NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Terra Incognita; or, The Convents of the United Kingdom. By John Nicholas Murphy. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)
An unknown land indeed is this that Mr. Murphy traverses—unknown, it is to be feared, not only to his “Protestant fellow-subjects of Great Britain and Ireland, for whose information it has been written” and to whom it is dedicated by the author, but also to too many of his Catholic fellow subjects, as well as to Catholics generally. The book is, in brief, a history of the growth and spread of the religious Orders in Great Britain and Ireland, the greater portion of it being devoted to their work and increase since a removal of the penal statutes enabled them to return in safety to the United Kingdom. The interest of the narrative is simply absorbing. The work accomplished by the Orders in face of a multitude of difficulties and dangers seems little short of the miraculous. They crept back singly or in little groups from France and Belgium, whence the first French Revolution drove them out. Thither they had flown for refuge when the greater revolution of the sixteenth century banished them and their faith from what had been a land of saints. Units gathered units, brothers brothers, sisters sisters, Congregations other Congregations, Orders affiliated Orders, and within less than a century we behold the consecrated yet desecrated soil of England and Ireland dotted with religious houses, asylums, schools, colleges, where the old faith is taught and practised. Those who are in search of the heroic, the sensational, the pathetic, the marvellous, should read this book. Their appetite will be satisfied with a healthy food. It is the old story over and over again of what can be accomplished by those who are really inflamed with a love of God and their neighbor. No one can rise from the story of St. Vincent de Paul or Nano Nagle without a moistening of the eye and a better feeling in his heart.
Mr. Murphy’s book was published
some years ago, and the extracts from secular and Protestant journals in Great Britain and Ireland show how truly he met a popular want at a time when men like Mr. Newdegate were bent on satisfying their own morbid curiosity and insane hatred of Catholicity by forcing themselves on the peaceful communities of Catholic ladies. If we have any Newdegates among us, they would do well to take up Mr. Murphy’s volume, and see for themselves how these “dark and cloistered women” spend their lives. The present volume is a new and improved edition. As the author tells us in the preface, “The statistics of convents have been largely amplified and brought down to the present day. Several chapters have been re-written, and eleven new chapters have been introduced.”
The Catholic’s Latin Instructor in the Principal Church Offices and Devotions. For the use of choirs, convents, and mission schools, and for self-teaching. By the Rev. E. Caswall, of the Oratory. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Father Caswall has done the Catholic laity a great service by this Instructor. As he truly observes in his preface, “A knowledge of Latin is not needed for Catholic worship.… Nevertheless, to those whose education admits of it an acquaintance with those portions of the Latin Liturgy which are in most frequent public use must ever be a legitimate and worthy object of interest.” Accordingly, he has put himself to the very considerable trouble of preparing a manual, which, although an experiment, will be found, we have no doubt, all that is needed for enabling the laity of either sex, who have an English education, to make themselves familiar with the language of the church’s liturgy. It deals with grammar as little as possible, he says, yet there will be found in Part II. more grammar than his words may lead us to suppose. Moreover, there are
ample directions given, at every turn, for the right use of the book.
The work is primarily designed, as the title-page indicates, for choirs and mission-schools. With regard to choirs, it is superfluous to observe how much better and more pleasing to God is an intelligent than a non-intelligent singing of the Latin. With regard to schools, especially those where elementary instruction in secular Latin is given, “Catholics will enjoy,” says our author, “in the living character of the language as used in the church offices, a great and singular advantage.” And further, “What better food for the mind can we offer to our children,” he asks, “than the simple translation from Latin into English—after a method easy alike to girls or boys—of what they constantly hear and often join in singing in church?” Then, as to the adult laity, there is “a large class of persons who, while provided with missals and prayer-books abounding in Latin text and side-by-side translations, yet, from want of a very little practical insight, fail to derive from these manuals the advantage intended. Others there are, devout persons of either sex, who might greatly profit by the occasional use of Latin prayers, but are restrained (and ladies especially) by an idea that in order to this they must first have a complete knowledge of Latin. Such a bugbear—for it is little else—will, let us hope, quickly yield to a steady practice of the present exercises.”