The Rev. Father O’Reilly’s biography is, however, not only more voluminous and more ample in its details than either of the preceding, but it is enriched by copious extracts from encyclical letters and other important documents, the proper understanding of which necessarily belongs to the elucidation of the history of Pius IX.’s pontificate. Apart from its completeness and elegance of style, its chief distinguishing feature is the insight it gives us into the policy and designs of contemporary rulers and conspirators in France, Italy, and Germany in their attempts on the integrity of the church, and their underhand alliances with the secret societies to effect their evil purposes. Only a man who has had personal knowledge of the actors who figured in the bloody drama of “United Italy,” and an intimate acquaintance with their present and prospective strategy, could unfold to the public gaze, in all its base enormity, the culpable indifference of the men who professed the greatest regard for the sovereign of the states of the church, and the insidious schemes of the modern champions of liberty, whose sole and whole object is the disruption of all forms of government under which civil and religious freedom would be possible. This it is that makes Father O’Reilly’s book not only interesting but highly instructive; for, to a certain extent at least, it furnishes us with a key to the enigma of European Continental politics which we Americans, happily removed from kingcraft and secret terrorism, so much require. The venerable and venerated Chief Pastor of the church has been fortunate in his American biographers, and we have little doubt that he will find some solace in his afflictions in the thought that three among our writers have almost simultaneously devoted their pens to recording the incidents of his life and defending his rights as a spiritual and temporal sovereign.
Report of the Special Committee of the Medico-Legal Society upon School Hygiene. New York: Terwilliger. 1876.
Few subjects are of more engrossing importance than the conditions requisite for the physical well-being of the rising generation; and as our embryo men and women spend a very large portion of their lives in school-rooms, it becomes a serious matter to determine whether these nurseries of learning are constructed in such a manner as to consist with the highest possible health standard. The investigations undertaken by Dr. R. I. O’Sullivan and his fellow-committeemen at the instance of the Medico-Legal Society reveal a condition which is truly startling. Oxygen is the life of our life-blood, and, if it is not supplied in the requisite quantity, the human system becomes predisposed to every disease and the foundation of a lifetime of misery is laid. Yet it is notorious that the arrangements of our much-vaunted school buildings go far short of ensuring a sufficient supply of this life-sustaining gas. Much of this deplorable lack of suitable arrangements is the result of ignorance. Many self-constituted sanitarians deem loftiness of ceiling to be the main and, indeed, the only condition required to ensure proper ventilation and a sufficient supply of air. They accordingly build without referenced horizontal breathing-space, in the absurd belief that all foul air ascends and is got rid of, some way or other. Now, the truth, says the report, is “that a lofty ceiling only makes that portion of space above the tops of the windows a receptacle for foul air, which accumulates and remains to vitiate the stratum below.” This is of itself a proof that a scientific supervision of our school buildings is the only guarantee we can have that the health of the children will be properly considered. The quantity of carbonic acid gas given off at each expiratory effort is far in excess of what our amateur sanitarians imagine; and when school buildings are erected without due regard for the diffusion of this deadly emanation, we must not be surprised to see our schools filled with pale and stunted children. In addition to the carbonic acid gas other deleterious exhalations of the human body poison crowded rooms, and are especially the cause of the peculiarly offensive and stuffy odor at which healthy olfactories revolt. Who that has entered one of our city public school class-rooms, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon, has failed to experience this disagreeable sensation? Yet physiology, as well as common sense, tells us that this effete organic matter which is constantly escaping from the lungs and from every pore of the skin is eminently injurious to health. Not only this, but in certain crowded portions of the city the adjoining streets and buildings lend their quota of noxious effluvia to the poisonous agents mentioned. The committee visited “one of the newest, best-arranged, and best-appointed schools in the city, and found it overcrowded and unventilated, tainted throughout the halls, and at times, by way of the fan-lights over the doors in the class rooms, odors arising from the latrines in the basement, which are emptied only once or twice a week.” In this model school-house only from thirty-three to forty-one cubic feet of air are allowed to each child, while nature vigorously clamors for at least eight hundred feet in the twenty-four hours.
In the second report read by Dr. R. I. O’Sullivan we are invited to contemplate a picture which but faintly reveals the evil effects that the early overcrowding exercises in after-days over the adult population: “Look around us in public assemblies, and see in those scarcely entering middle life the evidence of physical decline, the prematurely bald and gray, the facial muscles photographing the wearied brain and overtaxed nervous system.” Few can fail to realize, on due reflection, how much of the terrible truth of this picture is attributable to the bad condition of our school-houses. The conclusion is plain that the judgment of the trained sanitarian is of vital importance in the erection of school buildings, and that, until the necessity of his sage interposition is recognized by the Department of Public Instruction, diseases, the result of early confinement in close and crowded schools, which are quite preventible, will continue to prevail among us.
God the Teacher of Mankind: A plain, comprehensive explanation of Christian Doctrine. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis: Benziger Bros. 1877.
Catechism of Christian Doctrine, for Academies and High Schools. With the approbation of the Most Rev. J. Roosevelt Bayley, D.D., Archbishop of Baltimore. Intermediate No. III. Benziger Bros. 1877.
This is a most useful and comprehensive book, clear and definite in its plan, popular and interesting in its style. It is divided into two parts. Part I. deals with “The Enemies of the Church” from the beginning down to our own times. These enemies Father Müller sets down in the order of time as “Heathenism,” “Heresy,” and “Freemasonry.” Part II. is occupied with showing what in these days of vague beliefs and religious indifferentism it is most important to show—namely, that God himself is the teacher of mankind, and therefore that his voice must be listened to and obeyed. The church is the voice of God on earth; consequently, the everlasting object of the enemies of God is to silence and destroy the church. These avowed enemies were in the old days the heathen; later on the heretics. A deadlier foe than either, and combining the evil elements of both, the author points out to-day as Freemasons, the term covering, of course, all forms of secret oath-bound societies.
Father Müller’s sketch of Freemasonry is very extensive. For his charges against the societies comprehended under that head he relies mainly on Masonic documents and publications. Amid a vast amount of rubbish and jargon in the official rites and ceremonies of Masonry is plainly discernible a distinct purpose and plan, which can be considered none other than the destruction of all fixed belief in God and his revelation, in his church, and in the order of society and government founded on that belief. To expose this conspiracy against God and man—for such it is, and nothing less—is as much a service to any civilized state as it is to the direct cause of religion. On this account we do not think that in a book intended as much for ordinary readers as for those who are better instructed Father Müller has been at all wasteful in the large amount of space devoted to this portion of his subject. There is a tendency sometimes to pooh-pooh Masonry as a convenient scarecrow. Yet those who have noted the march of events in Europe within the century, and particularly within the latter half of it, will discover a startling resemblance between events as they have occurred, and as it was desired they should occur according to the programmes laid down beforehand by the leaders of the secret societies.