After the flood of light which even Protestant research has poured on the characters of Luther and Calvin, how can a poet (of all men) dare to hold them up to admiration?
Maria Monk's Daughter. An Autobiography. By Mrs. L. St. John Eckel. New York: Published for the Author by the United States Publishing Co.., 13 University Place. 1874.
The writer of this notice well remembers reading, when a boy of fifteen, the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, and Six Months in a Convent, by Rebecca Reed. With great satisfaction he recalls the fact that his own father, who was a Presbyterian minister of Connecticut, together with a very large number of other most respectable Protestants, condemned [pg 431] and repudiated the calumnies of Maria Monk from the first moment of their publication. The effect of these books and of the exposure so honorably made by Col. Stone on our own young mind, and undoubtedly upon the minds of thousands besides, to open our eyes to the falsehood and dishonesty of the gross misrepresentations of the Catholic religion and its professors which have been rife among Protestants, and are still prevalent among the less enlightened of them, both gentle and simple. Afterwards the task devolved upon us to prepare a set of documents concerning Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk which Bishop England had collected, for publication in the edition of his works issued by his successor in the see of Charleston. While we were correcting the last proofs of the printer at Philadelphia, the Times of that morning furnished us the last item of news respecting the unfortunate Maria Monk, which came to the knowledge of the public before the publication of the volume under notice, viz., that she had died in a cell on Blackwell's Island. After the lapse of twenty-five years, we find before us the autobiography of a daughter of Maria Monk, who seeks to expiate her mother's crime, and to make reparation for the wrong done to the clergy and religious of the Catholic Church by her pretended disclosures made in the fictitious character of an escaped nun. The unhappy young woman herself, though we believe she was the daughter of an English officer at Montreal, seems to have had a very unkind mother, and, for some reason to us unknown, to have been brought up without education, and early turned adrift without any protection. Having fallen into a condition of desperate misery, she resorted to the expedient of inventing her Awful Disclosures in order to get money and escape from present wretchedness. The men—far more malicious and base in their villainy than this poor forlorn girl, so much sinned against and so fearfully punished for her own sins that we pity more than we blame her—who prepared the vile book of Awful Disclosures, and published it under the name of Howe and Bates, cheated her out of her share of the profits. We are glad to see their infamy once more exposed, and the honor of the Catholic religion avenged. Although the most honorable class of Protestants are exempt from complicity with this and similar gross libels on Catholics and caricatures of all they hold dear and sacred, nevertheless their cause and name are disgraced by the fact that they are so frequently and generally implicated in a mode of warfare on the Catholic Church which is dishonorable. The statements which are continually made current among them respecting Catholics and their religion, and which are so generally believed, do no credit to their intelligence or fairness. We remember hearing the Archbishop of Westminster remark that the most ridiculous fables about the Catholic religion are accepted as truth among the aristocratic residents of the West End of London. The coarse and angry assaults of the English press upon the Marquis of Ripon, on account of his conversion, show, what Dr. Newman has so humorously and graphically described, the extent and obstinacy of vulgar prejudice and hostility in England. There is less here, and it is diminishing; yet there is enough to make Mrs. Eckel's audacious spring into the arena of combat against it well timed as well as chivalrous.
We do not intend a criticism on her book, but merely, as an act of justice to one who has braved the criticism of the world, to aid herself and her book to meet this criticism fairly, without prejudice from any false impressions which may be taken from its title. We therefore mention the fact, which may not be known to those who have not read the book or any correct account of its contents, that Maria Monk, according to the probable evidence furnished in the book, and which does not seem to have anything opposed to it, was really married to a man who was a gentleman by birth and of respectable connections, although reduced by his youthful follies to a condition which was always precarious and sometimes very destitute. Mrs. Eckel is the offspring of this marriage. After a childhood of hardship, she was adopted into a respectable family related to her father, Mr. St. John, and made the most strenuous efforts to acquire the education and good manners which are suitable for a lady. She married a gentleman of respectable position and of very superior intellectual gifts and culture, Mr. Eckel, who afterwards fell into distressed circumstances, and died in a very tragical manner. Mrs. Eckel separated herself from him some time before this occurred, and very shortly before the birth of her [pg 432] daughter, as it seems to us for very good reasons which exonerate her from all blame for the misery into which her husband fell when he lost the support of her sustaining arm. The remarkable history of her subsequent career in Paris must be sought for in the pages of the autobiography. The circles in which she moved while there were the highest, and many of her intimate friends were persons of not only exalted rank, but of the most exemplary piety, and of universal fame among Catholics. Of her own accord, without either compulsion or advice, she did what she was not bound in conscience to do—abandoned her brilliant position in the world, made known the secret of her origin, and has now thrown open the history of her life to the inspection of the world. That history must plead for itself and for the author before impartial and judicious readers. In our opinion it is substantially true. We believe the author has written it from a good motive, and that she is sincere in her statements. Divested of all the adventitious glitter of the successful woman of the world, she presents herself for precisely what she is in herself, and, as we think, is far more worthy of honor and respect now than ever before, or than the most brilliant marriage in France could have made her.
Everybody who can read this book will do so, as a matter of course, even if they have no other motive than they would have in reading one of Thackeray's romances. It is a romance in real life, and an instance of the truth of the old adage, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Such fictitious works as Lothair and the Schönberg-Cotta Family have served as a polemical weapon against the Catholic Church, and we do not see why a romantic but true history, of much greater literary merit than the whole class of that sort of trash, should not answer a good purpose on the other side. If the readers of the book find in it many things open to criticism, and jarring upon a delicate and cultivated Catholic sense of propriety and reverence, they should remember that the author lacks the advantage of long and careful Catholic discipline, is still comparatively young, and a novice in everything that relates to the spiritual and religious life. She does not profess to give the history of her life as a model to be imitated, or to instruct others as one competent to teach on spiritual matters, but to write her confessions for the encouragement of other wayward and wandering souls, and to speak out freely what she thinks as she goes along, with very little regard to censure or fear of it.
There seems a Nemesis in the publication of such a book which should give a salutary lesson to those who dare to throw dirt on the spotless robe of the Catholic Church. We have often thought that this Nemesis is frequently apparent of late in the punishments which have come from divine or human justice on notorious corrupters of public and private morals. Dreadful as are the actual corruptions and the corrupt tendencies in the bosom of our political and social state, we hope this is a sign that God has not abandoned us. It is hardly necessary to say that this is not a book suitable for very young people.