Extracts from the Fathers, etc. Dublin: W. B. Kelly, 1860. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This book, under the general title of Christian Classics, is intended, as we are informed in the preface, “nearly altogether for the use of students,” and as such may be considered a very useful and desirable publication. More than a score of the most illustrious and erudite fathers and writers of the church have been put under contribution by the editor, and though we consider the arrangement and choice of the selections susceptible of some improvement, we are grateful for those presented us in so neat and portable a form. Apart from what is purely moral and theological in the Extracts, there is a great deal of biographical and historical information interesting to the general reader, which cannot be easily acquired except through the voluminous tomes so seldom found in ordinary libraries.
Una and her Paupers; or, Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones. By her Sister. New York: George Routledge & Sons.
So-called Protestant lands, which were once a part of the fair garden of the church, still put forth some shoots occasionally from the old roots left in the soil. It is pleasant to see them springing up, now and then, as if to assert the indestructibility of the divine seed; for the spirit of self-sacrifice and of charity is essentially the spirit of Catholicism. As Balmes says, public beneficence was unknown to the ancients. It is wholly due to the church. The divine words, “Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me,” have gone on with their undulations through more than eighteen centuries of spiritual life in the church, awakening the tenderest instincts of the human heart in behalf of suffering humanity. Thank God! there are some nominally without its pale—
“With whom the melodies abide
Of th’ everlasting chime;
Who carry music in their heart
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.”
Una and her Paupers—happily styled Una, for such lives are unique, exceptional, in Protestant annals—is the history of a large-hearted, sympathetic, North-of-Ireland lady, who was gradually led, by her natural inclinations and by circumstances, to a partial renunciation of the comforts of a pleasant home and family affection, and submit herself to training as a nurse in the celebrated Kaiserswerth[132] institution of Protestant deaconesses. She was afterwards connected with an association of Bible-women at London; then underwent a year’s training as Nightingale nurse at St. Thomas’s Hospital in that city, and was subsequently appointed Female Superintendent of the Liverpool Workhouse, where she contracted a typhus fever, and died in 1868, at the age of thirty-five.
The book is admirably edited by her sister, and has a eulogistic introduction by Miss Nightingale, who seems to have given it its title. The American edition has, moreover, the advantage of a preface by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. From a Protestant point of view, this must be a charming and useful book. If not equally so to a Catholic, it is because his standard of piety is infinitely higher, and instances of far greater self-denial for the sake of others are of daily occurrence in the church.
Miss Jones’ piety was decidedly of the so-called Evangelical school in the Church of England. The Bible is constantly in her hands, and all her spiritual emotions are expressed in Biblical phrases that have more a smack of Cromwell than of prelacy. A few words dropped here and there in her letters show her instinctive aversion to Catholicism, but we love to think this rather the result of ignorance than want of charity in a person of her profession. Almost her first words written from Rome were: “I never go out but as a duty, for the whole is so depressing, and it is indeed so utterly the ‘city given to idolatry’; the associations of the past are forgotten in its present.” This says volumes for her cast of mind and piety. Kind and loving as she was by nature, we cannot regret she was excluded from all missionary efforts in the Catholic ward of the Liverpool Workhouse, on which she seems to have kept a longing eye. She appears to have gained some influence over one poor girl in London, who, she says, was “on the verge of becoming a nun—to her the only conceivable way of finding the peace she longed for: now her eyes seem to be opened to a better way, though she does not feel she has yet entered on it.” As we are not informed of the result, we may reasonably conclude this individual found peace at last in the only true refuge.