This question of secular education for our public schools is in fact one of the most difficult of solution. Chicago has met it in a summary manner by excluding the Bible from all her free schools, but this does not settle the question, because both believers and unbelievers in the various creeds of the churches admit that there should be provision made for the training of the moral faculties of the children in our public schools. Many of them, especially in cities and large manufacturing centres, come out of the dark alleys where intemperance, poverty and ignorance tend to arrest the development of their higher sentiments. For the unfortunate children of such homes the sessions of the public school afford the only glimpse of a better life, the only chance for moral and æsthetic culture. Protestants, as a rule, honestly believe that the reading of the Bible at the opening of school tends to waken and develop the moral aspirations of the child. Just as honestly and conscientiously do Catholics disbelieve in the efficacy of Bible reading, while they boldly condemn secular education as a principle. Father Muller, priest of the congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, in his work upon public school education, published three years ago in Boston, says: "The language of the Vicar of Christ in regard to godless education is very plain and unmistakable".... "Our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., has declared that Catholics cannot approve of a system of educating youth unconnected with the Catholic faith and the power of the Church".... "The voice of common sense, the voice of sad experience, the voice of Catholic bishops, and especially the voice of the Holy Father, is raised against and condemns the public school system as a huge humbug, injuring and not promoting personal virtue and good citizenship, and as being most pernicious to the Catholic faith and life and all good morals. A pastor, therefore, cannot maintain the contrary opinion without incurring guilt before God and the Church. He cannot allow parents to send their children to such schools of infidelity. He cannot give them absolution and say, Innocens sum."
According to the American Annual Cyclopædia for 1875, the Roman Catholic Church has in the United States 1 cardinal, 8 archbishops, 54 bishops, 4872 priests, 4731 churches, 1902 chapels, 68 colleges, 511 academies, and a lay membership numbering over 6,000,000. This shows a great and increasing prosperity of that Church in this country; yet our institutions have nothing to fear from that prosperity unless the principles of Catholicity support the "one-man power" against the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the foundation-principle of republicanism. Patriotic Catholic citizens claim that there is no conflict. They love their Church and their country, and will labor to preserve peace and harmony. Yet how can harmony be maintained while a large and increasing number of our tax-paying citizens, accepting their Church and its head as infallible, are forced by their spiritual allegiance to send their children to Catholic schools, though at the same time paying taxes to support those "godless" public schools condemned by the infallible Church? To take the ground that these two powers, the Catholic Church and our government, do not conflict, because one is a spiritual and the other a civil power, is simply absurd. We see that they do conflict. The pope interferes with the civil rights of our citizens when—as, for example, in his encyclical letter of December 8, 1874—he commands all Catholics to treat the liberty of speech, of the press, of conscience and of worship, the separation of Church and State and the secular education of youth, as "reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas."
THE EARLIEST PRINTED BOOKS.
A recent lecture of the Rev. Dr. Storrs in New York, before the Society for the Advancement of Science and Art, must have been very interesting to an ordinary audience, but for one composed of professed promoters of learning it could hardly have been sufficiently exact to give general satisfaction if the newspaper reports of it were at all correct. They represent the lecturer as saying that an immense number of books date back to 1450. Now, the first printed book bearing a date is the Psalter of Füst and Schoeffer, 1457. A portion of the Bible was printed by Gutenberg and Füst in 1450, but the work was so expensive and so imperfect that it was abandoned. In 1452, after Schoeffer joined the firm, another Bible is supposed to have been printed, but no copy of it is known to exist. Of course it is well known that many of the earliest printed books are without date, but none could have been printed before 1450; and there is no proof, we believe, that the Bible said to be of 1455 bore that or any date. In that year the firm of Gutenberg, Füst and Schoeffer dissolved. L. Grégoire in his Dictionnaire Encyclopédique, published in Paris in 1817, says that there are only three or four copies of the Füst Bible known to exist. Dr. Storrs, however, says, without giving his authority, that there are fifteen.
The sole idea of the early printers was to imitate exactly the manuscript characters of the scribes. The initial letters of the Bibles and the numbers of the chapters were therefore added with a pen in blue and red ink alternately; and there is not the slightest doubt that these first books were palmed off upon an unsuspecting public as manuscripts. All the servants or employés of Füst and Schoeffer were put under solemn oath to divulge nothing of the secret concerning printing. It is to the policy which the first printers exerted to conceal their art that we owe the tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus. Füst having printed off quite a number of Bibles, and had the large initial letters added by hand, he took them to Paris and sold them for about fifty dollars apiece. The scribes demanded about ten times that sum, and they earned the money, for it must have been an herculean task to copy, as they did, every letter of the Bible with such exquisite care, and then draw and illuminate the heads of the chapters and the initial letters. It was a marvel how this new man could produce these ponderous books at so low a rate. And then the uniformity of the letters and the pages increased the wonder, until the cry of "sorcerer" was raised: complaints before the magistrates were made against him, his lodgings were searched and a great number of copies were found and confiscated. The populace in their ignorance and superstition declared that he was in league with the devil, and that the red ink with which the books were embellished was his blood. It is a satisfaction to know that the Parliament of Paris passed an act to discharge the sorcerer from all prosecution in consideration of the usefulness of his art.
M. H.
FLOWERS VS. FLIES.
An Irish clergyman is said to have discovered last autumn a charming antidote to flies, which it is only a pity he could not have lighted on rather earlier in the season. Having occasion to change his abode, he sent on his window-plants, calceolarias and geraniums, to that which he intended to occupy several days before he went himself, and immediately found that he was pestered with flies, whereas previously he had enjoyed perfect immunity from the nuisance. A more agreeable remedy cannot be conceived. Next autumn let our windows be a blaze of brilliancy, so that all visitors to the Centennial may say, at all events, "There are no flies in Philadelphia."
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. Being an Essay towards the Restoration of Shakespeare's Text. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A., LL.D. London: Trübner & Co.