Footnotes
[1.] We say “indefinite,” because this virtual sphere in its continuous expansion wanes away insensibly, and has no definite limiting surface. [2.] That the matter of a primitive element is mathematically unextended will be rigorously proved in the next following articles. [3.] “A Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter.” Philos. Magazine, 1844, vol. xxiv. p. 136. [4.] The Catholic World, August, 1874, p. 584. [5.]
He says: “What do we know of the atom apart from its force? You imagine a nucleus which may be called a, and surround it by forces which may be called m: to my mind the a, or nucleus, vanishes, and the substance consists in the powers of m. And, indeed, what notion can we form of the nucleus independent of its powers? What thought remains on which to hang the imagination of an a independent of the acknowledged forces?”
We answer that there remains the inertia, the passivity, and the local position, which are not the property of the m, but of the a. The a, even according to Faraday, is the real centre of a sphere, and therefore it cannot vanish while the sphere exists, except inasmuch as it must be conceived without bulk, according to the theory of simple elements which he adopts.
“If Pilatus wears his hood
The weather surely will be good;
But if Pilatus dons his sword,
Then rain will soon be the award.”
“In world is naught, nature has wrought, that shall stay.
Therefore serve God, keep well the rod, thy fame shall not decay.”
S. Eugénie succeeded S. Odile as abbess of Hohenbourg, and died in 735. She was buried in the Chapel of S. John, and her tomb remained entire till the Lutheran soldiers of Mansfeldt broke it open in 1622. Her relics were collected by the clergy, and afterwards restored to the convent. Later, the Swedes cast them to the winds. Only a portion is preserved at Oberehnheim, and still exposed on her festival, Sept. 16.
S. Gundeline became the second abbess of Niedermünster. Her remains were once in a shrine of silver beside the grand altar, but were mostly lost in the Thirty Years' War. What remain are at Einsiedeln.
This precious work was carefully preserved in the Library of Strasbourg until the late siege. It is greatly to be hoped that it was transferred to a place of safety, and did not share the fate of that noble library. The manuscript throughout is by the hand of Herrade. It is composed of three hundred and twenty-four leaves of parchment. It is especially interesting because it shows the state of the sciences and literature, the manners, and the public and private usages of the XIIth century.
This work is a systematic collection of extracts taken from ecclesiastical history and from the fathers, mingled with reflections and observations on astronomy, geography, philosophy, history, and mythology, naturally introduced by the subject the author is treating of. To these are joined the poems of Herrade. It is illuminated with naïve and charming miniatures.
This work is dedicated by the illustrious abbess to her spiritual children. She explains in the preface, written in prose, the object she had in view in undertaking it. “Like a bee,” she says, “I have amassed in this book the honey drawn from the sacred and philosophical writings, that I may form a honey-comb to delight you and lead you to honor our Lord and the church. Seek herein an agreeable food for the soul, refresh hereby your fatigued minds, that you may always be occupied with your heavenly Spouse,” etc., etc.
She then enters upon the work. After speaking of God and his attributes, the angels and their fall, she comes to the creation, discusses man before and after his fall, passes in review the Old Testament in its relations with the New, with the history of the human race, the development of the arts, sciences, and philosophy.
She comes finally to the mystery of the Redemption, to which she joins the genealogy of our Saviour, traced upon a mysterious tree planted by the Divinity. She gives an account of the life, miracles, teachings, and parables of Christ. Then follow numerous extracts from the Acts of the Apostles, to which are annexed very curious paintings.
The history of the Roman emperors is naturally connected with the development of the Christian Church, and there are ingenious miniatures representing allegorically the virtues of the faithful followers of Christ, the hideousness of sin, the vanities and temptations of the world, the assaults of hell, and the means we should use to oppose them.
Finally, Herrade represents, in a series of considerations and paintings, the dignities, rights, and obligations of the ecclesiastical state.
This work, by the Abbess of Hohenbourg, is the production of a thoughtful mind, and is one that required much time. She very carefully indicates the numerous and authentic sources whence she draws her materials.
Herrade has also left a list of all the popes from S. Peter to Clement III., and several astronomical works, which also are, or were, in the Library of Strasbourg.
Father Gruber, General of the Jesuits, who was in great favor with Paul, presented to the czar a project for reunion. By command of the czar the Archimandrite Eugenius (Volkhovichinoff), afterwards Metropolitan of Kieff, published in 1800 an answer to this project, in the form of a canonical dissertation, On the Authority of the Pope. See The Russian Clergy, by Père Gagarin, S.J., pp. 118, 119.
It appears that this affair was under consideration for several years, and even in the reign of Catherine II. And in fact Hupel, in a note of the manuscript in which we found the opening passage of this essay, mentions the rumors read by the newspapers that a complete (pollige) reunion of the Russian with the Catholic Church was about to be accomplished, and attributed these same rumors to the ex-Jesuits. Hupel wrote in 1736. See op. cit. p. 88, note.
Note from the Author.
Curragh Chase, Adare, Ireland, Nov. 24, 1874.
Rev. and Dear Sir: The public has taken recently such deserved interest in the Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge that it has struck me that the last of the letters which I wrote to her before making my submission to the Catholic Church, in which I stated fully my reasons for taking that step, might be of use to many enquirers.
Readers of Sara Coleridge's Letters have often asked me, “But where is your part of the correspondence?” They may perhaps be glad to read at least one of those letters, to which many of hers were replies.
That letter I send you, with some preliminary remarks, this day, by book-post. It is quite at your service, if you think it worth publishing in The Catholic World....
I remain very truly yours,
Aubrey de Vere.
The History of New South Wales. With an account of Van Diemen's Land, New Zealand, Port Phillip, Moreton Bay, and other Australasian settlements. By Roderick Flanagan. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low. 1862.
Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Residence in New South Wales and Victoria. With a supplementary chapter on transportation and the ticket-of-leave system. By R. Therry, Esq., late one of the judges of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. London: Sampson Low. 1863.
It is not without reason that we insist upon this circumstance of being in contact with the people. If indeed the Russian Church were to unite herself to the Catholic Church, and the latter, following the toleration granted to the united Greeks, allowed the secular Russian clergy liberty to marry, the inconveniences we have noticed would be less felt, for the reason that, besides the fact that the Catholic Church would merely permit—never, either directly or indirectly, compel—priests to marry, there would always be a regular and celibate clergy side by side with the secular and married priests, and equally with them in contact with the people.
However, the barrenness in apostolic labors, and the inferior condition of all the Christian communities of Oriental rite among whom a married priesthood is permitted, oblige us to recognize in this permission a simple concession to human frailty; and their condition is a powerful argument in favor of the immense advantages, if not of the moral necessity, of ecclesiastical celibacy.
Statuti Generali ed altri documenti dei Framassoni pubblicati per la prima volta con note dichiarative. Roma: 1874.
Rituali Massonici del primo e del trentesimo grado detti di Apprendista e di Cavaliere Kadosh, per la prima volta pubblicati e commentati. Roma: 1874.
At the incorporation of the Uniates of Lithuania into the Orthodox Church, under the Emperor Nicholas, the Synod of St. Petersburg declared in its celebrated decree of March 5, 1839, as follows: “The solemn confession expressed in the synodal act (of the apostate bishops), that the Lord God our Saviour Jesus Christ is alone the true Head of the only and true church, and the promise of dwelling in unanimity with the most holy orthodox patriarchs of the East, and with the most holy Synod, leaves nothing more to require of the united Greek Church for the veritable and essential union of the faith, and, for this reason, there remains nothing which can oppose itself to the hierarchical reunion” (Persécutions et Souffrances, etc., p. 118). Now, if there existed between the Catholic Church and the Russian Church a veritable doctrinal disagreement with regard to the Procession of the Holy Ghost, the Synod of St. Petersburg, in not requiring of the apostate bishops any retractation on this point, would have been guilty of an inconceivable compromise of the faith. We leave to orthodox Russians the task of defending it.
It has been stated also that there is a disagreement between us and the Russians on the subject of purgatory. We here give what we find in the catechism of the late Mgr. Philarete, in use in the schools. We make use of the French translation, which appeared in Paris, with the concurrence of the Russian government and the Synod.
Q. “What remark remains to be made respecting the souls of those who have died in the faith, but whose repentance has not had time to bear fruit?
A. “That, to obtain for them a happy resurrection, the prayers of those who are yet on this earth may be to them a great assistance, especially when joined to the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass and to the works of mercy, done in faith and in memory of the departed” (Catéchisme détaille de l'Eglise Catholique orthodoxe d'Orient, examiné et approuvé par le Saint Synode de Russie. Paris: Klinsiock, 1851. On the eleventh article [of the Nicene Creed], p. 89).
The title of this tract is, Protestantism and Churches in the East. The cause of its appearance was the pretension of the Church of England—which, not without analogy with the Russian Church, recognized the sovereign of the country as its head, after Jesus Christ—in giving to the East a bishop invested by a mandate of Queen Victoria, with a jurisdiction embracing the whole of Syria, Chaldæa, Egypt, and Abyssinia. Finally, its object is to examine the formula, “No peace with Rome, but union and agreement at any price with the Syrians, the Abyssinians, and the Greeks,” and to prove the absolute impossibility of the Anglican and the Orthodox Churches being able honestly to agree together in point of doctrine.
If it be true that, in consequence of the marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh, a great sympathy with the Anglican Church has taken possession of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg, No. 42 of the Tracts for the Times ought to be reprinted in English, translated and printed in Russian, and widely disseminated in the two languages. It is the honesty itself of the two churches which is at stake.
The reader will not take it amiss if he should find here several points already developed in our former essay, The Pope of Rome and the Popes of the Oriental Orthodox Church. (London: Longmans, 1871.) It is almost impossible, in touching upon the same subject, entirely to avoid repetition; and, besides, there are certain ideas which require to be put forward pretty frequently, if they are sufficiently to arrest public attention.
Well, then, there is one idea, which we would willingly call the “providential idea” of the times, of so decisive a tendency does it appear to us for hastening the end of the schism and the return of the Græco-Russian Church to Catholic unity. It is the idea to which we now return, and which forms the subject of the entire third chapter of the essay just mentioned. We live in a century of revolutions; now, whilst the Catholic Church, in presence of the general overturning of thrones, dynasties and political constitutions, only strengthens, with her marvellous unity, the powers of her government, the Orthodox Eastern Church is given up defenceless to all the chances of political revolutions, and condemned, in her various branches, to submit to the form of government which these revolutions impose upon her. This fact alone is of a nature to lead back a goodly number of our separated brethren. We have not here to discuss lofty and abstract matters; we have to reflect whether Jesus Christ could thus have given up his church to the mercy of political revolutions. The man of the people, the illiterate, the workman, whose every moment is precious because he must live by the labor of his hands, can decide this question as easily as the theologian, the philosopher, and the statesman. It is a reflection which requires neither study nor any form of reasoning, nor even time; it is an argument self-evident to all—the “popular argument,” which must decide between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Eastern Communion.
After this our repetitions will be treated with indulgence, as will also our inability to make any promise not to recur, even more than once, to this same subject—in short, our desire will be found legitimate that the religious press of every country should make the idea which we have just expressed its own; that it should develop and popularize it, and make it really “the providential idea of the times.”
From what we have been able to ascertain, the conduct of the Russian Church upon this point is not so invariably uniform as to make it impossible to quote some exceptions to what we have just mentioned. It is very certain, however, that these exceptions do not regard great personages, who are always dispensed from submitting to baptism by immersion. To mention a recent example: the Princess Dagmar was admitted into the Russian Church without being required to receive a second baptism. The same thing was done in the last century. Voltaire having shown himself persuaded that the Russian Church baptized Protestants, baptized by infusion, was reproved by Catherine II. in the following terms: “As head of the Greek Church, I cannot honestly leave you unrebuked in your error. The Greek Church does not rebaptize at all. The Grand Duchess, etc.” (Vide Kegl. Eccles., p. 86, note.) What Catherine here calls the Greek Church is the Russian. Besides, Catherine herself had been received into the Russian Church without being rebaptized, and it was of this example that William Frederick Lütiens, the Lutheran author of the Dissertatio de Religione Ruthenorum Hodierna, did not fail to avail himself, in maintaining that upon this point also the Russians were in agreement with the Lutherans. “If the Russians of former days” (Rutheni veteres), writes Lütiens, “did not recognize as valid the baptism (by infusion) of our church, it cannot be attributed solely to their belief in the necessity of their ceremonies, but also to the hatred which, from the calumnies of the Romanists, they nourished against our Lutheran Church ...” (Dissert., etc., pp. 86, 7).
Besides, we find the following in the Russian Clergy of Father Gagarin: “The Ecclesiastical Talk (Doukhovnaia Beseda) of Sept. 17, 1866, was seeking for a means of reconciling on this point the Greek and Russian Churches. Nothing is stranger than the idea it has entertained. If we are to believe the Ecclesiastical Talk, the Greek Church fully admits the validity of baptism otherwise than by immersion, but has been obliged to exact a new baptism from those Latins seeking admission into her bosom, in order to draw a deeper line of demarcation between Greeks and Latins, from fear of a reconciliation, and to this end has attempted nothing less than to make the Greeks believe that the Latins were not Christians. We should never dare to attribute to the Greek Church such a proceeding. Lying, calumny, profanation of a sacrament that cannot be repeated—all this, according to the Ecclesiastical Talk, the Greek Church would knowingly and willingly do! Reading this, we cannot believe our eyes. And this journal is published by the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg, under the eye and with the approbation of the Synod!” (The Russian Clergy, translated from the French of Father Gagarin, S.J., by Ch. Du Gard Makepeace, M.A. London: Burns and Oates, 1872; p. 272.)