The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

CHAPTER II.

A GLANCE FROM MR. SCHÖNINGER.

None but people of routine ever used their prayer-books while F. Chevreuse was reading or singing Mass, and it was seldom that even such people used them the first time they heard him; for it was not enough that those who assisted should unite their intention with that of the priest, and then pray their own prayers, recalled now and then to the altar by the sound of the bell: their whole attention was riveted there from the first.

That penetrating voice, which enunciated every word with such exquisite clearness, speaking rapidly only because so earnest, was heard throughout the church, and its vivid emphasis gave new life to every prayer of the service. When F. Chevreuse said Dominus vobiscum! one replied as a matter of course—would as soon, indeed, have neglected to answer his face-to-face greeting on the street as this from the altar; the Orate, fratres, compelled the listener to pray; and, at the Domine, non sum dignus, one felt confounded and abashed.

Was it, then, you asked yourself, the first time this priest had said Mass, that he should stand so like a man who sees a vision? No; F. Chevreuse had been fifteen years a priest. Had he, perhaps, an intellect more high than the ordinary, or a superior sanctity? No, again; though a clearer mind or a nobler Christian soul one would scarcely wish to see. The peculiarity lay chiefly, we should guess, in a large, impassioned, and generous heart, which, like a strong fountain for ever tossing up its freshening tide, overflowed his being, and made even the driest facts bud and blossom perennially. In that heart, nothing worthy of life ever faded or grew old. Its possessions were dowered with the freshness of immortal youth.

Still, these gifts might have been partially ineffectual if nature had not added to them a sanguine temperament, and the priceless blessing of a body capable of enduring severe and prolonged labor. F. Chevreuse was spared that misery of a bright intelligence and an active will for ever pent and thwarted by physical incompetence, the soul by its nature constantly compelled to issue mandates to the body, which the body by its weakness is as inevitably compelled to disobey. In that wide brain of his, thoughts had ample elbow-room, and could range themselves without crowding or confusion; and the broad shoulders and deep chest showed with what full breathing the flame of life was fanned. His mind was always working, yet there was no sign of a feverish head; the eyes were steady, and the close-cut gray hair grew so thick as to form a crown.

For the rest, let his life speak. We respect the privacy of such a soul; and, though we would fain show him real and admirable, we sketch F. Chevreuse with a shy pencil.

The church of S. John was a new and unfinished one on Church Street. This street ran east and west, parallel with the Cocheco, and half-way up the South Hill, which here sloped so abruptly that the buildings on the lower side had one more story at the rear than in front, and those on the upper side one more story in front than at the rear. In consequence of this deceptive appearance, those who liked to put the best foot forward preferred to live on the upper side, though it doomed them to a north light in their houses, while those who thought more of comfort than of display chose the other side with a southward frontage.

The church was set back so as to leave a square in front, and its entrance was but four or five steps above the street; but at the back a large and well-lighted basement was visible. The priest’s house stood close to the street, on the eastern side of this square, and so near that between the back corner of its main part and the front corner of the church there was scarcely space for two persons to stand abreast. This narrow passage, screened by a yard or so of iron railing, gave access to a long flight of stairs that led to the basements of the church and of the house.

Seen from the front, this house was a little, melancholy, rain-streaked, wooden cottage, which might be regarded as a blot upon the grandeur of the church, or an admirable foil for it, as one had a mind to think. The door opened almost on the sidewalk, and beside the door were two dismal windows with the curtains down. In the space above, another curtained window was set between the two sharp slants of the roof. On the side opposite the church, where a lane ran down to the next street, the prospect was more cheering. You saw there an L as wide as the main building, though not so deep, and projecting from it so as to give another street door at the end of a veranda, and allow space for two windows at the rear of the house. This L was Mrs. Chevreuse’s peculiar domain, as the house was that of the priest. Her sitting-room and bedroom were here; and no one acquainted with the customs of the place ever came to the veranda door unless they could claim an intimate friendship with the priest’s mother.

The parlor with the two dismal front windows beside the entrance was used as a reception-room. Back of that was the priest’s private sitting-room, with two windows looking out on the veranda, and one window commanding the basement entrance of the church, the pleasant green space around it, and the flight of stairs that led up to the street. F. Chevreuse’s arm-chair and writing-table always stood in this window, and behind them was a door leading into a little side-room containing a strong desk where he kept papers and money, and a sofa on which he took an occasional nap.

Up-stairs were two sleeping-rooms; down-stairs, as the hill sloped, the kitchen, dining-room, and the two rooms occupied by Jane, the cook, and Andrew, the priest’s man. There was space enough in the house, and it had the charm of irregularity; but from the street, as we have said, it was a melancholy-looking structure. F. Chevreuse, however, could not have been better pleased with it had it been a palace. Within, all was comfort and love for him; and he probably never looked at the outside. The new church and his people engrossed his thoughts.

Mrs. Chevreuse was not so indifferent. “It would not look well for me to go up on a ladder, and paint the outside walls,” she said to herself, her only confidant in such matters; “but, if it could be turned inside-out for one day, I would quickly have it looking less like an urchin with a soiled face.”

No one could doubt this assertion after having seen the interior of this castle of the rueful countenance. There she could go up on a ladder without shocking any one, and from basement to attic the place was as fresh as a rose. But the nicety was never intrusive. This lady’s house-keeping perspective was admirably arranged, and her point of view the right one. Cleanliness and order dwelt with her, not as tyrants, but as good fairies who were visible only when looked for. If you should chance to think of it, you would observe that everything which should be polished shone like a mirror; that the white was immaculate, the windows clear, and the furniture well-placed. You might recollect that the door was never opened for you by an untidy house-maid, and that no odors from the kitchen ever saluted your nostrils on entering, though a bouquet on the stair-post sometimes breathed a fragrant welcome.

Now, housekeepers know that the observance of all these little details of order and good taste involves a great deal of care and labor; but they sometimes forget that their exquisite ménage loses its principal charm when the care and labor are made manifest. It cannot be denied that the temptation is strong now and then to let Cæsar know by what pains we produce these apparently simple results, which he takes as a matter of course; but, when the temptation is yielded to, the results cease to be entirely pleasing. The unhappy man becomes afraid to walk on our carpets, to touch our door-knobs, to sit in our chairs, eat eggs with our spoons, lay his odious pipe on our best table-cover, or tie the curtains into a knot. The touching confidence with which he was wont to ask that an elaborate dinner might be prepared for him in fifteen minutes vanishes from his face like a rainbow tint that leaves the cloud behind. “A cold lunch will do,” he tells you resignedly, and you detect incipient dyspepsia in his countenance. The free motions that seemed to feel infinite space about them are no more. The anxious hero pulls his toga about him in the most undignified and ungraceful manner, lest it should upset a flower-pot or a chair. In fine, the tormenting gadfly of our neatness stings him up and down his days, till he would fain seek refuge and rest in disorder.

Mother Chevreuse knew all this perfectly, and behaved herself in so heroic a manner that her son never suspected, what was quite true, that the unnecessary steps he caused her might make several miles a day.

One morning after early Mass, toward the last of May, she seated herself in the arm-chair by the window, and watched for the priest to come in from the church. This was a part of her daily programme, and the only time of day she ever occupied what she called his throne. After his breakfast, they did not meet, save incidentally, till supper-time; for, except when they had company, F. Chevreuse dined alone. The mother had perceived that, when they dined together, there had been a struggle between the sense of duty and courtesy which made him wish to entertain her, and the abstraction he naturally felt in the midst of the cares and labors of the day, and, ever on the watch lest she should in any way intrude on his vocation, had herself made this arrangement. The fact that he did not oppose it was a sufficient proof that it was agreeable to him.

This mother was the softer type of her son, as though what you would carve in granite you should first mould in wax. There was the same compact form, telling of health, strength, and activity, the same clear eyes, the same thick gray hair crowning a forehead more wide than high. Their expressions differed as their circumstances did; cheerfulness and good sense were common to both; but, where the priest was authoritative, the woman was dignified.

Presently her face brightened, for the fold of a black robe showed some one standing just inside the chapel door, and the next moment F. Chevreuse appeared, his hands clasped behind him, his face bent thoughtfully downward. Seeing him thus for the first time, you are surprised to find him only medium height. At the altar, he had appeared tall. You might wonder, too, what great beauty his admirers found in him. But scarcely had the doubt formed itself in your mind, before it was triumphantly answered. The priest’s first step was into a shadow, his second into sunlight; and, as that light smote him, he lifted his head quickly, and a smile broke over his face. Wheeling about, he fronted the east. The river-courses had hollowed out a deep ravine between him and the sunrise, and the tide of glory flowed in and filled that from rim to rim, and curled over the green hills like wine-froth over a beaker. He stood gazing, smiling and undazzled, his face illuminated from within as from without. It might be said of F. Chevreuse, as it was of William Blake, that, when the sun rose “he did not see a round, fiery disk somewhat like a guinea, but an innumerable company of the heavenly hosts crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’”

The mother watched, but did not interrupt him. She knew well that such moments were fruitful, and that he was storing away in his mind the precious vintage of that spring morning to bring it forth again at some future time fragrant with the bouquet of a spiritual significance. “Glimpses of God,” she called such moods.

He threw his head back, and, with a swift glance, took in the whole scene; the fleckless blue overhead, the closely gathered city beneath, the lights and shades that played in the dewy greensward at his feet, and, turning about, his mother’s loving face—a fit climax for the morning.

“Bon jour, Mère Chevreuse!” he called out, touching his barrette.

As he disappeared into the house, Mrs. Chevreuse went into her own sitting-room, which opened from his, and gave a last glance at the table prepared for his breakfast. The preparation was not elaborate. A little stand by the eastern window held a pitcher of milk, a bowl and spoon, and a napkin; and Jane, following the priest up-stairs, added a dish of oatmeal pudding.

F. Chevreuse walked briskly through the entry, and threw the street door wide open, then came back singing, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and the King of glory shall come in!” and continued, as he entered the room, his voice hardly settled from song to speech, “What created things are more like the King of glory than light and air? They are as his glance and his breath.”

The look that met his was sympathizing, but the words that replied were scarcely an answer to his question. “Your breakfast is cooling, F. Chevreuse,” she said.

He took no heed, but, clasping his hands behind him, walked to and fro with a step that showed flying would have been the more congenial motion.

“Mother,” he exclaimed, “the mysteries of human nature are as inscrutable as the mysteries of God. Would the angels believe, if they had not seen, that a Mass has been said this morning here in the midst of a crowded city, with only a score or so of persons to assist? Why was not the church thronged with worshippers, and thousands pressing outside to kiss the foundation-stones? When I turned with the Ecce Agnus Dei, why did not all present fall with their faces to the floor? And when Miss Honora Pembroke walked away from the communion-railing, why did not every one look at her with wonder and admiration?—the woman who bore her God in her bosom! And just now, when the sun rose”—he stopped and looked at his mother with a combative air—“why did not the people look up and hail it as the signet of the Almighty?”

Mother Chevreuse smiled pleasantly. She was used to being set up as a target for these unanswerable questions, especially in the morning, at which time the priest was likely to be, as Jane expressed it, “rather high in his mind.”

“If you could take your breakfast, my son,” she suggested.

“Breakfast!” He glanced with a look of aversion at the table that held his frugal meal, considered a moment, recognized the propriety of its existence, finally seated himself in his place, and began to eat with a very good appetite. “You were quite right, my lady,” he remarked; “the sunshine was drinking my milk all up. What thirsty creatures they are, those beams!”

Let it not be supposed that F. Chevreuse was so ascetical as never to eat except when urged to do so. On the contrary, he took good care to keep up the health and strength necessary for the performance of his multiform duties as the only priest in a large parish, and he used a wise discrimination in allowing others to fast. “Some fasting is almost as bad as feasting,” he used to say. “Besides injuring the health, it clogs the soul. You look down upon eating when you have dined moderately; but, when you have fasted immoderately, the idea of dinner is elevated till it becomes a constellation. I do not wish to starve, till, when I kneel down and raise my eyes, I can think of nothing but roast beef. Asceticism is not an end, but a means.”

“Mother,” he said presently, laying down his spoon, “why is it that the oatmeal and milk I get at home are better than that I find anywhere else?”

“Children always think the food they get at home better than what they get abroad,” she replied tranquilly.

Why should she tell him that what he called milk was cream, and that the making of that “stirabout” was a fine-art, which had been taught Jane line upon line, and precept upon precept, till every grain dropped according to rule, and the motion of the pudding spoon was as exact as a sonnet? Instead of being pleased, he would have been disturbed to know that so much pains had been taken for him.

“I like no earthly comfort that has cost any one much trouble or pain,” he would say. Like most persons who have been spared the petty cares of life, he did not know that in this discordant world there is no earthly comfort to any one which is not a pain to some other.

Breakfast over, the priest went promptly about his business; and Mrs. Chevreuse, shutting the door between their rooms, brought her work-basket to the stand where the tray had been, and seated herself to mend a rent in a soutane.

It was a pleasant room, with its one window toward the church, and an opposite one looking over the city and the distant hills, and most enticingly comfortable, with deep chairs, convenient tables, and tiny stands always within reach, and an open fireplace which was seldom, save at mid-summer, without its little glimmer of fire at some time of day. And even then, if the day was chilly or overcast, the fact that it was mid-summer did not prevent the kindling of Mother Chevreuse’s beltane flame. From this room and the bedroom behind it could be heard on still nights the dashing of the Cocheco among its rocks.

Mrs. Chevreuse worked and thought. The sunbeams sparkled on the scissors, needles, bodkins, and whatever bright thing it could find in her work-basket, on her eyeglasses and thimble, on the smooth-worn gold of her wedding-ring, and the tiny needle weaving deftly to and fro in an almost invisible darn, of which the lady was not a little proud. Her mind wove, too; not those flimsy fancies of youth so like spider’s webs upon the grass, that glitter only when the morning dew is on them: the threads of her dream-tapestry ended in heaven, though begun on earth, and their severance could only change hope into fruition. And all the time, while hand and heart slipped to and fro, the lady was aware of everything that went on in the house. She heard Andrew come into the next room with the morning mail, heard the sound of voices while he received his orders for the day, heard him go clumping down-stairs, and out through the kitchen into the chapel. Presently the clumping resounded outside, and, glancing across the room, she saw the old man standing on the basement stairs, his head on a level with her window, looking at her across the space that intervened, and gesticulating, with a twinkling candlestick in each hand.

Mother Chevreuse, still holding her work, went and threw the sash up.

“I think, madame, begging your pardon, that I can clean these just as well as you can,” says Andrew, with a very positive nod and a little shake that set all the glass drops twinkling and tinkling.

“Do you, Andrew?” returned madame pleasantly. “Very well, then, you can clean them, and save me the trouble. But don’t forget to rub all the whiting out of the creases.”

Andrew changed countenance as he turned slowly about to descend the stairs. Mrs. Chevreuse had been gradually taking the care of the altar from his rather careless hands, and this had been his diplomatic way of escaping the candlestick cleaning of that day without asking her to do it. He hobbled down-stairs again discomfited, and the lady went smiling back to her work.

“It is all very well for Sharp’s rifles,” she remarked, threading her needle; “but I don’t like being fired at in that spiral manner.”

Still weaving again with hand and heart, she heard Jane going about, like a neat household machine doing everything in its exact time and place, severe on interruption, merciless on mud or dust, ever ready to have a skirmish on these grounds with Andrew; she heard the rattle of paper from the next room, as letters and parcels were opened, the scratching of F. Chevreuse’s quill as he wrote answers to one or two correspondents, or made up accounts, and the little tap with which he pressed the stamp upon the letters.

How peaceful and sweet her life was, all she loved within reach, all she hoped for so sure! She breathed a sigh of thanksgiving, then dropped her work and listened; for the priest was preparing to go out. Every morning was spent by him in collecting for his church. He had found in Crichton a thousand or more practical Catholics, with one shabby old chapel to worship in, and nearly as many nominal Catholics who did not worship at all; and in three years, with scarcely any capital to begin with besides faith, he had raised and nearly finished a large and beautiful church, and gathered into it the greater part of the wanderers.

“Be prudent, my son!” the mother had warned him when he began what seemed so venturesome an enterprise.

“I am so,” he replied, with decision. “It would be the height of imprudence to leave these people any longer straying like lost sheep. When the Master of the universe commands that a house be built for him, is it for me to fear he will not be able to pay for it?”

She said no more. Mme. Chevreuse always remembered to distinguish between the son and the priest, and was never more proud of her motherhood than when her natural authority was confronted by the supernatural authority of her child. But she always sighed when he started on a collecting-tour, for his faith had to be supplemented by hard work, and often he came back worn with fatigue, and depressed by the sights of poverty, sorrow, and sin he had witnessed.

All had gone well with the church, however—so well that a new enterprise had been added, and a convent school was just making its small beginning in Crichton.

“Is madame visible?” asked a voice smothered against the door.

“Entrez!” she answered gaily; and the priest put his head in.

“Say a little prayer to S. Joseph for F. Chevreuse to-day,” he said; “for he is collecting for the great note.”

“Oh!” She looked anxiously at him, and met a reassuring smile in return.

“Never fear, mother!” he said cheerfully. “Do not all the houses and lands belong to God?”

“Certainly!” she answered, but sighed to herself as he went away: “it is very true they all belong to God, but I’m afraid the devil has some very heavy mortgages on them.”

Later in the day, Miss Ferrier called for Mrs. Chevreuse to go out and visit the sisters at the new convent. “I have taken all I could think of this morning,” she said, and enumerated various useful articles. “I suppose they want nearly everything.”

Mrs. Chevreuse commended her liberality. “But I am glad you did not think of cordage,” she added; “for that is the very thing I did remember.”

She opened a large basket, and laughingly displayed a collection of ropes and cords varying from coils of clothes-line and curtain-cord to balls of fine pink twine. “Jane’s clothes-line gave out yesterday,” she said, “and that made me think of this.”

Miss Ferrier gave a little shiver and shrug. “It is very nice and useful, I know; but ropes always remind me of hanging.”

“Naturally,” returned the lady, tying on her bonnet: “that is their vocation.”

“But hanging is such a dreadful punishment!” And the young woman shivered again.

“Why, my pictures seem to enjoy it,” Mrs. Chevreuse replied, persistently cheerful.

“Now, really, madame—“

“Now, really, mademoiselle,” was the laughing interruption, “what has put your thoughts on such a track this morning? If you want my opinion on the subject, I cannot give it, for I have none. All I can say is that, if I thought any one were destined to kill me, I would instantly write and sign a petition for his pardon, and leave it to be presented to the governor and council at the proper time. Think of something pleasant. I am ready now. We will go out through the house.”

She locked the veranda door, and put the key in her pocket. “I have only to give Jane an order. Jane!” she called, leaning out the window.

A head appeared from the kitchen window beneath, and the mistress gave her order down the outside of the house. “It saves so much going up and down stairs for two old women,” she explained. “Now, my dear.”

They went into the priest’s sitting-room, and again the door was locked behind them, and the key this time hung on a nail over the writing-table. “Wait a moment,” said madame then, and began picking up bits of paper scattered about the room. The priest had torn up a letter, and absently dropped the fragments on the carpet instead of into the waste-basket, and a breeze had been playing with them.

“How provoking men are,” remarked Miss Ferrier, stooping for a fragment which a puff of air instantly caught away from her.

“Are they?” asked Mrs. Chevreuse quietly. “I do not know, I have so little to do with them. Most people are provoking sometimes, I dare say.”

Having made a second ineffectual dive for the strip of paper, the young woman had not patience enough left to bear so cool an evasion. “F. Chevreuse deserves a scolding for strewing this about,” she said.

The mother glanced at her with that sort of surprise which is more disconcerting than anger. Miss Ferrier blushed, but would not be so silenced.

“If you should oblige him to pick them up once,” she continued, “that would cure him.”

“Oblige him!” repeated the mother with a more emphasized coldness. “I never oblige F. Chevreuse to do anything. I should not dream of calling his attention to such a trifle. He has higher affairs on his mind. Now we will go.”

Their drive took them through the town by its longest avenue, Main Street, which followed the Saranac half-way to its source. School children in Crichton looked on Main Street as their meridian of longitude, and were under the impression that it reached from pole to pole. It crossed the Cocheco by the central one of three parallel bridges, climbed straight up the steep North Height, and stretched out into the country. The convent grounds were on the west bank of the Saranac, twenty acres of rough land, roughly enclosed, with an old tumble-down house that had been a tavern in the early days of Crichton. It was a desolate-looking place, with not a tree nor flower to be seen, but needed only time and labor to become a little Eden.

In the eyes of Sister Cecilia it was even now an Eden. Her ardent and generous nature, made still brighter by a beautiful Christian enthusiasm, saw in advance the blossom and fruit of unplanted trees, and seeds yet in the paper. Full of delight to her was all this planning and labor.

She was out-doors when the carriage drove up, in earnest consultation with two workmen, directing the laying out of the kitchen-garden, and, recognizing her visitors, hastened toward them with a cordial welcome. Sister Cecilia was a little over forty years of age, tall and graceful, and had one of those sunny faces that show heaven is already begun in the heart. When she smiled, the sparkling of her deep-blue eyes betrayed mirth and humor.

“Dread the labor?” she exclaimed, in answer to a question from Miss Ferrier. “Indeed not! I was so charmed with the idea of coming to this wild place that I had a scruple about it, and was almost afraid I ought not to be indulged. It is always delightful to begin at the beginning, and see the effect of your work.”

She led them about the place and told her plans. Here a grove was to be planted, there the path would wind, vines would be trained against this stone wall.

“But I don’t see any stone wall,” protested Miss Ferrier.

Sister Cecilia laughed. “I see it distinctly, and so will you next year. There are piles of stones on the land which will save us a good deal of money; and we are very likely to have some work done for nothing. Do you know how kind the laborers are to us? Twenty men have offered to do each a day’s work in our garden free of charge. Those are two of them. Now, here we are going to have a large arbor covered with honeysuckle and roses. It must be closed on the east side, because there will be a river-road outside the wall some day, and we should be visible from it. But the south side will be all open, so we can sit under the roses and look down that beautiful river and over all the city. You see the knoll was made on purpose for an arbor.”

As they went into the house, a slender shape glided past in the dusk of the further entry. The light from a roof window, shining down the stairs, revealed a face like a lily drooped a little sidewise, a wealth of brown hair gathered back, and a sweet, shy smile. It was as though some one had carried a lighted waxen taper through the shadows where she disappeared.

“It is Anita!” exclaimed Miss Ferrier, stopping on the threshold of the parlor. “Why did she not come to us?”

“That dear Anita!” said the sister. “She has a piano lesson to give at this hour, and would not dream of turning aside from the shortest road to the music-room. If you were her own mother, Mme. Chevreuse, she would not come to you without permission. Yet such a tender, loving creature I never knew before. Obedience is the law of her life. Next spring she will begin her novitiate.”

The house was looked over, the other sisters seen, and the offerings brought them duly presented and acknowledged; then the two ladies started for home.

Miss Ferrier was rather silent when they were alone. She had not forgotten the reproof of the morning, and she felt aggrieved by it. Mrs. Chevreuse had known that she was but jesting, and might have been a little less touchy, she thought. What was the matter that almost every one was finding fault with her lately? Her mother accused her of being cross and captious, her lover found her exacting, and Mrs. Gerald had thought her too assuming on one occasion, and yet all she was conscious of was a blind feeling of loss—some such sense as deep-buried roots may have when the sky grows dark over the tree above. Little things that once would have passed by like the idle wind now had power to make her shrink, as the lightest touch will hurt a sore; and trifles that had once given her pleasure now fell dead and flat. The time had been when the mere driving through the city in her showy carriage had elated her, when she had sat in delighted consciousness of the satin cushions, the glittering harness and wheels, and even of the band on the coachman’s hat and the capes that fluttered from his shoulders. Now they sometimes gave her a feeling of weary disgust, and she assured herself that she knew not why. If any suspicion glanced across her mind that a worm was eating into the very centre of her rose of life, and the outer petals withered merely because the heart was withering, she shut her eyes to it, and kept seeking here and there for comfort, but found none. Honora was the only person who ever really soothed her; and, for some reason, or for no reason, even Honora’s soothing now and then held a sting that was keenly felt.

“Is it possible she is resenting my reproof?” thought Mrs. Chevreuse, and exerted herself to be pleasant and friendly, but without much success. Miss Ferrier’s affected gaiety was gone, and she had no disposition to resume it.

“She is not so good-tempered as I believed,” the priest’s mother thought when they parted, with one of those unjust judgments which the good form quite as often as the bad.

Miss Ferrier drove on homeward. She had no need to tell the coachman which way to drive, nor how, for he knew perfectly well that he was to make his horses prance slowly through Bank Street, where, in a certain insurance office up one flight of a granite building, Mr. Lawrence Gerald bit his nails and fumed over a clerk’s desk, and half attended to his business while inwardly protesting against what he called his misfortunes. Perhaps his desk faced the window, or maybe his companions were good enough to call his attention to it; for it seldom happened that Miss Ferrier, glancing up, did not see him waiting to bow to her. He did not love the girl, but he felt a trivial pride in contemplating the evidences of that wealth which was one day to be his unless he should change his mind. He sometimes admitted the possibility of the latter alternative.

To-day he was not at the window; but his lady-love had hardly time to be conscious of disappointment, when she saw him lounging in the doorway down-stairs. He came listlessly out as the carriage drew up, and at the same moment Miss Lily Carthusen appeared from a shop near by, and joined them. This young lady took a good deal of exercise in the open air, and might be met almost any time, and always with the latest news to tell.

“I congratulate you both,” she said, in her sprightliest manner. “That dreadful organist of yours has put his wrist out of joint, and cannot play again for a month or two. Isn’t it delightful?” She laughed elfishly. “Haven’t you heard of it? Oh! yes; it is true. It happened this morning when he came down the dark stairway in his boarding-house. He tumbled against the dear old balusters, and put his wrist out. I never before knew the good of dark stairways.”

“Why, Lily! aren’t you ashamed?” remonstrated Miss Ferrier, smiling faintly.

“Do you think I ought to be ashamed?” inquired Miss Lily, with an ingenuous expression in her large, light-blue eyes.

“Yes; I do,” replied Miss Ferrier, much edified.

“Well, then, I won’t,” was the satisfactory conclusion.

“I am sorry for Mr. Glover,” Miss Ferrier remarked gravely.

“Now, my dear mademoiselle, please don’t be so crushingly good!” cried the other. “You know perfectly well that he plays execrably, and spoils the singing of your beautiful choir; and you know that you would be perfectly delighted if F. Chevreuse would pension him off. Don’t try to look grieved, for you can’t.”

“I don’t pretend to be a saint, Miss Carthusen,” said Annette, dropping her eyes.

“And I don’t pretend to be a sinner,” was the mocking retort.

Mr. Gerald smiled at this little duel, as men are wont to smile at such scenes. It did not hurt him, and it did amuse him.

“But the best part of the business is that F. Chevreuse has asked Mr. Schöninger to play in his stead,” pursued the news-bringer. “He has written a note requesting him to call there this evening.”

Miss Ferrier drew her shawl about her, and leaned back against the cushions. She had an air of dismissing the subject and the company which, not being either rude or affected, was so near being stately that Mr. Gerald was pleased with it, and, to reward her, begged an invitation to lunch.

“I had just come out for my daily sandwich,” he said; “but if you will take pity on me—“

She smilingly made room for him by her side, and drove off full of delight.

The afternoon waned, and, as evening approached, Mrs. Chevreuse sat in her own room again, waiting for the priest to come home. She had visited her sick and poor, looked to her household affairs, stepped into the church to arrange some fresh flowers, and see that the candlesticks shone with spotless brilliancy, and was now trying to interest herself in a book while she waited. But it was hard to fix her attention; it constantly wandered from the page. Jane had heard and told her of the accident to their organist, and the rumor that Mr. Schöninger was to take his place; but had not told the news by any means with the glee of a Lily Carthusen. On the contrary, it had seemed to her mind an almost incredible horror that a Jew was to take any part in a service performed before the altar whereon the Lord of heaven was enthroned. To Jane’s mind, every Jew was a Judas. That he could be moral, that he could adore his Creator and pray earnestly for forgiveness of his sins, she did not for an instant believe. The worst criminal, if nominally a Catholic, was in her eyes infinitely preferable to the best Jew in the world.

“Andrew declared it was so, madame, and that he carried a note to that Mr. Schöninger before dinner,” she said, concluding her lamentation; “but nothing will make me believe it till I hear F. Chevreuse say so with his own mouth.”

“Oh! well, don’t distress yourself about it, Jane,” her mistress replied soothingly. “Perhaps it is a mistake; but, if it is not, you may be sure that F. Chevreuse knows best. He always has good reasons for what he does. Besides, we must be charitable. Who knows but the services of the church and our prayers might, by the blessing of God, convert this man.”

“Convert a rattlesnake!” cried Jane, too much excited to be respectful.

But Mrs. Chevreuse, though she had spoken soothingly to her subordinate, was not herself altogether satisfied. She was a woman of large mind and heart; yet, if any one people in the world came last in her regard, it was the Jewish people. Moreover, she had seen Mr. Schöninger but once, and then at an unfortunate moment when something had occurred to draw that strange blank look over his face. The impression left on her mind was an unpleasant one that there was something dark and secret in the man.

“Of course it will all be right,” she said to herself, annoyed that she should feel disturbed for such a cause. “I am foolish to think of it.”

The street door was opened and left wide, after F. Chevreuse’s fashion, and she heard his quick, light step in the entry. Dropping her book, she smiled involuntarily at the sound. How sweet to a woman is this nightly coming home of father, son, or husband! He came in, went to the inner room, and opened and closed his desk, then returned to the sitting-room, threw up the corner window, from which he could see into her apartment, and seated himself in his arm-chair, leaning forward as he did so to bow a smiling recognition across to her. His day’s work was as nearly over as it could be. In the morning, he must go out to meet his duties; in the evening, they must seek him. The hour for their social life had come; and though subject to constant interruptions, so that scarcely ten minutes at a time were left them for confidential intercourse, they were free to snatch what they could get.

Mrs. Chevreuse put her book away, and opened the door between the two sitting-rooms. “Father,” she said immediately, “is it true that you are going to have that Jew play the organ at S. John’s?”

The priest rose hastily, and his mother’s foot was arrested on the threshold; for just opposite her, coming into the room from the entry, was Miss Lily Carthusen, leading a little girl by the hand, and followed by “that Jew”; while, in wrathful perspective, like a thunder-head on the horizon, gloomed the face of Jane, the servant-woman.

The silence was only for the space of a lightning-flash, and the flash was not wanting; it shot across the room from a pair of eyes that looked as though they might sear to ashes what they gazed upon in anger. The next moment, the eyes drooped, and their owner was bowing to F. Chevreuse.

Miss Carthusen was perfectly self-possessed and voluble, seeming to have heard nothing. “This little wilful girl would come with Mr. Schöninger, madame,” she said; “and, as he is not going back, I was obliged to come and see her home again safely.”

The truth was that Miss Lily, who boarded in the same house with the gentleman, had encouraged the child to come, in order that she might accompany her.

F. Chevreuse had blushed slightly but he showed no other embarrassment. It was the first time that Mr. Schöninger had entered his house, and he welcomed him with a more marked cordiality, perhaps, on account of the unfortunate speech which had greeted his coming.

“You are welcome, sir! I thank you for taking the trouble to come to me. It was my place to call on you, but my engagements left me no time. Allow me to present you to my mother, Mme. Chevreuse.”

“My mother” had probably never been placed in so disagreeable a position, but her behavior was admirable. The man she had involuntarily insulted was forced to admit that nothing could be more perfect than the respectful courtesy of her salutation, which maintained with dignified sincerity the distance she really felt, while it expressed her regret at having intruded that feeling on him.

“Yet they talk of charity!” he thought; and the lady did not miss a slight curl of the lip which was not hidden by his profound obeisance.

The introduction over, she left Mr. Schöninger to the priest, and took refuge with his little friend, since she could not with propriety leave the room. The young lady was not agreeable to her. Mme. Chevreuse had that pure honesty and good sense which looks with clear regards through a murky and dissimulating nature; for, after all, it is the deceitful who are most frequently duped.

Miss Carthusen went flitting about the room, making herself quite at home. She selected a rosebud from a bouquet on the mantelpiece, and fastened it in madame’s gray hair with her fingers as light as snowflakes; she daintily abstracted the glasses the lady held, and put them on over her own large pale eyes. “Glasses always squeeze my eyelashes,” she said; “not that they are so very long, though, at least, they are not so long as Bettine von Arnim’s little goose-girl’s. Hers were two inches long; and the other girls laughed at them, so that she went away by herself and cried. Perhaps, beyond a certain point, eyelashes are like endurance, and cease to be a virtue. Who is it tells of a young lady whose long lashes gave her an overdressed appearance in the morning, so that one felt as though she ought to have a shorter set to come down to breakfast in?”

Mrs. Chevreuse observed with interest the striking difference between the two men who sat near her talking, both, as any one could see, strong and fiery natures, yet so unlike in temper and manner. The priest was electrical and demonstrative; he uttered the thought that rose in his mind; he was a man to move the crowd, and carry all before him. The ardor of the other was the steady glow of the burning coal that may be hidden in darkness, and he shrank with fastidious pride and distrust from any revelation of the deeper feelings of his heart, and held in check even his passing emotions. He would have said, with that Marquis de Noailles, quoted by Liszt: Qu’il n’y a guère moyen de causer de quoi que ce soit, avec qui que ce soit; and, doubtless, he had found it so.

F. Chevreuse had explained his wishes: their organist was disabled, and they had no one capable of taking his place. If Mr. Schöninger would consent to take charge of their singing, he would consider it a great favor.

Mr. Schöninger had no engagement which would prevent his doing so, and it need not be looked on at all as a favor, but a mere matter of business. His profession was music.

F. Chevreuse would insist on feeling obliged, although he would waive the pleasure of expressing that feeling.

Mr. Schöninger intimated that it was perhaps desirable he should meet the choir an hour before the evening service.

The priest had been about to make the same suggestion, and, since the time was so near, would be very happy to have his visitor take supper with him.

The visitor thanked him, but had just dined.

Nothing could be more proper and to the point, nor more utterly stiff and frozen, than this dialogue was. F. Chevreuse shivered, and called little Rose—Rosebud, they named her—to him.

The child went with a most captivating mingling of shyness and obedience in her air, walking a little from side to side, as a ship beats against the wind, making way in spite of fears. Her red cheeks growing redder, a tremor struggling with a smile on her small mouth, the intrepid little blossom allowed herself to be lifted to the stranger’s knees, her eyes seeking her friend’s for courage and strength.

Mr. Schöninger smiled on his favorite with a tenderness which gave his face a new character, and watched curiously while the priest reassured and petted her till he won her attention to himself. His own experience and the traditions of his people had taught him to look on the Catholic Church as his most deadly antagonist; yet now, in spite of all, his heart relented and warmed a little to one of her ministers. He knew better than to take an apparent love for children as any proof of goodness—some of the worst persons he had ever known were excessively fond of them—yet it looked amiable in an honest person, and F. Chevreuse’s manner was particularly pleasant and winning.

Embarrassed by the notice bestowed on her by all, yet, with a premature address, seeking to hide that embarrassment, the child glanced about the room in search of some diversion. Her eyes were caught by a picture of the Madonna.

“Oh! who is that pretty lady with a wedding-ring round her head?” she cried out.

“She,” said F. Chevreuse, “is a sweet and holy Jewish lady whom we all love.”

The little girl glanced apprehensively at her friend—perhaps she had been told never to speak the word Jew in his presence—and saw a quick light flicker in his eyes. He was looking keenly at the priest, as if trying to fathom his intention. Was the man determined to win him in spite of his coldness? Was it his way of making proselytes, this fascinating delicacy and tenderness? He did not wish to like F. Chevreuse; yet what could he do in the presence of that radiant charity?

“I think our business is done, sir,” he said, rising.

The priest became matter-of-fact at once.

“It is not necessary for me to make any suggestions to your good taste,” he said; “but I may be permitted to remark that our service is not merely æsthetic, but has a vital meaning, and I would like the music to be conducted earnestly.”

“I shall make it as earnest as your composers with allow, sir,” the musician replied, with a slightly mocking smile.

“My composers!” exclaimed the priest, laughing. “I repudiate them. Was it one of my composers who wrote the music of the Stabat Mater, and set his voices pirouetting and waltzing through the woes of the Queen of sorrows? The world accuses Rossini of showing in that his contempt for Christianity. I would not say so much. I believe he thought of nothing but the rhythm and the vowel-sounds.”

“And was it one of my composers,” the Jew retorted, “who set the Kyrie Eleison I heard on passing your church last Sunday to an air as gay as any dance tune? If the words had been in English instead of Latin, it would have sounded blasphemous.”

F. Chevreuse made a gesture of resignation. “What can I do if the musicians are not so pious as the painters, if they will put the sound in the statue, and the sense in the pedestal? My only refuge is the Gregorian, which nobody but saints will tolerate. I am not a composer.”

The call was at an end, and the visitors went.

As soon as they were in the street, Miss Carthusen observed: “I notice that F. Chevreuse adopts Paracelsus’ method of cure: he anoints with fine ointment, not the wound, but the sword that made the wound.”

She had been annoyed at the little attention paid to herself in contrast with the honor shown the priest’s mother, and wished to find out if Mr. Schöninger kept any resentment toward Mme. Chevreuse. He felt her inquisitive, unscrupulous eyes searching his face in sidelong glances.

“The priest was very courteous to me,” he replied calmly. “And I should think that madame might be a very agreeable person to those she likes.”

The young woman instantly launched into a glowing eulogy of the priest’s mother, till her listener bit his lips. He was not quite ready to be altogether charmed with the lady.

“And, à propos of medicine,” said Miss Carthusen lightly, “it has been revealed to me to-day who the first homœopathist was.”

“Is it a secret?”

“It was Achilles,” she replied. “Do you not remember that nothing but Achilles’ spear healed the wound that itself had made?”

As soon as they were gone, Mme. Chevreuse turned to her son. “Need I say how sorry I am?” she exclaimed.

Tears were in her eyes. She was touched to the heart that, though he must have been deeply mortified, he should still not have failed for a moment to treat her with even more than ordinary courtesy and affection, as if to show their visitors that he did not dream of reproving her.

“I knew that you felt worse about it than I did, dear mother,” he said, taking her hand. “And this will remind us both that it is not enough to be cautious in the expression of our thoughts. We must allow no uncharitable feeling to remain in our hearts.”

“‘Murder will out,’” he added more lightly, seeing her moved. “And, after all, isn’t Mr. Schöninger a fine fellow?”

Madame made no direct reply. She could not yet be enthusiastic about the Jew. “I think we should have supper,” she said, and went down to look after Jane.

“O madame! did you see the look that man gave you?” cried the girl.

“No matter about that,” the lady said calmly. “It was unfortunate that I should not have known he was coming. You must be careful to give some sign when visitors are coming in, and not introduce them in that noiseless way.”

Madame held, with the Duke of Wellington, that it is not wise to accuse one’s self to a servant. The humility, instead of edifying, only provokes to insubordination.

“I was coming down from the chambers, and met them at the street door, madame,” Jane made haste to say; “and I thought you would hear the steps.”

“Very well, Jane; it’s no matter. I’m sure you do your duty faithfully. And now we will have supper.”

---

[CHURCH AND STATE IN GERMANY.]

The new laws for the regulation and adjustment of the relations between church and state in Prussia, for the establishment of what Prince Bismarck calls a modus vivendi between the power spiritual and the power temporal—laws which have won the approval of the liberal and sectarian press in Europe and America—are substantially as follows:

1. All Prussian citizens who wish to receive ecclesiastical functions must matriculate at the state university. After matriculating, they must attend the university course for three years. On concluding their ecclesiastical studies, they must pass another state examination; that is to say, at the university. No candidate can be admitted to the priesthood unless he satisfy the state in this examination.

2. The creation of new (ecclesiastical) seminaries, great or small, is prohibited. The seminaries already existing shall be placed under state surveillance, and are forbidden to receive new scholars.

3. The candidate for the priesthood who is nominated by the bishop must be approved of and installed in his office by the president of the province. The bishop who nominates a candidate otherwise than in accordance with the law, shall be punished by a fine of from 750 francs to 3,750 francs ($150 to $750). The candidate submitting to such nomination shall be punished by a fine of from 3 francs (75 cts.) to 375 francs.

4. Ecclesiastical disciplinary power can only be exercised by ecclesiastical authorities of German nationality. The ecclesiastical functionaries who, by exercise of their functions, transgress the laws of the state or the ordinances of the civil authority, may, at the demand of that civil authority, be deposed, if the maintaining of their functions prove incompatible with public order.

A single question may not be inappropriate here: Why all this? Why must all Prussian citizens who wish to embrace the ecclesiastical state matriculate at the university? What special advantages are either they or that undefined thing called the state likely to derive from this matriculation? Matriculation is a very small thing at the best, and Catholics do not object to it even in a state university, as in London, where they do not possess one of their own. But why must ecclesiastical students be compelled to pass it? The matriculation examination as it obtains at the London University embraces a hodge-podge of study, a great part of which is of no absolute service to the clerical student in his career. All the subjects are touched upon more or less in his college course; but he naturally devotes his attention particularly to those which relate more especially to his vocation. And when the state forces a man who is studying to be a priest to attend a university course of three years, it steps out of its province, and commits a useless and tyrannical act.

As for the final examination at the end of the course, S. Paul certainly could never have passed it to the satisfaction of the present Prussian state—a man who taught such dangerous doctrines as that Christ was “above all principality, and power, and virtue, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.”

There is no need to pursue this part of the subject further. It must be plain to everybody that this provision of the bill is simply aimed at preventing candidates from aspiring to the priesthood at all, and hindering those who are perverse enough to aspire from becoming priests—a view which is strengthened by the clause following.

The candidate for the priesthood whom the bishop wishes to ordain and appoint must first meet with the approval of the president of the province, and not only meet with his approval, but be installed in his office by him. That is to say, the candidate must not be what the state would call an ultramontane—in other words, a Catholic; and ordination is practically transferred, if that were possible, from the bishop to the state. What can the president of the province possibly know about the candidate, an utter stranger to him? Or how is he to judge of his fitness or unfitness for the divine vocation? Is the president of the province for the future to undergo a course of theology, so as to be “up” in his duties? But it is needless to pursue this inquiry.

Jesus Christ, when he called his apostles, never consulted Pilate or Herod. He sought not men for the ministry who were learned in the wisdom of the schools: poor, ignorant fishermen were the foolish ones whom he chose to confound the wise and convert a world. Humanly speaking, and to human eyes, the Son of Joseph the carpenter was himself an ignorant man. There is no record of his studying, as did S. Paul, “at the feet of Gamaliel.” The apostles asked no man’s permission to preach; they consulted no powers in “the imposition of hands”; they carried on all the business of the church, they ordained and excommunicated, without ever consulting the president of the province in which they happened to be. Their successors will continue to do the same.

In military matters, for instance, which are purely state affairs, the interference of the president of the province would be resented. Courts-martial try offenders—the civil law may not touch them, and no president is ever called in to sanction the appointments to the various military grades. Why not? Simply because, in plain words, it is none of his business.

It seems foolish to examine this theme so closely, so flagrant is the violation of all common sense even, not to speak of legal right. Nevertheless, here is the Pall Mall Gazette, an ultra-liberal organ—so ultra, indeed, that it despises “commonplace liberalism”—giving its hearty concurrence to these measures, on the ground that priests are out of date, and the fittest judges of education are men of the world, statesmen, lawyers, and business men, who are more clever, better educated, and brisker in every way than the clergy—with much more to the same effect. Regarding its charge that the clergy are less fitted to cope with the question of education than men of the world:

In the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus is the principal teaching order of modern times. But outside of it there are plenty of teaching orders and societies—the Benedictines and others—possessed of excellent colleges and schools. There are also the colleges belonging to each diocese under the control of the respective bishops. Moreover, all education has come to us through the hands of the clergy; and the Catholic writers who have come out from Rome, and Louvain, and other purely clerical centres, even in these enlightened days, might possibly stand the trying test of comparison with the writers on the Pall Mall Gazette. But not to wander into so wide a field as this, the Pall Mall may be referred to its own columns for a refutation of at least a great part of this charge.

Writing last year on the expulsion of the Jesuits from Germany by the same power which has framed these laws for the education of the clergy, and which, as it confesses, are “almost enough to take one’s breath away,” the same journal said: “One of the most remarkable traits of the Society of Jesus has always been its literary productiveness. Wherever its members went, no sooner had they founded a home, a college, a mission, then they began to write books. The result has been a vast literature, not theological alone, though chiefly that, but embracing almost every branch of knowledge.”

And of their work in the particular profession which the Pall Mall itself graces at present—there is no knowing what it may not come to be in the future if its principles are only carried out—it said: “In Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, the most trustworthy critics are of opinion that there are no better-written newspapers than those under Jesuit control.”

This is only en passant; and, as it is often more satisfactory to let those outside of the church answer themselves, here is the opinion of the London Spectator upon this particular point, given in direct answer to the Pall Mall:

“Is an age of the world in which few men know what is truth or whether there be truth, one in which you would ask statesmen to determine its limits? We suspect that a race of statesmen armed with such powers as Prussia is now giving to her officials would soon cease to show their present temperance (!) and sobriety, and grow into a caste of civilian ecclesiastics of harder, drier, and lower mould than any of the ecclesiastics they had to put down.... To our minds, the absolutism of the Vatican Council is a trifling danger compared with the growing absolutism of the democratic temper which is now being pushed into almost every department of human conduct.”

On the larger question of the dangers of modern universities, the opinion of one of the keenest of living English statesmen was given in unmistakable language at the annual meeting of the Church Congress last year at Leeds. The Marquis of Salisbury is quite as true an Englishman as any writer on the Pall Mall Gazette, and his words may be considered to possess at least equal weight with those of the distinguished journal mentioned.

Referring more immediately to the abolition of the “Test Acts,” by which the state had hitherto guaranteed to overlook and prevent the teaching of infidelity, he said: “All hindrance to the teaching of infidelity has been taken away, and that is the great danger of the future. The great danger is that there should be formed inside our universities—especially, I fear, inside Oxford—a nucleus and focus of infidel teaching and influence; not infidel in any coarse or abusive sense, but in that sense in which Prof. Palmer used the words ‘heathen virtue.’ I fear that the danger we have to look to is that some colleges in Oxford may in the future play a part similar to that disastrous part which the German universities have played in the dechristianization of the upper and middle classes.” And the only advice he can give to England now is: “If the parents of England who send their sons to these colleges will be alive to the heavy responsibility which is now laid upon them, then perhaps we may have a better security, a better guarantee, than we have had that Oxford shall not be the means of uprooting the Christian faith which they had learnt at home.”

These words of the real, if not the nominal, leader of the conservative party in the British House of Lords, who at the same time is, or was when he delivered the speech, chancellor of the university of Oxford, are worthy of attention, and may be commended to that fussy little termagant, the Pall Mall Gazette. They have been doubly corroborated since by another British statesman whose testimony on such a subject is of at least equal weight with that of the ultra-liberal journal, inasmuch as he is the leader of the liberal party—the present Premier of England, in his recent great speech at Liverpool, which was principally devoted to exposing the errors of Strauss.

Passing on to the other laws, why, considered merely from a financial point of view, should the creation of new seminaries, great or small, be prohibited? This is controlling the private purse with a vengeance. The Prussian state, or Prince Bismarck and the professordom, forbid Prussians or anybody else to erect ecclesiastical seminaries. Of course, this means that Prussian or German youth are in future to be educated only in the state schools and universities. If they want to become priests, they must learn their theology as best they may; at least there shall be no schools or colleges for them to study in, for those already in existence are to be placed under state surveillance, to receive no new pupils—in a word, to be closed, or converted from the purpose for which they were founded by private funds into state schools with state professors at their head, which is just as though Gen. Grant swooped down on all the banking-houses in the United States, set them under government control, and bade the bankers go about their business. And yet Catholics who find some reason to object to this summary mode of dealing with their property and what they considered were their rights, are told that they are traitors to the state, conspirators against the empire, and that they only object in slavish obedience to a mandate from Rome.

This measure was well devised. Its framers said: We have banished the Jesuits; we have banished religious societies of every description; we have abolished the sacrament of marriage; we have banished religion from the schools; we now proceed to abolish ecclesiastical seminaries altogether: that is to say, we abolish the priesthood, we abolish God as far as Germany is concerned, and men shall worship us and us only—the supreme power.

What else does this law mean? It strikes out the priesthood, root and branch, as effectually as did the penal laws in England; nay, more so. The next clause fits in neatly. The bishop who nominates a candidate otherwise than in accordance with the law is fined heavily. As there are a good number of bishops, and as they are likely to disregard the law in this respect, this will ensure a constant revenue to the state as long at least as they are allowed to remain in the country.

Ecclesiastical disciplinary power can only be exercised by ecclesiastical authorities of German nationality. This, of course, is a blow struck directly at the Pope in his capacity of universal head of the church; indirectly at whoever may hereafter be appointed as bishops of the church in Germany. It simply forbids the Catholic bishops and priests to obey the commands of the Holy See, and, if carried out, would be subversive of the whole edifice of Christ’s church, which its divine Founder made one, indivisible, and CATHOLIC. “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations.” Prince Bismarck aims at carrying out what Bolanden calls “the Russian idea”—the erection in Germany of a state popedom. And again, Catholics are traitors to the state for objecting to it, though it is an amendment introduced into Article 15 of the Prussian constitution for the purpose of nullifying that truly liberal and wise measure, which was to the following effect:

The Evangelical and the Roman Catholic Churches, as well as all other religious societies, may administer and regulate their affairs in perfect freedom. All religious societies may continue in the possession and enjoyment of their institutions, foundations, and funds destined for worship, instruction, and charity.

This is the law that works in England, in this country, and wherever else the name of freedom is known. It left the Catholic Church little to desire in Prussia. The justice, the wisdom and necessity of substituting for this law those which appear at the head of this article, will be apparent.

Moreover, that same article very wisely and fairly provided that the state right of nominating, proposing, electing, and confirming in the offices of the church be suppressed, with the single exception of ecclesiastical appointments in the army and in public establishments.

That law worked to the satisfaction of all parties—the state, the Evangelicals, and the Catholics. The state never complained of it; the Evangelical Church never complained of it; the Catholic Church never complained of it. Why reverse this order now? Why, after handing the disciplinary power over into the hands of the church, and after having proved it so satisfactorily for half a century, do you now forbid the exercise of that power by authority which is not of German nationality? The constitution of the Catholic Church is exactly the same now as it was when that article was drawn up. The Catholic bishops were not self-appointed. Who conferred ecclesiastical disciplinary power in the first instance? The church through its head, the representative of Jesus Christ, who is not of German nationality; who, as head of the Catholic Church, is of no nationality; and to whom in that capacity the question of nationality does not apply: for the laws of which he is the keeper refer to the spiritual part of man’s nature, the moral order, which in all men is the same, and which takes as little color from the accidents of place or climate as it does from the darkness or the whiteness of the skin.

This law cannot be obeyed: its framers evidently were assured of this fact, for they provide that the ecclesiastical functionaries who, by exercise of their functions, transgress the laws of the state or the ordinances of the civil authority, may, at the demand of that authority, be deposed, if the maintaining of their functions prove incompatible with public order.

This means the destruction of the Catholic episcopate, or its total subserviency to the state. “I will strike the shepherd, and the flock will be dispersed,” said our Lord on a memorable occasion. That is precisely what Prince Bismarck says: Take all power out of the hands of the Pope; destroy the bishops if you cannot win them over to the state; strive to set priest against superior, by telling him that, if he disobey, the voice of his church is powerless to affect him whilst the arm of the state supports him. Swell the ranks of the “Old Catholic” party thus, and we shall force a schism on the church; after a short time, the people will go this way and that; the true shepherds gone, the flock will be dispersed, and the nation is ours to do as we please with, for there is no longer the voice of religion to rise up against us: the people are ripe for the worship of force.

Observe the steps which have led up to the present consummation from the foundation of the German Empire two years ago. The Jesuits, the vanguard of the church, are driven out. Why? For conspiring against the empire. Proofs? None.

All the other orders are driven out for the same reasons, and with the like proofs of guilt.

The universities are placed in the hands of infidels.

The schools are taken from the hands of religious, and placed altogether in the hands of the state.

The solemnization (!) of marriage is placed in the hands of the state.

Ecclesiastical seminaries are suppressed, and given over to the state.

Ecclesiastical students are for the future to be educated and appointed by the state.

Catholics must not subscribe money to build colleges of their own; if they do, those colleges will, like all the others, be appropriated by the state.

The bishops, the divinely appointed successors of the apostles, are only allowed to hold office at the will of the state.

He who disobeys is deposed from office by the state. The church is a thing of state. The human conscience is a thing of state. It has no rights, no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, that are not absolutely controlled by the state, “for in the kingdom of this world the state has dominion and precedence.”

There is the whole doctrine out, plain and undisguised. Those last words are taken from the speech delivered by Prince Bismarck to the House of Peers in the debate of March 10 on the question under consideration. And now that they are there, what is the state?

“The state is I,” said Louis XIV., and he was right in his estimate; but the fact of his having been right at the time when he made the boast did not prevent the French Revolution, rather helped it on, and does not prevent us to-day from repudiating the doctrine.

What constitutes the state in Prince Bismarck’s eyes? Is it the emperor, or himself, or Dr. Falk, or the German professordom? Is it the representatives of the country as collected in the Lower and Upper Prussian Houses? On the educational question, the Upper House, in which lay the strength of the conservative party, gave an adverse vote to the government, and the House was immediately dissolved. A number of mushroom peers were hastily created in an unconstitutional manner, and sent in as the creatures of Prince Bismarck, for the sole purpose of passing these bills, in order to give a show of free discussion, and make the measure of Prince Bismarck appear as the will of the nation. But does the following read like the speech of a man who was likely to favor free discussion, or rather, of one who pined for absolutism, and was determined to have it? It is an extract from the speech of the prince on resigning the premiership of the Prussian Parliament to Count von Roon: “There is no fear that Prussia will lose her legitimate influence in the federal government, even if the individual members of the cabinet are not on all questions at one.... Prussia’s territory making five-eighths of all Germany, she will always command the authority naturally belonging to her. Besides, the identity of the German and Prussian politics is guaranteed by the fact that the German Emperor and the King of Prussia happen to be one and the same person. I do not deny that the premier should be invested with more extensive prerogatives than are now his own. He might, for instance, be accorded the right of suspending the decisions of the cabinet until their approval or otherwise by the king; or he might be granted some other prerogative with a view to regulating the action of the administration. All this, I dare say, will come to pass in course of time, but, not being as yet conceded to him, he has to shift as best he may.... There is too much talking over one’s colleagues involved in the premiership to leave a man time for anything else.”

That speech was delivered some months ago. Since then, the speaker has come nearer to the boast of Louis XIV. This is how the echo of the German chancellor, the Berlin special correspondent of the London Times, speaks of it, with a cringing tone that to free stomachs brings an absolute nausea: “With a decisive struggle against popery looming ahead, it would be a great mistake in this loyal and king-loving country to strip the ministry of the authority it derives from representing the crown rather than the parliament”; whilst the Times itself remarks editorially, with a mental blindness strange indeed, if unintentional: “We do not anticipate any retrogression in the development of Prussia, but it seems inevitable that there should be some check in the progress of change, some slackening in the audacity of legislation, some disposition to rest and be thankful.”

To show how far freedom of discussion prevails in the Prussian Parliament over and above the speech quoted of Prince Bismarck, the dissolution of the Upper House on refusing to go the length of the government on the education question, and the creation of new peers for the purpose of overcoming that opposition, may be added the very significant announcement made by Dr. Falk on presenting the bill to the Chamber in the first instance, before a word of discussion had taken place on it, that his majesty’s sanction was certain beforehand; which was saying practically: You may vote as you please, but this bill must be passed, and he who opposes its passage is an enemy to the throne—no small threat in a military nation.

So much for freedom of discussion! Where, then, is one to find that mysterious body, the state, of which there is so much talk? Of course, this bill has passed both houses; it has been debated and divided on, and the divisions have gone with the ministry. Well, in representative governments, such is the rule. Whatever the majority votes becomes law. All looks fair. The bill has gone against the Catholics, and that is all that can be said about it.

But how has it gone against them? It is a sweeping measure; of that there can be no doubt. It is the most tremendous measure framed within this century, perhaps in all time, for the suppression of the faith; for, to any honest mind, these laws are absolute suppression of all that constitutes the Catholic Church, so far as human enactments can effect it. Prince Bismarck endeavored from the beginning of this contest with the church to throw a false light over it. He banished the Jesuits and the other orders on the plea that they were conspiring against the empire. There was no trial, or searching, or investigation. It was simply his ipse dixit: he commanded, and they were banished. At that time his contest, as he and his organs and representatives in the Chamber continued to assure the world, was one with conspirators, and in no wise with the Catholic Church. The secularization, which has been better called the dechristianization, of the schools, and the abolition of the sacrament of marriage, had nothing whatever to do with the Catholic faith. What mockery! Now he comes and forces this bill through the parliament, which, if carried out, as it doubtless will be to the letter—for Prince Bismarck does nothing by halves—simply and absolutely stops the life of religion, not alone the Catholic, but all religion with any pretension to the name, throughout Germany; and still he persists in declaring that the contest is not with the church. In his speech of March 10, which will be remembered in history, and in calmer moments read aright by all, the prince chancellor said: “The question in which we are at present involved is placed, according to my judgment, in a false light if we call it a confessional religious question. It is essentially political; it has nothing to do with the conflict of an evangelical dynasty against the Catholic Church, as our Catholic fellow-citizens are taught to believe; it has nothing to do with the conflict between faith and infidelity: it has solely to do with the ancient contest for dominion, which is as old as the human race; with the contest for power between monarchy and priesthood—the contest which is much older than the appearance of the Redeemer in the world.”

Now, if this statement of the relative position of the opposing forces be correct, Prince Bismarck makes the contest all the easier for the Catholics. He professes to remove it altogether out of the region of religion into that of politics, and thus the conflict, according to him, is one between two purely political parties. As will be shown, the party opposed to the present Bismarck policy is not at all restricted to the Catholics; it embraces the greater portion of the Evangelicals, most probably all of them, as well as those who, outside of Germany, would be called democrats. Basing the contest, then, on purely political grounds, the majority of the German Empire is driven by sheer force of the will of one man or of a few men, backed by the most powerful army in the world, into accepting a state of things which it abhors, and against which it vehemently protests. The claims of either party are to be decided purely on their own merits, and the verdict of a fair mind cannot fail to side with that at whose head stand the Catholics; for they claim nothing more than that the Prussian constitution, under which all up to the present have lived happily, be preserved inviolate. “Leave the Prussian law as it stood,” demand the Catholics and the Evangelicals. “We are content with it; we demand nothing more.” How such a plain and patriotic request can be contorted into conspiracy against the empire it is hard to conceive. As for the allegation that the relations of Catholics to the state have been altered one jot by the declaration of infallibility, that is idle. Catholics believe now precisely what they believed from the beginning. Prince Bismarck, then, was fully alive to the importance of the question he was engaged in at the time. It was no insignificant measure that might quietly sneak through the House almost without the House being aware of its existence. The German Empire numbers 40,000,000 of souls; of these 14,000,000 are Catholics; that is to say, more than one-third of the entire population. Call the relation existing to-day between these 14,000,000 of Catholics and the head of their church, the Pope, between them and their bishops and clergy, what you please, political or religious, the result of the passing of this measure is one and the same—the total breaking up of that relation in all that makes it what it is, in so far as it lies in Prince von Bismarck to effect that result. And so the world understands it.

“There is no parallel in history,” says the Pall Mall Gazette, “to the experiment which the German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently, but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it almost takes one’s breath away.”

The London Times of April 19, in a curious article on our Holy Father which will call for attention afterwards, sums up the situation thus:

“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become [which since have become] law, amount to a secular organization so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour, that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil power the control of all education, the imposition of its own conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office, the administration of all discipline, and at every point the right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany, without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the emperor.”

The Times is no special advocate of Catholic interests, so that, when it puts the case thus, it is out of no love for them. But after such a graphic picture of the situation, it is needless to reiterate what has been maintained, that, call these measures what you please, they simply involve and mean the legal suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany.

The bill, then, required some consideration; for it could only be regarded by one-third of the empire at least, and by the millions of their co-religionists outside the empire, not simply as an outrage on their conscience—that would be a weak word for it—but as a measure, whether it passed or was defeated, to be resisted with all the power that lies in man’s nature. In this light alone could it be looked upon by the Catholics, and thus the hearts of one-third of the empire were at once and, if freedom of conscience be not a meaningless phrase, most justly alienated from the government of an empire scarce yet two years old.

But the opposition was not confined to Catholics alone. The Evangelical party, though a few of its members and organs had opposed the intermeddling of the state with church affairs from the first, as a whole accepted the expulsion of the Jesuits and the other arbitrary measures as a good thing, and as a deadly blow struck at Rome. But when these crowning measures appeared, it saw that, as usual, the blow struck at Rome was a blow struck at all freedom, and strove to retract when too late. To quote the Pall Mall Gazette again:

“The difficulties of Prince Bismarck are not decreasing. The Jesuits have found a fresh ally in Prussia, and the ranks of the enemies of the new ecclesiastical legislation are swollen by combatants whose loyalty hitherto has been unswerving. Herr von Gerlach no longer stands alone as a Protestant opponent of the chancellor’s policy. A portion of the Evangelical clergy and a section of the Protestant aristocracy of the old provinces of the kingdom have passed over into the camp of the enemy. In Pomerania and Silesia, a bitterness of antagonism has revealed itself which was never suspected. The feelings that have fed this opposition have evidently been long in existence, but only now have they betrayed themselves openly. The occasion on which this was done was the emperor’s birthday. It has been customary to have religious services in the churches at such times, and they had come to be expected by the population as a regular part of the celebration. This year, however, many of the Evangelical clergy in different towns omitted the usual services, and kept their churches closed. A letter in the Spener Gazette remarks upon the astonishment excited in Neusalz, in Lower Silesia, because of the omission. Another letter from Wolgast says neither in that town nor in Kammin or Schievelbein was ‘the divine service held to which we have been always accustomed.’ The same thing occurred at Wernigerode, where the only notice of the occasion was in the prayers at the usual Sunday service the day after. These facts have excited much comment in Germany. The official papers openly accuse the Protestant clergy of the eastern provinces of becoming the allies of the ultramontanes” (April 12).

Thus does this “loyal and king-loving” people manifest its gratitude to the monarch for the forcing of this bill upon it. How is it that the bill hurts them, the Evangelicals, who detest the Pope, most of them, just as cordially as does Prince Bismarck? Alas for human nature! There was a touch of the weakness of the flesh in it after all.

When this bill met their gaze, the eyes of the Evangelicals were at last opened. They saw that its provisions were all-embracing, and that there was no distinction made between Catholic and Protestant, so just and righteous to all is the Gospel promulgated by Prince Bismarck—the gospel of the state! They had thought to get off scot-free; they lent no voice to the noble protest of the Catholic bishops at Fulda; but at length their zeal is aroused, and they generously throw their weight into the scale, praying that the new laws may take the form of exceptional measures for the Catholic Church.

Such was the form which the Evangelical objection took—on purely conscientious grounds, no doubt. While the internal budget was being discussed, some of the progressionists were so stupidly logical as to vote a refusal of the very respectable subsidy which this generous, charitable, and conscientious body enjoys. But Dr. Falk, the liberal, came to the rescue, and saved it.

The Prussian correspondent of the London Times has an instructive little paragraph on this subject, which may serve to throw some further light on this eleventh-hour opposition:

“But the Catholic dignitaries are not the only ecclesiastics opposed to the bill. The new measures applying not only to the Catholic Church, but to all religious communities recognized by the state, the Oberkirchenrath, or Supreme Consistory of the Protestant Church in the old provinces, has also thought fit to caution the crown against the enactment of these sweeping innovations. The principal reason given by the Oberkirchenrath against the clause in the new laws facilitating secession from a religious community, is that many a Protestant might be tempted to forsake his faith on the eve of the building of a new church. Rather than contribute his mite, as compelled by law, he might prefer being converted to something else.”

If letters could blush, that last sentence ought to be of a scarlet color. However, to keep to the question at hand: whatever may have been the motive, certain it is that at length the Evangelical party, as a party, a body, political or religious, as you please, is aroused, and turns upon the government, of which it was ready to be the obedient servant so long as all things went smoothly. A similar instance of a great uprising of religious zeal against government innovation was exhibited and is witnessed still in that “loyal and king-loving” body, the Irish Protestants, on the disestablishment of what was called the Irish Church. Here, then, are the Evangelicals protesting against the government, and the Catholics protesting against the government; how much of the nation is left? The Catholics are 14,000,000; the number of the Evangelicals is unknown to the writer, but it probably doubles, perhaps trebles, that of the Catholics—certainly in Prussia; at all events, it may be safely said that the majority of the German Empire protests against these laws. Where is the state to be found, then? The state certainly does not lie in the majority of the people. On purely political grounds, therefore, Prince Bismarck’s measure is tyrannical; nevertheless, “in the kingdom of this world, the state has dominion and precedence.”

“Ave, Cæsar! Morituri te salutant!”

Prince Bismarck expected this opposition. So powerful did he imagine it would be that he even feared it, and in his own speeches and organs mingled cajolery with threats. Whilst the ecclesiastical bills were still being debated, the Provinzial-Correspondenz (official), in a flaring article on the protest of the Catholic bishops at Fulda, and the Catholic opposition to the ecclesiastical laws, wrote:

“The state, of course, being responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants in every measure adopted, will have to be guided by a strict regard for what is just and upright. It will have carefully to refrain from meddling with the creed or interfering with the ecclesiastical institutions and usages immediately connected with the sphere of religious belief. Only the other day, the Minister of Education (Dr. Falk) expressed his conviction in the Lower House that, directly the new bills became law, the Catholic subjects would perceive that no one intended to injure their religious faith, oppress their church, or interfere with the preaching of saving truth.” (Dr. Falk’s convictions are of a piece with his notions of “truth.”) ... “In carrying through their present task, government is prepared to encounter serious resistance and much trouble; but it is also aware that the bills now under discussion, if once they become law, will supply it with effective means of exerting its authority.... If the washes of the government and parliament are fulfilled, the bills under discussion will be a work of peace.”

“That is, in case the bishops yield,” remarks the Prussian correspondent of the London Times. “In the other event, they are sure to be successively fined, deposed, incarcerated, and perhaps sent out of the country. All this the new legislation empowers the government to effect.”

The government, then, or the state, or whatever be the name by which Prince Bismarck chooses to be called, dreaded a powerful opposition. Nevertheless, it determined to pass these bills—which were absolutely uncalled for, as far as the harmony of the relations between Catholic and Protestant went, and that of either or both of these bodies with what ought to be the state, the true representative rulers of the people, and not a man or a few men elevated on the bayonets of a million soldiers—conscious that it was doing what the conscience of its people might of necessity endure for a time, but could never consent to. How long, then, did it take to bring this stupendous measure about, fraught as it was with all these consequences, and a cause of alarm and anxiety even to the government itself with all its bayonets?

The laws are dated January 8 of this year; they were presented to the Chamber on the following day, and, by the 21st of the same month, their first discussion is over. On April 25, they finally passed the Upper House.

In three months! A bill which altered throughout the whole relations between church and state in Germany, down to their minutest details; which involved the appropriation to state purposes of every ecclesiastical college or seminary subscribed for, and erected, and founded by the money of private individuals; which, involving as it does the suppression of the bishops and the clergy, as a necessary consequence hands over to the state a vast amount of funded property in churches and houses; which, above all this, meets religion at every turn, and makes it bow down and worship the state; which threatens a future of disturbance and danger of every kind—is pushed through both Houses of Parliament, and supposed to be fully discussed and decided on in a period of three months!

Why, a bill for the laying of a new line of railroad twenty miles in length would have required longer time and called for more discussion. There it stands now, law, and all Germany must obey it, because the state calls it law. On April 24, Germany could be Christian; on April 26, to be Christian is a crime against the state; to obey the dictates of conscience is a crime; to establish a school in the name of God is a crime; to establish a college for the education of God’s ministry is a crime; to obey the pastors, the priests, and bishops of God’s church, whom to obey hitherto was a virtue, is now a crime; to acknowledge the Pope as the head of the universal church, a crime; in a word, to be anything but German, body and soul, mind and heart and thought, is a crime, to be punished by all the rigor of the law!

Prince Bismarck, while he is about it, should go further. “To-day we will proceed to create God,” said a countryman of his, a philosopher, an enlightened man and apostle of the stamp of Dr. Falk, the putative father of these bills. The chancellor should create a German heaven to correspond with this German religion and reward its devotees, the worshippers of the divine state. What German Dante will arise to give us the Bismarck Inferno?

The steps which led up to this measure, the ingredients which compose it, the manner in which it was forced through, the meaning of it, and the effect, if carried out, it will produce on religion, have now been set before the reader, and he may fairly pronounce for himself upon the whole question. But the question asked at the beginning remains still unanswered: Why has all this come about? Why has so wise a statesman as Prince Bismarck is reputed to be raked up these embers of dissension, and fanned them into so fierce a flame? Is it to his advantage to turn one-third, the majority even, of his empire against him? Why, if the contest were not, as he and his supporters of the liberal and religious press allege, in a manner forced upon him, should he be so unwise as to run the danger of rending his empire asunder, and opening up that bitterest of difficulties, the religious question, which lay so quiet? In one word, was or was not the Catholic Church a danger to the new empire?

This is becoming the question of the day; and what concerns Germany concerns the whole world. The Catholic Church is a danger to the state.

Again, why?

Because you obey an infallible Pontiff, an absolute ruler, blindly and implicitly. Matters were not quite so bad before the declaration of the dogma of infallibility; but since that date, the Pope has taken a new stand which governments cannot admit. They cannot endure to have any portion of their subjects ruled by a foreign potentate. They cannot have their measures thwarted and decrees opposed by a mandate, open or secret, from Rome. They cannot admit the pretensions of a well-meaning, no doubt, but rather unpractical and decidedly impracticable old gentleman to the sovereignty over the whole world. Those whom he claims as his subjects may venerate him as much as they choose; they may even obey him, as far as believing in a God and all that sort of thing goes, if it bring any unction to their souls; they may believe in any mortal or immortal thing they please; but they must obey the laws of the land in which they live, whatever those laws may be. Religious belief may be anything you please, as long as it is confined to the individual’s mental faith; but his conduct must not be ruled by it. Whenever religion crosses the state, religion must give way. Governments cannot admit the disloyal theory of “a Catholic first, a nationalist if you will.”

It all lies there: the contest between Prince Bismarck and the church, between Italy and the church, between the whole world and the church. This contest did not begin with the German chancellor. There is a power behind the throne that moves even him to this deed of violence upon the sacred person of the spouse of Christ, his holy church: the same old tempter that first whispered to man in Eden: “Ye shall be as gods”; that drove the kings to stone and persecute the prophets; that moved the Jews to crucify Christ; that directed the arm of the pagan emperors of Rome. It is not in man of his own will merely to stir up this strife, and wage war upon his brother for the matter of faith. The spirit of evil is ever working; and his present chief representative, unconsciously it may be hoped, is the powerful chancellor of the German Empire. Here is his standpoint, as given by the Berlin correspondent of the New York Herald, in the remarkable speech of March 10. In the extract already given, the chancellor pronounced the contest he has entered upon as having “solely to do with the ancient contest for dominion, which is as old as the human race; with the contest for power between monarchy and priesthood—the contest which is much older than the appearance of the Redeemer in the world.” After endeavoring to connect every great movement of recent and mediæval history inimical, or supposed to be inimical, to Germany with the machinations of the Papacy, he goes on to say: “It is, in my estimation, a falsification of politics and of history when His Holiness the Pope is considered exclusively as the high-priest of any one confession, or the Catholic Church as representative of churchdom in general. The Papacy has been in all times a political power which, with the determination and with the greatest success, interfered in all the relations of this world; which meant to interfere, and considered such interference as its legitimate programme. This programme is well known. The aim constantly kept in view by the Papal power (like the Rhine borders before the eyes of the French)—the programme which, at the time of the mediæval emperors, was very nearly realized—is the making the secular power subject to the clerical—an aim eminently political, the effort to attain which is, however, as old as humanity; for so long have there been persons, whether cunning people or real priests, who have asserted that the will of God was better known to them than to their fellow-citizens; and it is well known that this principle is the foundation of the Papal claim to dominion.”

Now, there is no denying that this is a very fascinating doctrine for nations. The rulers studiously misrepresent the Papacy, setting it down as a political power: as that most dangerous of political powers which would clothe politics in the garb of religion, as Mahomet did, and give to their selfish schemes the name of the cause of God, so as to arouse an enthusiasm and fanaticism in their devotees which mere human powers can never hope to enkindle. Mahomet was just one of those “cunning people” who “asserted that the will of God was better known to him than to his fellow-citizens,” if they could be designated by that title. And the conquests that Mahomet achieved by that deceit are in the memory of all. The Pope is the Mahomet of the XIXth century, according to Prince Bismarck.

When Shakespeare put that famous sentence into the mouth of King John, “No foreign power shall tithe or toll in my dominions,” he only said the same thing. “You are about to disestablish the church in Ireland, because it was imposed by a foreign power,” said Mr. Disraeli, during the debates on the question of the disestablishment. “You will do so; but what will you have in its place? A nation ruled by a foreign power; for the Pope is an absolute sovereign.” The words are from memory; but the aim and substance are correct, and he of all men understood the fallacy of the argument; but he knew that it was a valuable party-cry to stir the blood of the patriotic Englishman. So, recently, Mr. Gladstone told the House of Commons that the Irish University Bill was defeated by Cardinal Cullen, under mandate, of course, from Rome. And so runs the cry through the world.

It buzzes around our ears out here even in certain quarters, though much less, happily, than it was wont to do. Terror of Rome! is the string to harp on. The Catholics wish to surrender the country into the hands of the Pope!

Laying aside the consideration of the practical impossibility of such a thing, suppose the Pope did reign as emperor in Germany to-day, would the people be less happy than they show themselves to be under the rule of Prince Bismarck? Would the Pope encircle his throne with a cordon of steel, or reign in the hearts of his people? How much happier are the inhabitants of the Papal States to-day under the rule of Victor Emanuel than they were under that of Pius IX.? Let the correspondents of the secular press answer with their periodical record of outrage and crime.

How is it possible to convince people that all these allegations are utterly and maliciously false? The Pope is infallible; and so was Peter when our Lord made him the rock upon which he should build his church. Peter had the same conflict with Rome that Pius has with Germany, not simply because he was Peter, the head of the church on earth, and the vicar of Jesus Christ, but because he was a Christian. And every Christian who is faithful to the law of his crucified Master is bound to say to the state “I cannot” when the state would have him deny that Master, and break loose from the teachings of the church. It is not the Pope these men are fighting: it is Christianity. As far as the German laws of making the divinely instituted sacrament of matrimony a merely civil contract, of preaching disobedience to the pastors of the church, go, were the Pope to die to-day, and, if possible, an interregnum, which seems to be so desired by many, to ensue, that fact would not make a bit of difference in the opposition of Catholics to these state measures. Wrong would be wrong still; the laws of God would remain as binding as ever; and to hinge the Catholic faith in this fashion on the Papacy is a transparent trick. The Pope teaches what Jesus Christ bade him teach; and no pope has ever swerved from that line.

It is almost useless to discuss this theme, and yet it must be taken up, though those violent opponents of what they call ultramontanism, by which they mean Catholicity, will still continue to close their eyes to the truth that the Catholic religion has no connection of any kind with politics as pure politics. But where politics touches upon religion, of course religion is to be taken into account. It would far overstep this article to go into all the details and intricacies of this question; but the statement of the position which Catholics take upon the subject may serve best to put the matter before the reader.

Catholics read history differently from Prince Bismarck and the scientific historians who surround him. For them all practical history, if the term may be used, begins with Jesus Christ. All the rest, as far as theories of government, of the relations of the state to the individual, go, may be considered as blotted out, as a tabula rasa, and the world, in the moral order, began anew. Before the coming of our Lord there was no government, in the modern sense of the word, outside of the Jewish nation: there was force. Jesus Christ laid down laws which should enter into every relation of the life of man, and could not be mistaken. These laws were just as binding on the monarch as on the subject, on the government as on the governed; they did not destroy government: they guided and helped it, and infused into it the first principles of freedom. Men recognized this fact, and, as Christianity advanced, governments began to fashion themselves closer and closer upon the law of the Gospel, until at length what is known as Christendom grew up, grounded, as its very name implied, upon the religion of Christ—that is to say, upon the law of Christ. Of course, in the various governments, many things remained contrary to this law, not, however, as rights, but as wrongs which only time and Christian influence could remove. However, governments were measured as to their justice and injustice, not by a standard antecedent to the Christian era, nor by any standard which they might choose to set up for themselves, but by their assimilation to, their agreement or disagreement with, the law of Jesus Christ.

Of course, to those who deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, all this reasoning goes for nothing; but Prince Bismarck does not profess to do so. Where, then, was this law to be found? Had it a keeper, a guardian, a propounder, one to whose care its divine Founder had entrusted it, guarded against the possibility of mistaking its teachings, or did he leave the dead letter to commend itself in a variety of ways to a variety of minds? Were all men blessed from birth with perfect intelligence and personal infallibility, there would have been no need of leaving anything more than the dead letter of the law, as in that case all would have agreed as to its meaning. But as men do not as a rule lay claim to perfect intelligence and personal infallibility, without going further into the question here, it seems obvious to common sense that, if Christ left a law to the world, he left it in somebody’s keeping: he left a government and a head, as the representative of himself. This representative is the Pope, whom all Christendom recognized for so many centuries, not as king of this mundane world, but as the supreme head of the universal church of Christ.

In time, he came to have a patrimony of his own, which was freely given him, and has been recently very freely taken from him. That patrimony he did not rule infallibly as king. His policy as an earthly monarch might even be defective, like that of any other ruler; but, in the domain of faith and morals, he, when speaking ex cathedrâ, could not err, and Christendom bowed to his decisions.

Here it is, then, that Catholics bind their faith in the Pope; not in Pius IX. as ruler of Rome, but in Pius IX. as the successor of Peter, as the vicar of Jesus Christ, as his living representative on earth. When, therefore, Christendom departs from Christianity, from the law of Christ upon which it was founded, and devises measures or promulgates doctrines in opposition to the law of Christ, Catholics look to the decision of him with whom the Word abides to say if this be true or untrue, right or wrong. He pronounces, and they believe and obey. He simply says this is or this is not the law of Christ—the law that rules the government as well as the governed. If governments enforce wrong with the strong arm, you must use all lawful resistance; but, rather than deny the truth, you must die as your Saviour died.

The tendency of governments to-day is to say: “We bow to no law, we recognize nothing higher than ourselves, and the laws we make must be obeyed without question.” This is going back to the ante-Christian era, and reviving the worship of force. Such is the tendency to-day: disbelief in Christ; disbelief, consequently, in his doctrines, in his church, in Christianity, in the head of his church. To be Catholic, consequently, is to be anti-national, in the eyes of the state, when in reality it is to be the truest citizen of the state. Home employed a Christian legion, and, though in bravery and devotion to the empire that legion knew no superior, many of its members were martyred because they recognized a spiritual power higher than the state.

And therein Catholicity is compelled to oppose the state: dating from Christ, believing in Christ, building itself upon Christ, its followers members of the church of Christ, it follows the state in all things save where it transgresses the commandments of Christ; hence the non possumus.

Coming back, then, to the present question, Catholics believe the Pope to be the infallible head of the Catholic Church, not the absolute emperor of the kingdoms of this world. Jesus Christ, whose vicar he is, himself proclaimed, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Nations may assume what form of government best suits them; all that is nothing to the Pope. A Catholic is absolutely free in this country, for instance, to vote whatever ticket he may please, Republican or Democratic. As far as those names and their meaning go, Catholicity has absolutely nothing whatever to do with them. But a political party erects what it calls a platform, raises a party-cry, and, as in the present instance in Prussia, calls itself liberal, and its liberalism attempts to wipe out absolutely the Catholic religion from the land and from the world if it could. Is it in human reason to expect Catholics not to allow their religion to influence their votes in such a case as that, or in such a case as the Irish university question, or in any similar case that might occur here?

What are votes given for? Surely to protect ourselves against tyranny of every form, and to secure our proper representation in the body to whose care is entrusted the government of the country. God forbid that religion should not influence politics! Why should it not? Let it alone; leave it free to do God’s work; leave it its churches, its colleges, its schools, its hospitals, its asylums, its associations, its free worship, its beliefs, and its institutions. But if you come, as Prince Bismarck has done, to say to religion, I will take from you your schools, which are your own private property; I will take from you your sacraments, which you believe to have been instituted by Jesus Christ; I will strip you of your ecclesiastical colleges, and educate your students myself; I will take your ordination out of the hands of your bishops, and ordain your priests myself; I will appoint your bishops as I please, and they who displease me are no longer bishops; I will take from you your head, the Pope, and make myself pope in his stead: all this will I do, but still you are at liberty to believe in and worship God—what must the answer be?

This is a mockery! This is paganism; it is violence, not law. We cannot obey. There, says Bismarck, or the state, that is treason. Why cannot you obey? Because the Pope, “that old conjuror of the Vatican,” forbids you. That is just the point: either the Pope must rule or I.

Because conscience forbids me, because human reason forbids me, because Jesus Christ forbids me, is the response of the Catholic. Catholics cannot consent to the doctrine that in the dominion of this world the state has precedence. What is the state? An accident. The Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, Bismarck, the British Parliament, the Commune, all these in turn call themselves the state. Government indeed is supreme, and to be obeyed, in its own sphere; but if there be no law higher than the material laws which men construct for themselves, and change as occasion demands, good-by to all stable government. If government be merely a creation of man, it must be subject to the varying temper of man; it cannot fix absolutely the rights of man; it can have no absolute title to his obedience. We utterly repudiate this doctrine, and refuse to accept anything as final which we construct for our own use. Its powers are limited as are those of all human institutions: once it oversteps these boundaries, it becomes tyranny. State to-day means Bismarck, to-morrow the Commune; it is a case of circumstances; and, if there lie no law beyond all this, no principles which are fixed and come from a Power above “this world,” one is as good as another. This power is religion, and the church is the embodiment of religion, and the Pope is the head of the corporate body, infallible indeed when teaching the universal church, else is he an accident the same as all the others.

Suppose our Blessed Lord were to come down in the flesh at this moment into Germany, what course would he take upon this question? Would he bow to Cæsar in this? Neither will his vicar nor his children. With the army at his back, Prince Bismarck does this wrong. It is said that he is driven to it for the unity of Germany. Germany was united without it. All the states cheerfully submitted even to Prussian preponderance, without thought of dragging in the religious question. The laws as they stood on that point were satisfactory. Well, Germany is united now; but it has become the union of galley-slaves, chained together, watched by a hard taskmaster whose blow is death. The enemy of true German unity to-day is Prince Bismarck.

There is the law, and it is sure to be carried out. Well, the bishops will go to prison, will pay the fines, or become exiles. They will continue to ordain priests and educate them, irrespective of that power called the state. And the real difficulty begins now. The Catholics cannot yield: sooner or later, the state must.

One fact has come out of it all which is worthy of notice. This XIXth century, at least this latter half of it, has been lauded and glorified superabundantly as the age of freedom, the liberal age.

Catholics began to forget their history. They began to think the era of persecution for conscience’ sake over, when they heard it proclaimed on all sides that perfect freedom of thought was the order of the day; there was to be no such distinction as Catholic or Protestant, or Jew or Gentile, any more; the lion was to lie down with the lamb, the world to become a haven of brotherly love, and the dawn of the millennium was seen in the heavens. The rack, the gibbet, the fagot, and the hurdle were all to be banished out of sight and forgotten, or only preserved in museums as evidence of what horrible beings our sires could become. It was all very gushing and nice; the narrow lines of prejudice were to be softened down, and old-fogy, stiff-kneed notions to be voted out.

Suddenly rang out the voice of Peter’s successor: Liberalism is false: beware of it. It is only a few years back since these words startled the world in the Syllabus. A storm of hatred and malign fury arose on all sides, endeavoring to drown the voice of the church. Who are you who condemn us? asked the world.

The infallible head of the church! Men proclaimed that Catholics themselves did not accept it; and the Catholic Church spoke out boldly in these days, not to proclaim a new doctrine, but only to acknowledge to a doubting world what it had always accepted and believed, that the head of the church upon earth is infallible. There was no more talk of softening down of lines: Catholics believed this, or were not Catholics. Listen to the voice of one of the bitterest and most persistent enemies of the Pope, speaking only the other day:

“It is impossible to imagine a belief more sincere, a vision more intense, a life more consistent, than that of the man who has claimed for more than a quarter of a century to be the lord and master of the whole world. If there be neither folly nor sin in such a claim, then we may admire Pius IX., and indeed must worship and obey him also.”[149]

Was the “intense vision” mistaken in detecting the poison which lay at the bottom of liberalism? Prince Bismarck has just deserted the conservative party to which he adhered so long—all his political life almost—and thrown himself into the arms of the liberals. These ecclesiastical bills are the result—such is liberalism. “We will force your children to go to our schools and receive the education we give them, which you call godless,” says Huxley, scientific liberal like Dr. Falk. La Commune was the essence of liberalism, and it shot the Archbishop of Paris and the priests out of pure sport apparently. “A free church in a free state” was the Cavour doctrine for liberal Italy, and the bill for the appropriation of church property and of that belonging to the religious orders has followed naturally upon the appropriation of the Papal States and the imprisonment of the head of the church. Switzerland, the liberal republic, banishes the Jesuits, closes the convents, and follows Bismarck’s steps in its dealings with the Catholic clergy. The South American states are doing the same in the name of liberalism. The whole world may be traversed, and wherever liberalism is strongest, there is violence done in the name of freedom.

And here in this free republic men are found, like the writers in the Nation and throughout the Protestant press, to approve of all this. And they are republicans—Americans—lovers of freedom. If Americans, they are traitors to their country, repudiators of the principles of their sires. They forget their history. What brought the Pilgrim Fathers hither? The refusal to take the oath of supremacy to the state. Is what was right in them wrong in us? Freedom was the one word written on the virgin brow of this yet young republic. You who approve of these measures in Prussia would wipe that word out, and set in its place slavery.

The effect which these measures have produced on the outer world is significant. Those who hailed the first outburst on the part of Prince Bismarck with such loud acclaim begin to hesitate and draw back. The secular journals in this country and in England, as a rule, either watch and pronounce upon the steps which have led up to this final outrage with timid caution, or, in a few instances, with downright disapproval.

“We deny entirely that Prince Bismarck himself ever adopted this policy on its merits in the sense in which the Pall Mall admires it. On the contrary, we believe that, as a statesman, he distrusted it seriously, and has even now little confidence in its success. We believe that it will result in giving a new stimulus to Roman Catholicism, and that the fanatical vehemence with which the German people have adopted it is a sufficient evidence of the rash and ill-considered character of the policy itself.”[150]

“This rough-and-ready method of expelling ultramontane influences ‘by a fork’ can hardly fail to suggest to a looker-on the probability that, like similar methods of expelling nature, it may lead to a reaction. Downright persecution of this sort (we are speaking now simply of the Jesuit law), unless it is very thorough indeed—more thorough than is well possible in this XIXth century—usually defeats itself.”[151]

In this country, the secular press seems generally inclined to shirk the question, or devotes an occasional paragraph to it from time to time, as to a disagreeable subject which will force itself upon the sight, but which it is better to get out of the way as speedily as possible. The religious press among us has gone wild over it from the beginning as a death-blow to Rome. But even they begin to distrust it, and soften their jubilant notes to a mild piano, that they hope all good from this measure—they do not exactly see what good, but they live in hope, whilst one of their number, the New York Observer, a fine hater of “Popery,” actually declared the other day that, in its opinion, “Cæsar was going too far.”

In Germany itself, as may be gathered from some of the extracts already given, the state-god is not yet accepted as infallible and supreme even in this world. Prince Bismarck marches very fast; and he would make Germany march with him. Sedan was won by marching: but this moral Sedan, as he would consider it, laughs at the snail’s pace of the other. There is such a thing as “riding a gift horse to death”; and Prince Bismarck seems intent on accomplishing that foolish feat.

And here a word may be devoted to the false allegation, which is now beginning to be dropped, that the Catholics were foes to the consolidation of the empire. The Jesuits were banished as conspirators against the empire; the whole Catholic Church was in a conspiracy against it; the Pope had gone further, and, with the rashness characteristic of him, “openly declared war against Bismarck and his ideas” (New York Nation). We have looked in vain for the details of this mysterious conspiracy, which have not yet seen the light, though it was so “well known.” Not a single scrap of evidence appeared, not a single riot occurred, not a house was fired; there was no gun-powder discovered, not even the traditional slouched hat and dark-lantern; the supreme majesty of the law was never violated even in the sacred person of a solitary policeman.

As for the other allegation, that Catholics were opposed to the unity of the fatherland, they had ample opportunity to speak prior to the war with France. There was no necessity for the Catholic German states to join Prussia, and spend their wealth and the lives of their sons in a terrible war. Why did not the Catholic clergy and bishops and the Pope, who are nothing but a political power, use the vast political power which they are supposed to wield in preventing the fatal alliance between Protestant Prussia and the Catholic states? Then was the time to pronounce, and how did they pronounce?

There was no doubt or hesitation on the part of either clergy or people. Napoleon made the fatal mistake of endeavoring to throw a religious color over his campaign, to win Catholic Germany to his side. Catholic Germany stood by its homes and altars, and its bishops, priests, and Jesuits stood with it. The Prussian Catholics gloried in their country, and would yield the palm of religious freedom to no nation, not even to ourselves. Mgr. Ketteler had long ago pronounced for the unity of the German Empire. So let that allegation drop.

After the war, each state continued in full and free possession of the right to manage its own home affairs: Prussia was the centre of foreign policy alone. First the Prussian system of service in the army was forced upon all, contrary to the wishes of the states, particularly Bavaria. When Prince Bismarck made up his mind to force this ecclesiastical bill upon Prussia, he saw clearly that, if it remained law for Prussia only, and a dead letter for all the federal states outside, it could not stand: it must be German or nothing. In order to bring this about, he sounded the states for the transfer of the home policy also to the hands of Prussia.

The proposition was vigorously opposed by all, chiefly by Bavaria. Everybody understood the thing dead, when suddenly the announcement came one morning that all the states, with the exception of Bavaria, were in favor of placing the home policy also in the hands of Prussia. Bavaria was left to do as it pleased, and now Prussia is the centre of all power in Germany, so that the reins of absolute government over a number of federal states, which two years ago were free, rest now in the hands of a man whose chief doctrine is the natural preponderance of Prussia.

The measures of the Bismarck régime in Germany have been from first to last measures of violence, not simply as regards the Catholic Church, but as regards the whole of the federal states; and their effects begin to show themselves already in the disrespect shown the emperor on his birthday, in the various riots which have taken and are taking place. And be it marked, not one of these riots has been attributed to the Catholics; they are too obedient to the religion which Prince Bismarck would destroy to take this form of endeavoring to right their wrongs. The riots have been generally called beer riots; but they are following so fast one upon the other, and occurring in so many different cities, that, however exciting a topic beer may be, people begin to hint at something else as cause for them.

“The riots at Stuttgart, which were due, apparently at least, to the hereditary quarrel with the Jews, were paralleled at Frankfort on Monday by a great beer riot, said to be due to the high price of beer, in which sixteen breweries were wrecked, twelve persons killed, and one hundred and twenty arrested. A correspondent of yesterday’s Times, who was in Frankfort and saw the riot, regards the deeper and more remote cause as being the thorough dissatisfaction of the people with the Prussian system of government.”[152]

Our readers will remember the very serious riot which took place in Berlin at the meeting of the emprors last year right under the noses of their imperial majesties. A Herald correspondent, writing on March 23, tells of a riot in Berlin on the birthday of the emperor; of another which occurred on March 18, the anniversary of the Revolution of 1848 in Berlin; and the correspondents both of the London Times and of the Herald, describe the ferocity with which the mounted police charged upon the unarmed mob, using their drawn sabres. The Herald correspondent concludes his letter thus:

“A slight demonstration on the part of the social democrats took place at Brunswick.

“A feeling of dissatisfaction at an undefined something is constantly gaining ground in Germany. There is a yearning after the freedom promised with the united empire. ‘Germany is great, but she is not happy!’ This seems to be the condition of the empire. The revolutions that have just taken place in France and Spain, the declaration of the republic, have had a positive influence in Germany. The democratic element is again lifting its head, and a great meeting of democratic leaders is soon to be held at Frankfort-on-the-Main, unless it be prohibited by the authorities. The Catholic element of the German population is also in a state of continual excitement.”

It is with no feeling of pleasure that these extracts are given here from such a variety of non-Catholic quarters, showing the distrust and growing dislike with which the Prussian rule is regarded. It is only to show that Catholics, in battling for their religion, are only battling for freedom and the rights of man. The mailed hand, red already with the life-blood of three nations, which now smites the church, will not hesitate to crush to powder every semblance of freedom which dares stand in its path. He who attacks the rights of God will laugh at the puny rights of man, simply as man. And you who bow down before the state; you who set up this state above you, and surrender yourselves to it absolutely—you have breathed life into the statue of Frankenstein; you would rid yourselves of it if you could, but you have created that which you cannot destroy, and forged for yourselves an agent of self-destruction.

Happily, Catholics have faith in a God above it all. If it has done no other good, it has brought out to the eyes of the world, in a wonderful manner, at once the vastness and the unity of the Catholic Church. Two years ago, the cry was: Catholics will not accept infallibility. When the Jesuits were driven out from Germany, the cry was: “Catholic Germany rejoices.” When the last remnant of the Papal States was torn from the Holy Father, the world cried out: “Now is the Papacy dead.” When a few disappointed and faithless men showed their heads in Germany, with all the power of the throne at their back, men cried out: “There is to be a new schism.” What do they say now?

Part of it has been seen already. M. John Lemoine, one of the oftenest-quoted writers of the day, a Protestant, writes to the anti-Catholic Journal des Débats on the defeat of the Irish University Bill: “From the depths of that palace which he calls his prison, the now helpless old man (le vieillard désarmé), who reigns only over consciences, has just shattered the most solid government of Europe (the Gladstone ministry), and overthrown the greatest minister of England. We would remark that never was the Pope more sovereign, more a dictator, more omnipotent, than since he has relinquished the command of subjects for that of the faithful only.”

After concluding that the stars in their courses have fought against Pius IX., and that his failure is Heaven’s doom, the London Times says:

“Indoors the whole universe is at his feet, but he cannot look out of his windows without seeing a world in arms against him.... Pius IX. has done all that devotees could dream, and suffered all that the world could accomplish. He has achieved an absolute dominion over the human intelligence, and lost every inch of his temporal power.... We may concede, we may be even well content, that he still holds and rules the most impulsive, the most imaginative, and the most sentimental races of the civilized world, and that he himself is admirably adapted for that empire over souls.... We envy the Pope his Irish, French, and Peninsular subjects as little as we envy them their infallible guide.”

The Times forgets the 14,000,000 German “subjects,” as it calls them, and the other millions outside of the races it has mentioned. From all it concludes, however, that “Rome will be Rome to the end of the chapter,” and that indeed it would be a pity that it were not so, though it ought to change a little with the world.

How, then, stands Rome to-day? Never more united, though never did the whole world collect its forces with greater animus to overwhelm it. The state in Germany banishes the Jesuits, and takes infidels to its bosom; in Spain, it banishes the Jesuits, and finds in their place the Descamisados; in Switzerland, it ejects Mermillod, and embraces Loyson; in Italy, it imprisons the Pope, and welcomes Victor Emanuel or Garibaldi: Non hunc sed Barabbam!

Meanwhile, the Catholic world speaks out, and from the ends of the earth comes back the protest, echoed from point to point, and gathering volume as it goes: We protest as men, we protest as free citizens, we protest as Christians! Protestation does little, say some. True, but, if it has done nothing else, it has at least silenced the false cry that Catholics approved of these measures. Protestation at last tells; and when the interests of those who are now indifferent come, as sooner or later they must come, to be affected by the policy to-day so successful in Prussia, our voices and warnings will be remembered. Catholics cannot at present take up the sword; they can only use, then, the weapons at their disposal—the voice and the pen. They must use them unceasingly and unsparingly until justice is done, and Catholics are granted the rights of citizens, which Freemasons are allowed to enjoy undisturbed. The rights of the state, whether monarchy or republic, are sacred in their eyes, but they live for something more than the state. All the armies in the world cannot coerce the free soul of one man, for they cannot reach it: it is beyond their province. There always will be two laws in this world—the law of God, and the law of man. The first is equivalent to right, the second is not necessarily so. The difficulty between states and the Catholic Church lies in the fact that the states consider legality synonymous with right, and that what is legal therefore must commend itself to the Christian conscience. Were men ruled by the law which makes the Catholic proclaim himself “a Catholic first, and a nationalist if you will,”[153] all difficulties would be at an end. We are Catholics first, because to be a true Catholic is the truest patriotism, and the perfection of citizenship; because to be Catholic is to be Christian, and all civilized governments draw all that is sound and good in them from Christianity, from Christ. When the state constructs no law which is not right, then will Lord Denbigh’s famous sentence have lost its meaning.

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[TO THE SACRED HEART.]

“Ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat.”[154]—Cant. v. 2.

Heart of hearts, a love is thine
Madly tender,[155] blindly true!

Love in vastness so divine,
In excess so human too!

Seems it more a burning grief—
Pining, aching for relief.

Seems thou dost not, canst not live,
Save to sue us for thy rest:

While the all that we can give
Is as nothing at the best.

Wondrous Lover! Shall I say
Thou hast thrown thyself away?

Drench’d with anguish, steep’d in woe,
Thou must needs, insatiate still,

Linger wearily below,
Prison’d to thy creatures’ will:

While the current of the days
Murmurs insult more than praise!

Here I find thee, hour by hour,
Waiting in thy altar-home,

Full of mercy, full of power—
Mutely waiting till we come:

Waiting for a soul to bless,
Some poor sinner to caress.

Forth, then, from the fragrant hush,
Where I almost hear thee beat,

Bid a benediction gush—
O’er me, thro’ me, thrilling sweet!

Heart of Jesus, full of me,
Fill mine—till it break with thee!

Feast of the Sacred Heart, 1873.

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[BRITTANY: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS POEMS.]

FOURTH ARTICLE.—CONCLUSION.

Like the Cambrian bards, their brethren of Armorica sang the triumphs and misfortunes of their country, and the deeds of her defenders, during the twelve centuries that they were governed by chiefs of their own race. The great names of Arthur,[156] of Morvan Lez-Breiz, of Alan Barbe Torte, and of Nomenöe, offered stirring subjects for the inspiration of the bards. In a former number, we gave “The March of Arthur,” of which the original, with the exception of the last two lines, bears every stamp of antiquity, and probably dates from the VIth century. The epic of “Lez-Breiz,” of which we proceed to give a translation of the fragments still extant, is about two centuries later.

Morvan, Machtiern or Viscount of Léon, son of a Konan, or crowned chief, was famous in the IXth century as one of the maintainers of Breton independence against the encroachments of the Franks under Louis le Débonnaire, and received from his grateful countrymen the surname of “Lez” or “Lezou Breiz”—the Stay, or the Hammer, of Brittany.

The story of Lez-Breiz, in a weakened and modified form, exists in Wales in the fragmentary ballad of Peredur.