.

In all these respects, Dr. Stöckl is pre-eminent. He has the vast and solid erudition of the great German scholars. He has, moreover, an intellect which is remarkable both for strength and clearness, a masterly reasoning faculty, great talent cultivated by long experience for instructing young students, and a style which represents his thoughts with the precision of a photograph. The German language is, moreover, of such a nature that, while it reproduces exactly the Latin terminology of scholastic writers, it brings out the idea in a new and fresh form, in which it becomes more intelligible to those who belong to the Teutonic race than it is in the Latin dress. We have never yet met with a manual of philosophy which seems to us so perfectly satisfactory as the Manual of Dr. Stöckl; and the speedy call for a second edition which followed its publication, as well as the praise given to it by competent authorities, proves that it has met the want which has been felt in Germany as in Great Britain and America. Besides the ordinary topics which are treated in our text-books, it contains also treatises on political and social morals, and has a companion volume of small size which contains a masterly treatise on “Æsthetics.” We have noticed it especially for the purpose of recommending it to the examination of those who are engaged in promoting the study of the scholastic philosophy, as a suitable work to be translated into English for the use of students. It is perhaps too large for a college text-book. It contains about one thousand pages octavo, and would require two years’ study, with an ordinary class, to be properly mastered, in connection with the Manual of the History of Philosophy, which is a volume of equal size. Nevertheless, although a smaller text-book is needed for the majority of pupils, this one would make an admirable work of reference for more advanced scholars, and supply the other needs which we have pointed out in the earlier part of our article as calling for a book of this kind in the English language. The great cost of translation and publication, coupled with the risk of a small sale, makes it somewhat difficult to undertake the task we have suggested as desirable. It cannot be done, of course, without the author’s permission, which, we suppose, he will readily grant to those who can give the proper guarantee for the faithful and scholarly performance of the work. We intended, when sitting down to begin this article, to make only a brief introduction of our own to a translation of the author’s chapter on the “Origin of Ideas,” as a specimen of the work. But we have not done so, as the reader knows, and have been unwittingly led on over such a length of space that we have left no room for any citations from the author, or minute review of the different parts of his philosophy. We trust that he will become speedily known to all lovers of the philosophy of St. Thomas, which he has so ably presented and defended, and we are sure that he needs only to be known to be most highly appreciated.

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FLEURANGE.
BY MRS. CRAVEN, AUTHOR OF “A SISTER’S STORY.”
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, WITH PERMISSION.

PART SECOND.
THE TRIAL.

XVI.

“The princess begs Mademoiselle Gabrielle to descend.” This message was brought Fleurange by one of the servants of the princess, whose attendants were a German valet de chambre, an Italian courier, and a Russian waiting-maid. The latter, named Varinka, literally belonged to the princess, being her slave. But Varinka, skilful and intelligent like all the Russians of her class, kindly treated by her mistress, to whom she was faithfully attached, and clothed in her cast-off garments, did not look upon her condition as in the least humiliating. In French she was called Mademoiselle Barbe, in Italian the Signora Barbara, and she considered herself, and indeed was regarded, as one of the most accomplished of servants. Extremely exacting of all who were beneath her, and inclined to be jealous of those she considered her equals, she at first wished to class the princess’ new demoiselle de compagnie among the latter. But Fleurange, without even observing this, knew how to take the place that belonged to her, and oblige Mademoiselle Barbe to maintain a respectful deportment towards her. Barbara was consequently inclined to dislike her, but, after some attentive observation, she had sufficient wit to refrain. The fact was, Fleurange’s activity relieved her from a part of her cares without increasing them in the least (for the young girl never required any one’s assistance), and used her influence in a way which every one else profited by as well as Barbara. When the Princess was recovering from one of the attacks of physical suffering that all at once showed how unavailing were the comforts, luxuries, and attentions that surrounded her, she dwelt constantly on her illness, its cause, duration, and probable or improbable cure, and under the influence of this preoccupation she became capricious, whimsical, and almost impossible to satisfy. No one had ever succeeded so well as Fleurange. Mademoiselle Barbe could not help acknowledging, “She really has all the trouble of keeping madame in a good humor, and we the benefit of it,” and this plain reasoning made her decide to live at peace with the new-comer, and take all possible advantage of the accommodating turn she noticed in Fleurange, who thus unwittingly disarmed her enemy and converted her into an ally, and almost a friend.

The princess’ message, which put an end to the young girl’s pleasant dreams, was, it must be acknowledged, merely an invention of Mademoiselle Barbe’s, who, being told by the courier it was very delightful on deck, was suddenly seized with the desire of a walk by moonlight. With this end in view, she sent the courier for Fleurange. As before stated, she was sure Mademoiselle Gabrielle would come down immediately without making any objections or asking any questions, which was one of her meritorious qualities in the eyes of this sagacious servant. “That young lady does not meddle with what does not concern her, which, I must acknowledge, is very agreeable,” she said.

As she had foreseen, Fleurange left her seat in the open air without any objection, and went down to the ladies’ cabin, of which the princess had exclusive possession. She found the invalid asleep, and quietly took a seat beside her without questioning the exactness of the message she had just received. Throwing off the cloak she wore, she said: “Here, Barbara, put on this, if you like, and go up and take the air. It is delightful on deck.”

It was by such pleasing good humor she had unintentionally made a conquest of one who naturally regarded Fleurange as a rival, and this, above all the qualities she possessed, was the charm that had most power over the princess, and changed the sudden infatuation to which she was liable (like most of the ladies of her country) into something deeper and more permanent.

The Princess Catherine was lying on a couch, her head propped up by several cushions, and her feet covered with a cashmere shawl. In spite of her age and ill health, which had changed the outlines of her face and form, beauty and grace had not disappeared without leaving on her person traces much less fleeting than beauty itself. Fleurange, looking at her face by the light of a lamp suspended from the ceiling, could not help admiring her noble brow, and the expressiveness as well as the still remarkable delicacy of her features. Suddenly, as she thus sat contemplating her with more attention than ever before, it seemed as if the face before her awoke some indistinct remembrance—but before she could grasp the idea that suddenly came into her mind, the princess opened her eyes. Seeing Fleurange beside her, she smiled, and extended her beautiful hand.

“You here, Gabrielle?” she said. “So much the better.”

“I was told you wanted me.”

“No; but I am very glad you are here.”

Fleurange bent down, and kissed the hand she held with an impulse more affectionate than she had ever felt towards her before. The princess seemed touched, and pressed her hand in return without speaking. Then she went to sleep again. Fleurange remained with her eyes fastened on her a long time, then she too lay down on a couch at the other end of the cabin, to pass away the few hours that yet remained before their arrival at Leghorn, which would be about daybreak.

At that time, long before the era of railways, the route from Leghorn to Florence, a long and dusty one, was not always traversed in a single day, and our travellers stopped at Pisa for the night. The princess no longer felt any interest in the places she had visited so many times. She had only one wish, and that was—to rest, and, once rested, to resume the journey. But it was quite otherwise with Fleurange. Pisa was her birthplace. In Pisa lay buried the mother she never knew. Here her father brought her during the few happy days they passed together. How many vicissitudes her young life had passed through since that time! How many sorrows and joys she had experienced! How many ties she had formed and broken! And with what interest she already dwelt on the past at an age when others are only thinking of the future! As soon as it was light, long before the princess awoke, Fleurange went to pray beside her mother’s grave. Then she directed her steps towards the Campo Santo, around which she slowly walked. Of all the places she visited with her father, this was the one of which she retained the most vivid recollection. The paintings of the Campo Santo are like a poem which it is impossible to understand if ignorant of the language in which it is written. This language she learned from her father, and had not been allowed to forget it in her uncle’s house. She remembered that her cousin, without ever having visited this spot, was as familiar with all the paintings as herself. “How much poor Clement would enjoy all these beauties of nature and art, and these scenes of historic interest!” she said to herself. “How much he would enjoy Italy!”

She might have added that, like many of his countrymen, he already knew and loved

“The land where the lemon-trees bloom,”

without ever having seen it. Many Germans have loved it with a profound and material passion, fatal when satisfied by violent possession, but reciprocated and fruitful when the forced and hated union was broken and gave place to voluntary and acceptable alliance.

Leaving the Campo Santo, Fleurange went into the church, the wonderful Cathedral of Pisa, which cannot be compared to any other; for, if there are any finer, it is doubted or forgotten as soon as this is entered. Here Fleurange heard Mass, after which she remained a long time on her knees, praying, thinking of all those she loved, and looking around: and all this without losing her spirit of devotion. This may appear strange to those who wish to confine the soul’s impulse towards God within narrow and rigid limits. It is nevertheless certain that, in a simple and upright heart, a good will, a more ardent love of the eternal goodness, the resolutions so properly called a firm purpose of amendment, all these effects of prayer often spring from what does not naturally seem destined to produce them. In those lands where religion and the arts go hand in hand, and where the inspiration which guides the painter and the architect is the same that draws the believer to the foot of the altar, it often happens that a glance at a fresco or painting aids the soul more than a sermon in its upward flight, and in accomplishing the very act for which it is prostrate before God.

It was thus Fleurange, kneeling on the pavement, holding her closed book in her hand, meditated, looked around, and prayed. Among the thoughts floating in her mind, there was one especially which seemed to harmonize with everything around her: it was the remembrance of the cloister of Santa Maria, and the friend of her early childhood, whose features at this moment seemed to beam out of some of the holy faces on the walls around her. She was once more beneath the same sky, and sufficiently near to cherish a hope of seeing her. At this thought her eyes overflowed with tears. The remembrance of her childhood prevailed over all others, and rendered her prayer more concentrated and more fervent.

Mild and saintly Madre Maddalena!—perhaps at this same hour you, too, were praying—praying for the child that was still dear to you: perhaps, afar off, you echoed her prayer and made it more efficacious—the oft-recurring prayer now on Fleurange’s lips as she was about to leave the church: “Our Father, ... lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!”

XVII.

For the first time since her illness, the princess rose above her languor, and resumed the faculty of talking of something besides herself. As they drew near the end of their journey, Fleurange perceived she knew how to converse, and that the indifference she sometimes manifested to what seemed most worthy of interest was not the result of ignorance, but simply a preference for something else. Like other people, she admired monuments, galleries, splendid churches, and museums, but she preferred the shops where she could procure the rarities she had a taste for, and liked to adorn her house with for the admiration of others. She enjoyed the brilliant sky of Italy and the comfort of its mild climate, so necessary to her health; but, if these advantages had not been accompanied by a sumptuous palace and a large circle of fashionable acquaintances, she would have regarded her expatriation as an exile, and found it but slightly mitigated by all the wonders of nature and art by which she was surrounded.

Their journey at last came to an end. The princess descended from her carriage at the foot of the magnificent entrance to her palace, so overjoyed at finding herself once more at home that the last traces of her recent malady disappeared as if by enchantment.

Numerous servants relieved Fleurange from the care of the light baggage with which the princess’ carriage was always encumbered, and she hastily followed her protectress up the broad steps of white marble that led to the first story. Here a vast hall ornamented with statues opened into apartments whose splendor surprised the young girl. She had already visited more than one palace in Italy with a similar display of grand proportions, frescoes, ceilings richly painted and gilded, but she had never seen anything comparable to the luxury of the furniture and the richness of the long suite of rooms through which they passed. When the princess came to the last, she stopped. This salon, smaller than the others, opened, as well as the one next it, upon a large covered terrace with frescoed arches, which, filled with flowers, rare plants, and seats of all forms and sizes, resembled a garden screened from the sun, and formed an appendage to the elegant apartment they had just entered, which was the princess’ private sitting-room. A table loaded with fruit-cake and ices stood in the centre of the room. The princess threw herself on a chaise longue. “We dine late,” said she. “I will take a biscuit and an ice. Eat something also yourself. But first take off your hat, lay down your satchel, and rest yourself. It is exceedingly warm.”

Fleurange attended to the princess’ wants, and then very willingly took a slight repast, which the heat of the mid-day hour made quite acceptable. While she stood taking an ice, the princess opened the pile of notes and letters on a small table near her. She read the notes first.

“Well, there are more people here than I expected. So much the better! Let me look over my cards.”

She read out a succession of names of people from various countries, with a running commentary on each which would have given the impression that these people she was so glad to find again were individually perfectly indifferent to her. Then she took up her letters.

“Ah! at last!” she exclaimed, tearing open a large envelope. “Let me see the date.—Now I am relieved!—Thank heaven, he is still there!” She read about a page, and then suddenly cried: “In less than a month? What, in less than a month?” Then she finished the letter in silence, and afterward remained a long time without speaking, but with an anxious and thoughtful look.

“Ah! Gabrielle, are you still here?” she said, rousing at last from her reverie. “I beg your pardon.” She rang. “You must be shown to your room. I advise you to take some repose. I shall do the same. We shall see each other again at seven o’clock, which is my hour. I expect hardly any one to-day, and shall wear my morning dress.”

Fleurange, thus dismissed, gladly followed the valet de chambre, who answered the bell, through the salons and up the grand staircase to the second story where her chamber was. There he left her with a respectful bow, after pointing out the corridor that gave access to the princess’ apartments without the necessity of passing through any of the rooms.

The chamber to which she was taken was handsome and spacious, but it seemed rather ornamented than furnished. Its size, its painting and gilding would have allowed much more and much richer furniture. But such as it was, it pleased the young girl’s fancy. The broad and lofty window in a deep embrasure admitted floods of light, but would have afforded no other view than the sky, if three stone steps had not made it accessible. From the upper step the eye looked down upon the interior court of the palace, which resembled a cloister with its light colonnade. A limpid stream flowed from a white marble fountain in the midst of velvet-like turf and surrounded by rhododendrons. Birds were warbling in a large aviary. All these things combined to make up a soft, pleasing picture, crowned by the azure vault of heaven—a picture singularly quiet and dreamy, and Fleurange remained a long time seated on a stone seat within the embrasure, allowing her thoughts to wander, as often happened, in vague regions, until a servant with her trunk reminded her it was time to descend in more than one sense from her elevation, and proceed to the matter-of-fact task of unpacking and arranging her effects. About to commence, she found she had left her satchel in the salon. As it contained her keys, she was obliged to go for it, and she took the short passage which led directly to the princess’ sitting-room; but, instead of returning the same way, she could not resist the desire of examining again, alone and at leisure, the sumptuous rooms she had only passed through before. She went leisurely through them, admiring as she went, with a mixture of childlike curiosity and an innate perception of the beautiful, all the objects that were collected here in uncommon profusion; but, notwithstanding the exquisite taste displayed, she could not help observing the ostentation, which by contrast vividly recalled the remembrance of the Old Mansion—the dear Old Mansion! where simplicity was so happily combined with the magnificence of art, where everything that charmed the eye appealed to the soul, inspired serenity and peace, and inclined one to application and study; whereas here, what met the eye and struck the attention spoke of amusement, luxury, and pride.

This comparison made Fleurange melancholy. She ceased looking around with interest, and was about to return to her chamber by the grand stairway without continuing her explorations, when, in crossing the hall, a large half-opened door opposite attracted her attention, and she yielded to the curiosity of glancing into the only apartment she had not seen. She pushed the door open, and entered a room equally as large as the others, but which seemed rather a study-room than a salon. The half-open shutters allowed the volumes in Russia leather that lined the walls to be seen, as well as the ebony book-cases on all sides. Furniture systematically arranged and protected by coverings, tables loaded with books placed in order as if no one had touched them for a long time, everything showed this room was unoccupied, and had not, like the rest, been prepared for the return of the mistress of the house; but a certain atmosphere of studious repose pervaded it which was more in conformity with Fleurange’s real tastes than all the magnificence she had just beheld. She therefore advanced some steps, looking around, and, the better to see the objects scarcely to be distinguished in the obscurity, she went to one of the windows and ventured to throw the shutters entirely open. The strong light which at once filled the room revealed a picture before her which she had not previously noticed. She glanced at it, and—it is impossible to describe her feelings!—She could not herself have found words to express her extreme astonishment and the overpowering emotion that made her turn pale and then red as she almost fell.—The picture thus suddenly revealed to her was that which had played so important a part in her life—her father’s last work—in a word, the Cordelia for which she had sat so long ago, and which she had never heard mentioned since without agitation!

For some moments she was overpowered by a thousand thoughts rushing over her—thoughts similar to those she had so successfully banished some months before by a supreme effort. It is not astonishing they should be involuntarily reawakened now. The lively curiosity with which she was filled was excusable, as well as her impatience to know how this picture came here, and whose room it was.—She felt she should soon know, and, with a heart still throbbing, she closed the shutters, and softly left the room in which she had just beheld this unexpected apparition, as it were.

She crossed the hall, and was at the foot of the stairs when she met Mademoiselle Barbe in a great hurry, and in that stage of fatigue bordering on ill-humor which, on a day of departure or arrival, is to be seen (and not wholly without reason) in those on whom rests the weight of packing and unpacking. Fleurange stopped her nevertheless, having resolved to ask an explanation of the first person she met.

“Barbara,” she said, “I have been examining all the rooms.”

These words brought a smile to the servant’s face, for she prided herself on the splendor of her mistress’ palace.

“We are well quartered, aren’t we?” she said, with an air of satisfaction.

“Yes, quite. Does the whole palace belong to the princess?”

“Certainly, from the garret to the cellar.”

“And she lives here alone?”

“Alone, of course, with Monsieur le Comte.”

“The count?”

“Yes; her son, who always lives with her when here. There—in that room,” said she, pointing towards the door Fleurange had just closed.

“Her son! What is his name?”

“Count George de Walden.”

“Count George de Walden?” echoed Fleurange, as if in a dream.

“Why, yes; that was the name of the princess’ first husband. Did you not know it?”

“No, I did not.”

“He died young—that one. Madame, too, was young. She mourned for him a long time, and then married again, but had no more children. The prince is dead also, but—”

Just at that moment a servant appeared with an armful of packages of all sizes, one of which fell from his hand. Barbara left Fleurange abruptly, and sought relief from her fatigue in a severe reprimand to the awkward man, more tired than herself.

XVIII.

Fleurange returned to her seat on the top of the three steps that led to her window, and was again looking down on the quiet and secluded court. But what a change had been wrought in her feelings since she sat there half an hour before! What contrast between this tranquil scene, which then harmonized so perfectly with the serenity of her thoughts, and her present agitation of mind! She endeavored to be calm, but for some time could not succeed. Was the emotion caused by this unexpected discovery surprise and joy, or regret and fear? She could not clearly decide, but it was a mixture of all these different sensations; and she gave herself up for a time to be buffeted by a whirlwind of contradictory thoughts. By degrees they at last became clearer and more distinct. Fleurange recalled the last time she heard Count George’s name mentioned, as well as the resolution she made that day. That resolution had been easily kept, thanks to all that had since happened to divert and absorb her attention. She must still remain faithful to it under entirely different circumstances. It was, however, no longer a question of forgetting the very name of Count George, as she was doubtless to see him, know him, and live under the same roof. But what she must impress most seriously on her mind was—that he would be as widely separated from her here in his mother’s house as when he only lived in the world of her dreams. This of course would be extremely difficult, but it was evidently a duty she owed to herself. This point once established, her course was plain.

The gentle hand that guided her childhood did not try to extinguish the exquisite though somewhat dangerous qualities with which she was gifted. She did not stifle the liveliness of her imagination, or the ardent tenderness of her heart, or the tendency of her sentiments to extremes.

Madre Maddalena considered these precious gifts only dangerous in the absence of two other qualities which she sought to develop in Fleurange, with a care only comparable to that which is used (in an inferior sense) in developing the human voice, and transforming it into an instrument at once powerful, harmonious, and almost divine. However musical a voice may be, one cannot sing without correctness of ear, and the power of sustaining its clearness for a long time without faltering. The divine harmony of the human faculties also depends on the correctness with which the word duty is echoed in the soul, and the strength of character to act upon it unhesitatingly and unfalteringly. These were the two qualities that overruled all others in Fleurange’s nature, and had hitherto preserved her from the dangers to which the others exposed her.

More than two hours passed away: the shadows of the columns grew longer beneath the portico: the evening star, herald of holy thoughts in Fleurange’s soul, came out clear and brilliant in the cloudless sky, reminding her of her accustomed prayer. She had hardly finished it when the clock struck and abruptly recalled the young girl to herself. She hastily opened her trunk, changed her dress, and entered the dining-room the very moment the Princess Catherine appeared.

Fleurange wore a plain dress of black silk. In the present state of her wardrobe, she would have been embarrassed if required to increase the elegance of her toilet, but she had not thought of it on the present occasion, after hearing the princess say she intended dining in her morning dress. She was, therefore, somewhat surprised to see the garment thus designated was a flowing robe of white cashmere richly embroidered with gold. Her coiffure was a tissue of lace and gold, and she wore on her neck six strings of magnificent pearls which hung down over her waist. But what surprised and disconcerted the young girl more was the dissatisfied look the princess gave her when she appeared. It was the first time the kind and cordial greeting to which she had become accustomed was wanting.

But it was no time to give or receive any explanations, for the princess was not alone. There were two or three guests whose names Fleurange afterwards learned: an old savant named Dom Pomponio; Signor Livio, a young artist: and the Marquis Trombelli, who was somewhat of a bore. To tell the truth, they occupied an inferior rank among the habitués of the palace, but they preserved the mistress of the house from the mortification of seeing the products of her cook’s skill waste their sweetness on the desert air, as well as the danger of dining without a sufficient number of guests in a vast room, where a tête-à-tête with Fleurange would have been unsatisfactory. Not that she was by any means indifferent to the quality of those she received in her drawing-rooms, but with respect to her convives she attached almost as much importance to their number as to their worth, and only required in return the ability of appreciating the exquisite dishes placed before them.

Notwithstanding the simplicity of her dress, Fleurange did not escape notice. The man of letters talked a little more than usual with the hope of dazzling her; the marquis directed his eye-glass towards her several times; and the young artist ventured on some words complimentary in their tone, but as she only replied in monosyllables the conversation languished. The evening seemed long, and the princess had yawned more than once, when she was suddenly roused at hearing announced—the Marquis Adelardi! She made a joyful exclamation.

The gentleman who appeared was about forty years of age. Fleurange afterwards learned he was a Milanais. She immediately perceived he was one of those men who converse well on every subject, and know how to excite an interest in what they are talking about, whether it be fashionable gossip, a political novelty, or a social and literary question, and who have no other fault than that of treating these subjects as if they were all of equal interest!

The atmosphere of the room at once changed. The Marquis Adelardi had not been there a quarter of an hour before he found means of setting off the indifferent elements of the circle to the best advantage, making each one talk of what he knew the best. He passed from politics to history, from the sciences to the arts, showing himself capable of conversing on all these subjects, if not of sounding their depths.

Fleurange silently listened to this conversation, which amused her, but her interest redoubled and changed its nature when the new-comer, drawing near the princess’ arm-chair, said:

“And when are we to see our George again?”

The princess replied in a pleased and yet half-anxious tone: “We shall see him again soon, for the letter I received from him this morning, written at St. Petersburg, announced his return at the end of this month.”

“So much the better, I miss him everywhere, and every way, here.”

“And I assure you I do also, as you may imagine,” said the princess, with a thoughtful air, as she played with her necklace of pearls. “Nevertheless, Adelardi, you know as well as I it would be better for him to remain where he is till the end of the year.”

“Come, my dear princess, give it up. I advise you to abandon the idea of making a courtier of George.”

“That is not the only point.”

“Yes, I understand. You think the fair Vera—” Here the marquis leaned forward, and exchanged some words with the princess in a low tone. Fleurange only heard these: “And you know this is my only wish.” It was the princess who spoke.

“And he?” said the marquis.

“He! You know him well.”

“But that is precisely the reason I should not have supposed him insensible to such attractions as hers.”

“Yes, indeed, but it is never sure he is not absorbed by some fancy not to be foreseen. Moreover, I believe if she had not been at court—” Here the princess again lowered her voice.

“Do not worry. He will yield at last.”

“I truly hope so, but meanwhile acknowledge it would be better for him not to return.”

“Yes and no. I am not sure it is very judicious to expose him to compromise himself, as he is always tempted to do.”

The princess looked very grave. “You are right from that point of view,” said she. “He really terrifies me often. But I think he would become more prudent if obliged to be so. It is a necessity of which one is at last convinced by living in Russia.”

The conversation was continued for some time in a low tone. Then the princess declared herself fatigued, and an exception was made to her custom of prolonging the evening to a late hour, and they all retired.

Fleurange was about to do the same when the princess stopped her and asked the reason of her simplicity of dress. “I am particularly desirous,” she said, “that they who in some sort aid me in doing the honors of my salon should be dressed stylishly—and I pay them accordingly,” she added with the want of delicacy sometimes to be remarked even in well-bred ladies with regard to their dependents. It was a fault the princess was not often guilty of, but this side of her nature became apparent when she was in a bad humor.

Fleurange blushed. “I beg your pardon, princess,” said she, “but I cannot comply with your request—I cannot,” she repeated, her eyes filling with great tears.

“What does all this mean?”

Fleurange hesitated an instant, but, obedient to her impulses, always frank and simple, she related what the princess had hitherto been ignorant of—the ruin of her family, and the motive that had induced her to accept the place she now occupied.

“If I am obliged to expend the money I receive from you in adorning my person; if I can only aid my relatives at the risk of displeasing you, then—then—” And her voice faltered. “Alas! madame, I should be obliged to seek elsewhere the means of—”

The princess did not allow her to finish. The young girl’s accent, as she gave her simple account, excited her sympathies; her dissatisfaction vanished, and the result of this little scene was that Fleurange was allowed not only to dispose of a part of her salary as she pleased, but the whole, on one condition, which the princess insisted upon, and to which Fleurange was at length forced to consent—that the princess, and she alone, should have the direction of her young companion’s dress and ornaments.

From that time Fleurange was profusely provided with all that could satisfy the singular requirement of her protectress, and at the same time gratify her generosity, keenly stimulated by her interest in the account she had just heard. Fleurange yielded with a mixture of gratitude and repugnance, endeavoring to reconcile the simplicity of her tastes with the elegant taste of the princess. The result, however, was that, when she appeared for the first time in public, the effect she produced far surpassed the expectations of her who seemed to attach so much importance to enhancing her beauty.

Elegance and luxury seemed really to be necessary elements of the Princess Catherine’s existence, and as an inferior article of furniture or hangings of any plainness would have been considered out of place in her apartments, so Fleurange’s simple black dress would have marred the prevailing harmony, and she regarded it as a matter of importance to change what injured the general effect. But she was by no means disposed Fleurange should cease to be her protégée, which gratified her pride as well as her kind heart.

If the somewhat too enthusiastic homage paid the young girl at her first appearance had been sought or even welcomed by her, the princess’ humor would doubtless have been affected by it; but the dignified modesty of Fleurange’s deportment soon modified the admiration whose incense would only have troubled the purity and elevation of her heart had vanity given it entrance.

Fleurange was not vain. This was one of her charms, and at the same time a safeguard.

The princess’ observant eye soon assured her there was no cause for fear. This increased her confidence in Fleurange, which soon became boundless. It was the height of her wishes to be attended by one whose beauty added to the attractions of her salon and gave her no anxiety as to the consequences; to enjoy, herself, the charm of Fleurange’s presence, her activity, and a thousand little talents which made her useful at every turn; and this without requiring the least vigilance on the part of herself, which would have greatly annoyed her. She was glad she could now be indolent at her ease. Fleurange wrote her notes, arranged her flowers, and completed work she zealously commenced and then abandoned, and afterwards complacently showed as her own. Fleurange was also ready to read to her, with her harmonious voice and expression only the more rare because perfectly natural, sometimes Italian or German poetry, and sometimes articles in the reviews and journals; then, at the hour of receiving visits, she was glad to absent herself, unless the princess invited her to remain or sent for her. By thus following her own judgment, she unwittingly fulfilled the secret wishes of the princess, who was perhaps better pleased with the tact with which she knew how to anticipate her desires than the promptness of her obedience.

Meanwhile the days passed away, and it was more than a month since their arrival at Florence. During this time Count George’s name was mentioned a thousand times in Fleurange’s presence, but it ceased to produce the effect she once wisely resolved to resist. Sometimes she smiled to herself as she thought it possible, after knowing him, she might be greatly astonished at his ever having occupied her thoughts to such an extent. “Phantoms always vanish, they say, when we approach and look them in the face.”

Such was the thought that crossed her mind, one morning, as she sat alone in the small salon. The princess had gone out, and Fleurange was seated at an embroidery frame completing some work. The thought just mentioned was suggested by the news received that morning of the certain arrival of Count George by the end of the week.

“Yes, reality puts all fancies to flight; and it is very probable,” she continued, pursuing the course of her reflections, “when I know him better—” She was suddenly interrupted by the noise of hasty steps in the next apartment. Generally, no one came that way without being announced. Surprised, Fleurange hastily rose to leave the room according to her custom, but had scarcely started when she found herself face to face with the person who entered.

It was he—yes, he—Count George!

She had not time to define her sensations. The effect she herself produced surprised her, or, to speak more correctly, terrified her so much that she remained motionless, silent, and astonished.

“Fleurange!—Great God! is it possible! Is it true? Fleurange!” repeated he with an emotion more profound than that of joy. His voice, no less than his features, was graven on the memory of her who heard it. The name, the almost forgotten name of her childhood, uttered in such a tone; the hand that grasped her own as that of a friend he had found again, but with a look that made Fleurange instinctively withdraw her eyes; his rapid questions, incoherent replies, the eager, tender, passionate tone of his words—everything in this meeting was sudden, ardent, and dangerous as lightning!

A carriage was now heard; but, before the Princess Catherine entered the salon, Fleurange had reached her chamber, pale and ready to faint.

All the unreasonableness, the madness almost, of her former thoughts, all that had seemed impossible, was in an instant transformed into a sudden, unforeseen, and dangerous reality! What had she just heard? What did he say? What! The thought of her had followed him for a year; he had endeavored to banish it, but had not succeeded; and now he had returned decided to make every effort to find her again—to behold her once more whose image had been constantly present in his mind!

Yes, he said all this!—And what she heard was the counterpart of what she herself had felt and struggled against.—Poor Fleurange! was it joy her pale and troubled face expressed? Was it a transport of pride, or of tenderness, that caused her heart to beat so painfully? Was it happiness that made her shed such a torrent of tears?

Oh! no, the words so sweet to hear when it is lawful to listen; the happiness of being loved when one loves—one of the greatest in the world; the words so readily understood because they express what one has so deeply felt; all that sometimes suddenly illumines a life like the light of the sun, had just fallen on hers with the brightness, instantaneousness, and danger of a thunderbolt!

XIX.

Count George de Walden possessed every exterior quality that could please or fascinate, and, though it would not have been wise to regard his chivalric air and the nobleness of his features and manners as the sure indices of a soul exempt from egoism, it was impossible not to be struck by his appearance, and difficult to forget him after he was once seen. The lively impression he made on Fleurange’s memory was not therefore so strange as might appear, and there were more excuses for it than she found herself. What was much more surprising was that, notwithstanding the charm with which she was endowed, the impression was reciprocal, and, at the end of a year, was not effaced.

We must not, of course, compare the simple, confused, and involuntary feelings of a young girl with those of such a man as Count George. Under the semblance of Cordelia, Fleurange had been constantly before his eyes as well as in his imagination. He passionately desired to behold her again. He resolved to find her without examining his intentions as to the project, and this tenacious preoccupation influenced more than he would have acknowledged the decision he recently made in spite of his almost pledged word.

Nevertheless, without being very scrupulous, the Count de Walden would have thought twice before allowing himself to make such a declaration to his mother’s companion as that with which he greeted her. But he by no means expected to find in the Gabrielle sometimes mentioned in his mother’s letters her whose singular name had remained imprinted on his memory, as well as her wonderful beauty, and the first moment of surprise deprived him of the faculty of reflection. Then, seeing the young girl’s sweet face blush and turn pale, seeing her charming eyes full of alarm, he uttered in spite of himself the words he would perhaps have been better able to suppress if she herself had been more successful at concealment.

But, as we have said, all this was quicker than thought. Five minutes had not elapsed from the moment of his sudden appearance before the princess, breathless with joy and haste, fell pale with emotion into her son’s arms. George led her to her chaise longue, and knelt beside her, and, while she was asking him—embracing him at every word—sometimes why he had returned so soon, and sometimes why he had kept them waiting for him so long, by degrees he entirely regained his self-control. When, after a long hour’s conversation, he found himself once more alone, he asked himself if the vision he beheld at his arrival was a reality or a dream of his imagination, and then, if he were pleased or not, that it had appeared to him beneath his mother’s roof.

During this time Fleurange also regained her self-possession, though slowly, and her first sensation was a kind of terror. “O dear friends! why did I leave you?” she cried, with a feeling analogous to that of one in the midst of a tempest, longing for the security of land. She felt the need of protection even more than at Paris with want staring her in the face, and more than ever did her isolation and weakness make her afraid. She wiped away her tears, folded her hands, and endeavored to reflect calmly, but it was beyond her power to be calmed yet. Her surprise and agitation had been, this time, too violent. In spite of all her efforts, the accents still ringing in her ears filled her with an acute, almost painful joy, which pierced her heart like a sword.

“No, no, I must not dwell on it,” she said, clasping her forehead with her hands as if to stay the current of her thoughts.

All at once a new idea occurred to her: “What will he tell his mother? What would she think? Would she be proud, haughty, and disdainful as she sometimes knew how to be? Would she order her new companion to leave her at once? What was to be the result?”

She was taking this new view of her position when Barbara, without the usual formality of knocking, came rushing in with the eager air of a person who brings news and a message.

“Mademoiselle Gabrielle,” she said, “the princess has sent me to inform you of the count’s arrival, and that there will be a great many at dinner. She wishes you to look your best.”

This message, in the midst of Fleurange’s reflections, was like cold water on a furnace, causing a kind of effervescence, and the confusion of her thoughts became more inextricable than ever. She looked at Barbara as if she did not comprehend her.

“You were asleep, perhaps,” said she, noticing the young girl’s pallor and bewildered look. “Are you ill?”

This question suggested an affirmative reply, and she told the servant she would be obliged to remain in her room. She was congratulating herself on this happy means of escape, when Barbara explained:

“Remain in your room! Sick! Well, what an idea! And on a day like this!—Madame would be pleased!—Come, mademoiselle, you know well she would never consent to it!”

“But if my head aches so I can hardly raise it?” said Fleurange.

Barbara looked at her. Fleurange was not deceiving her. She had a headache; she was very pale, and there was an unusual expression in her eyes and face, but she was no less beautiful than usual; rather the contrary.

“Come, Mademoiselle Gabrielle, you are not very ill, I know,” said Barbara. “Make an effort, otherwise you may be sure the princess will be up here, and then you will have to yield.”

This perspective reduced Fleurange to immediate submission.

“Then, Barbara,” she said, in a tone half plaintive and half impatient, “let her tell me what to wear! Dress!—If she only knew how I detest it!”

“Come, mademoiselle, there are many others who would be glad to be in your place,” said Barbara in an ill humored tone.

At first she was very much opposed to all her mistress’ generosity to Fleurange, but she soon softened, for the latter had a means of conciliating her which she often made use of, and always at a seasonable time.

“Here, Barbara, take this shawl. You may keep it. Come back in an hour, and tell me what the princess wishes me to wear. That is always the shortest way, and saves me the trouble of deciding.”

Barbara went away, but reappeared in an hour, bringing a dress of sky-blue gauze and some silver pins.

“Here, mademoiselle, is your toilet for to-day. Dress yourself quick; I am going to help you. Let me arrange your hair.—There!—These bright pins have a fine effect in your black hair. Now your dress, quick. The princess is already in the salon. Monsieur le Comte also, and a great many others. You will be late.—Come, what are you thinking of, Mademoiselle Gabrielle, to sit down instead of completing your toilet?”

Fleurange was indeed at once agitated and confused. She walked to and fro in her chamber, sat down, and rose up without any attention to the appeals addressed her. At length she resigned herself to let Barbara dress her as she pleased, and the latter, with a natural taste for the art, acquitted herself so well that, when the young girl, with a trembling hand, opened the door of the salon, hoping to glide in unperceived among the numerous guests already assembled, there was a general murmur of admiration. This added a mortal embarrassment to her trouble.

If any one had asked her the color of her dress she could not have told; but the idea suddenly occurred to her that Barbara had perhaps arranged her hair and dress in a different and more becoming way than usual, and she blushed, wondering what the princess would think of her unaccustomed display.

But the princess did not appear to take any notice of her. Standing in the centre of the room in the richest of dresses, she was doing the honors of the house with her usual ease. All at once Fleurange heard her name called: “Gabrielle!” It was the princess who beckoned to her. Fleurange approached, but a mist veiled her eyes, for she had seen from the first that Count George was beside his mother.

“My bracelet is unclasped. Fasten it, Gabrielle,” said the princess in her usual tone, at once kind and patronizing. Fleurange bent down and clasped the bracelet.

“George,” said the princess, “this is Gabrielle of whom I have often spoken to you. Gabrielle, this is my son.”

George bowed without attempting to speak. Fleurange did the same, but a painful sensation made the blood rush to her face. For the first time in her life, she felt tacitly guilty of a falsehood, or at least of deception, and, though comforted by the certainty the princess had no suspicion of what had taken place two hours before, a flash of haughty displeasure escaped from her eyes as she raised them and turned away her head.

Count George looked at her attentively for an instant, then became thoughtful, and it was only with an effort he took any part in the conversation at table. But in the evening, thanks to the Marquis Adelardi, whose friendship he valued and whose mind was in sympathy with his, he became more animated, and in his turn shone almost as much as his brilliant interlocutor; but he did not approach Fleurange, and did not even seem once to look towards her.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

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ART AND RELIGION.

God reveals himself to all the faculties of the soul. We not only know him as truth; we also love him as beauty. As he is infinite truth, so is he perfect beauty. Without the existence of God as absolute truth, science is impossible. Science, which is co-ordinated knowledge, can never be well grounded unless it rest upon the eternal and first cause, which is God. God as truth is at the bottom of all knowledge; as beauty, he is the ideal present to the soul in every conception of art.

Art is the expression of ideal beauty under a created form. The philosopher, in his meditations, seeks the true, which he translates into formulas; the artist in his impassioned love seeks the beautiful, which he makes to live on canvas, to breathe in marble, to speak from the living page.

The end of art is not to imitate nature. On the contrary, in the presence of natural beauty it looks beyond to the type, the idea of a still higher beauty. Hence the artist is not a mere copier of nature; for he is enamored of an ideal that disgusts him with all that he beholds in the real world. The aim and despair of his life is to give to this ideal a form and a sensible expression. Ideal beauty is that which disenchants the soul of the love of every created thing, and which in the presence of reality lifts it up to a higher love. It is a gleam from the face of God reflected through the blue heavens, the starry sky, or whatever in nature is grand or beautiful. It is the eternal allurement and eternal disenchantment of the noblest souls. True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. Hence art, which aims to give expression to this beauty, is essentially religious, and tends to elevate the soul from earth to heaven, and bear it away toward the infinite.

It is the ideal side of natural beauty that gives to it its religious power.

The view of the beautiful in nature creates in us a longing for heaven, because the image of God is reflected from all those objects which so inspire the soul. When, in the spring-time we seat ourselves on the border of a lake in whose tranquil waters, as in a vast mirror, are reflected the green woods and the laughing meadows, the trees and the plants and the flowers; into whose bosom the rippling waters of rill and rivulet are flowing, all joyous like children that run to meet their gentle mother, whilst the quiet winds whisper to one another from leaf to leaf, as if afraid to dispel the enchantment of the spot—does not, in such an hour, a mysterious solitude creep over the soul, and free it from the distracting thoughts of life, giving it power to raise itself on the wings of contemplation to the very throne of God? The sight of true beauty always reminds us of heaven. Seated on the border of that enchanted lake, man grows sad and thoughtful, a sweet melancholy takes hold of him, because he has caught a glimpse of home, but is still an exile. When, on a summer’s evening, the sun has sunk to rest, and not a breath creeps through the rosy air, but all nature is bowed in silent prayer, and the stars come out one by one, the guardians of the night—in this heavenliest hour, who has not been impressed by a sense of the infinite, the unmistakable presence of God, before whom heaven and earth, “from the high host of stars to the lulled lake and mountain coast,” grow still, absorbed in adoration?

There is also in the grand and rugged scenes of nature an immense religious power.

The ocean, the desert, high mountains and mighty rivers, storm and darkness, with the voice of thunder and the lightning flash, all speak of God, and in their presence man bows in homage to the omnipotence of his Creator. Hence the child of nature, however rude and imperfect his idea of God, is essentially religious in his aspirations.

Man must isolate himself and become absorbed in his own abstract and empty thoughts before he can lose consciousness of the ever-abiding presence of the Creator. For every creature is a revelation of heaven to the human soul, reminding it of its origin and high destiny. If nature leads us to God, why may not art have the same power, since both are expressions of the same eternal beauty?

Before considering this question, we wish to advert to the immense power and universal influence of art.

Few can enter into the sanctuary of science—even the rudest mind when brought in contact with ideal beauty by the creative power of art—but feel its force and its inspiration. Art is the most lasting of national glories. Indeed, we may say that without art there is no glory either national or individual.

The greatest deeds and the proudest names sink back in death unless art embalm them in poetry or in song, give them immortality on the speaking canvas or in the breathing marble.

Brave men lived before Agamemnon, but they are forgotten, for their names never shone on the poet’s page. Those nations are most glorious in which art attained its highest development.

The muse of Homer, the eloquence of Demosthenes, and the chisel of Phidias, have done more to immortalize Greece than the deeds of her proud heroes. The greatest human actions are in themselves but little removed from the commonplace affairs of everyday life; but the creative power of art transforms them and invests them with a charm which the reality never possessed. The primeval forests of Kentucky, in the day when its name was the “dark and bloody ground,” witnessed many a deed of human daring and of warlike prowess equal to those of Achilles and Hector under the walls of Troy; but art with its celestial wand never transfigured those deeds on the poet’s page, and they are forgotten, buried with the leaves that overshadowed them. The life of man is short, even that of a nation is not long; but art dies not, and has moreover the divine power of conferring immortality upon all that it touches. Shakespeare is worth more to the glory of England than all the victories of all her generals. Dante, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, with innumerable other names which represent the highest artistic power, have made Italy the consecrated land of poetry and of song, the home of beauty and of all loveliness—the native country of the soul.

Time alone, which is the approver of all things, can give to art its full power, and it is only when we consider it in the past that we become aware of its great influence in the history of the human race. The present is always a vulgar time; too real to be beautiful. The present is the slave of power and wealth, but these soon disappear, and art remains for ever. The first impulse in the movement which has carried the European mind to its present state of enlightenment was given by art in conjunction with religion. The study of the Grecian and Roman models, in poetry, in eloquence, and in architecture, fired the nations of Europe with a love of artistic perfection, and consequently greatly contributed to our present civilization. The historic power of art is in some respects greater than that of history itself. Few men know history as a science—the masses are brought into contact with the heroes of the past by poetry and by song.

Has God, who has given to art a universal mission in the development of man’s moral and intellectual nature, banished its elevating influence from the sphere of religion? It would be foreign to our present scope to discuss the actual and possible perversions of art. There is naught on earth so holy that the free will of man may not turn it to evil. The fact that a thing may be abused simply proves that it has a right and proper use. The abuse comes from the free agency of man; the use is the mission given by God, which is always holy and elevated.

The direct aim of art is the expression of infinite beauty under a created form, and hence a true work of art should elevate the soul to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. This contemplation of the divine ideal disenchants us of the things of earth; which truth is expressed by the old proverb, that there is no great genius without melancholy.

He whose soul habitually contemplates the ideal world is necessarily saddened by the reality of life, which is so infinitely beneath the elevation of his thoughts.

There is nothing sensuous in the idea of true beauty. Its property is to purify and moderate desire, not to inflame it. Hence art addresses itself less to the sense than to the soul. It seeks to awaken not desire, but sentiment. Chastity and beauty seek each other. Chastity is beautiful, and beauty is chaste.

These considerations go to show that art, the end of which is the expression of beauty, is in its tendency moral and elevating, and consequently religious.

There can, then, be no just cause of antagonism between religion and true art, as there can be no contradiction between theology and real science.

Far from being enemies, religion and art are allies. This truth the Catholic Church has ever proclaimed. She has stigmatized no one of the arts. In her universal life, she has a mission for each and every one of them. Her churches are not alone the temples of the living God—they are also the home of the arts which point heavenward.

The Christian religion in its dogmas and aspirations is essentially spiritual. The Catholic Church is the great and only successful defender of the distinction between spirit and matter. By her teachings and practices, she has rendered man more spiritual, and consequently more beautiful. By awakening him to the consciousness of the diviner and more ethereal part of his nature, she has developed in him the instinct of art, which is essentially spiritual because its soul is the ideal.

The more we meditate upon the nature of art, the more thoroughly are we convinced that true art is the sister of true religion. Protestantism, protesting against many truths, also protested against the alliance of religion and art. We speak of the Protestantism of the past; for no man knows what Protestantism is to-day. It is anything and everything, from semi-Catholicism down to naked infidelity. It has become mere individualism, and may consequently no longer be spoken of as an organization. The Protestantism which is dead objected to the alliance of religion and art because it conceived them to be of opposite nature and contrary tendency. Religion is the worship of God in spirit and in truth, and Protestantism looked upon art as purely material.

But in this as in other matters, the Protestant view was based upon a misconception both of religion and of human nature. If man were wholly spiritual, his religion would also be purely spiritual. But matter forms part of his nature. Even that which in him is most spiritual—thought—has its sensible element. An idea is an image, whence it follows that we cannot even think without forming to ourselves a mental representation of the thing thought of. No human act can be purely spiritual. The law of our being is that we rise from the visible to the invisible, from the sensible to the supersensible. An invisible and purely spiritual religion would be to us an unreal and intangible religion. An invisible church is a contradiction in terms, and without a church there can be amongst men no authoritative religious teaching. Neither religious nor intellectual life, in our present state, can exist without language, and language addresses itself directly and primarily to the senses. It is therefore impossible for man to express the spiritual without making use of the material. Hence art, which seeks to adumbrate the infinite under a finite form, in this simply conforms to the universal law of man’s nature, which in all things, even in thought, subjects him to matter.

Is not Christianity based upon this fact? Did not God take unto himself a visible and material nature in order to manifest to the world his invisible power, and beauty, and holiness? Is not the Christian religion a system of things invisible, visibly manifested? The end of religion is spiritual, but in order to attain this end it must possess a visible and material element. This fact of itself gives to art a religious mission of the highest order.

This mission is to proclaim to the world Jesus Christ and him crucified and glorified—by poetry, by song, by painting, by architecture, in a word, by every artistic creation of which genius is capable.

Jesus Christ is the beau ideal of art—the most lovely and beautiful conception of the divine mind itself. He is the visible manifestation of God, the all-beautiful.

Purity, and gentleness, and grace, with power and majesty, all combine to make him the most beautiful of the sons of woman, the fairest and the loveliest figure in all history, to whom the whole world bows in instinctive love and homage. There is a shadow on the countenance of Jesus which gives to it its artistic completeness. It is sorrow. There is something trivial in gaiety and joy which deprives them of artistic effect. The cheek of beauty is not divine except the tear of sorrow trickle down it. Hence to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified is not to preach perfect religion alone, but also the perfect ideal of art.

Christian science, which is theology, has as its object the dogmas of the church. Christian art relates directly to religious worship, but it has incidentally a doctrinal significance. If we consider eloquence an art, which we may do, for true eloquence is always artistic, we must concede that it holds a most important place in the church of Jesus Christ. He blessed eloquence and bade it convert the world when he spoke to the apostles these memorable words: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.” The divine command was to preach the Gospel, not to write it. The living word spoken by the divinely commissioned teacher has alone borne fruit in the world, converted the nations, and changed the face of the earth. Eloquence must be spoken. If you take from it its voice, you take away its soul. It is the cry of an impassioned nature, in which love, and faith, and deep-abiding conviction are enrooted. Add to this purity and holiness of life in him who speaks, and let him be in earnest, and he will be eloquent. Eloquence in the mouth of a consecrated teacher has a sacramental power. It is one of the divinely established ordinances for the propagation of religious truth, and for the conversion of a soul to God.

Poetry, too, is consecrated to the service of religion. The muse never soars her loftiest flight except when lifted up on the wings of religious inspiration. The most poetic word in language is that brief, immense word—God. It is the sublimest, the profoundest, the holiest word that human tongue can utter. It forms the instinctive cry of the soul in the hour of every deep emotion. In the hour of victory, in the hour of death, in the ecstasy of joy, in the agony of woe, that sacred word bursts spontaneously from the human heart. It is the first word that our mother taught our infant lips to lisp, when, pointing to heaven, she told us that there was God our Father, and bade us look above this base, contagious earth. When the mother for the first time feels her first-born’s breath, in tenderness of gratitude she pronounces the name of God; when in utter helplessness of woe she bends over the grave of her only child, and her heart is breaking, she can find no relief for her agonizing soul, until, raising her tearful eyes to heaven, she breathes in prayer the name of God.

When two young hearts that are one vow eternal love and fealty, it is in the name of God they do it; and the union of love loses half its poetry and half its charm except it be contracted before the altar of God and in his holy name.

When the mother sends her son to do battle for his country, she says, “God be with thee, my boy!”

When nations are marshalled in deadly array of arms, and the alarming drum foretells the danger nigh, and the trumpet’s clanguor sounds the charge, and contending armies meet in the death grapple, amid fire and smoke and the cannon’s awful roar, until victory crowns them that win; those banners that were borne proudly on till they floated in triumph over the field of glory are gathered together in some vast temple of religion, and there an assembled nation sings aloud in thanksgiving: “We praise thee, O God! we glorify thee, O Lord!” How often has not God chosen the muse of poetry in order to convey to the world his divine doctrines! The Bible contains much of the sublimest poetry ever written. Some of the Psalms of David, portions of Job and Isaias, equal in deep and lofty poetic feeling anything that Dante or Milton wrote. And did not these privileged minds also receive their highest inspirations from religion?

We may not separate poetry from music. Music is poetry in tones. It is the language of feeling, the universal language of man. The cry of joy and of sorrow, of triumph and of despair, of ecstasy and of agony, is understood by every human being because it is the language of nature. All the deep emotions of the soul seek expression in modulation of sound.

Cousin says: “There is physically and morally a marvellous relation between a sound and the soul. It seems as though the soul were an echo in which the sound takes a new power.”

Byron, too, seems to have felt this:

“Oh! that I were
The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,
A living voice, a breathing harmony;
A bodiless enjoyment, born and dying
With the blest Tone that made me!”

At the awakening call of music, the universal harmonies of nature stir within the soul. The ancients were wont to say that he who cultivates music imitates the divinity, and St. Augustine tells us that it was the sweet sound of psalmody which made the lives of the monks of old so beautiful and harmonious. God is eternal harmony, and the works of his hand are harmonious, and his great precept to men is that they live in harmony. Did not Jesus Christ come into the world amid the choral song of angels? Would you, then, banish music from the church of Jesus? No art has such power as music to draw the soul toward the infinite. It would seem as though the sounds of melody were the viewless spirits of heaven, calling us away from earth to our true home in the mansion of our Father. Whosoever has enjoyed the rare privilege of being present in the Sistine Chapel, during Holy Week, when the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolesi, on the Miserere, are sung, has felt the immense power of religious music. For a moment, at least, he has quitted this earth, and the voice of song has borne his soul in ineffable ecstasy to the very throne of God. As music develops religious sentiment, so religion gives to music its sublimest themes. To her, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart owe their divinest inspirations.

Painting, too, asks to be received into the temple of religion. What sentiment is there that the painter cannot express? All nature is subject to his command—the physical world and the moral world. His muse soars from earth to heaven, and contemplates all that lies between them. Above all, the human countenance divine, that mirror of the soul, belongs to the painter. His brush, dipped in the light of heaven, gives to virtue its own celestial hue; to vice, its inborn hideousness. He expresses every emotion of the human heart, every noble love, every lofty aspiration, every dark and baneful passion. Aristotle, the most comprehensive mind of the pagan world, affirms that painting teaches the same precepts of moral conduct as philosophy, with this advantage, that it employs a shorter method. Christian painting began in the Catacombs. In the rude pictures of that subterranean world we find the chief doctrines of Christianity reduced to their most simple expression under forms the most touching.

Painting there represents the Phœnix rising from its ashes, emblem of the immortality of the soul and of the resurrection of the body; the good shepherd bearing upon his shoulders the lost sheep, which teaches with touching simplicity one of the most beautiful of our Lord’s parables; the three youths in the fiery furnace, signifying the providence of God for those who fear and love him; Pharao and his hosts engulfed in the Red Sea, proclaiming to the faithful that God is the avenger of those who put their trust in him. These and similar subjects were peculiarly adapted to inspire courage in the hearts of the Christians of the first ages, when to be a follower of the cross was to be a hero.

As men of genius and learning by their life-long labors show us the divine beauties and perfections in the character of Jesus in new bearings, so the art of painting throws around his history an intenser light. His divinity is as manifest in the “Transfiguration” of Raphael as in the famous sermon of Massillon. His ineffable sufferings on Mount Calvary and the Godlike power which consented to death, but conquered agony, are as vividly and feelingly portrayed on the canvas of Rubens as in the unequalled and inimitable discourse of Bourdaloue. No one can look upon the “Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci without being inspired with a most sublime conception of that holiest event. Can we think of the passion and death of the Saviour without forming to ourselves a mental image corresponding to the scene? If, after all, we must have a picture, why not take that of genius rather than trust to our own tame plebeian fancy? And then, for those who cannot read or meditate profoundly, for the poor whom Jesus loved, what master is like painting?

St. Basil declares that painters accomplish as much by their pictures as orators by their eloquence.

The church as a lecture-room will interest only the cultivated few; the church as the temple of art sanctified by religion is the home of worship for the multitude.

Religion, if it be anything, must be popular, which science can never be, and which art always is. Then, in the name of the religion of the poor, let architecture advance to raise to God the temple of majesty and beauty, the democratic palace of the people, where the prince and the beggar sit side by side as brothers, a basilica prouder and loftier than that of the sceptred monarch.

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A FETE-DAY AT LYONS.

Some writer has remarked that “there is no purgatory in France,” meaning thereby to illustrate the great extremes of piety and irreligion in the national character; and, although on a broad ground this assertion is by no means orthodox, yet it is practically true to a certain extent, and nowhere perhaps are these traits more noticeable to a stranger than in the time-honored city of Lyons. Here faith and disbelief walk side by side through all grades of society, each stronger and more resolute from its very proximity to the other; and when the tide of revolution swept over France, nowhere have the excesses been greater or religion more monstrously profaned than here; and yet nowhere has faith been more profound, more edifying, and more uncompromising. The blood of its early Christian martyrs has been a wonderful leaven and has worked well, and the thousands of pilgrims who yearly tread the heights of Fourrière, the extraordinary solemnity and fervor of the exterior devotions and religious ceremonies, show that there is a countercurrent stronger and more powerful than any opposing force that infidelity can bring to bear against it.

It is to give a few impressions made by these latter characteristics of this old city that we now recall some reminiscences of a visit there several years ago. The antiquity of Lyons, and its many monuments of interest, are quite sufficient to induce a traveller to linger on his route, and a week can be easily filled in exploring the city proper and its environs.

Like many of the European cities, its streets are narrow, and the houses high and badly ventilated; but a great change has taken place in regard to these defects within the last ten years, and a renovation without mutilation has opened its thoroughfares, adorned it with beautiful squares, fine bridges, broad and handsome quays, and placed it on an equal footing with any city in Europe in regard to its sanitary advantages.

Dating as far back as the Christian era and beyond, there are many remnants of its Roman origin yet to be seen, which have been carefully preserved through its various vicissitudes. Christianity was here planted in blood; and under the Roman emperors, three persecutions of Christians took place, which numbered forty-five thousand martyrs on their crimson pages; and this is why faith has taken such deep root, and why it opposes itself so firmly to those subtle influences of the day which threaten to endanger a birthright so dearly bought.

To us Americans who are only familiar with Lyons in its commercial bearings, and from the superior quality of its manufactures which find their way into our market, the fact that its inhabitants are a lettered as well as a business people is rather a matter of surprise; and we gaze in wonder at its magnificent buildings, devoted to the fine arts, its lyceums, colleges, academies of science, schools and institutions of every kind for instruction and the development of the finer tastes; and the riddle is solved by knowing that their manufactures, their commerce, their business, occupy only a part of their lives, and by no means constitute the sum total, as is so nearly the case in this country. This repose is very attractive to us Cisatlantic people, who lead such restless lives; and the lovely summer days that we spent in the old city enjoying this tranquillity are never to be forgotten.

We were awaiting the celebration of the Fête du Saint Sacrament,[75] which is usually kept with so much solemnity in the provinces. On the eve of the feast we made the ascent of Mont Fourrière, though not in the garb of humble pilgrims, “with sandal shoon and scallop-shell,” but in the more commonplace character of sightseers from the Western World, attracted to this height by the far-famed shrine which crowns its summit, and by the many historic associations that cluster round it.

On our way up we visited a cemetery which almost hangs by the mountain-side, and from which there are lovely views in every direction. It made a strange impression, this city of the dead, so far above the noise and clatter of the busy world below. It was so still, nothing broke the silence except our footsteps along the gravelled walks. One tomb especially attracted our attention: it was fairly buried and hidden by the quantity of fresh flowers, and the crosses and wreaths of immortelles which covered it. While wondering who could be the silent occupant of a grave so much loved, a lady approached in deep widow’s mourning, leading two little children, clad in the same sombre hue. They came and knelt at the tomb. Our question was answered, and we moved silently away, sorry for even the momentary intrusion we had been guilty of. Near the cemetery is the church of St. Irenée, which contains the bones of 18,500 Christians, martyred by order of Septimius Severus, 193 A.C. The remains of its ancient crypt are also shown, which dates back to the second century. There is also a well in this crypt, in which it is said these bones were found. The roughly paved road then leads up to the Chapel,[76] and Terrace of Notre Dame de Fourrière. We found we were just in time for the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which was given here every afternoon during the Triduum which preceded the feast.

This little chapel was not remarkable either for its architectural finish nor for the richness and perfection of its ornamentation; it is plain, very plain indeed, but the marvellous number of its ex-votos, the gilt and silver hearts which actually burnish its walls, the crutches and other instruments suggestive of disease which hang around, tell of the moral and physical burdens which have been brought here and left, and of the weary, sorrowing souls who have wandered up this rocky height, who have made their deposit, and returned singing alleluias.

“There is one far shrine I remember
In the years that have fled away,
Where the grand old mountains are guarding
The glories of night and day.

*****

“It is one of Our Lady’s chapels,
And though poorer than all the rest
Just because of the sin and the sorrow,
I think she loved it the best.

“There are no rich gifts on the altar,
The shrine is humble and bare,
Yet the poor, and the sick, and the tempted
Think their home and their haven is there.”[77]

A fine terrace is just at the side of the chapel, and the view magnificent from the parapet which guards its eastern face. Just beneath lies Lyons in all its stateliness, traversed by two superb rivers from north to south, and prominent among its most striking points is the grand old Cathedral of St. Jean, which stands directly at the base of the mountain.

The surrounding country is a succession of lovely landscapes, and beyond, looking far away, a hundred miles off into Switzerland, the glorious Alps, with Mont Blanc’s snowy peak towering far above all, bound the horizon. We were fortunate in getting this view in perfection, for frequently a veil of mist and fog shuts out entirely this latter part of the tableau. On ascending the belfry of the chapel, we found the panorama yet more extended and enchanting. In every direction the views were entirely unbroken and uninterrupted. Seven rich provinces of France unfolded their scenery before our delighted eyes. At the extreme edge of the southern horizon rose Mont Pilat; at the west, the mountains of Forey and Auvergne; toward the north, Mont d’Or; and on the east, the Alps, in their eternal mantle of snow, completed a picture that could not be surpassed. Every prominence had caught the golden light of the sinking sun, and the shadows that had crept into the valleys only enhanced the coloring of the scene and made the effect more striking.

A Jesuit college, with its garden and appurtenances, is an appendant on the southern side of the terrace, and we crossed over to take a peep at their chapel, well knowing the good taste and exquisite finish which are usually displayed in their churches. There we found them also holding a Triduum, and, their service being a little later than that of the other chapel, we had the pleasure of attending Benediction a second time. Here the music was delightful and the chapel a gem. It was very small, and seemed to be lit entirely from the altar, which was ablaze with wax-lights and natural flowers; there appeared to be no external light to enter at all, and yet from its miniature size none of its details were lost, and, with the accessories of the solemn service then going on, it was the embodiment of beauty and inspiration.

When we turned our footsteps downward, the shadow’s had lengthened, and were fast creeping out of the valleys, and by the time we reached home the heights of Fourrière, which we still had in sight, were shrouded in gloom.

The next morning we were awakened by the booming of cannon, which announced the inauguration of the fête.

We hurried through breakfast, so as to reach the cathedral in time for the procession. In the square opposite our hotel, an altar had been erected, and we passed several others on our way, but their decorations, at this early hour, were not quite complete.

Everything wore a festive look, and everybody was out in holiday attire, flags and banners were flying, and the façades of some of those immensely high houses were festooned from top to bottom with crimson and yellow hangings. One building in especial was very effective; it was the Palais de Justice, which is on the right bank of the Saône, and which we faced in crossing the bridge to the cathedral. Its extended front of Corinthian pillars was draped in crimson cloth, which contrasted finely with the gray stone of which it was built. A little to its left is the old cathedral, stately and grand in its sombre livery of centuries. It has seen generations pass away, emperors and empires, kingdoms and kings, and yet it stands to-day intact, and ready to do duty for another hundred years, unless demolished by the sacrilegious hand of the iconoclast of the nineteenth century.

On reaching the place in front of the cathedral, we found a large crowd awaiting the procession. In a short time the sound of martial music was heard, and presently several officers rode up on horseback to open a passage through the crowd.

The procession was escorted by a troop of cavalry and military band, and preceded by a number of lovely children, dressed in white, with silver wings, their hair flowing, and scattering flowers as they passed along. As it entered the church, the organ pealed forth, filling the vast aisles with its magnificent harmony. Then Pontifical High Mass began, in all the grandeur of the especial ritual which is attached to this church, and which is the oldest in France, having been introduced here by one of the first bishops of Lyons; the liturgy is also different from that ordinarily used, and the ceremonies are of the most imposing character. The band, placed in a remote part of the church, played at intervals during the service, and the harsh and deafening sounds which are usually the result of brass instruments in a close building were lost in the immense space, and only the sweetest strains swept up through the nave and aisles.

In like manner the glare of day fell through the richly stained windows in a mellow and subdued light, which diffused itself generally over the church.

A very pleasant American writer[78] has said: “If we could only bring one thing back from Europe, that one thing would be a cathedral.” And truly these old monuments have a prestige to which persons of all creeds must pay tribute; and the veriest scoffer lifts his hat with reverence as he enters, and feels the influence of that wonderful atmosphere which pervades their hallowed precincts. After Mass we prolonged our walk home to see the decorations of the city. The altars were now entirely finished, and dressed with a profusion of natural flowers.

In the afternoon the procession passed round the city in a line with the altars, at each of which benediction was given. In their liturgy there are four special hymns for each of these stations or reposoirs, and, when the latter exceed that number, the chants are repeated until they have all been visited. There is generally one altar in each ward or district of the city, to satisfy the pious devotion of those who cannot attend service at the church.

In the evening illuminations and fireworks completed the festivities of the day—of a day whose minutest detail showed how true “the Rome of Gaul” had been to the colors which she unfurled nearly seventeen hundred years ago on the ramparts of paganism.

Since then I have seen other fêtes in other lands, but none have left the impression of the first which I saw inaugurated in the old Cathedral of St. Jean, under the shadow of Mont Fourrière.

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HOW THE CHURCH UNDERSTANDS AND UPHOLDS THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.

THIRD ARTICLE.
THE MIDDLE AGES.

The middle ages were undoubtedly the epoch during which the influence of woman upon the gravest affairs and most important issues in the history of the church was most widely exercised. There was hardly a single country in Europe that was evangelized and reclaimed from social barbarism without the direct intervention of the power of women, and wherever the inevitable excesses of a system in the main both useful and honorable, such as the feudalism of the middle ages, had to be checked or corrected, it was always done through the merciful intercession of holy and generous women. To begin with the country whose daughters have ever been foremost in zeal for the cause of religion, France, we have a long list of queens whose names are conspicuous in the annals of church history. They were no less honored in their own day than they have been since the voice of the faithful has proclaimed them saints. When the French monarchy was in its first military and elementary stages, the young Frankish conqueror, the heathen Clovis, who had just forced the ancient Gauls of the province of Rheims to bow before his power, found at the court of Gondebaud, King of Burgundy, the niece of that prince, Clotildis, a Christian maiden, renowned for her learning in matters of theology, and for her undaunted stand against the Arianism of her uncle’s court. St. Gregory of Tours, says Ventura,[79] represents her as evincing the most varied and reliable knowledge of Christianity, and especially of the questions at that time lately decided at the Council of Nicæa. She knew equally how to combat paganism on her husband’s part and Arianism upon her uncle’s, and displayed all the self-possession of a great apologist, with the theological science of a doctor of the church. This was as early as the year 493, not long after Clovis won the great battle of Tolbiac against the Alemanni, and became a Christian, according to his vow, made during the engagement, to the “Son of the living God, thou whom Clotildis worships.” The queen then sent for St. Remigius, the Bishop of Rheims, to instruct and baptize her husband. She instructed the women of her court and family herself, and showed herself most zealous in the propagation of the faith. The ceremony of baptism, and the anointing of the king which followed it, were performed, by the queen’s care, with extraordinary solemnity. She herself walked in the procession between the king’s two sisters, the one formerly a pagan, the other an Arian. The first, the Princess Albofleda, renounced the world and consecrated her virginity to God, thus giving a first example to the numerous royal maidens of France who have since left the court for the cloister. Clotildis so fired her husband’s heart with her holy enthusiasm that he built and endowed the church of SS. Peter and Paul in Paris, now called St. Genevieve in honor of the sainted shepherdess who, later on, shared with Clotildis herself the title of patroness of France. Clovis was afterwards buried in this church. The Visigoths and Burgundians, who were Arians, were shamed into less inhuman ways by the example and widespread influence of the victorious Clovis and his Christian warriors; the foundations of the great French monarchy were laid by the evident desire of the neighboring tribes to coalesce with the Franks; the future Catholic monarchy of Spain was consecrated by the heroic zeal and suffering of Clotildis the younger, the only daughter of Clovis, married to the Arian Amalaric, King of the Visigoths, in Spain, and the mitigation of many lawless and still half-barbarian acts during the reigns of her sons was successfully undertaken; so that it may be said with truth of this period of history that its chief glory was the supremacy of woman. Clotildis died at Tours, where for many years she had lived in solitude and humility, entirely ignoring her high rank, and employing her influence over her sons in exhortations to preserve the peace of their respective kingdoms, to protect the poor, and to treat them as brethren. But great as her services to religion and civilization had been, the church was not destined to suffer by her death, for a long succession of imitators of her virtues took her place from century to century, and protected the interests of that church whose champions cannot fail her as long as principle and honor exist in the world. Radegundes, the daughter of Bertarius, King of Thuringia, and the captive of King Clotaire I. (fourth son of St. Clotildis), was instructed in the Christian faith at the court of the latter, whom she afterwards married. Her great delight during the short period of her court life was the care of the sick in the hospital of Athies, which she had founded, and the alleviation of the miseries of the poor. She endeavored to restrain the lawlessness of the court; but, when her husband caused her brother to be treacherously assassinated, as Butler tells us,[80] in order to possess his kingdom of Thuringia, she was so grieved at the time that she begged for leave to retire into a monastery. Here her influence was greater than it had been at court. The great abbey of Poitiers was founded and the first abbess, Agnes, chosen by her. She enriched the church of this monastery with numerous gifts, and sent ambassadors to the Emperor Justin of Constantinople to obtain a relic of the True Cross. This being given her, she had it placed in a shrine, to which it was carried in solemn procession. She had already invited to Poitiers many learned and holy men, among others the orator and poet Venantius Fortunatus, who on this occasion composed the famous processional hymn “Vexilla Regis Prodeunt,” which is now one of the most prominent features of our liturgy. Thus, to a woman’s inspiration do we owe one of the hymns of world-wide renown, synonymous with the name and practice of Catholic Christianity. Butler tells us that Radegundes herself was a good scholar, and read both the Latin and Greek fathers. She procured for her monastery the rule and constitution of St. Cesarius of Arles, and had it confirmed by the Council of Tours, assembled 566. Here again, in the letter of Cesaria, the abbess of the monastery of St. John, at Arles, we have a most remarkable instance of the great discernment and prudence of a woman in her management of a numerous community. She gives the strictest cautions against all familiarities and partiality in a religious community, and also enjoins that each nun should learn the Psalter by heart and be able to read well. Biblical learning is thus proved to have been ever foremost in the minds of the pioneers of monasticism. But Radegundes, so great was her anxiety to make her monastery of Poitiers a perfect work, repaired to Arles herself, and studied the rule personally for some time, in order to help the Abbess Agnes in establishing it the more effectually. After the death of her husband, and during the shameful disturbances caused by the famous Fredegonda, the mistress of Chilperic, Radegundes became once more the support of orthodoxy and of the persecuted bishops of the realm. Among other proofs of the high esteem in which prominent churchmen held this great woman, let us cite the letter addressed to her by the assembled bishops of the Council of Tours, wherein they say: “We are rejoiced, most reverend daughter, to see such an example of divine favor repeated in your person; for the faith flourishes anew through the efforts of your zeal, and what had been languishing through the wintry coldness of the indifference of this age, lives again through the fervor of your soul. But as you claim as a birthplace almost the same spot whence St. Martin came, it is no wonder that you should imitate in your work his example and teaching. Shining with the light of his doctrine, you fill with heavenly conviction the hearts of those who listen to you.”[81]

The tradition of constant faith and resolute orthodoxy on the part of the queens of France was upheld in the century following that of Radegundes (the seventh), by Bathildis, the wife of Clovis II.; the friend of Eligius, Bishop of Noyon, and of Owen, Bishop of Rouen. Both of these had been placed in responsible positions at court through the influence of Radegundes—the co-operator of Genis, the holy almoner, who subsequently became Archbishop of Lyons, and the wielder of great power through the complaisance of her husband. Bathildis was pre-eminently the support of the episcopate and the refuge of the poor. She had herself been a captive, being by birth an Englishwoman, and having fallen to the lot of Erchinoald, the first officer of the King of Neustria, who treated her very kindly. Ventura says of her: “At the death of her husband, having been entrusted with the regency of the kingdom and the guardianship of her three little children, the oldest only five years old, she acquitted herself of this double office with such wisdom and prudence that even the great nobles and statesmen could not withhold their admiration and respect. With such counselors as the holy bishops Eligius, Owen, and Leger, it is not astonishing that she should have succeeded in banishing from the church in France the shameful simony which, through royal connivance, had hitherto dishonored it, and abolishing in civil matters the unjust and vexatious taxes that were grinding down the people. She multiplied hospitals, monasteries, and abbeys. The famous monastery of Chelles owes its origin to her.... But the most important of all her foundations was that of Corbie, which afterwards became so celebrated in France, and where this queen, as zealous for the propagation of science as for the strengthening of religion, established under able masters, gathered from all parts of the world, a system of the most complete literary and scientific education. This monastery, next to that of Lerins, was a true university and a centre of enlightenment. The regency of this woman renewed the glories and wonders of the reign of Pulcheria. Never had sovereign so exerted herself for the welfare of her people, both religiously, scientifically, and politically. But her greatest glory, which has not been sufficiently recognized, was ... that, contrary to the cold calculations of a false philosophy, she dared to do what no man had done before her. She abolished slavery in France (where it still subsisted), and was the first Christian sovereign who proclaimed as a national principle ... that a slave becomes free on setting his foot on the soil of France!”[82]

Between Bathildis and Blanche of Castille, from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was no lack of holy and learned women in France, but it would be impossible to enumerate them all. “The mother of St. Louis, though the church has never formally canonized her, stands out as one of the grandest figures in ecclesiastical history. Her stern and unflinching devotion to religious principle, instilled early into the mind of her son, sowed the seeds of sanctity in the exceptional life of that holy king. Her talents were no less remarkable than her austerity. Her marriage at the age of fourteen with Louis VIII., King of France, gave her the high position to which her birth, her genius, and her beauty entitled her. This union was the model of Christian marriages, and her historian, the Baron Chaillon, says that during the twenty-six years it lasted she and her husband were never separated for a single instant, and that not the slightest shadow darkened the serenity of their intercourse. Even at an early age and before her husband’s accession to the throne, her father-in-law, Philip Augustus, did not refuse to take and follow her advice in matters of state importance.”[83] At her husband’s death she became, by his desire, regent of the kingdom. Ever eager to put her son’s personal prestige foremost, she carefully initiated him into the affairs of the realm, and accustomed him early to appear in his royal character in public. She wisely averted the ever-impending coalitions of the great vassals of the crown against the royal authority. She continued the war against the Albigenses, whose dissensions were ruining the kingdom; she obtained the annexation of the territory of the Counts of Toulouse to the crown, and quelled the revolt of the Duke of Brittany, who ended by gladly recognizing his fealty to her son. When she committed to Gaulthier, the Archbishop of Sens, the mission of treating for the hand of Margaret of Provence for the young king, these were the severe instructions she gave him: Only to propose the marriage formally after he had well studied the character of the young princess, and had well satisfied himself as to the stability of her principles, the purity of her life, and the sincerity of her religion. Butler, in his life of St. Louis, says of the queen: “By her care, Louis was perfectly master of the Latin tongue, learned to speak in public, and to write with elegance, grace, and dignity, and was instructed in the art of war, the wisest maxims of government, and all the accomplishments of a king. He was also a good historian, and often read the works of the Fathers.” Thus it will be seen that, without departing from the strictest feminine delicacy, a woman may be the sole responsible preceptor of a statesman and warrior, and yet leave no stain of “petticoat government” on his education, nor any suspicion of undue asceticism on his belief.

Concerning the dissensions of the nobles and vassals who refused to be present at the young king’s coronation, Butler says: “The queen regent put herself and her son at the head of his troops, and, finding means to bring over the Count of Champagne to his duty, struck the rest with such consternation that they all retired.... The whole time of the king’s minority was disturbed by these rebels, but the regent, by several alliances and negotiations, and chiefly by her courage and diligence, by which she always prevented them in the field, continually dissipated their cabals.” Of the negotiations with the Count of Toulouse, a dangerous and powerful vassal, Butler gives these details: “In the third year of her regency, she obliged Raymund, Count of Toulouse and Duke of Narbonne, to receive her conditions, which were that he should marry his daughter Jane to Alphonsus, the king’s brother, who should inherit the county of Toulouse, and that, in case they should have no children by this marriage, the whole inheritance should revert to the crown, which last eventually happened.” The same author says of Margaret of Provence “that she surpassed her sisters in beauty, wit, and virtue.” In 1242, after the majority and marriage of her son, Blanche founded the monastery of Maubuisson. Louis was remarkable for the even-handed justice with which he protected the serfs against the encroachment of their feudal lords, and on one occasion refused to allow Mgr. Enguerrand de Coucy the privilege of being tried by his peers, and condemned him to death by the ordinary process of law, for having arbitrarily hanged three children who had been caught hunting rabbits in his woods. He afterwards spared his life, but deprived him of all his estates and exacted from him an enormous fine, which he employed in building and endowing a mortuary chapel where Mass should be offered every day for the souls of the murdered children. The rest of the fine was divided into several foundations for hospitals and monasteries. In 1248, St. Louis, according to a vow he had made in sickness, set out for the crusade against the Sultan of Egypt, leaving his mother once more regent of France. Ventura says of her during this second regency that, “being in France in the body, yet in the East in spirit, and following mentally her heroic son in his dangerous undertaking, she seemed to multiply herself. Entirely absorbed in the care of the home government of a great kingdom, that she might make justice, order, and peace supreme therein, she was also participating none the less entirely in the great struggle between the Cross and the Crescent, ... and it is impossible to entertain a correct idea of the wisdom, forethought, and activity of which Blanche, during those five years, gave proof, thus being enabled to send aid in kind, in arms, and in money, to the army in the East, yet without taxing and unduly oppressing the people at home. Thus she did not neglect the smallest details in order to assure the success of an expedition in which the rational honor of France as well as the triumph of Christianity was engaged.” Ventura then goes on to remind the would-be “emancipators” of woman that, throughout her arduous duties, Queen Blanche, notwithstanding her immense governing powers and her proud experience of fifty years, did not hesitate to take as a trusted friend and counsellor the learned Archbishop of Sens, Gaulthier-Cornu. Of this latter prelate and statesman, a contemporary historian has said, “As long as his power was in the ascendant, fraud and dishonesty hid their face, while peace and justice reigned.” Blanche of Castille died before her son’s return from Egypt, and hastened to pronounce her vows of monastic consecration to God before she breathed her last, on the first of December, 1252.

We must now go back some centuries to place before our readers a fugitive account of those French princesses who exercised in Spain a true apostolate. We have already mentioned the younger Clotildis, but Indegonda, the daughter of Sigisbert, King of Austrasia, and Rigontha, the daughter of Chilperic, King of Neustria, remain to be noticed. They were married to two brothers, the former to Hermenigild, the latter to Reccared, sons of Levigild, King of the Spanish Visigoths. Indegonda suffered great persecutions from her husband’s step-mother on account of her religion, the second wife of Levigild being a bigoted Arian, and it was even a long time before Hermenigild consented to become a Catholic. When at last Indegonda had obtained this happy conversion, she herself and her husband’s uncle, the holy Leander of Seville, were exiled, and Hermenigild so persecuted by his father that, having been betrayed by the Greeks and deserted by the Romans, he fell a victim to Arian vengeance, and, after suffering torture and imprisonment, was cruelly put to death by order of Levigild himself. This barbarian king, however, repented his unnatural cruelty before he died, and, recalling his brother-in-law Leander, entrusted him with the care of his remaining son Reccared. Rigontha, the wife of the young prince, had suffered great injustice at the hands of her own father Chilperic, the lover of the too famous Fredegonda. She had succeeded in converting her husband, and, together with his uncle Leander, exercised a salutary influence over him. Reccared assembled the Arian bishops of his kingdom, and spoke to them so persuasively that they acknowledged themselves willing to be reconciled to the church. The province of Narbonne, at that time under his dominion, followed his example, while the neighboring tribe of the Suevi, also Arians, speedily joined the church. A council was then assembled at Toledo, and the intimate union of Spain with Catholic interests was founded on a solid and reliable basis.

It is told as a pleasantry of some shrewd critic of modern times that, whenever he saw or heard a disturbance of any sort, his unfailing question was, “Who is she?” being certain that, whatever might be the effect, a woman was sure to be the cause. If this is unfortunately no longer a libel on the sex in this distracted century, at least we may point back to the so-called dark ages, and proudly say, with a certainty far more absolute than that of our cynical contemporary, when we read of any great consummation in the history of religion and civilization, “Who was she?”

Not long after the death of Blanche of Castille, another Spanish princess, the daughter of Peter III. of Aragon, and the niece of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, took up the tradition of holiness, which seemed the birthright of the royal maidens of mediæval times. Her father attributed his success in his undertakings against the Moors to her prayers and early virtues. At twelve years old she was married to Denis, King of Portugal, to whom she was not only a most faithful wife, but whom she succeeded, by her meekness and silent example, in winning back from his sinful courses. She is praised by her biographers for her ascetic virtues, and for her utter disregard of her earthly rank. But what concerns us more is to look into the influence she held on social and political affairs. Among these it is impossible not to reckon her charities, for private charity has often much to do with public honesty and morality. Butler tells us that she “made it her business to seek out and secretly relieve persons of good condition who were reduced to necessity, yet out of shame durst not make known their wants. She gave constant orders to have all pilgrims and poor strangers provided with lodging and necessaries. She was very liberal in furnishing fortunes to poor young women, that they might marry according to their condition, and not be exposed to the danger of losing their virtue. She founded in different parts of the kingdom many pious establishments, particularly a hospital near her own palace at Coimbra, a house for penitent women who had been seduced into evil courses, at Torres-Novas, and a hospital for foundlings, or those children who for want of due provision are exposed to the danger of perishing by poverty or the neglect and cruelty of unnatural parents. She visited the sick and served them with her own hands, ... not that she neglected any other duties, ... for she made it her principal study to pay to her husband the most dutiful respect, love, and obedience, and bore his infidelities with invincible meekness and patience.” Let us stop to note this last sentence, which no doubt by many of our chafing sisters of this age may be misunderstood. This meekness was not a want of spirit; it was the effect of “the subordination of our inferior nature to reason, and of our reason to God,” as one of the most lucid and most sympathetic of American exponents of Catholic truth once expressed to the writer the whole duty of man upon earth. It was no passiveness, no supineness, but the heroic endurance of the martyr, who is more concerned at another’s sin than his own wrong, and who does not consider that reprisal and resentment are efficient means to win the sinner back. When a woman stoops to retaliation, she forgets the dignity of her sex, and, if she forget it, who can she expect will remember it?

We may also be allowed to say one word about the numerous foundations constantly mentioned in the lives of these great Christian women of past ages. It is perhaps the general belief that nothing but monasteries were endowed in early times. We have sufficiently shown how fallacious such belief would be. Institutions of every kind, in which Catholic ingenuity was multiplied till it embraced every need and provided for every contingency, were sown all over the Christian world. The East was not forgotten, and, indeed, even the great orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers were originally nothing but organized bodies for the defence and shelter of the pilgrims who flocked to the holy places. Such charities as tended to diminish the temptations to crime were foremost among the many originated during the middle ages. We have only to refer to history to prove this. Even had these foundations been confined to monasteries, we must remember that the conventual abodes of old united in themselves nearly all the characteristics of other institutions, and in the less favored districts virtually supplied their place. Besides being the only secure and recognized homes of learning, the solitary centres of education, they were also the refuge of the homeless or benighted wanderer; the asylum of the oppressed poor, of threatened innocence, and of unjustly accused men; the hospital of the sick, the sure dispensary of medicines to the surrounding peasantry, and the unfailing granary of the poor during troublous times or years of famine. There was hardly one want, physical or spiritual, that could not find ready relief at the monasteries of both monks and nuns, so that in founding such retreats it is no exaggeration to say that orphanage, asylum, reformatory, hospital, and school were comprised within their walls.

We must return to the great queen whose munificence has led us into this digression, and resume, as was our purpose from the beginning, the rigid relation of mere historical facts to which we more willingly entrust the cause than to the most eloquent apologies.

When Elizabeth’s son, Alphonsus, revolted against his father and actually took up arms, she made the most prudent efforts to mediate between them, for which the Pope, John XXII., greatly praised her in a letter he wrote to her on the subject; but, certain enemies of hers having poisoned her husband’s mind against her, he banished her to the town of Alanquer. She refused all communication with the rebels, and at last was recalled by her penitent husband. Butler says: “She reconciled her husband and son when their armies were marching one against the other, and she reduced all the subjects to duty and obedience. She made peace between Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, and Alphonsus della Corda, his cousin-german, who disputed the crown; likewise between James II., King of Aragon, her own brother, and Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, her son-in-law. In order to effect this last, she took a journey with her husband into both these kingdoms, and, to the great satisfaction of the Christian world, put a happy end to all dissensions and debates between those states.” During her husband’s illness, which followed soon after, Elizabeth nursed him most devotedly, and ever exhorted him to think of his spiritual welfare. Her husband’s death was the end of her public career as queen—a fitting proof of the little value she placed upon the distinctions for which half the world is periodically laid in ashes. Her son, Alphonsus, and her grandson, also named Alphonsus, the young King of Castille, having again proclaimed war upon each other, Elizabeth set out to meet and reconcile them. She died on the way, in 1336, having obtained peace through her exhortations to her son, who attended her at her deathbed. Thus peace and brotherly love among princes and nations, as well as among the individuals of her own immediate circle, was ever nearest the heart of this great and admirable woman. How well it would be if she were taken as a model by the women of our day, and if her influence could be followed by the reward which our Lord himself attached to the noble office of peace-makers!

Turning to England, once the Island of Saints and the home of religious learning, we see the influence of woman most peremptorily asserted. There is Bertha, the daughter of Charibert, King of Paris, and wife of Ethelbert, King of Kent, whom we have already mentioned, with Brunehault, as being the apostles of the faith in England, and the zealous helpers of Gregory and Augustine. Rohrbacher says of her that she contributed mainly to the conversion of her husband and of the whole nation, and St. Lethard, her almoner and Bishop of Senlis, greatly aided her. There is Eanswide, her grand-daughter, the child of Eadbald, who was also converted later on and became abbess of the monastery at Folkestone, as Butler tells us. There is the great Edith, or Eadgith, the daughter of King Edgar, who in the tenth century was the ornament of her sex and the marvel of men. “She united,” says Butler, “the active life of Martha with the contemplation of Mary, and was particularly devoted to the care of the sick. When she was but fifteen years old, her father pressed her to undertake the government of three different monasteries, of which charge she was judged most capable, such was her extraordinary virtue and discretion. But she humbly declined all superiority.... Upon the death of her brother, Edward the Martyr, the nobility who adhered to the martyred king desired Edith to quit her monastery and ascend the throne, but she preferred a state of humility and obedience to the prospect of a crown.” Another Edith, the daughter of the great Earl of Kent, Godwin, became the queen of Edward the Confessor, with whom she lived by mutual consent in perpetual virginity, according to a vow the king had made many years before his marriage. Reading, studying, and devotion were her whole delight. Edward’s mother, Emma, is ranked among the saints, and was mainly instrumental in the religious and learned education of her son. Ventura, in his admirable work on Woman, which has become, as it were, a text-book for all those who are truly interested in the theme and history of woman’s greatness, draws attention to the fact that it was under the reign of Edward the Confessor—who is credited by prejudicial historians with “womanly” weakness, and who, on the contrary, was such an irrefragable proof of what the grave and wise influence of good women can do—that the equality of all men before the law was first recognized as a principle. Edward’s niece, Margaret, the wife of Malcolm, King of Scotland, was also a most eminent and influential princess. Her husband, whose confidence in her was unbounded, deferred to her in every particular of state government, whether internal or external, secular or religious. Their children’s education he left entirely in her hands, and, while she carefully surrounded them with masters well versed in all the knowledge then attainable, she was no less solicitous for the improvement of the nation. Butler says of her: “She labored most successfully to polish and civilize the Scottish nation, to encourage among the people the useful and polite arts, and to inspire them with a love of the sciences.... By her extensive alms, insolvent debtors were released, and decayed families restored, and foreign nations, especially the English, recovered their captives. She was solicitous to ransom those especially who fell into the hands of harsh masters. She also erected hospitals for poor strangers.” Her daughter Maud, who was the first wife of Henry I. of England, followed in her footsteps, and was highly revered, both during her life and after her death, by the two nations to which her birth and marriage linked her. Two great hospitals in London, that of Christ Church, Aldgate, and of St. Giles in the Fields, are due to her munificence and foresight.

We have no space to mention many of the Anglo-Saxon princesses who, either on the throne or in the cloister, swayed great political issues and protected learning while they shielded the virtue of their sex. We must leave the Island of Saints for other kingdoms whose queens were conspicuous not only in procuring the conversion of these realms to Christianity, but also in the territorial aggrandizement and material prosperity of the countries they governed. Bridget, Queen of Sweden, the famous author of the most interesting revelations ever written, was no less remarkable personally than fortunate in her many and distinguished children. Warriors and crusaders, holy wives and consecrated virgins, she offered them to God in every state, and instructed each with particular care. A pilgrimage to Rome in days when the journey from Scandinavia to the south was more an exploration than a safe pastime was bravely undertaken by her in her widowhood, and the foundation of her order and chief monastery at Vatzen is certainly one of the most boldly conceived systems known to the world. The monasteries of this order were double, and contained a smaller number of monks and a larger of nuns, divided by so strict an enclosure that, although contiguous, the communities never even saw each other. In spiritual matters, the monks held authority, but in temporal the nuns governed the double house; and in fact the monks were only attached to the foundation in a secondary degree of importance, and for the greater spiritual convenience of the cloistered women. Such subordination goes far to show how the pretended inferiority of woman is really an unknown thing in the church. The fanaticism and bad faith of later times affected to see an abuse in this system, and most of these monasteries were destroyed at the Reformation, but Butler says that a few exist yet in Flanders and Germany. St. Bridget’s works have been printed and reprinted from age to age, and have seemingly never lost what may be styled in modern parlance their popularity. She also procured a Swedish translation of the Bible to be written by Matthias, the Bishop of Worms, who died about the year 1410. She was altogether one of the most prominent women of the fourteenth century, and no unworthy successor to the central figure of the preceding age, Catherine of Sienna, of whom we shall have to speak briefly later on.

Two empresses of Germany deserve a passing notice here—Mathilda, the wife of Henry I. called the Fowler, and her daughter-in-law, the famous Adelaide. The former had been educated by her grandmother, who bore the same name as herself, and who was the abbess of the monastery of Erfurt. Once again we have a woman of genius, prudence, and great governing powers coming forth to rule a disturbed empire—and from what school? The world will hardly dare to call it unenlightened or narrow-minded; yet it was a monastery. During her husband’s wars against the Danes and Hungarians, then (it was in the ninth century) nothing better than barbarians, Mathilda was several times left regent, and Ventura tells us “that public affairs did not prosper less, the country was not less tranquil, nor the people less contented, because it was a woman who steered the helm of the state. When the emperor returned, he found everything in perfect order. The empress relinquished the functions of regent only to resume her former place of intercessor for the unfortunate, protectress of prisoners, and wise auxiliary to justice.” Adelaide, Princess of Burgundy, renewed in the following century the glories of Mathilda’s reign. She was married to the son of the latter, after having been for a short time the Queen of Lothair, King of the Lombards in Italy. Ventura says that her zeal for the public good and her love of the people gained her the appellation of the “mother of her kingdom.” After her husband’s death, Adelaide, says Butler, “educated her son Otho II. with great care, and his reign was happy as long as he governed by her directions.” His mother became regent after his death and that of his wife, and her biographer, Butler, tells us that she “looked upon power as merely a difficult stewardship, and applied herself to public affairs with indefatigable care.”[84]

The middle ages are so fruitful a field for historical details of the greatness of woman, that we find our materials crowding one upon the other in too great a profusion for our present limits. But some great figures in what we may call the Christian Pantheon of woman cannot be passed over without a word of notice. The tenth century gave another holy empress to Germany, Cunegonda, the wife of Henry II., himself a saint, and a descendant of St. Mathilda. His sister Giselda married King Stephen of Hungary, upon the express condition that he would endeavor to christianize his people. Cunegonda, who reigned for a short time between the death of St. Henry and the election of his successor, proved herself as competent to govern a realm as the greatest man; these are Ventura’s own words. The story of Elizabeth of Hungary has been eloquently told by the author of the Monks of the West, and pictorial art has handed down from generation to generation the touching legend of her life. Married early to a prince remarkable for his piety and generosity, she was able to indulge in her favorite pastime—working for and serving the poor. We, in these days, seem to think that philanthropy, the “love of man,” is an invention coeval with the erection of gossiping committees and wrangling “boards”; but, when we look back upon the history of our race, we are forced to remember that when man was loved for the sake of God, spiritually as well as temporally, and when the old-fashioned virtue of “charity” was not ashamed to own its created—not self-existent—origin, a broader system of benevolence was spread over Christian earth, and more daring undertakings were cheerfully and successfully carried through. Elizabeth of Hungary was not untried by adversity, and after her husband’s death suffered cruel persecutions from her brother-in-law Henry, with the undaunted fortitude which a good conscience ensures and which God’s grace strengthens. We are told of her that she spoke little and always with gravity, and especially shunned tattlers. Women are always being taxed on one side with ridiculous frivolity in speech, and urged, on the other, to a contradiction of the charge by the pedantic phraseology of surface science. We have not alluded in these pages as often as we should have done to the great love of silence which distinguished the great women whose memory is honored. Whether as religious or as seculars, the useful employment of time and a discreetness of conversation were the two special and similar characteristics of their widely different lives, and thus they provided for the devotions and the acts of charity which shared so large a portion of their days and nights. They were never idle or even uselessly occupied, and we know but few women of our own generation who could truthfully say the same of themselves. What powers, what energy, do we not see wasted in superfluous social duties; for while, as our modern phrase goes, they kill time, they are also engaged in stifling, dwarfing, or destroying the higher powers of their mind. Solitude, silence, meditation, these are essentials to a well-balanced mind; but how many minds there are who voluntarily go on, not heeding, until the world and its claims, its sham triumphs, and its petty rivalries upset this balance and obscure the mind’s eye! There are as many women whose intellect is wrecked on the shoals of Fashion with its “laws of the Medes and Persians,” as there are others whose sensibility is stranded on the rocks of Woman’s Rights Conventions with their reckless disregard of all natural ties and time-honored duties.

Poland presents us with several instances of heroic womanhood during the middle ages. Dombrowka, the daughter of Boleslas, Duke of Bohemia, married Mieczylas, Duke of Poland, on condition of his becoming a Christian. By her example he not only became a religious, but a pure, merciful, and just, man. His wife could not forget her own countrymen while evangelizing her new subjects, and it was to her repeated solicitations that Bohemia owed the establishment of the Archiepiscopal See of Prague. Christianity, which in those times we might call the dower of the royal maidens of Europe, was first carried into Hungary by the marriage of Adelaide, the sister-in-law of Dombrowka, to Geisa, chief of the Huns. This Geisa was father to St. Stephen, of whose exemplary queen, Giselda, we have already spoken. Of another Polish princess, Hedwige, the wife of Henry, Duke of Silesia and Poland, we are told that by her prudence and persuasiveness she succeeded in delivering her husband, who had been made a prisoner by her uncle, and in obtaining peace between these two princes. Even in our own days, have we not had recent examples of the high esteem in which the mediation of woman was held in a Catholic country by a Catholic sovereign? Who can forget that delicate diplomatic missions have been confided in past years to a woman who was the incarnation of social charm as she was also the most devoted and uncompromising enthusiast in the cause of the Catholic religion—the Empress Eugenie! This Hedwige, who, in 1240, was so instrumental in raising an army with which to encounter the heathen hordes of Tartars who threatened at that time to destroy civilization in Europe, was succeeded by another queen of the same name as the saintly Cunegonda of Germany. It was she who towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, as Dlugossius, her biographer, and the Bollandists relate, was the first to provide for the working of the salt mines of Wieliczka, which afterwards proved an infinite source of wealth to the kingdom. She also cheerfully contributed the whole of her princely dowry to the equipment of an army to be led against the Tartars who had made a second raid upon the frontiers of Poland. But the greatest heroine of the country whose women are to this day the bravest under misfortune, and the most faithful to their religion, was another Hedwige, to whom Poland is indebted for her territorial aggrandizement and some of the most interesting as well as useful of her public institutions. Born a princess of Hungary, the elective crown of Poland was offered to her when she was only eighteen, and, when her marriage became a matter of national importance, she made, herself, a choice which only her own consummate prudence and foresight could have justified. Jagellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and the surrounding barbarous provinces, became her husband, on the conditions, proposed by Hedwige, that his entire domains should be incorporated for ever in the kingdom of Poland; that his people should embrace Christianity; that Christians who had been enslaved should be set free; that certain Polish provinces once alienated should be restored, and that all Lithuanian treasures, whether hereditary or conquered by Jagellon from his enemies, should be appropriated for the benefit of the kingdom of Poland. Here is a treaty in which a kingdom is consolidated and a dynasty established, through the unassisted efforts of the genius and prudence of a woman. Hedwige founded numberless hospitals, schools, churches, and monasteries; the great cathedral of Wilna and seven episcopal sees also owe their origin to her. Only through her death and her husband’s good-natured but weak indifference when once her influence was removed was a great monastic institution abandoned, which had for its object the study and preservation of the Slavic languages and peculiar rites. The University of Prague was already in her day a world-famed seat of learning. Hedwige, in concert with the King of Bohemia, founded and endowed in that city a spacious and magnificent college, where the youth of Lithuania were gratuitously received and provided for during their academical course. Education was certainly as gravely thought of in those days as in our later times, when we boast of its benefits being so widely diffused. Whether it is as deeply impressed on its ordinary recipients, let the recent “commemorations” at Oxford proclaim. Dlugossius says the college (which exists to this day) was called the Queen’s House, “a name which is in itself an undying monument to the memory of this great woman, whose worthy thought it embodied, and charity it still expresses; remaining for ever a living testimony to the world of the merits of its illustrious foundress.” Boniface IX., who reigned during the last decade of the fourteenth century, corresponded with Hedwige, upon whom he relied as the principal support and auxiliary of religion in her realms. She was always appealed to as mediatrix between the king and his subjects, as also by the vassal nobles among themselves. What the king could not do by threats, she accomplished partly by her persuasive exhortations, partly by her grave and majestic demeanor. Her historian relates that she even quelled a popular rising, and put down the abuses which had given occasion to it, before the king had time to march an army into the disaffected district and reduce it by force. Once, while her husband was fighting in Lithuania, the Hungarians, her own countrymen, invaded Poland and captured several towns. “She no sooner heard of this,” says Ventura, “than she assembled the nobles and barons, improvised an army on the spot, and, without losing an instant, herself led it on to the frontiers. There, to the great astonishment of her generals, she displayed the military talents and bravery of an old warrior. It was she who directed the sieges, organized the sallies and attacks, and gave battle on the open ground, while the whole army obeyed her enthusiastically, proud to serve under a woman-general. She conquered the enemy at every encounter, wrested from them the important stronghold of Leopol, took other cities, and not only repossessed herself of the Russian territories usurped by the Hungarians, but also added to the kingdom of Poland a vast tract of country which voluntarily surrendered itself to her rule.”[85] Hedwige is perhaps less known than other renowned women of the middle ages, and therefore we have been led to speak more at length of her extraordinary powers. It would be useless to remind the reader that she was no less remarkable for the modesty of her private life and the austerities and charities of her secret life than famed for the wonderful and versatile talents displayed in her public career. Chastity and devotion invariably accompany all greatness in Catholic womanhood, but, as we shall have occasion to illustrate this fact later on, we will not now stop to consider it in its evident bearings on the vexed question raised by certain indiscriminate apostles of the rights of woman.

We cannot pass over, among the prominent women of mediæval times the famous Countess Mathilda, of Tuscany, the friend and ally of Gregory VII., Hildebrand the Reformer. Rohrbacher calls her the modern Deborah, and adds that in Italy, whose princes were mostly traitors to the cause of truth and patriotism, “one man only, during a long reign of fifty years, showed himself ever faithful, ever devoted to the church and her head, ever ready to second them in efforts for the reformation of the clergy and the restoration of ancient discipline, ever prompt to defend them, sword in hand, from their most formidable enemies, never allured by bribes, intimidated by threats, or cast down by adversity, and this one man was a woman, the Countess Mathilda.”

Her donation of Tuscany, the Marches, Parma, Modena, Reggio, and various other cities and lands, to the Holy See, is a fact that stands alone in history, and is simply the most momentous act of practical devotion which the Chair of Peter ever received. This generous and unreserved gift, first made to Gregory VII. in 1077, and confirmed in 1102 to Pascal II., is the unparalleled expression of the whole nature of woman, in its thoroughness, its spirit of martyrdom, its enthusiastic and unerring instincts, towards the good and the true. Henry IV. of Germany, having incurred excommunication, was reconciled to the Pope through the good offices of the great countess, and met him for that purpose at the fortress of Canossa, then a fief of the Countess of Tuscany. Ventura says of her that she was as learned as she was pious, and as solicitous for the propagation of science and the interests of literature as for the reformation of clerical abuses and the consolidation of the church. She multiplied schools and colleges over her dominions, but the crowning work of her great reign was the foundation of the famous University of Bologna, confessedly the best seat of learning in Europe for many centuries. Mathilda gathered together all the enlightened and talented masters of her age in this time-honored and world-renowned university, and in honor of her munificence it has remained a custom to this day to allow women to graduate there, to take a doctorate, and “profess” in public any of the learned faculties. Women, we are told by Ventura, the earnest panegyrist of the sex, have taken advantage of this custom at all times, and even up to the present day, when (in the beginning of this century, we believe) the celebrated female professor, Tambroni, taught Latin and Greek within the Bolognese university. Cardinal Mezzofanti, the great linguist, was at one time her pupil.

We have been led so far in the search, however superficial, for instances of the greatness of woman, as recognized, protected, and rewarded by the church, that we have reached a limit to our explorations in this article without mentioning any of the great women of the middle ages save those of royal descent. There are many who claim our attention, and whose influence over public affairs and the minds of men was not less than that exercised by the royal matrons and maidens we have cursorily named. Some were destined to mingle in political struggles, others owe their fame to their learning, one of them to actual feats of arms, and all to the spirit of chivalry which rendered a woman inviolable and sacred wherever honor was known and laws revered. But this spirit itself, what was it save the offspring of that higher spirit of reverential homage ever inculcated by the church towards that sex which gave a mother to our God?

Before taking up the subject of the status of woman within the church after the sixteenth century, we may, perhaps, return for a brief space to the Catherines of Sienna, the Joans of Arc, and the Genevieves of ecclesiastical history.

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BRYANT’S TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD. [86]

The appearance at this time and in this country of a first-rate translation of the Iliad is an event of much significance. Through the exaggerated praise which London critics bestow on our dialect poetry, there runs a quiet assumption that our culture is narrow and unsound. Our oaten pipe is well enough, but our lyre disjointed and unstrung. To such insinuations Mr. Bryant’s work is a complete and final rejoinder. We shall find it easy to show that he has made the best translation of Homer in our language, and with one exception the very best extant. In the face of such an achievement, it will henceforth be preposterous to sneer at American scholarship.

Winged words the Homeric poems may well be called, which, fledged in the dawn of time, have not yet faltered in their flight across the centuries. Their superiority as works of art is not more unquestionable than is their procreative power. They have ever been—to use Milton’s words—as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth. The history of Greek letters, we might almost say, is the genesis of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Upon them Aristotle based his canons; from them the Attic tragedy drew her inspiration and her argument. To the same source the most delightful of Greek historians referred his style and his method, while the choir of lyric and erotic poets confessed their debt to him who “gave them birth, but higher sang.” The direct action of the Homeric poems upon the masters of the Latin literature has been compared to that of the sunlight, but their indirect influence through the medium of Athenian models was pervasive and quickening as the solar heat. The development of poetry among Western nations can be accurately measured by the thoroughness with which they have assimilated Homer. The Orlando and the Lusiad repeat the story of Ulysses. Even minor excellences of the Iliad are reproduced in the Jerusalem Delivered. Milton and Goethe have drawn copiously from the same stores. Nor is there a single modern poet of the first rank, with the exception of Shakespeare, whose obligations to Homer are not manifold and obvious.

It is true that the eighteenth century, which sought to shatter so many idols, chose to depreciate these poems. Embellished by Pope, dissected by Fontanelle, and patronized by Mme. Dacier, they fell, it must be confessed, upon evil times. It is a suggestive commentary upon the self-styled siècle du goût that the autocrat of letters could pronounce the Iliad “une poème qu’on admire, et qu’on ne lit pas.”[87] To the author of the Henriade, Homer was only a beau parleur. It is now many years since the stigma went home to roost. Perrault and La Motte Houdart, who knew him only in the rags and gyves of an obscure translation, point with a satisfied smirk to the “coarseness” and “barbarism” of Homer. One is reminded of those Philistine lords who flung their jests at Samson Agonistes while he leaned against the pillars in Gaza.

Of living English poets, the strongest and sweetest acknowledge gratefully in Homer a source of their melody and strength. The fragment of an epic which is perhaps the Laureate’s best work was presented by the author as “faint Homeric echoes.” From Homer, quite as truly as from Chaucer, has the Earthly Paradise caught its genial sunshine and bracing air. The world, we presume, would have lost nothing had Mr. Swinburne read Euripides less and the Iliad more. A timely reaction has set in against the morbid self-consciousness and the hankering after glitter and novelty which are sure precursors of decay. Of that reaction, Matthew Arnold, who in childhood was taught to reverence Homer, has been the prophet and protagonist. With the same movement the temper and discipline of Mr. Bryant’s mind place him in active sympathy. We do not doubt that it was the aim of his Iliad to elevate and purify the taste of his countrymen. The success which his translation has already achieved augurs for it not a little influence upon the national literature.

To the thoughtful artist, Schlegel could suggest nothing more useful than the study of casts from the antique. A faithful version of the Iliad opens whole galleries of casts. The sculptor Bouchardon, we are told, was discovered reading Homer in a translation, and that a sorry one. “Ah, monsieur!” he exclaimed, “depuis que j’ai lu ce livre, il me semble que les hommes ont quinze pieds de haut.”[88] We know what Keats beheld upon looking into Chapman’s Homer, and we know that the quarry from which he hewed Hyperion is not yet exhausted. Of the thousands who will now listen for the first time to the story of Achilles, it may well be that some will kindle at what they hear. They will know how to thank Mr. Bryant that those flames which blazed over Troy, leaping from headland to headland, have once more borne a message across the sea.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, repeated attempts have been made to translate the master-poems of the Greek and Latin literatures into English verse. We suppose it will be acknowledged that those attempts have for the most part failed. The truth is that translation as commonly practised in England cannot properly be called an art. There are no fundamental principles universally recognized as the conditions of its development. It is still hardly more than a trick, in which one succeeds better than another, but each proceeds upon a method of his own. Who has prefaced his work with such a definition of translation as criticism can admit to be exhaustive and final? We might have expected so much from Hobbes. We do not find it. Dryden’s cardinal idea, that translation is “a kind of drawing after the life,” has never been literally accepted by others. It did not uniformly govern himself. The face seen and the face drawn both appeal to the brain through the eye, whereas even those English translators who aim to infuse the identical thought, feeling, or fancy of their original have recourse to media of sensual metaphor, sometimes modified, sometimes distinct from those employed in their author’s language. On Sir George Cornewall Lewis’ view of translation we will not dwell, because we are not sure that we understand it, and at least cannot conceive the practical application of it. It is enough for us that he heartily commended as an instance of right treatment Hookham Frere’s Aristophanes, which is clever, fresh, and racy enough, but certainly not Attic. There is another theory, that we should ask ourselves what our author would have said had he been writing in English. One objection to this is, as Mr. Newman remarks, that no two men would agree in their answers to such a question. Homer, if an Englishman and writing in our tongue, would unquestionably have given a different turn and tinge to his verse from that which it takes in Greek. But are we not bound to make the province of translation, as discriminated from paraphrase, the reproduction of what an author did actually say? Certainly the aim of Homeric translators into our tongue should be, not of course to compass the effect produced upon an Athenian reading Homer in the age of Peisistratos or upon a consummate scholar capable, we will say, of thinking in Ionic Greek, but to make upon Englishmen or Americans of average culture an impression nearly identical with that which they derive from the Iliad itself. Achieve this, and they who are themselves not scholars will at least be assured that they are reading Homer, not Sotheby or Pope. Such an aim does not seem too ambitious, but it has never been attained, rarely approached, in English. A radical error runs through all our metrical versions of the classic poets. Literal accuracy is by some repudiated, attempted by others, and occasionally secured in detached passages, but is always subordinate to the attainment of harmonious numbers and agreeable diction. Whenever literal accuracy seems likely to conflict with these, it is sacrificed. Now, if it be true that such sacrifice is frequently inevitable, then a genuine translation of the Iliad is an impossibility. But this we are reluctant to admit. The matchless version of Voss has proved that it is possible to be at once literal and musical, to preserve in one Germanic language at least as much of the Homeric flavor as Germans of average culture can detect in the original. Perhaps one clue to his success is to be found in his employment of the hexameter. A profound artist, he could not fail to recognize the inextricable connection of rhythm and cæsura with the shape and play of thought. He saw that in some subtle sort the metre is the poem. We have not abandoned the hope of seeing the hexameter one day naturalized in English. Mr. Kingsley’s Andromeda showed a marked improvement on Evangeline, and what the Laureate might do in this way is sufficiently clear from his Ode to Milton, where he has grappled successfully with alcaics, undoubtedly the most intricate and difficult of dactylic measures. The distinction between quantitative and accentual metres has been pressed too far by men who have wanted patience to cope with those peculiarities which render our language somewhat intractable to dactylic verse.

Almost every familiar scheme of English metre has been applied to the reproduction of Homer. We have had Chapman’s fourteen-syllable line, the rhymed couplet of Pope and Sotheby, the unrhymed iambics of Cowper, Mr. Worsley’s Spenserian stanza, the ballad movement in seven beats of Mr. Newman, and many more. One or two of these are noble English poems, but as translations none can be compared with the work of Voss. We should have said, before the appearance of Mr. Bryant’s volumes, that a new version of the Iliad executed upon one of the old plans and in one of the old metres was not called for. The attempt of Lord Derby to vie with Cowper in blank-verse had proved singularly unfortunate. Failing to accredit the scholar, its publication belittled the statesman. It is not with such a performance that the conservative party can match Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric Age. We should not highly commend Mr. Bryant were we to say that he is every-way more successful than Lord Derby. He has, in our judgment, surpassed Cowper, and that was no easy task. The associations, indeed, connected with what is known as blank-verse, render it to an English ear somewhat unsuitable to a poem like the Iliad, which presents an infinite variety of incidents and situations quite as often trivial as dignified. Still, Cowper, although his muse, stooping to certain homely details, discovers a sort of prudishness which is highly amusing, is generally vigorous and noble where energy and majesty are required, and had hitherto been the least unsatisfactory of Homer’s English translators. In examining Mr. Bryant’s work we shall mainly confine ourselves—so far as English writers are concerned—to a collation of Cowper and Lord Derby. We have neither space nor inclination to quote from the rhymed versions. Faithfully to reproduce Homer in rhyme was declared by Pope to be impossible, and Mr. Worsley’s Odyssey, delightful as it is, has not availed to set aside the judgment.

It would be easy to misinterpret the views which have governed Mr. Bryant’s work by his application of Latin names to the Homeric deities, and the reason which he assigns in the preface for this practice. It is true that he is countenanced by Lord Derby, but we think we had a right to expect more from his scholarship. We cannot but deem them both in the wrong, and to our mind the error is serious and far-reaching. The denizens of Homer’s Olympus are in the strictest sense personal gods. Such superhuman attributes as they severally possess are sharply defined, the degree and scope of their authority, except, perhaps, in two instances, clearly marked. They live the life of men, eat, drink, love, quarrel. They exhibit the most passionate interest in the war which rages before Ilium. They are bitter and unscrupulous partisans, wheedle, lie, bargain, rebel, in the cause of their protégées. They forsake their dwellings to take part in the debates of mortals, mix in the fight, are pierced with spears, and the celestial ichor flows precisely like human blood. In short, they resemble rather the demigods of a later mythology, and are rarely invested with that awful sublimity and mystery which enshroud most of the elder Roman divinities. Even in the Theogony of Hesiod, the attributes of certain gods have undergone a degree of alteration which it is tax enough to bear in mind. To insist upon confounding Ares, Aphroditê, and Athenê with Mars, Venus, and Minerva, deities which, as enshrined in the literature purely and distinctively Latin, are as native and peculiar to Rome as her language, is to mystify the reader who knows anything of either. It appears to us as unreasonable to rename the gods as to miscall the heroes of the Iliad. Surely it is no apology for the confusion of things essentially distinct that the practice has been in some sort naturalized in our literature. So are the legendary chronicles of the kings of Rome, so are the distorted portraits of Shakespeare’s histories. A manifest error cannot plead undisturbed possession. Moreover, it is now many years since English scholars have labored to educate their countrymen up to something like discrimination between the Greek and Latin mythologies. Their task is well-nigh done. Lemprière’s Dictionary is at length obsolete, and the volumes of Grote are in the hands of every schoolboy. If the prevailing excellence of Mr. Bryant’s work had not disarmed us, we should be disposed to protest against the repetition of an error, as well as against the presumption of national ignorance, by which it is excused. It is certainly matter of regret that such an objection should lie on the threshold of a work in most respects so sound and scholarlike.

The new version begins well:

“O Goddess! sing the wrath of Peleus’ son
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air.
For so had Jove appointed, from the time
When the two chiefs—Atrides, King of men,
And great Achilles—parted first as foes.”

Seven hexameters in eight lines of blank-verse—certainly a remarkable instance of compression. Except ἡρωων, πασι (almost an expletive), and προ in προιαψεν (which, perhaps, is faintly suggested by “swept”), not a word of Homer is omitted, not a word is added. “Birds of air” is an accurate translation of οἰωνοισι. “Parted first as foes” is exceedingly close. There is but one error, διος is rendered “great.” To this word no moral attribute whatever is attached in the Homeric poems. It is equivalent to “high-born” or “noble” (as Cowper gives it) in the primitive sense of that word. Lord Derby makes it “godlike,” which is quite incorrect. If there be a fault in the lines just quoted, it is a certain coldness. They hardly lift us to the height of the great argument. But for conscientious fidelity to the original, these lines have not been approached in English, and are in this respect fully equal to Voss. Hear, for instance, Cowper, who requires an extra line:

“Achilles sing, O Goddess, Peleus’ son,
His wrath pernicious, who ten thousand woes
Caused to Achaia’s host, sent many a soul
Illustrious into Ades premature,
And heroes gave (so stood the will of Jove)
To dogs and to all ravening birds a prey.
When fierce dispute had separated once
The noble chief Achilles from the son
Of Atreus, Agamemnon, King of men.”

This is pitched in the right key, although the finest line, the fourth, is perhaps too suggestively Miltonic. In his scholarship Cowper is loose. “Who” is grammatically wrong and æsthetically a blunder. It is not Achilles, but Achilles’ wrath that Homer means to sing. “Host,” “ravening,” “fierce,” “chief,” “Agamemnon,” are merely supernumeraries. “Illustrious” was inserted, we presume, for rhythmical reasons; it does not translate ἰφθιμους. “Stood” for ἐτελειετο is fine; Mr. Bryant fails to convey the notion of fulfilment, of inevitable accomplishment, which the word seems to carry. The antithesis between ψυχὰς and αὐτους, significant as regards the Homeric theory of a future life, is quite lost in Cowper, while it is cleverly projected in Mr. Bryant’s lines. “Premature” preserves the force of the preposition in προ-ιαψεν, which ought not to be overlooked.

It may be well now to quote Lord Derby. He needs ten lines:

“Of Peleus’ son, Achilles, sing, O Muse.
The vengeance deep and deadly whence to Greece
Unnumbered ills arose, which many a soul
Of mighty warriors to the viewless Shades
Untimely sent, they on the battle plain
Unburied lay, a prey to ravening dogs
And carrion birds, but so had Jove decreed.
From that sad day when first in wordy war
The mighty Agamemnon, King of men,
Confronted stood by Peleus’ godlike son.”

This is hardly worth criticising in detail. First, why “Muse”? “Vengeance” is bad for μηνις. “Deadly” translates οὐλομένην well enough, but “deep and deadly” suggests the harrowing phraseology of the Ledger romance. “Viewless Shades” is possibly poetical, but Homer chooses to be geographical—he says Ἀις. “They on the battle plain unburied”; we cannot find this in the Greek, but it accounts for one extra line. “Ravening” and “carrion” raise Cowper’s expletive to the second power. “Sad day”! And so it was, but to call it so is almost maudlin. Ἐριζω does indeed mean to wrangle, but “wordy war” is petty and poetastic. “The mighty Agamemnon”! Homer is satisfied with Atrides. And now we will see if it be possible to give this magnificent prologue measure for measure, line for line, almost word for word. Hear Voss:

“Singe den Zorn, O Göttin, des Peleiaden Achilleus,
Ihn der entbrannt den Achaiern unendbaren Jammer erregte,
Und viel tapfere Seelen der Heldensöhne zum Ais
Sendete, aber sie selber zum Raub’ ausstreckte den Hunden
Und den Gevögel umher—so ward Zeus’ Wille vollendet,
Seit dem Tage als einst durch bitteren Zank sich entzweiten
Atreus’ Sohn der Herrscher des Volks und der edle Achilleus!”

The figurative entbrannt for οὐλομένην is not to our taste. Bitteren is superfluous, and sendete imperfectly translates προιαψεν. Otherwise these lines are flawless.

We pass to the sixth book, to a passage which Pope and Chapman have done well, Sotheby on the whole better, where even Hobbes grows tender, where every translator has sought to do his best. The parting of Hector and Andromache is a scene (if we except the Alcestis) unique in classic literature. When we consider the state of society depicted in the Homeric poems, the figure of Andromache seems anomalous and inexplicable; or rather she almost constrains us to recast our notions of the social framework in which we find her set. In her the sexual passion is refined and sublimated to that noblest form of conjugal love which is thought to be peculiar to the civilized and christianized descendants from the chaste German stock. Through the historical ages of Greece, in the Roman Republic and Empire, we seek in vain a pendant to this portrait. The ideal would seem to have been lost. The painter who drew Alexander’s favorite could not have limned Andromache; he who sang Ariadne in Naxos would have failed to understand her. To recover the type, we must descend to a much later age—to Raphael and to Wordsworth. The sweetest words in our language—sweetheart, helpmate, wife—describe Andromache. She is not the wanton idol of a despot’s caprice, nor the dull victim of a convenient Athenian marriage, nor the selfish protégée of the cynical Roman law. She might have been bred in a Christian world and blessed an English home. We quote twenty lines from Mr. Bryant:

“She came attended by a maid who bore
A tender child—a babe too young to speak—
Upon her bosom, Hector’s only son,
Beautiful as a star....

*****

The father on his child
Looked with a silent smile. Andromache
Pressed to his side meanwhile, and all in tears
Clung to his hand, and thus beginning said:
‘Too brave! thy valor yet will cause thy death!
Thou hast no pity on thy tender child,
Nor me, unhappy one, who soon must be
Thy widow. All the Greeks will rush on thee
To take thy life. A happier lot were mine,
If I must lose thee, to go down to earth,
For I shall have no hope when thou art gone,
Nothing but sorrow. Father have I none,
And no dear mother....
Seven brothers had I in my father’s house,
And all went down to Hades in one day.

*****

Hector, thou
Art father and dear mother now to me,
And brother and my youthful spouse besides.’”

No man, we imagine, who examines the above lines will question the general accuracy of Mr. Bryant’s scholarship. They are at once the most succinct, literal, and beautiful reproduction of Homer’s words which has been achieved in English. As Americans, we are proud of them. Cowper, indeed, had finely rendered this passage, and it is possible that some persons unfamiliar with the Greek and habituated to the movement of the Paradise Lost may prefer his inverted construction and sonorous phrase. We will not quote him, however, but rather choose to pay Mr. Bryant the highest homage in our power by placing beside his lines the version of Voss:

“Die Dienerin aber ihr folgend
Trug an der Brust das zarte, noch ganz unmündige Knäblein.

*****

Hektor’s einzigen Sohn, dem schimmernden Sterne vergleichbar.
Siehe, mit Lächeln blickte der Vater still auf das Knäblein,
Aber neben ihn trat Andromache Thränen vergiessend,
Drückt ihm freundlich die Hand, und redete also, beginnend,
Seltsamer Mann, dich tödtet dein Muth noch und du erbarmst dich
Nicht des stammelnden Kindes, noch mein des elenden Weibes,
Ach, bald Witwe von dir, denn dich tödten gewiss die Achaier
Alle mit Macht austürmend; allein mir ware das Beste
Deiner beraubt in die Erde hinabzusinken; denn weiter
Bleibt kein Trost mir übrig, wenn du dein Schicksal erreicht hast,
Grau nur und nicht mehr hab’ ich ja Vater und liebende Mutter.

*****

Sieben auch waren die Brüder mir dort in unserer Wohnung,
Und die wandelten all ‘am selbigen Tage zum Ais.’”

We doubt if these lines can be surpassed except by the Greek itself. They echo the melody of Homer. Mr. Bryant, of course, relinquished the hope of competing with him in this respect when he adopted iambic verse. In point of compression, however, and literal accuracy, we shall find him not inferior. There are in both versions some imperfections. “Tender” (zarte) may perhaps stand for ἀταλαφρων although it represents but partially that exquisite epithet. Cowper omits this word altogether, and Lord Derby substitutes something of his own, “all unconscious.” To our mind Mr. Bryant’s “too young to speak” is most felicitous for νηπιον αὐτως. The word, however, in many passages of the Iliad shows no trace of relation to επος, and means simply “under age,” as Voss gives it. The force of the adverb is nicely preserved in the German. Both versions make ἁγαπητον “only” (einzigen). The line of the Odyssey (b. ii. 365) seems to us conclusive against the propriety of this translation. We prefer Cowper’s “darling.” And now we come to the famous simile, ἀλιγκιον ἀστερι καλῷ. Mr. Bryant, following Cowper, writes “beautiful as a star.” But Homer is far more picturesque than this. He shows us the bright cheeks and glancing eyes of Hector’s boy gleaming from his nurse’s bosom, as a star gleams. “A fair star”—Lord Derby would make it a planet, “morning star” he calls it. But stars that twinkle and glimmer are most alluring to the eye, are the fairest, and therefore Voss is right—schimmernden Sterne vergleichbar. Mr. Bryant is not successful in the next line. We cannot like “silent smile.” Can a smile be other than silent? Neither can Voss match Cowper’s

“The father silent eyed his babe, and smiled.”

“Pressed to his side” is vivid, where Cowper and Voss are tame; “clung to his hand”—the Greek is yet stronger, “grew on his hand.” Voss was certainly drowsy when he could render this “pressed kindly his hand.” Andromache’s touching first word is quite lost in the “Dear lord” of Lord Derby. Cowper’s “My noble Hector” is even worse. The truth is that Δαιμονιε is uttered by the young wife in tender reproach, and this is conveyed in good measure by “too brave,” but seltsamer Mann is perfect. “Tender child”—Cowper and Lord Derby write “helpless.” Voss’ stammelnden is based, we presume, on Il. 2, 238, where some command of speech more or less articulate seems to be conceded to νηπιαχοις. The next four lines of the new version are close and felicitous, but θαλπωρη is not so much “hope” as “comfort”; and “when thou art gone” hardly expresses the thought in ἐπει ἄν συ γε ποτμον ἐπισπῃς, whereas the German delivers it faithfully. We have reached finally a wonderful couplet which fairly throbs with passionate devotion. Here is the Greek:

“‘Ἑκτωρ, ἀταρ συ μοι ἐσσι πατηρ και ποτνια μητηρ,
Ἠδε κασιγνητος, συ δε μοι θαλερος παρακοιτης.’”

Which we may venture to render thus:

“‘Hector, united in thee still, find I my worshipful mother,
Father and brother in thee, O blooming Hector, my husband!’”

Voss is exceedingly sweet:

“‘Hector, O du bist jetzo mir Vater und liebende Mutter,
Auch mein Bruder allein, O du mein blühender Gatte!’”

Derby:

“‘But, Hector, thou to me art all in one,
Sire, mother, brother, thou my wedded love.’”

Cowper:

“‘Yet, Hector, O my husband, I in thee
Find parents, brothers, all that I have lost.’”

Bryant:

“‘Hector, thou
Art father and dear mother now to me
And brother and my youthful spouse besides.’”

Lord Derby’s version is curiously bad. Strange that one striving to utter to modern ears words which in the Iliad seem to break from the heart should go out of his way for “sire” and “brethren”! And for “wedded love,” it is not only incorrect, but mawkish, and therefore in this place detestable. Cowper likewise is weak and false. “Parents” is intolerable; ποτνια and θαλερος are overlooked. And in exchange for those adjectives we have “all that I have lost” (pure Cowper). Mr. Bryant does very much better, but he is again somewhat cold; and coldness here is hardly pardonable. He was determined to give the last line literally; but to put παρακοιτης in the vocative, as Voss has done, makes the verse literal enough and more glowing. Both Voss and Mr. Bryant are wrong in ποτνια. The active participle (liebende) is out of the question, and even “dear” conveys an erroneous impression of the relations subsisting between mother and daughter in the Homeric age. Ποτνια predicates a sentiment of respect and reverence, and is often associated with the names of deities. For an exact analogue we must go back to English domestic life in the last century. We shall find it in what was then a household word—“honored mother.” We must do Lord Derby the justice to say that he had hit upon the translation in line 413. It is a pity that he did not repeat it here. Θαλερος has proved a stumbling-block to most translators. It is a beautiful word: and placed with exquisite propriety in the mouth of a young wife who gazes on the bravest face and noblest form in Ilium. Mr. Bryant’s “youthful” is not absolutely wrong, but it is rather the impression which youth and health make upon the eye, their visible glory, their “purple light,” which Homer makes in θαλερος. Blühende gives it exactly. We wish that with these perfect words Andromache might have vanished from literature. The later myths dishonor her. It seems a crime against nature to recount of this woman that

“Victoris heri tetigit captiva cubile,”

and that Hector’s widow bore children to the son of Achilles. Surely instinct would have taught her the tenet of a later philosophy: “We are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.” Not in Euripides and Virgil, but rather in Racine, would we follow the fortunes of that Andromache whom we knew by the Scæan gate.

Let us glance next at the concluding lines of the eighth book. They have been translated by Tennyson, and it may be interesting to contrast his version. Mr. Bryant writes:

“So high in hope they sat the whole night through
In warlike lines, and many watch-fires blazed
As when in heaven the stars look brightly forth
Round the clear-shining moon while not a breeze
Stirs in the depths of air, and all the stars
Are seen and gladness fills the shepherd’s heart,
So many fires in sight of Ilium blazed
Lit by the sons of Troy between the ships
And eddying Xanthus: on the plain there shone
A thousand; fifty warriors by each fire
Sat in its light. Their steeds beside the cars—
Champing their oats and their white barley—stood,
And waited for the golden morn to rise.”

Tennyson renders the same passage thus:

“And these all night upon the ridge of war
Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed;
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful when all the winds are laid

*****

... and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart.
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain, and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire.
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds
Stood by the cars waiting the thronèd morn.”

Some may prefer the general effect of the Laureate’s lines, but our American version adheres quite as closely to the text. We are surprised, however, to find “warlike lines.” Mr. Tennyson’s alternative translation, “ridge of war” is an exact reproduction of the Greek, ἀνα πτολεμοιο γεφυρας. “Bridge,” which he first wrote, is post-Homeric. Lord Derby’s phrase is close enough, but wanting in pictorial power:

“Full of proud hopes, upon the pass of war
All night they camped, and frequent blazed their fires.”

If one care to see what sad work may sometimes proceed from a true poet, here is Cowper’s version of these lines—ten words are required to misconstrue three:

“Big with great purposes and proud they sat,
Not disarrayed but in fair form displayed
Of even ranks, and watched their numerous fires.”

The familiar simile of the moon and stars in the above passage is sharply and faithfully reproduced by Mr. Bryant, whereas Tennyson’s “look beautiful” for φαινετ' ἀριπρεπεα is both loose and weak. “All the winds are laid”; Cowper says “hushed.” Either is closer than Mr. Bryant’s phrase. Lord Derby’s translation of παντα δε τ' ειδεται ἀστρα is ambitious and clumsy—“Shines each particular star distinct.” The last six hexameters are given in seven lines of our version. Tennyson has compressed them into six, but with the sacrifice of Τρωων καιοντων, which the other neatly expressed by “Lit by the sons of Troy.” We could have dispensed with the Laureate’s “towers,” but are delighted to find ἐυθρονον preserved in “throned.”

To some readers our criticism may have seemed to dwell too nicely on details; but, if they will reflect a moment, they will perceive that this is itself a guarantee of sincerity. We propose to give grounds for our opinions, that others may accept them knowingly, or refute them, if they can. To flood with general praise or spatter with vague abuse belongs to the Cheapjacks of literature. Moreover, no American needs to be told that Mr. Bryant is a poet. Men do not ask whether his Iliad is a delightful poem, but whether it truthfully photographs Homer. That question, if we may judge from his performances, the average magazine critic has preferred to evade.

From the extracts already presented, it is manifest that our American translator has followed the text of his author with a scrupulous exactitude which required unusual self-command from a poet of original powers; yet he is often so truly and nobly poetical that many will overlook the superiority of his scholarship. Most countries of Western Europe have produced several translators of the Iliad. But in each language one has eventually obscured the rest, and thenceforward kept unchallenged a niche in the national literature. Some such pre-eminence among English versions belongs, in our judgment, to Mr. Bryant’s work. For conscientious adherence to the text, his version has no rival in our tongue, and ought, in justice, to be compared with Voss. In point of scholarship, Cowper had shown himself much stronger than Pope, but his translation beside Mr. Bryant’s Iliad seems to us a paraphrase. Both are masters of blank-verse, but Cowper is a pupil of Milton, while Mr. Bryant’s diction and rhythm are his own. The iambic pentameter is, in his hands, surprisingly plastic. We should not have supposed it capable of such happy adjustment to the shifting mood and varying pitch of the original; yet we cannot help a regret that this version was not executed in hexameters. We are quite sure that the achievement was possible to the author of this translation.

In such extracts as we have yet to make from Mr. Bryant’s work, we propose to compare him, not with his English rivals whom we hold him to have excelled, but with some of those translators who are most highly esteemed in other countries.

Few lines of the Iliad have been more frequently imitated than those which paint with the tints of Albano the girdle of Aphroditê. The incident which calls forth the description is well known. Determined to lull the vigilance of Zeus and rescue her darling Greeks, Herê flies to her toilet. The most truthful of poets puts no faith in beauty unadorned, and himself performs the part of tire-woman. It occurs, however, to Herê that her lord is already familiar with the resources of her wardrobe, and the fear of a cold or careless eye leads her to borrow of Aphroditê. She receives a talisman, but precisely what this was is—to men, at least—a riddle. It was an embroidered strap, so much is certain; but how used, and where? Belt or waist-girdle it was not, for that Herê had on. It was plainly a slender and dainty thing, or how could she hide it in her bosom? For our part, we believe it to have been a breast-band (Brustgürtel) worn just under the breast, although a French commentator with much heat pronounces this view an insult to the figure of the goddess. The one translator competent to decide so nice a question was Mme. Dacier. Unhappily she throws no light on it. Mr. Bryant turns the passage thus:

“She spake, and from her bosom drew the zone
Embroidered, many-colored, and instinct
With every winning charm—with love, desire,
Dalliance, and gentle speech that stealthily
O’ercomes the purpose of the wisest mind.”

We must object to “zone.” Mr. Bryant has just given (Il. 14, 181) the same name to a broad, heavily-fringed belt which Herê is now wearing. But Homer makes a difference, calling that ζωνη and this ἱμας. Voss likewise is here somewhat careless, rendering both words by Gürtel. “Dalliance” translates a stubborn word, and projects the idea which lay at the root of ὀαριστυς. Let us turn to Voss:

“Sprach und löste vom Busen den wunderköstlichen Gürtel
Buntgestickt; dort waren die Zauberreize versammelt.
Dort war schmachtende Lieb’ und Sehnsucht, dort das Getändel,
Dort die schmeichelnde Bitte die oft auch den Weisen bethöret.”

How neatly ποικιλον and κεστον are compressed in buntgestickt! Wunderköstlichen is, of course, mere padding. Schmachtende likewise is superfluous. Neither can we altogether like “befool” for ἐκλεψε νοον. Mr. Bryant’s phrase is certainly more felicitous. On the whole, it must be conceded that Voss flickers in these lines.

When Mme. Dacier brought out her Iliad, it was affirmed on all hands that Homer could never, in the nature of things, be presented in French verse. From that verdict an appeal has from time to time been taken, but the decision has never been reversed. Mme. Dacier’s stiffness and the flippancy of La Motte are indeed equally intolerable. We decidedly prefer to any metrical version in French the prose translations of Bitaube and Dugas Montbel. Both are in the strictest sense belles-lettres works, and are generally accurate and spirited. Bitaube portrays the girdle thus: “En même temps elle détache sa ceinture riche d’une superbe broderie. Là se trouvent réunis les charmes les plus séduisants; là sont l’amour, les tendres désirs, les doux entretiens et ces accents persuasifs, qui dérobent en secret le cœur du plus sage.” There are some adjectives here for which Homer is not responsible.

Monti’s version is well known. It has been called the golden ring which links the Greek and Italian literatures, and is ranked with Caro’s Æneid. Beside La Morte d’Ettore it appears a meritorious work. No doubt the climax of false taste was reached when Cesarrotti, who had executed a good translation in prose, proceeded to metamorphose the Iliad into a strange monster which he called The Death of Hector. We will not quote Monti now, for in this place he is tame and redundant. Yet he has skilfully hit with favellio a secondary meaning of ὀαριστυς. The French have a word from the same root, babil; but we have nothing in English which so happily expresses the cooing of young lovers. Tasso’s reproduction of these lines is exquisite. He is depicting Armida’s girdle. It was fraught, he says, with—

“Teneri sdegni, e placide, e tranquille,
Repulse, cari vezzi e liete paci,
Sorrisi, parolette, e dolci stille
Di pianto, e sospir tronchi, e molli baci.”

After the short, swift strokes of Homer, this picture seems almost florid with concetti. But each poet meant to epitomize the charms he had beheld in life. The countrywomen of Tasso were skilled in lovers’ sleights, whereas the simple virgins of Homeric times had never heard of the gai scavoir. If we may trust Brantôme, who knew something of Italian manners in that age, the dames of Sienna were quite competent to instruct Aphroditê in the arts of fascination.

The range of Homeric similes is not limited to the phenomena of sky, river, and ocean, to the familiar experiences of the forge, the vineyard, and the chase. The lightning play of fancy and memory and the emotions of the heart are submitted to the same scrutiny, and portrayed with like felicity. “Rapid as thought” has become the tritest commonplace in every European language, but the guise which the simile originally wore in Homer is still novel and effective. Incensed at the trick which has just been cleverly executed, Zeus orders Herê back to Olympus. Then Mr. Bryant:

“He spake, the white-armed goddess willingly
Obeyed him, and from Ida’s summit flew
To high Olympus. As the thought of man
Flies rapidly, when having travelled far,
He thinks, Here would I be; I would be there—
And flits from place to place.”

“Willingly” is supported by Voss’ willig, but has no correlative in the Greek. The context, moreover, shows that Herê departed in a pet, and her peevishness finds full vent when she reaches Olympus. Mr. Bryant omits to translate φρεσι πευκαλιμῃσι. For this phrase Voss gives spähenden Geiste, deriving the adjective from πευκη, by which, with Buttmann, he understands the pointed (not bitter) fir-tree. But if Schneider be right, these words are equivalent to πυκα φρονεοντων in the description of the girdle just quoted. The root would then be looked for in πυκνος, and the latter phrase might find an analogue, though not an exact one, in our “close schemers.” These details are worthy of notice, for Chapman, mistaking the primitive sense of this adjective, has utterly missed the point of the simile. The perversity of Hobbes is ludicrous. He condenses Homer after this fashion:

“This said, went Juno to Olympus high,
As when a man looks on an ample plain
To any distance quickly goes his eye.”

Voss and Mr. Bryant are in this place so much alike that we will not collate the German, but give instead Monti’s blank-verse:

“Disse e la Diva dalle bianche bracchia
Obbediente dall’ Idea montagna
Al Olympo sali. Colla prestezza
Con que vola il pensier del viatore
Che scorse molte terre le rianda
In suo segreto e dici, Io quella riva
Io quell’ altra toccai.”

Scorse and rianda are pictorial, and perhaps sufficiently literal. We like also suo segreto for “close mind.” Altogether the version is neat and animated, but less compact than Mr. Bryant’s. Both are quite as faithful as the prose of Bitaube and Montbel. The former writes: “Il dit, et Junon soumise à son époux s’élève des sommets d’Ida sur Olympe. Tel que le rapide essor de la pensée de l’homme lorsqu’ayant parcouru des pays d’une vaste étendue, et se rappelant en un moment tous les objets qui l’ont frappé, il dit en lui-même, j’étais ici, j’étais là.” It will be observed that Mr. Bryant’s “Here would I be, I would be there!” reproduces the optative εἰην. So does the Dorthin möcht ich, und dort of Voss. An alternative reading is ἠηv which Bitaube and Monti have preferred. The verb, however, should then be in the third person, not the first as they give it. The imperfect would impart to the thought a slightly different tinge, and make the traveller rather retrace in memory than revisit it in desire. If this reading be accepted, we might, perhaps, venture to present the passage in this form:

Thus he pronounced; and Herê, the white-armed goddess, obeyed him,
Down from the summits of Ida speeding to lofty Olympus,
Darting as darteth the mind of a man who whilom has travelled
Up and down on the earth, in close thought ponders his travels,
Here was he now—now there!—still aiming in many directions.

In the battle which opens in the twentieth book culminates the action of the poem. Achilles now enters the field, and Mr. Gladstone has justly remarked that we seem never to have heard of wars or warriors before. To frame his central figure, Homer summons from Olympus the whole hierarchy of heaven. Amid thunder and earthquake, the gods are seen rallying to either side. No part of the Iliad is pitched in a loftier key. Nowhere is a translator more strongly impelled to put forth all his powers. We quote Mr. Bryant:

“From above with terrible crash
Thundered the father of the blessed gods
And mortal men, while Neptune from below
Shook the great earth and lofty mountain-peaks.
Then watery Ida’s heights and very roots,
The city of Troy, and the Greek galleys, quaked.
Then Pluto, ruler of the nether world,
Leaped from his throne in terror, lest the god
Who makes the earth to tremble, cleaving it
Above him, should lay bare to gods and men
His horrible abodes, the dismal haunts
Which even the gods abhor.”

We ought not, perhaps, to dislike the expansion of πατερ ἀνθρωπων τε θεων τε in the second line, for the epithets added are themselves hardly more than formulas. The next four lines exhibit Mr. Bryant’s best work. Their vigor and elegance are not extraneous, but wrought with patient fingers out of the text itself. “Leaped from his throne in terror” is a melancholy falling off. This indifferent line must stand for three Greek verbs which render with startling accuracy the staccato movement of fear. We give from Voss the three hexameters which depict the panic of Aïdoneus:

“Bang auch erschrack dort unten des Nachtreichs Fürst Aldoneus,
Bebend entsprang er dem Thron, und schrie laut dass ihm von oben
Nicht die Erd’ aufrisse der Landerschüttrer Poseidōn.”

Nachtreich is not quite equal to “nether world,” but really these lines are incomparable. Beside them even the prose of Montbel seems a little wide of the text: “Dans ses retraites souterraines le roi des ombres Pluton frémit; épouvanté il s’élance de son trône, pousse un cri, de peur que le terrible Neptune entr’ouvrant la terre ne montre aux dieux et aux hommes ces demeures terribles en horreur même aux immortels.”

We are unable to speak without contempt of the Morte d’Ettore, but it is right to state that Cesarrotti’s prose translation of this passage is perhaps the closest extant. Monti’s verse will be found less literal:

“Tremonne
Pluto il re de sepolti et spaventato
Die un alto grido, e si gitto del trono
Tremendo non gli squarci la terrena
Volta sul capo il crollator Nettuno
Ed intromessa collaggiù la luce
Agli Dei non discopra ed ai mortali
Le sue squallide bolge, al guardo orrende
Anco del ciel.”

Homer says nothing of intromessa luce. The words are no doubt transferred from Virgil’s paraphrase—

“Trepidentque immisso lumine Manes.”

Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime, had quoted this passage of the Iliad, and Boileau in a translation of that work has reproduced it with considerable care. Boileau had positively condescended to defend Homer, but it is plain that his own theory of translation was that accepted by his age. La Motte has stated it in his ode. He tells Homer that he proposes

“Sous un nouveau langage
Rajeunir ton antique ouvrage,”

and deeming the unconscious energy of his author un peu sauvage engages to régler son ivresse. From Boileau no engagement was required. His Muse was too thoroughly the grande dame ever to forget herself, and even in Pythian convulsions retained a measure of decorum. We shall find his version at once droll and impressive. It is, so to speak, a Greek myth treated by Paul Veronese:

“L’enfer s’émeut au brait de Neptune en furie
Pluton sort de son trône, il pâlit, il s’écrie
Il a peur que ce dieu dans cet affreux séjour
D’un coup de son trident ne fasse entrer le jour
Et par le centre ouvert de la terre ébranlée
Ne fasse voir du Styx la rive désolée
Ne découvre aux vivants cet empire odieux
Abhorré des mortels, et craint même des dieux.”

To us no book of the Iliad is more delightful than the twenty-fourth. There are many scenes in which we would willingly linger not alone for the tender pathos with which the poet has informed them, but also for the light they throw on the social ethics of the later as well as primitive Greek world. The figure of Achilles weeping through the long night the loss of the beloved Patroclus is the immortal type of that devoted friendship which illumines with a peculiar radiance the stream of Hellenic biography. In the incessant warfare of sympathy with selfishness, friendship between man and man seems to have played something of the master rôle which in modern times has been engrossed by the passion of love. Again, Helen in her lament over Hector’s corpse lets fall some bitter words that deserve to be weighed in connection with the peculiar attitude which Menelaus maintains throughout the poem. They would assist us to understand her strangely equivocal position, as well as the conception of the marriage relation which obtained in the Homeric age. We have space, however, but for a single extract. We will choose Priam’s prayer to Achilles. How often and with what careful hand these lines have been reproduced in English is well-known. In French there are no less than ten metrical versions, to say nothing of prose. To poets of every nation this passage has remained a bow of Ulysses which many have been eager to grasp, but none save Voss has hitherto had sinew enough to bend. The circumstances under which the prayer is made are inexpressively affecting. The fate of Troy has at length compelled the combat of Hector and Achilles. From the walls of the city Priam has beheld the fatal issue. The pride and prop of his old age, the bulwark of his kingdom, lies dead and dishonored in the hostile camp. Conducted by Hermes, Priam passes the sentinels, and gains the quarters of his foe. He enters, springs toward Pelides, clasps his knees, and kisses those “slaughter-dealing hands” which had slain so many of his sons. Then Mr. Bryant:

“Think of thy father, an old man like me,
God-like Achilles! on the dreary verge
Of closing life he stands, and even now
Haply is fiercely pressed by those who dwell
Around him, and has none to shield his age
From war and its disasters. Yet his heart
Rejoices when he hears thou yet dost live,
And every day he hopes that his dear son
Will come again from Troy. My lot is hard,
For I was father of the bravest sons
In all wide Troy, and none are left me now!

*****

Oh! revere
The gods, Achilles, and be merciful,
Calling to mind thy father, happier he
Than I; for I have borne what no man else
That dwells on earth could bear—have laid my lips
Upon the hand of him who slew my son.”

Had these lines been pointed at by the legend, we could well understand why Solon should have burned his epic. Let us not stay for criticism, but, with eyes fixed on the Greek, give our ears to Voss!

“Deiners Vaters gedenk! O gottergleicher Achilleus,
Sein des Bejahrten wie ich, an der traurigen Schwelle des Alters,
Und vielleicht dass jenen die umbewohnende Völker
Drängen, und niemand ist ihm Jammer und Weh zu entfernen.
Jener indess so oft er von dir dem lebenden höret
Freut er sich innig im Geist, und hofft von Tage zu Tage
Dass er den trautesten Sohn noch seh’ heimkehren von Troja.
Ich unseliger Mann die tapfersten Söhn’ erzeugt’ ich
Weil im Troegebiet, und nun ist keiner mir übrig!
Scheue die Götter demnach, O Peleid! und erbarme dich meiner
Denkend des eigenen Vaters! Ich bin noch werther des Mitleids:
Duld’ ich doch was sonst kein sterblicher Erdebewohner
Ach die die Kinder getödtet die Hand an die Lippen zu drücken.”

We hold that it lies not in the power of translation to surpass these lines of Voss. They are truly marvels in photography. To every Homeric line corresponds a German hexameter. In every verse the emphatic word stands where Homer placed it. The very pauses are for the most part preserved. The translator has not retrenched a word. He has scarcely added one. He has certainly not added an idea. On the nice propriety of his diction, and his perfect sympathy with the feeling of the Greek, we need not dwell. In these respects Mr. Bryant must be ranked next to him—with an interval, perhaps, but next. His “dreary verge of closing life” skilfully interprets an ambiguous phrase which Voss has chosen to retain. Again, unseliger Mann is somewhat cold, whereas “my lot is hard” has caught, so to speak, the genuine accents of heartbreak. “And every day he hopes that his dear son,” etc. Readers of the Holy Dying will recall the touching picture of a drowned sailor rolled upon his floating bed of waves, while at home his father “weeps with joy to think how happy he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father’s arms.”

Voltaire has somewhere asserted that Homer never drew a tear. Yet even he could not behold this scene unmoved, and himself entered the lists as a translator. His version of this passage embodies the principles which he maintained ought to govern translators of Homer. It forms a curious chapter in the history of taste. Achilles turning discovers Priam, “ce vieillard vénérable,”

“Exhalant à ses pieds ses sanglots et ses cris
Et lui baisant la main qui fit périr son fils;
Il n’osait sur Achille encor jeter la vue,
Il voulait lui parler, et sa voix s’est perdue,
Enfin il le regarde et parmi ses sanglots
Tremblant, pâle, et sans force, il prononce ces mots.
‘Songez, seigneur! songez que vous avez un père—’
Il ne put achever. Le héros sanguinaire
Sentit que la pitié pénétrait dans son cœur,
Priam lui prend les mains, ah prince! ah mon vainqueur?
J’étais père d’Hector, et ses généreux frères
Flattaient mes derniers jours, et les rendait prospères.
Ils ne sont plus.”

These lines are not altogether without merit, but no man, we suppose, who possesses what has been termed a historical conscience will allow them to be poetic. The elements of the scene are there, but they are worked up in accordance with the tricks and traditions of the Comédie Française. To the eye of Voltaire, Priam was simply an antitype of the père noble, and must assume the attitude and demeanor appropriate to that rôle. In short, the verses are conceived in the spirit of his age, and exhibit his best manner. But read them after the Greek, and what fresh point they impart to the familiar words, “In old times men wrote like orators, but now like rhetoricians.”

From Voltaire to Monti is a long stride toward Homer’s Olympus. The Italian has infused much sweetness into this passage. And it is a native, not a grafted, sweetness. Writing in blank-verse, he neither needs nor claims the license of French translators; yet we sometimes miss Mr. Bryant’s terseness and simplicity; as in the initial lines:

“Divino Achille ti rammenta il padre
Il padre tuo da sia vecchiezza oppresso,
Qua io mi sono! In questo punto ei forse
Da potenti vicini assediato
Non ha chi lo socorra e all’ imminente
Periglio il tolga.”

To appreciate this version one needs only to glance at Cesarrotti’s. Priam’s first three words—Μνησαι πατρος σοιο!—comprise the most effective exordium in literature. They are true projectiles shot from soul to soul. Let us see if they are easily recognized in the Morte d’Ettore:

“Ah pieta, grida,
Divino Achille! Il padre tuo t’implora
Per tuo padre, pieta!”

Is it possible to place artist and word-monger in sharper antithesis? The success of his mission—perhaps his life—depends upon the first impression. Conceive royal Priam whining forth “Pity, pity!” like some professional beggar mumbling his worn-out lies. Homer said simply, “Think of thy father, Achilles!” The words, like the stroke of Moses’ rod, split the stubborn heart, and pity gushed forth in tears.

It must be admitted that Mr. Bryant’s lines are not always invested with the impassioned fervor and glowing life which have rescued the works of his English predecessors from oblivion. But it will often be found that where they were most spirited they were least Homeric. It is inevitable that a conscientious workman who resolves to copy his model in the minutest details will produce at times a mosaic rather than a casting—his materials will seem pieced and not fused. But we are sure that the sweetness of Mr. Bryant’s verse will delight the general reader, while scholars will appreciate his self-control. Animation is desirable, but fidelity is indispensable; and they who truly love the Iliad will prefer Homer in marble to Pope and Chapman in the flesh.

Over all translators of the Iliad, we confess that Voss is paramount; but no other version with which we are acquainted will bear a sustained comparison with Mr. Bryant’s. The latter’s obligations to Voss are undoubtedly great; but he has well-nigh cancelled the debt, for the next worker in the field will owe much to him. It may be that translation is not the highest function of genius; yet where it is nobly fulfilled it deserves and commands our gratitude. Nor is this all. It is something more than a figure of speech—the fine figure of Politian’s—by which Homer, assisting in the person of Ganymede at the banquet of the gods, is made to distribute to his best lovers some portion of his own ambrosia.

---

SPAIN: WHAT IT WAS AND WHAT IT IS.

A nation vegetating on old memories; a people for two centuries priest-ridden, just beginning to awaken and show some signs of the enlightenment of the age; a government liable to change every twenty-four hours; an empty treasury shifting from one to another incapable ministry; and, above all, a ridiculous pretension and holding to such an Old World phrase as national honor—such is the ordinary run of opinion on Spain. What is it coming to? What is its destiny? Has it a destiny in these busy, practical days? Or is its life played out long ago, and the nation simply drifting downwards into the yawning gulf of insignificance where many another has been swallowed up?

Have Catholics an interest in the question?

Yesterday, when mention was made of Spain, the enlightened world lifted up its eyes and hands in pious protestation against such an outrage on our nineteenth century of civilization. A superstitious race given to the worshipping of graven images, hoodwinked by the priests, those inveterate enemies of progress; no free-will among them; no understanding; nothing but memory. To-day all is changed. The dawn long delayed of enlightenment has come at last to the unhappy land—has come accompanied by the usual signs. Churches have been rifled, the sanctuary has been desecrated, the Jesuits have been scattered, nuns and monks have been robbed of their homes and driven naked into the world, blood has flowed freely, murder has been done. So, to-day the world smiles, and rubs its hands, and hopes better things for Spain.

That it was a great nation we all acknowledge, and the title is a true one. It was not alone a mighty nation; those buried under the Eastern sands were mighty nations, yet their workings in this world were as barren of fruit as the shifting covering that has hidden them away, without an oasis to redeem their barrenness. China might be called a mighty nation, but it has walled itself in from the world by the most narrow-minded and selfish policy, and we have had to fight our way through good and evil up to our present standard without a helping hand from it. Russia is a mighty nation, and we look anxiously to the development of its vast power, but up to the present its only effect on the world has been that of brute strength. But Spain has been pre-eminently a great nation; that is, a nation that has done much for its own and others’ development, in all that can make peoples sound, intelligent, prosperous, and happy.

Looking back at its history as far as we can look back, we find the same characteristics in the race as we find to-day; above all, that intense, all-absorbing nationality which has kept it unmixed and unconquered. Hannibal courted its alliance; the Roman failed ever to subdue it thoroughly. Great stubborn resistances to the Empress of the World stand out now and then in clear relief from that dim background—awful sieges wonderfully sustained, where the women play an equal part with the men. We shall always find these Spanish women leading the van in the hour of their country’s danger. The victories gained over them resembled the victory of Pyrrhus. The Romans went and the Moors came, and fastened on the heart of the kingdom, populating and flourishing there, sucking out its life. They built their cities and their palaces in the fairest spots in the land. Powerful, warlike, rich, with immense resources, they laughed at the handful of men, kingless, skulking among rocks, and starving for liberty. But that handful will not surrender what is their own while one arm can be raised to defend it. They are true to one another as Spaniards and as Catholics now; for a new element is in them binding them more firmly than the very blood that is common to their veins—religion, the religion of Christ, which they have seized upon with all their passionate nature, never to relinquish. Inch by inch the Moors are driven back over the sea. They were invaded again by a more terrible foe than all—more terrible even than France in her deep distress has lately seen. Bonaparte had drained the country of its armies, had emptied its coffers, and taken away its king, all under the shadow of friendship and alliance. When he held it thus powerless in his hands, he sent in his armies, and impudently set his brother on the throne. Kingless, moneyless, defenceless as they were, the people rose up, the women again leading the van, and the priests inflaming all. Bonaparte was driven out. The priests, for all their hoodwinking, can be good patriots, it seems. The London Times, the mouthpiece of the enlightenment of the age, certainly no great friend to Spaniards and Catholics, contrasted the conduct of France during the late invasion with that of Spain. France, in her sorest straits, was never so hard pushed as Spain when the first Napoleon entered; yet a nation of over 30,000,000 could not rid themselves of half a million. There was no Carthagena, no Saguntum, no Saragossa—no approach to such. And the Times confessed that France failed because she possessed neither the patriotism nor the religious enthusiasm of the Spaniards. Such examples has Spain given to the world of the purest patriotism, the first element of greatness in a nation; of a self-reliance that, when all seems lost, will not look without for aid, but to itself.

She has not ceased her working here. In no department has she been backward. Science owes her much. Literature is enriched by her authors. The inspirations of Murillo are the embodiment of all that our religion can feel in its deepest moments; before his canvas, the Christian prays, the infidel cannot scoff. She has given soldiers of the noblest type; statesmen the most benevolent and enlightened. The Spanish constitution in itself is from days remote admirable for equipoise and justice. In England they are just approaching the Spanish marriage laws. A Spanish merchant will tell you that for the generality of commercial questions he is his own lawyer, so clear and well-defined is the law.

What do we Catholics owe to Spain?

First of all, that high example of unswerving faith and devotion to the Holy See through ages of evil report and good report. The great heart of the nation is not moved by events that will come under our notice after. She has not only given a host of theological writers, but, what is still better, a host of theological actors—notably the Order of St. Dominic and the Society of Jesus, the names of which are enough to recall our debt.

To the Old World she opened up a New. Here Spain had a mission that is rarely given to nations. She failed, though the monarch sent priests to accompany the soldiers, to temper the conquest of the sword by that of the cross. How well the warriors of Christ demeaned themselves, our Bancroft and Prescott tell us.

She failed; but who shall cast the first stone at her? That nation only which has subdued another by Christian love and the weapon of the cross—a phenomenon that has not yet appeared even in these blessed days.

We hear much of the cruelty of these Spanish settlers, of their selfishness, of their greed of gold.

We must make a little allowance for the days in which they lived. Men were untutored then; peace congresses (save the mark!) were unknown; an Alabama case would either have been let alone or settled by the sword long ere it could have grown into a mere talking difficulty; men did not consult lawyers on the nice distinctions of meum and tuum. The Spaniards landed, and held their own by cruelty, oppression, and rapine, no doubt. We, with all our enlightenment, have followed their example pretty faithfully; except that, for men like the saintly Las Casas, we despatched an agent that worked a speedy conversion—fire-water. We have taken root here and grown up, and are a great nation, spreading out in all directions, wealthy, prosperous, enlightened, with civilization at our finger-ends, and Bibles willy-nilly in every one of our schools. Yes, we are a decided improvement on the Spaniards. But a hundred years ago there existed a race in this country to whom the land that we tread upon belonged. Where is that race now? A wretched remnant of it scowling and prowling on our outskirts; we are killing them off. We heard of them the other day joining in the great hunt. The most enterprising and powerful of our journals, one that has fitted out a purely benevolent expedition to Africa, sent its correspondent down to record it all. We had an “idyl of the plains”; the course of our great enlightenment and progress was drawn in fanciful colors, with this correspondent for central figure, riding for miles and miles under the stars to tell us at our breakfasts of the exact position of a soldier throwing an ornament round the neck of a savage maiden, and the evident appreciation the savages exhibited of champagne.

Spain failed in her mission, great and glorious as it was. Have we succeeded better? Has England, in India, or Tasmania, or wherever she set her foot?

Gold brought its own curse. When wealth comes unasked, few men will labor. The “Eldorado” filled the dreams and stopped the life of the Spaniards. One by one her rich possessions dropped from the parent nation, till Cuba was the only one left, and Cuba wishes to go also.

She has become a second-rate power in Europe, if so high—the kingdom “on whose dominions the sun never set.”

And here, with this glance at her past history to call to mind what she was, what she has achieved, the truly great elements that were always in her, we turn to look at her as she is; to consider her present bearing on the church, for we Catholics must always look at all things with a Catholic eye, knowing, as we do, that our religion is the one religion upon which the salvation of this world hangs; that, if the world is to be saved by us, we can never put our faith upon the shelf and enter the world as worldlings. The Spirit of God must permeate and pervade all people, all places, all things, at all times; and when that is accomplished, and not before, then will the world be saved.

Spain groaned under the rule of Isabella, or rather under the rule of her rulers. She was a woman far “more sinned against than sinning.” We are apt too often to blame the victim for the circumstances which make the victim. From her infancy a tool in the hands of unprincipled men; forced to marry a man utterly worthless in every respect; almost without one true friend, without a soul for her woman’s heart to cling to. We accuse her of all the evils created, fostered, encouraged by a host of powerful men, who used her as a chess-piece; while she stood, their game was safe. The revolution more than smouldered; but O’Donnell, at once a statesman and a soldier, kept it down. Narvaez, crafty and bold, succeeded him, and in turn went. These men, particularly the latter, in striking at their own foes, left a bitter legacy of hatred and revenge to the queen. What all foresaw came to pass—the last rising which ousted her. Prim came in; the nation’s destiny was at last in its own hands; now for the millennium.

Prim commenced it—a likely man for such a purpose. A bold, unscrupulous adventurer, whose chief virtue was his reckless bravery; no great talker; not a man who would astonish you by the wisdom of his words, but quick to decide, speedy to execute; a very soldier whose “voice was in his sword”—such was Prim. He found himself adored by the soldiers, glorified by the people. He did not care for the latter: when they wished to tear the crown from his cap on his entry into Malaga, he would not let them; he declared himself in plain words for monarchy from the beginning. He found the cortes split up into parties. Many for Don Carlos, a strong body, who if not crushed would have their king; so Prim resolved to crush them. A few for Montpensier; another few for Don Alfonso, the queen’s son; neither worth bothering about, Prim let them alone. A small compact party of republicans, very ably led; nearly all young, enthusiastic, lawyers many of them, excellent speakers, excellent fighters at a pinch, too. This was a dangerous party, who had been most instrumental in putting Prim where he was. He dared not turn round on them at once, the people were still armed. He coquetted with them. They were young, and many unfledged, eager to try their lungs, fond of the sound of their voices. Spain should be governed only as Spain wished; she should have a model constitution; freedom of the person, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of everything. No more conscriptions, only a few more thousands just to enable the army to quell those troublesome Carlists. He threw them a constitution, a model indeed in its construction, fit for Utopia, but scarcely for the wild spirits then raging in Spain. He let them wrangle over that, and turned himself to the army. He had always been popular with the soldiers; he moved everybody up a grade; by this means he created all the colonels, and the army was his. With this weapon secure in his grasp he could beat them all, and he did. He played them off, one against the other, in the cortes; he knew, split up as they were, the elements too opposed to coalesce, they would never agree about any single thing or any single person; he suggested this and he suggested that; if they would not take his suggestions, that was their fault. One thing was clear, they must support him, or anarchy would ensue. The Carlists left the chamber to fight. Precisely what Prim wanted; he had encouraged it, in fact; the sooner, the better for him, as he could the more easily crush them. He did so, cruelly and mercilessly. In the meantime, he was all honey to the republicans. But at last they began to see that they had been hoodwinked; that there was no hope of a republic from Prim; that the monarchy they hated would come in again, and all their efforts prove fruitless. Prim demanded the arms of the people—the arms which had been distributed to enable him to crush the monarchy. The republicans in their turn left the chamber to fight; and well they fought, too, against the overwhelming forces that Prim sent to quell them; for no half measures would do for Juan Prim. Those men who rose and fought so tenaciously at Cadiz, at Jerez, at Malaga, Valencia, had been well schooled beforehand by the preachers of the age. “You are poor, and your children will be poor after you. The labor of your hands goes to dress the fine ladies of the rich; to fatten lazy priests, who do nothing for a living; to set those brave gentlemen on horseback, who think themselves made of other flesh and blood than yours. We will change all that when the queen is driven out. We will all be equal, and do equal work or no work. Our men are men as theirs are; our women are women also.”

The queen was driven away; the friars, and the Jesuits, and the nuns banished. The government seized upon their houses and what was in them; of course it was not robbery when the government took them. Still the poor were not a penny the richer. These plausible doctrines had seized upon their simple minds. It was something worth fighting for, and they fought. No Paris barricades were ever defended with half the fury and obstinacy displayed by those Andalusians—the mountaineers and villagers whose fathers and grandfathers had harassed, surrounded, and captured a force of 4000 or more, under one of the First Napoleon’s generals. Still, we hear of none of those outrages at which the world sickened lately in Paris. “Aqui nadie se roba caballeros”—“Gentlemen, no one robs here,” was the first cry at Cadiz. A commandant of the forces was struck down in the midst of the revolutionists by a shot. They knew him well, and that he was going to fight against them; yet they were the first men to take him from the street and care for his wounds. There is all that is noble, generous, and faithful in the heart of this people, which it only requires a wise government to draw out.

They were beaten on all sides. They dared not rise in Madrid, for Prim kept his forces there, as a centre, menacing the country. In the midst of all this distraction, we see one flash of the old spirit that, however it might split against itself, was one against a common foe. Cuba saw its chance, and, though many concessions had been made, it would have liberty at once. Prim had quite enough to do at home; his hands were full with Carlists and republicans. We lent our sanction to the Cuban claims, with an after-eye to our own interests; and our minister made some representations that never quite came to light. Prim made no answer to them, at least in words. But, notwithstanding the dearth of money and of men, the strain at home requiring every nerve to sustain it, the old Spanish blood was true to itself. Volunteers sprang up in crowds; and force after force was shipped, is shipped still, to the island, ostensibly to quell a rebellion that never held a position from the first. A nation that can act so in such a moment must have something in it.

Before taking leave of Prim, in turn the hero and the terror of the revolution, much as we deplore that the destinies of such a nation at such a crisis should have fallen into the hands of such a man, we cannot help paying a tribute to his never-flagging energy, dauntless courage, and prompt decision. Men laughed at Prim, at his speeches, and wondered how he ever gained his position. Speaking on the deficiency of the national treasury, and utterly unable to tide over those rocks on which all governments break—figures: “I know we shall be able to meet the deficiency,” said Prim, “But how?” asked the deputies. “I do not know exactly how; but I have a feeling in my breast which convinces me;” the words are from memory, but they convey the substance. Men laughed, but Prim stood his ground; and gradually the question, “What will Spain do?” merged into that of “What will Prim do?” A better man and a wiser statesman, neither very difficult to obtain, would have availed himself of such an opportunity to heal his country’s wounds. Prim could not do this; he did not know how; but he was at least “wise in his generation.” He could not save the sick man; he did the next best thing, he kept him from killing himself. The foolhardiness of the man was his destruction. He had often had warnings, but he knew not what fear was, and took no precautions.

“To have the republic is easy,” said Castelar, the leader of the republicans, after one of his defeats, to Prim. “We have only to kill one man.” “Nothing but a thunderbolt kills me,” retorted Prim, “and of those very few fall.”

The thunderbolt fell and crushed him, but failed to crush what it was aimed at, the monarchy. Amadeus landed just in time to learn that his right-hand man was gone—a fearful venture for a young king and his queen. But he braved it royally; and though the race of Victor Emanuel can never find much favor in our eyes, this son of his, we confess, has borne himself through trying scenes like a king and like a gentleman, nobly supported by his brave and Catholic lady. That he was never elected by the people is clear; that, notwithstanding his personal merit, he is not likely to stay long where he is, is the surmise of all. If a telegram, without the slightest foundation in fact, announced his expulsion to-morrow, not a man in the world would disbelieve it. The people can feel no sympathy with a man who has no sort of title to their ancient crown; who is a perfect stranger to them, and almost to the world; who after the hawking of their throne about Europe, was forced upon them against their will. Besides, the Italians, of all European nations, are despised in Spain. They are considered there as good singers, dancers, cooks, and such like, but not the men for anything manly or great: how much less for the throne of Ferdinand the Catholic! “King Macaroni the First” was the burlesque that greeted Amadeus on his arrival in the capital. With him we will not trouble ourselves further, but with the revolution that gave occasion to the accident of his accession, and which will displace him to-morrow or the next day.

Spain undoubtedly was in a bad state under the régime of Isabella. The question is, Has she bettered herself by driving out the queen? The new order came in with a grand flourish of trumpets. Progress was the watchword: the “Progressistas” were Prim’s party till he broke them up. We have touched already on the blood shed in civil strife for this party and for that, but there are other things to consider. Education is the word of the day; let us see what the revolution effected in this direction.

The Jesuits under great difficulties were organizing colleges and missions; they were straining every nerve to educate and improve the people, and were just beginning to make some headway when the revolution came; and of course the first “abuse” to be abolished was the Order of Jesus—that order that flourishes even in Protestant countries like England, where the government, under such a chancellor as Mr. Lowe, grants them a pension for their observatory at Stonyhurst. They had to fly the country; their establishments were all broken up and seized upon by the government. A case in point:

At Port St. Mary’s, between Cadiz and Jerez, the gentlemen of the town, seeing the good effected by the Jesuits in their missions, and feeling it in the improved conduct of the men they employed, as more than one of them assured the writer, united and raised funds sufficient to build a magnificent college which they presented to the society. The government, then of Isabella, had nothing to do with it. When the revolution broke out, there were three hundred students there, many of them from the first families of Spain. In addition to these, forty of the poor children of the district were admitted to the course of studies free. The Jesuits were banished, and escaped with their lives, thanks to the courage of a noble-hearted gentleman of the town and his sons, who at the risk of their own lives and property gave them shelter till Topete himself went and conducted them to the sea. The college was closed and seized by the government. The gentlemen who built it demanded the building to be used at least for educational purposes, no matter under whom. To all their remonstrances a deaf ear was turned; and the college stands tenantless to this day. Those who had the means sent their children out of the country to England, France, or elsewhere. Many could not, and for them there was no remedy. Their children must do without education while the work of enlightenment goes on.

They drove out the friars and the nuns destitute into the world; seized upon their property, and possessed themselves of their treasures, the vessels of the sanctuary, vestments, paintings, gifts given in expiation of sins or propitiation of heaven by men and women long ago resting in their graves. Not a year back the writer, then in London, saw an announcement in the Times of the accession of some rare Spanish jewelry to the curiosities of the very interesting Museum at Kensington. He went, and found the ornaments that had decked the images and altars of the Virgen del Pilar at Saragossa, neatly arranged in two large cases, each ornament ticketed off as in a Jew’s shop, with the estimated value underneath in sums varying from over a hundred, sometimes over two or three hundred, pounds downwards. This sacrilegious robbery was repeated throughout the country—a dangerous example to the poor, whom they had indoctrinated with the pernicious ideas so prevalent in these times, the climax of which we saw the other day in Paris.

There was to be no state religion, and the clergy no longer to be salaried by the government. We must observe how all these movements strike at the church first; as is right they should do, for, that power destroyed, there is an end to morality, and the rest is easy. After a fierce and prolonged debate, in which the republicans came out in their true colors, and gave utterance, not the greater number happily, to open-mouthed blasphemy not simply against the church, but against the God whom Protestant and Catholic adore in common, the motion was not carried. The Catholic Church continues the church of the state, as it is the church of the whole nation.

“There are three things I hate intensely (que me odian): God, the monarchy, and phthisis,” said an alcalde in the north. It is a comfort to know that the wretch who said this craved a priest on his dying bed when attacked by the last object of his hatred, and God, ever merciful, allowed him one.

Emilio Castelar, the prime mover in the motion, spoke differently. He is the leader of the republicans: young, gifted beyond measure in all that can give a man influence among his fellows, a marvellous orator, whom the whole cortes, from the prelate to the red-hot republican, listens to spell-bound when he speaks. His attacks on Prim were terrible, unceasing, unsparing; he lashed the cortes into foam; but Prim, conscious of his power, had a dry, sarcastic manner of meeting them that took a good deal of the eloquent edge off. On the religious question Castelar said, “For my own part, if I chose any religion, it would be the Catholic, in which I was born and in which my mother died. A Protestant I could never be: it is too frigid for me.”

Liberty of the press, in these days the bulwark of our rights, liberty of public discussion, were proclaimed. The press was free to attack everything and every institution we consider holy. The republican papers poured forth floods of blasphemy unchecked. The Carlist, the Catholic organs alone were suppressed. Villaslada, the editor of the Pensamiento Español, the leading Carlist and Catholic newspaper, which bears the Holy Father’s blessing on its page, was forced to fly the country, and his papers seized. He has since returned, and has now a seat in the cortes. His offence was attacking the government and advocating the cause of Don Carlos at a time when Prim professed to await the expression of the will of the people to declare the king. So much for free discussion.

It would be tedious as well as profitless to take every item in the catalogue of a nation, and contrast them now with what they were before the overthrow of the Bourbon line. Certain it is that, bad as things were in Spain under Isabella, they are worse at present. Her commerce has deteriorated wofully. “We know not what to expect in Spain at any moment. The men we employ have been so preached to by the apostles of the revolution that they are ready to turn on us we know not when. We dare not keep a large stock on hand. We are trying to sell things off even at a sacrifice, we get our money safe banked in England, and, if the revolution and ruin come, well, at least we shall have some provision for our wives and children.” That is how any merchant will speak to-day on Spanish affairs.

“The shortest road to peace is through the revolution,” said Villaslada, and that is the opinion of all the thoughtful men the writer has met. They look upon a revolution as inevitable, the passions of the people have been so tampered with. It is hoped for that the people may sicken of their illusions; that the fury may waste itself; that the blood-letting which must follow may allay the fever, may open their eyes to the Utopia which their frenzy pictures.

It is a sad state for such a nation. It makes us anxious about the question we asked at the beginning, What is its destiny? Its debt is increasing as its credit declines. And yet the nation might be a great nation still.

Its foreign possessions it can do without. To get rid of Cuba would really be a relief. The advantages which the island affords for commerce by no means compensate for the continual anxiety it causes—the support of an army and a fleet. Spain is self-sufficient. With an area similar to that of France, her population is only one-third as large. The country if worked could produce corn enough to feed more than half Europe. Magnificent forests of chestnut and mahogany, soft groves of orange and olive trees, clothe and beautify the soil. Splendid rivers roll through the land, while bays and safe harbors indent the coast. In a little district perhaps not more than ten miles square grows the wine that supplies the whole world with sherry. Spanish wool holds its own in the mart. The people are intelligent, peaceful, and moral by nature. In no country can an inferior talk to a superior as freely without passing beyond the bounds as in Spain. Beautiful, historic cities are scattered through the land. Treasures of art are in their churches and galleries, refining the feelings and quickening the intellect. Their language is music; their climate delicious; their soil fruitful; land and living cheap. Their fleet is a formidable one; the Biscayan mariners for boldness and skill are unsurpassed, tossed as they are from infancy in the cradle of their bay, where the wide-spreading Atlantic is for ever wroth that it can go no further. The bravery and discipline of their army is within our recollection. That the energy of the race has not died out is proved by the war in Morocco, the speedy quelling of the revolution, the readiness of the nation to engage in war with such a power as ourselves, where the final issue could not be for a moment doubtful; but that much derided phrase “national honor” kept them true to themselves and their traditions, and we were wise enough not to provoke a contest with a people ready to sell their lives so dear. Yet with all these advantages, their course to-day is a downward one, and will continue so until one of two governments comes—either a man like the First Napoleon or a Bismarck, who to the iron will of Prim shall add a genius which the latter neither possessed nor pretended to possess; strong enough to grind down if necessary, but great enough to lift up. To such a man both Spain and France to-day present fields ripe with opportunity.

Or, for Spain at least, where there is still great faith and reverence for what is great and true, where happily materialism has not yet seized upon the hearts and the intellect of the people, a government that, instead of striking at the church which still is the church of the nation, and sapping the roots of Catholic, that is, of all morality, should call that church to its aid, and say to the people, “Your God shall be my God”—such a government would have from the start the greatest ally it could hope for in a religious people. Let it tell the people boldly that it shall have liberty, but not license, that it shall march with the age, that its great possessions are gone, never to return; but that at home it has resources that cannot fail, which only require the working to make them produce a hundredfold; a government which shall educate the children in religion, and from their infancy pour into their souls lessons of truth. Such a government might regenerate Spain. Such is partly the programme of Don Carlos. But he is the disciple of another school. Could he unlearn a little the doctrines of his school, Don Carlos holds the best chance to-day not only of occupying the throne, but of occupying the hearts and hopes of the nation.

And here we close with a remark on the failure of revolutions to work their purpose.

“The driving out of one unclean spirit to make room for seven more unclean,” is the history of all movements that have ever upset a throne which tradition has set in the intellect of the people, which custom has rooted in the soil, which has literally “grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength,” and even declined with their decline or caused it, which is of them. It is a strange fact, but history bears it out. As we have shown, the Spaniards drove out their queen, and for a moment held their destiny in their own hands. The French drove out the Emperor, and held their destiny in their hands. Is either country the better for their action? In great contrast to these stands out Germany, before the war composed of a number of independent or semi-independent peoples. They united and placed themselves under the yoke, and present to the world a combination so great, so powerful, so irresistible by any single state save Russia or our own, that the world was convulsed by it, and the face of Europe changed in a day. Whether it will last or not is foreign to our present purpose. Men should “count the costs” before they overturn any government. It is a hard thing to change a nation. Even though you present something better, you must combat rooted prejudice, immemorial tradition, every spontaneous feeling that rises, before your idea can hold the popular mind. Look at the slow spread of Christianity. People would not give up their gods of wood and stone. Our Lord cast out devils before their eyes. “It is by Beelzebub you cast them out,” they cried. But the agents of revolution generally begin on the other side. They cast in devils. They uproot everything that is stable; they undermine morality; they teach men to scoff at everything; to obey no law. Man is free, and this world is his to do as he likes with. Who says no? The priest? The priest and the monarchy go hand-in-hand to bind free-born nations down in superstition and slavery. So they work, and, when their harvest is ripe, they reap their reward. They hack at everything right and left. But demons are powerful only to destroy, and they have raised those that they cannot lay, save by blood and iron, as Prim did, as Trochu and the rest were compelled to do. “And the last state of these nations is worse than the first.”

We were saved from a like fate because the monarchy was never known here; our constitution was not a new one, it was in the intelligence of the people from the first, and its exponent was George Washington.

People with their own destiny thrust upon them can do nothing with it. Men have brooded for years under evil government, and when that falls a thousand quacks are ready, each with his panacea for the cure of the nation’s woes, and one is as likely as another. As for the nation at large, it wants to be governed. It cannot sit down and think, the matter out, rejecting this and choosing that. The first that is ready, if it happens to be good, good; if not, so much the worse. They have already knocked one government on the head; why should they stop at a second, or a third, or any number? And so step in cruelty and oppression on the one side, lawlessness in every form on the other. It is better to cure than to kill; better to reform than to overthrow; and if we must overthrow, let us do it like men and not like fiends. If the joint is rotten ere you displace it, see that you can replace it. The monarch is the key-stone of the constitution in lands where monarchy prevails. Remove that, and the whole fabric is shattered. You must build anew. You may build better; at all events, time is lost; most likely you will build worse; strengthen, reform the old—beware how you destroy it.

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OFFICIAL CHARITY.
FROM REVUE DU MONDE CATHOLIQUE.

In these times, all is laical—that is to say, in accordance with modern language, everything is bound to bear the stamp of the state. No contract is possible without the intervention of the state; no marriage exists without the ratification of the state; no school can be opened without the sanction of the state. In short, the state puts its iron clasp on all that man possesses, even his personal liberty and right. Henceforth, then, in the name of those immortal principles which consecrated the absolute and illimitable liberty of the human family, are abolished the most sacred rights of man—liberty in the bosom of the family and individual rights. In the name of liberty, the state confiscates all; it proclaims itself, without ceremony, the original author of all its laws. It is the god-state.

It is astonishing that, following a parallel exaggeration, the state has come to proclaim itself alone capable of exercising charity, as it is alone capable of teaching it! Logic ought to forcibly bring about this result. The state which adjudicates to itself the monopoly of direction, can it not also adjudge to itself the monopoly of the charity?

Yes, charity has become a monopoly of the state. What is it, then, other than official charity? Give alms if so be, but do not forget to pass them through the hands of the state. It is it alone that can distribute your generous gifts. Found hospitals if you will, but on the express condition that you are to abandon them to the hands of the state, who will administer them as masters. Such is in substance the idea of official charity, centralizing in the hands of the state, and administering through its functionaries, the benefits and alms given in a spirit of self-sacrifice.

Very well! The church has never exercised a similar tyranny. She has crushed the heathenish proposition of the Syllabus, “39. The state, from being the source of all good, enjoys a right which is not circumscribed by any limits,” and, always free from the errors which she points out, the church has never imposed any act that even appeared as a simple pretext to accuse her of inconsistency. Though divinely commissioned to guide men, enlighten and direct their intelligence, their will, and all their steps, the church has never believed it her right to say to her faithful: “Put your alms into my hands; I alone know how to properly distribute them.” No! assiduous in stimulating charity, active in giving it birth, the church contents herself with encouraging the sacrifices that holy love inspires, and to show herself happy in having children who evince in so tender a manner the sentiment of Christian brotherhood. An exquisite sense reveals to her that charity delights in secret and mystery; a marvellous delicacy teaches her that the poor and the unfortunate neither consent to pour out their griefs indiscriminately, nor to have their wants relieved by every hand.

Thus, in reference to works of charity, the supremacy of the church consists in helping to accomplish that which the spontaneous piety of her faithful confides to her, and to exercise an exact surveillance over the faithful accomplishment of the charitable dispositions shown by her children who are numbered among the dead. Inviting, encouraging, thanking, and supervising—such is the rôle of the church. If she welcomes with gratitude the faithful who select their pastors to dispense their bounty or for a go-between in their good works, she does not impose it upon them as a duty to confide alms to the care of bishops or of priests. And all doctrine tending to create a similar obligation is rejected by canon law as tainted with an odious exaggeration. Now, then, we have a right to reject the pretensions of the state over charity. Under what title does it place itself between the man who gives the alms and he who receives it? Is the sanctuary of charity less sacred than the domestic hearth? And if the home is inviolable, should not the secrets of charity be equally so?

We protest against official charity with all the energy of indignation. We proclaim it as an injury alike to the rich who give and to the poor who receive. The demonstration does not appear difficult.

Nevertheless, before undertaking it, we hope to interest our reader in placing before his eyes the sentiments of a judge whose views modern politicians do not ordinarily challenge. Portalis, every one knows, elevated the rights and prerogatives of the state high enough. “The state is nothing if it is not all,” said he, one day, before the legislative body. Here is certainly a witness unsuspected of partiality for the theory we are about to defend. Listen, then, to what he said himself to the proposition of official charity.