“To assume the task of creating, as it were, building up, and governing the infant churches thus confided to their care, was the work that was faithfully and zealously performed by our bishops. It was no uncommon thing for a bishop to be sent to a diocese where there was scarcely a shrine or a priest; where he not only had no friends or organized flock to receive him, but where he had not even an acquaintance; where he would not meet a face that he had ever seen before. In some instances, he had to enter a diocese rent with disunion or schism among the people; in others, he was compelled to reside out of the episcopal city by reason of disaffection prevailing within. In other cases, such was their poverty that they had not the necessary means to procure an episcopal outfit, to provide a pectoral cross and crosier, or to pay their travelling expenses to their dioceses. In many cases the humble log-cabins of the West were their episcopal palaces and cathedrals; and frequently church, episcopal residence, parish school, and theological seminary were all under the same contracted roof. In the midst of such difficulties, we behold examples of humility,

patience, cheerfulness, zeal, charity, love, poverty, and untiring labor. A study of such examples, and of lives so good, so heroic, has led us to undertake the work now presented to the public, in order to repeat and continue their holy influences, to preserve the memory of such deeds, to render a tribute to those honored names, and to rescue, as far as we could, our Catholic traditions from oblivion or total loss. We applied to ourself, and yielded to the spirit of, the poet’s appeal:

‘Spread out earth’s holiest records here,
Of days and deeds to reverence dear;
A zeal like this what pious legends tell?’”

The two volumes contain the lives of fifty-six American bishops, and to the second volume is affixed an appendix containing the lives of three prelates of other countries, who have a special connection with the American Church. The first volume, to which we will confine our present writing, contains the lives of twenty-nine prelates, a list of whom, with the dates of their consecration or appointment, and the religious orders to which they belonged, where such was the case, will in itself prove interesting.

The antiquity of our church in America is strikingly illustrated in this volume—an antiquity equal to that of the church in some of the old countries of Europe, extending back to the ages of faith, when the church was fighting her battles with paganism, and before the time when altar was raised up against altar by the Protestantism of the sixteenth century, and before the more modern phases of infidelity and communism had declared war against all altars and all religion. In the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the Northmen of Iceland, hardy adventurers on the seas, pushed their exploits beyond the continent of Europe, and landed colonies on the shores of this continent. Coming from their ice-clad homes, our extreme north-eastern regions were to

them a country of enchanting verdure, and received the name of Greenland; and, pushing their cruises farther south, they entered our own Narragansett Bay, where, seeing the country festooned with vines teeming with grapes, they called it Vinland. Our poet Longfellow, aptly quoted by Mr. Clarke, has celebrated some of the exploits of Vikings and Northmen on sea and shore. They were the freebooters and highwaymen of the ocean;

“Joining the corsair’s crew.
O’er the dark sea I flew
With the marauders;
Wild was the life we led,
Many the souls that sped.
Many the hearts that bled,
By our stern orders.”

At the time of which the poet sings, both Iceland and Greenland were pagan. The mother-country owed her conversion to missionaries from Ireland, and she, in turn, sent out devoted priests, who converted her colonists in Greenland and Vinland to the faith. Convents and churches arose and resounded with the praises of God, chanted in Latin hymns three centuries and a half before Columbus discovered America. Pre-eminent among the Catholic missionaries was Eric, who, in the beginning of the twelfth century, commenced his exalted labors at Greenland, and afterwards particularly along the banks of Narragansett Bay. The site of the present city of Newport and its vicinity were the virgin fields of his apostolic labors. So important did these Christian colonies become, that a bishopric was erected at Garda, the episcopal city of Greenland, and Eric was consecrated its first bishop by Lund, a bishop of Scandinavia. He visited again his cherished flock at Vinland, to whom he was devoted, and, rather than leave them, he resigned his mitre and crosier, went into the ranks of the clergy, and gave his life for

his flock—the first of American martyrs.

The colonies of the Northmen were swept away, and the record of them, even, faded from the histories and traditions of mankind.