at home in their religion and were determined to adhere to it faithfully. Under his leadership they began to send in objections to the statements and arguments of their infidel professors, which necessarily commanded some attention and respect and had influence with their fellow-students. Jouffroy himself, at the hour of death abjured infidelity, received the Sacraments devoutly, and declared that one half-page of the catechism was worth more than all the philosophical systems. It was at this time that Ozanam founded the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The Abbé Lacordaire, the Abbé Gerbet, and other eminent priests of Paris, and even the archbishop, interested themselves in the band of young Catholic students, and under their guidance the career of their leader, Frederic Ozanam, became, during his whole student-life, a truly noble and successful apostleship. Thus the way was prepared for him to carry on the same work in a much more efficacious manner as a professor at the Sorbonne.
In the year 1839 Ozanam, being then twenty-six years of age, a professorship of philosophy at Orleans and one of commercial law at Lyons were offered him, and the latter appointment accepted. He resigned it, however, after one year, in order to accept the position of assistant-professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. At this time an additional professorship of foreign literature at Lyons was offered to him, which would have secured to him, together with the law-professorship, an income of $3,000 a year. He was just about to be married to a young lady of Lyons. Nevertheless, he chose the position of assistant to the profesor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne,
although it was a precarious one, and brought him an income of less than $500, in order that he might be better able to carry out the one noble purpose to which he had devoted his life. Together with his professorship at the Sorbonne he held also, for a few years, another at the Collége Stanislas, which he was obliged to relinquish when, in 1844, on the vacancy of the chair of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, he received the appointment to fill it from the government. For all these early and brilliant successes he was in great measure indebted to the warm friendship and patronage of M. Cousin and M. Villemain, a fact most honorable to these distinguished men, who, as is well known, were leaders of the rationalist school, yet nevertheless, like the eminent Protestant, M. Guizot, really carried out in respect to Catholics their professions of liberality. M. Ozanam continued to fulfil his duties at the Sorbonne during twelve years, with some considerable interruptions caused by illness. His published works are chiefly composed of the substance of the lectures which he delivered.
The great idea which was before the mind of Ozanam from the period of his early youth was, the justification of the Catholic religion by the philosophy of universal history. Eventually, he was led to concentrate his attention principally upon the period embraced between the fifth and fourteenth centuries, with especial reference to the German empire and to the mediæval philosophy reflected in the poems of Dante, whose strong attachment to the German party in Italy is well known, though perhaps not so generally well understood. Frederic Schlegel has said: “It is pre-eminently
from the study of history that all endeavors after a higher mental culture derive their fixed centre and support, viz., their common reference to man, his destinies and energies. History, if it does not stop at the mere enumeration of names, dates, and external facts; if it seizes on and sets forth the spirit of great times, of great men, and great events, is in itself a true philosophy, intelligible to all, and certain, and in its manifold applications the most instructive. Then history, if not in itself the most brilliant, is yet the most indispensable link in that beautiful chain which encompasses man’s higher intellectual culture; and history it is which binds the others more closely together. It is the great merit of our age to have renovated the study of history, and to have cultivated it with extraordinary zeal. Within the last two or three decades alone so much has been achieved and produced in this department, that historical knowledge has been perhaps as much extended in that short space of time as formerly in many centuries.”[150] The scope and solution of universal history are found in the history of Christianity viewed in connection with the Judaic and patriarchal epochs of revealed religion which preceded the advent of the Messias. The most important portion of Christian history is that which relates to Western Christendom, the European family of nations which grew up under the immediate spiritual and temporal authority of the popes. This was the true civiltà cattolica, the millenial kingdom of Christ on earth, whose rise, progress, and gradual decadence occupied the space between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, whose
remnants are all that has any moral grandeur or value in the modern age, whose restoration and triumph under a new form are the only future hope of humanity.
The foundations of heresy and infidelity are laid in the falsification and perversion of history, and in the general ignorance of historical facts which opens the way for sophists to spin their webs of lies around the deluded minds of the multitude. To find some other source of the greatness, virtue, happiness, evolution in the line of its destiny, already actually exhibited in its history by the human race, especially its elect portion, and still possible in futurity, besides the revealed religion and Catholic church of God, is the problem of the anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-theistic sophists. Germany is their principal territory, the Gath and Ascalon of the Philistines who defy the armies of the Living God with their weapons of erudition and reasoning that are like a weaver’s beam. From the days of the old secular and ecclesiastical princes of Germany who revolted against the supremacy of Rome, down to Luther, his associates and successors, even to our modern German sophists, apostates and persecutors; the pretence of an autochthonous culture has been set up for Germany with a degree of pride, arrogance, and insolence which has no parallel, and is frequently so offensive and boastful as to be ridiculous not only in the eyes of the rest of the world but in those of all sensible and catholic-minded Germans. Christianity is considered by men of this school as the cause of a decline from the autocthonous civilization. War with the Christianity of the Latin races, and a return to unalloyed Teutonism, are regarded as the conditions of
a magnificent future development, political, scientific, and literary, which shall create a German empire in every respect supreme mistress of the modern world.
Ozanam’s chief object was to combat this claim by showing, not that Germany has nothing to be proud of and no greatness to aspire after, but that she is indebted for her past and present glory, and must be indebted for any fulfilment of a glorious destiny in time to come, to Christianity and Roman unity, without which the Germans would have remained always, and will again become, barbarians. We must refer the reader to Miss O’Meara’s interesting pages for a fuller account of the way in which Ozanam prepared himself for his task, and afterwards fulfilled it by his lectures on German history.
Schlegel had given him a brilliant example of the way in which history can be brought up to that high standard of scientific, ethical, and literary excellence which is set forth in the quotation we have made above from his lectures. The value and practical utility of the ideas there presented and illustrated so nobly by the literary career of Ozanam cannot be too much insisted upon. History is emphatically the modern field most necessary and advantageous for Catholic polemics. The history of particular epochs, of special classes and orders in society, of individual men of mark, of institutions, of branches of science, art, or learning—in a word, of every kind of topic which can be made distinct and interesting by being localized, limited in respect to time, or otherwise so brought within clear and defined boundaries that it becomes vivid and real to the intellect and imagination—is that which we have specially