Finally, a fragment of this strangely compounded body lodged in a neighboring town, and became the nucleus of an agricultural enterprise in which the harvest truly was not plenteous, and the competent laborers few; and of which, the root being rottenness, the blossoms soon went up as dust."
Mr. Vickers may thank the Archbishop of Cincinnati for having given his very boyish lucubrations a little momentary notoriety, which they never could have acquired by their own merit. They are crude, ill-mannered, replete with commonplace, effete, and senseless vituperations of all that is venerable in Catholicity and Christianity, and betray an ignorance of the subjects treated of which makes them unworthy of any serious attention. The point which the discussion chiefly turns upon is "freedom of thought." If Mr. Vickers is a disciple of the German pantheistic school, as we suppose him to be, he is not in a condition to maintain that there is any such thing as thought or freedom. We intend to give abundant proof of this assertion, in a series of articles, to be published in our Magazine, on Pantheism, in which we shall show, to the satisfaction of any person capable of metaphysical reasoning, that pantheism destroys the possibility of thought, in the true sense of the word, as the intellection of real, objective truth. Pantheism destroys, also, all possibility of freedom by reducing all phenomena to a fatal, invincible necessity. A pantheist is bound to accept all the persecutions of the middle ages, all the definitions of the church, and the encyclical of the pope, as manifestations of God. Our godlike friends are too much like the wife of the Connecticut corporal, who replied to the query of her innocent offspring, "O ma! are we all corporals now?" with the haughty rejoinder, "No, indeed! only your pa and I." Mr. Vickers and the members of the free-thinking coterie are not the only participators in the universal deity. If Mr. Vickers's brilliant exposition of the doctrine of the immaculate conception was a divine inspiration, Archbishop Purcell was equally moved by divine inspiration to the paternal castigation which he administers to his young and somewhat forward fellow-celestial. In fact, Mr. Vickers, the archbishop, the book containing their controversy, The Catholic World, ourselves, our readers, St. Thomas, Torquemada, Luther, Heidelberg University, and the Jesuits, are all one thing, or one nothing; a Seyn, or a Werden, or a Nichtseyn; all bubbles on the fathomless ocean of infinite—nonsense. It is a wonder that Mr. Vickers lays so much to heart, and makes such a serious business out of that which has no reality. A nephew of the great German philosopher, Hegel, who was also a favorite pupil of Feuerbach, and who is now a devout Catholic, told us, some time ago, that he asked Feuerbach why philosophy was making no progress, but seemed to be at a stand-still. The latter replied, that they had already proved by philosophy the nothingness of everything, and it was, therefore, useless to push philosophy any further, adding, that it was time to go back to common sense. Such is the end of that lawless, intellectual activity which Mr. Vickers calls "free thought." It is like a head of steam that bursts its boiler, and is then dispersed in the circumambient atmosphere.
Memoirs and Letters of Jennie C. White—Del Bal.
By her mother, Rhoda E. White,
1 vol. royal 8vo, pp. 363. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1868.
We must presage our notice of this interesting book, by saying we have a dislike to memoirs written by fond and partial friends. Lives of the saints we love to read, but our digestion was early impaired by the memoirs of good children (who all died young) with which we were fed for Sunday food, and we have latterly been in the bad habit of turning away from a book labelled, Memoirs of, etc.
However, we read Jennie's life with interest; and it is a beautiful story, giving to the reader a delightful insight into a truly Catholic family, where the breath of piety permeates the daily walk of every member, mingling with and heightening the light-hearted pleasures peculiar to the seasons of childhood and youth. The tale of her courtship and marriage is told with a sweet and winning grace, which charms us by its naturalness. Quite unlike the prevailing spirit and sentiment of "Young America" is the history of the prompt obedience to the mandate of parental authority, in giving up their engagement. The accepted lover, a resident of Santiago, New Granada, had promised his aged father not to forsake his own country, and Jennie's father could not give his consent to the taking of his first-born to that far-off foreign land. After a struggle, they parted with aching hearts, released from their engagement; but the influence of the true woman in the mother reunited that broken bond.
Contrary to the fate of many American girls who go to foreign homes, Jennie's marriage was an exceedingly happy one. The secret is very plain—they were both earnest Catholics. Oneness in faith, and earnest-heartedness in that faith, are the best securities for happiness in married life. The sight of this happy young creature, leaving so fond a circle of friends, and such a home as Jennie left behind in New York, to go to a comparatively unknown land—a country distracted by revolutions, with churches closed and priests exiled—gives us a glowing picture of the self-sacrificing spirit of true love. Her journeys by land and by sea, before she reached her destination, were perilous indeed; and we could not but ask, Yankee-like, why such a refined and cultivated and intelligent people as those among whom her lot was cast should never have provided some more comfortable way of reaching their country. She was the first American lady there, and attracted much attention and admiration by her brave, active spirit, as well as by her large Catholic heart. Her letters to her home friends are lovely from their childlike simplicity and truthfulness; giving us glimpses of many homesick heartaches, even when she was decking herself for the dance. Sometimes there appears a little excess in her efforts to be gay, when she writes, "I danced every piece but one till five in the morning." Mrs. Del Bal went to New Granada at a time when the so-called "Liberals," under Mosquera, were in the ascendant, proclaiming a pretended religious liberty, of which some of the first acts were the disbanding of all religious communities, turning the sisters upon the world, shutting up the churches, banishing the priests, unless they took an oath whereby they would cease to be Catholics; in fact, Mosquera made himself pope. Professing to establish a government in which there should be no connection between church and state, the government framed this article for the twenty-third of their Constitution:
"In order to sustain the national sovereignty and to maintain public peace and security, the national government, and in some cases the state government, shall exercise the right of supreme inspection over all religious worships, as the law shall determine."
This is a law of liberty very like those the English Catholics enjoyed under Queen Elizabeth.