"If Rome considered all ordinations by Parker and his successors, namely, the whole present English episcopate and clergy, to be invalid, null, and void, and consistently reordained all those converts who wished and were fit for orders; the Eastern Church can but imitate her proceedings, as both, in this point, follow the very same principles. ... The fact of the reordination is the final and conclusive verdict on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations. By this fact all further controversy is broken off and indisputably settled."
We fancy, then, the amusement which the pastoral of the late Anglican Synod will produce in the Eastern churches, for whose benefit it has been translated into the Greek language. We would recommend to the great Patriarchs to send a commission of doctors to the West, that they may see that oneness of mind of which the bishops so fervently speak. Then when they see it, we would like to have them point it out to us, that we may see it also, and rejoice with them.
It may perhaps appear to some of our readers that our sympathies are with the low-churchmen and ultra-Protestants of the Episcopal communion. This is, however, far from being the case. We admire consistency and cannot accept logical contradictions. The Protestant ground is something that our reason can comprehend, though we believe it does away with all revelation and leads directly to infidelity. But God has furnished us with no mental powers by which to fathom a system which is neither one thing nor the other, which wears a Catholic exterior over a Protestant heart. Such will be the verdict of the world. How long Anglicanism can last we know not. It has been a kind of half-way house to the church, and it may occupy this position for a long time. It seems to us that every honest high-churchman should become a Catholic at once, when he will find what he wants, not simply on paper but in life, not in imagination but in reality. The movement called ritualism is an indication that the grace of God is stirring up the dry bones; for Anglicanism in itself is the most lifeless and unspiritual religion we know of. God grant that the movement may bring forth its proper fruits. We only fear that when it comes to "leaving all for Christ," to giving up houses and lands, wives and children, position and preferment, many will go back, (as we have seen with sorrow,) and be like the young man in the gospel, who was, at one time, "not far from the kingdom of heaven." Ritualism is only a yearning after the real presence of the Incarnate God, for which the redeemed soul longs even with anguish. "Tears were my meat, day and night, while they said to me. Where is thy God?" The true heart will find its Lord only in that one body which is his fulness. Pray, then, fellow-Catholics, pray for the sincere and true, that they may have grace to forsake the land of shadows, and come where are the bright beams of the morning; that ere the night of death overtake them, they may, like the pure-minded Simeon, see the salvation of God, and joyfully chant their "Nunc dimittis," "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."
Bishop Doyle. [Footnote 20]
[Footnote 20: The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rt. Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. By W. J. Fitzpatrick, J. P. 3 vols. 8vo. Boston: P. Donohoe.]
"What can you teach?" "Any thing from A, B, C, to the third book of Canon Law." "Pray, young man, can you teach and practise humility?" "I trust I have, at least, the humility to feel that the more I read the more I see how ignorant I have been, and how little can, at best, be known." Such were the pithy replies to the equally condensed questions put by the venerable Dean Staunton, of Carlow College, to a young Augustinian friar who had been proposed as candidate for a professorship in that rising institution. The friar was Father James Doyle, then in his twenty-seventh year. Erect in stature, austere in features, the candid earnestness of his mind beaming through his expressive countenance, which bore the evident traces of studious habits, and the freedom of his unpretentious manners—all these qualities, combined in his looks and declared by his language, immediately enlisted the sympathetic esteem of the dean. Nor was his youth an obstacle to his acceptance. His appointment to the position followed, and the six years spent by him in the college served as a fit preparation for the public career of this eminent man, the narrative of whose life forms an essential part of the history of his country for at least fifteen years.
From the valuable work to which reference is made in the note to this article, we find much to admire in the noble character who forms the subject of Mr. Fitzpatrick's literary effort. There must have been placed at his disposal a rich and abundant store of material from which the biography was compiled. The work itself, in a literary point of view, is creditable to the diligence of the author; but at present we shall content ourselves with an attempt to gather from its comprehensive pages, and place before our readers, some of the most remarkable events that distinguished the life and were influenced by the action of the eminent prelate.
Of respectable and honorably rebellious ancestors, he was born in New Ross, County of Wexford, in 1786. In an appendix to the work before us there is a chronological article showing the descent of the Doyle family from some ancient, royal sept—a portion of Irish history by no means uncommon—to which we would refer those who should doubt his original nobility of blood. For us it will suffice to know that some of his immediate relatives had fallen for their country and its faith, and that even as far back as 1691, there were few more distinguished than the bold Rapparee chieftain, "Brigadier Doyle," who was sent from Limerick, by Sarsfield, to collect men and horses for the Jacobite army.