An Historical Sketch of the Order of St. Dominic; or, A Memorial to the French People. By the Rev. Father Lacordaire. Member of the same Order, of the French Institute, etc. New York: P. O'Shea, 27 Barclay Street. 1869.
All that was mortal of the great Lacordaire sleeps in the grave; but men such as he are not born to die—they belong to all time; their spirit for ever lives and breathes in their works. His was the eloquence that possesses the true trumpet ring that stirs men's souls; even when read, it is powerful.
The work before us was first published in 1839. In a masterly manner it exposes the absurdity of liberty proscribing liberty; of giving license for all things save serving God in the most perfect manner, and according to the very beau ideal of Christianity. Then, in a summary and graphic manner, it sketches the history, and points out the great names and the eminent services of one of the great bodies of the church militant—an order from whose ranks have been taken four popes, seventy cardinals, archbishops by hundreds, and bishops by thousands; which has produced theologians, artists, and architects who rank with the first; which has sent forth tens of thousands of missionaries, who have preached the Gospel in every language under the sun, and which has the glory of being able to point at the same time to Aquinas, the Corypheus of theologians, and to Las Casas, the slave of the enslaved Indians.
This book is especially à propos at the present, when the dogs of the press, after scouring the world through years of famine and lack of popish horrors, have just dropped the sorry bone picked up four thousand miles away in Cracow, hungrily passed from mouth to mouth, and found, alas! to be in reality without a vestige of consolatory meat—dry bone, "and nothing more."
Let those who love "fair play" read this short defence of a religious order by the Bossuet of the nineteenth century.
The Book of Moses; or, The Pentateuch in its Authorship, Credibility, and Civilization. By Rev. W. Smith, Ph.D. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society. (Second Notice.)
At the time of writing our first notice of the first volume of this great work, we had merely glanced at its contents, and were only able to give a first impression of its merit. Since that time we have read it carefully, and made use of it in giving a course of lectures to a theological class. We deem it, therefore, due to the author and to the interests of sacred science that we should express our deliberate judgment that it is a work of the highest erudition and merit. The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is proved by the learned author with all the cogency and conclusiveness of a complete moral demonstration. Not only is it by far the best work on the subject in the English language, but it is admitted by Dr. Reusch, the learned editor of the Bonn Litteratur Blatt, to be equal to the best of the German treatises, and acknowledged by the Katholik of Mayence to be superior to any of them. The latter periodical criticises Dr. Smith for the statement made by him that Moses imitated several things in the Egyptian sacred rites in his ritual laws. The critic admits the similarity between them, but asserts that Moses prescribed these rites by divine revelation. We venture to suggest that this is an irrelevant remark. The inspiration of the Divine Spirit may have directed him to imitate whatever was really excellent in Egyptian institutions, whether sacred or secular.
We hail this admirable work with the greatest joy, and await with anxious expectation the publication of the succeeding volumes. No professor of sacred science or student of the Holy Scriptures should be without it. Neologians and irrationalists are being crushed by the very science of criticism which they have so loudly vaunted as their own peculiar and irresistible engine of destruction for the overthrow of revelation. It is perhaps needless to add that Dr. Smith is a young, hitherto unknown priest of a small country mission in Wales.