[148]. Morzolik an ankou the Bretons call the wood-louse, in allusion to its faint, regular rapping. Cf. our Death-watch.
[149]. The precise distance at which the Bretons locate hell.
[150]. The following article was recently found in Chicago among the posthumous papers of Judge Arrington, who died in that city nine years ago, a convert to the Catholic Church. It was written twenty years previous, when he was struggling to escape from the meshes of pantheism, and seems to be a vigorous effort to prove to his own satisfaction the reality of a personal, rational Deity.
Some of the illustrations are recognized as having been used in a similar article published in the Democratic Review about thirty years ago, which was extensively copied, and even translated into the French and German languages. The present is a much more elaborate statement than that, as if the author still dwelt upon the subject, and as the years rolled on wished with increasing knowledge to more strongly substantiate to his intellect what his higher nature so instinctively craved.
At the bar Judge Arrington stood almost without a peer in the great Northwest for legal learning and oratorical power. Whenever he indulged in the luxury of literary and poetical composition he showed an ability that promised a like pre-eminence in those pursuits, had he devoted himself to them.
This struggle of a great mind to fling off the incubus of modern error, whose every maze he had thoroughly explored, coupled with his subsequent conversion to Catholicity and his saint-like death in its communion, is an admirable practical illustration of the truth that nothing short of the light and grace to be found only in the true church of Christ can ever thoroughly satisfy a great soul.
[151]. Judge Arrington had devoted much time and attention to studying the nature and results of sagacity in animals; but he so distinctly saw that they are not responsible agents, and that the harmonious and orderly results produced by them—as, for example, the mathematical regularity of the cells of bees—are to be attributed not to them but to the Author of their wonderful instinct, that he does not even pause to treat this as an objection to his proposition or to draw a distinction between mediate and immediate causes.
[152]. Written for a children’s “May Cantata.”
[153]. Numbers xvii.
[154]. Nothing could give a truer idea of the fog of misconception and ignorance that envelops every subject connected with Catholicity in England than an incident which occurred to the writer in the course of last summer. He had applied to the editor of an influential monthly of high standing, published in London, for permission to contribute a paper on the Bollandist Acta. The editor in reply said that he should be happy to receive an article on such a subject, adding, “They were old friends and benefactors of mine.” The phrase was somewhat puzzling; but it was fully explained to the writer by a literary friend of great experience as referring to the respectable family of the late Baron Bolland, a judge of the English Exchequer Court. The Catholic Bollandists were strangers even in name to the popular editor.