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Title: The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872‐March 1873
Author: Various
Release Date: September 12, 2015 [Ebook #49948]
Language: English
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC WORLD, VOL. 16, OCTOBER 1872‐MARCH 1873***
The Catholic World
A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science
Vol. XVI.
October 1872 to March 1873
The Catholic Publication House.
New York
1873
CONTENTS
Contents. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 91.—October, 1872. Bismarck And The Jesuits. Choice In No Choice. Fleurange. Review of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas. The Progressionists. Gavazzi Versus The See Of S. Peter. Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune. On A Picture Of S. Mary Bearing Doves To Sacrifice. Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries. Versailles. Father Isaac Jogues, S.J. Doña Ramona. The Distaff. A Martyr’s Journey. Odd Stories: III. Peter The Powerful. New Publications. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 92.—November, 1872. Centres Of Thought In The Past. Second Article. The Universities. Fleurange. The Poor Ploughman. A Dark Chapter In English History. The Progressionists. The Virgin. The Homeless Poor Of New York City. The House That Jack Built. Where Are You Going? Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune. Concluded. Use And Abuse Of The Novel. Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded. To S. Mary Magdalen. God’s Acre. Personal Recollections Of The Late President Juarez Of Mexico. New Publications. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 93.—December, 1872. The Spirit Of Protestantism. Fleurange. Sayings Of John Climacus. Dante’s Purgatorio. Canto Fifth. Sanskrit And The Vedas. The House That Jack Built. S. Peter’s Roman Pontificate. Sayings. The Progressionists. Christian Art Of The Catacombs. Beating The Air. A Retrospect. The Russian Clergy. The Cross Through Love, And Love Through The Cross. Odd Stories. IV. The White Shah. Signs Of The Times. New Publications. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 94.—January, 1873. A Son Of The Crusaders. At The Shrine. A Christmas Recognition. Fleurange. Sayings. Prince Von Bismarck And The Interview Of The Three Emperors. A Christmas Memory. The House That Jack Built. A Retrospect. The Cross Through Love, And Love Through The Cross. Europe’s Angels. The Nativity Of Christe. The Progressionists. ὙΠΝΟΣ A Legend Of Saint Ottilia. The Year Of Our Lord 1872. New Publications. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 95.—February, 1873. Who Made Our Laws? Dante’s Purgatorio. Canto Sixth. The Church The Champion Of Marriage. Fleurange. Cologne. John. The International Congress Of Prehistoric Anthropology And Archaeology. The See Of Peter. Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage. A Daughter Of S. Dominic. The Progressionists. F. James Marquette, S.J. Prayer Of Custance, The Persecuted Queen Of Alla Of Northumberland. Acoma. New Publications. The Catholic World. Vol. XVI., No. 96.—March, 1873. The Relation Of The Rights Of Conscience To The Authority Of The State Under The Laws Of Our Republic. The Widow Of Nain. Fleurange. American Catholics And Partisan Newspapers. Brussels. Sayings Of S. John Climacus. Marriage In The Nineteenth Century. A Pearl Ashore. The Benefits Of Italian Unity. Sonnet. Recollections Of Père Hermann. A Daughter Of S. Dominic. The International Congress Of Prehistoric Anthropology And Archæology. Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage. Martyrs And Confessors In Christ. The Roman Empire And The Mission Of The Barbarians. New Publications. Footnotes
[Cover Page]
CONTENTS.
Acoma, 703
Atlantic Drift—Gathered in the Steerage, 648, 837
American Catholics and Partisan Newspapers, 756
Beating the Air, 783
Benefits of Italian Unity, The, 792
Bismarck and the Jesuits, 1
Bismarck and the Three Emperors, 474
Bolanden’s The Progressionists, 40, 192, 358, 541, 674
Brussels, 766
Centres of Thought in the Past: The Monasteries, 79; The Same: The Universities, 145
Christian Art of the Catacombs, 372
Christmas Memory, A, 502
Christmas Recognition, A, 448
Church the Champion of Marriage, The, 585
Climacus, S. John, Sayings of, 318, 775
Cologne, 615
Craven’s Fleurange, 18, 158, 303, 459, 600, 737
Cross through Love, and Love through the Cross, 412, 523
Crusaders, A Son of the, 433
Cyprian, S., Martyrs and Confessors in Christ, 844
Dark Chapter in English History, A, 176
Daughter of S. Dominic, A, 658, 813
Deschamp’s Bismarck and the Emperors, 474
Distaff, The, 133
Doña Ramona, 122
English History, A Dark Chapter in, 176
Episode of the Commune, An, 61, 227
Europe’s Angels, 533
Father Isaac Jogues, S.J., 105
Father James Marquette, S.J., 688
Fleurange, 18, 158, 303, 459, 600, 737
Gavazzi versus the See of S. Peter, 55
God’s Acre, 264
Hermann, Père, 808
Homeless Poor of New York City, The, 206
House that Jack Built, The, 212, 336, 507
International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archæology, 639, 829
Italian Unity, The Benefits of, 792
Jogues, Father Isaac, S.J., 105
John, 622
Juarez, Personal Recollections of, 280
Legends of Saint Ottilia, 557
Marquette, Father James, S.J., 688
Marriage in the XIXth Century, 776
Marriage, the Church the Champion of, 585
Martyr’s Journey, A, 137
Martyrs and Confessors in Christ, 844
Monasteries, The, 79
Mission of the Barbarians, The, 845
Nativity of Christe, The, 540
New York City, The Homeless Poor of, 206
Novel, Use and Abuse of the, 240
Number Thirteen, 61, 227
Odd Stories, 138, 420
Ottilia, Saint, A Legend of, 557
Partisan Newspapers, American Catholics and, 756
Pearl Ashore, 788
Père Hermann, 808
Personal Recollections of Pres. Juarez, 280
Peter the Powerful, 138
Prince von Bismarck and the Three Emperors, 474
Progressionists, The, 40, 192, 358, 541, 674
Protestantism, The Spirit of, 289
Relation of the Rights of Conscience to the Authority of the State under the Laws of our Republic, 721
Retrospect, A, 395, 516
Review of Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas, 31, 254
Roman Empire and the Mission of the Barbarians, 845
Russian Clergy, The, 403
S. Peter’s Roman Pontificate, 345
Sanskrit and the Vedas, 322
Sayings, 357, 473
Sayings of S. John Climacus, 318, 775
See of S. Peter, Gavazzi versus the, 55
Signs of the Times, 422
Son of the Crusaders, A, 433
Spirit of Protestantism, The, 289
Universities, The, 145
Use and Abuse of the Novel, The, 240
Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas, Review of, 31, 254
Versailles, 92
Where are You Going? 221
White Shah, The, 420
Who Made our Laws? 578
Year of Our Lord 1872, The, 558
Poetry.
Anselm’s The Poor Ploughman, 175
At the Shrine, 447
Chaucer’s Prayer of Custance, 702
Choice in no Choice, 17
Dante’s Purgatorio, 319, 581
On a Picture of S. Mary bearing Doves to Sacrifice, 77
Poor Ploughman, The, 175
Purgatorio, Dante’s, 319, 581
Prayer of Custance, 702
S. Mary Bearing Doves to Sacrifice, 77
See of Peter, The, 647
Sonnet from Zappi, 807
To S. Mary Magdalen, 265
Ὕπνος, 556
Virgin, The, 205
Widow of Nain, The, 735
Zappi, Sonnet from, 807
New Publications.
Adams’ Young America Abroad, 859
Agnew’s Geraldine, 573
All Hallow Eve, etc., 428
Ambition’s Contest, 144
Arundell’s Tradition, 430
Athenæum, The, 859
Beloved Disciple, The, 143
Bibliographia Catholica Americana, 713
Bolanden’s New God, 573
Book of the Holy Rosary, The, 140
Brownson’s Life of Gallitzin, 712
Burke’s Ireland’s Case Stated, 857
Caswall’s Hymns and Poems, 858
Catholic Class Book, 288
Catholic Family Almanac, 429
Catholic Worship, 571
College Journal, 576
Commentary of the Fathers on S. Peter, 286
Conversion of the Teutonic Race, 567 The Same, Sequel, 567
Coppée’s Elements of Logic, 285
Craven’s Fleurange, 570
Cusack’s Life of F. Mathew, 572
Daily Steps to Heaven, 572
De Mille’s Treasury of the Seas, 859
De Vere’s Legends of S. Patrick, 570
Ellis’ Two Ysondes, 719
England and Rome, 286
English in Ireland, The, 716
Finotti’s Bibliographia Catholica Americana, 713
Fleurange, 570
Formby’s The Book of the Holy Rosary, 140
Froude’s English in Ireland, 716
Gardening by Myself, 144
God and Man, 430
Gratry’s Henry Perreyve, 141
Great Problem, The, 575
Guillemin’s Wonders of the Moon, 574
Hart’s Manual of American Literature, 431, 860
Heart of Myrrha Lake, The, 569
Henry Perreyve, 141
History of the Sacred Passion, 427
History of the Blessed Virgin Mary, The, 573
Holland’s Marble Prophecy, 431
Holley’s Niagara, 432
Holmes’ The Poet at the Breakfast‐Table, 858
Hope’s Teutonic Race, 567 The Same, Sequel, 567
Hübner’s Life of Sixtus V., 567
Hymnary, with Tunes, 431
Hymns and Poems, 858
Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac, 429
Index Circular, 860
Ireland’s Case Stated, 857
Issues of American Politics, The, 431
Jenna’s Elevations Poetiques et Religieuses, 717
Keel and Saddle, 857
Kroeger’s The Minnesinger of Germany, 575
Lacordaire’s God and Man, 430
Lasar’s Hymnary, 431
Lectures on the Connection of Science and Religion, 573
Legends of S. Patrick, 570
Leifchild’s The Great Problem, 575
Liberalisme, Le, 714
Life and Times of Sixtus V., 567
Life of Demetrius Augustin Gallitzin, 712
Life of S. Augustine, 714
Liza, 573
Macdonald’s Hidden Life, 432
Macdonald’s The Vicar’s Daughter, 143
Manual of American Literature, 431, 860
Memoirs of Mme. Desbordes‐Valmore, 715
Minnesinger of Germany, The, 575
Moriarty’s Life of S. Augustine, 714
Morris’ Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 287
My Clerical Friends, 567
New God, The, 573
Oakeley’s Catholic Worship, 571
Orsini’s History of the B. Virgin Mary, 573
Paquet’s Le Liberalisme, 714
Palma’s History of the Passion, 427
Parsons’ Biographical Dictionary, 572
Parsons’ Shadow of the Obelisk, 572
Peters’ Catholic Class Book, 288
Polytechnic, The, 859
Photographic Views, 714
Poet at the Breakfast‐Table, The, 858
Pocket Prayer Book, 286
Potter’s The Spoken Word, 142
Rawes’ The Beloved Disciple, 143
Revere’s Keel and Saddle, 857
Roundabout Rambles, 432
Sainte‐Beuve’s Memoirs of Mme. Desbordes‐Valmore, 715
Shadow of the Obelisk, The, 572
Skinner’s Issues of American Politics, 431
Spoken Word, The, 142
Stockton’s Roundabout Rambles, 432
Tradition, 430
Treasure of the Seas, The, 859
Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 287
Truth, The, 571
Turgeneiff’s Liza, 573
Two Ysondes, and other Verses, 719
Unawares, 143
Vicar’s Daughter, The, 143
Warner’s Gardening by Myself, 144
Waterworth’s Commentary of the Fathers on S. Peter, 286
Waterworth’s England and Rome, 286
Weninger’s Photographic Views, 714
Wiseman’s Lectures on Science and Religion, 573
Wiseman’s Works, 714
Young America Abroad, 859
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 91.—OCTOBER, 1872.
Bismarck And The Jesuits.
“1. The Order of the Company of Jesus, orders akin to it, and congregations of a similar character, are excluded from the German territory. The establishment of residences for these orders is prohibited. The establishments actually in existence must be suppressed within a period to be determined by the Federal Council, but which shall not exceed six months.
“2. The members of the Company of Jesus, of orders akin to it, and of congregations of a similar character, may be expelled from the Federal territory if they are foreigners. If natives, residence within fixed limits may be forbidden them, or imposed upon them.
“The measures necessary for the execution of this law, and for the certainty of this execution, shall be adopted by the Federal Council.”
Such is the amendment on the original motion for the recent legislation with regard to the Jesuits which was proposed to the Reichstag by Dr. Friedberg. The original motion was identical in aim and almost in substance. The amendment is more exact and well‐defined, leaving not the slightest loophole for possible evasion or escape. It was framed and pressed on by the kindly spirit and generous hand of Prince Clovis of Hohenlohe, the brother of the cardinal whose rejection by the Pope as ambassador from Germany to his court gave such high umbrage to the exquisitely sensitive Prince Bismarck.
Such is the law: plain, clear, and well‐defined. There is no mistaking it: it is “goodly writ.” Paraphrased, it runs thus:
There is a body of men—and women even; for though we attach ourselves to the chief point at issue, the phrase, “Those congregations of a similar character,” may cover a very extensive ground, and seems ingeniously framed for abuse—in Germany, possessed of certain property, colleges, churches, seminaries, schools; possessed of certain rights as free citizens of a free land: liberty of action and of thought. Most of them are natives of the soil; many of them members of the highest families in the empire. They have been doing their work all these years without let or hindrance, or rumor of such. The state found no fault with them, or at least never expressed it. Consequently, they went on without changing one iota of their principles or mode of action, teaching in the universities, colleges, and schools: preaching in the churches; gathering together communities; giving themselves free voice in a free press, that all might hear and tell openly what they were doing, and what they purposed doing. Without a moment’s warning, without a trial or even a mockery of a trial, the state swoops down on them, seizes their property, breaks up their communities, turns them out of their homes adrift upon the world, proclaims them outlaws, banishes them the empire, save such as were born in it—one of whom happens to be a cousin to the emperor himself; and these latter they proscribe to fixed limits under the surveillance of the police.
And such is law! The law of the new German Empire: the first great step in its reconstruction!
Short of death, the state could not do more utterly to destroy a body of men. Condensed into a word, these measures are—demolition. As death alone can make their penalty supreme, the crimes of these outlaws ought to be proportionately great. What, then, are these crimes that in a moment produced such a sentence?
Here we must confess to as great an inability to answer the question as Prince Bismarck or his followers found themselves; for the very simple fact that there are no crimes to answer for. This may account in part for the extra severity of the sentence. Only make the penalty big enough, and the popular mind needs to hear nothing of the crime. Prince Bismarck knows the value of the old adage, “Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.”
When the Communists seized upon Paris, we all knew what to expect: scant justice and speedy sentence; none of your careful balancing of right and wrong. They took what they could and gave no reason. This model German government, this new power which we all tremble at, though it promises to regenerate us, follows la Commune pretty closely in this its first essay of power.
In the even balance of the law, it is useless to talk of conspiracies, parties, plots, and this, that, and the other. Show us those conspiracies; point them out in black and white; let the law lay its inexorable finger upon them, and say, such and such actions have been committed by such and such persons; here are the proofs of guilt—and we are satisfied. Though the condemned may have been our dearest friends, we have only to acknowledge the justice of the sentence, to deplore that we have been deceived in them, and to range ourselves as honest men and true citizens on the side of the law. But in the present case, we have not had one single fact produced nor attempted to be produced; not a crime in the varied category of crimes has been laid at the door of the accused. We have had instead from such men as Bismarck and his tools vague generalities of “conspiracy,” “enemies at home as well as abroad,” intermingled with fears for the safety of the new empire—“the new creation”—padded in with bluster and empty bombast, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
And in the face of this advanced nineteenth century, this era of facts, figures, and freedom, on the strength of evidence that would not suffice to condemn the veriest scoundrel that ever stood face to face with justice in the dock, a body of intellectual gentlemen, beloved in the country from which they are banished, are proclaimed outlaws, enemies of their own nation, faithless to their country and their emperor, unfit to live in the land that is proud of them, and driven without scrip or staff into the world.
Let us bear it in mind, before quitting this point, that the feeling of their countrymen as well as of the whole Catholic world is with them. We all know how a government, and particularly a strong government, can influence the public voice and manipulate votes. Well, petitions rolled in for the suppression of the Jesuits; but, strange to say, roll in as they might, a still vaster number came to retain them; and on the strength of the former, the measure was put before parliament and passed. This fact of the popular voice proclaiming itself boldly in favor of the Order is very significant when we take into account the forces arrayed against each other, though, in truth, the battle was all on the side of the government. On the one hand we have the Prince‐Chancellor working the engine of the state—his own creation—with every nerve that is in him, joining himself in the debates with speeches of the bitterest and most inflammatory character; on the other, we have a body of 708 men! Such was their number in Germany according to the statistics of last year; the total number throughout the world being 8,809.
To this, then, the contest reduces itself apparently. These are the ostensible foes. The new and powerful German government, in the first flush of an unprecedented success, headed by the “terrible Chancellor,” pitted might and main against 708 individuals, staking its very life on the contest. What evenly matched foes! For the Jesuits are the sole object of this attack, mind. Listen to Minister Delbrück in his speech on the third reading of the bill: “It is my duty, in the name of the confederate government, to repudiate anew that view of the question which identifies the Society of Jesus with the Catholic Church.... In such an allegation they can discover nothing more than an arbitrary perversion of notorious facts: a falsification which is the more to be deplored, as it might serve to deprive the measure in circles outside of this assembly of its true character, and impress on it another which it does not possess.”
This minister was the mouthpiece of Bismarck—“the hands indeed are Esau’s, but the voice is that of Jacob.” Was there ever such a picture of injured innocence and righteous indignation?
Seven hundred and eight men who spend their lives, as all the world may see, in teaching, preaching, studying, visiting the sick, performing their daily household duties, are such terrible plotters, dangerous political leaders, that they cause the great Chancellor actually to tremble in his shoes. It is a strange fact that he did not find this conspiracy out sooner. Bismarck and the Jesuits are old neighbors, not to say friends. They have lived very happily together up to yesterday. They accompanied him to his wars, and took the place that is always theirs in the battle front, among the wounded and the dying, when no succor was nigh, in the endeavor to give rest and peace to the last moments of those whom Bismarck summoned from their quiet homesteads to die for him under the empty name of glory and patriotism. Some of them were rewarded by the Emperor with the Iron Cross—the proudest decoration which he can bestow on a man; as some others of them on the other side brought their science to bear on the dismal walls of the beleaguered city, spreading out light far and near to discover the crouching foe, and they were rewarded with death. Why, then, after living in harmony so long together, does the Chancellor turn round in a moment and make such a sweeping attack upon them, only them? The body, numerically, is absolutely too insignificant for all this uproar. Why, we could pack them all into some of our hotels, and they would scarcely make an appreciable difference in the number of visitors. Had there existed a conspiracy on their part against the empire, as is alleged, is it possible that with Bismarck’s unlimited power and resources, aided by those wonderful spies of his, who so infested France that his generals knew the country better than the French themselves did—is it possible that he who esteems so highly the value of the opinion of “circles outside the empire,” could not produce one sorry fact to bring forward against them? Their most determined opponents must confess that he has utterly failed to do so; and failing to do so, he has exercised, and the majority of the German Parliament has sanctioned, a barefaced abuse of power, such as we thought had died out with the good old days of Henry VIII. and Queen Bess, or lived only with the Sultan of Turkey or the barbarous monarchs of the East. May it not recoil on their own heads!
The quarrel is scarcely confined to these limits, then, terrible as the power of the Jesuits may be. We do not intend to insult the intelligence of our readers by going into a needless defence, for the millionth time, of the Jesuit Order. Their defence is written on the world with the blood of their martyred children. Their defence rests on the fact of their very existence under such persistent and terrible persecutions as their mother, the church, only has surpassed. It rests in the record of every land upon which the sun has shone. And as for the time‐worn themes, ever welcome and ever new, of secresy, unscrupulous agents, blood, poison, daggers, and all the mysterious paraphernalia which the Jesuit of the popular imagination still bears about with him under that famous black gown, which the intellect of the age, in the persons of the London Times’ correspondents and those of the Saturday Review, are never weary of harping on, we leave them to the enlightened vision of these gentlemen, and their rivals in this respect—the concocters of the villains of fifth‐rate novels. But they object: Well, we are ready to admire your Jesuits. They live among us and we know them, and really, on the whole, they are not half such bad fellows; in fact, we may go so far as to say they are very peaceable, intelligent, respectable gentlemen. When we wish to hear a good sermon we always go to listen to them. They are very fine writers, and very clever men. They have done much, or tried to do much, for America, Africa, Japan, and every out‐of‐the‐way place; they have done something in Europe, even. But after all you must acknowledge that they are very dangerous fellows. Why, your own Pope, Sixtus V., could scarcely be prevailed upon to permit the foundation of the Order at the beginning; and another of your Popes, Clement XIV., actually condemned them. Come, now; what do you say to that?
Must we soberly sit down to answer this absurdity once more? Our readers will pardon us for merely glancing at it, and passing on to the more immediate subject of our article.
First of all, granting, which we by no means intend to do, that all that they allege is true, that it was with the greatest difficulty they even crept into existence, and that a Pope found it necessary to suppress them; there stands out in the face of such opposition the telling fact of their existence in the broad light of these open days, when no sham can pass muster, when the keen, eminently honest eye of these folk pick out the false in a twinkling, expose it, hoot it down, away with it, and there is an end. Such a fact opposed to such never‐failing opposition is a very stubborn thing, and bears with it something very like reality and truth. As for the difficulty of their beginning, that is the history of all orders in the church, so careful is she of new‐fangled notions. In fact, if our recollection serves us, that, we believe, is the history of the church herself. So much for the alleged opposition of Sixtus V. And now for the quelcher: the suppression by Clement XIV.
Here we give in: our opponents are right. Clement XIV. actually did issue a brief suppressing the Jesuits. Of course it is perfectly unnecessary to inform these theological and mediæval scholars that a brief is a very different thing from a bull; that a brief is in no wise binding on the successor of the Pontiff who issues it; that a brief has no more to do with infallibility than these gentlemen themselves have. And now we would beg them to listen a moment to the very few Jesuitical words in which we explain this whole thing away.
Clement XIV. issued this brief in exactly the same way that King John signed the Magna Charta; Charles I. the death‐warrant of Strafford; or George IV. the act for Catholic emancipation. We believe none of our readers would blame King Charles for the death of Strafford, or thank King John for Magna Charta, or George IV. for Catholic emancipation; as little do we, can we, or any one who has read the history of the time, blame Clement XIV. for the brief which suppressed the Jesuits. The timid old monk—he was consecrated Pope at what the Bourbons considered the very safe age of sixty‐four—was strong enough to resist this wicked demand of their suppression to the utmost. We must bear in mind that the demand was made by no body in the church; but only by the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Naples. “I know what you want,” he said, “you want to create a heresy and destroy the church.” Another time he writes, “I can neither censure nor abolish an institute which has been commended by nineteen of my predecessors.” In the meantime, we have a disinterested witness, happily enough from Prussia, a man whom we have no doubt even Prince Bismarck has some respect for. It is no less a person than Frederick the Great, who writes to Voltaire:
“That good Franciscan of the Vatican leaves me my dear Jesuits, who are persecuted everywhere else. I will preserve the precious seed, so as to be able one day to apply it to such as may desire again to cultivate this rare plant.”
At last, notwithstanding his entreaties and prayers, they wrung the brief from the heart of the tottering old man. They gained their point while he lost his peace of mind, and was ever after murmuring, Compulsus feci, compulsus feci. We should be more correct in saying that they only half‐ gained it; for they were wild with rage at its being only a brief. What they wanted was a bull: destruction, not suspension. And such is the history of the famous suppression of the Jesuits.
To make the story complete, we may as well add that, as soon as the brief became known, Switzerland, knowing that it was the production of the Bourbon faction and not of the Pope, refused to submit to it and deprive the Jesuits of their colleges. Catherine of Russia interceded in their favor, and gave the poor Pope a crumb of comfort in the few days that were left him. Well did he say, “This suppression will be the death of me.” While Frederick the Great—but he shall speak for himself, and we commend his utterance to Prince Bismarck. He writes to his agent at Rome:
“Abbé Columbini, you will inform all who desire to know the fact, but without ostentation and affectation, and you will moreover seek an opportunity of signifying soon to the Pope and his chief minister, that, with regard to the Jesuits, I am determined to retain them in my states. In the treaty of Breslau, I guaranteed the status quo of the Catholic religion, and I have never found better priests in every respect. You will further add that, as I belong to the class of heretics, the Pope cannot relieve me from the obligation of keeping my word, nor from the duty of a king and an honest man.”
These words would be weakened by comment. We pass with relief from this worn‐out subject, and wish our adversaries joy of their mare’s nest. Men who have won the praise of their bitterest foes need small defence from their friends. We leave them in the hands of such men as Voltaire, Lord Macaulay, Sir James Stephens, Bancroft, Prescott, Parkman, and a host of other eminent men of all nations and all creeds save our own. When those who carp at the Jesuits have studied and refuted these writers to their own satisfaction, they may be in a fair way to meet us.
Now we are met with the further objection: if the Jesuits are such an excellent body as we make them; as Protestant historians and infidel writers make them; as Catherine of Russia, as Frederick the Great, the founder of the Prussian empire, and in this respect the proto‐Bismarck, make them—why should Prince Bismarck pick such a deadly quarrel with them?
Have we possibly been mistaken in him all this time? Have we had another Luther lurking beneath the person of the burly Chancellor? Has his aim been all along not merely to create a German empire, but a German religion and a German popedom? Has his zeal been inspired by religion? In his speech the other day he protested against the pretensions of the Pope “as a Protestant and an evangelical Christian.” We congratulate the evangelical Christians, whoever they may be, on their new apostle. For ourselves, we could not help laughing, and thinking that the height of solemn farce had at length been reached. The words reminded us of one Oliver Cromwell, who, in common with a well‐known kinsman of his, had a knack of “citing Scripture for his purpose.”
No; we confess it, notwithstanding this solemn affirmation from his own mouth, and before the German parliament too—(we think the printer must have omitted the “laughter” at the end)—we cannot bring ourselves to look upon the Chancellor as a “vessel of election,” though he may be a “vessel of wrath.” We consider that his worst enemy could scarcely say a harder thing of him than that he was a religious man. His is “Ercles’ vein: a tyrant’s vein.” The Emperor “is more condoling.” Now he presents the picture of a religious man par excellence. Why, his nostrils discerned a sanctified odor rising up from those reeking fields of France; and he could pray—how well!—after he had won the victory. But his Chancellor is a man of another complexion. He found a rich humor in it all. We have not forgotten that grim joke of his yet about the starving and doomed city. Is he not the prince of jesters? No, however bad may be our opinion of him, we will not accuse him of religiousness.
Where, then, lies the difficulty between them? The answer to this necessitates a review of the whole present question of Bismarck with the Papacy; and we must beg our readers’ indulgence in carrying them over such beaten ground in order to get at the root of it all, fix it in our minds, and keep it there, so that no specious reasoning may blind us to the reality of it, to the true point at issue.
We recollect the position of the Papacy prior to the Franco‐German war. The Pope was supported in his dominions by the arm of France—we say France advisedly; not by Napoleon. The war came and smote this right arm. Victor Emanuel stepped in; took possession: coolly told the Pope he would allow him to live in the Vatican. The world shrieked with delight at seeing a powerless old man reft of the little that was left him. The world was astonished at the generosity of Victor Emanuel in allowing the Pope a fraction of what happened to be his own property. The world looked for the regeneration of Italy, and it has had it. The New York Herald furnished us with the increase of crime since Victor Emanuel’s possession: if we recollect rightly, it is about fourfold. So the Pope rested, as he still rests, a virtual, in plain truth an actual, prisoner in the Vatican, without a helping hand stretched forth to him. Came his jubilee, and with it kindly and solemn gratulations from a quarter least expected—the new emperor. Our eyes began to turn wistfully to the new power, and people whispered, Who knows? perhaps our Holy Father has at last found a defender. Here was Bismarck’s opportunity of winning the hearts of the Catholic world, of binding us to him with the strongest chain that can link man to man. Time wore on, and the gloss wore off. Home questions arose, the Chancellor began to feel his way, to insinuate little measures such as the secularization of schools, which the Catholics, strange to say, found reason to object to. Prince Bismarck grew a little impatient; he was anxious to conciliate the Catholics as far as he possibly could; but really “his patience was nearly exhausted.” Our golden hopes began to grow dim. We have heard this sort of thing before; we hear it every day, from some whose opinions we respect; and we know what it means. It is the old cry, “We have piped to you and you will not dance; we have played to you, and you do not sing.” You are irreconcilable; there is no meeting you on debatable ground. And that is just the point. Our religion has no debatable ground, for it is founded on faith, and not on what goes by the name of free investigation. So that whether it be Bismarck or nearer friends of ours who would force or woo us in turn from our position, we must meet them in matters that touch our faith with the inevitable “Non possumus.”
Prince Bismarck began to grow weary of us; and he soon showed signs of his peculiar form of weariness. He scarcely agrees with “what can’t be cured must be endured”; his motto is rather, “What can’t be cured must be killed.” The secularization of schools was carried in the face of the protest of the Prussian Catholic bishops, assembled at Fulda. The solemnization of the sacrament of marriage is handed over to the civil jurisdiction, the same as any other contract. Still not a whisper against the Jesuits, though, as we have already quoted, his quarrel is purely and entirely with them. We pass on to the crowning act in his list of grievances: the embassy to the Court of the Vatican.
What a noble thing it looked in the all powerful Chancellor to despatch an ambassador from the high and mighty German empire, the mightiest in the world, to the old man pent up in the Vatican! What a condescension to acknowledge that such a person existed!
Of course the Pope would receive such marks of favor with tears of gratitude and open arms. What! is it possible? He actually rejects the ambassador, and sends him back on Bismarck’s hands. Well, well! wonders will never cease.
Now there never was such a tempest in a tea‐pot as the explosion this carefully laid train created. The very fact of sending an ambassador at all to a monarch acknowledges the perfect right of that monarch to receive or reject him as he pleases; and to common sense there is an end of the question. The Pope did not choose to receive this ambassador; he had every right to exercise his freedom of action; he exercised his right, but Prince Bismarck’s sensibilities were hurt. It was not so much the fact of rejection as the Pope’s want of politeness that afflicted him. In his speech before the Reichstag he declared that such a thing was without a parallel in the history of diplomacy. What martinets these Germans are for punctilio! We remember Mr. Disraeli actually refusing to accept as sufficient reason for the late war the “breach of etiquette at a German watering‐place.” Now, with all due respect, Prince Bismarck knew, as those he addressed knew, as all the world knows, that this statement was anything but correct. Ambassadors have been rejected before now, and probably will be again. In fact, had certain individuals of this class to and from ourselves been rejected at the outset, it would have saved national difficulties, or at least wounded feelings and displays of school‐boy recriminations scarcely creditable to such high and mighty folk as gentlemen of the diplomatic body. But there is more in the question than this. The Cardinal‐Prince Hohenlohe is a prince of the church. He is in addition attached to the Pope’s household. He gave himself freely and voluntarily to the service of the church. He is not a mere ordinary member of the Catholic body. He stands in relation to the Pope as Von Moltke, the Dane, stands in relation to the Emperor William; as those who were once fellow‐citizens of ours stand in relation to the Khedive, whose service they have entered; as Carl Schurz and millions of our fellow‐citizens stand in relation to the government of the United States. When the Italians entered Rome, Cardinal Hohenlohe left it; and the next the Pope heard of him was that his own servant had been appointed ambassador to his court from Berlin! Just as though tomorrow we received intimation that a new ambassador had been appointed to us from England, and that ambassador was no less a person than—Minister Schenck. We can imagine the New York Herald’s comments on such a proceeding. And yet Prince Bismarck is sore aggrieved at a breach of political etiquette.
We think we need trouble our readers with no further reasons for Cardinal Hohenlohe’s rejection. What share the cardinal had in the whole proceeding we do not know. Probably Prince Bismarck would eventually have found himself sadly disappointed in his ambassador had he been accepted. S. Thomas of Canterbury made an excellent chancellor till the king, against his wishes, compelled him to enter new service. But it is very clear that if Bismarck, as we do not believe, ever contemplated the possibility of the cardinal’s acceptance at Rome, what he wanted was a tool, one who, to use his own very remarkable words, “would have had rare opportunities of conveying our own version of events and things to his [the Pope’s] ear. This was our sole object in the nomination rejected, I am sorry to say, by Pio Nono.”
We have no doubt of it: it was his sole object; and the acceptance or rejection of his ambassador was one to him; for Prince Bismarck is generally provided with two strings to his bow. Had the cardinal been accepted, he believed he had a churchman devoted to his interests, another Richelieu; his rejection suited him still better; for he could now declare open war, and throw the onus of it on his adversaries. Through the whole proceeding we detect the fine hand of the man who forced on the Danish, Austrian, and French wars. Prince Bismarck must not be surprised if, in the face of such speaking examples, we come at last to have a faint conception of his strategy. His policy always is, and always has been, to egg his adversary on; to goad him into striking first, taking care all the while that he himself is well prepared. They strike, and he crushes them—all in self‐defence. He is exonerated in the eyes of the world. He can tell the others they provoked him to the contest; he can say to them, “Your blood be on your own heads.”
And so this carefully prepared train exploded. It looked such a noble, generous, friendly action to send an ambassador to the Pontiff’s court in the present position of the Pontiff, that, when the ambassador was calmly rejected, the world could not believe its ears; and Prince Bismarck entertains a very high respect for those ears notwithstanding their length. What could we say but that it was too much? There was no conciliating these Romanists and Ultramontanes, do what you would. It was clear that the Pope was altogether out of place in these days; and his obstinacy only served to keep very respectable bodies of men from agreeing and living neighborly together, and so on ad nauseam. Thus Bismarck could afford to froth and fume about insult, unprecedented actions, etiquette, and so on; urge upon the German nation that they had been insulted in the person of their august emperor, who seems as touchy on points of etiquette as a French dancing‐master; and ring the changes up and down till he closed with the loud‐sounding twang, “Neither the emperor nor myself are going to Canossa!”
Could anything be more theatrically effective? Could anything be more transparently shallow?
Well, in the face of this awful outrage and unprecedented provocation, what does the wrathful Chancellor do? March on Rome; declare war against the Catholics; utterly exterminate them; smite them hip and thigh? Nothing of the kind. He not only lets the Pope alone from whom he received the outrage, but he actually looks about for another ambassador, “in the event of unlooked‐for eventualities.” He entertains the greatest possible respect for Catholics. Indeed, he seems to be aware that the small fraction of 14,000,000 of them go to swell his empire; the most Catholic of whom, by the way, bore the brunt of the battle in France. He accepts his rebuff more in sorrow than in wrath. He lets the whole question slip; he has no quarrel with the 14,000,000; but there are 708 of them whom he pounces upon as the policeman on the small boy; and nobody can quarrel with him for letting the steam of his wrath off on this small body, which is at the bottom of every mischief that turns up.
Is not this excellent fooling? He says to the Catholics: I will not touch you; you and I are very excellent friends; I will not touch your mother—the church; I will content myself with murdering her eldest son, who is the cause of all the trouble between us.
Now, we may fairly ask the question: Is the quarrel confined to these limits? Why does Bismarck turn aside from the church, from the Pope who so angered him, from the bishops who protested against his laws and refused to submit to them, from the Centre in the Reichstag who so boldly, calmly, and logically oppose him?—why does he turn from all these legitimate foes, and fall on the small body of 708 men who compose the Jesuit Order in Prussia?
The answer is not difficult. The Jesuits as a body represent the intellect of the church. They represent indeed more, much more, than this; for intellect, great as it is, is not the highest thing in the eye of God or of his church; but our present point deals with their intellectual power. The Pall Mall Gazette said the other day, writing on this question:
“One of the most remarkable traits of the Society of Jesus has always been its literary productiveness. Wherever its members went, no sooner had they founded a home, a college, a mission, than they began to write books. [We beg to call the attention of those who would fain make the church the mother of ignorance, to testimony of this kind from such a source.] The result has been a vast literature, not theological alone, though chiefly that, but embracing almost every branch of knowledge.”
The Jesuits in Germany, as in all countries where they have freedom, possessed the best schools and colleges. They made themselves heard and felt in the press. “In Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium,” says the journal above quoted, “the most trustworthy critics are of opinion that there are no better written newspapers than those under Jesuit control.” It says further, and nobody will accuse the Pall Mall Gazette of being a Jesuit organ:
“Why indeed is their Order so dangerous, if it be not on account of the ardent, disinterested conviction of its members, their indomitable courage and energy, their spirit of self sacrifice, to say nothing of their intelligence and their learning? The effect of all this can but be heightened by persecution. On the other side [Austria, if we recollect rightly], the danger which the existence of the Order in the country really offers is much less than it is supposed to be. In Germany, it does not really exist.”
These extracts from various numbers of one of the leading rationalistic organs in England, which it were easy to supplement by many others of the same import, notably from the Saturday Review and the Spectator, we merely present here to such of our non‐Catholic readers as might receive our own testimony of whatever value with a certain suspicion. They embody very sound reasons for Bismarck’s unprovoked and unlawful attack. We purpose going a little deeper into the question.
The Jesuits now, as always, small as their number is, were the leading Catholic teachers in Germany among high and low. Their access to the chairs of the universities made them to a great extent the moulders of thought, the teachers of the teachers, the great intellectual bulwark against the spread of rationalism and every form of false doctrine which strives to creep in to the hearth of the commonwealth and endanger its existence. As they were the strenuous upholders of Bismarck in all that was right; as their influence against the maxims of the International, though not so immediate and showy as his, was infinitely deeper and more lasting, so when he would intrench upon rights that are inalienable to every man of whatever complexion and creed, they turned and boldly faced the Chancellor himself. Were the character which their opponents would fix upon them true, they had their opportunity of showing it—of going with him at least at the outset. He would not have disdained the assistance of such able lieutenants. But instead, the wily Jesuits, the men of the world, the plotters, the schemers, the Order that is untrue to everything and everybody save itself, throws itself with undiminished ardor, with a devotion worthy of the fatalist, with all their heart and soul, into a losing cause; into a cause which they have ever supported; which has been losing these eighteen hundred and seventy‐two years, but which has never lost.
These considerations bring us to the root of the question.
This marvellous German empire, this more than a nine days’ wonder, has been convulsed into life; and sudden convulsions are liable to as sudden relapses. Bismarck’s heart is in it; he is the corner‐stone; it is built upon him; and he of all men knows on what a rocking foundation it is built. Listen to his mouthpiece once more, Minister Delbrück, in his speech on the third reading of the bill against the Jesuits:
“We live under a very new system of government, called into existence by mighty political convulsions: and I hold that we should commit a great error in abandoning ourselves to the delusion that everything is accomplished and perfected because the Imperial German constitution has been published in the official organ of the empire. For a long time to come we shall have to keep carefully in mind that the constitution—the new creation—has enemies not only abroad but at home; and if the representatives of the empire arrive at the conviction that among these internal enemies an organ is to be reckoned which, while furnished with great intellectual and material means, and endowed with a rare organization, steadily pursues a fixed inimical aim, it has a perfect right to meet and frustrate the anticipated attack.”
We have shown how nobly they met and frustrated the anticipated attack—a rather summary mode, we submit, of dealing with those who may be enemies, for it has grown into only an “anticipated attack” now. Worse and worse for the wielders of law. It may be as well to note also that the Chancellor lets nothing slip. He allows the “great intellectual means” to go; but the “great material means” is a far more important thing. He sticks to that. There must be something of the Israelite nature in him. He out‐Shylocks Shylock. As in France, so here; he is not content with the “pound of flesh,” he will have in addition the “monies.” After all, what is there to surprise us in this? The great Chancellor, who coldly wrung such griping terms from bleeding France, could scarcely be expected to leave to the church the great material possessions, that is to say, the schools, seminaries, and churches, which belonged to her children.
But to resume: The first sentence of this quotation strikes the key‐note of the whole movement. And, we avow it, Prince Bismarck is right. This empire has enemies at home as well as abroad, and the Jesuits are in the van. All Catholics are its enemies; and we make bold to say that all free men, and particularly all Americans, are its enemies. For it is not a German but a Bismarck empire; a Bismarck creation, that started into life men scarce knew how; a momentary thing for mutual defence, but never to be made, as he has made it, as powerful an instrument of tyranny as ever was forged to bind and grind a free‐born people in fetters of iron for ever down. Never, in the vexed history of nations, has power, and such awful power, fallen into the hands of any one man at such an opportune moment for good; and never, at the very outset, has it been so basely and so openly abused. The state of Europe, at this moment, is deplorable; revolution in Spain, revolution in Italy, revolution in France. The government, the supreme control of the whole continent, shifting from hand to hand; yesterday it was Napoleon, to‐day ’tis Bismarck: Europe cannot stand these successive shocks, from empire to anarchy, from anarchy to empire, without warning and without ceasing. Under all smoulders the burning lava, breaking out from time to time in fitful eruptions—here the Carbonari, there la Commune, in other places as trades‐unions—which threatens to overwhelm and engulf the whole in one red ruin. It is simply the evil effect of evil spirits working upon dissatisfied and ill‐governed bodies of men. While over all, in the dim treacherous background, looms the vast giant power of Russia, that seems to slumber, but is only biding the event, and shows itself in dangerous signs from time to time. Europe yearns for something fixed, permanent, and strong. Napoleon held it—failed; and the reins fell into the hands of Bismarck. He commences his reign by declaring war against the only element that can humanize these conflicting masses, and cause this wild chaos of passion to adhere, coalesce, and become one again as its Creator made it: religion. Religion alone can make them bow to law; for religion alone can teach them that there is a law that is above, and gives a reason for that law which they themselves make for themselves. And what has Bismarck done with this power that was given him?
To begin with, he has banished religion from the schools, where it has flourished to the mutual satisfaction of Catholics and Protestants ever since its establishment. He has profaned the sacrament of marriage and handed it over to the civil courts. We will omit the expulsion of the Jesuits now. His empire is the most autocratic and aristocratic in Europe. Almost as a consequence, it is the most military. To make assurance doubly sure, he is making it more military still; not a nation of peaceful men, but a nation of warriors. Instead of allowing the weary nation a rest after a strife where centuries were condensed into a few months, and fabulous armies shattered in days, the military laws are made more stringent than ever. The Prussian system of service is to prevail throughout the empire, notwithstanding Bavaria’s remonstrance. Von Moltke’s declarations in his late speech are very clear and concise. Summed up, they mean discipline, discipline, discipline; and this is Bismarck’s word also. To produce this perfection of discipline, the power of the state must be supreme in every point. Nothing must escape it; nothing must evade it. The state must be religion, the state must be God, and Herr von Bismarck is the state. This sounds like exaggerated language; but Bismarck shall speak for himself:
“I may tell the preceding speaker [Herr Windhorst] that, as far as Prussia is concerned, the Prussian cabinet are determined to take measures which shall henceforth render it impossible for Prussians who are priests of the Roman Catholic Church to assert with impunity that they will be guided by canon law rather than Prussian law.”
This referred immediately to the case of the Bishop of Ermeland and others, for excommunicating disobedient priests.
The Bishop of Ermeland was ordered to withdraw his excommunication, because it might affect those who came under it in their civil capacity, under pain of suspension by the government. The answer of the Bishop, Monsignor Krementz, was admirable in every way, and we regret that our limited space compels us to exclude it. It is enough to say that the bishop shows, beyond the possibility of doubt, that he is actually within the law, by a special provision of the Prussian Constitution, which declares in Article XII. “that the enjoyment of civil and political rights is independent of religious professions,” while he declares at the same time that in such matters he is not bound by the civil law. Those opposed to him in faith must support him in this. Recent decisions in the English courts on behalf of the Established Church support him. And we need hardly waste the time of our readers by entering into such a question. If a government acknowledges a church at all, it must allow that church to work in its own way so long as it does not intrench upon the civic rights of the subject. The men in question, who were condemned, received their orders and powers of teaching, preaching, and saying Mass from the church, to which they made the most solemn oaths of entire obedience in matters of doctrine. If afterwards they grew discontented, they possessed the civil right to leave it. But as honest men, how could they remain in it, receiving emolument from it, using its property, and all the while persisting in preaching doctrines contrary to it, and endeavoring to destroy it? Those who defend the decision of the German government must allow that when, as not unfrequently happens, a Protestant clergyman becomes a convert to our faith, he may still abide in the Protestant church, preaching the Catholic faith to his congregation.
Our battle, then, and in this we are all Jesuits, is with the Bismarck empire, with the supreme power of the state. These ideas of Prince Bismarck are not new; they are as old as old Rome. The Roman was taught from his infancy that he belonged body and soul to the state; and no doubt Rome owed much of her vast power and boundless acquisitions to the steady inculcation of this materialistic doctrine from childhood upwards. “The divinity of the emperor” is not far removed from the divinity of the Chancellor. It is a very simple doctrine, and no doubt very convenient for those whom it benefits. But unfortunately for it and its defenders, One came into this world to tell us that we were “to render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This is the Catholic golden rule of politics, as we believe it to be of all orthodox Protestants. Prince Bismarck will excuse our obeying Jesus Christ in preference to him.
And here is the reason for the expulsion of the Jesuits: They are the ablest exponents of these doctrines, not necessarily the most earnest—all Catholics are alike in that; but their education has made them as a body the ablest, and therefore they are driven out from the schools, colleges, universities, and churches; from the land utterly. And by whom are they replaced?
By the tools of Bismarck, by men who are ready to preach his doctrines “for a consideration.” We had a sample of them the other day at the opening of one of the universities in Alsace. The correspondent of the London Daily News, among others, described them to us: how they fought like wild beasts to get something to eat, and attacked it with their fingers; how, at the end of the day, they, the German professors, reclined in the gutters, or reeled drunk through the public streets.
And now, to complete our glance at this very large subject, a word on the ambassador to Rome that is to be. While Bismarck is still determined to send one there, he leaves us no room to doubt of his intentions in the significant words—“unlooked‐for eventualities.” That is to say, he looks to the speedy prospect of the present Pontiff’s death, and intends to affect the election of his successor. While refraining from remarking on the outspoken indelicacy of this, we do not at all doubt his intention, as little as we doubt concerning the prospect of its success. It is perfectly true that when the church had some influence over the state—and how that influence was exercised, let the spread of education, the abolition of serfdom, the persistent defense of liberty, and prevention of so many wars speak—the three great Catholic powers, France, Spain, and Germany, had a veto on the election of the Sovereign Pontiff, which they duly exercised in the persons of their respective representatives. These representatives were heard and felt in the councils of the church, and the measures they brought forward taken into due consideration. But we were under the impression that the relations between church and state had been altered to some purpose in our days. Lot has parted from Abram. The state said to the church: Our compact is at an end; you have nothing more to do with us; you may fulminate your thunderbolts as you please, and let them flash abroad through the world. We laugh. Their day is passed. Papistical pyrotechnics may frighten women and children, but we are too old for that. We know the secret of it all; that at bottom the thunderbolt is only a squib, and must fall flat. The church accepted the situation. The state had proclaimed the separation final and eternal. It could scarcely be surprised at the church taking it at its word. It could scarcely be surprised to find the doors of the Vatican Council closed against it. It can scarcely be surprised to know that the veto no longer has force—no longer exists in fact; least of all could it be expected to have force in the hands of a Protestant and heretical power, even when held in the safe keeping of the pious Emperor William and the “Christian and Evangelical” Prince Bismarck.
One effect, and we think a very important one, has grown out of all this which we surmise Prince Bismarck scarcely counted upon. We believe the mass of thinking men, whatever their sympathies might have been prior to and during the late war in France, once they beheld the great German empire an accomplished fact, wished it a hearty Godspeed; for it held in its hands the intellectual, the moral, and that very important thing in these days, the physical force sufficient to regenerate Europe. We looked to it with anxiety to see whither it would tend; we looked to it with hope. Our anxieties have been realized, our hopes dashed to the ground.
Prince Bismarck has alienated all Catholics and all lovers of freedom. And our eyes turn once more, all the chivalry in our natures turns, to the rising form of his late prostrate foe. We are amazed at the intense vitality of the French nation. Bismarck but “scotched the snake, not killed it; ’twill close and be itself.” All our hearts run out to it in the noble, the marvellous efforts it is making for self‐regeneration. And if France, as we now believe, will, and at no very distant date, regain the throne from which she has been hurled, the hand that hurled her thence will, by a strange fatality, have the greatest share in reinstating her. “The moral columns of the new German empire have begun to tremble as though shaken by an earthquake,” says the Lutheran Ecclesiastical Gazette, after deploring, as we have done, all the recent measures that have passed.
As for the manner in which the Catholic Church will come out of this trial, we will let the Protestant press itself speak. We have already heard it in a half‐hearted way in England and among ourselves. The Kreuz‐ zeitung, the organ of the orthodox Protestants, speaks more plainly:
“An eminent Catholic, a member of parliament, said lately that the outlook of the Roman Church in Germany was never more favorable than it is to‐day. It seems that this judgment is not without foundation. The defections produced by the old Catholics are without signification: we have to state a fact of altogether another importance. Formerly, the greater part of the German bishops, the greater part of the lower clergy, and almost all the laics, were adversaries of the new dogma [we give those words of the Kreuz‐zeitung, with our own reservations as to faith in them], but now that the council has spoken, we only find thirty‐ two apostate priests; that is an immeasurable victory won by the Roman Church.... Though the Roman Church thus appears day by day more and more in the ascendant, the Evangelical Church sees itself with deliberate purpose pushed down the inclined plane, or, what is still worse, the government does not seem to be aware of its existence. We have been able to remark this recently in the discussion on the paragraph relating to the clergy in the Reichstag; and lately again on the occasion of the law on the inspection of schools. In the debates, at least those which concern the manifestations of the government, the question has been altogether with reference to the Roman Church. There has been no mention made, or scarcely any, of the Evangelical Church. The impression produced on every impartial observer must be this: the Roman Church is a power, a factor which must be taken into account; the Evangelical Church is not. This disdain is, for the latter, the most telling blow which can be inflicted upon it, and which must aid in strengthening the cause of Rome in a manner that must become of the deepest significance for the future. After all that, it is not strange to see the adherents of the Roman cause conceive the loftiest hopes.”
The Volksblatt von Halle states that “the Catholic Church has become neither more timid nor weaker, but more prudent, bolder, of greater consideration, and in every respect more powerful than ever.” We might go on multiplying such extracts, but our space forbids us.
The result then to us, to Catholics, is not doubtful, as the result of persecution never is. It is strange that such a keen‐sighted, eminently practical man as Prince Bismarck should become so suddenly blind to all the teachings of history. The meanest religion that exists among men thrives on persecution even when it has nothing better to support it. As for us, as for the Jesuits particularly, “suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe.” Their great Founder left it to them as his last legacy. And indeed, the measure he meted out to them has been filled to overflowing. While we are thus strong in faith, while we know that Prince Bismarck is only beating the air in his vain and impious efforts to extinguish that fire which God kindled and bade to burn, while we are calmly confident that he will shatter his mightiest forces against the Rock of Ages, and come back from the conflict battered and bruised—finding out too late that he made the one grand mistake of his life, which greater than he have made before him—still we cannot shut our eyes to the fact of the great injuries he is inflicting upon us, and the many fresh trials imposed upon the church and our Holy Father in his declining years.
What, then, are we to do?
We have power, and we must use it. We have voices, and we must make them heard. We have the silent, if not the outspoken sympathy of powerful bodies opposed to us in creed. We have the heart, when we show ourselves, of every free man and hater of oppression in any form. We have the genius of our own constitution on our side. We must speak out plainly and boldly as Catholic Americans. We must do what has already been done in London at the meeting in S. James’ Hall, presided over by the Duke of Norfolk; where peer and ploughman, gentle and simple, priest and layman, were one in protesting against this slavish policy of Prince Bismarck. Let us do the like. Let our eminent men, and they are not few, call us together here in New York, in every city throughout the nation—in behalf not only of our suffering brethren, but of those rights which are inalienable to every man that is born into this world—in protestation against a principle and a policy which, if they found favor here, would sap the life of our nation, and throw us back into the old slavery that we drowned in our best blood. Our standpoint is this: as there are rights which the state does not and cannot give us, those rights are inviolable, and the state cannot touch them. To God alone we owe them; to God alone we give them back, and are answerable for them. The state is not supreme in all things, and never shall be. These are the principles we defend, and are happy in being their persecuted champions.
It is not merely a question of creed; Bismarck does not attack a creed. It is a broad question of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of absolutism and freedom. Power was never given into the hands of the German Chancellor to be abused at the very outset, to oppress his subjects, Catholic and Protestant. It is not and it must not be supreme; and we very much mistake the genius of the great German people if they long allow it to continue so. It is not for him to deprive 14,000,000 of his people of their natural rights; the right to educate their children as they think proper, and as the law allowed them; the right to consider marriage a sacrament sanctified by God, and not a civil contract, to be loosed or unloosed at will by a magistrate; the right of listening to their most eminent teachers; the right of holding the seminaries and churches, built by their own money, for the use of their own priests; the right, above all, of believing that there is a God beyond all governments, from whom all government, which people make for themselves, springs; that God has set a law in the conscience which they must obey, even though princes and kings rage against it, and that it is not in the nature of things for this first and final law of conscience to clash with any other unless that other be wrong. When Prince Bismarck succeeds in eradicating these inborn notions from the minds of the German people, he will then have attained his supremacy; but that then is—never.
Choice In No Choice.
I know not which to love the more: The morning, with its liquid light; Or evening, with its tender lore Of silver lake and purple height.
To morn I say, “The fairer thou: For when thy beauties melt away, ’Tis but to breathe on heart and brow The gladness of the perfect day.”
And o’er the water falls a hue That cannot sate a poet’s eye: As though Our Lady’s mantle threw Its shadow there—and not the sky.
But when has glared the torrid‐noon, And afternoon is gasping low, The sunset brings a sweeter boon Than ever graced the orient’s glow.
And I: “As old wine unto new, Art thou to morn, belovèd eve! And what if dies thy every hue In blankest night? We may not grieve.
“Thy fading lulls us as we dote. Nor always blank the genial night: For when the moon is well afloat, Thou mellowest into amber light.”
Is each, then, fairer in its turn? ’Tis hence the music. Not for me To wish a dayless morn, or yearn For nightless eve—if these could be.
But give me both—the new, the old: And let my spirit sip the wine From silver now, and now from gold: ’Tis wine alike—alike divine!
LAKE GEORGE, July, 1872.
Fleurange.
By Mrs. Craven, Author of “A Sister’s Story.”
Translated From The French, With Permission.
Part Third. The Banks Of The Neckar.
“Brama assai—poco spera—nulla chiede.”—Tasso.
XXXIV.
“Return, Gabrielle! if possible, return at once; at all events, come soon.” These simple words from Clement to his cousin give no idea of the agitation with which they were written. Fleurange herself would never have suspected it, and less than ever at the arrival of a letter at once so affecting and so opportune. She even paid very little attention to her cousin’s assurances as to the inutility of any further sacrifices for the sake of his family. Clement, however, had written her the exact truth. The situation of Professor Dornthal’s family was of course very different from what it once was, but the change was far from being as great as they had all anticipated and prepared for a year before, when ruin overwhelmed and scattered them.
To leave the house in which they had lived twenty‐five years; to see all the objects that adorned it offered for sale; to give up the place where the happiest moments of their lives had been spent; all this at first excluded the possibility of anticipating anything but privation and sadness without alleviation. Madame Dornthal herself did not look forward to the future in any other light, and the courage with which she left her native city was the same she would have shown had her husband been condemned to suffer exile; she would have shared it with him, endeavoring to soften it as much as possible, but without anticipating the least possibility of joy in their changed lives.
Joy, however, returned. It not unfrequently happens that reverses endured without murmuring receive unexpected compensations.
In the first place, their new home, though simple, and even rustic compared with their old one, was neither gloomy nor inconvenient. Two spacious rooms on the ground floor allowed the whole family to assemble not only for their meals, but the evening reunions—their greatest pleasure when all the absent ones returned. A small garden surrounded the house, and a grass‐plot extended down to the river with a covered alley on each side. This place, called Rosenheim, merited its name by the abundance of flowers, and especially of roses, which on every side cheered the eye and embalmed the air. Their very first impressions, therefore, were quite different from what they had apprehended. Besides, Clement had reserved two or three of his father’s favorite paintings, several engravings, as well as a number of other familiar and precious objects, which preceded them, and were there, like old friends, to welcome them.
In the next place, the professor’s rare collections, and the works of art he had selected with so correct a taste and such profound knowledge, proved far more valuable than they had anticipated, so that, if no longer rich, an independence more than sufficient was assured them. Moreover, Clement’s prospects were exceedingly promising. His extraordinary ability was soon recognized to a degree that justified Wilhelm Müller’s foresight. To tell the truth, fortune is not so blind and capricious as she is often represented, and if she sometimes bestows her favors on those who are unworthy of them, there are some she reserves exclusively for persevering industry, perfect integrity, shrewd calculation, strict economy, and undeviating exactness. These virtues—and not chance—lay the foundations of durable and honorably acquired fortunes, and where they are lacking the greatest skill does not prevent them from being frequently lost in a day.
It was one of these legitimate fortunes Clement was worthy of and capable of acquiring. His success was already sufficient to dispense his father from the share of labor he had taken upon himself, but he could not turn him from his purpose, and soon perceived he ought not to attempt it. He derived the poetry of his nature from his father, and was indebted to his mother for his force and energy. Of these the professor, with all the rare and exquisite gifts of his mind and heart, was entirely destitute. A profound dejection mingled with his apparent resignation to misfortune, which sprang from the humiliating conviction—felt too late—of having brought it on himself by a want of foresight, and thus being responsible for the ruin of his family.
He needed something to divert him from this rooted idea, and therefore the necessity of exerting himself to fulfil the duties of the position he had accepted, and of pursuing his favorite studies, was too beneficial to make it desirable he should renounce it. His new life, no longer burdened by any material anxiety, gradually became both active and serene, and when the family assembled together, everything would have had nearly the same aspect as before, had it not been for the vacancies around the hearth. But after the arrival of Hilda and her husband, and subsequently of Dr. Leblanc, the evenings at Rosenheim became once more cheerful and almost lively. Ludwig and Hansfelt resumed their favorite topics of conversation; Hilda’s beauty and happiness delighted her father; the merry voices of the children resounded anew; and Clement often favored them as of yore with a lively air on his violin, but more frequently, at his father’s request, with some graver melody, which he would play with such skill and so pathetic an expression as to surprise Hilda, who asked him one day how he had found time in his busy life to develop his talent to such a degree. Clement did not at first hear, he was so absorbed in some strain of Beethoven’s, which gave forth a heart‐rending accent under his bow. She repeated her question.
“I often play in the evening at Frankfort,” he then replied. “Müller and his wife accompany me. Music refreshes me after the tedious labors of the day, and this prevents me from losing what you are so kind as to call my talent.”
Such was the state of things Fleurange would have found at her new home had she arrived a month sooner. In that case, her involuntary sadness might have excited more attention. But the serenity of the household, so recently regained, had been violently disturbed again. It was not surprising therefore that tears should mingle with her joy at seeing once more those she loved, especially as among them she found Dr. Leblanc’s sister in mourning for him, and she had to be informed of another misfortune, scarcely hinted at in Clement’s letter.
Professor Dornthal’s life was indeed no longer in danger, but his memory was greatly impaired, and his noble mind, if not extinct, only gave out a feeble and vacillating light. This was hoped to be merely a transient state, which time and absolute cessation from labor would soon remedy. But it was a severe affliction to them all, and Clement for the first time saw his mother’s courage waver. It was with truly a sad smile Madame Dornthal saw her husband recognize and embrace Fleurange without manifesting the slightest surprise at her presence, or realizing the time and distance that had separated them. It was the same with Clara; but when she placed her infant in his arms, there was a momentary reawakening of the invalid’s torpid memory. Tears came into his eyes; he embraced the child, murmured “God bless him!” and then gave him back to his mother, looking at him with an expression that filled them for a moment with hope. Then the gleam vanished, and he fell back into his former state.
In consequence of all these circumstances, when the family assembled in the evening in the large salon on the ground floor, every brow was clouded, all the young smiling faces were grave and anxious, and the same cause for sadness weighed on every heart. Perhaps this was best for Fleurange, who, ever ready to forget herself, seemed to feel, and indeed only felt the sorrows of the rest.
Ah! how her sadness, which seemed only sympathy, touched one person that night as he gazed at her in silent admiration. She was sitting between his sisters, the lamp suspended from the ceiling threw a halo around her charming face, and the voice, so dear and so long unheard, resounded for the first time in this place where everything seemed transformed by her presence!
The evening, so sad for all the rest, was not so for Clement. Even his anxiety for his father was suspended: he felt a renewed hope for him as well as for everything else—yes, every thing. He no longer took a dark view of things: he was, as it were, intoxicated with hope. With what a sweet confiding look she had pressed his hand! In what a tone she cried: “Dear Clement, how happy I am to see you again”! Could the future, then, be as doubtful as he had so recently feared? As to the smiles of fortune, he no longer doubted: he was sure of winning them henceforth. He once thought himself inefficient, but he was mistaken. Might he not also be mistaken in thinking himself incapable of ever pleasing?—To this question he heard no other reply but the quickened pulsations of his heart, and the rippling of the water flowing past the seat to which he had betaken himself on the banks of the river.
Meanwhile, Fleurange and her cousins went up‐stairs. Clement soon saw them all talking together in low tones on the large wooden gallery that extended around the house, and on which all the windows opened. Then they retired; but the light that shone for the first time that night was a long time visible, and Clement did not quit his post till he saw it was extinguished.
XXXV.
Fleurange gradually resumed the habits of domestic life—once the realization of all her dreams—and then, only then, she realized the extent and depth of the change she had undergone while separated from her friends.
She was no longer the same. No effort of her will could conceal this fact. Her heart, her thoughts, her regrets, her desires, and her hopes, were all elsewhere. Italy in all its brilliancy did not differ more from the peaceful landscape before her, charming as it was, with the little garden of roses and the river winding around it, the ruins beyond, and the dark forest in the background, than the vanished scenes—still so vividly remembered—of which that land was the enchanting theatre, differed from those now occurring beneath the more misty sky of Germany. At Florence, her struggles and efforts, and the necessity of action, stimulated her courage. The peace she found at Santa Maria revived her strength. But there, as we have said, the past and the future seemed suspended, as it were. Now the struggle was over as well as the pause that succeeded it, and she must again set forth on the way—act, live in the present, and courageously take up life again as she found it, with its actual duties and new combats. Fleurange had never felt more difficulty and repugnance in overcoming herself.
After the long restraint she had been obliged to make, it would have been some relief to be dispensed from all effort, especially at concealment, and freely give herself up to a profound melancholy, to pass away the hours in dreamy inaction, to weep when her heart was swelling with tears, and, if not to speak to every one of her sadness, at least take no trouble to conceal it.
This would have been her natural inclination, and it was only by an effort she refrained from yielding to it. But this would have shown the strength gained in her retreat to have been only factitious, and her intercourse with Madre Maddalena to have left, this time, no permanent influence. We have, however, no such act of cowardice to record respecting our heroine.
On the contrary, whoever saw her up at the first gleam of light in the east to relieve her aunt from all the cares of the ménage; whoever followed her first to the store‐rooms to dispense the provisions for the day, accompanied by little Frida, whom she initiated into the mysteries of housekeeping, and then to the kitchen to give directions and sometimes even lend assistance to the old and not over‐skilful cook; whoever saw her even going sometimes to market with a firm step, basket in hand, and returning with her cloak covered with dew, would not have imagined from the freshness she brought back from these matutinal walks, and the brilliancy which youth and health imparted to her complexion, that, more than once, the night had passed without sleep, and while hearing her early Mass, never neglected, she had shed so many scalding tears.
Other cares, more congenial and better calculated to absorb her mind, occupied the remainder of the day. Her special talent for waiting on the sick, and the beneficent influence she exercised over them, were again brought into requisition around her uncle, and Madame Dornthal blessed the day of her return as she witnessed the evident progress of so prolonged and painful a convalescence—a progress that gave them reason to hope in the complete restoration of the professor’s faculties, if not in the possibility of his ever resuming constant or arduous labor. The young girl found these cares delightful, and her new duties towards her dear old friend Mademoiselle Josephine no less so.
Josephine Leblanc’s affections had all been centred in her brother. She lived exclusively for him, and had never once thought of the possibility of surviving him. A person left alone in a house standing in a district devastated by war or fire, would not have felt more suddenly and strangely left alone than our poor old mademoiselle after the fatal blow that deprived her of her brother, so dear, so admired, and so venerated—the brother younger than herself, and in whose arms she had felt so sure of dying!
She remained calm, however, and self‐possessed. But the mute despair imprinted on her face as she went to and fro in the house, troubling no one with her grief, affected every beholder. She only begged to remain there that she might not have to return alone to the place where she had lived with him. From the first, Madame Dornthal had invited her to take up her residence near them, and Fleurange’s return brought her old friend to a final decision, which proved so consoling that she firmly believed it to have been in the designs of Providence. The doctor left considerable property, which now belonged entirely to his sister. All their relatives were wealthier than they, and lived in the provinces. There was nothing therefore to induce Mademoiselle Josephine to return to Paris, and she resolved to settle near her new friends, that she might be near her whom long before she had adopted in her heart. It was a formidable undertaking for a person who for forty years had led a uniform life, always in the same place, and who was no less ignorant of the world at sixty than she was at twenty years of age. But it seemed no longer difficult as soon as she again had some one to live for. As to Fleurange, she found it pleasant and beneficial to devote herself to her old friend in return, and, in acquitting herself of this new debt of gratitude, her heart gained strength for the interior struggle which had become the constant effort of her life.
Notwithstanding the marriage of her two cousins, everything now resumed the aspect of the past. Clara and Julian, established in the neighborhood where the pursuits of the latter would retain him a year, did not suffer a day to pass without visiting Rosenheim. Hansfelt no longer thought of leaving his old friend, and Hilda’s calm and radiant happiness seemed to lack nothing between her husband and her father, whose case now appeared so hopeful.
Clement alone was not, as formerly, a part of the regular family circle. He only came once a week—on Saturday evening—and returned to Frankfort on Monday morning as soon as it was light.
Business for which one feels a special aptitude is not generally repugnant. But Clement had such a variety of talents, and among all the things he was capable of, the duties of the office where he passed his days were certainly not what he had the greatest taste or inclination for. Nothing would have retained him there but the conviction of thereby serving the best interests of those dear to him. He must accept the most remunerative employment, and, this once resolved upon, nothing could exhaust the courageous endurance so peculiar to him. His courage was not in the least increased by the desire of surprising others or exciting their admiration, and nothing under any circumstances could daunt or turn him from his purpose. And he knew how to brave ennui as well as disaster. But this ennui, which he generally overcame by severe application, became from time to time overwhelming, and he would have had violent fits of discouragement had it not been for the cheering evenings he passed in the modest household of which he was a member.
Wilhelm Müller perceived that Clement’s varied acquirements were useful to him, and his devotedness to him was mingled with an admiration bordering on enthusiasm. On his side, he procured Clement the opportunity and pleasure of talking of something besides their commercial affairs, and with the aid of music their evenings passed agreeably away.
But the kind and simple Bertha, with the instinct that often enables a woman to put her finger on the wound the most penetrating of men would never have discovered, had found a sure means of diverting him. The children had never forgotten the great event of their lives—the journey and the beautiful young lady they met on the way. Clement never seemed weary of listening to this account, to which Bertha would add many a comment; and this had been the commencement of a kind of confidential intimacy, which she discreetly took advantage of, and which was of more comfort to him than he realized. In short, this was the bright spot in his weary life. He would need it more than ever when, after a leave of absence on account of his father’s terrible accident, which had been prolonged from day to day, he would have to return to his bondage, and this time with an effort that added another degree of heroism to the task he had imposed on himself.
It was now the eve of his departure. Fleurange and Hilda were sitting at twilight on a little bench by the river‐side conversing together, and Clement, leaning against a tree opposite, was looking at the current of the water, listening silently, but attentively, to the conversation that was going on before him. They were discussing all that had occurred during their separation, and Hilda began to question Fleurange about her journey—about Italy, and the life she led at Florence away from them all. Fleurange replied, but briefly and with the kind of apprehension we feel when a conversation is leading to a point we would like to avoid. She foresaw the impossibility of succeeding in this, and was endeavoring, but without success, to overcome her embarrassment, when Count George’s name at last was introduced. After some questions, to which Fleurange only replied by monosyllables, Hilda continued:
“Count George!—A friend of Karl’s, who met him, was pretending the other day in my hearing that no one could see him without loving him. As you know him, Fleurange, what is your opinion?”
The question was a decided one, and Fleurange, as we are aware, had no turn for evasion. She blushed and remained silent—so long silent that Clement abruptly turned around and looked at her. Did she turn pale at this? or was it the light of the moon through the foliage that blanched her face, and its silver rays that gave her an expression he had never seen till now? He remained looking at her with attention mingled with anguish, when at length, in a troubled tone and with a fruitless effort at a smile, she replied:
“I think, Hilda, Karl’s friend was right.”
These words were very simple after all, but the darkest hour of Clement’s life never effaced from his memory the spot or the moment in which they were uttered, the silence that preceded, or the tone and look that accompanied them.
XXXVI.
The blindness of love is proverbial. His clairvoyance would be equally so, were it not for the illusion that unceasingly aids the heart in avoiding the discoveries it dreads. The very instinct that gives keenness to the eye is as prompt to close it, and when the truth threatens one’s happiness or pride, there are but few who are bold enough to face it regardless of consequences.
To this number, however, Clement belonged. There was in his nature no liability to illusions which had the power of obscuring his penetration. Therefore the truth was suddenly revealed to him without mercy, and his newly budding hopes were at once blasted for ever.—That moment of silence was as tragical as if all his heart’s blood had been shed on the spot, and left him lifeless at the feet of her who had unwittingly given him so deadly a blow!
Within a year—since the day he thought himself separated from her for ever, not only by his own inferiority, but by the sad necessity of his new position—two unexpected changes had occurred: First, in his exterior life—then he was apparently ruined: now, he felt capable of repairing his fortunes. Secondly, in the opinion he had of himself.
Not that a sudden fatuity had seized the modest and unpretending Clement. By no means; but the great reverses of his family had certainly effaced in a day every trace of his youthful timidity, and a kind of barrier had all at once melted away before him. Hitherto his worth had not been recognized beyond the narrow circle of his family, and even there he was loved without being fully appreciated. Necessity threw him in contact with the world; all his faculties were brought into action and developed by exercise. His features, his attitude, his manners, and his general appearance all participated in this transformation. The silent awkwardness that once left him unnoticed was overcome by the necessity of asserting himself, and also by that increased confidence in himself produced by a widening influence over others. This influence, at which he himself was astonished, was not solely the consequence of the superior ability he manifested in the dull and prosaic life he had embraced. But in this career, as everywhere else, he brought his highest faculties into exercise; and while observing and seizing all these details of his material life, he understood how to impart a soul to them by his dignity, trustworthiness, unselfishness, and generous ardor—which are the sweet flowers of labor and the noble result of a well‐regulated nature.
He also reserved a prominent part of his evenings for the favorite studies in which he had not ceased to interest himself, as well as a thousand subjects foreign to his daily occupation, but exceedingly useful in the development of his mind. Thence sprang a simple and persuasive eloquence, which gave him an ascendency over every one, and caused him to be especially sought after on a thousand occasions that had no immediate connection with his actual position. Once or twice he had even been invited to speak at some public assembly which had for its object either a question of public interest, or one relating to literature and the arts, and he acquitted himself so well as to attract the notice not only of those to whom the name of Dornthal was already familiar, but of a great number of strangers. Numerous advances to acquaintance were made him on all sides, and Clement might easily have passed his evenings elsewhere than in the unpretending home of the Müllers. But he had no such inclination. Their company satisfied his present tastes. Music, which he would not willingly have been deprived of, was the delight of his hosts; and as is frequently the case in Germany, they were able to join him in duets or trios which many a professional singer would not have disdained to listen to.
Over his whole life, with its varied and absorbing interests, reigned one dear and ever‐present form. It seemed at first like some celestial vision, far‐off and inaccessible, but for some time, under the influence of all we have referred to, it appeared to have drawn nearer to him.
On this account, he began to appreciate the increased consideration with which he was regarded, but which he valued so little on his own. He ventured at last to ask himself if the good‐will that seemed to beam on him on all sides did not authorize him to hope sooner or later for something more, and if his favorite poet was wholly wrong in promising that he who loved should win something in return.
Such thoughts and dreams, if allowed entrance in the heart, are apt to end by taking entire possession of it; and, as we have said, Clement was intoxicated with hope when Fleurange reappeared in their midst. But his dreams, fancies, and hopes were now all crushed by one word from her—one word, the fatal meaning of which was clearly revealed by the expression of her eyes, which Clement caught a glimpse of by the pale light of the moon!
The grief that pierced his soul enabled him to realize the full extent of his illusions, and he was astonished he had ever before considered himself unhappy. For some time after his return to Frankfort, he was overpowered by a dejection such as he had never experienced. He felt as incapable of any further effort as he was indifferent to all success. His daily task became insupportable, and study in the evening impossible. Instead of returning to the Müller’s at the usual hour, he would leave the city afoot or on horseback, and roam around the country for hours, as if to wear out his grief by exhausting his strength.
Now he clearly saw he had only lived, planned, and exerted himself for her the two years past; he had given her not only his heart, but his entire life, and that life had had but one aim—the hope of some day winning in return the heart which would never belong to him now—because it was given to another! And while repeating Count George’s name with rage, he sharpened his anguish by recalling him, as he had once seen him, clothed with irresistible attractions. His noble features, his look of intelligence, his taste for the arts, the charm of his manners, his voice, and his language, all came back unpityingly to the memory of his humble rival. He remembered him in the gallery of the Old Mansion, through which he accompanied him at a time when he was a mere student, and absolutely wanting in everything that was, not only attractive, but capable of exciting the least attention. His imagination mercilessly dwelt on the contrast between them. Was it surprising (and he blushed at so ridiculous a comparison) such a man should be more successful than he? And should he, inferior as he was, be astonished that this man, living so near Fleurange, under the same roof—At this thought a bitter anguish, a furious jealousy, took possession of him, and excited a tempest in his heart which neither duty, nor his sense of honor, nor the energy of his will, could succeed in calming. There are times when passion rises superior to every other impulse, and they who have not learned to seek their strength from a divine source are always vanquished. But Clement had been accustomed to the powerful restraints of religion; his strength consisted in never throwing them off. Therefore, he was not to fail in this severe struggle: he would soon turn his eyes heavenward for the aid he needed in again becoming master of himself.
XXXVII.
Disinterestedness, energy, and the power of self‐control were, as may have been perceived, qualities common both to Clement and Fleurange. There was, in fact, a great resemblance in their natures, which, on his part, was the secret of the attraction so suddenly ripened into a more lively sentiment; and, on hers, of an unchanging confidence, in spite of the transformation of another kind she likewise experienced. And now they were both engaged in a like struggle: they were united by similarity of suffering, which separated them, nevertheless, as by an abyss.
Ah! if Clement could have hoped, as he once did, that a more tender sentiment would spring out of this sympathy and confidence, with what joy, what sweet pride, he would have regarded this conformity so constantly manifest between them! But the aspect of everything was now changed: there was no longer any possibility of happiness for him, he could now only suffer; and by the light of what was passing in his own heart he was enabled to read hers—at once open to him and yet closed against him for ever!
With all Clement’s self‐control, he would have been utterly unable to conceal the state of his mind from his cousin had he remained at Frankfort. But, after the days of overpowering anguish we have already referred to, after yielding without restraint to a despair bordering on madness, Clement at length succeeded in regaining his clearness of judgment.
One morning he rose before day, and left the city on foot. His walk was prolonged to such an extent that it might be called a pilgrimage, and the more correctly as its goal was a church, but so unpretending a church that it only differed from the neighboring houses by a stone cross to be seen when passing the door which it surmounted. The door was opened by the very person Clement came to see—a pious and simple young priest who was formerly his schoolmate. He was inferior to Clement intellectually, but his guide and master in those regions the soul alone attains. What Clement now sought was—not merely to pour out his heart by way of confidence—not even the consolation of discreet and Christian sympathy—but to recover his firmness by a courageous avowal of all his weakness, and afterwards make an unchangeable resolution in the presence of God and his representative at the holy tribunal. He had made a similar one while yet a youth, but now in his manhood he wished to renew it in a more solemn manner. It would of course require greater effort after the gleam of hope he had just lost, and the devotedness he pledged himself to would be more difficult after the revelation that she whom he loved, and must ever love, had given her affections to another. His voice faltered as he declared that no word, look, or act of his should ever trouble her, or reveal the sentiments she had inspired in the heart of one who would live near her, without her, and yet for her!
It was, in fact, his old devise: “Garder l’amour et briser l’espoir!” which he now solemnly assumed with the grave and pious feeling that accompanies all self‐sacrifice.
Such piety may be regarded by some as rather exaltée. They are right, but it is the kind of exaltation which accords with the real signification of the word, which elevates the soul it inflames, and which, though powerless in itself, can effect much when the divine assistance is invoked to co‐operate in aiding, increasing, in a word, exalting human strength!
That evening Clement quietly resumed his old seat at the Müllers’ fireside. In reply to Wilhelm’s questions, he said that during his long visit at Rosenheim he had neglected affairs that required his attention. “And then I confess,” continued he, “that I have been in a bad humor, and thought it wiser to relieve you from my society.” But to Bertha, who also questioned him, in a less vague way, however, he acknowledged more frankly, but no less briefly, that he had met with a great affliction, but requested her never to mention the subject to him. Then he took his violin and began to play a strain from Bach.
Bertha seated herself at the piano, and played an accompaniment to this and several other pieces. Her husband, who was beating time beside her, remarked that their young friend’s bad humor had a singularly favorable effect on his talent.
“I assure you, Dornthal, you never played so well as you have this evening.”
“Perhaps so,” replied Clement with a thoughtful air. “Yes, I think you are right.”
It was really the truth. Music was the veiled, but eloquent, language of his soul. The very feelings he so successfully repressed, the words that no temptation or impulse could induce his lips to betray, made the chords vibrate beneath his bow, and gave their tones an inexpressible accent it was impossible to hear without emotion and surprise.
When, at the end of a fortnight, Clement reappeared at Rosenheim, all exterior traces of the excessive agitation he had given himself up to had disappeared. He resumed his usual manner towards Fleurange. No one would have dreamed—and she less than any one else—that between the past and present he found the difference of life and death. She little imagined that the new and strange sympathy that existed between them revealed to him the secret of all her thoughts and struggles. She also, apparently, had become the same as before. Her time was actively employed, the care she had of little Frida and that she lavished on her uncle, the ménage, sewing, exercise, and study filled up the days so completely that it was very seldom she could have been found inactive or pensive.
Hilda, her favorite cousin, though likewise struck for a moment by the hesitation with which she replied to her questions about Count George, almost ceased attaching any importance to this slight incident when she observed the apparent calmness with which Fleurange fulfilled the duties of her active life. Only one clearly read her heart and understood the passing expression of weariness and sorrow that now and then overshadowed her brow for an instant, and saddened her eye. Only one noticed her absence when the family assembled in the evening, and followed her in thought to the little bench on the bank of the river, where he imagined she had gone to weep awhile, alone and unrestrained. All she suffered he had to endure himself, and he lived thus united to her, and yet every day still more widely separated from her.
The weeks flew rapidly away, however, and the tranquility and happiness of the family were continually increasing. The professor’s mental and physical strength gradually returned. Work alone was forbidden him, but reading and conversation were allowable and salutary diversions. His conversations with Hansfelt were sometimes as interesting as of old, and he might have been supposed to have regained the complete use of his faculties had not a partial decay of memory sometimes warned his friends he had not entirely recovered from his illness. For example, he often imagined himself in the Old Mansion, and this illusion became stronger after all his children, including Gabrielle, gathered around him. But in other respects his memory was good. Hansfelt found him as correct and clear as ever on all points of history or literary and religious subjects. It seemed as if the higher faculties of his nature recovered their tone first, and were invigorated by contact with the noble mind of his friend. Thus the evenings passed away without ennui, even for the youngest, while listening to their conversation.
These evenings frequently ended with music, which the professor craved and indeed required as a part of his treatment. Clement would take his violin, and not at all unwillingly, for he saw his cousin always listened to it attentively. In this way he dared address her in a mysterious language, which he alone understood, but which sometimes gave her a thrill as if she were listening to the echo of her own cry of pain.
One evening, when he had excelled, she said: “You call that a song without words, Clement, but the music was certainly composed for a song, which perhaps you know, do you not?”
“No,” replied he, “but like you I imagine I can hear the words, and feel they must exist somewhere.”
Hansfelt had also been listening attentively to the music.
“Yes,” said he smiling, “they exist in the hearts of all who love—especially in the hearts of all who love without hope. Here I will express in common language, but not in rhyme, the meaning of what Clement has just played.”
He took a pencil and hastily wrote four lines nearly synonymous with those of a French poet:
“Du mal qu’une amour ignorée Nous fait souffrir Je porte l’âme déchirée Jusqu’à mourir!”(1)
The pang of unrequited love I feel; ’Tis death the bleeding heart I bear Must heal!
Clement made no reply, but abruptly changed the subject. The children rose and clapped their hands as he struck up their favorite tarantella, and became noisy as well as gay.
Fleurange left the room, unperceived as she supposed, but Hilda, who had been carefully observing her all the evening, followed her, determined to obtain a complete avowal of all that was passing in her heart. She softly entered her cousin’s chamber. Fleurange was not expecting her. She had thrown herself on a chair, with her face buried in her hands, in an attitude expressive at once of dejection and grief.
Hilda approached and threw her arms around her. Fleurange sprang up, her eyes full of tears.
“Do you remember,” said Hilda in a soft, caressing tone—“do you remember, Gabrielle, the day when I also wept in the library at our dear Old Mansion? You asked me the reason of my tears, and I answered by opening my heart to you. You have not forgotten it, have you? Will you not answer me in a like way now?”
Fleurange shook her head without uttering a word.
“It has always seemed to me,” continued Hilda, “that the happiness which has crowned my life dates from my confidence in you that day. Why will you not trust me in a like manner, and hope as I did?”
“Happiness was within your reach,” replied Fleurange; “an imaginary obstacle alone prevented you from grasping it.”
“But how many obstacles that seem insurmountable vanish with time or even beneath a firm will!” She continued slowly and in a lower tone: “Why should not the Count George, then—”
“Stop, Hilda, I conjure you,” cried Fleurange in an agitated manner.
Her cousin stopped confounded.
“Listen to me,” resumed Fleurange, at length, in a calmer tone. “As it is your wish, let us speak of him. I consent. Let us speak of him this time, but never again. Tell me,” she continued with a sad smile, “can you make me his equal in wealth and rank? Or deprive him of his nobility and make him as poor as I? In either case, especially in the latter,” she cried, with a tenderness in her tone, and a look she could not repress—“ah! nothing, certainly nothing but his will, could separate me from him! But it is reasonable to suppose the sun will rise upon us to‐morrow and find us the same as to‐day: we no longer live in the time of fairies, when extraordinary metamorphoses took place to smooth away difficulties and second the wishes of poor mortals. Help me then, Hilda, I beseech you, to forget him, to live, and even recover from the wound, by never speaking to me either of him, or myself!—”
Hilda silently pressed her in her arms for a long time, and then said: “I will obey you, Gabrielle, and never mention his name till you speak of him first.”
XXXVIII.
The summer and autumn both passed away without anything new, except some variations in the professor’s slow recovery, and an occasional gleam of happiness for Clement—the revival of a spark of his buried hopes—but such moments were rare, and succeeded by a sad reaction; nevertheless, they were sweet and lived long in his memory.
One day in particular was thus graven on his heart—a fine day in October, when he had the pleasure of rowing Hilda and his cousin to a shady point further up on the river, which gracefully winds nearly around it. There they spent several hours, conversing together with the delightful familiarity of intimacy, and now and then reading some favorite passage in the books they brought with them. As he sat listening to the silvery tones of Fleurange’s voice, and met her expressive, sympathetic glance when he took the book in his turn and read nearly as well as herself; as he sat thus near her in that lovely, solitary spot, with no other witness but her whose affection for both seemed only an additional tie, hope once more entered his heart, as one breaks into a dwelling fastened against him, but, alas! to be promptly thrust out, leaving him as desolate as before.
While he was rowing them back in the evening, with his eyes fastened on Fleurange, he saw her delightful but evanescent emotions of the day fading away with the light, and another remembrance arise, sadder and more tender than ever, which gave to her eyes, sometimes fastened on the dark and rapid current, sometimes fixed on the shore, the expression he had learned to read so well—an expression that made his heart ache with pity and sympathy, but at the same time quiver and shrink with anguish, as if a lancet or caustic had been applied to his wound and caused it to bleed!
Two months later the festival of Christmas again brought him one of these fleeting moments of happiness. On the eve—the never‐forgotten anniversary of Fleurange’s arrival in their midst—the whole family were reunited, and felt as if they were living over again the delightful past. The Christmas tree was as brilliant as of yore; Mademoiselle Josephine, as ready to participate in the joy of her friends as she was to avoid saddening them with her sorrows, aided in adorning it, and every one found on its branches some offering from her generous hand. Then, as in bygone days, they wove garlands of holly, which Fleurange, as well as her cousins, wore at dinner, and this time without any entreaty. At a later hour they had music and dancing, which, ever ready as she was to catch the joy of others, gave her a feeling of unusual gaiety, to which she unresistingly abandoned herself—the gaiety of youth, which at times triumphs over everything, and sometimes breaks out with an excess in proportion to its previous restraint. Fleurange’s laughter rang like music, and her joyous voice mingled with the children’s, to the great joy of him who was looking on with ecstasy and surprise. Her radiant eyes, her glowing complexion, the brilliancy happiness adds to beauty, and had so long been wanting to hers, gave him, who could not behold it revive without transport, a feeling of intoxication which once more made him forget all and hope everything! But he was speedily and sadly recalled to himself.
Madame Dornthal was seated beside her husband’s arm‐chair, which she seldom left. A pleasant smile reappeared on her lips as she looked at her children moving around her. From time to time she leaned towards the professor, and was glad to see him entering into all that was going on with his usual pleasure and with perfect comprehension of mind. All at once she thought he turned pale. She looked at Clement, and made a gesture which he understood. The noise disturbed his father. In an instant profound silence was restored, and they all gathered around the professor’s chair. He appeared suddenly fatigued: his eyes closed, and he leaned his head on his wife’s shoulder. They all anxiously awaited his first words after this sudden fit of somnolency. Presently he opened his eyes and gave a vague, uneasy glance around. Then, turning to Madame Dornthal, he said in a sad tone, passing his hand over his forehead:
“Tell me why Felix is not here: I knew, but cannot remember.”
This new failure of his memory, the name associated with so many painful recollections and uttered in so distressing a manner, put an end to all the gaiety of the evening. The effect of so much agitation and fatigue on the professor was not regarded as very serious, but it left a painful impression, especially on Fleurange, who had fresh reasons for feeling his words.
Clement, who had been informed by Steinberg of what had occurred at Florence, silently entered into her feelings, and once more the flash of joy that lit up his heart vanished in a night darker than ever.
But he could not foresee that a public event of serious import was at that very hour transpiring far away, in a different sphere from his, which would have an important and painful influence on his humble destiny.
To be continued.
Review of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas.(2)
It is but too seldom that the reviewer has to welcome a work like that which we have already had the pleasure of introducing to our readers, and to which we now desire to render more fitting honors. An original life of a saint, and of an epoch‐making saint like Thomas of Aquin, treated on a scale adequate to its importance, in the English tongue, by an English Benedictine monk, is a refreshing novelty to those who, like ourselves, have so much to say to what is slight, or frivolous, or common, or hostile. The contemplative reviewer, looking at the two thick volumes of the English edition, feels inclined, like a man who guesses before he opens a letter, to conjure up fancies as to what he will find in this new life of S. Thomas of Aquin. Two volumes, each consisting of more than 800 pages, are a great deal, in these days, for one saint. They are a great deal to write, and what is perhaps of more importance, they are a great deal to read. But no one can suppose that they are too much for such a saint as Thomas of Aquin. Considering that his own works, as printed in the splendid Parma edition lately completed, would make up some forty volumes of the size of these two goodly ones, it is not much. Considering that Thomas of Aquin has been more written about by commentators for four or five centuries than any other man, except perhaps Aristotle, who ever lived—considering that every student of theology is always coming across his authority, and that he has been the great builder‐up of the vast building of Catholic philosophical and theological terminology, it is not much that he should have two volumes. Indeed, when we look into the book, we expect to find Prior Vaughan not seldom complaining of being obliged, through want of space, to leave out a great deal that he would have wished to say. And this leads us to notice the author’s name. Father Bede Vaughan, though fairly known by reputation in England, is perhaps a stranger to the greater number of American Catholics. It is sufficient to say at present that he is a brother of the Very Rev. Dr. Herbert Vaughan, whose presence in this country lately, in connection with the mission to the negroes, will have made his name familiar to many even of those who had not the pleasure of personally meeting him. Father Bede Vaughan is Prior of the Benedictine Cathedral Chapter of Newport and Menevia. A cathedral‐prior is a novelty, not only in literature, but absolutely. There were a great many cathedral‐priors in England once upon a time—men of power and substance—wearing their mitres (some of them) and sitting in the House of Lords. Whatever be the lands and the revenues of the only cathedral‐priory in English‐speaking hierarchies of the present day, it is pleasant to meet with the old name, and to meet it on the cover of a book. That a Benedictine should have written a sterling book will not surprise the world of letters. It is perhaps a little new to find the great Dominican, the Angel of the Schools, taken up by a member of an order which S. Thomas is popularly supposed to have in set purpose turned his back upon. But this is a point on which the work itself will enlighten us. Meanwhile, on opening the first volume we catch sight of a portrait of the Saint. It is a reproduction, by photography, of a painting by the Roman artist Szoldatics, which was painted expressly for the present work. It represents the well‐known scene in which the crucified Master, for whom the great doctor has written and taught his life long, asks him what reward he would desire. Portraits of S. Thomas of Aquin are not uncommon. We are all familiar with the large and portly figure and the full and mild countenance, the sun upon his breast, the black and the white, and the shaven crown of the Order of St. Dominic, the open book and the immortal pen. Some of the representations of the saint exaggerate his traditional portliness into a corpulence that almost obliterates the light of genius in his face. On the other hand, there exist many which give at once the large open features and the look of inspiration and of refinement. Those who have turned to the title‐pages of the best Roman or Flemish editions of his life or works will remember these. The new portrait, photographed in the first volume, is very successful. Thomas of Aquin had Norman blood in his veins, and the fairness of his skin and the contour of his head are not those of the typical Italian. The artist has managed to convey very well that massive head, in which every lobe of the brain seems to have been perfectly developed and roomily lodged, thus furnishing the intelligence with an imaginative instrument whose power was only equalled by its delicacy. In the corresponding place in the second volume there is a photograph of a meritorious engraving, from a picture or engraving unknown to us, in which, however, the head of the Saint is not so noble or refined.
Passing, however, to consider the substance of the work itself, it is not too much to say that, as a life of S. Thomas of Aquin, it is perfectly original. We do not mean, of course, that the writer has found out new facts, or made any considerable alteration in the aspect of old ones. But his plan of working is new. He has had the idea of giving, not merely S. Thomas, but his surroundings. Some saints, even of those who have spent themselves in external labors for their fellow‐men, require but little in the way of background to make their portraits significant. Ven. Bede’s biography would not gain much light from discussions upon Mohammedanism, or upon the state of England or of Europe during his life. To understand and love S. Francis of Sales, it is not necessary to study the growth of Calvinism, to follow the steps of the De Auxiliis controversy, or to become minutely acquainted with the character of Henri IV. But it is very different with S. Thomas of Aquin. Opening his mouth, like a true doctor of the church, “in medio ecclesiæ,” he had words to speak which all Christendom listened to, and acted upon, too, in one way or another. He was a power at Paris, at Cologne, at Naples. Every great influence of the thirteenth century felt the impulse of his thought: S. Louis the Crusader, Urban IV., Gregory X., the Greek schismatics, the Arabian philosophers, the opponents of monasticism, the mighty power of the universities. Prior Vaughan thus speaks in the preface to the first volume:
“The author has found it difficult to comprehend how the life of S. Thomas of Aquin could be written so as to content the mind of an educated man—of one who seeks to measure the reach of principle and the influence of saintly genius—without embracing a considerably wider field of thought than has been deemed necessary by those who have aimed more at composing a book of edifying reading, than at displaying the genesis and development of truth and the impress of a master‐mind upon the age in which he lived. It has always appeared to him that one of the most telling influences exerted by the doctor‐saints of God, has been that of rare intellectual power in confronting and controlling the passions and mental aberrations of epochs, as well as of blinded and swerving men....
“The object which the author of these pages has proposed to himself is this: to unfold before the reader’s mind the far‐ reaching and many‐sided influence of heroic sanctity, when manifested by a man of massive mind, of sovereign genius, and of sagacious judgment, and then to remind him that, as the fruit hangs from the branches, so genius of command and steadiness of view and unswervingness of purpose, are naturally conditioned by a certain moral habit of heart and head; that purity, reverence, adoration, love, are the four solid corner‐stones on which that Pharos reposes which, when all about it, and far beyond it, is darkness and confusion, stands up in the midst as the representative of order, and as the minister of light, and as the token of salvation.
“Now, the Angel of the Schools was emphatically a great and shining light. To write his life is not so much to deal with the subject of his personal history, as to display the stretch of his power and the character of his influence. Indeed, few of the great cardinal thinkers of the world have left much private history to record. Self was hidden in the splendor of the light which bursts out from it—just as the more brilliant the flame, so much the more unseen is the lamp in which it burns. It stands to reason that the more widespread the influence which such men as these exert, so much the wider must be the range taken by the writer over the field of history and theology and philosophy if he wishes adequately to delineate the action of their lives. The private history of S. Thomas of Aquin could be conveniently written in fifty pages, whilst his full biography would certainly occupy many thousand pages.” (Pp. iii., iv.)
The view which is thus sketched out is a large one. We have said that the author presents not merely his hero, but his hero’s surroundings. But, in studying his mind and his work, he does not content himself with making a vivid background of the thirteenth century. One century is the child of another, and mind is educated by mind. The past is the seed of the future, and no time can be understood without understanding the times that gave it birth. This is especially true of the times when history accumulates most rapidly, and of minds to whom it is given to fashion history as it is made. Prior Vaughan finds the story of S. Thomas’ intellectual work commencing far back in the work of those men whom he calls the “columnal fathers” of the church. He therefore takes his reader back to primitive ages—to the desert, the laura, the early conflicts of God’s servants with paganism, with heresy, and with worldliness. He sets before him S. Anthony, in the majesty of his single‐hearted union with Christ; S. Athanasius, worthy disciple of such a master, unsurpassed in the great opportunities of his life and the strength with which he rose to meet them; S. Basil, the monk that fought the world, and overcame it; S. Gregory Theologus, the vates sacer of the fourth century, who sang in verse and in rhythmical prose the song of the consubstantial Son of God. He introduces us to S. Augustine, to S. Ambrose, to S. Gregory the Great, and points out how essential a feature, in the greatness of S. Thomas, is the way in which he has reproduced all that was eternal and “catholic” in the thoughts of the men whom God has set up to be the pillars of the doctrine of his church. With other saints, it would, perhaps, be superfluous to trace their connection with the fathers; with the author of the Summa, it is indispensable.
“The Columnal Fathers and the Angelical were in completest harmony; they were knit together by the monastic principle. The intellectual hinges of the Universal Church (speaking humanly) have been monastic‐men—that is to say, men who, through an intense cross‐worship and a keen perception of the beautiful, threw up all for Christ; and through
‘The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obedience,’
loved, labored, suffered for him, and died into his arms.
“For the one thread which pierces through all, and maintains a real communication between the Angelical and the heroes of the classic age—which creates a brotherhood between S. Thomas of the thirteenth century and the great athletes in the second and the third—which makes the ‘Sun of the Church’ illuminate the ‘Pillar of the World,’ and so reciprocally—that is to say, which renders S. Thomas and S. Anthony one in spirit and in principle—was this, that their beings were transformed into a supernatural activity, through an intense and personal love of their Redeemer.
“This was the one special lesson which the Angelical drew from the wilderness and the fathers, which came to him through S. Benedict, indeed, but rather as a principle of quies than of exertion. In the desert athletes, and those who followed them, he found that principle operative, and almost military in its chivalrous readiness to combat and spill blood in defence of truth. It lent to him what it exhibits in them also—breadth of view, largeness, moral freedom, stubborn courage, generosity of heart, expansion of mind, and an electric light of intellect, which bear about them a touch of the Eastern world. How could the Angelical read Anthony’s life, or follow Athanasius in his exiles, or see Basil so heroically rigid in his defence of right, or hear, in imagination, Gregory Theologus pouring out a stream of polished eloquence, without being impressed by truth’s grace and music; how could he watch S. Chrysostom, all on fire with his love of God and with his discriminating sympathy for men, or think of the ascetic Jerome, battling single‐handed in the wilderness, or perusing his Scripture in the cave; how could he dwell in spirit with S. Ambrose or S. Gregory the Great, or follow the career of the passionate, emotional, splendid S. Augustine, without expanding in heart and mind towards all that is best and greatest—all that is most noble and most fair in the majestic character of God’s tenderly‐cherished saints?
“Had he not known them so intimately, great as he was, his mind would have been comparatively cramped, his character most probably would have been less imperial in its mould, and there would have been less of that oriental mightiness about his intellectual creations, which now reminds one of those vast monuments of other days, which still are the marvel of travellers in the East, and the despair of modern engineers.” (II., pp. 523‐5.)
A great portion of the second volume is taken up with the exposition in detail of these thoughts and ideas. We do not think that any one who has thoroughly seized the author’s point of view will be sorry that so much space is given to the lives and characters of men who are not the immediate subject of the book. The truth is, that the full significance of S. Thomas of Aquin has been very much overlooked in modern times. The non‐Catholic theory has always been that he was a voluminous “scholastic,” more acute than most of his sort, perhaps, but mediæval, hair‐splitting, and unprofitable. The Catholic theory has done him greater justice; but even the Catholic schools have too much forgotten S. Thomas. There is an interesting passage in one of Lacordaire’s letters, in which he tells the Abbé Drioux, who has done so much for S. Thomas in France, how he read the Angelical every day, and yet how long it had been before he had come to know him! And then he speaks with some depreciation of that “Positive” theology which has pretended to take the place of the scholastic form and discipline. The great preacher was familiar with the spiritual wants of the world in their widest aspect, and he no sooner came to know S. Thomas of Aquin than he saw that he was face to face with the mind that has said more truth about God and man, and said it better, than any one man who has ever lived; and he has said it so well, because he has not said it out of his own consciousness, but first saturated himself with the living truth of the immortal fathers, and then reproduced in his own way what God had thus himself imparted to the world.
The influence which S. Thomas owed to the study and meditation of the great fathers was surpassed—or rather, we ought to say, most powerfully shown—by the impressions made upon his heart, even more than his mind, by his early bringing up. Every one knows that the Angel of the Schools, who was of the noblest blood of Italy, spent his early years in the great arch‐monastery of Monte Casino. Prior Vaughan has no hesitation in making the assertion that Thomas of Aquin never lost what he acquired from the monks of S. Benedict during those seven childish years that he spent with them in the cloisters of the great abbey. He was never a professed Benedictine, although he would, in the natural course, have become one without making any explicit profession, had not the troubles of the times forced the monks to flee from the abbey. But the Benedictine or monastic spirit, the principle of quies, as our author calls it, with the vivid appreciation of the kingship of Christ, Thomas took away with him when he went forth and carried with him to the work he had to do. The new mendicant orders that had recently been founded were schools of activity, aggressive, moving hither and thither, pitching their tents in great towns, and lifting their voices in universities. Their saints were to be fitted for the regeneration of a new phase of the world. But in the saints themselves it was only an outward change. The essential spirit remained the same. That spirit had been the heirloom of the old monastic orders, and it could never be out of date. In the men who were to do the greatest things in the new life of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the old spirit of the cloister must be found strong and deep. In the man who above all was to stand forth as the sum and crown of the middle age, that contemplative, immovable, far‐seeing realization of “the person of Christ” must exist as heroically as in Anthony of the Desert or Benedict of the Mountain. And it was S. Thomas’ Benedictine training that contributed much to make him such a man.
“The monks thought much, but talked little; thus the monastic system encouraged meditation, rather than intellectual tournaments; reserve rather than display, deep humility rather than dialectical skill. The Benedictines did not aim so much at unrestrained companionship of free discussion as at self control; not so much at secular‐minded fantasy as at much prayer and sharp penance, till self was conquered, and the grace of God reigned, and giants walked the earth. Self‐mastery, springing from the basis of a supernatural life, moulded the heart to sanctity, and imparted to the intellect an accuracy of vision which is an act of nature directed and purified by grace. Theodore, Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, Dunstan, Wilfrid, Stephen, Bernard, Anselm, these names are suggestive of this influence of the monastic system.” (I., p. 26.)
It is one of the aims of the book to bring out the view that the prince of scholastics and the king of dialecticians was a man of the purest and deepest “monasticism.” But he was not destined to be as an Anselm, a Bernard, or a Hugh of S. Victor.
The Saint was sent to Naples for the prosecution of his studies, and whilst there he asked for and received the habit of S. Dominic. The author gives a brilliant sketch of Naples as it was under the sway of Frederick II. He then devotes a whole chapter to a “study” of the new orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic, for the purpose of bringing out vividly before the reader the new world that was springing up and the new race of men that the church was calling forth to deal with it. We have no space to quote from this chapter, but, even taken apart from its connection with S. Thomas, it is full of interest and life.
Thus was Thomas of Aquin prepared and equipped; prepared by the great fathers and by S. Benedict, equipped in the armor of the Order of intellectual chivalry. And what was the work before him? Who were his enemies, his friends, his neighbors, his assistants? In answer to these questions we have the chapters on “Abelard, or Rationalism and Irreverence”; on “S. Bernard, or Authority and Reverence”; on the “Schools of S. Victor”; on the “Arabian and the Jewish Influence in Europe”; on “William of S. Amour”; on “Paris and its University”; and on “Albert the Great.” Some of these chapters relate, as will be seen, to men who were not contemporaries of S. Thomas. But if Abelard, and S. Bernard, and William of Champeaux had passed away in the flesh, their influence or their views still lived on when Thomas wrote. And we see the full significance of these chapters on the great schools of thought, orthodox and heterodox, when we arrive at the second volume, and find the author showing in detail how the Angel of the Schools, in some part or other of his voluminous writings, met and refuted every form of prevalent error, and, whilst majestically laying down principles for all ages, never forgot to clear up the difficulties of his own time. The rationalism of Abelard, the emanation doctrines that Arabian subtlety had elaborated out of the reminiscences of the old Gnosticism, the errors of the Greek schismatics, the perversity of the Jews, are all encountered by his never‐resting pen, either in some one of his numerous Opuscula, varying in length from an essay to an octavo volume, or else in one or other of his two great Sums, or perhaps in more places than one, the refutation being the more complete as the writing becomes more mature. As for the two greatest and most prominent of his enterprises—the Christianizing of Aristotle and the formation of a complete Sum of theology—it was to be expected that Prior Vaughan should fully enlarge upon them. The chapters on “S. Thomas and Aristotle,” and “S. Thomas and Reason,” in the second volume, form a good introduction to the study of the Angelic Doctor, and at the same time give the enquiring mind some notion of how S. Thomas has performed one of the greatest feats that genius ever accomplished—the successful and consistent “conversion” of the greatest, the most original, and the most precise of heathen philosophers into a hewer of wood and carrier of water for the faith.
We would gladly dwell on the three chapters at the end of Vol. I., in which the writer, in reviewing the writings of the Saint in defence and exaltation of monasticism, gives a useful and spirited history of the whole of that exciting contest which took its beginning in William of S. Amour’s book called Perils of the Last Times. It seems really impossible to say how much the religious state, humanly speaking, owes to the man who wrote the book Against Those who attack the Service of God and Religion, and that On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life.
Passing now from the more remote surroundings of the hero of the story to the immediate scene of the greatest portion of his labors, we venture to believe that one of the most popular parts of this work of Prior Vaughan’s will be his animated description of the university system of the thirteenth century, and of the University of Paris in particular. He has spared no pains in getting at correct details and putting them artistically together. M. Franklin’s splendid and comparatively unknown labors on mediæval Paris have supplied him with matter that will be found nowhere else. Paris is the natural type of the great mediæval university. More central and accessible than Oxford, safer than Bologna, freer than Naples, and founded on a wide and grand basis, the University of Paris soon grew into a formidable assemblage of men who, whilst ostensibly votaries of science, were not unprovided with excitable spirits and rough hands. Students gathered, rich and poor, great doctors taught, munificent founders, like Robert of Sorbon, bestowed their money or their influence, the monks of all orders gathered round silently, and to some extent distrustfully, from Citeaux, from Cluny, even from the Grande Chartreuse, with the Benedictines of S. Germain, the Premonstratensians—their church was where now stands the Café de la Rotonde—and the Augustinians. As for the Dominicans and Franciscans, they, as may be supposed, were early on the spot, to teach quite as much as to learn. The following is a sketch of the men who flocked to the great university—at least of one considerable class:
“There were starving, friendless lads, with their unkempt heads and their tattered suits, who walked the streets, hungering for bread, and famishing for knowledge, and hankering after a sight of some of those great doctors, of whom they had heard so much when far away in the woods of Germany or the fields of France. Some were so poor that they could not afford to follow a course of theology. We read of one poor fellow on his death‐bed, having nothing else, giving his shoes and stockings to a companion to procure a Mass for his soul. Some were only too glad to carry holy water to private houses, selon la coutume Gallicane, with the hope of receiving some small remuneration. Some were destitute of necessary clothing. One tunic sometimes served for three, who took it in turns—two went to bed, whilst the third dressed himself and hurried off to school. Some spent all their scanty means in buying parchments, and wasted their strength, through half the night, poring over crabbed manuscript, or in puzzling out that jargon which contained the wisdom of the wisest of the Greeks. Whole nights some would remain awake on their hard pallets, in those unhealthy cells, trying to work out some problem proposed by the professor in the schools. But there were rich as well as poor at Paris. There was Langton, like others, famous for his opulence, who taught, and then became Canon of Notre Dame; and Thomas à Becket, who, as a youth, came here to seek the charm of gay society.” (I., p. 354.)
Amid all the noise, turmoil, and disputes of the huge colony of students, numbering more thousands than Oxford or Cambridge at this day can show hundreds, the great Dominican convent of S. James was a grand and famous centre of light and work. S. Dominic was not long before he settled in Paris. At first the friars lived in a mean hired lodging, apparently on the Island of Notre Dame. But soon their reputation for poverty and learning attracted the notice of influential benefactors, and they had a house of their own. It was dedicated to S. James the Apostle, and quickly became not only a great monastery but a famous school. The Dominican Order, divinely founded for a want of the time, soon began to show in front of the progress of the age, and to lead instead of following. It was here, in S. James, that Alanus de Insulis and Vincent of Beauvois wrote histories and commentaries; it was here that Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas lectured and wrote; and the crowd of lesser names that are mentioned on its rolls about this time, less distinguished but still distinguished, would take long to enumerate. It was for S. James that S. Dominic himself had framed a body of rules. These rules are most striking, as given in the pages of Prior Vaughan. They show how a saint and monastic legislator feels the “form and pressure” of the times, and how he provides for a new feature in monasticism. To read these rules, one feels tempted to say that the Dominicans sacrificed everything to give their men a first‐rate course of studies. But we must remember the midnight vigil and the perpetual absence and the long silence. Still, the cloisters of S. James were different enough from those of Monte Casino. There was a great hall at S. James’, where professors taught and whither students thronged to hear—how different from the remote cloister of Jarrow, where Venerable Bede taught his younger brethren for so many years on the quiet flats between the Wear and the Tyne! The cells knew the light of the midnight lamp, the cloisters resounded with disputation, the young students of the Order were men of few books—a Bible, a copy of the Historia of Petrus Comestor and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, was all their private library. But half the day was spent face to face with a professor and with each other, and the want of books was not much felt. And what an education it must have been to listen to and take down the Summa contra Gentiles of the Angel of the Schools! As we have said, the whole of these two chapters is instinct with the liveliest description, and we cannot do better than recommend readers to go to it and judge for themselves.
We must reserve what we have not yet touched upon, viz., the personal life of the Saint himself, for another notice. It must not be supposed that Prior Vaughan passes over the person of S. Thomas in his anxiety to show us what sort of a world he lived in. It will soon be seen, on making some slight acquaintance with the book, that the strictly biographical portion is in reality most successful; the story is well told, and, like all stories of sanctity and supernatural heroism, goes straight to the heart.
Without saying that Prior Vaughan’s two volumes partake of the nature of the perfect, we frankly say we do not intend to find faults in it. We welcome it, and it deserves to be welcomed by every Catholic that can read it. There are, of course, defects and a few errors here and there; but the book lays down no false principles, takes no dangerous views, and patronizes no pernicious mistakes. On the other hand, it deals with a wide theme in a large way. In language which, if at times too copious, is nevertheless frequently eloquent and always easy and fluent, the writer raises the life of a saint into a picture of a world‐epoch. He has labored very hard at his authorities and sources, and when the book gets into use many students, we are sure, will thank him for his copious references and notes. His imagination is of a high order, and his picture‐loving power is seen in the way in which he sketches with an epithet, puts together the elements that he finds up and down the old authors, and shakes the dust and the mildew from valuable bits of ancient chronicle, so that they look bright again. The Hon. John L. Motley is in the front rank of modern historians, and to compare any writer with him is to give praise that one must think much before giving; but if we wished to indicate the genre of Prior Vaughan’s style—its pictorial power, its realism, and its tone of earnest conviction—we should mention the name of the historian of the Netherlands. The two writers are very unlike in their convictions; and Mr. Motley has, no doubt, a perfection and finish of art which few writers can approach. But still Prior Vaughan is quite fit to be named in the same sentence. And a book which has cost so many hours of thought and labor, which aims so high, which is so really the work of a man with views and with a power to express himself, and which deals with a subject that can never lose its interest, but one which, if we do not mistake, is as yet only at the beginning of a grand revival, is a book to be welcomed, to be read, and to be thankful for.
The Progressionists.
From The German Of Conrad Von Bolanden.
Chapter V.
Gerlach whispered something to the banker. Holt pressed his pocket‐ handkerchief to the wound.
“Please yourself!” said the banker loudly in a business tone. Seraphin again approached the beaten man.
“Will you please, my good man, to accompany us?”
“What for, sir?”
“Because I would like to do something towards healing up your wound; I mean the wound in there.”
Holt stood motionless before the stranger and looked at him.
“I thank you, sir; there is no remedy for me; I am doomed!”
“Still, I will assist you. Follow me.”
“Who are you, sir, if I may ask the question?”
“I am a man whom Providence seems to have chosen to rescue the prey from the jaws of a usurer. Come along with us, and fear nothing.”
“Very well, I will go in the name of God! I do not precisely know your object, and you are a stranger to me. But your countenance looks innocent and kind, therefore I will go with you.”
They passed through alleys and streets.
“Do you often visit that tavern?” inquired Seraphin.
“Not six times in a year,” answered Holt. “Sometimes of a Sunday I drink half a glass of wine, that’s all. I am poor, and have to be saving. I would not have gone to the tavern to‐day but that I wanted to get rid of my feelings of misery.”
“I overheard your story,” rejoined Seraphin. “Shund’s treatment of you was inhuman. He behaved towards you like a trickish devil.”
“That he did! And I am ruined together with my family,” replied the poor man dejectedly.
“Take my advice, and never abuse Shund. You know how respectable he has suddenly got to be, how many influential friends he has. You can easily perceive that one cannot say anything unfavorable of such a man without great risk, no matter were it true ten times over.”
“I am not given to disputing,” replied Holt. “But it stirred the bile within me to hear him extolled, and it broke out. Oh! I have learned to suffer in silence. I haven’t time to think of other matters. After God, my business and my family were my only care. I attended to my occupation faithfully and quietly as long as I had any to attend to, but now I haven’t any to take care of. O God! it is hard. It will bring me to the grave.”
“You are a land cultivator?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Shund intends to have you sold out?”
“Yes; immediately after the election he intends to complete my ruin.”
“How much money would you need in order with industry to get along?”
“A great deal of money, a great deal—at least a thousand florins. I have given him a mortgage for a thousand florins on my house and what was left to me. A thousand florins would suffice to help me out of trouble. I might save my little cottage, my two cows, and a field. I might then plough and sow for other people. I could get along and subsist honestly. But as I told you, nothing less than a thousand florins would do; and where am I to get so much money? You see there is no hope for me, no help for me. I am doomed!”
“The mortgaged property is considerable,” said Gerlach. “A house, even though a small one, moreover, a field, a barn, a garden, all these together are surely worth a much higher price. Could you not borrow a thousand florins on it and pay off the usurer?”
“No, sir. Nobody would be willing to lend me that amount of money upon property mortgaged to a man like Shund. Besides, my little property is out of town, and who wants to go there? I, for my part, of course, like no spot as much, for it is the house my father built, and I was born and brought up there.”
The man lapsed into silence, and walked at Seraphin’s side like one weighed down by a heavy load. The delicate sympathy of the young man enabled him to guess what was passing in the breast of the man under the load. He knew that Holt was recalling his childhood passed under the paternal roof; that little spot of home was hallowed for him by events connected with his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, or with other objects more trifling, which, however, remained fresh and bright in memory, like balmy days of spring.
From this consecrated spot he was to be exiled, driven out with wife and children, through the inhumanity and despicable cunning of an usurer. The man heaved a deep sigh, and Gerlach, watching him sidewise, noticed his lips were compressed, and that large tears rolled down his weather‐browned cheeks. The tender heart of the young man was deeply affected at this sight, and the millionaire for once rejoiced in the consciousness of possessing the might of money.
They halted before the Palais Greifmann. Holt noticed with surprise how the man in blouse drew from his waistcoat pocket a small instrument resembling a toothpick, and with it opened a door near the carriage gate. Had not every shadow of suspicion been driven from Holt’s mind by Seraphin’s appearance, he would surely have believed that he had fallen into the company of burglars, who entrapped him to aid in breaking into this palace.
Reluctantly, after repeated encouragement from Gerlach, he crossed the threshold of the stately mansion. He had not quite passed the door when he took off his cap, stared at the costly furniture of the hall through which they were passing, and was reminded of St. Peter’s thought as the angel was rescuing him from the clutches of Herod. Holt imagined he saw a vision. The man who had unlocked the door disappeared. Seraphin entered an apartment followed by Shund’s victim.
“Do you know where you are?” inquired the millionaire.
“Yes, sir, in the house of Mr. Greifmann the banker.”
“And you are somewhat surprised, are you not?”
“I am so much astonished, sir, that I have several times pinched my arms and legs, for it all seems to me like a dream.”
Seraphin smiled and laid aside his cap. Holt scanned the noble features of the young man more minutely, his handsome face, his stately bearing, and concluded the man in the blouse must be some distinguished gentleman.
“Take courage,” said the noble‐looking young man in a kindly tone. “You shall be assisted. I am convinced that you are an honest, industrious man, brought to the verge of ruin through no fault of your own. Nor do I blame you for inadvertently falling into the nets of the usurer, for I believe your honest nature never suspected that there could exist so fiendish a monster as the one that lives in the soul of an usurer.”
“You may rely upon it, sir. If I had had the slightest suspicion of such a thing, Shund never would have got me into his clutches.”
“I am convinced of it. You are partially the victim of your own good nature, and partially the prey of the wild beast Shund. Now listen to me: Suppose somebody were to give you a thousand florins, and to say: ‘Holt, take this money, ’tis yours. Be industrious, get along, be a prudent housekeeper, serve God to the end of your days, and in future beware of usurers’—suppose somebody were to address you in this way, what would you do?”
“Supposing the case, sir, although it is not possible, but supposing the case, what would I do? I would do precisely what that person would have told me, and a great deal more. I would work day and night. Every day, at evening prayer, I would get on my knees with my wife and children, and invoke God’s protection on that person. I would do that, sir; but, as I said, the case is impossible.”
“Nevertheless, suppose it did happen,” explained Seraphin in a preliminary way. “Give me your hand that you will fulfil the promise you have just given.”
For a moment Seraphin’s hand lay in a callous, iron palm, which pressed his soft fingers in an uncomfortable but well‐meant grasp.
“Well, now follow me,” said Gerlach.
He led the way; Holt followed with an unsteady step like a drunken man. They presented themselves before the banker’s counter. The latter was standing behind the trellis of his desk, and on a table lay ten rolls of money.
“You have just now by word and hand confirmed a promise,” said Gerlach, turning to the countryman, “which cannot be appreciated in money, for that promise comprises almost all the duties of the father of a family. But to make the fulfilment of the promise possible, a thousand florins are needed. Here lies the money. Accept it from me as a gift, and be happy.”
Holt did not stir. He looked from the money at Gerlach, was motionless and rigid, until, at last, the paralyzing surprise began to resolve itself into a spasmodic quivering of the lips, and then into a mighty flood of tears. Seizing Seraphin’s hands, he kissed them with an emotion that convulsed his whole being.
“That will do now,” said the millionaire, “take the money, and go home.”
“My God! I cannot find utterance,” said Holt, stammering forth the words with difficulty. “Good heaven! is it possible? Is it true? I am still thinking ’tis only a dream.”
“Downright reality, my man!” said the banker. “Stop crying; save your tears for a more fitting occasion. Put the rolls in your pocket, and go home.”
Greifmann’s coldness was effective in sobering down the man intoxicated with joy.
“May I ask, sir, what your name is, that I may at least know to whom I owe my rescue?”
“Seraphin is my name.”
“Your name sounds like an angel’s, and you are an angel to me. I am not acquainted with you, but God knows you, and he will requite you according to your deeds.”
Gerlach nodded gravely. The banker was impatient and murmured discontentedly. Holt carefully pocketed the rolls of money, made an inclination of gratitude to Gerlach, and went out. He passed slowly through the hall. The porter opened the door. Holt stood still before him.
“I ask your pardon, but do you know Mr. Seraphin?” asked he.
“Why shouldn’t I know a gentleman that has been our guest for the last two weeks?”
“You must pardon my presumption, Mr. Porter. Will Mr. Seraphin remain here much longer?”
“He will remain another week for certain.”
“I am very much obliged to you,” said Holt, passing into the street and hurrying away.
“Your intended has a queer way of applying his money,” said the banker to his sister the next morning. And he reported to her the story of Seraphin’s munificence. “I do not exactly like this sort of kindness, for it oversteps all bounds, and undoubtedly results from religious enthusiasm.”
“That, too, can be cured,” replied Louise confidently. “I will make him understand that eternity restores nothing, that consequently it is safer and more prudent to exact interest from the present.”
“’Tis true, the situation of that fellow Holt was a pitiable one, and Hans Shund’s treatment of him was a masterpiece of speculation. He had stripped the fellow completely. The stupid Holt had for years been laboring for the cunning Shund, who continued drawing his meshes more and more tightly about him. Like a huge spider, he leisurely sucked out the life of the fly he had entrapped.”
“Your hostler says there was light in Seraphin’s room long after midnight. I wonder what hindered him from sleeping?”
“That is not hard to divine. In all probability he was composing a sentimental ditty to his much adored,” answered Carl teasingly. “Midnight is said to be a propitious time for occupations of that sort.”
“Do be quiet, you tease! But I too was thinking that he must have been engaged in writing. May be he was making a memorandum of yesterday’s experience in his journal.”
“May be he was. At all events, the impressions made on him were very strong.”
“But I do not like your venture; it may turn out disastrous.”
“How can it, my most learned sister?”
“You know Seraphin’s position,” explained she. “He has been reared in the rigor of sectarian credulity. The spirit of modern civilization being thus abruptly placed before his one‐sided judgment without previous preparation may alarm, nay, may even disgust him. And when once he will have perceived that the brother is a partisan of the horrible monster, is it probable that he will feel favorably disposed towards the sister whose views harmonize with those of her brother?”
“I have done nothing to justify him in setting me down for a partisan. I maintain strict neutrality. My purpose is to accustom the weakling to the atmosphere of enlightenment which is fatal to all religious phantasms. Have no fear of his growing cold towards you,” proceeded he in his customary tone of irony. “Your ever victorious power holds him spell‐bound in the magic circle of your enchantment. Besides, Louise,” continued he, frowning, “I do not think I could tolerate a brother‐in‐law steeped over head and ears in prejudices. You yourself might find it highly uncomfortable to live with a husband of this kind.”
“Uncomfortable! No, I would not. I would find it exciting, for it would become my task to train and cultivate an abnormal specimen of the male gender.”
“Very praiseworthy, sister! And if I now endeavor by means of living illustrations to familiarize your intended with the nature of modern intellectual enlightenment, I am merely preparing the way for your future labors.”
Chapter VI. Masters and Slaves.
Under the much despised discipline of religious requirements, the child Seraphin had grown up to boyhood spotless in morals, and then had developed himself into a young man of great firmness of character, whose faith was as unshaken as the correctness of his behavior was constant.
The bloom of his cheeks, the innocent brightness of his eye, the suavity of his disposition, were the natural results of the training which his heart had received. No foul passion had ever disturbed the serenity of his soul. When under the smiling sky of a spring morning he took his ride over the extensive possessions of his father, his interior accorded perfectly with the peace and loveliness of the sights and sounds of blooming nature around him. On earth, however, no spring, be it ever so beautiful, is entirely safe from storms. Evil spirits lie in waiting in the air, dark powers threaten destruction to all blossoms and all incipient life. And the more inevitable is the dread might of those lurking spirits, that in every blossom of living plant lies concealed a germ of ruin, sleeps a treacherous passion—even in the heart of the innocent Seraphin.
The strategic arts of the beautiful young lady received no small degree of additional power from the genuine effort made by her to please the stately double millionaire. In a short time she was to such an extent successful that one day Carl rallied her in the following humorous strain: “Your intended is sitting in the arbor singing a most dismal song! You will have to allow him a little more line, Louise, else you run the risk of unsettling his brain. Moreover, I cannot be expected to instruct a man in the mysteries of progress, if he sees, feels, and thinks nothing but Louise.”
The banker had not uttered an exaggeration. It sometimes happens that a first love bursts forth with an impetuosity so uncontrollable, that, for a time, every other domain of the intellectual and moral nature of a young man is, as it were, submerged under a mighty flood. This temporary inundation of passion cannot, of course, maintain its high tide in presence of calm experience, and the sunshine of more ripened knowledge soon dries up its waters. But Seraphin possessed only the scanty experience of a young man, and his knowledge of the world was also very limited. Hence, in his case, the stream rose alarmingly high, but it did not reach an overflow, for the hand of a pious mother had thrown up in the heart of the child a living dike strong enough to resist the greatest violence of the swell. The height and solidity of the dike increased with the growth of the child; it was a bulwark of defence for the man, who stood secure against humiliating defeats behind the adamantine wall of religious principles—yet only so long as he sought protection behind this bulwark. Faith uttered a serious warning against an unconditional surrender of himself to the object of his attachment. For he could not put to rest some misgivings raised in his mind by the strange and, to him, inexplicable attitude which Louise assumed upon the highest questions of human existence. The uninitiated youth had no suspicion of the existence of that most disgusting product of modern enlightenment, the emancipated female. Had he discovered in Louise the emancipated woman in all the ugliness of her real nature, he would have conceived unutterable loathing for such a monstrosity. And yet he could not but feel that between himself and Louise there yawned an abyss, there existed an essential repulsion, which, at times, gave rise within him to considerable uneasiness.
To obtain a solution of the enigma of this antipathy, the young gentleman concluded to trust entirely to the results of his observations, which, however, were far from being definitive; for his reason was imposed upon by his feelings, and, from day to day, the charms of the beautiful woman were steadily progressing in throwing a seductive spell over his judgment.
The banker’s daughter possessed a high degree of culture; she was a perfect mistress of the tactics employed on the field of coquetry; her tact was exquisite; and she understood thoroughly how to take advantage of a kindly disposition and of the tenderness inspired by passion. How was the eye of Seraphin, strengthened neither by knowledge nor by experience, to detect the true worth of what lay hidden beneath this fascinating delusion?
Here again his religious training came to the rescue of the inexperienced youth, by furnishing him with standards safe and unfalsified, by which to weigh and come to a conclusion.
Louise’s indifference to practices of piety annoyed him. She never attended divine service, not even on Sundays. He never saw her with a prayer‐book, nor was a single picture illustrative of a moral subject to be found hung up in her apartment. Her conversation, at all times, ran upon commonplaces of everyday concern, such as the toilet, theatre, society. He noticed that whenever he ventured to launch matter of a more serious import upon the current of conversation, it immediately became constrained and soon ceased to flow. Louise appeared to his heart at the same time so fascinating and yet so peculiar, so seductive and yet so repulsive, that the contradictions of her being caused him to feel quite unhappy.
He was again sitting in his room thinking about her. In the interview he had just had with her, the young lady had exerted such admirable powers of womanly charms that the poor young man had had a great deal of trouble to maintain his self‐possession. Her ringing, mischievous laugh was still sounding in his ears, and the brightness of her sparkling eyes was still lighting up his memory. And the unsuspecting youth had no Solomon at his side to repeat to him: “My son, can a man hide fire in his bosom, and his garments not burn? Or can he walk upon hot coals, and his feet not be burnt?... She entangleth him with many words, and she draweth him away with the flattery of her lips. Immediately he followeth her as an ox led to be a victim, and as a lamb playing the wanton, and not knowing that he is drawn like a fool to bonds, till the arrow pierce his liver. As if a bird should make haste to the snare, and knoweth not that his life is in danger. Now, therefore, my son, hear me, and attend to the words of my mouth. Let not thy mind be drawn away in her ways: neither be thou deceived with her paths. For she hath cast down many wounded, and the strongest have been slain by her. Her house is the way to hell, reaching even to the inner chambers of death.”(3)
For Seraphin, however, no Solomon was at hand who might give him counsel. Sustained by his virtue and by his faith alone, he struggled against the temptress, not precisely of the kind referred to by Solomon, but still a dangerous one from the ranks of progress.
Greifmann had notified him that the general assembly election was to be held that day, that Mayor Hans Shund would certainly be returned as a delegate, and that he intended to call for Gerlach, and go out to watch the progress of the election.
Seraphin felt rather indifferent respecting the election; but he would have considered himself under weighty obligation to the brother for an explanation of the peculiar behavior of the sister at which he was so greatly perplexed.
Carl himself he had for a while regarded as an enigma. Now, however, he believed that he had reached a correct conclusion concerning the brother. It appeared to him that the principal characteristic of Carl’s disposition was to treat every subject, except what strictly pertained to business, in a spirit of levity. To the faults of others Carl was always ready to accord a praiseworthy degree of indulgence, he never uttered harsh words in a tone of bitterness, and when he pronounced censure, his reproof was invariably clothed in some form of pleasantry. In general, he behaved like a man not having time to occupy himself seriously with any subject that did not lie within the particular sphere of his occupation. Even their wager he managed like a matter of business, although the landowner could not but take umbrage at the banker’s ready and natural way of dealing with men whose want of principle he himself abominated. Greifmann seemed good‐ natured, minute, and cautious in business, and in all other things exceedingly liberal and full of levity. Such was the judgment arrived at by Seraphin, inexperienced and little inclined to fault‐finding as he was, respecting a gentleman who stood at the summit of modern culture, who had skill in elegantly cloaking great faults and foibles, and whose sole religion consisted in the accumulation of papers and coins of arbitrary value.
Gerlach’s servant entered, and disturbed his meditation.
“There is a man here with a family who begs hard to be allowed to speak with you.”
“A man with a family!” repeated the millionaire, astonished. “I know nobody round here, and have no desire to form acquaintances.”
“The man will not be denied. He says his name is Holt, and that he has something to say to you.”
“Ah, yes!” exclaimed Seraphin, with a smile that revealed a pleasant surprise. “Send the man and those who are with him in to me.”
Closing a diary, in which he was recording circumstantially the experiences of his present visit, he awaited the visitors. A loud knock from a weighty fist reminded him of a pair of callous hands, then Holt, followed by his wife and children, presented himself before his benefactor. They all made a small courtesy, even the flaxen‐headed little children, and the bright, healthy babe in the arms of the mother met his gaze with the smile of an angel. The dark spirits that were hovering around him, torturing and tempting, instantly vanished, and he became serene and unconstrained whilst conversing with these simple people.
“You must excuse us, Mr. Seraphin,” began Holt. “This is my wife, and these are seven of my children. There is one more; her name is Mechtild. She had to stay at home and mind the house. She will pay you an extra visit, and present her thanks. We have called that you might become acquainted with the family whom you have rescued, and that we might thank you with all our hearts.”
After this speech, the father gave a signal, whereupon the little ones gathered around the amiable young man, made their courtesies, and kissed his hands.
“May God bless you, Mr. Seraphin!” first spoke a half‐grown girl.
“We greet you, dear Seraphin!” said another, five years old.
“We pray for you every day, Mr. Seraphin,” said the next in succession.
“We are thankful to you from our hearts, Mr. Seraphin,” spoke a small lad, in a tone of deep earnestness.
And thus did every child deliver its little address. It was touching to witness the noble dignity of the children, which may, at times, be found beautifully investing their innocence. Gerlach was moved. He looked down upon the little ones around him with an expression of affectionate thankfulness. Holt’s lips also quivered, and bright tears of happiness streamed from the eyes of the mother.
“I am obliged to you, my little friends, for your greetings and for your prayers,” spoke the millionaire. “You are well brought up. Continue always to be good children, such as you now are; have the fear of God, and honor your parents.”
“Mr. Seraphin,” said Holt, drawing a paper from his pocket, “here is the note that I have redeemed with the money you gave me. I wanted to show it to you, so that you might know for certain that the money had been applied to the proper purpose.”
Gerlach affected to take an interest in the paper, and read over the receipt.
“But there is one thing, Mr. Seraphin,” continued Holt, “that grieves me. And that is, that there is not anything better than mere words with which I can testify my gratitude to you. I would like ever so much to do something for you—to do something for you worth speaking of. Do you know, Mr. Seraphin, I would be willing to shed the last drop of my blood for you?”
“Never mind that, Holt! It is ample recompense for me to know that I have helped a worthy man out of trouble. You can now, Mrs. Holt, set to work with renewed courage. But,” added he archly, “you will have to watch your husband that he may not again fall into the clutches of beasts of prey like Shund.”
“He has had to pay dearly for his experience, Mr. Seraphin. I used often to say to him: ‘Michael, don’t trust Shund. Shund talks too much, he is too sweet altogether, he has some wicked design upon us—don’t trust him.’ But, you see, Mr. Seraphin, my husband thinks that all people are as upright as he is himself, and he believed that Shund really meant to deal fairly as he pretended. But Michael’s wits are sharpened now, and he will not in future be so ready to believe every man upon his word. Nor will he, hereafter, borrow one single penny, and he will never again undertake to buy anything unless he has the money in hand to pay for it.”
“In what street do you live?” inquired Gerlach.
“Near the turnpike road, Mr. Seraphin. Do you see that knoll?” He pointed through the window in a direction unobstructed by the trees of the garden. “Do you see that dense shade‐tree, and yon white‐washed wall behind the tree? That is our walnut‐tree—my grandfather planted it. And the white wall is the wall of our house.”
“I have passed there twice—the road leads to the beech grove,” said the millionaire. “I remarked the little cottage, and was much pleased with its air of neatness. It struck me, too, that the barn is larger than the dwelling, which is a creditable sign for a farmer. Near the front entrance there is a carefully cultivated flower garden, in which I particularly admired the roses, and further off from the road lies an apple orchard.”
“All that belongs to us. That is what you have rescued and made a present of to us,” replied the land cultivator joyfully. “Everybody stops to view the roses; they belong to our daughter Mechtild.”
“The soil is good and deep, and must bring splendid crops of wheat. I, too, am a farmer, and understand something about such matters. But it appeared to me as though the soil were of a cold nature. You should use lime upon it pretty freely.”
In this manner he spent some time conversing with these good and simple people. Before dismissing them, he made a present to every one of the children of a shining dollar, having previously overcome Holt’s protest against this new instance of generosity.
Old and young then courtesied once more, and Gerlach was left to himself in a mood differing greatly from that in which the visitors had found him.
He had been conversing with good and happy people, and his soul revelled in the consciousness of having been the originator of their happiness.
Suddenly Greifmann’s appearance in the room put to flight the bright spirits that hovered about him, and the sunshine that had been lighting up the apartment was obscured by dark shadows as of a heavy mass of clouds.
“What sort of a horde was that?” asked he.
“They were Holt and his family. The gratitude of these simple people was touching. The innocent little ones gave me an ovation of which a prince might be envious, for the courts of princes are never graced by a naturalness at once so sincere and so beautiful. It is an intense happiness for me to have assured the livelihood of ten human beings with so paltry a gift.”
“A mere matter of taste, my most sympathetic friend!” rejoined the banker with indifference. “You are not made of the proper stuff to be a business man. Your feelings would easily tempt you into very unbusinesslike transactions. But you must come with me! The hubbub of the election is astir through all the streets and thoroughfares. I am going out to discharge my duties as a citizen, and I want you to accompany me.”
“I have no inclination to see any more of this disgusting turmoil,” replied Gerlach.
“Inclination or disinclination is out of the question when interest demands it,” insisted the banker. “You must profit by the opportunity which you now have of enriching your knowledge of men and things, or rather of correcting it; for heretofore your manner of viewing things has been mere ideal enthusiasm. Come with me, my good fellow!”
Seraphin followed with interior reluctance. Greifmann went on to impart to him the following information:
“During the past night, there have sprung up, as if out of the earth, a most formidable host, ready to do battle against the uniformly victorious army of progress—men thoroughly armed and accoutred, real crusaders. A bloody struggle is imminent. Try and make of your heart a sort of monitor covered with plates of iron, so that you may not be overpowered by the horrifying spectacle of the election affray. I am not joking at all! True as gospel, what I tell you! If you do not want to be stifled by indignation at sight of the fiercest kind of terrorism, of the most revolting tyranny, you will have to lay aside, at least for to‐day, every feeling of humanity.”
Gerlach perceived a degree of seriousness in the bubbling current of Greifmann’s levity.
“Who is the enemy that presumes to stand in the way of progress?” enquired he.
“The ultramontanes! Listen to what I have to tell you. This morning Schwefel came in to get a check cashed. With surprise I observed that the manufacturer’s soul was not in business. ‘How are things going?’ asked I when we had got through.
“ ‘I feel like a man,’ exclaimed he, ‘that has just seen a horrible monster! Would you believe it, those accursed ultramontanes have been secretly meddling in the election. They have mustered a number of votes, and have even gone so far as to have a yellow ticket printed. Their yellow placards were to be seen this morning stuck up at every street corner—of course they were immediately torn down.’
“ ‘And are you provoked at that, Mr. Schwefel! You certainly are not going to deny the poor ultramontanes the liberty of existing, or, at least, the liberty of voting for whom they please?’
“ ‘Yes, I am, I am! That must not be tolerated,’ cried he wildly. ‘The black brood are hatching dark schemes, they are conspiring against civilization, and would fain wrest from us the trophies won by progress. It is high time to apply the axe to the root of the upas‐tree. Our duty is to disinfect thoroughly, to banish the absurdities of religious dogma from our schools. The black spawn will have to be rendered harmless: we must kill them politically.’
“ ‘Very well,’ said I. ‘Just make negroes of them. Now that in America the slaves are emancipated, Europe would perhaps do well to take her turn at the slave‐trade.’ But the fellow would not take my joke. He made threatening gesticulations, his eyes gleamed like hot coals, and he muttered words of a belligerent import.
“ ‘The ultramontane rabble are to hold a meeting at the “Key of Heaven,” ’ reported he. ‘There the stupid victims of credulity are to be harangued by several of their best talkers. The black tide is afterwards to diffuse itself through the various wards where the voting is to take place. But let the priest‐ridden slaves come, they will have other memoranda to carry home with them beside their yellow rags of tickets.’
“You perceive, friend Seraphin, that the progress men mean mischief. We may expect to witness scenes of violence.”
“That is unjustifiable brutality on the part of the progressionists,” declared Gerlach indignantly. “Are not the ultramontanes entitled to vote and to receive votes? Are they not free citizens? Do they not enjoy the same privileges as others? It is a disgrace and an outrage thus to tyrannize over men who are their brothers, sons of Germania, their common mother.”
“Granted! Violence is disgraceful. The intention of progress, however, is not quite as bad as you think it. Being convinced of its own infallibility, it cannot help feeling indignant at the unbelief of ultramontanism, which continues deaf to the saving truths of the progressionist gospel. Hence a holy zeal for making converts urges progress so irresistibly that it would fain force wanderers into the path of salvation by violence. This is simply human, and should not be regarded as unpardonable. In the self‐same spirit did my namesake Charles the Great butcher the Saxons because the besotted heathens presumed to entertain convictions differing from his own. And those who were not butchered had to see their sacred groves cut down, their altars demolished, their time‐ honored laws changed, and had to resign themselves to following the ways which he thought fit to have opened through the land of the Saxons. You cannot fail to perceive that Charles the Great was a member of the school of progress.”
“But your comparison is defective,” opposed the millionaire. “Charles subdued a wild and blood‐thirsty horde who made it a practice to set upon and butcher peaceful neighbors. Charles was the protector of the realm, and the Saxons were forced to bend under the weight of his powerful arm. If Charles, however, did violence to the consciences of his vanquished enemies, and converted them to Christianity with the sword and mace, then Charles himself is not to be excused, for moral freedom is expressly proclaimed by the spirit of Christianity.”
“There is no doubt but that the Saxons were blundering fools for rousing the lion by making inroads into Charles’ domain. The ultramontanes, are, however, in a similar situation. They have attacked the giant Progress, and have themselves to blame for the consequences.”
“The ultramontanes have attacked nobody,” maintained Gerlach. “They are merely asserting their own rights, and are not putting restrictions on the rights of other people. But progress will concede neither rights nor freedom to others. It is a disgusting egotist, an unscrupulous tyrant, that tries to build up his own brutal authority on the ruins of the rights of others.”
“Still, it would have been far more prudent on the part of the ultramontanes to keep quiet, seeing that their inferiority of numbers cannot alter the situation. The indisputable rights of the ascendency are in our days with the sceptre and crown of progress.”
“A brave man never counts the foe,” cried Gerlach. “He stands to his convictions, and behaves manfully in the struggle.”
“Well said!” applauded the banker. “And since progress also is forced by the opposition of principles to man itself for the contest, it will naturally beat up all its forces in defence of its conviction. Here we are at the ‘Key of Heaven,’ where the ultramontanes are holding their meeting. Let us go in, for the proverb says, Audiatur et altera pars—the other side should also get a hearing.”
They drew near to a lengthy old building. Over the doorway was a pair of crossed keys hewn out of stone, and gilt, informing the stranger that it was the hostelry of the “Key of Heaven,” where, since the days of hoar antiquity, hospitality was dispensed to pilgrims and travellers. The principal hall of the house contained a gathering of about three hundred men. They were attentively listening to the words of a speaker who was warmly advocating the principles of his party. The speaker stood behind a desk which was placed upon a platform at the far end of the hall.
Seraphin cast a glance over the assembly. He received the painful impression of a hopeless minority. Barely forty votes would the ultramontanes be able to send to each of the wards. To compensate for numbers, intelligence and faith were represented in the meeting. Elegant gentlemen with intellectual countenances sat or stood in the company of respectable tradesmen, and the long black coats of the clergy were not few in number. On a table lay two packages of yellow tickets to be distributed among the members of the assembly. At the same table sat the chairman, a commissary of police named Parteiling, whose business it was to watch the proceedings, and several other gentlemen.
“Compared with the colossal preponderance of progress, our influence is insignificant, and, compared with the masses of our opponents our numerical strength is still less encouraging,” said the speaker. “If in connection with this disheartening fact you take into consideration the pressure which progress has it in its power to exert on the various relations of life through numerous auxiliary means, if you remember that our opponents can dismiss from employment all such as dare uphold views differing from their own, it becomes clear that no ordinary amount of courage is required to entertain and proclaim convictions hostile to progress.”
Seraphin thought of Spitzkopf’s mode of electioneering, and of the terrible threats made to the “wild men,” and concluded the incredible statement was lamentably correct.
“Viewing things in this light,” proceeded the orator, “I congratulate the present assembly upon its unusual degree of pluck, for courage is required to go into battle with a clear knowledge of the overwhelming strength of the enemy. We have rallied round the banner of our convictions notwithstanding that the numbers of the enemy make victory hopeless. We are determined to cast our votes in support of religion and morality in defiance of the scorn, blasphemy, and violence which the well‐known terrorism of progress will not fail to employ in order to frighten us from the exercise of our privilege as citizens. We must be prepared, gentlemen, to hear a multitude of sarcastic remarks and coarse witticisms, both in the streets and at the polls. I adjure you to maintain the deportment alone worthy of our cause. A gentleman never replies to the aggressions of rudeness, and should you wish to take the conduct of our opponents in gay good‐humor, just try, gentlemen, to fancy that you are being treated to some elegant exhibition of the refinement and liberal culture of the times.”
Loud bursts of hilarity now and then relieved the seriousness of the meeting. Even Greifmann would clap applause and cry, “Bravo!”
“Let us stand united to a man, prepared against all the wiles of intimidation and corruption, undismayed by the onset of the enemy. The struggle is grave beyond expression. For you are acquainted with the aims and purposes of the liberals. Progress would like to sweep away all the religious heritages that our fathers held sacred. Education is to be violently wrested from under the influence of the church; the church herself is to be enslaved and strangled in the thrall of the liberal state. I am aware that our opponents pretend to respect religion—but the religion of would‐be progress is infidelity. Divine revelation, of which the church is the faithful guardian, is rejected with scorn by liberalism. Look at the tone of the press and the style of the literature of the day. You have only to notice the derision and fierceness with which the press daily assails the mysteries and dogmas of religion, the Sovereign Pontiff, the clergy, religious orders, the ultramontanes, and you cannot long remain in the dark concerning the aim and object of progress. Christ or Antichrist is the watchword of the day, gentlemen! Hence the imperative duty for us to be active at the elections; for the legislature has the presumption to wish to dictate in matters belonging exclusively to the jurisdiction of the church. We are threatened with school laws the purpose of which is to unchristianize our children, to estrange them from the spirit of religion. No man having the sentiment of religion can remain indifferent in presence of this danger, for it means nothing less than the defection from Christianity of the masses of the coming generation.
“Gentlemen, there is a reproach being uttered just now by the progressionist press, which, far from repelling, I would feel proud to deserve. A priest should have said, so goes the report, that it is a mortal sin to elect a progressionist to the chamber of deputies. Some of the writers of our press have met this reproach by simply denying that a priest ever expressed himself in those terms. But, gentlemen, let us take for granted that a priest did actually say that it is a mortal sin to elect a progressionist to the chamber of deputies, is there anything opposed to morality in such a declaration?
“By no means, if you remember that it is to be presumed the progressionist will use his vote in the assembly to oppose religion. Mortal sin, gentlemen, is any wilful transgression of God’s law in grave matters. Now I put it to you: Does he gravely transgress the law of God who controverts what God has revealed, who would exclude God and all holy subjects from the schools, who would rob the church of her independence, and make of her a mere state machine unfit for the fulfilment of her high mission? There is not one of you but is ready to declare: ‘Yes, such an one transgresses grievously the law of God.’ This answer at the same time solves the other question, whether it is a mortal sin to put arms in the hands of an enemy of religion that he may use them against faith and morality. Would that all men of Christian sentiment seriously adverted to this connection of things and acted accordingly, the baneful sway of the pernicious spirit that governs the age would soon be at an end; for I have confidence in the sound sense and moral rectitude of the German people. Heathenism is repugnant to the deeply religious nature of our nation; the German people do not wish to dethrone God, nor are they ready to bow the knee before the empty idol of a soulless enlightenment.”
Here the speaker was interrupted by a tumult. A band of factorymen, yelling and laughing, rushed into the hall to disturb the meeting. All eyes were immediately turned upon the rioters. In every countenance indignation could be seen kindling at this outrage of the liberals. The commissary of police alone sat motionless as a statue. The progressionist rioters elbowed their way into the crowd, and, when the excitement caused by this strategic movement had subsided, the speaker resumed his discourse.
“For a number of years back our conduct has been misrepresented and calumniated. They call us men of no nationality, and pretend that we get our orders from Rome. This reproach does honor neither to the intelligence nor to the judgment of our opponents. Whence dates the division of Germany into discordant factions? When began the present faint and languishing condition of our fatherland? From the moment when it separated from Rome. So long as Germany continued united in the bond of the same holy faith, and the voice of the head of the church was hearkened to by every member of her population, her sovereigns held the golden apple, the symbol of universal empire. Our nation was then the mightiest, the proudest, the most glorious upon earth. The church who speaks through the Sovereign Pontiff had civilized the fierce sons of Germany, had conjured the hatred and feuds of hostile tribes, had united the interests and energies of our people in one holy faith, and had ennobled and enriched German genius through the spirit of religion. The church had formed out of the chaos of barbarism the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation—that gigantic and wonderful organization the like of which the world will never see again. But the church has long since been deprived of the leadership in German affairs, and what in consequence is now the condition of our fatherland? It is divided into discordant factions, it is an ailing trunk, with many members, but without a head.
“It is rather amusing that the ultramontanes should be charged with receiving orders from Rome, for the voice of the Father of Christianity has not been heard for many years back in the council of state.”
“Hurrah for the Syllabus!” cried Spitzkopf, who was at the head of the rioters. “Hurrah for the Syllabus!” echoed his gang, yelling and stamping wildly.
The ultramontanes were aroused, eyes glared fiercely, and fists were clenched ready to make a summary clearing of the hall. But no scuffle ensued; the ultramontanes maintained a dignified bearing. The speaker calmly remained in his place, and when the tumult had ceased he again went on with his discourse.
“Such only,” said he, “take offence at the Syllabus as know nothing about it. There is not a word in the Syllabus opposed to political liberty or the most untrammelled self‐government of the German people. But it is opposed to the fiendish terrorism of infidelity. The Syllabus condemns the diabolical principles by which the foundations of the Christian state are sapped and a most disastrous tyranny over conscience is proclaimed.”
“Hallo! listen to that,” cried one of the liberals, and the yelling was renewed, louder, longer, and more furious than before.
The chairman rang his bell. The revellers relapsed into silence.
“Ours is not a public meeting, but a mere private gathering,” explained the chairman. “None but men of Christian principles have been invited. If others have intruded violently, I request them to leave the room, or, at least, to refrain from conduct unbecoming men of good‐breeding.”
Spitzkopf laughed aloud, his comrades yelled and stamped.
“Let us go!” said Greifmann to Gerlach in an angry tone.
“Let us stay!” rejoined the latter with excitement. “The affair is becoming interesting. I want to see how this will end.”
The banker noticed Gerlach’s suppressed indignation; he observed it in the fire of his eyes and the expression of unutterable contempt that had spread over his features, and he began to consider the situation as alarming. He had not expected this exhibition of brutal impertinence. In his estimation an infringement of propriety like the one he had just witnessed was a far more heinous transgression than the grossest violations in the sphere of morals. He judged of Gerlach’s impressions by this standard of appreciation, and feared the behavior of the progressionist mob would produce an effect in the young man’s mind far from favorable to the cause which they represented. He execrated the disturbance of the liberals, and took Seraphin’s arm to lead him away.
“Come away, I beg of you! I cannot imagine what interest the rudeness of that uncultivated horde can have for you.”
“Do not scorn them, for they are honestly earning their pay,” rejoined Gerlach.
“What do you mean?”
“Those fellows are whistling, bawling, stamping, and yelling in the employ of progress. You are trying to give me an insight into the nature of modern civilization: could there be a better opportunity than this?”
“There you make a mistake, my dear fellow! Enlightened progress is never rude.”
To Be Continued.
Gavazzi Versus The See Of S. Peter.
By a Protestant Doctor of Philosophy.
Introductory Note.
The topic of this article has already been fully and satisfactorily treated in THE CATHOLIC WORLD. It is well, however, to adopt, in handling the truth, Voltaire’s maxim in regard to falsehood, and to keep continually repeating those truths which are frequently denied. Not only the mountebank Gavazzi, but others more respectable than he is, keep on reasserting the denial of S. Peter’s Roman Episcopate, notwithstanding the evidence which has been over and over again presented in proof of it by Protestant as well as Catholic writers. We, therefore, willingly give admission to the present article, which, we may as well state, has been printed from the author’s MS. copy, without any alteration.—ED. C. W.
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At our examination in the diocese of the Protestant Episcopal Church in which we took holy orders, the question of S. Peter’s being at Rome was debated with some warmth by the clerical examiners and the bishop. We had at that time just passed our majority, and, while our reading had been pretty full, we had not touched the subject of this article, for it was indeed comparatively new to us. We remember well the remark of our bishop, whose opinion on theological questions we held in veneration. He was prominent on the bench of bishops as one of the most learned of our prelates, and he had wielded his pen in defence of Anglican Church principles with great reputation to himself among Episcopalians, particularly the High Church school of religious thought. At the period to which we refer, he gave it as his opinion that it was extremely doubtful that S. Peter ever visited Rome, and that he was the first bishop of its See was beyond the province of historical proof. Previous to this date in our studies, we would as lief have questioned the fact of the existence of Rome itself as that of S. Peter’s residence there, and his occupancy of that metropolitan see. We had reached this conclusion by no investigation: it was, rather, one of those traditional questions which fix themselves in the mind without much thought in either direction. The fact, as we supposed, had never been doubted. To hear for the first time a denial of its truth, and that, too, from our ecclesiastical superior, made an impression upon our mind which led us to investigate the subject as soon as time and opportunity were afforded us. From that day to this, we have heard the same theory advanced by Protestant clergymen of every shade of denominational opinion, and in the minds of many it has lodged itself as one of those mooted questions which baffle historical proof.
About twenty years ago, an Italian known as “Father Gavazzi” visited the United States. His crusade against the Church of Rome during that visit is familiar to all. Of its merits or the motives which prompted it we do not propose to speak, as it is foreign to the subject to which the interest of the reader is invited. Again the same Alessandro Gavazzi, as “Commissioner” of what he denominates the “Free Christian Church of Italy,” is lecturing to audiences in our principal cities, for the purpose of securing subscriptions for “evangelization” and for the “Biblical College in Rome.” What these terms may mean we do not know, and of them we have no disposition to speak. In the month of June last, “Father Gavazzi” was advertised to lecture under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association in the city in which we reside. Among others, who had no interest perhaps in the especial work in which he is engaged, we attended his lecture. From a report of the lecture in the issue of a daily paper of the following morning we make the quotation which forms the text, upon which we propose to place before the reader some historical proofs for the belief that S. Peter was at Rome.
“Father Gavazzi” said: “A discussion was proposed in Rome as to whether S. Peter was ever there or not. The Pope favored, insisted upon it, and in two days his chosen champions retired defeated from the contest. That is something. The Bible is entirely silent on this subject. But the priests say that is merely negative proof. The silence of S. Luke is, however, positive proof that S. Peter was never there. The discussion of this subject, once prohibited in Rome, is now talked of freely in all public places. It was his delight to fight the Pope. Pius IX. was no more the successor of S. Peter than he was the successor of the emperor of China. S. Peter was never in Rome to be succeeded by anybody.”
Modern investigation at best has done little to clear up the difficulties connected with the geographical history of the Apostle Peter. That he was at Rome, and suffered martyrdom in that city, is the general belief of the fathers. And it was not until the dawn of the Reformation that the apostle’s journey to that city, and his martyrdom there, became even a subject of doubt. So great was the anxiety of some to disprove the Primacy of the Roman See that scholarly men lent themselves to the repetition of myths and traditions which had no foundation in fact, and later writers, biased by early education and ecclesiastical connection, have even introduced into historical literature mythical stories, the germs of which run through the popular mythology of ancient and modern times. If, they argue, it can be proved that S. Peter was never at Rome, then we at once overturn the pretensions of the Papacy; or, again, if we can demonstrate that there is a break in the chain of succession of its bishops from S. Peter, the belief in the doctrine of an apostolic succession is clearly disproved, and the idea of a line of bishops reaching back through the long period of the Mores Catholici, or Ages of Faith, only a senseless forgery which originated with some monk the abbot of whose monastery was perhaps the first to give it form after he had ascended the chair of Peter. Mosheim, a respectable writer in the Protestant world, blinded by a singular prejudice which led him at times to forget the critical duties of the historian, is one among the few German scholars who has tarnished the pages of his Ecclesiastical History by giving credence to the fabulous story of Pope Joan. “Between Leo IV., who died 855, and Benedict III.,” says he, “a woman who concealed her sex and assumed the name of John, it is said, opened her way to the pontifical throne by her learning and genius, and governed the church for a time. She is commonly called the Papess Joan. During five subsequent centuries the witnesses to this extraordinary event are without number; nor did any one prior to the Reformation by Luther regard the thing as either incredible or disgraceful to the church.” The earliest writer from whom any information relating to the fable of Pope Joan is derived is Marianus Scotus, a monk of S. Martin of Cologne, who died A.D. 1086. He left a chronicle which has received many additions by later writers, and among those interpolations the students of mythical lore regard the passage which refers to this story. Platina, who wrote the Lives of the Popes anterior to the time of Martin Luther, relates the legend, and, with more of the critical acumen than Mosheim, adds: “These things which I relate are popular reports, but derived from uncertain and obscure authors, which I have therefore inserted briefly and baldly, lest I should seem to omit obstinately and pertinaciously what most people assert.” The legend of Pope Joan has been so thoroughly exposed that no controversialist of discrimination thinks of reviving it as an argument against the succession of the Bishops of Rome. Now and then it may be related to an ignorant crowd by an anti‐popery mountebank of our cities during times of religious excitement, but it is never heard from the lips of an educated Protestant. We are inclined to think, however, that the class of minds that seeks to throw doubt upon S. Peter’s residence at Rome in order to subvert the Primacy of the Apostolic See would not hesitate, in view of the evidence from early ecclesiastical writers, to introduce again this Papess Joan to their unlearned readers.
Turning, then, to the proofs of the subject of our paper, we take as the motto for our investigation of this and all kindred ecclesiastical questions the golden words of Tertullian: “Id esse verum, quodcunque primum; id esse adulterum quodcunque posterius.”(4) Or that petition of a great Anglican divine: “Grant, O Lord! that, in reading thy Holy Word, I may never prefer my private sentiments before those of the church in the purely ancient times of Christianity.”(5)
The earliest testimony is borne by S. Ignatius. He was closely connected with the apostles, both as a hearer of their teachings and sharer of the extraordinary mysteries of their faith.(6) S. John was his Christian Gamaliel, at whose feet he was taught the doctrines of Christianity, which prepared him not only to wear the mitre of Antioch, the most cultivated metropolis of the East, but also to receive the brighter crown of a martyr’s agonizing death. Full of years, the follower of the beloved disciple was hurried to Rome, to seal with his blood the truth of the religion of Christ. On his journey to the pagan capital, he was permitted to tarry for a season at Smyrna, to visit, for the last time, S. Polycarp, the aged bishop of that city. Here, in view of the dreadful death that awaited him in the Roman amphitheatre, and in communion with the revered fellow‐laborer of his life, he wrote his four epistles. From the one to the Romans we quote the following evidence: “I do not command you as S. Peter and S. Paul did; they were apostles of Jesus Christ, and I am a mere nothing” (the least).(7) “What can be more clear,” says the Anglican expositor of the Creed, Bishop Pearson, “from these words than that this most holy martyr was of opinion that Peter, no less than Paul, preached and suffered at Rome?”
Eusebius relates, upon the authority of Papias and S. Clement of Alexandria, that “S. Mark wrote his gospel at the request of S. Peter’s hearers in Rome,” and he further adds that “S. Peter mentions S. Mark in his first epistle, written from Rome, which he figuratively calls Babylon.”(8)
S. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, in his epistle addressed to the Romans, affirms that S. Peter and S. Paul preached the Gospel in Corinth and in Rome, and suffered martyrdom about the same time in the latter city.(9)
S. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who was born at Smyrna, though of Greek extraction, had been the disciple of S. Polycarp, Pothinus, and Papias, from whose lips he had heard many anecdotes of the apostles and their immediate followers. He was alike eminent both as a scholar in the learning of the times and as a controversialist of no mean repute. The part he bore against the Gnostic and other heresies rendered his name illustrious, not only within the limits of his episcopal jurisdiction, but wherever the claims of Christianity had been presented. The wonderful aptness with which he interwove Scripture and scriptural phraseology into his style, not altogether unpolished, is perhaps unequalled in patristic theology. Residing in a city whose language and intellectual characteristics differed from those of his native country, his writings are essentially foreign, and, with few exceptions, were lost at an early period. In the fragments which remain we find an unequivocal testimony in behalf of the subject under discussion. His language is: “S. Peter and S. Paul preached the Gospel in Rome, and laid the foundation of the church.”(10)
Caius, a learned Roman presbyter, and, as some suppose, bishop, arguing against Proclus, the chief champion of Montanism at Rome, says that he can “show the trophies of the apostles.” “For if you will go,” he continues, “to the Vatican, or to the Ostian Road, you will find the trophies of those who have laid the foundation of this church.”(11)
Origen, a man of encyclopædic learning, who had been carefully nurtured by Christian parents, and who was imbued with the hardy, stern culture of the Greek literature, at the early age of eighteen became the leader of the Alexandrine school of Christian philosophy. He proved no unworthy successor of the logical Clement. Certainly no name stands higher in the catechetical school than that of the iron‐souled Origen (ἀδαμάντινος). The eloquent teachings of this youthful master nerved many a Christian soul to endure with fortitude the fiery trials of martyrdom, and even comforted the bleeding heart of Leonides, his father, who became a victim of the unrelenting persecutions of Severus. From Origen we learn “that S. Peter, after having preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia, to the Jews that were scattered abroad, went at last to Rome, where he was crucified.” “These things,” says Eusebius, “are related by Origen in the third book of his Τῶν εἰς τὴν Γένεσιν ἐξηγητικῶν.”(12)
Tertullian by birth was a heathen and Carthaginian. He was the son of a centurion, and had been educated in all the varied learning of Greece and Rome. Skilled as a rhetorician and advocate in Rome, he brought, on his conversion to Christianity, the accomplishments of a highly cultivated intellect, but a sombre and irritable temper. The natural lawlessness of a mind guided by a passionate and stubborn disposition led him gradually to renounce the truths which the light of a higher intelligence had revealed, until at last he was anathematized for his Montanistic teachings. His writings are an invaluable addition to the Punic‐Latin theology, and a repository from which we receive great information concerning the polemic questions which at that period harassed the Christian church. Upon the subject of our article he writes as follows: “Let them, then, give us the origin of their churches; let them unfold the series of their bishops, coming down in succession from the beginning, so that the first bishop was appointed and preceded by any of the apostles, or apostolic men, who, nevertheless, preserved in communion with the apostles, had an ordainer and predecessor. For in this way the apostolic churches exhibit their origin; thus the Church of Smyrna relates that Polycarp was placed there by John, as the Church of Rome also relates that Clement was ordained by Peter.”(13)
Again: “If thou be adjacent to Italy, there thou hast Rome, whose authority is near at hand to us. How happy is this church, to which the apostles poured forth their whole doctrine with their blood! where Peter is assimilated to our Lord; where Paul is crowned with a death like that of John.”(14)
And again: “Let us see with what milk the Corinthians were fed by Paul; according to what rule the Galatians were reformed; what laws were to the Philippians, Thessalonians, Ephesians; what also the Romans sound in our ears, to whom Peter and Paul left the Gospel sealed with their blood.”(15)
To this list of witnesses we might add the testimony of the fathers and ecclesiastical writers who have flourished in different ages of the church, but we now propose to briefly survey the opinions of some of the most noted Protestant commentators.
The First Epistle of S. Peter is said by the apostle to have been written from Babylon, but whether it be Babylon in Chaldea, Babylon in Egypt, Jerusalem, or Rome, has given rise to much speculation.(16) Our Lord foretold the manner of St. Peter’s death,(17) and an event of such importance would naturally have awakened more than ordinary interest. Seven cities claimed the honor of Homer’s birth,(18) but no other place than Rome ever assumed to itself the glory of the apostle’s martyrdom. Controversies arose concerning the time of celebrating Easter, the baptism of heretics, and questions of a like nature, yet none disputed the place in which S. Peter was martyred. It is highly improbable that S. Peter ever visited either Babylon in Egypt or Babylon in Chaldea. Certainly no fact of history nor even possibility of conjecture furnishes the least warrantable presumption of either opinion. The great burden of proof points toward Rome. Like Babylon, pagan Rome was idolatrous. Like Babylon, it persecuted the church of God. Like Babylon, the glory of its pagan temple and fane had departed. In many manuscripts this epistle is dated from Rome.
Calvin, who little regarded the authority of the fathers, when, in the presumption of his self‐opinionated orthodoxy, he said: “All the ancients were driven into error,”(19) yet from evidence the most patent he believed that S. Peter suffered martyrdom at Rome. His language is: “Propter scriptorum consensum non pugno quin illic mortuus fuerit.”(20)
“On the meaning of the word Babylon,” says Grotius, one of the most celebrated of the Calvinistic school, “ancient and modern interpreters disagree. The ancients understand it of Rome, and that Peter was there no true Christian ever doubted; the moderns understand it of Babylon in Chaldea. I adhere to the ancients.”(21)
Rosenmüller, of whom an able American critic has said, “He is almost everywhere a local investigator,”(22) has left his testimony in the same language as Grotius: “Veteres Romam interpretantur.”
Dr. Campbell very reluctantly yielded, by the force of evidence, to the same opinion when he wrote: “I am inclined to think that S. Peter’s martyrdom must have been at Rome, both because it is agreeable to the unanimous voice of antiquity, and because the sufferings of so great an apostle could not fail to be of such notoriety in the church as to preclude the possibility of an imposition in regard to the place.”(23)
“From a careful examination of the evidence adduced,” says the learned Horne, “for the literal meaning of the word Babylon, and of the evidence for its figurative or mystical application to Rome, we think that the latter was intended.”(24)
We commend to “Father Gavazzi,” and to the Rev. Doctors Sunderland and Newman of Washington, who are ever ready to throw down the gauntlet when an argument is made to prove that S. Peter was at Rome, the language of the logical and laborious Macknight, who clearly expresses our own view, and whose diligence, learning, and moderation were so fully appreciated by Bishop Tomline: “It is not for our honor nor for our interest, either as Christians or Protestants, to deny the truth of events ascertained by early and well‐attested tradition. If any make an ill use of such facts, we are not accountable for it. We are not, from a dread of such abuses, to overthrow the credit of all history, the consequences of which would be fatal.”(25)
Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune.
Mlle. de Lemaque and her sister Mme. de Chanoir lived at No. 13 Rue Royale. They were the daughters of a military man whose fortune when he married consisted in his sword, nothing else; and of a noble Demoiselle de Cambatte, whose wedding portion, according to the good old French fashion, was precisely the same as her husband’s, minus the sword. But over and above this joint capital the young people had a good stock of hope and courage, and an inexhaustible fund of love; they had therefore as good a chance of getting on as other young folk who start in life under the same pecuniary disadvantages. M. de Lemaque, moreover, had friends in high place who looked kindly on him, and promised him countenance and protection, and there was no reason, as far as he and his wife could see, why he should not in due time clutch that legendary baton which Napoleon declared every French soldier carries in his knapsack. Nor, indeed, looking at things from a retrospective point of view, was there any reason, that we can see, why he should not have died a marshal of France, except that he died too soon. The young soldier was in a fair way of climbing to the topmost rung of the military ladder; but just as he had got his foot on the third rung, Death stepped down and met him, and he climbed no further. His wife followed him into the grave three years later. They left two daughters, Félicité and Aline, the only fruits of their short and happy union. The orphans were educated at the Legion of Honor, and then sent adrift on the wide, wide world, to battle with its winds and waves, to sink or swim as best they could. They swam. Perhaps I ought rather say they floated. The eldest, Félicité, was married from S. Denis to an old general, who, after a reasonably short time, had the delicacy to betake himself to a better world, leaving his gay wife a widow at the head of an income of £40 a year. Aline might have married under similar circumstances, but, after turning it over in her mind, she came to the conclusion that, all things considered, since it was a choice of evils, and that she must earn her bread in some way, she preferred earning it and eating it independently as a single woman. This gave rise to the only quarrel the sisters had had in their lives. Félicité resented the disgrace that Aline was going to put on the family name by degenerating into a giver of private lessons, when she might have secured forty pounds a year for ever by a few years’ dutiful attendance on a brave man who had fought his country’s battles.
“Well, if you can find me a warrior of ninety,” said the younger sister, a month before she left S. Denis, “I’m not sure that he might not persuade me; but I never will capitulate under ninety; I couldn’t trust a man under that; they live for ever when they marry between sixty and eighty, and there are no tyrants like them; now, I would do my duty as a kind wife for a year or so, but I’ve no notion of taking a situation as nurse for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s what one gets by marrying a young man of seventy or thereabouts.”
Félicité urged her own case as a proof to the contrary. Général de Chanoir was only sixty‐eight when she married him, and he retired at seventy. Aline maintained, however, that this was the one exception necessary to prove the rule to the present generation, and as no eligible parti of fourscore and ten presented itself before she left school, she held to her resolve, and started at once as a teacher.
The sisters took an apartment together, if two rooms, a cabinet de toilette, and a cooking‐range in a dark passage, dignified by the name of kitchen, can be called an apartment, and for six years they lived very happily.
Mme. de Chanoir was small and fair, and very distinguished‐looking. She had never known a day’s illness in her life, but she was a hypochondriac. She believed herself afflicted with a spine disease, which necessitated reclining all day long on the sofa in a Louis Quinze dressing‐gown and a Dubarry cap.
Aline was tall and dark, not exactly pretty, but indescribably piquant. Without being delicate, her health was far less robust than her sister’s; but she was blessed with indomitable spirits and a fund of energy that carried her through a variety of aches and pains, and often bore her successfully through her round of daily work when another would have given in.
The domestic establishment of the sisters consisted in a charwoman, who rejoiced in the name of Mme. Cléry. She was a type of a class almost extinct in Paris now; a dainty little cook, clean as a sixpence, honest as the sun, orderly as a clock, a capital servant in every way. She came twice a day to No. 13, two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the sisters paid her twenty francs a month. She might have struck for more wages, and rather than let her go they would have managed to raise them; but Mme. Cléry was born before strikes came into fashion, it was quite impossible to say how long before; her age was incalculable; her youth belonged to that class of facts spoken of as beyond the memory of the oldest man in the district. Aline used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she really could have been born, and if she meant to die like other people; the crisp, wiry old woman looked the sort of person never to have either a beginning or an end; they had had her now for eight years—at least Mme. de Chanoir had—and there was not the shadow of a change in her. Her gowns were like herself, they never wore out, neither did her caps—high Normandy caps, with flaps extended like a wind‐mill in repose, stiff, white, and uncompromising. Everything about her was antiquated. She had a religious regard for antiquity in every shape, and a proportionate contempt for modernism; but, of all earthly things, what her soul loved most was an old name, and what it most despised a new one. She used to say that if she chose to cook the rotis of a parvenu she might make double the money, and it was true; but she could not bend her spirit to it; she liked her dry bread and herbs better from a good family than a stalled ox from upstarts. She was as faithful as a dog to her two mistresses, and consequently lorded over them like a step‐mother, perpetually bullying and scolding, and bewailing her own infatuation in staying with them while she might be turning a fatter pullet on her own spit at home than the miserable coquille at No. 13 ever held a fire to. Why had she not the sense to take the situation that M. X——, the agent de change, across the street, had offered her again and again? The femme de ménage was, in fact, as odious and exasperating as the most devoted old servant who ever nursed a family from the cradle to the grave. But let any one else dare so much as cast a disrespectful glance at either of her victims! She shook her fist at the concierge’s wife one day for venturing to call Mme. de Chanoir Mme. de Chanoir tout court, instead of Mme. la Générale de Chanoir, to a flunky who came with a note, and she boxed the concierge’s ears for speaking of Aline as “l’Institutrice.” As Mme. la Générale’s sofa was drawn across the window that looked into the court, she happened to be an eye‐witness to the two incidents, and heard every word that was said. This accidental disclosure of Mme. Cléry’s regard for the family dignity before outsiders covered a multitude of sins in the eyes of both the sisters. Indeed, Mme. de Chanoir came at last, by force of habit, almost to enjoy being bullied by the old soul. “Cela nous pose, ma chère,” she would remark complacently, when the wind from the kitchen blew due north, and Aline threatened to mutiny.
Aline never could have endured it if she had been as constantly tried as her easy‐going sister was; but, lucky for all parties, she went out immediately after breakfast, and seldom came in till late in the afternoon, when the old beldame was busy getting ready the dinner.
It was a momentous life they led, the two young women, but, on the whole, it was a happy one. Mme. de Chanoir, seeing how bravely her sister carried the burden she had taken up, grew reconciled to it in time. They had a pleasant little society, too; friends who had known them from their childhood, some rich and in good positions, others struggling like themselves in a narrow cage and under difficult circumstances; but one and all liked the sisters, and brought a little contingent of sunshine to their lives. As to Aline, she had sunshine enough in herself to light up the whole Rue Royale. Every lesson she gave, every incident of the day, no matter how trivial, fell across her path like a sunbeam; she had a knack of looking at things from a sunny focus that shot out rays on every object that came within its radius, and of extracting amusement or interest from the most commonplace things and people; even her own vexations she had turned into ridicule. Her position of governess was a fountain of fun to her. When another would have drawn gall from a snub, and smarted and been miserable under a slight, Aline de Lemaque saw a comic side to the circumstance, and would dress it up in a fashion that diverted herself and her friends for a week. Moreover, the young lady was something of a philosopher.
“You never find out human nature till you come to earn your own bread—I mean, women don’t,” she used to say to Mme. de Chanoir. “If I were the mother of a family of daughters, and wanted to teach them life, I’d make every one of them, no matter how big their dots were, begin by running after the cachet. Nobody who hasn’t tried it would believe what a castle of truth it is to one—a mirror that shows up character to the life, a sort of moral photography. It is often as good as a play to me to watch the change that comes over people when, after talking to them, and making myself pass for a very agreeable person, I suddenly announce the fact that I give lessons. Their whole countenance changes, not that they look on me straightway with contempt. Oh! dear no. Many good Christians, people of the ’help yourself and God will help you’ sect, conceive, on the contrary, a great respect for me; but I become metamorphosed on the spot. I am not what they took me for, they took me for a lady, and all the time I was a governess! They did not think the less of me, but they can’t help feeling that they have been taken in; that, in fact, I’m an altogether different variety from themselves, and it is very odd they did not recognize it at first sight. But these are the least exciting experiences. The great fun is when I get hold of an out‐and‐out worldly individual, man or woman, but a woman is best, and let them go on till they have thoroughly committed themselves, made themselves gushingly agreeable to me, perhaps gone the length of asking, in a significant manner, if I live in their neighborhood; then comes the crisis. I smile my gladdest, and say, ‘Monsieur, or Madame, I give lessons!’ Changement de décoration à vue d’œil, ma chère. It’s just as if I lancéd an obus into the middle of the company, only it rebounds on me and hits nobody else; the eyebrows of the company go up, the corners of its mouth go down, and it bows to me as I sit on the ruins of my respectability, shattered to pieces by my own obus.”
“I can’t understand how you can laugh at it. If I were in your place, I should have died of vexation and wounded pride long ago,” said Mme. de Chanoir, one day, as Aline related in high glee an obus episode that she had had that morning; “but I really believe you have no feeling.”
“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque’s social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and lancéd with infinite gusto on every available opportunity.
On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold eau sucrée in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well‐born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The fauteuil de l’aïeule and the salon of the femme d’esprit, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished literary scheme, he brightened up the moment marriage came on the tapis. This hobby of the professor’s was a great amusement to Mme. de Chanoir, who delighted to see him jump into the saddle and ride off at a canter while she lay languidly working at her tapestry, patting him on the back every now and then, by a word of encouragement, or signifying her assent merely by a smile or a nod. Sometimes she would take him to task seriously about putting his theories into practice and getting himself a wife, assuring him that it was quite wicked of him not to marry when he was so richly endowed with all the qualities necessary to make a model husband.
“Ah! madame, if I thought I were capable of making a young woman happy!” M. Dalibouze would exclaim with a sigh; “but at my age! No, I have let my chance go by.”
“How, sir, at your age!” the générale would protest. “Why, it is the very flower of manhood, the moment of all others for a man to marry. You have outlived the delusions of youth and none of its vigor; you have crossed the Rubicon that separates folly from wisdom, and you have left nothing on the other side of the bridge but the silly chimera of boyhood. Believe me, the woman whom you would select would never wish to see you a day younger.”
And M. Dalibouze would caress his chin, and observe thoughtfully: “Do you think so, madame?” Upon which Mme. de Chanoir would pour another vial of oil and honey on the learned head of the professor, till the wonder was that it did not turn on his shoulders.
Aline had no sympathy with his rhapsodies or his jeremiads; they bored her to extinction, and sometimes it was all she could do not to tell him so; but she disapproved of his being made a joke of, and testified against it very decidedly when Félicité, in a spirit of mischief, led him up to a more than usually ridiculous culmination. It was not fair, she said, to make a greater fool of the good little man than he made of himself, and instead of encouraging him to talk such nonsense one ought to laugh him out of it, and try and cure him of his silly conceit.
“I don’t see it at all in that light,” Mme. de Chanoir would answer. “In the first place, if I laughed at him, or rather if I let him see that I did, he would never forgive me, and, as I have a great regard for him, I should be sorry to lose his friendship; and in the next place, it’s a great amusement to me to see him swallow my little doses of flattery so complacently, and I have no scruple in dosing him, because nothing that I or any one else could say could possibly add one grain to his self‐ conceit, so one may as well turn it to account for a little entertainment.”
It was partly this system of flattery, which Aline resented on principle, that induced her occasionally to snub the professor, and partly the fact that she had reason to suspect his dreams of married bliss centred upon herself. In fact, she knew it. He had never told her so outright, for the simple reason that, whenever he drew near that crisis, Aline cut him short in such a peremptory manner that it cowed him for weeks, but nevertheless she knew in her heart of hearts that she reigned supreme over M. Dalibouze’s. She would not have married him, no, not if he could have crowned her queen of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, but the fact of his being her slave and aspiring to be her master constituted a claim on her regard which a true‐hearted woman seldom disowns.
Félicité would have favored his suit if there had been the ghost of a chance for him, but she knew there was not.
Mme. Cléry looked coldly on it. Needless to say, neither M. Dalibouze nor his cruel‐hearted lady‐love had ever made a confidante of the femme de ménage; but she often remarked to her mistresses when they ventured an opinion on anything connected with her special department, “Je ne suis pas née d’hier,” an assertion which, strange to say, even the rebellious Aline had never attempted to gainsay. Mme. Cléry was not, indeed, born yesterday, moreover she was a Frenchwoman, and a particularly wide‐awake one, and from the first evening that she saw Aline sugaring M. Dalibouze’s tea, dropping in lump after lump in that reckless way, while the little man held his cup and beamed at her through his spectacles as if he meant to stand there for ever simpering, “Merci encore!”—it occurred to Mme. Cléry when she saw this that there was more in it than tea‐making. Of course it was natural and proper that a young woman, especially an orphan, should think of getting married, but it was right and proper that her friends should think of it too, and see that she married the proper person. Now, on the face of it, M. Dalibouze could not be the proper person. Nevertheless, Mme. Cléry waited till the suspicion that M. Dalibouze had settled it in his own mind that he was that man took the shape of a conviction before she considered it her duty to interfere.
By interfering Mme. Cléry meant going aux renseignements. Nobody ever got true renseignements, especially when there was a marriage in question, except people like her; ladies and gentlemen never get behind the scenes with each other, or, if they do, they never tell what they see there. They are very sweet and smiling when they meet in the salon, and nobody guesses that madame has rated her femme de chambre for not putting the flowers in her hair exactly to her fancy, or that monsieur has flung a boot at his valet for giving him his shaving‐water too hot or too cold. If you want the truth, you must get it by the back‐stairs. This was Mme. Cléry’s belief, and, acting upon it, she went to M. Dalibouze’s concierge in the Rue Jean Beauvais to consult him confidentially about his locataire.
The first thing to be ascertained before entering on such secondary details as character, conduct, etc., was whether or not the professor was of a good enough family to be entertained at all as a husband for Mlle. de Lemaque. On this sine qua non question the concierge could unfortunately throw no light. The professor had a multitude of friends, all respectable people, many of them décorés, who drove to the door in spruce coupés, but of his family Pipelet knew nothing; of his personal respectability there was no doubt whatever; he was the kindest of men, a very pearl of tenants, always in before midnight, and gave forty francs to Pipelet on New Year’s day, not to count sundry other little bonuses on minor fêtes during the year. But so long as her mind was in darkness on the main point, all this was no better than sounding brass in the ears of Mme. Cléry.
“Has he, or has he not, the particule?” she demanded, cutting Pipelet short in the middle of his panegyric.
“The particule?” repeated Pipelet. “What’s that?”
“The particule nobiliaire,” explained Mme. Cléry, with a touch of contempt. “There is some question of a marriage between him and one of my ladies; but, if M. Dalibouze hasn’t got the particule, it’s no use thinking of it.”
“Madame,” said Pipelet, assuming a meditative air—he was completely at sea as to what this essential piece of property might be, but did not like to own his ignorance—“I’m not a man to set up for knowing more of my tenant’s business than I do, and M. Dalibouze has never opened himself to me about how or where his money was placed; but I could give you the name of his agent, if I thought it would not compromise me.”
“I’m not a woman to compromise any one that showed me confidence,” said Mme. Cléry, tightening her lips, and bobbing her flaps at Pipelet; “but you need not give me the name of his agent. What sort of a figure should I make at his agent’s! Give me his own name. How does he spell it?”
“Spell it!” echoed Pipelet.
“A big D or a little d?” said Mme. Cléry.
“Why, a big D, of course! Who ever spelt their name with a little one?” retorted Pipelet.
“Ah!...” Mme. Cléry smiled a smile of serene pity on the benighted ignoramus, and then observed coolly: “I suspected it! I’m not easy to deceive in that sort of things. I was not born yesterday. Good‐morning, M. le Concierge.” She moved towards the door.
“Stop!” cried Pipelet, seizing his berette as if a ray of light had shot through his skull—“stop! Now that I think of it, it’s a little d. I have not a doubt but it’s a little d. I noticed it only yesterday on a letter that came for monsieur, and I said to myself: ‘Let us see!’ I said. ‘What a queer fancy for a man of distinction like M. le Professeur to spell his name with a little d!’ Là! if I didn’t say those words to myself no later than yesterday!”
Mme. Cléry was dubious. Unluckily there was no letter in M. Dalibouze’s box at that moment, which would have settled the point at issue, so she had nothing for it but to go home, and turn it in her mind what was to be done next. After all, it was a great responsibility on her. The old soul considered herself in the light of a protector to the two young women, one a cripple on the broad of her back, and the other a light‐hearted creature who believed everything and everybody. It was her place to look after them as far as she could. That afternoon, when Mme. Cléry went to No. 13, after her fruitless expedition to the Rue Jean Beauvais, she took a letter in to Mme. de Chanoir. She had never seen, or, at any rate, never noticed, the writing before, but as she handed the envelope to her mistress it flashed upon her that it was from M. Dalibouze, and that it bore on the subject of her morning’s peregrination.
She seized a feather‐broom that hung by the fireplace, and began vigorously threatening the clock and the candlesticks, as an excuse for staying in the room, and watching Mme. de Chanoir in the looking‐glass while she read the letter. The old woman was an irascible enemy to dust; they were used to see her at the most inopportune times pounce on the feather‐broom and begin whipping about her to the right and left, so Mme. de Chanoir took no notice of this sudden castigation of the chimney‐piece at four o’clock in the afternoon. She read her note, and then, tossing it into the basket beside her, resumed her tapestry as if nothing had occurred to divert her thoughts from roses and Berlin wool.
“Mme. la Générale, pardon and excuse,” said Mme. Cléry, deliberately hanging the feather‐broom on its nail, and going up to the foot of the générale’s sofa. “I have it on my mind to ask something of madame.”
“Ask it, my good Mme. Cléry.”
“Does Mme. la Générale think of marrying Mlle. Aline?”
Mme. de Chanoir opened her eyes, and stared for a moment in mild surprise at her charwoman, then a smile broke over her face, and she said:
“You are thinking that you would not like to come to me if I were alone?”
“I was not thinking of that, madame,” replied Mme. Cléry, in a tone of ceremony that was not habitual, and which would have boded no good (Mme. Cléry was never so respectful as when she was going to be particularly disagreeable), except that she looked very meek, and, Félicité thought, rather affectionately at her as their eyes met.
“Well,” said Mme. de Chanoir, “I suppose we must marry her some day; I ought, perhaps, to occupy myself about it more actively than I do; but there’s time enough to think about it yet; mademoiselle is in no hurry.”
“Dame!” said Mme. Cléry testily, “when a demoiselle has become an old maid, there is not so much time to lose! Pardon and excuse, Mme. la Générale, but I thought, I don’t know why, that that letter had something to do with it?”
“This letter! What could have put that into your head?”
Mme. de Chanoir took up the note to see if the envelope had anything about it which warranted this romantic suspicion, but it was an ordinary envelope, with no trace of anything more peculiar than the post‐mark.
“As I have told Mme. la Générale before,” said Mme. Cléry, shaking her head significantly, “I was not born yesterday”—she emphasized the not as if Mme. de Chanoir had denied that fact and challenged her to swear to it on the Bible—“and I don’t carry my eyes in my pocket; and when a demoiselle heaps lumps of sugar into a gentleman’s cup till it’s as thick as honey for a spoon to stand in, and a shame to see the substance of the family wasted in such a way, and she never grudging it a bit, but looking as if it would be fun to her to turn the sugar‐bowl upside down over it—I say, when I see that sort of thing, I’m not femme Cléry if there isn’t something in it.”
Félicité felt inclined to laugh, but she restrained herself, and observed interrogatively:
“Well, Mme. Cléry, suppose there is?”
This extravagance of sugar on M. Dalibouze was an old grievance of Mme. Cléry’s. In fact, it had been her only one against the professor, till she grew to look upon him as the possible husband of Mlle. Aline, and then the question of his having or not having the particule assumed such alarming importance in her mind that it magnified all minor defects, and she believed him capable of every misdemeanor under the sun.
“Mme. la Générale,” she replied, “one does not marry every day; one ought to think seriously about it; Mlle. Aline has not experience; she is vive and light‐hearted; she is a person to be taken in by outward appearances; such things as learning, good principles, and esprit would blind her to serious shortcomings; it is the duty of Mme. la Générale to prevent such a mistake in time.”
“What sort of shortcomings are you afraid of in M. Dalibouze, Mme. Cléry?” inquired Mme. de Chanoir, dropping her tapestry, and looking with awakened curiosity at the old woman.
“Let us begin with a first principle, Mme. la Générale,” observed Mme. Cléry, demurely slapping the palm of her left hand. “Mlle. Aline is née; the father and mother of mamzelle were both of an excellent family; it is consequently of the first necessity that her husband should be so, too; the first thing, therefore, to be considered in a suitor is his name. Now, has M. Dalibouze the particule, or has he not?”
It was a very great effort for Mme. de Chanoir to keep her countenance under this charge and deliver with which the old woman solemnly closed her speech, and then stood awaiting the effect on her listener; still, such is the weakness of human nature, the générale in her inmost heart was flattered by it; it was pleasant to be looked up to as belonging to a race above the common herd, to be recognized in spite of her poverty, even by a femme de ménage, as superior to the wealthy parvenus whose fathers and mothers were not of a good family.
“My good Mme. Cléry,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “you, like ourselves, were brought up with very different ideas from those that people hold nowadays. Nobody cares a straw to‐day who a man’s father was, or whether he had the particule or not; all that they care about is that he should be well educated, and well conducted, and well off; and, my dear, one must go with the times, one must give in to the force of public opinion around one. Customs change with the times. I would, of course, much rather have a brother‐in‐law of our own rank than one cleverer and richer who was not; but what would you have? One cannot have everything. It is not pleasant for me to see Mlle. de Lemaque earning her own bread, running about the streets like a milliner’s apprentice at all hours of the day. I would overlook something to see her married to a kind, honorable man who would keep her in comfort and independence.”
“Bonté divine!” exclaimed Mme. Cléry, with a look of deep distress and consternation, “madame would then actually marry mamzelle to a bourgeois sans particule? For madame admits that M. Dalibouze has not the particule, that he spells his name with a big D?”
“Alas! he does,” confessed the générale; “but he comes, nevertheless, of a good old Normandy stock, Mme. Cléry; his great‐grandfather was procureur du roi under—”
“Tut! tut!” interrupted Mme. Cléry; “his great‐grandfather may have been what he liked; if he wasn’t a gentleman, he has no business marrying his great grandson to a de Lemaque. No, madame; I am a poor woman, but I know better than that. Mamzelle’s father would turn in his grave if he saw her married to a man who spelt his name with a big D.”
The conversation was interrupted by a ring at the door. It was Aline. She came back earlier than usual, because one of her pupils was ill and had not been able to take her lesson. The young girl was flushed and excited, and flung herself into an arm‐chair the moment she entered, and burst into tears. Mme. de Chanoir sat up in alarm, fearing she was ill, and suggested a cup of tisane.
“Oh! ’tis nothing. I’m an idiot to mind it or let such impertinence vex me,” she said, when the first outburst had passed off and relieved her.
“Mon Dieu! but what vexes mamzelle?” inquired Mme. Cléry anxiously.
“A horrid man that followed me the length of the street, and made some impudent speech, and asked me where I lived,” sobbed Aline.
“Is it possible!” exclaimed the old woman, aghast, and clasping her hands. “Well, mamzelle does astonish me! I thought young men knew better nowadays than to go on with that sort of tricks; fifty years ago they used to. I remember how I was followed and spoken to every time I went to church or to market; it was a persecution; but now I come and go and nobody minds me. To think of their daring to speak to mamzelle!”
“That’s what one must expect when one walks about alone at your age, ma pauvre Aline,” said the générale, rather sharply, with a significant look at Mme. Cléry which that good lady understood, and resented by compressing her lips and bobbing her flaps, as much as to say, “One has a principle or one has not”—principle being in this instance synonymous with particule.
Things remained in statu quo after this for some years. Mme. de Chanoir did not enlighten her sister on the subject of the conference with Mme. Cléry, but she worked as far as she could in favor of the luckless suitor who spelt his name with a capital D. It was of no use, however. Aline continued to snub him so pertinaciously and persistently that Mme. de Chanoir at last gave up his cause as hopeless, and the professor himself, when he saw this, his solitary stronghold, surrender, thought it best to raise the siege with a good grace, and make a friendly truce with the victor. He frankly withdrew from the field of suitors, and took up his position as a friend of the family. This once done, he accepted its responsibilities and prerogatives, and held himself on the qui vive to render any service in his power to Mme. de Chanoir; he kept her concierge in order, and brought bonbons and flowers to No. 13 on every possible occasion. He knew Aline was passionately fond of the latter, and he was careful to keep the flower stand that stood in the pier of the little salon freshly supplied with her favorite plants, and the vases filled with her favorite flowers. He never dared to offer her a present, but under cover of offering them to the générale he kept her informed about every new book which was likely to interest her. Finally, Frenchman‐ like, having abandoned the hope of marrying her himself, he set to work to find some more fortunate suitor. This was par excellence the duty of a friend of the family, and M. Dalibouze was fully alive to its importance. The disinterested zeal he displayed in the discharge of it would have been comical if the spirit of genuine self‐sacrifice which animated him had not touched it with pathos. One by one every eligible parti in the range of his acquaintance was led up for inspection to No. 13. Mme. de Chanoir entered complacently into the presentations; they amused her, and she tried to persuade herself that, sooner or later, something would come of them; but she knew Aline too well ever to let her into the secret of the professor’s matrimonial manœuvres. The result would have been to furnish Mlle. de Lemaque with an obus opportunity and nothing more.
But do what she would, the générale could never cheat Mme. Cléry. The old woman detected a prétendant as a cat does a mouse. It was an instinct with her. There was no putting her off the scent. She never said a word to Mme. de Chanoir, but she had a most aggravating way of making her understand tacitly that she knew all about it—that, in fact, she was not born yesterday. This was her system, whenever M. Dalibouze brought a parti to tea in the evening. Mme. Cléry was seized next day with a furious dusting fit, and when the générale testified against the feathers that kept flying out of the broom, Mme. Cléry would observe, in a significant way:
“Mme. la Générale, that makes an impression when one sees a salon well dusted; that proves that the servant is capable—that she attends to her work. Madame does not think of those things, but strangers do.”
It became at length a sort of cabalistic ceremony with the old woman; intelligible only to Mme. de Chanoir. If Aline came in when the fit was on her, and ventured to expostulate, and ask what she was doing with the duster at that time of day, Mme. Cléry would remark stiffly: “Mamzelle Aline, I am dusting.” Aline came at last to believe that it was a modified phase of S. Vitus’ dance, and that for want of anything better the old beldame vented her nerves on imaginary dust which she pursued in holes and corners with her feathery weapon.
This went on till Mlle. de Lemaque was six‐and‐twenty. She was still a bright, brave creature, working hard, accepting the privations and toil of her life in a spirit of sunshiny courage. But the sun was no longer always shining. There were days now when he drew behind a cloud—when toil pressed like a burden, and she beat her wings against it, and hated the cage that cooped her in; and she longed not so much for rest or happiness as for freedom—for a larger scope and higher aims, and wider, fuller sympathies. When these cloudy days came around, Aline felt the void of her life with an intensity that amounted at times to anguish; she felt it all the more keenly because she could not speak of it. Mme. de Chanoir would not have understood it. The sisters were sincerely attached to each other, but there was little sympathy of character between them, and on many points they were as little acquainted with each other as the neighbors on the next street. They knew this, and agreed sensibly to keep clear of certain subjects on which they could never meet except to disagree. The younger sister, therefore, when the sky was overcast, and when her spirits flagged, never tried to lean upon the older, but worked against the enemy in silence, denying herself the luxury of complaint. If her looks betrayed her, as was sometimes the case, and prompted Mme. de Chanoir to inquire if there was anything the matter beyond the never‐ending annoyance of life in general, Aline’s assurance that there was not was invariably followed by the remark: “Ma sœur, I wish you were married.” To which Aline as invariably replied: “I am happier as I am, Félicité.” It was true, or at any rate Mlle. de Lemaque thought it was. Under all her surface indifference she carried a true woman’s heart. She had dreamt her dreams of happiness, of tender fireside joys, and the dream was so fair and beautiful that for years it filled her life like a reality, and when she discovered, or fancied she did, that it was all too beautiful to be anything but a dream, that the hero of her young imagination would never cross her path in the form of a mortal husband, Aline accepted the discovery with a sigh, but without repining, and laid aside all thought of marriage as a guest that was not for her. As to the marriages that she saw every day around her, she would no more have bound herself in one of them than she would have sold herself to an Eastern pasha. Marriage was a very different thing in her eyes from what it was in Mme. de Chanoir’s. There was no point on which the sisters were more asunder than on this, and Aline understood it so well that she avoided touching on it except in jest. Whenever the subject was introduced, she drew a mask of frivolity over her real feelings to avoid bringing down the générale’s ridicule on what she would stigmatize as preposterous sentimentality.
M. Dalibouze alone guessed something of this under‐current of deep feeling in the young girl’s character. With the subtle instinct of affection he penetrated the disguise in which she wrapped herself, but, with a delicacy that she scarcely gave him credit for, he never let her see that he did. Sometimes, indeed, when one of those fits of tristesse was upon her, and she was striving to dissemble it by increased cheerfulness towards everybody, and sauciness towards him, the professor would adapt the conversation to the tone of her thoughts with a skill and apropos that surprised her. Once in particular Aline was startled by the way in which he betrayed either a singularly close observation of her character, or a still more singular sympathy with its moods and sufferings. It was on a Saturday evening, the little circle was gathered round the fire, and the conversation fell upon poetry and the mission of poets amongst common men. Aline declared that it was the grandest of all missions; that, after the prophet and priest, the poet did more for the moral well‐being, the spiritual redemption of his fellows than any other missionary, whether philosopher, artist, or patriot; he combined them all, in fact, if he wished it. If he was a patriot, he could serve his country better than a soldier, by singing her wrongs and her glories, and firing the souls of her sons, and making all mankind vibrate to the touch of pain, or joy, or passionate revenge, while he sat quietly by his own hearth; she quoted Moore and Krazinski, and other patriot bards who living had ruled their people, and sent down their name a legacy of glory to unborn generations, till warmed by her subject she grew almost eloquent, and broke off in an impulsive cry of admiration and envy: “Oh! what a glorious privilege to be a poet, to be even a man with the power of doing something, of living a noble life, instead of being a weak, good‐for‐nothing woman!”
The little ring of listeners heard her with pleasure, and thought she must have a very keen appreciation of the beauties of the poets to speak of them so well and so fervently. But M. Dalibouze saw more in it than this. He saw an under‐tone of impatience, of disappointment, of longing to go and do likewise, to spread her wings and fly, to wield a wand that had power to make others spread their wings; there was a spirit’s war‐cry in it, a rebel’s impotent cry against the narrow, inexorable bondage of her life.
“Yes,” said the professor, “it is a grand mission, I grant you, but it is not such a rare one as you make it out, Mlle. Aline. There are more poets in the world than those who write poetry; few of us have the gift of being poets in language, but we may all be poets in action if we will; we may live out our lives in poems.”
“If we had the fashioning of our lives, no doubt we might,” asserted Aline ironically; “but they are most of them so shabby that I defy Homer himself to manufacture an epic or an idyl out of them.”
“You are mistaken. There is no life too shabby to be a poem,” said M. Dalibouze; “it is true, we can’t fashion our lives as you say, but we can color them, we can harmonize them; but we must begin by believing this, and by getting our elements under command; we must sort them and arrange them, just as Mme. la Générale is doing with the shreds and silks for the tapestry, and then go on patiently working out the pattern leaf by leaf; by‐and‐by when the web gets tangled as it is sure to do with the best workers, instead of pulling angrily at it, or cutting it with the sharp scissors of revolt, we must call up a soft breeze from the land of souls where the spirit of the true poet dwells, and bid it blow over it, and then let us listen, and we shall hear the spirit‐wind draw tones of music out of our tangled web, like the breeze sweeping the strings of an Æolian harp. It is our own fault, or perhaps oftener our own misfortune, if our lives look shabby to us; we consider them piecemeal instead of looking at them as a whole.”
“But how can we look at them as a whole?” said Aline. “We don’t even know that they ever will develop into a whole. How many of us remain on the easel a sort of washed‐in sketch to the end? It seems to me we are pretty much like apples in an orchard; some drop off in the flower, some when they are grown to little green balls, hard and sour and good for nothing; it is only a little of the tree that comes to maturity.”
“And is there not abundance of poetry in every phase of the apple’s life, no matter when it falls?” said M. Dalibouze. “How many poems has the blight of the starry blossom given birth to? And the little green ball, who will count the odes that the school‐boy has sung to it, not in good hexameters perhaps, but in sound, heart poetry, full of zest and the gusto of youth, when all bitters are sweet? O mon Dieu! when I think of the days when a bright‐green apple was like honey in my mouth, I could be a poet myself! No paté de foie gras ever tasted half so sweet as that forbidden fruit of my school‐days!”
“Good for the forbidden fruit!” said Aline, amused at the professor’s sentiment over the reminiscence; “but that is only one view of the question: if the apples could speak, they would give us another.”
“Would they?” said M. Dalibouze. “I’m not sure of that. If the apples discuss the point at all, believe me, they are agreed that whatever befalls them is the very best thing that could. We have no evidence of any created thing, vegetable, mineral, or animal, grumbling at its lot; that is reserved to man, discontent is man’s prerogative, he quarrels with himself, with his destiny, his neighbors, everything by turns. If we could but do like the apples, blossom, and grow, and fall, early or late, just as the wind and the gardener wished, we should be happy. Fancy an apple quarrelling with the sun in spring for not warming him as he does in August! It would be no more preposterous than it is for men to quarrel with their circumstances. The fruit of our lives have their seasons like the fruit of our gardens; the winter and snows and the sharp winds are just as necessary to both as the fire of the summer heat; all growth is gradual, and we must accept the process through which we are brought to maturity, just as the apples do. It is not the same for all of us; some are ripened under the warm vibrating sun, others resist it, and, like certain winter fruit, require the cold twilight days to mellow them. But it matters little what the process is, it is sure to be the right one if we wait for it and accept it.”
“I wonder what stage of it I am in at the present moment,” said Aline. “I can’t say the sun has had much to do with it; the winds and the rain have been the busiest agents in my garden so far.”
“Patience, mademoiselle!” said M. Dalibouze. “The sun will come in his own good time.”
“You answer for that?”
“I do.”
Aline looked him straight in the face as she put the question like a challenge, and M. Dalibouze met the saucy bright eyes with a grave glance that had more of tenderness in it than she had ever seen there before. It flashed upon her for a moment that the sun might come to her through a less worthy medium than this kind, faithful, honorable man, and that she had been mayhap a fool to her own happiness in shutting the gate on him so contemptuously.
Perhaps the professor read the thought on her face, for he said in a penetrated tone, and fixing his eyes upon her:
“The true sun of life is marriage.”
It was an unfortunate remark. Aline tossed back her head, and burst out laughing. The spell that had held her for an instant was broken.
“A day will come when some one will tell you so, and you will not laugh, Mlle. Aline,” said M. Dalibouze humbly, and hiding his discomfiture under a smile.
This was the only time within the last two years that he had betrayed himself into any expression of latent hope with regard to Mlle. de Lemaque, and it had no sooner escaped him than he regretted it. The following Saturday, by way of atonement, he brought up a most desirable parti for inspection, and next day Mme. Cléry was seized with the inevitable dusting fit. Nothing, however, came of it.
Things went on without any noticeable change at No. 13 till September, 1870, when Paris was declared in a state of siege. The sisters were not among those lucky ones who wavered for a time between going and staying, between the desire to put themselves in safe‐keeping, and the temptation of living through the blocus and boasting of it for the rest of their days. There was no choice for them but to stay. Aline, as usual, made the best of it; she must stay, so she settled it in her mind that she liked to stay; that it would be a wonderful experience to live through the most exciting episode that could have broken up the stagnant monotony of their lives, and that, in fact, it was rather an enjoyable prospect than the reverse.
Mme. Cléry was commissioned to lay in as ample a store of provisions as their purse would allow. The good woman did the best she could with her means, and the little group encouraged each other to face the coming events like patriotic citizens, cheerfully and bravely. Of the magnitude of those events, or their own probable share in their national calamities, they had a very vague notion.
“The situation,” M. Dalibouze assured them, “was critical, but by no means desperate. On the contrary, France, instead of being at the mercy of her enemies, was now on the eve of crushing them, of obtaining one of those astonishing victories which make ordinary history pale. It was the incommensurable superiority of the French arms that had brought her to this pass; that had driven Prussia mad with rage and envy, and roused her to defiance. Infatuated Prussia! she would mourn over her folly once and for ever. She would find that Paris was not alone the Greece of civilization and the arts and sciences, but that she was the most impregnable fortress that ever defied the batteries of a foe. Europe had deserted Paris, after betraying France to her enemies; now the day of reckoning was at hand; Europe would reap the fruits of her base jealousy, and witness the triumph of the capital of the world!”
This was M. Dalibouze’s firm opinion, and he gave it in public and private to any one who cared to hear it. When Mme. de Chanoir asked if he meant to remain in Paris through the siege, the professor was so shocked by the implied affront to his patriotism that he had to control himself before he could trust himself to answer her.
“Comment, Mme. la Générale! You think so meanly of me as to suppose I would abandon my country at such a crisis! Is it a time to fly when the enemy is at our gates, and when the nation expects every man to stand forth and defend her, and scatter those miserable eaters of sauerkraut to the winds!”
And straightway acting up to this noble patriotic credo, M. Dalibouze had himself measured for a National Guard uniform. No sooner had he endorsed it than he rushed off to Nadar’s and had himself photographed. He counted the hours till the proofs came home, and then, bursting with satisfaction, he set out to No. 13.
“It is unbecoming,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he presented his carte de visite to the générale, “mais que voulez‐vous? A man must sacrifice everything to his country; what is personal appearance that it could weigh in the balance against duty! Bah! I could get myself up as a punchinello, and perch all day on the top of Mont Valérien, if it could scare away one of those despicable brigands from the walls of the capital!”
“You are wrong in saying it is unbecoming, M. Dalibouze,” protested the générale, attentively scanning the portrait, where the military costume was set off by a semi‐heroic military pose, “I think the dress suits you admirably.”
“You are too indulgent, madame,” said the professor. “You see your friends through the eyes of friendship; but, in truth, it was purely from an historical point of view that I made the little sacrifice of personal feeling; the portrait will be interesting as a souvenir some day when we, the actors in this great drama, have passed away.”
But time went on, and the prophetic triumphs of M. Dalibouze were not realized; the eaters of sauerkraut held their ground, and provisions began to grow scarce at No. 13. The purse of the sisters, never a large one, was now seriously diminished, Aline’s contribution to the common fund having ceased altogether with the beginning of the siege. Her old pupils had left, and there was no chance of finding any new ones at such a time as this. No one had money to spend on lessons, or leisure to learn; the study that absorbed everybody was how to realize food or fuel out of impossible elements. Every one was suffering, in a more or less degree, from the miseries imposed by the state of blocus; but one would have fancied the presence of death in so many shapes, by fire without, by cold and famine within, would have detached them generally from life, and made them forgetful of the wants of the body and absorbed them in sublimer cares. But it was not so. After the first shock of hearing the cannon at the gates close to them, they got used to it. Later, when the bombardment came, there was another momentary panic, but it calmed down, and they got used to that too. Shells could apparently fall all round without killing them. So they turned all their thoughts to the cherishing and comfort of their poor afflicted bodies. It must have been sad, and sometimes grimly comical, to watch the singular phases of human nature developed by the blocus. One of the oddest and most frequent was the change it wrought in people with regard to their food. People who had been ascetically indifferent to it before, and never thought of their meals till they sat down to table, grew monomaniac on the point, and could think and speak of nothing else. Meals were talked of, in fact, from what we can gather, more than politics, the Prussians, or the probable issue of the siege, or any of the gigantic problems that were being worked out both inside and outside the besieged city. Intelligent men and women discussed by the hour, with gravity and gusto, the best way of preparing cats and dogs, rats and mice, and all the abominations that necessity had substituted for food. Poor human nature was fermenting under the process like wine in the vat, and all its dregs came uppermost: selfishness, callousness to the sufferings of others, ingratitude, all the pitiable meanness of a man, boiled up to the surface and showed him a sorry figure to behold. But other nobler things came to the surface too. There were innumerable silent dramas, soul‐poems going on in unlikely places, making no noise beyond their quiet sphere, but travelling high and sounding loud behind the curtain of gray sky that shrouded the winter sun of Paris. The cannon shook her ramparts, and the shells flashed like lurid furies through the midnight darkness; but far above the din and the darkness and the death‐ cries rose the low sweet music of many a brave heart’s sacrifice; the stronger giving up his share to the weaker, the son hoarding his scanty rations against the day of still scantier supplies, when there would be scarcely food enough to support the weakened frame of an aged father or mother, talking big about the impossibility of surrender, and lightly about the price of resistance. There were mothers in Paris, too, and wherever mothers are there is sure to be found self‐sacrifice in its loveliest, divinest form. How many of them toiled and sweated, aye, and begged, subduing all pride to love for the little ones, who ate their fill and knew nothing of the cruel tooth that was gnawing the bread‐winner’s vitals!
We who heard the thunder of the artillery and the blasting shout of the mitrailleuse, we did not hear these things, but other ears did, and not a note of the sweet music was lost, angels were hearkening for them, and as they rose above the dark discord, like crystal bells tolling in the storm wind, the white‐winged messengers caught them on golden lyres and wafted them on to paradise.
On A Picture Of S. Mary Bearing Doves To Sacrifice.
My eyes climb slowly up, as by a stair, To seek a picture on my chamber wall— A picture of the Mother of our Lord, Hung where the latest twilight shadows fall.
My lifted eyes behold a childlike face, Under a veil of woman’s holiest thought, O’ershadowed by the mystery of grace, And mystery of mercy—God hath wrought.
Down through the dim old temple, moving slow, Her drooping lids scarce lifted from the ground, As if she faintly heard the distant flow Of far‐off seas of grief she could not sound.
I think archangels would not count it sin If, underneath the veil that hides her eyes, They, seeing all things, saw the soul within Held more of mother‐love than sacrifice.
She walks erect, the virgin undefiled, Back from her throat the loose robe falls apart, And e’en as she would clasp her royal Child, She holds the dovelets to her tender heart.
No white wing trembles ’neath her pitying palm, No feather flutters in this last warm nest, And thus she bears them on—while solemn psalm Wakes dim, prophetic stirrings in her breast.
Sweet Hebrew mother! many a woman shares, Thy crucifixion of her hopes and loves, And in her arms to death unshrinking bears Her precious things—even her turtle‐doves.
But often, ere the temple’s marble floor Has ceased the echo of her parting feet, Her gifts prove worthless—thine is ever more The gift of gifts—transcendent and complete.
We mothers, too, have treasures all our own, And, one by one, oft see them sacrificed: Thou, Blessed among women—thou alone Hast held within thine arms the dear Child‐Christ.
Therefore, mine eyes mount up, as by a stair, To seek the picture on my chamber wall; Therefore my soul climbs oft the steeps of prayer, To rest where shadows of thy Son’s cross fall.
Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries.
It seems very ambitious to try and present to the reader a sketch of anything so vast as the field of research pointed out by the above title, and, indeed, far from aiming at this, we will set forth by saying, once for all, that our attempts will be nothing more than passing views, isolated specimens of that immense whole which, under the names of education, progress, development, scholasticism, and renaissance, forms the intellectual “stock in trade” of every modern system of knowledge.
The “past” is divided into two distinct eras—the monastic and the scholastic. In the earlier era, the centres of thought were the Benedictine and the Columbanian monasteries; in the second era, intellectual life gathered its strength in the universities, under the guidance of the church, typified by the Mendicant Orders. The first era may be said to have lasted from the fifth century to the eleventh, and to have reached its apogee in the seventh and eighth. The second reached from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, and attained its highest glory in the prolific and gifted thirteenth century. Each had its representative centre par excellence, its representative men, philosophy, and religious development. Prior Vaughan, in his recent masterpiece, the Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, expresses this idea in many ways. “From the sixth to the thirteenth century,” he says, “the education of Europe was Benedictine. Monks in their cells ... were planting the mustard‐seed of future European intellectual growth.” Further on he says: “Plato represents rest; Aristotle, inquisitiveness. The former is synthetical; the latter, analytical. Quies is monastic, inquisitiveness is dialectical.” Thus, Plato is the representative master of the earlier era; S. Benedict and his incomparable rule, its representative religious outgrowth; the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the liberal arts, its representative system of education. We do not hear of many “commentaries” in those days, nor of curious schedules of questions, such as, “Did the little hands of the Boy Jesus create the stars?”(26) On the other hand, elegant Latinity was taught, and the Scriptures were multiplied by thousands of costly and laborious transcriptions. The first era was eminently conservative. Its very schools were physically representative; “the solitary abbey, hidden away amongst the hills, with its psalmody, and manual work, and unexciting study.”(27) In the scholastic era, things were reversed. “Latinity grew barbarous, and many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise of reason. Yet intellectual progress was being made in spite of the decay of letters.... In the extraordinary intellectual revolution which marked the opening of the thirteenth century, the study of thoughts was substituted for the study of words.”(28) Here the representative exponent was Aristotle; the religious developments, the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders; and the personal outgrowth of the clashes of the two systems—that of the old immovable dogmatic church, and that of irreverence and rationalism—S. Bernard, S. Dominic, S. Thomas of Aquin, on the one hand, and Peter Abelard and William de Saint Amour, on the other. Here, again, we find the locale analogous to the spirit of the age. Cities were now the centres of knowledge; noisy streets, with ominous names, such as the “Rue Coupegueule,”(29) in Paris, so named from the frequent murders committed there during university brawls, take the place of the silent cloister and long stone corridors of the abbey; physical disorder typifies the moral confusion of the day; and Paris the chaotic stands in the room of Monte Casino, S. Gall, or English Jarrow. Then followed the “Renaissance,” that “revival of practical paganism.”(30) “The saints and fathers of the church gradually disappeared from the schools, and society, instead of being permeated, as in former times, with an atmosphere of faith, was now redolent of heathenism.”(31) Petrarch and Boccaccio were the representatives of this refined (if we must use the word in its ordinary sensual meaning) infidelity; Plato was the god of the new Olympus, but unrecognizable from the Plato embodied in the Fathers and Benedictine littérateurs, for, practically speaking, polite life had now become Epicurean; while as for the religious development of the times, since it could no longer be representative, it became apostolic. Savonarola and S. Francis Xavier are names that stand out in the moral darkness of that era, and the latter suggests the only new creation in the church from that day to our own. Christian education had been Benedictine, then Dominican; it now became Jesuit. The world knew its old enemy in the new dress, and ever since has warred against it with diabolical foresight and unwearied venom. Of this last phase of the past, which is so like the present that we have classed it apart, we do not purpose to speak, but will confine ourselves to those older and grander, though hardly less troublous times known as the middle ages.
The first two centres of Christianity and patristic learning outside Rome were Alexandria and Constantinople. The latter soon fell away into schism, and thence into that barbarism which the vigorous Western races were at that very same time casting off through the influence of the church that Byzantium had rejected. From Alexandria we may date the beginnings of our own systems of learning. The end of the second century already found the Christian schools of that city famous, and the converted Stoic Pantænus spoken of as one of “transcendent powers.” Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto, were teachers in those schools, and the Acts of the Martyrs tell us that Catharine, the learned virgin‐martyr, was an Alexandrian. Hippolytus was a famous astronomer and arithmetician. Clement used poetry, philosophy, science, eloquence, and even satire, in the interests of religion. Origen became the master of S. Gregory Thaumaturgus and his brother Athenodorus. “It was now recognized that Christians were men who could think and reason with other men, ... and of whom a university city need not be ashamed. Christians were expected to teach and study the liberal arts, profane literature, philosophy, and the Biblical languages, ... and all the time the business of the school went on, persecution raged with small intermission.”(32) Prior Vaughan says that “Faith took her seat with her Greek profile and simple majesty in Alexandria, and withstood, as one gifted with a divine power, two subtle and dangerous enemies—heathen philosophy and heretical theology—and, by means of Clement and of Origen, proved to passion and misbelief that a new and strange intellectual influence had been brought into the world.”(33) Antioch and Constantinople claimed the world’s attention later on, and the Thebaid teemed with equal treasures of learning and of holiness. S. John Chrysostom exhorts Christian parents, in 376, “to entrust the education of their sons to the solitaries, to those men of the mountain whose lessons he himself had received.”(34)
When the glories of the patristic age were waning, and the East seemed to fail the church, through whose influence alone she had become famous, there arose in the West, among the half‐barbarous races of Goths, Franks, Celts, and Teutons, other champions of monasticism and pioneers of learning. The raw material of Christian Europe was being moulded into the heroic form it bore during mediæval times by poet, philosopher, and legislator‐monks.
Of these monastic centres, Lerins is perhaps the oldest. Founded in 410, on an island of the Mediterranean near the coast of France, it became “another Thebaid, a celebrated school of theology and Christian philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the works of barbarism, and an asylum for literature and science which had fled from Italy on the invasion of the Goths.”(35) All France sought its bishops from this holy and learned isle. Among its great scholars was Vincent of Lerins, the first controversialist of his time, and the originator of the celebrated formula: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. We may be pardoned for extending our notice of him, since the words he uses on the progress of the church are so singularly appropriate to our own times and problems. Having established the unchangeableness of Catholic doctrine, he goes on to say: “Shall there, then, be no progress in the church of Christ? There shall be progress, and even great progress, ... but it will be progress and not change. With the growth of ages there must necessarily be a growth of intelligence, of wisdom, and of knowledge, for each man as for all the church. But the religion of souls must imitate the progress of the human form, which, in developing and growing in years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity of age as in the flower of youth.”(36) Had the monk of Lerins foreknown the aberrations of the doctor of Munich, he could not have better refuted the latest heresy of our own day. S. Lupus of Troyes, who arrested Attila at the gates of his episcopal city, and successfully combated the Pelagian heresy in England; S. Cesarius of Arles, who was successively persecuted and finally reinstated by two barbarian kings, and who gave his sister Cesaria a rule for her nuns which was adopted by Queen Radegundes for her immense monastery of Poictiers; Salvian, whose eloquence was likened to that of S. Augustine, were all monks of Lerins. S. Cesarius has well epitomized the training of this great and holy school when he says: “It is she who nourishes those illustrious monks who are sent into all provinces of Gaul as bishops. When they arrive, they are children; when they go out, they are fathers. She receives them as recruits, she sends them forth kings.”(37) As late as 1537, we find on the list of the commission appointed by Pope Paul III. to draw up the preliminaries of the Council of Trent, and especially to point out and correct the abuses of secular training and paganized art, the name of Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins.(38) But we must hasten on to other foundations of a reputation and influence as world‐wide as that of the Mediterranean Abbey.
In 580, there was a famous school at Seville, where all the arts and sciences were taught by learned masters, presided over by S. Leander, the bishop of the diocese. Then S. Ildefonso, of Toledo, a scholar of Seville, founded a great school at Toledo itself (where the famous councils took place later on), which, together with Seville, made “Spain the intellectual light of the Christian world in the seventh century.”(39)
From the South let us turn to the fruitful land where monks supplied the place of martyrs, and where the faith, planted by Patrick, grew so marvellously into absolute power within the short space of a century. Armagh, Bangor, Clonard, are names that at once recall the palmy days of sacred learning. “Within a century after the death of S. Patrick,” says Bishop Nicholson, “the Irish seminaries had so increased that most parts of Europe sent their children to be educated there, and drew thence their bishops and teachers.”(40) “By the ninth century, Armagh could boast of 7,000 students.”(41) “Clonard,” says Usher, “issued forth a stream of saints and doctors like the Greek warriors from the wooden horse.”(42) The Irish communities, Montalembert tells us in his brilliant language, “entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil; they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, from no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.” The young Luan answered the Abbot of Bangor, who warned him against the dangers of too engrossing a study of the liberal arts: “If I have the knowledge of God, I shall never offend God, for they who disobey him are they who know him not.”
The Irish were as adventurous as they were learned, and Montalembert bears witness to the national propensity in the following graceful language: “This monastic nation became the missionary nation par excellence. The Irish missionaries covered the land and seas of the West. Unwearied navigators, they landed on the most desert islands; they overflowed the continent with their successive immigrations. They saw in incessant visions a world known and unknown to be conquered for Christ.” And the author of Christian Schools and Scholars reminds us of the beautiful legend of S. Brendan, the founder of the great school of Clonfert in Connaught, the school‐fellow of Columba, and the pupil of Finian at Clonard, who is declared to have set sail in search of the Land of Promise, and during his seven years’ journey to have “discovered a vast tract of land, lying far to the west of Ireland, where he beheld wonderful birds and trees of unknown foliage, which gave forth perfumes of extraordinary sweetness.” Whatever fiction is mingled with this marvellous narrative, it is difficult not to admit that it must have had some foundation of truth, and the poetic legend which was perfectly familiar to Columbus is said to have furnished him with one motive for believing in the existence of a western continent. Later on we shall find Albertus Magnus foreshadowing the same belief in his writings. Two of the Irish missionaries deserve especial notice—Columba, the Apostle of Caledonia, and Columbanus, the founder of Luxeuil in Burgundy. The former, with his stronghold of Iona, which “came to be looked upon as the chief seat of learning, not only in Britain, but in the whole Western world,”(43) is familiar to all readers of Montalembert’s great monastic poem, and to that other public who have had access to the Duke of Argyll’s recent work on the rock‐bound metropolis of Christian Britain. We are told that the most scrupulous exactitude was required in the Scriptorium of Iona, and that Columba himself, a skilful penman, wrote out the famous Book of Kells with his own hand. It is now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The monks of Iona studied and taught the classics, the mechanical arts, law, history, and physic. They transferred to their new home all the learning of Armagh and Clonard. Painful journeys in search of books or of the oral teaching of some renowned master were nothing in their eyes; they listened to lectures on the Greek and Latin fathers, hung entranced over Homer and Virgil, and were skilled in calculating eclipses and other natural phenomena. They astonished the world with their arithmetical knowledge and linguistic erudition, and their keen logic and love of syllogism are spoken of by S. Benedict of Anian in the ninth century.(44) Art was equally cultivated, but this, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject. As an example of Columba’s liberal spirit and devotion to the best interests of literature, we may remark his defence of the bards at the Assembly of Drumceitt. Poets, historians, law‐givers, and genealogists, the bards represented all the learning of a past age and system; and if their arrogance now and then overstepped the bounds of courtesy, and even sometimes the restraints of law, in the main their institute was heroic and praiseworthy. Columba argued against their opponent, a prince of the Nialls of the South, Aedh, that “care must be taken not to pull up the good corn with the tares, and that the general exile of the poets would be the death of a venerable antiquity, and that of a poetry which was dear to the country and useful to those who knew how to employ it.” His eloquence saved the bardic institute, and the poets in their gratitude composed a famous song in his praise, which became celebrated in Irish literature under the name of Ambhra, or Praise of S. Columbkill.(45)
Columbanus, a monk of Bangor, was destined to found an Irish colony of even greater fame and longer duration than Iona. Luxeuil, founded in 590, at the foot of the Vosges in Burgundy, soon counted among its sons many hundred votaries of learning. Montalembert says of it that “no monastery of the West had yet shone with so much lustre or attracted so many disciples”. It became another Lerins, a nursery of bishops for the Frankish and Burgundian cities, a notable seat of secular knowledge, and, above all, a school of saints. Indeed, among the meagre, skeleton‐like details that come down to us of these giant abodes of a supernatural race of men, we find ourselves perforce repeating over and over the same formula of commendation. What more could one say but that each of these monastic centres was a school of saints? And yet how much variety in that sameness! How much that even we can see, and distinguish, and mentally dissect! We see some soaring spirit, whose burning love is never content with renunciation, but ever seeks, with holy restlessness, some deeper solitude in which to pray and meditate, like the Bavarian monk Sturm, the pupil and companion of S. Boniface, and the founder of the world‐renowned Abbey of Fulda; or, again, some great thinker like Alcuin of York, whose touching love for his own land and city makes us feel with pardonable pride how near akin is our own weak human nature to that of even the giant men of old; or spirits like the gentle Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the traditions of whose unwearied moderation and “inestimable gift of kindness and light‐heartedness,” as well as his “intense and active sympathy for those human sorrows which in all ages are the same,” are all the more precious to us that they are also mingled with tales of his wondrous horsemanship, athletic frame, and simple enjoyment of legitimate sports. The same author we have just quoted, Montalembert, says that the description of his childhood reads like that of a little Anglo‐Saxon of our own day, a scholar of Eton or Harrow. So that, when one after another we read of Gaulish, Celtic, and Teutonic abbeys that were intellectual capitals and centres of far‐reaching and all‐embracing knowledge, we must always remember that these words, grown trite at last from frequent use, have as varied a meaning as the collective name of Milky Way, which stands for countless worlds of unknown stars.
As Christianity spread in the early part of the middle ages, these monastic centres were multiplied like the posterity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Lindisfarne, the Iona of the eastern coast of England, soon rivalled her Scottish predecessor, and retained much the same impress of Celtic learning, while Melrose served as a supplementary school and novitiate. The Teutonic element now began to make itself felt. Caedmon, the Saxon cowherd, transformed into a poet and a monk by a direct call from God, sang the creation in strains “which,” says Montalembert, “may still be admired even beside the immortal poem of the author of Paradise Lost.” Wilfrid, the S. Thomas à Becket of the seventh century, vigorously planted Roman traditions and customs in the Saxon monastery of Ripon, and perpetuated the name of S. Peter in his other magnificent foundation of Peterborough, the poetic “Home among the Meadows,” or Medehamstede.(46) Theodore, the Greek metropolitan of England, in 673 introduced into the Anglo‐Saxon schools “an intellectual and literary development as worthy of the admiration as of the gratitude of posterity; the study of the two classic tongues (Greek and Latin) chiefly flourished under his care.... Monasteries, thus transformed into homes of scientific study, could not but spread a taste and respect for intellectual life, not only among the clergy, but also among their lay‐protectors, the friends and neighbors of each community.”(47)
Benedict Biscop, the contemporary of the chivalrous Wilfrid of York, is eminently a representative of Anglo‐Saxon cultivation. Montalembert puts his name in the “monastic constellation of the seventh century” for intelligence, art, and science. He it was who undertook a journey to Rome (which place he had visited many times before on other errands) solely to procure books; and it must be borne in mind that this journey was then twice as long and a hundred times more dangerous than a journey from London to Australia is now. After having founded the Abbey of Wearmouth, at the mouth of the Wear, Benedict set forth again, bringing masons and glass‐makers from Gaul to teach the Anglo‐Saxons some notions of solid and ornamental architecture. He was a passionate book‐collector, and wished each of his monasteries to have a great library, which he considered indispensable to the discipline, instruction, and good organization of the community. Originally a monk at Lerins, whither he had gone after giving up a knightly and seignorial career in his own country, he naturally drank in that thirst for learning which, in the earlier middle ages, seems to have been almost inseparable from holiness. Jarrow, the sister monastery to Wearmouth, situated near it by the mouth of the Tyne, was even yet more famous as a school of hallowed knowledge, and has become endeared to the hearts of all Englishmen as the home of the Venerable Bede. His is a figure which, even in the foreign annals of the church, stands pre‐eminent among ecclesiastical writers, and one in whom the Anglo‐Saxon character is thoroughly and beautifully revealed. Calm and steadfast self‐possession, that beautiful attribute of the followers of the “Prince of Peace,” is the key‐note to the writings of the historian‐monk of Jarrow. The first glimpse we have of him is as the solitary companion of the new‐made abbot, Ceolfrid, chanting the divine office at the age of seven; his voice choked with sobs as he thought of the elder brethren, all of whom a grievous pestilence had carried off. But though the choir had gone to join in the hymns of the New Jerusalem, the canonical hours were nevertheless kept up by the sorrowing abbot and the child‐chorister until new brethren came to take the place of the old ones. Bede was never idle; he says himself that “he was always his own secretary, and dictated, composed, and copied all himself.” His great history was the means of bringing him into contact with the best men of his day. “The details he gives on this subject show that a constant communication was kept up between the principal centres of religious life, and that an amount of intellectual activity as surprising as it is admirable—when the difficulty of communication and the internal wars which ravaged England are taken into account—existed among their inhabitants.”(48) Bede’s political foresight seems to have been of no mean order, and the grave advice he administers to bishops on ecclesiastical abuses shows at once his practical common sense and fearlessness of character. He also condemns the too sweeping grants of land, exemptions from taxes, and privileges offered to monastic houses, and gives the wisest reasons for his strictures. “The nations of Catholic Europe envied England the possession of so great a doctor, the first among the offspring of barbarous races who had won a place among the doctors of the church, ... and his illustrious successor Alcuin, speaking to the community of Jarrow which Bede had made famous, bears witness to his celebrity in these words: ‘Stir up, then, the minds of your sleepers by his example; study his works, and you will be able to draw from them the secret of eternal beauty.’ ”(49)
Malmesbury was another Anglo‐Saxon centre of thought, and the memory of S. Aldhelm long gave it that “powerful and popular existence which lasted far into the middle ages.”(50) The cathedral school of York, “which rose into celebrity just as Bede was withdrawn from the scene of his useful labors,”(51) produced one of the greatest of English scholars, and one instrumental in carrying knowledge acquired among monks to the warrior court of a foreign prince. Charlemagne and his Palatine schools of Aix‐la‐ Chapelle would have been shorn of half their glory had it not been for the Englishman Alcuin. But it was not without a pang that the home‐loving master left the school he had almost formed, and which he cherished as the product of his first efforts, and undertook to foster the same institutions in a strange land. These schools, in which enthusiastic French writers love to trace the germ of the mighty University of Paris, seem to have possessed a system of equality very creditable both to their master and their imperial patron. Later on, when the wearied magister at last wrested from Charlemagne the permission to retire into some monastery, since he had failed in obtaining leave to return and die at York, it was only to found another school that he occupied his leisure. S. Martin’s at Tours now became as famous as the Palatine at Aix‐la‐Chapelle. “He applied himself to his new duties with unabated energy, and by his own teaching raised the school of Tours to a renown which was shared by none of its contemporaries. In the hall of studies, a distinct place was set apart for the copyists, who were exhorted by certain verses of their master, set up in a conspicuous place, to mind their stops and not to leave out letters.”(52) Here, then, is another of those pleasant little details which creates a fellow‐feeling between the human nature of to‐day and that of past ages. The description of his life from which we have drawn this sketch closes thus: “In short, his active mind, thoroughly Anglo‐Saxon in its temper, worked on to the end; laboring at a sublime end by homely practical details. One sees he is of the same race with Bede, who wrote and dictated to the last hour of his life, and, when his work was finished, calmly closed his book and died.”(53)
We have already named Fulda, the glorious monastic centre where the monk Sturm established the Benedictine rule in 744, and where, before his death, 400 monks sang daily the praises of God, and good scholars were trained to intellectual warfare in the name of faith. In 802, “mindful of its great origin, it was one of the first to enter heartily into the revival of letters instituted by Charlemagne,” and sent the monks Hatto and Rabanus to study under Alcuin. We find a most graphic description of the daily routine of this great school in Christian Schools and Scholars. It so well illustrates the common life of the middle ages that we do not hesitate to give it at some length: “The German nobles gladly entrusted their sons to Rabanus’ care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and patience. At his lectures every one was trained to write equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy.... The school of Fulda had inherited the fullest share of the Anglo‐Saxon spirit, and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual activity which we have already seen working in the foundations of S. Benedict Biscop. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks.... Within doors the visitor might have beheld a huge range of workshops, in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal.... Passing on to the interior of the building, the stranger would have been introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school ... where our visitor, were he from the more civilized South, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil or Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother‐professors accuse him in good‐natured jesting of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the study of the dead languages, you may find some engaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries, words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe.... It may be added that the school of Fulda would have been found ordered with admirable discipline. Twelve of the best professors were chosen, and formed a council of elders or doctors, presided over by one who bore the title of principal, and who assigned to each one the lectures he was to deliver to the pupils. In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labor, Rabanus continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and reckoned among his pupils the most celebrated men of the age.... For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works in prose and verse embraced a large variety of subjects, ... and he is commonly reputed the author of the Veni Creator.”(54)
One of his pupils, the monk Otfried of Weissembourg, entered with singular ardor into the study of the Tudesque or native dialect. Inspired by Rabanus, who himself devoted much attention to this subject, and encouraged by a “certain noble lady named Judith,” Otfried undertook to translate into his native tongue the most remarkable Gospel passages relating to Our Lord’s life. His verses speedily became familiar to the people, and by degrees took the place of those pagan songs of their forefathers, by which much of the leaven of heathenism yet remained in the minds of the peasantry, associated as it was with all the touching prestige of nationalism and the honest pride they felt in their ancestors’ prowess.
Rabanus, while master of the Fulda school, had much to suffer from the eccentricities of his abbot, Ratgar, who, afflicted with the building mania, actually forced his monks to interrupt their studies, and even shorten their prayers, to take up the trowel and the hod and hasten on his new erections. Here we have the other side of the daily life of the middle ages, and a more ludicrous scene can hardly be imagined than the enforced labor of the scholar‐monks, their rueful countenances showing their despair at the unpleasant task, yet their unflinching principle of obedience towering above their disgust, and compelling them to work in silence till relieved by the Emperor Louis himself. The new abbot, installed in Ratgar’s place by a commission empowered to look into the latter’s unheard‐of abuse of his authority, was a saint as well as a scholar, and “healed the wounds which a long course of ill‐treatment had opened in the community.” Rabanus himself succeeded him, and resigned the mastership of the school to his favorite assistant, Candidus.
Passing over many abbeys whose merits it were too long a story to enumerate, we come to S. Gall, the great Helvetian centre of thought. Originally it was founded by Gall, the disciple of Columbanus, and in the reign of King Pepin changed the Columbanian for the Benedictine rule. Already, in its early beginnings, it was a home of art, and Tutilo’s works in gold, copper, and brass were famous throughout the Germanic world. The mills, the forge, the workshops of all sorts, the cloisters for the monks, the buildings for the students, the immense tracts of arable land, the reclaimed forests, the fleet of busy little boats on the great Lake of Constance, all told of a stirring centre of human life. And while art, science, philosophy, agriculture, and mechanical industry were all at work in the townlike abbey, “you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to the rude race of the mountains, who, before the monks came among them, sacrificed to the evil one, and worshipped stocks and stones.”(55) “S. Gall was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens, at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools were a kind of university, frequented by men of all nations, who came hither to fit themselves for all professions. S. Gall was larger and freer, and made more of the arts and sciences; indeed, so far as regards its studies, it had a better claim to the title of university than any single institution which can be named as existing before the time of Philip Augustus.(56) You would have found here not monks alone, but courtiers, soldiers, and the sons of kings. All diligently applied themselves to the cultivation of the Tudesque dialect, and to its grammatical formation, so as to render it capable of producing a literature of its own.”(57) The monks were in correspondence with all the learned monastic houses of France and Italy, and the transfer of a codex, a Livy, or a Virgil from one to the other occasioned as much diplomacy, interest, and excitement as a commercial treaty or the discovery of new gold fields would in our day. S. Gall had its Greek scholars, too, and seems to have fostered among its copyists a love for “fine editions,” such as would do honor to an English or Russian bibliomaniac of to‐day. They made their own parchment from the hides of the wild animals of their mountains, and employed many hands on each precious manuscript. The costly binding was likewise all home‐made, and many a jewelled missal must have come from the hand of the artist‐monk Tutilo. Music was a specialty of S. Gall, if one may say so in an age when music was so much a part of education that alone of all the arts it was included in the quadrivium, or higher instruction of the mediæval schools. Romanus of S. Gall it was who first named the musical notes by the letters of the alphabet, a system which is universal in Germany, and very commonly followed in England to this day.
We should multiply names ad infinitum were we to allow ourselves to roam further over that field of history so falsely called the dark ages. Einsiedeln, Paderborn, Magdeburg, Utrecht, are but a few of the many equally deserving of notice, the latter being, we are told, “a fashionable place of education for the sons of German princes” in the tenth century. Before we go on to the second stage of the learning of the past—the era of the universities—we cannot help looking back to the little Saxon island where, in 882, Alfred devoted one‐fourth of his revenue to the restoration of the Oxford schools and obtained from Pope Martin II. a brief constituting them what may be fairly called a university. This was at a time when learning was at a low ebb, and the invasions of the Danes were endangering the cause of letters—a cause so intimately wrapped up in that of the great monasteries. Glastonbury, the ruined home of so much wisdom, science, and philosophy, was destined under S. Dunstan to retake her place among the schools. A great revival was initiated by him, a reform among the clergy vigorously enforced, episcopal seminaries reopened, and monastic schools once more brought to their ancient place in the vanguard of civilization. Ethelwold, Dunstan’s disciple, was zealous for the study of sacred learning, and “loved teaching for its own sake. A new race of scholars sprang up in the restored cloisters, some of whom were not unworthy to be ranked with the disciples of Bede and Alcuin.”(58) At Glastonbury, like as at Fulda, the native tongue was cultivated, harmonized, and rendered capable of being ranked no longer as a dialect, but as the characteristic language of an eminently masterful people. Croyland, also, a ruined centre of intellectual life, rose again from its ashes; new monks and scholars reared its walls and filled its schools, and the Danish horrors were soon forgotten in the thoughtful kindness of the new abbot, Turketul, the nephew of Alfred, who, as we read, from a warrior and a courtier, a minister of state, and a royal prince, became a gentle monk and the rewarder of his little pupils. “Turketul took the greatest interest in the success of the school, visiting it daily, inspecting the tasks of each child, and taking with him a servant who carried raisins, figs, and nuts, or more often apples and pears, and such like little gifts, that the boys might be encouraged to be diligent, not with words only or blows, but rather by the hope of reward.” Such is the sweet, homely picture given us by the historian Ingulph of one of the greatest of schools in its early monastic beginnings. We have left ourselves so little space that even the metropolis of the Benedictines, the glorious and world‐renowned Monte Casino, can find but a scant notice in these pages. If Subiaco was the spiritual birthplace of the order par excellence, Monte Casino was its intellectual cradle. There the rule was written which, by some mysterious fate, was destined to absorb and supersede that of the widespread Columbanians; there were the missionary principles first established which led to the conversion of the Anglo‐Saxon race; there the school of quies and reverence first planted which made this wonderful monastery “the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe.”(59) It was likened to Sinai by Pope Victor III., the successor of Hildebrand, in bold and simple verses, full of divine exultation and Christian pride: it has been defended and protected by an English and Protestant scholar,(60) the minister of a nation whose civilization once flowed from its bosom, and whose learning was fostered in its early “scriptoria.” It has outlasted many of its own offspring, and still stands undecayed in its moral sublimity, fruitful yet in saints and scholars, the mother‐house of an order whose origin stretches beyond Benedict far into the desert of Paul and Anthony, Jerome and Hilarion.
And now that we are forced, reluctantly enough, to let fall the veil over that teeming life of the mediæval cloister, the fruitful nursery of every later intellectual development, shall we tell the reader what has most struck us throughout the short sketch we have been able to give of these centres of thought? Does not their history sound like some “monkish chronicle”? How is it that all the most “celebrated men of their time” (the phrase so often repeated in these annals) are monks, and so many not only monks, but saints? How is it that we come upon so many instances of these great scholars taking their turn at the mill, the forge, and the bake‐house, and that these details sound neither sordid nor vulgar, as they might of modern and secular littérateurs? It was the monastic principle, the Christ‐principle, as Prior Vaughan calls it in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin—the principle of faith, obedience, purity, adoration, and reverence. “The monks had a world of their own.... Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of European civilization. They were forming the languages of Schiller, of Bacon, and of Bossuet; they were creating arts which modern skill in vain endeavors to imitate; they were preserving the codices of ancient learning, and embalming the world ‘lying in wickedness’ with the sweet odor of their manifold virtues.”(61) Not only were they men who “wrote and spoke much, and, by their masculine genius and young and fresh inspiration, prevented the new Christian world from falling back from its first advances, either by literature or politics, under the yoke of exhausted paganism”;(62) not only were they men of progress even while essentially conservative, men of the future even while their studies were all of the past, but, “in opposing poverty, chastity, and obedience, the three great bases of monastic life, to the orgies of wealth, debauchery, and pride, they created at once a contrast and a remedy.”(63) Prior Vaughan, in his brilliant lifelike picture of mediævalism, S. Thomas of Aquin, perpetually refers to the ruling principle of monasticism: “To omit mention of the Benedictine principle would be to manifest great ignorance of the action of the highest form of truth upon mankind. The mastership of authority and reverence, springing out of the school of quies, did not cease to exert a considerable influence even after the dominant power of the monastic body had nearly disappeared.”(64) Elsewhere we read: “There was nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt upon by their biographers.... One of the marks of the age is the absence of the disputatious spirit, which, if it diminishes their rank (that of the monastic thinkers) in the world of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. The real spirit of the age was one of reverence for tradition.”(65)
The foresight of the monk‐teachers of the earlier middle ages is no less remarkable than their holiness. Everywhere they fostered the native idiom, and labored to reduce it to an intelligible grammar. The national and patriotic feeling thus awakened in the centres of learning must needs have endeared them to, and more closely linked them with, the intellectual progress of the people they instructed. A modern author observes that “Bede’s words are evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins of the Roman Empire did not barbarize knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet accomplished, and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, in science.” Indeed, natural science seems to have been from the first a peculiarly monastic pursuit. The great names of Bede, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are as a mighty chain from century to century, leading up to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Arago, and Humboldt; while in S. Brendan we have a bold precursor of Columbus.
The monasteries were so entirely the sole centres of civilization that numberless towns owe their origin to them. Scholars came for instruction, and remained for edification; grateful patients settled near the heaven‐ taught physicians who had cured them; peasants clustered round the abbeys for protection, and thus grew towns and villages without number in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. Even America bears to‐ day, in the name of one of her oldest English settlements, and a hereditary representative of intellect—Boston—a memento of the old intellectual supremacy of monasticism. S. Botolph, an Anglo‐Saxon hermit, left his monastery, and settled in a hut on one of the plains of Lincolnshire. Scholars gathered around him, and, despite his remonstrances, set up other huts around his, and the Benedictine monastery of Icanhoe was founded. As time went on, a village sprang up and became a town, and was called Botolphstown. The name was afterwards corrupted and cut down into Boston, and from Boston it was that the founders of New England set sail on their journey to Holland, their first stage on their way to the New World.
In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil‐wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor‐seller are the first citizens of the new town. Quies is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it “does not pay”; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called “cramming” than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money‐worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness.
Versailles.
What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter’s wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its hiding‐places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble Molière, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun’s warmth to the earth in spring‐time.
But we are beginning at the end. Versailles is identified to us chiefly if not solely with Louis Quatorze and his age; but it was not so from the beginning. Once upon a time it was a marshy swamp, unhealthy and uncultivated; and, if we deny Louis the faculty of creating men of genius, we cannot refuse him that of having evolved an Eden from a wilderness. There is little indeed in the history of this early period to compensate the reader for keeping him waiting while we review it, still it is better to cast our glance back a little, not very far, a century or so, to see what were the antecedents of the site of one of the grandest historic monuments of France.
In the year 1561, Martial de Loménie was seigneur of Versailles, and was frequently honored by the visits of Henri de Navarre, who went out to hunt the stag in his subject’s swampy wilderness. De Loménie sold it to Albert de Gondy, Maréchal de Retz, who in his turn was honored by the presence of his sovereign, Louis XIII., there. Louis was in the habit of indulging his favorite pastime at Versailles, but, beyond placing his land and his game at the disposal of the king, the maréchal seems to have shown scant hospitality to the royal hunter. Saint‐Simon tells us that during these excursions Louis usually slept in a windmill or in a dingy inn, whose only customers were the wagoners who journeyed across that out‐of‐the‐way place. Of the two lodgings he inclines to think the windmill was the most comfortable. Louis probably found neither quarters very luxurious, for in 1627 he purchased a piece of ground which had been in the Soisy family since the fourteenth century, and built himself a hunting‐lodge on the ruins of an old manor‐house there, to the great discomfiture of a large colony of owls who had made themselves at home in the moss‐grown ruin. Bassompierre deplores the vandalism which swept away the venerable shelter of the owls, and declares that after all the lodge was but a sorry improvement on the windmill, being “too shabby a dwelling for even a plain gentilhomme to take conceit in.” Such as it was, it satisfied the king, and remained untouched till it was swallowed up in the great palace which was to embody all the glories of the ensuing reign. When Louis Quatorze conceived the design of building Versailles, he confided the execution of his vast idea to Mansard, laying down, however, as a primary condition that the shabby little hunting‐lodge of the late king should be preserved, and comprised in the new structure. Mansard declared that this was impossible, to which Louis, with true kingly logic, replied coolly: Raison de plus.(66) No argument of artistic beauty or common sense could move him from his resolution, or induce him to sanction the demolition of the quaint little building that his father had raised. Rather than be guilty of such an unfilial act, he said he would give up the notion of his new palace altogether. Mansard had nothing for it but to give way, and pledge himself that the ugly red‐brick lodge should stand somehow and somewhere in the magnificent pile that was already reared in his imagination. The only concession he obtained was that it should be concealed, if this were possible. Mansard swore he would make it possible, and he kept his word. The lodge of Louis XIII. was swallowed up in the elaborate stone‐work of that part of the palace facing the Avenue de Paris, and remains to this day an enduring if not a very sensible proof of the filial respect of Louis XIV. This was the one solitary impediment that Louis threw in the architect’s way; in everything else he gave him carte blanche, power unlimited, and all but unlimited wealth to work out his fantastic and superb conception. Simultaneously with this mighty fabric another work of almost equal magnitude had to be undertaken; this was the planting of the park and the gardens. The country for miles around the site of the palace was a swamp abounding with reptiles, and reeking with vapors of so deadly a character that the men employed in draining it died like flies of a malaria that raged like a pestilence for months together. They refused after a time to continue the work, though enormous wages were offered, and it was found necessary at last, under pain of abandoning it, to press men into the service as for the army in time of war. No accurate statistics are extant as to the number of victims who perished in the execution of this royal freak; but the most authentic opinions of the time put it at the astounding figure of twenty thousand. So much for the good old times of the ancien régime, that we are apt to invest with a sort of pathetic prestige. What were the lives of so many vilains(67) and the tears and hunger of innumerable vilaines, widows and orphans of the dead men, in comparison to the supreme pleasure of the king and the accomplishment of his omnipotent will? The death‐sweat of these human cattle rained upon the swamp, and in due time it was’ made wholesome, purified as so many foul spots upon the earth are by the sweat of toil and sorrow, and fitted to grow flowers and green trees that would diffuse their fragrance and spread pleasant shade where corruption and barrenness had dwelt.
Le Notre, that prince of gardeners, may be truly said to have created the pleasure‐grounds of Versailles; nature had thrown many obstacles in his way, she thwarted him at every step, but her obstinate resistance only stimulated his genius to loftier flights and his indomitable energy to stronger efforts. He conquered in the end. Never was conquest more fully appreciated than Le Notre’s by his royal master. Louis not only rewarded him with more than princely liberality, but admitted him to his personal intimacy, treating the plebeian artist with an affectionate familiarity that he never extended to the high and mighty courtiers who looked on in envy and admiration. Le Notre was too little of a courtier himself to value adequately the honor of the king’s condescension, but he loved the man, and took no pains to conceal it; there was an expansive bonhomie, a native simplicity in his character, that, contrasting as it did with the artificial atmosphere of the court, charmed Louis, and he would listen with delight to the honest fellow’s garrulity while he related, with naïve satisfaction, the tale of his early struggles and the difficult and hardy triumphs of his talent and perseverance. Versailles was, of course, to be the crowning achievement of his life, and nothing could exceed the diligence and ardor that he brought to bear on it. He besought the king not to inspect the works while they were in the progressive stage, but to wait, once he had seen the disposition of the ground, till they were advanced to a certain point. Louis humored him by consenting, though greatly against his inclination. He kept his word faithfully in spite of all temptations of curiosity and impatience; contenting himself with questioning Le Notre, at stated times, as to how things were getting on, but never once, in his frequent and regular visits of inspection to the palace, did he set foot within the forbidden precincts. The day came at last when his forbearance was to be rewarded. Le Notre invited him to enter the closed doors. Louis came, and found that the reality far outstripped his most sanguine expectations; he was in raptures with all he beheld, and declared himself abundantly rewarded for his patience. Le Notre, no less enchanted than the king, walked on beside his chair, doing the honors of the gardens and the park, and listening with a swelling heart to the exclamations of delight that greeted every fresh view that opened in the landscape. It seemed, indeed, as if a whole army of fairies had been at work to bring such a paradise out of chaos; long rows of stately full‐grown trees, brought from a distance and transplanted into the arid soil, had taken root and were flourishing as in their native earth; winding paths intersected majestic avenues, and led the visitor, unexpectedly, to richly planted groves, where marble fauns hid coyly, as if frightened to be caught by the sunlight in their unveiled beauty; all the elves in fairyland, all the gods in Olympia, were here congregated, now astray in the green tangle of the wood, now standing in majestic groups, or peeping singly through an opening in the foliage as if they were playing hide‐and‐seek; water‐nymphs, dashing the soft spray round their naked limbs, started unexpectedly from nooks and corners, cooling the air that was heavy with the scent of flowers; the rush of the cascade answered the laughing ripple of the fountain; from bower to bower there came a concert of water‐music, such as no mortal ear had ever heard before; it was, indeed, a sight to set before a king, and the gardener might well rejoice who had worked these wonders in the desert.
Le Notre had been all this time trotting briskly by the king’s rolling‐ chair. When they had gone over the enchanted region, Louis said: “You are tired, my friend; get up here beside me, and let us go over it all once more.”
And Le Notre, without more ado, jumped up beside the king, and they began it all over again, as the children say of their favorite stories. He explained to Louis how he nearly despaired of ever getting that birch‐ grove right, owing to a bed of rock that would not be dislodged to make room for it; now and then he would catch the king by the sleeve, and bid him shut his eyes and not open them till they came to a certain point, when he would cry Voilà!—demeaning himself altogether like a true child of nature, and enjoying thoroughly the sympathy of the companion who, for the time being, a common delight made kindred with him. Suddenly, however, it seems to have dawned upon him that he was riding side by side with the king of France. He rubbed his hands, and exclaimed with childlike glee: “What a proud day this is in my life!” And then, as the tears came unchecked into his honest eyes, he added: “And if my good old father could but see me, what a happy one it would be!”
Louis, entering into the son’s emotion, made him talk on about his old father, and listened with profound interest to the story of their humble life in common. He wanted to give Le Notre letters‐patent of nobility, and so raise all his family to the rank of gentilshommes, but the offer was gratefully declined; it would have been a temptation to most men, but it was not to Le Notre; he had no ambitions of a worldly cast; his sole aspirations were those of a man of genius, and he preferred retaining the name of his father and ennobling it by a higher title than it was in the power of kings to bestow.
As soon as the palace and the grounds were finished, Louis came and took up his abode at Versailles. Then began that series of fêtes and pageants that makes the annals of that time read like the description of a long carnival. One of the most gorgeous of these fêtes was a sort of carrousel, given in 1664, when no less than five hundred guests were conveyed to Versailles in the king’s suite and at his expense—no small matter in the days when railways were unknown, and carriages drawn by six or eight horses were the only mode of travelling for persons of rank. The king played the part of “Roger” in the carrousel, and came riding on a white charger, magnificently caparisoned, all the court diamonds being given up to the adornment of rider and steed; he advanced at the head of a cavalcade of two hundred knights, after which came a golden chariot, called the “Chariot of the Sun,” and filled with shepherds and many mythological personages; the three queens, namely, the queen‐dowager Anne d’Autriche, the reigning queen, and the Queen of England, widow of Charles I., surrounded by three hundred ladies of the rank and beauty of France, assisted at the entrance of the tournament, while a vast concourse of enthusiastic spectators added by their presence to the enlivenment of the scene. At night “four thousand huge torches” illuminated the gardens; the supper was spread by nymphs and fauns, while Pan and Diana, “advancing on a moving mountain,” came down to preside over the festive board. Not the least noteworthy episode of the entertainment, which lasted seven days, was the representation of Molière’s Princesse d’Elide and the first three acts of Tartuffe, played now for the first time. The earlier fêtes at Versailles were marked by the presence of the greatest and fairest names that illustrated the reign of Louis Quatorze, so fertile throughout in celebrities.
Foremost in the gay and brilliant throng stands the figure of the one woman whom Louis ever really loved, the pale and pensive Louise de la Vallière, she who was in reality the goddess of this gorgeous temple, but who, in the words of Mme. de Sévigné, “hid herself in the grass like a violet,” and whose modesty and humility in the midst of her erring triumphs drew from all hearts the pardon she never wrung from her own uncompromising conscience.
All the glories of France flocked to Versailles as to a shrine where they did homage and were glorified in turn. At every step we meet the majestic figure of the Grand Monarque. See him at the top of the great stair, calling out to the Grand Condé, who toils painfully up the marble steps, bending under the weight of years and the fatigues of war: “Take your time, cousin; you are too heavily laden with laurels to walk fast; we can wait for you.” Not a room, or a terrace, or a gallery but has a witness to bring forth of the king’s courtesy or the king’s magnificence. There is the cabinet du roi, where he used to work at the affairs of state with his ministers, not one of whom worked as hard as the king himself. His ministers were not his tools nevertheless; despotic as he was, Louis let them hold their own against him, and when they had justice on their side he could yield gracefully to the opposition and respect the courage that prompted it. Witness the scene between him and his Chancellor Voisin, which took place in this same cabinet du roi. One of the most disreputable men of that not very reputable court, by dint of intrigue, obtained from Louis a promise of lettres de grâce. Next day, when the chancellor came in to his usual work, the king desired him to affix the great seals to the document, which was ready prepared. Voisin looked over it first conscientiously as was his custom, and then flatly refused to obey the king’s command, denouncing the grant of the lettres de grâce to such a man as an abuse of the royal privilege. Louis replied that his word was pledged, and it was too late now to discuss the unworthiness of the subject; he put forward his hand, and, seeing that Voisin did not move, he took the seals himself and affixed them to the deed. The chancellor looked on in silence, but, when Louis handed him back the badge of office, he drew away his hand, and said haughtily: “They are polluted; I will never take them back.”
“What a man!” exclaimed Louis, with a glance of frank admiration at his sturdy minister, and he flung the deed into the fire.
Voisin quietly took up the seals, and went on with his work as if nothing had occurred to interrupt it.
It was in the cabinet du roi that Louis took leave of the Duc d’Anjou, on the eve of his departure for Spain, with those memorable words: “Partez, mon fils, il n’y a plus de Pyrénées!”(68)
But it is in the Salle du Trône that the Grand Monarque appears to us in his most congenial attitude; here we see him in his true element, playing the king as the world never saw it played before, and assuredly never will again; here all the potentates of the earth came and greeted him spontaneously as le roi, as if he were the only real king, and they his vassals, or, at least, his humble imitators. One day we see the ambassador of the Dey of Algiers presenting in his name “a little present of twelve Arab steeds, and humbly praying that the mighty majesty of France would deign to accept them, seeing that King Solomon himself had accepted the leg of the grasshopper tendered to him by the ant.”
On another occasion, we see the stately Doge of Genoa advancing to pay his court; Louis questions him concerning the behavior of the courtiers to him, and the doge replies: “Truly, if the King of France steals away the liberty of our hearts, his courtiers take care to restore it.” The king suspects the reply to be provoked by some discourtesy on the part of his entourage, and, having investigated the matter and found that Louvois and De Croissy had demeaned themselves with unseemly hauteur to the sensitive stranger, he severely rebuked them in the presence of the whole court.
It was here, no doubt, seated on his golden throne, that Louis received the chief of Châteaubriand’s tale, and astonished him by the splendor of his state, and sent the noble savage back to his home in the far West to relate to the awe‐stricken children of the forest the wonders of the great French chief “whose superb wigwam he had beheld.”
The Salle du Sacre is less exclusive in its associations, the presence of the grand roi being thrown into the shade by the subsequent military glory of the grande armée. David has covered the walls with the chief events of Napoleon’s career, beginning with the first consulship, and continuing through the triumphal march of the Empire. When the first series of these immense pictures was shown to Napoleon, he, startled by their magnitude, of which he was probably a better judge than of their talent, turned to the painter, and exclaimed: “Now I must build a palace to lodge them!”
The Salle des Amiraux, which, as its name indicates, is consecrated to the memory of the naval heroes of France, was formerly the room of the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV. So little is known of this prince beyond the fact that he was the direct antithesis of his father in habits and character, that the following anecdote may be found interesting as connected with him:
The dauphin, like most princes of his time, was passionately fond of the chase. On one occasion he set out on a hunting expedition accompanied by a large party, and towards nightfall he and one of his equerries got separated from the rest, and found themselves astray in a dense wood, where they wandered for some hours without meeting any signs of human habitation. They came at last upon a small cottage, which, from its isolated position and shabby appearance, he set down as most likely a rendezvous of robbers, that part of the country being much frequented by these worthies. They were well armed, however, and determined to risk the barbarous hospitality of the thieves rather than pass the night amidst the snakes and other uncomfortable inmates of the woods. They knocked at the door, first meekly, then more peremptorily, and at last furiously; getting no answer, they resolved to break open the house, and began hammering away vigorously with the but‐end of their guns at the shaky old door. At this crisis a window opened somewhere, and a voice, that quavered with fright, besought the burglars to go away, as they would find nothing in so poor a lodging to repay their trouble. Summoned to say whom it belonged to, the voice replied that it was that of the curé of the neighboring hamlet, whereupon the huntsmen begged him to come down and spare them further trouble by opening the door himself. After much expostulation the host obeyed, and then his guests desired him to serve the best he had for their supper; there was no use protesting with visitors who had such formidable arguments on their shoulders and glistening in their belts, so the curé obeyed with the best grace he could. There was nothing substantial in the larder, he declared, but a leg of mutton, which the gentlemen were welcome to if they would undertake to cook it and let him go back to his bed. This they agreed to, with great good‐humor and many courteous thanks, and the old priest, after showing them where to find food and shelter for their horses, wished them a good appetite and betook himself to his couch, marvelling much at the sudden gentleness and courtesy of these singular burglars who had made their entry in so boisterous and uncivil a manner. The burglars, meantime, did full justice to his hospitality and their own cooking, and, having supped heartily, flung themselves at full length on the floor, and were soon sound asleep—sounder, no doubt, than their host, whose slumbers, if he slept at all, were most likely disturbed by visions of highwaymen arresting and murdering the king’s subjects or throttling honest folk in their beds, and such like unrefreshing dreams. The good man was up betimes, and while the hunters were still fast asleep he slipt out to seek some breakfast for them. Meantime the hunt, which had been in pursuit of the prince all night, perceived the little wreath of smoke that curled up from the curé’s chimney on the clear morning air, and at once made for the point whence it proceeded, sounding the horn as it approached. The prince and his companions started to their feet at the first note of the welcome signal, rushed to their horses, and were in the saddle and far out of sight before their host returned from his foraging expedition. Great was his surprise to find the birds had flown, but he was glad to be rid of them, and on such easy terms, for they had carried off nothing—the house was just as he had left it. It was not a thing to boast of, having harbored a couple of highwaymen for a night, though they had behaved so considerately to him—the curé, therefore, kept the adventure to himself. But he had not heard the last of it. The next day a messenger came in hot haste from Versailles with a summons for him to appear without further delay before the king. Terrified out of his five wits, and knowing full well what had brought this judgment upon him, the worthy old priest took up his stick and asked no questions, but forthwith made his way to the palace. He was conducted at once to the Salle du Trône, where Louis, surrounded by the rank and blood of France, was seated as for some solemn ceremonial on his chair of state. He bent a stern gaze on the curé, and in accents that made the culprit’s soul shake within him, demanded how it came to pass that a man of his holy calling made his house a rendezvous for midnight robbers who prowled about the country, disturbing honest subjects and breaking the king’s laws. The curé fell upon his knees, and humbly confessing cowardly concealment of a fact that he was in conscience bound to have denounced at once to the nearest magistrate, pleaded, nevertheless, that the bearing of those malefactors was so noble and their manners so courteous that he had doubts as to whether they were indeed such and not rather two knights of his majesty’s court; whereupon Louis bade the malefactors come forward, and, introducing them by name to the bewildered curé, enjoined him to be less cautious another time in opening his doors to benighted gentlemen.
“And in payment of the leg of mutton which my son was so unmannerly as to confiscate on you,” continued the king, “I name you Grand Prieur, with the revenues and privileges attached to the office.” This was assuredly the highest price that ever a leg of mutton fetched.
The chambre â coucher de la reine(69) plays a distinct part of its own in the annals of Versailles. We forget its first occupant, the gentle, long‐suffering Marie Thérèse, of whom, on hearing of her death, Louis Quatorze exclaimed: “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me!” we forget the longer‐suffering wife of Louis Quinze, the charitable Marie Leczinska, surnamed by the people “the good queen”; we lose sight of all the august figures who pass before us in the retrospect of this royal chamber, and see only Marie Antoinette, the haughty sovereign, the heroic mother and devoted wife, who has made it all her own. We see her, woke out of her sleep, and the cries of the mob menacing the palace in the dead of the night, and flying hardly dressed from the chambre de la reine to take refuge in the dauphin’s apartment, while the faithful guards dispute with their lives the entrance of her own to the mad multitude that have now broken in like a destroying torrent and are close upon the threshold. The walls seem still to echo the cry of those two brave guards as they fell: “Save the queen! Save the queen!” The great tragedy that was to change the whole destinies of France may be said to have begun on this terrible night of the 6th of October.
The chambre à coucher du roi(70) is, on the other hand, filled with Louis Quatorze to the exclusion of all other memories. Here was performed that solemn comedy in which the warriors and statesmen of the day took their part so gravely: the lever and coucher de roi. When we read the minute details given in the chronicles of the time of the ceremonial gone through by his courtiers every time the king got in and out of bed, it is a severe tax on our credulity to believe that the dramatis personæ who played the farce so seriously were not fools or grinning idiots, but sane and sober men whose lineage was second only in blue‐blooded antiquity to that of Cæsar himself, men of talent, men of genius, heroes who fought their country’s battles and deemed it no derogation to come from the field of glory and fight for the honor of handing the king his stockings or his pantaloons. This proud noblesse whom Richelieu could not conquer by the sword or subdue by tortures and imprisonment, lay down at the feet of Louis, and, it is hardly a figure of speech to say, licked them. They appear to have looked upon him, not as a mortal like themselves, however elevated above them in rank and power, but as a god, a being altogether apart from them in species. One is tempted to believe that both they and he must occasionally have been possessed with some vague notion that it was so; there is no other way of accounting for the servile worship which they tendered as a duty, and which he accepted as a due. Truly that famous “L’état c’est moi!”(71) sounds more of a god than a man; and that other utterance of Louis, Messieurs, j’ai failli attendre!(72) addressed to the proudest nobility in Europe, who were barely in their places when the flourish of trumpets announced the king’s entrance, is scarcely less grotesque in its superhuman pride.
This great and little coucher which was surrounded by so much prestige in the court of France was somewhat ridiculed by contemporary sovereigns, for the honor of humanity be it said; their admiration for Louis did not go the length of viewing the august ceremonial otherwise than in the light of a bore or a joke. When Frederick the Great heard from his ambassador an account of the first grand lever at which he assisted at Versailles, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, and exclaimed: “Well, if I were king of France, I would certainly hire some small king to go through all that for me!”
Considering how eagerly his courtiers contended for the honor of dressing the king’s person, one would have fancied the privilege of making his bed would have been proportionately coveted, and held second only to the honor of holding his majesty’s boots; but, such is the inconsistency of human beings, this was not the case. The courtiers probably felt that a line should be drawn somewhere, so they drew it here; they would not perform this menial office for the Grand Monarque, and the distinction of turning his mattresses and spreading his quilt devolved on valets of a lower grade. Among this inferior herd was one named Molière, a youth whom his comrades laughed at and treated as a sort of crazy creature who was always in the moon. One day when it happened to be his turn to spread the royal sheets, the poet Belloc overheard them chaffing him and refusing to help him in his work. He went up to Molière, and said: “Monsieur de Molière, will you do me the honor of allowing me to help you to make the king’s bed?” and Molière granted the request. The incident came to the king’s ear and led to his noticing the eccentric valet. A little later, and we see him standing behind the valet’s chair in this same room, where his majesty’s dinner was sometimes served, and waiting upon him, while the courtiers who had refused to sit at table with Molière stood round, looking on in “mute consternation at the strange spectacle,” Saint‐Simon tells us, who owns naïvely to sharing their consternation.
“Since none of my courtiers will admit Monsieur de Molière to their table,” said Louis, “I must needs set him down at mine, and show them that I count it an honor for the King of France to wait upon so great a man.”
Here, in this bed that Belloc and Molière had made together, Louis Quatorze died. From under the crimson and gold canopy which had witnessed the eternal levers and couchers, Louis rebuked the violent grief of two young pages who stood within the balustrade, that sanctum sanctorum which none under a prince of the blood or a high chancellor dare pass at any other time; they were weeping bitterly. “What!” exclaimed the king, “did ye, then, think I was immortal?” There was a time when he himself seemed to have thought so; but viewed by that vivid light that breaks through the mists of death, things wore a different aspect in his eyes; and the adulation which would fain have treated him as immortal, and which was during life as the breath of his nostrils to Louis, showed now as the empty bubble that it was.
No one ever again slept in the bed which had been honored by the last sigh of the Grand Monarque; the room remained henceforth unoccupied, and, with the exception of the pictures which have been removed, is still just as he left it. Louis carried his favorite pictures about with him wherever he went. “David,” by Domenichino, his best beloved of them all, is now to be seen at the Louvre; otherwise little has been altered in the chambre du roi; the bed and the ruelle are in their old place, also the table, on which a cold collation was laid every night in case of the king’s awaking and feeling hungry; this precautionary little meal was called the en cas; and the name with the habit, which had given rise to it, is still perpetuated in many old‐fashioned French families. Louis Quinze, from some superstitious feeling, could never bring himself to sleep in the death‐ chamber of his illustrious great‐grandfather; he took possession of what was then the salle de billiard, a noble room opening into the œil‐de‐ bœuf (bull’s eye), so called from its having an œil‐de‐bœuf over the large window at the north end. In an alcove in this billiard hall, Louis XV. died. The adjoining œil‐de‐bœuf was filled with the courtiers, who dare not venture within the polluted atmosphere of the royal chamber, but stood outside it, consulting together in “guilty whispers” as to what they ought to do; dreading on one hand the reward of their cowardice if the king should recover, and fearing on the other to fly too soon with their servile congratulations to his successor. In the great court below another crowd was assembled, watching in breathless silence for the signal which was to proclaim the king’s death. What a spectacle it was!—what a lesson for a king! The flatterers who yesterday had been his slaves, pandering to his vices, and helping to make him the abject creature that he was, abandoned him now that he was struggling with grim Death, and, all absorbed in selfish cares for their own interest, in speculations of the favor of the new king, they had no pity in their hearts for the master who could pay them no more. It came at last, the signal; the small flame of a candle was seen flickering through the darkness, and then held up at the window of the œil‐de‐bœuf. “Suddenly there was a noise,” says the historian of that ghastly scene, “like a roll of thunder, it was the courtiers rushing from the antechamber of the dead king to greet his successor.” Only his daughters had been brave enough to stand by the bedside of the dying man, and, now that he was gone, there was not one in all that multitude who could be induced to perform the last office of mercy towards his poor remains. It was imperative, nevertheless, that the body should be embalmed, and this appalling task devolved upon Andouillé, the late king’s surgeon. The Duc de Villequier went up to him and reminded him of it; he knew that the operation must insure certain death to the operator, but that was not his concern.
“It is your duty, monsieur,” said the duke; and he was coolly turning away when Andouillé stopped him. “Yes,” he replied, “it is my duty, and it is yours to hold the head.” De Villequier had forgotten this; he made no answer, but left the room, and nothing more was said about the embalmment. The body was hustled into a coffin, and smuggled rather than conveyed in the dead of the night to S. Denis, a few menials accompanying the King of France to his last resting‐place. The spirit of French loyalty may be said to have been buried with Louis Quinze; “the divinity that doth hedge a king” was that night laid low in France, wrapped in the shroud that covered the unutterable mass of corruption consigned like a dog to the ready‐made grave in S. Denis. Le roi could never again be to the nation what he had been heretofore. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!(73) ceased to be the watchword of its fealty; le roi, that being invested not merely with supreme authority, but with a sort of vague personal sacredness that has no parallel in modern loyalty, died with Louis Quinze, never to be resuscitated. The miserable death of the libertine prince, fit ending to an ignoble life, came upon his people in the light of a divine judgment, swift and awful, and dealt the last blow at that prestige which had for generations been the bulwark of king‐worship and shaded with its mysterious reverence the iniquities of the throne. No man suffers alone for his sins, but how much more truly may this be said of kings! Who could measure the depth of the gulf that Louis XV. had dug through his long reign for those who were to come after him, and realize the consequences of his evil deeds to future generations of Frenchmen? There is no greater fallacy than to attribute to an age the responsibility of its own destinies; none probably ever saw the beginning and end of its own history, for good or evil, but less than any other can the period of the Revolution be said to have witnessed this unity. We must look much further back to trace the rising of the red flood that inundated France in ’93. It was the insane extravagance of Louis XIV.’s reign and the official depravity of the succeeding one that sowed the harvest that was to be reaped in fire by the innocent victims of a corruption which for a whole century had been seething as in the caldron of the Prophet’s vision, till it boiled over in the mad frenzy of the Revolution, and swallowed up not only the monarch, but the soul and reason of France, in a deluge of exasperated hate and suicidal revenge. Louis Seize, the martyred king who was to expiate the follies and crimes of his predecessors, next passes before us along the galleries of Versailles. There is an interval of peace, a short halcyon time of pastorals and idyls, we see Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in Arcadia, we hear Trianon ringing with the music of her light‐hearted laughter, we see her choosing a friend,(74) and braving the jealous anger that makes a crime of her friendship though it be wise, and rebukes her mirth though it be innocent; but the queen turns a deaf ear to all warning sounds and shuts her eyes to the gathering clouds. Imprudent Marie Antoinette! Ill‐adapted wife of timid, hesitating, magnanimous Louis Seize, the Bourbon of whom it was written with truth:
“Louis ne sut qu’aimer et pardonner, S’il avait su punir, il aurait su regner.”(75)
He loved and forgave to the end, but he never learned to punish. Warnings were not wanting, but he would not heed them. See him standing in the embrasure of the window of that cabinet du roi whence Louis Quatorze ruled the kings and peoples of Europe; a new power has arisen; it is the people’s turn to rule the king, his brow is clouded, his lip trembles, not with fear—that base emotion never stirred the soul of Louis Seize—but with anguish, perplexity, doubts in himself that amounted to despair. He listens to the murmurs of the crowd down below; and to De Brézé, who repeats, in tremulous accents, Mirabeau’s message of tremendous import: “Go tell the king that the will of the people has brought us here, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence!” That force he knew full well would never be appealed to; it was not the people who should be driven hence, it was they who would drive the king. Presently we see the ponderous state coach jolting slowly down the Avenue de Paris, the first stage of the royal martyrs towards the guillotine; the mob, in a frenzy of drunken triumph, jostled it from side to side, pressing rudely through the windows to stare at their victims, and insulting them by thrusting the red cap into their faces, and shouting as they go: “The baker and the bakeress! now we have caught them, and the people shall have bread!” This journey dates a new era in the annals of Versailles, it is the death‐knell of the pleasant days of royalty; there are to be no more fêtes pastorales at Trianon, no more merry children of France careering over the flowery terraces, making the sombre alleys bright and the gay flowers brighter with the sweet melody of child laughter; all this is gone, and passed like a dream. “The old order of things has vanished, making place for the new.” Soon we shall see the palace of Louis Quatorze stripped of its costly furniture, invaded by the rabble, and pillaged from garret to cellar. The Convention will deem it right to utilize the “foregoing abode of the tyrants” by turning it into a hospital; they will transport the invalids to Versailles, but the rheumatic old heroes will find the apartments of the Grand Monarque too grand to be comfortable, they will complain of their pains and aches being aggravated by the draughts, and beg to be taken back to their homely quarters, and the Convention, in its benevolence, will accede to the request.
Louis XVIII. was anxious to fix his residence at Versailles, and went the length of spending six millions of francs on repairing the façade, which had been sadly battered by the Revolution, but he found that the expense of refurnishing the palace would have been too much for the exhausted finances of France; so he gave up the idea.
Louis Philippe restored it to its ancient splendor, but not for his own use; he made it over to the nation as a museum, where they might go and enjoy themselves, and see all the glories of their country commemorated. Many of the victories of the grande armée were painted to his order to complete the series already decorating the walls. Versailles has retained ever since this national character. Under the Second Empire it was used occasionally for fêtes given to foreign princes; the most magnificent of these was the one prepared for the Queen of England when she visited Napoleon III. after his marriage.
France has undergone many strange vicissitudes, and her palaces have harbored many unlikely guests; but among the strangest on record none can assuredly compete with the recent experiences of Versailles. If the spirit of Louis XIV. be permitted sometimes to haunt the scene of his earthly pride, what must his feelings have been during the last two years! What did he feel on beholding the halls which had echoed to his conquering step held by the victorious soldiers of Germany, and vacated by them to make way for the President of the French Republic? But this crowning enormity stopped short at the threat. The chambre du roi was indeed placed at the disposal of the President, but whether it was that he shrank from the profanation, or feared the vast proportions of the great king’s palace, as likely to prove too large a frame for the representative of a republic, he declined taking up his abode there. Versailles continues still to be the resort of the people and of travellers from all parts of the world.
Father Isaac Jogues, S.J.
Father Isaac Jogues, the first of the missionaries to bear the cross into the interior of our country, and the first to shed his blood on its soil for the faith of Christ, was a native of Orleans, France. He was born on the 10th of January, 1607, of a family distinguished alike for their virtues and their worth. In the bosom of this pious family the young Isaac was reared up, surrounded by all the profound and pleasing practices of Catholic devotion. Lessons of religion and letters were imparted together, and the scholar from his earliest youth proved himself remarkably apt at both. As soon as he was old enough, he was sent, to his own great joy, to the college at Orleans, then recently established by the Jesuit Fathers, under whose instruction he made rapid progress in his studies. The virtues of his character so ingratiated him with his companions at college, that no thought of jealousy ever entered their hearts at the eminence he enjoyed as a student.
As the close of his collegiate course drew near, he began, more seriously than ever, to meditate on the greatest act of one’s life—the selection of a vocation. It was his extraordinary devotion to the Passion of Our Lord that settled this question for him. The cathedral church of his native city was dedicated to the Holy Cross, and there from his tenderest years he gazed daily upon that sacred symbol of the Passion and Redemption glittering from the spires of the temple, and it became the object of his warmest affection.
“O lovely tree whose branches wore The royal purple of his gore! Oh! may aloft thy branches shoot, And fill all nations with thy fruit!”
Impelled by this devotion, he retired into himself in order to discover his vocation, and heard within his soul the voice of Heaven calling him to the Society of Jesus. Having applied for admission into the Society, and being received with alacrity by the superior, he entered upon his novitiate in October, 1624. To complete his studies he next went to the celebrated college of La Flèche, where he passed his examination in philosophy at the end of three years with great distinction. Then, in obedience to the discipline of his order, the young Jesuit went to teach in the college at Rouen, and for four years instructed the youth of that city in the elements of the Latin language, in the principles of religion and the practice of piety. So fruitful were his labors in this regard that his scholars were ever distinguished for the solidity and constancy of their virtues, and many of them became companions of their saintly preceptor in the Society of Jesus.
We now find him winning laurels in the flowery path of literature. It was, at the period of which we speak, the custom at the Jesuit colleges to test the qualifications of the teachers, by requiring them, at the opening of the year, to deliver an oration or poem, or read a lecture of their own production, in public. Simply in obedience to this rule, and without any desire of his own to gain distinction, the gifted Jogues participated in these exercises, and on one occasion produced a poem of rare excellence. But his heart was too thoroughly pre‐engaged to covet the laurels of literary fame. He was intent on winning another crown—the glorious crown of martyrdom. Yet so obedient was the young scholastic to the will of his superior and to the spirit of his institute, that he, who only desired for himself the wigwam and council fires of the roving tribes of the Western wilds, went out with as much labor and zeal to acquire all the accomplishments of learning as though a professor’s chair in Europe was to be the field of his ambition. He was next sent to Paris, where he began his course of divinity at the college of Clermont.
He applied himself to these studies with the greatest zeal, since they constituted the last probation and delay preceding his elevation to the sacred ministry, and the realization of his fondest hope—a foreign mission. He seems not to have discovered his future plans to his family, to whom he was, however, most tenderly attached. Writing to them in April, 1635, on receiving their complaint at his not having joined them in one of their family festivals, he says: “The prayers which I offer up, as well afar off as near you, are the most affectionate marks I can give of my interest in you all.”
When the time for the reception of holy orders drew near, he prepared himself by a spiritual retreat, and was ordained in February, 1636. His family, who were extremely devoted to him, were not present at his ordination; but his fond mother obtained from his superior a promise that he might say his first Mass in his native city. He accordingly went to Orleans, and offered up the holy sacrifice for the first time in the church of the Holy Cross. Then, tearing himself away from his mother and sisters, never to see them again, he went to Rouen, and entered upon what is called the second novitiate in the Society of Jesus. But a fleet was soon ready to sail from Dieppe for Canada, and the young missionary must hasten to his chosen field of labor and love.
He was accompanied on the voyage by the Jesuit Fathers Garnier and Chatelain, and by M. de Chanflour, afterwards governor at Three Rivers. The vessel in which they sailed being leaky, the pumps were kept in constant motion, and the labor thus imposed upon the crew gave rise to a mutiny, which Father Jogues alone was able to quell. M. de Chanflour ever afterwards, in speaking of the voyage, attributed his safety to the influence of Father Jogues’ prayers with God, and of his persuasion with the men.
After words of pious affection and encouragement which this exemplary son knew well how to address to that excellent mother, he proceeds in one of his letters addressed to her:
“I write this more than three thousand miles away from you, and I may perhaps this year be sent to a nation called the Huron, distant nearly a thousand miles more from here. It shows great dispositions for embracing the faith. It matters not where we are, provided we are ever in the arms of Providence and in his holy grace. This I beg for you and all our family daily at the altar.”
By his short stay at Miscou he missed the Indian flotilla, and Fathers Garnier and Chatelain embarked without him; but, some canoes having come in later, the Indians, when about to return, asked, as if reproachfully, why there was no black‐gown to be carried by them. Father Jogues, being then at Three Rivers, was summoned to embark, and at once joyfully entered the canoes.
We would gladly reproduce, did our space allow, a letter addressed to his mother, under date June 5, 1637, giving an account of this voyage. Suffice it to say that in nineteen days he accomplished what usually took twenty‐ five or thirty; joining Fathers Garnier and Chatelain, who had preceded him but a month, and three other missionaries who had been five or six years in the country.
Supported by his zeal, he accomplished his arduous and laborious passage, but no sooner arrived at Ihonitiria than his exhausted nature sank under a dreadful malady, which for more than a month threatened to terminate his existence. With four others he lay during all this time in a cabin, without medicines or food, except such food as was an aggravation to the disease. By the middle of October Father Jogues was so far recovered as to be able to take the ordinary food of the country, the sagamity.
In November he set out from Ihonitiria to join Father Brebeuf at the great town of Ossossané, where for a time they were companions on earth who were destined to be companions in heaven, in the enjoyment of the glorious crown of martyrdom. Sickness was raging over the land, and the missionaries hastened from town to town, and from cabin to cabin, baptizing the dying infants, and such of the adults as were willing to receive the words of eternal life. They even extended their visits to the neighboring Nipissings, who had been terribly afflicted with the prevailing maladies. The poor Indians, in most cases, would not listen to the voice of the fathers, because they could not promise, as their own sorcerers pretended, to cure their bodily afflictions. The horrid orgies of the medicine‐men were consequently in great requisition, and one of them, a little deformed creature, offered his services to one of the fathers in his sickness.
There was another medicine‐man, Tehoronhaegnon, who filled the land with dances and orgies of the most wicked and revolting character. The missionaries labored to banish these abominations from the country, and to introduce in their place the pure and holy rites of the Christian religion. Unacquainted with their language, Father Jogues labored under the greatest disadvantages, but by zealous and persevering application he was soon able to make himself well understood; and in a few years he was master of the Huron, the key‐tongue to so many others. Remaining at Ossossané as his place of residence, he was incessant in his visits and ministrations in the cabins of the people, preaching the faith to all, and at the same time rapidly acquiring their language. Late in 1637 he returned to labor in the same way at Ihonitiria. On the ruin of this town and its mission, he went again to join his superior, Father Brebeuf, at Teananstayae.
In 1639, Father Jogues accompanied Father Garnier in his expedition to plant the cross among the mountains of the Petuns, or Tobacco Indians. They twice visited the Petun village of Ehwae, which they dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul. But their noble efforts were in vain; every door was closed against them, and menaces assailed them on every side; even the women reproached their husbands for not killing them, and the children pursued them through the streets. The sachems gave a feast to the young warriors in order to induce them to destroy the missionaries; but the providence of God saved his servants from the impending blow.
In the next year, Father Jogues was stationed with Father Francis Duperon at the new residence at S. Mary’s. Four towns partook of their care, and these they piously dedicated to S. Ann, S. John, S. Denis, and S. Louis. Obliged to select the worst season of the year for their labor, because then only were the neophytes drawn together, their time was incessantly occupied in conveying to the untaught natives the faith and its consolations. Next year Father Jogues was stationed permanently at St. Mary’s. Here the fathers established a hospice, where the wayfarer was ever sure to find refreshment and relief for the body as well as the soul. To this sacred spot in the wilderness came Indians from distant villages to receive instruction in the faith, some to be baptized, some to prepare for the reception of Holy Communion, some to be trained in the duties of catechists, and others, like Joseph Chihatenhwa, to make a spiritual retreat.
But now a new enterprise for the Gospel drew Father Jogues away from St. Mary’s. This was to plant the cross in the region now comprising the state of Michigan. The missionaries knew that beyond the Huron Lake another vast expanse of water lay which never yet had been visited by them. The strait which connected the two lakes had formerly been known by the name of Gaston, and was supposed to have been once visited by Nicholet, but no intercourse ever subsisted between the French and the tribes of those regions. In the summer of 1641, numerous delegations from all the nations and tribes, scattered over a great expanse of country, were attracted to the “Feast of the Dead,” now to be given by the Algonquins.
Thus, on the present occasion, the numerous branches of the vast Algonquin family were brought in contact with the Jesuit missionaries and the Christian Hurons, and the latter spread far and near in this vast assembly the fame of the black‐gown chiefs. In the general interchange of presents, the missionaries presented to the strangers “the wampum of the faith.” The Panoitigoueieuhak, or Sauteux, as the French called them, a tribe inhabiting the small strip near the Falls of St. Mary, were particularly friendly and earnest, and invited the black‐gowns to come and bring the faith to their cabins as they had done for the Hurons. Father Raymbault and Father Jogues were named by the superior to visit this new and distant vineyard. Launching their canoes in the latter part of September at St. Mary’s, they glided over the little river Wye, and were soon on the broad, clear bosom of the great “Fresh‐Water Sea.” For seventeen days their frail canoes glided through the multitude of little islands that stud the water from the Huron promontory. They reached without accident the strait where Superior empties its waters into the lower lakes, and then they encountered Indians assembled to the number of two thousand. From these they learned of innumerable wild and warlike tribes stretching far to the west and south. Here, too, their eager ears were feasted with tidings of a mighty river rolling towards the south till it met the sea, whose shores were lined with numberless tribes and nations. Planting the cross at Sault St. Mary’s, the two fathers turned it hopefully and prophetically towards this great mysterious river, whose vast and teeming valley they thus took possession of in the name of the Prince of Peace. Having opened the way to this immense mission‐field by their visit, the two missionaries encouraged the Sauteux with the prospect of a future permanent mission, and, amidst the regrets of their new friends, again launched their canoes and returned to their mission‐house at St. Mary’s. “Thus,” says Bancroft, “did the religious zeal of the French bear the cross to the banks of the St. Mary and the confines of Lake Superior, and look wistfully towards the homes of the Sioux in the Valley of the Mississippi, five years before the New England Eliot had addressed the tribes of Indians that dwelt within six miles of Boston Harbor.”
At St. Mary’s, Father Jogues remained constantly employed at the hospice with Father Duperon in instructing and preparing the Indians for the reception of the faith. One hundred and twenty were baptized during the winter, and among these was the famous warrior, Ahasistari, a chief of the town of St. Joseph’s.
This brave and chivalrous chief had been for some time receiving instruction in the faith, and he now came forward to ask for baptism. The fathers at first put him off, in order that he might become still better instructed; but his entreaties were so earnest, and his appreciation of the Christian truths so intelligent, that it was deemed no longer necessary or proper to postpone the boon. He accordingly received the sacrament on Holy Saturday, 1642.
It has been seen how, at Orleans, the ardent novice of the Society of Jesus was passionately devoted to the cross, the memento of our Saviour’s Passion. Like S. Peter, his heart was still for ever enamored with the sacred humanity of his divine Master. Thus his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was intense, and the Real Presence, the greatest of blessings, made the wilderness of America a paradise to Father Jogues. Father Buteux says of him that he was “a soul glued to the Blessed Sacrament.” His prayers, meditations, office, examens of conscience—in fine, all his devotions—were performed in the little chapel before the Holy Eucharist. Neither heat, nor cold, nor the swarms of mosquitoes, with which the chapel was infested, could induce him to forego the society of his Saviour. No wonder he was attracted thither; for it was in the little chapel that he was not unfrequently favored with heavenly visitations. It was there, too, that he breathed that heroic prayer, whose only petition was that he might be allowed to bear a portion of his Saviour’s cross. His prayer was heard—a warning voice fortified his soul for the approaching conflict.
The necessities of the Huron missionaries had now arrived at the point of extreme distress. They were reduced to procure the wine for the altar from the wild grape; at last, flour to make the sacred host was wanting for the holy sacrifice, and the missionaries themselves were in want of clothes and other necessaries of life. The perilous passage through various intervening hostile tribes to procure relief from Quebec for the pressing demands of the mission must now be undertaken by some one, and Father Jerome Lalemant, the superior, selected Father Jogues for the task, which, however, at the same time, he permitted him to accept or decline. His immediate preparation to depart showed that he did not hesitate about accepting. To his great joy, the faithful and noble chief, Eustace Ahasistari, came forward, and offered to become his escort and guide. A flotilla of four canoes, bearing the missionary, the Christian chief, four Frenchmen, and eighteen Hurons, started from St. Mary’s on the 13th of June. The voyagers had to endure the usual portages at the rapids, and other hardships of such trips; but, by the exercise of great care and vigilance, they reached Quebec without harm from the savages. The faithful messenger, besides procuring books, vestments, and sacred vessels, had all things in readiness by the last day in July, the feast of S. Ignatius. He stopped to celebrate the feast of the great founder of his order, in which his companions united by approaching the sacraments in solemn preparation for their perilous return. The flotilla, now increased to twelve canoes, started from Three Rivers on the 1st day of August, and at first made slow progress against the impetuous current of the St. Lawrence. They spent the night on a small island in Lake St. Peter, twelve leagues from Three Rivers, and on the second morning they had not proceeded far when they discovered suspicious footprints on the adjacent shore. Nerved by the dauntless courage of Ahasistari, they pushed on, and had not advanced a league when suddenly a volley from a Mohawk ambush riddled their bark canoes. Panic‐struck, the Hurons, whose canoes were near the shore, fled in all directions. Only fourteen rallied round the gallant Ahasistari, who had now to oppose a force of twice his numbers. The Mohawks, armed with fire‐arms, and reinforced from the other shore, overpowered the Hurons, who broke and fled. Father Jogues, ever mindful of his sacred calling, in the heat of the attack calmly stopped to take up water for the baptism of his pilot, who was the only unbaptized Indian in his canoe. Seeing himself almost alone, he made to the shore; but he did not attempt to escape, which he might easily have done. “Could I,” he says, “a minister of Christ, forsake the dying, the wounded, the captive?” Advancing to the guard of the prisoners, he asked to be made a captive with them, and their companion in danger and in death. Well might the Mohawk guard, at the sight of such heroism, have been scarcely able to believe his senses! Well might the historian exclaim, “When did a Jesuit missionary seek to save his own life, at what he believed to be the risk of a soul?”(76) Father Jogues at once began his offices of mercy among his fellow‐captives. He encouraged and confessed his faithful companion, the good René Goupil; he instructed and baptized the Hurons, and as, one after another, they were brought in prisoners, the priest of God rushed to meet and embrace them, and to unite them to the fold of Christ.
In the meantime, Ahasistari, having got beyond the reach of his pursuers, looked round for Ondessonk. Finding that the black‐gown was not there, the noble chief relinquished his freedom that he might share in the captivity of the father, whom he had promised never to abandon. While Father Jogues was engaged in ministering to the prisoners, the voice of Ahasistari struck upon his astonished ears. “I made a vow to thee that I would share thy fortunes, whether death or life. Brother, here I am to keep my vow.” Also a young Frenchman, one of those donnés who accompanied and aided the missionaries, returned to join the prisoners with the same exalted motive; and, as Father Jogues tenderly embraced him, all bleeding and mangled as he was, the savages could not restrain their fury. Rushing upon the father, they beat him with their fists and clubs till he fell senseless to the ground. Then, seizing his hands, they tore out most of his nails with their teeth, and inflicted upon him the exquisite torture of crunching his fingers, especially the two forefingers. But these tortures were only the first outbursts of savage rage and cruelty, the forerunners of more cruel ones in reserve.
The time consumed in collecting the prisoners, dividing the booty, and preparing for retreat enabled Father Jogues to complete the instruction and baptism of the remaining prisoners.
On Lake Champlain, another Mohawk war‐fleet met the flotilla, and, drawing up on an island, the newcomers prepared to receive their countrymen and the prisoners. They erected a scaffold on the highest point of land for the prisoners; then offering thanks to the sun as the genius of war, they lined the shore, and welcomed the conquering fleet with a salute of firearms. The number of savages on the new flotilla was about two hundred, and, as their native superstition taught them that their success in war would be proportioned to their cruelty to the prisoners, sad indeed was the fate of the latter. Father Jogues closed the line of prisoners as they marched up to the scaffold, and so terrific was the shower of blows that assailed him that he fell exhausted to the ground: “God alone,” he exclaims—“God alone, for whose love and glory it is sweet to suffer, can tell what cruelties they wreaked upon me then.” Unable to proceed, he was dragged to the scaffold, when, on reviving, he suffered the ordeal of fire and steel. His closing wounds were reopened, his remaining nails were torn from their sockets, and the bones forced through the crushed fingers. Twice one of his tormentors rushed to cut off his nose—a certain prelude of death to follow—and was twice restrained by some invisible, some providential power. Falling repeatedly to the ground, the blazing brands and burning calumets forced him to rise. Thus tortured and fainting, the paternal eyes of Jogues still possessed tears of tenderest sympathy to shed for the sufferings of his fellow‐captive, Ahasistari, who, amidst his own sufferings, cried aloud in praise of the father’s courage and love of his children. The night was spent without food, and in the morning the voyage was resumed. While passing over the lake, again they met a Mohawk fleet, and again the victorious Mohawks must honor their countrymen by fresh tortures of the prisoners. On the next day, the ninth of the captivity, the flotilla reached the extremity of the lake, where the entire party landed. The prisoners, weakened and suffering with wounds and hunger, were now loaded with all the luggage, and, in this plight, forced to commence a four days’ journey by land. Some berries, gathered on the wayside, constituted their only food, and the exhausted father narrowly escaped being drowned in crossing the first river. On the eve of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, they reached the river near the Mohawk village. Here again the captives became the objects of cruel tortures for the amusement of the crowds swarming from the settlement to see them. “And as he ran the gauntlet, Jogues comforted himself with a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven,”(77) for it was the eve of her glorious Assumption into Heaven. Some Hurons, who met them at the river, exclaimed in compassion, “Frenchmen, you are dead!” Before going up to the village, Father Jogues was again cruelly beaten with clubs and sticks, especially on the head, which by its baldness excited the derision of the savages. Two remaining finger‐nails, which had escaped their impatient cruelty before, were now torn out with the roots. “Conscious that, if we withdrew ourselves from the number of the scourged, we withdrew from that of the children of God, we cheerfully presented ourselves,” were the words of the martyr himself, relating how he advanced to receive new tortures.
The line of march was formed for the village, Father Jogues closing as before the procession. Again the scaffold was erected, again the heroic band ran the gauntlet in marching to the scaffold hill, and the signal for the tortures to begin was given by a chief, who struck each captive three times on the back with a club. An old man approached Father Jogues, and compelled an aged captive woman to sever his left thumb from his hand with a dull knife. Long and various were the tortures which Father Jogues and his companions now endured, and though exhausted from the loss of blood, he consoled them in their sufferings. As night approached, the prisoners were tied to stakes driven in the ground, and thus exposed to the maltreatment of the children, who threw burning coals upon them, “which hissed and burned in the writhing flesh, till they were extinguished there.”(78)
On the following day the prisoners were led forth half naked through the broiling sun, to be exhibited and tortured in all the Mohawk towns. At the second village the same tortures were endured as at the first. On entering the last town the heart of Father Jogues was melted at the sight of a fresh band of Huron prisoners just brought in. Forgetting his own captivity and sufferings, he approached the captives with every expression of sympathy and kindness: he could not release their bodies from bondage; but he offered to their immortal souls the freedom of the Gospel. There was no water at hand with which to baptize these devoted captives; when, lo! the dews of heaven were supplied. An Indian at that anxious moment passed by with Indian corn, and threw a stalk at the father’s feet. As the freshly cut plant passed through the sunlight, dew‐drops upon the blades were revealed to the eager eyes of the missionary, who, gathering the precious drops into his hands, baptized two Hurons on the spot. A little brook they afterwards crossed supplied the saving water for the others.
In this town, also, the tortures were repeated with many horrid additions. Father Jogues, ever tender and sympathetic for the sufferings of his converts, was compelled to look on, and see the fingers of one of his Hurons nearly sawed off with a rough shell, and then violently torn off with the sinews uncut. Father Jogues and his companion René Goupil were led to a cabin and ordered to sing. Availing themselves of the command, they devoutly chanted the Psalms of David. They were burned in several parts of their bodies. Then two poles were erected in the air, in the form of a cross, and Father Jogues was tied to it by cords of twisted bark, thus throwing the whole weight of his body upon his wounded and lacerated arms. He asked to be released in mercy, in order that he might prepare for death, which he thought would result from his tortures, but this was refused him. Begging pardon of God for having made such a request, he had already resigned himself to the mercies of heaven, when suddenly an Indian in the crowd, touched with compassion, rushed forward and cut the cords that bound him to the cross. During the night he was again tied to a stake driven in the ground, and his sufferings were prolonged without relief till morning. On the following day the prisoners were carried back to the second town they had entered. Here the council decided to spare the lives of the French for the present, and to put the Hurons to death.
Father Jogues and René Goupil lingered in suffering, and almost at the point of death, for three weeks, at Gandawagué, now Caughnawaga, in New York. The Mohawks had concluded to send them back when convenient to Three Rivers. In the meantime, the Dutch settlers in New Netherland, who were allies of the Mohawks, heard that their Iroquois neighbors and friends had taken some European prisoners. These generous Dutch, headed by their minister, the worthy Dominie Megapolensis, took the matter in hand, and raised six hundred guilders for the ransom of the French prisoners. Accordingly Arendt Curler set out with this sum, accompanied by two burghers from Rensselaerswyck, now Albany, for the Mohawk castles. The treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawks was renewed, but neither money nor diplomacy could move the chiefs to deliver up the prisoners, whose importance they began now to perceive from the effort made for their release. All that the Dutch could obtain was a promise to send them back to Three Rivers.
Afterwards, divisions arose among the savages as to what disposition should be made of Father Jogues and René. In the meantime their lives were suspended upon the capricious humors and passions of the cruel Mohawks. The master of the cabin on seeing this ordered a young brave to put René to death; that order was afterwards obeyed.
After the death of René, Father Jogues remained among the Mohawks, the sole object of their barbarous cruelty and superstitious hatred. Amidst the countless sufferings he endured, his consolation consisted in prayer and visits of religion to the Huron prisoners. In his poverty he was rich in the possession of a volume containing one of the Epistles of S. Paul, and an indulgenced picture of S. Bruno. These, his only possessions, he carried always about his person.
In the fall, he was obliged to accompany the tribe as a slave on a grand hunt, and then for two months inconceivable hardships and labors were his constant lot. When the chase was unproductive, he was accused as the demon of their ill success. When sacrifice was offered to the god Aireskoi, he refused to eat any of the food of the idolatrous sacrifice, and was thereupon repulsed and avoided as polluted and polluting; and every door was closed against him, food was denied him, and a shelter refused. After performing the menial and oppressive labors which they imposed upon him, he retired at night to his little oratory, with its roof of bark and floor of snow, to commune with his Heavenly Father, his only friend; even to that sacred spot, the arrows, clubs, and once the tomahawk, of his persecutors followed him. He was finally sent back to the village, loaded with venison, over a frozen country, thirty leagues in extent, and almost perished of cold on the way. But even such a journey possessed its consolations; for on the way, by an act of heroism, he saved an Indian woman and her infant from drowning, and, as the infant was on the point of expiring from its exposure and injuries, he poured the waters of regeneration on its head, and saved another soul for heaven.
On arriving at the village, he was ordered to return over the same road to the hunting‐ground, but his repeated falls on the ice compelled him to abandon the journey and return to the village, to endure equal torments there. Obliged to become the nurse of one of the most inveterate of his enemies, who was lying devoured by a loathsome disease, the good Samaritan entered upon his task as a work of love, and for an entire month bestowed the most tender care and sympathetic attention upon his patient. In the spring of 1643, he was compelled to accompany a fishing party to a lake four days’ journey off, when he suffered over again the cruelties of the recent hunt. On the lake shore, as on the hunting‐grounds, his cross and little oratory of fir branches were his only consolations. His mode of life in these wildernesses is thus described by Bancroft: “On a hill apart he carved a long cross on a tree, and there, in the solitude, meditated the imitation of Christ, and soothed his grief by reflecting that he alone, in that vast region, adored the true God of earth and heaven. Roaming through the stately forests of the Mohawk Valley, he wrote the name of Jesus on the bark of trees, graved the cross, and entered into possession of these countries in the name of God—often lifting up his voice in a solitary chant.”
Repeatedly during this period was the murderous tomahawk suspended over his head; and twice was he selected to be sacrificed to the manes of some Indian warrior who had gone on the hunt and had not returned. But his life was in the hands of an invisible Protector. A generous Indian matron adopted him as her son, in the place of her own son she had just lost; and now, when he mingled with the Mohawks as their brother, he spoke to them of God, heaven, eternity, and hell. Though he convinced them that his words were true, they were too much wedded to their idols to yield to the grace of conversion. On one occasion he was led out to be sacrificed to the manes of the braves who had gone on a war party, and, not having returned, were supposed to be lost; but before the ceremony proceeded too far, the warriors returned just in time to save his life. They brought with them some Abnaki prisoners whom they destined for the stake. Father Jogues secured the services of an interpreter, instructed them in the faith, and succeeded in converting several of them, whom he baptized at Easter.
It was shortly after this that Father Jogues was compelled to witness the horrid spectacle of human sacrifice offered to the demon Aireskoi. How wonderful are the ways of divine Providence! for it was in the midst of this act, the lowest point in the scale of human degradation and of insult to God, that a human soul is regenerated by one of the Christian sacraments, and that soul is the victim itself of the superstitious rite. A woman was chosen for the victim, and was tied to the stake. The savages formed a line, and as they approached the stake each one did his share in burning, cutting, or otherwise torturing the unhappy victim. Father Jogues had previously instructed the woman. He took no part, of course, in this awful and wicked sacrifice, but he availed himself of an opportunity to press forward in the crowd, and as the victim bowed to receive the sacrament from his hands, the missionary poured the baptismal waters on her head, in the midst of the raging flames of the heathen sacrifice.
An effort was now made by his friends in Canada to secure the release of Father Jogues. Some braves of the Sokoki tribe, living on the Connecticut, had been captured by the Algonquins, and were now led forth for torture. The French governor procured their liberation, committed them to the care of the hospital nuns, and, after their wounds were healed, sent them back to their own country, with a request that they would induce their tribe to send an embassy to their allies the Mohawks to intercede for the relief of Father Jogues. The embassy was accordingly sent, the Mohawks lit their council fires, the Sokoki presents were accepted, but the main question was parried, and finally the old promise to send him back to Three Rivers was the only result. Perceiving now more than ever the dignity and importance of their prisoner, the Mohawks led him forth in triumph to show their allies that even the powerful French nation was tributary to the Iroquois. This cruel journey, two hundred and fifty miles long, was over a rugged and barren country, and many were the sufferings our missionary had to endure. Yet this journey was not without its peculiar consolations to Father Jogues. On one occasion he baptized five dying infants; and as he passed through the cabins in search of souls, he heard the voice of a former benefactor, the Indian who had so generously cut loose the cords that bound him to the cross of logs hoisted in the air in the village of Tinniontiogen, crying to him from his bed of misery and death. Father Jogues embraced his benefactor with a burst of gratitude and sympathy. Unable to reward him with worldly goods or temporal relief, the father instructed him in the truths of eternal life, bestowed upon the willing convert the treasure of the faith, and shortly before his death sealed all with the sacrament of baptism.
After his return to the village he was rushed upon one day by an infuriated savage, whose club laid him almost lifeless on the ground. Every day he was thus exposed to some imminent peril. His life was suspended upon the merest chance or savage caprice or passion. The good old woman who had adopted him, and whom he called his aunt, was his only friend in that vast region. She advised him to make his escape, but he believed it to be the will of God that he should remain there.
In August, 1643, he had to accompany a portion of the tribe on a hunting and fishing party, during which he visited for the second time the Dutch at Rensselaerswyck, the present city of Albany. The inhabitants again made a generous effort to secure the liberation of Father Jogues, but their appeal to the savage Mohawk was in vain. It was here, too, amid the dangers and distractions that encompassed him at Rensselaerswyck, that he produced that beautiful monument of taste and learning, as well as of apostolic zeal and love, the relation of his captivity and sufferings to his superior, which has been so greatly admired for its pure and classic Latin. In this letter, he says: “I have baptized seventy since my captivity, children, and youth, and old men of five different tongues and nations, that men of every tribe, and tongue, and nation, might stand in the presence of the Lamb.”
While engaged in helping the Iroquois to stretch their nets for fish, he heard of more Huron prisoners brought to the village, two of whom had already expired at the stake unbaptized. Obtaining the permission of his good aunt who had adopted him, he at once dropped the fish‐nets, and returned to the village in order that he might set his net for human souls. On his way to the village he passed through Rensselaerswyck. Van Curler insisted on his making his escape by flight, since certain death awaited him at the village, and offered a shelter and a passage on board of a ship destined first for Virginia and then for Bordeaux or Rochelle. It has already been related that Father Jogues had resolved to regard the Mohawk as his mission, he therefore hesitated to accept the generous offer of the Dutch, though inevitable death would soon remove him from that chosen field. But Van Curler and the minister of the settlement, John Megapolensis, pressed their appeal with such powerful arguments that the missionary promised to consider it, and asked one night for prayer and consultation with his soul and with God. After fervent supplication for the aid of heaven in deciding the matter with impartiality, and after much reflection, Father Jogues, knowing that if he returned to the village death would soon remove him from it, and convinced that his return to France or Canada would prove the only means of founding a regular mission in the Mohawk, resolved to attempt his escape, and went in the morning to announce his resolution to Van Curler and Megapolensis. They then arranged together the plan of escape. Returning to the custody of his guards, he accompanied them to their quarters. When they all retired at night to their barn to rest, the Iroquois slept around the father, in order to secure him closely within, while without the premises were guarded by ferocious watch‐dogs. In his first attempt early in the night, the dogs rushed upon him and tore his leg dreadfully with their teeth, and he was obliged to return into the barn. Towards daybreak a second attempt was more successful; the dogs were silenced; the prisoner quietly escaped over the fence, and ran limping and suffering with his lacerated limb fully a mile to the river where the ship lay. But here he found the bark sent by Van Curler for his escape lying high and dry and immovable on the beach, and the vessel was not within hailing distance. In these straitened circumstances, he had recourse to prayer. In making another effort to move the bark he seemed to be gifted with renewed strength, and soon the boat was afloat, and thus he succeeded alone in reaching the vessel. He was immediately concealed in the bottom of the hold, and a heavy box was placed over the hatch. In the filth of this narrow and unventilated place he remained two days and nights, suffering extremely from his wound, from hunger and the noisome air.
Father Jogues was then carried into the settlement to remain until all was quiet and it was time to embark. He was confided to the care of a man who permitted him to be thrust into a miserable loft, where he remained six weeks crouched behind a hogshead as his only shelter, with scarcely food sufficient to keep him alive, enduring every discomfort, and exposed to detection and recapture by the Iroquois or Mohawks, who incessantly haunted the house.
After six weeks thus spent, Father Jogues, accompanied by the minister, Dominie Megapolensis, took the first boat for New Amsterdam, as the city of New York was then called. The voyage lasted six weeks, during which Father Jogues became a great favorite with all on board. As they passed a little island in their route, the crew named it in honor of Father Jogues amid the discharge of cannon, and the Calvinist minister honored the Jesuit by contributing a bottle of wine to the festivities of the occasion. After an agreeable voyage, they arrived at New Amsterdam. The germ of the present monster city consisted then of a little fort garrisoned with sixty men, a governor’s house, a church, and the houses of four or five hundred men scattered over and around the entire Island of Manhattan. There were many different sects and nations represented there. The director‐general told Father Jogues that there were eighteen different languages spoken on the island. The Jesuit was enthusiastically received at New Amsterdam, for the people turned out in crowds to greet him. One of them, a Polish Lutheran, when he saw the mangled hands of Father Jogues, ran and threw himself at his feet to kiss his wounded hands, exclaiming, “O martyr of Christ! O martyr!” So practical, however, were the notions of the old Dutch inhabitants of the city about such matters, that they asked the missionary how much the company of New France would pay him for all he had suffered! Father Jogues made a vigilant search in New Amsterdam for Catholics. He found two: one, a Portuguese woman, with whom he could not converse, showed that she still clung to her faith by the pious pictures which were hanging round her room; the other, an Irishman, trading from Virginia, who availed himself of the father’s presence to go to his confession. It was from the latter that he learned that the English Jesuits had been driven from Maryland by the Puritan rulers of that colony, and had taken refuge in Virginia.
He remained there three months altogether in the old Dutch colony. Receiving commendatory letters from William Kieft, the governor of New Netherland, he sailed from the majestic harbor of New Amsterdam on the 5th of November, 1643. The little vessel possessed no comforts or accommodations. The father’s only bed was a coil of rope on deck, where he received severe drenchings from the waves breaking over him. A furious storm drove the vessel in on the English coast, near Falmouth, which was then in possession of the king’s party: two parliamentary cruisers pursued the Dutch vessel, but she escaped and anchored at the wharf. The storm‐ beaten crew went ashore to enjoy themselves, leaving only Father Jogues and another person on board, when the vessel was boarded by robbers, who pointed a pistol at the missionary’s throat and robbed him of his hat and coat. He appealed to a Frenchman, the master of a collier at the wharf, for relief, who took him on board his boat, gave him a sailor’s hat and coat, all his own poverty could spare, and a passage to France. In this plight, this celebrated missionary, whose fame filled all France, landed on his native shore on Christmas morning, at a point between Brest and St. Pol de Leon.
He borrowed a more decent hat and cloak from a peasant near the shore, and hastened to the nearest chapel, to make his thanksgiving and unite in the glorious solemnity of Christmas. As it was early he had the consolation of approaching the tribunal of penance, and of receiving the Holy Eucharist, for the first time in sixteen months. The touching story of his captivity and sufferings among the savages subdued their hearts and drew floods of sympathizing tears from the peasants whose hospitality he shared. They offered him all they had to forward him on his journey. A good merchant of Rennes, then passing on his way, heard the thrilling incidents he related, and saw his mangled hands: touched with compassion, he took the missionary under his care, and paid his expenses to Rennes, where he arrived on the eve of the Epiphany. He went to the college of his order in that city, and as soon as it was known that he was from Canada, all the members of the community gathered round him to ask him if he knew Father Jogues, and whether he was yet alive and in captivity. He then disclosed his name, and showed the marks of his sufferings; all then pressed forward to embrace their saintly brother, and kiss his glorious wounds.
He reposed for a few days at the college at Rennes, and then pushed on towards Paris, to place himself again at the disposal of his superior, humbly and modestly intimating a desire, however, to be sent back to his mission in America. His fame had long preceded him, and, when he arrived at the capital, the faithful pressed forward in crowds to venerate him and kiss his wounds. The pious queen‐mother coveted the same happiness, and he, whom we saw so recently the captive and slave of brutal savages, is now honored at the court of the first capital of Christendom. But the humility of Father Jogues took alarm at the honors paid to him. Throwing himself at his superior’s feet, he entreated that he might be sent back to the wilderness from which he had just escaped. The superior consented; but an obstacle here presented itself. So great were the injuries inflicted upon his hands by the Mohawks that he was canonically disqualified from offering up the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Application for the proper dispensation was made to the Sovereign Pontiff, upon a statement of the facts. Innocent XI. was moved by the recital, and, with an inspired energy, exclaimed, “Indignum esse Christi martyrem, Christi non bibere sanguinem”—“It were unjust that a martyr of Christ should not drink the blood of Christ!” Pronounced by the Vicar of Christ on earth to be a martyr, though living, he now goes to seek a double martyrdom in death. In the spring he started for Rochelle, and F. Ducreux, the historian of Canada, sought the honor of accompanying him thither.
He embarked from Rochelle for Canada, where he arrived on the 16th May, 1644. He found the Iroquois war still raging with unabated fury, and the colony of New France reduced to the verge of ruin. When his brethren in Canada heard and saw how cruelly Father Jogues had been treated in the Mohawk, and that his timely flight alone had saved his life, they felt the saddest apprehensions about the fate of Father Bressani, who had also fallen into the hands of the Iroquois. Finding it impossible to return to Lake Huron, Father Jogues joined Father Buteux in the duties of the holy ministry at the new town of Montreal, to which its founders gave the name of the City of Mary, in consecrating it to the Mother of God. It was during their sojourn together that the superior endeavored to draw from Father Jogues, by entreaty, and even by command, the circumstances of his sufferings in captivity; but his humility and modesty were so great that it was with the greatest difficulty that anything concerning himself could be drawn from him. In this spirit he avoided all the honors that were pressed upon him. After his return to Canada, he was so desirous of being unknown and unhonored that he ceased signing his name, and even his letters which he addressed to his superior after his return to Canada are without signatures.
Some Mohawk prisoners, kindly treated by the Governor of Canada and released, returned to their country, and disposed the Mohawks to make peace. A solemn deputation of their chiefs came to Three Rivers, and were received on the 12th of July, 1645, with great ceremony and pomp. Father Jogues was present, though unseen by the deputies; so was Father Bressani, who, having passed the ordeal of a most cruel captivity among the Mohawks, had been ransomed by the Dutch of New York, sent to France, and had now, like Father Jogues, returned to New France to suffer again. When all was silent, the orator of the deputies arose, and opened the session with the usual march and chants. He explained, as he proceeded to deliver the presents, the meaning of each. Belt after belt of wampum was thrown at the governor’s feet, until at last he held forth one in his hand, beautifully decorated with the shell‐work of the Mohawk Valley. “This,” he exclaimed, “is for the two black‐gowns. We wished to bring them both back; but we have not been able to accomplish our design. One escaped from our hands in spite of us, and the other absolutely desired to be given up to the Dutch. We yielded to his desire. We regret not their being free, but our ignorance of their fate. Perhaps even now that I name them they are victims of cruel enemies or swallowed up in the waves. The Mohawk never intended to put them to death.”
The French had little faith in the sincerity of the Mohawk, yet they wanted peace. The past was forgiven, the missionaries buried the remembrance of their wrongs with the hatchet of the Mohawk, and peace was concluded. The deputies returned to their castles to get the sachems to ratify the peace, and Father Jogues to Montreal to prepare himself for the terrible ordeal which he foresaw a Mohawk mission would open to him. His preparation consisted in prayer, meditations, and other spiritual exercises. The peace was ratified; the Indians asked for missionaries; the French resolved to open a mission among them, and Father Jogues was selected for the perilous enterprise. When he received the letter of his superior informing him of his selection, Father Jogues joyfully accepted the appointment, and prepared at once to depart. His letter in reply to the superior contains these heroic words: “Yes, father, I will all that God wills, and I will it at the peril of a thousand lives. Oh! how I should regret the loss of so glorious an occasion, when it depends but upon me that some souls may be saved. I hope that his goodness, which did not forsake me in the hour of need, will aid me yet. He and I are able yet to overcome all the difficulties which can oppose our project.”
On arriving at Three Rivers, he ascertained that he and the Sieur Bourdon were to go to the Mohawk castle, in the first instance, merely as ambassadors, to make sure of the peace. They departed on this dangerous embassy on the 16th of May, 1646, and during their absence public prayers, offered for their return, testified the fears felt for their safety. As they were about to start, an Algonquin thus addressed Father Jogues: “There is nothing more repulsive at first than this doctrine, that seems to annihilate all that man holds dearest, and as your long gown preaches it as much as your lips, you would do better to go at first in a short one.” Thereupon the prudent ambassador parted for the time with the habit of his order, and substituted a more diplomatic costume.
They were accompanied by four Mohawks and two Algonquins. After ascending the Sorel, and gliding through the beautiful islands of Lake Champlain, they arrived at the portage leading to the Lake Andiatarocté on the 29th of May, which was the eve of Corpus Christi. Here Father Jogues paused, and named the lake Saint Sacrament; but by a less Christian taste that beautiful name, given in honor of the King of kings, has since yielded to one given in honor of one of the kings of earth.(79) They suffered greatly for food on the way, but obtained a supply of provisions at Ossarane, a fishing station on the Hudson, supposed to be Saratoga. Then, gliding down the Hudson, they came to Fort Orange, where Father Jogues again, in the most earnest and sincere terms, expressed his deep gratitude to his liberators, the Dutch, whose outlay in his behalf he had already reimbursed to them from Europe. Not satisfied with expressing his thanks, Father Jogues endeavored to bestow upon his friend, Dominie Megapolensis, the greatest of possible returns—the true faith. He wrote from this place a letter to the minister, in which he used every argument that his well‐ stored mind or the unbounded charity of his heart could suggest to reclaim him to the bosom of that ancient church which his fathers had so unfortunately left.
After a short repose at Albany, they proceeded to the Mohawk, and arrived at the nearest town on the 7th of June. A general assembly of the chiefs was called to ratify the peace, and crowds came from all sides; some through curiosity to see, and others with a desire to honor, the untiring and self‐sacrificing Ondessonk. Father Jogues made a speech appropriate to the occasion and the purposes of his visits, which the assembled chiefs heard with great enthusiasm; presents were exchanged, and peace was finally and absolutely ratified. The Wolf family in particular, being that in which Father Jogues had been adopted, exclaimed, “The French shall always find among us friendly hearts and an open cabin, and thou, Ondessonk, shalt always have a mat to lie on and fire to keep thee warm.” Father Jogues endeavored to impress favorably the representatives of other tribes who were there by presents and friendly words. Then remembering his sacred character as a minister of God, he visited and consoled the Huron captives, especially the sick and dying; he heard the confessions of some, and baptized several expiring infants. Before departing Father Jogues desired to leave behind his box containing articles most necessary for the mission, which he was soon to return and commence among them; the Mohawks, however, dreading some evil from the box, objected at first, but the father opened it, and showed them all it contained, and finally, as he supposed, overcame their superstitious fears, and the box was left behind among them.
The ambassadors and their suite set out on their return, on the 16th of June, bearing their baggage on their backs. They also constructed their own canoes at Lake Superior, and, having crossed the lake in safety, arrived at Three Rivers, after a passage of thirteen days, on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, to the infinite joy and relief of all their friends.
On the 28th day of September, Father Jogues was on his way to the Mohawk, accompanied by Lalande, a young Frenchman from Dieppe, an Iroquois of Huron birth, and some other Hurons. As they advanced, tidings of war on the part of the Mohawks became more frequent, and the Indian escorts began to desert. They passed Lake Champlain in safety, and had advanced within two days’ journey of the Mohawk when a war‐party, marching on Fort Richelieu, came upon them. The savages rushed upon them, stripped Father Jogues and Lalande of their effects, bound them as prisoners, and turning back led them to the village of Gandawagué,(80) the scene of Father Jogues’ first captivity and sufferings. Here they were received with a shower of blows, amid loud cries for their heads, that they might be set up on the palisades.
Towards evening, on the 18th of October, some of the savages of the Bear family came and invited Father Jogues to sup in their cabin. Scarcely had the shadow of the black‐gown darkened the entrance of their lodge, when a concealed arm struck a well‐aimed blow with the murderous tomahawk, and the Christian martyr fell lifeless to the ground. The generous Kiotsaeton, who had just arrived as a deputy of a council called to decide on his case, rushed to save him, but the blade had done its work, and now spent its remaining force by inflicting a deep wound in the arm of that noble chief. The head of Father Jogues was severed from his body, and raised upon the palisade. The next day the faithful Lalande, and a no less faithful Huron, shared the same fate.
Father Jogues was in his fortieth year when he received the fatal stroke. When the tidings of his death arrived, every tongue in Canada and in France was zealous in the recital of his many virtues, and in praise of his glorious death. His zeal for the faith, his courage in danger, his humility, his love of prayer and suffering, his devotion to the cross, were conspicuous among the many exalted virtues that adorned his life and death. While his brethren lamented the loss the missions had sustained, they envied him the crown he had won. “We could not,” says Father Ragueneau, “bring ourselves to offer for Father Jogues the prayers for the dead. We offered up the adorable sacrifice, indeed, but it was in thanksgiving for the favors which he had received from God. The laity and the religious houses here partook our sentiments as to this happy death, and more are found to invoke his memory than there are to pray for his repose.”
Doña Ramona.
From The Spanish.
In an empire whose name history has failed to record, there lived in a miserable stable a poor laborer and his wife. Juan and Ramona were their names, though Juan was better known by the nickname “Under present circumstances,” which they gave him because in season or out of season that phrase was continually dropping from his lips. Juan and Ramona were so wretchedly poor that they would have had no roof to cover them unless a laborer of the province of Micomican had taken pity upon them, and given them a hut to live in, which in other days had served as a stable, and was now his property.
“We are badly enough off in a stable,” said Juan: “but we ought to conform ourselves with our lot, since under present circumstances God, though he was God, lived in a stable when he made himself man.”
“You are right,” replied Ramona.
So both worked away, if not happy, at least resigned—Juan in going out day after day to gain his daily reward of a couple of small pieces of money, and Ramona in taking care of the house, if house be a proper term to apply to a stable.
The emperor was very fond of living in the country, and had many palaces of different kinds in the province of Micomican. One day Juan was working in a kitchen garden near the road, when far away he saw the carriage of the emperor coming at a rate almost equal to that of a soul that the devil was trying to carry off.
“I’ll bet you,” said Juan, “that the horses have escaped from his majesty, and some misfortune is going to happen! It would be a great pity, for under present circumstances an emperor is worth an empire.”
Juan was not mistaken. The emperor’s horses had escaped, and the emperor was yelling:
“God take pity on me! I’m going to break my neck over one of those precipices! Isn’t there a son of a gun to save me? To whoever throws himself at the head of these confounded horses, I’ll give whatever he asks, though it be the very shirt on my back.”
But no one dared throw himself at the horses’ heads; for they tore along at such a furious rate that to rush at them was to rush into eternity.
Juan, enraged at the cowardice of the other workmen, and moved by his love for the emperor as well as his natural propensity to do good without looking at the person to whom he did it, threw himself at the horses’ heads, and succeeded in stopping the coach, to the admiration of the emperor himself, who at that moment would not have given a brass farthing for his life.
“Ask whatever you like,” said the emperor to him, “for everything appears to me small as a recompense to the man who has rendered me so signal a service.”
“Sire!” said Juan to him, “I, under present circumstances, am a poor day laborer, and the day that I don’t gain a couple of pesetas my wife and I have to fast. So, if your majesty will only assure me my day’s labor whether it rains or whether it is fine weather, my wife and I will sing our lives away in happiness, for we are people content with very little.”
“That’s pretty clear. Well, go along, it’s granted. The day that you have nothing to do anywhere else, go to one of my palaces, whichever you like, and occupy yourself there in whatever way you please.”
“Thank you, sire!”
“What! No; no reason for thanks, man. That is a mere nothing.”
The emperor went on his road happy enough, and Juan went on his, thinking of the great joy he was about to give his wife when he returned home at night, and told her that he had his day’s work secured for the rest of his life whether it rained or was fine weather.
In fact, his wife was greatly rejoiced when he carried her the good news. They supped, and went to bed in peace and in the grace of God, and Juan slept like one of the blessed; but Ramona passed the whole night turning about in the bed like one who has some trouble or desire that will not let him sleep.
“Do you know what I have been thinking the whole night long, Juan?” said Ramona, the following morning.
“What?”
“That yesterday you were a fool to ask so little from the emperor.”
“Indeed! What more had I to ask?”
“That he would give us a little house to live in, something more suitable and decent than this wretched stable.”
“You are right, woman; but now there is no help for it.”
“Perhaps there may be.”
“How?”
“Look here; go and see the emperor, and ask him.”
“Yes; now is the time to go on such an errand!”
“Go you shall, and quickly, too!”
“But, woman, don’t get angry. My goodness! what a temper you have! Well, well; I will go, and God grant his majesty does not send me off with a flea in my ear, although, under present circumstances, he is a very open‐ hearted, outspoken gentleman.”
Well, Juan set out for the palace of the emperor; and the emperor granted him an audience immediately on his arrival.
“Hallo, Juan!” said his majesty. “What brings you this way, man?”
“Sire!” replied Juan, twirling and twirling the hat which he held in his hand, “my wife, under present circumstances, is as good as gold; but, you see, the stable that we live in is gone to rack and ruin, and we wish to get it out of our sight. So she said to me this morning: ‘If your majesty, who is so kind, would only give us a little house, something better than the one we have, who dare sneeze at us then?’ ”
“Does your wife want nothing more than that? Well, it’s granted. This very moment I will give orders that they place the little white house at her disposal. Go into the dining‐room, and take a mouthful and a drop of something; and, instead of going afterwards to the stable, go to the little white house, and there you will find your wife already installed.”
Juan returned thanks to the emperor for his latest kindness, and, passing on to the dining‐room, filled himself with ham and wine.
Our friend commenced his journey home, and, when he arrived at the white house, his wife rushed out to receive him with tears of joy.
And indeed it was very natural for poor Ramona to find herself so merry, for the little white house was a perfect jewel. It occupied the summit of a gentle acclivity, whence the whole beauty of the plain was spread out before it. A large Muscatel vine covered the whole of the porch, and beneath it there were seats and little plots of pinks and roses. The apartments of the house were a little drawing‐room, very white, and clean, and pretty, with its chairs, its cupboard, and its looking‐glass; an alcove with its bed, so soft and clean and beautiful that the emperor himself might have slept in it; a little kitchen with all its requirements, among which were included the utensils, which shone like gold; and a little bewitching dining‐room, with four chairs, a table, and a sideboard. To the dining‐room there was a fairy entrance, adorned without by an arc of flowers, and through this entrance you passed into a garden, where there were fruits, and flowers, and vegetables, and a small army of chickens clucked; and every egg they laid was as big as Juan’s fist.
When night came on, Juan and Ramona took their supper like a couple of princes in their little dining‐room, and soon after laid them down in their beautiful bed. They both slept well, particularly Juan, who stirred neither hand nor foot the whole night through.
Ramona began to find fault the very next day, and Juan noticed that every night her sleep was more disturbed.
“Woman, what the devil is the matter with you, that all night long you are twisting like a reel?” asked Juan, one morning. “Why, there are no fleas here as there were in the stable.”
“Fleas hinder my sleep very little.”
“Well, then, what hinders it, woman?”
“What hinders it? Your stupidity in asking the emperor so little hinders it.”
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son!... And you still think it little that I have asked, and he granted us?”
“Yes, indeed I do. This little house is so small that one can scarcely turn in it; and if to‐morrow or some other day we have children, what shall we do with them in a hut like this?”
“Say what you like about it, there is no help for it now.”
“And how, I should like to know?”
“Going back and seeing his majesty, and telling him to give us a larger house, of course.”
“Go to Jericho, woman. You don’t catch me going on an errand of that kind!”
“Well, go you shall, then; or we’ll see who is master here.”
“But, wife, don’t you see that my very face would drop from me with shame?”
“Now, that’s enough of talk on the matter. All you have to do is, run along to the palace as fast as you can, if you care to have a quiet time of it.”
“Well, well; since you wish it, I’ll go.”
Juan, who did not possess an ounce of will of his own—a thing which is the greatest misfortune that can befall a husband who is not blessed with such a wife as God ordained for him—set out once more on his road towards the palace of the emperor.
“Indeed,” said he to himself, with more fear than shame, “it is very possible he will send me down‐stairs head foremost, because it is only natural that this abuse of his good‐nature will prove too much, even for him. And it will serve me right for my unfortunate weakness of character.”
Juan’s fears were not realized. So soon as he sought an audience with his majesty it was granted, and the emperor asked him, with a smiling face:
“How goes it at the little white house?”
“Not badly, sire!”
“And your wife, how does she find herself there?”
“Not badly, sire, but your majesty knows what the women are. Give ’em an inch, they’ll take an ell. My wife, under present circumstances, hasn’t a flaw in her; but she says that, if to‐morrow or the day after we have youngsters, we shall all be crowded there like bees in a bottle.”
“You are right. So she wants, of course, a house a little larger?”
“You’ve just hit it, sire!”
“Well, turn into the dining‐room till they give you a snack of something; and, instead of returning to the white house, go to the Azure Palace, where you will find your wife installed with the attendance befitting those who live in a palace.”
Juan returned the emperor thanks for his great goodness, and, after stuffing himself till he looked like a ball in the dining‐room, off he set, as happy as could be, to the Azure Palace, which was one of those that the emperor had in that district.
The Azure Palace was neither very large nor furnished with great wealth; but it was very beautiful and adorned with becoming elegance. A servant in livery received Juan at the door and conducted him to the apartment of the lady. The lady was Ramona, whom her maid had just finished dressing in one of the beautiful robes which she found in her new dwelling. Juan could do nothing but open his mouth and stare in amazement at seeing his wife in such majestic attire.
Juan and Ramona feared they would go mad when they found themselves lords of a palace, well fitted, elegant, and waited on by four servants: namely, a coachman, a footman, a maid, and a cook.
“Take off that clown’s dress,” said Ramona to Juan. “Aren’t you ashamed to show yourself in such a trim before our own servants?”
“This is a new start,” said Juan, astonished at the sally of his wife. “So I, who, under present circumstances, have passed all my life in digging the earth, and things even worse than that, must feel ashamed of the clothes I have worn all my life long!”
“But, you stupid head,” replied Ramona, “if you have costume corresponding to your rank, why didn’t you put it on?”
“My rank!... Come, this woman’s head is turned.”
“Juan, go to your apartment and change your things, and don’t try my patience so much, for you know already that my temper will not stand too great a trial.”
“Well, there’s no need to put yourself out, woman. Here I’m going now,” said Juan, turning to the room from which he saw Ramona come out.
“Blockhead!” said she, catching hold of him and showing him another room, “this apartment is mine, and that is yours.”
“Hallo! this is another surprise. So my wife’s room is not mine also?”
“No; that is only among common folk; but in people of our rank no.”
Juan gave up the dispute, and, entering the room which she had pointed out as his, found therein a wardrobe with a quantity of fine changes befitting a gentleman, and came out again transformed into a milord.
There passed fifteen days since Juan and Ramona came to live in the Azure Palace, and Ramona grew day by day more captious, and slept less and less every night.
“What the deuce ails you? One would think the ants were at you,” said Juan to her, one morning.
“What ails me is that I have the biggest fool for a husband that ever ate bread.”
“Hey for the sweet tempers! So you are not yet content with the sweet little fig that your husband gathered for you?”
“No, sir, I am not. One must be a dolt like you to content herself with what we have, when we might have much more only for the asking.”
“But, woman alive, have you lost your senses? Can the emperor grant us more than he has granted us, or do we need more to make us happy?”
“Yes, he can give us more, and we need it.”
“Explain yourself, and the devil take the explanation, for you’re going to drive me mad with your ambition.”
“Explain myself! I’ll explain myself, and very clearly, too; for, thank God, there are no hairs on my tongue to prevent me speaking to anybody, even to the emperor himself. To make you happy, all that is wanting is what common folk want—a good table where you may stuff yourself with turkey all the day long; but for us who have higher aims, we want something more than chunks of meat and wine that would make an ox dance a hornpipe. You can swell yourself out and look big when you walk out here, and hear them calling you Don Juan; but as for me, I could eat myself with rage when they call me Doña Ramona.”
“Well, and isn’t it better for them to call us that than Juan and Ramona, as they used to call us before? What more do you want, woman?”
“I want them to call me lady marchioness.”
“Have you lost your ears, Ramona? Now I tell you, and tell you again, that that wicked ambition of yours has deprived you of your senses.”
“Look here, Juan, you and I are not going into disputes and obstinacy. You know me well enough already, or if you don’t you ought to, to be certain that it doesn’t take long for my nose to itch. I want to be no less than the Marchioness of Radishe and the Countess of Cabbidge, who at every turn fill their mouths with their grand titles, and, when they meet one, don’t seem to have time to say with their drawling affectation, ‘Adios, Doña Ramona.’ Now, since the emperor has told you, when you saved his life, that you might ask him even for the shirt that he had on his back, go and see him, and ask him to make us Marquises.”
“Go and ask him if he has a head on his shoulders, why don’t you say? But there’s enough about it. Even in fun I don’t like to hear such nonsense.”
“Juan, don’t provoke me; take care that I don’t send you with a flea in your ear.”
“But, woman alive, however much of your husband’s breeches you may wear, could you even imagine that I was going to agree to this new start of yours?”
“I bet you, you will agree.”
“I tell you I am not going again to see the emperor.”
“Go you shall, though you have to go on your head.”
“But, wife, don’t be a fool—”
“Come, come; less talk, and run along.”
“Well, I’m going, then, since you are so anxious about it. The saints protect me, if I don’t deserve to be shot for this chicken‐hearted weakness of character!”
Juan took the road to the court, and solicited a new audience with the emperor. Though he took it for certain that his majesty would send him to Old Nick if he did not throw him to him over the balcony, he found that his majesty was very ready to grant him an audience.
“Sire, your majesty will pardon so many impertinences—” he stammered out, full of shame, when he drew near the emperor.
“Why, man, don’t be ashamed and a fool,” interrupted his majesty kindly. “Well, how goes it in the Azure Palace?”
“Beautifully, sire.”
“And how is that little rib of yours, eh?”
“Who—she? Oh! very well, under present circumstances.”
“And content with her lot? Is it not so?”
“Well, as for that, sire! Well, your majesty knows what the women are. Their mouths are like a certain place I wouldn’t mention before your majesty, always open, and there’s no getting at the bottom of it.”
“Well, and what does the good Doña Ramona ask now?”
“What, sire? But there—one is ashamed to say it.”
“Go on, man; out with it, and don’t be bashful. To the man that saved my life I’d give anything, even the crown I wear.”
“Well, then, sire! She wants to be a marchioness.”
“A marchioness! Is that all? Then from this instant she is the Marchioness of Marville.”
“Thank you, sire.”
“Keep the thanks for your wife; and look into the dining‐room to see if there is anything to lay hands on. And when you go back you will find your wife already installed in the palace belonging to her title, for the Azure Palace is not good enough for marquises.”
Juan passed into the dining‐room, and, after running the danger of bursting, he made his way for the palace of Marville. The palace of Marville was not such a very great wonder as its name might lead one to believe; but, for all that, one might very well pass his life in it!
A crowd of footmen and porters received Juan at the gates of the palace, addressing him as my lord marquis; and Juan, for all his modesty, could not but feel a little inflated with such a reception and such a title.
But there was nothing to hold the pride of his wife (though one might be as big as the bell of Toledo, under which one day there sat down seven tailors and a shoemaker) at hearing herself called by her maids lady marchioness here, and lady marchioness there.
“Well, so you are at last content, wife?” said Juan to her.
“Yes, of course, I am. And indeed it was very provoking to hear one’s self called Doña Ramona, short like, as though one were only the wife of the apothecary or the surgeon. You see the truth of what I have said; if one has only to open her mouth in order to be a marchioness, why shouldn’t she? Now you see that his majesty did not eat you for asking such a reasonable thing.”
“Well, do you know, now, that it cost me something to ask it of him?”
“Ah! get out of that; men are good for nothing.”
“But it gave me more courage when his majesty said to me: ‘Don’t be bashful, man; for to the man that saved my life I’d give even the crown I wear.’ ”
“Whew! so he said that to you?”
“As sure as I’m here.”
“Then why didn’t you ask him more?”
“There we are again! What more had I to ask?”
“You are right; for, as somebody said, ‘there are more days than long sausages,’ and
‘A horse and a friend No work can spend.’ ”
On the following day the Marquis and Marchioness of Marville took a turn in their grandest coach, and it was a sight to see how they rolled along, at every hour in the day, all around those parts, the very wheels seeming to say envy! envy! to the Marchioness of Radishe and the Countess of Cabbidge. Some little trouble took place on account of the actions and complaints of the country folk, who prevented them from passing in their coach over this and that road, or by this and that property. But the marchioness quite forgot all these annoyances when, for example, at meeting the wife of the apothecary or surgeon, she said to them from her coach wherein she reclined in all her glory, “Adios, Doña Fulana,” and the other answered her, trotting along on foot, “Good‐by, my lady marchioness.”
After some time the marquis thought he noticed that his wife was not perfectly happy, because he found her every day more capricious, and she never slept quietly.
One morning, when the day was already advanced, the marquis slept away like a dormouse, and the marchioness, who had passed a more restless and sleepless night than ever, lay awake at his side impatiently waiting for him to awake.
“S. Swithin! what a sleeper!” exclaimed the marchioness; and, no longer able to restrain her impatience, she gave her husband a tremendous pinch, and said, “Wake up, brute.”
“Oh! ten thousand d——!” yelled the marquis.
“Are you not ashamed to sleep so much?”
“Ashamed! of something so natural? More ashamed should the one be who does not sleep, for sleeplessness bespeaks an unquiet conscience. What the devil is the matter with you that you have not ceased the whole night from turning and twisting about?”
“Yes, indeed, if one only had a soul as broad‐shouldered as you.”
“I don’t understand you, woman.”
“Well, then, you shall understand me, blockhead though you are. Now, tell me, Juan, an emperor is greater than a king?”
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
“That is to say, that emperors can make kings?”
“I think so. For instance, suppose his majesty the emperor wished to say to us, ‘Ha, my good friends the Marquis and Marchioness of Marville, I convert the province of Micomican, which belongs to me, into a kingdom, and I make you the monarchs of my new kingdom,’ I believe nobody could hinder it.”
“Very well, then; I wish his majesty to say and do this at your petition.”
The very house seemed to fall atop of Juan at hearing this from his wife; but this latest caprice of Ramona was so absurd that he had courage to hope in its all being a joke.
“Don’t you think his majesty would give the person a nice slap in the face who was so impudent and barefaced as to go to him with such a petition as this?” he said.
“If you go, he will not; since he has said that he cannot deny even his crown to the man who saved his life. So go along, ducky, hurry and see his majesty.”
“But you mean this?”
“Why shouldn’t I mean it? I have a nice temper for jokes! I want to be queen, in order to let those little folks know their proper places, who pass their lives in digging the earth and eating potatoes, and have the impudence to dare face gentlefolk who condescend to pass wherever they please.”
“Well, well, now it’s clear that you have lost your wits altogether!”
“What you are going to lose, since you have no wits, is your teeth, with a slap in the face, if you don’t make haste and hurry off to the court.”
“I’d lose my head before I’d commit such an absurdity. There. I’ve given way enough already.”
“Indeed! Then from this day forward know that you have no longer a wife. This is my room, and you shall never set foot in it again, nor I in yours.”
“But, woman!”
“No, no; remember we are strangers to each other.”
“Come, don’t be obstinate, my own Ramonita.”
“Don’t I tell you, sir, that all is over between us?”
“Now, look here, pigeon.”
“Stop your prate!”
“The dev—! Well, come, you shall be satisfied; I will go and see his majesty, and tell him that you want to be queen, though I know he will shoot me on the spot.”
Ramona bestowed a caress on her husband in reward for his consent, and our good Juan made his way to the court cursing his own foolish weakness of character.
Contrary to his expectations, the emperor hastened to grant him an audience, and received him with the accustomed smile.
“Well, marquis, what is it?” he asked.
“What ought it to be, sire? A fresh impertinence.”
“Come, out with it man, and don’t be bashful. Something concerning the marchioness, eh?”
“You’ve hit it again, sire. These foolish women are never content.”
“Well, what does yours want?”
“Nothing, sire. She says, would it please your majesty to make her queen?”
“Queen! nothing more than that? Well, she is queen already, then. Now, go into the dining‐room, and see if there is anything there you can destroy; and, instead of returning to the palace of Marville, go to the palace of the Crown, where you will find your wife installed as becomes the Queen of Micomican.”
Juan outdid himself in thanks and courtesies, and, after treating himself in the dining‐rooms right royally, made his way home. On his arrival at the palace of the Crown, a salvo of artillery announced his coming. The troops were drawn up around the palace, where he entered to the sound of the Royal March, and amid the vivas of the people, who became mad in the presence of the husband of their new sovereign.
Her Majesty, the Queen Doña Ramona the First, was holding a levée at the moment when her august spouse arrived at the palace, and he, seating himself by her side, gave also his royal hand to kiss; but it was so dirty that as many as kissed it hurried out of the chamber spitting. To be king, it is necessary to keep the hands very clean.
The King and Queen of Micomican amused themselves mightily during the first weeks of their reign: so that all was feasting and rejoicing in celebration of their happy coming to the throne. But so soon as the festival passed, the Queen Doña Ramona began to grow sad and weary.
The king summoned the chief physician of the court, and held a deep consultation with him.
“Man alive,” said he to him, “I have summoned you in order to see what the devil you have to say to me touching the sorrow and evil state in which I have noticed my august spouse to be for some time past. She is always turning and twisting about in her bed, so that she neither sleeps herself nor lets me sleep, and the worst part of it is, that every day she is sadder, and everything irritates and exasperates her.”
“Well, sire, in the first place, we must please her in everything and by everything.”
“I agree with you there, man; but there are things beyond human power. If it rains, she is put out because it rains; if it blows, she is put out because it blows; if we are in the winter, she is put out because the spring has not come, and her mind is so turned that she cries out: ‘I command it not to rain,’ ‘I command it not to blow,’ ‘I command the spring to come at once.’ Now, you see that it is only by being God one can secure obedience of orders like these. Well, then, to what the deuce do you attribute these whims of my august spouse?”
“Sire, it is very possible that they may presage a happy event.”
“Ah, ah! I take you. Well, to be sure, and I never thought of such a thing. And wouldn’t it be a joy to me and to my august spouse to find ourselves with a direct successor? For, if not, there is no use in deluding ourselves: the day that we close our eyes, in comes civil war, and the kingdom is gone to Old Nick.”
So the Queen Doña Ramona remained watching to see what would happen. But months and months passed, and the queen grew every day sadder and more capricious.
One day the king decided on interrogating very seriously the queen herself, to see if he might draw from her the secret of her sadness and capriciousness.
“Well, let us know, now, what the deuce is the matter with you,” he said, “that you neither sleep nor let me sleep, and remain for ever like the thorn of S. Lucy.”
“I am very unhappy,” answered the queen, beginning to weep like a Magdalen.
“You unhappy?—you who lived in a stable as empty and bare as that which Our Lord lived in when he became man, and under present circumstances you find yourself the somebody of somebodies, a queen clean and complete? What the deuce do you want?”
“It is true, I am a queen. But I die of sadness when from the throne I look back and see nothing of what other queens see.”
“Well, and what do other queens see?”
“For instance, the Queen of Spain sees a series of great and glorious kings, named Recaredo, Pelayo, San Fernando, Alonso the Wise, Isabel the Catholic, Ferdinand the Catholic, Charles V., Philip II., Charles III.—and those kings had blood of hers, and seated themselves on the throne, and loved and made great the people that she loves and makes great.”
“You are right, wife. But you wish to do what is impossible, and that God alone can do.”
“Well, then, those impossibilities are the very things that tease and exasperate me. What is the use of being a queen, if even in the most just desires one sees herself constrained, and unable to realize them? It is a fine afternoon, for instance, and I begin to get ready to go out for a walk in the palace gardens, but a wretched little cloud appears in the sky, as though to say to one, ‘Don’t get ready!’ And when one wishes to go out, that insolent cloud begins to pour down water, and one is obliged to remain at home, disgusted and fretting. What I want is to have power enough to prevent a miserable little cloud from laughing at me.”
“But, woman, don’t I tell you that this power God alone can have?”
“Then I want to be God.”
Juan made the sign of the cross on himself, filled with shame and horror at hearing his wife give utterance to such a thing, whose head was undoubtedly turned by the demon of ambition. But he did not wish to exasperate the poor crazed being with lessons which, had she been in her right senses, she would have deserved.
“But don’t you know, child,” he said to her with sweetness, “that the fulfilment of that desire is as impossible as it is foolish? The emperor has granted us whatever we have asked, but what you want now he cannot grant.”
“Still, I want you to go and see him, and say so to him; for perhaps between him and the Pope they will be able to manage it.”
“But if there is and never can be more than one God, how can you be made God?”
“I have always heard say that God can do everything. If the emperor consults with the Pope, and the Pope has recourse to God, then you’ll see if God, who can do everything, will disappoint them both.”
“But if God cannot?”
“Hold your tongue, Jew, and don’t say such awful things. God can do everything.”
Juan thought it would be more prudent to abstain from contradicting his wife any further. So he retired and summoned the chief physician of the court, in order to lay before him the new and extraordinary phase which the moral malady of the queen displayed. The physician said that in his long professional career he had met with cases of mental aberration even more extraordinary than that of the queen; and insisted that, far from contradicting the august invalid, they should comply with her every wish as far as it was humanly possible.
The king returned soon after to the chamber of his august spouse, who the moment she saw him became a perfect wasp.
“How, sire?” she exclaimed. “So you are the first to disobey my orders?”
“How disobey?”
“Yes, sire! Did I not tell you that I want you to go and see the emperor, and implore him to place himself in communication with the Pope in order to see whether between them they could so manage that I might be God?”
“Yes, you told me so, but—”
“There are no buts for me. How is it that you are not already on the road to comply with my orders? Now, none of your nice little jokes with me, if you please—you, who are no more than the husband of the queen—and, if you ruffle my feathers, I’ll send you off to be hanged as soon as look at you.”
“Come, child, don’t be angry, you shall be obeyed instantly.”
“Remember, none of your pranks, now! And listen: go and tell that health‐ killer whom you seem to have made one of your council, that if you don’t go to see the emperor, and perform in every point the commission which I charge you with, he shall serve you as partner in your dance in the air.”
The king withdrew; and when he reported to the chief physician what his wife had just said to him, the physician insisted more than ever on the necessity of pleasing the august invalid in everything.
So the king set out on his journey to the imperial court. The extravagant and impious nature of his mission disturbed him greatly; but the consideration gave him comfort that he was no longer a Juan nobody, as on other occasions when he had made the same journey, but a monarch about to consult with another monarch. The only thing that weighed at all on his mind was the question of etiquette.
“I don’t know,” said he, “for the life of me what shoes to tread in when I address the emperor. I have heard it said that all we sovereigns call each other cousins, though not a bit of cousinship exists between us: but how do I know, if I call the emperor cousin, that he may not give me a blow that would send all the teeth down my throat?” Occupied with such thoughts, he arrived at the imperial court, and the emperor hastened to receive him when he had scarcely set foot in the palace.
“How is her majesty, Queen Doña Ramona?” asked the emperor kindly.
“Bad enough, under present circumstances.”
“Man, that is the worst news yet! And what ails her?”
“What the devil do I know? The evil one alone understands these women. If your majesty could only guess the commission she has given me—”
“Hallo, hallo! Well, let us hear it.”
“She says—but pshaw! One is ashamed to say it. She says to see if your majesty could consult with the Pope, and between you manage to make her God.”
“Eh! That is a greater request. Make her God, eh!”
“Your majesty sees already that it is a piece of madness; for a woman can’t complain of the small advance in her career who to‐day is a queen, and not a year ago lived in a stable. A stable is a disgrace to nobody, sure enough; for, after all, Our Lord, though he was God, lived in one when he made himself man.”
“So the good Doña Ramona wishes to be God, eh!”
“You’ve hit it, your majesty.”
“Well, we will please her as far as we are able. Let your majesty step into the dining‐room and drive the wolf from the door, and on returning you will find your wife, if not changed into God, changed into something which is like to him.”
The royal consort turned into the dining‐room, but, do what he would, he could scarcely swallow a mouthful. Everything seemed to disagree with him, and the cause of it lay in his feeling within him a restlessness which seemed to forebode some misfortune. He made his way homewards, and on arriving at the palace of the crown he saw, with as great sorrow as dismay, that the palace was closed and deserted.
“What has happened here?” he inquired of a passer‐by.
“The emperor has put an end to the kingdom of Micomican, re‐establishing the ancient province, and re‐incorporating it with the empire.”
Juan had neither courage nor strength to ask more. He wandered about for hours and hours like one demented without knowing whither, when suddenly he found himself at the door of the stable where he had lived with his wife, and on pushing open the door, which revolved on its hinges, he found his wife installed there once more. The only thing Godlike which the woman who had entertained the criminal ambition of becoming like to him, consisted in the similarity of her dwelling to the stable which God occupied when he became man.
The Distaff.
“In der guten alten Zeit wo die Königen Bertha spann.”
“In the good old times when Queen Bertha span” is a thrifty proverb still current in France and some parts of Germany where the distaff is yet seen beneath the arm of the shepherdess, looking, as she tends her flock, precisely like S. Genevieve just stept out from her canvas, or that more modern saint of the hidden life, Germaine of Pibrac, who is always represented with her spindle and distaff. In the very same fields where S. Germaine watched her flocks and twirled her spindle in the old scriptural way, keeping her innocent heart all the while united to God, have we seen the young shepherdess clad in the picturesque scarlet or white capuchon of the country, which covers their heads and half veils their forms—guarding their sheep and spinning at the same time.
And the same womanly implement is sometimes found in the hands of those of gentle birth in those old lands where so many still cling to the traditions of the past. We read of the now world‐famous Eugénie de Guérin that the same hand that wrote such charmingly naïve letters and journals did not disdain the spindle and the distaff. She writes thus in her journal: “I have begun my day by fitting myself up a distaff, very round, very firm, and very smart with its bow of ribbon. There, I am going to spin with a small spindle. One must vary work and amusements: tired of a stocking, I take up my needle and then my distaff. So time passes, and carries us away on its wings.” And again a day or two after: “I took my distaff by way of diversion, but all the while I was spinning, my mind spun and wound and turned its spindle at a fine rate. I was not at my distaff. The soul just sets that kind of mechanical work going and then leaves it.”
This reminds us of Uhland’s verse:
“Long, long didactic poems I spin with busy wheel, The lengthened yarns of epic Keep running off my reel:
“My wheel itself has a lyrical whirr, My cat has a tragic mew, While my spindle plays the comic parts And does the dancing too.”
Eugénie’s charming Arcadian life, passed in the primitive occupations of spinning, sewing, superintending the kitchen—even going, like Homer’s Nausicaa, to the margin of the stream to wash the linen in the running waters, and afterwards taking pleasure in spreading it all white on the green grass, or seeing it wave on the lines: all this, we say, without detracting from the poetry and grace of her nature, is enough to make us recall with a sigh the good old days when Queen Bertha span.
And this queen was Berthe au grand pied, the mother of Charlemagne, who had one foot larger than the other, and hence her name:
“You are the beautiful Bertha, the spinner, queen of Helvetia, She whose story I read at a stall in the streets of Southampton, Who, as she rode on her palfrey o’er valley and meadow and mountain, Ever was spinning her thread from a distaff fixed to her saddle. She was so thrifty and good, that her name passed into a proverb.”
Whether this Queen of Helvetia is our Bertha with the great foot we know not. The name is found in many curious old legends like the German one of Frau Bertha, a kind of tutelar genius of spinners, with an immense foot and a long iron nose, which doubtless served as a spindle. And an old manuscript, long hidden in some obscure corner of a German monastery, tells how King Pepin, wishing to wed the fair Bertha of Brittany, sent his chief officers to bring her to his court. The steward, who had charge of the escort, was not without ambitious views respecting his own daughter. He ordered his servants to put Bertha to death on the way. But they, instead of killing her, left her in a forest. Not long after—O happy chance!—King Pepin, overtaken by night while hunting, awaited the dawn in a house where he was served by the most beautiful maid his eyes had ever beheld. Of course it was Bertha with her great foot, which, we may be sure, she gracefully concealed beneath her flowing garments. And so they were married. Old poems sing of her industry, and tell us she knew how to spin like the princesses of scriptural and Homeric days. She is represented, too, on old coins seated on a throne with a distaff in her hands. All writers speak of her as Berthe au grand pied, but as otherwise beautiful and skilful in wielding the earliest implement of feminine industry. We may safely imagine her as tapping the mighty Charlemagne, leader of peerless knights, while yet a boy, with her convenient distaff; for her ascendency over him was such that he always regarded her with great reverence, even after his elevation to power!
And Bertha was not the only princess that laid her hand hold of the spindle. When the tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V. of France, was opened at St. Denis, among other things was found a distaff of gilded wood, but greatly decayed. And there is another in the Hôtel de Cluny, once used by some queen of France, we forget whom, on which is carven all the notable women of the Old Testament.
So too the daughters of Edward the Elder of England, though carefully educated, were so celebrated for their achievements in spinning and weaving that the term spinster is said to be derived from them.
And S. Walburga, the daughter of S. Richard, King of the Saxons, used to spin and weave among the royal and saintly maidens of Wimburn Minster. It was a common custom in those days. The distaff and the spindle were considered “the arms of every virtuous woman.”
The ancients held the use of them as such an accomplishment that Minerva is said to have come down to earth to teach the Greek women how to spin. Venus herself did not disdain to take upon herself the semblance of a spinner of fair wool when she appeared to Helen.
And spinning was as universal an acquirement among the Jewish as the Grecian women. They used to spin by moonlight on the housetops and, true to the instinct of their sex, kept so faithful an eye on their neighbors in the meanwhile that the ancient spinsters’ tongues were potent in the world of gossip. There is a tradition that S. Ann spun the virginal robes of her immaculate child in the pure beams of the chaste Dian.
Of the valiant woman in the Book of Proverbs it is said: “Her fingers have taken hold of the spindle.” And in Exodus we read that “the skilful women gave such things as they spun, violet, purple, and scarlet, and fine linen and goats’ hair, all of their own accord,” for the tabernacle.
We are told that the Jewish maidens who devoted themselves to the service of the temple were employed, among other things, in spinning the fine linen on their spindles of cedar, or ithel, a species of the oriental acacia, black as ebony and probably the same as the setim, or shittim wood, of the Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who passed her early days in the temple, participated and excelled in all the pursuits then carried on. The Protevangelion of S. James the Less relates that, when a new veil was to be made for the temple of our Lord, the priests confided the work to seven virgins of the tribe of David. They cast lots to see “who should spin the gold thread, who the blue, who the scarlet, and who the true scarlet.” It fell to Mary’s lot to spin the purple. Leaving her work, one day, to draw water in her jar, the angel drew near with his Ave Maria.
A distaff lies at Mary’s feet in Raphael’s “Annunciation,” and in many other celebrated paintings she is represented with one. In a “Riposa” by Albert Dürer she is depicted spinning from her distaff beside the Divine Babe who is sleeping in its cradle:
“Inter fila cantans orat Blanda, veni somnuli.”
S. Bonaventura tells us that several of the early sacred writers speak of our Blessed Lady’s industry in spinning and sewing for the support of her Son and S. Joseph in the land of Egypt. So reduced to poverty were they that, according to him, she went from house to house to obtain work, probably flax to spin as she sat watching the Holy Infant in the grove of sycamores of traditional renown. Her unrivalled skill in spinning the fine flax of Pelusium became a matter of tradition, and the name of Virgin’s Thread has been given to that network of dazzling whiteness and almost vaporous texture that floats over the deep valleys in the damp mornings of autumn, says the Abbé Orsini.
It is said the Church at Jerusalem preserved some of Mary’s spindles among its treasures, which were afterwards sent to the Empress Pulcheria, who placed them in one of the churches of Constantinople.
Other nations, too, had their famous spinsters. Dante’s ancestor in Paradise, looking back to earth, tells him of a Florentine dame of an opulent family who,
“With her maidens drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome.”
And a Spanish writer of past times says, speaking of the model woman: “Behold this wife who purchases flax that she may spin with her maids. See her thus seated in the midst of her women.” Thus did Andromache spin among her attendants.
So have we seen old nuns spinning in the cloisters of the remote provinces of France: the white wool on their distaffs diminishing slowly and calmly as their own even lives. They looked as if spinning out their own serene destinies. Such a happy destiny is not reserved for all whose thread is drawn out by Lachesis.
“Twist ye, twine ye! even so Mingle shades of joy and woe, Hope and fear, and peace and strife, In the thread of human life.”
At Rome there are two white lambs blessed on S. Agnes’ day (“S. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,” says Keats) in her church on the Nomentan road, and then they are placed in a convent till they are shorn, when their wool is spun by the sacred hands of the nuns. Of this the pallium is made—the distinctive mark of a metropolitan.
I have called the distaff the earliest implement of feminine industry. Such is the old tradition. There is a pathetic miniature of the twelfth century depicting an angel giving Adam a spade and Eve a distaff previous to their expulsion from Paradise: and on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus of the fourth century, Adam is represented with a sheaf of grain, for he was to till the earth, and Eve with a lamb whose fleece she was to spin. And we have our old English rhyme:
“When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?”
And so faithfully was the tradition handed down that the distaff has always been regarded as a symbol of womanhood, which woman scorned to see even in the hands of a Hercules.
In these days, when even our rustic belles are overloaded with accomplishments, the piano takes the place of “Hygeia’s harp” on which the fair maidens of the olden time loved to discourse fair music, like the gentle Evangeline of Acadie, seated at her father’s side,
“Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her,”
who, I fear, would be regarded in these days of improvement, at least in our country, with nearly as much horror as those other indefatigable spinners are by the good housewife:
“Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long‐legged spinners, hence!”
What charming pictures some of us retain in our memories of our gray‐ haired grandmothers of New England country life—delicately nurtured, too—sitting down in the afternoon by the huge fire‐place to spin flax on a little carved wheel! How many of us carefully preserve such a wheel in memory of those by‐gone days, when we loved to linger and watch the mysterious process, and look at the face that always was so kindly, and listen to the whirr whose music is now hushed for ever!
But though spinning by hand will soon become one of the lost arts, there is one who will spin on till time shall be no more—one from whose distaff is drawn out the web of our lives—the star‐crowned Clotho:
“Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! Life is short and beset by sin, ’Tis only God endures for ever!”
A Martyr’s Journey.
From The French.
In the Beaujolais, the country par excellence of beautiful women and beautiful vines, a little village lies hidden among luxuriant arbors. Each house is clothed in green leaves, and the wine, though rare, is not so wonderful as the immense tuns that hold it. Yet Coigny, with its nectar, its beautiful sky, its coquettish habitations its robust sons and attractive daughters, had not a habitable church. Still it dreamed of one, and four worthy priests worked hard and hopefully for the realization of the dream. One of them climbed well his ladder of orders, and has since become Bishop of Coutances; and if, as it is said, the zeal, piety, and legitimate influence of four ecclesiastics will finish the Cathedral of Cologne, notwithstanding the devil’s theft of the plan, what might not be hoped for Coigny?
So nothing more need be told than that, from amidst the lovely, smiling verdure of the little town, there sprang an exquisite white marble church, a temptation to pray in as well as to see, and the admiration of the entire province.
Madame la Marquise de —— gave all her inimitable guipures to ornament the high altar, and Monsieur le Comte de ——, a great amateur in pictures, placed a true Mignard—a Madonna with a lovely smile—upon the walls, even before they dried.
So each and all offered homage in the new house of God.
Still the beautiful little church lacked a patron, a saint under whose invocation it might be placed, and the blessed one must be represented by his own venerable ashes, a relic of the past, a protection for the future.
The village of Coigny, therefore, spared neither pains nor expense to be satisfied in this regard, and the Holy Father was applied to to select the patron. The dear old man replied favorably to the little town he could scarcely find on the map, and which was more noted for bearing the cross than ringing the bell; and a curious and grave ceremony took place.
They opened the Roman Catacombs, and they descended into the vaults of the cemetery of S. Cyriac, and there they chose the mortal remains of a Christian martyr buried for many centuries.
The stone that closed the cell bore a palm branch and the inscription,
Hilary At Rest,
and indicated he had died for the faith in the early ages of Christianity. His bones and the size of his head denoted only the adolescent, scarcely more than a child; while the whole expressed the courage of the man united to the grace of the angel.
The account from which this is taken adds, this young soldier of Christ was found sleeping peacefully at his post, extended on his granite bier, with his forehead cleft asunder, his neck cut open, of which the little bottle by his side held the precious blood. The figure of the young martyr had been covered with virgin wax, carefully enclosing the sacred bones, and, attired in silk and embroidery, he is holding the palm branch in his hand. The wounded head inclines as if bending to his murderers, his throat lies open in its deep sword‐wound, his hands and feet have bled, and the purple tide gushes from his wounds and trickles over his limbs; but his lips are shut with love, and his eyes are fixed, regarding with S. Stephen the heavens opening to receive him.
So this child of eighteen hundred years ago, this soldier of the faith, taken from the Roman Catacombs, was sent by the Pope to Coigny.
Can we not imagine his reception? Did not the village ring out its festal bells, and scatter flowers on his path, and with thousands of candles in the nave, and incense mounting far above the high altar, did not the little church welcome this contemporary of Nero, who had travelled surrounded by glorious palms in his own carriage over the line from Italy?
He has come, and twenty priests bear him on their shoulders, and his final resting‐place is under the high altar.
Coigny, the coquette, crowned by its green vine branches, bacchante‐like, the pious Coigny, has its martyr in the vaults of its own dear church, no more nor less than if it were a basilica.
True, he was an almost forgotten saint, and anonymously canonized, but the Scriptures told us long ago, “God knows how to recompense his own.”
Odd Stories: III. Peter The Powerful.
Long and loud was the flourish of trumpets that greeted the day on which Philip the Mighty was born to his father’s dukedom; so rare was the promise of a babe. Need it be said that, nurtured under the eye of his stern sire, he grew in the strength of justice? To such a degree had he inherited the zeal of his ancestors, that while yet in his cradle he strangled a wretched nurse for stealing his spoon; whereat there was another flourish of trumpets. Subsequent reflections upon the loss of so useful a servant taught him to restrain the exercise of his just powers; and hence, when his tutors failed to instruct him within a given time in the arts, sciences, languages, and literatures, he merely broke their heads. We live to learn; and so it proved even to a prince as well endowed as Philip the Mighty. In these early acts we can see the foundations of that character which was afterwards so great a monument among men.
During the famous period in which our prince served his sire in the administration of justice, the dungeons were never empty of thieves and wranglers, nor the axe long idle for want of miscreant heads. To a peasant who once stole an apple, he said, “How now, varlet, dost confess?” Answered the trembling churl: “Nay, most puissant lord, I stole not the fruit.” Then spoke Philip: “By my halidom, I’ll mend thine honesty”; whereupon the fellow was put on the rack till he broke a blood‐vessel, still not confessing, for it was death to steal an apple out of the duke’s garden. At night the peasant died in his bed of a hemorrhage, piously acknowledging in his last moments that he had committed the theft; whereat was another flourish of trumpets. Life is a great lesson, however, and it must not be supposed that our powerful hero could content himself with a few exploits at court when he felt that he had a mission to reform the world.
Therefore it was that Philip the Mighty set out upon a knight’s errand to slay all the witches, devils, malefactors, giants, goblins, and monsters that came in his path. But one squire rode with him, bearing a golden trumpet, which, when Peter had done to death a sour‐faced hag who shrieked at him on the mountain‐side, he blew right merrily. Now, the old witch had asked the valiant knight for justice against her lord at court. Life is a science not to be mastered without blows; and Philip learned to slay and fear not in such stout earnest that soon he won the renown of being, as in fact he was called, the Champion Wrong‐killer of the age.
When a foul, black‐hearted necromancer was tracked to his hiding‐place, what else should our good knight do but put him to the sword? When a five‐ eyed dwarf was accused of deviltry, who else should carve him for the crows but our duke’s son? When a grim ogre, breathing death and fury, beset him whose arm was so mighty, when malefactors pestered the land, when monsters of all kind raged on every hand, who dealt them such lightning doom as the champion wrong‐killer? On every occasion did his trusty squire blow the trumpet of gold right lustily, to the wonder of lords and people. Now, it was whispered that the slain sorcerers had helped husbandmen and artisans with their strange inventions; that the malefactors were slaughtered outright for the crimes of their fellows; that the giants were amiable men, sometimes, but provoked beyond endurance; that dwarfs and witches were poor old people, seldom as bad as they seemed to be. Nevertheless, the real monsters of the land increased day by day, in spite of the champion killer’s sword and his squire’s golden trumpet.
Weary with much slaughter of false knights and caitiff wretches and monsters, the paladin Philip resolved to undertake the deliverance of the poor from the oppressions of the rich. Filled with this noble idea, he slew a yeoman who was chastising his servant without mercy. Seeing a number of slaves at work, he set them all free by killing their master. He divided the estates of the rich among the poor. He distributed largesses among multitudes of the needy. He rescued honest damsels who were being carried away by villain lords. Alas! for an ingrate world. ’Twas rumored that the yeoman had left a widow and seven children to mourn him. The slaves became marauders; the poor quarrelled among themselves; the beggars got drunk; and some of the honest damsels lamented their fallen lords. Howbeit, the faithful squire blew his trumpet louder than ever.
Meanwhile had our good knight grown religious, and burned men at the stake; but the more the fuel, the greater the flame. The more lances he shattered for honor’s sake, the more swords he blunted for justice’s sake; the more money he spent to give feasts to beggars, and the more land he parcelled among the poor, all the more honor, justice, bounty, estate, remained to be won and adjusted. His sharp judgments had, after all, won him nothing but the sound of his trumpet. He had killed the innocent and robbed the poor, when he intended to do otherwise, and, if he executed Heaven’s judgments, it was by a kind of mistake. One thing he had not slain—himself.
All the while, he who had killed so many monsters was growing in bulk and stature out of all proportion. As his legs and arms increased their strength of muscle, his ears grew longer, and his eyes grew blinder. He scorned, nay, devoured the weak he once defended, and, at last, a monster himself, was killed by a conspiracy of those whose champion he once was. For Philip, though a champion wrong‐killer, was blind to his own wrong‐ doing; and, though a reformer, never allowed people to reform themselves; so he destroyed the wheat with the chaff and killed the good with the bad.
THE BOOK OF THE HOLY ROSARY. A Popular Doctrinal Exposition of its Fifteen Mysteries, mainly Conveyed in Select Extracts from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. By the Rev. Henry Formby, of the Third Order of St. Dominic. Embellished with thirty‐six full‐ page illustrations. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
The devotion of the Holy Rosary is one of the most beautiful which the Catholic Church proposes to her children, and is also probably the one which has been received by them everywhere, without distinction of nationality or class, with the most sincere delight. Catholics, it is true, are for the most part familiar with the general history and significance of this devotional practice, which in itself forms a compendium of popular theology. Most of the books, however, on this subject, with which we are acquainted, are intended to excite Christians to the frequent and devout use of this form of prayer, rather than to give them a full and clear understanding of its natural connection with the great and fundamental truths which form the basis of Christianity. The book of F. Formby is both doctrinal and devotional; all the more devotional because the piety which it inculcates is enlightened by true Christian science.
The work is divided into three parts corresponding with the three groups of mysteries of which the Rosary is composed. The author prefaces each of these groups with an introduction, in which he carefully compares its mysteries with their corresponding types in the Old Testament. This comparison is again instituted in a more particular manner as each mystery in turn presents itself for elucidation.
In treating of the different mysteries, he first quotes from Scripture those passages upon which they are formed, and then adduces the corresponding types from the Old Testament, still further illustrating the subject by apposite quotations and allusions taken from the classics of pagan literature. These are followed by extracts from the writings of the great Fathers and Doctors of the church, many of which will be new to the English reader. Thus each chapter of the book forms a comprehensive treatise, both doctrinal and devotional, of the particular mystery in the life of our divine Saviour or that of his Blessed Mother to which it is devoted.
Without going out of his way, F. Formby by the simple exposition of the doctrine and practice of the church shows in the most conclusive manner how utterly groundless are the objections of Protestants to Catholic devotion to the Mother of Christ. We have not for a long time read a book with which we are so perfectly pleased as with this of F. Formby. The clergy especially will find in it a rich mine from which to draw instruction for the people. It may be read with profit, however, by all classes of persons, as the plain and simple style in which it is written does not raise it above the comprehension of even uneducated minds. The book is ornamented with thirty‐six full‐page woodcuts, unusually excellent both in design and execution; which, added to the attractions of clear typography and tasteful binding, make it a work of art as well as of religion.
HENRY PERREYVE. By A. Gratry, Prêtre de l’Oratoire, etc. Translated by special permission. London: Rivingtons. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
After a life of singular purity and great activity in the cause of truth, F. Gratry entered upon his rest on the 6th of February, 1872. His impulsive and ardent nature hurried him for a moment, towards the close of his life, into a controversy which, for a time, caused the greatest anxiety to his friends, and threatened to throw a cloud over an existence otherwise so brilliant and precious. His heart, however, always remained loyal to the church and to truth, and, when he was made aware of his error, he himself was the first to acknowledge it, and to do all in his power to atone for it. The writings of F. Gratry have always possessed for us a singular charm. He has in a high degree the gift of making his thoughts contagious. He throws the warmth and life of his whole heart into his writings; his words breathe and palpitate and affect one like the presence of a noble and high‐wrought nature. In Henry Perreyve he found a subject peculiarly fitted to call forth these qualities of his style. The history of the outer life of Henry Perreyve was uneventful and short. Designed by his parents for the bar, disposed by his own vigorous and impetuous nature to the military life, he was called of God to the priesthood. When he had once recognized the voice of God, he devoted to this high vocation all the energies of a most gifted and courageous nature. At an early age he developed remarkable talents both for writing and speaking. He possessed the divine gift of eloquence, and Lacordaire, who loved him more than any other man in the world, looked forward to the day when his own voice, having grown feeble by age, would be born again with redoubled strength and warmth on the lips of Henry Perreyve. Alas, that such hope should be delusive! He to whom Lacordaire wrote, “You live in my heart eternally as my son and my friend,” was destined soon to follow his great preceptor to the grave. He died in 1865, when but thirty‐ four years old. The story of his life, as told by F. Gratry, is a poem full of the most exalted sentiment, and impressed with the highest form of beauty. “All who knew him,” says his biographer, “agree on this point, that the one characteristic which stamps his outward life and his inward soul is only to be expressed by that word Beauty. All the inward beauty wherewith courage, intelligence, devotion, and goodness can invest a soul, and all the outward expression of beauty with which such a soul can stamp the living man, were combined in him. Nature and grace had alike done their very best for him; he overflowed with their choicest gifts.” Whoever will read F. Gratry’s sketch will be persuaded that these words are not too strong. The life of Henry Perreyve is another confirmation of the truth that the ideal type of perfect manhood can be developed only in the Catholic Church. We especially recommend this book to the young men of our country. Even though it should not inspire them with the exalted ambition of consecrating their lives to God, it will at least teach them the transcendent beauty of Christian courage, of self‐devotion, of nobility of purpose.
Henry Perreyve was most ardent in urging his friends to aspire to the priesthood. In this connection F. Gratry remarks: “Truly, I know no wiser enthusiasm than that which stimulates men to become laborers for God. We have too few priests; we have far too many soldiers. No man becomes a priest whether he will or no; but on all sides the strong hand of the powers that be constrains men to be soldiers whether they will or no. Why is the priest’s lot to be counted worse than the soldier’s? He who chooses the sacred toil of God’s harvest‐field for his life’s labor, chooses the better part. Surely his ambition is beyond all comparison the greatest, best and noblest: his work the most fruitful, the most necessary. That is but a sorry delusion by which the world would set the priesthood before men as in the shadow of death, and other careers as in a glow of light and glory.”
THE SPOKEN WORD; or, The Art of Extemporary Preaching: Its Utility, its Danger, and its True Idea. With an easy and practical Method for its Attainment. By Rev. Thomas J. Potter, Professor of Sacred Eloquence in the Missionary College of All Hallows, Author of “Sacred Eloquence,” etc., etc. Boston: P. Donahoe. 1872.
One of the most favorable omens attending the great Catholic revival in the English‐speaking world is the appearance of works bearing upon the various duties of the sacred ministry. In the earlier days of struggle in England and America, the missionary priest entered upon a life of toil which gave but scant opportunity for adding to the fund of learning that served as its outfit. Hence, while the greatness of the Catholic champions, who entered the arena armed cap‐a‐pie by a long and thorough training, was brought into striking relief, the depression of minds less trained and of less capacity among the clergy was marked by the absence of a native literature suited to their class.
When a priest rarely had a day free from harassing labors, and was barely able to run into debt for the brick, beams, and shingles of a nondescript building wherein to assemble his flock, he certainly did well if, after reading his breviary and peeping into his moral theology, he kept himself informed of current events. Such circumstances of poverty were not favorable to literature or eloquence. Ecclesiastical art, with its intricate ceremonial and its peculiar music, was in a fair way to be lost; and the refinements of clerical education were rather sources of discouragement in the present than of bright anticipation for the future.
But this phase, having in some measure passed away in England, has lost much of its gloom for us in America. Pastors have more time to prepare instructions for their people. Congregations by their magnitude and intelligence call forth the highest efforts of eloquence. The instincts of Catholic devotion require that God’s house should be made a house of prayer, and demand, for their satisfaction and increase, the sacristy and choir, which shall be “for a glory and a beauty.” Meanwhile, increasing wealth furnishes means for fulfilling the requirements of the Roman Ritual.
The work which we notice is one of many signs of the times, and also one of a series of similar efforts by its earnest and experienced author. It is written in a clear and flowing style, slightly marred, however, by the frequent repetition of the adjective “expedite,” as qualifying the noun “knowledge,” and the perpetual recurrence of “a man who,” or “the man who.” The general effect is nevertheless pleasing, and the book itself ought to be read. The title contains a fair analysis of the work. It remains for us to say that the author is thorough in the treatment of his subject. His hints and warnings are useful to those accustomed to preach extempore; while his suggestions for the composition of sermons are entirely applicable to those who perfect their oratorical preparations before ascending the pulpit.
The appearance of the book is also quite in its favor, and we might adduce it as a sign of the times in a department to which we have not yet alluded.
THE BELOVED DISCIPLE. By the Rev. Father Rawes, O.S.C. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1872. New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.
This is a beautiful sketch of the life of “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Father Rawes, in common with S. Jerome, S. Augustine, and S. Bernard, has a great and special devotion to the Evangelist S. John. This little book is well written and is eminently devotional and instructive.
UNAWARES. By the Author of “The Rose Garden.” Boston: Roberts Bros. 1872.
One experiences a sense of rest and refreshment in reading this unpretending volume. It is a narrative of French life, not at all after the sensational order, but beautifully wrought out, with enough of romance to sustain the interest and chain the attention of the reader, but not a line or word that one could wish unwritten. With a slight plot and few incidents, this pleasing story charms us with a delightfully artistic description of a quaint old town in France, where the grand cathedral stands, the central object of attraction—solemn, steadfast, ever varying—severe or tender, as the case may be—but always inconceivably peaceful.
The characters, drawn with a skilful hand and admirably sustained, the chaste beauty of the language and style, with the gems of thought worthy of life‐long remembrance scattered throughout the volume, lead us to desire an acquaintance with other books this attractive author may have written.
THE VICAR’S DAUGHTER. By George MacDonald. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1872.
If not to be sensational is a merit, this book certainly has that merit. The Introduction, which in most books is apt to be dull, and often is skipped by the reader who wishes to plunge in medias res, is here the spiciest part, the sugar‐coating of the pill—if it be not ill‐natured to call this work a pill. A very mild one it is, and the patient, if none the better, will certainly be none the worse for taking it. Its object seems to be to promulgate some Presbyterian ideas concerning the means to be used for elevating the spiritual condition of the poor. The London poor is the class considered, but the general rules laid down may be supposed good for all poor. Some very queer ideas are broached; among others, that it is better to give a workman a gold watch than a leg of mutton, because by so doing you will pay him a compliment for which he will be grateful, but that he should have nothing given him “which he ought to provide for himself—such as food, or clothing, or shelter.” There is a Miss Clare who is possessed by such a missionary spirit and love for the poor, that we cannot help wishing she might find her proper sphere by becoming a Catholic “Little Sister of the Poor,” or some other equally useful sister of charity. The church utilizes such women much more wisely than they manage to find the best way alone. There is a chapter of Miss Clare’s reading and discussing of the Gospel with some workmen, which, if not positively irreverent itself, will be very likely to make the reader, who has any sense of humor, feel so in spite of his better instincts.
The Vicar’s daughter, Mrs. Percivale, is a very sprightly and well‐drawn character, whom we cannot help liking very much. She is the teller of the story, and in this Dr. MacDonald has shown much skill. It is in some parts so like a woman’s way of thinking and writing, that we can hardly believe it to be the work of a man, especially in Mrs. Percivale’s thoughts after the birth of her child. And in this the author approaches very nearly the Catholic ideal:
“I had read somewhere—and it clung to me although I did not understand it—that it was in laying hold of the heart of his Mother that Jesus laid his first hold of the world to redeem it; and now at length I began to understand it. What a divine way of saving us it was—to let her bear him, carry him in her bosom, wash him and dress him and nurse him and sing him to sleep! ... Such a love might well save a world in which were mothers enough.”
But alas! he makes the vicar himself save his faith from shipwreck by marrying the woman he wants—a queer and new argument for the marriage of the clergy, to be able to believe through such means. Not that this is intended by the author for any such argument; he being a Presbyterian, makes no question of the propriety and wisdom of the clergy marrying, but that a clergyman should be taught belief by getting the woman of his choice is “passing strange.” He also prefers giving his daughter to a sceptic rather than to a “thoroughly religious man,” for fear the latter might “confirm her in doubt.” To a Catholic, this seems a wonderful conclusion.
The chapter called “Child Nonsense” is nonsense indeed, and much below “Mother Goose” in literary merit. We wonder it found a place in the volume, which contains much genuine wit and good writing.
The illustrations to the book are clever, and the type and binding attractive.
AMBITION’S CONTEST; or, Faith and Intellect. By “Christine.” Boston: P. Donahoe. 1872.
We cannot, perhaps, give a better idea of the style and scope of this modest volume than by a quotation from the Preface: “It would be presumptuous to say that I have attempted this little work in order to aid in preventing these numerous wrecks of the soul; for where other and gifted pens, essaying so much and so well in this direction, still find it difficult to do all they would, it would be folly to suppose that my crude effort could accomplish anything. Still it is an effort made for the purpose of accomplishing some good, and written under the auspices of her who has never yet failed to assist the weak, the ever‐glorious and Blessed Virgin‐Mother of God, it may perhaps add a mite to that which is now being done for the proper training of our Catholic youth.”
GARDENING BY MYSELF. By Anna Warner. New York: A. D. F. Randolph. 1872.
We cannot imagine a pleasanter way of studying horticulture than by adopting Miss Warner’s volume as a text‐book. We can overlook the little attempts at moralizing, after the evangelical fashion, as she goes along, in view of the dismal theological efforts made by her sister (if we mistake not) a few years since. We advise our lady readers who have space for cultivating flowers to consult this little manual, assured that the occupation of which it discourses, and its results, will bring them a large store of unalloyed enjoyment.
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has in press, and will publish early in November, The Life and Times of Sixtus the Fifth, by Baron Hubner. Translated from the original French by James F. Meline.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 92.—NOVEMBER, 1872.
Centres Of Thought In The Past. Second Article. The Universities.
The change from the monastic to the scholastic era was one of which we can hardly form an idea. As radical as that brought about in politics by the tempest of 1793, it was less sudden, and, though to the full as dangerous as the unhappy “Reformation,” it was fortunately shorn of its heretical perils by the vigorous and successful hand laid upon it by the church. Instead of producing an organized system of antagonism to revealed truth, which it seemed at one time on the very verge of doing, it became so thoroughly absorbed into the church’s system that to many minds “scholasticism” is synonymous with “bigotry.” Yet how opposite was the reality to the idea which it conveys to the modern mind! The real temper of the church, the temper which will be hers eternally in heaven, is the temper of Mary; the contemplative, monastic ideal of perfect peace. In the XIIIth century (we say the XIIIth typically, for the change was gradually working some time before, and only grew to its maturity in that age), a giant intellectual convulsion took place, and the church was rudely wakened out of her placid ecstasy, to find herself assailed by brilliant and popular fallacies, urged by men of dazzling talent and fearless powers of questioning. It was as if some holy monk, who from childhood to ripe old age had spent his life on his knees before the silent tabernacle of a huge and perfect abbey‐church, were suddenly to be startled into action by the rude attack of a sacrilegious band on the very altar at whose steps he had worshipped so long. See him spring to his feet, and with unexpected strength throw himself before the priceless treasure, quell by his eagle glance the bewildered assailers of his peace, and convert by his heaven‐ dictated eloquence those very men into saints, those enemies into friends, those proud opponents into fellow‐watchers at the same hallowed shrine. So sprang the church to the defence of those doctrines which hitherto it had been mainly her duty to guard, and the struggle, distasteful as it must have been at first, nevertheless ended by producing a new harvest of saints, and increasing the human prestige as well as the spiritual armory of the church. The reader will no doubt be pleased to see what the writers already quoted have to say of this mighty intellectual revolution, and we gladly yield to them the field of description. “It will suffice to reconcile us to the temporary necessity of the change,” says the author of Christian Schools and Scholars, “that it was accepted by the church, and that she set her seal to the due and legitimate use of those studies which were to develop the human intellect to its full‐grown strength. Nay, more, she absorbed into herself an intellectual movement which, had she opposed it, would have been directed against her authority, and so to a great extent she neutralized its powers of mischief. The scholastic philosophy which, without her direction, would have expanded into an infidel rationalism, was woven into her theology itself, and made to do duty in her defence, and that wondrous spectacle was exhibited, so common in the history of the church, when the dark and threatening thunder‐cloud, which seemed about to send out its lightning‐bolts, only distils in fertilizing rain.” Speaking of S. Dominic, Prior Vaughan, in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, says: “He felt that a single man was but a drop in the ocean in the midst of such a vast and organized corruption. Man may be met by man, but a system only can oppose a system. A religious institution, combining the poverty of the first disciples of Christ with eloquence and learning, would alone stand a chance of success in working a regeneration.” He tells us further on that Albertus Magnus, the master of S. Thomas, saw that “Aristotle must be christianized, and that faith itself must be thrown into the form of a vast scientific organism, through the application of christianized philosophy to the dogmata of revealed religion.” The state of men’s minds is thus pithily described by the same author: “For, especially at this period, theory speedily resolved itself into practice; what to‐day was a speculation of the schools, to‐morrow became a fact; men lived quickly, thought quickly, and acted quickly in the days of William of Champeaux and Abelard.” Still, in summing up the character of those strange, contradictory times, so eminently “ages of faith” when contrasted with our day, yet ages of jarring contention when compared with the previous centuries, Prior Vaughan gives us the brighter side of the picture also: “Men were not startled in those days by the unusual deeds and privileges of chosen men. They took God’s word for granted. They believed what they saw; they did not pry and test and examine their souls. They got nearer the truth than we do. Their minds were not corroded by false science.” And in a footnote he adds, speaking of the great difference between heresy in the middle ages and heresy now: “In this (the reverence for authority) is seated the great distinction between the darkness of those days and the darkness of the present. Then, men fell away in detail, they denied this or that truth, or fanatically set up as teachers of novel doctrines, or were cruel, or superstitious, or fond of dress, or of excitement, or self‐display. But they held to the master‐ principle of order and of salvation, they did not reject the authority of the teaching church, or presume to call in question the directive power and controlling office of the sovereign pontiff.”
Now, let us at the outset anticipate one question our readers may very naturally ask themselves: Have we undertaken a sketch of the history of the church, or that of human thought and progress? The latter, undoubtedly. Then, how is it that “the church” runs through the whole, like the ground melody of the system? How is it that, even in the emancipating times on which we have now come, the doctors and masters of the schools are all monks and clerics, the theses chosen from Scripture texts, the disputes all turning on points of doctrine, and those, too, uncompromisingly of Catholic doctrine? We can only answer that such are the facts; secular learning hardly existed, and what there was of it was so tinged with religion that it was hardly distinguishable from that of theologians. Take Dante, for instance, an accomplished scholar, a patriot, a politician, and a keen philosopher. Who would not think him a priest and a theologian, from the way he has cast his grand and unrivalled poem? It is a summary of Catholic doctrine and tradition, a poetical version of S. Thomas’ Summa, without some knowledge of which it is absolutely impossible to read the third part, the Paradiso, and understand it. We cannot help it if we seem to be sketching ecclesiastical, while we are engaged on intellectual, history. Never before the “Reformation” were they divorced, and no better proof than this could be adduced of the essentially teaching mission of the church.
The proximate cause of the greatness of the University of Paris may be traced through four or five generations of scholars up to our Saxon master Alcuin. His pupil Rabanus, the great Abbot of Fulda, formed Lupus of Ferrières in his own mould; he in turn instructed Henry of Auxerre, the scholasticus or master of the Auxerre school, where he found Remigius, destined to become the re‐establisher of sacred studies at Rheims, the Canterbury of France. From Rheims this Remigius removed to Paris (in the Xth century), and from his time the schools of that city continued to increase in reputation and importance till they developed into the great university. He it was “who opened the first public school which we know with any certainty to have been established in Paris.”(81) The first rudiments of the laws governing the greatest corporate institution of scholastic times seem to have sprung from the very disorders occasioned by the immense numbers and pugnacious national characteristics of the rival students of all nations who flocked to Paris. In 1195, we find a certain John, Abbot of S. Alban’s, associated with the body of elect masters,(82) and the year previous Pope Celestine III. ruled that the students should be subject to ecclesiastical tribunals only, and should be exempt from all civic interference in their affairs on the part of the town authorities.(83) In 1200, the university is acknowledged by Philip Augustus as a corporate body, governed by a head who shall not be responsible for his acts to any civil tribunal whatsoever. And now begins in good earnest a system the like of which was never seen, and for brilliancy as for license will never be surpassed. It is like plunging into the seething cauldron of a “witches’ Sabbath” to read of the marvellous and feverish state of things in the Paris of the XIIIth century, and even of that of earlier days. For a vivid description of the turbulent city we can refer our readers to the recent work of the Benedictine, Prior Vaughan, and to the no less graphic pen of Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris. A grotesqueness wholly French pervades the latter work, but gives perhaps a truer picture of the reality than any less fastidious language could convey. In the Paris of old, as in our own day, things seem to have been inextricably mingled: the sage and the buffoon are elbowing each other in the streets; students who have come for fashion’s sake flaunt their vulgar splendor and their disgusting shamelessness in vice in the face of the poor scholar who sits attentive and eager on the straw‐covered floor of the lecture‐room; midnight orgies that seldom end in less than murder take place within a few feet of the oases of monastic life, where the canonical hours are still faithfully repeated and the rule still silently kept up. Vanity and frivolity are there, and the arrogance of wealthy dunces. Witness the young man whose father sent him to Paris with an annual allowance of a hundred livres. “What does he do?” asks a chronicler of that time, Odofied. “Why, he has his books bound and ornamented with gold initials and strange monsters, and has a new pair of boots every Saturday.” This was at the time that pointed shoes were the “rage,” and the university even passed a decree against them as follies unbecoming a scholar.(84) “We read of starving, friendless lads with their unkempt heads and tattered suits, who walked the streets, hungering for bread and famishing for knowledge, and hankering after a sight of some of those famous doctors of whom they had heard so much when far away in the woods of Germany or the fields of France.”(85) Many had to share their miserable garments with their companions, and take it by turns to wear their one tunic so as to make a decent appearance in the lecture‐hall, while the rest stayed at home. Others spent all they had on parchment, and were in need of oil for their lamps to study at nights. Long before the collegiate system became general, the lay‐students were huddled together in unhealthy tenements, over the shops of the burghers, with whom they had many an affray on the score of extortion and injustice. While the rich students employed their many servants and the tradesmen they patronized as instruments in their shameful intrigues, the poor scholars struggled on, some selling books at ruinously low prices, others absolutely begging their food in the streets or at the doors of the rich shopkeepers, while others again, more miserable because less determined, took refuge in the taverns, and drank away the little remains of vitality left in them, or as often were despatched in the unseemly brawls which tavern‐life was sure to foster. Then, as the brighter side of the picture, there were the monasteries, especially that of the Dominicans of S. James, where eager scholars studied in peace and order; the cloisters of Notre Dame, where venerable orthodoxy was long entrenched; the Sorbonne, destined to be for ages the most celebrated school of theology in Europe, and to hold its own long after the mediæval university had decayed. Disputed cases were sent to the Sorbonne for decision, popes took the advice of its doctors on important ecclesiastical matters, and its students possessed even greater personal immunities than their fellows of other colleges. Then, if we are to take the personal representatives of this wonderful university into account, what a forest of illustrious names starts up before our bewildered vision! In the XIth century, quite at the latter end, we are introduced to the gifted Abelard, who during the first half of the XIIth century gathered together all the stormy elements of the age, and centred upon himself the attention of the intellectual world. “He appears to have possessed,” says Prior Vaughan, “the special gift of rendering articulate the cravings of the age in which he lived.... One day he took into his hands Ezechiel the Prophet, and boasted that next morning he would deliver a lecture on the Prophecy. With bitter irony some of his companions implored him to take a little longer time to prepare; he replied with disdain, ‘My road is not the road of custom, but the road of genius.’ He was true to his word, and mockery was speedily turned to amazement when his companions, overcome with his eloquence, followed him verse after verse as he unfolded the hidden sense of the obscurest of prophecies, with a facility of diction and clearness of exposition and a readiness of resource which subdued the mind and captivated the imagination.” Success was his idol, pride his natural temper. He thought no question above his understanding, no truth beyond his apprehension; he threw down the glove in the face of a system more for the sake of routing its exponent than of impugning its truth, and when all eyes were upon him, and the populace of Paris rushed madly out on its door‐steps and house‐tops to cheer him as he passed, his end was won and his dearest wish fulfilled. One by one all his opponents were silenced; from school to school he rose, till at last the chair of Notre Dame was his; his name eclipsed that of all the masters of Paris, and drove from men’s minds even the fame of the doctors of the church.... And then what was the climax? It is told in three words—Héloïse, Soissons, and Sens. True, there was a long interval between the two misfortunes represented by the first two names, and that galling one which at last proved his salvation at Sens, and during the interval his fame revived, and again at Paris, though at S. Geneviève and no longer at Notre Dame, his prestige broke down all prejudice and his victorious career began afresh. Then see the last drama of his stormy, eventful life. He meets S. Bernard at Sens before a court of bishops, monks, and princes, his own disciples crowding triumphantly around him, a huge concourse of people heaving before him, he “the spokesman of thousands, from whose midst he would, as it were, advance and proclaim the creed of human reason.”(86) Opposed to him stands one whose cheeks are furrowed with tears, and who has made no preparation to meet the irrefragable dialectician, the prince of debate, but who, “though in appearance but an emaciated mystic from the solitude of his cell, would represent as many thousands more who saw beyond the range of human vision, and judged the highest natural gifts of God from the elevation of a life of faith.”(87) History gives us the thrilling denouement in startlingly simple form. When summoned to defend, deny, or explain the heretical propositions drawn from his brilliant works, Abelard turns in sudden contempt from the august assembly, and answers thus: “I appeal to the Sovereign Pontiff.” But all felt that this was defeat, the blow had been struck, the heresy was dead. And the heretic? Let many who have tried to‐day to walk in the dizzy path his footsteps have marked out, strive rather to imitate the end of his life; let them follow him to the solitary Benedictine Abbey where his gentle friend Peter the Venerable led him like a little child, and where his earnest, passionate nature, that could do nothing by halves, soon transformed him into a saint. And let the world which knows him chiefly through his sin and early shame fix its eyes upon him as one who, having abdicated honors greater than those of the greatest throne, having sorrowed with more than David’s sorrow, and taught with more than Solomon’s wisdom, at last found peace and justification in a narrow cell and in his daily avocations of instructing a small and obscure community on “divine humility and the nothingness of human things.”(88) Among the other great names that stand out in the tumult of Paris as stars of learning and holiness are William of Champeaux, Abelard’s chief adversary, and the founder of that saintly school of S. Victor which gathered in one the spirit of the old cloisters with that of the new scholastic teachers, and led the way through its famous doctor‐saints, Hugh and Richard, to the final welding together of the new form of theology, the incomparable Summa of S. Thomas. Then, too, we have the preacher Fulk of Neuilly, who became a scholar at a ripe age, and soon surpassed the young students whose aim was display rather than knowledge—the man who preached the fifth crusade at the tournament of Count Thibault de Champagne,(89) and was followed by such crowds that, to rid himself of them and their inconvenient homage (shown by cutting pieces out of his habit), he called out, “My habit is not blessed, but I will bless the cloak of yonder man, and you can take what you please.”(90) John of St. Quentin, also, a famous doctor, who, preaching on holy poverty and the vanity of all learning, all riches, and all honors, suddenly stops, descends the pulpit‐stairs, kneels at the feet of the astonished prior of the Dominicans, and will not rise before the latter has thrown around him his own black cloak and enrolled him in the army of that holy poverty he had just praised with so much zeal. Then Albert the Great, whose followers were so numerous that he had to leave the schools and speak in the open air, so that the square where he delivered his lectures was called Place du maître Albert, which name later on became corrupted into the form it still bears, Place Maubert. Albert brings before us the school of Cologne, inferior of course to the mighty university, but yet a centre, at least for Germany. There S. Thomas of Aquin first studied, and now and then astonished his undiscerning companions by the “bellowings of the great dumb Sicilian ox,” until he was finally sent to Paris, the scene of his matchless and altogether spiritual triumph. In him, the heir of the old Benedictine school of quies, sanctity worked that marvellous union of the old spirit and the new which ended by harmonizing the truths of the church with the clamoring aspirations of a new and venturesome age. But, inseparably connected though he be with the crisis of the XIIIth century, when passion was at its hottest, and the intoxication of world‐wide success made Paris reel like a drunken man, we feel nothing but peace in the life of the Angel of the Schools, the greatest scholar of the European university. A divine calm seems to curtain off his soul from the contentions in which his mind and body are engaged; his lessons seem rather to be given from a holy of holies than from a professor’s chair, and, while we see in him the greatest thinker of the age, we feel that above all he was its greatest saint. One might say of him, with all due reverence, that he was the only man of that turbulent and questioning day who had looked upon the face of God and lived. Beside him was his gentle friend, Bonaventure, of whom, though a professor also, we hear but little intellectually, but whom the highest authority on earth has sealed as a doctor of the church, a burning seraph of love.
And here we must leave that greatest of centres, Paris, whose prosperity at that time seemed so unalterable, and take a glance, necessarily a cursory one, at the other continental universities. Bologna undoubtedly claims the first place. It was called the “Mater Studiorum” of Italy, and vied more successfully with Paris than any other of the universities. The great Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, the liberal patroness of learning and protectress of the Holy See, was connected with its foundation, and by the end of the XIth century it was celebrated as the first law school in Europe.(91) This characteristic it always retained, while in the XIIth century canon law began to be equally studied there. Connected with Bologna was the publication of the Decretals of Gratian, a summary of the decrees of the popes, of a hundred and fifty councils, of selections from various royal codes, and of extracts from the fathers and other ecclesiastical writers.(92) The few errors in this gigantic work have often served as a peg whereon to hang many calumnies against the church; but the whole scope of the undertaking, so bold in its conception, so lucid in its exposition—has it ever been sufficiently examined outside the church? And will the world be astonished to know who was its compiler and who spent twenty‐five years of his hidden life upon it? A simple Benedictine monk of Chiusi, of whom nothing is known but his immortal work.
M. de Maistre has cleverly said, “Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare,” and we might adapt the pithy saying thus: Raise but the thinnest crust of what we call civilization, and you will find beneath the solid structure, the immovable foundation of monasticism.
In 1138, Frederic Barbarossa consulted the Bolognese doctors as to the framing of a code of laws for his Germano‐Italian Empire, and in return for their help gave them the Habita, or series of protective ordinances which raised the Italian university almost to the level of that of Paris. Alexander III., formerly a theologian in its schools, also favored Bologna, and a tide of scholars from all parts of Europe began to flow towards the Apennines. Among these we find S. Thomas of Canterbury, who, as we know, made such brave use of the legal science he acquired there. Bologna was the second centre of the Dominican Order, the teaching order of the church—the instrument raised up in the warm‐hearted but intemperate middle ages to guide aright those lava‐streams of misdirected enthusiasm which at one time threatened to rationalize or fanaticize the intellectual world. It is at Bologna that we read of the miracles of the gentle and bright S. Dominic, and of the angels that constantly followed him to do the bidding of him who through opposition and misunderstanding was always doing God’s bidding. Here, too, S. Thomas of Aquin came once, and, being unknown to the procurator of the convent, was required to carry the basket while his companion collected the friars’ daily pittance through the streets. A true monk, he gladly obeyed, and was pained and confused when some of the passers‐by told the procurator of the mistake he had made.
Italy was fruitful in universities, for, to mention only prominent names, there were Padua, Pavia, Salerno, and Naples, besides Rome, where the tradition of learning, especially sacred learning, was never quite broken. Padua was an offshoot from Bologna, and became famous in the XIIIth century for its devotion to classic literature and the liberal arts. At the time of the “Renaissance” it had become, however, a notorious focus of atheism.(93) Salerno was a school of medicine, and Pavia a brilliant and wicked resort of every intellectual aberration. We remember reading an excellent description of its vices, its dangers, and its attractions, in the life of a Venetian, a poet and child of genius, the friend and librettist of Mozart, whose name we cannot, however, recall. Even in those days of moral decadence the picture seemed appalling, and at Pavia as at Paris, as at Oxford in old times and our own day, there appears to have been no lack of brainless young profligates whose college career was a disgrace to their early education, and must have been a remorse prepared for their more sober conscience in later life.
The University of Naples, as we learn from Prior Vaughan, was the creation of Frederick II., the Sybarite emperor whose splendid barbaric physique knew how to make all Eastern luxury of body and Greek luxury of mind minister to his sovereign pleasure. The description of his harem, his kiosks, his palaces, his gardens at Naples, reads like a page from the Arabian Nights, and rival the impossible tales that are told of Bagdad’s lavish magnificence under the caliphs. Utterly pagan the university seems to have avowedly been. It had no being of its own, but was a royal appurtenance, as the other institutions of Frederick II. Learning was a luxury, and it behooved the emperor to have all luxuries at his feet. Students from all parts of his kingdom of Naples were compelled by arbitrary enactments to study nowhere else but in the exotic university; the professors were all paid from the public treasury, and among them, with characteristic pride and contemptuous eclecticism, the imperial patron had canonists, theologians, and monks. Astrology and the wildest theories were broached, Michael Scott, the pretended seer and alchemist, was conspicuous for his brilliant talents and pagan tendencies, the existence of the soul was freely questioned, materialism openly professed, and many literati ostentatiously paraded their preference of the philosophy of Epicurus or Pythagoras over the religion of Jesus Christ. A secret society is also alluded to in a popular poem of the day, its express purpose being the expunging of Christianity and the introducing of the exploded obscenities of paganism in its place.(94) This reminds us of Disraeli’s Lothair, in which such prominence is given to a secret society called Madre Natura, framed for the identical purpose we have just mentioned. It is said to have existed ever since the time of Julian the Apostate, and always with the same intent. The materialistic theories of the artist Phœbus concerning the absolute necessity of “beauty worship” and the superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic races (or principles) are only modern echoes of this pestilential teaching of the deification of materialism. Whether Disraeli, descended from that high race whose history and laws are a standing protest, and have been for ages a bulwark, against the “concupiscence of the flesh,” believes in these theories, is more than we can tell; he has at any rate clothed them with suspiciously gratuitous beauty in his recent work, and has, moreover, tried to fix upon the Anglo‐ Saxon race the stigma of practically adopting them as her own. The monastic history of the countrymen of Bede and Wilfrid tells a very different tale, and nevertheless does not omit to mention the love of sport and athletic exercises peculiar to Englishmen. How far, however, is the character of the young race‐riders(95) and fox‐hunters(96) of monastic England from that of the voluptuous Oriental and sensuous Greek!
Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Spain, and Flanders likewise had their own centres, more local, however, than those of Italy, all of them under the new form of universities, and all more or less emancipated from the strictly monastic spirit of the older centres of learning. Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Wittenberg were the foremost in Germany; Cracow was founded by a saint, the holy Hedwige of Poland; and Prague, which gave so much trouble and anxiety to the church in former times and hardly less in our own day, owes much of its glory to the holy women of the middle ages. Thus Dombrowka, a princess of Bohemia, married to a Polish chief, and Hedwige, the great queen and patron saint of Poland, established colleges there and endowed them liberally. Salamanca had a wider reputation, and fell heir to all the brilliant learning of the Arabian and Jewish schools, whose influence on Christian thought in the days of S. Thomas of Aquin had been so dangerous. All the scientific knowledge of the East thus became its natural property, while the intensely Catholic mind of the Spaniards held them aloof from what was poisonous in Eastern philosophy. And here let us stop to remark that Spain, ranked as it has always been among the Latin nations, nevertheless owes its first Christian traditions, and, no doubt, also its imperial notions of universal sway, to the vigorous Gothic races, mingled with the Frankish and Burgundian blood brought in by intermarriage with the Merovingian princes of France. There is something in Spanish history, in Spanish perseverance, we might almost say in Spanish toughness, that reveals the Visigoth, the man of the northern forests, with his indomitable energy and insatiable thirst for the sole rule of land and sea. Alcala, the creation of Cardinal Ximenes, and Coimbra, besides twenty‐four colleges dignified by the name of universities, make up the quota contributed by Spain to the intellectual progress of Europe. We wish we had more space and time to devote to them.
Flanders, the home of art in the middle ages, and the model of dignified and successful civic government, was not fated to be behind‐hand in the world of letters. As early as 1360, a gay scholar of the University of Paris, and a native of Deventer, returned to his birthplace with the halo of success and worldly fame about him. After a few years of vain display, Gerard of Deventer suddenly, through the agency of a holy companion, became an altered and converted man. Having fitted himself for a spiritual career by a three years’ seclusion among the Carthusians, he returned to his native city and instituted a congregation of Canons Regular, whom he entrusted to a disciple of his, a former canon of Utrecht. He himself died soon after, but under his successor, Florentius, the school grew in importance and renown till, in 1393, a scholar entered its cloisters, by name Thomas Hammerlein, now known to the Christian world as Thomas à Kempis, the reputed author of The Following of Christ. His life is too entirely spiritual to be mentioned here, but of the institute in which he was reared the same rule will not apply. Although the aim of the Deventer school was to revive the old monastic ideal, and although its spirit seems forcibly to remind us of Bede and Rabanus of Fulda, still it gave forth scholars like the “Illustrious Nicholas of Cusa, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning.”(97) It is also told of the Deventer brethren that they “displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and that one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college.”(98) The famous Erasmus passed his first years of study at Deventer in the latter end of the XVth century, and drew from his masters the prediction that he would “one day be the light of his age.” The later Flemish University of Louvain, founded in 1425, by Duke John of Brabant, was eminently an orthodox institution, and became, in the XVIth century, “one of the soundest nurseries of the faith,” as well as the chief seat of learning in Flanders. Even Erasmus owned in his letters that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris. Here, as usual, the Dominicans were foremost in the breach, and enjoyed great privileges, while their influence made itself powerfully felt throughout the university. S. Thomas of Aquin was, of course, the recognized authority followed by the whole university in matters of theology.
Ireland was not so fortunate during the scholastic as during the monastic era of intellectual development, but what benefits she had she owed them again to the same institution which had educated her sons in olden days. The first University of Dublin was founded in 1320, and had for its first master a Dominican friar. It soon decayed for want of funds and in consequence of the troubles of the times, but the Dominicans would not let learning perish, if they could help it. In 1428, a century later, they opened a free “high school” on Usher’s Island, where they taught gratuitously all branches of knowledge, from grammar to theology, and admitted all students, lay and ecclesiastical. Between this college and their convent in the city they built a stone bridge, the only erection of such solid material known in Dublin for two centuries afterwards, and, says Mr. Wyse in a speech on Education delivered at Cork in 1844, “it is an interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a convent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning where the whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously.”(99) A few years later, the four Mendicant orders, headed by the Dominicans, obtained from Pope Sixtus IV. a brief constituting their Dublin schools one university, with the same ecclesiastical rights and privileges enjoyed by the great University of Oxford, and this body corporate is mentioned as in active exercise of its powers just before the “Reformation.” It showed the general destruction brought by the apostasy of England on all monastic bodies, but such as it was it was the church’s creation, and a fitting successor to those centres of rare learning, the Columbanian monasteries of the VIIth and VIIIth centuries.
The Scotch universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen have been purposely left out, as we have no records of them at hand; of the latter, the remains of which we happened to visit some years ago, it will suffice to say that it possesses a library, the germs of which are due to Catholic collectors, and still has some very fine specimens of illuminated manuscripts. The wood carvings of the choir stalls and screen, of Flemish workmanship, are very beautiful, and the collegiate chapel, still existing, bears marks of the harmony and symmetry natural to the grand worship it once typified.
We have left Oxford to the last, since its history is perhaps almost unique. No university of its day can match it; its vitality has outlasted the “Reformation” itself, and its spirit and statutes remain to this moment as obstinately Catholic as in the days of Bacon and Duns Scotus. True, infidelity has not respected it, but no more did it respect the University of Paris in the XIIIth century, and far more vigorous than its great mediæval rival, Oxford still epitomizes the genius of a nation, while Paris has lost every vestige of its former academical sway. Its beginnings are lost in the ages of fable, for tradition asserts that long before Alfred there were schools and disputations there. The schools of Osney Abbey, and the Benedictine school in connection with Winchcomb Abbey, are among the earliest foundations, but as yet (in 1175) there were no buildings of any architectural pretensions. About that time a great fire destroyed the greater part of the city, and for a long while very little order prevailed among its motley inhabitants. Robert Pulleyn, an English scholar from Paris, who had set up a school in 1133 and in 1142, went to Rome, was made cardinal there, and obtained many ecclesiastical privileges for the Oxford scholars. Law already began to be studied in this century, but a historian of the time complains bitterly that “purity of speech had decayed, philosophy was neglected, and nothing but Parisian quirks prevailed. Had the monastic schools retained their ascendency,” he says, “polite letters would never have fallen into such neglect.”(100) In the XIIIth century there were 30,000 students at Oxford, though many among them were “a set of varlets who pretended to be scholars,” and passed their time in thieving and villany. The brawls of these said “varlets” were to the full as violent as those of the Rue Coupegueule, and much of the same kind of license disgraced Oxford as it did Paris. Nationality seems to have been a common pretext for fights, and S. George’s, S. Patrick’s, and S. David’s days were, instead of peaceful festivals, days of bloodshed and plunder. At last every demonstration on these days had to be forbidden under pain of excommunication. “Town and gown” fights too were frequent, and even internecine battles took place among the scholars themselves over a false quantity in pronunciation or a disputed axiom in philosophy. The fare in those days seems to have been scanty; here for instance is a collegiate menu: “At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the said beef, with salt and oatmeal and nothing else.” When they went to bed, “they were fain to run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet,” and what the beds were may be surmised from the fact of the students lodging where they could, generally in lofts over the burghers’ shops, as at Paris.
In the earlier part of the XIIIth century Cambridge was founded, and Peter of Blois, the continuator of Ingulphus, tells us that from this “little fountain (the first lectures given successively in the same barn, on various subjects, by three or four monks of Croyland) of Cottenham, the abbot’s manor near Cambridge, which has swelled to a great river, we now behold the whole city of God made glad, and teachers issuing from Cambridge, after the likeness of the Holy Paradise.” Cambridge seems to have cultivated the Anglo‐Saxon tongue, as Tavistock also did, a monastic school where the language was regularly taught “to assist the monks in deciphering their own ancient charters.”
“Old Oxford” was not the imposing pile of ecclesiastical buildings its later representative is now. Osney and S. Frideswide stood like castles in its surrounding meadows, but the main body of the university consisted in straw‐thatched houses and timber schools. There were pilgrimage wells where, on Rogation Days, various blessings were invoked on the fruits of the earth, and these were called by our forefathers “Gospel places.” It was a sort of religious “Maying,” the students carrying poles adorned with flowers and singing the Benedicite. The streets bore singular names—“School Street,” “Logic Lane,” “Street of the Seven Deadly Sins.” Here is the “Schedesyerde,” where abode the sellers of parchment, the schedes or sheets of which gave their name to the locality. The schools can be distinguished by pithy inscriptions over dingy‐looking doors—Ama scientiam, Impostu ras fuge, Litteras disce—but you will look in vain for public schools or collegiate piles. In these humble schools many great scholars were reared: S. Edmund of Canterbury, who, for instance, unless he chanced to spend it in relieving the distress of some poor scholar or little orphan child, left the money his pupils paid him lying loose on the window‐sill, where he would strew it with ashes, saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; or, again, S. Richard, Edmund’s friend, and afterwards his chancellor at Canterbury, who while at Oxford was so poor that he could seldom allow himself the luxury of mutton, then reckoned as ordinary scholar’s fare, and who lodged with two companions, of whom we hear the Parisian tale of the single gown worn alternately at lecture by each, while the others remained at home; Robert Grossetêle, the Franciscan, a universal genius and a most holy man, a zealous lover of natural science, and so well versed in the Scriptures that one of his modern biographers has candidly admitted that his “wonderful knowledge of them might probably be worth remark in our day, though in its own not more than was possessed by all theological students”; Roger Bacon, the greatest natural philosopher who appeared in England before the time of Newton; and Alexander of Hales, “the Irrefragable Doctor,” who also taught in the Franciscan schools of Paris—were among prominent Oxford scholars of the middle ages. Then the marvellous Duns Scotus a scholar of Merton and afterwards a Franciscan monk, an Abelard in brilliancy, versatility, and keenness of argument, who, disputing one day before the doctors of the Sorbonne (to whom he was personally unknown), was interrupted by one of them with this exclamation, “This must be either an angel from heaven, a demon from hell, or Duns Scotus from Oxford!” A similar legend is told of Alanus de Insulis, a Paris doctor, who, having left the schools and become a lay‐brother at Citeaux, accompanied the abbot to Rome to take charge of his horses. Being allowed to sit at the abbot’s feet during the council against the Albigenses, and finding the scales inclining in favor of the heretics, he rose, and, begging the abbot’s blessing, suddenly poured forth his irresistible arguments and defeated the sophistry of the Albigenses, who, baffled and furious, exclaimed, “This must be either the devil himself or Alanus.”
Thomas of Cantilupe, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, was another representative Oxford scholar. Of noble birth and great intellectual powers, he rose to the highest dignities of the realm, and, though Oxford was still a scene of violent disorders, he preserved his purity and calmness through all its dangers. The collegiate system soon came to put an end to this state of things, and Merton was the first college, properly so‐called, where moral order and architectural proportions received some attention. The aspect of the university now rapidly changed. Lollardism seriously affected the great seat of learning, and at first its doctrines were much upheld by the jealous secular teachers, who saw in his calumnies a weapon to be used against the saintly and successful friars; the tone of the university declined, and literature was wofully neglected for a time. However, as Lollardism faded from men’s minds, a revival of letters took place, and in the XVIth century Erasmus, who was very kindly entertained and welcomed at Oxford, pays the following tribute to its literary proficiency: “I have found here classic erudition, and that not trite and shallow, but profound and accurate, both Latin and Greek, so that I no longer sigh for Italy.”(101) And again: “I think, from my very soul, there is no country where abound so many men skilled in every kind of learning as there are here”(102) (in England). His own Greek learning was chiefly acquired at Oxford, for, previous to his coming hither, his knowledge of that language was very superficial.
We have lingered over the history of mediæval Oxford longer than our readers may be inclined to think reasonable, and we must confess that our interest in the only institution of the middle ages which stands yet unimpaired in glory, influence, and renown, has led us beyond the limits we had honestly proposed to ourselves.
Little now remains to be said. We have come upon the uninviting times when reason broke away from faith and carried desolation in its headlong course through the field of the human intellect. A literary and philosophical madness settled on men’s minds, and Babel seemed to have come again, except where the calm round of old studies was pursued with the old spirit of quies within the sphere of the ancient faith. All beyond was confusion and hurry; every one set up as a teacher before having been a disciple; each man dictated and no one listened; each would be the originator of a system which his first follower was sure to alter, with the perspective of having his alterations remodelled again by his first pupil, and so on ad libitum, till systems came to be called by men’s names, and to vary in meaning according to the particular temper of each one that undertook to explain them.
With all its turbulence and occasional excesses contrasted with the cynical refinement and polite indifferentism of to‐day, was not the older system the better one?
By Mrs. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story.”
Part Third.
The Banks Of The Neckar.
XXXIX.
About a fortnight after Christmas, Clement was returning to his lodgings a little sooner than usual, when he met Wilhelm Müller at the door.
“Ah! you have come at the right moment,” said he. “Let me tell you why. A courier from St. Petersburg arrived this morning with important news, which will have a serious effect on our business.”
“Are you referring to the death of the Emperor Alexander? I knew that yesterday. What else is there?”
“Quite another affair, indeed. Constantine has been set aside, and the Grand Duke Nicholas is to succeed his brother.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. But that is not all; we knew that yesterday. The news the courier brought this morning is more serious. It seems a conspiracy has broken out—”
“A conspiracy! Where?”
“At St. Petersburg. The courier left the twenty‐fourth of December. They were then fighting on the square before the palace, and the emperor was in the midst of the fight.”
“Constantine?”
“No, indeed; his brother.”
“The Grand Duke Nicholas? Is he at the head of the plot?”
“No; on the contrary, it seems to be Constantine, and yet it is not he either.—In fact, no one knows anything about it, the report is so very confused. But come and help me, if you will. We have despatches to send in every direction. We shall certainly have further news this evening. I dare say Waltheim (the chief member of the firm of which they were the principal clerks) is this very moment beside himself.”
The two friends set off together. They had hardly gone two steps before they came upon quite a group standing around the doorway of a fine house almost opposite Müller’s. It was the residence of the Russian legation. They were told in reply to their questions that a courier had just arrived on horseback, covered with dust and half‐dead with fatigue. He left St. Petersburg on the twenty‐sixth, and had been ten days on the way.
“Does anybody know what news he has brought?” asked Müller of the man who gave him this information.
“Nothing definite, of course. And we shall learn nothing there,” pointing to the diplomatic residence, “except what they please to tell us.”
Müller and Clement stopped no longer.
“The twenty‐sixth!” said Müller. “I should like to know the contents of the despatch.”
“The other legations must soon have news of as late a date, to say nothing of our own correspondent, who will give us the earliest information possible. But, now I think of it, one of the attachés of the French legation is somewhat of a friend of mine; what if I go and ask him for the details?”
Müller thought this a capital idea, and Clement left him at once to go to the residence of the French legation. Müller kept on to his office at Waltheim’s, where he would wait for him.
The young attaché referred to was the Vicomte de Noisy. He had been present at one of the public assemblies in which Clement distinguished himself as a speaker, and conceived a fancy for him from that time. They frequently made excursions together on foot or horseback, and the vicomte sought every opportunity of meeting Clement with an eagerness the latter sometimes reproached himself for not responding to with more warmth. He relied, therefore, on a cordial reception, and, in fact, as soon as he was announced, he was taken into a small room next the chancellerie, where M. de Noisy passed the greater part of his time. He found him seated at a table covered with papers. Before Clement had time to utter a word, the young attaché exclaimed, without leaving his place:
“Have you come with news? or to get some?”
“What a question! You know well our commercial agents are never able to rival the speed of the bearers of political despatches.”
“And yet it happens sometimes.”
“But not this time, unfortunately. The Russian legation has just received a despatch from St. Petersburg dated the twenty‐sixth.”
“So we have just heard. It came in an incredibly short time. I fear ours will not do as well. And yet the French embassy at St. Petersburg is not often caught napping.”
Some one rang furiously. A hussar opened the door and made a sign to the vicomte, who sprang forward.
“The courier!” he exclaimed. “Bravo! Vive l’ambassadeur! To be only one hour behind the Russian courier is wonderful! Here, mon cher, are some cigars. Take the arm‐chair and wait till I return. I shall soon be back, and will bring you the news.”
Clement threw himself into the arm‐chair, lit a cigar, took up a newspaper, and patiently awaited the young attaché’s return beside a good fire, which, without prejudice to the large stove at one end of the room, did not give out too much heat at this rigorous season. At the end of an hour, however, he was beginning to feel he was losing his time, when the Vicomte de Noisy reappeared with his hands full of letters, which he threw on the table.
“There,” he said. “To decipher and read these is not all: they are to be answered, and I do not know when I shall be able to leave the chancellerie.”
“Would it be indiscreet for you to tell me the nature of your despatches?”
“By no means. We have good news. It is all over. The struggle was severe, but short. The new emperor conducted admirably. The regiments in revolt have returned to their duty, all the leaders of the insurrection have been taken. The only serious thing is that among the latter are several belonging to the noblesse, and a great many gentlemen of social standing are compromised. This interests me more than anything else, because I was connected with the embassy at St. Petersburg before I came here, and know them all.”
“Have they given any of the leader’s names?”
“Oh! yes: Troubetzkoï, Rilieff, Mouravieff, Wolkonsky, and a host of others. But among all these names there is one I am amazed at finding. Who would ever have thought Walden would be drawn into such a row?”
Clement’s heart gave a leap. “Walden, did you say? What, the Count George de Walden?”
“The very person. Do you happen to know him?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Well, can you conceive of a man of his ability and distinction being mixed up in such a plot? It was an atrocious conspiracy to assassinate the emperor, and a foolish attempt to establish a republic. Constantine’s name was only made use of as a pretext.”
“And is Count George seriously compromised?” asked Clement.
“He could not be more so. He is classed among those who have no other alternative but Siberia or death.—But excuse me, Dornthal, I am forced to leave you. I dare say we shall have to work all night. Here,” said he, searching in his pocket, “here is a letter I have received from St. Petersburg by the courier. You may find in it some additional details that will interest you.”
The attaché hurried off through the door of the chancellerie, and Clement left the house. It was not till he found himself in the street that he began to recover from the stupefaction caused by the news he had just heard. He turned mechanically towards the office, where Müller was waiting for him, and gave him an account of what he had just learned, with the exception of the one fact of this political event of infinitely more importance to him than all the rest. He remained some time at his post, making an almost superhuman effort to control his bewildered mind and keep it on the work he had to do. At last he took leave of Müller and went back to his lodgings. Without stopping, as he usually did, to see the family, he went directly up‐stairs, and shut himself up in his room. He wished to be alone, that he might decide at leisure upon the course to pursue in consequence of so unforeseen and serious an event.
Gabrielle!—He thought of her—and her alone. How would she support such a blow? How was she to be informed of it?
He remained a long time buried in these reflections without thinking of the letter in his pocket. At length he bethought himself of it, and with the hope of getting some light began to read it attentively. After some preamble, which he ran over hastily, he came to what follows:
“This conspiracy, which broke out with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, and appeared to be only the spontaneous result of the prevailing doubt at the beginning of the present reign as to which of the two brothers was the real emperor, was really arranged a long time before, it seems. It is said to have had deep and extensive ramifications, and they who fomented and directed the plot only availed themselves of the circumstances that followed Alexander’s death as a pretext. It is said their plans were to have been executed in the spring, if the deceased emperor’s life had been prolonged till that time. But what seems equally certain is that a great number of those who are now seriously compromised had only a very imperfect idea of what was going on. Among these, I cannot doubt, is our poor friend George de Walden. You know he has always been dreaming of possible or impossible reforms. As evil would have it, he met in Italy during the past year a certain man named Lasko—very intelligent and capable, but an intriguer ready for anything, and mixed up with all the plots that have agitated Italy and Germany the past ten years. Imprisoned, then released, Heaven knows how, assuming a thousand names, in a word, one of those evil‐minded persons who are docile instruments in the hands of the real leaders of the great plots of the day, George was accidentally brought in contact with him, and once, only once, was persuaded to attend one of their meetings through mere curiosity. There by a still more unfortunate accident he happened to meet one of the leaders just referred to. The latter at once saw the influence to be derived from George’s name, position, enthusiasm, and even his ignorance of the extent of their schemes. He persuaded him to repair to St. Petersburg at a given time, and hold himself in readiness to second a combined movement, secretly arranged, but too extensive to be suppressed. This movement, he said, was to bring about the realization of some of George’s theories. I had these details from the Marquis Adelardi, the genial Milanais who spent a winter here three years ago, and is, you know, George’s intimate friend. The marquis, uneasy about the count’s sudden departure from Florence, and still more so when three months passed away without his return, came here to join him. He arrived only three days before the fatal twenty‐fourth. It appears George was certainly on the square that day and in the foremost ranks of the insurgents. Adelardi declares he went there sincerely convinced, by the representations of those who were desirous of leading him on, that Constantine’s renunciation was a pretence, and his rights ought to be maintained in the interests of their projects, which that prince, they declared, was ready to second. However that may be, it is only too certain that close beside him on the square was this same Lasko, who was killed at the very moment of firing at the Grand Duke Michael. One witness—and but one, for it requires some courage to testify in favor of a man in his situation—has stated it was George who turned his deadly weapon aside (thus saving the grand duke’s life) before the aide‐de‐camp of the latter shot the assassin. But there is so strong a feeling against him, both at court and in the city, that no one dares insist how much this circumstance is in his favor. He himself obstinately refuses to take advantage of it, and his haughty attitude since his arrest is by no means favorable to his interests. What makes his case more complicated, his secretary was an Italian most intimately connected with Lasko. This man, Fabiano Dini by name, was also on the square the day of the insurrection, and was severely wounded.”
Here Clement stopped. These last lines increased his agitation to the highest pitch. All their vague fears were thus confirmed—his cousin’s fatal destiny pursued him to the end! Unfortunate himself and a source of misfortune to others! Yes, that was Felix: capable of realizing his disgrace, but not of repairing it; seeking the post of danger and the opportunity of displaying his courage, reluctant to leave the obscurity in which he had hidden his life, he became one of those secret agitators who were then, perhaps even more than now, silently undermining Europe. He soon became their agent, and his talents, contempt of danger and death, made him a useful one. In this way he speedily came to an end that was inevitable.
Clement paced up and down his chamber a long time unable to calm his confused mind, but, after much reflection, came to the conclusion George’s trial would probably be prolonged, and might terminate less tragically than was to be feared from this letter. At all events, he ought to spare Fleurange all the anguish of this uncertainty as long as possible. This would not be difficult at Rosenheim, for the professor was not allowed to read the newspapers, and therefore none were left about the rooms occupied by the family. Hansfelt alone read them and communicated the news. Clement hastened to write his sister Hilda a few lines, confiding to her all he had just learned, and recommending her, as well as Hansfelt, to withhold from Gabrielle all information on the subject. “I shall be at Rosenheim in a week,” said he at the close, “and we will consult together, dear sister, about what will then be advisable. Meanwhile, I rely on your prudence and affection for her.”
Clement and his sister had never discussed the subject now referred to, but they had long read one another’s thoughts. They were now of the same mind, and Fleurange would have remained a long time ignorant of what they wished to conceal from her, had not an unforeseen circumstance overthrown, a few days after, all the plans laid by their prudence and affection.
XL.
The poor you always have with you. This is our Saviour’s declaration, and it accords with human experience. We find the poor everywhere, unless we wilfully turn away our eyes with culpable indifference. Mademoiselle Josephine, we are well aware, was not of the number of these blind or insensible persons. She therefore found quite as much work on her hands at Heidelberg as at Paris, with this difference, which was a keen mortification—she was unable to hold any communication with the objects of her bounty, except by gestures rarely expressive enough on either side to be understood. This forced her to dispense with what had always been the most pleasant feature of charity—kind words, and sometimes long chats with the poor on whom she bestowed alms.
“I only wish they understood a little French,” she said. “It seems as if it might be easy enough for them, whereas it is utterly impossible for me to learn German.” In a word, not to know French and to understand German seemed to Mademoiselle Josephine among the mysteries of nature. Nevertheless, as the poor people persisted in using only their own language, and resentment must not be carried so far as to refuse aiding them, mademoiselle was very glad to accept Fleurange as her interpreter and the agent of her charity. The young girl came every day at the same hour, either to accompany her or receive her orders and make the daily round in her stead.
She generally found mademoiselle in her laboratory, that is, in a room on the ground‐floor, in which the principal piece of furniture was an immense armoire, containing all kinds of things to be distributed among her actual or anticipated protégés. She liked to have a good supply on hand, and it was seldom a poor person found her without the means of aiding them at once.
“Here, Gabrielle,” said she one morning, when Fleurange appeared as usual, basket in hand, to get the charitable supplies for the day. “See, everything is ready.” And she pointed towards the things on the table, which, with the large armoire and two chairs, comprised all the furniture in the room. Everything was indeed arranged in fine order: on one side were two pairs of stockings and a woollen skirt; on the other, a covered tureen of broth, a small quantity of sugar, a bottle of wine, some tobacco, and two or three newspapers. To all these things she added a small vial, the contents of which required some explanation.
“The stockings and skirt,” said mademoiselle, “are for the mother of the little girl to whom you carried clothes yesterday. The broth and sugar are for our poor old woman, as well as this little vial of eau de mélisse of my own preparation, and not the worse for that. And the wine and tobacco are for the invalid soldier, the old carpenter whom you visited last week. His daughter succeeded in making me understand yesterday that nothing would give this poor man more pleasure than to lend him a newspaper occasionally. You can give him these which I procured for him this morning. Ah!—apropos, your cousin Clement left two nice cigars for him which I forgot. While I am gone for them, you can put all these things in your basket.”
The kind woman left the room to get the cigars. They were up‐stairs, but she never thought of counting her steps when it was a question of doing a kind act, however insignificant, for another. Only, she did not ascend the stairs quite as nimbly as she once did, and on this occasion it took her about fifteen minutes to go and return.
During this time Fleurange, standing at the table, proceeded to stow away all the things in her basket, and last of all was about to put in the newspapers when her eye fell on a paragraph in one of them that gave her a start. She seized the paper, opened it, and began to read with ardent curiosity. All at once she uttered a feeble cry, the journal dropped from her trembling hands, a mist came over her eyes, and, when her old friend returned, she found her lying on the floor, pale, cold, and senseless.
Fortunately, Mademoiselle Josephine did not lack presence of mind or experience. She flew to Fleurange, knelt beside her, raised her head, and supported her in her arms. Then she drew a smelling‐bottle from her pocket to revive her, and while showing her these attentions she racked her brains to guess what could have caused one so robust and generally so calm to faint in this mysterious way. All at once she noticed the newspaper, which had fallen at the young girl’s feet. “Ah!” she said, “she read something in that medley, perhaps some bad news; but, merciful heavens! what could it have been to produce such an effect?—Dear child,” she continued, looking tenderly at the pale and lovely face resting on her shoulders, “she said yesterday she never fainted but once in her life, and that was at our house in Paris two years ago when she was overcome by weakness and hunger.”
Poor Mademoiselle Josephine! compassion, and the remembrances thus awakened, doubly affected her, and her eyes were still filled with tears when Fleurange opened hers with an expression of surprise soon followed by an indistinct recollection. She rose slowly up, but, before mademoiselle could aid her, she threw her arms around her old friend’s neck.
“O dear mademoiselle!” she murmured, “did you know it?—did you know it?”
Poor Josephine had never been so embarrassed. To say she was totally ignorant of the point was to invite a confidence quite unsuitable at such a moment, and a contrary reply would also have its inconveniences. She therefore took refuge in an innocent subterfuge.
“Well, well, my poor child, what use is there in speaking of it now? Be calm, and do not say anything at present. We will talk about it another time. Be easy,” she added at a venture, “everything will be arranged if you take what I am going to give you.”
Then aiding Fleurange to rise, and placing her in a chair, she ran for a glass of water, into which she poured a few drops of eau de mélisse—a genuine panacea in her estimation—which she held to the young girl’s lips. Fleurange drank it all, and then gave a long sigh.
“What happened to me?” she said.
“Nothing. You were only faint. That is all.”
“That is strange, for I never faint.” And she passed her hand over her forehead.
“O my God! I remember it all now,” she suddenly exclaimed. “But is it true? May not this be false—a mere idle tale?”
“Who can tell?” replied mademoiselle vaguely. “That is quite possible. They say so many things.”
“But tell me all you know.”
“No, no, not now, Gabrielle, not now. You are not able to hear it. Do as I say, and we will talk about it at another time.”
Fleurange made no reply. A moment after, she rose. “I am well now,” she said; “I feel revived.”
She gathered up her long hair, which had fallen around her shoulders, took the journal and put it in her pocket, then put on the little velvet hat trimmed with fur which she generally wore in winter, and said: “Thanks, dear mademoiselle, and pardon me. I have quite recovered, but do not feel equal, however, to the visits you expected me to make to‐day.”
“No, indeed, of course not.”
“I must go home at once.”
“Yes, certainly, I am going with you. You must go to bed. You are generally pale, but now your cheeks are as red as those curtains,” pointing to the bright cotton curtains at the window.
“No, no, I am not ill,” said Fleurange, her eyes aflame. “The air will do me good. Do not feel uneasy. You see my faintness has entirely passed off.”
As mademoiselle had not the least idea of the cause of this sudden indisposition, and the young girl really seemed quite recovered, she did not oppose her wish to go home alone and on foot. The distance was not far. Fleurange came every day without any escort, she allowed her therefore to go, merely accompanying her as far as the gate of her little yard, where they separated, bidding each other good‐by till evening.
XLI.
The thermometer was down to five or six degrees. The little hat Fleurange wore protected her forehead, but showed the tresses of her thick hair behind. She drew up her hood when she wished to guard more effectually against the severity of the weather. But now she did not take this precaution. She only drew the folds of her thick cloak around her form, and set off with rapid steps. The keen, frosty air was refreshing to her burning cheeks and revived her strength, and, with the exception of an unusual glow in her complexion and in her eyes, there was no trace of her recent faintness when she reached home. As soon as she entered, without stopping an instant, she went directly upstairs, and, giving a slight knock at the door, entered the chamber between her own and Hilda’s, which Hansfelt had used as a study since his arrival at Rosenheim. When Fleurange entered, she found him and his young wife together. They started with surprise at seeing her, and stopped talking, with a certain embarrassment which did not escape Fleurange.
“I can guess the subject of your conversation,” she said with emotion, but without hesitation, “and it is what I wish to speak to you about.”
Her cousin looked at her, uncertain what reply she ought to make.
“Hilda,” said Fleurange, “you agreed never to mention Count George’s name to me till I should speak of him first. Well, I have now come to speak of him, and beg you both to tell me all you know about him. Here,” continued she, throwing the newspaper she had brought on the table, “read that, and then tell me all I am still ignorant of.”
What could they say? She stood before them so calm, resolute, and decided, that any reticence seemed useless. Hansfelt ran over the journal. He saw the article Fleurange referred to did not contain any details, but only a list of the accused, followed by some very clear comments on the fate which awaited them. Count George’s name figured among the first on the list.
“What is he accused of? What is the crime in question?” asked she in a decided tone.
Hansfelt still hesitated. But his wife knew better than he the character of her who was questioning them. “Karl,” said she, “you can tell her, and ought to do so. We must conceal nothing more from Gabrielle.”
“And why have you done so hitherto?” said Fleurange. “Ah! yes, I understand”—and a slight blush mounted to her forehead—“the secret I thought so well hidden has been discovered by you all!”
“No, no,” cried Hilda, “only by me—and you know I can conceal nothing from Karl—by me and Clement.”
“Clement also?” said Fleurange, with a start of surprise and a confusion which deepened her blush. “But, after all, what difference does it make?” she continued. “I shall conceal nothing more from any one, and I wish nothing to be kept from me either. Come, Karl, I assure you earnestly I do not lack fortitude, and hereafter you must not try to spare me. Surprise alone overpowered me for an instant. Now I am prepared for the worst, and ready to hear what you have to tell.”
But in spite of these words, when Hansfelt at last decided, after some further hesitation, to satisfy her, while he was giving her a circumstantial account of all Count George had done to forfeit his life, the color produced by the keen air, her walking so fast, and her agitation, vanished completely from the young girl’s face, and she became as pale as death.
“Siberia or death!” she repeated two or three times in a low tone, as if it were as difficult to understand as to utter such terrible words.
“As to the worst of these two sentences, it is to be hoped he will escape,” said Hansfelt.
Fleurange shuddered. Was it really of him—him!—they were talking in this way? “But tell me, Karl, is there no other alternative? May he not be condemned to prison or expatriation? They are also great and fearful punishments. Why speak only of two sentences, one almost as horrible as the other?”
Hansfelt shook his head. “His name, his rank, the benefits the government had conferred on his family, the favors so many times offered him, will all aggravate his crime in the eyes of his judges. His life, I trust, will be spared, but—”
“But—the mines, fetters, and fearful rigors of Siberia—do you think he will be condemned to suffer all these penalties without any alleviation?”
Hansfelt was silent. Hilda pressed Fleurange’s hands and tenderly kissed her colorless cheeks.
“I have said enough, and too much,” said Hansfelt. “Why will you ask me such questions, Gabrielle? And why do you tell me to answer her, Hilda?”
“Because I wish to know everything,” said Fleurange, raising her head, which she had rested a moment on her cousin’s shoulder, and recovering her firmness of voice. After a moment’s hesitation she continued: “Then nothing can save him?”
“You wished for the truth without any disguise, Gabrielle, and I have not concealed it from you. According to all human probability, nothing can save Count George from the fate that awaits him: that is beyond doubt. But it sometimes happens in Russia that sudden caprice on the part of the sovereign arrests the hand of justice. Nevertheless, it would be deceiving you if I did not add that there is nothing to lead us to hope he will be such an object of clemency. On the contrary, all the reports agree in stating that the irritation against him is extreme, and surpasses that against all the other conspirators.”
Fleurange remained a long time absorbed in thought. “Thank you, Karl,” said she at length. “You will hereafter tell me all you learn, will you not?”
After receiving the promise asked for, she turned to leave the chamber. “One more question,” said she. “My head must be very much confused, or I should have asked you before in what way his poor mother learned the news, and how she bears it.”
“Clement heard she was at Florence, as usual at this season, but on learning the news started at once for St. Petersburg.”
“St. Petersburg! at this time of year! The poor woman will die on the way.”
“I can tell you nothing more. Clement will be here this evening. He may have additional news.”
But when Clement arrived that night, Fleurange, prostrated by the anxiety and excitement of the day, was unable to leave her chamber. Her aunt, who remained with her, declared she should see no one else till the next day, and the interview she hoped to have with Clement was deferred. Meanwhile the latter was steeling himself for the new phase in the trial before him by listening to all the details of what had occurred. Mademoiselle Josephine informed them of what had happened to Fleurange at her house, and in return learned with interest mingled with profound astonishment the real cause of her fainting. Of all the sufferings in the world, those caused by love were the most unintelligible to her. If she had been suddenly informed that her dear Gabrielle had lost her mind, or was going into a consumption, she would not have been more surprised and disturbed. Perhaps less so, for the terror mystery lends to distress, and a complete ignorance of the suitable remedies for such a case, added powerlessness to anxiety. She, who had so many remedies of all kinds for every occasion, could absolutely think of nothing suitable for this. How this unknown person, whose name she had never heard until to‐day, could all at once become so essential to the happiness of this dear child, who was surrounded by so much affection from others and had always seemed so happy, was in her eyes a still greater phenomenon than knowing German. As for that language, she now resolved to study it, thinking the day might again arrive when there would be something within her comprehension and power to do for her. “I will endeavor to acquire it, that I may not lose an opportunity of profiting by it,” said she. This vague hope consoled her for her present incompetency, and satisfied, for the time, the devotedness of her kind heart, now quite out of its latitude.
XLII.
The following morning Fleurange, quite recovered from the physical effects of her agitation, was up at her usual hour, that is, at daybreak. She put on her thick cloak, her little fur‐trimmed hat, and started off to church for the first Mass, which she daily attended at this season. At her arrival she threw back her hood, and knelt as near the altar as possible. The church was so dark that each one brought a lantern, a bit of candle, or some other portable light to read by. These lamps and tapers, increasing with the number of worshippers, at last diffused sufficient light throughout the church to enable one to distinguish the people and objects in it. Fleurange did not bring a candle and needed none, for she had no prayer‐book, but she was not the less profoundly recollected. Pale and motionless, her hands clasped, her head raised, her eyes fastened on the altar, the delicate and regular outline of her face distinctly visible by a neighboring taper, she resembled a statue of white marble wrapped in sombre drapery. She prayed with fervor, but without agitation, without tears, and even without moving her lips. Her whole soul seemed centred in her eyes. Her look at once expressed the faith that implores and hopes, submission to God’s will, and courage to fulfil it. It was a prayer that must prevail, or leave the heart submissive and strengthened.
The Mass ended, all the lights were extinguished one after the other, but the faint glimmering in the east soon increased to such a degree that, when Fleurange rose after the church was nearly empty, she recognized Clement only a few steps off. He followed her to the door, she took the holy water from his hand, and they went out together.
It was now broad daylight, but the sky was veiled with gray clouds, a violent wind swept before it the snow that covered the ground, and when they issued into the street they were met by a perfect whirlwind of driving snow which Fleurange was scarcely able to withstand. Clement supported her, then retained her arm, and they walked on for some time without speaking. He had dreaded this interview in spite of himself, and now rallied all his strength to listen calmly to what she was about to say. But, at last, as she remained silent, he spoke first:
“You were ill last evening, Gabrielle. I was far from expecting to find you at church so early in such severe weather.”
“Ill?” replied Fleurange. “No; I was not ill, but suffering from a great shock, as you know, do you not, Clement?”
“Yes, Gabrielle, I know it.”
These few words broke down the barrier. What had haunted Clement’s thoughts now proved to be an actual reality; but energetic natures prefer the most terrible realities to vague apprehensions, and even to vague hopes, and he felt his courage rise in proportion as self‐abnegation became more completely rooted in his soul. After a moment’s silence, he said:
“Gabrielle, why have you not treated me of late with the same confidence you once showed me?”
She replied without any hesitation: “Because I made a resolution never to mention him—I made it,” she continued, without noticing the slight start Clement was unable to repress, “because I wished to forget him. It was therefore better for me to be reserved even with Hilda—even with you, Clement. But now,” continued she, with a kind of exaltation in which grief and joy were confounded, “now I think of that no longer. It seems as if a new life had commenced for him and for me. And yet we are separated, as it were, by death. But death breaks down barriers, and reunites, too. What shall I say, Clement? I seem nearer to him to‐day than yesterday, and in spite of myself (for I am well aware it is an illusion) I feel I shall be able to serve him in some way or other. At all events, I no longer have any motive for concealing my feelings, and to throw off this restraint is in itself a comfort.”
Clement listened without interrupting her. Each word gave him a sharp pang, but he steeled himself, somewhat as one does to the clash of arms and the firing of cannon till there is not even a movement of the eyelids to betray the fear of death or the possibility of being wounded. As to the illusion she spoke of, it was the last dream of sorrow and love. He would not try to dispel it.
“Let us hope, my dear cousin,” said he in a calm tone. “So many unforeseen circumstances may occur during a trial like that about to commence! There is no reason to despair.—Whatever may happen,” added he, as they approached the house, “promise me, Gabrielle, from this time forth, to show the same confidence in me you once did—a confidence which will induce you to tell me everything, and rely on me under all circumstances. You once made me such a promise: have you forgotten it?”
“No, Clement, and I now renew it. You are my best friend, as I once told you. My opinion has not changed.”
Yes, she had said so. He had forgotten neither the day nor the spot, and his heart throbbed at the remembrance! Though he was but little more than twenty years of age, and the honeysuckle he still preserved in memory of that hour was scarcely withered, a long life seemed to have intervened since they exchanged nearly the same words.
But when they separated with a pressure of the hand at the end of the conversation, on that gloomy winter morning, Clement was left with a less painful impression than that which came over him on the banks of the Neckar, when, in the pale light of the moon, he had so sudden and fatal a revelation from the expression of her eyes and the tone of her voice. She had told him nothing to‐day he did not know before. Instead of happiness, a vague perspective of devotedness opened before him. But even this was something to live for.
The following days passed without any new incident. The necessity of concealing their preoccupation from the professor obliged them all to make an effort which was beneficial especially to Fleurange, who remained faithful to her ordinary duties, passing as much time as usual beside her uncle’s arm‐chair, and with Mademoiselle Josephine and her poor protégées. But a feverish anxiety was sometimes apparent in her movements and in the troubled expression of her eyes when she went daily at the regular hour to ask Hansfelt what was in the newspapers. For more than a week, however, there was nothing new either to comfort her or to increase her sorrow. Clement had returned to Frankfort, and the days dragged along with deep and silent anguish. One morning, when least looked for, he suddenly appeared with unexpected news: the Princess Catherine was at Frankfort, and would be at Heidelberg the following day!
Fleurange trembled.—The Princess Catherine!—All the remembrances connected with that name revived with an intensity that for a moment overpowered her. She felt incapable of uttering a word.—“Coming here?” she said at length. “To Heidelberg? What for? What can bring her here? How do you know? Who told you? Oh! tell me everything, and at once, Clement!”
Clement implored her to be calm, and she became so by degrees while he related what he had learned the night before from the Princess Catherine herself. At her arrival at Frankfort, she was informed by M. Waldheim, her banker, that young Dornthal was in the city, and she begged him to call on her. Clement complied, but not without emotion, with the wish of Count George’s mother, and found her fearfully prostrated with grief and illness. He had, however, a long conversation with her, the substance of which was that, leaving Florence as soon as she learned the fatal news, she travelled night and day till she reached Paris, where she fell ill. After four days, however, she resumed her journey, but when she arrived at Frankfort the physician declared her utterly incapable of continuing it, and especially of enduring the increasing severity of the weather in proportion as she approached St. Petersburg. Able to go no further, she resolved at least to keep on as far as Heidelberg, hoping the care of a young physician of that city, since and even then very celebrated, would speedily enable her to resume her sad journey.
“I shall make the effort,” said the princess, “for I wish to live. I wish to go to him, if possible. I long to behold him once more! I hope much from Dr. Ch——’s attendance, as well as your cousin Gabrielle’s. I depend on her, tell her so. Tell her,” added she, weeping, “that I long to see her again, and beg her to come to me as soon as I arrive at Heidelberg.”
“And she will be here to‐morrow?” said Fleurange, much affected.
“Yes, towards night. I am going to notify the physician, and have the best apartments in the city prepared for her. Though she did not say so, I am sure, Gabrielle, she expects to meet you at her arrival.”
Fleurange merely replied she would be there, but her heart beat with a joy she thought she could never feel again. To behold George’s mother once more, and at such a time! Was it not like catching a glimpse of him? She would be sure of constantly hearing his name—of constant and direct news respecting him—in a word, this was the realization of a secret wish she had not dared utter.
The next day, a long time before the appointed hour, Fleurange was in the room prepared for the princess, arranging the furniture in the way she knew would suit her, trying to give everything a cheerful aspect, to lessen the sadness of the poor traveller, who, towards the close of this long day, at length arrived exhausted with fatigue, and fell sobbing into the young girl’s arms.
The time when she feared no other danger for her son than Gabrielle’s presence was forgotten. The impressions of the moment always overruled all others, and her present troubles were, besides, well calculated to absorb every thought. Therefore, in meeting her young protégée she only thought of the pleasure of seeing her again, of the comfort to be derived from her care and presence at a time when they were most needed, and everything except her first fancy for Fleurange seemed to be effaced from her memory.
XLIII.
A subdued light veiled every object. A bright fire sparkled in the small fireplace, only intended to be ornamental, as the room was otherwise heated by a stove. The princess was, as we have already seen her, reclining on a canapé sheltered by a large screen. Her elbow rested on a small table loaded with the various objects she always carried with her; her feet were covered with a large shawl, and near her sat Fleurange on a stool in the old familiar attitude.
There was a great change, however. They no longer resorted to reading as they once did, or followed the lead of the princess’ thoughts, generally more or less frivolous. One subject alone absorbed every faculty—a subject which she who listened with such ardent interest was still less weary of than herself.
To this the afflicted mother continually came back, sometimes with agitation, sometimes with a dull despair, but always with profound grief, heart‐rending to her whose sorrow equalled her own.
It was the first time the Princess Catherine had ever been subdued by misfortune. Subdued, but not changed, she not only instinctively retained all her elegant habits, but her passionate nature was unchanged, and burst forth into recriminations against all whom she thought implicated in her son’s misfortunes. This enabled her to pity, without blaming, him. It was one of these occasions Fleurange heard her exclaim that “Fabiano Dini was his evil genius!” and she shuddered in recalling her presentiment, so soon and so fatally justified.
“Yes,” said the princess during one of their conversations, “it was he—it was that Fabiano Dini who brought him in contact with that reprobate of a Lasko!”
And then she told the young girl about that person whose tragical end did not seem to have sufficiently expiated all the evil he had done her son—about his arrival at Florence, the ascendency he acquired over George, and the skill and promptness with which he took advantage of all his weak points. She had been incredulous at first, notwithstanding Adelardi’s warnings—alas! too long, too foolishly incredulous! But her fears once roused, how much had she not suffered! What efforts had she not made! Alas! but in vain!
“He was always so—that dear, unfortunate child! No prudence, no fear of danger, ever stopped him on the very brink where his inclinations led him. Oh! those wretches! they soon discovered his imprudence, his generosity, and his courage! And now,” she exclaimed, rising from her pillow, while her thick but somewhat gray hair fell over her shoulders in unusual disorder, “can he possibly be confounded with them? Oh! if I could only get well, only strong enough to start, to make the journey, to see the young empress even but once, I should obtain his pardon, I am sure!”
Then she fell back exhausted, murmuring as she wrung her hands: “And Vera!—Vera absent from St. Petersburg at such a time! She was expected there, but who knows if she may not arrive too late? And above all, who knows but she will be his worst enemy, and if he has not foolishly poisoned the very source whence he might now derive safety?”
These words, which perhaps might have caused fresh trouble, were not heard by her to whom they were addressed. Fleurange had softly left the princess’ side as she laid her weary head on her pillow, and was at the other end of the room preparing a soothing draught which the poor invalid mechanically took from her hand from hour to hour without obtaining the relief of a moment’s sleep. This overpowering excitement, which resisted every remedy, was somewhat soothed at the arrival of one of the Marquis Adelardi’s frequent letters. He was still at St. Petersburg, and kept her accurately informed of all that happened, sometimes reviving her hopes, and again confirming her fears. But hitherto he had not succeeded in learning anything certain as to the fate reserved for his friend. Sometimes, therefore, after eagerly reading these letters, she threw them into the fire with despair.
So much agitation at length brought on a high fever, and the princess had been confined to her bed several days, when one morning another letter arrived from St. Petersburg. Fleurange softly approached the bedside, and perceived the invalid was fast asleep. It was important this brief moment of repose should not be disturbed, and, besides, the physician had requested, some days previous, that no letter should be given her till it had been read, for fear she might learn some distressing news before she was prepared—as it was easy to foresee might happen. Fleurange promised to read the letters first, and with the less scruple that for more than a week she had been obliged to read them to the princess, who was too worn out to do so herself.
She now left her to the care of the faithful Barbara, and went into the salon, where, carefully closing the door, she broke the seal of the letter in her hands, which was also from the Marquis Adelardi. “At last,” he wrote, “I think I can certainly reassure you as to the most terrible of the events that seemed possible. The extreme rigor of the law will only be enforced against the acknowledged leaders of the conspiracy—four or five in number. All the others, among whom is George, will incur, alas! a terrible penalty, but we must be thankful not to look forward to one more frightful—I say we, my dear unfortunate friend, for, as to him, I fear this sentence will produce a contrary effect. I am persuaded he will consider it a thousand times more dreadful than the other.
“Since I last wrote you, through the intervention of one of the ambassadors, I have been allowed the privilege of entering the fortress where George is confined, and having a private interview with him. Pardon has been offered him if he will reveal the names of some of his accomplices. You will not be surprised at his refusing. But the numerous proofs of their criminal projects, which have been set before him in order to wrest some acknowledgment from him, have convinced him of the nature of the enterprise in which he risked his honor and life. The effect of this discovery has been to plunge him in the deepest dejection, and his only fear now is that his life may be spared.
“ ‘I merit death for my folly, Adelardi,’ said he: ‘you were right in warning me there would be no consolation in such a reflection at the extremity I am now in. But I shall submit to my fate without weakness, as you do me the honor to believe, I hope. I do not wish, however, to appear more courageous than I am, and if, instead of death, I am sentenced to drag out the life of a criminal in Siberia, I do not know what my despair might lead me to do.’
“As much precaution therefore must be taken in informing him of the mitigation of his punishment, as in announcing to others the severity of theirs. Before that time, I hope to obtain entrance again.
“Meanwhile I have learned with as much admiration as surprise that several who are doomed to the same punishment as he are to have an unexpected and unparalleled consolation. Their wives—their admirable and heroic wives—have begged to be allowed to share their fate, and at this very moment several ladies whom you know, young, beautiful, and accomplished, are preparing to follow their husbands to Siberia by inuring themselves to the rigor of the season. These unfortunate men, degraded from the nobility, deprived of their wealth, and stripped of everything in the world, cannot be deprived of the affection of these self‐sacrificing creatures whose noble devotedness nothing daunts. I confess this amazes and confuses me, for I never before realized, or even suspected, how much heroism and generosity there is in the heart of a woman!”—
Fleurange’s own heart throbbed so violently she was unable to continue the letter. With overflowing eyes she was still dwelling on the page she had just finished—reading it over and over—when she was told the princess was awake, and wished to know if there was a letter for her. For some days her mind had been so full of terrible anticipations about the final result as sometimes to produce fits of delirium. When, therefore, the contents of this letter were communicated to her, she felt an unexpected—an unhoped‐ for relief. His life—George’s life!—would be spared! There was yet time for her to effect something. She began to hope everything from the future, and became calmer than she had been for a long time. She was even to get up in the evening. She conversed, she spoke eagerly of her plans, her hopes, all she would do to soften her son’s exile, and the efforts she would make to abridge it; but what was extraordinary, Fleurange seemed absent‐minded and made scarcely any reply.
About nine o’clock Julian or Clement always came to accompany her back to Rosenheim—a half‐hour’s walk from the princess’ house, which was at the other end of the city. On this occasion, when she was sent for, she was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not notice which of the two was with her. It was starlight, but very cold, and her hair was blown about by the wind from beneath her little velvet hat.
“Draw your hood up, Gabrielle; it has not been so cold this winter.”
It was Clement’s voice which suddenly roused her from her reverie.
“Is it you, Clement?—Excuse me, I did not know whether I was with you or Julian.”
He gently attempted to raise her hood.
“No, no!” she said earnestly. “Let me breathe the air. Though it is scarcely more than two years since I saw snow for the first time in my life, I am not afraid of the cold. I could if necessary endure far more severe weather than this.—There!” And she took off her hat and walked some steps with her head completely exposed to the frosty night air. “You know,” she continued, with an animation that singularly contrasted with her previous silence—“you know, during the Russian campaign, those who endured the cold best were the Neapolitan soldiers. Well, like them, I have brought a supply of sunshine from the South which much harder frosts than this could not exhaust!”
Nevertheless, at Clement’s renewed entreaties, she laughingly put on her hat, and they walked quickly along, leaving scarcely a trace of their steps on the hard snow, deep as it was.
Her liveliness that evening was strange! Clement noticed it without comprehending the cause. Her cheerful tone and charming smile, instead of delighting him as usual, now made him inexpressibly uneasy, and sadder than ever!
XLIV.
As is often the case with people of violent and impressionable natures, the Princess Catherine seldom saw things long in the same light. Though her thoughts were sorrowfully fastened on one subject in consequence of the tragical events that so suddenly threw a dark, ominous veil over a life hitherto so smiling, she found means of giving a thousand different shades to her misfortune, and it was not always easy to follow her in the fitful turns of her grief. What consoled her one day was a source of irritation the next: what she affirmed in the morning, she vehemently denied in the evening. Sometimes she expressed her fears on purpose that they might be opposed; at other times, she burst into tears at the slightest contradiction, and, if they endeavored to reassure her, she accused them of cruelty and indifference to her troubles.
In consequence of one of these sudden fluctuations, the day following the arrival of the Marquis Adelardi’s letter which had seemed so consoling, Fleurange, at the hour of her usual visit, found her abandoned to the deepest dejection. Everything had assumed a new aspect, or perhaps it would be more just to say that everything now wore the terrible aspect of truth. And was it really enough that her idolized son was delivered from death? Was not the prospect she now dwelt on almost as fearful to bear? He—George!—her son!—in her eyes the perfect model of manly beauty, elegance, and nobleness of character, clad in the frightful garb of a criminal!—and going alone amid that wretched crowd to that dreary region, where the hardest and most humiliating labor awaited him, without even the consoling voice of a friend to encourage him, to take him by the hand, to love him, and to tell him so!
“Oh!” she exclaimed, in that accent which is as different from every other, as the grief of a mother differs from every other grief—“oh! feeble, ill, and exhausted as I am, why cannot I accompany him? It really seems to me, Gabrielle, if I were allowed, I should find strength, I should have the courage to go. I would start, I would go and share his wretched existence, I would participate in all the severities of so frightful a life, and by dint of affection I would make it endurable for him!”
This energetic cry of disinterested affection—its evident sincerity—was so rare a thing with the princess that it was the more affecting. Pale, silent, and motionless before her, Fleurange listened with an emotion that prevented her uttering the words that hung on her trembling lips. The poor princess was sobbing aloud, with both hands to her face, apparently exhausted by her own vehemence, when Fleurange, suddenly kneeling beside her, said in a low tone:
“Do you remember, princess, the promise you exacted from your son, one evening?”
The princess raised her head with surprise and a shade of resentment: “What do you mean? Do you wish to reproach me at such a time? The moment is well chosen, but such a thing from you, Gabrielle, surprises me!”
“Reproach you!” cried Fleurange. “No, I did not think of such a thing. It was a request, a petition, or, rather, it was a question I wished to ask you.”
“A question!” The princess looked at Fleurange. She was struck by the expression of her countenance, and interest, mingled with surprise, roused her from her dejection. What request was she going to make in so extraordinary a manner? And why did she look so determined, and speak in so supplicating a tone?
“Go on, speak, ask whatever you wish, Gabrielle.”
“Well, first let me tell you this: The eve of my departure from Florence, while descending from San Miniato with him—with Count George, he asked if I would be his wife, adding he was sure of obtaining your consent.”
“Why recall all these remembrances, Gabrielle? I thought you generous, but you are without mercy!”
Fleurange went on as if she did not hear: “I replied that I would never listen to him, unless, by some unforeseen circumstance impossible to conceive, his mother—you, princess—would gladly consent to receive me as a daughter.” She stopped a moment, as if too agitated to continue.
“What are you aiming at?” said the princess.
“I beg you to listen to me, princess. Here is my question: When this terrible sentence is pronounced, when Count George de Walden is degraded from his rank, deprived of his wealth, and even of his name (you shudder, alas! and I also at the thought)—but to return—when that day comes, if he asks the consent he promised you to wait for, will you grant it?”
The princess looked at her with astonishment, without appearing to comprehend her.
“Will you allow me to tell him you have consented? Will you on that day tell me you are willing I should become your daughter?”
The princess began to catch at her meaning, but she was too stupefied to reply.
“Ah! say the word, princess,” continued Fleurange, her face expressing both angelic tenderness and a more than feminine courage, “say it, and I will start. I will be at St. Petersburg before his sentence is pronounced, and when he comes out of his dungeon I will be there, and before he departs for the place of his exile a tie shall unite us that will permit me to accompany him and share all its severity!”—She continued in faltering tones: “And if ever the tenderness of a mother, the care of a sister, or the love of a wife, were able to alleviate misfortune, my heart shall have the combined power of these various affections.”
We are aware that, when certain chords were touched in the princess’ heart, they vibrated strongly, and made her for a moment forget herself. But never, under any circumstances of her life, had she felt an emotion equal to that now caused by Fleurange’s words and accents. She looked at her a moment in silence while great tears rolled down her cheeks, then, opening her arms and pressing the young girl passionately to her heart, she covered her forehead and eyes with kisses, repeating at intervals with a voice broken by sobs: “Yes, yes, Gabrielle, be my daughter: I consent with joy—with gratitude. I give you now my consent and a mother’s blessing!”—
The Poor Ploughman.
A true worker and a good was he, Living in peace and perfect charity; God loved he, best, and that with alle his herte, At alle times, were it gain or smart; And then his neighbour right as himselve. He wolde thresh, and thereto dyke and delve For Christe’s sake, for every poor wight Withouten hire, if it lay in his might. His tithes paid he full fair and well, Both of his proper work, and his cattel.—S. Anselm.
A Dark Chapter In English History.(103)
One of the most gratifying features of the literature of the present, and one that in some measure compensates us for the evils produced by the many worthless books that are still allowed to issue from the press, is its tendency by close investigation and collation to vindicate the truth of modern history, and especially of that portion of it directly or indirectly relating to the XVIth century. Gradually, but most effectually, the inventions and gross calumnies of the post‐Reformation writers are being dissipated, and the meretricious grandeur with which the characters and acts of the anti‐Catholic sovereigns, statesmen, and generals of that eventful period were designedly clothed, has been stripped off, revealing to their descendants the deformity and impiety of the heroes of the Reformation. Whether we turn to England or Germany, Edinburgh or Geneva, we find the men and women who in our own school‐boy days we were urged to regard as patterns of patriotism and morality, become under the scrutiny of living historiographers the veriest counterfeits—the prey of passion and the untiring enemies of every principle of government and religion which we are bound to respect. Yet this is what, logically, we might have anticipated. A bad cause needs to be sustained by vicious instruments; but so closely and consistently has the web of falsehood been woven around the true designs and actions of the reformers that it required the labor of many skilful and patient hands to undo the meshes and reduce the fabric, so dexterously spun, to its original elements. This is peculiarly difficult with the works of English historians and biographers of the past three centuries, whose unanimity in magnifying the virtues and screening the crimes of their public men is so remarkable as to utterly destroy the value of their works as authorities among people of other nations. The beastly vices of the eighth Henry were, of course, so glaring that they could neither be denied nor extenuated; but who would expect to find that his worthy daughter Elizabeth, the “virgin queen” and Gloriana, before whose benign altar even Shakespeare offered the incense of his flattery, should at this remote period be discovered to be: as a woman ugly, ill‐ tempered, and unchaste, and as a ruler fickle, cruel, cold‐blooded, and thoroughly despotic. James I., the head of a long line of gallant princes, to whom his pliant prelates attributed “divine illumination,” and subsequent historians praised for his learning and wit, we at length know to have been a miser and a charlatan, as deformed in mind as he was uncouth in person. “His cowardice,” says his compatriot and co‐religionist Macaulay, “his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision” to his English subjects. The unscrupulous Northampton and the subtle Cecil, the trusted ministers of both sovereigns, who had long been regarded as the unswerving champions of English independence and the bulwark of Protestant ascendency, are now proved to have been all along the paid tools of Catholic Spain, with whose ill‐gotten gold their lofty palaces were built and their luxurious wants regularly supplied.(104) The chivalrous and romantic Raleigh of other days, examined by the inexorable scrutiny of the XIXth century, turns out a spy in the pay of a foreign and by no means friendly power; the philosophic Bacon, a common peculator; and Coke, the father of English common law, a falsifier of sworn evidence and a concocter of legal conspiracies against the liberties of his countrymen. Yet these were the leading personages, who, with many others equally corrupt, in their day and generation swayed the destinies of England, desolated the church of God, originated or abetted plots and schemes, at home and abroad, for the spoliation and extermination of the professors of the ancient faith.
This tardy measure of historical justice is partly due to the appearance in different parts of Europe of important public and private documents and correspondence, which have shamed British Protestant authors into something like truthfulness, but principally to the revival of Catholicity in England, which has been the means of drawing out a mass of original and reliable information, that had long been allowed to slumber in the dark closets of a few noble families or in inaccessible libraries during the gloomy era of persecution and proscription. Our readers are already familiar with the articles which formerly appeared in these columns on the long‐unsettled and vexed question of the character of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the justice or injustice of her treatment by Elizabeth—contributions to current literature which in their collective form have found their way among the literati of all nations, and, from their admirable cogency of argument and conscientious appeals to contemporary authorities, have at length cleared away from the character of that ill‐starred lady the foul aspersions and unexampled obloquy heaped on it by the minions of the English sovereign.
Some more recent publications have thrown additional light on the tragic incidents of her reign and of that of her successor James, which, as far as they relate to the Catholics of Great Britain, are full of freshness and interest. Chief among them is the Life of Father John Gerard, for many years a Jesuit missionary in England under both rulers, with his account of the celebrated Gunpowder Plot, written soon after the failure of that conspiracy. Many of the participants in the plot were personally known to him, and he himself was accused of having taken an active part in its formation; but, though his name has been frequently mentioned in connection with it and his manuscript narrative more or less correctly quoted, it remained for a member of his Order, the Rev. John Morris, the able editor of the book before us, to present to the world for the first time the only complete and accurate history of an event which has been the fruitful subject of misrepresentation and comment by every writer on English history for the last two hundred years.
Few incidents of modern times can be said to have provoked more hostility to the church and the Jesuit Order than the Gunpowder Plot, few have been so dexterously used by the enemies of Catholicity to poison the public mind against the priesthood, and none the details of which are so little understood even at the present day by friends and foes. The 5th of November, the anniversary of its discovery, has long been a gala‐day with the more ignorant of the British populace; Protestant writers, divines, and politicians of the lower sort are not yet tired of alluding to the time when, as they are wont to allege, the Catholics by one fell swoop attempted to destroy king, lords, and commons; and even Lingard and Tiernay, with the very best intentions and after considerable examination of authorities, give a partial assent to the old popular conviction that, in some way or another, the Jesuits were at the bottom of the diabolical scheme, which in reality was the creation of a handful of desperate laymen. In fact, the former, with a penetration totally at variance with his general character, alludes to the taking of the oath of secrecy by Catesby and his companions in terms that would lead any superficial reader to adopt this absurd hypothesis. “All five,” he says, “having previously sworn each other to secrecy, received in confirmation of their oath the sacrament at the hands of the Jesuit missionary Father Gerard.”(105) It is true that in a subsequent edition of his History he endeavored to explain away, but in a very unsatisfactory manner, the implication of guilty knowledge on the part of Gerard; but, whether from an imperfect acquaintance with the writings of that priest, then unpublished, or from that spirit of timidity which too often characterized the conduct of the English Catholics of the last generation, his refutation is not of that full and hearty nature which might be expected from so clear and critical a scholar.
What Dr. Lingard was unwilling or unable to undertake may now, in view of more complete evidence, be accomplished by persons of lesser erudition, who, untrammelled by national partiality, are not alarmed at popular clamor or unwilling to disturb time‐honored but unfounded historical fallacies. We design, therefore, in this article to prove:
1. That the Gunpowder Plot was formed and carried out to its disastrous end by not more than a dozen desperate men, the victims of unrelenting persecution for conscience’ sake.
2. That the Catholic body in England, lay and clerical, till its discovery, neither were aware of its existence, approved of its aims, nor rendered any assistance to its projectors.
3. That no priest, Jesuit or other, was concerned in its formation, or afforded it any encouragement at any time; and that of all the seculars and regulars in the kingdom but two were ever aware of its existence, and that to them the knowledge came under the seal of confession and could not be revealed.
4. That those two used every possible effort to dissuade the conspirators from their design, and denounced on every occasion all violent attempts to redress the wrongs under which the Catholics suffered.
The state of England at the beginning of the XVIIth century, when James of Scotland was called upon to ascend the throne of his mother’s murderer, was deplorable in the extreme. Less than half a century had sufficed to change entirely the whole face of the country socially and morally, and the once “merrie” people were divided into two hostile camps, one the army of plunder and persecution, the other the cowering, dissatisfied, and impoverished masses. Many were yet alive who recollected with sorrow the time when the cross gleamed on the spires of a thousand churches, when the solemn sacrifice was offered up on myriads of altars, when the poor and afflicted easily found food and shelter at the numerous convents and abbeys that dotted the land of S. Augustine, and the young and the aged, the weak woman and the strong man, together bowed their knees in reverence before the statues of the “blessed among women” and other saints. Now all was reformed away—changed not with the consent of the people nor by the argument or eloquence of the preacher, but by the brute force and cunning fraud of a corrupt sovereign, a dissolute and avaricious court, and, partially at least, by a venal and cowardly episcopate. The churches no longer resounded from morning till night with the solemn sacred chants, the monasteries were in ruins or the scenes of impious revelry, the festivals of the church were abolished, and the peasantry, formerly accustomed to look forward to them as days of rest from hard toil and occasions of innocent enjoyment, were sullen and discontented. Those who had shared in the ecclesiastical plunder spent their time in the metropolis in wild extravagance, while the gentry, most of whom still adhered secretly to the faith, remained at home, the prey of anxiety and the tax‐gatherer. The masses were fast degenerating into that state of stolid ignorance and unbelief from which all subsequent legislation has failed to raise them. The laws of Elizabeth aimed at the suppression of all outward manifestation of Catholicity and the ultimate protestantizing of the nation; those of James, at the utter extirpation of the Catholics themselves.
As early as A.D. 1559, the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, a law was passed compelling every person holding office, either temporal or spiritual, under the crown, to take an oath of allegiance declaring the queen the supreme head of the church. The penalty for refusing this oath was forfeiture of goods and imprisonment, and a persistence in such refusal, death. Whoever affirmed the spiritual supremacy of the pope was declared guilty of treason; penalty, confiscation and death. Attendance at Mass was to be punished by perpetual imprisonment, and non‐attendance at Protestant service by a weekly fine. In the fifth year of her reign, any aider or abettor of such offenders was for the first offence to be fined and imprisoned for life, for the second to suffer death. Any clergyman celebrating Mass or refusing to observe the regulations of the Book of Common Prayer forfeited offices, goods, and liberty. In the thirteenth year, introducing into the kingdom a bull or other instrument of the pope was treason, penalty death; abetting the same, death; acting under such authority, death; introducing, wearing, or having in his or her possession an Agnus Dei, cross, etc., confiscation and perpetual imprisonment; and for leaving the kingdom without permission, forfeiture of lands and personal estate. In the twenty‐third year, any person granting absolution from sin in the name of the “Roman Church,” or receiving the same, their aiders, etc., was declared guilty of treason, penalty death; and for not disclosing knowledge of such offenders, confiscation and imprisonment. In the twenty‐ninth year, the tax for non‐ attendance at Protestant service was increased to £20 per lunar month, or forfeiture of two‐thirds of all lands and goods; and for keeping a schoolmaster or tutor, other than a Protestant, a fine of £10 per month was imposed, together with imprisonment at pleasure. By the statutes of the 21st, 27th, and 28th Elizabeth, every priest, Jesuit, or other ecclesiastic ordained out of the realm was obliged forthwith to leave the kingdom, and in case of his return he was to suffer death; those who received or harbored him were subject to a like punishment. Those being educated abroad were required to return home, and after neglect to do so, upon their being found in the kingdom, were to be put to death. For contributing money for colleges abroad and for sending students there, fine and imprisonment for life were considered adequate punishments; but by the 25th chapter of Elizabeth, all who persisted in refusing attendance on Protestant worship were liable to be transported for life, and if they evaded the statute they were liable to suffer death.(106)
We see, therefore, by this comprehensive penal code that every office under the crown was reserved as a bribe to recreant Catholics; that private tutors were commanded to teach nothing but the new heresy in Catholic families, while those who objected to such method of instruction could neither send their children abroad nor contribute to the support of those already there. All priests were obliged to take the oath of supremacy and observe the Book of Common Prayer; such as did not were to be banished, and if they returned were to be executed forthwith. No priest could, of course, be ordained at home, and if ordained abroad he was to be hanged whenever caught, without delay. If one of the laity attended Mass or wore the image of his crucified Redeemer, he was to be imprisoned for life; if he did not attend Protestant service, he was to be fined enormously; if he had no money to pay the fine, he might be banished for ever from his home and country, and if he endeavored to conceal himself at home his career was to be ended by the hangman.
Nor must it to be supposed that these sanguinary statutes, affecting the rights and liberties of at least one‐half of the population, were nothing but the splenetic fits of a jealous and tyrannical bigot or mere idle threats to frighten a half‐civilized horde. On the contrary, we have abundant facts to prove that they were thoroughly and cruelly enforced, and that the sufferers were principally the better class of the community. In 1573, the Rev. Thomas Woodhouse was drawn, half‐hanged, and then quartered alive in the usual way at Tyburn, for having denied the queen’s supremacy. Two years later, Father Cuthbert Mayne was executed with similar barbarity in Cornwall for having in his possession a copy of a Jubilee and for saying Mass in the house of a Mr. Teagian; the latter, with fifteen others, for being present on the occasion, was imprisoned for life. In 1577, Mr. Jenks was tried and convicted at Oxford for exposing some Catholic books for sale, and about this time we are informed the prisons were so full of “recusants” that a pestilence broke out and large numbers of the inmates perished. Among the sufferers in 1578 we find the names of Father Nelson and a Mr. Sherwood, who were hanged and quartered solely for being recusants. In 1582, Fathers Campion (the celebrated Jesuit missionary), Sherwin, and Briant, after the mockery of a trial, were executed in London, and in May of the year following no less than seven other priests suffered death at Tyburn. Thus nearly every year supplied its quota to the martyrology of the church in England, not to speak of the nameless thousands who died in confinement by the quick but silent process of torture and pestilence, or abroad, broken‐hearted and neglected. During the fourteen years succeeding the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, when fanaticism was rampant and bigotry held full sway in the councils of Elizabeth, sixty‐one clergymen, forty‐seven laymen, and two gentlewomen expiated their offence of being Catholics by a horrible and ignominious public death; while, according to the records still extant, the total number of the “good Queen Bess’” ecclesiastical victims amounted to the handsome number of one hundred and twenty‐three, including one hundred and thirteen seculars, eight Jesuits, one friar, and one monk, besides innumerable laymen in whose veins flowed the best blood of the land.
The rack and the thumb‐screw almost invariably preceded the half‐hanging and disembowelling, so that many looked upon the gallows as a welcome relief from worse sufferings. Priests were tortured to compel them to disclose the names of their penitents, and laymen to force them into the betrayal of their pastors. Father Campion was four times racked, and then secretly brought before the queen to discuss theology with that model Supreme Head of the Church; while others like Nichols found it more convenient to swear to all their tormentors required, for, as that recreant shepherd naïvely says in his Apology, “it is not, I assure you, a pleasant thing to be stretched on the rack till the body becomes almost two feet longer than nature made it.” Father Gerard, who speaks from personal experience, has left us in his Memoirs the following account of this most effectual method of extorting confessions in the glorious reign of that queen to which so many of our modern writers refer with pride and congratulation:
“Then they led me to a great upright beam, or pillar of wood, which was one of the supports of this vast crypt. At the summit of this column were fixed certain iron staples for supporting weights. Here they placed on my wrists manacles of iron, and ordered me to mount upon two or three wicker steps; then raising my arms they inserted an iron bar through the rings of the manacles, and then through the staples in the pillar, putting a pin through the bar so that it could not slip. My arms being thus fixed above my head, they withdrew those wicker steps I spoke of, one by one, from my feet, so that I hung by my hands and arms. The tips of my toes, however, still touched the ground; so they dug away the ground beneath, as they could not raise me higher, for they had suspended me from the topmost staples in the pillar. Thus hanging by my wrists I began to pray, while those gentlemen standing around me asked again if I was willing to confess. I replied, ‘I neither can nor will.’ But so terrible a pain began to oppress me that I was scarcely able to speak the words. The worst pain was in my breast and belly, my arms and hands. It seemed to me that all the blood in my body rushed up my arms into my hands, and I was under the impression at the time that the blood actually burst forth from my fingers and the back of my hands. This was, however, a mistake, the sensation was caused by the swelling of the flesh over the iron that bound it.... I had hung this way till after one of the clock, as I think, when I fainted.”(107)
It must not be supposed, however, that the zeal of the queen’s ministers was satisfied with these harsh measures against the clergy and the more prominent delinquents. All Catholics were put beyond the pale of the law. The country swarmed with spies and informers. Lists were accurately made out and carefully preserved of the recusants who owned property of any sort, and every possible method of espionage was adopted to detect them in the slightest infraction of the bloody code. Domiciliary visits became the order of the day, or rather of the night, for that was the time usually chosen by the pursuivants. Doors were broken open, closets ransacked, bedrooms of women and invalids invaded without ceremony; and frequently, the previous movements having been properly concerted, whole families were simultaneously borne off to prison, there to be detained without the least warrant of law for months and years. The tax of £260 annually, equal to at least five thousand dollars at the present day, was not only vigorously enforced, but upon the faintest rumor of a foreign invasion or domestic broil, special imposts were laid on the remaining property of the Catholics, and the owners were carried to the nearest dungeon till the affair blew over, when they were as unceremoniously dismissed until the next occasion arose for plunder and personal revenge.
Thus was the work of reformation and evangelization urged briskly forward in free England, and she was fast becoming converted and enlightened. Torture, death, and confiscation dogged the steps of the unhappy recusant who dare to profess, even in the privacy of his house, the faith of his fathers for ten centuries—that religion which had raised his ancestors from barbarism, freed him from the thraldom of feudalism, and given him Magna Charta, trial by jury, and representative government. The crown lawyers, like Coke, Stanhope, and Bacon, laid the plans, pious bishops like those of London, Ely, and Winchester, leaving their flocks to the devouring Puritan wolves, constituted themselves a sort of episcopal sheriffalty, and vied with each other in their ardor for the spread of the Gospel and their love for the spoils of the Papists. Their leader in all this was a vulgar wretch named Topcliffe, whose audacity, profanity, and lewdness made him the terror of men and the abhorrence of women, but whose usefulness was so apparent that he was constantly the object of government favors and clerical eulogy.
But human hate and diabolical ingenuity, it was thought, could not last for ever. On the 24th of March, A.D. 1603, Elizabeth died, to the last the prey of vain desires and unsatisfied ambition. For weeks before her decease she was haunted by the phantoms of her innumerable crimes, and so terrified at the approach of death that she refused to lie in her bed or to receive any sustenance from her usual attendants. The courts of Europe, to which she had ever been an object of dislike and fear, could ill conceal their pleasure at the event, but millions of her subjects, the impoverished, the widowed, and the orphaned, made desolate by her despotic cruelty, in silence execrated her memory.
The Catholics generally found consolation in the thought of her successor, and, with that unqualified confidence in the house of Stuart, which now seems like fatality, they began to hope for better days under his sway. Was he not, they asked each other, the son of Elizabeth’s royal victim, and could he be unmindful of the affection with which the Catholics of the three kingdoms ever regarded his mother? Had he not before he ever put foot in England authorized Father Watson to promise in his name justice and protection, and did not Percy, the agent and kinsman of the great Duke of Northumberland, assure his friends, on the strength of the royal word solemnly pledged, that the days of persecution were at an end? Poor deluded people, they little knew how much deceit lay in the heart of him whom the Protestant lord primate rather blasphemously averred “the like had not been since the time of Christ.” He had scarcely put on the crown when the Catholics discovered that they had neither mercy nor justice to expect from him. Once secure in the support of the Protestant party, he turned a deaf ear to their complaints, and even had the mendacity to deny his own word of honor, giving as a reason “that, since Protestants had so generally received and proclaimed him king, he had now no need of Papists.” Being by nature intolerant, he oppressed the Puritans, by whom he had been trained, to please the Episcopalians, and to gratify both he ground the Catholics into dust; arrests for recusancy multiplied, illegal visitations became more frequent, and if possible more annoying, the arrears of the monthly tax which he at first pretended to remit were demanded, and the amount, already enormous, was even increased so as to satisfy the ever‐increasing rapacity of his pauper courtiers who had followed him into England. In place and out of it, he made the most violent attacks on the faith of his dead mother and of at least one‐half of his English subjects, and his remarks were taken up and repeated from every Protestant pulpit and in every conventicle throughout the length and breadth of the land, till the hopes of the Catholics grew fainter and fainter, and finally expired. Unlike Elizabeth, he was not only expected to live a long life, but his progeny would succeed him, the heirs of his authority and cruelty; and being constitutionally a coward and an intriguer, he was bent on making peace with foreign powers, and thus cutting off all sympathy which the Catholic sovereigns might have felt it their interest to express for their suffering co‐religionists in Great Britain.
Though the principles of reciprocal protection and allegiance were not as well defined at that period as, they have since been, the Catholics of England would have been more or less than human if they could have regarded James’ government with any feeling other than detestation, and the wonder is not that a plot was laid to destroy it, but that so very few of the persecuted multitude could be found to embark in it, notwithstanding the manifold reasons afforded by the king and parliament for their destruction. It was an age of conspiracies and counterplots, when the highest and most trusted in every land endeavored by force or fraud to accomplish political and personal ends, success being the only criterion of merit. The history of Europe from the middle of the preceding century is full of dark schemes and secret contrivances, in which nobles and princes figure alternately as the bribers or the bribed, the patrons or the victims of the assassin, now devoted patriots and anon double‐dyed traitors. The long civil wars, the vicious legacy of the Lutheran attempt to unsettle the faith of Christendom, had nearly ceased from sheer exhaustion, and unemployed soldiers of desperate fortunes but undoubted courage were to be easily had for any enterprise, no matter how dangerous.
Of this character was Guy or Guido Fawkes, whose name, though not himself the originator of the Gunpowder Plot, is most intimately associated with it in popular tradition. The real authors were Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, Thomas Winter, and John Wright; all of whom were country gentlemen of good family and education, but, except Catesby, very much reduced in circumstances owing to the unjust and repeated exactions of the penal laws, which had not only robbed them of their property and shut them out from all public employment, but had branded them with the stigma of traitors to their country and enemies to their sovereign; for, having in the early part of their lives conformed to Protestantism, they had subsequently returned to the church into which they had been baptized—an offence in the eyes of the rulers of that day of the deepest dye.
In the early part of 1604, the five conspirators met in London, and, having taken a solemn oath of secrecy, determined on their future schemes for the total destruction of the government. Wishing, however, it seems, to exhaust all milder remedies, they sent agents to Spain and other foreign powers friendly to the Catholic cause, to induce them to use their good offices in mitigating the sufferings of the English recusants. The answers were generally favorable, but non‐committal, and the practical result nothing. They then determined to depend on themselves alone, and in the autumn rented a building adjoining the Palace of Westminster, the old House of Parliament, and commenced to undermine the dividing wall. This, some three yards thick of solid masonry, they found a work of difficulty, and from the paucity of their numbers and their inexperience in manual labor, advanced slowly. A circumstance soon occurred to modify their plans. A portion of the cellar immediately under the prince’s chamber, which had been used by a coal dealer, was vacated by the tenant, and Percy rented it, ostensibly for storage purposes. The mine was abandoned, and thirty‐two barrels of powder, which had been stored previously at Lambeth, were introduced in the night‐time, and covered from observation by wood, furniture, etc. All that was now required to complete the conspiracy was a proper moment for the application of the match. This work had brought them into the spring of 1605, and, as parliament was not to assemble for some months, they resolved to separate, some going into the country to see their relatives, and others to the Continent to enlist the assistance of such adventurers as could be found willing to take service under the anticipated new régime. Meanwhile eight more persons were admitted into the plot, the principal of whom were Rokewood, Grant, Tresham, and Sir Everard Digby, all young men of family and fortune, whose proud spirits chafed continually under the social and political ostracism to which all recusants of the period were doomed.
The opening of parliament, expected in September, was, however, postponed till the 5th of November, but, to the secret satisfaction of Catesby and his fellows, the penal laws continued to be rigidly enforced, and additional measures of persecution were devised by the king’s council for the adoption by the legislature when it should meet. As that time approached and everything augured success, the parts of the leading actors in the bloody drama were distributed. Fawkes was to fire the powder which was to blow the king, his oldest son Henry, and the lords and commons into eternity; Prince Charles, the next in succession, having been seized by Percy, was to be proclaimed king at Charing Cross by Catesby; while Tresham, Grant, and Digby were to gain possession of the person of the infant princess Elizabeth, at Lord Harrington’s country‐seat. After the explosion, Fawkes was to sail for Flanders to bring over reinforcements, and the others, a protector for the royal children having been appointed, were to rendezvous at Digby’s residence and raise the country in favor of the new government. There was a method in the madness of these men, and the first part of their programme would undoubtedly have been carried out but for one important fact upon which it seems they did not reckon: Cecil was fully cognizant of all their movements, and for his own good reasons, as we shall hereafter see, allowed them to proceed unchecked to the very last moment.
That moment expired soon after midnight on the night of the 4th‐5th of November, only a few hours before the expected catastrophe. As Fawkes was entering the cellar to assure himself that all was in readiness, he was seized by a body of soldiers under the command of Sir Thomas Knevett. His dress denoted that he was prepared for a journey, arms and matches were found upon his person, a dark‐lantern was discovered in a corner, and the removal of the débris that was piled in the vault revealed the powder arranged ready for explosion.
The scene that ensued was highly dramatic, and did great credit to the histrionic genius of the secretary. The lords of the council were hastily summoned to the king’s bed‐chamber, the prisoner was brought up for examination by torch‐light, and the royal pedant sat on the side of his couch in his night‐clothes for several hours, questioning and cross‐ questioning the would‐be murderer. But Guy was made of stern stuff, and, while he freely admitted that his intention had been “to blow the Scotch beggars back to their native mountains,” he obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates. The news spread with rapidity, and London at daylight was in the wildest commotion. The other conspirators in the city, with the exception of Tresham, fled to Digby’s house near Dunchurch, where a hunting party had assembled, but upon the disclosure of the treason and its failure the guests rapidly dispersed, two or three only, from friendship or other causes, resolving to remain with the conspirators and share the fate which now seemed certain to overtake them. One of these was Stephen Littleton, who resided at Holbeach in Staffordshire, a strongly Catholic county, and thither the whole party, numbering between forty and fifty, including grooms and other servants, proceeded through Warwick and Worcester, vainly endeavoring on their road to excite the people to join them. At Holbeach they resolved to make a stand, but an accident destroyed whatever little chance might have remained of a successful resistance. Their ammunition, which had been wet during their hurried journey, exploded while being dried, and not only seriously injured Catesby and three others, but afforded an excuse for their handful of followers to forsake them. In this condition they were soon surrounded by the forces of Sir Richard Walsh, who, after summoning them to surrender and receiving a defiant negative, ordered his men to fire. The brothers Wright, Percy, and Catesby, fell mortally wounded; Rokewood, Winter, Morgan, and Grant were wounded and taken prisoners, and Digby and the two others were soon after captured. They were immediately taken to London, tried, and with Fawkes executed on the 30th of the following January.
Under ordinary circumstances, this insane conspiracy of a dozen desperate men would have ended here, and the plot itself have become lost in the thousand‐and‐one concerted crimes against authority which disfigure the annals of European monarchy in the middle ages; but the Puritan party in England, the more insatiable enemies of the Catholics, who saw in it an excellent opportunity for wholesale spoliation of what yet remained to the persecuted, endeavored to involve the millions in the treasonable guilt of the few, and Cecil, who had so long nursed the designs of the traitors, had his own deep schemes to subserve by endorsing this foul calumny. But James, bigot as he was, could not, in the face of such palpable facts to the contrary, go to this extreme length. “For though it cannot be denied,” he said in his speech to parliament recounting the discovery and origin of the plot, “that it was only the blind superstition of their errors in religion that led them to this desperate device, yet doth it not follow that all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same.” Yet the Puritan party, who hungered for the spoils, by constant repetition succeeded in fastening the imputation of guilt on the entire Catholic body in England, and for a long time it was partially believed abroad, and re‐ echoed without hesitation by subsequent historians. The author of Her Majesty’s Tower, to whom Catholicity owes little else, has, we are happy to say, had the manhood to set the matter in its true light in his recent publication. He says:
“The news of this plot was heard by the old English Catholics with more astonishment than rage, though the expression of their anger was both loud and deep. The priests were still more prompt to denounce it than their flocks. The venerable Archpriest, George Blackwell, took up his pen before a single man had yet been killed or captured in the shires, and in a brief address to the Catholic clergy stigmatized the plot as a detestable contrivance in which no true Catholic could have a share—as an abominable thing, contrary to Holy Writ, to the councils, and to the instructions of the spiritual guides. Blackwell told his clergy to exhort their flocks to peace and obedience, and to avoid falling into snares.”
But it was necessary for the purpose of affording a decent pretext for further penal legislation, long since agreed upon in the council, as well as to destroy the sympathy still felt at foreign courts for the persecuted English, that the blame of the foul conspiracy should be laid not on the inhuman laws which had driven gallant and loyal men into deadly conflict with the government, but on the church. As it was impossible to implicate any considerable number of the laity or the secular clergy, it was resolved to single out the few Jesuits then in the country, and through them the entire Order, as fitting objects of national hatred and universal obloquy. The trick was not new even then, though since much practised and refined. Its execution was consonant also with the parliamentary design of exterminating Catholicity in the three kingdoms. The old clergy, or, as they were called, “Queen Mary’s priests,” were few, aged, and sure soon to die out in the course of nature, while the authorities had taken good care that they should leave no successors of native education. The Jesuits, on the contrary, were young men, generally scions of noble houses, gentle in breeding, and, from their continental training, thorough linguists, acute reasoners, and polished gentlemen. Their erudition made them feared by the half‐taught sophists of the reformed prelacy, their refined manners secured their admission into the best families, and their noble enthusiasm defied the utmost severity of the Puritan and Episcopal magistrates. Their knowledge of the country was accurate, and, though they were accused by such hired defamers as Coke of using many aliases, the odium was not theirs, but the law’s, that made their very presence in their native land treason. No religious community, it is well known, is the church, nor is she responsible for the conduct of each particular member, but the orders may be regarded as the vedettes of her grand army, and before it can be successfully attacked they must be driven in or captured.
Accordingly, one of the first steps taken by the king’s advisers after the trial of the conspirators was to issue a proclamation for the arrest of Fathers Gerard, Greenway, and Garnett, three of the four Jesuit missionaries then known to be in England. In this official document it was alleged “to be plain and evident from the examinations that all three had been peculiarly practisers in the plot.” Now, let us examine for a moment upon what those grave accusations were based. Simply on confessions of the prisoners, for it has never been alleged that the slightest proof, documentary or oral, other than those and the admission of Father Garnett, the provincial, were ever produced to connect the priests with the conspiracy. The examinations were conducted with the most exquisite tortures, taken down by the creatures of the government, and afterwards mutilated and altered by the attorney‐general to suit his own views. Fawkes, by special command of his majesty, was so frequently racked that he could not use a pen to sign his name, much less could he read what had been written for him, and Nicholas Owen, a lay‐brother, was so stretched that his bowels protruded and he expired in the hands of his tormentors. Of Father Gerard, mention was made by two of the original plotters, Fawkes and Winter, in allusion to the oath of secrecy. The latter said that “the five administered the oath to each other in a chamber in which no other body was,” which the latter confirms more in detail.
“The five,” he says, “did meet at a house in the field, beyond S. Clement’s Inn, where they did confer and agree upon the plot, and there they took a solemn oath and vows by all their force and power to execute the same, and of secrecy not to reveal it to any of their fellows, but to such as should be thought fit persons to enter into that action; and in the same house they did receive the sacrament of Gerard the Jesuit, to perform their vow and oath of secrecy aforesaid. But that Gerard was not acquainted with their purpose.”(108)
This last sentence was by order of Coke underlined with red, notated hucusque, and was carefully suppressed in the reading of the examination on the trial! The original document is still preserved in the Public Record Office, and how such an indefatigable student as Mr. Dixon could have overlooked this part of it is, to say the least, very suspicious. His version of the affair is as follows:
“An upper room of Widow Herbert’s house was turned into a chapel; and when the priest was ready for his part, Catesby, Percy, Tom Winter, Jack Wright, and Fawkes assembled in the house—a quaint old Tudor pile at the corner of Clement’s Lane—first in the lower room, where they swore each other upon the Primer, and then in the upper room, where they heard Father Gerard say Mass, and took from his hand the sacrament on that oath. Each of the five conspirators was sworn upon his knees, with his hand on the Primer, that he would keep the secret, that he would be true to his fellows, that he would be constant in the plot.”
Is this perversion of the facts of history accidental, or a piece of downright dishonesty? At first, overlooking the writer’s known hostility to the Jesuits, and his insinuation about the priest being “ready for his part,” we concluded that the sentence describing how the conspirators were sworn was intended to commence after the word “Primer,” to preserve the unity of the action, but by inadvertence was put after the mention of the taking of the sacrament, thus conveying the false idea that the conspirators swore also after or during Mass; but, having had occasion to refer to the index, we find that we had done Mr. Dixon’s dexterity injustice at the expense of his veracity. In seeking for the page of his book upon which this opaque statement appears, we find the following words in the index under the head “Gerard”—“administers the oath of secrecy to the Powder Plot conspirators in a house in Butcher’s Row, p. 95.” Thus the author of Her Majesty’s Tower, who, we presume, occupies a decent position among men of letters in his own country, not only cannot discover after the “occasional labor of twenty years” a most essential point of testimony bearing on the very subject to which his book is mainly devoted, but to make out a case against the much‐hated Jesuits actually falsifies and perverts facts already known and admitted; doing in the year of grace 1869 gratuitously, what Coke in 1606 did for hire. Can the force of malice go further? Digby, who, it will be remembered, was subsequently admitted into the plot, on his trial went even further than the originators of it; and, in exculpating the Jesuit Order, was most emphatic in denying any knowledge of the conspiracy on the part of Gerard, either in its progress or, as far as he knew, at its inception. So much for Father Gerard’s innocence as proved by others; the following is his own statement, made years after the occurrence when he was beyond the reach of English law, and subsequently affirmed in substance on his solemn oath:
“I have stated in the other treatise of which I spoke, that a proclamation was issued against those Jesuit fathers, of whom I am one; and, though the most unworthy, I was named first in the proclamation, whereas I was the subject of one and far inferior in all respects to the other. All this, however, I solemnly protest was utterly groundless; for I knew absolutely nothing of the plot from any one whatsoever, not even under the seal of confession, as the other two did; nor had I the slightest notion that any such scheme was entertained by any Catholic gentleman, until by public rumor news was brought us of its discovery, as it was to all others dwelling in that part of the country.”(109)
The treatise referred to in this extract is his Narrative, and in it Gerard takes frequent occasion to reiterate in the most positive manner, speaking in the third person, all knowledge of the conspiracy, even to saying Mass on the occasion alluded to by Fawkes. The house in Clement’s Inn, he fully acknowledges, was used by him and his friends, among whom there were at least two priests during his absence; and we can well believe that the two prisoners were mistaken in his identity, as we have no evidence that they were familiar with his appearance or personally acquainted with him. However, this does not signify. Some priest undoubtedly celebrated Mass, and the question is, Did he administer the oath, or knowingly administer the sacrament in confirmation of it? Winter and Fawkes declare he did not; Digby, who was most intimate with Father Gerard, denied in open court that that Jesuit knew anything about the plot; and Gerard himself repeatedly, under the strictest forms known in his Order, asserts his entire innocence, and it has never even been hinted that any other priest was concerned in the early stages of the conspiracy. This matter may therefore be considered closed.
Now, it is equally certain that Fathers Garnett and Tesimond, alias Greenway, did become acquainted with the plot during its progress; but the information came to them under the seal of confession, and could not be revealed. It is unnecessary to support this proposition by argument, as its wisdom is now generally recognized by the civil law even in Protestant countries. Confidential communications to priest, doctor, or lawyer are at last held sacred. What was the extent of their knowledge, and what was their conduct on receiving the same? In Thomas Winter’s public dying declaration, communicated by an eye‐witness to the author of the Narrative, he said: “That whereas divers of the fathers of the society were accused of counselling and furthering them in this treason, he could clear them all, and particularly Father Tesimond, from all fault and participation therein.” “And indeed Mr. Thomas Winter might best clear that good father, with whom he was best acquainted,” adds Father Gerard, “and knew very well how far he was from counselling or plotting that business. For himself, having first told the father of it (as I have heard) long after the thing was ready, and that in such secret as he might not utter it, but with his leave, unto his superior only, the father, both then and after, did so earnestly persuade him, and by him the rest, to leave off that course (as his duty was), that Mr. Winter might well find himself in conscience to clear this father from his wrongful accusation of being a counsellor and furtherer of the plot.”(110)
This statement was also repeatedly confirmed by Father Tesimond, both in his writings and in his account of the matter soon after his escape, published by Joannes in his Apologia.
Gerard and Tesimond having fled the country to avoid the popular tumult, “which,” says Mr. Dixon, “took no note of the difference between the children of S. Edward and the pupils of S. Ignatius,” the only remaining victim was the provincial Father Garnett. Him the government spies soon hunted down, and in company with Father Ouldcorne arrested at Hendlip House and lodged in the tower. This capture occurred on the 28th of February, and his trial took place on the 28th of March; the intervening month having been spent by the officers of the crown in procuring evidence of his guilt, but with so little success that an attempt was made to procure his condemnation by parliament, without the intervention of a jury, by inserting surreptitiously a clause in the bill of attainder introduced against the families of Digby and others. Cajolery was first resorted to, next torture, then the subterfuge of allowing him speech with his fellow‐prisoner Ouldcorne, overheard unknown to them by persons secretly hidden for the purpose, and again torture, but all to no effect. He at first refused to admit any knowledge of the conspiracy, but finally confessed that he had heard of it from Father Tesimond (Greenway) under the seal of confession, and that he had reprimanded that priest for ever so communicating it to him, and had admonished him to use all efforts to dissuade the conspirators from their rash designs. This was all that could be proved against him at his trial, but he was of course condemned, not however for treason, but for misprision of treason, and two months after executed, declaring his entire innocence most solemnly. Father Ouldcorne, who was also found guilty of knowledge after the fact, on no better evidence, suffered with him.
The provincial was examined no less than twenty‐three times before his trial, and much stress was laid during its progress and long afterwards on his equivocations in answer to the various searching queries touching the guilt of himself and others. The question of the morality of such evasion of the truth under the peculiar circumstances has, however, no practical value for us, as now by the well‐recognized policy of law in all civilized countries no person is bound to criminate himself either as a principal or a witness, and every individual is allowed to be the judge of his own case in this respect. No one has a right to entrap a prisoner into a confession of guilt, much less compel disclosures by foul means or torture.
Let us inquire for a moment how far Father Garnett’s statements in prison were borne out by his previous conduct. Several letters of his are still extant addressed to Father Persons, the English superior at Rome, on the state of the Catholics in England previous to the explosion of the plot, in which he intimates his suspicions that something desperate was about to be attempted against the government, and begs the superior to influence the Holy Father to interfere. On the 29th of August, 1604, he wrote: “If the affair of toleration go not well, Catholics will no more be quiet. What shall we do? Jesuits cannot hinder it. Let Pope forbid all Catholics to stir.” In May following he says: “All are desperate, divers Catholics are offended with Jesuits; they say that Jesuits do impugn and hinder all forcible enterprises.” On the 24th of July, after reviewing the threatening state of affairs in the kingdom, he repeats his request for pontifical assistance in keeping the people quiet. He then wrote:
“Wherefore, in my judgment, two things are necessary; first, that his holiness should prescribe what in any case is to be done; and then that he should forbid any force of arms to the Catholics under censures, and by brief publicly promulgated, an occasion for which can be taken from the disturbance lately raised in Wales, which has at length come to nothing.”(111)
His public acts were consistent with his views thus confidentially expressed. It is acknowledged that he was mainly instrumental in defeating the Grey conspiracy, in which Father Watson and many Catholics were involved, and, when Catesby and the other conspirators approached him on the subject of forcible resistance to James’ government, he denounced all such attempts in the most positive manner. “It is to you and such as you,” said that desperate plotter to the provincial, “that we owe our present calamities. This doctrine of non‐resistance makes us slaves. No authority of priest or pontiff can deprive a man of his right to repel injustice.” When it became apparent that such men as Catesby could not be stayed by ordinary means, he recommended that before any forcible measures were adopted an agent should be sent to Rome, and in the meantime took steps to procure the co‐operation of the sovereign pontiff himself to suppress all attempts at insurrection. In fact, his whole life was divided between his duty to God and his efforts to teach peace and longanimity to his persecuted countrymen, but the very fact that he was a Jesuit and a Catholic missionary was enough to condemn him in the eyes of the judges of that day. Let us hope that posterity will do him fuller justice.
The general accusation against the Order was grounded on the fact that many of the conspirators were converts and pupils of the Jesuits, and therefore they were their agents and instruments. This is plausible, and might be worthy of attention if true, but it lacks the essential element of reliability. Some were Catholics from their birth, others had only for the time being or during their minority outwardly conformed to Protestantism, and were simply reclaimed from their vicious habits by the Jesuits. But even if they had all been converts it would not strengthen their opponents’ position. So were many hundreds, nay, thousands of Englishmen who took no act or part in the conspiracy. Besides the Jesuits that had suffered in the preceding reign, the four fathers we have just mentioned had spent each over eighteen years in the country, laboring with a zeal and success seldom equalled, and it was this very success in gaining souls to Christ that furnished the greatest incentive for their destruction. Their intimacy with the conspirators was simply that of pastors with their penitents; the assertions of Bates, the servant of Catesby, to the contrary notwithstanding. That poor wretch was tortured and tampered with to induce him to make some accusation against the missionaries, and then hanged, but not before he retracted on the scaffold every sentence uttered by him when a hope of pardon had been held out as the reward of his perjury. Further, Mr. Dixon’s wild attempts to throw discredit on the English Jesuits abroad rest on no foundation whatever, nor has he a single impartial authority to support him in his broad assertions and elaborate reports of what are said to have been strictly private interviews and confidential correspondence between the plotters in England and the Jesuit colleges abroad. Owen and Baldwin, the alleged foreign correspondents, the parties most sought to be implicated, were never tried, but the latter was examined in England ten years after and discharged, nothing having been proved against him. So much for the bugbear of Catholics justifying wholesale assassination as a remedy for persecution, that has been such a sweet morsel under the tongues of Protestant divines and zealots for so many centuries.
Chapter VI.—Continued.
The tumult continued. As soon as the orator attempted to speak, his voice was drowned by cries and stamping.
“Commissary!” cried the chairman to that officer, “I demand that you extend to our assembly the protection of the law.”
“I am here simply to watch the proceedings of your meeting,” replied Parteiling with cool indifference. “Everybody is at liberty in meetings to signify his approval or disapproval by signs. No act forbidden by the law has been committed by your opponents, in my opinion.”
“Bravo! bravo! Three cheers for the commissary!”
All at once the noise was subdued to a whisper of astonishment. A miracle was taking place under the very eyes of progress. Banker Greifmann, the moneyed prince and liberal, made his appearance upon the platform. The rioters saw with amazement how the mighty man before whom the necks of all such as were in want of money bowed—even the necks of the puissant leaders—stepped before the president of the assembly, how he politely bowed and spoke a few words in an undertone. They observed how the chairman nodded assent, and then how the banker, as if to excite their wonder to the highest pitch, mounted to the speaker’s desk.
“Gentlemen,” began Carl Greifmann, “although I have not the honor of sharing your political views, I feel myself nevertheless urged to address a few words to you. In the name of true progress, I ask this honorable assembly’s pardon for the disturbance occasioned a moment ago by a band of uncultivated rioters, who dare to pretend that they are acting in the cause and with the sanction of progress. I solemnly protest against the assumption that their disgraceful and outrageous conduct is in accordance with the spirit of the party which they dishonor. Progress holds firmly to its principles, and defends them manfully in the struggle with its opposers, but it is far from making itself odious by rudely overstepping the bounds of decency set by humanity and civilization. In political contests, it may be perfectly lawful to employ earnest persuasion and even influences that partake of the rigor of compulsion, but rudeness, impertinence, is never justifiable in an age of civilization. Commissary Parteiling discovers no legally prohibited offence in the expression of vulgarity and lowness—may be. Nevertheless, a high misdemeanor has been perpetrated against decorum and against the deference which man owes to man. Should the slightest disturbance be again attempted, I shall use the whole weight of my influence in prosecuting the guilty parties, and convince them that even in the spirit of progress they are offenders and can be reached by punishment.”
He spoke, and retired to the other end of the hall, followed by loud applause from the ultramontanes. Nor were the threats of the mighty man uttered in vain. Spitzkopf hung his head abashed. The other revellers were tamed, they listened demurely to the speakers, ceased their contemptuous hootings, and stood on their good behavior. Greifmann’s proceeding had taken Seraphin also by surprise, and the power which the banker possessed over the rioters set him to speculating deeply. He saw plainly that Louise’s brother commanded an extraordinary degree of respect in the camp of the enemies of religion, and the only cause that could sufficiently account for the fact was a community of principles of which they were well aware. Hence the opinion he had formed of Greifmann was utterly erroneous, concluded Gerlach. The banker was not a mere secluded business man—he was not indifferent about the great questions of the age. Then there was another circumstance that perplexed the ruddy‐cheeked millionaire to no inconsiderable degree—Greifmann’s unaccountable way of taking things. The tyrannical mode of electioneering which they had witnessed at the sign of the “Green Hat” had not at all disgusted Greifmann. Spitzkopf’s threats had not excited his indignation. He had with a smiling countenance looked on whilst the most brutal species of terrorism was being enacted before him, he had not expressed a word of contempt at the constraint which they who held the power inhumanly placed on the political liberty of their dependents. On the other hand, his indignation was aroused by a mere breach of good behavior, an offence which in Gerlach’s estimation was as nothing compared with the other instances of progressionist violence. The banker seemed to him to have strained out a gnat after having swallowed a whole drove of camels. The youth’s suspicions being excited, he began to study the strainer of gnats and swallower of camels more closely, and soon the banker turned out in his estimation a hollow stickler for mere outward decency, devoid of all deeper merit. He now recollected also Greifmann’s dealings with the leaders of progress, and those transactions only confirmed his present views. What he had considered as an extraordinary degree of shrewdness in the man of business, which enabled him to take advantage of the peculiar convictions and manner of thinking of other men, was now to his mind a real affinity with their principles, and he could not help being shocked at the discovery.
He hung his head in a melancholy mood, and his heart protested earnestly against the inference which was irresistibly forcing itself upon his mind, that the sister shared her brother’s sentiments.
“This doubt must be cleared up, cost what it may,” thought he. “My God, what if Louise also turned out to be a progressionist, a woman without any faith, an infidel! No, that cannot be! Yet suppose it really were the case—suppose she actually held principles in common with such vile beings as Schwefel, Sand, Erdblatt, and Shund? Suppose her moral nature did not harmonize with the beauty of her person—what then?” He experienced a spasmodic contraction in his heart at the question, he hesitated with the answer, but, his better self finally getting the victory, he said: “Then all is over. The impressions of a dream, however delightful, must not influence a waking man. My father’s calculation was wrong, and I have wasted my kindness on an undeserving object.”
So completely wrapt up was he in his meditations that he heard not a word of the speeches, not even the concluding remarks of the president. Greifmann’s approach roused him, and they left the hall together.
“That was ruffianly conduct, of which progress would have for ever to be ashamed,” said the banker indignantly. “They bayed and yelped like a pack of hounds. At their first volley I was as embarrassed and confused as a modest girl would be at the impertinence of some young scapegrace. Fierce rage then hurried me to the platform, and my words have never done better service, for they vindicated civilization.”
“I cannot conceive how a trifle could thus exasperate you.”
Greifmann stood still and looked at his companion in astonishment.
“A trifle!” echoed he reproachfully. “Do you call a piece of wanton impudence, a ruffianly outrage against several hundreds of men entitled to respect, a trifle?”
“I do, compared with other crimes that you have suffered to pass unheeded and uncensured,” answered Gerlach. “You had not an indignant word for the unutterable meanness of those three leaders, who were immoral and unprincipled enough to invest a notorious villain with office and honors. Nor did you show any exasperation at the brutal terrorism practised by men of power in this town over their weak and unfortunate dependents.”
“Take my advice, and be on your guard against erroneous and narrow‐minded judgments. The leaders merely had a view to their own ends, but they in no manner sinned against propriety. The raising a man of Shund’s abilities to the office of mayor is an act of prudence—by no means an offence against humanity.”
“Yet it was an outrage to moral sentiment,” opposed Seraphin.
“See here, Gerlach, moral sentiment is a very elastic sort of thing. Sentiment goes for nothing in practical life, and such is the character of life in our century.”
“Well, then, the mere sense of propriety is not worth a whit more.”
“I ask your pardon! Propriety belongs to the realm of actualities or of practical experiences, and not to the shadowland of sentiment. Propriety is the rule that regulates the intercourse of men, it is therefore a necessity, nothing else will serve as a substitute for it, and it must continue to be so regarded as long as a difference is recognized between rational man and the irrational brute.”
“The same may be said with much more reason of morality, for it also is a rule, it regulates our actions, it determines the ethic worth or worthlessness of a man. Mere outward decorum does not necessarily argue any interior excellence. The most abandoned wretch may be distinguished for easy manners and elegant deportment, yet he is none the less a criminal. A dog may be trained to many little arts, but for all that it continues to be a dog.
“It is delightful to see you breaking through that uniform patience of yours for once and showing a little of the fire of indignation,” said the banker pleasantly. “I shall tell Louise of it, I know she will be glad to learn that Seraphin too is susceptible of a human passion. But this by the way. Now watch how I shall meet your arguments. That very moral sentiment of which you speak has caused and is still causing the most enormous crimes against humanity, and the laws of morality are as changeable as the wind. When an Indian who has not been raised from barbarism by civilization dies, the religious custom of the country requires that his wife should permit herself to be burned alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. Moral sentiment teaches the uncivilized woman that it is a horrible crime to refuse to devote herself to this cruel death. The pious Jews used to stone every woman to death who was taken in adultery—in our day, such a deed of blood would be revolting to moral sentiment, and would claim tears from the eyes of cultivated people. I could mention many other horrors that were practised more or less remotely in the past, and were sanctioned by the prevailing moral sentiment. Here is my last instance: according to laws of morality, the usurer was at one time a monster, an arch‐villain—at present, he is merely a man of great enterprise. Propriety, on the other hand, enlightenment, and polish are absolute and unalterable. Whilst rudeness and impertinence will ever be looked upon as disgusting, good manners and politeness will be considered as commendable and beautiful.”
Seraphin could not but admire the skill with which Greifmann jumbled together subjects of the most heterogeneous nature. But he could not, at the same time, divest himself of some alarm at the banker’s declarations, for they betrayed a soul‐life of little or absolutely no moral worth. Money, interest, and respectability constituted the only trinity in which the banker believed. Morality, binding the conscience of man, a true and only God, and divine revelation, were in his opinion so many worn‐out and useless notions, which the progress of mankind had successfully got beyond.
“When those who hold power take advantage of it at elections, they in no manner offend against propriety,” proceeded Carl. “Progress has convictions as well as ultramontanism. If the latter is active, why should not the former be so too? If, on the side of progress, the weak and dependent permit themselves to be cowed and driven, it is merely an advantage for the powerful, and for the others it is a weakness or cowardice. For this reason, the mode of electioneering pursued by Spitzkopf and his comrades amused but nowise shocked me, for they were not acting against propriety.”
Seraphin saw it plainly: for Carl Greifmann there existed no distinction between good and evil; he recognized only a cold and empty system of formalities.
The two young men issued from a narrow street upon the market‐place. This was occupied by a large public building. In the open space stood a group of men, among whom Flachsen appeared conspicuous. He was telling the others about Greifmann’s speech at the meeting of the ultramontanes. They all manifested great astonishment that the influential moneyed prince should have appeared in such company, and, above all, should have made a speech in their behalf.
“He declared it was vulgar, impudent, ruffianly, to disturb a respectable assembly,” reported Flachsen. “He said he knew some of us, and that he would have us put where the dogs would not bite us if we attempted to disturb them again. That’s what he said; and I actually rubbed my eyes to be quite sure it was banker Greifmann that was speaking, and really it was he, the banker Greifmann himself, bodily, and not a mere apparition.”
“I must say the banker was right, for it isn’t exactly good manners to howl, stamp, and whistle to annoy one’s neighbors,” owned another.
“But we were paid for doing it, and we only carried out the orders given by certain gentlemen.”
“To be sure! Men like us don’t know what good breeding is—it’s for gentlemen to understand that,” maintained a third. “We do what men of good breeding hire us to do, and if it isn’t proper, it matters nothing to us—let the gentlemen answer for it.” “Bravo, Stoffel, bravo!” applauded Flachsen. “Yours is the right sort of servility, Stoffel! You are a real human, servile, and genuine reactive kind of a fellow—so you are. I agree with you entirely. The gentlemen do the paying, and it is for them to answer for what happens. We are merely servants, we are hirelings, and what need a hireling care whether that which his master commands is right or not? The master is responsible, not the hireling. What I am telling you belongs to the exact sciences, and the exact sciences are at the pinnacle of modern acquisitions. Hence a hireling who without scruple carries out the orders of his master is up to the highest point of the age—such a fellow has taken his stand on servility. Hallo! the election has commenced. Be off, every man of you, to his post. But mind you don’t look too deep into the beer‐pots before the election is over. Keep your heads level, be cautious, do your best for the success of the green ticket. Once the election is carried, you may swill beer till you can no longer stand. The gentlemen will foot the bill, and assume all responsibilities.”
They dispersed themselves through the various drinking‐shops of the neighborhood.
Near the door of the building in which the voting was to take place stood a number of progressionist gentlemen. They all wore heavy beards, smoked cigars, and peered about restlessly. To those of their party who chanced to pass they nodded and smiled knowingly, upon doubtful voters they smiled still more blandly, added some pleasant words, and pressed the acceptance of the green ticket, but for ultramontane voters they had only jeers and coarse witticisms. As Greifmann approached they respectfully raised their hats. The banker drew Gerlach to one side, and stood to make observations.
“What swarms there are around the drinking‐shops,” remarked Greifmann. “It is there that the tickets are filled under the persuasive influence of beer. The committee provide the tickets which the voters have filled with the names of the candidates by clerks who sit round the tables at the beer‐shops. It is quite an ingenious arrangement, for beer will reconcile a voter to the most objectionable kind of a candidate.”
A crowd of drunken citizens coming out of the nearest tavern approached. Linked arm‐in‐arm, they swayed about and staggered along with an unsteady pace. Green tickets bearing the names of the candidates whom progress had chosen to watch over the common weal could be seen protruding from the pockets of their waistcoats. Gerlach, seeing the drunken mob and recollecting the solemn and important nature of the occasion, was seized with loathing and horror at the corruption of social life revealed in the low means to which the party of progress had recourse to secure for its ends the votes of these besotted and ignorant men.
Presently Schwefel stepped up and saluted the young men.
“Do you not belong to the committee in charge of the ballot‐box?” inquired Greifmann.
“No, sir, I wished to remain entirely untrammelled this morning,” answered the leader with a sly look and tone. “This is going to be an exciting election, the ultramontanes are astir, and it will be necessary for me to step in authoritatively now and then to decide a vote. Moreover, the committee is composed exclusively of men of our party. Not a single ultramontane holds a seat at the polls.”
“In that case there can be no question of failure,” said the banker. “Your office is closed to‐day, no doubt?”
“Of course!” assented the manufacturer of straw hats. “This day is celebrated as a free day by the offices of all respectable houses. Our clerks are dispersed through the taverns and election districts to use their pens in filling up tickets.”
“I am forced to return to my old assertion: an election is mere folly, useless jugglery,” said the banker, turning to Seraphin. “Holding elections is no longer a rational way of doing, it is no longer a business way of proceeding, it is yielding to stupid timidity. Mr. Schwefel, don’t you think elections are mere folly?”
“I confess I have never considered the subject from that point of view,” answered the leader cautiously. “But meanwhile—what do you understand by that?”
“Be good enough to attend to my reasoning for a moment. Progress is in a state of complete organization. What progress wills, must be. Another party having authority and power cannot subsist side by side with progress. Just see those men staggering and blundering over the square with green tickets in their hands! To speak without circumlocution, look at the slaves doing the behests of their masters. What need of this silly masquerade of an election? Why squander all this money, waste all this beer and time? Why does not progress settle this business summarily? Why not simply nominate candidates fit for the office, and then send them directly to the legislature? This mode would do away with all this nonsensical ado, and would give the matter a prompt and business cast, conformable to the spirit of the age.”
“This idea is a good one, but we have an election law that would stand in the way of carrying it out.”
“Bosh—election law!” sneered the banker. “Your election law is a mere scarecrow, an antiquated, meaningless instrument. Do away with the election law, and follow my suggestion.”
“That would occasion a charming row on the part of the ultramontanes,” observed the leader laughing.
“Was the lion ever known to heed the bleating of a sheep? When did progress ever pay any attention to a row gotten up by the ultramontanes?” rejoined Greifmann. “Was not the fuss made in Bavaria against the progressionist school‐law quite a prodigious one? Did not our own last legislature make heavy assaults on the church? Did not the entire episcopate protest against permitting Jews, Neo‐pagans, and Freemasons to legislate on matters of religion? But did progress suffer itself to be disconcerted by episcopal protests and the agonizing screams of the ultramontanes? Not at all. It calmly pursued the even tenor of its way. Be logical, Mr. Schwefel: progress reigns supreme and decrees with absolute authority—why should it not summarily relegate this election law among the things that were, but are no more?”
“You are right, Greifmann!” exclaimed Gerlach, in a feeling of utter disgust. “What need has the knout of Russian despotism of the sanction of constitutional forms? Progress is lord, the rest are slaves!”
“You have again misunderstood me, my good fellow. I am considering the actual state of things. Should ultramontanism at any time gain the ascendency, then it also will be justified in behaving in the same manner.”
Upon more mature consideration, Gerlach found himself forced to admit that Greifmann’s view, from the standpoint of modern culture, was entirely correct. Progress independently of God and of all positive religion could not logically be expected to recognize any moral obligations, for it had not a moral basis. Everything was determined by the force of circumstances; the autocracy of party rule made anything lawful. Laws proceeded not from the divine source of unalterable justice, but from the whim of a majority—fashioned and framed to suit peculiar interests and passions.
“We have yet considerable work to do to bring all to thinking as clearly and rationally as you, Mr. Greifmann,” said the leader with a winning smile.
Schwefel accompanied the millionaires into a lengthy hall, across the lower end of which stood a table. There sat the commissary of elections surrounded by the committee, animated gentlemen with great beards, who were occupied in distributing tickets to voters or receiving tickets filled up. The extraordinary good‐humor prevailing among these gentlemen was owing to the satisfactory course of the election, for rarely was any ultramontane paper seen mingling in the flood that poured in from the ranks of progress. The sides of the hall were hung with portraits of the sovereigns of the land, quite a goodly row. The last one of the series was youthful in appearance, and some audacious hand had scrawled on the broad gilt frame the following ominous words: “May he be the last in the succession of expensive bread‐eaters.” Down the middle of the hall ran a baize‐covered table, on which were numerous inkstands. Scattered over the table lay a profusion of green bills; the yellow color of the ultramontane bills was nowhere to be seen. The table was lined by gentlemen who were writing. They were not writing for themselves, but for others, who merely signed their names and then handed the tickets to the commissary. Several corpulent gentlemen also occupied seats at the table, but they were not engaged in writing. These gentlemen, apparently unoccupied, wore massive gold watch‐chains and sparkling rings, and they had a commanding and stern expression of countenance. They were observing all who entered, to see whether any man would be bold enough to vote the yellow ticket. People of the humbler sort, mechanics and laborers, were constantly coming in and going out. Bowing reverently to the portly gentlemen, they seated themselves and filled out green tickets with the names of the liberal candidates. Most of them did not even trouble themselves to this degree, but simply laid their tickets before the penman appointed for this special service. All went off in the best order. The process of the election resembled the smooth working of an ingenious piece of machinery. And there was no tongue there to denounce the infamous terrorism that had crushed the freedom of the election or had bought the votes of vile and venal men with beer.
Seraphin stood with Greifmann in the recess of a window looking on.
“Who are the fat men at the table?” inquired he.
“The one with the very black beard is house‐builder Sand, the second is Eisenhart, machine‐builder, the third is Erdfloh, a landowner, the fourth and fifth are tobacco merchants. All those gentlemen are chieftains of the party of progress.”
“They show it,” observed Gerlach. “Their looks, in a manner, command every man that comes in to take the green ticket, and I imagine I can read on their brows: ‘Woe to him who dares vote against us. He shall be under a ban, and shall have neither employment nor bread.’ It is unmitigated tyranny! I imagine I see in those fat fellows so many cotton‐planters voting their slaves.”
“That is a one‐sided conclusion, my most esteemed,” rejoined the banker. “In country villages, the position here assumed by the magnates of progress is filled by the lords of ultramontanism, clerical gentlemen in cassocks, who keep a sharp eye on the fingers of their parishioners. This, too, is influencing.”
“But not constraining,” opposed the millionaire promptly. “The clergy exert a legitimate influence by convincing, by advancing solid grounds for their political creed. They never have recourse to compulsory measures, nor dare they do so, because it would be opposed to the Gospel which they preach. The autocrats of progress, on the contrary, do not hesitate about using threats and violence. Should a man refuse to bow to their dictates, they cruelly deprive him of the means of subsistence. This is not only inhuman, but it is also an accursed scheme for making slaves of the people and robbing them of principle.”
“Ah! look yonder—there is Holt.”
The land cultivator had walked into the hall head erect. He looked along the table and stood undecided. One of the ministering spirits of progress soon fluttered about him, offering him a green ticket. Holt glanced at it, and a contemptuous smile spread over his face. He next tore it to pieces, which he threw on the floor.
“What are you about?” asked the angel of progress reproachfully.
“I have reduced Shund and his colleagues to fragments,” answered Holt dryly, then approaching the commissary he demanded a yellow ticket.
“Glorious!” applauded Gerlach. “I have half a mind to present this true German man with another thousand as a reward for his spirit.”
The fat men had observed with astonishment the action of the land cultivator. Their astonishment turned to rage when Holt, leisurely seating himself at the table, took a pen in his mighty fist and began filling out the ticket with the names of the ultramontane candidates. Whilst he wrote, whisperings could be heard all through the hall, and every eye was directed upon him. After no inconsiderable exertion, the task of filling out the ticket was successfully accomplished, and Holt arose, leaving the ticket lying upon the table. In the twinkling of an eye a hand reached forward to take it up.
“What do you mean, sir?” asked Holt sternly.
“That yellow paper defiles the table,” hissed the fellow viciously.
“Hand back that ticket,” commanded Holt roughly. “I want it to be here. The yellow ticket has as good a right on this table as the green one—do you hear me?”
“Slave of the priests!” sputtered his antagonist.
“If I am a slave of the priests, then you are a slave of that villain Shund,” retorted Holt. “I am not to be browbeaten—by such a fellow as you particularly—least of all by a vile slave of Shund’s.” He spoke, and then reached his ticket to the commissary.
“That is an impudent dog,” growled leader Sand. “Who is he?”
“He is a countryman of the name of Holt,” answered he to whom the query was addressed.
“We must spot the boor,” said Erdfloh. “His swaggering shall not avail him anything.”
Holt was not the only voter that proved refractory. Mr. Schwefel, also, had a disagreeable surprise. He was standing near the entrance, observing with great self‐complacency how the workmen in his employ submissively cast their votes for Shund and his associates. Schwefel regarded himself as of signal importance in the commonwealth, for he controlled not less than four hundred votes, and the side which it was his pleasure to favor could not fail of victory. The head of the great leader seemed in a manner encircled with the halo of progress: whilst his retainers passed and saluted him, he experienced something akin to the pride of a field‐marshal reviewing a column of his victorious army.
Just then a spare little man appeared in the door. His yellowish, sickly complexion gave evidence that he was employed in the sulphurating of straw. At sight of the commander the sulphur‐hued little man shrank back, but his startled look did not escape the restless eye of Mr. Schwefel. He beckoned to the laborer.
“Have you selected your ticket, Leicht?”
“Let me see the ticket.”
The man obeyed reluctantly. Scarcely had Schwefel got a glimpse of the paper when his brows gathered darkly.
“What means this? Have you selected the yellow ticket and not the green one?”
Leicht hung his head. He thought of the consequences of this detection, of his four small children, of want of employment, of hunger and bitter need—he was almost beside himself.
“If you vote for the priests, you may get your bread from the priests,” said Schwefel. “The moment you hand that ticket to the commissary, you may consider yourself discharged from my employ.” With this he angrily turned his back upon the man. Leicht did not reach in his ticket to the commissary. Staggering out of the hall, he stood bewildered near the railing of the steps, and stared vaguely upon the men who were coming and going. Spitzkopf slipped up to him.
“What were you thinking about, man?” asked he reproachfully. “Mr. Schwefel is furious—you are ruined. Sheer stupidity, nothing but stupidity in you to wish to vote in opposition to the pleasure of the man from whom you get your bread and meat! Not only that, but you have insulted the whole community, for you have chosen to vote against progress when all the town is in favor of progress. You will be put on the spotted list, and the upshot will be that you will not get employment in any factory in town. Do you want to die of hunger, man—do you want your children to die of hunger?”
“You are right—I am ruined,” said the laborer listlessly. “I couldn’t bring myself to write Shund’s name because he reduced my brother‐in‐law to beggary—this is what made me select the yellow ticket.”
“You are a fool. Were Mr. Schwefel to recommend the devil, your duty would be to vote for the devil. What need you care who is on the ticket? You have only to write the names on the ticket—nothing more than that. Do you think progress would nominate men that are unfit—men who would not promote the interests of the state, who would not further the cause of humanity, civilization, and liberty? You are a fool for not voting for what is best for yourself.”
“I am sorry now, but it’s too late.” sighed Leicht. “I wouldn’t have thought, either, that Mr. Schwefel would get angry because a man wanted to vote to the best of his judgment.”
“There you are prating sillily again. Best of your judgment!—you mustn’t have any judgment. Leave it to others to judge; they have more brains, more sense, more knowledge than you. Progress does the thinking: our place is to blindly follow its directions.”
“But, Mr. Spitzkopf, mine is only the vote of a poor man; and what matters such a vote?”
“There is your want of sense again. We are living in a state that enjoys liberty. We are living in an age of intelligence, of moral advancement, of civilization and knowledge, in a word, we are living in an age of progress; and in an age of this sort the vote of a poor man is worth as much as that of a rich man.”
“If only I had it to do over! I would give my right hand to have it to do over!”
“You can repair the mischief if you want.”
“Instruct me how, Mr. Spitzkopf; please tell me how!”
“Very well, I will do my best. As you acted from thoughtlessness and no bad intention, doubtless Mr. Schwefel will suffer himself to be propitiated. Go down into the court, and wait till I come. I shall get you another ticket; you will then vote for progress, and all will be satisfactory.”
“I am a thousand times obliged to you, Mr. Spitzkopf—a thousand times obliged!”
The agent went back to the hall. Leicht descended to the courtyard, where he found a ring of timid operators like himself surrounding the sturdy Holt. They were talking in an undertone. As often as a progressionist drew near, their conversation was hushed altogether. Holt’s voice alone resounded loudly through the court, and his huge strong hands were cutting the air in animated gesticulations.
“This is not a free election; it is one of compulsion and violence,” cried he. “Every factoryman is compelled to vote as his employer dictates, and should he refuse the employer discharges him from the work. Is not this most despicable tyranny! And these very tyrants of progress are perpetually prating about liberty, independence, civilization! That’s a precious sort of liberty indeed!”
“A man belonging to the ultramontane party cannot walk the streets to‐day without being hooted and insulted,” said another. “Even up yonder in the hall, those gentlemen who are considered so cultivated stick their heads together and laugh scornfully when one of us draws near.”
“That’s so—that’s so, I have myself seen it,” cried Holt. “Those well‐bred gentlemen show their teeth like ferocious dogs whenever they see a yellow ticket or an ultramontane. I say, Leicht, has anything happened you? You look wretched!” Leicht drew near and related what had occurred. The honest Holt’s eyes gleamed like coals of fire.
“There’s another piece of tyranny for you,” cried he. “Leicht, my poor fellow, I fancy I see in you a slave of Schwefel’s. From dawn till late you are compelled to toil for the curmudgeon, Sundays not excepted. Your church is the factory, your religion working in straw, and your God is your sovereign master Schwefel. You are ruining your health amid the stench of brimstone, and not so much as the liberty of voting as you think fit is allowed you. It’s just as I tell you—you factorymen are slaves. How strangely things go on in the world! In America slavery has been abolished; but lo! here in Europe it is blooming as freshly as trees in the month of May. But mark my word, friends, the fruit is deadly; and when once it will have ripened, the great God of heaven will shake it from the trees, and the generation that planted the trees will have to eat the bitter fruit.”
Leicht shunned the society of the ultramontanes and stole away. Presently Spitzkopf appeared with the ticket.
“Your ticket is filled out. Come and sign your name to it.” Schwefel was again standing near the entrance, and he again beckoned the laborer to approach. “I am pacified. You may now continue working for me.”
Carl and Seraphin returned to the Palais Greifmann. Louise received them with numerous questions. The banker related what had passed; Gerlach strode restlessly through the apartment.
“The most curious spectacle must have been yourself,” said the young lady. “Just fancy you on the rostrum at the ‘Key of Heaven’! And very likely the ungrateful ultramontanes would not so much as applaud.”
“Beg pardon, they did, miss!” assured Seraphin. “They applauded and cried bravo.”
“Really? Then I am proud of a brother whose maiden speech produced such marvellous effects. May be we shall read of it in the daily paper. Everybody will be surprised to hear of the banker Greifmann making a speech at the ‘Key of Heaven.’ ” Carl perceived the irony and stroked his forehead.
“But what can you be pondering over, Mr. Seraphin?” cried she to him. “Since returning from the turmoil of the election, you seem unable to keep quiet.” He seated himself at her side, and was soon under the spell of her magical attractions.
“My head is dizzy and my brain confused,” said he. “On every hand I see nothing but revolt against moral obligation, sacrilegious disregard of the most sacred rights of man. The hubbub still resounds in my ears, and my imagination still sees those fat men at the table with their slaveholder look—the white slaves doing their masters’ bidding—the completest subjugation in an age of enlightenment—all this presents itself to me in the most repulsive and lamentable guise.”
“You must drive those horrible phantoms from your mind,” replied Louise.
“They are not phantoms, but the most fearful reality.”
“They are phantoms, Mr. Seraphin, so far as your feelings exaggerate the evils. Those factory serfs have no reason to complain. There is nothing to be done but to put up with a situation that has spontaneously developed itself. It is useless to grow impatient because difference of rank between masters and servants is an unavoidable evil upon earth.” A servant entered to call them to dinner.
At her side he gradually became more cheerful. The brightness of her eyes dispelled his depression, and her delicate arts put a spell upon his young, inexperienced heart. And when, at the end of the meal, they were sipping delicious wine, and her beautiful lips lisped the customary health, the subdued tenderness he had been feeling suddenly expanded into a strong passion.
“After you will have done justice to your diary,” said she at parting, “we shall take a drive, and then go to the opera.”
Instead of going to his room, Seraphin went into the garden. He almost forgot the occurrences of the day in musing on the inexplicable behavior of Louise. Again she had not uttered a word of condemnation of the execrable doings of progress, and it grieved him deeply. A suspicion flitted across his mind that perhaps Louise was infected with the frivolous and pernicious spirit of the age, but he immediately stifled the terrible suggestion as he would have hastened to crush a viper that he might have seen on the path of the beautiful lady. He preferred to believe that she suppressed her feelings of disgust out of regard for his presence, that she wisely avoided pouring oil upon the flames of his own indignation. Had she not exerted herself to dispel his sombre reflections? He was thus espousing the side of passion against the appalling truth that was beginning faintly to dawn upon his anxious mind.
But soon the spell was to be broken, and duty was to confront him with the alternative of either giving up Louise, or defying the stern demands of his conscience.
The brother and sister, thinking their guest engaged with his diary, walked into the garden. They directed their steps towards the arbor where Gerlach had seated himself.
He was only roused to consciousness of their proximity by the unusually loud and excited tone in which Louise spoke. He could not be mistaken; it was the young lady’s voice—but oh! the import of her words. He looked through an opening in the foliage, and sat thunderstruck.
“You have been attempting to guide Gerlach’s overexalted spirit into a more rational way of thinking, but the very opposite seems to be the result. Intercourse with the son of a strait‐laced mother is infecting you with sympathy for ultramontanism. Your speech to‐day,” continued she caustically, “in yon obscure meeting is the subject of the talk of the town. I am afraid you have made yourself ridiculous in the minds of all cultivated people. The respectability of our family has suffered.”
“Of our family?” echoed he, perplexed.
“We are compromitted,” continued she with excitement. “You have given our enemies occasion to set us down for members of a party who stupidly oppose the onward march of civilization.”
“Cease your philippic,” broke in the brother angrily. “Bitterness is an unmerited return for my efforts to serve you.”
“To serve me?”
“Yes, to serve you. The disturbing of that meeting made a very unfavorable impression on your intended. He scorned the noisy mob, and was roused by what, from his point of view, could not pass for anything better than unpardonable impudence. To me it might have been a matter of indifference whether your intended was pleased or displeased with the fearless conduct of progress. But as I knew both you and the family felt disposed to base the happiness of your life on his couple of millions, as moreover I feared my silence might be interpreted by the shortsighted young gentleman for complicity in progressionist ideas, I was forced to disown the disorderly proceeding. In so doing I have not derogated one iota from the spirit of the times; on the contrary, I have bound a heavy wreath about the brow of glorious humanity.”
“But you have pardoned yourself too easily,” proceeded she, unappeased. “The very first word uttered by a Greifmann in that benighted assembly was a stain on the fair fame of our family. We shall be an object of contempt in every circle. ‘The Greifmanns have turned ultramontanes because Gerlach would have refused the young lady’s hand had they not changed their creed,’ is what will be prated in society. A flood of derision and sarcasm will be let loose upon us. I an ultramontane?” cried she, growing more fierce; “I caught in the meshes of religious fanaticism? I accept the Syllabus—believe in the Prophet of Nazareth? Oh! I could sink into the earth on account of this disgrace! Did I for an instant doubt that Seraphin may be redeemed from superstition and fanaticism, I would renounce my union with him—I would spurn the tempting enjoyments of wealth, so much do I hate silly credulity.”
Seraphin glanced at her through the gap in the foliage. Not six paces from him, with her face turned in his direction, stood the infuriate beauty. How changed her countenance! The features, habitually so delicate and bright, now looked absolutely hideous, the brows were fiercely knit, and hatred poured like streams of fire from her eyes. Sentiments hitherto skilfully concealed had taken visible shape, ugly and repulsive to the view of the innocent youth. His noble spirit revolted at so much hypocrisy and falsehood. What occurred before him was at once so monstrous and so overwhelming that he did not for an instant consider that in case they entered the arbor he would be discovered. He was not discovered, however. Louise and Carl retraced their steps. For a short while the voice of Louise was still audible, then silence reigned in the garden.
Seraphin rose from his seat. There was a sad earnestness in his face, and the vanishing traces of deep pain, which however were soon superseded by a noble indignation.
“I have beheld the genuine Louise, and I thank God for it. It is as I feared, Louise is a progressionist, an infidel that considers it disgraceful to believe in the Redeemer. Out upon such degeneracy! She hates light, and how hideous this hatred makes her. Not a feature was left of the charming, smiling, winning Louise. Good God! how horrible had her real character remained unknown until after we were married! Chained for life to the bitter enemy of everything that I hold dear and venerate as holy—think of it! With eyes bandaged, I was but two paces from an abyss that resembles hell—thank God! the bandage has fallen—I see the abyss, and shudder.
“ ‘The ultramontane Seraphin’—‘the fanatical Gerlach’—‘the shortsighted Gerlach,’ whose fortune the young lady covets that she may pass her life in enjoyment—a heartless girl, in whom there is not a spark of love for her intended husband—how base!
“ ‘Ultramontane’?—‘fanatical’?—yes! ‘Shortsighted?’ by no means. One would need the suspicious eyes of progress to see through the hypocrisy of this lady and her brother—a simple, trusting spirit like mine cannot penetrate such darkness. At any rate, they shall not find me weak. The little flame that was beginning to burn within my heart has been for ever extinguished by her unhallowed lips. She might now present herself in the garb of an angel, and muster up every seductive art of womanhood, ’twould not avail; I have had an insight into her real character, and giving her up costs me not a pang. It is not hollow appearances that determine the worth of woman, but moral excellence, beautiful virtues springing from a heart vivified by faith. No, giving her up shall not cost me one regretful throb.”
He hastened from the garden to his room and rang the bell.
“Pack my trunks this very day, John,” said he to his servant. “Tomorrow we shall be off.”
He then entered in his diary a circumstantial account of the unmasked beauty. He also dwelt at length upon the painful shock his heart experienced when the bright and beautiful creature he had considered Louise to be suddenly vanished before his soul. As he was finishing the last line, John reappeared with a telegraphic despatch. He read it, and was stunned.
“Meet your father at the train this evening.” He looked at the concise despatch, and fancied he saw his father’s stern and threatening countenance.
The contemplated match had for several years been regarded by the families of Gerlach and Greifmann as a fixed fact. Seraphin was aware how stubbornly his father adhered to a project that he had once set his mind upon. Here now, just as the union had became impossible and as the youth was about to free himself for ever from an engagement that was destructive of his happiness, the uncompromising sire had to appear to enforce unconditional obedience to his will. A fearful contest awaited Seraphin, unequal and painful; for a son, accustomed from childhood to revere and obey his parents, was to maintain this contest against his own father. Seraphin paced the room and wrung his hands in anguish.
The Virgin.
Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost With the least shade of thought to sin allied: Woman! above all women glorified, Our tainted nature’s solitary boast; Purer than foam on central ocean tost, Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon Before her vane begins on heaven’s blue coast, Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween, Not unforgiven, the suppliant knee might bend, As to a visible power, in which did blend All that was mixed and reconciled in thee Of mother’s love with maiden purity, Of high and low, celestial with terrene.—Wordsworth.
The Homeless Poor Of New York City.
In this class, the homeless poor, we embrace all those who have no fixed habitation—who have no idea in the morning where they will obtain shelter for their weary bodies during the coming night. We find here every age represented—from the infant in the mother’s arms, through the rapid stages of development (as it is well known that pain and hunger have a wonderful effect in maturing infant humanity), to the aged, tottering towards the grave, only waiting for their summons to cross over the river of time; looking with yearning eyes towards the Home prepared for them on the shore of eternity.
It is impossible to estimate the number of this class, as we have no statistics to guide us, but it is supposed that there are about forty thousand vagrant children alone in this metropolis. From this frightful number of infant waifs we may judge of the amount of misery and destitution in our midst—hidden from view behind our imposing marble warehouses and stately brownstone mansions.
We have been informed by a reliable police official that there are a large number of poor widows, whose husbands died in the service of our country during the late war, in a most destitute condition in this city, and that they frequently bring their children with them and apply for shelter at the station‐houses. They attempt to eke out a miserable livelihood by sewing, and when this fails them they are obliged to go (in this Christian city) to the abodes of crime, to avoid the inclemency of the winter nights. Few persons can form an idea of the struggles, the privations, and the daily sufferings of lone women who earn their daily bread by the use of the needle. If the fine ladies who adorn themselves in costly robes could go behind the scenes after they have left their orders at the elegant shops of the dressmakers; could they see their delicate fabrics taken home by the poor sewing‐women; see the weary forms bent over their work in the cheerless tenement‐houses, each stitch accompanied by a painful throb of heart and brain as the night wears on and the solitary candle burns low; the famishing child as he tosses and turns on his bundle of rags, murmuring, “Bread, mother, bread!”—ay! if the beaming eyes of the votaries of fashion could by some magic power see on their rustling silks, their costly linen, their beautiful lace, the imprint of the gaunt, lean fingers of the poor sewing‐women; could the tears that trickled down the worn cheeks crystallize where they have fallen; could the sighs which welled up from the overburdened heart strike with their low wailing sound on the ears of these worldlings—they would be filled with a larger sense of duty to their fellow‐creatures, a greater desire to follow the golden motto, “Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you.”
There is an official apathy to the condition of the extreme poor which, with the ballot placed in the hands of every man, has already produced baneful results to the well‐being of the Republic, and must eventually, if not remedied, act detrimentally to its safety. If an unfortunate wretch, clad in tattered garments, pass through our streets or loiter near our homes, he is at once eyed suspiciously—to wear the habiliments of poverty is evidence sufficient that the black heart of a criminal is enclosed within. It is true that promiscuous charity may do great harm, but it is surely the correct policy for a government, while it judiciously supplies the immediate wants of its poor classes with one hand, to open the avenues to employment with the other; thus teaching them the lesson impressed upon our first parents as they were banished from the Garden of Eden—that man must earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow.
We have already said that it is computed by well‐informed persons that we have in our midst some forty thousand vagrant children. Let us glance for a moment at their condition, and what is being done for them. It is difficult for any one to conceive the deplorable condition of these homeless children without personal observation. They tread the paths leading to moral destruction with such rapidity that hundreds of them are confirmed thieves and drunkards before they reach the age of twelve years. The day is passed in pilfering, and at night they sleep in some out‐of‐ the‐way place—under door‐steps, in wagons, or wherever they can store their diminutive forms. Some time since, a regularly organized band of boys were discovered to have constructed a shelter under one of the piers; and here they congregated at night, each bringing in his booty stolen during the day. A few days since, during a visit to one of the mission‐ houses of this city, the lady in charge pointed out to us a little girl, not more than nine years old, telling us that she never came to the house without being more or less under the influence of liquor, and a glance at the bloated features and nervous, trembling hands showed conclusively that it was her habitual condition. We understand that there are fiends in the shape of men and women in this city who will sell such children a penny’s worth of rum. Some persons have argued that these children are from bad parents, and under any circumstances, no matter how favorable, would be corrupt. Such an opinion is a libel on God and human nature. A certain proclivity to vice may be transmitted in the blood, but free‐will remains in the most degenerate, and is sufficient, with the aid of a good education and the grace of God, to overcome this obstacle to virtue. We know well the plastic nature of childhood, and, if educated from the first to honesty, morality, and sobriety, it will indeed be found a rare exception in which the developed man will not possess these virtues, and prove an honor to himself and society. But if the first lisp of the infant repeats an oath which is used more frequently than any other word by the debased mother, or if, as is the case with many, as soon as the babe can walk alone it is taught the art of begging and stealing, what can we look for in the same child simply developed to manhood? Are you surprised that he makes a thief? He has never been taught anything else, and he naturally looks upon the law as something that interferes with the right to take anything he desires, if he can only do so without being detected. Would you look for pure water from a stream whose bed is covered with filthy slime, and whose banks are the receptacle of disgusting, decomposed offal? Surely you would not drink of such, no matter how pure you knew the gurgling springs to be high up on the mountain‐side from whence it received its supply. Look at a babe as it is blessed with the first gleam of reason—its ability to notice things about it. Is there anything in the bright black eye to indicate the future cunning of the burglar? Do the rosy lips, wreathed in angel smiles, look as if they were fashioned to utter foul oaths and blasphemies? And the little chubby hands clasped in baby glee around the mother’s neck, could they, by a natural instinct, ever be turned in brutal wrath against that self‐same mother? Reason answers No to all these questions; and we argue that such vices are developed principally by education and example. Take this for granted, and, if we do nothing to save the child from such education, what right have we to imprison the developed man for acting upon the only doctrine he has ever been taught? Or a better view of the subject is: Would it not be the dictate of a sound political economy to take these children from the streets, and teach them some useful trade or pursuit, giving them, at the same time, the fundamental principles of Christianity, without which society is a tottering fabric, minus its very foundation? Do this, and we make producers out of the very men and women who will otherwise become consumers upon the state in the common prisons.
In several parishes of this city benevolent efforts are being made to rescue these children, but, so far as we can learn, the only institutions established where they are regularly taken care of and kept permanently are the following: “The Five Points House of Industry,” “The Five Points Mission‐House,” “The Howard Mission”; and last, but we hope soon to be first in its wide‐spread influence over these little creatures, is the one established some two years ago, and now located in East Thirteenth Street. This is managed by certain charitable Catholic ladies, and called “An Association for Befriending Children.” As most of the poor children on the Island are, or should be, Catholics, it is but just that the last‐ mentioned should receive support and countenance from every Catholic in the city able to assist it, and thus enable the lady managers in a short time to erect branch homes in every parish on the Island.
But come with us, dear reader, and let us look for ourselves at the condition of those who take advantage of the hospitality of the station‐ houses. Think for a moment that in 1862 there were seventy thousand nine hundred and thirty‐eight lodgers, while 1871 presents the fearfully increased number of one hundred and forty‐one thousand seven hundred and eighty who sought this shelter. Oh! that this number (equal nearly to one‐ sixth of the population of this vast metropolis), with its fearful weight of destitution and misery, suffering and despair, could be placed in burning letters upon the minds of those able, even without discommoding themselves, to relieve it!
Let us go back to midwinter. A blinding snow‐storm is wrapping the earth in a white mantle, and it is after midnight, but these are only better reasons for our undertaking, as they secure us increased opportunity to see the phase of suffering we seek; for surely in a night like this the shelter of any roof is a luxury compared to the exposure of the street.
Let us stop first at the Fifteenth Precinct: we ask the sergeant at the desk for the presiding officer, and we are at once shown to the captain’s room. He reads the note from headquarters giving us the entrée, and informs us that he will give us any information we desire. We request him to show us the quarters of the night lodgers. He leads us through a rear door into the yard, and here we find a second building, two stories high, built of brick and stone. The lower story is cut up into cells, with iron cross‐barred doors, for prisoners; and the upper is divided into two rooms—one devoted to the female, and the other to male, lodgers. The heavy granite stone forming a roof to the cells is also the floor of the upper rooms. As we make an inspection of the prison, we ask the captain what he thinks of this connection of homeless vagrants with prisoners? He promptly replies that it is most unfortunate, and should not be allowed, and with great kindness of heart says he would be willing to take care of a house in his precinct for any number of lodgers, if allowed to do so. He tells us that he does everything to alleviate the condition of these paupers he can; that, if a particularly distressing case presents itself, he allows the doorman to give the party a cell in the prison, that this is far more comfortable than the rooms above.
Think of this, you who at night rest your heads on pillows of down and wrap your bodies in fine rose blankets; think of beings so unfortunate that a prisoner’s cell, with the clanking iron‐barred door, is looked upon as a special favor! But let us ascend to the upper story. The door to the male apartment is opened, and the picture is before us. The ceiling is lofty, and a large ventilator opens to the roof from its centre, but where is the stone floor? It cannot be seen, so densely is it packed with outcast humanity. We can think of no other comparison but the way we have seen sardines packed in little tin boxes. Glance at this first row: here is an old German, next what looks to be a countryman, then three negroes, so black that they might have just arrived from the burning climate of Africa, then three Arabs, and in the distant corner more white men. The other rows are but copies of this, differing only in color or nationality, and such a heterogeneous mass of humanity, made common bed‐fellows by want, it would be impossible to find. Around the wall are placed iron frames, about one foot high, and in these fit plain boards, painted black; but here, again, none of this can be seen, the human flooring covers all. Think of this apartment, with seventy‐four men, of every description, from the octogenarian leaning over the brink of the grave, to the young boy seventeen or eighteen years old. Every clime has a representative; and in the vast group every variety of shade and color possessed by the human family can be seen. Opening the door to the female apartment, we find it occupied by a much smaller number; and we can see better the arrangement of the floor. The iron frames with their board covering extend from each wall towards the centre about six feet, leaving a space in the middle of the room as a passway. The same variety in color, age, and nationality is visible. Look at the different expressions of countenance—how replete with sadness, misfortune, degradation, and misery! These lodgers are divided into three classes: the first are officially known as bummers; they are generally inebriates and worthless idlers, the drones of the hive, who make the station‐houses their permanent lodging‐places, going night after night to different ones, thus distributing their patronage to a large number; but in spite of this the wary eye of the policeman soon recognizes them as belonging to this class. The second are those who by misfortune are obliged to seek this temporary shelter. Here are poor women, with their young children, forced out of their homes at night by drunken husbands; single persons, temporarily unable to obtain employment; here also you find those whose lives have been failures, whose every effort to succeed has proved abortive, who have been held down to the world’s hard grindstone by the iron grasp of poverty. The third class embraces those who have homes in the rural districts, and other poor strangers, who are by accident left in the city for the night.
Having completed our survey here, let us look in for a few moments at the Eighth Precinct. We find the captain obliging in his politeness, and we ask at once to be permitted to see the night lodgers. About the centre of the building a door opens, leading by a common stairway to the basement below. A fearful and sickening odor greets us as we pass down, and this, the captain informs us, permeates every part of the building, to the great detriment of his officers. He also tells us that his accommodations for wayfarers are very poor; that he is obliged to put them in two small rooms in the basement, which are close and unhealthy. We find this statement correct, the floor upon which the lodgers rest being about four feet below the street level; the ceiling is also very low, and the ventilation extremely imperfect. The only light in the apartment is from a small oil‐ lamp, and its sickly flame seems to add intensity to the aspect of the miserable surroundings. Look at that old man with long white beard and tattered garments, the first in the row near the entrance. There lingers still a look of dignity about his fine face, but his whole appearance denotes the victim of intemperance. See that young boy with his chest exposed, the third from the old man. He has never known his parents. Picked up in the streets when a babe by an old crone, he has been tossed about ever since with the vilest scum of metropolitan society. He is sixteen, but can count for you the number of dinners he has had in all those years, the number of times he has slept in a comfortable bed, ay, even the number of kind words that have been spoken to him! What can be expected from the future of such children, cradled in a den for the punishment of crime while yet the snowy innocence of babyhood is untarnished, the only lullaby the coarse jest, rude repartee, and foul oaths of the outcasts who surround them? The curses and impotent railings against a fate for which generally each is individually to blame, and the bitter invective against their more fortunate fellow‐beings, form a sad school in which to nurture pliable minds. But enough; the foul air of this basement oppresses us, and we gladly make our way to the outer world.
In the large cities of Europe, there are refuges established for this class on the following simple plan: An airy, comfortable, and well‐ ventilated room is procured, and fitted up with plain bedsteads and bedding, the latter of such materials as are easily washed. The next thing of importance is to provide means for bathing, and to require every person admitted to make use of these means before retiring to rest. It is also the custom to give the lodgers when they come in, and again in the morning when they leave, a large basin of gruel and a half‐pound of bread. The cost of such hospitality here would not exceed fifteen cents per night, and not as much as this if these houses were under the care of a religious community, saving by this the salaries of matrons and other employees, and at the same time ensuring the order always produced by the presence of disciplined authority. There should be separate houses for males and females, and each could be cared for by persons of their own sex; but all such institutions would require supervision by the police, as some unruly characters must be expected in a promiscuous crowd of vagrants. The night refuges of London for women and children, established by Catholics, are under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, and are most admirably conducted. The order and docility of the lodgers is said to be remarkable under the gentle sway of these ladies. Those in Montreal and Quebec are in charge of the Gray Nuns. It would not require a large number of these lodging‐houses for the relief of our city, but they should be located with regard to the density of population in given districts. Four or five for each sex, with proper accommodations, would be amply sufficient, as the total number of lodgers in the most inclement nights would hardly reach one thousand.
It is difficult to estimate the advantage to society as well as to the poor these homes would prove. In erecting them we should strike at the very foundation of the great social evil, and save hundreds of young women—strangers and unfortunates out of employment—from the snares set for their ruin in their lonely wanderings at night in search of shelter.
“There is near another river flowing, Black with guilt, and deep as hell and sin; On its brink even sinners stand and shudder, Cold and hunger goad the homeless in.” —Procter.
As the station lodgings now are, they form an incentive to the class known as bummers to avoid work. These people know there are thirty station‐ houses, and by frequent changes they manage to pass the year through without drawing marked attention at any one place. This class is composed of low thieves, drunkards, and beggars. If but few lodging‐places existed, they would soon become well known, and could then be committed to the workhouse. A sojourn for them on the “island of penance” in the East River would result in a marked decrease in the thieving constantly carried on about our wharves and private dwellings.
In erecting these night homes, either by charity or legislative enactments, we should save our city from a burning disgrace, and give hopes of respectability to many a weary soul beaten down to the dust by the undeserved humiliations which link misfortune with crime.
As a charitable investment, these homes would prove a wise economy, as they would permit the truly unfortunate to be properly cared for, which is impossible at present. They would throw a safeguard around the morals of homeless young women by giving them shelter with persons of their own sex, who could protect, sympathize with, and advise them. They would assist in detecting those who live by swindling their hardworking neighbors. Lastly and most important, they would separate the children of poverty from the abodes of crime.
[NOTE.—The foregoing article is the substance of a lecture delivered by Dr. Raborg before the Catholic Institute connected with the parish of S. Paul the Apostle in this city. Its suggestions are so apropos to the present season that we have deemed them worthy of reproduction in this permanent form. We desire also to state that the lecture had the effect of inducing several philanthropic ladies and gentlemen to visit the station‐ houses and make a personal examination themselves, the result of which was a rather extended article in Frank Leslie’s Newspaper of March 2, 1872, embracing some passages from the lecture, and accompanied by a clever illustration.
The sectarian institutions for vagrant children having been alluded to, and certain former allusions to the same in this magazine having been misunderstood, we think it necessary to make a remark here in explanation. We must admit and praise the philanthropic motive which sustains these institutions. At the same time, we regard them as really nuisances of the worst kind, so far as Catholic children are concerned, on account of their proselytizing character. Moreover, in their actual working they violate the rights both of parents and children, and we have evidence that these poor children are actually sold at the West, both by private sale and by auction. The horrible abuses existing in some state institutions are partly known to the public, and we have the means of disclosing even worse things than those which have recently been exposed in the daily papers. We trust, therefore, that the eloquent appeal of the author of the article will produce its effect upon all our Catholic readers, and stimulate them to greater efforts in behalf of these poor children.—ED. C. W.]
The House That Jack Built.
By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”
In Two Parts.
Part I.
It stood in one of the wildest spots in New England, surrounded by woods, a “frame house” in a region of log‐houses, and, as such, in spite of defects, a touch beyond the most complete edifice that could be shaped of logs.
The defects were not few. The walls were slightly out of the perpendicular, there were strips of board instead of clapboards and shingles, the immense stone chimney in the centre gave the house the appearance of being an afterthought, and the two windows that looked down toward the road squinted.
Yes, a most absurd little house, with all sorts of blunders in the making of it, but, for all that, a house with a worth of its own. For Jack Maynard had put the frame together with his own unassisted hands, had raised it with but two men to help him, and had finished it off alone. And round about the work, and through and over it, while his hands built visibly, his fancy also built airy habitations, fair and plumb, and changed all the landscape. Before this fairy wand, the forest sank, broad roads unwound, there was a sprinkle of white houses through the green country, like a sprinkle of snow in June; and in place of this rustic nest rose a fair mansion‐house, with a comely matron standing in the door, and rosy children playing about.
At this climax of his castle‐building Jack Maynard caught breath, and, coming back to the present, found himself halfway up a ladder, with a hammer suspended in his hand, the wild forest swarming with game all about him, and the matron of his vision still Miss Bessie Ware, spinster.
Jack laughed. “So much the better!” he exclaimed, and brought his hammer down with such force, laughing as he struck, that the nail under it bent up double and broke in two, the head half falling to the ground, the point half flattened lengthwise into the board, making a fragment of rustic buhl‐work.
“There’s a nail driven into the future,” said the builder, and selected another, and struck with better aim this time, so that the little spike went straight through the board, and pierced an oaken timber, and held the two firmly together, and thus did its work in the present.
“Well done!” said Jack; “you have gone through fifty summers in less than a minute.”
The startled woods rang to every blow, the fox and the deer fled at that tocsin of civilization, and the snake slid away, and set the green grass crawling with its hidden windings. Only one living creature, besides the builder, seemed happy and unafraid, and that was a brown‐and‐white spaniel that dozed in the shadow of the rising walls, stirring only when his master whistled or spoke to him.
“Wake up, Bruno, and tell me how this suits your eyes,” Jack would call out. Whereat Bruno would lift his lids lazily, show a narrow line of his bright brown eyes, give his tail a slow, laborious wag, and subside to his dreams again, and Jack would go on with his work. It seemed to be his heart, rather than the hammer, that drove the nails in; and every timber, board, latch, and hinge caught a momentary life from his hands, and learned his story from some telegraphing pulse. The very stones of the chimney knew that John Maynard and Bessie Ware were to be married as soon as the house should be ready for them.
There was not a dwelling in sight; but half a mile further down the road toward the nearest town, there was an odd, double log‐house, wherein lived Dennis Moran and his Norah, three little girls, and Bessie Ware, Dennis Moran’s sister’s child.
Jack paused in his work, took off his straw hat to wipe away the perspiration from his face and toss his hair back, first hanging on a round of the ladder just above him the hammer that had driven a nail through fifty summers. As he put his hat on again, he glanced downward, and there, at the foot of the ladder, stood twenty summers, looking up at him out of a face as fair as summers ever formed. The apple‐blooms had given it their pink and white, the June heavens were not bluer than those eyes, so oddly full of laughter and languor. The deepest nook under a low‐ growing spruce, nor shadow in vine‐draped cave, nor hollow in a thunder‐ cloud, ever held richer darkness than that hidden in the loose curls and waves of hair that fell about Bessie Ware’s shoulders. No part of the charm of her presence was due to her dress, save an air of fresh neatness. A large apron, gathered up by the corners, was full of fragrant arbor‐vitæ boughs, gathered to make a broom of. The large parasol, tilted back that she might look upward, allowed a sunbeam to fall on her forehead.
“Oh! what a tall pink has grown up since I came here!” exclaimed the builder, as he saw her.
“And what a great bear has climbed on to my ladder,” retorted the girl.
He came down from the ladder and began to tell her his plans.
“Bessie, I mean this shall be yet one of the best farms in the state. On that hill I will have corn and clover; there shall be an orchard in the hollow next to it, with peach‐trees on the south side of the little rise; and I will plant cranberries in the swamp beyond. In ten years from now, if a man should leave here to‐day, he wouldn’t know the place.”
Bessie smiled at the magician who was to work such wonders—never doubting but he would—then glanced about at the scene of his exploits. Sombre, blue‐green pines brooded over the hill that was one day to be pink with clover, or rustling with corn; oaks, elms, maples, birches, and a great tangle of undergrowth, with rocks and moss, cumbered the ground where peaches were to ripen their dusky cheeks, when Jack should bid them grow, and large, green, and red‐streaked and yellow apples were to drop through the still, bright, autumn air; and she knew that the future cranberry‐ swamp now stood thick and dark with beautiful arborvitæ trees, whose high‐ piled, flaky boughs, tapering to a point far up in the sunshine, kept cool and dim the little pools of water below, and the black mould in which their strong roots stretched out and interwove. But Jack could do anything when he set out, and her faith in him was so great that she could shut her eyes now and see the open swamp matted over with cranberry‐vines, and hear the corn‐stalks clash their green swords in the fretting breeze, and the muffled bump of the ripe apple as it fell on the grass.
After a while, Bessie started to go, but came back again.
“I forgot,” she said, and gave her lover a book that had been hidden under the boughs in her apron. “A book‐pedlar stopped at our house last night, and he left this. Uncle Dennis doesn’t want it, and I do not. Perhaps you can make some sense out of it.”
It was a second‐hand copy of Comstock’s Natural Philosophy, for schools, and was scribbled through and through by the student who had used it, years before.
Jack took the book.
“And that reminds me of your white‐faced boarder,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Is he up yet?”
“Oh! he gets up earlier than any of us,” she answered lightly. “He doesn’t act cityfied at all. And you know, Jack, the reason why he is white is because he has been sick. Good‐bye! Aunt Norah will want her broom before she gets it.”
Bessie struck into the woods instead of going down to the road, and was soon lost to view. Standing beside her little house, she had looked a tall, fairly‐formed lassie; but with the great trunks of primeval forest‐ trees standing about her, and lifting their green pyramids and cones far into the air, she appeared slim and small enough for a fairy. Even the birds, chippering about full of business, seemed to flout her, as if she were of small consequence—not worth flying from.
She laughed at them, and whispered what she did not dare to say aloud: “Other people besides you can build nests!” then looked quickly around to see if any listener were in sight.
There was a slight, rustling sound, and an eavesdropping squirrel scampered up a tree and peered down with twinkling eyes from a safe height. She was just throwing one of the green twigs in her apron at him, when she heard her name spoken, and turned quickly to meet a pleasant‐ faced young man, who approached from an opposite direction. This was the white‐faced boarder who had left the city to find health in this wild place.
The two walked on together, Bessie as shy as any creature of the woods, and her companion both pleased and amused at her shyness, and trying to draw her out. To his questioning, she told her little story. Her mother was Dennis Moran’s youngest sister, her father had been a color‐sergeant in the English army. There had been other children, all younger than she, but all had died, some in one country, some in another. For Sergeant Ware’s family had followed the army, and seen many lands.
“I am an East Indian,” Bessie said naïvely. “I was born at Calcutta. The others were born in Malta, in England, and in Ireland. It didn’t agree with them travelling about from hot to cold. My father died at Gibraltar, and my mother died while she was bringing me to Uncle Dennis Moran’s. May God be merciful to them all!”
Mr. James Keene had heard this pious ejaculation many a time before from the lips of humble Catholics, and had found nothing in it to admire. But now, the thought struck him that this constant prayer for mercy on the dead, whenever their names were mentioned, was a beautiful superstition. Of course he thought it a superstition, for he was a New England Protestant of the most liberal sort—that is, he protested against being obliged to believe anything.
They reached the house, near which Dennis Moran and his wife stood watching complacently a brood of new chickens taking their first airing. The young gentleman joined them, and listened with interest to the farm talk of his host.
What had set Dennis Moran, one of the most rigid of Catholics, in a solitude where he saw none of his own country nor faith, and where no priest ever came, he professed himself unable to explain.
“I’m like a fly caught in a spider’s web, sir,” he said. “When Norah and I came over, and I didn’t just know what to do, except that I wanted to have a farm of my own some day, I hired out to do haying for John Smith’s wife—John had died the very week he began to cut his grass, and Norah she helped Mrs. Smith make butter. Then they wanted me to get in the crops, and after that I had a chance to go into the woods logging. When I came out of the woods, Mrs. Smith wanted me to plough and plant for her. And one thing led to another, and there was always something to keep me. Norah had a young one, and Bessie came—a young witch, ten years old,” said Dennis, pulling his niece’s hair, as she stood beside him. “So I had to take a house. And the long and short of the matter is, that I’ve been here going on ten years, when I didn’t mean to stay ten weeks. But I shall pull up stakes pretty soon, sir,” says Dennis, straightening up. “I don’t mean to stay where I have to go twenty miles to attend to my Easter duties, and where my children are growing up little better than Protestants (he called it Prodestant). I’m pretty sure to move next fall, sir.”
At this announcement, Mrs. Norah tossed up her head and uttered an unspellable, guttural “Oh!” brought from the old land, and preserved unadulterated among the nasal‐speaking Yankees. “We hear ducks!”
Whatever might be the meaning and derivation of this remark, the drift of it was evidently depreciatory, and it had the effect of putting an end to her husband’s eloquence. Doubtless, Mrs. Moran had heard such announcements made before.
Bessie stole a little hand under her uncle’s arm, and smiled into his face, and told him that she had given Jack the book, and soon made him forget his mortification. She knew that he was sometimes boastful, and that the great things he was constantly prophesying of himself never came to pass; but she knew also that he had a kind heart, and it hurt her to see him hurt.
That same book, which the girl mentioned merely to divert attention, was to be a matter of more consequence to her than she dreamed. It was more important than the wedding‐dress and the wedding‐cake, which occupied so much of her thoughts—more important than the jealous interference of Jack’s mother, who did not like Bessie’s foreign blood and religion, though she did like Bessie—more important than even her Uncle Dennis’ actual flitting, when fall came—all which we pass by. Only one thing in her life then was of more consequence than that old school‐book, which the pedler left because no one would buy it, and that was the earnest and sorrowing advice of good old Father Conners when, against his will, he united her to a Protestant.
John Maynard said later, that before he read that book he was like a beet before it is pulled out of the ground, when it doesn’t know but it is a turnip, and firmly believes that it is growing upward instead of downward, and that those waving leaves of its own, which it feels, but sees not, exist in some outer void where nothing is, and that angle‐worms are the largest of locomotive creatures.
It is doubtful if the artistic faculty is any more a special gift in the fine than in the useful arts, or if he who creates ideal forms, in order to breathe into them the breath of such life as is in him, is more enthusiastic in his work, or more fascinated by it, than he who, taking captive the powers of nature, binds them to do his will.
This enthusiastic recognition of the work to which nature had appointed him, John Maynard felt from the moment when he first knew that a crowbar is a lever. He read that book that Bessie gave him with interest, then with avidity, and, having read, all the power latent in that wide brow of his waked up, and demanded knowledge. He got other and more complete works on mechanics and studied them in his leisure hours, he made experiments, he examined every piece of mechanism that came in his way.
Coming home one Sunday from a meeting which she had walked six miles to attend, Mrs. Maynard, senior, was horrified to find that her son had paid her a visit during her absence for the sole purpose of picking in pieces her precious Connecticut clock. There lay its speechless fragments spread out on the table, while the yawning frame leaned against the wall. Bessie sat near, looking rather frightened, and Jack, in his shirt‐sleeves, sat before the table, an open book at his elbow. He was studying the page intently, his earnest, sunburnt face showing an utter unconsciousness of guilt.
“Land sakes, Jack!” screamed his mother. “You’ve been and ruined my clock!”
A clock was of value in that region, where half the inhabitants told the hour by sun‐marks, by the stars, or by instinct.
He put his hand out to keep her back, but did not look up. “Don’t worry, mother,” he said, “and don’t touch anything. I’ll put the machine together in a few minutes.”
Mrs. Maynard sank into a chair, and gazed distressfully at the ruins. That the pendulum, now lying prone and dismembered, would ever tick again, that those two little hands would ever again tell the time of day, that the weights would run down and have to be wound up every Saturday night, or that she should ever again on any June day hear the faithful little gong strike four o’clock in the morning—her signal for jumping out of bed with the unvarying ejaculation: “Land sakes! it’s four o’clock!”—seemed to her impossible.
“And to think that you should do such work on the Sabbath‐day!” she groaned out, casting an accusing glance on her daughter‐in‐law. “You seem to have lost all the religion you ever had since you got married.”
Bessie’s blue eyes lighted up: “I think it just as pious for Jack to study, and find out how useful things are made, as to wear out a pair of shoes going to hear Parson Bates talk through his nose, or sit at home and spoil his eyes reading over and over about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
“Come, come!” interposed Jack; “if you two women quarrel, and bother me, I shall spoil the clock.”
This procured silence.
Had he been a little more thoughtful and tender, he would have told his mother that Bessie had tried to dissuade him from touching the clock, and had urged the impropriety of his doing such work on Sunday; but he did not think. She shielded him, and he allowed her to, scarcely aware that she had, indeed.
The young man’s prediction was fulfilled. Before sunset, the clock was ticking soberly on the mantelpiece, the minute‐hand hitching round its circle, and showing the reluctant hour‐hand the way, and Jack was marching homeward through the woods, with his rifle on one arm and his wife on the other.
They were both so silent—that dark‐browed man and bright faced woman—that they might almost be taken as kindred of the long shadows and sunstreaks over which they walked. He was building up a visionary entanglement of pulleys in the air, through which power should run with ever‐increasing force, and studying how he should dispense with an idle‐wheel that belonged in that maze; and she was thinking of him. He was thinking that this forest, that once had bounded his hopes and aspirations, now pressed on his very breathing, and hemmed his steps in, and wishing that he had wings, like that bird flitting before him; and she was watching his eyes till she, too, saw the bird.
Jack stopped, raised his rifle, took a hasty aim, and fired. Bessie ran to pick up the robin:
“How could you, Jack!” she exclaimed reproachfully, as she felt the fluttering heart stop in her hand.
He looked at it without the slightest compunction. “I wanted to see, as it stood on that twig, which way the centre of gravity would fall,” he said. “Don’t fret, Bessie! There are birds enough in the world.”
The young wife looked earnestly into her husband’s face, as they walked on together. “Jack,” she said, “you might kill me, and then say that there are women enough in the world.”
He laughed, but looked at her kindly, as he made answer: “What would all the women in the world be to me, Bessie, if my woman were out of it?”
Could she ask more?
“Jack, where do you suppose the song has gone to?” she asked, presently.
“Bessie, where does a candle go when it goes out?” was the counter‐ question.
There had been a season in this man’s life, during the brief bud and blossom of his love for Bessie Ware, when his mind had been as full of fancies as a spring maple of blossoms. But he was not by nature fanciful, and, that brief season past, he settled down to facts. Questions which could not be answered he cared not to ask nor ponder on and all speculations, save those which built toward an assured though unseen result, he scouted. The sole impression the bird had made on him was that it was a nice little flying‐machine, which he would like to improve on some day. Meantime, he had much to learn.
The extent of his ignorance did not discourage John Maynard, perhaps because it opened out gradually before him, over a new, unknown path starting from the known one. He was strong, fresh, and healthy, and the very novelty of his work, and his coming to it so late, was an assistance to him. “I have a head for all I want to get into it,” he said to his wife. “When my brain gets hold of an idea, it doesn’t let go.”
It seemed so, indeed; and sometimes when he sat studying, or thinking, utterly unconscious of all about him, his eyes fixed, yet glimmering, his mouth close shut, his breathing half lost, his whole frame, while the brain worked, so still that his hands and feet grew cold, Bessie became almost afraid of him, and was ready to fancy that some strange and perhaps malign spirit had entered into and taken possession of her husband’s soul.
And thus it happened that, after two years, the house that Jack built was abandoned to one of his relatives, and the young couple, with their baby boy, left the forest for the city.
Of course, no one is to suppose that John Maynard failed.
It was summer again, and lavish rains had kept to July the fresh luxuriance of June. The frame house stood nearly as it was when its builder finished it. The walls had changed their bright yellow tint for gray, and a few stones had fallen from the top of the chimney—that was all. The forest still gathered close about, and only a few patches of cultivated land had displaced the stumps and stones. A hop‐vine draped the porch at the back of the house, and a group of tall sunflowers grew near one of the open curtainless windows.
Civilization had passed by on the other side, and, though not really so remote, was still invisible. Twice a day, with a low rumble, as of distant thunder, a train of cars passed by through the valley beyond the woods.
There was no sound of childish voices, no glimpse of a child anywhere about. The air bore no more intelligent burden than the low colloquial dropping of a brook over its pebbly bed, the buzzing of bees about a hive, and a rustling of leaves in the faint stir of air that was more a respiration than a breath. The only sign of human life to be seen without was a frail thread of blue smoke that rose from the chimney, and disappeared in the sky.
Inside, on the white floor of the kitchen, the shadows of the sunflowers lay as if painted there, only now and then stirring slightly, as the air breathed on the wide, golden‐rayed shields outside. In the chimney‐corner, almost as silent as a shadow, an old woman sat in a rocking‐chair, knitting, and thinking. The two small windows, with crossing light, made one corner of the room bright; but where this woman sat, her face could be seen plainly only by firelight.
It was a rudely‐featured face—one seldom sees finely moulded features in the backwoods—but it showed fortitude, good sense, and that unconscious integrity which is so far nobler than the conscious. The gray hair was drawn tightly back, and fastened high on the head with a yellow horn comb; the tall, spare figure was clad in a gown of dark‐blue calico covered with little white dots, and a checked blue‐and‐white apron tied on with white tape strings, and the hands that held the knitting were bony, large‐ jointed, and large‐veined.
The stick of wood that had been smouldering on the andirons bent in the middle, where a little flickering flame had been gnawing industriously for some time. The flame brightened, and made a dive into this break, where it found a splinter. The stick bent yet more, then suddenly snapped in two, one end dropping into the coals, the other end standing upright in the corner.
“Bless me!” muttered the old woman, dropping her work with a start. “There’s a stranger! I wonder who it is.”
She sat gazing dreamily at the brand a moment, and, as her face half settled again, it became evident that the expression was one of profound melancholy as well as thoughtfulness. The lifted eyelids, and the start that roused without brightening, showed that.
After a moment’s reverie, she drew a long sigh, and, before resuming her work, took the long iron tongs that leaned in the corner, and most inhospitably tossed the figurative stranger into the coals.
“I wonder why my thoughts run so on Jack and Bessie to‐day,” she soliloquized, fixing the end of the knitting‐needle into the leather sheath at her side. “I wish I knew how they are. It’s my opinion they’d have done as well to stay here. I don’t think much of that machinery business.”
The coming event which had thus cast its shadow before, was already at the gate, or, more literally, at the bars. Bessie Maynard had walked alone up the road she had not trodden for years, and now stood leaning there, and looking about with eyes that were at once eager and shrinking. Her face was pale, her mouth tightly closed; she had grown taller, and her appearance disclosed in some indefinable way a capacity for sternness which would scarcely have been suspected, or even credited, in the girl of twenty we left her. A glance would show that she had suffered deeply.
Presently, as she gazed, tears began to dim her eyes. She brushed them away, let down the slim cedar pole that barred her passage, stepped through, replaced the bar, and walked up the path to the house.
The knitter in the chimney‐corner heard the sound of advancing steps, and sat still, with her face turned over her shoulder, to watch the door. The steps reached the threshold and paused there, and for a moment the two women gazed at each other—the one silent from astonishment, the other struggling to repress some emotion that rose again to the surface.
The visitor was the first to recover her self‐possession. She came in smiling, and held out her hands.
“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, Aunt Nancy?” she asked.
Her voice broke the spell, and the old woman started up with a true country welcome, hearty, and rather rough. It was many a year since Bessie Maynard’s hands had felt such a grasp, or her arms such a shake.
“But where is Jack?” asked his aunt, looking toward the door over Bessie’s shoulder.
“Oh! he’s at home,” was the reply, rather negligently given. “But how are you, Aunt Nancy? Have you room for me to stay awhile? I took a fancy to be quiet a little while this summer. The city is so hot and noisy.”
The old lady repeated her welcomes, mingled with many apologies for the kind of accommodations she had to offer, all the while helping to remove her visitor’s bonnet and shawl, drawing up the rocking‐chair for her, and pressing her into it.
“Do sit down and rest,” she said. “But where is the baby? Why on earth didn’t you bring her?”
Bessie clasped her hands tightly in her lap, and looked steadily at the questioner before answering. “The baby is at home!” she said then, in a low voice.
Aunt Nancy was just turning away for some hospitable purpose, but the look and tone arrested her.
“You don’t mean—” she began, but went no further.
“Yes,” replied Bessie quietly; “there is only James left.”
James was the eldest child.
Mrs. Nancy Maynard was not much given to expressions of tenderness—New England people of the old sort seldom were—but she laid her hand softly on her niece’s shoulder, and said unsteadily:
“You poor dear, how tried you have been!”
“We have all our trials,” responded the other, with a sort of coldness.
The old woman knew not what to say. She turned away, mending the fire. If Bessie had wept, she would have known how to comfort her; but this strange calmness was embarrassing. Scarcely less embarrassing was the light, indifferent talk that followed, the questions concerning crops, and weather, and little household affairs, evidently put to set aside more serious topics.
This baby was the fourth child that Bessie Maynard had lost. After the first, no child of hers had lived to reach its third year. Each one had been carried away by a sudden distemper. The first death had been announced to John Maynard’s aunt in a long letter from Bessie, full of a healthy sorrow, every line stained with tears. John had written the next time, his wife being too much worn out with watching and grief to write. At the third death, there came a line from Bessie: “My little boy is gone, Aunt Nancy. What do you suppose God means?”
Aunt Nancy had wondered somewhat over this strange missive, but had decided that, whatever God meant, Bessie meant resignation.
But now, as she marked her niece’s changed face and manner, and recollected that laconic note, she was forced to give up the comforting thought. There might be endurance, but there was no resignation in that face.
The sense of distance and strangeness grew on her, though Bessie began to help her get supper ready, drawing out and laying the table as though she had done it every day of her life, and even remembering the cup that had been hers, and the little iron rack on which she used to set the teapot. “Jack found the brass‐headed nail this hangs on miles back in the woods,” she said. “It’s a wonder how it got there.”
“Why didn’t Jack come with you?” asked Aunt Nancy, catching at the opportunity to say something personal.
A deep blush ran up Bessie’s face at being so caught, but her hesitation was only momentary.
“He is too busy,” she answered briefly.
“But I should think he might take a rest now and then,” persisted her aunt.
Bessie gave a short laugh that was not without bitterness.
“What rest can a man take when he has a steam‐engine spouting carbonic acid in one side of his brain, a flying‐machine in the other side, and a wheel in perpetual motion between them? John is given over to metals and motions. I might as well have a locomotive for a husband. Shall I take up the applesauce in this bowl?”
“Yes. I should think that James might have come.” Aunt Nancy held desperately to the thread she had caught.
“James is a little John,” replied Bessie, pouring the hot, green applesauce into a straight, white bowl with a band of narrow blue stripes around the middle of it. “Never mind my coming alone, Aunt Nancy. I got along very well, and they will do very well without me.”
They sat down to the table, and Bessie made a great pretence of eating, but ate nothing. Then they went out and looked at the garden, talking all the while about nothing, and soon, to the relief of both, it was bed‐time.
Where Are You Going?
We happened, the other day, to notice in the columns of a ribald infidel newspaper an advertisement in which a young lady gave notice of her desire to find “board in an infidel or atheist family.” There are many persons nowadays who are looking for a lodging‐place and for food which will give rest and refreshment to their minds and hearts, in the bosom of the infidel and atheistic family circle. They may not, in most cases, distinctly perceive and expressly avow that they are going over to dwell in the tents of atheism, but they have turned their faces and steps in that direction, and into the path leading thitherward, and those who keep on their way must arrive, sooner or later, at that destination. It is to these that we address the question: Where are you going? We would like to have them reflect a little on the kind of entertainment which they may reasonably expect to find in the private family of the household, and in the larger family of human society, when these are constituted on atheistic principles.
Before going any further, we will designate more precisely what class of persons we intend by the above description. In general, all who do not believe in a law made known to the mind and conscience by Almighty God, and, in particular, those who, having been brought up in the Catholic faith, no longer believe in that law as made known by the authority of the church. We class these last individuals, for whose benefit chiefly though not exclusively we are writing, with those first mentioned advisedly and for a reason; and warn them that they are included in the number of those whose faces are set toward atheism. Nevertheless, we do not say this on the ground that every one who is not a Catholic is either incapable of knowing God and his law, or logically bound to deny their existence. A Theist, a Jew, or a Protestant has a rational ground for holding against the atheist or infidel all that portion of Catholic truth which his religion includes. Therefore, we have not included any of these in the number of the atheistical.
Those only who do not believe in any law of God over the conscience we have charged with this tendency to positive atheism. Against such, the justice of the charge is manifest. For they are practically atheists already, and by denying an essential attribute of the Creator, and a relation which the creature must have toward him on account of this attribute, the way is opened to a denial of his existence. As for those who have been instructed in the Catholic faith and have thrown off its authority over their conscience, we say that they have turned towards atheism, because we are convinced that, as a matter of fact, the motives and reasonings which have induced them to this fatal apostasy are practically and theoretically atheistical, even if they themselves are not distinctly aware of their ultimate tendency. We do not deny that a Catholic may lapse into some imperfect form of Christianity or natural religion. The first Protestants had been originally Catholics, and so have been some of the so‐called philosophers professing natural religion. But the present tendency of unbelief is toward atheism, and those believers in positive, revealed religion, whether Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, who are swept by this current, are carried toward the abyss whither it is rushing. Those who reject the law of God which is proclaimed and enjoined by the authority of the church, do so because its moral or intellectual restraints are irksome, and they wish to be at liberty. In plain words, they wish to be free to sin, to follow the proclivity of our fallen nature to indulge in pride and concupiscence, without any fear of God before their eyes to disturb their peace. Therefore, they deny the authority of the church to bind their conscience to believe the doctrines and obey the moral precepts which she promulgates in the name of God. Their revolt is against the law itself and the sovereign authority of God. They sin against faith and against reason also; against the natural as well as the revealed law. They sin with the understanding as well as with the will, and their sin is one which goes to the root of all moral obligation and responsibility in the creature toward the Creator. It is an assertion of perfect individual liberty of thought and action, of independence and self‐sovereignty; and as such an independence is completely incompatible with the existence of God, it is but a step to deny that he exists, or at least that we have any knowledge of his existence. Moreover, modern unbelief proceeds by the way of objections, difficulties, and doubts. It is sceptical in its principle; and one who rejects the authority of the church and of divine revelation on the principle of scepticism, easily rejects all philosophy and natural religion on the same principle, and runs down into pure materialism and atheism.
There are many persons in Europe, and some in this country, who have sunk into a state of avowed impiety and violent hostility to all religion which places them beyond the reach of every appeal to reason, conscience, or right feeling. We do not attempt to argue with such as these; but we suppose in those whom we address a condition of the mind and heart much less degenerate and hopeless. We suppose them to recognize the excellence and necessity of the private and social virtues, and to retain some intellectual and moral ideal in their minds which they cherish and venerate. They believe in truthfulness, honor, fidelity, honesty, true love, friendship, in the cultivation of knowledge and the fine arts, in all that can give decorum, refinement, and charm to domestic and social life, power, dignity, and splendor to political society. But all this is looked on as a spontaneous, natural growth, which finds its perfection and its end from and on this earth, and in this life, without any direct relation to God and an immortal life in another sphere of existence. Now, that such persons are intellectually and morally on a height which elevates them far above those who are wholly degraded in mind and character, we readily admit. But they are on the verge of a precipice. It is the black and awful abyss of atheism which yawns beneath them. And we invite them to look over the brink, and down into those dark depths, that they may consider deliberately whither their steps are leading them, before it is too late to retreat to a safer position.
In what consists the reality of truth, let us ask of one who professes to love truth, or the obligation of respecting it, if Christianity is a falsehood, and its Founder a deceiver of mankind? One who knows the evidence on which Christianity rests, and rejects it as a delusion, has adopted a principle of scepticism which destroys all the evidence on which any truth can rest. The principles of reason are denied or called in question, unbelief or doubt extends to everything. The existence of God is doubted, the distinct and immortal existence of the soul is questioned, nothing remains but the senses and the phenomena which are called sensible facts. Take away God, the Essential Truth, who can neither be deceived nor deceive us, and who has manifested to us the truth by the lights of reason and revelation, and there is no such thing as truth. The descendants of apes, whose whole existence is merely one of sensation, who have sprung from material forces and are resolved into them by dissolution, can have no more obligation of speaking the truth than their cousins the monkeys. If lying, calumny, or perjury will increase the means of your sensible enjoyment, why not employ them against your brother‐apes, as well as entrap a monkey and cage him for your amusement? Whence comes the excellence and obligation of honor, that principle which impels a man rather to die than to betray a trust or abandon the post of duty? On what is based honesty? Why should one choose to pass his life, and to make his family pass their lives, in poverty and privation, rather than take the gold of another, when he can steal it with impunity? Where lies the detestable baseness of bribery and swindling? Why does the heart revolt against the conduct of the man or woman who is faithless to conjugal, parental, or filial love, who is a false friend, ungrateful for kindness, a traitor to his country? It is all very well to say that our natural instincts impel us to love certain qualities and detest others, as we spontaneously admire beauty and are displeased with ugliness. This is certainly true. And it is very well to say that happiness and well‐being are, on the whole, promoted by virtuous sentiments and actions, and hindered by those which are vicious. But if mere selfish, sensitive enjoyment of the good of this life be the end of life itself, all virtue is resolved at last into the quest of this enjoyment by the most sure and suitable means. When virtue requires the sacrifice of this enjoyment, it is no longer virtue. Why should a wife sacrifice her happiness to a cruel, sickly, or disagreeable husband, a husband preserve fidelity to a wife who is hopelessly deranged or who has violated her marriage vows? Why should a soldier expose his life in obedience to the order of a stupid or reckless commander, or shed his blood in an unnecessary war brought on by the folly or ambition of incompetent or unscrupulous rulers? Why should a seaman die for the sake of saving passengers who are nothing to him, and many of whom are perhaps worthless persons, leaving his widow and children without a protector? Why trouble ourselves about taking care of the poor, ruined wrecks of humanity, who can never more be capable of enjoying life or contributing to the enjoyment of others? If we are not the offspring of God, but of the earth, mere sensitive and mortal animals, existing for the pleasure of a day, all the virtues which demand self‐sacrifice are absurd; and the sentiments which we feel about these virtues are illusions. It is very well to appeal to these sentiments; but those who do so must admit that these sentiments must be capable of being justified by reason. An atheist or a sceptic cannot do this. If a man is essentially the same with a pig, there cannot be any reason for treating him otherwise than as a pig. Our natural sentiments, which revolt against the practical consequences of the degrading doctrine of atheism, prove that it is contrary to nature, and therefore false. It is because our nature is rational and immortal that we owe to ourselves and our fellows those obligations and charities which are not due to the brutes; that life, chastity, property, honor, love and friendship, promises and engagements, political, social, and personal rights of all kinds, are to be respected and held sacred. Our rational and immortal nature cannot exist except by participation from God, and its constitutive principle is the capacity to know God and recognize his law as our supreme rule. The obligation of doing that which is just and honorable is derived from that law. Our own rights and the rights of our neighbor are inviolable, because God has given them. They are the rights of God, as that great philosopher Dr. Brownson has so frequently and conclusively proved. God, as our lawgiver, must necessarily give us a law which is plain and certain. It can be no other than the Christian law. And every one who has been instructed in the Catholic faith must see that Christianity and the Christian law are guaranteed, defined, proclaimed, and enforced on the conscience by the authority of the church.
Let him reject that authority, and he has disowned God; and by so doing has taken away the basis of virtue. Self‐interest, sentiment, and human instincts are no sufficient support for it. For, although our temporal interests coincide in great part with the claims of virtue, and natural sentiments and instincts are radically good, we are subject to inordinate and even violent passions. Take away the fear of God, and the passions will sweep away all slighter barriers. Pride and concupiscence will assert their sway, make a wreck of virtue, and eventually destroy even our earthly and temporal happiness.
Even with all the power and influence which religion can exercise over men under the most favorable circumstances, there is enough of sin and misery in the world; but what are we to expect if atheism should prevail? The practical atheism, or, to speak Saxon, the ungodliness of the age, has produced enough of bitter and deadly fruit to give us a taste of the entertainment which is awaiting us if the time ever comes when the power which religion still retains is altogether taken away. We do not need to refer to the pages of professed moralists, or to quote sermons on this topic. It is enough to take what we find in the works of those masterly novelists who describe and satirize the crimes and follies of modern society and depict its tragic miseries, and what we read every day in the newspapers. The intrigues, villanies, swindlings, divorces, murders, and suicides which blacken the record of each passing month, and the hidden, untold tragedies going on perpetually in private life, give us proof enough of the ravages which the passions of fallen, weak human nature will make when all fear of God is removed, and they are left uncontrolled by anything stronger than self‐interest, and physical coercion in the hands of the civil power. No one who casts off all faith in God, allegiance to his authority, and fear of his just retribution, can foresee what he himself may become, or what he may do before his life is ended. The natural virtues, the intellectual gifts, the education, refinement, elevated sentiments, and pure affections which such a person may possess in youth, whether it be a young man or a young woman, are no sure guarantee or safeguard, even in a religious and moral community. Much less are they in one which is wholly irreligious. No one knows, therefore, how wicked he may become, or how miserable he may make himself. Still less can any one foresee what treachery, cruelty, and ingratitude, what bitter sufferings, and what ruin, may await him at the hands of others, if he is to be a member of a great infidel or atheist family which he has helped to form. He will be like the unhappy Alpine tourist who fell down from the Matterhorn, dragging with him and dragged by his companions from his dangerous foothold, and all dashed in pieces in the abyss beneath.
Let any one who has been brought up in the enjoyment of those advantages which give decorum, charm, and refined pleasure to life—and who wishes and expects to possess the same in the future which he looks forward to in this world, with a zest and freedom increased by the riddance of all fear of God—think for a moment about one very important question. To what is he indebted for the blessings he has already enjoyed, and to what can he look for those he is expecting? In order that he should have a happy home, his parents must fulfil all the obligations of the conjugal and parental relations. If he is born to wealth, his father has had to work for him, or at least to take care of his property. If he has had a good mother, it is needless to expatiate on all that a woman must be, must do, and must suffer, to give a child such a blessing as that which is expressed by the tender and holy name of mother. For his education, how many noble and disinterested men have toiled, how many generous sacrifices of time, and labor, and money have been required! To create the nation which gives him the advantages of political order, the civilization which gives him a society to live in, the arts which minister to his higher tastes and personal comforts, how many causes have concurred together, what a multitude of the most noble, self‐sacrificing, heroic exertions of genius, philanthropy, patriotism, fructified by a plentiful besprinkling of the blood of just and faithful men, have been necessary through long ages of time! In his ideal of a happy life, which he hopes for in this world, what a multitude of things he requires which presuppose the fidelity of thousands of persons to those obligations and relations of life on which he is dependent as an individual. His bride must bring to the nuptial feast her virgin purity, and keep her wedding‐ring unbroken and undimmed. His children must be such as a father’s heart can regard with pride and joy. Those with whom he has relations of business must act with honesty and integrity. He must have good servants to work for him, and hundreds of skilful and industrious hands must minister to his wants or caprices. Society must be kept in order, the machinery of the world must be kept going, the law must protect his life and property, and the majority of his fellow‐men must remain content with a lot of hard work and poverty, that he may enjoy his dignity, leisure, splendor, and comfort in peace and security.
Now it is a simple fact, that the principles and laws which have wrought out whatever is high and excellent in modern civilization, have been derived from the Christian religion. The public, social, and private virtues which alone preserve society from corruption and extinction, are the fruit either of religious conscientiousness, or of the influence of religion on the natural conscience of those who live in the atmosphere which it has purified and irradiated. There has never been such a thing as human society founded on atheism; and when atheism, practical or theoretical, has begun to prevail in any community, it has begun to perish. Whoever tampers with that poison is preparing suicide for himself, and death for all around him that is living. A large dose will kill at once all that is capable of death in a soul which is, in spite of itself, immortal. The slow sipping of small doses will gradually produce the same effect. The general distribution of the poison will destroy more or less rapidly the vital principle of the family, of society, of the state, of human civilization. Human beings cannot live together in peace and order, in love and friendship, in mutual truth and fidelity, in happiness and prosperity, if they believe that they are mere animals, whose only good is the brief pleasure which can be snatched from the present life. Even the imperfect amity and good‐fellowship, the lower grade of society, the inferior well‐being and enjoyment, the faint dim similitude of the rational order which exists among the irrational animals, cannot be attained by the human race when it strives to degenerate itself to the level of the brute creation. The irrepressible, inextinguishable, violent appetite for a satisfying good, when it is defrauded of its true object and turned away from its legitimate end, becomes a devastating tornado of passion. There is too much suffering, and too small a supply of sensible enjoyment in human life, to allow mankind to be quiet, and to agree together amicably in the relations of civilized society, in the common pursuit of temporal happiness. Pride and concupiscence are as insatiable as the grave and as cruel as death. The fear of God can alone restrain them. Take that away from the individual, and he will be faithless to the duties of life, friendship, honesty, patriotism, philanthropy, to his nobler instincts, his higher sentiments, his ideal standard of good, in proportion as his passions gain power over him. Take it away from the family and the social order, and mutual faithlessness, breeding mutual hatred and warfare, will be the result. Take it away from the masses of men, and the commune will come, the maddened rabble will rush for the coveted possessions of the smaller number who appear to have exclusive possession of the real good, and at last all will be resolved into a state of barbarism in which the race will become extinct.
This will never take place; for the church and religion of Jesus Christ are imperishable, and God will bring the world to a sudden end before the human race has had time to destroy itself. But such is the tendency of the infidelity and atheism of the age. Whoever turns his back on Christianity is a partaker in this tendency, and a companion of that band of conspirators against religion and society whose end is more infernal and whose means are more cruel than those of the Thugs of India.
Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune. Concluded.
There was music enough chiming at No. 13 to keep a choir of angels busy. Mme. de Chanoir, with the petulance of weakness, grumbled unceasingly, lamenting the miseries of her own position, altogether ignoring the fact that it was no worse, but in some ways better, than that of those around her, whinging and whining from morning till night, pouring out futile invectives against the Prussians, the Emperor, the Republic, General Trochu, and everybody and everything remotely conducive to her sufferings. She threatened to let herself die of hunger rather than touch horse‐flesh, and for some days she so perseveringly held to her determination that Aline was terrified, and believed she would hold it to the end. The only thing that remained to the younger sister of any value was her mother’s watch, a costly little gem, with the cipher set in brilliants; it had been her grandfather’s wedding present to his daughter‐in‐law. Aline took it to the jeweller who had made it, and sold it for one hundred and fifty francs. With this she bought a ham and a few other delicacies that tempted Mme. de Chanoir out of her suicidal abstinence; she ate heartily, neither asking nor guessing at what price the dainties had been bought; and Aline, only too glad to have had the sacrifice to make, said nothing of what it had cost her. Gradually everything went that could be sold or exchanged for food. Aline would have lived on the siege bread, and never repined, had she been alone, but it went to her heart to hear the never‐ending complaints of Mme. de Chanoir, to see her childish indignation at the great public disasters which her egotism contracted into direct personal grievances. Fortunately for herself, Mlle. de Lemaque was not a constant witness of the irritating scene. From nine in the morning till late in the evening she was away at the Ambulance, active and helpful, and cheering many a heavy heart and aching head by her bright and gentle ministry, and forgetting her own sufferings in the effort to alleviate greater ones.
“If you only could come with me, Félicité, and see something of the miseries our poor soldiers are enduring, it would make your own seem light,” she often said to Mme. de Chanoir, when, on coming home from her labor of love, she was met by the unreasonable grumbling of the invalid; “it is such a delight to feel one’s self a comfort and a help to them. I don’t know how I am ever to settle down to the make‐believe work of teaching after this long spell of real work.”
She enjoyed the work so much, in fact, that, if it had not been for the sufferings, real and imaginary, of her sister, this would have been the happiest time she had known since her school days. The make‐believe work, as Aline called it, which had hitherto filled her time had never filled her heart. It was a means of living that kept her brains and her hands at work, nothing more; and it had often been a source of wonder to her in her busiest days to feel herself sometimes seized with ennui. That trivial, hackneyed word hardly, perhaps, expresses the void, the sort of hunger‐ pang, that more and more frequently of late years had made her soul ache and yearn, but now the light seemed to break upon her, and she understood why it had been so. The work itself was too superficial, too external. It had overrun her life without satisfying it; it had not penetrated the surface, and brought out the best and deepest resources of her mind and heart—it had only broken the crust, and left the soil below untilled. She had flitted like a butterfly from one study to another; history, and literature, and music had attracted her by turns; she had gone into them enthusiastically, mastered their difficulties, and appropriated their beauties; but after a time the spell waned, and she glided imperceptibly into the dry mechanism of the thing, and went on giving her lesson because it brought her so much a cachet. But this work of a Sister of Mercy was a different sort of life altogether. The enthusiasm, instead of waning, grew as she went on. At first, the prosaic details, the foul air, the physical fatigue and moral strain of the sick‐nurse’s life were unspeakably repugnant to her; her natural fastidiousness turned from them in disgust, and she would have thrown it all up after the first week but for sheer human respect; she persevered, however, and at the end of a fortnight she had grown interested in her patients; by degrees she got reconciled to the obnoxious duties their state demanded of her; and before a month had passed it had become a ministry of love, and her whole soul had thrown itself into the perfect performance of her duties. She was often tired and faint on leaving the Ambulance, but she always left it with regret, and the evident zest and gladness of heart with which she set out each morning became at last a grievance in the eyes of her sister. Mme. de Chanoir vented her discontent by harping all the time of breakfast on the hard‐heartedness of some people who could look at wounds and all sorts of horrors without flinching; whereas the very sight of a drop of blood made her almost faint; but then she was so constituted as to feel other people’s wounds as if they were her own; it was a great misfortune; she envied people who had hard hearts; it certainly enabled them to do more, while she could only weep and pity. Aline bore the querulous reproaches as cheerfully as if she had been blessed with one of those hearts of stone that Mme. de Chanoir so envied. She had the indulgence of a happy heart, and she had found the secret of making her life a poem. But the nurse’s courage was greater than her strength. After the first three months, material privations, added to arduous attendance on the sick and wounded, began to tell; her health showed signs of rebellion.
M. Dalibouze was the first to notice it. He came regularly on the Saturday evenings as of old; his age exempted him from the terrible outpost work on the ramparts; and he profited by the circumstance to keep up, as far as possible, his ordinary habits and enjoyments, “afin de soutenir le morale,” as he said. When he noticed this change in Aline, he immediately used his privilege of friend of the family to interfere; he begged her to modify her zeal for the poor sufferers at the Ambulance, and to consider how precious her life was to her sister and her friends.
Aline took the advice very kindly, but assured him that, far from wearing out her strength as he supposed, her work was the only thing that sustained it. The tone in which she said this convinced him it was the truth. It then occurred to him that her pallor and languid step must be caused by the unhealthy diet of the siege. Everybody suffered in a more or less degree; but, as it always happens, those who suffered most said least about it. The gros rentier, who fared sumptuously on kangaroo, and Chinese puppies, and elephant at a hundred francs a pound, talked loud about the miseries of starvation which he underwent for the sake of his country; but the petit rentier, whose modest meal had long since been replaced by a scanty ration of horse‐flesh, and that only to be had by “making tail,” as they call it, for hours at the butchers shop—the petit rentier said very little. He was perishing slowly off the face of the earth; but, with the pride of poverty strong in death, he gathered his rags around him, and made ready to die in silence.
It was on such people as Mme. de Chanoir and her sister that the siege pressed hardest; their concierge was far better off than they; she could claim her bons, and fight for her rations; and she had fifteen sous a day as the wife of a National Guard.
As to Mme. Cléry, she proved herself equal to the occasion. She had no National Guard to fall back upon, but she was sustained by the thought that she was suffering for her country; she, too, was a good patriot. Patriotism, however, has its limits of endurance, and hay bread was the border line that Mme. Cléry’s patriotism refused to pass. When the good bread was rationed, she showed signs of mutiny; but when it degenerated into that hideous compound, of which we have all seen specimens, her indignation declared itself in open rage. “What is this?” she cried, when the first loaf was handed to her after three hours’ waiting. “Are we cattle, to eat hay?” And, breaking the tawny, spongy lumps in two, she pulled out a long bit of the offensive weed, and held it up to the scorn of the queue.
As to Mme. de Chanoir, when she saw it she went into hysterics for the rest of the day. But Providence was mindful of No. 13. Just at this crisis, when Aline’s altered looks aroused her sister from the selfish contemplation of her own ailments and wants, M. Dalibouze arrived early one morning soon after Mme. de Lemaque had started for the Ambulance, and announced that he had received the opportune present of a number of hams, tins of preserved meat, condensed milk, and an indefinite number of pots of jam. It was three times as much as he could consume before the siege was raised—for raised it infallibly would be, and, if he were not greatly mistaken, within forty‐eight hours—so he begged Mme. la Générale to do him the favor of accepting the surplus.
Mme. de Chanoir, with infantine simplicity, believed this credible story, and did M. Dalibouze the favor he requested. So, thanks to his generous friend, the professor in turn became the benefactor of the two sisters, and had the delight of seeing Aline revive on the substantial fare that arrived so apropos. Well, it came at last, the end of the blocus; not, indeed, as M. Dalibouze had prognosticated. But that was not his fault. He had not reckoned with treachery. He could not suspect what a brood of traitors the glorious capital of civilization was nourishing in her patriotic bosom. But wait a little! It would be made square yet. Europe would see France rise by‐and‐by, like the Phœnix from her ashes, and spread her wings, and take a flight that would astonish the world. As to the Prussians, those vile vandals, whose greasy moustaches were not fit to brush the boots of Paris, let them bide a while, and they shall see what they should see!
Thus did M. Dalibouze resumer la situation, while Paris on her knees waited humbly the terms that Prussia might dictate as the price of a loaf of bread for her starving patriots.
But the worst was to come yet. Hardly had the little ménage at No. 13 drawn a long breath of relief after the prolonged miseries and terrors of the siege, than that saturnalia, the like of which assuredly the world never saw before, and let us hope never will again, the Commune, began. Like a fiery flood it rose in Paris, and rose and rose till the red wave swept from end to end of the city, spreading desolation and terror everywhere, and making the respectable party of order long to call back the Prussians, and help them out of the mess. How it began, and grew, and ended we have heard till we know the miserable story by heart. I am not going to tell it here. The Commune is only the last episode in the history of No. 13.
There was work to do and plenty in binding the wounds and smoothing the pillows of dying men, and words to be spoken that dying ears are open to when spoken in Christian love. Aline de Lemaque’s courage did not fail her in this last and fearful ordeal. She resumed her duties as Sister of Mercy, asked no questions as to the politics of the wounded men, but did the best she could for them. Mme. de Chanoir could not understand how her sister spent her time and service on Red Republicans; the sooner the race died out, the better, and it was not the work of a Christian to preserve the lives of such snakes and fiends.
“There are dupes and victims as well as fiends among them,” Aline assured her; “and those who are guilty are the most to be pitied.” After a time, however, the dangers attendant on going into the streets became so great that Aline was forced to remain indoors. Barricades were thrown up in every direction, and made the circulation a dangerous and almost impracticable feat to members of the party of order. The Rue Royale, which had been safe during the first siege, was now a threatened centre of accumulated danger. It was armed to the teeth. The Faubourg end of it was barred by a stone barricade that might have passed for a fortress—a wall of heavy masonry weighted with cannon, two black giants that lay couched like monster slugs peeping through a hedge. But after those terrible weeks there came at last the final tug, the troops came in, and Greek met Greek. Shell and shot rained on the city like hailstones. The great black slugs gave tongue, bellowing with unintermitting fury; all round them came responsive roars from barricades and batteries; it was the discord of hell broke upward through the earth, and echoing through the streets of Paris.
Aline de Lemaque and her sister sat in the little saloon at No. 13, listening to the war‐dogs without, and straining their ears to catch every sound that shot up with any significant distinctness from the chaos of noise. Mme. Cléry was with them; she stayed altogether at No. 13 now, sleeping on the sofa at night. It would have been impossible for her to come and go twice a day while the city was in this state of commotion. To‐ day the old woman could not keep quiet; she was constantly up and down to the concierge’s lodge to pick up any stray report that came through the chinks of the porte‐cochère. Once she went down and remained so long that the sisters were uneasy. An explosion had reverberated through the street, shaking the house from cellar to garret, and, like an electric shock, flinging both the sisters on their knees simultaneously. Mme. de Chanoir’s spine had recovered itself within the last week as if by magic. She had abandoned her usual recumbent position, and came and went about the house like the rest of them. If the Commune did nothing else, it did this. We must give the devil his due.
“Félicité, I must go and see what it is. I hear groans close under the window; perhaps a shell has fallen in the court and killed her,” said Aline. And, rising, she turned to go.
“Don’t leave me! For the love of heaven, don’t leave me alone, Aline!” implored her sister. “I’ll die with terror if that comes again while I’m here by myself.”
“Come with me, then,” said Aline. And, taking her sister’s hand, they went down together.
Mme. Cléry was not killed. This fact was made clear to them at once by the spectacle of the old woman standing in the porte‐cochère, and shaking her fist vehemently at somebody or something at the further end of it.
“Stay here,” said Aline to Mme. de Chanoir, motioning her back into the house. “I will see what it is; and if you can do anything I’ll call you.”
It was the concierge that Mme. Cléry was apostrophizing. And this was why: a shell had burst, not in the yard, as the sisters fancied, but in the street just outside, and the explosion was followed by a shriek and a loud blow at the door, while something like a body fell heavily against it.
“Cordon!” cried Mme. Cléry; “it is some unfortunate hit by the shell.”
“More likely a communist coming to pillage and burn. I’ll cordon to none of ’em!” declared the concierge. “The door is locked; if they want to get in, they may blow it open.” But Mme. Cléry flew at her throat, and swore, if she didn’t give up the key, she, Mme. Cléry, would know the reason why. The concierge groaned, and felt, in bitterness of spirit, what a difficult task the cordon was. But she opened the door; under it lay two wounded men, both of them young; one was evidently dying; he had been mortally struck by a fragment of the shell that had burst over the thick oaken door and dealt death around and in front of it. The other was wounded, too, but much less seriously; he had been flung down by his companion, and the shock of the fall, more than his wound, had stunned him. Mme. Cléry dragged them in under the shelter of the porte‐cochère, and proposed laying them on the floor of the lodge. But the concierge had no mind to take in a dead and a dying man, and vowed she would not have her lodge turned into a coffin. The dispute was waxing warm, Mme. Cléry threatening muscular argument, when Aline made her appearance. Her training in the Ambulance stood her in good stead now.
“Poor fellow! He will give no more trouble to any one,” she said, after feeling the pulse of the first, and laying her hand for a moment on his heart; “bring a cloth, and cover his face; he must lie here till he can be removed.”
The concierge obeyed her. They composed the features, and laid the body under cover of the gateway.
Aline then examined the other. His arm was badly wounded. While she was still probing the wound, the man opened his eyes, stared round him for a moment with a speculative gaze of returning consciousness, made a spasmodic effort to rise, but fell back at once. “You are wounded—not severely, I hope,” said Aline; “but you must not attempt to move till we have dressed your arm.”
She despatched Mme. Cléry for the box containing her ambulance appliances, lint, bandages, etc., and then, with an expertness that would have done credit to a medical student, she washed and dressed the shattered limb, while Mme. de Chanoir watched the operation in shuddering excitement through the glass door at the foot of the stairs. What to do next was the puzzle. The concierge resolutely refused to let him into her lodge; there was no knowing who or what he was, and she was a lone woman, and had no mind to compromise herself by taking in bad characters. The poor fellow was so much exhausted from loss of blood that he certainly could not help himself, and it would have been cruel to leave him down in the courtyard, where his unfortunate comrade was lying dead within sight of him. Aline saw there was nothing for it but to take him up to their own apartment. How to get him there was the difficulty. He looked about six feet long, and might have weighed any number of stone. She and Mme. Cléry could never succeed in carrying him. He had not spoken while she was dressing his arm, but lay so still with his eyes closed that they thought he had fainted.
“We must carry him,” said Aline in a determined voice, and beckoned the concierge to come and help.
But before proceeding to the gigantic enterprise, Mme. Cléry poured out a tumbler of wine, which she had had the wit to bring down with the lint‐ box, and held it to the sufferer’s lips, while Aline supported his head against her knee. He drank it with avidity, and the draught seemed to revive him instantaneously; he sat up leaning on his right arm.
“We are going to carry you up‐stairs, mon petit,” said Mme. Cléry, patting him on the shoulder with the patronizing manner an amazon might have assumed towards a dwarf.
“You carry me!” said the young man, measuring the short, trim figure of the charwoman with a sceptical twinkle in his eyes: they were dark‐gray eyes, particularly clear, and piercing.
“Me and Mlle. Aline,” said Mme. Cléry, in a tone that testified against the supercilious way in which her measure was being taken.
Aline was behind him. He turned to look at her with a jest on his lips, but, changing his mind apparently, he bowed; then, with a resolute effort, he bent forward, and, before either she or Mme. Cléry could interfere, he was on his feet. It was well, however, they were both within reach of him, for he staggered, and must have fallen but for their prompt assistance.
“La!” said Mme. Cléry, “what it is to be proud! Lean on Mlle. Aline and me, and try and get up‐stairs without breaking your neck.”
“It is the fortune of war,” said the gentleman laughing, and accepting the shoulder that Aline turned towards him.
They accomplished the ascent in safety, and then, in spite of his assertion that he was all right now, Mme. de Chanoir insisted on their guest lying down on her sofa while the charwoman prepared some food for him. But safety, in truth, was nowhere. The fighting grew brisker from minute to minute. The troops were in possession of the neighboring streets; they had taken the Federals in the rear, and were mowing them down like corn. The struggle could not last much longer, but it was desperate, and the loss of life, already appalling, must be still greater before it ended. The stranger who had introduced himself so unexpectedly to No. 13 had formed one of the party of order, he told his good Samaritans, who had gone unarmed, with a flag of truce, to the Federals in the Rue de la Paix; he had seen the ghastly butchery that followed, and only escaped as if by miracle himself; he had fought as a mobile against the Prussians, and received a sabre‐cut in the head, which had kept him in the hospital for weeks; he had, of course, refused to join the Federals, and it was at the risk of his life that he showed himself abroad in Paris; just now he had been making an attempt to join the troops, when that shell burst, and stopped him in his venturesome career. All day and all night the four inmates of the little entresol waited and watched in breathless anxiety for the close of the battle that was raging around them. It never flagged for an instant, and as it went on the noise grew louder and more bewildering, the tocsin rang from every belfry in the city, the drum beat to arms in every direction, the chassepots hissed, the cannon boomed, and yells and shrieks of fratricidal murder filled the air, mingling with the smell and smoke of blood and powder. It was a night that drove hundreds mad who lived through it. Yet the worst was still to come. Late the next afternoon, Aline, who was constantly at the window, peeping from behind the mattress stuffed into it to protect them from the shells, thought she discovered something in the atmosphere indicative of a change of some sort. She said nothing, but slipped out of the room, and ran up to a bull’s‐eye at the top of the house that served as a sort of observatory to those who had the courage of their curiosity, as the French put it, and ventured their heads for a moment to the mercy of the missiles flying amongst the chimney‐pots. It was an awful sight that met her. A fire was raging close to the house. Where it began and ended it was impossible to say, but clearly it was of immense magnitude, and blazed with a fury that threatened to spread the flames far and wide. She stood rooted to the spot, literally paralyzed with horror. Were they to be burnt to death, after living through such miseries, and escaping death in so many shapes? Yet how could they escape it? There were barricades on every side of them; if they were not shot down like dogs, which was the most likely event, they would never be allowed to pass. All this rushed through her mind as she gazed in blank despair out of the little bull’s‐eye, that embraced the whole area of the Rue Royale and the adjacent streets. As yet, there was a space between the fire and No. 13. Mercifully, there was no wind, and she saw by the swaying of the flames that they drew rather towards the Madeleine than in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli. Flight was a forlorn hope, but still they must try it. She turned abruptly from the window, and was crossing the room, when a loud crash made her heart leap. She looked back. The roof of another house, one nearer to No. 13, had fallen in, and the flames, leaping through like rattlesnakes out of a bag, sprang at the sky, writhing and hissing as they licked it with their long red tongues.
“O God, have pity on us!”
Aline fell on her knees for one moment, and then hurried down to the salon.
“We must leave this at once,” she said, speaking calmly, but with white lips; “the street is on fire.”
M. Varlay, citoyen Varlay, as he gave his name, started to his feet, and, pulling the mattress from the window, looked out. He saw the flames above the house‐top.
“Let us go, with the help of God!” he exclaimed. “We must make for the Rue de Rivoli!”
Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman, as soon as they caught sight of the fire, shrieked in chorus, and made a headlong rush at the stairs.
“You must be quiet, madame!” cried M. Varlay in a tone that arrested both the women; “if we lose our presence of mind, we had better stay where we are. Have you any valuables, papers or money, that you can take in your pocket?” he said, turning to Aline. She alone had not lost her head.
Yes; there were a few letters of her parents, and some trinkets, valuable only as souvenirs, which she had had the forethought to put together. She took them quickly, and the four went down the stairs. There was no one in the lodge. The concierge had taken refuge in her cellar, and her husband was supposed to be saving France somewhere else. Mme. Cléry pulled the string, and the little band sallied forth into the street. The air was so thick they could hardly see their way, except for the fiery forks of flame that shot up successively through the fog, illuminating dark spots with a momentary lurid brightness, while now and then the crash of a roof or a heavy beam was followed by a pillar of sparks that went rattling up into the sky like a fountain of rockets. The Babel of drums, and bells, and artillery added to the confusion of the scene as the fugitives hurried on singly under the shadow of the houses. They fared safely out of the Rue Royale and turned to the left. The Tuileries was enveloped in smoke, but the flames were nearly spent, only here and there a tongue of fire crept out of a crevice, licked the wall, twisted and twirled, and drew in again. A crowd was gathered under the portico of the Rue de Rivoli, watching the last throes of the conflagration, and discussing many questions in excited tones. Our travellers pushed on, and came unmolested to the corner of the Rue St. Florentine, where a sentry levelled his bayonet before them, and cried “Halt!” Mme. de Chanoir, who walked first, answered by a scream. Citoyen Varlay, laying his hand on her shoulder, drew her quickly behind him. “Stand here while I speak to him,” he said, and he advanced to parley with the Federal, at the same time putting his hand into his pocket. They had not exchanged half a dozen words when the sentinel shouldered his chassepot, and said:
“Quick, then, pass along!”
Varlay stood for the women to pass first. Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman rushed on, but no sooner had they stepped into the street than, clasping their hands, they fell upon their knees with a cry of agonized terror. The sight that met them was indeed enough to make a brave heart quail. To the left, extending right across the street, rose a barricade, a fortress rather, surmounted at either end by two warriors of the Commune, bending over a cannon as if in the very act of firing; in the centre two amazon pétroleuses stood with chassepots slung en baudelière and red rags in their hands that they waved aloft proudly like women who felt that the eyes of Europe were upon them; the intermediate space on either side of them was filled up with soldiers planted singly or in groups, and poséd in the attitudes of men whom forty centuries look down upon. Just as Mme. de Chanoir and her bonne came in front of the terrible mise‐en‐ scêne, and before they could go backward or forward, the word Fire! rang out from the fortress, two matches flashed in the hands of the gunners, and the women dropped to the ground with a shriek that would have waked the dead.
“What’s the matter now?” cried the sentinel.
“They are going to fire!”
“Imbeciles! No, they are going to be photographed!”(112)
And so they were. A photographic battery was set up against the railings opposite. Aline and citoyen Varlay seized the two half‐fainting women by the arm, and dragged them across and out of the range of the formidable tableau vivant. Meanwhile, the fire was gaining on No. 13. The house three doors down from it was flambée. It had been deserted the day before by all its occupants, save one family composed of a husband and wife, who had obstinately refused to believe in the danger till it was too late to evade it. They were friends of M. Dalibouze’s and the professor turned in to see them this morning on his way to No. 13. “The situation was a difficult one,” he said; “it were foolhardy to defy it, and the time was come when good citizens should save themselves.” He convinced M. and Mme. X—— that this was the only reasonable thing to do. So casting a last look at their belongings, they sallied forth from their home accompanied by their servant, an ex‐sapeur, too old for military service, but as hale and hearty as a youth of twenty. The professor had got in by a backway from the Faubourg St. Honoré, and thither he led his friends now; but, though less than fifteen minutes had elapsed since he had entered, the passage was already blocked: part of the wall had fallen and stopped it up. There was nothing for it but to go boldly out by the front door, and trust to Providence. But they reckoned without the pétroleuses. Those zealous daughters of the Commune, braving the shot, and the shell, and the vengeful flames of their own creation, sped from door to door, pouring the terrible fluid into holes and corners, through the gratings of cellars, under the doors, through the chinks of the windows, everywhere, dancing, and singing, and laughing all the time like tigers in human shape—tigers gone mad with fire and blood. When the sapeur opened the door, he beheld a group of them on the trottoir; one was rolling a barrel of petroleum on to the next house, another was steeping rags in a barrel already half empty, and handing them as fast as she could to others, who stuffed them into appropriate places, and set a light to them; every flame that rose was hailed by a shout of demoniacal exultation. The sapeur banged the door in their faces.
“We must set to work, and cut a hole through the wall,” he said; “it’s the last chance left us.”
No sooner said than done. He knew where to lay his hands on a couple of crowbars and a pickaxe; the professor fired the contents of his chassepot at the wall, and then the three men went at it, and worked as men do when death is behind them and life before. It was an old house, built chiefly of stone and mortar, very little iron, and it yielded quickly to the hammering blows of the workmen. A breach was made—a small one, but big enough to let a man crawl through. M. X—— passed out first, and then helped out his wife. M. Dalibouze and the sapeur followed. They hurried through the next apartment. M. Dalibouze reloaded his gun; whiz! whiz! went the bullets; bang! bang! went the crowbars; down rattled the stones; another breach was made, and again they were saved. Three times they fought their way through the walls, while the fire like a lava torrent rolled after them, and then they found themselves at No. 13. M. Dalibouze’s first thought was for the little apartment on the entresol at the other side. They made for it; but as they were crossing the court a blow, or rather a succession of blows, struck the great oak door; it opened like a nut, and fell in with a crash like thunder. The burglars beheld M. Dalibouze in his National Guard costume scudding across the yard, and greeted him with howls like a troop of jackals. Whiz! went the grape‐shot. M. Dalibouze fell.
Mme. X—— and her husband had fallen back before the door gave way, and thus escaped observation. No one was left but the old sapeur.
“What sort of work is this?” he said, walking defiantly up to the men—there were five of them—“what do you mean by breaking into the houses of honest citizens?”
“You had better break out of this one if you don’t want to grill,” answered one of the ruffians; “we are going to fire it, par ordre de le Commune.”
The women had disappeared, and left their implements in the hands of the men.
“Oh! par ordre de le Commune!” echoed the sapeur; “then I’ve nothing to say; I hope they pay you well for the work?”
“Not over and above for such work as it is,” said one of the incendiaries, rolling a barrel into the concierge’s lodge.
“How much?”
“Ten francs apiece.”
“Ten francs for burning a house down! Pshaw! you’re fools for your pains!”
The sapeur shrugged his shoulders, and, turning on his heels, walked off. Suddenly, as if a bright thought struck him, he turned back, and faced them with his hands in his pockets.
“Suppose you got twenty for leaving it alone?”
“Twenty apiece?”
“Twenty apiece, every man of you!”
They stopped their work, and looked from one to another.
“Ma foi, I’d take it, and leave it alone!” said one.
“Pardie! we’ve had enough of it, and, as the citoyen says, it’s beggarly pay for the work,” said another.
“Done!” said the sapeur.(113)
He pulled out a leathern purse from his breast‐pocket, and counted out one hundred francs in five gold pieces to the five communists.
“Une poignée de main, citoyen!” said the first spokesmen. The others followed suit, and the sapeur, after heartily wringing the five rascally hands, sent them on their way rejoicing to the cabaret round the corner. This is how No. 13 was saved. No. 11 was burnt to the ground, and then the fire stopped.
But to return to Aline and her friends. They got on well till they came to the Rue d’Alger, where they were caught in a panic, men, and women, and children struggling to get out of reach of the flames, and threatening to crush each other to death in their terror. Our friends got clear of it, but, on coming out of the mélée at separate points, the sisters found they had lost each other. Mme. de Chanoir had held fast by Mme. Cléry, and was satisfied that Aline was safe under the wing of citoyen Varlay. But she was mistaken. He had indeed lifted her off the ground, holding her like a child above the heads of the crowd, and so saved her from being trampled under foot, most likely; but when he set her down, and Aline turned to speak to him, he was gone. It would have been madness to attempt to look for him in the mélée, so she determined to wait at the nearest point of shelter, and then when the crowd dispersed they would be sure to meet. She made for the door‐way of a mourning house at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré. But she had not been many minutes there when she heard a hue and cry from the Tuileries end of the street, and a troop of men and women came flying along, driving some people before them, and firing at random as they went. The sensible thing for Aline to do was, of course, to flatten herself against the wall, and stay where she was, and of course she did not do it. She saw a flock of people running, and she started from her hiding‐place, and turned and ran with them. They tore along the Rue St. Honoré till they came to the Rue Rohan; here the band broke up, and many disappeared at opposite points; but one little group unluckily kept together, and, though diminished to a third its size at the starting point, it still held in view, and gave chase to the pursuers. Mlle. de Lemaque kept with this. On they flew like hares before the hounds, till, turning the corner of the Place du Palais Royal, they were stopped by two Federals, who levelled their chassepots and bade them stand. The fugitives turned, not like hares at bay to face the hunters and die, but to rush into an open shop, and fall on their knees, and cry, “Mercy!”
The Federals were after them in a second. Instead of shooting them right off, however, they set to discussing the propriety of taking them out and standing them in regulation order, with their backs to the wall, and doing the thing in a proper business‐like manner. While this parley was going on, Aline de Lemaque cast a glance round her, and saw that her fellow‐ victims were two young lads and half a dozen women, all of them of the lower class apparently; most of them wore caps. The men who were making ready to shoot them without rhyme or reason, as if they were so many rats, were evidently of the very dregs of the Commune, and looked half‐drunk with blood or wine, or both—it was hard to say—but there was no trace of manhood left upon the faces that gave a hope that mercy had still a lurking‐place in their hearts. One of the women suddenly started to her feet. “What!” she cried, “you call yourselves men, and you are going in cold blood to shoot unarmed women and boys? Shame on you for cowards! There is not a man amongst you!”
She snapped her fingers right into their faces with an impudence that was positively sublime. The cowards were taken aback. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing.
“Sapristi! She’s right,” exclaimed one of them; “they’re not worth wasting our powder on!”
Like lightning, the women were on their feet, fraternizing with the men, embracing, shaking hands, and swearing fraternity in true communistic fashion. Mlle. de Lemaque alone stood aloof, a silent, terror‐stricken spectator of the scene.
“What have we here? Une canaille d’aristocrate, I’ll be bound! It’s written on her face,” said one of the ruffians, seizing her by the arm; “let us make away with her, comrades! It will be a good job for the Republic to rid it of one more of the lazy aristos that live by the ouvrier’s meat.” There was a lull in the kissing and hand‐shaking, and they turned to stare at Aline. Her life hung by a thread. A timid word, a guilty look, and she was lost. But the soldier’s blood rose up in her; she bethought her of her abus, and lancéd it.
“Lazy!” she cried; “I am a soldier’s daughter; my father fought for France, and left his children nothing but his sword; I work for my bread as hard as any of you!”
The effect was galvanic; they gathered around her, shouting, “Bravo! Give us your hand, citoyenne!”
And Aline gave it, and, like the statesman who thanked God he had a country to sell, she blessed him that she had a hand to give.
—Blood ran like water in the sewers of Paris for a few days, and then the troops were masters of the field, and order was restored—restored so far as to enable honest men to sleep in their beds at night.
Mme. de Chanoir was back again in the little saloon at No. 13, and diligently reading the newspaper aloud to a gentleman who was lying on the sofa near her; the générale’s spine complaint had been radically cured by the Commune, and she sat erect in a chair now like other people. The invalid’s face and head were so elaborately bandaged that it was impossible to see what either were like, while his bodily proportions disappeared altogether under a voluminous travelling‐rug. He listened for some time without comment to the political tirade which Mme. de Chanoir was reading to him, an invective against France, and her soldiers, and her generals, and the nation at large—a sweeping anathema, in fact, of everything and everybody, till he could bear it no longer, and, sitting bolt upright, he exclaimed:
“Madame, the man who wrote that article is a traitor. France is greater to‐day in her unmerited misfortunes than she was in the apotheosis of her glory; she is more sublime in her widowed grief than her ignoble foe in his barbarous successes! She is, in fact, still France. The situation is compromised for a moment, but—”
“Lâ, lâ, voyons!” broke in Mme. Cléry, putting her head in at the door, and shaking the lid of a sauce‐pan at the invalid. “How is the tisane to take effect if you will talk politics and put yourself into a rage about la situation! Mme. la Générale, make ’um keep still!”
The générale thus adjured laid down the newspaper, and gently insisted on M. Dalibouze’s resuming his horizontal position on the couch. Aline was not there; she was off at her old work at the Ambulance again. The hospitals had been replenished to overflowing by the street‐fighting of the last week of the Commune, la dénouement de la situation, as M. Dalibouze called it, and nurses were in great demand. Citoyen Varlay had not turned up since the night they had lost him in the crowd. The excitement and confusion which had reigned in the city ever since had made it difficult to set effective inquiries on foot, even if the sisters had been accurately informed regarding their quondam guest’s identity and circumstances, which they were not. All they knew of him was his appearance, his name, and his wound. This was too vague to assist much in the search. Mme. de Chanoir was sincerely sorry for it; she had been attracted at once by the frank bearing and courteous manners of the young citoyen; but his cool courage, his forgetfulness of himself for others, and the stoical contempt for bodily pain which he had displayed on the occasion of their flight, had kindled sympathy into admiration, and she spoke of him now as a hero. She spoke of him constantly at first, loudly lamenting his loss; for lost she believed him. He had, no doubt, been overpowered by the crowd; his disabled arm deprived him of half his strength, and, exhausted as he was by previous pain, and the violent effort to protect Aline in the struggle, he had probably fainted and been suffocated or crushed to death. This was the conclusion Mme. de Chanoir arrived at; but when she mentioned it to Aline, the deadly paleness that suddenly overspread the young girl’s features made her wish to recall her words, and from that out the name of the young soldier was never pronounced between the sisters.
Mme. Cléry had formed on her side an enthusiastic affection for him, and sincerely regretted his fate, but with a woman’s instinct she guessed that the one who regretted it most said least about it. She never mentioned citoyen Varlay to Aline, but made up for the self‐denial by pouring out his praises and her own grief into the sympathizing ear of the générale.
“What a pretty couple they would have made!” said the old woman one morning, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron; “he was such a fine fellow, and so merry; he only wanted the particule to make him perfect; but, after all, who knows? He may not have been as good as he looked. One can never trust those parvenus.”
A month passed. Mme. de Chanoir was alone one afternoon, when Mme. Cléry rushed into the room in a state of breathless excitement, her eyes literally dancing out of her head.
“Madame! madame! I guessed it! I was sure of it! I’m not that woman not to know a gentleman when I see him. I told madame he was! Let madame never say but I did!”
And having explained herself thus coherently between laughing and crying, she held out a card to her mistress.
Mme. de Chanoir read aloud:
LE BARON DE VARLAY, Avocat à la Cour de Cassation.
Another month elapsed, and the great door of the Madeleine was opened for a double marriage. The first bridegroom was a tall, slight man, on whose face and figure the word distingué was unmistakably stamped. The second was a plump, dapper little man, who, as he walked up the carpeted aisle of the church, seemed hardly to touch the ground, so elastic was his step; his countenance beamed, he was radiant, and it is hardly a figure of speech to say that he was buoyant with satisfaction. If he could have given utterance to his feelings, he would have said that “the situation was perfect, and absolutely nothing more could be desired.”
Mme. Cléry was present in her monumental cap, trimmed with Valenciennes lace brand‐new for the occasion, and a chintz gown with a peacock pattern on a pea‐green ground that would have lighted up a room without candles. She, too, looked the very personification of content. The first couple was all her heart could wish, and more than her wildest ambition had ever dreamed of for her favorite Aline. The second she had grown philosophically reconciled to. The marriage had one drawback, a grievous one, but the charwoman consoled herself with the reflection that Mme. de Chanoir might condone the bourgeoisie of her new name, by signing herself:
FELICITE DALIBOUZE, Née de Lemaque.
Use And Abuse Of The Novel.
If the question were put to us—What class of books, viewed merely as reading, without tutelage or commentary of any kind, had the greatest influence in moulding and training the thoughts, aspirations, mode of life, of the mass of readers in these days?—we should, notwithstanding the slur and sneer which it is fashionable for clever writers to cast upon them, answer unhesitatingly—Novels.
This answer, we have no doubt, might shock the sensibilities of some of our readers, as it might very cordially agree with those of a not insignificant body of others. Without going into a dry analytical discussion of the pros and cons of the question, we will adopt the easier course of taking at the outset everything we want for granted, and allowing the truth of it to emanate from the body of our article; merely premising that, if it be true, Catholics have too much neglected, are far too weak in, this very important collateral branch of modern education.
Every age, every cycle, every period in the history of the world has its distinctive features, its proper individualities, its representative men, systems, or facts, strongly and clearly marked. Ours is the iron age. Our province is matter. Our tastes are material. The world seems, strangely enough, to be working backwards. We began with intellect: we finish with matter. The signs of the past are stamped with intellect or the intellectual. The development of the present is steam and electricity. If we ask the ages, What have you given us? the answer comes rolling down out of the dim mountain of the past: Homer, Phidias, Apelles; the alphabet, the geometrical figure, the science of numbers; Plato and Aristotle; Virgil and the historians; the practical greatness of Rome; the great faith of the new‐born middle ages; the Crusades, the Gothic order, the great masters, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. We have our distinctive mark; the one indicated: the mastery over the material world. In the intellectual order, if we look for one, we must set it in the daily newspaper and the novel. These are the peculiar intellectual development of the XIXth century. Against the names of Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, we pit those of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Eugene Sue, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and her kin.
Surely this is rank heresy. Is not this the age of the rationalists, the free‐thinkers, “the swallowers of formula,” of Hegel, Cousin, Comte, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Thomas Carlyle? All these are nothing to the purpose. Thinkers, dreamers, idealists, doubters, belong to all ages. The novelists belong to ours alone, as surely as do the steamboat, the railway, the electric telegraph, the daily press, the penny post.
In saying this, we are not blind to the fact that novels and romances were written long before our century dawned. Cervantes and Le Sage are old enough; the Romaunts are older still. De Foe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, are names of a bygone century. But novelism, to use the word in a new sense, considered as a science—for such it has practically become—as the most popular branch of literature known in these days, with men and women of genius devoted to its pursuit, with an ever‐increasing progeny spreading and growing, and stifling each other out of life, is an intellectual phase proper of to‐day.
Philosophic historians trace the decline of peoples and periods in the decline of their literature; in its tone, its style, its subjects, and manner of treatment. If this test be applied to us, what a show should we make! But happily the test, though in the main a true one, is not an infallible one. The facility opened up by the invention of printing for writers of every shade of opinion to express their thoughts upon any given subject at any length and in any quantity, provided only they pay the printer, must weaken to some extent the theory that writers are the exact reflex of the times and peoples for and among whom they write. Still there rests the significant fact that to‐day the novel, and particularly the worst form of it, is the book of the period; the most popular, widely read, best paid class of literature that we possess—a fact which tells its own tale of our intellectual and moral advance.
The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear‐sighted, manly, and truth‐loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray‐haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates’ spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about her husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the Delectus; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the Symposia passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline’s conspiracy about; the effect of the quousque tandem speech related by an eye‐ witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.
These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!
Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third‐ rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.
As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?
A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one’s bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author’s secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas fils, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas fils is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas fils; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage‐knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas fils will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband’s infidelity. But probably such a high‐minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.
Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.
Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play‐ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind’s eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air‐drawn as Macbeth’s. We can commit cold‐blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far‐reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never will run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well‐known form, if we have. And if the never‐running‐smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!
The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.
But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.
“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a great genius, so early led astray!
The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him, from the crop‐haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin’s ideal man to the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady poisoners with the floating locks and sea‐green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady who makes novel‐reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men look to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel‐struck, novel‐bred, only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her tea.
All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded, save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”
What a field, then, is the novelist’s!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own.
Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair‐haired, open‐ hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night. Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from the grafting.
The grafting is the mother’s voice, the father’s example, the companions around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story‐books for Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a more serious work.
One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of friends, Robinson Crusoe, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat‐skin cap, a parrot, a Man Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle, tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him good‐bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way, notching the giant trunks with our six‐bladed penknife, shooting the buffalo with our pop‐guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by’r Lady! Here we are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was! The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk; the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business; his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the mêlée and bearing all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O’Malley waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to‐day. What a race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.
Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy. If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what is known as the Dime Novel and those blood‐and‐thunder weeklies with the terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature, boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by great Christian heroes, by the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children’s books written by Protestants. The production of children’s stories has grown into a science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the columns of the London Times devoted to as critical an examination of this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars, detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here, then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be filled up.
But our article deals not alone with children and children’s books. We purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational novel.
What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of Rasselas had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling Rasselas a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:
Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek‐ coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.
What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the Arabian Nights; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe‐encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night‐shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice‐told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder‐workers of the age.
Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth‐rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green‐room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera‐ singer, the ankles of a danseuse, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin‐mill; the prize‐ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming‐table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.
Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple‐hearted, simple‐mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop‐haired, steeple‐crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.
There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue‐books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing‐room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle‐gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!
Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine‐inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven‐born gift into the lowest of animal passions.
It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to‐day threaten to turn the world topsy‐turvy—the so‐called theory of Woman’s Rights—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first‐born, Free Love.
We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the New York Herald, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.
But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?
As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy’s “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare’s, and partaking of the great master’s “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss‐ trooper or a crusader, a free‐lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good‐naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess‐mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.
“What’s that ’ere beggar, Jack?”
“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can’t say exactly, but I expect it’s one o’ them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”
Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti‐Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow‐men.
From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.
They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high‐minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death’s‐head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray‐hairs, his asses or black‐ legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft‐hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro‐table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray’s world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.
In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer’s way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.
And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above‐mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single‐handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing‐room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in Sybil; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves’ and harlots’ dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God’s Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never‐ending, never‐wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to‐day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life’s journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.
To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to‐day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.
Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of The House of Yorke. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock‐down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.
Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and true love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self‐ denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul‐conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well‐told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.
Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.(114)
In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas of Aquin. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the saint is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan’s best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint’s personal story.
Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world’s course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private aside with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene‐painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the moralizing element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint’s life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half‐century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the Vie de Rancé contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men’s thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word revolution, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.
It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general romanesque tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well‐meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.
The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre‐eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.
Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:
“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.
Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint’s father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.
The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large‐ minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine, deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S. Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But we must pass it over. S. Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled “S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover, the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of his life.
“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth’s stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses, he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye; and those events or influences which excited the minds of others, and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys from his high crag, with half‐unconscious eye, the world of woods below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded, as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and rugged mountain, with the far‐distant ranges of the snowy Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace.... Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious, when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self‐forgetting and self‐restrained. A character with such a capability of asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self‐ repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless. But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind. Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light, peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical, with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught. There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart, seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say: ‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true! Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has been touched on and partially developed already. The reader, adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S. Victor’s—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole, follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize the aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and self‐forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self‐distrust and self‐forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God’s high majesty awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world; Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is, bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31‐48.)
The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the Greeks,
“Full in the midst, high‐towering o’er the rest,”
his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the quelling power that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle‐field; and his place in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer, a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:
“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen, first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident, he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents, the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived, for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry aloud, ‘Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed determinantis!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one after another, he started objections, created a hundred labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle arguments, but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i. 321, 322).
How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He spoke in the class‐hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old; and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow‐ religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But the writer of the Summa must have been great even in his lifetime. That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is fairly permitted to the serious biographer.
But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers by asking with childish meditative face, “What was God?” His quiet determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat, had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when the Angelical discussed:
“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent simply on the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity, the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way, giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine quies and benignitas into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools. And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the great lesson of self‐control, not only by the undeviating practice of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as an ‘ignominy’ (ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57‐59).
The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety. But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official. At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable, his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological discussion was “humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio.”
The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing‐ point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to be a saint. Each heard the other speak, and the spirit of one was the spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure, has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure’s children; and we have before us as we write the Cursus Theologiæ of a venerable bearded Capuchin, considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with S. Augustine, “præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister”—the great master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that the Jesuit theologians, even the many‐sided Suarez, have looked up to S. Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of conciliation. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only half‐way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary, the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the scholastic and Thomistic method of distinction. The distinguo of the tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its distinguo is the touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored‐up learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre‐ eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.
“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely bearing he advances, a mighty‐looking man, built on a larger scale than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already. Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow, the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well‐ chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so imperial a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty, of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring canvas” (ii. 108, 109).
The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much more of Prior Vaughan’s narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas’ holy distress of mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate. But the following paragraph must be transcribed:
“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him, as silently, after the day’s work, he retires to his cell, seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take from its hiding‐place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it, striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate self‐seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).
S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty‐eight years old. He was called away a little before his great work, the Summa, was completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the Summa stood still in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his companion Reginald, Non possum! “I cannot! Everything that I have written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came in, he set out, at the pope’s call, to attend the general council at Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.
“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth, close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and, turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘This is the place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to Reginald in presence of them all: ‘Hæc est requies mea in sæculum sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam—This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).
The whole of this last scene of the great saint’s pilgrimage is admirably and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict, should return to S. Benedict to die!”
We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and fulness of the author’s style, leave the impression of one whose heart is strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students, upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess; and there is no one who is more sure of the world’s attention and reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S. Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred science. “In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in corpore subdito peccatis.” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “mens purgatissima” than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels’ hands, with his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that dictated the Commentaries on Aristotle were ready to break forth with the Lauda Sion and the Pange Lingua. If he taught in the daytime, he chastised his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life, with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”
Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks of all English‐speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is, we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a museum. He is a man to know, not merely to know about; a man who taught in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel’s life here below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle, the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that Prior Vaughan’s S. Thomas may make its way into the hearts of earnest men, and it is our conviction that it will make its way, and that men will be the better for it.
To S. Mary Magdalen.
’Mid the white spouses of the Sacred Heart, After its Queen, the nearest, dearest, thou. Yet the auréola around thy brow Is not the virgins’. Thine a throne apart. Nor yet, my Saint, does faith‐illumined art Thy hand with palm of martyrdom endow: And when thy hair is all it will allow Of glory to thy head, we do not start. O more than virgin in thy penitent love! And more than martyr in thy passionate woe! How should thy sisters equal thee above, Who knelt not with thee on the gory sod? Or where the crown our worship could bestow Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?
God’s Acre.
In all countries and in all creeds, the dead have claimed the affectionate notice of the living. The idea of housing them, deifying them, propitiating them, of remembering them in some way, however diverse, has always been a prominent one. The belief in the soul’s immortality seems to have been even more clear to the ordinary mind of the natural man than that of a Supreme and Almighty Being. When Christianity appeared, the departed had a place assigned them among the members of the church, and were commemorated as absent brethren gone before their fellows one stage further on the last great journey; when the Reformation disfranchised human nature in the XVIth century, and levelled all its hallowed aspirations with the brute instincts of the animal kingdom, the dead, though divorced from communion with the living, were yet remembered, and placed in two categories—the elect, or the precondemned. Another life was even then believed in, and later branches of the reforming sects all condescended at least to theorize on the future state of disembodied spirits. It remained for our times to foster the cruel unbelief that dooms our loved ones, not even to everlasting perdition, but to absolute annihilation. It was hard enough in Puritan days for a pious though mistaken mind to bring itself to the belief that possibly the loved companion of childhood, the chosen mate of youth, the venerable parent, the upright teacher, was one of those predestined to eternal torments, one of the holocausts to the greater glory of God; but how far harder now for a fond heart, a clinging nature, to see in those it loves so many perishable puppets, without future and without hope! But happily there is a haven to which these storm‐tossed souls may come with the precious freight of their love and their unerring Catholic instincts. Their companions and brethren are not gone into trackless chaos, they are not absorbed into that monstrous “nothing” of which a false philosophy has made a bewildering bugbear. Every year the church protests against such revolting doctrines on the day which she publicly consecrates to prayers for and remembrance of the departed. This festival is like a spiritual harvest‐home; coming as it does just at the close of the ecclesiastical year, it marks an epoch in the life of the church suffering; and various “revelations” made to saints, as well as the collective belief of the faithful, agree in considering it a day of liberation and rejoicing among the souls in Purgatory. “God’s Acre” (according to the touching and suggestive German idiom) is reaped on that auspicious day, though, like Boaz, the Divine Reaper leaves yet a few ears of corn to be gleaned into heavenly rest by the prayers of the faithful on earth.
Before we go further into our own beautiful view of the future life, let us stop to see how other races and religions have treated the dead.
Of the Egyptians, it is difficult to speak except at too great a length, and, not having at hand sufficient authority, we can only set down what our recollection will supply. The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will no doubt remember some interesting articles published a few months since regarding the ancient civilization of Egypt, in which copious reference was made to the esteem and respect paid to the dead in that country. The singular custom of pledging the embalmed body of a father or ancestor, on the receipt of a loan, was noticed; also the dishonor attaching to the non‐redemption of such a pledge. A learned English author, speaking incidentally of Egyptian embalming, mentions that the word mummy is derived from “mum,” which, he says, is Egyptian for wax. Representations of the embalming process have been found on tombs and sarcophagi, in which the men engaged in it are seen wearing masks with eagles’ beaks, probably iron masks, thereby denoting of what a poisonous and dangerous nature this absolutely incorruptible embalmment must have been. The Pyramids are perhaps the most imposing funeral monuments ever raised to the memory of mortals, and even the famous Mausoleum of Artemisia can have had no more massive or eternal an aspect.
To pass from the cradle of older civilization to the land whose original peopling has sometimes been attributed, though we believe inaccurately, to Egyptian enterprise, the America of the Aztec and the Red Indian, we find in Parkman’s Jesuits in America some lengthy details on the funereal customs of the Huron tribe, now extinct. He says that “the primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, but not always in a state of future punishment or reward. Nor was the good or evil to be rewarded or punished (when such a belief did exist) of a moral nature. Skilful hunters, brave warriors, men of influence, went to the happy hunting‐ grounds, while the slothful, the weak, the cowardly, were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.... The spirits, in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and when night came hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.” The public ceremony of exhuming the dead, of which some interesting details are given further on, was supposed to be the occasion of the beginning of the other life. The souls “took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the greater number believed that they journeyed on foot ... to the land of shades, ... but, as the spirits of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly homes, where the living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin doors, and the weak voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn‐fields.... The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom. The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead as dancing joyously.... According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of endless festivity, ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the drum.... Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving rocks which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the pilgrims who endeavored to pass. The Hurons believed that a personage named Oscotarach, or the Head‐Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according to which, however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner.”
Le Clerc, in his Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, tells a curious story, which is mentioned in a foot‐note by Parkman. It was current in his (Le Clerc’s) time among the Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick, and bears a remarkable likeness to the old myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. “The favorite son of an old Indian died, whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade through a shallow lake, several days’ journey in extent. This they did, sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the water. At length, they arrived and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war‐club upraised, but, presently relenting, changed his mind and challenged them to a game of ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn, tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The bereaved father now begged hard for his son’s soul, and Papkootparout at last gave it to him in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing it hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert it into the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue, of their journey, there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in it, gave his son’s soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being curious to see it, she opened the bag, upon which it escaped at once, and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the abodes of the living.”
These superstitions, although they may make us smile, yet attest, through their rude simplicity, the natural and deep‐rooted existence in all races of a belief not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the possibility of communication with the departed. The Buddhist doctrine of transmigration is but a distorted version of the truth we call purgatory, that is, a state of temporary expiation and gradual cleansing. The Egyptian practice of embalming the dead and often of preserving the bodies of several generations of one’s forefathers in the family house, is another consequence of the primeval belief in the soul’s immortality. Everywhere reverence for the dead implied this belief and symbolized it, and even the custom of placing in the mouth of the Roman dead the piece of money, denarius, with which to pay their passage over the Styx, is referable to the true doctrine of good works being laid up in heaven and helping those who have performed them to gain the desired entrance into eternal repose.
The following minute description of the Indian feast of the dead, of which mention has already been made, is interesting, and is condensed from the account given by Father Brebœuf: “The corpses were lowered from their scaffolds and lifted from their graves. Each family claimed its own, and forthwith addressed itself to the task of removing what remained of flesh from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed with tears and lamentations, were wrapped in skins and pendent robes of beaver. These relics, as also the recent corpses, which remained entire, but were likewise carefully wrapped in furs, were carried to one of the largest houses, and hung to the numerous cross poles which, rafterlike, supported the roof. The concourse of mourners seated themselves at a funeral feast, the squaws of the household distributed the food, and a chief harangued the assembly, lamenting the loss of the deceased and praising their virtues. This over, the mourners began their march for Ossonané, the scene of the final rite. The bodies remaining entire were borne on litters, while the bundles of bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives, like fagots. The procession thus defiled slowly through the forest pathways, and as they passed beneath the shadow of the pines, the mourners uttered at intervals and in unison a wailing cry, meant to imitate the voices of disembodied souls, ... and believed to have a peculiarly soothing effect on the conscious relics that each man carried. The place prepared for the last rite was a cleared area in the forest, many acres in extent. Around it was a high and strong scaffolding of upright poles, with cross‐poles extended between, for hanging the funeral gifts and the remains of the dead. The fathers lodged in a house where over a hundred of these bundles of mortality hung from the rafters. Some were mere shapeless rolls, others were made up into clumsy effigies, adorned with feathers, beads, etc. In the morning (the procession having arrived over night at Ossonané) the relics were taken down, opened again, and the bones fondled anew by the women, amid paroxysms of grief. When the procession bearing the dead reached the ground prepared for the last solemnity, the bundles were laid on the ground, and the funeral gifts outspread for the admiration of the beholders. Among them were many robes of beaver and other rich furs, collected and preserved for years with a view to this festival. Fires were lighted and kettles slung, and the scene became like a fair or caravanserai. This continued till three o’clock in the afternoon, when the gifts were repacked, and the bones shouldered afresh. Suddenly, at a signal from the chiefs, the crowd ran forward from every side towards the scaffolding, like soldiers to the assault of a town, scaled it by the rude ladders with which it was furnished, and hung their relics and their gifts to the forest of poles which surmounted it. The chiefs then again harangued the people in praise of the departed, while other functionaries lined the grave throughout with rich robes of beaver skin. Three large copper kettles were next placed in the middle, and then ensued a scene of hideous confusion. The bodies which had been left entire were brought to the edge of the grave, flung in, and arranged in order at the bottom by ten or twelve Indians, stationed there for the purpose, amid the wildest excitement and the uproar of many hundred mingled voices. Night was now fast closing in, and the concourse bivouacked around the clearing.... One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold, chanced to fall into the grave. This accident precipitated the closing act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. All around blazed countless fires, and the air resounded with discordant cries. The naked multitude, on, under, and around the scaffolding, were flinging the remains of their dead, relieved from their wrappings of skins, pell‐mell into the pit, where were discovered men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them, arranged the bones in their places with long poles. All was soon over; earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided into a funereal chant, so dreary and lugubrious that it seemed like the wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition.”
These processions and ceremonies relating to the bones of the dead remind us of the singular custom observed at the Capuchin Convent of the Piazza Barberini in Rome. The skeletons of the dead monks are robed in the habit of the order and seated in choir‐stalls round the crypt, until they fall to pieces, or are displaced by a silent new‐comer to their ghostly brotherhood. The bones which are thus yearly accumulating are formed into patterns of stars and crosses on the walls of the crypt and surrounding corridors, while the skulls are often heaped up in small mounds against the partitions. The convent is strictly enclosed, and is only accessible to men during the rest of the year, but on All Souls’ day and during the octave, the public, men and women alike, are allowed to visit this strange place of entombment. Crowds flock to see it, especially foreigners. Hawthorne, in his Marble Faun, has described it in terms that make one feel as if his impression were vivid enough to supply the place of a personal one on the part of each of his readers.
The ancient Roman customs and beliefs concerning the dead are well worth noticing, as embodying the essence of the utmost civilization a heathen land could boast. It is said that the Romans chose the cypress as emblematic of death because that tree, when once cut, never grows again. The facts of natural history are sometimes disregarded by the ancient poets, but it is not with that that we now have to deal, but with the false idea symbolized by this choice. The Romans, nevertheless, fully believed in an after‐life, though one modelled much on the same principle as their life on earth. The unburied and those whose bodies could not be found were supposed to wander about, unable to cross the river Styx, and their friends therefore generally built them an empty tomb, which they believed served as a retreat to their restless spirits. Pliny ascribes the Roman custom of burning the dead to the belief that was current amongst the people, that their enemies dug up and insulted the bodies of their soldiers killed in distant wars. During the earlier part of the Republic, the dead were mostly buried in the natural way, in graves or vaults. Some very strange ceremonies are recorded in Adams’ Roman Antiquities concerning the funeral processions, which usually took place at night by torch‐light. (This was chiefly done to avoid any chance of meeting a priest or magistrate, who was supposed to be polluted by the sight of a corpse, as in the Jewish dispensation.) After the musicians, who sang the praises of the deceased to the accompaniment of flutes, came “players and buffoons, one of whom, called archimimus (the chief mimic), sustained the character of the deceased, imitating his words or actions while alive. These players sometimes introduced apt sayings from dramatic writers.” Actors were also employed to personate the individual ancestors, and Adams’ commentator adds in a foot‐note: “A Roman funeral must therefore have presented a singular appearance, with a long line of ancestors stalking gravely through the streets of the capital.” Pliny, Plautus, Polybius, Suetonius, and others are the authorities quoted on this curious point. It is said by some authors that, in very ancient times, the dead were buried in their own houses; hence the origin of idolatry, the worship of household gods, the fear of goblins, etc. Relations also consecrated temples to the dead, which Pliny calls a very ancient custom, which had its share in contributing to the establishment of idol‐worship. In the Book of Wisdom(115) we find a reference to this in these words: “For a father, being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son, who was quickly taken away, and him who then had died as a man, he began now to worship as a god, and appointed him rites and sacrifices among his servants. Then in process of time, wicked custom prevailing, this error was kept as a law.” Adams tells us that “the private places of burial of the Romans were in fields or gardens, usually near the highway (such as the Via Appia near Rome, the Via Campana near Pozzuoli, the Street of Tombs at Pompeii), to be conspicuous and remind those who passed of mortality. Hence the frequent inscriptions—Siste, viator,(116) Aspice, viator.”(117) Games of gladiators were frequently held both on the day and the anniversaries of great funerals; and on the pyre slaves and clients were sometimes burnt with the body of their deceased master, as also all manner of clothes and ornaments, and, “in short, whatever was supposed to have been agreeable to him when alive.” As the funeral cortége left the place where the body had been burnt, they “used to take a last farewell, repeating several times Vale, or Salve æternum,”(118) also wishing that the earth might lie light on the person buried, as Juvenal relates, and which was found marked on several ancient monuments in these letters, S.T.T.L.(119) “This is a very remarkable instance of the dead being considered, in one sense, as conscious, sentient beings, and evidently has an origin which can hardly be disconnected from some remote or indistinct recollection of the true religion.”
Adams goes on to say that “oblations or sacrifices to the dead were afterwards made at various times, both occasionally and at stated periods, consisting of liquors, victims, and garlands, as Virgil, Tacitus, and Suetonius tell us, and sometimes to appease their manes, or atone for some injury offered them in life. The sepulchre was bespread with flowers, and covered with crowns and fillets. Before it there was a little altar, on which libations were made and incense burnt. A keeper was appointed to watch the tomb, which was frequently illuminated with lamps. A feast was generally added, both for the dead and the living. Certain things were laid on the tomb, commonly beans, lettuce, bread, and eggs, or the like, which it was supposed the ghosts would come and eat. What remained was burnt. After the funeral of great men,... a distribution of raw meat was made to the people.”
“Immoderate grief was thought to be offensive to the manes, according to Tibullus, but during the shortened mourning that was customary, the relations of the deceased abstained from entertainments or feasts of any sort, wore no badge of rank or nobility, were not shaved, and dressed in black, a custom borrowed (as was supposed) from the Egyptians. ‘No fire was ever lighted, as it was considered an ornament to the house.’ ”
The common places of burial were called columbaria, from the likeness of their arrangement to that of a pigeon‐house, each little niche scooped out in the walls holding the small urn in which the ashes of the dead were deposited. These columbaria, Adams tells us, were often below ground, like a vault, but private tombs belonging to wealthy citizens were in groves and gardens; as, for instance, that of Augustus, mentioned by Strabo, who calls it a hanging garden supported on marble arches, with shrubs planted round the base, and the Egyptian obelisks at the entrance. The tomb of Adrian, now the Castel S. Angelo, was a perfect palace of wealth and art, and supplied many a later building with ready‐made adornment before it became what it now is, a fortress. The tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Via Appia, was also used as a mediæval stronghold, and looks more fit for such a use than for its former funereal distinction.
From ancient and imperial, we now pass to modern and Christian Rome, so undistinguishable in the chronology of their first blending, so widely apart in the moral order of their succession.
The subject of the catacombs and the early inscriptions on Christian graves is one so widely known and so copiously illustrated by many learned works, both English and foreign, that it would be superfluous to say much about it. Yet Cardinal Wiseman is so popular an author, and Fabiola so standard a novel, that we may be forgiven for drawing a little on treasures so temptingly ready to our hand. There is in the first chapter of the second part of Fabiola an interesting reference to the old established craft of the fossores, or excavators of the Christian cemeteries. Cardinal Wiseman says that some modern antiquarians have based upon the assertion of an anonymous writer, contemporary with S. Jerome, an erroneous theory of the fossores having formed a lesser ecclesiastical order in the primitive church, like a lector or reader. “But,” he adds, “although this opinion is untenable, it is extremely probable that the duties of this office were in the hands of persons appointed and recognized by ecclesiastical authority.... It was not a cemetery or necropolis company which made a speculation of burying the dead, but rather a pious and recognized confraternity, which was associated for the purpose.” Father Marchi, the great Jesuit authority on ancient subterranean Rome, says that a series of interesting inscriptions, found in the cemetery of S. Agnes, proves that this occupation was continued in particular families, grandfather, father, and sons having carried it on in the same place. The fossores also transacted such rare bargains as were known in those days of simplicity and brotherly love, when wealthy Christians willingly made compensation for the privilege of being buried near a martyr’s tomb. Such an arrangement is commemorated in an early Christian inscription preserved in the Capitol. The translation runs thus: “This is the grave for two bodies, bought by Artemisius, and the price was given to the fossor Hilarus—that is ... (the number, being in cipher, is unintelligible.) In the presence of Severus the fossor, and Laurentius.”
Cardinal Wiseman, jealous of Christian traditions, particularly notes that the theory of the subterranean crypts, now called catacombs, ever having been heathen excavations for the extraction of sand, has been disproved by Marchi’s careful and scientific examination. He then describes the manner of entombment used in these underground cemeteries: “Their walls as well as the sides of the staircases are honeycombed with graves, that is, rows of excavations, large and small, of sufficient length to admit a human body, from a child to a full‐grown man.... They are evidently made to measure, and it is probable that the body was lying by the side of the grave while this was being dug. When the corpse was laid in its narrow cell, the front was hermetically closed either by a marble‐slab, or more frequently by several broad tiles put edgeways in a groove or mortise, cut for them in the rock, and cemented all round. The inscription was cut upon the marble, or scratched in the wet mortar.... Two principles, as old as Christianity, regulate this mode of burial. The first is the manner of Christ’s entombment; he was laid in a grave in a cavern, wrapped up in linen, embalmed with spices, and a stone, sealed up, closed his sepulchre. As S. Paul so often proposes him for the model of our resurrection, and speaks of our being buried with him in baptism, it was natural for his disciples to wish to be buried after his example, so as to be ready to rise with him. This lying in wait for the resurrection was the second thought that regulated the formation of these cemeteries. Every expression connected with them alluded to the rising again. The word to bury is unknown in Christian inscriptions: ‘deposited in peace,’ ‘the deposition of ...’ are the expressions used; that is, the dead are left there for a time, till called for again, as a pledge or precious thing, entrusted to faithful but temporary keeping. The very name of cemetery suggests that it is only a place where many lie, as in a dormitory, slumbering for a while, till dawn come and the trumpet’s sound awake them. Hence the grave is only called the ‘place,’ or more technically ‘the small home,’(120) of the dead in Christ.”
The old Teutonic Gottes‐Acker, the acre or field of God, denotes the same eminently Christian idea; the dead are thus likened to the seed hidden in the ground for a while, to ripen into a glorious spiritual harvest when the last call shall be heard. We have read somewhere, in an English novel whose name has escaped our memory, the same beautiful idea most poetically expressed. It was something to this effect: “We put up a stone at the head of a grave, just as we write labels in the spring‐time for the seeds we put into the earth, that we may remember what glorious flower is to spring from the little gray, hidden handful that seems so insignificant just now”—a Catholic thought found astray in a book that had nothing Catholic about it save its beauty and poetry; for beauty is a ray of truth, and truth is one and Catholic. One other remark is worth remembering about the early Christian inscriptions on the tombs of the departed. There is generally some anxiety to preserve a record of the exact date of a person’s death, and, in modern days, if it happened that there was no room for both the day and the year, no doubt the day, would be left unnoticed, and the year carefully chronicled. “Yet,” says Cardinal Wiseman, “while so few ancient Christian inscriptions supply the year of people’s deaths, thousands give us the very day of it on which they died, whether in the hopefulness of believers or in the assurance of martyrs. Of both classes annual commemoration had to be made on the very day of their departure, and accurate knowledge of this was necessary. Therefore it alone was recorded.”
O ages of faith! when it was the ambition of Christians to be inscribed in the Book of Life, instead of leaving names blazoned in gold in the annals of an earthly empire!
Prayers for the dead were in use among the primitive Christians, and in one of the inscriptions mentioned by Cardinal Wiseman the following reference to these prayers is found: “Christ God Almighty refresh thy spirit in Christ.” That this hallowed custom is akin to the natural feelings of a loving heart is self‐evident; the coldness of an “age of philosophy” alone could doubt it. Well might it be called the age of disorganization and not of philosophy (which is “love of wisdom”), for the wisdom that seeks to pull down instead of building up is but questionable. The disorganization of political society which we see at work through the International and the Commune; the disorganization of moral society which we behold every day increasing through the ease with which the marriage‐ tie is dissolved, and the hold the state is claiming on children and even infants; the disorganization of religious society which we find in the ever‐multiplying feuds of sects, like gangrene gradually eating away an unsound body; these are all fitting companions to that most ruthless severing of this world from the next which pretends to isolate the dead from the spiritual help and sympathy of the living, and to dwarf in the souls of men what even human laws commanded, or at least protected, concerning their bodies. The want of our age is a want of heart; heartlessness and callousness to the most sacred, the most natural feelings, is shown to a fearful extent among our modern mind‐emancipators and reformers. On the one hand, nature is held up as a god to which all moral laws are to be subject, or, rather, before whose fiat they are to cease to exist, while, on the other, nature (in everything lawful, touching, noble, generous) is told that she is a fool, and must learn to subdue “childish” aspirations and outgrow “childish” beliefs!
But the belief of a communication between the living and the departed is not only a natural one; it is also Biblical. S. Matthew speaks of the middle state of souls when he mentions the strict account that will have to be rendered of “every idle word.”(121) S. Paul says that “every man’s work ... shall be tried in fire: and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”(122) S. Peter makes mention of “the spirits in prison,”(123) and S. John, in the Apocalypse, implies a state of probation when he says that “there shall not enter into it [the New Jerusalem] anything defiled or that worketh abomination, or maketh a lie.”(124) In the Second Book of Machabees, one of the most national of the Jewish records, and the most favorite and consolatory of the religious books held by the Jews as infallible oracles, the whole doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the departed is most plainly adverted to.
After a great battle and victory, Judas Machabeus searches the bodies of his slain warriors, and finds that some of them had appropriated heathen votive offerings made to the idols whose temples they had burnt at Jamnia a short time before. Upon this discovery, according to the sacred text, which is here too precious a testimony to be condensed, he, “making a gathering, sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection. (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.) And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.”(125)
It may not perhaps be generally known that, among the Jews, the custom of praying for the dead exists, and has always existed uninterruptedly. Some of the supplications are very beautiful, and we do not hesitate to give them here, as an interesting corroboration of the assertions we have made throughout.
The chief prayers for the dead are contained in the “Kaddisch” for mourners, which forms part of the evening as well as the morning service for the Jewish Sabbath. Although the dead are not mentioned by name, it is to them alone that the prayers apply, as we understand from persons of that persuasion. The text is the following:
“May our prayers be accepted with mercy and kindness; may the prayers and supplications of the whole house of Israel be accepted in the presence of their Father who is in heaven, and say ye Amen. [The congregation here answer Amen.] May the fulness of peace from heaven with life be granted unto us and to all Israel, and say ye Amen.” “My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. May he who maketh peace in his high heavens bestow peace on us and on all Israel. And say ye Amen.”
During these prayers, the mourners stand up and answer. Other invocations mention “the soul of my father” or “mother,” etc., as the case may be. In the service for the dead read over the corpse, these words occur: “O Lord our God, cause us to lie down in peace, and raise us up, O our King, to a happy life. I laid me down fearless and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustained me.” All through the Old Testament we constantly find “sleep” used as a synonym for death. Scattered through the morning and evening services of the Hebrew liturgy there are invocations, frequently repeated, referring to the dead, such as these: “Thou, O Lord, art for ever powerful; thou restorest life to the dead, and art mighty to save. Thou art also faithful to revive the dead: blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead.” God is also said “to hold in his hands the souls of the living and the dead,” thus giving at least equal prominence to the departed and those they have left in their place. The Jews believe and hope that their prayers on earth benefit and refresh their lost brethren, and pray daily for them. The bodies of the departed are plainly dressed in a linen shroud without superfluous ornamentation, but many of the old ceremonies and purifications enjoined in the old law are now dispensed with. The old manner of burial was in a cave or spacious sepulchre in a field or garden, and the body was wrapped in spices, which were often burnt around it. The double cave of Mambre, bought for Sarah by Abraham, stood at the end of a field, and the sepulchres of the kings were also in a field. The garden where Our Lord was laid is another instance of the universality of this custom. In the Second Book of Chronicles(126) we read of King Asa that “they buried him in his own sepulchre which he had made for himself in the city of David: and they laid him on his bed full of spices and odoriferous ointments, which were made by the art of the perfumers, and they burnt them over him with great pomp.” This burning (of spices) is often mentioned throughout Holy Writ. Rachel, says the Book of Genesis,(127) was buried “in the highway” that led to Bethlehem, and Jacob erected a pillar over her sepulchre; Samuel, “in his own house at Ramatha”; and Saul, beneath an oak near the city of Jabes Galaad, the inhabitants of which place provided for his burial, and fasted seven days in sign of mourning for their sovereign. Joram, king of Juda, was punished for his misdeeds by exclusion from the sepulchre of his fathers, “and the people did not make a funeral for him according to the manner of burning [spices], as they had done for his ancestors.”(128) Ozias, being a leper, a disease which came upon him in punishment for having usurped sacerdotal functions, was buried “in the field” only “of the royal sepulchre.” Thus we see the immense importance attached to the place of burial under the old Jewish dispensation, and how it was an eternal disgrace to be expelled in death from the neighborhood of one’s family and their hereditary place of entombment. This feeling has continued very strong in most civilized and in all savage races; the graves of their forefathers are even more symbolical of home and fatherland to the wandering desert tribes of different nations, than what we should call their hearths and firesides. In later times, how often have we not seen gorgeous and imposing buildings, especially cathedrals and abbeys, built over the shrine of a dead king or bishop, canonized by that popular veneration whose last expression was the public honor decreed them by the Roman Pontiff? In places where these monuments are not dedicated to the sainted dead whose shrines they guard, we often find them burdened with the condition of Masses being perpetually offered within their walls for the soul of the dead founder; others are memorial churches to friends or relations of the founder. Public charities, doles of bread and money, annual distributions of clothing, hospitals, schools, or municipal institutions, etc., spring chiefly from the desire of the survivors to have their loved ones remembered to all future ages, while sometimes a generous testator himself will take this simple and practical means of recommending himself to the prayers of unborn generations. Family names are perpetuated in remembrance of the departed; family records are valuable only in proportion as they embody a proof of longer or shorter descent from the distinguished dead. There is no test of success or popularity so sure as that of death, and no one can tell which of our living friends will be known to and loved by future nations, and which other will be passed by in obscurity and silence, until long after our exit and their own from this present life‐ scene. Real life is centred in the dead, it revolves around them, it depends on them. They are the root of which we are the leaves and flowers. The life of fame is theirs, while only the life of struggle is ours; they are victors calmly bearing their palms, umpires gently encouraging their successors, but we are only striving competitors, who know not and never will know our fate till we have gone with them beyond the veil.
Germany is, above all, the home of these beautiful traditions of an unbroken communion between the souls who have left earth and those who remain behind. There are the churchyards most loved, and the anniversaries of deaths most remembered, even among Protestants. It is a custom in Germany to wear black and to keep the day holy every recurring anniversary, were it twenty, forty, fifty years after the death of a relative or beloved friend. The cemeteries are always blooming with every flower of the season, the crosses or headstones always hung with wreaths of immortelles. In Catholic German countries, such as Bavaria, the festival of All Souls’ is one of the most interesting, because the most individual of the ecclesiastical year. We happened to be in Munich on one of these occasions, and had been there for a week previous, visiting the galleries and inspecting the art‐manufactures for which that city is world‐famous. But rich as it is in such treasures, the hand of its old King Louis—the grandfather of the present sovereign, and whom in his retirement we have met at Nice some few years before his death—has effaced much of its mediæval stamp, and attempted to varnish it over with a Renaissance coating very uncongenial to the northern character of its people and the northern mistiness of its atmosphere. Here we have again the wretched imitation in plaster of the marble Parthenon and Acropolis; the cold stuccoed pillars looming like huge bleached skeletons through a November fog, and yet supposed to represent the sun‐tinted columns of exquisite workmanship that rear themselves against the purple sky of Greece; the vast desert‐looking streets which, bordered by “Haussmann” palaces, seem intended for future rather than present habitation, and each of which, if cut into a dozen equal parts, would furnish any capital with twelve good‐sized public squares; above all, a stuccoed church, dazzlingly, painfully white, the Theatiner‐Kirche, a sort of S. Paul’s (London) without the smoky coat thrown over it by the chimneys of the busy city. Then, turning with relief to the little that is left of the old town, we find a few quaint streets leading to the cathedral, a plain but grand building, very fairly “restored” and adorned with the distinctive Munich statues of angels and saints, which are now sold all over the world, as the worthy substitutes of plaster‐of‐Paris images of the Bernini type of sculpture. A very interesting old triptych stands over the altar, with its strange medley of figures forming a striking and novel reredos. A procession was slowing winding its way down the aisles as we entered the cathedral one afternoon, and though the congregation was not numerous it was very devout. A few comfortable‐looking old houses and quiet streets surround the cathedral, and form quite an oasis in the midst of the modernized city. Indeed, the monotonous stretch of apparently uninhabited mansions was really wearying to look at, and we began to think that King Louis had built his town as if he expected its population to increase at a Chicagoan rate! It is true the season of fêtes had not come, and, according to the recognized phrase, “all the world” had left Munich for the country villas and hunting‐boxes in its neighborhood, but on the day of All Saints, the vigil of All Souls, how magically the scene changed! After Mass in the Royal Chapel, which, by the way, is beautifully decorated with frescoes of mediæval saints on a gilt background, we started for the great “Gottes‐Acker” (churchyard.) We had been told that this was worth seeing, and so it proved. The desert seemed to have blossomed like the rose. The road leading to the cemetery was crowded with carriages, carts, horsemen, and foot passengers. Every one, especially those on foot, carried wreaths of immortelles and small lanterns. The carriages were mostly laden with wreaths. Every one looked cheerful, but great quiet prevailed throughout the crowd. It seemed to us that until the dead called for a visit, the living in Munich must have been well hidden, so great were now the numbers that incumbered the hitherto lonely road. All were going in the same direction, and once there the scene was almost festive. Military bands (the best, we believe, next to the Austrian) were stationed near the cemetery gates. The “Gottes‐Acker” itself is an immense square, the length being about twice the breadth of the inclosure. Round the four sides runs a covered cloister, under which are all the graves, monuments, and vaults of the more wealthy part of the Munich population. Each of these was a perfect forest of evergreens and hot‐house plants, artistically heaped up around a vessel of holy water, from which any pious passer‐by was free to sprinkle the grave while repeating a prayer for its occupant. The large square in the centre was crossed and recrossed by narrow paths between the serried files of graves. Nearly all were distinguished by a cross, of stone, marble, wood, or metal. To these the wreaths and lamps were hung, and here and there a kneeling figure might be seen. Within the covered cloister a dense crowd promenaded slowly, while the bands played unceasingly, not always, however, appropriately. It was a striking scene, the like of which we do not remember to have ever witnessed elsewhere. At Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, the cemetery is similar to this in construction and arrangement, though it is, of course, smaller in size. Night fell gradually as we were admiring this peculiar expression of national idiosyncrasy, but the crowd did not seem to grow less dense. It was a remembrance worth carrying away from that old Munich whose spirit, though outwardly imprisoned in a pseudo‐classic shape, lives yet in the simple Christian instincts of its laboring classes. At this time, when it threatens to become another Wittenberg, have we not also seen the unconscious and magnificent protest of its inveterately Catholic feelings in the unique Passion Play, that worthily kept relic of the heroic ages of faith and chivalry? Kings and philosophers cannot change the world as long as peasants like those of Ammergau, and artisans such as work in the Munich manufactories—that should not be degraded to comparison with the materialistic establishments of Manchester or Sheffield—are yet to be found bearing through the present times the banner of their forefathers’ undying traditions. There is more simple faith among the German people, including also the Slavic and Hungarian races, than among some other modern Christian nations, and no doubt there must be a hidden law of gracious compensation in this fact, since the same country has been the cradle and the teacher of almost every modern heresy and philosophical (sic) aberration. No doubt the faith of the masses is intimately connected with their wonderful love of home and fatherland, their domestic instincts, their love of quiet family gatherings. All this easily leads to great love and tenderness for the departed, and it reads almost more like a German than a French saying, that “the dead are not the forgotten, but only the absent.”(129) Love for the dead and a reverent, prayerful remembrance of them are as much bulwarks to the morality of the living, as they are spiritual boons to the departed themselves. We would not speak ill of an absent friend, or break our word with one who had gone on a long journey; even a short earthly distance seems to make a pledge more sacred. How much more when the distance is the immeasurable breadth of the valley of the shadow of death! We all of us remember promises once made to those who have fallen asleep in Christ: those promises will be guardian angels to us, if we keep them; they will be so many drops of refreshing dew to those who are perhaps suffering at this moment for the unfulfilled promises once made by them in life. Shall we whose faith includes the communion of saints as a vital dogma, and whose humble hope it must ever be to become one of the church suffering after having done our weak share in the cause of the church militant—shall we be no better for this belief than are those who have it not? Let the dead be guides to us, while we are helps to them; let us each remember that besides the angel we have at our side, there is another spirit who rejoices or grieves for and with us—a company of spirits perhaps, but seldom less than one.
Mother or father, sister, brother, husband, wife, or child, that spirit from its prison looks sadly and lovingly earthward, marking our every step from its own patient haven of suffering sinlessness. No longer racked by the personal fear of falling away, no longer haunted by the possibility of temptation, it concentrates its loving anxiety on the soul whom it will perchance precede to heaven, but on whom it is yet dependent; let us not grieve it, let us not willingly or knowingly wound it, but rather let us take heed that we fit ourselves to go and bear it company in the new and glorious God’s‐Acre to which we hope to be called when that “which was sown in mortality shall be raised in immortality, and that which was sown in dishonor and weakness shall be raised in glory and in power.”
Personal Recollections Of The Late President Juarez Of Mexico.
I. The President In The Reception‐Room.
We saw President Juarez for the first time in the fall of 1865. He was then temporarily established with his government in the town of El Paso, on the northern frontier of Chihuahua, and within almost a stone’s throw of American soil. Fort Bliss, Texas, then recently reoccupied by the Union troops, was not more than ten minutes’ distance from the Plaza of El Paso.
The prospects of the Mexican Republic were not then very bright; the treasury was almost exhausted, the government was barely on Mexican soil, and on the American side of the Rio Grande it was generally looked upon as a question of time when President Juarez would have to seek safety on our own side of the boundary. It is needless to say that he would have been received by the Americans of that region with right royal hospitality.
American sympathy and material aid were looked for, and Americans were very popular with all the followers of the Mexican president.
Shortly after the arrival of President Juarez and his cabinet in El Paso, we joined a party of American gentlemen who paid him a visit. The party comprised, we think, nearly all the Americans of any standing about El Paso. There were the American consul, the collector of customs, three or four army officers from Fort Bliss, some local civil officials, and one or two leading business men.
President Juarez and his cabinet occupied a house on the Plaza—a large building constructed in the usual Mexican fashion. On announcing ourselves as a party of American citizens desirous of paying their respects to the chief of a sister republic, we were immediately ushered into a room where we found President Juarez with most of the members of his cabinet—notably his successor Señor Lerdo de Tejada, then Secretary of State, and Señor Yglésias, Secretary of the Treasury—now also named for the presidency—rather a sinecure office at the time.
We were presented in turn to the president by Señor Yglésias, the only person present attached to the president who spoke English. President Juarez spoke neither English nor French. He shook hands cordially with each of us, and expressed through Señor Yglésias the very great pleasure it gave him to receive our visit. We were sufficiently familiar with the Pueblo type to recognize Juarez immediately on entering.
President Juarez was low in stature, rather stout, but dignified, and at the same time easy in his manners. The Pueblo Indian was marked in every lineament of his face—the aquiline nose, the small bright black eyes, the straight cut mouth showing no trace of redness in the lips, the coal‐black hair, the swarthy complexion. Yet he was, as it were, an Indian idealized; his forehead was high, capacious, and the light of intellectual cultivation illuminated his face. He was dressed in plain black.
The secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, is evidently, judged merely from externals, a man of great intellectual ability. His skin is as white as that of the fairest daughter of the Anglo‐Saxon. A forehead, so high as to seem almost a monstrosity, and of a marble whiteness, towered above a face that gleamed with the glance of the eagle.
Señor Yglésias was of a darker complexion than his colleague in the cabinet. He seemed to be in rather indifferent health. The expression of his face was remarkably gentle and pleasing. We have already said that he acted as interpreter. He spoke English with a very marked accent, but with great care and correctness. We happened to be seated next him on a sofa, President Juarez being on his right. He told us that he learned to speak English in the city of Chihuahua, and that he had never been a day in an English‐speaking country.
Notwithstanding that President Juarez did not speak English, and the necessity of an interpreter naturally causes some embarrassment, yet his manners were so pleasant and affable that he placed us at our ease at once. He spoke about our war, and asked with much interest about our great military leaders, Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. He seemed to feel some sympathy with Gen. McClellan. A very pleasant half‐hour was spent in conversation on these and kindred subjects. It was at length interrupted by the entrance of a péon bearing a tray with quite a generous number of bottles of champagne on it.
We were invited to partake of the Green Seal. We stood around the table, President Juarez standing at the head. Toasts were drunk to the lasting friendship of the two North American republics, to the independence of Mexico, etc. The péon, who was not a very bright specimen of his tribe, exerted himself to his utmost to open the bottles sufficiently fast. In his tremulous hurry he got within point‐blank range of the president, and a peculiarly excited bottle going off prematurely, discharged about half its contents into the president’s shirt‐bosom. Juarez looked at the poor péon—whose swarthy face grew sickly pale, and who seemed about to sink to the ground with terror and confusion—neither in sorrow nor in anger. He took no notice whatever of the incident, but went on talking cheerfully as before. Such an accident happening to most men would have been laughable in the extreme. It did not seem to us to place Juarez in a ludicrous position at all, his self‐command was so perfect, his dignity so thoroughly preserved.
After all the patriotic toasts proper to the occasion had been drunk, we took our leave. The president again shook hands with us, again expressed, through Señor Yglésias, his gratification at meeting American citizens and officers, and hoped that he should receive further visits from us.
We departed very greatly prepossessed in favor of the Mexican president. We agreed in thinking that there was a simplicity and honesty of purpose about him which made him the best man for the difficult position of chief magistrate of the struggling republic in her great hour of trial.
II. The President In The Ball‐Room.
Some time after the visit just described, President Juarez gave a ball in honor of the anniversary of Mexican independence. We had the honor, in common with some other Americans, of receiving an invitation to the ball, which, of course, we accepted.
There were four American ladies in our party—two the wives of infantry officers stationed at Fort Bliss, the post surgeon’s wife, and the wife of one of the leading citizens of Franklin. We were all invited to pass the night—or such portion of it as would remain after the close of the ball—at the mansion of a lady, a native of El Paso, of American descent.
We were bestowed in three or four vehicles, and forded the Rio Grande successfully a little before dark. We found El Paso in festal array. The cathedral was covered with shining lamps from foundation to steeple. The Plaza was brilliantly illuminated, and crowds of both sexes were already assembling for the grand open‐air baile of the profanum vulgus. Class lines of demarcation are very sharply drawn in El Paso, and the gente fina alone were admissible to the president’s ball.
We dined at the Señora L——’s, where we had the pleasure of meeting several Mexican officers of high rank. Among them were General Ruiz, the Postmaster‐General (another sinecurist just then), and other staff officers, whose names we have forgotten. A little son of one of the officers at Fort Bliss—a child of five or six, who spoke Spanish very well, having passed nearly all his little life in New Mexico, only remaining sufficiently long in New York to set all doubts at rest as to his being born in the Empire State—became a very great favorite with the Mexican officers.
Between ten and eleven P.M. our vehicles were again in requisition, and away we went to the ball. It was given in the spacious house of a wealthy citizen, the front of which was brilliantly illuminated. A guard of Mexican soldiers was posted in front of the house, and lined the long hall leading to the ball‐room. Their pieces were at order, and they saluted the chief officers by striking the butt of their muskets against the ground. They were dressed in gray jackets, like the undress of the New York National Guard, white cross belts, white trousers, and a leather cap, somewhat Hussar shape.
We had the honor of giving an arm to one of the four American ladies on entering. Arrived at the door of the ball‐room, four white‐vested and kid‐ gloved Mexican gentlemen offered an arm each to the four American ladies, bowing at and smiling most sweetly on us the while. At first, we were disposed to resist “the deep damnation of this taking off.” The ladies hesitated and drew back. The situation would have become remarkably comic; but Don Juan Z——, well‐known to all Americans who visit El Paso, seeing the critical state of affairs, came to us and whispered that it was the costumbre del pais—the custom of the country. We submitted, but, we fear, not with a good grace. By the way, we only saw our American ladies at a distance for the rest of the evening. The Mexican gentlemen took entire charge of them. Don Juan informed us that we were expected to take our revenge among the señoras and señoritas.
The ball‐room was very tastefully arranged. The placeta, or open square in the centre of all Mexican houses, on which all the rooms in the building open, was roofed and floored for the ball‐room. The window‐ curtains were hung outside the window of the house; mirrors, paintings, etc., were hung on the outer walls, making the illusion that you were inside the house instead of outside of it, complete. American and Mexican flags were festooned around the walls. The music, softly and sweetly played, was placed in a side room, entirely out of sight. No braying cornet flayed your ears, and no howling fiddler, calling out the figures from a position dominating everything and everybody, gave you an attaque de nerfs. The fiddlers would be heard, not seen. The waltz, the national dance of Mexico, was, of course, the terpsichorean pièce de résistance; but a fair number of quadrilles were sprinkled through the programme, in compliment to the Americans.
We have seen many balls in the Empire City—some given under “most fashionable auspices”—but we must in justice declare that we have seen none which surpassed the Mexican President’s ball. There may have been more glare, more glitter, more diamonds, if you will, but there certainly was not more good taste, more elegance and refinement, more genuine good‐ breeding and gentlemanly and ladylike good‐humor. There was no rushing, steam‐engine fashion, the length of the ball‐room; knocking couples to the right and left, and tearing dresses, without even an apology. The ladies were richly but not gaudily dressed, and made no barbaric display of golden ornaments, as their New Mexican sisters are wont to do on bailé occasions. The gentlemen—except the army officers—wore the traditional black dress‐coat and pantaloons, with white vest and gloves, clothes and gloves fitting admirably, for the gente fina of El Paso got both from Paris. The army officers were, of course, in full uniform, the American uniform looking rather sombre compared with the red‐leg top trousers, with broad gold or silver stripes, and the magnificent gold‐embroidered sashes of the Mexican general and field officers. By the way, the lowest officer in rank of the Mexicans in the ball‐room was a colonel. The only captains and lieutenants admitted were the Americans. Juarez’ son—“the image of his father”—though somewhat shorter in stature, in the undress uniform of a second lieutenant of artillery was in the vestibule with the guard.
The president, with his cabinet and staff, was already in the ball‐room when we arrived. After being dispossessed of our fair companions, we were ushered to the portion of the room in which the president sat. We paid our respects in turn, and were kindly and cordially welcomed. Juarez was dressed in plain black, except his gloves, which, of course, were white.
The male portion of the American party then broke ranks, and spread themselves through the ball‐room, enjoying themselves each after his fashion; some in the fascinating “see‐saw” of the Spanish dance, others in the apartments off the ball‐room where exhilaration of a different kind was provided.
We passed a very agreeable hour with Signor Prieto, a Mexican poet and orator of distinction. Signor Prieto was then known as the “Henry Clay” of Mexico. He spoke French very well. He told us with just pride that he considered the highest recognition his efforts had received was the translation of one of his poetical pieces by our American patriarch‐poet, William Cullen Bryant.
Just before supper‐time, an official came with President Juarez’ compliments, to say that President Juarez and the members of his cabinet would take the American ladies in to supper, and requesting the American gentlemen to take in Mexican ladies. We immediately sought our friend Don Juan T——, and begged him to find us some Mexican lady who could talk either English or French. He found compliance with our request impossible, but gave into our charge the Señora S——, a magnificent beauty of the Spanish type, with coal‐black hair and large lustrous black Juno‐like eyes—fendus en amande. The other gentlemen of the American party were soon provided with supper partners, and we began our march for the supper‐ table, President Juarez taking in Mrs. Capt. O——; the secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, Mrs. Capt. B——; the secretary of the treasury, Mrs. Dr. S——; and the secretary of war, Mrs. W——, of Texas. The first table was for the president and cabinet, with the American party. The supper was rather a solemn affair. It consisted of nine courses, though the courses seemed as like each other as railway stations on the plains. All seemed to be desiccated, and reminded us somewhat of what we had read about Chinese feasts. When a course was served to every guest, the President looked down the table to his right and bowed; he then looked to his left and bowed. Then, and not before, knives and forks were observed, and the guests attacked the viands. This repeated nine times was not calculated to impart gaiety to the repast. It was slow, but ended at last, and we retired in the same order in which we entered, making way for the ladies and gentlemen of the second table.
After the supper, President Juarez sat for over an hour with the American ladies, chatting pleasantly with them in the simplest Spanish phrases he could devise. Seeing him chatting away and laughing gaily, no one could have imagined that he had the cares of a tottering government with an empty treasury upon his shoulders.
Capt. O—— asked us to go out with him and have a look at the great bronco, the public fandango, on the Plaza. As we passed out through the hall, the Mexican guard—now lying on their arms—jumped up and brought their muskets to the ground with a crash to salute our companion, much to his discomposure, as he wished to go out without attracting attention.
The great fandango was a sight worth seeing. A leviathan Spanish dance wound its way around and through the Plaza, filling to overflowing the market‐place, the sidewalks, and the arcades. Swarthy Mexicans with immense sombreros, with cigarettes of corn‐husks in their mouths, abandoned themselves to the swaying movements of the slow waltz, their dark‐eyed partners—often partners in the cigarette as well as the dance—now moving with a graceful languor, now dashing out with wild and unrepressed vigor to the clattering of a thousand castanets.
Unusual gambling facilities were to be found everywhere, of course. Cake merchants, fried hot cakes in the open air, lemonade, vino del pais, fresh queso, fruits, puros, were to be had for the paying.
Having seen sufficient of the great unwashed fandango, we returned to the ball‐room. Our companion was again the object of another demonstration of respect on the part of the guard. “I wish,” said he, “those fellows would go to sleep; this begins to be unpleasant.”
A waltz was in full gyration when we returned to the ball‐room. We took chairs and sat near the door chatting. Suddenly we became aware that some one stood behind us, placing a hand on either chair. Looking round, we saw that it was President Juarez. We immediately arose, but he insisted on our being seated, and resumed his former attitude. He talked with us for half an hour, in Spanish well adapted to our limited knowledge of the language, and which we had no difficulty in understanding.
During the evening, from time to time, we had received invitations from the president to drink wine with him—invitations which, of course, we did not refuse. Many patriotic toasts and sentiments were offered on both sides. It must have been in one of those festive moments that an enthusiastic gentleman of our party slapped the president on the back, called him “Ben” (Juarez’ Christian name was Benito), said he was “a brick,” and bade him “never say die” till he was dead! We were not a witness to this scene. It was described to us by members of our party.
Between two and three P.M. the president’s party left the ball‐room. Shortly after, the American clans were gathered, we got our fair ones back again, and set out for the hospitable dwelling of the Señora L——.
There was plenty of bustle and activity there. It seemed to us that half the people at the ball must have been guests of this house. All the rooms opening on the large placeta were turned into lodging‐rooms. There was hurrying to and fro with lights in hand, putting every one in his place. Some people put themselves in other people’s places. Notably our enthusiastic friend, who had taken up his quarters in a room intended for F—— and his new Spanish bride. He was found by the happy pair, just as happy as they were, sleeping the sleep of the just. In the meantime, the partner of his joys and sorrows sat solitary and alone in the room intended for her and her spouse, on the other side of the placeta, wondering at his absence and anxiously awaiting his return. This complication, however, was settled by transferring the lady to the room in which lay her sleeping lord, and bestowing the F——s in the room she had occupied.
After a good breakfast, we set out on our return to the Land of the Free, forded the Rio Grande at about noon, under a September sun—no contemptible luminary about latitude 32°, let us assure the reader. We sought our casas, darkened up our respective rooms, and shut the venetian blinds to keep out the flies, and having turned night into day, proceeded to turn day into night.
ELEMENTS OF LOGIC. Designed as a Manual of Instruction. By Henry Coppée, LL.D., President of the Lehigh University. Revised edition. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co. 1872.
President Coppée has carefully excluded from this edition of his Logic everything which could give offence to a Catholic. The main part of the work, treating of formal logic, is of course substantially the same with other treatises of this kind, and is written in a clear, simple style, well adapted to an elementary text‐book. But here our approbation must cease. The history of logic is altogether defective. The author advocates the doctrine derived by Hamilton from Kant, that our rational knowledge is merely “conditioned,” which is pure scepticism, and confounds Christian philosophy with theology, which is effectually to subvert both sciences. Teachers may find some useful assistance from this book in explaining the laws of thought; but it is altogether unfit to be placed in the hands of Catholic pupils. We reiterate the desire we have so often expressed, that some competent person would translate one of our standard Latin text‐books of logic, for the use of pupils and teachers who cannot read them in the original language.
THE POCKET PRAYER‐BOOK. Compiled from approved sources. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
This is certainly the most complete little manual we have seen, and, although it contains 650 pages, is small enough for the pocket; and gives, among other things, the three indulgenced litanies, the entire Mass in Latin and English, Vespers, and the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays throughout the year. The type, moreover, is singularly large and good. Thus the book supplies a long‐felt want; and ought to become very popular amongst Catholic men, for whose especial benefit it was compiled. There is another edition without the Epistles and Gospels, which fits the vest pocket, and can therefore be made emphatically a daily companion.
ENGLAND AND ROME. By the Rev. W. Waterworth, S.J. London: Burns & Lambert. 1854. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
A COMMENTARY BY WRITERS OF THE FIRST FIVE CENTURIES ON THE PLACE OF S. PETER IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, AND THAT OF S. PETER’S SUCCESSORS IN THE CHURCH. By the Very Rev. J. Waterworth, D.D., Provost of Nottingham. London: Richardson. 1871. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
The reader will perceive, if he takes notice of the titles of these two books, that they are by two different authors, both bearing the name of Waterworth. They are brothers, and one of the two is a Jesuit, the other being a dignitary of the Catholic Church in England. The work whose title stands first in order at the head of this notice, is not a recent publication, having been issued as long ago as 1854. We think it, however, not unsuitable to recall attention to it as a work specially useful at the present time. About one‐third of the volume is taken up with a very solid and scholarly disquisition on the general topic of the Papal supremacy. Its principal and special topic is, however, the relation of the church in England to the Holy See from the year 179 to the epoch of the schism of Henry VIII. It is handled with great learning and ability, and the sophisms and perversions of those disingenuous or ill‐informed controversialists who pretend to establish the original independence of the British Church are scattered to the winds.
The work of Dr. Waterworth, the Provost of Nottingham, was published last year. This learned divine is the author of the celebrated treatise entitled The Faith of Catholics, and is well known as a most profound and accurate patristic scholar. The present volume was prepared by him for the press before the publication of the Decrees of the Vatican Council; but its issue having been delayed by an accident, the author took the opportunity of making a re‐examination of its contents, with special reference to the objections raised by Dr. Döllinger, and of adding some new prefatory remarks. The result of his revision did not suggest to him the necessity of any alteration whatever, or show anything in the cavils of the petulant old gentleman, who has so completely stultified himself by retracting the deliberate convictions of his better days, worthy of any special refutation.
As for Dr. Waterworth’s work itself, it is quite unique in English Catholic literature, and different from the other works on the Papal supremacy, able and learned as these are, which we have hitherto possessed. It is literally an exhaustive collection of all the sayings of fathers and councils on the two topics discussed, during the first five centuries of the Christian era, by one who has mastered the whole of this vast body of literature. One hundred and seven fathers and councils are quoted, and copious tables at the end of the volume place the whole array of authorities in a convenient order for reference under the eye of the reader. It is needless for us to expatiate on the value of such a work, or to say anything more to recommend it to the attention of all who wish to study this great subject of the Papal supremacy.
THE TROUBLES OF OUR CATHOLIC FOREFATHERS, RELATED BY THEMSELVES. First Series. Edited by John Morris, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
One of the outward and by no means the least significant signs of the revival of religion in England is the appearance in rapid succession of a most useful class of books, having for their main object the vindication of the character and constancy of the Catholics of that country during and subsequent to the so‐called Reformation. We have had occasion elsewhere to refer to Father Morris’ work on the Condition of Catholics under James I. The book before us may be considered a continuation of that exceedingly interesting contribution to history, and, as it is the first of a series, we may expect at an early day others equally valuable from the same painstaking and indefatigable student.
Until lately, with very few exceptions, historical works relating to Great Britain have been the composition of prejudiced, anti‐Catholic writers, each in his turn guilty of the same omissions while servilely copying the misrepresentations of his predecessors; so that the public mind has at length become impressed with the conviction that, when the tocsin of rebellion against God’s law was sounded by Henry Tudor, the people of the whole of his dominions arose in hostile opposition to the authority of the church. None but a critical few, familiar with foreign contemporary authorities, were aware that, while the nobles who hungered for the spoils of convents and monasteries, and the suppliant courtiers, lay and ecclesiastical, whose fortunes depended upon the smiles of the sovereign, basely bowed down before the brutal passions of Henry and Elizabeth, the mass of the people, particularly the educated and moral middle class, held firmly to the faith, braving persecution, poverty, imprisonment, and even death, in defence of Catholicity. England, in fact, can count her thousands of uncanonized martyrs, priests and laity, men and women, who, in common with their co‐religionists of the Continent, fell victims to the lust, cupidity, and inhumanity of the “Reformers.” Some of their most glorious achievements will probably never be recorded in this world, but there is every hope that, through the exertions of such conscientious searchers as this learned Jesuit, a flood of light will be thrown ere long on the darkest, but not least edifying, days of the Christian Church in England. Heretofore this noble work has been delayed for various reasons. Contemporary documents were either in the hands of the Government, or were scattered among many convents and private libraries, and from long neglect had become almost forgotten; and it required so much industry as well as knowledge to search for and utilize them, that until lately no one was found equal to the task. Besides, the English Catholics of the last generation were so few and so lukewarm that it was difficult to find a publisher willing to risk his money and his reputation in bringing out books that were considered neither profitable nor politic. A change has come over the spirit of their dream, as the appearance of late of so many Catholic works, well printed and handsomely bound, from some of the first publishing houses in Europe, amply testifies; and the ancient faith is fast regaining its power in what, for three centuries, has been considered the stronghold of dissent. While of primary interest to English readers, works of this character will also have peculiar attractions for Americans, many of whom by blood and affinity are as much heirs to the virtues and courage of the British Catholics of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries as those born on that soil. No historical library in our language would be complete without such works as those of F. Morris, containing as they do original, authentic documents which hitherto have never appeared in print, in whole or in part. Such documents, carefully annotated, and modernized only as regards their obsolete orthography, are the true materials of history, worth an infinity of commentaries and second and third hand statements filtrated through the minds of ignorant or partial writers.
The present volume contains the memoirs of Mother Margaret Clement; a sketch of the history of the Monasteries of SS. Ursula and Monica at Louvain; an account of the dissolution of the Carthusian Monastery of the Charter House, London, and the execution of several of its monks, in the reign of Henry VIII.; a detailed narrative of the imprisonment of Francis Tregian for sixteen years; some additional particulars relating to the missions of Fathers Tesimond and Blount; the trial of the Rev. Cuthbert Clapton, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, as related by himself, and the correspondence of that official with his government from A.D. 1638 to 1643; with several interesting details of the sufferings and persecution of some noble Catholic families. These documents were procured in various places—in the Public Record Office; S. Mary’s College, Ascott; Stonyhurst; the Archives de l’Etat, Brussels; S. Augustine’s Priory, Abbotsleigh; Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, and in numerous private MS. collections; each original being preceded by a short but comprehensive introduction from the pen of the learned editor.
PETERS’ CATHOLIC CLASS BOOK: A Collection of copyright Songs, Duets, Trios, and Choruses, etc., etc. Compiled and arranged by William Dressler. New York: J. L. Peters.
The first half of this work is a reproduction of ballads of sentiment of no special merit, issued, as the foot‐notes ingeniously advertise to the purchaser, “in sheet‐music form, with lithograph title‐page,” by the publisher. The latter half is chiefly a reprint of so‐called religious songs which persistently return to us under one or another guise in publications of this class, like poor relations, and with as hearty a welcome as such visitors proverbially receive.
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has fixed upon the 5th of November as the publication day of The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1873: over 35,000 copies have already been ordered by the different booksellers. The Society has just published an edition of The Little Manual of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Spiritual Bouquet, formerly published by John P. Walsh, of Cincinnati; and will soon issue in book‐ form Fleurange, by Mrs. Craven; Col. Meline’s translation of Hubner’s Life of Sixtus V.; Myrrha Lake, or Into the Light of Catholicity. All‐ Hallow Eve and Unconvicted will appear early in November. Canon Oakeley’s work on Catholic Worship is in press, and will be published uniform with his excellent treatise on The Mass.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 93.—DECEMBER, 1872.
The Spirit Of Protestantism.
Recent events in Europe, particularly in Prussia and Italy, have done much to awaken the attention of thinking men in this country to the true spirit of what is known as Protestantism. While they have once more presented to our view humiliating spectacles of human weakness, injustice and downright tyranny under the guise and in the sacred names of religion and liberty, they have confirmed with remarkable force all that has been alleged against the spirit that actuates and has always governed the enemies of the Catholic Church.
When the revolt against Catholic doctrine and the spiritual authority of the See of Rome was first inaugurated in the XVIth century under the banner of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, it was asserted by those who then upheld the ancient faith that these were specious pretexts invented to cover ulterior designs, which, by giving full scope to the worst passions of our nature, would inevitably fix in the minds and in the hearts of mankind a moral slavery more debasing, and a servitude more irradicable, than even the most astute pagans of ancient times ever dreamed of; that dissent from the dogmas and discipline of the universal church did not in itself constitute a creed, but simply the negation of all Christian truth, and that the right of private judgment in matters of faith meant in reality the right, when seconded by the power, to pull down and destroy, to persecute and proscribe, to desecrate and desolate the Christian temples and charitable institutions which pious hands had reared and richly endowed throughout Europe. How sadly prophetic were the sagacious champions of true liberty and divine authority, the history of the last three centuries fully attests.
Whoever has studied the career of modern civilization, either in the detached records of nations and dynasties, or by following the course of the church herself from her foundation to the present day, cannot fail to discover that the advance of Europe from the epoch of the disruption of the Roman Empire until the commencement of the XVIth century was a steady, constant, and rapid march towards true civil polity and enlightenment; frequently checked, it is true, by wars and local schisms, but ever flowing onward in an irresistible and majestic flood.
From the barbarism and chaos incident to the disappearance of the central authority of the empire, Europe emerged into the preparatory condition of feudalism, at that time another name for order; and, through this state of order, the first necessity of freedom, she was fast acquiring that second essential element of political excellence—liberty. Already the humble peasants of Helvetia were as free as the air of their romantic mountains; Italy was dotted with republics; the Spanish peninsula was ruled more by its cortes than by its sovereigns; France had her several “estates”; Poland her elective monarchy; and Germany and the North were fast becoming imbued with liberal and constitutional ideas; England, the last to adopt the feudal system, had by degrees abrogated its slavish restraints and commercial restrictions, and, with justice, boasted of her great charters and independent parliaments; while over all a species of international law was established, the chief executive of which sat in the chair of S. Peter, before whose moral power warriors sheathed their swords and crowned kings bowed their heads in submission. Municipalities, the germs of which had first clustered around the monasteries, had become numerous and powerful enough to defy and, on occasion, to curb the power of the feudal nobles, and, under the protection of the guilds, the mechanical arts had acquired a degree of perfection fully equal if not superior to that of our own time. Those workers in wool, cotton, and silk, stone, metal, and wood, have left us lasting monuments of their skill not only in the productions of the looms of Flanders and Italy, and the forges of Spain and England, but, better still, in the multiplicity of magnificent cathedrals and basilicas, in the contemplation of which the artisan of this generation, with all his supposed advantages, is lost in silent admiration. Poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture, the four highest developments of creative genius, may be said to have reached, at the period immediately anterior to the Reformation, the acme of glory and greatness, never before nor since excelled or even equalled by man; while the discovery of the art of printing had given a new impetus to literature, and commerce spread her white wings in the Indian Ocean and along the shores of the New World.
Now, all these beneficent results were directly and indirectly the work of the Catholic Church. From the details of ordinary life to the more profound schemes of state policy, her animating presence was felt, and her influence cheerfully recognized and obeyed, for it was always exercised for the benefit of humanity and the greater glory of God. From the forging of the Toledo blade that flashed in the dazzled eyes of the Saracen, to the rearing aloft of that wonder of the Christian and pagan world, S. Peter’s; from the humble Mechlin girl meshing a robe for a statue of the Virgin, to Columbus exploring unknown seas in search of treasure to ransom the holy shrines; from the poor friar teaching the child of the degraded villein, to Archbishop Langdon framing Magna Charta; from the enfranchisement of a serf, to the organization of the crusades, there was no step in human progress that was not inspired and directed by the church for the wisest and most exalted purposes. Guided by the spirit of religion, the amount of solid happiness, simple virtue, and rational liberty enjoyed by the people of Europe at the opening of the XVIth century was greater, far greater, than their descendants possess at the present time, after nearly four hundred years’ experience, and countless attempts at religious, social, and political revolutions.
Yet, under the name of Reformation and greater liberty, this grand march towards human perfection and eternal bliss was to be stayed, and even for a time turned backwards, so that morally and politically Christendom has not yet, nor is it likely for a long time, to recover from the shock which it experienced at the hands of the Protestant reformers, their aiders and abettors. The motives which actuated these reactionists were neither new nor doubtful. Under various names and pretences, bodies of fanatics or knaves swayed by the same inducements had appeared from time to time in different parts of the world, generally causing much local disturbance, but always suppressed by the authority of the church or the strong arm of the state. They were simply detached efforts on the part of the worst portion of the population to throw off all spiritual restraint as well as temporal authority, and, by being thus freed both from moral and civil law, to give full scope to their passions, undeterred by either religious or social considerations. The history of fanaticism, of the Albigenses, the Fratricelli, and the Lollards, proves that the leaders in such movements were invariably the enemies of existing civil authority, and that profligacy and plunder were the lures by which they drew around them their deluded followers. The “Reformation,” as the last and greatest rebellion is called, forms no exception to the rule.
In the early part of the XVIth century it broke out in Germany under the auspices of three or four Saxon ecclesiastics, principal among whom were Luther and Melanchthon. The former schismatic, who was a preacher of some eminence, commenced by inveighing against the abuse of indulgences, and by rapid transitions ended by totally denying the authority of the church in every point of doctrine and discipline. He bases man’s salvation on faith alone regardless of works, proclaimed the right of every individual to make his own religion according as it seemed best to himself, and boldly advocated the massacre of priests and bishops and the pillage of churches and religious homes—the existence of all of which he declared to be contrary to Holy Writ. “Now is the time,” he wrote, at the commencement of his crusade, “to destroy convents, abbeys, priories, and monasteries”; to which advice he added a little later, “These priests, these Mass‐mumblers, deserve death as truly as a blasphemer who should curse God and his saints in the public streets.” A system of belief at once so convenient and so conformable with the greatest license, so free from all moral responsibility and so suggestive of rapine and spoliation, could not but attract followers, and Luther became so popular with the more debased of his countrymen and with the rapacious among the nobles, that rivals soon sprang up, who, accepting his premises, quickly outstripped him in the race of fanaticism. The Anabaptists under Münzer, thinking that they also had a right to private judgment, declared against infant baptism, demanded a reorganization of society on what would now be called a socialistic basis, and proceeded to put the heresiarch’s theory into practice by overrunning the fairest provinces of Germany with fire and sword, destroying alike feudal castles and Catholic churches, and slaughtering with unheard‐of barbarity every one who opposed them, whether layman or cleric.
This practical commentary on the new doctrine affrighted even its founder, so he hastened to implore the interposition of his friends among the German nobility. Accordingly, Philip of Hesse, in 1625, marched an army against them, and, meeting their main body under Münzer, a quondam friend and pupil of Luther, at Mülhausen, cut them to pieces and subsequently hanged their leader. About thirty thousand peasants are stated to have been slaughtered on this occasion, when the new Reformation may be said to have been baptized, and the right of private judgment according to Luther fully vindicated. Nearly at the same time another scene of even greater barbarity was enacted at the other extremity of the Continent. Attracted by reports of rich spoil to be obtained in Italy during the wars of the emperor and the French king for the possession of that lovely but unfortunate country, sixteen thousand German Lutheran mercenaries crossed the Alps and joined the forces of Constable de Bourbon, himself a traitor in arms against his country. Under the command of that gifted apostate, they marched on Rome, and, though their leader fell in the attack, the city was captured. Had he survived, the fate of the Eternal City might have been sad enough, but, unrestrained by superior authority, the conduct of the victors was simply diabolical. For weeks and months the city was given over to plunder, and the inhabitants to every species of outrage by those wretches, who, true to their master and his teachings, even went to the extent, in mockery of the church, to formally suspend Clement VII., and elect in his stead their new apostle. How Luther must have chuckled at the news!
“Never perhaps, in the history of the world,” says a distinguished historian, “had a greater capital been given up to a more atrocious abuse of victory; never had a powerful army been made up of more barbarous elements; never had the restraints of discipline been more fearfully cast aside. It was not enough for these rapacious plunderers to seize upon the rich stores of sacred and profane wealth which the piety or industry of the people had gathered into the capital of the Christian world; the wretched inhabitants themselves became the victims of the fierce and brutal soldiery; those who were suspected of having hidden their wealth were put to the torture. Some were forced by these tortures to sign promissory notes, and to drain the purses of their friends in other countries. A great number of prelates fell under these sufferings. Many others, having paid their ransom, and while rejoicing to think themselves free from further attacks, were obliged to redeem themselves again and died from grief or terror caused by these acts of violence. The German troops were seen, drunk at once with wine and blood, leading about bishops in full pontifical attire, seated upon mules, or dragging cardinals through the streets, loading them with blows and outrages. In their eagerness for plunder, they broke in the doors of the tabernacles and destroyed masterpieces of art. The Vatican library was sacked; the public squares and churches of Rome were converted into market‐places, where the conquerors sold, as promiscuous booty, the Roman ladies and horses; and these brutal excesses were committed even in the basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul, held by Alaric as sacred asylums; the pillage which, under Genseric, had lasted fourteen days, lasted now two months without interruption.”(130)
Having disposed of his rivals the Anabaptists and set afloat his anathemas against the church, Luther proceeded systematically to disorganize society and obstruct the efforts of the sovereign pontiff and the Catholic princes to save Europe from the horrors of a Mahometan invasion, at that time most imminent. He formed a league among the semi‐independent German princes favorable to his views, particularly on the matter of confiscation, and the power he had denied to the pope and bishops of the church he assumed to himself by forthwith creating a number of evangelical ministers to preach the new gospel. In 1529, the members of this league, with other nobles of the empire, were summoned by the Emperor Charles V. to a diet at Spires to concert means for the general defence of Christendom against the Turks, then threatening it by the way of Hungary. The Lutherans, taking advantage of the critical condition of affairs, and not being particularly adverse to the success of any movement that would destroy Christianity, demanded the most unreasonable terms as the price of their active co‐ operation. On the part of the emperor, it was proposed that all questions of a religious nature should remain in statu quo pending the struggle against the infidels, and be submitted as soon as practicable thereafter to a general or œcumenical council of the church, at which all parties were to be represented. “The edict of Worms,” they proposed, “shall be observed in the states in which it has already been received. The others shall be free to continue in the new doctrines until the meeting of the next general council. However, to prevent all domestic troubles, no one shall preach against the sacrament of the altar; the Mass shall not be abolished; and no one shall be hindered from celebrating or hearing it.” But these concessions to heresy for the general good, this weak recognition of an unlawful assumption of ecclesiastical and political authority, were not what the reformers desired. Not even toleration or equality would satisfy them. They wanted the right to persecute, to eradicate by forcible means and as far as their power extended, every vestige of Catholicity. They declared that in their opinion “the Mass is an act of idolatry, condemned by a thousand passages of Sacred Scripture. It is our duty and our right to overthrow the altars of Baal.” Thus protesting their duty and right to persecute, they retired from the diet, left the Mahometans, as far as they were concerned, free scope to destroy Christianity wherever they pleased, and Lutheranism, or rebellion, was henceforth known by the generic title of Protestantism.
So far from Protestantism being, as popularly represented, the assertion of liberty of conscience in religion, it originated in the denial of that liberty, by asserting the right to persecute those who differed from them in religion.
From this time the Reformation under its new and more comprehensive name made vast strides on the Continent, its path being everywhere marked by the same spirit of fanaticism, sacrilege, and destruction of property devoted to religion, learning, and charity; the insane dissensions of the Catholic rulers granting it immunity, if not positive encouragement. Geneva and part of Switzerland first embraced the gloomy doctrines of Calvin, and made active war on the church; spreading into France, the Netherlands, and the northern countries, their adoption by the ignorant and venal was invariably followed by the greatest atrocities and the wildest anarchy. Europe was shaken to its centre, and wars, the worst of wars, because waged in the name of religion, desolated the entire Continent for over a century with but pause enough to enable the combatants to rest and recruit their strength. The destruction of life during this period must have been immense, morals degenerated, industry languished, and the principles of rational freedom, which had been steadily gaining ground, were lost sight of in the clash of arms and the angry conflict of contending systems. From this epoch we may date the rise of modern Cæsarism and revolutionary ferocity which at the present moment are contending for supremacy in the Old World.
But it was not continental nations alone that suffered from the blight of this stupendous curse. Great Britain and Ireland soon experienced its baleful influence. Henry VIII., in order to be able to divorce his lawful wife and marry a mistress, cut himself loose from the See of Rome, and became, by act of parliament, head of the church in his own dominions. Henry was no mean reformer, as the record of his life testifies. He married in succession six wives, two of whom he repudiated, two beheaded, and his sudden demise alone prevented the execution of his surviving consort, whose death‐warrant had been signed by his royal and loving hand. “For the glory of Almighty God and the honor of the realm,” he seized upon all the churches in England, as well as nearly four hundred religious houses, and confiscated their property “for the benefit of the crown”—that is, for his own use and that of his facile courtiers and parliament. With the same pious purpose, we suppose, he ordered for execution, at different times, besides his wives, a cardinal, two archbishops, eighteen bishops, thirteen abbots, five hundred priors and monks, thirty‐eight doctors, twelve dukes and counts, one hundred and sixty‐four noblemen of various ranks, one hundred and twenty‐four private citizens, and one hundred and ten females. If all of those did not suffer the fate of the Charter‐house monks, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the Countess of Salisbury, it was not his fault, but theirs who were ungrateful enough to fly their country and perish in poverty and exile, thus robbing the Reformation in England of half its glory.
Under his daughter Elizabeth, nearly two hundred ecclesiastics are known to have suffered for their faith on the scaffold, besides laymen, and the multitude who died in prison: and if her successor, James I., does not present as striking a record of his zeal, it was because there were very few priests left to be hunted down, and very little Catholic property to be confiscated. To do that light of the Reformation justice, wherever he could catch a priest he hanged him, and, with a keenness eminently national, wherever a penny could be squeezed out of a recusant Papist he or his friends were sure to have it. Still he was only a gleaner in the field so cleanly reaped by his predecessors; for even in unhappy Ireland Elizabeth’s captains had done their work so thoroughly that he had nothing to seize upon or give away but the uninhabited and desolated lands.
However, lest the traditions of the early fathers of his church—Luther, Calvin, and the royal Henry—should be forgotten, and having no longer any Catholics to persecute, he turned his attention to the Presbyterians, Covenanters, and Puritans with some effect. The humanizing custom of cropping the ears and slitting the noses of those dissenters became greatly the fashion in this reign; for, though James acknowledged the right of private judgment in the abstract, the exercise of the right was found by his subjects to be a very dangerous pastime. The Puritans, who also based their religion on the same right, improved on the lessons thus taught; for, when in the next reign it became their turn to persecute and punish, instead of cutting off the ears or the nose of his son and successor, they took off the entire head, and gave to the English Church its first and only martyr. Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament interpreted “King James’ Version” too literally, and of course, believing in freedom of conscience, swept away episcopacy, kings, bishops, and all. After the Restoration, the English Church was again in the ascendant. Then they dug up the bones of the Puritan regicides, scattered them to the winds, and ever since the followers of John Knox and the believers in the Westminster Catechism have held a very subordinate place under the feet of “the church as by law established.”
If the fell spirit of Protestantism, which, as we have seen, was bloody and cruel in its inception and growth, had been confined to the eastern hemisphere, we, as Americans, feeling grateful to Providence for the exemption, might have less cause of complaint against it. But unfortunately it was not so. The virgin soil of the New World, from the first consecrated to freedom, we are often told, was destined to be polluted by the evil genius evoked by the apostate monk of Wittenberg. Every breeze from the east that wafted hither an immigrant‐ship bore on its wings the deadly moral pestilence of intolerance and persecution. It accompanied the Huguenots to the Carolinas, landed at Jamestown with the royalists, went up the Delaware with the Swedes and Quakers, up the Hudson with the Hollanders, and pervaded the hold of the Mayflower from stem to stern. Whatever physical, mental, and moral qualities those early adventurers, of many lands and divers creeds, may have possessed, Christian charity was certainly not of the number, and though they each and all proclaimed the right of every one to be his own judge in matters of religion—and most of them claimed to have suffered for conscience’s sake—not one had the consistency or the courage to tolerate, much less protect, the expression of an opinion or the observance of a form of worship differing from his own. So completely had the rancor of the founders of Protestantism eaten up whatever of Christianity it retained of the church’s teaching, that each of the sects, having no common enemy to prey upon, turned round, and, like hungry wolves, were ready to tear and rend each other. With the exception of one small settlement, there were no Catholics in the early colonies; but still, the Puritan found it as unsafe to live in Virginia as the Episcopalian did in New England, while the non‐ combatant Friend dared not risk his life in either locality. There was one little bright spot in the darkened firmament that hung over the infant settlements, and that was near the mouth of the St. Mary’s, on the Potomac. Here Lord Baltimore had planted a colony of Catholics which soon showed signs of life and vigor, worshipping according to the old faith, and proclaiming the doctrine of charity and religious toleration to all Christians. But it was not long allowed to enjoy its honors in peace. Its very existence was a reproach to its bigoted neighbors. Taking advantage of its humane and equitable laws, Protestants of the various denominations, persecuted in the other colonies, flocked to it as to a city of refuge, abused its hospitality, when strong enough in numbers changed its statutes, and actually commenced to persecute the very people who had sheltered them.
As the colonies grew in population and extent, we do not find that they increased in equity or liberality. Many of them were even at the pains of passing laws prohibiting the settlement of Catholics within their limits; and now and then we hear of some solitary priest being executed or a group of humble Catholics driven into further exile. The dawn of our Revolution created some change in religious sentiment, but it was more on the surface than in the heart. England, the oppressor, was the champion of Protestantism; France, the ally, was as essentially Catholic; so it was not considered politic to manifest too openly that bigotry of soul which pervaded all classes of society in those days, though even in the continental congress there were found some candid enough to object to asking the assistance of Catholic Frenchmen to help them to wrest their liberties from their Protestant enemy. These patriots preferred the Hessians and their Lutheranism to Lafayette and Rochambaud.
Our independence once gained by the efficient aid of the troops of the eldest son of the church, a pause appears to have occurred in the persecuting progress of the sects. Common decency required as much, but commercial interest demanded it. Our finances were in a ruinous condition, and it was only among the Catholic nations of Europe that we could look for sympathy and support. Then the new states very generally repealed the colonial penal laws, and finally the amended constitution prohibited the interference of the general government in matters of religion. Still, though we owe much to French sympathy and influence in placing us, as Catholics, free and equal before the law, we owe more to those of our own countrymen who actually had no religion at all. We would rather, for the honor of human nature, that the benefits thus received had been derived from another source; but it is an historical fact that the minds of many of the leaders of the Revolution, before and during that struggle, had become deeply imbued with the false philosophy then prevalent among the intellectual classes in Europe, and, believing in no particular revelation, dogma, or religion, they could see no reason why one party calling itself Christian should ostracise another claiming the same distinction. To their credit, be it said, our countrymen never carried their theories to the same extent as their fellow‐philosophers across the Atlantic, and their impartiality, which we would fain hope to have been sincere, took a direction in accord with the spirit of justice and impartial legislation.
If, then, our young Republic has not been disgraced by such penal enactments against Catholics as have long disfigured the statute‐books of England, and which are yet in force in Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the Protestant sects, as such, deserve neither credit nor gratitude. The active Protestants of that day—the ministers, deacons, and politicians—were just as narrow‐minded and as bigoted as were their ancestors, and as would be their descendants if it were not for certain good reasons best known to themselves. Witness the periodical outbursts of Nativism or Know‐Nothingism which have from time to time disgraced our national character. These have been directed invariably against Catholics—not against foreigners as such, for with a Protestant or even infidel foreigner their promoters have never professed to find fault. The occasional destruction of a convent, the burning of a church—and we have had many so dealt with—or the mobbing of a priest may only show that depravity exists in certain sections of the country, but the news of such atrocities has been received with such ill‐concealed satisfaction—certainly with nothing like hearty condemnation—by the clerical demagogues and the so‐called religious press, that we are forced into the conviction that to the absence of opportunity and power on their part we alone owe our exemption from such villanies on a larger and better organized system.
We are told, in a tone of patronage, if not menace, that we ought to be content as long as the Catholics of America are free and enjoy equality under the law. We grant the freedom and equality, but only so far as the letter, not the spirit, of the law is concerned. Let any one look at the way our Catholic missions in the far West have been defrauded for the benefit of Methodist and Baptist preachers of the Word and cheaters of the Indians, and tell us are they free and equal? How many Catholic chaplains are there in the army and navy, the bone and sinew of which are mainly Catholics? For how many foreign consuls are we paying merely to act as agents for the Board of Foreign Missions, Bible Societies, and Book Concerns? How are our numerous state institutions—penitentiary, reformatory, and eleemosynary—attended to in the interests of their Catholic inmates? When these questions are satisfactorily answered, we will be able to estimate the extent of the legal equality we possess. For so much of freedom and equality as we actually enjoy, we are thankful. Grateful not, however, to the Protestant sects, but to a benevolent Providence who has vouchsafed it to us; and, under him, to our Catholic predecessors who helped to found, and our co‐religionists who have bravely defended, our institutions, and who now stand ready to oppose with might and main any attempt to infringe upon our liberties.
But even as to the letter of the law we are not without just cause of complaint. For instance, we object most emphatically to the present school law of this state as unjust and inequitable in its provisions and method of administration. The state has no right to prescribe how or what our children shall be taught, and then make us pay for its so doing. We Catholics are unanimously in favor of educating our own offspring according to our conception of the demands of religion and morality, and, as the artificial body called the state is a judge of neither, it is manifestly incompetent to direct the training of our children. We are also willing to pay, and are actually expending, large sums of money in this good work; and while we are doing so, we hold it not just to tax us for the support of schools we do not require. Our duty to the state and society is performed when we teach our children to obey the laws of one and respect the usages of the other, and, if parents and the ministers of religion are unable to do this, mere officials and strangers certainly cannot. However, if the state will insist on levying a school‐tax, let it in justice give us a pro rata share of the money, and let the Evangelical Alliance of the sects take theirs and bring up their children in their own way. We ask nothing for ourselves that we would not willingly see granted to others, but, until one or other of these measures be adopted, we maintain that a large class of the citizens of the United States is deprived of one of its most vital and dearest religious rights.
Then, again, look at the treatment meted out by the legislative authorities to Catholic institutions, to our hospitals, foundling‐asylums, reformatories, and orphanages, which save annually to the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are daily conferring on society incalculable advantages. What begging, petitioning, and beseeching must we not resort to, to get the least legislative favor for them, even to a bare act of incorporation! For a quarter of a century or more, irresponsible bodies under the names of the sects, or even in no names but their own, have been fattening on the public money, our money, and no word of remonstrance has been uttered; but, as soon as anything is asked for our institutions, the cry of “sectarian appropriations” and “Romish designs” is immediately raised and repeated along the line. Every petty bigot who misuses a pen gets up a howl about the “Papists,” and “Romanism the Rock Ahead,” etc.; the pigeon‐holes of the religious newspaper offices, and of newspapers the contrary of religious, are ransacked for stale calumnies against the church, and slanders over and over refuted are launched at the most gifted and reputable of our citizens. This must all be changed before we can consider that, as Catholics, we stand on an equality with non‐Catholic Americans, and before we are prepared to admit that Protestantism, mollified by time and distance, has lost any of its pristine love of persecution and proscription. We would prefer to live at peace with every shade of Christians, but, if they will not let us, they must take the responsibility.
In stating our grievance in this manner, we do not address ourselves specially to the sense of justice or fair play of the leaders of Protestant opinion, but rather to the manhood and intelligence of our co‐ religionists who, by a more determined effort, might easily remove the evils of which we complain. We are more confirmed in this view by a recent event which happened at the national capital. The force of well‐regulated public opinion will always be very powerful in this Republic, and we are satisfied that the opposition very generally expressed by the Catholics of the country to the scheme of compulsory education by the general government, some time ago introduced into Congress by some distinguished members, had a powerful effect in defeating, for a time at least, a measure fraught with the greatest danger to our rights, and to the general liberties of all the states.(131)
We expect little from the Protestant press or pulpits. The manner in which the revival of religious persecutions in Europe has been looked upon by them precludes the faintest hope that they will listen to the appeals of humanity or justice where their passions, prejudices, or interests are concerned. Not very long since, the schismatic king of Sardinia wantonly levied war on the most defenceless and venerable sovereign in the world, and despoiled him of the larger half of his small dominions; yet there was not a single Protestant voice heard among us in reprobation of the foul act. Two years ago the same royal filibustero, with, if possible, less pretence, and without any warning, stealthily advanced his army on the Eternal City, took possession of its churches and their sacred furniture; its convents, and turned them into barracks and stables; its treasures of art and literature, and sold them to the highest bidder; its colleges and schools, and drove out the students and poor children to wander on the face of the earth. Then the Protestant churches and meeting‐houses rang with acclamations; and public assemblies were held by freedom‐loving American citizens to congratulate the modern vandal on his “victory” over—justice, religion, and civilization.
Rome has again been sacked, this time not by the rude Lutheran Landsknechte, but by a more ruthless and more insidious foe, the Garibaldini, the enemies of all forms of revealed religion, the men who swear on the dagger and the bowl because they have no God to swear by. The sovereign pontiff is virtually a prisoner in his Vatican; monks and priests, passing along the streets to comfort the afflicted or administer the sacraments to the dying, are set upon and slain at noon‐day; weak and delicately nurtured ladies are turned out of their peaceful retreats into the highways, to be insulted and derided by a crowd of vagabonds gathered from every quarter of Europe; the libraries, statuary, paintings, castings, and all the treasures which made Rome the centre of Christian art, and the depository of the world’s store of classic literature, lie at the mercy of a horde of ruffians, the very offscourings of Italian society, called together to that devoted city by the hope of plunder and the certainty of immunity for their crimes. All this and more is matter of public notoriety, yet no word of execration, no wail of sorrow, at this worse than vandalism rises up from a country that boasts its love of civilization, its chivalry to women, its respect for sacred things, and its patronage of the arts and letters. Why? They are only priests that are assassinated, only helpless nuns that are jeered at, only Catholic treasures that are stolen, shattered, or destroyed; right, justice, liberty, and even ordinary humanity, can afford to suffer and be forgotten, so that Catholicity be thereby weakened and checked in its onward course. The force of bigotry can go no further.
Late European mails bring us an account of a general election throughout “United Italy” on the universal suffrage plan—that supposed panacea for all political ills. The Catholics in certain portions of the country, it seems, who had hitherto abstained from voting, resolved this time to take part in the contest. As soon as this became known to the ministry, a circular was sent to even the local government officials, mayors of cities, magistrates, police captains, poll‐clerks, returning officers, etc., warning them of the danger, and threatening the severest penalties if steps were not immediately taken to prevent the Catholics from electing their candidates. The result was what might have been expected. The officials have done their duty to the government, and now feel secure in their places. The Catholics of one city, and that the largest, Naples, did, however, despite of all official precautions to the contrary, carry their election by an overwhelming majority; but, being only Catholic voters, the election has been set aside without even the mockery of an investigation or the least show of reason. Now, if such a thing had occurred in France, or any other country governed under Catholic auspices, we would be treated by nine‐tenths of the press of this country to a dissertation on the inability of the Latin nations to understand free institutions, and the folly of expecting an ignorant and slavish multitude to be able to appreciate the right of suffrage; but, as this gigantic fraud was perpetrated by a government in direct hostility to the head of the church, it is passed over in dignified silence. Not a syllable of remonstrance is uttered by our freedom‐shrieking friends—our Beechers, Fultons, and Bellowses—who are so fond of interlarding their sermons with political appeals against ballot‐stuffing and intimidation at the polls.
Let us turn for a moment to the present sad condition of Germany, the cradle and the victim of religious dissent and doubt. Prussia emerged from the late war not only the victor of France, but the conqueror of the several independent states and cities of the late Germanic Confederation. Her capacious maw has engulfed them all. Prince Bismarck, whose absolutist tendencies have long been recognized, not content with his success in creating an empire one and indivisible, desires to found a German church, to be conducted on strictly military and autocratic principles. Having disposed of a good many of the bodies, and taken possession of a large share of the property of the subjects of the new empire, he is now anxious to take care of their souls, and, whether they will or not, guide them in the way of salvation and the Gospel—according to Bismarck. Obedience to the central civil head in Berlin is to be the leading feature in his new religious system, and the emperor, like his brother of Russia and the Grand Lama, is to unite in himself absolute political and spiritual power, tempered by Bismarck.
A large portion of the Germans, having great doubts as to whether or not they have such things as souls to be saved, feel philosophically indifferent; the sects, being weak and without popular support, can make little resistance to the encroachments of the state; but the Catholic body, powerful not less from its intelligence and independence than from its numbers, utterly refuses to recognize the right or the authority of the chancellor to interfere in their spiritual affairs. That astute statesman first tried to frighten them by abolishing the denominational schools, then by patronizing a few dissatisfied professors who call themselves “Old Catholics,” but without avail; and now, like a genuine follower of the teachings of Luther, he is resorting to expatriation and persecution. He has already attacked the religious orders, and, as is generally known, has procured a law to be passed expelling the Jesuits and all religious in affiliation with them from the empire. It is not pretended that the members of that illustrious body, individually or collectively, have committed any offence against the state, nor is it even proposed that a semblance of a trial should be granted them before condemnation; but they have been guilty of opposing the designs of a confirmed despot, and their removal from home, country, and the sphere of their duties is forthwith decreed, and effected with all that mean malignity which subordinates who hope for future favor so well know how to exercise towards the victims of official oppression. The summary expulsion of so many learned and studious men from their schools and colleges has filled Europe with disgust and amazement; and even the more enlightened class of German non‐Catholics, who at least know the value of their acquirements and wonderful skill in training youth, have denounced, in the most forcible terms, an act so detrimental to the true interests of their country.
In England, a meeting of prominent Catholics was lately held, to protest, in the name of religion and learning, against this exhibition of high‐ handed authority; but Protestantism, true to its instincts, took the alarm, and, lest the Prussian Government might in the slightest degree be influenced, hastened to send an address to Berlin to assure Bismarck of English sympathy and support. This precious document was signed by fifty‐ seven persons, including the Marquis of Cholmondeley, the Bishops of Worcester and Ripon, Lord Lawrence, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Arthur Kinnaird, the Archbishop of Armagh, the Moderators of the Established Church of Scotland, of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of the English and Irish Presbyterian Churches, and the President and Secretary of the Wesleyan Conference. The reply of Bismarck, who is not remarkable for his “religiosity,” is full of sanctimonious cant and what, under the circumstances, seems to us very like grim irony:
“Most warmly do I thank you and the gentlemen who were co‐ signatories of the address you were good enough to present to me for this encouraging mark of approval. Your communication, sir, possesses a greater value, coming as it does from a country which Europe has learnt for centuries to regard as the bulwark of civil and religious liberty. Rightly does the address estimate the difficulties of the struggle which has been forced upon us contrary both to the desire and expectation of the German governments. It would be no light task for the state to preserve religious peace and freedom of conscience, even were it not made more difficult by the misuse of legitimate authority and by the artificial disturbance of the minds of believers. I rejoice that I agree with you on the fundamental principle that in a well‐ordered community every person and every creed should enjoy that measure of liberty which is compatible both with the freedom of the remainder, and also with the independence and safety of the country. God will protect the German Empire in the struggle for this principle, even against those enemies who falsely use his holy name as a pretext for their hostility against our internal peace; but it will be a source of rejoicing to every one of my countrymen that in this contest Germany has met with the approval of so numerous and influential a body of Englishmen.”
Now, all this simply means that the man who controls the affairs of Germany for the present is determined to destroy or to subject the spiritual order to the state; to enforce compulsory education, and prescribe forms of faith according to his ideas of what the “independence and safety of the country” demand; the penalty of resistance, as in the case of the Jesuits, being banishment, persecution, and perhaps worse, should the necessities of the case, in his individual judgment, require it. In this as in every other respect his word is all‐powerful in the empire. Still, we have yet to learn that one advocate of the higher law in America, one enemy of the union of church and state, one stickler for the rights of conscience, one believer in private judgment and religious freedom, has raised his voice against this violation of every right said to be so dear to the Protestants of the United States. Not one Protestant has protested against this assumption of absolute power over the minds and consciences of forty millions of people. Why? The answer is simple: the blow, in this instance, is aimed at Catholicity. Yes, the Republic is silent when even monarchical England feels herself constrained to speak. In a late number of the Manchester Examiner, a paper, we believe, anything but favorable to Catholics on general grounds, we noticed a very pertinent article on the address alluded to, of which the following is an extract, and we recommend it to the serious consideration of the conductors of the sectarian newspapers:
“We cannot understand why bishops and deans of the English Church should go into ecstasies over a united Germany, or why it should furnish a theme for the pious applause of Wesleyan presidents and Presbyterian moderators. Political changes concern politicians and political societies. When the kingdoms of this world adopt a different principle of grouping, all who take an interest in the political concerns of mankind may find in the altered arrangements abundant reason for gratulation or for dismay, but theological creeds and spiritual interests have no direct concern in the matter. If the unity of Germany were likely to give a great impetus to Roman Catholic doctrine, and aid the extension of Papal authority, Mr. Kinnaird would hardly have found in it a subject of thanksgiving, though, as a political change, it might have been equally desirable. Is it Prince Bismarck’s assumed hostility to the dogma of papal infallibility, and the trenchant steps he has taken with the Jesuits, that constitute the real merit of his policy in Protestant eyes? Well, then, to begin with, it is not at all clear that Prince Bismarck has any absolute aversion either to papal infallibility or to the Jesuits. If the pope had only thrown his influence into the scale of German unity, and employed it to further the new political policy in Fatherland, he might have made himself as infallible as he pleased without provoking any hostility from Prince Bismarck. If the Jesuits, instead of fighting against him, had fought for him, he would have made them welcome to as much power as they liked to grasp. At present, he finds them in his way, and he sends them off about their business; but our Protestant friends must not make too sure of him. He has fourteen millions of Catholics to govern, and he has no wish whatever to be at variance with the Pope. Besides, the necessity for getting rid of the Jesuits by depriving them of their civil rights is a thing to be deplored; since, so far as it does not spring from political considerations, the acts to which it leads are acts of persecution, and entitled to our regret, if not to our reprehension. We like the Jesuits just as little as the Germans do, but we allow them to settle amongst us, feeling sure that the law is strong enough to keep them in order. The thing really to be deplored is that Germany cannot afford to do the same, and it is a proper subject for commiseration rather than for eulogy.”
We have said more than enough to convince the most supine Catholic that Protestantism in this country has lost little if any of its anti‐Christian renown, and, if it cannot persecute here, it is in full sympathy with those in Europe who can; that, while it has lost much of its capacity, it has given up none of its desire for proscription. Split, as it is, into so many antagonistic sects, and constantly losing large numbers who are following out its teachings logically and gliding into indifferentism and infidelity, it is comparatively powerless to work us new injuries; but it is for us, by continued harmony, labor, and self‐sacrifice, to put beyond peradventure the question of our right to full and unqualified religious liberty and perfect impartiality in the administration of the laws.
XLV.
Fleurange, as we have said, generally returned to Rosenheim in the evening, but that day she left the princess several hours earlier than usual, and it was not yet night when Clement, who was alone in a room on the ground floor, absorbed in a large volume open before him, saw her suddenly appear at an hour when he expected her the least. Perhaps, instead of reading, he had really been dreaming over his cousin’s gayety which made him so sad the night before. At all events, when she appeared so suddenly before him at this unusual hour, the same sensation contracted his heart. There was, however, nothing in her appearance to justify his presentiment. He feared in seeing Fleurange again he might behold traces of the tears on her face which had probably succeeded her feverish and causeless gayety. But now, if not smiling and gay as the evening before, if, on the contrary, she looked serious and grave, her brow nevertheless was radiant, and in her brilliant eyes it was easy to read an expression of almost triumphant joy. All this by no means resembled the dejection that usually follows a fit of factitious gayety.
“You are alone!” said she immediately. “So much the better, Clement. I have something to tell you—you first, before any one else. You will see,” she continued, throwing off her cloak, “that I am faithful to my promise. I come to you now as to my brother and my best friend.”
As Clement looked at her and listened to this preamble, his heart instinctively warned him more and more strongly a great trial was at hand and he must prepare to suffer. But when, without much circumlocution, she came to the point; when she clearly laid before him her design; when, with a simplicity fearful from the strength of affection and devotedness it revealed, she unfolded the plan of her projected immolation—an immolation longed for, embraced, and decided upon—Clement literally felt his hair stand on end and it seemed to him as if his reason was deserting him.
What! lose one so dear, so precious, so adored!—lose her forever!—and in what way?—To see her voluntarily embrace a destiny too horrible for the imagination to contemplate. And wherefore?—wherefore?—Ah! the cry of Othello now resounded in Clement’s soul: “The cause—the cause!” Yes, the cause of this sacrifice was what added so much bitterness to his pain—and stung him so sharply, so cruelly, so intolerably, that, overpowered by the unexpected disclosure, overcome by an emotion impossible to master, Clement for a moment lost all control over himself. A smothered cry escaped him, and, leaning his head on his clasped hands, the tears he could not repress fell on the floor at his feet.
Clement’s firmness was so habitual that Fleurange was surprised at its failing him now, and perhaps at the moment the hidden cause of this fit of despair came over her like a momentary flash! But it was no time to dwell on such a thought, and, besides, Clement did not give her the opportunity. He rose and walked around the room in silence. His manly and courageous heart sought to regain self‐control, by an interior appeal to Him who alone could save it from bursting and renew its failing strength. He soon approached her, having triumphed over his emotion, and his first words gave an explanation quiet natural.
“Pardon me, Gabrielle,” said he, “I beg you, for my inconceivable weakness. But I could not indeed have any—any friendship whatever for you, to consider calmly the frightful perspective you so abruptly unfolded to me! You understand that, I imagine?”
“Yes, I expected to see all the rest greatly terrified. But you, Clement—I thought you capable of listening coolly to anything?”
“Well, my dear cousin, you had, you see, too high an opinion of my courage. However, I will endeavor to behave better in the future. Do not deprive me of your confidence, that is all I ask.”
“Oh! no, far from that, for it is on you I rely to inform the rest of the family of my resolution, and especially, and before any one else, your mother. You may imagine, Clement, that I must have her consent, and her blessing likewise. And you will plead my cause with her.”
Clement was silent for some moments. He was trying to command his voice, but it still trembled as he said: “And when do you think of starting?”
“In a week, if I can.”
“In a week!—That will be before the end of January! And have you thought of the means of making such a journey at this season?”
Fleurange hesitated. “I am quite well aware,” said she, “that it will be difficult for me to go alone.”
Clement hastily interrupted her in a terrified tone: “Alone!—I declare, Gabrielle, it is impossible to listen to you coolly, though I know your rash words must be taken seriously.”
“You must, however, take them so,” said she, in the same tone of energetic tenderness which had struck the Princess Catherine. “You must resign yourself to see me set out alone, if there is no other means of joining him.”
Oh! how willingly Clement would that moment have changed places with the prisoner! He was looking at Fleurange with sorrowful admiration when she resumed: “I thought it would not be difficult to find some one travelling to Russia with whom I could make the journey.”
“Go with strangers on so long and tedious a journey! That is impossible, Gabrielle, more impossible than the rest.”
“Ah!” cried Fleurange then, “with what confidence I would have had recourse to the kind friend Heaven once sent me. I feel his loss more now than ever.”
“You mean Doctor Leblanc?—Yes, I render justice to his memory. I am sure his devotedness would not have failed you under these circumstances. But you try my patience indeed, Gabrielle; you are too cruel.”
“Clement!—”
“What! you need a friend who has the unpretending merit of being faithful, devoted, capable of protecting you in so difficult a journey, and ready to remain with you till—till he can follow you no longer! And at such a time you do not deign even to remember you have a brother! And do you not see that, in thinking of others, you overlook what is at once his privilege and his duty?”
“Clement! my dear Clement!” said Fleurange, with tearful surprise, “what do you say? and what answer can I make? Assuredly I relied, and do rely, on you as a brother, and yet I confess I should not have ventured to ask you to make such a journey with me.”
Clement smiled bitterly. He could not help comparing what she was ready to do for another with what she thought him incapable of doing for her.
“Well, my cousin,” said he coldly, “you were wrong; it seems to me it was the very time to remember the promise you made me. As to me, I am merely faithful to the engagement I made the same day, that is all.”
“God bless you, Clement!—bless and reward you!” said she, much affected. “Yes, I acknowledge I was wrong. I should have known there was no kindness on earth equal to yours.”
She held out her hand. He pressed it in his without saying a word, and without looking at her; then they separated. Fleurange longed to be alone. Clement went to fulfil her commission to his mother.
XLVI.
It was the professor’s regular hour of repose in the latter part of the morning. Everything was quiet around him. His wife was seated at her wheel in the next room ready to answer the slightest call; for Madame Dornthal knew how to handle the spindle, and, in accordance with a custom kept up longer in Germany than anywhere else, had spun with her own hands the two finest pieces of linen for her daughter’s trousseau. She looked up as her son entered, and saw by his face that something agitated him. She gave him an inquiring look.
“I wish to speak to you, mother,” said he, in a low tone. “Let us go where we can talk freely.”
Madame Dornthal stopped spinning, immediately rose, and, ordering a young servant to take her place and call her if needed, she followed her son, softly closing the door behind her.
The opposite door, on the same corridor, opened into Clement’s chamber. They went there. Clement began to relate the conversation he had just had. His first words were met by an exclamation of surprise, after which Madame Dornthal listened without interrupting him. Her face by turns expressed interest, pity, and admiration, as he spoke; and it was with tearful eyes and a faltering voice she finally replied:
“My consent and blessing, do you say? You ask them for her? Poor child! how can I refuse my blessing to such devotedness! But my consent,” she continued gravely—“I cannot give that unconditionally.”
“What! mother,” said Clement earnestly, “can you think of refusing to let her go?”
“No, dear Clement; but I can refuse to let you accompany her.”
Clement started. “Mother!” cried he with surprise.
Madame Dornthal brushed back Clement’s hair with her hand, and looked him in the face, as we know she loved to do when moved to unusual tenderness towards him, then slowly said:
“Alone to St. Petersburg with Gabrielle! Have you reflected on this, Clement?”
Clement’s face slightly flushed, but his eyes met his mother’s with a beautiful expression of candor and purity. “Mother,” said he, “Gabrielle looks upon me as a brother. As for me”—he hesitated a moment and turned pale, but continued in a firm tone—“as for me, I regard her now as the wife of another. I hope you do not think it possible I can ever forget it!”
Madame Dornthal’s eyes filled with tears, and for a moment she looked at her son silently. Never had she loved him so much! Never had she so fully comprehended how worthy of affection he was! But the hour had come—perhaps the only period in life when the most passionate maternal love is powerless, and can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to comfort her suffering child!
She realized this; she felt she must respect her son’s secret sorrow, and repress the impulse of her own affection. Neither compassion nor sympathy could be of any avail at such a time. She therefore refrained with the sure instinct of a responsive heart, and Clement’s agitation soon subsided. He resumed in a calm tone:
“If you think it indispensable on her account, or on account of others, that a third person should go with us, then, mother, we will try to find some one.”
“Ah!” said Madame Dornthal, “if a cherished and paramount obligation did not retain me here, you would not have far to go for some one.”
Clement took his mother’s hand and kissed it. “I thought so,” said he, smiling. Then he continued: “We shall find some one, you may be sure, if necessary. For the moment we will leave it; we have something else to do.” And so to one after another the astonishing news was announced by him and his mother: first to the professor, and then to all the other members of the family. We will not describe their feelings individually, we will not tell how many tears were shed, what a succession of emotions poor Fleurange had to pass through that day. We will only say that, on the whole, they were all much more affected than surprised. So pure an atmosphere pervaded this unpretending household that everything beautiful and noble was at once perceived and comprehended without difficulty. To lose this charming sister, who had grown dearer and dearer, was too painful to be concealed, but Madame Dornthal’s daughters, like her, were ready for any sacrifice. Therefore the young girl felt that they entered into her feelings, and would regret, without blaming her. This sympathy not only increased her affection for those she was to leave, but gave great support to her courage.
The only person who did not at first participate in this general heroism was Mademoiselle Josephine. The knowledge of Fleurange’s resolution threw her into a state of stupefaction that would have been comical under any other circumstances. Her eyes wandered from one to another with a perplexed expression of consternation, as if imploring an explanation which would enable her to comprehend so extraordinary a fact. When, at her usual time, she joined the family circle in the evening, she was still speechless. She took her place among them, knitting‐work in hand, without saying a word or looking at any one.
The professor, cautiously informed of this new separation, heard it with resignation—a feeling that had grown upon him with respect to everything, in consequence of the increasing conviction that he had a long time to suffer and should never be well. Fleurange was now sitting near him. Madame Dornthal and her daughters were at work beside the table where sat the silent Josephine. Clement alone sat apart, talking in a low tone with his little sister on his knee. She was in her turn asking an explanation which no one had thought of giving her. While he was replying in a whisper, Frida’s large eyes opened to their utmost extent, her little mouth contracted, and a flood of tears inundated her face; then she threw both her arms around her brother’s neck, and said in broken accents:
“O Clement! how can I do without her?—I love her so much!—I love her so much!—”
Clement hid his face in the child’s long curls, pressed her in his arms, and kissed her affectionately, but he could not succeed in calming her till he promised that Gabrielle should return, and that he would bring her back. At this assurance, the child’s tears ceased to flow, she became quiet, and remained serious and thoughtful in her brother’s arms.
All at once Mademoiselle Josephine broke her long silence: “Siberia is a great way off, is it not?” said she.
A general smile accompanied the reply to this question, which was the first‐fruit of the elderly maiden’s prolonged deliberations.
“And is Clement going to Siberia, also?”
“No; he is going to St. Petersburg.”
“And how far is to St. Petersburg?”
They replied by giving her a full account of the way Fleurange would take to reach the end of her first journey. Being enlightened on this point, mademoiselle relapsed into her former silence, but not for a long time. A new idea suddenly occurred to her. She snatched off her glasses hastily.
“But those two children cannot travel all alone!” she exclaimed.
Madame Dornthal and Fleurange looked up, and Clement gave a start which disturbed the sleep into which Frida had fallen: every one became attentive.
“No, certainly not,” said the old lady earnestly. “How would that look, I beg to know?—Excuse me, Clement, you know how I esteem and love you; but then, my good friend, how old are you, pray? And as to Gabrielle, besides her age (which is equally objectionable), she has, as I have told her a thousand times, a dangerous face—a face which will not allow her to do a great many things permissible to others not older than she—I tell you the truth, and defy any one to deny it.”
No one attempted it, for the thought just expressed so characteristically was the opinion of all.
“Therefore,” continued mademoiselle, “Gabrielle must be accompanied by some respectable person. Once more pardon, Clement; this does not imply you can be dispensed with (you are a protector not to be easily replaced); but, my dear friend, les convenances require she should have at the same time an elderly and reliable companion. Now, I propose that this reliable and elderly person be—myself!—”
There was a general exclamation at these unexpected words. Every one spoke at once, and for some moments no one could be heard. The good Mademoiselle Josephine, however, comprehended at once that her proposition was generally approved. But before any one uttered a word, before Clement even had time to go and grasp her hand, Fleurange sprang forward, and, throwing her arms around her old friend’s neck, exclaimed: “Oh! how shall I thank you?—May God reward you for all it is his will I should owe you!”
This signified that she accepted her generous offer without any formality. A few hours previous, her aunt, we know, had attached a condition to her consent, and this was preoccupying Fleurange when her excellent old friend suddenly decided the matter in so unexpected a way.
From this moment, everything was plain to Mademoiselle Josephine. The opportunity she so greatly desired had not been long delayed. In this extraordinary phase of Gabrielle’s life she found an opportunity of manifesting the greatest devotedness, and of retarding still longer the hour of separation from her beloved protégée. She felt comforted, and was at once restored to her usual placid good humor. There remained, however, more than one misconception about the whole arrangement which she could not seem to clear up.
“Why,” said she an hour after, when, following her servant, who had come for her with a lantern, she took Clement’s arm to go home—“why cannot we also go to Siberia with her, if not disagreeable to this M. le Comte, whose name I can never pronounce?”
Clement could not repress a smile at this, but there was too much bitterness in it for him to wish to reply. She did not perceive it. She was only thinking aloud without regard to him, and, following the course of her reflections, she soon made another, which, far from exciting the least temptation to smile, made Clement shudder from head to foot.
“If,” she said, after a few moments’ silence—“if this Monsieur George is only worthy of the sacrifice she is going to make for him!—If after leaving us all—us who love her so much—she does not hereafter discover he does not love her as much as we!”
XLVII.
Clement left Mademoiselle Josephine at her door, and hastened back, struggling against the new tempest excited in his breast by the words he had just heard. Hitherto, in consequence of the impressions left by his meeting with Count George, and the prestige he had acquired in his eyes from the very attachment of his cousin, Clement had always regarded him as a superior being, to whom it merely seemed right, in the unpretending simplicity of his heart, that his humble affection should be sacrificed. To doubt him worthy of her—to fear that, beloved by her, he could cease to love in return, had never occurred to him, and mademoiselle had quite unwittingly thrust a warm blade into his bleeding heart. To admit such a thought would absolutely shake the foundations of his devotion and add despair to abnegation. He therefore repelled the thought with a kind of terror, and by way of reassuring himself he began to recall all the remembrances that once were so torturing. He took pleasure in dreaming of the devotion of which his rival was the object, the better to persuade himself it was absolutely contrary to the nature of things he could ever be ungrateful.
Fleurange’s reflections at the same hour were of a different nature. Somewhat recovered from the successive emotions of the day, she could now freely indulge in the secret joy with which her heart overflowed. She was at last free!—free to think of George—at liberty to love him and to confess it! The feeling so long repressed, fought against, and concealed, could now be indulged in without restraint! A few weeks more, and she would be with him!—She would be his!—All horror of the fate she was going to participate in was lost in the thought of bestowing on him, in the hour of abandonment and misfortune, all the treasures of her devotion and love, and this appeared a sweeter realization of her dreams than if united to him in the midst of all the éclat that rank and fortune surrounded him with!—
Ah! Madre Maddalena was right in thinking hers was not a heart called to the supreme honor of loving God alone, of bestowing on him that ineffable love which does not suffer the contact of any other affection, that unique love which, if it has not always been supreme, blots out, as soon as it springs up, all other love, as the sun causes the darkness to flee away and return no more to its presence!... “Whosoever loveth, knoweth the cry of this voice.”(132)
It was this voice which spoke directly to Madre Maddalena’s heart. Fleurange did not hear it so distinctly, even while silently listening to it apart from the noise of the world, though by no means deaf to the divine inspirations. She was pure: she was pious and steadfast: she had a fervent and courageous heart—a heart shut against evil, which preferred nothing to God, but which was ardently susceptible to affection when she could yield to it without remorse. This is doubtless the appointed way for nearly all, even among the best, and it is the ordinary path of virtue. But we would observe here that it is not the path of exquisite and inexpressible happiness already referred to, and we moreover add that, when a soul is inclined to make an idol of the object of its love, and place it on too frail a foundation, it is not rare that suffering—suffering whose severity is in proportion to the beauty and purity of the soul—leads it back sooner or later to that point where it sees the true centre to which, even unknown to ourselves, we all aspire, and which all human passion, even the most noble and most legitimate in the world, makes us lose sight of.
Fleurange perhaps had a confused intuition of this, and it made her look upon the frightful conditions on which happiness was vouchsafed her as a kind of expiation, which she accepted with joy, hoping thereby to assure the permanence of the love that overruled all other sentiments.
After Gabrielle’s conversation with Princess Catherine, the state of the latter underwent a salutary change. Her physical sufferings, and her grief itself, seemed suspended. A fresh activity was aroused as soon as she perceived a way of exerting herself for her son, and entering into almost direct communication with him. Let us add to these motives the princess’ natural taste for the extraordinary, and we shall comprehend that Fleurange’s heroic resolution afforded her an interesting distraction, and, at the same time, a source of activity which was useful and beneficial.
She made every arrangement herself. They were forced to allow her to direct all the preparations for the long journey the young girl was going to undertake. She and her elderly companion were to go as far as St. Petersburg in one of the princess’ best carriages, and everything that would enable Fleurange to bear the severe cold on the way was anxiously prepared. At St. Petersburg, it was decided she should take up her residence in the princess’ house until the day—the terrible day of the departure that must follow.
All this was transmitted by the princess to the Marquis Adelardi, whom she charged to receive and protect Gabrielle. Moreover, he must find means of announcing to George the unexpected alleviation Heaven granted to his misfortunes.
As to the steps to be taken in order to obtain the necessary permission for the accomplishment of this strange lugubrious marriage, and for the newly‐made wife to accompany her condemned husband, the princess thought the most successful course would be to obtain for Gabrielle an audience of the empress.
“Either I am very much deceived,” wrote the princess, “or her heart will be touched by such heroic devotion, by Gabrielle’s appearance, and the charm there is about her, and perhaps even by a remnant of pity for my poor George. Something tells me this pity still survives the favor he showed himself unworthy of, and that the day will perchance come when I can appeal to her with success. Obtain my son’s pardon!—behold him again!—Yes, in spite of everything, I hope, I believe, I may say I feel sure, that sooner or later this happiness will be granted me, unless so much sorrow shortens my life. Nevertheless, the effect of this terrible sentence, should he incur its penalty only for a day, will never be effaced. I feel it. My hopes for him have all vanished, never to return. How, then, could I hesitate to accept Gabrielle’s generous sacrifice—to accept it at first with a transport of enthusiasm which, I confess, I was seized with when, with indescribable words and accents, she so unexpectedly begged my consent on her knees, but afterwards deliberately, and, in consideration of the strange and painful circumstances in which we are situated, with sincere gratitude?”
“No doubt,” she added, with an instinctive and natural feeling, never wholly or for a long time dormant—“no doubt, when the time comes which I look forward to with hope—the time when he will be restored to me, other regrets will revive. But then, his condemnation, only too certain, puts an end to all hope in that direction. The conspirator acquitted, or even pardoned, might win a heart in which love perhaps still pleads his cause; but the haughty Vera will never bestow a thought on the returned exile from Siberia. I resign myself, therefore—and, after all, Gabrielle is charming, and, as far as I know, he never loved any one else as well. You will perhaps say that a quick fire is soon extinguished in George’s heart. I know that well, but it is very certain that this young girl’s devotion is calculated to foster the love she has inspired, and even to revive it if deadened by the revolutionary tempest he has passed through. As for me, I know, if anything can make me endure this fearful separation, it is the thought that this beautiful and noble creature, who is better fitted than any one else to preserve him from despair, will be with him in his exile.”
In the princess’ eyes, Gabrielle was, in spite of the pure generosity of her love, only a pis‐aller, or rather she was only something relatively to herself. She overwhelmed her to‐day with attentions and caresses as before she abruptly dismissed her, and as she would be quite ready to do again if a sudden turn of fortune brought about chances more favorable to her wishes. But, even if all these sentiments were evident, they could not change Gabrielle’s determination or diminish her courage. Her fate was already united in heart to George’s. Everything but this thought, and the anticipated joys and sacrifices connected with it, became indifferent to her. Calm and serene, she made all the preparations for her departure without haste or anxiety, and was equally mindful of her dear old friend, for whom she reserved the rich furs and all the other things which the princess had been careful to provide for herself as a protection against the cold.
The days, however, passed rapidly away, and as the time of separation approached, more courage was required for those she was to leave behind than for herself.
And when the farewell hour at length arrived, and she knelt in church with Clement, to utter a last prayer, the All‐Seeing Eye saw to which of the two belonged at that moment the palm of devotedness and sacrifice.
Part Fourth. The Immolation.
L’amour vrai, c’est l’oubli de soi.
XLVIII.
Our travellers were already far away, having pursued their journey for more than twelve days without stopping. In spite of the increasing severity of the weather, Fleurange and her companion went as far as Berlin, and even beyond, without suffering from the cold—thanks to the numerous precautions taken by the princess to protect them from it. But at Königsberg they were obliged to leave the comfortable carriage in which they had travelled thus far, for they wished, above all things, to travel fast, and they had the Strand to cross (the only way to St. Petersburgh at that season), that is to say, the narrow tongue of sandy soil that extends along the Baltic as far as the arm of the sea which separates Prussia from Courland like a wide canal, and then forms the basin or inland lake of Kurishe Haff. This bounds the Strand at the right, whereas at the left its dreary coast is shut in between the sea and the high dunes of sand which ward off the winds from the scattered habitations of this desolate region, all situated so as to face the lake and turn their backs on the sea.
The princess’ carriage remained, therefore, at Königsberg, to await the return of Fleurange’s travelling companions. She took with her, however, the rich furs, so warm and light, with which she had been provided, to wrap around Mademoiselle Josephine, in spite of her resistance. As for herself, she reserved a cloak of sufficiently thick material to protect her from the cold, not wishing to accustom herself to comforts she must afterwards be deprived of.
The change from one carriage to another was promptly effected, and the small calèche in which they were closely seated was soon on its way over the Strand towards Memel, which they hoped to reach the same evening. Clement, in front, gazed with secret horror on the desolate aspect of nature. Everything around him seemed a fitting prelude to that Inferno of ice towards which he was escorting her whom he would gladly have sheltered from too rude a summer breeze.
The weather was not as cold as on the previous day. The gray clouds charged with rain seemed to indicate a sudden thaw, and through them the sun, veiled as before a coming storm, cast a pale light over the dark waves and the sandy shore. The postilion, to favor his horses, rode so close to the water that the waves broke over their pathway. To the right rose the dismal sand‐hills, and on that side, as well as before them, nothing was to be seen but sand as far as the eye could reach; to the left, nothing but the tumultuous and threatening waves. Not a house far or near, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a living creature, save now and then some sea‐birds skimming wildly over the waves, adding another melancholy feature to the dreariness of the scene, which with the storm was a sufficiently exact image of the mental condition of him who was regarding it.
As to Fleurange, instead of looking around, she closed her eyes, the better to wander in imagination among the cherished scenes of the past and those she looked forward to. She beheld again the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and the radiant sky whose azure they reflect, and the graceful undulations of the mountains veiled in a pearly mist; then Florence, sparkling and poetical in the golden rays of departing light, and beside her she heard a voice murmuring words once dangerous to hear, but now delicious to recall and repeat to herself. How much she then suffered in struggling against her own impulses! Recalling those sufferings, how could she fear those she was about to brave?—sufferings repaid by the immense happiness of loving!—of loving without fear!—loving without remorse!—Besides, they were both young.—His mother’s hopes might be realized.—Yes, perhaps some day they would again behold, and together, that charming region, and then in the restored brilliancy of his former position, with her beside him, he would be convinced, convinced beyond doubt, that that was not the attraction which had won her, but really himself, and only him, whom she loved!
Yes, she was now happy; no fears troubled her; she was full of hope; and, as it is said of the only great and true love that it “believes it may and can do all things,”(133) so earthly love which is its pale but faithful reflection, made every earthly happiness appear possible and certain to Fleurange, inasmuch as the greatest of all was in store for her.
Clement was still absorbed in silent contemplation, and Fleurange in her sweet dreams, when Mademoiselle Josephine awoke from the drowsiness favored by the ample furs in which she was wrapped, which not only excluded the air but the sight of outward objects. She looked up and around for the first time that morning, and gave a sudden start of surprise.
“Ah! mon Dieu! mon Dieu!—” she cried with alarm. “Gabrielle, what is that?”
Fleurange, suddenly recalled from the land of dreams to what was passing around her, replied: “It is the sea. Did you not notice it before?”
“The sea!—the sea!—” repeated Mademoiselle Josephine, as if stupefied. “No, I had not seen it, and never imagined we should go on the sea in a carriage.—What a country! What a journey!” murmured she to herself, endeavoring to conceal the terror she had not ceased to feel as they proceeded on their way and found everything so different from France, and consequently the more alarming. But in her way she made an act of heroism in trying to overcome the surprise and fear caused by so many strange sights. She was especially desirous of not being troublesome to her companions. “Besides,” thought she, “if these two children are not afraid, I must at least appear as brave as they.” Nevertheless, she could not help repeating with astonishment: “Going on the sea in a carriage—it is really very singular!”
Fleurange laughed. “Here, dear mademoiselle, look on this side, and you will see we are not on the sea, but only on the shore.”
“Very near it, however, for we are riding through the water.”
“It is only the waves that break on the shore and then recede. There, you see the land, now.”
Mademoiselle felt somewhat reassured. She looked to the right, she looked to the left, she looked before her, then turned her eyes towards the gloomy immensity of the sea beside which they were riding.
“Oh! how dismal, how repulsive it is,” she exclaimed, at last.
Fleurange now gazed around. Her thoughts were no longer wandering. “The scene is indeed singularly gloomy,” said she. “The leaden sky—that mock sun—the dark waters of that melancholy sea, and the interminable sand. Yes, the whole region is frightful!” And she slightly shuddered.
“I have always been told,” said mademoiselle, “that the sea was glorious; but it seems it was a traveller’s tale for the benefit of those who never go from home.”
“No, no,” cried Fleurange, “do not say so. The sea is really beautiful where it is as blue as the heavens above, and where its shores are luxuriant with trees, plants, and flowers; but not here, I acknowledge.”
And, in spite of herself, the sweet impression of her recent dreams, caused by the contrast, entirely vanished. Her heart sank. She became silent, and for a long time none of the three travellers spoke.
The Strand, about twelve or fourteen leagues in length, was divided into several stages by post‐stations on the other side of the sand‐hills, whence were brought fresh horses. A carriage could not approach the stations on account of the deep sand, and when they paused a few moments to exchange horses, the travellers were only made aware of a neighboring habitation by a peal of the horn which responded afar off to that of the postilion as he announced his approach. While they were thus halting at the last stage, Fleurange noticed Clement’s anxious look towards the sea and the threatening sky. The wind grew stronger and stronger, and the waves mounted higher. A violent storm was evidently at hand. She beckoned to him, and said in a tone inaudible to her companion: “We are going to have bad weather, are we not?”
“Yes,” replied he, in the same tone. “It will be dark in about an hour, and I fear we may find the crossing rough and difficult. I do not say this on your account,” added he, with a somewhat forced smile. “I know well I am not allowed to tremble for you, however great the danger, but I fear you may find it difficult by‐and‐by to reassure your poor friend.”
He mounted to his seat again, ordered the postilion to hurry, and the little calèche set off as speedily as possible to avoid the enormous waves which threatened to upset them. In spite of their haste, night came on, and the storm set in before they arrived at the ferry across the arm of the sea which connects the Kurische Haff with the Baltic. The passage was short but dangerous. They could not stop an instant, for, though well sheltered here, the sea rose higher and higher, and the large boat that was to take the carriage across was difficult to manage in bad weather. They therefore rapidly descended the bank to the boat, and Mademoiselle Josephine was roused from the drowsiness produced by the motion of the carriage, by a sudden and violent shock, accompanied by cries and vociferations mingled with the roar of the sea and the frightful howling of the wind.
“O Jesus, my Saviour!” prayed the poor demoiselle, clasping her hands with terror: “the time, then, has come for us to die!”
The rain fell in torrents. The waves broke over the boat. Darkness added its horrors to the danger, which, to her inexperienced eyes, appeared to be extreme. The sweet voice of her young companion vainly sought to encourage her. By the light of the lanterns carried from side to side to light the boatman, she soon distinguished Clement standing beside the carriage, holding up a sail with a firm hand to screen them on the side most exposed to the waves.
“Poor Clement,” she exclaimed, “it is all over with us, then.”
“No, not quite, unfortunately,” replied Clement. “It will be at least half an hour before we reach the shore.”
“The shore!—the shore!—He imagines, then, we shall reach it alive?” said mademoiselle, hiding her face on Fleurange’s shoulder.
“Yes, yes,” replied the latter, pressing her in her arms. “Dear friend, there is no danger, I assure you. Believe me, I am only alarmed to see you so terrified.”
“Pardon me, child,” said the other, raising her head. “I resolved you should know nothing about it. But this time, Gabrielle, you cannot say we are not crossing the sea in a carriage,” continued she, with renewed alarm as she felt the increased motion of the waves.
Fleurange embraced her, repeating the same reassuring words. The poor old lady made no reply, she was trying to overcome her terror by a genuine act of heroism. “Danger or not, it is like what I have always imagined a terrible tempest, destructive of human life. But then,” murmured she still lower, “God overrules all, and nothing happens without his consent.”
Her physical nature was weak, but her soul was strong, and piety, a support in every trial, served now to calm her. She began to pray mentally, and did not utter another word till they reached the shore.
XLIX.
But a far greater danger awaited our travellers beyond Memel, whence they continued their journey the following day in sledges. The first, containing their baggage, preceded them several hours in advance to announce their arrival at the post‐stations; the second somewhat resembled a clumsy boat on runners, surmounted by a hood, and protected by a boot of thick fur. It was in this sledge Fleurange and her companion were stowed away. They were obliged to lie nearly down to avoid the piercing wind. The third vehicle, entirely uncovered, was very light, and so small that it barely contained Clement, in front of whom sat a young fellow wrapped in a caftan, strong and vigorous, but with a slender form quite adapted to the seat he occupied and the sledge he drove. With this light equipage Clement went like the wind, sometimes preceding the other sledge as a guide, and then returning to accompany it and watch over its safety.
The cold had become as intense as ever within a few hours. The pouring rain of the previous night after several days of thawing weather, alarming at that season, caused great gullies in the road, and endangered the passage over the rivers, at that time of the year, on the ice. Though scarcely four o’clock, the short day was nearly ended, and daylight was declining when our travellers came to the river they were obliged to cross in order to reach the small town of Y——. It was a deep, rapid stream, which at the beginning of every winter was encumbered with thick cakes of floating ice before the surface of its waters was congealed, and which, at the approach of spring, was also the first to resume its course and break the icy fetters that confined its current. This river was therefore almost always difficult to pass over, and very often dangerous, and, when the travellers came to the only place where it could be crossed, they felt they had reason to be anxious about the thaw. As soon as Clement cast his eyes on the river, he thought there were really some alarming indications. He at once saw there was no time to be lost, and drove directly on to the ice. Then he stopped, and hurriedly said to the young guide: “I think we should let the heaviest sledge go first: we will follow, if we can.”
“Yes, if we can,” said the other.
The order was instantly given, and the sledge that contained Fleurange and her companion passed rapidly on. But it had scarcely gone ten or twelve feet from the shore before an ominous cracking was heard. The frightened driver stopped. Clement imperiously ordered him to proceed without a second’s delay. But, instead of obeying, the driver, seized with fear, jumped out on the ice and sprang back to the shore he had just left. This jar increased the breaking of the ice which had already commenced. That next the shore gave way and began to move with the current, leaving an open gulf between the land and the still solid ice where our travellers remained. Great promptness of decision was necessary at a moment of such sudden and extreme danger, and orders as prompt as the judgment.
“Descend, Gabrielle,” said Clement, with authority.
The young girl instantly sprang from the sledge. Clement took Mademoiselle Josephine in his arms and placed her beside Fleurange.
“Get into my sledge, Gabrielle,” said he calmly, but very quickly. “As soon as you are safe, the sledge shall return for your friend. There is time, but you must not hesitate.”
“I do not hesitate,” said Fleurange. “I shall remain myself: she shall be saved first.”
Clement shuddered. But there was not time to contest the point. Besides, he knew from the tone of Fleurange’s voice that her decision was irrevocable, and he yielded without another word. He placed poor mademoiselle, who was incapable of comprehending what was transpiring, in the light sledge, gave the order—obeyed at once—and it darted off. The sound of the bells on the horses’ necks was heard for a few moments, and then died away.
Fleurange and Clement were left alone. Night was gathering around them. Not far off could be heard the slow cracking of the ice beneath the heavy weight of the sledge at the edge of the first opening. The noise increased, and the ice broke away the second time. The huge mass, thus detached, quivered, then, like the first, slowly descended the river, carrying the sledge with it. The opening became frightfully large. Clement looked before him to see if he could venture, by taking Fleurange in his arms, to cross on foot the long interval that separated them from the opposite shore. But it was too dark to distinguish the path, and, if they left that, death was inevitable. They might lose the only chance of being saved—by awaiting the return of the sledge. And yet they could not remain long where they were. The ice was already loosening around them. In a few moments there was another cracking, and it gave way before them. The fragment on which they stood became a kind of floating island. Clement saw at a glance the only course to be taken. He did not hesitate. He seized Fleurange in his arms, and, by the uncertain light of the snow, sprang boldly across the opening before them. They were once more on the solid ice, but who could tell how long it would be so? Who knew whether the sledge would succeed in reaching them again? Perhaps it was swallowed up in the impenetrable darkness, or left on the ice broken up around it. Otherwise it should have returned.
These thoughts crowded into Clement’s mind faster than they can be written. Fleurange, silent but courageous, was equally sensible of their danger. She bent down her head and silently prayed. Leaning thus against Clement, her hair brushing his very face, she might have heard the rapid pulsations of his heart and felt the trembling of the arm that supported her, and the hand that pressed her own. But he did not utter a word. His sensations were strange. A desire to save her doubled his strength and courage, and quickened all his faculties. At the same time, he was conscious of a transport he could not control—that she was there alone with him, that they were to die together, and she would never be able to fulfil the odious design of her journey!
But this moment of selfish love and despair was short. His thoughts returned to her—her alone. He must save her—save her at whatever cost. But how? It seemed as if an hour had passed away. It was useless to hope for the return of the sledge.—He thought he felt the ice quiver anew beneath his feet.—He looked at the dark current behind. Should he jump into the water, and endeavor to regain the shore they had left, but now no longer visible?—He hesitated a moment—no, that would expose her to certain death, and a more speedy one than now threatened them. It would be better to remain where they were, and endure the fearful suspense to the end.
They therefore remained motionless for some minutes more of silent agony. Notwithstanding her courage, the young girl’s strength began to fail. Her sight grew dim. There was a strange hum in her ears. Then her head fell on her cousin’s shoulder.
“Oh! I am dying,” murmured she. “May God restore you to your mother, Clement!”
At this moment of supreme anguish, Clement raised his eyes to heaven, and the cry of love and despair that rose from his heart was a prayer as ardent and pure as was ever uttered by childlike faith. He felt he was heard. Yes, almost at the same instant.—Was he mistaken? Afar off, so far he could hardly catch the sound, he thought he heard the jingle of bells. He listened without breathing.—O Divine Goodness! is it true?—Yes, yes, there is no longer any doubt. The sound becomes more distinct. It approaches.—It is really the sledge.—It is coming rapidly; it reaches them; it stops; it is really there!
“Blessed be God! she is saved!” was Clement’s cry. But Fleurange, overcome by weakness and terror, was already senseless in his arms.
He bore her to the sledge, and as he placed her within, but half conscious of what was occurring, he pressed her once more to his heart with unrestrained tenderness, and said: “Adieu, dear Gabrielle. Regret not that I die here. God is good. He spares me the sorrow of living without you.” And he added, in a lower tone: “Gabrielle, I have loved you more than anything else in the world. I can acknowledge it now, for death is at hand.” Then he stepped back, and ordered the young guide to hurry away.
His first words had only been indistinctly heard by Fleurange, as in a dream; but she clearly understood this precise order. It brought her at once to herself.
“Away!” she exclaimed. “Away without you! What do you mean?”
“It must be so,” said Clement. “The sledge can only hold you and the guide. Any additional weight would be dangerous. Go, without an instant’s delay.”
“Never!” said Fleurange resolutely. “Clement, we will all three die here, rather than leave you!”
“You must go!” repeated Clement energetically. “Go, I tell you! The sledge will return for me.”
“It will be impossible to cross a third time,” said the young conductor.
Clement knew it. He only replied by imperiously ordering him to start.
Fleurange, no less firm than Clement, rose and checked the hand that held the reins. The driver at once jumped down from his seat. “Do you know how to drive?” said he.
“Yes.”
“Well, I know how to swim. Here, get in quick.—Keep that for me,” continued he, hastily taking off his caftan and throwing it into the sledge. “Do not be uneasy. I shall get it again to‐morrow. I know the way and am familiar with the river.”
And without hesitating he plunged into the dark current, while Clement sprang to his seat in the sledge.
With a boldness that is the only chance of safety in such a case, he forced the horses into a gallop. They thus traversed with giddy rapidity the considerable distance that separated them from the other shore. The ice, jarred by the two former trips, cracked beneath the horse’s feet. To slacken their course an instant would have submerged them in the river, but the sledge flew rather than ran on the ice, and the hand that guided it was firm. They arrived at the goal in less than half an hour, and Fleurange, pale, exhausted, and chilled, fell into the arms of her dear old friend.
The latter was quietly awaiting them in a warm, well‐lighted room at the post‐station, and supper had been ordered, but Fleurange was neither able to talk nor eat. Mademoiselle saw that instant repose was absolutely necessary. She only persuaded her to take some hot mulled wine before going to sleep, and then went to join Clement in another room, where she learned, for the first time, all the danger she, as well as the rest, had escaped.
After the experience of the past day, Mademoiselle Josephine resolved never to manifest any astonishment at whatever might occur in this strange journey. She would go in a balloon without wincing, as readily as in a sledge, at Clement’s slightest injunction, for he seemed more and more to merit boundless confidence.
Perhaps, at the end of this terrible day, Clement did not give himself so much credit. He recalled what he had dared say to Fleurange in the height of their danger, and anxiously wondered if she heard and understood the words that rose from his heart at the moment death seemed so inevitable. Was she conscious when he uttered that last farewell? He did not know, and it was natural he should await the following day with anxiety.
But he was then reassured by finding his cousin as calm and frank as ever. She evidently had not understood, and probably not heard his words, or thought them sufficiently explained by the intensity of emotion naturally irrepressible at such a moment of extreme danger. The young girl was forced to rest a whole day to recover from her exhaustion. But it was their last halting‐place, and, when they resumed their journey, it was not to stop again till they arrived at its end.
Sayings Of John Climacus.
If any one has conceived a real hatred of the world, he is emancipated by this very hatred from all sadness. But if he shall cherish an attachment to things that are visible, he carries about with him a source of sadness and melancholy.
It is impossible that they who apply their whole mind to the science of salvation, should not make advancement. Some are permitted to perceive their progress, whilst from others, by a particular dispensation of Providence, it is altogether concealed.
He who strenuously labors to conquer his passions, and to draw nearer and nearer to God, believes that every day in which he has to suffer no humiliation is to him a grievous loss.
Repentance is the daughter of hope, and the enemy of despair.
Before the commission of sin, the devil represents God as infinitely merciful; but after its perpetration, as inexorable and without pity.
A mother will sometimes hide herself from her child, to watch its eagerness in seeking her, and she is exceedingly pleased to observe it seeking for her with sorrow and anxiety. By this means she wins its love, and binds it inseparably to her heart, that it may never be alienated from her in affection. “He that hath ears to hear,” saith our Lord, “let him hear.”
Meekness is an immutability of soul, which ever continues the same, whether amidst the injuries or the applaudits of men.
Dante’s Purgatorio. Canto Fifth.
[NOTE.—In this Canto, Dante introduces three other spirits, who relate the manner of their departure from the body, and recommend themselves to his prayers, that their penal sufferings may be alleviated.
The first of these penitents is Jacopo del Cassero, a townsman of Fano in Romagna, who, flying towards Padua from the vengeance of one of the tyrannous Este family, was waylaid and murdered in the marshes near Oriago.
The second is Buonconte, son of Guido di Montefeltro. He was a fellow‐soldier with Dante in the battle of Campaldino, and there slain; but what became of his body was never known until this imaginary narration.
The third is the noble lady of Sienna, Pia de’ Tolommei, whose story, told by Dante in three lines, has formed the subject of a five‐act tragedy, recently illustrated in this country by the genius of Ristori.—TRANS.]
Already parted from those shades, I went Following the footsteps of my Guide, when one Behind me towards my form his finger bent, Exclaiming—“See! no ray falls from the sun To the left hand of him that walks below! And sure! he moveth like a living man.” Mine eyes I turned, at hearing him say so, And saw them with a gaze all wonder scan Now me, still me, and now the broken light My body caused. The Master then to me: “Why let thy wonder keep thee from the height To drag so slowly? what concerns it thee What here is whispered? only follow thou After my steps, and let the crowd talk on: Stand like a tower, firm‐based, that will not bow Its head to breath of winds that soon are gone. The man o’er whose thought second thought hath sway, Wide of his mark, is ever sure to miss, Because one force the other wears away.” What could I answer but—“I come”—to this? I said it something sprinkled with the hue Which, in less faults, excuseth one from blame; Meanwhile across the mountain‐side there drew, Just in our front, a train that as they came Sang Miserere, verse by verse. When they Observed my form, and noticed that I gave No passage through me to the solar ray, Into a long, hoarse “O!” they changed their stave. And two, as envoys, ran up with demand, “In what condition is it that ye go?”
And my Lord said—“Return ye to the band Who sent you towards us, and give them to know This body is true flesh. If they delayed At sight,—I deem so, of the shadow here Thereby sufficient answer shall be made: Him let them reverence,—it may prove dear.”
I never saw a meteor dart so quick Through the serene at midnight, or a gleam Of lightning flash at sunset, through a thick Piled August cloud, but these would faster seem As they retreated; having joined the rest, Back like an unreined troop towards us they sped. “This throng is large by whom we thus are pressed, And come to implore of thee,” the Poet said— “Therefore keep on, and as thou mov’st attend.”
“O soul who travellest, with the very frame Which thou wert born with, to thy blessed end, Stay thy step somewhat!”—crying thus they came. “Look if among us any thou dost know, That thou of him to earth mayst tidings bear. Stay—wilt thou not? ah! wherefore must thou go? We to our dying hour were sinners there: And all were slain: but at the murderous blow, Warned us an instant light that flashed from heaven, And all from life did peacefully depart, Contrite, forgiving, and by Him forgiven To look on Whom such longing yearns our heart.” “None do I recognize,” I answered, “even Scanning your faces with mine utmost art; But whatsoe’er, ye blessed souls! I may To give you comfort, speak, and I will do; Yea, by that peace which leads me on my way From world to world such guidance to pursue.”
JACOPO DI FANO.
“Without such protestation,” one replied, “Unless thy will a want of power defeat, In thy kind offices we all confide; Whence I, sole speaking before these, entreat If thou mayst e’er the territory see That lies betwixt Romagna and the seat(134) Where Charles hath sway, that thou so courteous be As to implore the men in Fano’s town To put up prayers there earnestly for me That I may purge the sins that weigh me down. There I was born; but those deep wounds of mine Through which my life‐blood issued, I received Among the children of Antenor’s line,(135) Where most secure my person I believed: ’Twas through that lord of Este I was sped Who past all justice had me in his hate. O’ertook at Oriaco, had I fled Towards Mira, still where breath is I might wait. But to the marsh I made my way instead, And there, entangled in the cany brake And mire, I fell, and on the ground saw spread, From mine own veins outpoured, a living lake.”
BUONCONTE DI MONTEFELTRO.
Here spake another: “O may that desire So be fulfilled which to the lofty Mount Conducts thy feet as thou shalt bring me nigher To mine by thy good prayers. I am the Count Buonconte: Montefeltro’s lord was I. Giovanna cares not, no one cares for me; Therefore with these I go dejectedly.” And I to him: “What violence took thee, Or chance of war, from Campaldino then So far that none e’er knew thy burial‐place?” “O,” answered he, “above the hermit’s glen(136) A stream whose course is Casentino’s base, Springs in the Apennine, Archiano called. There, where that name is lost in Arno’s flood, Exhausted I arrived, footsore and galled, Pierced in my throat, painting the plain with blood. Here my sight failed me and I fell: the last Word that I spake was Mary’s name, and then From my deserted flesh the spirit passed. The truth I tell now, tell to living men; God’s Angel took me, but that fiend of Hell Screamed out: ’Ha! thou from heaven, why robb’st thou me? His soul thou get’st for one small tear that fell, But of this offal other work I’ll see.’ Thou know’st how vapors gathering in the air Mount to the cold and there condensed distil Back into water. That Bad Will which ne’er Seeks aught but evil joined his evil will, With intellect, and, from the great force given By his fell nature, moved the mist and wind And o’er the valley drew the darkened heaven, Covering it with clouds as day declined From Pratomagno far as the great chain,(137) So that the o’erburdened air to water turned: Then the floods fell, and every rivulet’s vein Swelled with the superflux the soaked earth spurned. When to large streams the mingling torrents grew Down to the royal river with such force They rushed that no restraint their fury knew. Here fierce Archiano found my frozen corse Stretched at its mouth, and into Arno’s wave Dashed it and loosened from my breast the sign, Which when mine anguish mastered me I gave, Of holy cross with my crossed arms: in fine, O’er bed and bank my form the streamlet drave Whirling, and with its own clay covered mine.”
PIA DE’ TOLOMEI.
“O stay! when thou shalt walk the world once more, And have repose from that long way of thine,”— Said the third spirit, following those before, “Remember Pia! for that name was mine: Sienna gave me birth: Maremma’s fen Was my undoing: he knows that full well Who ringed my finger with his gem and then, After espousal,—took me there to dwell.”
Sanskrit And The Vedas.(138)
“But in justice, I am bound to say that Rome has the merit of having first seriously attended to the study of Indian literature.”—CARDINAL WISEMAN: Connection between Science and Revealed Religion.
“The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European scholars to the extraordinary discovery (Sanskrit literature) that had been made were the French Jesuit missionaries.”—MAX MÜLLER: Lectures on the Science of Language.
What manner of language is the Sanskrit?
By what people or nation was it spoken?
When? and where?
What are its literary monuments?
Whence comes it—granting it to be as ancient a tongue as is represented—that neither in Greek, Roman, nor, indeed, in any ancient literature, is it ever mentioned, and that we only read of it in modern works, scarce a century old?
Such questions as these are frequently asked, even at the present day. Forty years ago, it is doubtful if there were ten persons in this country able to reply to them satisfactorily, and more than doubtful if a single scholar could have been found capable of translating the simplest Sanskrit sentence. Within that period, however, philological science in general, and Sanskrit in particular, have made long and rapid strides among us, and we now have scores of scholars fully awake to the importance of cultivating the resources of this wonderful tongue, as the origin or common source of the European family of languages, in which our own English is included.
At the head of these scholars stands, without dispute, Prof. William Dwight Whitney, whose, linguistic acquirements and philosophical treatment of difficult philological problems have earned for him a very high and well‐merited reputation. Nor is this opinion a merely patriotic and partial estimate. Prof. Whitney’s merits as a Sanskrit scholar and comparative philologist are fully acknowledged, not only in this country, but by the eminent Orientalists of Europe. The first periodical of Germany and of the world for the comparative study of languages (Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen, Berlin, 1872), in a late number recognizes, in the most flattering manner, Prof. Whitney’s high rank in the philological republic of letters, and refers in complimentary terms to the fact that he is well known in Germany as the editor of the Sanskrit text of the Atharva Veda.
We may here incidentally note, in the same number of the Zeitschrift, another gratifying recognition of advanced American scholarship. We refer to a review of Prof. March’s Comparative Grammar of the Anglo‐Saxon, from the pen of Moritz Heyne, the well‐known author of the Brief Comparative Grammar of the Old German Dialects, and editor of the celebrated editions of the Mœso‐Gothic Bible of Ulphilas, and of the Anglo‐Saxon poem of Beowulf. The German reviewer credits Prof. March’s work with extensive and original investigation, great erudition in the Anglo‐Saxon texts, and valuable contributions to the grammar of the language. He adds, that the study of Anglo‐Saxon is pursued with more zeal and success in the United States than in England. Solid commendation like this, from such a source, speaks well for American progress in the field of philological science.
During the past twenty years, Prof. Whitney has published numerous essays on Sanskrit literature which, limited to the special circulation of scientific or literary periodicals, have not fallen under the notice of the general reading public. Many of these articles he has now collected and published in a volume,(139) edited by himself. Four of the essays are on the Vedas and Vedic literature, one on the Avesta (commonly called the Zend‐Avesta), and seven upon various philological topics, including two reviews of Max Müller’s Lectures on Language, which are admirable specimens of temperate and careful criticism, guided by sound scholarship.
Prof. Whitney’s first paper on the Vedas (originally published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iii., 1853) opens thus:
“It is a truth now well established, that the Vedas furnish the only sure foundation on which a knowledge of ancient and modern India can be built up. They are therefore at present engrossing the larger share of the attention of those who pursue this branch of Oriental study. Only recently, however, has their paramount importance been fully recognized: it was by slow degrees that they made their way up to the consideration in which they are now held. Once it was questioned whether any such books as the Vedas really existed, or whether, if they did exist, the jealous care of the Brahmans would ever allow them to be laid open to European eyes. This doubt dispelled, they were first introduced to the near acquaintance of scholars in the West by Colebrooke.”
Not stopping to raise a question as to just reclamation in favor of Sir William Jones for a portion at least of the credit of the introduction of the Vedas to the “acquaintance of scholars in the West,” which, perhaps Professor Whitney means to solve in advance by a distinction between acquaintance and “near acquaintance,” we would observe that this comprehensive statement as to the introduction of the Vedas to European scholars takes for granted the previous interesting history of the modern discovery of the existence of the Sanskrit and of Vedic literature. We use the expression “takes for granted” in no invidious sense.
The author was writing for scholars who, he had a right to assume, were already acquainted with the objective history of his subject‐matter, and were probably informed as to the details of the gradual steps by which the certainty of the existence of a great language and a rich literature long buried in darkness was at length brought to light. His concern was with the internal, not the external, history of Sanskrit. Now, it is upon this external history that we propose to say something, returning to Prof. Whitney’s work when we reach the subject of the Vedas.
It is not necessary that our readers should, to any extent, be linguists or philologists in order to become deeply interested in the relation of the modern discovery of a language so old that it had ceased to be spoken and was a dead language hundreds of years before the Christian era—a language to which cannot with any certainty be assigned the name of the nation or people who spoke it, and which is at once the most ancient of all known tongues, living or dead, and, despite all modern research, still prehistoric.
To our Catholic readers, the narration of this discovery is full of interest; for in it they will recognize an additional version of the familiar story of the enlightened intelligence, piety, and self‐sacrifice of our devoted missionaries who, combining active zeal for knowledge with apostolic zeal for souls, amid privation and suffering, even in distant and savage lands, with one hand built up the walls of Zion, while with the other they erected temples to science.
In order fully to appreciate the bearing and importance of the revelation of Sanskrit to Europe, it is essential that we should first look a moment upon the condition of European comparative philology at the end of the XVIth and commencement of the XVIIth centuries. A short digression will suffice for this.
The Hebrew language was, from the earliest period of Christianity, settled upon by almost common consent of the learned as the primitive tongue. It was generally admitted by scholars that the sole great and essential linguistic problem to be solved was this:
“As Hebrew is undoubtedly the mother of all languages, how are we to explain the process by which Hebrew became split into so many dialects, and how can these numerous dialects, such as Greek and Latin, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, be traced back to their common source, the Hebrew?”
Upon this hopelessly insoluble problem an amazing amount of remarkable ingenuity and solid erudition were, for hundreds of years, hopelessly wasted, for, at this day, instead of Hebrew, Sanskrit is recognized as being the oldest of all known languages. How came this about? Reply to this inquiry will at the same time answer the questions proposed at the outset of this article.
The result of labor on the problem, “How could all languages be traced back to the Hebrew?” was of course unsatisfactory. No solution could be obtained. None indeed was possible.
At last it was suggested, why should all languages be derived from the Hebrew? and with investigation thus taken off its false route, the question was in a fair way to be successfully treated. Leibnitz vigorously denied the claims set up for Hebrew, and said: “There is as much reason for supposing Hebrew to have been the primitive language of mankind, as there is for adopting the view of Goropius, who published a work at Antwerp in 1580 to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in Paradise.” More than this, he indicated the necessity of applying to language as well as to any other science the principle of a sound inductive process, and in this he was greatly aided by the Jesuit missionaries in China.
“It stands to reason,” he said, “that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend step by step to the most ancient tongues, the analysis of which must lead to the only trustworthy conclusions.”
But Leibnitz, while properly disputing the justice of the claims of Hebrew as the mother‐tongue, knew of none other for which a similar claim might be advanced. It is doubtful if he ever heard of Sanskrit, although he lived until 1716, a full century after one, at least, of our missionaries had mastered Sanskrit and all the Vedas.
Sanskrit
is the ancient language of the Hindus, and had ceased to be a spoken language three centuries before the Christian era. The sacred Vedas, the oldest literary productions of the Hindus, and even the laws of Manu and the Purânas, later works, are written in a dialect still older than the Sanskrit, of which it is the parent, and are assigned by different scholars to periods varying from twelve hundred to two thousand years B.C. Thus, the dialects of Sanskrit spoken by the people of India three hundred years B.C. may be said to have been to the Vedic Sanskrit what Italian now is to the Latin. These dialects, modified by admixture with the languages of the various conquerors of India, the Arabic, Persian, Mongolic, and Turkish, and changed also by grammatical corruption, yet survive in the modern Hindí, Hindustání, Mahratta, and Bengálée.
Specimens of the dialects spoken by the people of the northern, eastern, and southwestern regions of India have come down to us in the inscriptions of the Buddhist King Piyadasi (third century B.C.), and in the account of the victory over Antiochus which King Asoka (206 B.C.) had graven on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri. These inscriptions have been deciphered by Burnouf, Norris, Wilson, and others, and are found to be in the Prakrit (common), not the Sanskrit (perfect) or exclusive dialect. From these facts the best Oriental scholars draw the conclusion that, at the periods of Piyadasi and Asoka, the Sanskrit, if spoken at all, was then already confined to the educated caste of Brahmans, having been a living language at some remote previous period (most probably between the VIIIth and IVth centuries B.C.), spoken by all classes of that race which emigrated from Central India into Asia, and the language so spoken is that to which modern Orientalists give the name of Aryan. For it will be borne in mind that the term Sanskrit is no indication of the people or race who originally spoke the language so called: it merely indicates the estimation in which it is held by their successors, and signifies “the perfect language.”
Meantime, during all these centuries, Sanskrit continued to be preserved as the classic tongue and literary vehicle of Brahmanic thought and study, and we are told on good authority that, “even at the present day, an educated Brahman would write with greater fluency in Sanskrit than in Bengálée.” It is now well established that Sanskrit is certainly not the parent, but the eldest brother or chef de famille of the large groups of Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian families from which all the modern European tongues (Basque excepted) are derived (we omit mention of the Oriental branches). When we write the Sanskrit words mader, pader, dokhter, sunu, bruder, mand, lib, nasa, vidhuva, stara, we very nearly write the corresponding English terms, and see in them their English descendants through Mœso‐Gothic and German. The Sanskrit and Greek equivalents of I am, thou art, he is, are almost identical:
Sanskrit: asmi, asi, asti. Greek: esmi, eis, esti.
We find the Sanskrit dinâra in the Latin denarius; ayas in Sanskrit—passing through the Gothic ais to English iron; and plava, in Sanskrit, a ship appearing in the Greek ploion (ship), Slavonic ploug, and English plough; for the Aryans said the ship ploughed the sea, and the plough sailed across the field. In like manner, similar illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely to the extent of volumes, showing not hazardous and doubtful etymological similarities, but clear, distinct, and sharp‐cut affinities by clearly traceable descent.
“Who was the first European that knew of Sanskrit, or that acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit, is difficult to say,” remarks Prof. Max Müller. Very true. But it is not at all difficult to reach the certainty that that European, whatever might have been his name, was a Catholic missionary.
Soon after S. Francis Xavier began to preach the Gospel in India (1542), we hear of our missionaries acquiring not only the current dialects of the country, but also the classical Sanskrit language; of their successfully studying the theological and philosophical literature of the exclusive priestly class; and of their challenging the Brahmans to public disputations. If the example of their labors, humility, sufferings, and piety were not sufficient to win souls, they always, where it was needed, had science at their command, and were at once scholars, linguists, mathematicians, and astronomers as well as lowly messengers of the glad tidings of salvation.
Prominent among the most remarkable of these men stands
Robert De’ Nobili.
A nephew of Cardinal de’ Nobili and a relative of Pope Julius the Third and of the great Bellarmine, he was nobly born and tenderly reared. He went a missionary to the Indies in 1603, and began his public labors at Madura in 1606. Being a man of superior education, cultivation, and refinement, he soon perceived the reasons which kept all the natives of high caste—especially the Brahmans—from joining the communities of Christian converts formed by the common people of the country. He saw that the Brahmans could be successfully met and argued with only by a Brahman, and he at once resolved on the heroic project of fitting himself by long study and almost incredible labor to become a Brahman in outward appearance, language, and accomplishments, and thus obtain access to the noblest, most learned, and most accomplished men in India. The task was full of difficulty. For years he devoted himself to his silent work, acquiring in secret the dialects of Tamil and Telugu, and the language and literature of Sanskrit and the Vedas. When in time he felt himself strong enough in Brahmanic learning and accomplishments to meet them in argument and debate, he publicly appeared arrayed in their costume, wearing the cord, bearing the exclusive frontal mark, and submitting to the rigid observance of their diet (eating nothing but rice and vegetables) and their complicated requirements of caste. So exhaustive had been his studies, so thorough was his preparation, and so admirable his talent, that his success was perfect. The Brahmans whom he met found in him their master even in their own exclusive field of literature, philosophy, and religion. Müllbauer (Geschichte der katholischen Missionen Ostindiens) says they were afraid of him. As a devoted and successful missionary, his life is full of interest; but we have to do with him here only as the first known European Sanskrit scholar. After forty‐two years of missionary labor in that exhausting climate, worn out, infirm, and blind, Robert de’ Nobili died, aged eighty years, at Melapour, on the coast of Coromandel. The distinguished Professor of Sanskrit at the English university of Oxford, Max Müller, pays the following earnest tribute to the acquirements of this admirable missionary and scholar:
“A man who could quote from Manu, from the Purânas, and even from such works as the Apastamba‐sûtras, which are known even at present to only those few Sanskrit scholars who can read Sanskrit MSS., must have been far advanced in a knowledge of the sacred language and literature of the Brahmans; and the very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fourth Veda, which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak points of the theological system which he came to conquer.”
Religious bigotry has sought to fix upon de’ Nobili the forgery of the Ezour‐Veda; but the examination of the charge by distinguished English (Protestant) Orientalists has only resulted in bringing out into brighter relief that devoted missionary’s remarkable acquirements and admirable virtues. Francis Ellis, Esq., a distinguished Orientalist, discovered the Sanskrit original of the Ezour at Pondicherry, and made an elaborate report upon it, which was published at the time, in the Asiatick (sic) Researches (vol. xiv., Calcutta, 1822), from which we cite the following short extract:
“Robertus de Nobilibus is well known both to Hindus and Christians, under the Sanskrit title of Tatwa‐Bodha Swami, as the author of many excellent works in Tamil, on polemical theology. In one of these, the Atma‐Nirnaya‐vivecam, he contrasts the opinions of the various Indian sects on the nature of the soul, and exposes the fables with which the Purânas abound relative to the state of future existence, and in another, Punergeuma Acshepa, he confutes the doctrine of the metempsychosis. Both these works, in style and substance, greatly resemble the controversial part of the Pseudo Vedas; but these are open attacks on what the author considered false doctrines and superstitions, and no attempt is made to veil their manifest tendency, or to insinuate the tenets they maintain under a borrowed name or in an ambiguous form. The style adopted by Robertus de Nobilibus is remarkable for a profuse admixture of Sanskrit terms; those to express doctrinal notions and abstract ideas he compounds and recompounds with a facility of invention that indicates an intimate knowledge of the language whence they are derived; and there can be no doubt, therefore, that he was fully qualified to be the author of those writings. If this should be the fact, considering the high character he bears among all acquainted with his name and the nature of his known works, I am inclined to attribute to him the composition only, not the forgery, of the Pseudo Vedas.”
But the result of further examination has decided that the Ezour‐Veda was not even written by de’ Nobili, but by one of his native converts. It is plain, from the testimony of Mr. Ellis, that he was not a man to seek the cover of the anonymous or the ambiguous, in order to attack the superstitions of Buddhism. This he did openly and boldly. Max Müller decides that “there is no evidence for ascribing the work to Robert.”
The example of Robert de’ Nobili was sedulously followed up by other members of his Order.
Roth, another Jesuit, appeared in 1664, master of Sanskrit, and successfully disputed with the Brahmans. Yet another, Hanxleder, who went to India in 1669, labored for more than thirty years in the Malabar mission, composed works of instruction, compiled dictionaries, and wrote works in prose and verse. Many of his writings are preserved at Rome. Among the most prominent of the Jesuit missionaries in the field of modern Oriental and Sanskrit literature was Father Constant Beschi, who went out to India in 1700. He made himself master of Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, and wrote moral works in Sanskrit which are still preserved and highly prized by the Brahmans. The natives called him the great Viramamouni. Scores of other missionaries might be named, equally devoted, equally learned. But they acquired science, Sanskrit, and Oriental erudition as a means, not an end. They sought no worldly distinction, no literary reputation. They had but one engrossing object and thought here below—their mission of charity and of love.
Nevertheless, the day of
Sanskrit For Europe,
long delayed, was now fast approaching. Its revelation to the West is generally ascribed to Sir William Jones. This assumption may be stated to be incorrect without in the slightest degree detracting from the merits of that distinguished English scholar. For more than a century before Sir William Jones went to India, the published letters of the Jesuit missionaries had established the existence and general characteristics of that remarkable tongue, the Sanskrit; and in 1740 (November 23), Father Pons, then at Karikal [Madura], addressed a letter to Father Duhalde, giving what Professor Max Müller describes as “a most interesting and, in general, a very accurate description of the various branches of Sanskrit literature; of the four Vedas, the grammatical treatises, the six systems of philosophy, and the astronomy of the Hindus. He anticipated, on several points, the researches of Sir William Jones.”
The letter in question was, in fact, an essay; and Father Pons so speaks of it. It fills sixteen closely printed octavo pages, and refers to the fact, not mentioned by Prof. Müller, that it is one of a succession of communications upon the same subject, inasmuch as he mentions a treatise written by himself on Sanskrit versification, transmitted to Europe the previous year, and specifies a Sanskrit grammar (Kramadisvar) which he sent two years before. Although Adelung, in his Mithridates, mildly censures both Father Pons and Sir W. Jones for exaggerating the value of Sanskrit, the exposition made by the former of the wealth of the Sanskrit language and literature is, to this day, held by distinguished scholars to be “very accurate.”
The Pons‐Duhalde letter is often referred to, but seldom quoted. We will therefore here cite a few short passages from it, which may give the reader some idea of the nature of the communication and an early estimate of the value of Sanskrit. We translate: “The Brahmans have always been, and still are, the only class who devote themselves to the cultivation of the sciences as a matter of hereditary descent. They originally descend from seven illustrious penitents, whose progeny, in course of time, was multiplied infinitely, etc. They are exclusively consecrated to learning, and a Brahman who strictly adheres to the rule of his order should devote himself solely to religion and study; but, in course of time, many have fallen into a very lax life.
“These sciences are inaccessible to all the other castes of people, to whom it is permitted to communicate certain compositions, grammar, poetry, and moral sayings.”
“The grammar of the Brahmans may fairly be classed in the rank of works of science. Never were analysis and synthesis more happily employed than in their grammatical works on the Sanskrit language. I am satisfied that this language, so admirable in its harmony, its wealth, and its energy, was at some remote period the spoken tongue of the country inhabited by the first Brahmans.”
Parenthetically, and also by way of comparison, let us look for a moment at the impression made by Sanskrit upon two other distinguished scholars from among those who were earliest in the field—Sir William Jones and Frederick von Schlegel.
At the outset of his researches, the first declared that, whatever its antiquity, it was a language of most wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a strong affinity. “No philologer,” he adds, “could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.” And Frederick von Schlegel (Essay on the Language and Philosophy of the Indians) says: “The similarity between Sanskrit, on the one hand, and Latin and Greek, Teutonic and Persian, on the other, is found not only in a great number of roots possessed by them in common, but it also extends to the inner structure and grammar. The remarkable coincidence is not merely such an accidental one as may be explained by an admixture of language, but an essential one which points distinctly to a common descent. Comparison further shows that the Indian (Sanskrit) tongue is the more ancient, the others younger and derived from it.”
But to return to our missionaries. The interest excited in Europe by the remarkable letter of Father Pons was purely one of surprise and speculation, inasmuch as Western scholars were without the means of testing the value of the great linguistic discovery. Sanskrit grammars, dictionaries, and even vocabularies were then unknown in any European tongue. This want, however, was soon supplied by another missionary, John Philip Wesdin, more widely known as Father Paulinus a Santo‐Bartolomeo. He spent thirteen years in India, and subsequently published (1790) at Rome, under the auspices of the Propaganda, several works on Sanskrit grammar and upon the history, theology, and religion of the Hindus.
Referring to his numerous publications (vielen Schriften), no less an authority than Adelung qualifies them as indispensable to a knowledge of Sanskrit as also to the other languages of India (welche zur Kentniss sowohl dieser Sprache als auch Indiens überhaupt unentbehrlich sind); and he adds (writing in 1806): “Peradventure has no European up to this time so deeply penetrated into this language as he.”(140) Of his first Sanskrit grammar, published at Rome in 1790,(141) Prof. Max Müller says: “Although this grammar has been severely criticised, and is now hardly ever consulted, it is but fair to bear in mind that the first grammar of any language is a work of infinitely greater difficulty than any later grammar.”
In this connection we must not omit some mention of that prodigy of linguistic industry and erudition, the Spanish Jesuit, Don Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura, who, in the midst of his missionary labors, collected specimens of more than three hundred languages.(142) This of itself was a gigantic work, and its rich results furnished to Adelung an important portion of the material of his Mithridates. Hervas, moreover, prepared grammars for more than forty languages, and is the founder of the true method of ascertaining lingual affinity by grammatical analysis, rather than by etymology, always more or less deceptive. Klaproth’s enunciation of this principle established by Hervas is so felicitous that we cannot refrain from citing it here: “Words are the stuff or matter of language, and grammar its fashioning or form.”
Concerning Hervas we need say no more than to add the noble tribute to his memory and his merits to be found in the pages of Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, p. 140:
“He proved by a comparative list of declensions and conjugations that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic are all but dialects of one original language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic. He scouted the idea of deriving all the languages of mankind from Hebrew. He had perceived clear traces of affinity in Hungarian, Lapponian, and Finnish—three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian family. He had proved that Basque was not, as was commonly supposed, a Celtic dialect, but an independent language, spoken by the earliest inhabitants of Spain, as proved by the names of the Spanish mountains and rivers. Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language, the establishment of the Malay and Polynesian family of speech, extending from the Island of Madagascar east of Africa, over 208° of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of America, was made by Hervas long before it was announced to the world by Humboldt.”
English literature has made us familiar with the name of Sir William Jones as the European originator of the cultivation of Sanskrit. The merits of Sir William Jones are not a subject of doubt or contest. Full justice has been done them. But when we come to settle the question of priority of successful and distinguished labor in the field of Sanskrit, the names and transcendent services of the humble and self‐sacrificing missionaries, Robert de’ Nobili, Roth, Hanxleder, Beschi, Pons, Paulinus a Santo‐ Bartolomeo, Hervas, and scores of others, their predecessors and companions, must ever be gratefully remembered.
The Triumph Of Sanskrit.
Through the publications of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, European scholars were now furnished with facilities for the study of Sanskrit, and it would be difficult to say which of the two, the language or the literature, excited the deeper or more lasting interest.
The absolute identity of grammatical forms of Greek and Latin with Sanskrit was at once recognized, and it was evident that these three languages sprang from one common source. The revelation created one of the greatest literary sensations ever known in Europe. The theory that upheld Hebrew as the mother tongue—already seriously damaged—now received its death‐blow. Classical scholars shook their heads sceptically. Theologians were troubled. Ethnographers were all at sea. Etymologists and lexicographers were dumfounded. The philosophers of the day, each one of whom had his own little system of the universe to take care of, saw their theories ruthlessly upset; and Lord Monboddo, who had just finished his great work in which he derives mankind from a couple of apes, and all the dialects of the world from the language of the Egyptian gods, was petrified with astonishment. His Egyptian theory, his men with tails, and his monkeys without tails, were all equally doomed to destruction. To his credit, though, it must be said that he soon afterward accepted the situation with commendable intelligence and alacrity.
Other pet theories and other deeply ingrained prejudices of many scholars of the best education were shocked and scandalized at the claims set up for Sanskrit. The idea that the classical languages of Greece and Rome could be intimately related to a jargon of mere savages—as they supposed the natives of India to be—was to the last degree repugnant to these gentlemen, and they went great lengths in assertion, absurd argument, irony, and ridicule, to escape the, alas! too inevitable and horribly unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same linguistic kith and kin as the language of the black inhabitants of India. The distinguished Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, by way of protest against the claims set up for Sanskrit, even went so far as to deny that any such language existed or ever had existed, and wrote his famous essay to prove that those arch forgers and liars, the Brahmans, had manufactured the dialect on the model of the Greek and the Latin, and that the whole thing, language, literature, and all, was a piece of daring invention and bold imposture.
How deeply rooted were the prejudices, and how stubborn the ignorance, even among scholars and men of literary pursuits, in favor of the Hebrew and against the reception of Sanskrit in its place, may be judged from the representative fact, that so late as the ninth day of August, 1832, we find no less a man than Coleridge making this entry in his note‐book: “The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous.”
The first European scholar of distinction who dared boldly accept the facts and conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship was Frederick von Schlegel. He began his study of the language with verbal tuition from Sir Alexander Hamilton, continued it at Paris with the aid of M. Langles, custodian of Oriental MSS. in the Imperial Library at Paris, and subsequently had the advantage of the rich collection in the British Museum. The result was his Language and Wisdom of the Indians, published in 1808. It embraced in one glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany, riveted them together by the name of Indo‐Germanic (by common consent of scholars since changed to Indo‐European), and became the foundation of the science of language. Appearing only two years after the publication of the first volume of Adelung’s Mithridates, “it is separated from that work,” says Prof. Müller, “by the same distance which separates the Copernican from the Ptolemæan system,” and this work of Schlegel, he adds, “has truly been called the discovery of a new world.”
Omitting mention of the labors of many distinguished French and German laborers in the same field, we may close our record of the services rendered by Catholic scholars to the cause of Sanskrit literature by reference to the remarkable course of lectures on “Science and Revealed Religion,” delivered by the Reverend (afterwards Cardinal) Wiseman, at Rome, in 1835,(143) only two years and six months after the memorable entry of Coleridge in his note‐book.
Sanskrit Literature And The Vedas.
It was perfectly natural that the fresh enthusiasm of the earliest Sanskrit scholars should have carried them into what is now looked upon as an undue estimate and hyperbolic praise of their new discovery and acquisition. And this early enthusiasm was neither short in duration nor limited in extent.
A tidal wave of admiration swept over European scholarship with the appearance of Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring (Calcutta, 1789), certainly a beautiful specimen of dramatic art and admirable poetry by Kalidasa, the Indian Shakespeare, who is assigned to the period of Vikrama the Great (B.C. 56). Sir William Jones very judiciously selected this masterpiece of Indian literature for translation as a first specimen, and, although in prose, it so delighted a French scholar, Chézy, that it induced him first to learn Sanskrit and then to publish a French version of it. This was followed by no less than four German translations, prose and verse, a Danish translation, and an additional English translation (the best) in a mingling of verse and prose (following the original) by Monier Williams. Goethe was enraptured with the Sacontala, and it drew from him the celebrated verse:
“Willt Du die Blüthe des Frühen, die Früchte des Späteren Jahres, Willt Du, was reizt und entzückt, willt Du was sättigt und nährt, Willt Du den Himmel, die Erde mit einem Namen begreifen, Nenn ich, Sacontala, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt.”(144)
A. W. von Schlegel finds in it so striking a resemblance to our romantic drama that we might, he says, be inclined to suspect we owe this resemblance to the predilection for Shakespeare entertained by Sir William Jones, if the fidelity of his translation were not confirmed by other learned Orientalists. And Alex. von Humboldt says of Kalidasa that “tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place amongst the poets of all nations.”
Voltaire went into ecstasies over a French translation of the Ezour‐Veda, a Sanskrit poem in the style of the Purânas, quite an inferior production, written in the XVIIth century by a native convert of Robert de’ Nobili. This French translation was published by Voltaire under the title, “L’Ezour‐Vedam, traduit du Sanscritam par un Brame,” and he stated his belief that the original was four centuries older than Alexander, and that it was the most precious gift for which the West had been indebted to the East.
Adelung, as we have seen, found fault with Sir William Jones and Father Pons for overrating the claims of Sanskrit, and subsequent critics have gone so far as to assert that its literary and scientific value is very slight. Among the latest of these are M. Jules Oppert(145) and Prof. Key of University College, London. Their objections and arguments are met and discussed by Prof. Whitney in the seventh essay of his volume, in a tone so moderate and a treatment so thorough as to present a more than satisfactory vindication of the claims of Indo‐European philology and ethnology to the serious attention and close study of every scholar. We are not aware that either Prof. Key or M. Oppert has cited the fact that, when the Indian rajah Rammohun Roy found the distinguished Sanskrit scholar Rosen at work in the British Museum upon an edition of the hymns of the Veda, he expressed his surprise at so useless an undertaking. It was not that the Indian philosopher looked upon all Vedic literature as worthless. On the contrary, he was of the opinion that the Upanishads were worthy of becoming the foundation of a new religion. The rajah most probably did not also consider the fact that, whatever might be the intrinsic literary merit of the Vedic hymns, they were none the less valuable to the comparative grammarian and philologist. For the purposes of grammatical construction, it is perfectly immaterial whether or not a text has the fire of genius or the inspiration of poetry.
And here it may be mentioned that Rammohun Roy, the descendant on both the paternal and maternal side of the highest caste Brahmans, and familiar with the whole body of Vedic and Sanskrit literature, indirectly bears high testimony to one of the grandest results obtained by European study of Sanskrit literature. That result is the exposure of Brahmanism as a gross imposture. Against any attack on its social and religious errors, the Brahmans formerly entrenched themselves in the pretended warrant of high antiquity and the authority of the sacred works. “Thus say the Vedas” was a sufficient justification for any claim, and “That is not in the Vedas” an unanswerable argument against any objection. Although they threw every possible obstacle in the way of Europeans who strove to obtain a knowledge of Sanskrit and access to the Vedas, by refusing to teach them and by withholding the sacred books, these difficulties were finally overcome, and when the Vedas were read and understood it became apparent that fully one‐half of the social and religious institutions of Brahmanism, as it existed down to the commencement of the present century, were not only without a shadow of authority in the Vedas, but absolutely opposed to the spirit and letter of its law. Thus, it is certain that nothing of the great characteristic feature of Brahmanism—the system of castes—can be found in the Vedas. The belief in the transmigration of souls and in the doctrines flowing from it has no existence there. And the Suttee, or system of widow immolation, the singular mingling of pantheistic philosophy with gross superstition, and the worship of the triad Brahma, Vishnu, and Civa, are all equally without Vedic foundation.
Robert de’ Nobili discovered all this at an early period, and it was only when he first fought the Brahmans with their own weapons—the Vedas—that they were, for the first time, silenced. Rammohun Roy had his eyes opened at an early age to the idolatrous system of the Hindus, came out from among them, and openly attacked its pretensions. “I endeavored to show,” he says, “that the idolatry of the Brahmans was contrary to the practice of their ancestors, and to the principles of the ancient works and authorities which they profess to revere and obey.”
Prof. Whitney, referring to the same subject, says: “Each new phase of belief has sought in them (the sacred texts) its authority, has claimed to found itself upon them, and to be consistent with their teachings; and the result is that the sum of doctrine accepted and regarded as orthodox in modern India is incongruous beyond measure, a mass of inconsistencies”: a summing up that might, we regret to say, be truthfully made of a Christian country of far higher civilization than that of India.
Not stopping to discuss what has been called the “standing reproach” against Indian literature, that it is barren of historical and geographical results, nor to point out much that is of high value and interest to every scholar, we will close by an inquiring comment as to the following statement made by Prof. Whitney at p. 22. He is speaking of the Vedic texts, and says: “So thorough and religious was the care bestowed upon their preservation that, notwithstanding their mass and the thousands of years which have elapsed since their collection, hardly a single various reading, so far as yet known, has been suffered to make its way into them after their definite and final settlement.”
We have italicized the passage which we wish to make the subject of our inquiry, for, unless we are mistaken, two instances may be pointed out in which the texts in question have been garbled or seriously tampered with.
We find the first instance in the developments growing out of the discussion as to whether there are three Vedas or four Vedas (Goverdhan Caul on the “Literature of the Hindus,” Asiatic Researches, Calcutta, 1788, vol. i., p. 340, and Sir William Jones’ Works, vol. iv. p. 93 (edition of 1807)). Even down to the present day, Indian scholars sometimes speak of three Vedas, sometimes of four. According to Indian tradition, Brahma has four mouths, each of which uttered a Veda. Yet most ancient writers speak of but three Vedas, Rig, Yajush, and Sama, from which it is inferred that the Atharva was written after the three first. The Atharva is spoken of and called the Veda of Vedas in the eleventh book of Manu, and the designation affirms the assertion of Dara Shecuh, in the preface to his Upanishad, that the first three Vedas are named separately, because the Atharvan is a corollary from them all, and contains the quintessence of them all. But this verse of Manu, which occurs in a modern copy of the work brought from Benares, is entirely omitted in the best copies, so that, as Manu himself in other places names only three Vedas, we must believe this line to be an interpolation by some admirer of the Atharva.
The second instance to be specified is furnished by Prof. Whitney himself, at pages 53, 54, and 55, where he gives a translation of a hymn from the concluding book of the Rig‐Veda (x. 18), describing the early Vedic funeral services. When the attendants leave the bier, the men go first, while the director of the ceremony says:
“Ascend to life, old age your portion making, each after each, advancing in due order; May Twashtar, skilful fashioner, propitious, cause that you here enjoy a long existence.”
The women next follow, the wives at their head:
“These women here, not widows, blessed with husbands, May deck themselves with ointment and perfume; Unstained by tears, adorned, untouched with sorrow, The wives may first ascend unto the altar.”
The wife of the deceased is then summoned away the last:
“Go up unto the world of life, O woman! Thou liest by one whose soul is fled; come hither! To him who grasps thy hand, a second husband, Thou art as wife to spouse become related.”
In commenting upon this hymn, Prof. Whitney notes its “discordance with the modern Hindu practice of immolating the widow at the grave of her husband,” and adds: “Nothing could be more explicit than the testimony of this hymn against the antiquity of the practice. It finds, indeed, no support anywhere in the Vedic scriptures.” And now we come to the “various reading,” for Prof. Whitney concludes the passage with this statement: “Authority has been sought, however, for the practice, in a fragment of this very hymn, rent from its natural connection, and a little altered; by the change of a single letter, the line which is translated above, ‘The wives may first ascend unto the altar,’ has been made to read, ‘The wives shall go up into the place of the fire.’ ”
We heartily welcome this work of Prof. Whitney, and thank him for it as a solid contribution to literature and to philological science, honorable to himself, and reflecting credit on American scholarship.
Part II.
It was late before Aunt Nancy felt the approach of sleep that night. She turned restlessly from side to side, thinking over Bessie’s strange behavior, and trying to find a solution for it. The appearance of a mystery disturbed all calculations based upon her plain and outspoken experience.
But the habits of years are not easily broken, and sleep, that for more than six decades had been wont to settle over this woman’s head as regularly as darkness settled on the earth, began now to dim her senses. She was about losing consciousness, when the vague sense of pain and perplexity which still clung to her mind strengthened and took a new form. It was no longer a woman who laughed bitterly when she should have wept, but a woman sobbing violently, she knew not why.
The sound continued, and before its dreary persistence Aunt Nancy’s hovering sleep took flight. She started up and listened, not yet quite recalled to recollection. It was indeed a woman’s voice sobbing uncontrollably. For one moment, the listener’s blood chilled with a superstitious fear; the next, she recollected that she was not alone in the house. It was Bessie who mourned. “Rachel weeping for her children, because they were not,” the old woman thought pityingly.
Poor Bessie had forgotten how thin the walls were in her old home, and, when the door opened and a tall figure clad in white entered her room, she uttered a cry of affright.
“You poor child! I couldn’t stand it to hear you cry so,” Aunt Nancy said, going to her bedside and bending down to put a caressing arm around her. “Don’t cry! Try to remember that you have not lost everything.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you, Aunt Nancy,” Bessie said faintly, sinking back on the pillow. “You had better leave me to have it out alone. I don’t often get a chance to have a good cry, and you have no idea what a relief it is.”
“I know all about it!” Aunt Nancy replied, and her voice, low and deep, had a sound like a tolling bell. “I have seen ’em all go and leave me, one after another, father and mother, brothers and sisters, husband and children, till every earthly hope was covered over with dust, and it seemed as though there was dust on the very bread I ate. Yes, I know what it is better than you, for you have your husband and one child left yet, and I have nothing on earth!”
“I have not!” Bessie cried out passionately, with the jealousy of one whose grief is underestimated. “John and the boy are further away from me than my dead children are!”
The barrier was down. She had betrayed herself, and must tell the whole, though she might be sorry afterward for having spoken. Concealment and self‐control were no longer possible.
It was a tale too often true, though not so often told. The husband, engrossed in business, and missing no home care which the love and duty of his wife could bestow, had forgotten, or did not care, or did not believe, that any return was due from him save a pecuniary support, or that he could be guilty of any sin of omission toward his wife, save the omission to provide her with food and shelter.
Perhaps no woman ever saw the heart she had once possessed slipping away from her, without making a mistake in her efforts to retain it. Indifference is her surest means of success, but indifference the loving heart can never affect. As well might flame hope to hide itself, living, in ashes.
The reserve and gravity of wounded feeling, when at length the husband noticed them, he named sulkiness, and the meanness of the causes to which he ascribed that were felt as an insult. The few timid reproaches and petitions the wife had brought herself to utter he listened to with surprise and annoyance, or with ridicule. Why, what in the world did she want?—to begin their courting days over again? In order to do that, they must first be divorced. What had he done? Had he beaten, or scolded, or starved her? Had he gone gallivanting about with other women? Nonsense! He had his business to attend to. Of course he loved her, but she mustn’t bother him.
What reply is possible to such arguments? How small seem all our sweetest human needs when they are put into words, simply because words can never express them! In such a controversy, hard natures have always the advantage over sensitive ones, and seem to triumph by their very inferiority.
Bessie was silent, and her husband thought that she was convinced, and dismissed the subject from his mind. If he observed that she grew pale, he supposed that city air did not agree with her. He missed no home comfort, heard no complaint, and therefore took for granted that all was right. He frequently absented himself from home on business, never asking his wife to accompany him, women being in the way on such occasions, and she seemed satisfied to see nothing beyond her own fireside. He brought home his plans and studies at evening, and, when the children’s play and caresses disturbed him, their mother took them away and amused them elsewhere. When, later, her little ones asleep, as she sat by her husband silently working, he found that the snip of her scissors and the rattle of her spools fretted him, Bessie said not a word, but went off to bed, and wet her pillow with bitter and unavailing tears, finding no comfort.
The thought of seeking comfort and help in her religion had not once entered her mind. She was dead to its obligations. They had never been impressed on her, and her heart had been engrossed by other interests. Her children had been baptized, and she usually went to an early Mass on Sunday, but never heard a sermon, and never read a religious book. She prayed often, but it was the outcry of pain, the petition for an earthly good, not the prayer for resignation and wisdom.
Of his wife’s real life John Maynard knew no more than he did of life at the antipodes. His profession engrossed his heart. His happiness was to work and study over polished metals, to fit cylinder, crank, and valve with nicety into their places; and at last, when that exquisite but irresistible power of steam, so delicate in its fineness, yet so terrible in its strength, began to steal into his work, to see the creature of brass and iron grow alive, and become more mighty than an army of giants, how tenderly could he handle, how carefully arrange, how patiently study out, the parts of his work! For the problem of that infinitely more exquisite mechanism—his wife’s heart—he had no time.
The boy, as boys will, followed in the footsteps of his father. He emulated the slighting of which the father was himself unconscious, and treated his mother with that intolerable mixture of patronizing kindness and impatient superiority so often witnessed in the presumptuous children of our time.
When Bessie Maynard had poured out her complaint, with many an illustration of which a woman could well understand the bitterness, Aunt Nancy was silent a moment.
“It’s pretty hard, dear,” she said then, embarrassed what to say. “Some men have that way of not caring anything about their wives, as soon as they have got them; but I never thought John would act so. And you know, Bessie, that, if it is hard, still he is your husband, and you can’t leave him for that. Try to be patient, and don’t lose courage. I’m sure he loves you, though he doesn’t show it; and he’ll come round by‐and‐by.”
The reply almost broke in on this trite advice: “I did not mean to leave him. I came down here to think. I can’t think there. I wanted to see again this place where I was a child, and where I was so happy. I thought that perhaps some of the old feelings might come back. I have been afraid of some things. Aunt Nancy, I was afraid I should grow to hate John!”
“Oh! no, Bessie,” the old woman exclaimed. “Never let yourself hate your own husband! It would be a dreadful sin; and, besides, it wouldn’t mend matters. It is better for a woman to love one who cares nothing for her than not to love anybody. I don’t believe but John is fond of you still, if he’d only stop to think of it.”
There was no reply.
“What else were you afraid of?” Aunt Nancy asked presently. “You said you were afraid of some things?”
Bessie did not answer.
That other fear that, shunned at first, then glanced upon, then brooded over silently till it had grown almost a probability, flashed out again on her in all its original hatefulness when she found herself about to explain it to a listener like this.
“If you don’t want to tell, I won’t ask you,” Aunt Nancy said, with almost childlike timidity. “But, may be, since you have begun, you would feel better not to keep anything back. You know, Bessie, I am on your side, though I am John’s own aunt.”
The younger woman crept nearer into the arm that half held her, and said, in a hurried whisper, “Every one is not so indifferent to me as John is!”
“I’m glad of it, child,” was the calm reply. “I don’t like to praise people to their faces, but you always had a sweet, winning way. I am glad that other people are good to you.” She waited again for the explanation, not dreaming that it had been given.
Bessie Maynard drew a breath, like one who plunges into water. “There’s some one who thinks me worth watching and sympathizing with, if John doesn’t,” she said.
“You don’t mean a man!” exclaimed Aunt Nancy.
“Of course I do,” answered Bessie almost pettishly.
The words were scarcely out of her mouth, before she was flung back on to the pillow by the arms that had held her so tenderly, and Aunt Nancy stood erect by the bedside. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Bessie Maynard?” she cried out indignantly.
“No, I am not!” was the dogged answer. “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
The flash of the old woman’s eyes could be seen in the dim light. “What! you, a married woman, not ashamed to let a man who is not your husband talk love to you!”
“He never spoke a word of love to me,” said Bessie, still sulky.
Aunt Nancy was utterly puzzled. “How do you know, then?” she asked.
Neither by nature nor education was this woman fitted to understand that subtile manner by which impressions and assurances are conveyed without a word having been spoken. A man would have been obliged to use plain language indeed, if he would have had her, a wife, understand that he loved her.
While Bessie described some of the delicate kindnesses of this dangerous friend of hers, Aunt Nancy listened attentively, and presently resumed her seat by the bed. She really could not see that the child had done, or meant, or wished any real harm.
“But, still, you must look out for the fellow, dear,” she said. “He wouldn’t hang round you so if he was what he ought to be. You never know what these city gentlemen are.”
“He isn’t a bad man!” Bessie exclaimed. “I won’t have him called so. I’m afraid; but, for all that, I respect him. I wish John were half as good.”
The story was ended; but with the feeling of relief which followed the disburdening of her heart came also the uneasiness and half regret we always experience when we have been led unawares to confide a secret to one whom we have not deliberately chosen as a confidant. Conscious of this new uneasiness, Bessie wished to close the conversation.
“Don’t let me keep you any longer,” she said. “Go to bed now, and forget all the nonsense I have been talking. I am sorry I disturbed you.”
Aunt Nancy paid no attention to this request. She sat a few moments in deep thought, then spoke abruptly: “Bessie, did you ever go to any of your priests about this business?”
“To a priest!” repeated Bessie, astonished at such a question from a rigid Puritan like her aunt, and doubtful in what spirit it was asked. “What made you think of that?”
“I am not a Catholic,” the old woman said, “but you are. And I like to see people live up to their religion, whatever it is. A religion that won’t help you in a strait like this isn’t worth having.”
Bessie was silent, knowing not what to say. Her faith was sleeping. That religion would help as really as the trials of earth can hurt she had not thought. Like many others, she invoked the aid of the church on the great events, the births, the marriages, and the deaths, but let the rest of life fight its own battles.
“Now, you listen to me,” Aunt Nancy said earnestly. “I’m not very wise, but I’m going to give you the best advice that you can get anywhere. Just you write to old Father Conners, the priest that married you and John, and tell him what a trouble you are in. I’ve seen him, and I believe he’s a good Christian, if he is a priest, and a sensible man, too. He comes three or four times a year up to a Mr. Blake’s, over on the railroad, and says Mass in his house. There are a good many Catholics round there now. It’s about time for him to come again. You write to him, and you won’t be sorry for it. There’s nothing else for you to do. Will you write, Bessie? I want you to promise.”
The promise was given hesitatingly, doubtingly, more to get rid of the subject than from any conviction of its wisdom.
But a promise is a promise, and next morning Bessie wrote the letter, not because she wished to, but because she must; and a very dry, cold letter it was. She was a little helped to the writing of it by the pleasant prospect of carrying it to mail. That would give her a long, solitary walk and a whole afternoon quite to herself; for the post‐office was in a desk, in a corner of the sitting‐room of a farm‐house four miles distant. This house was at the end of postal and stage accommodations in that direction. Three times a week a double‐seated open wagon was driven there from a seaport town thirty miles to the southward, passing through several small villages on its way. This stage had brought Bessie up, and was to return the next morning.
She set out on her walk soon after their early dinner, and reached the post‐office just at the high tide of that country afternoon leisure, when, their noon dinner quite cleared away, the women of the house are ordinarily free from everything that they would call labor. At this time the housewife smooths her hair and ties on a clean apron. One hears the snap of knitting‐needles through the silence, or the drowsy hum of the spinning‐wheel, or the sound of the loom where the deep‐blue woollen web grows, thread by thread, while the weaver tosses her shuttle to and fro.
Bessie had dreaded the gossip which she must expect to encounter; but, as she approached, the sight of blue and pink sun‐bonnets out in the field, where the women were raking, hay, relieved her fear. Not a soul was in the house. The watch‐dog, recollecting her, gave no alarm, only walked gravely by her side, and looked on while she slipped her letter into the bag left to receive the mail. All the doors and windows stood open, and the sunshine lay bright and clear on the white bare floors. Large, stupid flies bumped their heads against the panes of glass, and a bumble‐bee flew in at the front door, wandered noisily about the rooms, and out again by the back door. The painted wooden chairs stood straightly against the yellow‐washed walls, and a large rocking‐chair, with a chintz cushion, occupied one corner. A braided cloth mat covered the hearth, and the fireplace was filled with cedar boughs, through which glittered the brass andirons. On the high mantel‐piece stood a pair of brass candlesticks, and a tumbler filled with wild roses.
Bessie glanced hurriedly about, then stole out, trembling lest she should be discovered and pounced upon by some loud‐voiced man or woman from whom escape would be impossible. But no one appeared, and in a few minutes she was out of sight of the house.
Loud would be their exclamations of wonder and regret when they should discover that letter, knowing who must have brought it. How curiously would they handle it over, and examine it, and try to peep into it while they speculated and guessed concerning its contents!
“One comfort,” said Bessie to herself, as she glanced over her shoulder, and saw the last sun‐bonnet disappear, “I sealed it so that not even a particle of air could get in; and they can’t see a word without committing felony.”
The June day was passing away in a soft glory. All the world was green, all the sky was blue, and all the air was golden. But the green was so various, from a verdant blackness, through many tints, to a vivid green that was almost yellow, it seemed many‐colored as it was many‐shaped. There was every shape and size, from the graceful plume of ferns to the square‐topped oak with its sturdy, horizontal branches. Through it all wound the narrow brown road, with a line of grass in the middle between the wagon‐wheels where the horses feet spared it. The birds were singing their evening song, and a brook at the roadside lisped faintly here and there, then lay still and shone, then suddenly laughed outright.
On such an evening one does long to be happy; and, if happy, then one feels that it is not enough. Bessie walked on slowly, taking long breaths of the clear, perfumed air that had now an evening coolness. She would fain have stayed out till night fell. The house was near, so she stepped aside, sat down on a mossy rock, and looked at the sunset. The last, thin, shining cloud there melted in the fervid light, grew faint, and disappeared. Bessie’s eyes, so tearful that all this universe of green and gold swam before them, were fixed on the sky, and she thought over, with a clearer mind now, the last feverish, miserable years of her life.
It seemed to her that, if she had been less exclusively devoted to her husband, and had interested herself in other people and in the events of the day, she would have been wiser and happier. She had made herself as a slave, and had received a slave’s portion. It would be better to stand on a more equal footing, and, since works of supererogation, instead of winning his gratitude and affection, only fostered his selfishness and lowered her, to confine herself to the duties she was bound to perform.
“But it is my nature to love something with my whole strength, so that all else seems small in comparison,” she said, sighing. “How can I help it?”
While she gazed fixedly at the sky, at first without seeing, she presently became aware of a red‐gold crescent moon that had grown visible under her eyes, curved like a bow when the arrow is just singing from the string, like the new moon whereon Our Lady stands, a tower of ivory.
The tears in Bessie’s eyes made the shining curve tremble in the sky as though a hand held it; and, as though it were a bent bow, an arrowy thought flew from it, and struck quivering into her heart:
“Love God, and all will be well!”
She sat a minute longer, then rose and went quietly homeward. Aunt Nancy would be anxious about her; and the desire for solitude was gone. She was glad now that she had written to Father Conners, though the letter might have shown a gentler spirit. It was a comfort to have done something that was right, though it was not much.
One does not ordinarily become pious in a moment. We may recognize the voice of God, and be startled at the clearness and suddenness of the summons, but our sluggish faith has ever an excuse for a little more folding of the hands to sleep. But though not obedient at once, Bessie Maynard felt, rather than saw, that there was a refuge which made it no longer possible for her to despair.
Within a few days she received an answer to her letter. The priest was coming to that neighborhood by the last of the week, and would see her. The letter was brief and to the point, and contained not one word of sympathy or exhortation; but the tremulous characters, that told of age or infirmity touched the heart of the reader. This old man gave her no soft words, but he was hastening to her relief. For the first time, she anxiously asked herself if it had not been possible for her to avoid all her trouble, and if there was any element in her story which could reasonably be expected to call forth anything but reproof for herself from a man whose whole life had been one of charity and self‐denial. She wished to see him indeed, but she awaited his coming with a feeling little short of terror.
Bessie had not written to her husband. She could not bring herself to do that, for she did not wish to write coldly to him, and she would not use expressions of affection which had no echo in her heart. But she wrote to her son a gentle and tender letter, of which he was neither old nor sensitive enough to feel the pathos. Only one reproach found a place there: “I thought you might like to hear from me, though you cared more for your play than you did to say good‐by to me when I came here, and left me to go to the depot alone.” She did not intimate, though she thought, that the business which had called her husband away at the same time might as easily have been postponed.
Father Conners came. His open buggy was driven to the door one morning, and the boy who sat with him held the horse while the priest slowly alighted. He was a large, powerful‐looking man, still vigorous, though slightly bent and stiff with age. Snow‐white hair framed his expressive face, in which sternness and benevolence were strangely mingled. His color was fresh, perfect teeth gave a brilliancy to his infrequent smile, and his pale‐blue eyes were almost too penetrating to be met with ease. He walked with his head slightly bent down and his gaze fixed upon the ground till he reached the door, then looked up to see Bessie standing on the threshold.
She was a pretty creature still, in spite of troubled years, and her manner and expression would have propitiated a sterner judge. Blushes overspread her face, and she trembled; yet an impulse of joyful welcome broke through and brightened her, as a sunbeam brightens the cloud.
The priest stopped short, with no ceremony of greeting, and regarded her a moment, while she waited for him to speak.
The scrutiny satisfied him apparently.
“You did well to come back here,” he said then, and made a motion to enter. She stood aside for him to pass, and followed him into the little parlor which she had spent all the morning in preparing for him. An arm‐ chair had been improvised out of a barrel, some pillows, and a shawl, the rude fireplace was filled with green, and there were dishes of flowers about.
Her visitor did not appear to notice these simple efforts to do him honor. Almost before seating himself, he began to speak of what had brought him there.
“Now, my child, though I have time enough to say and hear all that is necessary, though it should take a week, I have no time to waste. Tell me the meaning of your letter?”
No time for gradual approach, for timid intimations, or delicate reserves till, warming with the subject, she could show plainly all that was in her heart. She must make the “epic plunge” without delay. Stimulated by the necessity, Bessie called up her wits and her courage, and, without being aware of it, told everything in a few words.
When she paused and expected him to question her, to her surprise he seemed already to know the whole. And, to her still greater pleasure, those points on which she had touched lightly, fearing that they might seem trivial in his eyes, he spoke of with sympathy.
“It is those little attentions and kindnesses which sweeten human life, my child, and help to sustain us under its heavier trials,” he said.
Bessie lifted her grateful, tearful eyes, and thanked him with a sad smile.
“And now,” he continued, “I want you to go to confession.”
Her eyes dilated with astonishment. She was confused and distressed, and a painful blush rose to her face.
“I have not confessed for years,” she stammered. “I am not prepared. When I have time to think, I will go to confession in a church. It seems strange to confess here.”
The priest was by nature and habits peremptory, and he knew that this was the proper time to exercise that quality. “Any place is proper for confession, if a better one is not to be had,” he said. “As to being prepared, let us see. You tell me that you have been thinking this all over this week, to see wherein you may have done wrong. There, then, is an examen of your conscience as to your duties toward your husband and, indirectly, toward God. You say that you have not practised your religion, but mean to do so in future. There is attrition, at least, and a purpose of amendment. You say that you know all you have committed of serious wrong in these years, don’t you?”
“Yes,” was the answer.
“You know humanly, as far as you can know, without the illumination of the Holy Spirit?” the priest corrected.
“Yes,” said Bessie again. “But I want to think it over, and make sure of my sorrow and good resolutions.”
“In short, you wish to reform and convert yourself, then go to God,” said Father Conners. “That is not the way. It is God who is to convert you. You need not stay to try to conquer your feelings, and hesitate for fear you may not be able to. Your reason is convinced. It is enough. Go to God, and ask him to help you to do the rest. While you are thinking the subject over in the woods here, you may die, or the devil may come and tempt you in the shape of this friend of yours. I will give you half an hour. While I have gone out to read my office under the trees, you kneel down here, and first ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten you, and reveal all your sins. Then say, and mean, that you are sorry, and plan how you may do better with God’s help in the future.”
He had risen while speaking, and was going toward the door. Refusal was impossible. Bessie carried her shawl‐covered arm‐chair out, and set it under a thick old pine‐tree on the slippery brown pine‐needles, through which tiny ants were running in every direction, very busy about some buildings of their own, carrying sticks larger than themselves.
Father Conners seated himself, set his hat on the ground by his side, spread a red silk handkerchief over his head, and took out his Breviary. He had but little time to attend to the beauties of nature, but the situation brought an expression of pleasure to his face. He gave one glance up into the overshadowing branches that spread their fragrant screen between him and the sun, then a kindlier glance to the young woman who stood looking wistfully at him.
“Come here for your confession when you are ready, child,” he said, “and don’t be afraid. See how peaceful the skies are. Is God less gentle? And here! take my watch, and come back in twenty‐five minutes. You have lost five minutes already.”
Bessie took the large silver watch on its black ribbon, and hastened to shut herself in her room, and Father Conners became absorbed in his office. So much absorbed was he, he did not observe that the silk handkerchief slipped slowly from his head, and that a large spider let itself down by a thread from the tree above, stopped within a few inches of that silvery hair, which it contemplated curiously, then ran up its silken ladder again as a young woman came out of the house, walked with faltering steps across the sward, and sank on her knees by the priest’s side.
An hour later, Father Conners climbed laboriously into his carriage, and drove away, and Bessie leaned on the bars, and watched him as long as he was in sight. She felt strong and peaceful. She counted over the promises she had made him, and resolved anew that they should be kept.
She stood there so long that Aunt Nancy, after having kept her dinner waiting out of all reason, came down to speak to her. She came with anxiety and hesitation, not knowing whether her niece was better or worse for this visit.
“You gave me good advice, Aunt Nancy,” Bessie said, turning at the sound of her step.
The old lady was delighted. “So you’re all right?” she said.
“I have got into the right track, at least,” Bessie answered, as they walked up toward the house. “I have been to confession.”
Aunt Nancy’s face clouded again on hearing this avowal. That was all the priest’s visit had amounted to, then—that John’s wife had been induced to go to confession! How could people be so superstitious, so subjected, to their priests? She had hoped that Bessie might have received some good sound advice and instruction.
This she thought, but said nothing.
How was she to know that in that one word confession was included advice, instruction, good resolution, and sorrow for sin, as well as the mystical rite which she abhorred?
S. Peter’s Roman Pontificate.
The history of mankind presents us innumerable facts that strike the reader with astonishment, and tax his ingenuity to its utmost to explain. The sudden fall of nations from the height of prosperity to misery and subjection, the invasion of hordes of barbarians to substitute their uncouthness and ferocity for the polish and civilization of centuries, the apparent vocation of some one nation, at different epochs, to assume a preponderance over all others in the government of the world, the appearance of some one great mind that shone like a sun amid the galaxy of intellect, revolutionizing his time, and then setting, without leaving any one to continue his work; all these facts confuse the mind, and, when man has lost the light that was sent into this world to guide him, seem to him but the bitter irony of destiny. Not so, however, are they viewed by him to whom revelation has imparted its illumining rays. He sees Providence everywhere, and, knowing some wise end has been intended by the Creator whose power conserves and directs the evolutions of the planets and the vicissitudes of human life, he is encouraged to inquire into the end for which such wonderful events have been brought about. ’Twas by this light the great Bishop of Hippo saw the providential disposition of the changes that took place in the world; looked on all history but as the preparation and continuation of the master‐work of God—his church. ’Twas by this light that, following in the footsteps of S. Augustine, Bossuet understood the relations of such different facts, and showed their connection in his Universal History. These men, and those who, like them, have studied the history of the nations of the earth, had no difficulty in realizing the relation of all these facts, and in looking on them as so many confirmations of the truth of Christianity; but those who are without faith stand aghast at the inexplicable phenomena they see before them, and of all none so sets at naught their judgment and defies their explanation as the greatest, the most persistent, the most important of all historical facts—the existence of the Catholic Church. They see it everywhere; modifying everything; setting at defiance all calculation; and when, according to human judgment, it should cease to exist, coming forth from the ordeal purer, stronger, more brilliant and powerful than before. Yet, they are not willing to learn by experience, but look forward to a future day when an expedient or a means will be discovered to destroy in its turn this gigantic fabric that appears to scorn the ravages of time and the fury of tempest, just as the Jews look forward to the Messiah who is to deliver them from captivity among the nations. In their useless hope, they leave nothing untried, and often scruple not at what in their private capacity they might scorn—distortion of history and downright calumny. No human institution could ever have withstood the array of powerful enemies the church of Christ has had since she first went forth from Mount Sion. No age has ever seen her without them; sometimes fierce persecutors, sometimes insidious plotters, sometimes open impugners of her dogmas; at other times dangerous foes, cloaking their hostility under the garb of devotion that they might better strike deep into her bosom the poison with which, in their foolish hate, they fancied they were to deprive her of life. But the spouse of Christ has always cast them from her, and walked majestically over the ruins they themselves had brought about, and this she will ever do. And why? Because she does not lean on a broken reed nor put her trust in an arm of flesh. She bears about her a charm that defies all attack—the protection of the Most High—and presents to all the proof of her holy character, those motives of credibility, that as they were intended for all time, so now as on the day of Pentecost, accompany her wherever she goes, invincibly proving to the mind of man her own divine origin and her claim to his obedience. As she was one, in the union of all her children in one faith and in one baptism; as she was holy in the lives of those that obeyed her; as she was catholic and universal, embracing peoples of all climes and of all ages; as she was apostolic in her origin and in the succession of her ministry, so is she now, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in the succession of her priesthood and in the infallibility of her head. As she was able to point to the wonders wrought by the apostle in the name of her divine founder, so now can she point to the miracles of her chosen servants: an Alphonsus de Liguori, a Paul of the Cross, a Ven. Pallotta, a Maria Taigi, a Maria Moerl, and a host of others, down to the martyred victims of communistic fury. She can show in the XIXth century, as she did in the first, a host of martyrs; old men and youths, matrons and tender virgins, who, when arraigned for their faith before the Chinese mandarin, fulfilled the promise of Christ, and gave inspired answers, as did the glorious children of the early church, and sealed, too, with their blood the belief they held dearer than life.
We can understand, then, how the church can look fearlessly at the storms that ever and anon burst upon her, because, built on the solidity of her belief, she knows the waves can but break harmless at her feet. She has no need of human means to secure her existence, for that has a promise of perennial duration. The condition, too, of her being is one of struggle and warfare, and, when it comes upon her, her only act is to oppose the shield of faith and the sword of the word of God—her only arms the truth. And as it is written that truth will prevail, so in every battle in which she has been engaged she has come forth at last with victory inscribed on her banner—victory through the truth.
We have said that the condition of her being is struggle and warfare. This, therefore, is never wanting; as all the world knows, she is called on to defend herself just now against the fiercest attacks she has perhaps ever suffered—perhaps even beyond what she underwent in that fearful persecution, in which her enemies directed against her every engine of destruction, and in their mad rejoicing recorded the inscription, Christiano nomine deleto. To‐day the openly declared foes of her faith are seated in triumph in her stronghold, and strain every nerve to uproot from the mind and heart of her children the faith of their fathers. Not content with attacking the dogmas she teaches, they assail every fact which in any way may favor her, no matter how clearly the history of past ages may proclaim its truth. An instance of this we have had but recently, but a few months ago, when an attempt was made to prove that the fact upon which the whole jurisdiction of the church is grounded never occurred—that S. Peter forsooth never came to Rome, and never founded the church there! With what success the champions of this assertion advocated their cause is known; and it may still further be judged of from the fact that a person who came to the discussion, doubting of the fact of S. Peter’s having been in Rome, left the hall after hearing the Catholic speakers, convinced that such an historical personage as S. Peter had lived and been in Rome, and he recorded his belief in one of the leading journals of Italy not favorable to the Catholic cause.
It may be said to be a strange phenomenon that a fact of history so notorious, and for which so great an amount of proof exists, which has at its command every fount of human certitude, as that of the coming of S. Peter to Rome, ever should have been called in question. But what will not party spirit attempt? It is not the first time nor will it be the last that partisans will seek to rid themselves of troublesome facts by downright denial of them. This spirit, however, is a dangerous one, and especially unbecoming the sincere student of history. We know what Bacon has said about the idola, and it is incumbent on every one who is searching after historic truth to lay aside prejudice or even the desire that facts may favor him. He must look at them merely as they are, take them on their proof, without, striving to lessen them or give them other proportions than are inherent in them. If the scope of all research is to find out the truth, it is our duty to seek it only, and not mar its beauty by adding to or detracting from it. In the present case the remark is highly applicable. Catholics have nothing to fear in examining the historic proofs on which the coming of S. Peter to Rome rests; while those who differ from them, in so far as they love truth, should be equally glad to look well into the claims to truth which this same fact puts forward. We propose to go briefly over the ground. We say briefly because it seems almost presumptuous, since so many able pens have dedicated themselves to this task, that we should undertake it anew. There seems to us, however, a want to be supplied, on this subject, something succinct and not too learned or too lengthy for the ordinary reader, engrossed in pursuits that do not allow time for more extended studies. This must be our excuse as well as our reason for the present undertaking.
In the discussion that took place in Rome on the 9th and 10th February, 1872, the chief speaker on the negative side ended his discourse by saying that, no matter what weight of testimony could be brought to sustain S. Peter’s coming to Rome, the silence of Scripture was for him an unanswerable argument; the Scripture should have spoken of the fact had it existed; it said nothing about it, therefore it had never existed. Were it not that the subject is too serious for such quotations, we should say with Gratiano, “We thank thee for teaching us that word!” This was the feeling that came over us as we heard the expression from the lips of the speaker, and now, after so much has been written, we have it still. It is needless to say that such an expression betrays anxiety with regard to positive argument, if not a suspicion of weakness in one’s own cause. We shall endeavor to show that there was reason both for this suspicion and this anxiety.
And, first, the opinion which is least probable concerning the death of S. Peter satisfactorily accounts for the silence of the Acts and of the Epistle to the Romans, the portions of Scripture on which our adversaries lay most stress in this matter. According to this opinion, S. Peter was martyred in Rome, Nerone et Vetere Consulibus, i.e., according to the Bucherian Catalogue, in the second year of Nero, the year 54 of the Christian era, this leaving S. Peter twenty‐five years of pontificate, from the year 29 to the year 54. S. Linus succeeded him, and ruled the church twelve years, dying after S. Paul, who was put to death before Nero went into Greece. S. Peter was therefore, according to this chronology, dead before S. Paul reached Rome. It is not strange, then, the Acts does not speak of his being there. As for the Epistle to the Romans, if it was written in the year 53, or two years before S. Paul came to Rome according to Eusebius, the reasons we adduce further on will explain the silence with regard to S. Peter. If, as the ordinary opinion has it, the Epistle was written from Corinth, in the year 58, S. Peter being already four years dead, the omission of his name is easily accounted for.
We say, secondly, that, in the belief that S. Peter and S. Paul died at the same time in Rome, sufficient reason can be found for the silence both of the Acts and of the Epistle to the Romans.
We beg particular attention to what we are going to say. Those portions of Scripture do not prove by their silence that S. Peter never came to Rome, first, because the Acts and the Epistle to the Romans are not adequate witnesses in the case; secondly, because neither the Acts nor the Epistle to the Romans was called on by circumstances to allude to S. Peter’s being in Rome.
And, first, the Acts and Epistle to the Romans are not adequate witnesses that S. Peter never came to Rome. We call attention to the fact that the Epistle to the Romans was written two years before S. Paul came to Rome. What therefore we are going to say under this first head regarding the Acts applies with greater force to the Epistle to the Romans. We shall then confine our remarks wholly to the Acts in this connection. We say, then, that, in order that the Acts should be received as an adequate witness, it should cover the whole period from the time S. Peter first left Judæa to that of his death as fixed by received historical data, for we cannot arbitrarily determine the period of his death. Now, it is well known that history indicates the date of S. Peter’s death as that of S. Paul’s. They are represented as dying on the same day and in the same year, one by the sword, the other on the cross; such are the words of the Roman Martyrology. This being so, we call attention to the fact that the chief disputant on the negative side of the question fixed on the year 61, from the Fasti Consulares—atti consolari, as that in which S. Paul came to Rome, this being the year in which Portius Festus went to take possession of his province.(146) The Acts tells us that after S. Paul came to Rome he dwelt for two years in his own hired house. Here the narration ceases, leaving Paul alive and in the year 63 of the Christian era. From that time to his death, according to historical data, occurs a period, according to different computations, of from two to four years. About this period of time no mention is made in the Acts for the simple reason that it is not embraced there; the narrative breaks off just as it begins. What was to prevent S. Peter’s coming to Rome during this period of from two to four years? If he had, the Acts could have said nothing about it, nor could it if he had not. The conclusion is simple, the Acts, and, a fortiori, the Epistle to the Romans, written prior to it, are no competent or adequate witnesses to prove S. Peter never came to Rome, nor died there.
We come to the second head: neither the Acts nor the Epistle to the Romans was called on to mention the fact of S. Peter’s being in Rome. With regard to the Acts, any one who will carefully read it will see that S. Luke narrates the acts of S. Paul. It was necessary to begin with some account of the commencement of the church to show S. Paul’s connection with it. This S. Luke does, speaking of the descent of the Holy Ghost, of the instantaneous and marvellous results of the preaching of S. Peter, of his admission of the Gentiles after the vision of the cloth containing all manner of animals, and then passes on to speak of S. Paul, of his persecution of the church, of the martyrdom of S. Stephen, of the wonderful conversion of S. Paul. Here S. Paul is brought into contact with S. Peter; but after the Council of Jerusalem, when S. Paul sets out to evangelize the heathen, S. Peter is no more heard of, not even when S. Paul returns to Jerusalem, as narrated in chapter xxi. Was he dead? Had this been so ere S. Paul left Judæa, from his intimate contact with S. Peter, it is probable S. Luke would have mentioned a fact so important as the death of the first of the apostles. He was not dead. He and the other apostles no longer appear in the narration of S. Luke, if we except S. James, Bishop of Jerusalem, whom S. Paul saw (chapter xxi.), because S. Luke did not propose to give a complete history of the church at that time, or of the apostles, but only of S. Paul and his acts. The Acts are contained in twenty‐eight chapters. In chapter vii., v. 57, Saul the persecutor is spoken of for the first time; in the next four chapters he is frequently mentioned. In the xv., S. Peter is mentioned for the last time; and from this to the xxviii. S. Paul is the theme of the inspired writer. In the 15th verse of chapter xxviii. the Christians go out to meet Paul at Forum Appii, and in verse 16 he is in Rome a prisoner; verse 7 shows him to us calling together not the Christians, but the chief men of the Jews, to explain that he has not appealed to Cæsar because he had anything against his people. After these words, at verse 21, the Jews reply to him, and he instructs or upbraids them as far as verse 29, which represents the Jews going away incredulous. Verse 30 says: “He remained two years in his own hired house, and received all who came unto him; 31, Preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching with all confidence, and without prohibition, the things that are of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Here the Acts ends. Does there seem to the reader any place in these two verses for a mention of Peter? Ought the inspired writer to have added more to his account? It seems to us not, for the end he had in view was gained. He had been a companion of S. Paul, he had told those who knew it not what had happened in their travels, and now S. Paul was in Rome, and dwelling there, in the centre of the world, he did not deem it needful to say any more, otherwise he would have told us some of the actions of S. Paul, for wonders and conversions he certainly wrought in those two years. But as S. Luke says nothing about these, nor about the flourishing Church of Rome to which S. Paul two years before had addressed his Epistle from Corinth, it is not strange he says nothing about S. Peter.
The silence of S. Paul in regard to S. Peter, in his Epistle to the Romans, is not only of no avail to our adversaries, but the Epistle itself contains matter for strong argument that S. Peter was permanently in Rome, and in fact founded the church there.
First, with respect to the silence of S. Paul in regard to S. Peter. It is a received canon of criticism that the silence of authors does not affect the existence of a fact, when that fact is proven from documents of weight; and this all the more when no valid reason can be put forward to show the author or authors should have mentioned the fact in question. Now, this is precisely the case with regard to S. Paul’s silence about S. Peter. We have documentary and monumental evidence, as we shall see hereafter, that S. Peter did come to Rome, while there was no practical reason why S. Paul should mention S. Peter:—not for the sake of commending him, for that was neither becoming, as S. Peter was head of the apostolic college, nor necessary, as S. Peter’s works bore the stamp of divine sanction; not for the purpose of asking permission to labor in Rome, as the apostles were equal in the ministry, and united in a bond of perfect harmony and mutual understanding, though with subjection to the centre of unity, S. Peter, without, however, the distinctions of the various rights and duties afterwards introduced by ecclesiastical custom; not for the purpose of salutation, for he could not address S. Peter as head of the church in a tone of authoritative teaching; and salutations, if, contrary to what is generally held, Peter were in Rome at the time the letter was written, could be made privately by the messenger who carried the letter, and thus the duty of urbanity or charity, the only one that could require express notice of S. Peter, may have been fulfilled. In fact, propriety itself required this latter mode of salutation, lest it should be said that S. Paul, instead of having directly addressed S. Peter, had saluted him publicly through those to whom he wrote—the Christians of Rome, the spiritual subjects of S. Peter. The silence, then, of S. Paul is of no weight to prove S. Peter never was in Rome.
The argument of silence, therefore, falls to the ground.
We said the Epistle to the Romans contains matter to show S. Peter was in Rome, and founded the church there.
Let us bear in mind who S. Peter was—the Apostle of the Gentiles. Why was it he did not go at once to the centre of the Gentile world? Could any more potent means have been adopted to spread Christianity? There centred the civilization of the known world; there the Ethiopian met the Scythian, the swarthy men from the banks of the Ganges were face to face with those who first saw light by the waters of the Tagus, and the Numidian horseman and the German warrior strolled through the Forum, admiring the temples of the gods of Rome. Nowhere was there more certainty of success in spreading abroad novelty of any kind than in this Babylon, receiving into its vast enclosure men of all the nations over which it ruled, and sending them forth again filled with wonder at what they saw, and eager to impart to their less fortunate countrymen what they had learned in their sojourn in the great city. Thither, however, S. Paul did not go, and why? Because some one was there already—some one of power and authority; some one whose labors had been crowned with success, and who had built up a church, the faith of which at the time this epistle was written was known throughout the whole world. S. Peter tells us himself he desired to go to the Romans to impart to them something of spiritual grace to strengthen them, that is, to be comforted in them “by that which is mutual—your faith and mine.” The mode of expression of S. Paul in this place, vv. 11 and 12, is worthy of notice. He says to the Romans he longs to see them to strengthen them, and, as if he might be misunderstood, he adds immediately, “that is to say, that I may be comforted together in you.” Evidently he speaks here as one who is careful lest he seem to usurp the place of another, or assume a right of teaching with authority which belonged to another. He would not have the Romans think he considers that the one who rules them is inferior to himself or stands in need of his support. In verse 18 he says: “I do not wish you to be ignorant, brethren, that I have often proposed to come unto you (and I have been prevented hitherto) that I may have some fruit among you as among other peoples.” It is manifest here that S. Paul’s duties with the Greeks kept him from going to Rome, and this, as we said before, because, the Romans being already provided with one who could teach them, there was not the pressing need of him that would make him leave those who had none to preach to them.
What we have said with regard to the tone of the first chapter of the Epistle is confirmed by the words of the apostle in chapter xv. 19‐26. Here S. Paul says why he had not gone to Rome—because he was preaching to those who had no one to preach to them. Had the Romans had no apostle preaching to them, this would not have been a reason to put forward, because the superiority of an apostle over any other preacher of the word was such as to do away with the necessity of any comparison, and to make all desirous in an eminent degree of seeing and hearing the chosen men the sound of whose voice was to be heard throughout the whole world. S. Paul then continues: “When I shall begin to take my journey into Spain, I hope that as I pass, I shall see you, and be brought on my way thither by you, if first, in part, I shall have enjoyed you.” From this it results, first, that S. Paul had no intention of remaining in Rome; and, secondly, that what he desired was to enjoy, in meeting the Romans, the consolation of seeing their faith, and of sharing with them the spiritual gifts he himself had received, which should serve to make them yet more steadfast in their fidelity to the Gospel, precisely as, to use an example, the preaching of the same doctrine they have heard from their own bishop, by a bishop who is his guest, strengthens the faithful in their religious belief.
The fact, then, stands that a flourishing church existed in Rome at the time S. Paul wrote his Epistle, and this is still further shown by the salutations in the last chapter. Who founded it? History is silent regarding any one but S. Peter. As Alexandria claims S. Peter and S. Mark; as Ephesus, S. John; as innumerable other cities and countries their respective apostles, so does Rome claim S. Peter as its first evangelizer. It would be absurd to say that all these other cities and nations could retain the memory of him who first preached to them the word of God, and Rome—the greatest of all, where so notorious a fact as the preaching of Jesus Christ could not pass by unnoticed, especially when its effects were so luminously conspicuous as S. Paul tells us they were—this Rome should alone be ungratefully forgetful of her best benefactor. The thing is absurd on the face of it. But history is silent about any other founder except S. Peter; therefore we are justified in concluding that S. Peter, and S. Peter alone, was the original founder of the Church of Rome, and that Rome is right in holding her tradition that such was the fact.
This tradition of S. Peter’s having been in Rome, having founded the church there, and having died there, gives strength to the conclusion which Scripture has aided us to form. To any one who is at all conversant with Rome, it must always have appeared a very remarkable fact that the discoveries made by the zeal of her archæologists have, as a rule, confirmed the traditions existing among the people both with regard to localities and facts. It would seem as if Providence, in these days of widespread scepticism, were unearthing the long‐hid monuments of the past to put to confusion those who would fain treat the history of early ages as a myth. The monuments stare them in the face, while their value is understood by men of sound practical sense. This is the reason of the reaction that is taking place against the sceptical style of writing history which Niebühr and Dr. Arnold adopted, and made to a certain extent fashionable. The words of a well‐informed writer, whose works have been deservedly well received—Mr. Dyer—are an excellent reply to authors of that stamp, based, as they are, on sound sense and the experience of mankind—the safest guides we can possibly follow; for it is folly to think that those who have gone before us blindly received everything that was told them. Whatever may have happened with regard to individuals, such certainly never was the case with regard to all. As well might we say that, because some writers of to‐day speak in a spirit of scepticism, all writers adopt the same style. Men in general never were sceptical, and never will be; they will use their senses and their intellect, and judge of things on their merits, and not according to the extravagant ideas of any one, however brilliant he be. Mr. Dyer, though speaking of ancient Roman history, makes remarks that are applicable in our case. He says, in the Introduction to the History of the City of Rome, p. xvi.: “It would, of course, be impossible to discuss in the compass of this Introduction the general question of the credibility of early Roman history. We can only state the reasons which have led us to doubt a few of the conclusions of modern critics about some of the more prominent facts of that history, and about the existence or the value of the sources on which it professes to be founded. If it can be shown that the attempts to eliminate or to depreciate some of these sources can hardly be regarded as successful, and that the general spirit of modern criticism has been unreasonably sceptical and unduly captious with respect to the principal Roman historian, then the author will at least have established what, at all events, may serve as an apology for the course he has pursued.” And at page lxii.: “There is little motive to falsify the origin and dates of public buildings; and, indeed, their falsification would be much more difficult than that of events transmitted by oral tradition, or even recorded in writing. In fact, we consider the remains of some of the monuments of the Regal and Republican periods to be the best proofs of the fundamental truth of early Roman history.” If this author could justly speak in this manner of a period regarding which there is certainly not a little obscurity, what are we to say when we are speaking of so well‐known an epoch as that of the Roman Empire under Claudius and Nero, and of a fact so luminous as that of the foundation of Christianity in the capital of the world? The certainty of the traditions concerning this fact undoubtedly acquires a strength proportionally greater, and this all the more because we have the monuments around which these traditions centre, and the existence of these monuments in the IId century is attested by the Roman priest Caius writing against Proclus, apud Eusebium, Hist. Eccl., c. xxv.: “I can,” he writes, “show you the trophies (tropæa) of the apostles. For, whether you go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way, the trophies of those who founded the church will present themselves to your view.” These monuments are the place of imprisonment of S. Peter, the place of his crucifixion, that of the martyrdom of S. Paul, the place of their burial, that in which their remains were deposited for a time, and their final resting‐place, over which the grandest temple of the earth rises in its majesty—a witness of the belief of all ages.
The tradition of S. Peter having founded the church in Rome receives additional force from the fact that but a short period elapsed before writers whose genuine works have come down to us recorded them, and thus transmitted them to us. Not to speak of S. Clement of Rome, of S. Ignatius of Antioch, of Papias, we take the words of S. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who was martyred in the year 202 of the Christian era. We omit speaking of the other Fathers, not because we consider their testimony without great value, for it is impossible, in our judgment, for any one who takes up their works with an unprejudiced mind, and reads them in connection with later and more precise writers on this subject, not to feel that they refer to a matter so universally and thoroughly known as not to need any further dwelling on than would a fact well known to a correspondent, demand details from the person who writes him the letter. S. Irenæus, we said, died in the year 202. He had been for a long time Bishop of Lyons, whence he wrote to S. Victor, Pope, on the subject of the controversy regarding the celebration of Easter, dissuading him from harsh measures with respect to the Christians of the East. S. Victor was Pope from the year 193 to 202, and succeeded Eleutherius, who became pope in the year 177. To this latter Irenæus was sent by the clergy of Lyons in the case of the Montanist heresy, he having been received and ordained priest of the diocese of Lyons by the Bishop Photinus, and it was during the pontificate of the same pope that he wrote his celebrated work against heresies. He was at this time not a young man, and we shall not be wide of the mark if we put his birth some years before the middle of the second century, and this all the more because he himself in the above‐mentioned book speaks of his early studies as gone by. According to the best authorities, S. John the Apostle was ninety years old when he was thrown into the caldron of boiling oil, under Domitian, in Rome. He lived several years longer at Patmos, and at Ephesus, where he died in the year 101, during the reign of Trajan. We have thus a period of from thirty to forty years between the death of S. John—the witness of what SS. Peter and Paul did, and who was fully acquainted with all that had occurred at Rome—and Irenæus. Independent of the means of information this proximity to the apostles gave him, both because in his youth he must have known many who had in their own youth seen and heard S. Peter, and because he had himself visited Rome, the interval between him and S. John is filled up by the link that unites them in an unbroken tradition, by the celebrated martyr and Bishop of Smyrna, S. Polycarp, the disciple of S. John and the master of S. Irenæus. We ask the reader to say, in all candor, whether this link be not all that can be desired to secure belief in the testimony handed down through it, from the apostles, especially with regard to such a thing as the chief theatre of the life, labors, and death of the head of the apostolic college. Anticipating a favorable answer, we proceed to give the words of S. Irenæus—of undoubted authenticity. In his work, Contra Hæreses, l. iii. c. i., he writes: “Matthew among the Hebrews composed his Gospel in their tongue, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing at Rome and founding the church. After their decease, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, committed to writing what had been preached by Peter.” In the same book, c. iii. § 3, S. Irenæus says: “But since it is too long to enumerate in a volume of this kind the successions of all the churches, pointing to the tradition of the greatest, most ancient and universally known, founded and constituted at Rome, by the two most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul, to that which it has from the apostles, and to the faith announced to men, through the succession of bishops coming down to our time, we put to confusion all who in any manner, by their own self‐will, or through empty glory, or through blindness, or from malice, gather otherwise than they should. For to this church, by reason of its more powerful headship (principalitatem), it behooves every church to come, that is, those who are faithful everywhere, in which (in qua) has always been preserved by men of every region the tradition which is from the apostles.” He goes on to say: “The holy apostles, founding and building up the church, gave to Linus the episcopate of administration of the church. Paul makes mention of this Linus in his letters to Timothy. To him succeeded Anacletus; after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement (who also saw the apostles, and conferred with them) obtained the episcopate, while he yet had the preaching of the apostles sounding in his ears and tradition before his eyes; not he alone, for there were many then living who had been taught by the apostles. Under this Clement, therefore, a not trifling dissension having arisen among the brethren who were at Corinth, the church which is at Rome wrote a very strong letter etc.... To this Clement succeeded Evaristus, and to Evaristus Alexander, and afterwards the sixth from the apostles was Sixtus, and after him Telesphorus, who also gloriously suffered martyrdom; and then Hyginus, next Pius, after whom Anicetus. When Soter had succeeded Anicetus, now Eleutherius has the episcopate in the twelfth place from the apostles. By this order and succession, that tradition which is from the apostles in the church, and the heralding of the truth, have come down to us. And this is a most full showing that one and the same is the life‐giving faith which from the time of the apostles down to the present has been preserved and delivered in truth. And Polycarp, not only taught by the apostles, and conversing with many of those who saw our Lord, but also constituted by the apostles bishop in Asia, in the church which is at Smyrna, whom we also saw in our early youth, taught always the things he had learned from the apostles, which also he delivered to the church, and which are alone true. To these things all the churches, which are in Asia, and those who up to to‐day have succeeded to Polycarp, bear witness.” And in his letter to Florinus, S. Irenæus says more explicitly that he was a disciple of Polycarp, that he had a most vivid recollection of his master, of his ways and words, which he cherished more in his heart even than in his memory.(147) Eusebius, in the Chronicon, says that Polycarp was martyred in the year 169, the seventh of Lucius Verus.
Nothing clearer, more explicit, or of greater value than a tradition with such links as S. John the Evangelist, S. Polycarp, and S. Irenæus could be desired to establish beyond a doubt that S. Peter came to Rome and founded the church there.
This fact having been shown to rest on a solid basis, we have now to say a word with regard to the time at which S. Peter came to Rome. On this point there is a difference of opinion; but this very difference of opinion as regards the epoch is a new proof of the fact. The most probable opinion, that which seems to have found most favor, fixes it at the year 42 of the Christian era, the second year of Claudius. This is what S. Jerome, following Eusebius, records. The learned Jesuit Zaccaria puts it at the year 41, in the month of April, the 25th of which was kept as a holyday, in the time of S. Leo the Great, in honor of S. Peter. This writer bears witness to the very remarkable unanimity among the Fathers with respect to the twenty‐five years’ duration of the pontificate of S. Peter in Rome, which according to S. Jerome would fix the date of his death as the fourteenth year of Nero, the 67th of the present era. The words of S. Jerome are: “Simon Peter went to Rome to overthrow Simon Magus, and had there his sacerdotal chair for twenty‐five years, up to the last year of Nero, that is, the fourteenth; by whom also he was crowned with martyrdom by being affixed to the cross.”(148) S. Jerome, we know, was well versed in the history of the church, had dwelt for a long time at Rome, and may consequently be presumed to have been excellently well informed with regard to the general belief and tradition of the people of Rome. The manner of the death of both apostles is mentioned by Tertullian, in his book De Præscriptionibus, c. 126, where, after bidding those he addresses have recourse to the apostolic churches, he says: “If you be near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also we have authority. How happy is this church, for which the apostles poured forth all their doctrine with their blood, where Peter equals his Lord’s Passion, where Paul is crowned with the end of John (the Baptist), where the Apostle John, after suffering no harm from his immersion in the fiery oil, is banished to an island.” Origen, too, says: “Peter is thought to have preached to the Jews throughout Pontus, Galatia, Bythinia, Cappadocia, and Asia; who, when he came to Rome, was finally affixed to the cross with his head down.”(149)
Before concluding what we have undertaken to say on the subject of S. Peter’s coming to Rome, we wish to notice the objection against this fact, and the duration of his pontificate, which must naturally appear to those not well acquainted with antiquity one of not a little strength. How could S. Peter hold the primacy at Rome, when the Acts represents him continually as in Judæa, among those of his nation to whom he had, as S. Paul says, a peculiar mission, the apostleship of circumcision? We reply, first: that the apostleship of S. Peter to the Jews did not exclude his labors with the Gentiles; in fact, we know from the Acts that S. Peter had a vision which led him to work for the latter, and that vision was immediately followed by the admission, by S. Peter himself, of the centurion Cornelius. Moreover, it is well known that there were Jews dispersed throughout the world, to whom S. Peter is said to have gone, as we have shown—in Pontus and the other countries of Asia Minor; and also in Rome they were numerous. Duty therefore, both to the Jew and Gentile, could and did lead S. Peter to Rome.
We say, secondly: there is no difficulty in the fact of S. Peter having been often in Judæa. The apostles, from their very charge, were obliged to travel much; and the sound of their voice was heard in every land. As is narrated of them, they divided the nations among them; and, burning with the fire of zeal sent down upon them on the day of Pentecost, they went about, everywhere kindling in others the flame that burned within themselves. As for the difficulties or facilities of travel, especially in the case of S. Peter, we cannot do better than to cite the words of the learned Canon Fabiani in his Discussion with those who impugned the coming of S. Peter to Rome. In the authentic report of this discussion, page 52, he says: “How many days were required for a journey from Cæsarea to Rome? Little more than fifteen days.... Lately very learned men among Protestants, and at the same time men thoroughly skilled in what regards the seafaring art, Smith and Penrose, have calculated from the very voyage of S. Paul, and from the narrations in the Acts, the time that vessels took to come from Cæsarea to Rome. They went at the rate of seven knots an hour, so that it took one hundred and seventy‐seven hours, or seven days and a third, to came from Cæsarea to Pozzuoli; and Pliny himself assures us that vessels came from Alexandria to Pozzuoli in nine days, from Alexandria in Egypt in nine days, and from Alexandria to Messina in seven days. Cæsarea and Jerusalem, you know, differ but little in distance to Rome, from Alexandria in Egypt. The journey from Messina and Pozzuoli to Rome was made in about two or three days, so that the whole time required to go from Rome to Jerusalem was not more than half a month.” It is easy, then, to understand how S. Peter could be often in Judæa, though he had fixed his permanent residence in Rome.
To sum up what we have been saying, no argument can be had from the silence of Scripture to prove S. Peter never came to Rome, because the Acts and Epistle to the Romans do not cover the whole epoch of S. Peter’s apostleship. Moreover, the silence of Scripture does not prove that S. Peter did not rule the Church of Rome twenty‐five years, because, as we have shown, there was no reason why either the Acts or the Epistle to the Romans should speak of S. Peter’s going to Rome and being there. What we have here asserted is all the more true because we have positive testimony not only with regard to S. Peter’s coming to Rome, but also respecting the date of his coming, the period of his ruling the church there, the time and the manner of his death there, and because we have the monuments recording the memory of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the trophies of the apostles, as Caius calls them, tropæa apostolorum, which exist to this day, surrounded by the marks of veneration and the pious traditions of the people of Rome. Against all these proofs difficulties of history and chronology are of no avail; for, in the first place, the very difficulties and discussions only serve to confirm the fact, especially since these difficulties and discussions have lasted for fifteen centuries without bringing about the rejection of the main fact; in the next place, we know there are many well‐established facts regarding which there exist difficulties to clear up, and this nowhere more than in past history. When we have proved by one solid, unanswerable argument a fact, we should not trouble ourselves much regarding what may be brought against it. The elucidation of knotty points may delight us and reward the labors of the erudite; for common practical use the matter is settled; and any one who rises up against it must not wonder if he be looked on as either not well informed, or, to say the least, eccentric.
Sayings.
“Rejoice not in riches or other transient gifts, for thou shalt be deprived of them like the actor, who, after finishing his part, lays aside his costume,”—S. Chrysostom.
“God has implanted in us conscience, and by this he acts in a manner more loving than our natural father; for this latter, after he has warned his son ten and a hundred times, expels him from his home; but God ceases not to warn us by conscience even to the latest breath.”—Ibid.
“To restrain anger assimilates man to his Creator.”—Ibid.
“The man who forgives his enemy is like God.”—S. Augustine.
“He is a true Christian who carries with him the whole belief of Christ, who acts virtuously through the spirit of Christ, and who dies to sin through the following of Christ.”—S. Thomas.
“No one is lost without knowing it; and no one is deceived without wishing to be deceived.”—S. Thomas.
Chapter VII. An Ultramontane Son.
Greifmann and Gerlach had driven to the railway station. The express train thundered along. As the doors of the carriages flew open, Seraphin peered through them with eyes full of eager joy. He thought no more of the fate that threatened him as the sequel of his father’s arrival; his youthful heart exulted solely in the anticipation of the meeting. A tall, broad‐ shouldered gentleman, with severe features and tanned complexion, alighted from a coupé. It was Mr. Conrad Gerlach. Seraphin threw his arms around his father’s neck and kissed him. The banker made a polite bow to the wealthiest landed proprietor of the country, in return for which Mr. Conrad bestowed on him a cordial shake of the hand.
“Has your father returned?”
“He cannot possibly reach home before September,” answered the banker. The traveller stepped for a moment into the luggage‐room. The gentlemen then drove away to the Palais Greifmann. During the ride, the conversation was not very animated. Conrad’s curt, grave manner and keen look, indicative of a mind always hard at work, imposed reserve, and rapidly dampened his son’s ingenuous burst of joy. Seraphin cast a searching glance upon that severe countenance, saw no change from its stern look of authority, and his heart sank before the appalling alternative of either sacrificing the happiness of his life to his father’s favorite project, or of opposing his will and braving the consequences of such daring. Yet he wavered but an instant in the resolution to which he had been driven by necessity, and which, it was plain from the lines of his countenance, he had manhood enough to abide by.
Mr. Conrad maintained his reserve, and asked but few questions. Even Carl, habitually profuse, studied brevity in his answers, as he knew from experience that Gerlach, Senior, was singularly averse to the use of many words.
“How is business?”
“Very dull, sir; the times are hard.”
“Did you sustain any losses through the failures that have recently taken place in town?”
“Not a farthing. We had several thousands with Wendel, but fortunately drew them out before he failed.”
“Very prudent. Has your father entered into any new connections in the course of his travels?”
“Several, that promise fairly.”
“Is Louise well?”
“Her health is as good as could be wished.”
“General prosperity, then, I see, for you both look cheerful, and Seraphin is as blooming as a clover field.”
“How is dear mother?”
“Quite well. She misses her only child. She sends much love.”
The carriage drew up at the gate. The young lady was awaiting the millionaire at the bottom of the steps. While greetings were exchanged between them, a faint tinge of warmth could be noticed on the cold features of the land‐owner. A smile formed about his mouth, his piercing eyes glanced for an instant at Seraphin, and instantly the smile was eclipsed under the cloud of an unwelcome discovery.
“I am on my way to the industrial exhibition,” said he, “and I thought I would pay you a visit in passing. I wish you not to put yourself to any inconvenience, my dear Louise. You will have the goodness to make me a little tea, this evening, which we shall sip together.”
“I am overjoyed at your visit, and yet I am sorry, too.”
“Sorry! Why so?”
“Because you are in such a hurry.”
“It cannot be helped, my child. I am overwhelmed with work. Harvest has commenced; no less than six hundred hands are in the fields, and I am obliged to go to the exhibition. I must see and test some new machinery which is said to be of wonderful power.”
“Well, then, you will at least spare us a few days on your return?”
“A few days! You city people place no value on time. We of the country economize seconds. Without a thought you squander in idleness what cannot be recalled.”
“You are a greater rigorist than ever,” chided she, smiling.
“Because, my child, I am getting older. Seraphin, I wish to speak a word with you before tea.”
The two retired to the apartments which for years Mr. Conrad was accustomed to occupy whenever he visited the Palais Greifmann.
“The old man still maintains his characteristic vigor,” said Louise. “His face is at all times like a problem in arithmetic, and in place of a heart he carries an accurate estimate of the yield of his farms. His is a cold, repelling nature.”
“But strictly honest, and alive to gain,” added Carl. “In ten years more he will have completed his third million. I am glad he came; the marriage project is progressing towards a final arrangement. He is now having a talk with Seraphin; tomorrow, as you will see, the bashful young gentleman, in obedience to the command of his father, will present himself to offer you his heart, and ask yours in return.”
“A free heart for an enslaved one,” said she jestingly. “Were there no hope of ennobling that heart, of freeing it from the absurdities with which it is encrusted, I declare solemnly I would not accept it for three millions. But Seraphin is capable of being improved. His eye will not close itself against modern enlightenment. Servility of conscience and a baneful fear of God cannot have entirely extinguished his sense of liberty.”
“I have never set a very high estimate on the pluck and moral force of religious people,” declared Greifmann. “They are a craven set, who are pious merely because they are afraid of hell. When a passion gets possession of them, the impotence of their religious frenzy at once becomes manifest. They fall an easy prey to the impulses of nature, and the supernatural fails to come to the rescue. It would be vain for Seraphin to try to give up the unbelieving Louise, whom his strait‐laced faith makes it his duty to avoid. He has fallen a victim to your fascinations; all the Gospel of the Jew of Nazareth, together with all the sacraments and unctions of the church, could not loose the coils with which you have encircled him.”
In this scornful tone did Carl Greifmann speak of the heroism of virtue and of the energy of faith, like a blind man discoursing about colors. He little suspected that it is just the power of religion that produces characters, and that, on this very account, in an irreligious age, characters of a noble type are so rarely met with; the warmth of faith is not in them.
“Mr. Schwefel desires to speak a word with you,” said a servant who appeared at the door.
The banker nodded assent.
“I ask your pardon for troubling you at so unseasonable an hour,” began the leader, after bowing lowly several times. “The subject is urgent, and must be settled without delay. But, by the way, I must first give you the good news: Mr. Shund is elected by an overwhelming majority, and Progress is victorious in every ward.”
“That is what I looked for,” answered the banker, with an air of satisfaction. “I told you whatever Cæsar, Antony, and Lepidus command, must be done.”
“I am just from a meeting at which some important resolutions have been offered and adopted,” continued the leader. “The strongest prop of ultramontanism is the present system of educating youth. Education must, therefore, be taken out of the hands of the priests. But the change will have to be brought about gradually and with caution. We have decided to make a beginning by introducing common schools. A vote of the people is to be taken on the measure, and, on the last day of voting, a grand barbecue is to be given to celebrate our triumph over the accursed slavery of religious symbols. The ground chosen by the chief‐magistrate for the celebration is the common near the Red Tower, but the space is not large enough, and we will need your meadow adjoining it to accommodate the crowd. I am commissioned by the magistrate to request you to throw open the meadow for the occasion.”
The banker, believing the request prejudicial to his private interests, looked rather unenthusiastic. Louise, who had been busy with the teapot, had heard every word of the conversation, and the new educational scheme had won her cordial approval. Seeing her brother hesitated, she flew to the rescue:
“We are ready and happy to make any sacrifice in the interest of education and progress.”
“I am not sure that it is competent for me in the present instance to grant the desired permission,” replied Greifmann. “The grass would be destroyed, and perhaps the sod ruined for years. My father is away from home, and I would not like to take the responsibility of complying with his honor’s wish.”
“The city will hold itself liable for all damages,” said Schwefel.
“Not at all!” interposed the young lady hastily. “Make use of the meadow without paying damages. If my brother refuses to assume the responsibility, I will take it upon my self. By wresting education from the clergy, who only cripple the intellect of youth, progress aims a death‐blow at mental degradation. It is a glorious work, and one full of inestimable results that you gentlemen are beginning in the cause of humanity against ignorance and superstition. My father so heartily concurs in every undertaking that responds to the wants of the times, that I not only feel encouraged to make myself responsible for this concession, but am even sure that he would be angry if we refused. Do not hesitate to make use of the meadow, and from its flowers bind garlands about the temples of the goddess of liberty!”
The leader bowed reverently to the beautiful advocate of progress.
“In this case, there remains nothing else for me to do than to confirm my sister’s decision,” said Greifmann. “When is the celebration to take place?”
“On the 10th of August, the day of the deputy elections. It has been intentionally set for that day to impress on the delegates how genuine and right is the sentiment of our people.”
“Very good,” approved Greifmann.
“In the name of the chief‐magistrate, I thank you for the offering you have so generously laid upon the shrine of humanity, and I shall hasten to inform the gentlemen before they adjourn that you have granted our request.” And Schwefel withdrew from the gorgeously furnished apartment.
Meanwhile a fiery struggle was going on between Seraphin and his father. He had briefly related his experience at the Palais Greifmann; had even confessed his preference for Louise, and had, for the first time in his life, incurred his father’s displeasure by mentioning the wager. And when he concluded by protesting that he could not marry Louise, Conrad’s suppressed anger burst forth.
“Have you lost your senses, foolish boy? This marriage has been in contemplation for years; it has been coolly weighed and calculated. In all the country around, it is the only equal match possible. Louise’s dower amounts to one million florins, the exact value of the noble estate of Hatzfurth, adjoining our possessions. You young people can occupy the chateau, I shall add another hundred acres to the land, together with a complete outfit of farming implements, and then you will have such a start as no ten proprietors in Germany can boast of.”
Seraphin knew his father. All the old gentleman’s thought and effort was concentrated on the management of his extensive possessions. For other subjects there was no room in the head and heart of the landholder. He barely complied with his religious duties. It is true, on Sundays Mr. Conrad attended church, but surrounded invariably by a motley swarm of worldly cares and speculations connected with farming. At Easter, he went to the sacraments, but usually among the last, and after being repeatedly reminded by his wife. He took no interest in progress, humanity, ultramontanism, and such other questions as vex the age, because to trouble himself about them would have interfered with his main purpose. He knew only his fields and woodlands—and God, in so far as his providence blessed him with bountiful harvests.
“What is the good of millions, father, if the very fundamental conditions of matrimonial peace are wanting?”
“What fundamental conditions?”
“Louise believes neither in God nor in revelation. She is an infidel.”
“And you are a fanatic—a fanatic because of your one‐sided education. Your mother has trained you as priests and monks are trained. During your childhood piety was very useful; it served as the prop to the young tree, causing it to grow up straight and develop itself into a vigorous stem. But you are now full‐grown, and life makes other demands on the man than on the boy; away, therefore, with your fanaticism.”
“To my dying hour I shall thank my mother for the care she has bestowed on the child, the boy, and the young man. If her pious spirit has given a right direction to my career, and watched faithfully over my steps, the untarnished record of the son cannot but rejoice the heart of the father—a record which is the undoubted product of religious training.”
“You are a good son, and I am proud of you,” accorded Mr. Conrad with candor. “Your mother, too, is a woman whose equal is not to be found. All this is very well. But, if Louise’s city manners and free way of thinking scandalize you, you are sheerly narrow‐minded. I have been noticing her for years, and have learned to value her industry and domestic virtues. She has not a particle of extravagance; on the contrary, she has a decided leaning towards economy and thrift. She will make an unexceptionable wife. Do you imagine, my son, my choice could be a blind one when I fixed upon Louise to share the property which, through years of toil, I have amassed by untiring energy?”
“I do not deny the lady has the qualities you mention, my dear father.”
“Moreover, she is a millionaire, and handsome, very handsome, and you are in love with her—what more do you want?”
“The most important thing of all, father. The very soul of conjugal felicity is wanting, which is oneness of faith in supernatural truth. What I adore, Louise denies; what I revere, she hates; what I practise, she scorns. Louise never prays, never goes to church, never receives the sacraments, in a word, she has not a spark of religion.”
“That will all come right,” returned Mr. Conrad. “Louise will learn to pray. You must not, simpleton, expect a banker’s daughter to be for ever counting her beads like a nun. Take my word for it, the weight of a wife’s responsibilities will make her serious enough.”
“Serious perhaps, but not religious, for she is totally devoid of faith.”
“Enough; you shall marry her nevertheless,” broke in the father. “It is my wish that you shall marry her. I will not suffer opposition.”
For a moment the young man sat silent, struggling painfully with the violence of his own feelings.
“Father,” said he, then, “you command what I cannot fulfil, because it goes against my conscience. I beg you not to do violence to my conscience; violence is opposed to your own and my Christian principles. An atheist or a progressionist who does not recognize a higher moral order, might insist upon his son’s marrying an infidel for the sake of a million. But you cannot do so, for it is not millions of money that you and I look upon as the highest good. Do not, therefore, dear father, interfere with my moral freedom; do not force me into a union which my religion prohibits.”
“What does this mean?” And a dark frown gathered on the old gentleman’s forehead. “Defiance disguised in religious twaddle? Open rebellion? Is this the manner in which my son fulfils the duty of filial obedience?”
“Pardon me, father,” said the youth with deferential firmness, “there is no divine law making it obligatory upon a father to select a wife for his son. Consequently, also, the duty of obedience on this point does not rest upon the son. Did I, beguiled by passion or driven by recklessness, wish to marry a creature whose depravity would imperil my temporal and eternal welfare, your duty, as a father, would be to oppose my rashness, and my duty, as a son, would be to obey you. Louise is just such a creature; she is artfully plotting against my religious principles, against my loyalty to God and the church. She has put upon herself as a task to lead me from the darkness of superstition into the light of modern advancement. I overheard her when she said to her brother, ‘Did I for an instant doubt that Seraphin may be reclaimed from superstition, I would renounce my union with him, I would forego all the gratifications of wealth, so much do I detest stupid credulity.’ Hence I should have to look forward to being constantly annoyed by my wife’s fanatical hostility to my religion. There never would be an end of discord and wrangling. And what kind of children would such a mother rear? She would corrupt the little ones, instil into their innocent souls the poison of her own godlessness, and make me the most wretched of fathers. For these reasons Miss Greifmann shall not become my wife—no, never! I implore you, dear father, do not require from me what my conscience will not permit, and what I shall on no condition consent to,” concluded the young man with a tone of decision.
“Your language sounds fabulous,” said he.
“Here, father, is my diary. In it you will find a detailed account of what I have briefly stated.”
Mr. Conrad had observed a solemn silence, like a man who suddenly beholds an unsuspected phenomenon exhibited before him. Seraphin’s words produced, as it were, a burst of vivid light upon his mind, dispelling the multitudinous schemes and speculations that nestled in every nook and depth. The effect of this sudden illumination became perceptible at once, for Mr. Gerlach lost the points of view which had invariably brought before his vision the million of the Greifmanns, and he began to feel a growing esteem for the stand taken by his son.
Gerlach took the book and shoved it into the breast‐pocket of his coat. In an instant, however, his imagination conjured up to him a picture of the Count of Hatzfurth’s splendid estate, and he went on coldly and deliberately: “Hear me, Seraphin! Your marriage with Louise is a favorite project upon which I have based not a few expectations. The observations you have made shall not induce me to renounce this project unconditionally, for you may have been mistaken. I shall take notes myself and test this matter. If your view is confirmed, our project will have been an air castle. You shall be left entirely unmolested in your convictions.”
Seraphin embraced his father.
“Let us have no scene; hear me out. Should it turn out, on the other hand, that your judgment is erroneous, should Louise not belong to yon crazy progressionist mob who aim to dethrone God and subvert the order of society, should her hatred against religion be merely a silly conforming to the fashionable impiety of the age, which good influences may correct—then I shall insist upon your marrying her. Meanwhile I want you to maintain a strict neutrality—not a step backward nor a step in advance. Now to tea, and let your countenance betray nothing of what has passed.” He drew his son to his bosom and imprinted a kiss on his forehead.
The millionaires were seated around the tea‐table. Mr. Conrad playfully commended Louise’s talent for cooking. Apparently without design he turned the conversation upon the elections, and, to Seraphin’s utter astonishment, eulogized the beneficent power of liberal doctrines.
“Our age,” said he, “can no longer bear the hampering notions of the past. In the material world, steam and machinery have brought about changes which call for corresponding changes in the world of intellect. Great revolutions have already commenced. In France, Renan has written a Life of Christ, and in our own country Protestant convocations are proclaiming an historical Christ who was not God, but only an extraordinary man. You hardly need to be assured that I too take a deep interest in the intellectual struggles of my countrymen, but an excess of business does not permit me to watch them closely. I am obliged to content myself with such reports as the newspapers furnish. I should like to read Renan’s work, which seems to have created a great sensation. They say it suits our times admirably.”
The brother and sister were not a little astonished at the old gentleman’s unusual communicativeness.
“It is a splendid book,” exclaimed Louise—“charming as to style, and remarkably liberal and considerate towards the worshippers of Christ.”
“So I have everywhere been told,” said Mr. Conrad.
“Have you read the book, Louise?”
“Not less than four times, three times in French and once in German.”
“Do you think a farmer whose moments are precious as gold could forgive himself the reading of Renan’s book in view of the multitude of his urgent occupations?” asked he, smiling.
“The reading of a book that originates a new intellectual era is also a serious occupation,” maintained the beautiful lady.
“Very true; yet I apprehend Renan’s attempt to disprove to me the divinity of Christ would remain unsuccessful, and it would only cause me the loss of some hours of valuable time.”
“Read it, Mr. Gerlach, do read it. Renan’s arguments are unanswerable.”
“So you have been convinced, Louise?”
“Yes, indeed, quite.”
“Well, now, Renan is a living author, he is the lion of the day, and nothing could be more natural than that the fair sex should grow enthusiastic over him. But, of course, at your next confession you will sorrowfully declare and retract your belief in Renan.”
The young lady cast a quick glance at Seraphin, and the brim of her teacup concealed a proud, triumphant smile.
“Our city is about taking a bold step,” said Carl, breaking the silence. “We are to have common schools, in order to take education from the control of the clergy.” And he went on to relate what Schwefel had reported.
“When is the barbecue to come off?” inquired Mr. Conrad.
“On the 10th of August.”
“Perhaps I shall have time to attend this demonstration,” said Gerlach. “Hearts reveal themselves at such festivities. One gets a clear insight into the mind of the multitude. You, Louise, have put progress under obligations by so cheerfully advancing to meet it.”
After these words the landholder rose and went to his room. The next morning he proceeded on his journey, taking with him Seraphin’s diary. The author himself he left at the Palais Greifmann in anxious uncertainty about future events.
Chapter VIII. Faith And Science Of Progress.
Seraphin usually took an early ride with Carl. The banker was overjoyed at the wager, about the winning of which he now felt absolute certainty. He expressed himself confident that before long he would have the pleasure of going over the road on the back of the best racer in the country. “The noble animals,” said he, “shall not be brought by the railway; it might injure them. I shall send my groom for them to Chateau Hallberg. He can ride the distance in two days.”
Seraphin could not help smiling at his friend’s solicitude for the horses.
“Do not sell the bear’s skin before killing the bear,” answered he. “I may not lose the horses, but may, on the contrary, acquire a pleasant claim to twenty thousand florins.”
“That is beyond all possibility,” returned the banker. “Hans Shund is now chief‐magistrate, has been nominated to the legislature, and in a few days will be elected. Mr. Hans will appear as a shining light to‐morrow, when he is to state his political creed in a speech to his constituents. Of course, you and I shall go to hear him. Next will follow his election, then my groom will hasten to Chateau Hallberg to fetch the horses. Are you sorry you made the bet?”
“Not at all! I should regret very much to lose my span of bays. Still, the bet will be of incalculable benefit to me. I will have learned concerning men and manners what otherwise I could never have dreamed of. In any event, the experience gained will be of vast service to me during life.”
“I am exceedingly glad to know it, my dear fellow,” assured Greifmann. “Your acquaintance with the present has been very superficial. You have learned a great deal in a few days, and it is gratifying to hear you acknowledge the fact.”
The banker had not, however, caught Gerlach’s meaning.
But for the wager, Seraphin would not have become acquainted with Louise’s intellectual standpoint. He would probably have married her for the sake of her beauty, would have discovered his mistake when it could not be corrected, and would have found himself condemned to spend his life with a woman whose principles and character could only annoy and give him pain. As it was, he was tormented by the fear that his father might not coincide in his opinion of the young lady. What if the old gentleman considered her hostility to religion as a mere fashionable mania unsupported by inner conviction, a girlish whim changeable like the wind, which with little effort might be made to veer round to the point of the most unimpeachable orthodoxy? He had not uttered a word condemning Louise’s infatuation about Renan. On taking leave he had parted with her in a friendly, almost hearty, manner, proof sufficient that the young lady’s doubtful utterances at tea had not deceived him.
Upon reaching home, Gerlach sat in his room with his eyes thoughtfully fixed upon a luminous square cast by the sun upon the floor. Quite naturally his thoughts ran upon the marriage, and to the prospect of having to maintain his liberty by a hard contest with his inflexible parent. He was unshaken in his resolution not to accede to the projected alliance, and, when a will morally severe conceives resolutions of this sort, they usually stand the hardest tests. So absorbing were his reflections that he did not hear John announcing a visitor. He nodded mechanically in reply to the words that seemed to come out of the distance, and the servant disappeared.
Soon after a country girl appeared in the entrance of the room. In both hands she was carrying a small basket made of peeled willows, quite new. A snow‐white napkin was spread over the basket. The girl’s dress was neat, her figure was slender and graceful. Her hair, which was wound about the head in heavy plaits, was golden and encircled her forehead as with a nimbus. Her features were delicate and beautiful, and she looked upon the young gentleman with a pair of deep‐blue eyes. Thus stood she for an instant in the door of the apartment. There was a smile about her mouth and a faint flush upon her cheeks.
“Good‐morning, Mr. Seraphin!” said a sweet voice.
The youth started at this salutation and looked at the stranger with surprise. She was just then standing on the sunlit square, her hair gleamed like purest gold, and a flood of light streamed upon her youthful form. He did not return the greeting. He looked at her as if frightened, rose slowly, and bowed in silence.
“My father sends some early grapes which he begs you to have the goodness to accept.”
She drew nearer, and he received the basket from her hands.
“I am very thankful!” said he. And, raising the napkin, the delicious fruit smiled in his face. “These are a rarity at this season. To whom am I indebted for this friendly attention?”
“The obligation is all on our side, Mr. Seraphin,” she replied trustfully to the generous benefactor of her family. “Father is sorry that he cannot offer you something better.”
“Ah! you are Holt’s daughter?”
“Yes, Mr. Seraphin.”
“Your name is Johanna, is it not?”
“Mechtild, Mr. Seraphin.”
“Will you be so good as to sit down?” And he pointed her to a sofa.
Mechtild, however, drew a chair and seated herself.
He had noted her deportment, and could not but marvel at the graceful action, the confiding simplicity, and well‐bred self‐possession of the extraordinary country girl. As she sat opposite to him, she looked so pure, so trusting and sincere, that his astonishment went on increasing. He acknowledged to himself never to have beheld eyes whose expression came so directly from the heart—a heart whose interior must be equally as sunny and pure.
“How are your good parents?”
“They are very well, Mr. Seraphin. Father has gone to work with renewed confidence. The sad—ah! the terrible period is past. You cannot imagine, Mr. Seraphin, how many tears you have dried, how much misery you have relieved!”
The recollection of the ruin that had been hanging over her home affected her painfully; her eyes glistened, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. But she instantly repressed the emotion, and exhibited a beautiful smile on her face. Seraphin’s quick eye had observed both the momentary feeling, and that she had resolutely checked it in order not to annoy him by touching sorrowful chords. This trait of delicacy also excited the admiration of the gentleman.
“Your father is not in want of employment?” he inquired with interest.
“No, sir! Father is much sought on account of his knowledge of farming. Persons who have ground, but no team of their own, employ him to put in crops for them.”
“No doubt the good man has to toil hard?”
“That is true, sir; but father seems to like working, and we children strive to help him as much as we can.”
“And do you like working?”
“I do, indeed, Mr. Seraphin. Life would be worthless if one did not labor. Man’s life on earth is so ordered as to show him that he must labor. Doing nothing is abominable, and idleness is the parent of many vices.”
Another cause of astonishment for the millionaire. She did not converse like an uneducated girl from the country. Her accurate, almost choice use of words indicated some culture, and her concise observations revealed both mind and reflection. He felt a strong desire to fathom the mystery—to cast a glance into Mechtild’s past history.
“Have you always lived at home, or have you ever been away at school?”
She must have detected something ludicrous in the question, for suddenly a degree of archness might be observed in her amiable smile.
“You mean, whether I have received a city education? No, sir! Father used to speak highly of the clearness of my mind, and thought I might even be made a teacher. But he had not the means to give me the necessary amount of schooling. Until I was fourteen years old, I went to school to the nuns here in town. I used to come in of mornings and go back in the evening. I studied hard, and father and mother always had the satisfaction of seeing me rewarded with a prize at the examinations. I am very fond of books, and make good use of the convent library. On Sundays, after vespers, I wait till the door of the book‐room is opened. I still spend my leisure time in reading, and on Sundays and holidays I know no greater pleasure than to read nice instructive books. At my work I think over what I have read, and I continue practising composition according to the directions of the good ladies of the convent.”
“And were you always head at school?”
“Yes,” she admitted, with a blush.
“You have profited immensely by your opportunities,” he said approvingly. “And the desire for learning has not yet left you?”
“This inordinate craving still continues to torment me,” she acknowledged frankly.
“Inordinate—why inordinate?”
“Because, my station and calling do not require a high degree of culture. But it is so nice to know, and it is so nice to have refined intercourse with each others. For seven years I admired the elegant manners of the convent ladies, and I learned many a lesson from them.”
“How old are you now?”
“Seventeen, Mr. Seraphin.”
“What a pity you did not enter some higher educational institution!” said he.
A pause followed. He looked with reverence upon the artless girl whom God had so richly endowed, both in body and mind. Mechtild rose.
“Please accept, also, my most heartfelt thanks for your generous aid,” she said, with emotion. “All my life long I shall remember you before God, Mr. Seraphin. The Almighty will surely repay you what alas! we cannot.”
She made a courtesy, and he accompanied her through all the apartments as far as the front door. Here the girl, turning, bowed to him once more and went away.
Returning to his room, Seraphin stood and contemplated the grapes. Strongly did the delicious fruit tempt him, but he touched not one. He then pulled out a drawer, and hid the gifts as though it were a costly treasure. For the rest of the day, Mechtild’s bright form hovered near him, and the sweet charm of her eyes, so full of soul, continually worked on his imagination. When he again went into Louise’s company, the grace and innocence of the country girl gained ground in his esteem. Compared with Mechtild’s charming naturalness, Louise’s manner appeared affected, spoiled; through evil influences. The difference in the expression of their eyes struck him especially. In Louise’s eyes there burned a fierce glow at times, which roused passion and stirred the senses. Mechtild’s neither glowed nor flashed; but from their limpid depths beamed goodness so genuine and serenity so unclouded, that Seraphin could compare them to nothing but two heralds of peace and innocence. Louise’s eyes, thought he, flash like two meteors of the night; Mechtild’s beam like two mild suns in a cloudless sky of spring. As often as he entered the room where the grapes lay concealed, he would unlock the drawer, examine the fragrant fruit, and handle the basket which had been carried by her hands. He could not himself help smiling at this childish action, and yet both great delicacy and deep earnestness are manifested in honoring objects that have been touched by pure hands, and in revering places hallowed by the presence of the good.
Next morning the banker asked his guest to accompany him to the church of S. Peter, where Hans Shund was to address a large gathering.
“In a church?” Gerlach exclaimed, with amazement.
“Don’t get frightened, my good fellow. The church is no longer in the service of religion. It has been secularized by the state, and is customarily used as a hall for dancing. There will be quite a crowd, for several able speakers are to discuss the question of common schools. The church has been chosen for the meeting on account of the crowd.”
The millionaires drove to the desecrated church. A tumultuous mass swarmed about the portal. “Let us permit them to push us; we shall get in most easily by letting them do so,” said the banker merrily. Two officious progressionists, recognizing the banker, opened a passage for them through the throng. They reached the interior of the church, which was now an empty space, stripped of every ornament proper to a house of God. In the sanctuary could yet be seen, as if in mournful abandonment, a large quadrangular slab, that had been the altar, and attached to one of the side walls was an exquisite Gothic pulpit, which on occasions like the present was used for a rostrum. Everywhere else reigned silence and desolation.
The nave was filled by a motley mass. The chieftains of progress, some elegantly dressed, others exhibiting frivolous miens and huge beards, crowded upon the elevation of the chancel. All the candidates for the legislature were present, not for the purpose of proving their qualifications for the office—progress never troubled itself about those—but to air their views on the subject of education. There were speakers on hand of acknowledged ability in the discussion of the doctrines of progress, who were to lay the result of their investigations before the people.
Seraphin also noted some anxious faces in the crowd. They were citizens, whose sons were alarmed at the thought of yielding up the training of their children into the hands of infidelity. And near the pulpit stood two priests, irreverently crowded against the wall, targets for the scornful pleasantries of the wits of the mob. Leader Schwefel was voted into the chair by acclamation. He thanked the assembly in a short speech for the honor conferred, and then announced that Mr. Till, member of the former assembly, would address the meeting. Amid murmurs of expectation a short, fat gentleman climbed into the pulpit. First a red face with a copper‐ tipped nose bobbed above the ledge of the pulpit, next came a pair of broad shoulders, upon which a huge head rested without the intermediary of a neck, two puffy hands were laid upon the desk, and the commencement of a well‐rounded paunch could just be detected by the eye. Mr. Till, taking two handfuls of his shaggy beard, drew them slowly through his fingers, looked composedly upon the audience, and breathed hotly through mouth and nostrils.
“Gentlemen,” he began, with a voice that struggled out from a mass of flesh and fat, “I am not given to many words, you know. What need is there of many words and long speeches? We know what we want, and what we want we will have in spite of the machinations of Jesuits and the whinings of an ultramontane horde. You all know how I acquitted myself at the last legislature, and if you will again favor me with your suffrages, I will endeavor once more to give satisfaction. You know my record, and I shall remain staunch to the last.”
Cries of “Good!” from various directions.
“Gentlemen! if you know my record, you must also be aware that I am passionately fond of the chase. I even follow this amusement in the legislative hall. Our country abounds in a sort of black game, and for me it is rare sport to pursue this, species of game in the assembly.”
A wild tumult of applause burst forth. Jeers and coarse witticisms were bandied about on every side of the two clergymen, who looked meekly upon these orgies of progress.
“Gentlemen!” Till continued, “the blacks are a dangerous kind of wild beast. They have heretofore been ranging in a preserve, feeding on the fat of the land. That is an abuse that challenges the wrath of heaven. It must be done away with. The beasts of prey that in the dark ages dwelt in castles have long since been exterminated, and their rocky lairs have been reduced to ruins. Well, now, let us keep up the chase in both houses of the legislature until the last of these black beasts is destroyed. Should you entrust to me again your interests, I shall return to the seat of government to aid with renewed energy in ridding the land of these creatures that are enemies both of education and liberty.”
Amid prolonged applause the fat man descended. The chieftains shook him warmly by the hand, assuring him that the cause absolutely demanded his being reelected.
Gerlach was aghast at Till’s speech. He hardly knew which deserved most scorn, the vulgarity of the speaker or the abjectness of those who had applauded him. Their wild enthusiasm was still surging through the building, when Hans Shund mounted the pulpit. The chairman rang for order; the tumult ceased. In mute suspense the multitude awaited the great speech of the notorious usurer, thief, and debauchee. And indeed, progress might well entertain great expectations, for Hans Shund had read a pile of progressionist pamphlets, had extracted the strong passages, and out of them had concocted a right racy speech. His speech might with propriety have been designated the Gospel of Progress, for Hans Shund had made capital of whatever freethinkers had lucubrated in behalf of so‐called enlightenment, and in opposition to Christianity. The very appearance of the speaker gave great promise. His were not coarse features and goggle eyes like Till’s; his piercing feline eyes looked intellectual. His face was rather pale, the result, no doubt, of unusual application, and he had skilfully dyed his sandy hair. His position as mayor of the city seemed also to entitle him to special attention, and these several claims were enhanced by a white necktie, white vest, and black cloth swallow‐tail coat.
“Gentlemen,” began the mayor with solemnity, “my honorable predecessor in this place has told you with admirable sagacity that the kernel of every political question is of a religious character. Indeed, religion is linked with every important question of the day, it is the ratio ultima of the intellectual movement of our times. Men of thought and of learning are all agreed as to the condition to which our social life should be and must be brought. The friends of the people are actively and earnestly at work trying to further a healthy development of our social and political status. Nor have their efforts been utterly fruitless. Progress has made great conquests; yet, gentlemen, these conquests are far from being complete. What is it that is most hostile to liberalism in morals, to enlightenment, and to humanity? It is the antiquated faith of departed days. Have we not heard the language of the Holy Father in the Syllabus? But the Holy Father at Rome, gentlemen, is no father of ours—happily he is the father only of stupid and credulous men.”
“Bravo! Well said!” resounded from the audience. Flaschen nudged Spitzkopf, who sat next to him. “Shund is no mean speaker. Even that fellow Voelk, of Bavaria, cannot compete with Shund.”
“Gentlemen, our good sense teaches us to smile with pity at the infallible declarations of yon Holy Father. We are firmly convinced that papal decrees can no more stop the onward march of civilization than they can arrest the heavenly bodies in their journeys about the sun. ’Tis true, an œcumenical council is lowering like a black storm‐cloud. But let the council meet; let it declare the Syllabus an article of faith; it will never succeed in destroying the treasures of independent thought which creative intellects have been hoarding up for centuries among every people. Since men of culture have ceased to yield unquestioning submission, like dumb sheep, to the church, they have begun to discover that nowhere are so many falsehoods uttered as in pulpits.”
Tremendous applause, clapping, and swinging of hats, followed this eloquent period. A distinguished gentleman, laying his hand upon Till’s shoulder, asked: “What calibre of ammunition do you use in hunting black game?”
“Conical balls of two centimetres,” replied Till, with no great wit.
“Yon fellow in the pulpit fires shells of a hundredweight, I should say. And if in the legislative assembly his shells all explode, not a man of them will be left alive.”
Till thought this witticism so good that he set up a loud roar of laughter, that could be heard above the general uproar.
Stimulated by these marks of appreciation, Shund waxed still more eloquent. “Gentlemen,” cried he, “no body of men is more savagely opposed to science and culture than a conventicle of so‐called servants of God. Were you to repeat the multiplication table several times over, there would be as much prayer and sense in it as in what is designated the Apostles’ Creed.”
More cheering and boundless enthusiasm. “Gentlemen!” exclaimed the speaker, with thundering emphasis and a hideous expression of hatred on his face, “the significance of religious dogmas is simply a sort of homœopathic concoction to which every succeeding age contributes some drops of fanaticism. Subjected to the microscope of science, the whole basis of the Christian church evaporates into thin mist. We must shield our children against religious fables. Away with dogmas and saws from the Bible; away with the Trinity; the divinity and humanity of Jesus, and other such stuff! Away with apothegms such as this: Christ is my life, my death, and my gain. Such things are opposed to nature. Children’s minds are thereby warped to untruthfulness and hypocrisy. In this manner the child is deprived of the power of thinking; loses all interest in intellectual pursuits, and ceases to feel the need of further culture. The times are favorable for a reformation. Our imperial and royal rulers have at length realized that minds must be set free. For this end it was as unavoidable for them to break with the church and priesthood as it is necessary for us. If we cherish our fatherland and the people, we must take the initiative. We are not striving to effect a revolution; we want intellectual development, profounder knowledge, and healthier morality.
“Shall peace be seen beneath our skies, The spirit’s freedom first must rise,”
concluded the orator poetically, and he came down amidst a very hurricane of applause.
There followed a lull. In the audience, heads protruded and necks were stretched that their possessors might obtain a glimpse of the great Shund. In the chancel, the chiefs and leaders crowded around him, smiling, bowing, and shaking his hand in admiration.
“You have won the laurels,” smirked a fellow from amidst a wilderness of beard.
“Your election to the Assembly is a certainty,” declared another.
“You carry deadly weapons against Christ,” said a professor.
Mr. Hans smiled, and nodded so often that he was seized with a pain in the muscles of the face and neck. At length, the chairman’s bell came to the rescue.
“The Rev. Mr. Morgenroth will now address the meeting.”
The clergyman mounted the rostrum, but scarcely had he appeared there, when the crowd became possessed by a legion of hissing demons.
“Gentlemen,” began the fearless priest, “the duty of my calling as well as personal conviction demands that I should enter a solemn protest against the sundering of school and church.”
Further the priest was not allowed to proceed. Loud howling, hissing, and whistling drowned his voice. The president called for order.
“In the name of good‐breeding, I beg this most honorable assembly to hear the speaker out in patience,” cried Mr. Schwefel.
The mob relaxed into unwilling silence like a growling beast.
“Not all the citizens of this town are infected with infidelity,” the reverend gentleman went on to say. “Many honorable gentlemen believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and in his church. These citizens wish their children to receive a religious education; it would, therefore, be unmitigated terrorism, tyrannical constraint of conscience, to force Christian parents to bring up their children in the spirit of unbelief.”
This palpable truth progress could not bear to listen to. A mad yell was set up. Clenched fists were shaken at the clergyman, and fierce threats thundered from all sides of the church. “Down with the priest!” “Down with the accursed black‐coat!” “Down with the dog of a Jesuit!” and similar exclamations, resounded from all sides. The chairman rang his bell in vain. The mob grew still more furious and noisy. The clergyman was compelled to come down.
“Such is the liberty, the education, the tolerance, the humanity of progress,” said he sadly to his colleague.
Christian Art Of The Catacombs.
By An Anglican.
“I do love those ancient ruins: We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.”—Webster (1620).
“Quamlibet ancipites texant hinc inde recessus, Arcta sub umbrosis atria porticibus; Attamen excisi subter cava viscera montis Crebra terebrato fornice lux penetrat; Sic datur absentis per subterranea solis Cernere fulgorem luminibusque frui.”
—Prudentius, Peristephanon, Hymn iv.
The Catacombs of Rome were the birthplace of Christian art as well as the sepulchre of the children of the early church. It is only within a few years that the modern traveller has been induced, through the careful study which the Catacombs have received, to visit these subterranean homes of the persecuted Christian, so filled with the symbolism of his faith. From 1567, the year in which Father Bosio began his investigations in the Catacombs, till the present century, some minds of kindred interest in these burial‐places of the martyrs have been fascinated with their Christian archæology, and from time to time have appeared works upon subjects connected with the Catacombs. F. Bosio spent thirty years in making explorations, and left for posthumous publication his Roma Sotterranea, which F. Severano issued from the press in Rome in 1632. Seventy years later came Inscriptionum antiquarum explicatio by the learned Fabretti, and eighteen years later still, F. Boldetti, who had devoted the greater part of his life to the examination of the monuments, inscriptions, and paintings of the Catacombs, embodied the results of his patience and industry in the great work Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterii dei Santi Martiri, etc., di Roma. Then came Bottari’s wonderful studies on the Christian art of the Catacombs entitled Sculture e pitture sagre, estratte dai Cimiteri di Roma. Following in the paths opened by these zealous Italian students, M. D’Agincourt, M. Raoul Rochette, Abbé Gaume, and the eminent artist M. Perret, have contributed to the archæological literature of France several important works on the Roman Catacombs.
To the pontificate of Pius IX. belongs the honor of producing the two greatest antiquarian scholars of our age. The one, the Cavaliere Canina, has treated with remarkable acuteness and judgment of the Appian Way from the Capenian Gate to Bovillæ;(150) the other, the Cavaliere de Rossi, of the Catacombs,(151) and it is of the latter that we propose to speak. It is impossible, in the brief space that is allotted to us, to do more than select one of the interesting subjects with which his works on the Catacombs abound, and as an Anglican student of the Catholic Church, its doctrines, its discipline, and its literature, there is none which so enkindles our enthusiasm as the Christian art of the early ages, and the symbolism with which it is clothed. We approach these pictures in the dark crypts and amid the countless tombs of the first martyrs of the faith with no little reverence. We lay aside our shoes, for the ground consecrated to the early dead is sacred, and the earnest wish of our heart is to put away the prejudice of ecclesiastical education and association. With this view before us, we make the noble words of Montesquieu our own: “Ceux qui nous avertissent sont les compagnons de nos travaux. Si le critique et l’auteur cherchent la vérité, ils out le même intérêt; car la vérité est le bien de tous les hommes: ils seront des confédérés, et non pas des ennemis.”(152)
From the early ages of the church till the close of the Vth century, the Christians of Rome were driven by the sword of persecution to seek a hiding‐place wherein to exercise the holy mysteries of their religion, and to inter the remains of their dead. The vast subterranean caverns, now known as Catacombs, but more anciently called Areæ, Cryptæ, and Cœmeteria, afforded a shelter for the living and sepulture for the faithful departed. These Catacombs doubtless had their origin in the sand‐ pits, or arenariæ, arenifodinæ, which the pagans had excavated to procure materials for building purposes.(153) Suetonius(154) describes how Phaon exhorted Nero to enter one of these caverns made by excavations of sand, and Cicero alludes to the arenariæ, outside of the Porta Esquilina.(155) In the admirable essay by Michele Stefano de Rossi, entitled Analisi Geologica ed Architettonica, and annexed to the work of his brother, it is stated that the Catacombs, with perhaps the exception of two that are Jewish, are the work of the early Christians.(156)
By singular perseverance and careful discrimination in the study of documents running far back into the centuries, the Cavaliere de Rossi transferred the situation of the Catacombs of S. Callistus from the church of S. Sebastian, where they had erroneously been located, to a place a half mile nearer Rome, between the Via Appia and the Via Ardeatina; on the left of the road was the cemetery of S. Prætextatus, and on the right that of S. Callistus. The discovery of these hallowed crypts and sarcophagi of the early saints and popes, is of inestimable value in elucidating intricate questions of doctrine and practice, of history and tradition, which have vexed the theological world for centuries. We can scarcely resist the temptation to follow M. de Rossi through these dim cathedrals of our Christian ancestors, and reproduce a part, at least, of his masterly elucidation of their general topography, together with the history of heroic suffering and Christlike courage which the sites and names of those dark ages of danger suggest. But we must forbear, and proceed to the pictures and emblems in order to draw from them some lessons of that early fortitude, which the child of the church of the first centuries learned, as he knelt by the tomb of his companion in the faith, and looked up to the ceilings of crypts and semicircular compartments to catch by the glimmering light of smoking lamps the lineaments of some design of the religion which he professed.
The paintings of the Catacombs represent the cardinal truths of Christianity, and their types are taken from both the Old and New Testament Scriptures, as also, in rare instances, from heathen mythology. The picture, perhaps most common to the eye of the worshipper at those shrines of the martyred dead, was the representation of the Saviour in that character which exhibits the tenderest attributes of his sacred humanity, and appeals to the sympathetic element in man. Christ as the Good Shepherd conveys in its fulness of meaning what perhaps no other type of our Lord does. It is variously represented, and under different forms may refer to the foreshadowing of the Messiah’s coming in the Old Testament and its fulfilment in the New. King David had been a shepherd, and understood the needs and labors of the shepherd life, and it may be that in the days of his pastoral innocence, when the lion and the bear were the destroyers of his flock, he wrote that psalm whose tone is one of quiet and trustfulness: “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”(157) Thus, in the days of persecution, the Christian of the Catacombs might read the sacred legend of our Lord under the figure of a shepherd—bearing the sheep upon his shoulders. The Good Shepherd was pictured again as bearing a goat, and in the Catacombs of S. Callistus he stands between a goat and a sheep; the former occupies the more honorable place, the right hand, and the latter the left. Often the Good Shepherd leans on his pastoral crook, and bears in his hand a pipe. All these typical allusions refer to his character as exhibited in the Gospels. They teach the merciful watchfulness of our Lord, and the readiness with which he takes back into his fold, the church, yea, to the more honorable place by his side, the wayward and the erring. “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. And other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.”(158) Protestant critics have not been wanting in an attempt to trace the symbolism of this figure of the Good Shepherd to a heathen origin, and adduce as an argument in behalf of their theory that its prototype is in the Tombs of the Nasones. Even in questions of Christian archæology is exhibited the same polemical spirit which animated the accomplished English scholar, Conyers Middleton, who lent all the resources of his vast learning in classical history to prove the resemblance and identity of pagan and Catholic rites. But a more learned and reverent critic in the field of antiquities is the incomparable Marangoni, whose splendid work, Cose Gentilesche trasportate ad Uso delle Chiese, sets at rest for ever many problems which Mr. Poynder, a shallow pretender to scholarship, revived in the Alliance of Popery and Heathenism.
While the ancient heathen lived in the atmosphere of a religion which incited to cheerfulness and pleasure in the present life, it portrayed but faintly any idea of immortality. The world around him was peopled with unseen spirits. They inhabited woods and streams, and he was ever watchful to interpret the slightest signs or omens which might yield him some token to enlighten the spiritual darkness of his soul. The mythological system of the pagan was a vital reality. It accompanied him not only to the solemn festival in the temple, but on the march, in the camp, and in the market‐place. It was with him in hours of joy and of sorrow; but it penetrated not beyond the boundaries of this world. It offered no cross here, and knew nothing of the crown hereafter. There were no bright pictures of the rewards of eternity. This life was the narrow limit of his hope and his labor. Hades or the grave was dreaded because of its sunlessness. Iphigenia entreats her father for life in an impassioned appeal, which sums up the heathen’s belief:
“To view the light of life, To mortals most sweet; in death there is Nor light nor joys; and crazed is he who seeks To die; for life, though full of ills, has more Of good than death.”
Occasionally the ancient philosophers and poets give intimation of a belief in immortality, but not in resurrection, as Cicero in that eloquent longing for the day when he shall meet his illustrious friend Cato.(159) But, as we have said, of the great doctrine of the resurrection, which solved the dark enigmas of humanity, they were ignorant. The hold which classical mythology had upon the human mind was relaxed before this august mystery of the Catholic faith. Pagan temples were deserted, and the sacrificial fires on their altars extinguished.
“The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty, That had her haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat’ry depths; all these have vanished. They live no longer in the faith of reason!”(160)
It is not remarkable, therefore, that delineations of the doctrine of the resurrection should not have been unusual in the church of the Catacombs. Two such representations, one from the Old Testament, and the other from the New, will exhibit the forms under which it was presented. Jonas as a type of the resurrection of our Lord has its authority from S. Matthew.(161) “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Four scenes from the history of Jonas are found in the chapels and on the tombs of the Catacombs, sometimes represented singly, sometimes all compressed under one type. The first is the prophet being thrown into the deep, the second as swallowed by the great fish which “the Lord had prepared,” the third as “vomited out upon dry land,” the fourth as lying under the shadow of a gourd. As we have seen, according to the Gospel of S. Matthew, the swallowing of Jonas by the whale, and being cast forth in safety after three days, was typical of the burial and the resurrection of our Lord himself; and may not the pictures of the fourth series denote not only the sufferings of the individual Christian, and the care which his risen Master bestows upon him, but also the vicissitudes of the Church Catholic in every age of the world? “Sometimes she gains, sometimes she loses; and more often she is at once gaining and losing in different parts of her history.... Scarcely are we singing Te Deums, when we have to turn to our Misereres; scarcely are we in peace, when we are in persecution; scarcely have we gained a triumph, when we are visited by a scandal. Nay, we make progress by means of reverses; our griefs are our consolations; we lose Stephen to gain Paul, and Matthias replaced the traitor Judas.”(162) When the eye of the early Christian rested upon this fourth representation from the prophet’s life, it caught another and a more subtle signification, which is read perhaps oftener in the night of affliction and persecution than in the day of joy and prosperity. Our century, Catholic and Protestant alike, needs to study its outlines as much as the first century and the worshippers in the Catacombs. “Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left?”(163) Here is a beautiful symbolism of the tender mercy of our God for all who are in error and in sin. It opposes the spiritual Pharisaism of our day, and exacts meekness and charity from all men. It is the destroyer of malevolence and anger and strife.(164)
Another picture, taken from the New Testament, and of frequent representation, is the “man sick of the palsy.” It is generally regarded by Protestant writers as belonging to that series of symbolical illustrations which embody the doctrine of the resurrection; and, to give greater force to their interpretation of the painting, they place much stress upon the words of the sacred text: “Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.” So far as we have examined copies of this picture, we are inclined to believe that it is connected with these which refer to the resurrection, except in one remarkable instance, in which it clearly symbolizes the sacrament of penance as it is taught in the Roman communion. In the Catacombs of S. Hermes is a representation of a Christian kneeling before another, which seems from its close proximity to the series of pictures of the Paralytic to point more directly to that other passage of the Gospel narrative: “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.” If our Lord delegated “such power unto men”—and the only logical and intelligent interpretation of the words of S. John(165) conveys this doctrine or it conveys nothing—here is a clear illustration of the power of the priesthood, which admits of no evasive contradiction, of no complicated and artificial hypothesis for the sake of escaping the recognition of the belief of the early Christians in the doctrine of sacerdotal absolution.
As resurrection is the portal of the church triumphant, so is baptism to the church militant. The former is but the complement and fulfilment of the latter. “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.”(166) The blessedness of the final consummation of the faithful departed was pictured in the symbols of the resurrection, and, as baptism is the foreshadowing of that glorious change which shall come over our vile bodies, it became a common subject of Christian art in the Catacombs. Its types are somewhat complex, and often susceptible of a twofold explanation. From the four scenes in the life of Moses, which are constantly repeated in the different Catacombs, we select that which prefigures Christian baptism—the miraculous supply of water in Kadesh. Art critics who have bestowed any attention upon the sacred pictures of the early ages place the representation of this miracle of Moses in the Catacombs of S. Agnes among the finest specimens of primitive delineation. Moses is pictured as bearing a rod, the emblem of power, with which “he smote the rock twice, and the water came out abundantly.” It is worthy of remark in passing that on vases found in the Catacombs, and on the sarcophagi as early, perhaps, as the IVth century, this same scene is depicted, and the rod, instead of being in the hand of Moses, is in that of S. Peter, and, in a few instances, the two are represented together, but the person who smites with the rod has inscribed over his head the name of S. Peter. Catholic writers on subterranean symbolism draw from it an artistic argument, which, coupled with the historical, seems an unanswerable statement of the question of the primacy of S. Peter. Quando Christus ad unum loquitur, unitas commendatur; et Petro primitus, quia in Apostolis Petrus est primus.(167) S. Peter bears the same relation to the Christian church that Moses did to the Israelitish. The one received from God the decalogue, which was to govern the actions of the Jews; the other, the keys, which were to open the kingdom of heaven. Nam et si adhuc clausum putas cœlum, memento claves ejus hic Dominum Petro, et per eum Ecclesiæ reliquisse.(168) Another type of baptism taken from the Old Testament, and capable of two expositions, is Noah in the ark. Here again, on the authority of an apostle, the church in the early ages read the history of Noah by the light of the new revelation made through the institutions founded by Christ. S. Peter, speaking of the small number saved by water at the deluge, adds: “The like figure whereunto, even baptism, doth now also save us,... by the resurrection of Jesus Christ,”(169) The ark is generally represented by a small box in which Noah sits or stands, receiving from the dove the olive branch of peace. Some writers on Christian archæology find in it a secondary meaning, regarding it as typical of the church, and the danger of those who are without the ark of safety.
Among favorite Old Testament subjects familiar to art students of the Catacombs are—Daniel in the lions’ den, and the three children of Israel in the fiery furnace at Babylon. Both are types of persecution, and of final deliverance through the miraculous interposition of God. In the cemetery of S. Priscilla, each of these pictures is to be seen, varying but slightly in the details of the portraiture. The three children appear clothed, and standing on the furnace. In a compartment beneath, the figure of a man is represented as feeding the fire with fresh fuel. Daniel, in the same cemetery, stands with outstretched arms between lions. The attitude in both these scenes from Jewish history appears to exhibit the ancient posture of the suppliant when in the act of prayer. A late writer on the Roman catacombs, the Rev. J. Spencer Northcote, D.D., formerly of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, spent much time, in company with the Cavaliere de Rossi and M. Perret, the French artist, in collecting materials for his small work on the burial‐places of the early Christians in Rome. He is so trustworthy a guide in everything that appertains to their archæology, that we gladly accept the explanation which he suggests of the position of Daniel and the three children of Israel. Speaking of the ancient attitude of Christian prayer—the hands extended in the form of a cross—he says:(170) “This form, which, as we learn from the Fathers, was universal among the early Christians, is still retained in some measure by the priests of the present day in the celebration of Mass, by Capuchins and others in serving Mass, and by numbers among the poor everywhere; it is worth noticing that S. Gregory Nazianzen expressly speaks of Daniel overcoming the wild beasts by stretching out his hands, meaning, of course by the power of prayer; but the explanation might almost seem to show that S. Gregory himself was familiar with this usual way of representing him.”
The publication of the Cavaliere de Rossi, which has so greatly alarmed the Protestant controversialist, is Immagine Scelte della B. Vergine Maria, tratte dalle Catacombe Romane. It is most beautifully illustrated with chromo‐lithographic engravings, and reflects great honor on the present state of art in Rome. The purpose of the work is to exhibit the veneration with which the Christians of the Catacombs esteem the Mother of our Lord. At a period of time in the history of the church, almost apostolic, that purest of human feelings, maternal love, subdued the soul of the artist, and kindled his imagination to trace with the brush or carve with the chisel the Blessed Virgin and her Divine Son.
The Virgin Mother,
“Who so above All mothers shone, The Mother of The Blessed One,”
is depicted by the artist with a tender and devout affection. The scenes are taken from the sacred narrative of the Evangelists, and an examination of them, simply from an æsthetical point of view, will more than repay the connoisseur of art. But to the conscientious archæologist and the sober inquirer, they occupy a grave relation. They throw additional light on the writings of S. Justin, S. Irenæus, S. Cyril, S. Jerome, and Tertullian, in regard to that dogma which, of all others, has perplexed the minds of earnest men outside the Roman communion. The honor paid to the Blessed Virgin is to‐day the especial “crux” of Dr. Pusey,(171) as it is, perhaps, of many not so learned as he, but as thoroughly dispassionate in the temper of their souls toward the attainment of divine truth. The poet of The Christian Year reached a lofty strain in behalf of a long‐forgotten doctrine in the Anglican Church when he gave in his verses for the Annunciation:
“Ave Maria! blessed Maid! Lily of Eden’s fragrant shade, Who can express the love That nurtured thee so pure and sweet, Making thy heart a shelter meet For Jesus’ holy dove?
“Ave Maria! Mother blest! To whom, caressing and caress’d, Clings the Eternal Child; Favor’d beyond Archangel’s dream, When first on thee with tenderest gleam Thy new‐born Saviour smil’d.”(172)
But Keble caught from an excursion to Ben Nevis, as his biographer conjectures, the hints of that beautiful poem, “Mother out of Sight,” which was intended for the Lyra Innocentium, but through the influence of two friends, Dyson and Sir John Coleridge, was withheld by the author, and only saw the light as one of his posthumous pieces. It has a clearer doctrinal ring than the stanzas for the Feast of the Annunciation, which foreshadow something of the intercessory power of the Mother of God. It merits the high praise which Keble’s ever‐faithful friend and, for years, his gifted ally bestows upon him. We more than regret that space forbids us giving the entire poem. It loses much of its beauty and continuity by fragmentary quotation, yet, from the fourteen stanzas, we are only able to reproduce four:
“Yearly since then with bitterer cry Man hath assailed the throne on high, And sin and hate more fiercely striven To mar the league ’twixt earth and heaven. But the dread tie that pardoning hour, Made fast in Mary’s awful bower, Hath mightier prov’d to bind than we to break; None may that work undo, that Flesh unmake.
“Thenceforth, whom thousand worlds adore, He calls thee Mother evermore; Angel nor saint his face may see Apart from what he took of thee; How may we choose but name thy name, Echoing below their high acclaim In holy creeds? since earthly song and prayer Must keep faint time to the dread Anthems there.
“Therefore, as kneeling day by day, We to our Father duteous pray, So unforbidden we may speak An Ave to Christ’s Mother meek (As children with ‘good morrow’ come To elders, in some happy home), Inviting so the saintly host above With our unworthiness to pray in love.
“To pray with us, and gently bear Our falterings in the pure, bright air. But strive we pure and bright to be In spirit. Else how vain of thee Our earnest dreamings, awful Bride! Feel we the sword that pierced thy side; Thy spotless lily‐flower, so clear of hue, Shrinks from the breath impure, the tongue untrue.”(173)
Another poet, once an Anglican, then a Catholic priest, and now passed into the land where the mists of controversy are cleared away, attained a higher plane of truth in regard to the Mother of our Lord:
“But scornful men have boldly said Thy love was leading me from God; And yet in this I did but tread The very path my Saviour trod.
“They know but little of thy worth Who speak these heartless words to me; For what did Jesus love on earth One‐half so tenderly as thee?
“Get me the grace to love thee more; Jesus will give, if thou wilt plead; And, Mother, when life’s cares are o’er, Oh! I shall love thee then indeed.
“Jesus, when his three hours were run, Bequeathed thee from the cross to me; And oh! how can I love thy Son, Sweet Mother, if I love not thee?”
We return to these pictures of the Catacombs, and we will content ourselves with an allusion only, preferring that the reader who is interested in them should examine them through his own, rather than through another’s eyes. From a lunette in an arcosolio in the cemetery of S. Agnes is a picture which of late years has been frequently copied. It represents the Blessed Virgin with uplifted hands, seemingly in the act of intercession, with the Infant Jesus in her lap. In the cemetery of Domitilla is a picture of the Mother and Son, and four Magi offering their oblations. It may be well to remark that the Gospel history of the Adoration of the Wise Men from the East does not limit their number. We have somewhere seen it suggested that the restriction to three had its rise from the offerings presented—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Another scene of the Adoration of the Magi is given with some difference of detail. The Virgin Mother is seated holding the Divine Son in her lap, above her head appears the star which guided the wise men to where the Infant lay. To the left is a somewhat youthful person, supposed to be S. Joseph. He holds in his hand a book, which the Cavaliere de Rossi very wisely and ingeniously interprets to be the writings of the evangelical prophet Isaiah, whose prophecies concerning the Messiah had now their fulfilment in the Infant Jesus.
Such are some of the many beautiful pictures which Roman art, through the indefatigable industry of de Rossi, has given us of the Blessed Virgin as represented in early ages. To other than jaundiced eyes, calmly and candidly studying them, they reveal the light in which they were so often viewed by the suffering children of the church amid the persecutions which attended the conflict between paganism and Christianity. In teaching us to honor the Mother of our Lord—Θεότοκος—they impress us with more distinct and more tangible thoughts of the incarnation of her Son.(174) With his usual discrimination and mastery of style, Dr. John Henry Newman has well said: “The Virgin and Child is not a mere modern idea; on the contrary, it is represented again and again, as every visitor to Rome is aware, in the paintings of the Catacombs. Mary is there drawn with the Divine Infant in her lap, she with hands extended in prayer, he with his hand in the attitude of blessing. No representation can more forcibly convey the doctrine of the high dignity of the Mother, and, I will add, of her power over her Son. Why should the memory of his time of subjection be so dear to Christians and so carefully preserved? The only question to be determined is the precise date of these remarkable monuments of the first age of Christianity. That they belong to the centuries of what Anglicans call the ‘undivided church’ is certain, but lately investigations have been pursued which place some of them at an earlier date than any one anticipated as possible.”(175)
One other topic remains to be considered before we pass on to some general reflections which early Christian art suggests. It was not uncommon for the artist in the first ages of the church to take subjects of heathen mythology, and invest them by his art with a Christian symbolism. The genius of Michael Angelo, so truly Catholic in taste and devout in expression, transplanted pagan forms from the broken temples of the elder civilization to the Christian churches of the new. He retouched them under the aureate light shed upon them by the reverent imagination of the Fathers. On the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are painted by this master‐hand the Sibyls, who in early times were regarded as the unconscious prophets of divine truth, uttering in their blindness crude intimations of the glory of him who was to be the fulfilment and completion of all shadows and of all types.(176) In the Catacombs may be seen a representation of Orpheus playing upon his lyre, and subduing by his melodious strains the ferocity of man and beast, and drawing even from inanimate creation by the power of music the subjects of his sway. Rocks and trees yielded to his lyric sweetness, the region of Plato opened to the sound of his “golden shell,” the wheel of Ixion ceased its revolutions, and Tityus forgot for the nonce the vulture that preyed on his vitals. The Thracian bard was the representative of the civilizer of savage men.
“Silvestres homines sacer interpresque Deorum Cædibus et victu fœdo deterruit Orpheus; Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres, rabidosque leones.”(177)
The symbolism of the picture seems to be this, that as Orpheus drew the whole creation to him by the music of his lyre, and called from the realms of Hades his beloved Eurydice to the regions of light, so Christ by his compassion commanded the love of all men, as well by his divine power the hidden forces of nature. Hades, or the grave, opened to him on that first Easter morning, as it will open to us on the last.
“Prisoner of Hope thou art—look up and sing In hope of promised spring. As in the pit his father’s darling lay Beside the desert way, And knew not how, but knew his God would save Even from that living grave; So, buried with our Lord, we’ll close our eyes To the decaying world, till angels bid us rise.”(178)
The late Dean of S. Paul’s, Dr. Milman, remarks, with an air of triumph, in his Ecclesiastical History,(179) that “the Catacombs of Rome, faithful to their general character, offer no instance of a crucifixion.” For the absence of the crucifix in the Catacombs, we as a Protestant can conceive of two causes, either of which would to our mind be sufficient to account for it. First, in the early ages it was highly important for the growth of the church, especially in the Roman Empire, to guard against the introduction of any symbol which would suggest pain or repugnance to Jewish converts; secondly, it was essential to clothe truth under a type which would not inspire mockery on the part of pagans, and so assist in keeping alive the persecuting spirit of the times. This in a measure no doubt led the early artists to use the heathen symbol of Orpheus as typical of Christ. A beautiful passage in the work of D’Agincourt affords still another general cause: “Entirely occupied with the celestial recompense which awaited them after the trials of their troubled life, and often of so dreadful a death, the Christians saw in death, and even in execution, only a way by which they arrived at this everlasting happiness; and, so far from associating with this image that of the tortures or privations which opened heaven before them, they took pleasure in enlivening it with smiling colors, or presenting it under agreeable symbols, adorning it with flowers and vine‐leaves; for it is thus that the asylum of death appears to us in the Christian Catacombs. There is no sign of mourning, no token of resentment, no expression of vengeance; all breathes softness, benevolence, charity.”(180)
Many emblems denoting the cardinal virtues are sculptured on the walls of the chapels and on the tombs of the Catacombs. Flowers, garlands, and grapes intertwine each other and embellish these ancient crypts. The laurel speaks of victory, the olive of peace and reconciliation, and the palm of final triumph. The lyre is significant of the æsthetical element of religion, and the anchor of hope for the heavenly port. The dove represents the Holy Spirit, the lamb the adorable Saviour—the Agnus Dei—the stag the thirsting of the soul for the paradise of God, and the peacock the belief in immortality. Among these general symbols so familiar to the saints of old, none is more prominent than the fish. Its history is ingenious, and, therefore, we will tarry for a moment ere we conclude. It naturally calls to mind the solemn parting of our Lord with the apostles by the Sea of Tiberias, when their nets were filled with fish, and Jesus “taketh bread and giveth them, and fish likewise.” In the church of the Catacombs this tender scene from the Evangelic record is always associated with the Holy Eucharist. As ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for a fish, contains the initial letters of the name and title of Christ—Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωπὴρ—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour—the figure was constantly used as a symbol of the divinity of Christ. In his Iconographie Chrêtienne, M. Didron assumes that this emblem on the sarcophagi of the Catacombs is simply indicative of the fact that the person buried beneath was by trade a fisherman. Certainly the numberless instances proving the falsity of this position render the opinion utterly worthless.
We must take leave of the Cavaliere de Rossi and the Christian art of the Roman Catacombs. Feeble as may be the execution of these pictures, crude in conception, and often colorless through the lapse of time, yet they speak of the ardor of the early Christian artists, and of the devotion and doctrine of the children of that church which is the mother of us all. In parting with the Cavaliere de Rossi, we say with all sincerity, that we have found nothing in his volumes unworthy of the reverential regard of honest and candid minds. Passages there are, which the timidity of Anglican churchmen would regard as dealing too freely with the symbolism of the Catacombs. Without accepting his conclusions in detail, we gratefully acknowledge that the Cavaliere de Rossi has shown English writers in what spirit all the grave questions of theology connected with subterranean art should be treated. His has been a great subject, and he has written with humility and ripeness of learning and clearness of apprehension, which well become the Christian scholar and the sacred theme. In closing his masterly work, we seem again bidding adieu to Rome, the reflection of whose classic greatness and Christian glory mellows hill and plain, pagan ruin and Catholic shrine.
“Gran Latinà Città di cui quanto il sol aureo gira Ne altera più, nè più onorata mira.”
And because of the house of the Lord our God, we utter from the depths of our heart the wish of the Psalmist of old: “Fiat pax in virtute tua: et abundantia in turribus tuis. Propter fratres meos, et proximos meos, loquebar pacem de te.”
Beating The Air.
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” says Owen Glendower, the great magician.
“So can I,” replies the sturdy, incredulous Hotspur. “But will they come?”
We are living in a sterner age than that in which Hotspur is supposed to have put this poser to the Welshman. Great declamations and fine promises will not do for any length of time, at least. We are hard, and prosy, and practical. We must have facts, and figures, and something clear before we are asked to choose a policy, or a system, or take a stand on a platform. Love of country, homes and altars, and all the old watchwords, serve no longer; they come down to a vulgar question of taxes, of custom‐house duties, of imports and exports, of pauperism, and the increase of crime. This hard, practical spirit has been carried with all the keenness of, if not an intellectual, at least a very intelligent age, into the sanctuary of religion, and men and women are no longer content to follow a sect or a creed because they happened to be born in it, or because their friends belong to it, or because as Giles has it, “Payrson says so, and Payrson’s daughter be married to Squoire.” They will have the why and wherefore: why they must take this creed and reject that; why they must take a part and not the whole; why it is necessary to be bothered with any form of belief at all, when, as they say, and many of them truthfully, they can get on well enough without it, and live happily, and play their part, and die out of the world without having committed any special faults against society, leaving behind them children whose rule in life shall be the truth and honor which they have bequeathed them as a last legacy. They have saved themselves infinite trouble by not mingling in the clashing of the sects, where each one claims to be the one, the only one, the church of Christ. One would imagine that Christ came only to set the world on fire and all good people by the ears; that, in fact, it would be better had he not come at all if this is to be the result, this wrangling and jangling and eternal jargon about what one must do to be saved, as though good people, who do no earthly harm must join one or other of these conflicting parties, who can never agree among themselves, and use the name of the God of peace as a firebrand to stir up dissension and the worst of strife. Influenced by thoughts such as these, we find so many of the most intelligent people, what we might call Nothingarians, believing in nothing but the law of the land, that is, of expediency—a class that is growing wider every day in proportion as the sects are loosening and parting asunder; which embraces the ablest writers on the ablest secular journals; which sees only one religious body in the world endowed with a consistency, and a uniqueness, and years, and a glorious history, and a strange unity that will not be broken; a church which takes to‐day, as it has always taken, the bold stand before the world—we are the one church founded by Jesus Christ, in this church and in this church alone is salvation, not because we say it, but because he has said it: a stand in their eyes outrageous, so utterly opposed, as it is, to the dictates of human reason, with its doctrines of infallibility and what not; yet, after all, logical and strangely consistent throughout; so bold, so logical, so strangely consistent and united, that if there were a church at all it would be this, for all else is uncertainty. And as the Nation said the other day in an article on the Old Catholics, written evidently by one of the class we have been describing: “The great strength of the Church of Rome lies now in the fact that he who quits her knows not whither he is going, and can find no man to tell him.” Schism and heresy and persecution have tried her in turn, and exhausted their efforts in vain; she stands today as she stood on the morning of the Christian era, full and fair in the light of God, not a dint in the rock, not a loosening in the edifice, though the ages have washed over her, and washed all other landmarks away; and the dove that leaves the ark finds no resting‐place over the barren waters; and the olive branch of peace is not yet found to tell us that the waters have subsided, and the earth is again as God made it.
Religious unity has been the dream of earnest seekers ever since Jesus Christ gave the final mandate to the apostle to go forth and convert the world; and it would seem that the dream is as far from fulfilment to‐day as it ever was; that it is likely to be so till the end of time. The Catholic Church is denounced as the great stumbling‐block in the way of the much‐desired unity. The sects say to her each in turn: You will not come to us; you will not join us. We are ready to make some sacrifices, but you will not budge an inch. You are false; you are absurd; you are mysterious; you are superstitious; you are everything that is bad—but only give up infallibility, says one, and we are with you; surrender the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, says another, and we will join you; only let your priests marry, says a third; give up the sacraments, says a fourth. To these, and all and many more, the church replies now as always: “Non possumus.” We cannot; God gave the laws to his church. They are his laws; they are irrevocable; more fixed than those of nature; it is not for us to change them. There again, say her adversaries: the old cry. You will not change; you will not concede; you are perverse and implacable. How can we ever have unity? They forget that they ask the church to dismember herself; to destroy her own identity; to break up, and come down to their level. Suppose she were to do so, what would the result be? She would be lost and absorbed in the sea of sectarianism. The one object to which all eyes look, whether faithfully or maliciously, as at least fixed and united to‐day as to‐morrow, as yesterday, would be blotted out of the sight of man. Even humanly speaking, much would be lost; nothing would be gained; and union would be farther off than ever.
The best example of the truth of this is given in the history of the last great departure from the Catholic Church—the Protestant Reformation. Though this movement never reached to the proportions of Arianism, yet it was a movement that captivated nations, and was eminently adapted to favor the revolutionary spirit then breaking out among men, to throw off all constraint of whatever nature, and stand upon the false notion of unbridled liberty of thought and action. The new doctrine of private interpretation spread rapidly, because it pandered to the age. Nations broke away from the church; a new faith, a new creed, grander, larger, fuller, purer than the old, was to be built up. And what was the result? What is the result? A multiplication of sect upon sect; a fresh departure; a new interpretation of the Gospel of God day after day; a breaking out into the wildest and most erratic courses of belief and conduct, oftentimes so utterly subversive to all government that it was obliged to be forcibly repressed by the law of the lands which at first favored it for its own purposes. This tower of faith that men would build from earth to heaven, like the old tower of pride, ended in nothing—crumbled away and caused a Babel—a confusion of beliefs. Such is the inevitable end of all religions that men make for themselves; vain efforts; uncertainty; good perverted or rendered useless; disagreement and religious anarchy.
No wonder that men cry out for something fixed. No wonder that so many turn infidel. Protestantism has proved an utter failure as a guidance and a religion to men. So much so that, if one asked for a definition of the Protestant religion today, it could not be given him; and the only right answer would be not a faith or a system, but the opposition of non‐ Catholic Christians to the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps the most striking proof of this is exemplified in the late meeting at Cologne. There were assembled delegates from several rival sects and churches, in the endeavor to bring order out of chaos, to plant a new church and a new faith which all men might accept. If the Protestant bishops who attended there were satisfied that their religion or form of religion was true and all‐sufficient, why not stay at home? Why did they go at all? While Döllinger and the rest, satisfied of the failure of Protestantism, cling fast to the torn shred of the Roman Catholic faith, and proclaim loudly and absurdly that they are Catholic still, it is a deep and bitter lesson to Protestants of the hopelessness of their efforts to create a unity such as they see alone in the Catholic Church.
In the midst of this general and growing dissatisfaction, a pamphlet has been put into our hands which promises to settle the vexed question once for all. It is written by a Baptist minister, the Rev. James W. Wilmarth, pastor at Pemberton, N. J. Who he is, beyond the fact stated on the cover, we do not know. His pamphlet has no claim to our attention beyond the thousand‐and‐one such thrust upon our notice day after day. But as it is somewhat pretentious, and has received the sanction of no less distinguished a body than the West New Jersey Baptist Association, which body, by vote, requested its publication (the substance of it having been delivered in the “doctrinal sermon” preached September 13, 1871), it may be taken to represent the orthodox Baptist doctrine, and may, therefore, be glanced at just to see what that doctrine is, or is supposed to be, for we have no doubt many Baptists would disagree with it. The author takes a bold line, “The True Idea of the Church: Baptist vs. Catholic,” for he recognizes(181) no logical middle position between Baptist and Catholic ground, and, therefore, salvation lies in one of the two bodies, as it cannot lie in both. What Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and the rest may think of this high‐handed mode of dealing with their several pretensions to truth, we may imagine. But they can scarcely complain, as all in turn adopt precisely the same line of argument: the haven of salvation resting not between Presbyterian and Baptist or Methodist and Episcopalian, but between each of these sects and Rome. They slide by each other, and confront us. The only similar example we can call to mind at present of such union out of disunion, is that of the fallen spirits.
It is unnecessary to observe that, in a contest of this nature between an individual Baptist minister and the whole Catholic Church, the church, notwithstanding her rather formidable array of theologians and philosophers, gets decidedly the worst of the battle. And, though the author, as he tells us in his preface, “has endeavored to ‘speak the truth in love,’ ” perhaps it was only natural to find, particularly towards the end, his temper proving a little too much for his “love,” so that we must not be astonished, though “in no partisan spirit has he discussed his theme,” at meeting little phrases scattered here and there of a decidedly unlovable nature. Thus, the Holy Father is mentioned as “the bigoted Pope of Rome” who “sits cursing modern civilization and freedom, and sighing for the return of the dark ages and the inquisition”; the whole Catholic system “a diabolical imposture,” italicized; “Catholics appeal chiefly to sentiment,” “undervalue the importance of Scriptures,” “may be good Catholics, and yet profane, immoral, untruthful, and regardless of the will of God, and that millions notoriously are so.” If this be our author’s mode of asking for his views “the candid consideration of every reader of whatever religious persuasion,” we should strongly recommend him for the future to alter his tone; if it be “speaking the truth in love,” we wonder what his notions of speaking the truth in wrath would be. Catholic writers are habitually accused of intolerance in tone and controversy: we humbly submit that, when we have to encounter—as we are compelled to do every day—adversaries of this stamp, we may be reasonably pardoned for not using studious phrases with men on whom politeness is thrown away.
A year has now flown by since this “discourse was prepared and delivered under a profound conviction of the importance and timeliness of the vital truths therein set forth, and it is now given to the public with the same conviction.” As to its timeliness, we have nothing to object, it was probably meant for Baptists rather than Catholics, and with an eye to the dissensions that seem racking and threatening to rend that body at present. In fact, from its whole tone and the round rating he gives members of his community who “would give up their vantage‐ground by concealment or compromise of truth,” and his insisting on their “maintaining their Baptist attitude” (whatever that may be precisely he fails to explain), the pamphlet sounds very much like a warning‐note—like the weak cry of “No surrender!” when surrender follows immediately, like Mr. Winkle’s “all right” when Mr. Winkle felt satisfied that it was all wrong. With regard to its “importance,” notwithstanding the writer’s “conviction” on the point, we may be permitted to entertain some slight doubt. Authors are sometimes apt to overrate the importance of their productions. At all events, after a year of trial, we have heard of no very wonderful result following the launching of this pamphlet on the troubled waters of controversy. Catholics are Catholics still. The church stands precisely at its first starting‐point of some nineteen centuries ago, while the Baptists stand at theirs—a point involved still in a region of mist, and apparently rapidly dissolving into it. So that, with regard to this closing of the controversy generally, we are compelled to arrive at the painful conclusion that it has either been very greatly undervalued by the public at large, or is absolutely good for nothing.
The author proposed to himself to place the only two ideas of the church, Baptist and Catholic, which he acknowledges, in such juxtaposition, in so clear a light, that all who read must be compelled to adopt either the one or the other. In other words, be purposed ending forever all the controversies that have ever raged between church and church, in a pamphlet of forty‐two pages. And his mode of setting about it is at least original.
“I do not propose to discuss this question of ‘true church’ after the common method. I shall not raise questions of apostolic or of historic succession, of ‘legality’ or ‘validity’ or ‘regularity.’ I propose to go deeper than that into the heart of the subject.”
Now, with all due respect to the reverend author, these little items, which he finds it so convenient to throw overboard in such an arbitrary fashion, constitute, for his readers at least, the heart of the subject. He tells us that “all the Christian ages with one consent acknowledge the church to be a divine society”—human‐divine, Catholics would say—“governed by divine law, established by Jesus Christ.”
Here we have, then, according to the author’s own words, a society, established by a person, at a certain date, which has come down from that person to to‐day. Men say that it has altered from its original. Two societies claim to be the original, the Baptist and the Catholic. It lies in one or the other, not between. We want to find out which it is. In this inquiry, history is nothing, legality is nothing, succession is nothing, validity is nothing. That is not the true method of going to work to find out what this society is; whether it has ever been broken, whether it contains and carries out what Christ its founder gave it, whether its members practise to‐day what they practised at the beginning—all that is nothing. The question is “the idea which underlies it all. What then is the true idea of the church? This is the great question.”
If the author proposed to argue in this style, he should have stated at starting his definition of the true idea of the church. He should have defined the term in order to explain clearly what he was seeking. But he does nothing of the kind. In fact, he soon loses the very word “idea,” and substitutes for it in one place “view,” in another “theories.” So that after all it comes down in plain English to what is your opinion on the subject, or what is your notion about it, despite his trite “challenges of the Catholic idea of the church at the bar of reason,” and so forth.
In fact, there is just that show of shallow learning sprinkled throughout the whole pamphlet which a preacher endowed with more words than weight generally uses to a thick‐headed congregation, who take his words for wisdom from the very fact that they cannot understand them. There are the divisions and subdivisions: the 1, 2, 3, in large and small figures, and occasionally in Roman characters; the appeals to this, that, and the other; the citing of “well‐known facts” and “notorious things” without substantiating them by any references, as in p. 17. “Witness the Baptist originators of the British and Foreign Bible Society; Carey, Judson, and their successors” in support of the view that with Baptists originated the desire for the revision of the Bible. Again, speaking of Catholic doctrine: “If men leave the church, they part from grace and are lost.” Apropos of which telling fact he informs us in the next sentence that “the history of Augustinianism is an instructive illustration. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was, in many respects, what would now be termed a high Calvinist. His fervid eloquence and mental power made a deep impression upon the theology of the Catholic (not then Roman Catholic) Church of the Latin world.” And that is all he says about him. As far as any evidence he furnishes to support it goes, he might just as well have substituted the name of S. Thomas Aquinas for S. Augustine, or Pius IX., or, as far as the majority of his readers know to the contrary, Tippoo Sahib. And in the very opening of the pamphlet the same shallowness is strikingly exemplified. He chooses the text, Acts ii. 47, “And the Lord added to the church daily those who are saved,” which, as he observes, reads in the version of King James, “Such as should be saved.” This text—his own rendering—“is one of those passages in which an incidental statement, as by a flash of lightning, reveals a whole body of doctrine.” In what it involves we find the true idea of the church, that is, the Baptist doctrine that we are regenerated in Christ by his death, and that baptism is, as it were, only a symbol, a sort of mark, by which we are known as belonging to the church, but not necessary for salvation, inasmuch as we are saved before we receive it. He alleges, with reference to the Greek version, that “should be saved” is wrong and “are saved” is right. And there the matter rests. Now, while on this very important point, whereon indeed rests his theory, he might as well have been a little more exact and explicit. A Greek reference is such a vague thing to build on. We agree with him that “should be saved” is a wrong rendering; as “are saved” happens also to be. The verse runs: Ο δε κυριος προσετιθει τους σωζομενους καθ᾽ ημεραν τη Εκκλησια. The present participle σωζομενους means being saved; but a present participle following a verb in the imperfect or aorist tense must be rendered imperfect, and therefore the passage should run, “And the Lord added daily to the church such as were being saved,” that is, such as were in the act or state of coming into the church through the merit of the death of Christ and the movements of his divine grace; a fact which throws altogether another light on the author’s fixed starting point. These things we mention to show how little trust can be placed on men who talk so loudly and pretentiously in this loose style. It shows also how very weak and treacherous is this absolute dependence on the private interpretation of the word of the Bible, whereon the Baptists stake their doctrine and salvation; and how insufficient the absolute creed which hangs for life or death on the possibly dubious rendering of a passage in a dead language.
But let us examine this doctrine, which all, whether Catholic or Anglican, Methodist or Jew, are bound to accept if they would be saved. We Catholics are asked to surrender for it the faith which we have held through the centuries of the Christian era, in defence of which we have poured out our blood so lavishly, tracing the martyr stream down through the long vista of ages, from the death on the cross to the stoning of Stephen, to the massacre of the nuns in China but yesterday. We are told to‐day that all our history, our sacraments, our doctrine, the faith on which we are built, our succession of pontiffs, the sacred orders of our priests, the church itself, which we define as the union of all the faithful under one head, which head is Jesus Christ, whose successor is the pope, are one and all “a diabolical imposture,” and that if we hope for salvation we must surrender them for the true doctrine as explained by this author.
“The Baptist holds that men receive salvation directly from Christ, and by virtue of an independent transaction with him; that a believer’s salvation is secured by a personal union with Christ; and that he is divinely commanded, after being thus saved, to unite with the church for the sake of personal profit and of usefulness; and that the church so constituted is to be governed by the law of Christ. He makes doctrine and conversion come first. Out of doctrine and out of conversion proceeds the church. And the saved man, already saved, comes into the church for training, for work,” etc.
Now, this passage is the author’s exposition of the true idea of a church, and on this everything else hangs. We may be obtuse, but we confess the exposition is somewhat misty to us; at all events, it does not captivate our intellect so completely as we would wish in a matter all‐ important—eternal salvation. We are told here that salvation is a personal matter between the individual and Christ; that there is no person or nothing intermediate. In plain English, that a man’s own conscience is his rule and guidance; that it instructs and satisfies him on all points of doctrine and conduct as a Christian. Now, it is Catholic doctrine that salvation is an entirely personal affair between the individual soul and Jesus Christ. The individual is not saved or condemned on the merits or demerits of the society, the church of which he is a member: in exactly the same way that a prisoner at the bar is held answerable to the law of the land for his wrong actions, and judged on them, and it avails him nothing to speak of the respectability of his relations, or of their evil behavior which may have partly led him into crime; such evidence may constitute to an extent extenuating circumstances, but a man is condemned finally on his own act. If the prisoner, on the verdict being given against him, pleads: But you condemn me; you do not take into consideration my relations; you tell me that all that has nothing to do with it; that I knew myself what was right and what was wrong; that, in fact, I was the best and only judge in the matter; well, I acknowledge it, I am the only judge, and if I am the only judge, and I make a mistake, you cannot punish me, there is nothing between you and my conscience. The court would respond: There is the law written plain for all men to read. The government made the law, you are judged by that. And this is precisely the Catholic doctrine of salvation. Though it be a final question between the individual soul and Jesus Christ, the law of Christ comes between them, as the law of Moses came between God and his people, and that law being made for the whole world, for the universal society of human beings, rests in the hands of the government duly constituted and appointed from that society by Jesus Christ himself, who no longer abides among us visibly, and is only known to us by faith.
Well, then, faith is enough; faith saves us, say the Baptists. If this be true, then, are the devils saved since they must have a far more vivid faith—belief in God—than the generality of human beings? If faith is enough to save a man, why not stop there? Why be baptized? Why join a church at all? “For the sake of personal profit” (a phrase apt to be misunderstood), “and of usefulness,” replies our author. After all, this idea of the church reduces itself to that of Mr. Beecher, which the author stigmatizes—a church of “expediency.” Later, on page 22, in “challenging the Catholic idea of a church at the bar of reason,” he says: “Now, in the case before us, what is the effect? Salvation.” Well, here we have it; the effect; the thing that the whole world is looking for—salvation. Why, that is everything; that is all we want, no matter how it comes. You are saved before entering the church. Then, what more is necessary? There is no need to go beyond that. Stay outside; live and let live; our safety is attained; let people wrangle as they may, there is no further fear. There is no need of a church at all, of communion, and the rest, if we are saved before entering it. That is all God asks of us, to save ourselves. It is already accomplished by regeneration and faith in him. There we stop, happy and contented, without any more quarrelling with our neighbors.
Then comes the further and final question: After all, who is Christ? How do we know him? Where do we find him? When and how does he speak to us? Of course, to “regenerate persons,” it is unnecessary to put these questions: But our author proposed going deeper into the matter than the common method, and, if the world is to become Baptist, it must know why. The regenerate enjoy “a personal union” with him, says the Baptist, and know when he speaks; when the Spirit impels them. This will never do for human nature. We must have something stronger than assertion, however strong. Christians can believe and understand S. Paul, when he tells them that he was caught up into paradise, and heard secret words which it is not granted to men to utter. The great apostle excuses himself for bringing this to the knowledge of the faithful, and only mentions it as a single act in his life, and one that affected his salvation in no wise. If the Baptists hold that they are continually in the third heavens, well and good. That at least has the merit of a clear, defined ground to stand on; but they will scarcely win many converts. Who is Christ, then, with whom you have this personal union? He is the founder of the Baptist Church, our author would respond; of what is known as Christianity? That is to say, of the system or systems of religion held by all people of the present day who call themselves Christians, but among whom the Baptists only hold the true church. Then we will work backwards to the foundation of your society and the others, and see which reaches to Jesus Christ. Oh! no, says our author; that is one of the common methods; they are poor. “Read the New Testament. You will find the Baptist doctrine of salvation, and the resulting Baptist idea of the church, taught or implied on every page,(182) and you will not find a trace of the Catholic doctrine of salvation, or of the Catholic idea of the church. If you doubt, search for yourselves the Scriptures, like the noble Bereans, and see whether these things are so.”
In support of this loose, sweeping assertion, this author contorts his text into a puny quibble, which any well‐instructed child might see through at once. He says: “We do not read the priests or the apostles added sinners to the church in order to save them,” but we do read: “The Lord added to the church daily those who are saved.” Ergo, “salvation was dealt with as a personal matter.”
If the Baptist Church rests on no better foundation than this, and if its teachers can only support its truth and doctrine on distorted meanings and texts of this description, we fear it will not hold together much longer, and we feel half inclined to apply to it a few of the “truths spoken in love” of which our author is so lavish in dealing with the Catholics. This very use of the word “Lord” is eminently Catholic. When we speak of a conversion, of a mercy gained, or a favor bestowed from heaven, though all these things happen through the hands and sometimes ministry of individuals, we always say, “The Lord did it; God Almighty wrought it; No man converted me, but the grace of God; No medicine saved my sick child, but the favor of God which accompanied its workings,” as the child answers to the first question of the catechism, Who made you? God. But for all this God works through human instruments. His priests are an ordination of his own for the government of his church, and by a worthy probation and preparation receive certain graces of God necessary for their state involved in the reception of what the church calls the sacrament of Holy Orders: a certain form to be gone through which Christ ordained for the reception of the special powers and graces conferred on that particular office, as in human governments a judge receives his insignia, a minister his portfolio, a doctor his diploma, in order to prevent everybody taking the administration of the law into his own hands, or every quack practising as he pleases. And so with the other sacraments.
But apart from appeals to texts, which we are almost weary of producing in favor of Catholic doctrine, and of the church who watched over and preserved those texts from destruction, the mutilation of which was wrought, as our author himself complains, not by us, but by the Protestants in the version of King James, and because we know that version to be mutilated, we appeal against its use in the schools which our children frequent: let us look at the broad Christian system, how it would stand as built up by this writer.
People who believe in Christ at all, and indeed all who acknowledge, as they must, Christianity to be a fact, a vast social system, existing under our eyes, looking back, see a time when it did not exist. A man came into the world at the point of time in its history which we fix upon as the beginning of the Christian era. At that time religion, speaking largely, consisted of the Hebrew and the pagan. The Hebrews were the chosen of God, and preserved the only true system which corresponds to the rational idea of the foundation and aim of humanity. This it kept to itself and did not seek to spread. Christ came, the man‐God, and founded a new order, enlarging upon the old, which was to embrace in its bosom the universe, and lead all nations back and up to God. The change contemplated was the vastest that could possibly be conceived, the union of the discordant elements of human nature in a system entirely above the capabilities of that nature. Men were to be chaste, to be humble, to love poverty, to speak no evil, to obey, to mortify themselves always, to pray always, to acknowledge the nothingness of their nature. This man, Jesus Christ, came, and, before he had converted people enough to form a single city even, was crucified, rose from his grave, and ascended into heaven, leaving twelve poor ignorant, timid men, and a few others to spread this new doctrine, this new and all‐absorbing social system, throughout the world and through all time. What did he leave to guide them in this tremendous work; a system, an order perfect in all its details, and capable of spreading with the contemplated growth of the church? or did he leave each to follow his own will and do what he could, by means of what is called personal union with himself, a being who no longer was present, visibly and palpably, before the eyes of men? As he chose men to do his work, to build up Christianity, he let them accomplish it after a human fashion, assisted by the saving fact that he would allow them never to err in the doctrines which he bade them preach: and to this end he gave them an order which was to be handed down forever: the apostleship. That was his government, and at this government was a head, Peter. And Peter, like all other human governors, at his departure handed his authority down to the next chosen to fill his place, the promise of the abiding Spirit passing to all, or the system must have broken down; and so to‐day Catholics recognize in infallibility nothing more than the apostles recognized in the decisions of Peter at Antioch. And so this author is correct in saying that the church with Catholics comes first, and not the Bible; for the church embraces the Bible, which is only the written document of the laws and ordinances of God to man, the letter of the law resting in the hands of the government which has charge of it, but that government itself subject to the law. The government existed among the Hebrews before the law was ever written. This system which we have endeavored faintly to sketch here is denied by the Baptist. He says: Christianity comes this wise: Christ came, died, and thus regenerated us. All who believed in him were saved. “The apostles preached the Gospel. Men were pierced to the heart and asked what they must do.” They must be immersed, not as a necessity, for they were saved by the fact of believing; but this act of immersion gave them the entry to the church of Christ. Then the New Testament was written, not by Christ, though inspired by him, and left in the hands of everybody to interpret the law as he pleased.
Now, we ask, can this system commend itself to the human reason as rounded and complete enough to fulfil the Christian idea of a church, which should receive and embrace the whole world in one union of religious harmony? A book thrown into the world—for so it must look to human eyes who knew nothing of its divinity—which each one was to take up and interpret as he pleased; a book subject to more or less of change in transmission from language to language, and in the absolute loss of the living tongue in which it was originally written, and the verdict of its genuineness, the verdict for or against the teachings of a living God, resting upon the dictum of a grammarian.
If Christianity hangs on this, for we have not misrepresented the writer—then we refuse to be Christian at all; for such a system does not and cannot, as he alleges, “sustain the test of sound reason, of stern experience, and of infallible Scripture, which ordeal the Baptist idea of the church endures.”
We need trouble ourselves with this writer no further. There is a great deal more in the pamphlet that might be touched on as showing the either absolute or wilful ignorance under which writers of this stamp labor when speaking of Catholics. He speaks of the Catholic doctrine with regard to sacraments in this loose way: “They are useful to infants and the dying. Men come to them for grace apart from the state of their own hearts.” Now, Catholics will perceive the utter absurdity of such a statement at once. The sacrament of baptism is necessary to infants, who of course are unconscious recipients of it, as they are unconscious of the sin in which they are born. This stain which they inherit, but do not incur by any act of their own, is washed away by the sacrament ordained by Christ, which admits them into the society of the church at the same time that their birth admits them to human society, its privileges as well as its trials. Extreme unction is administered to the dying person, even though he be unconscious, and is the most touching token of the love of the universal Mother for her children, who at the last moment will, although the dying man cannot ask it, administer the sacrament which God has ordained for that occasion, because she knows that his heart desires such aid at its passage from the world. But all sacraments given to adults give grace only in proportion as the recipient receives them worthily.
“If the priest refuses to come, then the sufferer, infant or adult, must die unbaptized and unsaved.”
If this gentleman had only taken the trouble to consult a Catholic catechism, he would have been spared the trouble of putting this further absurdity into print. He would have found little children taught at school that “in a case of necessity, when a priest cannot be had, any one may baptize,” and the instructions for administering the sacrament; and furthermore, that, if a person were placed in such a position that even this means could not reach him, the very desire is sufficient, as sometimes happens in the case of sudden conversions and martyrdoms.
As for Catholicity necessitating a ritual, all religions must more or less. Do men object to the old law because of its glorious ritual? Is not the very Baptist‐act of immersion a ritual, and their singing in common? So much so that, for neglect of this observance, Baptists cut off the whole Christian body from community with them. Which is harder to believe—the Catholic doctrine which teaches that we must obey the church which we believe to be the only church of Christ, and in support of which teaching we bring forward some very substantial proofs, or this? You may interpret God’s Word as you please; that alone is sufficient; but you are not in communion with his church unless you are immersed; a fact which it is very difficult to twist out of the Scriptures.
Again, he shows his weakness in saying that “Francis Xavier, working on the Catholic idea, baptized millions of Asiatics, and believed that in so doing he had saved their souls. But the heathen remained heathen still. There is no evidence, so far as I am aware, that under his labors one solitary soul was transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.” Not one, but millions, so that Sir James Stephens, a Protestant lecturer on history in a Protestant university, calls him a saint, not only of the Catholic Church, but of the world. Colleges were founded by him, and thousands of Christians suffered martyrdom for the faith. But “Judson” is the apostle after our author’s heart. Judson “lived to see thousands of civilized and christianized disciples in that dark Burman land; and the work still goes on, self‐sustained by the power of a true hidden life.” This latter is a very saving clause; so truly hidden is the work that our author can point to no fruit resulting from it. And as for those “thousands of civilized and christianized disciples,” we took the trouble to look for them, and we regret to say, for our author’s veracity, found them all “wanting.” Judson did not succeed in converting one either in Burmah or anywhere else; and his own sufferings seem to have been reduced to the martyrdom of marrying successively three wives.
If then, as our author says, “Logically there is no middle position between the high rock ground of Baptist truth and the low marsh ground of Catholic error; all things follow their tendencies, and it is easier to go down an inclined plane than to go up,” we fear that, for all he can do to prevent them, people will follow their natural tendencies. As a last word, we would strongly recommend him, before undertaking to set a church in its true colors before the eyes of men, to consider a little whether he knows anything of the subject he is writing about, and not stultify himself by an ignorance which looks like malice, though he calls it truth spoken in love.
A Retrospect.
And it fell out, says the chronicle, that Childebert, hunting one day in the forest of Compiègne in company with his wife Ultragade, was suddenly accosted by S. Marcoul, a holy man who stood in great repute of sanctity even during his lifetime; he seized the king’s bridle, and boldly petitioned alms for his poor and his church of Nanteuil, which was in a state of shameful unrepair. While he was yet speaking, a hare, pursued by the hounds, flew to the spot and took refuge under his mantle. S. Marcoul, letting go the bridle to place his hand protectingly on the trembling refugee, the king’s horse broke away, seeing which his piqueur rushed forward, and in tone of arrogance exclaimed:
“Miserable cleric! how durst thou interrupt the king’s chase? Give back that hare, or I will strike thee for thine insolence!”
The saint, humbly unfolding his cloak, set free the hare; it bounded away, and the dogs dashed after it. But lo! they had not made three strides, when they were struck motionless, rooted to the ground as if turned to stone. The piqueur, infuriated, flew after the hare, but he had not taken many strides, when he fell fearfully wounded by a large stone that had been hurled at him, no one saw whence, and laid his head open. The huntsmen, seized with terror, fell upon their knees, and implored the holy man to forgive them and intercede for the life of their companion. S. Marcoul forgave them, and then, going towards the prostrate body of the piqueur, he touched it and prayed over it, and presently the stricken man rose up healed. Childebert, being quickly informed of the two miracles, hastened after the man of God and knelt for his blessing, and took him home that night to the shelter of the castle, and dismissed him the following day loaded with presents for his church and rich alms for his poor. So stands the legend.
A witty Frenchman once said to a sceptic who sneered at the story of Mucius Scævola: “My friend, I would not put my hand in the fire that Mucius Scævola ever put his in it, but I should be desolated not to believe it.” How much wiser was that Frenchman than the dull criticism of our XIXth century, that goes about with a broomstick sweeping away all the lovely fabrics that less prosaic ages have raised to mark their passage on the road of history—a vicious old fairy, demolishing with her Haussmann wand the storied, moss‐grown monuments of the past, giving us naught in their stead but ugly, rectangular blocks built with those stubborn bricks called facts, statistics, and such like! Why try to prove to us that François I.’s heroic Tout est perdu fors l’honneur! was only the poetized essence of a rigmarole letter written not even from the field of Pavia, but from Pissighittone? Why insist that Philip Augustus never said to his barons, gathered with him round the altar, before the battle of Bouvines, “If there be one among you who feels that he is worthier than I to wear the crown of France, let him stand forth and take it”? True, Guillaume le Breton, who wrote the history of the campaign and never left Philip throughout, makes no mention of it, but what of that? The story is far too beautiful not to be true. Let us turn a deaf ear, then, to this old hag called Criticism, or deal with her and her bricks and mortar as the Senate of Berne did with a man who wrote a book to prove that William Tell never shot the apple, and, in fact, that it was doubtful whether he and the apple were not both a myth. The Senate burnt the book by the hand of the hangman publicly in the market‐place. We will deal in like manner with any profane mortal who questions the authenticity of the legend of S. Marcoul’s hare, which furnishes the first mention we find in history of the château of Compiègne.
The forest was its chief attraction to the kings of old Gaul, as it has been in later days to their successors. Clotaire I. met with an accident while hunting there in 561, and died of it; he was interred at Soissons, whither his fourteen sons accompanied him, bearing torches and singing psalms all the way. Fredegonda made the merry hunting‐lodge the scene of atrocities never surpassed even by her, fertile as she was in inventive cruelties. Her infant son fell ill of a fever at Compiègne and died, while the son of the prefect, Mumondle, who was taken ill with the same illness at the same time, recovered. The courtiers, thinking to allay the despair of the terrible mother by giving it an outlet in revenge, whispered to her certain stories that were current in the village about a witch who had sacrificed the royal infant to secure the potency of her charms in favor of the life of the other. Fredegonda caught at the bait like a tiger at the taste of blood. She scoured the country for decrepit old women, and, afraid of missing the right one, caused the entire lot to be seized and put to death before her eyes. The details of the tortures inflicted on them by the ruthless mother are too terrible to be described.
Clotaire II. lived many years at Compiègne, much beloved for his gentle and benevolent disposition, but nothing particular marks that period. King Dagobert made it likewise his principal residence, and enriched the surrounding country with many fine churches and noble monasteries. The most celebrated of these was the Abbey of S. Ouen’s Cross. The king was out hunting, one hot summer’s day in the year of grace 631, and emerging from the forest to the open road, he suddenly saw before him a gigantic cross of snow. Marvelling much at the unseasonable apparition, he sent for S. Ouen, who dwelt in the wood hard by, and bade him interpret its meaning to him. The saint replied that he saw in the sign a command to the king to build a church on the site of the miraculous cross. No sooner had he said this, than the cross began to melt, and presently vanished like a shadow. Dagobert at once set about obeying the mandate uttered in the peaceful symbol, and raised on the road from Compiègne to Verberie the stately pile called the Abbaye de la Croix de S. Ouen.
Many other foundations followed, but no event of note took place at Compiègne till Louis le Debonnaire appeared on the scene in 757—unless, indeed, we may record as such the arrival there of the first organ ever seen in France. It was sent as a present to Pepin by the Emperor Constantine, and the first time it was played a woman is said to have swooned, and awoke only to die. Louis le Debonnaire lived chiefly at Verberie, the magnificent palace of Charlemagne, a right royal abode, befitting the greatest monarch of France. Bronze, and marble, and precious stones, and stained glass, and all costly and beautiful materials were lavished with oriental prodigality on this wonderful Verberie, whose colossal towers and frowning battlements and elaborately wrought gates and gables were the marvel of the age and the theme of many a troubadour’s song. But what monument built by the hand of man can withstand the ravages of man’s ruthless passions? The palace of the Gallic Cæsar was not proof against the successive wars and sieges that battered its massive walls, till not even a vestige of the wonderful pile remains to mark where it stood.
The sons of Louis le Debonnaire, Louis, Pepin, and Lothair, rebelled against their father; Lothair got possession of his person, stripped him of all the ornaments of royalty, clothed him in sackcloth, and in this unseemly plight exhibited the old king to the insults and mockeries of the people. After this he compelled him to lay his sword upon the altar, and sign his abdication in favor of the unnatural son, who presided in cold‐ blooded triumph at the impious ceremony. As soon as this was done he sent his father, bound hand and foot, to Compiègne, where he was kept a close prisoner. Lothair’s brothers, however, hearing of this, were moved to indignation, and, stimulated perhaps not a little by jealousy of the successful rival who had started with them, but secured all the winnings for himself, they set out for Compiègne, stormed the fortress, and set free the king. But the unhappy father was not to enjoy long the freedom he owed to these filial deliverers. Louis again rose up in arms against him, and the king was forced to take the field once more in defence of his crown; he fell fighting against his three sons on the frontiers of the Rhine, and expired with words of mercy and forgiveness on his lips.
In 866, Charles the Bald held a splendid court at Compiègne to receive the ambassadors whom he had sent on a mission to Mahomet at Cordova, and who returned laden with costly presents from the Turkish prince to their master. Charles did a great deal to improve Compiègne; the old château of Clovis, which was no better than a hunting‐lodge grown into a fortress, he threw down and rebuilt, not on its old site, in the centre of the town, but on the banks of the Oise. Louis III. and Charles the Simple spent the greater part of their respective reigns at Compiègne, and added to the number of its institutions—primitive enough some of them—for the instruction of the people. “Good King Robert” comes next in the progress of royal tenants (1017): his name was long a household word among the people to whom his goodness and liberality had endeared him. One day at a banquet, where he was dispensing food to a multitude of poor and rich, a robber stole unobserved close up to him, and, under pretence of doing homage to the king, clung to his knees, and began diligently cutting away the gold fringe of his cloak. Robert let him go on till he was about halfway round, and then, stooping down, he whispered discreetly: “Go, now, my friend, and leave the rest for some other poor fellow.” Like many another wise and good man, Robert was harassed by his wife; she was a hard and haughty woman, who, while professing great love for him, made his home wretched to him by her quarrels and her domineering temper. The people knew it, and hated Constance; but, like the king, they bore it rather than quarrel with the shrew. “Let us have peace, though it cost a little high!” the henpecked husband was for ever repeating; and his people seemed to have been of one mind with him, for Constance ruled both him and them with her rod of nettles to the end, and had her own way in everything.
Philip II.’s occupation of Compiègne, which in those days of simple faith, when religious fervor ran high, had a significance that can hardly be appreciated in our own chill twilight days, so slow to see beyond the material world, so reluctant to recognize the supernatural as an aim or a motive power in the great movements that enlist men’s energies and direct them, changing the face of nations. This was the translation of the holy winding‐sheet from the casket of carved ivory—in which it had been given to Charlemagne, along with many other relics of the same date,(183) by Constantine II. and the King of Persia, as a reward for his services in expelling the Saracens from the Holy Land—into a reliquary of pure gold, inlaid with jewels. The holy shroud, when it was taken by Charles the Bald to the Abbey of S. Corneille at Compiègne, is thus described in the procès‐verbal of the translation, given at full length in the Grandes Chroniques: “It was a cloth so ancient that one could with difficulty discern the original quality of the stuff, being two yards (aunes) in length and a little more than one yard in width.... The liquors and aromatic ointments used in the embalmment had rendered it thicker than ordinary linen, and prevent one from discerning the color of the stuff, esteemed by the greater number of the spectators to be of pure flax, woven after the manner of the cloth of Damascus.” There are old pictures still extant, representing Charles amidst a vast concourse of prelates and nobles, accompanying the relic with prayer and solemn ceremonial.
In 1093, Matilda of England, on rising from an illness which had been considered mortal, sent as a thank‐offering for her recovery a costly shrine of gold and precious stones to Philip II., with a request that the holy shroud might be placed in it. Philip, in a charter drawn up and signed by himself, thus testifies to the gift and the translation: “It has pleased us to place in a shrine (chasse) of gold, enriched with precious stones, and given to this church by the Queen of England, the relics of our Saviour; we have beheld this cloth (linge), in which the body of our Lord reposed, and which we call shroud (suaire), according to the holy evangelist, and which has been withdrawn from the ivory vase.” We cannot realize, we say, how an event like this would stir the hearts of men in those days. Peter the Hermit was preaching the first crusade; his burning eloquence, like a lever, uplifting the arm of Christendom, and compelling every man who could draw a sword to shoulder the cross and go forth to fight and die for the deliverance of the tomb, where for three days their Lord had lain wrapped in this winding‐sheet. The union of mystical devotion and enthusiastic service which characterized the crusaders was fed by every circumstance that tended to embody to their senses those mysteries which had their birth in that remote eastern land towards which they were hastening, and the transfer of this sacred memento of the Passion from its simple ivory casket to a sumptuous one of gold and gems, the offering of a powerful sovereign, occurring at such a moment, was calculated to arouse a more than ordinary interest. They hailed the honors so apportioned paid to the holy shroud as a symbol and a promise; their faith, already quickened by the renunciation of all that made life dear, home, kindred, nay, life itself, for the deliverance of the Sepulchre, was stimulated to more heroic sacrifice; their hope was intensified to prophecy, by what appeared like a typical coincidence, a manifestation of divine approval that must ensure beyond all doubt the success of their enterprise. We should not be astonished, then, at the paramount importance assigned by the historians of that time to this event, but recognize therein the sign of our own condemnation, and of a spirit that is no longer of our day, but belongs, like those glorious relics, to a bright and glowing past.(184)
Philip’s son, Louis le Gros, like his father, lived principally at Compiègne; while he was away carrying on the second crusade, his incomparable minister, Suger, took up his abode there, and, dividing his time between prayer and the business of the state, governed wisely during the king’s absence.
When another crusading hero, Philip Augustus, offered his hand and his crown to the fair Agnes de Méranie, destined to expiate in tears and exile the ill‐fated love of the king and her own short‐lived happiness, it was at Compiègne that he presented her to the court and the people; it was here that amidst pomp and popular rejoicing the marriage was celebrated.
But the most curious episode in the whole range of the annals of Compiègne is perhaps that of a claimant whose story opens at this date. Baldwin IX., Count of Flanders and Hainaut, usually called Baldwin of Constantinople, before starting for the Holy Land came to Compiègne to swear fealty to the King of France, who invested him with knighthood on the same day that Agnes, like a softly shining star of peace and love, rose upon the troubled horizon of the kingdom. At Constantinople Baldwin was proclaimed emperor, and solemnly crowned by the pope’s legate at S. Sophia (1204). He immediately sent off his crown of gold to his beloved young wife, Marie de Champagne, desiring her to hasten to rejoin him, and share his new‐found honors. The countess obeyed the command and set sail for Constantinople, but, overcome by the unexpected news of her husband’s election to the throne, she died upon the journey. Baldwin’s grief was inconsolable; he laid her to rest in S. Sophia, the scene of his recent honors, and swore upon her tomb never to marry again, but to devote himself henceforth to the sole business of war: he kept his vow, and began that series of brilliant feats which culminated in his triumphant entry to Adrianople. Such was the fame of his prowess that powerful chiefs trembled at his very name: Joanice, the formidable king of the Bulgarians, sent a message to “the great French warrior,” humbly praying for his friendship. But the warrior mistrusted these overtures, and haughtily repulsed them. Whereupon Joanice, full of wrath, vowed vengeance, and in due time kept his vow. He raised an army, made war on Baldwin, whom he took prisoner after a fearful slaughter of his army at the battle of Adrianople. When the news of the disaster reached Flanders, Henri of Hainaut, brother of Baldwin, was at once proclaimed regent; he continued the war against Joanice, but without success, nor could he by bribes, concessions, or threats obtain the emperor’s release; Joanice would not even vouchsafe to reply to any of his overtures on the subject. All else failing, the pope interfered, and besought the conqueror not to sully his triumph by revenge, worthy only of a savage, but to treat magnanimously, or at least according to the rules of civilized warfare, for the ransom of his captive. To this appeal Joanice condescended to reply that, alas! it was no longer in his power, or any man’s, to comply with the desires of his holiness. The answer was taken for an announcement of Baldwin’s death, and universally accepted as such. Stories soon began to eke out concerning the horrible tortures practised on the unfortunate prince by his cruel captor; some accredited eye‐witness declared that he had been barbarously mutilated, his hands and arms cut off, and in this state thrown to the wild beasts, his skull being afterwards made into a drinking‐cup for the brutal Joanice, who had stood by gloating over the spectacle of his victim’s agony. Years went by and nothing transpired to throw the least doubt on the fact of Baldwin’s death, though the accounts as to the manner of it were somewhat conflicting. Henri of Hainaut was proclaimed sovereign of Flanders; after reigning ten years he died, and was succeeded by Jeanne, eldest daughter of Baldwin. She was not long in possession of the throne when the report was bruited about that her father was alive; he had been seen by some pilgrims journeying through Servia, who having lost their way in the forest of Glaucon came upon the grotto of a hermit, and were taken in and restored by him and sheltered for the night. This hermit, they recognized as their former prince, Baldwin; he was much altered by suffering, and his long white beard and uncouth garb were calculated to disguise him from any eyes but such as had known him well, but the pilgrims recognized him at once; they, however, discreetly forebore announcing the fact till they brought other witnesses to corroborate their own assurance. They returned soon with several trustworthy persons who had known Baldwin too well to mistake his identity after any lapse of years, and these declared unhesitatingly that the hermit was no other than the hero of Adrianople.
Baldwin, finding his secret discovered, fled to a distant and more inaccessible part of the forest; he was tracked thither, and again fled; but the pursuers finally got possession of him, and dragged him by main force into the neighboring town; the people flocked eagerly to see him, and with one voice they proclaimed him their long‐lost Baldwin, welcoming him with joyful acclamations as a father returned from the dead. Whether this popular welcome merely emboldened the real Baldwin to confess his identity and, as a necessary consequence, claim his rights, or whether it suggested to the false one the idea of simulating the person whom he resembled and was taken for, it is impossible to say, but at any rate from this period we no longer see him dragged, but marching forth, of his own free‐will, from town to town, and surrounded by all the paraphernalia of an injured claimant. His march was not, however, one of unbroken triumph; the town of Flanders refused to believe in him, and indignantly scouted himself and his followers as a band of impostors. The daughters of the dead man, Jeanne and Marguerite, refused to believe in him, and denounced him as a malefactor whose aim was to stir up disorder in the state for his own ambitious purposes. But Jeanne’s government was odious to the people; to escape from her harsh and cruel rule they would have willingly adopted any claimant who came with a fair show of right to enlist their credulity. Jeanne knew this, and at once took strong measures to put down the movement. It proved more difficult than she anticipated. Before many months the country was in a blaze, divided into two camps, one of believers, the other disbelievers, but both ready to devour each other to prove and disprove their special theories. A witness whose testimony went hard against the claimant was that of the old bailiff of Quesnoy; he had known Baldwin from a child, and mourned over him like a father, and, when he now appeared at the castle gates and demanded admittance, the old man refused to open to him, and vowed solemnly that he was not his master, but a base impostor. The conduct of this stubborn sceptic drew forth a pathetic appeal from the claimant. “I find,” he says, “more cruel enemies in my own house than in the land of strangers. Flanders, my mother, dost thou repulse thy son whom Greece and Macedonia received with open arms! I escaped from Adrianople through the carelessness of my guards; I fell into the hands of barbarians, who dragged me to the distant plains of Asia; there, like a vile slave, I, who had wielded the sceptre, was condemned to dig the earth; I dug until some German merchants, to whom I confided my story, ransomed me, and sent me back to my country, and lo! I arrive and show myself, and you repulse me! My daughter Jeanne refuses to own me in order not to resign her rank and subside into the subject of a court!” Unmoved by this touching denunciation, Jeanne persisted in disowning him, but, failing to prove her case, she referred it to Louis VII. of France. Louis, much interested in the extraordinary story, willingly undertook the arbitration. The claimant, on his side, testified great satisfaction on hearing that his fate was placed in the hands of a wise and powerful monarch, who was sure to prove a just and discerning judge; he set out in high spirits to Compiègne, where the king was then residing. Attired in the violet robes of a hermit, and bearing a white wand in his hand, he entered the august assembly with a countenance full of unblushing assurance, saluted the King of France with an air of proud equality, and noticed the barons and knights by a courtly inclination of the head. Louis, who had carefully studied the case, conducted the examination himself; he put many subtle and perplexing questions to the supposed Baldwin concerning events which had passed in his youth, and which it was thought impossible he could have learned from any one he had seen since his return, and the claimant answered accurately with an assurance that carried conviction with it. The examination lasted several hours, and, the closer it pressed him, the more triumphantly it established his identity. The witnesses who boasted of being able to confound the imposture in the twinkling of an eye were themselves confounded; they withdrew covered with confusion, and vowing inwardly that “this man was sold to the devil,” as only the father of lies could have told him so many hidden things, and borne him to success through such a quagmire of difficulties. There was, indeed, much conflicting evidence forthcoming. Henri, his brother, was dead, but the Dukes of Brabant and Limbourg, cousins and contemporaries of Baldwin’s, swore that the claimant was the real man; on the other hand, sixteen knights of unimpeachable honor swore to having seen the real man dead on the field of Adrianople. The king, after hearing with great patience, and weighing most impartially what was said on both sides, declared in favor of the claimant. The excitement was indescribable when he rose to pronounce the verdict; but at this point the Bishop of Beauvais stepped from his seat, and, holding up his right hand, adjured Louis to suspend for one moment the final words while he put a few short questions to the hermit. The king consented; a deathlike silence fell upon the assembly, and the bishop, going close up to the hermit, who was seated on a chair in the centre of the great hall, addressed him thus in a loud voice:
“Answer me three questions: 1st, In what place did you render homage to King Philip Augustus? 2d, By whom were you invested with the order of knighthood? 3d, Where did you marry Marie de Champagne?”
The claimant stammered, grew pale, and, after a vain attempt to fence with the questions, broke down. Extraordinary as it may seem, he had never given a thought to these prominent events in the life of Baldwin of Constantinople, or foreseen that he would be questioned concerning them. The enthusiastic sympathy of the court was changed in an instant to rage and scorn. Sentence of death was pronounced on the hermit of Glaucon on a charge of high treason, conspiring, fraud, perjury, and the long list of iniquities that make up the sum of a claimant’s budget. But having thus far acquitted himself of his office, the king handed over the criminal to Jeanne to be dealt with as she thought fit. In those rough and ready days there were no back‐stairs for a plucky claimant to escape by, no counsel to save him with a nonsuit, or such like modern convenience; the make‐ believe Baldwin was without more ado hung up between two dogs on the market‐place of Flanders. Some chroniclers throw uncomfortable doubts on the justice of the execution; a few maintain that this was the true man, and anathematize Jeanne as a parricide who sacrificed her own father to the love of power. Père Cahour, who is certainly a conscientious writer, speaks of her, on the other hand, as a just and upright woman, utterly incapable of so diabolical a crime, and stoutly vindicates the evidence of the sixteen knights, though how he adapts it to the belief in Baldwin’s capture by Joanice, which appears to have been general after the battle of Adrianople, it is difficult to see. The Chronique de Meyer, again, denounces Jeanne as an execrable monster, and declares that the man who was hanged was the real Baldwin. Clearly claimants have been always a troublesome race to deal with; even hanging does not seem to make an end of them, for their claims outlive them, and leave to historians a legacy of doubt and discord that is exceedingly difficult to settle.
The passage of S. Louis at Compiègne is marked by an event characteristic of him and of his time. He had ransomed from the Venetians at at an enormous price the crown of thorns of our Saviour. To do it public honor he carried it bare‐headed and bare‐footed from the wood of Vincennes to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and thence to the Sainte Chapelle, that gemlike little shrine which had been raised expressly to receive the priceless relic, and whose beauty is invested with a fresh interest since it escaped the fire of the Communists; the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice were burning so close to it that the flames might have licked its walls, yet not even one of its wonderful stained‐glass windows was injured.
Other monuments S. Louis left behind him, not built of stone or precious metals, but which have nevertheless endured and come down to us unimpaired by the lapse of ages, while houses and castles of stony granite have crumbled away, leaving no record on the hearts of men. Compiègne in the days of the saintly king was the refuge of God’s poor, of the sick and the sorrowing; S. Louis gave up to them all the rooms he could spare from his household, and devoted to tending and serving them with his own hands what time he could steal from the affairs of state.
The Russian Clergy.
We have heard nothing new of late about the project of certain zealous Anglicans and members of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States to establish communion between their churches and the schismatic Oriental Christians in the empire of Russia. It seemed fitting enough at first glance that the special variety of Christianity introduced by Henry VIII. should agree with the methods of ecclesiastical discipline prescribed by an equally autocratic sovereign at the opposite extremity of Europe; and there were, of course, abundant reasons why the Anglicans and their American descendants should covet a recognition from a branch of the church which, whatever its corruptions and irregularities, can at least make good its connection with the parent stem. Our readers have not forgotten, however, how coldly the overtures of these ambitious Protestants were received. The Russian clergy ridiculed the hierarchical pretensions of their English and American friends. They denied their apostolical succession. They questioned their right to call themselves churchmen at all; and, in short, looked upon them as no better than heretics, and not very consistent heretics either. The movement for union was a foolish one, begun in utter misconception of the radical differences between the two parties, and sure from the first to end in discomfiture and irritation.
Indeed, it was even more foolish than most of us still suppose. Not only was it impossible for the Russian Church to make the concessions required of it, but there is no reason to believe that the Episcopalians would have been very well satisfied with their new brethren had the alliance been effected. The Russian Church is an organization which stands far apart from every other in the world, presenting some monstrous features which even Protestantism cannot parallel. The Jesuit Father Gagarin has published a very curious work on the condition and prospects of the Russian clergy,(185) which would perhaps have modified the zeal of the English and American petitioners for union and recognition if they could have read it before making their recent overtures. We see here the rottenness and uselessness into which a national church falls when it is cut off from the centre of Christian unity and the source of Christian life.
The Russian priests are divided into two classes, the white and the black clergy, or seculars and monks. The great difference between them is, the white clergy are married, and the black are celibates. Whatever learning there is in the ecclesiastical order is found among the monks. The bishops are always chosen from the monastic class; and the two classes hate each other with remarkable heartiness. The marriage of priests is an old custom in the East, which antedates the organization of the Russian schism. It prevails in some of the united Oriental churches to this day. But in Russia it exists in a peculiarly aggravated form. Peter I. and his successors, by a multitude of despotic ukases, succeeded in erecting the white clergy into a strict caste, making the clerical profession practically hereditary, and marriage a necessary condition of the secular clerical state. The candidate for orders has his choice between matrimony and the monastery; one of the two he must embrace before he can be ordained.
The rule seems to have originated in an attempt to improve the education of the white clergy. The deplorable ignorance of the order led the government to establish ecclesiastical schools. But the schools remained deserted. The clergy were then ordered to send their children to them, and sometimes the pupils were arrested by the police and taken to school in chains. The Czar Alexander I. ordered, in 1808 and 1814, that all clerks’ children between six and eight years of age should be at the disposal of the ecclesiastical schools; and, that there might be no lack of children, the candidate for the priesthood was compelled to take a wife before he could take orders. Once in the seminary, the scholar has no prospect before him except an ecclesiastical life. He cannot embrace any other career without special permission, which is almost invariably refused. At the same time, the seminaries are closed against all except the sons of the clergy. The son of a nobleman, a merchant, a citizen, a peasant, who wanted to enter, would meet with insurmountable obstacles, unless he chose to become a monk.
Thus the paternal government of the czar secures first an unfailing supply of pastors for the Russian Church, which otherwise might be insufficiently served; and, secondly, a career for the children of the clergy, free from the competition of outside candidates. And, indeed, the priests might very well say: Since you compel us to marry, you are bound, at least, to furnish a support for our offspring. But the system does not stop here. What shall be done with the priests’ daughters? In the degraded condition of the Russian Church, where the white clergy or popes are popularly ranked lower in the social scale than petty shopkeepers or noblemen’s servants, these young women could not expect to find husbands except among the peasantry, and they might not readily find them there. The obvious course is to make them marry in their own order. The seminarian, therefore, by a further regulation of the paternal government, is not only obliged to marry, whether he will or no, but he must marry a priest’s daughter, and some bishops are so careful of the welfare of their subjects that they will not suffer a clerk to marry out of his own diocese. Special schools are established for these daughters of the church; and we could imagine a curious course of instruction at such institutions, if the Russian ecclesiastical schools really attempted to fit their pupils for the life before them; but, as we shall see further on, they do nothing of the kind.
Sometimes it happens that a priest has built a house on land belonging to the church. He dies, leaving a son or a daughter. His successor in the parish has a right to the use of the land, but what shall be done with the house? The law solves this difficulty by providing that the living shall either be saved for the son (who may be a babe in arms), or given to any young Levite who will marry the daughter. Thus the clerical caste is made in every way as compact and comfortable as possible, and, for a man of mean extraction, moderate ambition, and small learning, becomes a tolerable, if not a brilliant career.
The clergy of a fully supplied parish consists of a priest, a deacon, and two clerics, who perform the duties of lector, sacristan, beadle, bell‐ ringer, etc. The deacon has little to do, except to share on Sunday in the recitation of the liturgy, which, being inordinately long, is sometimes divided into sections and read or chanted by several persons concurrently, each going at the top of his speed. The clerks of the lower ranks, however, may pursue a trade, but they are all enrolled in the same caste, out of which they must not marry. The number of parish priests in Russia is about 36,000; of deacons, 12,444; of inferior clerics, 63,421. One‐half the revenue of the parish belongs to the priest, one‐quarter to the deacon, and one‐eighth to each of the two clerics. The prizes of the profession are the chaplaincies to schools, colleges, prisons, hospitals, in the army, in the navy, about the court, etc., most of which are liberally paid. The parochial clergy are supported by: 1. Property belonging to the parish, chiefly in the towns, yielding about $500,000 per annum; 2. A government allowance of $3,000,000 per annum; 3. About $20,000,000 per annum contributed by parishioners; 4. Perpetual foundations, with obligation to pray for the departed, invested in government funds at four per cent., say $1,075,000. The average income of a priest is thus about $341. In addition to this, however, each parish has a glebe, of which the usufruct belongs to the clergy. The minimum extent of this church domain is about eighty acres, and it is divided after the same rule as the revenues, namely, one‐half to the priest, one‐quarter to the deacon, and the remainder to the inferior clerks. When there is no deacon, the priest’s share is, of course, proportionately larger. In many parishes, the glebe is much more extensive than eighty acres. In Central Russia, it amounts sometimes to 250, 500, even 2,500 acres; and, in those fertile provinces known as the Black Lands, the share of the priest alone is sometimes as much as 150 acres. At St. Petersburg, the church provides the parish priest a comfortable and elegant home. “The furniture is from the first shops in Petersburg. Rich carpets cover the floors of the drawing‐room, study, and chamber; the windows display fine hangings; the walls, valuable pictures. Footmen in livery are not rarely seen in the anteroom. The dinners given by these curés are highly appreciated by the most delicate epicures. Occasionally their salons are open for a soirée or a ball; ordinarily it is on the occasion of a wedding, or the birthday of the curé, or on the patron saint’s day. The apartments are then magnificently lighted up; the toilettes of the ladies dazzling; the dancing is to the music of an orchestra of from seven to ten musicians. At supper the table is spread with delicacies, and champagne flows in streams. A Petersburg curé, recently deceased, loved to relate that at his daughter’s nuptials champagne was drunk to the value of 300 roubles (£48).”
Considering the education and social standing of a Russian priest, this is not bad. In the rural districts there is much less clerical luxury; there is even a great deal of poverty and hardship. But we must not forget that the rustic clergy is but a little higher in culture than the rudest of the peasantry, and a life which would seem intolerable to an American laborer is elysium to a Russian hind. Most, even of country priests, have comfortable houses, well furnished with mahogany and walnut; and, though they do not eat meat every day that the church allows it, they have their balls and dancing parties, at which their daughters dance with the young men from the neighboring theological seminaries. The wives and daughters of the reverend gentlemen, to be sure, have to labor sometimes in the fields; but “they are dressed by the milliner of the place; you will always see them attired with elegance; they do not discard crinoline, and never go out without a parasol”—except, of course, when they are going to hoe corn and dig potatoes.
The voluntary contributions of the parishioners are collected, or enforced, in a variety of ways, and paid in a variety of forms. Towards the feast of S. Peter each house gives from three to five eggs and a little milk. After the harvest, each house gives a certain quantity of wheat. When a child is born, the priest is called in to say a few prayers over the mother, and give a name to the baby; the fee for this is a loaf and from 4 to 8 cents. Baptism brings from 8 to 24 cents more. For a second visitation and prayers at the end of six weeks there is a fee of a dozen eggs. At betrothals the priest gets a loaf, some brandy, and sometimes a goose or a sucking‐pig. For a marriage he is paid from $1 60 to $3 20; for a burial, from 80 cents to $1 60; for a Mass for the dead, from 28 to 64 cents; for prayers for the dead, which are often repeated, 4 or 8 cents each time; for prayers read at the cemetery on certain days every year, some rice, a cake, or some pastry. The peasants often have a Te Deum chanted either on birthday or name‐day, or to obtain some special favor; the fee for that is from 8 to 16 cents. The penitent always pays something when he receives absolution; but as confession is not frequent in the Russian Church, the income from this source must be small. In the towns the fee is often as high as $1, $2, $4, and even more. Among the peasantry it sometimes does not exceed a kopec (one cent); but if the penitent wishes to receive communion, he must renew his offering several times. At Easter, Christmas, the Epiphany, the beginning and end of Lent, and on the patron saint’s day, which sometimes occurs two or three times a year, it is customary to have prayers chanted in every house in the parish, for which the charge varies in the rural districts from 4 cents to 60 cents each visit, according to the importance of the occasion. In the large cities the fees are much more considerable. Father Gagarin cites the case of a parishioner in St. Petersburg to whom the clergy presented themselves in this manner twenty‐seven times in a single year, and at each call he had to give them something. This, however, was an exception. Generally the visits are only fifteen a year. “Sometimes it happens,” continues our author, “that the peasant cannot or will not give what the priest asks. Hence arise angry disputes. One priest—so runs the story—unable to overcome the obstinacy of a peasant refusing to pay for the prayers read in his house, declared that he would reverse them. He had just before chanted, ‘Benedictus Deus noster’; he now intoned, ‘NON Benedictus, NON Deus, NON noster’ thus intercalating a non before each word. The affrighted peasant, the chronicle says, instantly complied. Often enough, too, in spite of all the prohibitions of the synod, the wives and children of the priests, deacons, and clerks accompany their husbands and fathers, and stretch out their hands also. The worst of all this is that the Russian peasant, while long disputing merely about a few centimes, will think himself insulted unless the priest accept a glass of brandy. And when the circuit of all the houses in the village has to be made, though he stay only a few minutes in each, this last gift is not without its inconveniences.” It must be an edifying round certainly. But then the reverend gentleman has a wife to help him home.
The black clergy is not in a much better condition than the white. All the monasteries are supposed to be under the rule of S. Basil; but they are not united in congregations, each establishment being independent of all the rest. Most of them do not observe the great religious rule of poverty and community of goods, but each monk has own purse, and the superiors are often wealthy. One hundred years ago, the number of convents, not reckoning those in Little and White Russia, was 954. The ukase of Catharine II., which confiscated the property of the clergy, suppressed all but 400. Since then the number has increased.
The great increase in the number of monks between 1836 and 1838 is accounted for by the forcible incorporation of the United Greeks. This was not formally effected until 1839, but the United Greeks were reckoned as part of the Russian Church in 1838, and many of their monks were transferred from their own to the non‐united monasteries earlier than that. It will be seen, however, that the increase thus obtained was not permanent.
The curious discrepancy between the number of monks and the number of nuns has an equally curious explanation. Women are forbidden, by a decree of Peter the Great, to take the vows under forty years of age. Hence the convents are crowded with postulants who must wait sometimes twenty years before they can take the veil. Some persevere, some return to the world, and many continue to live in the convent without becoming professed. If we reckon the whole population of the convents—monks, nuns, novices, and aspirants—we shall find the number of the two sexes more nearly agree.
It is interesting to see from which classes of society these monks and nuns are drawn. F. Gagarin distinguishes five classes: I. The clergy, including priests, deacons, and clerks, with their wives and children; II. The nobility, embracing not only the titled nobility, but government functionaries and members of the learned professions; III. The urban population, comprising merchants, artisans, citizens, etc.; IV. The rural population, consisting of peasants of all conditions; V. The military. The monks are recruited from these five classes in the following ratio:
Clergy: 54.3 per cent. Urban population: 22.3 " Rural population: 16.3 " Military: 3.4 " Nobility: 3 "
The immense preponderance of the clerical element is owing primarily, of course, to the regulation of caste, which virtually compels the children of the clergy to follow the profession of their fathers. For the ambitious, the monastery alone offers an alluring prospect, since it is from the black clergy that the bishops are taken. The religious calling, therefore, in Russia is not so much a vocation as a career. If there were really an unselfish devout tendency towards the monastic life among the children of the clergy, we should expect to find it stronger with the daughters than with the sons. But the case is far otherwise. There are no bishoprics for the women; their career is to marry priests, go with them from house to house collecting alms, and help them home when they have taken too much brandy. Hence we find the following ratio among the population of the nunneries:
Urban population: 38.8 per cent. Rural population: 31 " Clergy: 13 " Nobility: 12 " Military: 4 "
The number of recruits supplied to monasteries by the clerical profession averages 140 a year. These comprise a curious variety of persons. First, there are priests or deacons who have committed grave crimes; they are sentenced to the convent, as lay convicts are sentenced to the galleys. Next there are seminarists who have failed in their studies; if they quit the ranks of the clergy altogether, they are forced into the army; if they remain among the white clergy, they have no prospect of becoming anything better than sacristans or beadles; by entering a convent they will at least live more comfortably and may aspire to become deacons or priests. Then there are deacons and priests who have lost their wives; they cannot marry again; the Russian government hesitates to entrust a parish to a wifeless priest; the wife indeed, as we have just seen, has some very important functions to perform in the administration of parochial rites; so the unfortunate widower is not only advised but sometimes compelled to go to a convent. Again, there are seminarists who after completing their studies act as professors for some time before they are ordained. Suppose such a man has been married and his wife dies. He cannot be ordained if he marry again. He cannot be ordained a secular priest without a wife. He must either go to the convent or seek some career outside the clerical profession, and that, as we have seen, it is almost impossible to find. Ambition draws many to the monastery. A student of any one of the four great academies of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kasan, and Kieff, who embraces the monastic life during his academical course, is morally certain on quitting the academy of being named inspector or prefect of studies in a seminary; at the end of a few years he becomes rector; and if he do not impede his own advancement he can hardly fail to be a bishop after a while. Still there is difficulty in obtaining from the academies a sufficient number of educated monks, and according to F. Gagarin some extraordinary devices are resorted to in order to supply the demand. When persuasion has failed, the student whom the convent wishes to capture is invited to pass the evening with one of the monks. Brandy is produced and it is not difficult to make the young man drunk. While he is insensible the ceremony of taking the habit and receiving the tonsure is performed on him, and he is then put to bed. When he awakes, he finds by his side, instead of the lay garments he wore the night before, a monastic gown. All resistance is useless. He is told that what is done cannot be undone, and after a while he submits angrily to his fate. This at any rate was the method of impressment into the religious state adopted fifty years ago. Now, says our author, it is unnecessary, inasmuch as a shorter way has been found of reaching the same result. The students of the academies (these are students of theology, be it remembered—equivalent to our seminarians) are in the habit of frequenting public‐houses and getting drunk. They are carried home on hand‐barrows, and this proceeding is known as the “Translation of the Relics.” When a young man has been fixed upon as a desirable recruit for the monastery, the superior has only to watch until he is brought home on a barrow; the next morning, while his head and his stomach are rebuking him, he is informed that he has been expelled for his disgraceful conduct; but, if he will give a proof of his sincere repentance by making a written request to be received as a monk, he may be forgiven.
There is no novitiate in the Russian convents. The neophyte makes his vows at once—provided he has reached the age prescribed by the law—and instances are not wanting of monks who have even attained the episcopate without ever having lived in a convent. According to the Russian law, academy pupils may make the religious profession at 25; other men at 30. It often happens that a youth has finished his studies before reaching 25; in that case, instead of applying for a dispensation, he makes a false statement of his age. Others who fail at their books wait for their thirtieth year, and are placed meanwhile each one under the care of some monk, who is supposed to form him for the monastic state. But he receives no religious training. He does not learn to pray, to meditate, to examine his conscience. He waits upon his master; he joins in the long service in the church; and the rest of the time he spends in amusement within or without the convent. His pleasures are not always of the most edifying character, and his excursions are not confined to the day.
What sort of monks can be formed by such training? The asceticism prescribed by S. Basil is rarely observed. Meat is forbidden, but it is a common dish on the convent tables. Drunkenness is so prevalent that it hardly causes surprise. “After that,” says our author, “one can imagine what becomes of the vow of chastity.” There is, as we have already said, no pretence of observing holy poverty. Every monk has a certain share of the convent revenues, proportioned to his rank, and this share is sometimes large. The average income of the black clergy is not easily ascertained. There are two sorts of convents—those which receive aid from the state, as compensation for confiscated estates, and those which depend entirely upon private resources. Those of the first kind are divided into monasteries of the first, second, and third classes, receiving from the government respectively 2,000, 1,600, and 670 roubles a year ($1,680, $1,344, $563). There are 278 of these convents, receiving 259,200 roubles, or about $217,728 from this source. In former years, each convent was entitled to the compulsory services of a certain number of peasants. Since the emancipation of the serfs the government has commuted this privilege by paying an annual sum of 307,850 silver roubles, or $258,594. Endowments with an obligation to pray for the departed yield in addition $2,150,400 to white and black clergy together. Let us suppose that the monks get one‐ half; that would be $1,075,200 per annum. Then the convents possess large properties in arable lands, woodlands, meadows, fisheries, mills, etc. One convent is mentioned which has derived an income of $10,000 merely from the resin collected in its forests. The greater part of the revenues, however, are derived from the voluntary contributions of the people. These seem to be enormous. Russians prefer to be buried within the precincts of the monasteries, and the monks not only ask an exorbitant price for the grave, but make the deceased a permanent source of profit by charging for prayers over his remains. Images famous for miracles, churches enriched with the relics of saints, have multitudes of visitors who never come empty‐handed. How much can be made from this concourse of the faithful may be imagined when it is remembered that a single laura, that of S. Sergius at Moscow, is visited every year by a million pilgrims. Begging brothers traverse all Russia, gathering alms. A very pretty trade is driven in wax tapers. The various arts resorted to by the white clergy to collect money are well known to the monks also. The Laura of S. Sergius is said to have a revenue all told of at least 2,000,000 roubles ($1,680,000), and a single chapel in Moscow yields to the convent to which it is attached an annual income of about $80,000. These princely revenues are not devoted to learning, education, charity, religion. A large part is misappropriated by the persons appointed to gather them. A third is the property of the superiors. The rest is divided among the monks. The annual income of the superior of one of the great lauras is from $33,600 to $50,400; of the superior of a monastery of the first class, from $8,400 to $25,200; second class, $4,200 to $8,400; third class, $840 to $4,200. All this is for their personal use; the monastery gives them lodging, food, and fuel, and they have to buy nothing but their clothing.
The seminaries, governed by the state, teach successfully neither piety nor learning. The tendency of the courses of instruction is to become secular rather than ecclesiastical. A proposal has recently been made that each bishop shall choose for his diocesan seminary a learned and pious priest to hear the confessions of the pupils, and excite them to devout practices; but it is objected that no secular priest can be found who is fit to discharge such important functions, while those monks who are fit are already employed in more important duties; besides, if one could discover among the white clergy the right sort of man, so much virtue would come very expensive, and the bishops could not or would not pay the salary he would be in a condition to demand. The seminarians are required to confess twice a year, namely, during the first week of Lent and during Holy Week. In reality, most of them omit the second confession; they go home to their families at Holy Week, and rarely approach the sacraments, though they always bring back a certificate from the parish priest that they have done so. A new regulation prescribes two additional confessions and communions, namely, at Christmas and the Assumption, and attempts another reform by ordaining that seminarians shall say their prayers morning and evening, and grace before and after meat.
The bishops are appointed by the czar, and transferred, promoted, degraded, imprisoned, knouted, or put to death at the imperial pleasure. Until very recently, no bishop could leave his diocese without the permission of the synod, so that consultations among the episcopacy were, of course, impossible. Now, however, a bishop may absent himself for eight days, on giving notice to the synod. It is the synod at St. Petersburg that exercises, under the czar, the whole ecclesiastical authority of the empire. The bishop has no power, and nothing to do but to sign reports. All the business of his diocese is really transacted by a lay secretary, appointed not by the bishop, but by the synod. Under the secretary is a chancery of six or seven chief clerks, with assistant clerks and writers. This office superintends all the affairs of the clergy, and transacts no business without drink‐money. It is the most venal and rapacious of all Russian bureaus, and such a mine of wealth to the officials that recently, when the chancery of a certain town was abolished on account of the destruction of its buildings by fire, the employees petitioned to be allowed to restore them at their own expense. The secretary is the one all‐powerful person of the diocese. From 12,000 to 15,000 files of documents are referred to the chancery every year for decision, and it is he who passes upon them, asking nothing of the bishop except his signature. He is almost invariably corrupt, and as he possesses, through his relations with the synod, the power to ruin the bishop if he chooses, there is no one to interfere with him.
The synod consists of the metropolitan of St. Petersburg and a number of other bishops chosen by the czar and changed every now and then, and of two or three secular priests, one of whom is the czar’s chaplain, and another the chief chaplain of the army and navy. But in reality, the whole power of the synod is held by an imperial procurator, who sits in the assembly, watches all its proceedings, stops deliberations whenever he sees fit, is the intermediary between the church and the state, and formulates decisions for the signature of the synod. Most of these decisions are signed without reading, and sometimes they are made to express the direct contrary of the sense of the assembly. The procurator, in a word, is to the synod what the secretary is to the bishop—the representative of the civil power ruling the enslaved and submissive church. The czar speaks through the procurator, the procurator speaks through the lay secretaries of the bishop, and so the church is governed practically without troubling the clergy at all.
The “Old Catholics” of Germany, and the new and improved Catholics who are (perhaps) going to be made under the patent of Father Hyacinthe and wife, are understood to be looking eagerly for connections in various parts of the world. Let them by all means go to Russia. They will see there how much liberty a church gains when it cuts itself off from its obedience to the See of Peter, and what kind of a clergy is constructed when men try to improve upon the models of Almighty God.
The Cross Through Love, And Love Through The Cross.
Maheleth Cristalar was the daughter of a Spanish Jew. Her father had once been very wealthy, and indeed until the age of sixteen she had lived in princely splendor. The beauties of her Spanish home were very dear to her; she had many friends, and as much time as she chose to spend in study.
But one day, her mother, a stately, handsome matron, came into her little sitting‐room, looking pale and worn.
“Maheleth, my child,” she began, in faltering tones, “we have had some bad news this morning. I am afraid we are in danger of being totally ruined.”
The young girl looked up; she was very beautiful, and the spiritual expression on her face intensified and heightened her beauty in a singular degree.
“Ruined, dear mother? Is my father very unhappy about it?”
“He is more angry than unhappy; it has happened through the dishonesty of persons he trusted.”
“Shall we have to leave home?” asked Maheleth.
“I fear we shall; it is a heavy trial.”
“It will be for our good in the end, mother darling. I am so sorry for you and my father, because you have always been used to riches.”
“So have you, my poor child.”
“But not for so long a time; and it is easier to root up a sapling than a full‐grown tree.”
“Ah! you hardly know what may be before you, Maheleth; your sisters are mere children; we have but few relations; with fortune, so also friends will forsake us; the shock will be very sudden, and we shall have to bear it alone.”
“You forget our God,” said the girl gently.
A shade of impatience passed over the elder woman’s face.
“We do not hope for miracles now, child,” she answered; “your father has worked hard for his wealth, but God will not treat him as he treated Job.”
“Depend upon it, if he does not, mother mine, it is because he knows what is best for us. You would not have us lose our hopes of the hereafter for the sake of more or less comfort in the earthly present?”
“My child, you should have been a boy; such sayings would tell well in a sermon, but in practical business matters they are but cold comfort.”
“Oh! they are comfort sufficient, believe me; besides, they do not debar us from prudent measures and precautions in a temporal point of view.”
“Well, child, you are a visionary, I always knew that; it remains to be seen if you can be a stoic.”
“What need of that, dear mother? Stoicism is not obedience nor resignation.”
Here a light step was heard, and the half‐open door was pushed quickly back. A little girl, about nine years old, ran in with flushed face, and, holding in her hands a velvet casket, cried out in gleeful voice:
“O mother! sister! see! I got leave to bring this in myself. It has just come from the jeweller’s, just as my father ordered it!”
And she opened the casket, displaying a wonderful parure of opals and diamonds, exquisitely and artistically wrought. Señora Cristalar turned away impatiently, saying to the child:
“Thamar, I am engaged; don’t come fooling here about these jewels; put them down, and go into the next room.”
The child, hurt and astonished, looked blankly at her sister. Maheleth reached out her hand for the casket, and half rose from her seat.
“I will come to you presently, little sister, if you wait in there; never mind the pretty gems just now.”
And so saying, she kissed the little eyes that were ready to overflow with childish tears, and, setting the jewels on a table out of sight of her mother, resumed her seat.
“There are the first‐fruits of our circumstances,” said the mother bitterly. “The man expects to be paid for those to‐day, and I shall have to tell him to take them back!”
“Come! if there were nothing worse than that! Now, mother, we will both go to my father, and pray together, and then consult among ourselves.”
Maheleth’s father was very fond and very proud of his eldest daughter, and this indeed was his best trait. Shrewd and clever in worldly affairs, yet strictly honest in his dealings, he was not devoid of that hardness that too often accompanies mercantile success, and as often turns to weakness when that success disappears.
One thing seemed to sustain him, but it was only a hollow prop after all—his pride of race. For generations his family had been well known and honored: he could trace his ancestry back in an unbroken line of descent from one of the exiles from devastated Jerusalem. Rabbis and learned men had borne his name, and though in later times no opening save that of trade and banking had been available to those of his race, yet his blood yielded it in nothing to that of the proverbially haughty nobles of Spain. It mattered little that by some he was shunned as of an inferior extraction or lower social status; his own wealth, his wife’s beauty, his lavish hospitality, his daughter’s charms, were strong enough, he knew, to break the barriers of prejudice, at least as far as appearances went. As to marriages, he did not covet for his children the alliance of a poor foreigner, and poor most of the proud families were whom he daily entertained at his splendid house—poor in brains, poor in beauty, poor in energy and strong will.
And yet, though he almost despised his neighbors, this shock was very galling to him. They now would turn from him, would forget his open‐ handedness, and remember only his race and creed; would pity him perhaps, but with the pity that is almost contempt. And this seemed to paralyze him, for all his fiercely expressed consciousness of superiority to his friends.
Maheleth tried to persuade him to take the trial calmly; for even in a temporal aspect calmness would sooner show him how to retrieve his fortunes.
“For,” she said, “you know that, with your abilities, you can, if you will, gain enough for my little sisters’ dowry by the time they will be grown up; and that is the first thing to be considered, and after that we shall even have enough to live in comfort.”
“And what is to become of you, Maheleth?” asked her father fondly.
“Oh! you and I will be co‐workers. I will look after those two until you can marry them well, and so we will both have a definite object in life. We can keep my mother in some degree of comfort from the very beginning, if we only look things in the face.”
The opals and diamonds had to be returned to the jeweller’s; the pleasant home was broken up, and what with the sale of his property, and various other legal arrangements, Ephraim Cristaler was able to pay all his creditors, with a few trifling exceptions, for which he bound himself by solemn promise to provide shortly.
Then the banker and merchant disappeared, and the nine days’ wonder was forgotten by his former circle of acquaintances.
One day, a young Englishman, travelling or rather sauntering about Europe in a way unlike the usual useless rush of tourists from one point to another of Murray’s Guide‐Book, arrived at Frankfort and settled there—for how long, he, least of all, could have told.
At the hotel, nothing was known of him but his name, Henry Holcombe, and that he had come with a black portmanteau containing a number of books. He went slowly to see the sights, one by one, as if he had plenty of leisure and wanted to enjoy it; and, when he did go, he never measured the length and breadth of saloons, the height of towers, the number of statues in the cathedral‐niches; nor did he ever disgrace his name by carving it side by side with the ambitious Joneses or the heaven‐soaring Smiths on the pinnacle of a temple, or the bark supports of a summer‐house; when he went out with a book in his hand, it was neither the obtrusive Murray nor the ostentatious Byron; and, in fact, he departed altogether from the standard of the regulation British tourist.
He was walking one day down the Juden‐Strasse, the picturesqueness of whose mediæval‐looking houses had a special attraction for him, when it came on to rain very suddenly, and the sky seemed to threaten a storm in good earnest; the street was soon deserted, and the narrow roadway became a miniature stream. Presently he heard a step behind him, and a slight figure, half‐hidden by a large umbrella, pressed quickly past him. It was a woman, and, he thought, a very young one, but more than that he could not tell, because she was veiled and muffled, and held the dripping umbrella very close down upon her head. She had not gone a dozen paces beyond him before she dropped something white like a roll of music, and stooped slowly to pick it up. The cloak and long skirt she was holding fast to keep them from the mud embarrassed her, and the young Englishman had time to spring forward and restore the white roll of paper to her hand before she had grasped it.
“Oh! thank you, mein Herr!” said a low, rich voice, in very soft German. And, as Henry took off his hat in silence, the girl made a pretty sweeping inclination, and left him, walking as quickly as before.
But he had seen more this time, and he knew she was beautiful, and had a dainty, graceful hand. Curious and interested, he watched the dark‐clad figure down the street, quickened his own steps as it hastened on, slackened them as it paused to clear a crossing without splashing the long and rather inconvenient garments. He saw it stop at last, and ring a bell at an old forlorn‐looking door, where he might have expected to see the face of a gnome appear, as guardian of unsuspected treasures within.
He was dreadfully romantic, this young Englishman, but in a subdued, quiet way that seldom showed itself in words, and was specially repelled by the gushing style too much followed just then by some of his fair countrywomen.
The door was opened and shut, and, except through his notice of the number over it, 25, his relation with the beautiful stranger was cut off.
He thought of it day after day, got a directory, and found out that in the house No. 25 there lived three families of the names of Zimmermann, Krummacher, and Löwenberg. The occupations of the heads of the families were given thus: “money‐lender,” “banking‐clerk,” and “lace‐merchant,” respectively; no clue whatsoever, of course; and, unless in a regular and received manner, Mr. Holcombe could not think of entering the house. Still, the face he had seen veiled under the prosaic tent of a wet umbrella kept between him and his thoughts, and would not be driven away. Then, too, what business was it of his to go and throw himself in the way of a girl who most likely was a Jewess? Yet, reason as he might, the mysterious face would visit him, and it seemed to him as the face of an angel. Very often he passed the house, and once or twice even made a pretence of sketching it; but he never saw the figure again. Once a young face looked out over the flowers in the window of the ground‐floor room, a merry face full of health and mischief—not his dream. The blinds were always drawn on the first floor, even when the windows were open, and he began to fancy she must be hidden behind those discreet shrouders of privacy. A friend of his met him at his hotel one day when he came home from the Juden‐Strasse, and surprised him by telling him he was going home in a fortnight to get married.
“I’ve been half over the world, my dear fellow,” he said, “and enjoyed myself immensely. And I’ve got such a pile of things going home to my fiancée, for our house. She will be delighted, she is so fond of queer, foreign things, not like what other people have, you know. I’ll show you some, but most are gone in packing cases through agents from the different parts of the world I’ve been in.”
And the two young men went upstairs to examine the bridal gifts.
“Look here,” said Ellice to his quieter friend, “it was a pasha’s wife sent me these,” dragging out a handful of Eastern jewelry, golden fillets, and embroidered jackets and slippers. “A cousin of mine is the wife of the consul at Smyrna, and she got them for me, for of course I was not allowed to go near the Eastern lady! And look here, these are carved shells, and mother‐of‐pearl crucifixes from Jerusalem, and boxes made from Olivet trees and cedars of Lebanon; you should value those.”
“I hope your future wife will,” gravely said young Holcombe; “the wood of the olives of Gethsemani is almost a relic in itself.”
“Oh! Miss Kenneth will appreciate them just as much as you do, Holcombe, she is very reverential. See, here is some alabaster, Naples coral, and Byzantine manuscripts, and marble ornaments from the Parthenon. Ah! here is the filigree silver of Genoa; that is one of my last purchases, except these pictures on china from Geneva; see the frames, too, they are Swiss.”
Then he turned out a huge tiger‐skin, and said: “All my Indian things except this were sent from Bombay, and a year ago I sent home all kinds of jolly things from North America—furs and skins, antlers, and other curiosities. By the bye, I have some old point from Venice, but some people had been there before me and cleaned the shop out pretty nearly, so I shall have to get some more. Belgium is a good place, isn’t it?”
Holcombe looked thoughtful; his truant mind was at No. 25 again, and he did not answer. His friend went on:
“I’ll just ask the landlady, she’ll be likely to know if there is any place here, just for a souvenir of Frankfort.”
“Yes,” said Holcombe, “I suppose she knows.” And, as he spoke, the phantom face was directly in his mind’s eye, and he could not drive the vision away.
“And now, old fellow, suppose you show me the lions here,” said Ellice; “you have been here longer than I have.”
So they walked out, and of course in due time came to the high, irregular houses bordering the curious Juden‐Strasse. It was Friday evening, and the street was full of people hurrying to one spot; the air was balmy, and told of summer; the scene was very striking. The stream of people disappeared under the archway of a splendid Moorish‐looking building, with Hebrew characters carved above the portal. It was the new synagogue. The two friends followed the men; the women were lost to view in the stair‐ cases leading to the galleries. A gorgeous lattice‐work defended these galleries, and the assemblage in the main part of the temple were men with their hats on and light veils or shawls across their shoulders.
The service began; low, plaintive chants resounded through the building; sometimes the congregation joined. It was very solemn, and Henry Holcombe seemed fascinated. Some one passed him a book and found the place for him. And now came the prayer for the mourners, the mourner’s Kaddisch, as he saw it printed before his eyes. There was a stir among the people, and he could hear the women’s clothes rustling in the gallery. Those who had recently lost friends and relations stood up during the intercession, and then another prayer was offered up in German. Holcombe thought the sound of the old Hebrew was like the passing of water through a narrow rocky channel; it was soothing and flowing, sad and majestic, and he wondered if the girl he had seen once thought and felt about it as he did.
When the crowd dispersed, he tried to linger at the entrance, watching the women as they passed out. His friend was hardly so patient, and reminded him of the table d’hôte they had most likely already missed.
“I am afraid,” he said, “your people would scarcely approve your admiration of the pretty Jewesses.”
Holcombe blushed and moved away, and, just as he came out on the sidewalk, a girl in black passed him slowly, with an anxious, absent look.
“By jove! that is a pretty face!” exclaimed Ellice; but the other said nothing. For the second time, he had seen the face he was always dreaming of, “She looks like an angel,” he thought, “and yet she is not even a Christian.”
“I never saw a German Jewess like that,” his friend went on to say. “She looks like a Spaniard.”
The next day, Ellice had got an address written down, and said to Holcombe:
“If you care to go with me, we will go and look after this lace‐merchant this morning.”
Holcombe’s heart gave a great throb as he asked carelessly to see the address: “Jacob Zimmermann, 25 Juden‐Strasse.”
“I don’t know much about laces,” he answered, “but I will go with pleasure.”
“It feels like going on an adventure, like something you read of in a book,” said Ellice, “this penetrating into the privacy of those tumble‐ down dens of the Juden‐Strasse.”
“Well,” returned Holcombe quietly, “it does give one the idea.”
They rang at the door No. 25, and the merry, mischievous face he had seen once at the window greeted Henry as he entered. They inquired for Herr Zimmermann.
“Oh!” said the girl, laughing and looking astonished, “he is up on the third floor. Shall I show you the way? But he is ill, and, as he lives all alone, he has got into very queer ways.”
They went up, guided by the laughing girl, who rattled on as she preceded them.
“Gentlemen like you most often inquire for us, for my father, I mean, and no one ever comes to see old Zimmermann except some wrinkled old ladies, and heaven knows how they find him out; and as to Herr Löwenberg, he is a stranger and has no friends.”
The two young men then knew that she was the money‐lender’s daughter, and Holcombe thought his dream companion must bear the name of Löwenberg.
“But is not Zimmermann a rich old merchant, and is he not well‐known in the town?” asked Ellice. “My landlady named him at once when I asked for laces.”
“Oh! yes; rich he is; so rich he won’t sell generally; but then an Englishman is another thing! He lives like a rat in a hole, and starves himself.”
By this time, they had reached the door of the miser’s room; a low, subdued voice was heard within reading.
Their knock was answered by a noise of light footsteps, and the door was drawn ajar by some one inside.
“Rachel, what is it? You know Herr Zimmermann is ill.”
Holcombe knew that voice must belong to the girl he had never forgotten. Just then the light from the door fell upon the men in the darkened, narrow passage, and the slight figure drew back a little.
“They are English gentlemen,” said Rachel. “They want to buy.”
“To‐day, Rachel? It is the Sabbath.”
Rachel shrugged her shoulders, and Ellice stepped forward.
“I beg your pardon. I forgot that. But since we are here, perhaps you will let us see the laces, and we can come back and choose on Monday.”
The girl looked uneasily back into the room, and then said, in a very low voice:
“No; please do not ask to come in to‐day; he is hardly conscious, and he might forget it was the Sabbath in his excitement.”
“Very well,” said Ellice politely, and Holcombe whispered to him: “Come away; don’t you understand?”
The door was closed gently, and Henry said:
“She was afraid he could not resist the temptation of a good offer, if it were made to him, and she wanted to prevent his doing anything wrong.”
“How stupid I am!” said Ellice. “Of course that’s it. But, I say, is she not pretty?”
“Beautiful!” answered Holcombe very quietly.
“Is that Fraulein Zimmermann?” asked Ellice of Rachel.
“No; Fraulein Löwenberg,” said the girl. “She is very kind to the old man. Her own father is ill and can’t work, and she is very good to him. She reads to old Zimmermann, and looks after him, too, when he is ill. She has two little sisters also.”
“And how do they live?” asked Ellice.
“She keeps them, I think. The father used to be clerk in Hauptmann’s bank; but he has been laid up six months now, and the mother died two months after they came here.”
“Are they Germans?” said Ellice, really interested.
“Their name is, but I fancy they are foreigners. Maheleth speaks like a foreigner.”
“Maheleth! A curious name.”
“Yes, an unusual one; so is her sister’s—Thamar.”
They were at the street‐door now, and Ellice bade the girl good‐morning, saying they would come again on Monday.
“What a curious chance!” he went on. “It is the same girl we saw coming out of the synagogue last night. Did you notice?”
“Yes,” said Holcombe.
“You don’t seem very much interested, anyhow.”
“My dear fellow, I never could get up an ecstasy!”
“Still waters run deep, Holcombe. I suspect that is the case with you, you sly fellow.”
Monday came, and the two friends were again at No. 25. Rachel admitted them as before, and showed them into the old lace‐merchant’s den. He was alone, and looked very eager; but his wasted, wrinkled hands and dried‐up face spoke his miserly character, and froze the sympathy he so little cared to receive. He laid out his precious wares with trembling fingers, and it was curious to see these cobweb treasures drawn from common drawers and boxes, and heaped on a rickety deal table near the stove that was just lighted, because he was still so ill. Everything about the room looked cold and hungry; the floor was bare; the paint on the walls dirty and discolored; and an untidy assortment of tin pans and cheap crockery littered the neighborhood of the stove. The window looked into a back‐ yard, and what panes were not broken were obscured by dirt. In strange contrast to all this was a bouquet of fresh flowers on a chair.
While Ellice and the old man were bargaining, Holcombe fastened his eye on the flowers, conjecturing well whose present they were.
The old Jew asked enormous prices for his laces, and gave marvellous accounts of the difficulties he had sustained in procuring them as an excuse for his exorbitant demands. So the time seemed long to Henry, who knew little or nothing about such things, when suddenly Rachel appeared at the door with a basin of soup. “Fraulein Löwenberg sent you this,” she said to the old man, and then to the strangers: “You must excuse us; he is too weak to do without this at the accustomed time, and the fraulein is gone out.”
“Gone out!” querulously said the miser. “Gone out without coming to see me!”
“She knew you were engaged,” retorted Rachel. “You will see her again to‐ night.” She spoke as to a spoiled child.
“Well, well, business must be first, and she has business as well as I have.” And he went on with his flourishing declamations over his lovely laces.
Holcombe understood why she had omitted her morning’s visit to her old protégé, and, indeed, it would have been unlike his ideal of her had she acted otherwise.
“Have you nearly done, Ellice?” he said, coming up to the table.
“Yes; all right. See, I have chosen the nicest things I could find, as far as I know; but the fellow asks such confounded prices.”
“Well, you had only that to expect,” was the smiling answer, and then the young man turned to the lace‐merchant.
“Have you been ill long?”
“Only a month, and I should be dead if it were not for Maheleth. I cannot do without her.”
“But she is poor herself; she cannot bring you what you want, can she?”
“No, she cannot; she is poor, and her father is poor, and so am I. I sell nothing now; I have no customers.”
Holcombe smiled slightly, but he went on:
“Are you fond of flowers?”
“Yes, but I cannot afford them.”
“Then it would be cruel of me to ask a violet hearts‐ease of you; but, if you would give me that, I will send you more flowers, and bring you something you will like to‐morrow.”
“Yes, you may take one; but, if you want flowers, Maheleth can give you some; she has some growing in her room.”
“No, this one is enough. Good‐by, and I will try and see you again.”
As they left the house, Ellice said to his friend:
“Well, Holcombe, you are green! You don’t mean to say you believe he is poor?”
“No, I don’t believe it; but he will be none the worse off for a few flowers and some good food, if he won’t get them for himself.”
“I suppose you remember that there is another invalid in the house, and the same person nurses both?”
“I know what you mean, Ellice, and I wish you wouldn’t joke; it is not fair.”
“Very well, old fellow; but, if you were anybody but yourself, I should say ‘take care.’ You always were the steadiest old chap going.”
A day or two afterwards, Holcombe was left alone again; he had sent things to Zimmermann as he had promised; but as yet he had not revisited the Juden‐Strasse. On Friday, there was a special service at the Catholic cathedral, at eight o’clock, and the young man, hardly knowing why, determined to go.
The church was only partially lighted, except the chancel, which was dazzling. The music was good, the congregation devout, and the German sermon as interesting as could be expected. The whole effect was very beautiful, and seemed to Henry a peace‐giving and heart‐soothing one. A rush of voices came breaking in upon his reverie at the Tantum Ergo, and the surging sound was like a mighty utterance of his own feelings. As the priest raised the Host, he bowed his head low, and prayed for peace and guidance; and when he lifted it again the first object his eye fixed on was a slight, dark‐robed figure, standing aside in the aisle, drooping her head against one of the columns. He knew the figure well; but, with a strange thrill, he asked himself why was she here? For the music? For the beauty of the sight? For love of a creed she was half ashamed to embrace? Or from the curiosity of a chance passer‐by?
He watched her as she moved behind the shadow of the pillar, and waited till she was enticed from her hiding‐place by the quick desertion of the once crowded church. Now the light from a lamp streamed down on her; the face was anxious and troubled, as if weary with thought.
“Friday, too!” he said to himself. “And she has come here on the very Sabbath. Perhaps she has been to her own service first. But what can it mean, if she only were what this would point to?”
Odd Stories. IV. The White Shah.
If thou wouldst hear a choice history of princes, go into the garden of the shah’s pleasure‐house, and hearken to what the humming‐birds tell thee in sleep. How else could thy servant have learned the memory of Shah Mizfiz, the forgotten? Was it not he who built the palace of a hundred towers in the valley of groves? Beautiful beyond compare was that valley’s lake which presented itself like a mirror before the pavilion of the shah; and magnificent as a house in the sky were the hundred delicate towers that rose one above the other, amid gardens and fountains, and half lost in groves of venerable height and shade. High hills whose sides were covered with woods and flowers, and watered with streams and fountains, shut out the valley from the world save where it was entered through a great gate crowned with towers; and a long colonnade of loftiest trees pranked with beds of tulips, hyacinths, and roses, and intertwined with flowering vines that here and there made curious arbors. From the windows, or from the balconies, or from the pavilions of his palace, the shah could see the lords and ladies who, dressed in gold‐broidered silks of all colors, shook their plumes as they rode up to his gate, or, listening to the song of minstrels, sailed upon the bosom of the lake.
Naught now could the shah do but dream. Surrounded by hills that fenced him from mankind, by waters that mirrored the skies or leaped into the sunlight, by flowers whose odors inspired the sense, by trees which everywhere made repose for him, and by towers, the intricacies and ingenuities of which rendered his palace ever new to him, he forgot all common things. The cares of state he left to his ministers at the gate of the valley; while in one or other of the innumerable courts of his palace, or among its unknown and invisible gardens, he retired from the intrusion of mortals. “I went to seek the rose‐king,” said or sang a poet of the court; “so I stripped a great rose of all its leaves, one by one, and in its heart of hearts I found the Shah Mizfiz.” Now, having captured the tenth of a number of white elephants, the like of which was never seen, except in the woods and by the lake of the imperial valley, where they roamed in romantic innocence and tameness, the Shah Mizfiz betook himself to his dreams as others do to their books.
At times, seated high on his favorite white elephant, the old shah rode in state through his grounds. Thence it came to pass that, seeing his beard like almond‐blossoms, and the milky color of his throne‐bearer, they who visited the gardens of the lake remembered him as the White Shah. Leaning on the cushions of his vine‐encircled pavilion, his silken beard and silvery locks floating in the breath of the zephyr, how often have the minstrels passed by beneath him over the mirror of the lake, singing under their gorgeous sails or to the time‐beat of their oars those songs which, with a tinkling and rippling melody, lingered in his ear. Less was it known how looked and fared the shah when he retired to the inmost bowers of the interior gardens of the hundred towers. But what wonder if in one of those fine day‐dreams so celebrated by the poet Bulghasel the flower‐ fairies themselves did him veritable honor, and, circling gardens of roses, tulips, and lilies, danced at his feet and round about him, an illusion of humor and beauty?
Ah! the deep‐eyed, far‐gazing White Shah! What dreams he dreamed of green ages in the youth of the world, of far‐off golden centuries to come, of ships navigating the air of sunset, of adventures in the stars, and of nights with the great moon‐shah! They were not to be told or counted; the number and wonder of them would have tasked a hundred scribes, and put as many dreamers to sleep. Howbeit, the shah’s visions persuaded him to become an oracle for all his empire. Statesmen consulted his dreams, and poets made themes of them, and doubtless the humane spirit of his visions found its way into the laws. Thanks to them, the people had abundant feast‐days, and, if a mine of precious stones were discovered, or the caravans were richer than usual, or the lords were moved to more than wonted bounty, or new fountains were built on the dry roads, or new temples set up here and there, the shah’s dreams were praised. When he had completed the thousandth of a line of dreams, the smallest of which would have made a paradise on earth again, he dreamed that his people were prosperous like none other under the sun; for his prime minister had artfully omitted to report that his eastern provinces were suffering the horrors of a famine, and those of the west were threatened by war. But on neither of these facts did the White Shah lay the blame for that final eclipse which ruined his dreams. In a fatal hour, having too long slept among the poppies, and drunk too much wine and coffee, he dreamt that the demon Sakreh had caught him up in a storm on the desert of Lop, out of which he let him drop into the Lake of Limbo, whence, fishing him up by the hair of his head, he banged him against the Caucasus and set him down to cool on the Himalaya, ere, taking him to the topmost height of the palace of the hundred towers, he allowed him to fall through the many‐ colored glasses of the dome of delights. His displeasure with the effects of this dream was heightened and consummated when the poet Bulghasel, in a moment of malediction, trod on his particular corn. From that moment, peace forsook the couch of the White Shah, and dreams of glory visited not his slumbers.
Henceforward what had been dreamland to the too happy shah became the saddest reality. In a white age he had lost his visions as old men lose their teeth. He wandered about the valley—no longer seated high on the pride of his white elephant, but crownless and on foot—murmuring from hour to hour: “I have lost my dream—I have lost my dream.” One day, leaving palace and throne, he passed out of his gate liked one crazed, to seek, as he said, his dream. Far away among the Parsees the poet Bulghasel found him after many pilgrimages: “And O my white‐haired sire,” cried the affectionate poet, “hast thou found the object of thy search?” “Yea, son,” rejoiced the White Shah, “I have found that which I never lost, but would that I had possessed; for then my dream was a fiction, and now truth is a sufficient dream for me. If the new shah would sleep well, let him have this dream.”
Signs Of The Times.
In Europe, of late, meetings have been the order of the day. There have been meetings of emperors and Internationalists; of “Old Catholics” and Catholics; of church congresses and congresses to disestablish the church; of “Home‐Rulers” and Dilkites. The voluntary expatriation of the Alsace‐ Lorraine population has followed close on the heels of the violent expulsion of the Jesuits, both influenced by the same motive power; trades‐unions have called together a society of German professors, who, by dint of powerful speeches of an explosive nature, succeeded finally in showing, in a very conclusive manner, that they knew little or nothing of what they were talking about. Gambetta has found his voice again; Russia has mildly but decidedly objected to its inflammable utterances, and in the midst of all the hubbub the eyes of the world have been attracted to the strange spectacle in these days of a nation, by a sudden and spontaneous movement, turning its steps to an humble shrine of the Blessed Virgin.
As for the meeting of the emperors, we were not present at the council, and had no secret emissary concealed in the cup‐board. What was effected, or what was intended to be effected, is an utter mystery to us. We very much doubt if anything were effected at all; that is, anything real, lasting, and permanent. The composing elements were in themselves as incapable of mingling as oil and water. If people looked to permanent peace or peace for any length of time from it, we fear they will be sadly mistaken in view of what we have since seen. The effective forces of Austria are fixed at 800,000 men. The government, actuated doubtless by peaceful motives; finds it necessary to keep on hand a peace effective of 250,000; and, that this force may be in fighting order at any moment, the recruits must be kept for three years under colors. To supply this contingency, 30,000 more men are required, which draws a sum of $1,850,000 out of the national chest, a chest neither very deep nor very safe. The measure was objected to, whereupon Count Andrássy spurred them up by informing the astonished members that, notwithstanding the imperial exhibition of brotherly love at Berlin, the speeches, manœuvrings, fireworks, and the rest, he would not venture to answer for the continuance of peace even to the end of the present year. As an echo of the truth of this, Prussia has just given an order for 3,000,000 rifles of a new pattern, on the strength, doubtless, of the discharge of the French debt. Russia is increasing her already vast army steadily and surely, while France hopes by her new scheme of raising forces to show at the end of five years an active army of 715,000, and a territorial force of 720,000 men. So much for the effects of the imperial conference as regards peace.
The Internationale, true to the discordant elements of which it was composed, adjourned without effecting anything or coming to any conclusion. This was only to be expected; but we should not judge from this that it is dead, as has been too hastily done by many journals. Its life is disorder, and, if it can catch the trades‐unions, its influence would be paramount.
As for the meeting of the “Old Catholics”—we presume they call themselves “Old” Catholics as the Greeks called the furies Eumenides—it will soon have passed out of memory. We rejoice that it did occur, in order to show the “movement” in its true light. Luther himself had not half the chance which Döllinger and the rest enjoyed. The strongest of governments at their back, the whole anti‐Catholic world looking with eager eyes on this mountain in travail—parturiet; and not even the ridiculus mus is born in recompense for all this labor, storm, fuss, and anxiety. We forget; there issued a long string of resolutions, which one or two newspapers published, the generality very sensibly finding them of too great length and of too little importance to burden their leaders with them. The whole affair was utterly ridiculous even to the ménu, which, as became a solid dinner, composed for the most part of German professors with a few Episcopal waifs and strays from England and America, was in Latin, and commenced thus:
Symposium. Gustatio: Pisciculi oleo perfusi et salmones fumo siccati ad cibi appetentiam excitandam. Mensa prima, etc.
And this is the way in which the “Old Catholics” meet to found or reform a church! The effect of it all is shown in the comments of the secular press. The cleverest journals in England and America, those who expected much from it, generally express themselves to the effect that, though far from saying that the meeting was without significance, it did not succeed in erecting a platform whereon a body could stand. The fact is this: We are far from denying to the majority of the men there assembled abundance of intellect and that sort of talent that can make a fine speech or perhaps compose a readable book, but the world, if it must be changed, wants something more solid than this.
Prince Bismarck’s measures are what Strafford would call “thorough”; and he is carrying out this “thorough” policy with far greater effect than the vacillating Stuart. The latter lost his head for too much heart; the German chancellor is not likely to imitate him in that. The Jesuits had small respite. We presume they are all out of Germany by this time. How much the country at large will gain in peace, solidity, and security by their expulsion it is impossible for us to say. Oddly enough, in Prince Bismarck’s stronghold, Prussia itself, we find that the new order is not destined to run quite smoothly. The diet is dissolved because the Upper House refused to pass the country reform bill in the face of the emperor and an official intimation from the minister of the interior that if the measure were defeated the government would dissolve the diet and convoke a new one. Whether the members of the Upper House will continue the fight, and come into direct collision with the power which they so helped to make supreme, we do not know yet, but we expect not.
Meanwhile, the Jesuits have not gone out of their fatherland alone. The sympathy of the whole Catholic world has gone out with them, and its expression is gaining volume daily. Addresses of condolence and protestations against the legal violence which expelled them are rising up day after day from the hearth‐stones of the land they have quitted, as well as from lands and multitudes to whom they as individuals are utterly unknown. Perhaps the most noticeable of the many which are continually appearing in their own land is that of the society of German Catholics recently assembled at Cologne, which passed a series of resolutions protesting strongly:
1. Against the assertion that the Catholic population is indifferent to the interests of fatherland, and hostile to the empire. 2. Against the laic laws which would control the affairs of the churches. 3. Against the state direction of the schools. 4. Against the expulsion of the Jesuits. 5. Against the encroachment of the state on the jurisdiction of the bishops. 6. Against the suppression of the temporal power of the Pope.
Such is the Catholic voice all the world over. If rulers can respect this voice, they will have no more faithful, earnest, or devoted children than the children of the Catholic Church. If they cannot respect it, they have only to expect an unfailing legal opposition until they are compelled to respect it, as Ireland, speaking in O’Connell, compelled England to do; as Germany, by lawful agitation and peaceful though unceasing and determined protest, will compel Prince Bismarck to do, until we see again restored to the country which they love and which loves them the sons who, by peaceful counsel and wise guidance, and religious instruction, will bring more glory, solid prosperity, enlightenment, and peace to the nation than a cycle of Bismarcks.
The Bishop of Ermeland still survives the terrible threats of the chancellor which have been gathering over his head in deepening thunder this long while for excommunicating heretic priests; the bolt has not yet fallen. Perhaps Jove finds himself a little puzzled how to fulminate it to a nicety. To show the justice of the Bismarck government, and how equally it deals with all classes, the Consistory of Magdeburg has quite recently decreed the excommunication of all Protestants who by mixed marriages shall educate their children as Catholics; the decree has been carried into execution at Lippspring; the case brought before the civil courts, and of course the pastor, one Schneider, who wrought the excommunication publicly and openly in the church, was supported by the just weight of the law. Now, excommunication is excommunication whether you call it Catholic or Protestant. Why, then, threaten with impeachment? Why stop the salary which the government for the country bestows in the one case, and let the other go entirely free? And yet this is all according to law!
Another anomaly according to law is displayed in the seizing of the schools by the government. We have not space here to go into the whole question, instructive though it would be, as showing the determination of this government to uproot the Catholic faith by every means in its power. But we will mention one instance. A ministerial circular accompanied the notice of the new arrangements, informing the teachers that it was desirable that their scholars should belong to no religious confraternities—of the Rosary, Blessed Virgin, and such like—and that if they persisted in belonging to them they should be dismissed. We find it necessary to endorse this statement by informing our readers that it is plain, unvarnished fact. Civil marriage is now in full sway; that is to say, it is no longer a sacrament according to law. What wonder that the German bishops assembled at Fulda gave utterance to their solemn protest, an extract of which we cull? It reads as though it had been penned in the days of Diocletian, or Julian the Apostate, or Henry VIII. But in these days, when mere human society has come to know its power, and dream that it possesses freedom, the protest jars on our ears as something out of tune, out of time, out of date altogether:
“We demand, as a right which no one can dispute to us, that the bishops, the parish priests of the cathedral churches, and the directors of souls, be only appointed in accordance with the laws of the church and the agreement existing between the church and state.
“In accordance with these laws and agreements, the Catholic people and ourselves cannot consider as legal a director of souls or a teacher of religion one who has not been so named by his bishop; and we, the Catholic people and ourselves, cannot consider as legally recognized a bishop who has not been named by the Pope.
“We claim equally for ourselves and for all Catholics the right of professing throughout Germany our holy Catholic faith in all its integrity, at all times and in all freedom, and to rest upon the principle that we are in no wise constrained to suffer within the bosom of our religious community those who do not profess the Catholic faith, and who do not submit entirely to the authority of the church.
“We consider as a violation of our church and of the rights which are guaranteed to it every attack made against the liberty of religious orders. We regard and vindicate, also, as an essential and inalienable right of the Catholic Church, the full and entire liberty which it possesses of elevating its servants in accordance with ecclesiastical laws, and we demand not only that the church exercise over the Catholic schools (primary, secondary, and higher) the influence which alone can guarantee to the Catholic people that its children shall receive in the schools a Catholic education and instruction, but we claim also for the church the freedom to found and direct in an independent manner, certain private establishments ordained for the teaching of the sciences in accordance with Catholic principles. In fine, we maintain and defend the sacred character of Christian marriage as that of a sacrament of the Catholic Church, as well as the right which the divine will has given to the church in connection with this sacrament.”
The signatures of the bishops are affixed to this document, which is addressed to all the German governments, and produced a commotion and irritation among all the national liberal journals which were unexampled. We have given this extract here in order to bring home to the minds of our readers how hard the church is driven in Germany. When the bishops and the laity combined feel themselves called upon to protest in this style, the government which for no reason whatever can give rise to such a protest—signed by the saintly chiefs of a body of 14,000,000, and endorsed in meeting after meeting by those 14,000,000 and the countless numbers of their co‐religionists outside of Germany scattered through the broad world—must be one which does not govern, but tyrannizes.
The same “thorough” policy prevailed in Alsace and Lorraine. On the very day, October 1, when the option of declaring for France or Germany arrived, all the men who remained in the countries named were enrolled in the Prussian service from that date. This, beyond what Mr. Disraeli would call a “sentimental grievance,” drove them from the country, as it must have been intended to do. Service under the power that annexed them, which they but yesterday fought against, and a service the most rigorous and exacting that exists, as it must be in order to retain its supremacy, was something that seems to have been ingeniously invented in order to drive the people out. The provinces are more than decimated; the Prussian army, if increased at all, is increased in the event of a renewed war by untrustworthy men, and a new drop of gall is thrown into the already overbitter cup which France is compelled to swallow. And yet the Provinzial Correspondenz (official) of Berlin, in view of October 1, said: “The government has not hesitated an instant in calling without delay on the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine to serve in the German army, as the best and surest means to evoke and develop speedily among the population newly reunited to Germany the sentiment of an intimate community with the German people.”
This smacks of excess of credibility. If Bismarck wanted really to annex the provinces in heart and soul, he adopted the very surest means of emptying them in the speediest manner, and letting in the Germans, who now, sick of war and of the rumors of war, wish to emigrate in such formidable numbers. Probably the chancellor proposes using the deserted provinces as a safety‐valve for these recreant spirits. One of the most significant signs of the instability of the new empire is the desire of so many earnest workers to leave it just when it has been established in all its glory and power. But glory and power do not last long in the eyes of men who look to a peaceful life and to which side, in a popular phrase, their bread is buttered. Instead of peace, they find the service more rigorous than ever; the money which was won by the blood of their kin and countrymen going to the pockets of the generals, to carry out emperors’ fêtes, and purchase millions of rifles of a new pattern. Evidently the business of the German Empire wears a very martial look. But the artisan and clerk have fought well, and find no returns. Your German is of a logical bent, so he determines on going elsewhere, where he may live at peace, and let Bismarck look after his own empire.
In France, we have had and are having the pilgrimages to Lourdes. Not alone to Lourdes, and not alone in France, but in Belgium and Germany also there have been numerous pilgrimages to various shrines. Of course the wits of the secular journals, with a few honorable exceptions, have had a fine time of it, and have twisted the stories of the miracles of Lourdes and La Salette into every possible shape in which they might squeeze a laugh out of it. They are at great pains to show what we were long ago convinced of—that they do not know what faith means.
Mgr. Mermillod, after a residence of seven years in full enjoyment and exercise of his ecclesiastical functions, has suddenly come to be non‐ recognized by the Swiss government, or, more properly, by the Grand Council of Geneva, and his pension stopped. The Grand Council of Geneva had already expelled the Sisters of Charity and the Christian Brothers. It essays the rôle of Bismarck, and where it purposes stopping we do not yet see. But as the population of Geneva is composed of 47,000 Catholics against 43,000 Protestants, we may presume that the Grand Council of Geneva will very speedily be brought to its senses. Its miserable pension of 10,000 francs was raised to 23,000 in two days by a voluntary contribution set on foot by M. Veuillot of the Univers. The Grand Council has incurred the contempt of all rational minds, while Mgr. Mermillod is supported in his action by all his fellow‐bishops, by his Holiness, and by the Catholic world. It may be as well to remember that the Protestant party in the Swiss cantons voted, but were happily outvoted, for union with Prussia. It is not difficult to see whence the persecution of Mgr. Mermillod starts.
Gentlemen who have visited the Alhambra in London, or any one almost of the Parisian theatres, or Niblo’s in New York, are not apt to be squeamish on the score of the decent and moral in theatrical representations. Things must therefore be at a very bad pass when we find the correspondents of the London Times and the other English newspapers, in common with those of our own and the Parisian press, uniting in condemning in the most unsparing terms the pieces which are now in vogue on the boards of the Roman theatres. Cardinal Patrizi addressed an official letter to Minister Lanza on the subject. That gentleman, who is extremely active in suppressing a Catholic paper which dares to caricature his majesty’s government, sends back an answer which, divested of its diplomatic wool, is cowardly, stupid, and insulting. We have been astonished to find “religious” newspapers in this city gleeful over these representations which the good sense, if nothing more, of the secular correspondents of all journals in all countries condemns as odious, detestable, and utterly unfit to be presented in any civilized, or for that matter uncivilized, community. These journals which are religious see in them “a new means of evangelizing Italy.” Another feature in “united Italy” is the utter insecurity of life and property in Rome, Naples, and Ravenna principally, though, in fact, through the length and breadth of the land. Victor Emanuel has held the country long enough now to give some account of his stewardship. The government of the Pope and of the Bourbons, we were told, favored brigandage and every other atrocity; yet the correspondents of the London Times, the London Spectator, and by this time most of the other anti‐Catholic journals, are furnishing articles which must rather astonish the upholders of the blessings which were to flow from “Italy united.” They picture scenes of rapine and blood before which the graphic Arkansas letters of the Herald pale, while the doers of these deeds, the thieves and murderers, are “well known to the police,” in fact, on excellent terms with them, and walk about in the open day with any man’s life in their hands who dares frown on them. The government is simply afraid of them, afraid to use the only remedy now in its hands by proclaiming martial law, a proceeding which the English journals strongly advise. If such a state of things continues much longer, we fear the inevitable verdict must come to Victor Emanuel, “Now thou shalt be steward no longer.” Of his ill‐ gotten power, indeed, it may be said, “blood hath bought blood, and blows have answered blows.” People are apt to be logical; if a government robs and kills and calls it law, why should not they do the same? Italy will continue in a state of chronic anarchy until religion is restored to it; then order will follow as it is following in France to‐day.
In England, though Parliament has not been sitting, questions of moment have been rife. Mr. Miall has again raised the war‐cry against the Established Church, ably seconded by Mr. Jacob Bright. The Times and Saturday Review and other journals affect to laugh at Mr. Miall, as they and such as they laughed at the Reform Bill, the Act of Catholic Emancipation, and the disestablishment of the Irish Church. We believe Mr. Miall’s measure to be the logical sequence of the last of these measures, a fact which Mr. Disraeli in opposing it foretold. It is an anomaly—a church supported by a majority which does not believe in it. Mr. Miall’s measure is only a growth of time; in fact, it only requires the conversion of such organs as the Times and Saturday Review to bring it to pass to‐day.
As a corollary to Mr. Miall’s movement comes the annual Church Congress held this year at Leeds under the presidency of the Bishop of Ripon. This annual congress is a curious thing; it is a meeting of everybody, high and low, church and lay, to compare notes and see how the church is getting on—a very useful proceeding, no doubt, if there were only something faintly approaching unanimity among its members. As it happened, unanimity was the one thing wanting, and certain stages of the proceedings were as warm as those of the “Old Catholics” at Cologne. In fact, the account of the whole proceedings reads like an extract from The Comedy of Convocation.
THE HISTORY OF THE SACRED PASSION. From the Spanish of Father Luis de la Palma, of the Society of Jesus. The Translation revised and edited by Henry James Coleridge, of the same Society. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This is the third volume of the Quarterly Series which the Jesuit Fathers are bringing out in London. The series is beautifully got up, and we wish it every success.
The present work on the Passion has a prologue by the author, in which he sets forth the end he has had in view. The prologue is followed by a brief treatise on the method of meditation on the Passion, together with four sections suggestive of aids to the memory, the understanding, the will, and the colloquy. The whole is prefaced by the editor, from whose remarks we transcribe the following: “That he (the author) was a man of sound and deep theological learning is sufficiently proved by the work which is now presented to the English reader.... Everything he has written is of the most sterling value, and has always been very highly esteemed, especially by those who have labored in illustrating and explaining the Spiritual Exercises of S. Ignatius.... He tells us (in the prologue) that the book is designed both for simple reading and also for the purpose of furnishing matter to those who are in the habit of practising meditation and of preparing their meditation for themselves. Those who use the book for the first‐named purpose will hardly discover that it is intended also to serve the other; while those who practise meditation, and refer to these pages for matter pregnant with such considerations and suggestive of copious affections and practical resolutions, will not find it easy to exhaust the stores which are here so unostentatiously collected. It may be worth while to point out that the design of the author, that his book should thus serve the purpose of a storehouse for meditation on the Passion, accounts for the only kind of amplification which he has allowed himself. This is the paraphrastic commentary which he generally substitutes for or subjoins to the words of our blessed Lord in the various scenes of the Passion. The meaning of these sacred words is often very fully and lovingly brought out, although the narrative form in which the whole work is cast might less naturally suggest this method of treatment, so valuable to those who desire to feed on the sayings of our blessed Saviour in all their rich fertility and meaning.”
The editor expresses a fear “that the translation will be found to be, at least in parts, rugged and unpolished”; but says he has “tried, on the other hand, to make it as faithful as possible; and to that object has been well content to sacrifice smoothness of style, though the original deserves the most careful rendering in matter and in form.” “Palma belongs,” he adds, “to what I believe is the best age of Spanish religious literature—the age of Louis of Grenada, John of Avila, Louis of Leon, S. Teresa; S. John of the Cross, Louis da Ponte, and other famous writers. In point of style he is, perhaps, not equal to them; but he shares with many of these writers the characteristic of masculine common sense, theological culture alike exquisite and solid, and the tenderest and simplest piety. Happily, these are qualities which do not easily evaporate in a translation.”
He then goes on to say that he has “thought it better not to attempt in any way to edit Father Palma as to points on which he would perhaps write differently were he living in the present century.” We quite agree with his decision; and shall here close our notice of the book, since, after what we have borrowed from the preface, any comments of our own would be superfluous.
ALL‐HALLOW EVE; OR, THE TEST OF FUTURITY, AND OTHER STORIES. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
This book, containing three tales, All‐Hallow Eve, Unconvicted, and Jenifer’s Prayer, while it will doubtless afford much amusement to many readers during the long winter evenings, will, we trust, have other and more decided effects. By contrast, it shows that fiction of the very highest order may be successfully written without the extraneous aid of bad taste and more than doubtful morality, and by example it will encourage our aspiring writers who, now overawed by the shadow of departed genius, are unwilling or afraid to risk their reputations in endeavoring to rival the efforts of those who formerly delighted and instructed us by their compositions. When the Star of the North, Scott, set, it was feared that this species of literature had suffered an irreparable loss; but soon a host of writers sprang up in England, Ireland, and, we may say, America, who not only compensated for the loss, but more than repaid us for the decadence of the historico‐romantic school. When those in turn disappeared, it was confidently predicted that the present generation, barren of imagination and powers of observation and description, could not produce anything equal to what adorned the pages of men like Griffin, Dickens, and Hawthorne. Daily experience teaches us that this was a fallacy. New buds of promise are constantly springing up around us which need but the encouraging voice of the press and the smiles of a discriminating public patronage to warm into full‐blown vigor and loveliness.
The three tales before us are an earnest of this. The story entitled All‐ Hallow Eve, the first in this collection, as it is, we think, the first in merit, is a tale of singular beauty, power and truthfulness. In construction artistic without the appearance of art, in verisimilitude it is all that would be required by the most orthodox French dramatist. The characters are few and clearly defined, the plot simple, the scene scarcely changes, the time from beginning to end is short, and the dénoûment, though tragic, offends neither our sensibilities nor our sense of justice. Ned Cavana and Michael Murdock are two aged well‐to‐do Ulster farmers whose lands lie contiguous. The former has a daughter Winifred or Winny, and the latter a son Thomas; and the natural desire of the fond parents is to form a matrimonial alliance between their children, and thus unite the families and the farms. Tom Murdock is handsome, attractive, cunning, mercenary, and unscrupulous, while Winny, who is limned with more than a painter’s art, adds to her natural graces a noble heart and keen perception. Edmond Lennon, a young peasant rich in everything but money, falls in love with her, and, besides encountering the secret or open hostility of the Murdocks, he finds an almost insurmountable barrier in the caste pride of the father of his lady‐love. Aided, however, by the gentle and astute Winny, he partially succeeds in overcoming this difficulty, when the machinations of his rival are employed against him, and the result is—but we will not destroy the pleasure of our fair and necessarily curious readers by unfolding the catastrophe. The contrasts of character of the two old men, each in his way aiming at the best, and also between the suitors, are excellently drawn; the interludes, such as the All‐Hallow Eve festival and the “hurling” match, are accurate and lifelike, and the bits of pathos which here and there dot the course of the story are so touching in their very simplicity that we venture to say many an eye unused to the melting mood will be none the less moistened on their perusal. The style adopted by the author is easy and familiar, a little too much so, we imagine, to suit the tastes of the more exacting reader; and herein lies the only defect, if it can be called one, that we can perceive in this story.
Unconvicted; or, Old Thorneley’s Heirs, is a tale of an altogether different character, illustrating what may be called a more advanced state of civilization. The scene is laid in London, and the principal personages occupy a high social position. It is a story of suffering and affection, of deep, dark, and unruly passion, and undying love and friendship. It would be vain to attempt to epitomize the plot, which is woven so closely and so dexterously that our interest in the actors is kept constantly on the qui vive, and it is only at the very last chapter that we are relieved from all anxiety on their account. The tale opens with the death of old Gilbert Thorneley, it is supposed by poison, and the discovery of his murderer forms the principal theme of the entire narrative. This involves a great deal of legal discussion and analysis, and, for the first time in the history of fiction, as far as our knowledge goes, we have a clear and accurate description of the niceties, quibbles, and profundity of English law. Though more curious and instructive than amusing, this does not, however detract from the interest of the novel as such, but rather acts as an offset to the numerous scenes of connubial and filial affection with which it is replete. The moral is of course unexceptionable and easily drawn.
Jennifer’s Prayer, a shorter but no less meritorious story of English life, completes the volume, which, appearing at this season when good books become more a necessity than a luxury in the household, will no doubt be warmly welcomed by those who, from taste or inclination, prefer the attractions of the novel to the more serious study of science and history.
THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC FAMILY ALMANAC FOR THE UNITED STATES, FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1873, calculated for different parallels of latitude, and adapted for use throughout the country. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
There are something over five million Catholics in the United States, representing over five hundred thousand families. This little Catholic Family Almanac, then, should have a circulation of five hundred thousand. If it has not, the fault is not with the Publication Society, but in the Catholics themselves neglecting to diffuse it each in his own circle. A few years ago such a little annual would have been regarded as an impossibility. Beautiful in typography, with woodcut illustrations which in design and execution rival those of any work issued in the country, it is something that a Catholic can view with pride, and can never blush to open before any one. This is merely taking it at its mechanical value. Its scope is to give the yearly calendar of the church with what is locally interesting to us as Catholics in America, or associated with the trials and triumphs of the church in that Old World to which by some degrees more or less we must all trace our origin.
In this year’s little volume, we find portraits of various ages, with original sketches, telling us of great prelates among ourselves, Archbishop Spalding and Bishop McGill, representative men who knew the necessity of diffusing information among our people; bishops of the last generation like Milner, whose works are familiar to all, yet whose counterfeit presentment few have ever met; or Bishop Doyle, J.K.L., whom Ireland can never forget; or like De Haro, who extended his kindness to American Catholics in their early struggles; or like the illustrious Hughes, whose large mind gave us a national life and position. The Venerable Gregory Lopez will be new to many, great as was his fame in Mexico. Crespel represents the French pioneer clergy at the frontiers in colonial times—a man who saw rough life by sea and land in his missionary career. Father Mathew needs no comment. The likeness is speaking and fine. What part Catholics bore in the days of the Revolution we see in the sketch of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, illustrated with a portrait and a view of the old mansion. With his cousin, a priest, he was laboring to make our cause continental before the Declaration of Independence was debated in Congress.
Mrs. Seton, as the lady of wealth and influence in New York society, while Washington as President resided there, shows the wonderful hand of Providence. Who that saw that young wife then could have said that she would be the foundress of a Catholic sisterhood, and not be deemed insane? Mother Julia, foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame, whom some people may have heard of, and whose schools in this country alone contain sixty thousand pupils.
Next comes the Venerable de la Salle, founder of the Christian Brothers, whose pupils in our land, one might say, “no man can number for multitude.” The portrait and sketch of this servant of God will be read in thousands of American families which owe the Christian training of their boys to his devoted community of Brothers; and, happily in the same work, we have a portrait and sketch of the brilliant Gerald Griffin, who closed his days as a Christian Brother.
The view of old S. Mary’s, the cradle of Maryland, the Catholic settlement founded by the Ark and Dove, is alone worth all the Almanac costs. And this is but a portion of its contents. We have a stirring incident of the early missions, the Rock of Cashel, the Church of Icolmkill, the Cathedrals of Sienna and Chartres.
Every Catholic of means should feel it a bounden duty to order a number of copies of this Almanac, and distribute them among the families less likely to hear of its merits. In this way much is yet to be done in the diffusion of popular Catholic literature. Our laity have to feel that there is an apostolate incumbent upon them. Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
TRADITION. Principally with reference to Mythology and the Law of Nations. By Lord Arundell of Wardour. London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This is a work in which the chronologies, mythologies, and fragmentary traditions of many nations are gathered together and made to do service in the cause of Revelation.
The opponents of revealed truth not unfrequently assume this department of knowledge to be their exclusive possession—they have been foremost in working this mine, all it contains is theirs, and must be made to sustain their theories. Lord Arundell’s book shows how utterly groundless is this assumption. Here we have facts and figures, arguments and inferences, taken from their own writings, which go to establish the truthfulness of the sacred Scriptures from the very standpoint whence it has been sought to convict them of falsehood. The first chapter in Genesis is a key to every cosmogony. The rudest code of barbaric laws bears some impress of the Almighty Finger of Sinai. Traditions, however distant and vague, point in one general direction. These facts have long since been established. Lord Arundell proves them anew, and brings forth much new matter in his proofs. Indeed, while in many books we often have occasion to note the absence of data and ideas, this, we may say, is crowded with both.
We doubt not that this book will forward greatly the interests of truth, and thus the zeal and devotion of its noble author will be fully requited.
GOD AND MAN. Conferences delivered at Notre Dame in Paris. By the Rev. Père Lacordaire, of the Order of Friar‐Preachers. Translated from the French by a Tertiary of the same Order. London: Rivingtons. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
The translator has already given us two volumes of the great Dominican’s Conferences, and promises more in the same readable form. Persons as yet unacquainted with Lacordaire will find his papers kindle their enthusiasm beyond, perhaps, those of any other author—that is, if they can at all appreciate the originality of his argument, together with his giant grasp of thought and diction. And especially do we commend these conferences to earnest thinkers outside the church, with whom the supernatural is the question of questions.
Indebted as we are to the translator, he must not think us hypercritical if we complain of bad punctuation, a comma being sometimes found where a colon or even a full stop ought to be; or if we take leave to remind him that, to render French idiomatically, it will not do to preserve the sudden changes of tense which are forcible in that language, as in Latin, but sound very strangely in English.
THE HYMNARY, WITH TUNES: A Collection of Music for Sunday‐Schools. By S. Lasar. New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main.
We could recommend this hymn‐book to Catholic schools, and, on account of its intrinsic worth, would have been glad to do so, if the compiler had excluded the few hymns, of no special merit in themselves or in the tunes adapted to them, which are anti‐Catholic in doctrine. Poison is dangerous, and we cannot offer it even in the smallest quantities to our children.
THE ISSUES OF AMERICAN POLITICS. By Orrin Skinner, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1873.
Attracted by the title of this book, the fact of its dedication to a distinguished citizen of New York, and by its comprehensive table of contents, we took it up and read it from cover to cover. In all candor, we must say a more confused, ungrammatical, and shallower book it has seldom fallen to our lot to peruse; and why any respectable publishing house should have been induced to bring it out in such good style, or in any form at all, passes our comprehension. To grapple with the great issues of our American politics, to state each leading question clearly and fairly, and to draw deductions therefrom that will stand the test of justice and reason is a task requiring infinitely more experience, judicial ability, and knowledge of our language than the author displays or evidently ever will possess. Judging from this production, Mr. Skinner has not the faintest conception of the principles upon which rests the framework of our government. Though a lawyer, he is sadly ignorant of law as a science; and, though ambitious of authorship, he seems unable to write a paragraph intelligibly. For instance, take the following, snatched at random:
“The deduction from this criticism constitutes, of course, an advocacy of intelligent suffrage. The plea is here urged that an unrestricted suffrage is its own incentive to the education of those who exercise it. The assertion betrays an unpardonable ignorance of one of the most prominent characteristics of human nature. Frail humanity is so constituted that, when it has presented to it two ways of effecting its purposes, one with effort and the other without, it invariably chooses the latter. Equality as a fundamental element of republican institutions is also urged, Let such a sciolist read his conviction in the quotations from Burke already cited.”
It were, however, useless to further attempt to criticise this most pretentious and least readable of books, and the best wish we can afford the author, and one that we have no doubt will be gratified, is that it will be read by few and soon forgotten.
A MANUAL OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: A Text‐Book for Schools and Colleges. By John S. Hart, LL.D. Philadelphia: Eldridge & Bro. 1873.
Mr. Hart has gathered considerable fresh material on American literature in this volume. There is still much which he has omitted. With the same industry and care which he has already bestowed on this manual, he may render it complete. There is a personality in some of his remarks which is uncalled for. In spite of these defects, this is the best work of the kind with which we are acquainted.
THE MARBLE PROPHECY, AND OTHER POEMS. By J. G. Holland. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
When our holy church, with its venerated head, its divine sacraments and sacred ceremonies, is chosen by a writer of merit as the object upon which he feels himself moved to pour forth his scathing abuse or stinging ridicule, we bear his ponderous strokes or parry his keen thrusts as best we may, confessing to the pardonable weakness of feeling complimented at being called to the lists by an adversary of some strength of arm or sharpness of weapon; but, when one from the common crowd of chance‐ assembled knights, like our quondam Timothy Titcomb, presumes unchallenged to invite the attention of that respectable audience—the American public—to his little tilt against the giant of centuries, and, in his overeagerness to take a share in the fray, disports himself upon such a sorry steed as the “Marble Prophecy,” laden with “other poems” as a makeweight, we at once look about us to see if we have not a serviceable cane at hand for the use of the same discriminating public, et voila!
ROUNDABOUT RAMBLES IN LANDS OF FACT AND FANCY. By Frank R. Stockton. 1 vol. small 4to. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
This is an instructive work, compiled with much judgment and good taste from various authors, and is beautifully illustrated, making it a very desirable holiday present for the young folk.
NIAGARA: Its History and Geology, Incidents and Poetry. With illustrations. By George W. Holley. New York: Sheldon & Co. 1872.
This is something more than a mere Murray, or guide‐book, at the same time that it serves as a valuable reference to the intelligent tourist. Besides some historical and topographical descriptions, for which he draws on the works of Shea, Parkman, Marshall, the Relations of the Early Jesuit Missionaries, and State Documents, in addition to his own observations, he indulges in some geological speculations which will attract the attention of scientific readers. The whole is interspersed with anecdotes, incidents, and poetical scraps which will serve to relieve the tedium of travel, and hotel life.
A HIDDEN LIFE, AND OTHER POEMS. By George Macdonald, LL.D., Author of “Within and Without,” “Wilfred Cumbermede,” etc. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1872.
There is true poetry in this volume. The author possesses, in our judgment, powers of a high order. His mind, too, is of a deeply religious cast; and we wonder how he can remain a Protestant after his struggles with doubt on the one hand, as shown in the poem of “The Disciple,” and his attractions to Catholicity on the other, as evinced especially in his poem on “The Gospel Woman,” and most in the opening one, “The Mother Mary.” But then he has a laudatory sonnet “To Garibaldi.”
The “Catholic Publication Society” has in press, and will publish simultaneously with its appearance in England, from advance sheets furnished by the author, a new work, entitled, My Clerical Friends, by the author of The Comedy of Convocation. This will be the only authorized edition published in this country.
Books and Pamphlets Received.
From KREUZER BROTHERS, Baltimore: The Catholic Priest. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. 18mo, pp. 163.—The “Our Father.” By the same. 18mo, pp. 221.
From J. A. MCGEE, New York: Sister Mary Francis’ (the Nun of Kenmare) Advice to Irish Girls in America. 12mo, pp. 201.
From BURNS, OATES & CO., London: Reflections and Prayers for Holy Communion. From the French. With a preface by Archbishop Manning. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.) 18mo, pp. xii., 498.
From R. WASHBURNE, London: A Dogmatic Catechism. From the Italian of Frassinetti. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.) 18mo, pp. xix., 244.
From JAMES DUFFY, Dublin: Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects. By Henry Edward Manning, D.D. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.) pp. viii., 456.
From GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, New York: The Moral of Accidents, and other Discourses. By the late Thomas T. Lynch. 12mo, pp. xviii., 415.
From T. & T. CLARK, Edinburgh, and SCRIBNER, WELFORD & ARMSTRONG, New York: Biblical Commentary on the Books of the Kings. By C. F. Keil. 8vo, pp. viii., 523—Sermons from 1828 to 1860. By the late Wm. Cunningham, D.D. 8vo, pp. xxxvi, 416.—The Old Catholic Church. By W. D. Killen, D.D. 8vo, pp. xx., 411.—Biblical Commentary on the Book of Psalms. By F. Deleutzsch, D.D. Vol. III. 8vo, pp. 420.
From HOLT & WILLIAMS, New York: Fly Leaves by C. S. C. 12mo, pp. vi., 233.
From the AUTHOR: Key to the Massoretic Notes, Titles, and Index generally found in the margin of the Hebrew Bible. Translated from the Latin of A. Hahn. With many additions and corrections. By Alex. Merowitz, A.M., Professor of the Hebrew language and literature in the University of New York. New York: J. Wiley & Son. 8vo, paper, pp. 22.
From ELDREDGE & BROTHER, Philadelphia: A French Verb Book. By E. Lagarde, A.M. 12mo, pp. 130.
From P. O’SHEA, New York: Month of the Holy Rosary. By Rev. P. M. Chery, O.P. 18mo, pp. iv., 200—The Scapular of Mount Carmel. By Rev. P. Tissot, S.J. 24mo, pp. 105.
From the AUTHOR: The Irish Republic. A Historical Memoir of Ireland and her Oppressors. By P. Cudmore, Counsellor‐at‐Law. St. Paul: Pioneer Printing Company, 1871.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 94.—JANUARY, 1873.
A Son Of The Crusaders.
... “On his breast a bloodie crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead, as living, ever him ador’d: Upon his shield the like was also scor’d. For soveraine hope which in his helpe he had, Right faithful true he was in deede and word.”—SPENSER.
One day in the month of November, 1833, a stranger descended from the lumbering Schnellpost at the little town of Marburg (Electoral Hesse), on the pleasant banks of the Lahn. Looking around him, he discovered but a single object of interest—the old cathedral of the place, a noble Gothic edifice, which, although stripped and cold in its modern dedication to the Lutheran service, still preserved the salient features of its inalienable beauty and majesty of form.
The traveller, a young man of twenty‐three, a Catholic, and an enthusiast in his intelligent and cultivated admiration of the grand architecture of his church, recognized in the building a monument celebrated at once for its pure and perfect beauty, and the first in Germany in which the pointed arch prevailed over the round in the great renovation of art in the XIIIth century.
Contrary to Lutheran observance, the church happened on that day to be open, in compliance with a traditional custom, for the cathedral bore the name of S. Elizabeth, and this was S. Elizabeth’s Day. The stranger entered. There was no religious service. There were no worshippers, and children were at play among the old tombs. He wandered through the vast and desolate aisles, which not even the devastation and neglect of centuries had robbed of their marvellous elegance. Naked altars from which no ministering hand now wiped the dust, pillars, defaced statues, nearly obliterated paintings, broken and defaced wood carvings, successively struck his eye and attracted his attention. All these remains of Christian art, even in their ruin telling the story of their origin in days of fresh and fervent faith, appeared also to picture in a certain sequence the events of some devout life. Here was the statue of a young woman in the dress of a widow; further on, in painting, a frightened girl showing to a crowned warrior her robe filled with roses; yet further, these two, the young woman and the warrior, tearing themselves in anguish from a parting embrace. Again, the lady is seen stretched on her bed of death amidst weeping attendants, and, later, an emperor lays his crown on her freshly exhumed coffin.
It was explained to the traveller that these pictured incidents were events in the life of S. Elizabeth, queen of that country, who, that very day six hundred years ago, had died in Marburg and lay buried in the church. A silver shrine, richly sculptured, was shown to him. It had once enclosed the relics of the saint, but one of her descendants, turned Protestant, had torn them from it, and scattered them to the winds. The stone steps approaching the shrine were deeply hollowed by the countless pilgrims who, more than three centuries agone, had come here to kneel in prayer. “Alas!” thought the stranger, “the faith which left its impress on the cold stone has left none upon human hearts!”
He desired to know more of the saintly patroness of Marburg’s cathedral, and leaving the church sought out a bookseller, and asked for a life of S. Elizabeth. The man stared at him, bethought himself a moment, and then went up into a garret, from which he presently emerged with a dust‐covered pamphlet. “Here it is,” he said, “the only copy I have: no one ever asked for it before.”
The traveller resumed his journey, reading his pamphlet to beguile the tedium of his way. Although written by a Protestant in a cold, unsympathizing, matter‐of‐fact way, the essential charm of its mere record of youthful self‐devotion laid a powerful spell upon him. His artistic enthusiasm, his heart, his piety, were all touched and aroused. Just emerging in sorrow from one of the most trying ordeals of the battle of life, with repelled longings and disappointed hopes, his pent‐up youthful energies were now seeking some outlet for escape, some fresh field of action. Uncertain what this field, this outlet, might be, he had vowed that, with the choice before him of several different objects to pursue, he would decide for that which was the most Catholic. He had found it. “To S. Elizabeth he would,” in his own words, “sacrifice his fatigue and his hopes.” He would write her life, and strive to place on record its touching story—at once a tender love‐legend, a page of mediæval romance, and the hallowed tradition of a saintly career. At the first stopping‐ place he left the diligence, and, taking a return carriage, went immediately back to Marburg.
This traveller, this young stranger, was Charles, Count de Montalembert, peer of France. His sudden impulse, his enthusiastic vow, were not as words written in water. To what would at this day seem to many an inconsiderate, quixotic rashness, succeeded the deliberate realization of an undertaking full of labor and difficulty. He ransacked libraries, sought out chronicles, legends, and popular traditions, read old books and long‐forgotten manuscripts, and travelled far and wide throughout Germany, wherever a locality offered the attraction of the slightest association with the name of S. Elizabeth. The charm and fascination of his theme grew upon him with every additional fact he learned regarding her. Beginning at the famous old castle of Wartburg, where Elizabeth came a child, the daughter of a race of kings, from distant Hungary, he made a veritable pilgrimage, taking for his route the itinerary of his heroine’s life—to Kreuzburg; to Reinhartsbrünn, where, a young wife and mother of twenty, she parted in anguish from her husband, a crusader setting out for Palestine; to Bamberg, where she was driven by persecution; to Andechs, to Erfurth, and finally to Marburg, “whither,” as he says, “he returned to pray by her desecrated tomb, and to gather with pain and difficulty some remembrance of her from the mouths of a people who have renounced with the faith of their fathers the regard due to their benefactress.”
Bow down your heads, O generation of stockbrokers and speculators in provisions and railway shares, to the memory of this Montalembert, who, in the flower of his youthful manhood, for years went up and down the world with an idea in his head and heart!
But this book, this life of S. Elizabeth. you object, was, after all, a mere pious legend of dubious trustworthiness? On the contrary, it was a work of the highest value, even judged by the severest canons of historical criticism. Its introduction alone is sufficient to make the work classic. Sainte‐Beuve, high academic and critical authority, calls it majestic,(186) and reviewers of all nations have contributed their verdicts of approval.
This was Montalembert’s first literary production—a success, as it deserved to be, worthy forerunner of his yet greater work, The Monks of the West, and the first‐fruit of a splendid literary and oratorical career, whose main inspiration was always drawn from the sources of Catholic truth and Catholic faith.
Montalembert died in March, 1870, leaving a name and a reputation which for all time to come will remain one of the proudest illustrations of France.
We are fortunate in already having an admirable memoir of his life,(187) written by one of the most distinguished women of England. It cannot but be gratifying to all who cherish the memory of Montalembert that the task should have fallen into the hands of one so eminently capable as Mrs. Oliphant. Personally intimate with his family and on terms of friendship with his wife (née Comtesse de Merode), thoroughly familiar with the language, modern history, and politics of France, and the successful translator of The Monks of the West, it would have been difficult to find a writer better fitted, in knowledge and in sympathy, to record the life of Charles de Montalembert. Let us add here that, for reasons which the intelligent reader may easily divine, we are glad that the biography has been written by a Protestant. Although to a Catholic reader it would be more pleasant to read a life in which nothing could be found which is not in perfect harmony with the spirit of faith and loyalty toward the church, yet, for the public generally, the testimony of a fair and candid Protestant in respect to certain very important events in the career of Montalembert will be more free from the suspicion of bias, and therefore of more value in establishing the fact of his essential devotion to the Holy See to the end of his life.
We trust that the ladies of Sorosis and of the various wings and vanguards of the grand army of “The Rights of Women” will not take offence if we endeavor to compliment Mrs. Oliphant by saying that we especially admire the style in which her memoir is written, for a tone and quality which—turn whither we may—we cannot otherwise describe than as “manly.” Making due allowance for the almost inevitable partiality of the biographer for his hero, there is a directness, a solidity, a sound common‐sense view of practical questions, and an absence of mere sentimentality, all eminently to her credit and in admirable keeping with the dignity of her subject. Mrs. Oliphant’s modesty, too, equals her ability. Referring to her translation of The Monks of the West, she tells us: “We are sorry to add, to our personal humiliation, that Montalembert was by no means so much satisfied with at least the first part of the translation. He acknowledged that the meaning was faithfully rendered; ‘but,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot admire the constant use of French or Latin words instead of your own vernacular. My Anglo‐Saxon feelings are wounded to the quick by the useless admission of the article the or a; and by such words as chagrin instead of grief, malediction instead of curse, etc.’ The proofs of the translation came back from him laden with corrections in red ink—a circumstance which communicated to them a certain additional sharpness, at least to the troubled imagination of the translator; and the present writer may be perhaps allowed here to avow in her own person that up to this present moment, when she happens to have the smallest French phrase to translate, she pauses with instinctive alarm, hastily substituting freedom for liberty when the word occurs; and will cast about in her mind, with a certain sensation of fright, how to find words for authority, corruption, intelligence, etc., in other than the French form.”
Charles Forbes René de Montalembert was born in London on the 15th of May, 1810. His father was a noble French emigré; his mother, the daughter of James Forbes, an Englishman of distinction. The first nine years of his life were spent principally in England under the immediate care and in the personal companionship of his maternal grandfather, and, dating from this period, the English language was always to him a second mother tongue. At the age of fourteen we find him at the college of S. Barbe in Paris. The fact may be discouraging to many young gentlemen of the present day now at school and in sad possession of a class of ideas too generally accepted, to the effect that men become useful and distinguished by reason of the possession of some unaided special gift rather than by study and the laborious acquisition of knowledge—we say the fact may be discouraging to them, but nevertheless it remains a fact that the young Montalembert laid the foundation of his future distinction as a man of letters, an archæologist, a great orator, a great writer, an eminent political leader, and the ornament of the Chamber of Peers, in close, unremitting, laborious application to his studies while at school. After he had completed his college course and entered society, we find him writing to a friend: “It is usual to say that youth is the time for the pleasures of society. I look upon this opinion as a complete paradox. It seems to me, on the contrary, that youth should be given up with ardor to study, or to preparation for a profession. When a young man has paid his tribute to his country; when he can appear in society crowned with the laurels of debate or of the battle‐field, or at least of universal esteem; when he feels entitled to command respect, if not admiration—then is the time to enter society with satisfaction.”
Soon there came for him the period of illusions perdues, which, commencing with the entrance into life of every intelligent and ambitious young man, accompanies him with more or less persistence to the edge of the grave. Young Montalembert spent some time in Sweden, at whose court his father was the ambassador of Charles X. On his return to France, he wrote an article upon that country which M. Guizot, the editor of the Revue Française, advised him to cut down to half its length. He complied, sent in his abbreviated article, and the editor suppressed the best portion of what remained!
About this time he met Lamartine, became intimate with Victor Hugo, “then the poet of all sweet and virtuous things,” and numbered among his friends Sainte‐Beuve, who then shared Montalembert’s religious enthusiasm and his belief that Europe was to be regenerated by the church. Ireland, too, came in for a full share of his sympathy. He wrote an article on that country which Guizot allowed to go in entire. A friend tells him that his article on Sweden is dull, and that on Ireland commonplace. “Disappointing,” writes the young author in his diary, “but better than if my friend had praised me insincerely.” O’Connell, then in the fulness of his powers and his popularity, greatly attracted him. He would go all the way to Ireland to see him. And he did. Crossing the two channels, and traversing England, he made the journey over the mountains of Kerry on horseback, with a little Irish boy for his guide. He visited O’Connell at Derrynane, prepared and anxious to discuss with him the great subjects which filled his mind. The Liberator received him kindly, and after dinner—looking at the ingenuous face of twenty before him—did what he thought precisely the proper thing to do—ushered him at once into the drawing‐room, where the young count was thrown on the tender mercies of a crowd of pretty and gay young Irish women. Encore une illusion perdue! He had crossed seas and mountains to discuss freedom, the church, English rule and Irish emancipation, with Ireland’s greatest man, who, without listening to a word from him, thrust him into another room amid a bevy of laughing girls!
After Montalembert’s return from Ireland came his intimacy with Lacordaire and Lamennais, and the joint literary enterprise of the three in the establishment of the Avenir, whose motto was “God and Liberty.” Its first number was issued Oct. 15, 1830. We will not dwell on its history, so familiar to all Catholics, except to refer to the holy war waged by it and its friends against the monopoly of education by the government. Under the law, every private school, every educational institution not licensed and regulated by the University of Paris, was absolutely forbidden. Utter irreligiousness then pervaded the colleges and schools of France. The generation which passed through those schools bears witness to their evil influences, and confirms Lacordaire’s own record, who says that he left college “with religion destroyed in his soul,” and that he, like almost all the youths of his period, “lost his faith at school.”
Montalembert’s picture of these evil influences was everywhere recognized as truthful. “Is there a single establishment of the university where a Christian child can live in the exercise of faith? Does not a contagious doubt, a cold and tenacious impiety, reign over all these young souls whom she pretends to instruct? Are they not too often either polluted, or petrified, or frozen? Is not the most flagrant, the most monstrous, the most unnatural immorality inscribed in the records of every college, and in the recollections of every child who has passed as much as eight days there?”
To test the law forbidding freedom in education, Lacordaire and Montalembert opened a free school for poor children at Paris in the Rue des Arts. They were indicted for the offence, and tried at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. The audience, as may well be imagined, was made up from the nobility and intelligence of the land. The prisoners defended their cause in person. Lacordaire, who spoke first, referred to the fact that the government had lately impeached the previous ministers by virtue of power in the charter not reduced to a special law. “If they could do it, so could I,” said the brave priest, “with this difference, that they asked blood, while I desired to give a free education to the children of the poor.” He ended by recalling to his judges the example of Socrates “in the first struggle for freedom to preach.” “In that cause célèbre by which Socrates fell,” said Lacordaire, “he was evidently culpable against the gods, and in consequence against the laws of his country. Nevertheless, posterity, both pagan and Christian, has stigmatized his judges and accusers; and of all concerned have absolved only the culprit and the executioner—the culprit, because he had failed to keep the laws of Athens only in obedience to a higher law; and the executioner, because he presented the cup to the victim with tears.”
With this proud and plain warning ringing in their ears, the judges next heard Montalembert. He was just twenty‐one, and by the recent death of his father but a few weeks in his place as a peer of France. Sainte‐Beuve saw that his youth, his ease and grace, the elegant precision of his style and diction, veiled the fact that it was a prisoner—not a peer—who spoke, and his judges were the first to forget it.
“The entire chamber listened with a surprise which was not without pleasure to the young man’s bold self‐justification. From that day M. de Montalembert, though formally condemned, was borne in the very heart of the peerage—he was its Benjamin.” The sentence was a gentle reprimand and a mild fine of a hundred francs.
The Avenir, it will be remembered, had incurred no censure from Rome. Nevertheless, it had not prospered, and it was resolved by its founders that they would appeal to the head of the church for his explicit approval. Accordingly, the publication of the paper was suspended, and its last number announced “with pomp,” as Lacordaire says, that “the purpose of its editors was to suspend it until they had gone to Rome to seek sanction and authority for its continuation.” The biographer well remarks that “neither from primitive Ireland nor romantic Poland had such an expedition set forth.” They asked the head of the church “to commit himself, to sanction a new and revolutionary movement, to bless the very banners of revolt, and acknowledge as pioneers of his army the ecclesiastical Ishmaels who had carried fire and flame everywhere during their brief career.” There could, of course, be but one result—failure. The Avenir was condemned. Lacordaire and Montalembert at once submitted to the decision. Poor de Lamennais did not, and unhappily persisted in his sad mistake. In connection with this subject, we cannot here refrain from repeating at length some reflections which, coming as they do from an intelligent Protestant, have a peculiar force and value.
They are from the pen of Montalembert’s biographer, and present so admirable, so eloquent a résumé of the question of apostasy, that we have not the heart to curtail the passage containing them by so much as the omission of a single word:
“Except at the Reformation, when the great overflow of spiritual rebellion was favored by such a combination of circumstances as has never occurred since, no man or group of men have succeeded in rebelling against Rome, and yet continued to keep up a religious character and influence. No man has been able to do it, whatever the excellence of his beginning might be, or the purity of the motives with which he started. Even in the Church of England the career of a man who separates himself from her communion is generally a painful one. He makes a commotion and excitement in the world for a time before he has fully made up his mind; and at the moment of his withdrawal he is sure of remark and notice, at all events, from certain classes. But after that brief moment he sinks flat as the spirits do in the Inferno, and the dark wave pours over him, and he is heard of no more. All that sustained and strengthened and gave him a fictitious importance as the member of a great corporation has fallen away from him. He has dropped like a stone into the water—like a foundered ship into the sea. In England, however, after all has been done, there is a sea of dissent to drop into, and though his new surroundings may please him little, yet he will come out of the giddiness of his downfall to take some comfort in them—will accustom himself by degrees to the lower social level, the different spiritual atmosphere. But he who dissents from the Church of Rome has no such refuge. The moment he steps outside her fold he finds himself in outer darkness, through which awful salutations are shrieked to him by the enemies of religion, by those whom he has avoided and condemned all his life, and with whom he can agree only on the one sole article of rebellion. If he ventures to hold up his head at all after what all his friends will call his apostasy, the best that he can hope for is to be courted by heretics, professed enemies of the church which he has been born in, and which probably he loves most dearly still, notwithstanding his disobedience. To quarrel with your home is one thing—to find its domestic laws hard, and its prejudices insupportable; but to plunge into the midst of the enemies of that home, and to hear it assailed with the virulence of ignorance—to join in gibes against your mother, and mockery of her life and motives—is a totally different matter. Yet this is almost all that a contumacious priest has to look forward to. A recent and striking example, to which we need not refer more plainly, will occur to every one who has watched the contemporary history of the Roman Catholic Church. In this case a brilliant and remarkable preacher—a man supposed the other day to be one of the most eminent and promising sons of Rome—after wavering and falling away in some points from ecclesiastical obedience, suddenly appeared in an admiring circle of gentle Anglicanism, surrounded by a fair crowd of worshipping Protestants, ready to extend to him all that broad and universal sympathy which he had no doubt been trained to regard as vilest latitudinarianism, or the readiness of Pilate to make friends with Herod. This prospect must chill the very soul of a man who has received the true priestly training, and who has been educated in that love of his church which is of itself a noble and generous sentiment. The best thing that can happen to him is to fall among heretics; the other alternative, and the only one, so far as events have yet made it apparent, to fall among infidels: and as his education has taught him to make but small distinction between them, and the infidels are nearer at hand, and his own countrymen, what wonder if it is into their hands that the miserable man, torn from all his ancient foundations, ejected from his natural place, heart‐weary with the madness which is wrought by anger against those we love, should fall—what wonder if he should rush to the furthest extremity, hiding what he feels to be his shame, and endeavoring to take some dismal comfort in utter negation of that past from which he has been torn! Whether there are new developments in the future for the new Protesters whom a recent decision has raised up, we cannot tell. But such has been the case in the past. Life is over for the rebellious priest who breaks with his church; his possibility of service in his vocation has come to an end; even the most careless peasant in his parish will turn from him. He is a deserter from his regiment in the face of the enemy, false to his colors, a man no longer of any human use.”
It was during Montalembert’s sojourn in Italy, on his remarkable Avenir pilgrimage, that he became the intimate friend of Albert de la Ferronays, the hero of Mrs. Craven’s beautiful Récit d’une Sœur. He appears in the book designated under the name of Montal. From the same period, also, dates his intimacy with Rio, the future historian of Christian art. The young peer’s taste for art, always strong, and his enthusiastic admiration of the glorious remains of mediæval architecture, were both developed and strengthened under the teaching and influence of Rio. In March, 1833, he published an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which he energetically denounced the desecration and ruin of the grand old architectural monuments of France. It was addressed in the form of a letter to Victor Hugo, then leader of the Romantic school, who strongly sympathized with him on this subject, and whose Notre Dame de Paris had been reviewed in the Avenir by Montalembert with enthusiastic praise for the grand historical framework of the story. During the autumn of that year, Montalembert went to Germany, and, as we have seen, accidentally stopped at Marburg. Travel, research, and the collection of materials for the life of Elizabeth now engrossed all his time, until, attaining the legal age, twenty‐five, he took his seat in the Chamber of Peers. His first appearance at the bar of this chamber had been in defence of the liberty of teaching, and his first speech was in defence of the liberty of the press. These two discourses prefigured his parliamentary career. He was always the ardent advocate of liberty; rarely heard on the side of the government; and generally the leader of a conscientious and loyal opposition: which, well considered, would have been found the most prudent adviser of the administration in power.
Strongly imbued with English ideas, he fully appreciated the conservative power of an energetic opposition, ever ready to criticise, to question, to challenge, or to expose whatever might seem arbitrary or unconstitutional in the acts of the government. But this idea of an opposition at once loyal and law‐loving, was unfamiliar to his countrymen. To them, as a general thing, opposition meant revolution, and to many the spectacle of a peer of France, a Catholic, and a proprietaire, who was at once the friend of the proletaire, the dissenter, the oppressor, and the slave, was a paradox. And yet paradox there was none, for his declaration of principles was always clear and bold. Thus, in striving to cull from the Chamber of Peers a public expression of sympathy for the Poles, he insisted that it was their right and their duty to make an avowal of national sentiments, an expression of national opinion, that it was an obligation imposed by humanity and required by wise policy. “What is it,” he asked, “that has raised the British parliament to so high a degree of popularity and moral influence in Europe? Is it not because for more than a century no grave event has happened in any country without finding an echo there? Is it not because no right has been oppressed, no treaty broken anywhere, without a discussion on both sides of the question before the peers and commons of England, whose assemblies have thus become, in the silence of the world, a sort of tribunal where all the great causes of humanity are pleaded, and where opinion pronounces those formidable judgments which, sooner or later, are always executed?”
And his independence was that of the man as well as of the orator. He was committed to no policy, sought no party ends, but always, and at all cost, maintained the good, the just, the honorable. A lost or desperate cause, if equitable, was always sure of his support. The three oppressed nations of the earth, Poland under Russia, Ireland under England, and Greece under Turkey, were his most cherished clients. The weaker side ever strongly attracted him. “Penetrated by the conviction that just causes are everlasting,” says M. Cochin, “and that every protest against injustice ends by moving heaven and convincing men, he sought out, so to speak, every oppressed cause when at its last breath, to take its burden upon himself, and to become its champion. There is a suffering race, a race lost in distant isles, the race of black slaves, which has been oppressed for centuries. He took its cause in hand, and from the year 1837 labored for its emancipation. There are in all manufacturing places a crowd of hollow‐cheeked children, with pale faces and worn eyes, and the sight of them made a profound impression upon him; he took their cause also in hand. If you run over the mere index of his speeches, you will find all generous efforts contained in it.”
The year 1836 brought two notable events in the life of Montalembert—the publication of his first work, his Life of S. Elizabeth, and his marriage to a daughter of the noble house of de Merode in Belgium. Meantime, he continued his attacks on vandalism in art and his parliamentary labors, and was mainly instrumental in the creation of the committee of historical art and the commission on historical monuments, from both of which he was excluded under the Empire, which no more sympathized with his pure conceptions of Christian art than it did with his conception of Christian morals.
Rio has recorded the result of the impression made by Montalembert upon the English poet Rogers, which admirably illustrates the fact that Montalembert’s religion was not a sort of moral “Sunday suit” to be put off and on as occasion might require, and at the same time reveals to us the old poet in an entirely new aspect. The Montalemberts had spent the evening with Rogers, “and after their departure,” Rio relates, “when I found myself alone with Rogers, the expression of his countenance, which up to that moment had been smiling and animated, changed so suddenly that I feared I had offended him by some word of doubtful meaning which I might not altogether have understood. He paced about the room without saying anything, and I did not know whether I might venture to break this incomprehensible silence. At last he broke it himself, and said to me that, if he had the power of putting himself in the place of another, he would choose that of Montalembert, not on account of his youth and his beautiful wife, but because he possessed that immovable and cloudless faith that seemed to himself the most enviable of all gifts.”
Mr. Neale advised Montalembert that he had been elected an honorary member of the Cambridge Camden Society. On receipt of the news of this “unsolicited and unmerited honor,” Montalembert replied in a letter protesting against the usurpation of the title “Catholic” by the Camden Society. Here are some of its trenchant passages:
“The attempt to steal away from us, and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England, the glorious title of Catholic, is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present, by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have established your church. The name itself is spurned with indignation by the greater half at least of those who belong to the Church of England, just as the Church of England itself is rejected with scorn and detestation by the greater half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indifferent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of the Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150 millions of children, to dispossess you of this name. The Church of England, who has denied her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the bonds of unity and obedience. Let her therefore stand alone before the judgment‐seat of God and man. Even the debased Russian Church—that church where lay‐ despotism has closed the church’s mouth and turned her into a slave—disdains to recognize the Anglicans as Catholics. Even the Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries, sneer at this new and fictitious Catholicism. That the so‐called Anglo‐Catholics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and their contradiction, whose doctrinal articles, whose liturgy, whose whole history, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind except those who are born English and speak English—that they should pretend on the strength of their private judgment alone to be what the rest of mankind deny them to be, will assuredly be ranked among the first follies of the XIXth century.... You may turn aside for three hundred years to come, as you have done for three hundred years past, from the fountain of living waters; but to dig out a small channel of your own, for your own private insular use, wherein the living truth will run apart from its own docile and ever obedient children—that will no more be granted to you than it has been to the Arians, the Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy. I protest, therefore, against the usurpation of a sacred name by the Camden Society as iniquitous; and I next protest against the object of this society, and all such efforts in the Anglican Church, as absurd.”
We now have before us a period of seven years in the life of Montalembert, the record of which may be said to be the history of the great public questions which then agitated France; so intimately was his entire parliamentary career bound up with their development. The first and most important of these questions was that of education. Then, as now, the examination for the degree of A.B. (baccalaureat) was the key to all public occupations.
But at that time, from 1830 to 1848, no one had a right to present himself for this examination unless he had been educated in one of the public lycées, or some school licensed by the university, into whose hands the government had placed the monopoly of education. A wealthy parent might educate a boy under his own supervision in the best universities of England or Germany, or by private tutors, yet the youth would not be permitted to present himself for examination, although able to pass it with ease. And the degree resulting from this examination was the essential condition upon which the possibility of a public career was opened to every young Frenchman. Without it he could by no possibility be admitted to any public employment, the bench or the bar. Ability, accomplishments, acquirements, had nothing to do with the question. The young man must pass through a state school, or he was for ever debarred from a public career in his own country. But to pass through a state school, as all Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, then well knew in France, was to leave it with the loss of his religious principles. The biographer may well find it “equally incredible that such restrictions should have been borne by any people, and that a government founded upon liberal principles and erected by revolution should have dared to maintain them; but so it was.”
The parliamentary campaign on the educational question opened in 1844. Discussion soon reached a point of warmth. “There is one result given under the auspices of the university,” said Montalembert, “which governs every other, and which is as clear as daylight. It is that children who leave their family with the seed of faith in them, to enter the university, come out of it infidels.” The contradictions and mouvement incited by this statement pushed the orator to more emphatic statement. “I appeal,” he said, “to the testimony of all fathers and mothers. Let us take any ten children out of the schools regulated by the university, at the end of their studies, and find one Christian among them if you can. One in ten! and that would be a prodigy. I address myself not to such or such a religious belief, but to all. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, all who believe humbly and sincerely in the religion which they possess, it is to them I appeal, whom I recognize as my brethren. And all those who have a sincere belief, and practise it, will confirm what I have said of the religious results of the education of the university. Let us hear the testimony of the young and eloquent defender of French Protestantism, the son of our colleague M. Agenor de Gasparin.... ‘Religious education,’ he says, ‘has no existence in the colleges.... I bethink myself with terror what I was when I issued forth from this national education. I recollect what all my companions were. Were we very good citizens? I know not, but certainly we were not Christians; we did not possess even the weakest beginnings of evangelical faith.’ ”
The results of the French compulsory anti‐Christian education may be read in current history. “The men it has brought up are the men who allowed France to be bound for eighteen years in the humiliating bondage of the Second Empire; who have furnished excuses to all the world for calling her the most socially depraved of nations; who have filled her light literature with abominations, and her graver works with blasphemy; and who have finally procured for her national downfall and humiliation.”
Montalembert planted his little band in battle array against the compact and overwhelming forces of the government, under the inspiration and trumpet‐tongued tones of his admirable fils des croisés speech in the Chamber of Peers. Here, with its memorable termination, are a few passages from it. We regret we cannot give it entire. “Allow me to tell you, gentlemen, a generation has arisen among you of men whom you know not. Let them call us Neo‐Catholics, sacristans, ultramontanes, as you will; the name is nothing; the thing exists. We take for our motto that with which the generous Poles in the last century headed their manifesto of resistance to the Empress Catherine: ‘We, who love freedom more than all the world, and the Catholic religion more than freedom,’ ... are we to acknowledge ourselves so degenerated from the condition of our fathers, that we must give up our reason to rationalism, deliver our conscience to the university, our dignity and our freedom into the hands of law‐makers whose hatred for the freedom of the church is equalled only by their profound ignorance of her rights and her doctrines?... You are told to be implacable. Be so; do all that you will and can against us. The church will answer you by the mouth of Tertullian and the gentle Fénelon. ‘You have nothing to fear from us; but we do not fear you.’ And I add in the name of Catholic laymen like myself, Catholics of the XIXth century: We will not be helots in the midst of a free people. WE ARE THE SUCCESSORS OF THE MARTYRS, AND WE DO NOT TREMBLE BEFORE THE SUCCESSORS OF JULIAN THE APOSTATE. WE ARE THE SONS OF THE CRUSADERS, AND WE WILL NEVER YIELD TO THE PROGENY OF VOLTAIRE!”
“Mouvements divers” might well—according to the reported proceedings of the day—follow this burst of indignant eloquence. The words made the very air of France tingle; they defined at once the two sides with one of those happy strokes which make the fortune of a party, and which are doubly dear to all who speak the language of epigram—the most brilliantly clear, incisive, and distinct of tongues. Henceforward the fils des croisés were a recognized power, but they were only known and heard by and through Montalembert, and, so far as the public struggle was concerned, might be said to exist in him alone. Montalembert fought almost single‐handed. “The attitude of this one man between that phalanx of resolute opponents and the shifty mass of irresolute followers, is as curious and interesting as any political position ever was. He stands before us turning from one to the other, never wearied, never flagging, maintaining an endless brilliant debate, now with one set of objectors, now with another, prompt with his answers to every man’s argument, rapid as lightning in his sweep upon every man’s fallacy: now proclaiming himself the representative of the Catholics in France, and pouring forth his claim for them as warm, as urgent, as vehement as though a million of men were at his back: and now turning upon these very Catholics with keen reproaches, with fiery ridicule, with stinging darts of contempt for their weakness. Thus he fought single‐handed, confronting the entire world. Nothing daunted him, neither failure nor abuse, neither the resentment of his enemies, nor the languor of his friends, ... not always parliamentary in his language, bold enough to say everything, as his adversaries reproached him, yet never making a false accusation or imputing a mean motive. No one hotter in assault, none more tremendous in the onslaught; but he did not know what it was to strike a stealthy or back‐handed blow.”
Time has strange revenges. In April, 1849, came up the important question of the inamovibilité de la magistrature—the appointment for life of magistrates. His old enemies were delighted to find that Montalembert declared himself unreservedly in the affirmative, and none more than M. Dupin, the very man who uttered the memorable “Soyez implacables.” Again he had the government to contend with, for under the law magistrates were no longer irremovable. Montalembert proposed, as an amendment, that all magistrates in office should be reappointed, and that all new appointments should be made for life. He pointed out the evils of a system which made judgeships tenable only from one revolution to another, and made a noble office the object of a “hunt” for promotion dishonoring to all parties. He spoke of the magistracy as the priesthood (sacerdoce) of justice, and added: “Allow me to pause a moment upon the word priesthood, which I have just employed. Of all the weaknesses and follies of the times in which we live, there is none more hateful to me than the conjunction of expressions and images borrowed from religion with the most profane facts and ideas. But I acknowledge that our old and beautiful French language, the immortal and intelligent interpreter of the national good sense, has, by a marvellous instinct, assimilated religion and justice. It has always said: The temples of the law, the sanctuary of justice, the priesthood of the magistracy.” The cause was won by his eloquence, and thus the first political success he ever gained was not for himself or his friends, but for his enemies. Truly a fitting triumph for a son of the crusaders.
The peerage now being abolished, Montalembert was returned as deputy to the National Assembly by the Department of Doubs. Here his career was, if possible, yet more brilliant than in the Chamber of Peers. It would require a volume fitly to record them. Soon came the presidency of Louis Bonaparte. Himself the soul of honor, with an eye single to the welfare of France, deceived by solemn assurances which he unfortunately credited, unsuspicious of a depth of treachery which he could not conceive, and alarmed by the horrible spectre of socialism, just arising from its native blood and mire, Montalembert became the dupe and the victim of Louis Napoleon. When power had been fully secured, the new president offered him the position of senator, along with the dotation of 30,000 francs, which was refused without hesitation. A second and a third time the offer was renewed, the last offer being urged by De Morny in person. The only position he held under the government of Louis Napoleon was the nominal one of a member of the Consultative Commission, which he resigned on the publication of the decree for the confiscation of the property of the House of Orleans. He had already begun to suffer from the attacks of the disease to which he finally succumbed; and it was from his sick‐bed that he went to receive at the hands of the French Academy the highest and most dearly prized reward of French talent and genius. Montalembert was elected to the seat in the Academy vacated by the death of M. Droz, and his reception was an event. Being now freed from the absorbing engagements of life, he made several journeys to England, and travelled into Hungary, Poland, and Spain. His work entitled L’Avenir Politique de l’Angleterre was the fruit of his English visits; and was well received both in France and England. In October, 1858, the Paris Correspondant published a remarkable letter from Montalembert, describing a debate in the English Parliament. Its every paragraph was so full of a subtle and powerful contrast between political liberty in England and the absence of it in France that the Imperial government and its adherents were stung to the quick. He speaks of leaving “an atmosphere foul with servile and corrupting miasma (chargée de miasmes serviles et corrupteurs) to breathe a purer air and to take a bath of free life in England.” Referring to a former French colony, he says: “In Canada, a noble race of Frenchmen and Catholics, unhappily torn from our country, but remaining French in heart and habits, owes to England the privilege of having retained or acquired, along with perfect religious freedom, all the political and municipal liberties which France herself has repudiated.” A criminal prosecution was immediately begun against the count for this letter. Four separate accusations were brought. Among them were “exciting the people to hate and despise the government of the emperor, and of attempting to disturb the public peace.” The legal penalties were imprisonment from three months to five years, fine from 500 to 6,000 francs, and expulsion from France. According to French custom, the prisoner on trial was interrogated concerning the obnoxious passages, and, when Montalembert answered, it was discovered that the emperor and his government, not the prisoner at the bar, was on trial. With calm gravity he acknowledged each damning implication as an historical fact not to be denied, “enjoying, there can be no doubt,” says his biographer, “to the bottom of his heart, this unlooked‐for chance of adding a double point to every arrow he had launched, and planting his darts deliberately and effectually in the joints of his adversaries’ armor.”
The foundation of Montalembert’s great work, The Monks of the West, was laid in his studies for the life of S. Elizabeth, and the remainder of his active life was now devoted to its completion. It is sufficient to refer to it. We need not dwell upon this greatest production of his literary genius. Besides this, two other remarkable productions came from his pen toward the close of his career. These were the long and eloquent addresses, L’Eglise libre dans l’Etat libre, delivered before the Congress of Malines, and his Victoire du Nord aux Etats‐Unis, which, says his biographer, “is little else than a hymn of triumph in honor of that success which to him was a pure success of right over wrong, of freedom over slavery.”
It is well known that Montalembert was one of those who opposed the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. On this point, his biographer gives us this interesting information.
One of his visitors said to him, while lying on what proved to be his death‐bed: “If the Infallibility is proclaimed, what will you do?” “I will struggle against it as long as I can,” he said; but when the question was repeated, the sufferer raised himself quickly, with something of his old animation, and turned to his questioner. “What should I do?” he said. “We are always told that the pope is a father. Eh bien!—there are many fathers who demand our adherence to things very far from our inclination, and contrary to our ideas. In such a case, the son struggles while he can; he tries hard to persuade his father; discusses and talks the matter over with him; but when all is done, when he sees no possibility of succeeding, but receives a distinct refusal, he submits. I shall do the same.”
“You will submit so far as form goes,” said the visitor. “You will submit externally. But how will you reconcile that submission with your ideas and convictions?”
Still more distinctly and clearly he replied: “I will make no attempt to reconcile them. I will submit my will, as has to be done in respect to all the other questions of faith. I am not a theologian; it is not my part to decide on such matters. And God does not ask me to understand. He asks me to submit my will and intelligence, and I will do so.” “After having made this solemn though abrupt confession of faith,” says the witness whom we have quoted, “he added, with a smile, ‘It is simple enough; there is nothing extraordinary in it.’ ”
The last years of the life of this distinguished man were one long protracted agony of physical suffering. The symptoms of disease that first manifested themselves in 1852 had gone on increasing in severity until in 1869, more than a year before his death, he speaks of himself as vivens sepulcrum. “I am fully warranted in saying that the death of M. de Montalembert was part of his glory,” writes M. Cochin, in describing his constancy and resignation. He died on the 13th of March, 1870.
At The Shrine.
I.
The sunset’s dying radiance falls On chancel‐gloom and sculptured shrine, A splendor wraps the pictured walls, Where painted saints in glory shine! And blent with sweet‐tongued vesper‐bells, Through echoing aisles and arches dim The organ’s solemn music swells, The sweetly chanted evening hymn.
II.
Low at Our Lady’s spotless feet A white‐robed woman kneels in prayer: The Deus Meus murmurs sweet, While Glorias throb on perfumed air; Before the circling altar‐rail She breathes her Aves soft and low— The golden hair beneath her veil Wreathed like a glory on her brow.
III.
The sunset’s purple splendors fade, The dark’ning shades of twilight fall, The moonbeam’s silver touch is laid On sculptur’d saint and pictur’d wall; And while the weeping watcher kneels, And silence weaves her magic spells, The gray dawn thro’ the oriel steals, And morning wakes the matin‐bells.
ADVENT, 1872.
A Christmas Recognition.
We were old‐fashioned people at Aldred, and Christmas was our special holiday. The house was always filled with guests, not such as many of our grander neighbors asked to their houses, but such as cared for good old‐ fashioned cheer and antiquated habits. Not all were relations, for we never asked relations merely on account of their kinship, according to the regulation mixing of a conventional Christmas party, but among our own people were many whose presence at our Christmas gatherings was as certain as the recurrence of the festival itself. Among them was a great‐aunt, a soft, mild old lady, always dressed in widow’s weeds, but with a face as fresh as a girl’s, and hair white as the snowy cap she wore to conceal it. She had not come alone, for her adopted son was with her, the promised husband of her only child, dead years ago. He had left his own home and people, like Ruth, for the lonely, childless woman whom he was to have called mother, and remained her inseparable companion through her beautiful and resigned old age. There were, besides these, a young girl whose aspect was peculiar and attractive, and whose manner had in its mixture of modesty and self‐reliance a piquancy that added to the fascination of her person. She had come with a distant cousin of hers, a widow of a different type from our dear old relative, and whose object in chaperoning Miss Houghton must have been mixed. She was small, blonde, coquettish, and thirty‐two, though no one would have taken her for more than twenty‐five. She looked soft, pliable, irresolute, and tender, and men often found in her a repose which was a soothing contrast to her cousin’s energetic, peculiar, somewhat eccentric ways; only it was the repose yielded by a downy cushion, and people wearied of it after a while. The secret of the apparent partnership between these two opposite natures was perhaps this: the widow had a rich jointure, and was an excellent parti, while her cousin was portionless. Miss Houghton was thus doubly a foil to Mrs. Burtleigh.
I shall not speak of the other guests in detail, with the exception of one whom it would be impossible to overlook. He was a man nearer forty than thirty‐five, good‐humored and careless to all appearance, a hard worker in the battle of life, a cosmopolitan philosopher, and one of those handy, useful men who can sew on a button, cook an omelet, and kiss a bride as easily and unconcernedly as they gallop across country or horsewhip a villain. He had been in Mexico, surveying and engineering for an English railroad company, and he had spent some years in the East as the land‐ agent of a progress‐loving pacha. Europe he knew as well as we knew Aldred, while the year he had been absent from us had been filled by new and stirring experiences in Upper Egypt. But I forget; we have yet to speak of many little details of Christmas‐tide which preceded the gathering in of the whole party.
The kitchen department was, of course, conspicuous on this occasion. This included the village poor, who were regularly assembled every day for soup until Christmas eve, when each household received a joint of beef and a fine plum‐pudding. Some of us went round the village in a sleigh, and distributed tea and sugar as supplementary items. It was a traditional Yule‐tide, for the snow lay soft, even, and thick over the roads, as it but seldom does in England; then, the school was visited and solidly provisioned, the children were invited to a monster tea with accompaniment of a magic‐lantern show, after which the prizes were to be distributed, as well as warm clothing for the winter season. Nothing was said of the Christmas‐tree, as that was kept as a surprise.
The decoration of house and chapel was a wonderful and prolonged business, and afforded great amusement. Holly grew in profusion at Aldred, and a cart‐load of the bright‐berried evergreen was brought to the house the day preceding Christmas eve. The people we have made acquaintance with were already with us, and vigorously helped us on with the preparations. Such fun as there was when Miss Houghton insisted upon crowning the marble bust of the Indian grandee, Rammohun Roy, with a holly wreath, and when Mrs. Burtleigh gave a pretty, ladylike little cry as she pricked her fingers with the glossy leaves! The children of the house and those of another house in the neighborhood (orphan children whose gloomy home made them a perpetual source of pity to us) were helping as unhelpfully as ever, but what of that? It was a joyous, animated scene, and, still more, a romantic one; for the traveller, who had claimed a former acquaintance with Miss Houghton, now seemed to become her very shadow—or knight, let us say; it is more appropriate to the spirit of a festival so highly honored in mediæval times. The chapel, a beautiful Gothic building, small but perfect, was decorated with mottoes wrought in leaves, such as “Unto us a Son is born, unto us a Child is given,” and Gloria in excelsis Deo, etc., while festoons of evergreens hung from pillar to pillar, and draped the stone‐carved tribune at the western end with a living tapestry. Round the altar were heaped in rows, placed one higher than another, evergreens of every size and kind, mingled with islands of bright camellias, the pride of the renowned hothouses of Aldred. White, red, and streaked, the flowers seemed like stars among dark masses of clouds; and, when we lit a few of the tall candles to see the effect, it was so solemn that we longed for the time to pass quickly, till the midnight Mass should call forth all the beauty of which we had seen but a part.
These decorations had been mainly the work of the traveller (whom, in our traditional familiarity, we called “Cousin Jim”) and of our other friend, the adopted son of our old aunt; but, though their brains had conceived, it was Miss Houghton’s deft fingers that executed the work best. The last touch had just been put to an immense cross of holly which was to be swung from the ceiling, to supply the place of the rood that in old times guarded the choir‐screen. A star of snow‐white camellias was to be poised just above it, and a tall ladder had been put in readiness to facilitate the delicate task. Miss Houghton stood at the foot, one arm leaning on the ladder, the other holding aloft the white star. Her friend was halfway up, bearing the great cross, when he suddenly heard a low voice, swelling gradually, intoning the words of the Christmas hymn:
Adeste fideles, Læti triumphantes; Venite, venite in Bethlehem: Natum videte Regem angelorum: Venite adoremus, Venite adoremus, Venite adoremus Dominum.
Startled and touched, he began the repeating words of the chorus, pausing with his green cross held high in his arms. The others who, scattered about the chapel, heard his deep tones, answering, took up the chorus, and chanted it slowly to the end, Miss Houghton looking round with tears in her eyes, at this unexpected response to the suppressed and undefinable feelings of her heart. It was an impressive scene, the guests, servants, gardeners, and a few of the choir‐boys, all mingling in the impromptu worship so well befitting the beautiful work they had in hand. At the end of the verse, the traveller hastily gained the top of the ladder, and, having fastened the holly cross in its place, intoned a second verse, in which Miss Houghton immediately joined, and the harmonious blending of their voices had, if possible, a still more beautiful effect than the unaccompanied chant of the first verse. Again the chorus chimed in,
Venite adoremus, Venite adoremus, Venite adoremus Dominum.
in full, solemn tones, and all sang from their places, their festoons in their hands, so that at the end of the hymn the traveller said thoughtfully to his companion: “Laborare est orare should be our motto henceforth. I wish all our work were as holy as this.”
“And why not?” she answered quickly; “only will it so, and so it shall be. We are our own creators.”
“What a rash saying!” he exclaimed, with a smile; “but I know what you mean. God gives us the tools and the marble; it is ours to carve it into an angel or a fiend.”
At last the chapel decoration was over, and a few of the more venturesome among us went out in the snow for a walk.
Meanwhile, in the corridor (so we called our favorite sitting‐room), the Yule‐logs were crackling cheerfully on the wide hearth, and the fitful tongues of flame shot a red glimmer over the old‐fashioned furniture. One of the chairs was said to have belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, and there was another, a circular arm‐chair, that looked as if it also should have had a history connected with the great and learned. Full‐length portraits of the old possessors of Aldred covered the walls, and on the stained‐glass upper compartments of the deep bay‐window at one end were depicted the arms and quarterings of the family. The Yule‐logs were oak, cut from our own trees, and perforated all over with large holes through which the flames shot up like fire‐sprites.
The Christmas‐tree and magic‐lantern also had to be put in order to save time and trouble, and a stage for tableaux occupied the rapt attention of the amateur mechanician (our great‐aunt’s son) and of “Jim,” the traveller and practised factotum. Miss Houghton was never very far from the scene of these proceedings, and, when she was not quite so near, “Cousin Jim” was not quite so eager. Almost all our guests had brought contributions for the Christmas‐tree, of which our children had the nominal charge, and with these gifts and our own it turned out quite a royal success. Presents of useful garments, flannels, boots, mittens, woollen shirts, petticoats, and comforters, were stowed away beneath the lower branches, while all visible parts were hung with the toys and fruits, lights and ribbons, that so delight children. Gilt walnut‐shells were a prominent decoration, and right at the apex of the tree was fixed a “Christ‐child,” that thoroughly German development, an image of the Infant Saviour, holding a starred globe in one hand and a standard in the other. A crèche had also been prepared in the Lady‐chapel, a lifelike representation of those beautiful Christmas pictures seen to such perfection in the large churches of Italy. Munich figures supplied the place of wax models, however, and were a decided improvement.
Many people from the village had asked leave to come in and look at these peculiar decorations; but, as few of them were Catholics, it had been thought better to wait till the third Mass on Christmas day to open the chapel to the public. Christmas eve was a very busy day, and towards five o’clock began the great task of welcoming the rest of the expected guests. This was done in no modern and languid fashion; the servants, clad in fur caps and frieze greatcoats, stood near the door with resinous torches flaring in the still night air—it was quite dark at that early hour—and the host and hostess welcomed them at the very threshold. The children helped them to take off their wraps, and held mistletoe sprigs over their bended heads as they reached up to kiss them. Indeed, mistletoe was so plentifully strewn about the house that it was impossible to avoid it, but we had so far eschewed the freedom of the past as to consider this custom more honored in the breach than in the observance. The children and the servants, however, made up for our carelessness.
Very little toilet was expected for a seven o’clock dinner (we were not fashionable people), but we found that our well‐meant injunctions had hardly been obeyed. For the sake of the picturesque, so much the better, I thought. One of our friends had actually donned a claret‐colored velvet suit, with slippers to match, embroidered with gold; and, when we looked at each other in silent amusement, the wearer himself smiled round the circle, saying pleasantly:
“Oh! I do not mind being noticed. In fact, I rather like it—this was a lady’s fancy, you see.”
“How, how?” we asked eagerly.
“Well,” answered the Londoner, a regular drawing‐room pet, and a very clever society jester, “I was challenged to a game of billiards by a fair lady, the Duchess of ——. She said to me, ‘And pray do wear something picturesque.’ I bowed and said, ‘Your grace shall be obeyed.’ I happened to have some loose cash about me. I could not wear uniform, because I did not belong even to the most insignificant of volunteer regiments, and I went to my tailor. His genius was equal to the occasion, and this was the result. I played with the duchess, and she won,”—the hero of the velvet coat was an invincible billiard champion.—“As I have the dress by me, I take the liberty of wearing it occasionally in the country. It is too good to be hidden, isn’t it?”
So he rattled on till dinner was announced. It was a merry but frugal meal. The mince‐pies and plum‐pudding crowned with blue flame, the holly‐ wreathed boar’s head of romance, were not there; they were reserved for to‐morrow. So with the “wassail‐bowl,” the fragrant, spirituous beverage of which each one was to partake, his two neighbors standing up on each side of him, according to the old custom intended as a defence against treachery; for once it had happened that a guest whose hands were engaged holding the two‐handled bowl to his lips was stabbed from behind by a lurking enemy, and ever after it became de rigueur that protection should be afforded to the drinker by his neighbor on either side.
The fare to‐night was still Advent fare, but, after dinner, Christmas insisted upon beginning. We were told that the “mummers” from the village were come, and waited for leave to begin their play. They were brought into the hall, and the whole company stood on the steps leading up to the drawing‐rooms. The scenery was not characteristic—a broad oaken staircase, a Chinese gong, the polished oak flooring, the massive hall‐door. The actors themselves, seven or eight in number, dressed in the most fantastic and extemporized costume, now began the performance; and but for the venerable antiquity of the farce, it was absurd and obscure enough to excite laughter rather than interest. The children were wild with delight, and were with difficulty restrained from leaping the “pit” and mingling with the actors on the “stage.” Indeed, for many days after nothing was heard among them but imitations of the “mummers.” There was a grave dialogue about “King George,” then a scuffle ensued, and one man fell down either wounded or in a fit. The doctor is called; the people believe the man dead, the doctor denies this, and says, “I will give him a cordial, mark the effect.” The resuscitated man afterwards has a tooth drawn by the same quack, who then holds up the tooth (a huge, unshapely equine one provided for the occasion), and exclaims: “Why, this is more like a horse’s tooth than a man’s!” I never could make out the full meaning of the “mummers’” play; but, whether it was a corruption of some older and more complete dramatic form, or the crude beginning of an undeveloped one, it certainly was the characteristic feature of our Christmas at Aldred. It took place regularly every year, without the slightest deviation in detail, and always ended in a mournful chorus, “The Old Folks at Home.” After the actors had been heartily cheered, and the host had addressed to them a few kind words of thanks and recognition, they were dismissed to the kitchen, to their much coveted entertainment of unlimited beer. There they enacted their performance once more for the servants, who then fraternized with them on the most amiable terms.
Meanwhile, our party were gradually collecting round the wood‐fire in the corridor. It was a bitter cold night, the snow was falling noiselessly and fast, and the wind howled weirdly through the bare branches of the distant trees. Our old aunt remarked, in her gentle way:
“One almost feels as if those poor owls were human beings crying with cold.”
“We look like a picture, mother,” somewhat irrelevantly answered her son after a slight pause; “the antique dresses of many of us are quite worth an artist’s study.”
Mrs. Burtleigh, whose blonde beauty was coquettishly set off by a slight touch of powder on the hair, and a becoming Marie Antoinette style of négligé, here pointedly addressed the traveller.
“Sir Pilgrim,” she said, “did you ever think of home when you had to spend a Christmas in outlandish countries?”
“Sometimes,” answered “Jim” absently, his eyes wandering towards Miss Houghton, who stood resting her head against a carved griffin on the tall mantel‐piece.
She caught his glance, and said half saucily:
“Now, if it was not too commonplace, I should claim a story—Christmas eve is not complete without a story, at least so the books say.”
“If it were required, I know one that is not quite so hackneyed as the grandmothers’ ghosts and wicked ancestors we are often surfeited with at Christmas,” replied her friend quickly. The whole circle drew closer around the fire, and imperiously demanded an explanation.
“But that will be descending to commonplace,” pleaded the traveller.
“Who knows? It may turn out the reverse, when you have done,” heedlessly said Mrs. Burtleigh.
“Well, if you will have it, here it is. Mind, now, I am not going to give you a three‐volume novel, full of padding, but just tell you one incident, plain and unadorned. So do not look forward to anything thrilling or sensational.
“Some years ago, I was in Belgium, hastening home for Christmas, and spent three or four days in Bruges. I will spare you a description of the grand old city, and come to facts. I was just on the point of leaving, and had got to the railway station in order to catch the tidal train for Ostend, when a man suddenly and hurriedly came up to me, an old servant in faded livery, who, without breathing a word, placed a note in my hand, and was immediately lost to sight in the crowd. The waiting‐room was dimly lighted, but I could make out my own name, initials and all, on the envelope. In my confusion, I hurried out of the station, and, stepping into a small hôtellerie, I opened the mysterious note. It was very short: ‘Come at once to No. 20 Rue Neuve.’ The signature was in initials only. The handwriting was small and undecided. I could hardly tell if it were a man’s or a woman’s. I knew my way to the Rue Neuve, not a really new street, but one of Bruges’ most interesting old thoroughfares. No gas, a narrow street, great gaunt portes‐cochères, and projecting windows on both sides, the pavement uneven, and a young moon just showing her crescent over the crazy‐looking houses—such was the scene. I soon got to No. 20. It was a large, dilapidated house, with every sign about it of decayed grandeur and diminished wealth. Two large doors, heavily barred, occupied the lower part of the wall; above were oriels and dormers whose stone frames were tortured into weird half‐human faces and impossible foliage. No light anywhere, and for bell a long, hanging, ponderous weight of iron. I pulled it, and a sepulchral sound answered the motion. I waited, no one came; I thought I must have mistaken the number. Taking out the letter, however, I made sure I was right. I pulled the bell again a little louder, and heard footsteps slowly echoing on the stone flags of the court within. Sabots evidently; they made a rattle like dead men’s bones, I thought. A little grille, or tiny wicket, was opened, and an old dame, shading her candle with one brown hand, peered suspiciously out. Apparently dissatisfied, she closed the opening with a bang, muttering to herself in Flemish. It was cold standing in the street, and, as the portress of this mysterious No. 20 made no sign of opening the door for me, I was very nearly getting angry, and going away in no amiable mood at the unknown who had played me this too practical joke. Suddenly I heard the grille open again, very briskly this time, and a voice said in tolerably good French:
“ ‘Monsieur’s name is—?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I replied rather impatiently.
“ ‘Then will monsieur wait an instant, till I undo the bars?’ A great drawing of chains and bolts on the inside followed her speech, and a little gate, three‐quarters of a man’s height, was opened in the massive and immovable porte‐cochère. I stepped quickly in, nearly overturning the old dame’s candlestick. She wore a full short petticoat of bright yet not gaudy blue, and over it a large black circular cloak which covered all but her clumsy sabots. Her cap was a miracle of neatness, and her brown face, wrinkled but cheery, reminded me of S. Elizabeth in Raphael’s pictures. She said glibly and politely:
“ ‘Will monsieur give himself the trouble to wait a moment?’
“She disappeared with her candle, leaving me to peer round the courtyard, where the moon’s feeble rays were playing at hide‐and‐seek behind the many projections. Almost as soon as she had left, she was with me again, bidding me follow her up‐stairs. ‘My master is bed‐ridden,’ she explained. ‘Since he got a wound in the war of independence against Holland, he has not been able to move. Monsieur will take care, I hope, not to excite him; he is nervous and irritable since his illness,’ she added apologetically.
“I confess I was rather disappointed. I had expected that everything would happen as it does in a play—it had looked so like one hitherto. I thought I was going to meet a woman—young, beautiful, in distress, perhaps in want of a champion—but it was only a bed‐ridden old man after all! Well, it might lead to an act of charity, that true chivalry of the soul, higher far than mere personal homage to accidental beauty. I entered a darkened room, scantily and shabbily furnished, and the old woman laid the candlestick on the table. The bed was in a corner near the fire; the uneven parquet floor was covered here and there with faded rugs, and books and papers lay on a desk on the old man’s bed. At first I could hardly distinguish his features, but, as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw that he was a martial‐looking man, with eyes so keen that sickness could hardly dull them, and a bearing that indicated the stern will, the clear intellect, and the lofty bonhomie of an old Flemish gentilhomme. He looked at me with curious and prolonged interest, then said, in a voice full of bygone courtesy:
“ ‘Will monsieur be seated? I have made no mistake in the name?’
“ ‘No,’ I answered, wondering what the question meant.
“ ‘Then, monsieur, I have important news for you. The daughter of your brother—’
“I was already bewildered, and looked up. He continued, taking my surprise for interest: ‘The daughter of your poor brother is now a great heiress, and I hold her fortune in trust for her—do not interrupt me,’ he said, eagerly preventing me from speaking, ‘it tires me, and I must say all this at once. I do not know if you knew of her being taken from her parents when a child; of course you recollect that, after her mother’s marriage with your brother, there was a great fracas, and poor Marie’s father disinherited her at once. When the child was born—I was her god‐father, by the bye—her parents being in great poverty, I begged of the grandfather to help and forgive them, the more so as your brother was making his poor wife very unhappy. He refused, and, though he generally took my advice (he was an an old college friend of mine), he was obstinate on this point. The child grew, and the parents were on worse terms every year. Marie’s father held out against every inducement; your poor brother—forgive me, monsieur!—fell into bad company, and made his home a perfect hell; his wife was broken‐hearted, but would not hear of a separation, and her only anxiety was for her child. I proposed to her to take the responsibility myself of putting the little one out of reach of this dreadful example of a divided household, and she consented. The father stormed and raved when he found the child was gone, but for once his wife opposed him, and refused to let him know her whereabouts. Every year I interceded with the grandfather, who consented to support the little girl, but would never promise to leave her a competency at his death. One day, suddenly, your poor brother died.’
“I could not help starting; he saw my surprise.
“ ‘Oh!’ he resumed, ‘did you not know how he died? Pardon me, monsieur, I remember now that none of his English kin followed him to the grave, but I had heard your name before.’
“ ‘Monsieur,’ I began, fearing that he might be led on to talk of family secrets such as he might not wish to share with a stranger, ‘you have told me a strange tale; but allow me to undeceive you—’
“ ‘How did you deceive me?’ he asked impatiently, and I, remembering the old dame’s warning not to excite him, was puzzled how to act. In the meanwhile, he went on.
“ ‘Eh bien! The mother then went to England, to the school where her child was, and saw her, but she did not long survive the wear and tear of her wretched life, and the grief her husband’s death caused her—for, poor woman, she loved him, you see.’
“ ‘Just like a woman, God bless her!’ I murmured involuntarily. The old man bent his head in cordial assent, but immediately resumed: ‘Her father blessed her before she died, and promised to care for the little girl. He then drew up this will’—here he laid his hand on a thick packet on the desk—‘and entrusted it me. The child was nine years old then, and that was fifteen years ago. She was to be told nothing till her twenty‐first birthday, and to be brought up in England, unconscious of anything save that she was the child of honest parents. This went on for some years, and then my old friend died. I continued to send regular remittances to the little girl’s temporary guardians; the bulk of the fortune I kept in the house—there in that chest; perhaps it was a foolish fancy, but I did not care to have it in a common bank. The war came and passed over the flower of our land, and you see, monsieur, what it has left of my former self. Well, after a time, five or six years ago, I ceased hearing from my little ward; I was unable to get up and search for her; all that advertisements and correspondence could do I did, and my chief endeavor was to find you. I thought, if anything were likely, this was; she would go to you, her father’s step‐brother, a different man, as I always heard her mother say, from what her own unhappy parent had been.’
“ ‘But,’ I said, ‘allow me to correct a mistake, monsieur; I never had a step‐brother, or a brother either.’
“ ‘What!’ the old man exclaimed nervously—‘what do you mean? Do not joke about such things. Your name is ——. Your hair is fair and wavy, your figure tall and stalwart—that was the portrait of my poor little ward’s uncle, a different man, of different blood, as well as different name, from her father.’
“ ‘Do not tell me any names, monsieur,’ I here insisted, ‘until I have told you who I am.’
“He looked at me, still agitated, his brows knitted, and his lips quivered. I told him my name, birth, country, profession, and assured him that I, an only son, had never heard of any story like his. He seemed thunderstruck, and could hardly take in the idea; but, recollecting himself, said: ‘Pardon me, monsieur, but I have, then, caused you great inconvenience.’
“His politeness now seemed overwhelming; he was in despair; he was désolé. What could he do? How could he apologize? I quieted him as best I could by professing the utmost indifference about the delay, and begged him, though I would solicit no further confidence, to consider my lips as sealed, and, if he wished it, my services as entirely at his disposal.
“He smiled curiously, then said: ‘The best apology I can make is to tell you the whole. Your name and initials misled me. Having heard that you were in Bruges, I sent my messenger, who, it seems, only reached you as you were on the point of starting for Ostend. I thought it was my ward’s uncle I had found, and, never having seen him, I could not tell if you were the wrong man. I must continue to try and find him; if I fail—never mind, I want to tell you her name. She is Philippa Duncombe, and, when I saw her last, she was a dark child, quick, peculiar, and resolute. It is so long ago that I could give you no idea of her exterior as she is now. I think she must have suspected her dependence upon a supposed charity, and have left school without the knowledge of any one. Anyhow, I must still try to find your namesake; as for you, monsieur, I cannot thank you enough for your forbearance.’
“I left Bruges the next day, but, as you may suppose, the story of the Baron Van Muyden never ceased to haunt me, and a few months after I was glad and flattered to receive a letter from the old veteran saying that he had now ascertained that my namesake, the child’s half‐uncle, had been dead some years, and that he felt that to none other but myself would he now wish to transfer the task of searching for the lost heiress. Of course I accepted.”
Our friend paused here, and looked thoughtfully at the fire. The Yule‐logs were burning so merrily that a ruin seemed imminent, and while the silence was yet unbroken a sound of distant singing came towards the house. It was the gay company of Christmas carollers, singing their old, old ditties through the frosty night, in commemoration of the Angel‐songs heard by the watching shepherds so many long centuries ago on the hills of Judæa. But the company was too much absorbed in the traveller’s tale to heed the faint echo. Miss Houghton sat with her dark eyes fixed on the speaker, and every vestige of color gone in the intensity of her excitement; Mrs. Burtleigh, tapping the fender with her tiny gray satin slipper, seemed strangely excited, and glanced uneasily at her cousin; the rest of us were clasping our hands in our unrestrainable curiosity, and the provoking narrator actually had the coolness to hold his peace!
At last some one spoke, unable to control his goaded curiosity.
“Well?”
“Well?” repeated the artful “Jim.”
“Did you find her?” was the question that now broke from all lips, in a gamut of increasing impatience.
“I told you a story, as we agreed,” he answered; “but, if I tell you the dénoûment, we shall fall into what we wish to avoid—the commonplace.”
“Never mind, go on,” was shouted on all sides. Miss Houghton was silent, but she seemed to hang on his words. He had calculated on this emotion, the wretch, and was making the most of his points!
At last he resumed in a slow, absent way:
“Yes, I accepted the search; I made it; I did all I could think of—but I failed.”
The bomb had burst, but we all felt disappointed. This was not commonplace, not even enough to our minds. “He had cheated us,” we cried.
“I can only tell you the truth; remember this was all real, no got‐up Christmas tale, to end in a wedding, bell‐ringing, and carol‐singing. Hark! do you hear the carollers outside?”
No one spoke, and he went on, still meditatively: “I do not mean to give it up, though.”
Miss Houghton, who, till now, had said nothing, opened a small locket attached to one of her bracelets, and, keeping her eyes fixed on “Cousin Jim,” passed it to him, saying:
“Did you ever see this face before?”
He took it up, and looked puzzled. “No,” he said; “why do you ask?”
We all looked at her as if she had been a young lunatic, her interest in the story being apparently of no very lasting nature. She then unfastened a companion bracelet, the hanging locket of which she opened and handed to her friend again.
“This face you have seen?” she asked confidently.
He started, and a rush of color came over his bronzed cheeks.
“Yes, yes, that is the Baron Van Muyden—younger, but the same. And here is his writing, ‘To Marie Duncombe, her sincere and faithful friend.’ Miss Houghton?”
“Yes,” she answered calmly, as if he had asked her a question.
“Then what I have been looking for for three years I have found tonight?” he said, looking up at her, while we were all stupefied and silent.
“And what I have never dreamt of,” she answered in a low voice, “I have suddenly learned to‐night.”
The carollers were now close under the windows, and the words of a simple chorus came clearly to our hearing—
The snow lay on the ground, The stars shone bright, When Christ our Lord was born On Christmas night.
After a few moments’ silence, our curiosity, like water that has broken through thin ice, flowed into words again. Many questions and a storm of exclamations rang through the room, and the concussion was such that the Yule‐logs crashed in two, and broke into a race across the wide hearth, splinters flying to the side, and sparks flying up the chimney. Then Miss Houghton spoke with the marvellous self‐possession of her nature.
“I knew my own name and my mother’s from the beginning,” she said, “and Monsieur Van Muyden, and the old house, and the Flemish bonne in the Rue Neuve. I remember them all when a child. I used often to sleep there, and the night before I left Bruges I still remember playing with the baron’s old sword. I remember my mother coming to see me at school in England, a convent‐school, where I was very happy, and giving me these bracelets. She told me never to part with them; she said she would not be with me long. They told me of her death some months afterwards. The other portrait is that of my grandfather, given by him to my mother on her fête day, just before her marriage, with a lock of his hair hidden behind. She always wore it. M. Van Muyden’s was done for her when I was born, and was meant to be mine some day, as he was my god‐father. The remittances he spoke of used to come regularly; but, when I grew older, my pride rebelled (just as he guessed, you say), and I hated to be dependent on those who, kind as they were, were not my blood‐relations. I ran away from school, and lived by myself for a long time in poverty, yet not in absolute need, for I worked for my bread, and worked hard. I had a great deal to go through because I dared not refer any one to the school where I had lived. Mrs. Burtleigh was very kind to me; I told her my story, as far as I knew it, and somehow she found out that we were cousins through my father; so she made me take her maiden name, Houghton, instead of the one I had adopted before. She, of course, thought as I did, that the child of the disinherited Marie Duncombe and the unhappy Englishman, my poor father, could be naught but a beggar. She was kindness itself to me, and, though I was too proud to accept all she offered me, I did accept her companionship and her home. Many little industries of my own, pleasant now because no longer imperatively necessary, help me to support myself, as far as pecuniary support can be called such; my home has been a generous gift—the gift I prize most.”
She stopped, and Mrs. Burtleigh looked up in impatient confusion, perhaps conscious that her feelings and motives had been too mixed to warrant such frank, unbounded gratitude. “Jim” said nothing, and Miss Houghton seemed so calm that it was almost difficult to congratulate her. She was asked if she had recognized herself from the first in the story.
“Yes,” she said; “I knew it must be me.”
“You took it coolly,” some one ventured to observe.
“I have seen too much of the revers de la médaille to be much excited about this,” she said; but, if she was outwardly calm, her feelings were certainly aroused, for her strange eyes had a far‐away look, and the color came and went in her cheek.
Our friend seemed almost crestfallen; we thought he would have been elated. Presently she said to him, giving him the bracelets:
“You must take these to Bruges, and I think you had better take me, too.”
He stared silently at her. Just then the bell began to ring for the midnight Mass. What followed Miss Houghton told us herself.
The guests hurried to the chapel, rather glad to get rid of their involuntary embarrassment. Those two remained behind alone. She was the first to speak.
“I think you are sorry you have found me.”
“Yes,” he answered slowly, “sorry to find it is you: Miss Houghton was poor, and Miss Duncombe is an heiress.”
“What matter! If you like, Miss Duncombe will give up the fortune, or, if you want it, she will give it to you.”
He looked offended and puzzled.
“You do not understand me,” she said, half laughing: “Miss Duncombe will let you settle everything for her, and say anything you like to Miss Houghton.”
“You do not mean—” he began excitedly.
“I do,” she answered composedly.
And they were engaged then and there. He wanted to be married before they left England, but she refused, saying their wedding must be in a Flemish cathedral, and their wedding breakfast in a Flemish house. And so it was; and No. 20 Rue Neuve is now their headquarters, while the household of the Belgian heiress is under the control of the old Flemish woman who once shut that door in the face of the heiress’ husband.
M. Van Muyden is happy and contented, and a merrier Christmas day was never spent at Aldred than the day of this unexpected recognition.
Midnight Mass, Christmas‐tree, school‐feast, and all succeeded each other to our perfect satisfaction; the health of the heroine of “Cousin Jim’s” tale was drunk in the “wassail‐bowl” on Christmas night, and, as the happy, excited, and tired Christmas party separated on the day following New Year’s day, every one agreed that it was a pity such things so very seldom happened in real life.
Part IV.—The Immolation.
L.
While our travellers are completing the last stage of their journey, we will precede them to St. Petersburg, and transport our readers for a short time among scenes very different from those in which the incidents of our story have hitherto occurred.
The sentence of condemnation has been pronounced, and for some days the names of the five persons who were to suffer death have been known and privately circulated; privately, for the trials which excited universal interest were seldom discussed in society. At that epoch (different in this respect from a subsequent one, when liberty to say anything was allowed in Russia before anywhere else), whether through prudence, servility, or a fear resulting from the reign of the Emperor Paul, rather than the one just ended, every one refrained with common accord from any public expression of opinion whatever respecting the acts of the government. Flattery itself was cautious not to excite discussions that might give rise to criticism. The sovereign authority did not require approval, but only to be obeyed, not judged. This was generally understood, and the consequence was a general silence respecting forbidden topics; whereas, on every other subject, as if by way of indemnification, Russian wit was unrestrained, and so keen that the nation which prides itself on being the most spirituelle in the world found a rival, and only consoled itself by saying Russian wit was borrowed. It is incontestably certain that, though there were still some survivors of the time of Catherine’s reign, the French language was now so universally used in society at St. Petersburg, that people of the highest rank, of both sexes, spoke it to the exclusion of their own tongue, and wrote it with such uncommon perfection as to enrich French literature; whereas they would have been very much embarrassed if required to write the most insignificant note, or even a mere business letter, in the Russian language.
There is no intention of discussing here the causes that led to this engrafting of foreign habits, or of examining whether the Russians at that period, in imitating the French, were always mindful that when others are copied it should be from their best side. Still less would it be suitable to consider whether the people who possess the faculty of assimilation to such a degree are the most noble, the most energetic, and the most sincere. This would lead us far beyond our modest limits, to which we return by observing that, in spite of a splendor and magnificence almost beyond conception, in spite of a tone of good taste and a courtesy now almost extinct in France, in spite of hospitality on a grand scale, characteristic of Slavonic countries, an indefinable restraint, felt by all, prevailed in this attractive and brilliant circle, insinuating itself everywhere like an invisible spectre, modifying and directing the current of conversation—even the most trifling—and affecting not only the intercourse of fashionable life, but the freedom of friendly converse and the very outpourings of affectionate confidence.
The Marquis Adelardi had had several opportunities of mingling in this society, and found it congenial. It was a society in which he was specially adapted to shine, for he, too, as we are aware, had passed his life in a school of enforced silence; and, if he was formerly numbered among those who revolt under such restrictions, he had now renounced all efforts to break through them, and learned to turn his attention elsewhere. He understood, better than any other foreigner at St. Petersburg, how to navigate amid the shoals of conversation; to be entertaining, agreeable, interesting, and even apparently bold without ever causing embarrassment by an inadvertent remark; and if, in the ardor of discourse, he approached a dangerous limit, the promptness with which he read an unexpressed thought sufficed to make him change, with easy nonchalance, the direction of a conversation in which he seemed to be the most interested.
He was not, however, disposed to talk with any one the day, or rather the evening, we meet him again—this time at the Countess de G——’s, a woman of superior intellect, already advanced in years, whose salon was one of the most brilliant and most justly popular in St. Petersburg. Everything, indeed, was calculated to facilitate social intercourse of every degree, and, if there was a place where the bounds we have just referred to were invisible, though never forgotten, it was here. What could not be said aloud here, more than elsewhere, had a thousand facilities for private utterance. On the other hand, for the benefit of prudent people who preferred to say nothing at all, there were tables where they could play whist or a game of chess. A piano at one end of the spacious salon was always open to attract amateur performers, then more numerous than now, when no one ventures, even in the family circle, to play without unusual ability.
In this friendly atmosphere, our marquis, generally so social, was silent and preoccupied. Seated in a corner on a sofa where no one else was sitting, he took no part in the general conversation. And yet, as the room filled, and various groups were formed, here and there foreigners, and especially the members of the diplomatic corps who frequented the house, broached the great topic, and by degrees were heard on various sides the names of Mouravieff, Ryleieff, Pestel, and two others likewise condemned to death, as well as the names of those who were to be exiled—a punishment almost as terrible.
A young German attaché, perceiving Adelardi, approached, and took a seat beside him. “And Walden,” said he in a low voice, “have you not had permission to see him twice?”
“Have you seen him since he was informed of his fate?”
“No; but I have reason to hope I shall obtain that favor.”
“He is not sorry, I imagine, to escape the gibbet.”
“Not the gibbet; but as to death, I am sure he thinks it preferable to the fate that awaits him.”
“Poor fellow! but then, qu’allait‐il faire?”—
“Dans cette galère?” interrupted the marquis with displeasure. “The question is certainly apropos, and I would ask him if I could obtain a reply that would avail him anything.”
“By the way,” said the other, “I suppose you know who has just arrived at St. Petersburg?”
The marquis questioned him with a look of uncertainty, for he was expecting more than one arrival that day.
“Why, the fair Vera, who has returned to her post.”
“Really!” exclaimed Adelardi eagerly. “In that case perhaps we shall see her here, for I am told she comes every evening when in the city.”
“Yes, but not till the empress dispenses with her services. It is nearly ten o’clock. She will probably be here soon. Our agreeable hostess is one of her relatives.”
“I was not aware of it. I know the Countess Vera but little. She was not at court when I was here three years ago. I only saw her two or three times at the Princess Lamianoff’s, who was then here, but was not presented to her.”
“At the Princess Catherine’s? I believe you. It is said she wished Vera to marry her son, who was indeed very assiduous in his attentions. The young countess did not appear wholly insensible to them at that time. Do you suppose she is still attached to him?”
“I do not know.”
“Poor girl! I pity her, in that case, but it is not very probable she will long be infatuated about a convict. Besides, she will find others to console her, if she makes the effort.”
At that moment the piano was heard. The young diplomatist was requested to take a part in a trio, and the music put an end to the conversation that was becoming too ardent on every side, through the interest caused, not by the offence, but by the misfortunes of the criminals. Every one knew them, and several of them belonged to the same coterie which now scarcely dared utter their names aloud.
Adelardi remained in the same place, his head resting on his hand, more absorbed than ever. He pretended to be listening to the music, and was mechanically beating time. But he was thinking of something very different, and only started from his reverie whenever the bell announced a new arrival. Then he eagerly raised his head and looked towards the door, but only to resume his former position at the entrance of each new visitor—as if not the one whom he desired to see.
LI.
At the beginning of the same evening a different scene was occurring, not far distant, in a salon still more elegant and magnificent than the one we have just visited. It was not, however, intended, like that, for the reception of visitors, but solely for the pleasure and comfort of her who occupied it—a lady, as was evident, though there was no profusion of useless trifles or superfluous ornaments. But it seemed as if her hands could only touch what was rare and costly. Gold, silver, and precious stones gleamed from every object destined to her constant use, from the open cassette that contained her work to the sumptuous bindings of the books scattered over the embroidered covering of the table, or lying on a small étagère of malachite near a large arm‐chair. This chair, intended for reading, was also adapted to repose by the soft cushion covered with the finest lace for the head of the reader to rest upon in an attitude at once convenient and graceful. On all sides were flowers of every season in as great abundance as if they grew in the open air at the usual time. They gave out an exquisite odor, which, with perfumes more artificial but not less sweet, embalmed the apartment.
If, as some think, and we have already remarked, places resemble those who inhabit them, the reader may be eager to know the owner of this. We will endeavor to describe her as she appeared to those who knew her at the time of our story: a woman of that age when beauty is in all its freshness; who was truly said to have the dignity of a goddess and the form of a nymph; a face sweet and pale, but with noble, delicate features; a complexion of charming purity; a look and smile that were captivating; and the whole picture was framed by hair floating in long curls over graceful white shoulders.
Such was the person who, at the sound of a manly and sonorous voice, entered the salon just described, and threw herself into the arms of him who had called her by name. Their first words were expressive of joy at seeing each other again after a long separation of some hours, and for a time they seemed only to think of each other. Their glances, their smiles met, and it might have been supposed they had nothing in the world to do but love each other and tell each other so.
But the tone of conversation gradually changed. She grew earnest and he became uneasy. He made an effort to reply to the questions she addressed him and sometimes persistently repeated, but he appeared to do so unwillingly, as if he yielded out of condescension, and with difficulty resisted a desire of imposing silence on her. Once he rose and left her, but she followed him, softly placed her arm within his, and, drawing herself up to her utmost height (for, though she was quite tall, he was a whole head taller) whispered in his ear. He bent down to listen, but while she was talking a frightful change suddenly came over his face. She perceived it, and looked at him with surprise and an anxiety she had never felt before, as he leaned against the mantel‐piece and remained there grave and silent with folded arms.
He was then twenty‐nine years old, and in the brilliancy of that manly beauty which suffering, care, the violent passions of a later age, and time itself, scarcely altered. Besides his lofty, noble stature, and features so regular that no sculptor could idealize them, there was a charm in the expression of his face and the tone of his voice which inspired attachment as well as admiration. Hitherto resentment or anger had seldom been known to flash from his eyes or cause his voice to tremble, and perhaps this was the first time she had ever seen his blue eyes light up with so threatening a gleam. She did not dare persist in her request, but waited for him to break the silence. By degrees his ominous aspect gave place to profound and bitter melancholy. “Ah!” said he at length, “this is a sad beginning!” Then after a short silence, he looked around as he continued: “Cherished home! we shall perhaps often regret the happy days passed here!”—
“We will not leave it,” replied she with a quickness that betrayed how unused she was to contradiction. “We will keep it as it is, and always come back to it. Our grand days shall be passed, if need be, in the gloomy Winter Palace, but our happiest days shall be spent here, and they shall be in the future what they have been in the past.”
He shook his head: “The past was ours: the future does not belong to us. We must henceforth devote ourselves to our great country, and sacrifice all—all! God requires it of us.”
“All!” repeated she with alarm. “What! even happiness and mutual confidence? Oh! no, that portion of the past nothing shall infringe upon! And there is still another right I shall never renounce—that of imploring favor and pardon for the guilty.” She hesitated, and then went on, clasping her hands and fixing her eyes on him with a supplicating expression: “Will you no longer listen to me?”
“Always in favor of the unfortunate, but never for the ungrateful!”
He frowned as he said these words, and turned towards the door, but she stopped him.
She felt it would not do to persist, and with the adresse which is the lawful diplomacy of love, she at once changed the subject, and obliged him to listen while she discussed projects she knew he had at heart. She spoke of herself, of him, of the happy past, their brilliant future, of a thousand things, and indeed of everything except her whispered petition which she now wished him to forget.
The reader has already discovered himself to be in the presence of the young emperor and empress, whose unexpected accession took place in the midst of a storm. They were in the habit of meeting thus in the palace where they lived during the happy days of their early married life, when no thought of the throne disturbed their youthful love!(188) Both hesitated a long time about leaving this charming palace for the sovereign residence, and, when constrained to do so by the necessity of their position, they kept it as it was, without allowing anything to be changed, as a witness of the days that, in spite of the imperial purple, they continued to call the happiest of their life.
After the empress was left alone, she remained thoughtful a moment, then, approaching the malachite étagère, hastily rang a small gold bell. A door concealed beneath the hangings instantly opened, and a young girl appeared. She stopped without speaking, awaiting an order or some observation. But there was nothing in her attitude to indicate the timidity that might have been expected in a maid of honor answering the bell of her sovereign. On the contrary, there was a majestic beauty and an air about her which might have seemed haughty had it not been modified when she spoke. Then, there was a caressing glance in her eyes, though they sometimes sparkled as if betraying more passion than tenderness; but her fine form, her black eyes, her thick fair hair, and the delicacy of her complexion, rendered her at once striking and imposing. She waited some moments in silence—then, seeing her mistress did not address her, she advanced and spoke first: “Did your majesty venture to plead his cause?” said she.
The empress started from her reverie and sadly shook her head. “My poor Vera,” she replied, “you must renounce all hope.”
The young girl turned pale. “Renounce all hope!” exclaimed she. “O madame! can that be your advice? Can it be there is no hope?”
The empress, without replying, seated herself in her arm‐chair, took a book from the étagère, and began turning over the leaves as if she wished to put an end to the conversation. Vera’s eyes flashed for an instant, and it was with difficulty she repressed an explosion of grief or irritation. She remained silent, however, and stood beside the table absently plucking the petals from the flowers in a crystal vase before her.
The empress meanwhile kept her eyes fastened on her book, but presently she raised them and looked at the clock. “I do not need you any longer, Vera. It is ten o’clock. You are going to the Countess G——’s this evening, I think.”
“Yes, madame, if your majesty has no further orders to give me.”
“No, I have nothing more.—Ah! I forgot. Open that drawer,” pointing to the other end of the apartment. “You will find a letter there.”
Vera obeyed, and brought the letter to her mistress.
“Be sure to forward it to the address,” said the latter. “It is the permission for the Princess —— to accompany her husband to Siberia. I am happy to be able to render that heroic woman this sad service. But she is not the only one.”
“What a fate those women are bringing on themselves!” said Vera, shuddering with horror.
“Yes, it is indeed fearful,” said the empress; “but I admire them, and will serve them every way in my power.”
Vera was silent, and after a moment, seeing the empress had nothing more to say, she gravely approached to take leave of her. As she bent down to kiss her hand, the empress pressed her lips to her forehead.
“Come, Vera,” said she, “look a little more cheerful, I beg you. To satisfy you, I promise to make one more effort. But I think, my dear, you are very generous to express so much anxiety about him, for it is not the emperor alone who has reason to call him ungrateful!”
At this, Vera’s face crimsoned, and she drew herself up at once. “Your majesty has a right to say anything to me,” said she in a trembling voice, “but this right has generally been used with kindness.”
“Whereas you now find me cruel. Well, be it so; we will let the subject drop. Good‐night, and without any ill‐feeling, my dear.”
She dismissed her maid of honor with a motion of the head. Vera bowed, and without another word left the room.
LII.
“The Countess Vera de Liningen!”
At this name the Marquis Adelardi looked up, but this time he did not resume his former attitude, for the person he had so impatiently awaited at last appeared. It was she! The cause of this impatience, if we would know it, was a resolution to make an effort that evening in behalf of his friend through the Countess Vera, but it was first indispensable to be sure of her feelings towards him. He wondered if he should discover any traces of the ill‐concealed passion she once manifested for George, or if time and indignation, aided by the influence of the court, had done their work? Or had his inconstancy inspired an indifference which had not been disarmed by his misfortunes? All this Adelardi flattered himself he should discover in a single conversation, provided she consented to an interview. As to any fear of her eluding his penetration, he had too good an opinion of himself in that respect.
As soon as she appeared, he looked at her with lively interest, and an attention which he indulged in without scruple. Having seen her only twice some years before, without speaking to her, he thought she would not recognize him till he was formally presented.
Vera crossed the salon without embarrassment, and with the ease and grace of a person accustomed to high life and the sensation she produced. She was dressed in black, the court, and even the citizens, still wearing mourning for the Emperor Alexander. This made the dazzling whiteness of her complexion and her golden hair the more striking, and suited her form of perfect symmetry, though noble rather than slender. The only ornament she wore was a knot of blue ribbon on her left shoulder, to which was attached the chiffre of diamonds (her badge as maid of honor), in which were woven together the initials of the three empresses: Alexandrine, then reigning; Mary, the empress‐mother; and Elizabeth, Alexander’s inconsolable widow, who was so soon to follow him to the tomb.
Recent emotion still flushed the young girl’s cheeks, and the tears of wounded pride, hastily wiped away, gave her a mingled expression of melancholy and haughtiness which at once inspired a desire to pity and a fear of offending her.
She first approached the table where the lady of the house was playing whist. The latter raised her eyes, and merely smiled as she gave her a friendly nod of the head. Vera, without offering her hand, bowed, and made a salutation at once graceful and respectful, which was customary in that country when one lady is much younger than the other; she pressed her lips to the edge of the black lace shawl which the elderly lady wore; then she remained standing a moment near the card‐table, looking around the room. There was in this look neither eagerness, nor curiosity, nor coquetry: it was a mere survey of the room and its occupants, and it was easy to see she was seeking no one and expecting no one. She only replied to the salutations addressed her by a slight inclination of the head, sometimes by a smile.
Presently, seeing a vacant seat, she went to take possession of it, and thus found herself near the canapé occupied by the Marquis Adelardi. She was scarcely seated when the young diplomatist who had so recently spoken of her approached with lively eagerness, to which she only responded by a look of indifference and giving him two fingers of her gloved hand.
The Marquis Adelardi took advantage of this favorable opportunity to approach the young German and beg to be presented to the Countess Vera. Adelardi’s name was no sooner pronounced than it awoke a remembrance, at first vague, then distinct enough to make her blush. This lively embarrassment was quite evident for a moment. She bowed without speaking as he was presented, and, turning her face immediately away, continued for some moments to converse with the other, but only long enough to recover from her confusion. She speedily put an end to this trifling conversation, and, suddenly turning towards Adelardi, she said, without any trace of her recent embarrassment: “I remember very well, Monsieur le Marquis, your visit at St. Petersburg three years ago, but I was so young then you had probably forgotten me.”
Adelardi replied, as he would have done in any case, but in this instance with truth, that such a supposition was inadmissible.
“And as for me,” he continued, “never having had the honor of a personal acquaintance, I necessarily thought myself wholly unknown to you.”
“Your friends have so often spoken of you that your name was familiar, but your features, I acknowledge, were somewhat effaced from my memory.”
“Yours naturally clung to mine. Besides, I also heard you constantly spoken of.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Have you seen the Princess Catherine lately?” said she.
“No, I left Florence at the beginning of December.”
“For St. Petersburg?”
“And have you been here ever since?”
“Yes. You were absent at my arrival, otherwise I should not have waited till the present time to solicit the favor I have just obtained.”
There was another momentary pause. The young girl looked around, and continued, in a lower tone: “You were here, then, the twenty‐fourth of December?”
“I was.”
She hesitated an instant, then, lowering her voice still more, said: “And have you seen your friend since that fatal day?”
“Yes, and I hope to see him once more—alas! for the last time.”
Vera bit her lips, quivering with agitation, but soon resumed, with a coolness that surprised and, for a moment, disconcerted the marquis:
“I formerly knew Count George de Walden, but for some time had lost sight of him. Nevertheless, his sentence fills me with horror, and I would do anything in the world to deliver him from it—him and the rest.”
“Him and the rest? One as soon as the other?”
“One as soon as the other; they all excite my pity. I wish the emperor would pardon them all.” Her voice by no means accorded with her words; but Adelardi continued as if he did not perceive it:
“Pardon them all! That would be chimerical. But there are some who are deserving of clemency.”
“The emperor is more lenient towards inferior criminals than to those who, after being loaded with favors, forget his kindness.”
“And yet there may be extenuating circumstances even in some cases of that number.”
“Do you know of any that would be of any avail to Count George?” said she eagerly.
“Not quite so loud; we may be overheard.”
“Yes; you are right,” she said, resuming her former tone. “Let us change our seats; we look as if we were plotting something here, and should avoid attracting attention. Let us examine the albums on yonder table. There we can continue our conversation with less restraint.”
“Well,” continued she, as soon as they had effected the change proposed, and were seated before the albums, which they pretended to be examining carefully.
“Well,” replied Adelardi, “what I mean is that many things of no avail in the eye of the law might not be without influence over him who is head of the law.”
And while she was listening with interest, unintentionally betrayed by her eager, agitated expression, her glowing cheeks, and parted lips, Adelardi pleaded his friend’s cause, relating what we have already learned respecting his apparent, rather than real, complicity, his ignorance of the actual designs of the conspirators, and the circumstances that led to his presence among the insurgents on the twenty‐fourth of December. In short, he gave her all the details of which she had been totally ignorant, having only heard, during her absence, of George’s offence and the sentence he had incurred.
“And the emperor,” said she eagerly, “does he know it was he who saved his brother’s life that dreadful day?”
“I doubt it; there were only two witnesses who could attest it. One of these did not come forward, for fear of compromising himself; the other was exceptionable.”
“Who was the other?”
“A man named Fabiano Dini, George’s secretary; but a great culprit, not considered worthy of credit. He told the truth, however, ardently hoping his testimony might save his master.”
“He is doubtless condemned to the same fate?”
“Yes, but to a more severe one; his sentence is for life, whereas George’s is only for twenty‐five years.”
“Only twenty‐five years!” repeated she, with a shudder.
“Yes, it is horrible; it is worse than death! And George will envy the wretch who was the prime cause of his misfortune, for Dini, seriously wounded on the twenty‐fourth of December, will probably die before the sad day fixed for their departure.”
They were now interrupted by something not foreign to the subject of their discourse. A lady, unpretendingly clad, who till now had remained aloof, approached the young maid of honor, and, with a faltering, respectful tone, asked if the petition addressed his imperial majesty had been granted.
“Yes,” said Vera eagerly. “Permission has been accorded. The Princess —— received it this very hour. I left it myself at her door, on my way here.”
She kindly extended her hand to the person who addressed her. The latter bent down as if to kiss it, but Vera prevented it by cordially embracing her.
“Behold a true, faithful friend in misfortune,” said she, as the other left them. “She herself is capable of going to Siberia with her whose dame de compagnie she was in happier days. But then, the Princess —— has in her misfortunes the happiness of feeling herself beloved and respected by all.”
“Assuredly,” said Adelardi. “She is really an admirable woman.”
“So admirable that she is beyond my comprehension.”
“How so?”
“I do not understand how a person can resolve on the course she wishes to pursue—she and the others.”
“What!” said Adelardi, looking at her with surprise. “You do not understand how a woman can thus wholly devote herself to the man—the husband whom she loves.”
Vera shook her head. “No,” said she. “I do not wish to appear better than I am. If I were in such a position, if I had the misfortune of loving one of those convicts, he might rely on my exertions to obtain his pardon, and to use every means in my power to that end. But, as to sharing his lot and following him to Siberia, no, my dear marquis, I frankly acknowledge that is a proof of devoted affection I feel wholly incapable of.”
Another form at this moment passed before the marquis’ mental vision, beside which the beauty actually before him paled, and slightly modified the lively admiration with which he regarded her.
“Well,” said he, after a moment’s reflection, “I know one of these convicts for whom a woman—a young lady of about your age—is ready to give a still greater proof of devotion than the Princess ——, for she is not his wife. She is only—his betrothed, and wishes to marry him on purpose to share his fate.”
“That is something entirely original,” said Vera.
“To do that,” pursued Adelardi, “she has a double favor to obtain, and is coming to St. Petersburg for that purpose. She will be here to‐morrow, or, at the latest, in a few days. I have been commissioned to solicit for her an audience of the empress. Can I do so through your instrumentality?”
“Certainly. All these requests pass through my hands, and none have been rejected. But this is really the most singular case that has occurred.” She drew her tablets and a pencil from her pocket. “The name of your protégée?” said she.
Adelardi hesitated an instant, then, noting a little anxiously the effect produced, said:
“Her name is—Fleurange d’Yves.” He was relieved to hear the maid of honor say, after carefully writing down the name:
“Fleurange! that is a very singular name, and one I never heard before. To‐morrow,” continued she, rising, and returning the tablets to her pocket, “before noon you shall have a reply. Au revoir, Monsieur le Marquis.”
As she gave him her hand, she added in a low tone: “I thank you for all your information, and will endeavor to avail myself of it. If you see Count George, tell him—but no, tell him nothing. If by the merest chance I succeed, it will be time enough then to tell him what he owes to my efforts. If I do not—it will be better for him to remain ignorant of my failure.”
The Marquis Adelardi returned home greatly preoccupied, and absently took up two letters lying on the table. But after opening them, he successively read them with equal interest. First, he looked at one of the signatures: “Clement Dornthal? He is the cousin who accompanies the fair traveller. They have arrived, then.—Well, the end of the drama is approaching: we must all endeavor to play our parts with prudence. Mine is not the easiest!”
He opened the other note, and hastily ran over it. “Thursday! I shall see him on Thursday at two o’clock. Poor George! it will be a sad meeting, in spite of the news I have to surprise and console him.”
He had the satisfaction of learning by this note that, thanks to the powerful influence brought to bear on the occasion, he would be permitted to pass an hour with the prisoner every day during the week that yet remained before the sad train of exiles would set forth.
“Poor George!” he again repeated. “Can it be he has really come to this?—But who knows what may yet take place? If the proverb, ‘What woman wills, God wills,’ is true, all hope is not lost, for here are two women evidently with the will to aid him, and energetic enough to overrule the most adverse destiny. Two—doubtless one too many, and I have been rather bold to risk a fearful collision. But things have come to such a point that they can hardly be worse. If the fair Vera succeeds, it is George’s affair to get out of the complication of gratitude to her who has saved him, and the one ready to follow him. But if she fails, as seems only too probable, then the case will be very simple: our charming heroine will have no rival to fear.”
LIV.
After the succession of disagreeable surprises Mademoiselle Josephine had experienced during her painful journey, another of a different nature, but the greatest of all, awaited her at the end. Her imagination, we are aware, never furnished her with anything beyond the strictest necessity. It was only with difficulty she succeeded in comprehending that her dear Gabrielle had decided to marry a stranger condemned to the galleys, and this inconceivable idea seemed to have penetrated her mind to the exclusion of all others. She was going to join a prisoner, and from the day of her departure from Heidelberg she looked upon herself as on the way to a dungeon. When therefore she heard the words, “We have arrived!” and their sledge passed under the arch of an immense porte cochêre, she shivered with fear. It was, consequently, with a sort of stupefaction she found herself in a brilliantly lighted vestibule, whence a broad staircase led to a fine long gallery opening into one salon after another, at the end of which our travellers were ushered into a dining‐room, where supper was awaiting them of a quality to which mademoiselle was quite as unaccustomed as to the splendor with which it was served. She looked around with mute surprise, hardly daring touch the dishes before her, and looking at her two companions with an interrogative expression of the greatest perplexity. But they both seemed affected and preoccupied to such a degree as not to notice what was passing around them, and mademoiselle, faithful to her habits, forbore questioning them for the moment.
The repast was made in silence; after which Clement wrote a note which she heard him ask a valet to send to M. le Marquis. Then the two ladies were conducted to the apartments prepared for them. Fleurange embraced her companion and wished her good‐night, and Mademoiselle Josephine was left alone in a chamber surpassing any she had ever seen, with large mirrors around her, in which for the first time in her life she saw herself from head to foot. There was also a bed à baldaquin, which she scarcely dared think destined for her modest person, but in which at length she extended herself with a respect that for a long time troubled her repose. Never had the excellent Josephine found herself so completely out of her element. She wondered if it was really herself beneath those curtains of silk, and, when at last she fell asleep, it was to dream that Gabrielle, splendidly apparelled, was mounting a throne, and she, Mademoiselle Josephine, arrayed in a similar manner, was at her side. Her disturbed slumbers were not of long duration. Before day she was up, and impatiently waiting for the hour when she could leave her fine chamber and sally forth to explore this strange dwelling which the night before seemed so much like a fairy palace.
This impression was not lessened by the light of day. The rooms were really splendid, and furnished with the taste the Princess Catherine everywhere displayed, and which was as carefully consulted in the house where she only spent three months of the year, as in her palace at Florence, which she made her home. Mademoiselle went from one room to another in a state of continually increasing admiration, and, while thus walking about, she found everywhere the same mild temperature, which seemed something marvellous, for all the doors were open, and not only were there no fires to be seen, but no glass or even sashes in the windows. Apparently there was nothing to screen her from the frosty air without—freezing indeed, for on their arrival at St. Petersburg the thermometer was down to fifteen or sixteen degrees, and yet—what was the secret of this wonderful fact? She was not cold in the least, though the sight of the large windows made her shiver, and she only ventured to stand at a distance and look at the view without.
She beheld a vast plain covered with snow, with carriage‐ways in every direction, bordered with branches of fir. Vehicles of all kinds were crossing to and fro. Yonder was a succession of vast buildings, and farther off were the gloomy walls of a fortress flanked by a church whose gilded spire glittered in the winter sun—a sun radiant, but without warmth; which imparted a dazzling brilliancy to the snow, but whose deceptive light, far from alleviating the severity of the season, was, on the contrary, the surest sign of its merciless rigor.
While thus admiring and wondering at everything, Mademoiselle came to the last salon of the enfilade, where, before one of the large windows, she perceived Fleurange motionless and absorbed in such profound reverie that she did not notice her approach.
“Ah! Gabrielle, here you are! God be praised! I was lost, but no longer feel so, now I have found you. But, for pity’s sake! what are you doing at that open window?”
At this, Fleurange turned around with a smile. “Open! my dear mademoiselle? We should not be alive long, clad as we are.”
“I really do not understand why I do not feel the cold, and yet—”
Fleurange motioned for her to approach (for the old lady still kept at a respectful distance from the dangerous openings), and made her touch the thick glass, one pane of which composed the window—a luxury at that time peculiar to St. Petersburg, and which often deceived eyes more experienced than those of the simple Josephine. Reassured, but more and more amazed, she remained beside Fleurange at the window, profiting by the occasion to ask all the questions hitherto repressed. Everything was gradually explained to her, and she comprehended that this magnificent house belonged to Count George’s mother.
“And he?” she ventured to say when Fleurange had answered all the questions,—“he, Gabrielle, where is he?”
“He!” repeated Fleurange, as a flush rose to her cheeks and her eyes filled with tears—“he is there: there, mademoiselle, within the walls of the fortress before us!”
Poor Josephine started with surprise. “Pardon me!” said she. “If I had known that, I should not have mentioned him.”
“Why, mademoiselle?—The sight of those walls does not make me afraid! On the contrary, I long to enter them. I long to leave all this splendor which separates me from him as it did before! O my dear friend! you must not pity me the day I am united to him!”
The language of passion always had a strange effect on this elderly maiden, but she only allowed herself to reply meekly:
“Well, my dear child, we will not pity you! It is Clement and I who will need pity when that day comes, and you must not be vexed if—” And in spite of herself, great tears filled her eyes, which she promptly wiped away.
She remained silent for some moments, then spoke of something else, feeling if she resumed the subject it would speedily lead to an explosion of grief which she resolved to restrain that she might not afflict her young friend.
“What wide plain is that between the quay and the fortress?” she soon continued.
“That is the Neva,” replied Fleurange, smiling.
“The Neva?”
“Yes, the river that runs through the city.”
“The river?” repeated Mademoiselle Josephine. “Come, Gabrielle, I know I am very ignorant of everything relating to foreign countries, but still, not to such a degree as to believe that. A river!—when I see with my own eyes hundreds of carriages on it, sledges and chariots of all kinds, going in every direction, and houses and sheds!—And what are those two great mountains I see yonder?”
“They are ice‐hills, such as they have in Russia, mademoiselle, and which were imitated in wood three years ago at Paris. Do you remember? I am told these are only erected temporarily during the carnival.”
“Very well; but what you have said does not prove that to be the river, and that you are right.”
“It seems incredible, I know, but everything we see there now will disappear in the spring, leaving only a broad stream between that fine granite quay and the fortress. But I confess I can scarcely realize it myself, never having seen it.”
Clement now appeared. He looked pale and disposed to be silent, and gave every indication of having passed a no less restless night than Mademoiselle Josephine, though for a different reason. After exchanging some words with his companions, his eyes glanced over the broad river, and, like those of Fleurange, fastened on the gloomy walls of the fortress. It was a strange chance that led them all there precisely opposite. Clement gazed at the place with despair, jealousy, and horror, but still was unable to turn his eyes away.
“There, then, is the end,” thought he; “for her, the end desired: for me, the grave of my youth! Yes, when she once enters those walls, all will be at an end for me, were I to live beyond the usual period. My life will be ended at twenty years of age!”—
These reflections and others of the same nature were not calculated to make Clement very agreeable that morning. He was not only serious, which often happened, but, contrary to his habit, he was gloomy and taciturn. Their breakfast was despatched in silence, after which it was only by a great effort he gradually succeeded in regaining his usual manner.
“Cousin Gabrielle,” said he then, “I appear morose this morning, I am aware, and I beg your pardon. But I am only sad, I assure you—sad in view of what is approaching. This is pardonable, I hope,” continued he, taking Mademoiselle Josephine’s hand; “you will not require us, will you, to leave you without regret?”
“That is what I said to her a moment ago,” said poor Josephine, wiping away her tears. “She says she is happy; that she longs to be there,” casting a glance across the river. “We only desire her happiness, I am sure; but then for us—”
“Yes,” said Clement, with a sad smile of bitterness, “for us the few days to come will not be very happy, and we really have reason to be sad. As for me, Gabrielle, I also regret those just ended; for in this new sphere my rôle is at an end. I am now to be for ever deprived of the pleasure of being useful to you in any way.”
He was still speaking when the Marquis Adelardi was announced; and he hastily rose.
“Stay, Clement,” said Fleurange eagerly—“stay. I wish this excellent friend to become acquainted with you.”
“I also wish to make his acquaintance, but not now. Tell him that to‐ morrow, yes, to‐morrow morning—or even this evening, if he will receive me, I will call at his residence. Do not detain me now.”
And before the marquis appeared he was gone. He felt he should be de trop at this interview of such deep import to Fleurange, for such it was. To see George’s friend once more, his confidential friend—him who at this solemn period had become the intermediary authorized by his mother!—There was great reason to be agitated at such a thought. Besides, Adelardi had always inspired her with sympathy and confidence, and in this new sphere she realized how beneficial his experience would be, for Clement was right in saying he could no longer be of any use. He was as ignorant as she of the habits and usages of the court. And yet, to obey the Princess Catherine’s instructions, her first object must be to obtain an audience of the empress—a formidable prospect, which frightened her a thousand times more than all that afterwards awaited her. She therefore received the marquis with such childlike confidence as to redouble the regard he had always felt for her. There was the same beauty, the same simplicity about her, and, above all, the charm most attractive to eyes as blasés as his—of resembling no one else in the world! The extraordinary courage she showed herself capable of made him appreciate the more that which she manifested in separating from George, and revealed to him the whole extent of the sacrifice then made with so much firmness.
The mission confided to Adelardi assumed, therefore, a graver aspect in his eyes than before, and he was for an instant tempted to reproach himself for having, the night previous, invoked the aid of a rival in George’s behalf, who might prove an enemy to the charming girl before him. On all accounts, however, he could not regret this last effort for his friend’s welfare. In case Vera failed, and by chance was afterwards tempted to display any ill‐will at another’s performing an act of devotedness she declared herself incapable of, he had taken some precautions to defeat her, and flattered himself the favor would be obtained before she discovered by whom it was implored.
Meanwhile, the maid of honor was punctual. The marquis had already received her reply, and now placed it in his young friend’s hands.
“Your request is granted: Mademoiselle Fleurange d’Yves will be received by her majesty on Thursday, at two o’clock.
V. L.”
“The day after to‐morrow!” said Fleurange with emotion. Then, blushing as she continued: “But how happens it that the name which I have not borne for so long occurs in this note?”
“It is yours, is it not?” replied the marquis evasively.
“Yes, it is mine, but—” she stopped. A particular remembrance was now associated with the name of Fleurange. No one had called her so but George for more than three years. And the day for ever graven on her memory, he told her he should keep that name for himself—himself alone. She regretted to find it here written by a strange hand, and felt an involuntary contraction of the heart.
“I should have preferred the request made in the name I generally bear.”
“Pardon me. I am to blame in this,” said Adelardi. “I supposed it a matter of indifference. I thought the name of Fleurange would particularly attract the attention of her whose favor you seek, and remain more surely in her memory.”
This was merely an excuse which occurred to him in reply to a question he had not anticipated. His real motive was to conceal from the maid of honor another name perhaps more familiar, and which might be connected in her mind with some prejudice injurious to the success of the petition of which she was the intermediary.
“We serve God by climbing up to heaven from virtue to virtue; we serve Satan by descending into hell from vice to vice.”—S. Bonaventura.
He who reflects upon death has already cut short the evil habit of talkativeness; and he who has received the gift of inward and spiritual tears, shuns it as he would fire.—S. John Climacus.
Spiritual blessings attained by much prayer and labor are solid and durable.—Ibid.
The first degree of interior peace is to banish from us all the noise and commotion created by the passions, which disturb the profound tranquillity of the heart. The last and most excellent degree is to stand in no fear of this disturbance, and to be perfectly insensible to its excitement.—Ibid.
The heart of the meek is the throne on which the Lord reposes.—Ibid.
The day will belong to him who is first in possession.—Ibid.
Prince Von Bismarck And The Interview Of The Three Emperors.
By M. Adolphe Dechamps, Min. D’état
From La Revue Générale De Bruxelles.
MY DEAR FRIEND: You question me about the events which during the past two years have been subverting Europe, and you in particular ask me what I think of the meeting of the three emperors at Berlin, and of the policy of von Bismarck.
Your first inquiry is too general for me to take up in a letter which I wish to avoid making too long, but in a work which I am writing at present I will endeavor to do so to the extent of my ability. About the year 1849, I went to work on an Étude sur la France, out of which, during the second Empire, I put forth three separate publications.(189) In these I followed the course of Napoleon III., both in the successes and in the blunders which brought about his fall; and now in the midst of the obscurity of general politics which thickens more and more from day to day, and wherein the attentive observer perceives more sinister flashes than gleams of sunshine, I am about to complete the main work which I began more than twenty years ago.
In 1859, I sent my first publication on the Second Empire to the aged Prince von Metternich, who honored me with his friendship, and asked him for his views about the condition of Europe, which was then on the eve of being profoundly changed by the war in Italy.
The following is an extract from the interesting reply which I received from him only a short time before his death: “After having been a witness and spectator of the catastrophes which burst forth between the years 1789 and 1795, in the latter one I made my first entry into the higher walks of the political world, and 1801 was the first year of my diplomatic career. I consequently cannot be in ignorance of anything that has taken place since the two remote epochs above mentioned. Now, am I thereby in advance of other living men? Can I consider myself capable of drawing up a prognostication of what will happen even so far only as regards the most immediate future? Certainly not! But, nevertheless, one thing I know I can do, I can venture to affirm that not during the course of the last seven decades has there been a single moment when the elements which make up social existence have found themselves plunged in so general a struggle as they are now.”
Since the prince thus wrote me, we have had the campaign of Italy against Austria in 1859; the war in Germany which ended in Sadowa; the civil war in the United States of N. A.; the colossal war of 1870; the astounding fall of the second French Empire; the rule of the Commune, and the conflagration in Paris; a Republican government in France; the setting up of the Empire of Germany; the Italian Revolution in Rome, which keeps the Pope a captive in the Vatican and all the church in mourning; we have had Spain contended for by three dynasties and a prey to anarchy and civil war; and we have a socialistic revolution stirring up everywhere the laboring masses and unsettling the deepest foundations of the society of our day!
What would old Prince von Metternich say if, having before him the immense upheaving of which we are witnesses, he could be now called upon to reply to the general inquiry which you have put to me? He would decline giving an opinion; he would refuse to make any predictions; he would confine himself to the expression of deeper fears, because of the general and formidable struggle now raging between all the elements which make up the very life of society. I will do just as he would, and for a hundredfold more reasons than he could have. I feel, as do all those who have any political instinct, that decisive and dreadful events are drawing nigh; though I cannot yet distinctly perceive them, I feel them, as one does the approach of a storm, from the heaviness of the air before seeing the lightning flash or hearing the thunder roll.
I lay aside, then, your general inquiry, and take up the second one, which is more precise, and which relates to the meeting at Berlin and to the policy of von Bismarck.
It is almost needless for me to mention that, retired as I have been for a long time from politics, any opinions which I may express are merely individual ones, that I alone am responsible for them, and that nobody can claim a right to extend that responsibility to my friends, and still less to the political party which I have had the honor of serving. I make this express reservation.
What is, then, the meaning, the character, and the bearing of the meeting of the three emperors? Is it a congress? Is it an alliance?
It is neither one nor the other, and this has been carefully proclaimed. It is not an European congress, since England and France were not present at it, the one having been left aside, and the other naturally excluded. It is not a congress, since no treaty will sanction its views and results. But, besides, Prince von Bismarck wants neither congress nor treaty. He attached great importance to signing the treaty of Prague alone with Austria and the treaty of Frankfort alone with France; he refused, with a certain hauteur, to allow any interference of the other European powers in those treaties, although they brought about a fundamental change in the status and equilibrium of Europe.
In times past, after a great war, Europe has always intervened through a solemn congress in which it dictated the terms of a general peace, thereby securing for it solidity and duration. Thus the treaty of Westphalia brought with it its consequent peace, the treaty of Vienna the peace of 1815, and more recently the treaty of the Congress of Paris in 1856 followed upon the war in the Crimea. Heretofore Europe has been subject to a system of equilibrium: Bismarck has done away with the latter, and broken up the former.
But he perceived the danger of this attitude and this situation. Germany had vanquished Austria, crushed France, and had won European supremacy, but she stood alone. Austria, forced out first from Italy, afterwards from Germany, could not, without feeling a deep and natural jealousy, see the German Empire rise to the first rank while she sank to the second. Russia cannot see the German Empire extend from the Danube to the Baltic, and overtop the Slavic Empire, without becoming also jealous. England cannot look upon this state of things, which leaves her nothing to do but to keep quiet and silent, without feeling somewhat as Austria and Russia do. There is felt, then, at St. Petersburg, as at Vienna, and perhaps at London, an invincible distrust of the predominance of Germany and of the rupture, for her benefit, of the equilibrium of Europe. There are deep and opposing interests which are incompatible with a true alliance between the three emperors, and, albeit they have at Berlin shaken hands, toasted, and fraternally embraced one another and exchanged certain general ideas, they have not allied themselves on settled political views.
M. von Bismarck has himself pretty accurately defined the meeting at Berlin: “It is of importance that no one should suppose that the meeting of the three emperors has for its object any special political projects. Beyond a doubt, this meeting amounts to a signal recognition of the new German Empire, but no political design has directed it.”
It amounts to this or very nearly this: M. von Bismarck wanted neither a congress nor a treaty, nor did he seek an alliance which was impossible of attainment just now; but he was determined to put an end to his present isolation, and he sought in particular to cut short the dream of retaliation in which France might indulge from a hoped‐for alliance with Russia or with Austria.
The government of Berlin has in the meeting of the three emperors sought two and perhaps three ends: I. To bring about the recognition of the German Empire by the two great military powers of the North, and in that way deprive France of all hope of finding an ally, with a view to war, either at St. Petersburg or at Vienna. II. To discourage at the same time the particularism(190) of Bavaria and of South Germany, which has always looked for a support in the direction of Vienna. The third end may be to disarm the resistance of Catholics to the absurd and odious persecutions organized against them, by intimating to them that their cause has been abandoned by the Apostolic Emperor, the head of the House of Hapsburg.
The remarkable letter published in Der Wanderer of Vienna, under the heading of “The Order of Battle,” sets forth very cleverly each of these two hopes aforesaid of the Berlin diplomats.
“Those diplomats,” says Der Wanderer, “are rather barefacedly making game of Austria’s good‐nature. They calculate that this good‐nature will have the effect of paralyzing two (as M. von Bismarck considers them) implacable enemies of the empire, but heretofore friends of the Hapsburg dynasty; I mean the particularism of the minor states and the Catholic opposition. ‘Thanks to the house of Austria,’ say they, ‘we are going to disarm those reptiles, and pull out their venomous fangs.’ At the same time, those diplomats do not conceal their joy (premature, I hope) at what they call the Canossa(191) of Berlin and the retaliation of Olmutz. ‘We will get the old seal of the empire’ (I quote their words textually) ‘affixed to our heritage by the House of Austria.’ ”
It would seem, then, that the Emperor of Austria, by appearing at Berlin, meant to say to particularism and perhaps to the Catholic body: You need no longer count on me. And the Emperor of Russia went there to offer a toast to the German army and to signify to France: Do not count on any alliance with me for a war hereafter.
This would indeed be the crowning of M. von Bismarck’s policy. Since the two great wars against Austria and against France which by their prodigious results assuredly far surpassed his hopes and previsions, he has but one solicitude and one thought—to isolate France, to secure her military and political impotence, to file down the old lion’s teeth and to muzzle him.
To this end, he needed strong and impenetrable frontiers, which he got by the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince von Bismarck cannot fail to perceive that the annexation of these two provinces to Germany constitutes for it, in a political point of view, a source of weakness rather than of strength; that it is an additional embarrassment to the difficulties following the organization of German unity; that Alsace and Lorraine will be, for a long time to come, another bleeding Poland on the flanks of the new empire; nevertheless, the conquest of these two provinces seemed to him, in a military point of view, indispensable as a first material guarantee against the possibility of retaliation on the part of France. By the possession of those provinces, he turns against France the formidable triple line of defence of the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Vosges; at Strasbourg and at Metz he holds the strategical keys of France; these two strongholds are, so to speak, iron gates of which the bolts are kept at Berlin. The other Rhenish frontiers are defended by the armed neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Switzerland. Seated behind its impassable frontiers, and relying upon its powerful military organization and the remembrance of its recent triumphs, the German Empire appears perfectly secure from attack.
But even all this was not enough for Prince von Bismarck. He has just been repeating the policy which turned out so well for him in the war of 1866 against Austria. Then, through the guilty and senseless connivance of Napoleon III., he allied himself to Italy; he compelled Austria to divide her forces, to have two armies, one at Verona, the other in Bohemia—which was making sure beforehand of the defeat of Austria. M. von Bismarck has just begun a second time this skilful manœuvre. He has formed an offensive and defensive alliance with Italy which owes its political life to France, and repays the boon by treachery. By means of this alliance he would compel France, in the event of a war, to have an army of the Alps and an army of the Rhine, which would be equivalent to certain defeat.
Any war of retaliation is consequently for a long time to come rendered impossible.
There would be left to France only one resource, and that a distant one, viz., an alliance with a great military power, such as Austria, or, in particular, Russia, whose secret jealousies she would turn to her account.
But such an alliance presupposes France raised up, in a political, military, and moral sense, from her present ruin, and in possession of a settled government, stable within and influential without. Can a republic, even a conservative one, and even if it always had at its head as capable a statesman as M. Thiers, so raise France? Can a republic which is a good enough raft to take refuge on for a while, a so to speak narrow bed, which will do for France, wounded and ailing, to lie on during the period of convalescence—can it, in a country which lacks manly habits and historical institutions, unite enough solidity, security, wise liberty, strength, and grandeur to become the ally of so great an empire as Russia? To my mind, the idea of an alliance between a French republic and one of the two empires of the North against the German Empire is one of those impossibilities which need but to be asserted, not to be argued. If France could succeed in reuniting the separated links of her history, in reconciling her present with her past, if she were to again become a traditional, representative, and free monarchy, one holding itself equidistant from the abuses of the old régime and the errors of the Revolution—oh! then her situation would indeed be changed, and great alliances at present impossible might become possible soon thereafter. But such alliances would not have for their object never‐ending retaliations and new wars; they would bear their fruits through social peace, through the restoration of authority and order, and through that true, prudent, and measured liberty which, now that they have it not, they talk so much about. The greatness of France depends less on the extent of her frontiers than on her political, social, and religious renovation.
It is because M. von Bismarck understands perfectly that an alliance between one of the great military empires of the North and republican France is a chimerical project, that he encourages the adherents of the republic at Versailles to sustain their work.
Anyhow, M. von Bismarck, having in view the nature of contingencies, has sought to shut France out from hopes or temptations in this direction; after, having in her folly dreamt of getting a frontier on the Rhine, she has wretchedly lost, through the folly of her emperor, her eastern frontier; after, having sworn to tear in pieces the treaty of 1815, to which she had submitted with detestation, she has had to sign at Frankfort the treaty in virtue of which she was invaded and dismembered.
The new Empire of Germany, resting on its formidable army, protected by impenetrable frontiers, certain of an alliance with Italy which renders the undertaking of war against it almost impossible for France, sustained by the official friendship of Austria and of Russia, compels France to be resigned and peaceful; condemns her to political and military impotence, or, what may sound better, to walk in the ways of prudence. M. Thiers, in words which the French press has published, has recently made a resolute profession of this policy of prudence, by proclaiming that he desires peace—peace to build up and fructify; and that France, at all events, will not seek to break it.
When, from the balcony of the Imperial Palace at Berlin, it is proclaimed that the object and result of the meeting of three emperors is to sanction the statu quo of Europe, and to consolidate a general peace, we believe that they mean what they proclaim; but what is the signification of the proclamation? Why, that they have thereby accepted the actual state of things which has grown out of the recent wars; that is to say, the European supremacy of the German Empire, founded on the powerlessness or the cautious prudence of France; and that they think to have extinguished the centre of combustion from which the firebrand of war might be again hurled over Europe.
This is assuredly a clever policy, one in which Prince von Bismarck might allow himself to take a certain pride.
But in this serene sky there is one dark cloud, and we may well suppose that this cloud has disturbed the optimism of the diplomats assembled at Berlin. This cloud is that dreaded unknown future when France will be no longer governed by M. Thiers.
Salvation is not to come to France from the republic; in France there is neither a republic nor a monarchy; the forces which tend to a monarchy are disunited, and consequently powerless, and those which tend to a republic are still more divided; the nation is living under an administration ad interim; there is an absence of settled government and settled institutions, and an impossibility of establishing either, because of the wide divisions of irreconcilable parties, of anarchy in principles and ideas. The salvation of France for the time being is one man, a leader whose hand is pliable, firm, and commanding enough to hold political parties in submission and keep down the rivalries which would give France over to another civil war. M. Thiers believes that any present attempt to set up a monarchy would light up a civil war; while the conviction of the majority of the Assembly at Versailles is just as strong that, if the republic lasts, this civil war will break out on the morrow of the day when France will have lost M. Thiers. Probably both are right; it is rather to the condition itself of France than to the men that lead her that this lamentable state of affairs is to be attributed which finds its expression in the government of a provisional republic having nothing to look forward to in the future but unfathomable darkness and mystery.
M. Thiers is the embodiment of the conservative republic, which will last just so long as he lives, and I desire that his needed dictatorship be prolonged for a long while yet; but can we reasonably entertain such a hope? He has undertaken the admirable work of saving France; he has in Paris fought and won the great battle against anarchy; he has carried the loans through, reorganized the army and finances of France; he is pushing forward the evacuation of her territory; he maintains order. All this is very fine and grand; he is indeed acting the part of the saviour of his country; but let him not seek to do more; let him not be ambitious to become the founder of a government; let him rather be content with merely playing the first part at the head of affairs.
I thoroughly appreciate the work M. Thiers is engaged in; he directs his policy by the light of present events, the only ones he can control; he is going through the reparative period, but what is he preparing? What is he founding for the future? What heritage will he leave after him, and who will be his heir? Such are the questions which must come up to every reflecting mind, and in particular to his, so remarkably clear, perspicacious, and penetrating.
The weak side of his policy is that it leaves France on a political terra incognita. The creation of a few additional institutions will not suffice to raise France out of the provisional status in which she lies since her fall; I mean such as a vice‐presidency, the establishing of a lower house, all which would be adding shadows to shadows. It would never amount to anything more than an administration ad interim, and a period of expectation of a definite, stable, regular government having influence abroad, such an one as France feels that she does not but should possess. The question for M. Thiers, as well as for France and for Europe, remains the same: What is being prepared, what will the future bring?
As we know the tree by its fruits, so do we judge a policy by its results, and so will M. Thiers be judged.
If he leaves after him the heritage of a traditional and representative monarchy, or if, like a second Washington, he leaves as his successor to France a second John Adams or Thomas Jefferson who will enter upon the work of consolidating a republic really conservative, free, Christian, and powerful, he will indeed be a great man; but, if he is to be followed in power by a Gambetta who will be the predecessor of the socialist commune of Paris, he will, notwithstanding the immense services he has rendered, be severely judged by history. No one assuredly ought to understand this better than he.
Is the second President of the fourth or fifth French Republic to be a now unforeseen Jefferson or a Gambetta?
Such is the dreaded question now before us. These threatening eventualities have doubtless been attentively considered at the conference in Berlin. M. von Bismarck may have developed thereat the political plan which I have endeavored to analyze, and which has for its object the founding of the peace of Europe on France’s inability to undertake another war; but revolutionary and demagogical France, bearing incendiarism from Paris to Madrid, to Rome, and perhaps elsewhere, must be opposed in some other way than by the establishment of impenetrable frontiers and the formation of alliances; and on these other means of opposition the three emperors must have seriously conferred at Berlin, and I doubt much whether waging war against the Catholic Church has seemed to them the best way to avert the danger aforesaid.
I have sought in this letter to set forth the character and import of the meeting at Berlin, and to show the policy which Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to inaugurate there. I have not been eaves‐dropping at the doors of the chambers in which the three emperors and their chancellors held their deliberations; but there is no difficulty in conjecturing what was talked about, and, I may add, what was thought therein.
We must not overestimate the importance of these conversations; the meeting at Berlin will no more bring about positive results for the solution of pending questions in Europe than did the numerous interviews which Napoleon III. had with the Emperor of Austria, the ministers of Great Britain, and the czar. As we have stated before, it is not a congress; it forms no alliances, and no treaty determining the new European equilibrium will come out of it. What M. von Bismarck wished particularly to bring about was the presence of the two emperors with their counsellors in the capital of the new empire. Their mere presence signified, in the eyes of the prince chancellor:
The recognition of the German Empire; the sanction of the treaties of Prague and Frankfort, which were to form the basis of the new equilibrium of Europe.
The impossibility for France to find a powerful ally that would enable her to attempt a war of retaliation.
On the part of Austria, the abandonment of all idea of returning to her old German policy, and the repudiation of all connivance with the particularistic resistance of the lesser states of Germany.
I will presently examine whether the presence at Berlin of the head of the dynasty of Hapsburg signifies also the repudiation of the Catholic movement which the persecutions directed against the church have stirred up throughout entire Germany.
Assuredly this policy of M. von Bismarck shows, I will not say grandeur, but skill and audacity; and it has been crowned by wonderful success. When I saw Prince von Bismarck raise Prussia, that a few years ago could hardly rank among the great powers, to the height of the Empire of Germany through the victories of 1866 and 1871—when I contemplated these astounding results, I was for a moment tempted to consider him as a great minister, as one of the rare successors of Richelieu or of Stein.
I was the more inclined to this judgment because, as a Belgian, I was grateful for the honest and upright policy which he had followed as regards Napoleon III. before the last war. There is no longer any room for doubt, now that the diplomatic documents are known, that Napoleon III., in order to redeem the unpardonable blunder which he had committed by favoring the war of 1861 between Prussia and Austria, endeavored to obtain in Luxemburg and in Belgium the compensations which he considered needful for him in view of the aggrandizement of Prussia. We know about the rough draft of the Benedetti treaty, which no amount of equivocation and timid denial can do away with.
I had, in my work published in 1865, clearly denounced the plot; and from the Belgian tribune, because I had pointed out these perils to its government, I have been called a political visionary and almost a traitor to my country. Subsequent events have justified my allegations, and now every one knows that the dangers which we ran for a time were more real, nearer at hand, and greater than even I imagined them to be.
The war of 1870 was the consequence of the refusal of the government of Berlin to yield to the guilty covetousness of Napoleon III. I ascribe the honor of the former to M. von Bismarck and to the integrity of William IV. I had proclaimed the existence of two eminent perils: a diplomatic peril, viz., an alliance of France with Prussia, of which Belgium would have been the stakes and the victim; the chance of a war between those two nations, in which France might have been victorious. We have, almost by a miracle, escaped those two perils; through the war of 1870, Belgium has been preserved from diplomatic conspiracies, and as a Belgian I can never forget it.(192)
Belgium, since the late war, finds herself in a new position which has not attracted the attention it deserves.
Belgium, for a long time back coveted by France, particularly by France under the Empire and under the Republic, had, above all, to fear an alliance between France and Prussia, which latter might sacrifice her to the political combinations growing out of such an alliance. That is what Napoleon III. attempted in the Benedetti negotiation, and it was this peril which before the recent war alarmed my patriotism.
Now this peril has vanished. An alliance between the German Empire and France is now put off for a long time. But there is another motive still more powerful, and which constitutes our complete security, which is this: that the existence of a neutral and strong Belgium has become henceforward for the German Empire a necessity of the highest order. Since the government of Berlin has thought it indispensable for strategic purposes to hold Metz and the lines of the Meuse and of the Vosges, it cannot allow, under any consideration, independent Belgium to disappear and France to occupy that territory of Belgium which is watered by the Meuse and the Scheldt. Our neutrality protects the Rhine on the side of the gap between the Sambre and the Meuse, but can afford this protection only provided our neutrality is politically and militarily strong to such an extent as our financial resources will warrant.
Our neutrality, in order to be one of the supports of the peace of Europe, must be ever an honest one; it must stand as a barrier against aggression whether from the east or from the south; it must be hostile to no power. On the other hand, it is plain that, in order to fill this position of barrier and guarantee, Belgium must remain always armed and able to repel an attack at the outset; otherwise, she would become politically useless, and, in the event of a war, the occupation of her territory would follow as the fatal result of such omission.
This was true before the late war, and on this point my views have not changed; but, since the new European situation created by the war, this truth is twice as plain, and our duties to Europe have increased twofold. It is important that all our political men, without distinction of party, and that the entire nation, understand well the position to which we have been brought by recent events.
Far from being hostile to the German Empire, I find in it a new guarantee for the independence of my country. Our neutrality now rests on all the powers and on all the treaties that have been made: it had become a habit, after the advent of the Napoleonic Empire, to consider England as the special protector of our national independence, but now that Germany has a particular and powerful interest in that independence, instead of one special support only, we now have two.
It is proper that I should make this statement, as I am about to submit M. von Bismarck’s policy to a severe criticism. In this page of history which I have been rapidly writing, I have not been wanting in praise; and, if these lines are ever read by M. von Bismarck, he cannot complain of the appreciation which I have so far expressed of his policy. In the pages that follow, I shall not spare criticism. Much as I have admired the policy which prepared the war, in equal degree does my mind fail to comprehend the policy followed at Berlin since the peace, and which appears to me to be a perfect antithesis of the former one.
This latter policy appears to me so incomprehensible that I ask myself whether Prince von Bismarck, instead of being a political genius like Stein, is not entering upon the path of error in which Napoleon III. came to his ruin.
Napoleon III. has also been the ruler of Europe; the second Empire for many years enjoyed preponderance in Europe, and might have retained it much longer but for the accumulated blunders of imperial policy. Napoleon III., who had begun his reign isolated from other monarchs, and to whom the appellation of my cousin had been disdainfully denied, found himself, immediately after the war in the Crimea and after the Congress of Paris, at the head of a great Western alliance formed with England and Austria and by isolating Russia and annulling Prussia. He had reached the zenith of power in Europe; he had a star in which he and every one besides believed; kings and emperors came to Fontainebleau and to the Tuileries to pay their court to the parvenu sovereign who had been transformed into a Louis XIV., just as has happened at Berlin.
When I saw Napoleon III., at the summit of such a situation, break with his own hands, like a hot‐brained child, this magnificent Western alliance to which he was indebted for his high fortune; conspire at the Congress of Paris with M. de Cavour to bring about that fatal war in Italy against Austria which was the first cause of his disasters; turn out of the straight path of conservative principles which he had sworn to follow, and then lose himself in the tortuous and obscure ways of revolution, my judgment of him was definitively made. A man who could commit such a folly was neither a statesman nor a political genius; he was merely a lucky adventurer who had been helped on and spoiled by events, but who did not know enough to turn them to account.
It was just then, in 1859, on the eve of the war in Italy, that I wrote my first work on Le Second Empire, in which I did not hesitate to predict that this war, no matter how much glory it might make for the emperor, would nevertheless amount to a political defeat which would lead to the fall of the Empire. “The heads of even the wisest men,” I said, “are liable to turn when they have reached such an elevation as he has arrived at.” And I selected as the epigraph of my work, the words which old Prince von Metternich had uttered when speaking of the extreme good‐fortune of the Emperor of the French: “He is successful,” said the prince to me; “he has excellent cards in his hands, and he plays his game well, but he will be lost as a revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.” This remarkable prediction, made long before the war in Italy, has been verified to the letter, and my book, written in 1859, was merely a commentary upon it which subsequent events have confirmed.
M. von Bismarck is also at the acme of his triumph; he is presiding at his Congress of Paris. Behold Prussia, which but a few years ago had hardly any voice in the councils of Europe, now become the German Empire, and behold the Emperor of Germany getting the czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph to sanction at Berlin his victories, his conquests, and his political supremacy, by leaving France isolated, and making of no account England, which had kept herself aloof in her policy of forbearance.
Well, I do not hesitate to select this hour of triumph, when M. von Bismarck’s policy has been crowned at Berlin, in the midst of festivities the splendor of which is talked of far and wide, to predict its failure in the end if he does not change it. My reason for asserting this in presence of a state of things so contrary to my prediction is that M. von Bismarck is committing one of those blunders, I dare not say one of those political follies, which astonish reason, and which form the premises of a syllogism having for its conclusion an inevitable failure. The blunder is precisely similar to that perpetrated by Napoleon III., who, in consequence of having allied himself with revolutionary Italy, was led from Mexico to Sadowa, and from Sedan to Chiselhurst. This blunder on the part of M. von Bismarck, and of which he will yet repent, is his alliance with revolutionary Italy, which drags him into a war against the Catholic Church, which has always proved fatal to those who have attempted it, and which destroys the work of German unity which he had associated with his name. The epigraph of my work on Le Second Empire, borrowed from Prince von Metternich, might serve for this letter as well, if applied to the Emperor of Germany and his chancellor; if the head of the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns continues in the path of revolution in which M. von Bismarck has led him, “he will also perish, like the revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.”
Is it rashness on my part to point out to Prince von Bismarck and to the German Emperor the Tarpeian rock so nigh to the capitol to which they have ascended? Am I unjust towards the prince chancellor?
No one had a higher opinion of his political merit than I, and in appreciating, as I have done in this letter, his astounding successes, I have not been sparing of praise nor indeed of admiration. If, then, I am compelled to draw a comparison between Napoleon III. and him, and to measure by the blunder committed by the Emperor of the French in 1859 that which he is now committing, I must ask his pardon, for I make a great difference between those two contemporary personages. In the same degree that Napoleon III. was irresolute, beset by somnolent indolence and continual hesitation, so does, on the other hand, Prince von Bismarck know how to show a tenacious persistence and audacity in the carrying out of his designs; but this very tenacity may be a source of additional danger, if he enters upon a road which leads to an abyss; he will go forward in it quicker and more irremediably than another would, because he knows neither how to stop nor to draw back.
Let us, then, study the policy of M. von Bismarck.
And, in the first place, without wishing in the least to belittle the share which evidently belongs to him in the triumphs of Prussia, we must, nevertheless, admit that another important share falls to Count von Moltke, the greatest warrior of our day; and an equally considerable part is due to the blunders of his adversaries, Austria and Imperial France.
If, for example, Napoleon III. had not betrayed Austria in 1866 by allowing and favoring the alliance between Prussia and Italy, a war against Austria would have been impossible, and the victory of Sadowa would not have taken place; the senseless war of 1870, which grew out of the victory of Sadowa, would have been without either cause or pretext; France would be now erect, Austria would have maintained its influential position in Germany, and the German Empire would not have been established for the profit of Prussian unitarisme.
With the foundation of German unity, of the German Empire, Napoleon has had almost as much to do as M. von Bismarck. The great chancellor has found ready for him two instruments which he did not invent: the military genius of von Moltke, and the folly of Napoleon. To complete the expression of my thought, I will add that the German Emperor has only been, as he himself proclaimed after his victories, a mere instrument in the hands of Divine Providence for the chastisement of France. France has been unfaithful to her past history, from which she has severed herself; she has been unfaithful to the monarchical form of government which has rendered her glorious, and to the church which has made her great; she has lost, by a twofold apostasy, her political faith and her Catholic faith; she no longer possesses her institutions, which have been, one after the other, destroyed either by the old régime or by the Revolution; she no longer knows how to restore the monarchy, the elements of which have been scattered in the tempests of revolution; she knows not how to keep up a republic of which she has neither the habits, the historical conditions, nor the conditions social and political; she is in that state through which nations, condemned to perish, fall and decay, and out of which those nations which God wishes to save can get, only through punishment by fire or by the sword. M. von Bismarck has been, and may become again, that fire and that sword; which may perhaps be an honor, but does not justify pride.
The political work, then, which has produced the German Empire undoubtedly deserves praise, and assuredly does honor to the political merits of Prince von Bismarck, but does not facilitate the forming of a definitive judgment in his regard. It is in the work of peace that the statesman shows himself, and I must say it, that in this respect I do not find M. von Bismarck as great as events seemed to have made him out to be; just as he has been seen to be intelligent, fortunate, almost great during the period of warfare, so in like degree do I incline to consider him, in the period of present organization, improvident and blind.
This work of organization is a difficult one; it requires wisdom and time. M. von Bismarck has recourse to precipitation, to force, and to wrath.
German unity, inuring to the benefit of Prussia, could not, before the war of 1866, have been foreseen. When, in 1863, the Emperor of Austria made his triumphal entry into Frankfort, bearing in his hand federal reform, he was surrounded by all the princes of Germany. Prussia stood alone, abandoned by all Germany; and, if Napoleon had not foolishly thwarted the plans of the Emperor Francis Joseph, the Emperor of Germany would have been crowned, not at Berlin, but at Vienna.
After the war of 1866, Prusso‐Germanic unitarism had not yet been accomplished. Saxony and the states of the South which had fought by the side of Austria were defeated; they submitted to, rather than accepted, the terms which Prussia forced on them as the consequence of their defeat. Northern Germany was bounded by the Main, and the minor states ever felt themselves drawn towards Vienna, their old centre of attraction.
It was the war of 1870, declared by Napoleon against the whole of Germany, notwithstanding the patriotic protest of M. Thiers, which all at once created this unity; this unity, which brought all the Germans together under one flag, received thus the baptism of glory and of blood.
But the Prusso‐German unitarism, extemporized and rough‐cast by the war, was not consolidated; many difficulties remained to be overcome.
M. von Bismarck saw before him two formidable adversaries: the particularism of the middle states, and socialist democracy, which claims to abolish unity for its own gain, by substituting the German Republic for the German Empire.
Several symptoms go to show that the particularist movement, which had been stopped by the war, is reviving, and certainly the hostile action directed against the Catholics assists powerfully towards giving it new life. The symptoms of the awakening of this movement are numerous; it is needless that I should enumerate them; they are perfectly known at Berlin, and have assuredly become aggravated since the religious war undertaken by M. von Bismarck.
The particularism of the states, then, is not dead, and red democracy is full of life. These are the two great difficulties which M. von Bismarck’s policy finds in its way. To these must be added a third one: the assimilation of the two conquered provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French by the ties of history, of religion, of habits, and of interests.
To overcome these obstacles, to organize unity, the basis of the new empire, to accomplish his great work, M. von Bismarck needs prudence, time, and the hand of a true statesman.
Now, what does the Prince von Bismarck do? To the three considerable existing obstacles he adds another one, greater and more dangerous than the former, a difficulty which did not exist, which he of his own accord created, which he wantonly got up, and which will crush him; I mean the religious difficulty, the brutal war, the veritable persecution which he is organizing against the Catholics. He had to fight against particularist opposition and radical opposition; he himself, with deliberate purpose, needlessly and without reason, raises up a third one—the opposition of sixteen millions of Catholics united with their bishops; that is to say, almost half of the new empire which he thus unsettles and, so to speak, dissolves with his own hand.
Can anything be imagined more incomprehensible or more thoroughly preposterous?
What end is M. von Bismarck pursuing? By what thought and what views is he guided? The prince chancellor is neither mad nor blind; he has given abundant evidence of this; and yet, is it not folly, is it not blindness, to thus throw, without any appreciable motive, and with a heart as light as that of M. Emile Ollivier, sixteen millions of Catholics, including all their clergy and all their bishops, into a resistance which will be all the more obstinate and formidable because it will derive its strength from the oppression of conscience, from the suppression of liberty, the rending of the constitution, from the violation of justice and of rights? I have put these questions to eminent Germans of all parties, but have never got clear and satisfactory answers.
The Catholic Germans behaved admirably during the war; the Bavarian, Westphalian, and Rhenish troops were everywhere foremost under fire and in earning honor and glory. The priests and religious, both men and women, have shown a heroic devotedness on the battlefields, in the ambulances, and in the hospitals, so that M. Windthorst was enabled to say in the parliament at Berlin that many of those religious would go into exile wearing on their breasts the iron cross which they had earned during the last campaign.(193) The old antipathies against Prussia which prevailed along the Rhine and beyond the Main among Catholic populations were dying out; the establishment of religious liberty in Prussia on a more generous basis than in the lesser states had won the Catholics over to unity under Prussian hegemony; and the illustrious Bishop of Mayence, Mgr. de Ketteler, in an address which made a great noise in Germany and throughout Europe, raised the standard of rallying and unity.
The German Empire was consequently very near being established. M. von Bismarck stirs up a religious war which divides it in two and breaks it asunder. The war had brought together under the same flag Germans of all nationalities and all religious beliefs. Should not, then, all manner of pains have been taken to keep them united in the mutual work of the organization of the empire? Should not the first thought of a politician, after having achieved such wonderful success, and having before him the obstacles which still remained to be overcome, have been to begin by establishing peace in religious matters?
But I must repeat the question, What did M. von Bismarck do? He repulses the Westphalians and people of the Rhine who had become reconciled; he revives in Bavaria and in the South that particularism which was dying out; and on the political grievance he grafts a religious one; he doubles the obstacles of all kinds which lie in the way of his plans for Germanizing Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French and Catholic; into their bleeding wounds he, as it were, introduces gangrene, by entering upon an unheard‐of religious persecution, and without any pretext that he dare avow; he compromises in the most serious manner the work of unity, towards the founding of which he had aided so much; he acts as would the greatest adversary of that unity who could not contrive any better means for its destruction than to do just what Prince von Bismarck is doing—he drives into the ranks of opposition nearly half of the soundest population of the empire; he sets against himself the two hundred million Catholics spread throughout the world, and who are everywhere protesting against his oppression; he will also turn against him the old conservatives, who have been deeply hurt by the enactment of the law in regard to schools, as well as all sincere friends of religious and political liberty, so audaciously ignored by him. These friends of liberty are becoming scarce; they maintain, in the face of this odious violation of their principles, a shameful silence which they will have to break, if they wish to avoid making liberalism synonymous with hypocrisy.
Have I erred in comparing the policy of M. von Bismarck with that of Napoleon III., and his present blunder with that committed by the ex‐ emperor when, after the Congress of Paris, he broke up the splendid Western alliance?
When I endeavor to interpret M. von Bismarck’s conduct, I can find but one motive which can serve for its explanation, and that is his alliance with Italy. That alliance, which he conceived necessary in order to keep the forces of France divided, and to render a war of retaliation impossible, has drawn him into a fatal hostility against the Catholic Church.
His ally, Victor Emanuel, has conquered the Roman States by stratagem and by violence; he has usurped in Rome the throne of the pontiff king, who among the monarchs of Europe possesses assuredly the most ancient and most venerated titles to sovereignty; he holds the Pope captive in the Vatican, until such time as he can compel him to set out on the road to exile; he deprives the Sovereign Pontiff of the church of that sovereignty on which his independence rests, and thus throws the universal church into alarm and mourning.
This outrage against the church, perpetrated at Rome by the Italian government, has had its counterpart in Berlin. No doubt the condition which Victor Emanuel set upon alliance with him has been to make the German Empire enter into the vast plot got up against the independence and liberty of Catholicity.
Well! without being a prophet, it is not difficult to predict that the Italian alliance will prove as fatal to the German Empire as it has been to the second Napoleonic Empire, and that on the Italian rock M. von Bismarck’s work will be dashed to pieces, if he allows it to remain in the evil path in which it is now so deeply sunk.
Prince Bismarck considers himself to be the successor of Stein, to whom he has caused a statue to be erected, and whose great policy he claims that he is continuing. In this respect, he is profoundly mistaken; and, very far from following that policy, he abandons and betrays it.
Stein and all his school have, like Burke and Pitt, combated the principles of the French Revolution. French ideas had, at the close of the last century, invaded Germany, and the armies of the first Republic had no difficulty in conquering by their arms a country which they had before overrun with their ideas.
Baron von Stein, that restorer of the German Vaterland and liberty, was a mortal foe of the French Revolution. His mission and his work were to withdraw Germany from the fatal path into which, following France, she had strayed, and to bring her back into the path laid out for her by her history.
He could not save Prussia from the defeat at Jena, but he trained her, by his thorough and excellent reforms, for revenge at Waterloo and Sedan. He it was who formed Scharnhorst, the organizer of military Prussia, and whose system Count von Moltke perfected; he, probably, who became the soul of the patriotic movement in 1813; he it was who, together with Scharnhorst, Stadion, and Gagern, gave to Germany that powerful impulse out of which came the great present situation; he it was who stood the distinguished protector of the German historical school, that real antithesis of the French revolutionary school, which former had as its influential organs Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Schlegel, Görres, the two Grimms, de Savigny, etc., and which M. de Sybel represents still in our day.
Stein was a conservative, a patriot, and a Christian. What he fought against in the French Revolution was that philosophic and abstract method that France had adopted, destructive of all national tradition; that spirit of exclusive and narrow equality which influenced her course, and in the pursuit of which, according to M. de Tocqueville, she has lost liberty; that absolutism, whether in democracy or in Cæsarism, that obliteration of the individual, that indifference to rights, that worship of brute force, that extinguishment of all local, provincial, and autonomous life, that exaggerated idea of the state, that oppression of religious liberty, of Christian teaching, and of the Catholic Church, all of which characterized the French Revolution.
Stein wanted a Germany united, but federal, Christian, liberal, traditional, and historical; he wanted her, as Burke did England, to be the reverse of revolutionary France.
Now, is it not Stein’s work, that Germany born of his reforming genius, that M. von Bismarck is destroying? The liberal national party, on which he leans, is merely a doctrinaire French party, anti‐historic, ideological, and anti‐religious, the harbinger of levelling and radical democracy; a party which inclines to absolutism and Cæsarism, adores centralization, unconditional unification, and the omnipotence of the state, and which is the adversary of all proud and free consciences, and of any independent church. It is not the Protestant idea, but the Masonic and Hegelian one which this party represents.
Stein was a Christian, a conservative, and a German; the Prince von Bismarck is sceptical, revolutionary, and belongs to the French school. Stein sought to found German unity on federal liberties, in the alliance of the church with the school, and on peace between religious denominations; M. von Bismarck overturns that basis, substitutes in its place absolutist and Prussian unification, secularized teaching, and religious discord.
It is surprising that, when in France the ideas which inspired the French Revolution have been abandoned even by the most intelligent part of the school of liberalism; by such men as Tocqueville, Thierry, and Guizot, who are discouraged, and talk more openly of their disappointments than of their hopes; when M. Renan asserts that the French Revolution “is an experimental failure”; when the Revue des Deux Mondes, through the pen of M. Montégut, proclaims “that the Revolution is politically bankrupt”; on the very morrow of the final miscarriage of that Revolution under its two forms of government, the Empire fallen at Sedan, and the social Republic fallen under the ruins of the Paris Commune—it is at that very time that Prince von Bismarck thinks it skilful and profound to import that French revolutionary system into Germany! M. Renan has cause for rejoicing; he has given utterance to a wish which M. von Bismarck has set about to fulfil. “France,” he said, “need not be considered lost if we can believe that Germany will be in her turn drawn into that witches’ dance in which all our virtue has been lost.”
To sum up: German unity, the great German Empire, which such an extraordinary concurrence of circumstances had created, is being dissolved and ruined by Prince von Bismarck through the most inconceivable of political blunders. He throws sixteen millions of Catholics, once friendly to the Empire, into opposition to it; he gives a new food and new strength to the particularism of the Southern States, and to the Polonism of Posen; he makes twofold the difficulties of accomplishing the assimilation of Alsace and Lorraine; to political grievances he superadds religious grievances, far more to be dreaded than the former; he enkindles an implacable religious war upon the ruins of that denominational peace which King Frederic William III. had happily established, and by aid of which the present emperor and the empress Augusta had, in the opening period of their reign, won the hearts of the Catholics of the Rhine. To cover this blunder, M. von Bismarck enters into the Italian alliance which destroyed the second Napoleonic Empire, and will destroy the German Empire; and he abandons the historic German policy restored by Stein, to rush into the retinue of the national liberal party, into the paths of the French Revolution, into that witches’ dance to which M. Renan refers; and he inoculates his own country with the poison which has killed France!
IV.
But there is one final consequence of the policy of Prince von Bismarck to which I wish to call attention, and which is not least in gravity.
Austria, after having lost Italy, had, by the treaty of Prague, been excluded from Germany. Nevertheless, the German Empire, under the hegemony of Prussia, had not been set up; there existed only a Northern Germany, having the Main as its boundary; the Southern States, and even Saxony, preserved a certain autonomy; and Austria might hope by a wise policy to draw little by little into the sphere of her influence and attraction those countries which had been accustomed to look upon Vienna as their political pole.
The war of 1871 against France, which had united all the Germans under one flag, established German unity and the German Empire. The boundaries of the Empire were moved from the Main to the Danube, and all hope for Austria to regain her old German position was gone.
Austria accepted this situation; the Emperor Francis Joseph and his two counsellors, Count von Beust and Count Andràssy, worked together to bring about a sincere reconciliation between Austria and the German Empire.
They gave up the idea of bringing back the Southern States into the circle of Austrian influence; they feared, on the contrary, lest the German provinces of Austria, detaching themselves little by little from the weakened rule of the Hapsburgs, might be irresistibly drawn towards Berlin, the powerful and glorious centre of the German Vaterland.
Those fears may at present be entirely set at rest. There has been a complete reversal in the position of things. The people, for the most part so Catholic, of the Tyrol, of Lower Austria, and of Bohemia, will lose all inclination to draw nearer to the German Empire, where a bitter persecution is being waged against their religious faith. The bonds which unite them to Austria will be drawn the tighter. On the other hand, will not the Catholics of the Rhine, of Westphalia, of Poland, of Suabia, of Franconia, of Würtemberg, of Bavaria, of Alsace, and of Lorraine, driven from the bosom of the German Empire, in which they are no longer citizens, but pariahs, be tempted to look again in the direction of Austria, the centre of their older sympathies? All Austria has to do is not to interfere; M. von Bismarck is working for her.
The prince chancellor, notwithstanding the elated confidence which he has in his strength, has understood the danger of the situation.
In order to change it, he had but one easy thing to do, and that was to modify his policy, to give up persecuting the Catholics, to admit that he had gone astray, and to return to a calmer and wiser policy; but this he would not do; he has preferred to keep on, and to try to drag Austria into the same road.
Last year, at Gastein, he tried to induce Count von Beust to join in the campaign which he wished to begin against the internationale rouge and the internationale noire, but the Emperor Francis Joseph baffled the attempt. The prince chancellor renewed it the same year with the emperor himself at Salzburg, but he failed a second time.
Has he met with more success at Berlin, upon the occasion of the meeting of the three emperors? Has he tried to get Russia and Austria to recognize not only the German Empire, but to sanction by their adhesion to it his home policy against “Romanism,” that is to say, against the Catholic Church, or has he at least succeeded in inducing the belief that he had not tried in vain? Has he sought to drag them into the war which he is carrying on against the Jesuits, against the religious orders, against denominational liberty, against Catholic teaching, against the clergy and the bishops, until such time as he can make it break forth at Rome, by laying, in the next conclave, an audacious and sacrilegious hand on the pontifical tiara?
We shall find this out before long. If Austria follows the policy of the centralist party of the German professors at Vienna and at Prague, to which Count von Beust has already yielded too much, and which is identical with the policy of the national liberal party of Berlin, she will have advanced the interests of Prince von Bismarck, and not her own; she will have labored for him and against herself; she will have turned aside the danger imminent to the German Empire through M. von Bismarck’s blunders, and of which the Austro‐Hungarian Empire should have profited; she will have, with her historical good‐nature, served the views of Prussia to the detriment of her own; and Francis Joseph, the Apostolic Emperor, unfaithful to his traditions and to the arms of his house, will have made his policy subordinate to that of a Lutheran emperor!
I positively refuse to believe that any such result can come out of the interview at Berlin, albeit that our generation is accustomed to the realization of political impossibilities. I would fain persuade myself that, if the Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to draw Austria into his war against the Catholics and against Rome, he will have failed at Berlin as he did at Salzburg through the good sense of the Emperor Francis Joseph.
V.
The more I study M. von Bismarck’s policy, the less I understand it. If he were a sectarian pietist, I could account to myself for the idea of perfecting the political and military unity of Germany by a religious unity, of creating a Protestant state: it would indeed be a sorry Utopia, and to attempt it would be to make the mistake of being three centuries behind his time.
But M. von Bismarck is neither a sectarian nor a fanatic; he is rather, I believe, a sceptic who has little care for religious controversies, and who probably understands very little about the question of the Papal Infallibility which he is wielding as a warlike weapon against the church. M. von Bismarck is a politician; politics he aims at and should be busied in; his mission is to help found an empire and not a schism or a sect. Now, it is the Empire, the political work, which he gravely compromises by disturbing so profoundly through a denominational conflict the religious quiet which that work needed for its consolidation. Instead of the German state founded on unity and general assent, it is the Protestant state founded on the deepest and most incurable divisions that he seems to aim at creating. There is no difficulty in predicting that he will lose the political unity in the pursuit of a religious unity which is but a chimerical and impossible anachronism.
This political course which the prince chancellor has inspired the Emperor William to follow, whose past one makes such a striking contrast with it, is to me an insoluble enigma, and raises doubts in my mind of M. von Bismarck’s transcendent ability.
I will nevertheless try to make out this political enigma, by studying the pretexts on which the government of Berlin relies to justify itself, the circumstances by which it has been enticed, and the temptation to which it has yielded.
The pretext which it puts forward is the decision of the Vatican Council in regard to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff in matters of doctrine.
The circumstances by which it was carried away are the Italian alliance abroad and the alliance with the national liberal party at home.
The temptation that misleads it is the hope, fortunately disappointed, which the stand of the inopportunist bishops of Germany and of Austria caused it to form, which stand the Berlin government had mistaken for a real dissent from doctrine, and destined to become the foundation of a national church separated from Rome by that dissent.
I call the question of Papal Infallibility a pretext, and, in fact, it is a groundless quarrel without any importance or earnest meaning.
I am not called upon to enter here into a theological dissertation upon the dogma of the infallibility of the church and of its sovereign magistracy, etc. I refer my readers to the excellent works which have been published on the subject, and I trust to be excused for mentioning in particular those written by my brother the Archbishop of Mechlin.
I will say but one word en passant on the question. For every Catholic, there is no longer any open question. Before the council, discussion was allowable; since the definition proclaimed by an œcumenical council united to the Pope, all discussion is closed.
Every one knows of the conversation between a very intelligent lady of great faith and the Count de Montalembert, shortly before the death of that illustrious friend, in which she asked him what he would do if the council together with the Pope should define infallibility. “Well, I will quietly believe it,” replied the great orator, with the firm accent of the Christian who knows his catechism, and who recites his act of faith.
In fact, no father nor doctor of the church, from Origen and S. Cyprian down to S. Thomas and Bossuet, no council, no theologian, no Catholic, has ever doubted the doctrinal infallibility of the church. The controversy lay with the Gallicans, who claimed that the words of the Pope addressed to the church ex cathedrâ needed the assent of a council or of the church throughout the world to acquire the character of infallibility.
All the old Catholics of all the schools, Gallican even included, were agreed to accord to the definitions of a council united with the Pope, that is to say, the church, the divine privilege of infallibility set forth in Holy Scriptures and in all tradition. On this point Bossuet holds the same doctrine as Fénelon and Count de Maistre.
Now, in the present instance we have a council united to the Pope, and no council, from that of Trent back to that of Nicæa, has been more numerously attended, more solemn, freer, or more œcumenical, than that of the Vatican. To deny this is downright nonsense, in which those take refuge who seek to hide their apostasy from their own eyes. If the Council of the Vatican has not been œcumenical and free, then manifestly no council in the past has ever been.
To reject the doctrinal definition of the Council of the Vatican, in which the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops of all the world, whether opportunist or inopportunist, have agreed, would undoubtedly be to abandon the church of Christ, and to renounce the Catholic faith; it would be going beyond Gallicanism, which never thought of calling in question the decisions of a council united to a pope; even beyond the Jansenism of Port Royal, which would perhaps have accepted the Bull of Innocent X. if sanctioned by a council; it would be going beyond 1682, back to Luther; that is to say, to open heresy, and to the entire abandonment of the church, our mother.
How can M. Döllinger not see this? He who in 1832, at Munich, where the encyclical of Gregory XVI. reached M. de Lamennais, insisted with the latter, with all his force as a theologian, that he should submit to the pontifical encyclical, which, in the doctor’s eyes, was binding on conscience, although no council had adhered to it—how can he now, in his own case, resist the decisions of Pius IX. and the Council of the Vatican? He who has written so many works of grave learning, and in particular that one on The Church and the Churches, how comes it that he does not see that he is no longer in the church, and that he is seeking a shelter for his revolt in the smallest, the poorest, and the most dilapidated of those churches of a day which, in the name of history, he has so severely condemned? How can he find himself at ease and his soul tranquil in those ridiculous conventicles of Munich and of Cologne, by the side of Michelis, of Reinkens, Friedrich, Schulte, the ex‐abbé Michaud, the ex‐father Hyacinthe, and surrounded by Jansenist and Anglican bishops, by Protestant and schismatic ministers, by rationalists of all colors? How comes it that his faith and his learning are not shocked when brought into the midst of that confusion of doctrines and of tongues, and of ignorance of all kinds, which rendered the Congress of Cologne so notorious; that congress whereat the question was discussed “of the reunion of the old Catholics with the other churches having affinity of faith,” which means with all the sects separated from Rome, to the exclusion of the great universal church of S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Pascal, Descartes, Bossuet, Fénelon, de Maistre, Lacordaire, of the eight hundred bishops of the council, and of the sainted Pontiff Pius IX.? How can he, a man of learning, a priest, advanced in years, on the brink of eternity, prefer to put himself under the pastoral crook and the jurisdiction of the Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, or of a schismatic Armenian bishop, and fraternize with the Anglican bishops of Lincoln, Ely, and Maryland, rather than remain an humble priest, but proud of that Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church whose admirable unity bursts forth in the midst of the vast persecution which is being begun and prepared for her, and of which the Provost of Munich consents to be the guilty instrument?
This closes my parenthetical remarks on Dr. Döllinger and the Old Catholics, who are in reality merely old Jansenists and very old Protestants, and I come back to M. von Bismarck and to his policy.
Prince von Bismarck and the governments of Germany have no occasion to trouble themselves about the question of settling whether infallibility attaches to the Pope speaking ex cathedrâ, or to the Pope united to the council; these are all dogmatic theses with which they have no concern. The pretext got up by politics for trespassing on the domain of religious faith is the following: The politicians allege that the declaration of the council has conferred upon the Pope a new authority, that this authority is absolute and unlimited, and that this state of things affects the relations between the church and the state, which is thereby thrown upon its defence against possible usurpation. The Emperor of Germany, in a conversation which he recently had at Ems with M. Contzen, the courageous Burgomaster of Aix‐la‐Chapelle, brought out this singular idea of the politicians when he alleged “that the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, had declared war to the state.”
How can this be? In what respect does the question of the infallibility of the church touch the relations between the church and the state?
The declaration of the Vatican Council is not new; it belongs almost textually to the Council of Florence when it proclaimed the faith which had existed for centuries; it is ancient; all, or nearly all, the bishops at the late council were agreed, and are now all agreed, as to the ground of the doctrine; they were only divided on the question of opportuneness, and Mgr. the Bishop of Orléans, in his pastoral letter of assent, declared that he has always professed the doctrine which had been proclaimed.
Nothing, then, has been changed, and church and state remain in precisely the same situation of reciprocal independence in their distinct spheres, and of harmony in their relations, in which they were before the council.
Some either imagine, through most admirable ignorance, or hypocritically make show of believing, that the pontifical infallibility is a personal privilege, in this sense, that it is conferred on a person who cannot err in anything, that the Pope is infallible in all that he says and in everything; that he could lay upon the faithful the obligation of believing any decision that he might proclaim whether in the exclusive domain of science or in the exclusive domain of politics, where faith is not at all involved.
The object of infallibility is the doctrine of the faith and of the revealed law. The church has the deposit of revelation, of the Holy Scriptures, and of tradition; the Pope is its supreme guardian; the evangelical promise of infallibility is nothing else than the promise of fidelity in the custody of this sacred deposit! When the Pope or the council united to the Pope declares that a truth is contained in the deposit of revelation, they do not invent matter, they repeat and discern; they do not create a new truth, they confirm an old one, and cause new light to beam from it.
Infallibility is, then, not personal in the absurd sense in which the word is used; neither is it absolute and without limits; its domain, which is that of faith and morals, is clearly marked out by the constitution of the Vatican Council. “According to the perfectly clear text of the decree,” say the Prussian bishops who met at Fulda in 1871, “all allusion to the domain of politics is completely excluded from the definition of this dogma.” His Eminence Cardinal Antonelli, in his despatch of the 19th of March, 1870, to the Nuncio at Paris, is even more precise. “Political affairs belong,” he says, “according to the order of God and the teachings of the church, to the province of the secular authority, without any dependence whatever on any other.”
But, as between the secular power and the church, relations are necessary, these are settled by the two authorities through arrangements or concordats.
I allow myself to call Prince von Bismarck’s attention to this point. Positive relations between the church and states have been settled by concordats only; always, at all periods of history, the popes alone have negotiated concordats with the states; pontifical infallibility has absolutely no connection with concordats, and the Pope when he signs them does not speak ex cathedrâ and as supreme doctor of the church. How, then, can the declaration of the council have changed the relations between the church and governments, and how can the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, be said to have declared war to the state?
It is, then, a mere matter of pretext. In point of fact, it is the German Empire which is laying claim to absolute and unlimited power in the domain of religion as well as in the domain of politics; it examines and judges dogmas, intrudes itself into ecclesiastical discipline; it closes the priest’s mouth in his pulpit—by the lex Lutziana; it closes Catholic colleges and schools; it forbids religious to preach, to hear confessions, and even to celebrate Mass; it forbids the bishops to canonically exclude from the bosom of the church those who openly separate themselves therefrom; it banishes, for no crime, without trial and in bodies, the religious orders, in the same way that Louis XIV. (though he could give better reasons) drove the Huguenots from the soil of France; it favors schism, and aims at establishing a national church. It is, then, the German state which is declaring war to the church, and which is raising claim to political and religious infallibility by founding a veritable civil theocracy.
Let us put aside the pretext, which can in no wise serve either for the justification or for the explanation of the conduct of the government of Berlin. Let us examine the real motives which governed that conduct, the circumstances by which the emperor was carried away, and the fatal temptations which deluded him.
VI.
Foremost among these reasons and temptations has been, as I have said before, the alliance with Italy. It was the first cause, and was the signal for the sudden change which took place in the interior policy of the German Empire. This is evident from the fact that the political storm burst forth during the last session of Parliament precisely upon the occasion of a paragraph in the draft of the address got up by the national liberal party, and which was a stone hurled at the papacy. This was taking place at Berlin at the very hour when the Italo‐German alliance had been concluded at Rome; the coincidence is striking, and proves that war against the Catholic Church and her head has been made a condition of this alliance.
The next temptation, the second blunder of Prince von Bismarck, has been his exclusive alliance with the national liberal party, whose character I have defined above. This alliance with pseudo‐liberalism is the corollary of his alliance with Italy; both rest within and without on the revolutionary and anti‐Christian principle. War on Rome and the papacy has been the condition of the alliance with Italy; war on the Catholics in Germany has been the condition of the alliance with the national liberal party.
Prince von Bismarck had, for several years, met a keen resistance to his plans from the national liberal party, while during the same period he found a support in the conservative section of the Prussian chambers, with whom were joined the few Catholics of note who happened to be members of them.
To‐day he turns away from this weakened but still powerful conservative section, and he wages the bitterest war against the centre section, which is made up of Catholics. These two sections watch over the deposit of old German traditions; they wish to preserve the federal and constitutional character of the Empire, to maintain the Christian and denominational character of the schools, and throughout the nation, religious peace. Latterly the conservative section has become weak; it has yielded to M. von Bismarck’s policy; but sooner or later its traditions will bring it to the side of the section of the centre, in order that both may unite in sustaining the historic principles of the Germanic race against the centralizing anti‐religious policy of the national liberal party, which represents above all else the idea of the French Revolution.
The section of the centre, which, in 1870, in point of numbers amounted in the parliament to but very little, has seen its power increase proportionately with the development of the pseudo‐liberal party of centralization, of omnipotence of the state, of political levelling, and of anti‐Christian reaction. The outrage committed on the papacy by the Italian government gave increased energy to the Catholic movement, and the section of the centre, which, at the time it was first organized, consisted of fifty members only, saw its numbers increase after the elections to more than sixty, all united together by strong convictions; it can count to‐day nearly eighty, and it is safe to predict that, unless the government sends into the interior, or into exile, or puts in prison the leaders of the Catholic movement, the party of the centre will, after the next elections, thanks to the war begun against the church, have gained a force of more than one hundred votes, which will thus counterbalance those of the national liberal party.
It is this growing power of the party of the centre, the fruit of M. von Bismarck’s policy, which has impelled him to his policy of violence and anger against the Catholic Church; he means to make the clergy, the Jesuits, the religious orders, and the bishops pay for the political loss of rest occasioned to him by this phalanx which is growing into a legion, and at whose head stand such powerful leaders as Reichensperger, Mallinckrodt, and Windthorst. The eloquent words of these orators, as in former times those of O’Connell in England, and Montalembert in France, spread beyond the boundaries of Germany, to arouse and stir up everywhere all lovers of right, justice, true liberty, and the church of Jesus Christ.
The third temptation of the German government has been the stand taken in the Vatican Council by nearly all the bishops of Germany and of Austria. These pious and learned prelates were all agreed, along with those of the entire world, as to the mere ground of the doctrine; all or nearly all were infallibilists; Josephism, Fébronianism, had been for a long time dying, if not dead; but these same bishops were nearly all inopportunists. This M. von Bismarck misapprehended, he believed that there was, among the bishops in council, a real dissent as to doctrine; he imagined that the majority of the German and Austrian bishops would separate from Rome to follow M. Döllinger in the path of defection or of schism, through which he is moving to his ruin. The Italian alliance and the alliance with the national liberal party carried M. von Bismarck into hostile action against Rome; the difference of opinion among the bishops on the question of the opportuneness of the decision by the council led him to hope that he would find therein the elements for a Janist(194) and national church.
In this he has been entirely mistaken. “He had left the Holy Spirit out of his reckoning,” said recently to me a learned ecclesiastic of Berlin, and I add that he had also not reckoned on the faith and virtue of the episcopate.
Observe what is going on and how the Catholic tide is rising and resisting. M. von Bismarck met at Sedan a splendid, courageous French army, which, badly led and crushed by the fire of the German artillery, was forced to capitulate; he will henceforth find in opposition to him the Catholic populations, with their clergy and their bishops at their head, who will rise, in the name of God and of the liberty of the church, who will resist and never surrender.
M. von Bismarck is about to have experience of what the Catholic bishops are and of what they can do. They will not conspire; they will not sow rebellion and revolution; they will not join themselves to the red international party, but they will resist and will not yield. “In this present sad condition of things,” said the bishops met together at Fulda in April, 1872, “we will fulfil our duty by not disturbing the peace between the church and the state.” “As Christians,” said the learned Bishop of Paderborn, in his touching address to the exiled Jesuits—“as Christians, we can oppose neither force nor overt resistance to the measures of governmental authority. Albeit such measures seem to us iniquitous and unjustifiable, we may only meet them by that passive resistance which our divine Master Jesus Christ has taught us by his words and example; that silence, calm and full of dignity; that patience, tranquil and resigned, but abounding in hope; that loving prayer which heaps burning coals on the heads of our persecutors.”
Such is the admirable language of the German bishops, as it fell from the lips of the Archbishop of Cologne, Mgr. von Droste‐Vischering, on the very day preceding that on which he was led captive by a guard of soldiers to the fortress of Minden. The calm and intrepid Bishop of Ermeland is deprived of his salary and injured in his authority; he is marked out for punishment, and he awaits the coming of the soldiers with the fetters to bind him.
I cannot recall the venerated name of Mgr. Krementz without adding to it the illustrious one of Mgr. Mermillod, whom all Europe will continue to address as Bishop of Hebron and Geneva, despite that decision of the council of state which forbids him to exercise any function whatever, whether as bishop or as curate, and which cuts him off from all salary. Here, then, we have this republican and liberal Switzerland suppressing the Jesuits and all cognate religious orders, the brothers of the schools, the sisters of charity; closing seminaries, as at Soleure, because the moral theology of S. Liguori was taught there; unseating bishops, as at Geneva; and the people that do these things are yet shameless enough to talk of liberty, while all the speech‐makers of liberalism, whose hair stands erect at the mention of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who dinned the world with their clamors in the young Mortara case, cannot find a single word of liberality, not a single protest, not a single expression of indignation, to stigmatize these unheard‐of outrages against all liberties at once, and against all the rights of human conscience.
I have just been adverting to the passive resistance of the bishops in Germany; but the lay movement, which is kept strictly within the law, is less passive, less resigned, and is somewhat inflamed by politics. The reaction against the unwarranted persecution set on foot a year ago is breaking out everywhere. A committee of direction has been formed at Mainz, whose business is to centralize the legal resistance of German Catholics for the defence of religious liberty thus threatened and assailed. This committee, in their address dated in July last, call upon the Catholics of Germany to a crusade in opposition to the aggressions of the government. “We claim,” says this address, “for our creed that liberty and independence guaranteed to it by the constitution; and under the device, For God and our Country, we will fight to the last for the maintenance of our rights.” This address is signed by some of the most illustrious names of Germany, foremost among which I may mention those of Count Felix de Löe, of Baron de Frankenberg, of Count C. de Stolberg, and of the Prince of Isenburg.
A numerous meeting of Catholics voted to send the Archbishop of Munich an address praising him for his firmness and encouraging him in the contest which he is maintaining. At Breslau, a Catholic Congress has just assembled with great éclat. All the Catholic men of note in Germany were present at it. Vent was therein given to the most energetic complaints and the most indignant protests, resolutions of great firmness were adopted, a new impulse was given to all those associations which, like that of S. Boniface, of S. Charles Borromeo, and of Pius IX., have multiplied on German soil works of teaching and of charity; powerful preparations were in this congress made for resistance, while confiding in their rights and in God.
While the Catholic laity were thus meeting and organizing at Breslau and at Mainz, the bishops were quietly deliberating at Fulda, presided over by the Archbishop of Cologne, who is mindful of his illustrious predecessor, Clement Augustus. There, as the apostles of old in the cenaculum, they tarry in prayer, and they will come forth with a confidence and a courage such as have overcome adversaries far more powerful than the Prince von Bismarck.
VII.
The old régime, before it died out, made trial of rebellion against the church. Frederick the Great was certainly as able as M. von Bismarck; he had the world at his feet, and the church in Germany, infected with the doctrines of Fébronius, was apparently in the pangs of death. The last act recorded in history of the then three ecclesiastical electors of Mayence, Cologne, and Trèves had been to meet with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Primate of Germany, for the purpose of drawing up the Punctuations of Ems (1786), which were a code of rebellion against the Holy See. What a contrast with the present assembling of the German bishops at Fulda! These servile Punctuations of Ems were beginning to be carried out, when the armies of the French Republic came down and inflicted upon the authors of them the punishment they deserved.
Every one knows about Pombal, Choiseul, and Charles III., who confined the Jesuits within certain territorial limits, drove them away, cast them into prison, or sent them into exile, pretty much in the same way as M. von Bismarck is doing.
The power which did all this was swallowed up by the French Revolution.
This revolution, satanic, to use M. de Maistre’s term, out and out anti‐Christian, as M. de Tocqueville calls it, in its turn drove out, exiled, put to death, whether in the massacre of September, the drownings of the Loire, by the axe of the guillotine or the dagger of ruffians, the priests, Jesuits, and religious whom the old régime had spared.
But this sanguinary revolution went down in the slough of the Directory, and Napoleon put an end to it.
That extraordinary man perceived that persecution wounds the hand which uses it; he sought to make peace with the church; he reopened the churches, recalled the priests and the bishops, and signed the concordat. This was the great epoch of his reign: Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena.
But the potent emperor, intoxicated by glory and by pride, having become master of the world, thought he would be master of the church as well; his rule was over bodies, he sought to extend it over souls; which is the dream of all founders of empire. He stretched out his hand to the States of the Church, and annexed them to the French Empire; for which he was excommunicated by that gentle Pope Pius VII. He seized the pope, bore him away from Rome into exile at Savona and at Fontainebleau, and he found that under the lamb‐like exterior of his victim there beat the heart of a lion. He summoned together the council of 1811, thinking that it would be an easy matter to form a national church of which he would be Supreme Pontiff.
This took place in 1811. The next year brought the campaign of 1812, to be followed by the events of 1813 and 1814; Leipsic, Elba, Waterloo, and the rock of St. Helena last of all.
There is another example nearer to our times, upon which I have looked as a witness, and which I submit for the meditations of the Emperor of Germany.
King William I. of Orange fell into precisely the same blunder which William IV. is now repeating. He ruled over the beautiful kingdom of the Netherlands, so easy for him to maintain, and which through his mistakes was broken up. He, too, sought to constitute national unity through unity of language and of religion. So he suppressed, in 1825, the Catholic schools and colleges in Belgium, drove out the Jesuits and the brothers of the Christian schools, founded at Louvain the Philosophic College in which the clergy of the future national church were to be trained, violated the right to teach and of association, prosecuted the Bishop of Ghent, Mgr. de Broglie, got him condemned, and he was pilloried, in effigy, on a public square of Ghent, between two felons. This reckless and blind policy excited in Belgium a movement of resistance similar to that which we remark at the present moment in Germany. Five years later, in 1830, the Catholic liberal union was brought about, and every one knows the events to which it gave birth.
This much is matter of history. The German persecution is a trial for the church and for Catholics, but it will also bear with it the salvation which a trial properly borne always brings. Two results will come out of this trial: the Catholic Church, which they mean to weaken or prostrate, will, as always heretofore, come out of the contest more united and more powerful; Protestantism, in whose name the persecution is set on foot, will be mortally wounded by it, and will see its dissolution hastened; pseudo‐liberalism, which will have played the part of intolerance and persecution, will be unmasked, and all the friends of a prudent and sincere liberty will make their reconciliation with the persecuted, one with that great Catholic Church, ever militant, ever attacked, sometimes a martyr, but which ever in the end comes out triumphant over these trials which temper her anew, purify her, and add to her greatness. The world will understand that in trials such as she is now going through in Germany she is fighting for the liberty of the conscience of the human race.
Governments, and in particular great empires founded on force, look upon the independence of the universal church with feelings of jealousy and impatience; the idea of a national church has always been a favorite and a pleasing one with despotisms, because it promises them a servile instrument to carry out their designs. But when the church is subject to the state, there can be no church. The high level of the consciences of the people sinks as freedom disappears. The true and divine church can be contained within no boundaries and in no nationality; it is the spiritual kingdom of consciences and of souls; from the independence of the church, the independence of consciences and souls derives its life. If the church is under the yoke of the state, all consciences must suffer like subjection. The world will at last comprehend that national churches, that is, churches in subjection, can have only enslaved souls as followers, and that there can be no freedom for the conscience of man, except upon the sole condition of the independence of a church, accountable, not to any human power, but to God.
Will the persecution which has been begun be kept up with the same tenacity and violence which the Prince von Bismarck now displays? I fear less from it for the church than for himself and the German emperor, whose good sense, uprightness, and religious conscience must feel out of place in the midst of a policy so outrée, revolutionary, anti‐Christian, and anti‐constitutional, so contrary to his instincts, his natural disposition, and his antecedents. “It cannot be,” said M. A. Reichensperger, “that a monarch, crowned with the laurels of victory, after having achieved external peace through the courage and the fidelity of the entire German nation, will authorize the persecution of millions of Germans on account of their faith, and consent to destroy internal peace—that peace which in particular is the work of his royal brother, whose memory is still blessed by all Catholics.”
I add my prayer and my hope to the prayer and the hope of the great German patriot and orator, but I confess that his fears, which are greater than his hopes, are felt by me also, and to like extent. The times are gloomy. “The deluge is drawing nigh; but on the waters I see the ark of the church,” said Count de Montalembert. “She will ride it out, she will live, and will preside at the funeral of the very powers that thought to have prepared her own.”
Let Prince Bismarck not forget the words recently uttered by Pius IX. at one of those allocutions so sublimely eloquent and touchingly holy in spirit, which, from his prison in the Vatican he addresses to the world. He was addressing German Catholics, and he told them: “Be confident, be united; for a stone will fall from the mountain, and will shatter the feet of the Colossus. If God wills that other persecutions arise, the church does not fear them; on the contrary, she becomes stronger thereby, and she purifies herself, because even in the church there are things that need to be purified, and nothing contributes more thereto than the persecutions exercised on her by the great ones of the earth.”
Prince von Bismarck may perhaps have smiled on reading these words fallen from the lips of the Pontiff Pius IX.; if so, he is sadly mistaken; those old popes who are imprisoned and exiled, but who, to use the profound expression of the Count de Maistre, always come back, are also gifted with the command of words which are “as burning coals heaped upon the heads of their persecutors.” The Emperor Napoleon I., too, smiled at the excommunication hurled at him by Pope Pius VII., then weak and disarmed, and his complete ruin followed shortly after. I advise the prince chancellor to bear in mind the stone falling from the mountain and breaking the feet of the Colossus. I had myself, in my book published in 1860, ventured to refer to that same passage of Scripture: “That splendid figure,” I said, “which Daniel sets before us of kingdoms WITH FEET PART OF IRON AND PART OF CLAY, and of the church, that stone, cut out of a mountain, without hands, which broke in pieces the kingdoms, and became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth—that figure has its application in every age, and should stand for all Christians as a hope amid trials and a teaching to all the proud.”
A Christmas Memory.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil To wrestle, not to reign; and he assigns All thy tears over like pure crystallines For younger fellow‐workers of the soil To wear for amulets.
E. B. BROWNING.
No more brilliant party ever assembled for Christmas festivities in Northern Vermont than that which met on such an occasion, very early in this century, at the home of a young lawyer in the beautiful little village of Sheldon, since widely renowned for the efficacy of its healing waters.
The host and hostess were from families who came among the first settlers to Vermont. The company was gathered from all parts of the new and sparsely settled state, with a sprinkling of students who were completing their legal course at the famous law‐school of Judge Reeves, in Litchfield, Conn.—of which their host was a graduate—and of young ladies and gentlemen from different places in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Several of these young ladies were passing the winter with acquaintances in Sheldon, and the whole country from the “Province Line” (and even beyond it) to St. Alban’s was made merry with a succession of gay parties, sleigh‐rides, dinners, suppers, and dances given in their honor. Even the sequestered hamlets of Richford and Montgomery, nestled among their own green hills, did not escape the general hilarity, but were startled from their quiet decorum, and resounded with a merriment which awakened unwonted echoes in their peaceful valleys.
Among the guests at this Christmas festival was a young lady of Vermont, Miss Fanny A——, whose fair form rises before us as we write from the dim mists of childhood’s earliest memories—a vision of gentle dignity and youthful loveliness which time has no power to efface.
Though some years younger than the lady of the house, she was her very dear and intimate friend, and was now passing a few weeks with her. Her queenly manners, the silver ripple of her low, sweet voice in the flow of a conversation which held her listeners spell‐bound, as it were, by its clear and impressive utterances, bore witness to her familiarity with the most refined circles of city and country society, and the high culture of her splendid intellect.
Other circumstances, as will be seen, combined with her personal charms at this time to make her the centre of interest and attraction wherever she appeared.
She was the youngest daughter of a Green Mountain hero whom Vermont most delights to honor. Her father died when she was too young to realize her loss. Some years later, her mother—from whom she inherited her remarkable beauty and graceful dignity—married a most amiable man, who was capable of appreciating the rich treasure she committed to his charge in the person of her young daughter. Every advantage the country offered was secured to develop and polish the gem of which he was inexpressibly proud, and over which he watched with a solicitude as tender as her own father could have exercised.
At that time, the gay society in New England was strongly tinctured with the species of infidelity introduced and fostered by the writings of Thomas Paine and his disciples, among whom Fanny’s father had been conspicuous. Her step‐father was not of that school, but he detested the cant and Puritanism of the only religious people he had ever known—regarding them as pretensions of which even those who adopted them were often the unconscious dupes. He had never been drawn within reach of better influences, then exercised only by the Protestant Episcopal Church in Vermont, to rescue intelligent thinkers from the grasp of infidelity. He conducted the education of his gifted daughter, therefore, with the most scrupulous care to avoid entirely all considerations of religion in any form. When her active and earnest mind would peer beyond the veil he had so carefully drawn between its pursuits and the interests of eternity, and send her to startle him with some question touching those interests which he could only answer by evasive ridicule, or an emphatic request that she would refrain from troubling her head about such matters, she would retire to ponder within herself, even while striving to obey her earthly father, the higher obligations imposed by One in heaven. Light and wisdom from above soon illuminated the soul that surrendered itself a willing victim before the altar of eternal truth. She was led by a divine hand, through paths she knew not, to a temple of which she had scarcely heard, and, while still living among those to whom the Catholic religion was entirely unknown, entered its portals to find herself—scarcely less to her own astonishment than to the amazement and horror of her devoted parents—a Catholic, as firmly established and steadfastly resolved as if she had been born and educated in the faith!
The grief and indignation of her parents knew no bounds. They looked upon it as a most disgraceful infatuation. Peremptorily imposing silence upon her in relation to the subject, they determined to suppress it, if possible, until every means had been used to divert her mind from the fatal delusion.
All the wiles and artifices of the gayest and most fashionable circles in various American cities to which she was taken, were exhausted in vain to captivate her youthful fancy and deliver her soul from its mysterious thraldom. In vain the ardent addresses of devoted admirers—who were destined in the near future to be the brightest ornaments the bench and bar of their state could boast—were laid at her feet. In vain were all those worldly allurements, generally so irresistible to the young, spread before her. Her soul turned steadfastly away from each bewitching enticement, to solace itself with thoughts of the humble sanctuary in Montreal, where the weary bird had found a place in which she might build her nest, even within the tabernacle of thy house, O Lord of hosts!
In the autumn preceding the Christmas festival of which I write, the ramblers had returned from their fruitless wanderings. Fanny’s parents, discouraged and discomfited, resolved at this crisis to enlist the zeal of a few very intimate friends in their cause, by disclosing to them the great and unaccountable calamity which had befallen their child.
Among those whom they earnestly entreated to aid them in efforts to extricate her from the grasp of the great deceiver, was the lady with whom she was now passing the weeks of the early winter. A Connecticut Episcopalian of the High‐Church stamp, she occupied what they playfully called a “half‐way house,” at which they hoped she would be able to persuade Fanny to stop. She invited several gay young ladies to meet and enliven Fanny’s visit, but took the greatest pains to conceal from them the religious tendencies of her beautiful guest. She entered with great zeal upon every scheme for winter pastimes, in the hope of diverting the mind of her young friend from its absorbing theme. In their private conversations, she exhausted every argument to convince Fanny that the Episcopal Church offered all the consolations for which her soul was yearning. In vain, in vain! She who had been called to drink from the fountain‐head could not slake her thirst with draughts from scattered pools, which brought no refreshment to her fainting spirit. Vain also were the precautions used for concealment. Suspicions soon arose among her young companions that there was something wrong with Fanny. A rosary had been partially revealed as she drew her kerchief from her pocket. Worse still, a crucifix had been discovered under her pillow! Here were proofs of superstition indeed, of rank idolatry in unmistakable form, and no one knows to what unimaginable extent! Then it began to be whispered around the admiring and compassionate circle that she had not only taken the first step on the downward road, but was even now contemplating the still more fatal and final one of religious immolation!
It was their apprehension of this direful result which imparted a new and melancholy interest in their eyes to all her words and actions. Though she maintained a modest reserve upon the subjects dearest to her heart, they thought they could discover some mysterious connection with these in every expression she uttered.
On several occasions, the most adventurous of her companions endeavored to penetrate the silence that sealed her lips in regard to her religious convictions, by direct questions, and, when these failed, by ridicule of such “absurd superstitions”; but to no purpose. Her nearest approach to any satisfactory remark was in reply to one of these questions: “It is impossible to convey any clear idea to your mind, in its present state, concerning these matters. Your opinions are founded upon prejudice, and your prejudices are the result of your entire ignorance in relation to them. If you really desire to be better informed, you need, first of all, to pray with humility for light and guidance, and then seek for knowledge. If you do this with sincerity, you will surely be instructed, and ‘know of the doctrine’; but, if you refuse to take this first step, all the teaching in the world will be of no avail. ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither would they believe though one should come to them from the dead.’ ”
She rebuked ridicule with such calm dignity that it was soon abandoned, one of her assailants, a very lively young lady, remarking one day: “It is astonishing to see how terribly in earnest Fanny is! She certainly believes in the Catholic religion with all her heart, though how a person with her extensive information and splendid talents can receive such absurdities is a puzzle to common sense!”
But her severe trials were in her home. Her parents were unutterably grieved when she persisted in accepting the Catholic faith. This further determination to forsake those who had so fondly loved and tenderly cherished her, and who were so justly proud of the use she had made of the opportunities for improvement which their solicitude had secured for her, was beyond all human endurance.
If she had been the victim of adversity or of disappointed hopes, there might have been some excuse; but that the idol of doting parents should abandon her elegant home to the desolation in which her departure would enshroud it, and turn from all the advantages that wealth, position, and the homage of society could offer—dashing to the ground on the very threshold of life the brilliant prospects which were opening before her—was worse than madness! They complained bitterly to her of her ingratitude and heartless disregard of their feelings and wishes; poured unmeasured and contemptuous reproaches upon her for stifling the modest womanly instincts of her refined and delicate nature, to strike out boldly upon a new road hitherto untrodden by any woman of New England. Remonstrances, pleading, reproaches, and contempt were alike unavailing. Listening only to the persuasions of that “invisible Lover” whose voice had called her to relinquish the seductive charms which surrounded her worldly course, she turned away from them steadfastly to follow him and carry his cross up the steep and thorny paths of penance and self‐ abnegation, offering herself entirely to him on the Calvary made glorious to her by his precious blood.
Not “immediately,” however, like those whom he called of old, did she “leave the ship and her father, to follow him.” Weary years of waiting and yearning, far from the tabernacles where her soul had chosen its home, did she accord in tender regard for the feelings of those, so truly and deeply beloved, who could not give her up, and who had no clue by which to trace the course her spirit was taking, or power even to conjecture the motives that actuated her.
When at length the time arrived to which they had consented to limit her stay with them, who shall describe the pangs that rent her heart in a parting so full of grief; in severing these nearest and dearest ties, and in witnessing the anguish which overwhelmed those around whom her tenderest earthly affections were entwined?
Alone, but full of peace, “leaning on the arm of her Beloved,” did she tread the painful path. Her parents could not accompany her to witness the sacrifice which prostrated their fondest hopes, nor could they ever bring themselves to visit her in the sanctuary she had chosen.
Her Sheldon friend did so repeatedly, and was amazed to find her radiant with a joy which her countenance had never before revealed—happy in the peaceful home that offered only poverty and an unceasing round of labors in the service of the sick and suffering, with a happiness which the splendors of her worldly one could never impart.
Multitudes of New England people visiting Montreal flocked to the convent, begging to see the lovely young nun of the Hôtel Dieu, who was the first daughter New England had given to the sacred enclosure, and whom they claimed as belonging especially to them through her connection with their favorite Revolutionary hero.
So continual were these interruptions that she was driven at length to obtain the permission of the mother‐superior absolutely to decline appearing in answer to such calls, except when they were made by the friends of former days, for whom she still preserved and cherished the liveliest affection.
By a singular coincidence—or rather, let us say, through tender memories of the gentle nun long since departed from the Hôtel Dieu, and the prevailing efficacy of her prayers—a large proportion of those who were present at the Christmas party at Sheldon, including the mistress of the feast and many of her family, were, from time to time as years flew by, received into the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church.
And so does our gracious and mighty Mother, “ever ancient, ever new,” win her triumphs, one by one, perpetually through all the ages—wins them often in the face, nay, even perforce, of circumstances apparently the most directly opposed to her influence; accomplishes them by means so weak and simple as would seem, according to all human reasoning, utterly inadequate. In countries far remote from her gentle influence, one is called—we hardly know how or why—in this place, another in that, as if the words of our divine Lord found their fulfilment even in this: “Two shall be in the field: one shall be taken, and one shall be left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill: one shall be taken, and one shall be left.”
And every soul thus called to launch its eternal interests upon the ocean of infinite truth must encounter much the same appalling trials, be haunted by the same startling doubts and dark forebodings. Over the sunken rocks of heresy and unbelief along this coast the billows break with a force that affrights the stoutest heart, and many a would‐be voyager shrinks back dismayed before their power; but once pluck up heart of grace to pass the foaming barrier, in the mid‐ocean all is “peace, and joy unspeakable, and full of glory.”
We cannot more fitly conclude this little sketch of a real event than by a quotation from Montalembert’s closing chapter on the “Anglo‐Saxon Nuns”:
“Is this a dream, the page of a romance? Is it only history—the history of a past for ever ended? No; once more it is what we behold and what happens amongst us every day.... Who, then, is this invisible Lover, dead upon a cross eighteen hundred years ago, who thus attracts to him youth, beauty, and love?—who appears to them clothed with a glory and a charm which they cannot withstand?—who seizes on the living flesh of our flesh, and drains the purest blood of our blood? Is it a man? No; it is God. There lies the secret, there the key of this sublime and sad mystery. God alone could win such victories and deserve such sacrifices. Jesus, whose godhead is amongst us daily insulted or denied, proves it daily, with a thousand other proofs, by those miracles of self‐denial and self‐devotion which are called vocations. Young and innocent hearts give themselves to him, to reward him for the gift he has given us of himself; and this sacrifice by which we are crucified is but the answer of human love to the love of that God who was crucified for us.”
PART II.
Concluded.
Late in the afternoon, Bessie went down and leaned on the bars again, looking up and down the road, looking at the tracks left by Father Conners’ carriage‐wheels—the smooth curve of their turning; looking to see the shadows creep across the road as the sun went down. The sadness of a lonely evening was upon her, and, though she had not lost her morning resolution, she had lost the joyous hopefulness with which those resolutions were made.
At her left, and quite near, a fringe of young cedars made a screen between the ground that belonged to her house and the farmer next to it, where her uncle Dennis had lived when John Maynard had wooed and won her.
Pain came with that recollection, and almost the old bitterness. “I must go home again, and put my resolutions in practice right away, or I shall lose them,” she said to herself. “It won’t do for me to stay here and brood over my troubles. I cannot bear loneliness; and how terribly lonely it is here! I wish I had some one to speak to besides poor Aunt Nancy.”
She started, hearing a soft, clear whistling not far away. The strain was familiar, not to this region, but to her city life. While she listened, the sound ceased, or rather broke off suddenly.
Bessie’s eyes were wide open, her face flushed. Was there more than one person who could whistle so marvellously clearly and sweetly?
Some one began to sing then more sweetly still, and coming nearer while he sang words written by the most melodious of poets:
“Hark! a lover, binding sheaves, To his maiden sings; Flutter, flutter go the leaves, Larks drop their wings. Little brooks, for all their mirth, Are not blithe as he! ‘Tell me what the love is worth That I give thee.’
“Speech that cannot be forborne Tells the story through: ‘I sowed my love in with the corn, And they both grew. Count the world full wide of girth, And hived honey sweet; But count the love of more worth Laid at thy feet.
“ ‘Money’s worth is house and land, Velvet coat and vest! Work’s worth is bread in hand, Ay, and sweet rest. Wilt thou learn what love is worth? Ah! she sits above, Sighing, ’Weigh me not with earth. Love’s worth is love!’ ”
The singer had come yet more near, and would have been visible to her had not Bessie Maynard’s looks been downcast and her head drooping low. When the song ended, and the step paused, she lifted her eyes, and saw James Keene standing before her smiling and waiting for the greeting she was so slow to give.
Surprise, and perhaps fear, deprived Bessie for a moment of her self‐ possession. “What! you here!” she exclaimed, without the least sign of courtesy; and with that exclamation broke down the barrier of silence that had existed between them.
“Why should I not be here?” he asked quietly. “May not I also have memories connected with this place? It was here I recovered health, after an illness that nearly cost me my life. It was here I shot my first bear. And it was here I first saw you.”
Bessie perceived at once that, if the old reserve was to be maintained, she must immediately assume an air of decisive politeness. For an instant she wavered. Silence may be best for those who are doubtful of themselves, and, not willing to commit any flagrant wrong, are still not resolved to be absolutely honest. But when we are strong in the determination to be sincere, and to let the light of day shine not only on our actions, but on our inmost thoughts, then, perhaps, by speech we may most nobly and effectually establish our position.
Bessie Maynard, therefore, waited for the words which would give her an opportunity to put an end to the tacit and vague understanding existing between them.
He read her silence rightly; it was a command for him to speak; and he obeyed it, though the pale face and large, downcast lids gave little hope of any such answer as he might wish to receive.
“In those old days, so long ago, when I came here to try what a half‐ savage life would do for me, and was astonished to find a delicate human flower in the wilderness, I was a prophet.”
He leaned on the cedar bar that separated them, and looked dreamily off toward the woods. He would not surprise in her face any involuntary expression she might wish to conceal from him; he would take advantage of no impulse. If she came to him, she must come deliberately. For, setting aside Christianity—and he did not pretend to believe in it—James Keene had an exceptionally honorable nature. He would gladly have taken this woman away from a husband who, he believed, knew not how to value her, and who made her miserable by his neglect, but he held that it would be no wrong for him to do so.
“Yes, I was a prophet,” he continued; “for I believed then, what I am sure of now, that your marriage was a most unwise one. Give me credit, Bessie, for having been sincerely pained to see that, as years passed away, you had reason to come to the same conclusion. Whatever selfish wishes I may have had, I would at any time have renounced them could I have seen you happy with the man you chose to marry, knowing no other.”
Bessie lifted her eyes, and looked at him with a steady, tearful gaze. “People might say that you are wicked to speak so to me,” she said; “but I think that, according to your belief, you are very good; only you have no faith in religion. I esteem you so highly that I am going to make a confession which, perhaps, you may think I ought not to make. There have been times during these last few years when, if I had not had some little lingering faith, I would have welcomed from you an affection which I have no right to receive. There have been times when you might have spoken as lovingly as you could, and I should not have been angry. I tell you this partly because you must have at least suspected that it was so. And more than this. If I had seen you here a few days ago, my impulse would have been to welcome you more ardently than I ever yet welcomed any friend. You can understand how it all has been, without my explaining. I was so lonely, so neglected! I was so lonely!”
She had spoken with a sad earnestness, and there was something touchingly humble yet dignified in her manner; but, at the last words, her voice trembled and failed.
He was looking at her now. Excitement and suspense showed in the sparkling of his clear blue eyes, in the slight flush that colored his usually pale face, in the lips firmly compressed.
“All is changed now,” she went on. “I have been recalled to my religion, to my duty. I do not think that you should any more show me that sympathy which you have shown, and I do not think that you should see me frequently. I thank you for your kindness toward me. It has often been a comfort. But I am a wife”—she lifted herself with a stately gesture, and for the first time a wave of proud color swept over her face—“and the sadness which my husband may cause me no other man may ever again soothe.”
There was silence for a moment. The gentleman’s face had grown pale. There was a boundless tenderness in his heart for this fair and sorrowful woman, and he was about to lose the power to offer her even the slightest comfort, while at the same time he must still retain the knowledge of her suffering.
“I shall respect your wish and your decision,” he said, with emotion. “Forgive me if I have trespassed too much in the past. It seemed to me very little; for, Bessie, if I had not known that you had a religious feeling which would have held you back, or would have made you miserable in yielding, I should long ago have held out my hand to you, and asked you to come to me. If I had felt sure of being able to convince you beyond the possibility of subsequent regret, I should not have kept silence so long. But I respect your conscience. I should esteem myself a criminal if I could ask you to do what you believe to be wrong.”
Bessie Maynard’s face was covered with a blush of shame. Her thought had never gone consciously beyond the length of tender, brotherly kindness, and it was cruelly humiliating to see in its true light the position in which she had really stood. At that moment, too, she first perceived what a gulf lay between her soul and that of the man who had seemed always so dangerously harmonious with her. In principle, in all that firmly underlies the changeful tide of feeling, they were antagonistic; for he could speak calmly and with dignity of a possibility from which she shrank with a protesting tremor in every fibre of her being.
“I am going back to my husband,” she said, “and I shall never again forget that his honor and dignity are mine. I have been weak and childish, and more wicked than I knew or meant, and it all came because I loved my husband too much and God too little. But I trust”—she clasped her hands, and lifted her eyes—“I trust that I shall have strength to begin now a new life, and correct the mistakes of the past.”
She forgot for a moment that she was not alone, and stood looking away, as if there stretched before her gaze the new and loftier pathway in which she was to tread. Her companion gazed at her unchecked, with searching, melancholy eyes, not more because she was dearer to him in her impregnable fortress of Christian will than she ever had been in her human weakness, than because there rose from the depths of his restless soul a cry of longing for that firm foundation and trust which can hold a man in the place where conscience sets him, no matter how the tempests of passion may beat upon his trembling heart.
“There is, then, nothing left me but to say farewell.”
The poignant regret his voice betrayed recalled her attention.
“It has come to that,” she said gently. “But if you could know all I mean in saying farewell to you, it would not seem an idle word; for I hope and pray that you may fare so well as to come before long into the church. It is a refuge from every danger and every trouble, and I have only just found it out! Good‐by.”
She gave him her hand, and they separated without another word. But Bessie did not stop to look after this visitor. Whatever regret she might otherwise have felt was swallowed up in the one thought—it had seemed to him possible that she might leave, not only her husband, but her sacred, sainted babes, and go to him! To what a depth had she fallen!
When she had disappeared in the house, he strolled slowly down the road. Unless you had looked in his face, you would have taken him for a man who was calmly enjoying the contemplation of nature in that forest solitude. But from his face looked forth a spirit weary and hopeless that hastened not, because it beheld nowhere a place worth making haste to reach. Once only the gloom of his countenance lifted, and then it was with no cheering brightness, but as the cloud is momentarily illuminated by angry lightning.
A man was coming up the road, not such a man as one usually sees in these wild places, but one who bore the marks of city training and habits. The uniform gray clothing, the wide Panama hat, even the unobtrusive necktie, belonged to the city. This man was taller and broader‐shouldered than he whose eyes flashed out so scornfully at sight of him. His face was dark, vivid, and clean‐shaven, the forehead was wide, the dark‐brown hair closely cut, the gray eyes clear and penetrating. It was a face fitter to carve in stone than to paint, for its color and expression were less noticeable than its fine, strong outlines.
Yet now there shone a soft and eager light over that granite strength. There was a look of glad surprise, mingled with a certain amused self‐ chiding, as though of one who comes back from a long and gloomy abstraction, and finds a half‐forgotten delight still waiting at his side.
At sight of this man, James Keene’s first emotion had been one of anger, his first impulse to meet him boldly and with scorn. But scarcely had he taken one quickened step before he stopped, with a revulsion of feeling as unsuspected as it was confounding. Reason as he might, emancipate himself as he might from what he considered the superstitions of religion, he found himself now overwhelmed with confusion. He strove to call up to his mind all those arguments on which he had founded himself, but they fell dead. Whether it was the instinct of a noble heart that would not betray even an enemy, or an irradicable root of that religious faith which had been implanted in his childhood, or the strangeness of one who for the first time acts on principles long maintained in theory, or only a sensitive perception of the esteem in which the faithful world would hold his action, he could not have told. He only knew that, instead of standing, lofty and serene, in the dawn of this new light before which superstition and oppression were to pass away, he felt as if he were surrounded by a baleful glare from the nether fires. Sudden and scathing, it caught him, and burned his courage out like chaff.
In his eagerness and preoccupation, John Maynard had scarcely observed the person who approached; and, when the stranger turned aside into a wood‐ path, he gave him no further thought.
There was the little crooked house squinting at him out of its two windows, with the boards he had nailed, the chimney he had built, the door he had hung; there was the whole wild, rude place, with everything askew, that had once seemed a paradise—that had been a paradise—to him. With his hands and eyes educated, as they were now, to the utmost precision of outline and balance, the sight made him laugh out; and yet the laugh expressed as much pleasure as mockery.
He was taking his first holiday since he had left this house, and everything was delightfully fresh and novel yet familiar to him. He did not see the beauty that a poet or a painter would have found in that unpruned rusticity, for he was an artist of the exact; but the wabbly frame‐house, the reeling fences, the road that wound irregularly, the straggling trees that leaned away from the northwest, made a good background against which to contemplate the trim and shining creatures of his hands, regular to a hair’s breadth, unvarying and direct.
Coming to the bars, he threw himself over instead of letting them down, and found that he had grown heavier and less lithe than he was when last he performed that feat. He walked up the rocky path, his heart beating fast as he thought of the old time, and of the slim, bright‐faced girl he had brought there as a bride. If she could stand in the doorway now, as she was then, and smile at him coming home, he felt that he could be the old lover again. He had a vague idea that Bessie had grown older, and sober, and pale. Come to think of it, he hadn’t known much of her lately, and she had been dissatisfied about something. Why had she allowed him to get his eyes and ears so full of machinery? Surely he had lost and overlooked much. He had a mind to complain of her, only that he felt so good‐natured.
At sound of a step, Aunt Nancy went to the door; but at that sound Bessie took her sewing, and bent over it. Had James Keene repented their hasty parting?
“Does Miss Bessie Ware live here?” asked the gentleman, with immense dignity.
“Bessie Ware?” repeated Aunt Nancy, in bewilderment; then, as the recollection of Bessie’s confessions flashed into her mind, she stiffened herself up, and answered severely: “No, sir, she does not!”
“The idea of his refusing to give her her husband’s name!” she thought indignantly.
“Why, John!” exclaimed Bessie, over the old lady’s shoulder.
Aunt Nancy gave a cry of delight. She would at any time have welcomed John rapturously; but his coming now made her twice glad. Of course he and Bessie would make it all up.
The exuberance of her welcome covered, at first, the wife’s deficiency. But when the excitement was over, and they had gone into the house, Bessie’s coldness and embarrassment became evident.
“I am very much surprised to see you here,” she said, when her husband looked at her. She did not pretend to be glad.
“Are you sorry?” he asked, with a laugh.
“I am too much astonished to be anything else,” she replied quietly. “What made you come?”
John Maynard was disappointed and mortified. That for years he had met his wife’s affectionate advances as coldly he did not seem aware. Other things had occupied his thoughts. He did not recollect, as he had not noticed at the time, that her manner was now just what it had long been.
Supper was over, eaten in an absent way by the husband, who glanced every moment at his wife. He found her very lovely, though different enough from the glad, girlish bride who had once brightened this humble room for him. He could not understand her. Had she no recollection of those days?
She did not seem to have, indeed, for she made no reference to them by look nor speech, but talked rapidly, and with an air of constraint, of things nearer in time, and listened with affected interest while he told the latest city news, and the latest news of his own work; how high the engine spouted; of the tiny model locomotive he had built, all silver, and gold, and fine steel; of the money he expected to make by his new patent; of an accident that had happened in his shop—a German organist, with two or three others, had come to look at his machinery, and got his hand crushed in it, which would put a stop to his playing.
Bessie looked up with an expression of pain. “Poor man!” she murmured. “How miserable he must be!”
“Yes; I was sorry for him,” the husband replied. “They say he cared for nothing but music. His name is Verheyden.”
“Poor man!” Bessie sighed again, looking down. “Those machines are always hurting some one.”
“It was his own fault,” the machinist said hastily. “Did he suppose that the engine was going to stop when he put his forefinger on it? Why, that machine would grind up an elephant, and never mismake its face. But it is the first time any one was ever hurt by a machine of mine.”
He did not understand the glance she gave him. It was not pleasant, but what it meant he knew not. She was thinking: “It is not the first time one has been hurt so.”
Aunt Nancy found business elsewhere, and left the couple to themselves.
“I forgot you were coming away that day, Bessie,” her husband said hastily, the moment they were alone. “I never thought of it till I was five miles off, and then I concluded that you must have changed your mind, or you would have told me not to go.”
“You know I never tell you not to go anywhere,” she replied coldly.
He colored. “But you know that I didn’t mean to have you go to the depot alone. When I read what you wrote to Jamie, I felt sorry enough.”
In all the long years that were past, how generously would she have met an apology like this! How quickly would she have disclaimed all sense of injury, and even have tried to find some fault in herself! But now her heart, with all its impulses, seemed frozen. She only gave him a glance of surprise, and a quiet word. “There was no need of company, I knew the way.”
There was silence. Gradually, through the deep unconsciousness and abstraction of the man, came out incident after incident of their late life, slight, but significant. Each had seemed a detached trifle at the time, but now as he sat there, abashed and ill at ease, they began to show a connection and to grow in importance. It was as when, in a thick fog, the sailor sees dimly a black speck that may be only a floating stick, and another, and another, till, looking sharply, as the mist grows thinner, he finds himself caught among rocks at low tide.
John Maynard tried to throw off with a laugh the weight that oppressed him. “Come, Bessie, let the late past go, and remember only the life we lived here. Let’s be young people again.”
He went to her side, bent down, and would have kissed her, had she not evaded his touch, not shyly, but with a crimson blush and a quick flash of the eyes.
“Don’t talk nonsense, John!” she said, in a low voice that did not hide a haughty aversion. “Let us speak of something sensible. I have been thinking that some of our ways should be changed at home. I shall begin with myself, and attend strictly to my religion. Besides, I am not doing rightly in allowing James to grow up without any discipline, and I think he should be placed in a Catholic school, where he will be taught his duty. He is quite beyond my control.”
Her morbid humility and diffidence were gone. The feeling that had made her give up all rights rather than ask for them did not outlive the moment of her reconciliation with the church.
“I am willing he should go to any school you choose,” her husband replied gravely, impressed by the change. “I suppose the boy is going on rather too much as he likes. Do whatever you think best about it, and I will see that he obeys.”
She thanked him gently, and continued: “I shall go to High Mass after this, and I should be glad to have you go with me, if you are willing. It would be a better example for James than to see you go to the shop on Sundays. He is becoming quite lawless. We have no right to give our children a bad example. I would be glad to have you go with me, if you will.”
John Maynard’s face was glowing red. He felt, gently as she spoke, as if he were having the law read to him. “I am willing to go with you, Bessie,” he said. “I am not a Catholic, but I am not anything else.”
She thanked him again, earnestly this time, for it was a favor he had granted her, and she knew that he would keep his word. “You are good to promise that,” she said.
He laughed uneasily. “Have you anything else to ask?”
“I do not think of anything,” she replied, and there was silence.
The husband got up, and went to the door. The sun was sinking down the west. He looked at the glow it made, and remembered how he had seen it there in the days that were past, how quiet and peaceful his life had been, how much happier, had he but known it, than in the turmoil of later years. Then the days had been full of healthful employment, the nights of rest and refreshment, untroubled by the feverish dreams that now swarmed in his sleeping hours. And what was it that had made his life so happy? What had been the motive, the delight of everything? Nothing but Bessie, always Bessie, his help and his reward.
He turned his face, and saw her still sitting there, her head drooping, her hands folded in her lap. Those hands caught his glance. They were pale and thin. They looked as though she had suffered.
He went to her impulsively as his heart stirred, and put his arm about her shoulder. “Bessie, forget the last years, and let’s be as we were in the happy old time.”
She did not look angry; but she withdrew herself gently from him.
“John,” she said, “that is too much to expect at once. Years of pain cannot be forgotten in a moment. When you came to‐day, you asked if Bessie Ware lived here. She does not. The Bessie Ware you married is dead. I scarcely know yet who or what I am. I only know that I shall try to do my duty by you, and repair some of the faults and mistakes of the past. But, John, I must warn you that it is harder to reconcile an estranged wife than to win a bride.”
One piercing glance, angry and disappointed, shot from his eyes; then he went to the outer door. He stood a moment on the threshold, then stepped on to the greensward. Another pause, and he walked slowly back through the garden, seeming not to know whither he went.
Aunt Nancy, anxiously awaiting signs of reconciliation, saw him wander about aimlessly, then go and lean on a fence next the woods, his back to the house.
She went into the front room at once. She was on John’s side now.
“Bessie,” she said decidedly, “you mustn’t stand too much on your dignity with John. Men are stupid creatures, and do a good many hard things without meaning or knowing; and, if they come round, it isn’t wise to keep them waiting too long for a kind word.”
Bessie Maynard laid down the work she was pretending to do, and her hands trembled. “I am not acting a part, Aunt Nancy,” she said, “and I cannot be a hypocrite. I feel cold toward John. And I feel displeased when he comes and kisses me, as if he were conferring a favor, and expects me to be happy for that. I could not give up if I would, I ought not if I could. There is something more required than a little sweet talk.”
A half hour passed, and still John Maynard stood motionless, with his elbows leaning on the fence, and his head bowed. If Bessie had seen his face, it would have reminded her of the time when he first studied mechanics, and became so absorbed in the one subject as to be dead to all else. But there was the difference that he studied then with a vivid interest, and now with gloomy intentness.
An hour passed, and still he stood there; and the sun was down, and the moon beginning to show its pearly light through the fading richness of the gloaming. The birds had ceased singing, and there was no voice of wild creatures in the woods. It was the hour for prayer and peace‐making.
John Maynard started from his abstraction, hearing his name spoken by some one. “John!” said Bessie. She had been watching him for some time from the door, and had approached slowly, step by step, unheard by him.
He turned toward her a pale, unsmiling face. “How late it is!” he said. “I must make haste.”
She spoke hesitatingly, something doubtful and wistful in her face. “I have been thinking that I might have received you better, when you came on this long journey. Won’t you come in now and rest? I didn’t mean to turn you out of the house that you made—for me.”
He turned his eyes away. “And I’ve been thinking, Bessie, that I’d better go right back again; I can go down to the post‐office to‐night, and take the stage to‐morrow morning.”
“You will not go!” she said.
“I should only spoil your visit,” he went on. “I don’t want you to begin to ‘do your duty’ by me just now. I know, Bessie, that you had a good deal to complain of; but I swear to you that I did not mean to be hard. You know I had twenty‐five years to make up; and I was always looking for better times. I was so blind that I was fool enough to think you would be glad to see me here, and that we could begin over again where we began first.”
She did not answer a word. There is something confounding in the sudden humiliation of a man who has always been almost contemptuously dominant.
He looked at his watch. “I must make haste, or they will be in bed,” he said. “Make some sort of an excuse to Aunt Nancy for me. And when you want to come back, let me know, and I will meet you at the depot or come after you.”
He started, and she walked beside him down the path to the road. He seemed hardly able to hold his head up.
She walked nearer, and slipped her hand in his arm, speaking softly: “I said a little while ago that the pain of years cannot be forgotten in a moment. But I was wrong. I think it may.”
He looked at her quickly, but said nothing, and they reached the bars. Neither made any motion to let down the pole. They leaned on it a minute in silence.
“The fact is, Bessie,” the husband burst forth, “I’ve been like a man possessed by an evil spirit. I’m sorry, and that is all I can say.”
“No matter, Jack! Let it all go!” his wife exclaimed, clasping her hands on his arm, and holding it close to him. “You weren’t to blame!” (Oh! wonderful feminine consistency!) “Let’s forget everything unpleasant, and remember only the good. How you have had to work and study, poor, dear Jack! You must rest now, and never get into the old drudging way again.”
Aunt Nancy raked up the fire, and put down the window, looking out now and then at the couple who leaned on the bar below. Each time she looked, their forms were less distinct in the twilight. “That’s just the way they used to do fifteen years ago,” she muttered contentedly.
She sat a few minutes waiting, but they did not come in. Aunt Nancy sighed and laughed too. “It beats all how women do change their minds,” she said. “I did think that Bessie would hold out longer. Well, I may as well go to bed.”
By‐and‐by she heard them come into the kitchen.
“Now, I shut the doors and windows, and you rake up the fire,” Bessie said. “Do you remember it was always so, Jack?”
“Of course I do, little one,” was the answer. “But Aunt Nancy has got the start of us to‐night.”
“Aunt Nancy!” repeated Bessie, in a lower voice. “I declare, Jack, I forgot all about her.”
“I’ll warrant you did!” says Aunt Nancy to herself, rather grimly, perhaps.
“We will be sure to keep all our good resolutions, won’t we?” Bessie said.
“All right!” says John.
The door shut softly behind them, and there were silence, and peace, and hope in the house that Jack built.
Nothing of interest presented itself during the reign of Philip the Bold, except the council held there in 1278. In 1383, the unfortunate Charles VI., wearied with state troubles that he was so ill fitted to cope with, fled in despair from the Louvre to Compiègne. But he was not to find peace here more than in the busy turmoil of the city. Soon after his arrival he was attacked with insanity; at first it was considered of no moment, the natural consequence of a violent reaction or a weak and nervous temperament; great pains were taken to conceal the fact from the public, but after a time the symptoms became alarming, and it was impossible to keep the secret. After the festivities which followed his ill‐starred marriage with Isabeau de Bavière, the disease broke through all bounds; everything seemed to conspire to exasperate it: the assassination of Clisson by the Baron de Craon, the apparition of the phantom in the forest that seized the king’s bridle and uttered the mysterious message as it disappeared, the bal masqué when the Duke of Orleans inadvertently set fire to the king’s Indian costume—a skin smeared with a tarry substance and stuck all over with feathers—all these shocks, coming at short intervals, irritated the disordered imagination to fury, and the attacks became frequent and ungovernable. The king’s illness was imputed by popular superstition to the malefices of Valentina of Milan, Duchess of Orleans, who, if she lacked the power, no doubt had strong motives for evoking the powers of darkness to destroy the king’s reason, and thereby his authority. The demon which had taken possession of Charles’ brain does not seem to have invaded his heart or changed the natural goodness of his disposition. He was removed from Compiègne in one of his fits of madness, and when some years later he re‐entered it, it was by force of arms; the Bourguignons held the place. Charles laid siege to it; after a desperate resistance it surrendered, and he entered in triumph; nothing however could induce him to punish the rebels, he said there was blood enough upon the ground, and he would take no vengeance on his subjects except by forgiving them. Compiègne was soon to be the theatre of a more momentous struggle than these rough skirmishes between Charles and his people. Shortly after the mock peace signed there by Bedford, it was attacked by the Duc de Bourgogne and the English with Montgomery at their head. Jeanne d’Arc on hearing of it evinced great sorrow and alarm, but she flew at once to the rescue, and appeared suddenly in the midst of the king’s troops, with the oriflamme of S. Denis in one hand, and her “good sword of liege” in the other. The sight of her whom they looked upon as the angel of victory raised the drooping spirits of the soldiers and filled them with new ardor; they raised a cry of victory the moment they beheld Jeanne. Enguerrand de Monstrelet, who was an eye‐witness of the siege, describes her attitude and the conduct of the troops throughout as “passing all heroism ever before seen in battle.” But, alas! the star of the maid of Orleans was destined to set in darkness at the hour of its greatest splendor; her own prediction, so often repeated to Charles and those around him, “Un homme me vendra” (A man will betray me), was about to be fulfilled. On the 24th of May, 1429, there was a formidable engagement between the two armies. Jeanne, at the head of hers, performed prodigies of valor; after a brilliant sortie in which the enemy were repulsed, she was re‐entering the town by the Boulevard du Pont, and had almost reached the barrier through which hundreds of her own victorious soldiers had already passed, when, lo! the gates swing forward on their hinges, and are closed against her! The maiden’s cry of despair as she raised her sword and stretched both arms towards the gates was echoed by a yell of fiendish joy from the enemy; in an instant she was surrounded, disarmed, and taken captive by Montgomery. Guillaume de Flavy, governor of Compiègne, was accused of having committed this act of treachery, bribed by Jean de Luxembourg. If the accusation be true, and it has never been seriously challenged, the traitor’s punishment was as fitting as it was merited; he was immediately destituted of his office and revenues by the Connétable de Richemont, and driven to hide his base head in private life, where the Nemesis who was to avenge Jeanne d’Arc awaited him in the shape of his wife; she was jealous of her husband, who, it would seem, fully justified the fact; after leading him a miserable life and failing to convert him by slow torture from his evil ways, she bribed the barber to cut his throat one morning while shaving him, and finished the operation herself by smothering him under a pillow. For many years de Flavy’s effigy was burnt regularly at Compiègne on the 24th of May.
Louis XI. was liberated from the English, and came to Compiègne time enough to embitter the last days of his father, Charles VIII., who let himself die of hunger there from terror of being poisoned by his son. Comines says that his dutiful son and most amiable of men was so irritated by his courtiers for mocking “his boorish manners, his uncouth dress, and his taste for low folk,” that to spite them he published an edict forbidding them to hunt or touch the game in the forest of Compiègne, a prohibition against all precedent, nor did he ever invite them to join him there in the chase. But the pretty palace open to the four winds of heaven soon grew distasteful to him, and he forsook it for the more congenial retreat of Plessis‐les‐Tours, where, surrounded by spies and quacks and a moat filled with vipers and venomous snakes, he ended in terror and suffering a life which presents a strange mixture of shrewdness and credulity, bonhomie and ferocity, impiety and the grossest superstition.
Francis I. took kindly to Compiègne, which had been deserted by his two predecessors. His first act on coming there, as king, was to do public homage to the Holy Shroud. Louis, Cardinal de Bourbon, grand‐uncle to the king, and abbot of S. Corneille, exposed it to the veneration of the king and the people amidst great ceremony and prayer of thanksgiving. “He took the holy relic, and laid it on the grand altar with sentiments of great devotion and tenderness, which he expressed by abundant tears.” Francis added to the shrine “twenty‐two rose‐buds of pure gold, enriched with precious stones and pearls, and attached to twenty fleurs‐de‐lys of gold,” says Cambry, in his Déscription de l’Oise. There is also a letter of Francis’ giving a naïve account of the ceremony, quoted at length in the Histoire du Saint Suaire de Compiègne. Francis passes from the scene, and we see “the noble burgesses of Compiègne,” as he was fond himself of calling them, making great stir to receive his successor, Henri II., on his return from Rheims. Two years more, and there is the same merry hubbub, and the town is in gala dress to welcome Catherine de Medicis on her marriage. This abnormal type of a woman fell ill not long after her arrival, and vowed that if she recovered she would send a pilgrim to Jerusalem to give thanks for her; he was to start from Compiègne, and perform the journey all the way on foot, making for every three steps forward one step backward. Cambry says the vicarious pilgrimage was “faithfully executed according to the queen’s vow.”
Charles IX. was only a flying visitor at Compiègne. An odd story is told by D. Carlier and others as occurring there during his time. A man was discovered in the forest who had been brought up by the wolves, and taken so completely to their way of life that he had nearly turned into a wolf himself. “He was hairy like a wolf, howled, outran the hounds at the hunt, walked on all fours, strangled dogs, tore and devoured them.” For a time he made sport for the people, who hunted him like other game, but having shown a propensity to deal with men as he did with dogs, they laid a trap for him, chained him, and took him before the king. Charles, more humane than the noble burgesses, refused to have him killed, but ordered him to be shorn and confined in a monastery. “What reflections,” naïvely exclaims D. Carlier, “does not this incident suggest on the danger of bad example, and the pernicious effects of evil society!” It would be interesting to hear how the novice behaved himself in his new position, whether he developed any latent dispositions for the mystic life, and quite left behind him the habits of his early education which had corrupted his good manners; but of this D. Carlier says nothing.
Henri III., who lived at St. Cloud making omelets, expressed a wish to be buried near the Holy Shroud at Compiègne, in the church of S. Corneille; and as soon as Henri IV. became master of his “good town of Paris” he faithfully carried out this wish. Owing, however, to the dilapidated state of the finances, he could not do so with the proper ceremonial. “It was pitiful,” says Cheverny, in his Memoirs, “to see the greatest king of the earth in a chapelle ardente with only one lamp, one chaplain belonging to the late king, named La Cesnaye, and a few shabby écus to keep up a shabby service.” Instead of being removed to S. Denis after a temporary rest near the Holy Shroud, the body remained on in the vaults of S. Corneille, on account of a prophecy which said that Henri IV. would be buried eight days after Henri III.; a prediction which was actually accomplished, “though not,” says Bajin, “in a manner apprehended by the king”. When Henri IV. fell by the hand of Ravaillac, the Due d’Epernon advised Marie de Medicis to have the obsequies of the late king performed before those of her husband. Henri IV. was therefore kept waiting till his predecessor’s grave was filled. The first ceremony was performed quietly, almost in secret; and then the “good Béarnias” was taken to S. Denis, all France weeping and refusing to be comforted.
Louis XIII. was attracted to Compiègne solely by the pleasures of the chase. We see him watching the meet from a window giving on the Cour d’honneur, and whispering to the Maréchal de Praslin, “You see that man down there? He wants to be one of my council, but I cannot make up my mind to name him.” “That man” was Richelieu. The words were repeated to Marie de Medicis, as all her son’s words seem to have been, and she, counting on the prelate’s influence in supporting her against the king and her other enemies, vowed that he should be named, and so he was. A few days later we see Louis, equipped in his hunting costume, stride into the room of the queen‐mother, and proclaim in a boistering manner, meant to vindicate the independence of his choice, that he “had named the Bishop of Luçon member of his council as secretary of state.” Marie de Medicis looks coolly surprised, and bows her approval. By‐and‐by we have the Earl of Carlisle and Lord Holland presenting themselves at Compiègne to solicit the hand of Henriette of France for the Prince of Wales. They are received with every mark of cordial good‐will on the part of Louis and entertained with great splendor; but Richelieu looked askance on their mission; it was his way to begin always by mistrusting an offer, whether it came from friend or foe; in this case his piety was alarmed for Henriette’s faith, and he suspected England of some sinister design in seeking alliance with France. Louis, however, overruled his fears and scruples, and the minister contented himself with taking extraordinary precautions to ensure to the princess by contract the free exercise of her religion, stipulating that she should have in all her chateaux a chapel “large enough to hold as many people as she pleased.” The marriage was celebrated by proxy at Notre Dame, Buckingham representing the Prince of Wales, and from thence the court escorted the bridal party on their way as far as Compiègne. Louis XIII., though he made but short sojourns at the palace, kept up close and friendly intercourse with the inhabitants, writing to them himself when any important event took place. He announced to them, for instance, the siege of Rochelle, the war with the Spaniards, the peace with England, and many other events in which the honor and safety of the state were interested.
Louis XIV. was only eight years old when he paid his first visit to Compiègne, accompanied by his little brother the Duc d’Anjou and the Queen Regent; they were obliged to seek hospitality from the monks of S. Corneille, because the Carmelite nuns were at the palace, which had been lent to them while their monastery was being repaired, and Anne of Austria would neither intrude upon them nor suffer them to be disturbed. What a checkered space intervenes between this first appearance of the grand monarque at Compiègne and his last, when we see him passing the troops in review for the amusement of Madame de Maintenon! He stands uncovered beside her chaise à porteurs and stoops down to explain the various evolutions, while she raises three fingers of the glass to catch the explanation without letting in the cold; the Duchesse de Bourgogne and the Princesse de Conti, and all the train of princes and princesses, are grouped round the poles of the Widow Scarron’s chair, listening respectfully while the king speaks; but he addresses none of them.
“Le Bien‐aimé de l’Almanach, N’est plus le Bien‐aimé de France, Il fait tout ob Loc et ab Lac. Le Bien‐aimé de l’Almanach: Il met tout dans le même sac, La justice et la finance, Le bien‐aimé de l’Almanach N’est plus le bien‐aimé de France,” etc.(195)
Louis XV. made his entry into Compiègne preceded by a troop of falconers with birds on their wrists, and accompanied by cannon and music of fife and drum, and every demonstration of popular joy. He was just eighteen then; his life was like the beginning of a stream, bright and clear to its depths; soon it was to grow troubled, darkening and darkening as it reached its middle course, till at last the waters ceased to flow and there was nothing but a loathsome swamp. Compiègne was associated with the brightest and happiest incidents of his life. In 1744, after he had commanded the army with the Maréchal de Saxe, taken Ypres, Furnes, and Menin, and performed that series of brilliant feats of arms that raised him to the rank of a demi‐god in the eyes of the people, Louis was marching to Alsace when he was suddenly stricken down with a malignant fever and obliged to lay up at Metz. The news of his illness was received as a personal calamity all over France. Never before nor since was such a spectacle given to the world of a nation wrestling with its agony beside the death‐bed of a king. The churches were filled day and night, the people weeping as if every man were trembling for a wife, every woman for a son; unable to control their grief they wept aloud, “filling the streets with lamentations”; public prayers were everywhere offered up; processions were formed in every town and village, and a universal concert of supplication was going up to the divine mercy for the life of the king. When it was known that their prayers were heard, and that he was restored to them from the jaws of death, the reaction was like a national frenzy. “The nation,” says Bajin, “thrilled with joy from one end to another.” They christened their new‐found prince le bienaimé and henceforth he was called by no other name; he entered Paris like a conqueror bringing home the spoils of half of the world; at every step his progress was impeded by the people falling at his horses’ feet and struggling to clasp the hand of their beloved; mothers held up their babes to kiss him, and strong men clung to his hands and covered them with kisses and tears. Louis, overcome by this great tide of love that was sweeping round him from his people’s heart, was heard to repeat constantly while the tears streamed down his cheeks, “O mon Dieu, qu’il est doux d’être aimé ainsi!” (O my God! how sweet it is to be thus loved!) It was a manifestation the like of which history has never chronicled. Another not less ardent, though on a smaller scale, awaited the king at Compiègne. The town, deeming itself entitled to make a special family rejoicing, invited him to a Te Deum to be sung in the time‐honored abbey of S. Corneille. The king went and joined with deep emotion in the solemn hymn of thanksgiving. A monster bonfire was lighted on a hill above the town, a rainbow of colored lamps, stretching over an enormous space, symbolized the fair promise of delight which had risen upon France, fountains of red and white wine flowed copiously on the great Place, and a ball was given at night to which every inhabitant of the town was invited, and came; gentle and simple, rich and poor, old and young, all welded by a common joy without distinction of class into one kindred. The victor of Fontenoy responded nobly to this magnificent testimony of his people’s trust. Alas! that he should have outlived this glorious morrow, and turned from his brave career into a slough of selfishness and vice to become a byword to the tongues that blessed him, and accursed of the nation that had lavished such a wealth of love upon him! The title of Bienaimé, which had been spontaneously bestowed on him by the people, and been regularly prefixed to his name in the almanac and elsewhere, became a butt for squibmongers, and was applied to the king only in mockery and scorn. The following is a specimen:
When Marie Antoinette came to France as the bride of the Dauphin, it was at Compiègne that their first meeting took place. Louis Quinze greeted her with the most paternal affection; but his great, his sole preoccupation was, not how the Dauphin would like his fair young bride, or how she would take to the timid and rather awkward youth who blushed to the roots of his hair when the king, after raising her from her knees and embracing her, desired him to do the same, but how this pure young creature, who was entrusted to his fatherly care, would receive the Marquise du Barry. He presented her after all the other ladies of the court, and with a trepidation of manner that he was not able to conceal; but the incident had been foreseen and discussed at Vienna as well as at Compiègne. Marie Antoinette, sustained by her proud but polite mother, proved equal to the occasion; “she showed neither hauteur nor empressement,” but met the difficulty in a manner which put the king at ease, and impressed the court with a high sense of her tact and discretion. Nor was this first impression belied by her subsequent conduct; the Dauphine proved, on many trying occasions, that her good sense and judgment were a match for the nobility of her spirit and the goodness of her heart; the busybodies who worked so diligently to embroil her in a quarrel with Madame du Barry were foiled by her straightforward simplicity and the dignified reserve which she maintained alike towards them and towards the favorite. An instance of this occurred a few weeks after her marriage. The son of one of her women of the bedchamber, a Madame Thibault, killed an officer of the king’s guard in a duel; Madame Thibault threw herself at Marie Antoinette’s feet, and besought her to implore the king for her son’s pardon; the Dauphine promised, and after a whole hour’s supplication she obtained it. Full of gratitude and delight the young princess told everybody how good the king had been, and how graciously he had granted her request; but one of the ladies of the court, thinking to spoil her pleasure and excite her jealousy, informed her that Madame Thibault had also gone on her knees to Madame du Barry to intercede for her, and that the marquise had done so. Marie Antoinette, without betraying the slightest vexation, replied very sweetly: “That confirms the opinion I always had of Madame Thibault, she is a noble woman, and a brave mother who would stop at nothing to save her child’s life; in her place I would have knelt to Zamore(196) if he could have helped me.”
Charles V.’s old chateau, which had been patched, and mended, and added to till there was hardly a stone of the original building left, was thrown down by Louis Quinze, and rebuilt as we now see it. It was just finished in time to receive Louis Seize on his accession to the throne. The new king came here often to hunt, but he seldom stayed at Compiègne, though it was dear to him as the place where he first beheld Marie Antoinette. When the Revolution broke out, Compiègne suffered like other towns; some of its churches were destroyed, others pillaged; the Carmelites, whose convent had been the prayerful retreat of so many queens of France, were imprisoned in the Conciergerie, after appearing before Fouquier Tinville on a charge of having had arms concealed in their cellars. To this preposterous accusation, Mère Térèse de S. Augustin, their superioress, drawing a crucifix from her breast, answered calmly: “Behold our only arms! They have never inspired fear but to the wicked.” But what did innocence avail against such judges? The Carmelites were condemned to death, and executed at the Barrière du Trône. They ascended the scaffold singing the Veni Creator, and had just reached the last verse as the last victim laid her head on the guillotine. While awaiting in prison the day of their deliverance, those valiant daughters of S. Teresa amused themselves composing a parody on the Marseillaise, of which the following is a couplet:
“Livrons nos cœurs à l’allégresse! Le jour de gloire est arrivé; Le glaive sanglant est lévé, Préparons nous à la victoire; Sous les drapeaux d’un Dieu mourant Que chacun marche en conquérant; Courans et volons à la gloire! Ranimons notre ardeur, Nos cœurs sont au Seigneur: Montons, Montons, A l’échafaud, et Dieu sera vainqueur!”(197)
Napoleon I. furnished Compiègne for his young Austrian bride, Marie Louise; she was on her way thither when he met the carriage in the forest, and, jumping in, scared her considerably by the abrupt introduction.
At Compiègne took place Alexander of Russia’s famous interview with Louis XVIII.; the king entered the dining‐room first, and unceremoniously seated himself; his courtiers, scared at the royal discourtesy, began to murmur amongst themselves, which, the czar noticing, he observed with a smile: “What will you? The grandson of Catherine has not quarterings enough to ride in the king’s coach!”
Charles X. received at Compiègne Francis and Isabella of Naples, and gave for their entertainment a hunting fête, at which 11 wild boars, 9 young boars, 7 stags, 56 hind, 10 fawns, 11 bucks, 114 deer, and 20 hares fell victims to the will of the royal sportsmen. Charles, who was on the eve of losing a more serious and brilliant royalty (1830), was, by common consent, proclaimed king of the hunt.
The last circumstance of note connected with Compiègne is the camps held there by Louis Philippe in 1847, and commanded by the Duc de Nemours.
Under the Empire the chateau was inhabited for a short time by the court every autumn, and was the centre of brilliant fêtes and hospitalities.
The next morning he went to the Juden‐Strasse before the hour of the synagogue service, and walked up unannounced into old Zimmermann’s room. As he had hoped, so it proved—she was there, reading the Psalms to the old man. He wondered if she remembered him, if she had noticed him when he had stood upon the landing last Sabbath morning. Zimmermann greeted him with a nod that had not much recognition in it, but said:
“Maheleth, give the stranger a chair. Mein Herr, this is my good little nurse.”
Holcombe bowed, and the girl looked at him in silence for a few seconds.
“I remember,” she then said, “you picked up my music for me in a storm, nearly a month ago.”
“I thought you would not have known me again,” Holcombe stammered.
“Oh! yes, I am not forgetful. You have been very good to my patient, and I am very grateful, for he has eaten more this week than he has for a whole month.”
“I think I heard your father was ill, fräulein?”
“Oh! he has been so for many months. Is your English friend gone?”
“Yes; he has gone home to be married. I wish, fräulein, if you could suggest anything, I could be of some use, besides bringing fruit and flowers to this house. Do you know, since I have been in Frankfort, I have never found anything to do?”
“Do you mean,” she asked very gravely, “you wish to be of use to us?”
“I mean, if I could come and sit with Herr Löwenberg, and read or write for him, while you are away; for they tell me you are out all day, and it must be lonely for him.”
“That is very kind of you,” she answered, looking at him in calm wonder; “it is true he has no society, for the little girls hardly count.”
“Has he any books?” asked Holcombe. “Because I have plenty, and they might amuse him; and I have English newspapers, too, coming in regularly. Does he speak English?”
“He understands and reads it; but you are a stranger, and why should we place our burdens on your shoulders?”
“Oh! you must not mind my way; this sort of thing is a mania with me, you know.”
“It is a mania seldom found,” croaked out the old man.
“I think,” put in Maheleth, “it is time for me to leave you. How can I thank you, Mr. Holcombe? Perhaps, when you leave my friend here, you will stop at the next landing, and go in and see my father?”
“I will, and you must not think I am in a hurry.”
The ice thus broken, many visits followed, and at night, when Maheleth was at home, Henry read to the family in the little plain room that was so beautiful in his sight. More than once had he again seen the girl in the cathedral, always standing, and separated from the worshippers, always with that same sad, anxious look. One night, he noticed a certain constraint in the father’s and daughter’s manner, and Löwenberg was less cordial to him than usual. After that, Maheleth seemed yet more troubled, and grew paler and thinner. He asked old Zimmermann if he knew of any fresh trouble in the family, but he could learn nothing from him. Rachel, who always answered the bell, detained him one evening, and said:
“I would not go in to‐night, if I were you. Don’t be offended, mein Herr.”
“Why, Rachel, what is the matter?”
“Fräulein Löwenberg went to the Catholic Church last night, and her father found it out, and he said it was your fault.”
“Well, I will go in all the same; I had nothing to do with it, and my friend must not be angry with his daughter.”
Löwenberg was alone, and the room had a tossed look about it, very different from the cosy aspect it usually wore. The invalid lay on a couch, with a discontented expression on his dark, thin face.
“Are you worse to‐night?” gently asked Holcombe.
“Ay, worse indeed, and you must add to my troubles after I had treated you as a son!”
“I! My friend, do you think that of me? Don’t you know me better?”
“Ah!” said the invalid irritably, “don’t try to deceive me. You know I have nothing left to care for but my daughter, and you have been trying to convert her. I know why, too, but you shall not see her any more.”
“You wrong me, Herr Löwenberg. I have never spoken to your daughter about religion, because I did not know whether it might be agreeable to her or not, and she never started the subject.”
“You know she goes to your church?”
“Yes, I have seen her there several times; she never saw me, however, and I never hinted to her that I had seen her.”
“You speak very fairly about it; but I know how unscrupulous you Christians can be in this matter. You would think it a grand thing to convert her.”
“Undoubtedly, if I could do it by sheer conviction. But you should know me too well to believe I would do it by any undue or secret influence.”
“You do not know how dear she is to me; you do not know how her defection from our ancient faith would break my heart; how I should have to renounce her for my other children’s sake!”
“And how you would stain your soul with the blackest ingratitude, Herr Löwenberg, if you did!” interrupted Henry excitedly.
“So you think that, do you? You don’t know who she is, and how such a thing would be so unpardonable in her that no consideration could influence me. I never told you before, but she is of another blood than you are—she is the descendant of martyred rabbis, and her race is as pure as that of the old Machabees. We are not Germans. We are Spaniards, and, though ruined, our family pride is as great as it ever was—as great, too, as our love for our faith.”
“How long ago was it you were ruined?”
“Only a year and two months, and I fell ill six months ago; my wife died almost as soon as we came here, and my Maheleth has earned our daily bread, and taught her sisters, and managed the housekeeping, all alone. It is enough to make one curse God!”
“Hush, hush!” said Holcombe. “You do not mean that—you know you have too many blessings to thank him for.”
“And the best and only one you are seeking to take from me.”
“I swear to you that much as I should wish and pray for it—for that I will not conceal from you—yet I have never influenced your child in any way.”
“You have, because you love her.”
Henry was staggered at the suddenness of his words.
“You cannot deny it,” continued the invalid.
“No,” answered the young man; “I have no desire to deny it, but your daughter never heard it from my lips, and never would.”
“Never would!” echoed Löwenberg, firing up. “And do you, too, despise her for her race—she that is as far above you as you are above your lowest peasant!”
“God forbid!” said Henry solemnly; “for I think of her as of one of whom I am not worthy. But my faith forbids our union, and, love her though I shall to my dying day, my love should never cross my lips to stir and wound her heart.”
“You shall see her no more; you have seen her too much already; if you love her, as you say, desist at least now.”
“Do you mean that she knows—perhaps returns—my love?”
“I have said enough, and shall not gratify your vanity. But promise me you will not see her again, and I will even believe that you did not try to proselytize her.”
“No; I cannot promise that. Circumstances might arise under which it would be death to keep that promise, and yet I should have no hope of inducing you to give it me back.”
“You mean she might become a Christian?”
“Even so, as I pray she may.”
“And you will marry her then, and she feels it, and yet you pretend you use no influence!”
“I would marry her if she would not think me unworthy.”
“I need say no more. You have been my friend, and I thank you for your kindness; but henceforth our paths are separate. If I lose my child, I shall know you robbed me of her. I only ask you now to consider what I told you of our family and fortunes as a sacred confidence.”
“My friend,” said Henry sadly, as he rose, “I will obey you, and you may consider your secret as sacred as if it were my own. But remember this is your own act, and, if ever you wish to call on my friendship again, my services will be as willingly yours as though this breach had never been. God bless you and your daughter Maheleth!”
He left the room as in a dream; Rachel scanned his face curiously as she let him out at the crazy door.
“So,” he thought, “thus ends my connection with that house; and yet God knows how true my intentions were. I dare not seek her, still I know she may need me. God grant it be true that Maheleth is a Christian at heart!”
Unconsciously he bent his steps towards the cathedral; a few people were collected about the confessionals. The stained windows were dark and blurred in the uncertain light; only a lamp here and there hung from the pillars.
Perhaps his prayers were more fervent in intention than full in form, and mechanically he watched the shrouded confessionals. Suddenly from behind the green curtain of one of them issued the figure of the Jewish girl, a calm look lighting up her features, and her deportment altogether unlike that which he had so often and so painfully noticed.
Her eye fell upon him instantly, and, far from shunning him, gave him a long glance of recognition and sympathy. She knelt for some time, then rose and walked down the nave. He followed her, and at the entrance door she paused as if to wait for him.
“I have seen your father, Fräulein,” Holcombe said, “and he told me a great many things.”
“I hardly think he quite knows how far things have gone,” she answered gently. “I could give up anything for him except my soul, and for some months I have known that only by becoming a Christian could I save it.”
“I have often seen you in church.”
“Have you, indeed?”
“Your father accuses me of converting you.”
She blushed, and was silent for a few minutes.
“You have helped me by your prayers, I am sure,” she said at last.
“Tell me,” he asked, “are you a Catholic yet?”
“No; I only went into the confessional to speak to the priest; in a few days I shall be baptized.”
“I have a favor to ask you—will you let me be present?”
“Certainly, it will make me very happy, believe me.”
“Do you know that, when your father hears of it, he will turn you out of your home?”
“He said so—did he tell you so?”
“He did, but he could not have meant it.”
“Oh! yes,” she said sadly, “he would do it; he would think it a duty, a matter of principle.”
“It would be very ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful! Was I not bound to work for him who gave me life? He worked hard for us, and in the time of trouble we owed it to him.”
“But if he throws you off, what will become of him?”
“That is the saddest part; but I know God will take care of him.”
“Remember, Maheleth, that either for yourself or for him (for your sake) you must never hesitate to call upon me. Promise me that.”
It was the first time he had called her Maheleth. She blushed and looked down, saying:
“You have been very generous and very kind to my father; but surely now you have parted friendship with him?”
“No, I have not, as I told even him; but, were it not so, for your sake it should be.”
“I have God to look after me, Herr Holcombe.”
“But I want to be his instrument.”
“His Raphael, as you have been to us through this desert of want and poverty.”
“And will you not be my Sarah?” he asked suddenly, but in a soft, low voice.
Her whole frame shook; then she looked up in his face, silent.
“I have loved you since I knew you,” he went on to say; “I mean since I saw you first; but I never meant to tell my secret, for you know I could not wed a Jewess. But now, thank God! the bar is gone, and I can be happy without sin.”
She did not answer yet.
“Have I deceived myself, then?” asked the young man sadly. “And do you not love me, as I hoped?”
“I do,” she answered, quickly looking up. “God knows I do, but I cannot marry you.”
“Why, why, Maheleth? You torture me.”
“Because it would break my father’s heart, and because it would give him reason to say I had changed my faith for you.”
“But how could he?”
“I could not leave him in misery, and my little sisters alone, and go and live in peace and earthly comfort which they could not share.”
“They are most welcome to share it, Maheleth.”
“You are too good, too noble,” she said; “but it cannot be.”
“And you love me, you say?”
“Must we not love God better, dear, dear friend? Henry, do not be angry with me. You will be my dear brother in the faith always.”
Holcombe was too overcome to speak. She stopped and entreated him to leave her.
“I am paining you beyond necessity,” she said; “you will be happier and calmer if you do not see me till the day of my baptism. All things are God’s will, and, bitter as the trial may be, he gives us strength to bear it, if we look to him. Farewell, Henry.”
He wrung her hand in silence, and saw the drooping figure pass quickly out of sight. He felt how much harder her trial was, and how selfish his own words had been, yet he did not try to see her again until the day of her baptism.
The ceremony was to take place at the cathedral, at four in the morning. The sun had just risen, and the quiet streets were golden with his light. Holcombe was watching at the door. She came very soon, wrapped in a long black cloak, looking radiant and calm, as if nothing more could be of any consequence to her, nor stir her heart confusedly. She held out her hand to her friend with a “God bless you!” that left him dumb. Her cloak was laid on a carved bench, and her white robe gleamed under the rainbow from the great stained‐glass window above her. More beautiful than ever she seemed, and more angel‐like. The priest poured the saving waters upon her head, and performed all the holy mystic ceremonies of the sacrament, and she, as if in a heavenly trance, followed him throughout with her eyes and her lips. Mass was said directly after, and she and Henry knelt together at the altar‐rails to receive the Bread of Angels. A long time passed after Mass, and when at length Maheleth, now Mary, rose from her knees, it was only to go to the distant Lady‐chapel, and there offer up a golden brooch of Spanish workmanship, one of the few treasures saved from the wreck of her father’s fortune.
As she left the church, Henry followed her.
“Are you going home?” he asked timidly.
She turned her dark eyes upon him very softly, but with no sadness in them.
“I have no home now,” she said slowly. “Last night I bade my father farewell; I am going to the convent.”
A look of terror came into Henry’s face.
“To stay there always?” he asked.
“As God wills—I do not know,” she replied.
“But are you not sorry about your father and sisters?”
“It was a hard trial,” she answered, with radiant calmness in her eyes, “but God has taken the sorrow out of it now.”
“And shall I not see you again, now your faith is mine? I saw you often when there was a gulf between us!”
“It is better you should forget me. But that shall be as God wills; I leave it to him, and will make no arrangements.”
“Thank you for that, anyhow; remember all I told you, dear Maheleth; so far, at least, you can make me happy.”
“I will remember it always, and bless you for it, but I do not promise to act up to it.”
“Never mind, you cannot help God protecting you, no matter through what instrument.”
And with these words he left her.
For some weeks they did not meet, but Henry was busy at correspondence with his English agents and bankers. In the meanwhile, regular remittances arrived at Herr Löwenberg’s house, which he at first refused to accept, not knowing whether they came from his daughter whom he had thrown off, or his friend whom he had insulted, and not wishing to be beholden to either for his daily pittance. But starvation was the alternative, and, had not Rachel kindly shared her meals with his children, and sent him little inexpensive dishes now and then, hunger would have made him yield long ago. As it was, he missed his daily sustenance sorely, and at last, under protest, and promising himself prompt repayment of these loans as soon as he should be well again, he began to use the money sent to him. Many a time Holcombe came to the door to inquire after him from the good‐natured Rachel; and every day, in the dusk of the evening, came his daughter, almost always bearing a basket that held some little delicacy.
One night it happened that Henry and Maheleth met at the door. She was the first to speak.
“You see I am not yet immured in my convent!” she said gayly. “I have to thank you so much for coming here to look after my dear father. I shall be leaving Frankfort soon, and then there will be no one to be so good to him as you.”
“But I shall not leave. Do you really mean you are going?”
“Yes; the good nuns have got me a governess’ situation somewhere in Bohemia with Catholics. I shall go next week.”
“May I come and bid you good‐by?”
“Oh, yes! come on a visiting day, Thursday. Have you seen my sisters? How are they looking?”
“I saw them a week ago; they looked tired, I thought.”
“Oh! they don’t know how to nurse him, and he tires them, I am afraid. But God will see to them and him too.”
“Will you be able to come back here for a vacation?”
“Perhaps in a year—not before.”
“Your father may be well again by that time.”
“God grant it! But I must not stay any longer now.”
And having made some inquiries of Rachel, she left the house.
Henry Holcombe longed for Thursday. He wanted to ask leave to write to Maheleth, to give her news of her father, he would say. When the time arrived, the parlor at the convent was full, and he hardly relished making his adieus in a crowd. He was relieved to find a nun come and beckon him away, and show him into a quiet little room, with a polished floor, a Munich Madonna, and a few plain chairs round a dark table.
In a few minutes, a pleasant‐looking old religious came in, followed by Maheleth.
The girl reached her hand to Henry, saying:
“Sister Mary Ambrose knows you by name very well.”
The talk was general for a short time, then the old nun got up and walked to the window.
“I wanted to ask you if I might write to you, Maheleth,” said the young man, much relieved by the prospect of a comparative tête‐à‐tête.
“If you wish to do so, by all means.”
“And you don’t wish it?” he said, in disappointment.
“I meant it might be painful to you after all. What I wish is of no moment.”
“Maheleth, how can you say so, when you know I shall always feel for you the same love I do now?”
“Well, my friend, let that pass. Write to me, then; you know your letters will be welcome.”
“I will always let you know about your father.”
“You will not always stay in Frankfort?”
“Not quite, but I shall be here again this time next year.”
She smiled and said:
“I might not be here myself.”
“Then I shall see you wherever you are, and I shall ask you the same question you have answered once.”
“Ah! Henry, do not trust to accidents! It may never be; forget me, as I already told you.”
“We’ll not argue about it; we will wait and see. Look, I have brought you something,” he added, taking a tiny velvet case from his breast‐pocket. “It is not an engagement‐ring, do not be afraid,” he said, as she seemed troubled; “it is only a souvenir, and I want you to promise me to wear it for one year, till I see you again. After that, you shall do as you like about keeping it. You know what a rosary‐ring is?” he asked, as he showed her the broad yellow band notched by tiny bubbles of gold. “And here is the cross laid upon it, and the cross is of pearls, the emblem of innocence. You read what is inside now.”
She took it and read the device on the interior rim: “Crux per amore; Amor per cruce.”
“The cross through love; Love through the cross,” he explained.
She replied by kissing the ring and handing it to him, as she said:
“Put it on my finger, Henry, and only you or God himself shall ever draw it off.”
“You do not mean—”
“Hush! how can you question him? But I fear he will not call me in that way. Who knows, perhaps we shall meet next year? I leave my father to God and you.”
The old nun came back from the window.
“My child, I am afraid I cannot stay any longer,” she said.
The girl rose, and took Henry’s hand in both her own.
“God bless and reward you, my dear, dear friend. You know all I would say and yet cannot.”
He kissed her hand, and, with an ineffable look of holy calm, the Jewish convert left the room, still glancing back at him.
Two months passed, and Löwenberg grew better. One morning, a large letter was brought to him, with the Madrid post‐mark. He opened it hastily, and scanned its contents. The letter fell from his hands as he read, and a dizziness came over him; he lay back on his couch, deadly pale.
“Is it anything bad about Maheleth?” timidly asked little Thamar.
“No,” he said, momentarily roused to anger. He took up the letter again and muttered, “A million dollars!” The children thought he was worse, and looked on with scared faces.
The letter was from a banker at Madrid, saying that he was authorized by a person deeply in Señor Cristalar’s debt, but who wished to remain nameless, to apprise him of a certain sum, a million dollars, lying in ready money at his command in Hauptmann’s bank at Frankfort. The person had long been wishing to make this restitution, but had not till now been able to ascertain his hiding‐place. The invalid was in a fever; he could not help thinking of the young Christian he had spurned, yet he tried to persuade himself it was not he, but the man to whose knavery he had owed his total ruin.
Several days passed, and at last he wrote to Holcombe at the hotel he had been staying at. In ambiguous terms, he spoke of a generous service undeserved by him, and of his desire to see him, if only once. But the Englishman was gone and had left no address. He then wrote to his Madrid correspondent, urging him to try and discover the person from whom the money had been sent; but the banker wrote word that the whole transaction had been kept very secret, and that, before it had become known to him, it had passed through so many hands that it was impossible to find out the first person concerned. There was a hint of some American bank connected with it, and the money had been originally paid down in American gold; but beyond this there was no clue. Cristalar thought the Spanish banker had been probably bribed to keep silence, and a few more weeks sped by without his taking any active measures about his newly‐found wealth. He received and acknowledged a letter of advice from Hauptmann’s bank, telling him of the sum at his disposal, and Hauptmann himself came to call upon him and offer him his congratulations. The Spaniard, who still called himself by his German name, received the visit of his former employer as a mere conventional act of courtesy, and seemed in no wise elated by the sudden good‐fortune he was being congratulated upon. He did not change his lodgings, but he hired a servant, and sent his daughters to the best Jewish school in the town. As soon as he got well, which was by rapid degrees, after he had received the letter that once more made him a millionaire, he left his children in charge of Rachel, and proceeded to London, where he advertised daily for information of Henry Holcombe. The weekly supplies in small sums had never discontinued, but he felt assured that, notwithstanding all these blinds, he could not be mistaken as to the name of his benefactor.
Meanwhile, Maheleth in her Bohemian home heard from Rachel of her father’s fortune, his restoration to health, and his journey to England. She, too, wrote to Henry, and asked him to tell her if it were he that had thus returned good for evil. He simply said in reply that he was free to do as he liked with his money, and that he thought Señor Cristalar knew better how to use it than he did.
Summer came again, and with it Henry Holcombe; the old Juden‐Strasse was once more before him, and then he learnt that Herr Löwenberg had gone three months ago to Madrid. He had been travelling in Italy and Greece, and had never gone home to his old English country‐house, which now was let to good and steady tenants. He went to the convent; she was not there, but they expected her. So there was nothing for it but to go and chat with Rachel and old Zimmermann about old times and old friends.
A week later he called again at the convent, and the portress told him to wait. In the same little parlor, unchanged and clean, he waited for a quarter of an hour, hoping and dreading to see Maheleth. She came in this time alone. He took her hand in his, and looked a hungry look into her eyes. She said to him, smiling:
“Do you see I have kept my promise? I have the dear ring on my finger, and every day I have said the rosary with it for you. And now, you know, I must thank you.”
“I cannot bear it; don’t, for my sake, Maheleth! Have you heard from your father?”
“No; he never will write, I knew that; but I have heard of him; he is in Spain. He will begin again as a banker, I feel sure, and never rest till he has repaid you.”
“I don’t want to be repaid, except with interest, and you know it is not from him I can ask that. Do you remember that I was to ask you the same question I asked once already?”
“Yes, Henry, but think what you are doing.”
“I shall ask it first, and then think.”
“Well, Henry, if I should say that, I will answer it as you wish, provided you can gain my father’s consent?”
The young man looked blank.
“I believe that is what God would wish me to do, Henry. My father has no further need of me, and he or I owe you a debt of gratitude we can never pay; yet I should like his distinct permission, if I could have it, and you can obtain it more easily than I can.”
“I shall not rest till it be done,” said Holcombe excitedly. “Shall I write to him? Maheleth, you have had ‘Crux per amore’; now God will give us ‘Amor per cruce.’ ”
He wrote that very day to Madrid, asking the hand of his daughter from the wealthy Jewish banker, and pleading as hard as though he were some poor outcast, with never a roof to his head, begging for the favor of a royal maiden’s love. Cristalar was overjoyed at knowing at last where to find the man he owed health and fortune to, and, instead of a letter, he sent a telegram to say he would be in Frankfort in a week.
Henry took the telegram to the convent; Maheleth turned very pale as she read it.
“It is all right, surely, darling, is it not?” asked Holcombe.
“I have never seen him since the eve of my baptism.”
“And,” interrupted the young man, “please God, you will see him again the eve of our marriage.”
She hid her face in her hands. “God grant it!” she murmured, under her breath.
Ephraim Cristalar, for he called himself by his own name now, went to the hotel where Holcombe used to live, and inquired for the young Englishman. He had not long to wait.
“Mr. Holcombe!” he exclaimed, as he caught him in his arms, “I cannot speak to you—you are master of all I am and have; can you but forgive me, say?”
“My friend and father!” replied Holcombe, “you must not give way like this! I only asked you a simple question, a great favor, it is true, but that is all we have to speak of.”
“Oh! I know better than that, Henry. What have you to ask of me, when all I have is yours?”
“There is one thing I want, you know what; and my only other request is that you will see your daughter.”
Cristalar drew back. “She is yours, Henry Holcombe,” he said solemnly, “as far as she is mine to give; but she is an alien to my faith, and to my home.”
“No, no, it must not, shall not be. Remember how she fed you, worked for you, brought up your little ones, and sent you the little she earned, even though you had cast her off.”
“It is cruel, Holcombe, to remind me of that,” said Cristalar reproachfully. “Perhaps as your wife I may see her—as the wife of my benefactor, not as my daughter.”
“I want to take her from your hands. And think how she has wearied for you all this time!”
“I know—and do you think I have not missed her? I have only half lived since she left me; and I love her beyond description even yet, but that is an unhallowed love.”
“Say, rather, an unnatural delusion; I mean your refusal to see her. You will, for my sake, for your son‐in‐law’s sake?”
“Leave me now, Henry, I must think.”
Need we tell the end? How his better nature triumphed; how prosperity had softened his heart, and gratitude had bent his pride; how at last his father’s love could stand no longer the knowledge of his child’s great sorrow; and how Henry’s prophecy that Maheleth should see her father on the eve of her marriage was anticipated by many weeks? Her sisters and Señor Cristalar accompanied her to the cathedral, and, after the ceremony, the banker put into the hands of the officiating priest a check for $10,000 for the Catholic poor of Frankfort.
Holcombe House was made ready soon after for the bride’s reception, and Señor Cristalar established a branch bank in London, of which his son‐in‐ law was partner and responsible head. In a very few years, the Holcombe income was the same it had been before the appalling drain the agents had spoken of, when the young possessor had drawn the £100,000 of ready money left him by his father, and added to it an equal sum raised on the estate.
The old Spaniard could never be induced to abandon the faith that was as much a part of his family pride as of the tradition of his race; but Thamar and Agar, Maheleth’s two sisters, were baptized two years after the marriage, under the names of Elizabeth and Magdalen, and, when they in their turn married into noble English houses, their father certainly showed no sign of disapproval of their change of religion, in the princely fortunes he allotted to each.
Europe’s Angels.
It was night, and the old year was passing away. The angels had sung their anniversary strains of gladness, and had announced anew the coming of the Prince of Peace, only a week ago, yet there was a solemn silence now in their serried ranks, as they pressed around a group of their representatives.
I can hardly tell you where this was, or whether it was “in the body or out of the body” that I fancied I saw the glorious vision; I only know that it seemed as if infinite space were around them, and an amphitheatre of angelic faces, like living stones, were making a barrier between them and space, as the rainbow does between clouds.
There were many of those whom I have called representatives, and each bore some strange emblem, which I understood to be the badge of the nation over which he was set. Around each stood a host similarly distinguished, the guardian angels of each individual soul composing the nation. There was an awful stillness on this the last night of the year, as the conclave of angels sat brooding over the events of the immediate past. A few, more prominent among their brethren, presently stood forward, while a figure of marvellous beauty, but calm austerity of aspect, presented a book to them, which it supported as a deacon against its head. The book was closely written on one side, while the opposite page was blank.
An angel, crowned with an iron crown, and robed in a wonderful garment of deep azure,(198) curiously wrought in gold with stars and signs of lore and art, such as only one land in Europe can boast of being able to interpret, taking a pen in his hand, spoke to the assembled multitude.
“Brethren,” he said, in a deep, musical voice whose tones indicated both gravity and conscious strength, “before I write my brief record of the year we have now added to our experience, let me speak to you, as fellow‐ watchers over our God’s earthly treasures. My trust has been a bitter and a heavy one, yet withal a glorious vindication of faith and truth. We have risen among nations like a comet that for a moment eclipses the steadier and more lasting glory of the older planets, but in our course there were obstacles which have now become almost the monument of martyrs. Unmindful of the lion‐hearted men to whom Wilfrid, and Boniface, and Lioba preached, and of whom the strongest bulwark of intellectual faith was built by their later and more national saints, our new rulers have sought to renew the persecutions of the XVIth century, and the absolutism of a State Church. But our God, the ‘dear God’(199) of our people, knew how to raise up defenders for himself in the fearless pastors of his flock; knew how to inspire them with a bravery that scorned imprisonment and laughed at death, that made them raise their voices against presumptuous and intrusive authority on the one hand, and barefaced heresy on the other. We have triumphed in persecution; we have re‐echoed the non possumus of our earthly father and Pontiff; we have shown to our God the will of martyrs after having displayed before our sovereign the deeds of patriots. He thought to weld a mighty nation into one empire; he has riven it in twain in his unblest attempt, and has called up against his puny military power the anger of that God who, on the shores of the Red Sea, did punish Pharaoh and his host. ‘Who is like to thee, among the strong, O Lord? Who is like to thee, glorious in holiness, terrible and worthy of praise, doing wonders?’ ”(200)
Those that wore robes like that of the mighty angel who had spoken took up his last triumphant words, and chanted them forth in two alternate choirs, and the voice that came from this host of choristers seemed like the voice of the sea thundering amid caves and rocks. It surged up and died away in long reverberating echoes, a hymn of strength and defiance, a prophecy of a magnificent and almost endless future.
Then the angel who had spoken wrote a few words in the book, and, turning, presented the pen to one who stood close beside him, tall, stately, and calm, in white raiment, with the historical fleur‐de‐lis broidered thickly over his robe. On his brows shone the same emblem, wrought in gold and pearls, while in his left hand he held a flame‐colored standard, the oriflamme of the Crusades.
“My brethren,” he began, “this year has been a silent one compared with its last two predecessors; but none the less a year of sacrifice, of heroic expiation, of patient humility of spirit. We have lived amid perils as deep as religious persecutions; amid the perils of a civilization that is unchristian, and of refinements worse than heathen. The worship of the false gods has come back, and we are surrounded with a corruption as terrible as that of imperial Rome or effeminate Byzantium. Our name is no longer supreme, our escutcheon no longer unstained, our sword is broken in the hands of others, our missions are unprotected, and our influence no longer paramount among barbarians and plunderers, and still our corruption flourishes as unblushingly and undauntedly as ever, and our rivals, nay, our very captors, come to learn it at our feet. This is now our shameful supremacy; but, in the midst of these Capuan revels, is there still a hope for the nation? Yes, my brethren, the same hope that our glorious iron‐ crowned compeer has told us was his hope—the church, the faith, the truth. If our rulers, like those of our whilom foes, forget the Christian heroes whom we call our forefathers, the men who at the field of Tolbiac vowed our nation to the God of armies, and in a thousand fields in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt redeemed that holy vow, we do not and cannot forget it. Sons and daughters of the Crusaders, heirs and heiresses of the Kings of Jerusalem and the Knights of Rhodes and Malta, many of our nation are now in the holier army, the holier knighthood of religion; their habit is their coat of mail, their swift prayers and their swifter sacrifices are their battle‐axes, their spears, their maces; in every land they are fighting the battle of their own, in every breach defending the honor of their fallen country. All eyes are still upon their acts; their land, like a magnet, compels the glance of Europe and the world. The saviours who are working hiddenly at the regeneration of ‘the eldest daughter of the church’ are of no party, own no secret master, work for no wages, and seek no reward; they are soldiers of the cross, children of God, who, in the hospitals, the prisons, the galleys, the schools, the Chinese stations, the Canadian missions, the cloistered monasteries, under the names of Sisters of Charity, Order of Preachers, Missions Etrangères, Christian Brothers, Benedictines of Solesmes, Jesuits, and Sulpiciens, work for God, in God, with God. ‘Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ ”(201)
The choir of white‐robed angels that clustered round the one who had ceased speaking took up the grave refrain, and chanted it as their brethren had done before, and the song swelled majestically as it seemed to reach the uttermost bounds of the living barrier of angel faces round the central groups. Ere yet it had subsided, the last of the heavenly speakers wrote his record in the book, and gave the pen into the hand of a third angel who stood in grave expectancy by his side.
This one was tall and stalwart‐looking, a warrior‐angel, one would involuntarily be sure to think, yet his long trailing robe of crimson was woven not with dragons or golden leopards, but with miniature cathedrals, abbeys, and priories. The heaviness of this golden embroidery seemed to drag the garment into yet more statuesque folds, as the mighty wearer drew himself slowly up and took the pen, letting go, as he did so, his hold upon a silver shield bearing a blood‐red cross. His fair waving locks were uncrowned, and he bent his head towards the two who had spoken before.
“My brethren,” he began, and his voice sounded clear and clarionlike, “you have each of you sought in the continuation of the traditions of the past a pledge of the regeneration and safety of the future. I, too, looked to the early past for the golden age I would fain see revived among us, but, unlike you, it is neither persecution nor bloodshed that I have to record. Our nation is not eclipsed in power or in influence; and although our rulers are hardly worthy of their chivalric forerunners, yet there are yet among them some who are heirs to their fathers’ greatness of soul, though not to the integrity of their faith. Still, our race has kept more unblemished than others that reverence for authority without which no faith is sure, no empire stable. Our life flows more calmly on in our island‐home than does the troubled stream of our brethren’s days beyond the sea. Still, amid benefits without number, amid the march of science and the progress of art, things that in exchange for the ancient gift of faith our second fatherland every day gives us in return, we have one fruitful source of dread and danger—the sordid love of gain which makes our people restless during life, and leaves them hopeless in death. To strive against this demon of the air—for we seem to breathe his spirit in the very atmosphere—is the constant endeavor of my being. To knit art to God as it was joined to him in the olden days, to put honor before wealth, and conscience before success, to raise principle triumphant over interest, is my daily, necessary, but most wearisome task. Many voices erstwhile charmed our nation—that of the warrior, the bard, the monk; the voice of glory, the voice of learning, the voice of holy love. Now one cry alone harshly calls our children together—the cry of gain. Our country has forgotten its ancient fanes of learning, its island monasteries, its townlike abbeys, its glorious cathedrals, colleges, libraries, and halls, it has forgotten its tournaments of science, its chants, its liturgies, even its earthly pageants, and has run after the abject golden calf of these latter days. Not the poor alone, but the noble and great have with less excuse come down into the new arena, and lowered themselves to the level of money‐seekers, till the chivalry of our race has become a forgotten dream, a talisman that has lost its charm, a thing as out of date as a crowded abbey with its holy pomps of daily service would be among the darkened, busy streets of a modern gold‐coining city. And yet in many a nook, in many an obscure street of a little town, in many a shady, peaceful country home, are rising the fair progeny of our statelier fanes of old, and beneath groined roofs and before carved altars rise prayers as beautiful and as divers as the trefoils and roses on capital and pillar. In prayer, whether petrified into fair churches standing for ever, or moulded into golden altar‐plate rich with chasing and with gems, or flying straight to God’s feet in ardent, winged words of love, we place our last hope, the hope of the only true conversion our land can ever know; for ‘there is a success in evil things to a man without discipline, and there is a finding that turneth to loss.’ ”(202)
Here a countless host of angels, as gravely radiant, yet with the same solemn shade of sadness in their aspect, as the last speaker, took up his parting words, and chanted them slowly. I thought they caught unconsciously the ring of the holy words chanted so often through the ages of faith, in that land of cathedrals and cloisters. Indeed, the angel choir and their stately leader seemed none other than monastic champions turned into bright heavenly spirits, so akin is everything in that isle to the claustral ideal from which sprang its life—civil, collegiate, ecclesiastical, feudal, and social.
As the chanted dirge grew less and less distinct, another angel advanced to take the pen his predecessor had just laid in the folds of the book, after having written his year’s record within. This one had stood so far in the background as to have escaped my awed notice until now. He wore a long, loosely‐falling robe of black, and bowed his head as if in grief; his hands were clasped, and a golden and a silver key were held between his fingers; in his step there was no elasticity, and in his eye no gladness. All those who followed him seemed equally sorrowful, but soon I heard why it was, and no longer marvelled at it.
“Brethren,” he said, in mournful tones, “brethren of all climes, who once envied me my proud position of warden over the land which holds the father of all Christians, envy me no longer the sad honors I must yet bear. When I look at my nation, I can see nothing through my tears. Once I saw treasures of art and beauty; I can take pride in them no longer. I saw fair landscapes, the envy of the world, the garden of Europe, the beautiful God’s‐acre of a past of heroic deeds, buried in honorable oblivion as the seedlings of a more glorious crop of Christian heroism—I can take pleasure in these no more. I saw a people mild, inoffensive, believing, loving; now I see them corrupted, deluded, led away, and turned into furies. I saw churches gorgeous with the many gifts of fervent piety and grateful wealth; I see ruins now, sacrilegiously used for godless purposes, in derision and contempt of their lofty dedication. I saw one city, the jewel of the universe, the city of sanctuary and refuge, where faith reigned, and grief was comforted, and weakness was made strength; a ‘city of the soul,’ where God held court mid thousands of earthly angels, and where he found again the mingled worship of the mysterious Hebrew temple and of the holy, silent house of Nazareth. But now, brethren, rude men have scattered our treasures, profaned our churches, seized our cloisters, driven away learning and charity to put lewdness and brutality in their place, and have renewed, with far more blasphemous intention, the horrors of the barbaric invasions. I see the father of the faithful with the crown of martyrdom surmounting his tiara, waiting, like the Ecce Homo eighteen hundred years ago, the final verdict of an infuriate mob, while other nations, Pilate‐like, wash their hands of the sacred, helpless charge it were their first duty to defend. My brethren, weep with me, weep for me, and yet rejoice; ‘for the Lord will not cast off for ever.’(203) ‘And in that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book, and out of darkness and obscurity the eyes of the blind shall see.’ ”(204)
Many were the eager voices that took up the words of hope and sang them with a fervor which only guardian spirits can know. As the strain swelled and spread, then fell into a gentle murmur, as if the singers were loth to leave off the prayer of faith and hope, the angel had written his short record for the passing year, and looked around to welcome his next successor. There was a pause, and among the angelic conclave a swaying to and fro denoted that some suppressed feeling was at work. Those who had spoken stood apart in a conspicuous group, conferring among themselves; but I looked with awe and interest at those who had hitherto been silent.
The old year’s span was very short now. On earth the snow was falling, preparing a fitting shroud for the departing guest, and a fitting cradle for the coming stranger; there were revellers in many houses, heedless sleepers in more, and watchers in only a few; there were monastic choirs filing into silent churches for the coming office of matins; and there were also miserable outcasts, some voluntary slaves of the world, others unwilling watchers, poverty‐stricken, hunger‐smitten, desperately tempted creatures who might murmur at and even curse their fate, yet would not begin the year by breaking God’s commandments; there were many sinners doing penance, many happy death‐beds, many freed souls rushing on the wings of long‐repressed desire towards the goal that weary years of purgatory had hardly hidden from their longing gaze; and well might the angelic host thrill with holy delight as all these sights and sounds struck upon their consciousness. The good surely outweighed the bad!
Just then an angel stepped from among the hitherto silent throng—an angel with a face full of suffering, sweetness, and patience, yet withal a look of something deeper and stronger than mere patience; and his black robe was sown with silver stars, while a star glittered also on his forehead. In quick accents, full of strength, he addressed his companions, holding the pen in his hand.
“Brethren!” he said, “the march of events, as the world calls it, has passed over and by our nation, but in God’s eyes we are not so soon forgotten. The civilizer of Eastern Europe, the bulwark of Christianity against the Moslem faith, we have nevertheless suffered by the hands of Christian princess and been annihilated in the name of civilization. A martyr‐nation, a victim to false diplomacy, we stand in Europe with the chains still about our feet, while empires change hands and dynasties come and go; exiled and dispersed like the Hebrews of old, we are known, like them, by our indomitable faith and ever hopeful patriotism. Within this year, a gigantic empire has manacled us more cruelly, gagged us more closely, than before, but we are steadfast yet, for ‘blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ ”(205)
The words were caught up and re‐echoed by the angel throng around their star‐crowned leader, while he wrote the brief record of another year’s bitter wrongs still so heroically and silently borne. He passed the pen to another clothed in purple, who looked at him with angelic sympathy before he spoke. His voice was still and low, but clear as a silver bell.
“My brethren,” he said, “my task is hard and dreary; a mist of prejudice hangs over those vast steppes which form my dominions; a false civilization educates our nobles to a pitch of unnatural and seeming polish in which all truth is killed, and all natural kindness crushed; like the apples of the Dead Sea, our country is fair to the eye of the world, but ashes to the taste of God. We have all to hope, it is true, but much to fear; and, while the desolate semblance of the true faith spreads its outward and deceptive gorgeousness before the barren and fettered nation, the souls of our brethren perish of thirst, as it were, within sight of the Fountain of Life. Brethren, pray for my unhappy charge, and thou, O God! enlighten my people! ‘How incomprehensible are thy judgments, and how unsearchable thy ways!’ ”(206)
The purple‐robed choir around him took up the angel’s last words, and slowly chanted them, as if in awe and expectation, while their leader wrote a few brief words in the book.
Another came forward, gathering his golden robe together, the hem of which was broidered with figures of ships and charts, somewhat faded now, but this was redeemed by the effulgent brightness of the scroll he held on his outstretched hand a scroll bearing the divine motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam. Looking swiftly around, he began thus:
“My brethren, my provinces are narrowed and my nation lessened since her ships explored the ocean, her fleet sent forth armadas, and her leaders conquered new continents, but the spirit of the missionary and the martyr has not followed that of the less successful and less lasting investigator. Chivalry still lives in the land of the Cid, and fires the hearts in whose veins flows the blood of the Crusaders of Granada. Saints took up the warrior’s shield, and won their spurs in distant, dangerous services, till the names of Xavier, Loyola, Gaudia, and Teresa became the household words of a whole universe. Unbelief has poisoned our present position, and for our sins we have suffered dire misfortune and perennial disturbance. Still, our people are unchanged; faithfully the sons of the Visigoth martyrs keep the trust of their fathers, and, secure amid their mountain fastnesses, within the last year have raised the standard of the cross wreathed with the golden lilies of a national and well‐beloved dynasty. We have had triumphs of the soul and heroic deeds of patriotic daring mingled together in the annals of our peasant soldiers; the spirit of another Vendée has spoken to our nation; and God has rejoiced to find at last a human bulwark against human unbelief. ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy; deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man.’ ”(207)
And while the angel wrote his record in the book, his followers echoed his last words in tones of mingled triumph and supplication, chanting them, as all the others had done before them, in two alternate choirs. And now there was again a pause, while the first groups of angels who had spoken drew closer to the book, and gazed at the last records written in it. One more representative came forward, an angel robed in softest green, and bearing a harp in his hand. Turning to the west, he spoke in a voice full of deep emotion: “My brethren, I look towards the sea, and gaze at the land of the setting sun. I see my people spreading over the earth, so that I have more children in far‐away lands than on my own soil. I see them, the pioneer nation of whom Brendan was the first leader, planting the cross and the shamrock in unfailing union, wherever they go. Long ages of suffering have not reft them of the gift of faith, the treasure of art, or the strength of enterprise; their arm hath upreared every throne and stayed every altar; their women make a Nazareth of every home and a tabernacle of every hovel; their race links two worlds, that of the past and that of the future, that of culture and civilization, to that of enterprise and freedom. I look with pride on the ocean darkened by the barks of my people, and forget, as I look, to sigh over the ruined fanes and dismantled castles of old. Children of impulse, they carry their home in their hearts, and make another Erin round every cross they plant. Sea kings, but Christians, they take from the Norsemen their daring, and from their own isle its poetry, and, blending the two, bear the highest gifts of the Old World to be the heirlooms of the New. To my nation may it well and fittingly be said, ‘They went out from thee on foot, and were led by the enemies: but the Lord will bring them to thee exalted with honor as children of the kingdom.’ ”(208)
These prophetic words were caught up by the numerous followers of the green‐robed angel, and rang now in grand and now in softened cadence through the boundless field of space that encircled the heavenly throng. As the tones died away, the angel wrote his record in the book, and the bells of earth sounded faintly in the still air.
The old year was passing away, and the angels in silence gathered round the book. As the last stroke of midnight was heard, the bearer of it turned the leaf, presenting a surface fair and smooth as the petal of a lily, and the whole company of blessed spirits intoned the Veni Creator.
I heard as it were in a dream, and saw forms of light and beauty disperse like the fleecy clouds of morning, till the singing died away in faraway corners of our old, prosaic, yet blessed earth. The songs of heaven were carried into the uttermost recesses where earthly misery was keenest and earthly revelry loudest on that fateful night; and, as its echoes passed over them, the misery grew strangely bearable, the revelry was unaccountably hushed. Everywhere the new‐born year came in with a blessing and a promise, reverently gathering its predecessor’s lessons even while mourning its inevitable shortcomings; and so once more, according to the patience of God, his ministers went forth to clear for every man a new field where, past errors being forgotten, he might renew his struggle in the battle of life, and retrieve himself in the eyes of infinite purity and infinite justice.
Such was the beautiful death of the old year 1872.
The Nativity Of Christe.
Behould the Father is His daughter’s Sonne, The bird that built the nest is hatched therein, The Old of Yeares an hower hath not outrunne, Eternall life to live doth now beginnn, The Word is dumm, the Mirth of heaven doth weepe, Mighte feeble is, and Force doth fayntely creepe.
O dyinge soules! behould your living Spring! O dazeled eyes! behould your Sunne of grace! Dull eares, attend what word this Word doth bringe! Upp, heavy hartes, with joye your joy embrace! From death, from darke, from deaphnesse, from despayres, This Life, this Light, this Worde, this Joy repaires.
Gift better than Himself God doth not knowe, Gift better than his God no man can see; This gift doth here the giver given bestowe, Gift to this gift lett ech receiver bee: God is my gift, Himself He freely gave me, God’s gift am I, and none but God shall have me.
Man altred was by synne from man to best; Beste’s food is haye, haye is all mortal fleshe; Now God is fleshe, and lyes in maunger prest, As haye the brutest synner to refreshe: O happy fielde wherein this foder grewe, Whose taste doth us from beastes to men renewe!
SOUTHWELL.
Chapter VIII. Continued.
Once more the bell of the chairman was heard amid the tumult.
“Mr. Seicht, officer of the crown, will now address the meeting,” Schwefel announced.
The audience were seized with amazement, and not without a cause. A dignitary of a higher order, a member of the administration, ascended the pulpit for the purpose of making an assault upon Christian education. He was about to make war upon morals and faith, the true supports of every solid government, the sources of the moral sentiment and of the prosperity of human society. A remnant of honesty and a lingering sense of justice may have raised a protest in Seicht’s mind against his undertaking; for his bearing was anything but self‐possessed, and he had the appearance of a wretch that was being goaded on by an evil spirit. Besides, he had the habit peculiar to bureaucrats of speaking in harsh, snarling tones. Seicht was conscious of these peculiarities of his bureaucratic nature, and labored to overcome them. The effort imparted to his delivery an air of constraint and a sickening sweetness which were climaxed by the fearfully involved style in which his speech was clothed.
“Gentlemen,” said Seicht, “in view of present circumstances, and in consideration of the requirements of culture whose spirit is incompatible with antiquated conditions, popular education, which in connection with domestic training is the foundation of the future citizen, must also undergo such changes as will bring it into harmony with modern enlightened sentiment; and this is the more necessary as the provisions of the law, which progress in its enlightenment and clearness of perception cannot refuse to recognize as a fit model for the imitation of a party dangerous to the state—I mean the party of Jesuitism and ultramontanism—allow untrammelled scope for the reformation of the school system, provided the proper clauses of the law and the ordinances relating to this matter are not left out of consideration. Accordingly, it is my duty to refer this honorable meeting especially to the ministerial decree referring to common schools, in accordance with which said common schools may be established, after a vote of the citizens entitled to the elective franchise, as soon as the need of this is felt; which in the present instance cannot be contested, since public opinion has taken a decided stand against denominational schools, in which youth is trained after unbending forms of religion, and in doctrines that evidently conflict with the triumph of the present, and with those exact sciences which make up the only true gospel—the gospel of progress, which scarcely in any respect resembles the narrow gospel of dubious dogmas—dubious for the reason that they lack the spirit of advancement, and are prejudicial to the investigation of the problems of a God, of material nature, and of man.”
Here leader Sand thrust his fingers in his ears.
“Thunder and lightning!” exclaimed he wrathfully, “what a shallow babbler! What is he driving at? His periods are a yard long; and when he has done, a man is no wiser than when he began. Gospel—gospel of progress—fool—numskull—down! down!”
“Quite a remarkable instance, this!” said Gerlach to the banker. “Evidently this man is trying might and main to please, yet he only succeeds in torturing his hearers.”
“I will explain this man to you,” replied the banker. “Heretofore Mr. Seicht has been a most complete exemplar of absolute bureaucracy. The only divinity he knew were the statutes, the only heaven the bureau, and the only safe way of reaching supreme felicity was, in his opinion, to render unquestioning obedience to ministerial rescripts. Suddenly Mr. Seicht heard the card‐house of bureaucracy start in all its joints. His divinity lost its worshippers, and his heaven lost all charms for those who were seeking salvation. He felt the ground moving under him, he realized the colossal might of progress, and hastened to commend himself to this party by adopting liberal ideas. He is now aiming to secure a seat in the house of delegates, which is subsequently to serve him as a stepping‐stone to a place in the cabinet. Just listen how the man is agonizing! He is wasting his strength, however, and the attitude of the audience is beginning to get alarming.”
For some time past, the chieftains in the chancel had been shaking their heads at the efforts of this official advocate of progress. To avoid being tortured by hearing, they had engaged in conversation. The auditors in the nave of the church were also growing restive. The speaker, however, continued blind to every hint and insinuation. At last a tall fellow in the crowd swung his hat and cried, “Three cheers for Mr. Seicht!” The whole nave joined in a deafening cheer. Seicht, imagining the cheering to be a tribute to the excellence of his effort, stopped for a moment to permit the uproar to subside, intending then to go on with his speech; but no sooner had he resumed than the cheering burst forth anew, and was so vigorously sustained that the man, at length perceiving the meaning of the audience, came down amid peals of derisive laughter.
“Serves the gabbler right!” said Sand. “He’s a precious kind of a fellow! The booby thinks he can hoist himself into the chamber of deputies by means of the shoulders of progress, and thence to climb up higher. But it happens that we know whom we have to deal with, and we are not going to serve as stirrups for a turn‐coat official.”
The chairman wound up with a speech in which he announced that the vote on the question of common schools would soon come off, and then adjourned the meeting.
The millionaires drew back to allow the crowd to disperse. Near them stood Mr. Seicht, alone and dejected. The countenances of the chieftains had yielded him no evidence on which to base a hope that his speech had told, and that he might expect to occupy a seat in the assembly. Moreover, Sand had rudely insulted the ambitious official to his face. This he took exceedingly hard. All of a sudden, he spied the banker in the chancel, and went over to greet him. Greifmann introduced Gerlach.
“I am proud,” Mr. Seicht asseverated, “of the acquaintance of the wealthiest proprietor of the country.”
“Pardon the correction, sir; my father is the proprietor.”
“No matter, you are his only son,” rejoined Seicht. “Your presence proves that you take an interest in the great questions of the day. This is very laudable.”
“My presence, however, by no means proves that I concur in the object of this meeting. Curiosity has led me hither.”
The official directed a look of inquiry at the banker.
“Sheer curiosity,” repeated this gentleman coldly.
“Can you not, then, become reconciled to the spirit of progress?” asked Seicht, with a smile revealing astonishment.
“The value of my convictions consists in this, that I worship genuine progress,” replied the millionaire gravely. “The progress of this community, in particular, looks to me like retrogression.”
“I am astonished at what you say,” returned the official; “for surely Shund’s masterly speech has demonstrated that we are keeping pace with the age.”
“I cannot see, sir, how fiendish hatred of religion can be taken for progress. This horrible, bloodthirsty monster existed even in the days of Nero and Tiberius, as we all know. Can the resurrection of it, now that it has been mouldering for centuries, be seriously looked upon as a step in advance? Rather a step backward, I should think, of eighteen hundred years. Especially horrible and revolting is this latest instance of tyranny, forcing parents who entertain religious sentiments to send their children to irreligious schools. Not even Nero and Tiberius went so far. On this point, I agree, there has been progress, but it consists in putting a most unnatural constraint upon conscience.”
Gerlach’s language aroused the official. He was face to face with an ultramontane. The mere sight of such an one caused a nervous twitching in his person. He resorted at once to bureaucratic weapons in making his onslaught.
“You are mistaken, my dear sir—you are very much mistaken. The spirit of the modern state demands that the schools of the multitude, particularly public institutions, should be accessible to the children of every class of citizens, without distinction of religious profession. Consequently, the schools must be taken from under the authority, direction, and influence of the church, and put entirely under civil and political control. Such, too, is now the mind of our rulers, besides that public sentiment calls for the change.”
“But, Mr. Seicht, in making such a change, the state despotically infringes on the province of religion.”
“Not despotically, Mr. Gerlach, but legally; for the state is the fountain‐head of all right, and consequently possessed of unlimited right.”
“You enunciate principles, sir, which differ vastly from what morality and religion teach.”
“What signify morals—what signifies religion? Mere antiquated forms, sir, with no living significance,” explained Seicht, lavishly displaying the treasures of the storehouse of progressionist wisdom. “The past submitted quietly to the authority of religion, because there existed then a low degree of intellectual culture. At present there is only one authority—it is the preponderance of numbers and of material forces. Consequently, the only real authority is the majority in power. On the other hand, authorities based upon the supposed existence of a supersensible world have lost their cause of being, for the reason that exact science plainly demonstrates the nonexistence of an immaterial world. Cessante causa, cessat effectus, the supersensible world, the basis of religious authority, being gone, it logically results that religious authority itself is gone. Hence the only real authority existing in a state is the majority, and to this every citizen is obliged to submit. You marvel, Mr. Gerlach. What I have said is not my own personal view, but the expression of the principles which alone pass current at the present day.”
“I agree in what you say,” said the banker. “You have spoken from the standpoint of the times. The controlling power is the majority.”
“Shund, then, accurately summed up the creed of the present age when he said, ‘Progress conquers death, destroys hell, rejects heaven, and finds its god in the sweet enjoyment of life.’ It is to be hoped that all‐ powerful progress will next decree that there are no death and no suffering upon earth, that all the hostile forces of nature have ceased, that want and misery are no more, and that earth is a paradise of sweet enjoyment for all.”
Mr. Seicht was rather taken aback by this satire.
“Besides, gentlemen,” proceeded Gerlach, “you will please observe that the doctrine of state supremacy is a step backward of nearly two thousand years. In Nero’s day, but one source of right, namely, the state, was recognized. In the head of the state, the emperor, were centred all power, all authority, and all right. In his person, the state was exalted into a divinity. Temples and altars were reared to the emperor; sacrifices were offered to him; he was worshipped as a deity. Even human sacrifices were not denied him if the imperial divinity thought proper to demand them. And, now, to what condition did these monstrous errors bring the world of that period? It became one vast theatre of crime, immorality, and despotism. Slavery coiled itself about men and things, and strangled their liberty. Matrimonial life sank into the most loathsome corruption. Infanticide was permitted to pass unpunished. The licentiousness of women was even greater than that of men. Life and property became mere playthings for the whims of the emperor and of his courtiers. Did the divine Caesar wish to amuse his deeply sunken subjects, he had only to order the gladiators to butcher one another, or some prisoners or slaves or Christians to be thrown to tigers and panthers; this made a Roman holiday. Such, gentlemen, was human society when it recognized no supersensible world, no God above, no moral law. If our own progress proceeds much further in the path on which it is marching, it will soon reach a similar fearful stage. We already see in our midst the commencement of social corruption. We have the only source of right proclaimed to be the divine state. Conscience is being tyrannized over by a majority that rejects God and denies future rewards and punishments. All the rest, even to the divine despot, has already followed, or inevitably will follow. Therefore, Mr. Seicht, the progress you so loudly boast of is mere stupid retrogression, blind superstition, which falls prostrate before the majority of a mob, and worships the omnipotence of the state.”
“Don’t you think my friend has been uttering some very bitter truths?” asked the banker, with a smile.
“Pretty nearly so,” replied the official demurely. “However, one can detect the design, and cannot help getting out of humor.”
“What design?” asked Seraphin.
“Of creating alarm against progress.”
“Indeed, sir, you are mistaken. I, too, am enthusiastic about progress, but genuine progress. And because I am an advocate of real progress I cannot help detesting the monstrosity which the age would wish to palm off on men instead.”
The church was now cleared. Greifmann’s carriage was at the door. The millionaires drove off.
“Pity for this Gerlach!” thought the official, as he strode through the street. “He is lost to progress, for he is too solidly rooted in superstition to be reclaimed. War against nature’s claims; deny healthy physical nature its rights; re‐establish the reign of terror of the seven capital sins; permit the priesthood to tyrannize over conscience; restore the worship of an unmathematical triune God—no! no!” cried he fiercely, “sooner shall all go to the devil!”
A carriage whirled past him. He cast a glance into the vehicle, and raised his hat to Mr. Hans Shund.
The chief magistrate was on his way home from the town‐hall. He could not rest under the weight of his laurels; the inebriation of his triumph drove him into the room where sat his lonely and careworn wife.
“My election to the assembly is assured, wife.” And he went on with a minute account of the proceedings of the day.
The pale, emaciated lady sat bowed in silence over her work, and did not look up.
“Well, wife, don’t you take any interest in the honors won by your husband? I should think you ought to feel pleased.”
“All my joys are swallowed up in an abyss of unutterable wretchedness,” replied she. “And my husband is daily deepening the gulf. Yesterday you were again at a disreputable house. Your abominable deeds are heaped mountain high—and am I to rejoice?”
“A thousand demons, wife, I’m beginning to believe you have spies on foot!”
“I have not. But you are at the head of this city—your steps cannot possibly remain unobserved.”
“Very well!” cried he, “it shall be my effort in the assembly to bring about such a change that there shall no longer be any houses of disrepute. Narrow‐minded moralists shall not be allowed to howl any longer. The time is at hand, old lady—so‐called disreputable houses are to become places of amusement authorized by law.”
He spoke and disappeared.
Chapter IX. Progress Grows Jolly.
The agitators of progress were again hurrying through the streets and alleys of the town. They knocked at every door and entered every house to solicit votes in favor of common schools. Thanks to the overwhelming might of the party in power, they again carried their measure. Dependent, utterly enslaved, many yielded up their votes without opposition. It is true conscience tortured many a parent for voting against his convictions, for sacrificing his children to a system with which he could not sympathize; but not a man in a dependent position had the courage to vindicate for his child the religious training which was being so ruthlessly swept away. Even men in high office gave way before the encroaching despotism, for in the very uppermost ranks of society also progress domineered.
One man only, fearless and firm, dared to put himself in the path of the dominant power—the Rev. F. Morgenroth. From the pulpit, he unmasked and scathed the unchristian design of debarring youth from religious instruction, and of rearing a generation ignorant of God and of his commandments. He warned parents against the evil, entreated them to stand up conscientiously for the spiritual welfare of their children, to reject the common schools, and to rescue the little ones for the maternal guardianship of the church.
His sermon roused the entire progressionist camp. The local press fiercely assailed the intrepid clergyman. Lies, calumnies, and scurrility were vomited against him and his profession. Hans Shund seized the pen, and indited newspaper articles of such a character as one would naturally look for from a thief, usurer, and debauchee. Morgenroth paid no attention to their disgraceful clamor, but continued his opposition undismayed. By means of placards, he invited the Catholic citizens to assemble at his own residence, for the purpose of consulting about the best mode of thwarting the designs of the liberals. This unexpected fearlessness put the men of culture, humanity, and freedom beside themselves with rage. They at once decided upon making a public demonstration. The chieftains issued orders to their bands, and these at the hour appointed for the meeting mustered before the residence of the priest. A noisy multitude, uttering threats, took possession of the churchyard. If a citizen attempted to make his way through the mob to the house, he was loaded with vile epithets, at times even with kicks and blows. But a small number had gathered around the priest, and these showed much alarm; for outside the billows of progress were surging and every moment rising higher. Stones were thrown at the house, and the windows were broken. Parteiling, the commissary of police, came to remonstrate with the clergyman.
“Dismiss the meeting,” said he. “The excitement is assuming alarming proportions.”
“Commissary, we are under the protection of the law and of civil rule,” replied Morgenroth. “We are not slaves and helots of progress. Are we to be denied the liberty of discussing subjects of great importance in our own houses?”
A boulder coming through the window crushed the inkstand on the table, and rolled on over the floor. The men pressed to one side in terror.
“Your calling upon the law to protect you is utterly unreasonable under present circumstances,” said Parteiling. “Listen to the howling. Do you want your house demolished? Do you wish to be maltreated? Will you have open revolution? This all will surely follow if you persist in refusing to dismiss the meeting. I will not answer for results.”
Stones began to rain more densely, and the howling grew louder and more menacing.
“Gentlemen,” said Morgenroth to the men assembled, “since we are not permitted to proceed with our deliberations, we will separate, with a protest against this brutal terrorism.”
“But, commissary,” said a much frightened man, “how are we to get away? These people are infuriated; they will tear us in pieces.”
“Fear nothing, gentlemen; follow me,” spoke the commissary, leading the way.
The ultramontanes were hailed with a loud burst of scornful laughter. The commissary, advancing to the gate, beckoned silence.
“In the name of the law, clear the place!” cried he.
The mob scoffed and yelled.
“Fetch out the slaves of the priest—make them run the gauntlet—down with the Jesuits!”
At this moment, a man was noticed elbowing his way through the crowd; presently Hans Shund stepped before the embarrassed guardian of public order.
“Three cheers for the magistrate!” vociferated the mob.
Shund made a signal. Profound silence followed.
“Gentlemen,” spoke the chief magistrate, in a tone of entreaty, “have the goodness to disperse.”
Repeated cheers were raised, then the accumulation of corrupt elements began to dissolve and flow off in every direction.
“I deeply regret this commotion of which I but a moment ago received intelligence,” said Shund. “The excitement of the people is attributable solely to the imprudent conduct of Morgenroth.”
“To be sure—to be sure!” assented Parteiling.
The place was cleared. The Catholics hurried home pursued and hooted by straggling groups of rioters.
The signs of the approaching celebration began to be noticeable on the town‐common. Booths were being erected, tables were being disposed in rows which reached further than the eye could see, wagon‐loads of chairs and benches were being brought from all parts of town, men were busy sinking holes for climbing‐poles and treacherous turnstiles; but the most attractive feature of all the festival was yet invisible—free beer and sausages furnished at public cost. The rumor alone, however, of such cheer gladdened the heart of every thirsty voter, and contributed greatly to the establishment of the system of common schools. Bands of music paraded the town, gathered up voters, and escorted them to the polls. As often as they passed before the residence of a progressionist chieftain, the bands struck up an air, and the crowd cheered lustily. They halted in front of the priest’s residence also. The band played, “To‐day we’ll taste the parson’s cheer,” the mob roaring the words, and then winding up with whistling and guffaws of laughter. This sort of disorderly work was kept up during three days. Then was announced in the papers in huge type: “An overwhelming majority of the enlightened citizens of this city have decided in favor of common schools. Herewith the existence of these schools is secured and legalized.”
On the fourth day, the celebration came off. The same morning Gerlach senior arrived at the Palais Greifmann on his way home from the Exposition.
“I am so glad!” cried Louise. “I was beginning to fear you would not come, and getting provoked at your indifference to the interests of our people. We have been having stirring times, but we have come off victorious. The narrow‐minded enemies of enlightenment are defeated. Modern views now prevail, and education is to be remodelled and put in harmony with the wants of our century.”
“Times must have been stirring, for you seem almost frenzied, Louise,” said Conrad.
“Had you witnessed the struggle and read the newspapers, you, too, would have grown enthusiastic,” declared the young lady.
“Even quotations advanced,” said the banker. “It astonished me, and I can account for it only by assuming that the triumph of the common‐school system is of general significance and an imperative desideratum of the times.”
“How can you have any doubt about it?” cried his sister. “Our town has pioneered the way: the rest of Germany will soon adopt the same system.”
Seraphin greeted his father.
“Well, my son, you very likely have heard nothing whatever of this hubbub about schools?”
“Indeed, I have, father. Carl and I were in the midst of the commotion at the desecrated church of S. Peter. We saw and heard what it would have been difficult to imagine.” He then proceeded to give his father a minute account of the meeting. His powerful memory enabled him to repeat Shund’s speech almost verbatim. The father listened attentively, and occasionally directed a glance of observation at the young lady. When Shund’s coarse ridicule of Christian morals and dogmas was rehearsed, Mr. Conrad lowered his eyes, and a frown flitted over his brow. For the rest, his countenance was, as usual, cold and stern.
“This Mr. Shund made quite a strong speech,” said he, in a nonchalant way.
“He rather intensified the colors of truth, ’tis true,” remarked Louise. “The masses, however, like high coloring and vigorous language.”
A servant brought the banker a note.
“Good! Shund is elected to the assembly! The span of bays belongs to me,” exulted Carl Greifmann.
“Your bays Seraphin?” inquired the father. “How is this?”
Mr. Conrad had twice been informed of the wager; he had learned it first from Seraphin’s own lips, then also he had read of it in his diary; still he asked again, and his son detailed the story a third time.
“I should sooner have expected to see the heavens fall than to lose that bet,” added Seraphin.
“When a notorious thief and usurer is elected to the chief magistracy and to the legislative assembly, the victory gained is hardly a creditable one to the spirit of progress, my dear Carl. Don’t you think so, Louise?” said the landholder.
“You mustn’t be too rigorous,” replied the lady, with composure. “Rumor whispers many a bit of scandal respecting Shund which does, indeed, offend one’s sense of propriety; for all that, however, Shund will play his part brilliantly both in the assembly and in the town council. The greatest of statesmen have had their foibles, as everybody knows.”
“Very true,” said Gerlach dryly. “Viewed from the standpoint of very humane tolerance, Shund’s disgusting habits may be considered justifiable.”
Seraphin left the parlor, and retired to his room. Here he wrestled with violent feelings. His father’s conduct was a mystery to him. Opinions which conflicted with his own most sacred convictions, and principles which brought an indignant flush to his cheek, were listened to and apparently acquiesced in by his father. Shund’s abominable diatribe had not roused the old gentleman’s anger; Louise’s avowed concurrence with the irreligious principles of the chieftain had not even provoked his disapprobation.
“My God, my God! can it be possible?” cried he in an agony of despair. “Has the love of gain so utterly blinded my father? Can he have sunk so low as to be willing to immolate me, his only child, to a base speculation? Can he be willing for the sake of a million florins to bind me for life to this erring creature, this infidel Louise? Can a paltry million tempt him to be so reckless and cruel? No! no! a thousand times no!” exclaimed he. “I never will be the husband of this woman, never—I swear it by the great God of heaven! Get angry with me, father, banish me from your sight—it would be more tolerable than the consciousness of being the husband of a woman who believes not in the Redeemer of the world. I have sworn—the matter is for ever settled.” He threw himself into an arm‐ chair, and moodily stared at the opposite wall. By degrees, his excitement subsided, and he became quiet.
In fancy, he beheld beside Louise’s form another lovely one rise up—that of the girl with the golden hair, the bright eyes, and the winning smile. She had stood before him on this very floor, in her neat and simple country garb, radiant with innocence and purity, adorned with innate grace and uncommon beauty. And the lapse of days, far from weakening, had deepened the impression of her first apparition. The storm that had been raging in his interior was allayed by the recollection of Mechtild, as the fury of the great deep subsides upon the reappearance of the sun. Scarcely an hour had passed during which he had not thought of the girl, rehearsed every word she had uttered, and viewed the basket of grapes she had brought him. Again he pulled out the drawer, and looked upon the gift with a friendly smile; then, locking up the precious treasure, he returned to the parlor.
He found the company on the balcony. The sound of trumpets and drums came from a distance, and presently a motley procession was seen coming up the nearest street.
“You have just arrived in time to see the procession,” cried Louise to him. “It is going to defile past here, so we will be able to have a good look at it.”
A dusky swarm of boys and half‐grown youths came winding round the nearest street‐corner, followed immediately by the head of a mock procession. In the lead marched a fellow dressed in a brown cloak, the hood of which was drawn over his head. His waist was encircled with a girdle from which dangled a string of pebbles representing a rosary. To complete the caricature of a Capuchin, his feet were bare, excepting a pair of soles which were strapped to them with thongs of leather. In his hands he bore a tall cross rudely contrived with a couple of sticks. The image of the cross was represented by a broken mineral‐water bottle. Behind the cross‐ bearer followed the procession in a double line, consisting of boys, young men, factory‐hands, drunken mechanics, and such other begrimed and besotted beings as progress alone can count in its ranks. The members of the procession were chanting a litany; at the same time they folded their hands, made grimaces, turned their eyes upwards, or played unseemly pranks with genuine rosary beads.
Next in the procession came a low car drawn by a watery‐eyed mare which a lad bedizened like a clown was leading by the bridle. In the car sat a fat fellow whose face was painted red, and eyebrows dyed, and who wore a long artificial beard. Over a prodigious paunch, also artificial, he had drawn a long white gown, over which again he wore a many‐colored rag shaped like a cope. On his head he wore a high paper cap, brimless; around the cap were three crowns of gilt paper to represent the tiara of the pope. A sorry‐looking donkey walked after the car, to which it was attached by a rope. It was the rôle of the fellow in the car to address the donkey, make a sign of blessing over it, and occasionally reach it straw drawn from his artificial paunch. As often as he went through this manœuvre, the crowd set up a tremendous roar of laughter. The fat man in the car represented the pope, and the donkey was intended to symbolize the credulity of the faithful.
This mock pope was not a suggestion of Shund’s or of any other inventive progressionist. The whole idea was copied from a caricature which had appeared in a widely circulating pictorial whose only aim and pleasure it has been for years to destroy the innate religious nobleness of the German people by means of shallow wit and vulgar caricatures. And this very sheet, leagued with a daily organ equally degraded, can boast of no inconsiderable success. The rude and vulgar applaud its witticisms, the low and infamous regale themselves with its pictures, and its demoralizing influence is infecting the land.
The principal feature of the procession was a wagon, hung with garlands and bestuck with small flags, drawn by six splendid horses. In it sat a youthful woman, plump and bold. Her shoulders were bare, the dress being an exaggerated sample of the style décolleté; above her head was a wreath of oak leaves. She was attended by a number of young men in masks. They carried drinking‐horns, which they filled from time to time from a barrel, and presented to the bacchante, who sipped from them; then these gentlemen in waiting drank themselves, and poured what was left upon the crowd. A band of music, walking in front of this triumphal car, played airs and marches. Not even the mock pope was as great an object of admiration as this shameless woman. Old and young thronged about the wagon, feasting their lascivious eyes on this beastly spectacle which represented that most disgusting of all abominable achievements of progress—the emancipated woman. And perhaps not even progress could have dared, in less excited times, so grossly to insult the chaste spirit of the German people; but the social atmosphere had been made so foul by the abominations of the election, and the spirits of impurity had reigned so absolutely during the canvass in behalf of common schools, that this immoral show was suffered to parade without opposition.
The very commencement of this sacrilegious mockery of religion had roused Seraphin’s indignation, and he had retired from the balcony. His father, however, had remained, coolly watching the procession as it passed, and carefully noting Louise’s remarks and behavior.
“What does that woman represent?” he asked. “A goddess of liberty, I suppose?”
“Only in one sense, I think,” replied the progressionist young lady. “The woman wearing the crown symbolizes, to my mind, the enjoyment of life. She typifies heaven upon earth, now that exact science has done away with the heaven of the next world.”
“I should think yon creature rather reminds one of hell,” said Mr. Conrad.
“Of hell!” exclaimed Louise, in alarm. “You are jesting, sir, are you not?”
“Never more serious in my life, Louise. Notice the shameless effrontery, the baseness and infamy of the creature, and you will be forced to form conclusions which, far from justifying the expectation of peace and happiness in the family circle, the true sphere of woman, will suggest only wrangling, discord, and hell upon earth.”
The young lady did not venture to reply. A gentleman made his way through the crowd, and waved his hat to the company on the balcony. The banker returned the salutation.
“Official Seicht,” said he.
“What! an officer of the government in this disreputable crowd!” exclaimed Gerlach, with surprise.
“He is on hand to maintain order,” explained Greifmann. “You see some policemen, too. Mr. Seicht sympathizes with progress. At the last meeting, he made a speech in favor of common schools; he sounded the praises of the gospel of progress, gave a toast at the banquet to the gospel of progress, and has won for himself the title of evangelist of progress. He once declared, too, that the very sight of a priest rouses his blood, and they now pleasantly call him the parson‐eater. He is very popular.”
“I am amazed!” said Gerlach. “Mr. Seicht dishonors his office. He advocates common schools, insults all the believing citizens of his district, and runs with mock processions—a happy state of things, indeed!”
“His conduct is the result of careful calculation,” returned Greifmann.
“By showing hostility to ultramontanism, he commends himself to progress, which is in power.”
“But the government should not tolerate such disgraceful behavior on the part of one of its officials,” said Gerlach. “The entire official corps is disgraced so long as this shallow evangelist of progress is permitted to continue wearing the uniform.”
“You should not be so exacting,” cried Louise. “Why will you not allow officials also to float along with the current of progress until they will have reached the Eldorado of the position to which they are aspiring?”
“The corruption of the state must be fearful indeed, when such deportment in an officer is regarded as a recommendation,” rejoined Mr. Conrad curtly.
A servant appeared to call them to table.
“Would you not like to see the celebration?” inquired Louise.
“By all means,” answered Gerlach. “The excitement is of so unusual a character that it claims attention. You will have to accompany us, Louise.”
“I shall do so with pleasure. When sound popular sentiment thus proclaims itself, I cannot but feel a strong desire to be present.”
The procession had turned the corner of a street where stood Holt and two more countrymen looking on. The religious sentiment of these honest men was deeply wounded by the profanation of the cross; and when, besides, they heard the singing of the mock litany, their anger kindled, their eyes gleamed, and they mingled fierce maledictions with the tumult of the mob. Next appeared the mock pope, dispensing blessings with his right hand, reaching straw to the donkey with his left, and distorting his painted face into all sorts of farcical grimaces.
The peasants at once caught the significance of this burlesque. Their countenances glowed with indignation. Avenging spirits took possession of Mechtild’s father; his strong, stalwart frame seemed suddenly to have become herculean. His fist of iron doubled itself; there was lightning in his eyes; like an infuriated lion, he burst into the crowd, broke the line of the procession, and, directing a tremendous blow at the head of the mock pope, precipitated him from the car. The paper cap flew far away under the feet of the bystanders, and the false beard got into the donkey’s mouth. When the mock pope was down, Holt’s comrades immediately set upon him, and tore the many‐colored rag from his shoulders. Then commenced a great tumult. A host of furious progressionists surrounded the sturdy countrymen, brandishing their fists and filling the air with mad imprecations.
“Kill the dogs! Down with the accursed ultramontanes!”
Some of the policemen hurried up to prevent bloodshed. Mr. Seicht also hurried to the scene of action, and his shrill voice could be heard high above the noise and confusion.
“Gentlemen, I implore you, let the law have its course, gentlemen!” cried he. “Gentlemen, friends, do not, I beg you, violate the law! Trust me, fellow‐citizens—I shall see that the impertinence of these ultramontanes is duly punished.”
They understood his meaning. Sticks and fists were immediately lowered.
“Brigadier Forchhaem,” cried Mr. Seicht, in a tone of command—“Forchhaem, hither! Put handcuffs on these ultramontanes, these disturbers of the peace—put irons on these revolutionists.”
Handcuffs were forthwith produced by the policemen. The towering, broad‐ shouldered Holt stood quiet as a lamb, looked with an air of astonishment at the confusion, and suffered himself to be handcuffed. His comrades, however, behaved like anything but lambs. They laid about them with hands and feet, knocking down the policemen, and giving bloody mouths and noses to all who came within their reach.
“Handcuff us!” they screamed, grinding their teeth, bleeding and cursing. “Are we cutthroats?” The bystanders drew back in apprehension. The confusion seemed to be past remedying. A thousand voices were screaming, bawling, and crying at the same time; the circle around the struggling countrymen was getting wider and wider; and when finally they attempted to break through, the crowd took to flight, as if a couple of tigers were after them.
Many of the spectators found a pleasurable excitement in watching the battle between the policemen and the peasants; but they would not move a finger to aid the officers of the law in arresting the culprits. They admired the agility and strength of the countrymen, and the more fierce the struggle became, the greater grew their delight, and the louder their merriment.
Holt had been carried on with the motion of the crowd. When he dealt the blow to the fellow in the car, he was beside himself with rage. The genuine furor teutonicus had taken possession of him so irresistibly and so bewilderingly as to leave him utterly without any of the calm judgment necessary to measure the situation. After his first adventure, he had submitted to be handcuffed, and had watched the struggle between Forchhaem and his own comrades in a sort of absence of mind. He had stood perfectly quiet, his face had become pale, and his eyes looked about strangely. The excitement of passion was now beginning to wear off. He felt the cold iron of the manacles around his wrists, his eyes glared, his face became crimson, the sinews of his powerful arm stiffened, and with one great muscular convulsion he wrenched off the handcuffs. Nobody had observed this sudden action, all eyes being directed to the combatants. Shoving the part of the handcuff which still hung to his wrist under the sleeve of his jacket, Holt disappeared through the crowd.
The resistance of the peasants was gradually becoming fainter. At length they succumbed to overpowering force, and were handcuffed.
“Where is the third one?” cried Seicht. “There were three of them.”
“Where is the third one? There were three of them,” was echoed on every hand, and all eyes sought for the missing one in the crowd.
“The third one has run away, sir,” reported Forchhaem.
“What’s his name?” asked Seicht.
Nobody knew.
A street boy, looking up at the official, ingenuously cried, “’Twas a Tartar.”
Seicht looked down upon the obstreperous little informant.
“A Tartar—do you know him?”
“No; but these here know him,” pointing to the captives.
“What is the name of your comrade?”
“We don’t know him,” was the surly reply.
“Never mind, he will become known in the judicial examination. Off to jail with these rebellious ultramontanes,” the official commanded.
Bound in chains, and guarded by a posse of police, these honest men, whose religious sense had been so wantonly outraged as to have occasioned an outburst of noble indignation, were marched through the streets of the town and imprisoned. They were treated as criminals for a crime, however, the guilt of which was justly chargeable to those very rioters who were enjoying official protection.
The procession moved on to the ground selected for the barbecue. A motley mass, especially of factory‐men, were hard at work upon the scene. The booths, spread far and wide over the common, were thrown open, and around them moved a swarm of thirsty beings drawing rations of beer and sausages, with which, when they had received them, they staggered away to the tables. Degraded‐looking women were also to be seen moving about unsteadily with brimming mugs of beer in their hands. There were several bands of music stationed at different points around the place.
The chieftains of progress, perambulating the ground with an air of triumph, bestowed friendly nods of recognition on all sides, and condescendingly engaged in conversation with some of the rank and file.
Hans Shund approached the awning where the woman with the bare shoulders and indecent costume had taken a seat. She had captivated the gallant chief magistrate, who hovered about her as a raven hovers over a dead carcass. Moving off, he halted within hearing distance, and, casting frequent glances back, addressed immodest jokes to those who occupied the other side of the table, at which they laughed and applauded immoderately.
The men whom Seraphin had met in the subterranean den, on the memorable night before the election, were also present: Flachsen, Graeulich, Koenig, and a host of others. They were regaling themselves with sausages which omitted an unmistakable odor of garlic, and were of a very dubious appearance; interrupting the process of eating with frequent and copious draughts from their beer‐mugs.
“Drink, old woman!” cried Graeulich to his wife. “Drink, I tell you! It doesn’t cost us anything to‐day.”
The woman put the jug to her lips and drained it manfully. Other women who were present screamed in chorus, and the men laughed boisterously.
“Your old woman does that handsomely,” applauded Koth. “Hell and thunder! But she must be a real spitfire.”
Again they laughed uproariously.
“I wish there were an election every day, what a jolly life this would be!” said Koenig. “Nothing to do, eating and drinking gratis—what more would you wish?”
“That’s the way the bigbugs live all the year round. They may eat and drink what they like best, and needn’t do a hand’s turn. Isn’t it glorious to be rich?” cried Graeulich.
“So drink, boys, drink till you can’t stand! We are all of us bigbugs to‐ day.”
“And if things were regulated as they should be,” said Koth, “there would come a day when we poor devils would also see glorious times. We have been torturing ourselves about long enough for the sake of others. I maintain that things will have to be differently regulated.”
“What game is that you are wishing to come at? Show your hand, old fellow!” cried several voices.
“Here’s what I mean: Coffers which are full will have to pour some of their superfluity into coffers which are empty. You take me, don’t you?”
“’Pon my soul, I can’t make you out. You are talking conundrums,” declared Koenig.
“You blockhead, I mean there will soon have to be a partition. They who have plenty will have to give some to those who have nothing.”
“Bravo! Long live Koth!”
“That sort of doctrine is dangerous to the state,” said Flachsen. “Such principles bring about revolutions, and corrupt society.”
“What of society! You’re an ass, Flachsen! Koth is right—partition, partition!” was the cry all round the table.
“As you will! I have nothing against it if only it were practicable,” expostulated Flachsen; “for I, too, am a radical.”
“It is practicable! All things are practicable,” exclaimed Koth. “Our age can do anything, and so can we. Haven’t we driven religion out of the schools? Haven’t we elected Shund for mayor? It is the majority who rule; and, were we to vote in favor of partition to‐morrow, partition would have to take place. Any measure can be carried by a majority, and, since we poor devils are in the majority, as soon as we will have voted for partition it will come without fail.”
“That’s sensible!” agreed they all. “But then, such a thing has never yet been done. Do you think it possible?”
“Anything is possible,” maintained Koth. “Didn’t Shund preach that there isn’t any God, or hell, or devil? Was that ever taught before? If the God of old has to submit to being deposed, the rich will have to submit to it. I tell you, the majority will settle the business for the rich. And if there’s no God, no devil, and no life beyond, well then, you see, I’m capable of laying my hand to anything. If voting won’t do, violence will. Do you understand?”
“Bravo! Hurrah for Koth!”
“There must be progress,” cried Graeulich, “among us as well as others. We are not going to continue all our lives in wretchedness. We must advance from labor to comfort without labor, from poverty to wealth, from want to abundance. Three cheers for progress—hurrah! hurrah!” And the whole company joined in frantically.
“There comes Evangelist Seicht,” cried Koenig. “Though I didn’t understand one word of his speech, I believe he meant well. Although he is an officer of the government, he cordially hates priests. A man may say what he pleases against religion, and the church, and the Pope, and the Jesuits, it rather pleases Seicht. He is a free and enlightened man, is he. Up with your glasses, boys; if he comes near, let’s give him three rousing cheers.”
They did as directed. Men and women cheered lustily. Seicht very condescendingly raised his hat and smiled as he passed the table. The ovation put him in fine humor. Though he had failed in securing a place in the assembly, perhaps the slight would be repaired in the future. Such was the tenor of his thoughts whilst he advanced to the climbing‐pole, around which was assembled a crowd of boys. Quite a variety of prizes, especially tobacco‐pipes, was hanging from the cross‐pieces at the top of the mast. The pole was so smooth that more than ordinary strength and activity were required to get to the top. The greater number of those who attempted the feat gave out and slid back without having gained a prize. There were also grown persons standing around watching the efforts of the boys and young men.
“It’s my turn now,” cried the fellow who had carried the cross in the procession.
“But, first, let me have one more drink—it’ll improve the sliding.” He swallowed the drink hastily, then swaying about as he looked and pointed upward, “Do you see that pipe with tassels to it?” he said. “That’s the one I’m going after.”
Throwing aside his mantle, he began to climb.
“He’ll not get up, he’s drunk,” cried a lad among the bystanders. “Belladonna has given him two pints of double beer for carrying the cross in the procession—that’s what ails him.”
“Wait till I come down, I’ll slap your jaws,” cried the climber.
The spectators were watching him with interest. He was obliged to pause frequently to rest himself, which he did by winding his legs tightly round the pole. At last he reached the top. Extending his arm to take the pipe, it was too short. Climbing still higher, he stretched his body to its greatest length, lost his hold, and fell to the ground. The bystanders raised a great cry. The unfortunate youth’s head had embedded itself in the earth, streams of blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils—he was lifeless.
“He’s dead! It’s all over with him,” was whispered around.
“Carry him off,” commanded Seicht, and then walked on.
One of the bystanders loosed the cross‐piece of the mock crucifix; the corpse was then stretched across the two pieces of wood and carried off the scene. As the body was carried past, the noise and revelry everywhere ceased.
“Wasn’t that the one who carried the cross?” was asked. “Is he dead? Did he fall from the pole? How terrible!”
Even the progressionist revellers were struck thoughtful, so deeply is the sense of religion rooted in the heart of man. Many a one among them, seeing the pale, rigid face of the dead man, understood his fate to be a solemn warning, and fled from the scene in terror.
The progressionist element of the town was much flattered by the presence at its orgies of the wealthiest property owner of the country.
The women had already made the discovery that the millionaire’s only son, Mr. Seraphin Gerlach, was on the eve of marrying a member of the highly respectable house of Greifmann, bankers. But it occasioned them no small amount of surprise that the young gentleman was not in attendance on the beautiful lady at the celebration. Louise’s radiant countenance gave no indication, however, that any untoward occurrence had caused the absence of her prospective husband. The wives and daughters of the chieftains were sitting under an awning sipping coffee and eating cake. When Louise approached leaning on her brother’s arm, they welcomed her to a place in the circle of loveliness with many courtesies and marks of respect.
Mr. Conrad strolled about the place, studying the spirit which animated the gathering.
ὙΠΝΟΣ
Not now for sleep, O slumber‐god! we sue; Hypnus! not sleep, but give our souls repose! Of the day’s music such a mellowing close As might have rested Shakespeare from his art, Or soothed the spirit of the Tuscan strong Who best read life, its passions and its woes, And wrought of sorrow earth’s divinest song. Bring us a mood that might have lulled Mozart, Not stupor, not forgetfulness, not dreams, But vivid sense of what is best and rarest, And sweet remembrance of the blessed few; In the real presence of this fair world’s fairest: A spell of peace—as ’twere by those dear streams(209) Boccaccio wrote of, when romance was new.
A Legend Of Saint Ottilia.
Attich, Duke of Alsace, had a lovely wife, with whom he lived in great happiness, desiring but one thing more than he possessed—this was the blessing of children. His prayers, however, remained unanswered until he vowed that, if the Lord would grant his ardent wish, he would dedicate the child entirely to his service. At length a daughter was born to him, but the parents’ first joy was turned into sadness, for the child was blind.
Ottilia (thus was she named) grew up a lovely maiden, with rare goodness and virtues, showing, from her earliest youth, singular piety and devoutness of character. One of her daily prayers was that God might bestow on her the gift of sight. By‐and‐by, to the great astonishment of all, this prayer was answered. Beautiful before, the new expression of her eyes so enhanced her charms that, whereas previously she had no lack of suitors, now she was wooed by many and most noble youths. These dazzling prospects affected the mind of her father, and led him to repent the vow he had made to give his sweet child to God. Then Count Adelhart, a brave man, and one who had performed great services for Attich, claimed the hand of Ottilia, and the duke resolved that his daughter should become his wife. Ottilia heard this with terror; she told her father how wrong she believed it to be, and how she feared the vengeance of heaven if they thus disregarded his vow. Seeing, however, that her entreaties were of no avail, and that they meant to marry her by compulsion, she fled she knew not whither. Then Attich called out his servants to pursue her, he himself, in company with Ottilia’s suitor, taking the lead. They took the road to Freiburg, in Breisgau.
The day began to decline, and their efforts to find her had been in vain, when, on riding up a hill from whose top they could overlook the country, they heard a cry; turning their eyes toward the place from whence the sound came, they saw her whom they were seeking standing on the summit. They urged their steeds onward, rejoicing in the certainty of capturing the fugitive. Then Ottilia threw herself upon her knees, and prayed to heaven for assistance. The rock opened beneath her feet, and, in the sight of all, she sank into the yawning depth. The rock closed again, and, from the spot where it had been reft in twain, a clear well flowed, taking its course downward into the forest below.
The mourning father returned to his now desolate home. Never again did he behold Ottilia.
The wonderful tale soon spread far and near. The fountain became a place of pilgrimage. People drank from its waters, to which a wonderful healing influence for weak eyes was attributed. A hermit built his hut in its neighborhood, and “The Well of S. Ottilia” was and is much frequented by old and young. The mountain itself bears the name of “Ottilia‐Berg.”
Thus runs the simple legend which, even after the lapse of centuries, brings people to visit this famous spring, partly drawn thither by religious faith in the curative power of its waters, and partly attracted by the renowned beauty of the scenery which surrounds the spot where heaven‐trusting Ottilia had thrown herself upon the intervention of Providence.
The Year Of Our Lord 1872.
There lurks a grim sarcasm in our title for those who, as the years grow and die out one after the other, ask each in turn: What have you brought us? what growth of good and lessening of evil? what new bond to link the scattered and divided masses of a humanity which should be common—but is not—more closely and firmly together? Have you brought us a step nearer heaven, that is, nearer the destiny which God marked out in the beginning for his creation, or thrown us backward? Years are the days of the world, of national life; and as each closes, even the superior minds which will not deign to believe in such old‐fashioned words as a God, a heaven, or a hell, cannot fail to ask themselves the question, What has the world gained or lost in this its latest day?
We know that we shall be greeted at the outset by the old cry:—Catholics behind the age again: it is plain their religion was not made for the XIXth century; they will drift backward and sigh for the days that were, the gloom and the mist and the superstition of the “ages of faith”: they refuse to recognize the century, to understand it and its glorious enlightenment: they decline to march hand in hand with the great leaders, the apostles of the day, in politics, science, and religion—the Bismarcks, the Lanzas, the Mills, the Fawcetts, the Bradlaughs, the Döllingers, the Beechers, the Huxleys, the Buckles, the Darwins, the novelists, and the newspapers; the “enlightened” ideas of the age on marriage, education, civil government, and the rest. We humbly plead guilty to the greater portion of this charge. Modern enlightenment, as preached by the apostles above enumerated, and others such, possesses still too few charms to win us from our benighted ignorance. To us Utopia appears as far off to‐day as when it grew upon the mind of Sir Thomas More in the shape of a dream too splendid to be realized; as far off as the fairyland which presented itself to our youthful imagination, where everybody was goody‐goody, where all were kings and queens with crowns and sceptres, or lovely princesses and amiable princes, who loved each other with the most ardent nursery love, and with only one crabbed old fairy to spoil the scene, whose witcheries caused the amiable princes to undergo a certain amount of mild misfortunes, creating a corresponding amount of misery in the bosoms of the lovely princesses, till at length the old harridan was overridden to her shame and confusion, truth and virtue triumphed, everybody married everybody else, and there was peace and joy for ever after. To drop fancy: the story of the year would not seem to bring happier tidings of the great joy which was announced at the coming of Christ: of “peace on earth to men of good‐will.” “Civilized” governments still hold fast by the good old rule,
That he may take who has the power, And he may keep who can.
We purpose passing in review a few of the chief events which have moved the world during the past year and made its annals memorable in all time. Our review must necessarily be a rapid one, a mere glance in fact, at the multitude of events which confront us, some like ghosts which we have summoned from their graves in the buried year, others which accompany us into the new and the unknown to ripen or wither with us into their measure of good or of evil.
As the year opened, the eyes of the world were fixed upon the sick‐bed of the Prince of Wales, stricken down by fever apparently beyond hope of recovery. The whole thing is long forgotten; but the anxiety which his illness caused—in view of the possible political complications which might have resulted from the death of the heir to the English throne—and the enthusiasm which his recovery evoked from end to end of the land, makes the event worthy of mention in the record of the year as significant of the innate as well as outspoken loyalty of the English nation for their crown and institution—a national trait which it is becoming fashionable to question.
Our own year opened tragically with the murder of Fisk by Stokes, his boon companion. The man’s end was in keeping with his life, and his name should not have sullied our pages, but for the consequent collapse of the long triumphant Erie Ring. The era of blood thus commenced has flourished bravely. Quid novi? quid novi? was the daily cry at Athens when S. Paul entered it. We would not demean the commercial metropolis of the New World and of the new age by comparing it with the intellectual metropolis of paganism; but as the cry of the Athenians was each day: What new system, doctrine, or philosophy is there? the question of our more enlightened and Christian capital might well be: What new thing in the way of murder? Scarcely a day passes but some fresh horror greets our eyes in the morning. Nor is it left to the hand of man alone to take life as he pleases; the privilege has passed to women, and they make right good use of this latest form of their “rights.” We read till our blood curdles of the political poisonings of the XVIth century in Italy; of their secrecy and the safety of their carrying out. We are a more honest race than the Italians; we enshroud our deeds of blood in no false Machiavellian veil; we kill in open day. The lady or gentleman who has just taken away a life politely hands the pistol to the officer, who escorts him or her with the utmost courtesy to the police station, where a cell is luxuriously fitted up according to the exigencies of the case; the murderer stands up in open court, with the ablest champions to defend him; he calls upon the law to save him, and the “law” does. In the meantime obtuse people are beginning to inquire if there be such a thing as law in New York, and in America generally, and if the present administration of justice be not very closely allied to administering injustice.
We have felt compelled to touch on this point at some length; for murder, cool, deliberate, wilful murder, has marked our year with a red stain which was never dry; the murderers have either escaped or are living at ease and being “lionized” by the press in their prisons; justice is not administered among us. So true is this, that outraged public feeling, which requires a very heavy force to set its inertia in motion, has at length found it necessary to begin to weed the judiciary. Until it does so thoroughly, the law of New York is the law of the bullet and the knife.
If we were not above taking a lesson from people for whom we entertain, of course, a sovereign contempt, we might find something commendable in the action of the populace in Lima, Peru, on the occasion of the murder of Colonel Balta, the president, by Guttierez, the minister of war; who, in order to attain supreme power, caused Balta to be assassinated, having previously gained over the garrison of Lima, and had himself proclaimed dictator. The people, finding reason to object to this summary mode of settling questions, refused to accept this dictatorship; rose in revolt, overpowered the garrison, hanged the dictator and his brother to lamp‐ posts in the public square, and burned their bodies. We, are far from advocating the cause of “Judge Lynch”; but a slight touch of the sensible spirit displayed by the inhabitants of Lima has a wonderfully wholesome effect on evil doers in power.
Our political life for the past year has been absorbed in the presidential election and the settlement of the Alabama claims. This latter very vexed question has come at last to a final, peaceful, and satisfactory solution. Our claim for “indirect damages” against England was ruled out of court. An adequate propitiation was made in the final decision, given in our favor: England was compelled to pay us £3,000,000; she is supposed to have lost very much in prestige in consequence; particularly as the San Juan boundary question was also decided in our favor; the whole thing was settled by peaceful arbitration, and, therefore, no matter which party lost in prestige, or diplomacy, or pocket, both have good reason to congratulate themselves on getting out of sight, let us ardently hope, for ever, a very ugly question which was fast becoming a gangrene, corroding and eating out all good feeling between the two nations. It is one of the things which we sincerely trust may be buried with the dead year; and the two rival claimants we hope to see enter on a new lease of friendship and good‐will.
General Grant was re‐elected; the opposition arrayed against him under Mr. Greeley as candidate for the presidency, and such very able secessionists from the republican ranks as Messrs. Sumner, Schurz, and others, and the attempted coalescing of Democrats with dissatisfied Republicans, who would not coalesce, utterly broke down. General Grant’s is undoubtedly a national election: we trust, therefore, that his future term may correspond with the confidence placed in his rule by the nation; may be productive of all the good which we expect of it for the nation at large; may heal up old wounds still sore, and may lead the country wisely into a new era of prosperity and peace: the more so that the outer world is fast pouring in on us the most skilled artisans and law‐abiding, intelligent citizens of every European race.
Having said so much for ourselves, we turn to the workings of events in Europe during the past year, which indeed have occupied our attention more, almost, than our home questions. Our gaze has been riveted with an interest of almost painful intensity on the two contestants during the late dread struggle, and the actions and bearing of each have brought out the inner character of the two nations in such strong relief that we can think of Germany and France as two individualities. On the one side, we behold United Germany, the victor in the fight, like a strong athlete glorying in his great strength, setting on his own brow the laurels which he plucked from that of his fallen foe; not resting on his honors, and satiated for the time being with his glory, but anxious, careful, trying his strength, not letting his arms rust for want of practice, preparing himself for new glories and new contests to come as though they were to come to‐morrow, and as a matter of course. On the other, we have France wounded and bleeding at every pore. We thought its life had ebbed out, stricken first by the terrible blows of a merciless conqueror, after by a delirious contest with itself. And what do we behold? No longer a weak convalescent, sick, sore, and spiritless, but a great nation, infused with a new life; strong and gaining in strength every day; cautious indeed and still uncertain, but these are not bad signs in a nation which is recovering at however rapid strides, and which fell from its overweening confidence. It has almost exhausted its terrible debt to Germany, and rid the soil of the foot of the foe. Its loans were eagerly taken up and covered four times over: its exports for the first six months of the year were in advance of those for the corresponding six months, esteemed a period of great prosperity, prior to the war; its army is again on a firm and sound footing; its children are peaceful, calm and obedient to the law in the face of the tyranny and unnecessarily harsh measures and dictation of the conqueror and the rash declamations of Gambetta, biding their time with a calm good sense which we scarcely expected in the French people. Of course the nation is taxed and heavily; but the wonder is that a nation can endure such blows and live; can not only live, but present to the admiration and astonished gaze of the world, a year after what we considered its death and burial, so glorious a resurrection into a powerful and wealthy country. As these two nations have been the centre of attraction to the whole world during the year, we feel called upon to touch upon each in a more special manner than on other nations.
On April 7th, the Emperor William delivered a speech from the throne, from which we cull the following extract:
“Honored Gentlemen: You will share the satisfaction with which the Confederate Governments look back on the events of the first year of the newly founded German Empire, and the joyful confidence with which they look forward to the further national and state development of our internal institutions. With equal satisfaction you will hail the assurance that the policy of his majesty, the emperor and king, has succeeded in retaining and strengthening the confidence of all foreign states; that the power acquired by Germany through becoming united in one Empire is not only a safe bulwark for the fatherland, but likewise affords a strong guarantee for the peace of Europe.”
Now, that sounds so well, at least it did in April last, that it is almost a pity to spoil it by the inevitable comments which cannot fail to present themselves to the minds of its readers in December, in the face of one or two little events which have occurred since April. But before commenting on it, we must add a further exquisite little piece of irony from the same speech of Bismarck’s—we mean of the Emperor William: Prince Bismarck only read it:
“The new administration in, and the consolidation of the affairs of, Alsace and Lorraine make satisfactory progress. The damage done by the war is gradually disappearing with the aid of the subvention given in conformity with the law, dated June 15, 1871.”
As it is not the purport of this article to go extensively into the various subjects which come under our notice, we think that the best mode of dealing with the German question will be to read the above speech by the December light:
Honored Gentlemen: You will share the satisfaction with which the Confederate Governments look back on the events of the intervening nine months since his majesty, the emperor and king, first found reason to congratulate you on the consolidation of the newly founded empire. Those events are, in brief, as follows:
1. As we consider national education to be the first means in making good, sound, and efficient citizens of the Empire, and as we consider it, moreover, to be the great moralizer of the masses in these days, we have found it necessary to take this education from the hands in which it has rested for so long, “which the Prussia of the past encouraged, and indeed enforced; which have had the honor to receive the zealous support of two deceased monarchs, the father and brother of the present sovereign; which have received for the last two generations the approbation of all sorts of thinkers—who believed that the Prussian state could only subsist by a strict military and religious organization, that a definite church system must be chosen by the state, and the people drilled in it as they were drilled for his majesty’s armies.”(210) Notwithstanding the very solid proofs which our success in the late war gave us of the efficiency of this system, when our soldiers went to battle under the double panoply of intelligence and faith in God, we have since found it fit to divorce religion from education, and place this moralizer of the masses in the hands of those to whom morality is a thing unknown, or, if it mean anything, means blind obedience to the state in all things.
2. Holding as we do that marriage is another powerful moralizer of the masses, and the strongest bond for the welfare, happiness, and power of a nation, we have thought fit to divorce it also from religion, to strip it of the sacred character with which Jesus Christ invested it, and which, even were it false, has been the chief means of restoring woman to her fitting station in life, of civilizing man, and substituting love and purity for sensuality and animal passion: being perfectly alive to all this, we have still seen fit to hand the power of the binding and the loosing of marriage into the hands of the magistracy, to be dealt with for the future as a civil contract, thus reducing it to the far more convenient form of a mere matter of buying and selling at will.
3. Having already testified in the most direct and special manner our gratitude for the great services rendered us by the Society of Jesus and kindred orders recently on the fields of France, and in the more lasting and beneficial fields of intellectual and religious culture under the educational system which obtained so long and with such profit to us, but which we have since seen fit to put an end to, we think it fit to prove their devotion still further to us by banishing them the Empire, breaking up their communities, closing their churches, appropriating their property to our own use and imprisoning them if we find them within our territory. We mercifully spare them the further trial of immediate martyrdom.
4. Having been compelled to meet the demands of two powerful bodies of our subjects whose interests on religious questions sometimes clash, we have very wisely, and very satisfactorily to both bodies, met those demands by special articles in our legislative code which have hitherto answered their purpose so well that both bodies have been enabled to work harmoniously though in friendly rivalry together as common children of fatherland. We have seen fit to erase those laws, at least in the case of the Catholics. We cannot allow their bishops to excommunicate our subjects, though we have hitherto allowed it, and though we still allow it to the Protestants.(211)
Honored Gentlemen: Having thus succeeded in creating a profound and widespread agitation by outraging the feelings and the conscience of 14,000,000 of our most faithful subjects, an agitation which has spread from these 14,000,000 to hundreds of millions of their co‐religionists outside the Empire, and indeed of large bodies and powerful secular organs opposed to them in faith, the confederate governments, the most powerful of which is Catholic, may look forward with joyful confidence to the further national and state development of our institutions. With equal satisfaction you will hail the assurance that the policy of his majesty, the emperor and king, has succeeded in retaining and strengthening the confidence of all foreign states,(212) that the power acquired by Germany is not only a safe bulwark for the fatherland,(213) but likewise affords a strong guarantee for the peace of Europe.
The new administration in, and the consolidation of affairs in, Alsace and Lorraine, have made most satisfactory progress. By careful and well‐ devised management we have succeeded in driving out the population of these two provinces, two of the wealthiest in the world, in rendering their cities desolate and their smiling country a desert: in gaining for ourselves a new legacy of hatred, and arousing the disgust and, what politically is worse, the suspicion of all governments outside our own.
As a further comment on this speech we must add the dangerous symptoms of revolt exhibited by the Upper House in the Prussian diet, and the dubiously constitutional mode adopted of bringing it to submission. The influx of French gold would seem to have created a South Sea Bubble commotion in financial circles. Rent in the chief cities and towns has increased twofold; the cost of living has risen with it. This falls heaviest, of course, on the middle and lower classes, so that we are not surprised to hear, that the rate of living having increased 60 or 70 per cent. for the poorer classes during the last six or seven years, and the French gold never having filtered down to their pockets, the poor have been unable to meet their new expenses, and “ever since the conclusion of peace with France,” to quote the special correspondent of the London Times, April 11th, “the German workmen have been at war with their ‘masters.’ ” As a last comment we see the German people fleeing from this glorious consolidation of confederate governments in such numbers that the central government is compelled to call into practice measures as harsh on the one side to restrain their own people from running away as they used to force out the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine. We believe we have said enough of German “Unity” on its first two years of lease to show that its workings, whether internal or external, have been anything but satisfactory so far, and far from hopeful to the world at large.
The strikes which were successful in Germany were not restricted to that locality. They spread through the greater part of Europe, and reached out here to us, with varied success. New York was in many departments of business at a standstill in what is generally esteemed as the busiest portion of the year. Fortunately with us and for the greater part elsewhere, the “strikes” passed off peaceably, and the masters and workmen succeeded in coming to a compromise at least for the time being. This uprising of labor against capital formed one of the most significant, we fear most threatening, aspects of the year. There was a union and a combination among the working classes of European nations and our own, which enabled them to offer a persistent, solid, and bold front to their employers. Funds and a more perfect organization, neither of which seem to us impossible, would convert trades‐unions into the most formidable power in the world. Christian education can alone hope to convert this into a legal power. At present it wavers between the dictates of good sense and fair demands and the wild and impossible, but, to half‐educated men, very fascinating, dreams of the Communists. Labor is beginning at last to feel its power, its numbers, its irresistible force; that the world cannot get on without it, as little as it can get on without the co‐operation of the rest of the world. Let the laboring classes receive an education worthy of the name, plant religion in their hearts while at school, and, when they come to face the hard problem, the division of wealth, they will be led away by no fallacious teachings that what is and always must be a necessity is a wrong done to humanity; but divorce the schools, as governments seem now resolved to do, from religion, and labor will merge into Communism.
France has borne her terrible trials with a calmness, a magnanimity, and a self‐dependence which have regained for her in the eyes of the world more than she ever lost at Sedan. We speak here of the nation, not of its haphazard government. Thiers is at present a necessity; and by the aid of the bogy “resignation” which he has conjured up so often, and whereby he frightens the still cautious Assembly into submission, he has managed to hold the dangerous elements in such a state of order that the nation has been able so far to regain public confidence that its loans were caught up with avidity; it has almost freed itself from the foot of the foe; it has frowned down the folly of Gambetta; restored its army to a sound footing, and won the admiration and good‐will of all by its truly patriotic bearing in the face of a rapacious, dictatorial, and merciless conqueror. But Thiers cannot last, and what is to follow? The country would not bear the rule of “the man of Sedan,” though, undoubtedly, his twenty years of firm government wrought it up to the pitch of material prosperity which even its terrible losses have been unable to destroy. The speech of the Duc d’Audiffret Pasquier on the army contracts, showing a system of finance in the army somewhat similar to that which has recently greeted our eyes in the city government, has killed Napoleonism for the nonce. We can only hope for the best in France from some other and nobler sprout of former dynasties; we cannot foresee it. We must not forget that the nation has been kneeling at its altars and shrines. Of course superior people and “witty” writers have laughed at and insulted a nation for being foolish enough and so far behind the age as to believe in the assistance of a God whom they could not contain in their capacious intellects. France has survived the laughter and disregarded the laughers; but her sons have been none the less obedient to the laws and constitution established, and thus restored confidence in their country, by acknowledging the efficacy of divine worship, and the intercession of the blessed Mother with her divine Son.
The year has, happily, borne no war stain on its record; for we cannot dignify the English expedition against the Looshais in India by that title. Revolts among the natives have of late been cropping up again in British India, while the silent but steady march of Russia, with all her vast forces, nearer and nearer to the outline of the British possessions, threatens at no distant date an inevitable collision between the two powers, which, in the not very doubtful event of Russia’s victory, would avenge Sebastopol, and, at the same time more than counterbalance the present supremacy of Germany in Europe.
While England was all aglow with the gorgeous story of pomp and pageantry coming from the far East, of reviews of armies, of gallant processions from end to end of the land, of displays of splendor, and more than royal magnificence flashing on the bewildered gaze of the Easterns; outshining in dazzling brilliancy their own “barbaric pearl and gold”—wrought up to win over their allegiance by giving them some idea of the vast power of that empire far away, whose representative could muster such a show of majesty—came a cruel little flash across the world telling us that the show was ended by the death of the chief performer at the hands of an obscure assassin. A few feet in advance of his party, in the gloom of evening, as he is about to step from the pier into his boat, the stroke of a knife from a hidden assailant, and—Lord Mayo, the great Viceroy, is slain. England viewed his death as a national calamity. Following close on the heels of the murder of Mr. Justice Norman by another native, of the outbreaks of the Kookas and the Looshais, it had a significance which the nation took to heart.
From a further corner of the East still comes a dread story of famine devouring 3,000,000 of people in Persia. Small succor was offered them by their Christian brethren: and such as was sent seems to have reached them with the greatest difficulty. Horrible tales are told of hunger overcoming all the ties of nature, and mothers, in their madness, devouring even their own offspring. The harvest for this season was a very excellent one; but its effects cannot be felt till the coming year.
The East has not exhausted its romance yet, though this time it wears a less grim visage. We refer to the discovery of Dr. Livingstone by Mr. Stanley, a reporter of the New York Herald. Everybody believed Dr. Livingstone dead: Mr. Bennett believed him living: he despatched Mr. Stanley to interview him somewhere in the middle of Africa, and Mr. Stanley obeyed as successfully as though he had only been despatched to one of our hotels to “interview” a political man. Of course nobody believed either Stanley or the Herald; and of course there has been much consequent laughing at the “easy‐chair geographers,” when white, after all, turned out to be white and not black, as the learned gentlemen thus designated demonstrated to a nicety. But we should imagine that the persistent doubts of these gentlemen were the highest compliment which could be paid, either to Mr. Stanley or Mr. Bennett, as indicating the almost utter impossibility of their stupendous and brilliant enterprise. To the world at large, the finding of a man, whom, with all due respect, we cannot but look upon as self‐lost, is the least part of the undertaking. Mr. Stanley’s expedition and disclosures of the horrors of the slave trade have awakened a new interest in that horrible traffic, and promises to enlist the sympathies of nations in unison against it.
After a sleep of centuries Japan has reopened her gates to Christian influences and civilization—gates closed since the work so gloriously commenced by S. Francis Xavier was marred by the narrowness and selfishness and unchristian spirit of European traders. The Mikado despatched an embassy under the leadership of one of his chief statesmen, Iwakura, in order to study this boasted civilization and see what it was like. In the meantime, Christians are still suffering persecution and even death in Japan. But why should Iwakura interfere to stop it when he finds “civilized” governments, such as Germany and Italy, setting Japan a brilliant example in the same line of policy?
Correspondents give us reason to dread a fresh outbreak in China similar to the Tientsin massacre. We trust that the representatives of the European powers and our own will be alive to this. Nothing of great import has occurred in the empire beyond the marriage of his Celestial Majesty.
Going back to Europe, we find Spain in much the same state as the opening year found her; restless, dissatisfied, and disunited. A Carlist rising was effected in the spring, which at one time threatened to be formidable; but, after showing itself in fitful bursts at different points, it finally died out, for the time being at least, with a greater loss of gunpowder than of life. It was mismanaged. There were and still are a variety of little eruptions here, there, and everywhere. An attempt on the life of King Amadeo was got up for the purpose of arousing some loyalty in his favor. It created a little sensation at first; but people speedily suspected something, and the subject dropped. All parties in Spain are still at daggers drawn. Even if Amadeo could, by his influence, which we very much doubt after his sufficient trial, conciliate them, they would not be conciliated. We do not expect to find Amadeo’s name at the head of the Spanish government this day twelvemonth. A good regent, not Montpensier, might bring about the restoration of Don Alfonso; but where is such a regent? Don Carlos possesses the greatest amount of genuine loyalty to his name and cause, and he would be the winning man, could he only manage his rising in a more efficient manner. Even the Saturday Review, the other day, almost lamented the loss of Queen Isabella.
The state of Italy is perhaps on a par with that of Spain, with the advantage of the utter lawlessness touched upon in our last number. We are now informed that a bill for the suppression of religious orders is introduced. Of course it will pass. A government which shakes hands with the Garibaldini, which is hand and glove with the murderer and assassin whom it fears, is strong when it comes to the spoliation of religious houses and the persecution of Christian men who it knows will not resist. We cannot pass Italy by—alas! what an Italy it has become!—without one word of admiration for the Holy Father. Men, journalists, all sorts of people, would have driven Pius IX. from Rome long ago. But the pilot is still at the helm of the barque of Peter, though pirates tread the decks. And never during the successive storms which have made his long reign so dark with trial has our great pontiff presented to the angry world a more forcible spectacle of a man utterly above all the pettiness, all the trials, all the misery, which human malice can inflict upon humanity, than at this moment in his own person; looking afar over the troubled waters for the calm which shall come from heaven, and bring men back from their insane mood at the old whisper, “Peace, be still!” He stands there the truest and purest living protest of justice shackled by injustice, and around that prisoned throne range the hearts of all true Catholics and all true men in the world.
In England, the Gladstone Ministry after many threatenings has managed to hold its own, in consequence probably of the successful termination of the Alabama claims. The Ballot Bill has at length passed, and in future we hope to be spared the degrading scenes which were wont to accompany English elections. The Irish Church Establishment has falsified Mr. Gladstone’s high hopes of new life, vigor, efficiency, and so forth, on being deprived of its “temporalities,” which came into act this year. It has come to a miserable collapse, and is now a pauper asking alms to live. The agitation for the disestablishment of the English Church is gaining ground, as is also the Home‐Rule movement in Ireland, which undoubtedly received a fresh impetus from the attack made by a renegade Catholic judge on the Irish clergy and on one of their leaders, Archbishop McHale, whose name is venerated wherever his fame is known. There has been a cry of a coal failure, and a much more serious one, because better founded and more immediate, of a potato failure in Ireland as well as England, which, coupled with the strike of the agricultural laborers and the coming winter, threatens an ugly season. Serious riots incurring a lamentable loss of life and property occurred in Belfast on the repeal of the Parties Processions Act. The rioters held the city in a state of terrorism for days. “Of course the Orangemen began it,” commented the London Spectator; “the worst murder committed, that of Constable Morton, was the murder of a Protestant by Protestants, because he upheld the law.”
In Mexico, the death of President Juarez, the murderer of the unhappy Maximilian, as well as of countless others, whom “people who ought to know” were never tired of calling the saviour of his country, the true patriot, and the like, oddly enough put an end to the internecine strife which was ravaging the country, and everybody suddenly collapsed into peace: “Yet Juarez was an honorable man.”
In the natural order, there have been terrible convulsions, followed, in the closing year, by a succession of tempests on sea and land, productive of dismal disasters. In the spring, an earthquake shook Antioch, and half the city was gone, with a loss of 1,500 inhabitants. In the same month, Vesuvius belched forth torrents of burning lava for days, causing a vast destruction of property and loss of life to a few overcurious sight‐seers. Later on came the inundations of the Po, accompanied by losses more grievous still. Then storms swept the country, and, indeed, all Europe, strewing the shores with wrecked vessels and their crews. Fire touched and marred, but, fortunately, did not succeed in destroying, two of the grandest monuments of European art—the Escurial of Philip II. in Spain, and the Cathedral of Canterbury in England, doubly consecrated—the second time by the blood of the martyred S. Thomas. It was more successful among ourselves; and a few hours’ blaze in the month of November destroyed the finest portion of our most ancient city, Boston.
Among what might be termed the curiosities of the year figured the Boston Jubilee; an assembling together of European bands and singers, with a native chorus of 20,000. It was called music. A second curiosity was the epidemic which recently broke out among the horses, and brought life in New York to a standstill, or at least to a walking pace, for several days. It is to be hoped that means of transit may be devised to prevent the effects of such a casualty in future. A third curiosity was an assembly of recreant priests and others to the number of 400 at Cologne in order to do something. What the something was never appeared. They dined, quarrelled, and separated; while the world was agape to see something arise which should crush God’s Church. Other curiosities were the great trials, civil and military, which took place during the year. Among the former class that of the man known as the “Tichborne Claimant” stands pre‐eminent. The story is too well known to be commented on here; the “claimant’s” case broke down; he was committed to Newgate prison, bailed out, and is now “starring” the country to procure funds for a new trial. The case was remarkable for the strangest and oddest disclosures of character and hidden life from the highest almost to the lowest classes, not only in England, but in many other countries. The trial of Marshal Bazaine for the surrender of Metz, which is still pending, stands foremost in the rank of military trials. Væ victis! Many of Bazaine’s comrades were condemned for premature surrender by the Committee of Inquiry; we shall see whether the once great marshal will be able to come off with a clear escutcheon. Other trials were those of the Communists and the murderers of the Archbishop of Paris and the clergy. As a rule, a more villanous set never stood face to face with justice. They have had full, fair, and exhaustive trials; such as could offer any excuse for their crimes escaped; the others were shot.
Death has been mowing right and left among us with indiscriminating scythe. In Persia he grew weary of his own grim harvest. Eastern Europe was threatened with cholera, but escaped. Some tall heads have fallen among the mean; many whose names are memorable for evil as well as good; many others whose places it would seem hard to fill. The Catholic Church has lost Archbishop Spalding, Bishops McGill and O’Connor in America, Morris and Goss in England, Cardinal Amat in Italy. Their names will live in the church and in her prayers. Anderson and Meade have gone, Seward and Morse, and Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald, and Greeley, the founder of the Tribune. Persigny, and Conti, and Mazzini, each memorable in his way, dropped out during the year. Lever, one of the most genial of Irish novelists, is dead, and his much‐lamented countryman, Maguire, of Cork. The only surviving son of the Duc d’Aumale, a promising young man, was snatched away—an important event, as the claims of this branch of the family to the French throne fall now to the Count de Chambord. Bernadotte, Charles XV. of Sweden, has gone, and was succeeded on the throne by his brother Oscar.
And now, passing from the old, we look to the new, not without anxiety. The war against the church, in reality against the rights of man, the freedom of conscience, commenced in Germany, has spread thence to Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, and, under the form of the educational question, wider and further still. If Catholics would save the souls of their children, and of their children’s children, from the infidelity and the moral decay which we see around us, even in this free breathing atmosphere, they must be firm and united in their resistance to the encroachment of the state, where states possess no rights—over the dictates of conscience. The uprise of labor against capital, which was the real cause of the first French Revolution and its mad excesses, we have already touched upon. It should be a deep source of anxiety and care to true statesmen. War looms on the European horizon, gathers in silent thunder‐clouds all around. A flash is enough to kindle the combustion and make the thunder speak. Who shall say when or whence it comes? Europe is arming, and we have good authority for saying that “the next war will rage over half a century”—Bismarck himself. For the church we foresee an increase of bitter and severe trials. We can only appeal to that enlightenment which the age vaunts; to its common sense and common fairness to allow us the freedom in our own worship which they, if they possess any, claim for themselves. Public opinion is, to a great extent, the lever of the age. We must work at that until we shame it into powerful and persistent action to remove and overthrow the mountain of intolerance, bigotry, and opposition, which rulers, who are neither Protestant nor Catholic, are raising up in order to overwhelm all religion, all right, all freedom.
MY CLERICAL FRIENDS. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1873.
We need not say more than that the above is by the author of that production of exquisite humor and satire, The Comedy of Convocation, to awaken a profound interest in its appearance. This new book from his pen is somewhat similar. It is a choice compound of argument, history, and wit. Its object is to represent the English clerical body as it is, with a special intention of showing the ridiculousness of the claim made by some of its members to the character of Catholic priesthood. The author is the son of a clergyman, and was himself a clergyman, and is at home in his subject. We promise our readers a rare treat in this new and spicy volume.
CONVERSION OF THE TEUTONIC RACE. CONVERSION OF THE FRANKS AND ENGLISH.
SEQUEL TO THE SAME. S. BONIFACE AND THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. By Mrs. Hope. Edited by the Rev. J. B. Dalgairns, of the Oratory. London: Washbourne. 1872. 2 vols. crown 8vo. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Few readers of English books know much of those most splendid and important chapters of history, of which these two volumes contain a summary within a moderate compass. The lady who has written them is a very competent and graceful narrator of historical scenes and events. She has given us the cream of authentic and truly scientific historical works with care and skill, and at the same time she has clothed her narrative with a flowing and agreeable diction. There are scarcely two volumes to be found in the whole mass of recent English literature better worth reading than these. We are delighted, also, to meet again, in the preface of the second volume, with F. Dalgairns, from whose pen nothing ever comes which is not choice both in matter and style. His editorship adds a most satisfactory sanction to the historical and critical accuracy of these volumes, over which he has exercised a supervision, and some pages of which have been written by himself. These volumes which have gained great repute and favor in England will, we trust, have also a wide circulation in this country, and help to diffuse sound historical knowledge, which, as F. Dalgairns remarks, is such a powerful auxiliary to religious truth.
LIFE AND TIMES OF SIXTUS THE FIFTH. From the French of Baron Hübner. By James F. Meline. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1873.
The dying Gregory XIII., worn out with the difficulties and responsibilities of his position, raised his weary hands to heaven, and exclaimed: “Thou wilt arise, O Lord, and have mercy on Zion”; prophetic words that were realized in the election of Pope Sixtus V., who, as Ranke justly observes, possessed in the highest perfection the moral and intellectual qualities demanded for the suppression of the prevalent disorders of the times. Perhaps there is no other pope whose life is of more universal interest. His striking individuality of character appeals to the popular mind, and has given rise to a variety of fables respecting him which fasten themselves on the memory and, though not literally true, yet embody a certain truth of their own.
His rise from obscurity to become a link of that august dynasty beside which “the proudest royal houses are but of yesterday,” his ability to cope with all the difficulties of his position at a critical period in the political and religious world, his astuteness in dealing with the most wily diplomatists, his clear notions as to the necessity of balance of power among different nations, his financial ability and genius for statesmanship, have all commanded the very admiration of the enemies of the papacy. “A grand old man,” the British Quarterly styles him, and with reason. “A great pope, to whom posterity owes a debt of gratitude in consideration of the whole results of his pontificate,” says the Edinburgh Review.
The extraordinary events of the life of Sixtus V. were the result of his wonderful energy and persistency. People like decision of character—a man with a purpose, and the ability of putting it into execution. This is why all admirers of “self‐made” men like to retrace the upward steps of the life of this eminent pope, from the rustic boyhood of Felice Peretti on the shores of the Adriatic; his thirst for knowledge that impelled him to study by the lamp of the sanctuary; his girding himself with the cord of the humble Francis while yet a mere boy; his career as a young friar‐ preacher, drawing crowded Roman audiences to listen to his fervid eloquence, among them such men as S. Ignatius de Loyola and S. Philip Neri; his promotion to a cardinalship by a sainted pope who was his benefactor, and whose last moments he had the happiness of witnessing; his temporary retirement to his villa, where he gave himself up to quiet observation of the needs of the times, especially of his own country, the study of architecture and the improvements needed in Rome, and all those pursuits which tended to fit him for his subsequent elevation to the papacy. Sixtus V. did not look upon his success in life as solely due to his own merit. He recognized the finger of Divine Providence, and chose as his motto: “Thou, O God, hast been my defender, even from my mother’s womb.”
The Life of Sixtus V. by Baron Hübner, though written from a Catholic point of view, is acknowledged by the Edinburgh Review to be one of the most valuable contributions to the literature of the age, so rich in historical biography. Its superiority to the previous lives of that pope is partly due to his access to the archives of Simancas, not open to research at the time of Ranke. Though the pontificate of Sixtus V. was only about five years long, it embraced a rapid succession of extraordinary and tragical events, as is evident when we remember he was contemporary with Queen Elizabeth of England, Mary Queen of Scots, Philip II. of Spain, and Henry of Navarre, whose names recall the persecution of the Church in England, the execution of Mary Stuart, the Armada, the overthrow of the League, and the accession of Henri Quatre to the throne of France, and show us what a weight of responsibility rested upon the Head of the Church. No wonder he was soon worn out by the pressure. The tiara is but a thorny crown at the best, as befits him who stands in Christ’s stead. The very condition of the Pontifical States was an affair of no slight difficulty. Only a man of extraordinary energy and decision of character could have surmounted it. Sixtus V. has been called pitiless from the terrible punishments he inflicted for apparently trivial offences, but he was personally humane, for at the murder of his nephew he was the first to entreat the pope (Sixtus being at that time Cardinal Montalto) to drop his investigations, and when he had cleared the Roman States of brigandage, he endeavored to conciliate the nobles. His inflexible severity seemed imperiously demanded. Twenty‐seven thousand brigands ravaged his dominions; the castles of noblemen were their strongholds; they were protected by neighboring princes; and the very streets of Rome often witnessed the attacks of peaceful citizens by armed bands. Sixtus himself when a cardinal had nearly lost his life in encountering a band of lawless young nobles as he was going home one night. He saw the absolute necessity of putting an end to such disorders and the terror of the inhabitants. Accordingly, one of his first acts after his election was to forbid the carrying of fire‐arms in the streets, and, when he found his order disobeyed by four young men, he had them hung the very next morning.
But he was strictly impartial in administering justice. No clerical offender was screened by the sacredness of his garments. The friar who imposed on the piety of the faithful was scourged from one end of the Corso to the other; the cardinal who was desirous of protecting a guilty servant was threatened with the Castle of St. Angelo; the traitor‐priest who gave Queen Elizabeth information of what was occurring at Rome was executed in such a manner as to strike terror into every treacherous breast. No wonder Sixtus became a terror to evil doers, and his very name sufficed to put an end to the brawls in the streets. The time arrived when he could say with grim humor: “Fugit impius nemine persequente”—“The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”
Sixtus V. left proofs of his genius and energy all over Rome. He kept thousands of men constantly employed. The dome of S. Peter’s was completed in twenty‐two months, though the architect said it would require ten years. He restored a colossal aqueduct that had fallen to ruin, and brought the Acqua Felice into Rome from a distance of about twenty miles. He opened great thoroughfares all through the city, built the Lateran Palace, erected monuments, undertook to drain the Pontine Marshes, encouraged agriculture and the manufacture of silk, established the Congregation of Rites and several others, limited the number of cardinals to seventy, and partly revised the Vulgate with his own hand. His practical nature by no means made him insensible to softer influences. His soul was so alive to music that at the exciting time of his election he lent an ear to Palestrina’s music hastily composed for the occasion, and remarked that Pierluigi had forgotten Pope Marcello’s Mass—a criticism that mortified the great composer, but which has since been acknowledged to be true.
He won the gratitude of the Israelites by his favor. Amazed Rome saw a Gentile actually scourged on the Corso for insulting a member of that ancient race. To another Israelite was granted special privileges for his success in increasing the production of silk.
Col. Meline’s book is not a literal translation of Baron Hübner’s Life of Sixtus V.: it is rather a résumé, as the preface explains. It consists of three parts: the first reviews the life of that pope, giving such details as are of interest to the general reader; the second portrays the experience of a Transalpine traveller to Rome three centuries ago; and the third is a vivid picture of Rome at that time: the whole being an improved edition of three essays already given to the public.
The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD are already too familiar with Mr. Meline’s felicitous style and his power of analysis to require any commendation on our part. And to the public at large he has recommended himself by his chivalrous defence of Mary, Queen of Scots. The strong lance he has wielded in the defence of her fair name against that doughty writer of fiction, Mr. James Anthony Froude, has been too universally applauded not to secure a general welcome to whatever comes from his able pen.
THE HEART OF MYRRHA LAKE; or, Into the Light of Catholicity. By Minnie Mary Lee. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
The enthusiastic author of this charming little story has succeeded in presenting much logic which is usually dull, in very attractive attire. The arguments and conclusions are so wonderfully clear, that it is to be hoped the book will fall frequently into the hands of the class most in need of it, but, alas! least likely to read it. There is in it much of quiet humor which is irresistible and very “telling”; as, for instance, when to the question, “What Catholic books have you read, sir?” the sturdy Methodist, Abner White, replies: “Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Maria Monk, Six Months in a Convent, Romanism at Home, Priest and Nun, etc.” And again, in the interview between Aunt Ruth and the committee of Methodist ladies who had come to wait upon her after her husband’s conversion, human nature, and especially Methodist nature, is painted with a very clever pen. Who has not known just such spinsters as Miss Nancy and Miss Sarah? And what a keen dash is this:
“ ‘Then we shall report that you choose to follow your husband, rather than the goodly rules of our Methodist discipline?’
“ ‘I shall go with my husband certainly,’ was the firm, respectful answer.
“ ‘And may God have mercy on your soul,’ solemnly added the spinster, as if addressing a person about to be hanged.
“ ‘Thank you!’ absently and innocently responded the quiet Quakeress.
“ ‘I suppose, then, we need not even pray for you?’ said one.
“ ‘You always was a little queer, Sister White, you and Brother White, too, now that we come to think it over,’ said another.
“ ‘Extremely odd it is for one to lose all sense of propriety, and assume the responsibility of such a fearful step,’ rapidly spoke little Sarah.
“ ‘We pity you, and would help you, but you won’t let us,’ was Mrs. Sand’s trembling good‐by.
“ ‘We wash our hands of all sin in this matter. It lies at your own door,’ were the last consolatory words of Miss Nancy.”
Many another reader might say with Myrrha, “When I took up that small book called A General Catechism of the Christian Doctrine, I little dreamed upon what a study I had entered. Again, after reading it through, I as little dreamed upon what a sea of speculation I had launched.” May the result of such reading prove as fruitful of good to all readers as to Myrrha! But such results seem to happen oftener in books than in real, selfish life. The best of this story is its ending, which, this time, is neither marriage nor death for the lovers.
FLEURANGE. By Mme. Augustus Craven. Translated by M. P. T. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
Rarely, indeed, have we met a work whose author exhibits so many of the qualities indespensable in a good novelist, as the one under consideration. Artistic in conception, pure and elevated in style, it is withal faultless in tone and sentiment.
It is not our purpose to give an outline of the plot of this tale, or to enlarge on the actors through whom it is evolved, but we shall confine ourselves to some observations on certain characteristics of the writer as developed in her work.
The author manifests a high degree of insight and the æsthetic sense, an intimate knowledge of feminine nature, and more of that of the opposite sex than its members may dream of—in acquiring which the delicate intuitions of her own sex doubtless serve a better purpose than the mere logic and learning of ours. Although the story introduces the reader into the highest social circles, and its incidents are of the most absorbing interest, there is no sacrifice of the dramatic unities, or any departure from the essential simplicity of the narrative. This severity of style, we may say, is at once the most winning quality of a work of genius, and the best test of its success; making the latter dependent on inherent excellence, rather than adventitious aids. In works of this character, art in letters reaches its highest development—that in which it becomes the most natural.
A noticeable feature is the epigrammatic conciseness with which a sentiment or description is finished. The reader is never wearied with platitudes or over‐minuteness of limning. Whatever idea occurs to the writer which she is willing to share with the reader is expressed in the fewest possible words. Is a scene to be presented to the mind’s eye?—a few touches of the artist’s pencil bring it vividly before us. The reader finds himself moved alternately to mirthfulness, or tears, or astonishment, as he encounters an unexpected bit of humor, and exquisite burst of pathos, or some reflection almost startling in depth or suggestiveness. Some passages are open to obvious inference, while others constitute studies if we would probe their philosophy. It was a question with those who watched the serial progress of the story, how the author could bring order and harmony out of the complications in which she had involved her principal characters; and the way this has been accomplished will be acknowledged as not the least of her achievements. No characters are interchanged or lose their identity. Each acts his part as naturally, and retains his individuality, as in real life; so that, when the dramatis personæ are at length summoned to the footlights for a final adieu, we feel inclined to protest, in the name of all the delighted auditors, against the call, as a premature termination of a very pleasant intercourse.
The reception Fleurange has met with thus far is very flattering. It has commended itself to the favorable judgment of the London Saturday Review, and other authorities of like critical acumen; has been crowned by the French Academy; and received the general approval of the press and public, so far as we have learned, while passing through the pages of Le Correspondant and THE CATHOLIC WORLD. We know of no recent imaginative work of which we could speak in terms of more unqualified approbation, or better deserving a permanent place in our literature, both as a work of art and for the sound principles by which it is pervaded and informed.
On the translation, we do not know that we could bestow higher praise than to say that it reads like an original work of the first order; while we are convinced that it is a faithful and conscientious rendering from the French text.
LEGENDS OF ST. PATRICK By Aubrey De Vere. Dublin: McGlashan & Gill. London: Henry S. King & Co. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
“If the Ireland of early times is ever understood, it will not be till after thoughtful men have deemed her legends worthy of their serious attention.” This remark Mr. De Vere makes in his preface, and not until we had read through his Legends did we fully realize its truth. It is a most certain fact that the twilight of Irish history can be changed into day only by the profound study of its legendary lore. We have read several lives of S. Patrick, and more than one history of Ireland have we studied, but from none of them did we get so clear an insight into the character of the saint and the genius of his people as from Mr. De Vere’s Legends, few and short though they be.
The subjects are beautiful and poetic, and the author’s conception of them lofty and spiritual. There is indeed a sacred melody about early Irish song which only a spiritual bard can evoke. Chords there are in Erin’s ancient harp which a hand of mere flesh and blood may not touch. Mr. De Vere has sung those songs; he has touched these chords, and they have given forth their true melody. It is not to his beautiful diction and varying metres, it is not to his wonderful descriptive powers and high poetic gifts, that we attribute this success, but it is to those two passions of his soul which impress themselves on all that he writes—love of God and love of Ireland. And here an opportunity is afforded us of speaking of Mr. De Vere as the poet of Ireland. That he is far superior to any Irish poet of the present day is beyond all question, and that his equal, in everything save popularity, to any English poet of the day is a verdict competent judges have not hesitated to give.
We often ask ourselves, How is it, then, he is so little known and read by his countrymen in America? For twenty years he has scorned “the siren’s tinsel lure,” and devoted all his talents to sounding the praises of Ireland and of Ireland’s Catholicity. His sole aim through life has been to enshrine Ireland’s faith and Ireland’s song in the temple of fame. Patriotism is his only incentive to labor; he seems indifferent to popularity, and perhaps this is one reason why he enjoys so little. But there are other reasons, we think, and they also are in his favor. Mr. De Vere is too polished, too thoughtful, and too spiritual to be a popular poet.
If he would descend from his high poetic ideal to sing love songs, he would soon be popular; but he will never prove a recreant bard. Those for whom he has so long and so faithfully labored must disenthrall themselves from the spirit of the age, and ascend to his level; then will they find in him all they can desire, and proclaim him their laureate. They will not find in him, it is true, the inimitable sweetness of Moore or the poetic fire of Davis, but they will find in him the patriotism of both, a polish superior to either, and, over all and above all, they will find a muse ennobled by the highest sentiments of religion and morality.
THE TRUTH. By Field Marshal the Duke of Saldanha. Translated from the Portuguese, by William John Charles Henry. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This little volume will be found to contain not only some of the most forcible arguments for Christianity that have ever been advanced, but particularly a collection (in the first chapter) of testimonials from ancient heathendom to what is only realized in Christ and his religion. Nothing can be more interesting, surely, than the study of the great tradition of expectation which fulfilled the prophecy of the dying Israel: “And He shall be the expectation of the nations” (Gen. xlix. 10). Our noble author opens his first chapter with this sentence: “From the east to the west, from the north to the south, in every language, in the literature of all nations, with a voice spontaneous, universal, and unanimous, the entire human race cried aloud for the coming of a Divine Teacher.” And when we have delightedly perused this first chapter, we as heartily endorse its concluding sentence: “This we believe to have most clearly demonstrated that, ... with one voice, unanimous, spontaneous, and universal, the human race cried out for the coming of a God of revelation.”
The work is designed for a defence of Christianity against the infidelity of the day. And we think it a most able and a singularly attractive one. Let our young men especially read it. It will make them a match for any sceptical show of learning.
CATHOLIC WORSHIP. A Manual of Popular Instruction on the Ceremonies and Devotions of the Church. By Frederick Canon Oakeley. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
Recent converts and inquirers after religious truth frequently experience some difficulty in understanding the ceremonies of the church and the various devotional practices of Catholics. We know of no more suitable book to place in the hands of such persons than this little treatise of Canon Oakeley. It is concise, clear, and methodical. Nothing is left unexplained, from the practice of taking holy water upon entering the church to the consecration of a bishop. This book will be found to be of great use not only to converts, but to Catholics in general, containing as it does a thoroughly reliable explanation of everything connected with our worship. This second edition is an evidence of the favor with which it has been received by the Catholic public.
THE SHADOW OF THE OBELISK, and Other Poems. By Thomas William Parsons. London: Hatchards, Piccadilly. 1872.
This modest volume is from the author whose translations from Dante, that have appeared in our magazine, are attracting deserved attention.
Mr. Parsons’ powers as a lyric poet are considerable. His verse has, for the most part, the easy and often careless diction of a school which many think gone out, but which we believe destined to revive. Yet here and there we see the influence of Tennyson. The lines, “To Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” are in the latter style. For strength his sonnets are his best efforts. We wish he had favored us with more of them.
There is ample variety in the pieces collected. The poet has travelled much. “The Shadow of the Obelisk” sets us musing in Rome. “The Birthplace of Robert Burns” takes us to “bonnie Scotland.” “St. James’ Park” tells us the writer has philosophized in London. While the “Willey House,” “On the Death of Daniel Webster,” and “Hudson River” are themes from his native America. The lines, “On a Magnolia Flower,” are fragrant with the South—the pale, sad South—and one of the gems of the book.
Mr. Parsons is a Unitarian, as he takes care to indicate; but, like Longfellow, he has Catholic sympathies. However, there is one short translation from Dante, entitled “A Lesson for Easter,” the last two lines of which seem to talk Protestantism:
“Ye have the Testament, the Old and New, And this for your salvation is enough.”
But the preceding lines should throw light on the Catholic poet’s meaning:
“Christians, be staid: walk wisely and serene: Be grave, and shun the flippant speech of those Who think that every wave will wash them clean— That any field will serve them for repose. Be not a feather to each wind that blows: There is a Shepherd and a Fold for you: Ye have a Leader when your way is rough.”
All this is unmistakable orthodoxy; and, therefore, the two lines quoted, which come next, speak of the evidence of the Old and the New Testament for the “one Fold and one Shepherd” and the infallible “Leader.”
We conclude by hoping that Mr. Parsons will vouchsafe us another volume of minor poems, and especially of sonnets.
THE LIFE OF FATHER MATHEW, THE PEOPLE’S SOGGARTH AROON. By Sister Mary Francis Clare, Author of The Illustrated History of Ireland, Advice to Irish Girls in America, Hornehurst Rectory, etc.
The indefatigable Nun of Kenmare could not have employed her pen on a worthier subject than the life and labors of the Apostle of Temperance. She will have accomplished a great end if this work serves to keep green in the hearts of her countrymen and of all Catholics the memory of one who accomplished more good than many who possessed more brilliant abilities, yet who neglected to employ their talents in that usurious activity which wins a blessing.
DAILY STEPS TO HEAVEN. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1872.
This, as well as the preceding work, belongs to a series of publications by the same author, embracing religious, historical, and miscellaneous books, which have attained an extraordinary popularity in the old country and in the United States.
A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. By Rev. Reuben Parsons, D.D. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
This work has been compiled “for the use of colleges, schools, and families.” It contains short biographical sketches of the principal characters of history, together with chronological tables. The subjects are for the most part well selected, and, as far as we have read, are well and correctly treated. The style of the author is terse and vigorous, and well adapted to this kind of composition.
The printing is excellent, the binding neat, but the figure in the frontispiece has suffered not a little at the hands of the artist—an accident which mars somewhat the general appearance of the book.
THE NEW GOD. Translated from the German of Conrad von Bolanden, by Very Rev. Theodore Noethen, V.G. Albany: M. O’Sullivan. 1872.
Our readers have already had a sufficient taste of this author’s quality in “The Progressionists,” now going through our pages, to desire the further treat to be found in the new products of his pen. We do not recall any series of fictitious writings, designed to combat vicious principles and actions, more admirable as specimens of vigorous and effective composition. The most obtuse progressionist could scarcely fail to comprehend the drift of the underlying argument, while the more fastidious reader will be carried along by the interest of the tale through which it is conveyed. Father Noethen is performing an acceptable service in making these works known to the English reader.
Bolanden’s works fairly palpitate with the gravity of themes of living interest. The new German Government, the burthen of the present tale, has given evidence of their telling effect by ordering their suppression.
GERALDINE: A TALE OF CONSCIENCE. By E. C. A. New York: P. O’Shea.
Geraldine was one of the first successful religious novels which followed the revival of Catholic doctrine in England, and bids fair to hold its own for many a year to come. It enjoys a wider reputation than either of Miss Agnew’s other works, one of which, Rome and the Abbey, forms a sequel to this.
Mr. O’Shea also issues a reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion; intended, apparently, as the commencement of an uniform series of the great author’s works.
It is to be regretted that this work had not undergone a thorough revision by some competent hand before its reappearance, in order to adapt it to the present state of scientific investigation. Although true science can never be out of harmony with revelation, its successive developments may enable us to see the conditions of that harmony and relation in a clearer light than when the Lectures were originally published.
THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. Translated from the French of the Abbé Orsini, by the Very Rev. F. C. Husenbeth, D.D., V.G. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1872.
This work is already known to many readers in the presentation edition issued by the Messrs. Sadlier some years since, and the recent English edition of which the above is a fac‐simile. We are glad to see an edition like this made accessible to the great body of readers, though the fire in which the publisher was involved, will interfere for a time with that consummation. It has a number of pictorial illustrations, and there are appended the letters apostolic concerning the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception.
LIZA. By Ivan S. Turgenieff. New York: Holt & Williams. 1872.
Liza is another work from the pen of M. Turgenieff, the distinguished Russian novelist, several of whose works are already familiar to us. His quiet sarcasm in depicting the Russian of the old school, who needs no scratching to reveal the genuine Tartar—crafty and brutal, but with a kindly streak withal—and the Russian of the present generation who has imbibed foreign habits and theories by no means elevating, is admirably calculated to correct the evils of a transition state of society. The former affords us two affecting pictures in this book of women of repressed lives, who humbly kiss with their dying lips the hand that has crushed them. One of them leaves a young son, Fedor Lavretsky, who never forgets his pale and gentle mother, who in turn hardly dared caress him for fear of the sharp eyes and cutting tongue of her sister‐in‐law, Glafira, who had taken charge of the child. He is brought up under a system of repression, and, when his father dies, he goes to Moscow determined to repair the defects of his education. There he falls in love with the face of a beautiful girl who regards him as a schöne Partie and marries him. He gives himself up to the happiness of his new life, and is induced by his wife to leave his estate, and, after various changes, to go to Paris, where admiration seems to have intoxicated her. Fedor, becoming aware of her real character, settles an annuity on her, leaves her, and returns to his native land. He cannot bear, however, to go to his own seat where he passed the first happy days of his married life, but betakes himself to his aunt’s place—the stern Glafira, who had died during his absence. The desolate house is once more opened, and he stands alone in the room where she breathed her last, and looks with softened heart on the sacred icons in their gilded frames in the corner, and the worn carpet, covered with drippings from the wax candles she had burned before them, and on which she had knelt to pray. His old servant waits on him, he drinks tea out of the great cup he had used in his boyhood, looks over the large book full of mysterious pictures which he had found so wondrous in childish days. Everything recalls the earlier remembrances of his life. “On a woman’s love my best years have been wasted,” thought he.
Going to pay his respects to his great‐aunt, who is admirably drawn with a few vivid touches, he meets with Liza, whom he left a child, but is now nineteen years of age. There is a natural grace about her person; her face is pale, but fresh; her eyes lustrous and thoughtful, her smile fascinating, but grave, and she has a frank, innocent way of looking you directly in the face. Lavretsky is instantly struck with her appearance, and the impression is deepened the oftener he sees her. Liza’s mother is one of those women, qui n’a pas inventé la poudre, la bonne daìne, as one of her visitors ungratefully remarks. Her daughter owes the elevation and purify of her character to the nurse of her childhood, who gave herself up to penitential observances. Instead of nursery tales, she told Liza of the Blessed Virgin, the holy hermits who had been fed in their caves by the birds, and the female martyrs from whose blood sprang up sweet flowers. She used to speak of these things seriously and humbly, as if unworthy to utter such high and holy names, and Liza sat at her feet with reverent awe drinking in the holy influences of her words. Aglafia also taught her to pray, and took her at early dawn to the matin service. Liza grew up thoroughly penetrated with a sense of duty, loving everybody, but loving God supremely and with tender enthusiasm. Till Lavretsky came, no one had troubled the calmness of her inner life.
After some time, learning through a newspaper that his wife is dead, he confesses his love to Liza. She feels drawn towards him, her heart seems to respond to his love, but it is hardly with genuine passion; it is rather the agitation of a lily too rudely stirred by the breeze. Not that she has no depth of feeling; but, as she afterwards acknowledges, when she did indulge in hopes of happiness, her heart shuddered within her. Love seemed almost a profanation, as if a stranger had entered her pure maiden chamber.
Suddenly, the wife, supposed to be dead, reappears. It is all a mistake. Her husband is stunned. He feels he can never give back his love to one who has no longer his respect. And Liza is lost to him. After several attempts, he sees her again. Her eyes have grown dimmer and sunken, her face is pale, and her lips have lost their color. She implores him to be reconciled to his wife, and they part without her allowing her hand to meet his.
Six months later, Liza takes the veil in a remote convent in Russia. The Greek as well as the Latin convent seems to be the ideal refuge of startled innocence and purity. Once Lavretsky goes there, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He sees her as she is leaving the choir. She passes close by him with the quick, noiseless step of a nun, but keeps steadily on without looking at him. But he sees the almost imperceptible tremor of her eye; she bends her emaciated face still lower, and the hands that hold the rosary are clasped more tightly together.
But the chief value of M. Turgenieff’s novels to a Catholic lies not in the stories themselves certainly, but in the delightful pictures of Russian life and manners they present, and the influence they have had in softening the rugged manners of the north and changing the condition of the serfs.
WONDERS OF THE MOON. Translated from the French of Amédée Guillemin, by Miss M. G. Mead. Edited, with additions, by Maria Mitchell, of Vassar College. Illustrated with forty‐three engravings. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873.
This little book contains a tolerably full account of all that is known about the moon, and that is of interest to the general reader. Our knowledge of our satellite is in some respects hardly equal to that which we have recently acquired of the much more distant sun; though so near, comparatively, to us, it is still too far away for the telescope ever to give us as clear a view of it as we need; and the spectroscope is of little use in its examination. We shall never know much about it, and especially about its other side, unless we go to see it; and a trip to the moon, chimerical as it may seem, may not always remain an impossibility for some adventurous person who is willing to run his chance of finding in the apparently uncomfortable little place the necessary conditions for human life. However, not a few of us will be content with the information given in this book, which is vastly greater than what most persons would probably acquire by examining the moon with the finest telescope; for a telescope is of little service to one unaccustomed to use it, and few things are more provoking to an experienced moon‐gazer than evident failure of others to see what seems to him so plain. To those, then, who really wish to get a good idea of the moon, and especially of its physical constitution and probable scenery, in really the most satisfactory way, this little volume, notwithstanding a few slight inaccuracies (such as the placing of Petit’s bolide at 9,000,000 miles from the earth), will be quite interesting and valuable. These inaccuracies, if in the original, should have been corrected in the translation.
THE GREAT PROBLEM: The Higher Ministry of Nature viewed in the Light of Modern Science, and as an aid to advanced Christian Philosophy. By John R. Leifchild, A.M., author of Our Coal Fields and our Coal Pits; Cornwall: Its Mines and Miners, etc., etc. With an introduction by Howard Crosby, D.D., LL.D., Chancellor of the University of New York. New York: G. P. Putnam & Son. 1872.
Dr. Crosby introduces this really able and valuable essay with a just and manly rebuke of the unparalleled absurdity and impudence of our modern materialistic scientists; and it is high time for him, considering what balderdash he is obliged to listen to from his chancellor’s chair. The essay of Mr. Leifchild is a series of arguments on the topics of natural theology, in which some of the principal manifestations of the power and wisdom of God in the physical world are pointed out and referred to their true cause and end. The author most absurdly saws off the limb of the tree on which grows all the fruit he admires so much and gathers so carefully, by denying the value of metaphysics. But, in spite of that, his sound mind holds implicitly the very metaphysics he ignorantly despises, and he is therefore able to reason very well and conclusively. Most persons who read books of this kind are more ready to listen to a geologist teaching theology than to a professed theologian, and they prefer the roundabout method of coming to a point by induction to the straight road of logical deduction. This book is likely to be useful, therefore, and is, besides, printed in very clear, legible type, which makes it a pleasant book to read, though laboring under the sad inconvenience of having neither index nor table of contents. There are a good many interesting facts and statements about eminent writers interspersed, e.g., Spinoza and Leibnitz; but the author is seriously mistaken in ascribing any pantheistic doctrines or tendencies to Henry Suso and Tauler. We are happy to welcome such books from English writers who are adepts in the physical sciences. For these sciences, and the men who are really masters of them, we have a great respect in their own sphere. And we consider it a very praiseworthy and useful task for men of this kind, to undertake to show the conformity of these sciences with the queen over all the scientific realm—Christian philosophy.
THE MINNESINGER OF GERMANY. By A. E. Kroeger. New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1872.
In this little book we have a very charming, as also very learned, exposition of mediæval art. The Minnesinger or minstrel‐knights of the latter half of the XIIth and earlier half of the XIIIth centuries are but little known outside of Germany. In this book we are introduced to the principal masters of this beautiful and ephemeral school of song, Gottfried von Strassburg, Walter von der Vogelweide, Ulrich von Lichtenstein, Hartmann von der Aue, Regenbogen, Conrad von Würzburg, and Henrich von Meissen, known as “Frauenlob,” or “ladies’ praise.” These poets sang chiefly of religion and love. But foremost among all women, the great Mother of God chiefly claimed their enthusiastic homage, as we see by the long extracts given by Mr. Kroeger of some of their glorious “Hymns to the Virgin.” Here is an example, from “The Divine Minnesong,” attributed sometimes to Gottfried of Strassburg:
“Thou art the blooming heaven‐branch, Which blooming, blooms in many a grange; Great care and strange God lavished, Maid, on thee.”
We have, unfortunately, no space for a selection of the beauties collected for us in this book, and can only recommend our readers to procure it for themselves. It is full of gems, and is especially welcome to us as evidence of the high degree to which the burning faith of those days had led and guided lyrical art. Hartmann von der Aue’s “Poor Henry” is, so we are told, “the original of that sweet story of self‐sacrifice which Longfellow has made universally known as the ‘Golden Legend,’ (p. 190).” The same hymn we have already quoted has this allusion to the “living wine of true remorse” and the following words:
“He whom God’s love has never found Is like a shadow on the ground, And does confound Life, wisdom, sense, and reason.”
Conrad von Würzburg, in his “Golden Smithy,” represents himself as a gold‐ smith working an ornament for the Queen of Heaven, and says, “If in the depth of the smithy of my heart I could melt a poem out of gold, and could enamel the gold with the glowing ruby of pure devotion, I would forge a transparent shining and sparkling praise of thy work, thou glorious Empress of Heaven.” Walter von der Vogelweide sings these grand words:
“Who slays the lion? Who slays the giant? Who masters them all, however defiant? He does it who himself controlleth; And every nerve of his body enrolleth, Freed from passion, under strict subjection.”
Mr. Kroeger has done a service to art, to history, and to religion in opening thus before our eyes a few of the treasures of the so‐called dark ages.
COLLEGE JOURNAL. Georgetown College: Dec., 1872, Vol. I., No. 1.
This is as elegant a little paper in outward appearance as we remember to have seen. The articles are written with taste and correctness, and we offer a hearty welcome to the young gentlemen of classic Georgetown on their editorial début. We have only one piece of advice to give them, which is, to be careful that their wit and humor be as classic and scholarly as their serious pieces. Most papers, especially juvenile ones, break down on this point. We wish our young friends honor and success in their enterprise.
The Catholic Publication Society will publish in a few days Wild Times, a story by Miss Caddell.
Books And Pamphlets Received.
From C. DAREAU, Quebec: Francis Parkman. Par L’Abbé H. R. Casgrain. 18mo, paper, pp. 89.
From A. WILLIAMS & CO., Boston: The Blazing Star; with an appendix treating of the Jewish Kabbala. 12mo, pp. 180.
From JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Boston: The Masque of the Gods. By Bayard Taylor. 12mo, pp. 48.
From LEE & SHEPARD, Boston: Humanity Immortal. By L. P. Hickok, D.D., LL.D. 8vo, pp. 362.—God‐Man. By L. T. Townsend, D.D. 12mo, pp. 446.—Autobiography of Amos Kendall. Edited by his Son‐in‐law, Wm. Stickney. 1872.
From ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston: Paul of Tarsus: An Inquiry into the Times and the Gospel of the Apostle of the Gentiles. By A Graduate, 12mo, pp. 401.
From D. VAN NOSTRAND, New York: A Treatise on Acoustics in Connection with Ventilation. By Alexander Saeltzer. 12mo, pp. 102.
From J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Philadelphia: Thoughts on Paper Currency, etc. By Wm. Brown. 18mo, pp. 240.—Black Robes; or, Sketches of Missions and Ministers in the Wilderness and on the Border. By Robert P. Nevin. 12mo, pp. 366.
From A. D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., New York: The Scripture Doctrine in Reference to the Seat of Sin in the Regenerate Man. 18mo, pp. 125.
From DESFORGES & LAWRENCE, Milwaukee: A Religion of Evolution: Letters of “Internationalist” Reviewing the Sermons of J. L. Dudley, Pastor of Plymouth Congregationalist Church, Milwaukee, 8vo, pp. 42.
From C. C. CHATFIELD & CO., New Haven: Hints to Young Editors. 12mo, pp. 31.
From CARROLL, Wheeling: Pastoral Letter of the Rt. Rev. Richard Vincent Whelan, Bishop of Wheeling, to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese. 8vo, pp. 12.
Ninth Annual Report of the New York Catholic Protectory. Paper, 8vo, pp. 66.
Constitution and By‐Laws of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, with the Journal of Proceedings and Address of the First General Convention held at Baltimore, Md., Feb. 22, 23, 1872. 8vo, pp. 57.
Library Work in the Army. United States Military Post Library Association. Annual Report, 1871‐2. Paper, 12mo, pp. 57.
The English Inquisition worse than the Spanish. By an English Priest. Montreal. 18mo, pp. 34.
From Hon. EUGENE CASSERLY: Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the U. S. transmitted to Congress with the Annual Message of the President, Dec. 4, 1871.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 95.—FEBRUARY, 1873.
Who Made Our Laws?
It is a characteristic of every succeeding century to consider itself much wiser than any or all that have preceded it. In this respect our beloved NINETEENTH is no exception; in fact, with a vanity that may be palliated, if not excused, it considers that, comparatively speaking, the world has hitherto been in its schoolboy days, and only attained its majority on the first day of January, 1800. It is true that the great advances made in the physical sciences, in chemistry, astronomy, and geology, and in the application of steam and electricity, have marked our age as one of true progress in a certain direction, and are substantial subjects of self‐ congratulation; but it must also be remembered that very little of the genuine happiness of mankind in general depends upon any or all of these discoveries and appliances. Man, being an intellectual as well as an animal being, must look to spiritual discoveries and mental agencies for his chief sources of enjoyment; and, as the soul controls the body, as his main duty in this life is to qualify that soul for an eternity of bliss, as the unlimited future is superior to the limited present, it follows that the things merely of this world play a small and insignificant part in the real drama of the life of a human being. The sad misconception of this solution of the problem of man’s destiny has been the principal mistake of materialists, and their consequent punishment here below has been so marked that the criticism of the charitable is considerately withheld.
Fortunately for us Catholics, the great desideratum—the law that includes all laws—is immovably fixed, and no new discoveries, no alleged progress, no experiment, can disturb it. Immutable as the eternal hills, it stands to‐day as when promulgated in Judæa over eighteen hundred years ago by its Divine Founder, and though the heavens and earth may pass away, we have the assurance that it shall not. But there have sprung out of the operation of this great law other laws which may be called secondary or subsidiary, which have long affected the welfare of Christendom, and upon the observance or rejection of which much of the welfare or misery of nations has depended and must for ever depend. Political justice, social order, art, science, and literature, everything which relates to the relations of man with his fellows, and brightens and beautifies life, have a great deal more to do with forming the character and insuring the purity of a people, as well as the regulation of their actions justly, than railroads, telegraphs, and anæsthetic agents. Respect for the memory of the dead and charity for the living prevent us from pointing out individual instances where men, remarkable for their skill and perseverance in forwarding the latter projects, have neither been distinguished for their truthfulness, liberality, nor for any moral quality typical of intelligent Christians. The best of these men are simply clever mechanists, increasing, it is true, our sum of knowledge of the effect of certain forces in nature, yet without being able to reveal the nature of the forces themselves, which seems impossible; but whoever teaches us true ideas regarding the active agencies that govern ordinary life is the true benefactor of his species, and is the governor of his audience or race. Have our discoveries in this science of making mankind more moral, humane, and refined kept pace with our more intimate acquaintance with the secrets of nature and the laws of mechanism, or have we to look back to the despised past for all our ideas of rectitude in legislation, honesty in the administration of government, and truthfulness in the plastic arts? We fear that a candid answer to this question would involve some loss of our self‐esteem. While, like the degenerate Hebrews, we have been worshipping graven images, the work of men’s hands, we have been neglecting the Tables of the Law.
All national governments reflect more or less correctly the ideas of the people governed. The absolutism of Russia is as much the reflex of the mental status of the inhabitants of that vast and semi‐civilized empire as that of the United States is of our busy, hasty, and heterogeneous population. The first is a necessity growing out of a peculiar order of things, wherein many tribes and barbarous races are to be found struggling towards light and civilization; the other is the creation of the matured minds of experienced and profound statesmen, acting as the delegates of a self‐reliant and self‐sustaining people. Still, though the framework of the government is unique, the ideas of justice and equality which underlie it are old. In one sense they are not American, but European, for it cannot be denied that the principles of our constitutions, state and national, the laws accepted or enacted in harmony therewith, and the modes of their interpretation and administration, are taken from the civil polity of the nations of the Old World, as those again have been the direct and palpable result of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Russia to‐day is mainly barbarous, and subject to the unfettered will of one man, because centuries ago the East broke away from the centre of Catholic unity, and, in losing the Apostolic authority, lost all its vivifying power, and the ministers of the so‐called Greek Church their capacity and efficiency as civilizers and law‐givers.
The West was more loyal, and consequently more fortunate. If we consider for a moment the chaotic condition of the greater part of Europe when the church commenced to spread far and wide the teachings of the Gospel, slowly but steadily pursuing her holy mission, we may be able to appreciate the herculean task before her. Then, in every part of Europe, from the pole to the Mediterranean, from the Carpathians to the Atlantic, disorder, ignorance, and rapine prevailed. Wave after wave of Northern and Eastern hordes had swept over the continent and most of the islands, submerging the effete nations of the South, and carrying destruction and death wherever they surged. The old Roman civilization, such as it was, was entirely obliterated, all municipal law was abolished, the conquered masses were reduced to the condition of serfs, and, as each successive leader of a tribe rested from his bloody labors and built a stronghold for his occupancy, he reserved to himself the exclusive monopoly of plunder and spoliation in his own particular neighborhood. This of course led to rivalry and unceasing warfare between rival marauders, and the incessant slaughter and oppression of their retainers and tenants.
It was with these fierce and lawless nobles, as they loved to style themselves, that the church for centuries waged most persistent and uncompromising warfare, and against them she hurled her most terrible anathemas. It was she who taught the sanguinary barons and chieftains that there was a moral power greater than armed force and stronger than moated and castellated tower, who took by the hand the downtrodden, impoverished serf, freed him from his earthly bonds, taught him the knowledge of God’s law, the principles of eternal justice and the rights of humanity, and instilled into his heart those ideas of human liberty which have since fructified and now permeate every free or partially free government in both hemispheres. Those great results were achieved in many ways, as local circumstances required; by teaching and exhorting, by persuasion or threats, by taking the serf into the ministry of the church and thereby making him the superior of his former master, by introducing gradually just and equitable laws, and when necessary forcing their adoption on unwilling sovereigns and reluctant nobles, and, perhaps, most potently by the example of her own organization, which permitted the humblest of her children to be crowned by a free election with the tiara of the successors of S. Peter.
The influence of the church in secular affairs was particularly remarkable in England, from which we have drawn so many of our political opinions and principles. The early missionaries to the Britons and Saxons were doubtless men of high intelligence as well as sanctity; but the Norman and Anglo‐Norman ecclesiastics who came into the country with William the Conqueror and clustered around his sons and successors were still more remarkable for astuteness and breadth of view. For many generations after the Conquest they may be said to have governed England in so far as they framed her laws, conducted her ordinary jurisprudence, and mainly directed her foreign and domestic policy. The most interesting, though by no means the most impartial, chapters in Hallam and Blackstone are those devoted to the struggles between the lay lawyers supported or subsidized by the nobility, and the clerical jurists who defended the privileges of their order and the natural rights of the oppressed masses. The Great Charter, of which we hear so much from persons who very probably never read it, was undoubtedly the work of the latter, though signed by all the barons with their seal or mark; trial by jury, the germs of which may be traced into remote antiquity, was systematized and as far as possible perfected under their auspices; courts of equity, for the rectification of “injustice which the law from its generality worketh to individuals,” were their creation, and even until comparatively late years were presided over by them; and representative or parliamentary government may justly be said to have been the fruit of their fertile and ever‐active brains. Its founder, in England at least, was de Montfort, who, though not in orders, was the follower, if not the pupil, of the great S. Bernard.
It is thus that we, the ungrateful or forgetful eulogists of the XIXth century, while laying the flattering unction to our souls that we have done more than put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, ignore the long, painful, and continuous efforts of our spiritual forefathers to christianize, civilize, and make free our ancestors in the order of nature whom pagan despotism and barbaric cupidity sought to degrade and brutalize. In our self‐glorification we forget that all we have in legislation, of which we are naturally so proud and for which we never can be too thankful, is the product of long years of toil and reflection of humble priests and learned prelates, whose names are now scarcely remembered. The ideas of justice and clemency generated in the minds of those men of the past by the spirit of Catholicity are the same which govern our daily actions, and regulate the most important affairs of our lives and of those most dear to us, though we are so occupied or so ungrateful that we fail to acknowledge the sources from whence they arose.
For instance, the possession of real estate forms one of the principal attractions for the ambition of industrious Americans, yet how few of them ever think that the laws regulating its disposition, acquisition, and inheritance are the very enactments framed by monks, hundreds of years ago, and recognized by armed laymen after long and at times doubtful contests with the advocates of the arbitrary feudal system. Personal liberty, speedy trial by our peers, were first secured in an incontestable form by an archbishop of the church which some of our so‐called and “loudly called” preachers are never tired of denouncing as tyrannical. That the right of the people governed, to elect representatives to make laws affecting their “lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” was obtained and carried into practical effect by a Catholic statesman many centuries before Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin were born, seems to have been forgotten by our pseudo‐liberals; while the grand principle of political equality which lies at the foundation of our republic, instead of being less than a hundred years old, is coeval with Christianity itself, and in its operation within the church is more expansive and less discriminating as regards social rank and condition.
But though, in this inconsiderate age, we fail to acknowledge the deep debt of gratitude we owe to the workers and thinkers of the past for our laws, civilization, and correct ideas of government, we cannot if we would deny that we are still ruled by those very ideas, and that none of our boasted, and in their way valuable, discoveries have had the effect to give us a new or a better scheme of jurisprudence, whereby mankind can be made better, wiser, or happier.
The people of the United States are not generally considered a profoundly reflective people; we are too much engaged with the present to care much about either the past or future; but we respectfully suggest that, while we may be justly proud of our laws and system of government, it is hardly fair or generous to assume to ourselves all the credit for their formation and existence. We have done enough to secure the liberty of our fellow‐ men, and maintain our authority in the family of nations, not to be able to be just, if not generous, to the memory of the men who have bequeathed to us so invaluable a legacy; and let us therefore accord to our Catholic ancestors due credit for the conception and transmission of the laws under which we all so happily live. After all, their ideas rule more than our own, whether we will or not.
Dante’s Purgatorio. Canto Sixth.
When from the game of hazard men depart, The loser stays, and, casting o’er his throws, Learns a hard lesson with a heavy heart; While with the winner all the assembly goes: One runs before, one plucks his robe behind, But he delays not, though beside his way Another comrade calls himself to mind; And every one perceives that he would say: “Press me no more!” to whom he lifts his hand, And by so doing keeps the crowd at bay; Such I was, freeing me from that dense band, To this and that one bending my survey, And promising to answer each demand.
Here was that Aretine whose lethal wound The savage hands of Ghin’ di Tacco made; Also that knight who in pursuit was drowned. Here with stretched palms Frederic Novello prayed, The Pisan, too, at whose defeat his sire, Good old Marzucco, showed a strength sublime. I saw Count Orso, and that soul whom dire Envy and spite, but no committed crime Tore from his mortal frame, as he declared; Pierre de la Brosse I mean: so, while she may, Be that bad woman of Brabant prepared Lest she go join a far worse flock than they.
When I had freed me from the gathering press Of shadows praying still that others’ prayers Might hasten forward their own blessedness, I thus began: “Thy page, my Light! declares Expressly, in one text, that Heaven’s decree To no beseeching bendeth.(214) Yet this race Prays with such purpose: will their praying be Without avail? or have I in that place Misread thy word?” He answered: “It is gross And plain to reason: no fallacious hope Is theirs, if thy sound mind consider close; The topmost height of judgment doth not slope, Because love’s fire may instantly complete The penance due from one of these: but where I closed that point with words which you repeat, A gulf betwixt the Most High was and prayer: No praying there could cover past defect. Yet verily, in so profound a doubt Rest not, till she who, ’twixt thine intellect And truth, shall be thy light, herself speak out. Dost understand me? Beatrice I mean: Thou shalt behold her in a loftier place, This mountain summit, smiling and serene.” “Good Guide,” said I, “then let us mend our pace, I feel no more my weariness: o’er us The mountain shadow grows and hides mine own.” “We will go forward”—he gave answer thus— “Far as we can, ere this day’s light be gone; But thy thought wanders from the fact. That height Ere thou canst gain, thou shalt behold the day’s Returning orb, who now so hides his light Behind the hill that thou break’st not his rays. But yonder look! one spirit, all alone, By itself stationed, bends toward us his gaze: The readiest passage will by him be shown”
Sordello.
We came up tow’rds it: O proud Lombard soul! How thou didst wait, in thy disdain unstirred, And thy majestic eyes didst slowly roll! Meanwhile to us it never uttered word, But let us move, just giving us a glance, Like as a lion looks in his repose. Then Virgil, making a more near advance, Prayed him to show us where the mountain rose With easier slope, and still that soul replied Nothing to his demand; but question made About life, and our country. My sweet Guide Began to answer: “Mantua”—and the shade From where it had been, separate from his band, All rapt in self, sprang up towards him in haste, Saying: “O Mantuan, I am of thy land, I am Sordello.” And the twain embraced.
Ah slavish Italy! thou common inn For woe to lodge at! without pilot, thou Ship in great tempest! not what thou hast been, Lady of provinces, but brothel now! That gentle soul so quickly, at the dear Sound that recalled his country, forward came To grace his townsman with a greeting here; And now thy living children, to their shame, Are all at war, and they who dwell most near Prey, each on each, with moat and wall the same! Search, wretched! search all round thine either coast, And then look inland, in thy bosom, see If peace in any part of thee thou know’st! What though Justinian made new reins for thee, What boots it if the saddle remain void? Without his mending thy disgrace were less. And O ye tribe that ought to be employed In your devotions, and let Cæsar press The seat of Cæsar if God’s word you heed, See, since your hand hath on the bridle been, How wanton grown and wicked is the steed, Through want from you of the spur’s discipline. O German Albert! who abandonest Her now run wild, unchecked by curb of thine, When thou shouldst ride her with thy heels hard‐pressed; May heaven’s just judgment light upon thy line, And be it something strange, and manifest, To make him tremble that comes after thee, Because, for lust of barren fiefs out there,(215) Thou and thy Father have not shamed to see The empire’s garden desolate and bare. Come see the Capulets and Montagues, Monaldi and Filippeschi, O thou being Without concern! these wan with fears, and those Already crushed: come sate thyself with seeing, Thou cruel man, the outrage that is done To thy best blood, and make their bruises well! And thou shalt see too, thou cold looker‐on, Santafiore’s lords how safe they dwell. Come see thy Rome that mourning all alone Weepeth, a widow, calling day and night, Why, O my Cæsar, dost thou leave thine own? Come see what love there—how all hearts unite! And if no pity move thee at our moan Blush for thy fame beholding such a sight. And, lawful if I speak, O most high Jove Who wast for our sakes crucified on earth, Are thy just eyes who watchest men above Turned elsewhere?—Or is this before the birth Of some great good a preparation hid From us in the abyss of thy intent, That all the Italian towns are tyrant‐rid, And every clown that comes on faction bent Makes as much clamor as Marcellus did?
My Florence! well may’st thou remain content At this digression; it concerns not thee, Thanks to thy people, great in argument! Many with justice in their hearts there be Who stay the shaft lest, coming to the bow Without discretion, it might err; but they On their lips wear it. Many men are slow To serve the state, and turn from place away; Thy people do not—every one bends low, Crying before he’s called for: “I obey.” Now make thee joyful, who may’st triumph well; Thou who art rich—so wise! and so at peace! If I speak true in this—let the truth tell. Athens and Sparta, that raised civil Greece To such a height, and framed the ancient laws, Towards the well‐ordered life made small beginning Compared with thee, whose legislation draws Threads out so fine that thy October spinning Comes before mid‐November to a pause. How many times hast thou renewed thy men, Yea, within days that in thy memory dwell, And changed thy laws and offices, and then Customs and coins! if thou remember well Thou wilt behold thyself, unless quite blind, Like a sick woman, restless, that in vain Seeks on her pillow some repose to find, And turns and turns as ’twere to parry pain.
The Church The Champion Of Marriage.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” least of all the continued crusade the church has headed and now heads against the enemies of Christian marriage. What marriage is, what duties it involves, what holiness it requires, what grace it confers, we leave to other pens more learned or more eloquent to define. What are the Scripture authorities and allowable inferences concerning the married state, its indissolubility and its future transformation in heaven, we leave to theologians to state. Those who may feel curious as to that part of the question, or as to the local and civil enactments concerning marriage and divorce, we refer to two able articles published in THE CATHOLIC WORLD of October, 1866, and July, 1867.(216)
But as witnesses are multiplied when a strong case has to be made out in favor of some important issue, let us turn to the tribunal of history, and look over the record of the church’s battles. Witnesses without number rise in silent power to show on which side the weight of church influence has ever been thrown—the side of the oppressed and weakly. Every liberty, from ecclesiastical immunities to constitutional rights, she has upheld and enforced, and it would be impossible that she, the knight‐errant of the moral world, should have failed to break a lance, through every succeeding century, for the integrity of the marriage bond.
Take, for instance, the history of the new Frankish kingdom in the VIth century, at the time when the church was laboriously moulding pagan hordes into Christian and civilized nations. The times were wild and unsettled, the very laws hardly established, heathen license barely reined in by the threatening barrier of solemn excommunication. They were times of great heroism, it is true, but none the less of great abuses and of startling crimes. The bishops of the Christian church stood alone in the midst of the universal depravity, like mighty colossi, defying the civil power and rebuking royal license. S. Nicetus, the Bishop of Trèves, was one of these. The young King of the Franks, Theodebert, who was betrothed to Wisigardis, the daughter of the Lombard king Wakon, had, during a war against the Goths, taken a beautiful captive named Denteria. He made her his mistress, and, forgetful of his solemn betrothal, lived with her for seven years. The bishop never ceased boldly to admonish him and warn him, but to no purpose. After a while, his powers of persuasion failing to effect his charitable design, he resorted to the penalties of the church, and excommunicated him. But, instead of suspending his evil career, the king persuaded many of his courtiers to follow his example. The holy bishop excommunicated them all with calm impartiality. Despite the censures under which they lay, they insolently attempted to assist at High Mass one Sunday in the bishop’s presence. S. Nicetus turned to meet the sacrilegious throng, and undauntedly announced that, unless those who were excommunicated left the church, the Mass would not be celebrated. The king publicly demurred to this, but a young man in the crowd, possessed by the devil, suddenly started up, and in impassioned language gave testimony to the holiness of the bishop and the vicious and debased character of the king himself. Four or five stalwart men got up to hold him, but were unable to do so; his strength defied their utmost efforts, and burning words of condemnation continued to fall from his lips. The king, abashed, was forced to leave the church, while S. Nicetus caused the young man to be brought to him. The touch of the holy bishop’s hand, and his efficacious prayer breathed over him, cured him at once of the grievous affliction which had beset him for ten years. Finally, the displeasure of the Franks at the insult offered to the King of the Lombards and his daughter grew so serious that, with S. Nicetus at their head, they called a general meeting to denounce his conduct. He listened to their reproaches, and at last agreed to dismiss his mistress and fulfil his contract with the Lombard princess.(217)
An eminent French writer, De Maistre, says of the part played by the popes in the middle ages: “Never have the popes and the church rendered a more signal service to the world than they did in repressing by the authority of ecclesiastical censures the transports of a passion, dangerous enough in mild and orderly characters, but which, when indulged in by violent and fierce natures, will make havoc of the holiest laws of marriage.... The sanctity of marriage, the sacred foundation of the peace and welfare of nations, is, above all, of the highest importance in royal families, where excesses and disorders are apt to breed consequences whose gravity in the future none can calculate.”
In the early part of the VIIth century, S. Columbanus, the great Irish monk who founded the powerful monastery of Luxeuil in Burgundy, began that opposition to royal license which finally cost him his exalted position, and made him an exile and wanderer from his chosen abode. Queen Brunehault was practically reigning in Burgundy under the name of her grandson Theodoric. She connived at the young sovereign’s precocious depravity, and herself furnished him with attractive mistresses, thereby preventing his marriage with a suitable princess, for fear of losing her own influence over him in public affairs. One day, as S. Columbanus, whose monastery the king had munificently enriched, came to see Theodoric on matters of importance, the queen rashly presented the king’s illegitimate children to the saint, and begged him to bless them. Columbanus refused, turning away his eyes and saying sternly, “These children are the offspring of guilt, and they will never sit upon their father’s throne.” Another time, after many vain threats and remonstrances, the saint again visited Theodoric, but, instead of accepting the hospitality of his palace, took up his quarters in a neighboring house. Brunehault and her grandson, keenly alive to the implied rebuke, and resenting the public slight thus put upon them before their court and subjects, sent some officers of their household with costly vases and golden dishes, full of delicacies from the royal table, to Columbanus, at the same time entreating him to come to them. The saint made the sign of the cross, and spoke thus to the messengers: “Tell the king that the Most High spurns the gifts of the unjust; heaven is not to be propitiated by precious offerings, but by conversion and repentance.” And as he spoke the vases fell to the earth and broke, scattering the food and wine that had been brought to bribe the servant of God. The king, afraid of the divine judgments, promised to amend, but did not fail to relapse into sin, upon which Columbanus wrote to him again, and finally excommunicated him. Theodoric then visited the monastery of Luxeuil, and in retaliation publicly accused the saint of violating his rule. Columbanus answered, “If you are come here to disturb the servants of God, and stir up confusion among them, we will relinquish all your aid, countenance, and presents, O Theodoric; but know that you and all your race shall perish.” The king retired, awed for this time into silence; but, being further incensed against Columbanus by his grandmother Brunehault, he had him exiled to Besançon. The saint’s reputation was such that no one would venture to guard him, and he of his own accord soon returned to Luxeuil. Theodoric, growing more obstinate the firmer he saw his judge become, again ordered him to leave, even threatening force. Columbanus defied him, and announced that physical violence alone could drive him from his post; but, upon the persecution of the monastery continuing unabated, he judged it more perfect and charitable to exile himself for the peace of his community. Three years after, Theodoric and his children were all killed, and Clotaire, his relative and ruler of a neighboring kingdom, reigned in Burgundy in his stead.
The Byzantine Empire also was constantly torn by schisms and dissensions originating in the unbridled passions of its ignoble sovereigns. In the VIIIth century, Constantine VI., surnamed Porphyrogenitus, the son of the Empress Irene, married at his mother’s instigation an Armenian woman of low birth but irreproachable morals, named Mary. It was not long, however, before he became enamored of one of his wife’s attendants, Theodota, whereupon he proceeded to divorce the Empress Mary and force her to take the veil. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Tarasius, refused to dissolve the first marriage and perform the second, as required by the dissolute emperor, who then attempted to blind him by alleging that his wife had conspired to poison him. This the patriarch firmly refused to believe, and, moreover, represented to the emperor the scandal of his conduct, the infamy that would attach to his name in consequence, and especially the incalculable evil his bad example would cause among his not too chaste courtiers and people. Constantine lost his temper, and violently replied that he would close the Christian churches, and reopen the temples of the heathen gods. The patriarch threatened to refuse him the right of entering the sanctuary, and of assisting at the sacred mysteries; but when an unworthy priest, Joseph, the treasurer of the church of Constantinople, was found willing to celebrate between the emperor and Theodota an invalid “marriage” in one of the halls of the palace of S. Maurice, Tarasius hesitated to pronounce the excommunication. At this distance of time, it is not easy to point out the reasons and excuses which the unsettled state of things in the Byzantine Empire may have furnished for this act of seeming compromise; much less should we rashly condemn a holy and zealous bishop; but it is noticeable that such instances have never been repeated when it was the popes themselves who were directly appealed to.
As the patriarch had foretold, evil results followed the sovereign’s licentious example, a frightful laxity of morals prevailed, and insubordination to the church went hand in hand with the violation of the marriage bond. Tarasius excommunicated the priest Joseph two years after, but, although he had refrained from directly and publicly censuring the principal culprit, he was none the less persecuted by him.
In the following century, a still worse case of the kind took place, the chief actors in it being Bardas, the ambitious uncle of the wretched Emperor Michael the Drunkard, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, S. Ignatius. The former, who had the practical control of the state, and had induced his sottish nephew to give him the title of “Cæsar” of the Byzantine Empire, deliberately left his lawful wife, and lived in publicly incestuous union with the wife of his own son. S. Ignatius indignantly reproved him, and when the prince, braving his censures, presented himself in church on the Feast of the Epiphany, the patriarch publicly refused to admit him to the Holy Communion. Bardas furiously threatened him before the faithful, but the holy prelate boldly presented his breast to the blows he seemed about to receive, and in a few solemn words invoked the wrath of God on the sacrilegious “Cæsar.” He was promptly exiled to the Island of Teberinthia, where Bardas, partly by threats and partly by hypocritical promises, induced all his suffragans to repair in a body, and entreat him to resign the patriarchate. With holy firmness he resisted the treacherous appeal, whereupon Bardas had him put in irons, deposed, and replaced on the patriarchal chair by Photius, a creature of his own and a layman. The famous schism of Photius thus sprang from the same cause as later heresies, and everywhere we see contumacy to ecclesiastical authority making common cause with abandoned passion and shameless license.
The Photian schism was abetted in the West by another rebellious son of the church, Lothair, King of Lorraine, who was anxious to get rid of his wife Thietberga. This was one of the most famous cases of the sort during the middle ages, and was prolonged over many years, breeding not only the utmost moral disorder, but threatening also to bring about even political convulsions. Lothair had conceived a criminal passion for one of his wife’s maids, Waldrade, and to marry her his first endeavor was to prove the queen guilty of incest before her marriage with him. For this purpose he summoned his bishops three times at Aix‐la‐Chapelle, in 860, and had Thietberga condemned to the public penance usually inflicted in those days on a fallen woman. The time‐serving prelates, after a superficial examination of the evidence, allowed the divorce on the plea that “it is better to marry than to burn”; thus giving an early historical proof of the old saying about a certain person “quoting Scripture.” Widalon, Bishop of Vienne, who had not concurred in this iniquitous decree, wrote to the pope for guidance. The pope, Nicholas I., firmly standing by the tradition of the church, and vindicating the fundamental dogma of the sanctity of marriage, replied uncompromisingly that the divorce was null and void, the bishops blamable for their servility, and that even were it proved beyond doubt that Thietberga had been guilty of incest or any other sinful intercourse before marriage, yet the marriage itself could never on that account be legally dissolved. The queen herself then appealed to the pope, who appointed two legates to inquire into the matter. Baffled in his first attempt, Lothair now trumped up a second pretext, and pretended that he had been previously married to Waldrade, and that the queen had therefore never been his lawful wife. The pope replied that, until this matter was disposed of, the queen should be sent with all honor to her father, and suitably provided for from the royal treasury. Thietberga was now arraigned before a packed and bribed tribunal, and forced to acknowledge herself an interloper, but found secret means of sending word to the pope that she had acted under compulsion. Nicholas then wrote an indignant letter to the king and bishops, annulled all previous decisions, and commanded a new and fair trial of the case to be held. He then wrote to the Emperor of Germany, Louis II., and the King of France, Charles the Bald, as well as to all the bishops of the four kingdoms, Lorraine, France, Germany, and Provence, whom he ordered to repair to a council at Metz, where his legates would meet them. He charged them to have more regard to the laws of God than the will of men, and to protect the weak and innocent with all the dignity of their influence. Lothair, however, succeeded in corrupting the legates themselves, and the council merely met to confirm the previous infamous decrees and condemnations. Two of the prelates were chosen to report to the pope and bear hypocritical and falsified messages to him, but in vain. Nicholas, secretly advised of this treachery, and no doubt also divinely inspired, detected the imposition, abrogated the decrees of the false council, and canonically deposed the two guilty prelates from all their functions and dignities. They immediately took refuge at Benevento with the Emperor Louis II., who, hotly espousing their cause, marched with his army against Rome, and surprised the clergy and people in the act of singing the litanies and taking part in a penitential procession at S. Peter’s. His soldiers dispersed the people by force of arms, and blockaded the pope in his palace. Nicholas escaped in disguise, and for two days lay concealed in a boat on the Tiber, with neither covering for the night nor scarcely food enough to sustain nature. Thus the conflict between a sovereign’s unbridled passions and the calm and immutable principles of the Gospel was carried so far as to entail actual persecution on the sacred and representative person of the pontiff. The emperor, repenting of his hasty attack, sent his wife to the pope to negotiate a reconciliation. The two insubordinate bishops at the same time sent an embassy to Photius, the sacrilegious successor of S. Ignatius in the See of Constantinople, to demand his support and countenance. “And thus,” says Rohrbacher, to whom we are indebted for these graphic pictures of the early struggles of the church, “did the schism born of the adultery of Lothair in the West join hands with that born of the incest of Bardas in the East.” Lothair and the rebellious bishops now quarrelled among themselves, and one of the deposed prelates, the Archbishop of Cologne, repaired in haste to Rome to reveal the duplicity, the plotting, and insincerity that had characterized the whole of the proceedings.
The king himself, however, showed a disposition to submit, most of the bishops begged the pope’s forgiveness, and the former legate, Rodoaldus, having been excommunicated for his collusion with the king, a new one, Arsenius, Bishop of Orta, was appointed. The conditions he was charged to demand were explicit—either Waldrade must be dismissed, or the excommunication until now delayed in mercy would be pronounced. Unwilling to submit entirely, yet dreading the consequences if he did not, Lothair actually recalled Thietberga to her lawful position, and allowed Waldrade to accompany the legate to Rome, as a public token of her repentance and obedience. But although his royal word was plighted, he soon found his blind appetites too much for his reason and his faith, and, sending messengers to bring back his mistress, relapsed into his former sins. Waldrade herself was now publicly excommunicated.
In the meantime, Pope Nicholas died, and was succeeded by Adrian II., who proved himself no less strenuous an opponent of royal license than his holy predecessor had been. Lothair, naturally inclined to temporize, offered to go to Rome and plead his own cause with the new pontiff. In a preliminary interview held at Monte‐Casino, the pope reiterated his firm intention of coming to no understanding before the king had made his peace with Thietberga and finally dissolved his criminal union with Waldrade. The next day was Sunday, and the king hoped to hear Mass before he left for Rome, but he could find no priest willing to celebrate it for him, and was forced to take his departure in diminished state for Rome, where no public reception awaited him, so that he had to enter the Holy City almost as a pilgrim and a penitent. In those days of princely hospitality and profuse pageantry, such an occurrence was rare, and, therefore, all the more significant of the majestic and practical power of the church.
Lothair, now thoroughly sensible of his sin, and warned by the terrible dissensions of the past of what further misery to his country and people his prolonged obstinacy might involve, signified his intention to submit unconditionally to the pope’s decree. High Mass was then celebrated in his presence and that of all his noble followers by the pope in person, and when at the moment of communion the king approached the altar, Adrian impressively addressed to him the following unexpected adjuration:
“I charge thee, O King of Lorraine, if thou hast any concealed intention of renewing thy shameless intercourse with thy concubine Waldrade, not to dare approach this altar and sacrilegiously receive thy Lord in this tremendous sacrament; but if with true repentance and sincere purpose of amendment thou dost approach, then receive him without fear.”
The king, evidently moved by this solemn address, knelt down and communicated, and his retainers and courtiers took their places at the sacred board. That no pretext might remain for further equivocation, the holy pontiff warned them also, before administering the Blessed Sacrament to them, saying:
“If any among you have wilfully aided and abetted the king, and are ready wilfully to aid and abet him again in his wicked intercourse with Waldrade, let him not presume to receive sacrilegiously the body of the Lord; but you that have not abetted him, or that have sincerely repented of having done so, and are resolved to do so no more, approach and receive without fear.” A few of them shrank back at these awful words, but the greater part, whether in sincerity or in contempt, followed the king’s example and received.
After this, which did not take place till 869, we hear no more of Lothair’s passion for Waldrade.
Germany, too, had her Lothair, and, in the XIth century, King Henry IV., one of the most abandoned sovereigns that ever reigned, brought upon himself not only the papal anathema, but the displeasure of his electors and confederated vassals themselves by his shameless trifling with his marriage vows. His wife Bertha, a beautiful and virtuous woman, the daughter of Otho, Marquis of Italy, never found favor in his sight; and, in concert with some of his simoniacal bishops, Siegfried, the Archbishop of Mayence at their head, Henry held a diet at Worms in 1069 to procure a divorce from her. Siegfried, however, feeling uneasy at the part allotted him, sent to the Pope Alexander II. for advice, and received from him a severe reprimand for having countenanced the dissolute king. The papal legate, an austere and holy man, Peter Damian, arrived during the session of a diet at Frankfort, where the king’s cause was to be finally judged. Despite Henry’s protestations that his divorce would enable him, as he hypocritically said, to marry lawfully a wife that would please him, and to abandon his numerous harem of favorites, whom he would have no excuse any longer to retain, the stern sentence of Rome was passed against him—either excommunication or reconciliation with his wife. He reluctantly submitted, but only in appearance, for he refused even to see Bertha, and soon gave himself up to his former illicit pleasures. His brutal treatment of his second wife, Praxedes of Lorraine, whom he married according to his own choice after the death of Bertha, drew upon him further ecclesiastical censures, and he left a memory justly branded by all historians as more infamous still than that of the notorious Henry VIII. of England.
At the same time that his passions were revolutionizing the German Empire, Philip I. of France was showing an equally deplorable example to his vassals and subjects. He was married to Bertha, daughter of Hugh, Count of Frisia, by whom he already had two children, one of whom, Louis le Gros, succeeded him; but, blinded by a sinful affection, he carried off, in 1092, Bertrade, the wife of Fulk, Count of Anjou, and lived with her in a doubly adulterous union.
Hugh of Flavigny, a contemporary historian, says of this occurrence: “Even if our book were silent, all France would cry out, nay, the whole of the Western church would re‐echo like thunder in horror of this crime. It is truly monstrous that an anointed king, who should have defended even with the sword the indissolubility of marriage, should on the contrary wallow shamelessly for years in intolerable disorder.” The Blessed Yves, Bishop of Chartres, immediately lifted his voice against the enormity of the crime; but though his fervent reproaches fell upon a deadened conscience, and his letter to the king was in vain, still among the bishops of France none could be found, at least for a long time, to perform a scandalous “marriage” between the king and his mistress. At last the Archbishop of Rouen allowed himself to be blinded, and consented to unite them, but a prompt and sharp interference on the part of Rome punished him by a deposition from all his ecclesiastical dignities, which lasted for several years. The whole of the controversy had now come clearly to the knowledge of the Pope Urban II.
The Count of Anjou had declared war against the ravisher, and the king had put the B. Yves in irons under the guard of the Viscount of Chartres. In the meanwhile, the pope wrote a scathing letter to the metropolitan of Rheims and the episcopate of France. “You,” he says, “who should have stood as a wall against the inroads of public immorality, you have been silent and allowed this great crime; for not to oppose is to consent. Go now, speak to the king, reproach him, warn him, threaten him, and, if necessary, resort boldly to the last measures.” From 1092 to 1094 the pope never ceased publicly and privately to oppose Philip’s unlawful passion, and, sending as his legate Hugh, Archbishop of Lyons, convoked an assembly at Autun for the 15th of October, 1094, to decide the matter. The king insolently attempted to forestall the papal decision by calling a council for the 10th of September previous, which accordingly took place, and in which a few contumacious bishops confirmed the king in his obstinate resistance to the head of the church. As the queen had died a short time before, Philip presumptuously began to hope that his marriage with Bertrade would now be legalized; but, since she herself was the wedded wife of the Count of Anjou, it will be easy to see how vain were his expectations. The Council of Autun met, and, finding the king determined to continue in sin, solemnly excommunicated him. Philip then wrote a threatening letter to the pope, declaring that, if he did not absolve him from the church’s censures, he would go over to the anti‐pope Guibert, styled Clement III. Philip now attempted to secure immunity for himself in another way: he promised all sorts of reforms, both ecclesiastical and moral, if he could only obtain permission to indulge his guilty passion undisturbed. To this proposal the B. Yves replied, like S. Columbanus to Theodoric, that it was impossible to compound for sin by costly gifts, that God desires ourselves, not our treasures, and that heaven is won by penance and not by gold.
At length, in 1095, the Council of Placentia was held. Philip pleaded for a delay, which was granted him, but at the following council, that of Clermont, he and his concubine were at last rigorously excommunicated. And here Rohrbacher takes occasion to remark, à propos to the crusade which was then occupying Christendom: “Indeed, of what use would a crusade against the Turks have proved if the popes had not, at the same time, resolutely opposed the introduction of Turkish disorders into Christian society?”
In 1096, Philip consented to submit, and went in state to the Council of Nismes to meet the pope, and be absolved from the excommunication, which, as he found, weighed very heavily on his conscience. Throughout the middle ages this one trait, a lively faith, proved, indeed, the only barrier against excesses which, had they been unrestrained by the fear of ecclesiastical censures, would have simply produced a state of license worse than that of the latter days of the Roman Empire. But Philip’s repentance was short‐lived; he recalled Bertrade, and even gave away benefices and church dignities to her favorites, seculars, and persons of questionable morality. Urban II. died, and was succeeded by Paschal II., who again sent his legates to the king, and, at the Council of Poictiers, excommunicated the guilty pair a second time. At this council a strange scene took place. A layman threw a stone at one of the legates, and, though it missed him, it split open the head of another bishop who was standing near. This was the signal for a violent attack on the prelates; the unruly crowd outside the church battered down the doors, and rushed in, throwing stones and missiles of all kinds among the deliberating bishops. Of these a very few, seized with panic, hastily made their escape, but the greater part stood like heroes at their post, and even took off their mitres that their heads might present a better mark to the infuriated and partisan mob. Nor was this the only act of violence perpetrated in the name of Philip and Bertrade. Shortly after this scene, while staying at Sens, they remained a fortnight without hearing Mass, which so incensed Bertrade that she sent her servants to break open the doors of the church, and caused one of her priests, a tool of her own, to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice in her presence. Philip now noisily proclaimed that he was going to Rome to receive absolution, but Yves of Chartres warned the Pope of the king’s insincerity, and the pontiff remained conscientiously cold to all his advances until he had wrested from him a solemn oath not only to cease his criminal intercourse with Bertrade, but also to abstain from seeing her or speaking to her unless in the presence of a third person. Nevertheless, the solemn absolution was not pronounced in his favor before the Council of Beaugency, assembled in 1104, twelve years after his first sin in carrying off the lawful wife of his own vassal and kinsman.
The XIIth century, so stormily begun, was disturbed later on by yet another controversy of the same kind. It has been noticed by Protestant writers, says De Maistre, that it was almost invariably marriage, its indissolubility and the irregularities against its integrity, that have provoked the “scandal” of excommunication. In this admission, made rather to criminate than to honor the church, made indeed to throw the obloquy of schism upon the popes themselves, is there not an unwilling testimony to the Papacy’s unflinching championship of virtue?
In 1140, Louis VII. of France, surnamed Le Jeune, refused to sanction the canonical nomination of Peter, Archbishop of Bourges, whom Thibault, Count of Champagne, valiantly defended and upheld. At the same time, Raoul, Count of Vermandois, a man advanced in years, who had long been married to Thibault’s niece, wished to dissolve his marriage in order to contract another with Petronilla, the sister of the Queen of France, Louis’ wife, Eleanor of Antioch. He succeeded in persuading a few bishops to grant him this permission on the plea of relationship between him and his first wife, which, if true, would have made that union illegal from the first. S. Bernard, in a fervid letter to Pope Innocent II., denounces his vile conduct, giving a most lamentable picture of the state of the kingdom of France. “That which is most sacred in the church,” he says, “is trodden underfoot.” The pope, through his legate, Cardinal Yves, excommunicated the Count of Vermandois, and laid his whole territory under an interdict. Mass could no longer be said, the sacraments were not administered, the churches were closed, the bells silent. The king revenged himself by declaring war on the Count of Champagne, who had given shelter to the archbishop, and appealed to Rome against the Count of Vermandois. He devastated Thibault’s territory with fire and sword, and behaved, says Rohrbacher, rather like a Vandal chief than a Christian king. In 1142, he arrived before the town of Vitry, sacked it, and set fire to its church and castle. In the former were no less than 1300 persons, men, women, and children, who had sought safety in the sanctuary. He ruthlessly closed all avenues to the church, and burnt the miserable inhabitants as they vainly strove to escape. The town was hereafter called Vitry le Brûle. The Count of Champagne, weakened by this terrible onset, sued for peace, and promised to exert his influence to have both excommunication and interdict taken off the person and fiefs of Raoul de Vermandois. It was, in fact, provisionally suspended, but, as the culprit still refused to dissolve his criminal union, he was excommunicated for the second time. S. Bernard was a prominent actor in this controversy, and powerfully worked for the preservation of peace.
But greater troubles were yet in store for France and the church. In 1193, Philip Augustus lost his first wife, Isabella of Hainault, and soon afterwards sent the Bishop of Noyon, Stephen, with great pomp to the King of Denmark, Canute III., to ask the hand of his sister Ingeburga in marriage. The request was joyfully granted, and the queen‐elect brought back to France with all possible honor. The marriage took place at once, and the king confessed himself much pleased with his new consort. The next day he caused her to be solemnly crowned, a ceremony to which great importance was attached in those days; but, strange to say, during the service itself he was seen to turn pale as if with horror, and to cast sudden looks of aversion towards the queen. He, however, retired with her to Meaux, and lived with her a short time, still unable to conquer his dislike, which many did not fail to attribute to witchcraft, for Ingeburga was both comely, virtuous, and accomplished. The king now called together his parliament at Compiègne, his uncle, the Archbishop of Rheims and legate of the Holy See, presiding. The queen, who did not understand French, and whose Danish attendants had all been sent away, was present at the deliberation. Unheard, therefore, and even unchallenged, she was speedily declared too closely related to the king through his former wife Isabella to be united to him in lawful marriage. This seems to have been the favorite pretext for dissolving inconvenient marriages in those times, as it was also later in the too famous case of Henry VIII. of England and Catharine of Aragon, but even in this we see the spirit of subordination to the general authority of the church still underlying the partial revolts of her unruly sons. When Queen Ingeburga was made acquainted by an interpreter with the sentence rendered against her, she was painfully astonished, and, bursting into tears, cried out in her broken French, Male France! Male France! Some pitying hearts there must have been in that assembly of lords spiritual and temporal, some remorseful consciences among that gathering of Frenchmen, who, as Rohrbacher quaintly says, “forgot even to be courteous to a stranger and a woman.” Ingeburga, rising, then added, “Rome! Rome!”—sublime appeal of oppressed innocence to the fountain‐head of justice and honor! Philip had her immured in the Abbey of Cisoing. Pope Celestine III. sent legates to inquire into the rights of the case, but the king succeeded in intimidating them, and no conclusion was arrived at in the council held at Paris. The pope then wrote an energetic letter to the bishops, concluding by a decision to this effect, that, having carefully examined the genealogy upon which turned the question of the alleged close relationship between the king’s first and second wives, he solemnly annuls the unlawful act of divorce passed at the Parliament of Compiègne, and decrees that, if the king should attempt to marry any other woman during Ingeburga’s lifetime, he should be proceeded against as an adulterer.
This speedily came to pass. Not content with repudiating his wife, he attempted, in 1196, to marry another, Agnes of Merania (Tyrol). Ingeburga instantly appealed to the pope, saying that for this outrage her husband “allegeth no cause, but of his will maketh an order, of his obstinacy a law, and of his passion une fureur,” as Rohrbacher rather untranslatably puts it.
The Protestant historian Hurter says: “In this instance, the pope stands face to face, not with the king, but with the Christian. Innocent III. (he had succeeded Celestine) would not sacrifice the moral importance of his office even to procure help for the Crusade or to prepare for himself an ally in his dissensions with the German emperors.”
Pope Innocent remonstrated with the king first through the Bishop of Paris, Eudes de Sully, then personally by letter, and threatened him with the last and most awful punishment, excommunication. The king temporized, and would give no satisfactory answer, until in 1198 the papal legate, Peter of Capua, was directed to give him his choice between submission within one month or the imposition of an interdict upon the whole kingdom. This appalling measure had never before been so sweepingly resorted to, and the preparations for it were as solemnly magnificent as if they had portended the funeral of a nation. The council met at Dijon in 1199, and, during its seven days’ session, once more invited the king to attend and avert the doom his sin had well‐nigh brought upon the realm. But Philip remained inflexible, despite the last and urgent letters of the pope, and the interdict was accordingly pronounced.
Four archbishops, eighteen bishops, and a great number of abbots composed the august assembly, and on the seventh day of the council a strange and impressive scene closed the unavailing deliberations. At midnight the great bell of the cathedral tolled out the knell of a parting soul, the prelates repaired in silent and lugubrious procession to the high altar, now divested of all its ornaments, the lights were extinguished and removed, the figure of Christ on the great rood was veiled in penitential guise, the relics of the patron saints were removed into the crypt below, and the consecrated hosts yet unconsumed were destroyed by fire. The legate, clothed in purple, advanced to the foot of the denuded altar, and promulgated the awful sentence that was to deprive a whole Christian kingdom of the consolations of religion. The assembled people answered with a great groan, and, says a historian of the times, it seemed as if the Last Judgment had suddenly come upon men. A respite of twenty days was allowed before the interdict was publicly announced, but after Candlemas Day, 1200, it was not only announced, but rigorously enforced. The effect was terrible; thousands flocked to Normandy and other provinces belonging to the King of England, to receive the sacraments and perform their usual devotions; the king’s own sister, on the occasion of her marriage with the Count of Ponthien, had to remove to Rouen to have the ceremony canonically performed. The king, meanwhile, vented his fury on the bishops, imprisoned some, confiscated the temporalities of others, and caused many to be even personally maltreated. Queen Ingeburga was dragged from her convent, and barbarously imprisoned in the Castle of Etampes, near Paris. Philip’s wrath extended to all classes; the nobles he oppressed, the burghers he taxed beyond their means, until his very servants left him as a God‐ forsaken man. The pressure at last became so terrible that he was heard to exclaim in a transport of rage, “I shall end by becoming a Mussulman! Fortunate Saladin! he at least had no pope over him!” At a meeting of the lords and prelates of the kingdom, at which Agnes of Merania assisted, Philip moodily asked, in the midst of an ominous silence, what he was to do. “Obey the pope,” was the instant and uncompromising reply of the assembly; and, when the king further obtained a confession from his uncle the Archbishop of Rheims that the decree of divorce passed by him had been invalid from the first, he exclaimed in ill‐concealed anger, “You were a fool to give it, then!”
At this juncture, both Agnes and the king sent ambassadors to Rome to ask for a suspension at least of the interdict, but the pope was inflexible, and would hear of no negotiation before an unconditional submission. This Philip reluctantly promised; the interdict had now lasted seven months, and he could no longer withstand the dangerous and threatening attitude of his dissatisfied subjects. In the summer of the year 1200, Cardinal John Colonna, Cardinal Octavian, of Ostia, and several others repaired first to Vezelay, then to Compiègne, where they met the king and received his overtures. On the eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the assembly of lords spiritual and temporal met at the Castle of S. Léger, where the legate insisted on the deliberations being held in public. The anxious people crowded round the doors of the great hall, eager to watch every fluctuation in the proceedings. At last, on the legate’s urgent advice, and in his presence, Philip consented to visit Queen Ingeburga in state. She had been sent for to be present, but had not yet seen her husband. It was their first meeting since their separation six years before. At sight of her, the king recoiled, crying out, “The pope is forcing me to this.”
“Nay, my lord,” replied the injured wife, calmly and meekly, “he seeks but justice.”
Philip soon afterwards swore by proxy to receive the queen as his only and lawful wife, and to render her all the honors due to her rank. As soon as this was done, the bells rang out a joyous peal, and the people knew that peace had been made. The sacred images were again uncovered, the church doors were opened, and Mass was everywhere celebrated with great pomp. The people were frantic with joy, but the king, though he had bent under the weight of influence that had been brought to bear upon him, still persisted in asking for a divorce from his wife on the before‐mentioned plea of relationship. The pope delayed an answer, and, the better to satisfy the reason of the refractory king, appointed another meeting to be held at Soissons, six months after the date of the recent one at S. Léger.
To this meeting Canute III. of Denmark sent bishops and learned doctors to plead his sister’s cause, but, as on the king’s side was arrayed the best—though servile—talent of France, the case seemed not very hopeful, until an unknown and obscure ecclesiastic arose, and, towards the end of the council, which had already lasted a fortnight, modestly asked leave of the august judges to speak in favor of Queen Ingeburga. His address startled and moved all who listened, and they agreed with one voice that this sudden and almost inspired burst of eloquence was surely a sign of the will of God directly urging the queen’s rights. Philip, anticipating the papal decision, determined to surprise the assembly by forestalling it. He accordingly appeared on horseback very early one morning at the gate of the palace of Notre Dame, the queen’s residence, and in public—and shall we not say primitive?—token of reconciliation took Ingeburga away with him, making her sit on a pillion behind him. They rode away quietly and almost unattended, but soon after it became known that he had again imprisoned her in an old castle, and that, having thus broken up the council before a public decision had been rendered, he still considered himself free to seek the divorce. Soon after the difficulty was lessened by the death of the unfortunate Agnes of Merania, whose health had been shattered by the terrible and infamous publicity necessarily brought upon her during her recent pregnancy. It was not, however, for many years after her death, not until 1213, that Philip was sincerely and permanently reconciled to Ingeburga, whom he calls in his will his dear wife, and to whom he left a suitable provision as queen‐dowager.
Hurter and Schlegel both give witness to the admirable conduct of the mediæval popes in these and kindred struggles. The former says: “If Christianity was not reduced to a vain formula like the religion of the Hindoos, or relegated to one corner of the globe like a common sect, or sunk altogether in the mire of oriental voluptuousness, it was entirely owing to the vigilance and constant efforts of the popes.” And Schlegel, in his Concordia, speaks thus: “We hardly dare to liken the Guelphs, with the popes at their head, to anything approaching liberalism, so degraded has the term become in connection with modern liberals; yet they alone, because they had religion and the church on their side, were the true liberals of the middle ages. Indeed, if we look at the position of the popes in its highest type, we shall find that they were always either gentle peace‐makers and arbiters in times of unnecessary and foolish wars, or stern champions of the oppressed, and austere censors of morals.”
We pass over a few other less important cases, and come at once to the last and most fatal, those connected with the Protestant Reformation. In the XVIth century, the old story of Bardas and Photius was lamentably repeated in England. Germany was in open revolt; Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, was extorting shameful permissions for polygamy from the married monk Luther; religious were trampling their vows underfoot; Wittenberg, according to the Lutheran chronicler Illyricus, was no better than a den of prostitution; troops of “apostate nuns,” as Luther himself called them, were constantly arriving, begging, says Rohrbacher, for food, clothing, and husbands; Luther, their prophet, was hawking his mistress, Catharine Boris, about among his disciples, offering her as a wife first to one, then to the other, till he was at last forced to take her himself, to the no small disgust of his best friends, who remonstrated in the following graphic words: “If any, at least not this one.” The Germanic world was crazy with a new revolution, and henceforth the struggle was no longer to be a partial one, a revolt of the flesh, but a radical onset upon everything divine, upon revelation and faith, as well as upon moral restraints and social decencies. Philip of Hesse, petitioning in 1539 for permission to marry a second wife while the first was living, says that “necessities of body and of conscience obliged him thereto”; that “he sees no remedy save that allowed of old to the chosen people” (polygamy); that “he begs this dispensation in order that he may live more entirely for the glory of God, and lie more ready to do him earthly services; that he is ready to do anything that may be required of him in reason (as an equivalent), whether concerning the property of convents or anything else.” He also hints that he will seek this permission from the emperor, “no matter at what pecuniary cost,” if it be denied him by the Wittenberg divines, and alleges as a sufficient reason that it is too costly for him to take his wife to diets of the empire, with all the honors due to her rank, and equally too hard for him to live without female society during such times of gaiety. The permission was granted at last, reluctantly, it must be admitted, for even the first Reformers, lax as they were, were not Mormons. Melancthon drew it up, and eight divines, including Bucer and Luther, signed it, but made secrecy a condition. The shameful “marriage” was performed on the 4th of March, 1540, between the landgrave and Marguerite de Saal, and perhaps the most revolting feature of the proceeding was the consent of Philip’s lawful wife, the Duchess Christina.
In Chambers’ Book of Days, a collection of curious information, we read that a still more liberal dispensation from the ordinary rules of morality was in the last century accorded by the Calvinistic clergy of Prussia to the reigning King, Frederick William, successor of Frederick the Great, to have three wives at the same time, the Princess of Hesse, the Countess Euhoff, and Elizabeth of Brunswick. The progenitor of the Prussian dynasty had already given a similar example of licentiousness. In Luther’s time, Albert of Brandenburg, Grand Master of the religious order of chivalry, the Knights of S. Mary, otherwise called the Teutonic Order, broke his vows and took a wife, having already abjured his faith. Prussia, then only a province dependent on the Order, he seized as his own, Protestantizing it, and making moral disorder the rule there rather than the exception.
But we must glance at England, though the story of its defection is so well known that we will not do more than pencil the outlines of the conflict on this occasion. After twenty years of married life, without a scruple to mar his domestic peace, without a breath of scandal to sully the fair fame of the queen, Henry VIII. suddenly strives to obtain a divorce from his wife, Catharine of Aragon, that he may marry one who is already his mistress and the acknowledged head of his court. A faithful son of the church until a personal test of fidelity is demanded from him, he had already refuted Luther’s errors, and gained the title of “Defender of the Faith.” But passion blinds him, and everywhere he seeks a sanction for his unrestrained license. He applies to Rome and to Wittenberg: the latter answers in a deprecatory tone, “Rather than divorce your wife marry two queens”; the former, in the person of Clement VII., urges him to desist from his unlawful courses. Repulsed the first time, the pope sends Cardinal Campeggio, his legate, to treat of the matter with Cardinal Wolsey; they summon the queen to their presence; she refuses point‐blank, and appeals directly to Rome.
In 1531, Cromwell, the astute and traitorous protégé of Wolsey, suggests schism to the king as a means to the desired end. Henry, knowing the corrupt and venal state of the clergy in England, eagerly accepts the proposals, and instantly attempts to enforce a declaration of his supreme headship of the English Church by putting in force, against the clergy, several obsolete statutes of Norman origin, named “præmunire”; the whole ecclesiastical body is threatened with the punishment of attainder due to high treason, and to save the rest they offer the king a ransom of £100,000 (equal at that period to at least four times that sum according to modern computation). The king only accepts this amount with the supplementary condition of the “oath of supremacy.” At one stroke the episcopate is gagged, and schism practically effected. Meanwhile, Cranmer is sent to Rome to apply anew for the divorce.
His mission proved unsuccessful, and on his return a final council was held at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, where, however, the queen refused again to appear, and was therefore condemned as contumacious. Shortly after, at Lambeth, her marriage was annulled, and her daughter, the Princess Mary, declared illegitimate. Pope Clement VII. threatened to excommunicate the king; Henry never heeded him. A public consistory, held at Rome in 1534, reversed the Lambeth decision, but the die was already cast, and the complaisant parliament was ready to confirm Henry in all his desires. More’s and Fisher’s were the only dissentient voices heard throughout the kingdom; we know at what cost their courageous protest was raised. A reign of blood was inaugurated; confiscations enriched the royal treasury, and the servile episcopate bent to the shameful yoke like one man. Of the Franciscan friars, Peyto and Elston, who dared to preach to the king’s face against his adulterous union, the Protestant historian Cobbett says: “They were not fanatics, as some have said; they were the defenders of morality and order, and I know of no instance in ancient or modern history of a greater and nobler heroism than this.”(218)
In 1536, Queen Catharine died, and the same year was performed the marriage of Henry with Anne Boleyn by a Catholic chaplain, who was ordered to say Mass early one morning by the king, Henry falsely alleging that he had in his possession the newly arrived permission from Rome. But passion is no foundation whereon to build a permanent and happy domestic life. Anne’s immorality matched Henry’s, and ere long she was accused, vaguely, it is true, of treason, adultery, and incest. Her supposed accomplices and lovers were all executed, and she herself, in cruel derision, condemned on the 15th of May, 1536, to be executed on the 19th, while, on the intermediate 17th, the Archbishop of Canterbury, according to his royal master’s orders, declared her marriage annulled, and her daughter Elizabeth illegitimate. Thus she was first proved to have never been the king’s lawful wife, and then beheaded for infidelity to the man who had never been her husband. Of Henry’s subsequent wives and his methods of disposing of them we need say nothing; the separation from Rome had won him a sad independence of the only tribunal once recognized by kings, and divorce, adultery, and consequent murder had already begun the dark record which has ever since steadily increased in England.
The church was the only bulwark adequate to resist that flood of violent and powerful passions which kingly supremacy naturally incites and fosters, and, in breaking with the church, the licentious sovereigns of the XVIth century acted indeed with the wisdom of the children of this world. Still the church stood fast, sad but not conquered; the Mosaic law stood fast, passing into the dicta of society even where it was exiled from the legal courts—for who does not attach even now some idea of obloquy to a divorced or impure person?—still history pointed to the inevitable punishments that fall on the adulterer, and of which the “churches” so‐called, born of royal adultery, have invariably been palpable monuments.
In our days, who can doubt that that church alone which guarantees the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage can hope to become the saviour and regenerator of modern society; that that church alone which protects and ennobles woman can remain triumphant in lands where woman’s influence is slowly leavening the whole social mass; who can doubt that that church alone which can trace its uncompromising laws back to Mount Sinai can hope to retain the moral mastery over the unruly ages to come, even to that age which shall witness the Last Judgment and the final condemnation?
LV.
The clock had just struck two. Vera, according to her custom, was waiting in the ante‐room of the empress’ audience‐chamber. The door was soon opened by an usher, and the person she was waiting to introduce appeared. There was an involuntary movement of surprise on the part of both. Fleurange stopped as if in doubt. Vera’s appearance did not correspond with the idea she had formed of the lady‐in‐waiting she expected to find at her majesty’s door, and for an instant she thought she was in the presence of the empress herself.
Vera, on her side, expected still less to see a petitioner like the one who now appeared.
The Princess Catherine, with her usual forethought, had, in view of this important occasion, carefully prepared a dress for her who was to be regarded as her son’s fiancée, and, when the day came, the young girl opened a coffer which had a special place among her luggage, and followed with docility the instructions she there found in the princess’ own handwriting, with the dress she was to wear. It was black, as etiquette then required, but a court dress, and the princess took pleasure in having it made as magnificent as possible. Fleurange thus arrayed was dazzling. Nevertheless, her only ornaments were a gold chain from which was suspended a cross concealed in her corsage (a precious gift from her father which she never laid aside), and on her right arm a bracelet the Princess Catherine had taken from her own wrist the eve of the young girl’s departure, assuring her it would bring her good luck. She wore no ornament on her head, but her beautiful hair was turned back and plaited in a way not common at that time, though so becoming and striking as to add another peculiar charm to that of her whole person, which was as noble as if she was entitled to a place at court, but simple enough to show that she now appeared there for the first time.
The two young girls looked at each other, and, as we have said, their surprise was mutual. But it was only for an instant. Vera advanced.
“Mademoiselle Fleurange d’Yves, I suppose?”
Fleurange bowed.
“The empress awaits you: follow me.” She turned towards the door, but before opening it she said: “Take off the glove on your right hand—that is etiquette—and hold your petition in that.”
Fleurange mechanically ungloved her beautiful hand in which trembled the paper she held. She stopped a moment, pale and agitated.
“Do not be afraid, mademoiselle,” said the maid of honor to her in an encouraging tone. “Her majesty is kindness itself. You have nothing to fear; she could not be better disposed to give you a favorable reception.”
There was not time to utter another word. The door then opened. Vera entered first. She bowed, and made Fleurange advance; then retired herself with another profound reverence, leaving the young girl alone with the empress.
The audience lasted over half an hour, and Vera, though accustomed to wait, was beginning to find the time long, when the door again opened, and Fleurange came out. Her face was agitated, her eyes brilliant and tearful. Perceiving Vera, she stopped, and took her by the hand.
“Oh! you were right,” she said. “Her majesty treated me with wonderful kindness. But I know how much I am also indebted to you. It was owing to you she was disposed to be gracious even before I was heard. May God reward you, mademoiselle, and repay you for all you have done for me!”
Vera replied to this effusion with unusual cordiality, and accompanied Fleurange to the door. As they took leave of each other, their eyes met; a common impulse caused them both to make a slight movement: but a little timidity on one side, and some haughtiness on the other, stopped them, and the young girls parted without embracing each other.
Vera slowly retraced her steps, and entered the empress’ salon. As soon as the latter perceived her, she said: “Well, Vera, what have you to say? Did you ever see a more charming apparition?”
“The young lady was beautiful indeed,” said Vera, with a thoughtful air. “I never saw such eyes.”
“That is true—eyes that look you directly in the face, with an expression so innocent, so frank, and almost of assurance, were it not so sweet. I was not reluctant, I assure you, to take charge of her petition, and promise to favor it. Here, take it: I would not even read it. I am ready to grant all this charming girl requests. It is sufficient to know she loves one of those criminals, and wishes to marry him in order to share his fate. Such a terrible favor will not be refused, I am sure.”
The empress seated herself in her large arm‐chair. “But what fools men are,” she continued, after a moment’s silence, “to thus foolishly risk the happiness of others as well as their own! Really, I admire these women whom nothing daunts, nothing discourages, and who thus sacrifice themselves for such selfish beings.”
“Yes,” replied Vera, “their devotedness is certainly admirable; but the women who implore, who supplicate, and at length avert the punishment of the guilty, have also a noble rôle, madame, and one which the unfortunate have reason to bless.”
“I understand you, Vera. Your large beseeching eyes have nothing to remind me of, or reproach me for. I have already told the emperor all I learned from you yesterday. We must now leave it to his magnanimity, and importune him no more.”
These words were uttered with a slight accent of authority, and some moments of silence followed. Vera, with mingled sadness and displeasure, stood motionless with her eyes cast down, awaiting her sovereign’s order. In this attitude, she perceived a bracelet on the carpet, which she picked up to give her mistress, who recognized it. “Ah!” said she, “it is the talisman that charming creature, just gone, wore on her arm. Keep it, Vera, you can return it to‐morrow with the reply I promised her.”
Vera examined the bracelet with curiosity. It was a massive gold chain with a deep‐red cornelian clasp on which was graven some talismanic figure. It looked natural. She had seen some one wear a similar bracelet, she was sure; who could it be? For the moment, she could not remember.
While thus examining it, the empress continued: “Take a seat at that table, and write Prince W—— in my name, without any further delay—in my name, you understand. Send this petition with your letter, and say it is my wish it should be granted, and that I beg him to send me an answer—a favorable answer—to‐morrow morning at the latest. As soon as it arrives, you will forward it in my name without any delay to that lovely girl. She is staying at the Princess Catherine Lamianoft’s house on the Grand Quay.”
Vera could not resist a slight start: “The Princess Catherine’s?”
“Yes; but make haste, and do what should be done at once.”
Vera again looked at the bracelet; the princess’ name clearly recalled the remembrance so vague a moment before. It was hers. She had seen the Princess Catherine wear the bracelet.
“Come, Vera, what are you thinking of?”
“Nothing, madame; excuse me.”
“Then make haste and write what I tell you, and send the letter and the petition without any delay.”
Vera obeyed without reply; she took the petition, and went to a table in one of the deep embrasures of the windows, before which a gilt trellis covered with a vine formed a genuine screen. As soon as she was seated in this place where she could not be seen, she eagerly opened the petition, and glanced over it before beginning the letter. This glance was sufficient to justify the suspicion just excited. A deadly paleness came over her face; her features, generally so calm, were suddenly transformed by a violent explosion of anger and hatred. She crushed the paper, and remained motionless on the chair into which she had fallen, incapable of acting, thinking, or realizing where she was and what she had to do.
At length she returned to herself, and made an effort to collect her thoughts. The moments were passing away; the empress would be astonished at the time it took to accomplish her wishes. She therefore took up her pen, but had scarcely written a few words with a trembling hand, when a noise, unusual at that hour, was heard in the court—the sound of a drum, and the guards shouldering arms. Vera rose with surprise, and looked out of the window. The emperor had arrived in his sledge, alone and without any escort, according to his custom, though this was not his usual time of coming. Shortly after, the doors of the salon were thrown open—a signal for Vera to leave the room. She tore up the note, put the petition in her pocket, and, while the empress was advancing to meet her husband, the lady of honor disappeared through a side door, and hurried to her room next the empress’ apartment.
A whole hour passed away, she could not tell how. She had been able to control and generally to effectually disguise the strong feelings which pique had not suppressed—feelings which gave her assurance of some day overcoming all obstacles. And then, what were these obstacles? It was not long since George, her chosen husband from childhood, plainly testified the attraction he felt for her, and seemed as much as she to regard the union arranged in their infancy as the realization of his wishes. It is true a cloud had since passed across that brilliant horizon, and, when she met George again, he was not the same.—Why was it so?—She had often sought the reason, but all she was able to ascertain was that a young girl, an obscure demoiselle de compagnie in his mother’s service, fascinated him for a while, and some one had whispered the name of Gabrielle, but the haughty Vera was not disturbed by so trifling an affair. The future was hers, and she was awaiting it without any fear, when the news of George’s crime and misfortune came like a thunderbolt, enabling her to estimate the depth of her affection for him by the very liveliness of her grief. From that time she had but one thought—to prevail over the emperor, obtain George’s pardon, and win him back to herself. Her first repulse did not destroy all hope of success. But while her influence, her passion, and her efforts were still without any result, another—and what a rival! (for Vera, in spite of her pride, was not so vain or so stupid as not to recognize the redoubtable charm against which she had to struggle)—another, young, as beautiful as herself, and even more so, had eclipsed in an instant, by an heroic act, all her own devotedness had even dreamed of, and gone beyond the limits which she dare not cross! How could she doubt George’s feelings when the young lady she had just seen appeared in his prison. How could she thwart her? What was to be done? Besides, who was this girl who suddenly appeared in their midst—who had the air of an angel, but whom she hated as if she were a demon? All at once an idea flashed into her mind. “Can this be Gabrielle?” she exclaimed aloud. But before Vera had time to dwell on this idea, and calm the fresh agitation which it caused, the sound of the little bell interrupted her painful reverie. She rose, but with some surprise, for she had not heard the usual signal of the emperor’s departure, and she was very seldom admitted when he was present. But her hesitation was only momentary, for the bell again hastily repeated the summons. Vera hastened to answer it, but, confused at the sight of the emperor, she stopped at the door, and bowed profoundly. The empress, with mingled kindness and impatience, exclaimed:
“Why do you not come in, Vera? The emperor wishes to speak to you, and you are making him wait!”
LVI.
While all we have just related was occurring at the palace, the Marquis Adelardi was on his way to the fortress, considering as he went what it was advisable to say to George. After much reflection, he resolved not to announce Fleurange’s arrival till he knew the result of her interview with the empress. He must not torture George in his misfortunes with vague hopes; above all, he must avoid arousing expectations that might prove vain. This would delay the communication but little, for the young girl’s audience was the same day, and on the morrow he could act with a complete knowledge of the case.
Strong apprehensions were mingled with these thoughts as he reflected, on the new position in which his friend now stood. His fate was decided, the prolonged excitement of the trial was over, and the time come for him to resign himself to his lot. In what disposition should he find him? With a nature ardent and impetuous, but at the same time delicate, sensitive to the least restraint, and excessively fond of the comforts of life, how would he endure the horrors of this new prospect—he whose very object in his studies, and in the gratification of his tastes and passions, was only enjoyment? Pleasure by means of his intelligence, his affections, his intellect, and his senses—such had been the sole motive of his actions, even the best; and, in the dangerous risks that led to his destruction, he had rather sought to satisfy a thirst for a new sensation than the realization of a chimerical though generous scheme. How would he, for whom the words duty, sacrifice, and restraint had no meaning, now bear up in the presence not of danger, but of misfortune under so merciless a form?
The marquis asked himself these questions with an anxiety founded perhaps on some resemblance between his own nature and that of him whom he comprehended so thoroughly. Both were men of the world: one more refined and cultivated, more captivating; the other with more acuteness, more sagacity, and more judgment. Both were generous and noble, and, apart from the political entanglements that had misled them one after the other, incapable of a base action unworthy of their noble birth. But there exists in the human soul a chord whose tone is the echo of the divine voice; this chord gave out no sound in these men, otherwise accomplished; or, if not voiceless with the elder of the two, at least, according to the expression of the great poet of his country, inert and feeble from “silence too prolonged.” This mysterious and hidden chord never resounds very loudly, it is true, and the tumult of the world with its passions, pleasures, wit, talent, and glory, often deadens its tone and prevents its being heard; but when the silent hour of adversity comes, then it awakes to a sweet, powerful harmony which sometimes transforms the soul it fills. At such a time its want is felt, and excites a horror, the cause of which is not comprehended by those who experience it.
George was not confined in a dungeon, but in a narrow cell lighted only by a high grated window. There was nothing in it but a bed, a table, and two straw‐bottomed chairs. In his former visits, the marquis had found his friend sad, but always calm, courageous, and, as it were, contemptuous of the danger of his position. Though grown pale and thin, his features hitherto retained their lofty, noble character, and the disorder of his hair and even of his garments did not at all detract from the aristocratic appearance which, in the very best sense of the word, characterized his whole person. But this was no longer the case. He could not have been more changed by a long illness, or the inroads of time, than he was since they last met. Seated beside his table in an attitude of deep dejection, he hardly raised his head at his friend’s entrance. After pressing his hand, the latter remained some moments too much affected himself to break the mournful silence. George waited till the warden who ushered the visitor in had left the cell.
“You have come at last, Adelardi,” said he at length, with an altered voice. “I have been surprised not to see you since—since everything was decided.”
“I could not obtain permission to enter any sooner; but, to make up for it, I am allowed to come every day, till—” He stopped.
“Till I give up the enjoyments of this place for those that await me when I leave it,” said George, with a bitter smile.—“Adelardi,” continued he, changing his tone, and rising abruptly, “can a friend like you come to me to‐day with empty hands? Is it possible you have not divined my wants, and are here without bringing me the means of escaping my doom, and meeting death, which they have had the cruelty to refuse me?” He strode up and down his cell two or three times as if beside himself. “Answer me, then, Adelardi!” exclaimed he, in a violent manner. “Why have you not rendered me this, the greatest of services? In a similar position, you would have expected it of me, and I assure you it would not have been in vain.”
The marquis was not ignorant of the religious principles that should have inspired his reply, but he had long lost the habit of appealing to them. He therefore simply replied: “You know well, George, what you ask would have been impossible.”
“Ah! yes, I forgot.—It is just. They take precautions to prevent their victims from finding another way out of these walls than that opened by their murderers; but they do not consider all the resources of despair,” continued he, with agitation. “When a man is determined to die, they must be sharper than they are now to prevent him, and oblige him to accept the odious life they would inflict upon him.”
Adelardi allowed him without any interruption to give vent for some time to the despair that burdened his heart, but at last he turned to him with sudden firmness: “George, I have always found you calm and courageous till to‐day, but now your language is unworthy of you.”
A slight flush rose to the prisoner’s brow, and he resumed his seat. “You are right, my friend, I acknowledge. I am no longer what I was. I must indeed astonish you, for I no longer recognize myself.” He remained thoughtful for some moments, and then continued: “It is strange! for, after all, Adelardi, in saying that till now I never knew what fear was, or shrunk in the presence of danger or death, saying I had courage, was not laying claim to any extraordinary merit, for there are but few men who lack it. Yes, if any virtue fell to my lot, it was certainly that, it seems to me. Why, then, am I so weak to‐day?—Courage,” repeated he, after a pause. “Is it true? Was it really courage, or was I merely brave, which seems to be another thing? What is the difference between them?”
“I know not,” replied the marquis, as if in a dream; “but there is a difference, certainly.”
Neither of them possessed the true key to the enigma; neither of them now thought of searching for it. But Adelardi, glad to see his friend’s excitement somewhat allayed, continued the subject to which the conversation had led. Besides, he saw it would afford an opportunity of touching on a point he did not wish to introduce directly.
“No,” he resumed, “bravery and courage are not the same thing. What proves it is that the most timid woman can be as courageous as we when occasion requires it, and often more so.”
“Yes, I acknowledge it.”
“For example,” continued Adelardi, looking at him attentively, “more than one of your companions in misfortune have had a signal proof of such courage to‐day.”
“Do you not know that their wives have fearlessly and unhesitatingly requested and obtained the favor of sharing their lot? Some are to accompany them in their sad journey; others will follow them.”
“And have their husbands accepted such a sacrifice?”
“They who inspire such great devotedness can generally comprehend and accept it. It was only yesterday, one of them conversing with a friend admitted to see him, as I to see you, said: ‘I can submit to anything now; I can endure my fate without murmuring; I shall not be separated from her. The only intolerable sorrow in life will be spared me. I am grateful to the emperor, and will no longer complain!’ I must add that he was recently married, and adores his wife.”
“The only sorrow,” repeated George slowly—“the only one!—that is really something I cannot understand. To love a woman to such a degree as to feel her presence could alleviate such a lot as ours, and that never to behold her again, would be a misfortune surpassing that which awaits us! No, I do not understand that, I frankly confess.”
“And yet,” said Adelardi, with some eagerness.—But he stopped and did not continue his thought—that one can accept and admire heroic affection, but not suggest it.
“And yet,” continued George, smiling, “how often you have seen me in love, you were going to say. Yes, I acknowledge it, though perhaps I was sincerely so but once, only once, and yet—shall I confess it, Adelardi? Love even then was a holiday in my life; it added to its brightness; it was an additional enjoyment, another charm. Her beauty; her rare, naïve intelligence; even her virtue, which gave a mysterious attraction to the passionate tenderness sometimes betrayed, in spite of herself, by her eyes, so innocent and frank in their expression; Oh! yes, that time I was in love and ready to commit a folly I am now glad to have avoided. Poor Fleurange! If I had married her, what a fate I should have reserved for her, as well as for myself.”
“For her! Yes, indeed; it was a very different lot your affection promised her when you displayed it without any scruple; but if she—she, charming, devoted, and courageous, were there with you, do you not imagine she could sweeten yours?”
“Mine?—my lot?—the frightful lot that awaits me?” asked George, with a bitter laugh. Then he resumed the previous tone of their conversation.
“No, no; I am not one of those men whom love alone can suffice—stripped of all that outwardly adorns and adds to its value. In short, think of me as you please, Adelardi, but I do not resemble in the least my companion in misfortune you have just referred to. No human affection could make me endure the life I lead here; judge how it would be elsewhere.”
He rose, and began again to walk around in an excited manner. Adelardi remained silently absorbed in anxious, painful thoughts. George soon resumed, in a kind of fury: “Here, Adelardi, speak to me only of one thing; give me only one hope—death! death! that is all I desire.” And touching, with a gesture of despair, the black cravat negligently fastened around his neck, he said, in a hoarse voice: “This will be a last resort, if in a week I do not succeed in finding some means more worthy of a gentleman of escaping from their hands.”
His friend preserved a gloomy silence. What could he say? What reply could he make at a time when every earthly hope failed, and there was none felt in heaven? Adelardi was now fully conscious; he had a lively sense of what was wanting. He was born in a land where the impressions of childhood are always religious, and the longest period of indifference or forgetfulness seldom effaces them completely from the soul in which they were profoundly graven in early life.
“My dear friend,” said he, with a melancholy gravity not habitual to him, “to be of service to you at such a time, I feel I should be different from what I am. Yes, George; in the fearful temptation that now besets you, in your despair in view of the frightful lot that awaits you, there is only one resource, and but one. I feel unworthy of suggesting the only remedy.” His voice faltered, as he continued, with emotion: “George, you must believe—you must pray.”
George was for a moment surprised and affected. After a pause, which neither seemed disposed to interrupt, he said, in a softened tone: “Well, Adelardi, let it at least be permissible, in praying, to implore a favor not refused to a man more guilty than I: Fabiano is dying.”
“I know he cannot recover from his wound.”
“But perhaps he would not be in immediate danger had he not been violently attacked with typhus fever the day before yesterday. I hoped something myself from the contagion; but, doubtless afraid of shortening our heavy chain, they sent him last night to die at a hospital, I know not where.”
At that moment the bolt flew back, the hour had elapsed, and they were obliged to separate, but with an effort scarcely lessened by the thought that it was not a final farewell, and that this sad interview would be repeated more than once before the last.
As the marquis was about to leave the prison, the warden said in a low tone, as he was opening the last door:
“I do not think I am acting contrary to my duty in confiding this letter to you, sir. The dying prisoner who was taken away last night gave it to me one day, begging me to forward it to the address after his departure. He has gone away, and I wish to fulfil the poor fellow’s request.”
“Give it to me,” said Adelardi, as he took it. “I will see that it is forwarded.”
After leaving the fortress, he looked at the letter confided to him, and was greatly surprised to find it addressed to Mademoiselle Gabrielle d’Yves, at Professor Dornthal’s, Heidelberg.
LVII.
The Marquis Adelardi entered the sledge awaiting him at the gate of the fortress, but gave no orders to his coachman, uncertain where he should go. Fleurange by this time must have returned from the palace. Should he go to see her, as was agreed upon the evening before, to learn the result of the audience, and at the same time remit the letter confided to him? This was the plainest course to pursue, and, if he hesitated, it was because his interview with George had left a certain dissatisfaction or, at least, uneasiness which he feared to betray. In the singular mission confided to him, he began to feel that the love and courage of the two parties were unequally divided, and he would have anxiously questioned whether it was certain that the gratitude of one would finally correspond to the devotedness of the other, had he not been reassured by several reflections.
It was not, perhaps, very surprising that George depreciated a happiness he considered beyond his reach. But if she whom he was by no means expecting suddenly appeared in his prison, would he then complain that his bride was too beautiful? The marquis thought not. He knew better than any one else how Fleurange once charmed him. No woman had ever held such empire over George’s mobile heart, and he was sure the very sight of her again would suffice to revive the powerful attraction. As to this, his perfect knowledge of his friend’s character prevented all doubt, and therefore, though wounded by his coldness in speaking of Fleurange, he came to the conclusion his indifference would vanish like snow before the sun as soon as she appeared. She would never perceive it or suffer from it. He regarded this as the most important point.
The interest Fleurange inspired him with was one of the best and purest sentiments he had ever experienced in his life. Without suspecting it, and without aiming at it, she exercised a beneficent influence over him. A thousand early impressions, effaced and almost stifled by the world, awoke in the pure atmosphere that surrounded this young girl, and he welcomed them with a feeling that surprised himself. Therefore, from the time of meeting her again, he seriously assumed, more for her sake than George’s, the quasi‐paternal rôle the Princess Catherine had entrusted to him with respect to both.
The considerations referred to having, therefore, completely reassured him respecting George’s probable if not actual dispositions, he returned to his first intentions, and gave orders to be taken to the house on the Grand Quay. He had scarcely descended and asked to see Mademoiselle d’Yves, when he saw Clement crossing the hall. He bethought himself it might be better to consult him first.
Clement was gloomy and preoccupied. He had just seen his cousin return from the palace in all the brilliancy that dress and the joy resulting from success added to her beauty. But the marquis had not time to notice the young man’s physiognomy, nor the effort with which he replied to the first questions addressed him as soon as they were alone together in a room on the ground floor.
“I wish to speak to. you, Dornthal, about an unexpected incident. But first, has your cousin returned from the palace?”
“Do you know whether she is satisfied with the audience?”
“Yes; the empress promised to have her petition granted by to‐morrow.”
“I did not doubt it. The empress is always so kindly disposed to grant a favor; and, were it otherwise, the sight of her who presented the petition could not fail to ensure its success.”
Clement made no reply to this observation. “You said, Monsieur le Marquis, that an unexpected incident—”
“Yes, I am coming to it. I must first tell you what perhaps you are ignorant of.—That miserable Fabiano Dini, who so cruelly compromised George, and was confined with him—”
Clement, surprised, interrupted him with emotion. “The unfortunate man is actually dying, Monsieur le Marquis. He was removed from the fortress last night, and—”
“Parbleu! I know it; that was precisely what I was going to tell you. But how did you find it out?”
“I made inquiries respecting him.”
“You knew this Fabiano, then?”
“Yes, a little, and was interested in knowing what had become of him.”
“And do you know now?”
“Yes, I know in what hospital he is, and that, thanks to his illness which makes flight impossible, and the fear of contagion which keeps every one away from him, he is only guarded by the infirmarians. I hope to get admittance to him to‐day.”
“You know him?” repeated the marquis after a moment’s reflection. “Then that explains what seemed so mysterious. Your cousin Gabrielle, in that case, perhaps knows him also?”
“Yes, she knows him—the same. as I.”
“That explains everything; and, since it is so, here, Dornthal,” said the marquis, giving him the letter of which he was the bearer, “have the kindness to give her this.”
“I am not afraid, Monsieur le Marquis, to confide to you the secret of his sad life. You will keep it, I am sure, and will never forget, I hope,” added he in a faltering tone, “that it is Fabiano Dini, and not Felix Dornthal, who will be delivered by death from an infamous punishment.”
The marquis pressed his hand. “Rely on my silence, Dornthal.” After a moment, he continued: “This unfortunate man showed great courage during his trial, and absolute contempt of danger for himself. He only seemed preoccupied with the desire of saving him whose destruction he had caused. God forgive him!”
At the sight of his cousin’s writing, Clement was unable to conceal his emotion, and, seeing the marquis’ observant eye fastened on him, it seemed useless to conceal the truth. Without any hesitation, therefore, he briefly related all the circumstances of the life of him who was now expiating his faults by the final sufferings of a miserable death.
“Yes, truly, God forgive him!” gravely repeated the young man.
Adelardi again extended his hand, and was about to leave the room when Clement stopped him. “Monsieur le Marquis, will you allow me now to ask you a question?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, may I ask if Count George has been informed of Gabrielle’s arrival?”
“No, not yet.”
“But he is doubtless aware of her intentions?”
“No, my friend, he is likewise ignorant of them. Though I had no doubt as to Gabrielle’s success in her interview with the empress to‐day, nevertheless, before giving George such a surprise, I wished to be absolutely sure there was no uncertainty to apprehend.”
“Oh! yes, I comprehend you. To lose such a hope, after once conceiving it, would indeed be more frightful than death!” said Clement, with a vivacity that struck the other. He soon continued in a calmer tone:
“One more question, Monsieur le Marquis—an absurd question, I acknowledge, but one I cannot resist asking at such a time. You know my position with regard to Gabrielle is that of a brother. Can you assure me that he whom she loves, and is thus going to wholly immolate herself for—can you assure me on your honor that he is worthy of her?—that he loves her?—that he loves her as much as a man ever loved a woman? I certainly cannot doubt it, but then I must see her happy in return for so much suffering—I must!” repeated he almost passionately, “and I beg a sincere reply to my question.”
The marquis hesitated a moment. Clement’s vehemence struck him, and under the impression of his recent interview with George, he did not at first know how to reply. Should he betray his friend? Ought he to deceive him whose noble, upright look was fastened upon him? He remained uncertain for some moments; at length, he decided to be frank, and reply as candidly as he was questioned.
“You ask for the truth, Dornthal. Well, it is not in my power to affirm that George’s love is at this moment all you desire. According to my impression, Gabrielle is now only a sweet dream of the past. But be easy, my dear friend; as soon as this dream becomes a reality, as soon as she appears before him—is with him—his—oh! then there is no doubt but the almost extinguished flame will revive and become as brilliant as it once was, and this charming creature will have no cause to suspect a shadow of forgetfulness had ever veiled her image. What do you expect, Dornthal? As to love and constancy, women far surpass us, and they are not the less happy for that. Adieu! my dear friend, till to‐morrow.”
Clement only replied by taking the hand the marquis again extended before going out. He listened to him, pale and shuddering, but, as soon as he was alone, he exclaimed, endeavoring with an effort to suppress the sobs that stifled his breast:
“Ah! my God!—my God!—Is that love?”
LVIII.
Fleurange, to the great regret of Mademoiselle Josephine, laid aside the rich dress which seemed to realize the old lady’s dreams of the previous night, and had just reappeared clad in the simple high‐necked dress of dark cloth which was her usual costume, when Clement, who had told her he should not return till late in the evening, suddenly re‐entered the salon he left only half an hour before. His intention was to consecrate the remainder of the day to the sad duty he felt he owed his cousin, and thought it useless to mention it to Gabrielle, from whom he concealed all he had learned respecting Felix. But the letter just given him altered the case, and made it indispensable to inform her at once.
He therefore explained to her without much preamble the actual situation of their unhappy cousin; he informed her of the attempt he was about to make to see him, and then related what he had learned from the Marquis Adelardi, giving her the letter of which he was the bearer. It was not without lively emotion Fleurange broke the seal and hurriedly read it aloud:
“COUSIN GABRIELLE: I am condemned to the mines for life, but as, at the same time, I am dangerously wounded, I shall probably have long ceased to exist when this letter reaches you, if it ever does. I regret the misfortunes I have brought on so many, and especially on my last benefactor, and I particularly regret this on your account, for it will perhaps be a source of suffering to you. I should have thought of this sooner, but, seeing you unexpectedly pass by in a calèche one evening at Florence, I waited at the door of the hotel where I saw you stop, and yielded to the irresistible desire of making you think of me by throwing you some lines concealed in a bouquet. A few days after, my patron, who was very far from suspecting my acquaintance with the original, imprudently showed me his beautiful Cordelia. I confess I was seized with a keen desire to tear him away from contemplating it, which irritated me. Lasko opportunely arrived. But I did not think that would go so far. As to the rest, Gabrielle, believe me, my love which you rejected (and I confess you acted wisely) was perhaps more worthy of you than his; for I feel if I had met you sooner, and you could have loved me, you would have made me better, whereas he!—But it is too late to speak to you either of him or myself!—It is all over. It is to you—you alone, dear cousin, I address these last words; you must repeat them to all to whom they are due; uttered by you they will be heard. Forgive and Farewell.
F. D.”
Fleurange wiped away the tears that filled her eyes. The letter affected her in more than one way, and Clement, it may be imagined, did not listen to it with indifference. But now one thought overruled all others, and, after a moment’s silence, he said: “This letter was written when he expected to die from his wound. Illness is now hastening his end, and perhaps he is no longer living while we are talking. This evening, at all events, you will know whether I found him dead or alive.”
Fleurange interrupted him: “Clement, listen to me. If Felix is still alive, as is by no means impossible, I should like to see him again, and will go with you.”
“You!—no, that cannot be; the danger from contagion is too great. That hospital! you cannot go there; it is a place provided for criminals and miserable creatures of the lowest grade. I cannot expose you to so much danger. I will not.”
“But, perchance,” said Fleurange, “this preference, this sort of sympathy he has always expressed for me in his way, might give me the power of consoling the last moments of his wretched life. Who knows but my voice might utter some word to soothe the despair of his last agony? Clement, Clement, do you dare tell me I should not attempt it? Can you conscientiously venture to dissuade me from it, because thereby I shall incur some danger?”
“Gabrielle,” said Clement, with a kind of irritation, “you are always the same! Do you not understand that you are merciless towards those that love you?”
“Come, reflect a moment,” persisted she, “and answer me, Clement.”
A moment of silent anguish followed these words. Then, with a troubled voice, he said: “Be quick; lose no time. You may perhaps have an influence over him no one else could have. Make haste, I will wait for you.”
Before he ended, Fleurange was gone from the room. In less time than it takes to relate it, she returned wrapped in her cloak, her velvet hat on her head, her face concealed by a veil, ready to go. They went down without speaking a word. Clement’s sledge was waiting at the door. He took a seat beside her, and they set off with the almost frightful rapidity which is peculiar to that mode of conveyance. It was no longer light, being after four o’clock, but the brilliant clearness of the night, increased by the reflection of the snow, sufficiently lighted the way, and the horses went as fast as in the daytime. The place of their destination was on the opposite bank of the Neva, much lower down than the Princess Catherine’s house. They therefore crossed the river diagonally, following a road traced out by the pine branches which from time to time indicated the path. They were thus transported in the twinkling of an eye from the splendor of the city into the midst of what looked like a vast white desert. In proportion as they descended the river, the palaces, the numerous gilded spires of the churches, with the immense succession of buildings whose effect was heightened by the obscurity, were lost in the distance, and, when they at length stopped at the very extremity of a faubourg on the right bank of the river, they found themselves surrounded by wooden hovels, with here and there some larger buildings, but all indicating poverty, and none more than a story high. Clement aided his cousin in alighting, and looked around for the person he expected as his guide. A man approached.
“M. Clement Dornthal?” said he in a low voice.
“It is I.”
“You are not alone.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I have no permission, and a woman—it is forbidden.”
“I suppose, however, more than one has entered the place?”
“Oh! yes, but they must have permission—or else—”
“Here,” said Clement in a low tone, “mine will answer for both.”
The guide seemed to find the reply satisfactory; he pocketed the gold piece Clement slipped into his hand and made no further objection. They walked swiftly after him towards one of the buildings just referred to which was the best lighted. As they approached, they saw the light proceeded from a large fire kindled in the open air, around which quite a number were warming themselves, some squatting down, others standing, and some asleep near enough to the fire not to freeze to death; all lit up with the wild light which revealed their bearded faces, their angular fur caps, and their sheep‐skin caftans. Here and there were some venders of brandy, who furnished them with a more efficacious means of resisting the cold even than the fire in the brazier.
Clement and his companion passed rapidly by this group, not, however, without being assailed by some annoying words. A vigorous blow from Clement sent a curious winebibber flying back who attempted to lift Fleurange’s veil. This lesson was sufficient, and they arrived without any further annoyance at the door of the building decorated with the name of hospital, which was only a long, spacious wooden gallery.
They entered. Passing thus suddenly from the light of the great fire, and the sharpness of the extreme cold, into the obscurity and warmth of the ambulance, their first sensations were caused by the darkness and stifling atmosphere. Fleurange hastily threw back her veil, then took off her hat and unclasped her cloak, for she could not breathe; she felt nearly ready to faint from the effects of this sudden transition, but she almost immediately recovered. Clement was alarmed at first, but soon saw she was able to continue their sad search. As soon as their eyes became accustomed to the dim light around them, they saw the long row of pallets on which lay, in all the frightful varieties of suffering, nearly two hundred human beings whose mingled groanings rose on all sides like one sad cry of pain, enough to chill the veins with horror, and excite the pity of the most courageous and most hardened heart.
That of Fleurange beat painfully as they slowly advanced through the obstructed space. Clement was remorsefully regretting his consent to bring her to such a place, when all at once a moan, followed by some words indicative of delirium, checked every other thought, and kept them motionless where they stood. They listened—which of these unfortunate beings had uttered those words? They looked around as well as the poor light permitted, but on all these sick‐beds so close to each other they did not perceive one whose features bore the least resemblance to those of the unhappy man whose voice they thought they recognized.
“I beg you to lend me your light only for a moment,” said Fleurange, in a low, supplicating tone to an infirmarian to whom she had just heard some one speak in German, and who was rudely passing by her, lantern in hand.
The infirmarian stopped at hearing his language spoken, and looked at the young girl with surprise, then, as if softened by her aspect, he gave her the lantern, saying: “You can have it while I am gone to the other end of the ward; I will take it when I return.” As Clement took it, the light flashed across Fleurange’s face and uncovered head. Instantly there was a cry, an almost convulsive movement, and Gabrielle’s name was pronounced by the voice they had just heard. This indicated which of the miserable beds contained him whom they sought. They both approached with full hearts. By the aid of the lamp they gazed at the dying man. Was it really he?—was that Felix? His voice and words left no doubt, and yet there was nothing in that face, disfigured by agony and a horrible wound, to recall him whom they saw last in all the fulness of strength and the pride of youth. After his exclamation, he fell back almost lifeless, and Clement trembled as he bent down to ascertain if he still breathed. His heart was beating, though feebly and irregularly.
“Felix,” said he, “do you hear me? Do you know me?”
Felix opened his eyes. “What a strange dream!” murmured he. “It seems as if they were all here. That vision a moment ago, and now this voice—O my God, would I might never awake!”
Fleurange took the dying man’s hand, and bent over him to catch his words. Her features thus became distinctly visible in the light, and his eyes fastened with frightful tenacity on those of the young girl.
“It is impossible!” said he. “But what illusion is this which makes me see and hear what cannot be?”
“Felix,” said Fleurange, with a penetrating accent of sweetness, “it is not an illusion. We are here. God has sent us that you may not die alone without a friend to pray for you, without begging and obtaining pardon and peace.”
A ray of perfect clearness of comprehension now lit up his eyes, hitherto fixed or wandering. He seemed to comprehend, but did not reply. Clement and Fleurange were afraid to break the solemn silence. Felix’s eyes soon wandered from one to the other, and, taking the young girl’s hand and that of Clement, he pressed them together upon his heart, saying: “O my God! what a miracle!” Then he added in a feeble voice: “What a comfort that it is he, and not the other!”
They both understood his mistake, but were not equally affected. Fleurange slightly blushed, and withdrew her hand with a faint smile, but Clement’s face became almost as pale as that of the dying man. But graver thoughts prevailed over both at such a time. After a short silence, Fleurange again addressed Felix some words, but he made no reply, and his head, which she tried to raise, fell on his shoulder. He continued faint for some moments, then opened his eyes, and saw her beside him.
“God be praised!” said he. “The vision is still here!”
“Yes, I am here, Felix,” said Fleurange in a fervent tone: “I am here to pray with you. Listen to me,” continued she, speaking softly and very distinctly. “Say with me that you repent of all the sins of your life.”
“Of all the sins of my life!”—repeated the dying man.
“And if your strength were restored, you would make a complete and satisfactory avowal of them, with a sincere repentance. Do you understand me?”
The hand she held pressed hers. A tear ran down Felix’s cheek. A voice which was a mere whisper repeated the words: “A sincere repentance”—another faintness seemed to announce his end. “O my God!” said Fleurange, fervently raising her eyes to heaven, “if the sacred absolving words could only be pronounced over him!”
At that moment the infirmarian returned and abruptly took the lantern from Clement’s hand. “Excuse me, I need it for some one who has come to visit a patient.”
In the narrow space that separated the two rows of beds, there could be indistinctly seen a person of majestic, imposing appearance, whose long beard and floating hair, whose ample robes of silk and gold cross, clearly indicated his character; he was, in fact, a priest of the Greek Church. He had not, however, come to this sad place to exercise his ministry. One of the poor men suffering from the contagious disease was the object of his charity, and he had come to visit him. He was passing along without looking around, even turning his eyes away as much as possible from the sad spectacle that surrounded him, when Clement’s hand on his arm stopped him as he was passing Felix’s bed.
“What do you wish of me, young man?” he asked, with surprise.
“I implore you,” said Clement, “to come to this dying man who is truly contrite for his sins, with a sincere desire to confess them if he had the strength. Have the kindness to give him sacramental absolution!”
In spite of the place, the hour, the awful solemnity of the moment, the young Catholic girl started at hearing these words; her large eyes opened with an expression of the keenest surprise, and turned towards Clement with a mute glance of anxiety. He understood her, and, while the infirmarian was interpreting his words which had been heard but not understood, he replied: “This is a priest, Gabrielle, invested with all the authority of Holy Orders. In the presence of death, we can avail ourselves of it, without regard to anything else.”
He knelt down. Fleurange did the same. The dying man clasped his hands, and, whilst the word “forgive” once more trembled on his lips, the Greek priest raised his right hand with a majestic air, and pronounced over him the merciful, divine words of holy absolution!
Cologne.
What is more familiar than the name of Cologne? What is more delicious than the perfume of the veritable Jean Maria Farina? What is more delightful than the receipt of a box, with the stereotyped picture on the cover of the Rhine lazily flowing under the bridges, of the cathedral looming up to the sky, of the houses clustering around it as though for protection?
No one need be ashamed to avow his or her love of it; it is acknowledged to be indispensable. Bishop or priest, sage or philosopher, can use it without being thought undignified. Imagine a pope, or cardinal, or bishop, or priest, or senator, or judge scented with “Mille Fleurs,” or “Jockey Club,” or “Bouquet de Nilsson”! The bare thought is revolting! To be sure, for some years, “Bouquet d’Afrique” has been the fashion among the “potent, grave, and reverend seigniors” at Washington who make our laws and amuse themselves by adding “Fifteenth Amendments” to the highly respectable and ever‐to‐be‐respected Constitution of the United States.
But that will pass away with Time, the healer and destroyer; the reconstructionist will make all right; the “Fifteenth” will be amended with the “Sixteenth”; and, with the sway of lovely woman, Cologne, without which no well‐bred, well‐dressed woman’s toilette is complete, will resume its reign over heads and hearts; and “Bouquet d’Afrique” will perhaps return to the hot and happy home where the indefatigable Stanley recently discovered the wandering, long‐sought Livingstone—who did not care to be found, as he certainly appeared perfectly content among dusky dark‐browed brothers and sisters, hunting lions and tigers, and imagining each little rivulet and lake the source of the Nile, or Congo, or Niger, or any other meandering river taking its rise in the great water‐shed by the Mountains of the Moon.
If mothers are to be judged by the character of their sons, the mother of Nero, in whose honor Cologne was named, could not have been the mildest and gentlest of her sex. Says Lacordaire, “The education of the child is commenced in the womb of the mother, continued on her breast, completed at her knees.” Sweet must have been the reveries, refreshing the instructions, edifying the conduct of Julia Agrippina, who brought into the world the finished despot that drenched the soil of Rome with the blood of the Christian martyrs, who persecuted unto death the heroes of the faith that now people heaven.
Cologne owes its origin to a Roman camp established by Marcus Agrippa. The Emperor Claudius, at the request of his wife, Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus and mother of Nero, sent a colony of Roman veterans, A.D. 50, named the town after her Colonia Agrippina, and it then became the capital of the Province of Germania Secunda. Vitellius was here proclaimed Emperor of Rome, A.D. 69; Trajan here received from Nerva the summons to share his throne; the usurper Sylvanus was also proclaimed emperor here in 353; a few years later Cologne was taken by the Franks; Childeric made it his residence in 464; and Clovis was here proclaimed king in 508.
During the reign of Pepin, it was the capital of the kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia. Bruno, Duke of Lorraine, was the first of its archbishops who exercised the temporal power, with which he was invested by his brother, Otho the Great. From that time the town increased rapidly in wealth and splendor, and shortly after became one of the principal emporiums of the Hanseatic League; the commerce of the East was here concentrated, and direct communication with Italy constantly kept up. In 1259, the town acquired the privilege by which all vessels were compelled to unload here and reship their cargoes in Cologne bottoms.
At this period it had a population of 150,000, and could furnish 30,000 fighting men in time of war. In the XIIIth century, there was a mutiny among the weavers; 17,000 looms were destroyed; the rebellious workmen were banished from the city; and that, together with the expulsion of the Jews in 1349, did great injury to the town, the number of whose inhabitants was reduced in 1790 to 42,000, of whom nearly one‐third were paupers. Then came the devastating wars which succeeded the maelstrom of the French Revolution, when in the general upheaval empires and kingdoms disappeared, new political combinations were made which changed the map of Europe, and the Rhine became the frontier of the French Empire.
Cologne was nominally French, but the hearts of the people were German—as German as the most ardent worshipper of the “New God,” as Von Bolanden calls the new Empire, the child of Bismarck and Von Moltke. After Waterloo, the Holy Alliance made another partition of the kingdoms and peoples, and Cologne shook off the French yoke, and returned to her national ways and customs. One great cause of its decay had been the closing of the navigation of the Rhine, which restriction was removed in 1837, and, since then, trade has greatly revived, and the town been much improved.
Many of the old streets have been widened and paved, and a considerable portion of waste ground covered with new buildings. The opening of the railways to Paris, Antwerp, Ostend, Hamburg, and Berlin has greatly added to its commercial prosperity, and Cologne bids fair to resume its former position among the chief cities of Europe. Cologne was formerly called the “Holy Cologne,” and the “Rome of the North”—titles which she owed to the number of relics and churches she possessed.
At one time, the city contained 200 buildings devoted to religious uses. These gradually diminished, until in 1790 their number was reduced to 137. During the French Revolution, they were shamefully plundered, the convents suppressed, and their property confiscated; so that at present there are not more than twenty churches and seven or eight chapels; but many other ecclesiastical buildings still remain, used as warehouses and chapels.
Maria im Capitol, so named from its having been built on the site of the Roman capitol, stands on an eminence reached by a flight of steps. The Frankish kings had a palace close by, to which Plectruda, the wife of Pepin, retired in 696, having separated from her husband on account of his attachment to Alpais, the mother of Charles Martel. In 700, she pulled down the capitol, and erected a church on its site, to which she attached a chapter of canonesses. Until 1794, the senate and consuls repaired hither annually on S. John’s day to assist at Mass, when the outgoing Burgomasters solemnly transferred the insignia of office to the newly elected, who were each presented with a bouquet of flowers by the abbess.
The convent no longer exists, but there is a large cloister of the XIth century at the west end of the church, which was restored a few years ago. In this church, there are mural paintings of the early Cologne school, representing the wise and foolish virgins, numberless saints, the raising of Lazarus, and the founders of the church with their children. As in duty bound, Plectruda is properly conspicuous; her effigy in basso‐rilievo beneath the great east window is a very interesting work of the Xth century, and, on one of the towers, her sculptured figure appears between two angels, who are conducting her to her eternal home.
All the churches are more or less interesting, none more so than that of S. Gereon, founded in the IVth century. S. Gereon was the commander of a Roman legion, and he and his companions, 700 in number, were murdered by order of Diocletian upon the spot where the church was built by the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine.
The style is Byzantine, and very singular. The body of the church, preceded by a large portico, presents a vast decagonal shell, the pillars of whose internal angles are prolonged in ribs, which, centring in a summit, meet in one point and form a cupola, one of the latest examples known. A high wide flight of steps, rising opposite to the entrance, leads to an altar with an oblong choir behind it, from whence other steps again ascend to the sanctuary, a semicircular apse, belted, like the cupola, by an open gallery with small arches and pillars resting on a panelled balustrade.
The rotunda is surrounded by ten chapels, in which are the tombs of the martyrs. The walls are encrusted with their skulls, and, in the subterranean church, the pavement and walls are formed by the tomb‐stones covering the holy dust. In the lower church is the tomb of S. Gereon, and in one of the chapels is a mosaic pavement laid in the time of the Empress Helena. Behind the stalls of the clergy are hangings of Gobelin tapestry, portraying the history of Joseph and his brethren.
The baptismal font of porphyry, immensely large, was a present from Charlemagne; and, as the lid is too ponderous for any one to lift, there is a little machine that takes it off when required. We remained a long while in this very delightful church, and, by the time we left, what with Helen and Constantine, Diocletian and Charlemagne, we felt quite like an animated verd‐antique, so intensely Roman and Catholic had we become.
Afterwards we proceeded to S. Ursula’s, where the cruel Roman emperor was exchanged for the barbarian Huns. S. Ursula’s history was done in English by the old sexton, who finished every sentence by assuring us that S. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins met with their untimely fate from the barbarian Huns, who massacred them in cold blood. We made a stride of a few centuries, became Gothic, and extended our hatred to the barbarian Huns. As in S. Gereon, the bones of the martyrs are built in the walls for a space of two feet the whole extent.
In the Golden Chamber we saw the shrine of S. Ursula, the relics of S. Margaret, a thorn from the crown of Our Lord, and one of the vases used at the marriage feast of Cana, that witnessed the first miracle of the God‐ man. Link by link we were carried to the days when Our Lord was incarnate on the earth; we do not need such testimony to assure us of the truth of our holy faith, but, when we touch the vase that has been touched by Our Lord, our senses are awed by the thought of the God‐like condescension of him who became man, who lived like us, who mingled in our joys and sorrows, that we might become greater than the angels.
The Cathedral of Cologne, the queen of pointed architecture, erected on the site of a church founded in 814 by Archbishop Hildebold, and more beautiful than even we could imagine it, familiar as we were with it by picture and description, was commenced in August, 1248, by Archbishop Conrad, of Hochstaden. The works were for some years pushed on with great activity under the direction of Master Gerard von Rile, a builder of whom nothing more is known than that he died before 1302.
In 1322, the choir was completed and consecrated; then the building went slowly on until 1357, when the works were discontinued for a long time. In 1796, the cathedral was converted by the French into a warehouse, and it had very nearly become a ruin in 1807, when the brothers Sulpice and Melchior Boisserée drew attention to it by their illustrated work on its history. In 1824, the work of restoration was commenced, but little progress was made until, in 1842, the idea of completing the cathedral was conceived, and an association was formed to collect subscriptions for this purpose; and now the entire edifice will soon be finished if the works are carried on as zealously as they have been of late.
The glorious roof, arching 150 feet in the air, is magnificent; every day new beauties are added; four hundred men are daily at work, the stones are all cut, and in ten years at least this triumph of genius will be ready to receive the homage of all true lovers of art. The shrine of the Three Kings is superb—gold adorned with precious stones. There are the heads of the three men who came in faith, and bowed in all their pride and majesty before the infant Jesus in the manger; their names, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, are encrusted in rubies above the crowns that encircle their brows. Their bodies were brought from S. Eustorgio, in Milan, by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, after the taking of that city, and presented by him to Archbishop Rainoldo, who deposited them in the ancient cathedral July 23, 1164; from whence they were removed into the present chapel in 1337.
Among the treasures of the cathedral is a splendid ostensorium, one of the finest in the world, presented by some sovereign; another, not so handsome, sent by Pius IX.; and the cross and ring, given to the present archbishop by Kaiser William; both are of diamonds and emeralds, the ring, an immense emerald, surrounded by four circles of diamonds. The man who showed the church prided himself upon his English; would call the archbishops architects: “This is the statue of Engelbert, the first architect from Cologne.” And when we innocently inquired if the architects wore mitres and copes, he impressively repeated his remark; so we are still in doubt whether the archbishops built the cathedral or the architects dressed like bishops!
Wandering one day through the aisles of the cathedral, we paused for a while to gaze upon something beautiful that attracted our attention. It was behind the high altar; we were standing between it and the Chapel of the Magi, when, by chance, we looked down, and on the slab at our feet we saw in large letters, “Marie de’ Medici”—no date, no epitaph. So much for human greatness! Under that stone, trodden daily by hundreds, was the heart of Marie de’ Medici, one of the powerful family that gave to the church Leo X. and Clement VII., the descendant of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the widow of Henri Quatre, the mother of Louis XIII., the ex‐Regent of France. Banished from France, the inexorable hostility of Richelieu pursued her wherever she sought refuge. No crowned head dared shelter her.
One heart was true, one man was found who remembered in her adversity that she had favored him in the days of her prosperity. When, in the zenith of her power, she built the Luxembourg, she sent for Rubens to adorn it with the creations of his genius; she loaded him with favors, sent him on diplomatic missions to restore peace between Philip IV. of Spain and Charles I. of England. Both monarchs responded to her wishes, showered honors upon the artist‐diplomat, and Charles I. knighted him, and then presented him with the sword which had been used for the ceremony.
Genius is a power. Richelieu could command kings on their thrones, and the refugee queen was abandoned by all—by those who should have been bound to her by the ties of kindred, of position, by the claims of misfortune. England, Spain, Holland, refused her entrance; only in the free city of Cologne could she find sanctuary, and that sanctuary was the house of the noble, chivalric artist, Pierre Paul Rubens, whose brave heart quailed not before the wrath of the most powerful man of his age.
With loving care and respect he watched over her, soothed her in her dying agony, and held her in his arms when she breathed her last sigh. The house of Rubens still remains, and the room in which Marie de’ Medici died is preserved with the greatest care. When we visited it, we felt as though we were treading on holy ground, as in a shrine made sacred by a noble deed; for what more royal, more heroic, more Christian, than the brave, grateful heart that dared power to shelter misfortune?
Meanwhile that Marie de’ Medici lived and died in poverty in Cologne, Richelieu was at the apogee of his glory. King, nobles, courts, cowered beneath his glance. The conspiracy of Cinq‐Mars was quelled; his head had paid the penalty of his youthful folly. Richelieu, satisfied and avenged, left Lyons for Paris, carried on the shoulders of his attendants in a kind of furnished room, for which the gates of the cities through which he passed were demolished if they were too narrow to admit it. But the triumph was short‐lived. A few months after the death of Marie de’ Medici, her relentless persecutor followed her to the tomb, and her poor wearied body was removed to France and buried in S. Denis; but the heart was left in the Cathedral of Cologne—a mausoleum sufficiently splendid for any mortal dust.
Soon after leaving the house of Rubens, we came to another famous in Cologne; a large building, where, from one of the windows of the third story, two stone horses were contemplating the busy scene in the Neumarkt below; and then we heard the legend of the horses. Once upon a time this house was the residence of the wealthy family d’Andocht. Richmodis, the wife of Herr Mengis d’Andocht, died during the plague of 1357, and was buried with great pomp in the Church of the Apostles on the Neumarkt.
Her dressing attracted the notice of the sexton. He fancied he would like to have some of the gold and silver adornments; so the night after she was put into the vault he descended into it, opened the coffin, and took off some of the jewels. One of the rings would not move. To make the task easier, he cut her finger; she was only in a trance, and this summary process restored her; she sat up; the man rushed off affrighted. She managed to get out of the coffin. In his haste he had left his lantern behind; with it she made her way out of the church, and reached her home near by.
She knocked at the door; a servant opened it, and scampered off half dead with terror. She went to her husband’s room. He thought she was a ghost or devil; she told him she was his wife, as surely as that their horses would come up‐stairs and jump out of the window. As she spoke, the horses galloped up‐stairs, threw themselves out of the window; whereupon the husband acknowledged her to be his veritable wife. She soon recovered her health, lived for many years, and, to commemorate the wonderful event, the husband had the two horses done in stone and put in their respective panes of glass, where they have ever since remained, looking out of the window.
Now the house is a hospital, and we hope the patients are as much amused as we were at the effigies of the two well‐bred, obedient horses, who were as good at vouching for identity as Dame Crump’s little dog. In the Church of the Apostles, a faded Lent hanging is still preserved that was presented by Richmodis in gratitude for her wonderful deliverance from a living death.
The Rathhaus or Town Hall is a curious building, erected at different periods; the Hansa‐Saal is a fine room on the first floor, in which the meetings of that once powerful mercantile confederation were held; and at one end of it are nine statues holding escutcheons emblazoned with the arms of the Hanse Towns.
The Musée, a comparatively new creation, erected partly by the government, and partly by private subscription, contains many works of art. In the lower story are numerous Roman antiquities, found in or near Cologne; amongst them are busts of Cæsar, Germanicus, Agrippina, a statuette of Cleopatra, and a very fine head of Medusa, said to be larger and more beautiful than the Medusa Rondinini in the Glyptotheca at Munich. One gallery is filled with exquisite specimens of stained glass; the upper rooms are devoted to statuary and paintings, many of which are of the Düsseldorf school.
We were particularly struck with one, the “Triumph of S. Michael over Lucifer.” S. Michael is radiant, his sword flaming; and Lucifer, who is sinking into darkness, is terrible. There he is—no horned demon, but the beautiful fallen archangel, majestic and powerful; profound despair and gloom on his noble features, as the darkness overshadows him, and hell opens to receive him.
The people of Cologne are gay and sociable; in the afternoons, the Zoological Gardens are filled with children and nurses admiring the giraffes, elephants, and every other kind of animal belonging to earth, air, or water. An immense lion was a particular object of interest, as he had distinguished himself the day before we had the pleasure of seeing him by devouring his keeper. The Flora or Winter Garden is charming—a crystal palace, filled with fragrant plants, green vines garlanding the sides and roof, fountains playing, beautiful music well rendered by a good orchestra, and hundreds of people drinking coffee and smoking, who don’t bother themselves by receiving at home, but meet and gossip in the Flora, or the Opera House, to which they generally adjourn.
The Opera House is very pretty but miserably lighted, only two feeble gas‐ lights by the door. Prussian officers, however, abounded, and the glittering uniform shone in the clair‐obscur like fire‐flies in Florida on summer evenings. Perhaps it was to add to the effect of “La Dame Blanche,” which was the opera we chanced to hear, that we were kept in such gloomy darkness; but, as the music was well executed, the time passed pleasantly.
One extraordinary event must be chronicled—we did not buy one bottle of Cologne in Cologne; we left the city of Jean Maria Farina, and only saw the outside of his shop. What with Gothic churches and relics, Roman towers and antiquities, time flew, and we found ourselves also flying off from Cologne on an express train, without one drop of the veritable Eau‐ de‐Cologne in our possession. Mirabile dictu!
John.
In beauty, not above criticism; in courage, undaunted; in love, most generous and most forgiving; in patience, rivalling Job; in constancy, unswerving; in humility, without an equal.
After the above enumeration of qualities, it should be superfluous to add that John is a dog. It would be ridiculous to expect so much of a man. He is, moreover, a Skye‐terrier, well‐born and well‐bred.
To announce to John’s acquaintances that one was about to eulogize the dog would be to incur and deserve some such reply as that made by the Spartan to a rhetorician who announced his intention to pronounce an eulogium on Hercules: “An eulogium on Hercules?” repeated the Spartan. “Who ever thought of blaming Hercules?”
Our reply would be that we write, not for those who deny, but for those who never heard.
There is no shifting of scenes in our little drama. The unities are preserved with almost Grecian strictness; the writer, however, as chorus, claiming the privilege of being occasionally discursive.
Scene.—A suburban summer residence in that most magnificent of seasons, autumn, “in that month of all months in the year,” October; furthermore, the most perfect of Octobers. The stone‐colored house is the only neutral bit in the landscape; all else is a glow of color. The fresh greensward recedes under flower‐bosses of solid brilliancy. A flower carpet, gayer than any loom of Turkey, Brussels, or France ever wove, lies under the clump of evergreens in a far corner of the estate. Tapestries of woodbine hang over balconies, and porches, and bay‐windows; and the noble trees that stand, two and two, in stately pairs, all about the place, and up the avenue, are a torchlight procession, which sunshine, instead of quenching, fires to a still more dazzling blaze. It is that picturesque time when ladies throw gay scarfs over the summer dresses they still wear; when the sky shakes out her violet mists to veil the too divine beauty of earth; that season of exquisite comfort when one has open windows and open fires; that delicious season when fruit is brought to the table still warm with the sunshine in which it finished ripening five minutes before. Above all, it is that season when people who are at all sympathetic are inclined to silence.
Mrs. Marcia Clay was not at all sympathetic. She was simply herself, a frivolous woman, with a strong will, and a Chinese wall of selfishness and self‐complacence built up on all sides of her. The soft “Hush!” on the lips of the Indian summer, when the soul of Nature plumes her wings for flight, she heard not. The suspense, the regret, the melancholy, the fleeting rapture of the season she perceived not. To her it was surely the fall of the year, when people get ready for the winter, lay in coal, buy new clothes, and go back to town.
Flounced to the waist in rattling silk, her fair hair furbelowed all over her head, and, apparently, pounds of gold hanging from her ears, thrust through her cuffs, dangling at her belt, strung about her neck, and fastened to the pin that held her collar, this lady sat in one of the pleasant parlors of her house, and talked as fast as her tongue could run.
The woman who listened was of another kind, one who might have come to something if she had been possessed of will and courage, but who, having a small opinion of herself, was only somebody by little spurts, which did no good, since they were always followed by unusual self‐abasement. She was not without a despairing sense of this incongruity, and had more than once bewailed in her own mind the fact that she was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but inclined to each in turn; had little wings which, as she spread them, changed to little fins, which, as she moved them, became little feet, that, when she would have walked, collapsed utterly, and left her floundering—a woman without moral vertebræ, who had been all her life the prey of people in whom the moral vertebræ were in excess. She was nothing in particular, physically, either, being gayish, oldish, tallish, weakish, and dressed in that time‐honored, thin plain black silk gown which is the infallible sign of genteel poverty, and which, at this instant, adorns the form that owns the arm that moves the hand that holds the pen that writes this history.
Mrs. Marcia Clay.—“It is very provoking, my dear, but it can’t be helped. If I should intimate to him that our trunks are all packed to go in town, he would leave instantly. He is the most touchy of mortals. To be sure, I have invited him here again and again, but I expected him in summer‐time, not when we were on the point of moving, and had our very beds half made in the city. There’s nothing for it but to unpack, and pretend to be delighted. Fortunately, he amuses himself.”
The uncertain person in the black silk gown ventured to suggest that Mr. Bently might accompany them to town, and was met by a little shriek which made her jump.
“Fancy him in my blue satin or pink satin chamber! Why, my dear, he smokes, and—chews! chews, dear! Between you and me, he is a bear in his habits, a positive bear. If you will believe me, I have seen him wear slipshod shoes and crumpled linen. You should see him at home, in his den. An inky dressing‐gown that he wipes his pens on, old slippers with holes in them, books piled all about, and dust that you could write your name in! In that state he sits and writes hour after hour.”
Ah! Mrs. Clay & Co., who look at littleness through magnifying glasses, and are blind to all true greatness, the sole of this man’s slipshod shoe is cleaner than your tongue. There is no dust on his thoughts; there are no holes in the fabrics his brain weaves; and when he writes, far‐away lands that know you not, and kindred greatness nearer by, feel the electric spark that slips from his pen’s point.
“What a shocking person he must be!” says Miss Uncertainty, meaning to please. “I don’t wonder you won’t have him in town.”
“Goodness gracious, Miss Bird!” cried the lady, coloring up. “What can you be thinking of! Why, Mr. Bently is famous. He can afford to be eccentric. It is an honor to have him in one’s house. People have turned and looked at me when they heard that I am his cousin; and his name opens to me places that—well, everybody can’t enter. Then it is a very fine thing to have a gentleman in one’s parlors who can talk to those lions whom one doesn’t know what to say to, and who can tell what one’s pictures, and bronzes, and marbles mean, and translate from every language under the sun. I well remember a time when he won for me a perfect triumph over Mrs. Everett Adams. It was delicious. Mrs. Everett Adams is always picking up lions, especially learned and scientific ones, and, when Professor Porson came here, she monopolized him at once. You cannot conceive how odiously she behaved, nor what airs she assumed. One heard nothing but Porson, Porson, till I was sick of the name; and it was impossible to go anywhere, to theatre, opera, or concert, without seeing her sail down to the most conspicuous place, after everybody was seated, with Prof. Porson in her train. Well, one evening she brought him to our house, just to plague me, and we had half a dozen or so persons to meet him. It was an evening of torment, my dear. The professor was in the clouds, with Mrs. Everett Adams fluttering behind him, like a tail after a kite, and all the rest were in raptures, except me—I was extinguished. The professor knew what every bronze and marble was, and who made it, and if it was an original or a copy; and, in short, everything I had seemed as common as possible. As a last desperate resort, I brought out some old books in foreign languages that poor dear Clay had picked up. He was always collecting things of that sort. The professor turned them over with the tips of his fingers, and read a word here and there. Oh! he knew all about them. Yes; he had read them when he was a boy. But I had begun to suspect him. My poor husband used to say that, when a man will not own that there is anything he doesn’t understand, root and branch, he was always sure that that man was an impostor. So I took up two of the books that I saw he had passed over, and asked him to translate a passage for me. They looked about as much like a printed language as the figures on my carpet do. To my joy, he had to own that he couldn’t. They were Chaldaic, he said, and he had made but little study in that language. Mrs. Adams glanced angrily at me, and I smiled. Just at that moment, as good luck would have it, the door opened, and in came Cousin Bently. I flew at him with the books. Triumph, my dear! Never did I have such a rapturous moment. Cousin took the books up in his slow way, put up his eye‐glasses, and looked them over in such a superior manner that really my hopes rose. They were Arabic, I’ve forgotten what about, and he read out some passages, and translated them, all the company looking on. My dear, the Porson and Adams stock sank to less than one per cent. in an instant. The professor was red, and Mrs. Adams was pale. I could have hugged Cousin Bently on the spot, though his boots were not blacked, and his collar was in a positively shocking state.”
“How charming it must be to have him visit you!” says Miss Bird, wheeling about as the wind veered.
Poor thing! She did not mean to be insincere. She merely wanted to say the right thing, and didn’t care a fig about the matter, one way or the other.
“Charming!” repeated Mrs. Clay, with emphasis. “It gives a tone. Besides, it draws some people one likes to know. You should see Madame de Soi, the most exclusive of women, flutter round him like a butterfly round a—round a—well, really, I am at a loss for the word. It is impossible to call Cousin Bently a flower, unless one should make a pun about the seedy contents of his valise. I studied botany once, and I know a pun can be made of it. Madame knows no more and cares no more about his learning than a cat does, but she has tact, and does contrive to smile at the right time. I never could do that. When I smile, Cousin Bently is sure to push out his under lip, and stop talking. But she will look and listen with such rapture that you would positively think he were describing the dress the empress wore at the last ball; and sometimes she even says something that he will seem pleased with. That very evening of the Porson collapse she talked with him half an hour of molecules, whatever they are. I actually thought they were speaking of people. Fancy being called a molecule! Yes, Cousin Bently is a great credit, and a great convenience to me. Why, but for him, I couldn’t have gone to those stupid exclusive lectures of Mr. Vertebrare’s, where I yawned myself to death among the very cream of society.”
The lady paused for breath, and her companion, feeling obliged to say something, faltered out that she always feared those very clever persons.
“I should think you would after the experience you had with that dragon,” replied Mrs. Clay significantly.
Miss Bird colored, and was silent. “That dragon” was a rather difficult old lady, a Miss Clinton, with whom she had lived and suffered many years, and who had lately died.
“And so,” Mrs. Clay summed up, “I have Cousin Bently on my hands for a week or ten days, and must make the best of it. And”—suddenly lowering her voice—“speak of angels—ahem! Cousin Bently, allow me to make you acquainted with Miss Bird, an old schoolmate of mine.”
Miss Bird rose with a frightened air, dropped her eyes, blushed deeply, half extended her hand, and half withdrew it again, and stammered out, “Good‐morning, sir!” which was not a very felicitous greeting, the time of day being near sunset.
Mr. Bently acknowledged the introduction with rather a stately bow, gave the person before him a calm and exhaustive glance, protruded his under lip very slightly, without meaning to, and walked to the further end of the room.
“Why need people be such fools?” he muttered, half philosophical, half impatient. He had been, as all learned and even merely clever people must be, too much looked on as an ogre by the simple. It was rather provoking to see people shaking at his approach, as if he were going to compel them to talk Greek and calculus, or have their lives.
As the gentleman seated himself in an arm‐chair before a delightful bay‐ window, and facing the window, there was another addition to the company, and—enter our hero!
Reader, John!
A longish, curly‐haired quadruped with bright dark eyes full of merriment and kindliness, and teeth so beautifully white and even that it would be a privilege to be bitten by them. Of course he has undergone those improvements which man finds it necessary to make in the old‐fashioned plan of the Creator, and his clipped ears stand up pointed and pert, and his clipped tail is indeed less a tail than an epigram. But the bounding grace of his motions no scissors can curtail.
Do not imagine that John has entered the room properly, and stood still to be presented and described. Far from it. He bounced in through the window, as though shot from a mortar, and, while we have been writing this brief sketch of his person, has flown into the learned gentleman’s arms, kissed him enthusiastically a dozen times, pawed his hair into fearful disorder, made believe bite his nose and hands, with the utmost care not to hurt him in the least, pulled one end of his cravat out of knot, and threatened to overturn him, chair and all, by drawing back and rushing at him again like a little blue and yellow battering‐ram. His manner was, indeed, so overpowering that Mr. Bently had half a mind to be vexed, and could not help being disconcerted. His affection for dogs was entirely Platonic, and he had a theory that bipeds and quadrupeds should have separate houses built for them; but this creature had struck him as being the most honest and sensible being in the house, and had, moreover, taken to him.
Miss Bird looked askance at the scene in the bay‐window, and Mrs. Clay looked askance at Miss Bird, and wondered at her impudence and folly. Bird had blushed and dropped her eyes when she was introduced to the gentleman, and she was now watching him out of the corners of her eyes. Bird was an old maid, with a moderate annuity; Mr. Bently was an old bachelor, with next to nothing beside brains and a name. Bird must be set to rights. So much the lady’s actions told of her thoughts.
“I wish I dared send for Marian Willis here,” she whispered confidentially, watching the effect of her words. “Nothing would please me better than to bring those two together again. But Cousin Bently would suspect my drift, and, as likely as not, start off at once. Nothing annoys him so much as to see that any one is trying to get him married. Marian is in every way suitable, and between you and me, dear, I think they would both be glad to have a mediator, only they are too proud to own it. Everybody thought about ten years ago that they were engaged, and they certainly were in a fair way to be, when some lovers’ quarrel occurred, and they parted. You have never seen Miss Willis, have you?”
Yes; Bird had seen her at Miss Melicent Yorke’s wedding, and she was the grandest looking lady there. She wore a black velvet dress, buttoned up high with diamonds, and not another jewel about her. She had a pink half‐ open camellia in her bosom, and a wide‐open one in her hair. Clara Yorke said that the beautiful plainness of Miss Willis’ toilet made everybody else look all tags and ends. She gave the bride a rare engraving of some picture of The Visitation, which Miss Melicent didn’t half like, because the S. Elizabeth was on her knees, and because there was a crown carved in the frame just over the Virgin’s head. But the bridegroom had reconciled her to it, saying that motherhood is a crown to any woman. Mrs. Edith Yorke, Carl’s wife, who is now abroad, was very fond of Miss Willis, and used to call her “Your Highness.”
“Oh! their intimacy was because Mr. Carl Yorke was a Catholic,” interposed Mrs. Clay rather abruptly.
When Bird got talking of the Yorkes, she never knew when to stop; and the subject was not pleasant to her listener. Mrs. Clay had tried to be intimate with the family, and had signally failed. Always kind and courteous, there still seemed to be an invisible crystalline wall between them and her.
“Marian’s religion is her one fault. It may be possible that she and Cousin Bently disagreed about that, though it would be hard to find out what he believes, or if he believes anything. He defends every religion you attack, and attacks every religion you defend.”
“But do you think she would marry him?” asked Bird incredulously; and her glance toward the window became depreciatory and critical, instead of awful.
Mr. Bently, as a learned man, was to be regarded with fear and admiration; but as a bridegroom—that was another thing.
“Why, she is handsome and rich.”
“What if she is?” asked the other tartly. “It only makes her more suitable. But she is not rich, though she lives with a rich old uncle, who may leave her something. She is in every way suited to Cousin Bently. He would never marry an inferior woman.”
This last assertion Mrs. Clay made very positively, for the reason that she was mortally afraid it was not true. Her private opinion was that Mr. Bently must have been very lonely in his bachelor lodgings before he came to visit her, and that he might easily be induced to marry even Bird, rather than live alone any longer.
Meantime, the object of their conversation, having put the vociferous John away, and induced him to lie at his feet, instead of pervading his neck and face, sat gazing out through the window. He certainly was not an eminently beautiful man, neither was he a pink of nicety in his dress, though he abhorred untidiness in others, particularly in women. His form was rather fine, but his features were too strong for grace, his hair was growing gray, and his teeth were discolored by his odious beloved tobacco. There was something a little neglected in his appearance. Evidently he needed some one with authority to remind him, when occasion demanded, that his cravat was horribly awry, that he had forgotten to smooth his hair down since the last time he combed it up with his ten fingers, and that, really, that collar must come off. In fine, he needed an indulgent wife, who would look out for him constantly, but with discretion, never intruding the cravat and collar question into his sublime moments.
Was he conscious of something lacking in his life, that his expression was less the gravity of the man of thought than the sadness of the lonely man? Something ailed him—physical sickness, no doubt, for his face was flushed, and his eyes heavy—but some trouble of the mind also. He looked across the lawn, that was bounded by a dense line of autumn‐colored trees, with a sky of brilliant clearness arching over. Betwixt sapphire and jasper the low purple dome of a mountain pushed up, making a background for a shining cross that might be suspended in air for any support visible to him who gazed on it. But he had seen that cross before, and his mind, leaping over the few intervening miles, followed down from its sunlighted tip and touched a slim gray tower and a vine‐covered church, and, looking through the gay rose‐window over the chancel, saw a tiny lambent flame floating in and fed by sacred oil of olives. Mentally he stood before the church door, saw the grove of beeches that hid it from the road, saw through those heavy boughs the green slope of a lawn near by and the mansion that crowned its summit. But in one respect the eyes of the seer were less true to the present than to the past, for they beheld roses, instead of autumn colors, wreathing pillar, porch, and balcony.
In this house Marian Willis lived. He sat and recollected all his intercourse with her, from the first pleasant dawn of friendly regard and sympathy, growing up to something brighter and closer, yet scarcely defined, to its sudden extinguishment. His acquaintance with her had been like a day that breaks in silent and cloudless light, and is shut in by a cold and smothering fog before its noon. What had been expressed to her of all that sweetness he found in her society? What to him of the pleasure she seemed to feel in his? Nothing that had other utterance than silent looks and actions. What had separated them? A mist, a fog, an impalpable yet irresistible power. Some tiny wedge had been inserted that gave a chance for pride to rush in and thrust their lives apart. There had been a slight reserve that grew to coldness and thence to alienation. Who does not know how those many littles make a mickle? Possibly a certain gallant officer, just home from the wars, with his arm in a sling, and a sabre‐ scar across his temple, had had something to do with the trouble. Certainly the last mental picture Mr. Bently had carried away from his last visit at Mr. Willis’ was of this same officer walking in the garden with Marian Willis leaning on his sound arm, and listening to the tale of his adventures as women always do and always will listen to soldiers who bring their wounds to illustrate their stories.
On that occasion, Mr. Bently had returned to his cousin’s house and behaved in what he considered a very reasonable manner. He locked himself into his chamber, let in all the light possible, placed himself before the mirror, and critically examined the reflection he saw there. There was no glorious sabre‐wound across his temple, showing where he had once wrestled with death, and come off conqueror; but, instead, there were long, faint, horizontal lines beginning to show on his forehead—mementoes of the silent combat with time, and of anxious quest in search of hidden truth. There were no crisp, fair curls shining over his head; the brown hair was straight and short, and here and there a white hair rewarded the search for it. The soldier’s large violet eyes flashed like jewels; but these eyes in the mirror were no brighter than wintry skies, a calm, steady blue that a planet might look through, perhaps, but that were not used to lightning. The soldier was clad in a trim uniform that set off well a form of manly grace, the stripe that glimmered down the leg, the band, like a lady’s bracelet, that bound the sleeve, the golden eagle outspread on either shoulder, all helping to make a gallant picture; the raiment reflected with pitiless fidelity by the mirror before him was decidedly neutral. No one could call it picturesque nor even elegant of its kind. It was simply calculated to escape censure.
Having made a full survey and, as he thought, a fair comparison, this self‐elected judge then pronounced sentence on the person whose reflection he gazed at.
“You are a fool!” he said, with a conviction too deep for bitterness. “What is there in you that a fair and charming woman could prefer? Bah! She prizes you as she does those vellum Platos and Homers that she admires because others do, but cannot read a word of. When she sinks into her arm‐ chair for that hour of rest before dressing for dinner, does she take with her a book of Greek or of logic? No; she reads the poet or the novelist. You have nothing to do with her more intimate life.”
Thus had the scholar decided, gazing at his own reflection in the mirror, seeing there only the shell of the man, and that not at its best, at its worst rather. The kindling of intelligence, the scintillating of sharp intellectual pursuit, the soft radiance which dawning love gave him when he was shone upon by the beloved object—those he saw not. He saw only a fool.
So far, so good. But he had not finished the work. A fool may be miserable, may be ruined by his folly, even while owning it. He must not only prove the vanity of hoping, but the vanity of loving. He must remove the halo from his idol’s brow, not rudely, but with all the coolness and gentleness of reason. What, after all, were beauty and grace, a sweet voice and smile, and gracious speaking? He set himself to analyze them, physiologically, chemically, and morally.
So the botanist analyzes a flower, and when he has destroyed its ravishing perfume, and that exquisite combination which constituted its individuality—a combination man can separate, but which only God can form—he points to the fragments, and says, “That is a rose!”
But suppose that, even while he speaks, those withering atoms should stir and brighten, the anthers should gather again their golden pollen, and hang themselves once more on each slender filament, the petals blush anew, and rustle into fragrant crowding circles, and a most rosy rose should rise triumphantly before him!
Some such experience had Mr. Bently when he had finished his work of demolition. Turning coldly away from the ruins of what had been so fair, he walked to the window to take breath, and saw there before him the living woman complete, her soul welding with immortal fire every characteristic and mood into a being irresistibly lovely, baffling, and—disdainful. She stood in the garden where Mrs. Clay had purposely detained her beneath his window, and she stood there unwillingly. Only a social necessity had brought her to the house, and she had determined that she would not, if it could be helped, meet that gentleman who, from being a daily visitor of her own, had suffered three days to pass during which he had once or twice talked with her uncle over the gate, but had never approached her.
Since that hour when, looking from his window, he had seen her sail past without raising her eyes, Mr. Bently had been haunted at times by two antagonistic visions—the rose dissected, which he viewed with indifference, succeeded by the rose full‐blown, triumphant in unassailable sweetness.
He thought it all over now as he sat looking out of Mrs. Clay’s eastern bay‐window. And having thought it over once, it began to go through his mind again, and still again. The various scenes passed, one by one, slowly, like persons in a procession, and he gazed at them from first to last; and there was the first again! He had had enough of it, but it would not stop. His head was aching, and feeling somewhat light besides. He pressed his forehead with his hands, and tried to think of something else, even if it were no more pleasant subject than the cold he must have taken to make him so sore from head to foot. But still that procession moved with accelerating speed. He spoke to John, tired and annoyed himself a little with the creature’s antics, then leaned back in his chair, and let his brain whirl.
Certainly he was ill; but nothing else was certain. Whether to go or stay, to speak or remain silent, he could scarcely decide. When dinner was announced, instinct kept him conventional. He ate nothing, but he went through all the proper forms, with no more abstraction than might be attributed to his intellectual oddities. But dinner, with its inanities, over, he made haste to escape to his own room.
“Going out for a walk, cousin?” asked Mrs. Clay, as he passed her.
How the trivial question irritated him! He bowed, afraid to utter a word, lest it should be an offensive one. His nerves felt bare, his teeth on edge.
Miss Bird looked more deeply than her friend had, and in the one timid glance she gave the gentleman saw a painful trouble underneath his cool exterior.
“I hope he didn’t hear what we were saying of him before dinner,” she remarked apprehensively.
“No, indeed!” was the confident response. “He scarcely hears what you say to him, still less what is said of him.”
“But he looked displeased,” persisted the anxious Bird.
Mrs. Clay cast a sarcastic glance on her subordinate. “My dear,” she said with decision, “the less you occupy yourself with my cousin’s feelings, the better for you. Your solicitude will be quite thrown away.”
Bird sighed faintly, and resigned herself to being snubbed.
Mr. Bently walked up‐stairs slowly, dreading to be alone, and shut himself into his room; and, when there, desolation settled upon him. It is not pleasant to be sick in one’s own home, with loving and solicitous friends surrounding one with their cares, and taking every task from the weak hands; it is still less pleasant when, though friends are near, they are powerless to lift the burden which only those helpless hands can carry; but how far more miserable, how far more cruel than any other desolation on earth, is it when sickness falls upon one who must work, and the sick one is not only oppressed by the burden of duties unperformed, but is himself a burden, coldly and grudgingly tended, or tended not at all? Mr. Bently knew well the extent of his cousin’s friendship, and the worth of her Chinese compliments, and he would far rather have fallen in the street, and been left to the tender mercies of strangers, than fall ill in her house.
Morning came, and it was breakfast‐time, by no means an early hour. Mrs. Clay had put off the meal half an hour on her cousin’s account. “He has at least one polite habit—he does not rise early,” she said. “But then he is as regular as a clock in his late hour.”
He was not prompt this morning, however, for they waited ten minutes after breakfast was on the table, and rang a second bell, and still their visitor did not appear.
Miss Bird suggested that he had looked unwell the evening before, and might be unable to come down.
“Really, how thoughtful you are!” Mrs. Clay said with cutting emphasis. “I had quite forgotten. Perhaps, my son, you will go up and see if Miss Bird is right.”
“My son” objected to being made a messenger of. “If the old fellar wanted to sleep, let him sleep. Don’t you say so, Clem?”
Clementina always agreed with her brother; the two prevailed, and the “old fellar” was left to sleep, or toss and moan, or be consumed with fever and thirst, or otherwise entertain himself as he or fate should choose, while the family breakfasted at their leisure.
It is scarcely worth while to put Clementina and Arthur Clay in print. They are insignificant and, in a small way, disagreeable objects, and their like is often met with to the annoyance of many. The mental ignorance and lack of capacity which we lose sight of when they are overmantled by the loveliness of good‐will, in such as these become contemptible by being placed on pedestals of presumption and ill‐nature, and hateful when they are set as obstacles and stumbling‐blocks in the way of souls who would fain walk and look upward.
Breakfast over, and no Mr. Bently appearing, Mrs. Clay felt called on to make inquiries, and, accordingly, dispatched a servant to her cousin’s door, while she herself listened at the foot of the stairs. She heard a knock, but no reply, then a second knock, followed by the servant’s voice, as if in answer to some one within.
“Paper under the door, sir? Yes, sir!”
She was half way up the stairs by this time, and snatched the slip of paper which the man had found pushed out under Mr. Bently’s door. “What in the world can be the matter? Where are my eye‐glasses? Cousin Bently is such a frightful writer that, really—”
While the lady is adjusting her glasses, and her children and companion are gathering about her, we will read this document, for there will be no time afterward. It is short, and is strongly scented with camphor.
“I am ill, and, it is possible, may have small‐pox. It has been where I was a fortnight ago. Keep away from me, and send for a doctor.”
Confusion ensued. Screams resounded from the parlor; orders and counter‐ orders were given, only one fixed idea penetrating that chaos—to get away from the house as quickly as possible. Carriages were got out, silver and valuables piled into them by Bird, who alone would go upstairs, and who was made to do everything, and in less than half an hour the whole family started for the city. The servants, all but the gardener, had already fled.
“But who is to take care of Mr. Bently?” Bird asked, pausing at the carriage door.
“I shall give the gardener orders to get a doctor and nurse,” Mrs. Clay said impatiently, fuming with selfish terror.
“But I’m not afraid,” Bird hesitated. “I’ve been vaccinated. And it’s hard to leave him alone.”
“Nonsense!” cried the lady. “I shall allow nothing of the sort. It is not necessary, and, besides, it is not proper. Do get in, if you are going to town. It really seems to me, Miss Bird, that you are altogether too much interested in Mr. Bently.”
Then, at last, Bird perceived what was in the speaker’s mind, and, as most women would in such circumstances, laid down her better impulses at the feet of meanness. Crushed and ashamed, and, at the same time, weakly and despairingly angry, she took her place in the carriage, and listened in silence to the lamentations and complaints of her companions.
“How could Cousin Bently do such a thing? How could he come to me when he knew he had been so exposed?”
That Mr. Bently had only learned from the paper of the evening before to what he had been exposed, and had only thought during the night what might be the meaning of his illness, the lady did not inquire into.
At the garden gate stood James, the gardener. Mrs. Clay stopped long enough to give him hurried directions to get a doctor and nurse, and do all that was necessary for the invalid, then ordered the coachman to drive on.
“I hope John isn’t with us,” one of the young ones said presently. “He was round Cousin Bently all day yesterday.”
No; Bird, recollecting that fact also, had shut John into one of the chambers, and left him there. She ventured to hope that he would not be left to starve, but no one responded to her merciful wish.
The cause of all this terror and confusion had seen the departure of the family without being surprised at it. He had not undressed, but had lain on a sofa all night, and, when morning came, had written the warning which proved so effectual, and then sank into an arm‐chair near the window, longing for air. He expected the family to keep away from him, and was neither sorry nor indignant that they had removed themselves still further. Of course a doctor would be sent, and of course there was some one to take care of him. He sat and waited for that some one to enter. Perhaps it was James. He saw the gardener shut and fasten the gate after the carriage went out, and he heard the locking of the stable door. He waited, but no one came. Well, the house must be attended to first, and he would be patient, though thirst, and alternate fever and chills, and racking pains were tormenting him. He was annoyed, too, by John’s efforts to escape from the next room, and would have gone to release the creature but for the fear of spreading contagion.
A distant door opened and shut; he heard a distant heavy step, and thanked God that relief and companionship were at hand. But the sounds ceased, and no one came near him. He saw James, the gardener, laden with packages, hurry down the avenue, and disappear into the public road, and a thrill of fear shot through him. The scene outside swam before his eyes, and grew dark for a moment. Could it be that they had all gone away, and left him to die alone? No; he could not believe it! James had perhaps gone to bring the doctor. He would wait patiently, since wait he must.
An hour passed, and no one came. There was no sound in the house but that occasional whining and barking from the next room; no sound outside except when a carriage rolled swiftly by in the road. He saw no person coming. It was impossible to endure that thirst any longer. He went into the bathroom, and wet his hands and face, and drank of the tepid water there. His head reeled at sight of the stairs, and he did not dare to attempt to descend. Returning to his chamber, he fell on to the sofa, and, for the first time in his life, fainted; coming back to life again as though emerging from outer darkness, but not into light—into a sickening half‐ light, rather. So hours passed, and he knew without a doubt that he was utterly deserted, and that a lonely and terrible death threatened him. Could he do nothing to avert it? He recollected that Mrs. Clay had a medicine closet in the bathroom. Possibly, if he could reach it, something might be found there to relieve, if not to cure, him. What mountains molehills can change into sometimes! This man, so strong and full of life but a day before, now lay and gave his whole mind to planning how he should save himself a few steps in going to the bathroom again, how he could avoid the stairs, lest he should fall, and whether he could this time cross the corridor to release that troublesome, whining dog. Whenever, weary and confused, he lost himself a moment in a half sleep, that whining and scratching assumed terrible proportions in his imagination, and became the fierce efforts of wild beasts to reach him. He started up now and then, with wide‐open eyes, to assure himself that he was not in a menagerie; to fix in his mind the picture of that airy chamber, with its clear tints of green and amber, its open windows showing the long veranda outside, and the bright perspective of foliage and sky.
But when his eyelids drooped again, and he sank back into half sleep and half fainting, back came the painful phantoms to torment him till they were once more chased away for a time.
Toward evening he roused himself to make that difficult pilgrimage of fifty paces in search of healing and refreshment, bathed eagerly his face and head, and found his cousin’s medicine closet. But when he had reached that, his strength was nearly exhausted. He had only enough left to take down the laudanum bottle, and get back to his room with it. Laudanum might dull this pain, and quiet the excited nerves. Once more John must wait. He could not stop to release him.
The room in which the dog was confined had a window on the balcony that ran past Mr. Bently’s room. That window was open, but the blind was shut, and John, despairing of escape through the door, had turned all his efforts toward unfastening this blind, and had several times been near success, when the spring, flying back, had defeated him.
The invalid’s bath of cold water had refreshed him somewhat. He hated to take the laudanum. He had never been an intemperate man, and had always shrunk from swallowing anything which could in the least degree isolate his mind from the control of his will. He would bear the pain a little longer.
He lay there and thought, and visions of happy homes rose up before him. At this hour of early twilight, the lamps were being lighted, or people sat by firelight, and children, grown languid and sleepy with the long day’s play, leaned silent on their mothers’ laps. At this hour, men of thought, intellectual workers, laid aside the weightier labors of their profession to indulge in an exhilarating contention of wits, so much happier than other workers, in that their recreations do not retard, but rather accelerate their work. It is but dancing at evening with Terpsichore, or pacing with Calliope along the margin of the same road which he had travelled by day in a dusty chariot, or walked encumbered by his armor. In their lighter intellectual contests, what sparks were sometimes struck out to live beyond the moment that gave them birth! What random beams of light shot now and then into seeming nothingness, and revealed an unsuspected treasure!
All these scenes of social comfort and delight rose before the sufferer’s mind with tantalizing distinctness, fairer and fuller in the vision than he had ever known the reality to be. He felt like a houseless wanderer who, freezing and starving in the street, sees through lighted windows the warmth and joy of the home circle.
Mr. Bently was not a pious man. He had a deep sentiment of reverence, and a firm belief that somewhere there is an inflexible truth that deserves an obedience absolute and unquestioning. But controversy had spoiled him for religious feeling, which is, perhaps, too delicate for rough handling, and in the clash of warring creeds some freshness and spontaneity had been lost to his convictions. Reaching truth, winning battles for truth, he had been like a traveller at the end of a long journey, when he scarcely cares in his weariness for the goal attained, but must needs eat and sleep. He had spent too much time and strength in wiping away the mire flung on the garments of religion to be any longer quick in enthusiastic homage. “Pity ’tis, ’tis true.” The butterfly you would save from the net loses the down from its wings with your most careful handling; the friend you defend from calumny you dethrone even while defending. The feeling that dictated that brutal egotism, “Cæsar’s wife must not be suspected,” dwells in a less arrogant form in most human hearts, and rare indeed is that soul which sets its love as high, after even the most triumphantly refuted accusation, as it was before.
Desertion and imminent death chilled this man’s heart, and he had no mind to turn to God, save in a cold recognition of his power and wisdom. Love entered not into his thoughts, but despair did.
The pain increased, the dizziness came back. He stretched his hand for the glass and vial of laudanum, and tried with a shaking hand to pour out what he could guess to be an ordinary potion. There was no reason why he should suspect that that bottle might have been standing in the house so long as to have made even the smallest dose of its contents deadly. As he measured, and tried to recollect how much he should take, pouring out unknowingly what would have been for him Lethe indeed, a louder rattle and bang at the blind of the next room proclaimed the success of the four‐ footed prisoner. There was a scampering on the veranda, a dog’s head, eager and bright‐eyed, was thrust in at the window of the sick‐room, then, with an almost human cry of joy, John flew at its occupant.
Away went bottle and glass, breaking and spilling—no laudanum for Mr. Bently that day. Down went Mr. Bently among the sofa pillows, prostrated by the unexpected onset; and love, and delight, and absolute devotion, in the form of an uproarious Skye terrier unconscious and uncaring for risks, nestled in the breast of the deserted man, were all over his face and neck, and through his hair, and speaking as plainly as though human speech had been their interpreters.
When the man comprehended, recovering from his first confusion, reason and endurance stood aside and veiled their faces, and a greater than they took their place.
Through a gush of tears which were but the spray of a subsiding wave of bitterness, this soul raised its eyes, and beheld a new light. It lost sight of the Almighty in a vision of the Heavenly Father.
The flight that followed was painful, but not unsoothed. The dog, perceiving at once that his friend was ill, became quiet. He lay with head pressed close to the restless arm, and, if the sick man moaned, he answered with a pitying whine. Once he left the room, and wandered through the whole house in search of help, whined and scratched at every closed door, and, finding no one, came back with an air of distress and perplexity. Later, when Mr. Bently seemed very ill, John ran out onto the balcony, and barked loudly, as if calling for relief.
Morning came again, and the sick man’s pain gave place to a deathlike faintness, resulting from lack of nourishment. For thirty‐six hours nothing had passed his lips but water, and that no longer ran from the faucet when he tried it. He crept down‐stairs, stair by stair, holding by the balusters, like a little child. There was no water to be seen in the dining‐room, and he did not know where to find any. He reached the parlor, lay down on the floor, and prayed for death or for life—anything to put an end to that nightmare of misery. It seemed that death was coming. His hands and feet grew cold with an unnatural chill, and, though the morning sunshine poured through the windows, all looked dim to his eyes. His senses seemed to be slowly receding, without pain, without any power or wish on his part to recall them. He lay and waited for death.
And while he waited, as one hears sounds in a dream he heard a door open and shut, then a quick, light step that ran up‐stairs. John, standing over his friend, left him, and rushed to the parlor door, barking wildly, but was unable to get out, the door having swung to. In vain he tried it with his paws, and thrust his small nose into the crack. It was too heavy for him to move.
Suddenly, while Mr. Bently gazed with languid, half unconscious eyes at the creature, the door was pushed wide open, and a woman stood on the threshold. She was neither young nor old, but simply at the age of perfection, which is a variable age, according to the person. Her face was a full oval, but white now as hoar‐frost. All its life seemed to centre in the large hazel eyes that were piercing with a terrified search. She wore her fair hair like a crown, piled high above the forehead in glossy coils like sculptured amber. Over one temple a black and gold moth was poised, as though it had just alighted there, its wings widespread. The long black folds of a velvet robe fell about her superb form, sweeping far back from her swift but suddenly arrested step. Scintillating fringes of gold quivered against the large white arms, edged the short Greek jacket, and ran in a single flash down either side of the train. A diamond cross lay like a sunbeam on her bosom, a single diamond twinkled in each small ear.
There was but an instant’s pause, then she crossed the room quickly, and knelt by him.
“My God! my God!” she murmured, and lifted his head on her arm. “What fiendish cruelty!”
Her touch and voice recalled him to himself. He tried to put her away. “Leave me, Marian, I beg of you! Do not endanger yourself for me!”
But even while bidding her go, every nerve in him grew alive with the joyous conviction that he would not be obeyed, and that, danger or no danger, she would not desert him. Here were strength, help, and the power to command. She brought the world with her, this queenly woman, who had not even snatched the gloves from her hands since last night’s ball, but had hurried to seek news of him, after the first confused rumor, to call doctor and nurse, to rush to him herself with all the speed her panting horses could make.
“Leave you? Never!”
He asked no questions, but resigned himself. How delightful the sickness, how sweet the pain, that led to this! How thrice blessed the desertion that gave her to him!
In half an hour, the doctor had come and given his decision. Mr. Bently’s illness was merely a violent cold with fever, and a few days of careful nursing would make all right. In another half hour, he was established in a pleasant chamber in Mr. Willis’ house, with a nurse in close attendance, the whole family anxiously ministrant, John an immovable fixture in the sick‐room; and, later, Mrs. Marcia Clay besieging the house for news of poor dear Cousin Bently, and protesting and explaining to the very coldest of listeners, declaring that nothing but her duty to her family, etc.; and what was the meaning of that broken bottle and glass, and ineradicable laudanum stain on the carpet in her house? Was it possible that Cousin Bently had thought of taking any of that terrible stuff that she meant to have thrown away ages before? And would they bring down John? Arthur had asked for him.
Some one went to Mr. Bently’s room for John, but came back without him. The invalid was reported to have flown into something like a passion on learning the messenger’s errand, and to have held the dog firmly in his arms.
John was his! No one else should have him. Whatever crime it might be called to refuse to give him up—stealing, embezzling, false imprisonment—he was ready to be accused and convicted of it, and would go to jail for it with the dog in his arms.
Mrs. Clay was enchanted to be able to oblige her cousin in such a trifle, and would he speak freely when he wanted anything? and then went home and told all her family in confidence that Mr. Bently was a raving maniac.
Reader, according to our promises at the beginning of this history, we should stop here. The scene has changed, the time already exceeds twenty‐ four hours, and only the characters remain the same. But we have not done. There is something more which we are pining to tell. Shall we stop, then, and perish in silence, rather than transgress rules made by a people “dead and done with this many a year,” whose whole country, with themselves on it, could have been thrown into one of our inland seas without making it spill over? No! Perish the unities!
Scene II.—Large parlor, rosy‐tinted all through with reflections from sunset, from firelight, and from red draperies. After‐dinner silence pervading, open folding‐doors giving a view through a suite of rooms, in the furthest of which an old gentleman sleeps in his arm‐chair. Or, perhaps, it is a picture of a library, with an old gentleman asleep in it. The stillness is perfect enough for that. Mr. Bently, convalescent, first dinner down‐stairs since his illness, stands near a window looking out, but watchful of the inside of the parlor, and of a lady who sits at an embroidery‐frame near the same window. The lady is superficially dignified and tranquil, but there is an unusual color in the cheeks, and a slight unsteadiness in the fingers, which tell her secret conviction that something is going to happen. This is the first time the two have met since Miss Willis found the deserted man lying half senseless on Mrs. Clay’s parlor floor.
He is thinking of that time now, and that an acknowledgment is due, and wondering how it is to be made, half a mind to be angry, rather than grateful, for the service. Such is man. All the bitterness of his lonely life rises up before him. Gray hairs are on his head, lines of age mark his face, but his heart protests against being set aside as too old for anything but dry speculation and love of abstract truth.
“I have been seeking for some proper terms in which to express to you my grateful sense of your humanity in coming to me when I was left sick and alone, but I cannot find them,” he said at length, facing her.
“There is no need to say anything about it,” she replied quietly, setting a careful silken stitch. “I could not have done otherwise.”
Having begun, the gentleman could not stop, or would not.
“I am sure you meant well, but did you do well?” he went on. “Could you not have been content to send the doctor, without coming yourself? Did you reflect that you were apparently incurring peril, and that for a man who had a heart as well as a head, and, worse yet, for a man whose heart had for years striven vainly to forget you? You have deprived me of the shield and support of even attempted indifference. I can no longer try to forget you, or think of you coldly, without the basest ingratitude.”
Will the reader pardon Mr. Bently for expressing himself so grammatically? It was through the force of a long habit, which even passion could not break. It is true that, according to Gerald Griffin, Juno herself, when angry, spoke bad Latin; but then, Juno was a woman.
Allons, donc. We are ourselves interested in this conversation, and are pleased to observe that, though the speaker’s moods and tenses are not flagrant, his eyes and cheeks are.
The lady glanced up swiftly with that smile, half shy, half mirthful, with which a woman who knows her power, and means to use it kindly, receives the acknowledgment of it.
“Why should you think coldly of me, or forget me?” she asked.
Mr. Bently met her glance with stern eyes. “Does a man willingly submit to slavery?” he demanded. He had not suspected Marian Willis of coquetry.
She looked down at her work again, the smile fading, but the mouth still sweet, slowly threaded her needle with a rose‐pink floss, and said as slowly, “I do not wish you to forget me.”
One who has seen the sun strike through a heavy fog, stop a moment, then fling it asunder, all in silence, without breath of breeze, but making a bright day of a dark one, knows how Mr. Bently’s clouded face cleared at those words, and the look of her who spoke them.
No more was said then. Enough is as good as a feast, and both tasted in that moment the full sweetness of a happiness the more perfect because apparently incomplete.
On one point our mind is made up—this story shall not end with a marriage. A marriage there was, at seven o’clock one spring morning, in the little suburban church, with only three visible witnesses; and the marriage feast was—be it said with all reverence and adoration—manna from heaven, the Bread of Angels!
Mrs. Clay was, of course, shocked at this affair. Where was the trousseau, where the fuss, the presents that might have been, the rehearsal at a fashionable church, the organ music, the crowd of dear criticising friends, the reception, cake and wine, journey, what not—all the parade, weariness, and extravagance which have so often changed a sacrament into a ceremony? Where, indeed? They had no existence outside of the lady’s disappointed wishes.
She did not even see what she called this “positively shabby affair,” and we will not dwell on it. Turn we to the final scene.
Does the reader object that John bears too small a part in the story named for him? On the contrary, the whole story is because of John. You have, perhaps, seen a painting of the procession at the coronation of George IV., pages and pages of magnificent persons, names, and costumes, the brilliant pageant of the long‐extended queue, all because of one person in it. The figure is rather large, apparently, for use in this place, but only apparently; for John’s record is better than any king’s, in that it is unstained.
A year has passed. In the midst of a fair area of gardens and trees stands a pleasant house. Only a window or two are open, for the spring is not yet far advanced. Underneath a large old pine, tree not far from the porch, a hole has been dug, and at one side of it stands Mr. Bently, spade in hand, and at the other his wife. This little pit is lined with green boughs, and the lady stoops and carefully and soberly adds one more. On the heap of earth thrown up rests a box.
This much is visible to a young man who comes strolling up the path from the gate. He pauses, and looks on in astonishment. He recollects of having heard somewhere that Cousin Bently’s dog John was accidentally shot, and that Mrs. Bently cried about it. Can it be possible that they are making a funeral over John? That would be too funny.
Mr. Bently stooped, took the box in his arms, and placed it carefully down among the green boughs. Standing upright then, he wiped his eyes, and muttered a trembling, “Poor fellow!”
“Good‐morning!” said a brisk voice at his elbow. “I’m sorry Johnnie met with a mishap. Are you burying him here?”
The vapid, mean, supercilious face gave them both such a shock that they reddened and frowned. No one could have been less welcome at that moment than Arthur Clay.
Mrs. Bently answered his question with a brief, “Yes.”
“Oh! well, there are dogs enough in the world,” said the young man, meaning to be consoling.
“There are puppies enough!” muttered Mr. Bently, and began shovelling the earth savagely into the grave.
“Please go into the house, and wait for us, Arthur,” the lady said, with polite decision. She had no mind to have this last touching rite spoiled by such an intrusion.
But young Mr. Clay was in an obliging mood. “Thank you; I’d just as lief stay, and rather. I never attended a canine funeral before.”
There was a momentary silence, then Mrs. Bently spoke again, with still more decision and far less suavity: “On the whole, you must excuse us from seeing you any longer this morning. If you had gone to the door, the servant would have told you that we do not receive any one to‐day.”
The young man gave an angry laugh. “Oh! certainly! I wouldn’t for the world intrude on your sorrow. Good‐morning! It’s a pity, though, that dogs are not immortal, isn’t it? You might have John canonized.”
Mr. Bently flashed his eyes round at the speaker. “What!” he thundered, “you immortal, and my DOG NOT!”
If they had been two Parrott guns, instead of two eyes and a mouth, Mr. Arthur Clay could not have retreated more precipitantly.
The grave was filled in and covered over with boughs, two sighs were breathed over it, then the couple walked, arm in arm, slowly toward the house.
“He was a perfect creature!” Mr. Bently said, after a silence.
“Yes!” assented the wife. “Only he would bounce at one so.”
“Marian,” said her husband solemnly, “if it hadn’t been for John’s habit of bouncing at his friends, you would have had no husband.”
It was well meant, but unfortunately worded. The lady pouted, being by no means an ideal, perfect, pattern woman, but only a natural and charming one, with varying moods and whims playing, spraylike, over the deeps of principle and religion. “Don’t be too sure of that!” she made answer to him.
Mr. Bently never bristled with virtues when his wife made such remarks. He smiled now, full of kindness. “I meant to say that I should have had no wife,” he corrected himself.
At that, the pout, which was only a rebellious muscle, not a rebellious heart, disappeared. “It means the same thing, you most patient of men!” exclaimed his wife fervently.
They reached the porch, and stood there a moment, looking back to the mound under the pine‐tree.
“It is a comfort to think,” said the wife, “that for one year of his life we made him such a happy dog.”
Then they went in, and the door closed behind them.
The International Congress Of Prehistoric Anthropology And Archaeology.
From La Revue Generale De Bruxelles.
The International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archæology held its sixth meeting at Brussels, in 1872. The idea of this congress originated in Italy. Some eminent Swiss, Italian, and French naturalists, assembled at Spezzia in 1865, resolved to hold the first session the following year at Neufchâtel. This meeting, entirely confined to explorations, created no sensation out of the scientific world, but it was agreed there should be another at the time of the International Exposition at Paris in 1867. The congress, thenceforth established, appointed a committee to organize the next meeting. More than four hundred savants responded to the invitation. At Paris it was decided to meet again the next year at Norwich, at the same time as the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The programme of questions proposed for discussion at Norwich presents a striking similarity to that at Paris. The congress held at Copenhagen in 1869 was distinguished by a more local and practical character than the preceding. Finally, the Congress of Bologna, in 1871, enlarged still more the extent of its programme; according, however, the first place to objects that particularly interested Italy.
The programme of the Congress of Brussels was, so to speak, determined by M. E. Dupont’s important discoveries in the caverns of the province of Namur, and the questions were drawn up from the Belgian point of view, in order to give our savants an opportunity of acquainting foreign scientific men with the researches and facts relating particularly to our country. Similar proceedings had taken place at Copenhagen and Bologna. But the programme of Brussels by no means excluded points of general interest. Here is the list of those proposed:
I. What discoveries have been made in Belgium to attest the antiquity of prehistoric man?
II. What were the manners and pursuits of the people who lived in the caverns of Belgium? Did their manners and pursuits vary during the quaternary epoch? What analogy is there between their manners and pursuits, and those of the troglodyte population in other parts of Western Europe and of the savages of the present day?
III. What were the pursuits of the people who inhabited the plains of Hainault during the quaternary epoch? Can it be proved they held any communication with their contemporaries of the caverns of the provinces of Liége and Namur, or with the quaternary peoples of the valleys of the Somme and the Thames?
IV. What characterized the age of polished stone in Belgium? What was its connection with previous ages, and with the age of polished stone in Western Europe?
V. What were the anatomical and ethnical characteristics of man in Belgium during the age of stone?
VI. What characterized the age of bronze in Belgium?
VII. What characterized the appearance of iron in Belgium?
Excursions to the caverns of the valleys of the Lesse, the flint‐works of Spiennes and Mesvin, and the entrenched camp of Hastedon near Namur, formed a practical demonstration of the problems discussed at the meeting.
Many illustrious co‐workers responded to the invitation of the Committee of Arrangements. England was represented by Messrs. Prestwich, Owen, the great palæontologist, Dawkins, Lubbock, Franks, the Director of the Department of Antiquities and Ethnography at the British Museum, etc.; France, by her most eminent anthropologists, archæologists, and geologists, Messrs, Quatrefages, Broca, Belgrand, Hébert, De Mortillet and Bertrand of the Musée de S. Germain, General Faid’herbe, the Marquis de Vibraye, Cartaillac, De Linas, Doctors Lagneau et Hamy, one President and the other Secretary of the Society of Anthropology, Deshayes, Gaudry, Gervais, the Abbés Bourgeois and Delauny, one Superior and the other Professor at the College of Pont‐Levoy, Oppert, the celebrated explorer of Khorsabat, and many others, among whom we must not omit the inevitable Mlle. Clemence Royer, at least as a curiosity. The northern countries sent the founders of prehistoric archæology in the North—Messrs. Worsaœ, Engelhardt, De Wichfeld, Steenstrup, Waldemar‐Schmidt, from Denmark; Messrs. Hildebrand, Landberg, Lagerberg, Nillson, D’Oliviecrona, from Sweden; Italy was brilliantly represented by Messrs. Capellini, Fabretti, Biondelli, Count Conestabile, Gozzadini, etc.; Spain and Portugal by only a few; Holland by several, among whom was M. Leemans, Director of the Museum of Leyden; Austria by Count Wurmbrand; Germany by the Baron de Ducker, Professors Fraas, of Stuttgart, Schafthausen, of Bonn, the celebrated Virchow, of Berlin, Lindenschmidt, of Mayence; Switzerland by Desor, one of the founders of prehistoric archæology. Belgian science was represented in the committee by Messrs. d’Omalius d’Halloy, the venerable President of the congress, Van Beneden, De Witte, Dupont, with the élite of our savants, attended by a constellation of archæologists de circonstance belonging to the various orders of the literary, artistic, and political world, and even the commercial; for philosophy does not daunt M. Jourdain in these days. As for the rest, it was a spectacle of no slight interest to behold the extraordinary concourse of hearers that thronged the sessions at the ducal palace, attentively listening to discussions sometimes very abstract, and again participating in the excursions of the learned assembly with a genuine interest apart from the mere pleasure of the excursions themselves. In proportion as man adds to his knowledge of the globe he inhabits, instead of being satisfied, the greater ardor and interest he manifests to know more. “The surface of both land and water explored in every sense of the word; mountains measured; oceans sounded, and their secrets brought to light; inorganic substances and organized bodies analyzed and described; plants, animals, and the human races studied under every aspect; historical traditions investigated and revised; the dead languages brought into use, and the words derived from them traced back to their original roots—all this is not enough. Knowing what he is, and with a thousand theories as to his destination, man wishes to pierce the mystery of his origin; he asks whence he came, and how he began the career so laboriously pursued, and into which he was thrust by a destiny of which he had no consciousness.”(219) The truths that we grasp in our day were perhaps only guessed at by the ancients. Lucretius has drawn a very correct picture, for those days, of the wretched condition of the earlier races, their struggles with the elements, and even the primitive weapons of stone which they wrought before the age of bronze and iron. But this is only a poetical conception to which must be attached no more importance than it merits. The science of prehistoric ages then had no existence. This science, scarcely known twenty years ago, has now quite a literature of its own, several reviews, and an annual International Congress (in future it will be biennial), splendid museums in all our capitals, and a society whose labors have contributed not a little to so prodigious a result—the Society of Anthropology.
Some persons are troubled at the discussion of grave and delicate questions that seem to set revelation and science at variance. As for us, who can never admit the possibility of a conflict between the Bible and nature—those two divine revelations—or that they ought ever to be completely separated, we deeply regret the complete absence of our clergy at these great sessions, while those of France and Italy were represented in a brilliant manner.
“I am well aware,” says M. Chabas, in an able preface, “that the materialistic tendency of savants of very considerable attainments in anthropology and other branches of prehistoric research, withholds many men whose concurrence would be of value to science from entering the arena where such points are discussed.” But timid minds are becoming more reassured. Therefore, as the Abbé Bourgeois happily remarked at the Congress of Paris, “We shall perhaps have to add to the antiquity of man, but we ought also to detract from that of fossils.” Besides, hitherto, in spite of so much research, man alone has been found intelligent and with a moral sense of his acts; and in the animal kingdom there is not a single proof to confirm even remotely Lamarck’s theory of transmutation revived by Darwin. When so many are appealing to science to the exclusion of God from the universe, it would be well for others to endeavor to make him manifest by the aid of science.
“What!” exclaims Mgr. Meignan, in his brilliant work on The World and Primitive Man according to the Bible, “ought the exegete to make no account of the progress of human knowledge? Can the savant find neither profit nor light in the wisdom of Holy Writ? We think otherwise. The theologian who first studies nature will be better enabled to explain certain passages of the Bible; and the naturalist and archæologist, in their turn, will find it advantageous to study the real meaning of Genesis.” The human mind enters upon a course of examination more or less legitimate in subjecting religion itself to the trial of controversy; it is almost a duty imposed on the conscience of all who are not vainly endowed with reason to enable themselves to give a reason for the belief that is within them. “The task of the apologist,” says the eminent prelate just quoted, “is never at an end in our restless age.” The disagreement that some seem to apprehend only exists in superficial or sceptical minds.
If the Bible is not a scientific revelation, neither does it contradict science, and especially in the bold outlines drawn by Moses. Science, as it progresses, sets up its landmarks, so to speak, beside the immutable bounds of faith; it is so with the laws of light, as well as the fundamental principles of geology. Revelation assigns no limits to the antiquity of the world, and allows the beginning in which God created it to recede to as remote a period as is wished, and geology corroborates the Scripture account of successive creations. Is not the unity of origin of the human species, distinctly declared in both Testaments, connected with all the hypotheses that have excited so much opposition in our day? I do not mean the unity of the human species, a doctrinal question very different from the other, and not necessarily connected with it. But the unity of origin of the human race is now taught and demonstrated by the greater part of those versed in natural history; it is a scientific truth. As to the existence of man in the tertiary epoch, it is far from certain, though sustained by many highly respectable men.(220) M. Evans, the Secretary of the Geological Society of London, whose name is an authority on things pertaining to anthropology and palæontology, expressed himself in these terms at a meeting of the British Association at Liverpool last year [1871]: “We cannot,” said he, “possibly make any prediction as to the discoveries that still await us in the soil beneath our feet; but we certainly have no reason to conclude that the most ancient traces of man on the earth, or even on the soil of Western Europe, have been brought to light. At the same time, I must confess that the existing evidence of man in the miocene period, and even in the pliocene, in France (it will be seen further on that this has since been asserted in Portugal), appears to me, after the most careful examination on the spot, very far from convincing.”
Besides, the word prehistoric has only a relative exactness of meaning. In Belgium, prehistoric man comes down to the century before the Roman Conquest. A vast number of the monuments and remains so discussed in our day might be included in the historic period. In most cases, too absolute a signification is given to the word prehistoric, conveying an idea of remote antiquity far beyond the bounds of chronology. It is under the influence of this preconceived opinion that the most distinguished and independent investigators have allowed themselves to be carried away with the apparent revelation of an entirely new world. In hearing of the millions of ages attributed to quaternary man, one feels greatly behind the times, and asks himself anxiously if there really is a science that has a good right to make man so old, and that affords means of ascertaining, as has been stated, what our ancestors were observing in the heavens on the 29th of January, 11,542 years before Christ. This feeling of astonishment must be still livelier in those for whom the insoluble problems of antiquity extend back to less than two thousand years. We do not know the site of Alesia, and we pretend to know the habitat and manners of villages of more than three hundred thousand years before the downfall of the Gallic nationality! It should be confessed that the science which has so recently sprung up, and which has for its object the study of human labor anterior to the use of metals, is neither so firmly established nor so positive in its deductions that we should blindly accept such bold theories. This is one of the reasons that should encourage more men of serious pursuits to take a part in these debates, as to which it is allowable to hope that the truth will some day be discovered at an equal distance from any exaggeration.
We shall have occasion to return to these questions which occupied the Congress of Brussels. This preamble appeared necessary as a justification for confining ourselves to a plain, simple analysis of the proceedings of the congress—others can review them better than we.
We will only add one word more. The field for discussion had been prepared in a wonderful manner by the recent publication of the excellent work in which the learned and active director of our Royal Museum of Natural History has condensed his researches.(221)
The opening session took place the 22d of August. The day was spent in receptions, speeches of welcome, replies, the installation of the board, and other official courtesies which we spare the reader. The following days there were two sessions a day. The morning of the 23d of August was devoted to the first question in the programme. There was no one better fitted to develop it than M. Dupont, the Chief Secretary of the congress, and the most active of its organizers. He had already given a clear outline of its history in his discourse at the first session of the day before. It was started in Belgium in 1829, and kept up by the researches of Schmerling, who may be regarded as the Champollion of prehistoric anthropology; but our illustrious fellow‐citizen was not encouraged in his discoveries, and it may be said that he was, to a certain degree, a martyr to the scientific prejudices of his time. His labors, occurring at a time when Cuvier’s authority was at its height, could not counterbalance the influence of that great genius, who declared that man could not be found among fossils’ bones, and that the vestiges of the human race in the caverns came under the general rule. No one then could have dreamed of referring these remains to the epoch of the mammoth, and it was scarcely admitted, till within a dozen years, that man was contemporary with the animals of the geological periods which preceded ours. Schmerling, but little befriended by circumstances, was deceived as to what caused the introduction of this débris into the caverns. He attributed it to sudden inundations. Some years later, Mr. Spring opened the way to the true theory, which allows the reconstruction of the ethnography of geological epochs; but he could not continue his researches, and it was not till 1861 that Lartet’s report concerning the caverns of Aurillac at length established a collection of decisive facts. In 1863, M. Dupont was appointed to explore the caverns of the province of Namur, which gave promise of discoveries of unusual interest; it was important that our country, after having taken so large a part in establishing the first principles of this new science, should not remain inactive in the movement to which it had led. The immense result of researches continued without relaxation for seven years, summer and winter, and the valuable remains thus found, which are the ornament of our principal museum, prove that the direction of the task could not have been confided to better hands.
M. Dupont, laying aside the arbitrary classifications that had hitherto been adopted for determining the antiquity of remains found in caverns, introduced the geologic method in his researches, which is founded upon principles almost incontestable and evidences of indubitable truth. The chronological data furnished by this method are generally of mathematical exactitude. “With this point to start from,” says M. Dupont, “I was sure of clearly determining the fauna and ethnographical remains of each epoch to which the objects discovered in the various subterranean explorations belonged.”(222) In pursuing the application of this method, our young and already illustrious savant was enabled to show the evolution of physical and biological phenomena, and to reconstruct the ethnography of the age of stone. Whatever may be thought of the reality of the facts brought forward, it must be confessed that no ordinary mind could have formed such bold conceptions.
After a communication from Dr. Hamy on the flint‐works of France and England at the time of the mammoth, the Abbé Bourgeois discussed the question of tertiary man. The learned professor’s clear, fluent language, the distinction of his manners, and his open, animated countenance so completely won the goodwill of the audience that thenceforth, whenever he spoke, his appearance in the tribune was hailed with unanimous applause.
The Abbé Bourgeois and M. de Launay, his colleague, are the true heralds of tertiary man. The chronological discussion they so boldly excite seems to embarrass them but little; on the other hand, they almost banish the hope some still seem to cling to of finding the man‐monkey. In 1866, M. Bourgeois described and presented to the Academy of Sciences some wrought flints found in the tertiary deposits in the commune of Thenay near Pont‐ Levoy (Loir‐et‐Cher). M. Desnoyers had already, in 1863, pointed out bones found in strata incontestably pliocene, on which were striæ, or very distinct and regularly marked incisions. Worked flints are beginning to be found, we are assured, in the bottom of the calcareous deposits of Beauce; that is to say, in chalk. They are identical in form with those found on the surface; as in other places, there are utensils for cutting, piercing, scraping, and hammering. Many of these instruments have been injured by the action of fire. Finally, says the Abbé Bourgeois, “I find in them almost every proof of man’s agency, to wit: after‐touches, symmetrical grooves, grooves artificially made to correspond with natural ones, and especially the multiplied reproduction of certain forms. This is a peculiar, unheard‐of fact of the highest importance, but, to me, an indubitable one.” M. Bourgeois exhibited to the competent judges assembled at Brussels what he considered the proofs of the authenticity of his discovery. To him they are convincing, but what he seeks, above all, is truth, and he asked that a special committee be appointed to elucidate the question. This committee pronounced a verdict two days after, without deciding the point. Of thirty‐two specimens presented for examination, some appeared to them evidently wrought, but most of them were unanimously rejected. There was no difference of opinion as to M. Bourgeois’ sincerity of belief, but they were divided as to the authenticity of the deposit. Those who have seen the place had no doubts; the remainder were incredulous. M. Capellini proposed that a new committee be appointed to make researches on the spot. The general conclusion was that no solution is at present possible.
The existence of prehistoric man in Greece next became the subject of lively discussion, giving rise to the most contradictory opinions. The conclusion was that there are no decided proofs. The same doubt was manifested with respect to a skull from California, said to have been found in tertiary formation. It is not even certain it is a human skull.
The second session of the day opened with an account from M. Rivière of the discovery of a complete skeleton in a grotto at Menton, found among the remains of various animals of the quaternary epoch, such as the lion, bear, rhinoceros, etc. Then M. de Mortillet gave a detailed description of the fauna, and the utensils, arms, pursuits, manners, and even the first manifestation of art, of man in the quaternary period, and he proposed a still further subdivision of the classes than is now admitted. The speaker mentioned a very singular circumstance calculated to excite reflection—an inexplicable hiatus between the last period of the age of cut stone and the age of polished stone, in which new races appeared of greater industry and more intelligence, agriculture was developed, the industrial pursuits were extended, and art disappeared. It is the era of lacustrine villages and of dolmens. M. de Mortillet’s sketch of prehistoric civilization was picturesque but far from convincing.
The Abbé Bourgeois did not think M. de Mortillet’s classification correct, because the progress of civilization in France and Belgium was unequal. “The Belgians,” he said, “were more advanced.” And the orator added with charming bonhomie: “I cannot say it is otherwise now.”
M. Fraas, professor at Stuttgart, stated that he had made some explorations in the grotto of Hollenfelz near Ulm, in Würtemberg. The Homo unius cavernæ was refuted in his conclusions by M. Hébert, the celebrated professor at the Sorbonne, and by other savants. M. d’Omalius was of the opinion that two geologists of different countries, desirous of identifying beds contiguous to their fields of exploration, were never able to agree. Between two strata there are always deposits that partake of the distinctive characteristics of both.
We pass from the grave to the entertaining. The following day, at seven o’clock in the morning, all the learned assembly, glad, it may be imagined, to get away from the pretentious paintings of the ducal palace, took flight by steam for the valley of the Lesse. We would be the first to confess that, if the country excited the sincere admiration of the excursionists, the latter were equally a delightful source of curiosity to the native inhabitants. They will not readily forget the picturesque sight of our long caravan traversing the good town of Dinant all decked out with flags, parading in elegant equipages lost among the coucous, fiacres, and calèches of wondrous construction, or perched on the imperials of the most extraordinary vehicles, omnibuses, and pataches truly prehistoric, filing along the banks of the Meuse towards the valleys amid laughter, jests, joltings, and the vociferations of our Automedon. Charming landscapes, but detestable roads. This region has been so often described that I need not attempt to depict it; it is with the pencil and brush it should be undertaken. Sometimes the road winds around with disagreeable undulations through the deep ravines bordered by apple‐trees whose fruit‐laden branches sweep the imperials of the carriages, endangering the silken hat; sometimes rolling over broad grassy roads walled in by immense cliffs crowned with ruins and verdure, or affording vistas through the neighboring valleys, lit up by the sun streaming through the woods with a mild radiance that recalls the Elysian Fields of mythological memory. At length we come to the Lesse, which bars the way with its clear, rapid current. The carriages have to ford the capricious and petulant waters of the little winding torrent. The horses sheer in the very middle of the stream, causing a deafening noise of laughter, shouts of alarm, and blows of the whip. All ends by crossing without any great difficulty, but the same scene is reproduced five or six times with varied incidents; for there are that number of fords to cross. It was in one of these places, where we were obliged to cross the river in boats in order to reach the grottoes, that we saw the overloaded skiff capsized that bore among others M. d’Omalius and Mlle. Royer. The apostle of woman’s emancipation clung with shrill screams to the neck of a small gentleman, her chevalier servant for the time, and, when she found a footing with the water up to her chin, she contributed somewhat to save her assistant by keeping his head out of water—a fine opportunity for quoting La Fontaine, with a kind variation: “That is nothing; it is not a woman that is drowning.” The nonagenarian president of the congress was taken out safe and sound, and it was with extreme difficulty he was induced to change his chaussures, but nothing could prevail upon him to accept dry garments. Happily, the weather was superb, and the shipwrecked travellers could get dry in the sun.
We returned by way of the plateaux that overlook the valley. Nothing could be imagined more fantastically beautiful than that immense panorama bathed in the purple light of the setting sun. The visitors, under the guidance of M. Dupont, had been through all the principal caverns described in his book. His learned explanations were greatly relished, and added a keen interest to an excursion of which the unexpected and the amusing had heightened the charm. We will not speak of the banquet that crowned so delightful a day, or of the ovations that were lavished on the savants and others. For such details, we refer you to the newspapers that published the reports.
To Be Concluded In Our Next Number.
The See Of Peter.
Not unto hirelings, Prince of Shepherds, leave This distant flock. The wolf, long kept at bay, No longer in sheep’s clothing seeks its prey, Nor prowls at midnight round the fold’s low eave, Its weak, unwary victim to deceive; But rampant in the flock at noon of day, Careering leaps, to scatter, mangle, slay, While from afar the banished shepherds grieve. How long must sycophants wax blandly wise, And meek‐faced aspirants rebuke the cries Of outraged faith! On Peter, “Feed my sheep, My young lambs feed,” the charge benignant lies, And we whose vigils cheat the night of sleep, On Peter, still, calm eyes expectant keep.
Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage.
By An Emigrant.
To most of the sons and daughters of Columbia the few days they pass in returning from the Old Country represent but a period of wearisome delay—an interval sometimes nauseous and always irksome between the pleasures of travel and those of their own fireside, passed perhaps in recollection of the pleasures of Paris, the classic grandeurs of the Eternal City, or the picturesque beauties of Switzerland and the Rhine; not unfrequently, perhaps, by our belles, whose elegance and social value have received their last gilding in the grand tour of Europe, in anticipation of the effect of their costumes at Newport or Saratoga, or of their adventures and experiences in the great circle of their country friends. All that wealth and skill can do is lavished on the accommodations of ocean steamers, and nothing is spared to make the traveller independent of the caprice or ill‐temper of the watery god; and nowadays a passage from the Mersey to our Empire City is to the ordinary passenger almost as comfortable and quite as devoid of unusual interest as a sojourn of so many days at the St. Nicholas or the Fifth Avenue. There is, however, another class of voyagers whose hard‐earned savings form the staple of the receipts of the owners of these splendid vessels; they usually belong to a sphere where literature hardly penetrates and whence come few who wield a ready pen; hence perhaps the general ignorance that seems to prevail as to their treatment and accommodation. The cabin passenger sees them only in squalid groups, encumbering the decks of the great ship, beyond the middle enclosure reserved to the saloon; and if he dives into the close and half‐lit steerage, a very brief glance round its dim precincts satisfies his curiosity. Believing, however, that many of our adopted countrymen will feel some interest in knowing how the great army of emigrants who flock in hundreds of thousands to our shores fare on their ocean transit, one of us lifts a voice from the steerage to relate some of the realities of life in an emigrant ship. Naught have we extenuated or aught set down in malice, and, such as it is, our little narrative is a true history of personal and actual experience.
To the reader it matters little what ill‐fortune cast from his quiet anchorage a London clerk who had already seen three decades, and whose life had hitherto run in the tranquil groove of uniform official duty, sufficiently well remunerated to furnish the comforts of a middle‐class English home. Unable to regain a similar position in his native land, he goes to seek his fortune in the West, and, thither wending, finds himself in the steerage of one of our principal ocean steamers. Candor requires this avowal, for those interested in the great liners think they dispose of the numerous complaints as to their treatment of their emigrant passengers, by retorting that they provide for the working‐classes, and not for clerks out of place or penniless gentlemen. Hence what is here stated as to their discomfort deals not with the writer’s own feelings, but speaks of what he saw endured by others, and he gives voice not merely to his own opinions, but to the sentiments of the mechanics, artisans, and farm laborers who were his fellow‐voyagers.
Every emigrant has to provide himself with bedding, plate, basin, drinking and water can, and a knife and fork. Our first experience of emigrant life consisted in the purchase of these articles at a Liverpool slop‐shop; some ten shillings covered the entire outlay, except for the blanket, the most indispensable of all; for this purpose, the dealer persuaded us to buy a horse‐rug, which he solemnly assured us was worth double the money across the Atlantic: as a copy of the Times would give about as much warmth and shelter as the common covering sold with the bed, we invested in it. An addition to our comfort it certainly has been in the bunk, and in the long nights in the emigrant trains, and it still remains our property; no market have we been able to discover for the article, and we conclude that a certain spice of Americanism had communicated itself to the mercantile mind of the seller. Many of the inmates of our steerage dispensed with all or most of these domestic utensils. One gentleman’s luggage, whose world‐ wide travels we may hereafter refer to, consisted of a limited brown‐paper parcel; in his subsequent oceanic career his Irish suavity usually procured him the loan of one of the tins of an acquaintance; that failing, he borrowed any neighboring utensil whose owner was not for the moment at hand; or, driven to his last resource, abjured coffee or soup and ate his portion of meat on a piece of brown paper. Some had but one vessel which served indifferently for a drinking‐can, soup‐basin, plate, tea‐cup, or wash hand‐basin, while a few comfort‐loving people, more frequently, however, in the after or family steerage than in our bachelor quarters, carried heavy loads of comfortable bedding and neatly‐arranged baskets of table‐ware.
Nearly all this apparatus of bedding and tin‐ware is thrown overboard or given to the crew when the vessel arrives at its destination; only the frugal Germans carefully preserve their vessels, and, shaking out its straw or moss contents, preserve the ticking of the bed either as a wrapping for their baggage or some ulterior purpose. It certainly seems strange that an expenditure of from two to three hundred pounds should be incurred by every ship‐load of emigrants for articles of such brief utility. Could not this outlay be converted to the benefit of the ship‐ owners by the permanent provision of requisites of this description at a moderate charge?
The great landing stage at Liverpool on the morning of our embarkation was crowded with some two thousand persons—the passengers of three mail steamers, their friends, and the swarm of porters, carters, and pedlers in attendance on them. Everything was confusion; here mothers seeking a stray little one, there the husband anxiously gathering together his motley property of boxes, bedding, cans, baskets, and packages of every description, as they were roughly tossed out of the cart from some boarding‐house. The boxes had to be placed in one tender, the passengers and lighter luggage in another; porters drove greedy bargains with females helplessly encumbered with immovable boxes. Women with baskets full of articles for sale—combs and brushes, knives, scissors, and soap—pushed their way here and there. To single men, careful of small change, it was a problem how to move the box or trunk in one direction and yet secure the safety of the other articles while doing so. We despaired of solving the problem, and trusted to the honesty of a badge porter, who undertook for sixpence to place our box on the luggage tender; afterwards, nervous as to the actual presence there of our little all, we spent two weary hours in watching the baggage discharged into the hold. A thousand trunks and chests of every conceivable size, shape, color, and dimensions passed down the hatchway before us—handsome American boxes, ribbed and gay with bright nails; immense iron‐bound chests of unpainted deal, containing the whole household goods of some Swedish or Norwegian family, directed in quaint letters to some far‐off town in Minnesota or Wisconsin; flimsy papered trunks, with sides already creaking and gaping, threatening to disgorge their finery before they touch the ground in Castle Garden; and German packs of strong ticking or canvas about the size of a small haystack—and, with a sigh of relief, we at last saw our property shot with a crash into the hold. Nearly two long hours did we spend on the open stage under a drizzling rain, that soaked the beds and blankets before the tenders moored alongside; then all made for the gangways, tugging their luggage with them; produced their tickets as they passed on, and pushed, tumbled, and scrambled pell‐mell on board; a similar scene was enacted at the steamer’s side; and when at last we reached her spacious decks we felt like soldiers passed unscathed through some hard‐fought field; not all unscathed, however; a considerable number of missing tins, blankets, and even beds attested the severity of the struggle and gave zest to the satisfaction of the more fortunate.
Arrived at last on our floating home for the coming fortnight, we pushed our way into the steerages to find our berths and enter into possession: and here let us try to describe. The steamer was a magnificent vessel, advertised to be of 3,700 tons, and celebrated for the luxury of her saloon accommodation and her almost unrivalled speed—qualities, as experience taught us, attained somewhat at the expense of the comfort of her emigrant passengers. Right aft the forecastle or forward part of the deck was roofed over with what sailors call a whale‐back, to the entrance of the forward steerage; a small deck house, with doors on each side, and on one side a small closet with a half door and a few racks for clothes served as a deck bar; behind it, that is, towards the stern, was the forward fresh water pump; walking still sternwards, we next encounter another small house containing the wash‐house for the forward steerage, entered from below, and two or three cabins for some of the officers or petty officers opening on the deck; on one side of this was a hot water tap; a few feet further is the main deck house, extending about half the length of the ship; in the street‐like passages between its sides and the bulwarks—open iron railings in our vessel—are the doors to the galleys, boilers, engine‐rooms, officers’ berths, and saloon, which, unlike most other steamships, is in this situated amidships; from the saloon a handsome double staircase led on to the deck above, which, however, like the tops of all the other deck houses, was tabooed ground to the emigrants. At the end of the main deck house was the entrance to the forward or sternmost steerage, and at the side of it the after fresh water pump; still further aft another deck house contained the wash‐house belonging to this steerage, and, as in case of the forward steerage, entered from below, and one or two officers’ berths, and provided outside with a second hot water tap; still further, the stern deck house contained the wheel house, with the engine for working the rudder, the butcher’s shop, ice and meat house, and vegetable storehouse; and between its semicircular end and the bulwark round the stern ran a low gallery, always considered among us as the most desirable place to settle for the day. We were free to ramble or squat ourselves on the deck where we listed, except the extreme forecastle forward of the entrance to the sailors’ cabin; there an incautious intruder paid his footing with the penalty of a bottle or two of beer to the nearest sailor who could catch him. Under the whaleback, also, either by custom or some rule of the ship, was forbidden ground to children or the fair sex, and always the chosen resort of old hands who liked to smoke a quiet pipe sheltered from the wind, chat with those of the crew who were off duty, and be comfortably near the deck bar.
Enter the forward or bachelors’ steerage—the after one being reserved to married couples and single women; leaving the bright day, we can hardly distinguish the objects in the dim light, and feel our way down the first flight of steps; this brings us on the main deck; here it is not open to the sides of the ship, along which run the berths of the saloon passengers. Entered from the saloons at the fore part, where they terminate by the hospital, two neat rooms, each with three or four bunks with bedding, wash‐basins, etc., similar to those of a saloon berth, and in one of which, in the absence of patients, our two stewards sleep; and at the other or after end a narrow flight of steps leads up to the wash‐ house on deck. The main deck is lighted only by the stairs and the hatchway; when the wooden grating covering the latter is in its place, it is dim; when it is covered with tarpaulin to prevent the entrance of the rain or spray, too dark to see. We have still another flight of steps to descend to reach the cavernous abyss of the steerage itself, which is situated between‐decks; when our eyes grow accustomed to the obscurity, we see a central open space about ten feet wide, running from end to end; in this are three narrow wooden tables with benches, two lengthwise and one crosswise, each capable of seating about twenty people; on each side are the bunks, reaching to the roof, entered by narrow streets or passages leading off on either hand, and again benches in the central space all round the outer side of the bunks.
Each street of bunks contained twenty upper and lower rows of five each, on either hand; the inmates therefore, lay side by side, parallel with the ship’s length, with their feet to their own street, and their heads adjoining those of their neighbors in the adjoining street. The bunks themselves consisted simply of shelves of unpainted boards, with an opening of about an inch between each, and were about six feet and a half wide, and divided into the spaces for each bunk, and fenced at the foot by upright boards about a foot high; in short, an emigrant’s bunk means a slightly fenced off space of hard board rather more than six feet by two. The lower row are about two feet from the ground; the upper about three feet above the lower, and the same distance from the roof. They are not attached to the side of the ship, but to a framework a few inches from it, the interstices of which served to stow hats or tins. Inside this coffinlike area of the bunks you stow bed, bedding, cans, and all smaller impedimenta, while such boxes as found their way down are pushed under the lower berths, piled in corners of the central space, or serve in the streets as seats or footsteps to the upper berths. In our steamer the bunks seemed to have been just put up; they were free from vermin, the timbers had nothing dirtier about them than sawdust; indeed, as we believe, the number of steerage passengers who cross eastwards is much less than in the other direction, the greater part of the boards are often knocked down on the ship’s arrival in New York, and the steerage filled with cargo, and then re‐erected when she is again prepared for the westward trip. The berths next to the central space were the most in request, on account of their being nearer the fresh air, and the lower range everywhere objected to; but nearly all the tickets had a number affixed, and no liberty of choice was permitted. Ours was in the upper berth in one corner, and consequently very far removed from any ventilation; as a slight compensation, being next to the side of the ship, we could look through the little window over the surging water, with which it was almost level and frequently covered. The gaps between the planks were very annoying, as small articles readily fell through them, and if they fell beneath the lower range it was too dark and the space too narrow to readily recover them. From about nine till twelve every day the steerage was closed, all the inmates sent on deck, and the floor brushed and laid down with fresh sawdust; this process, we think, was confined to the central space and the streets, and did not extend to the spaces underneath the bunks; and it was daily inspected or supposed to be inspected by one of the doctors, of whom there were two on board.
The wash‐house to the forward steerage was of decent size, with tiled floor, and contained eight closet pans, five wash hand‐basins, each with a tap of cold water and one with a hot water tap, and four sinks, also with salt water taps: putting aside the absence of any privacy, the arrangements were suitable, and the fittings generally clean; but, as in so many other instances, the carelessness or inattention of the crew made the admirable equipments of the ship almost useless. Except early in the morning there was rarely any water in the taps, and in the hot water cistern, which also supplied the hot‐water tap outside, often none for two or three days: the engineer, the steward told us, would not waste the steam by putting his cistern into communication with the boilers; and then often, when turned on, the tap poured out so much more hot steam than water that one was likely rather to get scalded hands than a full can.
The after‐steerage was similar in character to that of the single men, but much larger, occupying both the main and between‐decks; the married men and women slept on one side, the single women on the other; their privacy being supposed to be secured by a canvas curtain let down at night the whole length of the cabin. In the other lines, we believe the men and women, married or single, are quite separated, but ours put it forward as one of their attractions that husbands and wives are berthed together; as this simply means that their bunks are allotted side by side, the wife is really no more berthed with her own husband than with the spouse of her next neighbor. Many of the more respectable women complained much of being misled by the announcement, and of their being unable to undress to rest during the whole of the voyage, as they might have done if a cabin had been really and exclusively reserved for children and females. To the after steerage two wash‐houses were attached, one for the women with closed private closets, and one for the men similar to ours.
The routine of one day’s life may serve for all. As the mornings were generally damp and chilly, like most in our steerage we slept till towards eight o’clock, and did not rise till breakfast was announced; as dressing consisted in knocking off the rugs and donning coat, waistcoat, and boots, it was not a long process; then we scramble down into our street, seize our can and wait; in our corner we are too far removed from the tables—which would not seat half the number the cabin contains—to try to obtain seats at them; so we sit in the bunks on the chests in our street, or stand till the steward comes round to the entrance, and sings out, “Who is for coffee?” Each holds out or passes on his can, and he ladles into it about a pint of a boiling hot decoction, sweetened but without milk, and bearing a distant but still recognizable relationship to the article one had hitherto known under the name. A few minutes afterwards he comes round with the fresh bread, and over its distribution there were always much squabbling and bad language, partly because the bakers disliked the trouble of baking more than the strictly necessary quantity, and were given to restricting both the number and size of the loaves, and partly because many could neither eat the waxy potatoes nor hard sea‐biscuits; so that all sorts of tricks were resorted to to secure additional loaves for their dinner or tea. Of all the articles of diet the warm fresh bread every morning was decidedly the favorite, and any shortcoming in its supply more resented than any other infliction; both in size and quality the loaves varied very much according to the caprice of the bakers, but they were generally good. Great pyramids of butter were placed in tins on the tables; most of the men would not eat it on account of its tallow‐like flavor; for our own part, on obtaining our coffee and bread, we cut the latter open, put a lump of butter to melt inside, and pressed it together to distribute it equally as it melted, and then proceeded on deck, and under the influence of the keen sea air rarely failed to eat with a good appetite this not very luxurious fare in some quiet corner out of the wind. After breakfast, warmed with the steaming coffee, we obtained a can full of fresh water from the pump, produced the toilet requisites from our satchel, and in one corner of our street performed our ablutions; we always took as near an approach to a sponge‐bath as circumstances permitted, and found the practice more refreshing even than sleep. Though the steward never interfered with me, it was, however, we believe, against the rules to wash elsewhere than in the wash‐house, or to use fresh water for the purpose. The first day or two we had to wash in the wash‐house before breakfast, but the crowd there for various purposes was so great and there was so little convenience for putting down the different articles that we gave it up; and after breakfast there was rarely water for the purpose.
The decks always presented a more crowded and busy appearance in the forenoon than in any other period of the day; the steerages were empty, and all their inmates perforce on deck, huddled here and there, wherever the deck houses offer shelter from the winds, in compact groups three or four deep. The German and Scandinavian mothers perform the ablutions of their numerous families deliberately and in public—an amusing, if to some disgusting, process; first, the white‐headed urchin is held between his mother’s or perhaps his eldest sister’s knees, and his poll carefully and methodically examined with the fingers—not a comb, and any strangers summarily executed. Then he is taken to the scuppers by the side of the ship, his head held over a tin of hot water and lathered till he is red in the face and his eyes full of soap; then washed and taken back again, his head combed down into smoothness, and released for the day with a weight off his mind, the process being varied in the case of a little girl by the plaiting of her long flaxen locks into ribbon‐adorned tails. The majority, however, treated their abode on shipboard as a time when the ordinary rules of civilized life were temporarily suspended, and eschewed washing, shaving, and all the vanities of dress until they again felt themselves on terra firma.
Dinner took place at twelve; we mustered as for breakfast, but with a more careful marshalling of cans, for two, if not three, were necessary, and a sharp watch was requisite to prevent some hungry but tireless prowler from summarily appropriating the nearest ware; first came the soup, dealt out as the coffee at breakfast—a hot compound with a faint reminiscence of gravy and mutton bones, some grains of barley, and fragments of celery and cabbage; sometimes, instead, a thick mixture of ground peas; such as it was, with plenty of salt which one of our street usually fetched from the table for the general benefit, it was the most reliable part of the dinner; it was always drinkable, and many came down to obtain it who would taste no other article provided by the ship beyond the soup and bread. Next came the meat, cut up into chunks in an immense tin, and shovelled out by the steward with a saucer on to the tin plates. Sometimes it was eatable; say, perhaps, on five out of the ten days a hungry stomach and a stern will could manage it; and once or twice we had fresh beef as good, allowing for the roughness with which it was served, as any one could desire; the salt junk and salt fish, however—and the latter, in deference to the feelings of the Catholic passengers, always appeared on Friday—were vile; the junk could not be cut with a knife, and had to be torn into shreds along the grain, while the fish in taste and smell was simply abominable.
The potatoes were one of our standing grievances; as there were but two stewards to assist some hundred and sixty people, they had to form a course of themselves, or the meat got cold while waiting for them; and instead of being boiled, they were steamed by some hasty process into the taste and consistency of a tallow candle. To the natives of the Emerald Isle, accustomed to consider their potato the pièce de resistance of their humble fare, this misusage of their favorite food was particularly aggravating, and their complaints were loud and endless. Boiled rice was generally served after the potatoes with coarse sugar or treacle; as long as the latter lasted it was palatable, but the sweetening generally bore the same relation to the rice as did Falstaff’s bread to his sack, and our ingenuity had to be taxed to procure a double or treble allowance of the sugar by changing places while the serving took place or holding the plate over the shoulders of the steward who carried it. On Sundays plum duff, a heavy pudding pretty liberally supplied with raisins, was dealt out, and to stomachs accustomed to steerage fare seemed something faintly approaching the luxuries of the table appropriate to the day. The tea, which took place at five, may be dismissed in two words: taste it had none, and its smell was beastly; however, it was always boiling hot, and in the cold, damp evenings anything warming was grateful. With it we had biscuits and butter.
Without a detailed notice of that indispensable and omnipresent article the sea‐biscuit, any account of our food would be incomplete; a barrel of them always stood at the head of the staircase on the main deck, and any one could help himself as often and as liberally as he thought proper; they formed our sole fare at tea, and our dernier ressort, when the dinner was, as it usually was every other day, altogether uneatable. More fortunate than most of our fellow‐passengers, we could combine recreation and humble fare by gnawing at their hard sides. Of wooden consistency they certainly were; to make any impression on their hard edges it was necessary first to break them with a smart blow of the fist, put a piece between two sound molars, shut your eyes, hold fast to one of the stanchions of the bulwarks, and bring your jaws together with a determined and persevering grind! The result, to our taste, was not unsatisfactory; they were perfectly sweet, and when once pulverized not ill tasted; and on several occasions, when we found the other provisions inedible, two or three biscuits, washed down with a bottle of porter, served us for a tolerable meal. Few, however, shared our liking or would touch them, except at the last extremity, and by those whose teeth were not in first‐ rate order they were unassailable. As a souvenir, we pocketed a couple on leaving the ship, and as we munched them on the following night on the platform of the emigrant car jolting along the side of the broad and mist‐ clad Hudson, hoped that Dame Fortune would never reduce us in the Far West to more unpalatable fare.
On the whole, it was possible to subsist on the ship’s provisions, particularly when the transit was regarded in a purgatorial or penitential sense; and that statement, too, must be qualified by the admission of the necessity of malt liquor: without two or three bottles of beer or porter a day, we could not have survived; they served as a tonic, which made greasy meat digestible, and biscuits possible to swallow; few, however, lived entirely on the steerage fare, nor must it be supposed that the grumblers or discontented were generally those who had, as it is termed, seen better days. Men of that class were slow to complain, because ignorant of what they ought to tolerate or endure in their altered circumstances. It was the well‐to‐do artisans or workingmen who showed the greatest disgust and were the bitterest in their complaints. Many families were provided with well‐filled baskets of good bread, ham, and bottles of preserves, and had their own store of tea and sugar, for which they obtained hot water from the galley; while others bought the whole of their food.
Buying, begging, and stealing food was one of the most interesting and to some the most engrossing of occupations; it required a little money, a deal of diplomacy, and very hardened feelings, and was accomplished in very various ways. At the commencement of the voyage, little cliques were formed of four or five people, who made up a purse of two or three pounds for one of the cabin stewards, who in return sold to or stole for them a regular supply of cabin provisions; we were asked to join a little party of this sort, but declined; nor did we observe much of their subsequent fortune, except that they professed to have plenty of good food, and seemed to spend most of their time in watching for the opportunity when their steward could safely convey it to them; others peeled potatoes or apples and carried water for the galleys, and got fed in return; some reduced it to a system, bought meat from the butchers, and got it cooked in the galley, or, for a consideration, got liberty to go in at an idle time and cooked it themselves; the ordinary way, however, was to buy a bottle of beer at our deck‐bar, hand it in to one of the cooks with a tin, and ask him to give you something, the best time being immediately after breakfast, when the hot scouse or Irish stew—far better food than any provided for us—was served out for the sailors’ breakfast, or after the saloon dinner; you then slunk about the galley door, cursed for being in their way by all the cooks except the recipient of the beer, until that gentleman saw the head cook or chief steward out of the way, filled the tin with anything at hand—generally scouse in the morning, cold beef and chicken in the evening—shoved it under your coat, and told you to clear out instantly. One’s feelings suffered much in this process; but a few days of steerage fare blunt the sensibilities and whet the animal appetite to an extent that requires to be experienced to be appreciated.
Another want that is keenly felt in consequence of the salt food and dry biscuit is that of something green or succulent. One craves an apple or an orange or lemon; and so well aware were the experienced travellers among us of this want that fresh fruit generally occupied a large space in their well‐stuffed baskets. We had only the slender resource of pulling pieces of celery through the grating of the vegetable store, peeling them and eating them as an addendum to the coffee and bread of our breakfast. Unfortunately either the demand for that cool vegetable was unexpectedly great in the saloon, or we emigrants were too successful in extracting it through the bars of the always open store; for before the voyage was half over the supply was exhausted, we then had raw carrots and onions from the same source, but the result was not satisfactory.
Many of the passengers who had no money suffered much from their inability to cope with our daily fate. One young man of about twenty‐two or three years of age particularly attracted our attention. Short and slight, of perfectly gentlemanly manners and quiet address, he had little of the typical American about him, though as we afterwards learned from himself he belonged to a Western family engaged in commerce and of considerable means. Some strange star must have presided over his birth, for he had the rarest of all dispositions in the New World, a dislike to traffic and money‐making, and an unconquerable yearning for a life of literary labor. He was returning westward after residing in Dresden and Florence, full of enthusiasm for Goethe and Schiller, Tasso and Dante, and proudly conscious of a vocation himself as a dramatic poet. He had shot, he said, in the lakes of Minnesota, hunted in the Adirondacks, become familiar with the most beautiful and intellectual of the European capitals, and now felt that his endowment for his career was enriched by the novel experiences of the steerage of an emigrant ship. Fine conceptions, except perhaps among saints or hermits, do not thrive on an empty stomach.
Our poet looked daily more pallid and spiritless. He listened uninterestedly to everything except prospects of better fare or prophecies of the speedy diminution of the irksome voyage. One night one of the cooks in the emigrant galley gave us a tin crammed to overflowing with fragments of meat and fowl, and, additionally armed with a bottle of porter and a biscuit, we had settled in a quiet leeward corner to make a hearty supper, when we thought of the famishing poet. We found him tending a little singing‐bird he was taking out with him, and invited him to share our meal; and the enjoyment with which he ate the broken meat—a biscuit serving for a plate, and a clasp‐knife for an instrument—was quite refreshing. We took alternate pulls at the porter, and felt pleased with ourselves and the world. His inner man refreshed, our poet became another person. The charm of his conversation well repaid our little sacrifice, and we talked art and literature, music and the drama, until the loneliness of the deck, the chill night breeze, and the bright moon mounted high in the star‐spangled heaven warned us of the approach of midnight. A few hours after we had landed in New York, we met our poet in Broadway, in all the elegance of clean raiment, and happily conscious of a well‐lined purse. Though our rough garb assorted ill with his gentility, he insisted on our drinking glasses together to the memory of our meeting. As we drank, he expatiated on the advantages of a varied experience of the many‐sided life of our poor humanity. Nevertheless, we opine, to cross the Atlantic in the steerage of an emigrant ship with an empty pocket, is one of those phases of existence which he will never voluntarily again investigate. Another instance of suffering was that of an Englishman—a quiet‐visaged, silent man, past middle age, whose velveteen coat and corduroy trowsers bespoke him a ploughman or gamekeeper from some Old World country neighborhood. He had with him his little daughter, a fair‐ haired, sweet‐faced little girl of about twelve, genteelly dressed. Neither he nor his child could eat the ship’s food, and the little girl used to sit all day quietly pining by her father’s side. They met, however, worse fortune on shore. Bound to some town in Ohio, he was apparently ignorant that a long journey separated it from their landing‐ place, and landed in Castle Garden penniless. Too shy or too proud to beg, the man and his little girl starved for a day, until some fellow‐passenger accidentally found out their condition and supplied them with food.
No account of a sea voyage would be faithful without noticing the dread malady, the sufferings of which form the traveller’s introduction to the domain of Neptune; but it is a life over which we must perforce draw a veil. To the voyager who has a comfortable berth, every convenience that wealth can produce, attentive stewards, and the command of each luxury that his fancy or fears can suggest, the horrors of sea‐sickness are sufficiently nauseous. What they are in the steerage of an emigrant ship, where your pangs are intensified by the maladies and filth, the groans and curses, of some scores of other victims, can be better imagined than described; it is too disgusting. For the first two or three days, to eye, ear, and nose our steerage was insufferable; there was no remedy but to avoid it as much as possible, and either abandon the meals altogether, or rush down, snatch a hasty portion of whatever came nearest to hand, and beat a hasty retreat to the fresh air of the deck before your rising gorge added you to the ranks of the inconsolable.
But this rough initiation had its practical advantage. Many of the younger passengers of the better class at the commencement of their voyage endeavored to keep up appearances in spite of all difficulties, and to present themselves on deck fresh from a careful toilette and in all the neatness of clean linen and well‐arranged dress; but, when they had once succumbed to the qualms of the malady, their vanity went overboard. Languid and weary, they crowded on deck, unwashed and uncombed, muffled in a waterproof, or huddled in twos and threes in a corner in the warm folds of a blanket or horse‐rug; and as their spirits revived they thought no more of struggling against adverse circumstances, and were content to “peg along” (pardon, kind reader, the expression) until their feminine instincts revived at the welcome sight of the wished‐for land.
A Daughter Of S. Dominic.
If she had been condemned to have her life written, and been given the choice of a name under which to appear before the world, this would probably have been the one she would have taken. But who could have persuaded the humble child of the grand S. Dominic that such a fate was in store for her, or induced her humility to accept it? Well, it matters little to her now whether men speak of her or for her, she is alike beyond the reach of their hollow praise and their jealous criticism. But to us it matters much. The teaching of such a life as Amélie Lautard’s is too precious to be lost; it is a lesson to be sought out and hearkened to, for it is full of beauty, and light, and encouragement to those whom she has left behind.
Amélie was born at Marseilles on the 12th of April, 1807. Her father was a medical man, eminent in his profession, an honorable man, and a good Christian. She lost her mother at the age of seventeen. Early in life she met with an accident which injured her spine so seriously as to render her by degrees quite humpbacked; the progress of the deformity was slow and very gradual, but even when it had grown to its worst it never looked grotesque or repulsive, nor did it, strange to say, take away from the singular dignity of her appearance or from the grace of her movements. In person she was tall and dark, not handsome, though her features had so much charm and expression that most people considered her so. Her intelligence was of a very high order, and pre‐eminently endowed with that delightful and untranslatable gift called esprit. From her earliest childhood she began to develop an angelic spirit of piety and a sensitiveness to the sufferings of others that is generally the outgrowth of maturer years. The sufferings of the poor claimed her pity especially, but not exclusively. The range of her sympathies was wide enough to embrace every kind and degree of sorrow that came within her knowledge. This characteristic of her charity, as rare as it is attractive, may be considered as the keynote of her life, and explains, humanly speaking, the extraordinary influence she exercised over all classes indiscriminately.
After her mother’s death Amélie became the chief delight and interest of her father, and she repaid his tenderness by the most absolute devotion. Offers of marriage were not wanting for the accomplished and spirituelle young lady, but Amélie turned a deaf ear to them all; filial duty as much as filial love had wedded her to her father, and she declared her intention never to separate from him, or let any other love and duty come between those she had vowed unreservedly to him. It was probably at this period of her life that she bound herself exclusively to the service of God by a vow of perpetual virginity.
During many years Dr. Lautard’s health was such as to require constant and unremitting care. Amélie nursed him with the tenderest affection, never allowing her devotions or her work amongst the poor to interfere with her first duty to him. He expired in her arms, blessing her and declaring that she had been the model of filial piety, the joy and solace of his widowhood. Amélie generously made the sacrifice of this one great affection to God, she drank the chalice with a broken heart, but with an unmurmuring spirit, and entered bravely on the new life that was before her. Hers was to be the mission of an apostle, and she must go forth to it unshackled by even the holiest and purest of natural ties. She had long been a member of the Third Order of S. Dominic, to whom from her childhood she had had a great devotion. To her previous vow of virginity she now added a vow of poverty, which, in the midst of abundance, she observed rigorously to the end of her life. Dr. Lautard, knowing her propensities, and suspecting rightly that, if her fortune were left completely in her own power, she would despoil herself of everything and leave herself without the means of subsistence, tied it up in annuities which could not be alienated. But while binding herself henceforth to the practice of the most rigid austerities, Amélie did not break off from her accustomed intercourse with her friends. She continued to receive them as hitherto in her father’s house. Dr. Lautard used to say that hospitality was a virtue which it behooved Christians living in the world to exercise towards each other, and he imbued Amélie with the same idea. Mindful of his precepts and example, she went on inviting her friends, and enjoyed having them with her, and surrounding them with attentions and seeing them well and hospitably served; at table she endeavored to disguise her own abstinence under a semblance of eating, or would sometimes apologize on the plea of her health, which had always been extremely delicate, for not setting them a good example.
Some rigid persons, unable to reconcile this frank and genial sociability with the crucifying life of penance and prayer and unremitting service of the poor and the sick which Amélie led, ventured to remonstrate with her on the subject. She replied with unruffled humility that it was a pleasure to her to continue to cultivate the friendships contracted for her and bequeathed to her by her father, and that she felt satisfied there was nothing wrong in her doing so, and that it did neither her nor them any harm; on the contrary, hospitality was often a means to her of doing good; a worldly man or woman who would fly from her if she approached them with a sermon, accepted an invitation to dinner without fear or arrière‐ pensée, thus enabling her to bring them under desirable influences in a way that awoke no suspicion and roused no antagonism, and often led to the most salutary results; a friendly dinner was, moreover, not unfrequently an opportunity of bringing people together and reconciling those who were at variance; in fact, Amélie pleaded so convincingly the cause of Christian hospitality as it was practised in the Rue Grignan, that the critics withdrew thoroughly converted and rather ashamed of their censoriousness. This thirst for doing good was, moreover, so unobtrusive and so free from anything like an assumption of superiority, that it was impossible to resent it; the tact and simplicity that accompanied all her efforts to benefit others prevented their ever being looked upon as indiscreet or meddling. She had a way of rousing your sympathies in a charitable scheme, or your indignation against some act of injustice or cruelty, and drawing you into assisting in the one or redressing the other without your suspecting that she had laid a trap for you; never preaching, never dictating, she had that rare grace, whose absence so often foils the most praiseworthy intentions, of doing good without being disagreeable. Her conversation was so sympathetic, and, owing to her mind being so abundantly stored by reading under her father’s direction, could be, when the opportunity occurred, so brilliant, that the most distinguished men delighted in it, and flocked to the Rue Grignan, counting it a privilege to be invited to its unpretending hospitalities. Amongst the many illustrious men who admired Amélie’s esprit and virtues and who courted her co‐operation in their apostolic labors, one of the most prominent was the Père Lacordaire. The history of their first work in common deserves special record, not only because of its being associated with “the cowled orator of France,” but because it is peculiarly identified with the history of Provence, that land so dear to us all as the birthplace and cradle of the devotion to S. Joseph. “Beautiful Provence! It rose up in the west from your delightful land like the cloud of delicate almond blossoms that seems to float and shine between heaven and earth over your fields in spring. It rose from a confraternity in the white city of Avignon, and was cradled by the swift Rhone, that river of martyr‐ memories, that runs by Lyons, Orange, Vienne, and Arles, and flows into the same sea that laves the shores of Palestine. The land which the contemplative Magdalen had consecrated by her hermit life, and where the songs of Martha’s school of virgins had been heard praising God, and where Lazarus had worn a mitre instead of a grave‐cloth, it was there that he who was so marvellously Mary and Martha combined first received the glory of his devotion.” We all know the passage by heart, but we quote it not so much for its sweetness as because it so appropriately introduces the story of the work in question, viz., the restoration of the pilgrimage of Ste. Baume, a pilgrimage once so celebrated throughout Christendom, but of late years fallen into neglect and almost total oblivion. Tradition tells us the story of its origin, its growth, its glories, and its decay. Its origin dates from a little bark that eighteen centuries ago came floating down the sunny waters of the Nile and rode into the blue Mediterranean, freighted with a legacy from Palestine to France, bearing in its frail embrace none other than the family who had their dwelling on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and whose names have come down to us with the halo of that simple and unrivalled title, “Friends of Jesus of Nazareth.” Villagers and the simple folk of the place welcomed the exiles more kindly, let us hope, than Bethlehem had welcomed the Virgin Mother and reputed father of their Friend some five‐and‐thirty years before; at any rate, Lazarus and his sisters remained in Provence. The people gathered round the dead man whom Jesus had wept over and raised to life, and hearkened to his teaching; he planted the cross upon their soil, and sowed the seeds of the Gospel in their hearts, and in return they thanked him as the Jews had thanked his Master, by putting him to death. Lazarus opened the first page of the martyrology of France. Martha on her side withdrew to Avignon, where, on the ruins of a pagan temple situated on the Rocher des Doms, she built a Christian church, and dwelt there in the midst of a school of virgins, teaching the Gospel. She died at an advanced age, venerated as a saint, and renowned as much for her sublime gift of eloquence and her bountiful hospitality as for the austere sanctity of her life. We are not told how far, if at all, Magdalen shared the apostleship of her brother in Marseilles; the only trace of her that remains in that city is an altar in the vaults of the Abbey of S. Victor. These vaults are like catacombs, and the most ancient monument of Christian faith that Marseilles possesses. The legend says that Magdalen, immediately on landing on the shores of Provence, took up her abode upon the rocky heights of Ste. Baume and lived there for thirty years, her life divided between agony and ecstasy, between tears that had never ceased to flow since that day when at Simon’s house she broke the alabaster vase over the feet of Jesus, and heard from his lips those words that have been the strength and the hope of sinners ever since: much had been forgiven her because she had loved much, and kept long vigils that were but a continuation of her faithful watch under the cross and at the door of the sepulchre. It seems strange, when we think of it, that she should have left the country where Jesus had lived and died, the home at Magdala that he had hallowed so often by his presence, and whose friendly hospitality had often been a rest and a comfort to him in his weary journeys round Jerusalem; that she should, above all, have torn herself from the companionship, or at least the neighborhood, of his Mother and the disciple whom he loved; for surely the one remaining solace of her purified passionate heart must have been to speak of her brother’s Friend and her own dear Saviour with those who had known and loved him best, to revisit the places he had frequented, the site of his miracles and his sufferings, and that hill of solemn and stupendous memories where she and they had stood together in a common agony of woe, hushing their breaths to catch the last throb of his sacred heart. But perhaps this voluntary exile from those beloved associations was the last sacrifice, the crowning act of renunciation, that Jesus asked of her before he bade her farewell? Perhaps he expressed a wish that she and Lazarus should be in a humble way to the West what Mary and S. John were to be to the East, and that they should forsake the land and the friends of their youth and go forth bearing the good news of his Gospel to France? He had raised her once to the rank of an apostle that morning after the resurrection, when he gave her a message to the disciples and bade her go and tell them and Peter that he was risen, and before ascending to his Father he may have told her once more to go and be the harbinger of his resurrection to disciples who knew him not and were yet dwelling in darkness. We shall one day know, please God, what her motive was, but meantime we may reverently conjecture that there was some such understanding between Our Lord and Magdalen which induced her to leave the country that was so full of the fragrance of his divine humanity, and where his Immaculate Mother still lingered in childless desolation. Magdalen came to Provence, and withdrew to a wild and barren spot, upon a mountain called, in memory no doubt of her first interview with Jesus, Ste. Baume; it rises above a valley that runs towards the Alps from the busy city of Marseilles. Here she dwelt in solitude, communing only with her Saviour, and shut away from cruel men who had crucified him. Many and beautiful are the legends grouped by the simple piety of the inhabitants around the lonely watcher of Ste. Baume; they tell you still in reverent and awestricken tones how seven times a day the saint was rapt into ecstasy, and carried from her cave in the mountain side to the summit of the mountain, and held there suspended between heaven and earth by angels, but seeing more of heaven than of earth, and hearing the music of the angelic choirs. The peasants show you, even in these unmystical days of ours, the precise spot of an abrupt sally of the mountain where the angels used to come every day at their appointed hours to commune with the penitent and lift her off the earth. For thirty years she lived here in penance and expectation, then the term of her exile closed, the day came when she was to be set free from the bondage of the flesh, and admitted once and for ever into the presence of her risen Lord. Perhaps Jesus himself whispered the glad tidings to her in prayer; or perhaps it was only the angels who were charged with the message; but anyhow, tradition tells us—and who dreams of doubting it?—that Magdalen knew by divine inspiration when the hour of her death was at hand, and that she was filled with a great longing to receive the body and blood of her Redeemer before entering his presence as her Judge. S. Maximin, who had been the companion of Lazarus and shared his labors and his pilgrimage, dwelt in the narrow plain which forms the base of the three adjoining mountains, Ste. Baume, St. Aurelian, and Ste. Victoire—Ste. Victoire under whose shadow Marius fought and defeated the Teutons and the Cimbrians. The dying penitent was unable to traverse herself the distance that separated her own wild solitude from the hermitage of S. Maximin, so the kindly angels came and performed a last office of love for the friend of their King, and bore her across the hills and the floods and the valleys to the oratory of the saint: he too had been warned, and was ready waiting for her. He heard her confession, pronounced again the words of pardon that had been spoken first to her contrite soul by Jesus himself, and gave her the holy communion. Then she died, and S. Maximin laid her in an alabaster tomb that stood ready prepared for her in his oratory. The piety of the faithful surrounded the tomb with enthusiastic reverence and devotion; pilgrims flocked from all parts of the world to venerate the remains of the queen of penitents, and to visit the grotto where she had lived and the oratory where she died. Cassian, the monk, who was himself a native of Marseilles, after graduating in the school of the Egyptian anchorites, returned to his native city, and raised the Abbey of S. Victor over the crypt where Lazarus slept. Ste. Baume and St. Maximin soon drew him with irresistible attraction; he founded two noble monasteries there, and he and his monks kept vigilant guard for a thousand years, from the IVth to the XIIIth century, over the ground where Magdalen had wept, and over the tomb where she rested. At the beginning of the VIIIth century, the Saracens invaded the fair land of Provence, and for nearly three hundred years it was a prey to their devastating fury. During this long period of invasion, the Cassianites, terrified lest the precious remains of Magdalen should be discovered by the enemy and desecrated, thought best to remove them from the place where they were known to be to one of greater secrecy and safety. They took the body, therefore, out of its famous alabaster tomb and laid it in the tomb of S. Sidonius, having previously translated elsewhere the relics of the holy bishop. With a view to future verification, the monks placed on the coffin an inscription testifying to the two translations, and narrating the manner of their accomplishment and the circumstances which led to it. The entrance to the crypt itself was then walled up with plaster, and overlaid further with a quantity of rubbish. But six centuries were to roll over the arid heights of St. Maximin before the entrance was to be broken open and the written testimony of the Cassianites invoked. When the wars of the Saracens were over, and men began to breathe in peace, and turn their thoughts once more to the worship of God and the veneration of his saints, the fact of the translation of the body of Magdalen from its original resting‐place to the sarcophagus of S. Sidonius had faded from their recollection; it was only repeated in a vague sort of way that the illustrious penitent had been removed to a place of safety, which was supposed to be at a distance; some local coincidences pointed to the Abbey of Vezelay as the spot which had been privileged to receive and shelter her. By degrees this belief took root in the public mind, and the stream of pilgrims began to flow once more and with renewed enthusiasm towards the venerable old Abbey of Burgundy; crusaders met there to invoke before starting for the defence of the Holy Sepulchre the protection of her whom the evangelists had handed down to us as the heroine of the Sepulchre; kings and prelates, warriors and poets, sinners and saints, flocked to the supposed tomb of Magdalen, “till,” in the words of a chronicler of the time, “it seemed as if all France were running to Vezelay.” God is slow to tell his secrets. It was not until the close of the XIIIth century that the illusion, which had evoked so much piety and so many manifestations of faith from Christendom, was dispelled, and the truth revealed. This is how it happened. We will translate from the Père Lacordaire, whose Sainte Marie Madeleine has supplied us almost exclusively with the foregoing details:
“S. Louis had a nephew born of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and Count of Provence. This nephew, who was likewise called Charles, and who on the death of his father became king of Sicily and the county of Provence, under the title of Charles II., had for S. Magdalen a tenderness which he inherited from his race, and which, though common to all the chivalry of France, attained in him the highest degree of ardor and sincerity. While he was still Prince of Salerno, God inspired him with a great desire to solve the mystery which for six centuries had hung over the grave of her whom he loved for the sake of Jesus Christ. He set out therefore to St. Maximin without any display, and accompanied only by a few gentlemen of his suite, and having interrogated the monks and the elders of the place, he caused the trenches of the old basilica of Cassian to be opened. On the 9th of December, 1279, after many efforts which up to that time had been fruitless, he stript himself of his chlamyde, took a pickaxe, and began to dig vigorously into the ground with the rest of the workmen. Presently they struck upon a tombstone. It was that of S. Sidonius, to the right of the crypt. The prince ordered the slab to be raised, and it was no sooner done than the perfume which exhaled from it announced to the beholders that the grace of God was nigh. He bent down for a moment, then caused the sepulchre to be closed, sealed it with his seal, and at once convoked the bishops of Provence to assist at the public recognition of the relics. Nine days later, on the 18th of December, in the presence of the archbishops of Arles and of Aix, and of many other prelates and gentlemen, the prince broke the seals which he had prefixed to the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was opened, and the hand of the prince, in removing the dust which covered the bones, encountered something which, as soon as he touched it, broke with age in his fingers. It was a piece of cork from which fell a leaf of parchment covered with writing that was still legible. It bore what follows: ‘L’an de la Nativitè du Seigneur 710, le sixième jour du mois de Décembre, sous le règne d’Eudes, très pieux Roi des français, au temps des ravages de la perfide nation des Sarrasins, le corps de la très chère et venerable Marie Madeleine a été très secrètement et pendant la nuit transféré de son sépulchre d’albâtre dans celui‐ci, qui est de marbre et d’où l’on a retiré le corps de Sidoine, afin qu’il y soit plus caché et à l’abri de la dite perfide nation.’(223) A deed setting forth this inscription and the manner of its discovery was drawn up by the prince, the archbishops, and bishops present, and Charles in great joy, after placing his seals again upon the tomb, summoned for the fifth of May of the following year an assembly of prelates, counts, barons, knights, and magistrates of Provence and the neighboring counties to assist at the solemn translation of the relics which he had been instrumental in raising from the obscurity of a long series of ages.”
The news of the event was hailed with a shout of joy by all Christendom; kings and prelates vied with each other in doing honor to the new‐found treasure; gold and precious stones poured in in quantities to adorn the shrine which was destined to replace the alabaster tomb of S. Maximin. “When the appointed day arrived,” continues the Père Lacordaire, “the Prince of Salerno, in the presence of a vast and illustrious assembly, opened for the third time the monument which he had sealed, and of which the seals were certified to be intact. The skull of the saint was whole except for the lower jaw‐bone, which was wanting;(224) the tongue subsisted, dried up, but adhering to the palate; the limbs presented only bones stripped of the flesh; but a sweet perfume exhaled from the remains that were now restored to light and to the piety of souls.... The fact had already been made known of a sign altogether divine having been seen upon the forehead of Magdalen. This was a particle of soft, transparent flesh on the left temple, to the right, consequently, of the spectator; all those who beheld it, inspired at the same moment by a unanimous act of faith, cried out that it was there, on that very spot, that Jesus must have touched Magdalen when he said to her after the resurrection, Noli me tangere! There was no proof of the fact, but what else could they think who beheld on that brow so palpable a trace of life which had triumphantly resisted thirteen centuries of the grave? Chance has no meaning for the Christian; and when he beholds Nature superseded in her laws, he ascends instinctively to the Supreme Cause—the Cause that never acts without a motive, and whose motives reveal themselves to hearts that do not reject the light.... Five centuries after this first translation, the noli me tangere, as that instinct of faith had irrevocably named it, subsisted still in the same place and with the same characters; the fact was authenticated by a deputation of the Cour des Comptes of Aix. It was not until the year 1780, on the eve of an epoch that was to spare no memory and no relic, that the miraculous particle detached itself from the skull; and even then the medical men who were called in by the highest authority in the county certified that the noli me tangere had adhered to the forehead by the force of a vital principle which had survived there.”
The piety of Charles of Anjou raised a stately temple to the penitent of Bethany on the site of the oratory of S. Maximin. Boniface VIII., who had beheld with his own eyes the miraculous presence of the noli me tangere, endowed the basilica munificently, and authorized the king to transfer the custody of the relics from the Order of Cassianites, who had formerly held it, to that of the Sons of S. Dominic, since become renowned through the world under the name of Frères prêcheurs. A great number of popes visited the shrine, and every king of France held it a duty and a privilege to come to S. Maximin and Ste. Baume, and invoke the aid and protection of the saint; up to Louis XIV., hardly a sovereign neglected this public tribute of respect and devotion to her; but with the Grand Monarque the procession of royal pilgrims came to an end. The red tide of revolution arose, and waged war against men’s faith, and destroyed its most touching manifestations and its noblest monuments. It broke, however, harmless, at the foot of S. Maximin. Not a stone of the grand old pile was touched, not an altar profaned, not even a picture stolen from the mouldy and unguarded walls; the most precious part of its treasure, the relics of Magdalen, which had been carefully concealed, were found intact, and duly authenticated as before. Ste. Baume was less fortunate; the storm that respected the tomb showed no mercy to the grotto which had witnessed Magdalen’s ecstatic communings with her Lord; the hospital, the convent, and the church adjoining it were completely destroyed; nothing remained but a barren rock and a portion of the neighboring forest. In 1822, a partial restoration was effected; the vast and massive monastery was replaced by a temporary building of the lightest and cheapest materials, little better than a lath and plaster shed, to keep the monks under cover; the grotto itself, once so sumptuously adorned by the piety of pilgrims, was left in a state of nakedness and neglect, its costly lamps once abundantly fed with aromatic oils were gone, their lights extinguished, like the faith that had kindled them. The church was rebuilt in the same superficial style as the convent, and solemnly reconsecrated in the presence of forty thousand souls assembled in the forest and down in the plain. But the material temple, great or small, is more easily rebuilt than the spiritual one; the temple of stone was raised up again, but where was the temple of the spirit which had animated it? Where was the architect who would rebuild this, who would collect the scattered fragments, and breathe upon the dead bones, and make them live, and bind them as of yore into a body of devout and simple‐hearted worshippers? Many, remembering the bygone glories of Ste. Baume, wished that a prophet would arise and work this wonder in Provence. Perhaps the wish took the form of a prayer in some loving hearts, and so brought about its accomplishment. The valiant‐hearted son of S. Dominic, the Père Lacordaire, was to be the prophet of their desires. He rose up and upbraided the people of Provence for their ingratitude to the memory of their illustrious patroness, and for their decayed faith, and exhorted them to stir up the dead embers of a devotion that had formerly been the edification and joy of Christendom to repair and beautify the deserted grotto of Mary Magdalen, and rekindle its lamps, and restore the pilgrimage of Ste. Baume in its ancient fervor. The work was one that appealed strongly to the sympathies of the Marseillese; but this was not enough to ensure its success. In order to make the sympathy effectual, the Père Lacordaire needed a helpmate who would go about amongst the people and put their good‐will into a practical form for him—some one who would second his exertions by docile and zealous and intelligent co‐operation. He looked around him, and his choice fell upon Amélie. He knew her, and thought she was of all others the person best suited to his purpose. It was no easy or pleasant task the setting on foot of a movement such as this; the preliminaries were sure to be full of difficulties, often of the sort that make self‐love wince and smart; there was plenty of ridicule in store, a goodly harvest of sneers and snubs to be garnered at the outset, rude opposition to be endured from those who had no faith at all, and chilling indifference from those who looked upon anything like a return to the forms and symbols of the middle ages as poetic enthusiasm not practicable in the XIXth century. It was just the kind of work to put the daughter of S. Dominic to. She did not disappoint the Père Lacordaire; but responded as promptly to the call as his own fiery spirit could have wished. It was in Amélie’s house that the eloquent Dominican inaugurated the œuvre of S. Baume, and told the story of the great penitent’s life and death. From the salon in the Rue Grignan the burning words of the orator went forth to all Provence and stirred many hearts. A committee was soon formed for raising the necessary funds towards the restoration of the grotto as a preliminary to the reopening of the pilgrimage. The Père Lacordaire, as if the more prominently to record the services Amélie had rendered in the work so far, and to associate her name with its progress, desired that the meetings should be held at her house; and so they were, and continued to be regularly until she left Marseilles for Rome. She lived to see their joint labors crowned with success; the grotto assumed gradually something of its ancient beauty; an inn was built on the plain at the foot of the mountain for the accommodation of travellers who came from a distance, pilgrims were once more seen toiling in great numbers up the steep paths of the forest leading to the grotto, and filling the glade with the sound of canticles, and the feast of S. Magdalen, the 22d of July, was again celebrated with something of the pomp and fervor of olden times.
But events of this stirring and, so to speak, romantic interest were rare in Amélie’s life. Her path lay rather along the valleys than upon the heights above. The doors of the Rue Grignan were often open indeed to the wise and learned, and occasionally to the great ones of the earth; but the visits of these were few and far between compared to those of the poor and humble, who besieged it at all hours of the day and night. The poor looked upon it as a centre of their own, where they had a right to come at all times and seasons and make themselves at home. They did this at last so completely that Amélie was sometimes obliged to slip out by a back door in order to escape from their precious but pitiless importunity. But no importuning, however persistent or unseasonable, could ruffle her unalterable sweetness, or surprise her into a sharp answer or an abrupt ungraciousness of manner. Hers was the charity that is not easily provoked: it made her stern to self, but long‐suffering towards others, slow to see evil, softly forbearing to the weaknesses of all.
This home work was only an episode in her everyday labors. There was not a mission, or a hospital, or a refuge, or a good work of any sort in the town, that she had not to do with in one way or another. Just as we often hear it said of a woman of the world, “She is of every fête,” so it used to be said in Marseilles of Amélie, “She is of every charity.” One of the most venerable fathers of the Society of Jesus declared that it was chiefly to her zeal and intelligent exertions that the Jesuits owed the establishment of their mission at Marseilles. The Père de Magdalon looked upon her as his right hand; he enlisted her co‐operation in all his undertakings, and he used to say that it was to her he owed in a great measure the success of the Maison de Retraite of S. Barthélémy, the last work of his apostolate, and which he lived to see blessed with such abundant fruits. The Filles de la Charité were long the special objects of her liberality and devoted exertions; then came the Sisters of Hope, whose services to the sick are so praiseworthy, and whose presence amongst them was hailed so gratefully by the Marseillese. When the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres were in any difficulty, they looked to Amélie to help them out of it, and they speak with effusion still of the many proofs of generosity they received from her, and of her unfailing readiness to assist them whenever they appealed to her. She seemed to hire herself out as a beast of burden to do the work and the bidding of every one who wanted her. When there was a question of establishing the Frères Prêcheurs at Marseilles, she multiplied herself tenfold. No obstacles could deter her in the service of the sons of her beloved S. Dominic; she found a house for them, and paid all the expenses of their installation. But whatever the work was that came under her hand, she did it, and as promptly and earnestly as if it were the one of all others she most delighted in; there was no exclusiveness, no narrowing of her sympathies to an idée fixe either in piety or in charity; those who had the privilege of being her fellow‐laborers for many years declare they never once knew her charity to flag or fail to answer a fresh demand upon it; the supply was inexhaustible, and seemed to increase in proportion as it spent itself. Her health was wretched and kept her in almost constant physical pain; yet her activity was extraordinary, and, considering the chronic sufferings she had to contend with for the greater part of her life, the amount of work she contrived to get through may be regarded as little short of miraculous. She rose habitually at five, spent several hours in prayer, and assisted at the Holy Sacrifice before beginning the active duties of the day. These lay wherever there were sick to be tended, and sorrowing ones to be comforted, and sinners to be converted. She was a member of the Congregation of S. Elizabeth for visiting the hospitals, and gave a good deal of time to this work, for which she had a particular devotion. Her gentleness and singularly attractive manner fitted her especially for dealing with aching bodies and sorrowing hearts, and it was not a very rare thing to see Amélie succeed in melting the heart of some obdurate sinner with whom the entreaties and repeated efforts of the chaplain and the nuns had failed. The same sympathetic responsiveness that she threw into so many different good works marked her intercourse with individuals; those whom she was tending or consoling or advising always felt that for the time being they were the chief object of interest to her in life, and that she was giving her whole heart to them. She made this impression perhaps more especially on the poor, to whom the sympathy of those above them has such a charm and such a gift of consolation. An amusing instance of it occurred once in the case of an old woman whom Amélie had been nursing for some time; she put so much goodwill into all she did, and performed the offices of a sick‐nurse so affectionately, that the poor old soul believed she had inspired her with some unaccountable personal attachment; she returned it enthusiastically, and was never tired testifying her gratitude and love. One day, however, Amélie arrived in the poor little garret—tidy and clean, thanks to her—but, instead of being welcomed with the usual smiles and embraces, the old woman set her face like a flint, and preserved a sullen silence. For some time she obstinately refused to say what was amiss with her, but finally, shamed by the coaxing and evident distress of her nurse, she confessed that the day before she had had a bitter disappointment. “I thought,” she said, “that you loved me, but I find I was under a delusion; you don’t care a straw for me; they tell me you do for every sick body in the town just what you have been doing for me.” It was with great difficulty that Amélie was able to console her and obtain her forgiveness for being so universal in her charity.
But though her creed dealt in no exclusions, there were two classes of her fellow‐creatures who above the rest had a decided attraction for Amélie: these were prisoners and soldiers. She yearned towards the former with the true spirit of him who loved the publicans and sinners, who gave the first‐fruits of his death to one of them on Calvary, and who prayed for them all with his last breath, saying: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” The wonders that Amélie worked in the gloomy cells of the Fort St. Nicholas, the sudden and admirable returns to God that she obtained from the condemned, are not to be counted; not by men, at least. Day after day she was to be found in the midst of them, teaching old men their catechism, comforting and exhorting all, preparing them for death, washing and dressing their sores, combing their hair, performing cheerfully and affectionately the most disgusting offices. Her labors in behalf of the troops are perhaps the most remarkable part of her life. She had for many years been very zealous in her endeavors to promote religious instruction amongst the soldiers, but her mission in this direction dates chiefly from the Crimean war. During this brilliant campaign, which brought so much glory and cost so much blood to the Allied armies, the thought of the sufferings of the soldiers in the trenches and on the battle‐fields filled Amélie’s heart to the momentary exclusion of all other interests and preoccupations. Her whole time was spent working for them, and begging and praying for them. She inspired all who came near her with something of her own ardor and tenderness in the cause. She set up societies among her friends for making clothes and lint for the sufferers, and for collecting money to procure all that could comfort and alleviate them. Her efforts were crowned with abundant success. Now, as on many other occasions, money flowed in to her from all sides, sometimes from strangers at a distance, for the fame of her charity had spread much further than the humble daughter of S. Dominic herself suspected, and many benevolent people who wished to give, and knew not how to apply their offerings, sent them to her, satisfied that they would be well and wisely employed. The way in which large sums of money sometimes dropped into her lap, as it were from the sky, at some opportune moment when she was in dire want of it for some case of distress, led many of her humble protégés to believe that it came to her miraculously. But, while mindful of their bodies, Amélie’s first solicitude was for the souls of the brave fellows who were going out to face death in the service of their country; while working so hard to procure all that could heal and solace their temporal sufferings, she was laboring still more assiduously in behalf of their spiritual interests. Nor did her efforts confine themselves exclusively to the soldiers, they extended to the officers as well, and much more difficult she often found them to manage than the rough‐and‐ ready men under their command. Many a droll story is still told at Marseilles of the tricks by which they sometimes evaded her attempts to catch them in her zealous toils and make them remember that they had another enemy to fight and to conquer besides the soldiers of Holy Russia. Once two young officers of good family and fortune, whose lives were not the most edifying to the community, were pointed out to Amélie by one of their brother officers, a fervent Catholic, as fitting subjects for her zeal. He undertook to bring them to the Rue Grignan under the pretence of introducing them to an old and charming friend of his, if Amélie would promise to try and convert them. She promised of course to try, and the two scapegraces made their appearance, never suspecting that a trap had been laid for them. The conversation dwelt upon the great topic of the day, the war, Amélie carefully avoiding the most distant allusion to the spiritual condition of her visitors. The young men were charmed with her affability and esprit, and, when she asked them to return with their friend in a few days and dine with her, they accepted her invitation with delight. During dinner their hostess alluded to the numerous pilgrimages that were being performed every day to Notre Dame de Garde; few of the soldiers or sailors started for the Crimea from Marseilles without climbing up the hill to salute Our Lady and ask her blessing on their arms. The young men confessed that they had never made the pilgrimage and evinced little admiration for their more devout comrades; Amélie seemed surprised, but not at all scandalized, at the frank admission, and proposed that they should both make the pilgrimage next morning and hear Mass there with her at eight o’clock. They assented with ready courtesy, inwardly treating the expedition as a harmless joke, and took leave of their hostess, very much delighted with her, and not much terrified by the salutary projects that might be lurking in her breast with regard to the morrow. They were at the bottom of the hill punctually at half‐past seven, and toiled up to the church, where they expected to see Amélie already on the lookout for them. But they looked round the church and saw no sight of her. Taking for granted that she was not there, and that something had interfered to prevent her keeping the appointment, they took themselves off with the comfortable feeling of having done their duty, and behaved like gentlemen, and come safe out of it. The morning was raw and cold, and they were both tired after the long pull uphill, so on their way down they turned into a little dairy where hungry pilgrims were comforting themselves with cups of coffee. There was a good fire in the place, and they sat down to enjoy it, and dawdled a good while over their hot coffee, wondering what kind trick of Fortune had prevented the enemy from appearing in the field; when lo! looking up suddenly, they beheld the truant peering in at them through the window. The pair started as if they had seen a ghost. But Amélie knew human nature too well to press her advantage at such a moment; she smiled, shook her finger threateningly, and went her way down the hill, leaving the two young men less triumphant than she had found them, and very anxious to clear themselves of having broken their word to a lady, and eager to redeem it a second time if Amélie desired. She did desire it, and it was not long before one of the two blessed her for having done so. He was ordered off with his regiment soon after, and before setting sail ascended once more to the shrine of Notre Dame de Garde in a different spirit and with a very different purpose.
Her intercourse with the troops during this period gave Amélie an insight into the deplorable ignorance in matters of faith that existed in the majority of them, and the absence of all religious instruction in the army; it filled her with surprise and grief, and she determined to set to work and bring about a change in both.
Reforms are proverbially difficult, and in any branch of the public service pre‐eminently so. But difficulties only stimulate strong hearts to more strenuous efforts. Amélie was, owing to her high intelligence, her well‐known virtue, and her widespread relations, better calculated than most people perhaps to succeed in the undertaking; besides, whatever the obstacles were, she never reckoned with human means when God’s work was to be done; she called him to the rescue, and left the issue in his hands. It would be impossible to recount all she did and suffered in this most arduous undertaking, the journeys she took, the petitions she drew up, the letters she wrote, the disappointments and antagonism that attended it in the beginning, and the physical and moral fatigue that it involved all through. The frequent and successive journeys of eighteen hours to Paris and the same back would have been a serious trial of strength to a strong person; but to Amélie, whose health was extremely delicate, and who hardly ever knew the sensation of being without pain, most frequently acute and intense pain, the wear and tear of those journeys in the sultry heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter alike must have been terrible. But she made small account of her body, she drove it on like a beast of burden, goading it with the ardor of her spirit, and never gave in to its lamentations until it positively refused to go on. Her own shortcomings were, however, the lightest portion of her difficulties. She had obstacles to overcome on every side, especially in quarters where it was most essential for her to find approval and assistance. Silvio Pellico said it was easier to traverse a battle‐field than the antechamber of a king, and the same may be said most likely of the antechamber of a minister. At least Amélie found it so. Many a brave spirit might well have given up in despair before the contemptuous rudeness and petty opposition of small functionaries, and the inaccessible coldness of great ones, and the disheartening predictions of well‐wishers who had gone through similar experiences, and knew what it was to want anything, even in the natural course of things, done at the War Office; but Amélie’s courage never flagged for a moment. By degrees her perseverance began to meet with some signs of success. It was known that one military man in high repute supported her views, and was doing his best to enable her to carry them out; this converted others. Several who had in the first instance treated her project as impracticable, or unnecessary, or simply absurd, one after another came over to her; it was not always because she convinced them, but she won them; they might resist her arguments, but it was impossible to come often in contact with her without feeling the contagion of her earnestness and sincerity of purpose. Her labors were finally crowned with abundant success. She obtained all the concessions she asked, and every facility for carrying them out and improving the spiritual condition of the soldiers. One of her chief anxieties had been for the condemned prisoners in the Fort St. Nicholas. She obtained permission for one of the dungeons to be turned into a chapel there, and it was henceforth her delight to go there on the great feasts and decorate the altar, and make it gay with lights and flowers for the captives. A chaplain was appointed to the fort, and he was allowed every facility for the exercise of his ministry.
The little enfants de troupe whose youth recommended them to Amélie’s solicitude were provided with the needful means of religious instruction by the establishment of a school, over which she herself presided from time to time, cheering on the pupils by good advice, and occasional presents to the most industrious and deserving. General de Courtigis, who commanded the garrison for many years at Marseilles, and left behind him a memory respected by all good men, had been from the first a staunch ally of Amélie’s in her endeavors to introduce a Christian spirit amongst both the officers and men. At her suggestion he organized a military Mass every Sunday at the Church of S. Charles, and there a great number of men, with the general at their head, assisted regularly at the Holy Sacrifice. It was a great treat to Amélie, whenever she could find time, to go and assist at it with them. She enjoyed the martial appearance and reverent bearing of the soldiers with a sort of motherly pride, and the sharp word of command, and the clanking of the bayonets when they presented arms at the solemn moment of consecration, used to send a thrill of emotion through her frame that often melted her to tears.
“Oh!” she was heard once to exclaim, on coming out of S. Charles’, “what a grand and consoling spectacle it is, to see our soldiers publicly worshipping God! One feels that they must be invincible in battle when they set out with the blessing of God on their arms.”
The troops, on their side, repaid her interest in them by the most enthusiastic affection. They used to call her notre mère amongst themselves, and it delighted Amélie to hear a grizzly old veteran address her by this familiar name. Sometimes the brave fellows’ gratitude expressed itself in a way that was rather trying to their adopted mother. A regiment which had been quartered at Marseilles, and received many proofs of zeal and kindness from Amélie during its stay there, happened to hear, when passing through Lyons some years later, that she was stopping there. They started off at once in full force, and gave her a military serenade under her windows. Amélie, of course, showed herself at the window, and acknowledged the honor, but this did not satisfy the soldiers: nothing would do them but she should come out and shake hands with every man in the regiment.
Much as Amélie shrank from public notice or praise, her humility could not prevent her extraordinary exertions in behalf of the troops, and the success which had attended them, from shining out before men. The nature of the undertaking had necessarily brought her in contact with the most influential military men of the day, both at Marseilles and in Paris. These gentlemen had ample opportunity to appreciate her character and judge of the value of her services; and though so many had opposed her in the beginning, when they saw her labors triumphant, success raised her so highly in their estimation that they thought it would be becoming to offer a public tribute of their esteem and gratitude by decorating her with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Accordingly, a letter was despatched one day from the War Office, informing the quiet, unpretending friend of the poor soldier that the government, to testify their approval of her conduct, invested her with the most honorable mark of distinction it was in their power to bestow. Amélie received the announcement at first as a joke. The idea of her going about the world with the Cross or the red ribbon fastened to her black gown, and being greeted with the military salute and presented arms to whenever the symbol caught the eye of a soldier or a sentry, while she threaded her way through the busy streets of Marseilles, struck her as so altogether comical that she could only laugh at it. But neither the authorities nor her friends saw any laughing matter in it; the latter combated her refusal so strongly that Amélie was perplexed; she knew not how to reconcile her deference to their wishes with what appeared to her little short of an act of treason to Christian humility and common sense; they argued that, by accepting the Cross, she would excite a good feeling in the minds of many towards the government, a result which in those turbulent and antagonistic times was always desirable, and, in the next place, it would invest her with a half‐official position in certain circumstances that she might find very useful to others in her relations with minor functionaries. This last consideration had some weight with Amélie; she turned it to account, though not in the way her friends desired. She wrote to the minister, declining gratefully an honor which she did not feel qualified to accept, but requested that he would reward what he was pleased to call her services by granting her a droit de grace. This would entitle her to present petitions for a commutation of sentence in case of military prisoners, and even on certain specified occasions to commute the sentence herself. The privilege was granted at once, and, if ever virtue had a sweet reward in this world, it was when Amélie exercised it for the first time in favor of one of the captives of Fort St. Nicholas. Her friends rejoiced with her, and almost forgave her for refusing the sterile honor of the Cross of the Legion of Honor. They never knew, so carefully did her humility keep its secret, that the government, when granting her the droit de grace, exacted as a condition that she should submit to become a member of the Legion of Honor. It was years after that a friend, who had heard something in high quarters which aroused his suspicions, and who was intimate enough with Amélie to take the liberty of catechising her on the subject, asked point‐blank if she was decorated, and under promise of secrecy learned the truth.
To Be Concluded In Our Next.
Chapter IX. Progress Grows Jolly. Concluded.
In passing near the tables Gerlach overheard conversations which revealed to him unmistakably the communistic aspirations and tendencies prevailing among the lower orders, their fiendish hatred of religion and the clergy, their corruption and appalling ignorance. On every hand he perceived symptoms of an alarmingly unhealthy condition of society. He heard blasphemies uttered against the Divinity which almost caused his blood to run cold; sacred things were scoffed at in terms so coarse and with an animus so plainly satanical that his hair rose on his head. It was clear to him that the firmest supports, the only true foundations of the social order, were tottering—rotted away by an incurable corruption.
In Gerlach’s life, also, as in that of many other men, there had been a period of mental struggle and of doubt. He, too, had at one time found himself face to face with questions the solution of which involved the whole aim of his existence. During this period of mental unrest, he had thought and studied much about faith and science, but not with a silly parade of superficial scepticism. He had resolutely engaged in the soul struggle, and had tried to end it for once and all. Supported by a good early training and a disposition naturally noble, instructed and guided by books of solid learning, he had come out from that crisis stronger in faith and more correct in his views of human science. The scenes which he was witnessing reminded him vividly of that turning‐point in his life; they were to him an additional proof that man’s dignity disappears as soon as he refuses to follow the divine guidance of religion. Grave in mood, he returned to the table around which were gathered the chieftains. The marks of respect shown to the millionaire were numerous and flattering. Even the bluff Sand exerted himself unusually in paying his respects to the wealthy landholder, and Erdblatt, whose embarrassed financial condition enabled him beyond them all to appreciate the worth of money, filled a glass with his own hand, and reached it to Mr. Conrad with the deference of an accomplished butler. Gerlach was pleased to speak in terms of praise of the nut‐brown beverage, which greatly tickled Belladonna, the fat brewer. Naturally enough, the conversation turned upon the subject of the celebration.
“I confess I am not quite clear respecting the purpose of your city in the matter of schools,” said Mr. Conrad. “How do you intend to arrange the school system?”
“In such a way as to make it accord with the requirements of the times and the progressive spirit of civilization,” answered Hans Shund. “An end must be put to priest rule in the schools. The establishment of common schools will be a decided step towards this object. For a while, of course, the priests will be allowed to visit the schools at specified times, but their influence and control in school matters will be greatly restricted. Education will be withdrawn from the church’s supervision, and after a few years we hope to reach the point when the school‐rooms will be closed altogether against the priests. There is not a man of culture but will agree that children should not be required to learn things which are out of date, and the import of which must only excite smiles of compassion.”
“Whom do you intend to put in the place of the clergy?” inquired Mr. Conrad.
“We intend to impart useful information and a moral sense in harmony with the spirit of the age,” replied Hans Shund.
“It seems to me the elementary branches have been very competently taught heretofore in our schools, consequently I do not see the need of a change on this head,” said Gerlach. “But you have not understood my question. I mean, who are to fill the office of instructors in morals and in religion?”
The chieftains looked puzzled, for such a question they had not expected to hear from the wealthiest man of the country.
“You see, Mr. Gerlach,” said Sand bluntly, “religion must be done away with entirely. We haven’t any use for such trash. Children ought to spend their time in learning something more sensible than the catechism.”
“I am not disposed to believe that what you have just uttered is a correct expression of the general opinion of this community on the subject of the school question,” returned the millionaire with some warmth. “It is impossible to bring up youth morally without religion. You are a housebuilder, Mr. Sand. What would you think of the man who would expect you to build him a house without a foundation—a castle in the air?”
“Why, I would regard him as nothing less than a fool,” cried Sand.
“The case is identically the same with moral education. Morality is an edifice which a man must spend his life in laboring at. Religion is the groundwork of this edifice. Moral training without religion is an impossibility. It would be just as possible to build a house in the air, as to train up a child morally without a religious belief, without being convinced of the existence of a holy and just God.”
“Facts prove the contrary,” maintained Hans Shund. “Millions of persons are moral who have no religious belief.”
“That’s an egregious mistake, sir,” opposed the landholder. “The repudiation of a Supreme Being and the violent extinction of the idea of the Divinity in the breast are of themselves grave offences against moral conscience. I grant you that, in the eyes of the public, thousands of men pass for moral who have no faith in religion. But public opinion is anything but a criterion of certainty when the moral worth of a man is to be determined. A man’s interior is a region which cannot be viewed by the eye of the public. You know yourselves that there are men who pass for honorable, moral, pure men, whose private habits are exceedingly filthy and corrupt.”
Hans Shund’s color turned a palish yellow; the eyes of the chieftains sank.
“Besides, gentleman, it would be labor lost to try to educate youth independently of religion. Man is by his very nature a religious being. It is useless to attempt to educate the young without a knowledge of God and of revealed religion; to be able to do so you would previously have to pluck out of their own breasts the sense of right and wrong, and out of their souls the idea of God, which are innate in both. Were the attempt made, however, believe me, gentlemen, the yearning after God, alive in the human breast, would soon impel the generation brought up independently of religion to seek after false gods. For this very reason we know of no people in history that did not recognize and worship some divinity, were it but a tree or a stone, that served them for an object of adoration. In my opinion, it would be far more indicative of genuine progress to adhere to the God of Christians, who is incontestably holy, just, omnipotent, and kind, whilst to return to the sacred oaks of ancient Germany or to adopt the fetichism of uncivilized tribes would be a most monstrous reaction, the most degrading barbarism.”
The chieftains looked nonplussed. Earnest thinking and investigation upon subjects pertaining to religion were not customary among the disciples of progress. They looked upon religion as something so common and trivial that anybody was free to argue upon and condemn it with a few flippant or smart sayings. But the millionaire was now disclosing views so new and vast, that their weak vision was completely dazzled, and their steps upon the unknown domain became unsteady.
Mr. Seicht, observing the embarrassment of the leaders, felt it his duty to hasten to their relief. His polemical weapons were drawn from the armory of bureaucracy.
“The progressive development of humanity,” said Mr. Seicht, “has revealed an admirable substitute for all religious ideas. A state well organized can exist splendidly without any religion. Nay, I do not hesitate to maintain that religion is a drawback to the development of the modern state, and that, therefore, the state should have nothing whatever to do with religion. An invisible world should not exert an influence upon a state—the wants of the times are the only rule to be consulted.”
“What do you understand by a state, sir?” asked the millionaire.
“A state,” replied the official, “is a union of men whose public life is regulated by laws which every individual is bound to observe.”
“You speak of laws; upon what basis are these laws founded?”
“Upon the basis of humanity, morality, liberty, and right,” answered the official glibly.
“And what do you consider moral and just?”
“Whatever accords with the civilization of the age.”
A faint smile passed over the severe features of Mr. Conrad.
“I was watching the procession,” spoke he. “I have seen the religious feelings of a large number of citizens publicly ridiculed and grossly insulted. Was that moral? Was it just? You are determined to oust God and religion from the schools; yet there are thousands in the country who desire and endeavor to secure a religious education for their children. Is it moral and just to utterly disregard the wishes of these thousands? Does it accord with a profession of humanity and freedom to put constraint on the consciences of fellow‐citizens?”
“The persons of whom you speak are a minority in the state, and the minority is obliged to yield to the will of the majority,” answered Seicht.
“It follows, then, that the basis of morality and justice is superior numbers?”
“Yes, it is! In a state, it appertains to the majority to determine and regulate everything.”
“Gentlemen,” spoke Gerlach with great seriousness, “as I was a moment ago strolling over this place, I overheard language at several tables, which was unmistakably communistic. Laborers and factorymen were maintaining that wealth is unequally distributed; that, whilst a small number are immensely rich, a much greater number are poor and destitute; that progress will have to advance to a point when an equal division of property must be made. Now, the poor and the laboring population are in the majority. Should they vote for a partition, should they demand from us what hitherto we have regarded as exclusively our own, we, gentlemen, will in consistency be forced to accept the decree of the majority as perfectly moral and just—will we not?”
There was profound silence.
“I, for my part, should most emphatically protest against such a ruling of the majority,” declared Greifmann.
“Your protest would be contrary to morals and equity; for, according to Mr. Seicht, only what the majority wills is moral and just,” returned the landowner. “And, in mentioning partition of property, I hinted at a red monster which is not any longer a mere goblin, but a thing of real flesh and bone. We are on the verge of a fearful social revolution which threatens to break up society. If there is no holy and just God; if he has not revealed himself, and man is not obliged to submit to his will; if the only basis of right and of morals is the wish of the majority, this terrible social revolution must be moral and just, for the majority wills it and carries it out.”
“Of course, there must be a limit,” said the official feebly.
“The demands of the majority must be reasonable.”
“What do you understand by reasonable, sir?”
“I call reasonable whatever accords with the sense of right, with sound thinking, with moral ideas.”
“Sense of right—moral ideas? I beg you to observe that these notions differ vastly from the sole authority of numbers. You have trespassed upon God’s kingdom in giving your explanation, for ideas are supersensible; they are the thought of God himself. And the sense of right was not implanted in the human breast by the word of a majority; it was placed there by the Creator of man.”
The official was driven to the wall. The chieftains thoughtfully stared at their beer‐pots.
“It is clear that the will of the majority alone cannot be accepted as the basis of a state,” said Schwefel.
“The life of society cannot be put at the mercy of the rude and fickle masses. There must be a moral order, willed and regulated by a supreme ruler, and binding upon every man. This is plain.”
“I agree with you, sir,” said the millionaire. “Let us continue building on Christian principles. As everybody knows, our civilization has sprung from Christianity. If we tear down the altars and destroy the seats from which lessons of Christian morality are taught, confusion must inevitably follow. And I, gentlemen, have too exalted an opinion of the German nation, of its earnest and religious spirit, to believe that it can be ever induced to fall away completely from God and his holy law. Infidelity is an unhealthy tendency of our times; it is a pernicious superstition which sound sense and noble feeling will ultimately triumph over. We will do well to continue advancing in science, art, refinement, and industry, in true liberty and the right understanding of truth; we will thus be making real progress, such progress as I am proud to call myself a partisan of.”
The chieftains maintained silence. Some nodded assent. Hans Shund gave an angry bite to his pipe‐stem, and puffed a heavy cloud of smoke across the table.
“I have confidence in the enlightenment and good sense of our people,” said he. “You have called modern progress ‘a pernicious superstition and an unhealthy tendency of the times,’ Mr. Gerlach,” turning towards the millionaire with a bow. “I regret this view of yours.”
“Which I have substantiated and proved,” interrupted Gerlach.
“True, sir! Your proofs have been striking, and I do not feel myself competent to refute them. But I can point you to something more powerful than argument. Look at this scene; see these happy people meeting and enjoying one another’s society in most admirable harmony and order. Is not this spectacle a beautiful illustration and vindication of the moral spirit of progress?”
“These people are jubilant from the effect of beer, why shouldn’t they be? But, sir, a profound observer does not ‘suffer himself to be deceived by mere appearances.’ ”
An uproar and commotion at a distance interrupted the millionaire. At the same instant a policeman approached out of breath.
“Your honor, the factorymen and the laborers are attacking one another!”
“What are you raising such alarm for,” said Hans Shund gruffly. “It is only a small squabble, such as will occur everywhere in a crowd.”
“I ask your honor’s pardon: it is not a small squabble, it is a bloody battle.”
“Well, part the wranglers.”
“We cannot manage them; there are too many of them. Shall I apply for military?”
“Hell and thunder—military!” cried Hans Shund, getting on his feet. “Are you in your senses?”
“Several men have already been carried off badly wounded,” reported the policeman further. “You have no idea how serious the affray is, and it is getting more and more so; the friends of both sides are rushing in to aid their own party. The police force is not a match for them.”
Women, screaming and in tears, were rushing in every direction. The bands had ceased playing, and noise and confusion resounded from the scene of action. Louise ran to take her brother’s arm in consternation. The wives and daughters of the chieftains huddled round their natural protectors.
“Hurry away and report this at the military post,” was Seicht’s order to the policeman. “The feud is getting alarming. One moment!”
Tearing a leaf from a memorandum book, he wrote a short note, which he sent by the messenger.
“Off to the post—be expeditious!”
Louise hastened with her brother and Gerlach senior to their carriage, and her feeling of security returned only when the noise of the combat had died away in the distance.
The next day the town papers contained the following notice: “The beautiful celebration of yesterday, which, on account of its object, will be long remembered by the citizens of this community, was unfortunately interrupted by a serious conflict between the laborers and factorymen. A great many were wounded during the mêlée, of whom five have since died, and it required the interference of an armed force to separate the combatants.”
Chapter X. Brown Bread And Bonnyclabber.
Seraphin had not gone to the celebration. He remained at home on the plea of not feeling well. He was stretched upon a sofa, and his soul was engaged in a desperate conflict. What it was impossible for himself to look upon, had been viewed by his father with composure: the burlesque procession, the public derision of holy practices, the mockery of the Redeemer of the world, in whose place had been put a broken bottle on the symbol of salvation. He himself had been stunned by the spectacle; and his father? Was it his father? Again, his father had accompanied the brother and sister to the infamous celebration. Was not this a direct confirmation of his own suspicions? His father had become a fearful enigma to his soul! And what if, upon his return from the festival, the father were to come and insist upon the marriage with Louise, declaring her advanced notions to be an insufficient ground for renouncing a pet project? A wild storm was convulsing his interior. He could not bear it longer, he was driven forth. Snatching his straw hat, he rushed from the house, ran through the alleys and streets, out of the town, onward and still onward. The August sun was burning, and its heat, reflected from the road, was doubly intense. The perspiration was rolling in large drops down the glowing face of the young man, whom torturing thoughts still kept goading on. Holt’s whitewashed dwelling became visible on the summit of a knoll, and gleamed a friendly welcome as he came near it—a welcome which seemed opportune for one who hardly knew whither he was hastening. The walnut‐tree which could be seen from afar was casting an inviting shade over the table and bench that seemed to be confidingly leaning against its stem. A flock of chickens were taking a sand‐bath under the table, flapping their wings, ruffling their feathers, and wallowing in the dust. Seated on the sunny hillock, the cottage appeared quiet, almost lonesome but for a ringing sound which came from the adjoining field and was made by the sickle passing through the corn. A broad‐brimmed straw hat with a blue band could be noticed from the road moving on over the fallen grain, and presently Mechtild’s slender form rose into view as she pushed actively onward over the harvest field. Hasty steps resounded from the road. She raised her head, and her countenance first indicated surprise, then embarrassment. Whom did her eyes behold rushing wildly by, like a fugitive, but the generous rescuer of her family from the clutches of the usurer Shund. His hat was in his hand, his auburn locks were hanging down over his forehead, his face was aglow, his whole being seemed to be absorbed in a mad pursuit. To her quick eye his features revealed deep trouble and violent excitement. She was frightened, and the sickle fell from her hand. Not a day passed on which she would not think of this benefactor. Perhaps there was not a being on earth whom she admired and revered as much as she did him. All the pure and elevated sentiments of an innocent and blooming girl united to form a halo of affection round the head of Seraphin. At evening prayer when her father said, “Let us pray for our benefactor Seraphin,” her soul sent up a fervent petition to God, and she declared with joy that she was willing to sacrifice all for him. But behold this noble object of her admiration and affection suddenly presented before her in a state that excited the greatest uneasiness. With his head sunk and his eyes directed straight before him, he would have rushed past without noticing the sympathizing girl, when a greeting clear and sweet as the tone of a bell caused him to look up. He beheld Mechtild with her beautiful eyes fixed upon him in an expression of anxiety.
“Good‐morning, Mr. Seraphin,” she said again.
“Good‐morning,” he returned mechanically, and staring about vaguely. His bewilderment soon passed, however, and his gaze was riveted by the apparition.
She was standing on the other side of the ditch. The fear of some unknown calamity had given to her beautiful face an expression of tender solicitude, and whilst a smile struggled for possession of her lips her look indicated painful anxiety. Mechtild’s appearance soon directed the young man’s attention to his own excited manner. The dark shadow disappeared from his brow, he wiped the perspiration from his face, and began to feel the effect of his walk under the glowing heat of midsummer.
“Ah! why, here is the neat little white house, your pretty country home, Mechtild,” he said pleasantly. “If you had not been so kind as to wish me good‐morning, I should actually have passed by in an unpardonable fit of distraction.”
“I was almost afraid to say good‐morning, Mr. Seraphin, but—” She faltered and looked confused.
“But—what? You didn’t think anything was wrong?”
“No! But you were in such a hurry and looked so troubled, I got frightened,” she confessed with amiable uprightness. “I was afraid something had happened you.”
“I am thankful for your sympathy. Nothing has happened me, nor, I trust, will,” he replied, with a scarcely perceptible degree of defiance in his tone. “This is a charming situation. Corn‐fields on all sides, trees laden with fruit, the skirt of the woods in the background—and then this magnificent view! With your permission, I will take a moment’s rest in the shade of yon splendid walnut‐tree planted by your great‐grandfather.”
She joyfully nodded assent and stepped over the ditch. She shoved back the bolt of the gate. Together they entered the yard, which a hedge separated from the road. The cock crew a welcome to the stranger, and led his household from the sand‐bath into the sunshine near the barn.
“Yes, Mr. Seraphin; but the dirty chickens have scattered dust all over the bench and table. Wait a minute, you’ll get your clothes dusty.”
“This is a cool, inviting little spot,” said the millionaire, as he pointed to the shade of the walnut‐tree. “No doubt you often sit here and read?”
She hurried into the house. His eyes followed her receding form, his ears kept listening for her departing steps, he heard the opening and closing of doors: presently she reappeared, dusted the bench and table with a brush, and spread a white cloth over the table. Seraphin looked on with a smile.
“I do not wish to be troublesome, Mechtild!”
“It is no trouble, Mr. Seraphin! Sit down, now, and rest yourself. I am so sorry father and mother are not at home. They will be ever so glad to hear that you have honored us with a visit.”
“Is nobody at home?”
“Father is in town, and mother is at work with the children in the harvest field.”
“Are you not afraid to stay here by yourself?”
“What should I be afraid of? There are no ghosts in daytime,” she said with a bewitching archness; “and as for thieves, they never expect to find anything worth having at our house.”
She was standing on the other side of the table, looking at him with a beautiful smile.
“Won’t you have a seat on this bench?” said he, making room for her. “You need rest more than I do. You have been working, and I am merely an idle stroller. Do take a seat, Mechtild.”
“Thank you, Mr. Seraphin—I could not think of doing so! It would not be becoming,” she answered with some confusion.
“Why not becoming?”
“Because you are a gentleman, and I am only a poor girl.”
“Your objection on the score of propriety is not worth anything. Oblige me by doing what I ask of you.”
“I will do so, Mr. Seraphin, since you insist upon it, but after a while. I would like to offer you some refreshments beforehand, if you will allow me.”
“With pleasure,” he said, nodding assent.
A second time she hurried away to the house, whilst he kept listening to her footsteps. The extraordinary neatness and cleanliness which could be seen everywhere about the little homestead did not escape his observation. On all sides he fancied he saw the work of Mechtild. The purity of her spirit, which beamed so mildly from her eyes and was revealed in the beauty of her countenance and the grace of her person, seemed embodied in the very odor of roses wafted over from the neighboring flower garden. He was unconscious of the rapid growth within his bosom of a deep and tender feeling. This feeling was casting a warm glow, like softest sunshine, over all that he beheld. Not even the chickens looked to him like other fowls of their kind; they were ennobled by the reflection that they were objects of Mechtild’s care, that she fed them, that when they were still piping little pullets she had held them in her lap and caressed them. He abandoned himself completely to this sentiment; it carried him on like a smooth current; and he could not tell, did not suspect even, why so wonderful a reaction had in so short a time taken place in his interior. Beholding himself seated under the walnut‐tree surrounded only by evidences of honorable poverty and rural thrift, and yet feeling a degree of happiness and peace he had never known before, he fancied he was performing a part in some fairy tale which he was dreaming with his eyes open. And now the fairy appeared at the door having on a snowy‐white apron, and carrying a shallow basket from which could be seen, protruding above the rest of its contents, a milk jar. She set before him a pewter plate, bright as silver. Then she took out the jar and a cup, next she laid a knife and spoon for him, and finished her hospitable service with a huge loaf of bread.
“Don’t get dismayed at the bread, Mr. Seraphin! I am sorry I cannot set something better before you. But it is well baked and will not hurt you!”
“You baked it yourself, did you not?”
“Yes, Mr. Seraphin!”
He attacked the loaf resolutely. From the dimensions of the slice which he cut off, it was plain that both his appetite and his confidence in her skill were satisfactory. She raised the jar of bonnyclabber, which lurched out in jerks upon his plate, whilst he kept gayly stirring it with the spoon. Then she dipped a spoonful of rich cream out of the cup and poured it into the refreshing contents of the plate.
“Let me know when you want me to stop, Mr. Seraphin.” Mechtild poured spoonful after spoonful; he sat immovable, seemingly observing the spoon, but in reality watching her soft plump fingers, then her well‐shaped hand, next her exquisitely turned arm, and, when finally he raised his eyes to her face, they were met by a mischievous smile. The cup was empty, and all the cream was in his plate.
“May I go and fetch some more?” she asked.
“No, Mechtild, no! Why, this is a regular yellow sea!”
“You wouldn’t cry ‘enough!’ ”
“I forgot about it,” he replied, somewhat confused. “To atone for my forgetfulness, I will eat it all.”
“I hope you will relish it, Mr. Seraphin!”
“Thank you! Where is your plate?”
“I had my dinner before you came.”
“Well, then, at any rate you must not continue standing. Won’t you share this seat with me?”
She seated herself upon the bench, took off her hat, smoothed down her apron, and appeared happy at seeing him eating heartily.
“Don’t you find that dish refreshing, Mr. Seraphin?”
“You have done me a real act of charity,” he replied. “This bread is excellent. Who taught you how to make bread?”
“I learned from mother; but there isn’t much art in making that sort of bread, Mr. Seraphin. The food which people in the country eat does not require artistic preparation. It only needs good, pure material, so that it may give strength to labor.”
“I suppose you attend to the kitchen altogether, do you not?”
“Yes, Mr. Seraphin. That’s not very difficult, our meals are of the plainest kind. We have meat once a week, on Sundays. When the work is unusually hard, as in harvest time, we have meat oftener. We raise our own meat and cure it.”
“You have assumed household cares at quite an early age, Mechtild.”
“Early? I am seventeen now, and am the oldest. Mother has a great deal of trouble with the small ones, so the housework falls chiefly to my share. It does not require any great exertion, however, to do it. Plain and saving is our motto. Mother specially recommends four things: industry, cleanliness, order, and economy. She advises me not to neglect any one of these points when once I will have a household of my own.”
“Do you think you will soon set up a separate household?” asked he with some hesitation.
“Not for some time to come, Mr. Seraphin, yet it must be done one day. If my own inclination were consulted, I would prefer never to leave home. I should like things to continue as they are. But a separation must come. Death will pay us a visit as it has done to others, father and mother will pass away, and the course of events will sever us from one another.”
Her head sank, the brightness of her face became obscured beneath the shadow of these sombre thoughts, and, when she again looked up, there appeared in her eyes so touching and childlike a sadness that he felt pained to the soul. And yet this revelation of tenderness pleased him, for it made known to him a new phase of her amiable nature.
For a long time he continued conversing with the artless girl. Every word she uttered, no matter how trifling, had an interest for him. Besides her charming artlessness, he had frequent occasions to admire the wisdom of her language and her admirable delicacy. The setting sun had already cast a subdued crimson over the hilltops, hours had sped away, the chickens had gone to roost, still he remained riveted to the spot by Mechtild’s grace and loveliness.
“Father is just coming,” she said, pointing down the road. “How glad he will be to find you here!”
His head bent forward, Holt came wearily plodding up the road. His right hand was hidden in the pocket of his pantaloons, and his head was bowed, as if beneath a heavy weight. As Mechtild’s clear voice rang out, he raised his head, caught sight of his high‐hearted benefactor, and smiled in joyful surprise.
“Welcome, Mr. Seraphin; a thousand times welcome!” he cried from the other side of the road. “Why, this is an honor that I had not expected!”
He stood uncovered, holding his cap in the left hand, his right hand was still concealed. Mechtild at once noticed her father’s singular behavior, and her eye watched anxiously for the hidden hand.
“Your daughter has been so kind as to offer refreshments to a weary wanderer,” said Gerlach, “and it has been a great pleasure for me to sit awhile. We have been chatting for several hours under this glorious tree, and may be I am to blame for keeping her from her work.”
Holt’s honest face beamed with satisfaction. He entirely forgot about his secret, he drew his hand out of his pocket, Mechtild turned pale, and a sharp cry escaped her lips.
“For mercy’s sake, father!” And she pointed to the broken chain.
“What are you screaming for, foolish girl? Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Seraphin! this chain has got on my arm in an honorable cause. I will tell you the whole story; I know you will not inform on me.”
Seating himself on the bench, he related the adventures of the day.
The mock procession passed before Mechtild’s imagination with the vividness of reality. The narration transformed her. Her mildness was changed to noble anger. She had heard of the vicar of Christ being insulted, of holy things being scoffed at, of the Redeemer being derided by a horde of wretches. With her arms akimbo, she drew up her lithe and graceful form to its full height, and with flashing eyes looked at her father while he related what had befallen him. Seraphin could not help wondering at the transformation. Such a display of spirit he had not been prepared to witness in a girl so gentle and beautiful. When her father had ended his account, she seized his hand passionately, pressed it warmly between her own hands, and kissed the chain.
“Father, dear father,” she exclaimed in a burst of feeling, “I thank you from my heart for acting as you did! Those wretches were scoffing at our holy religion, but you behaved bravely in defence of the faith. For this they put chains on you, as the heathen did to S. Peter and S. Paul.”
Once more she kissed the chain, then, turning quickly, hastened across the yard to the house.
“Mechtild isn’t like the rest of us,” said Holt, smiling. “There’s a great deal of spirit in her. I have often noticed it. But I am not astonished at her being roused at the mock procession—I was roused myself. I declare, Mr. Seraphin, it is a shame, a crying shame, that persons are permitted to rail at doctrines and things which we revere as holy. One would almost believe Satan himself was in some people, they take so fanatical a delight in scoffing at a religion which is holy and enjoins nothing but what is good.”
“It is incontestable that infidelity hates and opposes God and religion,” replied Gerlach. “The boasted culture of those who find a pleasure in grossly wounding the most sacred feelings of their neighbors, is wicked and stupid.”
Mechtild returned with a file in her hand.
“Right, my child! I was just thinking of the file myself. Here, cut the catches of the lock.”
He laid his arm across the table. A few strokes of the file caused the lock and remnant of chain to fall from his wrist.
“We will keep this as a precious memento,” said she. “Only think, father, that wicked official ordered you to be manacled, and he is the representative of authority. How can one respect or even pray for authorities when they allow religion to be ridiculed?”
“Pray for your enemies,” answered the countryman gravely.
“I will do so because God commands me; but I shall never again be able to respect the official!”
Her anger had fled; she appeared again all light and loveliness. He did not fail to observe a searching look which she directed upon him, but its meaning became clear to him only when, as he was taking leave, she said in a tone of humility: “Pardon my vehemence, Mr. Seraphin! Don’t think me a bad girl.”
“There is nothing to be forgiven, Mechtild. You were indignant against godless wretches, and they who are not indignant against evil cannot themselves be good.”
“We are most heartily thankful for this visit,” spoke Holt. “I need not say that we will consider it a great happiness as often as you will be pleased to come.”
“Good‐night!” returned the young man, and he walked away.
Deeply immersed in his thoughts, Seraphin went back to town. What he was thinking about, his diary does not record. But the excitement under which he had rushed forth was gone—dispelled by the magic of a rural sorceress. He walked on quietly like a man who seems filled with confidence in his own future. The recent painful impressions seemed to his mind to lie far back in the past; their place was taken up by beautiful anticipations which, like the aurora, shed soft and pleasing light upon his path. He halted frequently in a dream‐like reverie to indulge the happiness with which his soul was flooded. The full moon, just peering over the hills, shed around him a mystic brightness that harmonized perfectly with the indefinable contentment of his heart, and seemed to be gazing quizzingly into the countenance of the young man, who almost feared to confess to himself that he had found an invaluable treasure.
As he stopped before the Palais Greifmann, all the bright spirits that had hovered round about him on the way back from the little whitewashed cottage, fled. He awoke from his dream, and, ascending the stairs with a feeling of discomfort, he entered his apartment, where his father sat awaiting him.
“At last,” spoke Mr. Conrad, looking up from a book. “You have kept me waiting a long time, my son.”
“I was in need of a good long walk, father, to get over what I witnessed this morning. The country air has dispelled all those horrible impressions. There is only one thing more required to make me feel perfectly well, dear father, which is that you will not insist on my allying myself to people who are utterly opposed to my way of thinking and feeling.”
“I understand and approve of your request, Seraphin. The impressions made on me, too, are exceedingly disagreeable. The advancement of which this town boasts is stupid, immoral, detestable. How this state of society has come about, is inexplicable to me who live secluded in the country. Society is diseased, fatally diseased. Many of the new views professed are sheer superstition, and their morality is a mere cloak for their corruption and wickedness. All the powers of progress so‐called are actively at work to subvert all the safeguards of society. And what your diary reports of Louise, I have found fully confirmed. Though it cost the sacrifice of a long cherished plan, a son of mine shall never become the husband of a progressionist woman.”
“O father! how deeply do I thank you!” cried the youth, carried away by his feelings.
“I must decline being thanked, for I have not merited it,” spoke Mr. Conrad earnestly. “A father’s duty determines very clearly what my decision upon the matter of your marriage with Louise, ought to be. But I am under obligations to you, my son, which justice compels me to acknowledge. Your discernment and moral sense have prevented a great deal of discord and unhappiness in our family. Continue good and true, my Seraphin!”
He pressed his son to his bosom and imprinted a kiss on his forehead.
“To‐morrow we shall start for home by the first train. Fortunately your prudent behavior makes it easy for us to get away, and the final breaking off of this engagement I will myself arrange with Louise’s father.”
Seraphin Gerlach To The Author.
DEAR SIR: Two years ago, I took the liberty of sending you my diary, with the request that you would be pleased to publish such portions of its contents as might be useful, in the form of a tale illustrative of the times. I made the request because I consider it the duty of a writer who delineates the condition of society, to transmit to posterity a faithful picture of the present social status, and I am vain enough to believe that my jottings will be a modest contribution towards such a tableau.
The meagre account given by the diary of my intercourse with Mechtild, will probably have enabled you to perceive the germ of a pure and true relation likely to develop itself further. I shall add but a few items to complete the account of the diary, knowing that poets, painters, and artists have rigorously determined bounds, and that a twilight cannot be represented when the sun is at the zenith. I am emboldened to use this illustration because your unbounded admiration of pure womanhood is well known to me, and because the brightness of Mechtild’s character, were it further described, would no more be compatible with the sombre colorings in which a true picture of modern progress would have to be exhibited, than the noonday sun with the shadows of evening.
My memoranda concerning Mechtild, which, despite studied soberness, betrayed a considerable degree of admiration, made known to my parents, naturally enough, the secret of my heart. Hence it came that a quiet smile passed over my father’s face every time I commenced to speak of Mechtild. Holt’s manly deed at the mock procession had already gained for him my father’s esteem, and, as I spoke a great deal about Holt’s thoroughness as a cultivator, my father began to look upon him as a very desirable man to employ.
“We want an experienced man on the ‘green farm,’ ” said father, one day. “Offer the situation to Holt, and tell him to come to see me about it. I want to talk with him.”
“Give the good man my compliments,” said mother; “tell him I would be much pleased to become acquainted with Mechtild, who sympathized with you so kindly on that memorable day!”
I wrote without delay. Holt came, and so did Mechtild. But few moments were necessary to enable mother to detect the girl’s fine qualities. Father, too, was delightfully surprised at her modesty, the beauty of her form, and grace of her manner. He visited the farm accompanied by Holt. The cultivator’s extraordinary knowledge, his practical manner of viewing things, and the shrewdness of his counsels in regard to the improvement of worn‐ out land and the cultivation of poor soil, completely charmed my father. A contract containing very favorable conditions for Holt was entered into, and three weeks later the family took charge of the “green farm.”
Upon mother’s suggestion, Mechtild was sent to an educational institution, where she acquired in ten months’ time the learning and culture necessary for associating with cultivated people.
Father and mother had received her on her return like a daughter. This reception was given her not only in consideration of Holt’s skilful and faithful management of business, but also on account of Mechtild’s own splendid womanly character—perhaps, too, partly on account of my unbounded admiration for the rare girl.
“The girl is an ornament to her sex,” lauded my father. “Her polished manner and ease in company do not suffer one to suspect ever so remotely that she at any time plied the reaping‐hook, and came out of a stubblefield to regale a weary wanderer with brown bread and bonny‐clabber. I am quite in harmony with your secret wishes, my dear Seraphin! At the same time, I am of opinion that a step promising so much happiness ought not to be longer deferred. I think, then, you should ask the father for his daughter without delay, so that I may soon have the pleasure of giving you my blessing.”
From my father’s arms, into which I had thrown myself in thankfulness, I hastened away to the “green farm,” where Mechtild with maidenly blushes, and Holt in speechless astonishment, heard and granted my petition.
I am now four months married. I am the blest husband of a wife whose lovely qualities are daily showing themselves to greater advantage. Mechtild presides over Chateau Hallberg like an angel of peace. Towards my father and mother she conducts herself with filial reverence and never‐ceasing delicate attentions. Mother loves her unspeakably, and no access of ill humor in father can withstand her charming smile and prudent mirth. Concerning the banking‐house of Greifmann, I have only sad things to tell. Carl’s father had entered into very considerable speculations which failed and drove him into bankruptcy. Carl saw the blow coming, and saved himself in a disgraceful manner. There was a savings institution connected with the bank in which poor people and servants deposited the savings of their hard labor. Carl appropriated this fund and made off a short time before the failure of the house. Thousands of poor persons were robbed of the little sums which they were saving for old age, by denying themselves many even of the necessaries of life.
The maledictions and curses of these unfortunate people followed across the ocean the thief whose modern culture and progressive humanity did not hinder him from committing a crime which no Christian can be guilty of without losing his claim to the title. Carl, however, still continues to pass for a man of culture and humanity notwithstanding his deed. And why should he not, since without faith in the Deity moral obligations do not exist, and consequently every species of crime is allowable? The old gentleman Greifmann died shortly after his ruin; Louise lost her mind.
My father felt the misfortune of the Greifmanns deeply, without, however, regretting in the smallest degree the wise determination which their godless principles and actions had driven him to. Formerly he could never find time to take part in the elections. But now he is constantly speaking about the duty of every respectable man to oppose the infernal machinations and plans of would‐be progress. He intends at the next election to use all his influence for the election of conscientious deputies, so that the evil may be put an end to which consists in trying to undermine the foundations of society.
Accept, dear sir, the assurance of the esteem with which I have the honor to be
our most obedient servant,
SERAPHIN GERLACH.
CHATEAU HALLBERG, Jan. 4, 1872.
[Two chapters have been omitted in this translation of “The Progressionists.”—ED. C. W.]
F. James Marquette, S.J.
Among the names that have become immortalized in the history of our country, there are few more certainly destined for perpetual fame than those connected with the discovery and exploration of that mighty river which courses so boldly and majestically through this vast continent. Thus it is probable that there never will be a time when even children at school will not be familiar with such names as De Soto, Marquette, and La Salle.
James Marquette was born in the city of Laon, near a small branch of the Oise, in the department of Aisne, France, in the year 1637. His family was the most ancient of that ancient city, and had, during many generations, filled high offices and rendered valuable services to their country, both in civil and military life. We have accounts of eminent services rendered to his sovereign by one of his ancestors as early as 1360. The usefulness and public spirit of the family, we may well suppose, did not expire with the distinguished subject of this memoir; for we find that, in the French army that aided our fathers in the achievement of American Independence, there were no less than three Marquettes who laid down their lives in the cause of liberty. His maternal name was no less distinguished in the annals of the church. On the side of his mother, Rose de la Salle, he was connected with the good and venerable John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, so distinguished for their successful services in the cause of popular religious education. It was this pious mother that instilled into her illustrious son that tender and fervid devotion to the Blessed Virgin which so ravished his soul and adorned his whole life. In 1654, when but seventeen years old, he entered the Society of Jesus, in which the time of his novitiate, the terms of teaching and of his own theological studies, consumed twelve years. He had chosen for his model S. Francis Xavier, and in studying his patron’s life, and meditating on his virtues, the young priest conceived a holy longing to enter the field of missionary toil. He was enrolled in the province of Champagne; but, as this had no foreign missions, he caused himself to be transferred to the province of France. His cherished object was soon attained. In 1666, he was sent out to Canada, and arrived at Quebec on the 20th of September of that year.
F. Marquette was at first destined for the Montagnais mission, whose central station was at Tadousal, and on the 10th of October he started for Three Rivers, in order to study the Montagnais language, a key to many neighboring Indian tongues, under that celebrated philologist as well as renowned missionary, F. Gabriel Druilletes. His intervals of leisure were here employed in the offices of the holy ministry. F. Marquette was thus occupied till April, 1668, when his destination was changed, and he received orders to prepare for the mission on Lake Superior, known as the Ottawa mission. He accordingly returned to Quebec, and thence set out for Montreal on the 21st of April, with Brother Le Boesme and two other companions; and from the latter place he embarked on the Ottawa flotilla. He was accompanied by other missionaries on this toilsome and dangerous voyage up the Ottawa, through French River, to and across Lake Huron, and to the Sault St. Mary. This region had long before been dedicated to God by the erection of the cross by Fathers Jogues and Raymbault, and twenty years later, 1660, F. Ménard became the founder of the Ottawa mission; and when F. Marquette arrived in Canada, F. Allouez was then pushing his spiritual conquests beyond any points reached by his zealous predecessors. On the advent of F. Marquette to the shores of Lake Superior, it was found expedient to establish two missions, one of which should be located at the Sault St. Mary, and the other at Green Bay. Erecting his cabin at the foot of the rapids on the American side, F. Marquette opened his mission at the Sault, where he was joined the following year by F. Dablon, Superior of the Ottawa mission. These two zealous missionaries soon gathered a Christian flock around them, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was now offered up in that wild region in “a sanctuary worthy of the faith.” “It is,” says Bancroft, “the oldest settlement begun by Europeans within the present limits of the commonwealth of Michigan.” So rich was the harvest which the enthusiastic and apostolical Marquette saw before him that he writes in one of his letters: “Two thousand souls were ready to embrace the faith, if the missionary were faithful to his task.” Yet knowing the uncertainty of the Indian character, he proceeded cautiously and prudently in his undertakings. Though his ardent hopes were not fully realized, the harvest was not a fruitless one; and Fathers Dablon and Marquette labored on with undaunted courage and undiminished zeal, instructing the people, baptizing such as were in danger of death, and laying the solid foundations of a future Christian commonwealth.
In August of 1669, F. Marquette was transferred from the Sault to Lapointe, to conduct the missions of the Holy Ghost among the Ottawas, and to fill the place recently occupied by F. Allouez, who had gone to Green Bay. After a perilous and exhausting navigation, amid snow and ice, of a month’s duration, he reached Lapointe in safety, and full of ardor for the work before him. A few extracts from the account of this mission, which F. Marquette gave to his superior in his letter of the following year, will be more acceptable to the reader than any synopsis we could prepare from it:
“Divine Providence having destined me to continue the mission of the Holy Ghost begun by Allouez, who had baptized the chiefs of the Kiskakonk, I arrived there on the thirteenth of September, and went to visit the Indians who were in the clearings, which are divided into five towns. The Hurons, to the number of about four or five hundred, almost all baptized, still preserve some little Christianity. A number of the chiefs assembled in council were at first well pleased to see me; but I explained that I did not yet know their language perfectly, and that no other missionary was coming, both because all had gone to the Iroquois, and because F. Allouez, who understood them perfectly, did not wish to return that winter, as they did not love the prayer enough. They acknowledged that it was a just punishment, and during the winter held talks about it, and resolved to amend, as they tell me.
“The nation of the Outaouaks Sinagaux is far from the kingdom of God, and being above all other nations addicted to lewdness, sacrifices, and juggleries. They ridicule the prayer, and will scarcely hear us speak of Christianity. They are proud and undeveloped, and I think that so little can be done with this tribe that I have not baptized healthy infants who seem likely to live, watching only for such as are sick. The Indians of the Kinouché tribe declare openly that it is not yet time. There are, however, two men among them formerly baptized. One, now rather old, is looked upon as a kind of miracle among the Indians, having always refused to marry, persisting in this resolution in spite of all that had been said. He has suffered much, even from his relatives, but he is as little affected by this as by the loss of all the goods which he brought last year from the settlement, not having even enough left to cover him. These are hard trials for Indians, who generally seek only to possess much in this world. The other, a new‐married young man, seems of another nature than the rest. The Indians, extremely attached to their reveries, had resolved that a certain number of young women should prostitute themselves, each to choose such partner as she liked. No one in these cases ever refused, as the lives of men are supposed to depend on it. This young Christian was called; on entering the cabin, he saw the orgies that were about to begin, and, feigning illness, immediately left, and, though they came to call him back, he refused to go. His confession was as prudent as it could be, and I wondered that an Indian could live so innocently, and so nobly profess himself a Christian. His mother and some of his sisters are also good Christians. The Ottawas, extremely superstitious in their feasts and juggleries, seem hardened to the instructions given them, yet they like to have their children baptized. God permitted a woman to die this winter in her sin; her illness had been concealed from me, and I heard it only by the report that she had asked a very improper dance for her cure. I immediately went to a cabin where all the chiefs were at a feast, and some Kiskakonk Christians among them. To these I exposed the impiety of the woman and her medicine men, and gave them proper instructions. I then spoke to all present, and God permitted that an old Ottawa rose to advise granting what I asked, as it made no matter, he said, if the woman did die. An old Christian then rose and told the nation that they must stop the licentiousness of their youth, and not permit Christian girls to take part in such dances. To satisfy the woman, some child’s play was substituted for the dance; but this did not prevent her dying before morning. The dangerous state of a sick man caused the medicine men to proclaim that the devil must be invoked by extraordinary superstitions. The Christians took no part. The actors were these jugglers and the sick man, who was passed over great fires lighted in every cabin. It was said that he did not feel the heat, although his body had been greased with oil for five or six days. Men, women, and children ran through the cabins, asking, as a riddle, to divine their thoughts, and the successful guesser was glad to give the object named. I prevented the abominable lewdness so common at the end of these diabolical rites. I do not think that they will recur, as the sick man died soon after.
“The nation of Kiskakous, which for three years refused to receive the Gospel preached them by F. Allouez, resolved in the fall of 1668 to obey God. This resolution was adopted in full council, and announced to that father, who spent four winter months instructing them. The chiefs of the nation became Christians, and, as F. Allouez was called to another mission, he gave it to my charge to cultivate, and I entered on it in September, 1669.
“All the Christians were then in the fields harvesting their Indian corn; they listened with pleasure when I told them that I came to Lapointe for their sake and that of the Hurons; that they never should be abandoned, but be beloved above all other nations; and that they and the French were one. I had the consolation of seeing their love for the prayer and their pride in being Christians. I baptized the new‐born infants, and instructed the chiefs whom I found well disposed. The head chief having allowed a dog to be hung on a pole near his cabin, which is a kind of sacrifice the Indians make to the sun, I told him that this was wrong, and he went and threw it down.
“Having invited the Kiskakous to come and winter near the chapel, they left all the other tribes, to gather around us so as to be able to pray to God, be instructed, and have their children baptized. They all call themselves Christians; hence in all councils and important affairs I address them, and, when I wish to show them that I really wish what I ask, I need only address them as Christians; they told me even that they obeyed me for that reason. They have taken the upper hand, and control the three other tribes. It is a great consolation to a missionary to see such pliancy in savages, and to live in such peace with the Indians, spending the whole day in instructing them in our mysteries, and teaching them the prayers. Neither the rigor of the winter nor the state of the weather prevents their coming to the chapel; many never let a day pass, and I was thus busily employed from morning till night, preparing some for baptism, some for confession, disabusing others of their reveries. The old men told me that the young men had lost their senses, and that I must stop their excesses. I often spoke to them of their daughters, urging them to prevent their being visited at night. I knew almost all that passed in two tribes near us; but, though others were spoken of, I never heard anything against the Christian women, and when I spoke to the old men about their daughters, they told me that they prayed to God. I often inculcated this, knowing the importunities to which they are constantly exposed, and the courage they need to resist. They have learned to be modest, and the French who have seen them perceive how little they resemble the others from whom they are thus distinguished.
“After Easter, all the Indians dispersed to seek subsistence; they promised me that they would not forget the prayer, and earnestly begged that a father should come in the fall when they assemble again. This will be granted, and, if it please God to send some father, he will take my place, while I, to execute the orders of my father‐superior, will go and begin my Illinois mission.
“The Illinois are thirty days’ journey by land from Lapointe by a difficult road; they lie south‐southwest of it. On the way you pass the nation of the Ketchigamins, who live in more than twenty large cabins; they are inland, and seek to have intercourse with the French, from whom they hope to get axes, knives, and ironware. So much do they fear them that they unbound from the stake two Indian captives, who said, when about to be burned, that the Frenchman had declared that they wished peace all over the world. You pass then to the Miamiwek, and by great deserts reach the Illinois, who are assembled chiefly in two towns containing more than eight or nine thousand souls. These people are well enough disposed to receive Christianity. Since F. Allouez spoke to them at Lapointe to adore one God, they have begun to abandon their false worship; for they adored the sun and thunder. Those seen by me are apparently of good disposition, and they are not night‐ runners, like the other Indians. A man kills his wife if he finds her unfaithful. They are less prodigal in sacrifices, and promise me to embrace Christianity, and do all I require in their country. In this view, the Ottawas gave me a young man recently come from their country, who initiated me to some extent in their language during the leisure given me in the winter by the Indians at Lapointe. I could scarcely understand it, though there is something of the Algonquin in it; yet I hope, by the help of God’s grace, to understand and be understood if God by his goodness leads me to that country.
“No one must hope to escape crosses in our missions, and the best means to live happily is not to fear them, but, in the enjoyment of little crosses, hope for others still greater. The Illinois desire us, like Indians, to share their miseries and suffer all that can be imagined in barbarism. They are lost sheep, to be sought amid woods and thorns, especially when they call so piteously to be rescued from the jaws of the wolf. Such, really, can I call their entreaties to me this winter. They have actually gone this spring to notify the old men to come for me in the fall.
“The Illinois always come by land. They sow maize, which they have in great plenty; they have pumpkins as large as those of France, and plenty of roots and fruit. The chase is very abundant in wild cattle, bears, stags, turkeys, duck, bustard, wild pigeon, and cranes. They leave their towns at certain times every year to go to their hunting‐grounds together, so as to be better able to resist if attacked. They believe that I will spread peace everywhere if I go, and then only the young will go to hunt.
“When the Illinois come to Lapointe, they pass a large river almost a league wide. It runs north and south, and so far that the Illinois, who do not know what canoes are, have never yet heard of its mouth; they only know that there are very great nations below them, some of whom raise two crops of maize a year. East‐southeast of the country is a nation they call Chawawon, which came to visit them last summer. They wear beards, which shows intercourse with Europeans; they had come thirty days across land before reaching their country. This great river can hardly empty in Virginia, and we rather believe its mouth is in California. If the Indians, who promise to make me a canoe, do not fail to keep their word, we shall go into this river as soon as we can, with a Frenchman and this young man given me, who knows some of these languages, and has a readiness for learning others; we shall visit the nations which inhabit it, in order to open the way to so many of our fathers who have long awaited this happiness. This discovery will give us a complete knowledge of the southern or western sea.
“The Illinois are warriors; they make many slaves, whom they sell to the Ottawas for guns, powder, kettles, axes, and knives. They were formerly at war with the Nadouessi, but, having made peace some years since, I confirmed it, to facilitate their coming to Lapointe, where I am going to await them, in order to accompany them to their country.”
Much as he loved his children at Lapointe, and faithfully as he had served them, the voice of his superior had ordered him to this new, vaster, and more laborious field, which to his true Jesuit obedience was a task of love. The Illinois at once become dear to his heart as his future children; he studies their language, loses no opportunity of learning all about their country, its tribes and their customs, sends them presents of pious pictures and the loving messages of a father, welcomes every member of their nation who might visit Lapointe with open arms, and presses him to his heart, and devotes every moment of leisure afforded him from his labors to sedulous preparation for the contemplated mission of the Immaculate Conception. His intelligent mind fully comprehended the vast importance of the undertaking in its relations to the church and the civilized world, and conceived at once the bold and daring project of a thorough exploration of the great river around which so much mystery, intermingled with romantic fables and dim traditions, still hung. It is with equal truth and justice that Bancroft writes: “The purpose of discovering the Mississippi, of which the tales of the natives had published the magnificence, sprang from Marquette himself.”
It has already been stated that F. Marquette had sent some pious pictures to the Illinois, and by the same messenger to the Sioux, whom he expected to be embraced in his intended mission. The messenger who carried the father’s presents also bore his request for protection and a safe‐conduct to such European missionaries as might visit or pass through their country, and a message, “That the black‐gown wished to pass to the country of the Assinipoils and Kilistinons; that he was already among the Outagamis; and that he himself was going in the fall to the Illinois.”
Sad indeed must have been the feelings of the good father, when, early in the winter, the Sioux returned to him the pious pictures he had sent them, in which he saw an ominous forerunner of impending war. The Ottawas and Hurons had by their insolence aroused the indignation of the Sioux, and the latter had seized the tomahawk and prepared for the bloody and revengeful strife. His hopes of reaching the cabins of the Sioux by an overland route now vanished before the approaching storm. The Indians at Lapointe could not withstand the fierce onsets of the Dakotah war‐parties, and first the Ottawas, abandoning their village, launched their canoes upon the lake, and were soon gathered in Ekaentoulon Island. The Hurons remained alone at Lapointe, and F. Marquette remained in the midst of them to minister to their spiritual wants, share their dangers, and uphold their faith and courage. And when they too were forced to depart, the good father, ever true to his spiritual flock, was content to “turn his back on his beloved Illinois to accompany his Hurons in their wanderings and hardships.” The Hurons settled at Mackinaw, a bleak and desolate spot, but the abundance of fish the neighboring waters afforded was certain to secure the fugitives from starvation, while the very desolation of the scene seemed a protection from hostile bands. Scarcely had the Hurons thrown up their cabins on this dreary shore, when a rude sylvan chapel, surmounted by a cross, graced and cheered the scene, and became the cradle of religion at the mission of S. Ignatius. Such was the early origin of Michilimackinac. Beside the enclosure of cabins and chapel arose a palisade fort for defence. For several years F. Marquette labored in this remote and arduous station, cheered only by the consolations which spring from faith and by the bountiful harvests of souls he reaped.
Though longing to proceed on his mission to the Illinois, as all his letters so earnestly manifest, F. Marquette found ample work both for his mind and hands in arranging matters at Lapointe, so that his departure should cause as little damage as possible to that mission, to which he had been so faithful and devoted, and which he was now about to confide to the care of another, and in making the necessary preparations for his departure; for his time seemed now near at hand. The dreary days of winter were enlivened by recounting the projected plans of the coming spring, and in gathering all the information within his reach concerning the Mississippi and the nations inhabiting its banks. Most of the actual knowledge then possessed on the subject was derived from the accounts and relations of the Jesuit missionaries of the Northwest, and from the reports of the Canadian traders among the Indians. His inquiries of the more northern tribes were eagerly answered by startling fables of various hues and contradictory generalities, but nothing definite could be learned from them as to the course of the great river, its direction or outlet, or of the natives along its course. All was conjecture and theory. As early as 1639 the Sieur Nicolet, who was the interpreter of the French colony of New France, had penetrated westward to the furthest grounds of the Algonquins, and had encountered the Winnebagoes, “a people called so because they came from a distant sea, but whom the French erroneously called Puents.” And we learn from F. Vimont that “the Sieur Nicolet, who had penetrated furthest into those distant countries, avers that, had he sailed three days more on a great river which flows from that lake (Green Bay), he would have found the sea.” And although the Indians called the Mississippi itself “the sea,” and the Sieur Nicolet may have fallen into the same error, in either case it seems quite certain that he was the first to reach the waters of that river. In 1641, Fathers Isaac Jogues and Charles Raymbaut carried their missionary labors to the Sault St. Mary, and received distinct accounts of the Sioux, and of the great river on whose banks they lived. In 1658, after F. Garreau had suffered martyrdom on the St. Lawrence on his way to renew the Western missions destroyed by the recent Iroquois war, De Groseilles and another Frenchman penetrated to Lake Superior, and passed the winter on its shores. They visited the Sioux, learned with greater clearness and particularity of the course of the great river on whose banks they stood. Their annalist writes: “It was a beautiful river, large, broad, and deep, which would bear comparison, they say, with the St. Lawrence.” The missionaries of the Saguenay had also “heard of the Winnipegouek, and their bay whence three seas could be reached.” And war parties of the Iroquois told the missionaries of New York of their wars with the Ontoagannha, “whose towns lay on a beautiful river (Ohio), which leads to the great lake, as they called the sea, where they traded with Europeans who pray to God as we (the French) do, and have rosaries and bells to call men to prayer.”(225) F. Ménard, the founder of the Ottawa mission, also heard, in 1660, of the Mississippi and the nations on its banks, and was only prevented from visiting them by meeting with a martyr’s death while prosecuting his work. F. Allouez, his successor, also writes of the great river, “which empties, as far as I can conjecture, into the sea of Virginia,” and was the first to reveal to Europeans its Indian name; for, in speaking of one of its tribes, he says: “They live on a great river called Messipi.” At the time that F. Dablon was appointed Superior of the Ottawa missions, and F. Marquette appointed to establish the intended Illinois mission, and the exploration of the river was about to be undertaken, the latter, as already stated, was for some time engaged in gathering information concerning its course and outlet. Three principal conjectures prevailed at this time: first, that it ran towards the southwest, and entered the Gulf of California; second, that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico; third, that it took a more easterly direction, and discharged itself into the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere on the coast of Virginia. To F. Marquette belonged the glory of solving the problem, and thus of opening the interior of the continent to Christianity and civilization.
The war which was raging in the country rendered it impossible for the missionaries of themselves to undertake the opening of the long‐desired mission of the Illinois, and they had accordingly applied for assistance to the French government to further this great enterprise. F. Marquette, as we have seen from his letters, remained ever ready at a moment’s notice from his superiors to advance into this dangerous field. He was not deterred by a consciousness of his own declining health, already enfeebled by labors and exposures, nor by the hostile character of the nations through whose country he would have to pass, nor by the danger of a cruel death at the hands of the fierce Dakotah. This last only made the prospect more enticing to one whose highest ambition was to win the glorious crown of martyrdom in opening the way for his brother Jesuits to follow in the battle of the faith. The same flotilla that carried his letter to F. Dablon to Quebec in the summer of 1672, on its return conveyed to him the joyous news that the petition of the missionaries had found favor with the government; that the Sieur Jolliet was designated to undertake the exploration of the Mississippi; and that F. Marquette was chosen the missionary of the expedition. It was the Blessed Virgin whom, F. Marquette says, “I had always invoked, since my coming to the Ottawa country, in order to obtain of God the favor of being able to visit the nations on the Mississippi River.” It was on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the same Blessed Virgin Mary that he received the glorious tidings that the realization of his hopes and prayers was at hand. He bestowed upon the great river the name of the Immaculate Conception, which, however, as well as its earlier Spanish name of River of the Holy Ghost, has since yielded to its original Indian appellation.
The exploring party, consisting of “the meek, single‐hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Jolliet for his associate, five Frenchmen for his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin,” set out upon their glorious expedition. Mr. J. G. Shea, to whom we are so much indebted for his researches into this interesting part of the history of our country, describes the voyage in the following graphic and eloquent manner:
“In the spring they embarked at Mackinaw in two frail bark canoes; each with his paddle in hand, and full of hope, they soon plied them merrily over the crystal waters of the lake. All was new to Marquette, and he describes as he went along the Menonomies, Green Bay, and Maskoutens, which he reached on the 7th of June, 1673. He had now attained the limit of former discoveries; the new world was before them; they looked back a last adieu to the waters which, great as the distance was, connected them with Quebec and their countrymen; they knelt on the shore to offer, by a new devotion, their lives, their honor, and their undertakings to their beloved Mother, the Virgin Mary Immaculate; then, launching on the broad Wisconsin, sailed slowly down its current, amid its vine‐clad isles and its countless sand‐bars. No sound broke the stillness, no human form appeared, and at last, after sailing seven days, on the 17th of June they happily glided into the great river. Joy that could find no utterance in words filled the grateful heart of Marquette.
“The broad river of the Conception, as he named it, now lay before them, stretching away hundreds of miles to an unknown sea. Soon all was new; mountain and forest had glided away; the islands, with their groves of cottonwood, became more frequent, and moose and deer browzed on the plains; strange animals were seen traversing the river, and monstrous fish appeared in its waters. But they proceeded on their way amid this solitude, frightful by its utter absence of man. Descending still further, they came to the land of the bison, or pisikiou, which, with the turkey, became sole tenants of the wilderness; all other game had disappeared. At last, on the 25th of June, they descried footprints on the shore. They now took heart again, and Jolliet and the missionary, leaving their five men in the canoes, followed a little beaten path to discover who the tribe might be. They travelled on in silence almost to the cabin‐doors, when they halted, and with a loud halloa proclaimed their coming. Three villages lay before them; the first, roused by the cry, poured forth its motley group, which halted at the sight of the new‐comers and the well‐known dress of the missionary. Old men came slowly on, step by measured step, bearing aloft the all‐mysterious calumet. All was silence; they stood at last before the two Europeans, and Marquette asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘We are Illinois,’ was the answer, which dispelled all anxiety from the explorers, and sent a thrill to the heart of Marquette; the Illinois missionary was at last amid the children of that tribe which he had so long, so tenderly yearned to see.
“After friendly greetings at this town of Pewaria, and the neighboring one of Moing‐wena, they returned to their canoes, escorted by the wondering tribe, who gave their hardy visitants a calumet, the safeguard of the West. With renewed courage and lighter hearts, they sailed in, and, passing a high rock with strange and monstrous forms depicted on its rugged surface, heard in the distance the roaring of a mighty cataract, and soon beheld Pekitanoui, or the Muddy River, as the Algonquins call the Missouri, rushing like some untamed monster into the calm and clear Mississippi, and hurrying in with its muddy waters the trees which it had rooted up in its impetuous course. Already had the missionaries heard of the river running to the western sea, to be reached by the branches of the Mississippi, and Marquette, now better informed, fondly hoped to reach it one day by the Missouri. But now their course lay south, and, passing a dangerous eddy, the demon of the Western Indians, they reached the Waboukigou, or Ohio, the river of the Shawnees, and, still holding on their way, came to the warm land of the cane, and the country which the mosquitoes might call their own. While enveloped in their sails as a shelter from them, they came upon a tribe who invited them to the shore. They were wild wanderers, for they had guns bought of Catholic Europeans at the East.
“Thus, after all had been friendly, and encouraged by this second meeting, they plied their oars anew, and, amid groves of cottonwood on either side, descended to the 33d degree, when, for the first time, a hostile reception was promised by the excited Metchigameas. Too few to resist, their only hope on earth was the mysterious calumet, and in heaven the protection of Mary, to whom they sent up fervent prayers. At last the storm subsided, and they were received in peace; their language formed an obstacle, but an interpreter was found, and after explaining the object of their coming, and announcing the great truths of Christianity, they embarked for Akamsea, a village thirty miles below on the eastern shore.
“Here they were well received, and learned that the mouth of the river was but ten days’ sail from this village; but they heard, too, of nations there trading with Europeans, and of wars between the tribes, and the two explorers spent a night in consultation. The Mississippi, they now saw, emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, between Florida and Tampico, two Spanish points; they might, by proceeding, fall into their hands. Thus far only Marquette traced the map, and he put down the names of other tribes of which they heard. Of these, in the Atotchasi, Matora, and Papihaka, we recognize Arkansas tribes; and the Akoroas and Tanikwas, Pawnees and Omahas, Kansas and Apiches, are well known in after‐days.
“They accordingly set out from Akensea, on the 17th of July, to return. Passing the Missouri again, they entered the Illinois, and, meeting the friendly Kaskaskias at its upper portage, were led by them in a kind of triumph to Lake Michigan; for Marquette had promised to return and instruct them in the faith. Sailing along the lake, they crossed the outer peninsula of Green Bay, and reached the mission of S. Francis Xavier just four months after their departure from it.
“Thus had the missionaries achieved their long‐projected work. The triumph of the age was thus completed in the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi, which threw open to France the richest, most fertile and accessible territory of the New World. Marquette, whose health had been severely tried in this voyage, remained at St. Francis to recruit his strength before resuming his wonted missionary labors; for he sought no laurels, he aspired to no tinsel praise.
“The distance passed over by F. Marquette on this great expedition, in his little bark canoe, was two thousand seven hundred and sixty‐seven miles. The feelings with which he regarded an enterprise having so grave a bearing on the future history and development of mankind may be appreciated from the following closing passage of the ninth section of his Voyages and Discoveries:
“ ‘Had all this voyage caused but the salvation of a single soul, I should deem all my fatigue well repaid. And this I have reason to think; for, when I was returning, I passed by the Indians at Peoria. I was three days announcing the faith in all their cabins, after which, as we were embarking, they brought me to the water’s edge a dying child, which I baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable Providence, for the salvation of that innocent soul.’ ”
F. Marquette prepared a narrative of his voyage down the Mississippi (from which the foregoing quotation is taken), and a map of that river; and on his return transmitted copies to his superior, by the Ottawa flotilla of that year. It is also probable that Frontenac, the Governor of New France, as he had promised, sent a copy of them to the French government. The loss of Jolliet’s narrative and map gave an inestimable value to those of Marquette. Yet the French government did not publish them, probably in consequence of the discontinuance of the publication of the Jesuit Relations about this time; and thus the great interests involved in the discovery were neglected. Fortunately, F. Marquette’s narrative fell into the hands of Thevenot, who had just published a collection of travels, and such was his appreciation of it that he issued a new volume, entitled Recueil de Voyages, in 1681, containing the narrative and map of the Mississippi.(226) Mr. Sparks, in his life of F. Marquette, speaks thus of the narrative:
“It is written in a terse, simple, and unpretending style. The author relates what occurs, and describes what he sees, without embellishment or display. He writes as a scholar and as a man of careful observation and practical sense. There is no tendency to exaggerate, nor any attempt to magnify the difficulties he had to encounter, or the importance of his discovery. In every point of view, this tract is one of the most interesting of those which illustrate the early history of America.”
Having reached Green Bay, the exhausted voyager sank down under the effects of his recent travels and exposures. His disease was so obstinate and protracted that he suffered during the entire winter, though with patience and resignation, and did not recover before the end of the following summer. Having received from his superior the necessary orders for the establishment of the Illinois mission, he started on the 25th of October, 1674, for Kaskaskia. He was accompanied and assisted by two faithful and devoted Frenchmen, and by a number of Pottawattomies and Illinois Indians. They coasted along the mouth of Fox River, and then, advancing up as far as the small bay breaking into the peninsula, they reached the portage leading to the lake. As the canoes proceeded along the lake shore, the missionary walked upon the beach, returning to the canoes whenever the beach was broken by a river or stream; and their provisions were obtained from the abundant yield of the chase. On the 23d of November, the courageous missionary found his malady returning, but pushed on, amid cold and snow, until, on the 4th of December, he reached the Chicago River, which was closed with ice. Here again the unpropitious elements and his own infirmities compelled him to stop and spend the winter. But his time was not idly spent during this detention, for his missionary zeal found occupation in the spiritual care of his Indian companions, whom he instructed as well as he could, and sent them forward on their journey. His faithful Frenchmen remained now alone with him; but at a distance of fifty miles was an Illinois village, where there were two Frenchmen, traders and trappers; and these, hearing of the forlorn condition of the missionary, arranged that one of them should go and visit him. They had prepared a cabin for him, and the Indians, alarmed for his safety, were also anxious to send some of their tribe to convey their father and his effects to their village. Touched by their attentions, he sent them every assurance of his visiting them, intimating, however, the uncertainty of his doing so in the spring, in consequence of his continued illness. These messages only added to the alarm of the Indians, and the sachems assembled and sent a deputation to the black‐gown. The presents they bore were three sacks of corn, dried meat, and pumpkins, and twelve beaver skins. The objects of their visits were, first, to make him a mat to sit on; second, to ask him for powder; third, supply him with food; fourth, to get some merchandise. The good father made answer in characteristic terms, as follows: “First, that I came to instruct them by speaking of the prayer; second, that I would not give them powder, as we endeavor to make peace everywhere, and because I did not wish them to begin a war against the Miamis; third, that we did not fear famine; fourth, that I would encourage the French to bring them merchandise, and that they must make reparation to the traders there for the beads taken from them while the surgeon was with me.” Presenting them with some axes, knives, and trinkets, he dismissed them with a promise to make every effort to visit them in a few days. Bidding their good father to “take heart,” and beseeching him to “stay and die in their country,” the deputation “returned to their winter camps.”
The ensuing winter months, though marked by every bodily suffering and privation, were replete with religious consolation. His whole time was spent in prayer. Admonished by his disease that his last end could not be far off, he offered his remaining days entirely to God. He lost sight of the sufferings of his body in the overflow of heavenly consolations with which his soul was ravished. Still the recollection that he had been appointed missionary of the Illinois, and the duty this seemed to impose upon him of laboring for the conversion of those noble but benighted souls, filled his heart with the desire of visiting them, if it should be the will of God, and the establishment of the Illinois mission became the absorbing thought of his mind and the burden of the prayers which he addressed to the throne of heaven. His sufferings he bore not only with patience, but with joy; if he prayed for their cessation, it was only with the view that he might thus be enabled to encounter the new sufferings, labors, and hardships of his mission, and that he might devote his remaining days to the salvation of his beloved Illinois. To obtain this privilege from heaven, he induced his companions to unite with him in a novena of prayers in honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some time after Christmas, 1675, his Patroness in heaven obtained the desired boon of health for her devoted client; for he soon began to recover from his disease, and, though still feeble, was enabled by the 29th of March, when the snow and ice began to melt, and the inundations compelled them to move, to set out for Kaskaskia, in the Upper Illinois. He arrived at that Illinois town on the 8th of April, but his journal was discontinued from the 6th of April, and we have no record of his movements from that time. He was received by his children as an angel from heaven, for they scarcely supposed he had escaped alive the rigors of the winter. It was Monday in Holy Week, and the good man immediately commenced his work. He visited the chiefs and ancients of the town, and gave them and the crowds who assembled in the cabins he visited the first necessary instructions in the Gospel. So great were the throngs that assembled to hear him preach that the narrow accommodations of the cabins could not hold them. On Maundy Thursday he called a general assembly of the people in the open field, a beautiful prairie near the town, which was decorated after the fashion of the country, and spread with mats and bear skins. He formed a little rustic altar by suspending some pieces of Indian taffety on cords, to which were attached, so as to be seen on all four sides, four large pictures of the Blessed Virgin, under whose invocation the mission was placed. The assembly was immense; composed of five hundred chiefs and ancients seated in a circle around the missionary, and around these stood fifteen hundred young men. Besides these, great numbers of women and children attended. He addressed his congregation with ten words or presents, according to the Indian fashion, associating each word or present, which represented some great truth or mystery, with one of the ten beads on the belt of the prayer which he held in his hand. He explained the object of his visit to them, preached Christ crucified—for it was the eve of Good Friday—and explained to them the principal mysteries of the Christian religion. The Holy Mass was then celebrated for the first time in this new mission. On each of the following days he continued his instructions, and on Easter Sunday he celebrated the great Feast of the Resurrection, offering up Mass for the second time. He took possession of the land in the name of his risen Lord, and bestowed upon the mission the name of the Immaculate Virgin Mary.
His former malady now returned with renewed violence. His strength was wasting away. To remain would accomplish no good for his children, for he was unable to discharge the duties of the missionary, and no alternative was left but to make an effort to reach his former mission, Mackinaw, where he hoped to die in the midst of his fellow‐members of the Society of Jesus. He was the more willing now to seek rest in the bosom of his Redeemer and in the Society of his Blessed Mother in Heaven, because he had performed his promise, the mission of the Illinois had been founded, his words had been lovingly received by his people, the good seed had been sown in their hearts, the Holy Sacrifice had been offered up in their presence and for their salvation, and future missionaries might now advance to cultivate the field and reap the harvest he had prepared. His docile Indians, with the devotion of children, begged him to return to them as soon as his health should permit. He repeatedly promised them that he or some other missionary would come to continue the good work amongst them. The people followed him on his journey, escorted him thirty leagues on his way with great pomp, showing him every mark of friendship and affection, and many contended among themselves for the honor of carrying the scanty baggage he possessed. Taking the way of the St. Joseph’s River and the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, along which he had yet to travel over a hundred leagues through an unknown route, his strength soon began to fail entirely. He could no longer help himself; his two faithful French companions had to lift him in and out of his canoe when they landed at night; and so exhausted had he become under his wasting disease that they had to handle and carry him like a child. In the midst of his sufferings and the hardships of such a journey in his enfeebled health, his characteristic equanimity, joy, and gentleness never for a moment left him. He could even forget his own sufferings to console his companions. He encouraged them to sustain the fatigues of the way, assuring them that God would protect and defend them. His native mirthfulness was even in this extreme crisis conspicuous in his conversations. He now calmly saw the approach of death, and joyfully and heroically welcome it as the reward of his toils and sacrifices. He had some time before prepared a meditation on death, to serve him in these last hours of his life, which he now used with great consolation. He said his office to his last day. His devotions frequently assumed the shape of colloquies with his merciful Lord, with his Holy Mother, with his angel guardian, and with all heaven. He repeatedly pronounced with fervor the sublime words, “I believe that my Redeemer liveth”; and again, “Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of God, remember me.” Perceiving a river on whose banks loomed up a prominent eminence, he ordered his companions to stop, that he might die and be buried there. He pointed out the spot on this eminence in which he desired them to inter his remains. This river, until recent years, bore his name. His companions still desired to press forward, in the hope of reaching Mackinaw; but they were driven back by the wind, and, entering the River Marquette by its former channel, they erected a bark cabin, under which Marquette, like his great model, S. Francis Xavier, was stretched upon the shore, and, like him, sighed only to be dissolved and to be with Christ. So cheerfully did he realize his approaching dissolution that he gave all the necessary directions to his companions touching his burial. He had a week before blessed some water, which he instructed them how to use on the occasion, how to arrange his hands, feet, and head, with what religious ceremonies to bury him, even telling them that they should take his little altar bell, and ring it as they carried him to the grave. On the eve of his death, he told them with a countenance radiant with joy that the morrow would be his last day on earth. Still mindful of his sacred ministry, and anxious to be doing good, he administered the sacrament of penance to his two companions for the last time. He thanked them for their charity to him during this arduous and eventful voyage, begged their pardon for the trouble he had given them, and directed them to ask pardon for him and in his name of all the Fathers and Brothers of the Society of Jesus in the Ottawa country; he also gave them a paper in which he had written all his faults since his last confession, which he begged them to give to his superior, that he might pray the more earnestly for him. He promised not to forget them in heaven. Ever mindful of others in this trying moment, and overflowing with charity for his neighbor, he insisted upon his companions taking some rest, leaving him to commune with heaven, assuring them that his hour was not yet at hand, and that he would call them in due time. This he did; summoning them to his side, just as his agony was approaching. Hastening to him, they fell melting into tears at his feet. He embraced them for the last time, called for the holy water he had blessed and his reliquary, and, taking his crucifix from around his neck, and handing it to one of them, he requested him to hold it up before him, so that he could behold it every moment he had yet to live. Clasping his hands, and fixing his eyes affectionately on the image of his expiring Saviour, he pronounced aloud his profession of faith, and thanked God for the favor he enjoyed in dying a Jesuit, a missionary of the cross, and, above all, in dying in a miserable cabin, amid forests, and destitute of all human consolation and assistance. He then communed secretly for some time with his Creator, but his devotion from time to time found vent in the ejaculations, “Sustinuit anima mea in verba ejus,” and “Mater Dei, memento mei.” These were his last words before he was taken with the agony of death. His companions frequently pronounced the names of Jesus and Mary, as he had previously requested them to do, and, when they saw he was about to expire, they called out “Jesus, Maria,” whereupon he repeated those enrapturing names several times with distinctness, and then suddenly, as if his Saviour and Mother had appeared to him, he raised his eyes above the crucifix, gazing with a countenance lit up with pleasure at those blissful apparitions. He expired as peacefully and gently as a child sinking into its evening slumber.
“Thus he died, the great apostle, Far away in regions West; By the Lake of the Algonquins Peacefully his ashes rest; But his spirit still regards us From his home among the blest.”
The devoted companions of the illustrious missionary, happy, in the midst of their bereavement, in the privilege of witnessing one of the most heroic and saintly deaths recorded in the history of our race, carried out every injunction of their departed father, and added every act that love and veneration could suggest, and that their impoverished condition in the wilderness could afford. They laid out his remains as he had directed, rang the little altar bell as they carried him with profound respect to the mound of earth selected by himself, interred him there, and raised a large cross to mark the sacred spot.
The surviving companions of the deceased now prepared to embark. One of them had been ill for some time, suffering with such depression of spirits and feebleness of body that he could neither eat nor sleep. Just before embarking he knelt at the grave of his saintly friend, and begged him to intercede for him in heaven as he had promised, and, taking some earth from the breast of the departed, and placing it upon his own breast, it is related that he felt his sadness and bodily infirmity immediately depart, and he resumed his voyage in health and gladness. Many are the pious traditions of miraculous results attributed to the sanctity of F. Marquette; many of them are still handed down among the Western missionaries, and some of them have found a place in the pages of serious history.
The remains of the saintly Jesuit were, two years afterwards, disinterred by his own flock, the Kiskakons, while returning from their hunting‐ grounds, placed in a neat box of bark, and reverently carried to their mission. The flotilla of canoes, as it passed along in funeral solemnity, was joined by a party of the Iroquois, and, as they approached Mackinaw, many other canoes, including those of the two missionaries of the place, united in the imposing convoy, and the deep, reverential chant, De Profundis, arose heavenward from the bosom of the lake until the body reached the shore. It was carried in procession with cross, burning tapers, and fragrant incense to the church, where every possible preparation had been made for so interesting and affecting a ceremony; and, after the Requiem service, the precious relics were deposited in a vault prepared for them in the middle of the church, “where he reposes,” says the pious chronicler, “as the guardian angel of our Ottawa missions.” “Ever after,” says Bancroft, “the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument.”
The following notice of the character of F. Marquette is from the gifted pen of Mr. Shea:
“Such was the edifying and holy death of the illustrious explorer of the Mississippi, on Saturday, the 18th of May, 1675. He was of a cheerful, joyous disposition, playful even in his manner, and universally beloved. His letters show him to us as a man of education, close observation, sound sense, strict integrity, a freedom from exaggeration, and yet a vein of humor which here and there breaks out in spite of all his self‐command.
“But all these qualities are little compared to his zeal as a missionary, to his sanctity as a man. His holiness drew on him in life the veneration of all around him, and the lapse of years has not even now destroyed it in the descendants of those who knew him. In one of his sanctity we naturally find an all‐absorbing devotion to the Mother of the Saviour, with its constant attendants, an angelical love of purity, and a close union of the heart with God. It is, indeed, characteristic with him. The privilege which the Church honors under the title of the Immaculate Conception was the constant object of his thoughts; from his early youth he daily recited the little offices of the Immaculate Conception and fasted every Saturday in her honor. As a missionary, a variety of devotions directed to the same end still show his devotions, and to her he turned in all his trials. When he discovered the great river, when he founded his new mission, he gave it the name of the Conception, and no letter, it is said, ever came from his hand that did not contain the words, ’Blessed Virgin Immaculate’; and the smile that lighted up his dying face induced his poor companions to believe that she had appeared before the eyes of her devoted client.
“Like S. Francis Xavier, whom he especially chose as the model of his missionary career, he labored nine years for the moral and social improvement of nations sunk in paganism and vice, and, as he was alternately with tribes of varied tongues, found it was necessary to acquire knowledge of many American languages: six he certainly spoke with ease; many more he is known to have understood less perfectly. His death, however, was, as he had always desired, more like that of the apostle of the Indies; there is, indeed, a striking resemblance between their last moments; and the wretched cabin, the desert shore, the few destitute companions, the lonely grave, all harmonize in Michigan and Sancian.”
Prayer Of Custance, The Persecuted Queen Of Alla Of Northumberland.
Mother, quod she, and maiden bright, Mary! Soth is that through womanne’s eggement Mankind was lorn, and damned aye to die, For which thy Child was on a cross yrent: Thy blissful eyen saw all his torment; Then is there no comparison between Thy woe and any woe man may sustain. Thou saw’st thy Child yslain before thine eyen, And yet now liveth my little child parfay, Now, lady bright! to whom all woful crien, Thou glory of womanhood, thou faire May, Thou haven of refute, bright star of the day! Rue on my child, that of thy gentleness Ruest on every rueful in distress.
—Chaucer.
Acoma.
“Mr. S——, would you like to visit Acoma?” asked the commandant.
“Most assuredly,” I replied; “I came out here to see all I could see. But what or who is Acoma?”(227)
“A town built on the top of a rock rising from a level plain to a height of over two hundred feet is Acoma—the home of the Acoma Indians, a tribe of the great Pueblo family. I am ordered thither to have a talk with the principal men, and induce them to give up some Navajo children—captives—they are said to have taken in a recent skirmish.”
I had been enjoying the hospitality of the commandant for some days at old Fort Wingate, near the Ojo del Gallo, in the northwestern part of New Mexico. Acoma lies about fifty miles to the southeast of the fort, by a very rough trail across the mountains. It was somewhat further by the regular trail.
As we started, the sun was creeping over the brow of lofty San Mateo. The party consisted of the commandant, Don Juan Brown, a Castilianized American, who speaks Spanish like a native, and went with us as volunteer interpreter; Messrs. Jim Durden and Joe Smithers, gentlemen loafers; a sergeant and twenty cavalry as escort in case of unexpected and undesired rencounters with hostile Apaches or Navajoes; last, the writer, a denizen of the city of Gotham, general tourist, grand scribe and chronicler.
We all rode on horseback, except Don Juan Brown, who, being a trifle over 225 lbs., divided his weight between a pair of good horses attached to a light buggy. The order of march was: two cavalrymen five hundred yards in advance; the commandant, with Jim and Joe and the writer; the main body of the escort; Don Juan Brown with his buggy, and a rear guard of two cavalrymen five hundred yards behind.
A brisk trot of three miles brought us to the Puertocito, or Little Door, which leads from the Valley of the Gallo into the Mal Païs, a petrified sea of lava, which lies between the Puertocito and the mountains. The lava stream seems to have been suddenly turned to stone by a wave of some enchanter’s wand while it was a raging, seething torrent.
We halted and dismounted, tightened girths, etc. Jim and Joe, unused to the equitating mood, and evidently disliking particularly the trotting tense, had fallen back to the rear guard, and looked somewhat shaken. The relief of a walk of some miles was in store for them, as the trail through the Mal Païs admitted only of that gait and of single file.
The Puertocito is formed by two rocks about twenty feet high. We wound our way through tortuous passages, through lava spires, at a slow walk. We could not see more than a few yards ahead. It was a dreary pathway. The knowledge that it was a haunt for Indians bound on robbery or revenge gave imagination an opportunity to put her darkest colors on the natural gloom. An hour’s slow walking brings us to the Bajada, or Descent, where our path is up and down the steep sides of a lava rock thirty feet high. We dismount and lead our horses carefully down. Half a dozen men holding on to the buggy behind make sufficient drag to let it down in safety, though with some wrenching of the wheels in the channelled surface of the rock.
Thence our way lies on the eastern skirt of the lava, which runs along with the stream known as the San José through a deep and winding gorge named Los Rémanzos. I have seen some wild scenery in my time, but never before nor since so savage a piece of landscape as Los Rémanzos. The mountains rise perpendicularly on either hand—their barren sides dotted with huge boulders which seem ready to fall instantly on the traveller beneath. You wonder why they do not fall. The winding cañon shuts out all view beyond twenty yards in advance. A trail barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass creeps between the San José and the mountains on one side; and from the stream to the mountains on the other the lava piles up its grim and threatening forms.
We halted at the picket to wait for the escort, the buggy, and Jim and Joe, beguiling the time by a comforting draught of hot coffee from a military quart cup which the commander of the picket hospitably offered us. The laggards soon arrived. Jim and Joe took advantage of the pause before starting again to enter a solemn protest against trotting:
“For heaven’s sake, commandant!” said they with one voice and in a tone that showed acute feeling, “either walk or lope; we cannot endure that confounded trot. We shall be as raw as uncooked beefsteaks.”
A bright thought struck them both simultaneously, and, without any further ceremony, they rushed to the buggy, leaving their horses to take care of themselves or be taken care of by some good‐natured dragoon.
Another mile brought us to the crossing of the San José. Here was a check to our proceedings: the crossing was not fordable. The stream, usually about two feet wide and three inches deep at the crossing, had in consequence of recent heavy rains and the melting of snows filled its steep bed and overflowed its banks for fifty yards on either side. A powerful eddy made it impossible for a horse to strike ground on the other side. A dragoon dashed in and tried it, but it was with great difficulty we saved him and his horse from being carried down the swollen stream, and got them safe on our side again.
“That settles it, gentlemen,” said the commandant; “we shall have to cross the mountains—a rough trail, but we have no choice.”
It was now proposed to leave the buggy behind, but Joe would not hear of it. The commandant was too polite to insist, as he ought to have done.
Crossing a narrow but steep cut, however, the buggy went over, spilling Don Juan and Jim over the mountain‐side. The buggy stood on its top—wheels in the air. The horses—good and gentle animals—came to a full stop and stood perfectly quiet. Otherwise, there would have been as little left of the buggy as of Dr. Holmes’ one‐horse shay, the last time the deacon rode in it. Neither the Don nor Jim was hurt, though the latter was somewhat frightened. Don Juan took the matter with the coolness of an old hand. The buggy was uninjured; it had merely met with a reverse. It was soon put upon its legs—or, rather, its wheels—again. Its progress was so aggravatingly slow when even our fastest possible gait was a walk, that, dividing the escort, we went on, leaving it to proceed at its leisure.
It was about nightfall when we reached the edge of a precipitous descent where all marks of a trail disappeared. The descent was probably two hundred feet in perpendicular height, and alarmingly steep.
“The buggy can never go down there,” was the general remark.
“Confound the buggy, we shall have to sleep out in the cold all night with nothing but a saddle‐blanket, on account of it,” also translates a very general sentiment.
“We cannot desert them, however,” said the commandant; “as the buggy has come with us we must stand by it. We shall wait here until it comes up.”
We had a long and weary wait for that anathematized buggy. At length, as the shades of night were falling, the long‐looked‐for buggy was seen, its top bumping up and down like a buffalo with a broken foreleg. The don walked on one side of the vehicle holding the reins; Joe walked on the other side as gloomily as a chief mourner. The remainder of the escort with dismal visages followed behind.
A glance over the steep brink did not give any radiance to their gloomy countenances. Don Juan expressed his regrets that we should have been detained by the slow and difficult progress of the buggy. Joe said nothing, but evidently felt ashamed of himself.
We were still twenty miles from Acoma. Within about five miles, the commandant said there was a little Indian hut—a sort of outpost of the Pueblo—the owner of which, old Salvador, was one of the notables of the Pueblo. The commandant had notified Salvador by courier some days before of our intended visit. He had proposed to meet us at the ranchito and guide us over the remainder of the mountain trail. Here we could pass the night under cover at least, though we should be pretty closely packed.
Joe had resumed the saddle after the steep descent had been accomplished. He and Jim now led the party, and, as the rest of us stayed with Don Juan and the buggy, they got considerably in advance. Thus they had reached the ranchito some twenty minutes before we did. We found them knocking at the door and calling loudly and indignantly on the inmates to open.
“We have been knocking and shouting here for half an hour, and the confounded old Indian has not taken the slightest notice of us. I believe he would let us freeze.”
“Salvador does not know you,” said the commandant. “He is too wise an Indian to open his doors to strangers in this country after nightfall. Salvador is reputed wealthy, and it behooves him to be careful what nocturnal visitors he receives. I think I can get Salvador to open. Is Señor Don Salvador within?” asked the commandant, in Spanish.
“Is it the Señor Comandante who is without?” asked Don Salvador, in the same language, with the usual Pueblo peculiarities of pronunciation—the use of l for r, etc.
Being satisfied on this point, Salvador opened the door to receive us.
Salvador was a stout, middle‐sized, gray‐headed Indian of the Pueblo type. The presence of the commandant being a voucher for the rest, Salvador now proceeded to shake hands with the whole party—in the order of rank, as he understood it—taking first the commandant, next the bugler, then the sergeant and the men of the escort, and then the civilians, Don Brown and the writer, and lastly Jim and Joe; conscientiously repeating in each individual case, “Como le va!” and “Bueno!” Indians believe in uniforms and brass buttons. They don’t understand official dignity without outward and visible signs.
The ranchito was a little structure of tierrones, or sods, roofed with poles laid across from wall to wall, and covered with brush and earth. There were no windows. The door was the only aperture, I think. I am not quite sure whether there was a hole in the roof to let out a little of the smoke; there may have been. The edifice was about large enough for a fair‐ sized poultry‐house. It was perched on the steep mountainside, the earth being cut away on the upper side to give an approach to a level foundation. There was a small shed for animals, the fodder for whose use being piled on top of it. There was the usual corn‐crib. Our best horses were honored with the hospitality of the shed, Salvador’s pony and burros being turned out to make room for them. The other animals were tied to logs in front of the ranchito, and a guard placed over them.
It required some stooping to enter Salvador’s residence. This was very hard on the stout Don, who had not seen his own knee for a number of years, but he accomplished it as if he had been in the daily habit of touching his toes without bending his knees. But a further trial still awaited him. The hut was divided into two rooms. The passage between the two rooms was a blighted door, cut short in its youth to the proportions of a small fireplace. We had to come down to all‐fours to get into the inner chamber. When the commandant, the staunch Don, and the writer had entered, the place seemed full. But Salvador, on hospitable thoughts intent, insisted on Jim and Joe entering. Then Salvador wriggled in. The room was replete.
After a meagre supper and a quiet smoke, we arranged the details of the morrow’s trip. With our saddles for pillows, and our saddle‐blankets and overcoats for beds and bed‐covering, we lay down to sleep. Brown, with Jim and Joe, in the inner room; the commandant, the old Pueblo, and myself in the outer. Jim and Joe lay perpendicularly to Brown, and Salvador described a horizontal to the commandant and myself. I slept well, considering, though I was waked two or three times by a roaring noise, which seemed to me to be that of the house falling, as I was endeavoring to force myself through the passage between the two apartments, in which, more than once during the night, I dreamt that I was stuck fast. On waking, I discovered that the sound proceeded from the resounding Aztec nose of our host, Salvador.
We were roused before day by the old Indian. Dressing took no time, as we had not undressed the night before—a great saving of time, labor, and discomfort. Breakfast was to be got ready, however. Salvador made the fire. The commandant detailed himself and myself as cooks for the morning. At supper‐time, Don Juan, assisted by Jim and Joe, would officiate culinarily. Slices from a haunch of bacon we had brought with us, cooked on the end of a stick, with “hard tack” and coffee, made in a camp kettle, furnished a delicious breakfast. What is there in the odor of unctuous bacon that makes it so pleasant to the nostrils when one is camping out or “roughing it”? There are people who cannot abide the smell of bacon within the confines of civilization. But put them on the Plains, or in the field, and a daily dose of the appetizing grease is necessary to “settle their stomachs.” I have known men who, in long trips in the wilds, forsook chickens and returned to first principles and bacon.
We made an early start. The buggy was left behind. Don Juan saddled one of his horses. He borrowed from the old Indian a saddle, so angular and so full of sharp points that it must have been hard even for an Indian’s seat. But Brown, though heavy, was a good horseman, and he bore the infliction like a hero.
Salvador was our guide. When we were all mounted, and ready to start, we looked around for him. After some hunting we saw him above us, mounted, and seemingly emerging from the roof of the ranchito. He went straight up the side of the mountain, beckoning to us to come on, and shouting “Caballeros! por aquí!”(228)
An Indian does not understand flank movements. He does not go around obstacles. He goes straight over them on the direct line of his objective. We followed our guide, dismounting, however, leading our horses, and zigzagging up the steep ascent like Christians and white men.
Our course was over mountain and across ravine on a bee‐line of ascent or descent for Acoma. There was some growling by Jim and Joe, but as our general gait was a slow walk, and they made much of their progress on foot, they did not grumble much.
I noticed moccasin tracks in several places where the ground was soft. The distance between the foot‐prints was very great. It astonished me. I rode to the commandant’s side, and called his attention to the wonderful tracks. He pointed them out to Salvador, who said they were the tracks of a muchacho he had sent to the Pueblo last night with the news of our arrival at the ranchito. What a stepper that muchacho must have been! His average bound must have been at least ten feet.
“How long will it take him to go to the Pueblo, Salvador?” asked the commandant.
“Oh! not long,” replied Salvador, “long as a good horse.”
Experientia docet. Before I saw those tracks I used to set down the accounts I read in my Grecian history of wonderful time made by messengers to Athens and other classic centres as antique yarns. I now believe in the fastest Grecian time reported. Thus, the torch of faith is often lit by the merest straying spark—a lesson to us not to limit our belief to what is within the scope of our knowledge. We know so little.
Jim and Joe had begun to growl over the continual ups and downs of the journey when we saw Salvador, who was some three or four hundred yards ahead, dismount at the foot of what seemed to be the steepest ascent yet.
“This must be a stiff one,” said the commandant. “I see Salvador has dismounted. It takes a pretty steep ascent to make an Indian or a Mexican dismount. They hold to the saddle until the animal begins to bend backward.”
It was a steep and toilsome ascent, winding in and out through huge boulders just wide enough apart to let a horse squeeze through. It was not always easy to convince the horses that there was room enough for them to pass. They would refuse to be convinced, and obstinately draw back, to the discomfort and danger of those leading them, and more so of those following.
At last we reached the top of the ascent. The descent on the other side was a worthy pendant to it. We halted on the crest to enjoy the landscape before us. From the base of the height a level plain spread away for miles, unbroken save by a cluster of lofty perpendicular white rocks, each rising independently from the level plain. On the top of the highest of these rocks stood a little town, the smoke from its chimneys mingling with the clouds. This was Acoma.
We descended slowly and carefully. A brisk trot of about two miles brought us to two lofty natural columns, through which the trail passed. They seemed the pillars of a gigantic portal—a resemblance which had struck the Indians, for they named it El Puerto: The Gate. We had now reached the base of the inhabited rock. An excavation near the base was pointed out to us by Salvador as the trace of an attempt to mine the position by the Spanish invaders! I think the story rather a doubtful one.
I judged the rock to be about two hundred and fifty feet in height. The path up the rocky side to the village was steep and narrow. No wheeled vehicle has ever entered the Pueblo. The primitive carreta, with its clumsy wheels of solid disks cut from the trunk of some gigantic cotton‐ wood, stopped short at the base—going thus far and no further. Provisions and other necessaries are packed up on the backs of surefooted donkeys. Water for drinking purposes is carried up on the heads of the Indians in large earthen vessels named tinajas; for other uses rain‐water is carefully gathered in natural tanks or hollows in the summit of the rock. There is a bypath or short‐cut up to the Pueblo which the Acomas generally use when unburdened or in a hurry. A glance showed us that it was only practicable for Acoma Indians. This short‐cut is in the most nearly perpendicular of any of the rocky sides. It consists of holes in the smooth and vertical side of the rock, in which the Indians place their hands and feet, and climb up after the fashion of sailors clambering up rigging, and with no less rapidity.
We returned to the common highway, which now seemed by comparison a flowery path of dalliance. It was slow and tiresome work, however. After a rest or two, to breathe our animals and ourselves, we finally reached the comparatively level space, some acres in area, on the summit of the rock.
Here we were met by Francisco, our guide’s son, the governor, matadores, alguazils, and other functionaries of the Pueblo. This is as good a place as any other to say that the governor and all other officials are elected annually. They were dressed in the usual Pueblo fashion. Their heads were uncovered. They were draped in large blankets, which gave them a very dignified appearance.
We received a most cordial reception. The commandant had been a good friend to the Acomas—had protected them in their little trading operations, and helped them in the long, hard winters when their granaries were empty. The entire male population was assembled in the Plaza or central square. The squaws and children were at their front doors, that is to say, on the roofs, for the entrance to a Pueblo’s dwelling is from above.
A fire for the dragoons to cook their rations by was made in the centre of the Plaza. The horses were picketed around. A contribution of corn and firewood was levied by the governor for the use of the escort. The Indians came in cheerful, laughing groups, bearing their costals of corn or their bundles of wood. The escort being provided for, we went to the house of Francisco, the most comfortable house in the Pueblo; for Francisco was the wealthiest member of the little community. The governor’s dwelling was a poor one, and himself a poor man who was unable to entertain us as comfortably as Francisco could. He accompanied us thither.
Francisco’s dwelling, like most of the others in the Pueblo, was a two‐ storied adobe building, whitewashed inside and out. The mode of access was a ladder placed against the outer wall of the lower story. Having reached the top of this, you walk across the roof and enter the house by a door on the second story, the façade of which is somewhat retired from the front line of the first.
Here we found some rosy, apple‐faced squaws, engaged in culinary and other domestic operations. One was kneeling grinding corn with the primitive matata. They smiled with all their countenances on us; and a half‐dozen of the whitest sets of teeth, that dentist or dentifrice never touched, gleamed a bright welcome to us. They wore the usual dark woollen robe, made of two pieces, about five feet long and three broad, sewed together at one of the narrow ends, but with an aperture for the head to pass through. The robe is then gathered round the waist and tied with a string. Their nut‐brown arms were bare, and encircled at the wrist by from one to a dozen brass rings; their feet were bare. The thick swathing of buckskin, with which they wrap their lower limbs when journeying, and which gives them the appearance of being terribly swollen, were laid aside, much to the furthering of a graceful effect.
We were invited to descend to the sitting‐room, situated beneath, through a very narrow trap‐door. Don Juan walked fearlessly toward the aperture. We begged him to pause before he rushed into a place whence he could never hope to return. The Indians understood the joke, and enjoyed it hugely.
So the Don entered the aperture, and by judicious squeezing actually succeeded in passing. His coat‐tails got through about the same time as his head. The others, being of the lean and hungry‐looking kind, had no difficulty in descending.
From the room into which we had descended ventilation was completely excluded. Light was only admitted through one or two small panes of glass in apertures like port‐holes in the walls.
We took seats on sheep‐skins spread in a circle around the floor. The commandant made known his business in passable Spanish; the governor replied, through Francisco, as interpreter. The worthy Don intervened, from time to time, between the high contracting parties, when there was a lack of language or danger of misunderstanding. The business was completed satisfactorily and in short order.
While the floor was being set for dinner—tables not being in vogue here—we endeavored to obtain the Acoma’s idea of the antiquity of the Pueblo. Francisco, though he had learned to read and write, had not got beyond the Indian idea of time, space, or number. There is no medium between “many” and “few”—very far, muy lejos; and near, cerca.
“How many years old is the Pueblo?”
“Muchos años.—Many years.”
“About how many?”
“Who knows, señor?” with a shrug. “A great many.”
“Who is the oldest man in the Pueblo?”
“The cacique.”
The cacique, we were informed, is the official historian of the Pueblo. His records consist only in oral traditions, which he teaches to a youth selected for the purpose, who is to succeed him in his office when he dies.
“Is the cacique very old?”
“Si, señor! Very old.”
It is useless to ask an Indian how old he or any other Indian is, as he never knows. So we did not ask how old the cacique was.
“Was the cacique he succeeded very old?”
“Yes, sir; very old.”
“Was the Pueblo in existence as long as he can remember?”
“Yes, sir; and as long as the cacique before him and the cacique before him could remember. But we shall have the cacique here shortly, and then after dinner we’ll have a good big talk about the many years ago.”
Francisco, the governor, and his father now engaged in an earnest conversation in their Indian tongue, the result of which was that Francisco unlocked a vast trunk, of antique form and solidity, and took therefrom a pile of manuscript, which he handed us with great solemnity. The Indians looked upon this venerable pile with great reverence. It was probably the first time it had been touched by “outsiders.” We owed the permission to examine it to the many kind acts the commandant had performed for the Acomas.
The first portion of the manuscript examined was a Missal. The Office of the Mass was copied in Latin in a fair plain hand, the work of some Spanish missionary. The ink had turned yellow, but the text was clear and legible throughout. Nothing in the MS. Missal indicated the date of its writing. A further examination of the venerable pages furnished us some information. Besides the Missal, they comprised a register in Spanish of births, marriages, and deaths. The earliest written record of the Pueblo which we found is the record of a baptism, 1725.
Having gleaned what knowledge we could from the precious manuscripts, they were carefully and reverently put away in the ponderous chest, and secured by a padlock nearly as large as a travelling satchel.
Dinner was now served. It was very good. It consisted of a chicken stew, good white bread, and very passable tea. The stew was made so intensely hot, however, by chile colorado,(229) that I did not enjoy it as much as I might have done had it been less fiery. I never could relish chile either colorado or verde. But on this occasion, I determined to eat it if it burned me to a shell to show my appreciation of Acoma hospitality!
The cacique—an old, white‐haired, blear‐eyed Indian, at least ninety—came in toward the close of the meal, accompanied by the youth whom he was instructing in the historical and legendary lore of the Pueblo. He evinced no inclination to be communicative, but showed a determination to make a rousing meal—something to which he was evidently not accustomed. After dinner he devoted himself to smoking our cigars; but not a word could we get out of him about the history of Acoma. Joe said that as a story‐teller he considered the cacique a decided failure.
The governor signified that he was now ready to show us the church. So thither we proceeded.
The church is, of course, of adobe. It was unused at the time we visited it. No priest had been attached to the Pueblo for some years. But it was not suffered to fall into decay. On one side of the altar was a painting of the Virgin and Child; on the other, one of S. Joseph. On the ceiling above the altar were large paintings of the sun and moon. Here we got another chronological glimmer—the last we found. It was an inscription which stated that the church had been renovated in 1802. The Indians told us it was done by some artist‐priest who came from far away—probably Spain or Italy. There are a pair of bells in the belfry. The Acoma tradition is that these bells were a gift to the Pueblo from a Queen of Spain. Of course they do not know the date of their reception. They say, however, that it was some time before the renovation of the church.
We next went to the southern edge of the rock to look at the “short cut” from above. This was not easy or pleasant pedestrianism. The rock here ceased to be level, throwing up sharp craggy points. The Indians stepped from point to point, erect and graceful and without difficulty. The pale faces were compelled by a due discretion to abandon erect attitudes, and proceed bending down, and using hands as well as feet. A look down the rocky side was sufficient. The commandant shook his head, and said in Spanish:
“That is no way for a white man to come up”—a remark which the Indians seemed to consider remarkably humorous. They laughed and “how‐how”‐ed vehemently.
As we returned, we remarked that on one side of the rock it was bevelled down from the summit about forty or fifty feet, and then resumed its general steep and vertical character. Some houses were situated near the superior edge of this bend. A thrill ran through me from head to foot as I saw a child roll from the front of one of the houses down the incline.
“He will be dashed to atoms!” I cried in horror.
The Indians looked in the direction to which I frantically pointed, and then united in a good‐humored laugh.
Soon another urchin, and another, and another followed the first, who picked himself up just at the deadly brink, and mounted the incline, to roll down again and again, as we used to on a hillside in snow with our sleds, in our younger days. This was play for the infantine Acomas. They were “keeping the pot a‐bilin’.”
The Indians told us that no fatal accident had ever happened to any Acoma either while rolling down the dread incline “in pretty, pleasant play,” or climbing the steep path the mere sight of which had made us dizzy. Tradition records that only one Indian ever “went over the side.” He was saved by a projecting stump catching him by the breech‐clout and holding him suspended until he was rescued—unhurt.
Our next visit was the Estufa. Here the sacred fire was burning. The Estufa was an underground apartment. We descended through a trap‐door, which also served as a chimney, and down a smoke‐begrimed ladder. The chamber was some thirty feet in length and perhaps fifteen in width. We were informed that it was the general place of meeting—the public hall—the club‐room of the Pueblo. It was pretty hot and not very sweet down there. We found four Indians seated around the fire, each with a loom in front of him, weaving a blanket. Their only covering was the breech‐clout. The Indians told us, through Don Juan, that these men watched the fire, which was always kept burning—waiting for the coming of Montezuma. They were relieved by four others at stated times. We shook hands with the naked watchers, and “how‐how”‐ed with them in the usual way.
“Do you think Montezuma will come?” asked Joe, through Don Juan, of one of the vigilants.
The worthy, shrugging his naked shoulders, looked up sidewise at Joseph, and replied:
“Quizas? Quien sabe?—May be! Who knows?”
Joe withdrew. We all followed him. We had now seen all the lions of the Pueblo of Acoma. “Boots and saddles” and “to horse” were sounded, and with many hand‐shakes, some embraces, and general “how‐hows,” we bade adieu to the hospitable Acomas and their rocky home, and began our return march.
THE LIFE OF DEMETRIUS AUGUSTIN GALLITZIN, PRINCE AND PRIEST. By Sarah M. Brownson. With an Introduction by O. A. Brownson, LL.D. New York: Pustet. 1872.
Women of talent and cultivation make admirable biographers. In religious biography we know of nothing more charming than the lives written by Mère Chauguy. In recent English literature, the Lives of Mother Margaret Mary O’Halloran, by a lady whose name is unknown to us, and of S. Jane Frances de Chantal, by Miss Emily Bowles, are among the most perfect specimens of this very agreeable species of writing which we have met with in any language. This new and carefully prepared biography of a priest who was illustrious both by birth and Christian virtue, by a lady already known as the author of several works of fiction, well deserves to be classed with the best of its kind in English Catholic literature. It is a work of thorough, patient, and conscientious labor, and for the first time adequately presents the history and character of Prince Gallitzin in their true light. Certainly, we never knew before how truly heroic and admirable a man was this Russian prince who came to pass his life as a missionary in the forests which crowned in his day the summit of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania. The charm of a biography is found in a certain fulness and sprightliness of style and manner, a picturesqueness and ideality of ornament and coloring, a warmth and glow of sentiment, which give life and reality to the narrative. Miss Brownson still possesses the juvenile élan which naturally finds its expression in the style we have indicated, and has also attained that sobriety and maturity of judgment which give it the rightly subdued tone and finish. In several matters of considerable delicacy which she has been obliged to handle, we think she has shown tact and discretion, while at the same time using enough of the freedom of a historian to bring out the truth of facts and events which needed to be told in order to make a veritable record and picture of the life of her subject. The prince is fortunate in his biographer. Would it were the lot of every great man in the church to find a similar one! Miss Brownson’s book seems to us the best religious biography which has been written by anyone of our American Catholic authors. We would like to see more works of this sort from feminine writers, to whom we are already so much indebted for works both of the graver and the lighter kind, and particularly from Miss Brownson, who has fully proved her ability in the volume before us.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA CATHOLICA AMERICANA. A list of works written by Catholic authors and published in the United States. By Rev. Joseph M. Finotti. Part I., 1784 to 1820 inclusive. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872. 8vo. pp. 319.
It was said of Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms that it was the first dictionary that a man could read through with pleasure. The same in the way of bibliography may be said of this; for, if any of our readers supposes that the title tells the truth, he is mistaken. It is not a mere list, as the author modestly calls it. Some twelve years ago, Mr. Shea published in one of our Catholic papers a list of titles of “The First Catholic Books printed in this County,” coming down to the same date and including the same period as our author, and giving sixty‐eight titles. This meagre beginning of American Catholic bibliography has in F. Finotti’s hands grown to nearly five hundred titles, including some few imprints later than 1820.
It is not merely a collection of titles of Catholic works, but of all works by Catholic authors printed in the country, with notes of the highest interest to Catholics who care at all for what was done by our fathers in the faith in this republic. Biographical notices, notices of celebrated books, accounts of controversies of the time, anecdotes illustrative of Catholic life in the earlier days, notes of Catholic printers and journalists, all find their place in these notes, in which the abundant knowledge of our earlier men and times, and things acquired by the patient and loving research of years, fairly bubble out spontaneously. It is not a history indeed, but to the historian will be invaluable as an authority and a guide.
On some points this work is absolutely exhaustive. The collection of pamphlets and works growing out of the Hogan affair in Philadelphia, considering their perishable nature, is perfectly wonderful, and his library alone can enable any one to go thoroughly into the history of that unhappy matter which was destructive to so many souls.
Of the writings and publications of the celebrated Mathew Carey, we have also here by far the most accurate and comprehensive account ever drawn up, comprising nearly twenty‐five pages.
Many will be amazed to see how many sterling Catholic books were issued early in the century, and thus be able to judge of the zeal and true religious feeling of the little body of Catholics who so generously sustained the publishers, as well as of the public spirit of a man like Bernard Dornin—in our mind, as in F. Finotti’s, the type of what a Catholic publisher should be. Of him as of many other Catholics our author gives biographical notices that we should look for in vain in all the cyclopædias and biographical dictionaries. Book notices often end with the assertion that the book should be in every family; we hardly suppose the publishers ready to supply every Catholic family in the country with a copy, for the edition is small, and must be taken up at once. It is by no means merely a book for the Dryasdust collector or antiquarian. It must find its place in the libraries of many of our gentlemen who love their religion and love books, as well as in our college libraries. We trust that it will impel all to endeavor to have some of the early printed Catholic books, as matters of laudable pride. If they can even find some that have escaped the Argus eyes of the reverend collector and his associate book‐hunters, they will, we trust, be good enough Christians to bear with equanimity even that severe trial to a bibliographer.
This Bibliography commends itself to those interested in the bibliography of the country or the history of printing in the United States.
In the Historical Magazine some months since there was a Bibliography of works on Unitarianism, but it was silent as to Father Kohlmann’s work, and to a sermon by a Catholic clergyman of Pittsburg. So, too, Sabin’s Bibliopolist recently gave a list of books printed in Brooklyn, but was silent as to a Catholic Doctrine printed there in 1817, as well as of Coate’s very curious Reply to Rev. F. Richards’ supposed reasons for becoming a Catholic.
There is one strange point about American bibliography, and that is that the laborers in it have been almost exclusively from Europe. Ludewig gave the Bibliography of Indian Languages and that of Local History; O’Callaghan, that of American Bibles; Harisse, that of the earliest American; Rich was a pioneer in the same field; and now Finotti gives us the Catholic element. Where are our native bibliographers?
LE LIBERALISME. LECONS DONNEES A L’UNIVERSITE LAVAL. Par l’Abbé Benjamin Paquet, Docteur en Theologie, et Professeur à la Faculté de Theologie. Quebec: De l’Imprimerie du Canadien. Brochure, pp. 100. 1872.
Lower Canada, considered both in respect to the condition of the Catholic Church therein, and to the political well‐being of its people, is an eminently fortunate region, despite the rigor of its climate. It is especially pre‐eminent in respect to the Catholic education given to young men of the leisured classes, and others who go through the intermediate and higher courses. Laval University is truly a splendid institution among many others which make Quebec an unique city in Northern America. These remarks are suggested by the pamphlet before us, which is a specimen of the sound and opportune instruction given at the Laval University. The Lectures contained in it give an exposition which is both learned and clear of that most important portion of the Syllabus which relates to the errors of modern liberalism condemned in the Pontifical Acts of Pius IX. When will the Catholics of the United States enjoy privileges similar to those which are the portion of the Catholics of Lower Canada? The Abbé Paquet’s Lectures were delivered as a part of his course on the law of nature and of nations, and were attended not only by his pupils, but by a numerous and select audience, several of whom requested their publication. We have already sufficiently expressed our approbation of their doctrine and style, and they have been favorably noticed in Europe. We are confident that a considerable number of our readers will hasten to procure them, and receive great profit from their perusal.
CARDINAL WISEMAN’S WORKS. New Edition, first 3 vols. New York: P. O’Shea.
This is a reissue of a new London edition which we most cordially commend. The first two volumes, containing the Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion, have already been noticed in these pages. The third volume contains the splendid treatise on the Holy Eucharist. Cardinal Wiseman was a great writer, a great prelate, and a remarkably devout and holy man. His works are among our choicest treasures, and as such ought to be everywhere circulated and continually perused by those who wish to imbue their minds with the purest doctrine and the most valuable knowledge.
THE LIFE OF S. AUGUSTINE, BISHOP, CONFESSOR, AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH. By P. E. Moriarty, D.D. Ex‐Assistant General O.S.A. Philadelphia: Cunningham. 1873.
This is a popular biography, though proceeding from the pen of a learned man, and showing marks of erudition. The sketch is a complete one, and shows great power of generalization and condensation in the writer, with vigor and impetus of style. It is not, however, minute in respect to the saint’s public life, or his great work as a philosopher and doctor of the church. This could not be expected in a work of moderate size adapted for popular reading. There is, however, a brief summary of the saint’s writings, with a synopsis, and an account of the Augustinian Order, all of which are of interest and value to the general reader.
PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEWS; OR, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL TRUTHS REFLECTED IN THE UNIVERSE. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., S.J. New York: P. O’Shea. 1873.
A handsomely printed volume, with a very ornamental title‐page quite appropriate to the nature of the book. The views of truth presented in this book are expressed in aphorisms. Good taste, poetic sensibility, spiritual wisdom, and the purest Christian feeling are their chief characteristics. We are disposed to think this the best of F. Weninger’s works. There are many persons who take great delight in aphorisms of this kind, and we think all such readers will like this book. It is good also as a help to meditation, and a treasury of short spiritual readings for those who have not time for long ones; and will be useful to those who like to stop occasionally in more laborious occupations of the mind, and gather a little spiritual nosegay.
MEMOIRS OF MADAME DESBORDES‐VALMORE. By the late C. A. Sainte‐ Beuve. With a Selection from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1873.
Madame Valmore was one of those poets of the affections who
“Learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
No one can look for a moment at her portrait as depicted in this touching book without feeling that the thorn is continually pressing against her gentle breast. Her poetry and her letters are the very outcry of impassioned love and grief. “I am like the Indian that sings at the stake,” she says. One of her volumes is entitled Tears, every line of which is a pensive sigh. Her poems are full of “the charm of that melancholy which M. de Segur calls the luxury of grief.” M. Michelet says: “She alone among us had the gift of tears—that gift which smites the rock and assuages the thirst of the soul!” M. Sainte‐Beuve calls her “the Mater Dolorosa of poetry,” but that title, consecrated to a higher, diviner type of sorrow, is one that most of us would shrink from applying to ordinary mortals.
It would almost seem as if the highest, purest notes—“half ecstasy, half pain”—only spring from the soul overshadowed by sorrow, as the eyes of some birds are darkened when they are taught to sing. Mme. Valmore herself, in allusion to a brother poet, wonders “if actual misery were requisite for the production of notes that so haunt one’s memory.”
The tombs among which she used to play as a child in the old churchyard at Douai seem to have cast their funereal shadows over her whole life—shadows that lend to her sad muse so attractive a charm. One of her poems thus begins:
“Do not write. I am sad and would my life were o’er. A summer without thee?—Oh! night of starless gloom!— I fold the idle arms that cannot clasp thee more— To knock at my heart’s door, were like knocking at a tomb. Do not write.”
Mme. Valmore’s nature was eminently feminine. Her heart was her guide. She was a being of impulse and sympathy. But her instincts were so delicate and true that they were to her what reason and philosophy are to colder natures. Her imagination was thoroughly Catholic. It is only Catholicity that develops souls of such tender grace and beauty, and she was brought up under its influences. A cheerful piety, Catholic in tone, seems to have pervaded her life, and consoled and sustained her in its many dark hours. She loved to pray in the deserted aisle of some shadowy church full of mystery and peace. “She had her Christ—the Christ of the poor and forsaken, the prisoner and the slave, the Christ of the Magdalen and the good Samaritan, a Christ of the future of whom she herself has sung in one of her sweetest strains:
‘He whose pierced hands have broken so many chains,’ ”
—a line that appeals to all who have sinned and been forgiven!
In her last years she thus writes: “I see at an immense distance the Christ who shall come again. His breath is moving over the crowd. He opens his arms wide, but there are no more nails—no more for ever!”
Her devotion to Mary is constantly peeping out in her letters. After visiting a church at Brussels, she writes thus to her daughter: “To‐day we saw the black Virgin with the Child Jesus also black like his mother. These Madonnas wring my heart with a thousand reminiscences. They are nothing in the way of art, but they are so associated with my earliest and sweetest faiths that I positively adore those stiff pink‐lined veils and wreaths of perennial flowers made of cambric so stout that all the winds of heaven could never cause a leaf to flutter.”
She writes her brother: “Lift up your hat when you pass the Church of Notre Dame, and lay upon its threshold the first spring flowers you find.”
One of the most touching features of her life is her devotedness to this brother, an old soldier and pensioner in the hospital at Douai, whom she aided out of her own scanty purse, and still more by the moral support she was continually giving him in the most delicate manner; trying to ennoble his unfortunate past so as to give him dignity in his own eyes—a thing so often forgotten in our intercourse with those who are in danger of losing their self‐respect.
Mme. Valmore’s charity and sympathies were not confined to her own kindred. They responded to every appeal. The condemned criminal and prisoners of every degree excited the compassion of her heart. At a time of great distress at Lyons, she says she is “ashamed to have food and fire and two garments when so many poor creatures have none.” And yet she seems not to have had too many of the comforts of life herself. One Christmas eve she speaks of kneeling on her humble hearth—“a hearth where there is not much fire save that of her own loving, anxious heart—” to pray.
It is sad to see a woman with such a refined, poetical nature, and a heart sensitive to the last degree, condemned to a fate so chilling and unkind. But she never lost courage. Living in narrow lodgings, and on limited means, she contrived to give a certain artistic air to everything around her, and received her visitors with polished ease and self‐possession, hiding her griefs under the grace of her manner and the vivacity of her conversation. Her courage and fortitude were admirable under adverse circumstances and such afflictions as the loss of her daughters. No book not strictly religious could teach a more forcible lesson of patient, cheerful endurance—how “to suffer and be strong.” The work is elegantly translated, and is a welcome addition to the lives of celebrated French ladies already issued by the same publishers.
THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By James Anthony Froude, M.A. In 2 vols. Vol. I. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873.
We have here the first volume of a new and very elaborate work by the adventurous historian of England, and chivalrous champion of Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth. It might perhaps have been hoped that enough had been said of Mr. Froude in these columns, and that our readers had done with him. His reputation as a faithful historian had been sorely damaged, and indeed irretrievably ruined, by several indignant critics in England, in Scotland, and in Ireland, as well as in the United States (by the short, sharp and decisive onslaught of Mr. Meline); so that it has been an actual surprise to the literary world to find him once more tempting Providence in a new book, heralded and advertised by a course of lectures in New York. But this is the nature of the man: he must surprise and startle, or he dies; he must provoke the most wondering and angry contradiction and comment, and gratify the small feminine spite that possesses him, provided he can sting and wound like a hornet. For him, to scold is to live.
The present volume, although entitled The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, is in fact occupied, for more than two hundred pages, with an account of the dealings of his country with Ireland during the XVIIth century, and presents his views of Irish history at the notable periods of the insurrection—or alleged “massacre”—in 1641, as well as the short reign of James II. The narrative ends at the time of the small French invasion under Thurot, shortly after the middle of the XVIIIth century; leaving Still to be treated the whole era of the Volunteering, the Insurrection of ’98, and the Union, so‐called. Indeed, if the author carry forward his subject into the present century, as he has carried it backward into the one before the last, he will have the great famines to deal with, and the multitudinous emigration; so that we may expect a vast picture, covering the whole canvas, portraying from the strictly English point of view that ghastly history in its full perspective. The Froude theory is, on the whole, quite simple; nothing can be more easily understood. It is, in few words, that the English nation having been “forced by situation and circumstances” to take charge of Ireland and its people, when it suited the English to change their religion, or to come back to it, or to change it again, they were bound in duty to compel the Irish to change along with them each time, by means of pains and penalties, from heavy fines to transportation and death on the gallows; also that the English having a strong wish to possess themselves of all the lands of Ireland, everything was lawful and right to effect that object. The reader will remark, with surprise (and the more surprise, the better for Froude), that in his lectures lately delivered in New York, which were a kind of abstract of the work then in press, he did not venture to say before an intelligent audience of freemen some of the things which he has dared to print in the book then just ready to burst upon the world. For example, he did not say, even before the “Christian young men,” such words as these which are found in the book (p. 609):
“The consent of man was not asked when he was born into the world: his consent will not be asked when his time comes to die. As little has his consent to do with the laws which, while he lives, he is bound to obey.”
This sentiment he perhaps thought it unnecessary to enunciate here; because, in fact, he intended it solely for the Irish, not by any means for the Americans, although it reads like a universal maxim for the human race. Again, he did not think it necessary to say in so plain words what he has laid down clearly enough in this passage (p. 213):
“No government need keep terms with such a creed [meaning the Catholic Church] when there is power to abolish it. To call the repression of opinions which had issued so many times in blood and revolt by the name of religions persecution is mere abuse of words.”
ELEVATIONS POÉTIQUES ET RELIGIEUSES. Par Marie Jenna. Deuxième Edit. 2 vols. Paris: Adrien le Clerc et Cie. 1872.
As the eye lingers upon a beautiful landscape, spring clad and fair in the clear light of the new‐risen sun; as the ear loiters unwilling to lose the last echoed link of some simple melting melody; as the hand tarries loth to quit the gentle grasp that speaks unspoken sympathy, so have we—reluctant to lose such fair pictures, such moving lays, such deep and tender feeling—lingered and loitered and tarried with Marie Jenna, “the Poet of the Vosges.” Gifted with the nice perception of a true poet, Marie Jenna clothes the simplest ideas in language of such rare delicacy, so fresh, tender, vivid, and withal so musical, that mind, heart, eye, and ear, all are at once engaged. A bird, a butterfly, a flower, gains new interest in her hands; she flings a grace around it, she vests it with a dignity it never had before; she makes it live again. Take, for instance, the opening stanzas of “Le Papillon”:
“Pourquoi t’approcher en silence Et menacer mon vol joyeux? Par quelle involontaire offense Ai‐je pu déplaire à tes yeux?
“Je suis la vivante étincelle Qui monte et descend tour à tour; La fleur à qui Dieu donne une aile, Un souffle, un regard, un amour.
“Je suis le frère de la rose; Elle me cache aux importuns, Puis sur son cœur je me repose Et je m’enivre de parfums.
“Ma vie est tout heureuse et pure, Pourquoi désires‐tu ma mort? Oh! dis‐moi, roi de la nature, Serais‐tu jaloux de mon sort?
“Va, je sais bien que tu t’inclines Souvent pour essuyer des pleurs, Que tes yeux comptent les épines Où je ne vois rien que des fleurs.
“Je sais que parfois ton visage Se trouble et s’assombrit soudain, Lorsqu’en vain je cherche un nuage Au fond de l’horizon serein.
“Mais Celui dont la main divine A daigné nous former tous deux, Pour moi parfuma la colline, Et de loin te montra les cieux.
“Il me fit deux ailes de flamme, A moi, feu follet du printemps; Pour toi, son fils, il fit une âme Plus grande que le firmament.
“Ecoute ma voix qui t’implore, Loin de moi détourne tes pas... Laisse moi vivre un jour encore, O toi qui ne finiras pas!
“Mon bonheur à moi, c’est la vie, La liberté sous le ciel bleu, Le ruisseau, l’amour sans envie: Le tien ... c’est le secret de Dieu.”
What can be fresher or more charming than this naïve, earnest appeal for life and liberty? And again, in “Pour un Oiseau,” beginning with:
“Il est à toi, c’est vrai ... Frère, veux tu qu’il meure? Sa beauté, sa chanson, tout est là ... dans ta main; Et l’arbuste où sa voix gazouillait tout à l’heure Au bosquet, si tu veux, sera muet demain.
“Tu le tiens: sa faiblesse à ta force le livre; Mais aussi ta pitié peut le laisser aller; Ne le fais pas mourir! il est si bon de vivre Lorsque l’été commence et qu’on peut s’envoler,”
we find the same delicacy of thought, the same rippling, flowing language; and what joyousness and how cheery it sounds: il est si bon de vivre.
But Marie Jenna strikes deeper chords, awakes more solemn strains, than these; and through them all, the graver as the lighter, binding them in one harmonious whole, there sings out the same clear note of firm, enlightened faith that never wavers; it penetrates each thing she handles, giving that breadth and largeness to her field of view that it alone can give. In some beautiful stanzas, “Beati qui lugeant,” she draws near to one bowed down with sorrow, and fearlessly, yet oh! how tenderly touching the wound because she knows its cure, she speaks:
“Va, ton sein cache en vain le glaive qui le blesse: J’ai compris ton silence et j’ai prié pour toi. Laisse aller ta fierté comme un poids qui t’oppresse, Et pleure devant moi.
“Il est, je le sais bien, des jours où la souffrance Trouve en sa solitude une âpre volupté; Et le monde léger voit passer en silence Sa pâle majesté.
“Et la main d’un ami s’arrètant incertaine, N’ose écarter les plis de son voile de deuil. Il est des maux si grands, que la parole humaine Expire sur le seuil.
“Mais deux jours sont passés; il est temps que je vienne; Oh! laisse un front d’ami penché sur ta douleur! Ne te détourne pas: Mets ta main dans la mienne, Ton âme sur mon cœur.
“Si je ne t’apportais qu’une amitié fidèle, Mes pas avec respect s’éloigneraient d’ici. J’attendrais que la tienne enfin se souvint d’elle, Mais j’ai souffert aussi...
“Je ne te dirai point cette vaine parole Que la douleur accueille en son muet dédain. Non, ce que j’ai pour toi, c’est un mot qui console, C’est un secret divin.”
Already we seem to see awaked attention, a gleam of hope flit across the stern, wan face that marks such helpless, hopeless misery; now softening the hard, cold look that bid defiance to all sorrow, repelled all sympathy; now changing it to one of anxious longing and of mute entreaty for the proffered gift, le mot qui console. And see, or is it fancy only, or are there really tears now falling, “gemlike, the last drops of the exhausted storm”? Space forbids us to give it in its fulness, this secret divin, to curtail it would spoil it: so we send the reader to the original, and would ask him only if in the last stanza he does not hear two voices singing:
“Heureux les affligés! dit la Vérité même. Heureux, c’est vrai, mon Dieu! quand vous avez parlé. Nous voulons bien souffrir si le bonheur suprême, Est d’être consolé.”
Then look at this exquisite little picture, “L’Enfant Ressuscité.” Rarely have we met with one more pathetic. It is very delicately painted, with shades so subtile that, in the simplicity of the whole, we are apt to overlook them. And here also we have a glimpse of that reverential love for childhood that is by no means the least characteristic trait of Marie Jenna:
“Elle avait tant gémi, sa mère, et tant pleuré! Tant pressé sur son sein le front décoloré, Que dans le corps glacé l’âme était revenue, Et qu’en bénissant Dieu, palpitante, éperdue, Comme un trésor qu’on cache elle avait emporté Dans ses deux bras tremblants l’enfant ressuscité! Trois mois s’étaient passés depuis.....mais, chose étrange! On eut dit que le ciel avait fait un échange. L’enfant penchait son front comme un bouton flétri, Et depuis ces trois mois, jamais il n’avait ri. Il préférait aux jeux l’ombre silencieuse; Sa mère en l’embrassant n’osait pas être heureuse....
“Des volets entr’ouverts s’élancent des chansons; Dans les clochers frémit la voix des carillons. Ecoute, mon Louis, ces chants, ces joyeux rires.... Vois; c’est le jour de l’an; dis ce que tu désires. Chaque enfant pour étrenne a des jouets nouveaux. En veux‐tu de pareils? en veux‐tu de plus beaux? Veux‐tu ce bélier gris qu’on traîne et qui va paître Au printemps dans les prés l’herbe qui vient naître? Mais regarde plutôt; des pinceaux, des couleurs, Qui d’un papier tout blanc font un bouquet de fleurs. Oh! vois donc ce ballon de laine tricolore Qui s’élève et retombe et se relève encore! Tu n’aimes pas courir..... Que puis‐je te donner? Dis.....ta mère à présent ne sait plus deviner. Veux‐tu ce sabre d’or qui déjà ferait croire Que mon petit Louis médite une victoire? Aimes‐tu ce chalet d’un long toit recouvert? Mais non....qu’en ferais‐tu? Veux‐tu ce livre ouvert, Où près de chaque histoire on regarde une image, Ou l’on rit, où l’on pleure, où l’on devient plus sage? Ah! voici des oiseaux! tu les aimerais mieux! Les oiseaux sont vivants; tu les ferais heureux! Si tu voulais des lisandes roses fleuries, J’en saurais bien trouver, Louis, pour que tu ries. Réponds; je t’aime tant! n’oses‐tu me parler? Tu pleurais ce matin; je veux te consoler. Dis‐moi ce doux secret pendant que je l’embrasse. Que veux‐tu, mon Louis? Et l’enfant, à voix basse: Des ailes pour m’envoler!”
No one can fail to be struck with the sudden stillness that follows the mother’s anxious striving to drive away the cloud that would hang over her little one; with the awe and fear, too, that fill her heart; with the mystery in the whispered answer of the strange mysterious child given back from death in answer to her passionate prayer. It sets us thinking of that other mother whose grief so touched the Master’s heart that he spoke the word, “and he that was dead sat up and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother.” Did that young man go home so grave, with never a smile to light his face, so strangely altered, that, after the first burst of gladness, his mother, clasping him to her bosom, dared not rejoice?
Of the more serious pieces, perhaps not one equals in force “La plus grande Douleur.” It is the old tale, always new though so oft repeated: the old tale that startles, shocks, and brings sharp pain as for the first time it comes home to each one, telling that that strong bond which binds friends closer, draws classes nearer, makes nations firmer, has snapped and riven two hearts asunder; that the newly‐awakened intellect first meeting early faith has turned aside, has chosen a road far other than that on which till now both friends had travelled hand in hand; that that “little superficial knowledge of philosophy that inclines man’s mind to atheism” has come between them like an icy barrier, chilling the old friendship and making everything so dark and strange which before was warmth and light between them; and with effect so drear, so piercing, too, and sharp, that the unchanged heart feels any pain than that would be light to bear:
“Oui mon Dieu! nous pouvons, sans que l’âme succombe, Laisser notre bonheur à ce passé qui tombe; Nous pouvons au matin former un rêve pur, Tout d’amour et de paix, tout de flamme et d’azur, Puis livrer les débris de sa beauté ravie A ce vent du désert, qui laisse notre vie Sans fleur et sans épi comme un champ moissonné; Meliner notre front pâle et découronné, Et devenir semblable à cette pauvre plante Qui n’est pas morte encore, et qui n’est plus vivante, Nous pouvons voir gisant sur un lit de douleur, Celui qui nous restait, l’ami consolateur, Compter chaque moment de son heure dernière, Poser nos doigts tremblants sur sa froide paupière, Et baiser son visage, et nous dire; Il est mort! Nous le pouvons, mon Dieu! Parfois le cœur est fort.
“Mais aimer une autre âme, et la trouver si belle Qu’on frémit de bonheur en se penchant vers elle, Puis un jour contempler d’un regard impuissant Sur sa beauté céleste une ombre qui descend; De cette âme où passaient les souffles de la grâce, Sentir parfois monter quelque chose qui glace, Douter, prier tous bas, pleurer d’anxiété, Craindre, espérer..... Longtemps marcher à son côté Sans oser voir au fond.... Puis un jour où l’on ose, Reculer de partout où le regard se pose, Où fut le feu sacré toucher de froids débris, Murmurer en tremblant un langage incompris Où Dieu passa, chercher sa lumineuse trace, Et n’y trouver plus rien ... rien! pas même un soupir, Pas un cri douloureux vers l’aube qui s’efface, C’est trop souffrir!”
The two volumes before us contain many poems, both short and long, of such great freshness and beauty, so full of original turns and delicate touches, that it is difficult to choose from amongst them. However, we have said enough to give a fair notion of Marie Jenna’s style, and quite enough to show that it is her own, with its own peculiar charm. And so our task is done. If it be said that, having uttered only praise and found no fault, we have but half fulfilled the critic’s task, we answer that we never meant the tone of criticism. All know that man’s most perfect work is not without its blemish; but in our first walk through so fair a garden, meeting new beauties on every side, it would have been ungracious in us to have sought defects: that task we leave to others. Ours has been to welcome, and to tell of fresh flowers of much loveliness offered to us from across the sea, with the certainty that no one can read her “Elévations Poétiques” without feeling that he is indebted for some real enjoyment to the charming “Poet of the Vosges.”
THE TWO YSONDES, AND OTHER VERSES. By Edward Ellis. London: Pickering. 1872.
It takes but a short while to read this thin volume; nor will any one with a taste for true poetry find the perusal a task. The author undoubtedly possesses “the vision and the faculty divine,” and belongs to the subjective school of which Tennyson is king—a school peculiarly capable of teaching a subjective age. The more the pity, then, say we, that Mr. Ellis should have made his chief poem, “The Two Ysondes,” hang on the idea that love is fate. His “Two Ysondes” are the two “Isolts” of Tennyson; but Tennyson does not attempt to excuse the passion of Mark’s wife for Tristrem. Our author makes it originate in Tristrem and Ysonde having “drunk,” “by an evil chance,” a philtre which had been placed “in Tristrem’s charge” as “a wedding‐gift for Ysonde and King Mark” (p. 7). Now, it may be said that this does away with the guilty aspect of the romance, and throws over the whole a veil of faëry. Yes; but we insist that it is, therefore, the more mischievous, as teaching the doctrine of fatality.
Neither is this the only, or even the most, objectionable feature of the poem; for, together with descriptions of emotions and caresses which would be chaste if the theme were lawful love, all idea of sin is kept away, and especially as regards its eternal consequences. There is not a word about remorse during life, or of repentance at death. But Tristrem dies in despair of beholding the object of his passion; and Ysonde, in turn, expires on the breast of her dead lover, declaring that she will “go with him beyond the bars of fate.”
Now, we should not have troubled ourselves to make these strictures but that Mr. Ellis shows powers for the misuse of which he will be very responsible. Moreover, as is clear from some of his shorter lyrics, particularly “At a Shrine,” his mind has a religious bent, with (of course) Catholic sympathies.
With regard to his verse, it is less Tennysonic than his thought. Better if, while originating metres (with which we have no quarrel whatever), he modelled both his lines and his diction on the peerless accuracy of England’s laureate.
From KELLY, PIET & CO., Baltimore: The Money God. By M. A. Quinton.
From LYNCH, COLE & MEEHAN, New York: English Misrule in Ireland: A Course of Lectures. By V. Rev. T. N. Burke, O.P. 12mo. pp. 299.
From J. A. MCGEE, New York: “Thumping English Lies”: Froude’s Slanders on Ireland and Irishmen. With Preface and Notes by Col. J. E. McGee, and Wendell Phillips’ Views of the Situation. 12mo. pp. 224.—Half Hours with Irish Authors: Selections from Griffin, Lover, Carleton, and Lever. 12mo. pp. 330.
From A. D. F. RANDOLPH, New York: Christ at the Door. By Susan H. Ward. 12mo, pp. 232.
From J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Philadelphia: Expiation. By Mrs. Julia C. R. Dorr.
From J. R. OSGOOD & CO., Boston: The Romance of the Harem. By Mrs. A. H. Leonowens. 12mo. pp. viii.‐277.
From ROBERTS BROS., Boston: What Katy Did. By Susan Coolidge.—Thorvaldsen: His Life and Works. By Eugene Plon. 12mo. pp. xvi.‐320.—The World Priest. By Leopold Schefer. 12mo. pp. xv.‐371.
From THE AUTHOR: Sermon at the Month’s Mind of the Most Rev. M. J. Spalding, D.D., Preached at the Church of the American College (Rome). By the V. Rev. Dr. Chatard, Rector. Paper, 8vo. pp. 30.
From E. H. BUTLER & CO., Philadelphia: The Etymological Reader. By Epes Sargent and Amasa May.
From S. D. KIERNAN, Clerk, Department of Public Instruction: Report of the Board of Public Instruction of the City and County of New York, for the year ending Dec. 31, 1871; with Addenda to May, 1872.—Manual of the Department of Public Instruction, 1871‐2. 18mo, pp. 262.
From HOLT & WILLIAMS, New York: Sermons by the Rev. H. R. Hawes, M.A. 12mo, pp. xiv. 347.
From AMERICAN BAPTIST SOCIETY, Philadelphia: The Baptist Short Method, with Inquirers and Opponents. By Rev. C. T. Hiscox, D.D. 18mo, pp. 216.
From HURD & HOUGHTON, New York: The City of God and the Church Makers. By R. Abbey. 12mo, pp. xx. 315.
From BURNS, OATES & CO., London (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society): The Life of Monseigneur Berneux, Bishop of Capse. Vicar‐Apostolic of Corea. By M. l’Abbé Pichon. Translated from the French, with a Preface by Lady Herbert.
From JOHN HODGES, London: (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society): The Lives of the Saints. By Rev. S. Baring‐ Gould, M.A. March.
From J. R. OSGOOD & CO., Boston: His Level Best, and Other Stories. By Edward E. Hale.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 96.—MARCH, 1873.
The Relation Of The Rights Of Conscience To The Authority Of The State Under The Laws Of Our Republic.
(A LECTURE BEFORE A CATHOLIC SOCIETY OF S. PATRICK’S CHURCH, NEW HAVEN, CONN., OCT. 20, 1872.)
REVEREND GENTLEMEN AND MY FRIENDS: Before I speak particularly of the relation of the rights of conscience to the laws existing in our republic, I consider it necessary to make a few preliminary remarks and to lay down a few principles regarding the nature of law and government in general, and the relation which they hold to religion. I shall best illustrate the difficulties which envelop this subject, and also give a clue to the way by which it may be extricated, by making a supposition.
Let us suppose that a large number of men come together for the purpose of founding a new state with all its institutions of civil society and government. Some of these are Christians, among whom are Quakers; others are Mohammedans, Hindoos, Thugs, idolaters practising human sacrifices, and communists. It is necessary that they should agree and concur with each other in regard to the rights which respect life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness in general and particular, and the means of protecting all these rights, otherwise no society or government is possible. But this cannot be done by any general consent among these different parties. The Christian holds the sacredness of life and property, and the force of the law of monogamy. The Mohammedan rejects this last, and maintains the right to a plurality of wives. The Hindoo regards it as a sacred right and duty of a widow to offer herself on the funeral pile of her husband, that her spirit may rejoin his spirit in another world. The Thug considers it a most holy and meritorious act to murder as many persons as possible in honor of the cruel goddess whom he worships; while the idolater looks on the sacrifice of children or captives as the means of placating his offended deities and procuring success in war. The Quaker will not allow of any bloodshed whatever, either for avenging crime or repelling aggression. And the communist would abolish all rights of property, reconstruct society on a wholly different plan from that which has heretofore existed, and banish all religion as noxious to the well‐being of man.
It is evident, therefore, that society cannot be constituted without religion, and that society constituted with religion, and on the basis of religious ideas, requires some agreement in these religious ideas, and the incorporation of some fixed and definite religious principles into its very structure and conformation.
If we consult history, we shall find that no state or perfect society has ever been established on the atheistic principle. Every one that has ever existed has had a religious basis, and all political and social constitutions have proceeded from religious ideas and been founded upon them. The civilization of Christendom in general has received its specific form from the influence of the Christian religion moulding and modifying in the Eastern world its previous and ancient laws, and in the West to a great extent creating a new order out of a pre‐existing state of imperfect civilization or semi‐barbarism. To this Christendom we belong, and the laws of our republic are a product of this Christian civilization. This cannot be denied, considered as a mere historical fact respecting our origin; for we are the offspring of Christian Europe, and in the beginning distinctly professed to be a Christian people. But it may be said that we have changed, have undergone a political regeneration as a nation, and in the process of transformation have thrown out all religion from our organic constitution as a republic. By our organic constitution and the laws of our republic I intend not merely the federal constitution and laws which bind together the United States, but also the laws and constitutions of the states, the tout ensemble of our common and statute laws of every kind, which form the regulating code of our whole society as one political people. And in regard to this organic law, I affirm that we do not form an exception among human societies to the universal rule I have above laid down, that the state in political society is based on religious ideas.
In support of this proposition, I cite the opinion of a most competent and impartial judge, Prof. Leo, of Halle, and borrow from him a definition of that which constitutes our state religion. This great historian, in the introductory portion of his Universal History, where he is discussing the universal principles which underlie all political constitutions, analyzes in a masterly way the elements of our own system of government; and he points out that which is the religious element, namely, the rule or law of morals, derived from the common law of Christendom, or a certain standard of moral obligation, conformity to which is enforced by the state with all its coercive power. All churches or voluntary associations which include this moral code or religion of the state within their own specific religious law possess complete equality and liberty before the civil law. With their doctrines, rites, regulations, and practices the state does not interfere, and gives them protection from any infringement upon their rights on the part of any private members of the community. But let them, on pretext of doctrine, of ecclesiastical law, of liberty of conscience, or even of any divine revelation, violate by any overt acts the rule of moral obligation recognized by the state, they come into direct collision with her authority, and must suffer the consequences. So far, therefore, as concerns that portion of Christian law, namely, the moral precepts of the Christian religion, which are incorporated into our civil law, all churches are in vital union with the state. Even Jews, because they hold, with Christians, the decalogue; and societies based on purely natural religion, because they hold the law of nature, are in the same vital union, so far, with the state. And beyond this, within the limits which this law sanctions or permits, all these churches or societies are in union with the state, as lawful, voluntary associations over which her protection is extended. But let a Mohammedan community be formed among citizens or resident foreigners, and attempt the introduction of polygamy, our laws require the civil magistrate to interfere and suppress by force this exercise of the privileges granted by their prophet. Let a community of Hindoos, Thugs, or idolaters establish itself within our bounds, and commence any of the murderous practices of those false religions, and the gibbet or the sword would be called on to execute vengeance upon them. We have in our borders the sect of Mormons, whose doctrines and practices are contrary to our fundamental laws and subversive of them. Obviously, we cannot, consistently with our safety, our well‐being, or our essential principles of political and social order, tolerate the enormities of Mormonism, much less permit the formation of a Mormon state. The right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, must be exercised in conformity to certain laws, which are to the state as her axioms or first principles, and are held as inviolable. And the exercise of this right, in this due and legitimate manner, must not be hindered by force and violence under any pretext. Therefore no pretence of conscience or religion can avail to cover any violation of law by an individual or a society, or any such infringement on the rights of others as has been just alluded to. All this presupposes that the state recognizes and bases its laws upon certain fixed ideas concerning the rights which God has really granted to men, and the obligations which he has imposed upon them. But this has also been distinctly and expressly declared by a body of men, representing the whole political people of the nascent republic which was afterwards developed into the United States of North America. The declaration was made in the very act which constituted the United Colonies free and independent states, and which was published to the world on the fourth day of July, 1776. In the first sentence of this Declaration of Independence, the Congress affirms that the people of the United States have judged it necessary “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which THE LAWS OF NATURE AND OF NATURE’S GOD entitle them.” This august body then proceeds to lay down the foundation and basis of the entire argument of the document, as follows: “We hold these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.” It then proceeds to argue that those governments which fail to fulfil this end, and pursue a contrary end by invading and destroying these rights, forfeit their powers; and makes an application of this principle to the casus belli between the colonies and the British crown.
In this most momentous crisis, amid the very birth‐pangs of our infant republic, the people of the United States solemnly declared that the origin of all right, all law, all political organization, all government, and specifically of those which constitute the United States a separate political people, is to be found in the lex æterna, the law of God; that is to say, it is in religion. For what is religion? According to Cicero’s definition, it is a bond which binds men to God and to each other. This is the very meaning of the word, which comes from ligare, to bind, whence we have the terms ligament, ligature, and obligation. Human right is, therefore, something conferred by God. The right to govern must come from God, for we are created equal, and therefore without any natural right of one over another to give him law. The rights of the governed come from God, and are therefore inviolable; but liberty is the unhindered possession and exercise of the rights conferred by God, under the protection of lawful government; and liberty of conscience is freedom to obey the law of the Creator, and to enjoy the blessings which he has imparted to the creature by that law. These rights and liberties belong to each individual man as a grant from the Creator, which he can maintain in the face of any government, be it that of a monarch, of an aristocracy, or of a majority of the people. If a monarch, or one who executes by delegated power the sovereignty of a majority, invades the right of an individual, he violates a law. This law can be no other than that of the Sovereign Lord of the universe. There is, therefore, a higher law than human law, a higher sovereignty than human sovereignty, to which both governments and the governed are subject and amenable, and which are acknowledged as supreme by this American Republic of which we are citizens. And as another proof of this recognition, I may cite the law of oaths, or the solemn appeal to Almighty God as the Supreme Judge, by which a religious sanction is given to judicial testimony and the engagements of public officers.
There is, therefore, in our republic a religion of the state, but one embodied in civil and political society only, which leaves to citizens perfect freedom to organize churches and act out what they profess to be the dictates of their individual consciences, provided they do not violate the laws which constitute the religion of the state.
Under this law, the Catholic Church possesses in essential matters theoretical liberty and equality of rights with the various religious bodies existing in the country, with some trivial exceptions to be found in the laws of some of the states. To a great extent, this theoretical liberty is also a practical liberty, really possessed and enjoyed, and only occasionally invaded. This is a remark which is quite specially verified in the instance of your own state of Connecticut.
This has not always been the case either here or in other portions of our country. Catholics have not always enjoyed freedom of conscience and liberty of religion. If we go back to the early history of the colonies which became afterwards the United States, we shall find that their founders did not intend to grant that liberty which now exists. In some of these colonies, the Church of England, in others the Church of the Puritans, and in those of Spain and France, which were admitted at a later period, the Catholic Church was the established religion of the state. In all the English colonies the Catholic religion was proscribed and persecuted. The Puritan fathers of New England intended to establish a theocracy. There was a strict union of church and state under their old colonial governments. Only professed members and communicants of the church could vote, and the legislatures regulated the affairs of parishes, and decided doctrinal questions. Our ancestors therefore had a Christian ideal of the state before their minds which they attempted to make an actual reality, and which they dreamed should become the kingdom of Christ our Lord upon the earth which the prophets and apostles foretold. The attempt failed from causes which lay within the bosom of the community itself, and not because of any external force; and the same community which had by tacit agreement or positive statutes enacted the original law combining a specific form of religion with the state, repealed the same by its own free will. In the Puritan state, the first change came about by the multiplication of baptized persons who never became communicants. The number of citizens who were thus deprived of the highest rights of citizenship was felt to be a grave anomaly and inconvenience in a democratic state, and caused the adoption of the half‐way covenant. By this arrangement, those baptized persons who publicly acknowledged their baptism were considered as quasi‐members of the church, entitled to all political rights. When, in the course of time, the number of unbaptized persons increased, and other sects of Protestantism began to flourish, new changes were brought about by which in the end the connection between the state and the Puritan Church was dissolved. Similar causes produced similar effects in other parts of the country, and, so far as the federal union was concerned, there was obviously from the first an utter impossibility of making any specific form of Christianity the religion of the entire republic. Thus, by the very law which the necessity of the case imposed upon the separate states and the entire federal republic, that liberty of religion became established under which the Catholic Church could come in upon a footing of perfect equality with the other religious denominations. Catholics have not come into New England and Connecticut either to demand religious liberty as a right or to beg toleration as a favor. We have not obtained our rights or privileges by any agitation or revolution stirred up by ourselves in our own interest. The work was done before there was a number of Catholics worth estimating either in Connecticut or New England. It was done by the old manor‐born citizens for their own advantage and the welfare of the state.
So also, in regard to the political privileges conceded to foreign‐born immigrants. These are, in their nature, distinct and separate from the rights of conscience conceded to Catholics. Yet they have an actual connection, arising from the fact that so very large a proportion of our Catholic citizens are of foreign birth, and so large a proportion of our adopted citizens are of the Catholic religion; and therefore, in the public mind, these two matters are very much blended together, and even confused with each other. It is, therefore, quite fitting that I should speak of the two things in relation with each other. And I remark on this point that the privileges possessed by the Catholics of this state who are of foreign birth, by which they are made equal to the native‐born citizens in regard to both religious and political rights, have not been extorted by themselves, but freely conceded for the good of the state and of all citizens generally. The original inhabitants had the power to exclude the Catholic religion from all toleration. They had the power and the right to exclude all foreigners from the privileges of native‐born citizens, or to make the conditions of being naturalized more stringent than they now are. They took another course, having in view their own good and the well‐being of the state, and Catholics as well as foreigners have profited by it. Catholics have profited by the religious liberty conceded to citizens, which is something essentially distinct from the privileges conceded to residents of foreign origin. And in point of fact, although the extent and prosperity of the church in Connecticut have proceeded principally and in very great measure from the immigration of Irish Catholics into the state, yet its rights, and liberty, and equality do not depend on anything necessarily and essentially but the religious liberty granted to citizens, and which is the birthright of Catholics as well as Protestants who are born on the soil of the republic.
It would be easy to show, in respect to our country at large, that the first beginnings of the Catholic Church have an intertwined radical grasp with the first fibres of national life in our own soil; and that there is a truly glorious Catholic chapter in the history of the United States. We can find something of this even in the history of this state. The first Mass celebrated in Connecticut was said in an open field within the bounds of Wethersfield, by the chaplain of the French troops who came here to aid our fathers in fighting the battle for independence. The first Catholic sermon in English was preached by the Rev. Dr. Matignon, of Boston, in the Centre Congregational Church of Hartford, at the invitation of the Rev. Dr. Strong, the pastor of the church. The first Catholic church was formed at Hartford in 1827, by Mr. Taylor, a respectable citizen of that town, who was a convert, and who organized the few Irish, French, and German Catholic residents in the place into a congregation, which assembled on Sunday for worship. In 1830, Bishop Fenwick, of Boston, a native of Maryland, purchased and blessed a small frame church, over which he placed F. Fitton, a native of Boston, who was the pastor of the entire state, and who is still actively engaged in the duties of the priesthood at Boston. During the first five years of his ministry at Hartford, F. Fitton received eighty adult converts, who, with their families, made a considerable portion of his little flock, since, in 1835, there were only 730 Catholics in the whole state. The first bishop of the diocese of Hartford was a native of New England. The present distinguished prelate who rules the church in Connecticut is a native of Pennsylvania; and of the 150,000 Catholics under his jurisdiction nearly one‐half must be natives of the state or of the United States. We have, then, some 67,000 native‐born Catholics in this state, most of whom are native‐born Yankees.(230) If you wish to see a fair sample of these, you have only to visit St. Patrick’s Church at nine o’clock of a Sunday morning, where you will see the church filled with them, and to go into the school‐house behind the church any day in the week, where you will find 1,100 of these young Catholic Yankees busily conning their lessons, and learning to love God and their native Columbia. All these have their liberty of conscience and their other rights as citizens secured to them by their birthright, and therefore, on this ground alone, the Catholic Church is equal to the Protestant churches before the law.
And as regards foreign‐born citizens, the state having conceded to them equal rights to those of native‐born citizens, their conscience or religion is included among these rights. The original concession was a privilege, but, having been once conceded, it has become a right. And it was conceded, as I have said, for the good of the state which conceded it, and in view of a compensation or equivalent which the party of the grantor expected to receive. You did not intrude yourselves upon the soil of the state, or come uninvited to beg food and shelter. You were invited, and that not from motives of pure philanthropy. Doubtless many had a kind and philanthropic feeling in the matter, but the prime and urgent motive was that you were needed and wanted for your labor. You were told that your services were wanted for the upbuilding of the material prosperity of the state, and, as an inducement to come, you were offered citizenship, and with that, freedom to bring your religion with you and enjoy it. This was a favor to you without question; but not a purely gratuitous one. It was something advanced to you, but for which you were expected to make a future compensation. And you have well purchased your rights, not only by what you have done in the peaceful arts of industry, but by fighting for your adopted country and shedding your blood for its integrity and the consolidation of its power. You have fought for the state, and for the United States, and, therefore, the compact has been sealed and made inviolable by your blood.
Now, what is the point I have been coming to and have at length reached? It is this: that you possess the full freedom and equality of your Catholic religion, not by toleration, but as an absolute right, inhering in your character as citizens whether by birth or adoption. Catholics are legally domiciled here by virtue of our laws, which recognize, maintain, and protect their religious rights as standing on an equal footing with those of Congregationalists or Episcopalians. No doubt, we should cherish a kind feeling toward those who have granted these most precious and valuable rights, and respect their similar rights. But we must not permit ourselves to be placed in any position of inferiority to other classes of citizens. We must insist upon the full recognition of our equality in the state, and maintain with a manly bearing all our rights of conscience to their fullest extent, claiming and demanding from our fellow‐citizens a complete respect and observance of these rights, and from the state that protection in their exercise which it is bound to give.
The Declaration of Independence avows as an article of the national creed that the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been conferred by the Creator, and is inalienable, and that government is instituted for the purpose of securing to us the possession and exercise of this right. The right to liberty includes freedom to keep the commandments of God, to observe his law, to make use of all the means which he has granted to us for obtaining grace, acquiring virtue, and fulfilling the end of our creation. The right to happiness includes the undisturbed enjoyment of all the privileges of our religion, which alone can make us truly happy in this world, and enable us to obtain eternal happiness. The right to liberty and happiness gives freedom, to those who choose to do so, to devote themselves to the sacred duties of the altar and the cloister. It gives freedom to practise all the rites and ceremonies of religious worship, to dedicate our wealth to the service of God and our fellow‐men, to constitute and regulate our churches according to our own canonical law, to establish and hold possession of colleges, seminaries, convents, and charitable institutions, to educate our children, to profess and practise the Catholic religion wholly and entirely. It is the end of government to secure these rights, so that, if it fails to do so by extending an efficacious protection to their free and peaceable exercise, it is negligent of its duty; and if it impairs or violates them by unjust and tyrannical legislation, it commits a positive act of wrong and usurpation. The government, the sovereign power in the state from which the government holds its authority, are amenable to the eternal law, as well as the individual citizen; and they may violate it by neglecting to secure and protect, or by infringing upon, the rights of conscience conferred by the Creator. Wherefore it is necessary to keep a watchful guard over these rights, to proclaim and defend them loudly when they are assailed or in danger of being impaired, and by all lawful means to hinder any attempt to interfere with their exercise by unjust legislation or a tyrannical exercise of authority by the governing power and its official agents. It is a universal and constant tendency of the sovereign power in the state to usurp unjust authority and to invade the rights of its subjects. The liberty of the individual man and of the class which is governed is always in danger, and, therefore, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. This is true where the people retains its sovereignty, as well as where the sovereignty has been entrusted to a monarch or an aristocracy. It is a great mistake to suppose that a popular form of government and republican institutions are a perfect and adequate guarantee of liberty in general or of liberty of conscience in particular. The political majority or ascendant party can tyrannize over the minority or weaker party and over private citizens. Magistrates elected by a popular vote can misuse their power to oppress those whom they ought to protect. Legislatures chosen by the people can pass the most unjust and despotic laws. The Athenian democracy banished Aristides the Just, and poisoned Socrates, the wisest man of pagan antiquity, the father and founder of philosophy. In our own day we have seen the most perfidious violation of guaranteed rights, and the most tyrannical oppression of the religious freedom of Catholics, perpetrated by the Swiss Republic. Catholics are always liable to oppression where they are the weaker party, and have never any sufficient guarantee for the acquisition and preservation of their full religious liberty, except in their own numbers and strength, made available by their own energetic activity in their own cause. According to the principles and spirit of our laws and political institutions, the Catholic Church possesses in the United States a greater degree of the liberty which belongs to her by divine right than in most other countries. And in practice this liberty has been to a great extent secured to her by the justice of the people at large, and the fidelity of those to whom the administration of law has been entrusted. We may say of Connecticut especially that, considering the old and deeply rooted prejudice of her native inhabitants against the Catholic religion, it is remarkable with what comity they have received and made place for the new and mercurial race who have come in to replenish their staid old towns and quiet villages with fresh life, and with what composure they have beheld the multiplication of the crosses which gleam in the sunlight, on their hilltops and in their valleys, over the churches and convents of that which to them was a new and strange religion. Nevertheless, we cannot and ought not to be content with anything short of that full and complete liberty and equality which of right belong to us, and which do not in the least degree prejudice the same rights in those who profess a different religion. There are some things in regard to which it is our duty as well as our right to demand a greater measure of justice than that which has hitherto been yielded, and to exert ourselves to prevent a still further diminution of our rights as Catholic citizens.
One of these is the right of those unfortunate persons who are inmates of prisons, houses of reformation, and similar institutions to enjoy all the privileges and fulfil all the duties of their religion, if they are members of the Catholic Church. Closely connected with this is the right of the Catholic clergy to have access to all the members of their flock, and to exercise the functions of their sacred ministry wherever their duty calls them, unhindered, and, if necessary, fully protected by the law and all official persons.
Another is the complete and untrammelled freedom of Catholic education in all its departments. The state has no right either to prescribe and enforce religious instruction beyond those first principles of morality and civic obligation which are the foundations of our political order, or to interfere with the religious instruction which the Catholic conscience demands for those who are in a state of pupilage. Far less has it the right to prescribe an irreligious and atheistical system of instruction. I cannot enlarge upon this most important topic in this place. I will here simply recall what I have said of the possibility and danger of usurpation over the rights of conscience even in popular governments, and point out a direction from which we ourselves are threatened by this very danger. I refer to a project entertained by some persons in high positions of establishing under the authority of the federal government a national and compulsory system of education, thus depriving not only Catholics, but Protestants and Jews also, of their essential right as citizens to give their children a religious education. I do not attribute this policy to the party of the administration as a party, but it is most undoubtedly the policy of a considerable and very active section of what is called the Republican party, and is part and parcel of a scheme for modifying most essentially the relations between the federal and the state governments, for extending the authority of the governing power and restricting the private liberty of citizens. The men who are possessed by these ideas are in sympathy with that party in Europe self‐styled the progressive party. The idea which they have of liberty is their own freedom to drive the people on the path which they themselves have surveyed and marked out as the straight road to happiness and well‐being, and this compulsory march they dignify by the name of Progress. In this country, they are avowedly not content with existing institutions and laws, but are restless to try their improving hand upon them. They desire to secure uniformity according to their own ideal standard, by consolidation, concentration, unification of the legislative and executive powers in the federal government, and the reduction of the states into the condition of subordinate, dependent provinces in a republican empire. Education by the state and for the state, and in accordance with so‐called progressive ideas, is an essential part of this Prussianizing plan—an education wholly secular, from which instruction in positive, revealed dogmas and a positive religious discipline are wholly excluded, on the plea that all these are sectarian; and one, of course, which is really anti‐Christian and godless—an education like that of the University of Paris, which made a whole army of infidels among the lettered class in France. It is on this ground of education that the tyrannical and infidel power of the state is waging a battle with the point of the lance against the church and the Catholic religion in Europe. In England, also, as I know from those who have heard it from the lips of the leaders of this party, it is the fixed purpose of these leaders to work for the establishment of this infidel system by the coercive power of the state. The necessary sequel of all this is the commune; and, if such a system should prevail here, we have in prospect the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, the destruction of those institutions of learning which will not conform to the ideal of the state, the overthrow of the most essential rights of conscience, and finally the proscription of religion, followed by the war of the masses upon the rights of property and upon the order of civil society itself.
We want none of these improvements of Boston doctrinaires, and no meddling of political charlatans with our constitution. Our private rights we hold from the Creator, and not from any social compact or grant of government. State rights, the strongest safeguard we have against usurpations upon our liberty, we hold from the fundamental law which first constituted us a political people—the law of unity in multiplicity, which is our strength, and the geometrical principle, of our harmonious and symmetrical structure. There was a time when our centralizing principle was in danger; when, so to speak, the centrifugal force threatened to become too strong, and to make a rupture of our system. Now it is the opposite danger we have to fear—the increase of the centripetal force. As we were in danger of flying away from our sun and becoming separated, wandering political orbs, so we are now in danger of running into our sun, and thus losing our proper orbits, becoming absorbed into the central mass, and thereby suffering the extinction of the life of liberty in the individuals who form our population. Therefore, as the exorbitant demands of state rights have been repressed, it should now be our study to prevent the encroachment of federal power upon the just domain of these state rights, of state power over municipal freedom, and of all these powers upon the personal and private liberty of the citizen. It is for the interest of all to do this, but my special purpose has been to show why Catholics in particular are bound to do it, in order to preserve that liberty which God has given to them, and their rights of conscience, among which this right of education is one of the most precious and the most imperilled.
This leads us to another point. All religious societies being equal before the law, and entitled to an equal protection, so long as they do not violate those fundamental principles of morality which constitute the religion of the state, Catholic institutions have an equal claim to a share in the distribution of the public money with those which are not Catholic. In this state, large sums have been granted to institutions which are under the control of particular denominations; for instance, to Yale College. The state is bound to be impartial, and whatever it determines to do in support of education or for the nurture and relief of the helpless and destitute, and the reformation of the depraved, it is bound to carry out on this impartial principle. Therefore grants to useful institutions ought never to be opposed or withheld on the ground that the Catholic clergy have the control over them, and that within their walls the Catholic religion is taught and practised. Nor has the state any right to prefer, much less to enforce, what is falsely called a non‐sectarian system of religious and moral instruction. This is one of the most patent fallacies by which the common mind in our time and country is duped and deluded. If there is one only true church, all other so‐called churches are sectarian, or sections cut off from the church. The true church cannot be a sect or have anything sectarian about it. But the state is incompetent to judge or decide that the Catholic Church is a sect in this sense; and, therefore, incapable of determining that the public money which is granted to a Catholic institution is devoted to sectarian purposes. The state is equally incompetent to decide that there is no one true church, and that, therefore, all denominations are sections of the true church, or sects considered in the sense of parts included in a whole. But if it were competent to decide this point in the sense indicated, the only just conclusion would be that all should be impartially treated and protected. The state is also incompetent to decide that a particular party of men, having a system differing from that of any one sect, and professing to retain the common elements of all, is not itself a sect, and that its system is non‐sectarian. It is, in fact, only another sect. Regular association, government, and special rites are not essential to the nature of a sect. There were the sects of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians among the Jews. There are philosophical sects. A sect is a party of men holding certain particular opinions. Those men who profess to hold what they call the essential parts of religion and morality, and to teach the same without any sectarian doctrines, simply mean that they do not hold the tenets of any of the Protestant sects around them, by which they differ from each other. But they belong to the genus Protestant nevertheless, and have their own specific differentia. They cannot discriminate the essential from the non‐essential parts of Christianity without a criterion, and the criterion which they adopt and apply makes their specific doctrine, which constitutes them a distinct, if not a separate, sect. They assume that the specific doctrines and laws of the Catholic Church are not essential. But in this they deny a fundamental Catholic doctrine: they place themselves in opposition to Catholics in respect to the essentials of faith and practice, and thus they are, relatively to us, a sect. The state cannot decide this question, and cannot, without injustice, prefer one party to the other. It is, therefore, a violation of Catholic rights to compel Catholics to listen to the teaching which calls itself non‐sectarian, or in any way to adopt and sanction it as a system exclusively entitled to the support and protection of the state.
The truth is that the state has nothing to do directly with religious instruction. Formerly, in this state of Connecticut, it had to do with it, because the Puritan form of Protestantism was the established religion of the state, and made part of the law. But now the state has only to protect the religious corporations and societies which have legal existence in the enjoyment of their vested rights. Grants of money and other legal provisions must be made in view of the utility to society and the state which lies in the nature of the object which any institution aims at accomplishing. Education, the care of the orphaned, the poor, the sick, and other destitute persons, and the instruction of all classes in moral and civic virtues and the fear of that Creator who is acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence as the Author of our natural rights, are useful to the state and society, and even necessary to their continuance and well‐being. Therefore the state may exercise a supervision within certain limits over these things, and grant subsidies for the purpose of sustaining them. But this must be done in such a way that no violence is committed upon the rights or the liberty of conscience guaranteed by law. Religion must be left free, and not interfered with by the state. But non‐ interference is something quite incompatible with exclusion. The state cannot confiscate the property which it has once granted to Yale College because the clergy of one particular denomination control the religious instruction of the college. Nor can it justly refuse to treat Catholic institutions of education with a favor equal to that which it shows to others, because the Bishop of Hartford will have control of their religious teaching.
It is for the interest and well‐being of the state and of all classes of its citizens that the Catholic Church should fully exercise all its rights, and enjoy the most perfect freedom of growth and development. The Catholic Church is fully and unchangeably committed to those essential principles of morality on which our laws are founded. By the very principle of the Catholic religion, those who profess it can never abandon or change these principles, and they thus receive the strongest guarantee of their perpetuity in the number and the moral power of those citizens who profess this religion. By our religion we must hold and profess that human rights are conferred by the Creator, that they are inviolable, and that civil society has been established by Almighty God, with its institutions of government, in order that these rights may be secured. We must profess that peoples and governments are accountable to God for the just administration of the trust committed to them, and responsible to a higher law than mere human laws, the eternal law itself, which is written on the conscience and clearly promulgated by a divine revelation. We must profess the sanctity of life, of marriage, of the rights of property, of oaths, contracts, treaties, and civic obligations, and the duty of allegiance and obedience to the laws and the lawful authorities in the state. All that I have shown to be the religion of the state, which is indeed nothing more than a portion of the universal common law of Christendom, is involved in the religion of Catholics and taught by it with an authority which they acknowledge as unerring and supreme. Here is, therefore, a principle of stability to the state, and to the rights of all classes of citizens, which is involved in the education and popular instruction which is given by the Catholic clergy. Moreover, as the pastors of 150,000 of the inhabitants of the state, and wielding a moral influence over them far superior to that of any other body of clergy, it is for the interest and advantage of their fellow‐citizens that their education, training in their special functions, and other qualifications and advantages for exercising their civilizing power upon such a large and increasing mass of the population, should be elevated to the highest possible grade. Therefore the schools, academies, seminaries, and religious houses in which the clergy are trained are deserving of encouragement as sources of intellectual, moral, and social benefit and improvement to society at large, which accrue to the benefit of the state.
The same is true of institutions of religious women, who are a kind of female clergy in a wider sense of the word, of schools of all kinds, of orphanages and charitable asylums. In the care of the poor and the sick especially, the Catholic Church can do a work which cannot be done so well by any other society, and thus relieve the state of a burden as well as heal a sore on the body politic which is frequently dangerous as well as distressing. Besides these more necessary services to humanity, the Catholic Church contributes to the decoration and embellishment of life, to the refinement of taste, and to the increase of innocent and elevating enjoyment. It ornaments towns and villages with specimens of fine architecture, multiplies statues and paintings, cultivates sacred music, and by its multifarious ceremonies acts most powerfully not only on the souls of men to raise their minds to an unseen world, but, in their human sentiments and manners, to give grace and refinement as well as enjoyment to a life rendered too dull and prosaic by the everlasting drudgery of an industrious and material existence.
All this would not weigh a feather with the severe Puritan ancients who founded this commonwealth. The Catholic religion is a religion of error, they would have said; error is fatal to the soul, and cannot be tolerated in a state where laws are framed according to the laws of God. But times are changed, and both laws and the minds of the descendants of the Puritans are changed with them. Even a great light among the descendants of the Scottish Presbyterians, the Rev. Dr. Hodge, has declared that the Catholic religion teaches the essentials of Christianity, exercises a wholesome moral influence, and cannot be refused the same countenance and aid by the state which is given to the Protestant religion, without the usurpation of an authority to determine what is religious error. Although the New York Observer has raised an outcry against this candid statement of a learned and honest man, and has vehemently denounced the Catholic religion as worse than infidelity, I am persuaded that Yale College will not be satisfied to take a more illiberal position than Princeton, and that the general sense of the Protestant people of Connecticut will accord with that of Dr. Hodge, and reject the contrary extreme of the Observer. The religious people of Connecticut cannot fail to see that they have a common cause with us against atheism and progressive radicalism, and that we are a bulwark against a devastating flood which would sweep away their rights with ours if it once broke over the surface of our society. Our rights stand upon a common basis. They depend from a common chain, which is fastened by the same ring. They have nothing to fear from any violation of their liberty or usurpation of their rights on our part, even should we obtain power enough to be able to attempt such an enterprise. We always respect vested rights and established laws, when these are not contrary to the law of God. The order which is now established is the only one that is good for a state in which the inhabitants are divided in religion, and it enables these divided religious communities to live together in political harmony and social peace. We will not disturb this harmony, and we denounce those who attempt to stir up the passions of the people to destroy it as the enemies of the state as well as impious transgressors of the law of God. The rights of conscience and the liberty of religion which we possess under our laws are invaluable and precious to all of us. And there is indeed a common bond between the descendants of the Puritan founders of this commonwealth and the descendants of the persecuted Catholics of Ireland who have settled on this soil, of which perhaps you have not thought sufficiently. It is the bond which has been made by a conflict which the fathers of both these lines of descendants have maintained against a common enemy. That enemy was the despotic tyranny of the successors of Henry VIII. and their ministers. Our ancestors drew the sword against an invasion of rights which, they avowed, had been conferred upon them by their Creator, and the issue of the war was the establishment of this republic, in which the rights of conscience are declared to be sacred. The ancestors of the “exiles of Erin” who have found a new home in this republic fought, both with the sword and with the patient resistance of martyrdom, against the same despotic violence which invaded all their rights both civic and religious. It is fitting, therefore, that their descendants should dwell together in the land rescued by the blood of heroes from tyranny, and that here should flourish the religion rescued from the same tyranny by the blood of martyrs.
I conclude with the eloquent apostrophe of the Bishop of Orleans to the Belgians, which came from his mouth like the electric flash, amid thunders of applause, at the Congress of Malines in 1867, where I had the privilege of being present. “Vous avez une patrie, sachez la garder!”—“You have a country, know how to keep it!”
When we look abroad and see the dark, threatening clouds overhanging older nations, threatening new tempests to follow those which have lately burst upon them, and then look at home on the peace and liberty we enjoy; our church and religion free, priests, bishops, and the Holy Father from his prison in the Vatican, exercising their lawful jurisdiction without hindrance, we can esteem at their proper worth the blessings we enjoy. We learn how to value order, good government, and civilization founded on religious ideas, as the most precious of all earthly possessions after the faith and the means of eternal salvation. These advantages we possess in the laws and institutions which are summed up in the one word our country—our native land, or the land of our refuge and our children’s nativity. Let us all, therefore, prize, cherish, guard, and loyally serve it during life; prepared and resolved, if necessary, to give our blood and our lives in its defence, in emulation of the patriotic bravery of our noble brothers and ancestors from whom we have received this fair inheritance.
The Widow Of Nain.
“The only son of his mother, and she was a widow.”
The dust on their sandals lay heavy and white, Their garments were damp with the tears of the night, Their hot feet aweary, and throbbing with pain, As they entered the gates of the city of Nain.
But lo! on the pathway a sorrowing throng Pressed, mournfully chanting the funeral song, And like a sad monotone, ceaseless and slow, The voice of a woman came laden with woe.
What need, stricken mothers, to tell how she wept? Ye read by the vigils that sorrow hath kept, Ye know, by the travail of anguish and pain, The desolate grief of the widow of Nain.
As he who was first of the wayfaring men Advanced, the mute burden was lowered, and then As he touched the white grave‐cloths that covered the bier The bearers shrank back, but the mother drew near.
Her snow‐sprinkled tresses had loosened their strands, Great tears fell unchecked on the tightly clasped hands; But hushed the wild sobbing, and stifled her cries, As Jesus of Nazareth lifted his eyes.
Eyes wet with compassion as slowly they fell— Eyes potent to soften grief’s tremulous swell, As, sweetly and tenderly, “Weep not,” he said, And turned to the passionless face of the dead.
White, white gleamed his forehead, loose rippled the hair, Bronze‐tinted, o’er temples transparently fair; And a glory stole up from the earth to the skies, As he called to the voiceless one, “Young man, arise!”
VIII.
The hard, rigid outlines grew fervid with breath, The dull eyes unclosed from the midnight of death; Weep, weep, happy mother, and fall at his feet: Life’s pale, blighted promise grown hopeful and sweet.
IX.
The morning had passed, and the midday heats burned: Once more to the pathway the wayfarers turned. The conqueror of kings had been conquered again: There was joy in the house of the widow of Nain.
Part IV. The Immolation.
LIX.
Several hours had passed since Fleurange’s return. Anxiety, horror, sadness, and emotion, which by turns filled her heart during the affecting scene we have just described, now gave place to a feeling in which a sweet, profound sense of gratitude predominated.
Ah! no one could comprehend, without the experience faith alone gives, the mysterious joy that penetrates the heart when the salvation of a soul seems assured; when, in a tangible manner, as it were, the abyss of divine mercy which ever surrounds us, opens and allows us to sound its depths; when, in answer to our tears, we almost behold the heavens open; when, in return for pardon implored, we are made to comprehend the ineffable signification of two other words, sweet as mercy and boundless as infinitude—pardon obtained.
Fleurange therefore felt, if not happy—for the impressions of the day had been too solemn not to have left a veil of sadness on her soul—at least calm and serene. The sight of that death‐bed had put to flight some of the dreams she so often abandoned herself to now without scruple—dreams of passionate joy at her approaching sacrifice, mingled with the perspective of a brighter future, in which her happiness with George would be increased and consecrated by the sufferings they first shared together—the cherished theme on which lingered her imagination, her heart, and even her soul, which had faith in the efficacy of sacrifice, and instinctively made it the basis of its hopes. Everything, even this, was forgotten for the moment. It was as if a graver, purer, holier strain had put to flight the mingled harmony in which heaven and earth seemed almost confounded. Hitherto, the idea of immolating herself with and for another had seemed noble; but at this quiet hour, after a day of so much agitation, a sublimer thought sprang up in her soul in spite of herself; it was that of a sacrifice unknown to the person for whom one immolates one’s self!
Was not the greatest of sacrifices—the sacrifice which is our example—of such a nature? Was it not made for those who were unaware of it? And has not this very ignorance been regarded by the eternal goodness as a plea for disarming eternal justice?
Fleurange did not attempt to thus define her confused thoughts; she allowed them to float in her mind without welcoming or rejecting them. She was in that frame of mind which unconsciously enfolds a latent disposition in the depths of the soul, that suddenly develops into efforts and sacrifices which seem impossible an hour before they have to be made.
She was alone in one corner of a large, white marble fireplace in which blazed a good fire. She preferred this salon to the others, which were heated invisibly, though it was the smallest in the house, and it was the one she habitually occupied. Clement, after accompanying her home, had returned to the sad place they visited together to obtain, if not an honorable, at least a separate burial of his unfortunate cousin’s remains. Mademoiselle Josephine, at her usual hour, had gone to her fine chamber, which she now occupied with less uneasiness than the first night, and had been for an hour in the capacious bed, where she had learned to sleep as comfortably as under the muslin curtains which generally guarded her slumbers.
It was nearly ten o’clock, and Fleurange in her turn was about to retire, when the noise of a carriage was heard, the bell rang, and a few minutes after a card was brought her. She looked at it: “The Countess Vera de Liningen”—and beneath, written with a pencil: “Will Mademoiselle Fleurange d’Yves have the kindness to see me a moment?”
“Vera!—the Countess Vera!—”
Fleurange repeated the name twice. It was the first time she had thought of it since she left Florence. She remembered hearing it once in a conversation between the Princess Catherine and the marquis, the first time she ever saw the latter. From that time, Vera’s name had never been mentioned before her. The marquis instinctively avoided it in talking with her the day before, as he did that of Gabrielle in conversing with Vera, and no one mentioned it at the palace. Fleurange’s surprise was therefore inexpressible. She remained with her eyes fixed on the card, till the valet de chambre took the liberty of reminding her the Countess Vera was waiting in her carriage for an answer.
“Certainly. Ask her to come up.” Then she waited, with a mixture of curiosity and embarrassment, for the entrance of the visitor, without knowing exactly why. She was almost breathless from agitation; but when the door opened, and she saw the beautiful maid of honor, she felt partially relieved.
“Ah! it is you, mademoiselle,” she exclaimed joyfully. “Pardon me for not having divined it immediately, but I did not know this morning the name of her who received me so kindly.”
It now occurred to Fleurange that the maid of honor had been sent by the empress sooner than she expected with the favorable reply promised, but the visitor’s pale face and silence struck her and checked the words on her lips.
“You were unaware of my name this morning, but did you never hear it before?”
Fleurange blushed. “Never would be incorrect,” replied she.—And she stopped.
“No matter,” continued Vera. “I do not care to know when or how you heard it. I can imagine they did not say much to you about me. But allow me to ask you in my turn if you have not another name besides that under which I had the honor of presenting you to her majesty!”
“My name is Fleurange,” replied the young girl simply, “but it is not the one I habitually bear.”
“And your other name?” asked Vera, with a trembling voice.
Fleurange was astonished at the manner in which this question was asked, and still more so at the effect of her reply, which produced a frightful change in the listener’s face.
“Gabrielle!” repeated she. “I guessed rightly, then.”
An embarrassing silence followed this exclamation. Fleurange did not know what to say. She awaited an explanation of the scene which appeared more and more strange. But while she was looking at Vera with increased surprise during this long silence, a sudden apprehension seized her, and a faint glimpse of the truth flashed across her mind. Nothing could have been more vague than the remembrance of the name mentioned before her but once, but that time it was in a conversation respecting George, and she bethought herself that she understood it to be a question of a marriage the princess desired for her son. Was it with reluctance Vera had now brought the permission for another to accompany him? Such was the question Fleurange asked herself. Approaching Vera, therefore, she said to her softly:
“If you have come with a message, how can I thank you sufficiently, mademoiselle, for taking the trouble of bringing it yourself!”
Vera hastily withdrew her hand, and retreated several steps; then, as if suffering from an emotion she could not overcome, she fell into an arm‐ chair beside the table, and for some moments remained pale and breathless, with a gloomy, forbidding air, wiping away from time to time with an abrupt gesture the tears which, in spite of all her efforts, escaped from her eyes.
Fleurange, motionless with surprise, looked at her with mingled interest and astonishment, but, the frank decision of her character prevailing over her timidity, she came at once to the point.
“Countess Vera,” said she, “if I have not guessed the motive that brings you here, tell me the real one; there is something in all this which I do not understand. Be frank; I will be likewise. Let us not remain thus towards one another. Above all, do not look at me as if we were not only strangers, but enemies.”
At this word, Vera raised her head. “Enemies!” she said. “Well, yes, at present we are.”
What did she mean? Fleurange crossed her arms, and looked at her attentively, trying to guess the meaning of her enigmatical words, and the still more obscure enigma of her face, which expressed by turns the most contradictory sentiments; the enigma of her eyes, which sometimes gazed at her with hatred, and then with sweetness and a humble, beseeching look. At length Vera seemed decided to continue. “You are right,” she said; “I must put an end to your suspense, and explain my strange conduct; but I need courage to do this. To come here as I have, to appeal to you as I am going to do, I must—I must, without knowing why—”
“Well,” said Fleurange with a faint smile, “continue. You must what?”
Vera went on in a low tone, as if affected: “I must have had a secret instinct that you were kind and generous.”
This result of so much hesitation did not throw any light on the subject, but only made it more obscure.
“There has been preamble enough,” said Fleurange, with a calm accent of firmness. “Speak clearly now, Countess Vera, tell me everything without reservation. You may believe nothing to fear. Though your words do me an injury I can neither foresee nor comprehend, speak, I insist upon it. Hesitate no longer.”
“Well, here,” said Vera, suddenly throwing on the table a paper till now concealed.
Fleurange took it, looked at it, and blushed at first, then turned pale. “My petition!” she said. “You have brought it back? It has been refused, then?”
“No; it was not sent.”
“You mean that the empress, after showing me so much kindness, changed her mind and refused to present it?”
“No; on the contrary, she ordered me to forward your petition, and to add her recommendation.”
“I disobeyed her orders.”
“I await the explanation you doubtless intend giving me. Go on without any interruption; I am listening.”
“Well, first, did you know that George de Walden was the husband promised me—to whom my father destined me from infancy?”
“Who was promised you!—from infancy! No, I did not know that. No matter; go on.”
“No matter, indeed; that is not the point, though it is proper to inform you of it. Neither is it a question of his misfortune, or his frightful sentence, or that terrible Siberia where you wished to accompany him and participate in a lot the severities of which you could neither alleviate nor perhaps endure. This is the point: to preserve him from that destiny, to save him, to enable him to regain life, honor, and liberty—in a word, all he has lost. His property, name, and rank can all be restored to him. It is this I have come to tell you and ask you to second.”
“All can be restored to him?” repeated Fleurange, in a strange voice. “By what means?—what authority?”
“The emperor’s. I have appealed to his clemency, and my prayers have prevailed, but on two conditions, one of which is imposed on George, and the other depends on me. To these two conditions, there is a third which depends on you—you alone!”
Fleurange’s large eyes fastened on Vera with an expression of profound astonishment and anguish.
“Finish, I conjure you, if you are not mad in speaking to me so, or I in listening to you—if we are not both deprived of our reason!”
Vera clasped her hands, and passionately exclaimed: “Oh! I beg you to have pity on him!” She stopped, choked with emotion.
Fleurange continued to gaze at her with the same expression, and, without speaking, made a sign for her to continue. She seemed to concentrate her attention in order to comprehend the words addressed her.
“I am waiting,” she said at last. “I am listening attentively and calmly; speak to me in the same manner.”
Vera resumed in a calmer tone: “Well, this morning just as I had finished reading your petition and learned for the first time who the exile was you wished to accompany—at that very moment the emperor arrived at the palace and sent for me.”
“The emperor!” said Fleurange, with surprise.
“Yes, and can you imagine what he wished to say to me? You could not, and I am not surprised, for you are not aware how earnestly I had solicited George’s pardon, and, to this end, how zealously I had sought out every circumstance calculated to conciliate his sovereign. Well, what the emperor wished to inform me was that this pardon would be granted me—me, do you understand?—but on two conditions.”
“His pardon!” exclaimed Fleurange. “Go on, I am listening.—”
“The first, that he should pass four years on his estates in Livonia without leaving them.—” Vera stopped.
“I hear; and next?” said Fleurange, raising her eyes.
“Next,” said Vera slowly and anxiously, “that the will of my father and his should be fulfilled before his departure.”
Fleurange shuddered. An icy chill struck to her heart, and her head swam as if with dizziness. But she remained perfectly motionless.
“His pardon is at this price?” said she in a low voice.
“Yes; the emperor has taken an interest in me from my childhood; he loved my father, and it has pleased him to make this act of clemency depend on the accomplishment of my father’s wish.”
There was a long silence. Vera herself trembled at seeing Fleurange’s pale lips, and colorless cheeks, and her eyes looking straightforward, lost in space.
“And he?”—she said at last. “He accepts his pardon on this condition—without hesitation?”
“Without hesitation!” repeated Vera, blushing with new emotion. “That is what I cannot say. It is this doubt that humiliates and alarms me, for the emperor would regard the least hesitation as fresh ingratitude, and perhaps would annul his pardon.”
“But why should he hesitate?” said Fleurange, in an almost inaudible tone.
“Fleurange,” said Vera, in that passionate tone she had used two or three times during this interview, “let us rend each other’s hearts, if need be, but let us go on to the end. Have you had permission to see George since you came?”
“No.”
“But he expects you; he knows you have arrived, and the devotedness that has brought you here?”
“No, he is still ignorant of all this; he was to be informed of it to‐ morrow.”
A flash of joy lit up Vera’s black eyes. “Then it depends on you whether he hesitates or not—whether he is saved.—Yes, Fleurange, let him remain ignorant of your arrival, let him not see you again—let him never behold you again,” she continued, looking at her with a jealous terror she could not conceal, “and his life will again become brilliant and happy—as it was—as it always should be—and the remembrance of the last few months will disappear like a dream!”
“Like a dream!” repeated Fleurange mechanically, passing her hand over her brow.
“I have told you everything now,” said Vera. “I have done you an injury I can understand better than any one else. But,” she continued, with an accent that resounded in the depths of the listener’s soul, “I wished to save George, I wished to win him back to me! And I thought, I know not why, for I am generally distrustful—yes, I thought I could induce you to aid me against yourself!”
Fleurange, with her hands clasped on her knees, and her eyes gazing before her with a fixed expression, seemed for some moments insensible to everything. She was listening, however—she was listening to that clear, distinct voice which resounded in her soul in a tone so pure—a voice she had never failed to recognize and obey.
If George were free, if he recovered his name, rank, and former position, would she not still be in the same position as before? In that case, could she treacherously usurp the consent obtained from his mother, and that to the detriment of the one before her—the wife chosen from his infancy? Would it not be treachery to him to present herself before him at the moment of recovering his liberty, and thereby endanger its loss with the momentary favor that conferred it?
She placed her icy hand on Vera’s, and turned towards her with a sweet expression of resolution. “That is enough,” she said, in a calm tone. “You have done right. Be easy, I understand it all.”
Vera, astonished at her expression and accent, looked at her with surprise.
“Do not be afraid,” continued Fleurange, in the same tone. “Act as if I were far away—as if I had never come.” And, taking the petition lying on the table, she tore it in pieces, and threw it into the fire! There was a momentary blaze, which died away, and she looked at the ashes as they flew.
Vera, with an irresistible impulse, pressed her lips to the hand she seized, then remained mute and confounded. She had come determined to prevail over her rival, to convince her, to use every means of contending if she failed in her first efforts, but her victory suddenly assumed an aspect she had not anticipated. It had certainly been an easy one, and yet Vera felt it had left a bleeding wound. She experienced for a moment more uneasiness than joy, and her attitude expressed no more of triumph than that of Fleurange of defeat. While one remained with her head and eyes cast down, the other had risen. A passing emotion colored Fleurange’s cheek, the struggle of the sacrifice gave animation and an unusual brilliancy to her face.
“I think,” said she, “you have nothing more to say to me.”
“No—for what I would like to say I cannot, dare not.”
Vera rose and turned towards the door. A thought occurred to her. She approached Fleurange. “Excuse my forgetfulness,” said she; “here is the bracelet you lost this morning. I was commissioned to restore it to you.”
At the sight of the talisman, Fleurange started; her momentary color faded away, she became deadly pale, and, as she looked at it silently, some tears, the only ones she shed during the interview, ran down her cheeks. But it was only for an instant. Before Vera realized what she was doing, Fleurange clasped the bracelet around her rival’s arm.
“This talisman was a present from the Princess Catherine to her son’s betrothed. She said it would bring her good luck. It no longer belongs to me. I return it to you; it is yours.”
Fleurange held out her hand. “We shall never see each other again,” she continued; “let us not bear away any bitter remembrance of each other.”
Vera took her hand without looking at her. She had never felt touched and humiliated to such a degree; gratitude itself was wounding to her pride. But Fleurange’s sweet, grave voice was now irresistible, and spoke to her heart in spite of herself. She hesitated between these two feelings. Fleurange resumed: “You are right. It is not my place to wait for you at this time—you have nothing more to forgive me for, I believe, and I forgive you everything.”
And as Vera still remained motionless with her head bent down, Fleurange leaned forward and embraced her.
LX.
The Marquis Adelardi often declared he had witnessed so many extraordinary and unexpected events that he was seldom surprised at anything that happened. But the day that now dawned brought a surprise of the liveliest kind, and even a second one in the course of a few hours. He rose late, according to his custom, and was breakfasting beside the fire when a note was brought him which put a premature end to the repast just begun. After reading it, he fell into deep thought, then rose and strode around his room. Finally he went to the window, and read the following note a second time.
“MY KIND FRIEND: I have changed my mind. I earnestly beg you when you see Count George not to mention my name, and, above all, to take the greatest precaution to keep him for ever ignorant of the plans I formed and the journey I have made. This will be easy, for no one knows I am here, and tomorrow, before night, I shall have left St. Petersburg. Everything will be explained to you, but I only write now what is most essential for you to know without any delay.”
In vain he read and re‐read. Such were the words, signed Fleurange, which he held in his hands. For once the marquis was completely at a loss. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could account for this sudden change. The success of her petition presented the empress the day before was certain. He recalled every detail of his recent interview with her, during which, having nothing more to conceal, she naïvely revealed all the depth and sincerity of her sentiments towards George. He had long been aware of her firmness and courage, and the idea of her drawing back at the last moment in view of the trial never occurred to him. There was, then, an impenetrable mystery, and he impatiently awaited the hour he could go for the promised explanation. But he must first keep his engagement with George. Poor George! he inspired him now with fresh pity, though he had doubted, the evening before, if he was worthy of the consolation in store for him. It seemed now as if he could not live without it, and that a new and more frightful sentence had been pronounced against him. The marquis was about to start for the fortress to fulfil more sadly than ever the painful duty of his powerless friendship, when another letter was brought him. The mere sight of this second missive made him start, and he examined with extreme astonishment the address and the very envelope that bore it, the impression on the seal, and the slight perfume it gave out. All this was a source of surprise, and, for once, it was not unreasonable, as it generally is, to dwell on these exterior signs before solving the mystery by opening the letter. The reader may judge, after learning that the Marquis Adelardi recognized his friend’s writing in the address. Since George’s imprisonment, he had neither had permission to write, nor the means. In the second place, the paper, the arms on the seal, the perfume—all these things belonged to a different condition, for certainly none of these elegances had been allowed him in prison. The mere exterior of the letter, therefore, had something inexplicable, and, when he opened it to solve the enigma, he read as follows:
“MY VERY DEAR FRIEND: Perhaps the very sight of this letter has given you a suspicion of its contents. If not, know that I am free, or, at least, I shall be so to‐morrow! Meanwhile, I have left the frightful cell where you found me yesterday, and now, thanks to the governor of the fortress, am established in his own apartment and surrounded once more by all the delightful accessories of civilized life of which I thought myself for ever deprived—accessories which are only a dawn of the delightful day before me. Yes, Adelardi, free! by the favor of the emperor, against whom I eagerly pledge myself never to enter into a conspiracy as long as I live. Free on two conditions: one to live at my home in Livonia four years; the other—guess what it is! It is not more severe than the first: it is to return to my first love—to her to whom I owe my pardon. In a word, to end where I began, by marrying Vera de Liningen! What do you say to that? Is not this a dénoûment worthy of a romance? You predicted it once, do you remember it? ‘You will renounce this folly which tempts you, and keep the promise you made.’ I was far from believing it then, and perhaps it is well even now that that beautiful siren is seven hundred leagues off, for I know not what would be the result were I subjected to the fascination of those eyes which turned my head, whereas I am now wholly absorbed in the happiness that awaits me. Vera still loves me. She is also beautiful in her way, and, above all, possesses a charm which makes me forget all others. She has the beautiful eyes of liberty which I owe her. Therefore I am not tempted to refuse the hand she is ready to accept, or even my heart, though somewhat blasé, but now filled with gratitude strong enough to sufficiently resemble the love she has a right to expect.
“Au revoir, Adelardi! Come when you please; I am no longer a prisoner, though I have pledged myself not to leave here till I go to the empress’ chapel to meet her who is to accompany me into the mitigated exile to which we are condemned.”
It would be difficult to describe the strange effect of this letter, coming so soon after the other, upon the person to whom they were both addressed. It would be impossible to say whether he was glad or sorry, indignant or affected, relieved or overwhelmed, by such sudden news; and, though only imperfectly enlightened respecting some of the circumstances he wished to know, he felt that somehow Fleurange had been informed of George’s pardon before himself, and the conditions attached to it. This was the evident meaning of her note, which now seemed to the marquis so generous, so touching, and even so sublime, that his whole interest centred, with a kind of passion, in this charming, noble girl. Her letter, which lay beside George’s before him, displayed the greatest contrast imaginable to the cold, selfish levity of the latter. At all events, he had no reason now to be anxious about him on whom everything seemed to smile, but rather about her who was immolating herself to‐day as much as yesterday—unsuspected by the object—and with a devotedness a thousand times more disinterested and more generous than before.
At that moment the door opened, and the marquis uttered an exclamation of joy and welcome at hearing Clement announced. He was just thinking of him, and wishing he could see him at once. As soon as he looked at him he perceived he was unaware of what had occurred. Clement returned home at a late hour the night before, and had not seen Fleurange since their return from the hospital. He now came from the burial of his unfortunate cousin in a distant, obscure spot, to beg the marquis to use his influence to obtain permission to place a simple stone cross on his forlorn grave. But he could not find any opportunity of introducing the subject, the marquis was so eager to enter on that which absorbed him. He informed Clement of George’s pardon and the conditions on which it was granted; but in his eagerness he did not at first perceive the effect of the news on his listener. The latter remained motionless, and for moments his excessive surprise prevented him from replying. The aspect of everything was so changed by the intelligence that his mind refused to take it in. He looked at the marquis with so singular an expression that he was struck by it, and clearly saw he had unguardedly touched a deeper and more vital point than he supposed.
“Pardon me, Dornthal, I have excited you more than I wished or expected.”
“Yes,” said Clement, in a strange voice, “I acknowledge it; but does she know what you have just informed me of?”
The marquis in reply gave him Fleurange’s note. He read it with a still more lively emotion than he had just experienced; but he succeeded better in controlling it.
“Poor Gabrielle! This is evidently a generous, spontaneous impulse, worthy of her. But,” continued he, in quite a different accent, in which trembled an indignation he repressed with difficulty, “I cannot comprehend how this—how Count George can unhesitatingly consent to the conditions proposed, for really I can never believe them rigorously imposed by the emperor, still less that they could be accepted if he appreciates as he ought the sentiments which I should suppose would prevent him from accepting them.”
The marquis hesitated a moment, and then said: “Here, Dornthal, time presses; it is better you should know everything without delay.” And he gave him George’s letter.
As Clement read it, contempt and anger were so clearly displayed in his face that the marquis was confounded at the flash of indignation with which he crushed the letter and threw it on the table. “That is exactly what I should have expected from the man you told me of yesterday. Poor Gabrielle!” he continued, in a voice trembling with emotion and tenderness, “it is thus that the precious treasures of thy heart have been lavished and wasted!”
He leaned on the table, and hid his face in his hands. For some instants there was a silence neither sought to break. At length Clement returned to himself. “Once more pardon me, M. le Marquis. I really do not know what you will think of me after the weakness I have shown before you. But no matter, it is not a question of myself, but of her. There is one point I recommend to you which there is no need of insisting upon: she must remain ignorant of the contents of this letter. She must never know—never, do you understand?—what kind of a love she thought worthy of hers.”
The marquis looked at him with astonishment. “And it is you, Dornthal, who are so anxious as to your cousin’s remembrance of Count George!”
This total absence of vulgar triumph and selfish hope added another notable surprise to those of the morning. Clement neither noticed Adelardi’s tone nor the kind, affectionate expression of regard which accompanied the words he had just uttered.
“I wish her to suffer as little as possible,” said he briefly; “that is my only aim and thought.”
He rose to go out. The marquis pressed his hand with a cordiality he rarely manifested, and after Clement’s departure he remained a long time thoughtful. Perhaps at that moment he was thinking how much more satisfaction there was in meeting and studying such a noble heart than most of those whose acquaintance he had hitherto sought and cultivated with so much eagerness.
LXI.
At Clement’s return, he learned that his cousin had asked for him several times. He immediately went up to the room she occupied. His emotion at seeing her again, though less sudden than that he had just experienced, was deeper than he anticipated, for he was unprepared for the change wrought within so short a time. She was, however, as calm and resolute as the night before, though she had passed through what might be called the agony of sacrifice—that hour of inexpressible suffering, not when the sacrifice of one’s self is decided upon, not even that in which it is consummated, but the intermediate hour in which repugnance still struggles against the will. It was this hour endured by our common Master in the order of his sufferings after he took upon himself our likeness.
Fleurange had only taken a short hour of repose before day. The remainder of the night she passed wholly in conflict with suffering. She then allowed the repressed sobs that filled her breast during her interview with Vera to burst forth without restraint as soon as she was alone for the night; she gave herself up to the poor solace of tasting at leisure the bitterness of sacrifice, repelling every consoling thought—almost allowing the waves of despair to gather round her, and, if not to break over her, at least to threaten her.
The chamber she occupied was more spacious and sumptuous than Mademoiselle Josephine’s, being that of the Princess Catherine herself. It was lighted only by a lamp which burned before the holy images enshrined in gold and silver in one corner, according to the Russian custom. Fleurange threw herself on a couch, and there, with her head buried in the cushions, her long hair dishevelled, and her hands clasped to her face inundated with tears, she gave vent to her grief for a long time without any attempt to moderate it.
Once before in her life she had abandoned herself to a similar transport of grief, though certainly with much less reason. It was when she left Paris two years before, and it seemed as if she was alone in the world, and all the joys of life had come to an end. Those who have not forgotten the beginning of this story may remember that on that occasion the sight of a star suddenly appearing in the clear sky brought her a message of peace. God knows, when it pleaseth him, how to give a voice to everything in nature, and to speak to his creatures by the work of his hands, and even of theirs. An impression of such a nature now infused the first ray of calmness into the tempest that completely overwhelmed her soul. Suddenly raising her head from the attitude in which she had so long remained, her eyes naturally turned towards the light diffused by the lamp before the images in the corner of the chamber, the richest of which sparkled in its ray. In these Greek paintings, as we are aware, the heads alone on the canvas stand out from the gold and precious stones that surround them. That which now attracted Fleurange’s attention was the image of Christ—that sacred face of the well‐known type common to all the representations of Byzantine art. That long, grave face, those mild eyes, with their calmness and depth, have a thrilling, mysterious effect which surpasses a thousand times every reproduction of human beauty. This impression, which a pious love of art enables every one to comprehend, was associated with a tender remembrance of Fleurange’s childhood. She had often prayed before a face of similar aspect in the chapel of Santa Maria al Prato. She now looked steadfastly into those divine eyes gazing at her, and it seemed as if that sweet penetrating look pierced to the depths of her soul, and infused a sudden, marvellous, inexpressible consolation. Changing gradually her previous attitude, she remained for some time seated with clasped hands, transfixed. At last, her eyes still fastened on the holy face, she fell on her knees, bent down her head, and remained a long time buried in profound recollection. Her immoderate grief seemed to diminish and change its character. Her tears, without ceasing to flow, lost their bitterness and changed their object; for in the mildness of that majestic look she read a reproach which she comprehended!—
“O my Saviour and my God! pardon me!” exclaimed she, with fervor, bending down till her forehead touched the floor.
Pardon!—Yes, in spite of her purity, her piety, and the uprightness of her soul, it was a word Fleurange was likewise obliged to utter. In it she felt lay solace and peace for her heart. She perceived it now for the first time. A new light began to rise in her soul, like the faint flush of aurora which precedes day, and her grief seemed a punishment merited for forgetfulness, her tears an expiation. These thoughts were still confused; but their influence was already beneficent, and she soon felt really springing up within her the courage and fortitude which she outwardly manifested during her interview with Vera. She had always been capable of action in spite of suffering, and she now sought it, realizing its benefit. The night was far advanced, but she did not feel the need of repose, and before seeking it she would give her heart and mind, even more fatigued than her body, the relief they needed. Under the impression of all the incidents and varied emotions of the day, she wrote the Madre Maddalena a letter which was the faithful transcript of all she had passed through. The joy of the morning, the sacrifice of the evening, her despair scarcely subsided, nothing was concealed or suppressed, not even a fresh ardent aspiration towards the cloister which she thought could no longer be shut against her, and which now seemed the only refuge of her broken heart.
There is a certain art in reading the hearts of others; but it is as great a one to be able to read one’s own, and this art Fleurange possessed in the highest degree when in the presence of that great soul which afar off as well as near watched over hers. This outpouring soothed her. She afterwards slept awhile, and, on awaking, courageously despatched the letter which we have just seen the Marquis Adelardi read and communicate to Clement.
But such a night leaves its traces. Fleurange’s swollen eyes, her contracted features, her pale, trembling lips, and her sad expression indicated suffering which was an insupportable torture to Clement. He would have spared her this at the expense of his life, as it is allowable to say he had proved. But now that the arduous duty of earnestly desiring her happiness through the affection of another was no longer required of him, the impetuous cry of his own heart became almost irresistible in its power, and Clement never manifested more self‐control than this morning in subduing the impulse which prompted him a thousand times to throw himself at his cousin’s feet, and passionately tell her she loved and regretted an ungrateful man, and that she herself was even more ungrateful than he! But instead of that, he silently pressed her hand. Fleurange saw he was aware of everything, and it was a relief to have nothing to tell. In a few words they made arrangements for their departure, and Clement promised her to start within twenty‐four hours.
Meanwhile, Mademoiselle Josephine appeared, and Clement, too preoccupied to use any circumlocution, simply announced the change in his cousin’s intentions, without giving her any explanation. But when, in the height of her joy, mademoiselle exclaimed, “She is going back with us!—O mon Dieu! what happiness!” Clement frowned and pressed her hand in so expressive a manner that the poor demoiselle stopped short and, according to her custom, buried her joy in utter silence, saying to herself that the day would perhaps come when she would understand all these inexplicable things, and, among others, why, when she wept at Gabrielle’s leaving them, it was necessary to conceal her sorrow; and now she was to remain, it was not permitted to manifest her joy.
“All this is very singular—I always seem to take aim at the wrong moment. And yet, Clement allow me to say that I suspect that, as to this Monsieur le Comte, it was I—and I alone—who was right.”
This last reflection did not escape her, it is reasonable to suppose, till later, at one of those seasons of special unburdening her mind to Clement which she sought now and then, and we should add that the smile in return amply repaid her for the frown we have just noted.
The evening passed away almost in silence. The Marquis Adelardi spent it with them. The frightful alteration in Fleurange’s features did not allow him to mistake the extent of her sufferings; and her calm, simple manner redoubled the enthusiasm she had always inspired him with—an enthusiasm which gradually ripened into solid friendship, and ultimately wrought a durable, beneficent effect on his life.
Before Clement and his cousin separated for the night, they spoke of Felix’s sad burial, and its lack of any religious ceremony. The marquis had promised to obtain the last favor Clement asked—that a cross should mark the spot where he reposed. The following morning Mass was to be celebrated for him in the Catholic church.
“We will attend this Mass together,” said Fleurange.
“Yes, Gabrielle, that was my expectation.”
The next morning, at an early hour, Fleurange and her cousin were prostrate at the foot of the altar in the large Catholic church on the Nevskoi Prospekt. After all the sorrow that had overwhelmed the young girl’s soul since the night before, this was an hour of sad consolation and repose. Her long journey, after all, in spite of the bitter deception, in spite of the grief and sacrifice at the end, had not been made in vain. He whose last hours she had consoled, and for whom they were now praying, had carried away with him the blessed influence of her presence into those regions to which repentance opens the door! Repentance! the salvation of the soul that feels it, the benediction of the soul that seconds it, the mysterious joy of the angels that inspire it and rejoice over it as one of the delights of their eternal beatitude!
They left the church, and slowly descended the long avenue bordered by trees called the Nevskoi Prospekt. They found their way impeded by a numerous crowd in front of the gate of the Anitschkoff Palace, which they had to pass. Fleurange, lost in thought, was walking slowly along without looking around, and Clement also was absorbed in his own reflections, when they were both startled as if by an electric shock.
“The newly married pair are coming out,” said a voice.
“Married!—condemned, you mean,” replied another, laughing. “You know they are both going into exile.”
They heard no more. Clement’s sudden effort to lead Fleurange away was powerless. She resisted it, and, leaving his arm without his being able to prevent it, she swiftly made her way to the front, and leaned against a tree. She saw the grille open—the carriage appeared; it drew near; at last she saw him! Yes; she saw Count George’s noble features, his smiling face, his radiant look, and she caught a glimpse of the black eyes and golden locks of the bride. Then it seemed to grow dark around her, and everything vanished from her thoughts as well as from her sight!
Epilogue.
—“No, my Fior Angela, I once more say no, as when you made the same request at Santa Maria that lovely evening in May while we were gazing at the setting sun over the cloisters. What has been changed? And why should God call you now to this retreat if he did not call you then?—Because you suffer still more? But, my poor child, you were suffering then. Life, you said, seemed ‘empty and cheerless, unsatisfactory and imperfect.’ And, indeed, you were not wrong. That is its real aspect when we compare it with the true life that awaits us. From that point of view nothing truly can give it the least attraction; but with this kind of disgust there is no sadness mingled. We are not sad when an object seems poor and valueless compared with another object wonderful and divine of which we are sure. As I have already told you, this is the disgust of the world whence springs the irresistible call to the cloister; but, as I likewise said, this divine voice, when it speaks to the soul, resounds alone, to the exclusion of all earthly voices. A flame is kindled that absorbs and extinguishes all others, even those earthly lights that are attractive and pure. That divine call has not been made to you. The earthly happiness you dreamed of has failed you, that is all. And this disappointment for the second time has inspired you with the same wish as before; but, as on that occasion, I believe if God claimed your life he would not have permitted such a heart as that of my Fleurange to be divided for a day!
“This time, it is true, everything is at an end, and without remedy. You are irrevocably separated from him to whom you gave your heart—allow me to say now, to whom you gave it unreasonably!—You shudder, my poor child, you find me cruel, and all the false brilliancy which fascinated you, now lights up anew the image still present and still dear to your imagination; nevertheless, I will go on.
“There is an earthly love which, if it lengthens the road that leads to God, does not, however, turn one from it—which, by the very virtues it requires, the sacrifices it imposes, and the sufferings that spring from it, often seconds the noblest impulses of the soul.
“Do you not feel now, Fleurange, that the foundation of such a love was wanting to yours? I perceived it at Santa Maria as soon as I heard your story to the end, and looked into the most secret recesses of your heart. I then understood why God had placed obstacles in your way, and imposed a sacrifice on you. Your sufferings appeared to me the expiation of an idolatry you did not realize the extent of.
“If you had shown any doubt or hesitation as to the course to be pursued, if you had been weakly desirous of sparing yourself and escaping the sacrifice imposed, perhaps I should at that time have expressed myself more severely. But you acted with firmness and uprightness, and I deferred revealing to you the secret malady of your heart till, with time, peace should be restored to you. Till then, what you suffered seemed to me a sufficient punishment.
“But it was not to be so. The temptation was to be renewed, and under a form impossible for my poor child to resist. She yielded to the generous, passionate impulse of her heart, and found in the very excess of her devotedness a means of satisfying her conscience which she confusedly felt the need of. But something more was essential: she must suffer still more—more than before. In short, the idol must be shattered, and this destruction seemed to involve the very breaking of her own heart!—
“But it is not so, Fleurange. Across the distance that separates us I would make my voice heard, and wish it possessed a divine power when I say to you: ‘Rise up and walk.’ Yes; resume your course through the life God gives you, and courageously bless him for having snatched you from the snare of a love not founded on him, which must have proved hollow sooner or later. Then look around, see whom you can console and aid; see also whom you can love; especially notice who loves you, and banish from your heart the thought, equivalent to blasphemy, which you express in saying, ‘My life is stripped of all that made it desirable!’—
“Some day, my Fior Angela, you will again recall these bitter, ungrateful words, and will, I assure you, see their falsity. If God did not create you to love him to the exclusion of those lawful affections which reflect a ray of his love, you were still less created to find rest in a love deprived of that light—a love whose sudden rending and keen anguish preserved you from proving its perishable nature and spared you the pain of irreparable deception!
“Once more, Fleurange, prostrate yourself before God, and give thanks: then rise up and act. No lingering pity over yourself, no dwelling regretfully on your deceived hopes and the pain you have suffered. Courage! Your heart has been weak, it yielded to fascination; but your volition as yet has never ceased to be strong. However rough the path of duty, it was enough for you to see it in order to walk in it without faltering. Courage, I say! You will live. You will do better than live—you will recover from all this, and recall the time that seemed so dark as that which preceded the real day that is to illumine your life.
“At first this letter will add to your sadness. You will feel yourself deprived of everything, even of the consolation you expected of me; but do not yield to the temptation of burning this letter after reading it. Keep it to read over again, and be sure that sooner or later the day will come when a sweet promise of happiness will respond at the bottom of your heart at reading it. You will then comprehend what were the prayers of your Madre Maddalena for you, dear Fleurange, for they will on that day have been heard!—”
This reply to the letter Fleurange wrote during the night of agitation which followed her interview with Vera we lay before our readers at its arrival at Rosenheim after her return from her sad journey; but one summer evening, two years after, the young girl, seated on a bench overlooking the river, read it over the second time. She was in her old seat, but her appearance was somewhat changed. A severe illness, resulting from the emotion and fatigue endured two years before, endangered her life, and to her convalescence had succeeded a malady slower, deeper, and more difficult to heal, against which all remedies, though energetically seconded by a resolute will, long remained ineffectual.
During this period of weakness Fleurange had never known before, life assumed a new and formidable aspect. For a long time she was unable to struggle actively against the double languor of illness and depression; she had to endure inaction without making it an additional torture to herself and others; in short, she was obliged to be constantly and silently on her guard against herself. She succeeded, however, accepting with grateful docility all the care that surrounded her. She did not repel her friends from her crushed heart, but, on the contrary, endeavored to convince them that their affection was sufficient, and that, once more with them, nothing was wanting. By degrees, it required no effort to say this. As the sun in spring‐time melts away the snow, then warms the earth and covers it with flowers, so, under the influence of their beneficent tenderness, everything began to revive in her heart and soul. Was it not delightful, as she lay half asleep on her chaise longue for long hours, to hear around her, like the warblings of birds, Frida’s caressing voice mingled with the tones of her cousin’s little children whom she loved to hold in her arms and caress when they awoke her? Was it not a consolation to rest her weary head on a bosom almost maternal? Was it not salutary to converse with her Uncle Ludwig when he wheeled his chair near the young invalid, and spoke of so many things worthy of her attention without ever turning it away from the highest of all? And Hilda? And Clara? And Julian and Hansfelt? Did they not all come with their constant affectionate interest, each one bringing, as it were, a flower to add its perfume to the air she breathed? Finally, was it nothing when she opened her eyes to meet the kind glance of her old friend who, after fearing to lose her, was never weary of gazing at her now she was again restored to life?
And what shall we say of him whom we have not yet named—him whose solicitude for her was not apparently greater than that of his parents and sisters, but who, during her long convalescence, ended by taking a place beside her which no one thought of disputing? Clement’s character has been badly delineated if, after the unexpected occurrence that restored freedom to his hopes, it is supposed he was prompt to admit them, and especially to express them. Nevertheless, since it was no longer an absolute duty to maintain a strong, constant control over himself; since the fear of betraying himself no longer obliged him to a restraint with his cousin which had extended to every subject, and ended by frequently obliging him to partially conceal from her the superiority of his mind and the rare nature of his intelligence, a change was wrought in him which he did not realize himself, and now gave to his physiognomy, the tone of his voice, and his whole person a wholly different character than before in the eyes of her to whom he thus appeared for the first time. She noticed it with surprise, and, when he stopped reading to express the thoughts that sprang spontaneously from his heart when moved, or his mind unimpeded in its flight, and touched on a thousand subjects hitherto deemed forbidden, she became thoughtful, and, in spite of herself, compared his eloquence of soul, whose source was so profound, and whose flight was sometimes so elevated, with the eloquence of another which once dazzled her, the only charm of which sprang from his carefully cultivated mind, and his mind alone. Every day she impatiently awaited this hour for reading or conversation. She already appreciated her cousin’s devotedness, the incomparable kindness of his heart, his trustworthiness, his energy, and his courage. She had given him credit for all these qualities before, and yet, all at once, it seemed as if she had never known him. She even asked herself one day if she had ever looked at him, so completely did the expression of his countenance—which beamed with what is most divine here on earth—a double nobleness of mind and soul—so fully did his look and smile atone for the imperfections already alluded to in Clement’s features, but which time had greatly modified to his advantage. She soon felt that, though she had always cherished a strong regard for her cousin, she had been unjust to him and never appreciated his real worth.
But the day, the hour, the moment when she discovered she had been not only unjust, but ungrateful, and even cruel, we cannot state, and perhaps she did not know herself. Was it the day when, after reading in a tremulous tone a passage that expressed what he dared not utter, he suddenly raised his eyes and looked at her as he had never done before? Was it on another occasion, when, playing one tune after another on his violin, he ended with that song without words which Hansfelt called Hidden Love, and suddenly stopped, incapable of continuing? Or was it when, towards the end of the second spring after their return, she had fully recovered, and he saw her for the first time in the open air standing near a rose‐bush with her hands full of flowers? Was it when he knelt to pick up one that had fallen at her feet, and remained in that position till she extended her hand and blushingly bade him rise? No matter. That day came, and not long before the one when we find her seated on the bench by the river‐side, attentively reading over the letter Madre Maddalena had written her two years before.
The young girl, as we have said, had changed somewhat since we last saw her. Her long illness had left some traces, but those traces which are an additional charm in youth, betokening the complete return of brilliant health. Fleurange’s form was more slender and supple; her complexion more transparent; her long hair, cut off during her illness, and now growing out again, encircled her youthful face with thick, silky curls—all this gave her something of the grace of childhood, and when she stood beside her cousin, whose tall stature and manly, energetic expression added the appearance of several years to his real age, it would never have been supposed she was not the younger of the two.
Motionless and absorbed, from time to time as she read her face colored and expressed a variety of emotions. But when she came to her own words: “My life is now stripped of all that made it desirable,” and what follows, “Some day, my Fior Angela, you will recall these bitter, ungrateful words, and will, I assure you, see their falsity,” she stopped short, and, raising her eyes full of tears to heaven, she said:
“Yes, Madre mia, you were right!” She covered her face with her hands, and remained a long time absorbed and overpowered by a flood of thoughts. In the depths of her memory, there were vague recollections of the past traced as if by lightning; and some almost forgotten scenes now rose before her like a confused dream.
That violent outburst of grief; the sobs he could not repress when he learned she was determined to go to George; and, later on, the words murmured on the ice when he thought the last hour of his life had come, scarcely heard at the time, and then speedily forgotten, came back to‐day like invisible writing brought out by the application of heat. The sentiments she had discovered only within a few days perhaps had long been experienced by Clement, if not always—and, if so, oh! then, how great had been his love and constancy, and what sufferings had he not endured for her sake! Alas! what had she not inflicted on that noble, faithful soul!
“Oh!” cried she aloud, “was there ever a person more blind, more ungrateful, more cruel than I?”
She stopped, started, and raised her head; she thought she heard her cousin’s step. She was not mistaken. He sought her in her favorite seat, and now stood before her in the same place where, three years before, she unwittingly caused him so much suffering as he looked at her. It was the same place, and the same season, and also the same hour. Daylight was fading away, and now, as then, the rising moon cast a silver ray over the charming face which he was again seeking to read. But this time his questioning look was comprehended, and the silent response of her beautiful eyes, as expressive as words, imparted to the heart that understood it one of those human joys reserved here below for those alone who are capable of a pure, constant, peculiar love—a love only worthy of being named after that for God.
We might now end this story, and lay down our pen, without attempting to describe the joy of the family when, as night came on, they saw the two absent ones return, and each one divined from their looks the nature of the conversation which tonight had detained them so long on the banks of the river. But towards the end of an evening so happy, Mademoiselle Josephine unintentionally made an exclamation it may not be useless to add:
“See! see!” she cried, in the exultation of her happiness, mingled with secret pride at her penetration, “how right I was in thinking Count George!—” She stopped confounded, suddenly recalling all past precautions, and fearing she had been imprudent in neglecting them.
But Fleurange unhesitatingly exclaimed: “Go on, dear mademoiselle, go on without any fear, and boldly pronounce a name I now neither shrink from nor seek to hear.” And, as she spoke, the remembrance of his past tortures crossed Clement’s memory, giving him a keener sense of his present happiness. She asked him, in a calm tone, “Is he still in exile, or has he been pardoned?”
Clement replied with a smile: “No, he has not been pardoned; he is still undergoing his sentence to the full extent.” After a moment’s silence, he added: “I had a letter from Adelardi this very morning which speaks of him.—Would you like to read it?”
At an affirmative nod from her, he took out his pocket‐book to find the letter. As he opened it, a little sprig of myrtle fell out. Fleurange immediately recognized it. “What! you still keep that?” said she, blushing.
Clement made no reply. He looked at it with emotion; it was a part of a carefully hoarded treasure, and for a long time the only joy of his hidden love! “Never, no never!” murmured he. “That was my reply that evening, Gabrielle, when you promised me a beautiful bride. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, for I had said the same words an hour before, and the coincidence struck me.”
“What can we think of it, now you are really the fiancée I dreamed of as impossible?”
“That our presentiments are often illusory—and our sentiments also, Clement,” added she, turning towards him her eyes veiled with tears which seemed to implore his pardon.
We will not say what Clement’s reply was; only, that it made them both completely forget Adelardi’s letter. We will, however, lay it before our readers, who may be less indifferent to its contents than he to whom it was addressed was for the moment. It was dated at Florence. The marquis, whose visits at Rosenheim had become annual, announced his speedy arrival, after which he continued:
“The poor Princess Catherine, after whom you inquire, has had a return of her malady, so many times cured, and it is now increased by dissatisfaction and annoyance more than by age. No one succeeds in taking care of her so well as she whom she still remembers. Each new attack renews her regrets, which have found no compensation in the gratification of her wishes. I have often remarked, however, that there is nothing like the realization of a desire to efface the remembrance of the ardor with which it was sought, and even the transport that hailed its fulfilment. It is certain the princess’ actual relations with her son are by no means satisfactory; they are affected by the ill‐humor of both parties. George’s exile would seem enviable to many; for the place he inhabits has everything to make it delightful excepting the liberty of leaving it, and this mars the whole. He can enjoy nothing, he says, because everything is forced upon him. There is reason, therefore, to fear the future he is preparing for himself and his wife is very ominous.
“The Countess Vera is a beautiful, noble woman, capable of self‐sacrifice to a certain point, but haughty, high‐tempered, and jealous to the last degree. She thought the sacrifice she made in marrying George in the position he was then in, would secure his unsteady heart, and bind him faithfully to her through gratitude. She saw only too soon it was not so, and that the comparative liberty he had regained was soon regarded as a weary bondage. Thence resulted scenes which more than once have disturbed the life whose monotony they are not allowed to break. Will you credit it? In one of them, Vera, in the height of her irritation and jealousy, betrayed the secret hitherto so well guarded, and declared in her anger that she regretted not having left him to the fate another was so ready to share with him. She afterwards had reason to regret her imprudence, for George exacted a complete revelation, and the remembrance thus suddenly revived and clad with the double charm of the past and the unattainable caused him in his turn to overwhelm her with the most bitter reproaches. I am not sure but he had the cruelty to tell her he should a thousand times have preferred the fate she saved him from to that he now had to endure with her!—There can only be one opinion as to this mirage of his imagination; but, after all this, you will not be surprised to hear that they both long with equal ardor for their liberty, which they must wait for two years longer. According to appearances, it will be as dangerous for one as for the other. The princess has realized and predicted this since her visit to Livonia last summer, where I accompanied her.
“During her stay, George did not spare her any reproaches, and they were the more keenly felt because she had for a long time seen that the result of her wishes had been a sacrifice of her own comfort and happiness through her opposition to what had at once deprived her of her son and the only companion that had ever satisfied her. And when she is dissatisfied, she must always vent her anger on some one besides herself. Whom do you think she reproached the other day before me for all her troubles? Gabrielle!—who, she said, did not know how to avail herself of her ascendency three years ago as she should, and to retain it!
“Since she has seen that I by no means sympathize in her regrets—which will not be shared by you either, I suppose, nor, I like to think, by her who inspires them—she is offended with me in my turn, and declares in a melancholy tone that all friends are unfeeling and all children ungrateful!—”
Clement’s reply to this letter hastened the marquis’ arrival. He had seen his young friend’s hopes spring up and develop, and would not for the world have been absent from Rosenheim on the day of their realization. William and Bertha, the discreet confidant who knew how to console Clement in his sufferings without questioning him, were the only friends, besides the marquis, who were admitted that day into this happy family. The wedding was as gay as Clara’s, but the newly married pair were graver and more thoughtful. They had both passed through severe trials, which now gave a certain completeness to their happiness, often wanting here below in the most joyful of festivals.
And they also, in their turn, set off for Italy, and it may be imagined that, among the places they visited together, the first to which their hearts led them was that where awaited the Madre Maddalena’s welcome and blessing. At their return, Mademoiselle Josephine’s house, improved and embellished, became their home, on the condition imposed by their old friend that she should dwell under their roof the remainder of her days.
Was their destiny a happy one? We can safely reply in the affirmative. Was it exempt from pains, sufferings, and sacrifices? We can deny that still more positively. But it was, however, enviable; for of all earthly happiness, they possessed what was most desirable, without ever forgetting that “life can never be perfectly happy because it is not heaven, nor wholly unhappy because it is the way thither.”(231)
American Catholics And Partisan Newspapers.
To Catholics, as such, the political discussions of a Presidential campaign have no special significance. Thus far no issues between the two chief parties have particularly affected us. Both have generally been careful not to offend us; and although in local elections questions touching our schools and charities have sometimes become prominent, in the larger contest our votes have been fairly divided between the Republican and the Democratic candidates. If there ever unfortunately arise a distinctively Catholic party in American politics, it will not be because Catholics are unwilling to co‐operate freely with their Protestant fellow‐ citizens in secular affairs, but because we have been thrown upon the defensive by some combination directly and designedly hostile to our religious interests. None know better than we do that there is no excuse in this country for uniting religious with political issues. Our constitution gives equal liberty and protection to all, and we should be sorry to have it otherwise, for we know that the church makes all the more rapid progress in the United States by reason of her absolute independence. Asking nothing of the state but fair play, she gives no excuse to her enemies for making any discrimination against her children. Her position has been generally understood and approved; and although there are fiery bigots at all times who rave about the dangerous designs of the papists, and affect to dread a crusade with torch and sword as soon as we get to be a little stronger, the good sense of the American people has usually treated these sectaries with the indifference they deserve.
We have intimated, however, in former numbers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, that the chronic anti‐Catholic agitation might assume a new character which would require on our part a new attitude of resistance. A few years ago, when the settlement of the issues of the war first seemed to menace the dissolution of the Republican party, the most active leaders of that party began to cast about for a “new departure,” and one of their favorite plans for keeping the organization alive was the scheme of compulsory education by the general government. Of this project the Hon. Henry Wilson was a prominent advocate. It has not yet been formally brought into politics, for the party has been able to get along without it; but it has not been abandoned, and we need not be surprised if it be strongly pushed within the next few years. Now, Catholics look upon the question of religious education as one of paramount importance. They will not surrender the teaching of their children into the hands of Protestants and infidels; they will not consent, so far as their young people are concerned, to the separation of religious and secular instruction. Any party which seeks directly or indirectly to limit the usefulness or hamper the operations of Catholic schools, must prepare to encounter in Catholics a united and determined resistance.
Thus far no such conflict has arisen. We may hope that it never will arise. And yet, during the canvass that has recently closed, two of the leading organs of Republican opinion have opened a bitter and apparently concerted warfare upon the Catholics of the United States which we cannot help regarding as highly significant. In the midst of a Presidential campaign, political organs never make such attacks except for political reasons. The papers to which we refer are in close relations with the party leaders. The New York Times became for a time, when The Tribune abandoned orthodoxy, the principal Republican newspaper of the principal state in the Union. It is known to have reflected with tolerable accuracy the sentiments of the Republican managers in New York, and it has always said what it assumed to be acceptable at the White House. For a long time it has been notoriously unfriendly to Catholics. It has amused itself, in its heavy, witless way, laughing at what they hold sacred and abusing all that they respect. Until a few months ago, its offensive utterances seemed to be merely the occasional vulgarities of a bigotry that, did not know enough to hold its tongue. But when Mr. Francis Kernan was nominated for Governor of the State of New York, its assaults became more methodical, more vehement, and apparently more malicious. Mr. Kernan is a Catholic; so The Times instantly denounced him as “a bigot.” An utterly untrue pretence was made that Democrats were asking Irishmen to vote for him on account of his religion, and thus the point was insinuated rather than openly pressed that on account of his religion Protestants ought to vote against him. For the first time, to our knowledge, since Know‐Nothing days, the question of religious belief was dragged into the dirty arena of politics. Happily, the Catholics as a body kept their temper and their judgment during these infamous proceedings. They refused to be drawn into the discussion which The Times wanted to provoke, and even when that paper surpassed all its former disreputable acts by reproducing in its columns a forged handbill, showing the name of Francis Kernan surrounding a huge black cross, and told the public that such were the devices by which the Democratic candidate sought to inflame the fanatical zeal of his followers, the Catholics contented themselves with one word of indignant denial. It would have been a rash display of political courage to which we do not believe The Times capable of rising, if an open attack had been made upon the Catholic faith or Catholic morals. The Times was even frightened at its own frankness in scolding at Mr. Kernan for a bigot. It professed to be shocked at the introduction of religious affairs into the discussions of the campaign, and carried on a cowardly anti‐Catholic warfare under cover of repelling purely imaginary assaults. Of course this subterfuge was well understood by all parties. The Catholics knew that they had done nothing to draw this fire; the Protestants also knew it, and a great many of them were indignant at the transaction. Was The Times itself deceived? That is a question which perhaps we should not attempt to answer. In its wild bigotry, it is capable of believing almost any preposterous falsehood against us; but it is equally capable of inventing one. Some familiarity with the course of political controversies in the United States has convinced us that in a fight The Times sticks at nothing. It would rather stab an enemy in the back than kill him in open battle. It never gives fair‐play; it never makes amends for a wrong‐doing; it never withdraws a calumny. Everybody who has had a controversy with it will bear witness that it is not in the habit of telling the truth about its adversaries. That it is in the habit of consciously, or, to speak more correctly, deliberately, lying we do not go so far as to say. But there is a kind of falsehood very common with people of strong prejudices to which The Times is greatly addicted. It bears about the same relation to truth that hyperbole bears to historical statement. Let us suppose that The Times really imagines the Catholic Church to be a dangerous and immoral organization, and its bishops and supporters in this country to be engaged in an enterprise which ought to be resisted; with this conviction of the general wickedness of Catholic principles, it imagines itself justified in charging upon individual Catholics a variety of specific crimes for which it has no evidence whatever. Catholics are none too good to commit murder, we can imagine it saying; therefore let us accuse Francis Kernan of killing his grandmother. The Pope is an impostor; therefore it cannot be wrong to call Archbishop McCloskey a thief. Indeed, men who would blush to tell an untruth in private intercourse with their fellow‐men have no hesitation in publishing slanderous accusations which they suppose may “help their party”; and, if we should say that their conduct in doing so was to the last degree infamous, they would affect to be shocked by our strong language. The editor of The Times would think twice before he went into a club parlor, and publicly accused some prominent citizen of a criminal action, unless he had the strongest possible proof of the commission of the offence. But he makes such accusations every day in his newspaper, without knowing, and we presume without caring, whether they are true or not. Anybody whom he dislikes he regards as an outlaw. Anybody who comes in his way is a fit subject for the penitentiary. We saw a striking illustration of his entire insensibility to the demands of truth and honor in his behavior towards a rival newspaper a few weeks ago. At the close of the year, The Times made great efforts to secure the old subscribers of The Tribune, who were supposed to be dissatisfied with that paper’s recent declaration of political independence, and the means which it took to secure them was one which in any other business would have resulted in a suit for slander and a verdict in very heavy damages. The Times first circulated a report that The Tribune had sold itself to one of the most disreputable stock‐gamblers in Wall Street, and then assured the public that the circulation of its competitor had fallen away more than half, and was rapidly going down to nothing at all. Both these stories were well known to be entirely untrue, and, if the editor of The Times was not conscious of their falsity when he penned them, he might easily have learned the truth by a moment’s inquiry. But he did not want the truth. He wanted to say something damaging, and these were the most damaging things he could think of.
How much he succeeded in damaging Mr. Kernan by his campaign slanders against Catholics, we can guess from the figures of the election. Mr. Kernan received about 5,000 more votes for Governor than Mr. Greeley received in this State for President; but he received 5,000 fewer than the candidate for Lieutenant‐Governor on the same ticket. This loss is probably attributable directly to the anti‐Catholic feeling, for Mr. Kernan is a gentleman to whom no personal objection could possibly be made except on religious grounds. No doubt an equally large number of voters were repelled, by the bigotry The Times fostered, from supporting the Democratic and Liberal ticket at all; so that we shall not pass the bounds of probability if we estimate the fruit of prejudice and falsehood in this case as equivalent to ten thousand votes.
Catholics are used to injustice, and they are not quick to resent it. In America, the church has prospered under every sort of obstacle and discouragement short of the direct hostility of the government, and it is not likely that her course will be stayed by The New York Times. But it is well for us to look at the situation carefully, and judge who are our friends. If any political party is to make bigotry part of its stock in trade, we cannot help taking notice of such a declaration of hostilities, and we shall govern ourselves accordingly.
We have said that The Times and Harper’s Weekly appear in this matter to have acted in concert. Perhaps it is unfair to hold the party managers fully responsible for the utterances of these two violent newspapers; but we cannot forget that both journals are in close communion with the Republican administration, and that both have been governed during the campaign by the judgment of the Republican leaders. The editor of The Times enjoys the most intimate association with the federal organization popularly known as the “Custom‐house faction” in New York City; the editor of Harper’s Weekly is the personal friend of the President, and speaks the mind of the President’s chief advisers in Washington. If, then, these two papers have made a systematic assault upon the Catholic Church in the midst of a sharp political controversy, and have taken pains to give their furious Protestantism a direct political bearing, the party for which they speak must be prepared to face the responsibility. It should be observed, however, in justice to the sensible and unprejudiced members of the party, that Harper’s Weekly, though it may have been encouraged in its bitterness by partisan considerations, did not draw from such motives its first anti‐Catholic inspiration. It has always been our enemy. A spirit, of commercial fanaticism, the hatred of a religion which it will pay to abuse, has distinguished the firm of the Harpers ever since the public has known anything about them. The political campaign of 1872 made no difference in the tone of their paper; it merely gave force, and concentration, and regularity to the attacks which had previously been spasmodic.
How coarsely it attempted to turn to political account the religious bigotry upon which it had always traded may be seen in an article entitled “Our Foreign Church,” published in Harper’s Weekly of the 14th of September last. The writer starts with the assumption that all religious denominations in this country, except “the Romish Church,” patriotically renounced the authority of their European rulers when the American republic was founded. The Methodists “rejected the control in political and ecclesiastical matters of their founders”; the Presbyterians repudiated the General Assembly of Scotland; Episcopalians revolted from the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Jews “threw themselves boldly into the tide of American progress”; while the Catholic Church alone stood aloof, and “refused to separate itself from its European masters,” and conform its organization to the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of the United States. Ridiculous as this complaint sounds, it is no burlesque, but a faithful synopsis of the nonsense which Mr. Eugene Lawrence is permitted to print in Harper’s Weekly. A church of divine origin, according to this preposterous person, is to change its divine laws to conform to the requirements of temporary human institutions; and the political theories of Thomas Jefferson are to govern the ordinances of Jesus Christ. It is the glory of the true church that she is above all secular constitutions. She has seen the rise and fall of countless dynasties and states; she will survive the ruin, if every form of government now known upon earth shall be eventually overthrown. Empires, kingdoms, republics, are all alike to her. She was founded for all ages and all climes; she was not created, as Mr. Eugene Lawrence seems to think she ought to have been, for the exclusive benefit of the United States of America. This is a great country; but we presume that our constitution, amendments and all, occupies but an insignificant place in the divine order of the universe.
Obeying its heaven‐appointed head, who did not see fit to choose either Europe or America for the place of his human birth, the Roman Catholic Church in America, according to Harper’s Weekly, is a foreign body, and, therefore, dangerous (as all foreigners are) to the peace of society. “It is loud in its denunciations of American civilization;” it “furnishes three‐fourths of the criminals and the paupers who prey upon the Protestant community”; it never intermits its “attacks upon the principles of freedom”; and “its great mass of ignorant voters have been the chief source of our political ills.” Moreover, “the unpatriotic conduct of the Romish population in our chief cities during the rebellion is well known. They formed a constant menace and terror to the loyal citizens; they thronged the ‘peace meetings’; they strove to divide the Union; and when the war was over they placed in office their corrupt leaders, and plundered the impoverished community.” We are almost ashamed to copy, even for the purpose of denouncing it, this insult to the memory of our dead Catholic soldiers. There is not a man in the United States who does not know of the noble share of these outraged “Romish” troops in the terrible struggles of the civil war; not a man who is ignorant of the splendid record of the Irish regiments under the Union flag on every hard‐fought field from the first Bull Run to the last conflict before Richmond. “The Romish population of our chief cities” furnished the bone and sinew of more than one gallant army during those four sad years. They gave up their lives for the country of their birth or their adoption with a heroism that stirs every sensitive heart. Their priests followed the army on the march and into the fight. Their Sisters of Charity nursed the wounded and the sick. The greatest of their prelates, aided by another bishop who is still living, spent the last remains of his strength in defending the cause of the Union in hostile foreign capitals. Nothing, in fine, could be more magnificent than the patriotism with which the adherents of this “foreign church” sacrificed life and fortune for their country during its hour of need; and we have no language to define the infamy of endeavoring to make capital for Gen. Grant by maligning the devoted men whom he led to death at Shiloh and in the wilderness, and whose bravery, we are sure, he would be the last man to depreciate.
And now, continues the writer in the Weekly, as the Presidential election approaches, “our foreign church has assumed more openly than ever before the form of a political faction.” “Romish priests” and “Romish bishops” have taken the field as the partisans of Mr. Greeley, “the candidate of disunion and of religious bigotry”!—the italics are ours—and the church is engaged in an attempt “to place the fallen slaveholders once more in power.” For these statements we deliberately declare that there is no justification whatever. Mr. Eugene Lawrence invented them out of his own bigotry and malice; and when he had the folly and insolence to threaten us, as he did at the close of his article, with “the vengeance of the people,” he added to his untruthfulness a degree of hypocrisy which we have rarely seen equalled even in the publications of the house of Harper & Brothers. We say hypocrisy; but perhaps that is unfair. Mr. Lawrence may be silly enough to tremble at the bogies of his own devising. He may imagine that the rest of the world is as much afraid of the Pope as he is. He may fancy that the whole party of which he is such a hard‐working member is burning with desire to take the Jesuits by the throat and hang them on the nearest lamp‐post. If he did not suppose that a profitable market could be found for his sensational wares, he probably would not be at the trouble of the manufacture. If the “vengeance of the people” do not menace the Jesuits, it will certainly not be the fault of Mr. Lawrence. In the issue of the Weekly for Oct. 12, he had a furious narrative of “The Jesuit Crusade against Germany,” the points of which are substantially these: The Jesuits, with the aid of the Inquisition (of which they are the directors) and of a hired band of convicts and brigands, obtained the absolute mastery of the city of Rome and the papal government. The wretched people “cowered before their Jesuit rulers,” and within the crumbling walls of the guilty capital “priests and cardinals perpetrated their enormities unchecked and unseen.” They then, by means of their “lawless police,” overpowered the Œcumenical Council, and forced it, “by intimidation and bribes,” to accept the doctrine of infallibility, to curse liberty and education, and to set on foot a bloody crusade against political and intellectual freedom. This was in accordance with the Jesuits’ time‐honored policy. “The fierce and fanatical Loyola” used to burn heretics in Spain and Italy, and taught his followers that no mercy should be shown to such offenders. It was the Jesuits who set on foot the persecutions under Charles V. and Philip II., and “excited the unparalleled horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.” In 1870, they were getting ready for a new religious war. Napoleon III. was their chief backer. In fact, the attack upon Germany in 1870 was the result of a conspiracy between Rome and Paris, concluded at the council, and the purpose of the war was nothing less than the establishment of the Jesuit Order on the ruins of prostrate Germany! For this scheme the Irish Catholics of Dublin, London, and New York “furnished men, sympathy, and possibly money.” And now that the conspiracy has failed, and that the papists of France have been beaten (in spite of all the sinews of war so lavishly furnished by the Irish laborers and servant‐girls of New York), the Jesuits are getting, up another European convulsion. “The Romish Church, organized into a vast political faction, is stirring up war in Europe, calls upon France to lead another religious crusade, and promises the aid of all the chivalry of Catholicism in avenging the fall of Napoleon upon the German Empire.” It purposes to involve all the great states of Europe in a common ruin, “and erect the Romish See upon the wrecks of the temporal empires.” The pilgrimage of Lourdes is a part of this scheme. The Catholic Union is another. The International Society of Workingmen (of which the Jesuits are the secret instigators!) is another. Mr. Lawrence exhibits the venerable fathers in the unfamiliar garb of communists, and substitutes the red cap for the beretta with all the effrontery and nonchalance in the world. The Order which in one column is the detested safeguard of absolutism becomes in the next the raving propagandist of social anarchy, revolution, and universal democracy. Can any rational person after this condescend to dispute with Mr. Lawrence?
As in the other cases to which we have referred, there was a political moral to this story also. If we would avert this horrible era of blood and fire, said Harper’s Weekly, we must vote for General Grant, and stand up for the straight Republican ticket. Grant is the firm ally of Germany against Jesuitism. Grant is the champion of public schools against religious education. Grant is the enemy of all manner of Romish fraud and violence. Greeley is the friend of priests and persecutors, the foe of the Bible and education, the accomplice of that infamous “Jesuit faction” which “would rejoice to tear the vitals of American freedom, and rend the breast that has offered it a shelter”; and if he should be elected the “Jesuit Society” would celebrate the victory “like a new S. Bartholomew, with bells, cannon, processions, prayers at the Vatican,” and hasten “the rising of the Catholic chivalry ... in their sanguinary schemes against the peace and independence of Germany.” Such was the wicked nonsense with which Harper’s Weekly in the autumn of 1872 attempted to make political capital out of the ignorance and bigotry of its readers.
But this was not the worst. The Jesuits were not only conspirators against political and mental freedom, they were the principal enemies of the freed people of the South. Their society (risum teneatis, amici) had “allied itself with the Ku‐klux of Georgia and Mississippi”! And so infatuated was the Weekly with the monstrous folly of this tale that week after week it returned to the same slander. On Oct. 26 it printed a portrait of the Most Reverend Father‐General, accompanied with one of the most outrageous pages of falsehood and defamation ever put into type. “In our country,” says the author of the article, “the Jesuit faction has allied itself with the Ku‐ klux.” “The Jesuit Society assumes the guise of liberalism, and cheers on the rebel and Ku‐klux in their plots against the Union.” “In America the Jesuits link themselves with the Ku‐klux.” They do this because they hate the republic. They denounce, “with maledictions and threatenings, the course of modern civilization.”
“The world is in danger from the mad schemes of the triumphant society; it is rousing France to a new crusade with omens and pilgrimages; it threatens the German Empire with a war more disastrous and destructive than Europe has ever seen. It summons its adherents to the polls in Italy; it guides the elections of Ireland, terrifies Spain, and even disturbs the repose of London; and in our own country, so recently torn by civil war, the papal crusaders, linked by the tie of perfect obedience, stand ready to profit by our misfortunes, and to stimulate our internal dissensions; to crush those institutions that have ever reproached their own despotism, and destroy that freedom which is the chief obstacle to their perpetual sway.”
The picture which the Weekly draws of these dangerous brethren is horrible enough to throw a child into fits:
“A dreadful mystery still hangs over them. Their proceedings are secret, their purposes unknown. At the command of an absolute master, they wander swiftly among the throngs of their fellow‐men, eager only to obey his voice. Obedience is to the Jesuit the first principle of his faith, instilled into his mind in youth, perfected by the labors of his later years; he hears in the slightest intimations of his chief at Rome the voice of his God, the commands from heaven; and in the long catalogue of fearful deeds which history ascribes to the disciples of Loyola, the first impulse to crime must always have come from the absolute head of the Order, and its single aim has always been to advance the power of the Romish Church. Scarcely had its founder gained the favor of the Pope, and fixed his seat at Rome, when he revived the Inquisition. Italy trembled before the spectacle of ceaseless autos‐da‐fe; the tortures and the cries of dying heretics, the ruin of countless families, the flight of terrified and hopeless throngs from their native land to the friendly shelter of Germany and Switzerland, were the earliest fruits of the relentless teachings of Loyola. The Jesuits led the armies of the persecutors into the beautiful Vaudois valleys, and the worst atrocities of that mournful example of human wickedness are due to their brutal fanaticism. Soon they spread from Italy through all the kingdoms of Europe; everywhere they brought with them their fierce and cruel hatred of religious freedom, their cunning, their moral degradation, their bold and desperate policy. They ruled in courts; they terrified the people into submission; they were the most active politicians of their time; their wealth was enormous; their schools and colleges spread from Paris to Japan; and for three centuries the name of the Jesuits, covered with the infamy of the massacres of the Vaudois, the Huguenots, the Hollanders, and the Germans, surrounded by its terrible mystery, the symbol of a dark and dreadful association, has filled mankind with horror and affright.”
The practical conclusion to be drawn from all this rhetoric was that everybody, and especially every German, ought to vote for Gen. Grant and the straight Republican anti‐Jesuit ticket. It was the Jesuits who “nominated Mr. Greeley, a person known to be in friendly connection with the Romish leaders and closely linked to the Papal Church.” The Jesuits “cover Grant with monstrous calumnies, and celebrate the erratic Greeley.” “Let every German beware lest he lend aid to the enemies of his country. Let him shrink from the support of any candidate who is maintained by the influence of the Jesuits.” “We trust every sincere Protestant ... will labor ceaselessly to defeat the schemes of the Jesuits, and drive their candidate back to a merited obscurity.” And in the same number we find the following wicked paragraph:
“A Jesuit, the Rev. Mr. Renaud, was appointed some time ago by Archbishop McCloskey to superintend the Romish interest in our city charities. The result was at once apparent. The Jesuits excited a revolt in the House of Refuge. One of the keepers was murdered. One of the convicts was sent to the State prison. The rebellion was subdued; but the Jesuits still defend the murderer, and assail with calumnies the House of Refuge, one of the most valuable and successful of our city institutions. This is a curious confirmation of that dangerous character of the Jesuit Society which is painted upon a larger scale in our article in the present number on ‘The Jesuits.’ ”
The next slander of the Weekly was to identify Tweed with the Jesuits. “When the Romish priests,” says this astonishing journal (Nov. 2, 1872), “at the command of their foreign master, began their assaults upon the public schools, they found a ready ally in the Tammany Society.... Tammany became the representative of a foreign influence and a foreign church. It was European rather than American. It teemed with the coarse prejudices, the dull ignorance, the intense moral blindness that to American sentiment are so repulsive, with that mental and moral feebleness that belongs to populations racked by the despot and oppressed by the priest.” An infamous compact was now struck between Tammany and the Papal Church. The “Romanists” supported the political leaders in riotous license, gross vices, and indecent corruption; while an enormous debt was laid upon the city “to satisfy the demands of the Romish priests.” Thus Tammany, by the aid of its foreign allies, became despotic master of New York.
“Covered with the ineffaceable stains of treason and of public robbery, its members attempted to rule by force, and in the spring of 1871 New York lay at the mercy of rebels, peculators, and foreign priests. The press was threatened, whenever it complained, with violence, lawsuits, and the frowns of infamous courts. The Common Council was imported from Ireland, and foreign assassins threatened the lives of those ardent citizens who planned reform.”
The overthrow of the Tweed and Connolly Ring was a stunning defeat for the Pope and his agents. The nomination of Greeley and Kernan (the one openly, the other secretly; a slave of the Jesuits and the Inquisition) was a desperate attempt of the Jesuits to recover what they had lost. And then followed the usual homily, “Vote for Grant,” etc.
In this bitter political campaign against the church the writers for Harper’s Weekly were zealously assisted by their artist, Mr. Thomas Nast. This individual has done more to degrade his profession than any other draughtsman we know of, except, perhaps, the makers of lascivious pictures for some of the flash newspapers. He has made a practice of ridiculing the religious belief of hundreds of thousands of honest people who came to America, as he did, from a foreign land, because America offers to all immigrants the fullest measure of political equality and religious freedom. It has been his pleasure to depict the priest invariably as a sleek, sensual, brutal, and repulsive rogue; the bishop as a grim, overbearing, and cunning despot, or now and then as a crocodile crawling with open jaws towards a group of children. In the Weekly of Oct. 12, he represents Brother Jonathan attempting to sever the tie which binds an American bishop to the Pope, holding out, as he does so, a naturalization paper inscribed “This ends the foreign allegiance.” The Pope has his arms full of papers: “Orders to all state officials that are Roman Catholics”; “Down with the American public schools”; “The promised land, U. S.,” etc.; and the bishop carries similar documents: “Orders from the Pope of Rome to the Catholics in America”; “Vote for Horace Greeley”; “Vote for Kernan; he is a Roman Catholic, and will obey the orders of the church.” Another picture, entitled “Swinging around the circle,” was intended to represent all the disreputable supporters of Mr. Greeley in company. “Free love and Catholicism” were side by side, in the persons of Theodore Tilton and a priest, and “Mass and S. C.” figured as a conventional Irishman with one of the Ku‐klux. Mr. Kernan was drawn (Nov. 2) kneeling, in an abject attitude, at the feet of the Pope (“Our Foreign Ruler”), and swearing, “I will do your bidding, as you are infallible”; in the background stood a priest loaded with papal orders against the public schools; and on the wall was a copy of the forged handbill, with the legend, “For governor, Francis Kernan,” surrounding a black cross. In a picture of the “Pirates under False Colors,” a priest with a cross held aloft in one hand, and a tomahawk half hidden in the other, is a conspicuous figure in a gang of ruffians. In another cartoon a vulgar‐ looking priest is seen sprinkling the ruins of Tammany Hall with holy‐ water.
Now, we know very well that from one point of view the introduction of these calumnies into politics was fraudulent. Mr. Greeley certainly had no leaning towards the Catholic Church and no affiliations with Catholic leaders, and Gen. Grant, we venture to affirm, is insensible to the bigotry which his unworthy followers brought up as a reason for his re‐ election. We have nothing to ask of any President, and we give our votes according to our individual preferences. But while we do not purpose acting as a religious body in any political movement, we do not purpose either to be set aside by any political party as an outlawed and degraded people, upon whom venal pamphleteers and ignorant politicians may trample at pleasure. If party organs take pains to attack us, and pour out, day after day, and week after week, their filthy libels upon us, the party which sanctions such a warfare and tries to reap the fruits of it shall bear the responsibility. The Catholics of the United States are too numerous, too intelligent, and too public‐spirited to be treated with contempt by any faction, whether that faction call itself Liberal, or Republican, or Democratic. We prefer, as we have often said before, to let the politicians alone, and go our various ways in quiet, some after one leader, some after another. But it may as well be understood that, if any of these parties invite an irrepressible conflict with us, they will find out, we trust, that we are not disposed to flinch from the defence of our rights, which are identical with the rights of all other American citizens.
Brussels.
“There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”
Childe Harold.
The roar of cannon that ushered in the day of Waterloo—the deadly Waterloo, big with the fate of empires—the fatal Waterloo, that sealed the doom of the mighty conqueror, that hurled him on the prison‐island in the far‐distant ocean, where expiation could be the only consolation of the proud, haughty heart that knew no law but the iron will, which, irresistible to all else, was shivered on the Rock of Peter—was not the first, and may not be the last, sound of fearful strife there heard, as Belgium has ever been the chosen battlefield of Europe.
And so well is the fact recognized, that the sole condition on which she now exists as an independent state, is that of perfect neutrality. No matter what may be her sympathies, what may be her interests, she cannot take the sword: she can only defend her frontier, and prevent the entrance of either friend or foe. This it is that gives her importance; her central position, which makes her the key of the Continent, causes England to watch over her with tender interest, gives the mistress of the seas a pied‐à‐terre in case of a general war—a contingency which may arise at any moment.
The late King Leopold I., the Nestor of the European sovereigns, held an exceptional position; the head of one of the smallest states, he had perhaps the largest personal influence. His sagacity and experience made his advice sought and respected by all. When, in the revolution of 1848, thrones were tumbling down, and kings flying in every direction, of course Brussels had to follow the prevailing fashion, and, without knowing exactly what was wanted, the Bruxellois assembled around the palace; but before they could state their grievances, Leopold appeared upon the balcony, told them there was no necessity of any demonstration; he had come to Brussels at their invitation, and was ready to leave, if his departure would make them happier. Whereupon they reconsidered the question, and concluded to let well enough alone.
After the separation of Holland and Belgium, Brussels increased rapidly, and is now one of the pleasantest capitals in Europe. The new part of the city, the Quartier Leopold, is a beautiful faubourg, and the boulevards that encircle the city with a belt of green verdure, furnish a delightful promenade. The park, a portion of the forest of Soignes, is charming; the great trees meet in arches, and shade the crowds of ladies and children, who live in the open air on fine days. On Sundays, the military bands play from 2 to 3 P.M.; and every summer evening, from the 1st of June to the 1st of September, the orchestra of the Grand Opera gives concerts in the kiosk of the Quinconce, the flower‐garden of the park.
Life in Brussels is very pleasant, easy, and independent; all the appliances of modern civilization are within reach, botanical and zoological gardens, picture galleries, theatres; the opera is a permanent fact, at a reasonable rate; the orchestra led by Hanssens (recently departed for another world) was admirable; numbered among the violinists De Beriot, blind, but playing always with rare skill, and the other artists were of equal merit. Of late years Brussels has become a foyer for discontented spirits—
“Black spirits and white, Red spirits and gray. Mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may.”
And mingle they do without fear of mouchards, and air their opinions, no matter how wild and dangerous. If they go a little too far, the government or persons attacked interchange a few diplomatic notes with the Belgian authorities, and then the police politely request them either to be silent or try another dwelling‐place. Prim was for a long time resident, but one fine morning was advised to take his departure, as his intrigues were becoming too open and dangerous, but had been kept secret long enough to lay the mine that exploded and blew the Queen of Spain into France; and Henri Rochefort, driven from France, issued his Lanterne, which threw light on many facts then thought to be false, but which events proved to have been only too true.
Brussels is a paradise for women of taste; for where else can be found such laces and fairy webs, such garnitures of point de Bruxelles, of Valenciennes, of Malines, of Duchesse? A morning stroll down the Montagne de la Cour and the Madeleine is a feast for the eye, for lace‐making is one of the fine arts; the large houses employ three or four first‐class artists to draw the designs, and, as the competition is great, the efforts to surpass are immense. In making up a bride’s trousseau, it is etiquette for the mother of the bride to give the white laces, the happy bridegroom the black; and the prices where the parties are wealthy run up to an enormous amount.
The gold embroideries are equally beautiful; in one fabrique we saw a set of vestments just finished for the Cathedral of Tournai; they were for Lent, and were violet, with the instruments of the Passion exquisitely done in raised embroidery. The effect was admirable; on the back of the chasuble was the cross with the spear and the sponge, and so perfect was the sponge it seemed as though it could be grasped. The column was on the front of the vestment. It was a complete set for priest, deacon, and sub‐ deacon, with five copes, so that the artist had full opportunity for the display of his talent. The same house had recently sent off the dresses for the Empress of Austria and the ladies of her court, to be worn when they walked in the procession on the Feast of Corpus Christi. Specimens of the embroidery, which was of silver on white satin, were shown us, and, judging by what we saw, the effect of the whole must have been charming.
The Musée Ancien is devoted to the artists of the past. Hubert and Jean Van Eyck, whose discovery of the use of oil in mixing colors revolutionized art, are represented by the “Adam and Eve” and the “Adoration of the Magi.” Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More is worthy of the subject and the artist. Crayer’s Saints and Martyrdoms abound; one, the “Apparition of Our Lord to S. Julien,” illustrates the beautiful legend of S. Julien and his wife, S. Basilisse, who founded a hospital, where they received and tended the sick poor. One winter night, hearing sighs and groans at the door, S. Julien went out, and found a man nearly frozen to death. He carried him in, warmed him before the fire, restored him to consciousness, and then laid him in his own bed. The next morning the holy couple went in to see their guest. The bed was empty, and, as they approached it, Jesus, for it was he who had taken the form of the poor sick man to try their charity, appeared to them, and said, “Julien, I am your Lord and Saviour, who announces to you that ere long you and your wife will repose in God.”
The “Martyrdom of S. Peter,” by Van Dyck, is terrible. The saint is fastened to the cross, and three men are placing it in the ground. One, kneeling, is endeavoring to push the end of the cross into the hole prepared to receive it, another supports the cross on his shoulders, the third steadies it. Meanwhile, all the blood in S. Peter’s body seems to have descended into his head and face, which is brick‐dust color, and looks as though it would burst. Altogether it is a fearful picture, so lifelike that one waits to hear the thump the cross will give when finally placed. Such pictures make us appreciate our feather‐bed Christianity, the comfortable way we try to gain heaven and at the same time keep up an agreeable acquaintance with the world, and perhaps its friend, the devil.
The finest Rubens in this Musée is “Christ ascending Calvary.” It is when he is met by S. Veronica and some other women, who are magnificently dressed, thus making the contrast greater between them and the exhausted, blood‐stained figure of Our Lord, who is sinking beneath the weight of the cross, and the agonized face of his blessed Mother, who, supported by S. John, is advancing with outstretched hands to the assistance of her beloved One.
The flower‐pieces by Seghers, the famous Jesuit painter, are exquisite; interiors by Cuyp and Teniers, displaying their delicate care and finish, are numerous; pictures by Rembrandt, with all his wonderful effects of light and shade; some charming faces by Velasquez—two lovely little girls hand‐in‐hand, who look as if they would step out of the frame and speak; two splendid half‐lengths of Albert and Isabella, by Rubens, whose portraits are always admirable; and some very good specimens of the Italian school, among which are a Madonna of Sassoferrato, and a portrait of a young woman, by Guercina, which is very beautiful.
The Musée Moderne is a collection of the modern Belgian school, which deservedly ranks among the first. “Hagar in the Desert,” by Navez, is as touchingly beautiful as any of the masterpieces of the great past; Leys, Wiertz, Gallait, Portaels, whose “Fuite en Egypte” is found everywhere, are men whose genius is recognized by all Europe; Van Schendel has produced effects of light as remarkable as Rembrandt; Willems and Stevens in finish rival Cuyp and Teniers; and Verboekhoven’s cattle‐pieces are unsurpassed. Art is encouraged and fostered by the government; every year there is a grand competition for the “Prix de Rome”; a committee is appointed by the crown to decide upon the merit of the pictures, and the successful one receives the Prix de Rome, which is four thousand francs, a sum sufficient to maintain a student in Rome, in artist style, three years, while he continues his studies.
Brussels is comparatively modern; it was a mere village when Malines, Louvain, and other towns had acquired importance. In 1005, it passed by marriage into the possession of the Comtes de Louvain, under whom it rapidly increased; in 1040, it was surrounded by massive walls, of which some portions still remain in the garden of the Curé of S. Gudule. In 1106, Comte Godfrey le Barbu acquired the title of Duc de Brabant, but Louvain continued the most important town in the duchy, and preserved the title of capital until the time of Albert and Isabella, who preferred Brussels on account of its healthful climate and the vicinity of the well‐ stocked forest of Soignies.
The Grande Place of Brussels is unique; any change is forbidden by law; as it has been for generations, so it must remain; and when one descends suddenly from the park and boulevards, brilliant and gay with all the sparkle of modern life, into the Grande Place, it is like another world. The Hôtel de Ville is on one side; opposite is the Maison du Roi, adorned with a statue of the Blessed Virgin, beneath which is the legend, A Feste, Fame et Bello, libera nos, Maria Pacis, placed there in 1625 by Isabella in gratitude to our Lady of Peace, for having delivered the city from plague, famine, and war. In the place immediately below, is the noble monument erected in reparation to the memory of the unfortunate Comtes d’Egmont and de Hornes, on the spot on which, as the inscription runs, “they were unjustly executed by the decree of the cruel Duc d’Albe.”
It was unjust and cruel, but still we cannot judge the past by the present. Then, principles were positive facts, not vagaries expected to give way at any moment to expediency, but realities plain and palpable, upon which depended not only this perishable present, but the never‐ending future, with its eternity of weal or woe. As men were expected to live up to their principles, so were they expected to die for them. It is a high standard by which to live, but it is the safest. We fancy nowadays that the cruelty then dealt out for thoughts and opinions was abominable, but we forget that those ideas, those thoughts, produced the frightful effects of the ravages of the Gueux, of the orgies of John of Leyden; that from religious they degenerated into social excesses of the lowest kind—excesses which, if prolonged, would have reduced Christian Europe to Vandal barbarism.
And so the brave, unfortunate Comte d’Egmont, the hero, whose valor contributed so signally to the brilliant victory of Philip II. at St. Quentin, lost his life for having tampered with the political sectaries, or rather by being led into the snare by the Prince of Orange; when too late, he saw his error, which was only political; his faith he ever kept pure and untarnished. The Prince of Orange, on the eve of leaving Brussels to join the enemy in Germany, urged him to go, but Egmont refused; the prince told him if he remained he would be lost; that he was a fool to run the risk. Friends until then, they parted in anger. Egmont spurned him, and said, “Adieu, prince sans terre”; the prince replied, “Adieu, comte sans tête”—words which were too fatally verified soon after. The Maison du Roi is now occupied by the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire, and it was in a small room in the second story that Comte d’Egmont passed the night preceding his death, and wrote those touching farewell letters to his wife and the King of Spain which reveal the nobleness of his character. The famous picture by Gallait, “La tête d’un supplicié,” is a portrait of Egmont. We have seen the original in the atelier of Gallait, and he assured us it was an accurate resemblance. Requiescat in pace.
The Hôtel de Ville on the Grande Place is the finest of the municipal palaces found in almost every city of Belgium. It is built round a quadrangle, and the oldest part is the wing to the east of the tower, commenced in 1402, at the angles of which are elegant turrets; the façade consists of a gallery of open arches, surmounted by the Grande Brétèque, a balcony from whence proclamations were made; above this are two rows of windows, and an enormous battlemented roof, pierced with thirty‐seven dormer windows.
The tower is 330 feet high; the lower half, from the basement to the summit of the roof, is square; the upper part, built in 1444, is octagonal, surmounted by a magnificent spire of open‐work, remarkable for its lightness and delicacy; on its apex is fixed a table of stone, twelve feet in circumference, and on this stone a globe of copper, supporting a colossal figure of S. Michael trampling on the devil, thirteen feet high, made of a number of thin plates of copper‐gilt, in 1454, which serves as a weathercock, and turns with the least breath of wind. There is a shocking tradition, currently reported, but not positively confirmed, that the architect of the beautiful tower hung himself on its completion, because he had not placed it exactly in the centre of the façade; which certainly did not remedy the evil, as putting himself out of the world did not put the tower in the right place.
The first story of the Hôtel de Ville contains a gallery in which are magnificent full‐length portraits of Philippe le Beau, Charles V., Philip II., Albert and Isabella, and other dignitaries; the council‐room, audience‐chamber, and all the other apartments are splendidly ornamented, the walls hung with Gobelin tapestry, representing scenes in the life of Clovis and Clotilda. The ceiling of the council‐chamber is a masterpiece of Janssens, in which the most extraordinary effects of light and shade are produced; it represents an assembly of the gods, and their majesties vary in their positions as they are seen from different points.
The remainder of the Grande Place is lined with venerable old houses, terminating in fantastic gables, most of which were originally the halls of various guilds and corporations; their façades pierced with numerous odd little windows and covered with quaint designs, bas‐reliefs, pilasters, balustrades, and inscriptions; some of the houses are gilded, which adds to the picturesque appearance of the place, and on the summit of the Brewers’ Guild is a fine equestrian statue of Prince Charles of Lorraine—the good prince, as he is still affectionately called. In mediæval times, the Grande Place was the ordinary scene of tournaments and executions; here the Knights of the Golden Fleece held their brilliant réunions, and Philip l’Asseuré and Charles V. gave splendid fêtes, which in the reign of Philip II. were succeeded by very different scenes, under the stern rule of the Duc d’Albe.
Just behind the Hôtel de Ville, at the corner of the Rue du Chêne and the Rue de l’Etuve, is the beloved little statue of the “Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles.” The present bronze statue, after a model by Duquesnoy, was made in 1619, and this replaced an old stone statue which is said to have existed in the IXth century. Its origin is not known, but the favorite tradition is that it represents a youthful Duc de Brabant, whose father dying left him an infant of three years under the regency of his mother, the Duchesse Lutgarde. The neighboring Comte de Malines coveted the fair inheritance, declared war against the boy‐duc, and approached Brussels, determined to take it by force of arms. The Brabançons flew to defend the rightful heir, and, when the decisive day arrived, they besought the duchesse to let them carry the little fellow in his cradle, and suspend it from a great oak‐tree that overlooked the battle‐field. The duchesse in tears consented, accompanied them to the field of Ransbeek, and remained by the tree, from the highest branch of which the cradle was suspended.
The battle raged with fury; three times the Brabançons were driven back to the tree, but the sight of the brave little boy, who looked on with intense interest, never exhibiting fear or impatience, spurred them on to fresh efforts; at last the day was won, and the cradle carried back in triumph to Brussels, the duchesse radiant with joy. To commemorate the event, the oak‐tree was transplanted to Brussels, placed at the corner of a street, since then called Rue du Chêne, and the statue erected at its side; in the course of time, the tree has disappeared, but the statue remains, the object of undying love and interest. To steal it is considered an impossibility; in 1585, he was seized and carried off to Antwerp, but was speedily recaptured and brought home in triumph by a small party of Bruxellois; again he was taken away in a baggage‐wagon by the English troops after the battle of Fontenoy, and, on being recovered, was allowed for a short time to delight by his presence the inhabitants of Grammont, until he was reclaimed by the Bruxellois. In 1747, he was stolen by some soldiers of Louis XV., and again a few years later by two English soldiers, who, however, found him too heavy to carry away; the last time he was disturbed was in 1817, but the same good fortune attended him, and he was again recovered, to the great joy of the Bruxellois, who look upon him as the good genius of the city, and consider his loss a public calamity.
In the XVIth century, Louvain and Brussels gave him two splendid dresses for fête‐days; Charles V. presented him with a complete suit, and settled a pension on him. In 1698, the Elector of Bavaria not only gave him a uniform, but invested him with a military order, and appointed a valet‐de‐ chambre to wait on him. Peter the Great visited him, and added to his pension. In 1747, Louis XV. made him a knight, and solemnly decorated him with the Order of S. Louis, at the same time presenting him with a suit of gold‐laced uniform, a chapeau‐bros, and a sword; and in 1780 he was the first who wore the national cockade of Brabant, hence his present title, “Le Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles.”
On national fêtes, and during the Kermesse in July, he is always dressed in the uniform of the Garde Civique, which he has worn since 1830, his numerous orders displayed on his infant breast. In addition to these gifts, several persons have made him presents, while some have actually remembered him in their wills. He thus possesses a positive revenue which is regularly paid, a treasurer who is responsible for his disbursements, a lawyer, and a valet‐de‐chambre; and let any stranger beware of ever speaking disrespectfully or slightingly to any Bruxellois of the “Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles”!
Brussels abounds in charitable institutions and convents of every order; some are peculiar to the place. There is but one house in the world of the “Dames de Berlaimont”—an order of canonesses who follow the rule of S. Augustine—and it was founded by the Comtesse de Berlaimont, whose husband was one of the great officers of the court of Charles V. It is eminently aristocratic in its design. Any number of quarterings was required for the fair candidates in the palmy days of the old régime, but ideas have been modified by the wheel of the revolution, and now, if the head and heart are right, whether the blood is more or less blue is not strictly considered. The convent is splendid, the canonesses charming, and the education received by the young ladies under their charge leaves nothing to be desired.
Convents of Poor Clares are now few and far between; one is still found in Brussels. The rule is very strict—the strictest, we believe, for women in the world, not even excepting those of the Trappistines and Carmelites. It is forbidden to see strangers, but the superioress graciously relented in our favor, drew aside the heavy serge curtain behind double iron grilles armed with spikes, and told us we could look at her, but not speak. This announcement was made before the curtain was drawn. We kept profound silence, and for a few moments contemplated the figure, that stood motionless and speechless. What could have carried her there, from family, from home with all its charms? At the moment of solemn choice, the world enters but little into the thoughts: it is the strong ties that God and nature have implanted in the human heart that are the hardest to unloose.
She had left all for the rigid rule, for the self‐denying life, of a Poor Clare; the happy unbroken sleep of youth for the broken night of prayer and meditation; and, when sleeping, not even to lie down, but to sit half‐ upright; to go barefooted, never to touch meat, never to speak—only imagine it, a woman, and never to speak!—never to her fellow‐beings—ever to God. It was for him she had left home and friends, to find her eternal home and the never‐failing Friend; to be thirteen hours a day in prayer and adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, to expiate by her life the sins of the world around her. It is a wonderful life, a supernatural life; but, when truly desired, supernatural grace is given to lead it courageously to the grave.
The oldest church in Brussels is Notre Dame de la Chapelle, in the Rue Haute, which derives its name from having been at first a simple oratory in which the great S. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, had said Mass. The style is Gothic, and recently the choir, which is very fine, has been restored; it had been disfigured by an atrocious high altar in the style of the Renaissance; but in this reign of good taste it was decided to remove it, and in making the changes it was found there was a false wall, which, on being destroyed, disclosed the beautiful circle of the apse, which is remarkable for having the presbyterium and the credence‐table cut in the wall, something that has only been found in two other churches—one in France, another in Germany.
Notre Dame des Victoires—or Notre Dame du Sablon, as it is more generally called from its situation on the Place du Petit Sablon—is in the form of a Latin cross, with a polygonal apse to the choir. The Place du Petit Sablon during several centuries was the favorite residence of the aristocracy, and is yet surrounded by the Hôtel de Merode, and the palace of the Duc d’Aremberg, which was formerly occupied by Comte d’Egmont. Consequently in this church the monuments are very fine, especially the mortuary chapel of the Princes of Tour and Taxis, in which is an exquisite statue of S. Ursula, by Duquesnoy, and the tombs of the De Hornes, d’Egmonts, and De Chimay.
The beautiful collegiate church of SS. Michel and Gudule is built on a height formerly called Mont St. Michel, and its great towers dominate the city, and can be seen from every point. Its plan is cruciform. The choir is entirely surrounded by chapels, from which it is separated by double rows of columns; on one side is the Chapel du Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, on the other the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin, behind that of S. Mary Magdalen. It is a magnificent church, one of the richest in Belgium, and the vestments and appointments are superb. The laces are a treasure in themselves—laces which now cannot be bought, are used in the sanctuary, and the vestments and antependiums are of corresponding magnificence. One antependium, which is the Lamb surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists, is considered the finest piece of embroidery in Belgium.
But the glory of S. Gudule is not the gold, and silver, and lace, but the Très‐Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, which is there preserved, and which is the object of the profoundest love and veneration. For it did Charles V. build the exquisite chapel whose four splendid windows were presents from his sisters, the Queens of Portugal and Hungary, his brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, and Francis I. of France. Sovereigns, princes, nobles, and people for five hundred years have adored the sacred Body of our Lord, so cruelly profaned and outraged by the Jews, on Good Friday of 1370, who on that day, the day of Redemption, assembled in their synagogue, and stabbed the consecrated hosts stolen from S. Catherine’s, and, when they stabbed them, the blood which had flowed for them on Calvary, flowed again beneath their sacrilegious hands.
Day and night reparation is offered; the synagogue is now a chapelle expiatoire, attached to which is a community for perpetual adoration, and the Confrérie du Très‐Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, established in S. Gudule, embraces thousands. The Duc d’Aremberg gave the monstrance, which is a cross of diamonds, surmounted by a triple crown of diamonds, from which hangs a little ship of the same precious stones, presented by the captain and crew of a vessel, in gratitude for delivery from shipwreck. Marie Antoinette sent her wedding necklace of diamonds to be suspended around it, and the lamps around the sanctuary are kept burning by the children of the family d’Aremberg.
The great ornament of the nave is the pulpit, elaborately and exquisitely carved in oak by Verbruggen in 1699, originally in the church of the Jesuits, in Louvain, and, on the suppression of the Order, given to S. Gudule by Maria Theresa, in 1776. The lower part represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by the angel of the Lord, armed with a flaming sword. On the left is seen Death gliding around with his dart. The pulpit itself, in the hollow of the globe, is supported by the tree of knowledge, crawling up which is the serpent, while on the extreme summit stands the Blessed Virgin holding her divine Son, whom she is assisting to bruise the serpent’s head with a large cross. On either side the railing of the steps is formed by a hedge in which numerous birds are enjoying themselves; on the side of Adam are the eagle, the jay, and a monkey; while in the vicinity of Eve are the peacock, the ape, and the parrot.
And why these birds are there is the result of a little domestic disagreement between the artist Henri Verbruggen and his wife Martha Van Meeren, whom he married, hoping to find a tenth muse, but who only proved a prosaic everyday somebody, who fretted herself to death because Henri loved pleasure even more than art, and, while amusing himself with his friends, forgot there was no money in the house, nothing in the larder, nothing wherewith to dress Mme. and Mlle. Verbruggen. Poor Martha, who loved order, and would have been the treasure of some honest burgher, only provoked and irritated Henri by her occasional plain statement of facts. Affairs were in this sad condition when the Jesuits of Louvain, knowing the splendid talent of Verbruggen, ordered a pulpit for their church. The artist was enchanted. Here was a field for his genius; he immediately conceived an admirable work, which should contain, as in a book, the whole history of the Christian religion.
Said he, “I will make a globe, which will represent the earth, under which I will place Adam and Eve, the moment after their fatal disobedience, which entailed on us such misery. This globe will be the pulpit, the canopy of heaven will cover it, the tree of knowledge will overshadow it, around which will creep the serpent, and above, Mary, crowned with stars, the moon at her feet, her infant Son before her, will bruise the serpent’s head with the cross. By the side of the man I will place the cherubim with the flaming sword; near the woman, young and beautiful, hideous death—that will be a contrast!”
The artist commenced his work with ardor. The wood grew animated beneath his fingers. But pleasure for ever distracted him; the more people admired, the more he amused himself. Martha was miserable; she could see no hope of order and plenty. Irritated by the complaints of his wife, Verbruggen determined to revenge himself in his chef‐d’œuvre, and so perpetuate his vengeance. He was making the stairs of the pulpit. In his angry malice, Verbruggen thought he would punish Martha by placing satirical emblems to characterize women. On the staircase, by the side of Eve, who has just sinned, and who still holds the apple, he placed, as symbols, a peacock for pride, a squirrel for destructiveness, a cock for noise, an ape for malice—four defects of which poor Martha was totally innocent.
Man he made with pleasure. On his side he placed, first, an eagle, to typify genius—but just then Martha bade adieu to the world and her troubles, and Verbruggen was a happy widower. Too late, the sculptor understood his loss; the gentle, patient wife was gone, and now he only remembered her good qualities; his courage and energy forsook him; he could not work. Months rolled on; his friends pitied him, and tried to rouse him from his deep despondency.
“You weep for Martha,” said they; “there are others as good; you are only thirty‐six—marry Cecile Byns. She is joyous and lively like you. She will be a mother to your daughter, a charming companion for you.”
Verbruggen listened to the good advice; he asked the hand of Cecile Byns, who was one of those women that rule while laughing, that carry the point while appearing to submit. Cecile knew her power over Verbruggen, and made him obey.
“I love you,” said she, “but I will not marry you until the work which will make me proud of the name of Verbruggen is finished.”
“Only say the word,” replied Henri, “and I will complete it.”
Accompanied by her mother, she visited his atelier. She asked the explanation of the emblems he had placed on the side of Eve. The sculptor blushed.
“When I made what astonishes you,” he stammered, “I did not know Cecile Byns.”
“Very well,” replied the young lady; “but after the symbols of our defects, which perhaps we have not, how do you intend to designate your own noble sex?”
“I had just commenced,” he answered, blushing redder than before. “You already see the eagle, perhaps it typifies vanity.”
“Not at all,” interrupted Cecile. “The eagle is a bird of prey, an emblem of brutal tyranny. What do you intend adding?”
Verbruggen was silent. Cecile continued: “To be just to men, as you fancied you were towards us, you will place near the eagle a fox, a symbol of vain gossip; a monkey eating grapes, for drunkenness; a jay, for foolish pride. You must avow, my dear Verbruggen, these defects belong to men as much as the faults you have given to us, and which adorn the other staircase. And now, when this great work is completed, I will accompany you to the altar.”
The sculptor did not reply. He obeyed, fulfilled faithfully the orders given, and received for reward the hand of Cecile Byns; since which happy event he was never known to offer any further insult to the devout female sex.
And so the pulpit was finished and placed in the church of the Jesuits in Louvain, where it was the object of universal admiration, as it still continues to be in beautiful S. Gudule the pride and joy of Brussels.
Sayings Of S. John Climacus.
It is better to displease our relatives than displease God.
Obedience is simply going about anything without any judgment of our own.
Let your conscience be the mirror in which you behold the nature of your obedience.
A new wound is easily closed and healed; but the old wounds of the soul are cured, if ever, with great difficulty.
He is truly virtuous who expects his death every day; but he is a saint who desires it every hour.
Marriage In The Nineteenth Century.
“Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.”—Matt. xxiv. 35.
It is only truth that is immutable in this world, and only truth’s representative that dare speak to‐day the same language it spoke eighteen, twelve, or three centuries ago.
Truth cannot progress, for it partakes of the nature of God’s perfection; it is not an ideal of our own evolving, susceptible of improvement as our knowledge grows wider, but a type towards which we are, on the contrary, making slow stages of assimilation. Of all individual parts of truth, hardly one of which remains in our day unassailed, none is so fiercely attacked as the truth about marriage. And yet, as we have shown in a previous paper,(232) almost every argument against it has repeatedly been put forward by barbarians and Romans, Byzantine emperors and feudal chiefs, and borne out by all the imposing display of military force, legal servility, and even ecclesiastical truculence. One might almost say of the agitation against marriage in our day, “What has been will be, and what will be has been.” If it is no longer in the individual passions of kings and nobles that the conflict centres, it is still a “sovereign” who plays the part of Philip Augustus or Henry VIII.—the “sovereign people.” Instead of one mighty colossus, it is a legion of personally obscure individuals which the church finds opposed to her; but the principle is the same, the issue is identical. What councils and embassies did formerly is now done oftener and in privacy; new agencies have widened the possibilities of communication, of discussion, and of adjustment, and causes are more rapidly multiplied, as well as more speedily settled. The press has lent its power to the altar, and redeemed, in part, its too well‐earned reputation as a pander and a tempter; and besides these new helps, we have, as of old, all those oft‐tried resources of personal eloquence, canonical censures, and grievous penances.
Still the question is exactly the same in the nineteenth as it was in all preceding centuries: Shall passion or reason rule mankind? Shall the most sacred of all rights of property be protected and maintained, or shall communism be allowed gradually to extirpate the human race?
The historian Rohrbacher, whom we have often quoted in the paper referred to above, specially insists upon the confusion which the legalized disruption or total disregard of the marriage vow would introduce into society, and supports his opinion by that of De Maistre. He also adduces the argument that, since the creation of man in the earthly Paradise was a perfect and complete act, and only one woman was there joined to one man, therefore the union of one man and one woman was distinctly God’s type of what he meant all future unions to be. We might speak of many Scripture proofs of the original institution of marriage being a state of perpetual monogamy until death, but such proofs would involve too lengthy a sketch of one portion of the subject, and this aspect has been so often discussed that we turn with a feeling of relief to any less hackneyed view of the question.
Speaking broadly, we may say that the Hebrews were the first, as they were for a long time the only, people whose laws protected both the honor and the property of women. Because they did so, they were also most stringent as regards the tie of marriage. Again, with them ancestry and descent were of paramount importance, and every family jealously guarded its record and registers; this also implied a strict protection of marriage, and, in fact, would have been impossible without it. Even when dispensations were allowed the Jews “because of the hardness of their hearts,” the son of the first wife was not to be put aside for the son of the second, if the latter were more pleasing to her husband than the former, and this because the sacred rights acquired at her betrothal were absolutely inalienable.(233) In the marriages mentioned in the Old Testament, the consent of the woman is always formally asked,(234) and she is considered competent to inherit property and transfer it to her husband.(235)
Among other nations of antiquity, the more truth was obscured in their religious forms, the more degraded became their ideal of marriage. This is patent even among such civilized nations as the Greeks and Romans; the whole of mythology is a deification of the passion of lust, and a caricature on marriage. Still, where greater genius abounds, there also we find glimpses of a higher morality. For instance, in Homer’s magnificent poems, conjugal love and fidelity stand out nobly as the themes of his especial admiration. It would require a thorough examination of many of the passages of the Iliad, and greater space than we have now before us (since this idea can only be used here as a collateral one), to bring out the full force of this striking fact, and some day perhaps it may be our good fortune to return to this topic; suffice it to say at present, that any one who reads Homer attentively will be struck by the majestic attitude of Juno, the constant protectress of the Greeks, and by the hearty sympathy shown by the poet in a struggle undertaken purely to vindicate the dignity of marriage and the rights of hospitality. This is perhaps even more obvious from the fact that even the good personages of the poem, the self‐sacrificing and devoted Andromache, the noble Hector, the infirm and guiltless Priam, are all included in the sweeping misfortune which is the swift and just retribution of the cowardly rape of Helen. The vindication of the principle of marriage is evident, while in the Odyssey its glorification is even more obvious. This illustration, for which we have to thank a very zealous and learned religious whose kindness put the suggestion entirely at our own disposal, is one which it is worth while for thoughtful persons to consider, as it gives a far greater moral importance, and consequently a more perfect artistic interest, to one of the few colossi of the intellectual world.
The law of Jesus Christ succeeded the preparatory dispensation of Moses, and perfected all its enactments, marriage among the rest. It gave the marriage contract an added dignity by making it the image of the union—single and indivisible—of Christ and the church, and by elevating it into a sacrament; in other words, a means of sanctifying and special grace. In this is certainly the secret of the church’s inflexibility with regard to marriage. Since by it a distinct and sacramental grace was vouchsafed, it followed that this grace in itself was sufficient to enable the contracting parties, provided they faithfully corresponded to it, to remain holily in the state of matrimony until death; so that, whenever any serious breach took place between them, the church could reasonably argue that the fault lay with their dispositions, not with the contract itself. In the old law, marriage, though holy, was not a sacrament, and was susceptible of greater relaxations; but in the new law, with a higher dignity added to it, and more abundant grace attached to it, it is too strong to need concessions and too noble to wish for them.
The Hebrews also, in propagating their own race, used the only means then in their power of propagating the knowledge of the true God; but in the new dispensation we have substituted a generation according to the spirit for the previous generation according to the flesh. Polygamous marriages among the Jews were a mysterious channel provisionally used for the increase and maintenance of God’s worship upon earth; but, since the coming of Christ, men have been won by the Word of God, the preaching of his servants, the sufferings of his martyrs, and the learning of his disciples. Those who are now constantly born into his fold are born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”(236) Having said so much upon the historical and Scriptural aspect of marriage, we leave it to others to dispute the particular meaning of such and such texts, and the particular inferences to be drawn from the context, and go back to the church’s firm stand upon this matter.
Not only has she been the foremost champion of the integrity of marriage in past ages, but she is now almost its only one. No body of such force or numbers exists in the world, which alone gives her the priority among the upholders of Christian marriage; and when the tenets of the few other bodies to whom marriage is sacred are examined, they will be found to be inspired and created by her principles, so far as they refer to this matter.
Of the Anglican communion, especially in its more advanced branches, it is sufficient to say that, having better than any other body preserved the forms, it has as its reward attained to more of the spirit, of a “church,” and consequently inculcates a higher morality. But the following testimony, which, from the name of the sheet furnishing it (the Reformed Missionary), we suppose represents some other Protestant body, is more interesting because more unexpected. A Catholic paper of Nov. 16, 1872, the Standard, has preserved this testimony for us. Under the title of “The Divorce Question Again,” it discusses church authority and its relation to the civil law, and uses the following strong language: “Spiritual interests and spiritual discipline belong to that supernatural order of grace which has its home in the bosom of the Christian church.... There are many things besides loose divorce legislation which the state either tolerates or legalizes, but which the church cannot sanction or countenance for a single instant without committing spiritual suicide. And if the state should expressly dictate to the church a line of action at variance with the plain teaching of Christ, then it would be our solemn duty to obey God rather than men.... The church must interpret God’s Word, and exercise spiritual discipline in accordance therewith, no matter what course the state may take in disposing of kindred questions. As Dr. Woolsey has expressed it: ‘Whatever be the attitude of the state, the church must stand upon the principles of the New Testament as she expounds them, and apply them to all within her reach!’ ”
What is here said of the “state” may be applied to the people, the press, popular license, and all the modern agencies which the evil one has added to his former royal and learned tools. But if among earnest though mistaken Christians we find such auxiliaries as the Reformed Missionary and the eloquent sermons of Anglican divines,(237) we have also to encounter such authorities as the following on the side of passion and licentiousness: “Dr. Colenso, embarrassed by the obstinate adherence to polygamy which he observed among the Kaffirs, came to the resolution, after conference, it is said, with other Anglican authorities of the highest rank, to remove the difficulty by a process which, though adopted in a well‐known case by Luther and Melancthon, had not previously received the official sanction of Anglican bishops. As polygamy would not yield to Protestantism, Dr. Colenso agreed to consider polygamy ‘a Scriptural mode of existence.’ Here are his own words: ‘I must confess that I feel very strongly that the usual practice of enforcing the separation of wives from their husbands, upon their conversion to Christianity, is quite unwarrantable, and opposed to the plain teaching of our Lord.’ And then he proves, of course from the Bible, that polygamy is not inconsistent with the all‐holy religion of the Gospel. Here is the proof: ‘What is the use,’ he asks, ‘of our reading to them (the heathen) the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel, and David, with their many wives?’ But Dr. Colenso was not without support in his view on polygamy. ‘The whole body of American missionaries in Burmah,’ he observes, ‘after some difference of opinion, came to the unanimous decision to admit in future polygamists of old standing to communion, but not to offices in the church (as if the last were a greater privilege than the first!)’ ‘I must say,’ he continues, ‘that this appears to me the only right and reasonable course!’ ”
At the beginning of this extract, we read that Dr. Colenso was embarrassed by the obstinate adherence to polygamy among the Kaffirs. This means, we infer, that he had originally withstood this heathen practice. Why had he done so? If he believed it sufficiently immoral to attack it, he was guilty of violating his conscience in ceasing his attack; if he had always believed it “Scriptural” or allowable, he was guilty of hypocrisy in attacking it at all. Then, when he asks, “What is the use of our reading to them the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel, and David, with their many wives?” he gives us unconsciously another advantage by tacitly confessing the necessity of a divinely inspired interpreter of the Bible. If Dr. Colenso had been a Catholic, the difficulty would not have existed. Does he suppose that Catholic converts among savage nations do not hear the same stories? But in their case, a teaching and speaking church comes to their rescue, and explains what otherwise would seem dark. It is strange to hear a Protestant Christian, bred up on the rule of “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible,” hesitate as to the effect of certain stories in the Bible. If the poor Kaffirs were to be evangelized upon the principle that a Bible precedent was practically a permission for all time, they would soon have Judiths and Jaels among them, as well as Abrahams, Israels, and Davids.
In the Times (London) of Dec. 20, 1872, on the occasion of a public “Day of Intercession” for more missionaries, we read the following stringent criticism upon the body which of all others most nearly approaches the ideal of a church: “The Church of England,” says the Times, “utterly abandons large regions on the ground that in tropical climes there will be polygamy or an equivalent disregard of the marriage ties, and that no preaching can prevail against it”—a confession of powerlessness which quite coincides with what we have said of Dr. Colenso. Still it is not fair to class the Anglican communion, despite this weak shrinking from a difficult task, with the more systematic deserters from the championship of duty; but, if we are grieved and astonished at her defection under certain circumstances, what shall we say of the following breach of ecclesiastical discipline on the part of those whose very names argue in this case a departure from the path of known duty? In the New York World of the 5th of January, 1873, we read among the announcements of business transacted in the mayor’s office the previous day this startling disclosure: “During the day the mayor was waited upon by a wedding‐party, the principals of which were Michael M’Clannahan and Mary Donovan, who wished to be united in matrimony without going to the trouble of getting up a public church celebration. Mr. H—— performed the duty according to the statute, and the bride and bridegroom went on their way rejoicing.”
It is not for us to judge these persons, nor speculate upon the motives that led them to take such a step; but the occurrence is nevertheless a sign of the demoralization which is every day on the increase among our people.
Polygamy, under the name of Mormonism, is still tolerated and protected in the United States, and the annals of divorce in the states where Mormonism is illegal quite make up the deficiency. In Connecticut, according to the deposition of the Rev. Dr. Woolsey, President of Yale College, made before the Western Social Science Congress in Chicago, the ratio of divorce is one in every eight marriages. We were told by a distinguished New England convert that the Vermont marriage law was practically so lax that the following “cause” for a divorce was considered legal: A couple, not very long married, mutually wished for a separation, simply on the score that they were dissatisfied with their bargain. They went to a lawyer to ascertain the technicalities of the case, and were told—appearances having to be saved!—that some specific cause must be alleged. The easiest was cruelty. But the parties had never been violent; so the lawyer suggested that the husband should, in his presence, give his wife a “blow.” This was soon accomplished by a light slap on the cheek of the willing “victim”; cruelty was pleaded, and the divorce obtained.
In Rhode Island, the proportion of divorces to marriages in 1869 was one to fourteen, and the law of that state leaves it practically to the discretion of the courts to annul any ill‐assorted marriage on the ground of uncongenial temper, desertion, drunkenness, or any sort of bad conduct. In that year, out of 166 divorces, only 66 were granted on the plea of adultery, while it must also be borne in mind that this grave charge is often unjustly and maliciously made to cover some shameful behavior on the part of the plaintiff, or to gratify his or her revenge. Speaking of a clergyman who was reported to have married one man successively to five wives, all of whom were living at the same time, a Protestant paper comments thus on the story: “It may be true or false. It is not altogether improbable. It suggests very serious reflections, as indicating what is possible under our laws, and the course things are taking in American society.” The paper goes on to speak of the clergyman’s responsibility in such a case, and although advocating the desirability, “for many reasons,” of the office of solemnizing marriage being “confined almost entirely to ministers of the Gospel,” does not see that it stultifies itself directly after by explaining that “the trust is reposed in them, not by any right to it on their part, as holding an ecclesiastical office, but on account of their position and general character(!). They are able to guard marriage, and give it a religious character and sanction. But they act, so far as the law goes, simply as civil magistrates.”
And let us add that here is precisely the evil, and that as long as clergymen are lowered to the level of magistrates, loose morals will never be uprooted.
The Nation of March 2, 1871, has the following:
“We cut from the marriage notices of the Philadelphia Press the following illustration, omitting names, of the way in which attempts to reduce human marriages to the level of those of the lower animals are dressed up in fine language:
“ ‘In Philadelphia, February 23, S—— and S——, the parties protesting against all marriage laws, whether legal or conventional, which subject either the wife or the husband to any control or influence on the part of the other which is not in accordance with the dictates of pure and mutual love.’
“This is, of course, simple ‘pairing.’ Marriage means the assumption by a moral agent of an obligation to perform certain duties, even after they become disagreeable. The arrangement by which the parties live together as long as they find it thoroughly pleasant is that common among birds, beasts, and fishes, and has nothing human about it.”
The Independent, a Protestant religious paper, sneers at all barriers to divorce, Catholic, Protestant, or civil, as “shallow,” and declares that “no matter with what solemn ceremony the twain may have been made one, yet when love departs, then marriage ceases and divorce begins.”
A certain unhappy section of those waifs of womanhood, the advocates of woman’s rights, is known as the champion of “free‐love,” that is, in plain words, adultery. Mrs. Stanton, one of the leaders, has said somewhere that “marriage is but a partnership contract terminable at the will of the parties,” and has advocated marriages for three years.
To this last proposition we have only one objection. Why three years? If a marriage is based on mere passion, three months or six at the furthest would be enough to exhaust the cohesive element, for if the adage be true that “no man is a hero to his valet,” it is equally certain that no man and woman could by any human possibility live together for that time in the familiar intercourse implied by marriage, without discovering to each other certain asperities of temper, inequalities of disposition, in short, all the little meannesses of our poor human nature. This disenchantment, following the close and daily companionship that is almost inevitable in married life, is enough to kill passion, though it cannot even daunt principle. Again, in a marriage based on passion, the satiety that follows in the train of unlawful love would be reproduced, and would break up the connection in far less than three years. In fact, when we come to sift the question, we find that, putting aside the religious spirit presiding over marriage, that state of life has no appreciable sign to distinguish it from the score of illicit connections punished by law or branded by society. We find here almost a parallel to the question lately agitated in England among Episcopalians, as to the reason why the Church of England should be called a “church,” and not, like all other independent Protestant bodies, a “sect.” We ask, What is to distinguish such a “marriage” as our modern reformers advocate from the “liaisons” at which society pretends to be so virtuously shocked? Where is the intrinsic difference between a woman who sells her honor to many men at once and one who surrenders it to a single man at a time for just that period during which pleasure shall keep her constant to him?
Another form of attack upon the sanctity of marriage is the trade of the great journals in daily advertisements such as these, which meet our eyes every morning:
“Absolute divorces legally obtained in different states. Desertion, etc., sufficient cause. No publicity. No charge until divorce is obtained. Advice free.
——, Attorney, —— Broadway.”
Or, with slight variations, thus:
“Also Commissioner for every State.
——, Counsellor‐at‐Law, —— Broadway.”
Here we see the press and the law conspiring to lend aid—and, more than that, encouragement—to the loosest and most devastating of passions. Then, again, the tone of the newspapers with regard to moral irregularities is a painful sign of the times. Thus we read in a great “daily”:
“Out West they call divorces ‘escapes.’ A speedy and safe ‘escape’ is guaranteed for a very low figure, and, as usual, a great many parties figure for it.”
There is a levity about such remarks that is saddening, when taken in connection with the future of a great people.
The morbid curiosity of the public is thus excited under the convenient plea of satisfying it, while, with regard to the institution of marriage itself, the saying is exemplified, “Give a dog a bad name, and then shoot him.” Marriage is ridiculed, conjugal affection put down as antiquated, home‐lovingness pitied as old‐fashioned, family reunions voted dull, and, as a natural consequence, youth is more or less alienated from the unfashionable circle. It is easy, then, to turn on marriage as a principle, remove the stumbling‐block altogether, paint in seductive colors a substitute for home, and familiarize the public with so‐called legal but transient unions. Once this principle is established in the abstract, it will be merely a question of time as to its practical extension. Granted that a man or woman may change companions as often as they choose, who is to regulate how often? Like the husband of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, every day? Why not? Again, if one man may have many “wives,” why should not a woman have many “husbands”? And so on ad infinitum the license might spread unchecked, till there would be as many conflicting interpretations of marriage as there are already of the Bible. Absolute communism would be quite a logical sequence, and, in a society so utterly confused as to parentage, there could be little question as to inheritance!
Christian marriage, on the contrary, has both a social and a sanitary, as well as a religious aspect. It creates a strong and healthy race, and at the very outset of each man’s career gives him a position by investing him with a responsibility. He feels that the pride which his old father and mother have in him must not be shamed; that the honor of his family is bound up in his actions; and that his behavior may influence for good or for evil both the moral and temporal prospects of his near kindred. A man so weighted feels a just pride, which, in default of higher motives, may even yet guide him into greatness; and though such a man may yield to temptation, fall into vice, and disgrace himself, so much at least of his early training will survive as to make him feel keenly the shame of his position. This alone has saved hundreds. It has been the serpent in the wilderness to many, but it would no longer be an imaginable motive were the ideal of Christian marriage, with its attendant responsibilities, to be swept away. There is another aspect under which the frequency of divorce and the condoned irregularities of intercourse between the sexes are a constant threat to public security—we mean in provoking murder. Three parts of the fearful murders committed in New York, and also in many other parts of the Union, are traceable more or less to ill‐assorted marriages and a spirit of unchristian rebellion against lawful restraints. Lately there has been a glaring case in point, the details of which are fresh in the memory of every one. A man is deliberately shot dead on the very threshold of what is practically a “Divorce Court”; the murderer is a brutal husband incensed at the victim’s testimony against himself. In 1872, three of the most famous New York “characters” figured in a terrible drama ending in death, imprisonment, and disgrace. What was the reason that set two of the most unscrupulous speculators in the world at deadly enmity? The disputed favor of a woman who, according to the new code, only asserts her rights, and claims to change “husbands” as often as she pleases. God help the age and nation in which such things are daily done, and where animal passion laughs in the teeth of law! Who does not see how every right and security hangs by the sanctity of marriage? Marriage, in the proper sense of the word, implies exclusive and permanent possession, and represents the first and greatest right of property. If that property is to be made movable, salable, takable, in a word, why not other less sacred and less valuable property also? “Property is theft,” say the socialists, and certainly it is, if we can previously agree to consider marriage so. If all kinds of possessions (life itself included) are to be thus transferable, every individual will be reduced to protect them single‐handed against the world, and from this state of things will grow a monster system of organized murder and legalized rapine. The early Californian society would be nothing to this imaginary community.
In France, Italy, and Spain, the infamous laws not only encouraging but actually enforcing civil marriage are sapping the foundations of society; and in England, a country hitherto held as a model for its conjugal and homely tendencies, the tenets of “free‐love” are making giant inroads into social life, and leavening the mass of everyday literature. Bigamy and divorce are almost worn‐out sensations; they have supplied the ablest pens with thrilling subjects, and have furnished the best theatres with the only dramas that really “take.” Something new and more monstrous yet is needed, and the prurient imagination that shall first succeed in originating a new version of social sin will become the power of the moment.
Such is the present situation. We do not know if there ever has been a worse stage of immorality, except, perhaps, that before the Flood; for at all times of unparalleled license there have been some extenuating circumstances, of which we are afraid we must own ourselves bereft. In the beginning of the Christian era, license was confined to pagans; for in the tottering Roman Empire the Christians were all soldiers of the cross, and their watch for the Bridegroom was too eager to allow them time for temptation; in the transition state that followed, the church’s power already made itself felt, and though barbarian kings still defied their pastors, the latter had at hand ecclesiastical terrors that seldom failed in the end to subdue the half‐converted Goth or Lombard. In the days of the ill‐starred Renaissance, when a spirit of neo‐classicism threatened once more to deify sin under the garb of art, the Council of Trent sat in solemn judgment, and condemned abuses which had unhappily paved an easy way for heresy: while later on, even in the days of the wicked and brilliant court of Versailles, there was found a Bourdaloue to rebuke the public sinners who sat in the high places, and to eulogize Christian marriage in the midst of a gathering which seemed to have utterly forgotten its meaning.
Faith still lingered—the faith that made the middle ages what they were—that faith that condemned public sin to as public a penance, and out of great excesses drew great examples. Louise de la Vallière was almost the last representative of this mediæval spirit of generous atonement; and her heroic words, when told in her cloister of the death of her son, “I should weep rather for his birth than for his death,” were the genuine outcome of a faith that could restore a prostitute to innocence, and place upon a once guilty brow almost a virgin’s crown.
With Voltaire, the work that Luther had begun was perfected, and henceforth it was not Europe that believed, but only a few scattered exiles who here and there kept the lamp of the faith dimly alight in the stifling atmosphere of universal and fashionable doubt. Even among believers the spirit of ready sympathy, with the slightest indication of the church’s unspoken meaning was gone, and there remained only the too self‐conscious effort of unquestioning loyalty. Still, thank God! it did and does remain, and, though shorn of all poetry, it is none the less vigorous in self‐defence. But we may now say that indeed the flood has broken loose, the Philistines are upon us, the whole array of the world’s newest forces is brought to bear against us, and behind her dismantled outposts the church retreats to her citadel, the naked Rock of Peter. Men say that the Council of the Vatican was inopportune, presumptuous, and imprudent; let the world’s gracefully lapsing course be a living refutation to such words. Every outward stay is gone; every difficulty in the way of the reunion of pastors is trebled; every see is hedged about with physical bars that are insurmountable; nothing remains free but what cannot be fettered—the tongue. Who can wonder if the church, in this dire emergency, delegates to one man the power she can no longer collectively exercise in peace? As in old Flemish cities there sits up in the lonely belfry of the cathedral a watcher whose duty it is to guard the city against fire, and to warn the people through a brazen trumpet at which spot he descries the first appearance of danger, so in the heart of the City of God there sits now the watchman whose eye and voice are bound to raise the alarm and direct the remedies through the length and breadth of listening Christendom.
The Council of the Vatican has made the word of the Pope the brazen tocsin of the Christian world.
And now, having said so much of the possibilities opened up by the present lax spirit in morals and equally lax interpretation of what remains in the shape of legal restraints upon vice, let us speak of what Christian marriage ought to be. We will be brief, for the position almost defines itself. Of the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances, even in the case of one of the parties breaking the marriage vow, we will not speak, nor even of the fidelity which marriage requires in every thought and slightest intention. But we would insist upon that which ensures a happy and holy union, namely, the preliminary motive. We have seen how bad marriages and an unworthy idea of this state of life lead to shame, to socialism, to violence, sometimes to a criminal ending in a common jail; let us see now what leads to bad marriages themselves. Two motives there are—one mercenary, and one sensual. We heard a very impressive Jesuit preacher say a few years ago, in the pulpit of one of the most beautiful and frequented churches in London, that to make a good marriage both prayer and seemly preparation are necessary. Some parents, he said, in their pious anxiety to leave all things to Providence, and to avoid that solicitude for worldly things which the Gospel condemns, neglect to avail themselves for their children of the allowable means and legitimate opportunities of social life; but to these he would say, Remember the words of Christ: “Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”(238) On the other hand, many parents sinned far more grievously and—he was loth to say it—more frequently by altogether leaving the Creator out of the question in the serious matter of their children’s settlement in life. Which of these two extremes is the prominent one in this country? We need not answer the question. We know too well how nine‐tenths of those marriages are made which within a few months or years are broken in the divorce courts, or otherwise dissolved by a shameful esclandre. We know how wealth especially, position, associations, beauty, and accomplishments all rank before moral worth in what is called lightly but too truly the “marriage‐market.” We know how marriage is looked forward to through girlhood, not as the assumption of a sacred responsibility, but as the preliminary step to emancipation; we know how it is heartlessly canvassed by men as an expensive but advantageous luxury, its cost being in proportion to the social figure it will enable them to make, but its essence of no deeper moral account to them than the purchase of one trotter or the undertaking of one speculation more or less. We do not say that there are no exceptions to this rule—far from it; but that is just the point: however honorable these cases are, the fact still remains that they are exceptions. Again, where the motive is not directly mercenary, it is often selfish; old men will marry for mere comfort, physical luxury, and the regularity of a well‐ appointed home—things which the presence of a handsome, thoughtful, and tolerably intellectual woman alone can ensure; women no longer young, but still hungering for the whirl of fashion, will marry unsuitably for the sake of an assured position and means to continue the frivolous course of their former lives; in fact, all shallow disguises of selfishness have their representatives in the “marriage‐market,” from that of the millionaire who wants a wife to sit at the head of his table and wear his diamonds, to that of the day‐laborer who wants one to cook his dinner, mend his clothes, and eke out his week’s earnings by her own hard work. Marriages made in this spirit are unblest and always end badly: the millionaire will divorce his wife, and the laborer murder his in a fit of intoxication; the end is the same, the means differ only according as natural temperament and habits of education diverge.
How far otherwise with marriage in the true Scriptural, Christian sense of the word! In poverty or in riches, alike sacred and full of dignity; always conscious of its sacramental crown; ever mindful of its holy ministry, the salvation of two souls, the ladder to heaven of two lives that without it might have made shipwreck of their eternal interests! A thing apart from the common unions of earth, different from a commercial partnership, stronger than a political coalition, holier than even a spontaneous friendship. A thing which, like the riddle of Samson, is “sweetness out of strength,” and whose grace is so sublime that in heaven it can only find one transformation worthy of itself. “You err, not knowing the power of God; for in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.”(239) We are not told that the tie will be like brotherhood or like friendship; we are left to infer that between husband and wife some more peculiar link will exist hereafter than will be common to us all as children of the same Father, and it is plainly foretold that this relation will be as that of the angels towards each other.
We have only to look into the gospels and the teachings of the Apostle of the Gentiles to see by what means we may in the married state so sanctify our lives as to deserve this heavenly transformation; we have only to read the marriage‐service to learn the plain, straightforward, but most solemn duties, the performance of which will secure us spiritual peace and joy in this life or the next. To use the sacrament worthily, we must come to it with worthy preparation and steadfast intention, first as Christians resolved never to perjure themselves before God, then as rational beings willing to abide by whatever unforeseen consequences their deliberate vow may entail in the future. For it is an idle pretext to allege that, if one party breaks the engagement, the other is de facto absolved from it. Where in the formula, Catholic or Protestant, is this proviso? The only qualifying sentence is this, “Until death do us part.” How, then, can any reasonable person interpret “death” to mean sin, incompatibility, or any other incidental unpleasantness? We think that those who are so ready to foist unwarrantable meanings on the plain and naked oath they have sworn in full possession of their senses at the altar, would hardly be the persons we should like to trust as men or women of unimpeachable honor in the ordinary transactions of life.
If mercenary motives are uppermost in the majority of marriages in this age and in this nation, sensuality is none the less responsible for a share of the misery attendant upon modern unions. We have already spoken of the evil of marriages founded on passion, and of the shameful way in which the colloquial adage, “Marry in haste, and repent at leisure,” is thus frequently illustrated. To this also the remedy lies in a serious Christian spirit of preparation for marriage. The root of all evil developments in the relations between the sexes lies in the early education of the contracting parties, and it is here that the only radical cure can be tried. The church bids her children be especially circumspect at the juncture of marriage, but she also teaches them to reverence the sacrament from childhood upward as a type of the union between herself and her divine Spouse. If, as children, marriage appears to us in the shape of the angel of home, watching over the existence it has created, and dignifying the parental authority it has built up; if in youth the goal of marriage is looked forward to as the toga virilis of life, the reward of a dutiful childhood, the ennobling badge of our enrolment among the soldiers of the cross, then and only then will our country find in us efficient citizens, earnest patriots, and reliable defenders. If among men there is revived the chivalrous spirit of deference and forbearance towards women which sealed the middle ages as a charmed cycle among all divisions of time, and among women there is cultivated that generous and true womanliness which made SS. Monica and Paula, and Blanche of Castille, the typical heroines of the wedded state, then may we expect to see “a new heaven and a new earth.” Marriage means reverence for each other on the part of the persons married, as representing in themselves the sacrament typical of Christ’s union with the church; it means reverence for the children who are entrusted to their care by God and their country, and whom they are bound by the solemn adjuration of Christ not to scandalize; it means reverence for themselves, as the tabernacles of a special grace and the progenitors of new worshippers at God’s feet, new subjects of the kingdom of heaven. It is the woman especially who is bound to feel and express this reverence, for woman is, as the French poetically say, the priestess of the ideal. Besides, the highest perfection ever reached in the married state was reached by a woman, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. Among married saints there have always been more women canonized than men. The women of a nation form the men; and, if marriage is to be reformed, it must be done first through the women. We hope and pray that it may soon be so, but we fear that outside the church, where the reform is, in the abstract, not needed, there is not sufficient impetus to ensure its being made. We say in the abstract, because practically there are many marriages made among Catholics, celebrated in Catholic churches, and decorously observed through the course of a blameless life, which yet call loudly for reform, and sadly lack the noble Christian spirit that made perfect the unions of Delphina and Eleazar, and of S. Louis of France and Margaret of Provence. But however deficient in some cases our practice may unhappily be, our doctrine remains ever unchanged, and our laws ever inflexible. Thanks to the church, marriage is still recognized as an act not purely animal nor yet purely civil; and, thanks to the infallibility of the church and her calm expectancy of eternal duration, it will remain to the end of time an honored institution. If threatened, it will still live; if derided, it will nevertheless conquer. Christian marriage is the mould in which God has chosen to throw the lava of natural passion, and without whose wholesome restraints we should have a shapeless torrent of licentiousness, scathing mankind with its poisonous breath, carrying away all landmarks of ancestry, property, and personal safety, and finally exterminating the human race long before the appointed time for the dread judgment in the Valley of Josaphat.
A Pearl Ashore.
If one should wish to enjoy perfectly a fugue of Bach’s, this is perhaps as good a way as any: listen to it on a warm afternoon, in a Gothic Protestant church, in a quiet city street, with no one present but the organist and one’s self. If any other enter, let him be velvet‐footed, incurious, and sympathetic. It would be better if each listener could suppose himself to be the only listener there.
The wood‐work of the church is dark, glossy, and richly carved. Rose, purple, and gold‐colored panes strain the light that enters, full and glowing up in the roof, but dim below. On the walls, tinted with such colors as come to us from Eastern looms, and on the canvas of the old painters, are texts in letters of dull gold—those beautiful letters that break into bud and blossom at every turn, as though alive and rejoicing over the divine thought they bear. A sunbeam here and there, too slender to illumine widely, points its finger at a word, touches a dark cushion and brings out its shadowed crimson, or glimmers across the organ pipes, binding their silver with gold, as though Light would say to Song, “With this ring I thee wed!”
Those clustered, silvery pipes are surrounded by a border of dark, lace‐ like carving, and a screen of the same hides the keyboards. Through this screen shines the lamp on the music‐desk. Some one is stirring there. You lean back on the cushions, so that the body can take care of itself. Mentally, you are quiescent with a delightful sense of anticipation. If the situation should represent itself to you fancifully, you might say that your soul is somewhat dusty and weary, and has come down to this beach of silence for a refreshing bath. Knowing what you are to hear, watery images suggest themselves; for in the world of music it is the ocean that Bach gives us, as Beethoven gives us the winds, and Handel the stately‐flowing streams.
We have made a Protestant church our music‐hall, because, though not the dwelling‐place of God on earth, it is often the temple of religious art, and, having nothing within it to which we can prostrate ourselves in adoration, it can yet, by signs and images, excite noble and religious feeling. Indeed, we would gladly banish to such concert‐rooms all that music, however beautiful in itself, which intrudes on the exclusive recollection proper to the house of God.
This, we repeat, is as good a way as any to hear a fugue of John Sebastian Bach’s. So also thought Miss Rothsay; and she was one who ought to know, for she was a professional singer, and as sensitive musically as well could be.
It was an afternoon in early September, and she had only the day before reached her native city, after a prolonged residence abroad. Hers had been that happy lot which seems to be the privilege of the artist: her work, her duty, and her delight were the same. That which she must and ought to do she would have chosen above all things as her recreation. Now, with a perfected voice, and a will to use truly and nobly that gracious power, she had returned to her native land.
Her first contact with the New World had given her a slight jar. Utility seemed to mean here something rough and harsh, and the utility of beauty to be almost unrecognized. She had as yet met with only two kinds of people: those who regarded her talent as beautiful indeed and useful, in so far as it brought her money, but otherwise superfluous; and that yet more depressing class who were enthusiastic in hailing a new amusement, a new sensation, and who valued the singer as a necessity to elegant dissipation. As yet, she had met with no serious disciple of music.
Yet, when she stepped from her door to walk about, to renew her knowledge of familiar scenes, and make acquaintance with changed ones, she was pleased to perceive some of that tranquillity which, in her foreign life, had been so conducive to a steady growth in art. The fine streets she traversed were quiet, distant from the business world, and out of its track. The September air was golden, and the sun so warm as to make the shade welcome. Here and there, through openings between the houses, or at the ends of long avenues, were to be seen glimpses of country; and a thin haze, so exquisite that it might be the cast‐off mantle of Beauty herself, half veiled, while it embellished, the landscape. It was quite in keeping to see an open church door. One who loitered on the steps explained that there was to be an organ recital, but could not say who the organist was to be.
Miss Rothsay entered, scarcely seeing her way at first, seated herself, and looked about. The atmosphere of the place suited her taste. None but noble and sacred images presented themselves. Art was there in its sublimity, and in its naïve simplicity. Here was a form full of austere beauty, there one whose grace verged on playfulness. The scene had the effect of a sacred picture, in the corner of which one can see children playing or birds on the wing.
Miss Rothsay, without knowing it, made, herself, a lovely picture in the place. Her oval, pale face was lighted by liquid gray eyes, now lifted, and drinking in the upper light. On her fair hair was set a foreign‐ looking black hat, turned up over the left temple with an aigrette and feather. A slight and elegant figure could be perceived beneath the dark‐ blue mantle.
Wondering a little, while she waited, who the organist might be, she ran over in her mind those she had known before going abroad. From that, dismissing the present, her thoughts glanced over those she had known abroad, and at last rested on one she had not seen nor heard of for eight years. Eight years before, Laurie had gone to Germany to study, and he was probably there yet. She recollected his face, more youthful than his years, and full of a dreamy beauty; the figure, tall and graceful, yet wanting somewhat in manly firmness. She heard again, in fancy, that changeful voice, so low, eager, and rich‐toned when he was in earnest; she met again the glance of his sparkling blue eyes, full of frankness and enthusiasm. Where was he now?
Had he been a common acquaintance, she would have inquired concerning him freely; but he was a rejected lover, and she would not, by mentioning his name, remind people of that fact. Why had she rejected him? Simply because he had seemed to her not to reach her ideal. It had occurred to her since that time that possibly his manner and not his character had been at fault. At twenty years of age, she had been more mature than he at twenty‐ five. She liked an appearance of dignity and firmness, and had made the mistake often made by those older and wiser than herself, of thinking that dignity of soul must always be accompanied by a grave manner, and that an air occasionally or habitually demonstrative and variable, which is merely temperament, indicates a fickle or superficial mind. Sometimes, indeed, the strongest and most profound feelings, in reserved and sensitive persons, seek to veil themselves under an affectation of lightness or caprice, and the soul looks forth with a sad scorn through that flimsy mask on the hasty and egotistical judge who pronounces sentence against it.
“And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love,”
is true of some of the finest natures.
Miss Rothsay, during these eight years of her separation from Laurie, had more than once felt a misgiving on his account, lest she had done him injustice. Observing and studying the manners of those she met, she saw that what passed for dignity was sometimes only the distrustfulness of the suspicious, the caution of the worldly‐wise, the unsympathizing coldness of the selfish, or the vanity of the conceited. She had lost not only her admiration, but her respect for that unchangeable loftiness which chills and awes the demonstrative into silence; and she had remembered, with a growing regret, Laurie’s cordial ways, that seemed to expect friendliness and sympathy from all, and to appreciate the purity of his soul, that never looked for evil, and turned away from it when it intruded itself, and thus seemed scarcely aware that evil existed. Still she had been too deeply engrossed in her studies to give him much thought, and it was only now that she became conscious of regret.
Meantime, the organist had taken his place, and was arranging his music. The light of the lamp shone on a face wherein were exquisitely blended strength and refinement. One could see there passion purified by prayer, and enthusiasm too deep for trivial excitement. The face showed, too, when studied, that tranquil reserve, not without sadness, which is learned by those who have too often cast their pearls before swine, yet who do not despair of finding sympathy.
He placed the music, sat an instant in fixed recollection, as though he prayed, then lifted his tapering hands, so nervous, light, and powerful, and let them fall on the keys. To the listener beyond the screen, it was as though her reverie had been broken by a burst of thunder. Then the sea rolled in its waves of sound, strong, steady, a long, overlapping rhythm. What did it mean, that fugue? Did it symbolize the swift‐coming assaults of evil that seek to drag the race of man downward, as the persistent sea eats away, grain by grain, the continents? Was it, perhaps, the ceaseless endeavor of the faithful will that, baffled once, returns ever to the charge, and dies triumphantly struggling? Did it indicate the generations of men flowing on in waves for ever, to break at the feet of God; or the hurrying centuries, cut short, at last, by eternity? However it might be interpreted, the music lifted and bore the listener on, and the silence that followed found her otherwhere than the last silence had left her. She was the same in nature, but her mood was higher; for music does not change the listener, it merely intensifies what is positive in his nature, whether it be good or bad, to its superlative degree.
Vibrating and breathless still with the emotion caused by that grand composition so grandly rendered, Miss Rothsay perceived a slip of paper on the cushion, and reached her hand for it. It proved to be a programme of the Recital. She glanced along the list, and read the name of the organist at the end—it was Duncan Laurie!
She heard, as in a dream, the soft‐toned Vorspiele that followed, and only came back to music when the third number, a toccata, began. But the music had now to her a new meaning. It seemed to triumph over and scorn her. She heard through that melodious thunder the voice of Nemesis.
But when the closing piece, a noble concerto by Handel, sang out, it reproved that fancy of hers. There was no spirit of revenge nor mean triumph in Laurie’s nature.
The audience, small and select, went out quietly. The organist closed the instrument, and prepared to follow, yet waited a moment to recover full consciousness of the everyday world he was going to meet. The air seemed to pulse about him still, and wings of flying melodies to brush his face. Never had he felt less inclined to meet idle compliment or talk commonplace. “I hope no one will wait for me,” he muttered, going out into the vestibule.
But some one was waiting, a pale‐faced, lovely woman, who looked at him, but spoke not a word. The look, too, was short; for when he exclaimed and reddened up to the eyes, and held out a trembling hand, her eyes dropped.
There is a commonplace which is but the veil to glory or delight, like Minerva in her russet gown. The conventional questions that Laurie properly asked of the lady, as they walked on together, were of this sort. When did she come home? was as one should say, When did Joy arrive? When do the stars come? And the steamer that brought her could be as worthy of poetical contemplation as the cloud that wrapped a descending Juno, or the eagle that bore away a Ganymede.
Not long after, when some one asked them who was their favorite composer, each answered “Bach!” and, when alone together, each asked the other the reason for that answer.
“Because,” said the lady, blushing, “it was on the waves of one of Bach’s fugues that I reached the Happy Islands.”
“And because,” returned the lover, “when some of Bach’s music had rolled back into the ocean, it left a pearl ashore for me.”
The Benefits Of Italian Unity.
From The Etudes Religieuses.
Revolution is a dangerous syren. The nations of the earth have yielded to her seductions, but the day is coming when with one voice they will curse the great enchantress who has lured them on to apostasy. For a century she has not ceased to announce an era of prosperity to the rising generation, but at length we see her promises are as deceptive as her principles are corrupt. From the heart of all nations rise up groans and maledictions against her teachings, and against her agents who have betrayed the hopes of their partisans, brought death instead of life, ruin instead of prosperity, and dishonor instead of glory. In a word, revolution is in a state of bankruptcy. This is not acknowledged by the politicians of the tiers‐parti and their followers. They still continue to proclaim the sovereignty of the “immortal principles,” declare revolution a success, celebrate its material and moral benefits, and boast that “real social justice was for the first time rendered in 1789”—after eighteen centuries of Christianity! But people are ceasing to be duped by any such political sophisms; they are beginning to regret profoundly the peace, order, and security, and all the benefits assured to the world by the supremacy of religion, and lost through social apostasy. The wisest of politicians are tired of revolutions. People who have lost their sacred heritage, and find themselves deprived of the highest blessings of life, are beginning to remember their baptismal engagements, and to feel the necessity of putting an end to revolution, and returning to the social order established of God. The prodigal son, famished with hunger, makes an energetic resolution: Surgam et ibo ad patrem! Hesitation is no longer possible. Weary of your modern theories, we will return to our Father’s house—to Christ and his church!
The man who comprehended most thoroughly the Satanic nature of the revolutionary spirit—Count Joseph de Maistre—had an intuitive assurance of the calamities that would avenge the disregard of the laws of order, and lead future generations back to the sacred principles of their ancestors. The foresight and warnings of this eminent writer are well known. Addressing the French, he says: “Undeceive yourselves, at length, as to the lamentable theories that have disgraced our age. You have already found out what the promulgators of these deplorable dogmas are, but the impression they have left is not yet effaced. In all your plans of creation and restoration you only leave out God, from whom they have alienated you.... How has God punished this execrable delirium? He has punished it as he created light—by a single word—Fiat!—and the political world has crumbled to atoms.... If any one wishes to know the probable result of the revolution, they need only examine the point whereon all its factions are united. They all desire the degradation, yea, the utter subversion, not only of the monarchy, but of Christianity; whence it follows that all their efforts must finally end in the triumph of Christianity as well as the monarchy.”(240) In these few words the great philosopher gives us a complete history of the era of revolution in the past as well as the future. He declares it a widespread overturning of order, necessarily followed by terrible misfortunes, till a counter‐stroke turns the nations back to the way appointed by God.(241)
While M. de Maistre was regarding the progress of events from the heights of his genius, he gave the most minute attention to the ravages of the revolutionary spirit in every department. In the Mélanges Inédits, for which we are indebted to Count Joseph’s grandson, and which appeared on the very eve of our great disasters (1870), we find more than a hundred pages devoted to reviewing the benefits of the French Revolution. They contain an inventory drawn up by the aid of the republican papers of the time, in which the moral and material results of revolutionary barbarism are attested by the avowal of the barbarians themselves. A certain historian of the Revolution would have done well to examine this catalogue before officially undertaking, in the presence of the National Assembly, the awkward apology so generally known. And what if he had continued to verify the benefits of the revolutionary syren, still beloved of certain politicians, till the end of the year 1872? How glorious would be the balance‐sheet of the “immortal principles” in the eighty‐fourth year of their reign! Every Frenchman knows what it has cost to be the eldest son of the Revolution!—As statistics are held in such high honor in our day, why not draw up the accounts of ’89, and establish clearly the active and passive of the revolutionary spirit now spreading throughout the world?
We lay before our readers some notes that may be of service in this vast liquidation, taken from two valuable works that have been kindly brought to our notice.(242) We do not feel at liberty to designate the eminent person who wrote these Notes, which, if we are rightly informed, were first published in the Messager Russe. All we feel permitted to state is that we can place full confidence in the probity of this traveller. He belongs to the diplomatic corps, but unfortunately is not of the Catholic religion. We will let him testify for himself. It will at once be seen by the frequent quotations we shall make that he is a man of superior mind, decision and honesty of character, and of an upright and incorruptible conscience.
“Eleven years ago, I witnessed the foundation of the kingdom of Italy. I have just seen the work completed—the edifice crowned—Rome made the capital.—My observations have been made in person, and are impartial, as I had no preconceived opinions. My numerous quotations are taken in a great measure from Italian sources, nay, even the most Italian. My position as an independent observer, unbiassed by any feeling of responsibility, enables me to judge events in a cooler manner than might be done by an opponent of the various publicists that have treated of the successive phases of the great Italian drama.”(243)
Here, then, is contemporaneous Italy studied by an observer of incontestable impartiality—studied on the spot, and from authentic sources. It is by no means uncommon to hear the correspondents of Catholic journals accused of exaggeration. Certain newspapers under party influence, like the Journal des Débats and the Indépendance Belge, are paid to divert public attention from facts that cannot be denied. We are sure the Italo‐Parisian and the Italo‐Belgian press will not say a single word about the Etudes sur l’Italie contemporaine.(244)
How shall we characterize the Italian crisis as a whole? Is it merely one of those accidental revolutions which history is full of, or is it a genuine revolution with its systematic hatred of Christian society? Our readers must not be astonished at such a question. I know some Catholics—a little too liberal, it is true—who have not thereon, even in these times, perfectly correct notions. We remember certain unfortunate expressions respecting the governments of the ancien régime which committed the unpardonable fault of injuring Italian liberty, and even respecting that venerable Christian administration that has been dragged through blood and fire. Did not the honorable M. Dulaurier recently confess in an ingenuous manner the illusions he was under before he set foot on Italian soil, and how he believed in the possibility of a reconciliation between the Pope and the excommunicated king? He says he heard on all sides a sentiment to which he gave credence without much reflection: “Why interpose between the two parties contending for Rome? Pius IX. and Victor Emmanuel are both Italians: they will end by settling the difficulty, and we shall trouble ourselves for nothing.” The reality, the sad reality, forces us to a different opinion.
It was a beautiful illusion—once greatly dwelt upon in official papers—to think Piedmont sincerely and uniquely preoccupied about the freedom of Italy; to believe in the Subalpine posture of disinterested chivalry, and in Napoleon III. going to war in a great cause merely for the glory of being a liberator. Doubtless there was, for some time, a liberal party in Italy dreaming at once of a confederacy and of national independence. But Mazzinism and its ideas of unity prevailed, and it was manifest to those whose eyes were not blinded that the Piedmontese government superseded Giovane Italia by taking advantage of the naïveté of honest liberals.(245) All sincere and upright minds must free themselves from so illusive a deception. The mask has fallen off, so must the scales from their eyes. The Italian movement is essentially revolutionary—or Satanic. It is not one of those transformations so frequent in the political life of a nation: it is a work of subversion, a war on the church, a religious persecution, and “pure impurity,” to use Joseph de Maistre’s words.
It has been demonstrated quite recently in this magazine that the whole tendency of the Italian Peninsula, and its providential destiny, are opposed to unity; that the Revolution has done violence to nature and religion, to the institutions and traditions of the past, and to the faith and morals of the people weighed down by the yoke of unity; and that it has lied to history, to the world, and to God. Les Etudes sur l’Italie contemporaine takes a similar view of the case:
“The unity of Italy was not a national necessity; ... the movement was not spontaneous, but forced.... The Piedmontese government has shown some shrewdness (unscrupulous shrewdness) in borrowing its programme from Mazzini. The campaign of 1859 led the way to this political intrigue. As to the nation, it imagined the promised regeneration would produce a new era of happiness when the foreigner was once got rid of. The masses have given in to the ambition of the minority.
“In the transformation of Italy, we see action precede reflection; we see what Frederick the Great said of Joseph II.—the second step taken before the first.... It must be remembered that the geography of Italy was one of the causes of its division, the length being so disproportionate to its width, which prevented a common centre, and led to separate developments and outlets.... Even if railways are now a means of greatly shortening distances, the union of the remote parts ought to be the result of a natural and progressive tendency—not revolutionary.
“The first idea of Rome as the capital sprang from the classics. It was a rhetorical expression (according to Senator Stefano Jacini).... If official Italy had need of Rome, Rome by no means had need of Italy.... And what do they wish to do with Rome? The unionists in favor of a monarchy wish to transform it into a modern capital that it may become the centre of the general action and influence which united Italy is ambitious of exercising in the world. The Mazzinians, the socialist republicans, and the free‐ thinkers wish to make it the centre of the doctrines they are desirous of substituting for Christianity. These new apostles are not agreed among themselves, but they are all fighting in the breach against the Catholic organization, and their real object is the destruction of Christian principles.”(246)
To effect the unification of Italy, it was therefore necessary to conspire against the natural inclinations of the inhabitants, against the rights of local principalities, and against the real interests of the nation, to conspire not only against the temporal, but the spiritual power of the papacy. Where they do not find the normal conditions of assimilation, they do not hesitate to resort to deeds worthy of brigands. Conspirators, alas! have never been wanting in the country of Machiavelli. In the present age they superabound. “It has been the misfortune of Italy—its robe of Nessus—that for twelve years all who have succeeded to power, even the best, have been conspirators.”(247) Yes; and foremost among them is the great and good Cavour, whom a French diplomatist—an honest man, however—has lately depicted, with an enthusiasm that has hardly died away, as struggling to promote the greatness of his country.(248) We do not dispute Cavour’s ability, or his perseverance in striving after a certain end, or his subtleness and patience in the execution of his designs, or his skill in availing himself of the very passions he pretended to yield to. He succeeded—is it not a glorious title to fame?—in keeping Napoleon III. in leading‐strings till a Prussian Cavour is found to continue the rôle and lead the emperor on to Sedan. But herein Cavour showed himself crafty, deceitful, and—why should we not say it?—criminal. Has not M. Guizot called a certain writer a “malfaiteur de la pensée?” Besides, Cavour spoke of himself to his friends somewhat as we do. Our French diplomatist, M. Henry d’Ideville, in a curious page of his Notes Intimes, lets us into the secrets of the game and those who took part in it.
“You see, my dear d’Ideville (it is Cavour who is speaking), your emperor will never change. His fault is a disposition to be for ever plotting.... With a country as powerful as yours, a large army, and Europe at peace, what is he afraid of? Why is he for ever disguising his intentions, going to the right when he means to turn to the left, and vice versa? Ah! what a wonderful conspirator he makes!”
M. d’Ideville is a man of wit. With all possible courtesy, he replied:
“But, M. le Comte, have you not been a daring conspirator also?”
“I? Certainly,” replied M. de Cavour. “I have conspired, and how could I do otherwise at such a time?... We had to keep Austria in the dark, whereas, your emperor, you may be sure, will remain for ever incorrigible. I have known him a long time! To plot, for ever plot, is the characteristic of his nature. It is the occupation he prefers, and he pursues it like an artist—like a dilettante. In this rôle he will always be the foremost and most capable of us all.”(249)
US ALL! Yes, there it is ably expressed in a word: all conspirators and accomplices, not to speak of the dupes. On the 24th of March, 1860, M. de Cavour, after signing the treaty that ceded Nice and Savoy to France, approached M. de Talleyrand, and, rubbing his hands, whispered in his ear: “We are accomplices now, baron, are we not?”(250) Alas! wrongfully acquired, and never any benefit, we now see why we have lost Alsace and Lorraine!
The entire route from Turin to Rome is marked by the deeds of these conspirators, by their tricks and intrigues, and by their crimes and double‐dealings, which have resulted in the profit of Piedmont and Prussia, and the disgrace of our poor France. M. d’Ideville’s conscience evidently reproached him at last for having liked Cavour so well, and for imprudently interesting himself in the Italian scheme. The other diplomatist, who has anonymously given his Etudes sur l’Italie to the public, seems never to have had the least sympathy with the iniquitous and sacrilegious ambition of the Sardinian government. It is true he does not belong to the French diplomacy infatuated with the ideas of ’89!(251) He finds nothing seductive in the policy of the conspirators. The fiction disguised under the attractive title of national rights, the age of annexations, the trick of the plebiscites, the system of moral agency, the so‐called exigencies of civilization and progress, and the revolutionary messianism which constitutes the foundation of the Napoleonic ideas, have no attraction for him. His style is tolerably forcible when he speaks of all these stratagems: “Such tactics are nothing new. They have always been resorted to in order to palliate schemes of ambition and hypocrisy.”(252)
A government given to conspiracy condemns the nation that supports it, as well as itself, to degradation—to moral and material ruin. If for a while it flatters itself with the hope of systematizing the revolution and directing its energies, it soon becomes its slave and finally its victim. When the hand is caught in machinery, the whole body is soon drawn after it, the head as well as the rest.
Our diplomatic traveller states some aphorisms in connection with this subject that are full of significance, and reveal the genuine statesman.
“A government that owes its existence to a revolution is not viable in the long run unless it has the power and wisdom to sunder all the ties that connect it with the party to which it owes its origin.
“Every government that has a similar origin to the Napoleonic Empire, and, still more, one which owes its existence thereto, will find itself in danger when traditionary principles once more assert themselves for the safety of society.
“Governments of a revolutionary origin have been known to become conservative and renounce their former principles of action. The Italian government may likewise wish to do this, but it cannot.
“All who have risen to power in Italy have had some connection with the revolutionary party, and are obliged to favor it. In particular instances, they have sometimes manifested a certain firmness towards its factions, but in essentials they have yielded to the inevitable pressure.
“Revolution leads to disorder, and, when it triumphs, the destiny of the country is thrown into the hands of its adherents. Political bias must take the place of capacity and often of honor itself.”(253)
One of the first material disasters produced by a triumphant conspiracy is the squandering of the finances. There is an immediate necessity of enriching itself, repairing all deficiencies, paying traitors, buying consciences and votes, keeping a secret reserve of ready money to reward the zeal of journalists, and stimulate or lull the passions according to the exigencies of the moment. The wretched state of the budgets in United Italy will become as proverbial as the marchés of the 4th of September in France. With all the domains Piedmont has received from the annexed states, it ought to be rich—rich enough to pay the debt its accomplice, the Empire, has bequeathed to us. The finances of the different states, especially of Rome, were in perfect order, and, with the exception of the kingdom of Sardinia, the receipts surpassed the expenses. Now the credit of Italy is destroyed, and nothing is heard of but duties and taxes, such as were unknown throughout the Peninsula in 1859, more particularly at Rome. Figures are eloquent—we must refer to them:
“Previous to 1860, there were seven states in Italy, each with its court, ministers, administration, and diplomatic corps. All these governments expended about five hundred millions of francs a year, and the imposts amounted to nearly the same sum. These seven states had a debt of about two milliards and a half. At the present time, without reckoning the interest on the floating debt to the National Bank, Italy annually pays about three hundred millions of interest, corresponding to a debt of seven milliards, and all this notwithstanding the sale of domanial property amounting to six hundred and fifty millions, notwithstanding the alienation of the railways of the state and the manufacture of tobacco, and notwithstanding the seizure of ecclesiastical property, all of which have amounted in nine years to nine milliards three hundred and sixteen millions of francs received at the state treasury. Nevertheless, the public debt amounts to the aforesaid sum of seven milliards. And yet the army is badly maintained, the navy poorly organized, and the administration in a state of chaos and unparalleled demoralization.”(254)
And here is M. Quintino Sella, who has just made known the projected budget for 1873; he acknowledges a deficit of sixty millions, as had been anticipated, while the ordinary receipts amount to eight hundred and five millions. If the kingdom of Italy were administered as economically as in the time of the seven sovereigns, a budget of eight hundred and five millions would leave a surplus of three hundred millions. And yet one of the pretexts of unification was that it would save the expense of so many courts, which bore hard on the people! Poor people! they know now what to think of cheap governments, and will soon see that the ministration of the imposts is leading to bankruptcy, in spite of the fresh confiscations and appropriation of conventual property about to be made at Rome.(255)
And it must be remembered that, in spite of these great budgets, the army is badly maintained and the navy poorly organized. Custozza and Lissa had previously convinced us of this. Austria was well aware of it, and even the France of M. Thiers suspects that, in spite of the valor of the old Piedmontese soldiery, and the discipline of the Neapolitan army; in spite of the aptitude of the Genoese and Venetian sailors, the military forces of Italy are a mere illusion, particularly on account of the inefficiency of the leaders of the army and navy. Since the time of M. de Cavour, whose ability is by no means beyond doubt, there have been only second‐rate men beyond the Alps—not a statesman, not an orator, not a minister, not a financier, not a genuine soldier—everywhere and in everything there is the same disgraceful deficiency. Facundum sed male forte genus.
“I knew well the men of 1848, some of whom are still remaining, but they must have degenerated through ambition and the necessity of sustaining their position, for even in the revolutionary ranks there was more elevation in 1848 than at the present time.
“Previous to 1860, the armies of the different states, including, of course, the Piedmontese army, constituted a more powerful and better organized force than is now under arms. ‘Our army,’ says General La Marmora, ‘has the traditional reputation of being disciplined, but it is demoralized by a want of stability in its organization, and a lack of moral influences.’ La Marmora opposes among other things the exclusion of chaplains and of the religious element among the troops.
“The Sardinian and Neapolitan navies greatly surpassed the Italian. The men were better drilled, and the shipping in better order. Such is the opinion recently expressed by the English naval officers in port at Naples who were at the exposition of the present year.”(256)
And yet the military forces are the only remaining bulwark of order in Italy—I mean material order, for moral order no longer exists anywhere. The so‐called conservative party, that is to say, the moderate revolutionists, rely on the army. But the ultra revolutionary element is also to be found there, and some day the advanced party will, for its own designs, entice away the officers that followed the hero of Caprera in his campaigns. It will not be sufficient to name Cialdini, Cadorna, or even La Marmora, to counteract the fatal consequences of Castelfidardo and the Porta Pia. By excluding religious influences from the army, and giving it a false idea of patriotism, the source of courage and energy is dried up. After all, revolution will never be friendly to the army, and the genuine soldier will always execrate revolution, whether instigated by princes, citizens, or the mob. A soldier who entered Rome through the breach, lately wrote to the Libertà: “The day the King of Italy is satisfied with mere volunteers, as the Pope was, we shall see whether it is the Pope or the king that is loved and esteemed the most by the Italian people.”
In opposing the system of territorial divisions on account of the army, which he considers unsuited to the Peninsula, General La Marmora’s opinion is founded on a proof that has the misfortune to prove too much. “If there were small territorial armies,” says he, “in addition to separate administrations in the various regions of Italy, the unity for which we have done so much, and Providence still more than we, would incur great danger.”(257) Why not boldly declare, general, that there are two Italys—the Reale and the Legale, one of which has a tendency to revolt against the other? And, above all, why utter a blasphemy against the sovereign providence of God?(258) Italia legale labors in vain; the revolutionary impulse given to it by Cavour is an accelerated movement; it will never reascend the declivity that leads al fondo. It will always have against it not only the betrayed interests and the revolted conscience of Italia reale, but, above all, Divine Providence, who will one day show that the favors and proofs of protection accorded to the “regenerators” were merely for them, as for Napoleon III., the snares of avenging justice. In insidiis suis capientur iniqui.
“As to greatness and political importance, admitting even the possibility of indefatigable and intelligent effort, Italy will never equal the glorious traditions of its past history. Italian glory is the glory of the different states of the Peninsula.... To acquire fresh glory, there must be, besides unity, a strength of organization it does not possess, and cannot, because it is a mirage and not a reality.
“The North invades the South: this cannot be called community of interests. It is an attempt at absorption on the part of the North, and at the expense of the South.
“Once at Rome, the programme was to have ended. A new life was to commence; fresh energy was to be the signal of an era of grandeur and prosperity; interiorly, there was to be a more perfect administration; exteriorly, a prudent national policy, that is to say, the Napoleonic idea of the Latin races that Italy was to revive. Rome was to be the great centre of liberal influences.... All this had been announced and promised. As for me, I see no choice between a blind alley and a politique d’aventure.
“It seems to me the union, at a critical moment, should find protection in the wishes of the inhabitants. I can testify that if the former sovereigns of Naples, Florence, Parma, and Modena could return, the day would be hailed by a majority of the inhabitants as one of deliverance. In Lombardy it is different, I acknowledge. The noblesse say, as I myself heard a personage of great note: We are badly governed, but at least it is no longer by foreigners. The middle classes are republicans, and in the country the Austrian rule is regretted. The people of Venice either aspire to a republic or regret the unfortunate Archduke Maximilian, whom they would have liked as an independent sovereign. In the old pontifical provinces called the Legations, they would not care to return to the former condition of things as they were, but some would be satisfied with the Pope and a local autonomy; the remainder form a sufficiently numerous republican party.”
“In a word, THERE IS EVERYWHERE DISSATISFACTION AS WELL AS DISAPPOINTMENT, AFTER TWELVE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE.”(259)
It is not astonishing, therefore, that at an audience on the 18th of last Nov., the Grand Duke Nicholas, nephew of the Emperor of Russia, said to Pius IX., with all a young man’s frankness: “Most holy Father, since I have been in Italy, everywhere I go, I hear nothing but evil of King Victor Emmanuel and his government.”(260)
We need only open our eyes to see the interior condition of united Italy as soon as there was any question, no longer of conspiring and declaiming, but of organizing and governing. And its exterior political relations compare quite as unfavorably with the programme of emancipation. By a kind of divine irony, Italy has become a mere humble vassal of Germany—of the Holy Protestant Empire of Berlin—and the future King of Rome was only acting his part when he proclaimed himself the King of Prussia’s hussar.(261) It is well known at the Quirinal that, though influenced for the moment by the dominant party, the authorities may some day return, even through interest, to traditional principles and the old political code which does not recognize the revolutionary schemes of nations or parties. Besides, the Italian princes, who represent the law, are still living. Francis II. may be found to be a genuine Neapolitan, Ferdinand IV. a very good Tuscan, Robert I. an excellent Parmesan, and Francis V. the best of Modenais. And, lastly, is not Pius IX. more of an Italian than the Savoyard who styles himself the King of Italy?... And if the French, whose connivance can no longer be expected, even under M. Thiers, should favor the restoration of the throne to a prince, “qui a la justice dans le sang et dans l’âme,” and would at need have it in his hand, the Italian framework, which merely stands through toleration, would be threatened with sudden and ignominious ruin. It is all this that recently induced the prince‐héritier to mount like a Hungarian foot‐soldier behind the triumphal chariot of the German Cæsar.
Another evil: the Prussians are not the most scrupulous people in the world about other people’s property, and their investigations in the Peninsula have excited suspicions as to the object of their cupidity. Let M. de Bismarck, more audacious and grasping than the late M. de Cavour, once succeed in driving the Hapsburgs from Germany, will it not occur to him to take advantage of the title of the Lombardo‐Venetian kingdom for the benefit of the Cæsar of Berlin? For it is skilfully demonstrated in Germany that the Germanic race has the power, and, therefore, the right, to a powerful navy, and, for the benefit of this navy, an outlet on the Adriatic. And there is no other possible ally but Prussia to protect what calls itself the kingdom of Italy!
“Alliances are beneficial when the parties unite their influence for a common end. (Allies, in our day, no longer seek to know each other’s principles or origin.) But when they are not formed inter pares, or nearly so, and especially when they are intended to guarantee the very existence—the vital principle—of the weaker ally, then the alliance loses its true character, and soon ends in subjection on the ground of politics or economy, and sometimes both.”(262)
Such are the glories of Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic! If, in spite of her presumptuous farà da se, she was obliged to have recourse to a foreign hand in order to rise, and still needs a foreign arm to stand erect, she will, according to appearances, have need of no one to aid her in falling: she will topple over of herself. The so‐called free country is only an enslaved kingdom—a vassal, a satellite without strength and without prestige.
Of all the Italian formulas that have served to mislead the liberal mind, there is not one more odiously false and deceptive than the too famous expression, A free church in a free country. History has already interpreted it, A persecuted church in an enslaved country. The revolutionary factions that have assumed the authority have imposed thereon the complete execution of their plan, and we know that the Masonic lodges, though they denounce Mazzinian deism, have fallen into the atheism of Renan, al fondo!
The sacrilegious frenzy of the Revolution, and the madness of those that encouraged it, have been stigmatized in forcible terms by the august prisoner of the Vatican:
“Unbelief assumes an air of authority, and proudly stalks throughout the length and breadth of the earth, doubtless imagining it is to triumph for ever.... Woe to those who are linked with the impious, and dally with the Revolution under the pretence of directing it! Sooner or later they will be drawn into the abyss. The recent disasters at Naples may be adduced as an example. A great number of curious people, heedless and devoid of all prudence, hastened to get a nearer view of the devouring flames issuing from the fearful mouth of Vesuvius, and many of them became victims of mistaken curiosity. So it is with those who covenant with the Revolution and the revolutionists, hoping to overrule the former and keep down the latter. Rash people! they will all become a prey to the flames that surround them on every side.”(263)
The revolutionary lava floods the streets of Rome and covers the whole Peninsula. It began in the cities, spread into the country, and will end by swallowing up the army. The universities and common schools are invaded, the torrent engulfs the workshops and stalls, and undermines the walls of palaces. Princes even have opened their gates at its approach. In vain the Holy Father sounds the cry of alarm; in vain his prime minister publicly denounces the progress of the deadly current—party spirit seems to have paralyzed all in authority.
We will not describe the exploits of this new Islamism against the papal power. The history of its ambuscades and pillages is sufficiently well known. There never was a richer treasure of dishonor for revolution to endow a people with. “The title of liberators was all the same retained.” Yes, all the same!
Joseph de Maistre somewhere refers to an English functionary as saying that every man who spoke of taking an inch of land from the Pope ought to be hung. “As for me,” adds the witty writer, “I cheerfully consent, in order to avoid carnage, that hung should be changed to hissed.”(264)
Let us wait. An avenging God will do both: subsannabit, conquassabit. Had the plots of the unionists merely aimed at the temporal power, perhaps divine justice would have been satisfied with a hiss at the hour of some Italian Sedan, but the gibbet—it is a law of history—is reserved for persecutors and apostates.
When the Sardinian government knocked at one of the gates of Rome, as it awaited a propitious moment for battering it down, it bound itself before all Europe to solve the problem of the separation of church and state which had puzzled all the doctors of liberalism, and of which it pretended to have found the key. It was said the Roman question and the Italian question were to cease to be antagonistic, or, at least, they were to resemble those rivers that, while mingling their waters, preserve their own colors, as we see in the Rhône and the Saône. It was promised a channel should be made wide enough for this double current of opinions. Hence the origin of the famous law of the Guarantees. This scheme of conciliation is properly appreciated in the Etudes sur l’Italie Contemporaine:
“How many times I have heard it said that the Papacy and the Italian government, even though they never came to an agreement, might at least be like two parallel lines indefinitely and pacifically prolonged! This is a mistake arising from a judgment founded on impressions—and when I say impressions, I mean appearances.
“From the beginning, this law of Guarantees was a one‐sided and fruitless attempt.... The government and the Chambers never had any doubt as to the refusal of the Pope. This law was like an olive branch presented at the point of the sword as a suitable corrective to palliate the violent occupation of Rome.... I do not think a single statesman could really have believed in the success of this law, otherwise than as the decree of the conqueror.
“Besides the moral, juridical, and historic reasons to hinder an understanding between the Pope and a sovereign master of Rome, there was also the impossibility of coexisting with a power that rests on an unstable foundation.
“Even from the point of view of modern but not subversive ideas, A SEPARATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT OF STATE AND CHURCH IS THE SEPARATION OF STATE AND REVOLUTION.”(265)
These are golden words. But our diplomatic traveller is forced to acknowledge that the Italian government cannot break its iniquitous bonds, that it lacks honesty and force, and that all the factions seek their own good first and then the evil of others. Our author, though, unfortunately, too indifferent a spectator to Italian persecution, at least has the advantage of being an unexceptionable witness.
“Practically, it is not the state, it is society, that modern Italy separates from the church.... One of the greatest mistakes the unionists have made since the beginning of the Revolution has been the war declared against the clergy and the church. It is at once a political and historical error, and the greater for being committed at Rome.
“Tolerance (practised from time to time according to orders) has its reaction, and of the deepest die, in a recrudescence of insults, sequestrations and confiscations imposed on the ministers of the sanctuary and even the sanctuaries themselves.
“Anti‐Christianity has established itself with a bold front at Rome—with its schools of free‐thinkers, speeches in which atheism is proclaimed without the least reticence, burial without any religious ceremony, and irreligious books sold at low prices.
“In everything relating to teaching, the choice generally falls on the unbeliever.
“Materialism is taught ex cathedra in all the universities.
“They have not yet touched on the most vital question—the suppression of the convents (at Rome) and the incameration of the property of the clergy. But they will come to that, and speedily.... The attempt at what is called a conciliation must sooner or later end in an outbreak.”(266)
They did come to it—to that shameful encroachment of the government on the religious corporations. The party demanded it, M. de Bismarck advised it, and the diplomatic corps tolerated it. What will not diplomacy tolerate? It was, however, clearly demonstrated to the representatives of different governments the urgent necessity there was of taking under their united protection the independence of the Sovereign Pontiff so poorly guaranteed by the usurper, of declaring the inviolability of church property, the possession of which—and it is a wholly legitimate one—is a sine qua non condition of pontifical independence, without considering that most of these establishments have a double claim as to their origin and destination, to be regarded as international property.(267) Nothing was done. The tolerance of official Europe towards the Piedmontese filibustering has been unlimited, though unrestricted usurpation has been followed by open persecution. Pius IX. had good reason to severely allude to “the so‐called governments” that find amusement in the Revolution. Europe seems to have sent its diplomatists to the court of the usurper in the capital of the Christian world, that they might close their eyes to all the schemes of Freemasonry, and the numberless vexations and spoliations, that they might play the rôle of stage‐dancers in the sacrilegious comedy! Such base complacency justifies the expression of a Catholic writer: “Europe is in a state of mortal sin!”
I am almost ashamed to be obliged to refer to the authority of a diplomatist who belongs neither to our nation nor our religion. I wish I could quote some official report of a minister from France! Might not M. Fournier have employed his time better than in figuring at banquets offered to a renegade, and in listening to heretical and atrocious speeches from the professors of the Romano‐Piedmontese university? I will console myself in transcribing a page from M. Dulaurier, the honorable member of the Institute, likewise an ocular witness, and a witness worthy of credit, even from a subscriber to the Débats:
“These grievances and many others are aggravated by the excesses to which the press—the illustrated press, above all—has given itself up, and by the incessant war it wages against religion. Ignoble caricatures are daily exposed for sale in the sight of the police, and to their knowledge, in all the Kiosques and newspaper shops, and on the walls, or are hawked around by miserable creatures in rags. The Don Pirloncino, a humorous paper, obsequious to the government, diffuses three times a week its abominations on the most august mysteries of the Christian faith and the ministers who dispense them. The cross itself—the cross before which Christians of all communions bow with respect—not only Catholics, but schismatics, Greeks, and Orientals, and even Protestants—is not safe from its insults. My heart swells with horror when I recall one of these pictures—a caricature of the Crucifixion. In the place of the God‐Man is Dr. Lanza, Minister of the Interior. The words put in his mouth, and on the lips of his murderers, are untranslatable. Under his feet, at the lower extremity of the tree of the cross, is fastened transversely an instrument that I dare not designate otherwise than by saying it is made a burlesque use of at the end of the first act of M. de Pourceaugnac. Our French revolutionists, in their senseless fury, have broken the cross in pieces, but it never occurred to them to defile it in such a manner. So revolting an idea could only spring from imaginations the country of Aretino alone is capable of producing.
“In the presence of these abominations echoed by the political press devoted to the advancement of free‐thinking, the Sovereign Pontiff, the clergy, and the Roman people who are fundamentally religious, can only veil their faces, resign themselves, and have recourse to prayer. And prayer rises unceasingly to heaven in expiation of so many horrors. It is the only consolation left to all these afflicted souls. There is a constant succession of triduos, announced by blank notices, headed Invito sacro, and signed by Mgr. Patrizi, the Cardinal Vicar. One of these notices, which I saw affixed to the columns at the entrance to his eminence’s palace near the Church of Sant’ Agostino, gives an idea, in the very first line, of the indignation that is fermenting in every Catholic breast: ‘The earth is full of the most horrible blasphemies. La terra è piena della più orrende bestemmie.’ ”
We will not deny one benefit—and this time a real one!—that has sprung from the Italian Revolution: it has served to revive the fidelity and fervor of all true Italians. It can be rightly said of it, as M. Guizot says of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, It has awakened, even among its adversaries [we must correct this Protestant writer’s mistake—he should have said among its adversaries alone], religious faith and civil courage. Some natures that were formerly nonchalantes, timid, and delicate, are no longer satisfied with groaning over the evil, but take a bold stand against the inroads of impiety. Italy, somewhat inclined to the far niente, might of itself have yielded; sustained by the hand of a great Pope, she is roused to withstand the unloosed tempest. She no longer falters before the responsibility of a religious manifestation or an anti‐ revolutionary vote. No longer afraid of the threats of the poniard, or of conciliating, through culpable prudence, her temporary masters, she at last ventures to show herself openly, as she really is—the cherished and faithful daughter of the Church of Rome. Roused by provocations and blasphemies, her filial piety towards the Papacy has become more lively and aggressive. She protests solemnly against the schemes of the adventurers who have trampled under foot their faith, honesty, morality, and honor. At the sight of these sublime outbursts of a spirit at once Catholic and Roman, the church is consoled, and observant Christendom begins to hope the reaction will be the more salutary from the extreme violence of the crisis.
One of our co‐laborers has expressed all this much better than we can:
“If there is a country we have reason to conceive such consoling hopes of, assuredly it is Italy, in spite of all the scandals and all the infamy that now degrade it. All who have had a favorable opportunity of observing the moral condition of the country agree in declaring the greater part of the inhabitants faithful to their belief. It is merely the froth and pestilential impurities that are seething on the surface. Some day it will doubtless be with this impure froth as with the stagnant waters for which Pius IX. some years ago made an opening to the sea, giving fresh fecundity to the old Italian soil. Purified by trials, as by a new baptism, this nation, in many respects so highly gifted, will once more have acquired a beneficial discipline of mind and character, the advantages of a robust and manly training, the practice of energetic individual action, and especially of great combined efforts which she is beginning to give us the consoling spectacle of in the recently formed Catholic associations.”(268)
In France we think lightly, or rather we have an incorrect idea, of what our brethren in Italy are effecting. The very people among us who only talk of harmony and compromise reproach the Catholics of the Peninsula for being inactive and inefficient. They even make them partly responsible for the national misfortunes and the decay of moral principle beyond the Alps. We protest against such superficial judgments. We know Italy too well not to have a right to speak in favor of those who are so unjustly accused. Catholics in Italy decline public offices, ne eletti, ne elettori; and they do well, because the Sardinian government imposes an oath after the style of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Tell us if it is proper for a Catholic to take a seat in a parliament established at Rome between the Vatican where the Pope is imprisoned, and the Quirinal where the Piedmontese has established himself by the aid of a false key. Does the military career offer much attraction when he might be ordered to assassinate the pontifical zouaves, open a breach in the walls of Rome, bombard Ancona or even the quarter of the Vatican? He might without any great difficulty present himself at the municipal and provincial ballot‐boxes. The faithful Neapolitans, at the invitation of their archbishop, formed a majority there, and this is not an isolated case. But do you, who are the safety of France, set the example of hastening to the polls?—No; good Christians in Italy are far from being inert, nor do the clergy inculcate inertness. Abstaining is quite a different thing from inaction. Is the public aware that the Catholic press is one of the glories of the Peninsula? There are a hundred journals and reviews on the other side of the Alps consecrated to the service of the truth, and some of these publications are of unequalled merit. It is sufficient to name the Civiltà Cattolica, the Unità Cattolica, and the Voce della Verità. We confess our admiration for the courageous journalists who keep their own course in spite of arrests, law‐suits, fines, imprisonment, and threats of coltellate. And the tone of these papers, with some insignificant exceptions, is healthier than with us, the union of sentiment stronger, and their adhesion to the apostolic constitutions more sincere and open. Associations have spread from one end of the Peninsula to the other, and everywhere produce the most beneficial results. I need only mention the Society of Catholic Youth at Bologna, celebrated on account of the generous filial stand it has taken from the first in favor of Pius IX., and the Roman Society for the promotion of Catholic interests, which, by its branches and parish committees, exercises so prodigious an influence over the city of Rome as to excite the anxiety of those in authority.
But let us once more listen to our unexceptionable witness, whom I think every one will feel indebted to us for quoting so much at length: testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ.
“The religious reaction is more and more decided, even in the middle and lower classes, owing to the zealous associations that have assumed the direction. This movement is worthy of study.... At Rome, and throughout Italy, this reaction has given rise to societies composed for the most part of men still young, whose object is to oppose all pernicious doctrines. These societies are to be found at Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, Turin, Verona, Genoa, Lucca, Padua, Pisa, and Bologna.
“In January, 1871, the following statement was made in the Riforma, the organ of Rattazzi: ‘The clerical party is being more and more reinforced at Rome; the clerical press every day acquires more strength, its organs increase in number and boldness.’... The clerical press is really well sustained, and, in spite of the persecutions and ill‐treatment of all kinds the editors of these journals have to undergo, they do not cease their energetic efforts.
“The administering of the oath has caused wholesale resignations in all the dicastères (at Rome). Many of these functionaries are left without any means of subsistence.... As early as the year 1871, there were more than four thousand resignations.
“Thousands of Romans go to the Vatican to give their plebiscites, and to the basilica of St. Peter to offer solemn prayers for hastening THE DAY OF DELIVERANCE.”(269)
The day of deliverance will arrive, and, in spite of the sneers about our wailing over disappointed hopes, it will come soon! But how will this deliverance be effected? United Italy has against it the upper and nether fires—the Catholic reaction that will never stoop to parley, and the exertions of the demagogues, which are continually increasing. At present the nether fires seem like the prelude of the Internationale.
The intermediate party, which would like to consolidate le fait accompli, and which recruits adepts from the very opposers of the mezzi morali, is not sufficiently free from all alloy of party spirit to constitute a government capable of resistance and of exacting respect from the league of destruction.
Unhappy but beloved Italy! Great and holy city of Rome! shall we have the sorrow of seeing the enemy flamber your palaces, your museums, your churches?
Not long since we were asked at Florence to read the prophecy of Joel, so applicable to the future of Italy: “Hear this, ... tell ye of this to your children, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation. That which the palmer worm hath left, the locust hath eaten; and that which the locust hath left, the bruchus hath eaten; and that which the bruchus hath left, the mildew hath destroyed. Awake, ye that are drunk, and weep, and mourn, all ye that take delight in drinking sweet wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.”—Joel. i. 2‐5.
It is true too large a part of the Italian nation have grown giddy from the intoxicating draught of liberalism, and it is to be feared they may be condemned to drink the bitter cup of expiation to the dregs. The international “locusts” will devour that which the Sub‐Alpine “palmerworm” hath left. To‐day, the taxes of Sella; to‐morrow, the communism of Castellani: yesterday, a political revolution; to‐morrow, a radical revolution: yesterday and to‐day, the hypocrisy of the tribune; to‐morrow, the bloody scenes of the national Comitia. After the physicians and lawyers, after the members of the Consorteria and the friends of Rattazzi, the lowest grade of society—the “bruchus” and the “mildew”—like a barbarous horde, will overturn, and destroy, and deluge with petroleum.
Italy, more than France or Spain, has abused the divine gift. She has “the light of Rome and the sun,” but has been ungrateful, proud, impious, shameless, and reckless. The whole land is now a mere haunt for banditti, traitors, and buffoons.
Alas! it is so: but Pius IX. still prays for his beloved Italy! Following the example of its lawful ruler, the nation—at least, the better portion of the nation—have multiplied their holy prayers, which daily grow more frequent from the delay of the benefit and the example of France. It has a clearer sense of equity and justice; it already feels disposed to renew its former covenant with God, return to the path of order, and take up its national traditions of glory. It is awakening from its dreams of moral and social primacy. It will be satisfied with, and glory in, being the patrie environnante of the Vicar of Christ. Would that France, once more regenerated, might speedily aid her in breaking loose from the tyranny of lodges, and shaking off the Prussian suzerainty!
In 1860, the unhappy King of Sardinia said to M. de la Tour d’Auvergne, the French minister at Turin: “I do not wish you to leave me under false impressions. I feel sure you regard me as impious—as an infidel, as people persist in saying. You are wrong.—If I number kings among my ancestry, there are likewise saints. Here, look around.—Well, do you think that in yonder world all these sainted relatives of mine have any other occupation than to pray for me?”(270)
Our Saviour prayed for those who knew not what they did! Pater dimitte illis. May all the saints in heaven and on earth pray for poor Italy! It has need of it.
Sonnet.
FROM THE ITALIAN OF GIOVANNI BATTISTA ZAPPI, UPON THE MOSES OF MICHAEL ANGELO IN THE CHURCH OF SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI, AT ROME.
Whose form there, sculptured in such mass of stone, Sits like a giant, carrying art so far Beyond all works most beautiful and known? On those quick lips life’s very accents are! That man is Moses: on the awful front The double ray,(271) the glory of his beard, Reveal as much: ’tis Moses from the Mount When much of Deity in his face appeared! So looked he once when he the vasty fount Of sounding waters with his one word stayed. Such was his aspect when the sea obeyed And swallowed Egypt. O ye tribes that bent Before the calf! had you an image made Like this to worship, less were to repent.
Recollections Of Père Hermann.
France has a strange, magnetic power of attracting to herself, and absorbing into her mould, all the great talent of the world. How many men there are in Paris, who, from the ends of the earth, come together to lose their nationality in her appreciative bosom, and to gain there instead a reflected light of popularity ensured by her endorsement alone! All countries have adopted citizens, it is true, some by social, some by artistic, some by political adoption, but no country has a larger share of adopted intellect than France.
To all intents and purposes, the famous artist‐convert and artist‐monk, Père Hermann, was a Frenchman, though he was born a German Jew, in the free city of Hamburg. His biographers have told us all the striking incidents of his life; they have dwelt on his intoxicating success during youth, his mad extravagance of opinion, of expenditure, and of depravity, and, lastly, on his almost miraculous conversion and religious vocation. His death, which was a fitting crown to his life, and can be dignified by no lesser title than martyrdom, has endeared his memory still more to all those who knew him personally and had many secret reasons to admire his sanctity and feel grateful for his spiritual direction. His was a figure not easily forgotten, and perhaps a few touches of personal reminiscences will not be unacceptable to our readers, since all that links us to the saints, and brings the shadow of their sanctity nearer to our littleness, can hardly fail to be of interest.
The first time we were brought in contact with him was in the summer of 1862, when he came by special invitation to spend a few days with us in the country. The house itself had a monastic appearance and origin. It had been, so said tradition, a rural dependency, half farm, half infirmary, of a great Franciscan convent. It had been restored in 1849 and 1850, or thereabouts, and thanks to the good taste of the owner and the talent of the architects employed, had developed into a gem of Elizabethan Gothic and of domestic comfort. The little market‐town adjoining, once a centre of wealthy wool‐merchants and a great mediæval mart, contained several XIVth century buildings in a state of entire preservation, besides the later pile of the almshouses (XVIIth century), which, both as a building and an institution, was the pride of the surrounding country. Twelve old and destitute people, six men and six women, invariably widows or widowers, are generously supported on the fund left in perpetuity for this purpose by Joanna, Lady C——, wife of the great loyalist Baptist, Viscount C——, who burnt down his manor‐house (opposite the almshouses), rather than let it fall, with its treasures of plate and furniture, into the hands of Cromwell’s Roundheads.
It was the yearly custom to feast these good people at the manor, the restored Franciscan dependency, and thither they were conveyed one day during the summer in question, in a large covered cart provided with seats like a French char‐à‐banc. Père Hermann had been in the house since the previous evening, and had stipulated with his cordial host and hostess that he should wear his Carmelite habit while within the limits of the private grounds. The sight of this alone had in it something homely; it was a rest to the eye to see the cowled figure pacing the terrace in the early morning, Breviary in hand, and to lapse into beautiful day‐dreams of what might have been had England kept true to the faith. The Carmelite was delighted at the prospect of seeing this annual feast given to the almshouse people, and no sooner had they all assembled round the ample board spread for them on a shady part of the terrace at the back of the house, than he made his way towards them, and, saluting them, showed how much he sympathized in their enjoyment. His English was, of course, very imperfect; indeed, he never grew to any proficiency in speaking that language, but his interest in the scene was none the less vividly expressed. The old people still wear the costume appointed by the foundress of the institution: for the men, gaiters and a long coat of rough black cloth, with a silver badge or medal; for the women, a narrow, old‐fashioned dress of the same material, and a similar badge. These badges, we believe, have never been renewed since the original endowment, and are handed down from one bedesman to his successor, and so on; the clothes are renewed every two years. If we mistake not, Père Hermann said grace for these poor people, who, though all Protestants, seemed not at all shocked at the “popish” apparition. Indeed, he gained the hearts of all who ever saw him, his gentleness and recollection inspiring a respect for his person which was little short of veneration. He seemed as though he were walking with angels and listening to heavenly converse even while charitably lending his time and his bodily presence to earth. When he had enjoyed, with the simplicity of a child, the sight of the innocent sports and merriment of the old people, he left us for the chapel, where he spent a great part of his time. We cannot help adverting to a little occurrence which took place at one of these almshouse feasts (we believe this very one), and which was certainly very pathetic. A monk might well take pleasure in such unaffected simplicity and gentleness among those whose ancestors had been so intimately linked of old with monastic patrons. One of the old women, speaking to one of her host’s daughters of her little grandchild, a baby girl who was just dead, said, in the broad dialect of the county of Gloucester (which, however, we dare not imitate in print):
“When the child was born, my daughter made me notice how long the little thing’s fingers were, and said, ’Bless its little heart! they are long enough for the baby to be a waiting‐maid on the queen.’ And we agreed, laughing‐like, that a waiting‐maid the child would surely be. But when it died, I said to my daughter, said I, ‘Jane, we were mistaken about the baby’s fingers, you see. I tell you the Lord gave her those beautiful long fingers, not to attend on any great lady or queen on earth, but to play on the golden harps in his kingdom of heaven.’ ”
No truer nor more reverent poetry can be found anywhere than that simple utterance of an unlettered old woman who had not even that instinctive education which belongs to all those who learn the Catholic catechism. Such women and such poetry used to abound in the England of historic times, but error and materialism have but too well succeeded during the last three centuries in making the type rare and not easily discoverable, save in some forgotten nook of the rural districts.
Père Hermann that evening allowed us to enjoy our treat, after giving him his among the bedesmen, by playing a little on a cottage piano‐forte in what we called the oak drawing‐room. The servants were all collected in the next room (the library), and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction, as he was ever most fastidiously thoughtful of the comforts and pleasures of those in inferior station. His playing, though not comparable to his triumphant successes as an artist nearly twenty years before, was still admirable, and, above all, so sympathetic. He played, among other things, the “Prayer of Moses” with great solemnity and expression, and also some of his own Cantiques, which for blending passion with religious earnestness are something unique. He never played anywhere save in private, and then only to small audiences in an informal manner, and never touched the organ save by obedience in his own church, or for the Forty Hours’ Exposition, saying that he wished to have his art ever sanctified by a religious inspiration. The fascination and temptation of artistic triumphs must still have been appreciable stumbling‐blocks in his spiritual career. Therefore, to hear him play at all was no slight favor, and, while on this visit, he repeated this favor more than once. On the last day, he said Mass in the domestic chapel, and distributed the Scapular to the household, enrolling nearly every member in the Confraternity. He gave a short address on the origin and meaning of this devotion, the distinctive one of his Order, and which was further made interesting on this occasion by the fact of the host’s having in former years rescued a picture of S. Simon Stock in the act of receiving the first miraculous Scapular. The figures were life‐size, and the painting after the manner of the later Italian school; the canvas was found riddled with holes, having been used as a target by ignorant or fanatical possessors. The restored picture was hung in the drawing‐room, where it became a great source of interest to the zealous convert Carmelite, our dear guest. During this visit was laid the foundation of a spiritual friendship between him and the writer—a friendship which proved a great benefit and guidance in our after‐life.
Meeting him again in London a few months later, we learnt a singular occurrence connected with his influence over souls. A young girl, not much over seventeen, and of a wilful and rebellious nature, who was under Père Hermann’s spiritual direction, happening to come up to town for a few days, experienced a strange phase of religious excitement. Careless as she was about all serious matters regarding the future state, she was nevertheless seized with a strong feeling of inadequacy in her religious efforts. She rose suddenly (it was a bright moonlight night), and went to the window, where the chastened beauty of the moon made even the monotonous landscape of London roofs and chimneys shine with a weird charm and take on suggestive shapes of startling vividness. Something—the grace of God, we ought no doubt reverently to say—seemed to take hold of her heart and shake her whole being. It was not the fear of punishment, the blank of unsated frivolity, that moved her; only one cry burst from her heart—“I have never loved God enough—I have never loved him at all.” If any but the saints ever feel perfect contrition, she did at that moment; for in that one sin she saw all others contained. Sobs came from the depths of her heart; she paced her room with naked feet, unmindful of discomfort, unheeding the autumn chill that is never long absent from London atmosphere, repeating again and again, like a dirge, those words, “I have never loved God enough—I have never loved him at all.” Then came a wondering feeling as to what this awakening meant; was it conversion, or the beginning of a vocation, or a sign that some special self‐devotedness would be required of her through life? She said to herself, “I will see Père Hermann, and tell him; I wonder if this will last!”
Strange to say, the blessed excitement passed away, and the next morning, though she tried to revive it, it was impossible. Not a trace of emotion was left, although the mind recalled distinctly what an ecstasy of sorrow it had been, and how it had shaken the soul to its very centre. The young girl, however, saw Père Hermann, and told him of it, and in the parlor of the nuns of the Assumption, Kensington Square, he gave her the advice of a father and a saint. She is still living, and none can tell if that prophetic call may not yet have unexpected fulfilment through the prayers of one who is now a saint in heaven. This occurrence led to a very interesting and intimate correspondence, which we have examined ourselves, and of which we would gladly give some extracts were the letters not unfortunately beyond our reach at the present moment.
Père Hermann was peculiarly fond of children, as indeed all saints are. Going one day to the Brompton Oratory, which the finest organ in London and a very perfect and numerous surpliced choir contribute to make one of the leading Catholic churches of the English capital, he was prevailed upon to play a voluntary after the Offertory. There sat a child in that choir, only a little chorus singer, but whose early dream it had ever been to become a musician and play upon an organ such as that majestic, imperial instrument which he listened to with vague awe every Sunday. He knew the story of the great artist who now sat at the organ in his Carmelite habit, and he drank in eagerly the grand strains he could but dimly understand, yet admired so intensively. Things which he never knew technically till many years after, yet seemed not unknown to his sympathetic ear, and, if he understood but little of the science that created those rolling chords and modulations, he could worship the beauty they expressed.
A few days later, the little chorister, with six or seven companions from the Oratory School, was taken to the temporary Carmelite chapel in Kensington. It was all very poor and unpretending, but the spirit of recollection and peace made an Eden of the temporary refuge of these “knights of poverty,” and the children were very much impressed. Père Hermann came to the parlor to see them, and inquired severally after each one from the Oratorian Father in whose special charge they were. Our little chorister was dumb with awe and delight, expecting the holy Carmelite to notice him particularly; but when the Oratorian was questioned about this boy, he answered laughingly:
“Oh! this fellow is going to be a tinker.”
Père Hermann looked amused but incredulous, and the child grew hot and uncomfortable under the laughing gaze of his companions. He had long made up his mind as to what he would like to be, and the tinker suggestion was peculiarly hateful to him, because systematically used by his wise instructor to “break his pride.” But the gentle monk saw the boy’s discomfiture, and came skilfully to the rescue.
“And will you really be a tinker, my little man?” he said, smiling.
“No, father,” readily answered the little one. “A musician.”
“You mean a tinker, Peter,” teasingly suggested the Oratorian, and the boy blushed with annoyance.
“No, no,” said Père Hermann; “he will be a musician, as he says, and a good one. And now,” he continued, “it is nearly time for Benediction, and I am going to play the harmonium; would you like to stay for that?”
The child was speechless with delight, and then the holy monk added:
“You shall pull out the stops for me, Peter,” which was done, and, though it seemed the acme of happiness to Peter, it probably did not improve the music.
After the service, the father called one of the lay brothers, and entrusted the children to his care, saying, with simple glee, and in the broken accent which all who knew him remember as a characteristic of his otherwise terse and appropriate language:
“Now, brother, go and feed these little ones, and mind you give them plenty of good things.”
The order was well obeyed, for the tradition of ample and eager hospitality has never been lost among religious orders, be they poor and struggling and even proscribed, or rich, powerful, and influential. Rich plum‐cake and good wine, with candies of every sort, were set before the little musician and his friends, but the child was even then thinking exultingly that Père Hermann had really said he should be an artist. In later years, when studying his art in Flanders, or earning his bread by it in England, this saying, that from such holy lips seemed a prophetic blessing and an earnest of success, often and often recurred to his mind, and encouraged him in the many dark days through which he had to pass.
To all those who learned to love Père Hermann from personal intercourse with him, every remembrance of his words, however trifling, is now doubly treasured; his death, uniting as it did in itself the heroism of philanthropy, of patriotism, and of divine charity, has already practically canonized him in the eyes of his friends and spiritual children; and as we lay this slender wreath of praise among the more important tributes that literature, art, and religion have heaped around his memory, we are fain to exclaim, with the wise man of Israel, “Blessed are they that saw thee, and were honored with thy friendship.”(272)
It was a singular proof, not only of respect for her character, but of confidence in her judgment and discretion, on the part of the government, to have entrusted her with this right of mercy; knowing, as no one who knew anything about her could fail to know, her extraordinary tenderness of heart and compassion for suffering, especially in the case of the soldiers. It seemed a risk to invest her with a sort of judicial right to interfere in their behalf at the hands of law and justice; but they never had reason to regret it. She showed herself to the last worthy of the trust reposed in her. In the exercise of a privilege whose application was one of the keenest joys of her life, Amélie evinced a mind singularly well balanced, a judgment always clear, and a prudence ever on the alert to guide and control the impulses of her heart. But when her judgment approved the promptings of charity, no consideration could deter her from obeying them. She was by nature very timid, and of late years, owing to her having quite broken off intercourse with the world, properly speaking, this timidity had grown to a painful shyness. Whenever there was a necessity, however, she could brave it, and face a gay crowd or a doughty magnate with as much ease and cheerfulness as if the act demanded no effort or sacrifice of natural inclination. Such sacrifices were frequently required of her. Her name had a prestige that gained entrance through doors closed to persons of infinitely higher social position and importance; and when a community, or a hospital, or a family wanted a mediator in high quarters, they turned quite naturally to Amélie. On one occasion her courage and good‐nature were put to a rather severe test. It was in the case of a poor man who had been condemned to a long term of punishment for some fraudulent act. The circumstances of the case, the hitherto excellent character of the man, the fierce pressure of want under which the fraud was committed, and certain points which threw doubts on the extent to which he had been consciously guilty, along with the misery his condemnation must entail on a wife and young family, roused strong sympathy for him, and a general impulse seized the townspeople to appeal to the emperor for his pardon. But how to do it so as to make the appeal efficacious—who to entrust with the delicate mission? Every heart turned instinctively to Amélie. Her name rose to every tongue. The most influential of the petitioners went to her, and besought her to go to Paris and obtain an audience of the emperor, and implore of his clemency a free pardon for the convict. Her first impulse was to draw back in dismay at the mere contemplation of such a feat; but the petitioners brought out an array of arguments that it was not in Amélie’s nature to resist. She called up her courage, recommended the success of her mission to the prayers of the Marseillese and the protection of N. Dame de Garde, and started off to Paris. Thanks to her previous relations with the ministerial world, she was able to obtain, after some delay, an audience of the emperor. He received her with the most flattering marks of personal consideration, and granted her at once the pardon she sued for. Amélie telegraphed the good news to Marseilles on leaving his majesty’s presence, and was met on her arrival there the following day by her protégé and his family in tears of joy and gratitude.
On another occasion, she was applied to for a rather large sum of money for a very pressing charity. She happened for the moment to have exhausted all her own and her friends’ resources, and knew not where to turn for the necessary sum. Some enterprising person proposed that she should go and beg it at the house of a banker who was giving a grand ball that night, and at which all the wealthy notabilities of the town were to be present. It was quite an unprecedented proceeding, and one that it required the humility and the courage of Amélie to undertake. She hesitated as usual at first, and as usual, seeing that the thing had to be done, and that no one else would do it, she consented. A preliminary step was to obtain the host’s permission. This he at first emphatically refused; and, seeing that it required nearly as much courage on his part to allow his guests to be waylaid as for Amélie to waylay them, it is not much to be wondered at. Courage, however, is catching. Amélie pleaded, and the banker gave way. He opened her list of contributions by a handsome sum, and consented that she should come the same evening and beg the rest at his house. It was a strange episode in the brilliant scene—the pale, dark‐eyed woman, in her homely black gown and neat little black net cap, standing at the door of the ball‐room; and stretching out her little bag to the votaries of pleasure as they passed her: “Pour les pauvres, mesdames! Pour les pauvres, messieurs!” The words must have struck in oddly enough through the clanging of the orchestra, and the rustling of silken robes, and the hum of laughter as the merrymakers swept round in the mazes of the dance. But the low, sweet voice of the beggar rose above the music and the din loud enough to reach many hearts that night; no one turned a deaf ear to the suppliant; the gentlemen gave money, or pledged themselves to give it; the women dropped rings and bracelets into the velvet bag that soon overflowed with its own riches; and when all the guests had arrived, and the festivity was at its height, Amélie, after admiring, as she was always ready to do, everything bright and beautiful that was not sinful—the brilliancy of the scene, the bright jewels and the pretty toilets, and the artistic decoration of the rooms—bade good‐night to it all and to her host, and went home with her heart full of love and gratitude towards her kindly fellow‐creatures.
But we should never end if we were to narrate all the acts of charity and zeal that she was never tired of performing. The following, however, are too characteristic to be omitted:
Late one evening, in her rounds through one of those dark centres of misery and crime that are to be found in all big cities, Amélie heard that a mountebank was dying in a neighboring cellar, all alone and in great pain. She made her way to the place at once. The dying man was lying on a heap of a straw, but he was not alone; a bear and a monkey shared his wretched abode; they had enabled the poor mountebank to live, and now they stood by while he was dying, watching his death‐throes in dumb sympathy. Nothing scared by the presence of his strange company, Amélie went up to the man and spoke to him gently of his soul. If he had ever heard of such a thing as an essential part of himself, he seemed to have altogether forgotten it, but he did not repulse her; he let her sit down beside him on the live, fetid straw and try to soothe him in his pains, and instruct him in the intervals, and prepare him to make his peace with God. By the time her part of the task was done, the night was far spent, but there was no time to lose. Amélie went straight to the priest’s house and woke him up. On the road, she told him what he would find on arriving.
The two went in together. Amélie knelt down in the furthest corner of the place and prayed, and the bear and the monkey looked on while the sweet and wondrous mystery between Jesus and the good thief was renewed before their blank, unintelligent eyes. The mountebank made a general confession of his whole life, and received the last sacraments. Then the priest went home, and Amélie remained alone with the dying man, who expired a few hours later with his head resting on her shoulder.
On another occasion, she heard that a woman whose life had been a public scandal in the town was at the point of death. She rose at once to go to her, and, in spite of the remonstrances of those present, she did go. The character of the woman and her associates, and the place where she lived, were indeed enough to deter a less daring spirit than Amélie, but whenever an objection was raised on prudential grounds to her visiting here or there, she would playfully point to her hump, and say:
“With a protector like that, a woman may go anywhere.”
The woman at first repulsed her fiercely and bade her begone, and refused to hear the name of God mentioned; but Amélie held her ground, pleading with all the eloquence at her command—and those who have heard it in moments when her soul was stirred by any great emotion declare that it was little less than sublime. She caressed the wretched creature, calling her by the most endearing names, till at last the obdurate heart was softened, she let Amélie stay and speak to her, and even asked her to come back the next day. “But,” she added, “you’ll find a monsieur at the door, and he’s capable of beating you if you try to come in against his will.”
But Amélie was not likely to be deterred by this. She came the following morning, and found the monsieur. He met her with insulting defiance, and dared her to enter, and, on her attempting to do so, he raised his hand and clenched it, with a savage oath threatening to strike her.
“Hit here!” said Amélie, coolly turning her hump to him.
Confounded by the words and the action, the man let his arm drop. Before he had recovered from his surprise, she had passed into the sick room, and he stood silently looking on and listening in wonder to what was going on before him. Amélie left the house unmolested, and returned a few hours later with a priest. The unhappy woman had been a Christian in her youth. She made a general confession in the midst of abundant tears, and died the next day in admirable sentiments of contrition and hope. The example was not lost on her companion; he made a sudden and generous renunciation of his sinful life, and Amélie had to rejoice over the return of two souls instead of one.
As we have said before, her charity was essentially catholic, universal in every sense. She was ready to pity everybody’s troubles, and, with Amélie, to pity meant to help. The poor widow toiling broken‐hearted for her children in the courts and alleys of the big town; the father struggling with adversity in another sphere, trying to educate his sons and marry his daughters and pay the inexorable debt of decency that society exacts from a gentleman; the poor, lone girl battling with poverty, or perhaps writhing in agonized shame at having fallen in the battle; the rich mother weeping over the wanderings of a son; the poor orphan without bread or friends; the rich orphan pursued by designing relations, or in danger of falling into the hands of a worthless husband; high and low, rich and poor alike, all came to Amélie for sympathy and counsel, and no one was ever repulsed. Even those difficulties which are the result of culpable weakness, and which meet generally with small mercy, not to say indulgence, from pious people, found Amélie full of indulgent pity and a ready will to help. An officer on one occasion was drawn inadvertently into contracting a debt of honor which he had no means of paying. In his despair he thought of Amélie, and, half maddened with shame and remorse, he came to her to ask for pity and advice. The sum in question was two thousand francs. Amélie happened to have it at the moment, and, touched by the distress of the man of the world, she gave it to him at once. There was no spirit of criticism, no censoriousness in her piety, no fastidious condemnation of things innocent in themselves, however apt to be dangerous in their abuse. She loved to see young people happy and amused, and would listen with real interest and pleasure to an account of some fête where they had enjoyed themselves after the manner of their age. This simplicity and liberty of spirit enabled her often to take advantage of opportunities for doing good that never would occur to a person whose piety turned in a narrower groove; she was wont to exclaim regretfully against good people for being so overnice in the choice of opportunities, and thus cramping their own power and means of usefulness. With regard to the choice of tools in the same way, she would often deprecate the fastidiousness of certain pious people, urging that, when there was a work to do, an aim to accomplish, an obstacle to overcome, we should take up whatever tools Providence put in our way, not quarrelling with their shape or quality, but doing the best we can with them, profiting by a knave’s villany or a fool’s folly to further a just purpose, or a noble scheme, or a kind action, making, as far as honesty and truth can do it, evil accomplish the work of good.
Faithfully bearing in mind that we may do no evil that good may come of it, Amélie had withal an ingenious gift of turning to good account the evil that was done by others; but she was slow to see the evil, and, when it was forced upon her, she had always more pity than censure for it. Her lamp was always lighted, and she was ever ready to help the foolish ones who go about this world of ours crying out to the wise ones: “Give me of your oil!” For it is not only when the Bridegroom comes that we need to have our lamp lighted, we want it all along the road, for others as well as for ourselves; we must even adapt it to the necessities of the road by changing the color of its light. This we can do by changing the oil. We must use the oil of faith when we want a strong, bright blaze to keep our feet straight amidst the ruts and snares and pools of muddy water that abound at every step; we must burn the oil of hope to frighten away despondency and cheer us when our hearts are heavy and our courage ebbing; but we must be chiefly prodigal of the rich and salutary oil of charity, for the flame it sends out is often more helpful to others than to ourselves. Sometimes, when our lamp is so low that it hardly shows the ground clear under our own feet, it is shedding—thanks to this marvellous oil of charity—a heavenly radiance on the path of those journeying behind us; its flame is luminous as a star and soft as moonlight; people on whom we turn its roseate glow rejoice in it as in sunshine: it softens them, it heals them, it takes the sting out of their worst wounds. The lamp fed with this incomparable oil is, moreover, often brightest when we ourselves are sick at heart, and when it costs us an effort to pour in the oil and set the wick in order. We do not realize it, but we can believe it by recalling the effect of kindness on our own souls in some well‐remembered hour, when it came from one in great sorrow, and who we knew was setting aside her own grief to enter into ours. Let us be brave, then, to hold up our lamp arm‐high to the pilgrims who are toiling foot‐sore and faint up the steep and rugged path of life along with us; its flame soars on to heaven, and shines more brightly before God than the fairest and loveliest of his stars.
We mentioned already that Amélie, on her father’s death, made a vow of personal poverty. She observed this vow with the utmost rigor as far as was consistent with decorum and the absence of anything approaching to a display of holiness—a thing of which she was almost morbidly afraid. Her usual dress was a black woollen gown and a shawl of the same material; her appearance in the street was that of a respectable housekeeper, but no one who saw the outward decency of her attire suspected the sordid poverty that often lay beneath it. She limited herself to a pittance for her clothes, and she would submit to the most painful inconvenience rather than exceed it. Once she gave away her strong boots and a warm winter petticoat to a poor person at the beginning of the winter, and, though the cold set in suddenly with great severity, she bore it rather than replace either of them till her allowance fell due. How her health bore the amount of labor and austerities that she underwent it is difficult to explain without using the word miraculous.
When, under the pious auspices of Monseigneur de Mazenod, the devotion of the Perpetual Adoration was established at Marseilles, Amélie at once had herself enrolled in the confraternity; unable to spare time from her multiform works of mercy during the day, she entrenched upon her nights, and used to spend hours in adoration before the Tabernacle. Fatigue and bodily suffering were no obstacle to the ardor of her soul; her spirit seemed to thrive in proportion as her body wasted. After a day of arduous labor, constantly on her feet, going and coming amongst the poor and the sick, breathing the foul air of hospital wards, and dingy cellars, and garrets, fasting as rigorously as any Carmelite, and grudging her body all but the bare necessaries of life, she was able to pass an entire night on her knees before the Blessed Sacrament, and be apparently none the worse for it. Such wonderful things are those who love God strengthened to do for him. Yet this woman was made of the same flesh and blood as ourselves; she had the same natural shrinkings and antipathies; her body was not made of different clay from ours, or supernaturally fashioned to defy the attacks of the devil and the repugnances of nature, to endure hunger, and pain, and fatigue without feeling them; she had the same temptations to fight against, the same corrupt inclinations to overcome, and the same weapons of defence against her enemies that we have—faith and prayer and the sacraments. What, then, is the difference between us? Only this, she was generous and brave, and we are mean and cowardly. We bargain and hang back, whereas she made no reserves, but strove to serve God with all her heart and all her strength, and he did the rest. He always does it for those who trust him and hearken unconditionally to that hard saying: “Take up thy cross and follow me!” For them he changes all bitter things into sweet, all weakness into strength; for the old Adam that they cast aside he clothes them with the new, thus rendering them invincible against their enemies, and repaying a hundred‐fold, even in this life, the miserable rags that we call sacrifices; he fills the hungry with good things, and in exchange for creatures and the perishable delights which they have renounced for his sake he gives them himself and a foretaste of the bliss of Paradise.
During her solitary vigils before the altar, the thought of the ingratitude of men and their cruel neglect of our Saviour in his Eucharistic prison sank deeply into Amélie’s heart, and filled it with grief and an ardent desire to make some reparation to his outraged love. We have all read the wonderful chapter on Thanksgiving in that wonderful book, All for Jesus. Most of us have felt our hearts stirred to sorrowful indignation at the sad picture it reveals of our own unkindness to God, and the tender sensitiveness of the Sacred Heart to our ingratitude, and his meek acceptance of any crumb of thanksgiving that we deign once in a way to throw to him; we have felt our tepid pulses quicken to a momentary impulse of generosity and passionate desire to call after the nine ungrateful lepers, and constrain them to return and thank him; we watch them going their way unmindful, and we cast ourselves in spirit at the feet of Jesus, gazing after them in sad surprise, and we pour out our souls in apologies—so bold does the passing touch of love make the meanest of us in consolations to him for the unkindness of his creatures. Alas! with most of us it ends there. Next time he tries us we follow the nine selfish lepers, and leave him wondering and sorrowing again over our ingratitude. But with Amélie it was different. No inspiration of divine grace ever found her deaf to its voice; her love knew no such things as barren sighs and idle mystic sentimentalities. Her whole heart was stirred by that touching and powerful appeal of Father Faber’s, and she began to consider at once what she could do to respond to it. The idea occurred to her of instituting a community, to be called Sœurs Réparatrices, whose mission should be to give thanks and to console our divine Lord for the ingratitude of the world by perpetual adoration before the Tabernacle, and at the same time of getting up a regular service of thanksgiving among the faithful at large, to have short prayers appointed and recommended by the church to their constant use, for the sole and express purpose of thanking God for his countless mercies to us all, but more especially to those among us who never thank him on their own account. Both suggestions were warmly approved of by many pious souls to whom she mentioned them.
In order, however, to carry them out effectively, it was deemed advisable that Amélie should go to Rome and obtain the authorization and blessing of the Holy Father. She had never been to Rome, but it was the desire of her life to go there; it drew her as the magnet draws the needle; Rome, to her filial Catholic heart, was the outer gate of heaven; it held the Father of Christendom, the Vicar of Christ; it held the tombs of the martyrs, its soil was saturated with their blood, all things within its walls were stamped with the seal of Christianity, and told of the wonders that it had wrought. Amélie, glad of the necessity which compelled her to fulfil her long‐cherished desire, set out for the Eternal City. She received the most affectionate welcome from the Holy Father, who had been long acquainted with her by name, and knew the apostolic manner of life she led. With regard to the community which she desired to found, and of which she was to become a member, but not superioress, His Holiness approved of it, but beyond this, of what passed between him and Amélie on the subject, no details have transpired. She said that the Holy Father encouraged her to carry out the design and gave her his blessing on it, and promised her his fatherly countenance and protection; but whether she submitted any rule to him at this period we have not been able to ascertain. As to the scheme of general thanksgiving that she proposed to inaugurate, he gave her abundant blessings on it, and indulgenced several prayers that she submitted to his inspection. Unfortunately, we have not been able to procure a copy of the little book which contained them all; this is the more to be regretted, that some of them were drawn up by Amélie herself and full of the spirit of her own tender piety; they were also preceded by a preface in which she appealed very lovingly to the children of Mary and the members of the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, and begged their zealous co‐operation in the service of thanksgiving. We may mention, however, that she was in the habit, during the few remaining years of her life, of constantly recommending to her friends the use of the Gloria Patri and the ejaculation Deo Gratias! as having been particularly commended to her devotion by the Holy Father himself.
An incident occurred to Amélie during her stay in Rome which she often narrated as a proof of the extreme need we have of a service of thanksgiving. She went one morning to an audience at the house of a cardinal, and while she was waiting for her turn she got into conversation with the Superior of the Redemptorist Fathers in France. Always on the watch to gain an ally to the cause, she told him the motive of her journey to Rome, and begged that he would use his influence in his own wide sphere to forward its success amongst souls.
“Ah! madame!” exclaimed the Redemptorist, “it was a good thought to try and stir up men’s hearts to a spirit of thanksgiving, for there is nothing more wanted in the world. The story of the nine lepers is going on just the same these eighteen hundred years. I have been forty years a priest, and during that time I have been asked to say Masses for every sort of intention, but only once have I been asked to say a Mass of thanksgiving!”
Yes, truly the story of the nine lepers is being enacted now as in the old days when Jesus exclaimed sorrowfully, “Is there no one but this stranger found to return and give thanks?”
But for all her clear‐sighted sensitiveness to the sins and shortcomings of her day, Amélie was full of hope in it; nothing annoyed her more than to see good people lapse into that lugubrious way so common to them of always crying anathema on their age and despairing of it; she used to say that she mistrusted the love and the logic of such; that those who love God and their fellow‐creatures for his sake never despair of them, but work for them, trusting in God’s help and in the ultimate triumph of good over evil; that despair was a sign of stupidity and cowardice. And was she not right? Surely every age has in its ugliness some counterbalancing beauty, some redeeming grace of comeliness, in the tattered raiment that hangs about its ulcers and its nakedness. God never leaves himself at any time without witnesses on the earth, and it is our fault, not his, if we do not see them. There are always bright spots in humanity, and those who cannot discern them should blame their own dull vision, not their fellow‐ men. As poets who have the mystic eye see beauties of hue and color in the material world where common men see nothing but ruin and decay, so do the saints and the saint‐like, with the keen vision of faith and hope, alone penetrate the external darkness and decay of humanity, and discover in the midst of gloom and evil much that is promising and fair; they see elemental wines boiling up in the cauldron of travail and suffering, and they know that their bitterness is salutary and their fire invigorating unto life.
Amélie returned to Marseilles well satisfied with her visit to the Holy City, and resumed her labors with renewed zest. But she had left her heart behind her, and from the day she left Rome she had but one desire, and that was to return and end her days there. Her health had of late grown so feeble that it was more and more a subject of wonder to those who witnessed it how she was able to continue her life of superhuman activity without flagging for a day. Amélie felt, however, that it could not last much longer now. She had frequently expressed in the midst of her busy, active life a longing for a life of contemplation, and in proportion as the end drew near, the yearning for an interval of silence and solitude increased. She was often heard to say to her fellow‐laborers:
“It is time I left off looking after other people’s souls, and attended a little to my own; I feel the want of more prayer, of more time before the Blessed Sacrament; really, I must begin to get ready.”
In the year 1869, she determined to carry this desire into execution, and begin to get ready, as she said, by withdrawing into a more solitary life. Her love for the church had taken a new impetus from her intercourse with the Holy Father; from the first the Denier de S. Pierre counted her among its most zealous promoters, but more so than ever now. An abundant collection which she made just at this time offered a plausible pretext to her for going to Rome, in order to lay it at the feet of Pius IX. So after putting her affairs in order, and bidding good‐by to only her immediate and intimate friends, so as to avoid anything like resistance or a demonstration on the part of the multitude of people to whom she knew her departure would be painful, Amélie took leave of the hospitable old home in the Rue Grignan, and set her face once more toward the Eternal City.
But she had a last work to do for her native town on the road. The splendid military hospital of Marseilles, in which she had taken so deep and active an interest, was served by lay nurses, and both the soldiers and the civil authorities were anxious to have these replaced by Sisters of Charity. Easy as the thing seemed, up to the present all endeavors to effect the substitution had failed. It rested with the government to make the appointment and to grant a certain sum for the maintenance of the community when attached to the hospital, but, owing either to the case not being properly represented, or to the ill‐will of certain officials who put obstacles in the way, every application on the subject had been met by a refusal. The authorities, seeing all else fail them, turned to Amélie. They remembered her success on a former occasion, and requested her to take the affair in hand on arriving in Paris, and get from the minister the desired concession. The mission was repugnant to her, because she foresaw it would involve her having to come forward and put herself in the way of notabilities and magnates; but, as there seemed just a chance of being able to perform a last service to the soldiers, she accepted, and promised to do her best.
She had a military friend in Paris, who, though a practical Catholic, occupied a distinguished position in the service, and was on good terms with its chiefs. This gentleman procured an audience for her of Marshal ——, who was then in the ministry, and the person to whom she was directed to apply in the first instance.
The marshal, who had been made aware of the subject of her visit, received her, according to his custom, in shirt‐sleeves and a towering rage, asked her a dozen questions, one on top of another, without giving her time to edge in a word of protest, wondered very much what she or anybody else meant by interfering with soldiers and their hospitals and the supreme wisdom of the government, of dictating to them what they ought to do; but that was the way with women; women were always meddling with what didn’t concern them; they were the most difficult subjects to govern; for himself, he would rather have the management of ten armies than a village full of women, etc. In fact, his excellency bullied his visitor after the usual manner of his peculiar courtesy, and Amélie was obliged to take her leave after a very brief audience, during which she had been rated like a naughty schoolboy and not allowed to say three sentences in self‐defence. Clearly there was not much to be done in that quarter. Her friend then proposed getting her without further preamble an audience of the emperor. Amélie preserved a grateful recollection of the reception she had met with from his majesty some years before, and the idea of entering his presence again inspired her with less terror than the prospect of a second edition of the marshal; she thought, moreover, that there might be a speedier and better chance of success by applying directly to the emperor than by beating about the bush with his ministers, admitting even that they were not all of the same type as the one she had tried. Amélie accepted the offer, therefore, and, after a shorter delay than any one but a cabinet minister might have been obliged to undergo, she received a letter from the Lord Chamberlain notifying the day and hour when she was to present herself at the Tuileries.
She was shown into the antechamber, where generals, dignitaries of the state, bishops, and other important personages were waiting their turn to enter the imperial presence. His majesty was giving audience to an ambassador when Amélie arrived, and there was rather a long delay before the door opened. When it did, it was not his chamberlain, but the emperor himself who appeared on the threshold; he stood for a moment, and looked deliberately round the room, where he recognized many noble and influential personages, and then, perceiving an elderly lady in a rusty black gown sitting at the furthest end of it, he walked straight up to her, and held out both his hands. “Mademoiselle Lautard,” said his majesty, “I thank you for the honor you do me by this visit; I am sure I have only to mention your name for every one present to admit your right to pass before them.”
There was a general murmur of assent, though it must have puzzled most if not all of the spectators of this strange scene who this poverty‐stricken, humpbacked elderly lady was to be thus greeted by Napoleon III., and handed over their heads to the presence‐chamber. As soon as they were alone, the emperor drew a chair close to his own, and, inviting his visitor to sit down, he said:
“Now, tell me if, over and above the pleasure of seeing you, I am to have that of doing something that can give you pleasure?”
Amélie, in relating the interview to her friend, said that, when she saw his majesty bearing down upon her before the assembled multitude in the antechamber, she felt ready to sink into the ground, and wished herself at Hongkong; but the moment he spoke her terrors vanished, and she had not been two minutes with him before she felt perfectly at her ease, and talked on as fearlessly as if he had been an old friend. She told him her wishes about the hospital, and he promised unconditionally that they should be carried out. For certain formalities, however, it was necessary to refer her to his minister.
“You will call on Marshal ——,” said his majesty; “he is the person to do it.”
“Sire!” exclaimed Amélie, throwing up her hands in dismay, “anything but that; your majesty must really manage it without sending me again to Marshal ——.”
“Ah! you have been to him already,” said the emperor, with a quiet smile; “well, try him again, and this time I warrant you a better reception; he is bon enfant au fond, but you must not let him think that you’re afraid of him.”
Thus warned and encouraged, Amélie promised to take her courage in both hands, as the emperor said, and beard the lion once more in his den. Before letting her go, his majesty questioned her minutely about the condition of the hospitals and other charitable institutions at Marseilles, concerning all of which he appeared to be singularly well informed.
The next day, she presented herself at the ministère, and was ushered into the marshal’s presence. He had his coat on this time; whether the fact was due to accident, or to a desire to propitiate the lady who had complained of him to his master, history does not say; but, as soon as Amélie entered, his excellency accosted her with: “Well, so you were affronted with me, it seems! What did you say about me to the emperor?”
“Excellency,” replied Amélie, “I told his majesty that I had expected to find a minister of France, but I found instead a man in a passion.”
The marshal grunted a laugh, and told her to sit down and explain her business. She did so, this time with perfect satisfaction to both parties, and they parted the best friends in the world.
This closed her career of usefulness in France; she waited to make the needful arrangements for the departure of the nuns, their reception at Marseilles, etc., and then she started for Rome.
On setting out for the Eternal City, Amélie seemed to have had the presentiment that she had entered on the last stage of her pilgrimage. The sense of her approaching end, which betrayed itself, perhaps unconsciously, in conversing both by word and letter with her most intimate friends, was accompanied by an increase of fervor and a serenity which struck every one who approached her as something almost divine. The project which she had formed of founding and entering a community of Sœurs Réparatrices was still unrealized, but she hoped now to carry it into effect, to make the remainder of her life a perpetual Deo Gratias! and to die in the outward livery of the religious state whose spirit her whole life had so faithfully embodied. But God had other designs upon her. Meantime, in the twilight interval of comparative leisure that she had looked forward to so long and enjoyed so thankfully, Amélie did not give up all active work; she prayed more, and lived in greater retirement; but she still gave a fair proportion of each day to her accustomed service of the poor and the sick.
These were troubled days that she had fallen upon in Rome. The sacrilegious hand of parricides had robbed the church of her possessions, and reduced Pius IX. to the nominal sovereignty of the capital of Christendom, as a prelude to making it, what it is now, his prison. Catholic hearts were sad; but, amongst all his children, the Vicar of Christ had no more faithfully sorrowing heart than Amélie’s, none who entered more keenly into his griefs or responded with more filial alacrity to their claim on her sympathy and participation and righteous anger. She beheld the persecutions of God’s church, the hatred and malice of its enemies, the cowardice of those who called themselves its friends, but stood by passive and cold while the crime perpetrated outside Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago was renewed before their eyes on the body of that church which Christ had died to found; she saw pride and materialism everywhere at work striving to undo his work, to prevent the coming of his kingdom, and to establish the kingdom of sin upon earth; and the sight of all this filled her heart with grief, but not with despair. It was indeed an hour of unexampled grief for Christendom, but it was also an hour for activity, and zeal, and renewed courage; it was a time for each individual member to prove himself, for all to put their hand to the plough that was furrowing the bosom of the church, and to water the travailed soil with fertilizing tears, and, if need be, blood, thus preparing it for the future harvest that was inevitable. For even as God’s enemies of old had stood at the foot of Calvary, and shook their heads at the bleeding victim of their own hate and envy, and bade him come down from the cross, knowing not the dawn of the Resurrection was nigh, when the victim would arise triumphant over death, and compel his murderers to acknowledge that this man must indeed have been the Son of God—so now the enemies of his church had their hour of triumph, and clapped their hands for joy to see the church that he had built upon the Rock, and promised that the gates of hell should not prevail against, tottering and crumbling under the blows of progress and an enlightened civilization and the force of arms. But their triumph was but the hour of the powers of darkness that was not to endure, but would perish at the appointed time before the manifestation of the Sun of Justice.
Still, even faithful hearts quailed before the storm, and were scandalized at the way in which God seemed to forsake his own, not recognizing in this mysterious abandonment another trait of resemblance between his Vicar and the divine Model, who cried out in his dereliction, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
Amélie was forced to hear and see much that was unutterably painful to hear as a true child of the church; many who called themselves such, and who were glad enough to draw upon her magnificent sacramental treasury, and to praise and serve her in the days of peace, were not stout‐hearted enough to share her tribulations or even to understand them, and stood aloof when they ought to have acted, or remained dumb when they ought to have spoken, or spoke what they had better have left unsaid. But alongside of this indifference or treachery she witnessed a great deal that was beautiful and consoling. Pilgrims were flocking from the four quarters of the globe to lay at the feet of Pius IX. the tribute of their fidelity and abundant offerings, often collected in perilous journeys at great risk and sacrifice. Then there were the Zouaves, nos chers Zouaves, as Amélie always called them, presenting a noble example to us all by their heroic devotion to the cause of God, their spirit of immolation, their chivalrous valor in action, and the marvellous purity of their lives. These modern crusaders replaced the suffering soldiers of Marseilles in Amélie’s solicitude during her stay in Rome. She tended them and worked for them indefatigably, and dwelt continually in letters home on the consolation the spectacle of their childlike piety afforded her.
Early in December she wrote to a friend at Marseilles: “Our dear Zouaves have made their entry into Rome. They passed under my windows. They are the flower of the French nation. They are full of that energy which nothing but the spirit of the faith gives. It is beautiful to see them receive Holy Communion before arming themselves. This morning eighteen hundred of them, bent on shedding their blood in the cause of God, marched proudly into the Eternal City with the band playing and colors flying; they reminded one of the Theban legion. I witnessed a touching sight. The Holy Father met them on their way, and they fell on their knees like one man to get his blessing. He blessed them with visible emotion. How could a father not be moved at seeing the devotion of his children? The Flemish and the Bretons are particularly conspicuous; ancient traditions have been preserved amongst them, and have come down from the fathers to the sons. This evening they accompanied His Holiness to the Vatican, where they cheered him with the enthusiasm of Christian hearts. It was impossible to withhold one’s tears as one beheld the venerable Pontiff rest his loving and gentle gaze on all this youth, so devoted to him, and burning to prove their fidelity. In these days, the position of the Zouaves amongst Christian soldiers is a noble one. Oh! if the idle youth of France knew what a happiness it is to serve God, how many families would be happy and blest even in this world as well as the next! I see here numbers of young men who had strayed away from the right path for a time, but who had the grace to return to it, and are now as happy as children, pure as angels, attached to the church and the Vicar of Christ. Their sole ambition is martyrdom; their joy is to look forward to it. Oh! I see here admirable things. Adieu, dear friend. Let us pray always.”
Sinister reports and wild alarms, sometimes the result of malice, sometimes of fear, were constantly starting up in Rome, terrifying the weak, and stimulating the brave to greater vigilance and courage, but keeping every one on the qui vive from day to day. In the midst of the general excitement of expectation or terror, the serene confidence of Pius IX. remained unshaken, like the rock on which it rested. Amélie, who was admitted frequently to the honor and happiness of speaking to the Holy Father, was lost in wonder at it—at the unearthly peace that was visible in his countenance and pervaded every word of his conversation. Shortly before the date of the foregoing letter, she wrote to the same friend:
“The most contradictory stories are current here, but the peace, the calm, the abandon of the Holy Father are indescribable, and go further to inspire confidence than the most sinister conjectures to create terrors. The daughters of Jerusalem followed our Redeemer to Calvary: a sort of filial sentiment holds me in Rome. I cannot go away.... Let us pray! The power of prayer obtains all things.”
Let us pray! This had been the lifelong burthen of her song, and the cry grew louder and more intense as she drew near the close. It was not the shrill cry of those who say, Lord! Lord! but the irrepressible voice of a soul whom the spirit of prayer possessed in the fulness of its availing power, and side by side with whose growth grew the spirit of sacrifice, the thirst for self‐immolation. She clung firmly to hope as the anchor of courage and resignation in the present trials of the church, but the sense of the outrages that God’s glory was enduring in the person of His Vicar increased in her soul to positive anguish. The consideration of her own nothingness and utter inability to lighten the cross that was pressing on the saintly Pontiff, pursued her day and night with the mysterious pain that is born of the love of God.
What a wonderful thing the soul of a saint or even a saintlike human being must be! How one longs to go within the veil and get a glimpse of the life that is lived there! It is so strange to us to see a creature take God’s cause to heart, and pine and suffer about it as we do about our personal cares and sorrows. It sets us wondering what sort of inner life theirs can be, and through what process of grace and correspondence and mysterious training they have grown to that state of mind when the things of God and his eternity are poignant realities, and the things of earth hollow phantoms that have lost the power to charm, or terrify, or touch. We see them hungering after justice as we hunger after bread, pining actually for the accomplishment of God’s will as eagerly as we pine for the success of our puny enterprises and the triumph of our small ambitions; and we are astonished, as it behoves our stupidity and hardness of heart to be, at the incomprehensible character of their faith and love. When life presses heavily upon us, and the cross is bruising our shoulders, and all things are dark and dreary, we catch ourselves occasionally sighing for death. This is about our nearest approach to that homesick yearning expressed in the words of the apostle: “I long to die, to be dissolved, and to be with Christ!” What an altogether different feeling it must be with these saintlike souls when they long for death! They are not impatient of life, or, like tired travellers, angry with the dust and sun of the road, and disgusted with the uncomfortable wayside inn where they put up; they are impatient of heaven and of the vision that makes the bliss and the glory of heaven. Too jealous of their Creator’s rights to rob him even in desire of one year, or day, or hour of their poor service while he sees good to employ them, they are willing to go on toiling through eternity if he wishes it; but they are homesick, they long to see him, they yearn after his possession with a sacred unrest that we who have but little kinship with their spirit cannot understand. They are saddened by their exile and by the sight of sin and of the small harvest their Lord’s glory reaps amidst the great harvest of iniquity that overruns the world. They watch the sea of humanity rolling its waves along time, moaning with conscious agonies of sin, storm‐lashed and terrible, breaking in billows of impotent rage against the Rock of redemption, and dashing headlong past it into the gulf, where it is sucked down into everlasting darkness; and seeing these things as God sees them, and as they affect his interests, they are filled with sorrow, and call out for the end, that this mighty torrent may be stayed. They call out to the stars to rise on the far‐off heights, that loom dim and gloomy through the swirl and vapor of the storm. They would fain hush the winds and the waves, and hasten the advent of the Judge before whose splendor the dark horizon will vanish, and whose glory will outshine the sunrise and fill the universe with joy. It is not their own selfish deliverance or the world’s annihilation that they long for, but its consummation in man’s happiness and the Creator’s glory.
Amélie longed with all the strength of her generous heart to do something for her Lord, to help ever so little towards hastening the coming of his kingdom before he called her away. One morning, after communion, as she was praying very fervently for the Holy Father, whose health just then was a source of great anxiety amongst the faithful, this longing came upon her with an intensity that she had never felt before; she was seized with a sudden impulse to make the sacrifice of her life in exchange for his, and to offer herself as a victim that he might be spared yet awhile to guide and sustain the church through the trials and temptations that were afflicting her. The impulse was so vehement that it was with difficulty she restrained herself from obeying it on the spot; the desire, however, to obtain the blessing of obedience in her sacrifice enabled her to do so. She quietly continued her thanksgiving, and, on leaving the church, went straight to the Vatican. There, kneeling at the feet of the suffering Vicar of Christ, she told him of the desire that had come to her, and begged him to bless it, and to permit her to offer herself up next day at Holy Communion as a victim in his place if it should please God to accept her.
Pius IX. was silent for some moments, while Amélie, with uplifted face and clasped hands, awaited his reply. Then, as if obeying a voice that had spoken to him in the silence, he laid his hand upon her head, and said, with great solemnity: “Go, my daughter, and do as the Spirit of God has prompted you.” He blessed her with emotion, and Amélie left his presence filled with gladness and renewed fervor. She spent the greater part of the day in prayer. In the afternoon she wrote two letters: one of them, of too private a character to be given at length, contained the foregoing account of the morning’s occurrences; the other we transcribe. It is a revelation beyond all comment of the state of her soul as it stood on what she believed to be the threshold of eternity.
SATURDAY, Dec. 15—ROME.
“We still continue in the greatest calm. Nos chers Zouaves have the courage of lions; they draw their strength from the blood of the martyrs. Generally speaking, they are pious as angels. You see them constantly during their free hours slipping off their knapsack and their arms to go and kneel at the feet of the priest in the confessional, or to pray at the shrine of the queen of martyrs; they are truly the children of the church, and—”
Here the letter broke off.
The next morning was Sunday. Amélie repaired, as usual, to early Mass at S. Peter’s. She received Holy Communion, and then, with the Eucharistic Presence warm upon her heart, she offered up her life to him who had been its first and last and only love. The words were hardly cold upon her lips, when she was seized with sudden and violent pain, and fell with a cry to the ground. She was surrounded immediately, and carried home. Priests and religious of both sexes who were in S. Peter’s at the moment, and knew her, filled with alarm and distress, accompanied her to the Strada Ripresa dei Barberi. Medical aid was sent for, but it was soon evident that her illness was beyond the reach of human skill. All that day and the next she continued in agonizing pain, unable to speak or to thank those about her except by a smile or a pressure of the hand. Early on the following morning, Wednesday, she grew calmer, the pain subsided, and Amélie asked for the last sacraments. She received them with sentiments of ecstatic devotion, and for some time remained absorbed in prayer. Her thanksgiving terminated, she took leave tenderly of those friends who surrounded her, and then begged they would begin the prayers for the dying; they did so, and she joined in the responses with a fervor that went to every heart. When they came to those grand and solemn words with which the church speeds her children into the presence of their merciful Judge, “Depart, Christian soul, in the name of the Father who created thee, in the name of the Son who redeemed thee, in the name of the Holy Ghost who sanctified thee,” Amélie bowed her head and died.
The news was conveyed at once to the Vatican. When Pius IX. heard it, he evinced no sudden surprise, but raised his eyes to heaven, and murmured with a smile:
“Si tosto accetato!”(273)
The announcement of Amélie’s death was received with universal expressions of dismay and sorrow. It was not only the poor, who had been her chief and most intimate associates in Rome, that mourned her, all classes of society joined in a chorus of heartfelt regret, and proved how well they had appreciated the gentle French sister who had dwelt humbly amongst them doing good. The house where she lay in her beautiful and heroic death‐ sleep was besieged by people from every part of the city; all were anxious to gaze once more upon her face, to touch her hands with crosses and rosaries, to kneel in prayer beside the victim who had offered herself for the sins of the people, and been accepted by him who delighteth not in burnt‐offerings, but in the sacrifice of a contrite heart. To her truly it had been answered: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee according to thy word!”
The miraculous circumstances of her death were soon proclaimed. In the minds of those who had known her well they excited no surprise. From all they called out sentiments of admiration and praise. Tears flowed uninterruptedly round the austere court where the virgin tabernacle rested from its labors, but they were tears sweeter than the smiles and laughter of earth; prayers for the dead were suspended by common impulse, and the spectators, exchanging the De Profundis for the Te Deum and the Magnificat, broke out into canticles of triumph and hymns of rejoicing.
The Zouaves, her beloved Zouaves, hurried in consternation to the house as soon is the news reached them that the gentle, devoted friend of the soldier was no more; and it was a beautiful and stirring sight to see them sobbing like children beside her, touching her hands with their sword‐ hilts and their rosaries, and swelling in broken but enthusiastic voices the hymns of thanksgiving.
The Holy Father, wishing to pay his tribute to the general testimony of love and admiration, commanded that the child of S. Dominic should be carried to her grave with a pomp and splendor befitting the holiness of her life and the heroic character of her death. The remains were conveyed accordingly first to the Basilica of the Apostles in solemn state, escorted by a vast concourse of people, priests and religious, and exposed there throughout the morning to public veneration; a requiem Mass and the office of the dead were chanted; in the afternoon, the body, followed by all that Rome held of greatest and best, was transported to the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli. The Zouaves claimed the privilege of bearing the precious remains upon their shoulders, and it was granted them. By special permission of His Holiness, Amélie was interred in Santa Maria; but her death was no sooner known at Marseilles than the townspeople spontaneously demanded that the body should be returned to them. But Pius IX. replied that Rome had now a prior claim to its guardianship; Amélie had made the sacrifice of her life at Rome and for Rome; it was fitting that the ashes should remain where the holocaust had been offered and consumed. Marseilles yielded to the decision of the Sovereign Pontiff, and the daughter of S. Dominic was left to sleep on under the august dome of the Ara Cœli, there to await the angel of the resurrection, whose trumpet shall awake the dead and bid them come forth and clothe themselves with immortality.
The following is the authentic record of this miraculous death, as copied from the original, legalized by Cardinal Patrizi, Vicar of His Holiness:
“Je soussigné, curé de la trèssainte basilique constantinienne des douze saints apôtres de Rome, certifie que dans le registre XII. des défunts, lettre N, page 283, se trouve l’acte dont l’extrait mot à mot suit:
“Le vingt‐deux décembre mil‐huit cent soixante six.—Mademoiselle Claire‐ Françoise‐Amélie Lautard de Marseille, fille de M. Jean Baptiste Lautard, vierge très pieuse, pendant quelle offrait Dimanche dernier à Dieu sa propre vie pour le salut du souverain Pontife, Pie IX. de Rome et de la sainte église, a été saisie sur le champ par la maladie, et ayant reçu très pieusement les sacraments de l’église, jouissant de la plenitude de ses facultés, en prière, entourée de plusieurs prêtres et vierges, a rendu son âme a Jésus Christ son époux, avec la plus grande sérénité, le Mercredi dix‐neuf à neuf heures et demie du matin dans la maison Rue Ripresa dei Barberi 175, l’âge de cinquante neuf ans; son corps, le lendemain vingt, après le completuum a été conduit accompagné par un grand nombre de religieuse en cette basilique et y a été exposé pendant la matinée suivant l’usage des nobles, l’office et la Messe ont été dit, dans l’après‐midi le corps a été transporté à l’église de Sainte Marie in Ara‐ Cœli, òu il a été enseveli dans le tombeau des Sœurs de St. Joseph de l’Apparition.
“Donné à Rome,” etc.(274)
The International Congress Of Prehistoric Anthropology And Archæology.
From La Revue Generale De Bruxelles
The sessions of August 25 began with fresh discussions concerning the troglodytes of Menton and the so‐called tertiary skull from California already spoken of. M. Desor entered into extensive details concerning the hatchets of nephrite and jade found in the Alps, and apparently of Oriental origin. “I do not believe,” said he, as he ended, “that these hatchets were utensils, but merely objects of display, like the dolmens(!)—precious memorials and relics of the first ages of humanity.” M. de Quatrefages thought these hatchets a proof of ancient commercial relations with the East. A great deal was said in this discussion of the use of stone knives by the Egyptians in embalming the dead, and among the Jews for circumcising. Only one thing was forgotten—neither the Egyptians nor the Jews ever attached any religious importance to the use of stone, and they likewise made use of bronze and iron knives in these operations. The instrument of circumcision at the present day is a steel blade.(275) M. Leemans, director of the museum at Leyden, thought these hatchets came from Java. He reminded us that there has always been constant intercourse between Switzerland and that island, and that the majority of the soldiers of the East India Company were traditionally recruited in Switzerland. The Abbé Delaunay refuted M. Desor’s opinion by merely referring to the collection at Pont‐Levoy, where there are fourteen hatchets of jade found in that vicinity. It was thought desirable to ascertain the as yet unknown source of jade. They now returned to the hiatus mentioned by M. de Mortillet at the previous session, in order to oppose it by bringing forward an intermediary race, for whom M. Broca was the sponsor, though without flattering it much. He engaged in a long, subtile argument on the way tertiary flints were introduced into the valleys and caverns. They were not agreed on this question, which is one we can only regard with speculative interest.
The excursions to the ateliers of Spiennes and Mesvin were not as pleasant as the one to the Lesse. For that, the country around Mons should be as charming as that of the Meuse—and the people likewise. There is a very complete work by M. Dupont concerning these excavations, in which have been found millions of rough flints, to which he does not hesitate to assign a quaternary origin of the mammoth period. When one has a taste of the mammoth, he cannot get too much of it. I know of sceptics and controversialists who through speculations of another kind are plunged into foolish incredulity. Here is an instance: from time immemorial our forefathers made use of flints for striking fire, and many of us can still remember the custom, which may not have wholly disappeared. For centuries, households had to be supplied with flints for the tinder‐box, and in abundance, for this stone is soon worn out by iron; it becomes furred and smooth, and is soon unfit for use. If we compare the considerable traffic in flints that must have been carried on with the enormous consumption that supports the fabrication of chemical matches, we can easily see that the sites of the workshops where flints for striking fire were cut must have been heaped with millions of rough ones—nodules, chips, and débris of all kinds; that excavations must have been made by pits, which necessarily extended to considerable depth, and crossed very old geologic strata, for silex is found imbedded in chalk at a depth of thirty or forty metres in some places; that to argue from the stratification of surrounding formations, in order to decide on the synchronism of the excavations, would expose us to conclude post hoc, ergo propter hoc. And I have not mentioned all the common uses made of flints in a household. For many years they were used for firearms, and silex is still used in ceramic manufactures, the origin of which is lost in the darkness of ages. A great many of the flints that appear cut are only fragments that may have been owing to spontaneous fracture. Now, whence came all the flints used for striking fire during the historic periods that go back from our time to the middle ages and to antiquity? Has it been proved that these remains, so‐called prehistoric, do not come within the domain of history; nay, even of modern history? At all events, the age of the quaternary deposits is by no means established, and it is on the mere presence of human remains, or of the productions of human labor among these deposits, that certain anthropologists found the millions of ages they attribute to our species. These remains do not indicate the site of ancient settlements; they have been washed away from those settlements by currents of water, and the question is, What epoch produced these changes?—a question not solved, and perhaps never will be.
Besides, the primary defect of the whole prehistoric system is the indissolubly confounding of two orders of very evident facts, but which may by no means have any correlation as to time. Wrought flints show evident traces of human labor, and there is no unprejudiced person who cherishes the least doubt about it. The evidence of design shown by the examination of two or three specimens is in itself a proof of some value, but this proof makes an irresistible impression on the mind when, in addition, we see an accumulation of specimens. It is, then, no longer possible to attribute the uniform shape of the flints to a mere accident. But were they fashioned at the time of the formation of the terrains in which they are embedded? That is another problem, the solution of which is liable to controversy. Mr. Taylor, who is very respectable authority in such matters, declares, after much conscientious research, that the gravel‐beds of St. Acheul were deposited in the earlier part of the Christian era. People of the historic period, such as the first inhabitants of Umbria and the Egyptians, made flints precisely like those of St. Acheul. The prodigious antiquity of man must be greatly shaken by these observations. At Sinai, flint has been used to effect immense excavations in the rock; it is again utilized under the form of hammers and chisels in the ancient copper mines of the Aztecs, in Canada, Spain, Wady‐Maghara, and Bethlehem, as well as on Lake Superior, in Tuscany, and in Brittany. The Bedouins of Africa and the Indians of Texas still make use of them; and M. Reboux, who gave the Congress a practical demonstration of the mounting and use of the utensils of the stone age, received his inspiration from those savages. They make the handles out of the sinews of the bison, covered with a wide strip of the animal’s skin recently taken off. This band is wound around grooves made in the middle of the hammer. The skin, as it dries, contracts, and the stone, the extremities of which alone are uncovered, is enclosed in a sheath so tight that it cannot be drawn out.(276) It must be acknowledged, then, that the authenticity of these beds at Spiennes, as prehistoric ateliers, appears exceedingly doubtful, and there is a tinge of similar incredulity in the behavior of the people around the Camp des Cayaux: “Countrymen, and even little peasant girls,” says a reporter of one of our principal journals, “were selling the finest stones to the travellers, making superhuman efforts to repress smiles that threatened to explode into loud laughter. A singularly ironic expression was legible in the large eyes of these fillettes and broke through their pretended seriousness. It was very evident that the benighted villagers in the vicinity of Mons were not sufficiently initiated into the new gospel of science, and by no means had implicit faith in it. The irreverence of the population was still more evident at the entrance of the hamlet, where a group of young women manifested quite an uncivil merriment at the sight of some of the princes of science who were toiling along under the heavy burden of quaternary flint.” As an example of moral contrasts, I will merely allude to Hennuyer and the peasant of Furfooz, one sceptical and contemptuous of everything, and the other with genuine respect for the traditions of his beloved valleys.
The morning of the twenty‐seventh was mostly taken up with a report from General Faid’herbe on the dolmens of Algeria. A burst of applause greeted the illustrious and genial hero of Lille. Popular sentiment seemed an embodiment of the
“Placuit victrix causa diis, sed victa Catoni”
in the very teeth of the Borussians.(277)
General Faid’herbe assigned a historic epoch to the origin of the dolmens. These monuments, which are tombs, were the work of one race found on every shore from Pomerania to Tunis, and which, according to him, proceeded from the north to the south. The dolmens of Africa are like those of Europe. But what race was this? A blonde race from the shores of the Baltic, as the speaker proved by three facts: 1. Blondes are still to be found in Barbary. 2. Ancient historians speak of the blonde people who lived there before the Christian era. 3. Fifteen centuries before Christ the blonde inhabitants of that country attacked Lower Egypt. M. Faid’herbe stated that when he lived in Senegal there were two powerful negro tribes in the countries on the upper Niger having a political organization of relative advancement. The complexion of the royal family was somewhat clear, and they prided themselves on their descent from white ancestors. Etymological indices lead us to believe that this dynasty descended from the blonde race of the dolmens.
M. Worsaae opposed the general’s opinion, and maintained that the builders of the dolmens, on the contrary, proceeded from the south to the north, where they attained the height of their civilization. M. Cartailhac, however, stated an important fact that weakens this objection: the dolmens of the South of France contain metallic objects whose place of fabrication could not have been far off; those of the interior and the North only contained articles of polished stone.
A small man now sprang into the tribune, fierce as Orestes tormented by the Eumenides, with black eyes, long streaming hair, and a person of incessant mobility. It is one of the princes of oriental philology—M. Oppert, who began a demonstration of the chronology of remote historical times, which he continued in the afternoon session. He assured us, as he began, that he did not intend to offend any one’s religious convictions, or to discuss the chronology of the Bible, which, in his eyes, is eminently respectable. In his opinion, the difference of the dates pointed out in different chronological tables can be explained without any difficulty. M. Oppert showed us how the chronologies of Egypt and Chaldea, which were calculated by cycles of unequal length, begin with the same date—the 19th of January, Gregorian (the 27th of April, Julian), of the year 11542 B.C.!
He therefore concluded that the people of those regions must have observed the important astronomical phenomena of that time, the risings of Sirius perhaps, which would indicate a degree of civilization somewhat advanced for a period still ante‐historic. I like to recall the very words he used; they are full of meaning.
M. Ribeiro had made researches in Portugal that appeared to him conclusive as to the existence of pliocene man, and he produced tertiary flints which he believed to be cut. The Abbé Bourgeois, who could not remain indifferent to any proof of tertiary man, allowed an unexpected declaration to escape his lips. “I should like,” said he, “to consider these fragments as authentic proofs of the truth of my theory, but the truth obliges me to declare that I cannot discover any evidence of human labor in them.” M. Ribeiro sank into his seat under this coup de hache‐ polie, and tertiary man was properly buried, after a later correction from M. Bourgeois, who admitted that one of M. Ribeiro’s flints bore marks of human labor, but he had doubts as to its bed.
Anthropology and ethnography had the honors during the greater part of this session.
M. Lagneau said the researches made in Belgium showed there were three perfectly distinct species of men in this country, and he opposed M. Dupont’s opinion that the skulls of Furfooz belong to the Mongoloid race. M. Hamy demonstrated anatomically that a particular race, the Australioid, is spread throughout Europe. The jaw from Naulette appears to belong to this race; the skull from Engis belongs to another. M. Hamy thought he discovered some of the characteristics of the Australioid race in certain inferior types in Belgium and France. These primitive races are not extinct. They still peep out in isolated cases of atavism, and he exhibited a curious instance—the hideous portrait of a boat‐woman of the neighborhood of Mons, with all the characteristics of the Australioid race of the mammoth period. In this selection of a Montois type there was a spice of revenge evident to every one. M. Virchow found a manifest difference between the skulls at the British Museum and those of criminals in the collection at the university. The Flemish skulls present the same prognathism as those of Furfooz, and certain types have characteristics that might cause them to be classed with the Mongoloid race.
As to the size of the skull, it is not owing to the development of the psychical faculties, and we should be cautious about drawing premature conclusions concerning the primitive races of this country. M. Virchow cited the example of the two skulls found in a Greek tomb of the Macedonian epoch, the form and size of which induced him to class them unhesitatingly with the Mongoloids of the caverns of the Lesse. Now, one of these skulls was that of a Greek woman of great distinction, both as to her social condition and intellectual culture. The learned professor from Berlin expressed a doubt as to the Germanic origin of the Flemings. M. Lagneau also thought we should not decide too hastily about the races that first inhabited Belgium. He could not see why the Flemings and Germans should have the same origin. In Germany, Belgium, and France the races are excessively mixed up. Germany was repeatedly invaded by people from Gaul. Prognathism alone is not typical any more than the temperament, color of the hair, etc.
M. Vanderkindere thought the Flemish of Germanic origin, and the Walloon of Celtic. Blondes do not belong to the Aryan races. Prognathism is more common in them than in the dark people of the country, in which the speaker finds Ligurian traces, as in the basin of the Loire (Liger‐ Liguria). Now, the blonde race, has always thought itself superior, and this belief was so strong in Flanders in the heart of the middle ages that the mother of Berthulphe de Ghistelles, displeased at the alliance her son had contracted with the beautiful Godelive, a native of Boulonnais, whom her contemporaries reproached solely on account of her black hair and eyebrows, expressed her contempt in these significant terms: “Cur, inquit, cornicem de terra aliena eduxisti?” She thought it disgraceful to defile the pure blood of her antique Germanic race (alti tui sanguinis) by such an alliance.
In a subsequent session, this question of races came on the carpet again. M. Dupont, combining the observations made in the three excursions (that to Namur had taken place the day before), established a filiation between the different peoples who inhabited Belgium in different periods of the stone age. The people of Mesvin, the Somme, the Tamise, and the Seine were contemporaries. The race of Mesvin inhabited Hainault at the same time as the troglodytes, whom they did not know. It might have been the people of Mesvin and the Somme, who, gradually attaining to polished stone, invaded the country occupied by the less advanced people of the caverns. M. Virchow could not recommend too much prudence to those who are investigating the science of anthropology. In prehistoric times, as in our day, there were variations of the same race, but that is not accounted for by atavism. It must be concluded that men were simultaneously created or born in several places, and different types sprang from the commingling of the actual races. We take pleasure in collecting these indirect acknowledgments from the lips that dared say, “There is no place in the universe for a God, nor in man for a soul.” M. de Quatrefages thought, like M. Virchow, that all the various races cannot be owing to atavism. Crossing has a good deal to do with it. It is allowable to refer the variety of types to the more or less commingling of the ancient races, as they are everywhere mingled now. We can hardly deny, however, that the present population partly descended from the troglodytes. The people of Furfooz must still have some representatives in Belgium, especially among the women. Science proves that woman retains the type of the race to which she belongs longer than man. At a later day we shall doubtless succeed in deciphering the origin of the human races. In these researches we must also consider the action of les milieux. Mlle. Royer expressed a disbelief in the unity of the human species. Unfortunately, the inevitable crossing is always obstructing her observations. She absolutely refuses to admit that the white man is Aryan, or at least Asiatic. She hopes, however, some day to obtain a solution of these great problems. How far, madame, your knowledge extends, and how astonishingly you have retained the persistent type of madame la guenon from whom you flatter yourself to have descended! After other discussions concerning the bronze utensils found in various parts of Europe, and the influence of Etruscan art, which extended even to the North, M. Baudre undertook the demonstration of a point singular enough. Primitive man, he said, doubtless possessed the musical faculty, and it is impossible with his knowledge of the flint he daily used that it should not have occurred to him to apply the sonorousness of that stone to some practical use. No one can positively declare this was so, but who can deny it? M. Baudre has constructed an instrument composed of accordant flints—a prehistoric piano—on which he executed a brabançonne that would have excited the envy of the Moncrabeaux. It is neither more nor less insupportable than the modern instrument of torture of which some unideal creature, with bent body and a prey to convulsive jerks, strikes the senseless ivory with his skinny phalanges till it shrieks under the touch.
Of the excursion to Namur we will only allude to what bore on the scientific labors of the Congress; that is, the visit to the Camp of Hastedon. The delightful, cordial reception given us in that pleasant town, the banquet and concert which followed, will not soon be effaced from the memory of the excursionists. The plateau of Hastedon, close to Namur, rests on a solid mass of dolomite, and is surrounded by a bastion composed of fagots calcined—it is not known how, huge boulders, and a thick layer of earth and stones. The Romans occupied it for a certain time, but the parapets that surround it are much more ancient. It is an immense plain, eleven hectares in extent, strewed with flints, both wrought and polished, that came from Spiennes, while those of the caverns of the Lesse came from Champagne. The troglodytes of the Lesse and the people of Spiennes were contemporaries in the age of cut stone, but there was no intercourse between them. During the age of polished stone, on the contrary, the importation of flints from Champagne ceased in the region of the caverns, and the flint of Spiennes was diffused among the plateaux of upper Belgium. The inhabitants of Spiennes extended their former bounds, penetrated to that region, and fortified it. According to M. Dupont, the Camp of Hastedon must have been one of their fortresses.
The final séance of the Congress opened with a very interesting and animated discussion as to the first use of bronze and iron. Where did the bronze come from? M. Oppert thought it of European origin. The Phœnicians went to England for tin rather than to the East. M. Worsaae was convinced it came from Asia, and that a bronze age will be discovered in Egypt. M. Leemans was of the opinion that the iron age preceded the bronze in India and Ceylon. M. Conestabile was inclined to think the Phœnicians obtained their tin from the Caucasus rather than England. M. Franks said they might have found it in Spain and Portugal, and M. Waldemar‐Schmidt thought the Egyptians obtained theirs from Africa.
M. de Quatrefages afterwards summed up the character of the Congress of Brussels: it appears from scientific evidence in every direction that certain existing types have an incontestable resemblance to the people of the quaternary period. In the second place, it now seems established that man of the stone age travelled much more than has been supposed.
The close of the session was marked by two occurrences that produced a strong impression on the assembly. The two workmen who so ably assisted M. Dupont in the exploration of the caverns had, at the solicitation of the committee, the décoration ouvrière conferred on them by Messrs. de Quatrefages and Capellini. Then a letter from M. G. Geefs was read, stating that he had made a bust of M. d’Omalius unbeknown to the latter, which he offered as a mark of homage to the Congress. This bust, concealed at the end of the apartment, was uncovered and presented to the venerable president, old in years but youthful in feeling, whose fine noble career M. de Quatrefages retraced in an address sparkling with wit. Then, after some isolated communications, the Congress passed a resolution to hold its seventh meeting at Stockholm, in 1874, under the effective presidency of Prince Oscar of Sweden, and the Congress was declared adjourned.
We cannot better end this report, which I should have liked to make more complete, than by quoting M. Dupont’s résumé (a little indefinite, in my opinion) of the labor of the Sixth International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archæology:
“After the weighty discussions that have taken place at the Congress of Brussels,” says M. le Secrétaire Général, “it is proper to lay before the public the chief problems discussed by the learned assembly. These problems have not all been definitely solved. That was not to be expected, for the result of such scientific meetings is seldom the decision of questions, but rather stating them with clearness and precision. The discussions at such meetings lead to the opening of new paths, and preparing the way, by throwing new light on it, for calm and persevering labor in the study. There alone is it possible to weigh the value of arguments, elucidate obscure points, and arrive at conclusions. In this spirit six principal points have been drawn up:
“1. Did man really exist in the middle of the tertiary period? Several of the specialists present at the Congress declared in the affirmative. But it appeared, especially from the flints discovered by the Abbé Bourgeois, that further researches should be undertaken before science can decide on a point so important in the history of mankind. The bed of the flints in question was ultimately regarded as incontestable.
“2. The formation of the valleys and the filling of the caverns were regarded as the result of fluvial action. The study of these phenomena may be considered as the fundamental point of research respecting man of the quaternary epoch.
“3. The bones of goats, sheep, and oxen, discovered in the deposits of the mammoth age in the Belgian caverns, were acknowledged to be similar to our goats, sheep, and certain species of our domestic cattle. An opinion was advanced that perhaps they originated these domestic species, whose origin has often been sought in vain.
“4. Communications between different tribes of the stone age in Western Europe were for the first time distinctly stated. The people of the quaternary epoch were divided into two classes, one of which, by the regular development of its industrial pursuits, arrived at such a degree of progress that it was thought they must have invaded the region of the Belgian caverns in the age of polished stone, and subjugated our troglodytes.
“5. The discovery at Eygenbilsen gave occasion for recognizing the Etruscan influence in our region previous to the Roman conquest. There was a disposition to admit that the intercourse between Italy and the Scandinavian countries must have been much later.
“6. The opinion that the anthropological types of the quaternary epoch have survived, and constitute an essential element of existing European nations, was admitted in principle by all the anthropologists who expressed any opinion on the subject. The problem of the origin of European races is thus placed in an entirely new light.”
The generally fortunate voyage of our vessel was varied by two or three days of very rough weather, and the miseries of our first night at sea were intensified by a violent gale. The fast steamer, built with lines calculated for excessive speed, cut through rather than breasted the waves. Tons of clear water washed over the whaleback, knocking over one or two hapless wights, and drenching many others. Her wind‐ward side was incessantly swept by blinding showers of heavy spray. To pass from the shelter of the main deck to the entrance of our steerage was a veritable running the gauntlet. You watched till the ship rose, and then ran at full speed for the shelter of the whaleback, happy if you reached it without being rolled by a sudden lurch into the scuppers, or losing your balance and clinging to the nearest rope or stanchion, being soused by the spray from the next wave that struck her.
The storm raged more fiercely as the evening advanced, and from timid lips came stories of the lost City of Boston and the hapless London, while more experienced hands regretted their precipitancy in selecting a vessel of a line in which every other quality was said to have been sacrificed to that of excessive speed, and indulged in uncomfortable surmises as to the consequences of the shaft snapping or the engines breaking down. When the damp and chill of the advancing night drove us to our bunks, we clambered down‐stairs, and, staggering away into our respective streets, crawled in. To realize my first impression of the steerage of our vessel at night, when its cavernous space was lit, or rather its grim darkness made visible, by a single lantern, would require the pen of Dickens or the graphic pencil of Gustave Doré. Crouching between those bunks and the roof grotesque forms, dimly seen in the obscure light, threw weird shadows on the cabin sides. Here one busily engaged, under innumerable difficulties, in making up a neat bed of sheets and blankets, into which he afterwards burrows by an ingenious backward movement, like a shore crab hiding himself in the sand left uncovered by the receding tide; while his next neighbor retires to rest by the simple process of kicking off his boots, pulling his battered night‐cap over his eyes, and stretching himself on the bare boards, with a muttered string of curses on the ship, the weather, and the world in general, for his evening orisons. At a corner of one of the tables appear a group of players poring over their cards in a chiaro‐oscuro that recalls a scene of Teniers or Van Ostade, while at another a group are gathered round a young vocalist who quavers out in a dull monotone a curious medley of sentimental ditties and music‐hall vulgarities. Gradually all drop away into their bunks, and everything is still, save the deep breathing of some hundred souls, and the groans of the sufferers from the malady of the sea. Occasionally the heavy plunge of the ship, as she dashes into some mountainous wave, extinguishes the lamp with the shock, and buries the little windows under water, leaving the cabin for a few seconds in profound darkness. In the gale during the first night of our voyage, one tremendous billow struck the ship, burying us in black night, and rolling trunks, tins, and clothes cluttering to leeward with the lurch of the vessel, and awakening all in a moment from their slumbers. A general consternation prevailed, and while some called in angry tones for the lamp to be relighted, others could be heard muttering the unfamiliar words of a half‐forgotten prayer. As the great ship shook in her conflict with the raging sea, and we heard overhead the rush of many feet and the swash on deck of a heavy mass of water, I felt nervous enough till she rose again and, creeping to the little window, I could see the cold moon throwing a silvery track across the waste of raging, wind‐ lashed surges.
I thought of the great ships that had gone down, crowded with hundreds of unprepared and unthinking souls, into the cruel bosom of the great ocean; perhaps their unknown fate was to sink in the darkness of the night, crushed in a moment by an iceberg, or, maimed and helpless, battered to pieces and submerged by the angry waves. What a horrible death‐agony must be that of the doomed, who, after the sudden crash of a collision, or battened down in their dark prison in a raging storm, heard the cataract of water roar down the hatchway, greedy to engulf them! For a few moments what fearful struggles would take place in the crowded cabin to mount the bunks and gain the last mouthful of the retiring air, until the flood buried all in the bosom of the deep, in a silence to be broken only by the trumpet of the Judgment Day! Should I, I pondered, in such a dark hour, have the strength of mind or grace of God to lie still on my bed and let the rising water cut short the prayer on my lips, or, hoping against hope, with angrily raging heart die fighting to breathe a few seconds longer the vital air? Of a truth, to die suffocated in the darkness, without a last look at the great vault of heaven, a last breath of the pure air, seemed to me to be to doubly die.
If I suffered some discomfort and perhaps a little anxiety from the occasional anger of the mighty main, it was far more than compensated for by its aspect in its calmer and more peaceful moods. I cannot understand how in a few days voyagers can learn to complain of the monotony of the sea; to me, its different moods in calm and storm, the snowy crests of the dancing waves, the foaming and often phosphorescent wake of the great steamer, and the ever‐changing aspects of the cloud‐laden heavens, were objects of untiring interest. If I had the magic pen of the author of the Queen of the Air, I would write a book on the cloud‐scenery of the Atlantic. Never, even in the purest Italian sky or the cloudless heavens above the vast expanse of a Western prairie, have I seen Diana so purely fair, Lucifer so bright, or Aurora clad in such varied garments of purple and rose; such a wonderful vault lined with innumerable flakes of spotless wool left by the dying wind; such masses of cumulus, sometimes as solidly white as Alpine summits, sometimes before the rain‐storm luridly gray‐ black with the gathered water, like the massive bulk of Snowdon seen through a driving rain; and, once or twice, the pall of the thunder‐storm rising over the leeward heaven and advancing towards us, its ragged edge momentarily lit up with the blazing tongues of the lightning, until it rolled over, deafening with its dread artillery and hiding all around in mist and blinding rain. The grandeur of sunset and of sunrise, when not obscured by the mistiness of a moist atmosphere, was indescribable. Every night, with renewed pleasure, we watched the god of day sink beneath the western horizon. Turner, in his wildest dreams of those gorgeous heaven‐ pictures that he had not seen on earth but felt that he would love to see, imagined no greater luxury of gold, carmine, purple, crimson, rose, and rose‐tinged snow, than was afforded by some of the spectacles of the setting sun. One evening still holds my memory entranced: the heavy curtain of dull gray mist that all day had lain low over the sea rolled eastward before the evening breeze; the emerging sun, low on the horizon, dyed the receding masses of cloud with a thousand shades of livid purple; the peaks and shoulders of the eastern range of mountains of dark vapor caught the light, while between them sank valleys and depths more sombre by the contrast. Westward, below the rosy, almost blood‐red sun, ran two long narrow filaments of purple cloud, dark across the glow of the heavens, like bars across a furnace. A few moments, and the shining orb sinks beneath them, fringing their edges with refulgent gold, then falls into a sea of liquid fire. A little longer the crimson hues linger on the eastern curtain of clouds, then grow fainter and fainter, and die away into the gray hues of a moonless night.
Among the five hundred emigrants our good ship carried there were, it is needless to say, many men of different speech, and almost every diversity of occupation and character. Besides the four nations of Great Britain, we had Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians in considerable numbers, a few French, Poles, and Russians, a Levantine Jewess and her children, and a solitary American. With the Teutons my ignorance of their language prevented me holding further converse than to learn their nationality and their destination—generally Illinois, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Unlike the Irish, with whom New York seemed to fulfil all their notions of America, the Germans and Scandinavians appeared all westward bound, in large parties, organized for agricultural life; and while they were in a considerable minority on the vessel, they formed much the larger proportion of the passengers in the emigrant cars. The amount of their baggage was something prodigious. Nearly all apparently peasants in their native land, they seemed on leaving it to transport everything they possessed except the roof over their heads to their adopted country. What would not break they enclosed in immense bags of ticking and rough canvas, and the residue of their property in arklike chests, the immense weight and sharp iron‐bound corners of which moved the sailors to multiform blasphemy. For my part, I had read so much of the contented prosperity of the peasantry in Norway and Sweden that I speculated not a little as to what cause could lead them to make the long and expensive migration from Christiania or Gottenburg to the so far off shores of the Mississippi.
With the Germans, who came principally from the neighborhood of Mannheim, the case was different. Several of them could speak a little French, nor were they reticent as to the principal cause that led them to desert their fatherland: it was the man tax, levied by the empire of blood and iron on their youth and manhood, that drove them from their farms in the sweet Rhine valley to seek abodes in the new and freer world. Several of them had followed the Bavarian standard under Von Tannen through the hardships and carnage of the Franco‐German war; but to the shrewd sense of the peasant the halo of military glory and the pomp of wide empire meant but conscription and taxation, fields untilled, and wife and children starving, while the blood of father and son was poured out to indite a new page in the gory annals of warlike fame.
By the way, one of them assured us that never in the fiercest time of that deadly strife, even when, in long forced marches, driving Bourbaki’s broken bands through the snows of Jura, had they fared so badly as he did then, to which I may add the experience of an Englishman—whose sinister countenance and shabby attire gave increased weight to his testimony—who averred that we fared little better than in a workhouse and worse than in a jail.
Amongst us there were many mechanics, principally Irish, who were returning from visits to their friends; nor can I omit to chronicle their uniform and emphatic testimony as to the benefit they had received from their emigration. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, they were sure of work, could live and dress comfortably, and lay by a large proportion of their earnings, while in England, and still more in Ireland, they were happy when their earnings kept them in lodging, food, and clothing, and saving was neither thought of nor possible. From what I could learn, the position of the unskilled laborer appeared by no means so bright. The different system of hiring in America made the nominally higher wages more precarious than in the old country; and I suspect that everywhere the untaught man, who, ignorant of any distinct branch of industry, brings only his thews and sinews to market, is, and will ever be, but “a hewer of wood and drawer of water”—an ill‐paid and little valued drudge.
For one class of the Irish emigrants, of whom we had a certain number on board, their countrymen entertained a profound and not unfounded contempt. Youths from Cork or Dublin shops or offices, whom dissipation or misconduct had thrown out of place, or the desire of novelty or adventure had attracted to the New World—unfit for manual labor, and without any special qualification for commerce—their heads were turned with tales of the giddy whirl of New York life, in their notions of which gallantry, whiskey, politics, calico balls, and rowdy patriotism made a curious medley. Their general ambition was to be bar‐tenders, and with some exceptions their usual behavior showed them to be little fitted for any better avocation.
One of the characters that most attracted my attention, though I elicited but little response to my advances from his taciturn nature, was a miner from Montana—a man of short stature but powerful build, with, a determined, weather‐beaten face, and a decidedly sinister squint, who had rambled over the greater part of California, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Montana, and apparently returned no richer from his wanderings. Having been a seaman before he took to a mountain life, his gait had acquired an indescribably curious mixture of the out‐kneed walk of a man constantly on horseback with the roll of a sailor, while he had, too, a curious habit of involuntarily working the fingers of his right hand as if they held a six‐ shooter. He usually restricted himself to the bachelor society under the whaleback, and, chary of his words, amused himself with an amateur surveillance of the operations of the men, or occasionally exchanged reminiscences in brief sentences with two or three other returned Californians: how he and his mates had killed a grizzly at the foot of Mount Helena; how he had made £1,200 in eight months from a claim in Siskiyou County, and lost it all in working another in El Dorado County, at which he persevered fruitlessly for three years, while the claims on each side brought heavy piles to their workers; how he had seen twenty‐six “road agents” hanged together in Montana; and other tales of far West mining, murder, and debauchery. Once only his hard face relaxed into a laugh at a story he told of two men who quarrelled in a California saloon, and, dodging round the table, while the rest of the company made for the door or skulked behind the beer barrels, emptied their revolvers at each other with no worse effect than one slight scratch. That twelve barrels should go off and no one be killed seemed to be too ridiculous, and his risible faculties overcame him accordingly. Strangely enough, while he spoke with the most hearty enthusiasm as to the pleasures of a mountaineering life, which he declared, with a good horse, a trusty rifle, and staunch mates, was the finest in the world, and to judge from appearances had certainly not made his pile, he never intended to return westward, but was bound for some city of the South. Possibly some episodes in his checkered existence had caused him to bear in mind the shortened career of the twenty‐six road agents with a distinctness that determined his preference for this side of the Rocky Mountains.
The most lively time of the day was the evening after the five o’clock tea; the sailors during the dog‐watches—from four to eight—do not turn in, but remain on deck, and they amused or persecuted the female passengers with a coarse gallantry that generally made the more modest women remain below; the cooks, engineers, and firemen stood at their doors in the deck‐ house and greeted with horse‐banter the passers‐by; while on the open space before the wheel‐house a few couples danced to the music of an accordion, or tried to tire each other out to the whistled tune of an Irish jig. A pair of professional singers, husband and wife, to whose retinue I usually attached myself, used to sit at the door of the saloon and favor us with selections from their repertory, often with a success that brought metallic appreciation from the gentlemen in the neighboring smoking‐room; till after sunset—generally interpreted with extreme liberality—one of the stewards of the after‐steerage literally hunted the women down‐stairs; and then often on fine nights the sailors would cluster round the open hatchway and sing for or banter with their favorites below.
The behavior of the sailors towards the women was the subject of constant complaint by the more respectable of the passengers throughout the voyage; in the evening, no woman without her husband was safe from their persecution, and not always with him at her side; as they stood by each other, and always had the sheath‐knife at their side, the men were not very ready to commence a quarrel with them; if their advances were resented, they were apt to change from coarse good‐humor to the most revolting and obscene abuse. Hence, as I have mentioned, many of the women would not return to the deck after the evening meal. In short, if other steamers are like the one in which we made the passage, no young woman could cross in the steerage without her modesty being daily shocked, and, if she was unprotected, running great risk of actual insult. I have mentioned that the deck bar was at the head of our staircase and consequently near the sailors’ cabin; one night it was broken open and cleared of its contents; whether the culprits were either sought for or detected, I never heard; but certainly the seamen next day were in a state of extreme conviviality: and, under the emboldening influence of liquor, one lively young mariner put his arm round the waist of a very handsome young Englishwoman, whose ladylike dress and appearance had so far prevented her from being molested in this way. A fight between her husband and the delinquent was with difficulty prevented by the bystanders, and the former went to complain to the chief officer; he mustered the watch and read them a lecture on their not interfering with the female passengers, and told the culprit he would hand him over to the authorities at Castle Garden on his arrival at New York, who would certainly send him for six months to prison. The latter did not seem much discomposed at the intimation, and the day I landed in the Empire City he appeared at our boardinghouse on Washington Street in a state of great hilarity and beer, and informed us with much blasphemy that he had cut his connection with the ship.
The emigrant passengers on board our ship suffered much annoyance and discomfort; but I do not hesitate to say that most of our troubles arose from the crew and attendants rather than the arrangements of the ship itself. Much of the accommodation provided—for instance, in the case of the wash‐houses and fresh‐water pumps—was made useless by the negligence or surliness of the men by whom they were controlled; the victuals seemed generally to be of good quality, and, except in the case of the fresh bread and sugar, were provided with lavish if not wasteful abundance, but they were usually carelessly cooked, if not actually uneatable, and served in the roughest and most heedless manner. The crew were a most disorderly set—quarrels were of constant occurrence. I saw two fights—one between the interpreter attached to the after‐steerage and one of the stewards; and another, which took place between the head‐cook and the butcher in the saloon galley; and I heard of several others. The cooks and bakers in the steerage galley were changed once or twice during the voyage, but no change for the better resulted. I attribute this want of anything like discipline or attentiveness to their duties to the constant change of the men on board these steamers; they only sign articles for the run out and home, rarely remaining more than one or two voyages in the ship, and many go the westward voyage merely to get to New York and desert the ship the moment they arrive there. I was told the chief officer called the milors together and promised them, as the ship was short‐handed (she had seven less than her complement of 28 seamen), they should receive £5 10s. per month instead of the £4 10s. for which they had shipped; but in spite of this, nearly half of them would desert when the ship came to her moorings. The cooks, bakers, and stewards are engaged in the same way, and the consequence is, before they can all be got to understand their positions and work well together, they are paid off and a new set come on board. If the companies could form a permanent staff for their vessels, and go to the same care and expense over their organization as they give to the material equipment of their splendid vessels, an immense change for the better would be effected in the comfort and convenience of the emigrant. As to the distribution of provisions, the passengers might be arranged in messes of ten or twenty, some of whose number would fetch their food from the galley for allotment among themselves, and thus give them an opportunity of eating their meals at table in a more Christianlike and less piggish manner than the majority are at present compelled to do. Nor do I see any great difficulty or additional expense in a different arrangement of the bunks, by which, at the sacrifice of the wide space in the middle of the steerage, they could be grouped on each side of a central table, so that each twenty or thereabouts would form a partially separated room, with its own table and its own mess.
At last, early on the second Sunday morning, the thunderlike roll of the cable paid out over our heads awoke us as the ship came to anchor off Staten Island, and later in the day she moored alongside the company’s wharf in New Jersey. In sight of the promised land, the fatigue and annoyance of the voyage were soon forgotten. A liberal meal of fresh and unusually well‐cooked beef and plum‐duff, eaten undisturbed by the vessel’s motion, made the memory of the disgusting messes we had endured or revolted at less poignant. The entire passengers went on shore in the forenoon, but none of the emigrants were allowed to leave, or any one to come on board the ship. Boatfuls of friends of the passengers came alongside, and the word passed along the deck that Mrs. Brady’s husband or Mary Cahill’s brother was seeking her. Numberless inquiries were shouted as to Mike, or Mary, or the children, until the gray twilight hid the spires and streets of the great city across the river. The chief officer came round early with a lantern, and summarily dismissed all the women below, and all went quietly to rest. Often, I believe, the last night on board the emigrant ship is a scene of wild revelry, if not actual debauchery; but the want of liquor—none was sold after the vessel came to her moorings—and the absence of the fairer sex, effectually quenched any convivial tendencies.
At an early hour next morning the luggage was run out of the hold, and tumbled pell‐mell on deck; and the youth of either sex, hitherto contented with the shabbiest and most negligent of attire, watched eagerly for their boxes, dragged them to a convenient corner, and made an elaborate toilette, either for the benefit of their American friends or to give the coup de grâce to the sweethearts they had encountered on the voyage. It was like the transformation scene in a pantomime, and I could hardly recognize my lady acquaintances in their gay bonnets and neat dresses. Much of their finery, however, suffered serious damage before they emerged on the Bowery. In the afternoon, the custom‐house officer came on board and took his place near the gangway, alongside of which lay a tender for the passengers and a barge for the luggage. The boxes were scattered all over the deck, and to get them examined one had to drag them to the officer, open them and close them, obtain a Castle Garden check from an official at the head of the gangway, and then they went over the side on to the barge, and the passenger on to the tender. Every one was anxious to be off, and all scrambled at once towards the gangway, dragging boxes and bundles with them. Never did we see such a scene of tumult and confusion. Such a babel of tongues; such despair at boxes that either would not open, or more frequently, being opened, would not shut; such lamentations over their often hopelessly shattered contents—the married women imploring some one to mind their children while they dragged their boxes to the gangway; the single ones begging quondam admirers to help them to move their heavy trunks—appeals to which the latter, sufficiently engrossed with their own struggle to be off, generally turned a deaf and unkind ear. The custom‐ house officer seemed to discharge his duty with as much good‐humor as the necessity of examining some thousand boxes in a limited time would allow. We got off with the first tenderful, and after waiting an hour or two in Castle Garden, where we at once cleared the refreshment stall of what we then thought delicious coffee and pies, we were told to fetch our luggage on the following day, and then passed out into Broadway to seek our various fortunes.
In the boarding‐house where I spent the night in New York, I met passengers from most of the other lines. All complained of their accommodations, and affected to believe that they had unfortunately selected the most uncomfortable service. For my own part, I believe that on the whole there is but little to choose between the accommodations and provisions supplied by the different companies, and that the description I have given of the arrangements of one line would generally apply to the rest.
Martyrs And Confessors In Christ.
Nor let any of you be sad, on the ground that he is less than those who, before you having suffered torments, have come by the glorious journey to the Lord, the world being conquered and trodden down. The Lord is the searcher of the reins and heart, he sees the secret things, and looks into things hidden. The testimony of him alone, who is to guide, is sufficient for earning the crown from him. Therefore each thing, O dearest brethren, is equally sublime and illustrious. The former, namely, to hasten to the Lord by the consummation of victory, is the more secure; the latter is more joyful, to flourish in the praises of the church, having received a furlough after the gaining of glory. O blessed church of ours, which the honor of divine condescension thus illumines, which in our own time the glorious blood of martyrs thus makes illustrious! Before, it was white in the works of the brethren; now, it is made purple in the blood of martyrs. Neither lilies nor roses are wanting to its flowers. Let all now contend for the most ample dignity of both honors. Let them receive crowns, either white from their works, or purple from their martyrdom. In the heavenly camp peace and war have their respective flowers, by which the soldier of Christ is crowned for glory. I pray, bravest and most blessed brethren, that you be always well in the Lord, and mindful of us. Farewell.—S. Cyprian.
The Roman Empire And The Mission Of The Barbarians.
Third Article.
So the great Roman world sinned on to the last. Christianity, with a cry of fear and alarm, pointed to the stormful North, and exhorted to repentance; but her voice was drowned in the mad shouts of revelry and the wild din of reckless passion. The mistress of nations would not consent to show signs of fear or alarm. She cast her far‐seeing eye over her wide, rich provinces towards the frowning horizon, and she had some knowledge of what sort of elements were hidden behind the black cloud‐wall there. Never yet had the whole terrible ferocity of latent wrath burst forth; but still, from time to time, as she had watched for some centuries back, the storm‐cloud had opened for a moment, and the low thunder‐peal had been heard, and the lightning‐fires had scathed her frontiers, and sometimes even had touched the very heart of some of her outlying provinces. But the fiery sword had been sheathed. The rent seemed to close again, and the thunder‐murmurs died away. Still no brightness tinged the angry North. But darker, wilder, more fiercely threatening the storm‐cloud grew. There was an angry God behind it, with his warrior hosts, hidden, and biding the solemn, predetermined moment. If the queen of empire felt, at times, a thrill of alarm, she tried to shake it off again. For proudly she gazed around on her widespreading dominions, and counted her almost countless monuments of conquest and glory, and appealed to the long past for her claim to live on immortally; and then took consolation and confidence to herself that the pillars of the firmament would crumble to dust, and the heavens fall, before she could be moved from her everlasting foundations. But still there were hearts that trembled for fear, conscious that something terrible was coming upon the world. The cry of the rapt seer of Patmos seemed still to be rising from the bosom of the Ægean Sea, and ringing in the ears of those who had faith in a God of justice. All those terrible woes foretold in the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of the Apocalypse seemed about to be accomplished. With strange wailing sound, as of a warning archangel’s trumpet, the prophetic voice appeared to repeat: “Thou art just, O Lord, who art, and who wast, the holy one, because thou hast judged these things: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink.... And great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the indignation of his wrath.” Louder still that voice seemed to rise in tones of merciful warning: “Go out from her, my people; that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and the Lord hath remembered her iniquities.... She saith in her heart: I sit a queen, and am no widow; and sorrow I shall not see. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be burned with fire; because God is strong, who shall judge her.” So appeared to sound out clear the sad, wailing voice of the prophet in these sorrowful days. And the people of God took warning. Full of fear and dread, they fled from the “great Babylon” and the other principal cities of the empire, and hid themselves from the wrath that was to come. Those who remained behind laughed with mocking incredulity at their fears, and, as if in defiance of a mighty God, drained the sparkling goblet with an intenser relish, and the din of revelry waxed louder, and the Circensian games were applauded with a wilder joy. Countless numbers of Christians, who still had faith in God’s Word and fear of his justice, hurried with rapid steps from these scenes of reckless dissipation and pleasure. They went to kneel with uplifted hands amid the sands of the Libyan Desert, or the wooded mountains of Lebanon; to implore mercy on a wicked world, amid the islets of the Tyrrhenian Sea, or in the rocky caves of the Thebaid.
At intervals another warning voice is heard, sounding, with the vehemence of the Baptist’s cry, from the holy precincts of Bethlehem. S. Jerome is meditating and commenting, in his convent cell, on the prophecy of Ezekiel. As he ponders on the judgments of God on Jerusalem of old, he cannot but think of Rome in his own day. As the images of ruin and destruction grow before his mind, and his great heart burns with compassion for sinful, sinning man, he pauses in his reading, and lifts his voice in warning of the vials of wrath that are about to be poured out upon the empire. Through the voluptuous palaces of Rome which he once knew so well, the loud warning voice of the holy anchoret of Bethlehem pierces with an awakening sound, and helps to persuade many a patrician beauty “to exchange the dream of pleasure, so soon to be interrupted by the clangor of the Gothic trumpet, for the sacred vigils and austerities of the Holy Land.” “Read,” he cries out, “the Apocalypse of S. John: mark what is written of the woman clothed in scarlet, with the mystic inscription on her forehead, and seated upon seven hills, and of the destruction of Babylon. ‘Go out of her, my people,’ saith the Lord; ‘that you be not made partakers of her crimes, and partners in the plagues that shall afflict her.’ Leave the proud city to exult in everlasting uproar and dissipation, satiating her bloodthirstiness in the arena, and her insane passion in the circus. Leave it to her to trample under foot every sense of shame in her lascivious theatres.” After these words of startling vehemence, he attunes his voice to gentler accents. And pours out his enthusiastic soul in language of sweetest music, winning and captivating both ear and heart. He throws a ravishing fascination and sweetness around his life at Bethlehem that must have been irresistible to souls in which yet lingered any purity of sentiment or love for the holy and beautiful. “How different,” he exclaims, “the scenes that invite you hither! The most rustic simplicity is characteristic of the natal village of our Redeemer, and sacred hymns and psalmody are the only interruptions of the heavenly stillness and serenity which reign on every side. Walk forth into the fields: you startle with mingled astonishment and delight to find that ‘Alleluia’ is the burden of the ploughman’s song; that it is with some inspired canticle the reaper recreates himself, in reposing at noontide from his overpowering toil; and that it is the royal Psalmist’s inspiration that attunes the voice of the vine‐dresser, as, scroll in hand, he plies his task all day.” Thus does he paint in charming colors the immediate neighborhood in which he lived so happily. His words take us back to the days of Eden, and make us realize what unfallen and sinless mankind would have been. Then he passes on to those scenes and names which are interwoven into the history of our Lord’s life, and round these again he casts the fascination of his poetical outpourings. We are carried on as by a magic spell, and we feel ourselves drawn captives after the mighty heart that glows with such a fiery heat of love in that grotto of Bethlehem. We cannot wonder that many souls felt the wondrous spell of that clear, sweet voice, as it broke with its music‐tones of penetrating power into the palaces of Rome. The loud‐wailing trumpet‐tones of the Apocalyptic seer, as they rose with terrific warning from the bosom of the Ægean, and the melodious music of the anchoret of Bethlehem, as it was carried westward on the breeze, both conveyed a message from a merciful God to the children whom he yet loved. But we will listen again to that winning voice from Bethlehem, as it pleads on, trying to draw Christians from the perils that were so near: “Oh! when shall that blessed day arrive,” it continues, “when it shall be our own delight to conduct you to the cave of the Nativity; together to mingle our tears with those of Mary and of the Virgin Mother in the sepulchre of our Lord; to press the wood on which he redeemed us to our throbbing lips; and, in ardent desire, to ascend with him from Mount Olivet?” We will hasten thence to Bethany to see Lazarus come forth in his winding‐sheet, and to the banks of that blessed stream sanctified by the baptism of the Word made flesh. Thence to the huts of the shepherds who heard the canticle of “Glory to God on high” and “Tidings of great joy,” as they were keeping their night‐watch over their flocks. We will pray at the tomb of David, and meditate under the steep precipice where inspiration used to come on the prophet Amos, until we hear again the living clangor of his shepherd‐horn. In Mambre, we shall commune in spirit with the great patriarchs and their consorts who were buried there; visit the fountain where the eunuch was baptized by Philip; and in Samaria honor the relics of S. John the Baptist, of Abdias and Eliseus, and devoutly explore the caverns where the choirs of the prophets were miraculously fed, in the days of famine and persecution. We will extend our pilgrimage to Nazareth, and, as the name implies, behold the flower of Galilee. Hard by is Cana, where he changed water into wine. Thence to Mount Tabor, where our prayer shall be that our rest may not be with Moses and Elias, but in the eternal tabernacle, where we shall enjoy the beatific vision of the Father and the Holy Ghost. Thence returning, we shall see the Lake Genesareth, and the wilderness where the merciful Jesus feasted the multitudes; and Naim shall not be passed by unheeded, where he gave back to the disconsolate mother “her only son.” Hermon shall be pointed out, and the torrent of Endor where Sisera was overcome; and Capharnaum, the theatre of so many miracles. Thence going up to Jerusalem, as it were in the retinue of our Lord, as the disciples were wont to do, we will pass through Silo and Bethel; and having made the circuit of so many scenes, consecrated by the presence, the preaching, and the miracles of the Son of God, to that grotto where he was born to us a Saviour, we shall at last return; perpetually to hymn his praises, to deplore our trespasses with frequent tears; to give our days and nights to holy orisons, as if smitten with the same love which exclaimed, “Him whom my soul hath yearned for, have I found. I will hold him, and will not let him go.”(278) Such wondrous music did the spiritual enchanter pour forth from his lonely grotto. In such words as these, throbbing with love and holy zeal, did the great heart of the worn ascetic of Bethlehem gush forth. And they depicted in such vivid colors the sweet peace and purity and happiness of a new earthly paradise far away in the Eastern land, that many souls were lured away by the charmer’s voice out of the great Western Babylon in time to escape the tempest that was just about to descend upon it. Many illustrious names appear among the fugitives. Paula forgot her lofty pedigree and her more than princely fortune, and fled eastward, and S. Melania and many others of patrician rank hurried away to Bethlehem to escape the impending doom. And there, whilst the mighty God thundered, and hurled his flaming arrows of vengeance, and the great sinful empire tottered and crashed under the awful blows of his wrath, did those favored Christians tremble and pray amid holy scenes and sweet associations, round the grand spiritual figure of S. Jerome.
But it was not only among the believers in God’s Word, and those who observed the signs of the times from their watch‐towers in the heart of the empire, that the belief in the imminent catastrophe had taken a strong hold. The idea that vengeance was close at hand was agitating with fierce intensity the barbaric nations themselves. Whence that idea came, they themselves could not have told. It had long been working in their minds like a living fire; it had gone on inflaming their souls till they felt their whole being on fire with an ungovernable passion for destruction and vengeance. They had been kept for long centuries by an overruling power in their northern forests, waiting for an unknown moment in the future. But that moment, they felt, was now at hand. They were ready for it, for they knew they were the scourges of wrath in the hands of a mighty God.
But before that fierce, black storm‐cloud up yonder in the North pours out its fiery wrath upon the doomed empire, we will try to get a glimpse behind it to see what elements are hidden there.
Let the reader open his historical atlas, and follow with his eye the boundaries of the Roman Empire in the West. He will see that the east, west, and south of Europe are lying at the feet of Rome, the heart and centre of the world. As he casts his glance over his chart, he will be struck by the countless names that cover the face of Italy and Gaul and Spain, and all those countries that are comprehended within the rule and civilization of the great capital of the empire. But as he raises his eye northwards, he marks the outlines of Roman power. He might say that the Rhine and the Danube are the boundaries in that direction of imperial dominion. And what does he see beyond? Nothing that denotes that civilization has ever set a firm foot there. The great Hercynian forest begins at the Rhine, and stretches far away, with its dense, impenetrable blackness, as far as the Vistula. It looks like a long, broad line of fortification thrown up by nature to guard the North from Roman ambition. Beyond this, again, is a wild unknown land. The student becomes bewildered as he tries to gain an accurate knowledge of it. It is a dreary wilderness of forest, and swamp, and vast tracts of land that have known no tillage. He finds no name of city or town, but only the hard names of countless barbaric tribes. These seem to fill, without order or defined limit of dominion, the vast area from the borders of the Rhine and Danube to the Baltic Sea, and the mainland and innumerable islets of Scandinavia. If he cast his eye towards the North‐east, the prospect is of a land still less known, and, at the same time, less thickly peopled. But the barbaric names are there, though few in number, and the wild waste seems to stretch away interminably into the darkness. The map calls it Scythia, and that is almost all the student can gather from looking at it; but it seems to him that it is the high‐road by which the countless barbarian tribes have come into Europe. We may well believe Gibbon when he tells us that this vast, unknown northern land, cut off from the Roman Empire by the Rhine and the Danube, and shrouded in gloom and darkness by its widespreading forests, extended itself over a third part of Europe.(279) Tacitus describes it as a country under a gloomy sky, rude, dismal in aspect and cultivation; more humid than Gaul, more stormy than Noricum and Pannonia.(280) It was a country where the waters were often covered with thick ice, and the mountains with snow, where the air was cold and sharp, and the storms blew fierce and strong. It was, in a word, a country where no delicate, soft races could have lived, but where only men of stalwart frame and hardy natures could have their home; men who could bound up the snowy mountain heights with a feeling of luxury, could hunt with delight among the frozen swamps, and run in the teeth of the sharp blast through thick forests where the warm sun‐rays never penetrated. And what was this strange, unknown land, so dark and impenetrable, so vast in its extent, so defended by rivers and ocean and far‐reaching fortification of Hercynian forest, so wild and uncultivated, so dismal and cold, and overhanging with its savage, frowning aspect the empire of Rome? It was the camp of the God of battles. With a divine purpose of his own, he had kept it free from Roman conquest. He had marked it off for himself by those wide rivers and stormy seas, and planted that thick long line of forest trees on its frontier, and shrouded its vast area in secrecy and mystery by widespreading woods. And under the shadow of these thick forests he had, for long generations, been gathering his warrior‐bands. The great empire had been growing for centuries in power and riches, and had piled up her monuments to tell the ages of her glories, and had come to think herself everlasting; but whilst she thus developed her power so mightily, her destroyers were being gathered together in secret in that Northern land. It was not by chance that the Roman Empire had built herself up in such glory and imposing magnitude on the ruins of the great empires that had preceded her, and not for a barren purpose. God had marked with his finger the boundary‐line of her dominions long before she extended her power so far, and he had appointed her the work which she was to do for him. But he had marked out, also, the term in the future whereunto she should endure, and had chosen beforehand the instruments which he would use for her destruction. As she was to be the most mighty of all empires which the world had ever seen, so would her destroyers have to be mighty and terrible in their powers of destruction. And those destroyers God will have ready at the right moment. No human eye could see what was going on under that dense darkness in the North; its mysterious depth was impenetrable to mortal kin. It was the secret laboratory of God, where he was fashioning his instruments of wrath. He had long been there amidst the terror and gloom beckoning the wild races of the earth to come to him, and they had obeyed his call, though they knew not why. Far back in the ages of time, before history had taken up her pen, there was a great breaking up of the Aryan family in the Eastern land, and they divided themselves into two great sections. They moved in opposite directions, one towards the East, the other towards the West. Though that breaking up seems, at first sight, to have nothing providential about it, yet it was no accidental separation. Bringing our Catholic principles to bear upon it, we soon see that it was the work of God. The wild tribes wandered on, they knew not whither. But they had a guide as real and definite as the Israelites in after‐times. It was, perhaps, no pillar of fire nor mysterious moving cloud, but yet as unerring in its leading. The Eastern Aryans took possession of Persia, and, invading India, gradually made themselves masters of the country as far as the Ganges. In this rich and fertile region they soon advanced, with rapid steps, to a high state of civilization. When we first meet them in history, they are a powerful nation, with well‐disciplined armies, and arts and sciences highly cultivated. Of those who took the westerly course, some settled down in the southern parts of Europe, and at the opening of history are found in a state of civilization. One section of them, wild, bold, and free, remain in a nomadic state. They wander on towards the Northwest, never settling down, ever restless. They feel themselves drawn ever onward, as by some mysterious power which they cannot resist. That strange, unseen power is he who dwells amid the darkness of the Scandinavian and Suabian forests. And as they pour into that weird gloom, band after band, they are lost to view. God wants them there for a time. They are one day to rush forth again, at his bidding, wild and fierce as ever, to do their appointed work.
Of these multitudinous tribes, hidden under the dark covering of those Northern forests, we cannot undertake to give any detailed account. The student who has ever pored over his historical chart representing the home of the barbarians, knows well how impossible it is to obtain accurate ideas about them. He is simply bewildered with the number of tribes, and the hard names by which they are designated. He is content to let Dr. Latham and Mr. Kingsley dispute at their pleasure as to whether the Goths were Teutons or a separate tribe. Some authors, with Gibbon, would make the Teutons the great tribe which included and absorbed almost all the rest, whilst Dr. Latham insists that they were far less in numbers than is commonly supposed. It is not now our purpose to enter on a question of this nature. Our view of them is simply as a fourmillement des nations, confused, indistinguishable, undefinable. We cannot pretend to speak with accuracy as to what territory was occupied by each tribe. What they do we can only guess at. They do not regard themselves as in their settled home. They wander about restless, and unsatisfied in their wild forest lands. They have only an indistinct idea whence they came, but they have a mysterious instinct whither they are to go when the appointed day comes. At one time they are on the Baltic shore, at another on the Danube bank. They never think of marching back Eastward, whence they came; their faces are turned towards the South, and they dream of a rich, golden city in which they are one day to revel and feast to their heart’s content.
It is something bewildering to pause over and think upon, in our historical studies, is this Northern land of darkness, with its hidden millions of wild savages silently wandering about in their gloomy forest, under the eye of God, and waiting for the signal to rush forth upon the sin‐laden empire of Rome! There never was anything more mysterious in history. They hang for long years, like a suspended curse, over a sinful world. They would have come down thundering like a crushing avalanche long before they did, if God had not held them back. It is wonderful to think how really they were in the hand of the great Over‐ruler. Suddenly it had entered into their minds, as we have seen, to break up their home in the far East, in prehistoric times, and they had obeyed the instinct. They moved away from their native land, and set out upon their wanderings. They knew no land beyond their own, nor had they reason to expect that they would discover anything better than what they enjoyed in the country of their birth. But still they wandered on. Whither they were journeying they had no knowledge, but they were obeying an overmastering power. They found themselves, at last, gathered together in a mysterious land of darkness, and there they paused. They felt they were at the rendezvous to which they had been called. They were at the feet of him who had beckoned to them to leave their homes in the Eastern land. Their instinct now was to remain hidden there for a time behind the great fortification of the Hercynian forest. From beginning to end all through their history these barbarians are in the hand of God, under his generalship, and used to execute his designs. Such teaching as this will, no doubt, appear puerile to the sneering atheism of men like Herbert Spencer. He and those of his school have discovered that God has nothing to do with the course of human events or the government of the universe.(281) Social Science has led them far beyond the old‐world ideas of God and divine government; but, thanks to the sound and safe teaching of Catholic principles, there are yet men in these days who refuse to run after the ignis fatuus of Spencerian philosophy.
But when we consider how the great civilized world of the Roman Empire and this world of the barbarian tribes bordered so close on one another for so long a time, and when we think what conquests Christianity had made wherever civilization had set its foot, we wonder how that dark Northern land could remain still heathen. Were not the citadels of the Christian religion planted all along the borders of the Roman Empire? Did no gleams, then, of Christian light shoot forth into the darkness beyond? We know that such certainly was the case in the Northwestern portion, where the Goths dwelt, for we read of Ulphilas and his apostolic labors among that tribe. But for the most part, the darkness was unpenetrated, and we are struck by the sight of two worlds running so close up to one another and yet remaining so isolated in a religious point of view. The fact was, the time for the conversion of the Northmen had not yet come. Their apostles were to be a race of heroes born on the mountain‐heights, and nourished in the pure, bracing air of monastic solitude. The barbarians were waiting for the monks. It is true that these wild tribes had already a worship of their own, and deeply religious in their way they certainly were. It was a religion quite in keeping with their wild, free character. Men who were so restless and active in their disposition, who delighted in storm and mountain and roaring torrents, would have no temple of wood or stone for their place of worship. Their temple was out in the open air, under the driving clouds, within hearing of the tumbling waterfalls, in sight of nature’s face; for nature to them was God. They saw him in the great mountain towering up on high, in the rocking forest‐trees, in the wide‐ stretching plain, in the flowing river, in the gushing fountain. He was in every object around them; in every speck of light in the overarching heavens; in the glistening streamlet; in the variegated flowers bedecking nature’s face; in the rock that stood out to break the power of the rushing sea‐waves; in the very stones scattered around them on the plain. There was a divinity of some kind in everything they saw.(282) It would, perhaps, be more true to say that their religion was polytheism rather than pantheism. We find, moreover, that the tendency of their religious belief was to keep alive in their souls the warlike spirit. The greatest and highest of their gods were beings of mighty power and terrible violence. “Woden, or Odin, as he was called in Scandinavia, was the omnipresent, the almighty creator, the father of gods and men; who ruled the universe, riding on the clouds, and sending rain and sunshine; in whom were centred all godlike attributes, of which he imparted a share to the other gods; and from whom proceeded all beauty, wisdom, strength, and fruitfulness, the knowledge of agriculture and the arts, the inspirations of music and song, and all good gifts. He was the giant hunter, who in the darkest nights rushed through the air on his white charger, clad in a brown mantle, his white locks streaming from beneath his slouching hat, followed by a train of wild huntsmen, the horses snorting fire, the bloodhounds baying, announcing war and carnage, danger and distress, as he passed along with lightning speed. But he was in a more special way the god of war, revelling in blood and slaughter, giving courage and victory to his votaries, and admitting to his Valhalla, or hall of bliss, none but those who died by the sword.
“Next to him was his son Thor, who rode on the thunder‐cloud and whirlwind, whose hammer was the thunderbolt, whose arrows were the lightning flashes, and whose wagon dashed through the heavens with crashing noise and ungovernable fury.”(283)
Then there was Saxnôt, another son of Woden, who occupied the third place among the gods. His name is afterwards associated with those of Woden and Thor in the abjuration of paganism made by those who were converted to Christianity. He is designated under many different names. He is Eor, or Are, or Ere, or Cheru, Tyr, Zio, Tuisco, or Tuis. He was the god of war, fierce and terrible, rushing to battle, at Woden’s side, and bearing down whole hosts with his mighty sword of iron or stone.
War, blood, and violence, then, were ever, in the minds of the barbarians, associated with the greatest of those beings whom they worshipped and admired. The character and the deeds of these gods were the highest and the noblest they could conceive. To be mighty in battle like them; to wield their war‐weapon as Thor wielded his huge hammer; to mow down enemies as Tuisco did with his terrible sword, would be the grand object of their soul’s desire. We may judge how little there was in their religious worship to tone down their fierce natures. Everything symbolized war; their deities were almost all warlike. Even Freyja, the Northern Venus, was pictured to their imagination as delighting in war. She was believed to be ever present in the battle‐field, wielding her flaming sword, with frantic joy, over the heads of their enemies, and ready to bear off the souls of the slain to Odin’s Valhalla. In that imaginary Elysium the joys of their fallen heroes were also of a warlike and savage character. They revelled there in “constantly massacring visionary foes, and drinking without satiety, out of the skulls of the slain, brimming ale‐cups presented by lovely Valkyrja.” What shall we expect, then, when these wild warriors are turned loose upon the Roman Empire?
But is it possible to obtain a further glimpse behind that vast, dark line of pine‐trees? Can we, by any means, get a glance at the wild indwellers of the mysterious land beyond? What are those men like whom God has so long kept hidden there? From time to time they have come forth from their forest homes and stood on the boundaries of the civilized world, and rolled their glaring eyes around over the rich empire that was to be their booty. But that has been, as it were, only for a moment. They have plunged again into their native darkness. Yet such writers as Apollinaris and Ammianus Marcellinus have told us something of them. By their aid we can picture to ourselves what those terrible hosts of avengers will be like, who will presently come down with such a headlong sweep upon the doomed empire of Rome.
All that we can imagine savage and terrible and extraordinary in figure and habit is found in real fact among those barbaric hordes. There are among them tribes who are small of stature, and thin and brawny, but quick and fierce as the wild‐cat. There are, too, men of giant height and strength, who can wield their huge clubs like playthings, and shiver the hard rock like glass. They have blue, flashing eyes, and bathe their flaxen hair in lime‐water, and anoint it with the unsavory unguent of rancid butter. Some of them roam about nude and uncovered as the wild animals of the forest, proud of their iron necklaces and golden bracelets; others are partially clothed with the skins of savage beasts, cut and shaped after the most odd and fantastic fashions. Some give additional terror to their appearance by wearing helmets made to imitate the muzzles of ferocious beasts. Plutarch tells us that all the Cimbrian horsemen wore helmets made in the form of the open jaws and muzzles of all kinds of strange and savage animals, and surmounted these by plumes shaped like wings, and of a prodigious height. This gave them the appearance of monstrous giants. They were armed with cuirasses of most brilliant metal, and covered with bucklers of uniform whiteness. Some shaved their chins, and, what must have added much to their hideousness, the back of their heads, whilst their hair was drawn to the front and hung down over their eyes like the forelock of a horse. So says Apollinaris,
“Ad front em coma tracta jacet, nudata cervix Setarum per summa nitet.”(284)
Others, again, allowed their hair to grow, and wore long mustachios and beard. Their weapons of war were various and strange as their own appearance. Some fought on foot, wielding with savage fury the huge club, or crushing mallet, or heavy‐headed hammer; or they did fierce work with their rude sword, or long javelin with its two points, or double‐edged hatchet; or they were skilful in the use of the sling or the arrow pointed with sharp pieces of bone. Others rushed to battle on high war‐steeds barded with steel, or on small horses, ugly and wretched to look at, but swift as eagles in their course. If they fought on the level plain, these barbarians were sometimes scattered over a large space, or they formed themselves into cuneiform bodies, or they pressed together into compact, impenetrable masses. If the contest was waged in the forests, they clomb the trees, which they worshipped, with the agility of monkeys, and there combated their enemies with wild ferocity, thus borne on the shoulders and in the arms of their gods. If they were conquerors in the battle, they abandoned themselves to acts of the most savage cruelty. To illustrate this we need only think of the tragic deeds that were done amid the swamps and the wooded hills of the Teutoberger Wald in the latter days of Augustus. It is sad, indeed, to read in Tacitus and the pages of Dio of the fate of that noble Roman army over which Varus held command. Yet we cannot regret to see the well‐concerted rising of the German tribes, under the splendid military genius of Arnim, to throw off the Roman yoke. We hold in deepest horror the wrongs, the oppressions of the Romans from the first ravages of Cæsar to the judicial murders of Varus. We think with feelings of indignation of the treachery and the bloody cruelty of Cæsar when the Usipetes and the Teuchteri were all but annihilated on the banks of the Rhine, and the Roman general rejoiced at his own unprovoked atrocity. We recall with sorrow all that the barbarians had had to suffer from their Roman conquerors through succeeding years, and our souls are on fire at the recollection of it. When, then, we see that the day of deliverance is at hand, we carrot but rejoice with Arnim and his brother Adelings at the prospect of future freedom. Our sympathies are with the Germans, not with their Roman oppressors. Whilst the Romans, then, are hungry and starved in the long, boggy valley between the sources of the Ems and the Lippe, and the rain falls in torrents through the cold night, and the soldiers’ spirits sink as they find themselves hemmed in by the enemy on all sides, we are, meantime, in imagination and feeling with the barbarian chiefs holding high festival as they recall the memory of ancient freedom and the deeds of former days, and we join in the war songs as they echo among the wild, dreary hills, and swell above the howlings of the storm. And when the morning breaks ominously and darkly over the Teutoberger Wald, and the tempest rises higher, and the heavy‐armed Romans cannot advance, and find it difficult, even, to keep their footing in the wet and slippery swamp; when we see their bows now useless from the wet, and their spears and shields no longer glittering in military pride, and their entire armor and clothing drenched and made too heavy for the poor benumbed and hunger‐stricken soldiers to bear, we can scarcely feel one pang of sorrow. On the contrary, our heart leaps with gladness when Arnim from his watch‐eminence gives the signal, and the trumpets ring out and the war‐weapons clang, and the terrible Barritum described by Tacitus(285) is heard rising above the howlings of the storm. We know how that tragic day ended, and how the evening saw the Roman host covering, with their dead bodies, the length and breadth of the battle‐field. Never had there been, in the annals of military warfare, such a terrible massacre of Roman legions. The news of it seized upon Augustus like a madness, and the old man, during the short remainder of his life, wandered sad and disconsolate through the apartments of his palace, sometimes dashing his white head against the walls, and murmuring, Quintili Vare, legiones redde!(286) But the barbarians were not content with such terrific slaughter as nearly annihilated the Roman army; their wild ferocity and cruelty showed themselves in their treatment of the captives. Tacitus in his Annals tells us(287) that in the neighboring woods the barbarians had altars erected to their gods, and there the surviving Roman tribunes and the centurions of the first class were offered in sacrifice. Around Varus’s camp Roman heads were fixed, in cruel mockery, on the trunks and branches of trees, and in the midst arose a huge mound of Roman bones, left to be stripped of their flesh by the wild birds of prey, and then to whiten under that northern sky into a long enduring monument of a great barbarian victory.
If, on the contrary they were conquered, their fury was boundless, and was even turned against each other. When Marius overcame the first Cimbrian league, those who composed it were found on the field of battle bound fast to each other, so that they could not fall back before the enemy, and thus were compelled to conquer or die. Their wives were armed with swords or hatchets, and, shrieking and gnashing their teeth with rage and grief, they struck both Cimbrians and Romans. They rushed into the thickest of the fight, snatching with their naked hands at the sharp‐cutting Roman sabres; they sprang upon the legionaries like tigers, tearing from them their bucklers, and thus purposely drawing upon themselves their own destruction. It was a dreadful sight also to witness some of them when the fortune of the day had turned against them, rushing to and fro with dishevelled hair, their black dresses all torn and bloody, or to see them mounted like mad fiends on the chariots, killing their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons, strangling their new‐born infants and casting them under the horses’ hoofs, and then plunging the dagger into their own bosoms.(288)
Some of the barbarians delighted in eating human flesh. Ammianus Marcellinus gives us a picture in his history which freezes our blood and haunts us with its horrid memory. He tells us that, after the defeat of Valens under the walls of Constantinople, a barbarian was seen rushing among the imperial troops, naked down to his waist, sword in hand, and uttering a hoarse, lugubrious cry. He sprang with savage fury upon an enemy whom he had slain, and, applying his lips to his throat, sucked out his life‐blood with a wild beast’s relish. The Scythians of Europe were amongst those who showed this same instinct of the weasel and the hyena. We have the authority of S. Jerome for believing that the Atticoti also were accustomed to feed on human flesh. When they were wandering about in the woods of Gaul, and happened to meet herds of swine or other cattle, they cut off the breasts of the shepherdesses, and large pieces from the bodies of the shepherds, and ate them as dainty bits.(289) The Alans tore off the heads of their enemies, and caparisoned their horses with the skins of their bodies. The Budini and Geloni were accustomed to do much the same, being particular in reserving their enemies’ heads for themselves. The appearance of the Geloni was a sickening sight to look upon. They were accustomed to have their cheeks cut and gashed; and their proudest distinction was a face all covered with wounds that were scaly, and livid and crowned with blood‐red crests.
But if there is something terrible in the appearance and customs of the barbarians whom we have mentioned, it is surpassed by what we are told of the Huns. We shall not be able to form a true idea of the dreadful avengers who are to come down out of that Northern gloom, unless we look for a moment at this most terrible of the barbaric tribes. The Goths themselves, the stalwart giants of the Scandinavian forests, who knew no fear of men, could not but be terrified when they first fixed eyes on the hideous forms of the Huns. Jornandes, the Gothic historian, tells us that “the livid color of their skin had in it something shocking to the sight; theirs was not a face, but a deformed mass of flesh, provided, instead of eyes, with two black sinister spots. Their cruelty wreaked itself even upon their own new‐born offspring, whose cheeks they lacerated with iron before they had tasted their mother’s milk; and from this cause no down graced their chin in youth, no beard gave dignity to their old age.” We are told by Ammianus that “they looked not like men, but like wild beasts standing on two legs, as if in mockery of the human species.” They were, in truth, the wildest and most savage of all the barbarian hordes. They loved to be free and unrestrained as the wandering blasts of their native solitudes. They ate and slept on the ground under the open sky. They took their food raw and uncooked, like the tigers of the forest. No temples of worship had they; their God was a naked sword fixed in the ground. They were devoured by an insatiable thirst for gold, which they were ever ready to procure through blood, and smoke, and wholesale ruin. But the characteristic of their race was a ferocious delight in cruel massacre, and they gloried in pillaging, burning, and levelling down to the ground every monument of civilization that came in their path, till the regions over which they swept bore a resemblance to their native deserts. The rest of the barbarians were amazed at their inhumanity, and looked upon them as fiends under the likeness of men.
But we need say no more. We have caught some few glimpses of what is behind the dark storm‐cloud, and we can form some idea of the horrors that are hidden there. Well may men tremble as they look northwards in the Vth century. Well may Christians think they hear now again, ringing out more clearly than ever, the warning voice of S. John, and flee to far‐off hiding‐places. The sinful empire herself feels, at times, as if under the horrors of a nightmare; in her frightful dreams she thinks she is trampled upon, and crushed under the feet of fierce, wild men of terrible aspect, and torn and hacked by their strange weapons of war. As the tempest lowers over her darker and darker, and threatens to become all‐enveloping in its wrath, a deep shudder runs through her mighty frame. And well may she stagger and quake for fear. The reckoning‐day is close at hand, so long waited for by the holy martyrs of foregone centuries. And a day of dreadful destruction it will be.
But lo! the hour has already struck. God has given the signal to his warrior‐hosts. The Goth has given a ringing blast on his horn, and the German has shouted the first notes of his terrible war‐song, and the pine‐ trees of the Hercynian forest are trembling at the sound. The avengers of the martyrs and the Christian name are coming, and the whole North is shaking under their tread. At last the storm‐cloud bursts, and fiery destruction sweeps down upon the doomed empire of Rome.
IRELAND’S CASE STATED: IN REPLY TO MR. FROUDE. By the Very Rev. T. N. Burke, O.P. New York: P. M. Haverty. 1873.
Ireland’s case has been stated, argued, vindicated, and, so far as the verdict of the American people is concerned, adjudicated. Mr. Froude has given his last scowl and his last growl, and gone back to his own country—which he has damaged by his foolish escapade—the most badly beaten man of the present decade. It is rather late in the day to revert to the topic of F. Burke’s combat with this obstinate champion of bad characters and bad causes, and we will, therefore, let it pass with these few words. We are hoping to see soon issued Mr. Haverty’s promised second volume of F. Burke’s Discourses and Lectures, and we once more express our regret that any should be found so unmindful of propriety and courtesy, to say the least, as to interfere with F. Burke’s control of the publication of his own works. The eloquent Dominican preacher may be assured that the respect and sympathy not only of all Catholic Irishmen, but of all other Catholics of the United States, will be his while he remains here as our honored guest, and will follow him when he returns to his native land, or to his own beloved and imperial Rome.
KEEL AND SADDLE: A RETROSPECT OF FORTY YEARS OF MILITARY AND NAVAL SERVICE. By Joseph W. Revere. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1872.
We are so often disgusted, in reading books of entertainment, with a revelation of positive rascality and impiety, or at least of a want of high moral and religious principle in the author, that it is a relief to meet sometimes with a happy disappointment. This is a lively, entertaining book of varied adventures on field and flood. Yet we always find the author, when his personality comes into view, not only a bold and brave soldier, but a gentleman, an honorable man, and a frank, staunch Catholic Christian, who never obtrudes yet never hides his faith and his principles of virtue. His views of Spanish affairs strike us as rather defective, and occasionally there is a narrative concerning persons of depraved morals which would have been better omitted for the sake of his youthful readers. The “Golondina” episode in chapter xxiv. relates an adventure whose lawfulness, we suspect, though perhaps admitted by quarter‐deck theology, would not stand the test of a strict examination. Sometimes we are at a loss to discover whether the author intends us to understand his narrative as historical, or is merely relating a conte for our amusement. In his own personal adventures and the descriptions he gives of what he has seen, we discover at once that his narrative is real as well as picturesque. And it is certainly most interesting. The off‐hand, unstudied, and unaffected style reveal the character of the true, genuine, frank sailor and soldier; while at the same time, the refinement of taste and the cultivation of mind which are manifest throughout give these sketches from the diary of a long and adventurous life the literary finish which belongs to the work of a scholar. Notwithstanding certain exceptions we have made, we reiterate our commendation of the high tone of moral principle, the unaffected religious reverence, and the generally healthful and invigorating spirit which pervades the book which the gallant General Revere has given to the public as the retrospect of his forty years of naval and military service.
HYMNS AND POEMS: ORIGINAL AND TRANSLATED. By Edward Caswall, of the Oratory. Second Edition. London: Burns, Oates & Co.; Pickering. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Father Caswall’s hymns are as well known as Father Faber’s. Indeed, if we mistake not, many of them are popularly attributed to the departed writer. In the present volume we have a complete collection of the Breviary hymns, in the first place. This is especially valuable as the only one in the language (as far, at least, as we are aware). And the author deserves the more praise for this labor of love, because of the great difficulty of rendering the terse, stiff Latin. Then, secondly, we have “Hymns and Sequences of the Roman Missal”; followed by “Hymns from Various Offices and other Sources.” Thus the translated portion of the volume is quite sufficient to make it worth possessing. The execution, too, is very happy, on the whole. No one who has attempted to translate these hymns himself will insist overmuch on the absence of phrases commonplace or prosaic.
The second portion of the volume, “Original Hymns and Meditative Pieces,” also contains much that entitles it to a place in every household. The devout Catholic, and more especially the convert, will find many things said for him which have come into his mind, but without his being able to express them. Moreover, several pieces turn on topics which are generally supposed themes for the dryest meditation. They are here proved suggestive of true poetry.
The only fault we have to find with Father Caswall’s verse is the same that we find with Wordsworth’s: the too frequent sacrifice of poetic diction and the use of too many long Latin words. But this defect is unimportant compared with the value of the thoughts and teachings conveyed, and we fervently thank Father Caswall for his contribution to our scanty Catholic poetry.
THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST‐TABLE. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1872.
“Once I wrote because my mind was full; But now I write because I feel it growing dull,”
or,
“I have lived long enough,”
“Poor old man, thou prun’st a rotten tree That cannot so much as a blossom yield In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry,”
or some such saw, this Poet at the Breakfast‐table should have affixed to these four hundred pages of incomparable drivelling.
“I talk half the time,” says the poet, in his opening paragraph, “to find out my own thoughts, as a schoolboy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them.”
And what does the schoolboy find there?
Rusty nails, old shoe‐strings, copper pennies, dead bugs, crumbs of bread, broken knives, and other trash neither beautiful nor useful. The similitude is just. The contents of the Poet’s brain are as precious as those of the boy’s pocket; and if we wish to push the comparison further, the wares of both are often of doubtful ownership. The only serious thing in the book is its humor.
“I don’t suppose my comic pieces are very laughable,” writes this poet, philosopher, sage; “at any rate, the man who makes a business of writing me down says the last one I wrote is very melancholy reading; and that if it was only a little better, perhaps some bereaved person might pick out a line or two that would do to put on a gravestone.” He has a most infallible instinct for the right comparison; as, for instance: “I love to talk, as a goose loves to swim. Sometimes I think it is because I am a goose.” This is the first evidence of intelligent thought in the whole book. “My book and I,” he informs us, “are pretty much the same thing. Sometimes I steal from my book in my talk, without mentioning it, and then I say to myself: ‘Oh! that won’t do; everybody has read my book, and knows it by heart.’ And then the other I says: You know there are two of us, right and left, like a pair of shoes! The other I says: ‘You’re a—something or other—fool.’ ” The other I is evidently a sensible fellow. “They haven’t read,” continues the other I, “your confounded old book; besides, if they have, they have forgotten all about it.”
Again, the other I says: “What a Balaam’s quadruped you are to tell ’em it’s in your book; they don’t care whether it is or not, if it’s anything worth saying; and if it isn’t worth saying, what are you braying for?” This is the question the reader asks himself all along, as the evidence that the poet has nothing to say worth the saying becomes more and more overwhelming. This kind of criticism, we know, is little better than trifling; but the performance deserves no other treatment, for we candidly think that a sorrier book could not proceed from a mind untouched.
Why did this Poet, when he meant to write a book, seat himself at the breakfast‐table? Did he not know that a full stomach does not argue a mind replete? Had not Shakespeare said long ago that fat paunches have lean pates, or was he not physician enough to know that the mens divinior is not to be found in hot rolls and coffee?
We shall conclude with one other brief quotation from the Poet:
“What do you do when you receive a book you don’t want from the author? said I: ‘Give him a good‐natured adjective or two if I can, and thank him, and tell him I am lying under a sense of obligation to him. This is as good an excuse for lying as any, I said.’ ”
As we do not believe there can be an excuse for lying, and as we are certain that in this case there is no obligation under which to lie, we cannot give the author “a good‐natured adjective or two”; but we shall thank him to give us no more such nonsense.
YOUNG AMERICA ABROAD. Second Series: Cross and Crescent; or, Young America in Turkey and Greece. A Story of Travel and Adventure. By William T. Adams (Oliver Optic), author of “Outward Bound,” “Shamrock and Thistle,” “Red Cross,” “Down the Rhine,” etc. Boston: Lee & Shepard, Publishers. New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham. 1873.
This is the third volume of the second series of Young America Abroad, and, like all the rest of the series, is most instructive and entertaining.
THE TREASURE OF THE SEAS. By Prof. James De Mille, author of “The B. O. W. C.,” “The Boys of Grand Pre School,” “Lost in the Fog,” “Fire in the Woods,” “Among the Brigands,” etc. Illustrated. Boston: Lee & Shepard, publishers; New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham. 1872.
This is one of the best of the “B. O. W. C. Series,” and will certainly be a favorite with the boys.
THE POLYTECHNIC: A Collection of Music for Schools, Classes, and Clubs. Compiled and written by U. C. Burnap and Dr. W. J. Wetmore. New York: J. W. Schermerhorn & Co.
THE ATHENÆUM: A Collection of Part‐Songs for Ladies’ Voices. Arranged and written by U. C. Burnap and Dr. W. J. Wetmore. New York: J. W. Schermerhorn & Co.
The best criticism of both these musical publications is found in the preface to the first one cited:
“Collections of school music are already sufficiently numerous and bulky, but too often they are found to contain very little that is available for the ordinary or the extraordinary occasions of school life.”
HART’S MANUAL OF AMERICAN LITERATURE—A MISTAKE CORRECTED.—Since writing the brief notice of this really valuable work which appeared in our December number, we have observed a very serious misstatement in it respecting a distinguished convert to the Catholic faith, the late Dr. Ives, formerly Protestant Bishop of North Carolina. Prof. Hart states that he returned to the Episcopal Church. He never dreamed of such an act of superlative folly. He died, as he had lived, a most fervent and devout Catholic, we might almost say—a saint, and was buried with all the rites and all the honors of solemn obsequies in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. Prof. Hart, who always endeavors to be fair, and whose notices of Catholic writers are marked by their courtesy, would never have made this incorrect statement unless he had been misled by some false information, and we rely on his rectifying it in his next edition.
The following circular has been sent to us, and we publish it because we think there is nothing more hostile to such nefarious projects than free and early ventilation. Why does not Mr. Abbot renounce his popish name, in his zeal to abolish every vestige of Christianity? Our readers will not fail to see how apposite an illustration this document furnishes of some of the remarks in our first article. We have also received an article from the Cincinnati Gazette advocating the persecution of Catholics in this country, with a trenchant reply by F. Callaghan.
(From THE INDEX, January 4, 1873.)
Organize!
Liberals Of America,
The hour for action has arrived. The cause of freedom calls upon us to combine our strength, our zeal, our efforts. These are
The Demands Of Liberalism.
1. We demand that churches and other ecclesiastical property shall no longer be exempted from just taxation.
2. We demand that the employment of chaplains in Congress, in state legislatures, in the navy and militia, and in prisons, asylums, and all other institutions supported by public money, shall be discontinued.
3. We demand that all public appropriations for sectarian, educational, and charitable institutions shall cease.
4. We demand that all religious services now sustained by the government shall be abolished; and especially that the use of the Bible in the public schools, whether ostensibly as a textbook or avowedly as a book of religious worship, shall be prohibited.
5. We demand that the appointment, by the President of the United States or by the Governors of the various states, of all religious festivals and feasts, shall wholly cease.
6. We demand that the judicial oath in the courts and in all other departments of the government shall be abolished, and that simple affirmation under pains and penalties of perjury shall be established in its stead.
7. We demand that all laws directly or indirectly enforcing the observance of Sunday as the Sabbath shall be repealed.
8. We demand that all laws looking to the enforcement of “Christian” morality shall be abrogated, and that all laws shall be conformed to the requirements of natural morality, equal rights, and impartial liberty.
9. We demand that not only in the constitutions of the United States and of the several States, but also in the practical administration of the same, no privileges or advantage shall be conceded to Christianity or any other special religion; that our entire political system shall be founded and administered on a purely secular basis; and that whatever changes shall prove necessary to this end shall be consistently, unflinchingly, and promptly made.
Liberals! I pledge to you my undivided sympathies and most vigorous co‐operation, both in The Index and out of it, in this work of local and national organization. Let us begin at once to lay the foundations of a great national party of freedom, which shall demand the entire secularization of our municipal, state, and national government.
Let us boldly and with high purpose meet the duty of the hour. Rouse, then, to the great work of freeing America from the usurpations of the church! Make this continent from ocean to ocean sacred to human liberty! Prove that you are worthy descendants of those whose wisdom and patriotism gave us a constitution untainted with superstition! Shake off your slumbers, and break the chains to which you have too long tamely submitted.
FRANCIS E. ABBOT.
TOLEDO, OHIO, Jan. 1, 1873.
Liberals Of New York,
Shall the coming “National Association to secure a Religious Amendment to the United States Constitution,” to be held in New York in February, find us unorganized for resistance? Let us at once form a “Liberal League,” in which we may arrange a campaign offensive and defensive for our liberties. Send me at once the addresses of those who sympathize with us, that a meeting may be called at an early day: remember that “he who is not for me is against me,” and that our liberties are threatened.
E. F. DINSMORE, 36 Dey Street, New York, Agent of The Index.
[Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]
FOOTNOTES
1 Alfred de Musset.
2 The Life and Labors of S. Thomas of Aquin. By the Very Rev. Roger Bede Vaughan, O.S.B., Cathedral‐Prior of S. Michael’s, Hereford. 2 vols. London: Longmans; Hereford: James Hull. 1871‐2.
3 Proverbs vi., vii.
4 Adv. Prax., c. 2.
5 Bishop Wilson, Sacra Privata.
6 Homil., in S. Ignat., vii. p. 593.
7 Οὐχ ὡς Πέτρος καὶ Παῦλος διατάσσομαι ὑμῖν· ἐκεῖνοι Ἀπόστολος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἐγὼ δὲ ἐλάχιστος.
8 Κλήμης ἐν ἕκτῳ των Ὑποτυπώσεων παρατέθειται την ἱστορίαν· συνεπιμαρτυρει δὲ αυτῷ καὶ ὁ ἱεραπολίτης ἐπίσκοπος ὀνόματι Παπίας. Τοῦ δὲ Μάρκου μνημονεύειν τὸν Πέτρον ἐν τῇ προτέρᾳ ἐπιστολῇ, ἦν καὶ συντάξαι φασὶν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῆςς Ῥώμης· σημαίνειν τε τοῦτο αὐτὸν τὴν πόλιν τροπεκώτερον Β βυλῶνα προσειπόντα, διὰ τούτων· Λοπαζεται ὑμᾶς, κ.τ.λ.
9 Eusebius’ Eccl. Hist., l. 2, c. 25.
10 Τοῦ Πέτρου καὶ τοῦ Παύλου εν Ρώμηλ εὐαγγελιζομένων καὶ θεμελιούντων τὴν ἑκκλησιαν.—Eusebius, l. 5, c. 8; also, S. Irenæus, Adv. Hæreses, l. 3, c. 3.
11 Ἐγω δε τα τρόπαια των Ἀποστόλων ἔχω δεῖζαι, κ.τ.λ.—Eusebius, l. 2, c. 25.
12 Eusebius, l. 3, c. 1.
13 “Edant ergo origines ecclesiarum suarum; evolvant ordinem episcoporum suorum, ita per successiones ab initio decurrentem, ut primus ille episcopus aliquem ex apostolis, vel apostolicis viris, qui tamen cum apostolis perseveraverit, habuerit auctorem et antecessorem. Hoc enim modo ecclesiæ apostolicæ census suos deferunt: sicut Smyrnæorum Ecclesia Polycarpum ab Joanne collocatum refert; sicut Romanorum, Clementum a Petro ordinatum itidem.”—Tertulliani, De Præscriptione Hæreticorum, c. 32.
14 “Si autem Italiæ adjaces, habes Romam, unde nobis quoque auctoritas præsto est. Ista quam felix ecclesia, cui totam doctrinam apostoli cum sanguine quo profuderunt! ubi Petrus passioni Dominicæ adæquatur; ubi Paulus Joannis exitu coronatur.”—Tertulliani, De Præscriptione Hæreticorum, c. 36.
15 “Videamus quod lac a Paulo Corinthii hauserint; ad quam regulam Galatæ sint recorrecti; quid legant Philippenses, Thessalonicenses, Ephesii; quid etiam Romani de proximo sonent, quibus evangelium et Petrus et Paulus sanguine quoque suo signatum reliquerunt.”—Tertulliani, Adv. Marcionem, l. 4, c. 5.
16 1 S. Peter v. 13: “The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus, my son.”
17 S. John xxi. 18: “Verily, verily I say unto thee, when thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldst: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldst not.” Also, 2 S. Peter i. 14: “Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath showed me.”
18 “Seven Roman cities strove for Homer dead Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”
19 “Veteres omnes in errorem abrepti sunt.”
20 Instit., l. 4, c. 6, n. 15.
21 “De Babylone dissident veteres et novi interpretes. Veteres Romam interpretantur, ubi Petrum fuisse nemo verus Christianus dubitavit: novi, Babylonem in Chaldea. Ego veteribus assentior.”
22 Prof. Stuart, Andover Biblical Repository, Jan., 1833, vol. iii. p. 153.
23 Lectures on Ecclesiastical History.
24 Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures, vol. ii. p. 361.
25 A New Literal Translation, from the Original Greek, of all the Apostolic Epistles; with a Commentary and Notes.
26 Prior Vaughan, S. Thomas of Aquin, i. 464.
27 S. Thomas of Aquin, Introduction.
28 Christian Schools and Scholars, ii. 20, 21.
29 S. Thomas of Aquin, i. 369.
30 Christian Schools and Scholars, ii. 325.
31 Ibid.
32 Christian Schools and Scholars, i. 9‐11.
33 S. Thomas of Aquin, i. 134.
34 Montalembert, Monks of the West, i. Edin. ed.
35 Monks of the West.
36 Ibid.
37 Monks of the West.
38 Christian Schools and Scholars, ii. 426.
39 Monks of the West, ii.
40 Christian Schools and Scholars, i.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Christian Schools and Scholars.
44 Christian Schools and Scholars, i.
45 Montalembert’s Monks of the West, iii. 195, 197.
46 Monks of the West.
47 Monks of the West.
48 Monks of the West.
49 Monks of the West.
50 Ibid.
51 Christian Schools and Scholars.
52 Christian Schools and Scholars.
53 Ibid.
54 Christian Schools and Scholars.
55 Christian Schools and Scholars.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Christian Schools and Scholars.
59 Monks of the West.
60 Gladstone.
61 Christian Schools and Scholars.
62 Monks of the West.
63 Monks of the West.
64 S. Thomas of Aquin.
65 Christian Schools and Scholars.
66 “All the more reason.”
67 Term for the peasants and workingmen.
68 “Go, my son, there are now no Pyrenees.”
69 The queen’s bed‐chamber.
70 The king’s bed‐chamber.
71 “I am the state!”
72 “An instant more, and I should have had to wait!”
73 “The king is dead, long live the king.”
74 The Duchesse de Polignac.
75 Louis only knew how to love and to forgive; had he known how to punish, he would have known how to reign.
76 Bancroft.
77 Bancroft.
78 Shea.
79 Lake George.
80 Caughnawaga.
81 Christian Schools and Scholars, i. 327.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Christian Schools and Scholars.
85 Life of S. Thomas of Aquin.
86 S. Thomas of Aquin.
87 Ibid.
88 S. Thomas of Aquin.
89 Christian Schools and Scholars.
90 Ibid.
91 Christian Schools and Scholars.
92 Ibid.
93 Christian Schools and Scholars, ii. 370.
94 See S. Thomas of Aquin, i. 42.
95 Montalembert, Monks of the West, v. 159.
96 Ibid., v. 97.
97 Christian Schools and Scholars.
98 Ibid.
99 Christian Schools and Scholars.
100 For all these and the following details, see Christian Schools and Scholars.
101 Christian Schools and Scholars.
102 Ibid.
103 The Condition of the Catholics under James I. Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot. Edited, with his Life, by John Morris, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1871. New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.
Her Majesty’s Tower. By William Hepworth Dixon. Second series. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1869. Reprinted.
104 “The great house then rising at Charing Cross was said, in reference to these gifts, to be plated with King Philip’s gold. Much of Don Juan’s money passed in Cecil’s pocket.... Northampton and Suffolk also obtained the most princely sums.”—Her Majesty’s Tower, pp. 59, 60.
105 History of England, ix. 36.
106 Statutes of Elizabeth, chap. i., v., xiii., xxi., xxiii., xxvii., xxviii., xxix., xxxv.
107 The Life of Father John Gerard, xcvii.‐ix.
108 Fifth Examination of Fawkes, November 9th and 10th, State Paper Office, No. 54.
109 Life of Father John Gerard, p. clxxviii.
110 Page 221.
111 A Narrative, etc., pp. 76‐77.
112 Told to the writer as a fact.
113 This incident is authentic, and occurred at No. 13 Rue Royale.
114 The Life and Labors of S. Thomas of Aquin. By the Very Rev. Roger Bede Vaughan, O.S.B. 2 vols. London: Longmans; Hereford: James Hull. 1871‐2.
115 xiv. 15, 16.
116 “Stop, traveller.”
117 “Behold, traveller.”
118 “Farewell,” or “Hail, for ever.”
119 Sit tibi terra levis.
120 Locus, loculus.
121 Matt. xii. 32.
122 1 Cor. iii. 13, 15.
123 1 Pet.
124 Apocalypse xxi. 27.
125 2 Mach. xii. 43‐46.
126 xvi. 14.
127 xxxv. 19, 20.
128 2 Chron. xxi. 19.
129 “Les morts ne sont pas les oubliés: ils ne sont que les absents.”
130 Sismondi, His. Ital. Rep.
131 See CATHOLIC WORLD, vol. xiii., No. 73, April, 1871, p. 1.
132 The Following of Christ, b. iii. chap. v.
133 Following of Christ, b. iii. chap. v.
134 The Marquisate or March of Ancona was then governed by Charles of Valois, who held Naples.
135 That is, in the territory of Padua, founded, as the student will remember, by the Trojan Antenor, whose tomb is shown in Padua to this day.
136 That is to say, the hermitage of the Camaldolites in Milton’s Vall’ombrosa.
137 Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; The Avesta; The Science of Language. By William Dwight Whitney, Prof. of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale College. One vol. 8vo, 416 pp. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873.
138 Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; The Avesta; The Science of Language. By William Dwight Whitney, Prof. of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale College. One vol. 8vo, 416 pp. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873.
139 Title of the work given at head of this article.
140 Still stronger in the original: “Vielleicht ist noch kein Europäer so tief in diese Sprache eingedrungen als er.”—Mithridates, vol. i. p. 134.
141 Sidnarubam seu Grammatica Samscrdamica, cui accedit dissertatio historico‐critica in linguam Samscrdamicam, vulgo Samscret dictam, in qua hujus linguæ existentia, origo, exarati critice recensentur, et simul aliquæ antiquissimæ gentilium orationes liturgicæ paucis attinguntur et explicantur autore Paulino a S. Bartolomæo. Romæ, 1790.
142 Catalogo de las Lenguas de las Naciones conocidas. Madrid, 1800‐1805. Six large 8vo volumes.
143 These lectures, printed in book‐form at London, were soon after first published in the United States by the Presbyterian College of Andover.
144 “Wouldst thou the young year’s blossoms and the fruits of its decline, And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed, Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine? I name thee, O Sakuntula, and all at once is said.”
145 L’Aryanisme, et de la trop grande part qu’on a faite à son influence, etc.
146 How such information could have been had from the Fasti Consulares is difficult to say; the suppression was probably a lapsus memoriæ for Josephus Flavius. The date of S. Paul’s coming to Rome is too uncertain to be fixed at 61, yet we accept this year on the authority of those who put it forward in the discussion.
147 See Op. S. Irenæi, Ed. Cong. S. Mauri, Ven. an. 1734.
148 De Viris Illustribus, c. i.
149 Ap. Eusebium, H. E. lib. iii. c. i.
150 Via Appia da Porta Capena a Boville. Descritta dal Commendatore L. Canina. 2 vols. Roma. 1853.
151 La Roma Sotterranea Christiana. Descritta ed illustrat dal Cav. G. B. de Rossi. Roma. 1864.
152 Defense de l’Esprit des Lois, 3e partie.
153 Aringhi, Roma Subterr. lib. iii. c. 2.
154 Ner. 48.
155 Pro Cluent. 13.
156 I cimeteri sotteranei di Roma sono stati scavati dai cristiani fossari tranne pochissime eccezioni, le quali importanti per la storia, nell’ampiezza però della sotteranea escavazione scompajono; e possono veramente dirsi quello, che i matematici appellano una quantitià infinitesima e da non essere tenuta a calcolo.—App. p. 39.
157 Psalm xxiii.
158 S. John x. 14‐16.
159 O præclarum diem, cum ad illud divinum animorum concilium cœtumque proficiscar, cumque ex hac turba et colluvione discedam! Proficiscar enim, non ad eos solum viros, de quibus ante dixi, sed etiam ad Catonem meum.—De Senectute, 25.
160 Coleridge’s Piccolomini, scene iv.
161 xii. 40.
162 Newman’s Church of the Fathers, Introduction.
163 Jonas iv. 2.
164 S. Augustine says:—“Love the men, destroy the errors: be bold without pride in the maintenance of truth; strive for the truth without harshness; pray for those whom you rebuke and confound.”—Contra lit. Petiliani, l. i.
165 xx. 23.
166 Romans vi. 3, 4.
167 S. Augustine, Serm. 296, p. 1195, tom. v.
168 Tertullian, Scorpiace, p. 628.
169 1 Epist. iii. 2.
170 Am. ed. p. 82.
171 An Eirenicon, Eng. ed., p. 101.
172 “If there be one writer in the Anglican Church who has discovered a deep, tender, loyal devotion to the Blessed Mary, it is the author of The Christian Year. The image of the Virgin and Child seems to be the one vision upon which both his heart and intellect have been formed; and those who knew Oxford twenty or thirty years ago say that, while other college rooms were ornamented with pictures of Napoleon on horseback, or Apollo and the Graces, or Heads of Houses lounging in their easy‐chairs, there was one man—a young and rising one—in whose rooms, instead of these, might be seen the Madonna di Sisto or Domenichino’s S. John—fit augury of him who was in the event to do so much for the revival of Catholicism.”—Newman’s Essays, vol. ii. p. 453.
173 Memoir of Keble. By Sir J. T. Coleridge, Eng. ed., p. 305.
174 Dr. Nevin, one of the leaders of religious thought in the German Reformed communion, of which the Mercersburg Review is the organ, has said: “The man cannot be right at heart in regard to the faith of the Incarnation, whose tongue falters in pronouncing Mary Mother of God!”
175 A Letter to Dr. Pusey on his recent Eirenicon, p. 59.
176 The late Dr. Faber, when an Anglican, said: “Thus I hold it pious to believe that in pagan times many a wandering beam, many a pitying angel, many a rent in heaven, many a significant portent, many an overflow of the appointed channels of grace, were vouchsafed, whereon a poor glimmering faith might feed, and grow, not wholly of itself, into a feeble yet steady light, acceptable for his sake who sent such faith its food.”—Foreign Churches and Peoples, p. 535.
177 Horace, De Arte Poetica, 391.
178 Keble’s Christian Year—Easter Eve.
179 Lib. iv. c. 4.
180 A Hist. de l’Art.
181 Page 36.
182 Page 30.
183 The scourge used by one of the executioners at the pillar was amongst the number, and is now to be seen in the cathedral of Aachen. It is composed of narrow leathern thongs, terminated by an iron point, the whitish color of the leather bearing manifest stains of the precious blood that bespattered it. Constantine’s signet, the eagle and ciphers, is distinctly visible on the time‐worn, faded seal, that looks like a sort of hard chalk. The reliquary is a crystal vase, encased in gold and gems.
184 It is not within the limits of this sketch to follow the “Saint Suaire” through its subsequent translations, but it may interest such of our readers as are not acquainted with the fact, that it is now at Aix‐la‐Chapelle, where every seven years it is opened by the chief prelates of Catholic Germany, and in the presence of princes and bishops exposed to the veneration of the faithful for three days, the church bells ringing all the time, and the cathedral crowded day and night.
185 The Russian Clergy. Translated from the French of Father Gagarin, S.J. By Ch. Du Gard Makepeace, M.A. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
186 “L’ouvrage s’ouvre par une introduction majestueuse sur le treizième siècle.”
187 Memoir of Count De Montalembert, Peer of France, Deputy for the Department of Doubs. A Chapter of recent French History. By Mrs. Oliphant, author of The Life of Edward Irving, S. Francis of Assisi, etc. In two volumes. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London. 1872.
188 The Anitchkoff Palace, on the Nevskoi Prospekt.
189 In 1859, Le Second Empire; in 1860, La France, l’Autriche et l’Angleterre; in 1865, France et l’Allemagne.
190 Particularism here means the tendency and policy on the part of Bavaria and the Southern States of Germany to resist absorption of their autonomy in certain matters by Prussia.—Translator.
191 The town where Henry IV., of Germany, performed a penance imposed by Pope Gregory VII.—Trans.
192 In the work, published in 1865, which procured me the honor of being made the subject of a parliamentary debate, I had dwelt upon the two‐fold danger to be feared, whether from an alliance which might reopen the Belgian question, or from a war on our frontiers, it might be, on our invaded territory. I advised appeasing our political discords, the better to resist this double peril. This sums up in a few words the purport of my pamphlet.
My adversaries in the tribune and in the press denied the existence of these dangers which they asserted were merely imaginary; they charged me with having got up a sham Belgian question, and with having, in that way, spread the knowledge of it abroad.
“With what have I charged the Honorable M. de Champs?” said M. Dolez. “It is with having pretended that our nationality was environed by perils, and that a Belgian question was on foot in which our independence might be taken away from us.”
M. Frère‐Orban ridiculed in a pleasant way my forebodings. He said that I was “a lookout man who, in his tower, descries that which no one else can possibly see, ... who imagines that he has discovered that which nobody had seen before. To‐day,” he added, “when there is nothing, absolutely nothing, of a nature to cause uneasiness to the country, we are told, in consequence of a party scheme: Let us hold our tongues and appease our discords. The liberal party must, in order to save Belgium from a danger which does not exist, cease resisting the pretensions of the clerical party.”
Well, what does M. Frère‐Orban think now? While he, as minister, was uttering in the tribune the above quieting and optimist statements, M. Benedetti had entered with M. von Bismarck into a parley, the subject of which was the Belgian question. This was the diplomatic peril. The other peril has been clearly revealed to us after Sedan. General de Wimpfen has stated to General Chazal that the question of invading or not the territory of Belgium had been earnestly discussed at Sedan. This would have been bringing the war on our violated soil.
193 Priests and religious, men and women, numbering together 1,909, have given corporeal and spiritual attendance to 21,000 sick and wounded, and this only out of love for God and their neighbor.
194 Referring to the very bitter attack on the definition of infallibility and the doings of the council which appeared about that time in pamphlet form from a writer under the nom de plume of Janus.—Translator.
195 The bien‐aimé of the Almanac is no more the bien‐aimé of France, He does everything ab hoc and ab hac, puts all in the same sack, Justice and finance, this bien‐aimé of the Almanac, etc., etc.
196 Zamore was a negro who repaid by the basest treachery the favors lavished on him by Madame du Barry; he was the immediate cause of her execution, having betrayed her hiding‐place to the convention. She is the only woman of that period who died like a coward, struggling to the last.
197 “Let our hearts be light and gay, Glory’s hour is here to‐day; The blood‐red blade is raised on high, We conquer when we die— Rally to victory. ’Neath the flag of a dying God! We tread the path he trod; We run, we fly To glory nigh. Behold our ardor rise, Our hearts are in the skies, Arise, arise! The scaffold mount—and God’s the victory.”
198 Blue is the color of knowledge.
199 Der liebe Gott, the received formula in Germany, as the “good God,” le bon Dieu, in French, and Almighty God in English.
200 Exod. xv. 11.
201 Matt. vi. 33.
202 Eccl. xx. 9.
203 Lam. iii. 31.
204 Is. xxix. 18.
205 Matt. v. 10.
206 Rom. xi. 33.
207 Ps. xlii. 1.
208 Baruch v. 6.
209 The Arno, Chiana, and Mugnone.
210 London Times, Feb. 3.
211 As was shown in THE CATHOLIC WORLD last month, excommunication is not only recognized by the law in the case of Protestant excommunicators, but has been sanctioned and confirmed by law, on an actual case being brought into court. Of course we shall be met by the objection that the formal declaration of Papal Infallibility has altered the connection between the Catholic Church and the state. Unfortunately for this easy method of explaining away difficult matters, excommunication has not been a whit altered in force, relation, or form from the days of the Apostles to Pius IX.
212 In proof of which read the declaration of Count Andrássy to the Austrian Parliament that, notwithstanding the friendly assurances with which the three emperors parted at the breaking up of their recent conference at Berlin, he could not guarantee peace even up to Christmas. Observe also the significant rearming of all the great European powers and the recent order from Berlin of 3,000,000 rifles of a new pattern.
213 Witness Bavaria’s remonstrance, which was disregarded, at the sudden imposition of the severe military code of Prussian service without allowing it time to recover. As a more recent comment on that, read the very able and interesting letters which appeared in the New York Herald, Nov. 22, on the European situation, a short extract from which, of a Bavarian view on German unity, we give: “Germany accepts it, because it in some respects realizes the German dream of unity. That, of course, every German wants. But no one wants a united despotism, a military code that turns the whole nation into a camp, and takes half a million able‐bodied men away from the farms and industrious callings. We want a Germany for the good of the fatherland, not for the glory of a little upstart Prussian prince whose name is not much older than the Bonapartes’ crown.”
214 “Desine fata deûm flecti sperare precando.”—Virg. Æn. vi. 376.
215 In Germany.
216 “Divorce Legislation in Connecticut,” and “The Indissolubility of Christian Marriage.”
217 For this and the following references, see Rohrbacher’s Histoire Universelle de l’Eglise Catholique. This work is so comprehensive, and so full of the most learned and accurate researches, that we have relied entirely upon its lengthened narratives for the facts mentioned in this article. The work is excessively voluminous (28 vols 8vo), and to verify personally each separate reference given by the author would be almost impossible, besides being a very tedious undertaking. We have preferred, therefore, to rely upon the single authority of one who is confessedly the best modern church historian.
218 History of the Reformation.
219 E. Dally.
220 “It is an error to suppose that the Catholic faith limits the existence of man to about six thousand years. The church has never decided this delicate question, and this abstention is full of wisdom. Nothing positive, in fact, has been revealed to us on this point. The various chronological systems are the work of man; they rest on bases often hypothetical. Nevertheless, we cannot admit even the possibility of the arbitrary theories of several distinguished geologists who date the appearance of man on the earth twenty and even thirty millions of years back. Good‐sense alone should incline one to be moderate on this point.”—Mgr. Meignan, Le Monde et l’Homme primitif, chap. vi.
221 L’Homme pendant les Ages de la Pierre dans les Environs de Dinant‐ sur‐Meuse. 2e édition. Bruxelles: Muquardt. 1872.
222 This is true, at most, of the formations previous to the quaternary deposits; in the latter, the synchronism of the fauna becomes wholly uncertain, and only founds the emigration or disappearance of certain species of animals on inductions that have a hypothetical basis. As to their emigration, we have had too many instances in the historic period, as M. Chabas justly observes, to make us regard that necessarily the index of vast chronological intervals. Where are the elephants that abounded in Mauretania Tingitana, according to Solinus’ Polyhistor; the hippopotami of Lower Egypt, the boas of Calabria, the lions, aurochs, and bears of Macedonia, the beaver, etc.? In the XVIIth century of our era, the stag, roebuck, wild boar, wolf, and bear still formed a part of the fauna of the Cevennes. The reindeer lived in the Black Forest in the time of Cæsar, who describes this animal from hearsay, but characterizes it sufficiently by the peculiarity of the male and female having the same kind of horns. M. Lartet is also inclined to the opinion that the age of the reindeer is perhaps not so ancient as was once supposed. The mammoth is no longer found alive, but has been discovered with its flesh and skin still remaining, embedded in ice, and affording nourishment to dogs and other animals. Struck with this preservation, M. d’Orbigny expresses a doubt as to the antiquity of the mammoth. He thinks it may have existed five or six thousand years ago, and believes it may still live in some unexplored locality. At least, it lived in America till a comparatively recent period. Its remains, and those of the mastodon, have been found in the auriferous deposits of California, among remarkable traces of human labor. At the Congress of Copenhagen, M. Schaffhausen expressed the opinion that the lost species should rather be regarded of a more recent date than that the antiquity of man should be extended to hundreds of thousands of years. As to the wretchedness and inferiority evident from the primitive pursuits of man and the conformity of his organs, the enemies of Christianity triumph over the discovery. We believe with Mgr. Meignan that “a proof of the authenticity of the Bible has been lightly transformed into an objection against it. The revolt and disobedience of man explain the wretched state in which he at first lived; and the hardships he underwent during the period he inhabited caverns and lacustrine dwellings prove to all who believe in the goodness of God that a great crime must have armed His justice.”
223 “In the year of the Nativity of our Lord 710, the sixth day of the month of December, under the reign of Eudes, most pious King of the French, during the ravages of the perfidious Saracen nation, the body of the most dear and venerable Marie Madeleine was secretly and by night transferred from its alabaster sepulchre into the present one, which is of marble, and whence the body of Sidonius has been withdrawn, in order that the other may be better concealed and be beyond the reach of the above‐named perfidious nation.”
224 Seven years later, when the head was taken to Rome by Charles, Boniface VIII. sent to S. John of Lateran for a relic which had long been venerated there as the maxillar bone of Magdalen; on adjusting it to the broken part, it fitted in so exactly as to leave no doubt as to where it had originally been taken from.
225 Shea.
226 See the narrative and map in Shea’s History of the Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi.
227 Pronounced Ac‐o‐ma—the accent on the first syllable.
228 “This way, gentlemen.”
229 Red pepper; chile verde, green pepper.
230 This estimate, which was considered as too high by some of the clergymen present, is given only as conjectural. It is based on the census of 1870, according to which there are in the state, in round numbers, 203,000 persons of foreign parentage at least on one side, of whom 113,000 are foreign‐born. It would seem probable that we might allow out of this number 83,000 foreign‐born and 67,000 native‐born Catholics. It is certain, from other evidence, that the number is over 100,000, and, whatever the correct number may be, nine‐twentieths is very near the proportion of the native‐born to the whole number. The entire population of the state is 537,000. Nearly two‐fifths of the whole are, therefore, of foreign parentage.
231 Eugénie de la Ferronnays.
232 “The Church the Champion of Marriage,” CATHOLIC WORLD, February, 1873.
233 Deut. xxi 16, 17.
234 Gen. xxiv. 39, 57, 58.
235 Numb. xxvii. 8; xxxvi. 3, 8.
236 S. John i. 13.
237 Jeremy Taylor’s “On the Marriage Ring,” besides many modern ones, especially by the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, New York.
238 Matt. vii. 21.
239 Matt. xxii. 29, 30; Mark xii. 24, 25.
240 Considérations sur la France, chapter x. et alibi passim.
241 M. de Maistre is sometimes quoted as taking a different view; for example, in an article in the Correspondant for Nov. 10, Joseph de Maistre declared revolution an epoch and not an event. But this by no means signifies that the illustrious publicist meant that revolution was about to prevail. He says: “The French Revolution is an important epoch, and its manifold consequences will be felt far beyond the time of its outbreak and the limits of its original sphere.... If there is not a moral revolution throughout Europe, if the religious spirit is not strengthened in this part of the world, the bonds of society will dissolve.” The clergy of France, in particular, are called to “the essential work” of reacting against the influence of the Goddess of Reason. See Considérations sur la France, chap. ii.
242 Etudes sur l’Italie contemporaine, and Notes d’un Voyageur. Première Etude, June, 1871; Seconde Etude, July, 1872. Paris: Amyot.
243 Première Etude, p. 3.
244 “Except the Univers, which has a correspondent at Rome, and keeps up constant communications with that city in other ways, and, on the other side, the Journal des Débats, which is supplied with information by the Italian government, and, as we have been assured, receives a handsome subsidy for the patronage accorded, most of the French papers have no other source of supplying their readers with news than the conjectures, more or less unreliable, of the Havas agency, a succursale, as to what concerns Italy, of the Stefani agency at Florence. It is supposed, however, that nothing is easier than to obtain information about a country at our very doors.”—M. Ed. Dulaurier, member of the Institute, “Impressions et Souvenirs de Rome,” in the Gazette du Languedoc for Sept. 19. I take the liberty of recommending to M. Dulaurier, and all who wish to know the state of affairs in Italy, the valuable Correspondance de Genève. The Journal of Florence, recently combined with the Cattolica of Rome, affords instructive reading. Besides information peculiar to itself, this paper reproduces in each number interesting extracts from various Italian journals.
245 “The French, under Napoleon I., introduced the idea of centralization into Italy and the code of the Revolution which the restored princes had the want of foresight to retain. The old municipalities were destroyed, and never recovered their former independence even in the States of the Church. Piedmont, of all the states of the Peninsula, was the longest under the poisonous influence of foreign ideas. Hence it became the centre of the Revolution.”—Quel est l’Avenir de l’Europe? pages 40‐41. Geneva: Grosset, 1871. The author of this remarkable work is of the school of the Count de Maistre, and worthy of his master.
246 Première Etude, pp. 6, 12, 13, 15; Seconde Etude, pp. 4, 10, 11.
247 Première Etude, p. 10.
248 Journal d’un Diplomate en Italie.—See the Etudes for July, 1872.
249 Journal d’un Diplomate en Italie, pp. 305, 306.
250 Journal d’un Diplomate en Italie, pp. 116, 117.
251 Les Diplomates Français sous Napoléon III., by B. d’Agreval. Paris: Dentu. 1872. A work we recommend to all publicists who wish to add to their knowledge.
252 Première Etude, p. 10.
253 Première Etude, pp. 5, 10, 11; Seconde Etude, p. 4.
254 Première Etude, p. 7.
255 The minister has laid before the Parliament the account of the expense of opening the breach in the walls of Rome. This crime cost nearly forty‐eight millions.
256 Première Etude, p. 11; Seconde Etude, p. 12.
257 Cf. Première Etude, p. 10.
258 See a forcible and eloquent article in the Civiltà Cattolica on the Caresses de la Providence. Sér. viii. vol. v., No. 519, Feb., 1872.
259 (Première Etude, pp. 7, 8, 27; Seconde Etude, pp. 11, 12.) “The invaders take the stand of masters, but the people have not joined them. They remain isolated in their midst in the position of a military and administrative colony, about as favorably regarded and received as the Prussians in those departments of our country where they are still encamped. The Romans, it cannot be denied, love their Pope.”—M. Ed. Dulaurier, loc. cit.
260 Union, Nov. 26.
261 “We continue to be regarded at Berlin with the most favorable dispositions, as the demonstrations of which our princes were the object prove.”—Speech of M. Visconti‐Venosta in the Chamber of Deputies, Nov. 27, 1872.
262 Seconde Etude, p. 13.
263 Address, April 28, 1872.
264 Correspondance Diplomatique in the year 1815.
265 Première Etude, p. 17; Seconde Etude, pp. 4, 14, 15, 16, 17.
266 Première Etude, pp. 25, 26; Seconde Etude, pp. 15, 16, 26.
267 See, in the Etudes for Oct., 1871, the article by Fr. Ch. Clair, who, in an address to the government of M. Thiers, carries on a vigorous argument ad hominem respecting the “necessary liberties” of the Pope.
268 P. Toulement, La Providence et les Chàtiments de la France, ch. xvii.
269 Première Etude, pp. 24, 25, 26: Seconde Etude, pp. 17, 22, 34.
270 Journal d’un Diplomate en Italie, pp. 17, 18.
271 This alludes to the indication of superhuman power by the budding horns which Michael Angelo has represented upon the head of Moses, adopting the Jewish symbol of strength so frequent in Scripture.
272 Ecclus. xlviii. II.
273 So soon accepted!
274 “I, the undersigned, parish priest of the most holy Constantinian Basilica of the Twelve Apostles of Rome, certify that in Register XII. of the dead, letter N, page 283, is to be found the deed of which the following is the copy, word for word.
“The twenty‐second of December, eighteen hundred and sixty‐six, Mademoiselle Claire‐Françoise‐Amélie Lautard, of Marseilles, daughter of M. Jean Baptiste Lautard, a most pious virgin, while offering last Sunday her life to God for the Holy Father, Rome, and the church, was seized on the spot by illness, and having received most piously the sacraments of the church, in the full possession of her faculties, in prayer, and surrounded by several priests and virgins, gave up her soul to Jesus Christ, her spouse, with the greatest serenity, Wednesday the 19th, at half‐past nine in the morning, in the house Rue Ripresa‐dei‐Barberi 175, at the age of fifty‐nine years. The following day, the 20th, her body was carried, after the completuum, accompanied by a great number of religious, to this basilica, and was here exposed during the morning after the manner of nobles, the office of the dead and a solemn Mass being performed; in the afternoon it was conveyed to the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, and there interred in the tomb of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition.
“Given at Rome,” etc.
275 This mistake is awing to a wrong meaning given to a word in the Book of Joshua in the Septuagint; where the word tsorim is translated knife of stone, when it also means a sharp knife; tsor only means stone in the sense of rock or block.
276 Simonin, La Vie Souterraine.
277 Ancient name of the Prussians.—Trans.
278 S. Jerome’s Epist. 44, 45.
279 Hist. of Decline and Fall of Rom. Emp., vol. iv. ch. ix. p. 262, 1st ed.
280 Germania, i. 5.
281 “The Study of Sociology,” by H. Spencer, in the May No. of The Contemporary Review, 1872.
282 See Mrs. Hope’s Conversion of the Teutonic Race, ch. i.
283 Conv. of Teut. Race, p. 20.
284 Apollin., Paneg. Major.
285 Germania, iii.
286 Suet., in Oct. xxiii.
287 I. 61.
288 Plutarch, Vita Marii.
289 S. Jer. adv. Jovin. ii.
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