His dying words to his clergy, and through them to his flock, were as follows:
“Tell my people that I love them; tell them how much I regret that circumstances have kept us at a distance from each other. My duties and my difficulties have prevented me from cultivating and strengthening those private ties which ought to bind us together; your functions require a closer, a more constant intercourse with them. Be with them—be of them—win them to God. Guide, govern, and instruct them. Watch as having to render an account of their souls, that you may do it with joy, and not with grief. There are among you several infant institutions which you are called on, in an especial manner, to sustain. It hast cost me a great deal of thought and of labor to introduce them. They are calculated to be eminently serviceable to the cause of order, of education, of charity; they constitute the germ of what, I trust, shall hereafter grow and flourish in extensive usefulness. As yet they are feeble, support them—embarrassed, encourage them—they will be afflicted, console them.
“I commend my poor church to its patrons—especially to her to whom our Saviour confided his in the person of the beloved disciple: ‘Woman, behold thy Son; Son, behold thy mother.’”
The second volume contains the lives of thirty American bishops, and, in the Appendix, the lives of Right Rev. Charles Augustus de Forbin-Jansen, Bishop of Nancy, France, who visited this country in 1840, and rendered signal services to religion while here; of Right Rev. Edward Barron, who volunteered from this country for the African mission, was made Bishop of Africa in 1845, and died at Savannah, Georgia, in 1854,
“a martyr of charity”; and of Cardinal Bedini, whose visit to this country is in the recollection of our readers.
We cannot close our notice without again commending, in the most emphatic manner, this record of the labors of the self-denying prelates who were the means, under God, of planting the church in our beloved country—not only for its historical interest, and as an addition to our permanent Catholic literature, but for the incentive it furnishes to others, both cleric and lay, in their several spheres, to be unremitting in their efforts to extend the faith, thus happily transferred to our soil, to every nook and corner of this favored land.
[118] Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States, with an Appendix and an Analytical Index. By Richard H. Clarke, A.M. In two vols. Vol. I. New York: P. O’shea. 1871.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
The Vicar of Christ; or, Lectures upon the Office and Prerogatives of our Holy Father the Pope. By Rev. Thomas S. Preston, Pastor of St. Ann’s Church, New York, and Chancellor of the Diocese. New York: Robert Coddington, No. 366 Bowery. 1871.