All the great men and women whose names stud the calendar of the church owed their greatness to their simplicity, and the words of the greatest saint that ever lived, the words of her, were they not the simplest ever found on record: "Be it done unto me according to thy word"?
Saints of our timid generation, saints of our half-hearted century, saints of our hitherto barren civilization, start up, and fill the plains and the valleys of all lands, fill the offices of the city and the homes of the citizens, fill the church, the courts, the universities, fill the lowly serried ranks of the poor, fill the more burdened and more responsible phalanx of the noble and the rich!
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
The Life of St. Thomas of Aquin. By Father Vaughan, O.S.B. London: Longmans, Brown, Green & Co. Vol. I. For sale by The Catholic Publication Society, New York.
This is a good stout volume, like St. Thomas himself. It is a book for its outward appearance such as we seldom see. We have many well-printed books, but this one is remarkable for its large, clear type, which makes it pleasant and easy to read. The subject is one of the greatest interest and importance. The life and times of St. Thomas have a peculiar charm about them, aside from the history of his genius, and of his philosophical and theological system. The two together make a theme which far surpasses in grandeur and attractiveness even the history of the majority of great saints. St. Thomas is the great doctor of the church. His intellectual sway is something without a parallel. The study of his works is on the increase, and he is likely to acquire even a greater and more universal sway than he enjoyed before the Reformation. We have never before had a really good biography of St. Thomas in English. Father Vaughan has taken hold of the work with zeal and ability. It is only half published as yet, but the first volume presents so large a portion of the angelic doctor's life before us that we can estimate its value as well as if we had the whole. An analysis of some of the principal works of St. Thomas is given by F. Vaughan, and he endeavors to present to the reader a picture of the times when he lived, as well as to describe the events of his personal history. Every student should have this book. It is indeed a wonderful thing to see such a specimen of genuine old monastic literature issuing from the English press. It makes us hope that England may yet become once more the merrie Catholic England of the olden time.
My Study Windows. By James Russell Lowell, A.M., Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871.
Met with in the pages of a review or magazine, Mr. Lowell's prose is always sure to be more or less pleasant reading. His wit, his refinement, and a certain something which we are only unwilling to call his delicacy of appreciation, because, in spite of his generally acknowledged merits as a critic, he seems to us not always perfectly reliable in that capacity, always find him willing and amused readers. But when he shuts up too much of his work at once between a pair of covers, and gives whoever will a too easy opportunity of comparing him with himself, we doubt whether even his admirers—a class in which we are not unwilling to include ourselves—do not find him a little wearisome, and discover in him a poverty of suggestion and a timidity of thought which gibbet him as a book-maker, although, being in a measure counterbalanced by an abundance of lighter merits, they would have left him an easy pre-eminence over most of his contemporaries as a magazinist. Nor, if we may for once adopt a method of criticism from which our author himself is not averse, and trust our instinct to read between the lines, is Mr. Lowell altogether free from a suspicion that such may possibly be the case—and that, as affecting his own culture and habit of mind also, it was a far-reaching mistake in our Puritan ancestors to cut themselves quite asunder from the traditions of the past before they came here to establish free thinking and free religion along with a free government. However it may be with government, neither thought nor faith seems to flourish well without having its roots in the past. Like their transcendentalist sons, our New England progenitors were themselves "Apostles of the Newness," and simply antedated them by a few generations in the experiment of throwing overboard a great deal of valuable freight, and trying to right themselves by laying in a supply of useless ballast. The sentiment which they dignified by the name of trust in Providence appears nowadays under a less equivocal disguise as self-reliance; and while it produces certain easily appreciable results both in society and literature, it makes instability, a want of solidity, and an absence of germinative force permanent characteristics of both of them. Not, however, to make an essay on a sufficiently suggestive topic, but to confine ourselves to the particular matter in hand, it is perhaps Mr. Lowell's thin-skinnedness as an author, and a characteristic modesty as to the value of his utterances, none the less apparent for being put carefully out of sight, which give him, to our thinking, his best claim to the liking of his readers—while at the same time it is a modesty so well justified by the actual state of the case as to explain why it is that one is always more ready to accept with satisfaction what he has to say about an author whose claims have been tested by more than one generation of critics, than to trust him for a thoroughly reliable estimate of a literary workman of to-day. Even in the former case one inclines to believe that he may sometimes feel a just preference for his own opinions in contradistinction to those of Mr. Lowell—who is not, for instance, likely to elicit much intelligent sympathy with his verdict on the poetical merits of the "Rape of the Lock." By far the pleasantest portions of the present volume are the three opening essays, in which Mr. Lowell quite forgets that he is a critic, or, at least, that he is a critic of books. The essays on Carlyle and Thoreau contain also a good deal of sound, if not particularly subtle, criticism; and in general, although the book does not show Mr. Lowell in his most characteristic vein, it pleases us all the better on that account, as giving us what substance there is in his thought, with much less than ordinary of the technical brilliancy which wearies quite as often as it entertains.
Dion and the Sibyls. A Classic Christian Novel. By Miles Gerald Keon, Colonial Secretary, Bermuda, author of "Harding the Money-Spinner," etc. New York: Catholic Publication Society. 1871. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 224.