The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878

by Various

THE PRINCIPLE OF BEATITUDE IN HUMAN NATURE.

St. Thomas defines beatitude, in respect to man, to be “the perfect good in which the natural tendency of the human will to universal good attains complete rest.”[^[119]] This is beatitude objectively considered. Subjectively, it is the actual fruition consequent upon attainment, and rest in the quiet possession, of the perfect good which is the object of volition. This fruition is an immanent act within the nature of the human subject, and must therefore proceed from a principle within the human nature. Nature denotes the same thing with essence, expressing only as a distinctive term its being a principle of activity. By reason of his essence, the human being has within him a principle by virtue of which he desires, seeks, and is impelled by the movement given him by his First and Final Cause toward the attainment of beatitude. As intelligent, universal truth is his object, to which his intellect is connatural; as volitive, universal good is his object, to which his will naturally corresponds.

The idea of universal good is obviously the one which lies at the foundation of this conception of beatitude. It is well known that the notion of good as a universal is one of the transcendental predicates; that is, of those which are outside of everything which does or can mark out any generic ratio, or diversity of kind between any existing or possible beings. Good is not a genus or kind, in opposition to some diverse genera or kinds which are not good; and, à fortiori, it is not a species, under which individuals are to be classed as specifically different, by the note of goodness, from other individuals who by their specific difference are something else than good. It is the species which completely determines the essence of every existing thing, and the specific difference which marks its essential unlikeness to other things whose essence is other than its own. Therefore no being can be essentially unlike any other by reason of one being good and the other somehow dissimilar to good. The predicate of good belongs to all genera, and, of course, to all species and individuals, as a universal notion transcending all their respective determining notes, and identifying itself, in the analogical sense proper to each of them, with all and singular of these notes.

Good is whatever is consonant to nature, whatever is a perfection, or subserves to the conservation and increase of a perfection. It is coextensive with being, and identical with it, as are all the transcendental notions, which merely present the same object of thought under various phases. Whatever is thinkable, as an object is an entity; as having its own entity undivided in itself and divided from every entity other than itself, is a unity; as an intelligible entity is a verity; as containing in itself reason for the volition that it should be what it is, it is a good. All these notions are contained in the notion of being, and are as universal as being, which has in opposition to it only nothing, that is, no-being, no-one-thing, no-true-thing, no-good, mere negation and nullity.

We are at present concerned only with actually existing rational nature, in its relation to universal being as the object of its volition, or movement towards the universal good in which it seeks for beatitude. Whatever is consonant to rational nature, gives it perfection or subserves to its perfection, is its good. Good is being regarded in its aspect as something desirable, in which the will can rest with complacency. Every actual, concrete essence is good, as such, because it has being, and in so far as it has being; and it presents, therefore, an object to the will which is desirable and in which it can have complacency. The rational nature is in itself a good as an actual being, and it is a good to itself, or, in other words, it is a good for it that it exists. The universe in which it exists is all good in essence and nature. Universal nature is in consonance with itself, and its laws tend to the perfection, conservation, and augmentation of being, throughout its whole extent. The movement of will in rational nature toward the universal good is only a higher kind and mode of an operation which is common to all nature. Things destitute of sense are put into operation toward the general end of the universe by blind and fatal laws, which receive their impulse and direction solely from the will and motive power of their creator. Those which have sense but not reason are incited to movement by a vital impulse and the excitement of their sensitive faculties by external objects. Rational nature moves itself by intelligence and will toward the good which is its object. Intellect has for its connatural object universal being as verity, and tends toward an adequation between itself and its object. So, likewise, the will in respect to the good of being. This adequation constitutes the beatitude of rational nature, and an approximation to it is an approach toward beatitude which constitutes a greater or lesser degree of imperfect felicity. The principle of beatitude has therefore been pointed out and proved to exist in human nature. The intense longing for it is matter of self-consciousness to every human being. The natural tendency and longing for beatitude cannot have been implanted by the Creator in order to be frustrated. There is no place in the nature of things for any other intention and end of creation, except to produce the good of being in all its grades and orders, according to the determinate measure prescribed by the divine intellect and the divine will. The good of inanimate nature necessarily falls short of any final and complete term in itself, because it does not contain any faculty of apprehension and complacency. Mere sensitive apprehension and complacency in living, irrational beings do not adequately supply this deficiency, because they attain only to the lowest and most imperfect good, in a partial and deficient mode. All nature below the rational, therefore, furnishes only an element, an inchoate and incomplete material substratum for the formal and complete good of created being, which can only possess a final actuality and become an end in itself in rational nature. Material beings have only their own essence and existence, which are exclusive and isolated, determined by necessary laws to merely extrinsic states and movements, in which they are totally inert. They have no return upon themselves and no capacity of receiving any other being into their own. Therefore they can have no self-consciousness or self-activity, no cognition or sentiment. Sensitive beings have a partial return upon themselves by sensation and sensitive cognition, and a limited self-activity. A spirit returns upon itself with a complete retroaction, and can receive other beings into itself according to the mode of the recipient, that is, ideally. It has therefore complete self-consciousness and self-activity, intelligence and volition, and in the human essence, by virtue of the union of the rational part with the animal, it has also a more perfect kind of sensitive life. It apprehends and possesses its own being, and universal being outside of itself, as a verity by intelligence, as a good by volition. When it is perfect and permanent in its natural good, the possession of this good is in itself beatitude. There is no other term or effect which can possibly have the ratio of an end to the intention of the Creator in the creative act, for it is the only complete and final good of being. Created being is nothing but a participation of the uncreated and necessary being, and an imitation of it in the finite order. Finite beatitude is, therefore, a participation of the infinite beatitude of the divine nature, and an imitation of it. God alone is THE BEING, who exists by his essence, and possesses being absolutely and in plenitude. In the same sense in which He alone is, whose Name is Ego sum qui sum, He alone is good and He alone is blessed. That is, He alone is good by his essence actually and in plenitude, and is alone by his essence possessed of the plenitude of blessedness.

Boethius defines the eternity of God as “the perfect possession, all at once, of boundless life.” This may answer as a definition of the beatitude of God. His being is living being, in all respects boundless, and so absolutely in act that it is incapable of any increase or diminution. The being of God is essentially good, and an object of complacency. The life of God consists in the act of intelligence and volition in which he knows and wills his own being, as infinitely intelligible and infinitely desirable. For God, to be and to live is to be blessed. The vision of his own essence presents to him an object of infinite complacency in which his will rests with a perfect and eternal quietude. What his essence is, and what that good is which constitutes the infinite beatitude of God, we cannot know except in an analogical manner. The universe of created being is an image and imitation of the divine essence. Whatever being and good we can perceive in the works of God we know must have its archetype in the essence of God, existing in a supereminent mode and an infinite plenitude. Created beauty is something which being seen pleases, in which the will reposes with complacency when it is apprehended by the intellect. Infinite, absolute, uncreated beauty must please infinitely the infinite intelligence which beholds it by a comprehensive vision. This is the nearest approach we can make to a conception of the beatitude of God.

The being of God is the archetype and source of all created being, and his infinite beatitude the archetype and source of all finite beatitude in created, intelligent beings. Creation proceeds not from want but from fulness of good in the infinite Being; not from necessity but from free volition. It is an overflow of power, intelligence, and love, diffusive of the good of being from the boundless sea of the divine essence into the streams which it fills. Its ideal possibility is in the divine essence as imitable, presenting to the divine intelligence innumerable terms of the divine omnipotence, and to the divine will innumerable objects of volition and complacency. The act which brings it out of nonexistence into existence proceeds from the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity equally and indivisibly. The origin of the creative act is in the Father, the medium in the Son, the consummation in the Holy Spirit. The almighty word of intelligence and volition calling the nonexistent universe into existence, proceeding from the Father as the origin of infinite and finite essence, in the Word is the creative ideal and measure of all the intelligible and intelligent creation, in the Spirit is the cause and principle of all created good. The formal principiation of the divine essence, proceeding from the Father and the Son as its active principle, whose term is the person of the Holy Spirit, is pure Love. Love is the consummation of the infinite being of God, and its eternal efflorescence is beatitude, the perfect possession of boundless life which is a boundless good, totally, existing in a present whose duration is without any before or after, without beginning or end or successive parts, and unchangeable by any increase or diminution. It is a maxim of philosophy that operation is in accordance with the nature of the operator. An artist produces a work corresponding to the nature of his art. The work of the Holy Spirit is like himself. The divine essence in his person being love, the consummation of the divine work in creation effected by him must be good; and that good in its last result is beatitude. He is “The Lord and Giver of life.” The life of the intelligent creature is like the life of God. He is finite, and therefore his duration is not eternity. It has a beginning, and a before and after, and its totality is not possessed all at once in one present, but its parts succeed each other without end. Although he cannot possess his past and future at one time, he possesses always his present, which glides with him through all time, and is an imitation of the eternal, ever-enduring present of eternity. The perfect possession of all that constitutes his life, without any fear of losing it, constitutes his beatitude. Divine love, diffusive of the good of being out of its own plenitude, can have no other end in creation, in so far as this end is contained within the creation itself, except the beatitude of intellectual creatures.

The idea from which creation receives its form is in the Word, and intellectual creatures are specially made in his image. In the Incarnation, the Word united to his divine nature a rational nature, consubstantial with that which is common to the whole human race, and allied generically to the highest as well as to the lowest orders of created beings, that is, both to the spiritual and the corporeal extremes of nature. The created nature thus assumed into personal unity with the divine nature in Immanuel, who is the only-begotten Son of God the Father from eternity, has become the nature of God, and as such entitled to receive from the divine nature the communication of its plenitude of being and of good, in so far as this is communicable in a finite mode and measure. The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Son, both in the eternal order of the Trinity and in the temporal order of creation, is communicated to the human nature of Immanuel as the principle of life and beatitude. The hypostatic union of created and uncreated nature in the person of Jesus Christ is the masterpiece of the Lord and Giver of life, the ultimate term of his creative act. The beatitude which he imparts to the human nature of Jesus Christ is the supreme participation of its rational intelligence and will in the divine act of comprehensive vision of the divine essence and infinite complacency in its absolute beauty, which constitutes divine beatitude. The angels were destined to the same beatitude, and, those excepted who forfeited their right by sinning, they have attained it. The human race was created for the same destination, and the elect will receive their perfect consummation in the same sempiternal glory and blessedness which belongs of right to the humanity of the Eternal Son, on the day of the universal resurrection.

It is evident that this supernatural beatitude in God completely fulfils the definition of beatitude given by St. Thomas as bonum perfectum quod totaliter quietat appetitum. The object of the rational human appetite, that is, of the will, is universal good, which is in God in the most absolute and perfect plenitude. But universal good is also in creatures by participation, and presents a proper object of complacency to the will in perfect harmony with its primary object of beatific love. Our Lord Jesus Christ in his human mind and human heart not only has the immediate intuition of God and of all things in God, together with the love which accompanies this highest mode of knowledge, but also the mode of knowledge and love which is strictly natural. He delights in the contemplation of the beauty of his own human nature, in the works which he performed through it, in its dignity and exaltation, in the splendor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the angels and the saints, in his entire and universal kingdom both of mind and matter. He delights in loving his companions in celestial glory, and in receiving their love, in radiating light and beauty and happiness all around himself through countless realms of space and numberless multitudes of beings. His human nature was not essentially changed at the resurrection, but only glorified. He has therefore that sublimated corporeal and sensitive life which is proper to the nature which he assumed, with the sensitive cognition and enjoyment resulting naturally from its attributes and faculties.

The kingdom of heaven has therefore its visible and natural as well as its divine aspect. Natural beatitude in the possession of universal created good, in the enjoyment of the works of God, in science, in the sentiment of the beautiful in created objects, in activity, in society and friendship, co-exists with the uninterrupted contemplation of the divine essence, and the perfect quietude of everlasting repose on the bosom of God. The quiet and repose of the spirit in beatitude by no means signifies inaction and the slumber of the faculties. God, who is immutable, is most perfect act, and the first mover of all things. The rest of beatitude is in opposition to the restless inquietude of a spirit which has not found its equilibrium, and is impelled by unsatisfied longings to seek for its perfect good. Its rest consists in its having found its equilibrium in the stable possession of the perfect good. But the presence of the due object to the intellect and the will calls forth their most perfect and intense activity, and the very qualities of the glorified bodies of the blessed saints in heaven prove that they also will be active, and not for ever standing still in one posture or reclining indolently on grassy meads, as some seem to imagine is the Christian belief. It is indeed most difficult to form any imaginary pictures of the future life which are in any way satisfactory to reason. But whatever we can represent to ourselves by such efforts which can give some idea of a glory and a beatitude worthy of rational beings in a perfect state, assuredly will be realized in a way far beyond our conceptions.

The aim of the foregoing exposition has been to prepare the way for presenting, in the natural element which exists in supernatural beatitude, that which is the purely natural good due to the intellectual nature left to itself in its own native sphere, the underworld below heaven. We call this sphere of pure nature native to the intellectual nature in general, because it belongs there by virtue of its essential being, prescinding from any higher destination given to it gratuitously, whether simultaneously with its original creation or subsequently to it. It is an underworld relatively to the supernatural order whose last complement is in the hypostatic union realized in the Incarnation. The state of pure nature in respect to the only species of simply intellectual or rational creatures known to us, is treated by Catholic theologians in a merely hypothetical manner; as a possible state, in which angels and men might have been constituted by the Creator, or in which he could, if he pleased, place other beings generically similar to angels or men, in other spheres of the universe which are distinct from our earth and the celestial abode of the angels. Whether there are now or ever will be such beings, inhabiting the numerous worlds with which the vast extent of real space is filled, can only be matter of conjecture. But the human species, and the hierarchy of pure spirits with which it is in present relation, were destined for the supernatural order immediately depending from the royal seat of Immanuel, the sovereign head of the host of deified intelligences, as its centre. In respect to the human race, therefore, the state of pure nature is presented under another aspect as a state of lapsed nature, and the sphere of the underworld is its native sphere actually and by virtue of natural generation, by reason of a fall and a sentence of deprivation. On this account, the permanent future state of all human beings who are finally excluded from heaven, in Christian eschatology is primarily considered as a state of loss. Whatever felicity is possible in this state appears as something remaining from the original destination of mankind, and not as the complete good of human beatitude. For this reason, we have presented first the total ratio of beatitude in respect to human destiny, before considering what remains after the sum of supernatural good has been deducted.

Substantially, the state of lapsed nature as denuded is the same with pure or nude nature. The question of the object and nature of pure natural beatitude is the one to be decided, in order to determine what amount of good in the endless life of human beings who lack the beatific vision of God is conceivable and possible. There is only one serious difficulty in this question. It arises from the consideration of the very essence of intelligence as related to the universal truth, and will as related to the universal good. The intellect, as such, by its very nature, seeks for the deepest cause, and for an adequation with the intelligible being of its universal object, and the appetite of the will follows it. How, then, can the intellect rest in any object except the absolute, necessary, infinite essence of God, apprehended by a clear and immediate intuition, or any other object but this perfectly quiet the appetite of the will? It is evident that if the intellectual nature, as such, has in it an exigency and a longing which cannot be satisfied with any good to which its faculties are commensurate, beatitude is something essentially supernatural. In this case, the natural order must be merely inchoate, potential, needing to be completed by the supernatural. Intellectual beings could not, then, be created for a purely natural end and destiny; the only end suitable and fit for them would be that which reaches its consummation in the beatific vision. Defrauded of this in any way, even without any voluntary fault of their own, they must be miserable during eternity through the suffering of the pain of loss, or at least continue for ever in a state of arrested and imperfect development, in which absence of suffering would be due only to insensibility, with an imperfect kind of felicity similar to that which men possess in this earthly condition, from the common enjoyments of human life.

We deny, however, that there is any exigency in created nature for the supernatural good. The difficulty above stated, that God is necessarily the supreme object of the created intellect and the created will, we answer as follows. Intellect, by nature, seeks God, according to its own mode and measure. The operation of the will is determined by the intellect. Nil volitum nisi prius cognitum. The divine intellect, which is the divine essence considered as intelligent subject, is in adequation with the divine essence considered as intelligible object. God has immediate, comprehensive cognition of himself by his essence. Every created essence is infinitely different from the divine, and therefore has an operation intrinsically unequal to the act in which the divine life consists. Operatio sequitur esse. The being of an intelligent creature is within the order of the finite, of the imitated, participated existence, activity, enjoyment, which is a diminished image of the archetypal reality in the Creator. All this is within the circle of nature, and when this circle is perfect, including whatever belongs to it, there is no exigency of anything beyond. The knowledge of God, not as he is in his essence, within his circle of immanent being, but as he is in the terms of his creative act, in the universe, in the intellectual light and intelligible essence of the created spirit itself, is within the circle of nature. As the Author of nature he is knowable and lovable, by perfect and well-ordered faculties of pure nature without grace and without defect. Natural beatitude does not require the immediate and intuitive, but only the mediate and abstractive cognition and contemplation of God, and does not exact any kind of union of the will to God as the sovereign good, except that which terminates by natural sequence its own rightly directed and completed spontaneous movement. Even now we can find God by reason, and take complacency in his perfections. Much more can beings of a higher perfection attain to the knowledge of God in a manner proportionate to their kind or degree of perfection, and with a complacency corresponding to their knowledge, if their intelligence and will are rightly co-ordinated, and directed toward their proper object. As respects the universal verity and good of being in the created universe, there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that it can be attained within any finite limits, in a state of pure nature.

This inferior sphere of natural beatitude being thus theoretically possible, it is most reasonable to suppose that all human beings who at the general resurrection are dispossessed of any right to the kingdom of heaven, and at the same time free from all actual sin, receive their ultimate destination in such a sphere. There is no reason in the order of justice why they should be deprived of any perfection or good of which they are naturally capable. In the “restitution of all things,” the ἀποκατάστασις, there will be no deordination left in the universe, and no imperfection of order belonging to an inchoate condition of nature. Venit dies, dies tua, in quâ reflorent omnia. Inanimate creation will become resplendent with the beauty which the last touches of the divine Artist have given to his consummate work. The influence of the life-giving Spirit will be poured in a full torrent through all parts of the universal realm of living being. In this general restitution we may be certain that the thousands of millions of human infants who have never attained to the use of reason in this world, and have never received the grace of regeneration, will be raised up, by the bounty of their Creator, in the full perfection of their human nature, both corporeal and intellectual, to live for ever in the enjoyment of all the good which is due to pure nature, participating in their own inferior degree in that excellence and felicity which in its highest perfection belongs to the blessed in heaven as an adjunct of their supernatural glory and beatitude. Moreover, it is altogether congruous to the order of redemption in Jesus Christ, and probable, that they will receive, in common with the whole creation, their own special benefit and increase of natural good, through the Incarnation. There is no obstacle in their nature to the reception of any good except that of the beatific vision. They may, therefore, enjoy the vision of the glorified humanity of the Lord, worship him and love him as their creator and benefactor, see and converse with the angels and saints, and in every respect enjoy a better and more desirable immortality than that which would be possible in another system of divine providence which did not contain a supernatural order.

Besides those who die in infancy, there are many adults who may be considered as on the same level with infants in respect to moral responsibility. Balmes proposes the opinion that a large proportion of the most ignorant and spiritually undeveloped part of mankind, especially those who are born and brought up in a low state of barbarism, never attain the rational level of a well-instructed Christian child of five or six years old, who, nevertheless, is regarded in Catholic theology as incapable of mortal sin.[^[120]] Among the whole multitude of those who are destitute of the ordinary means of salvation, each and every individual either has the use of reason sufficiently for full moral responsibility, or he has not. If he has not, he is, in the moral relation, an infant, at most capable of venial sin; but if he has, either he has divine faith sufficient for obtaining salvation, or the sufficient grace and means for attaining the faith, or neither of these requisites for working out his salvation by his own voluntary efforts. In this last case his lack of faith is no sin, and he is only accountable for the observance of the natural law according to his own conscience. If he keeps this natural law, he is subject to no eternal penalty besides the privation of supernatural beatitude. All men, therefore, who really incur the responsibilities and the risks of a moral probation, have an opportunity of meriting heaven, or at least of attaining that natural felicity hereafter which is the lot of infants who die without baptism.

From all these premises we deduce one general conclusion, that the notion of a doom to everlasting infelicity and misery, which is a dire and inevitable calamity involving the great mass of mankind, by reason of the state in which they are born into this life, is a chimera of the imagination, and not any part of the Catholic faith or a just inference from any revealed doctrine. The sufferings of those who have not deserved punishment by their own voluntary transgressions of the divine law are temporary, disciplinary, intended for a final good, and in the end abundantly compensated. Many of the sufferings which have the nature of punishment are condoned altogether, and many others are temporary and in their last result beneficial to those who are subjected to their infliction. No rational and immortal being is permanently deprived of the proper perfection and good of his nature by fate or destiny, or by the arbitrary will of the Creator and sovereign Lord of the universe. The order of reason and justice of itself produces only universal good, and this universal good embraces the private and personal good of each individual being, except in so far as he has freely and wilfully made himself unfit and unworthy to participate in it. Eternal retribution is awarded solely to personal merit or demerit in proportion to its quantity. Outside of the order of just retribution, there is no action of God upon his creatures except that of pure goodness and love, bestowing gratuitously, unmitigated good without any mixture of evil. The desire for permanent beatitude in endless life, and the natural principle of beatitude implanted in every rational nature, are not frustrated and thwarted through any deficiency in nature, or failure of divine Providence to carry out his original design and intention to its complete and ultimate term. The only failure is in the free and concreative cause to which God has given dominion over itself and its acts and the effects of those acts, with power to produce in prescribed limits as much or as little good as it chooses. This free cause is free-will, which is the only cause, in every rational creature finally deprived of his original right to beatitude, of the state of irreparable privation in which he is placed by the “restitution of all things.” The restitution brings all nature into order and to perfection, in so far as each thing in nature is receptive of its proportionate good. Rational nature is receptive according to its rational appetite or the attitude of the will. Those rational beings who have determined themselves to a state of volition contrary to the order of reason and justice are, in so far as they are affected by this state, receptive only of a violent reaction of order against their will, repressing and confining their inclination to a perverse activity. The privation of beatitude is co-extensive with the contrariety between the will and the permanent, irreversible order of reason; and this contrariety is proportional to the misuse of freewill by sinning during the term of probation. Their evil is nothing but spoiled good, and they are themselves the spoilers. It is through no defect of goodness in God, or deficiency of good in the order of nature, that they are what they are. Every thing and every person in this order is in the right place and the due relation, according to the highest reason and the most perfect justice. God has made all things well, they are what they ought to be, and there is no flaw or defect in the bonum honestum of the universe. God must take complacency in the fulfilment of his own wise and just will, and every rational being must concur with intellect and will in that which God wills. This is precisely what St. Thomas affirms when he says that the beatitude of the just will be increased by their knowledge of the eternal punishment of sinners, and there is no sense or reason in the diatribes of rationalists against him or any other theologian who does not overpass the limits of Catholic and rational doctrine on this head.

Another conclusion which may be reasonably deduced from sound theological principles and probable opinions is, that the majority of mankind, and of rational beings in general, are in a state of perpetual felicity in the world to come. There is no reason whatever for supposing that more than a third part of the angels fell with Lucifer. It is probable that the greater number of adults who live and die in the faith and communion of the church are finally admitted into heaven. We cannot deny that numbers of those who have lived under the natural law, without any explicit faith in Jesus Christ, have been also saved by extraordinary grace. Nor is it possible for us to determine what proportion of the great mass remaining may eventually attain some degree of inferior natural felicity similar to that which is the lot of infants dying in original sin. The number of infants who have received baptism and have died before the use of reason at least equals the number of the baptized who have attained adult age, and to these must be added all those who died in infancy before the sacrament of baptism was instituted, and had received remission of original sin under the ancient covenant of grace. The entire multitude of infants who have died since the beginning of the world at least equals the number of adults, and it is therefore certain that the majority of all human beings will possess in the future life either supernatural or natural beatitude. There is no reason, therefore, for the supposition that the Christian and Catholic doctrine represents the vast majority of human beings as destined to a state of everlasting misery. If any one is disposed to entertain the hypothesis that the universe is filled with a multitude of rational beings who are neither angels nor men, whose number bears a quantitative proportion to the physical magnitude of the vast cosmical system of the starry heavens, there is as much reason for supposing that they are all eternally good and happy as for supposing that they have existence. In respect to mere extensive and numerical quantity, the amount of good resulting from the creative act of God far surpasses the sum of that possible additional good which has been frustrated by the failure of free, concreative causes to co-operate with the first cause toward the great, final end of creation. In reality, the absolute, eternal decrees of God are not in any way frustrated by the failure of a certain number of creatures to attain the good for which they were destined. They leave no gap in the universal order which the foresight of God has not filled up. Their loss is exclusively their own, and their sins have only furnished an occasion for bringing out of the evil which they have attempted a far greater good than they could have effected by a faithful co-operation with the will of God, greater glory to the Creator and to the universe, more splendid merits in the just, a more magnificent exhibition of wisdom and love in the cross, through which the divine Redeemer of men triumphed over sin and death. “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath also exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above every name: that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and in hell; and that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”[^[121]] The perfection of the whole creation, in subordination to the sphere of supernatural glory inhabited by the sons of God, is also clearly declared by St. Paul to be a consequence of the exaltation of Jesus Christ through the cross. “For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth, and is in labor even until now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body.”[^[122]]

Satan himself, with all those whom he has seduced into sin in the mad hope of thwarting the divine work of the Incarnation, has only contributed by his efforts to destroy the universal order, under the overmastering intelligence of God, to increase its splendor. In the end he will be found to have wound himself up by going around in his circuit. A few years ago there was a bear in the Central Park, who was permitted to live on a grass-plat, fastened by a long chain to a stake in the middle. By going continually round and round his post, he used to wind himself up so tightly that he could not stir. Satan is like this bear. His great achievement, and masterstroke of policy, was the crucifixion of the Son of God, by which he was exalted and obtained a name above every name, before which every knee in hell shall bow and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. This is the one great example of the universal action of divine Providence in bringing out of all evil a greater good than that which the evil destroys or prevents.

St. Paul anticipates an objection, which is likely to occur to some minds, in respect to the justice of God in the unequal distribution of grace, and the withholding of mercy from those whom he permits to work out their own final perdition. “Thou wilt therefore say to me: Why doth he then find fault? For who resisteth his will?” The answer is a rebuke of the presumption of those who pretend to dispute the sovereign right and dominion of God over his creatures, and thus in reality make the divine Majesty subservient and responsible to his own subjects. “O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it: Why hast thou made me thus? Or hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another to dishonor?”[^[123]] The whole mass of mankind being destitute of any right to supernatural grace and beatitude, there can be no complaint against the sovereign will of God for conferring the grace of regeneration upon some and withholding it from others. None of those who have made themselves positively unworthy of everlasting glory by their sins are entitled to mercy. That God withheld all hope of pardon from the fallen angels and gave that hope to men, that to some sinful men he gives more grace than to others, and that he compels those who rebel against him to glorify him against their will in their own defeat and the overthrow of all their plans, is no ground of complaint against the divine justice. “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated”; that is, loved less, and excluded from certain special, gratuitous blessings bestowed on Jacob. “What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? God forbid!” No creature is made to suffer without sufficient reason or deprived of any natural or acquired right. But in respect to gratuitous gifts, and especially graces conferred upon the unworthy, God is absolute master. “For he saith to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” It enters into the very notion of grace and mercy that they should be purely gratuitous. The whole order of grace in respect both to angels and men is purely gratuitous. It is therefore absurd to argue from the justice and goodness of God, and from the superabundant mercy which he shows toward sinners in this world, especially when they are within his special circle of grace, the Catholic Church, that he will give grace or show mercy after the day of judgment, in derogation of the order of justice. It was a purely gratuitous act of goodness in God to elevate human nature by the hypostatic union, and to give angels and men a share in the privileges of the sacred humanity. The rewards conferred on merit in this order are indeed rewards of justice, but the whole basis of the justice by which glory is proportioned to merit is laid in a gratuitous grant of the very conditions of merit, the grace which made it possible, and the promise of reward on which the title to the kingdom of heaven rests. Absolute, indefeasible, personal right to the glory of heaven does not exist except in Jesus Christ the Lord, who is a divine person, and whose merits are infinite and equal to all the benefits conferred by the Father upon creation. The rights of all those who share with him, the Blessed Virgin Mary included, have been conferred by him upon them. The beatific vision is a pure boon of goodness to every creature who attains its possession. All might have been left in their natural state without any possibility of attaining it, without any derogation of the order of eternal law in respect to intellectual nature. There is no reason, therefore, why the number of the elect, once completed, should ever be increased, or the gates of heaven reopened to admit new citizens and princes of the celestial Jerusalem. Those who have never forfeited a right to admission through their own fault have no reason to bewail their exclusion.

Those who have lost their right cannot possibly hope to recover it, because they are left in their despoiled nature, utterly impotent to turn back toward the supernatural good, deprived of all grace and beyond the reach of the economy of mercy, which has passed away for ever. In respect to supernatural life they are dead, and as incapable of resuscitation by any effort of their own as a corpse is incapable of repossessing itself of the soul which has departed from it. The ἀποκατάστασις is not a resurrection to spiritual life in grace, for this belongs to the preceding, initial order of regeneration which has terminated with the end of the present world. The bodily resurrection and restitution of nature gives only to human beings the complement of the life which they already possess, whether supernatural or merely natural, and to the physical universe its complement of perfection in the eternal order. The angels remain intrinsically unchanged in their spiritual, incorruptible nature, as God made them in the beginning. The holy angels continue in the possession of the supernatural mode of being which they acquired by their free and active co-operation with grace, before the probation of man commenced, without any increase of essential glory and beatitude. The fallen angels remain in the state into which they voluntarily precipitated themselves at the same time. The change which takes place at the end of human probation is, for the angels, only extrinsic. The holy angels cease to combat with the demons, and to minister in the economy of redemption. The demons are compelled to desist from their war against Immanuel and his kingdom, and are relegated to their destined abode. All human beings are placed in the state and condition in which they are to remain for ever, those who have followed the demons in their rebellion in a state similar to theirs, as those who have obeyed God are in a state similar to that of the holy angels. It is this part of the Christian doctrine which Origen wholly misunderstood. He may be excused from wilful and contumacious heresy, on account of the paucity of means at his command for learning the complete doctrine of the apostles, and the modest, hypothetical manner in which he proposed his erratic theories. We may also give him the benefit of the doubt respecting the entire purport of what he really and persistently did teach out of all that mass of wholly uncatholic and in a great measure absurd opinions, so justly condemned by the patriarchal synod at Constantinople in its fifteen anathematisms, and in a general way by several subsequent œcumenical councils. It is impossible to doubt, however, that one fundamentally erroneous conception was fixed in his mind, and gave occasion to the fanciful hypotheses of aeons and ages, and transitions of spirits up and down through the scale of being. This conception was an exaggeration of the freedom of will inherent in rational nature. Because no creature is either holy or wicked by his essence, but every one is capable of good or evil, he argued the perpetual flexibility and vertibility of free-will between good and evil. Permanence in good must therefore be attributed only to a habit of right determination, and permanence in sin to an opposite habit or obstinacy of purpose to do wrong. Perhaps his various and apparently conflicting statements can be reconciled, if we suppose that he admitted the actual perseverance of some in holiness through a kind of moral impeccability acquired by long and persistent efforts, with a consequent eternity of unchangeable beatitude; and an opposite state of irreclaimable perverseness in others with everlasting misery as its necessary penalty. Those who are in the middle between these two extremes are then variable, vacillating between the opposite poles of moral good and evil, happiness and infelicity, at least during indefinite periods of duration. Our modern rationalistic Christians to a certain extent are involved in the same imperfect philosophical notions which Origen, in the lack, of a Christian philosophy, borrowed from Neo-Platonism. They do not understand the nature of grace, which gives immutable holiness and impeccability as a perfection to a created essence which in itself is capable of defect. Hence, they cannot get a clear idea of a permanent state of indefectibility in good except as a moral habit resulting from a series of acts. Nor can they understand the opposite state of deficiency and privation as something permanent in itself, apart from the habit of sinning which has been contracted by acts of sin and may be removed by contrary acts under the influence of moral discipline. They choose to consider the state of those who become perfectly good, here or hereafter, and attain the felicity of heaven, as something fixed, because it is agreeable to the feelings to think so. They also strive to make the prospects of those who are not very good, and even of those who are very bad, as hopeful as possible, in view of a certain, or probable, or at least possible, future conversion at a more or less remote æonian period, because it is likewise agreeable to the feelings to anticipate this happy change. Moreover, they are very willing to accept the teaching of the Bible and the Christian tradition concerning the eternity of heaven, without seeking too anxiously for metaphysical or moral demonstration of its intrinsic credibility, because it satisfies the natural desire of the heart for perfect good. We do not deny that there is some truth in their reasonings concerning acquired habits of virtue and vice, but they are defective as an argument for the determination of the future destiny of souls. The certainty of a fixed and immutable state of sanctity and beatitude for the just in heaven does not depend either on these reasonings, or on an exegetical and critical interpretation of certain words in Holy Scripture. It has a deeper foundation. The human soul of Jesus Christ is impeccable because of its indissoluble union with the divine nature in his person. The angels and saints are impeccable because they also are united to God by an indissoluble union. The Holy Spirit is in them as the principle of their spiritual life. They love God above all things by a happy necessity, and their intuitive vision of his essence, the infinite good, with the perfect quietude of the will in the enjoyment of this good, raises them above all possibility of attraction toward any object which could allure them from their willing worship and allegiance to their sovereign Lord. Moreover, they actually possess the inferior good in the most perfect manner, with an unbounded liberty to follow all their inclinations, which are all innocent, in conformity to reason, and identical with the will of God. The indestructibility and immortality which belong to their essence as spirits, by nature, pervades their entire actual being with all its accidents, so that they are incapable of suffering any deterioration or injury.

In the natural order of beatitude, the perfect intellectual cognition of God accompanied by perfect natural love to him as the most perfect being, together with the complete possession of all connatural good, removes all tendency to evil. Nature seeks good by a necessary law, rational nature by its spontaneous, voluntary movement. No rational being seeks evil gratuitously or for the sake of evil, but only under the aspect of good, not sub ratione mali but sub ratione boni. Where no illusion is possible, no sin is possible. Liberty of choice between the contraries of good and evil is not intrinsic to liberty of will, or a perfection of liberty, but a defect. It belongs to a defective order and to a defective subject, an order of probation and a subject placed under a trial of his obedience. The order and the subject are arranged to suit each other. The subject is required to move toward his end by using his reason and will rightly, and concurring with the Creator in bringing the inchoate order of creation to its due perfection. The order is such that it is not yet perfect, but capable of being made so by the operation of free, intelligent beings upon it. When the time of the end is reached, in the ἀποκατάστασις, this moral order is superseded; there is nothing which can be injured or abused or misdirected. Intelligent creatures which are made perfect have no more scope for election between contraries; their spontaneous and voluntary action is necessarily toward the true, universal good, and their liberty of choice has no possible terms which are not within the circle of order. They cannot think or will otherwise than right, because they are perfect and all things which come in contact with them are perfect. In this way they are brought into a similitude with God. He is what he is by necessity of nature, though he is most pure and simple act, wholly free from any extrinsic limitation or intrinsic contradiction to his will. He does what he will beyond his own being, but only that which is good. It is a perfection of his will that he cannot sin, as it is of his intellect that he cannot err or be ignorant. Falsehood and evil are nothing, and cannot terminate a divine act. Bonum ex integrâ causâ, malum a quovis defectu—Good is from complete cause, evil from any defect. God is absolute, infinite, first cause, and no defect in his causality is possible. Second causes, when they possess and exert their integral causality, are deficient in nothing which belongs to them. All those beings which are constituted in their ultimate perfection are in this integral state, and therefore are above all liability to evil throughout eternity.

This flexibility and vertibility in respect to good and evil, imagined by Origen as perpetually inherent in rational creatures, is a mere figment of his imperfect philosophy. He had scarcely any books to read which could help him to satisfy his unbounded curiosity to penetrate into the rational sense of the doctrines of revelation. Besides the Scriptures themselves, there was only pagan philosophy for him to study. Our modern philosophers have cast away the Catholic theology and philosophy, and strive to reconstruct the higher science for themselves, though with very poor success. The old Protestant theology was a doctrine of cruel, inexorable fate, which suppressed all freedom and justice in the moral order. The new theology which has subverted it restores the freedom of the will, and protests against the gloomy exaggerations and perversions of Christian dogmas which make them incredible and insupportable. But, in the effort to substitute more rational ideas, it overthrows or weakens the stability of the whole order of creation in its relation of dependence on the sovereign power and will of God. The wisest and most sober of those who are seeking for some stable and certain doctrine regarding the destiny of man and the final cause of creation, confess that they are in doubt and cannot solve the most momentous of the problems which force themselves on their attention. They never will find the light of truth until they return to the true church of Jesus Christ, and by her lamp recover the lost clew which guides the steps of the wayfarer through the labyrinth. The one dark mystery which like a cloud overshadows the bright disc of light “which enlighteneth every man coming into this world,” the mystery of moral evil and its punishment, cannot be ignored or reasoned away. Catholic theology does not create this mystery but finds it existing. It cannot remove it, but it, so to speak, absorbs it in another, the mystery of moral probation. And this mystery, awful as are the responsibilities and risks which it presents to view as environing those beings who are called to run and to contend for the supernal prize upon the arena, has in it more of light than of darkness. It throws new splendor upon the ἀποκατάστασις in which the order of reason and justice finally and universally triumphs. Its dark spot is reduced by the exposition of the Catholic doctrine as authoritatively taught by the church, in connection with certain or probable and permissible reasoning from revealed or rational premises, to its smallest limits. The gloom of doom and fate in the destiny of rational beings is scattered like an unwholesome mist from the swamps of error, in the light of this doctrine. The universality and perpetuity of the struggle and danger of probation are reduced to the limits of a relatively small number and brief period of duration. The numerical proportion of the losers to the winners in the strife is reduced to the lowest terms which are consistent with a fair and judicious estimate of the probabilities of the question. Moreover, the multitude of beings, whether greater or lesser, who suffer eternal loss as the penalty of their irreparable failure, are not losers through mischance or inferiority to competitors, as in a strife where one person wins at the expense of a less capable or less fortunate rival. Neglect or contempt of their own supreme good, deliberate and wilful wasting of their day of grace, are the sole causes of their failure. Their loss of beatitude is the penalty of their demerit. It is equally proportioned to their ill-desert, and this is limited to the sins committed during the time of probation which have never been remitted. The demerit of the angel which determines his eternal destiny is the demerit of one act only, the sin by which he fell from grace. The demerit of the man is confined to the sins of his mortal life unforgiven at the moment when this life ceases. The notion of an eternal increase of demerit, and a corresponding augmentation of torment without end, is a mere human invention without any foundation in Catholic doctrine. God has set bounds to the dangerous liberty of choice between good and evil, and to the evil as well as the good resulting from its exercise. Hell can become no worse than it is when the last sentence of the Judge has been pronounced, and the active hostility of the powers of hell against the kingdom of God is suppressed for ever when they are made to bend the knee before the name of Jesus, and to confess his glory. “Qui crucem sanctam subiit, infernum confregit.” The unending warfare between good and evil, the perpetual strife, the infinite series of changes, the eternal fluctuations and revolutions of Neo-Platonic philosophy, are a wild dream. The inventions and exaggerations and distortions produced by the working of the human intellect and imagination upon a mystery of God, have no value and are not to be confounded with the revealed truth made known through the teaching of the church. Clear and adequate knowledge of the future life is reserved for the future life. In the obscurity of this present state we not only have the veracity of God as the motive and ground of faith, but also the perfect, unerring intelligence of the human soul of Jesus Christ as the medium of transmitting to us the revelation of those things which are not seen but believed, and its pure love for humanity as the warrant of confidence in the divine goodness. Human reason and justice, impersonated in their ideal and integral perfection in union with the divine wisdom in Immanuel, will be the standard and measure of the final judgment by which the destiny of all men and all creatures will be determined for eternity. We need not have any misgivings, lest the ways of God should not be vindicated before the whole rational universe.

ENGLISH STATESMEN IN UNDRESS.
EARL DERBY, JOHN BRIGHT, AND MR. GLADSTONE.

The recent resignation of Earl Derby was an act entirely characteristic of the man. He is not at all like Mr. Gradgrind, but he reminds one very forcibly of that unamiable stickler for, and worshipper of, facts. Let one come to Earl Derby with a new fact, or, better still, with a new application of old facts, and he is sure of a patient, candid, and intelligent hearing; but if he approaches him with a theory, or a sentiment, or a hypothetical conclusion based upon “ifs,” Earl Derby will be as unresponsive and immovable as a statue. His ruling passion is to be, or at least to appear, positively practical; the phrase most often on his lips is “common sense.” His illustrious father was a writer of established fame; a gay man of the world; fond of society and proud of his popularity with “the sex”; a captivating orator and an extremely skilful Parliamentary debater; moreover, he did not disdain to stoop to tricky devices when sober argument and sound reason would not ensure success. The present Earl Derby is prosaic to an almost painful degree; he cares little for society, and has not even “a redeeming vice”; his political and personal honesty is unimpeachable; he is as incapable of wilfully deceiving or misleading a foreign diplomatist as he would be of cheating his butcher; his speeches, in and out of Parliament, are models of wise dulness and calm force; they may in vain be searched through and through for a flight of fancy or an extravagant expression; and as for a joke—his lordship, as seen and heard in public, is apparently incapable of either making or understanding one. Sometimes those listening to him are tempted to laugh at him; but he never invites them to laugh with him. To hear him discourse for forty minutes at a time upon the comparative advantages of closed and open sewers, or demonstrating, with mathematical exactness, the superiority of natural manure over artificial compounds, is instructive, but it is not exhilarating. Lord Derby, however, is not without ideas. It was he who furnished Mr. Disraeli with a popular cry in 1874, when, hard pressed for a policy, and finding that appeals concerning the Straits of Malacca failed to fire the popular heart, that versatile and humorous statesman startled the country by declaring that the most pressing, inspiriting, and noble duty of the government at that moment was to improve the drainage of the kingdom. This was Earl Derby’s happy thought, and Mr. Disraeli was enraptured when, on asking his lordship to put it in shape, the latter proposed the formula, “Sanitas sanitatum; omnia sanitas.” There is a belief entertained by some of Earl Derby’s more intimate friends that at heart he is a sentimental, romantic, susceptible person, and that he is so morbidly timid of being suspected of such amiable weaknesses that he has fabricated for himself an artificial disguise for public wear, in which he may appear as the hard, dry, prosy, unsentimental, matter-of-fact business man. It does not stand to reason, it is claimed, that any man, and above all an English nobleman with practically boundless wealth, in the enjoyment of vigorous health, and in the prime of his life (he is now only fifty-two years old), could possibly be so preternaturally dry and skilfully prosaic as is Lord Derby. “It must be put on,” they say, “to hide the natural romance and tenderness of his disposition”; and as one of the proofs of the correctness of this theory they relate the story of his first and only love; of its frustration by accidents not wholly beyond his control; of his long and patient, but not hopeless, waiting for the death of the rival who had carried off the prize; and of his calm confidence, fully justified by the result, that he in his turn would win the lady. The story is true; but it may bear a different moral than the one assigned to it by those who fancy that Earl Derby, reversing the plan adopted by Hamlet, has chosen to put a solemn disposition on to hide the antic joyousness of his real nature. A sufficient acquaintance with Earl Derby will establish the fact that, if he wears a disguise, it fits him so well that no one can detect the imposition. He always seems to be exactly the same; never hot, never cold, never excited, never listless, attentive to everything that is said to him, replying without hesitation but without haste, most often in words that might have been cut and dried six months before.

His resignation, as previously remarked, was entirely characteristic of the man. He will not be led along a tortuous path; and the policy of Lord Beaconsfield on the Eastern question has been very crooked. Its very success depended on its crookedness. The two earls are great friends; in fact, Lord Beaconsfield would be guilty of ingratitude if he should ever cease to regard Lord Derby with affection. Nor is it to be supposed that Lord Beaconsfield is a whit more patriotic than Derby, or that he has a keener sense of what is necessary for the safety of the empire. The difference between them is the difference between the daring yet keen speculator and the staid and methodical merchant. Lord Beaconsfield is sometimes willing to try the hazard of the die. Something may always turn up; there is the possibility of an alliance with Austria; there is the chance that Italy may be willing to repeat the part that Sardinia played in 1854; it is on the cards that the death of Bismarck or of the Emperor William may effect a radical change in Germany’s foreign policy; it is possible that France may be magnanimous enough to forget how England left her naked to her enemy in 1870, and that the allied French and English armies may again fight together in the Crimea. Lord Beaconsfield is popularly supposed to argue thus; but Lord Derby is subject to no such illusions. At least, he will take no chances. He has no sentimental horror of war, as John Bright has. He would fight soon enough if he saw his way clearly to a successful issue of the conflict; but he does not see his way. For England to enter single-handed into an armed struggle with Russia would in his opinion be madness; and he is convinced that she cannot count upon a single ally. It is true that some of the German people are not much in love with Russia; but the German government, Lord Derby affirms—and he ought to know—is altogether on the side of Russia, and an unkind neutrality is all that England can expect from that source. As for France, not a single French politician would advocate an English alliance for war; the Crimean War was never popular in France, and the 100,000 French lives lost in that struggle are still lamented. Sardinia joined England and France in the war of 1854 because she was in a position in which an adventurous policy was desirable; but now Sardinia is swallowed up in Italy, and Italy has all she can do to make both ends meet at home. The great hope lies in Austria; but Earl Derby knows that Francis Joseph, Alexander, and William are three sworn friends, and he sees, moreover, that one of these would not be likely to break with another of the triumvirate unless he were assured that the third would either aid him or remain neutral. Still more plain is it to Earl Derby’s cool perception that the internal divisions of Austria are so grave that she would be mad to engage in a war which, if unsuccessful, would split the empire in twain. The Magyars sympathize with Turkey, the Slavs with Russia, the Austro-Germans with neither; the army could not be trusted; and the finances of the empire are in such a condition that it was with the greatest difficulty that the government the other day raised a loan of twenty-five millions of dollars. It is clear enough to Lord Derby that England, without an ally, would be worsted; and it is equally clear that she cannot safely count upon an ally. Of course all things are possible. She may secure an ally; but it is only a chance, and Lord Derby will take no chances.

There is another fact that weighs upon him: the consideration that the war, if entered upon, has no definite, practical object. The cant is that it is necessary in order to regain for England influence in Europe; but this is a consideration that has no weight in Lord Derby’s mind. He sneers at it in his dry, prosaic manner as something that is ridiculous. In a certain sense he is a democrat. He recognizes fully the fact that England is practically a democracy, and on a memorable occasion he shocked the Lords by telling them that the people were their “employers.” But he is keenly alive to the fact that a government which shapes its course in accordance with the ever-shifting breeze of popular caprice cannot have an intelligible or consistent record; and the other day he took occasion to point out that the “employers” of the government, in regard to the Eastern question, had not been of the same mind for six months together. Two years ago it was as much as one’s life was worth to say a word in favor of the Turks or against the Russians; now it is all the other way. Turkey might have been saved, and not a voice was raised; now she is irretrievably lost, and every one is crying out that she must be saved. So Earl Derby refuses to help his “employers” to embark in a war without an object well defined, without reasonable hope of success, and without an ally. He does it without the passion that Mr. Gladstone displays; without the rhetoric John Bright uses, without a flourish, or a poetical quotation, or a sarcasm—simply as a dry, shrewd, cold-blooded, and clear-headed merchant would do when asked to imperil his fortune by wild investments on the Stock Exchange.

One of the writer’s most memorable conversations with Lord Derby was on a summer morning in 1872, when he was resting in the cool shade of the Opposition, and had plenty of time on his hands to devote to those subjects of social science and political economy in which one might imagine he takes more real personal interest than in adjusting the balance of power in Europe or in maintaining the prestige of England on the continent. The Stanleys for four centuries, and I know not how long before, have been large landholders. The first Earl Derby was created by King Henry VII. in 1485—seven years before Christopher Columbus discovered America—but the family had been a rich and powerful one long ere that. The Lord Stanley whose designed failure to bring up his contingent to the support of Richard III. at the battle of Bosworth Field had so much to do with the defeat of that resolute monarch was the father-in-law of his conqueror and successor, Henry VII.; and the young George Stanley whose head was so opportunely saved by the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk, that there would be time enough to decapitate him “after the battle,” was the fifteenth predecessor of the present earl. I was accompanied in this visit by an English commoner, who was greatly interested at that time in certain projects for the systematic improvement of the dwellings of the working-classes—projects which Earl Derby also regarded as worthy of his attention. The large estates of the family in England and Ireland have always, or at least for a very long time, been well administered. Neither the former nor the present earl has been accused of being a bad landlord; they were not given to rack-renting, and their tenants did not fear to ask them for favors. The former earl was perhaps more quick to grant a request from a tenant than the present one; but if the plea be a good one the applicant will not go away denied. But it must be a good one; of all men in England Lord Derby is perhaps the least easily deceived. There is nothing imposing in his town-house. It is not a palace, like the magnificent mansion of the Marquis of Westminster; nor does it stand apart in dull and ugly grandeur, as does Devonshire House; nor bewilder and delight the visitor by the splendor of its saloons and the beauty of its grounds, as does Stafford House, the glories of which so dazzled the Shah of Persia that he asked the Prince of Wales, who had just entertained him in shabby Marlborough House, why he permitted the Duke of Sutherland, a subject, to dwell in a state so superior to that which royalty itself maintained. Earl Derby’s town residence is a plain building in Piccadilly, not far from the almost equally unostentatious house where the richest lady in England resides. There are houses on Park Avenue, New York, which are finer than the London residences of either Lord Derby or the Baroness Burdett-Coutts; and there is little in his lordship’s dwelling that is either rare or strange. The great historical and romantic heirlooms of the family are elsewhere—at Knowlsey Park, for instance. We held our conversation on the occasion referred to in a room looking out upon St. James’ Park and the Green Park. The windows were open; the sweet, fresh air of the morning came freely in. From the leather-cushioned chair in which I sat I could see a portion of the façade of Buckingham Palace, the west front of Westminster Abbey, and the towers of the Parliament House. The earl questioned me for some time concerning the actual condition of affairs as they then were in America; and his questions were sometimes hard to answer. One thing impressed me as rather remarkable: he made no mistakes in his questions; that is, he did not ask how far Chicago was from Illinois, or whether New York and Washington were under the same municipal government—interrogatories which another very studious and painstaking English nobleman once put to me. Had we yet made any satisfactory progress in solving the problem of the true relations between capital and labor? We had certain facilities at our command for working out that solution; would we work it out, and if so, how? Was there any common interest and common feeling between American workmen and American masters? The abolition of slavery was doubtless a fine thing; but had it not been accompanied with, or followed by, a long series of financial, industrial, and political mistakes? It was with a feeling of relief that I found my examination ended, and became a listener instead of a talker.

On the subject of improved dwellings for the working-classes he held very firm convictions. Unquestionably these were needed, but he did not wish to be a party to any scheme which proposed to build little palaces for working-men, and to rent them at one-tenth of their value, making up the deficiency by contributions from the rich. That was all nonsense. Nor was he very much enraptured with the Peabody buildings; they were well enough in their way, but they were not available for those who most needed them. The thing to be done was to make the workmen help themselves. How? Well, possibly by co-operation. The earl thought that much might be accomplished by an aggregation of sixpences. As for co-operation in distribution, that had already demonstrated its own usefulness; would it not be well to attempt the experiment of co-operation, strictly confined to the workmen themselves, in buying lands, erecting houses, and selling them, on long time, to themselves? He had in a drawer of his table an elaborate calculation of what might be accomplished in this way; but after producing it he suggested so many objections to its practicability that I soon regarded it with contempt. The agitation concerning the demands of the agricultural laborers was at this time just beginning to make itself felt; and the conversation drifted into a rather desultory discussion of that subject. The earl made two points very clear: in his opinion the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers would greatly increase the strength of his own party, and if he cared only for that he would advocate it; but it would not advance the interests of the peasants nor promote the general welfare of the country. He made some very hard and dry statements on this point. I was rather taken aback by them, but did not attempt to controvert them. Subsequent events in the United States have shown that the earl had a prophetic ken. He disclaimed, with something like animation, the idea of comparing the liberated and enfranchised slaves of our Southern States with the English peasants; but he said that the party that had enfranchised the slaves would not retain their political allegiance, and would probably owe its ultimate overthrow to them. Men are not grateful beings, he said; it is a great mistake to count on their gratitude. Besides, the negroes will believe that they were enfranchised not so much for their own sakes as for the reason that they might aid in keeping their liberators in power. Unless negro human nature was unlike Anglo-Saxon human nature, the enfranchised negroes would say to themselves: “What has been given to us belonged to us; the men who gave it wished to buy us to serve them; but they have only given us what was rightfully our own, and they have nothing more to give us. A vote is nothing to us, save for the use we can make of it. We do not care whether this man or that man is President; but we do care whether our rent is lowered or raised, or whether we are on good or bad terms with our landlords.”

It was in this way that Earl Derby demonstrated to me that the negro vote in the South, so long as the rights of property were held sacred and order was preserved, would always be at the disposal of the land-owners of that region; and he drew the same conclusion as to the results of the enfranchisement of the English peasants. Affairs were bad enough as they were; despite all the new devices for securing the purity of elections, they were not pure, and he did not see how they were ever to be made pure. It was in 1849, if I remember correctly, that Earl Derby visited the United States and the West Indies. He was then a very young man. Mr. Fillmore was President. A very different political atmosphere prevailed at Washington and elsewhere from the present one. The young Lord Stanley observed affairs for himself and drew his own conclusions. At heart I think he was more pleased with the South than with the North or West; and, without saying so in words, he left upon me the impression that he did not entertain a very high opinion of our Republican statesmen.

It is more pleasant to hear him talk in private than to listen to him in public. But he is not a bad speaker, as English speakers go. He was better in the Commons when Lord Stanley than in the Lords as Earl Derby. But whenever he speaks he impresses you as being an earnest and sincere man—not earnest in the sense of enthusiastic, but sober, steady, and fully believing in the truth of what he is saying and of the necessity of his saying it. He is not what is called a popular man, but he is esteemed and respected by every one. His father died in the autumn of 1869; the nine years that have since passed have been eventful ones for the present earl, and his responsibilities have been heavy. But they have not dismayed or disheartened him, and when I last met him he was looking younger and rather less grave—more happy, I thought—than usually.

In certain respects Mr. John Bright resembles Earl Derby; in others he is the very contradiction of the earl. Physically the two men are not very unlike. Either of them would do very well for a model of the traditional John Bull; indeed, Punch has often used both of them for this purpose. Mr. Bright is fifteen years the senior of Earl Derby, and two years younger than Mr. Gladstone. Earl Derby has been in active political life for twenty-six years; Mr. Bright for thirty-five years; and Mr. Gladstone for forty-six years, for he was returned as the Tory member for Newark in 1832, when Earl Derby was a child of six years; and he had sat in Parliament eleven years before Mr. Bright entered the House in 1843 as member for Durham. It is a curious fact, to which I have heard Mr. Bright refer with some mirthfulness, that he sat in the House for four years without opening his mouth. It was not until 1847 that he made his maiden speech in the House; it was a plea for extending the principles of free trade, and it gave him a national reputation. As between Derby, Bright, and Gladstone, the latter must be admitted to be the greatest man—greatest in his acquired knowledge, greatest in his natural genius, greatest even in his oratorical power. But there is at times a charm in the speeches of John Bright that the finest utterances of Mr. Gladstone never carry with them. Mr. Gladstone captivates the fancy, pleases the taste, convinces the judgment, for the time being at least; Mr. Bright touches the heart and subdues it. I am not certain but that his skill in this depends upon a trick. Mr. Bright in his life has been the doer of some heartless and cruel things; he has wrought more mischief than most men of his age; his idea of progress has been that of the bourgeoisie, not that of the workman; his beau ideal of a country is a republic where there is no titled aristocracy, but where the working-classes, having fair wages, are quite content with their station and have no inconvenient aspirations beyond it. The manufacturers and the traders are Mr. Bright’s “people”; he would like to see nothing above them; he thinks those below them should be content with the station wherein God has placed them. Mr. Bright has often fanned popular discontent, but it has been too often for the purpose simply of using the power thus evoked to pull down something that stood above him. The mercantile spirit is strong in him. Anything that was for the good of trade was good in his eyes; the trader was always his idol. But he had “a way with him” that enabled him to carry along the hearts of the workmen. His personal appearance and deportment had something to do with this: his round, florid, solid, “English” face, his almost magical voice, the ease and power of his delivery, his wonderful mastery of plain and forcible but really elegant English, the aptness with which he could introduce a quotation from Holy Writ or from some familiar English poet or rhymster. I find myself unconsciously writing of Mr. Bright in the past tense. It is only while revising these lines for publication that the sudden death of his wife occurs. That bereavement will be very hard for him to sustain; it is probable that his public career has ended. When the utter breaking down of his health compelled him to retire from Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet in December, 1870, he was in a deplorable condition. After many months of entire abstinence from mental excitement of any kind his mind began to resume its strength. But from that time there has always been danger of another collapse. An intimate friend of his family told me that Mr. Bright was in the condition of one whose arm had been broken and who had the bones reset. “So long as he does not use the arm, and allows it to rest in its sling, all will go well; but if he strikes a blow with it, it will fall shattered at his side.” It was during this period of convalescence and rest that I saw Mr. Bright most frequently. The attachment between his wife and himself was very evident. He petted her as if she had been a bride in her honeymoon. On one occasion, when breakfasting with them, the conversation turned chiefly on the then recent declarations of President Grant in his Des Moines speech concerning secular education and the rights of the Catholic Church in the United States. This must have been some time in December, 1875. I was grieved, although not surprised, to hear Mr. Bright express sentiments of very bitter hostility to the church, and a desire to see education wholly taken from her control. He confessed that he did not know anything about the merits of the question as it stood in the United States, but he applauded the President for his boldness in bringing the subject forward. Mrs. Bright, seeing that the topic was an agitating one to both of us, adroitly turned the conversation into another channel, and Mr. Bright was presently telling me stories of Mr. Cobden and of the early struggles for free trade. He said that one of the things he most prized was a copy of a resolution passed in 1862 by the New York Chamber of Commerce, expressing its sense of the devotion which he had manifested to the principles of international justice and peace.

Mr. Bright is a fascinating conversationalist, and it is a great pleasure to listen to him. Like most men who have not been born to high positions, but who have attained them by the force of their own genius, there is sometimes observable a little stiffness, or mauvaise honte, in his manner. There is some difficulty here in expressing one’s self clearly without seeming to be offensive. Mr. Bright has often expressed great contempt for the English hereditary nobility; and he is, or was, in the habit of regarding them as a pack of fools. The aristocracy of England have not failed to afford abundant instances of what Mr. Bright was fond of calling their “unwisdom.” More than this, the personal littleness, meanness, duplicity, and cruelty of some of these hereditary noblemen cannot be denied. But it would be impossible for one of them, if you were lunching with him, to tell you that the sherry you were drinking cost ninety shillings a dozen, and therefore must be good.

Mr. Bright has very frequently expressed an ardent admiration for American institutions, and he has often been accused of wishing to Americanize the British Constitution. Had Mr. Bright been born to an earldom, he would have been the greatest stickler for the rights of his class who has lived since the days of Louis XIV. A dozen English noblemen could be named who are more ardent republicans than is John Bright. He does not like to see men above him; but he is quite content to see any number below him, so long as they help him to lower those above him to his own level. Men speak of him as a radical; but he is nothing of the kind. Mr. Gladstone is tenfold more of a radical. If John Bright lived in the United States he would belong to the conservative party, whatever its name might be. Between him and such men as Auberon Herbert, Charles Bradlaugh, and the other republicans in England there is a great gulf fixed; and this not at all by reason of the irreligious opinions of these men. He would like a republic well enough, if he were always to be President, and if the rights of property were secure from all infringement. It is an utter misconception of Mr. Bright’s character to rank him among enthusiastic, unselfish, and theoretical reformers and philanthropists. His passions are strong, but his hate is far fiercer than his love is powerful; and he cares infinitely more for the “freedom of trade” than for the freedom of man. His opposition to the bill for preventing and punishing the adulteration of articles of food illustrates this curious trait in his character. He said, almost in so many words, that it were better that the people were half poisoned and wholly cheated than that the government should interfere between buyer and seller, to protect the former and lessen the gains of the latter. This is the true Manchester spirit—the spirit that has led the cotton-makers of Lancashire to load their fabrics for the Eastern markets with so much glue and chalk that a fabric which appeared of the best quality became a worthless rag as soon as it was wet—a deception, by the way, that has now cost England the loss of a very large share of her Chinese and Indian trade.

Mr. Bright is also violently inconsistent at times. We conversed once for a long time on the question of the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers and to women. Some of his remarks reminded me of that shrewd American politician who was in favor of the Maine Liquor Law, but was opposed to its enforcement. Mr. Bright and his party had recently suffered some mortifying disillusions. The new voters, enfranchised by the Reform Bill, which Mr. Disraeli had taken up and passed after the Liberals had dallied with the question for years, began to manifest evidences of insubordination—not at all, however, in the right direction, from Mr. Bright’s point of view. It must be understood that a superstition had sprung up to the effect that all the new voters must necessarily be on the side of the Liberals; just as it was supposed that the enfranchised negroes in the United States must all vote the Republican ticket for ever and a day. There was this difference between the two cases: the Republicans had actually freed the negroes; the English Liberals, led by Bright and Gladstone, had talked about enfranchising the lower classes in England, but, while talking about it and disputing where the line should be drawn, the Tories, led by Disraeli, stepped in and accomplished the work by establishing what is virtually household suffrage. The former Earl Derby, led an unwilling captive by Disraeli, had reluctantly given his assent to this measure, which he called “a leap in the dark”; but at the time of which I speak it was becoming plain that this leap had landed the Conservative party upon very good ground. The new voters, instead of swelling the ranks of the Liberals, were to a great extent found in the train of the Tories, and Mr. Bright was disgusted with them. I have good reason to know that he disliked the idea of universal suffrage, and that he had quite as sincere a horror of the residuum as that which Mr. Lowe expressed. The “conservative working-man” was beginning to show that he really existed and was not a myth. The voters of the kingdom had been vastly increased in numbers; but the new voters, when they came to the polls, were found to be quite as conservative, and in many cases more so than the old constituencies. This was a source of keen mortification and disappointment to Mr. Bright, and the first results of the Ballot Bill caused him no less chagrin. He had indulged in two illusions: let us have a general suffrage (not universal but general) and secret voting, and we shall carry every election district and be masters of the situation for ever more. Household suffrage and the ballot were provided, and from that day to this the Liberal party has grown weaker. Mr. Bright took no care to conceal from me the annoyance that these results gave him; and it was plain that his faith in the good sense and integrity of the masses was weakened. The impression he left on my mind in this conversation was that he would have preferred a much more limited suffrage; no one should vote, for instance, who did not pay a rental of perhaps six pounds a year. As for the future, there were two classes yet to be enfranchised—the agricultural laborers and the women. With regard to the latter Mr. Bright referred me to his brother Jacob. “He is the great man for the women,” said he. “He has that matter in charge; he can tell you more about the merits of their demands than I can. I am a little afraid of women as voters. Women are naturally easily led away by romance and glitter; and I suspect a showy ministry would always be more apt to secure their support than a sober and dull administration.” With regard to the claims of the agricultural laborers for the suffrage he was cold and guarded in his expressions. Theoretically they should have what they asked; but as a practical measure, and one of immediate action, it was plain that he preferred to allow affairs to rest as they were. He feared that the peasants with votes in their hands would be seduced by the Tories, as the new voters in the boroughs had been. “A little more education would be desirable before thus increasing the constituencies,” said he. “What kind of education, Mr. Bright?” “Well, certainly not that of the parish school, with the parson as the real teacher; and that, as affairs now are, is almost all they can have.”

The study of Mr. Bright’s course upon the great question of the present day in England—war with Russia or surrender to her—is full of interest to those who wish to closely analyze his character. Eighteen months ago Mr. Bright—Quaker as he is, apostle of peace as he is, trader and manufacturer as he is—was altogether in favor of war; that is, of a certain war—the war of the Russians against the Turks. In the Christmas-tide of 1876 Mr. Bright could say nothing too harsh in condemnation of those who were attempting to prevent Russia from entering into the war with Turkey. He spoke, he said, in the name of Christianity, but only to remind his hearers that the Russians were Christians and that the Turks were Mohammedans. Very curious language at that time came from the lips of this great peace advocate. In substance it was an appeal to Englishmen to encourage Russia in her attempt to drive the Turks from Europe, “bag and baggage,” as Mr. Gladstone has it. English Christians were bade remember by this Quaker peace-apostle that seven hundred years ago their ancestors fought to regain possession of Bethlehem and Calvary and the Mount of Olives; and that those sacred places now, as then, were in the possession of the infidels whom Russia, if not interfered with by England—would soon drive forth. England should stand by. If she interfered she would prevent the war; she must not lift a finger nor say a word save in approval of the Russians; and they must be left to wage war as they wished or as they could. Eighteen months have passed; the Russians have waged their war; it has been marked at every step with revolting horrors; half a million of Mohammedans and hundreds of thousands of Christians have perished in it; and Mr. Bright ought to feel satisfied. But now that England proposes to interfere and to fight a little on her own account, Mr. Bright boils over with rage, and calls all England to observe the unparalleled wickedness of the government in proposing to employ its Indian troops to sustain the empire. It is infamous to employ them, especially against “Christian Russia.” War conducted by Russia is not at all shocking; war waged against her is the unpardonable national sin. Russia might shed oceans of Christian blood in her wars, and Mr. Bright be content; but when England proposes to use Mohammedan soldiers in efforts to save English interests in the East from utter ruin, Mr. Bright raises his hands in horror and declaims against the wickedness of war. Radical inconsistencies like these are natural to Mr. Bright. They are observable in many of his acts; they crop out in his conversation. He has spoken eloquently against persecution for opinion’s sake; but, to judge him by his tone, he would burn Earl Beaconsfield at the stake to-morrow.

In all my conversations with Mr. Bright there were two things that impressed me: his indifference to, and want of sympathy with, the question of university education in any of its aspects, and his perfectly ignorant hostility to the Catholic religion. This hostility was not active, or it was rarely so; but it was implanted deep in his mind, and it colored to a great extent some of his most important actions. Without knowing anything at all about the church, and without, as I believe, having even so much as read a Catholic book, he had put it down among his self-evident truths that the church was the foe of what he most held dear, and he hated her accordingly. Mr. Bright’s instincts are clear, and they did not deceive him here. The church is the foe of what he most holds dear; for in the ideal society which John Bright would create, if he had his way, the temple would be a cotton-mill, the priests would be the manufacturers, and the people would have “free trade” for their god.[^[124]]

Mr. Gladstone has within him the power of being as plodding and patient in his search for dry facts as Lord Derby is; he is as passionate in his hatreds and as inconsistent in his affections as is Mr. Bright; but he has what neither Derby nor Bright possesses—genius. He is a far more attractive man than either. It was my dear friend, the late John Francis Maguire, who first brought me into personal contact with Mr. Gladstone. We were talking together in the lobby of the House of Commons one summer evening in 1870, the year after the passage of the Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, when Mr. Gladstone came by and stopped to speak to Maguire, to whom he was very much attached—as who was not that knew him? After a few moments Mr. Gladstone complained of the heat in the lobby. “Let us go out on the terrace,” said he. “But I must not leave my American friend; come along, ——. Mr. Gladstone, permit me to present my friend.” We moved along the long corridor to the terrace that overhangs the Thames; and here, while they continued their conversation, which was of no interest save to themselves, I had ample opportunity to regard at close range the then ruler of England. He was sixty-one years old; he is now sixty-nine. The disappointments, defeats, and ardent but unsuccessful conflicts he has fought during the last four years have aged him; but he is still hale and vigorous, and, for all that one can see, may count upon many years of active life, which indeed no man will begrudge him. He is not by any means an Adonis, and never has been; but as we sat together that evening on the stone bench of the terrace he seemed to me a fascinating man. His voice in conversation is melodious and pleasant, with an occasional touch of a strange, melancholy minor key. If he be interested in his subject and on good terms with the person to whom he is speaking, he is a most charming conversationalist. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford; he entered Parliament as the member for Newark in the Tory interest in 1832. He has had forty-six years of almost uninterrupted public life. He was under-secretary for the colonies in 1835 under Sir Robert Peel, and vice-president of the Board of Trade in 1841; he revised the tariff in 1842, and was president of the Board of Trade in 1843; he was returned for Oxford in 1847, and became a Liberal in 1851 on the questions of university reform and Jewish disabilities; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition Ministry of 1852, and was sent on a mission to the Ionian Islands by the then Lord Derby in 1858; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer again under Palmerston in 1859, and repealed the paper duty, making possible the establishment of the penny newspaper; he aided Cobden to accomplish his commercial treaty with France, and amused himself by interfering officiously with the domestic government of the kingdom of Naples; he was defeated for Oxford in 1865, but immediately returned for Lancashire, and after the death of Palmerston became leader of the House as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Russell. He brought in his Reform Bill in 1866, was defeated on it, and went into opposition; he brought in and succeeded in effecting the passage of his Irish Church resolutions in 1868; he was defeated for Lancashire at the general election of 1868, but returned for Greenwich, and took charge of the government as Prime Minister in that year. He disestablished the Irish Church in 1869; passed the Irish Land Bill in 1870; abolished purchase in the army in 1871 by the arbitrary exercise of the prerogative of the crown, and negotiated the Treaty of Washington. In 1874, anxious to finish his Irish work, he evolved from out of the depths of his own inner consciousness an Irish University Education Bill, and had the extreme mortification of seeing it not only rejected by the Catholics but violently opposed by the English and Scotch Liberals. He appealed to the country, not on that question but on a new project invented by himself for the abolition of the income tax; his majority of sixty members was turned into a minority of as many, and his old foe, Disraeli, came marching into power with drums beating and colors flying.

Since then Mr. Gladstone has conducted a species of independent opposition of his own; he has sought to punish the Catholics for their refusal to accept his University Bill by writing several venomous pamphlets to show that Catholics could not be loyal subjects; he has endeavored to upset the Disraeli administration on various occasions; he conducted the Bulgarian outrage excitement with great skill; and for the last few months he has been almost incessantly engaged in the most strenuous and violent efforts to prevent England from interfering in any way with Russia in the execution of her designs against Turkey. This was the extraordinary man with whom I was sitting on that summer evening. After a while he turned to me to ask me about some of his American friends, and thus I was drawn into the conversation. Mr. Maguire, for my benefit, I think, diverted it into the channel of the then remaining causes of Irish discontent; and the conversation became animated and ran on until the unlucky ringing of a division bell compelled both the premier and the Irish member to run off and leave me alone—not, however, before Mr. Gladstone had given me an invitation which I was not slow, in future days, to accept.

Thus it came about that many conversations were held between us, and the memory of them is for the most part extremely pleasant. We spoke generally on the immediate questions of the day, occasionally diverging into wider and more fragrant fields. He had at this time a very wide circle of Roman Catholic friends; and he was so fond of their society that Mr. Newdegate and Mr. Johnson, of Edinburgh (the secretary of the Anti-Papal League), got up the story that he was about to be received into the church. This rumor grew into the fact that he had been actually received; but to this there was the variation that he had become a communicant of the Greek Church! There never was any foundation for these stories; but it is probable that there was a period in Mr. Gladstone’s life when, had he not been Prime Minister of England, he would have become a Catholic. This reminds me of a story that Cardinal Manning once told me. He and Mr. Gladstone were very old and very dear friends; and this friendship continued unbroken until Mr. Gladstone’s assault upon the church in his “Vatican” pamphlets. I do not think the friendship thus sundered has ever been restored. But the story was this: One day the premier was talking with the archbishop, and after a little pause he said: “What a pity you ever left us, Manning! Had you remained with us you would have been Archbishop of Canterbury to-day, with £15,000 a year!” “I clasped my hands,” said his grace, “looked up to heaven, and exclaimed with all my heart, ‘Thank God for having saved my poor soul!’”

Mr. Gladstone’s town residence in Carlton House Terrace was pleasant to visit. He had enjoyed being a victim to the old-china and Wedgwood mania, and some of the rooms were crammed with his successes in the collection of “uniques” in this line. He—or some one in his confidence—had had good taste in pictures, and some excellent works of old and new masters hung upon his walls. It was wonderful to hear him talk about blue china, but I think his strong point in this line is Wedgwood. It was pleasanter, however, to draw him away from his china and lead him on to talk about men or books. He discussed both, on occasion, with a freedom and incisiveness that were somewhat startling. It was amusing to see the care with which he sometimes avoided speaking about Mr. Disraeli, and the latitude which he allowed himself on other occasions in denouncing and ridiculing him. He once complained bitterly that Disraeli was not an Englishman and had no English blood in him; and when I ventured to suggest that the wretched malefactor could scarcely be blamed for circumstances so wholly beyond his control, he looked very glum for some moments, and then turned the conversation aside, as if disinclined to accept even that apology for his foe.

It is that curious trait in Mr. Gladstone’s character which makes it so difficult for him in his public speeches to make a statement without qualifying it, or amplifying it, or stating several hypothetical cases with reference to it, that renders his conversation so charming. Beginning to tell you something about Pius IX., for instance, he will branch off into a story about Father Newman, an anecdote of Mazzini, a reminiscence of Orsini, Palmerston, or Louis Napoleon, an adventure that happened to himself in Naples, his feelings when he recognized an old college chum of his as a bare-footed friar in a monastery on the Alps, and so on. It is like the Arabian Nights, for one story grows out of the other, and all the time he does not forget the original subject, the Pope, but comes back to him, and winds up with the story about him, told with all due emphasis and action. There was a time when for Pius IX. Mr. Gladstone entertained what seemed to be a truly sincere admiration and respect; occasionally the feeling appeared to be even that of affection. As for the insensate hatred and dread of the church which fills the breasts of Messrs. Newdegate and Whalley, Mr. Gladstone never shared it. This, however, did not prevent him from making his outrageous attacks upon the church, in order to revenge himself upon the Irish and English bishops for refusing to support him in his University Bill. His passions are very strong. The difference between him and Mr. Disraeli is that the latter seems never wholly in earnest, while the former always is. Some of the language in which he has allowed himself to indulge in his recent speeches on the war question have been marked with a degree of passionate violence that would seem to indicate a mind overwrought. There used to be a cruel saying in the London clubs that “Mr. Gladstone would die either in a mad-house or a monastery.” I believe the credit of the mal mot was given to Mr. Disraeli. There seems small hope left of the monastery, and there was probably never any danger of the mad-house. But Mr. Gladstone has now been out of power for four years; he reflects that his own imprudence thrust him out; he can see no prospect of a return to power; and he feels that under the guidance of Earl Beaconsfield England is being led into grave dangers. He chafes and frets, and the apparently unreasonable violence of his language is only the candid expression of his sincere wrath and fear.

Of these three statesmen, Earl Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright, Mr. Bright is the dandy. The earl is negligent in his dress, and thrifty therein; but his valet, or some one else, manages to turn him out neatly every morning. Mr. Gladstone is positively careless as regards his attire, and one imagines that nobody but himself has anything to do with it. It has been whispered about that Mr. Gladstone’s tailor pays a large sum every year to have his identity concealed, for Mr. Gladstone’s clothes fit him so badly, or seem to do so, that the tailor’s business would be ruined if his name were known. The shocking bad hat of Mr. Gladstone, and his baggy “Sairey Gamp” of an umbrella, so often pictured in Punch, are no exaggerations; the last time I saw him he was sailing down Pall Mall under full steam for the Reform Club, with this identical hat and umbrella. There is a deep mystery connected with his legs, or with his trowsers, for they bag to an incredible extent at the knees, and are always too long at the lower extremities. I have said that he was not an Adonis, but when he is pleased and happy there is something winning in the expression of his mouth, and his eyes are wonderfully eloquent. Mr. Bright’s rich but plain costume is always faultlessly neat and clean; his linen spotless; his shoes have an almost unearthly lustre; his hat shines in rivalry with them. When, on the occasion of his taking office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancashire, he went to Windsor “to kiss hands,” the queen, it is said, was enchanted with him, and the Princess Beatrice, who is much given to speaking out her mind, is reported to have exclaimed: “Ever since Louise married young Mr. Argyll, I have supposed that nothing was left for me but one of Marshal and Snelgrove’s young men. But if any one of those tradesmen were as handsome and good as this old tradesman, I’d take him in a moment.”

Mr. Bright’s handwriting is small, elegant, and beautifully distinct. Mr. Gladstone writes a rapid, bold, and running hand, at times rather illegible. He is somewhat too fond of his pen; of late he has written too much on unimportant subjects. Earl Derby has a happy dread of committing himself on paper, and writes but few letters. “Do not write to me,” he said one day; “come and talk with me; it will be better for each of us.” Mr. Gladstone once made a very happy retort to a question put to him in the House of Commons concerning one of his letters. Mr. Bouverie, with all due solemnity, and after having given a day’s notice of his question, asked the premier if his attention had been called to a letter published in the Times, purporting to have been addressed by him to the correspondent of a New York journal, and whether he had really written the letter. “It is quite true,” Mr. Gladstone replied. “Mr. —— addressed me a very proper and courteous letter, upon certain matters connected with the Treaty of Washington and the negotiations at Geneva, and I replied to it. He subsequently obtained my permission to make the letter public. And I have to add that I often have to write letters to much less important persons than the representative of an influential American journal.” As he had recently written a letter to Mr. Bouverie, the hit was thought to be a good one, and the House laughed.

RELATIONS OF JUDAISM TO CHRISTIANITY.
II.
THE INFLUENCE OF JEWISH IDEAS ON HEATHEN PHILOSOPHY.

Strabo, after having mentioned the great number of Jews residing in Cyrene, a city celebrated for its schools of Greek literature, adds that “it would be difficult to show a spot upon earth where they were not found and where their influence was not felt.” The influence of which he speaks must not be restricted to that which they acquired everywhere by their remarkable industry, commercial capacity, and wealth; it was felt in the higher field of thought, and was brought to bear on heathen philosophy, in which it produced considerable modifications. We are chiefly concerned with the Greeks, whom all admit to be the representatives of philosophical speculations in the ages we are reviewing.

It is the opinion of Aristobulus, of Aristeas, and of Philo that the Greek philosophers were acquainted with the sacred books of the Hebrews, and that they derived from them those great truths relating to God, the soul, a future life which we find in their writings. We can easily understand this to have been the case when we reflect that the Hebrews were already in Egypt in great numbers, when the learned men of Greece repaired thither in search of knowledge; and in order to account for the opinion just mentioned it is by no means necessary to have recourse to the national pride with which its supporters are supposed by our rationalists to have been animated. Because Aristobulus, Aristeas, and Philo were Jews it does not follow that they should have been so blinded by the desire of glorifying their nation as to make them lose their well-known critical acuteness. Besides, they were not the only ones who perceived that the Greeks had borrowed from the Hebrews. Antiquity is at one in recognizing the fact. The Fathers of the primitive church who had occasion to touch upon the subject do not hesitate to affirm it from observations of their own. “Our sacred books,” says Tertullian, “are the treasure from which philosophers have drawn all their riches. Who is the poet, who is the sophist, that has not borrowed from the prophets? It is at those sacred sources that the philosophers have striven to quench their thirst. These men, impelled by their passion for glory, endeavored to reach the sublimity of our Holy Scriptures, and when they found in them anything that suited their views they made it their own. But as they did not consider them as divine, they made no scruple to alter them. And, moreover, they could not understand many a passage the sense of which was obscure even for the Hebrews, to whom the books belonged.” St. Justin equally affirms that “Plato took from Moses his doctrine of creation, as well as his notions on the Word, or Logos, and the Energy or Spirit of God, though all these truths appear strangely disfigured in the Athenian philosopher.” Again, Clement of Alexandria tells the Neo-Platonics that their master, Plato, had borrowed from the books of Moses his most sublime doctrines and purest moral precepts, and adds: “We state the fact that the Greeks, not satisfied with transferring to their writings the wonderful events related in our sacred books, have stolen from us our principal dogmas in altering them. They are caught in the very act of theft as to what regards faith, wisdom, knowledge and science, hope and charity, penance, chastity, and the fear of God, which virtues are the offspring of truth alone.” Eusebius tells us that Pythagoras had held communications with the prophets at the time when the Jews were exiles in Egypt and Babylonia. Hennippus, according to the testimony of Josephus, confirms that fact by saying that Pythagoras had embraced and professed a part of the doctrines of the Jews, and had transmitted their philosophy to the Gentiles. Clearchus affirms that Aristotle had spoken to him of his conversations with a Jew “from whom much was to be learnt.” Theodoret is not less positive. “Anaxagoras and Pythagoras,” he says, “in their travels in Egypt, had made the acquaintance of learned men of that country and of Judea. It is to the same source that Plato came later in search of knowledge, as we are informed by Plutarch and by Xenophon.” “What is Plato?” said the Pythagorean Numerius. “He is a certain Moses who speaks Attic.” The negations without proofs which men of rationalistic tendencies oppose to this view cannot stand before the overwhelming testimony of the Fathers, doctors, and historians of the primitive church, corroborated as it is by more than one pagan author. Our modern Catholic writers, without any exception that we know of, have recognized that influence of revelation on the heathen mind. “The laws which Solon gave to the Athenians,” remarks Fleury, “had a great analogy with those of Moses. The principles of Socrates are founded on those of the Hebrew legislator; his notions of the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, the distinction between good and evil, the merits and rewards of virtue, the chastisements of vice, are all derived from the sacred books. The political system exposed by Plato in his Republic, in which he enjoins that every one should live by his own labor, without luxury or ambition, without innovation or change, under the sway of justice the greatest of all goods, and the government of a wise ruler devoted to the happiness of his subjects, is nothing else but the theory of the constitution which governed Judea.” “Aristotle,” says M. de Maistre, alluding to a passage already quoted, “conversed with a Jew in comparison with whom the most distinguished philosophers of Greece seemed to him but barbarians. The translation of the sacred books into a language which had become that of the universe, the dispersion of the Jews over the whole world, and man’s natural curiosity for everything new and extraordinary had caused the Mosaic law to be known everywhere, which thus became an introduction to Christianity.” “The doctrine of the Hebrews,” writes M. de Bonald, “was spread with their writings in those parts of Asia and of Europe bordering on Palestine. It was not unknown to the Greeks, and undoubtedly gave to the philosophy of Plato that stamp of elevation and of truth by which it is characterized.”

But it is to Alexandria that we must turn in order to follow the developments and modifications of Greek thought in the three centuries which immediately preceded, and in the four centuries which followed, the coming of Christ. Ptolemy I., during his glorious reign, that lasted from 306-285 B.C., among other monuments with which he adorned the city of Alexander, established the famous Museum or University of Alexandria, with its vast library, which is said to have contained seven hundred thousand volumes. It soon became the centre of intellectual life. There the most renowned teachers in philosophy, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts lived and taught. Thither would resort the learned of many countries and religions. From the time of its foundation to that of Proclus, the most important of the Neo-Platonics, who died four hundred and eighty-five years after Christ, that school continued to flourish, but then began to decline until every trace of it disappeared before the invasions of the barbarian Mussulman. For a long time the philosophy of the Museum consisted in commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. But the Jews of the Greco-Egyptian city, which had become after Jerusalem the most important seat of their religion, were destined to give a new direction to these speculations; and from it arose that peculiar school of thought denominated Neo-Platonism. It was an effort made to reconcile together popular belief with philosophic thought, and was common both to the Jewish and to the Grecian schools. The first endeavored to blend Judaism with Hellenism, as the latter did to give a logical and doctrinal foundation to heathenism.

It is not easy to fix the date when the movement began. Some trace it back to Aristobulus. He lived under Ptolemy Euergetes, whose reign extended from 247-221 B.C., and had been the teacher of that illustrious prince, who, disdaining the coarse divinities of Egypt, addressed his homage to Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, and sacrificed in the Temple of Jerusalem, where he left marks of his munificence and of his piety. It is true that Aristobulus appealed to Orphic poems in which Jewish doctrines are found in support of the assertion that the Greek poets and philosophers had borrowed their wisdom from the Jews. But this opinion, which is shared by Aristeas and others in those ages, is not peculiar to Neo-Platonism, and is by no means one of its characteristics. Others pretend that the earliest traces of Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy are to be found in the Septuagint. According to them, the authors of this version of the Biblical writings into Greek, made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), knew and approved the principal doctrines of this philosophy, and contrived to suggest them by apparently insignificant deviations from the original text. But the passages on which they rest their argument do not necessarily force us to admit this conclusion. We find that they avoid representing God under sensible forms; such ideas as God’s repenting, being angry, etc., are toned down in their expression; in the same way euphemisms are used when there is question of sensible manifestations of the Divinity; there are omissions and explanations in the translation which are not authorized by the original text. It is evident that the translators were influenced in their work by the dread they had lest Jehovah should be assimilated to the false divinities of pagan mythologies. All this competent critics concede, but fail to see in the Septuagint a union of Greek philosophemes with Jewish ideas. Be this as it may, it was at the dawn of Christianity, when the Ptolemies had gone and the Romans came in, that the Neo-Platonic movement was really inaugurated; and if it did not originate with Philo, it was in him, at any rate, that it first attained to importance. Philo belonged to a rich family of Alexandria, and was born about twenty-five years before our era. He lived long enough to be placed at the head of the legation to Caligula in favor of his people, and to write an account of it in the reign of Claudius. What gives a special interest to his writings is that they were composed at the very last period of the Jewish nation, before the appearance of Christianity. In religion a zealous Jew penetrated with the truth and goodness of the Hebrew revelation, and a Greek by education—a man, besides, of high intellectual gifts—it is no wonder that he should wish to blend in a harmonious whole the two elements of his own being, and to fuse the form of Greek thought with the substance of Jewish belief. In his endeavors to realize this object Philo falls into grievous errors, and on several points deflects from the Jewish faith into Greek views. “His love of Greek philosophy,” says Allies, “had led him, as it seems unconsciously, to desert the divine tradition of Moses and the orthodox Jewish belief.” Here, then, we are concerned with two questions: first, What did Philo contribute to Greek thought? and, secondly, How far his orthodoxy suffered by its contact with it.

Philo introduced into philosophy two principles the result of which can be traced throughout the whole subsequent periods of Neo-Platonism: the principle of faith, or the need of a revelation in order to acquire the knowledge of God and of the great problems relating to human life; and the principle of grace, or of a special assistance from heaven in order to make this knowledge practically available. Now, these principles had been either entirely ignored by the Greek philosophers or had remained without any significance to them down to Philo’s time. Reason was the only light by which they were guided, and scientific thought their only source of knowledge. We find in them no assumption of supernatural revelation, no requirement of contact with the divine other than what might be produced by the effect of thought itself. Greek philosophy in its whole tenor was rationalistic. “On the contrary,” observes Allies in his Formation of Christendom, “the religious and philosophical system of Philo is based upon the idea of a revelation made to man by God, and of holiness, the result of divine assistance. His conception of God is derived to him from the theology of the Old Testament; it comes to him as a gift from above, not as an elaboration of his own mind.” Hence it is that his notion of the Supreme Being is so much above that given us by Plato and Aristotle. The God of Plato is an ideal and metaphysical God, not absolutely personal, not free; the God of Aristotle, or his Primum movens, the first Motor, is mechanical, and holds in the universe the office of the spring in a watch, by which all its parts are moved; but the God of Philo is life, and, as he constantly calls him, “the living God.” “He is one, simple, eternal, unoriginated, and absolutely distinct from the world which is his work. His own being is incomprehensible. We can only predicate of him that he is ‘He who is.’ He is most pure and absolute mind, better than virtue and better than knowledge, better than the idea of goodness and the idea of beauty. He is his own place, and full of himself, and sufficient for himself, filling up and embracing all that is deficient or empty, but himself embraced by nothing, as being one person and yet everything” (Legis Allegor., l. xiv., quoted in Allies). His providence is fully recognized. “Those who would make the world to be unoriginated, cut away, without being aware of it, the most useful and necessary constituents of piety—that is, the belief in Providence. For reason proves that what has an origin is cared for by its father and maker. For a father is anxious for the life of his children, and a workman aims at the duration of his works, and employs every device imaginable to ward off everything that is pernicious or injurious, and is desirous by every means in his power to provide everything which is useful and profitable for them. But with regard to what has had no origin there is no feeling of interest, as if it were his own, in the breast of him who has not made it. It is a worthless and pernicious doctrine to establish in the world what would be anarchy in a city, to have no superintendent, regulator, or judge by whom everything must be distributed and governed” (De Mundi Opificio, apud Allies). In his work entitled Quod Deus est Immutabilis Philo ascribed to God absolute knowledge. “To God,” he says, “as dwelling in pure light, all things are visible, for he, penetrating into the very recesses of the soul, is able to see transparently what is invisible to others, and by means of prescience and providence, his own peculiar excellences, allows nothing to abuse its liberty or exceed the range of his comprehension. For, indeed, there is with him no uncertainty even in the future; for there is nothing uncertain and nothing future to God. It is plain, then, that the producer must have knowledge of all that he has produced, the artificer of all that he had constructed, the governor of all that he governs. Now, Father, Artificer, and Governor he is in truth of all things in heaven and the world. And whereas future things are overshadowed by the succession of time, longer or shorter, God is the Maker of time also.... For the world by its motion has made time, but he made the world, and so with God there is nothing future, who has the very foundations of time subject to him. For their life is not time, but the archetype and model of time, eternity; and in eternity nothing is past and nothing is future, but there is the present only.” In his conceptions of the Godhead and of his attributes it is evident that Philo, as long as he follows the light of revelation and keeps clear of the false notions which he had drawn from Greek sources, rises far above the speculations of the Greek philosophers on the same subjects. Plato himself in his happiest moments never reached such heights. For Philo, God is goodness and sanctity itself. By this he does not mean only that he is the boundless ocean of all perfections, the archetype of all holiness and of everything that is good, but that he is the origin of all human virtue, which flows from him into his rational creatures as from its only source. “It is God,” he writes in his Allegories of the Law, “who sows and plants all virtue upon earth in the mortal race, being an imitation and image of the heavenly.” According to him, man, in order to reproduce in himself the divine resemblance in which holiness consists, must be freed from the influence of his sensuous nature, the source of his weakness and sinfulness. But in that nature no power is to be found to transform itself, as no nature has the power of changing itself into anything other than what it is. The consequence is that “he must betake himself to a higher power, and receive from it as a loan that strength which fails in himself.” The difference between this doctrine and that of the older philosophers is palpable. When Plato and Pythagoras recommend to their disciples the subduing of the senses as a condition to reaching truth, they suppose that man can do it by his own efforts and without any help from above; and this is precisely what Philo denies. Furthermore, the knowledge of God, in which man finds his perfection and supreme happiness, is not a mere ray of cold light, but it leads to an intimate union with him, which is the ultimate point of Philo’s system; and this union, as everything perfect in human nature, is an immediate gift of God. Thus Philo would reach knowledge and virtue by the gift of God, bestowed through his grace, whilst down to his time Greek philosophy, adhering to its own principle, scientific thought, would reach them by the exercise of reason alone.

It is impossible to overrate the influence which Philo, with his powerful genius and vast erudition, must have exercised not only among his co-religionists but among the Greek-speaking populations of Alexandria and other countries. The most authorized writers have at all times rendered justice to his great merits. Josephus says that he was “a man illustrious in all things”; Eusebius extols “the abundance, the richness, the sublimity of his style and the depth of his thoughts”; St. Jerome, speaking of his works, says that “they are most remarkable and innumerable”; St. Augustine praises him as “a philosopher of universal erudition, whose language the Greeks do not hesitate to compare to that of Plato.” Photius also testifies that “his writings gave him an immense reputation among the Greeks.” This truly admirable man went, as did all the great philosophers of antiquity, over the whole range of human knowledge: history, ethics, jurisprudence, politics, metaphysics, cosmogony, physics, mathematics—no department of learning did he leave unexplored. In morals he rises far above Stoicism, and approaches to the sublimity of the Gospel—a fact which probably was the origin of the opinion entertained by some that Philo had embraced Christianity. But the glaring errors which are found in his works on several important points show that he was rather the disciple of Plato than a follower of Christ.

No Christian would have held, as he did, the independent existence of matter, which is the subversion of the dogma of creation ex nihilo taught us by revelation. For Philo God is not, strictly speaking, the Creator, but the Demiurgos, the Artificer and Arranger of the world. He admitted the Stoic doctrine of the human soul being a fragment or derivation of the divine Mind. He places the origin of evil in the conflict of matter and spirit. Accordingly, the body is an absolute contradiction to the mind, and, as such, the source of all evils. He thinks that the earthly shell is a prison out of which the soul longs to be set free. Thus it is not the abuse of free-will, but rather the conflict between the flesh and the spirit, which is made the source of evil. On these four points Philo’s ideas are identical with those of Plato and the Greek school. Philo is further notorious for his extravagant use of allegory in the interpretation of Scripture on the one side, and in giving a moral sense to the Greek myths on the other; besides, it is asserted that his doctrine on the Logos, or divine Word, is erroneous, and has thrown considerable obscurity over his otherwise elevated and exact conceptions of God.

According to the Alexandrian philosopher, the Logos, or the Word, would be “an intermediary being between God and the world,” “the first-born of God,” “the highest of all the divine forces or potencies,” “a creature whose instrumentality he used to give existence to all other creatures,” “a second God.” The Logos is also the directing power of the world, the divine Providence that governs all things. “The divine Word,” he says, “flows down as from a fountain, like unto a stream of wisdom, to inundate souls enamored with heavenly things. It is by his Word that God gives to the children of the earth the knowledge of that which is.” Finally, the Word holds the office of mediator between man and God; in this regard it is “the Supreme Pontiff,” and may be called “the Paraclete, or Consoler.” If we take some of these expressions in their literal meaning—if the Logos is, properly speaking, a creature, and yet a second God endowed, as it appears from the passages which we have just quoted, with the attributes of the Divinity—there is no doubt that Philo is at variance with the orthodox teaching of the Jews, who were always averse to anything that would in the least go against their belief in the unity of God. Creation in the first book of Genesis is simply attributed to God: “At the beginning God created heaven and earth,” and in the Book of Wisdom and other passages of Biblical writings there is nothing to indicate that the Word, the Energy or the Virtue of God, by which he created all things, is not identical with God. In Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 14, Wisdom is said to have been created before the world. But there is no question here of any creative act, properly so-called. The meaning is that the Word, who is the Wisdom of the Father, was produced from eternity by an ineffable generation; for Wisdom is spoken of as existing before all time, and therefore is eternal and God himself. The notion of the Logos which is attributed to Philo would likewise be at variance with that of his master, Plato. The doctrine of Plato on the subject is contained in his theory of ideas, the types, exemplars, or immutable reasons of things, present to the mind of the Creator, which determine in him the essence of each class of beings, and direct him in the production of his works. Did Plato make of those types or ideas separate existences and substantial beings distinct from God? Aristotle interpreted in this sense certain expressions of his teacher. But in antiquity as well as in our own days Plato found strenuous defenders who refused to admit that he ever intended such an absurdity. For our own part, we believe that the whole of his doctrine is faithfully exposed in the following passage of Atticus, apud Eusebius, one of his most illustrious disciples: “Plato,” he says, “had recognized God as the Father and Author, the Master and Administrator, of all things. Understanding, by the very nature of a work, that he who produces it must first of all conceive its plan in his mind to give it existence afterwards according to that type, he saw that the ideas of God were anterior to his works; that they were the immaterial, purely intelligible, eternal, immutable exemplars of everything that exists; that in them was the first being, the being par excellence from which all things derive their being, since they are only in the measure in which they reproduce their types. Being fully aware that those truths are not easily understood, and that language is inadequate to formulate them in a clear manner, Plato discoursed of them as best he could, opening the way to those who would come after him; and absorbed in that consideration, making his whole philosophy converge towards that object, he declared that wisdom consisted in the knowledge of the divine exemplars, and that such was the science which would lead man to his end or beatitude.” Again, if it be true that Philo conceived the Logos as a being distinct from God, his doctrine has nothing in common with the Christian dogma of the Word as exposed in the Gospel of St. John. The Word that was at the beginning, and by whom all things have been made, was with God, and the Word was God. But it would not be fair to condemn a man before having made honest endeavors to give to his words the most favorable interpretation of which they are susceptible. When Philo calls the Word “the first-born of God,” “the first creature,” nothing forces us to attach to these expressions any other meaning than that we give to similar locutions which we find in Scripture, and in some of the early Fathers; as, for instance, St. Paul, Coloss. i. 15, who, speaking of the Word, says that “he is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature”; and Clement of Alexandria, who declares that the Word is “the first created wisdom.” Besides, it is probable that Philo had some idea of the personality of the Word. We must not forget that he based all his philosophical speculations upon revelation as found in the Old Testament, and that he could not have been wholly ignorant of the teachings of Christianity. When, therefore, he uses the expression “second God,” or “the other God”—alter Deus—it is possible that he intends to designate by it the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Be this as it may, certain it is that Philo’s ideas are found permeating Neo-Platonism in that phase of it into which it entered in his time, and which is also denominated Neo-Pythagoreanism, because in that school an attempt was made to revive the doctrines and method of Pythagoras, as well as his mode of life. It will be sufficient here to direct our attention to Apollonius of Tyana, the chief representative of the Neo-Pythagoreans of that period. He was a contemporary of Christ. His life, written by Philostratus in the third century, is a philosophico-religious romance in which the Neo-Pythagorean ideal is portrayed in the person of Apollonius. He had visited many countries and sojourned with the sages of India, whom he admired, and whose pantheistic notions he adopted. His doctrine is no more that of the old Greek philosophers, who considered reason as the only means of knowledge. He pretends to be in direct communication with the Deity, from which he derives light and strength; and in this immediate contact with Heaven his whole being is purified and elevated to a degree of power which gives him, as he pretends, the dominion over the forces of nature. And as the soul is, according to him, a portion of the divine intelligence, and the source of all good to man, so the body, which is regarded as the prison of his higher nature, must be the source of the disordered affections which gain mastery over his soul. All the ascetic life of Apollonius is therefore directed to subdue this tyranny of the body. This he must do first in himself and then in those around him.

There is no doubt that this tone of mind, which began to prevail at the very time Christianity made its appearance in the world, was favorable to it. Henceforth the several schools of philosophy shall be brought in contact with Christian dogma and the contest carried on in the same field. On the one hand, the Greek philosophers were in search of a light which they did not possess; they were forced to acknowledge in spite of themselves that the speculations and systems had failed to give a solution to the most important problems with which humanity is concerned; they had been made aware of the insufficiency of reason to effect this purpose; they felt the need of a special assistance from above as a check to the corruption of nature. And, on the other hand, the champions of a new religion saw the necessity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the ideas of their opponents, in order to meet them on their own ground and gain admittance into the very heart of pagan learning. “In the truest sense of the word,” says a writer in the Dublin Review, “Christianity is a philosophy, and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in those times. Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, the ultimate wisdom. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at the same time the necessary ground of all important practice. A system of philosophy was, therefore, at that period, tantamount to a religion. When the Christian teachers then told the philosophers of Alexandria that they could teach them true philosophy, they were saying not only what was perfectly true but what was perfectly understood by their hearers. The catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the museum.” It was in this light that the Neo-Platonics must have looked upon such men as Clement, Origen, and other writers of the Christian school. They listened with deep interest to the words of those teachers, who, with a clearness and authority which they had not known before, propounded doctrines that had already found an echo in their hearts. “Your masters in philosophy,” they were told, “are great and noble; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge. Come to us, then, and we will show you what is wanting in them. Listen to these old Hebrews whose writings you have in your hands. They treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and much more, is our inheritance. The truth which you seek we possess. ‘What you worship without knowing it, that we preach to you.’ God’s Word has been made flesh, has lived on earth, the Perfect Man, the Absolute Man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you. Asceticism and the subduing of the flesh by mortification are good and commendable, but the end of it all is God and the love of God, and this end can only be attained by a Christian.” Thus those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which they especially prided themselves were brought back to them with an intensity of light that made visible the darkness which surrounded the teachings of their old masters.

It does not matter that Christianity found its most bitter enemies in the ranks of Neo-Platonism. It was a great advantage for it to be brought hand-to-hand with all forms of error. The battle raged for three hundred years; but from the very first Christianity proved itself superior to its antagonist by the influence which it exerted even then on heathen philosophy, whose tone and temper were completely changed as early as the time of Plutarch—that is, about fifty years after Philo. That influence is unmistakable, as Champagny clearly shows in his Antonines. Philosophy has become more pious, more worshipful. The idea of one supreme God is more definite; God is spiritual, not material; he is the pattern of every virtue, and his providence extends over the world and man. The principles of morality are purer and in many cases recall the spirit of the Gospel. “In the time of Severus,” says Allies, “all the thinking minds have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods. The cross has wounded them to death.” It is in vain that the later Neo-Platonics and court philosophers strive to shelter retreating heathenism in a last fortress. They only prepare the way for the Christian faith, which they strenuously combat. When the Emperor Severus, regarding with the eye of a statesman and a soldier that faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the height of the throne a general assault upon it; when his wife encourages Philostratus to draw an ideal heathen portrait, that of Apollonius of Tyana, as a counterpart to the character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the Gospels an imitation which is to supply the place of the reality, they confess by the very fact the weakness of heathenism and the ascendency which the religion of Christ had already obtained. Soon after Origen could discern and prophesy the complete triumph of that religion. To Celsus, who had objected that, were all to do as the Christians did, the emperor would be deserted and his power fall into the hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, he replied: “If all did as I do, men would honor the emperor as a divine command, and the barbarians, drawing to the Word of God, would become most law-loving and most civilized; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of that Word gathering to itself more and more souls” (Orig. contra Celsus, apud Allies).

Philo, therefore, in inaugurating the Neo-Platonic movement in philosophy, was only fulfilling the mandate delivered to his people, that of preparing the way of the Lord and disposing the nations for the acceptance of the Gospel. The church succeeds the synagogue as the divinely-accredited teacher of mankind; the long-cherished hope of the Hebrews is realized, and the true kingdom of David, is established upon earth to hold universal sway. The Gentile world, through the instrumentality of the chosen people, had been made to share in the great hope of a Redeemer, and within it aspirations had been developed and longings were felt which philosophy was unable to satisfy; and at the very time when its inanity appeared more manifest Christ reveals himself to that world as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and presented to it in his own person that form of virtue which Plato thirsted to see embodied. Under his influence the face of the earth is renewed; what human genius, with all its efforts, had failed to accomplish, what such men as Plato, Pythagoras, and others could not accomplish, even among a small number of adepts—this and infinitely more was realized, not merely within the narrow circle of a few privileged disciples, but among the masses, among the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and the weak; not in one corner of the globe, but all over the world, from north to south and from east to west; not only in countries favored by great intellectual aptitudes, where the arts and sciences flourished, where civilization with all its refinements had reached the highest degree of perfection, but in countries most abandoned, among savage tribes and barbarous nations plunged in utter darkness. Surely a new principle of life has taken possession of the earth—a divine principle which gives rise to those heroic virtues which we see displayed in every rank of society and in all climes, and by which the human race is transfigured. This result was foretold centuries before; it is the new creation spoken of by the Psalmist: “Thou shalt send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created; and thou shalt renew the face of the earth” (Ps. ciii. 30). It was preceded by a series of events so combined that it is impossible not to see in them the supernatural action of divine Providence and the profound wisdom of God, who makes use of apt means for the furtherance of his end. Besides, there is a wonderful unity of truth discernible from the very beginning, and which appears in an unbroken chain throughout the course of ages. It is the same Word, the same light, which was communicated to our first parents that we see increasing in intensity until it reaches in Christ the splendor of the full day. The first revelation of the Word to man is to be found in his natural reason, which is pervaded with primary truths that are axioms in the intelligence of mankind. “But on these,” says Cardinal Manning (Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost), “descended other truths from the Father of light, as he saw fit to reveal them in measure and in season, according to the successions of time ordained in the divine purpose. The revelations of the patriarchs elevated and enlarged the sphere of light in the intelligence of men by their deeper, purer, and clearer insight into the divine mind, character, and conduct in the world. The revelations to Moses and to the prophets raised still higher the fabric of light, which was always ascending towards the fuller revelation of God yet to come. But in all these accessions and unfoldings of the light of God truth remained still one, harmonious, indivisible; a structure in perfect symmetry, the finite but true reflex of truth as it reposes in the divine intelligence.” None of the much-boasted theories of our modern rationalists gives us that unity which is the test of truth. The restoration of our fallen race by the manifestation of the Word is the leading principle of Schlegel’s Philosophy of History; and the greatest minds, as St. Augustine and Bossuet, admitted no other in their immortal works. How puerile, in comparison with their grand and luminous conceptions, are all those systems which would fain explain the destinies of man without God! To the dreamers who have invented them can be applied the words of St. Paul: “They detain the truth of God in injustice. They have become vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart has been darkened” (Rom. i. 18-21).