The lion is dead; his thunderous voice is for ever hushed. The farewell utterance which closed his career as an editor with so much dignity and pathos was his valedictory to life and to the world. It is pleasant to think that, before he died, a response full of veneration and affection came back to him from the organs of Catholic opinion and feeling in America and Europe, and that he has gone to his grave in honor and peace, where his works will be his monument, and his repose be asked for by countless prayers offered up throughout all parts of the Catholic Church, in whose battles he had been a tried warrior and valiant leader for thirty years.
It is not an easy task to give a perfectly just and impartial estimate of such a man and such a career. The intimate relations between Dr.
Brownson and those who have been the chief conductors of this magazine, together with the very active and extensive share which he had in their efforts to establish it and raise it to its present position, impose an obligation of personal friendship and gratitude somewhat like that which affects the relatives and family friends of a great man in the memorials which they prepare for the honor and fame of one whom they regard with a veneration and affection precluding the free exercise of critical judgment. On the other hand, the difference of opinion which afterwards severed the connection between Dr. Brownson and The Catholic World, and the controversy we have had with him on some important theological and philosophical questions, may give to the expression of anything like a discriminating judgment the appearance of an adverse plea against an opposing advocate in favor of our own cause. Nevertheless, as the motive of our friendship was chiefly sympathy in the great common cause of the Catholic Church, which was not essentially altered by a disagreement that produced no bitterness or animosity, we trust that our mood of mind is not influenced by any partial and personal bias, so as to produce either exaggeration or diminution of the just claims the great deceased publicist possesses on the admiration of his fellow-men. We may fail from want of capability, but we cannot avoid making the attempt to satisfy in part the desire which all Catholics everywhere must feel to know what those who have been near to Dr. Brownson during his public life have seen, and what they think, of his character and his career, more especially since his conversion.
Dr. Brownson has told the world a great deal about his own history in the book which he published in 1857, entitled The Convert. The salient facts of his life are generally known to the public, and have been summarily stated in the obituary notices of the leading newspapers, so that we have no need to take up much of our limited space in recounting them. The principal interest they possess is in their relation to the formation of his mind, his character, his faith, and his opinions. He was not baptized in his infancy, but was nevertheless brought up strictly and religiously according to the old-fashioned Puritan method, in their simple, humble cottage at Royalton, Vermont, by an elderly couple, distant relatives of his family, who adopted the fatherless boy when he was six years old.[112] A wonderful child he must have been, and we can see in his brief narrative of his early years, as in the instances of St. Thomas of Aquin and Chateaubriand, though under circumstances as different as possible from theirs, a most interesting example of Wordsworth’s aphorism, “The child is father of the man.” From the dawn of reason he was a philosopher, never a child, thinking, dreaming in an ideal world, reading the few books he could find—especially King James’ English Bible, which he almost learned by heart—never playing with other children, and enjoying very scanty advantages of schooling. After his fourteenth year he lived near Saratoga, in New York State, and worked hard for his own maintenance. At nineteen we find him at an academy in the town of Ballston—a privilege which we believe he purchased with the
hard earnings of his industry. At this time, from an impulse of religious sentiment, he sought for baptism and admission into the Presbyterian church, which he very soon found an uncongenial home and exchanged for another sect at the opposite pole of Protestantism, that of the Universalists, among whom he became a preacher at the age of twenty-one. The subsequent period of his life until he had passed somewhat beyond his fortieth year—that is, until 1844—was marked by various phases of rationalism, and filled with active labors in preaching, lecturing, writing, and editing various periodicals, all carried on with restless energy and untiring industry. He was married early in life to an amiable and intelligent lady who was a perfect wife and mother, and after her conversion a perfect Christian; and the six children who lived to grow up, five of whom were sons, all received an excellent education. The eldest son, his namesake, has passed his life as a teacher and farmer in a remote State, living the life of a good Catholic with the spirit of a recluse, altogether uninterested in the great affairs of the world. Two others were lawyers and died young. The fourth, after passing some years with the Jesuits, entered the army of the United States at the breaking out of the war as a captain of artillery, was severely wounded, and after the close of the war was admitted to the bar, married, and began the practice of law at Detroit. He is known to the literary world as the translator of Balmes’ Fundamental Philosophy. The youngest son also served gallantly as an officer of the army of the republic during the civil war, and died on the field of battle in the flower of his youth.
The only daughter, who is the wife of a most worthy and respectable gentleman, before her marriage published several works, and particularly the Life of Prince Gallitzin, a biography of very considerable merit. All the fruits of the intellectual labors of Dr. Brownson were absorbed in the support and education of his family and some dependent female relatives, and beyond these simple means of keeping up his plain and unostentatious household, the great and patriarchal philosopher received no pecuniary recompense from his long and severe labors in the field of literature. His true profession was that of an editor and reviewer. The exercise of the functions of the Protestant ministry was not to his taste, and five years before his conversion to the Catholic Church, which took place in 1844, he founded a Review at Boston, which was, with a change of title, continued during his residence in that city, then transferred to New York and sustained until 1864, revived once more by a kind of dying effort in 1873, and finally closed a few months before the end of Dr. Brownson’s mortal career. An active part in politics was taken by Dr. Brownson during several years of his earlier public career, but his restless, impetuous, independent spirit made it impossible for him to remain long within the ranks of any political party. Until his conversion he was an agitator, a reformer, associating by turns with Fanny Wright, Robert Dale Owen, the leaders of the working-men’s party, Channing, Parker, and the Boston clique of world-reformers, captivated by the theories of Leroux and St. Simon, and even fancying himself the providential precursor of a new Messias who was to do away with all old things
and renovate the world. At last he became convinced that Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church as the perpetual teacher, guide, and ruler of men and nations, and settled himself in his only true vocation as an exponent and advocate of her doctrines and order by the means of his written works. It was only as a Catholic publicist that he became a truly great man, and achieved a great work for which he deserves to be held in lasting remembrance. To this work the last thirty years of his life were devoted with a gigantic energy, which diminished toward the end under the influence of advancing age and enfeebled health, but never wholly flagged until the approach of death gradually quenched and at last extinguished the vital flame of his physical existence. During the last seventeen years of his life his residence was at Elizabeth, New Jersey, with the exception of a few months which he passed with his son, Henry F. Brownson, Esq., of Detroit, in whose house he died, and from which he was carried to his last resting-place in the Catholic cemetery of that town. His last years were filled with sufferings from severe physical infirmities, the sudden deaths of several of his children, above all from the death of his tenderly-loved and devoted wife, and from the desolation and loneliness which is usually the cloud in which the setting sun of genius goes down, especially when one survives the period of his great activity, and finds himself, as it were, walking among the graves of friends and past works, drawing always nearer to his own sepulchral resting-place. His death occurred on the morning of Easter Monday, April 17, 1876, when he was in the middle of his seventy-third
year, and his obsequies were celebrated on the following Wednesday. From the time of his conversion he was not only a loyal but a pious and practical Catholic, constantly receiving the sacraments, and making his own salvation the chief object to be attained in life. There can be no doubt that he lived and died a just and good man, full of merit, and sure of a high place in heaven, as well as on the scroll of honor where the names of the great men of the age are inscribed by the verdict of their fellows.
If we were allowed to stop here, our task would not have any of that difficulty or delicacy which we said at the outset must necessarily belong to an effort at estimating Dr. Brownson’s character and career as a Catholic publicist. That he built on the true foundation as a wise master-builder, with gold, silver, and precious stones, much solid and fine work able to stand the fire and deserving a reward both on earth and in heaven, we can affirm with conscientious fidelity to our own conviction, and without fear of contradiction. That there was no wood, hay, or stubble in the great mass of materials which he used in his many and extensive works we dare not assert. The difficulty lies in discrimination, and in the relative estimate of a man certainly great and good, in comparison with other great champions of the Catholic faith, and with the standard of perfection. It must be remembered that Dr. Brownson was a self-made man, and, until he was past thirty, was in circumstances most unfavorable to his intellectual culture. He received in his youth only the rudiments of an education, was associated during his early manhood with vulgar sectaries and demagogues, engaged in a rude, turbulent
struggle for a living and a position as a religious and political leader, as well as in a perpetual search after truth, without adequate means of satisfying the cravings of his restless intellect and passionate heart. He came into contact with intellectual and cultivated men for the first time in Boston after he joined the Unitarians. His efforts to educate himself were certainly strenuous. He acquired the Latin, French, German, and Italian languages sufficiently well to read books written in all those languages, and his knowledge of English authors was, of course, very wide and extensive. Nevertheless, the want of a systematic education in his early youth, and of regular, symmetrical intellectual training, was always a great disadvantage, as it necessarily must be to every self-made man. Moreover, the necessity of perpetually speaking and writing on the most important subjects as a teacher and guide of others, before he had thoroughly learned what he had to teach, made him liable to hasty and crude statements, to inaccuracies and errors, to changes and modifications in his views and opinions, and to a certain tentative, erratic course of thought. He was like a great ship making its way by waring and tacking, often changing its course, and frequently stopping for soundings, but on the whole making steady headway towards one definite point, escaping many dangers, and at last arriving on open sailing ground by the genius of its pilot, notwithstanding insufficient charts and an unknown coast. In certain favorite branches of study—as, for instance, in history, the history of philosophy, political ethics, and English philology—his knowledge was not only extensive, but extremely accurate. Of scholastic metaphysics