The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873

by Various

The Progressionists.

From The German Of Conrad Von Bolanden.

Chapter V.

Gerlach whispered something to the banker. Holt pressed his pocket-handkerchief to the wound.

“Please yourself!” said the banker loudly in a business tone. Seraphin again approached the beaten man.

“Will you please, my good man, to accompany us?”

“What for, sir?”

“Because I would like to do something towards healing up your wound; I mean the wound in there.”

Holt stood motionless before the stranger and looked at him.

“I thank you, sir; there is no remedy for me; I am doomed!”

“Still, I will assist you. Follow me.”

“Who are you, sir, if I may ask the question?”

“I am a man whom Providence seems to have chosen to rescue the prey from the jaws of a usurer. Come along with us, and fear nothing.”

“Very well, I will go in the name of God! I do not precisely know your object, and you are a stranger to me. But your countenance looks innocent and kind, therefore I will go with you.”

They passed through alleys and streets.

“Do you often visit that tavern?” inquired Seraphin.

“Not six times in a year,” answered Holt. “Sometimes of a Sunday I drink half a glass of wine, that's all. I am poor, and have to be saving. I would not have gone to the tavern to-day but that I wanted to get rid of my feelings of misery.”

“I overheard your story,” rejoined Seraphin. “Shund's treatment of you was inhuman. He behaved towards you like a trickish devil.”

“That he did! And I am ruined together with my family,” replied the poor man dejectedly.

“Take my advice, and never abuse Shund. You know how respectable he has suddenly got to be, how many influential friends he has. You can easily perceive that one cannot say anything unfavorable of such a man without great risk, no matter were it true ten times over.”

“I am not given to disputing,” replied Holt. “But it stirred the bile within me to hear him extolled, and it broke out. Oh! I have learned to suffer in silence. I haven't time to think of other matters. After God, my business and my family were my only care. I attended to my occupation faithfully and quietly as long as I had any to attend to, but now I haven't any to take care of. O God! it is hard. It will bring me to the grave.”

“You are a land cultivator?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shund intends to have you sold out?”

“Yes; immediately after the election he intends to complete my ruin.”

“How much money would you need in order with industry to get along?”

“A great deal of money, a great deal—at least a thousand florins. I have given him a mortgage for a thousand florins on my house and [pg 041] what was left to me. A thousand florins would suffice to help me out of trouble. I might save my little cottage, my two cows, and a field. I might then plough and sow for other people. I could get along and subsist honestly. But as I told you, nothing less than a thousand florins would do; and where am I to get so much money? You see there is no hope for me, no help for me. I am doomed!”

“The mortgaged property is considerable,” said Gerlach. “A house, even though a small one, moreover, a field, a barn, a garden, all these together are surely worth a much higher price. Could you not borrow a thousand florins on it and pay off the usurer?”

“No, sir. Nobody would be willing to lend me that amount of money upon property mortgaged to a man like Shund. Besides, my little property is out of town, and who wants to go there? I, for my part, of course, like no spot as much, for it is the house my father built, and I was born and brought up there.”

The man lapsed into silence, and walked at Seraphin's side like one weighed down by a heavy load. The delicate sympathy of the young man enabled him to guess what was passing in the breast of the man under the load. He knew that Holt was recalling his childhood passed under the paternal roof; that little spot of home was hallowed for him by events connected with his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, or with other objects more trifling, which, however, remained fresh and bright in memory, like balmy days of spring.

From this consecrated spot he was to be exiled, driven out with wife and children, through the inhumanity and despicable cunning of an usurer. The man heaved a deep sigh, and Gerlach, watching him sidewise, noticed his lips were compressed, and that large tears rolled down his weather-browned cheeks. The tender heart of the young man was deeply affected at this sight, and the millionaire for once rejoiced in the consciousness of possessing the might of money.

They halted before the Palais Greifmann. Holt noticed with surprise how the man in blouse drew from his waistcoat pocket a small instrument resembling a toothpick, and with it opened a door near the carriage gate. Had not every shadow of suspicion been driven from Holt's mind by Seraphin's appearance, he would surely have believed that he had fallen into the company of burglars, who entrapped him to aid in breaking into this palace.

Reluctantly, after repeated encouragement from Gerlach, he crossed the threshold of the stately mansion. He had not quite passed the door when he took off his cap, stared at the costly furniture of the hall through which they were passing, and was reminded of St. Peter's thought as the angel was rescuing him from the clutches of Herod. Holt imagined he saw a vision. The man who had unlocked the door disappeared. Seraphin entered an apartment followed by Shund's victim.

“Do you know where you are?” inquired the millionaire.

“Yes, sir, in the house of Mr. Greifmann the banker.”

“And you are somewhat surprised, are you not?”

“I am so much astonished, sir, that I have several times pinched my arms and legs, for it all seems to me like a dream.”

Seraphin smiled and laid aside his cap. Holt scanned the noble features of the young man more minutely, his handsome face, his stately [pg 042] bearing, and concluded the man in the blouse must be some distinguished gentleman.

“Take courage,” said the noble-looking young man in a kindly tone. “You shall be assisted. I am convinced that you are an honest, industrious man, brought to the verge of ruin through no fault of your own. Nor do I blame you for inadvertently falling into the nets of the usurer, for I believe your honest nature never suspected that there could exist so fiendish a monster as the one that lives in the soul of an usurer.”

“You may rely upon it, sir. If I had had the slightest suspicion of such a thing, Shund never would have got me into his clutches.”

“I am convinced of it. You are partially the victim of your own good nature, and partially the prey of the wild beast Shund. Now listen to me: Suppose somebody were to give you a thousand florins, and to say: ‘Holt, take this money, 'tis yours. Be industrious, get along, be a prudent housekeeper, serve God to the end of your days, and in future beware of usurers’—suppose somebody were to address you in this way, what would you do?”

“Supposing the case, sir, although it is not possible, but supposing the case, what would I do? I would do precisely what that person would have told me, and a great deal more. I would work day and night. Every day, at evening prayer, I would get on my knees with my wife and children, and invoke God's protection on that person. I would do that, sir; but, as I said, the case is impossible.”

“Nevertheless, suppose it did happen,” explained Seraphin in a preliminary way. “Give me your hand that you will fulfil the promise you have just given.”

For a moment Seraphin's hand lay in a callous, iron palm, which pressed his soft fingers in an uncomfortable but well-meant grasp.

“Well, now follow me,” said Gerlach.

He led the way; Holt followed with an unsteady step like a drunken man. They presented themselves before the banker's counter. The latter was standing behind the trellis of his desk, and on a table lay ten rolls of money.

“You have just now by word and hand confirmed a promise,” said Gerlach, turning to the countryman, “which cannot be appreciated in money, for that promise comprises almost all the duties of the father of a family. But to make the fulfilment of the promise possible, a thousand florins are needed. Here lies the money. Accept it from me as a gift, and be happy.”

Holt did not stir. He looked from the money at Gerlach, was motionless and rigid, until, at last, the paralyzing surprise began to resolve itself into a spasmodic quivering of the lips, and then into a mighty flood of tears. Seizing Seraphin's hands, he kissed them with an emotion that convulsed his whole being.

“That will do now,” said the millionaire, “take the money, and go home.”

“My God! I cannot find utterance,” said Holt, stammering forth the words with difficulty. “Good heaven! is it possible? Is it true? I am still thinking 'tis only a dream.”

“Downright reality, my man!” said the banker. “Stop crying; save your tears for a more fitting occasion. Put the rolls in your pocket, and go home.”

Greifmann's coldness was effective in sobering down the man intoxicated with joy.

“May I ask, sir, what your name [pg 043] is, that I may at least know to whom I owe my rescue?”

“Seraphin is my name.”

“Your name sounds like an angel's, and you are an angel to me. I am not acquainted with you, but God knows you, and he will requite you according to your deeds.”

Gerlach nodded gravely. The banker was impatient and murmured discontentedly. Holt carefully pocketed the rolls of money, made an inclination of gratitude to Gerlach, and went out. He passed slowly through the hall. The porter opened the door. Holt stood still before him.

“I ask your pardon, but do you know Mr. Seraphin?” asked he.

“Why shouldn't I know a gentleman that has been our guest for the last two weeks?”

“You must pardon my presumption, Mr. Porter. Will Mr. Seraphin remain here much longer?”

“He will remain another week for certain.”

“I am very much obliged to you,” said Holt, passing into the street and hurrying away.

“Your intended has a queer way of applying his money,” said the banker to his sister the next morning. And he reported to her the story of Seraphin's munificence. “I do not exactly like this sort of kindness, for it oversteps all bounds, and undoubtedly results from religious enthusiasm.”

“That, too, can be cured,” replied Louise confidently. “I will make him understand that eternity restores nothing, that consequently it is safer and more prudent to exact interest from the present.”

“'Tis true, the situation of that fellow Holt was a pitiable one, and Hans Shund's treatment of him was a masterpiece of speculation. He had stripped the fellow completely. The stupid Holt had for years been laboring for the cunning Shund, who continued drawing his meshes more and more tightly about him. Like a huge spider, he leisurely sucked out the life of the fly he had entrapped.”

“Your hostler says there was light in Seraphin's room long after midnight. I wonder what hindered him from sleeping?”

“That is not hard to divine. In all probability he was composing a sentimental ditty to his much adored,” answered Carl teasingly. “Midnight is said to be a propitious time for occupations of that sort.”

“Do be quiet, you tease! But I too was thinking that he must have been engaged in writing. May be he was making a memorandum of yesterday's experience in his journal.”

“May be he was. At all events, the impressions made on him were very strong.”

“But I do not like your venture; it may turn out disastrous.”

“How can it, my most learned sister?”

“You know Seraphin's position,” explained she. “He has been reared in the rigor of sectarian credulity. The spirit of modern civilization being thus abruptly placed before his one-sided judgment without previous preparation may alarm, nay, may even disgust him. And when once he will have perceived that the brother is a partisan of the horrible monster, is it probable that he will feel favorably disposed towards the sister whose views harmonize with those of her brother?”

“I have done nothing to justify him in setting me down for a partisan. I maintain strict neutrality. My purpose is to accustom the weakling to the atmosphere of enlightenment which is fatal to all religious phantasms. Have no fear of [pg 044] his growing cold towards you,” proceeded he in his customary tone of irony. “Your ever victorious power holds him spell-bound in the magic circle of your enchantment. Besides, Louise,” continued he, frowning, “I do not think I could tolerate a brother-in-law steeped over head and ears in prejudices. You yourself might find it highly uncomfortable to live with a husband of this kind.”

“Uncomfortable! No, I would not. I would find it exciting, for it would become my task to train and cultivate an abnormal specimen of the male gender.”

“Very praiseworthy, sister! And if I now endeavor by means of living illustrations to familiarize your intended with the nature of modern intellectual enlightenment, I am merely preparing the way for your future labors.”

Chapter VI. Masters and Slaves.

Under the much despised discipline of religious requirements, the child Seraphin had grown up to boyhood spotless in morals, and then had developed himself into a young man of great firmness of character, whose faith was as unshaken as the correctness of his behavior was constant.

The bloom of his cheeks, the innocent brightness of his eye, the suavity of his disposition, were the natural results of the training which his heart had received. No foul passion had ever disturbed the serenity of his soul. When under the smiling sky of a spring morning he took his ride over the extensive possessions of his father, his interior accorded perfectly with the peace and loveliness of the sights and sounds of blooming nature around him. On earth, however, no spring, be it ever so beautiful, is entirely safe from storms. Evil spirits lie in waiting in the air, dark powers threaten destruction to all blossoms and all incipient life. And the more inevitable is the dread might of those lurking spirits, that in every blossom of living plant lies concealed a germ of ruin, sleeps a treacherous passion—even in the heart of the innocent Seraphin.

The strategic arts of the beautiful young lady received no small degree of additional power from the genuine effort made by her to please the stately double millionaire. In a short time she was to such an extent successful that one day Carl rallied her in the following humorous strain: “Your intended is sitting in the arbor singing a most dismal song! You will have to allow him a little more line, Louise, else you run the risk of unsettling his brain. Moreover, I cannot be expected to instruct a man in the mysteries of progress, if he sees, feels, and thinks nothing but Louise.”

The banker had not uttered an exaggeration. It sometimes happens that a first love bursts forth with an impetuosity so uncontrollable, that, for a time, every other domain of the intellectual and moral nature of a young man is, as it were, submerged under a mighty flood. This temporary inundation of passion cannot, of course, maintain its high tide in presence of calm experience, and the sunshine of more ripened knowledge soon dries up its waters. But Seraphin possessed only the scanty experience of a young man, and his knowledge of the world was also [pg 045] very limited. Hence, in his case, the stream rose alarmingly high, but it did not reach an overflow, for the hand of a pious mother had thrown up in the heart of the child a living dike strong enough to resist the greatest violence of the swell. The height and solidity of the dike increased with the growth of the child; it was a bulwark of defence for the man, who stood secure against humiliating defeats behind the adamantine wall of religious principles—yet only so long as he sought protection behind this bulwark. Faith uttered a serious warning against an unconditional surrender of himself to the object of his attachment. For he could not put to rest some misgivings raised in his mind by the strange and, to him, inexplicable attitude which Louise assumed upon the highest questions of human existence. The uninitiated youth had no suspicion of the existence of that most disgusting product of modern enlightenment, the emancipated female. Had he discovered in Louise the emancipated woman in all the ugliness of her real nature, he would have conceived unutterable loathing for such a monstrosity. And yet he could not but feel that between himself and Louise there yawned an abyss, there existed an essential repulsion, which, at times, gave rise within him to considerable uneasiness.

To obtain a solution of the enigma of this antipathy, the young gentleman concluded to trust entirely to the results of his observations, which, however, were far from being definitive; for his reason was imposed upon by his feelings, and, from day to day, the charms of the beautiful woman were steadily progressing in throwing a seductive spell over his judgment.

The banker's daughter possessed a high degree of culture; she was a perfect mistress of the tactics employed on the field of coquetry; her tact was exquisite; and she understood thoroughly how to take advantage of a kindly disposition and of the tenderness inspired by passion. How was the eye of Seraphin, strengthened neither by knowledge nor by experience, to detect the true worth of what lay hidden beneath this fascinating delusion?

Here again his religious training came to the rescue of the inexperienced youth, by furnishing him with standards safe and unfalsified, by which to weigh and come to a conclusion.

Louise's indifference to practices of piety annoyed him. She never attended divine service, not even on Sundays. He never saw her with a prayer-book, nor was a single picture illustrative of a moral subject to be found hung up in her apartment. Her conversation, at all times, ran upon commonplaces of everyday concern, such as the toilet, theatre, society. He noticed that whenever he ventured to launch matter of a more serious import upon the current of conversation, it immediately became constrained and soon ceased to flow. Louise appeared to his heart at the same time so fascinating and yet so peculiar, so seductive and yet so repulsive, that the contradictions of her being caused him to feel quite unhappy.

He was again sitting in his room thinking about her. In the interview he had just had with her, the young lady had exerted such admirable powers of womanly charms that the poor young man had had a great deal of trouble to maintain his self-possession. Her ringing, mischievous laugh was still sounding in his ears, and the brightness of her sparkling eyes was still lighting up his memory. [pg 046] And the unsuspecting youth had no Solomon at his side to repeat to him: “My son, can a man hide fire in his bosom, and his garments not burn? Or can he walk upon hot coals, and his feet not be burnt?... She entangleth him with many words, and she draweth him away with the flattery of her lips. Immediately he followeth her as an ox led to be a victim, and as a lamb playing the wanton, and not knowing that he is drawn like a fool to bonds, till the arrow pierce his liver. As if a bird should make haste to the snare, and knoweth not that his life is in danger. Now, therefore, my son, hear me, and attend to the words of my mouth. Let not thy mind be drawn away in her ways: neither be thou deceived with her paths. For she hath cast down many wounded, and the strongest have been slain by her. Her house is the way to hell, reaching even to the inner chambers of death.”[3]

For Seraphin, however, no Solomon was at hand who might give him counsel. Sustained by his virtue and by his faith alone, he struggled against the temptress, not precisely of the kind referred to by Solomon, but still a dangerous one from the ranks of progress.

Greifmann had notified him that the general assembly election was to be held that day, that Mayor Hans Shund would certainly be returned as a delegate, and that he intended to call for Gerlach, and go out to watch the progress of the election.

Seraphin felt rather indifferent respecting the election; but he would have considered himself under weighty obligation to the brother for an explanation of the peculiar behavior of the sister at which he was so greatly perplexed.

Carl himself he had for a while regarded as an enigma. Now, however, he believed that he had reached a correct conclusion concerning the brother. It appeared to him that the principal characteristic of Carl's disposition was to treat every subject, except what strictly pertained to business, in a spirit of levity. To the faults of others Carl was always ready to accord a praiseworthy degree of indulgence, he never uttered harsh words in a tone of bitterness, and when he pronounced censure, his reproof was invariably clothed in some form of pleasantry. In general, he behaved like a man not having time to occupy himself seriously with any subject that did not lie within the particular sphere of his occupation. Even their wager he managed like a matter of business, although the landowner could not but take umbrage at the banker's ready and natural way of dealing with men whose want of principle he himself abominated. Greifmann seemed good-natured, minute, and cautious in business, and in all other things exceedingly liberal and full of levity. Such was the judgment arrived at by Seraphin, inexperienced and little inclined to fault-finding as he was, respecting a gentleman who stood at the summit of modern culture, who had skill in elegantly cloaking great faults and foibles, and whose sole religion consisted in the accumulation of papers and coins of arbitrary value.

Gerlach's servant entered, and disturbed his meditation.

“There is a man here with a family who begs hard to be allowed to speak with you.”

“A man with a family!” repeated the millionaire, astonished. “I know nobody round here, and have no desire to form acquaintances.”

“The man will not be denied. He [pg 047] says his name is Holt, and that he has something to say to you.”

“Ah, yes!” exclaimed Seraphin, with a smile that revealed a pleasant surprise. “Send the man and those who are with him in to me.”

Closing a diary, in which he was recording circumstantially the experiences of his present visit, he awaited the visitors. A loud knock from a weighty fist reminded him of a pair of callous hands, then Holt, followed by his wife and children, presented himself before his benefactor. They all made a small courtesy, even the flaxen-headed little children, and the bright, healthy babe in the arms of the mother met his gaze with the smile of an angel. The dark spirits that were hovering around him, torturing and tempting, instantly vanished, and he became serene and unconstrained whilst conversing with these simple people.

“You must excuse us, Mr. Seraphin,” began Holt. “This is my wife, and these are seven of my children. There is one more; her name is Mechtild. She had to stay at home and mind the house. She will pay you an extra visit, and present her thanks. We have called that you might become acquainted with the family whom you have rescued, and that we might thank you with all our hearts.”

After this speech, the father gave a signal, whereupon the little ones gathered around the amiable young man, made their courtesies, and kissed his hands.

“May God bless you, Mr. Seraphin!” first spoke a half-grown girl.

“We greet you, dear Seraphin!” said another, five years old.

“We pray for you every day, Mr. Seraphin,” said the next in succession.

“We are thankful to you from our hearts, Mr. Seraphin,” spoke a small lad, in a tone of deep earnestness.

And thus did every child deliver its little address. It was touching to witness the noble dignity of the children, which may, at times, be found beautifully investing their innocence. Gerlach was moved. He looked down upon the little ones around him with an expression of affectionate thankfulness. Holt's lips also quivered, and bright tears of happiness streamed from the eyes of the mother.

“I am obliged to you, my little friends, for your greetings and for your prayers,” spoke the millionaire. “You are well brought up. Continue always to be good children, such as you now are; have the fear of God, and honor your parents.”

“Mr. Seraphin,” said Holt, drawing a paper from his pocket, “here is the note that I have redeemed with the money you gave me. I wanted to show it to you, so that you might know for certain that the money had been applied to the proper purpose.”

Gerlach affected to take an interest in the paper, and read over the receipt.

“But there is one thing, Mr. Seraphin,” continued Holt, “that grieves me. And that is, that there is not anything better than mere words with which I can testify my gratitude to you. I would like ever so much to do something for you—to do something for you worth speaking of. Do you know, Mr. Seraphin, I would be willing to shed the last drop of my blood for you?”

“Never mind that, Holt! It is ample recompense for me to know that I have helped a worthy man out of trouble. You can now, Mrs. Holt, set to work with renewed courage. But,” added he archly, “you will have to watch your husband that he may not again fall into the clutches of beasts of prey like Shund.”

“He has had to pay dearly for his experience, Mr. Seraphin. I used often to say to him: ‘Michael, don't trust Shund. Shund talks too much, he is too sweet altogether, he has some wicked design upon us—don't trust him.’ But, you see, Mr. Seraphin, my husband thinks that all people are as upright as he is himself, and he believed that Shund really meant to deal fairly as he pretended. But Michael's wits are sharpened now, and he will not in future be so ready to believe every man upon his word. Nor will he, hereafter, borrow one single penny, and he will never again undertake to buy anything unless he has the money in hand to pay for it.”

“In what street do you live?” inquired Gerlach.

“Near the turnpike road, Mr. Seraphin. Do you see that knoll?” He pointed through the window in a direction unobstructed by the trees of the garden. “Do you see that dense shade-tree, and yon white-washed wall behind the tree? That is our walnut-tree—my grandfather planted it. And the white wall is the wall of our house.”

“I have passed there twice—the road leads to the beech grove,” said the millionaire. “I remarked the little cottage, and was much pleased with its air of neatness. It struck me, too, that the barn is larger than the dwelling, which is a creditable sign for a farmer. Near the front entrance there is a carefully cultivated flower garden, in which I particularly admired the roses, and further off from the road lies an apple orchard.”

“All that belongs to us. That is what you have rescued and made a present of to us,” replied the land cultivator joyfully. “Everybody stops to view the roses; they belong to our daughter Mechtild.”

“The soil is good and deep, and must bring splendid crops of wheat. I, too, am a farmer, and understand something about such matters. But it appeared to me as though the soil were of a cold nature. You should use lime upon it pretty freely.”

In this manner he spent some time conversing with these good and simple people. Before dismissing them, he made a present to every one of the children of a shining dollar, having previously overcome Holt's protest against this new instance of generosity.

Old and young then courtesied once more, and Gerlach was left to himself in a mood differing greatly from that in which the visitors had found him.

He had been conversing with good and happy people, and his soul revelled in the consciousness of having been the originator of their happiness.

Suddenly Greifmann's appearance in the room put to flight the bright spirits that hovered about him, and the sunshine that had been lighting up the apartment was obscured by dark shadows as of a heavy mass of clouds.

“What sort of a horde was that?” asked he.

“They were Holt and his family. The gratitude of these simple people was touching. The innocent little ones gave me an ovation of which a prince might be envious, for the courts of princes are never graced by a naturalness at once so sincere and so beautiful. It is an intense happiness for me to have assured the livelihood of ten human beings with so paltry a gift.”

“A mere matter of taste, my most sympathetic friend!” rejoined the banker with indifference. “You are not made of the proper stuff to be a business man. Your feelings would easily tempt you into very unbusinesslike [pg 049] transactions. But you must come with me! The hubbub of the election is astir through all the streets and thoroughfares. I am going out to discharge my duties as a citizen, and I want you to accompany me.”

“I have no inclination to see any more of this disgusting turmoil,” replied Gerlach.

“Inclination or disinclination is out of the question when interest demands it,” insisted the banker. “You must profit by the opportunity which you now have of enriching your knowledge of men and things, or rather of correcting it; for heretofore your manner of viewing things has been mere ideal enthusiasm. Come with me, my good fellow!”

Seraphin followed with interior reluctance. Greifmann went on to impart to him the following information:

“During the past night, there have sprung up, as if out of the earth, a most formidable host, ready to do battle against the uniformly victorious army of progress—men thoroughly armed and accoutred, real crusaders. A bloody struggle is imminent. Try and make of your heart a sort of monitor covered with plates of iron, so that you may not be overpowered by the horrifying spectacle of the election affray. I am not joking at all! True as gospel, what I tell you! If you do not want to be stifled by indignation at sight of the fiercest kind of terrorism, of the most revolting tyranny, you will have to lay aside, at least for to-day, every feeling of humanity.”

Gerlach perceived a degree of seriousness in the bubbling current of Greifmann's levity.

“Who is the enemy that presumes to stand in the way of progress?” enquired he.

“The ultramontanes! Listen to what I have to tell you. This morning Schwefel came in to get a check cashed. With surprise I observed that the manufacturer's soul was not in business. ‘How are things going?’ asked I when we had got through.

“ ‘I feel like a man,’ exclaimed he, ‘that has just seen a horrible monster! Would you believe it, those accursed ultramontanes have been secretly meddling in the election. They have mustered a number of votes, and have even gone so far as to have a yellow ticket printed. Their yellow placards were to be seen this morning stuck up at every street corner—of course they were immediately torn down.’

“ ‘And are you provoked at that, Mr. Schwefel! You certainly are not going to deny the poor ultramontanes the liberty of existing, or, at least, the liberty of voting for whom they please?’

“ ‘Yes, I am, I am! That must not be tolerated,’ cried he wildly. ‘The black brood are hatching dark schemes, they are conspiring against civilization, and would fain wrest from us the trophies won by progress. It is high time to apply the axe to the root of the upas-tree. Our duty is to disinfect thoroughly, to banish the absurdities of religious dogma from our schools. The black spawn will have to be rendered harmless: we must kill them politically.’

“ ‘Very well,’ said I. ‘Just make negroes of them. Now that in America the slaves are emancipated, Europe would perhaps do well to take her turn at the slave-trade.’ But the fellow would not take my joke. He made threatening gesticulations, his eyes gleamed like hot coals, and he muttered words of a belligerent import.

“ ‘The ultramontane rabble are to hold a meeting at the “Key of Heaven,” ’ reported he. ‘There the stupid victims of credulity are to be [pg 050] harangued by several of their best talkers. The black tide is afterwards to diffuse itself through the various wards where the voting is to take place. But let the priest-ridden slaves come, they will have other memoranda to carry home with them beside their yellow rags of tickets.’

“You perceive, friend Seraphin, that the progress men mean mischief. We may expect to witness scenes of violence.”

“That is unjustifiable brutality on the part of the progressionists,” declared Gerlach indignantly. “Are not the ultramontanes entitled to vote and to receive votes? Are they not free citizens? Do they not enjoy the same privileges as others? It is a disgrace and an outrage thus to tyrannize over men who are their brothers, sons of Germania, their common mother.”

“Granted! Violence is disgraceful. The intention of progress, however, is not quite as bad as you think it. Being convinced of its own infallibility, it cannot help feeling indignant at the unbelief of ultramontanism, which continues deaf to the saving truths of the progressionist gospel. Hence a holy zeal for making converts urges progress so irresistibly that it would fain force wanderers into the path of salvation by violence. This is simply human, and should not be regarded as unpardonable. In the self-same spirit did my namesake Charles the Great butcher the Saxons because the besotted heathens presumed to entertain convictions differing from his own. And those who were not butchered had to see their sacred groves cut down, their altars demolished, their time-honored laws changed, and had to resign themselves to following the ways which he thought fit to have opened through the land of the Saxons. You cannot fail to perceive that Charles the Great was a member of the school of progress.”

“But your comparison is defective,” opposed the millionaire. “Charles subdued a wild and blood-thirsty horde who made it a practice to set upon and butcher peaceful neighbors. Charles was the protector of the realm, and the Saxons were forced to bend under the weight of his powerful arm. If Charles, however, did violence to the consciences of his vanquished enemies, and converted them to Christianity with the sword and mace, then Charles himself is not to be excused, for moral freedom is expressly proclaimed by the spirit of Christianity.”

“There is no doubt but that the Saxons were blundering fools for rousing the lion by making inroads into Charles' domain. The ultramontanes, are, however, in a similar situation. They have attacked the giant Progress, and have themselves to blame for the consequences.”

“The ultramontanes have attacked nobody,” maintained Gerlach. “They are merely asserting their own rights, and are not putting restrictions on the rights of other people. But progress will concede neither rights nor freedom to others. It is a disgusting egotist, an unscrupulous tyrant, that tries to build up his own brutal authority on the ruins of the rights of others.”

“Still, it would have been far more prudent on the part of the ultramontanes to keep quiet, seeing that their inferiority of numbers cannot alter the situation. The indisputable rights of the ascendency are in our days with the sceptre and crown of progress.”

“A brave man never counts the foe,” cried Gerlach. “He stands to his convictions, and behaves manfully in the struggle.”

“Well said!” applauded the [pg 051] banker. “And since progress also is forced by the opposition of principles to man itself for the contest, it will naturally beat up all its forces in defence of its conviction. Here we are at the ‘Key of Heaven,’ where the ultramontanes are holding their meeting. Let us go in, for the proverb says, Audiatur et altera pars—the other side should also get a hearing.”

They drew near to a lengthy old building. Over the doorway was a pair of crossed keys hewn out of stone, and gilt, informing the stranger that it was the hostelry of the “Key of Heaven,” where, since the days of hoar antiquity, hospitality was dispensed to pilgrims and travellers. The principal hall of the house contained a gathering of about three hundred men. They were attentively listening to the words of a speaker who was warmly advocating the principles of his party. The speaker stood behind a desk which was placed upon a platform at the far end of the hall.

Seraphin cast a glance over the assembly. He received the painful impression of a hopeless minority. Barely forty votes would the ultramontanes be able to send to each of the wards. To compensate for numbers, intelligence and faith were represented in the meeting. Elegant gentlemen with intellectual countenances sat or stood in the company of respectable tradesmen, and the long black coats of the clergy were not few in number. On a table lay two packages of yellow tickets to be distributed among the members of the assembly. At the same table sat the chairman, a commissary of police named Parteiling, whose business it was to watch the proceedings, and several other gentlemen.

“Compared with the colossal preponderance of progress, our influence is insignificant, and, compared with the masses of our opponents our numerical strength is still less encouraging,” said the speaker. “If in connection with this disheartening fact you take into consideration the pressure which progress has it in its power to exert on the various relations of life through numerous auxiliary means, if you remember that our opponents can dismiss from employment all such as dare uphold views differing from their own, it becomes clear that no ordinary amount of courage is required to entertain and proclaim convictions hostile to progress.”

Seraphin thought of Spitzkopf's mode of electioneering, and of the terrible threats made to the “wild men,” and concluded the incredible statement was lamentably correct.

“Viewing things in this light,” proceeded the orator, “I congratulate the present assembly upon its unusual degree of pluck, for courage is required to go into battle with a clear knowledge of the overwhelming strength of the enemy. We have rallied round the banner of our convictions notwithstanding that the numbers of the enemy make victory hopeless. We are determined to cast our votes in support of religion and morality in defiance of the scorn, blasphemy, and violence which the well-known terrorism of progress will not fail to employ in order to frighten us from the exercise of our privilege as citizens. We must be prepared, gentlemen, to hear a multitude of sarcastic remarks and coarse witticisms, both in the streets and at the polls. I adjure you to maintain the deportment alone worthy of our cause. A gentleman never replies to the aggressions of rudeness, and should you wish to take the conduct of our opponents in gay good-humor, just try, gentlemen, to fancy that [pg 052] you are being treated to some elegant exhibition of the refinement and liberal culture of the times.”

Loud bursts of hilarity now and then relieved the seriousness of the meeting. Even Greifmann would clap applause and cry, “Bravo!”

“Let us stand united to a man, prepared against all the wiles of intimidation and corruption, undismayed by the onset of the enemy. The struggle is grave beyond expression. For you are acquainted with the aims and purposes of the liberals. Progress would like to sweep away all the religious heritages that our fathers held sacred. Education is to be violently wrested from under the influence of the church; the church herself is to be enslaved and strangled in the thrall of the liberal state. I am aware that our opponents pretend to respect religion—but the religion of would-be progress is infidelity. Divine revelation, of which the church is the faithful guardian, is rejected with scorn by liberalism. Look at the tone of the press and the style of the literature of the day. You have only to notice the derision and fierceness with which the press daily assails the mysteries and dogmas of religion, the Sovereign Pontiff, the clergy, religious orders, the ultramontanes, and you cannot long remain in the dark concerning the aim and object of progress. Christ or Antichrist is the watchword of the day, gentlemen! Hence the imperative duty for us to be active at the elections; for the legislature has the presumption to wish to dictate in matters belonging exclusively to the jurisdiction of the church. We are threatened with school laws the purpose of which is to unchristianize our children, to estrange them from the spirit of religion. No man having the sentiment of religion can remain indifferent in presence of this danger, for it means nothing less than the defection from Christianity of the masses of the coming generation.

“Gentlemen, there is a reproach being uttered just now by the progressionist press, which, far from repelling, I would feel proud to deserve. A priest should have said, so goes the report, that it is a mortal sin to elect a progressionist to the chamber of deputies. Some of the writers of our press have met this reproach by simply denying that a priest ever expressed himself in those terms. But, gentlemen, let us take for granted that a priest did actually say that it is a mortal sin to elect a progressionist to the chamber of deputies, is there anything opposed to morality in such a declaration?

“By no means, if you remember that it is to be presumed the progressionist will use his vote in the assembly to oppose religion. Mortal sin, gentlemen, is any wilful transgression of God's law in grave matters. Now I put it to you: Does he gravely transgress the law of God who controverts what God has revealed, who would exclude God and all holy subjects from the schools, who would rob the church of her independence, and make of her a mere state machine unfit for the fulfilment of her high mission? There is not one of you but is ready to declare: ‘Yes, such an one transgresses grievously the law of God.’ This answer at the same time solves the other question, whether it is a mortal sin to put arms in the hands of an enemy of religion that he may use them against faith and morality. Would that all men of Christian sentiment seriously adverted to this connection of things and acted accordingly, the baneful sway of the pernicious spirit that governs the age would soon be at an end; for I have confidence in the sound sense and moral rectitude of the [pg 053] German people. Heathenism is repugnant to the deeply religious nature of our nation; the German people do not wish to dethrone God, nor are they ready to bow the knee before the empty idol of a soulless enlightenment.”

Here the speaker was interrupted by a tumult. A band of factorymen, yelling and laughing, rushed into the hall to disturb the meeting. All eyes were immediately turned upon the rioters. In every countenance indignation could be seen kindling at this outrage of the liberals. The commissary of police alone sat motionless as a statue. The progressionist rioters elbowed their way into the crowd, and, when the excitement caused by this strategic movement had subsided, the speaker resumed his discourse.

“For a number of years back our conduct has been misrepresented and calumniated. They call us men of no nationality, and pretend that we get our orders from Rome. This reproach does honor neither to the intelligence nor to the judgment of our opponents. Whence dates the division of Germany into discordant factions? When began the present faint and languishing condition of our fatherland? From the moment when it separated from Rome. So long as Germany continued united in the bond of the same holy faith, and the voice of the head of the church was hearkened to by every member of her population, her sovereigns held the golden apple, the symbol of universal empire. Our nation was then the mightiest, the proudest, the most glorious upon earth. The church who speaks through the Sovereign Pontiff had civilized the fierce sons of Germany, had conjured the hatred and feuds of hostile tribes, had united the interests and energies of our people in one holy faith, and had ennobled and enriched German genius through the spirit of religion. The church had formed out of the chaos of barbarism the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation—that gigantic and wonderful organization the like of which the world will never see again. But the church has long since been deprived of the leadership in German affairs, and what in consequence is now the condition of our fatherland? It is divided into discordant factions, it is an ailing trunk, with many members, but without a head.

“It is rather amusing that the ultramontanes should be charged with receiving orders from Rome, for the voice of the Father of Christianity has not been heard for many years back in the council of state.”

“Hurrah for the Syllabus!” cried Spitzkopf, who was at the head of the rioters. “Hurrah for the Syllabus!” echoed his gang, yelling and stamping wildly.

The ultramontanes were aroused, eyes glared fiercely, and fists were clenched ready to make a summary clearing of the hall. But no scuffle ensued; the ultramontanes maintained a dignified bearing. The speaker calmly remained in his place, and when the tumult had ceased he again went on with his discourse.

“Such only,” said he, “take offence at the Syllabus as know nothing about it. There is not a word in the Syllabus opposed to political liberty or the most untrammelled self-government of the German people. But it is opposed to the fiendish terrorism of infidelity. The Syllabus condemns the diabolical principles by which the foundations of the Christian state are sapped and a most disastrous tyranny over conscience is proclaimed.”

“Hallo! listen to that,” cried one of the liberals, and the yelling was [pg 054] renewed, louder, longer, and more furious than before.

The chairman rang his bell. The revellers relapsed into silence.

“Ours is not a public meeting, but a mere private gathering,” explained the chairman. “None but men of Christian principles have been invited. If others have intruded violently, I request them to leave the room, or, at least, to refrain from conduct unbecoming men of good-breeding.”

Spitzkopf laughed aloud, his comrades yelled and stamped.

“Let us go!” said Greifmann to Gerlach in an angry tone.

“Let us stay!” rejoined the latter with excitement. “The affair is becoming interesting. I want to see how this will end.”

The banker noticed Gerlach's suppressed indignation; he observed it in the fire of his eyes and the expression of unutterable contempt that had spread over his features, and he began to consider the situation as alarming. He had not expected this exhibition of brutal impertinence. In his estimation an infringement of propriety like the one he had just witnessed was a far more heinous transgression than the grossest violations in the sphere of morals. He judged of Gerlach's impressions by this standard of appreciation, and feared the behavior of the progressionist mob would produce an effect in the young man's mind far from favorable to the cause which they represented. He execrated the disturbance of the liberals, and took Seraphin's arm to lead him away.

“Come away, I beg of you! I cannot imagine what interest the rudeness of that uncultivated horde can have for you.”

“Do not scorn them, for they are honestly earning their pay,” rejoined Gerlach.

“What do you mean?”

“Those fellows are whistling, bawling, stamping, and yelling in the employ of progress. You are trying to give me an insight into the nature of modern civilization: could there be a better opportunity than this?”

“There you make a mistake, my dear fellow! Enlightened progress is never rude.”

To Be Continued.

Gavazzi Versus The See Of S. Peter.

By a Protestant Doctor of Philosophy.

Introductory Note.

The topic of this article has already been fully and satisfactorily treated in The Catholic World. It is well, however, to adopt, in handling the truth, Voltaire's maxim in regard to falsehood, and to keep continually repeating those truths which are frequently denied. Not only the mountebank Gavazzi, but others more respectable than he is, keep on reasserting the denial of S. Peter's Roman Episcopate, notwithstanding the evidence which has been over and over again presented in proof of it by Protestant as well as Catholic writers. We, therefore, willingly give admission to the present article, which, we may as well state, has been printed from the author's MS. copy, without any alteration.—Ed. C. W.

---

At our examination in the diocese of the Protestant Episcopal Church in which we took holy orders, the question of S. Peter's being at Rome was debated with some warmth by the clerical examiners and the bishop. We had at that time just passed our majority, and, while our reading had been pretty full, we had not touched the subject of this article, for it was indeed comparatively new to us. We remember well the remark of our bishop, whose opinion on theological questions we held in veneration. He was prominent on the bench of bishops as one of the most learned of our prelates, and he had wielded his pen in defence of Anglican Church principles with great reputation to himself among Episcopalians, particularly the High Church school of religious thought. At the period to which we refer, he gave it as his opinion that it was extremely doubtful that S. Peter ever visited Rome, and that he was the first bishop of its See was beyond the province of historical proof. Previous to this date in our studies, we would as lief have questioned the fact of the existence of Rome itself as that of S. Peter's residence there, and his occupancy of that metropolitan see. We had reached this conclusion by no investigation: it was, rather, one of those traditional questions which fix themselves in the mind without much thought in either direction. The fact, as we supposed, had never been doubted. To hear for the first time a denial of its truth, and that, too, from our ecclesiastical superior, made an impression upon our mind which led us to investigate the subject as soon as time and opportunity were afforded us. From that day to this, we have heard the same theory advanced by Protestant clergymen of every shade of denominational opinion, and in the minds of many it has lodged itself as one of those mooted questions which baffle historical proof.

About twenty years ago, an Italian known as “Father Gavazzi” visited the United States. His crusade against the Church of Rome during that visit is familiar to all. Of its [pg 056] merits or the motives which prompted it we do not propose to speak, as it is foreign to the subject to which the interest of the reader is invited. Again the same Alessandro Gavazzi, as “Commissioner” of what he denominates the “Free Christian Church of Italy,” is lecturing to audiences in our principal cities, for the purpose of securing subscriptions for “evangelization” and for the “Biblical College in Rome.” What these terms may mean we do not know, and of them we have no disposition to speak. In the month of June last, “Father Gavazzi” was advertised to lecture under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association in the city in which we reside. Among others, who had no interest perhaps in the especial work in which he is engaged, we attended his lecture. From a report of the lecture in the issue of a daily paper of the following morning we make the quotation which forms the text, upon which we propose to place before the reader some historical proofs for the belief that S. Peter was at Rome.

“Father Gavazzi” said: “A discussion was proposed in Rome as to whether S. Peter was ever there or not. The Pope favored, insisted upon it, and in two days his chosen champions retired defeated from the contest. That is something. The Bible is entirely silent on this subject. But the priests say that is merely negative proof. The silence of S. Luke is, however, positive proof that S. Peter was never there. The discussion of this subject, once prohibited in Rome, is now talked of freely in all public places. It was his delight to fight the Pope. Pius IX. was no more the successor of S. Peter than he was the successor of the emperor of China. S. Peter was never in Rome to be succeeded by anybody.”

Modern investigation at best has done little to clear up the difficulties connected with the geographical history of the Apostle Peter. That he was at Rome, and suffered martyrdom in that city, is the general belief of the fathers. And it was not until the dawn of the Reformation that the apostle's journey to that city, and his martyrdom there, became even a subject of doubt. So great was the anxiety of some to disprove the Primacy of the Roman See that scholarly men lent themselves to the repetition of myths and traditions which had no foundation in fact, and later writers, biased by early education and ecclesiastical connection, have even introduced into historical literature mythical stories, the germs of which run through the popular mythology of ancient and modern times. If, they argue, it can be proved that S. Peter was never at Rome, then we at once overturn the pretensions of the Papacy; or, again, if we can demonstrate that there is a break in the chain of succession of its bishops from S. Peter, the belief in the doctrine of an apostolic succession is clearly disproved, and the idea of a line of bishops reaching back through the long period of the Mores Catholici, or Ages of Faith, only a senseless forgery which originated with some monk the abbot of whose monastery was perhaps the first to give it form after he had ascended the chair of Peter. Mosheim, a respectable writer in the Protestant world, blinded by a singular prejudice which led him at times to forget the critical duties of the historian, is one among the few German scholars who has tarnished the pages of his Ecclesiastical History by giving credence to the fabulous story of Pope Joan. “Between Leo IV., who died 855, and Benedict III.,” says he, “a woman who concealed [pg 057] her sex and assumed the name of John, it is said, opened her way to the pontifical throne by her learning and genius, and governed the church for a time. She is commonly called the Papess Joan. During five subsequent centuries the witnesses to this extraordinary event are without number; nor did any one prior to the Reformation by Luther regard the thing as either incredible or disgraceful to the church.” The earliest writer from whom any information relating to the fable of Pope Joan is derived is Marianus Scotus, a monk of S. Martin of Cologne, who died a.d. 1086. He left a chronicle which has received many additions by later writers, and among those interpolations the students of mythical lore regard the passage which refers to this story. Platina, who wrote the Lives of the Popes anterior to the time of Martin Luther, relates the legend, and, with more of the critical acumen than Mosheim, adds: “These things which I relate are popular reports, but derived from uncertain and obscure authors, which I have therefore inserted briefly and baldly, lest I should seem to omit obstinately and pertinaciously what most people assert.” The legend of Pope Joan has been so thoroughly exposed that no controversialist of discrimination thinks of reviving it as an argument against the succession of the Bishops of Rome. Now and then it may be related to an ignorant crowd by an anti-popery mountebank of our cities during times of religious excitement, but it is never heard from the lips of an educated Protestant. We are inclined to think, however, that the class of minds that seeks to throw doubt upon S. Peter's residence at Rome in order to subvert the Primacy of the Apostolic See would not hesitate, in view of the evidence from early ecclesiastical writers, to introduce again this Papess Joan to their unlearned readers.

Turning, then, to the proofs of the subject of our paper, we take as the motto for our investigation of this and all kindred ecclesiastical questions the golden words of Tertullian: “Id esse verum, quodcunque primum; id esse adulterum quodcunque posterius.”[4] Or that petition of a great Anglican divine: “Grant, O Lord! that, in reading thy Holy Word, I may never prefer my private sentiments before those of the church in the purely ancient times of Christianity.”[5]

The earliest testimony is borne by S. Ignatius. He was closely connected with the apostles, both as a hearer of their teachings and sharer of the extraordinary mysteries of their faith.[6] S. John was his Christian Gamaliel, at whose feet he was taught the doctrines of Christianity, which prepared him not only to wear the mitre of Antioch, the most cultivated metropolis of the East, but also to receive the brighter crown of a martyr's agonizing death. Full of years, the follower of the beloved disciple was hurried to Rome, to seal with his blood the truth of the religion of Christ. On his journey to the pagan capital, he was permitted to tarry for a season at Smyrna, to visit, for the last time, S. Polycarp, the aged bishop of that city. Here, in view of the dreadful death that awaited him in the Roman amphitheatre, and in communion with the revered fellow-laborer of his life, he wrote his four epistles. From the one to the Romans we quote the following evidence: “I do not command you as S. Peter and S. Paul did; they were apostles of Jesus Christ, and I am a mere nothing” [pg 058] (the least).[7] “What can be more clear,” says the Anglican expositor of the Creed, Bishop Pearson, “from these words than that this most holy martyr was of opinion that Peter, no less than Paul, preached and suffered at Rome?”

Eusebius relates, upon the authority of Papias and S. Clement of Alexandria, that “S. Mark wrote his gospel at the request of S. Peter's hearers in Rome,” and he further adds that “S. Peter mentions S. Mark in his first epistle, written from Rome, which he figuratively calls Babylon.”[8]

S. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, in his epistle addressed to the Romans, affirms that S. Peter and S. Paul preached the Gospel in Corinth and in Rome, and suffered martyrdom about the same time in the latter city.[9]

S. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who was born at Smyrna, though of Greek extraction, had been the disciple of S. Polycarp, Pothinus, and Papias, from whose lips he had heard many anecdotes of the apostles and their immediate followers. He was alike eminent both as a scholar in the learning of the times and as a controversialist of no mean repute. The part he bore against the Gnostic and other heresies rendered his name illustrious, not only within the limits of his episcopal jurisdiction, but wherever the claims of Christianity had been presented. The wonderful aptness with which he interwove Scripture and scriptural phraseology into his style, not altogether unpolished, is perhaps unequalled in patristic theology. Residing in a city whose language and intellectual characteristics differed from those of his native country, his writings are essentially foreign, and, with few exceptions, were lost at an early period. In the fragments which remain we find an unequivocal testimony in behalf of the subject under discussion. His language is: “S. Peter and S. Paul preached the Gospel in Rome, and laid the foundation of the church.”[10]

Caius, a learned Roman presbyter, and, as some suppose, bishop, arguing against Proclus, the chief champion of Montanism at Rome, says that he can “show the trophies of the apostles.” “For if you will go,” he continues, “to the Vatican, or to the Ostian Road, you will find the trophies of those who have laid the foundation of this church.”[11]

Origen, a man of encyclopædic learning, who had been carefully nurtured by Christian parents, and who was imbued with the hardy, stern culture of the Greek literature, at the early age of eighteen became the leader of the Alexandrine school of Christian philosophy. He proved no unworthy successor of the logical Clement. Certainly no name stands higher in the catechetical school than that of the iron-souled Origen (ἀδαμάντινος). The eloquent teachings of this youthful master nerved many a Christian soul to endure with fortitude the fiery trials of martyrdom, and even comforted the bleeding heart of Leonides, his [pg 059] father, who became a victim of the unrelenting persecutions of Severus. From Origen we learn “that S. Peter, after having preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia, to the Jews that were scattered abroad, went at last to Rome, where he was crucified.” “These things,” says Eusebius, “are related by Origen in the third book of his Τῶν εἰς τὴν Γένεσιν ἐξηγητικῶν.”[12]

Tertullian by birth was a heathen and Carthaginian. He was the son of a centurion, and had been educated in all the varied learning of Greece and Rome. Skilled as a rhetorician and advocate in Rome, he brought, on his conversion to Christianity, the accomplishments of a highly cultivated intellect, but a sombre and irritable temper. The natural lawlessness of a mind guided by a passionate and stubborn disposition led him gradually to renounce the truths which the light of a higher intelligence had revealed, until at last he was anathematized for his Montanistic teachings. His writings are an invaluable addition to the Punic-Latin theology, and a repository from which we receive great information concerning the polemic questions which at that period harassed the Christian church. Upon the subject of our article he writes as follows: “Let them, then, give us the origin of their churches; let them unfold the series of their bishops, coming down in succession from the beginning, so that the first bishop was appointed and preceded by any of the apostles, or apostolic men, who, nevertheless, preserved in communion with the apostles, had an ordainer and predecessor. For in this way the apostolic churches exhibit their origin; thus the Church of Smyrna relates that Polycarp was placed there by John, as the Church of Rome also relates that Clement was ordained by Peter.”[13]

Again: “If thou be adjacent to Italy, there thou hast Rome, whose authority is near at hand to us. How happy is this church, to which the apostles poured forth their whole doctrine with their blood! where Peter is assimilated to our Lord; where Paul is crowned with a death like that of John.”[14]

And again: “Let us see with what milk the Corinthians were fed by Paul; according to what rule the Galatians were reformed; what laws were to the Philippians, Thessalonians, Ephesians; what also the Romans sound in our ears, to whom Peter and Paul left the Gospel sealed with their blood.”[15]

To this list of witnesses we might add the testimony of the fathers and ecclesiastical writers who have flourished in different ages of the church, but we now propose to briefly survey the opinions of some of the most noted Protestant commentators.

The First Epistle of S. Peter is said by the apostle to have been written from Babylon, but whether it be Babylon in Chaldea, Babylon in [pg 060] Egypt, Jerusalem, or Rome, has given rise to much speculation.[16] Our Lord foretold the manner of St. Peter's death,[17] and an event of such importance would naturally have awakened more than ordinary interest. Seven cities claimed the honor of Homer's birth,[18] but no other place than Rome ever assumed to itself the glory of the apostle's martyrdom. Controversies arose concerning the time of celebrating Easter, the baptism of heretics, and questions of a like nature, yet none disputed the place in which S. Peter was martyred. It is highly improbable that S. Peter ever visited either Babylon in Egypt or Babylon in Chaldea. Certainly no fact of history nor even possibility of conjecture furnishes the least warrantable presumption of either opinion. The great burden of proof points toward Rome. Like Babylon, pagan Rome was idolatrous. Like Babylon, it persecuted the church of God. Like Babylon, the glory of its pagan temple and fane had departed. In many manuscripts this epistle is dated from Rome.

Calvin, who little regarded the authority of the fathers, when, in the presumption of his self-opinionated orthodoxy, he said: “All the ancients were driven into error,”[19] yet from evidence the most patent he believed that S. Peter suffered martyrdom at Rome. His language is: “Propter scriptorum consensum non pugno quin illic mortuus fuerit.”[20]

“On the meaning of the word Babylon,” says Grotius, one of the most celebrated of the Calvinistic school, “ancient and modern interpreters disagree. The ancients understand it of Rome, and that Peter was there no true Christian ever doubted; the moderns understand it of Babylon in Chaldea. I adhere to the ancients.”[21]

Rosenmüller, of whom an able American critic has said, “He is almost everywhere a local investigator,”[22] has left his testimony in the same language as Grotius: “Veteres Romam interpretantur.”

Dr. Campbell very reluctantly yielded, by the force of evidence, to the same opinion when he wrote: “I am inclined to think that S. Peter's martyrdom must have been at Rome, both because it is agreeable to the unanimous voice of antiquity, and because the sufferings of so great an apostle could not fail to be of such notoriety in the church as to preclude the possibility of an imposition in regard to the place.”[23]

“From a careful examination of the evidence adduced,” says the learned Horne, “for the literal meaning of the word Babylon, and of the evidence for its figurative or mystical application to Rome, we think that the latter was intended.”[24]

We commend to “Father Gavazzi,” and to the Rev. Doctors Sunderland and Newman of Washington, who are ever ready to throw down [pg 061] the gauntlet when an argument is made to prove that S. Peter was at Rome, the language of the logical and laborious Macknight, who clearly expresses our own view, and whose diligence, learning, and moderation were so fully appreciated by Bishop Tomline: “It is not for our honor nor for our interest, either as Christians or Protestants, to deny the truth of events ascertained by early and well-attested tradition. If any make an ill use of such facts, we are not accountable for it. We are not, from a dread of such abuses, to overthrow the credit of all history, the consequences of which would be fatal.”[25]

Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune.

Mlle. de Lemaque and her sister Mme. de Chanoir lived at No. 13 Rue Royale. They were the daughters of a military man whose fortune when he married consisted in his sword, nothing else; and of a noble Demoiselle de Cambatte, whose wedding portion, according to the good old French fashion, was precisely the same as her husband's, minus the sword. But over and above this joint capital the young people had a good stock of hope and courage, and an inexhaustible fund of love; they had therefore as good a chance of getting on as other young folk who start in life under the same pecuniary disadvantages. M. de Lemaque, moreover, had friends in high place who looked kindly on him, and promised him countenance and protection, and there was no reason, as far as he and his wife could see, why he should not in due time clutch that legendary baton which Napoleon declared every French soldier carries in his knapsack. Nor, indeed, looking at things from a retrospective point of view, was there any reason, that we can see, why he should not have died a marshal of France, except that he died too soon. The young soldier was in a fair way of climbing to the topmost rung of the military ladder; but just as he had got his foot on the third rung, Death stepped down and met him, and he climbed no further. His wife followed him into the grave three years later. They left two daughters, Félicité and Aline, the only fruits of their short and happy union. The orphans were educated at the Legion of Honor, and then sent adrift on the wide, wide world, to battle with its winds and waves, to sink or swim as best they could. They swam. Perhaps I ought rather say they floated. The eldest, Félicité, was married from S. Denis to an old general, who, after a reasonably short time, had the delicacy to betake himself to a better world, leaving his gay wife a widow at the head of an income of £40 a year. Aline might have married under similar circumstances, but, after turning it over in her mind, she came to [pg 062] the conclusion that, all things considered, since it was a choice of evils, and that she must earn her bread in some way, she preferred earning it and eating it independently as a single woman. This gave rise to the only quarrel the sisters had had in their lives. Félicité resented the disgrace that Aline was going to put on the family name by degenerating into a giver of private lessons, when she might have secured forty pounds a year for ever by a few years' dutiful attendance on a brave man who had fought his country's battles.

“Well, if you can find me a warrior of ninety,” said the younger sister, a month before she left S. Denis, “I'm not sure that he might not persuade me; but I never will capitulate under ninety; I couldn't trust a man under that; they live for ever when they marry between sixty and eighty, and there are no tyrants like them; now, I would do my duty as a kind wife for a year or so, but I've no notion of taking a situation as nurse for fifteen or twenty years, and that's what one gets by marrying a young man of seventy or thereabouts.”

Félicité urged her own case as a proof to the contrary. Général de Chanoir was only sixty-eight when she married him, and he retired at seventy. Aline maintained, however, that this was the one exception necessary to prove the rule to the present generation, and as no eligible parti of fourscore and ten presented itself before she left school, she held to her resolve, and started at once as a teacher.

The sisters took an apartment together, if two rooms, a cabinet de toilette, and a cooking-range in a dark passage, dignified by the name of kitchen, can be called an apartment, and for six years they lived very happily.

Mme. de Chanoir was small and fair, and very distinguished-looking. She had never known a day's illness in her life, but she was a hypochondriac. She believed herself afflicted with a spine disease, which necessitated reclining all day long on the sofa in a Louis Quinze dressing-gown and a Dubarry cap.

Aline was tall and dark, not exactly pretty, but indescribably piquant. Without being delicate, her health was far less robust than her sister's; but she was blessed with indomitable spirits and a fund of energy that carried her through a variety of aches and pains, and often bore her successfully through her round of daily work when another would have given in.

The domestic establishment of the sisters consisted in a charwoman, who rejoiced in the name of Mme. Cléry. She was a type of a class almost extinct in Paris now; a dainty little cook, clean as a sixpence, honest as the sun, orderly as a clock, a capital servant in every way. She came twice a day to No. 13, two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the sisters paid her twenty francs a month. She might have struck for more wages, and rather than let her go they would have managed to raise them; but Mme. Cléry was born before strikes came into fashion, it was quite impossible to say how long before; her age was incalculable; her youth belonged to that class of facts spoken of as beyond the memory of the oldest man in the district. Aline used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she really could have been born, and if she meant to die like other people; the crisp, wiry old woman looked the sort of person never to have either a beginning or an end; they had had her now for eight years—at least Mme. de Chanoir had—and there [pg 063] was not the shadow of a change in her. Her gowns were like herself, they never wore out, neither did her caps—high Normandy caps, with flaps extended like a wind-mill in repose, stiff, white, and uncompromising. Everything about her was antiquated. She had a religious regard for antiquity in every shape, and a proportionate contempt for modernism; but, of all earthly things, what her soul loved most was an old name, and what it most despised a new one. She used to say that if she chose to cook the rotis of a parvenu she might make double the money, and it was true; but she could not bend her spirit to it; she liked her dry bread and herbs better from a good family than a stalled ox from upstarts. She was as faithful as a dog to her two mistresses, and consequently lorded over them like a step-mother, perpetually bullying and scolding, and bewailing her own infatuation in staying with them while she might be turning a fatter pullet on her own spit at home than the miserable coquille at No. 13 ever held a fire to. Why had she not the sense to take the situation that M. X——, the agent de change, across the street, had offered her again and again? The femme de ménage was, in fact, as odious and exasperating as the most devoted old servant who ever nursed a family from the cradle to the grave. But let any one else dare so much as cast a disrespectful glance at either of her victims! She shook her fist at the concierge's wife one day for venturing to call Mme. de Chanoir Mme. de Chanoir tout court, instead of Mme. la Générale de Chanoir, to a flunky who came with a note, and she boxed the concierge's ears for speaking of Aline as “l'Institutrice.” As Mme. la Générale's sofa was drawn across the window that looked into the court, she happened to be an eye-witness to the two incidents, and heard every word that was said. This accidental disclosure of Mme. Cléry's regard for the family dignity before outsiders covered a multitude of sins in the eyes of both the sisters. Indeed, Mme. de Chanoir came at last, by force of habit, almost to enjoy being bullied by the old soul. “Cela nous pose, ma chère,” she would remark complacently, when the wind from the kitchen blew due north, and Aline threatened to mutiny.

Aline never could have endured it if she had been as constantly tried as her easy-going sister was; but, lucky for all parties, she went out immediately after breakfast, and seldom came in till late in the afternoon, when the old beldame was busy getting ready the dinner.

It was a momentous life they led, the two young women, but, on the whole, it was a happy one. Mme. de Chanoir, seeing how bravely her sister carried the burden she had taken up, grew reconciled to it in time. They had a pleasant little society, too; friends who had known them from their childhood, some rich and in good positions, others struggling like themselves in a narrow cage and under difficult circumstances; but one and all liked the sisters, and brought a little contingent of sunshine to their lives. As to Aline, she had sunshine enough in herself to light up the whole Rue Royale. Every lesson she gave, every incident of the day, no matter how trivial, fell across her path like a sunbeam; she had a knack of looking at things from a sunny focus that shot out rays on every object that came within its radius, and of extracting amusement or interest from the most commonplace things and people; even her own vexations she had turned into ridicule. Her [pg 064] position of governess was a fountain of fun to her. When another would have drawn gall from a snub, and smarted and been miserable under a slight, Aline de Lemaque saw a comic side to the circumstance, and would dress it up in a fashion that diverted herself and her friends for a week. Moreover, the young lady was something of a philosopher.

“You never find out human nature till you come to earn your own bread—I mean, women don't,” she used to say to Mme. de Chanoir. “If I were the mother of a family of daughters, and wanted to teach them life, I'd make every one of them, no matter how big their dots were, begin by running after the cachet. Nobody who hasn't tried it would believe what a castle of truth it is to one—a mirror that shows up character to the life, a sort of moral photography. It is often as good as a play to me to watch the change that comes over people when, after talking to them, and making myself pass for a very agreeable person, I suddenly announce the fact that I give lessons. Their whole countenance changes, not that they look on me straightway with contempt. Oh! dear no. Many good Christians, people of the 'help yourself and God will help you' sect, conceive, on the contrary, a great respect for me; but I become metamorphosed on the spot. I am not what they took me for, they took me for a lady, and all the time I was a governess! They did not think the less of me, but they can't help feeling that they have been taken in; that, in fact, I'm an altogether different variety from themselves, and it is very odd they did not recognize it at first sight. But these are the least exciting experiences. The great fun is when I get hold of an out-and-out worldly individual, man or woman, but a woman is best, and let them go on till they have thoroughly committed themselves, made themselves gushingly agreeable to me, perhaps gone the length of asking, in a significant manner, if I live in their neighborhood; then comes the crisis. I smile my gladdest, and say, ‘Monsieur, or Madame, I give lessons!’ Changement de décoration à vue d'œil, ma chère. It's just as if I lancéd an obus into the middle of the company, only it rebounds on me and hits nobody else; the eyebrows of the company go up, the corners of its mouth go down, and it bows to me as I sit on the ruins of my respectability, shattered to pieces by my own obus.”

“I can't understand how you can laugh at it. If I were in your place, I should have died of vexation and wounded pride long ago,” said Mme. de Chanoir, one day, as Aline related in high glee an obus episode that she had had that morning; “but I really believe you have no feeling.”

“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque's social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and lancéd with infinite gusto on every available opportunity.

On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for [pg 065] that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold eau sucrée in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well-born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The fauteuil de l'aïeule and the salon of the femme d'esprit, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished literary scheme, he brightened up the moment marriage came on the tapis. This hobby of the professor's was a great amusement to Mme. de Chanoir, who delighted to see him jump into the saddle and ride off at a canter while she lay languidly working at her tapestry, patting him on the back every now and then, by a word of encouragement, or signifying her assent merely by a smile or a nod. Sometimes she would take him to task seriously about putting his theories into practice and getting himself a wife, assuring him that it was quite wicked of him not to marry when he was so richly endowed with all the qualities necessary to make a model husband.

“Ah! madame, if I thought I were capable of making a young woman happy!” M. Dalibouze would exclaim with a sigh; “but at my age! No, I have let my chance go by.”

“How, sir, at your age!” the générale would protest. “Why, it is the very flower of manhood, the moment of all others for a man to marry. You have outlived the delusions of youth and none of its vigor; you have crossed the Rubicon that separates folly from wisdom, and you have left nothing on the other side of the bridge but the silly chimera of boyhood. Believe me, the woman whom you would select would never wish to see you a day younger.”

And M. Dalibouze would caress his chin, and observe thoughtfully: “Do you think so, madame?” Upon [pg 066] which Mme. de Chanoir would pour another vial of oil and honey on the learned head of the professor, till the wonder was that it did not turn on his shoulders.

Aline had no sympathy with his rhapsodies or his jeremiads; they bored her to extinction, and sometimes it was all she could do not to tell him so; but she disapproved of his being made a joke of, and testified against it very decidedly when Félicité, in a spirit of mischief, led him up to a more than usually ridiculous culmination. It was not fair, she said, to make a greater fool of the good little man than he made of himself, and instead of encouraging him to talk such nonsense one ought to laugh him out of it, and try and cure him of his silly conceit.

“I don't see it at all in that light,” Mme. de Chanoir would answer. “In the first place, if I laughed at him, or rather if I let him see that I did, he would never forgive me, and, as I have a great regard for him, I should be sorry to lose his friendship; and in the next place, it's a great amusement to me to see him swallow my little doses of flattery so complacently, and I have no scruple in dosing him, because nothing that I or any one else could say could possibly add one grain to his self-conceit, so one may as well turn it to account for a little entertainment.”

It was partly this system of flattery, which Aline resented on principle, that induced her occasionally to snub the professor, and partly the fact that she had reason to suspect his dreams of married bliss centred upon herself. In fact, she knew it. He had never told her so outright, for the simple reason that, whenever he drew near that crisis, Aline cut him short in such a peremptory manner that it cowed him for weeks, but nevertheless she knew in her heart of hearts that she reigned supreme over M. Dalibouze's. She would not have married him, no, not if he could have crowned her queen of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, but the fact of his being her slave and aspiring to be her master constituted a claim on her regard which a true-hearted woman seldom disowns.

Félicité would have favored his suit if there had been the ghost of a chance for him, but she knew there was not.

Mme. Cléry looked coldly on it. Needless to say, neither M. Dalibouze nor his cruel-hearted lady-love had ever made a confidante of the femme de ménage; but she often remarked to her mistresses when they ventured an opinion on anything connected with her special department, “Je ne suis pas née d'hier,” an assertion which, strange to say, even the rebellious Aline had never attempted to gainsay. Mme. Cléry was not, indeed, born yesterday, moreover she was a Frenchwoman, and a particularly wide-awake one, and from the first evening that she saw Aline sugaring M. Dalibouze's tea, dropping in lump after lump in that reckless way, while the little man held his cup and beamed at her through his spectacles as if he meant to stand there for ever simpering, “Merci encore!”—it occurred to Mme. Cléry when she saw this that there was more in it than tea-making. Of course it was natural and proper that a young woman, especially an orphan, should think of getting married, but it was right and proper that her friends should think of it too, and see that she married the proper person. Now, on the face of it, M. Dalibouze could not be the proper person. Nevertheless, Mme. Cléry waited till the suspicion that M. Dalibouze had settled it in his own mind that he was that man took the shape of a conviction before [pg 067] she considered it her duty to interfere.

By interfering Mme. Cléry meant going aux renseignements. Nobody ever got true renseignements, especially when there was a marriage in question, except people like her; ladies and gentlemen never get behind the scenes with each other, or, if they do, they never tell what they see there. They are very sweet and smiling when they meet in the salon, and nobody guesses that madame has rated her femme de chambre for not putting the flowers in her hair exactly to her fancy, or that monsieur has flung a boot at his valet for giving him his shaving-water too hot or too cold. If you want the truth, you must get it by the back-stairs. This was Mme. Cléry's belief, and, acting upon it, she went to M. Dalibouze's concierge in the Rue Jean Beauvais to consult him confidentially about his locataire.

The first thing to be ascertained before entering on such secondary details as character, conduct, etc., was whether or not the professor was of a good enough family to be entertained at all as a husband for Mlle. de Lemaque. On this sine qua non question the concierge could unfortunately throw no light. The professor had a multitude of friends, all respectable people, many of them décorés, who drove to the door in spruce coupés, but of his family Pipelet knew nothing; of his personal respectability there was no doubt whatever; he was the kindest of men, a very pearl of tenants, always in before midnight, and gave forty francs to Pipelet on New Year's day, not to count sundry other little bonuses on minor fêtes during the year. But so long as her mind was in darkness on the main point, all this was no better than sounding brass in the ears of Mme. Cléry.

“Has he, or has he not, the particule?” she demanded, cutting Pipelet short in the middle of his panegyric.

“The particule?” repeated Pipelet. “What's that?”

“The particule nobiliaire,” explained Mme. Cléry, with a touch of contempt. “There is some question of a marriage between him and one of my ladies; but, if M. Dalibouze hasn't got the particule, it's no use thinking of it.”

“Madame,” said Pipelet, assuming a meditative air—he was completely at sea as to what this essential piece of property might be, but did not like to own his ignorance—“I'm not a man to set up for knowing more of my tenant's business than I do, and M. Dalibouze has never opened himself to me about how or where his money was placed; but I could give you the name of his agent, if I thought it would not compromise me.”

“I'm not a woman to compromise any one that showed me confidence,” said Mme. Cléry, tightening her lips, and bobbing her flaps at Pipelet; “but you need not give me the name of his agent. What sort of a figure should I make at his agent's! Give me his own name. How does he spell it?”

“Spell it!” echoed Pipelet.

“A big D or a little d?” said Mme. Cléry.

“Why, a big D, of course! Who ever spelt their name with a little one?” retorted Pipelet.

“Ah!...” Mme. Cléry smiled a smile of serene pity on the benighted ignoramus, and then observed coolly: “I suspected it! I'm not easy to deceive in that sort of things. I was not born yesterday. Good-morning, M. le Concierge.” She moved towards the door.

“Stop!” cried Pipelet, seizing his berette as if a ray of light had shot [pg 068] through his skull—“stop! Now that I think of it, it's a little d. I have not a doubt but it's a little d. I noticed it only yesterday on a letter that came for monsieur, and I said to myself: ‘Let us see!’ I said. ‘What a queer fancy for a man of distinction like M. le Professeur to spell his name with a little d!’ Là! if I didn't say those words to myself no later than yesterday!”

Mme. Cléry was dubious. Unluckily there was no letter in M. Dalibouze's box at that moment, which would have settled the point at issue, so she had nothing for it but to go home, and turn it in her mind what was to be done next. After all, it was a great responsibility on her. The old soul considered herself in the light of a protector to the two young women, one a cripple on the broad of her back, and the other a light-hearted creature who believed everything and everybody. It was her place to look after them as far as she could. That afternoon, when Mme. Cléry went to No. 13, after her fruitless expedition to the Rue Jean Beauvais, she took a letter in to Mme. de Chanoir. She had never seen, or, at any rate, never noticed, the writing before, but as she handed the envelope to her mistress it flashed upon her that it was from M. Dalibouze, and that it bore on the subject of her morning's peregrination.

She seized a feather-broom that hung by the fireplace, and began vigorously threatening the clock and the candlesticks, as an excuse for staying in the room, and watching Mme. de Chanoir in the looking-glass while she read the letter. The old woman was an irascible enemy to dust; they were used to see her at the most inopportune times pounce on the feather-broom and begin whipping about her to the right and left, so Mme. de Chanoir took no notice of this sudden castigation of the chimney-piece at four o'clock in the afternoon. She read her note, and then, tossing it into the basket beside her, resumed her tapestry as if nothing had occurred to divert her thoughts from roses and Berlin wool.

“Mme. la Générale, pardon and excuse,” said Mme. Cléry, deliberately hanging the feather-broom on its nail, and going up to the foot of the générale's sofa. “I have it on my mind to ask something of madame.”

“Ask it, my good Mme. Cléry.”

“Does Mme. la Générale think of marrying Mlle. Aline?”

Mme. de Chanoir opened her eyes, and stared for a moment in mild surprise at her charwoman, then a smile broke over her face, and she said:

“You are thinking that you would not like to come to me if I were alone?”

“I was not thinking of that, madame,” replied Mme. Cléry, in a tone of ceremony that was not habitual, and which would have boded no good (Mme. Cléry was never so respectful as when she was going to be particularly disagreeable), except that she looked very meek, and, Félicité thought, rather affectionately at her as their eyes met.

“Well,” said Mme. de Chanoir, “I suppose we must marry her some day; I ought, perhaps, to occupy myself about it more actively than I do; but there's time enough to think about it yet; mademoiselle is in no hurry.”

“Dame!” said Mme. Cléry testily, “when a demoiselle has become an old maid, there is not so much time to lose! Pardon and excuse, Mme. la Générale, but I thought, I don't know why, that that letter had something to do with it?”

“This letter! What could have put that into your head?”

Mme. de Chanoir took up the note to see if the envelope had anything about it which warranted this romantic suspicion, but it was an ordinary envelope, with no trace of anything more peculiar than the post-mark.

“As I have told Mme. la Générale before,” said Mme. Cléry, shaking her head significantly, “I was not born yesterday”—she emphasized the not as if Mme. de Chanoir had denied that fact and challenged her to swear to it on the Bible—“and I don't carry my eyes in my pocket; and when a demoiselle heaps lumps of sugar into a gentleman's cup till it's as thick as honey for a spoon to stand in, and a shame to see the substance of the family wasted in such a way, and she never grudging it a bit, but looking as if it would be fun to her to turn the sugar-bowl upside down over it—I say, when I see that sort of thing, I'm not femme Cléry if there isn't something in it.”

Félicité felt inclined to laugh, but she restrained herself, and observed interrogatively:

“Well, Mme. Cléry, suppose there is?”

This extravagance of sugar on M. Dalibouze was an old grievance of Mme. Cléry's. In fact, it had been her only one against the professor, till she grew to look upon him as the possible husband of Mlle. Aline, and then the question of his having or not having the particule assumed such alarming importance in her mind that it magnified all minor defects, and she believed him capable of every misdemeanor under the sun.

“Mme. la Générale,” she replied, “one does not marry every day; one ought to think seriously about it; Mlle. Aline has not experience; she is vive and light-hearted; she is a person to be taken in by outward appearances; such things as learning, good principles, and esprit would blind her to serious shortcomings; it is the duty of Mme. la Générale to prevent such a mistake in time.”

“What sort of shortcomings are you afraid of in M. Dalibouze, Mme. Cléry?” inquired Mme. de Chanoir, dropping her tapestry, and looking with awakened curiosity at the old woman.

“Let us begin with a first principle, Mme. la Générale,” observed Mme. Cléry, demurely slapping the palm of her left hand. “Mlle. Aline is née; the father and mother of mamzelle were both of an excellent family; it is consequently of the first necessity that her husband should be so, too; the first thing, therefore, to be considered in a suitor is his name. Now, has M. Dalibouze the particule, or has he not?”

It was a very great effort for Mme. de Chanoir to keep her countenance under this charge and deliver with which the old woman solemnly closed her speech, and then stood awaiting the effect on her listener; still, such is the weakness of human nature, the générale in her inmost heart was flattered by it; it was pleasant to be looked up to as belonging to a race above the common herd, to be recognized in spite of her poverty, even by a femme de ménage, as superior to the wealthy parvenus whose fathers and mothers were not of a good family.

“My good Mme. Cléry,” she said after a moment's reflection, “you, like ourselves, were brought up with very different ideas from those that people hold nowadays. Nobody cares a straw to-day who a man's father was, or whether he had the particule or not; all that they care about is that he should be well educated, and well conducted, and well off; and, my dear, one must go with [pg 070] the times, one must give in to the force of public opinion around one. Customs change with the times. I would, of course, much rather have a brother-in-law of our own rank than one cleverer and richer who was not; but what would you have? One cannot have everything. It is not pleasant for me to see Mlle. de Lemaque earning her own bread, running about the streets like a milliner's apprentice at all hours of the day. I would overlook something to see her married to a kind, honorable man who would keep her in comfort and independence.”

“Bonté divine!” exclaimed Mme. Cléry, with a look of deep distress and consternation, “madame would then actually marry mamzelle to a bourgeois sans particule? For madame admits that M. Dalibouze has not the particule, that he spells his name with a big D?”

“Alas! he does,” confessed the générale; “but he comes, nevertheless, of a good old Normandy stock, Mme. Cléry; his great-grandfather was procureur du roi under—”

“Tut! tut!” interrupted Mme. Cléry; “his great-grandfather may have been what he liked; if he wasn't a gentleman, he has no business marrying his great grandson to a de Lemaque. No, madame; I am a poor woman, but I know better than that. Mamzelle's father would turn in his grave if he saw her married to a man who spelt his name with a big D.”

The conversation was interrupted by a ring at the door. It was Aline. She came back earlier than usual, because one of her pupils was ill and had not been able to take her lesson. The young girl was flushed and excited, and flung herself into an arm-chair the moment she entered, and burst into tears. Mme. de Chanoir sat up in alarm, fearing she was ill, and suggested a cup of tisane.

“Oh! 'tis nothing. I'm an idiot to mind it or let such impertinence vex me,” she said, when the first outburst had passed off and relieved her.

“Mon Dieu! but what vexes mamzelle?” inquired Mme. Cléry anxiously.

“A horrid man that followed me the length of the street, and made some impudent speech, and asked me where I lived,” sobbed Aline.

“Is it possible!” exclaimed the old woman, aghast, and clasping her hands. “Well, mamzelle does astonish me! I thought young men knew better nowadays than to go on with that sort of tricks; fifty years ago they used to. I remember how I was followed and spoken to every time I went to church or to market; it was a persecution; but now I come and go and nobody minds me. To think of their daring to speak to mamzelle!”

“That's what one must expect when one walks about alone at your age, ma pauvre Aline,” said the générale, rather sharply, with a significant look at Mme. Cléry which that good lady understood, and resented by compressing her lips and bobbing her flaps, as much as to say, “One has a principle or one has not”—principle being in this instance synonymous with particule.

Things remained in statu quo after this for some years. Mme. de Chanoir did not enlighten her sister on the subject of the conference with Mme. Cléry, but she worked as far as she could in favor of the luckless suitor who spelt his name with a capital D. It was of no use, however. Aline continued to snub him so pertinaciously and persistently that Mme. de Chanoir at last gave up his cause as hopeless, and the professor himself, when he saw this, his solitary stronghold, surrender, thought it best to [pg 071] raise the siege with a good grace, and make a friendly truce with the victor. He frankly withdrew from the field of suitors, and took up his position as a friend of the family. This once done, he accepted its responsibilities and prerogatives, and held himself on the qui vive to render any service in his power to Mme. de Chanoir; he kept her concierge in order, and brought bonbons and flowers to No. 13 on every possible occasion. He knew Aline was passionately fond of the latter, and he was careful to keep the flower stand that stood in the pier of the little salon freshly supplied with her favorite plants, and the vases filled with her favorite flowers. He never dared to offer her a present, but under cover of offering them to the générale he kept her informed about every new book which was likely to interest her. Finally, Frenchman-like, having abandoned the hope of marrying her himself, he set to work to find some more fortunate suitor. This was par excellence the duty of a friend of the family, and M. Dalibouze was fully alive to its importance. The disinterested zeal he displayed in the discharge of it would have been comical if the spirit of genuine self-sacrifice which animated him had not touched it with pathos. One by one every eligible parti in the range of his acquaintance was led up for inspection to No. 13. Mme. de Chanoir entered complacently into the presentations; they amused her, and she tried to persuade herself that, sooner or later, something would come of them; but she knew Aline too well ever to let her into the secret of the professor's matrimonial manœuvres. The result would have been to furnish Mlle. de Lemaque with an obus opportunity and nothing more.

But do what she would, the générale could never cheat Mme. Cléry. The old woman detected a prétendant as a cat does a mouse. It was an instinct with her. There was no putting her off the scent. She never said a word to Mme. de Chanoir, but she had a most aggravating way of making her understand tacitly that she knew all about it—that, in fact, she was not born yesterday. This was her system, whenever M. Dalibouze brought a parti to tea in the evening. Mme. Cléry was seized next day with a furious dusting fit, and when the générale testified against the feathers that kept flying out of the broom, Mme. Cléry would observe, in a significant way:

“Mme. la Générale, that makes an impression when one sees a salon well dusted; that proves that the servant is capable—that she attends to her work. Madame does not think of those things, but strangers do.”

It became at length a sort of cabalistic ceremony with the old woman; intelligible only to Mme. de Chanoir. If Aline came in when the fit was on her, and ventured to expostulate, and ask what she was doing with the duster at that time of day, Mme. Cléry would remark stiffly: “Mamzelle Aline, I am dusting.” Aline came at last to believe that it was a modified phase of S. Vitus' dance, and that for want of anything better the old beldame vented her nerves on imaginary dust which she pursued in holes and corners with her feathery weapon.

This went on till Mlle. de Lemaque was six-and-twenty. She was still a bright, brave creature, working hard, accepting the privations and toil of her life in a spirit of sunshiny courage. But the sun was no longer always shining. There were days now when he drew behind a cloud—when toil pressed like a burden, and she beat her wings against it, and hated the cage that cooped her in; and she longed not so much for rest [pg 072] or happiness as for freedom—for a larger scope and higher aims, and wider, fuller sympathies. When these cloudy days came around, Aline felt the void of her life with an intensity that amounted at times to anguish; she felt it all the more keenly because she could not speak of it. Mme. de Chanoir would not have understood it. The sisters were sincerely attached to each other, but there was little sympathy of character between them, and on many points they were as little acquainted with each other as the neighbors on the next street. They knew this, and agreed sensibly to keep clear of certain subjects on which they could never meet except to disagree. The younger sister, therefore, when the sky was overcast, and when her spirits flagged, never tried to lean upon the older, but worked against the enemy in silence, denying herself the luxury of complaint. If her looks betrayed her, as was sometimes the case, and prompted Mme. de Chanoir to inquire if there was anything the matter beyond the never-ending annoyance of life in general, Aline's assurance that there was not was invariably followed by the remark: “Ma sœur, I wish you were married.” To which Aline as invariably replied: “I am happier as I am, Félicité.” It was true, or at any rate Mlle. de Lemaque thought it was. Under all her surface indifference she carried a true woman's heart. She had dreamt her dreams of happiness, of tender fireside joys, and the dream was so fair and beautiful that for years it filled her life like a reality, and when she discovered, or fancied she did, that it was all too beautiful to be anything but a dream, that the hero of her young imagination would never cross her path in the form of a mortal husband, Aline accepted the discovery with a sigh, but without repining, and laid aside all thought of marriage as a guest that was not for her. As to the marriages that she saw every day around her, she would no more have bound herself in one of them than she would have sold herself to an Eastern pasha. Marriage was a very different thing in her eyes from what it was in Mme. de Chanoir's. There was no point on which the sisters were more asunder than on this, and Aline understood it so well that she avoided touching on it except in jest. Whenever the subject was introduced, she drew a mask of frivolity over her real feelings to avoid bringing down the générale's ridicule on what she would stigmatize as preposterous sentimentality.

M. Dalibouze alone guessed something of this under-current of deep feeling in the young girl's character. With the subtle instinct of affection he penetrated the disguise in which she wrapped herself, but, with a delicacy that she scarcely gave him credit for, he never let her see that he did. Sometimes, indeed, when one of those fits of tristesse was upon her, and she was striving to dissemble it by increased cheerfulness towards everybody, and sauciness towards him, the professor would adapt the conversation to the tone of her thoughts with a skill and apropos that surprised her. Once in particular Aline was startled by the way in which he betrayed either a singularly close observation of her character, or a still more singular sympathy with its moods and sufferings. It was on a Saturday evening, the little circle was gathered round the fire, and the conversation fell upon poetry and the mission of poets amongst common men. Aline declared that it was the grandest of all missions; that, after the prophet and priest, the poet did more for the moral well-being, the spiritual redemption of his fellows than any other missionary, whether [pg 073] philosopher, artist, or patriot; he combined them all, in fact, if he wished it. If he was a patriot, he could serve his country better than a soldier, by singing her wrongs and her glories, and firing the souls of her sons, and making all mankind vibrate to the touch of pain, or joy, or passionate revenge, while he sat quietly by his own hearth; she quoted Moore and Krazinski, and other patriot bards who living had ruled their people, and sent down their name a legacy of glory to unborn generations, till warmed by her subject she grew almost eloquent, and broke off in an impulsive cry of admiration and envy: “Oh! what a glorious privilege to be a poet, to be even a man with the power of doing something, of living a noble life, instead of being a weak, good-for-nothing woman!”

The little ring of listeners heard her with pleasure, and thought she must have a very keen appreciation of the beauties of the poets to speak of them so well and so fervently. But M. Dalibouze saw more in it than this. He saw an under-tone of impatience, of disappointment, of longing to go and do likewise, to spread her wings and fly, to wield a wand that had power to make others spread their wings; there was a spirit's war-cry in it, a rebel's impotent cry against the narrow, inexorable bondage of her life.

“Yes,” said the professor, “it is a grand mission, I grant you, but it is not such a rare one as you make it out, Mlle. Aline. There are more poets in the world than those who write poetry; few of us have the gift of being poets in language, but we may all be poets in action if we will; we may live out our lives in poems.”

“If we had the fashioning of our lives, no doubt we might,” asserted Aline ironically; “but they are most of them so shabby that I defy Homer himself to manufacture an epic or an idyl out of them.”

“You are mistaken. There is no life too shabby to be a poem,” said M. Dalibouze; “it is true, we can't fashion our lives as you say, but we can color them, we can harmonize them; but we must begin by believing this, and by getting our elements under command; we must sort them and arrange them, just as Mme. la Générale is doing with the shreds and silks for the tapestry, and then go on patiently working out the pattern leaf by leaf; by-and-by when the web gets tangled as it is sure to do with the best workers, instead of pulling angrily at it, or cutting it with the sharp scissors of revolt, we must call up a soft breeze from the land of souls where the spirit of the true poet dwells, and bid it blow over it, and then let us listen, and we shall hear the spirit-wind draw tones of music out of our tangled web, like the breeze sweeping the strings of an Æolian harp. It is our own fault, or perhaps oftener our own misfortune, if our lives look shabby to us; we consider them piecemeal instead of looking at them as a whole.”

“But how can we look at them as a whole?” said Aline. “We don't even know that they ever will develop into a whole. How many of us remain on the easel a sort of washed-in sketch to the end? It seems to me we are pretty much like apples in an orchard; some drop off in the flower, some when they are grown to little green balls, hard and sour and good for nothing; it is only a little of the tree that comes to maturity.”

“And is there not abundance of poetry in every phase of the apple's life, no matter when it falls?” said M. Dalibouze. “How many poems has the blight of the starry blossom given birth to? And the little green [pg 074] ball, who will count the odes that the school-boy has sung to it, not in good hexameters perhaps, but in sound, heart poetry, full of zest and the gusto of youth, when all bitters are sweet? O mon Dieu! when I think of the days when a bright-green apple was like honey in my mouth, I could be a poet myself! No paté de foie gras ever tasted half so sweet as that forbidden fruit of my school-days!”

“Good for the forbidden fruit!” said Aline, amused at the professor's sentiment over the reminiscence; “but that is only one view of the question: if the apples could speak, they would give us another.”

“Would they?” said M. Dalibouze. “I'm not sure of that. If the apples discuss the point at all, believe me, they are agreed that whatever befalls them is the very best thing that could. We have no evidence of any created thing, vegetable, mineral, or animal, grumbling at its lot; that is reserved to man, discontent is man's prerogative, he quarrels with himself, with his destiny, his neighbors, everything by turns. If we could but do like the apples, blossom, and grow, and fall, early or late, just as the wind and the gardener wished, we should be happy. Fancy an apple quarrelling with the sun in spring for not warming him as he does in August! It would be no more preposterous than it is for men to quarrel with their circumstances. The fruit of our lives have their seasons like the fruit of our gardens; the winter and snows and the sharp winds are just as necessary to both as the fire of the summer heat; all growth is gradual, and we must accept the process through which we are brought to maturity, just as the apples do. It is not the same for all of us; some are ripened under the warm vibrating sun, others resist it, and, like certain winter fruit, require the cold twilight days to mellow them. But it matters little what the process is, it is sure to be the right one if we wait for it and accept it.”

“I wonder what stage of it I am in at the present moment,” said Aline. “I can't say the sun has had much to do with it; the winds and the rain have been the busiest agents in my garden so far.”

“Patience, mademoiselle!” said M. Dalibouze. “The sun will come in his own good time.”

“You answer for that?”

“I do.”

Aline looked him straight in the face as she put the question like a challenge, and M. Dalibouze met the saucy bright eyes with a grave glance that had more of tenderness in it than she had ever seen there before. It flashed upon her for a moment that the sun might come to her through a less worthy medium than this kind, faithful, honorable man, and that she had been mayhap a fool to her own happiness in shutting the gate on him so contemptuously.

Perhaps the professor read the thought on her face, for he said in a penetrated tone, and fixing his eyes upon her:

“The true sun of life is marriage.”

It was an unfortunate remark. Aline tossed back her head, and burst out laughing. The spell that had held her for an instant was broken.

“A day will come when some one will tell you so, and you will not laugh, Mlle. Aline,” said M. Dalibouze humbly, and hiding his discomfiture under a smile.

This was the only time within the last two years that he had betrayed himself into any expression of latent hope with regard to Mlle. de Lemaque, and it had no sooner escaped him than he regretted it. The following [pg 075] Saturday, by way of atonement, he brought up a most desirable parti for inspection, and next day Mme. Cléry was seized with the inevitable dusting fit. Nothing, however, came of it.

Things went on without any noticeable change at No. 13 till September, 1870, when Paris was declared in a state of siege. The sisters were not among those lucky ones who wavered for a time between going and staying, between the desire to put themselves in safe-keeping, and the temptation of living through the blocus and boasting of it for the rest of their days. There was no choice for them but to stay. Aline, as usual, made the best of it; she must stay, so she settled it in her mind that she liked to stay; that it would be a wonderful experience to live through the most exciting episode that could have broken up the stagnant monotony of their lives, and that, in fact, it was rather an enjoyable prospect than the reverse.

Mme. Cléry was commissioned to lay in as ample a store of provisions as their purse would allow. The good woman did the best she could with her means, and the little group encouraged each other to face the coming events like patriotic citizens, cheerfully and bravely. Of the magnitude of those events, or their own probable share in their national calamities, they had a very vague notion.

“The situation,” M. Dalibouze assured them, “was critical, but by no means desperate. On the contrary, France, instead of being at the mercy of her enemies, was now on the eve of crushing them, of obtaining one of those astonishing victories which make ordinary history pale. It was the incommensurable superiority of the French arms that had brought her to this pass; that had driven Prussia mad with rage and envy, and roused her to defiance. Infatuated Prussia! she would mourn over her folly once and for ever. She would find that Paris was not alone the Greece of civilization and the arts and sciences, but that she was the most impregnable fortress that ever defied the batteries of a foe. Europe had deserted Paris, after betraying France to her enemies; now the day of reckoning was at hand; Europe would reap the fruits of her base jealousy, and witness the triumph of the capital of the world!”

This was M. Dalibouze's firm opinion, and he gave it in public and private to any one who cared to hear it. When Mme. de Chanoir asked if he meant to remain in Paris through the siege, the professor was so shocked by the implied affront to his patriotism that he had to control himself before he could trust himself to answer her.

“Comment, Mme. la Générale! You think so meanly of me as to suppose I would abandon my country at such a crisis! Is it a time to fly when the enemy is at our gates, and when the nation expects every man to stand forth and defend her, and scatter those miserable eaters of sauerkraut to the winds!”

And straightway acting up to this noble patriotic credo, M. Dalibouze had himself measured for a National Guard uniform. No sooner had he endorsed it than he rushed off to Nadar's and had himself photographed. He counted the hours till the proofs came home, and then, bursting with satisfaction, he set out to No. 13.

“It is unbecoming,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he presented his carte de visite to the générale, “mais que voulez-vous? A man must sacrifice everything to his country; what is personal appearance that it could weigh in the balance [pg 076] against duty! Bah! I could get myself up as a punchinello, and perch all day on the top of Mont Valérien, if it could scare away one of those despicable brigands from the walls of the capital!”

“You are wrong in saying it is unbecoming, M. Dalibouze,” protested the générale, attentively scanning the portrait, where the military costume was set off by a semi-heroic military pose, “I think the dress suits you admirably.”

“You are too indulgent, madame,” said the professor. “You see your friends through the eyes of friendship; but, in truth, it was purely from an historical point of view that I made the little sacrifice of personal feeling; the portrait will be interesting as a souvenir some day when we, the actors in this great drama, have passed away.”

But time went on, and the prophetic triumphs of M. Dalibouze were not realized; the eaters of sauerkraut held their ground, and provisions began to grow scarce at No. 13. The purse of the sisters, never a large one, was now seriously diminished, Aline's contribution to the common fund having ceased altogether with the beginning of the siege. Her old pupils had left, and there was no chance of finding any new ones at such a time as this. No one had money to spend on lessons, or leisure to learn; the study that absorbed everybody was how to realize food or fuel out of impossible elements. Every one was suffering, in a more or less degree, from the miseries imposed by the state of blocus; but one would have fancied the presence of death in so many shapes, by fire without, by cold and famine within, would have detached them generally from life, and made them forgetful of the wants of the body and absorbed them in sublimer cares. But it was not so. After the first shock of hearing the cannon at the gates close to them, they got used to it. Later, when the bombardment came, there was another momentary panic, but it calmed down, and they got used to that too. Shells could apparently fall all round without killing them. So they turned all their thoughts to the cherishing and comfort of their poor afflicted bodies. It must have been sad, and sometimes grimly comical, to watch the singular phases of human nature developed by the blocus. One of the oddest and most frequent was the change it wrought in people with regard to their food. People who had been ascetically indifferent to it before, and never thought of their meals till they sat down to table, grew monomaniac on the point, and could think and speak of nothing else. Meals were talked of, in fact, from what we can gather, more than politics, the Prussians, or the probable issue of the siege, or any of the gigantic problems that were being worked out both inside and outside the besieged city. Intelligent men and women discussed by the hour, with gravity and gusto, the best way of preparing cats and dogs, rats and mice, and all the abominations that necessity had substituted for food. Poor human nature was fermenting under the process like wine in the vat, and all its dregs came uppermost: selfishness, callousness to the sufferings of others, ingratitude, all the pitiable meanness of a man, boiled up to the surface and showed him a sorry figure to behold. But other nobler things came to the surface too. There were innumerable silent dramas, soul-poems going on in unlikely places, making no noise beyond their quiet sphere, but travelling high and sounding loud behind the curtain of gray sky that shrouded the winter sun of [pg 077] Paris. The cannon shook her ramparts, and the shells flashed like lurid furies through the midnight darkness; but far above the din and the darkness and the death-cries rose the low sweet music of many a brave heart's sacrifice; the stronger giving up his share to the weaker, the son hoarding his scanty rations against the day of still scantier supplies, when there would be scarcely food enough to support the weakened frame of an aged father or mother, talking big about the impossibility of surrender, and lightly about the price of resistance. There were mothers in Paris, too, and wherever mothers are there is sure to be found self-sacrifice in its loveliest, divinest form. How many of them toiled and sweated, aye, and begged, subduing all pride to love for the little ones, who ate their fill and knew nothing of the cruel tooth that was gnawing the bread-winner's vitals!

We who heard the thunder of the artillery and the blasting shout of the mitrailleuse, we did not hear these things, but other ears did, and not a note of the sweet music was lost, angels were hearkening for them, and as they rose above the dark discord, like crystal bells tolling in the storm wind, the white-winged messengers caught them on golden lyres and wafted them on to paradise.

To Be Continued.

On A Picture Of S. Mary Bearing Doves To Sacrifice.

My eyes climb slowly up, as by a stair,

To seek a picture on my chamber wall—

A picture of the Mother of our Lord,

Hung where the latest twilight shadows fall.

My lifted eyes behold a childlike face,

Under a veil of woman's holiest thought,

O'ershadowed by the mystery of grace,

And mystery of mercy—God hath wrought.

Down through the dim old temple, moving slow,

Her drooping lids scarce lifted from the ground,

As if she faintly heard the distant flow

Of far-off seas of grief she could not sound.

I think archangels would not count it sin

If, underneath the veil that hides her eyes,

They, seeing all things, saw the soul within

Held more of mother-love than sacrifice.

She walks erect, the virgin undefiled,

Back from her throat the loose robe falls apart,

And e'en as she would clasp her royal Child,

She holds the dovelets to her tender heart.

No white wing trembles 'neath her pitying palm,

No feather flutters in this last warm nest,

And thus she bears them on—while solemn psalm

Wakes dim, prophetic stirrings in her breast.

Sweet Hebrew mother! many a woman shares,

Thy crucifixion of her hopes and loves,

And in her arms to death unshrinking bears

Her precious things—even her turtle-doves.

But often, ere the temple's marble floor

Has ceased the echo of her parting feet,

Her gifts prove worthless—thine is ever more

The gift of gifts—transcendent and complete.

We mothers, too, have treasures all our own,

And, one by one, oft see them sacrificed:

Thou, Blessed among women—thou alone

Hast held within thine arms the dear Child-Christ.

Therefore, mine eyes mount up, as by a stair,

To seek the picture on my chamber wall;

Therefore my soul climbs oft the steeps of prayer,

To rest where shadows of thy Son's cross fall.

Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries.

It seems very ambitious to try and present to the reader a sketch of anything so vast as the field of research pointed out by the above title, and, indeed, far from aiming at this, we will set forth by saying, once for all, that our attempts will be nothing more than passing views, isolated specimens of that immense whole which, under the names of education, progress, development, scholasticism, and renaissance, forms the intellectual “stock in trade” of every modern system of knowledge.

The “past” is divided into two distinct eras—the monastic and the scholastic. In the earlier era, the centres of thought were the Benedictine and the Columbanian monasteries; in the second era, intellectual life gathered its strength in the universities, under the guidance of the church, typified by the Mendicant Orders. The first era may be said to have lasted from the fifth century to the eleventh, and to have reached its apogee in the seventh and eighth. The second reached from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, and attained its highest glory in the prolific and gifted thirteenth century. Each had its representative centre par excellence, its representative men, philosophy, and religious development. Prior Vaughan, in his recent masterpiece, the Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, expresses this idea in many ways. “From the sixth to the thirteenth century,” he says, “the education of Europe was Benedictine. Monks in their cells ... were planting the mustard-seed of future European intellectual growth.” Further on he says: “Plato represents rest; Aristotle, inquisitiveness. The former is synthetical; the latter, analytical. Quies is monastic, inquisitiveness is dialectical.” Thus, Plato is the representative master of the earlier era; S. Benedict and his incomparable rule, its representative religious outgrowth; the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the liberal arts, its representative system of education. We do not hear of many “commentaries” in those days, nor of curious schedules of questions, such as, “Did the little hands of the Boy Jesus create the stars?”[26] On the other hand, elegant Latinity was taught, and the Scriptures were multiplied by thousands of costly and laborious transcriptions. The first era was eminently conservative. Its very schools were physically representative; “the solitary abbey, hidden away amongst the hills, with its psalmody, and manual work, and unexciting study.”[27] In the scholastic era, things were reversed. “Latinity grew barbarous, and many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise of reason. Yet intellectual progress was being made in spite of the decay of letters.... In the extraordinary intellectual revolution which marked the [pg 080] opening of the thirteenth century, the study of thoughts was substituted for the study of words.”[28] Here the representative exponent was Aristotle; the religious developments, the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders; and the personal outgrowth of the clashes of the two systems—that of the old immovable dogmatic church, and that of irreverence and rationalism—S. Bernard, S. Dominic, S. Thomas of Aquin, on the one hand, and Peter Abelard and William de Saint Amour, on the other. Here, again, we find the locale analogous to the spirit of the age. Cities were now the centres of knowledge; noisy streets, with ominous names, such as the “Rue Coupegueule,”[29] in Paris, so named from the frequent murders committed there during university brawls, take the place of the silent cloister and long stone corridors of the abbey; physical disorder typifies the moral confusion of the day; and Paris the chaotic stands in the room of Monte Casino, S. Gall, or English Jarrow. Then followed the “Renaissance,” that “revival of practical paganism.”[30] “The saints and fathers of the church gradually disappeared from the schools, and society, instead of being permeated, as in former times, with an atmosphere of faith, was now redolent of heathenism.”[31] Petrarch and Boccaccio were the representatives of this refined (if we must use the word in its ordinary sensual meaning) infidelity; Plato was the god of the new Olympus, but unrecognizable from the Plato embodied in the Fathers and Benedictine littérateurs, for, practically speaking, polite life had now become Epicurean; while as for the religious development of the times, since it could no longer be representative, it became apostolic. Savonarola and S. Francis Xavier are names that stand out in the moral darkness of that era, and the latter suggests the only new creation in the church from that day to our own. Christian education had been Benedictine, then Dominican; it now became Jesuit. The world knew its old enemy in the new dress, and ever since has warred against it with diabolical foresight and unwearied venom. Of this last phase of the past, which is so like the present that we have classed it apart, we do not purpose to speak, but will confine ourselves to those older and grander, though hardly less troublous times known as the middle ages.

The first two centres of Christianity and patristic learning outside Rome were Alexandria and Constantinople. The latter soon fell away into schism, and thence into that barbarism which the vigorous Western races were at that very same time casting off through the influence of the church that Byzantium had rejected. From Alexandria we may date the beginnings of our own systems of learning. The end of the second century already found the Christian schools of that city famous, and the converted Stoic Pantænus spoken of as one of “transcendent powers.” Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto, were teachers in those schools, and the Acts of the Martyrs tell us that Catharine, the learned virgin-martyr, was an Alexandrian. Hippolytus was a famous astronomer and arithmetician. Clement used poetry, philosophy, science, eloquence, and even satire, in the interests of religion. Origen became the master of S. Gregory Thaumaturgus and his brother [pg 081] Athenodorus. “It was now recognized that Christians were men who could think and reason with other men, ... and of whom a university city need not be ashamed. Christians were expected to teach and study the liberal arts, profane literature, philosophy, and the Biblical languages, ... and all the time the business of the school went on, persecution raged with small intermission.”[32] Prior Vaughan says that “Faith took her seat with her Greek profile and simple majesty in Alexandria, and withstood, as one gifted with a divine power, two subtle and dangerous enemies—heathen philosophy and heretical theology—and, by means of Clement and of Origen, proved to passion and misbelief that a new and strange intellectual influence had been brought into the world.”[33] Antioch and Constantinople claimed the world's attention later on, and the Thebaid teemed with equal treasures of learning and of holiness. S. John Chrysostom exhorts Christian parents, in 376, “to entrust the education of their sons to the solitaries, to those men of the mountain whose lessons he himself had received.”[34]

When the glories of the patristic age were waning, and the East seemed to fail the church, through whose influence alone she had become famous, there arose in the West, among the half-barbarous races of Goths, Franks, Celts, and Teutons, other champions of monasticism and pioneers of learning. The raw material of Christian Europe was being moulded into the heroic form it bore during mediæval times by poet, philosopher, and legislator-monks.

Of these monastic centres, Lerins is perhaps the oldest. Founded in 410, on an island of the Mediterranean near the coast of France, it became “another Thebaid, a celebrated school of theology and Christian philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the works of barbarism, and an asylum for literature and science which had fled from Italy on the invasion of the Goths.”[35] All France sought its bishops from this holy and learned isle. Among its great scholars was Vincent of Lerins, the first controversialist of his time, and the originator of the celebrated formula: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. We may be pardoned for extending our notice of him, since the words he uses on the progress of the church are so singularly appropriate to our own times and problems. Having established the unchangeableness of Catholic doctrine, he goes on to say: “Shall there, then, be no progress in the church of Christ? There shall be progress, and even great progress, ... but it will be progress and not change. With the growth of ages there must necessarily be a growth of intelligence, of wisdom, and of knowledge, for each man as for all the church. But the religion of souls must imitate the progress of the human form, which, in developing and growing in years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity of age as in the flower of youth.”[36] Had the monk of Lerins foreknown the aberrations of the doctor of Munich, he could not have better refuted the latest heresy of our own day. S. Lupus of Troyes, who arrested Attila at the gates of his episcopal city, and successfully combated the Pelagian heresy in England; S. Cesarius of Arles, who was successively persecuted and finally reinstated by two barbarian kings, and who gave his sister Cesaria a rule for her nuns which was [pg 082] adopted by Queen Radegundes for her immense monastery of Poictiers; Salvian, whose eloquence was likened to that of S. Augustine, were all monks of Lerins. S. Cesarius has well epitomized the training of this great and holy school when he says: “It is she who nourishes those illustrious monks who are sent into all provinces of Gaul as bishops. When they arrive, they are children; when they go out, they are fathers. She receives them as recruits, she sends them forth kings.”[37] As late as 1537, we find on the list of the commission appointed by Pope Paul III. to draw up the preliminaries of the Council of Trent, and especially to point out and correct the abuses of secular training and paganized art, the name of Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins.[38] But we must hasten on to other foundations of a reputation and influence as world-wide as that of the Mediterranean Abbey.

In 580, there was a famous school at Seville, where all the arts and sciences were taught by learned masters, presided over by S. Leander, the bishop of the diocese. Then S. Ildefonso, of Toledo, a scholar of Seville, founded a great school at Toledo itself (where the famous councils took place later on), which, together with Seville, made “Spain the intellectual light of the Christian world in the seventh century.”[39]

From the South let us turn to the fruitful land where monks supplied the place of martyrs, and where the faith, planted by Patrick, grew so marvellously into absolute power within the short space of a century. Armagh, Bangor, Clonard, are names that at once recall the palmy days of sacred learning. “Within a century after the death of S. Patrick,” says Bishop Nicholson, “the Irish seminaries had so increased that most parts of Europe sent their children to be educated there, and drew thence their bishops and teachers.”[40] “By the ninth century, Armagh could boast of 7,000 students.”[41] “Clonard,” says Usher, “issued forth a stream of saints and doctors like the Greek warriors from the wooden horse.”[42] The Irish communities, Montalembert tells us in his brilliant language, “entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil; they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, from no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.” The young Luan answered the Abbot of Bangor, who warned him against the dangers of too engrossing a study of the liberal arts: “If I have the knowledge of God, I shall never offend God, for they who disobey him are they who know him not.”

The Irish were as adventurous as they were learned, and Montalembert bears witness to the national propensity in the following graceful language: “This monastic nation became the missionary nation par excellence. The Irish missionaries covered the land and seas of the West. Unwearied navigators, they landed on the most desert islands; they overflowed the continent with their successive immigrations. They saw in incessant visions a world known and unknown to be conquered for Christ.” And the author of Christian Schools and Scholars reminds us of the beautiful legend of S. Brendan, the founder of the great school of Clonfert in Connaught, the school-fellow of Columba, and the pupil of Finian at Clonard, who is declared [pg 083] to have set sail in search of the Land of Promise, and during his seven years' journey to have “discovered a vast tract of land, lying far to the west of Ireland, where he beheld wonderful birds and trees of unknown foliage, which gave forth perfumes of extraordinary sweetness.” Whatever fiction is mingled with this marvellous narrative, it is difficult not to admit that it must have had some foundation of truth, and the poetic legend which was perfectly familiar to Columbus is said to have furnished him with one motive for believing in the existence of a western continent. Later on we shall find Albertus Magnus foreshadowing the same belief in his writings. Two of the Irish missionaries deserve especial notice—Columba, the Apostle of Caledonia, and Columbanus, the founder of Luxeuil in Burgundy. The former, with his stronghold of Iona, which “came to be looked upon as the chief seat of learning, not only in Britain, but in the whole Western world,”[43] is familiar to all readers of Montalembert's great monastic poem, and to that other public who have had access to the Duke of Argyll's recent work on the rock-bound metropolis of Christian Britain. We are told that the most scrupulous exactitude was required in the Scriptorium of Iona, and that Columba himself, a skilful penman, wrote out the famous Book of Kells with his own hand. It is now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The monks of Iona studied and taught the classics, the mechanical arts, law, history, and physic. They transferred to their new home all the learning of Armagh and Clonard. Painful journeys in search of books or of the oral teaching of some renowned master were nothing in their eyes; they listened to lectures on the Greek and Latin fathers, hung entranced over Homer and Virgil, and were skilled in calculating eclipses and other natural phenomena. They astonished the world with their arithmetical knowledge and linguistic erudition, and their keen logic and love of syllogism are spoken of by S. Benedict of Anian in the ninth century.[44] Art was equally cultivated, but this, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject. As an example of Columba's liberal spirit and devotion to the best interests of literature, we may remark his defence of the bards at the Assembly of Drumceitt. Poets, historians, law-givers, and genealogists, the bards represented all the learning of a past age and system; and if their arrogance now and then overstepped the bounds of courtesy, and even sometimes the restraints of law, in the main their institute was heroic and praiseworthy. Columba argued against their opponent, a prince of the Nialls of the South, Aedh, that “care must be taken not to pull up the good corn with the tares, and that the general exile of the poets would be the death of a venerable antiquity, and that of a poetry which was dear to the country and useful to those who knew how to employ it.” His eloquence saved the bardic institute, and the poets in their gratitude composed a famous song in his praise, which became celebrated in Irish literature under the name of Ambhra, or Praise of S. Columbkill.[45]

Columbanus, a monk of Bangor, was destined to found an Irish colony of even greater fame and longer duration than Iona. Luxeuil, founded in 590, at the foot of the Vosges in Burgundy, soon counted among its sons many hundred votaries of learning. [pg 084] Montalembert says of it that “no monastery of the West had yet shone with so much lustre or attracted so many disciples”. It became another Lerins, a nursery of bishops for the Frankish and Burgundian cities, a notable seat of secular knowledge, and, above all, a school of saints. Indeed, among the meagre, skeleton-like details that come down to us of these giant abodes of a supernatural race of men, we find ourselves perforce repeating over and over the same formula of commendation. What more could one say but that each of these monastic centres was a school of saints? And yet how much variety in that sameness! How much that even we can see, and distinguish, and mentally dissect! We see some soaring spirit, whose burning love is never content with renunciation, but ever seeks, with holy restlessness, some deeper solitude in which to pray and meditate, like the Bavarian monk Sturm, the pupil and companion of S. Boniface, and the founder of the world-renowned Abbey of Fulda; or, again, some great thinker like Alcuin of York, whose touching love for his own land and city makes us feel with pardonable pride how near akin is our own weak human nature to that of even the giant men of old; or spirits like the gentle Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the traditions of whose unwearied moderation and “inestimable gift of kindness and light-heartedness,” as well as his “intense and active sympathy for those human sorrows which in all ages are the same,” are all the more precious to us that they are also mingled with tales of his wondrous horsemanship, athletic frame, and simple enjoyment of legitimate sports. The same author we have just quoted, Montalembert, says that the description of his childhood reads like that of a little Anglo-Saxon of our own day, a scholar of Eton or Harrow. So that, when one after another we read of Gaulish, Celtic, and Teutonic abbeys that were intellectual capitals and centres of far-reaching and all-embracing knowledge, we must always remember that these words, grown trite at last from frequent use, have as varied a meaning as the collective name of Milky Way, which stands for countless worlds of unknown stars.

As Christianity spread in the early part of the middle ages, these monastic centres were multiplied like the posterity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Lindisfarne, the Iona of the eastern coast of England, soon rivalled her Scottish predecessor, and retained much the same impress of Celtic learning, while Melrose served as a supplementary school and novitiate. The Teutonic element now began to make itself felt. Caedmon, the Saxon cowherd, transformed into a poet and a monk by a direct call from God, sang the creation in strains “which,” says Montalembert, “may still be admired even beside the immortal poem of the author of Paradise Lost.” Wilfrid, the S. Thomas à Becket of the seventh century, vigorously planted Roman traditions and customs in the Saxon monastery of Ripon, and perpetuated the name of S. Peter in his other magnificent foundation of Peterborough, the poetic “Home among the Meadows,” or Medehamstede.[46] Theodore, the Greek metropolitan of England, in 673 introduced into the Anglo-Saxon schools “an intellectual and literary development as worthy of the admiration as of the gratitude of posterity; the study of the two classic tongues (Greek and Latin) chiefly flourished under his [pg 085] care.... Monasteries, thus transformed into homes of scientific study, could not but spread a taste and respect for intellectual life, not only among the clergy, but also among their lay-protectors, the friends and neighbors of each community.”[47]

Benedict Biscop, the contemporary of the chivalrous Wilfrid of York, is eminently a representative of Anglo-Saxon cultivation. Montalembert puts his name in the “monastic constellation of the seventh century” for intelligence, art, and science. He it was who undertook a journey to Rome (which place he had visited many times before on other errands) solely to procure books; and it must be borne in mind that this journey was then twice as long and a hundred times more dangerous than a journey from London to Australia is now. After having founded the Abbey of Wearmouth, at the mouth of the Wear, Benedict set forth again, bringing masons and glass-makers from Gaul to teach the Anglo-Saxons some notions of solid and ornamental architecture. He was a passionate book-collector, and wished each of his monasteries to have a great library, which he considered indispensable to the discipline, instruction, and good organization of the community. Originally a monk at Lerins, whither he had gone after giving up a knightly and seignorial career in his own country, he naturally drank in that thirst for learning which, in the earlier middle ages, seems to have been almost inseparable from holiness. Jarrow, the sister monastery to Wearmouth, situated near it by the mouth of the Tyne, was even yet more famous as a school of hallowed knowledge, and has become endeared to the hearts of all Englishmen as the home of the Venerable Bede. His is a figure which, even in the foreign annals of the church, stands pre-eminent among ecclesiastical writers, and one in whom the Anglo-Saxon character is thoroughly and beautifully revealed. Calm and steadfast self-possession, that beautiful attribute of the followers of the “Prince of Peace,” is the key-note to the writings of the historian-monk of Jarrow. The first glimpse we have of him is as the solitary companion of the new-made abbot, Ceolfrid, chanting the divine office at the age of seven; his voice choked with sobs as he thought of the elder brethren, all of whom a grievous pestilence had carried off. But though the choir had gone to join in the hymns of the New Jerusalem, the canonical hours were nevertheless kept up by the sorrowing abbot and the child-chorister until new brethren came to take the place of the old ones. Bede was never idle; he says himself that “he was always his own secretary, and dictated, composed, and copied all himself.” His great history was the means of bringing him into contact with the best men of his day. “The details he gives on this subject show that a constant communication was kept up between the principal centres of religious life, and that an amount of intellectual activity as surprising as it is admirable—when the difficulty of communication and the internal wars which ravaged England are taken into account—existed among their inhabitants.”[48] Bede's political foresight seems to have been of no mean order, and the grave advice he administers to bishops on ecclesiastical abuses shows at once his practical common sense and fearlessness of character. He also condemns the too sweeping grants of [pg 086] land, exemptions from taxes, and privileges offered to monastic houses, and gives the wisest reasons for his strictures. “The nations of Catholic Europe envied England the possession of so great a doctor, the first among the offspring of barbarous races who had won a place among the doctors of the church, ... and his illustrious successor Alcuin, speaking to the community of Jarrow which Bede had made famous, bears witness to his celebrity in these words: ‘Stir up, then, the minds of your sleepers by his example; study his works, and you will be able to draw from them the secret of eternal beauty.’ ”[49]

Malmesbury was another Anglo-Saxon centre of thought, and the memory of S. Aldhelm long gave it that “powerful and popular existence which lasted far into the middle ages.”[50] The cathedral school of York, “which rose into celebrity just as Bede was withdrawn from the scene of his useful labors,”[51] produced one of the greatest of English scholars, and one instrumental in carrying knowledge acquired among monks to the warrior court of a foreign prince. Charlemagne and his Palatine schools of Aix-la-Chapelle would have been shorn of half their glory had it not been for the Englishman Alcuin. But it was not without a pang that the home-loving master left the school he had almost formed, and which he cherished as the product of his first efforts, and undertook to foster the same institutions in a strange land. These schools, in which enthusiastic French writers love to trace the germ of the mighty University of Paris, seem to have possessed a system of equality very creditable both to their master and their imperial patron. Later on, when the wearied magister at last wrested from Charlemagne the permission to retire into some monastery, since he had failed in obtaining leave to return and die at York, it was only to found another school that he occupied his leisure. S. Martin's at Tours now became as famous as the Palatine at Aix-la-Chapelle. “He applied himself to his new duties with unabated energy, and by his own teaching raised the school of Tours to a renown which was shared by none of its contemporaries. In the hall of studies, a distinct place was set apart for the copyists, who were exhorted by certain verses of their master, set up in a conspicuous place, to mind their stops and not to leave out letters.”[52] Here, then, is another of those pleasant little details which creates a fellow-feeling between the human nature of to-day and that of past ages. The description of his life from which we have drawn this sketch closes thus: “In short, his active mind, thoroughly Anglo-Saxon in its temper, worked on to the end; laboring at a sublime end by homely practical details. One sees he is of the same race with Bede, who wrote and dictated to the last hour of his life, and, when his work was finished, calmly closed his book and died.”[53]

We have already named Fulda, the glorious monastic centre where the monk Sturm established the Benedictine rule in 744, and where, before his death, 400 monks sang daily the praises of God, and good scholars were trained to intellectual warfare in the name of faith. In 802, “mindful of its great origin, it was one of the first to enter heartily into the revival of letters instituted by Charlemagne,” and sent the monks Hatto and Rabanus to study under [pg 087] Alcuin. We find a most graphic description of the daily routine of this great school in Christian Schools and Scholars. It so well illustrates the common life of the middle ages that we do not hesitate to give it at some length: “The German nobles gladly entrusted their sons to Rabanus' care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and patience. At his lectures every one was trained to write equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy.... The school of Fulda had inherited the fullest share of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual activity which we have already seen working in the foundations of S. Benedict Biscop. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks.... Within doors the visitor might have beheld a huge range of workshops, in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal.... Passing on to the interior of the building, the stranger would have been introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school ... where our visitor, were he from the more civilized South, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil or Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother-professors accuse him in good-natured jesting of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the study of the dead languages, you may find some engaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries, words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe.... It may be added that the school of Fulda would have been found ordered with admirable discipline. Twelve of the best professors were chosen, and formed a council of elders or doctors, presided over by one who bore the title of principal, and who assigned to each one the lectures he was to deliver to the pupils. In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labor, Rabanus continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and reckoned among his pupils the most celebrated men of the age.... For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works in prose and verse embraced a large variety of subjects, ... and he is commonly reputed the author of the Veni Creator.”[54]

One of his pupils, the monk Otfried of Weissembourg, entered with singular ardor into the study of the Tudesque or native dialect. Inspired [pg 088] by Rabanus, who himself devoted much attention to this subject, and encouraged by a “certain noble lady named Judith,” Otfried undertook to translate into his native tongue the most remarkable Gospel passages relating to Our Lord's life. His verses speedily became familiar to the people, and by degrees took the place of those pagan songs of their forefathers, by which much of the leaven of heathenism yet remained in the minds of the peasantry, associated as it was with all the touching prestige of nationalism and the honest pride they felt in their ancestors' prowess.

Rabanus, while master of the Fulda school, had much to suffer from the eccentricities of his abbot, Ratgar, who, afflicted with the building mania, actually forced his monks to interrupt their studies, and even shorten their prayers, to take up the trowel and the hod and hasten on his new erections. Here we have the other side of the daily life of the middle ages, and a more ludicrous scene can hardly be imagined than the enforced labor of the scholar-monks, their rueful countenances showing their despair at the unpleasant task, yet their unflinching principle of obedience towering above their disgust, and compelling them to work in silence till relieved by the Emperor Louis himself. The new abbot, installed in Ratgar's place by a commission empowered to look into the latter's unheard-of abuse of his authority, was a saint as well as a scholar, and “healed the wounds which a long course of ill-treatment had opened in the community.” Rabanus himself succeeded him, and resigned the mastership of the school to his favorite assistant, Candidus.

Passing over many abbeys whose merits it were too long a story to enumerate, we come to S. Gall, the great Helvetian centre of thought. Originally it was founded by Gall, the disciple of Columbanus, and in the reign of King Pepin changed the Columbanian for the Benedictine rule. Already, in its early beginnings, it was a home of art, and Tutilo's works in gold, copper, and brass were famous throughout the Germanic world. The mills, the forge, the workshops of all sorts, the cloisters for the monks, the buildings for the students, the immense tracts of arable land, the reclaimed forests, the fleet of busy little boats on the great Lake of Constance, all told of a stirring centre of human life. And while art, science, philosophy, agriculture, and mechanical industry were all at work in the townlike abbey, “you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to the rude race of the mountains, who, before the monks came among them, sacrificed to the evil one, and worshipped stocks and stones.”[55] “S. Gall was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens, at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools were a kind of university, frequented by men of all nations, who came hither to fit themselves for all professions. S. Gall was larger and freer, and made more of the arts and sciences; indeed, so far as regards its studies, it had a better claim to the title of university than any single institution which can be named as existing before the time of Philip Augustus.[56] You would have found here not monks alone, but courtiers, soldiers, and the sons of kings. All diligently applied themselves to the cultivation of the Tudesque dialect, and to its grammatical formation, so as to render it capable of producing a literature of its own.”[57] The monks were in correspondence [pg 089] with all the learned monastic houses of France and Italy, and the transfer of a codex, a Livy, or a Virgil from one to the other occasioned as much diplomacy, interest, and excitement as a commercial treaty or the discovery of new gold fields would in our day. S. Gall had its Greek scholars, too, and seems to have fostered among its copyists a love for “fine editions,” such as would do honor to an English or Russian bibliomaniac of to-day. They made their own parchment from the hides of the wild animals of their mountains, and employed many hands on each precious manuscript. The costly binding was likewise all home-made, and many a jewelled missal must have come from the hand of the artist-monk Tutilo. Music was a specialty of S. Gall, if one may say so in an age when music was so much a part of education that alone of all the arts it was included in the quadrivium, or higher instruction of the mediæval schools. Romanus of S. Gall it was who first named the musical notes by the letters of the alphabet, a system which is universal in Germany, and very commonly followed in England to this day.

We should multiply names ad infinitum were we to allow ourselves to roam further over that field of history so falsely called the dark ages. Einsiedeln, Paderborn, Magdeburg, Utrecht, are but a few of the many equally deserving of notice, the latter being, we are told, “a fashionable place of education for the sons of German princes” in the tenth century. Before we go on to the second stage of the learning of the past—the era of the universities—we cannot help looking back to the little Saxon island where, in 882, Alfred devoted one-fourth of his revenue to the restoration of the Oxford schools and obtained from Pope Martin II. a brief constituting them what may be fairly called a university. This was at a time when learning was at a low ebb, and the invasions of the Danes were endangering the cause of letters—a cause so intimately wrapped up in that of the great monasteries. Glastonbury, the ruined home of so much wisdom, science, and philosophy, was destined under S. Dunstan to retake her place among the schools. A great revival was initiated by him, a reform among the clergy vigorously enforced, episcopal seminaries reopened, and monastic schools once more brought to their ancient place in the vanguard of civilization. Ethelwold, Dunstan's disciple, was zealous for the study of sacred learning, and “loved teaching for its own sake. A new race of scholars sprang up in the restored cloisters, some of whom were not unworthy to be ranked with the disciples of Bede and Alcuin.”[58] At Glastonbury, like as at Fulda, the native tongue was cultivated, harmonized, and rendered capable of being ranked no longer as a dialect, but as the characteristic language of an eminently masterful people. Croyland, also, a ruined centre of intellectual life, rose again from its ashes; new monks and scholars reared its walls and filled its schools, and the Danish horrors were soon forgotten in the thoughtful kindness of the new abbot, Turketul, the nephew of Alfred, who, as we read, from a warrior and a courtier, a minister of state, and a royal prince, became a gentle monk and the rewarder of his little pupils. “Turketul took the greatest interest in the success of the school, visiting it daily, inspecting the tasks of each child, and taking with him a servant who carried [pg 090] raisins, figs, and nuts, or more often apples and pears, and such like little gifts, that the boys might be encouraged to be diligent, not with words only or blows, but rather by the hope of reward.” Such is the sweet, homely picture given us by the historian Ingulph of one of the greatest of schools in its early monastic beginnings. We have left ourselves so little space that even the metropolis of the Benedictines, the glorious and world-renowned Monte Casino, can find but a scant notice in these pages. If Subiaco was the spiritual birthplace of the order par excellence, Monte Casino was its intellectual cradle. There the rule was written which, by some mysterious fate, was destined to absorb and supersede that of the widespread Columbanians; there were the missionary principles first established which led to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon race; there the school of quies and reverence first planted which made this wonderful monastery “the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe.”[59] It was likened to Sinai by Pope Victor III., the successor of Hildebrand, in bold and simple verses, full of divine exultation and Christian pride: it has been defended and protected by an English and Protestant scholar,[60] the minister of a nation whose civilization once flowed from its bosom, and whose learning was fostered in its early “scriptoria.” It has outlasted many of its own offspring, and still stands undecayed in its moral sublimity, fruitful yet in saints and scholars, the mother-house of an order whose origin stretches beyond Benedict far into the desert of Paul and Anthony, Jerome and Hilarion.

And now that we are forced, reluctantly enough, to let fall the veil over that teeming life of the mediæval cloister, the fruitful nursery of every later intellectual development, shall we tell the reader what has most struck us throughout the short sketch we have been able to give of these centres of thought? Does not their history sound like some “monkish chronicle”? How is it that all the most “celebrated men of their time” (the phrase so often repeated in these annals) are monks, and so many not only monks, but saints? How is it that we come upon so many instances of these great scholars taking their turn at the mill, the forge, and the bake-house, and that these details sound neither sordid nor vulgar, as they might of modern and secular littérateurs? It was the monastic principle, the Christ-principle, as Prior Vaughan calls it in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin—the principle of faith, obedience, purity, adoration, and reverence. “The monks had a world of their own.... Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of European civilization. They were forming the languages of Schiller, of Bacon, and of Bossuet; they were creating arts which modern skill in vain endeavors to imitate; they were preserving the codices of ancient learning, and embalming the world ‘lying in wickedness’ with the sweet odor of their manifold virtues.”[61] Not only were they men who “wrote and spoke much, and, by their masculine genius and young and fresh inspiration, prevented the new Christian world from falling back from its first advances, either by literature or politics, under the yoke of exhausted paganism”;[62] [pg 091] not only were they men of progress even while essentially conservative, men of the future even while their studies were all of the past, but, “in opposing poverty, chastity, and obedience, the three great bases of monastic life, to the orgies of wealth, debauchery, and pride, they created at once a contrast and a remedy.”[63] Prior Vaughan, in his brilliant lifelike picture of mediævalism, S. Thomas of Aquin, perpetually refers to the ruling principle of monasticism: “To omit mention of the Benedictine principle would be to manifest great ignorance of the action of the highest form of truth upon mankind. The mastership of authority and reverence, springing out of the school of quies, did not cease to exert a considerable influence even after the dominant power of the monastic body had nearly disappeared.”[64] Elsewhere we read: “There was nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt upon by their biographers.... One of the marks of the age is the absence of the disputatious spirit, which, if it diminishes their rank (that of the monastic thinkers) in the world of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. The real spirit of the age was one of reverence for tradition.”[65]

The foresight of the monk-teachers of the earlier middle ages is no less remarkable than their holiness. Everywhere they fostered the native idiom, and labored to reduce it to an intelligible grammar. The national and patriotic feeling thus awakened in the centres of learning must needs have endeared them to, and more closely linked them with, the intellectual progress of the people they instructed. A modern author observes that “Bede's words are evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins of the Roman Empire did not barbarize knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet accomplished, and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, in science.” Indeed, natural science seems to have been from the first a peculiarly monastic pursuit. The great names of Bede, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are as a mighty chain from century to century, leading up to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Arago, and Humboldt; while in S. Brendan we have a bold precursor of Columbus.

The monasteries were so entirely the sole centres of civilization that numberless towns owe their origin to them. Scholars came for instruction, and remained for edification; grateful patients settled near the heaven-taught physicians who had cured them; peasants clustered round the abbeys for protection, and thus grew towns and villages without number in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. Even America bears to-day, in the name of one of her oldest English settlements, and a hereditary representative of intellect—Boston—a memento of the old intellectual supremacy of monasticism. S. Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon hermit, left his monastery, and settled in a hut on one of the plains of Lincolnshire. Scholars gathered around him, and, despite his remonstrances, set up other huts around his, and the Benedictine monastery of Icanhoe was founded. As time went on, a village sprang up and became a town, and was called Botolphstown. The name was afterwards corrupted and cut down into Boston, and from Boston it was that the founders of [pg 092] New England set sail on their journey to Holland, their first stage on their way to the New World.

In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil-wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor-seller are the first citizens of the new town. Quies is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it “does not pay”; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called “cramming” than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money-worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness.