Well may we inquire of Janus and his admirers, What has become of the promises made to the church by her divine Founder? Where is that spirit of truth to guide her through her pastors, the bishops united with the supreme Head? Where is that firm rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail?
These questions are so intimately connected with the whole divinely reared edifice of the church of Christ, that to deny what the authors of Janus have done is heresy in its worst form, as much as Arianism, Pelagianism, or Nestorianism. We cannot withhold from our readers the appreciation of a candid and thoughtful outsider on the position Janus has followed throughout his work:
"If the liberal Catholicism of Janus and his friends is an infallible system, it is an infallible system which has succumbed at once to a false pretence of infallibility on one side and an openly-admitted fallibility on the other. Now, infallibility which is beaten for centuries, both by a sham infallibility and by admitted incapacity for true infallibility, is infallibility of a very novel kind, very difficult to imagine. It looks, at first glance, very like a rather specially fallible kind of fallibility with a taste for calling itself grand names. If Janus and his friends are right, no paradox of the Christian faith is half as great as theirs, which maintains that the true infallibility of the church has not only lain perdu for centuries, but has been impersonated by a growth of falsehood without any interposition on the part of the divine source of infallibility. That, we confess—with all our respect for the wish of Janus to enter a protest on behalf of liberty and civilization—we do find a hypothesis somewhat hard even to listen to. A dumb infallibility that cannot find its voice for centuries, even to contradict the potent and ostentatious error that takes its name in vain—is that the sort of divine authority to which human reason will willingly go into captivity? But we might sympathize with the authors of Janus, in spite of their utterly untenable intellectual position, if they seemed to us to have any clear advantage in moral earnestness and simplicity over their opponents. But, while there is a certain school of ultramontanes that simply and profoundly believes in the infallibility of the pope, in spite of all the critical and historical difficulties which the liberals ably parade and sometimes even overstate, we find it hard to believe that the latter believe cordially in any church infallibility at all." (Quoted by the Dublin Review, January, from the Spectator, November 6, 1869.)
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF THE REVUE DU MONDE CATHOLIQUE.
THE LITTLE WOODEN SHOE.
Jacques was a fisherman—a lucky one too. He had a little house, all his own, and, in it Jeanne who had been for seven years his wife, and Ange, the jolliest little scamp that ever romped about a fisherman's cottage. But these are not all his treasures. He has, besides, a store of nets and a boat called the Fine-Anguille. The sea was never yet too rough for either. For it never stormed until the Fine-Anguille had come with her crew, snug and dry, to her mooring. The captain of this frigate was Jacques; the mate—and what a mate he was!—was Fanor, a Newfoundland, peer and prince of all dogs. Every body knew the Fine-Anguille. Every body knew Fanor. And well it was for many of them that they did. They had made his acquaintance under memorable circumstances. For, when Fanor looked from his kennel at night along the dark coast, he could see the glow of many a fireside which would have long been dark and cheerless if he had not rescued from the waves the strong arms that earned its fuel. Many a mother felt something queer in her throat and in the corners of her eyes when she saw the great shaggy brute, and thought of a certain little head that might long ago have been pillowed in the sea-weeds.
But when the feast of our Lady of Larmor came, ah! then Fanor was in his glory. Did he walk in the procession? Of course he did! Did he not know what was the proper thing for a respectable dog to do and where his right place was, after the banners? "Ah!" said Jacques, "he's a Christian. He's no dog; he is almost a man."