Full text of "The Catholic world"

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THE 

CATHOLIC WO 

VOL. XCIV. OCTOBER, 19-11. No. 559. 

THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE. 

1861-1911. 

BY EDWARD A. PACE. PH.D. 

!HE occurrence and the celebration of Cardinal 
Gibbons' twofold jubilee may well be regarded 
as notable events in the religious history of 
1911. It is not merely the fact that the dis- 
tinguished jubilarian has spent fifty years in 
the priesthood, nor even that during this long period he has 
attained to such high position in the Church ; but rather that 
an occasion which means so much for him personally should 
have called forth universal congratulation. One might say 
that it was not the Cardinal alone but the entire country that 
observed his anniversary with a heartiness approaching en- 
thusiasm. 

For those who share his Catholic faith it is quite natural 
to rejoice and be thankful that so many years, with fruits so 
abundant, should have been granted him. But they have fur- 
ther reason for gratification in the fact that their non- Catholic 
fellow-countrymen were no less eager in paying the Cardinal 
their tribute of respect and esteem. The public manifestation 
in his honor in which our leading citizens took part, was 
characteristic of our national spirit. It showed plainly that 
whatever be their special beliefs or attitudes towards religion, 
men of discernment and breadth are able and willing to ap- 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCIV. I 




z THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

predate the worth of one whose qualities are the explanation 
both of his ecclesiastical rank and of his influence for good 
in the country at large. 

The feelings of regard which found expression on this oc- 
casion were not suddenly aroused; they have grown steadily 
through the course of a long career. They are shared by men 
who have observed closely the trend of events and have helped 
to make our history. How rapidly it has been made during 
half a century, what far-reaching changes its record includes, 
cannot yet be fully realized. The relative importance of each 
movement that in passing has absorbed much interest and in- 
volved much effort, can only be determined by the perspec- 
tive that will be drawn from some later viewpoint. As to the 
predominance, likewise, of any one tendency, opinions will 
probably differ; and it would hardly be correct to say that 
the changes or happenings of greatest importance have been 
political or social, economic, scientific or religious. Amid 
them all, however, as affecting them and as affected by them 
in turn, the educational movement claims special considera- 
tion. It has led to much discussion within its own lines, and 
it has reached out to the testing of principles which belong 
with equal or even prior right to different spheres of thought 
and action. On the other hand, an education undertakes to 
give a preparation for complete living, it brings into promi- 
nence certain standards of value which enable us to decide 
what service is real, and to see why a given sort of service 
calls forth general recognition. Controlled as it is by ideals 
and directed by principles, the educational movement suggests 
at least one way of determining by what attitudes and aims 
and courses of action, the needs of our country can be ade- 
quately supplied. 

What we chiefly want is the American in the true sense, 
the man who is glad to have the country vouch for him, but 
is still more anxious to have the country get credit because 
of him and his doings at home and abroad. It is understood 
that we must set high standards, and therefore a great deal 
is said on the platform and put down in the books about the 
civic ideal. Good citizenship is held forth as the aim for 
which all should strive, and even as the concrete form of the 
best morality. The chief purpose of the school and of the 
vast machinery of education is declared to be the training for 



.] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE 3 

citizenship. And frequently enough it is urged that the main 
duty of the churches is, or should be, to inculcate those prin- 
ciples on which depend the security of the social structure 
and the prosperity of the state. In all this there is a certain 
measure of truth; for it is beyond question that the agencies 
which educate should keep in view the social and moral wel- 
fare of the nation. But the most effectual lesson in this mat- 
ter is found and given, not in words but in lives that realize 
the ideal. 

The same holds true, in due proportion, of our Catholic 
position as regards the nature and foundation of citizenship. 
Once it is understood that morality is the basis of the social 
relation, it may be further shown without much difficulty that 
morality itself must have religion for its support. It is well 
to insist on this conclusion, were it only to show that it is 
the logical and practical outcome of sound principles. But 
here again it is both instructive and gratifying to see in an 
actual example the verification of our claims and the argu- 
ment of fact in behalf of our theory. And when the example 
is given with a force and steadfastness that are in keeping with 
exalted station in the Church, it is all the more convincing 
and the more likely to secure imitation. 

Now imitation, to be genuine, must aim not simply at 
achievements similar to those which have made others illustri- 
ous, but also at reproducing the qualities, the force and purity 
of character, that are the sources of all true achievement. Care 
then should be taken to avoid the fallacy that consists in 
drawing fine pictures and setting them up for general admira- 
tion without adopting any effectual means to obtain the appro- 
priate result. It is nowadays quite common to make lengthy 
discourses upon those who are proposed as models of civic 
virtue. Their memory is perpetuated in brass and stone and 
printed page as though such tributes could dispense us from 
building the one real monument that their greatness deserves. 
The child in school is taught to hold their names in benedic- 
tion, and gradually a calendar is being formed, which year by 
year, culls out new holidays for patriotic observance. And 
doubtless this is as it should be; but one naturally asks whether 
it is consistent to extol these patterns of moral excellence and 
at the same time exclude morality from education or reduce 
it to the barest so-called essentials. That imitation is an all- 



4 THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

important factor in the development of character, no one de- 
nies, and probably it will be admitted that at present more 
than at any previous time in our educational history, there is 
an abundance of copies which the growing mind is invited to 
follow. And yet it is obvious enough that the imitations dis- 
cernible in private and in public life are not altogether perfect; 
they would hardly be mistaken for the originals. This, of 
course, does not mean that the principle of imitation is to be 
abandoned; but it does indicate very clearly that if the prin- 
ciple is to yield its full value, a more definite sort of morality 
must be taught and the methods of teaching must become 
more effective. 

There is a principle of even larger import which is con- 
sidered as fundamental in determining the aims of education 
and which, properly interpreted and wisely applied, may be 
productive of excellent results. Life, we are told, depends 
upon adaptation to environment. The organism thrives in pro- 
portion as it adjusts its activities to the conditions which sur- 
round it. Mental development implies an increasing corre- 
spondence between thought and reality, and more efficient re- 
action to the impressions, situations, and opportunities which 
experience brings. Education, then, is essentially a process 
of adjustment, and the educated individual invariably shows a 
power of adaptation. Life itself, in the social and moral sense, 
no less than in the physical, is vigorous according to the way 
it meets the demands of environment; and a successful life is 
one in which the response is complete. 

Not only is this principle, generally speaking, an expres- 
sion of the truth ; it moreover condenses to very brief form a 
number of ideas, each of which is full of significance. It im- 
plies, first of all, that the worthy life is no mere passive ex- 
istence or inert tenure of any position however dignified for 
a succession of years however prolonged. It means action, 
attainment, results not necessarily of the conspicuous sort, 
nor in the direct line of human appreciation, yet always in the 
way of developing to the utmost the capacities with which 
one is endowed, and in turning to the best advantage every 
occasion that offers. Activity, however, is quite a different 
thing from the restless, aimlees doing that expends itself now 
in one pursuit now in another, with endless schemes that do 
not get beyond the beginning or with vain attempts to realize 



i9".] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE 5 

Utopian fancies. Activity to be of any value must be a vital 
response, must be guided by a clear understanding of the en* 
vironment, its problems, possibilities, and dangers; and when 
these are intelligently grasped, it must resolutely face them 
and, if needs be, oppose them. Adjustment, in other words, 
is by no means that shifting about as circumstances require 
which so often involves the surrender of principle. Those who 
are ready to do, or leave undone, any and every thing, just 
to get along in the world, are turned and moulded by the 
spirit of the age or the passing fashion of its thought; they 
are good illustrations of plasticity, but not of adaptation in the 
true sense. And the little success that they win at one mo- 
ment is likely to be spoiled at the next. 

Against such passive yielding to outward influences, the 
vigorous life finds protection in striving for definite purposes. 
Its action is indeed a response, but in responding it modifies 
to some extent the forces that are exerted upon it, and thus, 
in a measure, it shapes anew the environment in view of its 
own further aims. What the quality of these aims may be, 
and especially what relation they hold to morality, are ques- 
tions that do not need to be considered as determining success 
in the ordinary acceptation of the word. In fact the tendency 
of many very active people would seem to imply that success 
is the real standard of values. This unacademic pragmatism 
has evidently no place in a philosophy of life that takes its 
guidance from religion. For if morality is opposed to a supine 
acceptance of the situation, it is equally at variance with the 
active adjustment that seeks only self or compasses unworthy 
ends. Religion, on the contrary, demands that the whole pro- 
cess of adaptation be inspired and directed by the highest of 
purposes. The action which it calls forth must not only be 
influential, but also and chiefly must be influential for good. 
To sway public opinion or shape the course of events is one 
thing; it is something more to lead thought into the way of 
truth, and action into the path of righteousness. In each case 
there is evidence of power and in each the result is success; 
yet the processes are not identical nor the final attainments 
of equal value. 

In one respect, however, the two kinds of adjustment 
agree. As they presuppose a due consideration of the factors 
with which they deal, they also exhibit in their dealing a 



6 THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

spirit of forbearance and moderation. Violence is not vitality. 
Organic development is gradual, going forward unceasingly 
but without abrupt change or sudden display of energy. The 
progress of mental life, the normal growth of society, and the 
safest course of all institutional activity, are characterized by 
the same gentle steadiness. The adaptation which makes en- 
deavor on any plane successful is patient yet never idle, 
timely but without haste; and in the very exercise of its 
power, it gives evidence of greater power held in reserve. 
When, as the moral order requires, the sense of duty and 
respect for the rights of the fellowman become dominant 
factors, and when further these are tempered by breadth of 
sympathy with whatever is good in others, there results a 
union of strength and gentleness which marks the true per- 
sonality. 

Thus interpreted, the principle of adjustment, though re- 
cent in its formulation, is as old as the Church herself. It is 
one proof, and not the least striking, of her vitality, that she 
has adapted her action to the most widely different conditions 
and to the ceaselessly varying needs of humanity. Favorable 
or unfavorable as the environment might be, the Church has 
met it in all times and in all lands with unbending adherence 
to doctrine and moral principle and yet with a comprehen- 
sive charity that makes adequate allowance for the weakness 
and waywardness of men. Where by yielding, to drift with 
the current of the time, she might have had a smoother course, 
she has stood firmly for the teachings of the Gospel ; and 
where it was clear that by modifying her own legislation she 
might direct human thought and action into safer channels, 
she has known how to make concessions without sacrifice of 
what is essential. Thus to each succeeding civilization and to 
each new form of culture, of scientific acquisition and of social 
reconstruction, she has adapted her message of truth, present- 
ing it in terms that all might understand yet no whit lessen- 
ing its import. But such vital adjustment would have been 
impossible were the Church not fully conscious of her divinely- 
given mission and of the Spirit of God abiding with her for- 
ever. Here is the source of her activity ; here, too, the in- 
spiration of her purpose. For amid all the variations of her 
environment, through all struggle and reverse and interval of 
peace, she has steadfastly pursued the one aim of leading 



i9i i.] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE ^ 

men to salvation. The pursuit itself, even where it seemed 
beset with the worst difficulties, has turned to her advantage. 
It has proven her loyalty to Christ and her superiority to 
worldly considerations. It has enriched her with an experi- 
ence which no other existing organization can claim. Out of 
conflict even more than from the rarer enjoyment of peace, 
have arisen her great leaders, the strong-willed pontiffs and 
bishops who have fought for her rights against the mighty 
ones of earth. But through it all, and especially when failure 
seemed imminent, the Church has lived on, patiently yet reso- 
lutely striving to make all men sharers in her own inde- 
structible life. 

The evidences of this salutary adjustment are written 
through the history of the Church. They are as clear in the 
later centuries as in those that went before. And they are 
nowhere and at no time more obvious than in our own day 
and our own country. The progress of Catholicism in Amer- 
ica, notably during the last fifty years, has illustrated in a 
remarkable way the power of adaptation which the Church 
possesses. The larger freedom which she enjoys has permitted 
her to come into closer contact with the people and to devote 
her entire energy to the work of religion. Of a necessity 
also the Church is affected by the countless movements in 
which the activity of a vigorous national life finds expression. 
From the problems that grow out of rapidly changing condi- 
tions and that involve, in one way or another, the social, 
moral and religious welfare of the country, the Church may 
not hold aloof; she is bound not only to recognize them as 
actual and urgent but also to grapple with them and seek 
their solution. In a word it may be said that the Church 
here has a better opportunity than ever before to permeate 
and quicken the national life in all its phases with her own 
spiritual energy. And this means that there is very special 
need of churchmen who shall grasp the situation and profit 
by the opportunity. 

It is important for the Church as well as for the Republic 
that the foundations of our national institutions be preserved 
intact. If liberty and individual rights are to mean anything 
more than resonant vociferation, they must be properly under- 
stood. Their obligations, no less than their advantages, must 
be emphasized and brought home to every citizen. Each and 



8 THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

all must be made to realize that the very fulness of freedom 
which they enjoy entails duties proportionately serious and 
manifold, that the discharge of these obligations is no mere 
optional affair, but that, on the contrary, it is the essential 
condition on which the perpetuation of liberty depends. To 
say that society is impossible without law and observance oi 
law, is a truism; to make it a principle of action, the indi- 
vidual must be convinced that the law is for him and that 
his observance is what social welfare and his own best interest 
require. If the same jealous zeal were shown in complying 
with law as appears in making the law and selecting the law- 
makers, the courts would find their task lightened. 

It is just at this point that one may plainly see how in- 
dispensable for the common* weal is the basic principle of 
Catholicism considered as a system of government. The ele- 
ment of authority with the corresponding duty of obedience 
is what gives the Church unity and strength; and it is pre- 
cisely what is needed to safeguard our free institutions. 
Where this element is rejected as forming no part of religious 
belief or organization, it is hard to see what aid the state can 
logically expect from the spiritual order. Where on the con- 
trary, as in the Church, there is not only a recognition of 
the principle of authority but a concrete application of it in 
duly appointed rulers, the whole force of religion is brought 
to the support of laws that are justly enacted by the state. 
The hierarchy is thus more than a well-ordered series of 
honorable positions; it is authority in action; and those who 
are elevated to its highest ranks are men whose qualification 
to rule has been well attested by their readiness to obey. 
From such representatives of an authority that deals with 
the most vital of all interests, the country may well expect 
words of counsel and of warning; and their utterance loses 
none of its force when its key-note is deep concern for the 
maintenance of our institutions through integrity in all public 
and private relations. 

That morality is an essential requisite for the well-being 
of any nation, is generally recognized. But too often the mis- 
take is committed of supposing that there can be a genuine 
morality quite apart from religion, as though one's duties to 
God were of no consequence so long as other obligations are 
fulfilled. The inconsistency of such a view is not its worst 



igii.] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE 9 

feature, for it practically results in weakening the sense of 
obligation and of responsibility to any authority whatever. It 
leads to a subjectivism which is even more disastrous in the 
moral sphere than it is in the sphere of knowledge. Once 
the individual is persuaded that he is the only arbiter of 
right and wrong in the matter of his own conduct, he natur- 
ally takes it upon himself to decide whether and how far be 
shall yield obedience to any power; and his decision, in most 
cases, is the outcome of his personal interests and aims. On 
this basis he easily severs the bonds that should hold invio- 
late the social order, both in regard to the community at large 
and, in particular, the sacred obligations of domestic life. 

Without the sanctions of religion it is vain to hope that 
the family tie or any other will be kept secure by even the 
most stringent legislation. The confidence that is reposed in 
public opinion as a corrector of wrongs and abuses is justi- 
fied no doubt whenever that opinion itself, formed on right 
principles and in accordance with true standards, is strong 
enough to prevail and to deal out summary justice to those 
who defy it. But public opinion is an affair of the general 
conscience, and when this is blunted or weakened, its protest 
against wrong-doing must lose its earlier vigor, and dwindle 
into a passive indifference if not into an outright endorsement 
of what it should condemn. And since legislation also is so 
largely affected by public opinion, remedial enactments, if 
framed at all, will hardly get beyond the page of the statute- 
book. They will not, at any rate, have the binding force that 
they would have if they could presuppose on the part of the 
individual citizen that deeper moral sense which seeks first the 
kingdom of God and His justice. 

Hence arises the problem, in some respects the most 
serious that confronts the Church in this country how shall 
the teachings and practices of the Catholic faith be brought 
to bear as a vitalizing influence upon the thought and action 
of all our people. Noting that adjustment in some of its 
phases has been achieved, as is shown by the growth and 
prosperous condition of the Church, we have further to ask 
by what means a complete adjustment is to be attained. The 
Church must not only continue to exist, but must also increase, 
putting' forth her activity in an ever-widening field, with 
greater efficiency and more abundant results. Where so many 



io THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

other agencies have failed and so many movements have 
come to naught, it yet remains to be seen what vivifying 
power the Church can exert and through what forms of action 
it can best be exerted. 

The hopeful aspect of the situation is found in certain traits 
of the national character which under the influence of re- 
ligion can be developed into the firmest setting and support 
of the moral and spiritual life. There is a sense of practical 
utility that can be trained to appreciate the benefits which 
religion confers and a spirit of generosity that often approaches 
the sacrifice of self in its efforts for good. The love of inde- 
pendence, wisely guided, can become the source of fearless- 
ness in striving for truth and righteousness, while the ten- 
dency to frank and open expression is quite compatible with 
respect for authority and with heartfelt reverence for all that 
is justly revered. The eagerness to honor those who promise 
little and do much, the general contempt for sham and the 
readiness to denounce evil that is done in high places, are 
surely qualities which religion can turn to the best account. 
They do not imply perfection nor justify a boastful self-com- 
placency; but they do encourage such endeavor on the part 
of the Church as is needed to lift them to a higher plane 
and to eliminate other less desirable characteristics, not all 
of which, however, are American in origin or normally 
assimilated by the best type of our citizens. Even the intense 
devotion to business and the often censured love of gain can- 
not do away with the fact that the things of the mind are 
appreciated and sought after, while material pursuits not rarely 
convince the winners of success that the intellectual needs of 
the people are the first that should be supplied. 

The interest in education which has thus become as pro- 
found as it is widespread, makes new and special demands 
upon all who seek to better our moral and social conditions, 
to deepen respect for authority and to place the home on 
surer foundations. The school has taken up a position of 
prime importance as the medium through which the country 
is to be saved. And in consequence, the teacher has ad- 
vanced to the first rank as a factor in determining what sort 
of men and women our future citizens shall be. There is in- 
deed a tendency to regard education in a narrow sense as 
the remedy for all our ills and to dispense with moral and 



19 1 1.] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE n 

religious training. But this exaggerated view in no wise 
diminishes the significance of the school and of the teacher 
for the welfare of religion ; it rather emphasizes the need of 
insisting on a complete education in which religion with its 
truths and obligations shall be the central, vitalizing element. 
The teacher who with kindly skill places the truths of Chris- 
tianity within reach of the child is doing a blessed work. 
And the teacher who helps thousands to a better understand- 
ing of Catholic belief, removes thereby one of the princi- 
pal difficulties that the Church and the Catholic school en- 
counter. 

There can be no doubt that many people in this country, 
intelligent and fair-minded in other respects, have very in- 
accurate and inadequate notions regarding the Church. With 
an imperfect knowledge of her history they often combine a 
settled conviction that at some time or times more or less 
remote she abandoned the doctrine of the earliest days and 
gradually replaced it with the baseless traditions of men and 
the complexities of theological systems. It would almost seem 
that in their judgment the Church had not only grown with 
the centuries, but also that she had outgrown the original 
truth of the Gospel and had over-adapted her teaching to the 
requirements of human speculation. Such misunderstandings, 
of course, are dealt with at length and the historical truth set 
forth in numberless books of theology. Non- Catholic scholar- 
ship also has made it easy to trace to the primitive Church 
the doctrines that are held by the Church of to-day. But 
neither dogmatic treatises nor the fruits of patristic research 
will come to the knowledge of the many unless they be cast 
in a form at once simple and attractive. Truth is meant to 
save men, not to frighten or turn them away. The light falls 
gently. Hard sayings can be softened by the zeal to win. 
And charity is certainly a true witness to the faith of our 
fathers. No other method would avail to meet the needs of 
our generation, and none could prove more clearly that our 
Catholic belief has handed on with ever increasing value our 
Christian heritage. 

From the beginning the Church was careful to safeguard 
the deposit of faith by instructing the people. The earliest 
Christian schools were mainly devoted to the teaching of 
religion. When in later ages, the cathedral arose, the school 



12 THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE [Oct., 

sprang up at its side and the liberal arts were taught under 
the eye of the bishop who took a direct and personal interest 
in the progress of learning. At length came the universities 
founded by Popes and Prelates with the co-operation of the 
civil power. About these centers were grouped the religious 
orders in whose cloisters the classics had been preserved, the 
Scriptures diligently studied, and the great teachers of the 
medieval schools prepared for their chief undertaking, the 
construction of a vast synthesis combining in unity all the 
elements of knowledge. Thus, in due time, the Church of her 
own initiative had built up a complete educational system 
and had given it as its inner, directive principle the truth and 
the practice of religion. 

Something of the kind has been accomplished in this coun- 
try during the last halt century. The parochial schools have 
been brought to a high degree of efficiency, while academies, 
colleges and seminaries have provided for the education of 
laity and clergy in every department of knowledge. And the 
important thing is that this work has been done not with the 
support of the state, but through the loyalty and generosity 
of the Catholic people. It is the best evidence that they re- 
gard as precious and worthy of much sacrifice the faith which 
is their inheritance. It has solved, without fine theorizing 
but with earnest, practical effort, the problem of moral instruc- 
tion, and it has made possible the latest and most important 
phase of our educational progress. 

The foundation of the Catholic University is in large meas- 
ure due to the solicitude of Cardinal Gibbons for the diffusion 
of Catholic truth. In its organization and development he 
has taken an active part. Under his direction it has centered 
around the teaching of the sacred sciences the various depart- 
ments of knowledge that deal with nature and life, with mind 
and society and the history of human endeavor. And it has 
gathered upon its borders, as did the universities of old, the 
sons of Francis and Dominic as well as religious communities 
of more recent origin. Within two decades it has extended 
an influence which is felt throughout the entire system of 
Catholic schools, and which must finally result in their thorough 
co-ordination. To unite all our teaching forces, to strengthen 
each and help it to do its work in the best possible way, is a 
purpose which is in keeping with the scope of the University 



i9i i.] THE CARDINAL'S JUBILEE 13 

and with the efforts of its Chancellor in behalf of education. 
Nothing in fact could afford him deeper satisfaction than the 
growth of an institution to which he has given so much 
thought and for which he has made more than one sacrifice 
in order that the whole Church in America and every 'section 
of the country may derive the benefit. 

It is, therefore, fitting that the University should observe 
the Cardinal's Jubilee in a manner appropriate both to its own 
special character and to his deservedly high position in the 
educational world. The new hall that bears his name and that 
is to be dedicated this month, will serve as a reminder of his 
earnest endeavors in behalf of higher education; the Univer- 
sity itself, alike in its material structure and in its academic 
spirit, will manifest more clearly as time goes on, the largeness 
of purpose, the courage and hopefulness that have sustained 
its Chancellor, and each graduate who quits its halls to engage 
in the service of the Church, the work of the professions or 
the apostolate of [our Catholic schools, will owe him a debt 
of gratitude. 

But the truer, more lasting memorial is not built with hands 
nor written down in the language of learning. It is a tribute 
of intelligence, indeed, yet even more of affectionate esteem. 
It is the testimony of many hearts to whom his words, either 
spoken or written, have brought light and comfort, to whom 
his priestly ministration has been as a message of peace and 
his example an incentive to right living. To this number, 
greater than he himself can tell, in a word to the people, he 
will be as for fifty years he has been, the ambassador of 
Christ. 




THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

5 ABBfi MATHIEU fed his silkworms and visited 
his bees. His peaches were ripening on the 
south wall. His garden was like a tight nose- 
gay, so filled in was it with all manner of 
flowers. His pears and apricots were excellent. 
The last bottle of wine he had brought up from the cellar 
had the glow and the fragrance of the South in it. It was 
going to be a good vintage this year if but ces scelerats from 
Paris and from Marseilles would permit it to ripen and be 
gathered in peace. The corn was golden-white on the long 
Southern slopes if but ces scelerats would permit it to be 
reaped and threshed and ground in peace. 

With his hands hidden in the wide sleeves of his rusty old 
cassock he came back from the bees, his old poodle, Aristide, 
following at his heels. Ces scelerats! M. 1'Abbe said it to 
himself with a virtuous intensity. Yet if they had but spared 
the King and Queen! if they had not persecuted God and 
His Church 1 Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite I There was that in 
the brave words which set the old heart to beating under the 
rusty cassock. After all, these Reds of Paris and the Midi 
were they not the children of the movement he had preached 
for and written for forty years ago ? 

Mathieu! It had been a name to stir the blood once. 
People still remembered those moving songs of the Revolution 
who had forgotten, if they ever knew, that Marcel Mathieu, 
terrified of the hurly-burly he had helped to raise, had all of 
a sudden retraced his steps gone back to rest with the old 
Mother he had forsaken. He had abandoned, deserted, the 
cause of the Revolution. He himself would have said that 
with the years he had grown humbler and wiser that he was 
frightened of the armed Revolution which had sprung up 
from the seeds he and such as he had sown. Up in Paris 
now the Revolution was devouring her children. Many of 
those who had dreamed fine dreams with him of how the 
people should be free and should rise to the height of their 
freedom had gone in the tumbrils to the Place de la Greve. 



19 n.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 15 

The noblest and fairest heads had tumbled in the basket. The 
Gironde was a tragic memory. The King and Queen were 
in prison awaiting the mockery of a trial. They were tearing 
the Constitution to rags and tatters up there in Paris. How 
little they could have foreseen it all when their heads were 
stuffed with fine dreams, and it seemed such a small matter 
to their inexperienced youth to pull down the world and re- 
build it at their pleasure! 

Marcel Mathieu ! The name was quite lost in M. 1'Abbe 
Mathieu, who made hymns now where he had made battle- 
songs, who was a quiet, peace-loving, snuff-taking old man, 
with his silkworms and bees and vegetables for his interests, 
beyond the little Hock which was so hard-working and simple 
and innocent that it gave its pastor no cause for anxiety. 
The silkworms might do badly, or foul brood come upon the 
hives, as it had done once or twice within the forty peaceful 
years. Material calamities might threaten the village. There 
might be a bad harvest or a bad vintage and Bois-le-Saint go 
pinched and hollow-cheeked till another year made up for the 
ill deeds of this one. There might even be illness. There 
had been an epidemic of low fever the winter before last; 
and one summer the Boulogne fever had carried off a score 
of children and nearly broken M. 1'Abbe's heart. But the 
people were good always; there was very little to distress a 
poor priest's heart. And Mme. Du Chatel and Mile. Cle'men- 
tine at the Chateau des Tournelles were good to the people. 
They were a happy little family at Bois-le-Saint, where the 
years had gone by like a placid dream for M. 1'Abbc. 

Bois-le-Saint was out of the track of the Revolution. 
Buried between hills, a tiny village of some two hundred souls 
the squat tower of Notre Dame de la Pietie" rising amid the 
graves at one end, the two pointed turrets of the Chateau at 
the other end rumors of the Revolution had only reached it 
faintly, from far away. M. Du Chatel, Mile. Clementine's 
brother, had been in the movement in Paris up to a point. 
He had thought, as Marcel Mathieu had thought forty years 
ago, that one might let the sea loose and chain it up at will- 
The day of the flight to Varrennes he had been found by the 
King's side. That was well. Old Mme. Du Chatel had for- 
given her grandson for that much, which had all but broken 
her heart. She lifted her head proudly now as she talked of 
Henri. He had been misled, the poor boy, but he had atoned 



1 6 THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU [Oct., 

for that. No one knew where he was now. He had escaped 
to England perhaps. Certainly he was not in the Conciergerie, 
nor in La Force, nor in Les Carmes, nor in L'Abbaye. Of 
that Madame was assured, having yet good friends up in Paris. 

As M. PAbbe paced slowly down his garden walk, by the 
holly-hocks in bloom, his thoughts were much concerned with 
M. Henri. The young marquis was very dear to him. He 
had christened him; he had heard his first confession; given 
him his first Communion. He had taught him his Greek and 
Latin and various accomplishments proper to a gentleman. 
He wondered whether in the teaching something had not 
slipped into the boy's mind from his own ; whether it was 
not due to him that M. Henri had been a Jacobin a leader, 
up to a point, of the party of the Revolution. And if so, the 
boy had been shocked, horrified, as he had, at the spectacle 
of their white lady with her garments dabbled in blood; a 
Maenad where they had thought to see a goddess; a fury, 
drunken with the blood of nobles and saints, of the innocent 
and the gentle. 

He did not yet know all the things that were happening 
in Paris, else he would have had no heart for his garden, for 
his bees and silkworms. So far away was he from the terror 
that he could yet enjoy his game of dominoes of evenings 
with Mme. Du Chatel. It distracted the poor lady and kept 
her from thinking incessantly of Paris and M. Henri. Mile. 
Clementine too. The poor lady's fiance was in La Force. 
Any day Marat might find him on his list of condemned. M. 
le Vicomte was forty if he was a day, and had lived, as they 
say. Perhaps Mademoiselle had not been so very desirous of 
the marriage when it had been a matter of the immediate 
future, although she was too dutiful to set herself against 
Mme. la Marquise. But now with M. le Vicomte in prison, 
as likely as not in the tumbrils any day that rose Mile. 
Clementine had come to wear a proud and suffering look 
which told how her heart was making a hero and a martyr of 
her middle-aged fiance. 

Surely the Revolution would pass them by in the Bois-le- 
Saint I No one was desirous of it. Even Guilbert, the cob- 
bler, who was suspected of being Red, was a good soul, not 
at all one to desire the death and plunder of those whom the 
will of God had placed over him. Thinking of Guilbert, M. 
1'Abbe smiled as he held a pinch of snuff between his finger 



.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 17 

and his thumb. Guilbert had been frugal and had bought 
some hectares of land. He had a bit of vineyard. The Revo- 
lution had gone too far and fast for him. He was a man of 
property. When he thought of a party of Reds from Mar- 
seilles or Avignon trampling down his vines and plundering at 
their will, he breathed fire and fury against them, as he had 
been used to against the aristocrats. 

The little garden, between its walls, was very warm. M. 
1'Abbe muttered to himself, "pouf!" and again " pouf ! " as 
he came into the cool darkness of the white house with the 
green jalousies closed over the window-spaces. Something 
glimmered white in the gloom yellow-white the marble bust 
of himself done in Paris in the great days iorty years ago. 
It stood between the two windows, on a pedestal, the name 
" Mathieu," cut deeply and gilt, beneath the bust. 

It was like and unlike M. 1'Abbe. The hair fell upon the 
shoulders; it was their protest in those days against the 
powder and periwigs which were a part of the luxury of the 
aristocrats. A shirt a little open at the neck. The face was 
smooth and young. In M. 1'Abbe it had fallen into lines and 
wrinkles. But the expression was recognizable over forty years. 
The heart of a priest keeps very young. M. 1'Abbe would have 
something of the boy in his face when he lay in his ccffin. 

It was almost the hour for the dejeuner. M. 1'Abbe could 
hear Clairette stirring about among her pots and pans. He 
dropped into a chair and wiped his face with his red hand- 
kerchief. Aristide stretched himself with a sigh at his feet. 
It was certainly very hot. M. 1'Abbe nodded. A lock of 
silken white hair fell forward in the middle of his forehead. 
It brought out his likeness to the bust as he nodded asleep. 

A delicious odor from the kitchen filled the room, con- 
flicting with the warm scents of the flowers outside. M. 1'Abbe 
dreamt of M. Henri. They were reading together the Miles 
Gloriosus of Flautus. A bee droned in the room, and it was 
summer weather. He looked affectionately at the handsome 
young profile. The boy's cheek was in his hand. He was 
reading the Latin easily and fluently. He had the making of 
an accomplished scholar, had M. Henri. M. 1'Abbe was proud 
of his pupil. 

Over against him as he slept there was a tall slender 
bookcase, the upper shelf of which contained in one coiner a 
VOL. xciv. -2 



is THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU [Oct., 

little sheaf of slender volumes, each tied with a ribbon, each 
inscribed across its cover with a name in gilt lettering, deeply 
tooled "Mathieu" M. 1' Abbe's poems. He had often thought 
that he ought to destroy them. They were the dragon's 
teeth that had sown the Revolution. He was not aware that 
up in Paris they were singing some of his songs. Turgid 
stuff, M. 1'Abbe thought them now; and yet he had not the 
heart to destroy them. 

He had heard the Marseillaise. The thing was in the air. 
Somehow or other it had penetrated even to Bois-le-Saint. 
Only a few evenings before he had been oddly terrified, com- 
ing upon a group of babies in the dusty road, marching 
their little heads, sunburnt to white, flung back, sticks on 
their shoulders for guns, a red rag on the flaxen curls, march- 
ing to that irresistible tune. He had felt as though the Revo- 
lution were come to Bois-le-Saint. Yet now the Marseillaise 
was in his own dreams. The droning bee buzzed it. His fin- 
gers tapped to it on the arm of the chair. 

While he slept the door of the salon opened and a figure 
slipped within a ragged figure, with a lean and hungry face. 
At first the new-comer could see nothing. He stood blinking 
in the darkness, more blinded by it than he had been by the 
sun outside. Keeping his hand pressed on the door-handle, 
he stood and seemed to listen. There was a faint sound in 
the distance something ringing, martial. 

" Ah ! It is the Marseillaise ! " he said to himself, and 
listened, his head bent to catch the faintest sound. 

As he stood, the quiet breathing of M. 1'Abbe reached his ear. 

" It is good," he said to himself. He could see now. 
Things began to take shape out of the dimness. Aristide 
was fawning on his feet licking his hands. He could see the 
glimmering bust, the shapes of the few articles of furniture, 
the crucifix on the wall. 

He stooped and shook gently the old priest asleep in the 
armchair. 

"I am desolated at having to waken thee, Monsieur," he 
said and his voice, although tired, had a gay ring in it 
"but Messieurs les Sans-Culottes will not wait. They are on 
their way to the Chateau. Having drawn blank there, they 
will look for me here. You must hide me, Monsieur." 

" M. Henri ! " cried the old priest, coming awake with a 
great start. "What is it thou art saying, mon cnjant? That 



igil.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 19 

they are after thee? That I must hide thee ? But where? 
Oh, my child, if they were to take thee I should die of it." 

" Live, Monsieur, live," said the young man, sniffing the 
air. " Why, what a delicious fragrance ! Potage a la bonne 
femme, a vol-au-vent, I know it of old as Clairette can make 
it. She is a veritable blue-ribbon. Why I have been living 
on the grass of the field and a little stolen fruit for days. I 
must feed or I must die." 

"You shall feed, my son, but you shall not die," M. 
1'Abbe said, getting to his feet. "But to hide thee! Where? 
Dear heavens I where is there that thou wilt be safe? The 
bell-tower? No; they would explore it first. The granary? 
I have heard how they plunged their swords into a hayrick 
and brought them out bloody. Let me think! Dear heavens! 
where am I to hide thee?" 

"Give me some of the potage a la bonne Jemme first. It 
will save my life. Afterwards, there will be time enough to 
think about saving it the second time. I am going to Clair- 
ette. Listen there it is again. They are singing the Marseil- 
laise. I hope they will not frighten Mme. la Marquise, since 
I dare not be by her side to protect her. Listen; the ser- 
geant who is with the Reds Valjour he made my boots in 
the good days; he is friendly because I remembered to pat 
the cheek of his crippled boy. He dare do nothing for me, 
because the others are behind him. One is easily suspected 
nowadays. Ma foi t The Revolution eats her children with 
an easiness ! But Valjour will not be rough with Madame 
and Mademoiselle. They are not always so bad, the Reds. 
They say that even Paris is nearly filled to the lips with 
blood. One of these days it will be Marat's turn! The 
things I have seen ! " 

With a sudden change of mood he hid his eyes, at once 
gay and haggard, behind his hand. 

"Ah, Monsieur!" he said brokenly. "A week ago I saw 
the lovely body of Mme. la Princesse de Lamballe dragged 
naked through the streets, exposed to nameless insult. . 

For a moment he choked; then went on again: "Oh, 
Freedom, what crimes are committed in thy name! Thou 
and I, have we not both had our share in letting this monster 
loose? Those sonnets of thine, Monsieur. Why even yet 
they set my soul marching. Ah, there it goes again, the 
Marseillaise I And my blood must caper to it, whatever I do." 



20 THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU [Oct., 

Old Clairette had opened the door and come in quietly. 
She stood now in the doorway, gazing in amazement at M. 
1' Abbe's ragged visitor, whose hand rested on the marble bust 
as though he apostrophized it. 

M. 1'Abbe, observing her, beckoned her to come in. Two 
heads were better than one three than two; and he had 
often been glad to lean on Clairette's common sense. 

"It is M. Henri, Clairette 1" he said "M. Henri. Be is 
starving, and we must hide him, because the Reds are after 
him. They are on their way to the Chateau. Where are we 
to hide M. Henri?" 

"Why, Monsieur" she considered "we have not a spot 
here. The family vault of the Du Chatels. But the Reds 
would not spare the dead. Let me see Ah, I have it. There 
is the well in the grove of the starlings. They will never dis- 
cover it. M. Henri knows it." 

"Excellent!" said M. Henri, in a voice at once faint and 
jovial. " I would very much prefer the grove of the starlings 
to the vault of the Du Chatels. Doubtless the day will come 
when I shall be sufficiently content there. But not yet. There 
is a certain lady. She is safe in England of the fogs, I am 
enchanted to say. For her sake I will do all I can to say 
nothing of Mme. la Marquise and Mile. Clementine to save 
my life. Oh, Clairette thy potage I am starving." 

He stood leaning weakly against the pedestal of the bust. 

Clairette flung a strong old arm about him and helped 
him to a chair. 

"See now, M. Henri," she said, consoling him as 'though 
he were a child. "My little one, be quiet. I go to fetch the 
potage." 

She was back in a few seconds with the good soup smok- 
ing on a tray. M. Henri ate it wolfishly; would have the 
rol au-vent atop of it, an omelette anything Clairette could 
give him. But M. 1'Abbe forbade anything beyond the soup 
for a little while, lest too much given to a starving man 
might have evil results. 

While M. Henri ate the last of the soup, still with a fam- 
ished eagerness, there came a sudden blare at their ears as 
it seemed. Some one was banging furiously at the little green 
gate in the white wall, which fortunately M. Henri had bolted 
behind him on his entrance. Out of a silence which had been 
ominous there burst the roar of the Marseillaise. M. Henri 



.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 21 

was caught, like a rat in a trap. There was no exit from the 
little white house except by the green gate. The well of the 
starlings, the family vault of the Du Chatels ! No use to think 
of them now. The Reds were without, howling for M. Henri's 
blood. There was no way of escape. No cover in the little 
house that would not yield up its secret after a few minutes 
of search. 

Clairette had caught up her tray and basin. M. 1'Abbe 
stood with an arm flung about M. Henri's shoulders, as 
though to protect him. The onslaught on the door grew 
more furious. And now they had scaled the walls. They 
were round about the house. 

"There is the chimney," said Clairette. 

"Ah, yes, there is the chimney," said M. Henri. "I am 
glad I have finished thy potage, Clairette. It makes a new 
man of me. If there were but time for a cigarette ! Why, 
what a hurry they are in, these murderers! Lest I should 
not have time later, my love to my grandmother and Mile. 
Clementine, my undying adoration to " 

He disappeared up the chimney before he could finish the 
sentence; and in a second Clairette was opening the stout 
outer door of scrolled ironwork, which kept the house secure 
while it admitted fresh air, with a manner of the extreme 
crossness of old age. 

" What a hurry you are in, Messieurs 1 " she grumbled, un- 
bolting the door leisurely. "One would think yours was the 
most pressing business in all the world. A pack of vaga- 
bonds, going about the country, killing innocent folk, and 
preventing the people gathering in the harvest." 

She was swept back by the violent opening of the door 
and the inward rush of the Reds. They took no heed at all 
of the dauntless old woman, except that one sturdy fellow set 
her on her feet when she was all but down. They were in 
a merry mood apparently, having sacked a wine- shop on the 
way. Some were laughing and chattering, some shouting the 
Marseillaise. They had dark, Southern faces. These were not 
Parisians at least for the greater part. They were some of 
the men who had marched from the South on Paris, singing 
Rouget de Lisle's immortal marching-song. With their red 
caps and sashes, and their swarthy Southern faces, they made 
a picturesque group, if one had leisure or inclination to per- 
ceive the picturesque just then. 



22 THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU [Oct., 

They swarmed all over the place, laughing and shouting. 
Into the salon and the tiny salle-a-manger. Upstairs to the 
little bedrooms in the roof. Into Clairette's clean kitchen, 
where a dozen hands were thrust out to lift the soup-pot from 
the fire. Into the garden, where the pears and apricots hung 
ripe on the wall. 

There was no time for M. 1'Abbe to do anything. He 
thought of the sacred vessels in the church; the locked taber- 
nacle. Too late to do anything. " Lord, protect Thyself ! " 
he said, closing his old eyes. He leant an elbow on the mar- 
ble bust in a momentary weakness. Then he drew himself 
upright. He was between the fireplace and the Reds. He said 
to himself that if it were necessary he would die in the place 
of M. Henri. Perhaps if they killed him they might be satisfied. 

He opened his eyes. Why, they looked men after all, 
those Reds ! Not monsters. The artistic perception, never 
dead in him, was aware of the flashing teeth, the dark eyes 
with the gold in the whites, the brawny figures. They were 
laughing and hustling each other like a crowd of rough, good- 
natured boys. In advance of them stood their sergeant very 
unlike them a man of cities, smaller, paler, insignificant. 

" We seek the ci-devant Marquis Du Chatel, who ,is in 
hiding here," he said, in a voice he tried to make big, but 
only resulted in making squeaky. M. 1'Abbe said to himself 
that there was trepidation under the red sash. 

" If you will not give up the ci-devant Marquis Du Chatel, 
we shall proceed to search for him," he said. " If my com- 
rades are a little rough you will only have yourself to blame, 
M. 1'AbbeV' 

"Too polite, citizen!" said a voice from behind. "Marat 
would not like to hear of so much politeness to one of the 
enemies of the people." 

The little sergeant trembled, and turned a livid face over 
his shoulder. 

" Our sergeant does not forget," said another voice, " the 
time when he made shoes for the dainty feet of the aristocrats." 

There was a hoarse burst of laughter. Sergeant Valjour 
turned a greyish shade. 

"Come," he said, with an attempt at a rough manner, "give 
us up the ci-devant. There is no time for parley. We know 
he is in the house." 

The crowd pushed him on from behind. M. 1'Abbe had 



.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 23 

time for a wandering thought as to how Valjour came to be 
sergeant of a regiment of the Reds of the Midi. Poor fellow ! 
he thought. His head was not very secure upon his shoulders. 

Some one had pulled roughly at the blind, which had tum- 
bled to the floor. A sudden glare of light poured into the 
room, falling full on M. 1'Abbe, where he stood by his bust. 
He was saying to himself now that if they stabbed him to 
death, which they might set about doing at any moment, the 
half-jocular mood of the crowd changing to one of ferocity, 
as with those Southerners it might happen while one said 
" pouf 1 " why then his death would be an atonement for the 
part he had taken in letting loose the Revolution. 

There was a giant of a fellow by the sergeant's elbow. 
He was staring hard from the bust to M. 1'Abbe's face. The 
priest had not noticed him. The sudden change in the tem- 
per of the crowd had come. Some one had shouted from 
behind: "Valjour is a traitor. Let us find the ci-devant for 
ourselves!" The knives were out in a dash. The eyes of the 
men had the look of the bull's eyes when he charges. 

Suddenly the big fellow Sung himself in front and seemed 
to push the mass back with his immense strength. 

"Citizens! Comrades! Listen to me!" he said. 

" Listen to Gaston Galant ! " some one shouted from the 
back of the room. 

" Am I one to betray the Republic ? " he asked passion- 
ately. "Why, what fools you are, Marseillais I Don't you 
see ? Why here is our Mathieu to whose songs we march. 
He slipped out of the world so long ago that we thought he 
was dead. Listen, my children. Let us sing him his own 
song, La Libertf et France, Sing, my children." 

They were upon M. 1'Abbe, roaring one of those songs 
which he had thought to be long forgotten he had been so 
long out of the world embracing him, kissing his cheeks, all 
the wild fellows pushing and jostling each other to get a sight 
of him. The men of; the Midi are poets at heart. In Paris 
it might have happened ; but perhaps not. They were tigers 
in Paris then, only wanting human blood. Whereas the men 
of the Midi were as yet intoxicated for freedom. 

The news spread among those outside. They had discov- 
ered Marcel Mathieu living in the retirement of Bois-le- Saint, 
long lost to the world. And but for Citizen Gaston Galant 
they might have knifed their poet. 



24 THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU [Oct., 

They had M. 1'Abbe up on their shoulders, carrying him 
round his garden and through the village, shouting and sing- 
ing Liberte et la France and La Patrie and Camarades, mes 
camarades! Turgid things of his youth, almost forgotten, not 
to be named in the same day with those elegant classical son- 
nets which had won the approval of the gentlemen of the 
Gironde. An odd, meek little figure M. 1'Abbe made as he 
looked down on the glowing faces all upturned to his. The 
people came out of their cottages, timidly at first, to see the 
Reds go by carrying M. 1'Abbe on their shoulders. Presently 
they joined the crowd, and joined in the shouting and the 
singing and the laughter. 

When they had carried M. 1'Abbe all round the village 
the Reds carried him back to his own house. Some one had 
twisted a wreath of laurels and laid it on the brows of the 
bust. M. 1'Abbe was heartily glad it was not on his brows^ 
for those children of the South were capable of everything. 

They put down M. 1'Abbe at his own gate ; and Gaston 
Galant made a florid speech for his fellows, in which he ex- 
pressed their joy at their discovery of the illustrious Mathieu. 
Since he would not return with them to Paris M. 1'Abbe 
shook his head violently at that then they must only wish him 
a glorious peace in the retirement he had chosen. They were 
inconsolable because they had overrun the illustrious Math- 
ieu's domain and pillaged his fruit-garden. The fortunes of 
war ! Mathieu was too good a son of freedom to complain. 
Meanwhile he might rest assured that the village would be 
safe for them. The abode of the illustrious Mathieu must 
be ever sacred and dear to the children of the Revolution 
who were fed at the fountain of his genius. And so on to 
the end of a most flowery oration. 

Whatever the Reds might do when their passions were 
aroused, they sat down now with the people of Bois-le-Saint, 
sharing their meals together, helping the women in their prepa- 
ration of food, dandling the babies, teaching the boys how to 
shoulder a gun, telling the old people the news from Paris. 
When they marched out at evening they left many regrets 
behind with the people of Bois-le-Saint. To be sure, they 
were not all bad the Reds. Their little sergeant at their 
head marched with the lightest step of all, shouting: Cama- 
rades, mes camarades! with the best of them. 

Meanwhile, M. Henri, new cleansed from the soot, shaved, 



i9i i.] THE BUST OF MARCEL MATHIEU 25 

wearing M. 1'Abbe's best cassock till more suitable garments 
could be procured for him, lamented the vol-au vent which 
the Reds had snatched from his lips. A vol-au-vent, see you, 
such as Clairette made is not to be prepared in five minutes. 
The laurels hung withering on the bust of Marcel Mathieu. 
And M. 1'Abbe lamented over his broken hollyhocks and tbe 
beans and peas and aubergines trampled under the feet of tbe 
Reds. The garden would hardly recover the damage which 
had been done this year. 

Meanwhile, who knew what the good God would bring 
about next year? Peace, perhaps, and the dying down of 
evil passions in men's hearts. They were growing sick of 
Marat up in Paris. The people were recovering from their 
debauch of blood. Next year who knew ? M. Henri might 
come back. There was yet to smuggle him to the coast and 
get him conveyed to England. Next year could not bring 
back all the dear souls who were dead. But there had been 
things dreadfully amiss with the old order. Marcel Mathieu 
would be the last to deny it. And out of evil would come 
good in God's time, next year or some year. 

M. 1' Abbe's eyes twinkled as he took snuff and gazed with 
a sideways head from M. Henri, lamenting his vol-au-vent t to 
the withered laurels stuck askew on the brows of the bust. 
After all those Reds the children of the Revolution; there 
was much of the child left in their hearts. They were not 
bad, poor fellows, not at all bad. How they had looked at 
him as they roared his songs ! For a moment his heart was 
uplifted with pride and something of the old spirit. Then he 
rebuked himself inwardly. 

"You and I, M. Henri," he said "we were both too con- 
fident. I blame myself with thy faults. But the poor people 
there is a deal of good in the hearts of the people. We 
shall pray for our Reds, shall we not, M. Henri? But truly 
the cassock becomes thee. If it were not for Mme. La 
Tour. . . ." 

"It was truly said," M. Henri remarked, "that the habit 
does not make the monk. But, at the moment, do not ask 
me to pray for ces sctterats, Monsieur, I implore you. I think 
upon that vol-au-vent" 




WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 



|HE question put at the head of this is perhaps 
the greatest of all historical questions, with the 
exception of that other question : " What was 
the Church in the Roman Empire ?" An answer 
to which provides the picture of that capital 
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity 
and attained to a full consciousness of itself. 

The question is of such vast importance because when we 
grasp what the Reformation was we understand its conse- 
quences, we know and on what a scale the united body of 
European civilization has been severed and by what a wound. 
The abomination of industrialism ; the loss of land and capital 
by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of mod- 
ern discovery to serve the end of man ; the increasing chaos 
and misfortune of society all these attach one to the other, 
each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller phenomena as 
well when we appreciate both the nature and the magnitude 
of the catastrophe. 

It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to 
its end and that, though those now living will not live to see 
it, Christendom may enter into a convalescence, and may at 
last forget the fever and be restored. With that I am not 
here concerned, and it is my business only to trace the major 
lines of that storm which four hundred years ago brought 
Christendom to shipwreck. 

At the outset, however, I would warn the reader against 
a rather subtle trap which history lays before the feet of its 
students. The reply to any of the major and answerable 
questions of history should be simple and direct in proportion 
to the importance and magnitude of the question ; but the 
question is only answerable as an historic question when the 
question " what " and not the question " why " is set for so- 
lution. 



i9i i.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 27 

In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human 
kind, in that proportion it springs from some revolution in 
the human mind. To pretend an examination of the secret 
springs whence the human mind is fed is, in the historian 
fatuous and futile. The greater the affair the more directly 
does it proceed from unseen sources which the theologian may 
catalogue, the poet see in vision, the philosopher explain, but 
with which history cannot deal and the historian as historian 
cannot grasp. It is the function of history to present as to a 
spectator the outward thing, and to show the reader as much 
as a spectator could have seen, illuminated by a knowledge of 
the past and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events. 
I repeat, the historian answers the question, "What was" 
this or that. To the question, " Why was it," if it be in the 
spiritual order (as are all major things) the reader must at- 
tempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes than those 
of historic science. 

It is the neglect of this canon which has rendered futile so 
much work, laborious, and would-be- illuminating, upon the 
past. Read Gibbons' attempt to account for " why " there was 
a church in the Roman Empire, and mark its hopeless failure. 
Mark also how all examination of the causes of the French 
Revolution are colored by something small and degraded, quite 
out of proportion to that stupendous crusade in which two 
million men gave up their lives and transformed the modern 
world. The truth is, that the historian can only detail those 
causes, largely material, all evident and objective, which lie 
within his province, and such causes are quite insufficient to 
explain the full result. Were I here writing " Why " the 
Reformation came, my reply would not be historic but mystic. 
I should say that it came " from outside mankind," but that 
would be to affirm without the hope of proof and only in the 
confidence that all material attempts at proof would be con- 
temptible. Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an 
issue, but only in the presentation of the thing as it was, and 
upon this I now set out. 

With the close of the Middle Ages two phenomena ap- 
peared side by side in the society of Europe. The first was 
an aging and a growing fatigue of the simple medieval scheme; 
the second was a very rapid accretion of technical power. 

As to the first I have suggested (it is no more than a 



28 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Oct., 

suggestion) that the medieval scheme of society though much 
the best fitted to our race and much the best expression which 
it has yet found especially conducive of happiness (which, 
here and hereafter, is the end of man) was not properly pro- 
vided with instruments of survival. Its science was too im- 
perfect, its institutions too local, though its philosophy was the 
widest and most general ever conceived. At any rate, what- 
ever be the reason, that society did rapidly grow old. Its 
every institution grew formal or debased. The Guilds from 
true co-operative partnerships for the proper distribution of 
the means of production and for the prevention of a proletariat 
and the vile cancer of capitalism, tended to become privileged 
bodies. The original tenants of the village showed faint signs 
of becoming an oligarchy with landless men around them. 
The Monastic orders were tainted in patches, as it were, up 
and down Europe with worldliness, with an abandonment of 
their strict rule and occasionally with vice. Civil government 
grew befogged with tradition and with complex rules. All 
manner of theatrical and false trappings began to deform so- 
ciety, notably the exaggeration of heraldry and a riot of sym- 
bolism of which very soon no one could make head or tail. 
The temporal and visible organization of the Church did not 
escape in such a welter. The lethargy, avarice, and routine 
from which that organization suffered, has been not only gross- 
ly exaggerated but in particular denaturalized. An altogether 
false picture of it has been drawn for popular consumption, 
but in a degree the temporal organization of the Church had 
decayed. It was partly a taking too much of things for 
granted, a conviction that nothing could really upset the unity 
of Europe, partly the huge concentration of wealth in clerical 
hands, which proceeded from the new economic activity all 
over Europe, coupled with the absolute power of the clergy 
in certain centers and the universal economic function of Rome, 
partly a popular loss of faith which did the business. At any 
rate, the evil was there. 

All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their ori- 
gins, or they fail. There appeared throughout Europe in that 
last century of united Europe, sporadic attempts breaking out 
here and there to revivify the common life especially upon 
its spiritual side by a return to the primitive communal enthu- 
siasms in which religion necessarily has its historical origins. 



19".] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION f tg 

This was in no way remarkable, neither was it remarkable 
that such sporadic and spontaneous outbursts should each have 
its own taint or vice or false color, but what was remarkable 
and what made the period unique in the whole history of 
Christendom (with the possible exception of the Arian flood) 
was the inability or incapacity of the external organization of 
the Church at the moment to capture and digest the spiritual 
discontent and the spiritual hunger of which these errors were 
the manifestation. In a slower time the external organization 
of the Church would have absorbed and regulated ; but things 
were moving at a rate more and more rapid, the whole so- 
ciety of Western Christendom woke from experience to ex- 
perience. It was flooded with the newly found manuscripts 
on antiquity, with the new discoveries of unknown worlds, new 
commerce, printing and, an effect perhaps rather than a cause, 
the complete re-birth of painting, architecture, sculpture and 
all the artistic expression of Europe. 

In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted 
return to early religious enthusiasm, was not digested and was 
not captured. It was repressed haphazard and quite as much 
haphazard encouraged, but there seemed no one corporate 
force present throughout Christendom which could persuade, 
encourage and command. 

Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of 
special heresies the business was local, peculiar and contemp- 
tible. Wycliffe, for instance, was no more the morning star of 
the Reformation than the capture of Jamaica, let us say, was 
the morning star of the modern English Empire. Wycliffe 
was but one of a great number of men who were theorizing 
up and down Europe upon the nature and fate of the soul. 
Such men have always abounded; they abound to-day. Some 
of WyclifTe's extravagances resembled what many Protestants 
happen to have since held ; others (such as his theory that 
you could not own land unless you were in a state of grace !) 
were singularly of the opposite extreme to Protestantism. 
And so it is with the whole lot, and there were hundreds of 
them. There was no common theory, no common feeling, 
there was nothing the least like what we call Protestantism 
to-day. Indeed that spirit and mental color as I shall show in 
a moment, does not appear until a couple of generations after 
the opening of the Reformation itself. What there was, was 



30 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Oct., 

a widespread discontent and exasperated friction against the 
existing, rigid, and somewhat decayed temporal organization 
of religious affairs, and in their uneasy fretting against that 
bond the various centres of irritation put up now one start- 
ling theory which they knew would annoy the official Church, 
now another perhaps the exact opposite of the last. In a 
word, a general, social ill- ease was the parent of a number of 
sporadic heresies, and no one of these had any philosophic 
driving power behind it. 

Shall I give an example ? One of the most popular forms 
which the protest took, was a demand for Communion in both 
kinds and for the restoration of what was in many places 
ancient custom, the drinking from the cup after the priest. 
Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation 
against the external organization of the Church was the power 
at work? Could any point have less to do with the funda- 
mentals of the faith? Here is another example. Prominent 
among these expressions of discontent you have the Adam- 
ites,* who among other tenets rejected clothes upon the more 
solemn occasions of their ritual. The whole business was a 
rough and tumble of protest against the breakdown cf a social 
system whose breakdown seemed the more lamentable because 
it was in theory founded upon the most intimate appetites of 
European men. 

This very general picture omits Huss with his powerful 
personality and the national movement for which he stood. 
It omits the Council of Constance and all the great facts of 
the fifteenth century on its religious side. I am concerned 
only with the presentation of the general character of the 
time, and that character was as I have described it, a sort of 
chronic rash upon the skin of Christian Europe, which rash 
the body of Christendom could neither absorb nor cure. 

Now at this point and before we leave the fifteenth cen- 
tury, there is another historical feature which it is of the 
utmost importance to seize if we are to understand what fol- 
lowed, for it was a feature common to all European thought 
until a time long after the accurate establishment of the 
schism. It is a feature which nearly all historians neglect 

* The rise of these oddities is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe, and is, like his career, 
about loo years previous to the Reformation proper. Unlike the Wycliffites certain members 
of the Adamites still survive in Austria. 



i.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION ? 31 

and yet one manifest upon the very slightest reading of con- 
temporary documents and that feature is this: No one dreamt 
a divided Christendom to be possible. All these movements 
were oecumenical; they were not peculiar to one race, or 
blood or climate or city or nation. They thought, even the 
wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a whole. You were 
as likely to get an enthusiast declaring himself to be Elias in 
Seville as an enthusiast denying the Real Presence in Aber- 
deen. That fatal habit of reading into the past what we 
know of the future has in this most deplorably marred his- 
tory, and men whether Protestant, or Catholics, who are now 
accustomed to Protestantism, read Protestantism and the ab- 
surd idea of a local religion a religion true in one place and 
untrue in another into a time where the least instructed 
peasant would have laughed in your face at the very con- 
ception of such lack of reason. 

The whole thing, the evil and the quite ineffectual resist- 
ance to the evil, was a thing common to all Europe. 

It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or 
to recede. Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical ex- 
perience and technical skill were moving at such a rate that 
a contemporary spiritual phenomenon if it advanced at all 
was bound to advance very rapidly, and this spiritual eruption 
in Europe came to a head just at the moment when the 
contemporary expansion of travel, of economic activity and of 
the revival of learning, had also emerged in their full force. 
It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that 
the coalescing of the various forces of discontent began to be 
apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to burst and 
the Reformation proper to be started upon its way. But, as 
a preliminary to that matter, the reader should first under- 
stand how another and quite disconnected social happening 
had prepared the way for the triumph of the reformers. This 
social happening was the advent of Absolute Government in 
civil affairs. Here and there in the long history of Europe 
there crops up an isolated accident, very striking, very effec- 
tive, of short duration. We have already seen that the Nor- 
man race was one of these. The Absolute in civil government 
which accompanied the Reformation was another. 

A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest 
and most enduring of historical things. Countless centuries 



32 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Oct., 

of the old Empires of the East were passed under such a 
claim, the Roman Empire was based upon it, the Russian 
state was made by it, French society luxuriated in it for one 
magnificent century. It is the easiest and (when it works) 
the most prompt of all instruments. But I beg the reader to 
distinguish between the claim to Absolute Monarchy and the 
sense which produced for a very short time in European 
affairs, a time exactly coincident with the Reformation, the 
phenomenon of the Absolute in civil government. The differ- 
ence is this: An Absolute Monarchy is simply a convenient 
short-cut by which things are done quickly and which people 
take to when they are wearied of inefficiency and delay : a 
thing which they cling to in theory long after it has lost 
power because it is theoretically capable of getting things 
done at once and without discussion. But the sense of an 
absolute civil Government is something very different. It is 
a demand, an appetite proceeding from the whole community 
and amounting to a worship of civil authority. In one as- 
pect it is the deification of the state. In another the deifi- 
cation of law ; but in every aspect it is the adoration of the 
Executive, "This governs me; I will worship it and do all 
it tells me." Such is the formula for the strange passion 
which has now and then seized great bodies of human beings 
intoxicated by splendor and by the vivifying effects of com- 
mand. Like all manias (for it is little better than a mania) 
this passion when it is past is hardly comprehended; like all 
manias while it is present it overrides all other emotions. 
Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered or enjoyed 
such a mania. The free cities manifested that disease quite 
as much as the great monarchical states. In Rome itself the 
temporal power of the papal sovereign was then magnificent 
beyond all past parallel. In Geneva Calvin was a god. In 
Spain, Charles and Phillip governed two worlds without ques- 
tion. In England the Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. 
Men might and did rebel against a particular government, but 
it was only to set up something equally absolute in its place. 
I will not waste the reader's time in any discussion upon 
the causes of that astonishing political attitude. It must suf- 
fice to say that for a moment it hypnotized the whole world. 
If we understand it we largely understand what made the 
success of the Reformation possible. 



.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 33 

Well then, the increasing discontent of the masses against 
the decaying forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing 
irritation against the temporal government and organization of 
the Church, came to a head just at that moment when civil 
government was worshipped as an awful and almost divine thing. 

Into such an atmosphere was launched the last and strongest 
of the overt protests against the old social scheme and in 
particular against the existing power of the Papacy, especially 
upon its economic side. 

The name most prominently associated with the crisis is 
that of Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by 
birth and speech, and one of those exuberant, vital, rather in- 
consequential characters which so easily attracts hearty friend- 
ships and which can never pretend to organization, though 
certainly to creative power. What he precisely meant or 
would, no man could tell, least oi all himself. He was "out" 
for the general wave of change. Whether he ever intended even 
t the end of bis life, nay, whether he could ever have imagined, 
a disruption ef the European Unity is very doubtful. A large, 
coarse, happy man, comparable in some ways to Danton, but 
without Danton's sanity or measure and certainly without his 
grasp of things. 

Luther was a voice rather than a leader. He was but 
one of many, and had he never lived the movement would 
have been much the same. One scholar after another (and 
these of every blood and from every part of Europe) joined 
in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic trainirg 
to the newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride 
of life, of the logician to the mystic, all these in a confused 
whirl swept men of every type into the disruption ; one thing 
only united them. They were all inflamed with a necessity 
for change. Great names which refused to destroy at last 
the greatest is that of Erasmus ; great names which even ap- 
pear in the roll of that of the Catholic martyrs Thomas 
More is the greatest of these must here be counted with the 
names of men like Calvin on the one hand, Rabelais upon the 
other. It is safe to say that not one ardent mind in that first 
half of the sixteenth century but was swept into the stream. 

Now all this would and must have been quieted in the 
process of time but for that other factor of which I have 
spoken, the passion which that eager, creative moment felt 
VOL. xciv 3 



34 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Oct., 

for the absolute in civil government that craving for the some- 
thing godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne or a 
national hymn. This it was which caught up and, in the 
persons of particular men, used the highest of the tide. 
Certain princes in Germany (which had of all the groups of 
nations least grasped the meaning of authority) befriended here 
one heresiarch and there another. The very fact that the 
Pope at Rome stood for one of these absolute governments 
put other absolute governments against him. The wind of 
the business rose; it became in no small degree a quarrel of 
so vereigns, when two further characters appeared in the move- 
ment side by side. 

The first was this: Its success seemed more and more 
marked in those outer places beyond the limits of the old 
Roman Empire and notably in the Northern Netherlands and 
in Northern Germany where men easily submitted to the 
control of wealthy merchants and of hereditary landlords. 
Secondly, a profound mistrust of the new movement, a re- 
action against it, a feeling that it was the affair of the rich 
and the cupidinous began at first in a dull, later in an angry 
way, to stir the masses of the populace throughout Europe. 
The stronger the old Latin civilized sense of human equality 
was, the more the populace felt this, the more they instinct- 
ively conceived of the Reformation as something that would 
rob them of some ill-understood but profound spiritual guar- 
antee against slavery, exploitation and oppression. There was 
a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers and their 
rich patrons by the time the movement had reached a head 
and by the time the central power of the Church had been 
openly defied by the German princes; a grumbling like the 
undertone of the sea before bad weather. 

A general observer, cognizant of what was to come, would 
have been certain at that moment that the populace would at 
last rise, and that if the movement against the Church and 
civilization was to come to anything, it would come to no 
more than the lopping off of outer and insignificant things. 
The Baltic Plain, sundry units of the Germanies and Scandi- 
navia, probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain 
valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and the Pyre- 
nees, which had suffered from lack of instruction and cculd 
easily be recovered, would be affected. The barbaric parts, 



i9i i.] MARY'S THOUGHT 35 

which had never been within the pale of the Roman Empire 
would have to go, bat the soul and intelligence of Europe 
would be kept sound; its general body wpuld reunite and 
Christendom would once more reappear whole and triumphant- 
So it would have been but for one master tragedy which 
changed the whole scheme. Of the great units of civilization, 
Iberia, Italy, Britain, Giul, one, at this critical moment, turned 
traitor; that province was the province of Britain. The break- 
down of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the 
chief event of all. By a curious accident one province ex- 
traneous to the E npire, Ireland, heroically preserved what the 
other extraneous provinces, the Germanics and Scandinavia, 
were to loose. In spite of the loss of Britain, and cut off by 
that loss from direct succour, Ireland preserved the tradition 
of civilization. It must be my next business to describe the 
way in which Britain failed in the struggle, and, at the hands 
of the King and of a little group of avaricious men, such as 
the Howards and the Cecils, changed for the worse the history 
of Europe. 



MARY'S THOUGHT- 

BY EDWARD F. GARESCHE, S.J. 

When hand in hand they wandered forth 

His mighty world to see, 
What marvels Christ could tell to her 

Of sky and flower and tree ; 
For though He was a tiny child, 

All lore remembered He ! 

But not the world His power had made 
Was Mary's thought and pride ; 

Her little Son walked loving near, 
Tender and trustful- eyed, 

What recked she of earth's fair array 
When heaven was at her side ! 




HENRIK IBSEN. 

BY EDWARD CURRAN. 
II. 

ITH Peer Gynt the poet's work ended, and now 
began that of the prose dramatist. Ibsen ceased 
to be a poet. Mr. Gosse, his English biogra- 
pher tells us that even the dress and manners 
of a poet (for there are such things) ceased in 
1877 when Ibsen became a successful dramatist. His first 
prose drama was entitled The League of Youth, a hit at a po- 
litical party in Norway. The play was soundly hissed, and an 
uproar created on its first performance in Christiania. Its 
center idea is a league founded by a young adventurer who 
raises a cry against the conservative landed and moneyed 
classes. To combat these is his apparent great aim. In re- 
ality he is founding the league to use it as a tool for his own 
political advancement. His scheming after a wife is most en- 
joyable, and Ibsen lands him into such a quandary in the 
end, that nearly all our attention and interest are centered on 
how the young man will wind up his meteoric public career. 
The play is wholesome and clean, yet it has not a single 
noble character in it. Fieldbo is the only one at all ap- 
proaching the humane and high-souled. Considered as a 
drama it lacks coherence, the plot being hidden at times with 
material which seems out of place. Still the play is immeas- 
urably above some others of Ibsen which have been highly 
praised. In Norway The League of Youth will always be 
looked upon as a mile-stone in the road of national progress 
towards the realization of the people's aspirations. 

With this play began the so-called social or Ibsenite 
dramas, which, with the exception of Emperor and Galilean, 
appeared at close intervals during the succeeding nineteen 
years. Patting aside Emperor and Galilean, which came im- 
mediately after The League of Youth, the next drama in the 
series was The Pillars of Society, a fine travesty on the relig- 



i9i i.] HENRIK IBSEN 37 

tous shamming and hypocrisy of those who succeed by ruin- 
ing their fellow-man. Ibsen shows much power of observation 
in his treatment of the society of ladies who meet in conclave 
under the guidance of the village rector to rescue the "Lapsed 
and Lost." The biting sarcasm of the scene is delightful, and 
Ibsen adds to its reality by showing up that special female 
failing, a love of a little gossip about some scandal of which 
they must speak with bated breath. These good ladies meet 
in the house of him who takes the part of an essential pillar 
of society, but whose whole life is based on a lie and a cal- 
umny of his relative whom he has ruined in the eyes of the 
townsfolk. His villainy is further shown up when he demands 
of his honest foreman a deed that is sometimes, but very 
rarely committed to pretend to repair a ship in dock and 
send her on her voyage in a sinking condition. The pharisa- 
ism of the man is gradually shown with more than ordinary 
skill. 

Ibsen makes considerable use of the central idea of Ber- 
ick's love for his little son. And the scene where he learns 
that the child has become a stowaway on the coffin-ship 
which by his orders has put to sea in a storm is splendid. 
The plot is not devoid of a tendency, but a very slight one, 
to what is unclean. One can scarcely say that the play is 
unfit for the stage since there is no grossness of language or 
action; the objectionable portions chiefly referring to a past 
scandal in the town. The young girl, Dina, whose mother 
fell, is well drawn. She revolts against the humbug and simu- 
lated goodness of the people surrounding her, and she longs 
to get among those who are not too good. Another well 
conceived character is Lona, the half-sister of Berick's victim; 
the girl who to help the young fellow, a blackguard in the 
eyes of the world, flaunts society and disappears with him, so 
that she may be his guide and helper through life. Martha, 
too, who hides her love for the same belied young fellow, and 
waits for him long years, and then finally manoeuvres that he 
may marry Dina, is one of the very few examples of a clean, 
good woman created by Ibsen. Among certain sections of 
modern pharisees, whose gospel is "sin, but don't be caught," 
this play will send blushes of shame into the cheeks. The 
drama has its failings, and though it is not a great work it 
may outlive all the other plays of Ibsen. 



38 HENRIK IBSEN [Oct., 

I shall omit to deal with three of the social plays and, 
passing lor an instant over a fourth, The Lady of The Sea, 
shall group together the three most objectionable dramas of 
Ibsen. By doing this the themes may be more easily recog- 
nized. A Doll's House, Ghosts, and Hedda Caller are those 
which have principally given rise to the much-abused terms 
"problem plays" and "Ibsenite." It is well to say bluntly 
that these three plays are unclean and have a decided im- 
moral tone. But such a declaration must not be misunder- 
stood in the sense that Ibsen is a pornographic writer. He is 
not. But he treats of questions which previous to his time 
were looked upon as so objectionable that a black pall should 
be always kept covering them. He withdrew this pall, and 
offered the problems of life to theatre-goers. His problems 
of morality are dull, and in more than one instance stupid. 
We gather more the picture of an animal striving to reason 
on conditions and phases of life than a human being gratify- 
ing desire by words and actions. In some quarters Ibsen has 
been looked upon as a second Shakespeare ; in fact I believe 
that I am not overstating the case when I say that among 
the lower grades of actors the Norwegian ousts the English- 
man. This is inevitable. For where literature is unknown 
and the glamor of stage effect the only end in view the sit- 
uations of Ibsen demand little ability, while those of Shake- 
speare require talent of high order. There is as much com- 
parison between the two dramatists as there is between gold 
leaf and the gold paint of commerce brass filings mixed in 
banana oil. The age in which Shakespeare lived was not a 
very reticent one, and he speaks after the manner of his day. 
To us he is sometimes immoral inasmuch as he uses the lan- 
guage rather common then, but now hidden and reserved. But 
if he does speak out it is with a quickness of thought and a 
turn of idiom that hide the indecency in the brilliancy of 
expression. We pay attention rather to the cleverness of the 
words than to the uncleanness of the meaning. There is none 
of this in Ibsen. He is uniformally dull, and often absurd, in 
his language when he touches on questions of morals. Of 
course when played by a licentious actress Dora, Regina, or 
Hedda could be made vehicles of the grossest vice gilded by 
histrionic cleverness. But with the histrionic tricks of ac- 
tresses I have nothing to do here. Judging only from the 



i9i i.] HENRIK IBSEN 39 

written word these three characters are as unreal and as un- 
natural creations as any purveyor of fiction ever conceived. 

A Doll's House is a curious mixture of the sane and the 
nonsensical. Nora has a loving husband, and three children 
whom she loves after a manner. She is supposed to have 
made a great sacrifice in the past for the love of this hus- 
band. Her conduct as we see it in the play does not admit 
of this possibility. On her own confession she knows nothing 
about religion; her morals are peculiar; her ideas about mar- 
riage not less so ; to her it is a free partnership in a limited 
liability company, and home means house: "I came to live in 
your house," she tells her husband in one place. And when 
she is circumvented by the outcome of her supposed great 
sacrifice, and is rebuked by her husband, she quietly and 
coldly determines on the instant in the presence of her hus- 
band to leave him forever. In the beginning of the play 
Ibsen makes Helmer the husband a booby, now he shows 
him up as a cad, a selfish dishonorable man. So far as his 
conduct stands Nora argues well about their possible future 
life in the house. But the whole situation is unconvincing. 
Nora is only an automaton speaking and acting according to 
Ibsen's commands, and his trick, while it is a splendid piece 
of theatrical surprise, of making her dress in her street clothes, 
give up her wedding ring, and leave the house, is thoroughly 
unreal. Nora gives utterance to ideas which she could never 
understand, and which I doubt very much if Ibsen himself 
quite understood. The only thing certain or human about the 
play is that Nora wants her freedom and she takes it, without 
judge or jury's decision, on the plea of future incompatibility 
of temperament. 

Regina in Ghosts acts in a similar manner, but under dif- 
ferent circumstances. She is also full of the craze for free- 
dom, and is "full of the enjoyment of life," which is the 
Ibsenesque paraphrase of gross immorality. Her relations with 
Engstrand (known to all the world except Mrs. Alving as her 
father) her conversation with him about her dead mother, her 
reference to him as "an unmarried man" for whom it would 
not be correct for her to keep house, are so unnatural and 
brutally revolting that one can hardly suppress the thought 
that the lines were penned by a man suffering from men- 
tal disease. Throughout this thoroughly unwholsome and 



40 HENRIK IBSEN [Oct., 

debasing drama the theories of morality are such as are only 
heard in divorce courts, and we cannot wonder that the Ger- 
man civil authorities forbade a public performance of the play 
in 1887. There is not a single redeeming quality in the 
drama. It is depressing, dull, immoral, and is lacking in in- 
terest. There is vehemence of diction in a couple of places, 
but this does not make up for the absence of a plot. To say 
that the madness of Oswald in the final scene, and the as- 
sumed murder of her own child by Mrs. Alving are sufficient 
to give the basis of a plot is drawing a line so fine that none 
but Ibsen's mystical interpreters will be able to find it. Hered- 
ity is the pivot on which the narrative dialogues turn. Os- 
wald's father was immoral; he was the father of Regina (the 
mother being his housemaid) and Oswald inherits softening of 
the brain from this rake of a father. 

What a gathering of characters we have in this work ! 
Engstrand suggests plainly to Regina, the daughter of his 
wife, that she should come with him and become a street 
woman; Oswald is simply dead to any distinction between 
what is moral and what is unlawful; Mrs. Alving, his mother, 
ran away in former years from her home and cffered to be- 
come the mistress of the minister of the place; Regina throws 
up all and leaves to go out into the world "to erjoy life." 

In the third drama of this group we have Hedda Gabler, 
which is, if possible, a more debasing work. It is not easy 
to state briefly the outline of this play, as it is more involved 
than either of the preceding. Roughly, it may be said that 
the theft of a manuscript-book is the centre around which the 
plot revolves. Hedda, the daughter of a general, marries 
Tesman, a professor and author. Previous to her marriage she 
had some amatory relations with Lovborg, and after her hon- 
eymoon she enters into an intrigue, a "triple alliance," with 
a judge who visits the house. Lovborg, who had been a con- 
firmed drunkard, comes upon the scene again. He has already 
published a successful book, and has nearly finished another, 
which he reads to Tesman. The latter becomes tinged with 
jealousy. Hedda urges on Lovborg to break his temperance 
pledge, and in a drunken spree which follows he loses his 
manuscript. It is picked up by Tesman, and next falls into 
the hands of Hedda, who callously burns it, Lovborg, in great 
distress over the loss of the manuscript, calls to see Htdda, 



19 1 1.] HENRIK IBSEN 41 

and she hands him a pistol to go and kill himself. Events not 
turning out as she had wished she blows out her own brains. 

It is indeed a nasty plot, and both narrative and action 
are worse. If there were many Heddas in this world it would 
be a sad place to live in. Fortunately there are not; for if 
all the criminal resorts of females could be scoured there would 
not be found among poor fallen womenfolk two Hedda Gab- 
lers. Hedda is not a woman; she is a fiend. She has been 
compared to lago. But the villain of Othello bears no rela- 
tionship to the strumpet of Ibsen's brain. At the very begin- 
ning Shakespeare is careful to let us know that lago hates 
both Othello and Cassio, who had supplanted him ; and it is 
whilst working to destroy the latter, and to ruin the happiness 
of Othello's married life with a view to his own future hap- 
piness arising out of such infelicity that lago acts. Hedda's 
case is altogether different. Lovborg and she have kindred 
ideas of love, and are attracted to each other by this similar- 
ity of view. Yet she eggs him on to his ruin, her plea being : 
" I wish for once in my life to have power over the fate of 
a human being"; and in cold blood she directs him to the 
final step. Shakespeare could never create such a wanton. 
He has his irail females, not wanting in strong vice, but al- 
ways in some way or other they have something humane 
about them. Ibsen makes Hedda a liar, a thief, a strumpet, 
a cheat, a murderer, a suicide. One may search all kinds of 
fiction, and nothing lower than Hedda Gabler will be found. 
To have her paraded on the stage before young women is 
only another way of preaching prostitution in private life, and 
teaching the best and surest ways to succeed without being 
caught. The work is a disgrace to the modern stage, and is 
undeserving of being ranked as literature. 

Of Ibsen's remaining plays, written between 1888 and his 
death, one, When We Dead Awaken, may be dismissed without 
comment as an inartistic series of dialogues of an indecent 
type. The Lady of the Sea, is, on the other hand, a clean, 
interesting work, with a strange phase of human thought dom- 
inating the life of Ellida (the Lady), the young woman whose 
early life was spent in solitude with her father on a lonely 
lighthouse. In this play Ibsen approaches more than any 
place else making his characters human beings with real hearts 
palpitating in them, and not psychological ideas dressed up 



42 HENRIK IBSEN [Oct., 

in clothes and stalking a stage. Bolette is a good, kind, 
generous girl; her only fault, perhaps, is her consideration in 
marrying simply because her livelihood may be assured. Her 
sister Hilda is a heedless girl, also kind at heart, but masking 
it by her cruelty of tongue. The Lady of the Sea, Ellida, is 
also a good creation. And her husband would be faultless 
were it not for his weakness in facing a difficulty. 

Succeeding the Lady of the Sea came The Master Builder, 
over which there has been considerable discussion. Its appear- 
ance was in a sense disastrous to Ibsen's influence in some 
quarters. Even his greatest admirers drew the line at the 
several absurdities which are so evident in this work. To dis- 
count such criticisms another group of the dramatist's friends 
began to see in the play a mysticism or symbolism, which, of 
course, is a grand bait for ignorant people. There is not a 
shred of anything of the sort in the play. Solness, the Master 
Builder, after ruining a man, takes him into bis employ as a 
paid assistant, and next does everything possible to crush out 
the budding genius [of the old broken-down man's son. To 
keep the latter from setting up in business on his own account, 
Solness takes into his office the young man's fiancee as book- 
keeper, and then weans her heart from the young fellow. 
There is here the basis for a capital drama, were it not that 
Ibsen's craze for mentally affected people cause him to picture 
Solness as a rogue, developing rapidly as the play proceeds, 
into a simpleton with criminal desires. His wife is an out-and- 
out fool. A sane woman would never dream of holding higher 
in her esteem an old silk dress, a few jewels and dolls than 
her two children, who died in their infancy, owing to the flight 
she had to take for her and their lives from a burning build- 
ing. A woman who was once a mother and now childless 
could hardly be guilty of such action. Mrs. Solness talks in 
the coldest manner about the death of her children, as some- 
thing which should have happened. But of her dolls, which 
she lost when her children died, it was otherwise. 

MRS. SOLNESS. (Choking -with tears,') I had nine lovely 
dolls. 

HILDA. And they were burnt too ? 

MRS. SOLNESS. All of them. Oh, it was hard so hard 
for me. 

The Hilda of this play has now become one of the great 



i9i i.] HENRIK IBSEN 43 

female characters of Ibsen's works, wherewith actresses attempt 
to show their powers of delineating the fickleness and the 
passion of women. Hilda is something like a pirated edition 
of Hedda Gabler. She has nearly all the faults of Hedda, but 
is not so gross. For a young girl, who has just left home to 
see the world, or to come " into her kingdom," which is a 
place or state (we are left uninformed) of immorality, she is 
amazingly well prepared by her nasty, double-meaning phrases. 
However, she is not entirely wanting in some good points, 
and in this she differs from Hedda. They agree in their 
methods of dealing with their lovers. Hedda drives Lovborg 
to his death; Hilda urges Solness to his. Some of the situ- 
ations in the play are simply preposterous, and would ruin the 
chances of an unknown playwright who would be so foolish 
as to introduce them into his first attempt. 

The fourth of this period, and the second last of Ibsen's 
plays in chronological order is John Gabriel Borkman. It is 
the history of a defaulting bank manager. Of all Ibsen's works 
I like this best, as it contains, according to my ideas, his two 
most finely conceived and most consistently worked-out char- 
acters John Borkman and his wife. Borkman is a man with 
one great idea, which has lured him on to destruction. Money 
is all he wants and he will do great things for humanity. 
Not getting the wherewith to work these marvels he uses the 
money of the bank, and a few years in prison is the result. 
His eternal tramping up and down in the gallery above his 
wife's room strikes me as a splendid dramatic incident in the 
play, as it is also perfectly natural for a man in his state of 
mind. It lends an atmosphere of mystery and fear to the 
opening of the play, and prepares us for the great scene in 
the gallery. Still there are some points in the construction 
that could be improved. The ending is far-fetched in the sud- 
denness of Borkman's death, as well as the reconciliation of 
the sisters. But his determination to remain out in the snow 
is true to life, though on the stage it has the bad effect of 
provoking the onlooker, and therefore detracts from the move- 
ment of the action. Each scene in the play is powerfully 
done, with the exception of that in the third act, where every- 
thing appears so unhinged that one is tempted to think that 
the characters are being packed on the stage by Ibsen, so that 
he may get out of a corner in which he finds himself. 



44 HENRIK IBSEN [Oct., 

Borkman's wife can be summed up as a monument of self- 
ishness. " Think of me," is her cry and motto through life. 
She is certainly well drawn. Foldal, the unsuccessful poet, is 
also very near life; and Ibsen takes advantage of his delusion 
about a vocation and his bitterness over his failure in life, to 
annunciate the Ibsenesque doctrine on friendship. 

BORKMAN. There we've been all the time deceiving each 
other. And perhaps deceiving ourselves both of us. 

FOLDAL, Bat isn't that just the essence of friendship, 
John Gabriel ? 

BORKMAN. (Smiling bitterly.} Yes, you're right there. 
Friendship means deception. I've learnt that once befoie. 

It may be seen from this rapid survey of Iben's dramas 
that what are termed "problem plays" are nothing more than 
a representation on the stage of the hallucinations of immoral 
women regarding their position in the world. The noble and 
elevating side of life; all that goes to make family happiness, 
or to help on the general weal of the state, is absent from 
these plays. What Ibsen sets down as a problem in morality 
was settled thousands of years ago on Mount Sinai. What he 
attempts to picture as a problem in social order has been 
always and will be always confined to those portions of man- 
kind who are ostracized from the good and the pure. What 
he is actually attempting under a false guise is the overturn- 
ing of all order. Let Ibsenism loose and marriage will no 
longer be a tie binding for life; it will be only an arrange- 
ment like that adopted in modern Egypt by abandoned women; 
a companionship for a time, and then the informal " I divorce 
you " from the lips of one partner rends the tie. Ibsenism 
means a leveling down, and nothing in the shape of leveling 
up. If all his poems and plays be examined it will be found 
that he has not created a truly noble woman. Whenever he 
does attempt to show a good woman his works drops to a low 
standard. It is more his forte for women of loose morals than 
anything else that caused certain dramatists to push him be- 
fore the public. He would turn the first sod, and thus open 
up a road for more glaring and daring exhibitions of wanton- 
ness. Of course there was the cry that Ibsen was the true 
dramatist of all times, for he broke with the traditions of the 
Scribi school of play-construction which was beginning to 
become too heavy for the smaller fry of dramatists. The old 



i9i i.] HENRIK IBSEN 45 

school had its faults, but it took an enormous amount of 
theatrical experience and no little skill to heap on the accu- 
mulating effects required for a successful drama in its style. 
Naturalness was not always the result. But it is very doubt- 
ful if the true end of drama is simply to repeat on the stage 
the happenings of every-day life, The sordidness of life, the 
frailties of man must be modified and made suitable for a 
place where mental recreation is the first and chief thing 
sought for. 

Monstrosities, whether physical or moral, are always in the 
world, and it is only a falsehood to present such as the nor- 
mal factors of life. Yet this is what Ibsen does. His women 
are not women. They are only vicious children who have 
learned the practices of vice, who are stubborn in their petty 
ideas, and who recognize no parental or moral authority. 
Dress up a few of these undeveloped criminals in the finery 
and flounces of a woman, and you have an Ibsenerque Nora, 
Maia, Regina, Hilda, or Hedda. Children are wayward ; so 
are these characters. Children get fixed in their minds silly 
ideas which all the world cannot change ; these characters 
differ in no way from such. 

Rubek, the husband of Maia, jestingly told her one day 
that he would take her to the top of a mountain and show 
her all the world. Maia harps on these words, and finally 
pairs off with another man to see that glory. Hilda in The 
Master Builder leaves parents and home because Solness told 
her when she was quite a child that he would make her a 
princess. She comes to his house to live with him, though 
she knew him to be married, in order that she may enjoy his 
kingdom. Selma, who is not however immoral, also pettishly 
decides on leaving her husband on the flimsiest of pretexts. 
Regina is told in good humor one day by Oswald that he will 
take her to Paris so that she may see the world, and the idea 
clings to her so much that she leaves her place and goes out 
to add herself to the list oi the fallen. Ellida remembers the 
eyes of the stranger to whom she had betrothed herself in 
former years, and keeps her husband in an agony of suspense 
as to whether or not she will leave him to go with the sailor. 

This deliberate departure from home and kindred, and the 
sham cry for "freedom" is reiterated by Hilda, Solveig, Mrs. 
Alving, Agnes, Maia, Nora, Mrs. Elvsted. The latter packs up 



46 HENRIK IBSEN [Oct., 

and goes off with the tutor of her step-children. Mrs. Alving 
in her past life left all and offered herself to another man. 
Agnes, after her betrothal to Edjar cuts herself free from him 
and takes up with Brand to whom she is a total stranger. 
Maia wants her freedom, and takes it; her husband taking 
his and at the same time the companionship of his old model 
of whose past shady life we are not left in doubt by Ibsen. 
Hilda, as we have just seen is ready to consort with a mar- 
ried man. Solveig is as ready to go with Peer Gynt. Ellida 
and Agnes are the only ones who, obtaining their choice of 
freedom, turn it to good account. We cannot be surprised, 
when we hear of this kind of freedom and independence of 
action, to meet with peculiar ideas of marriage. Maia, Nora, 
and Hedda promulgate these ideas fully by their filthy sug- 
gestive expressions. If Ibsen's other women have not the 
same loose notions of the married state, they enter it through 
sordid reasons. Ibsen seems to have been unable to create a 
pure, good, noble woman ; one whose influence would help to 
uplift the minds and lives of other people. 

His men are not a whit better. Ibsen is indeed no friend 
of his fellow-countrymen, for he makes them out to be fools, 
scoundrels, hypocrites, schemers, when they are not immoral 
or mad. Oswald, Solness, Borkman are sheer madmen ; the 
latter two having method in their madness. They, with Brats- 
berg and Monsen in The League of Youth, and Bernick have 
ruined other men, yet with an assumed innocence fail to see 
how they could have avoided the crime. Add to these the 
two weaklings Tesman and Helmer ; the dipsomaniac Lov- 
borg; the mean, petty, jealous Rank and Brack; hypocrites 
like Stensgard and Ejnar, and what we have left of Ibsen's 
men are not worth speaking of. He has only one good, con- 
sistent man in all his plays, Fieldbo in The League of Youth. 

The question that naturally arises out of a study of Ibsen's 
works is: "shall he live?" If we were to become subservi- 
ent to the prevailing opinions of those who follow the man- 
dates of a few of his more insistent admirers, we should have 
to add him without any more ado to the list of immortals. 
But an impartial opinion derived solely from his dramas and 
poems leads to something not quite in agreement with such 
rapid promotion to fame. At present there is a positive 
mania for unusual treatment of delicate subjects. This ccmes 



i9i i.] HENRIK IBSEN 47 

from the disturbed moral condition of society, which again is 
the result of the ever-broadening tendencies of non-Catholic 
forms of religion. The special effort made is so to translate 
" freedom " as to suit every individual taste. Whatever helps 
to break the bonds of family life, or to give a coloring of de- 
cency to a violation of all moral laws, will be received en- 
thusiastically. Such is given with greater force in the theatre 
where all the senses are appealed to. As Ibsen is there the 
apostle of moral anarchy he is raised on a high pedestal by 
those who smile knowingly at all forms of revealed religion, 
as well as by those who wish to give reign to their passions 
but are held in check by the conventional laws of society. 
He is therefore held up for the esteem of mankind. He is 
spoken of as one of the greatest men in literature. But even 
amongst his most ardent friends adverse criticism of wotks 
which they formerly praised is not wanting. He was un- 
doubtedly a man of talent, and it may possibly happen that 
he will have some sway in dramatic circles for a decade or 
so, but gradually and assuredly he will disappear, and come 
to be looked upon as nothing better than a link with the 
past. In future years Peer Gynt, The Pillars of Society, and 
John Gabriel Borkman may be looked into through the mere 
curiosity of learning what and how the man wrote. His so- 
called symbolic works will die the death. Symbolism or mys- 
ticism is a will-o'-the-wisp to those whose religious principles 
are not the healthiest. For them any witless stuff provided 
it be couched in Delphic terms is welcomed with enthusiasm. 
But they must also have novelty, and as the new is always 
being coined, Ibsen's poor mysticism will quickly grow hoary 
and be put into that grave where many a man's work goes: 
oblivion. 

(THE END.) 




SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS. 

BY ALLEN S. WILL.' 

HEN we speak of Cardinal Gibbons, we instinc- 
tively think of him with the deepest reverence, 
affection and admiration. That is not only the 
feeling of Catholics; it is the sentiment of 
practically all Americans. What, then, are the 
prominent characteristics of the exalted churchman who is 
regarded with this almost unique esteem by his fellow coun- 
trymen ? 

Those who know him best are aware that it is impossible 
to see all of his strong traits except after long and close ob- 
servation. Indeed, men who have had the privilege oi his 
acquaintance for years are not infrequently impressed by some 
quality in his fibre which had been previously unknown to 
them, because the occasion for bringing it to the surface had 
not arisen. The general lines of his character are as clearly 
defined as the demarcations of a map, but he has the Ameri- 
can gift of versatility to such a remarkable degree, that no 
matter in what situation he may be thrown, he seems the man 
for the occasion. This produces an impression that he is con- 
stantly appearing in a new light, and yet the same light, and 
illustrates the extraordinary extent of the resources with which 
Providence has endowed him. Let us take a glance at some 
of the most striking things that stand out in the varied land- 
scape of his life and character. 

A quality which underlies everything else is his devotion 
to the primary, spiritual duties of his calling. He is first of 
all the priest, laboring in season and out of season for the 
salvation of souls offering Mass, preaching, confirming bap- 
tizing, consoling the sick, officiating at the sacrament of mar- 
riage, presiding at funerals, hearing confessions, paying pas- 
toral calls. No duty that may fall to the lot of a parish 
clergyman is so humble that he is not ready to perform it. 
His chief delight in the great round of labor that he under- 

* Author of the Life of Cardinal Gibbans, by John Murphy Co., Baltimore. 



igii.] CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS 49 

takes, is in the portion of it which is purely apostolic. This 
eminent churchman, whose influence stretches around the 
world, who is a participant in so many things that shape the 
course of the human race, is a fountain of inspiration to piety 
for all who come in contact with him. He would rather be 
instrumental in making a convert than in framing a canon for 
the Church, or in taking part in some event that might shine 
brilliantly in the light of earthly glory. The simpler things 
are those which appeal most to him. He will make a child 
happy, and bestow a word of cheer that will lift an older 
person over a rocky place in the steep path of life; but the 
next moment he will be ready to battle against some wrong 
with all the intensity of a powerful nature, and, if need be, 
to improve the great who may be responsible for it. 

I have never seen or heard of a clergyman who excels 
htm in the constancy and fervor of his devotions. These 
consume several hours of every day, and nothing is per- 
mitted to interfere with them. He begins reading the dif- 
ferent parts of his office punctually almost to the minute, ard 
his constant poring over the Scriptures is a habit that has 
lasted him since seminary days. So familiar with the Bible is 
he that he can clothe his ordinary thoughts in its language, 
and not infrequently he does so. 

We hear much now and then, of "old fashioned religion." 
If this means the simple and all-embracing piety of the Gos- 
pel, the Cardinal is an example of it that would be hard to 
equal. With him it is interwoven in every fibre of his nature, 
every act of his life. It shuns sham, sensationalism and arti- 
ficiality and is the most natural and real thing in the world. 
He is a bulwark of the Faith, and if any one attacks the 
essentials of Christianity, as Edison did a few months ago 
when he denied the immortality of the soul, the Cardinal be- 
comes the champion who meets the assault and, triumphantly, 
turns it into a rout. 

Next in order of the Cardinal's more pronounced charac- 
teristics is his patriotism. Like his religion, it sits upon him 
naturally. He loves America and has faith in it; that is the 
whole story. In the days of the "A. P. A," now happily 
past, hostile critics turned a microscope on his patriotism, but 
found no flaw in it. If any American ever proved devotion 
to country, he has done so. What high courage it took to 
VOL. xciv. 4 



50 CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

make his famous speech in Rome March, 25, 1887, when he 
discussed the relations between Church and State in the 
United States! He had just received the red hat, and the 
world was ready to listen to him. Standing in his titular 
Church, the ancient temple of Santa Maria in Trastevere, he 
proclaimed that in the United States there was "liberty with- 
out license, and authority without despotism"; and "that for 
the great progress of the Catholic Church in America we 
are indebted, under God and the fostering care of the Holy 
See, to the civic liberty we enjoy in our enlightened Re- 
public." None had been willing to believe this, but, suddenly 
everybody believed it. Europe understands America now, as 
never before; and the greatest influence in bringing this 
about was the Cardinal's speech on that notable occasion. It 
seemed timed, as by an act of Providence, for the exact mo- 
ment when it would produce the most powerful, impression, 
From that day to this he has been recognized on all sides as 
a representative American in the best sense of the word. 

About the same time he was successful in his protracted 
struggle to prevent the Knights of Labor from being put on 
the list of organizations forbidden by the Church. For this 
he was acclaimed by the great army of toilers throughout the 
world, and in the United States, particularly, it stamped him 
as a champion of the people. On his return from Rome, his 
country, figuratively speaking, took him to its heart and no 
great public occasion in the land which he loves so well has 
since been complete without him. Almost immediately he was 
invited to offer prayer at the celebration, in Philadelphia, of the 
centennial of the constitution; soon afterward he was instru- 
mental in forwarding from President Cleveland, as a jubilee 
gift to Leo XIII., a copy of that same constitution, superbly 
bound. He became the friend of Presidents, and they his 
friends. His aid was freely lent to great refoirrif, such as the 
abolition of the Louisiana lottery, which he was chiefly instru- 
mental in crushing after the failure of protracted and deter- 
mined efforts by others. In his own Baltimore and Maryland, 
he has long since occupied, by common consent, the place of 
foremost citizen, whose aid is sought and never refused in 
movements for the social and material welfare of his neigh- 
bors. 

There are different kinds of patriotism, and it may be in- 



CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS 51 

teresting to us to consider of what kind is that which is so 
pronounced a trait oi Cardinal Gibbons. It consists chiefly of 
two things faith and service. He believes in his country, 
and strives to help her, by example and precept, to attain the 
glorious destiny which he believes is to be hers. In his re- 
cent speech at the great civic celebration held in Baltimore 
in honor of his jubilee he said: 

Ever since I entered the sacred ministry, my aim has been 
to make those over whom I exerted any influence not only 
more upright Christians but also more loyal citizens ; for the 
most faithful Christian makes the best citizen. I consider the 
Republic of the United States one of the most precious heir- 
looms ever bestowed on mankind down the ages, and that it is 
the duty, and should be the delight of every citizen to 
strengthen and perpetuate our government by the observance 
of its laws and by the integrity of his private life. 

His is practical patriotism. While he praises his country 
and holds up her form of government as a splendid example, 
he reprehends national faults as often as he bestows laudation. 
He has been unsparing in his condemnation of ballot frauds, 
of the lax and dilatory practices of the courts, of the shame- 
ful divorce laws in some of the states, and other evils that 
have afflicted the body politic. His voice is always on the 
side of enlightened and progressive citizenship, and he 
staunchly upholds constituted authority. Socialism and an- 
archy find in him an uncompromising and watchful foe. But 
through it all is the thread of trust in the future, of confi- 
dence in the ability of the American people, under the 
American constitution, to right their wrongs by orderly 
means. 

He hoped that the Spanish war might be averted; but 
when it began, he threw in his lot ardently with his country 
and prayed for a speedy and happy issue of the conflict. 
He has urged the teaching of history and civics in the 
parochial schools and the study of the lives of great Ameri- 
cans as an inspiration to the young. We should bear in mind 
that all this has been done without soiling the robe of a 
prince of the Church. As Archbishop Ireland exclaimed in 
his wonderful sermon on " The Church and the Age," at the 
silver jubilee celebration of the Cardinal's episcopacy : " Car- 



52 CHARACTERISTICS OP CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

dinal Gibbons, the most outspoken of Catholics, the most 
loyal co-laborer of the Pope of Rome, is the American of 
Americans ! " 

No churchman ever received such a spontaneous tribute 
from his fellow countrymen as was bestowed on him at the 
celebration in Baltimore last June. To enumerate those who 
honored him on that occasion would almost seem like a vision 
of the imagination had not 20,000 persons been there to see 
that it was indeed reality. On the stage were President Taft, 
Vice-President Sherman, Ex-President Roosevelt, Chief Justice 
White, Speaker Clark, Ex-Speaker Cannon, a host of members 
of both houses of Congress, Governor Crothers, of Maryland, 
Mayor Preston, of Baltimore, Ambassador Bryce, and many 
others who represented the public opinion of the country. 
President Taft remarked : " What we are especially delighted 
to see confirmed in him is the entire consistency which he has 
demonstrated between earnest and single-minded patriotism on 
the one hand, and sincere devotion to his Church on the 
other." Said Ex-President Roosevelt: " The Cardinal through- 
out his life has devoted himself to the service of the Amer- 
ican people." Here is the fruit of the tree. The labors of a 
long life have not been in vain. 

It is undeniable that the people have been inclined to be 
resentful of the participation of clergymen in secular affairs, 
and it has remained for a Catholic of Catholics to teach the 
lesson of how it ought to be done. The Cardinal has illus- 
trated in his own life a thousand times more patriotism than 
he has preached. Take away every word he has said on the 
subject, and his great record of conduct and service remains 
a pattern for every churchman and every American, a les- 
son for this generation and for the generations to be. 

Another prominent characteristic of Cardinal Gibbons is his 
mingling in the every day life of the people, particularly of 
the community in which he lives. This extends the zone of 
his good influence to tens of thousands who might never be 
able otherwise to come within reach of it. How natural it is 
for a priest or bishop, engrossed with his own special duties, 
to get out of touch with the world, perhaps even to hold 
aloof from it ! But the Cardinal is not too much weighed 
down with his tremendous burdens to be "all things to all 



men." 



i9ii.] CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS 53 

On the streets of Baltimore, where he takes long walks for 
exercise, he is the best known figure. It is interesting, even 
amazing, to observe him as he moves, cane in hand, at that 
fast pace which has tired out many a good pedestrian who 
has essayed to follow him. He is constantly being saluted 
and raising his hat in return. Sometimes, on the busiest thor- 
oughfares, it seems as if he speaks to fully one-third of those 
whom he meets. He apparently never forgets a face and tht 
range of his acquaintance is a constant source of wonder to 
those who observe him. He knows not only the people, but 
the streets, the buildings every object seems familiar to him. 
Most surprising of all, a large proportion of those with whom 
he comes in contact have received some help or inspiration 
from him, and appear to ftel grateful for it. 

Who can enumerate the homes into which he has brought 
light, the hearts which have been uplifted by his aid or coun- 
sel ! He knows something about each person that establishes 
a direct bond and nothing seems to slip from the tenacious 
grasp of his memory. Dignified and self-contained at all 
times, he is, nevertheless, the simple, kindly man, beloved 
as well as revered by his neighbors. 

If Baltimore or Maryland is to do anything especially im- 
portant, one of the first thoughts is of the Cardinal. His 
help must be sought and, if the object is a worthy one, none 
doubts that it will be given. For patriotic meetings, reform 
movements, civic enterprises of magnitude he is considered 
indispensable. When he attends one of these gatherings, he 
seems to be personally acquainted with every one there. He 
knows the young as well as the old, and calls the children by 
name. 

It is worth a long journey to attend one of the New Year 
receptions which he customarily holds on the first Sunday of 
every January. After High Mass, he takes his position in 
one of the parlors of his residence and lo, it seems as if the 
whole city is at his doors 1 The governor and mayor are 
usually there, as well as living ex-governors and ex- mayors 
and hundreds of others prominent in the public life of the 
community. No other personality in Maryland could be the 
center of such a throng. But listen ! As the long line passes, 
hear the affectionate and reverent words of greeting, the 
exchange of reminiscence, the play of good-natured wit and 



54 CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

try to think how one man could have all these friends, bound 
to him, evidently, by powerful ties. No need to wonder any 
longer whether a churchman can be in and of the people 
here is a demonstration that he can be, and that he can exer- 
cise a more potent influence over men than any civil officer 
invested with authority derived from the state. 

An enumeration of the positive traits of Cardinal Gibbons 
which does not include his broad toleration among the first 
of them would present an unfaithful picture. It pervades the 
whole spirit of his life-work and is based on a genuine charity 
that seems to include the world in its scope. Although he is 
"the most outspoken of Catholics," as Archbishop Ireland 
said of him, he is the foremost representative, in American 
church life, of the brotherhood of man. His See of Baltimore 
is the one whose roots were planted at St. Mary's in 1634, 
when the Catholic Calverts established the first colony in the 
Western Hemisphere in which there was liberty of conscience 
for all men. The Cardinal remembers this, and is proud of it; 
and he illustrates in his own life, more than any other of his 
fellow countrymen, the sublime spirit which animated the 
founders of Maryland. The wonderful civic celebration in his 
honor, to which previous allusion has been made, was organ- 
ized by Protestants, who largely predominated among the 
speakers and the audience. Lpok on this picture and then on 
the situation in France and Spain and Portugal. 

In the United States, for the first time in an English- 
speaking country since the time of Henry VIII., the Catholic 
Church has everywhere won a ready, indeed, a sympathetic 
hearing. It is the work of Cardinal Gibbons, chiefly, which 
has produced this amazing change. Men can remember when 
the Know-Nothing fever throbbed in the veins of a large part 
of the American people, and when the "A. P. A." planted 
the weed of prejudice from Maine to Texas. The Church has 
replaced doubt with trust. All this has been accomplished 
without the slightest fraction of modification of the Cardinal's 
orthodoxy and without ostentatious overture or effort. He 
does not speak ill of the followers of any religious belief, and 
is ready to co-operate in public affairs with all his fellow- 
countrymen in the perfect equality of American citizenship. 
They believe in him and he in them. As a churchman, his 
work is to spread the Gospel and save souls. How well he 



i.] CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS 55 

has performed it! Think of the immense growth of the Catho- 
lic Church in the United States since he became a Bishop in 
1868. He believed, from the first, that the best way to enable 
the Church to pursue her divine mission, unhampered by preju- 
dice or other obstacle, was to dispel the cloud of misunder- 
standing that obscured her path. If she could be presented 
to the American people in her proper light, he had no doubt 
of the result ; there would be a rich harvest to be reaped by 
her devoted clergy among millions of people from whom she 
had been practically shut out. Experience has amply confirmed 
the soundness of this view. Perhaps it was fortunate that the 
Cardinal's first bishopric was in North Carolina, a state in 
which there were then but eight hundred Catholics. He was 
full of youthful vigor the youngest member of the hierarchy 
and brimming over with constructive projects. Were his 
plans to wither, or to find fruition ? Stern necessity helped to 
teach him a way to carry them out. This apostle of rock- 
ribbed faith gave no offense to sincere men who differed from 
him in conviction. He made friends of all his neighbors ; 
wherever he could find a hall in which to preach, the founda- 
tion of a Catholic Church was likely to follow soon. As he 
traveled on his missionary journeys, the leading Protestant 
people received him in their homes as an honored guest and 
sometimes contributed of their means to plant firmly the be- 
ginnings of the Catholic faith in their communities. Contact 
of this sort strengthened the young Bishop's fervent devotion 
to his own Church, for if there is any firmer Catholic than 
he, I have yet to see one ; but it also broadened his toleration 
and showed him that the distrust which had existed so long 
could be removed. 

In Virginia, to which field he was transferred, he had to 
labor again among a population predominantly Protestant and 
affected not a little by the prejudice which remained from 
colonial days. His mission was to calm antagonistic opinion, 
in order to prepare the soil for the seed which he had come 
to sow, and he went about the task with rare discretion as 
well as determination. In Baltimore he is as much beloved 
by Protestants as by Catholics, who find not infrequently in 
his sermons spiritual food more suited to them than is given 
by their own ministers. 

A story is told of an incident which occurred while he was 



56 CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

taking one of his customary walks with a friend from another 
city. Taey passed the door of a beautiful church, from which 
the congregation was emerging. The Cardinal was saluted by 
so many of the worshippers, and gave so many salutes in turn, 
that his companion remarked : 

"You seem to be well acquainted in this parish." 
" A.h," was the reply, " these are our Episcopalian friends! " 
The result of his enlightened attitude may be stated thus, 
in general terms : A Catholic clergyman now has a free field 
for his labors in any American parish in which he may be 
stationed, although formerly he found the tone of a Protestant 
community characteristically hostile ; the attitude of the officers 
of the national, state, and local governments is one of almost 
uniform friendliness; a Catholic may aspire to any civic position 
with little or no fear of prejudice; and the total communicant 
membership of the Church is leaping by hundreds of thous- 
ands. As far as the Catholic Church in America is concerned, 
the Cardinal has created almost a new atmosphere for her. 
He has thoroughly identified her with the institutions of his 
country and has won her the love of a vast host of its people 
who might have been repelled by different methods. 

Scitl another trait of the Cardinal is the wide scope of his 
activity the tremendous sweep of his aspiration and effort. 
If there is any particular weakness of which the average church- 
man is in danger, it is narrowness; but there is a danger, too, 
in reaching too far, and one may trespass on territory where 
his presence may not be recognized as appropriate. The Car- 
dinal understands how to balance these two considerations 
perfectly, and %as given an example that may be imitated 
with profit throughout the world. He feels that anything 
which concerns men, concerns him ; but he also understands 
how to go about his task with entire fidelity to his duty as a 
minister of the Gospel. No one, for instance, ever called him 
sensational, although he has denounced public evils in and out 
of the pulpit more often, perhaps, than any other American. 
His guidance is so sound, his reproof so well administered, 
his sincerity so evident, that none can doubt. He seems to 
get the right gauge of everything that is going on and seizes 
the opportune time to speak or act. 

tc is astonishing that he finds time for all his varied labors. 
He is one of the foremost American authors, and his books 



19 1 1.] CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS 57 

are all about religion, or topics growing out of it. He is es- 
pecially interested in education, and the Catholic University 
of America at which a beautiful memorial hall is to perpetu- 
ate his name and jubilee has been the favotite project of his 
life. He is a frequent visitor to schools and colleges in his 
diocese and elsewhere, taking a keen and practical interest in 
what they do and ought to do. As a sociological reformer of 
the best type, he is one of the first in America, contributing 
by his time and efforts to multiplying and directing the activ- 
ities of institutions devoted to orphans, the poor, the insane, 
the wayward. As a result of his guidance, the reformatory in- 
stitutions in the diocese of Baltimore are without superiors 
anywhere. 

He is a student of history and civics, and is always at 
home in the wide range of contemporary literature. When 
thrown in any company, he can talk with intimate knowledge 
of the special concerns of those who are assembled. Possessed 
of this broad equipment, he can open the door to every heart. 
His sympathies are as wide as humanity itself. 

The Cardinal's gifts as a preacher would have made him 
famous had he been without other marks of distinction. He 
possesses a clear, bell-like voice, almost perfectly modulated, 
and capable, even at the age of 77 years, of filling the largest 
church or hall. He does not use the ordinary arts of the 
orator, but aims rather to present his ideas with such sim- 
plicity of word and gesture, that they will strike home in 
the most effective way. Distinctness of enunciation is one of 
his most agreeable qualities in the pulpit, which is the arena 
of so much poor elocution in these times. A remarkable mag- 
netism of manner attracts the attention of the bearer at the 
outset and holds it without effort to the end. The Cardinal's 
memory is so extraordinary that he seldom refers to manu- 
script. 

If I should seek to describe his preaching in a word, I 
would say that it is fascinating. He does not complicate a 
subject by digression, but unfolds his virile ideas in logical, 
orderly sequence, so that one seems to melt into another; 
most important of all, he has something to say before he un- 
dertakes to say it. The sermons which he delivers on the first 
Sunday in the month in the Baltimore Cathedral are listened 
to by congregations which pack that large and beautiful edi- 



58 CHARACTERISTICS OF CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct. 

fice, and many non-Catholics are always present. They are 
Gospel sermons in the best sense of the word, and I have 
never heard of one which was not appropriate to the time and 
place. Even when they treat of distinctively Catholic doctrines, 
they give no offence to others. 

As an extemporaneous speaker outside of church, the Car- 
dinal is unsurpassed in the readiness and charm of his utter- 
ances. He has the happy faculty of saying the right thing at 
the right time, but always there is the touch of the church- 
man something that rings of his calling and exercises a good 
influence on his hearers. He usually begins with a phrase or 
two that puts him in intimate touch with the spirit of the oc- 
casion and its principal figures, and his address is always 
voted the " hit of the day." 

Of (the administrative gifts that are so necessary to the 
successful transaction of the great duties which have fallen to 
his lot, the Cardinal is abundantly possessed. Out of our 
American life, there has been recently born a new occupation 
that of " engineer of efficiency." This phrase fits the Cardi- 
nal perfectly. Some men can plan and some can execute, but 
he can do both. Had he chosen some other career than that 
of a churchman, I believe that his labors would have been 
crowned with equal success. His conspicuous ability has been 
devoted to the cause of religion, with a single-minded purpose 
that has stamped him as the type and pattern of the "Am- 
bassador of Christ." 




ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS. 

BY MICHAEL HENRY LUCEY. PH.D. 

[HE Catholic parish school system is a natural 
growth. Catholic schools sprang from local 
needs, and were not forced on the people from 
above by their ecclesiastical superiors. When 
the first school, St. Peter's, was established, over 
one hundred years ago, the Catholic laity through a board of 
trustees elected by them managed the temporal affairs of the 
parish. While it is true that Bishop Carroll advocated the 
establishment of a school, yet this would have had very little 
effect had not the people themselves felt the necessity of one. 
In those days the lay trustees ran things with a high hand. 
They chose their own pastors, discharged them at will, and 
resented the interference of Bishop Carroll when he sought 
to interfere with this practice. The parish school, when 
founded then, expressed the needs of the people themselves. 
There was no other school to which they could send their 
children, and they were compelled of necessity to establish 
one, or to allow their children to grow up in ignorance. 

During the next forty years, in which the lay trustees ex- 
ercised complete control of the temporalities of the parishes, 
we find that as each church was built a school was opened. 
These schools were for the most part poorly housed and mis- 
erably equipped, it is true, but they were the best that the 
people could provide. 

In this forward movement of Catholic schools the people 
were directed and encouraged by the words of their bishops, 
but these were, after all, only exhortations and not commands. 
The parish schools were established long before a church 
council of any kind was held in the United States. While 
it is true that the general policy of the Church as expressed 
through its councils and bishops has had a powerful influence 
on the character and growth of the parish schools, the point 
to be noted is, that this influence only made itself directly 
felt after the schools had been established. And even then 
no action was taken to affect in any way the administration 



60 ADMINISTRA7ION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

of the schools. It was only urged that parish schools be 
founded, that they be made efficient, and that religious teach- 
ers be employed if possible. Pastors and people still retained 
full power in the organization and management of their schools. 

This characteristic of the school is shown in various ways. 
Each parish planned its school as best it could. Some par- 
ishes provided schoolhouses, but for the most part, the people 
were forced to be content with the dark, poorly furnished, 
ill-ventilated basements of their churches. As time went on, 
one school after another emerged from the twilight and came 
into its own. But still there was no general policy followed, no 
definite plan. As each pastor planned his new school-house, 
he kept in mind not only the needs of the children but the 
financial condition of the parish as well. Some erected new 
buildings, others remodeled old ones. Some erected structures 
that vied in size, beauty and convenience with those erected by 
the public school authorities, while others built more modestly. 

We may note the same spirit of local power in the matter 
of selecting teachers. There was no common standard. Each 
pastor hired whom he wished. He was the examiner and the 
employer. The qualifications of a teacher were such as each 
pastor determined for himself. How this plan worked in prac- 
tice we have seen. The salary was so meagre that skilled 
teachers could not be employed, and we have seen the spectacle 
of the sexton conducting the school in addition to his other 
duties of digging graves and keeping the church clean. 

The same state of affairs is noted in the matter of text- 
books and of grading. Each school had its own text-books 
selected either by the teacher or the pastor. Many text-books 
were of the very poorest kind, with the matter badly selected, 
poorly printed and miserably illustrated. As the schools in- 
creased in size and numbers the great demand for school 
books induced publishers to issue series of texts for all classes, 
and the keen competition led to great improvements in them. 
Still, many of these later books were printed in the form of 
a catechism, that is, by arrangement of question and answer. 
Even as late as 1890 the Reverend Inspector of Schools re- 
ported that catechisms of history were freely used, and that 
in numerous cases unless the questions were put exactly as 
they were in the book the children could give no answer. 

It was, however, in the matter of grading that the lack 
of a general system or plan was most clearly felt. Each 



i.] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS 61 

school was a law unto itself. Now this would have been an 
advantage rather than a defect, if the children did not move 
from school to school, and if the parish authorities were ex- 
pert in school matters with the requisite time and ability to 
plan a systematic course of instruction. But when the pastors' 
varied duties are considered it is clear that in many schools 
conditions were not of the best. 

The only elements that tended to make for union in this 
clash of individual units were the various religious orders. 
The schools conducted by members of the same community, 
as for instance those under charge of the Brothers of the 
Christian Schools, would be very much alike. This was owing 
to the common training received by the Brothers, to the (act 
that very often the text-books used were prepared by members 
of the community, and to the further fact that their superiors, 
in going from school to school, would note conditions and strive 
to bring the schools to a common standard. 

Such, then, was the chaotic condition of affairs when the 
Third Plenary Council met at Baltimore. The Fathers of the 
Council not only urged the desirability of multiplying Cath- 
olic schools, as we have noted before, but they likewise in- 
sisted on the necessity of perfecting them. 

We repudiate the Idea, [they state], that the Catholic 
school need be in any respect inferior to any other school 
whatsoever. And if hitherto, in some places, our people have 
acted on the principle that it is better to have an imper- 
fect Catholic school than to have none, let them now push 
their praiseworthy ambition still farther and not relax their 
efforts till their schools be elevated to the highest educa- 
tional excellence. 

They, however, did not trust to these pious and hopeful 
exhortations, but laid down certain definite decrees, which are 
still in force, as to the manner in which this result was to be 
accomplished. 

The first requires that the seminarists, during their prepar- 
ation for the priesthood, receive special training for their 
future work in the management of schools. To this end the 
educational aspects of such studies as psychology, pedagogy 
and pastoral theology should be emphasized. The second re- 
quires every rector to visit his school frequently, at least once 
every week, in order that he may inspect the work being done, 



62 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

stimulate the pupils and teachers to greater effort, and if pos- 
sible give instruction in sacred history and catechism. The 
third insists on the obligation of all Catholics to do their 
utmost in the support of the parochial schools in order that 
they be raised to a high state of proficiency. 

As the condition of the school is determined largely by 
the kind of teachers employed, the Fathers decreed also that 
no one should be allowed to teach in a parish school until he 
or she had proved his or her fitness for the position by pre- 
vious examination. Bishops are required to designate one or 
more of their priests as a Diocesan Board of Examiners, to ex- 
amine all applicants, whether religious or lay, for positions in 
the parish schools. To the successful candidates a diploma 
good for five years is given. At the end of that time a final 
examination is held, and if the result is satisfactory the license 
is made permanent. Those religious that are governed from 
abroad or from other states must show diplomas from their 
religious superiors, or from some other diocesan board of 
examiners. 

Besides this commission for the examination of teachers 
which has jurisdiction over the whole diocese, the bishop is 
directed to appoint one or more Board of Examiners of Schools, 
as the condition of his diocese may determine. Each board 
is to be composed of one or more priests. It is their duty to 
visit and to examine the schools under their direction at least 
once, and if possible, twice each year, and to report the re- 
sults of their examinations to the bishop. 

Finally, in order that there might always be a sufficient 
number of trained teachers for the parish schools, the Fathers 
advised the establishment of Catholic Normal Schools, where 
they did not exist, and where the necessity for them was 
apparent. 

With these plans for improving the parish schools Dr. 
Corrigan was in thorough accord. This he made clear at the 
outset of his career in New York. On November 17, 1886, 
he convened a diocesan synod for the purpose of ratifying and 
promulgating the decrees of the Plenary Council. To the 
exhortation of the Council he added his own, urging the 
clergy to do all in their power to carry them into effect. 

The men selected by him for the various commissions or 
boards were not only learned and able priests, but they were 
experienced educators as well. All of them were actively 



i9i i.] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS 63 

connected with the work of the parish schools, and most of 
them had large schools under their immediate direction. 

As members of the commission for the examination of 
teachers he appointed the Right Rev. Mgr. Preston, V. G., 
the Very Rev. Mgr. Farley, and the Rev. Messrs. Edwards, 
Kearney, McGean, Kessler and Tonner; while the Very Rev. 
Mgr. Farley, and the Rev. Messrs. J. J. Dougherty, Healy, 
P. F. McSweeney, Larkin, N. J. Hughes, and the Rev. Fathers 
O'Connor, S.J., Colonel, C.SS.R., and Vorwerk, O.M.Cap., 
were constituted a Board of Examiners of Schools for the 
Boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Richmond. 

The first work of the Commission for the Examination of 
Teachers, was to draw up a uniform course of study for the 
schools. This course, entitled " Directory and Course of In- 
struction," issued in 1887, sets forth in detail the work to be 
done in each grade and in each subject in the schools. 

The prescribed course of study was, for the most part, 
such as that found in the public schools. English, arithmetic 
and writing were to be taught in each grade from the lowest 
primary to the highest grammar. Geography was to be taken 
up in the third year, history in the fourth, and bookkeeping 
in the last grade. But it is the work laid down under the 
heading "Christian Doctrine" that challenges the attention of 
one accustomed to the course of study in our public schools. 
A systematic outline of work was given for each grade ; the 
prayers to be taught, and the subjects of oral instruction were 
also prescribed. 

The members of the Board cf School Examiners, after a 
year's experience, found that they could not spare sufficient 
time from their other duties to visit and inspect the various 
schools of the city. Accordingly, they chose one of the 
younger clergymen, Rev. William E. Degnan, S.T.D., to be 
their representative in the visitation and examination of schools. 
Dr. Degnan prosecuted his work with energy and success 
until the fall of 1889, when ill health caused him to resign. 

The board was particularly fortunate in its choice of the 
next inspector, Rev. M. J. Considine. He was an able, ener- 
getic administrator, one who grasped clearly the problem to 
be solved and the solution of it. 

His was the herculean task of bringing under a central 
authority and forming into a united system, the numerous 
parish schools of the city, some of which had for almost a 



64 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

century enjoyed independent existence. The parish schools 
had grown up each in its own parish. Despite their faults, 
and they had many, they were deeply rooted in the affections 
of the people. In their precarious struggle for existence they 
had to depend entirely on the support of the faithful of each 
parish, and naturally they reflected the needs and aspiratiors 
of their supporters. There was no external authority to whom 
desired changes had to be referred. Each school was free to 
adapt itself without question to its particular parish. And 
adapt themselves they did, and that successfully, too, else 
they could not have long existed. For it must be remembered 
that side by side with these parish schools, eking out their 
precarious existence from the contributions of the faithful, was 
a system of generously supported public schools, free to all 
who might enter. 

The Rev. Mr. Considine undertook the task with charac- 
teristic vigor, and in a series of able reports sketched the 
condition of the schools, noted their defects in unvarnished 
language, and suggested remedies. These recommendations 
invariably met with the cordial support of the School Board. 
After each report was received it was customary for the 
board to send a circular letter embodying the Inspector's 
recommendations, and giving explicit directions for their en- 
forcement to all rectors and principals. 

This steady, persistent work of the Inspector, supplemented 
by the authority of the School Board, soon had its effect. 
The course of study, as prescribed, was carefully followed in 
all schools; the fitness of teachers was tested by examination 
and observation in the classroom ; methods of teaching were 
improved, and needed changes were made in many schools 
in order to protect better the physical well-being of the 
pupils. 

Archbishop Corrigan warmly supported and encouraged 
this work of raising the standards of the schools. His zeal 
in the cause of Catholic education was with him a matter of 
conscience, and was just as earnest and sincere in his last days 
as when the decrees of the Third Council were first issued. 
At the last meeting with the clergy of his diocese he an- 
nounced that any pastor who did not, within two years, estab- 
lish a Catholic school, should give him in writing the reasons 
for not doing so. He did not, however, live to see these 
directions fulfilled. On May 5, 1902, his busy life came to an 



i.] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS 65 

end, and he was laid to rest far from turmoil and strife, in 
the quiet of his cathedral. On the marble slab which closed 
the chamber of death was carved the well earned title: "The 
Staunch Defender of Christian Education." 

The Most Rev. John Farley, the present Archbishop, is 
peculiarly well fitted to deal with the problem of parish schools. 
Educated at Rome, as had been his two immediate predeces- 
sors, an early opportunity was given to him to learn the ad- 
ministrative duties devolving on the head of the diocese. 
After having served as secretary to Cardinal McCloskey for 
many years, he was appointed pastor of one of the largest 
city churches, St. Gabriel's. Here he was enabled to study 
at first hand the work of a parish school, and the duties and 
responsibilities of a pastor in maintaining it. Later as Auxil- 
iary to Archbishop Corrigan, with the title of Bishop of 
Zeugma, he had an opportunity to come more directly into 
contact with the actual needs of the diocese. But probably 
his most valuable training for the educational phase of his 
manifold duties was that gained as president of the School 
Board, appointed by Archbishop Corrigan to bring order and 
system into the parish schools of the city. 

His work in this trying post we have already briefly noted. 
It was a work that required tact and judgment, one in which 
a man less skillful would have found difficulty. And yet we 
have seen with what patience and skill the local rights of the 
schools were considered, while all the time they were being 
transformed from a mass of discordant units into an harmoni- 
ous whole. 

This same rare good judgment and ability to secure results 
without any friction has marked his career as Archbishop. 
The good work instituted by his predecessors has been kept 
up and new problems have been met and solved. Perhaps 
the most important phase of the work has been the supplying 
of the churches and schools for the rapidly growing outer 
boroughs. The growth of the Church in the borough of the 
Bronx has been phenomenal. While only four Catholic parish 
schools were established previous to the administration of 
Archbishop Farley, since his accession fifteen have been 
opened. The schools in the borough of Richmond have been 
doubled in number, while twenty new ones have been added 
to the long list in the parent borough itself. Thus, in the 
VOL. xciv. 5 



66 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

eight years of Archbishop Farley's administration forty new 
schools have been established in the three boroughs of New 
York City which are under his care. Not only are new 
schools being opened, but old buildings are being replaced 
with new ones. During the year 1910, for example, five 
modern schoolhouses were built to take the place of older 
ones, namely St. Gabriel's, East 37th Street, Manhattan; St. 
Columba's, West 25th Street, Manhattan ; St. Anthony's, Mc- 
Dougal Street, Manhattan; St. Mary's, Rosebank, Richmond; 
St. Mary's, Jackson Street, Manhattan. 

The boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens likewise show a 
healthy growth. Since the appointment of Right Rev. Charles 
E. McDannell, who succeeded Bishop Loughlin, on April 25, 
1892, thirty-four new schools have been founded. 

In 1908 the Church celebrated, with imposing ceremonies, 
the one hundredth anniversary of the formation of New York 
into a diocese. As her prelates, priests and people surveyed 
the work accomplished, one of the results which they regarded 
with the greatest pride and satisfaction was the magnificent 
system of parish schools which had sprung from the one small 
seed planted in Barclay Street, so long before. Like the oak, 
the growth at first had been slow, but also like it the seedling 
had now developed into a sturdy tree, with innumerable 
branches, which had weathered many storms. 

It is interesting to note the growth of the schools, decade 
by decade. During one period they seem to be dormant, at 
another they spring again into renewed activity, as though 
new life had been imparted to them : 

MANHATTAN BRONX RICHMOND TOTALS 

1800-1810 I I 

1810-1820 I I 

1820-1830 2 2 

1830-1840 2 2 

1840-1850 4 4 

1850-1860 9 

1860-1870 8 

1870-1880 3 

1880-1890 13 

1890-1900 5 

1900-1910 20 15 5 40 

68 20 8 96 



10 

2 II 

1 5 

'4 

- 6 



i9 1 1.] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS 67 

As may be seen, the growth in the present decade is more 
than twice that of any preceding period of the same length. 
The contributing factors here are the rapid spread of the city 
to the outlying boroughs, and the new spirit infused into the 
cause of Catholic education by the present Archbishop. The 
motto of Archbishop Hughes, " The School Before the Church," 
has again been revived ; the harmonious days of Cardinal Me- 
Closkey seem to have returned; while the zeal and system of 
the time of Archbishop Corrigan are in no way abated. 

Where one hundred years ago there was only one school 
with about five hundred pupils, to-day there are in the entire 
city 167 parish schools in which are instructed 125 645 pupils. 

But this represents only a part of the educational activity 
of the Church. Besides the parish schools, she has many 
other institutions for the care and education of the young, 
such as schools for Deaf Mutes, Orphan Asylums, Industrial 
and Reform Schools. The total number of young people under 
Catholic care in the diocese of New York and of Brooklyn 
reach the grand total of 183,365. 

We are concerned here, however, only with the parish 
schools, and cannot dwell on these other phases of diocesan 
educational activity. A comparison of the number of pupils 
in the public elementary schools and in the parish schools 
will give a better notion of the work accomplished. The total 
enrollment in the former is 693,246 and in the latter 125,645. 
Comparing these figures with the total population of the city 
4,766,883 as given by the 1910 census, we find that 14.5 per 
cent of the entire population is in the public elementary 
schools and 2.6 per cent in the Catholic parish schools. 

To manage this large and constantly growing system of 
schools there are in New York City three Catholic school 
boards, one for the boroughs of Manhattan, Bronx and Rich- 
mond; another for Brooklyn; and the third for Queens. The 
members of the first board are appointed by the Archbishop 
of New York, and those of the other two by the Bishop of 
Brooklyn. Heretofore no laymen have been appointed to the 
Catholic school boards of New York City. While the reverend 
members composing these boards are able men, yet it would 
seem that inasmuch as the parish schools are erected and sup- 
ported by laymen, the latter ought to have some voice in their 
management. The Most Rev. James H. Blenk, D.D., Arch- 



68 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

bishop of New Orleans, has appointed an equal number of 
religious, of secular clergy, and of laymen to his diocesan 
school board, stating that he believed " if laymen are to give 
their full support to any work they should know what is 
done, and how it is done, so that they may give it their un- 
divided support." 

The School Board for the boroughs of Manhattan, the 
Bronx and Richmond is composed of fifteen members, the 
president being Right Rev. Mgr. Joseph F. Mooney, V. G., 
and the secretary Rev. Michael J. Considine. While its pow- 
ers are broad, as we have noted in discussing the organization 
of the first board, they are in no way equal to those exercised 
by the corresponding body in the public school system. For 
instance, the Catholic board has no power or authority over 
the financial affairs of the schools except that it may recom- 
mend changes and improvements involving the expenditure of 
money. The finances of the schools are in charge of the local 
pastor and his board of lay trustees. The central authority 
licenses teachers, the pastor employs them. In general it may 
be said that the Catholic parish schools enjoy a much greater 
measure of local independence than do the public schools. 
This is due, as we have seen, to the fact that ever since the 
founding of the first Catholic school, over one hundred years 
ago, until a short time since, the control of the schools was 
entirely in the hands of the local authorities. 

The central board exercises its authority chiefly through 
its two superintendents of schools. While changes have been 
made from time to time, the clergymen chosen for these posi- 
tions have kept up the high standard of work set by the Rev. 
Michael J. Considine, under whose efficient direction the 
schools were organized into a system. The present superin- 
tendents are Rev. Joseph F. Smith, and Rev. Michael J. 
Larkin. Rev. Thomas A. Thornton was appointed in 1903 
and resigned in 1908 to take charge of St. Columba's Church, 
on West 25th Street. 

In recent years great improvements have been made in the 
parish school buildings. No longer are the schools housed in 
the basements of the churches. Each parish school is now in 
a building of its own. Old buildings have been repaired and 
renovated, while others have been torn down to make room 
for newer ones of a more modern type. In replacing these 



.] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS 69 

old buildings, as well as in erecting others for new schools, 
every effort is being made to have them not only modern in 
all that pertains to a well planned, well equipped school, but 
likewise models of architectural skill. 

There are 1,398 teachers employed in the parish schools of 
the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Richmond. Of 
these 814 are religious teachers, 432 lay, and 152 special. 

The religious teachers are a trained body of educators who 
devote their lives to teaching. Before entering on their work 
they receive a thorough course of training, and their manner 
of life afterwards is conducive to further improvement and 
study. They live a community life. They are free from the 
distractions and cares of the world, and devote their lives to 
meditation, study, teaching and prayer. There are, besides, at 
stated intervals, meetings of religious teachers for the discus- 
sion of professional topics. 

The salaries paid these teachers are very low, as compared 
with those received by the teachers in the public schools. 
The rate of wages is regulated by the heads of the various 
teaching communities. Sisters of Charity are now receiving 
for their services $400 per annum, and the Brothers of the 
Christian Schools the same. This low wage in no way affects 
the type of religious teachers. They are vowed to poverty, 
and the salaries received go into a common fund. 

The salary question does, however, play an important part 
in the life of the lay teacher. The salaries paid rest wholly 
with the pastor of each parish, the amounts varying from 
thirty to sixty per month, according to grade taught, length 
of service, etc. The lay teacher is bound to the work by no 
such ties as is the religious, and in accotdance with the usual 
economic laws, the better fitted are drawn where higher wages 
prevail. The Catholic authorities deplore this condition of af- 
fairs, and are endeavoring to pay such salaries as will hold 
their most efficient teachers. 

The value of school property in Manhattan, the Bronx and 
Richmond is $11,347,500, and the annual cost of maintenance 
of the schools is $742,055. The value of school property and 
the cost of maintenance of schools in the boroughs of Brook- 
lyn and Queens, we are unable to determine, as no statistics 
of this kind are issued, but inasmuch as the number of pupils 
in their schools almost equal those in the schools of the other 



70 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct., 

three boroughs, we shall keep well within the bounds of prob- 
ability in stating that the Catholic people of New York City 
expend over one and a quarter million dollars annually for the 
maintenance of their schools. 

Again reckoning on the per capita cost of educating a child 
in the public elementary schools, the parish schools save the 
city over $3,800,000 annually. 

The parish schools are supported by the voluntary contri- 
butions of the Catholic people of the city, not a cent coming 
from the public treasury. The means of raising this money 
varies in different parishes. In some a special school collec- 
tion is taken up at each Mass, in addition to the regular col- 
lection. In other, school associations are formed for this pur- 
pose, while in others, volunteer collectors make a periodic 
house to house canvass. 

Now, if the curriculum and method of these schools are 
practically the same as those of the public schools, why do a 
people who are by no means wealthy choose voluntarily to 
assume the onerous burden of establishing and maintaining 
them ? We have seen this partly answered in the various en- 
actments of the Councils, and in the opinions of the priests 
and prelates cited in former articles. However, a later day 
statement of the position of the Church is interesting and 
suggestive. Mgr. Lavelle, Rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, 
puts the question and answer in this wise: 

What is the motive of these schools? Why do people, not 
yet overburdened with this world's goods, and keenly eager 
for the betterment of their condition, elect to support a volun- 
tary system of education, after having paid their taxes to the 
regularly organized system of the state ? The answer is this : 
The Catholic schools are supported by a large body of earn- 
est, sincere, God-fearing men, who believe in their faith as 
they do in their life ; who are anxious to see their faith 
stamped indelibly upon their children ; who fear that this 
faith and all faiths are liable to be weakened, if not lost, by 
an education purely secular ; and who are convinced that by 
making this sacrifice of double taxation they are doing the 
very best possible service for the welfare of religion and mo- 
rality, and, at the same time, lor the honor, exaltation and 
solidifying of those institutions, whose symbol is the royal 
red, the lily white, and the azure blue of the Stars and 
Stripes. Why do they believe this ? They dread, on princi- 



i9i i.] ADMINISTRATION OP THE PARISH SCHOOLS 71 

pie, the education of the head without the heart. They see 
more vice than there should be about them, in high places 
and in low drunkenness, licentiousness, dishonesty, hate, 
with all its revolting sequels divorce, disloyalty, anarchism, 
faithlessness to trusts. 

This moral and religious education is accomplished directly 
by instruction in the Catechism, Bible and Church History. 
Primarily, it is the duty of the pastor and other priests to 
look after the teaching of religion in the schools. Owing to 
the peculiar circumstances of a large city, it is impossible, 
however, for them to undertake this. They supplement by 
their instruction and explanation the previous work of the 
teacher. 

The most important part of this work, however, is done 
indirectly. The Catholic school authorities hold that since all 
truth belongs to God, there is no branch of learning in the 
teaching of which the instructor cannot in some way keep 
before the minds of the children the Almighty Creator and 
Absolute Owner of all beings. 

The parish schools must, in the final analysis, be judged 
by the service which they render to the community. On this 
they must stand or fall, not only as far as the community at 
large is concerned, but likewise with the Catholic portion of 
it. The test by which they will be measured by the general 
public is the work accomplished in the public schools. Do 
these parish schools render as effective or more effective ser- 
vice to the state as the public schools ? What are the relative 
merits of these two systems in training their pupils to be use- 
ful citizens ? How do their graduates compare in social effi- 
ciency ? 

It is on this issue that the parish schools must be judged, 
and it is on this that their hope of eventual support from the 
public treasury depends. With the question of religious in- 
struction the state is not and will not be concerned. 

Of the relative results thus far accomplished one cannot 
speak with certainty. No thorough investigation has been at- 
tempted with this end in view. There has been a great deal 
of loud assertion, but sufficient data has not been gathered on 
which to base a sound conclusion. In view of this state of 
affairs, then, we can only draw inferences from scattered facts. 



72 ADMINISTRATION OF THE PARISH SCHOOLS [Oct. 

The parish schools have always been close to the people ; 
they have, until within a few years, been entirely under local 
management; and their work has consequently been of a very 
practical character. Whatever may be said of the instruction 
given in the so-called " fads," it is certain that the children 
were well grounded in reading, writing and arithmetic. Of 
late years their curriculum has been broadened, and is now 
practically the same as that of the public schools. Whether 
this will lessen their former efficiency in the three " R's " is a 
matter for time to decide. It would, however, seem that the 
parish schools are not losing their old time vigor. 

Certain it is that a large portion of the community believe 
that the work accomplished compares favorably with that done 
in the public schools. It is hardly likely that Catholics would 
continue to send their children in increasing numbers to these 
schools, if their standards were not up to the public schools. 
No coercion, no threats, are used to compel parents of over 
125,000 children to send them to these schools. Around them 
on all sides, are children who attend the public schools, whose 
progress they may note and compare with that made by their 
own children. And yet in this city, where millions are voted 
out of the public treasury annually for public education, the 
parish schools continue to grow and multiply. 

Their graduates who choose, or who are compelled by cir- 
cumstances to enter business life find no difficulty in getting 
positions. In fact, in many schools, the boys who are about 
to be graduated have positions waiting for them. 

The parish school authorities are doing their utmost to 
bring their schools to a high state of efficiency. They believe 
that the work accomplished is equal to that done in the public 
schools, and as an evidence of their faith they invite exami- 
nation by competent public authority. For a number of years 
pupils from these schools have entered examinations conducted 
by the state department of education, and have been uniformly 
successful. 




A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES. 

BY CHRISTIAN REID. 

5HEN the organization of affiliated Reading Cir- 
cles, known as the Columbian Reading Union, 
came into existence about twenty years ago, it 
was distinctly in advance of the movement for 
the formation of women's Book Clubs which a 
little later swept over the country like a tidal wave. At 
present it would be difficult to find a spot so remote that 
this wave has not reached, a village so small that does not 
possess its Book Club, or ia proportion to size, several such 
organizations ; and one has only to glance at the social 
columns of provincial newspapers to see constant reports of 
the meetings of these clubs, in which the books discussed have 
equally honorable mention with the floral decorations pro- 
vided, and the refreshments served. But while this movement 
has made such tremendous headway among those outside of 
the Church, what has become of the Reading Circles formed 
for the study of Catholic literature, under competent direc- 
tion? There is far more need of such organizations now than 
when they were started; in fact the need is so great, and 
(one would think) so apparent that it seems almost incredible 
that the movement should have died from lack of interest, 
just when a widespread awakening to the need of some degree 
of mental culture has arisen among the vast multitude of 
women who are without any authority to direct their study 
of literature. It is surely a sad commentary on the intellectual 
apathy of Catholics that this should be the case, and a truly 
extraordinary thing that there is so little perception of the 
great dangers lurking in this movement, and of the crying 
need to guide and restrain those who acknowledge the author- 
ity of the warning voice of the Church. 

For underlying all the movement is the popular belief that 
reading in itself is good the belief which throws open public 
libraries, without any kind of censorship, to the ignorant and 
the young. To Catholics it is unnecessary to say this is a 
fallacy on a par with that which declares every man free and 
competent to select or make his own religion. " Man," says 



74 A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES [Oct., 

Lacordaire, " is a being subject to instruction," and without 
such instruction he is certain to go woefully wrong in reading 
as in everything else, since reading is simply a means to an 
end, and unless wisely directed the end may be infinitely more 
harmful than beneficial, as history testifies, and experience as- 
sures us. For ideas are the most vital things on earth, en- 
dowed with a life and a potency to which nothing else in the 
world can be compared, possessing a merciless logic, and a 
power of affecting human conduct and human events far be- 
yond the utmost point that our limited vision can reach. In 
the eagerness with which women have rushed into the pursuit 
of mental culture there are unquestionably many factors to be 
perceived. One is the social instinct, to which the clubs ap- 
peal; another the impulse so strong in human nature, and es- 
pecially in feminine nature, to follow the fashion of the hour; 
but deeper and. more controlling than either of these is the 
desire to widen the horizon of thought, to eat of those fruits 
of the tree of knowledge which are so lavishly and so tempt- 
ingly set forth in our day. 

But not all of these fruits are good, and this being so, the 
imperative need arises for some standard of discrimination in 
selecting those which are to be assimilated. No wise man or 
woman feeds the body on poison, yet all around us we see the 
mind the divine principle of life, the source and spring of all 
our actions fed on poisons which are not less deadly because 
they may be offered "in a Venice glass." That such poisons 
are constantly offered no one who is at all familiar with mod- 
ern literature can be unaware. In the present time, above all 
other times that the world has known, the license of the pen 
is absolutely unrestrained; no theory is too dangerous, no 
philosophy too subversive of the social and moral order, to be 
presented with every charm of literary skill, and invested with 
the fascination which for certain minds dwells in the audacious 
and the bizarre. When considering, therefore, many of the 
evils which just now threaten society, especially those which 
relate chiefly to women their growing unrest and dissatisfac- 
tion with existing social conditions, their forgetfulness of old 
and sacred ideals of duty, their waning faith in God, and their 
readiness to adopt wild cults of all kinds it is impossible not 
to recognize the omnipresent book club as the culture spot of 
many of these destructive germs. For with the license of the 
pen on the part of writers, there has come a corresponding 



] A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES 75 

license of thought on the part of readers. And this not only 
in the case of mature persons, but with girls, often scarcely 
out of school, who form themselves into these clubs, and wholly 
undirected, choose, read, and discuss books, the mere titles of 
which make one shudder, so clear is it that such works must 
inevitably act as a degenerating force, sapping the moral vital- 
ity, that they will lower the whole tone of the mind, destroy 
reverence, and the instinctive shrinking of a pure soul frcm 
things which defile. 

And if this seems to be taking the work of these organiza- 
tions too seriously, let it be said that the matter is neither so 
trivial nor so individual as it possibly appears. For the mat- 
ter of that, what is limited to the individual in this strangely 
interwoven life of ours, where 

" . . . thou canst not stir a flower 
Without troubling of a star?" 

Therefore, while we may be tempted to think of the novels 
these girls read very much as we think of the sweets they 
devour things bad for the digestion, but of equally slight 
importance such a view is surely a grave mistake. Taking 
into consideration the strongly ant i- ethical tendency of mod- 
ern fiction, the manner in which the laws of morality are 
scoffed at, or ignored, while many writers among whcm 
women are the worst offenders treat with a truly brutal un- 
reserve, subjects and phases of life which are base and degrad- 
ing, can we doubt the character of the influence which this 
fiction must exert, or fail to remember that in the keeping of 
the girls who are absorbing it will one day lie the destiny of 
future generations? For although women in our day have 
been largely led to forget the greatness and the power that 
dwell in motherhood, neither the greatness nor the power is 
lessened by such forgetfulness. Whether they will or no, the 
divinely ordained law of being stands firm: "in these delicate 
vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of hu- 
man affection," and of much more, of the highest potential- 
ities of the race for time and for eternity. There is a deep 
significance in the well-known fact that no great man ever 
lived who had not a great mother, one strong in the moral, 
if not in the intellectual qualities, but usually strong in both. 
And this being so, can too much importance be attached to 
the kind of mental food with which women are feeding their 



76 A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES [Oct., 

minds, and from which they are to draw nourishment for the 
minds and souls of others? There is no more touching pas- 
sage in the memoirs of Mistral, the famous Provencal poet, 
whose glorious mission it was to waken to life again a dead 
language, and to sing in the tongue of the troubadours the 
beautiful stones of his land, than that in which he says of his 
mother, from whom he first heard these tales and legends of 
Provence, "So the cradle of my early years was rocked, filling 
my dreams with poetic visions. Thus from my mother I drew 
not only nourishment for my body, but for my mind and soul 
the sweet honey of noble tradition and faith in God." Sel- 
dom has more exquisite tribute been paid by son to mother, 
and there have been many mothers in the long history of our 
race to whom such tribute might be paid, whose noble im- 
press on the souls of men will go on perpetuating itself 
through countless channels of influence, ending only with the 
final harvest of all things. 

But there are others whose impress will be of another 
kind. To find this strikingly portrayed, let us turn to one of 
those modern books in which a lesson of strong moral import 
is conveyed by a writer who, like the ancient sybils, seems 
forced to bear testimony to a truth of which he is himself 
unable to perceive the full significance. The book in question 
is The Old Room, by Carl Ewald, a young Danish writer, 
lately dead, and it belongs to the school of fiction which is 
largely influenced by what is known as the symbolist move- 
ment in literature a movement which in its reaction against 
realism has gone so far in the other direction that reality is 
altogether lost sight of, and we wander in a world of shadows 
and allegories which are often too cryptic to be understood 
without an interpreter. But the meaning of this particular 
story is sufficiently plain, whether intended by the author, or 
not. The old room which it describes, closed, guarded, jeal- 
ously preserved as a shrine for the inner sanctities of home, 
is clearly a symbol of the life of past generations, of the 
laws, traditions and customs which were sacred and binding 
to them. But this old life has grown too narrow for the new 
woman, palpitating with desire for freedom, impatient of re- 
straint, thirsting for all that the world can give of pleasure, 
of intellectual satisfaction, and the happiness that is supposed 
to spring from gratified desires. An intensely significant 
drama, though veiled in mystical phraseology, takes place be- 



19 II.] A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES 77 

tween husband and wife in the old room, ending when the 
woman, defiantly breaking the bonds of the past, and acknowl- 
edging no duty in the present, goes forth to the freedom she 
craves, as Ibsen's Nora goes in the Doll's Houst. Even as 
that famous drama ends with the crash of a closing door, so 
this ends with the violent opening of one, the flinging Wide 
the door of the sacred chamber of family life, and leaving it 
to desolation and desecration. Here, we are told, the story 
was intended to end, but the sybilline spirit was evidently too 
strong for the author, and in a vision he saw the consequences 
of the woman's action the woman who stands as a type of 
her generation on others besides herself. The second part 
of the book deals with the life and character of the child of 
these people, so widely separated in heart and soul, the one 
clinging to old ideals, the other flinging herself into new con- 
ditions and eagerly draining the cup of life, to find only bit- 
terness in the dregs. In their son we see the symbol of a 
generation born out of struggle, nurtured without faith, dis- 
cerning no purpose or meaning in life, and at last going out 
of it by his own act, in black despair. It is a picture of 
darkest pessimism, for like most of those who draw such pic- 
tures, the author diagnosed an evil for which he was unable 
to prescribe a remedy, yet it carries a deep warning for the 
woman who is tempted to forget that in disregarding old 
sanctities and flinging off old restraints she is imperilling more 
than her own soul the souls of those who are to come after 
her, and on whom she has the truly terrible power of laying 
her seal for good or for evil. 

To draw the obvious moral seems superfluous, yet one is 
often inclined to ask whether the women who form these 
book clubs wish, like the mother of Mistral, to be remembered 
as having handed on "the sweet honey of noble tradition and 
faith in God," or like the mother in The Old Room to be held 
accountable by God and man for the degeneracy which is an 
inevitable result of the gospel that a decadent literature 
preaches. One feels moved to beg that they will reflect a 
little upon these things when they are making up their book 
lists, and choose elevating literature, rather than that which 
can only taint the imagination and warp the character, since 
it cannot be too often repeated that it is by our ideals that 
we live and act, and to maintain these ideals high and stain- 
less we need all the help that the lofty souls and great minds 



78 A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES [Oct., 

of our race can give us in their written words. But, as a 
general rule, such appeals fall upon deaf ears. The demand 
in these clubs is almost invariably for " the latest thing," the 
book most widely talked of and sold, without regard to its 
artistic or ethical values; indeed the knowledge that a book 
offends against decency, as well as against morals, is enough 
to insure its being clamored for by every book club in the 
land. 

Now, these things being so and no one who knows any- 
thing about them can doubt the accuracy of what has been 
written is it not clear that there are dangers in this move- 
ment against which Catholics should be on their guard ? For 
human nature being what it is, we cannot be surprised that 
Catholic women are frequently drawn into these organizations, 
which appeal to the social instincts, as well as to the intel- 
lectual tastes, of those who belong to them ; and, being thus 
drawn, that they absorb the literature provided without even 
a thought of the Church's prohibition of books which are 
dangerous to faith or morals. The indifference of many Cath- 
olics toward such prohibition, their apparent ignorance that 
there is grave sin involved in reading bad books, and their 
absolute lack of any knowledge of Catholic writers, past or 
present, are almost incredible. And this lack of knowledge is 
not confined to the illiterate. On the contrary, it is to be 
found most strikingly among those who claim a certain degree 
of mental culture, who could successfully stand an examina- 
tion on the popular fiction of the day, but who never by any 
chance buy, and only by chance read, a book by a Catholic 
author. Many explanations of this might be given, but what- 
ever the explanation, the fact remains and stares us in the 
face. Catholics, as a rule, are profoundly ignorant of their own 
literature, although it is no longer broadly true that, as Car- 
dinal Newman said, they are " not a reading class." The 
great wave of superficial culture, resulting from universal 
education, has reached them, as well as others. They are 
now frequenting libraries and joining book clubs, and in both 
cases feeding their minds on matter which must in the end 
work evil to their souls. To declaim against this is of little 
good. The children of the world are again proved wiser in 
their generation than the children of light, and the only 
remedy for the condition is to promote and encourage Catho- 
lic associations for reading. 



191 1.] A PLEA FOR READING CIRCLES 79 

To turn from general statements to a particular instance, 
the attention of the present writer has lately been called to 
this subject by an attempt to form an association of the kind, 
the result of which is instructive. To relate the matter briefly, 
a few months ago in a town containing half a dozen book 
clubs, one Catholic woman said to another, apropos of the 
kind of literature circulated: " Why can we not forma Catho- 
lic club and get some of our own books, of which we are all 
so woefully ignorant?" The other was doubtful, but "We 
can try," she agreed. A few persons were consulted, the idea 
was received with enthusiasm, and nine women came eagerly 
to form themselves into an association for the study of Catho- 
lic literature. Then it was suggested by one who knew some- 
thing of the work of the Columbian Reading Union, that a 
Reading Circle should be formed and affiliation sought. This 
also was enthusiastically agreed to, but disappointment ensued 
when a letter to the Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD brought 
the news that the Columbian Reading Union had lapsed into 
desuetude, and that the movement, fraught with such hopes 
and such possibilities for good, had died just when the great 
literary awakening of women had fairly begun ! Comment and 
regret were alike useless, but the Reading Circle already formed, 
went on bravely with its work, a series of books by Catholic 
authors were ordered, and it was almost pathetic to see the 
eagerness of these women to read something in which their 
faith was not misrepresented or ignored. Their interest has 
grown steadily with every meeting held, while the good results 
of awakening knowledge are simply incalculable. And as if 
to justify their raison d'etre in the fullest manner, they have 
extended their efforts to promote Catholic knowledge beyond 
themselves. At the time when the Reading Circle was formed, 
steps were being taken to open a public library in the town, 
and knowing well the kind of books with which it would be 
filled under the exclusive control of Protestants, and thinking 
of the coming generation of Catholics who would seek reading 
there, it was proposed that the Circle should place a set of the 
Catholic Encyclopedia in this library. The matter was carried 
without a dissenting vote, the books were promptly ordered, 
and thus an authoritative source of information about Catholic 
beliefs and historical facts has been placed where all may have 
access to it, thereby depriving any of the excuse of ignorance. 



8o THE END OF TOIL [Oct. 

Once more, then, in view of what one Reading Circle has 
accomplished in a few months of existence, may not the earn- 
est plea be heeded for the revival of the Columbian Reading 
Union, as a directing agency, and the formation of Reading 
Circles wherever a group of educated Catholic women may be 
found ? There is nothing more certain than that in this age 
of the world reading is the chief means employed by the powers 
of darkness to spread error and undermine faith; and we may 
also be sure that people will read bad literature, if good lit- 
erature is not provided for them, and their taste trained to 
appreciate and enjoy it. 



THE END OF TOIL. 

BY CAROLINE D. SWAN. 

The Harvest moon is rising full and clear ; 
Her emerald softness glorifies the plain. 
The grain is gathered in, the laborer's wain 
No longer lumbers on. Afar and near 
New golden peace illumes the ended year. 
'Tis sad, for us! We miss the daily strain; 
Our doings press no longer. Heart and brain 
Need pure submission seeking, oft, in vain. 

The reaper's work doth stand at last revealed 
Amid the splendors of the Harvest field. 
Its imperfections, I/ord of Grace, forgive ! 
He gave his all for love. Where joys unfold 
Moon-lighted wings upon Thy fields of gold, 
Where bliss abides, take him with Thee to live! 




THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS. 

BY JOHN J. BURKE, C.S.P. 

JO every thoughtful Catholic the question oi the 
Catholic Press and its efficiency must be a 
matter of personal concern and of deep interest. 
The Catholic Press of a country reechoes the 
condition of the Church in that country and 
with it the welfare of the Church is inextricably bound up. 
If any argument were needed, one might review the history 
of the countries wherein the Church is now persecuted, where 
her religious are not allowed to place foot, and where Cathol- 
icism as a vitalizing, national force is absent. Such a review 
would bring home to us the fact that long before these things 
could be, the Catholic Press of the country had died. Its 
sickness and death showed the lack of appreciation by the 
body Catholic, the popular mind, so to speak, of the supreme 
importance of Catholic truth ; of an intelligent understanding 
of Catholic teaching; and of personal devotion and eagerness 
to serve its cause. 

If argument were needed we might repeat what after all 
must be self-evident, namely, that the Catholic Press is the 
faithful echo of the Catholic mind. It is the power of the 
mind that rules and directs the world. Ideas are tireless, ever 
marching on, ever gathering recruits unless stripped of their 
power by other ideas. Where the mind is brought to bear 
upon matters religious, scientific, literary, social or economic, 
and when it begets a "theory," an "idea" which may be 
wholly or partly true, or even false, but which nevertheless 
fascinates many because it promises sudden emancipation from 
their ills, or seems to answer satisfactorily the yearnings of 
the human heart either for this world or the next then, un- 
less that "idea" or "theory," if it be false, be combated 
with equal intelligence, equal zeal, it will lead many captive 
and do untold harm to the cause of Catholic truth. The idea 
of Darwinian evolution is an illustration to the point. How 
that notion has actually led the world captive and affected 
VOL. xciv. 6 



82 THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS [Oct., 

and shaped every field of human activity, even to our very 
commonplace thoughts, would take too long to tell. But even 
he who runs may read the sign posts along every roadway of 
human life. 

If any argument were needed to prove the supreme im- 
portance of a Catholic Press and its support by the Catholic 
body, we might quote for pages the teaching, the passionate 
appeals, born of the clear vision that foresaw the danger, of 
the bishops throughout the world; of priests; of laymen, 
leaders of the Catholic body who kept themselves in close 
touch with the needs of the hour. To this work the late 
Holy Father, Leo XIII. frequently and with much emphasis 
summoned Catholics. He himself was a great apostle of the 
Press. Our present Holy Father, Pius X., has sent forth the 
same call time and again. We may repeat here one warning, 
the emphatic language of which will show us clearly what 
importance attaches to the work of the Catholic Press in the 
eyes of our Supreme Pontiff: "Neither the faithful nor the 
clergy make use of the Press as they should. In vain will 
you build churches, give missions, found schools. All your 
work will be destroyed, all your efforts will prove fruitless if 
you are not able to wield the defensive and offensive weapon 
of a loyal and sincere Catholic Press." 

The sense of the supreme importance of a robust, intelli- 
gent Catholic Press has been present with the leaders of the 
Catholic Church in this country. The history of our Catholic 
Press, considering the severe hardships under which the Cath- 
olic Church had to labor, and has often still to labor, is a credit- 
able one. Zealous pioneers, self-sacrificing and far-sighted 
men of the clergy and laity gave the services of a lifetime to 
its cause. The Plenary Councils, the Bishops of the country 
have time and again pronounced upon its importance, fur- 
thered it by every means within their power, urged, com- 
manded, and pleaded with the Catholic laity for its support. 

In answer to these needs and these demands the pro- 
moters of the Catholic Press have labored unceasingly and it 
may truthfully be said, in their own measure, successfully. Our 
forefathers built well and whatever future growth will be given 
to the Catholic Press must rest upon the foundation which 
they laid amid hardships that we know not of, and in spite of 
obstacles that we in this day of prosperity cannot imagine. 



19 1 1.] THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS 83 

Their work is showing its results, and the encouraging growth 
of what they started was most happily and effectively shown 
in the Convention of Catholic Editors held in Columbus, Ohio, 
on August 24-27. 

That convention must have been a surprise to all who 
took part in it. All of us had been for a greater or a less 
time, working to promote the cause of the Catholic Press. 
Yet we had been working alone. For the most part we were 
entirely unknown one to another. Our only acquaintance had 
been that of the impersonal editorial. We had never ex- 
changed views as to how the interests of our Press might be 
furthered; how needed support for it might be obtained; how 
its efficiency might be assured. We suddenly knew one an- 
other as fellow citizens, workers in a common cause. The 
happiest note of the convention was this note of a common 
cause. It produced at once a unity of action that was as ad. 
rairable as it was unexpected in a body of men and women 
who had been brought together for the first time from all 
parts of the country and who represented interests often 
thought to be inimical. 

Yet, we repeat, the remarkable fact is that these interests 
were subordinated and from the beginning the convention 
seemed animated with the single purpose to promote through 
the most expeditious and efficient channels the welfare of the 
Catholic Press. That same spirit ruled the convention to the 
very end and was the secret of its success. 

Success, we say, because the purpose of this convention 
was to effect an organization of the Catholic Press throughout 
the country. This was well illustrated when, in the election of 
directors and officers, a delegate from the West rose and said 
that the great object of the convention was to secure efficiency 
for an organized Catholic Press through the various boards 
that were to be appointed. Such efficiency, the delegate con- 
tinued, could be possible only when the board of managers 
could meet together frequently and at short notice if necessary. 
The East would surely have some representatives on the board. 
Therefore, that all might be within meeting distance the West 
would not only resign all claim, but would insist that all the 
members of the board should reside in the East, and this sen- 
timent was enthusiastically applauded and supported by all 
the representatives from the West. 



84 THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS [Oct., 

The convention was hastily assembled. In fact its zealous 
promoters when they first made their plans never expected 
such a large and representative attendance. It was their hope 
that they might gather at least a few representatives cf the 
Catholic weeklies and take some steps for a permanent or- 
ganization. In consequence, some papers which should have 
been represented at the convention were neglected when the 
invitations were issued and, through no fault of their own, were 
not represented. This unfortunate oversight was regretted by 
the convention and its will expressed that all the Catholic 
periodicals and newspapers of the United States and Canada, 
of whatever language, should be included in the organization. 

The organization is to be known as the Catholic Press As- 
cociation. Its permanent Honorary President is the Right Rev. 
James J. Hartley, Bishop of Columbus. It is to be governed 
by a board of managers who were elected by the convention. 
In order to cover the whole field of the work of the Press 
three bureaus were appointed, the News Bureau, the Adver- 
tising Bureau, and the Bureau of Literature. 

It must be understood that this convention dealt in no 
daydreams. No men know the difficulties that confront an 
organization of the Catholic Press, better than the men there 
present. Experience has seared that knowledge into their souls. 

In one sense this convention achieved nothing. In another 
sense it achieved much. Had it done no more than make 
Catholic editors acquainted with one another and send them 
away with fresh inspiration and new ideas it would have been 
well worth while. But it achieved more than this. It shaped 
the plans, it founded an organization which should mean great 
advancement for the Catholic Press of this country. The con- 
vention recognized that it must work slowly ; that time is 
demanded to bring about efficient results. But with the co- 
operation of the Catholic newspapers and periodicals of the 
country, in the work which they themselves have organized, 
the promises for effective work, for continued growth and 
strength are very bright. 

It is idle and very cheap, indeed, to stand aside and say: 
" This has been done before and has failed. We will see 
what you are going to do and if it amounts to anything we 
will join with you." 

With the single purpose of promoting the welfare of the 



i9".] THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS 85 

Catholic Press the Columbus Convention labored and it asked 
the co-operation of every Catholic paper, every Catholic pub- 
lication throughout the land. 

The establishment of a news agency was the first and, we 
might say, the principal work of the convention. The need 
of accurate news on matters Catholic, both here and abroad, 
but particularly abroad, is evident to all. The News Bureau 
looks forward to the establishment in the near future of a cable 
service and domestic telegraph service. The work was taken 
up enthusiastically by the convention and was placed in the 
hands of a group of very capable men. At least forty of the 
Catholic weeklies present pledged a sum of money for the 
establishment of this Bureau, and there is every reason to be- 
lieve that, placed as the work now is in the hands of ener- 
getic and experienced men, it will give what we so urgently 
need immediate, accurate information on matters of Catholic 
interest. 

The object of the convention was organization, not same- 
ness. It does not seek to decrease the individuality of any 
Catholic newspaper. The despatches of this News Bureau will 
be but a bare report of the essential facts. The presentation 
of those facts and editorial comment on them will be the work 
of the individual editor. 

With its cable service abroad, its representatives in the 
countries of this continent, and in all the principal cities of 
the union work which will take time, but which the News 
Bureau gave good evidence of being able to accomplish it 
should mean thorough efficiency for the Catholic Press of the 
country ; and the heroic endeavor to establish such a desirable 
and needed service should cheer the heart and enlist the sup- 
port of every earnest Catholic. 

The work of the Advertising Bureau is to bring before ad- 
vertisers the worth of Catholic publications as advertising me- 
diums; to encourage Catholics to patronize those who adver- 
tise in Catholic publications, and perhaps, through co-operation 
on the part of various newspapers, to give mutual help in se- 
curing more advertising. The details of the work are placed 
in the hands of a competent board of advertising experts. 

As the News Bureau will attend to the news of immediate 
importance, so it is hoped that by means of the Bureau of 
Literature the Catholic Press Association will keep the Catho- 



86 THE CONVENTION OF CATHOLIC EDITORS [Oct. 

lie Press well informed on the work of Catholic literature and 
Catholic authors throughout the world. The labors of Catho- 
lics in every field of endeavor, matters that are always of in- 
tense interest to our people and that show the extraordinary 
far-reaching works of Catholic bodies throughout the world- 
all of these things are within its province. Catholic defense 
and exposition, the missionary labors of the Church at home 
and abroad, the work of exceptional worth being done by 
Catholics in every field of literature to-day it will be the 
work of the Bureau to gather evidence of all this, and send it 
to the Press of the country. It will not interfere with any 
existing organization or organ. It seeks to help the organiza- 
tions already established and give them a means whereby their 
work may become known to the entire Catholic Press of the 
country, and through that Press be presented to all our people. 

By means of this Bureau the organization looks forward 
eventually to helping Catholic authors. The Bureau will en- 
deavor to read submitted manuscripts, to recommend such as 
meet with its approval to the body of the Catholic Press and, 
by securing several weeklies, published at points very distant 
one from the other, to accept the same story, thus find for 
the author a wider and better paying market. 

The report of these considerations and of how the conven- 
tion sought to meet them will show that at least it made a 
beginning. Like the infant that it is, the Catholic Press As- 
sociation must feel its way ; and the Bureaus that it has ap- 
pointed must study their fields ; face the many difficulties that 
confront them ; work slowly, principally because of* the limited 
financial [means at their command. Time will be required; 
other conventions must be held; mistakes no doubt will be 
made. But that for which it labored is so needful, so worthy ; 
it is a work that means so much for our Lord and His Holy 
Church, that the inspiration which it furnished the editors as- 
sembled in Columbus, and the prayers of the faithful which we 
are sure will be offered for it, will to this happy beginning 
give healthy growth, fruitful labor and, eventually, an efficient 
Catholic Press that will command a hearing from all of our 
fellow-citizens, vitalize our national life with Catholic truth, 
and lead our country to the feet of Christ. 




HIS EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS. 

BY LUCIAN JOHNSTON. 

jjT is with reluctant diffidence that a writer attempts 
an estimate of the nature and value of the life- 
work of a public man during the lifetime of the 
same. The undertaking is difficult enough in 
the case of the dead of all times, even of that 
of the more recent deceased. Witness in proof the divergence 
of opinions that even yet cluster about the personalities of 
men like Cardinals Newman and Manning. In the case of the 
living the task increases enormously in difficulty. Issues in 
which men figured and yet figure are too fresh to be judged 
with that calm and soberness of judgment and freedom from 
partisan bias which should be the very foremost and first 
qualities of a biographer or casual critic. Moreover, often 
mere good taste forbids the discussion during the lifetime of 
these issues, which can be treated with perfect propriety after 
death. 

The present writer, therefore, abstains from attempting a 
comprehensive estimate of the life-labor of his Eminence, 
James Cardinal Gibbons. He feels that it is premature. But, 
allowing for all this, it seems both in good taste and quite 
practicable even now to point out and estimate correctly, at 
least one, perhaps the most important phase, of his great work 
in the United States. An aspect, too, from which all, even 
now, perhaps can best estimate, not only the kind of work 
which he has so brilliantly accomplished, but as well the 
character and the gifts which enabled him to accomplish the 
same. This being the case, it is not in bad taste to anticipate, 
at least so far, the judgment of posterity. 

Now, whatever else posterity may have to say of the life- 
work of the Cardinal, certainly, without doubt, it will give 
him the credit of having done more than any other American 
prelate towards breaking down hostility towards the Catholic 
Church on the part of non-Catholics of all persuasions ; to- 
wards leading the Church out of that wilderness of obloquy 



88 His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

wherein he found her at the beginning of his career; towards 
making her honored and respected throughout the United 
States in a word, of having made anti-Catholic bigotry ridicu- 
lous and proven to its very teeth that Catholicism and healthy 
Americanism are not inimical, but perfectly consistent with 
each other. Among his many encomiums, we say without 
hesitation that this will be given him unanimously by pos- 
terity. And surely this alone without anything else is suffic- 
ient to stamp his work as the work of a genius, to place him 
in the very front rank of great Americans, to class him with 
those other great Cardinals of the English-speaking peoples 
Newman and Wiseman and Manning; finally, to mark him 
off, with the great Carroll and the wonderful John England. 

To understand the real magnitude of such a work and the 
consummate skill required for its doing, turn back a few pages 
of the history of the Church in the United States, not going 
back further than the period when his Eminence was growing 
up to manhood. 

The Know-Nothing party was then running its bloody and 
dishonorable career. As early as 1844 native American mobs, 
because of anti-Catholic hatred, had deliberately burned to the 
ground St. Michael's and St. Augustine's Churches in Phila- 
delphia; had fired many houses tenanted by Catholics, and 
even shot some of the inmates on their very doorsteps. This 
and similar instances throughout the country were only a 
prelude to a more organized, but none the less brutal cam- 
paign of bigotry against Catholics, which came to be known 
popularly as the Know-Nothing party, formally organized in 
1852 in New York. The avowed purpose of this society as 
given in its own ritual was to resist the " insidious " policy 
of the Church of Rome in every possible way, the chief and 
most effective way being to refuse to vote for any Catholic 
for any office whatsoever. 

People of this generation, accustomed to tolerance, are 
almost inclined to laugh at such an absurd society. But it 
was no laughing matter in those days. That society progressed 
so rapidly that it actually became a national party. By 1855 
there were seventy-five Know-Nothing members (elected as 
such) in the Thirty-fifth Congress. And in 1856 the party felt 
strong enough to run Millard Fillmore for President. Odd 
to say, Catholic Maryland was the only state carried by him. 



ig 1 1.] firs EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS 89 

The worst part of the movement was that it did not confine 
itself to the polls, but expressed its hatred as well by the 
torch and the gun. All over the country, at Providence, R. I., 
Boston, Baltimore, Wheeling, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Newark, 
N. J., Ellsworth, Me., Manchester, N. H., Bath, Me., Dorches- 
ter, Mass., Sidney, Ohio, Galveston, Norwalk, Conn., Brook- 
lyn, Louisville, there were disorders of all kinds; burnings of 
convents and churches, blowing up of churches with gun- 
powder, tarring and feathering and riding-on-rails of priests, 
insulting of nuns in the streets, lustful investigations of their 
convents, disfranchising of Catholics under all sorts of pre- 
texts, disqualifying of Catholics from office New Hampshire 
up to 1877 did so and lastly, the actual butchery of Catholics 
such as happened at Louisville on August 5th, 1855, on the 
famous, or rather infamous " Bloody Monday," when, as Bishop 
Spalding wrote to Bishop Kenrick : " Nearly one hundred poor 
Irish have been butchered." 

The present Cardinal was about twenty-one years of age 
when he must have read of this horrible outrage the culmi- 
nating infamy of all that bigotry in which he had grown up. 

Such was the United States when James Gibbons was en- 
tering upon the ministery. A state of absolutely insensate 
hatred of Catholicity that went as far in its ferocity, but with 
less logic, than any Torquemada or Lord Jeffries a hatred 
that was a curious compound of Native American bitterness 
and Cromwellian piety and Anglican sophistry. Yes; such 
was, from a religious standpoint, the attitude of the United 
States towards Catholicism when his Eminence was about to 
be ordained. 

This is one picture. Now look on this. It is " Hyperion 
to a Satyr." We are at the year 1911, in the month of 
June, and I have before me the newspaper accounts of the 
reception given to Cardinal Gibbons at the Fifth Regiment 
Armory on June 6th. With all the memories of those cruel 
Know-Nothing days yet rankling, the reader almost wonders 
if he is dreaming when he notes the vast change that has come 
over the American people. 

Twenty thousand people stream into and about that huge 
pile of masonry. Inside on a temporary stage, bedecked with 
American flags, what do they behold? There are the Presi- 
dent and Vice-President of the United States, the Speaker of 



90 His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of the Su- 
preme Court, the Governor of the State of Maryland, the 
Mayor of the City of Baltimore, with Governors of other 
states and other civic notables of the land, including an ex- 
President. Why have they come ? What is the object of this 
most representative gathering that has ever taken place in our 
history, perhaps the most unique gathering that the world has 
ever seen? Why! one almost smiles at the simplicity of the 
thing. These men, representing all that is officially highest 
in our nation, with the representative of another great nation 
(Mr. Jusserand, Ambassador from France) have assembled to 
do honor to a Catholic priest on the golden anniversary of his 
priesthood and the silver anniversary of his Roman Cardinalate. 

Contrast this, I say, with that other picture, and then you 
can realize the vast change that has come over American 
thought since the days when the fires of convents and churches 
were burning in the face of indignant heaven. 

What has brought about that change? Many causes there 
are no doubt. Catholic emigration from Ireland and Catholic 
Germany were bound in the long run to make its influence 
felt by force of sheer numbers. The splendid devotion of 
thousands of obscure priests and self-denying laymen was also 
the seeding of this wonderful blossoming. The very nausea 
of respectable Protestantism inevitably turned in disgust from 
the memories of the forties and fifties; and there are many 
other causes too numerous to mention. 

But, withal, both because of his own personal labor and 
because of the exalted position held by him in the Church, 
certainly to one man more than to any other belongs the 
credit of having hastened this transformation. And that man 
is Cardinal Gibbons. 

Observe for yourselves. Omitting the years of his priest- 
hood in Baltimore, look at him, the young Bishop of North 
Carolina. From the start we see him combatting that ancient 
heritage of Europe intolerance. Working faithfully among 
his people, he yet finds time to write for the benefit of his 
fellow-citizens of non-Catholic persuasions an effective exposi- 
tion of Catholic belief and practice. The Faith of our Fathers is 
the book which the average Catholic priest hands to those seek- 
ing information about the Catholic Church. Why ? Simply 
because it is saturated with that kindly, broad, tolerant, con- 



i.] His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS 91 

ciliatory, gentlemanly spirit and tone which disarm prejudi- 
cial reading at the very start. So that in this, the very first, 
and not the least of his pronouncements to the American 
people, the Cardinal gave the key-note of that policy of re- 
conciliation which has been and is to-day the secret of his 
wonderful success; something that reminds one more than 
once of the attractive piety of Francis de Sales vis-a-vis the 
Calvinists of Savoy. 

So much as Bishop. The day comes when he is trans- 
ferred to the wider field of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and 
not long after welcomed among the most select body of men 
on earth the Roman Cardinals. And here the work, begun 
so unostentatiously in North Carolina, immediately begins to 
assume nation-wide effectiveness. Much of the old bigotry 
remained. The public schools were mostly Protestantized, the 
press was, to say the least, not fair, popular literature was yet 
contemptuously indifferent, the Church was an object of curi- 
ous suspicion. So that much depended upon the policy of 
that man who occupied the most prominent position before 
the non-Catholic public. As Archbishop of Baltimore, the 
Primatial See of the United States, and as Cardinal, the most 
exalted ecclesiastic outside of Europe, Cardinal Gibbons in 
some ways held the future of America in his hands. By a 
narrow, hard, uncompromising, unreasonable, rcfractaire policy 
he could have retarded vastly the progress of the Church and 
indirectly fomented again into flames the old hatred of it. 
When he is gathered to his fathers this will be said of him, 
that he could have made dreadful mistakes, and did not make 
them mistakes that on more than one occasion would have 
retarded Catholicism for a generation. Such a compliment is 
sufficient for any man entrusted with public responsibility. 
And this remark becomes all the more significant when you 
reflect that he has been in the public eye for half a century, 
and has dealt with most momentous and delicate questions. 

And looking over it all, is it not due to just that spirit of 
reconciliation characterizing every step of his career ? A spirit 
of gentlemanliness, of personal cleanness of life, of courteous 
respect for others' religious views, that has made religious 
bigotry, at least in the United States, so absurd, so ridiculous, 
that even the bigoted (who are yet numerous) must perforce 
close their mouths out of sheer shame ? 



92 His EMINENCE, JAMES SARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

This is the meaning of this wonderful celebration in Balti- 
more last June. That affair meant that toleration had triumphed 
at least in public, that Catholicism was proven to be friendly 
to, even an ally of America, that the stigma of " foreignism " 
was removed from the name Catholic, that henceforth it was 
un-American to cut a Catholic at the polls. 

Take, for instance, what I consider the three most signifi- 
cant addresses on that occasion those of Ambassador Jus- 
serand, Ex-President Roosevelt and Mr. Elihu Root. Each 
in its own way, bears out this statement. 

Mr. Roosevelt, with his characteristic impetuosity, spoke of 

how blessed we are because we are united on an occasion like this, 
without regard to past history and antecedents, without regard to dif- 
ferences of religious or political belief, to honor a good man, who in 
and through his Church and as a citizen, has lived the life that a good 
man should . . . Our Republic, mighty in its youth, destined to 
endure for ages, will see many Presidents during those ages, and it 
will see Presidents who are Catholics as well as Presidents who are 
Protestants. 

Senator Root's words were so much to the present point 
and so thoughtful that they are quoted more freely. He said : 

It is a privilege to be permitted to add a few words to the tribute 
which Baltimore and Maryland and the Country are paying to Cardi- 
nal Gibbons to-day. Words, however eloquent, are but feeble in 
expressing the meaning of such an assemblage as this. The fact that 
not only the friends and neighbors of Baltimore are gathered here, 
but that these representatives of all parts of our country, many of 
them a large part of them of different religious beliefs, many of 
them representing communities widely differing in their religious 
faith, have come to join in this expression of respect and reverence for 
the great prelate, shows more than words can show the deep signifi- 
cance of this occasion. 

Your Eminence, and my friends of .Baltimore, the gathering here 
means more than personal opinion or feeling that America can do 
what was impossible in lands less free and ages less trained in human- 
ity. It means that our American doctrine of separation of Church and 
State does not involve the separation of the people of America from 
religious belief. It means that our American doctrine of religious 
toleration does not mean indifference to religious faith. It means 
that with all our commercialism, with all our wonderful progress in 
the power to produce wealth, in all our differences between ourselves 
as to the possession and distribution of wealth, the people of America 
believe in ideals and feel the guidance of faith in things higher 
than their material possessions. 



i9i i.] His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS 93 

It is because Cardinal Gibbons has illustrated in his life, in his con- 
duct, in his arduous labors, in his self-devotion to all good causes, all 
that we would like to have our children admire and follow, all that we 
love to believe our country possesses, that America, through us, with 
sincerity and ardor, honors him to-day. And it is because he has 
been the champion of ideals, because he is a man not only of work 
but of faith, that we who differ from him in dogma, who do not be- 
long to his Church, hold him as in his proper person, illustrating the 
true union of service to state and service to God, the true union 
which makes the functional and ceremonial union of Church and 
State unnecessary, the union in the heart of man of devotion to coun- 
try and devotion to God. 

Words of praise like this coming from one of the most 
thoughtful legal minds among us are striking enough. But 
the tribute of Ambassador Jusserand possesses a significance 
which to students of past history, especially in France, amounts 
to something startling, coming as it did from the representa- 
tive of a country which just now is practically persecuting the 
Catholic Church through those unworthy, underhand, legal 
means so ready to the hand and brain of the modern man. 
M. Jusserand said : 

There are two thoughts which occur to me. One of them that it is 
a beautiful and inspiring sight when a vast community, when the rep- 
resentatives of a vast nation, come together to pay honor to one who 
has lived in the sight of his countrymen in the full blaze of publicity, 
in the discharge of honorable, difficult, and laborious functions, a 
life free from spot and blame, a life which is honorable alike to- his 
country and to himself. 

May I extend to you, your Eminence, my most sincere congratula- 
tions upon this happy day, my congratulations on the respect and 
tribute of affection which is paid to you by all of your fellow-citizens 
and the regard they entertain of your splendid services to the Church 
and to the Commonwealth. 

And the other thought that comes to me is this: Is it not a beauti- 
ful sight when we think of those ages of the past in which those of us 
who do not belong to the Church which his Eminence represents, ard 
those of us who do belong to that Church, were divided by bitter an- 
tagonisms and mutual suspicions is it not a blessed thing that to- 
day we can all meet without distinction of religious faith to pa) honor 
to one who illustrates the fundamental principles of Christianity by 
his life as well as by his teachings ? 

There are diversities of governments, but the same spirit, and in 
his Eminence and in his life there is drawn out a beautiful model and 
example of those virtues which belong to our common Christianity 
and which we can all honor alike. 



94 His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct., 

I may say to you, Citizens of the United States, that if there is any- 
thing which we in Europe specially honor and admire in the great 
republic which belongs to you, it is this that you have carried out 
consistently from the first that admirable principle with which you 
started, of making no distinction of religion and by teaching all men 
that their Christianity is a part of common citizenship. That is a 
great lesson which has been taught to the world by America, and I do 
not think it could be taught in a more impressive form or shape than 
it is taught when all religious faiths may gather to honor an illustri- 
ous prelate of the Catholic Church. 



The other speeches were about in the same vein. These 
struck me as most expressive of the idea back of, and through- 
out, the whole affair. The key-note of them all is that Ca- 
tholicism is no longer regarded as an enemy of the Republic, 
rather an ally; that Protestants should meet Catholics on the 
common ground of mutual respect and toleration; that anti- 
Catholic discrimination at the polls is un-American; that the 
old-time bigotry which burned convents and blew up churches 
and shot down Irish Catholics is an antiquated relic; that it 
is ridiculous and idle and absurd and childish to ostracize a 
man because of his religious faith. 

Now, most of us are naturally quite curious to know what 
effect all this has or will have upon Europe ; in a word, if the 
tremendous influence of his Eminence here will at all affect 
thought on the other side of the big pond. At present it is 
impossible to say to what extent he has made his example 
felt. Europe at present is everywhere battling with serious 
problems which are quite likely to distract attention from 
American affairs. Especially is this true in Latin, countries, 
where Church and State have locked horns in an apparently 
endless struggle. 

And, yet, surely it does not seem possible that thinking 
men over there, earnestly seeking for a solution, should be 
entirely oblivious of this wonderful settlement of the relations 
between State and Church that is being accomplished here, 
and of which the Cardinal's reception was but a public ex- 
pression. It is incredible that such men should not be amazed 
at the spectacle of a nation chiefly Protestant publicly honor- 
ing, through its highest official representatives, a Roman Car- 
dinal because of his great work. And if they read the ad- 
dresses on that occasion, they would be blind indeed if they 



.] His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS 95 

did not find in those utterances the key to the solution of 
their own difficulties. 

Take the plain words of President Taft. How much nearer 
an honorable settlement would the French Government and 
clergy now be if a French President were speaking thus to a 
Roman Cardinal: 

As American citizens, we are proud that his prominence in the 
Church brought him twenty-five years ago the rank of Cardinal. The 
rarity with which this rank is conferred in his Church upon bishops 
and priests so far from Rome is an indication of the position which he 
had won among his fellow-churchmen. But what we are especially 
delighted to see confirmed in him and his life is the entire consistency 
which he has demonstrated between earnest and single-minded pa- 
triotism and love of country on the one hand and sincere devotion to 
his Church upon the other. 

One of the tenets of his Church is respect for constituted authority, 
and always have we found him on the side of law and order, always in 
favor of peace and good will to all men, always in favor of religious 
tolerance, and always strong in the conviction that complete freedom 
in the matter of religion is the best condition under which churches 
may thrive. With pardonable pride, he points to the fact that Mary- 
land, under Catholic control, was among the first to give complete 
religious toleration. 

I realize, of course, the impertinence of offering advice to 
another nation on its internal affairs, but certainly our French 
neighbors have in the above plain, manly words a solution of 
what strikes us as their silly and most fruitless squabbles. 
"Earnest and single-minded patriotism and love of country on 
the one hand and sincere devotion to his Church upon the 
other." There they have it in a nutshell. A recognition by 
all that every Catholic, from Cardinal to peasant, must sin- 
cerely love and honor and obey his Church, including the 
highest act of obedience to the See of Peter at Rome itself; 
that separation of Church and State does not mean state con- 
trol of church, but rather "complete freedom," as Mr. Taft 
adds further down ; that, whenever the State meets the Church 
in this manly fashion, the Church will respond with an earn- 
est patriotism and love of country, with a "respect for consti- 
tuted authority," will prove the surest bulwark of "law and 
order," will become thoroughly in sympathy with national con- 
sciousness, and will, in consequence of all this, itself "thrive" 
and become more vigorous. 



96 His EMINENCE, JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS [Oct. 

It is idle to object to this on the plea that France has its 
peculiar difficulties. That is just the point. For, the United 
States also has had, yet has and will have its difficulties in 
settling the relation between Church and State. But here, I 
say, is just the point. These difficulties have in the past been 
successfully solved precisely by both parties meeting each 
other in the spirit we have seen to be the spirit of Mr. Taft's 
remarks. And that spirit is merely a spirit of common sense, 
mutual respect for the rights of both State and Church, gen- 
tlemanly tolerance in a word, a spirit of practical statesman- 
ship. 

If such a spirit does gradually permeate European politics 
apropos of the Church, as all should hope, be they Christian, 
Jew or Gentile; and if it comes to any considerable extent 
through the influence of the life work of Cardinal Gibbons, 
then, indeed, he can well be termed a providential man, who 
can legitimately rank with the greatest Cardinals in the history 
of the Church. 

No man can forsee whether it will or no. The old Church 
in Europe seems fated to pass through many more cruel vi- 
cissitudes before a satisfactory readjustment can be reached. 
But, to repeat, if the outcome be happy, it can be due only 
to that calm, common-sense, gentlemanly kind of practical 
genius that has so dexterously guided the destinies of the 
Church in the United States a rare kind of genius, almost 
baffling in its intangibility the genius of a practical Church- 
Statesman like that of the subject of this writing. 



Hew Books. 



ESSAYS. By Rev. Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder. Edited 
by Francis Bacchus. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 

$2.50. 

Father Ryder's name is known to Catholics principally by 
the excellent book he wrote against the bigot, Littledale. The 
bosom friend of Newman, and the nephew of Manning's wife, 
he moved in circles permeated with a religious and literary 
atmosphere. He was born in 1837 of Protestant parents, his 
father being a clergyman of the Church of England. The 
latter became a convert, his family following him into the 
Church when the future Oratorian was a small cliild. Henry 
went about for two or three years in search of a vocation, 
and after spending a year in Rome he crossed to Dublin to 
assist Newman in the work of the Catholic University. From 
there he passed into the Oratorian novitiate in 1856 where 
he was ordained a priest in 1863. For many long years he was 
closely allied with Newman, to whom he succeeded as superior 
of the Birmingham Oratory. He died in 1907. 

The present volume of essays may be termed Remains. 
Its contents are varied and unequal. Two biographical articles 
on Father Spec, the Jesuit prison reformer, and M. Emery, 
the celebrated Superior of St. Sulpice, are both interesting 
and of considerable value. The same cannot be said of a re- 
view of Father Lucas's Savenarola, or of a paper on Ritual- 
ism. Father Ryder is on firmer ground in his paper entitled 
'The Pope and the Anglican Archbishops" where he speaks 
with no uncertain voice. Following these comes a defence of 
Newman on Miracles, where the Cardinal's well-known Essay 
is explained and defended. The remaining papers are decidedly 
the best in the volume, one of them, "The Passion of the 
Past," being a delightful literary treat most welcome after the 
staid, severe, theological discussions preceding it. In this one 
short essay Father Ryder shows unmistakably that he pos- 
sessed true literary ability with considerable poetic feeling. 

VOL. XC1V. 7 



98 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

We should have liked to see this paper first in the volume so 
that appreciative readers would be prepared to treat with 
greater seriousness the paper on Father Spec's poetry. An 
article on "The Ethics of War" is plain spoken to an un- 
usual degree. The theory advanced is that war is not only 
permissible but necessary under certain conditions for the 
welfare of mankind. We imagine that the paper which will 
appeal most to the generous reader is "Some Memories of a 
Prison Chaplain," as it is humorous, while having the addi- 
tional interest that the prison to which Father Ryder was at- 
tached as chaplain was that made notorious by Reade in It 
is Never Too Late to Mend. The description of a religious 
battle between an English Protestant mob, led on by (we 
presume) an anti-Popish lecturer rejoicing in the name of 
Murphy, and the inhabitants of an Irish quarter is delightful. 
When Father Ryder's prison congregation became doubled in 
a marvelously quick time he was everywhere regaled with the 
excuse " I was in for Murphy, your Reverence." 

To the readers interested in the life of Newman all the 
value of the volume will be concentrated in the final paper on 
"Purcell's Life of Cardinal Manning," where the author handles 
his theme with exceptional vehemence, which may be accounted 
for by the admission of the editor, Father Bacchus, that this 
paper was not originally intended for publication as it stands. 
There are several headings under which Father Ryder treats 
of Manning's life: Manning's ambition, his duplicity, his in- 
fidelity to the claim of friendship in the case of Newman, his 
treatment of Newman over the questions of The Temporal 
Power, the Oxford dispute, the Infallibility of the Pope. 
Manning comes out of this crucible not so immaculate as 
when he went in. But after dealing some heavy blows Father 
Ryder, referring to Manning, concludes his paper thus: 

I claim that he be clothed in a garment down to his feet of 
the cloth of gold of charity, and for the naked hands and feet 
and face where they have contracted any stain from the dust 
of human frailty, let them be wiped reverently. He has done 
many noble deeds, and has been a tower of strength and a 
house of refuge for God's people, and he has met with hard 
measure at many hands, at mine alas, it may be, but none 
harder than at the hands of the man who undertook to write 
his life. 



i9n.] NEW BOOKS 99 

LIFE OF THE VENERABLE GONCALO DA SILVEIRA. By Her- 
bert Chadwick, SJ. New York: Benziger Brothers. 

Among the general public it is not widely known that South 
Africa has produced its proto-martyr (this term being used in 
its popular and more extended sense, as Father Chadwick 
points out) yet such has been the case, the subject of this 
biography being the privileged person. 

Goncalo da Silveira was born about forty miles from Lis- 
bon on February 23, 1526, of an aristocratic family. His 
mother having died immediately after his birth, and his father 
also shortly afterwards, he was taken care of by a married 
sister. While acquiring his education at the newly established 
Jesuit College at Coimbra the desire seized him to become a 
Jesuit. After considerable opposition from his family he at 
length passed through his novitiate and was ordained a priest 
in 1545. Immediately he began to exhibit wonderful zeal in 
preaching and in the confessional, with the result that his 
fame spread throughout Portugal. A slight misunderstanding 
arose between him and St. Ignatius who had commanded him 
to a certain line of action, while his Provincial, unknown to 
the General, had directed otherwise. He obeyed the Provin- 
cial. In 1556 he was appointed Provincial of India from where, 
after spending his full term in office, and a few quiet months 
studying in the novitiate, he was sent to Africa. 

His work here was prodigious but devoid of permanent 
success, which may be easily understood after reading Father 
Chadwick's account of the country. On the borderland of 
starvation, Father Goncalo forced his way over immense tracts 
of country and came to what we can only call a fool's para- 
dise. Instead of the "Golden Emperor" of the Portuguese 
traditions, and the Royal Palace of unimaginable wealth he 
found a dirty chief squatting in a grass hut perched on poles. 
At first he had considerable success with this chief and his 
subjects. But the tongue of the slanderer intervened, and 
Father Goncalo was dealt with in true African manner. On 
March 16, 1561, he was strangled before the crucifix in his hut. 

The account of this great priest's life is well worth read- 
ing; all of it is good, but the part describing his march over 
hundreds of miles to the great unknown "Emperor" is espe- 
cially interesting. Needless to say we extend a hearty wel- 
come to the book, and wish it success. 



ICO 



NEW BOOKS [Oct.. 



CRITICISMS AND APPRECIATIONS OF CHARLES DICKENS' 
WORKS. By G. K. Chesterton. New York : E. P. Dutton 

& Co. $2. 

In this substantial volume Mr. Chesterton has collected 
the introductions written to the Dickens novels lately re-pub- 
lished in the Everyman series together with some additional 
notes. He brings out with great clearness the fact that 
Charles Dickens was quite unconsciously a prophet of twen- 
tieth century life. So many of his types are so vividly with 
us to-day. There is the cosmopolitan financier who has become 
so oppressive ; he is no longer the heavy English merchant like 
Podsnap; he is always of the Lammle and Veneericg lineage. 
Dickens was altogether indifferent to theories but he felt the 
way things were going. He disliked oppression. " He dis- 
liked the look on the face of a man when he looks down 
upon another man. And that look on the face is, indeed, the 
only thing in the world that we have really to fight between 
here and the fires of hell." Mr. Chesterton brings out very 
well the difference in quality between Dickens' humor and 
Dickens' pathos. "Humor is expansive, bursting one's sides, 
but Dickens tried to make his pathos expansive too." Pick- 
wick is the one book of his where all the tenderness is un- 
questionably true. He thinks that Nicholas Nickleby touched 
the supreme point, the supreme point where love and fighting 
are inseparable. In Oliver Twist we have "the revelation of 
those moral, personal and political instincts which were the 
make-up of Dickens' character and the permanent support of 
his literary genius." All the emblems of established ugliness 
are there, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. 
"As a nightmare the work is admirable." "There are two 
really fine love affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only 
two. One is the happy courtship of Swiveller and the March- 
ioness ; the other is the tragic courtship of Toots and Flor- 
ence Dombey." 

Martin Chuzzlewit he calls " a sad and sodden story," but 
there is the delightful Mark Tapley who, when he was told 
there were no masters in America, retorted, " All owners are 
they?" In American Notes, says Mr. Chesterton, "we find 
Cincinnatus, instead of putting his hand to the plough, put- 
ting his feet on the tablecloth." Then, of course, Dickens 
brought back Christmas, a first step towards bringing back 



i9u.] NEW BOOKS 101 

Christianity, Christianity, I mean as we Catholics understand 
it, with all its joyousness and real charity and simple personal 
pleasure. 

THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN. By G. K. Chesterton. 
London: Cassell. $1.50. 

A book of detective stories the detective being a Catho- 
lic priest. We first meet Father Brown as he travels from a 
small Essex village in order to attend the Eucharistic Con- 
gress. 'The little priest was so much the essence of those 
Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk 
dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had 
several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of 
collecting." But for all this he was a great detective, a sort of 
Detective Extraordinary to the smartest detectives of Europe. 
On this same prosaic journey from the Essex flats he falls 
in with the notorious French criminal, Flambeau, who thinks 
him a fool and who lures him away to Hampstead Heath in 
order that he may rob him of a sapphire cross, about which 
the good little priest has been simple enough to talk quite 
openly. The denoument is delightful. The notorious criminal, 
himself disguised as a priest, having lured his victim to a 
lonely place, suddenly demands of him the brown paper par- 
cel containing the sapphire cross. The simple ecclesiastic con- 
fesses that he has left it behind after all, and when Flambeau 
threatens violence Father Brown replies: 

"No, you won't take it by force. First, because I really 
haven't still got it. And, second, because we are not alone." 

Flambeau stopped in his stride forward. 

"Behind that tree," said Father Brown, pointing "are two 
strong policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did 
they come here, do you ask? Why, I brought them of course 1 
How did I do it? Why, I'll tell you if you like! . . ." 

"As you wouldn't leave any tracks for the police, of 
course somebody had to. At every place we went to, I took 
care to do something that would get us talked about for the 
rest of the day. I didn't do much harm a splashed wall, 
spilt apples, a broken window; but I saved the cross, as the 
cross will always be saved. It is at Westminster now." 

Father Brown then remarks that he had stongly suspected 
Flambeau's priestly pretensions, first, because he seemed so 



102 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

ignorant of human wickedness and, secondly, because he had 
attacked reason, which is bad theology. 

And even as he turned away to collect his property, the 
three policemen came out from under the twilight trees. 
Flambeau was an artist and a sportsman. He stepped back 
and swept Valentine (the great detective) a great bow. 

"Do not bow to me, man ami" said Valentine. "Let us 
both bow to our master." 

And they both stood an instant uncovered, while the little 
Essex priest blinked about for his umbrella. 

While the Blue Cross is the most entertaining of the stories, 
some of the others are wonderfully ingenious. The In-visible 
Man, for instance, is a murderer whom nobody has seen be- 
cause he is the postman. "Nobody ever notices postmen 
somehow," said Father Brown, " yet they have passions like 
other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse 
can be stowed quite easily." The Hammer ojf God, too, is a 
fine gloomy story with a deep religious tinge. The aristo- 
cratic Anglican parson, " who loved Gothic architecture more 
than God;" the Presbyterian Blacksmith and Father Brown 
with his genial but terrible lucidity, are very forcibly con- 
trasted. Mr. Chesterton cannot help showing us, by the way, 
how tremendously a man's dogmatic beliefs alter the character 
of his vices, aye, and of his virtues too. But simply as de- 
tective stories they are all excellent; in mechanism, much 
simpler, but in the secrets of human nature much more pro- 
found than the fine work of Robert Louis Stevenson, not to 
speak of the more popular Sherlock Holmes. 

RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS OP THE DAY. By the Right Rev. 
Alexander MacDonald, D.D. Vol. III. New York: Chris- 
tian Press Association. $i. 

In the third volume of Religious Questions of the Day Dr. 
MacDonald treats of a variety of subjects, the greater balance 
of which are biblical. There are papers on "Evolution," the 
" Higher Criticism," " The Firmament," "The Atonement," "The 
" Holy House of Loreto," " Papal and Conciliar Infallibility," 
the "Apostles Creed," and several more dealing rather severely 
with assertions in The Catholic Encyclopedia. Since most of the 
contents consists of criticisms on the assertions of other writ- 
ers there is a want felt in not having before us the entire 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 103 

statements of those criticised. And we cannot help feeling 
that Dr. MacDonald has been unduly severe in some places 
on his opponents. While it is the nature of man to err it is 
rather uncharitable, if not uncalled-for, to be flinging such 
terms as "stupidity," "nonsensical," "puerile," "idiotic." 
Indeed we are not surprised that one of the papers was de- 
clined publication by the editor of a prominent Catholic peri- 
odical. 

SWITZERLAND TO-DAY: A STUDY IN SOCIAL PROGRESS. 
By Virginia M. Crawford. St. Louis : B. Herder. 30 cents. 

This little volume will be of value to all who are interested 
in the vital questions of sociology. It gives a clear, definite, 
condensed history of the Catholic social movement in Switzer- 
land from the dissolution of the Sonderbund in 1844, to the 
years of the Kulturkampf, 1870-1975. And, it is only by fol- 
lowing the controversies of these past years that one grasps 
the marvelous progress of the Church in Switzerland, which is 
now, admittedly, the most helpful experimental school for so- 
cial economics. It is inspiring to read of the magnificent re- 
sults accomplished by the Ecole Normale Menageie, the Ar- 
beiterinnen Fereine, the Protectorate for Girls, and the Ligue 
Sociale des Acheteins, all founded by women, and in all of 
which religious are prominent helpers, especially the up-to- 
date Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. There are, of course, 
great problems yet to be grappled with, and methods still on 
trial. But there is no question that the network of organiza- 
tions now covering the greater part of Switzerland are doing 
remarkable work. And these societies represent definite, con- 
tinuous effort at a constructive social policy on Catholic lines, 
similar to that which is followed by our own American Volks- 
verein. 

MASTER CHRISTOPHER. By Mrs. Henry de la Pasture. New 
York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $1.35. 

Lady Clifford adds to her laurels by this book. She tells 
the life-story of a brother and sister left orphans. They are 
children of parents who mutually agreed to separate; the boy 
remaining with the father, the girl going away with the mother. 
Years pass and the father and mother die just as Christopher 
reaches his twenty-second year and Mary her eighteenth. 



104 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

Neither has seen the other during all this time. Christopher 
is rich, but uncultured and reckless. Into his rough life Mary 
is introduced as mistress of the family home. Then comes 
upon the scene Erica Clow, a handsome, unscrupulous girl. 
Christopher falls in love with her; she falls in love or plays 
at it with three other men, which brings about complications. 
The story is healthy, well-written, and interesting. Those 
who appreciated The Grey Knight will certainly read Master 
Christopher with great pleasure. 

THE LITTLE HOUSE UNDER THE HILL. By Clara Mulholland. 
New York: Benziger Brothers. 75 cents. 

We have here the story of a family of girls who, under the 
care of their governess set to work to keep a small cottage 
which their parents rented for them. They become in turn 
cook, housemaid, gardener, or seamstress, and with the money 
which they earn from their gardening they help two young 
girl friends. Their good, innocent and useful lives will offer 
splendid material for young girls, for whom this book is par- 
ticularly suited. 

THE MAGIC OF THE SEA. By James Connolly. St. Louis : 
B. Herder. $1.50. 

A young Irishman, Shane Ronan, narrates this story. 
Leaving Ireland he joins a privateer and is captured by an 
English frigate. On the first opportunity he deserts, and 
climbing aboard a schooner to offer his services he discovers 
that the skipper is his old schoolmate, Jack Barry. From this 
onwards we have a narrative of Barry's exploits in the War 
of Independence. Both he and Ronan sail in the same ships, 
pouncing upon English vessels, and fighting with an abandon 
of bravery that is so characteristic of their countrymen. 
Throughout the war they fight until Congress recognizes 
Barry's ability by making him a commodore. 

In some places the descriptions of the fights on sea are 
very well done, but, perhaps, most readers will think that there 
are too many fights and that these begin to assume a same- 
ness to one another. As is to be expected from Captain Con- 
nolly, the atmosphere of the book is thoroughly in keeping 
with the nautical character of the story ; there is also a quiet 
manner of expression about the language which seems natural 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 105 

with the position of the narrator, Shane Ronan. In the mass 
of literature covering the War of Independence The Magic of 
the Sea should find a place. 

THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA. By William J. Locke. New 
York: John Lane Company. $1.30. 

In Mr. Locke's new book we have unfolded the story of 
an outspoken woman, Clementina, who is an artist of great 
ability, but of pronounced eccentricities. In early life she was 
disillusioned by a love affair, and now in her thirty- sixth year 
she wages war on those small manners and customs of life 
which do not offend against morality or religion. Now and 
then the true heart of a woman begins to beat, but she stifles 
the throb. Her glory consists in an adroitly worked feminine 
plot against an unscrupulous woman with a past, who is bait- 
ing her trap to catch Clementina's old friend, Dr. Quixtus, 
who likewise has suffered some disillusions of the world. So 
much has he taken these to heart that he sets out under the 
guidance of three ne'er-do-wells to find and taste of evil. 
But, somehow, his natural goodness is continually asserting 
itself and spoiling his premeditated wickedness. 

The author has created two interesting characters in Clem- 
entina and Quixtus. The breezy, masculine language of the 
woman, her intellectual ability, her power over all whom she 
meets, are portrayed remarkably well. Then there is the live- 
ly, sunlit face of Tommy, always protruding itself in the 
pages; and we get a clever study of a little girl. The book 
is clean, wholesome, well-written, and most interesting. It is 
suitable for all classes of Catholics except those who may dis- 
like the light expletives which fall from Clementina's mouth 
now and again. We know that Mr. Locke is not a Catholic, 
yet there are several touches in this book which seem to come 
from one intimate with Catholic figures of speech. 

AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE EAR- 
LIEST TIMES TO THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO (1815). 
By C. R. L. Fletcher. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 

$3-50. 

These two bulky volumes of English history have consid- 
erable merit, but they have also great faults; as narrative, 
they are interesting, well-connected and graphic; as the index 



io6 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

and commentary of the author's own opinions, they are frankly 
open to deserved criticism and correction. 

The Muse of History whom we are wont to regard as 
dignified and impartial, becomes in Mr. Fletcher's hands a 
brusque and aggressive person, full of prejudices and incon- 
sistencies, to which she gives frequent expression in language 
that is over- strong, and in a manner akin to the offensive. 

The author's praiseworthy purpose is to give young people 
not children, but pupils in high- schools and colleges, a his- 
tory which should convey knowledge with pleasure, a read- 
able, comprehensive narrative, not a mere text- book of dates, 
facts and names, and it must be said to his credit that he 
has succeeded in what is confessedly a difficult task. 

But it is possible surely to take, as Mr. Fletcher does, the 
patriotic view-point, to have opinions in regard to other na- 
tions, other people's politics and religion, and yet to be fair, 
just, sympathetic. The need of such a temper is all the more 
necessary when one is dealing with minds that are immature, 
receptive, and apt to take bias and it is here that Mr. 
Fletcher falls lamentably short in his task. With him it always 
is "my country right or wrong, here's to old England free 
and Protestant, to the king and the church, God bless 'em." 

So that despite his scholarship, his mastery and condensa- 
tion of the subject, his presentation of the interesting and 
elimination of the dull, these volumes keep up and transmit 
unimpaired what Newman calls the "Protestant tradition." 
They are misleading, unserviceable and offensive on many 
important points. 

It is not possible to follow an author through fifteen hun- 
dred pages which bristle with prejudiced pronouncements and 
often with misrepresentations, and so we must content our- 
selves with a few samples of his inconsistency and unfairness. 
"The mediaeval idea (p. 47) was that the more uncomfortable 
you were, the more were you likely to devote yourself to the 
service of God and to save your own soul. The evil of this 
idea is the separation made between the service of God and 
the service of one's fellow creatures; to some extent a rather 
unpractical form of monkish piety got a firm hold on our 
Saxon forefathers; carried to its extreme, it led kings to 
neglect their duty to their people, to alienate rich lands, rents 
and services (which should have been used to defend England 



.] NEW BOOKS 107 

from foreign foes) to the ever-growing greed of the Church 
and always for the sake of saving their souls." 

But (mark, kind reader, the inconsistency of our author) 
"but," he continues, "there was an immense good in it too; 
for after the Roman conquerer, the monk was the next great- 
est colonist and civilizer. So the monasteries became the 
greatest centers of civilization in England agriculture, learn- 
ing, and mechanical arts flourished in their domains, while 
every where else little progress was made." 

Speaking of the introduction of Christianity among the 
Saxons (pp. 45, 46) he says: "the leader of the mission was 
an arrogant priest called Augustine who etc., etc." "Augus- 
tine thought more of getting his own claims as first Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury acknowledged than of preaching peace 
and good-will among Christians." St. Thomas a Becket does 
not fare near so well as Augustine at his hands, "Becket was 
indeed a man such as Shakespeare has described Wolsey as 
being 'of unbounded stomach.'" 

" As passionate and unforgiving as Henry II., he lacked 
altogether Henry's breadth of view, and statesmanship. Few 
of Becket's immediate followers ever believed in the sincerity 
of his conversion during his lifetime, and most men regarded 
the ostentatious asceticism which he adopted as mere hypoc- 
risy, it was only when they found a hair-shirt, etc., etc." 
We spare our readers the whole extract as the details evi- 
dence coarseness. Here is a brief and pointed little sentence: 
" Henry knew his Rome, and English guineas or shall we 
say Saxon pennies did their usual work" 

All through his pages, indeed, we soon get to know what 
to expect at the mention of Rome "craft," "greed," " abso- 
lute 'lack of principle" these are the recurring expressions, 
and the "superstitions" of Catholic England of which Mr. 
Fletcher is evidently in horror, just about equal his "growing 
hatred " of popery, if we may judge by the number of times 
these two phrases are met with. " One wonders," he says (on 
p. 229 and surely from his point of view one has reason) 
"one wonders why the Popes ever consented to the establish- 
ment of the monastic orders which threw such a direct chal- 
lenge to the system on which the Church grew fat." 

But it is in discussing the Reformation, its causes and 
its principal ^agents, that, unless we know our sturdy, illog- 



io8 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

ical Englishman, we shall have cause to wonder indeed. For 
he is as strong in condemnation of the parties who brought 
it to pass, Henry VIII., Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, Earl of 
Essex, as any Catholic could wish, and as frankly cynical that 
real religious principle occasioned its form and development 
as a free-thinker, whereas Mr. Fletcher is a strong church- 
man. He says (p. 54, part 2nd.) " with great callousness the 
Tudor blood combined an actual touch of the tiger that rather 
likes blood," and on (p. 58) "it is tolerably clear that lust 
for spoils was at the bottom of the matter." 

We shall not follow the narrative from which as he relates 
it, it is but too evident how force, fraud, expediency and 
blood robbed an unwilling nation of its faith but allow our- 
selves a few extracts from which it will appear that our 
Anglican High Church friends will get scant comfort at the 
hands of Mr. Fletcher, fellow-believer that he is. " No more 
ludicrous error is possible than that which is often heard from 
the lips of well-meaning but ignorant clergymen of to-day, 
that no change was made by the Reformation in the doctrine 
or the discipline of the English Church. It would be nearer 
to the truth to say that the Queen (Elizabeth) backed up by 
a brave minority of striking English laymen created a new 
Church and compelled fanatics on both sides to accept it " 
(p. 151) and again and again he calls it the "artificial" 
Church. Mr. Fletcher rises to his highest eloquence, where he 
eulogizes he does it briefly Luther, Cranmer, Elizabeth and 
Oliver Cromwell. 

It may perhaps be thought that the odium theologicum has 
had much to do in the above criticism of our author's volumes 
though we entirely disclaim any such motive. 

But if any good American will follow his chapters on the 
causes which led to the severance of the colonies from the 
mother country, we promise him entertainment and novelty. 
George III. was an excellent, high-principled gentleman who 
knew what was best both for his subjects at home and beyond 
the sea; those beyond the sea were a lot of disobedient hot- 
heads, smugglers, people who wanted every advantage without 
paying for them Samuel Adams was a traitor on principle, 
Patrick Henry a mere spouter, Franklin, a liar and a hypo- 
crite, and our commissioners to France, Deane, Franklin and 
Jay, sleek rascals. 



19 1 1.] NEW BOOKS 109 

We confess we do not quite see how Mr. Fletcher's vol- 
umes will prove acceptable to American scholars. 

ALONG THE ANDES AND DOWN THE AMAZON. By H. J. 
Mozans, A.M., Ph.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 
$1.50. 

It is a pleasure to note the large number of valuable addi- 
tions made in the last few years to our literature on South 
America. Among the new volumes we find Along the Andes 
and Down the Amazon by Dr. H. J. Mozans, published with a 
graceful, personal introduction by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. 

The author for his first chapters remains in Ecuador, land 
of volcanoes ; he then goes by steamer down the " rainless 
coast " oi Peru, returning for a visit to Lima, "city of Kings." 
From Lima he begins the journey across the Andes and down 
the Amazon. Following as he does in the footsteps of the 
conquerors of Peru, Pizarro and Orsua, Dr. Mozans gives a 
scholarly and brilliant refutation of the old theory of the 
wonderful Luca civilization and of the cruel oppression of the 
Spaniards. 

The fact is [he tells us] that the empire of the Lucas, so 
often regarded as possessing all the boasted advantages of 
Utopia, was nothing more than a realization of the ideals of 
certain of our modern socialists and communists. "It re- 
sembled," declared Humboldt, " a great monastic establish- 
ment, in which is prescribed what each member shall do for 
the common weal," or rather, " it was what Proudhon in his 
Contradictions Economiques has so aptly characterized as ces 
huitres attacMes au rocher de la fraiernitt oysters attached 
to the rock of iraternity." The absolute communism, that 
dominated every field of human endeavor, was the most 
striking object lesson ever given to the world that the doc- 
trine of perfect equality in human society, which is now 
preached by certain doctrinaires and enemies of social prog- 
ress, is the veriest chimera. If the Spaniards had not put an 
end to this unnatural system of government, the empire of the 
Lucas would of itself soon have disintegrated and the people 
would have reverted to a lower stage of barbarism than that 
which they occupied at the time of the arrival of Pizarro. 

The Indians were treated unjustly and cruelly by some of 
the Spanish conquerors, conquistadores of the sword, urged on 
by greed and ambition. But, as the author points out, the 



no NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

conquhtadores of the cross, who accompanied the invasion, 
strove against this cruelty, and brought the compensating 
gifts of Christianity and civilization to the savages. 

The result was [we quote again] that Spanish America was 
but little vexed with that terrible Indian problem which, in 
our northern continent, led not to one but to three centuries 
of dishonor. In a few decades the followers of the Poverello 
of Assisi, of Dominic and Ignatius I/oyola, were able to effect 
what our great statesman, Henry Clay, declared to be impos- 
siblethe civilization of the red man. 

The passages descriptive of natural beauty, of the table- 
lands, the snowy peaks, and the tropical forest, are exception- 
ally impressive. The author has a fine command of language, 
and does justice to his subject. 

We do not know what faith Dr. Mozans professes, but his 
comments on the present activities of the Church in South 
America are intelligent and admiring, and, as we have seen, 
he gives generous, unbounded praise to the early Spanish 
missionaries. The fact doubles our pleasure in pronouncing 
his book a scholarly and valuable study. There are, we add, 
a number of fine illustrations. 

KENNEDY SQUARE. By F. Hopkinson Smith. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50. 

In Kennedy Square Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith has written 
another of his pleasant, old-fashioned romances. Kennedy 
Square is in the Baltimore of sixty years ago. and against the 
background of magnolias, mahogany and old silver are shown 
the sweet, wilful heroine, the hot-blooded lover, the irascible 
father, and the peace-making uncle. As in the story of Peter, 
the dcus ex machina is the lovable, quixotic old bachelor; St. 
George Temple is an ultra- aristocratic Peter of an earlier 
generation. Two or three interesting chapters introduce Edgar 
Allan Poe into the story, showing his manner of life, and how 
he was regarded by the Baltimore of his own day, but no new 
light is thrown on his character. 

DIONIS OF THE WHITE VEIL. By Caroline Brown. Boston : 

L. C. Page & Co. $1.50. 

The escaped nun, whose constant recurrence Miss Tynan 
deplored so wittily, yet with so sincere an indignation in the 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS in 

August number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, has again bobbed 
up serenely. This time she is in literature (sic/); as Mr. 
Boffin says, what scarers there are in print ! She gives the 
title, Dionis oj the White Veil, to a recently published book 
by Caroline Brown, a romance of the early eighteenth century. 
The fair Dionis, a young novice ready for final profession, 
comes over from France in company with three other nuns 
and two Jesuits, to undertake a mission to the Indians on the 
Mississippi shores. Unluckily she meets the Chevalier Fou- 
chet; he comes, he sees, and the Church is conquered. The 
author, of course, describes the lofty motives and the heroism 
of the religious with the same acute understanding with which 
Byron might have summed up the philosophy of St. Thomas, 
and the same fervent sympathy which might have glowed in 
an account of the Battle of Bunker Hill, if written by the late 
Count Tolstoi. The author also has evidently studied diction 
and history in the same school; the result is a fine careless 
rapture of split infinitives and wily Jesuits, of nuns that shud- 
der at " the evil eye," and relative pronouns that shriek to 
heaven for antecedents. The book is not worth a serious re- 
sentment. 

HER LITTLE YOUNG LADYSHIP. By Myra Kelly. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25. 

The deplorable story of Myra Kelly's desertion of the 
Church, of her marriage, and of her sad death shortly after, 
has drawn much attention recently to her literary work. Lit- 
tle Citizens, Little Aliens, and Wards of Liberty, stories of 
Jewish school children in New York, made a wide appeal be- 
cause of their novelty and delightful humor. Who can forget 
Morris Mogilewsky, " monitor off the goldfish," or the little 
girl that wore "for ladies shoes"? In these child-studies, 
mingling fun and warm sympathy, Myra Kelly doubtless found 
her metier. Her work along other lines, though always clever, 
was less individual. 

Her last and longest novel was left ready for the press at 
the time of her death, and is now published under the title, 
Her Little Young Ladyship. The theme is of international 
marriage; this time a Connecticut planter's daughter and a 
young Irish earl. There is skillful character-drawing, and the 
author's style is as sprightly and fun-flecked as ever, but the 



ii2 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

story does not form a coherent whole. Though the salt of 
Celtic wit and a soupfon of the mustard of melodrama make it 
palatable enough, yet somehow it refuses to jell. It gives the 
impression of having been written half-heartedly, or perhaps 
hurriedly and with interruptions. It can certainly be enjoyed, 
but not unreservedly praised. 

THE QUEEN'S FILLET. By Canon Sheehan, D.D. New York: 
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.35. 

In this, Canon Sheehan's book, the scene is laid in France 
during the time of the French Revolution. If the beginning 
be taken as the motif of the story we have the career of an 
eldest son of an aristocratic family who is disinherited by his 
father and forced to enter St. Sulpice to become a priest. 
The young man loathes the idea of forcing himself into the 
sanctuary without a vocation, and on the morning oi his ad- 
vancement to sub-deaconship he declines to prostrate before 
the altar with the other candidates, rushes off to the sacristy, 
dresses in secular garb, and goes out into the world. The 
Revolution is just breaking out, and Maurice becomes a 
prominent figure in it. His adventures, and those of his 
friends, as well as his end, we leave veiled. 

The theme is a rather hackneyed one which is not re- 
deemed by any great originality of thought. For the first 
one hundred and fifty pages Canon Sheehan writes well, and 
constructs with evident care, but he soon loses the thread of 
the story, with the result that the book becomes a bewilder- 
ing mass of detail which has the effect of irritating an ob- 
servant reader. Besides, there is an air of unreality through- 
out; the topography of Paris is of the vaguest sort, indeed we 
could not pick our way through the city though we know most 
of its corners. There are many good, some excellent passages 
in The Queen's Fillet, but the work is not always sustained. 

DR. DUMONT. By Florence Gilmore. St. Louis: B. Herder. 
50 cents. 

Dr. Dumont is the pathetic story, very simply told, of a 
man who has outlived success and is tested by disappointment 
and bitter trials, but whose faith leads him on to the happy 
realization of all his hopes for those he loves and for himself. 
The name of the author is becoming widely known, even on 



i9i i.J NEW BOOKS 113 

the other side of the Atlantic, as is evident from a recent 
appreciation in the Irish Monthly. 

LE PROBLEME DU MAL. Par P. J. Bonniot. (Paris : Pierre 
Tequi. 3 fr. 50.) 

Here is another evidence of the wonderful literary activity 
of the French clergy in the interests of religion. This treatise 
on the evil that afflicts the world in various ways, is written 
to combat the objections to, and blasphemies against, the good- 
ness of God. Some of these are quoted in the beginning of 
the book, and they show to what extent French freethinkers 
can go in their hatred of all that pertains to God. The treatise 
is divided into eight books, and this gives the author an 
opportunity of going systematically through nature to show 
how and why there exist cruelty, illness, and various defects 
of the animal world. This is very well done ; there is no 
trace of exaggeration, but a judicious calmness pervades the 
whole volume. The last book, treating on hell, will be most 
unpleasant reading to freethinkers. It is a good sign of the 
times that a volume like this of almost three hundred and 
seventy pages on a deep, abtruse theological subject, can 
reach a third edition. We wish it increased success, and rec- 
ommend it as a good hand-book for those who can read 
French. It has a rather good introduction by X. Moisant, 
who gives a rough view of the whole subject, and in doing so 
takes occasion to quote Carlyle and George Elliot. 

SOUVENIRS DE JEUNESSE. Par Charles Sainte-Foi. (Paris : 
Perrin et Cie. 5 fr.) 

The author whose real name, Eloi Jourdain, is less widely 
known than by his fseudonymn, Charles Sainte-Foi, was a dis- 
ciple of de Lamennais, and studied for some time with the in- 
tention of becoming a priest. Having given up the idea he 
entered upon a literary career with excellent results both for 
himself and the Catholics of France. He broke with de 
Lamennais when the latter declined to submit after his con- 
demnation. He had many unique opportunities of studying 
the character of de Lamennais while he was the latter's pupil 
at La Chiinaie, and the summing up of de Lamennais' virtues 
and weaknesses is the best we have ever seen. We think that 
VOL. xciv. 8 



II 4 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

for this reason alone, if for no other, these reminiscences will 
take a permanent place in the ecclesiastical history of a diffi- 
cult and misunderstood period of the Church in France. 

The most prominent men of the period (1828-1835) pass 
before us in review, for Sainte-Foi met them all. His ex- 
periences were not confined to Paris, but extended to Ba- 
varia and Austria. Among the many good chapters one in 
particular, the comparison between the Bavarian and French 
priesthood, attracts attention by its shrewdness of observation. 
In another chapter on the diplomatic world of Vienna the 
author tells us how he was asked by Metternich to go to 
Rome and be ordained a priest and then to enter the diplo- 
matic corps of the Vatican, where Metternich would give him 
his patronage and procure the good will of some Cardinals. 
To decline such an offer was only natural to one whose heart 
and soul were wrapped up in the welfare of the Church. 
". . . il eut trap repugne a ma conscience d'entrer dans I'etat 
ecclesiastique pour parvenir aux dignites et aux honneuts" 

We sincerely hope that the book will be translated into 
English as it is both interesting and valuable. 

WRIT IN REMEMBRANCE, by Marian Nesbitt (New 
York: Benziger Bros. 45 cents), is a very simple story 
written in the style and on the lines of the usual popular 
novel. Sybil Stapylton, a young heiress, is destined by her 
mother to marry an unknown prince. During a visit to her 
mother's new home Sybil is caught in a severe thunder-storm 
and is aided by a young man who calls himself a Professor. 
Sybil engages him to teach her German, and from this inci- 
dent arise expected results. The book will appeal to young 
women who wish to dream of European princes and romantic 
marriages. 

HTOWARDS THE SANCTUARY, by Rev. J. M. Lelen 
* (St. Louis: B. Herder. 25 cents), is a collection of "in- 
formal meditations on God's call to the eternal priesthood," 
addressed to Catholic youth. 



V 



r OCATION THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS, by the 
Rev. Peter Geiermann, C.SS.R. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 
5 cents), is a short reading for school children and would 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 115 

show them that obedience to God's special designs in the 
soul is the only secret of happiness here and hereafter. 

TTNION WITH JESUS. By Very Rev. Canon Antoni. 
Translated by A. M. Buchanan, M.A. (New York : Ben- 
ztger Bros. 5 cents), is a further appeal by the author of Vain 
Fears, addressed especially to those who, assisting at Mass 
daily, have an opportunity to receive daily Communion. 

Father Geiermann has also compiled The Child's First Com- 
munion Catechism (St. Louis: B. Herder. 30 cents per doz ), 
which presents the necessary doctrinal truths in the simplest 
possible form. 

Another excellent catechism for little children is the Cate- 
chism for First Communicants published by Frederick Pustet 
& Co., New York. 5 cents per copy. 

UNKNOWN ARIZONA. By Mrs. Martha Summerhayes. 
(Salem Publishing Co., Salem, Mass. $1.60). Mrs. Sum- 
merhayes' story of an officer's wife on the frontier forty years 
ago, is so fresh and vivid that it fascinates the lay reader as 
well as the army men who have given it so enthusiastic a re- 
ception. The change of conditions in Colorado and Arizona 
in so short a time is almost incredible. Professor Lyons of 
Yale writes : " This book is a real contribution to American 
History." 

T IFE OF ST. ALOYSIUS GONZAGA. By M. Meschler, 
V S.J. (St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.50). The name of Father 
Meschler is always a guarantee of solid piety and accurate 
research, and his new life of St. Aloysius is a desirable ad- 
dition to those already published. The very distinguished 
worldly position of St. Aloysius, and the close attention given 
by responsible persons to every detail of his short life, aside 
from his saintly character, create an unflagging interest in all 
that may be told of him. 

CT. MARGARET QUEEN OF SCOTLAND (St. Louis: 
^ B. Herder), is a book charming in its direct simplicity as 
well as its historical accuracy. It is a valuable addition to 
the " Notre Dame " Series of Lives of the Saints, and is well 
adapted for young girls. ($1.25). 



ii6 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

WHERE WE GOT THE BIBLE, by Rev. Father Graham, 
M.A. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 30 cents), is a succinct, 
logical statement of plain facts that should be, but are not, 
known to every Catholic. Father Graham was for some years 
a minister of the Established Church in Scotland, and it was 
his profound study of the question of "Rome and the Bible," 
that led him into the Catholic Church. His present work will 
do much to dispel false traditions and lessen prejudice. It 
deserves to be widely known. 

THE VISION OF MASTER REGINALD, by H. M. Capes, 
(St. Louis: B. Herder. 75 cents), is an account of 
the life of Reginald of Orleans, Friar Preacher, whom the 
Dominicans call " Our Lady's Favorite," and through whom 
they received the cherished scapular, to the wearing of which 
so many privileges are attached. In 1875, the proofs of Reg- 
inald's sanctity having been established and accepted, the de- 
cree of beatification was promulgated. The volume also con- 
tains a description of a Dominican convent in the thirteenth 
century. 

17ATHERINE OF THE BARGE, by Madge Blundell (St. 
-**- Louis: B. Herder. 50 cents), is the story of an Italian 
woman, of her devotion to the memory of her dead uncle and 
his beloved boat, and of her brave attempt to prevent her 
young husband from selling it. It is a simple little story, but 
effectively told. 

"CIGHT short stories by Charlotte Dease, which have ap- 
*^ peared in various periodicals, are now republished in 
book form with tke title, Children oj the Gael (New York : 
Benziger Brothers. 75 cents). Now dark with an eerie gloom, 
now shot with sudden humor, the stories are instinct with the 
true Irish spirit. The style is remarkable for its simplicity 
and purity. 

A MONG the popular new books is The Story Girl, by L. M. 
* Montgomery (Boston: L. C. Page & Co. $1.50). Like 
the author's first success, Anne tf Green Gables, it is a story 
of children for grown-ups. It makes pleasant reading. 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 117 

PLEMENTARY LESSONS ON THE HOLY EUCHARIST, 
by Dom Lambert Nolle, O.S.B. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 
45 cents per dozen), follows the sequence of the Mass in its 
presentation of truths concerning the Blessed Sacrament. 

JOHN, THE BELOVED AND PAUL OF TARSUS, by 
I M. T. Kelly. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 25 cents.) These 
"character sketches" bring the reader into closer touch with 
the beloved disciple and with the great apostle of the Gentiles, 
and lead him to a more intimate and comprehensive study of 
their writings. These volumes are very tastefully presented 
aid a new edition testifies to their popularity. 

J IFE AND WORKS OF OZANAM, by Kathleen O'Meara 
- / (New York : Christian Press Association. 85 cents), is a 
new edition of Kathleen O'Meara's well-known work on the 
great apostle of Catholic social work. 

PARLY FIRST COMMUNION, by F. M. de Zuiueta, sj. 

*-< (New York: Benziger Brothers. 50 cents), is a commen- 
tary on the text of the decree Quam Singulars. Another con- 
tribution to the growing literature on Holy Communion for 
little children, from the pen of the same author, is entitled 
Jesus, the Bread of Children (St. Louis: B. Herder. 35 cents). 
It tells in simple, conversational style, first of the miraculous 
bread given by God in the desert, and then of the Bread of 
life given by Christ Himself at the Last Supper. 



STORY OF THE OLD FAITH IN MANCHESTER, 
by John O'Dea (New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.50). 
This faithful history of the " Old Faith " in Lancashire, famous 
for her steadfastness through the horrors of persecution, gives 
statistics of great value and shows well the pre- reformation 
status of the Church and the Holy See in England. As the 
preface by the Lord Bishop of Salford states, the record of 
persecution " is not set down for the purpose of perpetuating 
old animosities, but rather that examples of glorious constancy 
and heroism may confirm our loyal devotion to the Faith and 
the Chair of Peter." 



ii8 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 



INSEPARABLES, by Rev. John J. Kennedy (Mel- 
-* bourne: W. P. Linehan. $i.) Apart from a few faults 
of construction Father Kennedy has written a good book, one 
that will be found most welcome by Catholic readers of fiction. 
The story concerns two brothers just leaving a Jesuit college 
for Melbourne University. They are the sons of a renegade 
Catholic father who wishes them to become irreligious, and a 
pious mother who is praying that they may preserve the faith. 
The part Catholicity plays in their lives, and in those of their 
companions is clearly brought out. Father Kennedy would 
be well advised if he omitted the last paragraph from the 
book. 

COME PLAIN SERMONS, by Rev. Thomas L, Kelly, LL.D. 
^ (St. Louis: B. Herder. $1,25). The sermons which make 
up this volume were written some years ago while the author 
was editor of The Providence Visitor, Since then he has been 
afflicted for some eight years with paralysis, which brought 
about a loss of speech and even a loss of all knowledge of 
reading and writing. Now that he has once more learned to 
read and to write (with his left hand) he has gathered together 
these sermons which his intimate friends have held in high es- 
teem. They are simple, short homilies on the Epistles and 
Gospels of the Sundays, and will be found useful to hard- 
working priests who are on the look-out for short but practi- 
cal sermons. 

ST. THOMAS A BECKET, by Mgr. Deminund. Translated 
by C. W. W. Deickworth & Co. (New York: Benziger 
Brothers. $i.) Brilliant administrator and consummate diplo- 
matist, daring soldier as well as skilled tactician, Thomas a 
Becket passes before us in the fascinating biography of Mgr. 
Deminund until the culminating tragedy of his death wins for 
him the martyr's crown. From first to last the interest never 
flags, and one forgets the charming style in the story of the 
personality that played so great a part in the life of England. 

BEGINNINGS, OR GLIMPSES OF VANISHED CIVILI- 
AN ZATIONS, by Marion McMurrough Mulhall (New York: 
Longmans, Green & Co. $i). This attractive volume of com- 
pilations from various sources and learned authorities has evi- 



19".] NEW BOOKS 119 

dently been found interesting to many readers as there is al- 
ready a demand for another edition. It is desirable to put into 
popular form, such researches as these somewhat fragmentary 
extracts that may induce young readers to take up later on 
serious study on similar lines. 

WE have received three works by Father Juan B. Ferreres, 
SJ. (Madrid: Razdn y Fe) dealing with questions of 
canon law and moral theology. In La Curia Romana, the 
learned Jesuit author first traces the origin and history of the 
College of Cardinals and the various congregations, tribunals, 
etc., composing the curia. This is followed by a clear and 
detailed exposition of the recent apostolic constitution Sapiente 
concilia (the complete text of which is subjoined) and an indi- 
cation of the differences between past and present practice and 
law. Three indices of general contents, an alphabetical index 
of subjects and one of authors, add to the value of this 
thoroughly scholarly work. Real and Apparent Death with re- 
lation to the Sacraments, is a fourth and enlarged edition Of 
a work already translated into English. The fifth edition of 
Espousals and Matrimony, a comprehensive commentary upon 
the decree Ne Temere, includes even the interpretations of 
the Sacred Congregation of the Sacraments delivered in 
March 1911. 

pIERRE DE KERIVLET, by Vicomte Hippolyte Le Gou- 
rello, gives the wonderful story of the Breton penitent who 
rose from the depths of crime to the heights of virtue. Ange et 
Apotre; La Piete, Le Zele, by Abbe* P. Fiege, is now in its 
third edition, and has won the highest commendation. It 
deals with the love of God and arouses enthusiasm to service. 
It could be profitably used as a book of meditation. La Lot 
d' Exit, by Edmond Thirset, already in its third edition, 
hows the demand for books on present day conditions in 
France. Bound together by a slender thread of romance it 
gives a touching and graphic picture of the personal results 
of the tyranny of the French Government to the Religious 
Orders. Pensees et Maximes of R. P. de Ravignan, S J, by 
Charles Renard, is a choice collection culled from one whom 
Gregory XVI. called The Apostle oj Paris. La Salut Assure, 
par La Devotion d Marie, sends up in its title the cry of a 



120 NEW BOOKS [Oct. 

devout soul urging all to have confidence in the "Refuge of 
Sinners." La Loi d'Age pour Premier Communion, by Abbe 
Sibend, is a second edition of a work published twenty years 
prior to the recent decree. Yet it is a most exact and 
luminous commentary. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 

DIEU EXISTE, by Henry de Pally. In a few pages the 
author appeals to man's common sense in view of the 
great truth that God appears in all creation. Each argument 
is condensed and well presented. Un Newman Russe ; Vladimir 
Soloriev, by Michel d' Herbigny. The aspirations of Chris- 
tian Russia, its philosophical and social tendencies are com- 
paratively unknown to us. Vladimir Soloviev merits to be 
hailed by Russia as the first of her philosophers, the most 
Christian of her sons. The comparison drawn by M. d' Her- 
bigny between Soloviev and Newman is most apt and strik- 
ing. To both was vouchsafed the light of Faith, and the 
primacy and infallible authority of the See of Peter have had 
no abler apologist than this Russian convert philosopher. All 
are published at Paris by Beauchesne et Cie. 

'THE EUCHARISTIC LITURGY IN THE ROMAN RITE, 
-*- by Rev. E. S. Berry. (New York: Frederick Pustet & 
Co. 75 cents.) There are few better ways of stimulating de- 
votion than the intelligent study of the Liturgy of the Church, 
its history and its symbolism. This present volume is an 
adaptation from the original Italian. It is well arranged, 
simple and clear and will interest all who desire some definite 
knowledge of the ceremonies and rites of the Church. 



jforeign periodicals. 

The Tablet (12 August): "Catholicism at Home and Abroad" 
is an address by the Archbishop of Westminster deliv- 
ered at the Catholic Congress at Newcastle. It con- 
siders the Independence of the Holy See; the Position 
of the Church in Portugal ; the Secondary School Regu- 
lations. An enthusiastic body of Catholics banded to- 
gether at 'the Congress in protest against the Regula- 
tions of the Board of Education for Secondary schools 
inasmuch as they interfere with the freedom of religious 
instruction existing in Catholic secondary schools, and 
prevent the establishment of new Catholic secondary 
schools. 

(19 August): The Rev. A. H. Lang, M.A., under the 
caption "Anglicans, Lutherans, Greeks," says that "the 
cultivated classes in Denmark and in North Germany 
are solidly making their way back to the ancient Church ; 
and in Russia so great is the fear of a return to Cath- 
olicism that no foreign priest is now allowed to enter." 
Miss Margaret Fletcher tells "What Catholic Women 
are doing in England " how they are " engaged in build- 
ing up again a social life laid waste at the Reformation." 
A paper by Father Henry on " Foreign Missions " gives 
encouraging words concerning the fruits of foreign mis- 
sions, and tells how the work expands and grows. 
(26 August): "The Great Strike" shows how Mr. 
Lloyd George's Conciliation Scheme, which was to ren- 
der a railway strike "practically impossible," failed to 
prevent the recent general railway strike which was 
serious enough to bring the country to the brink of 

civil war. A Roman correspondent gives assuring 

words concerning the Holy Father and tells at length 
of how he spends his days in the Vatican. " Statis- 
tics as to the Operation and Administration of Laws 
relating to the sale of Intoxicating Liquor in England 
and Wales give happy proof that the nation is becom- 
ing more sober, an event which will be hailed as a 
great triumph for the cause of Temperance. " A Church 
Dedication in North Borneo," by H. N. G. Hyrst is a 



122 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct., 

traveler's tribute to the work of the Mill Hill Fathers. 
A paper read by the Reverend Charles Plater, S.J., at 
the Newcastle Congress on " Some Methods of Circu- 
lating Catholic Literature " is here published. 
(2 Sept.) : " Laurier and Larger Markets " comments on 

the issue in the late Canadian election. An account 

of the life and work of Mgr. Hilton President of the 

English College, Lisbon. "The Belgian Catholics 

and Their Schools" gives an exposition of the demand 
made by Belgian Catholics for fairer terms for Catholic 

schools at the recent demonstration in Louvian. How 

the Insurance Bill will affect industrial charities is dis- 
cussed by Robert Segar in his paper on the subject. 
"The International Congress of Catholic Esperantists" 
by the Rev. P. H. Dowling, C.M., gives the notable 
features of this meeting, not the least of which was the 
ease with which the various nationalities in attendance 
talked in the new Esperanto language. Dr. Edward 
Somers, J.P. in his paper on "Temperance and Thrift" 
defines thrift as the economic use cf all the resources 
vouchsafed [to man, and temperance as the economic 
use of one of these resources, namely alcohol. 
The National Review (Sept.): "Episodes of the Month" again 
emphatically states that the outlook for England is 
fraught with peril which no patched-up settlement be- 
tween France and Germany over Morocco will perma- 
nently dispel. "Agadir," an unsigned article, reviews 

the beginnings of the Moroccan trouble and the present 
relations between France and Germany, with a view to 
showing that England is a barrier to Germany the 
world over and as a reminder to the British public that 
"rights without the might to protect them are vain and 

profitless." Lord Ebury sketches the origin, progress 

and adoption of " The Parliament Bill." " Had," by 

the Hon. Henry Lygon concerns itself with the last 
meeting of the Constitutional Conference which, the 
writer says, " tricked the nation into committing itself 

to a policy which it had hardly considered." "A 

Shooting Star," by Captain Harry Graham is a bio- 
graphical sketch of Charles Townshend who is remem- 
bered to-day only as an orator and " a statesman whose 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 123 

disastrous policy helped to rend an Empire asunder." 

"The Homing Power of Animals" is a study by 

Captain Humphries. A. Maurice Low in "American 

Affairs," writes of President Taft and Canadian Reci- 
procity, the losses by fire in the United States, and the 

spread of prohibition in the South. "The Creed of 

an Agnostic Spiritualist," by J. Arthur Hill. The author 
has " no deep certainty about anything." " Produc- 
tion: An Economic Note" shows the annual produc- 
tion of Great Britain, Germany and the United States. 

The Church Quarterly (July) : " The Morals of Immoralism," a 
summary of the philosophy of Nietzsche. By Rev. W. 

R. Matthews, B.D. "Glimpses of the Church of 

England in the Eighteenth Century." The object of 
this article is to illustrate from contemporary authority 
the general position and activity of the Church of Eng- 
land during the eighteenth century. "Reincarnation," 

a criticism by Rev. W. St. Clair Tisdall, of the re- 
vival of the ancient doctrine of the transmigration of 
souls. A theory so evil in its effects and so destitute 
of proof can hardly, in the Europe of the twentieth 
century, have a fate different from what befell it in 

the past. " Oxford of Five Hundred Years Ago." 

A brief survey of the early history of Oxford. 

Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept.) : " Prospects of the Catholic 
Church in China," by Rev. J. M. Fraser, after describ- 
ing the empire's state of rapid evolution, closes with an 

appeal for missionaries. Rev. T. Dunne, C.C., sketches 

the life and character of " Sir William Butler." " The 

Wisdom of Francis Thompson," by W. P. Smith, S.J., 
points out that the poet was a mystic whose message 
was to interpret the meaning of pain. 

Le Correspondant (10 Aug.): Francis Laurentie in "The Diary 
of An Exile," presents a daily account for the year 
1848-1849 kept by Count de Chambord during his ex- 
ile from France in Germany, Italy and Austria. The 
diary shows how alert the Count was to all going on 
in France. Letters from the reigning sovereigns to the 
Count are also presented in full.^ " A Friend of La- 
martine," by Leon Seche, gives an account of the life 
and works of Louis de Vignet, and the friendships ex- 



124 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct., 

isting between Lamartine, de Vignet and de Virien be- 
gun in their college days. The article is compiled from 
the personal letters of these three literary men, hitherto 
unpublished. Prince Louis D'Orleans presents his third 
article entitled " Across Bolivia." In this article he 
takes the reader from Santa Cruz to Puerto-Suarez, 

pointing 'out the principal events en route. " The 

Cuirassiers of the Guard," by Baron Almir de Vaux is 
an account of the Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 taken 

from the note- book of an officer. " The Truth About 

Mexico," is an unsigned article on the recent revolution 
in Mexico, centering the blame on the last election of 
President Diaz and his former administrations. 
(25 Aug.): A. Leroy-Beaulieu discusses the compro- 
mise effected between the German Government and the 
provinces of Alsace-Lorraine concerning the French lan- 
guage, in the article entitled, " The Law for French 

Culture." "Unedited Letters of Voltaire," presents 

the private letters of Voltaire from 1719-1778, with an 

introduction and notes by Fernand Caussy. "A 

French Mission to Morocco under Louis XIII.," by 
Baron Andre de Maricourt, relates the efforts of Louis 
XIII. at Christianizing Morocco. This article has been 
compiled chiefly from the journal of a Capuchin mis- 
sionary Father Joseph of Paris. " For Our Little 

Marines," by P. Giquello, describes the movement en 
foot for the support and education of the orphans of 

French sailors. " The Neapolitans and French at 

Naples 100 Years Ago," by Antoine de Tarle, discusses 
the political intrigues at Naples in 1811. 
Revue du Clerge Franfais (15 Aug.): L. Venard concludes his 

article on "Christian Origins." E. Vacandard brings 

to a close his examination of "The Question of Ritual 
Murder Among the Jews." After consideration of the 
many alleged cases of the crime, he concludes that "this 
is a heritage from ages without criticism, which the 
generations have transmitted blindly in favor oi race 
hatred." Not a single case seems to have a solid foun- 
dation. Apropos of a recent biography of Schopen- 
hauer, E. Lenoble gives a brief sketch of the philoso- 
pher's life. He considers also the pragmatic philosophy 



.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 125 

of William James. A. Gratieux writes of "Icons 

Among the Russians." "The Association of Heads 

of Families," signed J. T., is an account of a movement 
to resist the anti-religious activity of the government 
especially regarding the education of the children. 

Revue Pratique d' Apelogetique (15 Aug.): "The Preacher," by 
H. Lesetre. The preacher, says the author, should be 
a man of progress. He should not rest upon natural 
abilities or inspiration for his sermons. He should work 
with the aim of making his sermons ever more worthy. 

" Vocation." By a Friend of a Priest. Vocation, 

though mysterious, has two signs by which it can be 
known. The first consists in a horror for vice, a love 
of virtue, a desire to save souls. The second mark is 
the call of the Church. The Church studies the appli- 
cant for the priesthood, and she accepts him if she 
finds the vocation to be true. 

(i Sept.): Dr. Robert van der Elst, writing on miracu- 
lous cures, concludes that there have been wonderful 
cures in the Church which cannot be explained by 

natural causes. " Modernist Apologetics," according 

to H. Petitot, are based on false exegesis, a radical 
evolution of dogma, and a subjective test of truth. 

tudes (5 August) : Victor Pourcel eulogizes the studies of 

animal life made by J. H. Fabre. Gaston Sortais 

describes "The Frescoes of the Basilica at Assisi." 
"The Phenomena of Radio- Activity," by Joseph de 
Joannis. 

(20 Aug.): Lucien Roure reviews the brief authentic 
history of St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) with the 
Augustinian Canons and with the Friars Minor, and 
dwells upon his remarkable energy and purity of heart 
and his love of nature. " The Present Religious Situ- 
ation in Spain," according to Charles Parra, is very dark, 
especially in the central and southern parts. The older 
clergy are apathetic, half the people illiterate, the press 
anti-clerical and violent, the premier cannot resist the 
logical outcome of his policies, the best Catholics, the 
Carlists, are the implacable enemies of the ruling dy- 
nasty. A. Decisier describes the transfer of the relics 

of St. Francis de Sales and of St. Jane de Chantal as 



i26 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct. 

a Savoyard celebration.- Guillaume de Jerphanion 
praises Commandant d'Ollone's researches on " The Last 
of the Barbarians China, Thibet and Mongolia." 

La Civilta Cattolica (19 August): "The Conflict Between 
Morality and Sociology" is the first of a series of ar- 
ticles discussing the French school of sociologic posi- 
tivism headed by Durkheim. "The Origin of the 
Rose in Dante's Empyrean " refers the conception to 
Innocent III. more particularly and discusses its various 
mystical interpretations. The recent Eucharistic Con- 
gress in Spain is the subject of an article which is en- 
thusiastic as to Spain's Catholicity.-^" Good Readers" 
describes the qualities necessary in the reader who 
wishes to read with profit to himself.-^ The full text 
of the " Protest of the Portuguese Bishops " is given 
as is also the proceedings of the Court of Appeal, in 
confirming the condemnation of Verdesi. 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (August): A. Leger traces 
"The Doctrine of Wesley," from its inception as a 
doctrine of justification by faith alone this faith con- 
sisting in a special assurance given the individual by 
God that he is saved from the law of sin and death to 
the doctrine maintaining good works as a condition of 
saving faith. Ch. de Hellencourt writes of the " Ex- 
terior Activity of the Christian Mystics." " One can- 
not find on earth a type of man more complete and 
more perfect than the true Catholic mystic . . . 
He realizes in the highest degree the living synthesis of 
thought and action in love." S. Saberthonniere be- 
gins an article on " The Religion of Descartes." 

Stimmens aus Maria Laach: J. Kreitmaier, S.J., writes sym- 
pathetically of "Richard Wagner's Character." In this 
first paper, he describes the gifted artist, as passionate, 

capricious, sensitive and somewhat weak. A. Lehm- 

kuhl, SJ. points out five points of difference between 
" Christianity and Socialism " : origin, object, means-:* 
activity and consequences. "The Discussion Concern- 
ing Romanticism " by J. Overmans, S.J., traces the 
various meanings of this term in different authors. 



IRecent Events. 

In the presence of danger, the 
France. French people have shown great 

firmness, patience and self- restraint, 

and almost complete unanimity. There have been a few mani- 
festations against the government by anti-militarists and a 
section of the Socialists, but the latter as a body have fallen 
into line with the rest of the nation. The secrecy which has 
been maintained as to the conversations which have so long 
been carried on with the German Government, has been 
respected, although the conditions were trying, the govern- 
ment having been formed only a few days before the crisis 
occurred, and the desire to know what was going on having 
naturally been great. Even the workirgmen who had, by 
strikes and violence and numerous acts of malicious injury, 
caused such extreme anxiety, for a considerable time sus- 
pended proceedings of this kind, doubtless from a sense of com- 
mon danger. There were a few acts of sabotage, but not to any- 
thing like the same extent as before. But the rise in the price 
of food has led the women of France to acts almost as violent 
as were those of the railway men, and in these proceedings 
they have been supported by the notorious Confederation of 
Labor. Energetic measures have been taken by the govern- 
ment as it recognizes the revolutionary character of the 
movement. Troops in some places have had to be called out. 
The condition of the Army and the defences of the country 
are under present circumstances a matter of supreme interest. 
If what is said is true there is little reason to fear. Since 
1905, hundreds of millions of francs have been spent upon the 
eastern forts, which are said now to constitute a line of de- 
fence without a parallel in Europe. There are now twice the 
number of guns that there were in the same year, and the 
stock of stores and ammunition is three times as great. The 
Minister of War in a speech recently made declared that he 
had the fullest confidence in the strength of the Army that 
it was a living reality. All ranks, high and low, bore testi- 
mony to this. These are official declarations, but even these 
are sometimes true. The Navy, however, is not at the same 
high level. It has shown marks of deterioration in quality 
and has not been maintained at its full strength in comparison 



i28 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

with its former position and that of other Powers. The pres- 
ent Minister, however, M. Delcasse, has taken steps for a 
complete reorganization and for its due increase. But time has 
not yet permitted any great measure of improvement. There 
is, however, little doubt that should the worst happen, France 
would be supported by a Power whose Navy would make up 
for any deficiencies in her own. 

The action of Germany in sending 
France, Germany and Morocco, a war vessel to Agadir has been 

the cause of anxiety throughout 

the whole of Europe, and to a certain extent in this country 
for now more than two months. It is Germany herself that 
has suffered the most, especially in the disturbance to business 
which has resulted. For with all her power and prosperity 
Germany is not a rich country. She depends for the carrying 
out of her many commercial projects on money which has to 
be got from other countries, especially from France, which is 
at present the great treasury to which the European Conti- 
nent wishes to have recourse. Direct financial intercourse be- 
tween France and Germany, although much desired by many 
German financiers, and advocated by a few French, such as 
the quotation of German securities on the Paris Bourse would 
give, has not been permitted since the war of 1870, but in 
roundabout ways means have been taken to make use of French 
resources. The Baghdad railway, for instance, has been financed 
by a body of financiers who have their headquarters in Swit- 
zerland. Naturally Germany's action in Morocco has made 
the owners of this money anxious to withdraw it from the 
keeping of a possible enemy, and they have accordingly been 
calling it in, and this has resulted in somewhat serious conse- 
quences to business in Germany, consequences which doubtless 
were not foreseen by the clique which, it is said, prompted 
the hasty action of the government. 

While it is not possible to get at the real truth about cur- 
rent events, as so many people concerned in them do not love 
the light, and are not willing to come to it, there is good 
reason to think that the real promoters of the recent step are 
not the Emperor, or his official advisers, but persons belonging 
to the party of Pan-Germans which has been vociferous for so 
many years in urging on forward movements. In particular 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 129 

this party has been calling upon the government to seize upon 
a port on the coast of Morocco, in order that the ever-in- 
creasing German Navy may establish for itself a stronghold 
upon the Atlantic. Certain newspapers which advocate these 
views have not hesitated to declare that German domination 
of the whole of Europe is the aim to be kept in view by all 
good Germans, and the Emperor himself has been subjected 
to outspoken criticism on account of what is believed to be 
his strong desire for peace. 

Great Britain, of course, finds no favor in the eyes of those 
who have such a lofty ambition. The policy of England has 
always been to preserve the balance of power, and to prevent 
any nation from securing that all-dominant place which the 
Pan-Germans wish to secure for the German Empire. At the 
present time the agreement made with France in April 1904 
as to Morocco and Egypt makes it necessary for her to sup- 
port the Republic irrespective of her general policy. More- 
over, the compensations required by Germany in the first 
instance would have seriously conflicted with British interests. 
Hence it cannot be doubted that Great Britain has been giv- 
ing to France real support, and, taking into account the words 
of Mr. Lloyd George there is every reason to think that this 
support would, in the unhappy event of war, take the shape 
of military assistance. But the support thus given has not 
been with a view to bring on a conflict, as has been asserted 
by what is called the Press of the second rank in Germany, 
but with an object the very reverse the bringing about of a 
reasonable agreement between the two countries. This is 
made plain by Mr. Asquith's speech in Parliament and by the 
repeated declarations of all responsible British journals. These 
facts, however, have not prevented some organs of the German 
Press just referred to from asserting that, while France is the 
traditional enemy of Germany, the angriest and most ceaseless 
enemy is Great Britain ; and that Germany's path is every 
where blocked by England, no opportunity being missed on her 
part of doing Germany an injury or of hampering her progress. 

It must be confessed that there is some truth in the 
assertion that Great Britain stands in the way of German 
desires for an outlet for her ever-increasing population to 
colonies in which that population can settle without ceasing 
to be subjects of the Emperor. But it is untrue to say that 
VOL. xciv. 9 



130 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

this has been done out of enmity to Germany or on purpose 
to thwart her. England's colonies had been established long 
before Germany needed expansion. The Monroe doctrine 
stands in the way of Germany's wishes as effectually as do 
the colonies of Great Britain, but the Monroe doctrine in- 
volves no animosity on the part of this country towards Ger- 
many. Hence the recent effort to embitter the German public 
against Great Britain is unjustifiable, and although the journals 
that have been endeavoring to embroil the two countries are 
not without influence, they do not represent the best part of 
the German people. To put the matter on a lower ground, for 
Germany to excite warlike feeling in Great Britain is in the 
highest degree detrimental to her own interests. There are 
all sorts of people in England as in every other country, and 
among them are to be found strong advocates of a war with 
Germany at the earliest possible moment, before the German 
navy has grown in strength so as to become more of a match 
for the British than it has yet become. These look upon a 
war as inevitable and naturally wish it to be waged while 
England is relatively strong. It is into their hands that this 
German Press is playing. 

Among the German parties the Social Democrats are the 
only one which has taken a decided stand in favor of the 
maintenance of peace. Their leading spokesmen repudiate 
both the new policy of seeking compensation as well as the 
older of coveting territory because convenient for expansion. 
Expansion, they say, is not needed, for Germany is able to 
find room for a million and a half of foreign workmen and to 
supply them with work. But it would be a mistake to expect 
that the Social Democrats will be able to exercise a decisive 
influence upon the course of events. They are, indeed, the 
most numerous of all the parties, but the rest are accustomed 
to unite against them. 

How soon the conversations which have been going on so 
long will come to an end it is not possible to say, or what 
will be the outcome. It does not seem likely, however, that 
war will break out, even in the event of no agreement being 
reached. If Germany's object in going to Agadir had been 
to provoke war with France, these long conversations would 
not have taken place. Perhaps a Conference of the Powers 
interested may be held in order to settle the whole question. If 
this should result in freeing the hands of France and of Spain, 



i.] RECENT EVENTS 131 

that they may obtain effectual control of regions which have 
for so long a period been blighted by the despotic rule of irre- 
sponsible autocrats, and have become the abode of cruelty and 
lust in all their most revolting fours, an upward step will have 
been taken in the progress of mankind towards better things. 
Nothing at all has been said about referring the settle- 
ment of the question between France and Germany to arbi- 
tration, and it might be inferred from this by the opponents 
and be-littlers of this movement that the talk of settling dis- 
putes in this way was futile, that it was only of service in 
minor matters about which war would in no case be resorted 
to. Such a conclusion, however, would be precipitate. The 
movement for arbitration sprang out of the strong feeling 
which has for a long time existed in favor of peaceful methods 
of settling international questions, from a keen realization of 
the horror and essential barbarity of war. Perhaps it may be 
said to be due in a measure to the diffusion in the minds of 
ruled and rulers of a more Christian spirit. Had it not been 
for this general adoption of higher principles, there is but 
small reason to doubt that the challenge for such it was 
offered by Germany to France when she sent the gun-boat 
to Agadir, would have been taken up in the spirit in which it 
was made, and that instead of consenting to take part in a 
series of conversations with a view to a peaceful settlement 
of the question, France would have demanded satisfaction for 
the affront ; nor would the other Powers have acquiesced in 
the discussion behind their backs of questions which affected 
their interests. So that, although arbitration has not been 
formally proposed, yet the spirit from which the arbitration 
movement has sprung has led to the settlement by peaceful 
methods for a peaceful settlement seems now assured of 
what would, under the domination of other sentiments, have 
led to war. It must be remembered, too, that Germany is the 
most backward of all the nations in the support which she has 
given to the settlement of disputes by recourse to arbitration, 
and consequently it was not to be expected that she would 
appeal to this method, or even listen to such an appeal. 

The negotiations between Russia 

Germany. and Germany which began with 

the Tzar's visit to Potsdam last 

November have at last been brought to a conclusion. In this 



132 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

cue the possessions of another Mohammedan nation form the 
subject-matter of a possible conflict, although not of so acute 
a character as that with France concerning Morocco. In 
1907 Russia and Great Britain came to an agreement concern- 
ing their respective spheres of influence in Persia, according 
to the terms of which Russia was left free in the North, and 
Great Britain in the South, each to pursue its own plans and 
projects. The new Agreement between Russia and Germany 
is concerned exclusively with this Northern part of Persia in 
which Russia is interested, and by it Germany is pledged not 
to seek concessions for railways, roads, navigation or tele- 
graphs for herself, or to support any such application on the 
part of German or other subjects. The Russian Government 
binds itself, on its part, to apply within a certain definite 
period to the Persian Government for a concession for a 
railway from Teheran to a place to which a branch of the 
Baghdad Railway will be brought under German auspices, thus 
affording a connection with this long-projected and much- 
talked-of railway. Russia pledges herself in no wise to hin- 
der the completion of this railway, or to prevent the par- 
ticipation of foreign capital. It is now expected that Baghdad 
will be reached by 1918. This agreement between Russia and 
Germany in no way affects the attitude of Russia towards 
France or the support which it has given to the latter Power 
in the Morocco question. The Dual Alliance and the Triple 
Entente remain unshaken. But the conclusion of the new 
agreement encourages the hope of better relations between 
Germany and Russia, and consequently of increased interna- 
tional security. An indirect result of the agreement is the 
probability that Russia and India will in a short time be con- 
nected by railway, and that thereby order will be promoted 
among the tumultuous tribes which have reduced Persia to 
the chaotic condition of the present time. 

No relaxation is taking place in the efforts to increase the 
Navy. On the contrary, not only is there an enlargement of 
the size of the warships, but there has been a constant re- 
duction ol the period of construction. From 36 to 40 
months, the German Minister for the Navy declared three 
years ago, was the average time which it took to build a vessel. 
The average rate of construction is now from 29^ to 31^ 
months. Whether still further demands are to be made upon 
the German people for a new programme of ship-construction 



i9ii.] RECENT EVENTS 133 

has excited no little discussion. The German method is to 
make arrangements for building at a certain rate for a fairly 
long period in advance. This period comes to an end in 
1917. But in a speech recently made at Hamburg, the Em- 
peror referred to the Navy as young and still growing to 
maturity, and expressed his conviction that the German peo- 
ple were minded to strengthen the Navy in the future, so 
that security might be attained that nobody would dispute 
with them the place in the sun which belonged to them. 
An intimation was given that the whip and the spur might 
bs applied to stimulate the nation to the requisite effort. 
There are those who see in this an intimation that a new pro- 
gramme of naval construction has been made by the govern- 
ment and will soon be introduced, and this in violation of an 
assurance given by Prince Billow that the limit of taxation had 
been reached, and in spite of the fact that an increase in number 
of the Social Democrats is the invariable result of every fresh 
addition to the burdens of the people. 

Germany has not been without its labor troubles, although 
compared with those of Great Britain and France they have 
scarcely deserved to be mentioned. The Kaiser, in one of 
the numerous speeches which he has been making, took occasion 
to praise his consort, the Empress, as one who had brought 
family life into the Hohenzollern House, and had become 
a model for German mothers. She had raised up six sons 
to become capable and earnest men, who were not minded 
to make use of the easy side of their titles and positions, and 
to live for enjoyment, but in the hard and strict performance 
of duty to devote their strength to the Fatherland. With 
such examples before their eyes it may be that the German 
people, employer and employed alike, may be saved from 
the conflicts that too exclusive a pursuit of their supposed 
rights is bringing upon other countries. 

Another supposed case of espionage has tended still fur- 
ther to increase the feeling against Great Britain which the 
alleged conduct of that country in the Morocco question had 
already made sufficiently dangerous. An Englishman has been 
arrested at Bremen on suspicion, but the grounds of it have 
not been disclosed. To return the compliment, a German 
officer has been arrested at Plymouth on the charge of at- 
tempted bribery in order to learn official military and naval 
secrets. Incidents of this kind do not improve the relations 



134 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

between the two countries. Whether the visit of the Heir- 
apparent of the Sultan to Berlin will have any effect upon the 
relations between Turkey and Germany has not yet been dis- 
closed. 

Very little that calls for notice 
Austria-Hungary. has taken place in either Austria 

or Hungary. This doubtless is to 

be taken as an indication that things are going fairly well. 
Payment of bills incurred through the annexation of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, and for the increase of the Navy, is the main 
preoccupation of the government, and this although a neces- 
sity is not of much interest to the outside world. For many 
years the relations of Austria with Hungary have not been 
so good as they now are. The question of the common Bank 
has been settled to the satisfaction oi both countries. The 
Emperor-King 4 Francis Joseph, has been celebrating his eighty- 
first birthday amid general rejoicings, and a statue in his 
honor has been unveiled at Karlsbad. No steps have been 
taken in Hungary to proceed with the long promised Bill for 
Universal Suffrage. The fact that within a month two duels 
were fought by members of the Hungarian nobility enables 
a judgment to be formed as to its progress in civilization. 
Count Aehrenthal has returned to the Foreign office thereby 
disappointing those who had hoped that his career was 
ended. The Albanian rising and the way in which Aus- 
tria treated the Catholics who looked to her for protection, 
has led to the diminution of Austrian influence in the Bal- 
kans. The King of Montenegro has supplanted the Emperor 
of Austria in the affections of those who suffered at the hands 
of the Turks. Peoples and races that for centuries have been 
sworn enemies have now for the first time entered into 
friendly relations. Germany, it is taken for granted, is being 
supported by Austria in the question of Morocco. At all 
events Great Britain has been assailed both by a part of the 
Press and by the President of the Austrian Chamber. In a 
speech made by the latter, he promulgated what he called a 
new idea the Mediterranean for the Mediterranean States. 
This, he said, was directed against a Power which has its 
hands in all the affairs of the world, and wants to drive back 
Germanic Germany. The Power he had in his mind was Great 
Britain, and he proceeded to declare that he would not stand 



191 1.] RECENT EVENTS 135 

its proceedings, and that he was ready to go hand in hand 
with the French and Italians in solid opposition. They wished 
to be recognized in the Mediterranean as fully valid Mediter- 
raneans. So far as yet appears little progress has been made 
with the new idea. 

After somewhat protracted labors, 
Portugal. due to the desire of making the 

new Constitution as perfect as 

possible, the Constituent Assembly has passed the new Con- 
stitution. Few details, however, have been published, for the 
interest taken in the doings of Portugal does not seem to be 
great. There is to be a Senate, to be chosen out of the most 
prominent members of the National Assembly. Immediately 
after the completion of the work of constitution making, a 
President of the Republic was elected by the Assembly itself. 
The nominee of the moderates, Dr. Arriaga, was chosen by a 
majority over the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the late Pro- 
visional Government. It is hoped that the new President, who 
has the sympathy of the greater part of the Chamber, as he 
is not a party man, will conciliate both the Advanced and the 
Moderate Republicans. He is seventy years of age, a Doctor 
of Laws of the University of Coimbra, and a brilliant journ- 
alist and orator. On the election of the President the Pro- 
visional Ministry at once resigned. France immediately official- 
ly recognized the Republic and doubtless other Powers will not 
long defer so doing. After one unsuccessful attempt, a Minis- 
try was formed in the course of a week. It is of a Conserva- 
tive character, and supported by a majority of 55 in the 
Chamber and 25 in the Senate. There is danger, however, 
lest it should meet with obstruction on the part of the Radi- 
cals headed by Senhor Costa, in the event of its trying to 
alter, as the Conservatives wish to do, the Law of Separa- 
tion of Church and State. 

The new Republic is threatened by many dangers, both in- 
ternal and external. Labor disputes involving violence and 
riots have taken place in various places. Friends of the ex- 
pelled royal family are threatening an invasion from Spain, 
and they are said to have many sympathizers not only among 
the people but in the Army. 



With Our Readers 

TWO EARLY ENGLISH MYSTICS. 
(WRITTEN IN 1894 BY LIONEL JOHNSON.) 

SAYS a modern writer : "Our island would be but a spare contributor to 
a general exhibition of mystics. The British cloister has not one great 
mystical saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us, prepare the way for the 
Reformation. John Wycliffe and John Tauler are a striking contrast in this 
respect. . . . Whether coming as gloomy superstition, as hysterical 
fervor, or as pantheistic speculation, mysticism has found our soil a thank- 
less one." It is true that Catholic England produced no Tauler, Eckhart, 
John of the Cross, Merswin, Suso, St. Teresa, or Catharine, or Gertrude: 
neither in orthodox mystical theology nor in heretical has England excelled. 
But Vaughan's language is vastly too sweeping ; it is the language of a 
partly false tradition, which assigns to the Anglo-Saxons all practical quali- 
ties, to the Celts all extravagance and revolt. Sober, steady, sensible, quiet 
religion, a decent gravity and seriousness, are the supposed Saxon virtues; 
wild yearnings and visionary longings and imaginative audacities are given 
to the Celts. It is generally assumed that early English poetry, wherever 
found, is a dull and earthbound thing, compared with Celtic; and, though 
we hear plenty of Saxon "superstition," it is said to have been a prosaic 
thing, coarsely uninspired, without the true glooms and glories, loveliness 
and strangeness, of an impassioned mysticism. What has early Anglo- 
Saxon literature to set by the side of St. Brendan's voyage, or of St. Fur- 
sey's visions, and all the riches of the Celtic Christian spirit in legend and 
in song? That is, of course, a conventional and mistaken conception. 
Modern writers have dwelled sufficiently upon the characteristics of the 
Northumbrian and Western literature to make it clear that an immense 
sadness and an immense passion, a sense of tears and a fighting fierceness, 
went to the self-expression of the Saxon Christian writer. When Vaughan 
asks for a monkish mystic, we point him to Richard Rolle of Hampole that 
eager Augustinian visionary. 

A certain pathos clings about the memory of this ancient English 
mystic. He died in 1349, and our chief authority for his life is derived 
from the office which the nuns of Hampole had composed for him against 
the day of his elevation to the Church's altars. But that day never 
came, and Richard Rolle remains a saint uncanonized and scarce re- 
membered, save by literary historians and philologists. Leaving Oxford 
and his father's house before his twentieth year, he retired to an eremitical 
life near Hampole, in Yorkshire, and abode there all his days in contempla- 
tion, and in the composition of devout works, original and translated, Latin 
and English, prose and verse. His is the glory of being the first original 
writer of English prose whose name we know, and, scant as is our knowledge 
of him, he is a figure of profound fascination, as mystical theologians are 
wont to be. Anglican Churchmen, whilst often learned in Church historians 
before the Reformation, are apt to begin their study of English theologians 



i.] WITH OUR READERS 137 

with Cranmer and Hooker, ignoring even the Anselms and other lights of 
the Church. Many would mistake an extract from Rolle for some utterance 
of fourteenth-century Germany or sixteenth-century Spain, of an Eckhart 
or a John of the Cross; it is a prevailing delusion that old England produced 
no mystics, properly so called, but merely devotional writers untouched by 
the spirit of the "sacred darkness" and the contemplative ecstasy. Rich- 
ard Rolle, with his fellows and followers represented in this volume,* dispels 
that error; it is a book burning with the divine zeal, the work of men driven 
by Bonaventure's Goad of Love, and casting themselves upon poetry, alle- 
gory, ejaculation, for the expression of their passionate hearts. With Sir 
Thomas Browne, they love to "lose themselves in an O Altitude/" and, as 
the same writer has it, they "have been so happy as personally to under- 
stand Christian Annihilation, Ecstasy, Exolution, Liquefaction, Transforma- 
tion, the Kiss of the Spouse, Gustation of God, and Ingression into the 
Divine Shadow," and therefore " they have already had a handsome antici- 
pation of heaven ; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in 
ashes unto them." 

At the same time there is an English note in their theological strictness. 
It is easy, as Faber said, "to go wrong in spiritual theology, and to stray 
into the shadow of condemned propositions." But these mystics do not so 
much as skirt the abyss of pantheism, as do so many of their foreign breth- 
ren; they keep safe within the plain paths traced by creed, and Scripture, 
and the Church's "living voice." They are practical, in the common sense 
of the word, and write less with a desire to contribute to mystical science for 
its own sake, than with an eye to the practice of piety. They are not, like 
the great masters of Catholic mysticism, intellectually hard to comprehend, 
but fervent and simple. Their pages are not divided into rigid logical sec- 
tions, but are a vehement stream of entreaties and outcries, starred with 
"Ah, sweet Jesu !" and rapturous appeals. Rolle, at least, has a singular 
poetical charm in imagination and in phrase, a true literary instinct amid 
his ecstasies. Thus, Conscience is " the Abbey of the Holy Ghost," founded 
by the Father of Heaven. The Holy Ghost is its warden and visitor : and 
twenty-nine "ghostly ladies " inhabit it, of whom Charity is abbess, Wisdom 
prioress, Meekness sub-prioress. God's four daughters dwell in the con- 
vent: Mercy and Truth are Abbess Charity's chaplains, Righteousness is 
Wisdom's, Peace attends upon Meekness. It is like Bunyan, but more con- 
sistent in theological meaning, less vivid in dramatic art. The plangent 
sentences are full of piteous beauty and simplicity. What a reverent real- 
ism in this scene from the Crucifixion 1 "And then took they such another 
rugged nail and drove it with an hammer through both His feet at once into 
the hard Tree. Ah, Lord, how that rugged nail crashed among the hard 
bones! " This is no Spanish Jesuit of Renaissance times, nor Italian Pas- 
sionist of our own: it is a north-country Saxon hermit of the fourteenth cen- 
tury. But, like all who have what Wesley called " heart-religion," he loves 
the personal, and physical, and concrete details of the Scripture narrative, 
and to amplify them in his imagination as in this exquisite passage : 

Johnson here refers to Yorkshire Writers, Richard Rolle of Hamfole, an English Father 
of the Church, and his Follower!. Edited by C. Horstman. Published by Sonnenschen of 
London. 



138 WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

"Then was He born of His Mother in an old broken house at Bethlem 
town's end, and laid in an ass-manger on a little hay. And there found He 
another lady of the same Abbey, that is Poverty: forwhy His Mother had 
none other sheets to bind Him in, but took a kerchief off her head, and cut 
an old kirtle, and made thereof clothes, and wound therein her Child for 
cold, and laid Him on a wisp in an ox-stall I trow there was poverty 
enough ! " It is all realized, as by some contemporary artist of the cloister, 
who had no wish to denude the Gospels of their positive externals, by way of 
honoring their internal message. Rolle has an extraordinary passion of 
humble faith, finding utterance in touching words. He asks of the Blessed 
Virgin " neither castles, nor towns, nor none other world's weal, nor sun, 
nor moon, nor none of _the bodies of heaven, nor nothing: but wounds of 
ruth, of pain, and of compassion of sweet Jesu my Lord's passion is all my 
desire." For he has " appetite to pain," for the Passion's sake. "Ah, 
sweet Jesu, then were there five great floods of blood from hands, feet, and 
side. Thy chin hangeth on Thy breast, the white of Thine eyes is cast up- 
wards Thy lips shrink, Thy white teeth show, Thy lovely face is become all 
pale, Thine hair clotted all with blood." But from such piteous and vivid 
realization he always passes to a moral or to prayer: there is no morbid 
feverishness of imagination. The counsels for daily life, the "Form of 
Perfect Living," are direct and plain, rich in common sense, application to 
the world, knowledge of human nature; yet all in rigorous contoimity with 
orthodox belief, with the doctrine of Augustine and of Bernard, Anselm 
and Bonaventure. As M. Huysmans' latest hero discovered, Catholic mys- 
ticism is justified by experience; it contains a true psychology; it works. 
Rolle sets it forth with beauty and intensity of speech, which do not obscure 
its matter-of-fact truth to the realities of life. He was a man of visions and 
ecstasies, living in ' worlds not realized" by the mass of men; and the re- 
sult is not a mere hysterical emotion, nor wayward rhapsody, but a consist- 
ent and verifiable doctrine, containing nothing of which "Seynt Thomas 
Alqwyne" or " Seynt Gregor" could disapprove. Not that he is a meta- 
physical theologian, a scholastic; his fundamental theology is that of tradi- 
tion, and personal experience has instructed him in its ascetic and mystic 
sides. 

Though it is true that pantheistic mysticism had no place in England, 
and that Wycliffe was no mystic, yet M. Jusserand reminds us, that some of 
his heretical, unpantheistic doctrines were welcomed by the adepts of the 
Free Spirit in Bohemia. The general truth seems to be that, whilst formal 
mysticism the mysticism of Germany and Spain have been uncongenial to 
the English mind, yet that a mystical strain has run through English litera- 
ture. English religion, since the Reformation, can boast of the Cambridge 
Platonists, of Leighton and Law, among the " orthodox " ; of Fox and Bun- 
yan, Wesley and Irving, among the nobler "schismatics"; of countless 
queer and pathetic bodies, Muggletonians and the like, such as flourish 
among us still, swelling the "varieties of Protestantism." But it is in 
English literature, rather than in English religion, that something mystical 
has prevailed; something which warrants M. Brunetiere in saying that, 
while French literature expresses the communis sensus of the world, English 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 139 

gives voice to personal vagaries, strange idiosyncrasies, individual (motions, 
the lyrical cries and private thoughts of isolated, single souls. In the last 
century, English writers were for establishing a check against the spirit of 
lawlessness, or of " each man a law unto himself"; they did great and good 
things, but in that they failed. To-day, English literature has all the ex- 
travagance and individualism of the Elizabethan. French writers have no 
sense of mystery; the French mystics a Francis of Sales, a Fenelon, a 
Madame Guyon have none; they are touching and melting and moving, 
sometimes majestic and supeib ; but there is no feeling of awe, no shudder 
and thrill, either of agony or of ecstasy, when reading them. And the 
poets, the orators, the historians, and romance writers of France, are in like 
case: Chateaubriand and Michelet, Hugo and Lacordaire, Renan and Bal- 
zac, Mirabeau and Diderot, Baudelaire and Rousseau there is not one line 
in them that gives us the sense of an everlasting wonder and a fearful joy. 
But in Langland, M. Jusserand bids us see an early chief of a great com- 
pany, among whom are Wesley and Shelley, Blake and Browning, Cowper 
and Carlyle, Coleridge and Newman. He traces the strain of semi-mystical 
emotion, common to them all, to the Germanic element in the English race. 
Thanks to the fusion of races, the mingling, as Arnold eloquently explains, 
of Celt and Teuton and Scandinavian, the English race has neither the meta- 
physical turn of the Germans nor the idealism of the Celts undiluted and 
pure; the two combine, and create a literature of beautiful mysticism, a 
literature full of strangeness and propensity, of thought quivering with 
emotion. In Tennyson's phrase, our poets " follow The Gleam." Lang- 
land, a brooding and solitary man, his heart hot within him, "spake with 
his tongue" when "the fire kindled"; his visions were of "the whole 
creation groaning and travailing together," of the world under a cloud, of 
a painful pilgrimage to the altar of " Saint Truth." His conception of the 
social state was not Utopian and unpractical, but he could only see life in 
some eternal light; he saw in the Commons of England at once a national 
power and a divine instrument. Milton, in the last pages of his Reforma- 
tion in England, uses language of apocalyptic fire and majesty, whilst his 
practical politics are calm and sober, not the ravings of Fifth Monarchists. 
It is instructive to contrast these Englishmen with the rhetoricians of the 
French Revolution ; they advocated all manner of Utopias with elegant and 
pseudo-classic grace, with invocations of Brutus and Humanity and Reason, 
without the least touch or tone of mystery and awe. No passage of Hugo's 
greatest verse, magnificent and resonant, rings so true and pierces so deep 
as do Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" lines, or some of Shakespeare's son- 
nets. Take the late Mr. Pearson's National Life and Character: it is lucid, 
systematic, unrhetorical, a book of statistics and scientific induction and his- 
torical comparison, yet what a sense of the mystery of things, what a feeling 
for the strangeness of human fortunes, the lots, issues and struggles of 
mortality! The English distaste for logic springs from the instinctive con- 
viction that logic cannot get to the heart of anything the conviction that 
animated Burke in pleading for Ireland and against the Revolution. " All 
shallows are clear," said Johnson, when one praised the clearness of Hume ; 
and in the same century Butler and Berkeley poured scorn upon the facile 



i 4 o WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

coffee-house sceptic, who never recognized the depths and heights of exist- 
ence : 

"Thus God has will'd 
That man, when fully skilled, 
Still gropes in twilight dim ; 
Encompassed all his hours 
By fearfullest powers 
Inflexible to him." 

It is this recognition of a mystery in the world, however vaguely and 
variably felt, which forbids us to believe that Englishmen will ever accept 
purely "scientific and secular" principles of individual or of social life. 
From that early reformer Langland up to our day, English literature has 
been wont to take the side of faith in unseen realities j not all the forces of 
material desire and material comfort, of national pride and social dissatis- 
faction, have been able to turn the face of England towards the way that 
ends in the anarchy of atheism and the atheism of anarchy. Langland 
echoed David "Clouds and darkness are round about Him : righteousness 
and judgment are the habitation of His seat." This mediaeval dreamer of 
dreams, with his eyes so keen to mark the swarming life around him, and 
still so ardent in reverence for the eternal truth, and in belief in its power to 
redress all wrongs and confute all lies, is a " representative man " among 
English mystics. 



CATHOLIC FEDERATION. 

f"pHE Tenth National Convention of the American Federation of Catholic 
\. Societies, which convened in Columbus, Ohio, August zoth to 24th, 
was one of the greatest held by this organization. The ceremonies opened 
with Pontifical High Mass at St. Joseph's Cathedral. His Excellency, Most 
Rev. Diomede Falconio, Apostolic Delegate, was the celebrant. The Rt. 
Rev. Regis Canevin, Bishop of Pittsburg, preached a masterly sermon. 
Among the Church dignitaries in attendance were, besides Mgr. Falconio, 
Most Rev. Archbishop Moeller of Cincinnati, Bishop James McFaul of 
Trenton, N. J., Bishop J. J. Hartley of Columbus, Bishop H. Richter of 
Grand Rapids, Mich., Bishop Joseph Schrembs of Toledo, Bishop Regis 
Canevin of Pittsburg, Bishop C. P, Maes of Covington, Ky., Bishop P. J. 
Muldoon of Rockford, Bishop Kelley of Detroit, Bishop Thos. J. Lillis of 
Kansas City, Abbot Paul Schaeuble of Louisiana, Mgr. M. J. Lavelle of 
N. Y. City, Mgr. A. J. Teeling of Boston, Mass., Mgr. F. Wall of New York, 
and Mgrs. Specht and Soentgerath of Columbus. 

A monster parade took place in the afternoon, in which, it was esti- 
mated, 12,000 persons participated. The parade was reviewed by Gov. 
Harmon and all the Church dignitaries present. 

Sunday night a great mass meeting was held at Memorial Hall, at 
which addresses were made by the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Moel- 
ler, Bishop Hartley, Prof. Walsh of Fordham University, N. Y., Gov. Har- 
mon of Ohio and others. 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 141 

The business sessions were held atthe Knightsof Columbus Hail and were 
quite spirited. The reports of the National President and National Secre tai y 
gave evidence of the great work done by the Federation since its last conven- 
tion held in New Orleans. They showed the Federation's activity in its 
crusade against immorality, the indecent stage, the salacious posters, di- 
vorce, Socialism, and the White Slave Traffic; and its work for the better 
observance 0f Sunday, and the suppression of sacrilegious works. 

Letters of encouragement were received from Cardinal Merry del Val, 
and four other Cardinals of the Church, as well as hundreds of Bishops and 
Archbishops from all parts of the Catholic world. 

Some very telling addresses were delivered by Bishop Muldoon, by 
Bishop Canevin and by Abbot Paul Schaeuble. 

The resolutions adopted by the Federation cover the following: 

Loyalty and Devotion to our Holy Father; Message of Congratulation 
to Cardinal Gibbons, Encyclopedia Britannica, Persecutions in Albania, 
Portugal, etc., Sunday Observance, Mailing or offering for sale of obscene 
literature, Catholic Citizenship, World Federation, Catholic Education, 
Catholic Schools and Colleges, Freedom of Education, Educational Periodi- 
cals, Catholic Daily Press, Deaf Mutes, Catholic Alumni Association, Bible 
Reading, etc., Social Section, Welfare of Wage Earners, Social Reform, 

At the second Mass Meeting, held at Memorial Hall Tuesday night, ad- 
dresses were made by Right Rev. James A. McFaul, Rev. Dr. J. Cavanaugh, 
of Notre Dame, Indiana; Chief Horn Cloud, of the Indian Missions, and 
others. The meeting was presided over by Hon. Judge M. F. Donahue, of 
the Ohio Supreme Court. 

The great banquet at which covers were laid for over i,coo persons 
closed the Tenth National Convention. 

The following officers were elected: 

President, Edward Feeney, Brooklyn, N. Y.; First Vice-President, J. B. 
Oelkers, Newark, N. J.; Second Vice-President, Thomas P. Flynn, of Chi- 
cago, 111.; Third Vice-President, J. A. Coller, of Shakopee, Minn.; Fourth 
Vice-President, J. J. Hynes, Buffalo, N. Y.; Fifth Vice-President, James J. 
Regan, St. Paul, Minn.; Sixth Vice-President, J. W. Philp, Dallas, Tex.; 
Secretary, Anthony Matre, St. Louis, Mo.; Treasurer, C. H. Schulte, De- 
troit, Mich.; Marshal J. W. West, Kansas City, Kan.; Joseph Horn Cloud, 
of South Dakota, Color Bearer. 

MEMBERS OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD: 

Most Rev. S. G. Messmer, D.D., Milwaukee, Wis.; Right Rev. James 
A. McFaul, D.D., Trenton, N. J.; Thomas H. Cannon, Chairman, Chicago, 
111.; Nicholas Conner, Dubuqur, la.; John Whalen, New York City, N. Y.; 
C. W. Wallace, Columbus, O.; F. W. Immicus, Pittsburg, Pa.j Daniel 
Duffy, Pottsville, Pa.; H. V. Cunningham, Boston, Mass.; Charles I. Dene- 
chaud, New Orleans, La.; F. W. Heckenkamp, Jr., Quincy, 111. At a meet- 
ing of the Executive Board Frank J. Matre, St. Louis was appointed Su- 
pervisor of the Associate Membership. 

The next convention will take place in Louisville, Ky., in August 1912. 



WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

The Apostolic Delegate who attended the various sessions has this to say of 
the Federation : " The American Federation of Catholic Societies is working 
distinctly under the protection and guidance of the American hierarchy and 
with the full sanction and the blessing of the Pope." 

ANTHONY MATR, National Secretary. 



THE vestibule "Church Rack " for the distribution of books and 
pamphlets to our people is now being placed in many churches 
throughout the country. From the words of appreciation which we 
have received the use of the " Rack " means much for the spread of 
Catholic reading matter. It is the most effective, indeed we might 
say the only practical way to give instructive, useful reading matter 
into the hands of Catholics. One of these ' ' Racks ' ' is placed at the 
entrance to the Church. With its display of numerous pamphlets 
on various interesting subjects, it is visible at once to all who enter. 
It attracts their attention. They stop to examine. The little 
booklets are there before them with the titles plainly shown. The 
inquirer will find pamphlets on devotional subjects; on Christian 
Doctrine ; on social questions of present-day interest, which are the 
common talk of the man in the street ; stories of vital, human interest. 
The price marked in large letters, usually five cents, is easily 
within the means of all. The purchaser makes his selection, takes 
the pamphlets home and introduces good Catholic reading matter, 
perhaps for the first time, to his household. Thus has the " Church 
Rack " brought blessings to him and his family far-reaching in 

their results. 

* * 

T*HESE RACKS furnish a means of communication between the 
-1- Church and the people. By means of them we can promote 
in many ways the spiritual and intellectual welfare of our people. 
Many Catholics often wish for a pamphlet on this or that subject 
which will give them the teaching of the Church ; help them to take 
an intelligent stand on a disputed question and to speak with know- 
ledge. Many Catholics will eagerly read a pamphlet on prayer, on 
the inspiring life of a saint, on a matter of spiritual instruction, yet 
they have not known where such a pamphlet might be obtained. 
We often forget that our people are eager for spiritual food, that the 
word of God's holy writers would be a consolation and joy to their 
souls, if they could but receive it. Unfold to them the beauties of the 
spiritual life, the help and encouragement that come from thinking 
upon the high and the better things, keep before them or help them 
to keep before themselves, the good things that God has prepared for 
those who love Him and they will be the first to take these things 
to their hungry hearts ; the first to see and to appreciate the great 
treasures which these truths contain. 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 143 



N' 



' O such opportunity as that which the ' ' Church Rack ' ' furnishes 
has been given to us to bring these things before our people. 
It is a direct, simple way. Moreover, it helps the missionary spirit 
which because of the conditions of our social Hie is aroused at some 
time in the soul of every one of us. Frequently because the Catholic 
does not know where to obtain the pamphlet that would satisfy the 
inquirer who has asked him questions about the Church, the inspir- 
ation is allowed to die, and nothing is done. If the Catholic now 
knows that he can go to the "Church Rack" and obtain the 
pamphlet that he desires even if he but knows that he will find a 
pamphlet telling in general of the claims and teachings of the 
Church, the inspiration will live ; he will act upon it because he 
knows how [to act, and that "Rack" pamphlet may lead the in- 
quirer to the true fold. 

* * 

THE Rack is inexpensive, the literature is inexpensive. It would 
be a most laudable work for some member of every parish 
throughout the country to donate a "Rack" and a supply of lit- 
erature to his parish church. The cost of ' ' Rack ' ' and reading matt 
ter may be obtained by writing to the Columbus Press, 120 Wes- 
6oth Street, New York City. To care for the "Rack," to study 
the needs of a particular locality, to keep it supplied with pamphlets, 
and such pamphlets as will fit the needs of the people, is a work 
that will appeal to a number of people in every parish, and no diffi- 
culty will be experienced in securing the service of one to do this most 
praiseworthy work. The ' ' Church Rack ' ' has proven its worth 
after long years of experience both in Ireland and England. It will 
prove its worth here. A study of our situation and our needs, 
patience and confidence, instruction, explanation, will make it a 
blessing for our people and for the Church ; one of the most effective 
means of missionary work both for the household of the faith and 
for those that are without. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 



BBNZIGEK BROTHERS, New York: 

Children of the Gael. By Charlotte Dease. 75 cents. Gemma Galgani. By Philip 
Goghlan, C. P. 40 cents. ' The Holy Viaticum of Lijc as of Death. By Daniel A. 
Dever, Ph. D. 75 cents. Back to Rome. By Godfrey Raupert. $i. Gold, Frankin- 
cense and Myrrh. By A. Borini. 30 cents. Louise Augusta Lechmere. By Henry 
D'Arras, S.J. 90 cents. A soggarth's Last Verses. By Matthew Russell. S.J. 75 
cents. The Culture of the Soul. By Rev. P. Ryan. 95 cents. The Way That Leads 
to God. By Abbe" A. Saudreau $1.50. Sermons and Lectures. By Mgr. Grosch. $1.35. 
The Little Child's First Communion Book. By Very Rev. H. Canon Csfferata. 5 cents. 
The Life of St. Teresa f Jesus. By Very Rev. Benedict Zimmerman, OC.D. Trans- 
lated from the Spanish by David Lewis. $2 85. 

HENRY HOLT & Co., New York: 

Tht Opening Up of Africa. By Sir H. H. Johnston. 75 cents. Liberalism. By L. T. 
Hobhouse, M.A. 75 cents. Crime and Insanity . By Dr. C. A. Mercier. 75 cents. 

P. J. KENEDY, New York: 

The Question of the Htur. By Joseph P. Conway. 35 cents. 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN COMPANY, NewjYork: 

Mother Carey 's Chickens. By Kate Douglas Wiggin. $1.25. 
EATON & MAINS, New York : 

Strange Siberia. By Marcus Lorenzo Taft. $i. 
CHRISTIAN PRBSS ASSOCIATION, New York: 

The History of Pope Boniface VIII. By Don Louis Tosti. $2. 

A. C. McCLURG & Co., New York : 

Emerson's Wife and Other Stories. By Florence Finch Kelly. $1.25. Dr. David. By 
Marjorie Benton Cooke. $1.35. 

DODD, MEAD & Co., New York: 

Mona, An opera in three acts. Poem by Brian Hooker; music by Horatio Parker. 
$1.25. Stories of Shakespeare's Tragedies. By H. A. Guerber. $1.25. 

D. APPLETON & Co., New York; 

Marcia, of the Little House. By Emily Calvin Blake. $1.20. 

B. HERDER, St.Louis: 

St Patrick. Notre Dame series. $1.25. The History of Religion. Vol. V. Edited by 
C. C. Martindale. Socents. Hurdcott. By John Ayscough. $1.25. 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & Co., Boston : 

The American Philosophy Pragmatism. By A. C. P. Huizenga. 60 cents. 
GINN & Co., Boston: 

Pure Fods. By John C. Olsen, A.M., Ph D. Papers on Inter-Racial Problems. Pub- 
lished for the World Peace Foundation. Edited by J. Spiller. 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington: 

Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Commission of Labor, (1909) Vol. II. 
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne; 

The Divine Institution and Obligation of Confusion. By Dr. Murray. Christian Mar- 
riage. By Very Rev. Dean Phelan.V.G. The Inquisition. Edited by Rev. Joseph 
Sasia, S.J. How Character is Formed. By Canon Sheehan, D.D. Pamphlets one 
penny each. 

P. LETHIELLEUX, Paris: 

Retraite Spirituelle sur Us Qualitils it Devoirs du Chritien. Par le P. Jean-Nicolas 
Grou, 6 />. 



THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCIV. NOVEMBER, 1911. No. 560. 




CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

have recently witnessed yet another of the oft- 
recurring and sickening episodes in the history 
of the Turks in Europe which for centuries 
have marked them out as "the great Anti-christ 
among the races of men." "The Committee which 
dominates the Turkish Government," observes an English Prot- 
estant journal* "a committee which is already as ripe for de- 
position as ever Abdul Hamid was has at last seen that its 
wisest course would be to act, or pretend to act, the part of 
indulgent father towards the Malissori of Albania." Then 
after enumerating the Committee's terms of peace, it proceeds: 
"we do not expect to see any of these terms carried into 
effect, except so far as may be convenient. We have no 
longer a shred of faith in this blood-stained Committee, the 
instigator and rewarder of outrage, and the procurer, in the 
future, of all manner of trouble for Turkey." And it con- 
cludes: "But no doubt the world will .presently be able to 
enjoy the spectacle of the Committee squabbling among them- 
selves ; and the best we can hope for is the rise of a dictator 
who will hang them all"; and with this sorry consolation the 
matter is dismissed. The best we can hope for is, not a re- 
sponse to the crying need of civilized and humane interven- 
tion, not an intervention such as of old issued from the center 
of a united Christendom since the differences of Protest- 

* The Guardian, n August, 1911. 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCIV. IO 



i 4 6 CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK [Nov., 

antism have robbed the Holy See of being the world's instru- 
ment of peace but that from among the Turks themselves a 
dictator may arise to punish the Turk for such conduct as 
has been his habit for centuries. 

" Usually placid, hypochondriac, and impassioned," as 
"the barbarian at rest," the Turk impresses the casual visitor 
as being a gentle, kindly-disposed, and much-maligned indi- 
vidual. But behold him as " the barbarian roused to action " 
and you see in each individual Turk "the ungovernable fury 
of a multitude," all ties, all attachments, ail natural and moral 
obligations forgotten or despised, till his rage subsides, and 
his worse than bestial lust is satisfied. 

No race [says Newman], casts so broad and dark a shadow 
on the page ol ecclesiastical history, and leaves so painfiil an 
impression on the minds ot the reader, as the Turkish. . ."N. 
The Holy See has the reputation, even with men of the world, 
of seeing instinctively what is favorable, what is unfavorable.) 
to the interests of religion and of the Catholic Faith. Its un^ 
dying opposition to the Turks is not the least striking instanct- 
of this divinely imparted gilt. From the very first it pointed 
at them as an object of alarm for all Christendom, in a way iji 
which it had marked out neither Tartars nor Saracens. It ex> 
posed them to the reprobation of Christendom, as a people, 
with whom, if charity differ from merciless ferocity, tendernes^ 
from hardness of heart, depravity of appetite from virtue, ancJ 
pride from meekness and humility, the faithful never coulcl 
have sympathy, never alliance. It denounced not merely ail 
odious outlying deformity, painful simply to the moral sight 
and scent, but an energetic evil, an aggressive, ambitious, 
ravenous foe, in whom foulness of life and cruelty of policy 
were methodised by system, consecrated by religion, propa- 
gated by the sword.* 

War with the Turks was the uninterrupted cry of the 
Popes for seven or eight centuries, from the eleventh to thtf 
eighteenth. " It is a solitary and singular event in the history' 
of the Church." 

Much was borrowed by Mahomet from the Church the 
existence of God, the fact of His revelation, the faithfulness >'jf 
His promises, the eternity of the moral law, the certainty of 
future retribution. 

* Hist. Sketches, Vol. I. pp. 104-10. 



19".] CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK 147 

He stands in his creed between the religion of God and the 
religion of devils, between Christianity and idolatry, between 
the West and the extreme East. And so stood the Turks, 
on adopting his faith ; . . . they stood between Christ in 
the West, and Satan in the East, and they had to make their 
choice ; and, alas ! they were led. . . to oppose them- 
selves, not to Paganism, but to Christianity, and in the event 
have proved, of all races the veriest brood of the serpent 
which the Church has encountered since she was set up, 
for 800 years her incessant foe, singled out as such, and 
denounced by successive Vicars of Christ.* 

A. D. 1048 is fixed by chronologists as the date of the 
rise of the Turkish power in so far as Christendom is inter- 
ested in its history. Toghrul Beg, the first Sultan of the time 
of Seljuk invaded the Greek provinces of Asia Minor, from 
Cilicia to Armenia, along a line of 600 miles; and 130,000 
Christians is said to be the sacrifice he offered to the false 
prophet. His nephew, Alp Arslan, succeeded him in 1062, 
and penetrated to Cassarea in Cappadocia, attracted by the 
gold and pearls that encrusted the shrine of St. Basil. He 
then turned his arms against Armenia and Georgia, and, after 
conquering the mountaineers of the Caucasus, encountered, 
defeated and captured the Greek Emperor of " New Rome," 
humbled him literally to the dust, and having placed his foot 
upon his neck, gave him his life and, for a large ransom, his 
liberty. Malek Shah, the son of Alp Arslan subdued Syria 
and the Holy Land and took Jerusalem, and gave to his 
cousin Solyman his territories in Asia Minor, planting him 
over against Constantinople as an earnest of future conquests. 

Meanwhile, Pope St. Gregory VII., though thousands of 
miles from the scene of the sufferings inflicted upon pilgrims 
to Jerusalem and the Christians of the East, and despite con- 
flicts at home with the secular power, nevertheless, in his zeal 
for that Christendom of which he was chief shepherd and 
ruler, in 1074 addressed a letter to the Emperor of Germany, 
suggesting a crusade (which later Popes carried out) and as- 
suring him that he had 50,000 troops ready for the project. 

It is commonly said, [observes Newman] that the Crusades 
failed in their object ; that they were nothing else but a 

*nid. 87-8. 



148 CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK [Nov., 

lavish expenditure of men and treasure ; and that the posses- 
sion of the Holy Places by the Turks to this day is a proof of 
it. Now I will not enter here into a very intricate controversy ; 
this only will I say, that, if the tribes of the desert, under the 
leadership of the house of Seljuk, turned their faces to the 
West in the middle of the eleventh century ; if in forty years 
they had advanced from Khorasan to Jerusalem and the 
neighborhood of Constantinople ; and if in consequence they 
were threatening Europe and Christianity ; and if, for that 
reason, it was a great object to drive them back or break 
them to pieces; if it were a worthy object of the Crusades to 
rescue Europe from this peril and to reassure the anxious 
minds of Christian multitudes ; then were the Crusades no 
failure in their issue, for this object was fully accomplished. 
The Seljukian Turks were hurled back upon the East, and 
then broken up by the hosts of the Crusaders. The lieuten- 
ant of Malek Shah, who had been established as Sultan of 
Roum (as Asia Minor was called by the Turks), was driven to 
an obscure town, where his dynasty lasted, indeed, but gradu- 
ally dwindled away. A similar late attended the house of 
Seljuk in other parts of the Empire, and internal quarrels in- 
creased and perpetuated its weakness. Sudden as was its 
rise, as sudden was its fall ; till the terrible Zingis, descend- 
ing on the Turkish dynasties, like an avalanche, co-operated 
effectually with the Crusaders and finished their work ; and 
if Jerusalem was not protected from other enemies, at least 
Constantinople was saved, and Europe was placed in se- 
curity, for three hundred years.* 

In a footnote to this passage is a quotation from Francis 
Newman : 

The See of Rome had not forgotten, if Europe had, how 
deadly and dangerous a war Charles Martel and the Franks 
had had to wage against the Moors from Spain. A new and 
redoubtable natio'n, the Seljuk Turks, had now appeared on 
the confines of Europe, as a fresh champion of the Moham- 
medan creed ; and it is not attributing too much foresight or 
too sagacious a policy to the Court of Rome, to believe, that 
they wished to stop and put down the Turkish power before 
it should come too near. Be this as it may, such was the 
result. The might of the Seljukians was crippled on the 
plains of Palestine, and did not ultimately reach Europe. 
. . . On the whole, it would seem that to the Romish 

* Ib., p. 102. 



.] CHRISTENDOM AND THE IUSK 149 

Church we have been largely indebted for that union between 
European nations, without which Mohammedanism might 
perhaps not have been repelled. 

The Seljakian Turks, after all but taking Constantinople, 
and overrunning the West, were defeated by a united Christen- 
dom, realms, before all else, for the cause of Christ, and re- 
sponsive to the call of Christ's Vicar. For more than two 
centuries the Crusaders of Europe, united under the standard 
of the Vicar of Christ, fought for the faith of the nations, 
and Europe was saved from the Turk. Then from oat the 
ashes of the Seljukian Turkish dynasty arose the dynasty of the 
Ottoman Turks. The Seljokians had failed against Christen- 
dom united ; the Ottomans, alas, succeeded by reason of 
Christendom's divisions and decay of faith and devotion. 

Ottoman's father was in the service of the last Sultan of 
the Seljukian line and governor of a horde of 400 families. 
Ottoman, on succeeding his father, proclaimed a gazi, or holy 
war, against Christians and commenced a long series of con- 
quests, which, lasting about 270 years, resulted in the Otto- 
man becoming one of the first powers of the world. Orkhan, 
his son, gained the Greek Emperor's daughter, a Christian 
princess, in marriage; and, crossing over into Europe under 
cover of friendship to the court of Constantinople, obtained 
in 1358, possession of the fortress of Gallipoli, and with it a 
foothold in Europe. His son Murad I. conquered the eastern 
half of the Balkan peninsula, cutting off Constantinople from 
Christian Europe. And, finally, Constantinople was taken by 
Mohammed II. in 1453. 

During all this period the Popes were solicitous for the 
welfare of the Christians of the East, and constantly sought 
the aid of the powers of Christendom in their defence. But 
they were impeded by difficulties many and various. Chief 
among these difficulties was the attitude of Constantinople 
itself. The Eastern schismatics hated and despised Western 
Christendom as much as they hated and feared the Turks. 
Cowardly, crafty, fickle and insincere, as notoriously they were, 
how was it possible to save them without their own co-oper- 
ation and in spite of themselves? During the two hundred 
years that the Crusades lasted, the multitudes of warriors who 
had gone to their assistance had been subjected to intolerable 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK [Nov., 

experience of their character and attitude. For two hundred 
years, "each spring and summer," says Gibbon, "had pro- 
duced a new emigration of pilgrim warriors for the defence of 
the Holy Land." The East asked succor of the West, and 
the West generously responded. When Peter the Hermit was 
in Constantinople and was informed by the Patriarch that in 
vain did he look for the Emperor's aid, he cried : " I will 
rouse the nations of Europe in your cause." And to the 
capitals of Europe the Emperors selfishly betook themselves, 
to obtain, instead of supplying, aid against the Turk; and then 
they made gain of the Crusaders' successes, striving the while, 
in their pride and cowardice to humble them when in their 
city and provinces. In the council of Placentia, summoned 
by Pope Urban II., before the commencement of the Crusades, 
in the presence of 200 Latin Bishops, 4,000 inferior clergy, 
and 30,000 laity, the ambassadors of the Greek Emperor had 
been introduced, and had pleaded the distress of their sover- 
eign and the danger of their city which the unbelievers 
already were threatening.* They insisted on its being the 
policy of the Latin princes to repel the Turk in Asia rather 
than when he was in the heart of Europe; and they gave 
such an account of their own miseries, as drew tears from the 
great assembly and the promise and assurance of help and co- 
operation. 

But when Godfrey and his companions in arms arrived in 
the neighborhood of Constantinople they found themselves all 
but betrayed into the enemy's hands. When, later, the Cru- 
saders had crossed over into Asia they found the gates of the 
cities closed against them; food, in insufficient quantity, some- 
times poisoned, was let down to them from the walls, base coin 
was given them, bridges broken down before them, false guides 
supplied, and information of their movements given to the 
Turks. 

The Greek clergy preached against them as heretics and 
schismatics and dogs ; the Patriarch and the Bishops spoke of 
their extermination as a merit ; and their priests washed 
and purified the altars where the Latin priests had said 
Mass. Nay, the Emperors formed a secret alliance with 
Turks and Saracens against them, and the price at which 
they obtained it, was the permission of erecting a mosque 
in Constantinople, t 

* Gibbon. t Newman, Hist. Sketches, Vol. i, p. 138. 



.] CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK 151 

Later, the Greek populace rose against the Latin merchants 
settled in Constantinople, and, aided by the Emperor's troops, 
slaughtered them in the streets and in their homes ; they 
burned their clergy in the churches, their sick in the hospitals, 
and reduced their whole quarter to ashes; they sold 4,000 of 
the survivors into perpetual slavery to the Turks; they cut off 
the head oi the Cardinal Legate and tied it to the tail of a 
dog ; and then they chanted a Te Deum ! Little wonder, that, 
twenty years later, the crusading hosts turned their arms against 
the Greeks themselves, besieged and took Constantinople, and 
committed such excesses, alas, as still further increased the 
Pope's difficulties and compromised the cause of the Crusades. 

When, at a later period, Mohammed took Constantinople, 
he not only saw that the Greek Church under a Patriarch ap- 
pointed by the Sultan would be a useful instrument of gov- 
erncnent, but it was likewise part of his policy to favor it in 
view of the crusading plans of the Latin powers. The Popes, 
as he could see, rose to the conception of the unity of Chris- 
tendom ; not so the Greeks, to whom the supremacy of the 
infidel Sultan seemed more tolerable than the supremacy of 
the Vicar of Christ. Therefore, he fostered the Greek ill-feel- 
ing and chose for the Patriarchate one who was opposed to 
the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. 

Another of the Pope's difficulties was occasioned by the in- 
crease of national prosperity and strength. Rulers and peo- 
ple, who were increasing in worldly substance were not disposed 
to spend it upon distant and spiritual objects, such as the con- 
tinuance of the war against misbelievers; nor did they care 
for the religious tenets of those with whom they traded. 
Moreover, in proportion as nations increased in wealth and 
power, so did they in jealousy of each other and in indiffer- 
ence to the interests of religion. France and England aban- 
doned the Holy Wars to war on each other. " As in the 
twelfth century, we read of Coeur de Lion in Palestine, and in 
the thirteenth, of St. Louis in Egypt, so in the fourteenth do 
we read the sad tale of Poitiers and Crescy, and in the fif- 
teenth of Agincourt." Henry V. of England, crossed the chan- 
nel to conquer France at the very time when the Ottoman 
reverses afforded hope of Christendom's success. He had pro- 
posed to conquer Jerusalem, and had sent a knight to survey 
the towns and country of Syria; but premature death over- 



152 CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK [Nov., 

took him and prevented him from undertaking a conquest 
mare glorious than the one in which he was engaged. In the 
same century Charles VII. of France forbade the preaching of 
a Crusade in his dominions lest it should lay him open to 
the attacks of the English. Alfonso of Portugal retracted his 
promise to join in a Holy War. Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily 
took the Cross, but used the men and money raised for its 
objects in a war against the Genoese. The Bohemians would 
not fight unless they were paid. The Germans pretended to 
fear that the Pope would apply the money they contributed 
for some other purpose. In short, what Pope Boniface IX. 
had said when proclaiming a Crusade in 1394 was but too 
true, not only of his own, but likewise of subsequent times. 
In his Bull he bewails the sins of Christendom, which had 
brought upon them that scourge which was the occasion of 
his invitation. In speaking of the massacres, tortures, slavery, 
which had been inflicted on multitudes of the faithful, he says: 

the mind is horrified at the very mention of these miseries ; 
but it crowns our anguish to reflect, that the whole of 
Christendom, which, if in concord, might put an end to 
these and even greater evils, is either in open war, country 
with country, or, if in apparent peace, is secretly wasted by 
mutual jealousies and animosities. 

The fourteenth and fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth 
centuries were the period at once of the Ottoman growth and 
of Christendom's defection the period in which " the sins of 
nations were accumulating that heavy judgment which fell upon 
them in the Ottoman conquests and the Reformation." In the 
middle of the fourteenth century the teaching of Wickliffe 
gained ground in England; Huss and others soon after gained 
a hearing on the Continent; and Luther prevailed in the first 
half of the sixteenth century. Thus was the attention of the 
Popes and of Western Christendom diverted from the troubles 
in the East to an evil which more effectually than any other 
has hindered the Holy See from being the world's instrument 
of peace and Christian progress. 

The Reformation reacted on the Eastern Question, [says a 
non-Catholic writer.] The mere fact that the Roman See 
continuously and consistently exhorted to a Crusade was to 



1 9 ii.] CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK 153 

the adherents of the new religious movement an argument 
against a Turkish war. Luther himself announced the 
principle, that to resist the Turks was to resist God, who 
had sent them as a visitation. At a safe distance, this was 
a comfortable doctrine. But some years later, when the 
visitation drew nigh to the heart of Germany itself, the Re- 
former was somewhat embarrassed to explain away his earlier 
utterances. The diffusion of the doctrine of the Reformers 
seems to have been one of the causes which slackened and 
weakened the resistance of Hungary to the Ottoman inva- 
sion. . . . Early in 1529 it was known that Solymon 
was preparing for a grand expedition northwards in that 
year. Germany was alive to the danger. Luther changed 
his attitude and acknowledged the necessity of war against 
the Turks, while he insisted that all the disasters which had 
befallen Christendom from Varna to Mohdcs had been due 
to the interference of Popes and bishops language which 
the deeds of Archbishop Paul Tomory of Kalocsa, the de- 
fender of Southern Hungary, might have been held to 
belie.* 

But though by 1571 "half Christendom had become Prot- 
estant, and secretly perhaps felt as the Greeks felt, that the 
Turk was its friend and ally," and though neither from Eng- 
land, France, nor Germany could he look for help, Pope Pius 
V., fired with the zeal bequeathed him by his predecessors, 
formed a holy league with Philip, King of Spain and the Ve- 
netians, Don John, of Austria, being appointed commander- 
in-chief of the forces, and Colonna, admiral. The Turks were 
scouring the Gulf of Venice, blockading the ports and terri- 
fying the city itself. Pope Pius resorted to prayer; he ap- 
pointed a triduo of supplication at Rome, took part in the 
procession himself, and proclaimed a jubilee to the whole 
Christian world. He exhorted the officers of the armament to 
see to the good conduct and morals of their troops. A fast 
of three days was proclaimed for the fleet, commencing on 
our Lady's Nativity; everyone went to confession and Com- 
munion. On the 7th of October they found and fought the 
Turkish fleet. Upwards of thirty thousand Turks perished, 
and nearly the whole of their fleet was taken, with three thou- 
sand, five hundred prisoners. It was the greatest blow that 
the Turks had sustained since Timour's victory over Bajazet, 

* The Cambridge Modern Hist., Vol. I, Art. on Ottoman Conquest, pp. 95, 97. 



iS4 CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK [Nov., 

a century and a half before. It was the turning point in the 
Turkish history. Such is the judgment of Protestants. "The 
battle of Lepanto arrested forever the danger of Mahommedan 
invasion in the south of Europe."* "The Austro- Spanish 
monarchy set limits to their expansion both in the north and 
in the south."! 

And great as were the material consequences of the over- 
throw at Lepanto to the Turks, the moral misfortune was more 
serious still, and more permanent, by reason of the fatalism 
of their creed. Unable to abandon their traditionary princi- 
ples without ceasing to be a state, and by the very principle 
of their existence pledged to barbarism, they remain in their 
decadence what they have ever been, with nothing to show 
for their former long reign of successes; ignorant, fanatical, in- 
capable of progress, sensual, devilish, despising labor, detest- 
ing and despising Europe. And the civilized governments 
around them, in proportion as they advance in material and 
moral strength, feel that they are in the way, and fain would 
be rid of them. But the Turk's existence in Europe is per- 
force tolerated by reason of the mutual jealousies of the 
Christian powers; and a divided Christendom has no common 
centre round which to rally in the interests of civilized and 
humane intervention and the deliverance of the victims of the 
Turk's fierce and bestial barbarity. Europe's national jealousies 
and interested and contemptuous patronage, combined with the 
mutual jealousies of the Sultan's subject populations, prevail 
to maintain the Turk in position and to give him a free hand 
in the perpetration of repeated atrocities. The nations of 
Europe have substituted in place of a central Christian author- 
ity the temporal " balance of power," and by so doing, not 
only have they deprived the Holy See of the power of acting 
as the world's instrument of peace and orderly progress, but 
they have deprived themselves of the power of concert in Chris- 
tian and humane endeavor, as likewise of the means of pro- 
moting that universal peace of which we nowadays hear so 
much, even while armaments are enormously increasing in the 
interests of national ascendency. 

The religion of the Turks, national and local, is " their 
badge of a standing antagonism to nations they abhor," and 
"places them, in their own imagination, in a spiritual posi- 

* Alison's Europe, Vol, IX., p. 95. t Cambridge Modern Hist,, p. 103, 



i9 1 1.] CHRISTENDOM AND THE TURK 155 

tion relatively to those nations, which they would simply for- 
feit if they abandoned it. It would require clear proof of the 
fact, to credit in their instance the report of a change of 
mind, which antecedently is so improbable." * It seems incon- 
ceivable that they should, as an existing nation, accept of 
modern civilization. What will come of the present Young 
Turk movement f remains to be seen. But that "the great 
bulk of evidence goes to show that Mohammedanism has al- 
ways been a curse and always will be a curse, that Turkey 
cannot possibly succeed," is the opinion of writers friendly to 
the movement,! and seems apparent enough. 

Meanwhile, Christendom divided by the differences of Prot- 
estantism and the jealousies of nationalism, is powerless to 
effect anything in the nature of what Christendom united under 
the divinely appointed authority of the Holy See accomplished 
in subduing, converting, and uniting the barbarian invaders of 
the empire; as likewise by her continual arbitration between 
the feudal monarchs of the Middle Ages, her command of their 
services, and her action as a whole during the centuries of 
crusades. 

Catholicism is the one great principle of unity and concord 
which the world has seen ; the Holy See is the one Catholic 
centre and court of appeal that the world has known. Unity 
with the Holy See meant for the nations unity with one an- 
other in any cause that threatened or affected Christendom as 
a whole, in any cause that called for civilized and humane in- 
tervention. In vain do men who are now agitating for uni- 
versal peace cast about for some other means as the world's 
instrument of peace and orderly progress. It is not in human 
nature to supply it; man is unequal to the need. Only by a 
return to the divinely appointed centre and circle of unity 
will concord reign amongst Christians, and the principle of 
universal peace prevail. Only in union with the Holy See can 
Christendom present to its common foe, the enemies of the 
Cross, a united front. Such is the experience of Christianity ; 
and such the verdict of history. 

* Newman, Hist. Sketches, p. 226. 

, t For an account of it see Dublin Review, Art., "Modernism in Islam," April, 1910. 

I Ibid, p. 295. 




THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS.* 

(TALES OF FATHER LACOMBE). 

BY KATHERINE HUGHES. 
I. 

jjOR months the plague, like a skeleton shrouded 
in gravecloths, had stalked over the plains. In 
every tepee its cold talons had lain a frozen 
grip upon the Crees of the Saskatchewan, and 
each morning the bodies of its victims wrapped 
in blankets or buffalo robes were massed on the prairie for 
interment. 

It was the golden autumn now. The smallpox was past, 
but Father Lacombe was still with his Cree nomads as he had 
been all summer, passing from camp to camp, nursing their 
sick by day and night, burying their dead away from the 
dogs and coyotes. 

He was in the camp of Sweet Grass, famous on the plains 
as a councilor and warrior head- chief of all the Crees of the 
Saskatchewan. The snows of fifteen winters had melted since 
this chief's hospitable lodge had first been thrown open to 
Father Lacombe, and since then there had existed between 
the two a deep friendship accompanied oddly enough by a 
quiet, persistent clash of will. 

Now and again the spirit of this contest lifted its head, 
when the two met by camp-fire or trail, and the sturdy mis- 
sionary approached the chief afresh with invitations to em- 
brace the Christian faith. The answer of Sweet Grass was 
always the same: 

"Leave me alone; I will tell you when my time comes." 

And with this the calm, unvoiced struggle would be re- 
sumed between the two. One spring that Father Lacombe 
had cured his favorite young warrior from blood-poisoning, 

* Chief Sweet Grass was baptized by Father Lacombe and later taken across the prairie to 
St. Boniface and confirmed by Archbishop Tache. It was he who negotiated the Treaty with 
Canada at Fort Pitt in 1876, and he died a few years later, killed by an accidental shot from 
the revolver presented to him on the occasion of the Treaty by Governor Morris. 



.] THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS 157 

Sweet Grass had voluntarily offered to become a Christian. 
Yet, as season gave way to season, and Sweet Grass still held 
back, Father Lacombe ransacked his consciousness for the key 
to the mystery. 

No Christian warrior on the plains was at greater pains to 
assist him than Sweet Grass; nor had the great Little Chief 
any contempt for his teachings. He merely refused to submit 
himself to the new order. 

Now, in this mellow autumn weather, when the peace of 
Gad lay over the lately-afflicted camp, a group of the stronger 
Indians gathered about Father Lacombe's tent one evening for 
prayer. And as they prayed they were astounded to see 
Sweet Grass stalk into the circle, not pausing till he reached 
the priest. There he solemnly abjured his old beliefs. 

He knelt then, and asked Father Lacombe to make the 
sign of the cross on him; which Father Lacombe did, saying: 

" In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the 
Holy Ghost, I receive you, brave Chief of the Crees." 

It was a dramatic scene, pregnant with significance for the 
onlookers. They knew that the head. chief had the heart of a 
woman for his friends, but he was also a man of fire and iron 
in war, and shrewd as a serpent in council. . . . He had 
yielded now to the white man's God: who among them could 
hope to hold out longer against Him ? 

For days Sweet Grass busied himself studying Christian 
teachings with Father Lacombe. Then, another evening after 
prayer, as the old men sat about Father Lacombe's tent 
smoking and talking, Sweet Grass again startled his people. 
He inquired abruptly of Ka-miyo-atckak-we (the Man-of-thc- 
Beautiful-Mind) : 

" Will you soon baptize me ? " 

" The whole camp knows I am only making you ready for 
that." 

" But perhaps you would not do it if you knew what a 
man I am and what evil I once did." 

Father Lacombe in reply slipped his crucifix from his belt, 
and holding it out to their gaze and his own said : " He be- 
came Man and died on the Cross for your salvation. He 
came into the world to save sinners. . . . He will pardon 
you all. . . ." 

"Hah!" 



158 THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS [Nov., 

Sweet Grass heard with satisfaction. But his soul still 
troubled him. Its spur urged him to have recourse to the 
centuries-old custom of his race and, as a warrior guilty of a 
crime propitiates the Great Spirit by confessing his evil to 
one of the Ancients of the tribe, Sweet Grass bared his secret 
to Father Lacombe. 

Then for a long time the evening silence was broken only 
by the low and rather pleasant voice of the Little Chief: 

"When I was a child I did not belong to the Crees. I 
was taken by them in battle from another tribe, and I did not 
know my father and mother. I had no name. 

"In the Cree camp there was only one old woman who 
was kind to me. She adopted me for her son. The other 
children were rude to me, and the old people treated me like 
a dog. When I grew older there was still no favor for me, 
for I was very small and they said I would be no good for 
hunting or for battle. 

"They gave me no true name; they called me 'He-who- 
has-no-name.' Every man and woman in the camp was proud 
of the name given them after their birth by the old women ; 
but the braves were still more proud of the name each man 
made for himself when he first did some great deed to show 
himself a man. It was always so. 

" When a young brave wanted to receive some rank among 
his own people or win for himself a name he would rise up 
in camp and call on his comrades to come with him on the 
war-path. Now and again I would see these braves take their 
departure, while all our people looked on. 

" The war-cry was raised ; their young wives or sweet- 
hearts or mothers gave them their guns and moccasins and 
pemmican. The old councillors encouraged them, and the leader 
of the new war-party made a brave speech in the centre of 
the camp. 

" He called upon all his comrades to come with him to 
kill the old enemies of their race and carry off the horses of 
those who had so often robbed them. . . . Then another 
day the warriors would return with their young leader at their 
head. They were greeted with joy by the women and older 
men and the new brave was given a fine name, the seal upon 
his new manhood. 

"But in all these war-parties no one ever called upon me. 



i9i i.] 7 HE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS 159 

I was still a stranger in their camp. And I spent my days 
working for the old woman, grieving in my heart because in 
all that camp I was treated only as a dog. But a day came 
when I was close to eighteen years, and I could no longer live 
under the scorn of the men around me. I made up my mind 
that I should go to war. 

" I told my plans to none, and I called no other braves to 
help me. I only went to the old mother- squaw and said: 

"To-night I am going out on the war-path." 

" She cried out ' Are you crazy, you boy, to talk of go- 
ing alone to make war?' 

" I only repeated what I said, and ordered her to bring 
me all that I needed for now I was a man. But I had no 
sweetheart or wife to bring me the pemmican or moccasins. 
The old mother brought them to me, and when she did she 
spoke to me in a new fashion. She saw that now I was a man 1 

" I had an old gun a hunter had given it to me once for 
tending horses and I made fresh arrows and a lassoo of s/iaga- 
nappi. At night when the camp slept I went away alone. It 
was my plan to go south to the Blackfeet camps. 

"For five days and nights I walked over the prairies look- 
ing for our enemies. One night in the distance I saw a large 
camp of Blackfeet on the bank of a river. ... At once I 
hid myself for the night in a coulee among the bushes. 

"At daybreak I studied the country about the camp, and 
at one side I saw a band of horses feeding on the prairies. 
They had no guard over them." 

Here the voice of Sweet Grass took on a deeper note. 
Father Lacombe was so moved by what remained of this self- 
revelation of the strong Little Chief's self -revelation, that only 
the facts of the narrative have stayed in his memory. 

While Sweet Grass was reckoning the number of horses, he 
suddenly saw a warrior leave the camp and walk slowly in the 
direction of the coulee. The Blackfoot came to a stop on the 
top of a hill near the nameless youth from the country of the 
Crees. The latter saw him plainly in the clear morning air. 

He was an old man of dignified aspect, one of the Ancients 
of the tribe, and he wore a fine cloth mantle striped in red. 
On the hill-top he turned his face toward the East and stood 
there in prayer, with arms outstretched, adoring the sun, which 
at that moment had lifted itself above the horizon. 



160 THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS [Nov., 

The youth concealed at the mouth of the coulee bowed 
his soul before the Great Spirit, and asked that it should be 
revealed to him what he was to do. The old man dropped 
his arms to his side, ceased his prayer, and paused on the 
hill-top, looking far out over the land of his people. 

Then he turned and continued his walk toward the coulee. 
As his slow steps brought him closer to the youth's hiding- 
place, the nameless Cree took this progress as an answer to 
his prayer. He held his breath and waited. 

He felt his quiver and put the gun aside ; the report of 
a gun would only arouse the sleeping camp; his arrow would 
find its way truly to the old man's heart. He made his prep- 
arations with exquisite care ; he must have the scalp of this 
Blackfoot, a man of importance in his tribe. What matter 
that the man was old and his mien peaceful ? . . . The 
youth must have a name ; he must stand as a man among his 
people. 

It was so that he stifled in himself the stirrings of some 
finer feelings than the young Indian warrior usually knew- 
perceptions deepened in him by his own sensitive childhood. 
Whatever came to pass ... he must have a name. 

The Ancient came nearer. The youth lifted an arrow from 
his quiver, whispered to it "To the heart!" And it sped 
from his hands through the leafy copse direct to the heart of 
the old man. 

The Blackfoot councillor fell forward on the prairie sud- 
denly silently. The boy leapt through the bush to the body, 
and buried his knife deep in the Ancient's breast to insure 
death. Then he painted his own face with red streaks of the 
blood that gushed forth. 

He stripped the scalp from the head of the Ancient, hung 
it to his belt as he had seen the warriors bear their trophies, 
and from the ground beneath where some sweet-grass was 
growing he snatched a handful, stained it with the flowing 
blood and thrust it into the bosom of his deerskin tunic. 

Reckless with his first taste of blood, the boy ran lightly 
down the hill to where the horses grazed. He lassooed one 
a strong stallion and mounting it, drove the others ahead 
of him toward the north and the camps of the Crees. 

He raised the harsh war-cry he had so often heard from 
the young warriors. He flung it back in defiance to the 



i9i i.] THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS 161 

roused camp of the Blackfeet. Then he turned his back in 
triumph on the Bow River country. 

The horses were fresh and galloped over the springy 
turf like creatures that knew his purpose. A few of the band 
had evaded his eager round-up at the start, and ior some 
hours he could hear the thunder of their hoofs and the en- 
raged cries of their riders behind him. . . . The Black- 
feet were following their superbly audacious enemy. 

But they feared a Cree ambuscade and dropped the pur- 
suit before midday. Even the daring Blackfeet could not con- 
ceive of one slight youth entering their country and single- 
handed robbing them of a whole band of horses. 

When the enemy dropped behind, He-who-has- no-name 
rested a brief space and watered his horses in a pleasant 
creek. His first mount being tired, he lassooed another and 
pushed on and on driving his horses ahead of him, stopping 
for neither food nor drink again until he had crossed the Red 
Deer River. 

Now he was in the country of the only people he knew 
of the people who would not make him theirs. He could let 
his horses slacken speed here, but all through the night he 
rode, pushing on toward the camp he had left as a nameless 
youth. 

Shortly after dawn he saw the camp rise in the distance 
like large-tented fringe on the greensward. He carried him- 
self like another being, and he felt a long time had elapsed 
since a despised boy slipped out of the camp by stealth, 
begging the Great Spirit to send him scalps of his enemies, 
so that he too might be a warrior among men. 

He urged the horses to a gallop. 

The camp was still asleep, but it was roused by the rumble 
of his horses' hoofs galloping over the plain. The Crees 
tumbled out of their lodges to learn the cause of the alarm. 
. . . As they did a single warrior rode into camp, driving 
forty-two Blackfoot ponies before him 1 

He-who-has-no-name was standing erect on his one pony's 
back, chanting the weird war-songs of their tribe. 

" Rise 1 Rise!" he cried. " He-who-has-no-name has come 
from the war. Let the orphans and those who have no horses 
come and I will give to them 1 " 

The band thronged about him; his praises were shouted 

VOL. XCIV. II 



162 THE SHADOW ON THE SOUL OF SWEET GRASS [Nov. 

aloud. He had never seen a warrior received in greater 
triumph. Questions were hurled at him beyond his power of 
answering, for many had not even known the lad was away 
from the camp. 

One of the old men invited him kindly down from his 
horse, and to this man the young brave presented as further 
evidence of his deed the tuft of blood-stained sweet grass he 
carried inside his shirt. 

The Ancient raised it aloft. 

"Sweet Grass will be his name!" he cried. 

And "Sweet Grass! Sweet Grass!" the Crees acclaimed 
on all sides. 

It was so that Sweet Grass made his name in the nation 
of which he was one day to be the head. 

There was silence among the warriors when the voice of 
Sweet Grass died on the quiet evening air. 

The old chief had told his story with no bravado, but only 
with regret. 

It was this wanton murder of an unoffending old man in 
the act of worshipping the Great Spirit in his symbol the 
sun that had weighed on the mind of Sweet Grass. He 
loathed the crime; the thought of it had held him back from 
a religion of love which taught "Thou shalt not kill!" He 
feared the missionaries would reject him when they knew of 
the crime. 

Now with his story told that autumn night he found no 
judge in Father Lacombe, but a disciple of the all- compre- 
hending Christ, the Man of Sorrows and the disciple repeated 
only the Master's words: 

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!" 




THE AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES. 

A HE PLY. 
BY CHARLES O'SULLIVAN. 

" Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it." 

Jefferson's First Inaugural. 

JHE article that appeared in the CATHOLIC WORLD 
for August by Mr. James M. Dohan, on the 
agreement prior to mixed marriages would, 
I think, possess a more permanent value had the 
writer refrained from pouring criticism on the 
article by myself, on the same subject, that appeared in the 
June number of the magazine. There is not the slightest reason 
why Mr. Dohan and I should quarrel. There is no question 
of controversy between us. On fundamentals we are certainly 
agreed agreed that the law in Great Britain to-day is against 
the validity of a contract made by a Catholic and Protestant 
before marriage providing for the religious education of chil- 
dren ; agreed also that the law in this country on the subject 
is in an unsettled condition; and it is the obvious desire of 
us both to find a method of settling that law, thus render- 
ing a slight service to .the great Church of which we are 
both humble members. ' For travelers going along a narrow 
path in the dark to bump into each other is foolish, and 
sometimes even fatal. But perhaps, Mr. Dohan is to be ex- 
cused. He has but recently finished a great case, and while 
it is true he met with defeat, he was not overwhelmed by 
any means. He has (to use the phrase of the militarists) re- 
treated in good order. He has saved his banners! It is quite 
evident, however, that he has not yet laid aside the accouter- 
ments of the conflict. He is still wearing the wig and gown 
of the forum, and, consequently, instead of stating the law 
and the facts with the perfect impartiality of the clear-headed 
judge or fair-minded historian, he argues with the passionate 
force of an ardent advocate intent on persuading the court to 
decide in his favor and zealously twisting everything to advan- 
tage in his eagerness to obtain a verdict. Mr. Dohan's article 
is a glowing description of what ought to be or what may 
be, but not, unfortunately, of what is. 



1 64 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

I. 

Anyone who takes the trouble to glance over the article 
written by me, will see at once that it was not meant to be a 
digest of cases or a brief on the law. Least of all was it an 
attempt to make a case an attempt that is to establish a 
fact or state of facts arbitrarily assumed to be true, by subtle, 
specious and sophistical reasoning, far-fetched speculations 
and false analogies. Knowing that the paper was to be read 
by many lay people I tried to avoid technicalities, and, there- 
fore, while stating the law as accurately as possible, merely 
cited the leading cases. That is why I did not specifically 
refer to In re Clarke and In re Newton although the rules laid 
down in those cases will be found on p. 341 of my article. 
And that, too, is one of the reasons for my failure to men- 
tion the long list of decisions quoted by Mr. Dohan, many of 
which (as I shall show hereafter), are quite wide of the mark. 
My intention was, of course, to set forth the law precisely as 
it is to-day in America, Ireland and England; not to expound 
what the law should be or prophesy what it may be to-mor- 
row. My intention was, further, to call the attention of 
Catholics everywhere to a question that (it seemed to me) 
affected their most vital interests the spiritual welfare of 
themselves, their children and their children's children. And 
finally, I offered certain suggestions, not in the expectation, 
or even the hope, that they would be accepted and made use 
of by those in authority, but rather in the confident belief 
that other lawyers would be incited thereby to offer sugges- 
tions likewise, so that from many ideas or plans one might be 
chosen that would stand the test of judicial investigation. 
Great questions should be treated sincerely and with candor. 
The lawyer who intentionally deceives clients who seek his 
advice, by stating the law falsely, can only be compared to 
the physician whose anxiety for the physical welfare of his 
patient prompts him to conceal the approach of death. To 
those who have seen fit to criticize me for bringing this ques- 
tion to the front at all, saying that it is far better for the 
public to remain in ignorance concerning such matters to 
those people, I reply, now in the noble words of Ecclesiastes : 
" To every thing there is a season and a time to every pur- 
pose under heaven; a time to rend and a time to sew; a time 
to keep silence and a time to speak." 



19 ii.] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 165 

II. 

Had Mr. Dohan been content to admit that the Courts in 
Ireland and England had decided that a pre-nuptial contract 
providing for the religious education of children to be born, 
was invalid, it would be unnecessary to deal further with that 
side of the matter; unfortunately, however, he has chosen to 
give reasons for the judges acting as they did reasons that 
display a curious lack of historical knowledge on the part of 
a person so pretentious. On p. 670 of his article Mr. Dohan 
says : " To an American lawyer the whole line of English 
cases is based on (i) the fact that the Church of England is 
an established Church and this leads to (2) a prejudice of the 
English judges in its favor." 

In other words, the minds of the judges in Ireland and 
England were so warped by bigotry that they were quite un- 
able to deal fairly with Catholics and Catholic affairs. Now 
this charge, so cruelly unfair to men of great learning and 
probity long since dead, can easily be refuted by proving 
three propositions: (i) that a Protestant judge held such a 
contract invalid on legal grounds although it provided for the 
education of children as Protestants; (2) that a Catholic judge 
held such a contract invalid on legal grounds although it pro- 
vided for the education of children as Catholics; (3) that in 
administering the rules of law relating to the religious train- 
ing of children the judges of Great Britain have been consis- 
tently fair in their treatment of their Catholic fellow-citizens. 

Let us proceed to consider these propositions in the order 
named : 

First: In 1851 the Irish Court of Chancery decided the 
case known as In re Browne, a Minor (2 Ir. Ch. 151). At that 
time the Established Church flourished in Ireland, penal laws 
still darkened the statute books, and, it being the year of that 
infamous legislative measure known as "the Ecclesiastical Titles 
Bill," an unfortunate feeling of antipathy was felt by one re- 
ligious body for the other. Sir Thomas Berry Cusack Smith, 
the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, was a Protestant, and the 
pre-nuptial contract he was required to construe provided 
that the children should be reared as Protestants, the Catholic 
father having given his solemn consent to that being done. 
If the Irish judges were as loyal to the Establishment as Mr. 
Dohan would have us believe, here was certainly a splendid 



166 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

chance to proclaim that allegiance to the world. But the 
Master of the Rolls evidently prized honor and justice more 
than intolerance and bigotry, for in a masterly opinion, written 
with great vigor and acuteness, he held that the pre- nuptial 
agreement entered into by the father and mother to educate 
the children in the Protestant faith was against public policy 
and incapable of enforcement. 

Second: In the year 1869 Mr. Gladstone declared in a 
memorable speech that the Established Church in Ireland 
must cease to exist as a State Church. " In the name of light 
and truth " he cried, " we shall go forward. The hour is 
come. Justice postponed is justice denied." And at his word 
that vast and fantastic structure that for several centuries 
had cast a weird shadow over the Irish hamlets, tottered, 
and crumbled away and was no more. Two years later, 
in 1871, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland handed down his 
opinion in the Meade Case (5 Ir. Rep. Eq. 98), and in view of 
all that has gone before I think it is perfectly fair to ask 
Mr. Dohan how he reconciles his theory with that opinion 
which decides so plainly that a pre-nuptial contract entered 
into by a Protestant father and a Catholic mother to rear the 
children in the Catholic faith has no binding force in law? 
If the Protestant judges decided against the validity of such 
contracts because of prejudice, why did not this great Catho- 
lic judge decide the other way ? Why did he hand over two 
innocent little children who had been carefully brought up as 
Catholics until one was nine years of age and the other eight, 
to a Protestant father, to be trained thenceforth according to 
the tenets of the Church of England ? Was Lord O'Hagan 
of Tullahogue a bad Catholic or a bad judge? 

Third : In Great Britain, as I pointed out in my previous 
article, a father is permitted to direct the religious education 
of his children until they are twenty-one years old and the 
courts will not interfere with his authority unless he is guilty 
of gross immoral or irreligious conduct, or has waived his 
rights by allowing the infants to be reared in another faith 
for so long a time that to change might be injurious to their 
moral and physical welfare. 

Mr. Dohan cites a great number of cases that have arisen 
in England under these rules and gently chides me for having 
failed to do so. Well, he is perfectly right; I did not cite 
them nor did I try, for such decisions are not in any way 



i9i i.] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 167 

apposite to the question under discussion which is simply 
this: Is a contract entered into by a Catholic and Protestant 
before marriage providing for the religious education of the 
children, valid in law ? In his eager hunt for cases, Mr. 
Dohan travels far from this point thus falling into that ancient 
fallacy known among disputants as the ignoratio elenchi. I 
am glad he has done so, however, as it gives me an excuse 
for traveling a little myself and consequently quoting seme 
cases strangely omitted from Mr. Dohan's digest cases never- 
theless that show very conclusively that in their treatment of 
Catholics, the English judges have been eminently just. 

In the case of Talbot v. The Earl of Shrewsbury, (4 M. & 
C. 673) although it was urged upon the Court that it would 
be distinctly for the pecuniary and worldly advantage of the 
infant who was heir to the great title and estate of the Earl 
of Shrewsbury to be brought up in the Protestant faith, Lord 
Chancellor Cottenham directed that the child be educated as 
a Catholic since that had been the religion of its father. 

In the case of Davis v. Davis (10 W. R. 245) a similar 
question was passed upon by Vice-Chancellor Wood who also 
decided that the directions contained in the will of a Catholic 
father that " the child should be brought up in the faith of 
the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church," must be ob- 
served and carried into effect although the infant's mother 
was a Protestant. 

In the case of Austin v. Austin (34 L. J. Eq. 499) Lord 
Chancellor Westbury went to great lengths to enforce the 
maxim Religio sequitur patrem for he directed that an infant of 
three years of age, whose father had been a Catholic, should 
be left under the care of the Protestant mother until she at- 
tained the age of seven years and that she should from that 
time be brought up and educated as a member of the Roman 
Catholic Church. 

In the case of Hawks-worth v. Hawks-worth (L. R. 6 Ch. 
539) the court practically turned a Protestant child into a 
Catholic for it directed that an infant who had been educated 
by its mother as a member of the Church of England until 
she had reached the age of eight and a half years should be 
educated thereafter as a Roman Catholic, that having been 
the religion of the father. 

I can quite conceive [says Lord Justice Mellish in his 
concurring opinion], that many persons might think that it 



i68 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

would be for the Interest of the child in such cases that the 
mother should be allowed to educate the child in her own 
religion ; but that is not the rule of law. The rule of law is 
that the religion of the father is to prevail over the religion of 
the mother, even in such a case, and that rule, of course, we 
cannot alter. 

Now if these cases prove, as I maintain, that the decisions 
in Great Britain against the validity of the agreement prior 
to mixed marriages were not influenced by bigotry or prompted 
by a mistaken sense of loyalty to the Established Church, it 
follows, as a matter of course, that they must have been ren- 
dered on legal grounds purely. The fact is that Mr. Dohan 
attaches an importance to the Anglican Establishment that 
cannot but surprise any close observer of foreign affairs. I 
assure him that she is not by any means the powerful or- 
ganization he seems to think. Her enemies have encompassed 
her and most of the important offices in the state, at the 
bar and in the Army and Navy are not now held by mem- 
bers of the Church of England, but by Catholics and non- 
conformists. But yesterday we saw a Catholic acting as Lord 
Chief Justice of the realm, and to-day a Jew, Sir Rufus Isaacs-, 
is attorney general of England, while an agnostic, Viscount 
Morley of Blackburne, leads the Liberal Government in the 
House of Lords. 

III. 

And now, at last, I turn to the long line of American de- 
cisions so elaborately compiled by Mr. Dohan. No doubt he 
expected to overwhelm me entirely, and if numbers counted 
for anything he certainly would have accomplished his pur- 
pose. But while Mr. Dohan has numbers on his side he has 
little else, for his myriad of precedents do not contain a 
single case possessing cogency, relevancy or pertinency, and, 
when all is said and done, those are the qualities that make 
legal decisions valuable, especially in a discussion like the 
present. In my previous article I said that Brewer v. Cary 
(127 S. W. R. 685), was the only case in which an American 
Court of Appeal had passed upon a pre-nuptial agreement 
providing for the religious education of children and that the 
decision in that case had been adverse to the validity of the 
contract. To that statement I adhere. What the courts of 



] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 169 

other states will do or what the decision of the United States 
Supreme Court will be when a case involving such a question is 
submitted on appeal, I cannot say, as I do not pose as a 
prophet, but narrate facts as an unbiased historian. But this 
far I am prepared to go; until a judicial tribunal equal or 
superior in power to the Missouri Court overrules the decisions 
in Brewer v. Gary that case will stand as a precedent and 
as Mr. Disraeli said so wittily, many years ago, "a precedent 
embalms a principle." 

Fn examining the decisions cited by Mr. Dohan, it is 
necessary to remember that the question is not whether the 
statutes of adoption are valid, not whether agreements made 
after marriage and the birth of children are valid, but the 
question is whether a contract entered into before marriage, 
to educate the children born of that marriage in a certain 
religious faith, is valid in law ? This necessitates three things 
(i) the agreement must be made before marriage and (2) it 
must provide ior the religious education of (3) children not 
in being. 

I shall proceed to discuss the citations of Mr. Dohan in 
the order in which they are quoted by him. 

In the case of Janes v. Cleghorn, (54 Georgia 9,) the mother 
of an infant having died the father placed her in the care and 
custody of an intimate friend of his wife with the distinct 
agreement and understanding that she was to have the child. 
The infant's father died when she was about three years of 
age never having in any way attempted to take the child into 
his own possession. Sometime later a brother-in-law of the 
child's father obtained the consent of the adopted parents to 
take the child on a visit to his family, promising to return it 
in two days. When he did not comply with his promise a writ 
of habeas corpus was obtained and the child, by order of the 
court was returned to its adopted parents. It is provided by 
the Georgia statute that a father loses control over his child, 
(i) by voluntary contract releasing the right to a third person 
and (2) by consenting to the adoption of the child by a third 
person. The case of Lamarv. Harris, (117 Georgia, 993,) is also 
an adoption case. The mother of an infant of two months 
having died, the father by voluntary contract gave the child to 
its maternal grandfather for adoption. When the grandfather 
died he left a will naming his son testamentary guardian of 
the infant. Later the son gave the child to its aunt to be 



1 70 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

brought up and it was not until six years had passed that the 
father attempted to regain possession of his offspring. The 
court held that the contract was binding, saying: "It is ex- 
pressly provided by statute that parental power over a child may 
be lost by voluntary contract releasing the right to a third 
person." 

Purinton v. Jamrock, (195 Mass. 187) is likewise an adoption 
case. It seems that an illegitimate child who had been cared 
for by the state for six years, having been committed to the 
State Board of Charity by virtue of R.L. c. 83 Sec. 37, was 
about to be adopted into a respectable family. The mother op- 
posed the adoption on numerous grounds among them being 
that the persons seeking to adopt the child were Baptists while 
she was a Catholic. The Chief Justice of Massachusetts, whose 
opinion was confirmed in all respects by the Supreme Judicial 
Court had this to say on that objection : " The Roman Catho- 
lic Church and the Baptist Church are both alike before the 
law. . . . The law assumes that the child will be as well 
taught in one Church as in the other, and that his future happi- 
ness is as likely to be promoted in one as in the other." A 
decree was made accordingly, and the child was adopted into 
the Baptist family. 

When Mr. Dohan comes to discuss the opinion of Mr. Just- 
ice Brewer in the case of Chapsky v. Wood (26 Kan. 650) he 
gives a wrong impression of what was said by that distinguished 
jurist. A worthless father and a sick mother by verbal agree- 
ment gave their little girl to an aunt, who, it appears was 
wealthy and capable of taking care of her. After five and one- 
half years the father attempted to recover the child by writ of 
habeas corpus. Mr. Dohan says that Judge Brewer enunciated 
the principle in that case that " parents have no absolute right 
of property in their minor children of which they cannot be 
deprived without their consent." Now what actually was said 
is the following : 

The father is the natural guardian and is prima fade en- 
titled to the custody of his minor child. . . . A child is 
not in any sense like a horse or any other chattel, subject mat- 
ter for absolute and irrevocable gift or contract. The father 
cannot, by merely giving away his child, release himself from 
the obligation to support it, nor be deprived of the right to its 
custody. ... I might say here that the statute has pro- 
vided for the relinquishment through probate court proceed- 



19 1 1.] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 171 

Ings which may be considered (but that Is outside this case) 
irrevocable. ... A parent's right to the custody of a 
child is not like the right of property, an absolute and uncon- 
trollable right. ... A mere right of property may be as- 
serted by any man, no matter how bad, immoral or unworthy 
he may be ; but no case can be found in which the courts have 
given to the father, who was a drunkard and a man of gross 
immoralities, the custody of a minor child, especially when 
that child is a girl. 

Now this is precisely the rule laid down by the English 
Courts in Wellesley v. We lies ley (2 Bligh 124) and in re Newton 
(i Ch. 740). 

Mr. Dohan tells us that the case of The State v. Smith (6 
Maine 400) is in point but when we come to examine it we 
are disappointed to find that it is very similar to the case of 
Chapsky v. Wood (supra). In a fit of momentary kindness, a 
brutal husband made an agreement with his wife " that if in 
consequence of any ill-treatment by him his wife should be 
rendered unhappy and unwilling to co-habit with him . . . 
then she tniyr live separately from him at her own pleasure 
and shall be at liberty to take the children under her own con- 
trol and custody." When the wife finally was compelled to 
leave home taking the children with her the father brought 
the matter into court on a writ of habeas corpus and the couit 
quoting with approval the decision in Wellesley v. Wellesley, 
decided in favor of the mother on two grounds: "(i) that the 
father was unfit to have the care of the children, and (2) that 
by reason of statute the agreement was valid until the child- 
ren reached the age of fourteen years." 

Mr. Dohan tries to emphasize the opinion of the court that 
the father had no vested right to the exclusive possession of his 
children. But whoever claimed he had? I certainly did not; 
and the rules followed by the courts in the last two cases are 
the rules laid down, consistently enforced and systematically 
followed by the Chancery Court of Great Britain for over a 
century. 

In Fletcher v. Hickman, (50 W. Va. 244), a dying mother 
persuaded her husband to consent that her mother (the child- 
ren's grandmother) should take the children and bring them 
up. After the death of his wife, the father, who was unable 
to support the children properly, attempted to recover them 
through a writ of habeas corpus. The court held that the 



172 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

grandmother should retain possession, on the ground that it was 
for the benefit of the children, saying : " Unless the welfare 
of the child demands a disregard of the contract, it is binding. 
It is not binding under those decisions if the welfare of the 
child does demand that the contract be disregarded." 

In Clark v. Bayer, (32 Ohio State, 299), a father and mother, 
being wholly unable to care for their infant children, trans- 
ferred the possession of them to their grandfather, formally 
abandoning their rights as parents. The learned court said 
this in the opinion : 

In case of controverted custody, the present and future inter- 
ests of the minor controls the judgment and directs the dis- 
cretion of the courts. While the legal rights of parents are 
to be respected, the welfare of the minor is of paramount 
consideration. If necessary to attain that end, the custody 
of minor children will be taken from their parents or refused 
to them. 

In Ward v. Goodrich, (34 Col. 369), the father of an infant 
two years old, having brought suit for divorce against his wife, 
but desiring to leave the child in her possession, entered into 
an agreement to allow her a certain sum each week for its 
support. When he failed to keep his agreement the wife sued 
on the contract, and, of course, recovered. The court's decision 
was sound in law, but I fail to see what it has to do with an 
ante-nuptial agreement relating to the religious education of 
children not in being. 

Anderson v. Young (54 So. Carolina, 388), follows the same 
rule set forth in Fletcher v. Hickman and Clark v. Bayer 
(supra). It seems that under the statutes of South Carolina 
it is lawful to apprentice children to learn trades, etc. Ac- 
cordingly, the parents of two half- grown children apprenticed 
them to a farmer until they were fourteen years of age, for 
the purpose of having them trained as farmers. Later, the 
father of the children, a worthless, indigent individual, at- 
tempted to recover them, but the court, while holding that 
the indenture of apprenticeship had not been properly exe- 
cuted, refused to direct that the children be taken away from 
the farmer, holding that it was for their benefit to remain with 
him. 

In State v. Barrett (45 N. H. 15), a father parted with his 
parental rights to the custody and service of his infant child 



i9i i.] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 173 

until she was eighteen years of age. The court held that the 
agreement as drawn did not conform with the provisions of the 
statute, which only permits children to be bound as appren- 
tices until they are fourteen. Nevertheless, it was decided 
that the infant alone could avoid such a contract it being 
binding on the parent. 

Mr. Dohan is of the opinion that In re Doyle (16 Mo. App. 
159) is in favor of the pre-nuptial agreement, and, as it touches 
on the question of religious training, it certainly is more ap- 
posite than some of the other cases quoted by him. The 
father of four children, being totally unable to care for thtm 
properly placed two of them in a Catholic orphan asylum. 
Later, one of the little girls was given to a family who were 
thought to be Catholics, but as a matter of fact had no re- 
ligious faith at all. When this fact became known to the 
father, he executed an agreement to one of the sisters, sur- 
rendering to her all his parental rights, and thereafter she 
applied to the court for the child's custody: 

We cannot In this proceeding [says the court, In the 
course of a long opinion] determine the question of guardian- 
ship ; and whether we shall alter the custody of this child ( 
Is a matter that rests solely in our sound discretion, which, 
in such a matter, Is not In America governed by any wooden 
rule as to the rights of the father, but Is to be exercised on 
general principles of justice, after full consideration of all the 
circumstances, and with a view mainly to the child's interest, 
which we must look upon as altogether paramount to the 
claims of its father, who Is not vested by law with any abso- 
lute right to its custody. 

And then the court goes on to say, regarding religion: 

A father in Missouri forfeits no rights to the custody and 
control of his child by being or becoming an atheist, nor are 
his rights in this respect increased belore the law by his be- 
lieving rightly. The State of Missouri has, however, a law 
which forbids the appointment for an orphan ... of a 
permanent guardian who is of a different religion from that of 
its last surviving parent. Under this law, no doubt, a bap- 
tized Catholic or a Jewish child might be given up to a guar- 
dian who rejected all forms of religious belief; and must be 
so given up if the last surviving parent died in the open pro- 
fession of unbelief. The enactment is not made with any 



174 AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES [Nov., 

view to the eternal interests of the child in a future state of 
existence, but with a view to the rights and feelings of the 
parents. . . . It is manifest that anything which inter- 
feres with the natural right of the father to direct the religious 
education of his child, strikes a blow at the family which in 
the last analysis is the foundation of the state. Few men 
would be willing to assume the burdens of a legal paternity 
if they supposed that their children could, against their will, 
be taken from them to be educated in religious systems which 
they believed to be false, and to be taught there to despise 
their father for his superstition or for his infidelity as the case 
might be. 

Mr. Dohan is mistaken if he thinks this case was decided 
because an agreement of abandonment had been signed by the 
father. The court concluded thus: 

After giving to this case the most careful consideration 
. . . we have arrived at the conclusion that we shall best 
consult the interests of the child by remitting her now to 
the custody of Sister Simeon in accordance with the wishes of 
her only surviving parent, which we have felt that we had 
under the circumstances to regard in some degree in arriving 
at this determination. 

In re Clements (78 Mo. 352) raises the question as to the 
construction of the Missouri Statute of adoption (R. S. 1879, 
Sec. 601). A widowed mother who had executed a deed of 
adoption of her child, later signed an instrument committing 
the care and custody of the same child to the Orphan Asy- 
lum. The Court, however, held that the subsequent paper 
could not be construed as a revocation of the deed given under 
the Statute. 

Mr. Dohan calls Now&ck v. Burger (133 Mo. 24), " the best 
case of all," and so the facts are worth examining. The de- 
fendant made an oral ante-nuptial agreement with his intended 
wife, that in consideration of their marriage and of his having 
charge of their illegitimate child, the plaintiff, during bis mi- 
nority, he would in his will devise his property to this child 
and any children of their marriage in equal shares. The hus- 
band died making no provision for the plaintiff, who thereupon 
brought action for specific performance. It was objected 
to this agreement that it was not in writing and consequently 
was invalid under the Statute of Frauds. While I admit that 



1 9 ii.] AGREEMENT PRIOR TO MIXED MARRIAGES 175 

the court decided that the marriage constituted a good con- 
sideration, I can't help asking what difference does that make ? 
In the questions raised in regard to the pre- nuptial agreement 
relating to the religious education of children in the Irish and 
English Courts the contract was never objected to on the 
ground of consideration. 

Now, I ask my readers to analyze these cases carefully, 
to examine the facts closely, ascertaining precisely the ques- 
tion involved, and then say in what way they are analogous to 
the case of a man and woman of different religions making a 
contract before marriage to educate the children of that mar- 
riage according to the tenets of a certain faith. Where is the 
relevancy, the cogency, the similarity ? How do they help us 
in answering the objections so sharply defined by the presiding 
justice of the Missouri Court of Appeals ? Most of these cases 
have arisen under the statutes of the various states, and but 
two of them refer in any way to religion and religious train- 
ing. The only case involving the question of an ante- nuptial 
contract is Nowack v. Berger (133 Missouri 24) Mr. Dohan's 
" ultimate and consummate flower " and that relates entirely 
to property rights, the important point discussed and finally 
settled by the court, being that marriage was a good consid- 
eration for a verbal ante-nuptial agreement when made between 
the parties themselves. Yet it is on these decisions that Mr. 
Dohan actually bases his opinion that a contract made by a 
Catholic and Protestant before marriage with regard to the 
control of the custody and religious education of future off- 
spring, is legally valid and binding in Colorado, Georgia, Mas- 
sachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, South Caro- 
lina and West Virginia. 

Of course it is not at all difficult to see through his argu- 
ment. He reasons that because the law permits a parent under 
certain circumstances to make an absolute gift of his child to 
strangers, and because in particular instances the law will for 
the benefit of the child deprive the parent of his natural rights, 
that, therefore, a man or a woman may make a contract be- 
fore marriage consenting to have the children of the marriage 
educated in a certain religion. He might just as well say that 
because a man can walk he can also swim. It would be quite 
as logical. 



THE LORD- 

BY JULIAN E. JOHNSTON. 

I can see Him in the sunlight 

In His Beauty and His Splendor, 
And the garments of His Glory 

On the morning float and flow : 
I can hear Him in the whisper 

Of the willows young and tender. 
I can hear Him in the murmur 

Of the river singing low. 

I can see His footsteps shining, 

In the glory of the flowers 
In the purple of the poppy 

And the crimson of the rose. 
I can feel His Sunny Presence 

Filling all the golden hours, 
Making music on the mountain 

Where the morning-bugle blows. 

And the trees their banners flutter 

In the beauty of His Splendor, 
And the river offers incense 

In its smoke of silver mist. 
All the birds with rapture singing 

Hail the Maker, kind and tender 
I/ike a thousand bells a-ringing 

In His dome of amethyst. 

Bvery violescent aster 

Every shell beside the ocean 

Every breeze that like a robin 
Whistles on its silver flute, 



19".] THE LORD 177 

Sweetly murmurs of the Master 

In the music of devotion 
Till my heart is like the singing 

Of a silver-ringing lute. 

O, the summer is a casket 

Rich with every jewel splendid 
Gladly offered to the Glory 

Of the Lord of Love and Light. 
And the night a silver basket, 

Full of brilliants gaily tendered 
To the Lord, whose Golden Beauty 

Makes the brow of morning bright ! 

O it's sweet to know that Heaven 

Is beside, and not above us ; 
That the Lord of life and glory 

Makes His tent upon the hills; 
That in all the summer sunshine 

We can find the Looks that love us, 
Hear the rustle of His garments 

In the music of the rills I 

As of old He spake to Moses 

In the bush upon the mountain, 
So He speaks to every spirit, 

In the balsam-laden breeze ; 
In the blooming of the roses, 

In the flashing of the fountain 
For His rubrics are the flowers, 

And the stars, His Litanies. 



VOL. xciv. 12 




PRAGMATISM-WHAT DOES IT MEAN ? 

BY WILLIAM TURNER, S. T. D. 

T is pleasing to our sense of national pride to 
be able to record the fact that philosophy in 
America has never been anti-religious in the de- 
gree in which it has been aggressively opposed 
to religious institutions in other countries. If 
one leaves out of account the non-technical philosophy of Tom 
Paine, which was, after all, but an echo of the restless ration- 
alism that stirred Europe to its depths at the close of the 
eighteenth century, and the loose literary form of philosophiz- 
ing that characterized the so-called School of Concord in the 
middle of the nineteenth century, one will find that all the 
great names in the history of philosophy in this country are 
those of men who strove to uphold, if not some one 
form of Christian belief, at least, belief in the fundamental 
truths common to all Christians. Jonathan Edwards, strict 
Calvinist in theology, James McCosh, orthodox Presbyterian, 
Orestes A. Brownson, a fervent and devout Catholic from his 
conversion in 1844 to his death in 1876, John Fiske, a theist, 
and William T. Harris, late United States Commissioner of 
Education, who was personally known to many of us as an 
opponent of scepticism and materialism all these were con- 
structive thinkers as far as the existence of God, the immor- 
tality of the soul, and the freedom of the will are concerned. 
They had no inclination to tear down the structure of reli 
gious faith, or to sweep away the foundation underlying the 
edifice of Christian theology. Still, while these were Ameri- 
can philosophers, their philosophy was not American, but a 
modification of English, Scottish, German or Italian philoso- 
phy. In our own day, there has grown up a school of thinkers 
who are not only American philosophers, but founders of a 
philosophy that is genuinely, indeed, characteristically Ameri- 
can, and it is pleasing to reflect that they, too, are, in inten- 
tion, at least, with us, rather than against us in the struggle 
of Christian philosophy to resist the encroachments of ma- 



1 9 1 1 .] PRA CM A TISM WHA T DOES IT MEAN f 179 

terialistic scepticism. The members of this school are known 
as pragmatists. For the last ten years, they have occupied 
the limelight of attention in the world of philosophy, and have 
so popularized their ideas and method as to merit the dis- 
tinction, unique among metaphysical thinkers, of drawing fire 
from the most unconventional of all our critics, the genial 
Mr. Dooley. They have attracted notice not only in centres 
of learning throughout Europe, but also in the popular maga- 
zines and even in the daily press. The leaders of the move- 
ment are Charles Sanders Pierce, now of Medford, Pa., the 
late Professor William James, Professor John Dewey, now of 
Columbia University, New York, Dr. Frederick S. Schiller, 
now of the University of Oxford, who received his philosoph- 
ical education in this country. 

Let us examine, in the first place, the intellectual antece- 
dents of pragmatism, so that, having ascertained how it came 
to be, we may, perhaps, be better able to understand what it 
is. Descartes, as is well known, built a whole system of phi- 
losophy on the foundation of individual consciousness. The 
one incontrovertible truth, he said, is that " I think." I may 
doubt about everything else, but I cannot doubt that I think; 
because doubting is thinking, so that even were I to doubt 
that I am thinking, the fact of doubt would show that I am 
thinking. But, if I think, I exist. If I exist, God exists. If 
God exists, the external world exists. And thus the whole 
body of truth rests on my consciousness of the fact that I 
think. Kant changed all that. For " I think " he substituted 
" I ought." He considered that moral obligation is the one 
incontrovertible fact, and on moral conscience he built the 
structure which Descartes sought to build on individual con- 
sciousness. Now, Kant's influence leads ultimately to the prag- 
matic way of thinking. Theoretical reason was the guide of 
the Cartesians; practical reason is the guide of the Kantist. 
Lotze, a follower of Kant, put the matter clearly when he said 
that the validity of a principle is not of so great importance 
as its value. From this it is but a step to the American 
way of asking, not is the principle true, but what is it worth ? 
What consequences will it have for you and me ? 

Another line of descent of pragmatism is indicated by the 
change of point of view in the sciences. Up to the nineteenth 
century, scientists were seeking for causes to explain facts, and 



i8o PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN f [Nov., 

laws which, they hoped, would represent the truth of the 
facts. They used hypotheses only as means to discover laws, 
intending, after the discovery of the law, to discard the hypo- 
thesis as useless. Then came the theory of evolution, which, 
independently of whether it is true or not, is valuable in bi- 
ology as an explanation of many facts which are ascertained 
to be true. In the nineteenth century, too, appeared the the- 
ory of ether to explain the phenomena of light and heat. 
The scientist is inclined to think that if evolution explains the 
facts of biology, and ether explains the facts observed in our 
study of light and heat, it matters little whether evolution is 
itself a fact or ether really exists. They " work out " all right, 
as we say, and that is enough. Hence, the pragmatists' view 
of truth, that a principle is true if it works, or functions 
satisfactorily. 

We must not, however, omit the influences, temperamental, 
racial and environmental, which no doubt explain pragmatism 
as much as any logical antecedents. The men who originated 
the pragmatic movement are of the motor-active type. The 
first of them Mr. C. S. Pierce, declares that pragmatism rests 
on the axiom, "The end of man is action," an axiom, he adds, 
that does not recommend itself to him at sixty as forcibly as 
it did when he was thirty. The country in which pragmatism 
sprang up is pre-eminently a country of achievement; the age 
in which it saw the light is an age which bestows its highest 
praise on successful endeavor. We boast that we have no 
traditions, that we do not look backward to customs, institu- 
tions, established lines, but forward to results, success, achieve- 
ment. If a man "makes good," we are inclined to think that 
he is good, and if an experiment in public policy succeeds, 
we care little whether the manner of it is inconsistent with past 
precedent, or in line with logical progress. We are not pre- 
pared to say that " whatever is, is right " but if a project or 
a method succeeds, we are inclined to think that it has much 
in its favor. The pragmatist, then, is in harmony with the 
spirit of the country and the times when he discards the old 
logical tests of truth and applies in place of them the test of 
practical consequences. Suppose one is confronted with the 
assertion " The human soul is immortal." If he were an in- 
tellectualist, that is, a philosopher of the old type, he would 
try to fit it into a logical system; he would reason the mat- 



1 9 1 1 .] PRA CM A TISM WHA T DOES IT MEAN t 1 8 1 

ter out in this way: The human soul is a spiritual substance; 
what is spiritual, having no parts, is not liable to corruption; 
therefore, the death of the body cannot result in the disin- 
tegration of the soul. The pragmatist does not look back- 
ward. He looks forward. He asks how does the assertion 
" The human soul is immortal" work? What practical conse- 
quences has it for you and me ? If these consequences are 
satisfactory, the assertion is true ; that is the only meaning 
that its truth can have. 

We are now in a position to define more closely what 
pragmatism is. According to the late Professor James, prag- 
matism is "A temper of mind," an attitude; it is also a theory 
of the nature of ideas ; and finally, it is a theory about real- 
ity.* We shall, therefore, describe pragmatism (i) As an at- 
titude towards philosophy ; (2) As a theory of knowledge, and 
(3) As a metaphysics, or theory of reality. 

(i) As an Attitude of Mind. The old philosophy, or intel- 
lectualistic philosophy, as the pragmatists call it, was organ- 
ized as a retrospective system. It started with self-evident 
truths, as we do in geometry ; to these it added truths of ex- 
perience, as we do in the natural sciences, and from these it 
built up a system, the dominant cohesive force, the cement 
and mortar of the structure, being logical consistency. When 
a new truth was presented for consideration, the old philosophy 
tried to fit it into the system ; if it was true, either self- 
evident or vouched for by experience, it was inevitable that 
it should fit in, or that the old system should be modified. 
The new philosophy is not retrospective. James says express- 
ly that the attitude of the pragmatist is "The attitude of 
looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed 
necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, conse- 
quences, facts."! The pragmatist discards "closed systems." 
"The whole function of philosophy," says James, "ought to 
be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and 
me, at definite instants of our lives, if this world-formula or 
that world-formula be the true one."f It is only just, how- 
ever, to put on record the protest of the pragmatist against 
a misunderstanding of the phrase "practical consequences." 
When he says that truth is to be tested by practical conse- 
quences, he does not mean practical in the sordid, material 

"Journal of Phil., etc., V. 85. \Pragmatism, p. 55. \ Op. cit., p. 50. 



1 82 PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN ? [Nov., 

sense. He does not mean consequences of the " bread and 
butter" sort; he does not mean what difference will it make 
in dollars and cents. He, too, admits that philosophy bakes 
no bread. He means consequences which satisfy other needs 
besides the economic needs of mankind. Professor Dewey ex- 
plains the matter thus. When we acquire a new item of knowl- 
edge, we must relate it somehow to what we know already. 
As long as it remains unrelated, it is like a thorn in the flesh; 
it irritates us; the mind is under a strain, or tension, until it 
is adjusted to the new truth. As soon as the adjustment is 
completed there arises a sense of satisfaction, and this sense 
of satisfaction is the only test of truth that we have. Do you 
wish, then, to know whether a doctrine is true or false ? If 
it satisfies, it is true; if, despite your efforts, it remains a 
thorn in the sensitive tissue of the logical mind, if it does not 
satisfy, it is false. If it does neither one nor the other, it has 
no meaning. To attain satisfaction, you must remake all the 
truth that is already in the mind. There is, therefore, no fixed 
truth. Knowledge is a stream that never stops flowing. La- 
bitur et labetur, as the Latin poet said. This view is empha- 
sized by the English pragmatist, Dr. Schiller, who names his 
philosophy Humanism, because there is no God-made truth 
handed out to us in systems; we make our own truth, or 
rather our truths, for ourselves. I have my truths, you have 
yours; and all truth is personal. This, then, is the general 
attitude of the pragmatist towards philosophy. 

(2) Theory of Knowledge. The old notion, the intellectualist 
notion, was that our thoughts somehow represent things; our 
impressions and ideas correspond to real things, our judgments 
represent real relations among things, and the conclusions of 
science correspond to laws of nature, which are real and in- 
dependent of us. The pragmatist takes an entirely different 
view of truth. For him, the value of a concept or idea does 
not consist in representation; it consists in its use as a tool 
or instrument to manipulate our experience. The Germans 
have an appropriate name for such a tool or instrument; they 
call it a Dcnkmittel, an instrument of thought. If one were 
asked what a saw is, it would be quite natural to answer by 
describing it as an instrument used to cut wood; a hammer 
would just as naturally be described as an instrument used for 
driving nails. So, says the pragmatist, our ideas are best de- 



1 9 1 1 .] PR A CM A TISM WHA T DOES IT ME A Nf 183 

scribed as contrivances invented by man to bring order and 
arrangement into our experience, which would otherwise be 
chaotic. An excellent example is furnished by Professor Dewey. 
" What," he asks, " is our idea of a rose ? " The old answer 
was: "It is an image in the mind, representing the color, 
texture, shape, fragrance, and so forth of a certain kind of 
flower." The pragmatist's account of it is quite different: 

A sweet odor ol a certain specific kind enters into my con- 
sciousness. I think immediately of a rose. That is, there 
comes to my mind the idea of a rose. This idea becomes 
forthwith apian of action. It leads me to walk towards the 
source of the odor, to look at the object from which the odor 
emanates, to handle it, to examine it closely, until I have 
finally reached satisfaction in the conclusion that the object 
is a rose. The idea has removed the mental strain, it has put 
an end to inquiry, it has satisfied; only in that sense is it 
true.* 

It is clear, then, that the meaning of an idea, the meaning 
of any kind of knowledge, or the truth of any kind of knowl- 
edge, does not consist in its correspondence with an object, 
but in its function as an instrument used for the purpose of 
relieving mental strain, or bringing order into the chaos of our 
experience. From this it follows that knowledge has no fixed 
value. No truth can be acquired once for all, and set aside, 
so to speak, for future reference.. We make truths as we go 
along. This is the meaning of James' famous saying that truth 
is not transcendent but ambulatory. Let us take one more ex- 
ample, this time from the kind of knowledge that we call 
judgments. No one doubts that two and two are four. That 
is a truth which we consider to be self-evident. If any one 
were so original as to question it, we should answer that two 
and two are four. " Because our experience shows that two 
dollars and two dollars are four dollars, two trees and two 
trees are four trees"; or, with some amount of condescension 
to kindergarten methods, we might answer: "Because two 
blocks and two blocks are four blocks." As philosophers, 
however, we know that the judgment " Two and two are four " 
is necessarily true, because "two" and "four" are here used 
as abstract representations of quantity, which necessarily imply 
the truth that " Two and two are four." The pragmatist once 

* CfMind, 1906, pp. 203 ff. and Journal of Phil., Vol. II., 397 ff. 



1 84 PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN f [Nov., 

more gives a different account of the matter. He says that 
our semi-human ancestors long ago used the formula in deal- 
ing with cocoanuts, or flint arrow-heads, or some of the other 
things in which they were interested. Their descendants, down 
to our day, have used the formula with similar success; so 
that it comes to us as an inevitable conviction which we in- 
herit, and which we continue to use, as they used it, for prac- 
tical purposes. It worked then; and it works now. But it is 
not necessarily true. The so-called necessity of it is simply 
an inveterate habit of the race. The consequence of all this 
is that there are no absolute and necessary truths, and that, 
as John Stuart Mill said, "it is quite conceivable that on the 
planet Mars or in some remote interstellar space, two and two 
would be three, or five, or any other number imaginable." 
What a pity that we did not realize this when we were making 
our first steps in arithmetic ! How we could have upset the 
authority of our teacher, and brilliantly evaded the conse- 
quence of our mistakes in multiplication and addition. But, 
there is a serious side to it all. If there are no necessary 
truths, and that alone is true which works out satisfactorily, 
then the way to scepticism, it seems to me, is wide open. 
Let us come, however, to the next point. 

(3) The pragmatist theory of reality. At first, the pragma- 
tist was seemingly unable to make up his mind about the 
value of metaphysics. At one time he considered metaphysics 
to be "a luxury"; at another, he concluded that pragmatism 
was merely a method, and could be made to suit any kind of 
metaphysics. For instance, the Italian pragmatist, Papini, 
described pragmatism as a corridor, leading to various apart- 
ments, labeled "materialism," "idealism," and so forth. Fi- 
nally, the pragmatist decided that he should have a meta- 
physics of his own, and he determined to call it pluralism. 
Pluralism is opposed to monism. Monism maintains that all 
reality is fundamentally one, that there is a unity underlying 
all the events which constitute our experience. Christian phi- 
losophy is monistic, in so far as it assigns one source or 
origin to all things, teaches that there is one, all- ruling Provi- 
dence, that He holds us all in the hollow of His hand, and 
that all things tend each in its own way to fulfill the one 
Divine Purpose in creation. There are differences among 
things; for a mineral is not a plant, a plant is not an animal, 



i9i i.] PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN f 185 

an animal is not a human being. Monism, however, holds 
that in spite of these differences there is a fundamental unity. 
The pluralist says "No; things are essentially different one 
from another. This is a multiverse, not a universe, when it 
comes into our experience. After it has come into our ex- 
perience, we begin to connect up the disparate events, we 
string the beads together into a kind of unity, and so convert 
the multiverse into a universe." This is what 'James means 
when he says that the unity of reality is " of the strung-along 
type." We make our world, it is not ready made as we enter 
into it. This view he thinks, appeals to the strenuous, to the 
tough-minded, to the democratic soul. "Sick souls," he says, 
and people whose minds are "tender" prefer to believe that 
they step into a world already made for them by an Absolute 
Mind that put order into chaos. Such people are, to his way 
of thinking, aristocrats. As for him, give him the good, 
strenuous, democratic view, according to which he is indebted 
to no one for his world, but makes it himself. The view 
which I have ventured to call that of Christian philosophy 
does not appeal to him. He confesses that it has a certain 
majesty; and a capacity to yield religious cemfort to a most 
respectable class of minds; but "it is dapper, it is noble in 
the bad sense of the word, in the sense in which it is noble 
to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat 
and dirt, it seems to me that, when a view of things is 'noble* 
that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and 
as a philosophical disqualification." * Here one catches I 
think, the note of Americanism, democracy, strenuosity, the 
self-conscious condescension to grasp the horny hand of toil. 
But, is not the note forced, as the French say ? Is it neces- 
sary to carry so far our love of freedom and our apprecia- 
tion of honest, though humble, labor ? Is it not rather the 
fanaticism of the ignorant Puritan who would have no Roman 
candles in the celebration of the Fourth of July in his town, 
because Romanism was opposed to our free institutions. We 
can be independent without going so far as to claim the right 
to make our own universe, each for himself. The test of this 
audacious democracy run riot is the pragmatist treatment of 
the idea of God. Naturally, being a pluralist, the pragmatist 
will not admit that God is an all-including infinite reality, in 

. * Pragmatism, pp. 71 and 72. 



186 PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN? [Nov., 

the pantheistic sense. He will not bow to the theistic idea 
of a God Who made the universe for us. Therefore, he will 
have a pantheism of his own, a peculiar democratic pantheism 
of the "strung-along " type, according to which the universe 
is not part of God, but God a part of the universe. God, 
says the pragmatist, is finite. He "has an environment, is in 
time, and works out a history, like ourselves. Thus, He 
escapes from the foreignness, the timelessness, the remoteness 
which theists ascribe to Him."* A finite God! A God sub- 
ject to the vicissitudes of time and history ! Surely this is a 
sufficient refutation of pragmatist metaphysics, and a proof 
that it carries its irreverent audacity, which is not a part of 
true democracy, beyond the limits, not only of logic but of 
decent sentiment as well. 

And yet, the attitude of pragmatism towards religious in- 
stitutions is not one of intentional hostility. As I said at the 
beginning, there is in the history of philosophy in America a 
pleasing spirit of toleration and a tendency to build up where 
philosophers in other countries have shown an eager willing- 
ness to tear down. The pragmatist is tolerant, even though 
he does appear to patronize. He realizes the vital and social 
importance of all religions. And he realizes it by force of 
logic, as well as by his own inclination to be conciliatory. 
Religion, he thinks, is not merely an attitude of mind, not 
merely an illumination thrown on facts already ascertained by 
science, nor yet a state of feeling or sentiment which disposes 
one to place an emotional value on the facts which leave the 
scientist cold, so to speak. It is more than that. It adds 
new facts to the facts of science, and brings forward new 
truths which it adds to the truths of science. These facts 
and these truths make a difference and lead to further differ- 
ences in the matter of conduct. Therefore, religion has a 
meaning independently of science, and whether religions are 
proved or not, they are approved by the pragmatist. They 
should be judged, and they are judged in the pragmatist 
school, by their intent rather than by their content. So that 
if a false system of religious truth could have the same effect 
in the social life as a true one it would be just as good, just 
as beneficial, and therefore, in spite of the paradox, just as 
true as the true system. Take, for example, the belief in the 

* Cf. Pluralistic Universe, p. 318. 



i9".] PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN f 187 

existence of God. " On pragmatic principles," says James, 
" if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest 
sense of the word, it is true"* James is convinced that it 
does work satisfactorily, and so are most of the pragmatists. 
But, the Christian philosopher would do well to pause before 
he accepts such assistance as the pragmatist offers. Non tali 
auxilio. In the first place, there is a confusion here between 
two very different things. It is not the existence of God, 
but belief in the existence of God, that " works satisfactorily." 
We do not need to be told that. We know that the belief 
in God functions for good. It restrains and represses in the 
moral order impulses and tendencies that are undesirable from 
the point of view of social welfare. It is, in the moral order 
also, a source of inspiration, inciting to noble effort and nerv- 
ing the believer to deeds of sublime, heroic sacrifice. In the 
moral order also, it sustains the soul in a hopeful outlook on 
life, and suggests always the vision of the better things that 
are beyond. In the intellectual order, the belief in God nur- 
tures a confidence in the rationality of things, and brings 
order into the chaos of our experience. From God to God is 
an excellent epitome of the history of the world, and Jer God 
is a splendid all-inclusive motive for human conduct. But, 
what we need is not this realization of the value of a belief 
in God; what we need in the face of scepticism and agnosti- 
cism is the ability to show clearly that this belief is justified, 
that the existence of God is a fact; and the pragmatist brings 
us not a step nearer to that conclusion. He does not, because 
he cannot. When he talks of the "effects" or "consequences" 
of a principle he means effects and consequences within our 
experience. All the consequences, therefore, which follow 
rom " the hypothesis of God " must be such that they fall 
within actual or possible human experience. But, apart from 
the supernatural experience of the mystic, which the pragma- 
tist takes no account of, our experience of the existence of 
God can never be direct, personal or immediate, but only in- 
direct, inferential and deductive. The pragmatic test fails, 
then, in its most important application to religious truth, in 
spite of the good will and the friendly attitude of the prag- 
matist. 

What, then, is to be our attitude towards the latest Amer-' 

* Pragmatism, p. 299. 



1 88 PRAGMATISM WHAT DOES IT MEAN? [Nov., 

ican philosophy ? What are we to think of its present achieve- 
ments and of its prospects in the future ? Let the pragmatist 
speak first in his own behalf: 

The centre of philosophic gravity [writes James] must alter 
its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by 
the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. . . . 
It will be an alteration in the " seat of authority " that re- 
minds one almost of the Protestant reformation. And as, to 
papal minds, Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of 
anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often 
seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It would seem 
so much trash, philosophically. But, life wags on, all the 
same, and compasses its ends, in Protestant countries. I 
venture to think that philosophic Protestantism will compass 
a not dissimilar prosperity.* 

The challenge is fairly flung down. It is not the intellect- 
ualist but the pragmatist himself who calls pragmatism "philo- 
sophic Protestantism." Like Protestantism, it is individualistic; 
making the consequences to you and me to be the test of 
meaning and of truth; it goes back, in fact, to the doctrine of 
the Greek sophist that " Man is the measure of all things." 
Like Protestantism, it is the centrifugal rather than centri- 
petal. It denies the fundamental unity of reality, rejects the 
validity of universal principles, and scornfully repudiates uni- 
versally valid ideas, reducing all knowledge to my knowledge 
and your knowledge, replacing all central truth by a principle 
similar to that of private interpretation. Like Protestantism, 
it misrepresents the medieval scholastic realism, casting asper- 
sions on that which it does not understand. On this plat- 
form, if one may so designate its programme, it appeals to 
the future, and as you have just heard, appeals with confi- 
dence. Is that confidence doomed to disappointment ? It 
seems to me that it is. And my reason for so thinking is, 
in a sense, pragmatic. Pragmatism will not satisfy the de- 
mands of a future generation. The whole drift of thought is 
towards centralization in every line of human endeavor. The 
nineteenth century was collectivistic, centripetal, Catholically 
inclined, compared with the eighteenth century, which was in- 
dividualistic, inclined towards fragmentation and tending to 

* Pragmatism, p, 123. 



1 9 1 1.] PR A CM A TISM WHA T DOES IT MEAN f 1 89 

Protestant decentralization. We have inherited the spirit of 
the nineteenth century and are more inclined to carry it farther 
in the same direction than to revert to an earlier tendency. 
Not only in industry, production, transportation and other 
material lines, but in organization and government, in art, 
literature, theology and philosophy we are centralizing, unify- 
ing and building up, where former generations were decen- 
tralizing, fragmentating and tearing down. There is a note of 
democratic individualism in the pragmatic philosophy, that 
makes it distinctly American. There is also admittedly a note 
of Protestant anarchy that is not American but old- country, 
eighteenth century revolutionism witness James' fling at the 
dapper, aristocratic spirit of intellectualism. The true Amer- 
ican is he who, seeing the signs of the times, realizing the 
dangers of a democracy run riot, seeks to reconcile progress 
with stability, freedom with authority, individualism with 
healthy institutionalism. The pragmatist has brought philos- 
ophy down to earth and to practical issues. But he has car- 
ried his "shirt-sleeves" manner too far. It is for a future 
school of philosophy to profit by what the pragmatist teaches 
and at the same time avoid the exaggeration into which the 
pragmatist has fallen. The philosophy which will satisfy by 
meeting the demands of the future generation will have to be 
constructive in the true sense, not only tolerant of authority, 
but able to articulate its individualism into an intellectual 
system, and to reconcile the new with the old in an age that 
is beginning to realize how much the present owes to the 
past. The world does not "wag on," as James says. It 
moves cautiously and circumspectly at times. It is doing that 
now. And over against the advantages of Protestant individ- 
ualism and democratic strenuosity it recognizes the claims cf 
Catholic principle and aristocratic leisure. Pragmatism stands 
on one side, on the side of Protestantism. The American 
philosophy of the future will be obliged to make an intelli- 
gent compromise. 



A SISTER-IN-LAW OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES. 
MARIE AYMEE DE RABUTIN CHANTAL.* 

BY THE HON. MRS. MAXWELL SCOTT. 
I. 




short life-story of Marie Aymee de Rabutin 
Chantal, the daughter of St. Chantal and the 
sister-in-law of St. Francis de Sales is very beau- 
tiful. It is, indeed, a little poem of earthly hap- 
piness, crowned by heroic suffering and virtue, 
and breathes a fragrance which sets it apart from other bi- 
ographies, however holy and admirable. 

This young girl, for she was but nineteen when she died, 
was very dear to our Saint. He had watched over her from 
her early childhood, and when she married his brother Ber- 
nard, he welcomed her into the family as " one of the best 
loved sisters in the world," and, to use his own expression, he 
became henceforth her "father and brother in one" through- 
out the happy and the sorrowful days of her short earthly 
pilgrimage. 

Marie Aymee, who was the second child of the Baron and 
Baroness de Rabutin Chantal, was born at the Chateau of 
Bourbilly on July i, 1598. Her mother consecrated her to 
the Blessed Virgin and gave her the name of Mary in her 
honor, to which was added that of Aymee, after one of her 
aunts. From her infancy she seems to have merited her 
name of " beloved," says her biographer. " God had en- 
dowed her with so many natural gifts of body and mind, 
although they appeared as yet only in bud, she was so 
charming, that Monsieur, her father, had more affection for 
this little one than he had for his only son, and her mother 
and other relations were especially fond of her." 

Marie Aymee and her brother and sisters, Celse Begnine 

* This sketch is founded on Les deux fillet de Sle. Chantal, with introductory letter by 
Mgr. Dupanloup. Paris : Firmin Didot. 



.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 

and Franf oise,* grew up in an atmosphere of peace and joy 
in the ideal home portrayed for us in St. Chantal's life, till 
she was four years old, when the death of her father under 
the most tragic circumstances brought a sudden end to the 
happy home life, and changed the course of the child's exist- 
ence. M. de Chantal, who, had gone out one morning on a 
shooting expedition, was shot accidentally by a friend, and 
brought back to his unfortunate wife and children in a dying 
condition. Marie Aymee, although too young to understand 
fully his danger, shared her mother's anguish, and showed her 
love for her father by kissing his hands or laying her little 
head beside his. When death came it was long before she 
understood the sad mystery, but when at last she felt that 
her father had left her, she stretched out her arms to the 
lifeless body and burst into tears. This sad event had a 
great effect on the child, but as soon as consolation was pos- 
sible, she strove to comfort her mother in her innocent way. 
Mine, de Chantal was one of those who love with all their 
strength, and she was at first entirely crushed by her sorrow, 
and longed to retire from the world. She says herself of this 
time: "If duty to my four little children had not kept me 
back I should have fled at once to the Holy Land, there to 
end my days." But, as always, duty and the will of God were 
her guides, and she remained at Bourbilly to inaugurate a new 
life of devotion to her children and their interests. One of 
the witnesses in the process of canonization tells us how she 
now ordered her life. "She redoubled her prayers to God and 
her alms to the poor she gave all her rich garments to churches 
and sent away her husband's servants with handsome gifts, 
keeping for herself and her four children only a modest widow's 
retinue conformable to the life she wished to lead." 

It was under the shadow of this great sorrow that Marie 
Aymee's education began. As she was the eldest girl, and per- 
haps more greatly gifted than Celse Begnine, Mme. de Chantal 
felt that it was important that she should be an example to the 
others, and began earnestly to try " to cultivate this rare plant 
that it might bear the fruit of all the virtues." With all her 
gifts the little girl had also certain faults. Her mother watched 
carefully over these tendencies, and did not hesitate to pun- 

* The youngest sister, Charlotte, was born just before her father's death, and we her 
little of her short life. 



192 A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Nov. , 

ish her if necessary, so that gradually the child conquered her 
childish failings. After the first year of mourning had passed, 
President Fremyot sent to Dijon for his daughter and her 
children to visit him, and this good grandfather, by his great 
affection mingled with authority, comforted them all. He con- 
soled and cheered his daughter and caused her to moderate 
her grief and a certain severity which had unconsciously 
clouded her new life, and the children benefited by brighter 
surroundings. In spite of his age and serious character Marie 
Aymee became quickly devoted to her grandfather, and showed 
him " many little attentions and tendernesses, so that he felt a 
special affection for the child." Unfortunately the peaceful 
time at Dijon could not last. The children's other grandfather, 
M. de Chantal, urged Mme. de Chantal to come and live with 
him at Monthelon. This old gentleman, " of a sad and severe 
character," threatened to marry again and disinherit the child- 
ren if his daughter-in-law did not comply with his wishes, so 
that she felt obliged to obey him. 

For almost seven years, therefore, Monthelon became the 
home of Mme. de Chantal and her children, and here the former 
heroically endured what her biographer truly calls a purga- 
tory. Not only was the old Baron a most difficult character, 
but he was ruled by a housekeeper, a woman who assumed 
all the airs of mistress of the household. She insisted on 
bringing her own children to live in the house, and treated 
Mme. de Chantal very badly. To these insults the Saint re- 
turned only gentleness and humility, while to obviate the dif- 
ficulties of the situation, she undertook the charge of this 
person's children herself, " in order to make them very gocd 
and that they might not in any way harm her own children." 
She devoted herself more than ever to the care of these dear 
children, and as Marie Aymee was now five, she was able to 
profit by her mother's lessons. Mme. de Chantal, always an 
early riser, assisted daily at her children's toilet, taking care 
that they should hear no idle words from their attendants, 
and heard them say their little prayers; after which she took 
them to say "good morning to their grandfather and wait 
upon him if he permitted it, though he was not always in a 
humor for this." Besides their simple lessons and religious in- 
structions the children helped their mother in her works of 
charity, and this was their great delight. On Sundays and 



1 9 1 1 . ] A SISTER- IN- LA WOFST. FRANCIS DE SALES 193 

Feast days Mme. de Chantal would set out on foot, attended 
by two servants and accompanied by Celse Begnine and Marie 
Aymee, and presently, as she grew older, by Fraccoise, to 
assist the poor. Everyone carried something. The children 
took charge of the bread and the clothes, while their mother's 
share was the soup and medicine: "Marie Aymee in particu- 
lar carried as much as possible, and the more she had to take 
charge of, the happier she was." 

In 1604, when Marie Aymee was six years old, a great and 
happy event came to change the lives of the whole family. 
In the spring of this year they made the acquaintance of St. 
Francis at Dijon, where he was preaching the Lenten Sermons, 
and whither M. de Fremyot summoned his daughter once 
more. The first meetings between her and her future director 
and their wonderful results have been often recorded, and here 
we must keep to the story of Marie Ayme'e, but luckily for 
us there is special mention of her in the early chronicles. 
The little girl, who saw the Saint at her grandfather's house, 
and, who, with a child's instinct became quickly attracted by 
his paternal kindness and gentleness, " almost at first sight 
loved him like a father and approached him with a confidence 
which surprised everyone. The Saint, astonished and touched 
by this naive attachment, felt suddenly a special affection for 
this child, and looked upon her in future as the youngest, 
tenderest, and most loved sheep that he was to guide to the 
Good Shepherd." 

When he visited the good President the Saint would be 
met and escorted by the children to the drawing-room after 
which his "little people," as he called them, would disperse 
to play, all except Marie Aymee, who remained near him 
hidden behind a curtain or a chair: "to consider quietly and 
at her ease this great Bishop, who seemed to her a Saint 
from heaven;" but presently, stealing from her place, she 
would come closer and the Saint would not fail to talk to 
her. At a later date, when writing to Mme. de Chantal, he 
refers to this time: "Marie Aymee is the eldest, and besides 
this I am bound to love her more tenderly because one day 
at Dijon, when you were not at home, she showed me much 
favor and allowed me to embrace her have I not good reason, 
therefore, to pray our Lord to make her all pleasing to His 
goodness?" 

VOL. xciv. 13 



194 A SISTER-IN-LAW OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Nov., 

Not only did the Saint take special interest in the chil- 
dren, but, as we know, his advice to their mother for her own 
direction, resulted in great benefit to them also. In place of 
the somswhat severe and austere rules of life which had 
guided her latterly, St. Francis inculcated gentleness and joy 
of spirit, amidst her sorrows and in spite of or rather be- 
cause of her great spirit of mortification. Full of charity to 
her neighbors, as she was, the habits of the time yet required 
much personal attendance, and we may recall the saying of 
Mine, de Chantal's servants, who, after she had met St. 
Francis, remarked that under her former directors Madame 
prayed four times a day and disturbed everyone, but that she 
now prayed continually and disturbed no one, and we can 
understand that the new regime made the home life brighter 
for the children. The Saint likewise spared no pains to assist 
their mother in their education. Above all he recommended 
her to respect their individual liberty, to draw them to virtue 
rather than to constrain them to it, and no doubt those words 
of his, with which we are familiar, "Do all by love, nothing 
by force," and " One must as much as possible influence the 
minds of others as the angels do by gracious movements and 
without violence," helped the widowed mother in her task. 
In one of his letters to her the Saint says: "As God has 
given you this wish, to see all your children devoted to the 
service of God, you must bring them up for this, gently in- 
spiring them with suitable thoughts but this, little by little 
as they grow older." In another letter he attacks the vanity 
inherent in women, and of which Marie Aymee already showed 
decided signs: "In all your daughters eradicate female van- 
ity nearly all women are born to it." 

When Marie Aymee was eight and it seems strangely 
young to us her mother and grandparents began seriously to 
consider her future. Mme. de Chantal, who had passed through 
so much joy and sorrow, would have been glad, had her child 
shown signs of vocation to the religious life, to place her in 
the peace and shelter of the cloister, but the little girl ap- 
peared to be more fitted for the world. Her own wishes were 
carefully ascertained, and says the Chronicle, " Messieurs, her 
grandparents, destined her for the world and she wished what 
they wished." 

At Whitsuntide, 1607, the latter made up her mind to go 



191 1.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 195 

to Anaecy to confer with St. Francis. In making this plan 
she little foresaw that this journey would have a great in- 
fluence on her future and that of her children, and that, in 
particular, she was about to make the acquaintance of Marie 
Aymee's future husband. 

At Annecy Mme. de Chantal stayed at the Bishop's house 
where Mme. de Boisy, the mother of St. Francis, came to en- 
tertain her. This lady, was deeply loved and revered by her 
large family, and by none more than by her saintly eldest 
son, and Mme. de Chantal, we are told, " soon loved her as 
if she was her own mother; joining with the other children 
of the venerable lady and asking to be united with them in 
her heart, she rendered her the most tender and respectful 
marks of attention." In her family circle Mme. de Boisy 
showed special affection to her youngest son, Bernard, " either 
because he was the youngest, or because he was the most 
amiable," and it was he who was to have the honor of being 
Mme. de Chantal's son-in-law. The charming love story which 
we have to record began by a trifling episode of which, at 
the time, she was far from perceiving the importance. 

On the Feast of Corpus Christi, Mme. de Chantal who had 
followed the procession through the town of Annecy, returned 
home rather fatigued, and wished to go to her room to rest. 
As she ascended the stairs several gentlemen came forward to 
assist her. She thanked them and declined their help, but 
seeing that the young Bernard continued to follow her, she 
said with a smile: "Truly I am willing to have this one for 
my share." She said these words quite simply without any 
design, but they were quickly repeated, and Mme. de Boisy 
accepted them with joy as an indication that Mme. de Chantal 
was thinking of a marriage between Bernard and her daughter. 
" She at once felt such a desire for this alliance that she gave 
St. Francis no peace until he had arranged that he and she, 
with Mme. de Chantal, should be left alone after dinner to 
discuss the matter." The Saint did not care to speak of such 
things, but he could not distress his mother, so he acquainted 
Mme. de Chantal with the hopes to which her words bad 
given rise. She, on her side, felt greatly astonished; and 
perhaps thought that in the small town of Annecy a great 
importance was given to trivial events. At first she could 
see only difficulties in the way of such a marriage, the pic- 



196 A SlSTER-TN LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Nov., 

ture of the two grandfathers both devoted to Marie Ayiree, 
and who would be loath to let her come so far rose before 
her eyes. She, therefore, expressed her gratitude to Mme. de 
Boisy without committing herself to any definite reply, but 
before leaving Annecy she took the opportunity of closely 
observing Bernard de Sales, and received an impression such 
as is not easily effaced from a mother's heart. Bernard, at 
this time twenty- three, was already an accomplished gentle- 
man and soldier, while, thanks to his holy brother's care, he 
had received a brilliant and solid education, and was a fer- 
vent and well instructed Catholic. It was no wonder that 
the project so unexpectedly presented to her should, as time 
went on, become more and more acceptable to Mme. de Chantal. 
The death of Jeanne de Sales, Mme. de Boisy's youngest 
child, brought Mme. de Chantal to a decision regarding the 
proposed marriage, for she felt a great desire to console Mme. 
de Boisy by meeting her wishes and by giving her a new 
daughter to fill the place of the one she had lost. She re- 
solved, therefore, to lose no time in consulting Marie Aymee's 
grandparents, with whom, in those days, rested the final de- 
cision in such matters. She went first to President Fremyot, 
and she tells us herself the result: 

My good lather was much surprised at the news, and showed 
me many reasons against my proposal ; nevertheless, God gave 
me grace to hold so firmly to my point as my conscience was 
engaged, that he agreed, and weighed with great respect the 
honor and happiness it would be to our house to be allied to 
that of the blessed Bishop whom he revered as a true man of 
God. 

With M. de Chantal there was greater difficulty, but after 
Mme. de Chantal had received a half-consent from him, she 
informed St. Francis, who at once wrote the old Baron a 
letter full of humble gratitude and respect that must have 
charmed even him. By degrees also the opposition of the 
other relations, at the idea of losing their charming Marie 
Aymee and letting her go to the wilds of Savoy, died away, 
and the project seemed about to be realized. The occasion 
of Marie Aymee's First Communion, in 1608, brought the two 
grandfathers together and enabled them to arrange the tem- 
poral matters relating to their child's future establishment. 



191 1.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 197 

We have no details as to this great day in Marie Aymee's 
life, though we learn from a letter of St. Francis that he was 
unable to be present, but her biographer tells us of its happy 
fruits, and how she began from now "to pray longer and with 
more attention, her care for the poor was more loving, and 
her character already so charming became excellent." 

The wish that Marie Aymee should be all that Mme. de 
Boisy desired, and should be worthy of the hopes placed in 
her, filled her mother's heart and caused her some anxiety. 
She determined to do all in her power to prepare her daughter 
for her new life, and for this purpose and in spite of her 
youth, she took her to Dijon to introduce her to society, and 
to accustom herself to its usages. With her mother beside 
her, to watch over her, to warn her against the vanities which 
had a certain fascination for her, Marie Aymee could safely 
enjoy this glimpse of the world. " Mme. de Chantal knowing 
perfectly how to teach, and Marie Aymee possessing much in- 
telligence and grace, she became a little marvel, and in this 
new guise of a Demoiselle no one could help admiring her." 
St. Francis heard a rumor that Marie Aymee was thus mak- 
ing her appearance in the world, and he felt a little anxious 
and wrote to Mme. de Chantal as follows: "I am told that 
our Marie Aymee and tre$ aimee is with you, for I inquired, 
but I am also told that you let her go much into society, 
although I had not asked this please do not make her so 
fine that she will look down upon us I " And again, after re- 
ceiving a messenger from Dijon, "I asked Jean plainly whether 
our dear Marie wears a Moule* but I did not mean that 
there was any harm in that, for, as you know well, I like 
well-moulded heads, and if that little head is moulded by you 
I shall care for it all the more. What would you have ? Girls 
must be a little smart." Such are the words of the gentle 
Saint regarding the innocent adornments suited to Marie 
Aymee's age, while for older women his verdict was that 
their dress should be simple but fitting and suitable to their 
position in the world, "so that we may not alarm young people 
but draw them to imitate us." 

Everything being now satisfactorily settled, and Mme. de 
Boisy earnestly pressing matters on, the moment had come 
for Bernard de Sales to see his fiancee, and although it seems 

* Headdress of the period. 



198 A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Nov., 

strange to us that the meeting had not taken place earlier, 
Marie Aymee's extreme youth explains the delay, which also 
was quite in accordance with the customs of the day. It was 
settled that St. Francis, accompanied by his two brothers, M. 
de Groisy, and Bernard, should visit Monthelon. The journey 
was undertaken with great joy and ardor on the part of the 
latter, to conquer his lady's affections, and as Marie Aymee's 
biographer) says, the holy Bishop had another kind of con- 
quest to effect, that of the old Baron de Chantal, whom he 
had not yet seen. Mme. de Chantal had begged to be warned 
in time of the arrival of the travelers, no doubt in order to 
dress Marie Aymee becomingly. So St. Francis sent on a 
messenger three hours in advance, and when the party reached 
the castle they found Mme. de Chantal, the Baron and the 
four young people awaiting them at the door. 

Marie Aymee and Bernard seem to have felt a mutual at- 
traction at first sight, and "drawn one to the other those two 
gentle hearts began the romance which was to end only with 
their lives." 

St. Francis* presence smoothed many little difficulties of 
detail, and when he left " every one was enchanted at the 
alliance." Bernard returned home in excellent spirits at the 
success of his wooing and began at once to correspond with 
Mme. de Chantal and Marie Aymee. 

At the close of this year of 1608, an event took place in 
the family of Sales which had a great influence on Marie 
AymeVs future. M. de Boisy, the father of St. Francis, by 
his will, which is a very curious one for those days, had de- 
creed that his children should share his property : 

He did this in order that they should live together without 
separation or disunion, but in case for the sake of peace it 
should be necessary to divide his goods, lie wished that 
Francis, the Bishop, his eldest son, should make the division 
and that Bernard de Sales, the youngest, should have first 
choice. 

Bernard, having taken advice on the matter, chose for his 

hare the Chateau de Sales itself, and thus as Baron de Thorens 

became in a manner the head of the family. St. Francis was 

much pleased, but there were of course some murmurings 

among the other brothers at this choice, nor can we wonder, 



191 1.] A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 199 

bat peace was soon made through the influence of Louis de 
Sales, Seigneur de Thuile, the third brother of the Saint, as 
we learn by the latter's letter to Mme. de Chantal. "Never," 
he writes, "had our Thuile given us so much pleasure as in 
this division of property, which we have made amicably this 
week among my brothers, in short our Marie Aymee will be 
Baronne de Thorens. But all this has been done so peaceably 
and christianly that I feel quite edified and consoled," 

This event, of course, simplified the arrangements for the 
marriage, and the contract was duly drawn up and signed in 
the presence of President Fremyot at his Chateau of Thotes, 
on January 3, 1609. On her return to Monthelon after this 
ceremony, Mme. de Chantal had to suffer anew from the hos- 
tility of the housekeeper whom we have mentioned ; as this 
trial and her long patience under it now became known to her 
father, she easily obtained his permission, and even that of 
M. de Chantal, to spend Holy Week at Annecy and to take 
Marie Aymee to see Mme de Boisy, whose health gave cause 
for anxiety, and whose longing to see her whom she called 
" her little Baronne " was becoming even more pressing, for the 
venerable lady felt a presentiment that she would die before 
she should have the joy of possessing her long desired daugh- 
ter-in-law. 

Mme. de Chantal set out early in March, accompanied by 
Marie Ayme'e and Franfoise, and a modest retinue of servants. 
The journey was made on horseback, and at this season of 
the year it was long and cold. The Holy Bishop multiplied 
his blessings and wishes for the travelers, and hoped that Marie 
Ayme'e would not be overtired. In one of his letters he goes 
into details about the visit and proposes that they should stop 
first with his mother at the Chateau de Sales: "to have a lit- 
tle rest and refreshment," and that then the whole party should 
come on to him at Annecy. The little visit to Sales was a 
great happiness to all. Mme. de Boisy was indeed enchanted 
with Marie Aymee, and would have liked to keep her then 
for good, but to this Mme. de Chantal could not consent, and 
after Lent was over she returned with her daughter to Bur- 
gundy. 

The time of the marriage was, however, not very far off. 
It was fixed for October, 1609, and Marie Ayme'e might have 
been a little alarmed by her mother's earnest instructions 



200 A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Nov., 

about the change before her, and the serious duties oi the 
married state, had not the thought of Bernard's kindness and 
charm driven all fear from her heart. On October 13, the 
numerous relations being all assembled, St. Francis, with celes- 
tial joy and ardent prayers, gave the nuptial blessing to this 
brother who was more than brother to him, and to this little 
Marie Aymee, whom he called "his well-loved daughter." 

The long desired event was accomplished, but as the little 
bride was only eleven,* she, according to the custom of the 
time, was to remain under her mother's care for the present, 
and Bernard had to return at once to Savoy to continue his 
duties in the household of the Due de Nemours. Before they 
left both he and St. Francis gave many affectionate counsels 
to Marie Aymee, but while Bernard said, " Be always good 
and charming," the Saint added, " Become always better and 
wiser." On reaching Annecy he wrote those lines to Mme. 
de Chantal: "I want to tell you that your son has been in 
so gentle and agreeable a temper throughout the journey that 
I love him more than fraternally, and especially when he 
speaks lovingly of his little wife." 

It is at this moment in Marie Aymee's life that her mother's 
design of giving herself to Almighty God in religion was taking 
shape. During the years 1609-10 she was occupied in arrang- 
ing for this great step, and for the welfare of Celse Begnine 
and her daughters. The life she was about to embrace would 
leave her for some time free to direct these temporal affairs, 
while Franyoise and Charlotte were to remain with her and 
be educated in the convent. In the spring of 1610 everything 
seemed ready for the consummation of her sacrifice, when 
fresh sorrows fell unexpectedly on the two families little 
Charlotte de Chantal, of whom we catch but a glimpse, died 
suddenly, and almost at the same moment Mme. de Boisy was 
taken from her devoted children. These sad events hastened 
Mme. de Chantal's movements, for it was evident that Marie 
Aymee would need her mother's presence to watch over her 
at first in her new life, now that Bernard's mother was dead. 
He came himself to Dijon to fetch his mother-in-law, his wife 
and Franfoise, and witnessed the heartbreaking parting be- 
tween the former and her son and aged father, and her hero- 

* As we need hardly remind our readers, those early marriages were not uncommon at 
the time of which we write. 



191 1.] FINIS VITAE 201 

ism on the occasion a heroism at which the world wonders, 
but which was understood by Marie Aymee, on whom it made 
a great and lasting impression. She, on her side, had the grief 
of saying farewell to her grandfather, whom it was not likely 
she would see again. Escorted by Bernard, the ladies made 
their way to Annecy, where Mme. de Chantal's project was 
no secret, and where they were warmly welcomed. 

" The Holy Father," says a contemporary, " in company of 
twenty-six cavaliers, went to meet her who came in the name 
of the Lord, and who entered Annecy on Palm Sunday, all 
the town singing hosannas for her happy arrival. She brought 
with her Mme. de Thorens, her eldest, and Mademoiselle de 
Chantal, her second daughter, called Fran^oise, since married 
to the Baron de Toulonjon ; Charlotte, the third, called the 
angel by the Blessed Francis, was already with the angels." 

(TO BE CONCLUDED.) 



FINIS VITAE. 

Blessed are the dead -who die in the Lord. 
BY MARIA LONGWORTH STORER. 

FOLD thy hands, close thine eyes, 

I<ife's toil is past ; 
Ended thy sacrifice, 

Christ comes at last. 

Backward earth's vapors roll : 

Stars fill their place : 
Deep in thy crystal soul 

God sees His Face. 




MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY.* 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. 

{0 be forced to depend entirely upon God is a 
better condition than to be dependent in part 
on Him and in part on one's own efforts also. 
"I have always been fond of making a virtue 
of necessity," says St. Teresa (Letter Ixxiv.). 
It sounds paradoxical, but it is quite right to say, that the 
better service of God is by virtue that is compulsory. 

I. 

The words of Jesus in the Garden: "Not as I will, but as 
Thou wilt " (Matt. xxvi. 39), achieved our salvation, the com- 
pulsory act of a Savior Who yet "was offered because He 
willed it" (Isaias liii. 7). It is better to let God gain you to 
His side than to strive to gain God to your side. One of the 
accusations of the Royal Prophet against the Israelites is that 
they " Waited not for God's counsel " (Ps. cv. 13). The spon- 
taneous activity of guileless souls responsive to the attractions 
of grace is the highest order of spirituality. As Moses was 
bidding farewell to Israel, he commanded them : " And thou 
shalt build an altar to the Lord thy God, of stones which iron 
hath not touched, and of stones not fashioned or polished ; 
and thou shalt offer upon it holocausts to the Lord thy God" 
(Deut. xxvii. 5, 6). Why this rude architecture for the divinest 
uses? Because, as we must suppose, the Lord would welcome 
the homage of simple hearts more gladly than that of those re- 
fined by human instrumentality, even the holiest. He loves 
the artless yearnings of untainted minds. Virgin soil attracts 
His husbandry by preference. And all experience shows the 
peculiar force of sacramental grace upon youthful minds un- 
touched by the iron of man's art, unfashioned and unpolished 

* For a powerful exposition of the spiritual doctrine here treated, the reader is respect- 
fully referred to the small posthumous work of Father J. P. de Caussade, S.J., entitled 
Atandanment, or Absolute Surrender to Divine Providence, edited by the late Rev. Henri 
Ramiere, S.J., translated by Ella McMahon (New York: Benziger Brothers). The 
English version, which is accurate and exceedingly appreciative, was due to Father Hecker's 
encouragement, who had used the original continuously from its first appearance. 



.] MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY 203 

by other hands than God's own. If this be true of ordinary 
existence, it is especially so of the breathings of a patient soul 
writhing under the scourge of adversity. 

St. Paul (II. Cor. vi. 4-6) enumerates the virtues of the 
Christian, and he begins with patience "much patience." 
This is the only one of his lengthy list to which he gives an 
adjective " much patience," until he comes to the last and 
greatest: "charity unfeigned." An honor this for patience. 
And indeed the whole peril of the pilgrim is lest be shall be 
deficient in patience and insincere in charity. 

II. 

The apostolic contrast of strength and weakness is thus 
expressed: "Gladly, therefore, will I glory in my infirmities, 
that the power of Christ may dwell in me " (II. Cor. xii. 9). 
Could anything be straighter against the world's wisdom ? A 
logician would run St. Paul to this absurdity: weakness is 
equal to strength. The apostle instantly accepts: "When I 
am weak, then am I powerful," and he goes yet deeper into 
this divine absurdity: "For which cause I please myself in 
my infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in 
distresses for Christ" (ibid. id). 

The divine use of affliction is that it elicits the prayer of 
patience, which never goes far astray from Calvary's bounty. 
"When thou shalt seek the Lord thy God," said Moses to 
Israel, "thou shalt find Him; yet so if thou seek .Him with 
all thy heart, and all the affliction of thy soul " (Deut. iv. 29). 
God's shadow is more healthful than the world's suishine, to 
use a saying of St. Francis de Sales. Visitations of sorrow 
dredge a channel deep and wide for the stream of heavenly 
consolations sure to flow into it in due time; consolations and 
divine guidance. For wisdom, according to Job, is " not found 
in the land of them that live in delights" (Job xxviii. 13). 

III. 

Abandonment to God's will is itself a consecration to a 
life of perfection. Whosoever keeps the rule of patience 
takes God for his novice master. Seldom do sick men ap- 
preciate how directly they are being brought under God's 
leadership. Any serious consideration of the lot of man, shows 
conditions of trial so universal, that all must agree that heaven's 



204 MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY [Nov., 

best favor is fortitude in adversity, patience in pain and be- 
reavement. What else can be God's purpose in our miseries 
but the universal offer of the grace of patience? Must not 
the office of suffering, be great in quality and extensive in 
scope, since Providence has made it coextensive with human 
existence? Atonement for sin is its primary privilege. Eut 
there is another, which Bishop Hedley states in his Book of 
Retreat : 

" Suffering gives a certain kind of intensity to acts of the 
will, which nothing else can give. This is what recommended 
it to the Heart of Jesus, (a Heart desirous of proving to men 
the reality and the depth of its love)." And that author quotes 
St. Thomas : " The first cause of the passion was that 
Christ wished it to be known how much God loved man." 
The first cause, then, of man's suffering, is to show how much 
man can love God both by sharing in Christ's atonement and 
in intensifying his heart's love. 

Submission to the divine will is an inevitable virtue: I 
may be obedient or I may be prayerful, but I must be pa- 
tient. Sooner or later one must turn in his agony to his 
nearest associates and cry with blessed Job : " Have mercy 
upon me, have mercy upon me, at least you my friends, for 
the hand of the Lord hath touched me" (Job xix. 21). A 
man before and after a long illness is two different men. If a 
Christian, he is advanced into a new being of chastened self- 
mastery; if a worldling, he is sunk into degeneracy, for he 
has wilfully refused the divine discipline. Some men hate af- 
flictions, and these are worldlings; some without hating dread 
them, and these are timid Christians; others though dreading 
them yet appreciate their place in God's plan, receive them 
calmly, and then even thankfully. To that class all of us are 
called. Nor should we flinch from aspiring to the class be- 
yond, namely, those who seek suffering by preference, as did 
our Master : " I have a baptism wherewith I am to be bap- 
tized; and how am I straightened till it be accomplished" 

(Luke, xii. 50). 

IV. 

One sometimes projects a good work after much prayer, 
feeling that God is with him and the result is failure. What 
then? Amid disappointments, misunderstandings, calumnies, 
and failures, God is still to be thanked as the origin of the 



i9i i.] MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY 205 

undertaking. The work though a failure in itself is a success 
as a stimulant to confidence in the divine goodness. The Lord 
praised David: " Whereas, thou hast thought in thy heart to 
build a house to My Name, thou hast done well" (III Kings, 
viii. 1 8) yet would He not have David but David's son build 
His temple. The grace of bearing his disappointment was a 
better gift irom God to David than the honor of building and 
dedicating the temple. 

In earlier Christian days how often was the whole reliance 
of a community snatched away by martyrdom? Yet the peo- 
ple rejoiced; and God compensated them. Not only was it a 
happier lot to have advocates in heaven instead of leaders on 
earth, but conversions, the most unexpected, supplied the loss. 
This dispensation was not for the age of martyrs alone. It 
was in fulfillment of an invariable rule of Providence: "Give, 
and it shall be given to you, good measure" (Luke, vi. 38), a 
rule that prevails as well in men's exchanges with divine Provi- 
dence as with one another. 

The martyrs, by making a virtue of necessity, have out- 
ranked all other kinds of saints in the liturgy of Holy Church. 
So should the bearing of arbitrarily inflicted injuries outrank 
other forms of holy chanty towards men contradictions and 
contempts, ignorings of merit and perverse misunderstandings 
of motives, bullying manners and violent tempers, disobedience 
of inferiors and suspicions of superiors. These seem little when 
set against the rack and the wild beasts of our heroic ances- 
tors, yet they are often harder to bear. Suffer them with joy 
and they win you a martyr's crown ; suffer unto blood, that 
is unto annihilation of all human favor, do it willingly, gladly. 
You are young? Be glad for God's sake that it is said of 
you, he is too eager, he is ambitious, opinionated, silly. Old ? 
Be content to hear that you have survived your usefulness and 
are played out, are reactionary, are a hindrance and should be 
turned down. Pray to God to give you much of this kind of 
suffering; some of it is surely well merited by your sins, all 
of it elevates motives and humbles pride. 

V. 

Just as meritorious, and alas, far oftener available, is aban- 
donment to Gad in the misery of our remorse of conscience. 
We cannot too brightly realize that God works at His best 



206 MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY [Nov., 

if we dare so speak in drawing good out of evil, nay, that 
it is the lowest evil that, as it were, provokes Him to the 
highest good. When my past sinfulness agonizes me, then, 
O God, lead my anxious spirit into the inner chambers of 
holy trustfulness, that I may there abandon myself to Thee 
for pardon and salvation. Herein is the penitent's road to that 
goal of predestination known as recollectedness of spirit, which 
is defined as a tendency to consider the present things of 
earth with a mind preoccupied with the future things of etern- 
ity. Who cannot hold his own against the bitterest tauntings 
of men and devils, if he can only say with the psalmist: "The 
princes sat and spoke against me; but Thy servant was em- 
ployed in Thy justifications " (Ps. cxviii. 23). 

VI. 

Proceed quietly; be not much interested in anything ex- 
cept ii the routine of prayerful exercises and herein seek 
that quiet which abandons all to God. Commend afflictions 
to Him, jays in like manner; absorb all attention in utilizing 
the means and methods of keeping mentally close to Him 
without easily leaving Him. Make the paramount interest of 
life an uninterrupted offering of loving submission to God. 
This doctrine is indeed unanimously taught, but it is very 
little known and less practised. Its application is best illus- 
trated by God's using dire calamity as a vocation to extraor- 
dinary sanctity. Take an instance from among the hermits of 
the fourth century. One of them was a famous master of 
holiness known as Paul the Simple. In the world he had 
been a poor man of the lowest state of life. When he was 
sixty years old his wife proved false to him. A deadly mis- 
fortune was this, and Paul fell under the blow, but only to 
recover quickly, and to recognize the hand of God beckoning 
him to a high degree of sanctity among the anchorites of 
Egypt. 

We read of the gift of tears among holy souls ; and the 
gift of tongues was a marvelous apostolic attribute. But St. 
Chrysostom, treating of St. Paul's imprisonments, speaks of 
anothe'r: the gift of chains. "If," says he "I might have had 
my choice to stand with the angels near God's throne on 
high, or to be bound with St. Paul, I would have preferred 
the dungeon. Would you rather have been the angel loosing 



i9i i.] MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY 207 

Peter, or Peter in chains? I would rather have been Peter. 
This gift of chains is something greater than to stop the sun, 
to move the world, or to command devils " (quoted by Alban 
Butler, June 30). We now and then read of a dying man 
begging to have some love token inclosed with his corpse in 
his coffin. It is related of Babylus, a martyr bishop of An- 
tioch, who died in prison for the faith in the persecution of 
Decius, that he begged that his chains might be buried with 
him in his grave. Such are the love-tokens of God's heroes. 

VII. 

Even in little things thoughtful souls find a divine great- 
ness. The clock striking the hours tells of the eternal years; 
the wind tossing the dust in the street tells of the vanity of 
human strivings. Not only the wheels of life but every little 
cog upon them is recognized as part of the divine plan. What, 
then, must be the lessons taught by the death of our dear 
ones, or by the annihilation of our own bodily forces. To a 
discerning mind the outward order of our life whether in little 
things and great is in direct contact with the invisible Prime 
Mover Himself. What of our souls little whirlwinds of joy or 
great tempests of sorrow ? To a spiritual man all thought is 
union with God. Thinking, for instance, of Jesus on His 
hidden throne in a church, abandoning oneself absolutely to 
Him there, at Mass, at and after Holy Communion is not 
this high spirituality ? Hence the apostle's reproach to the 
Galatians that they would not give up wholly to God, though 
they were men, " before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been 
set forth, crucified " (Gal. Hi. i). Of all happenings in heaven 
or earth that of the Eucharist is supreme ; no less so in its 
teachings than in its graces. 

A mark of Christian character is constant advertence to 
an overruling Providence. As Jesus saw His Father in every 
event even the most trifling, so in like manner does the Chris- 
tian whose heart Christ has taken possession of. O what a joy, 
when human motives of placid acceptance of the inevitable 
find themselves elevated into divine impulses of abandonment 
to a Father's care, making the most ordinary things of life all 
heavenly. This is the best granting of the prayer: "Thy 
will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 

To yield allegiance to God in all the varying circumstances 



208 MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY [Nov. 

of life, whether petty or grave, is the mark of a recollected 
man, nay, it actually is self-recollection. Such a one, respon- 
sive to the inner touches of the Holy Spirit, is from that 
very fact careful not to forget the external guidance of Provi- 
dence, and he scrutinizes the most minute signs of divine 
love. A sparrow is cheap; yet "one of them doth not fall 
upon the ground without your heavenly Father" (Matt. x. 28). 
The hairs of my head grow unnoticed and soon are wasted ; 
yet "a hair of your head shall not perish" (Luke xxi. 18). 
God is found supreme in His bounty among the tiny flatterers 
of the grove: "your heavenly Father feedeth them" (Matt. 
vi. 26) ; and He is revealed in His sovereign beauty amid the 
waving grass of the meadow : " I say to you that not even 
Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these "(Ibid. 29). 
Divine majesty is amazingly revealed in a drop of water under 
the microscope. An infinite purpose of unity is shown in the 
anatomy of a little moth. God is in all things and in every 
particular thing, eliciting thanksgiving, adoration, awe, and 
above all confidence in His Fatherly care. 

Simply a general view of God's guidance is not adequate, 
nor conscious acceptance of it only in matters of supreme 
importance. God's current influence is as a rule, more potent 
to sanctify than His occasional and decisive interference, 
which is usually but the sum and completion of His current 
teachings. These have occupied God and should have ab- 
sorbed us for years perhaps. God in everything and ourselves 
in God, is another expression of making a virtue of necessity. 

The greater changes of Providential rule throw us back 
upon the lesser; upon one littlest point can God turn the vast 
universe of our destiny. A priest in vigorous health once 
said to Father Hecker whose long agony of pain was soon 
to end in death that he felt full of courage. Father Hecker 
answered: "That is the way I used to feel. I used to say: 
O Lord ! I feel as if I had the whole world on my shoulders, 
and all I've got to say is, O Lord ! I'm sorry you've given 
me such small potatoes to carry on my back. But now well, 
when a mosquito conies in I say : Mosquito have you any 
good to do me? Yes? Then I thank you, for I am glad to 
get good from a mosquito." 




THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST. 

BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D, 

GREAT many people in our time who think that 
they have reason to know something about the 
matter, are quite sure that modern science has 
done away with the possibility of old-time re- 
ligious faith. They feel convinced that it is im- 
possible for a man to know science deeply and thoroughly 
and still continue to believe in old-fashioned religious truths. 
Two classes of people particularly are so convinced. The first 
is composed of men of science, who have never known very 
much about religion, who have only the most supeificial ideas 
as to what the real significance of religious truths is, and who 
are inclined to think that religion itself is little more than an 
emotional exercise. The second class is much larger and con- 
sists of people of superficial knowledge whose information has 
been derived mainly from popularizations of science, and who 
often owe the notions on scientific subjects, which they hold with 
as much firmness as the devout believer holds the dogmas of 
faith, to sensational reports in the newspapers and the maga- 
zines. 

For both of these classes argument is quite unavailing. 
For the scientist who knows nothing of religion, but who 
thinks that he does, there is no basis on which argumentation 
can be founded. It would be quite impossible to make him 
believe that his idea of religion is entirely at fault, and that 
theology is as definite a science as his own. 

Of course, to many people it will seem quite impossible 
that a scientist should thus be ignorant about something con- 
cerning which he is so ready to express opinions, but then 
Josh Billings said: "it is not so much the ignorance of man- 
kind that makes them ridiculous as the knowing so many 
things that ain't so." Professor Von Ruville, the Professor of 
Modern History at the University of Halle- Wittenberg (Lu- 
ther's University) in Germany, in giving an account of his 
conversion to the Catholic Church two years ago, said that 
until he read a Catholic book he never knew anything about 
VOL. xciv. 14 



210 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

Catholicity. He thought he knew all about it. He was a 
man past fifty and had been a student all his life. His pro- 
fessors had told him many things about it; yet, when he read 
a Catholic book he found that he had been merely accumula- 
ting ignorance and not knowledge. 

For both the scientists who know so little about religion 
that their opinion as to the relation of science to faith is 
quite worthless, and for the greater number who get their 
science at second-hand, there is need of an authoritative 
declaration from a man who knows both science and religion. 
This we now have in the book issued shortly before his re- 
cent death, by Professor Dwight of Harvard which in his 
modest way he called simply Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist* 

Of course it must not be thought that Professor Dwight is 
an exceptional case among modern scientists, or even a very 
rare example of a scientist who found no difficulty as regards 
faith and science. On the contrary no one knew better than 
he that great scientists who were Catholics have almost with- 
out exception maintained their faith in absolute purity while 
making some of the great discoveries of modern time. For 
those who talk much of the supposed incompatibility of faith 
and science it is well sometimes to have a list of great scien- 
tific believers, men who have expressed themselves in no 
dubious terms with regard to faith and most of whom were 
devout Catholics. Morgagni whom Virchow greeted as the 
father of modern pathology; Laennec the founder of modern 
physical diagnosis; Ampere to whom electricity owes so much; 
Galvani and Volta who laid the foundations of it; Johann 
Miiller, the great teacher of modern medicine; Theodor 
Schwann who discovered cells and founded modern biology; 
Lamarck the first great evolutionist; Claude Bernard the great- 
est of modern physiologists; Pasteur the father of bacteriology; 
Lord Kelvin to whom modern physics owes so much ; Clerk 
Maxwell the greatest of mathematical scientists; and many 
others of less repute who might readily be named have 
scouted the idea that their knowledge of science disturbed 
their faith. On the contrary most of them are on record with 
expressions which declare that the more they knew about 
science, in the words of Pasteur, the deeper was their faith. 

* Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist, By Professor Dwight. New York: Longmans, 
Green & Co. 



i9ii.] THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMISJ 211 

Professor D wight was eminently fitted to take up the dis- 
cussion of the supposed difficulties between faith and science, 
because he had been occupied all his life with the biological 
and medical sciences. An old saying runs that where there 
are three physicians, there are two atheists, and it has been 
said that a little biology makes more heretics than dozens 
of heretical missionaries. As most of our makers of modern 
medicine have been devout believers, and many of them gocd 
Catholics (as the list given in the preceding paragraph shows), 
and as a number of important contributions to biology have 
come from Catholic clergymen, it is evident that neither of 
these maxims holds good for the scientist who is profound 
enough to be original. Still, the impression remains that the 
study of these sciences tends to take men away from faith, so 
that Professor Dwight's career makes him just the proper per- 
son to discuss the situation. 

Many of the sketches written of him just aiter his death 
spoke of him as a convert, some of them said he had become 
a convert after his marriage when he was well past thirty 
years of age. As a matter of fact, though a descendant of an 
old Puritan family, Professor Dwight had been a member of 
the Church since the age of twelve, having become a convert 
with his mother. He was so situated as to have the leisure 
and the inclination for special studies in both science and re- 
ligion. His favorite author was St. Thomas Aquinas. He is 
thought to have been as well read in St. Thomas as any lay- 
man of his generation. There can be no question then, of his 
having kept his faith because he neglected to inform himself 
of what he was expected to believe. 

A smart expression used by a distinguished professor of 
the philosophical department of the university in which Pro- 
fessor Dwight has held the chair of anatomy for nearly a 
quarter of a century was, that if a man has faith and knows 
science he must keep them in water-tight compartments in 
his consciousness, for, if by any chance they should mingle, 
faith would inevitably disappear in the reaction that would 
take place. Professor Dwight deliberately courted the ming- 
ling of his faith and science. Science was always and con- 
tinued to be until the end his principle occupation, yet faith 
and a faith for which he knew the reason was the guicirg 
star of his life. He was an eminently practical Catholic. He 



212 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

was one of the most prominent members of the St. Vincent 
de Paul Conference of Boston and spent much time in its 
noble works of charity. For him service to humanity was one 
of the highest expressions of religion. He had no illusion, 
however, with regard to service to humanity as being man's 
only duty or the only manifestation of his religious feelings 
required of him. Protestantism which began with claiming 
that faith without works was the essence of religion has now 
come to claim that works without faith are what count; not 
what a man believes, but what he does for others constitutes 
the fulfillment of his religious duty. Professor Dwight, how- 
ever, looked to the life of the spirit as well, and it is to him 
that the establishment in bis native city of the practice cf the 
Holy Hour, the spending of an hour every month before the 
Blessed Sacrament, is due. 

Those who knew him best, know how tender was his faith, 
and his trust, how humble his belief, yet how complete and 
how devoted he was to the practice of his religion. Yet he 
was a member of many scientific societies of The American 
Society of Naturalists, The American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, The American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences, and he had been a president of The Association of 
American Anatomists. Some of his contributions to anatomy 
attracted wide attention. His study of variations and anoma- 
lies made him one of the world's authorities on that subject, 
and the collection of bones made to illustrate the subject to 
be seen in the Anatomical Museum, Harvard University, is 
one of the best of its kind in the world. 

Evidently, here is a man who has the right to talk about 
the relations of faith and science. He knows both at first 
hand. He is an authority in science and deeply conversant 
with his faith. 

la the Preface of his book Professor Dwight states his 
purpose very straightforwardly : " It is often said by those 
outside of the Church that they cannot see how a Catholic 
can be a man of science, and conversely, how a man of sci- 
ence can be a Catholic. Indeed, I fear there are many poorly 
instructed Catholics who are very much of the same opinior. 
It may be that it is my duty, on account of the position I 
have the honor to hold to give to both of these classes such 
poor help as I can. It is just possible that some of those 



i9 1 1.] THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST 213 

who have been my pupils during the twenty-seven years of 
my professorship may be interested in the views as mine. 
Should that be the case, I am sure that I need not tell them 
that this discussion is meant above all to be an honest one." 

The general argument of the book may readily be under- 
stood from the chapter headings. In the Introduction he says 
that every one concedes that there has been a great decline 
in religious belief during the past fifty years; because of the 
progress of science during that same time the decline in be- 
lief is attributed to science. Particularly is this true of the 
study of evolution. Of this there is one feature that is su- 
premely interesting. "We have now," he says, "the remark- 
able spectacle that, just when many scientific men are of ac- 
cord that there is no part of the Darwinian system that is of 
any very great influence, and that as a whole the theory is 
not only unproved but impossible, the ignorant half-educated 
masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a 
fundamental fact. Moreover, it is not to them an academic 
question of biology, but, as the matter has been presented to 
them, it is a system: to wit, the monistic system of philoso- 
phy. Thus presented, it is undeniably fatal, not only to all 
revealed religion, but to any system of morals founded on a 
supernatural basis." 

In the chapter on " Thought of the Day," he takes up the 
problems of evolution particularly, and answers the question : 
" Does evolution leave us a God ? such a God as a Christian 
can earnestly believe in," pointing out how little we know in 
reality about evolution. 

" The tyranny of the Zeitgeist in the matter of evolution 
is overwhelming to a degree of which outsiders have no idea; 
not only does it influence (as I must admit that it does in my 
own case) our manners of thinking, but there is the oppression 
as in the days of the ' Terror.' How very few of the lead- 
ers of science dare tell the truth concerning their own state 
of mind ! How many feel themselves forced in public to do a 
lip-service to a cult they do not believe in ! As Professor T. 
H. Morgan intimates, it is only too true that many of these 
who would on no account be guilty of an act which they recog- 
nize as dishonest, nevertheless, speak and write habitually, as if 
evolution were an absolute certainty, as well established as the 
law of gravitation." 



214 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

Dr. Dwight shows particularly how much Haeckel has in- 
fluenced popular thought with regard to evolution, and recalls 
the fact that no one has more discredited science than Haeckel 
himself. Professor His has marked out a number of false 
dealings by Haeckel in his books, by the invention of illustra- 
tions, by the changing of illustrations taken from other wotks 
to suit his purpose, and by the placing of false designations 
so as to show similarities that he would like to have exist. 
Professor His concludes, and it must not be forgotten that he 
is one of the great anatomists of his generation: "Let then 
others honor Haeckel as an efficient and reckless party leader ; 
according to my judgment he has forfeited through his methods 
of fighting even the right to be counted as an equal in the 
company of serious investigators." Our own Agassiz in an- 
swering some of Haeckel's claims had been even more severe 
than His. Professor Dwight says: " Agassiz' tone is not that 
of one arguing with an equal, but of one exposing a knave." 
If evolution were what Haeckel would make of it and if 
Haeckel's opinions were science then evolution might leave us 
no God. As it is, we are only on the threshold of any knowl- 
edge of evolution, and what we do know about it is entirely 
compatible with the acceptance of all the dogmas of faith. 

Professor Dwight then discusses the various theories of evo- 
lution. For most people Darwinism and evolution are sup- 
posed to be synonymous, and Darwin is supposed to be the 
first to have evolved a complete system of evolution. This is 
so far from true that Lamarck's theory of evolution, expounded 
in the first year of the nineteenth century, has among scien- 
tific men at least as much prestige as Darwinism. No one 
now accepts Darwinism pure and simple as an adequate ex- 
planation of evolution. A number of very prominent scientists 
have thought that a modification of Lamarckism would be 
even more satisfactory than any modified 'Darwinism. There 
are much greater difficulties now for the acceptance of any 
theory of evolution than there were when Darwin wrote. The 
scientific world is about ready now to confess that acquired 
characters are not transmitted, and this makes it very difficult 
to understand the evolution that might come from the effect 
of environment. On the other hand variation and especially 
variation with adaptation, absolutely requires some internal 
factor acting with a definite purpose before evolution can be 



1 9 1 1.] THOUGHTS OF A CA THOLIC ANA TOMIST 215' 

explained. In a word, the old problem of purpose in the uni- 
verse and especially in living things makes itself felt. 

Candid scientists do not hesitate to say that we as yet 
know very little about the process. Dr. Dwight quotes Pro- 
fessor Thomas Hunt Morgan, Professor of Biology at Colum- 
bia, who says: 

"It has been pointed out that the evidence in favor of the 
theory of evolution appears to establish this theory with great 
probability, although a closer examination shows that we are 
almost completely in the dark as to how the process has come 
about." 

Professor Osborn, who has a right to an opinion in the 
matter, suggests that we are only on the threshold of any evi- 
dence for evolution at the present time. He says: 

" It follows as an unprejudiced conclusion from our present 
evidence that upon Weismann's principle we can explain in- 
heritance but not evolution, while with Lamarck's principle and 
Darwin's selection principle we can explain evolution, but not, 
at present, inheritance. Disprove Lamarck's principle and we 
must assume that there is some third factor in evolution of 
which we are ignorant." 

This is the internal factor expressive of the purpose of the 
organism. 

. Professor Dwight makes very clear how confused is the 
thought of the day. Serious thinkers admit, as Ambassador 
Bryce said not long since, that " the mists that hang around 
man's origin and destiny are just as thick now as they ever 
were," but, desirous of some explanation, and not finding it, 
even the educated accept current thought, though often quite 
able to point out its inconsistencies, its lack of logic and its 
inconclusiveness. This is true not only for superficial thinkers, 
men who must have something to say, but also for those who 
have studied deeply, but who refuse to think that the old ex- 
planations of faith can possibly be received by them. Professor 
Dwight cites some examples. Goldwin Smith, for instance, de- 
clares that "it is impossible since Darwin's discoveries to up- 
hold anything dependent on the belief that man is a creature 
apart from other animals," yet, as Professor Dwight points out, 
he "presently turns round and demolishes what he had so 
lightly asserted." Darwin, Goldwin Smith says, " assumes that 
conscience is merely the individual index of general opinion. 



216 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

Surely in the case of religious men and nations it is something 
more. It has sustained the martyr against the overwhelming 
preponderance of public opinion, and is constantly sustaining 
men of independent mind against the opinion of the hour." 
"More than this," as Professor Dwight points out, "Goldwin 
Smith stands for the freedom of the will absolutely with a 
clearness that is utterly at variance with the monistic doctrines 
he apparently has felt called upon to accept." Goldwin Smith 
declares: "But unless our nature lies to us we have liberty of 
choice with responsibility attached to it; and if our nature 
has lied to us, philosophy may as well spare its pains." Pro- 
fessor Dwight points out "what confusion there is also when 
men untrained in Christian philosophy and without faith at- 
tempt to answer the materialist philosophers." Professor C. 
Lloyd Morgan in attempting to do so, falls as so many mod- 
ern philosophers do, into a system of pantheism in which "he 
sees the impossibility of distinguishing one's neighbor from 
one's self and both from God, which of course makes nonsense 
of everything. Do we not know that we are not God nor our 
neighbor, but just ourself? Professor Morgan owns frankly 
that he cannot resolve the difficulties." 

Concerning Professor James who was in Professor Dwight's 
words, " a valued friend," and who, he feels confident would not 
have objected to what he has written of him, Professor Dwight 
has a few words of emphatic commentary. Much better than 
the great majority of modern writers on philosophy outside 
the Church, Professor James has seen the difficulty of explain- 
ing conditions as we see them around us without recurrence 
to old religious principles. He thinks, however, that we have 
outlived these old religious principles, and that as a conse- 
quence we have come into a rather tragic predicament. Mon- 
istic pantheism, has, he confesses, replaced the old dualistic 
theism at British and American Universities. This is an inter- 
esting comment from an expert on some recent discussion of 
faith at American Universities.. It is this that has brought 
about the intellectual difficulties with regard to God and the 
soul. Professor James asks: "Well, what must we do now 
in this tragic predicament ? For my part, I have finally found 
myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely and 
irrevocably. . . . Reality, life, experience, concreteness, 
immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, over- 



i9i i.] THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST 217 

flows and surrounds it. I saw that I must either forswear 
that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole psycho- 
logical and Kantian education has committed me I must, in 
short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental 
states, now singly and now in combination, in a word bring 
back scholasticism and common sense or else I must squarely 
confess the solution of the problem impossible, and then either 
give up my intellectualist logic, the logic of identity, and adopt 
some higher (or lower) form of rationality, or finally, face 
the fact that life is logically irrational. . . . Those of us 
who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense-minded, 
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain, 
resulting in nothing but this mouse." 

On this Professor Dwight comments " The thing, however, 
is too sad to smile at, and the result is not a mouse but a 
monster who has devoured reason and common sense and 
offers us instead pragmatism." 

He cites James against himself "Read" he says "James' 
Faith Ladder of which he himself says ' Not one step is log- 
ical, yet it is the way in which monists and pluralists alike 
espouse and hold fast to their visions. It is life exceeding 
logic, it is the practical reason for which theoretic reason 
finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.' " 

An argument which has appealed strongly to many scien- 
tists as supporting evolution is the explanation of variations 
and anomalies in human beings as reversions to previous 
stages of existence in the evolutionary scale. Atavistic rever- 
sion is a nice mouth-filling term. High-sounding terms, re- 
version, recapitulation, ontogeny and the like kave in the 
popularization of evolutionary theories meant much more than 
observations or discoveries. It is well-known that human be- 
ings present many variations from the normal human beings. 
No two skeletons are alike any more than two sets of human 
features are alike. The differences in skeletons are them- 
selves quite marked, and the variations, as they are called, 
while sometimes rare among human beings are common among 
animals. Hence, it was argued, that their only explanation 
could be on the score of evolution. 

Professor Dwight has made a special study of variaticns 
and anomalies, especially in the skeleton and he is acknowl- 
edged as one of the world's authorities. He discussed the 



218 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

significance of anomalies in the American Naturalist for Feb- 
ruary, 1895, and showed that the popular theory of reversion 
was untenable. After studying many further skeletons in 
museums in many parts of the world he is quite emphatic in 
his declaration that " the more anomalies we study, the less 
justification do we find for explaining them as reversions." 

This whole subject is typical of other arguments for evo- 
lution. They are usually founded on superficial, though often 
very speciously attractive, theories. It seems easy to explain 
color by using the words " Protective Mimicry." It has been 
shown that while this has some significance, most of the color 
in plants and animals has quite a different origin and cannot 
at all be explained on any principle of color protection. It 
has been shown, indeed, that many of the stories of so-called 
color protection are merely pretty myths. Professor Dwight 
as an authority on Variations and Anomalies takes the found- 
ation away from a similarly specious argument, but only the 
deepest study could have done that. The less one knows 
about biological science the easier it is to accept evolution. 
The more one knows about the biological sciences the more 
are the difficulties of any evolutionary theory. It is a ques- 
tion indeed of " drinking deep or touching not the Pierian 
spring " for beyond peradventure here " a little knowledge has 
been a dangerous thing." 

The chapter on "Living and Non- Living" contains some of 
Dr. Dwight's most interesting material. He emphasizes the 
distinctions in such a way as to make some of the familiar 
differences appear almost new. The following paragraph for 
instance, on the effect of use on living and non-living material 
is very striking. Dr. Dwight says: 

"The non-living is either broken or worn away by it. 
The stone rolled for centuries on the beach loses all ridges, a 
file becomes smooth by using, the magnet loses its power; 
but, provided always that the external irritation be not so 
great as to be destructive, the living organism profits by the 
process, and this, moreover, in many ways. Thus the muscle 
that is judiciously exercised becomes more powerful, the hands 
of the worker grows larger and stronger. Protective changes 
also appear; the skin becomes fitter to resist pressure under 
stress of trial. More remarkable still the senses of sight, of 
hearing, and the rest become more acute by usage. These 



THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST 219 

phenomena in the living body not only imply a something 
that the non-living does not have, but they are, one might 
say, contradictory to the effects of use on the lifeless." 

Even more interesting, however, is the consideration of the 
changes that take place in living material alter injury or the 
destruction or amputation of parts. In the non-living nothing 
happens, unless perhaps the influence of the elements bring 
about gradual weathering. In the living tissues, however, the 
story of what happens is a marvel. Professor Dwight says : 

" But when we pass from these remarkable changes conse- 
quent upon legitimate use and wear and tear of the body, to 
cases of injury or partial destruction, what we see is still more 
remarkable. This holds good whenever the injury be to the 
developing embryo or to the mature body. It is, of course, 
an old story that in the lower forms repair is much more 
complete than in the higher. A newt for instance, reproduces 
a new leg in the place of an amputated one. In the higher 
animals repair is generally effected by the development of a 
tissue of lower grade than the one destroyed. Thus an injury 
to the skin is made good by a scar, which serves the purpose 
of skin as far as protection goes tolerably well, but does not 
have the hairs nor glands which normal skin should present. 
A ruptured muscle is made good by fibrous tissue instead of 
muscular fibre." 

The machine explanation of living beings, which has been 
often suggested and which seems to many to satisfy their 
search for efficient causes of the phenomena in living things, 
receives its due attention, and Professor Dwight suggests that 
the refutation -of the machine theory by Professor Driesch of 
Heidelberg in the GifTord Lectures (of 1907 and 8) on The 
Science and Philosophy of the Organism is so perfect that 
it is but just to give it in his own words: 

"There cannot be any sort of machine in the cell from 
which the individual originates, because this cell, including 
both its protoplasm and its nucleus, has undergone a series of 
divisions, all resulting in equal products, and because a ma- 
chine cannot be divided, and in spite of that remain what it 
was. There cannot be, on the other hand, any sort of machine 
as the real foundation of the whole of an harmonious system, 
including many cells and many nuclei, because the development 
of this system goes on normally, even if its parts are rear- 



220 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

ranged or partly removed, and because a machine would never 
remain what it had been in such cases." 

Dr. D wight emphasizes the fact that "the changes during 
development, the arrangement of the cells, their change into 
different tissues, their gradual growth into organs are dis- 
tinctly teleological or, in plain English, purposeful. The cells 
arrange themselves as under the action of intelligence. The 
growth of lower organisms which can be followed by the micro- 
scope is most wonderful, both when all goes on as it should, 
and still more when owing either to intentional mutilation or 
to some accident, something occurs to change the regular 
course of events." To many it may seem that this appeal to 
teleology, to final causes once more, is distinctly reactionary 
and away from the true domain of physical science. Nothing 
is more interesting in biology at the present time however, 
than the teleological tendencies of the men whose work in 
biology is thought most of. Driesch, and the younger school 
of biologists generally in Germany are confessed ideologists. 
Things become what they are because there is a purpose in 
them, a vital force that directs their activities. Physics and 
chemistry will not explain what takes place in the animal 
body and some co-ordinating activity different from these 
must be confessed to be present. 

Professor D wight's chapter "On Man" is particularly im- 
portant because in any criticism of the descent of man from 
animals, the fragments of missing links, real or supposed, that 
have been found are extremely important. These are all 
skeletal portions ; and as Professor Dwight is a special author- 
ity on bones his opinion is of great value in the matter. He 
discusses the question particularly as to whether the body of 
Adam was a new creation or evolved from lower forms. 
Many assume this latter as a working hypothesis whether they 
really believed it or not. Catholics have done so and they 
understand that the question is an open one. After stating 
the arguments that make for such a view, he then confesses 
that he has been drawn more and more away from the view 
in recent years. He says " that one of the greatest errors of 
the naturalist of to-day against which I am continually pro- 
testing is that similarity of structure necessarily implies rela- 
tionship." The argument used by theologians that such an 
origin is unworthy of the dignity of man, for many years 



i9".] THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST 221 

puzzled Professor Dwight, but as time went on, he felt more 
and more inclined to respect it. As for the missing links 
Professor Dwight considers them of very little significance; 
and thinks that what we need to study much more in man is 
not evolution, but deterioration. This has never been made 
enough of. And he quotes Chesterton " Man is always some- 
thing worse or something better than an animal." 

Professor Dwight has insisted on the necessity for the use 
of words with definite meanings and according to definite cri- 
terion. In the discussion of reason in animals and in man, 
nothing is clearer than that the ground for most of the argu- 
mentation in this subject is due to the use of words with very 
different meanings, Professor Dwight says: 

" The word ' reason ' is used in the most unreasonable 
way; the idea of reason being hopelessly confused with that 
of instinct or tendency. When we are told that plants have 
intelligence we can only say that the author of the statement 
has his own ideas of what intelligence is. Why should he not go 
a step further and say that some plants have religion because 
they turn their heads to the sun? The general teachiag of ex- 
perts in the study of animals like ants, bees, and wasps, which 
have very highly developed instincts, is that they show no signs 
of reason when they find themselves under strange conditions." 

As Professor Dwight pays his compliments to Haecke), so 
too he has a word for Huxley. As it happens to illustrate 
this particular phase of the subject it may come in here: 

"Let us now look at man as a whole. Huxley once rec- 
ommended that we should study man's body as if it had been 
sent us from another planet ' preserved, it may be in a cask 
of rum.' He then pointed out what I have stated at length, 
that all bodily differences between man and apes are merely 
differences of degree. The incident seems to me a very strik- 
ing evidence of how much friend and foe alike have over- 
estimated Huxley. Surely it takes no great talent to see that 
to place any being correctly in the scale of creation (or if you 
prefer in that of nature) it is necessary to study and classify 
him as a whole. Suppose a bee, or an ant, or a wasp had 
happened to fall into that same cask of rum, should we have 
had any hint of their wonderful instincts from our examina- 
tion of their dead bodies? Of course we are told that Hux- 
ley meant to discuss only the body and place it in its zoologi- 



222 THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST [Nov., 

cal position; but it is getting recognized that this is a very 
narrow and one-sided view to take of any organism and, 
above all, of so high an organism as man, whose intelligence 
(be its origin what you will) places him in an order of his own. 
The problem is of a higher sphere than that of morphology." 

In the matter of evolution, then, in spite of all the work 
that has been done we are very far from being in a position 
to draw conclusions. The only conclusion is, that as yet 
there can be no conclusion. In his concluding chapter Pro- 
fessor D wight says: "Turning to organisms, we cannot refuse 
the evidence of some system, perhaps of more than one sys- 
tem, of evolution ; and yet, with the possible exception of 
evolution by sudden changes, there is no system that has 
stood the test. There is no even plausible line of ascent up 
to the body of man. Science shows us that whatsoever in 
evolution can be considered as established rests primarily on 
the action of an internal force. All that we know of evolu- 
tion points to law." 

The place of chance and of accident in the world of living 
things is entirely due to the limitation of our understanding 
of the order in which they exist. As Professor Dwightsays: 

"Science shows us that in what, for want of a better name, 
we call accidental variation, there is some regulating principle, 
presumably closely allied to that which presides over adapta- 
tions, reproducing occasionally features of structure which 
by no possibility can have been inherited, which would imply 
not only absolutely different, but, so to speak, contradictory 
lines of descent. We have not the clue to the puzzle of vari- 
ations, but in their very irregularities they point to law." 

In the light of what we know of Professor Dwight's last 
days, his concluding paragraph is especially interesting. Friends 
were highly edified by the calm, Christian spirit in which he 
met what he knew was inevitable. For more than a year he 
was quite aware that death was upon him and that all that 
surgery could do was merely palliative. A surgeon who was 
a dear personal friend for many years had done all that was 
possible, and then Professor Dwight went about bis work as 
calmly as if the end were not so near and there were years of 
work ahead of him. As the end approached and bodily suf- 
fering was added to the mental strain under which he lived, 
friends who were not themselves Catholics said that "if the 



1 9 1 1 . ] THO UGHTS OF A CA THOLIC A NA TO MIS T 223 

Catholic religion could make a man and all his family receive 
affliction in such a spirit it was a faith that all must rever- 
ence." It is easier to understand this calm spirit after read- 
ing the concluding words of the book: 

"Finally, reason by the light of faith tells us that a plan 
of creation worthy of God must include the supernatural, and 
be grand beyond human conception. Anything less would be 
but a grotesque caricature. This is not to say that the world 
does not take the course prescribed by the laws of nature, but 
that there is something far beyond and above the natural 
sphere. The triumph of souls, who, by serving God have 
stood the test and won the crown is so immeasurably great 
that the fate of the stars and planets, of myriads of merely 
physical worlds is less than nothing when weighed against it." 

In the midst of the confusion of thought and disturbance 
of mind over the problems of man's place and destiny in the 
universe, so common during our generation, Professor Dwight 
had found a safe harbor for himself with peace of mind and 
satisfaction of reason. He had done so not by concealing from 
himself any of the difficulties, nor by masking the strength of 
opposing arguments. He knew the reasons for his faith and 
held it all the more firmly. It is no wonder then, that he was 
inclined to pity those who would not follow out their thoughts 
to ultimate logical conclusions, or who feared to do so because 
of the practical applications to their mode of life and belief 
that these might have. In an early chapter of the book on 
Thought of the Day he had expressed this very simply yet with 
feeling. He said: 

" The work of sham science in first deceiving and then de- 
moralizing the population has been well done. We find men 
and women of all degrees outside of the Catholic Church la- 
menting that all their foundations of belief are gone and that 
science is the torrent that has swept them away. How com- 
plete is the deception of which even men of high abilities are 
the victims will be shown by the writings oi educated non- 
Citholics of more or less reputation during the last generation 
as men of science or as general critics. It is instructive if dis- 
heartening reading. A very striking feature is the implied, 
sometimes the frankly expressed, admission that a logical an- 
swer to their perplexities is impossible; yet they will not turn 
to the Church which alone can furnish it." 




BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS. 

BY F. W. GRAFTON, S.J. 

JHE school question is in the present day one of 
the most "live" questions in every country 
under the sway of what is usually spoken of 
as western civilization. This means, of course, 
that civilization which, in its ethical aspect, is 
the outcome of some nineteen centuries of Christianity. The 
tide of Christianity has, indeed, ebbed and flowed many times 
during those centuries, but the broad result has been that the 
old pagan moral code has been swamped and that throughout 
Europe and America there prevails a fairly universal convic- 
tion, sub-conscious, perhaps, at times, yet, in reality, always 
present, that the Christian code of morals is the only basis 
on which society can solidly rest. Still, the alternate ebb and 
flow continues and will continue. It is one of the inevitable 
accompaniments of the existence of Christ's kingdom upon 
earth. He has promised to His Church the final victory, but 
not the certainty of conquest in every battle that is waged. 
This, in His divine providence He leaves largely to the hazard 
of the fight or rather to the strategical skill and powers of 
leadership of bishops and priests, the officers of the Church 
militant, and to the sturdiness and courage of the rank and 
file in the fighting line, the Catholic laity. 

For close on eighteen centuries the schools were left un- 
questioningly in the hands of the Church. Even where the 
scarce three century-old Protestantism prevailed, this was still 
the case. The belief in the paramount importance of the su- 
pernatural still flourished ; and though the principles on which 
Protestantism was based had already poisoned the roots, yet 
the tree was a sturdy one and the evil worked its way only 
slowly up through the branches to its attack on flower and 
fruit. But as those principles slowly but surely came to their 
own and were reinforced by one of those outbursts of pagan- 
ism or materialism or whatever you like to call it >our Lord 
used to call it "the world" which nearly always accompanies 



i9 1 1.] BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS 225 

an increase of material prosperity either in the individual or 
in the commonwealth, the civil power laid hands on the 
schools and claimed them as its own, saying, that the primary 
object of the schools was to fit people for life in this world. 
The Church had always maintained that the primary object 
was to fit men for the next world. The issue was thus a 
clear one. But though it was clear then and is clear now, 
yet, such is the power of that sub-conscious recognition of 
the basic value of Christian morality and of the fundamental 
truths on which it itself rests that scarcely anywhere do you 
get it stated in this clear way. Anything is put forward as a 
pretext for turning religion out of the schools rather than an 
open denial of the supernatural, for the popular conscience 
would not tolerate that, and as long as we pretend to be en- 
joying the blessing of democratic governments, the popular 
conscience, at least in public utterances, must be considered. 

Now the interest for Catholics throughout the world of 
the present struggle over the school question in Belgium is 
this. First, of course, Belgium is the particular spot on the 
earth's surface where is taking place what should prove for 
the moment a decisive engagement in the perennial struggle 
between the world and the Church, and it is our business to 
take an interest in the fortunes of any of the Church's troops. 
Moreover, it is an engagement on this new battle-ground of 
the schools, which, as I have said, is scarcely more than a 
century old, and all of us have, therefore, much in the way of 
tactics to learn from the contest. Secondly, it is the only 
modern instance of a similar struggle taking place with a 
frankly Catholic party in power. And thirdly, this same 
Catholic party has met the enemy on their own ground and 
shown clearly to all the world that true toleration of all men's 
honest opinions can be based on sound Catholic principles, 
without having anything to do with that washy type of toler- 
ation which is so popular in the present day and has its only 
real foundation in scepticism as to the value of all religion. 
No good Catholic denies to-day any more than in the thir- 
teenth or any other century that the state should be the open 
supporter of the Church. But equally no Catholic denies that 
in the majority of countries to-day with their divided beliefs 
and absence of beliefs giving them all the credit of being 
VOL. xciv. 15 



226 BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS [Nov., 

honest that a wise toleration makes most for the public peace 
and for the good of society. The Catholic Church will never 
abandon her ideal, for the very good reason that it is rooted 
in indisputable truth, but she was instituted by Christ for the 
realities and actualities of life and has never failed, where it 
was for the good of souls, in adapting herself to the circum- 
stances of the times as far as was possible without violating 
her principles. And the policy followed by the Catholic gov- 
ernment of Belgium for more than a quarter of a century 
is a concrete example of this. 

The elementary schools in Belgium, as at present consti- 
tuted are regulated by the laws of 1884 and 1895. Yet, 
though these laws had their origin under a Catholic govern- 
ment, the Catholic schools are still at a disadvantage before 
the law. For it was not the policy of the government to 
make any violent changes in the organization of the schools; 
they were content to let justice come to its own by gradual 
stages. 

There exist three types of elementary schools in Belgium. 
The free public elementary school is maintained by the mu- 
nicipal or communal authority and is staffed by lay teachers 
or by religious as that authority may choose. Religious in- 
struction is given for half an hour every day, either at the 
beginning or end of one of the normal school periods, so that 
conscientious objectors may have the opportunity of with- 
drawing their children from it, if they wish. This instruction 
is given either by the teacher, or if he object, by someone 
else approved by the local authority. Doctrinally, it is under 
the control of the parish priest. Moreover, in virtue of Arti- 
cle 17 of the Belgian Constitution, schools may be opened by 
private individuals and religious instruction of any type may 
be given or religious instruction may be entirely omitted as 
the proprietors of these schools may determine. Thirdly, such 
private schools, provided they charge no fees and also pro- 
vided that in respect of efficiency, sanitation, etc., they come 
up to the standard required in the public schools, may be 
"adopted" by the local authorities, that is, be maintained by 
them. They must of course also submit to state inspection, 
and religious instruction has to be given at the beginning or 
end of either the morning or afternoon class period as in the 



i9i i.] BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS 227 

public schools. Where such a school is in existence the munici- 
pality may dispense with the establishment of a public school 
unless at least twenty heads of families having children of 
school age demand a public school. In that case the munici- 
pality is bound to provide one. 

For the financing of both public and "adopted" schools 
the local authorities are in the first place responsible but they 
receive subsidies for this purpose both from the national and 
provincial exchequer. The free schools that are not " adopted " 
by the commune or municipality receive only the subsidies 
provided by the state, but at the same rate as the maintained 
schools. There are, of course, schools that fulfill all the con- 
dition for "adoption" and accept state inspection, but which 
the local authorities refuse to " adopt," and these are tech- 
nically known as " adoptable " schools. 

Such, in outline, is the legal aspect of the present situa- 
tion. Let us see now how it works out in practice. At first 
sight one would imagine that for all parties especially for Cath- 
olics in a country mainly Catholic nothing could be fairer. 
There is religious instruction apparently in all the public 
schools, freedom of conscience and freedom for private enter- 
prise in founding other types of schools which, when scholas- 
tically efficient, may receive support from public funds. A 
few figures will, however, make the real situation clear. There 
are at present in attendance at the public schools 67,000 chil- 
dren, at the "adopted" schools 236,000, at the "adoptable" 
schools 182,331, and at other elementary schools 57,000, Now 
why is there such a comparatively small number of scholars in 
the public schools where religious instruction is supposed to be 
provided, and why is there an overwhelmingly larger number 
in the " adopted " and " adoptable " schools ? The fact is, that 
nearly all these latter types of schools, which have to be pro- 
vided out of private funds even when they are "adopted" 
and maintained by the public authority, have been established 
by Catholics for the very good reason that their consciences 
would not in most cases allow them to send their children to 
the public schools. It will be remembered that a clause of 
the law allows the children of conscientious objectors to be 
withdrawn from religious instruction. Now, in the large towns 
especially, where the Socialists and anti-clericals are most in 



228 BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS [Nov., 

force, this clause has been taken advantage of by the muni- 
cipal councils hostile to religion. The people have been can- 
vassed and peaceful persuasion of the recognized anti-clerical 
type employed to obtain signatures authorizing the with- 
drawal of children from religious instruction, with the result 
that in Brussels, for instance, So per cent of the children in 
the public schools are thus dispensed 1 In Antwerp also the 
22,537 children in the public schools never hear a word of 
religious instruction, so that in that city Catholics have been 
forced to spend during the past twenty-five years well over a 
million dollars in providing schools to which their consciences 
would allow them to send their children. Moreover, the anti- 
clerical municipalities staff their schools with teachers of their 
own way of thinking, and on various pretexts hinder the clergy 
from giving religious instruction even to those children whose 
parents demand it. 

This policy is naturally not without its result on the reli- 
gious life of the people. In the mining district, for instance, 
of Charleroi, a region that was originally strongly Catholic, a 
third of all the marriages and a fifth of all the burials now 
take place without the blessing of the Church. Again in one 
commune of this district a third of the children remain un- 
baptized and of thirty-one marriages only nine took place in 
a church. In another out of twenty-eight burials only seven 
were celebrated with the assistance of a priest 1 

Small wonder, then, that the Catholic government of Bel- 
gium has set itself to work, while there is yet time, to remedy 
this state of affairs. Yet the task was not an easy one. There 
were at the same time other educational deficiencies to be 
remedied, while this primary one, from the Catholic point of 
view, had to be so dealt with that no loophole should be left 
for the enemies of the Church to allege that anyone's liberty 
of conscience had been in any way violated. Most of all was 
this a delicate matter in that the government had determined 
to include in its new law what the Socialists had long been 
clamoring for, namely, free and obligatory elementary educa- 
tion up to the age of fourteen for all children in the country ; 
and this compulsory school attendance had to be imposed 
without doing any violence to the honest religious or irreligi- 
ous convictions of any parent. 



i9i i.] BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCOOOLS 229 

Thus, in the first place, we may notice that the opposition 
received from the government the measure of school reform on 
which they had laid most stress. Nor was this all. The age at 
which a child might leave school was to be raised to fourteen 
years; practical instruction in various trades and occupations was 
to be included in the elementary school curriculum ; salaries of 
teachers were to be increased, and means taken to provide for 
greater efficiency in the staffing of the schools. Yet all this 
was of no avail to stem the tide of opposition so long as the 
new law was to give to Catholics the opportunity of sending 
their children to schools where their faith would not be en- 
dangered ; so long as it was to free Catholics from an unjust 
burden of double taxation, that of maintaing their own schools, 
and that of supporting the public schools. In a Catholic coun- 
try the condition of Catholics in this regard was analogous 
to that of Catholics in Protestant England though not quite 
so advantageous. It was incomparably inferior to the condi- 
tions that govern Catholic schools in Holland and Germany 
both predominantly non-Catholic countries. 

The opposition to the introduction of compulsory attend- 
ance at school had, it is true, come from the Catholic side. 
But this was not, as their enemies are fond of alleging, be- 
cause Catholics are obscurantists and the foes of education 
and progress. It was rather because they knew the value to 
be set on their faith and quite rightly felt that it was better 
to send their children to no school at all than to one where 
they would encounter only hostility to their religion, and, as 
has been said, in many districts only such schools were avail- 
able. For where the anti-clericals had a majority on the local 
boards the municipal schools were no more neutral than are 
the so-called neutral schools in France. Indeed, this irre- 
ligious spirit which the Belgian Catholics have to combat, 
consists largely of the overflow of French anti- clerical sewage 
which has found its way across the common frontier, the com- 
mon language providing an all too easy channel for it. 

The law whose primary object was to meet this unsatis- 
factory state of affairs was the work of M. Schollaert's cabinet. 
Its main provision is a most ingenious scheme of unique in- 
terest, yet extremely simple and intelligible. It has in addi- 
tion the merit of emphasizing in a concrete form the great 



230 BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS [Nov., 

Catholic principle that it is the parents in the first place, and 
not the state, who have the duty and the right of determin- 
ing what religious instruction shall be given to their children. 
Briefly, the system is this : A coupon, called a ton scolaire, 
is given by the government to every parent for each child of 
school age in his family. This coupon has a monetary value 
equal to two-thirds of the cost of a child's education in one 
of the free schools and is redeemable by the state. It must, 
however, be presented to the authorities of the school which 
the child frequents and its face value is then paid over to that 
authority. Moreover, the ban scolaire is available not only for 
the public and "adopted" schools, but also for all free schools 
which are " adoptable." Of the expenses of the Ions scolaires 
sixty per cent is taken from the national exchequer, ten per 
cent from the provincial and thirty per cent from the com- 
munal funds. A committee consisting of a president and six 
members, two provided by each of the above three financial 
administrations, will control the clearing-house process for the 
just distributions of the various funds. The remaining third 
of the cost of a child's education, which the value of the 
coupon does not cover, has to be provided, in the case of 
public and " adopted " schools by the local authority, and in 
the case of "adoptable" schools by the proprietors. From 
this it will be seen that even under the Schollaert law, though 
it makes a great advance on previous conditions, the private 
Catholic schools would not be on a completely equal footing 
with the public schools. Yet the main weight of the finan- 
cial burden would be removed and it would be possible 
to establish distinctively Catholic schools wherever they are 
needed. 

The great advantage of the system of the ban scolaire is 
its prospective stability, and it is this as much as anything 
that has provoked the bitter opposition of the anti-clericals 
and caused a temporary check to the project. The ban scolaire 
embodies in a tangible form, which even the humblest citizen 
can appreciate, the right of the parent to choose the school 
to which he will send his child. Once introduced it would 
become to him the symbol of that right, and woe to the anti- 
clerical government that should at any time endeavor to restrict 
his use of it. The Belgian parents, who are the last people 



i9i i.] BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS 231 

in the world to allow their individual liberty to be interfered 
with, would resist uncompromisingly the tampering with a right 
secured in so concrete a fashion. 

The opposition on the public platform to the proposed law 
has naturally been based on every pretext save the real one 
hatred of Catholicism. In the first place the project was 
declared to be unconstitutional. This objection was supposed 
to find its justification in Articles 17 and 25 of the Belgian 
Constitution. The first of these declares that the right to es- 
tablish schools is free to all and that the public schools are 
under the control of the state and are to be supported by 
public funds. From this the opposition would draw the con- 
clusion that private schools may not be subsidized from public 
funds without infringement of the Constitution. M. Schollaert, 
in his speech of May 20, 1911, effectually disposed of this 
sophism and, moreover, proved triumphantly that for more 
than eighty years subsidies had been paid by the state to 
private enterprise in education of all grades without any one 
for a moment suspecting its illegality. Article 25 secures the 
administrative autonomy of the Commune, and this too was 
now supposed to be encroached upon. But M. Schollaert again 
showed that while the communes were called upon to pay no 
more than before for education, it was the heads of families 
themselves belonging to each Commune who determined in 
what way the money should be spent. There was only this 
difference that the individuals were freer than before in their 
choice. Thus, communal autonomy in the matter was rather 
increased than diminished. 

The truth is, that the compulsory education demanded so 
loudly by the anti-clericals, meant for them a universal sys- 
tem of public schools, without religious teaching at all, which 
all children would be compelled to attend. In other words 
they wanted to introduce the French "neutral" school, which 
all the world knows means a type of school essentially irre- 
ligious and atheistic. They were so short of sound arguments 
against the proposed law that they actually charged the gov- 
ernment with the desire to squander public funds on religious 
education while they themselves would have all children at- 
tend the public schools, and all these schools supported en- 
tirely by public funds. The anti-clerical education budget 



232 BELGIAN CA THOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS [Nov., 

would thus far exceed that of the Catholic proposal. Again 
the old charge of subsidizing the religious orders out of pub- 
lic moneys is a futile one. The law proposed to deal with 
free schools and the large majority of those conducted by re- 
ligious charge fees. Indeed, in the free schools there are only 
442 religious employed as teachers as against 13,628 lay 
teachers! and the ban scolaire could not be used for the sup- 
port of a school where payment is required. 

But for the moment this most interesting and admirable 
experiment in educational legislation has received a check. It 
was, as was only to be expected, met by the anti-clericals with 
parliamentary obstruction, and the procedure in the Belgian 
Chamber renders this only too easy. For the preliminary ex- 
amination of any proposed law there are six subordinate com- 
mittees and a central one. These are chosen by lot, and con- 
sequently it may easily happen, where a party possesses so 
narrow a majority as the Catholic party in Belgium, that the 
lot may give the opposition the majority on several of these 
committees. This is what actually happened when the Educa- 
tion Bill came up for consideration last May. On three of the 
subordinate committees the anti- clericals had a majority, and 
these three refused to report on the bill. As, however, the 
Central Committee cannot proceed to deal with a bill unless 
it be reported favorably by a majority of the subordinate com- 
mittees, this meant that the proposed law would be shelved 
indefinitely. M. Schollaert then had recourse to a constitu- 
tional but unprecedented measure. He proposed to refer the 
Bill to a special commission elected by the whole Chamber 
and, therefore, necessarily containing a government majority. 
It was this that for the moment wrecked the Education Bill 
and at the same time the Schollaert Cabinet. M. Woeste, one 
of the leaders of the Catholic party who had all along been 
strongly opposed to the principle of compulsory education in 
any form, now took further exception to M. Schollaert's un- 
precedented step. To carry their law through, the Schollaert 
Cabinet required the solid support of all Catholics, and this 
revolt of M. Woeste's whose position after all is not quite 
clear even to many of the Belgians themselves caused the 
King of Belgium alter consultation with leaders of both politi- 
cal parties, to ask for an adjournment of the bill. His Majesty 



i9i i.] BELGIAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR SCHOOLS 233 

had always spoken warmly in favor of the principle of the 
Schollaert law, and it was apparently merely as an act ot pru- 
dence that he desired the adjournment, in order to give time 
for a closer study of the details and also for popular passions 
to cool down. The Socialists had been raising an agitation 
against the law on their old lines and the not unmerited repu- 
tation which the Belgian mob have for expressing their opinions 
by street rioting showed every sign of being once again con- 
firmed. M. Schollaert, who was prepared to stake all on what 
he believed to be a truly national measure for he had em- 
bodied in his bill, as has been explained, the main features, 
too, of the opposition demands then resigned. This means 
that the proposed law is for the present put out of court and 
must wait until after the elections of 1912 to be reintroduced, 
that is, supposing the Catholics return with their majority 
intact. This majority is, however, so narrow, one of eight 
votes only, that no one can speak with certainty as to the 
outcome of next year's elections. At the same time there is 
good hope, for the Belgian Catholics have again closed up their 
ranks, and time and again the results of past elections have 
shown that there is no better banner for Catholics to fight 
under than that of Catholic education for Catholic children. 



Bew Boohs* 

A SOGGARTH'S LAST VERSES. By Father Matthew Russell, 
S.J. London : Burns & Oates. 75 cents. 

Readers already familiar with the secular verses and again 
with the religious verses of a certain high-hearted "soggarth," 
will welcome alike with pleasure and regret these last -verses 
from his pen. For no one is quite ready for the swan song 
of Father Matthew Russell. It is more than thirty years since 
the words of this blithe and learned son of St. Ignatius began 
to enrich our Catholic literature. In prose and verse be has 
spoken to us with humor and pathos and erudition; in fields 
devotional, apologetic, historical and in that form of essay 
which a critic has amiably defined as " rambling around a sub- 
ject." Father Matthew Russell has become, indeed, an insti- 
tution among English-speaking Catholics: "doing the King's 
work all the dim day long," he has prospered the cause of 
Catholic letters by precept and example. God grant him (since 
he is fain to jump by mystic elevens) a safe arrival at the goal 
of eighty-eight I 

Tucked away among these present verses is an exquisite 
little prose translation of Louis Veuillot's " Sleepy Carthusian," 
which no one ought to miss. 

HURDCOTT. By John Ayscough. St. Louis : B. Herder. $150. 

The announcement of another book by John Ayscough will 
be a gratification to all readers of his San Celestino and Mez- 
zogiorno. This new story is called Hurdcott, and the setting is 
England of the early nineteenth century. The heroine, finely 
and nobly conceived, the Englishman whose Buddhist belief 
is so strangely conquered by Catholicity, and finally, Hurd- 
cott himself, the young Chalkshire shepherd of unknown origin 
and lonely life, to whom tragedy brings his greatest happi- 
ness, these are the characters. The story has the simple 
qualities of greatness; its dignity, however, is relieved by a 
humor half-gentle, half-satirical, but always a delight. In this 
humor, and in the construction of plot, we note again the 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 235 

resemblance to the best of George Eliot's works. The perfec- 
tion of style is a rarity and a deep pleasure. Our only 
possible criticism is a regret that the author's skillfull and 
very delightful introduction of Charles and Mary Lamb does 
not further continue into the development of the story. 

THE DANGER ZONE OF EUROPE. By H. Charles Woods. 
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $3.50. 

LIFE IN THE MOSLEM EAST. By Pierre Ponafidine. New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $4. 

The present Turko-Italian War lends a special interest to 
this volume, dealing with conditions, changes, and problems 
in the Near East. Its chapter on the Turkish Army and Navy 
will show a reader that Italy has little to fear in the present 
contest. 

The author has traveled extensively and leisurely ; talked 
intimately with the officials, missionaries and peasants of all 
the provinces of the Near East territory. He states that he 
writes the facts without bias or prejudice of any kind. 

He has, no doubt, honestly tried to live up to this claim, 
but we do not think he has been successful ; in fact, we think 
such an achievement impossible to any man who is human 
and who knows the Near East question. Nevertheless, the 
present volume is a most valuable book, and one that gives 
the reader a good introduction to a question that has been 
crying for a solution for hundreds of years, and a question to 
which no Christian and particularly no Catholic can be indif- 
ferent. 

The book treats extensively and with first-hand knowledge 
of the new regime of the Young Turks; Turkey's Army and 
Navy; the Albanian Question; the massacres throughout Ar- 
menia in 1909 ; the effect of the new rtgime in Asiatic Tur- 
key; the Cretan Question; the military revolution in Greece; 
the independence of Bulgaria; Servia, Montenegro and Bosnia. 

The author begins with the statement that he will put down 
just what he heard and saw, yet, later, he confesses his sym- 
pathy with the Turk in the Turk's best aspirations, in other 
words, with the development of a strong Ottoman Empire. 
He admits that he does not tell many of the atrocities cf the 
Armenian massacres of 1909, because they are unprintable. 



236 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

Yet, we believe, that they have an essential bearing on the 
whole question, for they explain in part why an Ottoman 
Empire is unthinkable for any Christian. Though complicated 
by innumerable lesser political, religious and racial problems, 
the Near East Question practically resolves itself into a con- 
test between Christianity and civilization on the one hand and 
Moslemism and decay on the other. The author himself sees 
this when, writing of a possible union of Moslems and Chris- 
tians in Albania, he says: "The danger from the civilization 
point of view is that there is no doubt that a great Moslem 
propaganda will be inaugurated." 

It is vain to speak of a Turkish government that will do 
anything like justice to its Christian subjects. Recent history 
supports the history of the past to prove that Moslemism is 
professedly the foe of Christianity. The growth and increase 
of an Ottoman Empire are abhorrent to every lover of civili- 
zation. 

Life in the Moslem East is written by the Russian Consul 
General in Constantinople and has been translated into English 
by his wife. It also is the account of one who has lived and 
traveled much in the East and who tells what he himself has 
seen and heard. He confines himself to descriptions of the 
external life of the Mussulman, with some discussion on the 
Koran, the position of women, and the religious life of the people 
in general. He discusses no problems, but tells in a pleasant, 
narrative way of the life in the Moslem East Asiatic Turkey, 
Arabia, India and Persia. He is sympathetic with his subject, 
yet he does not hesitate now and again to point out faults and 
shortcomings. In particular he shows that divorce is one of 
the great curses of Islamism. The book contains many chap- 
ters of interesting descriptions, for the life of the East, particu- 
larly that of the Bedouin, has its fascination. This work shows 
in its own way just as effectively as does The Danger Zone 
of Europe, that a compromise between East and West, Chris- 
tianity and Moslemism, is impossible. The life of the East 
will have to see an absolute change, will have to be torn up 
by its roots, ere it can be grafted upon the tree of the world's 
civilization. The volume has numerous illustrations and is 
splendidly presented. We think that a map and an index 
'would make desirable additions. 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 237 

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. By John M. Gillette. New York: 
The American Book Company. $i. 

The author tells us in his Preface that this book is the 
outcome of his work while teaching in 1505 in the State Nor- 
mal School of Valley City, North Dakota. What he means by 
vocational education he also tells us: it "is broad enough in 
meaning to cover all the training courses which are needed to 
meet the practical demands of life." He divides his book into 
three parts, treating respectively the educational renaissance, 
social demands on education, and methods of socialization, 
which all contain several chapters on a variety of subjects sup- 
posed to have some immediate connection with education. 

Here and there we find some good things in the book, but 
one cannot help noticing that the author is somewhat like a 
rudderless ship whenever he attempts to deal with the ques- 
tion of morality or the teaching of it. He strives hard to 
build up a structure totally independent of religion, and suc- 
ceeds simply in giving us the " emotional attitudes "of a gen- 
tleman named Bagley. A school-garden, the care of tools and 
other articles will develop (we are told) the sense of property 
right. It is maintained that the American public school sys- 
tem is the ideal, and that this and that craze are necessary 
for fitting a child for life's battle. Blind theorizing abounds 
everywhere. Ground that was effectually turned and cultivated 
centuries ago is now gone over and treated as if it were vir- 
gin soil. 

If the methods of the Catholic Church were more fully 
studied, and some vigorous attempts made to understand its 
attitude towards the education of youth, many pages of this 
and similar books need not have been written. That the au- 
thor does not possess the necessary knowledge of the Catholic 
attitude is quite evident. This illuminating sentence is given 
on page 192 : " In the encyclical of 1908 the Pope permits 
Catholics to send their children to public schools, but puts the 
ban on 'Modernism.'" It is quite evident what condition of 
mind has given rise to this sentence. Are we to judge sim- 
ilarly the statement on page 150 that Thomas Moore wrote the 
Utopia f If we extract some statistics which have been culled 
from other writers, there is nothing of value remaining in 
Vocational Education. 



238 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

THE LIVES OF THE POPES OF THE MIDDLE AGES. Vols. 
VI., VII., and VIII. By Rev. Horace K. Mann. St. 
Louis: B. Herder. $3. a volume. 

We have already called attention to the previous Lives of 
this series in THC CATHOLIC WORLD for February, 1911. 
The three volumes now under consideration have as a sub- 
title "The Gregorian Renaissance" because the influence of 
that great Pope, St. Gregory the Seventh, dominated the 
whole period, 1049 A. D. to 1130 A. D. ; he gave it its char- 
acter and shaped its spirit. 

Of the thirteen Popes whose " Lives " are recounted in 
these volumes, six had Hildebrand as friend, counsellor, and 
guide before he himself ascended the pontifical throne and 
the six who succeeded him, walked in the path he had traced, 
and carried forward the lines of his policy. 

Coming to power after one of the worst periods in the 
Church's history, Gregory the Seventh stands forth as the great- 
est reformer among all the Popes, the projector and embodiment 
of mediaeval ideals, the strenuous asserter of the Church's in- 
dependence, the upholder of its sovereignty over the whole 
Catholic world. 

He initiated the first acts of a world-drama which held the 
stage of Europe for three hundred years and more; it reached 
its highest activity in Innocent the Third, and its denouement 
came with Boniface the Eighth and though mediaeval ideals 
lingered on for a much longer time, they had ceased to claim 
the undivided attention of mankind. 

It is not possible for the wit of man to make portions of the 
history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries edifying or pleas- 
ant reading. Our author has done much, however, in bringing 
out the Christian faith, piety, zeal and fidelity that did exist 
in those days, though for the most part they were days of 
trial and suffering for God's Church. 

It was an age of violence and confusion, of building up 
and breaking down, of Norman invasion and Saracen attack, 
yet it was redeemed somewhat by great saints and scholars. 
It was the golden age of monastic observance and diffusion, 
it was the period which gave birth to the Crusades, which in 
themselves are evidence of widespread, enthusiastic faith. 

To recount the triumph of Gregory the Seventh, in reform- 
ing the Church, to enter on the problems of the age, lay- 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 239 

investiture, and the co-ordination of the spiritual and the 
temporal, would carry us too far, and we send our readers 
to these scholarly, well-documented volumes with the assur- 
ance of pleasure and profit in their exposition and solution. 

THE HISTORY OF ROME AND THE POPES IN THE MIDDLE 
AGES. By Hartmann Grisar, SJ. English translation by 
Luigi Cappadelta. Vol. I. St. Louis: B. Herder. $4.50. 

In this first volume and in those which are to follow we 
have one of those erudite studies which are a credit to Cath- 
olic scholarship and to the great Society of which the author 
is a member. 

There is in truth a vast literature bearing on the general 
subject written from many points of view. But, as the author 
remarks in his Preface there is no complete and trustworthy 
history of the inner side of life in mediaeval Rome which is 
so necessary a clue if we would rightly understand the import 
of many outward events. His purpose accordingly is twofold ; 
to deal with Rome as a city in its local fortunes, its changes 
and developments, and also, to recount its world- wide influence 
and mission as the focus and seat of Christian civilization. 

The recent additions to our knowledge in the way of ex- 
cavations and research, of monuments and documents are so 
numerous that they have lessened the value of what used to 
be considered the standard work on the subject, that of 
Gregoravius. Passing over the fact that it was written fifty 
years ago, it is the work of a non-Catholic who never rose to 
the true conception of what the Church is and who, despite 
many a high tribute, was an enemy of the Papacy. 

This first volume deals mainly with three topics: the tran- 
sition from Paganism, monumental Rome both classic and 
early Christian, and the history of the Popes down to the 
fall of the Empire. While all three are treated in a way at 
once learned and interesting, it is evident that the arcliaslog- 
ical side has been for the author a labor of love. The minute 
detail, the happy speculation, the latest word of modern re- 
search are here to be had with their bearing both on classic nar- 
ratives and their testimony to early Christian faith and practice. 

In a word, the History is of value to scholars, of interest 
to the thoughtful reading public; and we look forward with 
expectancy to its continuation and completion. 



240 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Hilaire Belloc,.M.A. New 
York: Henry Holt & Co. 75 cents. 

The researches of historians have by no means ceased as 
regards the history of the French Revolution. Gradually new 
documents are seeing the light, while the source, the progress, 
the outcome of the movement are obtaining more critical and 
impartial treatment than heretofore. As Mr. Belloc rightly 
points out, bias has had a great deal to do with shaping sev- 
eral stories of the great upheaval. His attempt is to put the 
history of the Revolution in its proper perspective, seeking 
right causes, tracing out their inevitable results, and thus 
building up good history on well-laid foundations, not erect- 
ing the structure first, and then arguing how the building 
found its way into the air without any apparent sub-structure: 
not reading history backwards from a knowledge of after- 
events. Owing to the adopton of this sane and scientific 
method, Mr. Belloc has given us a book which, though small, 
must have a special and important place assigned it among 
the many histories of the Revolution. 

He has not only brought to bear on the subject a knowl- 
edge of the literature of France which perhaps can hardly be 
surpassed by any other English-speaking writer, but he has 
brought, too, an intimate knowledge of the country where he 
served his term as a soldier and citizen. Now as a natural- 
ized British subject he uses his experience and learning in a 
most commendable manner. It is frankly as a Catholic be 
writes (as he tells us in his Preface) and wholly in sympathy 
with the political theory of the Revolution. Therefore, he 
begins his work by stating rather extensively what this politi- 
cal theory is, and he devotes the later pages to settirg forth 
clearly what the effects of that theory and more particularly 
its application by politicians are in relation to the Catholic 
Church, and how the pronounced antagonism between the 
French Republic and the Church came about. These chapters 
are well worth a most careful reading. Rousseau's theory of 
democracy, as propounded in Contrat Social, is analyzed 
briefly, and with considerable appreciation for the lucidity, 
terseness, and accuracy of that " wonderful book." For critics 
of this book Mr. Belloc has not much mercy ; they either 
" have not read the work or, having read it, did so with an 
imperfect knowledge of the meaning of French words." 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 241 

From this the chapters move on brightly to a considera- 
tion of the prominent characters of the Revolution: Louis 
XVI, a man of quiet, unostentatious, religious practices, but 
an incapable : Marie Antoinette, a busybody whose interfer- 
ences in public life rushed on the country to the cataclysm, a 
woman who really thought that she was made of different and 
superior elay to other people on whom she accordingly looked 
with disdain, rather indifferent to religion but virtuous so far 
as practical morality went, though in language not all that 
she should have been ; Mirabeau, a great man, absolutely de- 
void of religion, who took bribes but still remained independ- 
ent in politics; La Fayette, who "never upon a single occa- 
sion did the right thing"; Dumouriez, the traitor; Danton, 
who thoroughly, more than other men, understood the na- 
tional characteristics of the people; Carnot, the military genius 
oi the Revolution; Marat, the insane; Robespierre, the just 
and incorruptible, who has been wrongly accused by posterity 
for the many crimes committed during the Terror. For the 
one who has not closely followed the different schools of 
thought on the Revolution, there will be many surprises in the 
brief paragraphs allotted to the above. For instance, the 
Terror itself becomes resolved into what has the appearance, 
at any rate, of being a necessary application of mere martial 
law minus formalities. Here, it was, that Robespierre was 
absolutely helpless, as he was totally ignorant of military 
affairs, and had to bend before the superior knowledge of 
Carnot. Why the Terror ceased when the head of Robes- 
pierre rolled in the sand Mr. Belloc explains well. 

To most Catholics the final chapter on the relations of the 
Revolution and the Church will be read with greatest interest, 
and we venture to say with equally pronounced surprise. 
Here we have some salutary plain speaking which tends to 
solve a problem that has been thought impossible of solution 
by a certain class of mind. The rapid success of revolution- 
ary enmity towards the Church was not the work of a day; 
it was the outcome of a religious decadence in France where 
"the Catholic Church was at a lower ebb than it had ever 
been since the preaching and establishment of it in Gaul." 
Bishops were bad (one was an atheist), priests were both igno- 
rant and loose-livers, the laity had lost all sense of religion, 
and in court circles it was thought the proper thing to be 
VOL. xciv. 16 



242 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

witty and sarcastic about matters pertaining to religion and 
the Church. "It is safe to say," writes the author, "that 
where one adult of the educated classes concerned himself 
seriously with the Catholic Faith and practice in France be- 
fore the Revolution, there are five to-day." Comment is un- 
necessary. The Church was looked upon simply as an appen- 
dage of the hated monarchy, and when the one went down the 
other had necessarily to follow it in the eyes of the French. 
Some very useful military plans are inserted in the text, 
but they are reduced to such small dimensions that consider- 
able difficulty is experienced in making out the details. As 
enlarged insets they would prove of great value to students 
of the wars of France with the Allies. We have noted a 
couple of small slips: "Diacletian" (p. 232), "the bishops 
should be elected" (p. 238). A more generously-printed, and 
much less eye-straining Index than the one now affixed should 
certainly have been given. 

THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. Vols. X. and XI. New 
York: Robert Appleton Company. 

With the twelfth volume of The Catholic Encyclopedia in 
their possession, subscribers who, at the outset, doubted the 
successful issue of the work are now wondering how socn the 
last volume will be in their hands, so rapidly has the publica- 
tion been carried on. Like their predecessors, Volumes X. 
and XI. deserve praise for the large number of well-written 
and well-edited articles they contain. 

Perhaps the most important theological article is that on 
the " Sacrifice of the Mass," by Dr. Joseph Pohle, who treats 
his subject with the thoroughness and mastery that marked 
his articles " Eucharist " and " Grace " in former volumes. 

Eugene Jacquier, Professor of Scripture in the University 
of Lyons, writes on the " Gospel of St. Matthew." To him it 
seems probable that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Aramaic, 
not in Hebrew, and that Matthew's Greek translator used 
Mark's Greek Gospel, especially for our Lord's discourses. 
Of interest to every reader will be the article "Modernism," 
by Father Vermeersch. Like most " isms " Modernism is hard 
to define exactly, but the author has explained as lucidly as 
could be done the ideas and tendencies of the Modernists. 
Father Thurston, in his article on the " Holy Nails," states 



i.] NEW BOOKS 243 

that "very little reliance can be placed on the authenticity rf 
the thirty or more holy nails that are still venerated." If ere 
wishes to find real pleasure as well as information in the pages 
of the Encyclopedia, let him read Dr. Barry's brilliant articles 
on " Cardinal Newman " and the " Oxford Movement." In his 
article on the " Pentateuch," Father Maas sets forth clearly 
the witness of Scripture and Tradition, as well as the internal 
evidence for Mosaic authorship, in accordance with which testi- 
mony the Biblical Commission has declared that the arguments 
of the critics do not warrant us in maintaining that the bocks 
of the Pentateuch have not Moses for their author. He then 
adds a* scholarly criticism of the theories of those who question 
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. An article of special 
interest and importance just at this time is " Catholic Periodi- 
cal Literature," a series of contributions by several authorities 
on the Catholic Press throughout the world. 

We have noted some errors. For example, in the article, 
" Matteo of Acquasparta," the biographer's birthplace is mis- 
spelled every time it occurs. Again the author of the article 
on "New Mexico," writes: "Christmas is the only religious 
festival observed as a legal holiday in New Mexico." He then 
adds : " New Year's Day is also a legal holiday." 

The editors are to be congratulated on the rapid progress 
of this excellent work. 

JOHN RUSKIN : A STUDY IN PERSONALITY. By Arthur 
Christopher Benson. New York: G. P. Putnam Sons. 
$1.75- 

This volume was written by one whose equipment leads us 
to expect a dignified and worthy attempt to explain the 
character of John Ruskin. It is written from the standpoint 
of discriminating admiration of what was noble, morally and 
spiritually wholesome and helpful in that great man. The 
mistakes, shortcomings and amazing limitations of Ruskin are 
dealt with, as they should be, in the hope of presenting them 
in their right place in his career. While the warmth of gen- 
uine sympathy is felt throughout the volume, at no time does 
the author lose his good sense of proportions and his instinc- 
tive grasp on the real meaning of Ruskin's life and work. 
Lovers of Ruskin will find the study delightful. Not a few 
pages suggest the rich feeling, the impetuous metaphor, and 



244 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

emotional intensity of Ruskin himself. Raskin's critics may 
find fault with the gentleness with which his limitations are 
explained, if not excused. But, after all, Ruskin belongs to 
those who love him. 

He was an extraordinary man. His contributions to the 
discussion of the great moral truths that underlie human ex- 
istence and relations were of a high order. He scattered in- 
spiration through ten thousand lives and cleared the vision of 
natural beauty and quickened the sense of its charm for them. 
He proclaimed unbending faith in the moral puipose of life. 
He taught much that was true in art, in science, in ethics, in 
economics and in psychology. He erred frequently in under- 
standing his own knowledge and was mislead many times by 
the vehemence of his convictions. Just because he was gilitd 
with marvelous imagination and exquisite sensibility his feel- 
ings frequently clouded his judgment. Just because he saw 
great truths wonderfully and declared them in wonderful lan- 
guage he often saw lesser truths with blurred vision and mis- 
understood them. He may have erred in coming too near to 
the noble social ideals which seem to have the exalted sanc- 
tion of heaven, but was his error greater than that of those 
who seemed to surrender faith in the same ideals and lazily 
tolerated the inexcusable failure of institutions to protect them. 

If reservoirs of bitterness from which invective flowed forth 
were found in his richly endowed heart, there were also cradled 
in that same heart emotions whose purity, spiritual depth and 
varied richness give to us appreciations of life and of its su- 
preme laws which only a limited number among the great 
ones of earth have been gifted enough to proclaim with be- 
coming dignity. We may believe that the zone of influence in 
which his virtues operated and which his achievements inspired 
was immeasurably greater than that in which his mistakes 
bore any fruit. One of his own paragraphs suggests itself 

here : 

As I myself look at it there is no fault nor folly of my life 
and both have been many and great that does not rise up 
against me and take away my joy and shorttn my power of 
possession of sight of understanding, and every past effort of 
my life, every gleam of Tightness or good in it is with me now 
to help me in my grasp of this art and its vision. So far as I 
can rejoice in or interpret either, my power is owing to what 
there is of right in me. I dare to say it, that because through 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 245 

my life I have desired good and not evil : because I have been 
kind to many ; have wished to be kind to all ; have willfully 
injured none ; and because I have loved much and not un- 
selfishly, therefore, the morning light is yet visible to me on 
those hills, and you who read may trust my thought and word 
in such work as I have to do for you, and you will be glad 
afterward that you trusted them. 

Benson's volume throughout takes practically this attitude 
in estimating Ruskin. The volume may be commended strongly 
to those who have been unable as yet to find the right point 
of view in estimating Ruskin, because it will teach them. It 
may be commended strongly to those who love Ruskin and 
rejoice in the power of the truth which he proclaimed and 
the writer gratefully numbers himself among them because of 
the exalted and justified estimate of Ruskin which is set forth. 

We Catholics may justly find much of which to complain 
in the work of Ruskin. His misunderstanding of Catholicity 
was quite as remarkable as in a certain way was his under- 
standing of it. Nevertheless, there are scattered throughout 
his volumes instances of great spiritual penetration. What 
worthy lessons may be found in many of his lectures on art 
and architecture, and with what profit may this day of secu- 
larism take to itself these words on religion : 

Anything which makes religion its second object makes re- 
ligion no object. God will put up with a great many things 
in the human heart but there is one thing He will not put up 
with, a second place. He who offers God a second place, 
offers Him no place. And there is another mighty truth 
which you all know, that he who makes religion his first 
object makes It his one object : he has no other work in the 
world than God's work. 

THE DOWNFALL OF THE GODS. By Sir Hugh Clifford, 
K.C.M.G. New York: E. P. Button & Co. $1.50. 

Opinions will differ considerably as to the artistic value of 
this book, but there will not be much divergence on the ques- 
tion of its interest. From start to finish it holds the attention 
of the reader. There is a thoroughly Eastern coloring through- 
out; a coloring, indeed, which renders it not quite suitable 
for the eyes of young people. The moral ideas of the East, 



246 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

which do not agree on all points with those of the West, are 
described as the opportunity is given. 

The reputed son of people devoid of caste, Chun feels with- 
in himself the call to great deeds and a high place in the 
world. He tests his dreams by plunging into the sacred waters 
which popular superstition claimed would destroy any but the 
priests. Coming out of the tank unscathed he is firmly con- 
vinced that he is one of the demigods. Then, as if to strength- 
en his fantasy he is accosted by a figure, which, in the moon- 
light he takes to be that of a goddess. Henceforth, for her 
he lives, and on this passion, and the subsequent companion- 
ship of the two depend the most powerful chapters in the 
book. Besides a talent for clear description the author has 
considerable power in characterization. 

SIDELIGHTS ON CONTEMPORARY SOCIALISM. By John 
Spargo. New York: B. W. Huebsch. $i. 

In a small volume dedicated to Victor Berger and made 
up of lectures delivered on various occasions, Mr. Spargo ad- 
dresses his fellow socialists on certain problems that concern 
themselves. The real character of Marx, his relation to re- 
cent phases of the development of Socialism, and the ever 
acute problem of "what to do with the intellectuals?" form 
the topics of the three discourses. Of course they are inter- 
estingly treated, and of course the book is useful to every 
student of contemporary socialism, although it reveals little 
that is unfamiliar to those acquainted with the author's pre- 
vious works. 

One of the interesting sidelights not purposely uncovered is 
the poverty of the Socialist conception of the word "spiritual." 
It is rather a favorite word with our author, but a disappoint- 
ing one, witness the hollow ring of his pages (58-64) where 
he enlarges upon the spiritual side of Marx's nature. 

Indeed, given so reasonable and persuasive an exponent of 
Socialism as Mr. Spargo, we should find it hard to detect 
any irreconcilable difference between his policy and legitimate 
social reform, until we come at the " spiritual " considerations. 
More and more the men of his school are confining them- 
selves to purely scientific discussions. Less and less there- 
fore, and almost never of set purpose, do they offend our 
religious prejudices. When they shall have utterly lost that 



i9u.] NEW BOOKS 247 

philosophical attitude which is really their distinctive char- 
acteristic, and shall in consequence have ceased to be what 
Socialists hitherto have been, in a word when Socialism is at 
last an essentially different thing from what in doctrine and 
in life, history shows it hitherto to have been, then, but only 
then, can there be realized Mr. Spargo's dream of a whole- 
hearted alliance between "him and his" and "us and ours." 

THE LONG ROLL. By Mary Johnston. New York: Hough- 
ton Mifflin Company. $1.40. 

Miss Johnston's book is very little of a romance and very 
much of a history to our great satisfaction indeed, but to the 
disappointment of many readers who prefer books less serious 
and less long. Official records, local traditions, private paper?, 
and personal reminiscences have been drawn upon heavily and 
utilized carefully, in the tracing out of the details of Stonewall 
Jackson's military career; for around his achievements the story 
is built. To historical accuracy must be added vivid realism 
as among the characteristics of the book. Of course, it also 
has faults too flaring a color and too heavy a brush disfigure 
many of the scenes. With the fault of frequent failure in due 
reticence must be classed also a Southern partisanship and 
an exaggerated Virginiaism, which most of us, however, will 
find it not difficult to excuse. More blameworthy is the mean 
spirit which controls her representation of the Frederick Jesuit 
a man whose memory still lingers in that old Maryland town, 
to refute the very unlovely characterization of him which Miss 
Johnston curiously enough has elected to lay before us here. 

The two maps on the inside covers notably the map of 
the Shenandoah Valley are very helpful to the reader. A 
second volume is to follow the present one. It may easily 
be fairer and more skillful; it will hardly be as interesting as 
the really fascinating series of pictures which flash out from 
the six hundred pages of The Long Roll, 

EDUCATION AS GROWTH, OR THE CULTURE OF CHARACTER. 
By L. H. Jones, A.M. New York: Ginn & Co. $1.25. 

In this era of psuedo- scientific agnosticism when many of 
the false theories of Haeckel and Spencer are still taught as 
absolute dogmas in our public schools and colleges, it is sig- 
nificant to find a man like Professor Jones, testifying to the 



248 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

absolute necessity of a religious basis for all true education, 
on the strength of convictions gained as the result of over 
forty years' experience in our public educational system. His 
book Education as Growth is a series of arguments for the ex- 
istence of the soul, taken from psychology, philosophy, and 
his personal experience and an earnest appeal to teachers to 
adjust all their instruction to the needs of the individual soul. 

Professor Jones is endeavoring throughout to suggest a 
religious ideal of life and education, and his best utterances 
have this aim in view: e g. t "The perfection of culture is to 
think clearly, to aspire nobly, to drudge cheerfully, to sympa- 
thize broadly, to decide righteously, and to perform ably" (p. 
115) Again "Doing God's will is the only means of perfect- 
ing our spiritual sight or spiritual insight, to which we must 
trust for further spiritual knowledge" (p. 142). However, in 
speaking of the final " purpose of education," he is frankly 
unable to speak "with accuracy and precision" (p. 183). 
Although he regrets that many a scientist has co "feeing of 
faith in many practical and religious questions merely because 
he has never studied the facts on which such conclusions are 
based " (p. 135), Professor Jones himself seems to be un- 
acquainted with that great body of Christian experience upon 
which the conclusions of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Ignatius 
Loyola, and Blessed Thomas a Kempis are based. On p. 133 
this writer maintains that "faith never arises without having 
been preceded by special thought " ; but he seems as forgetful 
of the fact that philosophy is a valuable aid to religious ideal- 
ism as he is mindful throughout of the value of philosophy 
for educational idealism. 

In the endeavor to base faith entirely upon a rather prig- 
gish introspection and thus make religion the product of an 
inverted and diluted mysticism, Professor Jones ignores the 
necessity of religious doctrine at the same time that he is ex- 
pounding pedagogical doctrine. Consequently he falls into 
the error of making a plea for indifferentism in religion on 
the theory that each religion is merely a matter of " form or 
rite" (p. 161), a theory which he illustrates by comparing the 
various religions to different routes by which we may reach 
Chicago. Consciously or unconsciously, he finds it impossible 
to apply this idea of indifferentism in the matter of pedagogi- 
cal creed. On pp. 76 and 120 he ridicules the conclusions 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 249 

and methods of the materialists; on p. 272 he says: "A too 
close restriction to physical themes is liable to lead to agnos- 
ticism in reference to other forms of truth. Liberality of 
range in studies will restore sanity of judgment." Of Spencer 
he writes: "After he had assumed the iole of philosopher he 
was still a prejudiced witness because of his early education. 
Even in his later years, when he had caught universality of 
view, he held to many of his early prejudices, thus vitiating 
many of his conclusions." In his later years Spencer, it is 
true, realized that materialism was a very narrow and very 
partial aspect of reality ; yet, " rarely did he attempt to cor- 
rect the views expressed in his early writings, although some 
of his later ones contradicted them " (p. 237). 

Such destructive criticism of doctrines contrary to those 
held by Professor Jones is necessary if we believe with him 
that " wrong standards not only lead to activities that do not 
educate rightly, but prevent activities toward other and better 
ideals. Many immediate ideals may be right in themselves, 
but if realized, they make us tend to forget that there is any- 
thing higher or farther on. It is the teacher's office to keep 
the public reminded of the larger hope and the truer aim " 
(p. 189). We may profitably apply many of the immediate 
ideals suggested in this book, provided we keep in mind that 
there is the larger hope and the truer aim than are here em- 
bodied the hope of perpetual union with the Divine Will 
and the aim of implanting and strengthening that hope in 
every human soul. 

THE WAY THAT LEADS TO GOD. By The Abbe" A. Saudreau. 
Translated from the French by Leonora L. Yorke Smith. 
Revised by Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B. New York: Ben- 
ziger Brothers. $1.50. 

Every book making for God's love with doctrinal soundness 
and devotional saneness is entitled to our welcome, but in this 
case the greeting is hearty. The names of the author, translator 
and editor are widely and favorably known in the field of Catho- 
lic literature, and guarantee a useful publication. 

The book veritably leads the way in the practice of Chris- 
tian perfection. How to seek God in prayer, how to embrace 
Him closely, how to discriminate His guidance from the mind's 
fantasies and the evil one's deceits this is the great purpose 



NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

of the book, wrought out compendiously but not scantily. 
We know not if a single good thing of weight, contributing to 
a pure-hearted religious service, is omitted. 

The word "practical" characterizes the title. Asa matter 
of fact these pages are transcribed from the author's notes used 
during many years of conferences to the Good Shepherd Nuns 
of the Mother House of Angers. Springing originally from 
study and prayer, the maxims, methods, illustrations here 
found, have been sifted free from superfluities by actual con- 
tact with living beings, by employment in the spiritual equip- 
ment of great numbers of souls devoted to Christian and com- 
munity perfection. 

Everywhere we meet with appeals to sound reason, to 
experience, to the native longings of the heart for higher 
things, all culminating in the final appeal to Catholic faith. 
Hardly the littlest spark of devotion is kindled into a flame 
except by the breath of holy doctrine. In this and other 
respects the book reminds us of the far-famed Introduction to 
a Devout Lije, for it is a manual of ready use and reference 
for devout souls in all stations of life, including confessors, 
novice masters, chaplains of communities, and prefects of pious 
societies. 

GEMMA GALGANI: A CHILD OF THE PASSION. By Philip 
Coghlan, C.P. New York : Benziger Brothers. 40 cents. 

This adaptation from the Italian of the Consultor General 
of the Passionists, is the story of one of those saintly lives 
that develop and reach perfection only in the Catholic Church. 
Gemma Galgani died only a few years ago, and proves that 
God's arm of mercy and love has not been shortened, but that 
He still, as always, makes saints live among us and inspire us 
by their example. The events related are attested by un- 
questionable evidence. 

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC WHO'S WHO. Compiled and Edited 
by Georgina Pell Curtis. St. Louis : B. Herder. $2. 

The work of compiling such a volume as the American 
Catholic Who's Who, must have been attended with labors and 
difficulties such as only one actually doing the work can 
know. But every thoughtful outsider can realize something 
of them, and our first word to the editor of this volume, Miss 



i9n.] NEW BOOKS 251 

Curtis, is one of sympathy and encouragement. There has 
long been need of a Catholic Who's Who, not only for the 
special worker who must know, but also for the general pub- 
lic at large. The present volume is the first of its kind, and 
hence it must necessarily be very much in the nature of an 
experiment. But Miss Curtis has succeeded, evidently after 
great labor, in producing a volume that contains much infor- 
mation and that will be useful to many. She has endeavored 
to give short sketches of the prominent Catholics of the coun- 
try; with the events and achievements that have caused them 
to deserve prominence. A Catholic author, for example, is 
under discussion, and information concerning him is desired. 
This Who's Who will give the reader information concerning 
his education, the list of his wotks, etc. The volume seeks 
to cover every field of activity and includes every Catholic of 
note, so its utility is beyond question and we hope that it 
will receive sufficient support to warrant a second edition. 

In the criticism of such a detailed woik one is willing to, 
and indeed should, pass over minor defects of omission or 
of tnisstatement, such as, for example, including the name 
of Henry George, Junior. One cannot but hope, however, that 
in a second edition there will be shown a more positive standard 
of judgment than this present edition gives evidence of. In 
many cases the individual mentioned has been allowed to write 
his own biography and it has been inserted just as it stood, 
without that use of an editor's blue pencil which it emphat- 
ically demanded. Men who have but little claim to the atten- 
tion of the Catholic body have been allowed to exploit their 
business; their political careers, in other words, have used the 
book as a personal advertisement. The biography of Mayor 
Gaynor of New York, who is by no means a Catholic, is noth- 
ing but a campaign document. The purpose of such a book 
should be to give the general reader a true idea of the prom- 
inence and work of the individual treated. Personal feeling 
and personal desire should both be disregarded. The stand- 
ard of judgment should be objective, and it demands on the 
part of him who exercises it a thorough knowledge through 
trustworthy sources of the work accomplished by the particu- 
lar individual whose name is allowed to have a place therein. 
The present volume gives much useful infotmation, but it 
lacks almost entirely a sense of proportion. As a consequence, 



252 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

unless the reader comes to it with foreknowledge, he will fre- 
quently be deceived and think that a particular Catholic is an 
important man whereas he may have no claim to importance at 
all. Ttie application of a standard requires severity; it oftentimes 
brings as its reward enmity from those who are small enough 
to nourish enmity; it will be bitterly criticized by others who 
also have their standard of judgment, but it is an essential 
requirement for a thoroughly capable Who's Who, and we 
trust that Miss Curtis will not hesitate to use the pencil ard 
the knife, too, in the preparation of a second edition. 

BIBLE SYMBOLS. Designed and Arranged to Familiarize the 
Child with the Great Events of Bible History and to 
Stimulate Interest in Holy Writ. By Rev. Thomas C. 
Gaffney. Drawings by Max Bihn. Chicago and Boston: 
The John A. Hertel Company. $2. 

Practical helps to make study easier and more attractive 
for our children are always to be commended. When the 
helps are to aid the child to obtain a knowledge of the Bible, 
they are to be most highly commended. We have found Bible 
Symbols a book that, old and sophisticated as we are, was 
delightful and that so captured our attention that we lost 
thought of the flight of time. Both the author and the illus- 
trator, one by the pen, the other by the brush, or, more ac- 
curately, the pen also, have prepared the text and stories of 
the Bible, illustrated them with designs familiar to every child, 
and presented them in a way that is clever, fascinating and, 
we believe, extremely useful. The child will be introduced 
by a few words to the Bible narrative, the narrative will then 
be taken up by a picture that stands for the next word or 
words; by naming the pictures the child becomes familiar 
with the whole narrative. It is the incentive to solve the puz- 
zle, so to speak, that fascinates, and we do not hesitate to 
say that the compilers have made Bible study delightful and 
easy for children. We recommend the book to parents, to 
teachers, and to schools. 

THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, PRAGMATISM. By A. V. C. P. 
Huicinga. Boston : Sherman, French & Co. 60 cents. 

In sending forth this criticism of Pragmatism, the author 
expresses the devout hope that many may " by faith learn 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 253 

Jesus as the truth, and so learn to consecrate themselves to 
the truth as it is in Jesus ! " We regret that this essay is not 
better calculated to further the realization of that hope. Prag- 
matism is a somewhat vague philosophy to start with, and the 
author's exposition of it lacks clearness and force. The reader 
will find a much more satisfactory discussion of the subject in 
Theories of Knowledge, by Leslie J. Walker. 

PURE FOODS: THEIR ADULTERATION, NUTRITIVE VALUE 
AND COST. By John C. Olsen, A.M., PhD. New York: 
Ginn & Co. 80 cents. 

Dt. Olsen's little book on pure foods, which has recently 
appeared, is an excellent example of popularized science. It 
treats of a subject that is of importance to all and imparts a 
great deal of technical information, so that it can readily be 
grasped by the ordinary reader, and at the same time afford 
him a few hours of very interesting reading. The book tells 
us not only in general but also in particular, what food is, 
how it is made or obtained, just what its nutritive value is, 
and how it is commonly adulterated. Directions for thirty- 
seven experiments are given at the end of various chapters. 
Most of these are so simple that they place even the ordinary 
housewife in a position to detect many impurities that might 
be in the various food stuffs that she buys. At all events, the 
book would serve admirably for a text book in a course on 
domestic science. Here and there even references to the 
literature are given, but these are altogether too scarce, ar.d 
the reader is left frequently without any means of following 
up the evidence or seeking further information when it seems 
desirable. Such opportunities the author could have increased 
without adding materially to the labor of the publisher. 

DE QUALITATIBUS SENSIBILIBUS ET IN SPECIE DE COLORI- 
BUS ET SONIS. By Hubert Griinder, S.J. St. Louis: B. 
Herder. 50 cents. 

The title of this book might lead one to expect a general 
treatise on sensations from a scholastic point of view. The 
purport of the author is not, however, so extensive, though 
of none the less importance. The problem is one of Episte- 
mology rather than Psychology. It is the long discussed ques- 
tion: Where are we to locate colors and sounds? Are they 



254 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

in objects outside the mind or do they exist truly and properly 
as colors and sounds only in the mind itself ? If we say that 
they exist in the mind alone, are we not involved in some 
kind of Idealism ? There is nothing original in the author's 
answer to these questions. It is already to be found in cur- 
rent text books of scholastic philosophy. He maintains the 
position that colors and sounds reside as such only in the 
mind of the observer, but that they exist fundamentally in 
objects outside the mind. This position, however, is maintained 
with such cogency and so many considerations are brought up 
from modern scientific research that the opposing scholastic 
view, viz., that sensible qualities reside formally in the object 
seems to be forever ruled out of court. Not the least point 
of value in the book is the copious citation of references from 
original sources. There is, however, no classified bibliography, 
which would have added materially to the scientific value of 
the work. 

A CHEVALIER OF OLD FRANCE. By John Harrington Cox. 
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.25. 

It is the so-called Dark Ages that can give the joy of warm 
sunshine to us wearied by the electric glare. Honor, purity, 
and simple piety, the ideals of chivalry, are not only nobler, 
but pleasanter and more human than our universal money- 
getting craze. In education those ideals may easily be made 
a force, especially through the medium of literature. King 
Arthur was after all a greater man than Andrew Carnegie, 
nor does a class of children hesitate which to choose for a 
reading lesson. The literature of chivalry makes a quick ap- 
peal to boys and girls; it gives a safe outlet to the romantic, 
and an impetus to the idealistic in their natures. To many a 
poetry-loving boy the good blade of Sir Galahad is more real 
than his own father's gold-headed cane. This is by way of in- 
troducing a newly published volume by John Harrington Cox, 
A.M , Professor of English Philology in the West Virginia 
University. The second in the author's " Knighthood " series, 
this book is the Chanson de Roland, translated and adapted 
from Old French texts for the use of children between the 
ages of eleven and fourteen. It is the tale of the valor of 
the friends, Roland and Oliver, of the treason of Guenelon, 
and of the reprisals and conquests of Charlemagne a tale of 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 255 

excitement, nobility, and reality. The author is to be con- 
gratulated; his work is along right lines, and should be widely 
appreciated, both in and out of the school- room. 

FRANCISCO FERRER: CRIMINAL CONSPIRATOR, by 

John A. Ryan, D D. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 15 cents.) 
A remarkably restrained tone pervades this brochure, which is 
a critical examination of articles by William Archer, in Mc- 
Clure's Magazine. So far as one can judge impartially, Dr. 
Ryan answers effectually the many peculiar assertions of the 
Englishman. It is not to Spanish law that Dr. Ryan has re- 
course.; he makes his points from a consideration of proce- 
dures in English and American courts of justice, and in mili- 
tary tribunals of America. This is the readier way to bring 
home to Americans the exaggerations and falsehoods circulated 
by the secular and anti-Catholic press throughout this country. 

PERTITUDE: A STUDY IN PHILOSOPHY, by Rev. 

V Aloysius Rotter, SJ. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 50 cents.) 
Within the compass of some ninety pages Father Rotter demon- 
strates what is meant by certitude. He makes three main di- 
visions in his work; the first containing fundamental and nec- 
essary notions in general, the second setting forth the requisites 
for certitude, and the third its properties. With such admira- 
ble clearness and simplicity of language does he prove his 
various theses that the object of his book "to secure a 
greater esteem and love for the philosophy of St. Thomas 
Aquinas" cannot help being attained. One point is particu- 
larly commendable, and that is the entire absence of those 
long quotations from the writings of friends and opponents, 
which so often have no other result than the bewilderment of 
the reader. Admirably written, then, and well printed, this 
little treatise is to be warmly commended to all who seek in- 
formation on a difficult subject. 

PLEA FOR A CATHOLIC PROFESSIONAL LITERA- 
TURE, by Owen L. Lewis. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 5 
cents). This little pamphlet makes a practical and eloquent 
appeal for a more productive scholarship among American 
Catholics to counteract the "one common fallacy, the principle 
of Subjectivism" which tinctures so largely the mass of non- 



256 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

Catholic "Professional Literature." The author uses the word 
professional in a broad sense to cover all subjects outside the 
field of art and belle lettres. His words will find an echo in 
the soul of every right-thinking roan. 

WAIN REPETITIONS, by Cardinal Newman. (St. Louis: 
^ B. Herder. 10 cents). The author's name is more than 
sufficient recommendation for this little extract from The 
Rambler on the manner of vocal prayer. 

CHOICE OF A STATE OF LIFE, by St. Alphonsus Maria 
V de'Liguori, edited by the Rev, J. Magnier, C.SS.R. (St. 
Louis: B. Herder. 15 cents). Father Magnier has gathered 
together in three little pamphlets St. Alphonsus' words on 
" Vocation to the Religious Life, Meditations for Religious, 
and Vocation to the Priesthood." These may be had in 
separate volumes or bound together. 

T I is almost an instinct to look with suspicion upon any 
-* volume that openly confesses itself a collection of Western 
stories. One dreads the usual revolvers, oaths and sombrero- 
topped "kids." But, to these indispensable stage properties are 
added sanity, cleverness and humor in a new book called 
Emetson's Wije, and Other Western Stories, by Florence Finch 
Kelly. The author writes well and entertainingly. (Chicago: 
A. C. McClurg & Co. $1.25). 

T'HE WAR MAKER, by Horace Smith. (Chicago: A. C. 
* McClurg & Co. $1.50.) Of recent years there have been 
a couple of successful attempts to palm off on the public, works 
of fiction as autobiographical or biographical. To the person 
who does not know contemporary American history The War 
Maker will appear a weak attempt at adding to the successful 
number. The exploits of Captain George Boynton are more 
like the wild phantasms of imagination than the adventures of 
a modern rover. They are most unconvincing, and appear 
highly improbable. From New York the Captain drifted every- 
where, and like the detectives of the lurid tales he always 
slipped through danger unscathed, scattering as he went money 
as thickly as the leaves fall in autumn. The book is not re- 
markable for its freedom from rough, uncouth English, and as 
a piece of literature it must take a low place. 



I9H.] NEW BOOKS 57 

JUVENILES : The season's list of books for young readers 
is an unusually large one. The publishers have made 
elaborate preparations to meet the demands of the holiday 
trade, and it is a pleasure to note that the great majority of 
these books have both intrinsic worth and good mechanical 
make-up to recommend them. It will not be difficult to find 
a suitable book for the boy and girl since the best interests 
of young readers have evidently been kept in mind by those 
who are responsible for the launching forth of the latest ju- 
venile?. 

Mother Carey's Chickens, by Kate Douglas Wiggin has 
already won for its gifted author added laurels. Mother 
Carey herself is the influence that moulds most happily the 
characters of her four children. The loss of their father, a 
naval officer, is the circumstance which changes the usual or- 
dering of things in the comparatively affluent household, and 
gives the Carey's an opportunity to show of what stuff they 
are made. How they adapt themselves to a modest country 
home, to frugal living, and to the new life around them, is all 
set forth in the author's inimitable way. We are glad to know 
Miss Nancy and to admit her into our circle of juvenile book 
friends, but, in so doing, we do not forget our allegiance to 
that equally lovable child, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. 
(New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company. $1.50). 

Marcia of the Little House is a story by Emily Calvin 
Blake. There are so many little Marcias in the world, so 
many eldest daughters who have to play the part of little 
mothers where the family is large and money not too plenti- 
ful, that we are sure the little heroine of this story will have 
a whole host of friends before her first season in public is at 
an end. The chapter entitled : " Cutting Tessie's Hair," which 
tells how Marcia resolved to save twenty- five cents to the 
family pocketbook makes delightful reading, and where is the 
reader young or old who will not laugh to tears at Marcia's 
triumph over the detestable duty of darning the family stock- 
ings ? Marcia's affection for her father, her success in win- 
ning recognition for him when the proper time comes, gives 
to the story an interest that will win many hearts. (New 
York: D. Appleton & Co. $1.20). 

To the J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia are the 
children of to-day indebted for the beautiful holiday editions 
VOL. xciv. 17 



25 8 NEW BOOKS [Nov. 

of the juvenile classics which they are publishing. Two of 
the latest of these have just come to us Hans Anderson's 
Fairy Tales and The Chronicles vf Fairy Land by Fergus 
Hume. No praise can be too extravagant for the illustrations 
in color in both books by Maria L. Kirk. They are exquisitely 
and tastefully done, and give an attractive setting to the fairy- 
lore loved by children of many generations. The child who 
finds either of these books near his Christmas stocking (they 
are too serviceable a size to fit inside) will be fortunate indeed. 
Boarding-school stories are ever as dear to youthful hearts 
as dill pickles and just about as beneficial. The latest to 
hand is Tabitha at Ivy Hall, by Ruth Alberta Brown (the Saal- 
field Publishing Co., Akron, Ohio. $1.25). This time the 
young heroine has two troubles; her name, Tabitha Catt, and 
her unnaturally unnatural father. These she contrives to 
spread over three hundred pages of print. 

'THE LIFE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN IN ART, is the 
title of a picture published by William F. Butler (Mil- 
waukee, Wis.). This picture comprises a group of forty- nine 
incidents in the life of the Blessed Mother as painted by the 
great masters. These reproductions have been arranged chron- 
ologically, and under each is given the name of the painter, 
and the city in which the original is located. The picture is 
tastefully and attractively presented, and recommends itself for 
both home and school. (24x30 is the size of the illustration, 
and its cost is $2.) 

DAN AM A AND THE CANAL TO-DAY, by Forbes Lind- 
say. (Boston : L. C. Page & Co. $3). We are all eagerly 
looking forward to the completion of the Panama Canal. 
Meanwhile, since even we hurrying Americans must wait, the 
present volume will give us a very competent notion of how 
far the worker has progressed and of what an immense, almost 
superhuman task the building and completion of this canal 
means. The book includes a history of the various unsuccess- 
ful attempts in the past, is rich in illustration and better still, 
includes a number of helpful maps. 



periobicals, 



Ike Tablet (16 Sept.): France is witnessing serious strikes and 
riots carried on as protests against the high price of 
food. - " The German Centre Party," is an account of 
the history and work of the great German Catholic 
political party. - A report from a sleeping-sickness 
camp in Africa, states that out of four hundred cases 
treated 67 per cent have been sent away as cured. 
The new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica finds a 
plea in its defense among the "Literary Notes" of 
" W. H. K " - A recent article reprinted from The 
Jewish World, has the following to say about the Popes 
as protectors of the Jews: "It would be unjust, as well 
as unhistorical, not to acknowledge the efforts of many 
of the Popes and other high ecclesiastical dignitaries to 
accord them the protection of the Church." 
(23 Sept.): "Tu es Petrus and the Critics." A recent 
critic of the Papal claims, in discussing the famous 
Petrine text (Matt. xvi. 18-19), sees ' n it no support 
for the Papacy, and states that "the (Catholic) position 
has been long abandoned by scholars." He is confronted, 
however, with the testimony of no less than ten "ad- 
vanced critics," all " utterly opposed " to the Papacy, 
who admit " that, if authentic, the Catholic position is 
sound," and that Matt. xvi. 18-19, "does make for the 
Roman Primacy strongly." 

(30 Sept.): A huge meeting of Ulstermen was lately 
held in Belfast. It declared Ulster's determination to 
remain within the Union and under no circumstances 
to " accept Home Rule or acknowledge a government 
which was not responsible to the Imperial Parliament." 
- " The Pense"es of Pascal " (an Impression), by the 
Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P. - "Rescue Work and 
Girl -Mothers," a paper read at the meeting of the 
Ladies of Charity at the Newcastle Congress by Mrs. 
V. M. Crawford. 

The National Review (Oct.) : " Episodes of the Month " dis- 



26o FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

cusses at great length the defeat of the Reciprocity 
Movement in the recent Canadian election. The Na- 
tional is jubilant over the returns. That the Tory 

Party is the one vehicle for liberty and for real prog- 
ress is the opinion expressed by Lord Willoughby de 

Brooke in his article, "The Tory Tradition." "The 

Crisis in Consols," by W. R. Lawson, takes exception 
to England's policy of allowing its credit, its public 
funds, and the savings of its people to be made the 

plaything of party politics. "In Japanese Byways," 

E. Bruce Mitford gives a refreshing picture cf life and 
customs in the interior of Japan. ^Pelham Edgar con- 
tributes a study of " Voltaire and His Age." " Never 
was a mind so brilliant, so utterly destitute of the re- 
ligious sense as was the mind of Voltaire." " The 

Problem of South Africa," by " Voortrekker," shows 
that South Africa is poor in its men and women, and 
suggests as a remedy, that the tides of emigration be 
directed in the right lines, that white men and women 
be put on the land, and a fruitful living made possible 
for them. 

The Crucible (Sept.): "A Notable Book," by the Editor, is a 
review of a recently published volume, The Education 
of Catholic Gitls," by Janet Erskine Stuart. ^Start- 
ling facts showing the advance in England of an anti- 
Christian propaganda, are given by Irene Hernaman, in 

her paper, " The Socialist Sunday School." Elizabeth 

Walmsley, gives evidence that little provision is made 
at the various Canadian ports for the reception, tem- 
porary housing and employment of Catholic emigrant 
women, in whose interests the author has made a study 

of existing organizations. Margaret Fletcher describes 

the recent Eucharistic Congress at Madrid as "a na- 
tional wave of devotion and triumph, engulfing and ab- 
sorbing the tiny foreign tributaries." In "The Place 
of the Catholic College Girl in the Educational World," 
Delia Ford says, "that the Catholic college girl is a 
new type of the mulier Jortis we are all looking for." 

The Dublin Review (Oct.): "A Unionist and a Liberal View 
of 'the Passing of the Parliament Bill'" the one coir- 
pares Asquith to Mirabeau and fears a like end ; the 



.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 261 

other looks upon it as a splendid vindication of the will 

of the people. Albert A. Cock contributes thirty 

pages on Francis Thompson. Besides Wordsworth's in- 
tuitive grasp of Nature's spiritual significance, the ecstasy 
of Shelley, and Tennyson's melodies, Thompson pos- 
sessed " all the virility of Browning without his obsti- 
nate involutions of thought and lacunae of argument." 

"Some Modern Martyrs of the French Revolution," 

by W. S. Lilly. Charlotte Balfour points out that 

Fiona Macleod entirely missed the Christian note in the 
Celtic Legends. 

The Irish Theological Quarterly (Oct.): The Rev. T. Slater, 
S.J., in his treatise on "Eugenics and Moral Theology" 
analyzes this recently-born science on heredity and 
clearly shows that the ends it seeks to accomplish can- 
not be attained except at the sacrifice of moral princi- 
ples. The means thus far suggested to obtain the de- 
sired end of improving the standard of human kind 
seriously interferes with the marriage rights guaranteed 
to all except those who voluntarily relinquish them and 
are contrary to the dictates of Catholic Moral Theology. 

In discussing "The Sentences of Anselm of Loan 

and Their Place in the Codification of Theology during 
the Twelfth Century," the Rev. J. Ghellneck, S.J., says 
that while Anselm's work cannot claim a place among 
the front rank of twelfth century theologians, his in- 
fluence on the scholars of that day surely entitles him 
to a prominence above the ordinary. 

Expository Times (Oct) : In his article on " The Present Theo- 
logical Situation," the Rev. J. M. Shaw makes an appeal 
for a restatement of theology along the lines of com- 
parative religion and of religious psychology. The 

Rev. W. F. Cobb, D D., in "The Gift of Healing in 
the Church," assures us that this same power, which 
was common in Apostolic times and was revived by the 
Saints of the Middle Ages, flourishes even to-day, 
wherever the soil is congenial that is, wherever there 
is faith. 

The Month (Oct.): "The Laity and the Unconsecrated Chalice," 
is the title of an article by the Rev. Herbert Thurston, 
which deals with a custom which, though obsolete, is 



262 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

still to be found in even the latest editions of the Mis- 
sale Romanum. The custom referred to is that of offer- 
ing to the communicant a vessel containing wine and 
water as a purification. The Rev. C. C. Martindale 
under the caption " Inter-Racial Problems," discusses 
some of the important questions which were considered 
at The First Universal Race Congress whose purpose 
was to encourage a fuller understandiig and a heartier 
co-operation between the peoples of the West and 
East, so-called white and colored peoples.' In the 
article "The Encyclopedia Britannica and the History 
of the Church," the Rev. A. Keogh shows that the 
eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica when 
viewed from a Catholic standpoint, is unscholarly and 
sectarian in its treatment of religious subjects, and also 
that only a comparatively small number of articles 
purely Catholic, were written by Catholics. 
Le Correspondant (25 Sept.): Mgr. De Guebriant in his article 
entitled: "The Chinese Question," dispels the illusions 
hitherto entertained about China's method of government, 
natural resources and commercial enterprises by a state- 
ment of the actual conditions. He also gives a descrip- 
tion of the work of Catholic missionaries and what the 

Church hopes to accomplish in the future. "A Danger 

for Our Finances," by A. Liebaut, discusses the three de- 
grees of apprenticeship embodied in M. Villemin's Law 
passed in 1900. A. Liebaut argues for a milder inter- 
pretation of the law; a salary for apprentices and high 
schools and colleges for technical training." The 
Centenary of the University of Christiania," by L. 
Delavaud relates the history of Norway's University 
since its inception in 1811, describing the wotk accom- 
plished since this time and the illustrious scholars who 

have taught there. Jean Lemoine presents his second 

and last installment of " A New Historian of the 
Fronde," presenting another view of the French Civil 
War taken from the private papers and letters of 

Chevalier de Sevigne. " Impressions of Jersey," by 

Ernest Tissot, describes the sceneiy and customs of 
the island, and the house occupied by Victor Hugo 
during his four years' exile from France. 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 263 

Revue Pratique d ' Apologetique (15 Sept.): " The Religious Life 
of Clerics." This paper is a call to the secular priest- 
hood for a stricter conformity to their vocation, and 
suggests that they adopt a rule of life for themselves, 
after the pattern of the religious clergy. A. Lesetrc 
contributes an article on "Preaching." The preacher 
should use the word of Scripture. St. Paul said his 
speech was not the persuasive words of human wisdom 
and Leo XIII. that Scripture gives to the preacher's 
eloquence a "victorious power." 

(i Oct.): "Catholic Conceptions of the Dogmas of the 
Redemption" by J. Riviere. The article as the title 
indicates is chiefly historical. References to the doc- 
trine from early times are first reviewed, then are 
quoted the definitions of the Councils of Trent and of 
the Vatican. The second part of the article is a con- 
sideration of the idea of the Redemption in the Old 

and New Testaments and in Tradition. "The Peril 

of Mediocrity " is a paper of exhortation to priests to 
rise above what is mediocre. 

Revue Thomisle (Sept.-Oct.) : The leading article is by Pere 
Perret, O.P., on "The Magnificat." The author dis- 
cusses the question as to whether this passage in 
St. Luke is really a canticle of the Blessed Virgin ; 

he then gives an interpretation of the text. R. P. 

Audin, S.C.J., writes on "The Method of Instruction 

in Scholastic Philosophy." The account of " The 

Thomistic Movement in the Eighteenth Century," is 
continued by Pere Coulon, O.P. The value of the 
contribution of the " Bibliotheque Casanate " to the re- 
vival of " Thomistic Theology " is the subject matter of 

the paper. There is a reply to Bonyssonic by Pere 

Mclizan, O.P., on " The Hypothesis of Spontaneous 
Generation." 

Etudes (Sept. 5): Sainte-Marie Perrin emphasizes the import- 
ance of symbolism in mediaeval religious architecture 
and illustrates this from the exterior of Notre Dame de 

Fourviere. In an extract from his forthcoming Lije 

oj St. Francis Xavier, Alexander Brou pictures the sad 
state of Portuguese Asia in 1542. Greed ruled the 
Europeans. The clergy were few and the newly bap- 



264 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

tized, having had little instruction, were Christians only 
in name. Pierre Rousselot praises the recent philo- 
sophical treatise on St. Thomas Aquinas, by A. D. Ser- 

tillanges. J. de la Serviere describes a trip through 

the newly evangelized Chinese province of Kiang-nan. 

Adhemar d'Ales attacks the views of Hugo Koch 

on " St. Cyprian and the Roman Primacy." According 
to Koch, Our Lord began by confiding apostolic powers 
to St. Peter alone, and this numerical unity is an image 
and type of the moral unity which he designed. Later 
on, equal powers were given to each of the other 
Apostles. Anton Seitz has published a criticism of 
Koch's interpretation. 

(20 Sept.): M. Aulard has written a book on Napo- 
leon and public instruction ; it deals largely with the 
establishment and organization of the imperial univer- 
sity and with the relation of the minister Fontanes to 
ecclesiastical schools. Paul Dudon holds the general 
conclusions to be unsupported by the evidence. 
Jean Hachin shows that the Champagne riots were 
caused by failure of the crop, the adulteration of the 
wine by the merchants, and the legal attempt to limit 
geographically, the champagne district. He favors the 
organization of the growers. 

La Revue du Monde (1-15 Oct.): Continuing the exposition 
of the " School Question in the Canadian Northwest," M. 
Savaete presents letters, newspaper notices, dispatches, 
etc., to show the influence of the appointment and 
presence of the Apostolic Delegate in Canada from the 
point of view of the Minority Party and its suspicion 
of the bad faith of the government in its use of and 

intercourse with Mgr. Merry del Val. Commander 

Silvestre gives details of the "Attack" and "After the 
Attack" of the "English Fireships in the Roadstead 

of the Island of Aix in 1809." M. Sicard's second 

conference on " God and Man," treats of the soul as 
the "Paradise of delight" of the Divine Gardener. 
A further treachery of Bismarck in the affairs of Alsace- 
Lorraine in 1903, as shown by M. de St. Vallier, Min- 
ister Plenipotentiary of the French Government, forms 
the sixth chapter of M. Bonnal de Ganges' article on 



19 ii.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 265 

"The Alsace-Lorraine of Bismarck." A. Barbier pre- 
sents some new fables in verse after de la Fontaine. 
P. At treats of the "Physiology of Catholic Lib- 
erals "from an anonymous article in the Cctrtsfottdant 
on "The Pope and Liberty." His analysis accuses the 
unknown writer of a false interpretation of the Encycli- 
cals of Leo XIII., and draws attention to the fact that 
Rights may be tolerated by the Church without being 
acknowledged as Positive, and applied to countries where 
religious unity does not exist without becoming suitable 
for those that retain unity of faith. 

Revue -du Clergc Franfais (i Sept.): H. Lesetre contributes an 
article, entitled : " Has the Redemption Been a Failure ? " 
which is concerned with the question of the salvation 
of those before and after the time of our Lord, who had 
no adequate knowledge of revelation so far as appear- 
ances go. F. Martin treats of *' The Gospel Parables 

in Painting." J. Riviere reviews a number of late 

monographs, among them "The Mystery of the Redemp- 
tion," by Edouard Hugon, O.P.; " The Priesthood and 
Sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ," by J. Grimal, S.M. ; 
also a number of late works on the sacerdotal vocation. 

E. Vacandard writes of " Pope Damasus and the 

Veneration of the Saints." "The Liberty of Teach- 
ing," by Mgr. Mignot, comments on the anomaly of a 
state professing liberty and equality while denying to 
parents the fundamental right to a control of their own 
children's education. R. Doumic writes of "The Brutal 
Theatre," which, he complains, often "depoetizes" and 
dehumanizes love, to leave subsisting in its place only 

a bestial instinct. S. Duchesne gives a discourse on 

" Progress and Tradition." 

(15 Sept): Leon Desers gives an account of the work 
of " The Seventh Diocesan Congress of Paris." Follow- 
ing are the subjects which occupied it: "Works of Re- 
ligion and Piety," "The Sick Poor of Paris," "Group- 
ing of Catholic Action." E. Vacandard presents a 

"Chronicle of Ecclesiastical History." Some of the 
works he notices are: "Religious Intolerance and Poli- 
tics," by A. Bouche-Leclercq ; three works on the ques- 
tion of Pope Liberius, by Fedele Savio; "The Inquisi- 



266 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

tion, the Times, the Causes, the Facts," by Maurice 
Landrieux. 

(i Oct.): J. Bousquet begins a historical sketch of the 
"Various Schisms of the Orient," in which he presents 
the relations of the Eastern Churches to the Bishop of 
Rome, of the Byzantine Emperors and Patriarchs, in re- 
gard to ruling the Church. G. Planque, writing of 

"The Religious Movement in English speaking Coun- 
tries," takes up especially the "non-conformists" and 
treats of their religious and social works, their missions, 
revivals, etc. Ch. Urbain contributes an article, en- 
titled " History and Erudition," in which he treats 
briefly a number of topics regarding literary personages. 
Mgr. Lobbedey writes of "The Professional Asso- 
ciations in Relation to the State." He considers the 
theory of their respective rights, the causes oi the con- 
flicts which divide them, and the remedies to heal or 
at least diminish the evil. 

Annales de Philosophic Chrfaienne (Sept): A. Leger continues 
his study on the "Doctrine of Wesley. " P. Vulliaud 
writes of "The Esoteric Doctrine of the Jews, apropos 
of the publication of Sepher-ha-Zohar " (The Book ef 
Splendor). The study of this book is important, among 
other reasons, because of its messianic bearing, its use 
in explaining certain obscurities in the texts of the New 
Testament, and its aid in biblical exigesis. 

Chronique Sociale de France (Aug-Sept.) : In " Dependence and 
Liberty," Abbe Tiberghien maintains that "man is free 
but at the same time dependent, and all his glory con- 
sists in freely accepting his dependence." He points 
out that despite the present age's worship of the words 
"liberty and independence," some of its strongest 
movements insist upon solidarity and social interde- 
pendence. 

Stimmen aus Maria Laach: Under the title "The French 
Novel of the Present," J. Overmans, S.J., describes the 
result of Andre Billy, a French editor, proposing the 
question: "In what direction will the novel develop?" 
He notes a remarkable lack of all moral and religious 

influences in the answers. Cl. Blume, S.J., thinks it 

well established that the Te Deum existed, at least in 



.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 267 

embryo, before St. Ambrose. A second article is to 

follow. A. Koch, S.J., traces the history of " Adult 

schools" from the sixteenth century. 

La Scuola Cattolica (August): The first article discusses the 
reforms instituted by the Holy Father in Italian semi- 
naries and deals extensively with the objections that 

have been raised against various of the provisions. 

"The Educational Mission of the Mother" (Sac. Dott. 
Cherubino Villa) is an eloquent defence of the rights 
and duties of the mother in the bringing up of her 

offspring. The series on the "Messianic plan" is 

continued by Adolfo Cellini. "The School of Lam- 

menais," by Guiseppe Piovano begins a study of Lam- 
menais and the influence that he exerted on his con- 
temporaries. Canon Marchini discusses the doctrine 

of the Church on Scriptural inerrancy and defends his 
work contra modernistas against objections raised by his 
critics, and takes his stand firmly on the Ptovidentissi- 
mus Deus of Leo XIII. 

La Civilta Cattolica (16 Sept.): The leading article deals with 
the extraordinary manifestations of interest and sym- 
pathy, even in the most unexpected quarters, called 
forth by the recent sickness of the Holy Father. 
"The oldest account of the Deluge" reviews Hilprecht's 
work on the Nippir temple library and Kendal Harris* 
" Odes and Psalms of Solomon." Hilprecht's Babylon- 
ian fragments, closely agreeing with Genesis are referred 
to a period 2400-2100 B.C. or about the time of Ab- 
raham. Father Swan's Life of St. Francis Borgia 

containing some new matter is reviewed at length, as 
is also Nicoles Franco's critique of the work of Archi- 
mandrite Zigarimos on Church Unity. The full text 
of the decision of the Court of Appeal confirming the 
condemnation of the apostate Verdisi is given; among 
other things it specifically and without qualification rec- 
ognizes the " professional secret "in the seal of con- 
fession. 

Espaiia y America (Sept.): The leading article is a vindication 
of the life of Yovellanos who died in 1811. Father B. 
Martinez admires greatly Jaspar Melchor de Yovellanos, 
the able politician, the universal genius, the noble man, 



268 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov. 

the great lover of his country who governed Spain un- 
til the dawn of 1789, and terms him the wisest of the 
Bourbons. Forsaken in his old age he died broken- 
hearted over the evil fortune of his country. 

Rodriguez continues his study of the Spaniards in 
search of gold, and treats in this second article of the 
particular expedition of Herman Perez de Quesada 
an expedition that brought nothing to its leader 
but bitterness and disappointment, and which forced 
him to learn the sad lesson, taught, it is said, by 

Charles V., " Fortune favors youth only." P. N. de 

Medio gives a very interesting article on the question 
of energy. He aims to show that the opposition made 
to the philosophic axiom, " nothing is lost " is well 
grounded; and that the second part of that axiom, 
" nothing is created" is not exactly true. "Allegory 
in Literature " by P. M. Velez. Allegory is a beautiful 
manifestation, natural and legitimate, of the human mind 
in literature, particularly in the Biblical and European 
literature of the Middle Ages. Three points divide this 
study ; the genesis of allegory in literature, its manifest- 
ation in universal literature, its pre-eminence and par- 
ticular importance in Biblical and European literature 
in the Middle Ages, especially in the Italian and Span- 
ish literature of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth 

centuries. M. P. Y. Rodriguez continues his able 

study of the quadruple version of Genesis from the 
unedited work of Pedro Ciruelo. 



IRecent Events. 

In the face of a somewhat dis- 
France. heartening series cf misfortunes, 

which may be the indication of 

even deeper-seated evils, the French people have maintained 
an unperturbed firmness, and have set themselves to work to 
find suitable remedies. The high price of food, which in com- 
mon with the rest of the world, has been felt by the French, 
was the cause of a new kind of resistance on the part of the 
working-classes. Hitherto, this resistance has taken the foim 
of strikes by the laborers, men as a rule, for an increase of 
wages. In this case it was the housewives who, at the be- 
ginning, took the leading part, and they took action not for 
higher wages but for lower prices. They offered what they 
thought was reasonable, and if that was not accepted they 
adopted what is now called direct action, that is to say, they 
proceeded to destroy the articles which they could not purchase. 
Things went so far in many parts of France that troops had 
to be called out for the suppression of the distutbances. Of 
these disturbances the notorious General Confederation of 
Labor took advantage to regain its recently waning influence. 
The government did not limit its efforts to the suppression 
by force of these riotous proceedings. It appointed a Commis- 
sion to make inquiries into the causes of the increase of 
prices, and to suggest remedies. This Commission reported 
within a few days and made certain recommendations for tbe 
alleviation of the evils, and tending to the reduction of prices, 
leaving, however, the Tariff unaltered. The most far-reachirg 
proposal of all will form a part of the next year's Budget. A 
measure is to be brought in for the establishment of munici- 
pal butchers' and bakers' shops, which it is hoped will set a 
standard of prices for the trades. It is also intended to cere- 
bat the increase of rents by establishing in the large towns 
municipal lodgings, for which a low rental will be charged. 
These proposals did not at once bring about peace. Riots 
continued to take place in all parts of France. In a suburb 
of Paris barricades were erected. In some places the munici- 
pal authorities fixed by public ordinance the rate at which 
provisions should be sold, in others they opened stores of 



270 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

their own. Gradually the disturbances came to an end, more 
or less complete, the government having presented a firm 
front to the agitators, and having secured the arrest and im- 
prisonment of a large number of the rioters. When taken in 
connection with the postal and railway strikes of last year, 
the Champagne riots of last spring, and the numerous acts of 
Sabotage which have been taking place for a long time, it is 
clear that there is in existence a widespread and deeply- 
seated feeling of discontent among large bodies of the people 
and that this cannot but be a cause of anxiety as to what the 
near future may bring forth. 

In a department of the public service, the theft of Leo- 
nardo de Vinci's " Mona Lisa " has revealed the fact that 
there has existed for a long time widespread demoralization 
a demoralization which reflects no credit on the civic virtue 
of the Third Republic emancipated though it boasts that it is 
from all clerical influences. In fact, the culpable carelessness 
of the officials which rendered such a theft possible is directly 
due to the present political system, for the National Museums 
and Art Galleries have come to be the dumping-ground of 
the satellites of ministers and of members of the Assembly 
and Senate. Several of the conservators of the Louvre were 
appointed merely because they were faithful followers of some 
politician or other, possessing absolutely no qualification for 
the offi:es to which they were appointed, and making no 
effort to fulfill the duties thereof. A justification offered by 
the Postal employees for their strike some time ago, was 
that meritorious services were not rewarded by promotion and 
increase of pay, the choice offices being rilled by the appoin- 
tees of members of the Assembly or other politicians. 

To the restoration of the Navy to the position which it 
formerly occupied, and which it had lost through similar mal- 
administration and neglect on the part of some of his prede- 
cessors as Minister of Marine, and of the naval officials, M. 
Dslcasse has been devoting long-continued and earnest effort. 
At the review which took place at Toulon early in Septem- 
ber, it was thought by France and by the world, that he had 
demonstrated the success of these efforts. A really imposing 
spectacle was presented of 90 war vessels, none of which 
were " lame ducks." Seldom or never has there been mani- 
fested so great enthusiasm as when the President of the Re- 



I9II.] RECENT EVENTS 271 

public reviewed this mighty fleet. In the speeches made on 
the occasion it was declared that the Navy had now attained a 
high standard of preparedness. The command of the sea was 
recognized to be necessary for the efficient defence of the 
coasts of France. The Navy must, therefore, be as ready as 
the Army. The review was looked upon as marking its re- 
generation, restoration from the rank from which it had fallen 
as the result of the pernicious policy of demagogues and other 
political wreckers. 

A few weeks afterwards, however, these anticipations were 
doomed to disappointment. Discontent arose among the la- 
borers' in the dockyards, and grave apprehensions were felt 
that they would manifest their feelings by preventing the launch 
of the last two warships which France has built. Great efforts 
prevented so untimely a demonstration, and the launch passed 
off quietly. A few days after the review at Toulon by the 
premature explosion of a shell on one of the cruisers, nine 
officers and men were killed and seven wounded. The crown- 
ing disaster took place five days later when the Libcrte was 
blown up and completely wrecked with the loss of many lives. 
Grave injury was also done to another battleship and three 
others suffered in a less degree. It is said, in fact, that never 
in the time of peace has any navy suffered such terrible loss 
of life and damage. This catastrophe is a grave disaster to 
the French Navy, for although the Libertc was not one of the 
very largest of its vessels, its destruction breaks up the homo- 
geneity of the second Squadron to which it belonged and is 
considered so important as not to be incapable in certain con- 
tingencies of affecting the balance of naval power in Europe. 
Estimates for the immediate construction of a vessel to take 
its place are to be presented to Parliament immediately after 
it opens. Conjecture of course is rife as to the cause of the 
disaster. On high authority it is asserted that it was due to 
the spontaneous combustion of a certain powder, the same 
kind as that to which the loss of the Jena four years ago was 
said to be due. The question arises who is responsible for 
the supply of a powder already proved so dangerous. Sug- 
gestions are made that the explosion may have been due to 
the action of some among the discontented whether with the 
state of the Navy or that of the country at large, and although 
this may be thought almost incredible it cannot be said to be 



272 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

utterly impossible, in view of the fact that there are not a 
few among the French proletariat who advocate a general 
strike in the event of France being involved in war. The 
official inquiry will, of course, be held to discover, if it is 
possible, the real cause. 

The last news is to the effect that 
France, Germany and Morocco. France and Germany have arrived 

at an agreement, but as the same 

thing has been said some half a dozen times, it may be 
prudent not to put too much confidence in its truth. If, 
however, it should be true, by the agreement Germany rec- 
ognizes the right of France to assume a Protectorate over 
Morocco under certain conditions, the details of which are 
not disclosed, which France accepts and Germany allows. 
The other Powers concerned, the signatories of the Act 
of Algeciras, have also to give their consent to the new ar- 
rangement. Little difficulty, however, is expected in obtain- 
ing this consent, except perchance, in the case of Spain. Spain 
has unquestionable rights which France is bound to recognize, 
but whether an agreement can be reached as to their precise 
nature is not yet quite certain, especially as Spain seems to 
believe, if the utterances of the Premier represent the feel- 
ing of the people that her claims stand in danger of being ig- 
nored by both Germany and France, and to be determined to 
go so far as to make war in defence of them. The other part 
of the proposed agreement between France and Germany has 
not yet been reached, nor is it quite certain that it will be. 
As a compensation for her recognition of the uncontrolled 
supremacy of France in Morocco, Germany demands an in- 
crease of her own territory at the expense of France. A large 
part of the French Congo is asked for. Considerable reluc- 
tance is being shown in France to make this cession of terri- 
tory, and of course should it be' refused, the whole agreement 
will fall through. Even in that case war need not be antici- 
pated. Not that France is afraid of a war. She looks upon 
her army as equal to any in Europe, both in quantity and 
quality, and while not eager for the fray is ready for it. But 
there is every reason to expect a peaceful solution. 

As to the rights and wrongs of the question which led to 
the discussions that have taken place it is not easy to form 



i9ii.] RECENT EVENTS 273 

an opinion. The French Expedition to Fez is declared by 
Germany to have been a breach of the Algeciras Act, and 
consequently, to have nullified the agreement made by Ger- 
many with France in 1509. On the other hand, France will 
not admit that this expedition constituted a breach of the 
Act, but allows that it was an extension. However, France 
had no love for the Act. It had been forced upon her through 
the efforts of Germany, and when the latter showed herself 
willing, for a consideration, to set it aside, she took the op- 
portunity of securing that freedom of action of which it had 
deprived her. If the outcome of all should be that the power 
of the Sultan is destroyed and his cruel tyranny put an end 
to, the world will have reason to rejoice that upon yet one 
more of its dark places some degree of light has arisen. 

Germany has been less perturbed 
Germany. than any other of the great Pow- 

ers and some of the smaller 

ones. The conversations with France about Morocco have, of 
course, held the first place in the mind of the public. The 
Navy League has thought it necessary to break the silence 
which it had imposed upon itself on account of these conver- 
sations. It has made a vigorous appeal for a rapid fulfillment 
of its demand for filling up " the serious gaps in Germany's 
naval armaments." For this purpose the programme of con- 
struction should be altered and several more large cruisers 
than it contemplates should be built. It calls upon the gov- 
ernment to bring in a Budget Bill satisfying these require- 
ments. 

The Social Democratic Congress has been held at Jena, 
and made an earnest protest against a man-murdering war 
between civilized peoples. It characterizes the promoters of 
German mining claims abroad as pirates, and calls upon the 
German workingman to employ every means to prevent a 
world-wide war. Whatever may be said against German So- 
cialists in other respects, they deserve praise for the resistance 
they offer to offensive wars. And that this resistance is looked 
upon with favor by large numbers of Germans, seems to be 
shown by the fact that the Social Democrats have wrested a 
seat from the Centre Party which had been held by the latter 
from the beginning of the Empire. 
VOL. xciv. 1 8 



274 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

The Lord Mayor of London has 

Austria-Hungary. been paying a State visit to Vienna 

and was received by the Emperor 

Francis Joseph and his people with the utmost cordiality. 
This visit may tend to remove the coolness which in some de- 
gree has continued to exist between the two countries ever 
since the opposition offered by Great Britain to the annexa- 
tion of the Provinces. 

For a long time the peaceful quiet of Vienna has remained 
unbroken. There have been from time to time large demon- 
strations of popular feeling as when the Socialists made their 
great demonstration some years ago. But Austria as well as 
the rest of the world, is suffering from the high prices of food. 
The Social Democrats made this the occasion of riotous pro- 
ceedings which were more violent and sanguinary than were 
those in France. The government was held to be responsible 
for not having taken any action to remedy the evils of which 
complaint had long been made. The troops had to be called 
out, and they did not spare the rioters; nor did the latter 
refrain from doing all possible injury in order to make, as 
they called it, " a demonstration of despair." 

The riots were not confined to the capital; in many other 
places there were scenes of disorder. There is no doubt that 
the cost of living has risen in Austria to an almost intoler- 
able height, nor has the Austrian government been so willing 
to take steps to remedy the evil as has the French. Indeed, 
it is hard to see what it can do, for the country owing to the 
military measures of two years ago has had to bear addi- 
tional taxation and cannot afford to reduce the protective 
duties which are one main cause of the high prices. 

The riots also made it clear that there exists in Austria a 
party ready for a revolution. "Down with government," 
"Hurrah for the revolution" were among the shouts raised 
by the crowds. "Down with the soldiers; we do not need 
an army, we want bread " was a popular cry, not without 
some justification under the circumstances. The feeling is 
general that the government has failed to take into suffi- 
cient account the pressing needs of the city population. The 
Prussian Ministry has been willing to learn from the misfor- 
tune of their neighbors, and has introduced an emergency 
tariff on the Prussian railways, whereby the transport of vari- 



RECENT EVENTS 275 

ous articles is reduced by fifty per cent. A scheme has also 
been considered enabling Poor Law authorities to distribute 
certain articles of food at or below cost price. Austria has 
since followed the example of Prussia in reducing by one- 
half the railway tariff on certain articles of food. 

Considerable discussion has taken place with reference to 
a change that has taken place in the war department common 
to Austria and Hungary. The former Minister has resigned, 
and his resignation, rumor says, is due to a disagreement with 
the Heir-Apparent to the Throne, although the late Minister 
denies that any unconstitutional influences have been at work. 
The chief importance of the resignation is the possibility that 
it may lead to differences with Hungary, as he was the author 
of a Bill which is now under discussion in the Hungarian Par- 
liament. The relations between Hungary and Austria are still 
exceptionally good. No more has yet been heard of the Ui i- 
versal Suffrage Bill so long promised. 

The death of M. Stolypin is from 
Russia. every point of view a great calam- 

ity, but there is reason to hope 

that it will not prove so overwhelming as some have thought, 
nor involve the destruction of constitutional government or 
a return to the ancient absolutism. It may, indeed, be the 
case that he had finished his work; for the quarrel with the 
Duma, which his conduct in the matter of the Bill for the Po- 
lish Zemstva had precipitated, may have finally destroyed his 
influence with the Legislature. It will be remembered that in 
his anxiety to pass this Bill into law after it had been rejected 
by the Senate, M. Stolypin prorogued the Duma for three 
days, creating thereby an artificial vacation, and in the inter- 
val effected his purpose by availing himself of the provision 
in the Constitution which enables the Tsar to make temporaty 
laws in extraordinary circumstances without the concurrence 
of the Duma. This arbitrary and tricky way of proceeding, 
alienated so many of his supporters, that he incurred the cen- 
sure of the Duma, and it had, in consequence, become very 
doubtful whether he would have been able, had he survived, 
to regain its confidence, or to pass the temporary into 
a permanent Law. His successor as Prime Minister, it is 
satisfactory to be able to say, has been a coadjutor of M. 



276 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

Stolypin for many years, and there is reason to think that 
there will be no reversion to autocracy. In this case the 
glory of having been one of the foundation stones of or- 
derly government for this mighty Empire will belong to M. 
Stolypin. He took his stand midway between absolutism 
and anarchy. The first Duma was dissolved by him, because 
it wished all in a day to attain complete control, not only 
ot the making of the laws, but also of the administration. It 
wished to make the Cabinet responsible to Parliament in the 
same way as it is in Great Britain, going one step farther 
than Germany has yet gone, and for the matter of that, far- 
ther than the United States has gone. The second Duma M. 
Stolypin dissolved, because not a few of its members had en- 
tered into a conspiracy to seduce the Army from its allegiance, 
and the Duma was unwilling to allow these members to be 
prosecuted. With the third and still existing Duma M. Stoly- 
pin has been able to work for four years or thereabouts, and 
to go a long way towards accomplishing what he himself de- 
scribed as the superhuman task of bridging over the chasm 
between autocracy and constitutional government. Although 
it may be premature to be sure that success has been finally 
attained, it may at least be said that there are good grounds 
for hope, and that whatever has been accomplished is due, in 
a large measure, to M. Stolypin, since he, when sorely tempted 
by the conduct of First and Second Dumas to relinquish the 
task and to revert to absolutism, gave his support to the Tsar, 
in the endeavor to establish the Constitution on a firm basis. 
To M. Stolypin also is due that measure of agrarian reform 
which has gone far to satisfy the demands of the peasantry 
that they should be made the owners of the land a measure 
which has cut the ground under the feet of revolutionary an- 
archists by giving contentment to the most numerous part of 
the population. On the other hand, he is accused of excessive 
severity in the measures which he took for the repression of 
the revolution. But it must be remembered that things had 
gone so far in Russia that the country seemed on the brink 
of dissolution, and of a reversion to barbaric anarchy. More- 
over, why it should be so we do not know, but it seems to 
be undeniable that a large number of the Russian officials seem 
to have lost all sense of right and wrong. The police, who 
are supposed to maintain order, have among their number 



i9".] RECENT EVENTS 277 

agents of the revolution. The man who assassinated M. Stoly- 
pin was a member of the secret police force and of an anar- 
chic society at the same time. So that it is not fair to criti- 
cize from our point of view the measures that may be deemed 
necessary to remedy so bad a state of things. A more justi- 
fiable criticism of M. Stolypin would be his treatment of the 
subject nationalities. To him is due the law of last year, 
which has in principle deprived Finland of its chartered rights. 
Measures detrimental to the economic well-being of the Polish 
peasantry were supported by him, and, in fact, were the cause 
of his quarrel with the Duma. He has also treated with harsh- 
ness the Catholic Clergy of Poland. But it must be remem- 
bered that as it has been said about art, so in the develop- 
ment of a nation's life "all good design has always been and 
always will be founded upon the centuries of good that have 
gone before. Original work must come as a natural growth 
in continuation of what has gone before, never by way of 
antithesis." M. Stolypin has been compared to an English 
Tory. Tories may be out of place in the England of to-day, 
but they had a good share in making England what it is, and 
in preparing the way for the existent Radicals. In fact, they 
did a work which present-day Radicals could never have ac- 
complished. And so it may well be the case that M. Stoly- 
pin's work has been the necessary preparation for the per- 
manent establishment of a much more popular form of govern- 
ment for Russia. 

The new Premier, M. Kokovtsoff, has been for many years 
one of the most prominent members of the government. As 
Minister of Finance he has wielded sway over the greatest 
department of the State. He has been brought especially into 
the closest touch with the commerce of the country and the 
industries of the people, with their needs and wants, and he 
is not, therefore, likely to be in favor of warlike measures, 
especially as he had an intimate experience of the cost of the 
war with Japan, having had to reorganize the finances after 
that war. So successful has he been in this, that although, 
when he entered upon the task in 1906, there was a deficit of 
eighty million dollars, in the present year, without the aid of 
loans there is a free balance in the Treasury of two hundred 
and fifty millions. The development of Russia's natural re- 
sources and of her commerce is in his opinion the most im- 



278 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

portant interest of the Empire. As regards the Constitution, 
on its introduction he was not a supporter of it; but he has 
since repeatedly declared that it would be folly to diminish 
or to withdraw, what has once been promised or given; and 
he is, therefore, opposed to any great change of policy. Of 
the Triple Entente he has always been a stanch adherent. 
Hopes, may, therefore, be entertained that the death of M. 
Stolypin will not lead to reaction. In fact, the Tsar himself 
has proved a stanch supporter of the Constitution, and has 
regained popularity. A few years ago he lived a life worse 
than that of a prisoner, for while a prisoner is safe, the Tsar 
was in constant danger of assassination. Now he is acclaimed 
by vast crowds of his people whenever he appears in public. 

One good thing, at least, seems likely to result irom the 
recent crime. The Secret Police Force, a body of men which 
is both demoralized and demoralizing, has proved itself ineffi- 
cient a thing which is worse in the eyes of its employers' 
A Bill for the reorganization of the Police Force of Russia. 
as a whole, is to be introduced into the next Session of the 
Duma, and among its proposals is the complete suppression 
of the Secret Police called the okhrana. The police are to be 
put upon quite a different footing, and it is to be hoped that 
the Empire may be freed from the hateful rule of spies and 
informers. 

The Law of last year, which established the principle of 
interference with the hitherto existing privileges of Finland, 
is being carried into practical effect. Two Communes which 
belong to a province of the Grand Duchy are to be detached 
and incorporated into the Empire, and the Pilots of the Fin- 
nish harbors will have soon to receive their licenses from the 
Imperial, rather than the local, authorities. Hence there is the 
prospect of conflict between the two. 

The good relations between Russia and Great Britain have 
been put to a test by the appointment in Persia cf a British 
officer as head of a police force for the collection of Persian 
taxes. To this appointment Russia strongly objected, inasmuch 
as, in her view, it was an interference in a sphere which she 
claimed as under her own exclusive influence. The situation was 
saved, however, by the British government supporting Russia's 
opposition to the appointment. The Persian authorities, how- 
ever, persisted in their determination and made every effort 



1 9 1 1 . ] RECENT E VENTS 279 

to remove the objections of Russia. Even though no success 
should attend these efforts, it has been made plain that the 
entente with Great Britain is still intact. Great progress is 
being made in the construction of a new Navy to replace the 
losses during the war with Japan. With this country the last 
causes of friction have been removed, an agreement having 
been made by which all the outstanding claims of either 
party having been mutually settled. Russia's position of in- 
fluence with the Balkan States has been strengthened by the 
marriage of a member of the Russian Imperial Family with 
a daughter of the King of Servia, and by the support which 
it gave to Montenegro during the recent uprising of the Al- 
banians. In fact, when compared with most of the other Eu- 
ropean States and the troubles of various kinds by which they 
are being distracted, Russia is for the present to all outward 
appearance in an enviable position. 

The outbreak of war between Italy 

Italy and Turkey. and Turkey has taken the world by 

surprise, and has been, so far as it 

is in the power of Italy to affect its progress, a great setback 
to the efforts which have of late been made to settle differ- 
ences by peaceful means. No one questions the fact that for 
many years Italy has had serious grievances against the Turks 
and Tripoli. The banking, industrial and agricultural enter- 
prises, the scientific missions, and the commercial and ship- 
ping undertakings of the Italians have been systematically the 
object of the most obstinate opposition on the part of the 
Turkish authorities. Crimes have been committed against the 
Italians, and the culprits have not been punished. The acces- 
sion of the Young Turks to power has brought no improve- 
ment. Moreover, Italy like Germany desires an outlet for her 
citizens, and wishes them to remain under her flag. The 
Turks, too, whether Old or Young, deserve as their whole 
history has proved and the recent campaign in Albania has 
exemplified, complete and immediate expulsion from Europe 
and the destruction of all dominion over Christian races. But 
all this affords no justification for the arbitrary proceedings of 
Italy in declaring war at the time and in the way she has 
done. The Press of Germany, Italy's ally, strongly condemned 
Italy's action and declared her demand of reparation unjiut 



280 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

and out of all proportion to the wrong sustained. Even Eng- 
land, which has always been Italy's friend, has been outspoken 
in condemnation of what is looked upon as a patent breach 
of International Law. In truth, as the time and circumstances 
prove, the Italian government, seeing that France was on the 
point of securing the position in Morocco which she bad long 
sought, thought the moment opportune for seizing Tripoli as 
her compensation for the increase of France's power. It is 
said that a secret Treaty was made in 1901 between France 
and Italy by which France renounced any claim she might have 
in favor of Italy. The Italians expecting that opposition 
would be offered to any immediate action on their part, de- 
termined to forestall it and to take immediate steps thereby 
provoking complication not only in the Eastern Mediterranean 
and in the Balkans, but also making it probable that the 
whole of Europe may ultimately become involved. Nay, even 
throughout the North of Africa, where Islam is a strong and 
growing power the effects may be felt in the colonies of all 
the Powers. All the Powers will use every endeavor to local- 
ize the struggle, and have so far succeeded. But ultimate 
success is very doubtful. On the whole it is impossible to 
sympathize with either side in wrong doing of various kinds 
they are equally balanced. 

Recent events have thrown the 

Turkey. occurrences of only a short time 

ago so much into the background, 

that it may seem out-of-date to make even a reference to 
them. But, to a certain extent, the war which has just broken 
out with Italy finds a part of its explanation in these ante- 
cedent occurrences, and this, as well as desire to give in these 
pages a more or less complete record of events, justifies a 
brief allusion to the settlement of the Albanian question which 
took place in the first half of August. This settlement was 
made without the actual intervention of any of the Powers, 
and even without the open threat of such intervention or 
the formal guarantees demanded by the Albanians. It was, 
however, undoubtedly due to the fear entertained by the 
Turks that intervention might take place, in the event of 
their carrying things so far as to declare war against Monte- 
negro. The erms granted to the Malissori involved the first 



I9U.] RECENT EVENTS 281 

check so far received in that Turcification of the various na- 
tionalities which has formed a part of the policy of the Young 
Turks. 

These terms include the granting of a general amnesty to 
all who took part in the revolt; the permission to carry arms 
by all, except in the towns and bazaars ; the use of the Al- 
banian language in elementary schools ; the construction of 
roads; the rebuilding of burned and damaged houses; the 
granting of money for the support of those who had suffered 
loss during the insurrection ; the remission of taxes for two 
years, and the various other claims made by the Albanians. 
On the whole, the Turks have suffered a substantial defeat, 
for they were forced to grant practically all the demands of 
the rebels. But they suffered a still greater moral defeat, for 
the inhuman cruelty of the methods taken by them in their 
attempt to suppress the revolt destroyed their prestige through- 
out the world and alienated from them the sympathy which 
had been felt for their efforts to renovate the Empire. In this 
manner, too, the way was prepared for the unwarranted as- 
sault upon their rights in Tripoli which is now being made by 
Italy. It seems, too, to have been fairly well proved that in 
the aims and objects placed before themselves by the Young 
Turks and in the ways of carrying them into effect which they 
adopted, powerful support, if not instigation and initiative, 
was given by the Jews dwelling in Turkey. 

One remarkable result of the conflict between the Turks 
and Albanians has been the friendship which has been formed 
between Albanians and Montenegrins after they have been for 
centuries the bitterest of enemies. For a long time there had 
been growing up in Turkey a strong opposition to the domin- 
ation of the Committee of Union and Progress to whose 
efforts the emancipation of the country from the rule cf Abdul 
Hamid was due. The natural gratitude which was felt to 
those who had delivered them from degrading thralldom pre- 
vailed for a time over every other consideration ; but at length 
the arbitrary proceedings of the Committee, its cruelties in 
Bulgaria and in the suppression of the Albanian revolt, to- 
gether with the irresponsible secrecy of its proceedings, had 
brought matters to such a pass that a supreme effort to secure 
deliverance from the new oppressors was on the point of be- 
ing made, when the war with Italy broke out. One of the 



282 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

first results of this war was the fall of the Cabinet through 
which the Committee had governed. What will be the ulti- 
mate result upon the internal management of affairs remains 
to be seen. It can hardly fail to be salutary, for the Turks 
had mistaken the sympathy expressed for their efforts to ob- 
tain a measure of self-government as an endorsement of their 
attempt at self-aggrandizement. To almost every country, es- 
pecially those that were comparatively weak, they had in con- 
sequence succeeded in rendering themselves more or less ob- 
noxious. 

The unrest of the working classes 
Spain. which has shown itself in almost 

all of the chief countries of Eu- 
rope, has been manifested in a startling manner in Spain. 
Throughout the whole of the Peninsula in Madrid, at Bilbao, 
Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Saragossa, Cortina and Ferrol, 
the general strike, so much talked of in France, was pro- 
claimed, accompanied by so many manifestations of violence 
that more Hispanico martial law was at once proclaimed, and 
even the Constitutional guarantees were suspended. The cause 
of these extreme measures was the discovery so the govern- 
ment alleged, that the labor leaders had entered into a con- 
spiracy with Spanish and foreign Anarchists to bring about a 
revolution and to establish the Commune. In fact the Com- 
mune was proclaimed in two or three places. The means of 
effecting this change of government was to be the proclama- 
tion of a general strike with violent measures which aimed at 
paralyzing national life by stopping the public services. It is 
remarkable that the first step which the revolutionists tried to 
take was the suppression of all newspapers. The movement, 
it is said, was supported by the Socialists, and also by some 
of the Republicans of the Extreme Left. But it has not yet 
been fully ascertained to what extent the various parties are 
responsible; it seems, however, to be established that there is 
a close alliance between the Labor Unions and various revo- 
lutionary bodies. The prompt and drastic measures taken by 
the goveratnant brought speedy failure to the elaborately laid 
plans of the conspirators and, at least for the time being, 
peace and order are restored. The high price of living which 
has been the cause of the labor unrest in France and Austria 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 283 

was not without its influence upon the movement in Spain 
but it was not so prominently or exclusively the cause of the 
Spanish troubles. 

The first anniversary of the Re- 
Portugal, public was celebrated at a time 

when, if Royalist news can be be- 
lieved, the days of the new government are numbered. On 
the other hand, telegrams from Lisbon, while admitting the 
existence of Royalist conspiracies and attempts at uprising 
and of inroads from Spain, affirmed the complete failure of the 
efforts of the enemies of established authority, with the deter- 
mination on the part of that authority to punish with severity 
the attempts to rebel. Many arrests have been made, and the 
prisoners thrown into horrible dungeons beneath the sea, made 
of old for the opponents of royalty. The latter statement, 
however, has been denied by the Republican Government the 
prisoners have been put into cells, not into dungeons. It is 
better, in the midst of so many contradictions, not to place 
for some time great confidence in either the one side or the 
other. The President who has been elected, has chosen a 
Ministry made up of what is called the Moderate- Republican 
Party, which has for its opponents the Socialist-Radical Party. 
Whether there will prove to be any real difference of princi- 
ple between these two divisions of the Republicans is not yet 
quite certain. In the old days, both of the apparently opposed 
parties were united in the one common principle, if such it can 
be called, of seeking for themselves the spoils of office, ard 
doing nothing more for the good of the State. In the Repub- 
lic the line of division, professedly, is that the Moderates be- 
lieve in the maintenance of law and order as the first essential 
business of government, and of securing it by a policy of 
conciliation and compromise, while the Socialist-Radicals are 
bent on securing the adoption of the Democratic programme 
drawn up by the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and 
especially the execution of the law as already promulgated 
for the Separation of Church and State. Therefore, between the 
two parties, there seems to be a clear issue, especially as the 
Ministry has announced its intention of revising the Separation 
Law in several particulars. The authorization of the Catholic 
clergy marrying, with pensions for their widows and children, 



284 RECENT EVENTS [Nov. 

is to be withdrawn. Clerical dress in the streets is to be al- 
lowed, and several other of the worst provisions of the Decree 
are to be suppressed. These proposed changes in the Law 
will have to be presented to Parliament for its approval in 
November, when it reassembles, if the Republic is then in ex- 
istence. Of its own authority, the Ministry has revoked cer- 
tain decrees of the Provisional Government, among them one 
for increasing the salaries of numerous officials. A deficit of 
more than five million dollars is not .compatible with the in- 
crease of expenditure sanctioned by the Provisional Govern* 
ment. 

The attempt to establish constitu- 
Persia. tional government in Persia has 

of late been put to a number of 

severe tests. With nations, as with individuals it is hard after 
having grown accustomed to do evil, to learn to do well. In 
consequence of the maladministration of the former Shah, 
respect for authority has been completely undermined. More- 
ever, in order to raise money certain restrictions have been 
placed upon the free management by the Persian authorities 
of their own revenue. Hence, throughout the country an- 
archy exists, and when money is wanted for the purpose of 
suppressing this anarchy, the free application of the revenue 
is hampered by these engagements. The Treasurer-General 
supplied by this country to take charge of the revenue, has 
been driven almost to desperation in his efforts for the reform 
of the financial administration, and has been on the point of 
resigning on account of the resistance of interested Powers. 
He has found, however, the necessary encouragement and 
support from the Persian government and it may be that his 
attempt will ultimately prove successful. The ex-Shah's effort 
to regain the throne has been defeated, but the troubles of 
which he was the cause, are not yet at an end, for another 
claimant has put in an appearance. The days are still dark 
for Persia, and the question whether she will emerge from 
chaos still awaits an answer. 



With Our Readers 



THE work oi the secularization of our schools and the disasters 
which it means to our national life are arousing more and 
more the interest of all thinkers throughout the country. Not 
long since THE CATHOLIC WORLD brought to the notice of its 
readers, the fact that throughout the non-Catholic body there was 
an increasing sense of the necessity of religious instruction in the 
education of the young ; and that public proclamation of such ne- 
cessity was becoming more and more common. In the measures 
which the states have taken because of their desire to avoid all sec- 
tarian strife, to keep every vestige of religious instruction out of the 
schools, they have all unwittingly perhaps, opened the door to 
agnosticism and materialism ; to a generation that will not know 
the truth of God and the way of Christ. 



spirit of weak compromising, of a deadening peace, is in this 
I case begetting a curse greater than any of its apparent bless- 
ings. Policy, not principle, prevailed at the sowing, and the harvest 
Is chaos, not order and progress. Religious education is a problem 
that the state must face. It can no more escape it than it can escape 
the fixed laws of nature. The sooner the people of this country 
face it honestly, the better for the nation. Signs there are, as we 
have said, that many who hitherto have been blind, are now awake 
to the danger that we are nursing in our social body. The volume 
reviewed in this number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, entitled : 
Education as Growth, by Professor Jones, is an instance to the point, 
* * 

THE article by Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard 
University, in the Outlook si October 21, and entitled: "The 
Religious Ideal in Education," is evidence of a similar kind. It is 
true that Dr. Eliot offends nobody ; he makes religion simply a love 
of truth, beauty and goodness even the agnostic will claim this 
without any definite content. Yet, it does show, that Dr. Eliot Is 
alive to the emptiness and insufficiency of modern education, and 
would do something to give the youth of the country a sense of 
spiritual values. He would have the state itself undertake this 
work. He describes it as a great governmental function in the 
Republic, thus to teach the young the religious ideals of truth, 
beauty and goodness. Not of any solid content in itself, the paper 
is valuable as a sign post. It voices a cry, though faintly, oi what 
the Church has stood for always, and is standing for to-day, consis- 



286 WITH OUR READERS [Nov., 

tently, and logically, and in a manner worthy ot man's obedience. 
She can and does tell him what is truth and what is beauty and 
what is goodness. And without a definite teacher it is idle to talk 
of these things to men, because in themselves they may have as 
many meanings as there are grains of sand upon the shore. 


IN this movement for the promotion of religious education, we are 
pleased to notice the establishment of an organization entitled : 
" Society for the Protection of Church Schools." The object of the 
Society is : 

To impress upon the minds of the people the moral danger that 
threatens the nation from the Godless school, and the employment of public 
opinion as a motive force in the direction of providing a system of distribu- 
tion of public funds for educational work which shall be just; and so, do 
away with un-American discrimination against churches and religious insti- 
tutions, to encourage large benevolences upon the part of men of wealth to 
institutions of learning wherein the moral training is given with the religious 
inspiration behind it, as an offset to the practical subsidization of our col- 
leges and universities in the interest of an affirmitive agnosticism. 
* * * 

THE President of the Society is the Honorable Bird S. Color, of 
New York ; the editor of the pamphlet which announces the 
formation of the Society is Mr. John A. Heffernan of 365 St. John's 
Place, Brooklyn, N. Y. The society makes a public appeal lor 
members. There is absolutely no religious qualification. The So- 
ciety promises to publish philosophical and historical studies upon 
the subject of religion in education; and every lover of the welfare 
of America hope that its efforts will meet with success. 



THE movement for the curtailment of Sunday labor in the post 
offices of the United States, has resulted in reducing the Sun- 
day working force in Greater New York alone by fifteen hundred 
men. The business men of the country are recognizing the right oi 
employees of the postal service to have one day's rest in seven, and 
have acquiesced without complaint in the views of the post office 
department. Steps are now being taken to secure permanent re- 
sults by means of legislation. 



THOSE who had the privilege of knowing the late Monsignor 
White, of Brooklyn, will welcome the publication of a brochure 
just issued by the International Catholic Truth Society (407 Bergen 
Street, Brooklyn). The pens of those who knew Dr. White as 
priest and friend, of those outside the Church who were influenced 
by his great work in behalf of the poor and the workingman, and 



.] BOOKS RECEIVED 287 

who labored with him in the interests of social reform, pay tribute 
in this brochure to the memory of a well-beloved priest and a faith- 
ful servant of the Lord. The price of the booklet is 15 cents; with 

photogravure portrait, 25 cents. 



A DMIRABL/E work is being done by the Knights of Columbus in 
-ti. the distribution of apologetic Catholic literature. THE CATH- 
OLIC WORLD called the attention of its readers to the excellences of 
Dr. James J. Walsh's volume The Popes and Science when it was first 
published. The Knights of Columbus have devoted a sum of money 
for a special edition of this work. The volume is well printed ; 
bound in cloth and sells for the unusually low price of thirty cents. 
(New York : Fordham University Press) . Such work ought surely 
receive the hearty support of Catholic societies and of the Catholic 
public in general. The book is particularly well fitted to answer 
effectively the too common objection that the Church has been, and 
is, opposed to science. The most pressing need of the Church to- 
day is that her children should be conversant with worthy Catholic 
literature, and we congratulate the Knights of Columbus on the 
part they are taking in this missionary labor. 

. 

IT is a great pleasure for us to note that the first edition of Dr. 
Dwight's book, Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist, reviewed in 
this number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, was exhausted almost the 
very day of publication. The second large edition, which the pub- 
lishers (I/ongmans, Green) have just issued, gives promise of equal 

success. 



WE wish to call the attention of our readers to the Life of Cardinal 
Gibbons, by Allen S. Will, A.M., published by the John 
Murphy Company, Baltimore. Our readers are already acquainted 
with Mr. Will, through his article on " Some Characteristics of Car- 
dinal Gibbons," which appeared in the October CATHOLIC WORLD. 
His volume needs no further recommendation to our readers. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York : 

Tht Old Home. By Dr. Chatelain. Translated from the French by Susan Gavan Duffy. 
75 cents. The Home of Evang tline. By A. L. Pringle. 90 cents. Dominican Mission 
Book and Manual of Gtneral Devotions By a Dominican Father. 75 cents. 1 he Sol- 
dier of Christ. By Mother Loyola. $1 50. Brevtor Synopsis Thtologt Moralis et 
Pastoralis, By A. Tanquerey et E. M. QueVastre. $1.50, Right and Might. By 
Sophie Maude. $1.10. Catholic Ideals in Stcial Life, by Father Cuthbert. $1.10. 
Stttote. By Michael Earls, S.J $i. Through the Break in the Wit. By Stevens 
Dane. 45 cents. The Life of Union With Our Lord. By Abbii F. Maucourant. 60 
cents. 

DODD, MEAD & Co., New York: 

Their Heart's Desire. By Frances Foster Perry. $i. A Search for the Apex of America. 
By Annie S. Peck. $3.50. Lift in the Moslem East. By Pierre Ponafidine. $4. 

GINN & Co., New York: 

Commercial Geography. By Albert Perry Brigham. $1.30. The Hindu-Arabic Numer- 
als. By David Eugene Smith and Louis Charles Karpinski. $i 25. 



288 BOOKS RECEIVED [Nov., 1911.] 

LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York: 

Industrial Causes of Congestion of Population in New York City. By Edward Ewing 

Pratt, Ph.D. $2. 
THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY, New York : 

The Auto Boy's Camp. By James A. Braden. $i Taiitha, at Ivy Hall. By Ruth 

Alberta Brown. Illustrated by Alfred Russell. $1.25. 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York: 

Kant's Critique of ^Esthetic Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. $3.40. 
Tke Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Adapted by H. W. and F. G. 
Fowler. $i. 
WINDSOR PUBLISHING COMPANY, New York : 

Croscup's Synchronic Chart of United States History. $1.50. 
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY, New York: 

White Patch. By Angelo Patri. 40 cents. 
MACMILLAN COMPANY, New York : 

Social France in the Seventeenth Century. By Ce'cile Hugon. $3. Honey-Sweet. By 

Edna Turpin. $1.25. 
CHARLES SCRIENER'S SONS, New York: 

Franz Liszt. By James Huneker. $2. 
P. J. KENEDY, New York: 

Frequent Communion for Busy Men. By Julius Lintels, S.J. 5 cents. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York : 

The Cambridge Historical Readers. Introductory. Primary. Edited by G. F. Bosworth, 
F.R.G.S. 40 cents. The Camoridge Historical Readers. Intermediate. Junior. 
Senior. Edited by G. F. Bosworth. F.R.G.S. 60 cents. Pioneer Irish of Onondaga. 
(1776-1847.) By Theresa Bannan, M. A. $2. 

HARPER BROTHERS, New York: 

The Mansion. By Henry Van Dyke. 50 cents. 

SIR ISAAC PITMAN .% SONS. New York: 

Manuale Stenographiae Latinae. Secundum Systema Pitman. Auctore Gulielmo Tat- 

lock, S.J. 85 cents. 
SOCIETY OF THE DIVINE WORD, Techney, 111. : 

St. Michael's Almanac. (1912,) 25 cents. 
EDWIN V. O'HAHA, Portland, Oregon: 

Pioneer Catholic History of Oregon. By Edwin V. O'Hara. 
JOHN MURPHY COMPANY, Baltimore: 

Life of Cardinal Gibbons. By Allen S. Will, A.M., Litt.,D. $2. 
M. A. DONOHUE & Co.. Chicago: 

An Appeal for Unity in Faith. By Rev. John Phelan, $i. 

LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston : 

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$4.50. 
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The Incorrigible Dutane. By George C. Shedd. $1.25. The Loser Pays. By Mary 
Openshaw. $1.25. The Marriage Portion. By H. A. Mitchell Keays. $1.35. The 
Log of the Easy Way. By John L. Mathews. $i 50. 
B. HERDER, St. Louis : 

Communion Prayers of the Saints. Compiled by Rev. Peter Geiermann, C.SS.R. 60 

cents. 
THE CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Pittsburg: 

How Catholics Get Married. 5 cents. 
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The Songs of Bethlehem. With violin obligate. Music by C. E. Le Massena; words by 

Charles Irvin Junkin. 40 cents. 
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne; 

Simple Talks for First Communion. By Miriam Agatha. Life of Rev. Mother Javouhey. 
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Le Guide de La Jeunesse. Par M. L-Abbe" de Lamenais. I fr. Considerations Sur 
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Jtsus Christ et I' Etude Comparie des Religions. Par Albert Valensin. 



THE 




CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XCIV. DECEMBER, 1911. No. 561. 

\ 

THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

BF we look out of ourselves upon the arena of 
Christendom including under the term Chris- 
tendom all religious bodies whatsoever that claim 
the Christian name we shall not fail to see that 
half, or more than half of it forms a vast re- 
ligious society the members of which are of all races and na- 
tions, and though, subject on this account, to many and vari- 
ous forms of civil government, are none the less in matters 
religious visibly united as in a kingdom "at unity with itself" 
by reason of their allegiance to one and the same ecclesiasti- 
cal authority and government. Unity in universality is at once 
the distinguishing characteristic of this religious society and its 
title to the Catholic name. Its members are called Catholics 
because they are "members one of another " in a visible polity 
which transcends nationality and is everywhere, independently 
of national frontiers, governed from an extra-national centre. 
And if the prefix "Roman" be added, this is but to denote 
the seat or centre of government, since this visible body is not 
without a visible head. 

Outside and over against, and excluded by, this Catholic 
Church are, to speak generally, the national Churches of the 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCIV 19 



290 THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES [Dec., 

East, all of them "erastianised" whether under the Czar or the 
Sultan; and, passing over the various sects of the East and 
the "old Catholic" separatists and others, few and dwindling 
in numbers, in the West, who have retained Episcopal ordina- 
tion, we come to the Anglican Established, the Scotch Epis- 
copal, and the Protestant Episcopal American Churches, sec- 
tions of whose members claim for these Churches a valid 
Apostolical succession. And, in addition to all these are the 
various Protestant sects, too numerous to name. The Eastern 
National Churches, some sixteen in number, though independ- 
ent each of the rest, profess the same faith, use, in different 
languages, the same liturgy, and, excepting the schism between 
the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of Bulgaria, 
are in communion with one another. Some high-church mem- 
bers of the Anglican communion, that is to say, of the English 
Established, Scotch Episcopal, and Anglo-American Churches, 
profess the like faith and greatly desire communion with the 
"orthodox" East. But between no two of these Churches, 
Eastern and Anglican, is any common administrative authority 
to be found. Each is independent of the rest in relation to 
that which alone could constitute them one ecclesiastical body 
politic, one Ecclesia or Church. The sections of Anglicans just 
now referred to do, indeed, claim that their communion is of 
one and the same visible Church, not only with the Eastern 
communion, but likewise with the communion of Rome; but 
waiving the question of Anglican Orders " who," in the words 
of Newman, "will in seriousness maintain that relationship, or 
that sameness of structure, makes two bodies one. . . . Eng- 
land and the United States are from one stock; can they, 
therefore, be called one State ? England and Ireland are peo- 
pled by different races; yet are they not one kingdom still?" 
And so clearly is this uaderstood by Protestants generally, that 
they disclaim all idea of a one visible Church as a Divine in- 
stitution, and maintain that the Church of Christ is an invisi- 
ble body made up of the elect, known only to God, and gath- 
ered out of all Christian bodies whatsoever; visible Churches, 
in their estimation, being but of human formation for conven- 
ience sake, and, therefore, quite lawfully subject to division 
and subdivision. Their highest ideal is " union in diversity," 
and they interpret the term " Catholic," of which they now 
make free use, as signifying brotherly agreement to differ, and 






.] THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES 291 

a large-minded disposition to account all Christian bodies as 
belonging to the Christian brotherhood, save and except, per- 
haps, the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, not union, but division 
in diversity is but too obviously what jrnay be called a note 
of Christendom outside the Catholic fold. Another equally 
obvious note is that, while devoid of unity in all other re- 
respects, it is united always in hostility to the Catholic Church. 

Our outlook, then, has shown us Christendom divided into 
two hostile camps the one forming a visible kingdom "at 
unity with itself," spread over the world and gathering all 
races of men into its fold by virtue of a power which obvi- 
ously transcends nature and is independent of national front- 
iers; the other made up of a number of national and local 
Churches and innumerable sects, powerless to effect any ap- 
proach to a union that would suggest an idea of a visible 
Church of all nations. And it may be added, that while a 
large proportion of Protestantism sees no necessity in belong- 
ing to any religious body in particular, the religion of perhaps, 
a still larger proportion, and certainly of an ever-increasing 
one, is little more than an occasional sentiment with no defi- 
nite belief in God or Christ. 

Now, whatever be our opinion in regard to the condition 
of Christendom, it should, at least, be obvious that Christian- 
ity is in any case to be regarded as a fact in the world's his- 
tory. It has, and ever has had, an objective existence. The 
Christian religion cannot be reduced to a purely religious 
sentiment of a purely personal concern. It is more, much more 
than this, and much more extensive. It is a religion co-exten- 
sive with mankind. We cannot cultivate Christianity as indi- 
viduals apart and independently. Private judgment is unequal 
to any such task. Morals imply an origin and an end, an au- 
thority and sanction, a code of law and rules of obedience; 
in a word, a religion not of our own making, but made for 
us in common with all mankind, and, therefore, obseive, nec- 
essarily one and universal. 

When thus brought back to its true elements, to Its essen- 
tial nature, religion appears no longer a purely personal con- 
cern, but a powerful and fruitful principle of association. Is 
it considered in the light of a system of belief, a system of 
dogmas ? Truth Is not the heritage of any individual, it Is 



292 THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES [Dec., 

absolute and universal ; mankind ought to seek and profess 
it in common. Is it considered with reference to the precepts 
that are associated with its doctrines? A law which is oblig- 
atory on a single individual, is so on all ; it ought to be pro- 
mulgated, and it is our duty to endeavor to bring all man- 
kind under its dominion. It is the same with respect to the 
promises that religion makes, in the name of its creeds and 
precepts ; they ought to be diffused ; all men should be in- 
cited to partake of their benefits. A religious society, there- 
fore, naturally results from the essential elements of religion, 
and is such a necessary consequence of it that the term which 
expresses the most energetic social sentiment, the most in- 
tense desire to propagate ideas and extend society, is the 
word proselytism, a term which is especially applied to re- 
ligious belief, and in fact consecrated to it.* 

The writer of these words proceeds to insist, also, that a 
religious society, like any other society, needs some form of 
government : 

No society can endure a week, nay more, no society can 
endure a single hour, without a government. The moment, 
indeed, a society is formed, by the very fact of its formation, 
it calls forth a government a government which shall pro- 
claim the common truth which is the bond of the society, and 
promulgate and maintain the precepts that this truth ought to 
produce. The necessity of a superior power, of a form of 
government, is involved in the fact of the existence of a re- 
ligious, as it is in that of any other society. 

And since Truth, being divine, is absolute and universal, 
it follows that the religious society in which it is enshrined is 
likewise of divine, not human, institution, and, therefore, in- 
fallible in its preservation and teaching of the truth; and not 
only universal, but indivisible also. "The gates of hell shall 
not prevail against My Church," declared its Divine Founder, 
that time He delivered to St. Peter "the keys of the king- 
dom." 

To belong to a religious body confessedly of human insti- 
tution, and dependent on time and place for its existence, is 

*Guizot, Europ. Civil , Lect. V., Beckwith's Transl., quoted Newman's Divelffmenl, 



i9".] THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES 293 

to treat truth as so much matter of private judgment and 
human opinion. To belong to a Church, whether local or 
national, which claims to be a part of the one visible Chinch 
Catholic, but is not so in fact, because not under her juris- 
diction and, therefore, not of her kingdom, is to assert that 
the promise of Christ has failed and that His Church has be- 
come "a kingdom divided," the vast proportion of it, though 
preternaturally uniting vast multitudes out of every nation 
under heaven, being governed by a false form of ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction, and the remainder for the most part led captive 
and nationalized under civil rulers; the true form of Catholic 
jurisdiction being meanwhile, as for centuries past, so seeming- 
ly for centuries yet to come, in abeyance that is to say non- 
existent 1 

Such notions certainly do not receive support from the 
Scripture record: "In the days of those kingdoms (of the 
earth that shall arise) the God of heaven will set up a king- 
dom that shall never be destroyed, and His kingdom shall not 
be delivered to another people, and it shall break in pieces, 
and shall consume all these kingdoms, and itself shall stand 
for ever." "Thou art worthy, O Lord . . . because Thou 
wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God in Thy Blood out of 
every tribe and tongue and people and nation and hast 
made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign 
on the earth." The Church of Christ is to "reign on the 
earth" and "shall stand for ever." But " if a kingdom be 
divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand." Therefore, 
the Catholic Church has not, and never will, become "a king- 
dom divided." 

If, then, the visibility of the Church is a doctrine of 
revelation ; if the Church is a kingdom " at unity with it- 
self," rather than a family continually dividing into inde- 
pendent branches; if, in accordance with the promise "ask 
of Me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inher- 
itance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession," 
there is such a Church spread over the erbis terrarum it 
should not be difficult to choose our camp; it should not be 
difficult to decide that the larger half of Christendom, which 
presents a united front and gathers of all nations into its 
ranks, approximates more nearly to what has been promised 



294 THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES [Dec., 

concerning Christ's reign on the earth than would any imag- 
inable union or combination of the divided forces of the camp 
over against it. 

A choice must be made if we would be Christians. We 
cannot cultivate Christianity as individuals sole and apart. 
The Christian religion is a union of doctrines, precepts, prom- 
ises, divinely bestowed for all mankind. The Gospel, or good 
news of salvation, is " a substantive message from above, 
guarded and preserved in a visible polity " co-extensive with a 
world in which warfare has been the normal condition of 
everything ever since the time of man's fall. We are called 
to combat. The Chureh with her unity in universality of gov- 
ernment, independent of the world in the domain of religion, 
is on 'one side; the world, and the religions which the world 
tolerates, patronizes, establishes, as being dependent, or harm- 
less, or useful for its purposes and the advancement of its 
civilization, are on the other. The Catholic Church has ever 
been dissociated from all other Churches and religions as 
being " not of the world " because, amongst other reasons, 
tenacious of her independence and self-government in the 
domain of religion. 

The Catholics [says the world's press] , wherever they are 
numerous and powerful in a Protestant nation, compel (sic) as 
it were by a law of their being, that nation to treat them with 
stern repression and control. . . . Catholicism, if it be 
true to itself, and its mission, cannot (sic) . . . wherever 
and whenever the opportunity is afforded it, abstain from 
claiming, working for, and grasping that supremacy and 
paramount influence and control, which it conscientiously be- 
lieves to be its inalienable and universal due. ... By 
the force of circumstances, by the inexorable logic of its 
claims, it must be the intestine foe or the disturbing element 
of every state in which it does not bear sway ; and . . 
it must now stand out in the estimate of all Protestants, 
Patriots and Thinkers (philosophers and historians, as 
Tacitus ?) as the hostis humani generis (sic.), etc. * 

Such, likewise, was the world's estimate of the Divine 
Founder of the Church Himself, whom it accused of "per- 

* Tkt Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, quoted in Newman's Development, p. 247. n. 



i9i i.] THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES 295 

verting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, 
and saying that He was Christ the King;" such, too, its esti- 
mate of the Apostle of the Gentiles, whom it designated "a 
pestilent man, raising seditions throughout the world;" and 
such that of the heathen statesmen who named the first 
Christians " enemies of the human race," and accused them of 
"corrupting the maxims of government, making a mock at 
law, dissolving the empire." 

It was in vain that our Lord explained, " My Kingdom is 
not of this world." The rulers of the kingdoms of this world 
have ever been jealous of His Church, because they have ever 
recognized in her a kingdom, which, while not of this world, 
is superior to the kingdoms of the world, more extensive, 
more permanent, and maintains against them an unconquer- 
able jurisdiction in the sphere of religion, nowhere suffering 
the civil power to intrude into her Lord's domain. And, 
meanwhile, religious bodies that have broken away from the 
unity of the Church, together with all other bodies calling 
themselves Christian, however much they differ with one an- 
other are at one amongst themselves, and with the world, in 
regarding the Catholic Church as the common enemy, more 
especially because she convicts them of schism and error, ex- 
cludes them in consequence, and maintains against them her 
divinely appointed authority and Catholic organization. And, 
meanwhile, that she " is not of this world " in a higher sense 
than the world, and the churches and other religious bodies 
outside her fold wot of, or are willing to admit, has from age 
to age, and in one country after another, been abundantly 
proved by the world's failures in its endeavors against her; 
since these failures " prove to us, with a cogency as great as 
that of a physical demonstration, that she comes not of earth, 
that she holds not of earth, that she is no servant of man, 
else He who made could have destroyed her." 

Thus, the condition of Christ's Church on earth is a per- 
petual warfare, and her "empire is an incessant cor quest"; 
and He warns us: "he that is not with Me, is against Me; 
and he that gathereth not with Me, scattereth." We cannot 
be with Him, we are against Him, while we affect to cultivate 
Christianity apart from His Church. We cannot belong to 
His Church, we remain outside her kingdom, we are in the 



296 THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES [Dec., 

camp over against her, however much we may profess and 
practice of her doctrines and precepts, if we fall short of sub- 
mission to her authority and jurisdiction. For the Catholic 
Church has a jurisdiction coextensive with her world-wide 
kingdom, everywhere one and the same and everywhere in 
active operation ; and to submit ourselves to her government 
is as necessary to our salvation as to believe her doctrines 
and practice her precepts. It is, moreover, obvious to every- 
one that of catholic jurisdiction, there is none outside the com- 
munion of which the Pope is the head. "With him alone 
and round about him are found the claims, the prerogatives 
and duties which we identify with the kingdom set up by 
Christ." Submission to the Vicar of Christ is, therefore, at 
once the test of catholicity and the condition of our siding 
with and not against our Lord, of gathering with Him and 
not scattering. 

"There must be also heresies," says the Apostle, "that 
they also who are approved may be made manifest among 
you." A revelation is both the occasion of doubt and the 
test of faith; a command is both the occasion of transgres- 
sion and the test of obedience. We live in a fallen, rebellious 
world; therefore, it should not surprise us to find misbelief 
and rebellion prevalent in all ages of its history on as large a 
scale as faith and submission to authority. But while faith 
and obedience are ever one, misbelief will always be manifold ; 
and while the former is ever on one side and the latter on 
the other, the latter by its manifold divisions does but em- 
phasize the truth of the former's position, being at one only 
in regarding it as the common foe. 

It may be concluded, then, that a preliminary note (so to 
speak) of the Catholic Church, is that she is on one side and 
all other religious bodies, together with the world, are on the 
other. This ever has been, ever will be, one of her notes, in 
accordance with the warning of her Divine Founder: "If the 
world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated Me before you. 
If you had been of the world, the world would love its own 
but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you 
out of the world, therefore, the world hateth you." " If they 
have called the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much 
more them of His household." 



] THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES 297 

On the whole, then, we have reason to say, that if there be a 
form of Christianity at this day distinguished for its careful 
organization, and its consequent power; if it is spread over 
the world ; if it is conspicuous for zealous maintenance of its 
own creed ; if it is intolerant towards what it considers error ; 
if it is engaged in ceaseless war with all other bodies called 
Christian; if it, and it alone, is called "Catholic" by the 
world, nay, by those very bodies, and if it makes much of the 
title ; if it names them heretics, and warns them of coming 
woe, and calls on them one by one, to come over to itself, over- 
looking every other tie ; and it they, on the other hand, call 
'it seducer, harlot, apostate, Antichrist, devil ; if, however 
much they differ one with another, they consider it their com- 
mon enemy ; if they strive to unite together against it, and 
cannot ; if they are but local ; if they continually subdivide, 
and it remains one ; if they fall one after another, and make 
way for new sects, and it remains the same ; such a religious 
communion is not unlike historical Christianity, as it comes 
before us at the Nicene Era.* 

And, indeed, as Newman also showed most clearly as it 
comes to us in each preceding and succeeding era of the 
Church's history. 

It is proposed in subsequent articles to consider the four 
great notes of the Church. 

* Newman's Devtltfmtnl, p. 272. 




THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE. 

A GROUP OF YOUNG CATHOLICS. 
BY MAX TURMANN, LL.D. 

|T is frequently repeated, and oftentimes readily 
believed, by foreigners that religious life is almost 
extinct in France. Happily, this is not true. 
On the contrary, there is now perceptible among 
us a veritable renaissance of the Faith. No bet- 
ter proof of this is required than the magnificent Congress of 
the Catholic Association of Young Frenchmen that met in 
Paris a few weeks since, in which five thousand young men 
representing five thousand groups throughout the length and 
breadth of France, were united in this far- extending and, we 
hope, stable Society. And it must not be thought that the 
membership of these Young Catholics is a mere formality, merely 
the giving of names and the payment of dues. There could 
be no more serious error. They are practical, zealous Catho- 
lics, who strive earnestly to bring their lives into complete 
accord with these convictions. 

The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will, no doubt, be 

interested in learning of the organization of these groups of 

Young Catholics who are destined, we are certain, to play an 

active and important part in the development, growth and 

influence of Catholicism in France. 

To insure complete understanding of the inner working of 
these groups, we have chosen, as an illustration, an average 
type now working actively in the rural district of Bourgogne 
in the east of France. It unites in a single organization the 
groups of eight neighboring parishes. This association is 
called "The Sowers of the Valley of 1'Ouche." We shall 
examine its foundation, its organization and its results up to- 
date. The 1'Ouche is a little river that flows in leisurely 
course through the department of the Cote d'Or, passing slowly 
through the city of Dijon and on between two ranges of gently 
sloping hills until it flings itself into the Saone. It is a most 



.] THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE 259 

charming valley, dotted here and there with large villages, 
such as Bugney, Ste-Marie, Fleurey, etc. What, then, is the 
origin of this Society ? It is to be found primarily in the 
instinctive desire felt by those who have the same ideas and 
mutual aspirations, to draw nearer to one another and to 
unite their efforts in a common cause. This natural impulse, 
however, is not sufficient in itself. There must be some one 
who comprehends, who will recognize it, help it to express 
itself, and enable it to accomplish the greatest good of which 
it is capable. 

At the heart of every flourishing work one will find the 
initiative of a man of action as well as of devotion. This is 
true of the "Young Catholics of 1'Ouche." The cure" of one 
of the parishes in this region, conceived the idea of uniting 
all these activities in one powerful group. To assist him in 
this enterprise, he discovered among his parishioners an inde- 
fatigable auxiliary who, in turn, gathered about himself a dozen 
others all zealous Catholics. This was the nucleus around 
which many other energies gradually ranged themselves. The 
example set up by these beginners was rapidly imitated in 
every one of the eight parishes of the Valley, and after some 
months of vigorous effort a group was successfully established 
in each individual parish. These eight groups, while preserv- 
ing their autonomy, united themselves one to another in an 
association under the title of: "The Sowers of the Valley of 
1'Ouche." 

For the well-being and stability of every society, there 
must be a central authority, but in order that it may not be- 
come tyrannical, such authority must be limited by law. The 
Sowers having formed themselves into an association, proceeded 
to frame the laws under which the Society should live and 
act. Their rule gives an accurate idea of the complete organiza- 
tion of these groups of the Valley of 1'Ouche. And we pre- 
sent it here just as it was definitely adopted on the I3th of 
December, 1908: 

1. This group of Young Catholics has organized itself under 
the name of the "Sowers of the Valley of 1'Ouche." 

2. It includes all members living in parishes of the Valley 
of 1'Ouche. 

3. The members of this organization shall have for chap- 
lain one of the cures of the Valley; they will elect by a ma 



300 THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE [Dec., 

jority vote a president, vice-president, a secretary- treasurer 
and an assistant secretary. 

4. A central committee shall be appointed by the officers 
of the organization, among whom is the chaplain, as well as 
by the cures of the parishes of the Valley and the file-leaders 
(chefs de file). 

5. Every parochial group shall be represented by a file- 
leader, an assistant to the file-leader and a treasurer. 

6 Duties of the officers : The President shall have charge of 
the general organization of the Society. He shall preside at 
its meetings and superintend the activities of the organization. 
The chaplain shall occupy himself with the morale of the So- 
ciety and the good conduct of its members. The secretary- 
treasurer shall send announcements of the meetings to the 
file-leaders. He shall take care of the finances, and issue the 
bulletin of the Society, The Echo of the Valley ; and shall 
render an account of his work to the Central Committee. No 
expenditure exceeding the sum of ten francs shall be under- 
taken without the explicit approval of the Central Committee. 
The file-leaders, when informed by the secretary of a meeting, 
shall at once send notice of such meeting to every member of 
their division. Failure to comply with this rule shall entail a 
fine of 25 centimes. The members of the Society will spare 
no effort to set a good example to their fellow- citizens, by 
irreproachable conduct and the practice of their religious 
duties. 

7. Funds : The central fund shall be provided for, (a), by 
a weekly collection of five sous, payable by each member of 
the Society who is over fifteen years of age, and of two sous 
payable by all members under fifteen, (b). By receipts from 
dramatic and other entertainments, (c). By a contribution of 
one franc from the honorary members of every parochial group, 
(d). By gifts from the society in general. The treasuries or 
the parochial groups shall be fed by collections from their 
honorary members and by special gifts. 

8. The Patron: The patron of the Society shall be St. 
Bernard and his feast shall be observed regularly every year. 

9. Meetings: The meetings of the federation shall be held 
monthly and shall take place in each village in turn. Every 
parish group shall hold its own meeting on the other Sundays. 

10. Admission of members: It is required that any young 



i9i i.] THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FBANCE 301 

man presented as a candidate for membership, shall be recom- 
mended by two of his companions approved by the chaplain, 
and voted upon favorably by a majority of the members before 
he can be definitely accepted as a Sower. 

n. Dismissal: Disorderly conduct, drunkenness, non-pay- 
ment of dues for three months, absence from meetings for 
three months without excuse, shall constitute causes for the 
dismissal of a member. Any member who has incurred three 
censures for any one of these causes shall be dismissed from 
the Society. 

14. Death: Upon the death of a member a Mass shall be 
offered in his parish church, and the stipend shall be provided 
by his comrades. 

!3- Pilgrimage to Lourdes : The representative to be sent 
each year on the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes shall 
be chosen by lot. 

14. Badge: At the meetings each Sower shall be required 
to wear the cross which is the badge of the Society. 

15. Military Service: A sum of twenty francs shall be ac- 
corded to every member of a group when he goes on military 
duty. 

It is useless to explain or comment upon the various de- 
tails of these statutes. They are clear and precise. But in 
themselves they are a dead letter; they are of value, only, 
according to the manner in which they are applied. It is, 
therefore, worth while to notice how great and how flexible is 
the authority of the Society. Let us note also, that every 
parochial group has its own rule and its own independent ex- 
istence. The meetings of all the parochial groups form an 
inter- parochial society, composed of elements differing widely 
according to the mental qualifications of the different parishes 

The actual life of these groups of Young Catholics is mani- 
fested principally, by the meetings which are of two kinds but 
all of which are held on Sunday. 

There is, on the one hand, the monthly meetings, which 
are accompanied by some ceremony and which are attended 
by the members of all the parochial groups. The Souirs go 
in turn to each one of these eight parishes. They assist in a 
body at Mass and Vespers ; they take part in a frugal but 
pleasant banquet; they pass through the village stteets, their 
flag floating over them as they march. In the coutse of the 



302 THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE [Dec., 

day they listen to a conference at which it is permitted for 
any one to ask any questions that he wishes. The day is 
frequently ended with a dramatic entertainment, admission to 
which is free to the entire village. 

I have before me in The Echo of the Valley, an account of 
these weekly meetings and I may say positively, that these 
manifestations of the faith and zeal of these " Sowers of the 
Valley of 1'Ouche" have never failed in enthusiasm, whatever 
may have been the circumstances or the time. 

In addition to the monthly meetings which bring the 
Sowers together, now in one parish, now in another, there are 
the meetings every Sunday in each parish. These may be 
held in the residence of the cure* or in a hall. They have 
not the gaiety and ceremony of the monthly meetings but are 
of a more intimate nature. They contribute more efficiently 
to the development of the influence of the pastor over his 
young charges, and increase their confidence in him. The 
programme of these meetings, also, is varied and suited to the 
occasion reading circles, conferences, gymnastic classes, read- 
ing alone with comments, recitations, music, or perhaps, a 
play if it should be a feast day. 

The Sowers have cultivated theatrical representations in 
their best sense. Their theatre is sometimes a barn, some- 
times a room in a factory, sometimes a big room in an inn. 
They make their own scenes, copy out their parts and in order 
to learn them, come to rehearsals after working hours and 
frequently give evidence of untiring interest. Sometimes they 
organize a " theatrical circuit " with a repertoire of two or 
three plays and with these they go from village to village 
performing before the admiring inhabitants. The Sowers are 
not ignorant of the power of the drama. Their dramatic 
efforts are rarely without a moral and, during their "circuits," 
especially, they present and develop an apologetic thesis. 
The play entitled: General de Sonis at Z0(gy, was an eloquent 
appeal to cultivate love of religion and of country; For the 
Others showed that regard for the secret of the confessional 
might lead to martyrdom ; The Expulsion of I' Abbe Jerome 
scored energetically the proceedings of free masonry. These 
strong, moral lessons are taught in comedies that strike the 
note of gaiety, and they exercise a very real influence upon 
a rural public. But the object of the Society of the Sowers 



i9i i.] THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE 303 

is not simply innocent amusement but also the fostering of 
intellectual and moral development. This development is pro- 
moted by the study circles which extend through the eight 
parishes of the Valley. Often on Sunday evening the cure 
will hold a conference for the young men or read from some 
interesting book; he invites discussion from them on religious 
or social questions, explains the difficulties that are presented, 
and, in a word, implants in these young minds principles by 
which they may judge and speak wisely of current events, of 
institutions and men. A large number of subjects are thus 
treated in the course of a year, especially during colder 
weather when all outdoor work in the fields is suspended. 
Among the questions studied and debated at these meetings 
are: "The Church; The Benefactor of Society;" "The Dan- 
gers of Alcoholism;" "The Inquisition;" "The Index of 
Prohibited Books and Its Usefulness," etc., etc. 

From these beginnings the Society has directed its activity 
toward economics; a conference upon "syndicates" turned all 
thoughts in the direction of a professional farming association. 
A vast beneficiary society has been formed, which by means 
of a slender collection insures to its members the payment of 
a daily indemnity in case of illness; spiritual retreats are held 
and, in certain cases, a dowry is provided for the wedding day. 

Among the institutions organized by this Society, now barely 
three years old, we must not forget an employment office which 
secures positions for trained servants. This has already done 
excellent work. We must also mention the establishment of 
a mutual fire-insurance scheme, and also the establishment 
of a circulating library. In the foundation and direction of 
these different institutions the Young Catholics make their 
social apprenticeship, as in the study circles they become ac- 
customed to speaking, expressing their ideas and acquiring 
precise knowledge. Also, they are formed, little by little, into 
men who do not shrink from responsibility, and who, when oc- 
casion offers, will state and defend their convictions. In short, 
the association of Sowers exercises the very happiest religious 
influence on its members. In their reunions they learn to 
know, to love and to esteem piety, and in this way complete 
their Christian education; more than this, these meetings 
strengthen the habit of regular attendance at the offices of 
the Church. 



304 THE SOCIAL APOSTOLATE IN FRANCE [Dec. 

Therefore, from the point of view of a Catholic the Society 
of Sowers constitutes a moral force. Its creation has, in con- 
sequence, resulted in the formation of a homogeneous group, 
full of life, conscious of its duties. It effectively destroys the 
weakness of human respect, and just as truly engenders Chris- 
tian conviction and social activity. A young man who was 
formerly a weak and timid Catholic when he stood alone, now 
becomes positive; zealous; and even an apostle through the 
medium of such federation. The example and power of union 
have killed the cowardice of the individual. The practice of 
religion is thus made easy, and as a first result the Sowers 
are made strong Christians and earnest Catholics. 

And to make a good Christian is, at the same time, to 
make a good citizen. The Society of the Sowers is an excellent 
school of civic and social education. One sees them learn to 
comprehend the tie that exists between the conscience and pub- 
lic life, for conscience, as it is well or ill-directed, makes of 
us good or bad citizens. The social teaching given to the 
Sowers prepares theirf to be not lazy, greedy drones in the 
hive of the city, but bees diligent and ardent for the public 
good. 

Groups of Young Catholics, such as the " Sowers of the 
Valley of 1'Ouche," are useful defenders of the cause of the 
Church and of their country. We are happy to say, in clos- 
ing, that France now possesses several millions of them. 




A SONG IN THE STREET. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

IHERE was Adolph and there was Berta and 
there was little Peterkin. Adolph was a com- 
poser of what Berta thought the most wonder- 
ful things; but he had not yet found a music- 
publisher to believe in him. He sometimes 
played accompaniments, but seldom at the great halls, more 
often at small concerts in the suburbs or in country places. 

A year ago Adolph had thought himself on the high road 
to success, for a beautiful and popular Australian singer had 
found him out and he had played some of her accompaniments 
at the big halls. Of course, playing accompaniments even for 
beautiful and popular singers is a long way off from getting 
your own compositions published and accepted, which was 
the summit of Adolph's desire, still more of Berta's for him. 
If Adolph could but have made enough money for himself and 
Berta and Peterkin to live in a country cottage not far from 
London, so that Berta need not earn money by playing the 
fiddle in public except when she liked to do it, he would have 
been satisfied to let the music-publishers go, and make the 
music for his own delight and Berta's and little Peterkin's 
trusting to the future for the immortality that was bound to 
come. Perhaps, Peterkin would bring it some day, for although 
he was not more than five, the little lad could produce the 
most ravishing sounds from his mother's fiddle, and could not 
be kept from the music, although Adolph said: "No, no, we 
will not have thee a prodigy, Peterkin. Thou sbalt be a 
happy, heedless child like other children. And then, who 
knows, but that some day thou mayst be a musician." 

Well, the Australian singer had gone back on a tour to 
her own country. She had all but decided to take Adolph 
with her as her accompanist, and he and Berta were bracing 
thecnselves up for the parting, when Adolph fell ill and she 
had to go without him. Adolph had been ill on and off ever 
since; better in the summer, bad again when the fogs came 
VOL. xciv. 20 



306 A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

and the winter cold. He was always talking cheerfully of 
turning a corner; but the corner remained unturned, and the 
winter that Peterkin was five years old, the burden of keeping 
the home together lay entirely on Berta's shoulders. I ought 
to have mentioned earlier, that Berta was a violinist and 
played at the smaller concerts and at at-homes and functions 
of various kinds, besides giving lessons in young ladies' schools 
and to a few private pupils. 

That Berta must go out to earn the money was such a 
grief to Adolph, that it helped, perhaps, to keep him from 
getting strong. He was a big, dark-haired and dark-eyed 
Southern German, pious and simple, with a mild, dreamy, 
expression and a voice at once deep and soft. Ridiculous, 
that a big fellow like him must keep by the fireside in win- 
ter, while a little woman, like Berta, should have to go out 
and earn for the home. Adolph said over and over to him- 
self as he lay a-bed, that it was the will of the good God ; 
but with all his resignation he fretted. The great grief had 
been when the stork had brought Feterkin a little sister who 
had not lived; and Berta had been very ill, and the doctor 
had suggested that she had worked too hard and long. 
Adolph adored children; and it had been very hard for Berta 
to coax him out of his despondency after that, although he 
said to himself over and over again that it was the will of 
God, he felt as though he had been cruel to the little woman 
he loved best and the little woman who had not lived. 

That winter came in unusually early. November had been 
a month of fogs and frosts and storms, a month of many 
shipwrecks, and December went on much the same way. The 
doctor had positively forbidden Adolph to be out of doors, 
unless it might be for a walk in the sun when a sunny and 
still day came, which didn't happen once in a blue moon. 

" Couldn't you get him away to the South ? " the doctor 
asked. "Hasn't he friends to go to? Anything that would 
tide him over these few bad months. Given a chance, he 
would throw off the cough. Isn't there anyone ? " 

Berta shook her head. She said many prayers at the little 
altar of our Lady of Prague in their sitting room. Unless 
she helped, there was no one. They hadn't the money to 
make Adolph strong again, perhaps, to save his precious life, 
for the doctor had been irritable of late about the persistence 



1 9i i.] A SONG IN THE STREET 307 

of Adolph's cough, and Berta knew that the doctor's irrita- 
bility meant anxiety. Dear heavens, unless she helped what 
were they to do ? 

The doctor had seen Adolph one bitter morning in Decem- 
ber, and had again broached the subject of his going away, 
and had gone off grumbling that there ought to be an endow- 
ment for geniuses, and that the old system of patronage had 
had much to recommend it. 

" If Madama were but back 1 If the dear Lady yonder 
would but hasten her return 1 " Adolph said, smiling at Berta, 
and looking from her to the statue. " Madama would help us. 
She said that she would sing in my scena herself, and take 
Hermann by the throat and shake him into publishing it. 
There would not be much difficulty about publishing it, if 
Madama were to sing it. It is in the hands of the good God." 
"Oh, Adolph 1" said Berta, and leaned her face on his 
shoulder and wept a few bitter, hard tears, as the tears of 
real trouble are apt to be; and then she ran away from him 
to light our Lady's blue lamp which had just gone out. 

" Never mind, my little one," Adolph said, tenderly com- 
forting her. "Bear a little while longer with this great, hulk- 
Ing lump of laziness that is thy husband. Soon the little, old 
cough will depart. She will take care of us. Madama will 
return. The scena will be published. This day I (eel a tre- 
mendous energy. I have it in me to finish the "Song of the 
Angels in the Stable at Bethlehem." Thou shalt hear it when 
thou art come back. Peterkin will be quiet as a mouse. 
Afterwards, for reward he shall play to us his own composi- 
tions. Wilt thou, wonder-child ? Then go, go, my heart 1 Thou 
hist rutnjled all thy pretty hair, and spoilt thine eyes with 
thy tears." 

Berta had gone to her afternoon engagement. When she 
started a light snow had begun to fall. She was playing at a 
big house in the west end, and it was a rather tiresome jour- 
ney from the little street of red houses as near the edge of 
London as they dared to go; only that the edge never re- 
mained the same for long. Always, always other little streets 
of red houses were springing up and taking another strip of 
their fields and leaving them further and further away from 
the edge. 

The hostess at the great house was a sweet-faced, middle- 



308 A SOJVG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

aged lady, who found time to speak to Berta and praise her 
playing and ask her very kindly if she had had her tea and 
been properly looked after. Berta was an accomplished violin- 
ist bat no genius; and she was very glad of the couple of 
guineas which she received for an engagement like this. Lady 
Herapath had put an envelope very gently into her hand, and 
Berta could feel the coins lying inside it. She kept it in her 
muff as she went home, and she was so busy considering how 
to spend it, that she hardly noticed the discomfort of the 
street where the snow was melting to slush as it fell, and the 
whirling flakes had a way of striking one full-tilt in the eyes, 
or dropping icily down the back of one's neck. 

Despite the bad weather, the streets were very full of 
people, all jostling each other. She went round by the shops 
to make a few purchases on her way home. This was her 
last engagement before Christmas, and the money must be 
husbanded; but she bought the supplies for a little meal, some 
sausages which could be quickly and easily cooked, a loaf of 
black, German bread, a little pat of butter, some fruit, and a 
tiny bunch of violets for our Lady of Prague. At the end she 
hesitated a second or two, and finally, bought Peterkin a toy. 
They wanted to keep him from the music as much as they 
could, to make him like other children. He was too much 
given to sitting with his little hands clasped about his knees, 
seeing visions and dreaming dreams when he was kept from 
the music. Never was so little troublesome a child as Peter- 
kin. Of course it was good, with a sick father, else both 
Adolpi and Berta would have wished him noisier. 

Waen she got in rather wet and cold, but heart-warm, as 
she always was, coming home to Adolph and Peterkin, she 
found the fire low and Peterkin sitting on the hearthrug, lis- 
tening with a rapt absorption to his father's music. 

" I have got it, Berta," Adolph said, turning round and 
looking at her with the strange sightlessness in his eyes that 
always meant he was far away with the music. "Here it is, 
my woman, the song the angels sang with the stars. Our 
Lady of Prague has given it to me. I have put it down to 
the very last note. Listen and you shall see them going up 
and down the ladder to heaven, the shining ones, and singing 
against the stars." 

Then, all of a sudden, he discovered that she was wet and 



i9i i.] A SONG IN THE STREET 309 

weary, and that she had come in with an armful of packages. 
She was hungry, too, for she had not waited for the tea at 
Delamere Crescent, being too eager to hurry home to Adolph 
and Peterkin. So, full of contrition, he leit the piano and the 
precious sheet of music on which he had jotted down "Our 
Lady's Song of the Angels," just as she had given it to him 
while the ecstasy was upon him, and knelt to mend the fire, 
and sweep the hearth and take off Berta's wet shoes and help 
to prepare the evening meal. 

While Berta got out of her wet skirts in the little bedroom, 
he kept calling out to her his apologies because he had not 
the meal ready, and she answered him gaily, although the lit- 
tle cough with which his speech was punctuated, seemed to 
strike at her heart. But when she appeared she was smiling, 
and she had put on the old blue dress which Adolph loved, 
because she had worn it the first day he ever saw her, and 
she had a blue ribbon wound in and out her pale hair. Adolph 
and Peterkin both thought she looked beautiful in the blue 
dress, not knowing anything about changes of fashion or such 
things. 

Tien they sat down to the evening meal together, and be- 
cause the Christmas atmosphere was all about them, they talked 
of Christmas as it would be at home, and how they would 
keep the door open no matter how it snowed or blew on 
Christmas Eve, lest, perhaps, some poor Travelers refused long 
ago by the inns at Bethlehem, might desire to come in ; and 
how places would be set out at the board and a white bed 
made in preparation for those august Visitors if they should 
chance to come. For to Adolph and Berta the age of miracles 
was not done any more than it was to the child. And while 
they talked our Lady of Prague, with the violets at her feet, 
seemed by the flickering of her blue lamp, to listen and smile. 

" We shall set the door open on Christmas Eve before the 
stroke of midnight," said Adolph. " If it was in our own 
country, we should hear the dear joy-bells, and we should go 
to the Midnight Mass. But thou wilt be asleep, little Peterkin. 
Only keep thy heart open, little son, for the Child of Bethle- 
hem and His Mother to come in." 

After the meal was over, and the things they had used 
washed and put away, Adolph and Berta made up a fine fire 
and sat by it talking. Adolph was too joyously excited to 



310 A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

think of sleeping, and every minute he would get up and run 
to his piano and play a bit of the " Angels' Song," with his 
eyes shining and his hair all rumpled up about his face. Coming 
back, he would talk of the time when his work would be 
praised, and honor and money would come in, and they could 
go back to Bavaria whenever it pleased them, and escape the 
sad, English winter. Berta smiled to hear him as he planned 
out all the glorious doings as though they were already at 
their door; now and again he would have to stop to cough 
the little, old cough, and her eyes would fill with tears. 

Sometimes he would get up, for he was very restless, and 
go to the window and look out. The snow had left cff, but 
the suburban road was white and the little trees in front had 
each its burden of snow; the snow was heaped upon the win- 
dow sill, and even the black railings outside had become frosted 
silver. The moon came out overhead and swam in a clear 
sky of steely blue, and the wind began to blow from the 
North. 

" It would be great weather for the sledge, my heart," said 
Adolph. "Do you remember ?" 

Once start Adolph on reminiscences of the old days, and 
one never knew when he would be done. He chattered along, 
laughing now and again, or coughing; and Berta sat watching 
him with a clouded happiness on her face. How dear he was, 
Adolph I Only the good God knew how dear. And the little, 
old cough was gaining on him ; and there was no money in 
this city of rich people to give him a chance for his life. If 
Madama would hear 1 If only Madama would come back. 
She, too, was a loving child of her who stood smiling over 
them from her little shrine. Berta did not know how to beg. 
There might be founts of charity ready to flow, but she did 
not know how to tap them. She and Adolph were always 
somewhat frightened of strangers in this great London town 
where they had been too poor to make friends. They felt this 
little house like a boat, a dear ark of refuge upon desolate 
and stormy seas. 

Now and again the boys came down the streets singing 
the Christmas Carols, with a careless irreverence that only 
thought of the pence to be gathered. Adolph was divided 
between a desire to clap his hands over his ears to keep out 
the profanation of the holy hymns and the desire, born out 



i9i i.] A SONG IN THE STREET 311 

of the Christmas charity, to fling a penny to be scrambled for 
by the boys who would stop midway of the carol to grab 
for a copper. Now and again he had a third mood, in which 
he would trounce the little scoundrels if he could, but that 
generally ended in a laugh. After all, they did not know, the 
little rascals. It was a heretical country, although it had many 
Cdristian virtues. The little rascals knew no better. 

It was a relief when it grew late and the carol singers de- 
parted. The little road was very quiet by eleven o'clock. 
They still sat by the extravagant fire which Adolph had in- 
sisted on building much too high, unwilling to leave its com- 
fortable glow, and the frost was growing more intense as the 
night went on. 

Suddenly, just as the distant church-clock pealed the quar- 
ter, a new voice rose up in the little road between the sub- 
urban houses. It was singing the Adeste fidelis. 

Adolph sprang to his feet. This was another thing from 
the carol singers. It was a beautiful voice, clear and soaring. 
Never had the wonderful Christmas song been sung more 
beautifully. 

"He is an artist, that one!" said Adolph, coming back to 
earth as the singer finished. "What does he do in Rosemary 
Road? It is a voice for oratorio." 

Before Berta could stop him he was out in the hall and 
had flung open the door. The singer was standing just in 
front of the gate. There was a cheerful light from the red 
curtain out on the snow. All the other mean houses in Rose- 
mary Road showed black house fronts. 

" My friend," said Adolph, rushing out in the snow, for- 
getting all about the little, old cough. "What a voice I It 
is the song the angels sang, sung by an angel. Come in, my 
friend, and be fed and comforted from the cruel night. Thou 
hast rapt us up even to heaven." 

The singer looked to Berta like nothing so much as a black 
bear standing there on the whiteness of the snow. Adolph, with 
an arm about his shoulders, was drawirg him into the house. 
He came not unwillingly. The house-door was closed behind 
them, and he revealed himself in the light ol the little halj 
lamp as muffled up to the ears in a fur coat, which had made 
Berta think of him as a black bear. 

He pulled off his fur coat and a great many wrappings 



312 A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

besides, and followed Adolph and Berta into the warm, little 
room. Berta was scolding Adolpb for having run out into 
the snow, and Adolph was not heeding. The stranger's eyes 
were taking in the little room, with the shrine of our Lady 
of Prague, the piano, all its contents, as though they pleased 
him. Adolph was pouring out praises of the singing, and bid- 
ding Berta hurry up with food and refreshment for the heav- 
enly singer. He was bubbling over with joy and excitement. 

"I am both cold and hungry," said the stranger. He was 
obviously an Italian by his look and speech. " My friend, 
what a climate I What a winter! What do we in it, we art- 
ists ! " 

Wonderful that he should have known Adolph for an art- 
ist, and yet, perhaps, it was not so wonderful. 

"He is so careless !" lamented Berta, bustling about. "He 
would go out in the snow despite his little, old cough." 

" Ah, what a voice 1 " sighed Adolph again. He had found 
a pair of well-worn slippers for the stranger by this time, and 
he had gone down quite naturally on his knees, as no English- 
man could have done it, to take off the snow-sodden boots. 
" What a voice 1 My friend, what misfortune must have come 
to thee that thou hast been brought to sing in the streets ! " 

" No such great misfortune either," said the stranger, " since 
it brings me to such hospitality. No, no, my friend, I pro- 
test. I can wait on myself. I owe my apologies to Madame." 

" Oh, but Berta will not mind," again he coughed his 
little, old cough. " See you, we are all artists together, thou 
aad I and Birta; and Peterkin, but Peterkin is a-bed. Shall 
we not share alike? Perhaps some day thou wilt do it to us. 
Who knows? Is it not a time when all doors should be open 
because of a hospitality which Bethlehem denied?" 

Berta, clattering about in her little kitchen, smiled. To her 
it was obvious enough that the singer did not sing in the 
streets out of need. That fur coat now; Berta put the price 
handsomely at twenty pounds, not knowing that she might 
have multiplied it by ten. He was doing it for a wager doubt- 
less; she had heard of such things. But his voice was tired 
and he looked cold and pinched. To be singing in the snowy 
streets, for whatever reason he did it, was a cruel thing to do 
on a winter night and he a child of Italy. She had lit up 
her little oil stove, and was cooking the remainder of the sau- 



] A SONG IN THE STREET 313 

sages and some eggs. She was grinding coffee too; the fra- 
grance of it stole out through the open door between the 
kitchen and sitting room, and was grateful to the stranger's 
senses, while he sat gazing across at our Lady of Prague in 
her shadowy corner. 

He ate like a starving man and Adolph watched him with 
eyes of dreamy pleasure, attending to his wants assiduously. 
After supper they sat and smoked. Berta made up the fire 
again. Midnight had already sounded, but the stranger seemed 
in no hurry to be gone. They were talking of music now. 
The stranger had taken Berta's fiddle from its case and ex- 
amined it and praised it. His eyes had wandered on to the 
open piano, had fallen on the sheet dotted all over with 
Adolph's strange hieroglyphics. 

"You were composing?" he said. 

"The Song of the Angels at Bethlehem," Adolph replied. 
"It is but just completed. No time yet to make a fair copy." 

" You are pleased with it ? " 

"To-day I am well-pleased. Who knows? To-morrow. . . . 
Yet, she, over there, gave it to me. I am sure to-night." 
Adolph shrugged his shoulders. " I have been up among the 
stars to-night. To-morrow I may have tumbled to earth, very 
bruised and shaken. I may think I was mistaken, that she 
did not give. Thou knowest ? " 

"Oh yes, I know; it is the artist's way. Will you play it 
for me, 'The Song of Our Lady?'" 

" Why yes, in gratitude for the Adeste, I could not re- 
fuse. To-night I am sure it is hers, as the Adeste was given 
by the angels." 

He played the " Song of the Angels" again. Berta thought 
it the most heavenly thing she had ever heard. The stranger 
sat with one of Adolph's pipes between his fingers listening. 
He was quiet till the end. Then he passed his hands over 
his eyes as though he came out of sleep. 

"It is wonderful, this Song of Our Lady," he said. "My 
friend it is great music. You are a genius. If she has given 
it, you have received it. I, too, am a composer when I do 
not sing, and I take off my hat to you." 

" Ah 1 " There were great beads of perspiration on AdoJph's 
brow, but his eyes were shining. He came over and clasped 
the other man's hand. "We are both artists then. The praise 



A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

of an artist is sweet. Some day, my friend, you shall sing a 
song of mine. You will make the world accept it. Oh but, 
though you sing in the streets to-day you shall sing at the 
opera to morrow. My friend, I do not ask ivhy you should 
sing in the streets. It is for yourself. But, they shall hear 
you. The doors I could not knock at for myself shall open 
to you. You shall not sing in the streets. That precious voice 
to grow roughened and spoiled by the hard life and the bit- 
ter cold. No, ten thousand times no. They shall hear you, 
my friend. The world shall hear you." 

His face glowed with the delight of the discoverer. Berta 
heard him, smiling. What a great, darling goose he was, her 
Adolph, not to see that the man need not sing in the streets, 
that he wore the dress of a gentleman. But Adolph's thoughts 
were always only half or less than half on earth. A child 
could deceive him. His eyes were always in the world of his 
music, in the world of the Unseen. 

The stranger would hear more. Adolph played on and 
on. The stranger sang through one or two songs, filling Adolph 
with ecstasies of delight. At the end of one he suddenly laid 
his hand on Adolph's shoulder. 

"My friend," he said, "that cough, I do not like it. You 
will have to go away out of England, to sunny skies and balmy 
air and come back without it." 

Adolph shrugged his shoulders, with a sidelong look at Berta. 

" It is for the rich to go away," he said. " The poor cannot 
afford it. It is not the will of God. It is near Christmas now. 
Soon the spring will be here. I shall lose the cough, if she 
will ask it of her Son. If I could but be heard ! If a little 
success would come! There has been so long in which we have 
hoped. I could not tell it to thee if thou, too, had not found 
the world a hard place. I could not have lived only for my 
Berta. My friend, the greatest blessing a man can have on 
earth is a good wife. She has toiled for me, and the little 
one, while I sit at home and make the music no one listens 
to. If I could I would take her and Peterkin you have not 
yet seen the rogue he will be the great musician one day if 
the world refuses to the end to listen to me I would take 
her and Peterkin where we could bask in the sun. What it 
would be, the sun, after this darkness! But the winter cold 
is for me the will of God. 



i9i i.] A SONG IN THE STREET 315 

Again he coughed, and the stranger was aware that Berta's 
eyes filled with tears. 

" I am going now," he said. " It is time you should be 
in bed. I will tell you something before I go. I think Madame 
has guessed it. I do not need to sing in the streets. I sing 
for a vow. Ten years ago to-day, the Feast of Our Lady's 
Expectation, I was picked out of the streets. Ever since I 
have sung through the streets on that day, wandering where 
my footsteps lead me. What I receive I give to the poor. I 
do not always receive much. I choose the little and humble 
streets for the greater part. My desire is to give joy, to uplift 
hearts by my singing. Oh, I could tell you stories. I may 
some day, but not to-night. I am very glad that I wandered 
to Rosemary Road to night. Here I have iound faith and love 
and genius, precious things, my friends. The world does not 
always know its most precious things." 

He turned to go, but Adolph laid detaining hands on him. 

"No, no," he said. "There will be fog; the night is so 
calm and it is freezing. Why, you might walk into the canal ; 
and among the half-built houses here in the fields, dangerous 
men often skulk in corners. Stay where you are to-night. 
We will do our best for you. You shall go as early as you 
will in the morning." 

Bsrta made up a bed on a chair bedstead for the visitor, in 
the corner, where our Lady of Prague smiled down on him in 
her strange, heavenly way, making everything as comfortable 
as she could. Adolph was quite excited over the new friend. 
It was well on in the small hours before they got to bed ; and 
Adolph and Berta slept more sweetly for the kind act they had 
done in giving a fellow-creature a shelter from the bitter night, 
for, as Berta said, it was a long way to any hotel or inn, and 
something might have happened to the owner of the beautiful 
voice. Why, for all they knew, he might have wandered about 
being tired and hungry, and fallen exhausted at last, and been 
frozen before morning. One reads such terrible things in the 
newspapers of poor folk being frozen to death, alas! 

There was a cold, white light over everything, and the 
frost flowers were muffl.ng the panes when they were awak- 
ened in the morning by Peterkin, who had lain patitntly for 
a long time playing with his new toy, till at last his patience 
had given out. 



316 A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

Their first thought was of their guest. Adolph got up and 
put on his dressing-gown, coughing as the cold air got into 
his lungs and went to see after a hot bath for the visitor. 
There was one thing in the little house, that one could have 
hot water by day or night. 

Lo, and behold, the room was empty ! The bed-clothes 
had been neatly folded up on the bedstead. There were signs 
in the bath room that some one had washed there. But the 
visitor had flown. 

" But for the bedstead in the parlor, little one," said 
Adolph, "I should have thought it a dream. It was strange 
that he should have gone without a word." 

" Perhaps he was an angel," said Berta. " Not that he 
looked like one with all that dark hair. Do angels wear fur 
coats ? " 

" He sang like one," said Adolph. " I wonder if we shall 
ever hear him again ! " 

It was not till Berta was getting the fire to burn, and the 
room in order for the breakfast, that she discovered a folded 
note evidently written on a page torn from a note-book lying 
at our Lady's feet. 

" My friend," it ran, " I am not an ingrate. I go away, 
but I return about four o'clock of the afternoon. Be ready 
to come with me. I will take as much care of thee as thy 
Berta has done. Thy friend, 

EDUARDO SAROGNI." 

Adolph gasped holding the note to Berta. 

"It cannot, it cannot be, the Sarogni," he said, "that 
glorious prince of song. And yet, and yet, did we ever hear 
anything like the Adeste, Berta ? Oh, it must be. Did we not 
read, before he came, that some one had picked him up starv- 
ing in the streets of Paris ? " 

" I think," said Berta unsteadily, " that the Christ Child 
and our dear Lady of Prague have taken pity on us. He said, 
you remember what he said of thy music, my dear." 

Then they embraced each other and Peterkin; and being 
simple and grateful souls they knelt down to return thanks, 
their faces irradiated with the light of the morning sun that 
came redly through the pane. 

About half- past three in the afternoon, a magnificent 
motor-car dashed up to the little house, to the bewilderment 



i9i i.] A SONG IN THE STREET 317 

of the neighbors and doubtless to the annoyance of the chauf- 
feur who had never driven over worse roads than this half- 
constructed one strewn with the debris of building. However, 
no one took any notice of him sitting grimly before the 
wheel. Oat stepped Sirogni. Why, how had they mistaken 
him ? His face was well-known to them from the newspapers 
and the pictures in the shops; but they had not heard him, 
since he had only sung in London this winter, and the little, 
old cough had kept Adolph at home. 

He came into the house carrying a fine fur coat upon his 
arm. He saluted Adolph with a great smack on the back 
which brought the little, old cough out of its lair. He kissed 
Berta's hands, and he lifted Peterkin above his head, to that 
serious child's delight. And he laid a rose at the feet of our 
Lady of Prague. 

" Well, are you ready ? " he asked, " all three." 

Berta gasped. 

"Where are you taking us to?" she said. 

"Why to the well at the world's end where they cure 
coughs," he answered. " Do I look a fairy godfather or do I 
not? Come, I shall give you a half-hour in which to get 
ready. We must be at Dover to-night." 

It all seemed mad to Berta's mind, but the papers had 
been full of Sarogni lately and of his goodness to the poor. 
So she went obediently and huddled her few belongings 
together, and also Peterkin's, and put out the fire and pre- 
pared to lock up the house, and all without asking a ques- 
tion. She could trust our Lady to take care of everything. 

"Your wife is a woman in a thousand, Maestro," Sarogni 
said, turning to Adolph, who, in a dream, was filling a port- 
manteau with musical manuscripts. "She shall shop in Paris. 
I am your banker and hers for the time being. You will re- 
pay it all, be assured. First, Eduardo Sarogni; next, thou, 
my friend. The eighteenth of December, it is the Feast of 
Oar Li'ly's Expectation, shall be written in letters of gold in 
the annals of music, as in the annals of heaven." 

Berta, not knowing yet what was happening, what was to 
happen, saw Sarogni help Adolph into the fur coat. In a 
dream she locked up the little house and handed the key to 
a friendly, neighboring woman who would light an occasional 
fire to keep the piano from damp, and who was to use up the 



318 A SONG IN THE STREET [Dec., 

provisions left there for herself and her family. At the very 
last she ran back and took our Lady from her shrine. Fortu- 
nately, the figure was of marble and not too large. In a 
dream she found herself standing on the frozen pavement, the 
statue on one arm, holding Peterkin by the hand. Adolph 
was already inside the motor, and Sarogni had taken her violin- 
case and placed it inside with Adolph. And the chauffeur 
was putting up their poor, little trunk and their small bags 
and packets on top of the motor where there were already a 
good many trunks and packing-cases of various sizes. 

A few minutes more, and she was inside the warm, luxuri- 
ous motor and Adolph was holding her hand to make her feel 
that this was solid reality and not the wildest of dreams. 

"It is the Riviera for Christmas," said Sarogni; "and 
afterwards, if the little, old cough will not go, it shall be 
Algiers." 

And there they were flying away past the lights of London 
and out into the quiet country and past other lights till 
Dover was reached, and there was the great, splendid hotel, 
and the manager bowing before Sarogni and never betraying 
his surprise at seeing him in the company of such shabbily- 
dressed people. 

It was for Sarogni's sake, and trusting in his prophecies 
about Adolph's future, that Berta consented at Paris to pro- 
vide herself and Peterkin with an outfit which should make 
them less conspicuous. And then they were flying away in 
the motor, better than any train de luxe, ever further and 
further south till the white palaces and the blue waters of the 
Mediterranean rose up wonderfully on the horizon. 

Berta and Adolph and Peterkin, plucking roses and violets 
on Christmas Day and praising the good God humbly and our 
Lady of Prague for the wonderful thing that had happened to 
them, scarcely yet dared look their happiness in the face lest 
it should vanish from them. But it was no dream. They 
basked in the great sun and the glorious air, and the little, 
old cough hid her head and was forgotten; and Sarogni came 
and went between London and the Riviera, watching over 
Adolph as though he were a dear, much-loved brother, treating 
him always with the most tender reverence. And presently 
others came, operatic impresarios, and musicians of various 
kinds, and many famous people, and behaved towards Adolph 



19 1 1.] CHRIST'S CHOICE 319 

as though he was one of the wonders of the world. Nor did 
Adolph seem a bit spoiled by the praise. When anything 
delighted him, such as reverence from some one he rever- 
enced, he would look round for little Berta, standing shyly 
in the background and draw her to his side; and afterwards 
they would carry their thanks to our Lady of Prague whose 
shrine was set among wonderful flowers, above which she 
stood and smiled as she had smiled for the bunch of violets in 
London. 

Of course, Adolph's fortune was made, and be was going 
back to London in June to hear his opera at Covent Garden 
with Sarogni as the principal male singer. But be would 
always be the humble and simple creature he had been in the 
days of his adversity, always filled with a resolve, in which 
his wife shared, that this prosperity sent him by the good 
God and our Lady of Prague, should be for the good of 
others as well as of himself. As for Peterkin, he was the only 
one not surprised by the strange happenings. Peterkin had 
not been such a lover of dreams and visions as to be surprised 
that one should come true. This actual happening from heaven 
was better than all the visions and quite to be expected. 



CHRIST'S CHOICE. 

BY EDWARD F. GARESCHE. S.J. 

Thy breast is very bleak and bare, 

A narrow place and poor ; 
How should thy Lord find lodgment there? 

Its coldness how endure? 

But ah ! Christ loveth very dear 

The poor and bitter part ! 
He hastes to fill with angel-cheer 

The stable of thy heart ! 




A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL. 

BY EMILY HICKEY. 

JHERE is no poem of Browning's in which he 
appears to come so near the Kingdom, to lay 
his hand as it were, on the great verities of 
Christianity, to take hold of the garment, not 
merely touching the hem, as this poem of " Saul." 
Non-Catholic poet though he is, let us be thankful that here, 
as elsewhere though less fully, he has drawn at the well of 
Life Eternal, and given to his fellows a most precious draught. 

The poem of "Saul" is a many- noted one. We can hear 
the resonant joy of life, with all its functions and all its bonds* 
we can hear the beat of high spiritual emotion, of a love that 
knows the depth of reverent admiration, and of pity no less 
reverent and deep ; and we have the clear ring of the faith 
that speaks of restoration, the voice of the faith that sees how 
God's redemption must come out of man's necessity. The 
music, beautiful throughout, rises, as the subject rises to the 
great revelation of Incarnate God, into what can be given no 
name lower than that of sublimity. 

David is the speaker, the teller of the tale. He is alone 
in the early morning; the dawn and the night are still strug- 
gling on the mountain's breast, and the earth is drenched with 
dew; Kidron is retrieving the loss brought by the fierce sun- 
shine of yesterday. 

That yesterday has been to David a day of days ; a day 
wherein the greatest and sweetest knowledge of all his life 
has come to him; a day crowned by the vision of Christ, the 
King of love. 

David is taken as the shepherd lad, the lad who has led a 
life quiet and simple, and undisturbed except by perils ap- 
proaching his flocks. His annointing as a king is not brought 
forward, nor yet his great strength and fitness for war. He 
is shown to us lifted by a tremendous experience in which 
grace has responded to grace, into the perfection of his spir- 
itual manhood. 



i9ii.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 321 

An evil spirit troubled (o* terrified) Saul. Browning appears 
to take the state induced by this troubling, or terrifying, as a 
kind of cataleptic trance. And the servants of Saul said to him : 
. . . Let our Lord give orders, and thy servants who are before 
thee will seek out a man skilful in playing on the harp that when 
the evil spirit from the Lord is upon thee, he may play with his 
hand, and thou mayest bear it more easily. 

One of the servants has seen the man, who, he thicks, is 
the one to help the king, the gifted son of Isai (or Jesse) the 
Bethlehemite. So David is sent for, and comes, and takes his 
harp, playing with his hand before the king, whensoever the 
evil spirit is upon Saul. And the king was refreshed, and was 
better, and the evil spirit departed from him. And Saul loved 
David exceedingly, 

We see how the pain and anxiety of the king's friends and 
attendants are indicated in those two words of Abner's, Saul's 
uncle. " At last thou art come." How well we know what is 
the meaning of that " at last," we who have waited long for 
the coming of help to our stricken beloved, when every mo- 
ment has seemed an hour, and the hours have borne in them 
the anguish of days and more. 

How well Browning has realized the Scriptural presenta- 
tion of Saul, in those splendid early days of his career. How 
Saul, as we see him through our poet's eyes, is one still great 
in his fall, still the Saul we remember in glory. The great- 
statured man is here, the greatness of his stature correspond- 
ing to, and symbolizing, the greatness of his destiny, the great- 
ness of his gifts. We can see him as he sits with his knees 
like great oak-roots encircling the beloved harpist, pushing his 
large fingers through the young man's hair. We feel how all 
the accessories are indications of that superb strength the 
"lordly male-sapphires," the "rubies courageous at heart." 
When we see him first, he hangs on the great cross-support 
of his tent, the cross that has been for so many centuries the 
symbol of anguish and woe. It seems at first as if the com- 
bat were over, and the victory lay with death. But there is a 
stronger than death, even love. 

The power of music is here; the power of that ineffable 

gift which, it has been said, can express nothing unholy, 

nothing unclean. But even music is to fail before the great 

spiritual strain that precedes the revelation of God, when harp 

VOL. XCIT. 21 



322 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

and song have done their office, and are put aside nothing 
but plain speech then, the universal gift for the expression of 
the deepest truths. 

The power of prayer was David's; that power whose mys- 
tery is mocked at, or smiled at, or gently and not by inten- 
tion, irreverently, put aside; that power commanded us to use, 
to " move the Hand that moves the world"; that power which 
can make of the silent outpourings of the heart's petition a 
work greater than the unaided struggle and striving ard do- 
ing of souls by whom it is untried and ignored. David 
has prayed before he entered the tent into which he is to 
bring the great light of God's good news; he goes on pray- 
ing: his "soul" is "God's servant," his "word" then is 
" God's word." The power of faith is here, and the power of 
faith leads up to the revelation of the power of love. 

He tunes his harp, first taking off the lilies that had 
shielded the strings from the beating and breaking of the 
fierce sunshine. The first tune is the tune of the folding. One 
by one the sheep come to the pen door, in their whiteness 
and their wholeness. It was well to begin with this music of 
quietness and peace. It passes into the music of attraction, 
the tune that draws off the brooding quails from their mates, 
so powerful is the magic of its call ; and then comes the tune 
that makes the crickets bold for their fight; and then "what 
has weight to set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand- 
house." All these tunes show the sympathy and power of 
understanding the animals which might naturally come to the 
gentle mind in the outdoor life. 

" God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our 

fear. 
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here." 

The music passes on, and up too, from the tunes that the 
animals love, to the tunes that belong to the life of man 
among men. First is "The help-tune of the reapers, their 
wine-song, when hand grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good 
friendship, and great hearts expand and grow one in the sense 
of this world's life." 

It is well to note the grandeur of the conception of the 
life of corporate labor ; the greatness of the work of the 



i9".] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 323 

gathering in of the produce of the land that has been tilled 
and bidden to bring forth. The song of death comes next, 
the praise of one gone from among his fellows, "with his few 
faults shut up like dead flowerets;" and then the song of 
marriage, when the young maidens lead the one of themselves 
vaunted, "as the beauty, the pride of our dwelling." Then 
comes the great march of the men who are working in unity 
to buttress the arch that naught can break. And last comes 
the music of worship, which is the crown set upon all life 
and all life's showings forth, "the chorus intoned when the 
Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned." 

The song of the reapers, the praise-song of the dead, the 
great march of those that labor harmoniously in high perfec- 
tion of work; all these, incidents of every-day life, touching 
man's bond with his fellows, beautiful and delectable as they 
are, yet have had no power to move the frozen spirit of the 
king. It is when the music telling of the bond between man 
and God which completes and sanctifies the bond between 
man and man, has sounded forth, that the first response is made: 
"here in the darkness Saul groaned." 

" And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened 

apart ; 
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered ; and sparkles 

'gan dart 

From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a start, 
All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. 
So the head; but the body still moved not, still hung there 

erect." 

A groan has broken the silence, and the tent is shaken by 
the awful shudder that marks the coming of the king back 
from the deathly trance. We notice the strength of the shud- 
der, the shudder of the man of might. It is the strong, the 
strongest who have the sharpest fight. It is only the shudder 
of the wave of life in that grand frame; there is not yet mo- 
tion, the evidence of life. 

And now David sings of the delight of life : 

" Oh, our manhood's prime vigor I No spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 



324 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool sil- 
ver shock 

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 

divine, 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 

of wine, 

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!" 

Here surely is the right and lawful delight in the life that 
God has given; something absolutely different from the pagan 
absorption in the things of sense. And, as we go on, we 
have just what divides the healthy love of life and of bodily 
joy from the pagan over-care for sensuous beauty and pleas- 
ure, in the reminder of the ties that bind life to life, involving, 
as the recognition of ties must always involve, the potentiality 
of sacrifice and suffering. 

" Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword 

thou didst guard 
When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious 

reward ? 
Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as 

men sung 

The low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint tongue 
Joining in while it could to the witness, 'Let one more attest 
I have lived, seen God's hand thro* a lifetime, and all was 

for best'? 
Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, nor 

much, but the rest. 
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working 

whence grew 
Such result as, from seething grape- bundles, the spirit 

strained true." 

The tie of the family, the strong bond of kinship, the bond, 
sometimes yet stronger, of friendship; the tie to the country, 



.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 325 

thy country whose right it is to demand that a man give up 
his life for her sake, all these are here. 

"And the friends of thy boyhood that boyhood of wonder 

and hope, 
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's 

scope, 

Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch, a people is thine; 
And all gifts which the world offers singly, on one head 

combine ! 
On ode head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage 

(like the throe 

That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold go) 
High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning 

them all 
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature King Saul ! " 

Here the poem ended, as it appeared in Bells and Pome- 
granates, (No. VII. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics), in 1845.* 
How long it was before its final form was assumed we can- 
not, of course, exactly say, but it seems fair to suppose that 
the date of its publication coincides rather closely with the 
date of its production, which was ten years later than the ap- 
pearance of the first part. It came out in the completed foim 
in the volume called Men and Women: it is now among the 
Dramatic Lyrics. Is there any other instance of a sequel so 
glorious; of a second part, belonging to a decade later of life 
and art, having all the splendor of setting and rhythm and 
strength and beauty of the first, yet rising into something 
greater and higher by far, and rising with all the serenity of 
natural development? I have elsewhere touched on the fact 
that the period of Browning's life during which his marriage 
gave him close association with a poet who was certainly a 
Christian, a poet in whom he believed with all his heart, syn- 
chronizes with the period of his direct affirmation of the truth 
of Christianity; and I cannot but think that the spirit of 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was at any rate part of that which 

* The early version has : 

Even rage like the throe 

That opes the rock, helps its glad labor and lets the gold go 
And ambition that sees a sun lead it oh, all of these, all 
Combine to unite in one creature Saul. 



326 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

made Robert Browning see, as, later on, as it appears, he 
ceased to see. 

In the two splendid apostrophes to the glory of the king, 
God-chosen, God-gifted, the second one ending "Then, first of 
the mighty, thank God that thou art," we see the way in which 
Browning has absorbed the Scriptural narrative. He has not 
only seized the thought of the bodily greatness and beauty of 
Saul, beyond the greatness and beauty of his fellows, for 
"there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier per- 
son than he" but he has also caught the spirit of grateful 
love and reverence in which the Israelites looked upon him as 
the leader who had wrought their deliverance from the Am- 
monites. After their great victory under his captaincy, the 
people in their enthusiasm of grateful loyalty had clamored for 
death to be meted out to those who had opposed Saul's com- 
ing to the kingdom ; but Saul had shown the mercy that was 
still further to endear him to them. His valor, glory and 
generosity are prominently dwelt on in the lamentation made, 
after the battle of Gilboa, over Saul and over Jonathan his 
son. "The shield of Saul is the shield of the valiant"; his 
sword has never returned empty from the fight; his swiftness 
was more than the swiftness of the eagle, his strength stronger 
than the strength of the lion. How are the valiant fallen in 
battle 1 He has clothed the daughters of Israel with scarlet in 
delights, and given ornaments of gold for their attirel 

" And lo t with that leap of my spirit heart, hand, harp and 

voice, 

Etch lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice 
Saul's fame in the light it was made for as when, dare I say, 
Tae Lard's army, in rapture of service, strains through its 

array, 
Add upsoareth the cherubim chariot " 

It is a great simile, daringly used, that of the Lord's army 
straining through its array, till the cherubim-chariot of Jehovah 
soars up; and the pitch and special fictingness of such a simile 
lies in the words "in rapture of service." It is just that rap- 
ture, that supreme delight which implies and involves perfect 
selflessness, the being caught up, lifted away, from self and 
lower things, that is David's too; that rapture of service, the 
same in kind, not in degree, as the service of the cherubim. 






i9ii.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 327 

"... What next should I urge 
To sustain him where song had restored him?" 

The release has come, but still all remains to traverse between 
hope and despair: 

"Death was past, life not come: so he waited. Awhile his 

right hand 
Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to 

remand 

To their place what new objects should enter: 't was Saul 
as before." 

The cup has been filled with the wine of this life, all the 
fruitage of the fair vine of earth; but the man cannot drink it. 
His eye is dim, his lip is pallid: 

" . . . beyond on what fields, 

Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye 
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup 
they put by ?" 

It is one of the things most terrible to lose the power of 
caring. This may come from illness, from physical exhaustion, 
from mental fatigue, or after the stress of a great anguish. 
Bat. however it oe, to lose the power of caring is one of the 
worst things that can befall, and the worst of all when it 
comas from spiritual indolence, the failure of the exercise of 
the faculty of loving 1 

"Hesaith: 'It is good'; still he drinks not: he lets me praise 

life, 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part." 

Do we not know this, some of us? Can we not remember 
times when the sky was blue enough above our heads, and 
the sun was warm and bright, and the grass green and fine, 
and yet all was cold and dark and lifeless? It was, indeed, 
a time in which we could well have said: "I see them all so 
excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are." 

There is verily a vintage more potent, a vintage all-perfect, 
but the wine must be the crushing of the grapes of God. 



328 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

Then David draws on the "fancies" that had come to him 
long ago, begins to draw on the inwardness of that life. As 
at first he has drawn on the outside of it with the music that 
belongs to it, the life that has lovingly taken in the life of the 
creatures whom God made, and to whom He has given 

"... our love and our fear, 
To give sign, we and they are His children, one family here." 

The life of his soul had been fed as, lying in his hollow, with 
the sheep feeding around him, he had seen the slow wheeling 
of the solitary eagle, slow as though in sleep. To him, lying 
there, his world seemed a very small world, just "a strip" 
twixt the hill and the sky. A greater world than his own, as 
he thought, would lie beneath the ken of that eagle. To him- 
self, as it seemed, the world would always be a small world, 
to himself whose days, as he thought without any ambition 
that it should be otherwise, were ordained to be passed with 
his flocks. Yet, how infinitely greater a world was even al- 
ready his, and how far greater was it yet to be, for this 
kingly soldier and seer and singer for all time. 

He uses his life as we, too, may do, our common everyday 
life and what it holds. As he had lain in that hollow, the shap- 
ing spirit of imagination was his and he had dreamt the life he 
was never, so he thought, to mix with, and in his mind's eye 
had seen how men in that great world used their energies; 
that great world, not his, yet one day to be his in all the 
worth of its splendor and fullness. He had thought of their 

" schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage 

that gains, 
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for." 

No longer the comeliness of life in all its functions, in all its 
grades. Something higher yet is to come. 

" . . . And now, these old trains 
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the 

string 
Of my harp made response to my spirit." 

Not now will he offer again the rejected comfort of the thought 
of life, the mere mortal life held in common by man and by 



i9i i.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 329 

brute, wonderful and magnificent though it be. Now the thought 
must go to the fruit of this life, and all that it shall yield in 
the juice that is the cure of sorrow, the wine that maketh glad 
the heart of man; in the sacrifice of stem and branch, in the 
poor plight even of the tree itself, for the sake of the palm- 
wine that shall staunch "every wound of man's spirit in win- 
ter." As by its wine the dead palm tree shall live in all the 
glory of giving, so by the spirit shall Saul live, long after the 
life of the flesh has ceased. 

" . . . Each deed thou hast done, 

Dies, revives, goes to work in the world ; until e'en as the sun 
Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though 

tempests efface, 
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere 

trace 
The results of his past summer prime, so, each ray of thy 

will, 

Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill 
Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give 

forth 
A like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and the 

North 
With the radiance thy deed was the germ of." 

His life over, he shall live by these deeds, his fame going 
forth, carved in cedar and graven in gold, and written on the 
"smooth paper reeds" wherewith even now "the rivers a- wave." 

"So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part 
In thy being ! then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou 
art." 

Here the shepherd-seer pauses in his story, and bursts into 
that grand invocation to the God in Whose strength he had 
begun, carried on, and completed the high quest laid upon him 
the adventure, as the poet makes him call it, in reference, 
I suppose, conscious or unconscious, to the high quests of 
chivalry ! 

" . . . O Thou who didst grant me that day, 
And before it not seldom hast granted Thy help to essay, 



330 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

Carry on and complete an adventure, my shield and my sword 
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was 

my word, 

Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavor 
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless 

as ever 

On the new stretch of heaven above me till, mighty to save, 
Just one lift of Thy hand cleared that distance God's throne 

from man's grave ! 

Let me tell out my tale to its ending my voice to my heart 
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I 

took part, 

As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, 
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep 1 
For I wake in the gray dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves 
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron 

retrieves 
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine." 

The king resumes 

"his old motions and habitudes kingly. The right hand re- 
plumed 

His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the 
swathes 

Of his turban, and see the huge sweat that his countenance 
bathes, 

He wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as 
of yore, 

And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set 
before." 

He has returned to the decencies of life ; its beauty will 
come by and-by. 

" He is Saul, ye remember in glory, ere error had bent 

The broad brow from the daily communion ; and still, though 

much spent 
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God 

did choose, 
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite 

lose." 
" Saul's glory and fame." The thought of these cannot satisfy. 



A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 331 

It is not enough to live in fame, nor to live in memory, nor 
to live in influence. Every roan has the sacred right to live 
as an individual, that sacred right given by bis creation and 
sealed by his redemption. He must have what God meant 
him to have, with all his power to use it for magnificent uses, 
or to waste and desecrate. 

David has touched on the praise he has forseen for the man 
who sits patient there; and the harp falls forward, now its 
work is done. Has any comfort come ? Has the best he could 
do brought any solace? 

"... Then first I was 'ware 

That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast knees 
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak- 
roots which please 

To encircle a lamb while it slumbers. I looked up to know 
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke not, 

but slow 

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care 
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' 

my hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, 

with kind power 

All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. 
Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized 

mine 
And, oh, all my heart how it loved him I but where was the 

sign ? 

I yearned ' Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, 
I would add to that life of the past, both the future and this; 
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, 
As this moment, had love but the warrant, love's heart to 

dispense.'" 

Some of us have known "the agony of conscious impo- 
tence"; the impossibility of delivering a beloved friend Irora 
the su-kin^-ia of the masterless might of waters; or of bring- 
ing any deliverance to him. And more of us, perhaps, have 
known what it meant to watch how coldness and apathy seized 
upon a soul; to watch the dropping of old piety or the fling- 
ing of it scornfully away : to see the apparent triumph of the 
power of ill, and to be unable to help except by the use of 



332 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

the weapons never to be plucked away, the force of faith and 
of hope and of love, and the strength of holy prayer. We know, 
as David has learned, where the supreme help lies, and we un- 
derstand the submission of man's nothing- perfect to God's 
all-complete, "and climb to the feet of God by each new 
obeisance of the spirit," by " that stoop of the soul which, in 
bending, upraises it too." 

He has learned this. The passion of rescue grips him and 
holds him; all that he, in his mighty yearning, would do for 
him that he loves, all that, in spite of that agony of desire, 
he cannot do, could be done by the Power, the Wisdom at which 
his knowledge shrivels confounded ; the Infinite Care, to which 
his forethought is purblind and blank ; the Perfection that every- 
where fronts him, " in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in 
the soul and the clod." And yet he can think that there is 
just one way in which man, the lover, may rise to the height 
that is the highest. In the light of the glorious knowledge 
that has since been given him, he can laugh as he thinks of 
this; can laugh in the calm of the soul that sees and knows. 
The one gift of love is his; in this one, he may be the great- 
est. Knowledge, forethought, every faculty of his, he now 
knows to be nothing, as compared to the infinite wisdom, the 
infinite care, the soul everywhere of superb perfection. But 
love, is not love the one perfect gift from man to man ? O 
limited vision ! O faith in the least things, and distrust in the 
greatest of all! 

" Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
That I doubt His own love can compete with it ? Here, 

the parts shift? 

Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began? 
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, Who yet 

alone can? 
Would it ever have entered my mind the bare will, much 

less power, 

To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with ? to make such a 

soul, 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the 

whole ? 



i9n.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 333 

And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) 
These good things being given, to go on, and give one 

more, the best? 
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the 

height 
This perfection succeed with life's dayspring, death's minute 

of night ? 

Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, 
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now and bid him awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself 

set 
Clear and safe in new light and new life " 

"Saul, the ruin, the failure, he seems now." How is be 
to be set in new light and new life? To some of us, at least, 
this will seem the fullest possible expression of what they have 
known. For some among us have descended into the deepest 
depths of the darkest dark, when our agony for the spirit 
in prison seemed all in vain; our anguish for that spirit bound 
and fettered in impurity, in selfishness, in all that has meant 
a horrible waste and desecration of God-given power and glory, 
all that has made us tremble to think that in that lowest deep 
there may yet be a deeper deep. " Saul, the ruin, the failure, 
he seems now." 

" Ob, speak through me now ! " God will hear the appeal; 
fro n the seen, the soul of the lover will pass to the unseen; 
from the human, and through the human, to the divine. 

"See the King I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall 

through. 
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to 

enrich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would knowing 

which, 
I know that my service is perfect. Ob, speak through me 

now ! 
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst Thou so 

wilt Thou I 
So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, utteimost 

crown 
And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up rcr down 



334 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec., 

One spot for the creature to stand in 1 It is by no breath. 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death ! 

As Thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
Tny power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! 
He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall stand 

the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! my flesh, that 

I seek 

In the Godhead 1 I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, 
Thou shalt love, and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 

hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 

Christ stand ! " 

Now David sees. Now is it given to him to understand 
something of the mystery of the tremendous love that drove 
the Son from the bosom of the Father, expelled Him from 
His heaven, forced Him to the womb, to the manger, to the 
carpenter's bench, to the life unsheltered, to humiliation, suf- 
fering, agony, and death ; the love that had to be revealed 
in sacrifice, than which there is no greater way. 

See the Christ stand/ See Him stand in His infinite love, 
the love that comprehends all knowledge, all justice, all mercy; 
His Face like the face of the sons of men; His human Hands 
stretched out, jeweled with the ineffaceable marks of the glori- 
ous Wounds; stretched out to keep open the opened gates of 
life. 

And as the earth spins on, there is, perhaps, not one mo- 
ment at which there is not somewhere ascending the smoke 
of the Sacrifice that His love has empowered His servants of 
the Altar to make until He comes again, whereby we are bid- 
den to see the Christ, the very Christ of God; in the mystery 
of the Passion lifted up, the Conqueror conquered by death 
for a little space; in the mystery of the Resurrection triumph- 
ing over the victor ephemeral; and in the mystery of the As- 
cension passing upwards to the central abode of light and love 
that is called the Bosom of the Father. 

Here the salvation, the redemption, the restoration. Deus, 



i9i r.] A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL 335 

qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti, et mi- 
rabilius reformasti. 

Then comes the great Epilogue, wherein Browning seems 
almost to pass the barrier, impalpable as it sometimes is, which 
divides the seer from the mystic: 

" I know not too well bow I found my way home in the night. 
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, 
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: 
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly 

there, 

As a runner beset by the populace famished for news 
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed 

with her crews ; 
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and 

shot 
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted 

not, 
For the Hand still impelled me at once, and supported, 

suppressed 

All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, 
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest." 

Yes, he hardly knows how his way home was found. The 
stupendous revelation has opened his eyes, as the eyes of those 
are opened who have come to know something of the depth 
and height and breadth of the love that passes knowledge. 
He knows now of the witnesses, the cohorts around him, 
angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware. 
With the revelation of God Christ there has been given to him 
to know of presences and powers which till then he had no 
knowledge of; and he catches a glimpse of the fierce struggle 
going on for hell is loosed with her crews. He feels the stars 
beat with emotion; he knows that the fire shot from them is 
the strong pain of pent knowledge for the message must one 
day be given, but, till then, the pain is strong and great- 
Yet he, to whom the knowledge of the key to the deep mys- 
teries has been given, the key of love, faints not, impelled and 
supported by the hand of God. 

To us in our weakness, how often there comes, after a time 



336 A STUDY OF BROWNING'S SAUL [Dec. 

of high exaltation, a time of depression and of being laid low. 
It is not so here. David keeps watch, unsleeping, and, as we 
feel, uncaring to sleep, till the dawn, when the trouble has 
withered from earth, the trouble of the shaking and upheaval 
of a great revelation. It died out in the day's tender birth; 

"in the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills; 
In the shuddering forests' held breath ; in the sudden wind- 
thrills; 
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye 

sidling still 
Though averted with wonder and dread ; in the birds stiff 

and chill 
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with 

awe" 

" E'en the serpent that slid away silent he felt that new law." 
" The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the 

flowers ; 
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the 

vine-bowers: 
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and 

low, 
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices 'E'en so, it is 

so I '" 

"It is so." "It is so." Not "so be it." This is better 
than Amen: for possession is better than desire; and attain- 
ment is better than aspiration. 




TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS. 

BY FRANCIS O'NEILL, O.P. 

'Twere well with most, if books, that could engage 
Their childhood, pleased them at a riper age, 
The man approving what had charmed the boy, 
Would die at last in comfort, peace and joy : 
And not with curses on his art who stole 
The gem of truth from his unguarded soul. 

Cowptr : Tirocinium. 

SINCE the days of Pestalozzi, the educational field 
has been a scene of contending forces. Refoim 
has been the rallying cry, newly-forged weepers 
the instruments of the charge. If now and 
again the battle paused for an hour, it was but 
to chrystalize the wildly shaken ideas of the combatants or 
germinate new ones. However short the armistice, the next 
engagements were able to boast of new methods of attack 
formulated by a corps of university specialists who had made 
the psychology of child-thought a subject of careful and pains- 
taking analysis. The rising generation was just about to be 
blighted, their youthful enthusiasm destroyed and their intel- 
lectual powers warped, when suddenly, all was saved by the 
Introduction of plastic manipulations in red clay. 

The good news was heralded by the educational press and 
sent broadcast over the country. The satisfaction of School 
Superintendents, who were on the lookout for something to 
relieve the monotony of rational study, was measureless, as 
was the wonderment that came to the rural school pupils when 
the post-pluvial sport of their early years was presented to 
them under the guise of a senso physico mental developer. 
This was the "play principle" in pedagogy, and so intricate 
did it become after some years of normal school experimenta- 
tion that it was finally deemed advisable to send out scientifi- 
cally equipped teachers for summer school work. These were 
a chosen lew who longed to disseminate up-to-date methods 
at state expense. They came into each county to find the 
entire teaching force of the locality gathered together under 
VOL. xciv. 22 



338 TEXT- BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS [Dec,, 

the leadership of the county superintendent, and ready, even 
anxious, to follow the city professors through the mystic 
mazes of cerebral evolution. Much stress was laid upon the 
untramtneled spirit of freedom which was shown to be the 
special prerogative of the American child coming to him as a 
precious heritage of the Pilgrim Fathers. The child-mind was 
to soar into undreamed heights upon the wings of free choice 
and individual initiative. 

That he might do so unimpeded by mistaken attempts at 
direction, his teachers were exhorted to view the mysterious 
workings of the child mind as revealed in the modern psycho- 
logical laboratory. Volumes of pedagogical wisdom, fresh from 
the press and loaded down with high-sounding testimonials 
from learned chairs, were introduced as indispensable. The 
native tact and personal magnetism of Amy Kelly were dis- 
counted. Each particular Dodd was to be evolved henceforth 
upon accurate specifications. Instruments of inanity masquer- 
ading under the specious title of Outlines of Mind Develop- 
ment, were distributed ireely or perhaps held by the professor 
to be dealt out judiciously with much befogging explanation. 
No wonder that the " three r's " were lost sight of when Sep- 
tember placed the little ones at the mercy of the newly- 
equipped faddists. No wonder that we are now face to face 
with socialistic plans of medical inspection which, if adopted 
may force another Xenophon to execrate the habits of the 
modern Mossynoeci. 

Literature has been unkind to the schoolmaster. It has 
pressed out what little sympathy might otherwise linger in 
the bitter-sweet memories of school days. After the years of 
school experience have mellowed and the scenes then enacted 
have been brought under a more accurate perspective, one 
cannot help but find in the wide halls of recollection, suitable 
characters to unite with those which literature has made no- 
torious. 

Miss Barbara Pinkerton, fond as she was of an elaborate 
display which was not always an honest indication of the equip- 
ment of her establishment, and weak in her adulation of pow- 
erful patrons, is not so very far in advance of some modern 
educators; Mr. Squeers, himself, might have many imitators 
even now, were the sentiment against corporal punishment less 
pronounced, and as for Dr. Blimber, a thousand such as he 



191 1.] TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS 339 

still smile " auspiciously at their authors," discovering to the 
wondering Pauls of this generation the complex formulas of 
some new-found science, or adjusting upon them some psycho- 
logical harness, with a view to exploiting the surpassing ex- 
cellence of the fit in magazine articles and upon the lecture 
platform. 

Humanitarianism is the masque which gives unlimited scope 
to modern pedagogical theories. Good citizenship, a spirit of 
civic righteousness and the moral uplift agitation are at pres- 
ent the themes which occupy the attention of many a univer- 
sity professor to the total exclusion of the fundamental princi- 
ples from which all these should flow. No one who has not 
been forced to listen to the personal observations of a soci- 
ologist concerning the every day happenings of an every day 
life, can know what an inexhaustible treasury of talk is hid- 
den away from the uninitiated in the social atmosphere of a 
man who refuses to wear a regulation neck- tie. 

If those who busy themselves in attempts to awaken what 
they call the "social conscience of the masses" would but 
pause a moment, they might realize that there is nothing 
good in to-day's programme for the "uplift of humanity" 
which is not drawn directly from the teachings of our Lord. 
But it seems that the desire to continue Othello's occupation 
is uppermost in the minds of our educators. The result is, 
that a brand-new philosophy of life must emanate with peri- 
odic regularity from the fertile brains of the university profes- 
sor, if he is to hold his position in our "up-to-date" institu- 
tions. The pity is that not a few Catholics are won over by 
the phosphoric display of this original spontaneity and their 
sons come back to the fireside with a head full of theories 
which are destined to be exploded to-morrow, and with hearts 
turned away from the tabernacle where dwells the Divine 
Guest of Infinite Love. 

There are signs, just now, that a reaction is setting in. 
Old time methods of mental discipline have been put aside so 
long, that to rehabilitate them must seem almost like the dis- 
covery of something new in the educational archives. If such 
a hoax is successful, the coming books will insist upon mental 
gymnastics calculated to fashion strong men and noble women. 

It is significant that such good things come through books. 
Fhilobiblos, the ancient author of Iht Old Librarian s Alman- 



340 TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS [Dec., 

ack, admonishes us to select wisely: "You shall chuse your 
Books with Care and Circumspection. When you have deter- 
min'd that it is Prudent to purchase a certain Work do so 
cautiously and make a Shrewd Bargain with the Vendor. It 
will then be your Duty to Peruse the Volume, even if (as 
doubtless will be the Fact) you have scan'd it before Buying." 
In these critical times would it not be well to follow such sage 
advice ? For, of all the memories which come back to us so 
vividly as we pass along the years that lie open before us, 
what ones are so luminous as those associated with our old 
school books! We can still repeat a page or two of the well 
thumbed speller; the elm tree which was described as mag- 
nificent stands forth prominently and all the bits of poetry 
have become never failing wells of joy and meditation. Is 
this not proof that text- books make a lasting impression, and 
is it not imperative that they be chosen with thougbtiul dis- 
crimination ? 

Fortunately, the Catholic teacher is not at sea in respect 
to those things which make a book worthy. The difficulty 
has been, and to a great extent is, that there are few books 
that measure up to the Catholic standard of what a book 
should be. Catholic teachers have been walkirg for many 
years the hall of Eblis with fine specimens of the book-makers' 
art in their hands, but with despair gnawing at their hearts. 
The gift-bearing Greeks besieged us and placed in the hands 
of our children instruments of physical and moral destruction. 

We were weak then, to-day we are strong, and we have 
begun to purge out the old leaven. That we have delayed so 
long, is, perhaps, due to the fact that our higher institutions 
of learning are blessed with professors who are abundantly 
capable of pointing out the glaring errors met with in the 
various texts. It may be true that such teachers rather enjoy 
finding the reptile in the grass, since its killing serves to focus 
attention and stimulate interest. 

Great harm can come where conditions are less satisfac- 
tory. The intellectual pabulum containing seme scattered 
grains of historical arsenic too often escapes the Marsh test. 
Need we be surprised that the result is deadly, that Catholic 
students hug the shores in cowardly fear of storms. Irstead 
of cruising full sail upon the high seas knowing that the bark 
is Peter's, false history and mistaken interpretations of life 



ig 1 1.] TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS 341 

hold them snugly in port. What will give the students of our 
Catholic schools a proper possession of the facts better than 
a complete system of instruction embodied in well- arranged 
text-books ? 

The need is a pressing one. The Catholic school stands 
for principles which have been repudiated by public propa- 
gandists. It has never sought the blandishments of popular 
approval. Up-to-dateness has not meant patterning after pub- 
lic school methods. The Catholic spirit has remained alocf 
and even in the early days when poverty compelled us to make 
use of the public text- book, it was with the tacit understand- 
ing that such a practice was but tolerated. From time to time 
books better suited to the Catholic students have been issued. 
The good which they have accomplished is incalculable. They 
have opened the way so well that there is reason to hope that 
a concerted movement may soon take place which will give 
every grade a complete set of Catholic school books. 

These need not be extraordinary in matter or form. There 
attractiveness should lie in manifest worth not in special fea- 
tures. Fashions change monthly that the old may be discarded, 
that the new may be superseded by objects of a more allur- 
ing hue. We have come to expect that every new book should 
have a new idea nestling within its cover, a new atmosphere, 
perhaps, or some pedagogical nostrum which will excite the 
mind of the class laggard until he becomes the most brilliant 
member of his university, and subsequently, the nightmare of 
succeeding generations. Such books have no place in the nor- 
mal class room. If a student is mentally dull why stop the 
progress of the class by trying on all a variety of pedagogi- 
cal misfits? The danger is, that the boy may suddenly find his 
bearings and walk off with the honors leaving you to hug the 
delusion that the last combination of hitching straps was the 
cause of the start. 

A history of English literature which will avoid the glar- 
ing defects of those already on the market must be written in 
the near future, if our schools are to have a creditable guide. 
It should be a book of facts so arranged that students might 
follow the development of the several species of literature with- 
out interruption. Any attempt to press fine phraseology into 
these is manifestly a mistake. Needless repetition of phrases 
is nothing short of criminal. A recently published book on 



342 TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS [Dec., 

English literature begins no less than fifty-five paragraphs with 
the words: "He was born." More rarely the author indulges 
in " first saw the light." This takes space a costly waste in 
a book of some four hundred pages. 

There should be no thought in the mind of a text-book 
author about the public wearing a path to his humble dwell- 
ing in the woods. Such an expectation tempts a writer into 
the wearisome fields of platitudinous generalizations and rend- 
ers his work unsafe for first studies. Industry, accuracy and a 
calm power for critical analysis are the main characteristics. 
Instead of these, text-book commercialism has placed a pre- 
mium upon hot- house qualities which wither in an hour. Every 
writer flatters himself that he has succeeded not Louis XIV 
but Charlemagne. The productions are in perfect keeping. 
This one embodies the results of the latest Posnett in com- 
parative literature, showing the determined environments, the 
aspirational elements and the tribal contributions which have 
given to the world the Divine Comedy, Shakespearean drama 
and Walt Whitman ! Evolution, it seems, is not always a for- 
ward movement. Another comes from the pen of a philologist 
who has inhaled "atmosphere" in foreign universities. He is 
numbered among those who are so busy studying the twigs 
that they neglect the ripened fruit; 

" . . . Who chase 
tA panting syllable through time and space; 

it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 
Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark. 1 ' 




A thirdR reaches the height o'- irie undesirable and places 
before the/ ' student rp.odei selections from our best authors. 
Think of ) cit ! A crass of fifty, the majority of whom have 
difficulty P n relating the bare facts of a boat-ride, are asked to 
see the visib'^ which the dying eyes of Garfield beheld, to 
watch with (fc^olumbus until heaven blessed him with the sight 
of the unknoVwn land, to follow Everett as he reveals the stu- 
pendous cloc.t'k-work of the skies. 

Selections |<such as these are simply discouraging to a young 
student. His rttoemory is stored with the passages that repre- 
sent the highes* t reaches of oratorical grandeur, and when he 
attempts to Write, these at once beckon him above the 



i9i i.] TEXT. BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS 343 

clouds. The result is, that after vainly trying to continue 
the pyrotechnic display, he makes up his mind that he has 
not the creative gift of the masters and that nothirg he can 
write is worth while. Had such highly intensified selections 
been reserved for maturer years when they would be read in 
their context, the gradual working-up process would be under- 
stood, the reader would see that such a splendid burst of glory 
with its resultant shower of stars did not happen without a 
well-planned and carefully directed rushing- up. 

The material out of which a student can best write a story 
has nothing to do with special selections. Verbally, a boy 
can give a good account of himself, because then he does not 
revert to set forms of exposition. The events, if well remem- 
bered, follow in logical order and the story unfolds as it 
stimulated the teller. Every boy has or should have a stock 
oi genii who come at his bidding to help out the dry-bones 
of technical knowledge. Listen to the Cottage Poet: 

Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings I made an 
excellent English scholar and by the time I was ten or eleven 
years of age I was a critic in substantives, verbs and particles. 
In my infant and boyish days too, I owe much to an old 
woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignor- 
ance, credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the 
largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning 
devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, 
kelpies, elk-candles, deathlights, wraiths, apparitions, can- 
trips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons and other trumpery. 
This cultivated the latent seeds of poesy. 

It is a lamentable fact that our histories are unsatisfactory. 
If books that treat of literature should have an acceptable 
literary form by force of the old adage, that fat oxen should 
have a driver of considerable rotundity, books that deal with 
the happenings of mankind should be distinguished by a close 
adherence to fact. Writers who are content to accept the 
statements of others without personal verification are untrust- 
worthy compilers. Efforts to make over the old have resulted 
in a chrestomathy of purple patches " which serves to exploit 
a hesitating tendency to appear exceptional. What interest 
is aroused by a list of questions modeled upon the traditional; 
" After Washington crossed the Delaware, where did he go?" 



344 TEXT-BOOKS FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS [Dec. 

The failures thus far hinted at are typical of most books 
proposed for our Catholic schools. What can be done to 
remedy these defects and thus reduce the burdens which un- 
suitable text- books place upon those engaged in teaching? 
Shall we admit that since novels and penny- dreadfuls are 
most called for in Carnegie libraries, the taste of the coming 
generations is not to be raised ? Shall reverence never again 
kiss the ink-horn of the author of Clarissa? 

In order that a complete system of Catholic texts may be 
had quickly, something should be done at once to enlist the 
co-operative strength of the entire teaching force of our 
schools. While it might prove difficult to select a single indi- 
vidual sufficiently equipped for the work, there are in every 
educational institution not a few who have given their life 
study to important phases of certain studies. Such persons 
are safe guides. Under this plan the departments of litera- 
ture and those of other subjects would be presented in har- 
mony with their particular dominant note. Naturally, the 
Religious Orders that have been founded for educational work 
could furnish exceptionally competent writers. It is not too 
much to hope that a Co-operative Corps of Text-book Writers 
will arise before long, since the good of Catholic Education 
calls loudly for the fruits of their toil. 




THE CROSS OF THE LEGION. 

BY JEANIE DRAKE. 

yes, it is a favorite Church, most popular and 
frequented, our St. Ferdinand des Ternes. There 
are more baptisms and funerals and weddings 
from there than from any other Church in Paris," 
said Madame Michaud complacently. She leaned 
her plump arms on the counter of her tobacco and wine shop, 
not ceasing to make fly her knitting needles while she watched 
the proceedings at the church across the way. 

" It is quite simply because of an overcrowded parish," 
explained the little director of the Pontpes Funebres from next 
door, who took a very small morning glass deliberately and 
chiefly for the sake of the laugh and jest which flavored its 
thinness. 

The tobacconist would have contradicted, no doubt, but 
was obliged to lay aside her needles to supply a customer re- 
quiring postage stamps. When she resumed them it was to 
step out upon the sidewalk where were placed many little 
marble-topped tables under awnings, at which other custom- 
ers gossiped and sipped, this summer holiday. 

"It is a baptismal occasion," she told these. "The cab- 
inet-maker's fourth, you know, all the others have died. And, 
to bring better luck what do you think they have asked 
Mademoiselle Jeanne, Mademoiselle Didier, you understand, 
to be the godmother 1 It was presumption, perhaps, such a 
young lady as Mademoiselle, and daughter of an old sovs- 
officier. But what would you? His wife is devoted to the 
lieutenant and the demoiselle, their lodgers. 

While these chatted outside on the Paris pavement, under 
the brilliant July sunshine, across the way, the sacred rite 
being ended, Mademoiselle Didier, dark-eyed and slender and 
graceful in her pretty, inexpensive summer toilet, relinquished 
the little godchild to his mother. " We will share your christen- 
ing feast later, but now papa must see the troops coming 
back from Longchamp. Is it not so, papa?" 

" Bat, certainly, my little one," and with military prompt!- 



346 THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

tude, he tucked her under his arm. " Au revoir, Madame and 
Monsieur." 

" A thousand thanks for your goodness, Mademoiselle and 
Monsieur." 

Down the step?, along the square and through streets, the 
girl clung fondly to her father. He was hardly as tall as she 
bat very erect and soldierly of bearing; and his white hair 
and m>u3tache contrasted well with the dark eyes which her 
own resembled. His simple holiday suit, though threadbare, 
was well brushed, his cravat tied to a nicety, and his cheap 
thread gloves duly buttoned. 

"Oh; how good, how good you are to have pleased these 
kind people by coming to the church with me and giving up 
the review which you have always so much enjoyed." 

" My dear, the concierge and his wife have been so atten- 
tive to our comfort, it was little to do in return. Besides " 
gaily, " if I must, otherwise, have gone alone, I should have 
missed one of the chief advantages. To have had on my arm, 
a charming young girl at whom the old comrades must look 
with admiration ; and even, perhaps, with envy, thinking: 'Ah, 
if we had a daughter like that ! Just heaven, what happi- 
ness 1 ' " 

" Ah, you foolish papa, it is only you who think that of 
me. Well, at least, you will meet the President and troops 
returning through the Sots." 

" Unless they have already disbanded." 

They were now hurrying across the Avenue de la Grande 
Armce, when near the Rue Pergolese came clattering a de- 
tachment of the dragoons of the Seventh, their swords and 
blue and gold shining fair in the sunlight, and a general cfficer 
at their head. The retired lieutenant whirled about and sa- 
luted, the officer, iron-gray and middle-aged of aspect, return- 
ing the salute with a smile of friendly recognition. 

"General Delcasse, it was?" asked the girl. 

Yes. He must have left the staff, after review, that he 
might ride with his former troops. He loves to do it." 

" Well, why should that make you sigh, Monsieur le lieu- 
tenant ! He, also, will be retired before long, and he has no 
daughter, you told me." 

" No, no children, that is true." 

"You were much with him in those days?" artfully. 



.] THE CROSS OF THE LEGION 347 

"He came from St. Cyr, a boy officer when I was still 
private in the fifth, and we were together at Port- a Monsson. 
Then he was my captain at Maubeuge where he was badly 
wounded." 

" And," shyly, " where a certain private Didier won cor- 
poralship by carrying him into safety under heavy fire from 
the enemy, and was badly wounded himself." 

"Pouf! that was nothing. He was decorated then, and 
promoted to be Major after Sedan and the siege of Paris in 
the Second." 

" And you got that dear scar across your cheek." 

" I served under him later in the Chasseurs d'Afrique until 
he was transferred to the cuirassier's and then made general 
of brigade, general commandant, and now division general. 
Yes, we have marched, and bivouacked and fought on many 
a field together, and always been friends if a humble lieu- 
tenant, from the ranks, may say so." 

Just at this moment, as they passed from the Rue Pergo- 
lese into the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, General Delcasse, 
having left the troop and resigned his horse to the orderly, 
came towards them. "You are too late, Monsieur, for all but 
the tag-end. The President has gone home to early break- 
fast; and it is Sauve qui peut with the others who shall 
soonest follow his example. Your daughter, it is, I think, 
Didier? Present me. I have seen you often, Mademoiselle, 
with your father. You have heard him speak, doubtless, of 
his old officer and comrade in more than one campaign. But, 
perhaps, you may not know that but for him I should not be 
here to-day to ride to the review on the Fete Nationale. 
Ah, he would not boast about that, of his own doings. He 
should have been promoted sooner that his pension might now 
be greater." He selected a great bunch of crimson roses from 
the stock of a perambulating Marchande des quatrt Saisons who 
wheeled her cart of flowers nearby. "Do me the favor to ac- 
cept these, Mademoiselle. Now, I take the omnibus home, 
my horse being tired. Au revoir, Mademoiselle, and you, 
Didier." 

"Ah, that is a man," said the lieutenant, as the General 
mounted to the roof of a passing vehicle. 

"You, too," declared Jeanne, giving his arm an affection- 
ate squeeze, and smiling, coquettishly at the flowers, which, 



348 THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

he fondly declared gave the last touch of perfection to her 
appearance. " They shall adorn my godson's christening feast." 

This was unheard, for he assented absently. " Did you 
remark," he asked, "the Grand Cross among his orders? 
That is the most precious of all. They tell me it is now 
sometimes bestowed on many who have not fairly earned it. 
But General Delcasse was decorated on the field of honor by 
the Emperor himself, when they thought him dying of his 
wounds. Ambery and Soupon, who fought beside me, they 
had medals." 

" And you, who rescued the general, and nearly died, 
too you should have had one," said the girl impetuously, 
having detected his faint sigh. 

" Ah, well, I got my sergeantcy there. One must not look 
to have everything in life. See you, my little one, or one 
would be too content, and never be homesick for heaven." 

"Don't dare to be homesick for heaven, wicked man, 
while you have me ! " 

" That is better, truly, than fifty medals," he assured her. 
"So let us enjoy the Fete." And resuming his Gallic light- 
heartedness began to point out to her this or that which was 
amusing in the holiday crowds thronging past. " See those 
privates cocking their caps at the nursemaids, quite as I might 
have done in the days of my youth, and that fellow who 
stumbles and kicks, as by accident, the old woman's poodle. 
Hear him ! ' A thousand excuses, Madame the cabaret is not 
to blame; it is the sun.' He must hurry to get out of sound 
of her scolding." 

They were now within the Bois where merchants of cocoa, 
of pepperment lozenges, of oranges, offered their wares and 
made miraculous escapes under the legs of the trooper's 
horses, and among the rushing automobiles. Down a long, 
verdant alley they went, the pair, towards the Lake, where 
Jeanne espied a bench unoccupied, but : " No, no," the veteran 
objected, " on a fete we will treat ourselves to chairs. It is 
but a few sous." 

She laughed, shaking her pretty head, for she knew their 
sous were more easily spent than obtained. "Even the extra 
pension which goes with the Cross would be a help," she re- 
flected, and then rejected the thought as unworthy the day 
and her father's child. 



i9"-] THE CROSS OF THE LEGION 349 

While they watched the crowd boating, feeding the water 
fowl, treating themselves out of paper bags, giving themselves 
to the festal spirit with childlike and Latin thoroughness, a 
mm, well-dressed and leisurely of gait strolled across the grass 
near them. He was, indeed, the same whom Madame Mi- 
chaud's sharp eyes had discerned on the steps of St. Ferdi- 
nand's that morning, following the cortege. He paid his sous 
to the bearded old man in sabots and black calico overalls, 
who presided over the chairs, then drew his quite close to the 
lieutenant and asked a light for his cigarette. Then hesitated: 
"Ah, pardon, it perhaps offends Mademoiselle?" 
"Not at all," her father smiled companionably. "She is 
accustomed " 

" Then monsieur will do me the honor" tendering a cigar. 
From this it was easy to slip into general topics. The new- 
comer had been in the Bois since daybreak for the review, 
taking his little breakfast after in the Chinese Pavilion. 
" Though not a soldier himself he adored the army and missed 
no military function." 

" I thank you, Monsieur, in the name of the army." 
" It was, perhaps, indiscreet to pay so direct a compliment, 
lor I will confess I had already remarked Monsieur's soldierly 
carriage and knew him for an officer." 

" A retired lieutenant, only, promoted from the ranks." 
" For conspicuous gallantry, the orders read, Monsieur," 
Jeanne murmured proudly. 

"That goes without saying, Mademoiselle, when one re- 
gards your father. Pardon, again, but are we not neighbors? 
I have seen you often entering St. Ferdinand, and I have a 
modest bachelor apartment, rue Denis Poisson, and an office 
at Avenue Malakoff." 

"We are in the Rue St. Ferdinand," said Monsieur Didier. 
The stranger offered his card which was inscribed "Anatole 
Flossin, avocat." 

Jeanne, to avoid his glances of open admiration, buried her 
face among her roses. She was not sure that she liked this 
man with his bold eyes which she had encountered more than 
once upon the street. She liked better to have her father in- 
terested in his description of the review, the President's car- 
riage, the staff, the ministers, the glittering horse troops, in 
fine, all the accompaniments of military manoeuvres. And then 



3so THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

the crowd and again the crowd at no previous review had 
it been so great, and the presentation of the standards to 
many new regiments and the enthusiasm of the tribunes 
"Monsieur should have viewed that!" 

"A household event prevented, which reminds me, cher- 
ished one, it is the hour appointed for breakfast." 

They left the new acquaintance with many civilities. But 
that night when they went out to see the illuminations and 
the crowds merrily dancing in the squares they saw Monsieur 
Flossin again quite by accident, it seemed. He laughed, in- 
dulgently, at the antics of some soldiers who danced with each 
other. 

" They think it a pity to waste good music provided free 
by a paternal Government, which reminds me that I have here 
some tickets to the Opera Comique, also free for this one 
night to first comers as you know. The boy who sold them 
to me had stood in line all night to get them. If you would 
care to use them ? No ? Well, a free show is apt to be 
mixed." 

"It is Jeanne who is dainty," said Monsieur Didier. "When 
I was a youngster I used to foot it on this night merrily enough 
outdoors but a demoiselle ah, that is another thing, and for 
her father, too." But he felt it incumbent on him now to 
permit a call from the friendly and obliging Monsieur Flossin. 

After the cool, bright day of the National Fete, a long 
and unusually hot summer followed. The papers said that all 
Paris was en villegiature or touring in far places. But Jeanne 
knew better. The swarming inhabitants of the Avenue des 
Ternes, for example, were not en villegiature or touring. 

Among them Jeanne moved on her own little household 
errands, spiritually far apart, but with a sweet smile or word 
for each that she knew. "Your demoiselle is looking pale," 
observed Madame Michaud, accusingly to Madame Cussard, 
with the little Ferdinand in one arm, and her marketing bas- 
ket on the other. " Is it the heat or that you do not make 
her comfortable?" 

" Our rooms are all of them most comfortable," said Madame 
Cussard, with spirit. " That thin man in glasses he comes too 
often and talks too much." 

" Flossin is his name," said Madame Michaud, and thought- 
fully, "he might be a good parti for the demoiselle. But no, 



i9i i.] THE CROSS OF THE LEGION 351 

he is a man of pretensions, and would not wish to marry even 
a pretty girl like our demoiselle without dot I wonder " she 
clicked her needles together. But here a customer's little dog 
jumped high over a stool and the group called: "Houp-la!" 
and diverted her attention. 

Jeanne, herself, with the fixed continental idea that a 
dowerless girl must not look to marriage, and at first per- 
plexed by Monsieur Flossin's visits had come to regard them 
with gratitude in spite of her former distaste. It is true his 
glances and compliments were still disagreeable to her ; but it 
was something to leave her father provided with a companion 
during her frequent absences. He seemed to hear with pleas- 
ure the old officer's stories and shared his cigarette and glass 
of Eau Luciee. To make ends meet, she being diplomie, had 
pupils in languages to whom she went, and so avoided him often. 

But suddenly one day he met her at the door returning 
and said without preface: "Mademoiselle, you have remarked, 
perhaps, the rosette of an order which I sometimes wear ? It 
is for a trifling service I was able to render a foreign govern- 
ment. And to think that your father with his magnificent 
record which I have learned a little from himself, much from 
others, should be without such recognition ! He feels it pain- 
fully, as you his daughter, have doubtless guessed. He has 
honored me with his confidence, and I have some little inter- 
est and a large acquaintance with those in power. If you 
will trust me with the matter it is now September I think 
I may promise you the decoration for his Christmas present." 

"Ah!" breathed Jeanne, her soft eyes shining. 

"There is, of course it is a detail some necessary expen- 
diture. I wish I was rich enough to advance the preliminary 
cost; but think what it will be to him, and the rightful pride 
he will have in it ! And afterwards there will be lull repay- 
ment from the life-pension attached." 

They had now ascended, and her father came forward to 
her, his face aglow. " Has Monsieur told you, my cherished 
one? After all these years 1 Ah, Jeanne, Jeanne, I have said 
little, for I would not grieve you; but it has been a long dis- 
appointment, and, now, I can die happy ! " 

With his hands in hers, his eager appeal of voice and feat- 
ure, Jeanne, the most prudent of girls could not resist. "It 
it is a certainty, Monsieur Flossin?" she hesitated. 



352 THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

He shrugged his shoulders. "Come then to my office, both 
of you. See and talk with my clients, for many of whom I 
have reclaimed their just dues in money and honors. Of 
course, the cross is not bought, you understand ; but to bring 
your distinguished services to the notice they have accident- 
ally missed, man lieutenant, costs a trifle," 

"We have our small savings in the bank ; but if not enough, 
I can raise more on my pension papers. It will be fully re- 
paid by the added income later, Jeanne and the cioss!" 

So exalted was he at this prospect that the girl had not 
the heart to object nor the courage to oppose. Little by lit- 
tle their bank account was now withdrawn and given to Flos- 
sin, who cheered them with word of most certain success. 

The veteran twirled his moustache and whirled his light 
cane about with a new boyishness. " I should never have 
begged the cross," he said proudly, "but I can wear it when 
it comes with a good conscience. You will be pleased to walk 
with the old father, then, my Jeannette?" 

" I am pleased to walk with him now," said Jeanne, who 
was secretly a little troubled. For their tranquility was now 
gone and they lived in a disquieting atmosphere of alternate 
hope and fear, according to the lawyer's varying reports. 
Sometimes they went to Flossin's handsomely furnished office. 
Sometimes he came to them, and about a week before Christ- 
mas he brought them a paper which set forth that the brilliant 
services of Lieutenant Didier during two wars having been 
overlooked, were now to be rewarded, etc. And this brevet 
was signed by some one very high in the Ministry of War. 
Monsieur Didier trod upon air, and willingly drew out the last 
of his account at the bank, and an advance upon his pension 
papers that the final expense might be met. 

"The color of the ribbon is red, my Jeanne," he jested, 
"which well accords with your hair and eyes," and she re- 
joiced in his happiness. 

This was a mild winter, with no snow and even a little 
sunshine. Through the quarter there went the season's joyous 
stir and bustle of shopping, and the crowds slipping in and 
out the ever open church doors for pious commemoration 
could see the Infant's creche being already built. So busy was 
Madame Michaud that her needles actually rested while she 
served those who, even in winter, must sit outdoors. 



.] THE CROSS OP THE LEGION 353 

"A great scandal is discovered, with fraudulent traffic and 
forgery in all sorts of decorations, and even the academy's 
palms," announced a newcomer forcibly. 

The lieutenant passing by, went his way, smiling happily, 
in spite of the keen East wind which made him shiver. In the 
pocket of his threadbare coat, worn without great coat, he bad 
a small trinket just bought for Jeanne, and now he stopped at 
the confectioner's for a little box of bon-bons. " She will scold 
but prettily," he thought, "for our , funds are low for the 
moment. But the loan on the great coat covers it." 

At the door he met her, and they passed up arm in arm. 
She was quite white, and but for his own shivering he most 
have felt her tremble. "But what is it? "she asked him. 
" You are so cold. Come in here, there is a good fire. But, 
but you are without your overcoat in this weather 1 Oh, 
careless one ! " Then she saw that though cold, he was much 
flushed, and he confessed to feeling very strangely tired. So, 
she persuaded him to go to bed, and made him a hot tisane, 
and tucked him in and left him. Then, her bravery deserting 
her, she ran down to the concierge's room, and finding kind 
Madame Cussard alone, laid her bead upon her shoulder. 

" Ah, Madame Cussard, a great misfortune but we must not 
tell papa not yet. That man who came here whom we em- 
ployed he has cheated everybody and run away with their money. 
There was a great crowd about his office when I came by, and 
they were terribly angry and shouted dreadful things. Papa 
has taken cold and may sleep. Will you listen if he needs you?" 

Then the poor child ran round in the night to St. Ferdi- 
nand's, open for choir practice. On her knees, before the 
Blessed Sacrament, she could find only a few words to say, 
and repeated over and over: "Ah, dear Christ Child, in this 
Thy holy season, help us, oh, help us!" And then in the 
midst of her prayer, like inspiration, came a sudden thought. 
With a final adoration, she wiped her eyes, composed herself, 
and went quickly home. 

It was evident next morning that the lieutenant had a 
touch of influenza, to which he succumbed the more easily, 
from the severe unconscious strain of the preceding months. 
He stayed in bed, while Jeanne left him on some excuse of 
shopping. "To get my Christmas present?" he jested. "It 
should be handsome this year, with our happy prospects." 
VOL. xciv. 23 



354 THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

She took the underground to the Elysee, but the office she 
sought was closed. " For the holidays," said the sentry. 
" General Delcasse ? He may be at his hotel twenty Rue 
des Hirondelles." Another disappointment might there have 
awaited her, for the General's automobile was in front of the 
house and he himself just issuing. 

"To speak with me a moment? But certainly Mademoi- 
selle. What can I do to serve you. Come in." He led the 
way to his library, where a young secretary was finishing the 
day's mail. "Be seated." 

" Pardon my boldness, Monsieur le General," Jeanne began 
at once; "but it is it is for my father's sake, who is all I 
have, you know." 

" My child, speak quite freely. Your father was my com- 
panion-in-arms." 

" He has always I have known it, though, perhaps, no 
one else guessed felt hurt and disappointed, that while many 
of the comrades gained the cross, his was withheld." 

The secretary, who was of grave but gentle countenance, 
arose: " Monsieur le General, I can finish these letters within." 

A flush crimsoned the young girl's face, for she had not 
perceived him sitting behind the high desk. Their eyes met 
and his were respectfully expressive. The general nodded as- 
sent, and the young man passed out, with a salute to his chief 
and one still lower to the girlish visitor, whose dark eyes 
pleading, and graceful form inclined in eager appeal, had given 
her new charm. 

"You were saying " 

" Monsieur, for months now, a man dishonest he has proved 
has flattered my father with hopes of that honor. Papa is 
old and not strong ; he has been under a long strain. I left 
him in bed suffering. He knows nothing yet of the fraud and 
confidently expects the decoration at Christmas, as he has been 
promised. It will almost kill him, the shock of the truth. If he 
must know, I thought it might come less harmfully from you, 
who could soften it with some gracious words of appreciation 
from his former chief. Or, he says you are so good, perhaps 
you could advise me as to some way to keep it from him." 

" My child," said the general, gravely, " that would be im- 
possible. The quarter will talk of it; the papers will be full 
of it; for it is a flagrant scandal and we are already on the 



THE CROSS OF THE LEGION 355 

track of that gang of rascals. By the way," keenly, "was your 
particular member of the gang intending to please your father 
with a sham decoration pour vos beaux jeux, it would be com- 
prehensible, or pour les beaux jeux de votre cassette?" 

Again the crimson rose to Jeanne's soft cheeks. " Mon- 
sieur, he has, in truth, emptied the cassette, it was so small. 
But," hurriedly, " that is nothing. I am quite young and 
strong. I can work for both." 

" I see you are a true soldier's daughter. Well, go home. 
Tell your father you met me, and that on hearing of his ill- 
ness I sent him his superior's orders to stay in bed for a week. 
Keep every one from him for that time, and we will see what 
we can do. Those sharpers may have returned his papers, 
since they did not need them. Yes ! That is well. I will 
send Monsieur Berthod to you for them, through having been 
so much together, my personal witness might be enough, au 
revoir, then, Mademoiselle." 

Jeanne, her heart lightened in spite of certain loss and still 
uncertain help took her leave with pretty murmured acknowl- 
edgment, and before going home, stopped again at St. Ferdi- 
nand's to thank the Christ Child for the General's friendship. 

He who had meant to spend the holidays hunting at his 
country place, stayed now in town, and was quite busily em- 
ployed. Then, on Christmas Eve, his aim accomplished, he 
spoke to his secretary: "I am sorry to have kept you work- 
ing on a holiday, Andre." 

" Monsieur, I was glad to be so worthily employed." 

"You have met here the young daughter of Lieutenant 
Didier." 

" Yes, Monsieur le General." 

" More than once since, when I have sent you to their 
house. How do you find her?" 

" Altogether adorable, Monsieur." 

"You have never yet thought of marriage, Andre"?" 

" Not before this, Monsieur, having my mother to provide 
for and not having before exactly felt " 

"Just so. Mademoiselle Didier has, however, no dowry." 

"That is a pity," said the young Frenchman, "I have 
thought, however, Monsieur le General being so liberal, my 
salary so good, that perhaps " 

"Just so," said the general, again, absently. 



356 THE CROSS OF THE LEGION [Dec., 

Jeanne's heart had time during the week to grow some- 
what heavy again. Her father's attack of influenza was severe 
and necessitated expenditure, difficult above all just now. And 
then the discovery that it was caused by his having pledged 
his overcoat to buy her some little gifts fretted her. " I did 
not need it. A soldier should not coddle himself," he pro- 
tested in answer to her tender reproaches. The young secre- 
tary's calls, though strangely fluttering her girlish stateliness 
of manner, had brought little encouragement. 

" The general can break the disappointment to him better 
than anyone, Mademoiselle," was all he told her. And, that 
she was to expect a visit from General Delcasse, Christmas 
morning. 

So she went to early Mass on the great festival, and of- 
fered Holy Communion for the dear father; then later as he 
was stronger, assisted him to dress and established him in an 
easy chair by the bright fire in their tiny sitting-room, where 
her books and flowering plants made it cosy. 

" Ah, how the little chain sets off my Jeanne's pretty 
looks," he complimented her. But she shook her finger at 
him. "I should not have needed to do that," he declared 
stoutly, " but for the expense of the cross." He looked at her 
with a new anxiety. " Is it not strange that we hear nothing 
from Flossin this week ? He promised for to-day." His eyes 
were weak and he seemed very pale and fragile, sitting there 
by the fire. 

But while Jeanne hesitated, stifling a sigh, Madame Cus- 
sard's voice was heard speaking importantly: " Certainly, Mon- 
sieur le General, awaiting your visit au troisieme;" and Gen- 
eral Delcasse and his secretary came in. 

"Didier, my dear fellow, I am glad to see you better. I 
have come to bring you, in person, the cross of honor, so 
long and well-merited, which pleasure the Ministry permits me 
as you are confined to the house, and because my personal 
testimony has helped establish claims overlooked all these years 
through their blindness and my own want of thought. But when 
I told them how we served together at Monsson, at Maubeuge, 
at Sedan " 

" Under the walls of Paris, in Africa." 

"Just so. They could not resist; and this is your Christ- 
mas present." He fastened the decoration on the veteran's coat, 



i9i i.] THE CROSS OF THE LEGION 357 

who was mute from emotion. " Mademoiselle shares, I know, 
your joy. But I venture to offer for herself, and her ac- 
ceptance, another present." Andre" here took his place beside 
him. " This gentleman, long in my employ, and known to me 
from childhood asks the hand of Mademoiselle in marriage. He 
has been a devoted son and should make a good husband. His 
means are sufficient; but Mademoiselle is not without dot. I 
claim the privilege of her godfather which Didier, I should 
have been and take upon myself her suitable dowering, a 
trifling remembrance, indeed, of her father's service to me. 
What do you say, Didier?" 

" Mon General, your goodness, your recommendation " 

" Pardon, Monsieur," said Andre, whose gaze had been fixed 

worshipfully on Jeanne's wide, dark eyes and parted lips, " but 

if Mademoiselle should find me unworthy the whole quarter 

speaks of her beauty, her sweetness, her piety." 

Bat Jeanne, with a shy smile, placed in his the hand which 
he kissed. 

"A perfectly suitable marriage," pronounced Madame 
Michaud, watching the bridal cortege, "and it makes an ideal 
household. The little silver haired mother who is very silent, 
forms an excellent audience for the lieutenant, who has no 
objection to talk. And the young pair, so charming and devoted. 
The general is in full uniform and talks with Monsieur Didier, 
who wears his rosette. Ah, there is Mademoiselle no Madame 
in her pretty white, who kisses her hand to us. A thousand 
felicitations." 

When the general's automobile had puffed and snorted away, 
the bride still hesitated on St. Ferdinand's steps before begin* 
ning the usual French bourgeois wedding drive. 

"Let it be the Bois," she decided, for it is not too cold. 
To-day was made expressly for our wedding, it is so mild for 
the first of the year, and actually, a little sunshine. The Bois 
certainly." 

Whither they drove and descended again near the Lake. 
While the lieutenant, quite well again, and the proudest of men 
in the great coat and rosette of the order, gave his arm to the 
gentle little woman in widow's dress, the bride and groom walked 
apart, her white gown trailing across the now withered grass, 
under leafless boughs, through which the sun filtered upon her. 



35 8 CHRISTMAS CAROL [Dec. 

"Not too bleak, my dearest?" asked Andre. 

" Oh, lovely," she sighed. " It was here, you know, we first 
met that man Flossin." 

"But that should not endear the spot!" 

" Oh, but yes, my Andre. Was it not because of him, that 
after long strain and anxiety, heavy cross and grief, the Christ 
Child led me to your General in my trouble 1 And through 
him has there not come to my father the cross he has so de- 
sired ; and to me the best, the finest Christmas gift in the 
whole world 1 " 

" Thanks be to Him, then, for mine, Who makes good to 
come out of evil." He bent to look at the sweet face smiling 
up at him; then lifted his hat reverently, as across the wintry 
stretches came the faint, clear sound of the church bells. 



CHRISTMAS CAROL. 

BY CHARLES L. O'DONNELL, C.S.C. 

LAMBS and little children, 

Gather two by two, 
Little Lamb and lowly Child 

Here is laid for you. 
Come to Mary's smiling Son, 
Worship all, and one by one. 

Lights are on His forehead, 

Little children, see ; 
Other stars shall burn there, 

Red as stars may be. 
Guileless children, for us plead, 
Us for whom the Lamb shall bleed. 

Little lambs, all in a row, 

Lay your faces down 
Till the Lady Mary stoop 

And touch you with her gown. 
Little children, laugh and nod,' 
Gambling round the Lamb of God. 




WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 
II. 

SAID in the last article of this series, that the 
capital event, the critical moment in the great 
struggle of the Reformation, was the defection 
of Britain. 

It is a point that the normal modern anti- 
Catholic and anti-Christian historian does not and cannot make. 
Yet it is, perhaps, the most important historical point between 
the saving of Europe from the barbarians and modem times. 

Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they 
would be seen by an impartial observer from some great dis- 
tance in time, or in space, or in mental attitude. Let me put 
them as they would appear to one quite indifferent to, and 
remote from, the antagonists. 

To such an observer, the history of Europe would be that 
of the great Roman Empire with its civilization passing through 
the transformation I have described : its mind first more and 
more restless, then more and more tending to a certain form 
of philosophy, and that form as we believe preordained, as 
such an observer might think, accidental the Catholic Church. 
The Catholic Church becomes the soul, the vital principle, the 
continuity of Europe. It suffers grievously from the accident, 
largely geographical, of the Eastern schism. It is of its na- 
ture perpetually subject to assault; from within, because it 
deals with many matters not open to positive proof; from 
without, because all those who are not of European civiliza- 
tion are naturally its enemies. 

The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and 
the unity of this soul are preserved from generation to gener- 
ation, in its transformation declines as to its substance. It be- 
comes coarsened and less in its material powers. It loses its 
central organization (which is replaced by a mass of local 
lordships jumbled into more or less national groups). In build- 



36o WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION f [Dec., 

ing, in writing, in cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculp- 
ture, it forgets all but the fundamentals of its arts but expands 
so far as its area is concerned. Great belts of barbaric Ger- 
many receive the Roman influence Baptism and the Mass. 
With the Creed there comes reading and writing, building in 
brick and stone, bridges and the power of thinking clearly. 
It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian 
reaches longitude 10 East and the Scandinavian Peninsula. 
But a thousand years after our Lord it has reached even these, 
and there remains between the unbroken tradition of our 
civilization in the West and the schismatic but Christian civili- 
zation of the Greek Church, nothing but a little island of 
paganism along the South of the Baltic, which island is les- 
sened year after year by the armed efforts and the rational 
dominance of culture; our Christian and Roman culture pro- 
ceeds continuously eastward, mastering the uncouth. With the 
thirteenth century a united Christendom is finally and abso- 
lutely formed. It was not destined to endure, for the destiny 
of the Church is not peace but battle. 

After this general picture of a civilization dominating and 
mastering in its material decline a vastly greater area than it 
had known in the height of its material excellence this sort 
of expansion in the dark the impartial observer, whom we 
have supposed, would remark a sort of dawn. That dawn came 
at the end of the eleventh century. The Norman race, the 
sudden, and, as it were, miraculously new invigoration of the 
Papacy, the Crusades, mark a turn in the tide of material de- 
cline and that tide works very rapidly towards a new and in- 
tense civilization, which we call that of the Middle Ages, and 
which gives Europe a second and most marvelous life, which 
is a late reflowering of Rome, but of Rome revivified with the 
virtue and the humor of the Faith. 

The second thing that the observer would note in so gen- 
eral a picture, would be the peculiar exception formed within 
it by the group of large islands lying to the North and West 
of the Continent. Of these the larger, Britain, had been a 
true Roman Province, but for more than the lifetime of a man 
it had on the first assault of the barbarians been cut off. Then 
it was re-Christianized almost as thoroughly as though even 
its Eastern part had never lost the authority of civilization. 
The Mission of St. Augustine recaptured Britain but Britain 



i9".] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 361 

is remarkable in the history of civilization for the fact that 
alone of civilized lands it needed to be recaptured at all. The 
western island of the two, the smaller island, Ireland, presented 
another exception. 

It was not compelled to the Christian culture as were the 
German barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charle- 
magne forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was under no 
necessity to go to school. But in a most exceptional fashion, 
though already possessed of, and perhaps, because so possessed, 
a high pagan culture of its own.it accepted within the lifetime 
of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit of 
the Creed. The civilization of the Roman West was accepted 
by Ireland, not as a command nor as an influence, but as a 
discovery 1 

Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the North 
and West of the Continent remain in the observer's mind, and 
he will note, when the shock of what is called " the Reforma- 
tion " comes, new phenomena attaching to those islands, cog- 
nate to their early history. 

Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present 
in the pages that follow. 

What we call " the Reformation " was essentially the reac- 
tion of the barbaric and ill-tutored fringe, external to the old 
and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of 
that civilization. The Reformation was not racial. Even if 
there were such a physical thing as a " Teutonic Race " (and 
there is nothing of the kind), the Reformation shows no coin- 
cidence with that race. The Reformation is simply the turn- 
ing-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five hundred 
years, had set steadily forward and had progressively domi- 
nated the insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, 
the confused by the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest 
by the conquered against moral and intellectual superiority 
which offended them. Racially the Slavs of Bohemia joined 
in that sincere protest of the lately and insufficiently civilized, 
and quite as strongly as, and even earlier than, the very varied 
tribes of the Sandy Heaths along the Baltic. The Dolicoceph- 
alic Scandinavian, who has nothing physical in common with 
the Brachycephalic tribes of the Baltic Plain, comes into the 
game. Wretched villages in the mark of Brandenburg as Sla- 
vonic in type as the villages of Bohemia, revolt quite as much 



362 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Dec., 

as the isolated villages of the Swedish Valleys or the isolated 
subjects of the Cevennes or the Alps. The revolt is confused, 
instinctive, and, in a way, animal, enjoying the sincere motive 
which accompanies unintelligence, but deprived of unity and 
of organizing power. There has never been a Protestant 
creed. 

Now the point to seize is this: 

Disastrous as such a revolt was to souls or (to speak upon 
the plane I adopt throughout these papers) to civilization ard 
its fate, bad as it was that the tide of culture should have 
begun to ebb from the incompetent boundaries which it had 
once so beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is, the re- 
action against the unity and the clear thought of Europe, 
would never have counted largely in human affairs had it been 
confined to those external fringes of the civilized world. Per- 
haps they might have been reconquered. The inherent force 
attached to reality and the muscles of the mind would lead us 
to hope so. But, perhaps, they would not have been recon- 
quered. Perhaps they would have lapsed quite soon into their 
original paganism. 

But though the revolt was external to the foundations of 
Europe, to the ancient provinces of the Empire, yet an inter- 
nal consequence of that revolt arose within the ancient prov- 
inces. It may be briefly told. The wealthy took advantage 
within the heart of civilization itself, of the external revolt 
against order ; for it is always to the advantage of the wealthy 
to deny general conceptions of right and wrong, to question a 
united philosophy, and to weaken the drastic and immediate 
power of the organized human will. It is always in the nature 
of great wealth to be insanely tempted (though it should know 
from active experience how little wealth can give), to push on 
to more and more domination over the bodies of men and it 
can do so best by attacking fixed social doctrines. 

The landed squires then, and the great merchants power- 
fully supported by the Jewish financial communities in the 
principal towns, felt that with the Reformation their oppor- 
tunity had come. The largest centres of commerce even in 
Gaul (that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human life) 
licked their lips. Everywhere in Northern Italy, in Southern 
Germany, upon the Rhine, wherever wealth had congested in 
a few hands the chance of breaking with the old morals was 



i9i i.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 363 

a powerful appeal to the wealthy, and, therefore, throughout 
Europe, even in its most ancient seeds of civilization, the 
outer barbarian had allies. 

Theirs was not any dumb, instinctive revolt like that of 
the Outer Germanics the Outer Slavs or the neglected moun- 
tain valleys against order and against clear thought, with all 
the hard consequences that clear thought brings. Ihey were 
in no way subject to enthusiasm for the vaguer emotions 
roused by the Gospel or the more turgid excitements deriv- 
able in Scripture from an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. 
They were "on the make." Montpellier, Nimes, the move- 
ment in Rome itself, in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted in- 
tellectual aid, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance and 
even winked solemnly at the lunatic inspirations of men and 
women filled with " visions." But their object was money. 

One group and one alone of the European nations was too 
recently filled with combat against vile, non-Christian things 
to accept any parley with the anti- Christian movement. That 
unit was the Iberian Peninsula. It is worthy of remark, es- 
pecially upon the part of those who realize that the sword 
fits the hand of the Church and that Catholicism is never 
more alive than when it is in arms, I say it is worthy of re- 
mark by these that Spain and Portugal through the very 
greatness of an experience still recent when the Reformation 
broke, lost the chance of combat. There came*indeed, from 
Spain, or rather, from the Basque nation, that weapon of steel, 
the Society of Jesus, which St. Ignatius formed and which, 
surgical and military, saved the Faith, and, therefore, Europe. 
But the Iberian Peninsula as a whole rejecting with contempt 
aad with abhorrence, and rejecting rightly, the follies of anti. 
civilization, had no opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy 
the religious wars which revivified France, and it may be 
urged by a just critic that Spain would be the stronger to-day 
had it fallen to her task as it did to the general populace of 
the Rhine and of Gaul, to come to hand-grips with the thing, 
to test it, to know it, to dominate it, to bend the muscles 
upon it, and to re-emerge triumphant from the struggle. 

Such a great factor would the observer perceive in the 
enormous combat originated by what I have called the ebbing 
of the tide. He would have seen in a word, the atheism, and 
the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality of the Renaissance, 



364 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Dec., 

answering over the heads of the Catholic populace, the call of 
external barbarism joining hands with the iconoclasts of the 
outer belts of Europe. 

Nevertheless, even with such allies that barbarism would 
have failed and the Reformation would to-day be but an his- 
torical episode by which to explain the fact that the outer 
portions of civilization had decayed, had not a second great 
phenomenon appeared, which was the loss of Britain. 

Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss of Britain 
of such capital importance? 

To say that Britain revolted against civilization in the six- 
teenth century (and suffered the grievous consequences we 
know) because Britain is "Teutonic" is to talk a balderdash 
it would be waste of time to meet. And to say that Britain 
revolted because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than 
in any other ancient Province, is to know nothing of history. 
The seeds of revolt were in her then as in every other com- 
munity; as they must be in every individual, who may find 
any form of discipline a burden which he is tempted in a 
moment of disorder to lay down. But to pretend that Eng- 
land and Scotland, to pretend that the Province of Britain in 
our civilization was more ready for the change than the in- 
fected portions of Southern Gaul, or the humming towns of 
Northern Italy, or the intense life of Hainult or Brabant, is to 
show a contemptible ignorance of European affairs. 

How Britain went we must examine more particularly, and 
why Britain went we also must examine more particularly than 
any such false generalization would allow. 

The province of Britain was not a great one in area or in 
numbers. Even to-day, under conditions of high, industrial 
congestion it is not the largest European unit. It was a still 
smaller numerical factor when the Reformation broke out. It 
was, indeed, very wealthy for its size, as were the Netherlands, 
but its mere wealth does not account for the fundamental im- 
portance of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the sixteenth 
century. The real point was that one and only one of the 
old Roman provinces with their tradition of civilization, let- 
ters, persuasive power, multiple soul one and only one, went 
over to the barbaric enemy and gave that enemy its aid. 
That one was Britain. 

Well then, how did Britain go? 



19 ii.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION f 365 

I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next 
page or so. I believe it to be of capital value in explaining 
the general history of Europe, and I know it to be hardly 
ever told; or if told at all fragmentary told. 

England went because of three things. First, her Squires 
had already become too powerful. In other words, the eco- 
nomic power of a small class of wealthy men had grown, on 
account of peculiar insular conditions, greater than was healthy 
for the community. 

Secondly, England was, more than any other part of West- 
ern Europe (save the Batavian March),* a series of markets and 
of ports, a place of very active cosmopolitan influence, in 
which new opportunities for the corrupt, new messages for 
the enthusiastic, were frequent. 

In the third place, that curious phenomenon on which I 
dwelt in my last paper, the religious nay superstitious at- 
tachment of citizens to the civil power, to the monarch, was 
exaggerated in England as nowhere else, save, possibly, in one 
or two ardent city-states of the Continent. 

Now put these three things together, especially the first 
and third (for the second was both of minor importance and 
ore superficial) and you will appreciate why England fell. 
One too wealthy class, tainted with the atheism that always 
creeps into wealth long and securely enjoyed, was beginning 
to possess English land. It would take far too long to de- 
scribe here what the process had been. It is true that the 
absolute monopoly of the soil, the gripping and the strangling 
of the populace by landlords, is a purely Protestant phenome- 
non. Nothing of that kind had happened or would have been 
conceived of as possible in pre- Reformation England, but still 
something like a quarter of the land (or a little less) had got 
into the possession of one class which had also begun to en- 
croach upon the judiciary, in some measure to supplant the 
populace in local law making, and quite appreciably to sup- 
plant the King in central law-making. 

Let me not be misunderstood : the England of the fifteenth 
century, the England of the generation just before the Refor- 
mation, was not an England of Squires; it was not an England 
of landlords; it was still an England of Englishmen. The pro- 

* I mean Belgium. That Frontier of Roman influence upon the lower Rhine which so 
happily held out for faith and just preserved it. 



366 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Dec., 

cess by which the English plutocracy has grown up, was but 
in germ before the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. 
But for the Reformation it would not have matured. Sooner 
or later a popular revolt (had the Faith revived) would have 
killed the growing usurpation of the Squires. But the germ 
was there; and the Reformation coming just as it did, both 
was helped by the Squires and helped them. 

The slow acquisition of considerable power over the courts 
of law and over the soil of the country by an oligarchy, par- 
tial though it was, was a predisposing condition to the dis- 
ease. It may be urged that if the English people had fought 
the growing power of the Squires more vigorously, they would 
not have conquered in the Reformation as they did. Possibly ; 
and the enemies of the English people are quick to point out 
that some native sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing 
down of the social balance in favor of the rich. But no one 
who can even pretend to know medieval England will say that 
the Eiglish consciously desired or willingly permitted to grow 
up such a state of affairs. Successful foreign wars, dynastic 
trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of national conscious- 
ness, which consciousness had centred in the wealthier classes 
all these combined to let the evil in without warning and, on 
the eve of the Reformation, a rich, avaricious class was al- 
ready empowered to act in Britain, ready to grasp, as all the 
avaricious classes were throughout the western world, at the 
opportunity to revolt against that morality which has ever 
suspected the rich, and in their attempts at tyranny, condemned 
them to eternal torments. 

Now add to this the strange, but at that time very real 
worship of government as a fetish. This spirit did not really 
strengthen government, far from it. A superstition never 
strengthens its object, nor ever makes of the supposed power 
of that object a reality. But though it did not give to the 
intention of the prince real power, it gave to the word of 
the prince a fantastic power. In such a combination of cir- 
cumstances nascent plutocracy, the prince worshipped you 
get holding the position of Prince, Henry VIII., a thorough 
Tudor, that is, a man weak to the point of imbecility where 
his passions were concerned, violent from that fundamental 
weakness which, in the absence of opposition ruins things as 
effectively as though it were strong. No executive power in 



i9i i.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 367 

Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt against civiliza- 
tion than was the Tudor family. Henry the VII., his son, and 
his two grand-daughters exceeded, upon the contrary, in their 
passion for the old order of the Western world, but at the 
least sign of weak resistance, Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who 
intrigued, Henry their father, who pillaged, Henry, their grand- 
father, who robbed and saved, were one. To these characters 
slight resistance was a spur; with strong, manifold sub- con- 
scious opposition they were quite powerless to deal. Their 
minds would not grip (for their minds though acute, were not 
large) but their passions shot. And one may compare them 
when their passions of pride, of lust, of avarice or of facile 
power were aroused, to vehement children. Never was there 
a family less statesmanlike ; never one less full of stuff and 
of creative power. 

Henry desired a divorce from Katharine of Aragon. The 
Papal Court opposed him. He was incapable of negotiation 
and still more incapable of foresight. His energy, which was, 
to borrow an historical metaphor, " of an Arabian sort " blasted 
through the void because a void was there. Of course it seemed 
to him no more than one of those recurrent quarrels with the 
authority of Rome which all kings (and Saints among them) 
had engaged in for many hundred years. All real powers thus 
conflict in all times. But, had he known it (and he did not 
know it) the moment was fatally inopportune for playing that 
game. He may never have meant to break with the unity of 
Christendom. A disruption of that unity was probably incon- 
ceivable to him. He meant to " exercise pressure." All his 
acts from the decisive Proclamation of September 19, 1530 on- 
wards, prove it. But the moment was the moment ot the 
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, plundered 
into disaster without knowing what the fullness of the moment 
was. 

It was the same thing with the suppression of the monas- 
teries. In the matter of their financial endowment, an economic 
crisis, produced by the unequal growth of economic powers had 
made them ripe for resettlement. Religious orders were here 
wealthy without reason, poor in spirit and numbers, but rich 
in land ; there impoverished without reason, rich in popularity 
and spiritual power, but poor in land. The dislocation which 
all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic side through 



368 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? [Dec., 

the mere efflux of time, inclined every government in Europe 
to a resettlement of religious endowments. 

Henry did not resettle. He plundered and broke. He used 
the fetish of executive power just as much at Reading or in 
the Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and immediate 
popular feeling was with him, as at Glastonbury wheie it was 
against him, as in Yorkshire where it was in arms, as in Gal- 
way where there was no bearing with it at all. There was no 
largeness in him nor any comprehension of complexity, and 
when in this Jacobin, unexampled way, he had simply got rid 
of that which he should have restored and transformed, of what 
effect was it ? 

It was of no effect to the Crown. From a fourth to a 
third of the economic power over the means of production in 
England which had been vested top heavily in the religious 
foundations here, far too rich, there, far too poor he got by 
mere confiscation. But he made no addition to the wealth of 
the Crown. On the contrary, Henry ruined the Crown. Tht 
land passed by an instinctive multiple process but -very rapidly 
to the already powerful class which had begun to dominate the 
villages. Then, when it was too late, the Tudors attempted to 
stem the tide. But the thing was done. Upon the indiffer- 
ence which is always common to a society long and pro- 
foundly Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or having conquered 
heresy, ignorant at any rate of struggle for the Faith, two ar- 
dent minorities converged. The tiny minority of confused men 
who really did desire what they believed to be a restoration 
of "primitive" Christianity and the much larger minority of 
men now grown, almost invincibly powerful in the economic 
sphere, for the Squires by 1560 had come to possess, through 
the ruin of religion more than half the land of England. 

With the rapidity of a fungus growth, this new class spread 
over the desolation of the land. They captured both the Uni- 
versities, all the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. 
They won their great war against the Crown after Henry's 
folly. Within a century they had established themselves in 
the place of what had once been the monarchy and central 
government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in 
vain ; they killed one embarassed King Charles I. and they 
set up his son Charles II. as an insufficiently salaried puppet. 
Since their victory over the Crown they and the capitalists who 



i9 1 1.] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION f 369 

have sprung from their avarice and their philosophy, and largely 
from their very loins, have been completely masters of England. 

Here the reader may say: "What! this large national slow 
movement, to be interpreted as the function of such minor- 
ities?" Yes; to interpret it otherwise is to read history back- 
wards. There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, 
nor any illusion to which the human mind is more prone. 
To read the remote past in the light of the recent past; to 
think the process of the one towards the other "inevitable"; 
to regard the whole matter as a slow, inexorable process, inde- 
pendent of the human will, still suits the pantheist philosophy 
of our time. But more than this ; there is an inherent tend- 
ency in all men to understand Tuesday in the light of Wed- 
nesday, and then by a sort of illogical reversion in the mind, 
to interpret Tuesday in terms of Wednesday, and to say that 
a country of such and such a state of society in the seventeenth 
century was necessarily bred in the sixteenth. 

That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a 
combined effort of reading and of imagination into the shoes of 
Tuesday, as though you did not know what Wednesday was 
to be, and then to describe what Tuesday was. 

Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century English- 
man in the midst of the Reformation, and what do you per- 
ceive ? A society wholly Catholic in tradition, lax and care- 
less in Catholic practice! irritated or enlivened here and 
there by a few furious preachers, or by a few enthusiastic 
scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of the representa- 
tive of civil government; intensely national! in all the roots 
and traditions of its civilization, Roman; impatient of the dis- 
proportion of society, and in particular of economic dispro- 
portion in the religious aspect of society, because the religious 
function, by the very definition of Catholicism, by its very 
creed, should be the first to redress tyrannies. Upon that 
Englishman comes first a mania for his King 1 next a violent 
economic revolution, which in many parts can be made to 
seem an approach to justice! finally a national appeal of the 
strongest kind against the power of Spain. 

When the work was done, say by 1580, the channel be- 
tween England and those parts of the Empire which were 
still furiously resisting the storm, was cut. No spiritual force 
VOL. xciv 24 



370 WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION f [Dec., 

could arrive save through another channel, the channel of those 
few enthusiastic men who still believed (they continued to 
believe it for fifty years) that the whole Church of Christ had 
gone wrong for centuries. And that some ."primitive consti- 
tution " might be restored to it throughout the West. These 
visionaries were the reformers; to these, souls still athirst lor 
spiritual guidance turned. They were a minority even at the 
end of the sixteenth century, but they were a minority of in- 
itiative and of action. With the turn of the century the last 
man who could remember Catholic training was dead. The 
new generation could turn to nothing but the new spirit (for 
it was not a new doctrine). For authority it could find noth- 
ing definite but a printed book. That minority remaining a 
minority leavened and at last controlled the whole nation and 
by the first third of the seventeenth century Britain was 
utterly cut off and sealed Protestant. The governing class 
remained indifferent (as it still is) to religion but highly 
cultured. The populace drifted here into Paganism, there 
into enthusiastic forms of religion. It was the middle class 
which went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbar- 
ism of the Outer Germanies permeated it and transformed it. 
That was the English Reformation. 

And its effect upon Europe was stupendous; for though 
England was thus cut off, England was still England. You 
could not destroy in a Roman province the great traditions of 
municipality and letters. It was like a phalanx of trained 
troops joining untrained natives in some border war. England 
lent, and has from that day continuously lent the strength of 
a great civilized tradition to forces whose original initiative 
was simply directed against European civilization and its tra- 
dition. The loss of Britain was the one great wound or lesion 
in the body of the Western world. It is not yet healed. 

Yet all this while that other island of the group to the North- 
west of Europe, that island which had never been conquered 
by armed civilization as were the outer Germanies, but had 
spontaneously and, as it were, miraculously accepted the Faith, 
presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss of Britain, 
which had been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke 
of battle cleared off, could discover the astonishing loyalty of 
Ireland. And to this exceptional province Britian now lost 



19".] WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION? 371 

to the Faith, an equally exceptional and unique outer part which 
had never been a Roman province, yet which now remained 
true to the traditions of Roman men, lay upon the map as a 
counter-weight. The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland 
have exceeded in violence and cruelty any efforts observable 
in any part of the world. They have failed. As I cannot 
explain why they have failed so I shall not attempt to explain 
how and why Ireland was saved when Britain went under. I 
do not believe it capable of an historic explanation. It seems 
to me a phenomenon essentially miraculous in character, not 
generally attached (as are all historical phenomena) to the 
general and divine purpose that governs our large political 
events, but directly and specially attached. It is of enormous 
significance; how enormous men, perhaps, will be able to see 
many years hence when another definite battle is joined be- 
tween the forces of the Church and her opponents; for the 
Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect in- 
tegrity and has kept serene without internal reactions and 
without their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe 
which is the Catholic Church. 

In my next paper I shall deal with that major phenomenon 
proceeding from the Reformation, and particularly from the 
Reformation as it affected Britain, the industrial system and 
the enslavement of the poor. 




A SISTER-IN-LAW OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES. 

MARIE AYMEE DE RABUTIN CHANTAL. 

II. 

BY THE HON. MRS. MAXWELL SCOTT. 

fFTER Easter Mme. de Chantal and her daughters 
went to the Chateau de Sales, where her son-in- 
law was eagerly awaiting his bride. 

Marie Aymee became the beloved young mis- 
tress of the beautiful Castle of Sales, the family 
home which Mgr. Charles Auguste de Sales, nephew of St. 
Francis, described so beautifully fifty years later. 

After spending a few weeks at Sales to counsel and direct 
her daughter in her new duties, Mme. de Chantal saw that 
the latter no longer needed her guidance and that the time 
had come when she might begin the foundation so long 
planned. She, therefore, returned to Annecy, taking Francoise 
with her, and shortly afterwards she, with her first com- 
panions Mile, de Brechard and Mile. Favre, took possession of 
the humble Maison de la Galerie, destined to be the first 
monastery of the Visitation. Marie Aymee, who was among 
the ladies who formed the little procession at the opening of 
the convent, wept bitterly, we are told, and returned to Sales 
more than ever resolved to try and imitate the virtues she 
had so often admired in her mother. This, she strove to do so 
earnestly that she became "the admiration of all the world, 
and it was a marvel to observe her at home, where she was 
so affable and gracious that everyone felt confidence in ap- 
plying to her for the affairs of her household." Country life 
in France at that period was very sociable. When the husbands 
and fathers were not absent in attendance at court or at the 
wars, their families interchanged constant visits to join ia 
hunting and shooting and other amusements. The young 
couple, therefore, saw much company. Bernard de Sales was 
very fond of society, and Marie Aymee succeeded in pleasing 
too well not to take pleasure in it. 



i9i i.] A SISTER- IN-LA w OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 373 

Mme. de Chantal, whose maternal vigilance discovered that 
her daughter was becoming more fond of the world and that 
her former piety was getting a little cold, strove gently, and 
without constraining her, to draw her from these little failings. 
"She begged her to make a quarter of an hour's meditation 
in addition to her daily prayers. Marie Ayme'e felt some re- 
pugnance to binding herself to do this, but her blessed mother 
showed her that a quarter of an hour in this holy exercise 
would soon pass and that the fruit she would draw from it 
would give her great consolation in the future." Marie Aymee, 
who was singularly sensible and reasonable, understood her 
mother's remonstrances, the more so, perhaps, that public 
events also suggested grave and anxious thoughts. 

War was at hand, and Bernard, her beloved husband, was 
shortly to leave her to be exposed to all its dangers. These 
absences of her husband were to be Marie Aymee's special 
trial. At the moment we speak of, Henry IV. 's tragic death 
had brought fresh political complications, and the Duke of 
Savoy, Charles Emanuel, took the opportunity of invading 
the duchy of Montferrat to which he asserted a claim. This 
enterprise was generally censured throughout Europe, and Spain 
took up arms against Savoy. Bernard de Sales begged to be 
allowed to fight for Savoy, and he was sent to join the forces 
raised by the Marquis de Lans to protect the frontier between 
Savoy and France, as the latter country was also implicated 
in the struggle. 

In all her troubles, and especially in her loneliness, Marie 
Aymee went often to the convent, where, not only her mother 
and sister were ever ready to comfort her, but all the nuns 
were her second mothers and sisters in affection. Among 
them was a young religious destined to be her special friend, 
Sister Paul Hyeronomine de Monthoux, who belonged to a 
great family in the neighborhood of Geneva. To her, Marie 
Aymee confided her joys and sorrows and would recount what 
she had seen and heard in society, at which Sister de Mon- 
thoux " did not pretend to be shocked," but would lead her 
friend gently to other topics, and with her great tact and 
warm affection was of great use to Marie Aymee, who admired 
in her the virtues of a perfect religious. Bernard de Sales 
had also a special reverence for her and greatly approved her 
friendship with his wife. It is during his second absence that 



374 A SISTER-IN-LAW OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Dec., 

we find more special indications of her influence. After a 
short truce Bernard, who was now Colonel of twelve hundred 
men-at-arms, was about to return to the war, and Marie 
Aymee, in addition to her sorrow at losing him, was in deli- 
cate health. So far, her hopes of maternity had been, more 
than once, disappointed and her frail health and these frequent 
illnesses gave cause for anxiety. Her holy friend, while tenderly 
consoling her under a double trial, helped her to take a great 
step in her spiritual life. Up to this time Marie Ayme'e, al- 
though she felt boundless respect and affection for her saintly 
brother-in-law, had not sought his advice for the direction of 
her soul. Sister de Monthoux, who felt that the moment had 
come when his influence would be of incalculable advantage 
to this chosen soul, advised her to make a general confession 
and to make it to St. Francis. Once more, as in the question 
of the daily meditation, Marie Aymee recognized the value of 
the advice. " She understood that to refuse the aid of such 
a guide when he was at her disposal was to refuse the light." 
Without delay she made her general confession to the Saint 
" notwithstanding the great repugnance which she felt," says 
an old chronicle, " and this victory over herself was followed 
by so many graces that she took the resolution to belong to 
Almighty God for the rest of her days." 

St. Francis was in the habit of spending a few days each 
year at Sales during the Carnival season at Annecy, and this 
year of 1615 found him there soon after Marie Aymee had 
asked for his guidance. During those days passed in the quiet 
of his old home, the Saint strengthened and consoled his little 
sister and daughter, and it was then that he wrote the charm- 
ing letter to Mme. de Chantal about the doves which is fa- 
miliar to all his readers. 

It was probably after this visit, and to encourage Marie 
Aymee in her resolutions that the Saint sent her the following 
beautiful blessing : 

The blessing I wish you, my very dear sister, my daughter, 
should come from the hand ot our Lord, and I think that His 
divine Majesty will grant it if you beg forit with suitable sub- 
mission and humility. And for my part, my very dear 
daughter, adoring with all my heart His divine Providence, I 
implore Him to pour out on your heart the abundance of His 



191 1.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 375 

favors, so that you may be blessed In this world and In the 
next with the blessings of His grace and of eternal glory. So 
be it. May you be blessed in your heart and in your body, 
in your own person and in that of those who are most dear to 
you, in your consolations and in your labors, in all that you 
do and suffer for God. In the name of the Father, and of the 
Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. 

Your very humble and very faithful brother, 

FRANCIS, Bishop of Geneva. 

And now let us see how Marie Aymee responded to the 
gentle counsels and direction of the Saint. A contemporary 
writer tells us that "her heart was like good soil in which 
the holy seeds of the advice of the blessed Bishop took root 
and grew so well that they stifled all the little inclinations to 
vanity with which, like cockle, the enemy had sown it. In 
less than two months she found herself so much delivered 
from these that her only desire and ambition was to rule her 
life in all ways according to the teaching of The Introduction 
to the Devout Life, and she succeeded so well that she became 
herself a little Philothea. Above all, she took pains that her 
devotion should not be a trouble to others, and without dis- 
turbing any one, this young and delicate lady she was only 
now sixteen rose daily at five o'clock in imitation of her holy 
mother, and after saying the morning prayers indicated in the 
Introduction (Chap. X. of the second part), she occupied herself 
with her household affairs, and then made her meditation, in 
which God gave her supernatural favors. After dinner she 
retired to do a little spiritual reading, recited her rosary with 
loving devotion, and every evening made her examination of 
conscience. Far from making her less charming in society, 
her new way of life helped to deepen Marie Aymee's char- 
acter and made her conversation still more agreeable, and she 
continued to receive her neighbors with such cordiality that 
they never left the Chateau de Sales without projects of re- 
turning thither." 

Bernard de Sales was well pleased at his wife's progress 
in holiness, but, as sometimes happens even with good and 
earnest men, he began to fear that she was becoming too per- 
fect, and thought that she might profitably curtail some of 
her practices and devotions, so, as our chronicle quaintly says: 



376 A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Dec., 

" One day he told her pleasantly that it gave him great con- 
solation to see her so devout, but that he could wish that she 
was a little less so, to which she made such gracious and de- 
vout answer that he remained quite content." 

We have alluded to Marie Aymee's fragile health, and to 
her disappointed hopes of motherhood. In 1615, when she 
was seventeen, and probably after one of her frequent illnesses, 
we find her making her will, a touching document, which she 
draws up, " so as to leave in peace those who are to succeed 
after her death, to the goods which God has given her in this 
world." Two years later she suffered another loss in her third 
child, a girl, who died an hour after baptism. 

A new kind of trial was also to fall upon her and the 
house of Sales, and the world which Marie Aymee had been 
tempted to like too well, brought her for a time only bit- 
terness. I refer to a strange accusation which led to M. de 
Charmoisy's imprisonment, and in which St. Francis' brothers 
were involved and nearly suffered the same fate.* " We have 
spent the whole of Lent in our little town," writes the Saint, 
" in defending ourselves from the calumnies which have been 
showered indiscriminately on most of us because of these 
wretched bastonnadts (of M. Berthelot)." This absurd accusa- 
tion, and others, which grew out of it, brought trouble for a 
long time, and the Saint's humility and self-effacement under 
the trial was a great lesson for Marie Aymee, who had been 
greatly alarmed for her husband and brothers-in law, particu- 
larly when she saw M. de Charmoisy unjustly banished and 
imprisoned. 

Presently, public events brought to light the origin of this 
plot against the faithful subjects of Savoy. The Due de 
Nemours, who was on ill terms with Charles Emanuel, was 
found to be in league with Spain, and a large force of the 
enemy appeared suddenly in Savoy and advanced to the neigh- 
borhood of Sales, where Marie Aymee, who was all alone 
Bernard being far away with his soldiers beyond the mountains 
was greatly alarmed; but she was able to send word to 
Louis de Sales, who arrived in great haste and drove the en- 
emy as far as Conflaus. They rallied presently and threatened 
Annecy and Rumilly, but the resistance offered by the inhabi- 
tants and the forces sent by M. de Lans finally saved Savoy. 

*M. Berthelot. 



191 1.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 377 

The Bishop and his brothers distinguished themselves by their 
loyalty daring these events, and Bernard, who returned to help 
kls countrymen in their need, won special honor. When, there- 
fore, the Prince of Piedmont arrived at Annecy to complete 
the victory gained by its inhabitants, he lodged with St. Fran- 
cis and showered favors upon him and his brothers. This act 
of tardy reparation to her family was a consolation for Marie 
Ayme"e, and now that peace had come she and Bernard enjoyed 
a few months together at Sales. "Thus, winter passed in great 
tranquility, and in a gentle union of heart together they made 
projects to love and serve God better," projects which, alas, 
were not to be realized in this world, for the hour of supreme 
trial was approaching. 

In the spring of 1617 the political horizon was again men- 
acing. France, which, for a time had been allied to Savoy, 
recalled her troops, and the smaller country was left to face 
Spain alone. Under these circumstances new levies were called 
for, and Bernard's duty called him once more to the front. 
He "loved war passionately," and even the thought of sepa- 
ration from Marie Aymce had hitherto been unable to check 
his military ardor, but now for the first time he felt sad and 
overcome by sorrowful presentments, and it was with a heavy 
heart that he made the preparations for the campaign and for 
leaving his wife, who was again in a delicate state of health. 
With his wife, he journeyed to Annecy. There he received 
the sacraments and made his will. At last, the moment of 
separation came, and Marie Aymee's last words were to as- 
sure Bernard that if he did not come back to her she would 
consecrate herself to God with her mother. 

Bernard de Sales and his troops passed over the Alps and 
joined the Duke of Savoy's forces, who were preparing to suc- 
cor Verceil, which was threatened by the Spaniards, but he 
was not destined to take part in the siege. He was suddenly 
seized with the fever, then termed "pestilential," and which 
generally proved fatal. His brother, Janus de Sales, and his 
friends hastened to have him conveyed to Turin where after 
going to confession several times and sending a last farewell 
to Marie Ayme"e, Bernard asked for the last sacraments, and 
according to St. Francis' words, "died piously, like a saint, 
among the soldiers" on May 23, 1617, and was buried in the 
Barnabite Church with every mark of honor and esteem. 



378 A SISTER-IN-LAW OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Dec., 

Bad news ever travels fast, and the sorrowful tidings quickly 
reached St. Francis. The Saint's sorrow was increased by the 
thought of that of Marie Aymee. He could not weep alone 
for this "poor dear brother de Thorens that he loved beyond 
words," for " alas," as he wrote, " my affliction is doubled 
by that of his poor little one and that of our Mother de 
Chantal," and he was obliged to be the bearer of the mourn- 
ful news to the convent. Marie Aymee's heart was prepared 
for the blow by her entire resignation to God's will and by 
the presentments we have spoken of. 

For Marie Aymee, with warnings in her heart, had ever been 
in alarm, " and when anyone approached she was seized with 
dread, thinking that they were bringing bad news." One eve- 
ning she noticed that her mother was absent from some com- 
munity exercise, and this caused her great anxiety. It was at 
this moment, in fact, that St. Francis was breaking the news 
to Mme. de Chantal. Marie Aymee was so anxious that she 
watched for her mother's return from the parlor, but the lat- 
ter, through love for her child, had such control over her feel- 
ings " that she did not let the sorrowful news be known that 
evening but diverted her thoughts, only counseling the love of 
God's good will in all events." 

It had been agreed between her and St. Francis that he 
should tell Marie Aymee of her supreme trial, and he arrived 
at the convent early next morning. Here we must use the 
words of the chronicle: 

After hearing Marie Aymee's confession, the Saint said: 
" Well, my dear daughter, do we belong entirely to God ? " 
" Yes, Monseigneur, absolutely." " And are we not in haste 
to receive from His holy and blessed hand all that it pleases 
Him to send us? " " Yes, Monseigneur and my father," re- 
plied Marie Ayme'e, sighing deeply, " but, alas, you wish to 
tell me that my dear husband is dead," and the Saint avow- 
ing it, she exclaimed gently : " Ah, my Lord and my God, is 
it really true ? Hast Thou taken my dear husband from me ? 
Alas, what wouldest Thou have me do ?" The Saint, who 
knew the piety of this afflicted soul, only said a few words to 
her, judging it more suitable to leave her to our Lord. He 
went, therefore, to the altar to say Mass lor the repose of the 
departed, and for the consolation of his dear widow, to whom 
he gave Holy Communion in order to place the medicine of life 



191 1.] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 379 

upon this death wound. . . . Certainly, it was marvelous 
how sweetly she received the blow. She heard Mass from the 
sacristy, and gave vent to her sorrow in pious exclamations. 
. . . When the moment for Communion approached, she 
was led to the nuns' choir, and there she made, secretly, a 
vow of perpetual chastity and received the most Holy Sacra- 
ment as a seal on her heart which from now was consecrated 
only to her beloved Jesus. Alter Holy Communion she re- 
mained silent, without sobs or tears, making her thanksgiving. 

Marie Ayme"e spent the rest of the day in bed, for her 
state of health could not but cause anxiety. She remained 
with her hands joined and her eyes raised to heaven, weeping 
gently : 

When anyone approached the bed she could be heard say- 
ing : " Oh, Jesus, my Love, Thy will be done in life and in 
death. O, Jesus, I am all Thine. Oh, Jesus, draw me to 
Thee. Oh, passion and death of my Saviour, I love Thee, I 
embrace Thee, Thou art my hope ; " or again : " Ah, Lord, 
art not Thou the God of perfect goodness ? How then is it 
that Thou hast separated us ? That dear husband and I had 
begun such a happy life together, Alas, how short it was ; 
such are the pleasures of this world. Oh, my God, Thou 
alone art everlasting. It is to Thee we must attach ourselves." 

If any one thinks that God's saints are less sensible to hu- 
man sorrow or feel family losses less keenly than others, we 
would ask them to read what is recorded of the deep grief of 
St. Francis and of St. Chantal on this and similar occasions. 

Marie Aymee, however, did not return to the Chateau de 
Sales as had been intended. She desired greatly to remain in 
the convent to shelter her sorrow under her mother's love, no 
doubt, but still more to share her life of prayer and sacrifice, 
and so it was arranged that she should remain there until the 
time of the birth of her child approached, when she was to 
remove to a house prepared for her in Annecy. The prospect 
of her motherhood was now her only link with this world, and 
it helped her to pass the sorrowful days before her, but above 
and beyond this was her love for our Lord, which was her 
support and supreme consolation. St. Francis quickly real- 
ized this, and presently in his letters he ceased to speak to 
her of her husband, and helped her to lift all her thoughts 
and aspiration to God alone. 



380 A SlSTER-IN. LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Dec., 
On June 30 he wrote her the following beautiful letter: 

You know, my dear daughter, my sister, and I believe that 
your heart tells it you also, that mine is extremely consoled 
when you send me news of yourself, for, as it has so pleased 
God, I am thy dear brother and father in one and the most 
affectionate and sincere that you can imagine. Well then, my 
dear soul, make all your little efforts gently, peacefully, amica- 
bly, to serve this Sovereign Goodness which obliges you to 
this by the blessings with which He has favored you till now. 
And do not be astonished at difficulties, for, my dear daughter, 
what can we secure that is precious without a little care and 
trouble ? Only we must be firm in aspiring to the perfection 
of divine love in order that our love may be perfect. The love 
that seeks less than perfection can be but imperfect. I will 
write to you often, for you know the rank you hold in my af- 
fections and also my mother (Mme. de Chantal) to whom, 
please recommend me for although, I write to her, too, still, 
I must seek your help to refresh and recreate her a little, the 
more so that she takes pleasure in knowing that you are my 
very dear daughter and that you have affection for me in that 
character. May God be in the midst of your heart and in 
that of our dear sister ; * who is certainly also my daughter, 
with all my heart at least, I think so, and wish always to 
think so for my pleasure. 

The chronicle goes on to tell us of Marie Aymee's quiet 
life in the convent and of the edification she gave to all the 
sisters. But after about three months had passed she was 
taken suddenly ill in the night. 

Our blessed mother, [continues the writer] , was immediately 
called. She was very much astonished, and the danger in 
which she found Marie Aymde prevented her from being 
taken to the house in the town which had been prepared. 
Necessity, which knows no law, made it needful for her to 
remain in the convent. The poor dear widow gave birth to a 
beautiful little son, but, alas, he was a child of sorrow and 
gave very short joy, for, being in imminent danger of death, 
our blessed mother baptized him at once. 

The baby died almost immediately, and when Marie Ayme'e 
asked anxiously for her child she was told that she was the 

* Franfoise de Chantal. 



1 9 1 1 .] A SISTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FSANCIS DE SALES 38 1 

"mother of an angel/' and quickly recognizing what was 
meant the poor young mother exclaimed: "Alas, has the 
poor child lived so short a time that he is already with the 
angels," then, turning to Almighty God, she renewed her 
offering of herself, declaring she would now remain in the 
convent for good. When those round her tried to console 
her, Marie Aymee replied : " As you see, my soul is in one 
way crushed by extreme sorrow, but in another it is extremely 
consoled to see that my God has done all things for His glory 
and my salvation." "Thus," continues the narrator, " this 
blessed soul who was overwhelmed by severe pains of body 
and great anguish of mind, lay peacefully in her little bed, 
speaking to God from time to time by ejaculations of love 
and resignation to His holy will." When she was first taken 
ill St. Francis was unwell and kept to the house, but he re- 
ceived constant news of the invalid and shared in the great 
anxiety. In a note to Mme. de Chantal he says: "May God 
in His goodness give us the soul of the child and the life of 
the mother whom I keep in my heart as my poor and very 
dear little daughter." 

Meanwhile, Marie Aymee, foreseeing that she would net 
recover, was calmly preparing for death. At her own desire 
she made a fresh will in which she left all that she had in- 
herited from her husband to St. Francis " in gratitude for the 
kindness and charity which my much honored brother-in-law 
and dear spiritual father has shown me." The same evening 
she became suddenly worse, and the doctors declared that she 
could only live a few hours. St. Francis, on hearing this, 
came at once to the convent, accompanied by his brother, 
Mgr. de Chalcedoine, and several priests. As he entered the 
room, Marie Aymee, who had been unconscious, came to her- 
self and asked to go to confession and to receive Holy Com- 
munion. A little later, turning to her mother, she said: 
"May I venture to ask you something?" Mme. de Chantal, 
who thought that perhaps she wished to be buried by her 
beloved husband, replied : " My daughter, say frankly what 
you desire for your comfort, for we will try to do it if we 
can," but Marie Aymee's request was of another nature. She 
begged to be given the habit of the Visitation and to be 
buried with the nuns, and, turning to St. Francis, she added 
" Monseigneur, I confess that I am unworthy of this grace, 



382 A SlSTER-IN- LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES [Dec., 

but I implore you, Monseigneur, my very dear father, not to 
consider my unworthiness but your own charity and the great 
wish which God has given me for a long time past to die a 
religious." The holy Bishop and his assistants could not re- 
strain their tears, and Mme. de Chantal, who was by her 
daughter's bedside, wept " tears of sorrow and consolation 
both, for she no longer looked upon her as her child by na- 
ture but as a precious vessel into which God poured such 
abundant graces and benedictions that she thought only of 
eternity and what she could do that was most perfect and 
most pleasing to God." 

The account of the next few hours is very beautiful and 
touching. After Marie Aymee had been anointed and had 
made her religious vows, she talked gently to her mother and 
St. Francis and those around her, giving, in the midst of her 
suffering, signs of the rarest tenderness for others and of the 
highest sanctity. St. Francis, who saw of what heroic virtue 
she was capable; and wishing to give her an occasion of 
meriting still more, asked her whether she would be willing 
to continue in her sufferings till the day of judgment if it 
were God's will. "Yes, Monseigneur," she answered with 
fervor, "not only these sufferings, but also all those it might 
please God to send me, for I am His without exception." At 
two o'clock in the morning death came to release her pure 
soul. She exclaimed gently : " Ah, here is death and I must 
go; death has seized my heart " then pronouncing the Sacred 
Name of Jesus three times and raising her eyes to heaven she 
breathed her last. 

"After the death of Marie Aymee," says her biographer, 
"many tears were shed, but these tears were sweet and 
brought with them abundant consolation," and her best 
epitaph, we think, are the words spoken and written of her 
by the Saint who had watched over her young life. After 
Marie Aymee's death, this second great family sorrow, St. 
Francis sought consolation with his friend Mgr. de Camus, 
Bishop of Belley: 

He came to see me [says the latter] , and related to me the 
history of this holy death preceded by so pious a life with so 
many tears, that I felt inclined also to weep. He esteemed 
much, and according to God, the singular virtues of the 



191 1.] A SlSTER-IN-LA W OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES 383 

mother but he had so high an idea of the supernatural perfec- 
tion which God by His grace had poured out on the soul of 
the daughter, his dear sister, that he spoke of her rather as 
an angel than as a human being. Writing to a friend St. 
Francis says : "All this year we have lived amidst trials, and 
I think you will have heard of the sudden death of my brother 
and sister which I call sudden, for who would have expected 
them ? but very happy deaths, also, considering the circum- 
stances and the holiness of both, for in particular my dear lit- 
tle sister went from us with such sweetness and gaiety that one 
of the doctors who saw her die exclaimed that if angels were 
mortal they would wish to die like that." [And again] : God 
has afflicted our house by the deaths of my brother and sister 
de Thorens, but His divine and paternal hand forces us to 
adore His goodness which has touched us so gently, for my 
brother died holy, amidst the soldiers where few saints are to 
be found, and my sister, his dear wife and my dearest daugh- 
ter, died holy among the servants of God in the cloister, which 
is generally a seminary for saints. She made her profession 
and was burled in the Visitation habit. The doctors who at- 
tended her in her last illness asked my leave to invoke her. 

Such words, we think, form a fitting close to this sketch 
of the life of Marie Ayme'e de Thorens, the daughter and 
sister of saints. 



IRew Books* 

FROM GENEVA TO ROME VIA CANTERBURY. By Viator. 
New York : Benziger Brothers, 45 cents. 

It is not always as the crow flies that the child of earth 
conducts his pilgrimage. By many a detour, with many a halt 
and breathing space, does he attain to his Land of Heart's 
Desire. And so, to anyone familiar with the journey, there is 
no strangeness in finding Canterbury as a way-station between 
Geneva and the City of the Ages. 

Yet, while common enough, this journey of Viator is all 
unhackneyed. It is as fresh and as vivid as the perennial daisy. 
He was born into a sect very honest, very earnest, but hope- 
lessly false to Nature and to Beauty. Its Hell was the ever- 
present reality of his childhood: its Heaven, a threatened con- 
tinuation of dreary Sunday mornings in chapel. Into this drab 
life, with its alternating periods of morbid excitability, came 
fugitive longings for the liberal world of culture and art and 
freedom and human joy. It was the beginning of the end. 
So one day the pilgrim passed out, bitterly enough, from the 
path of his hereditary evangelicalism. For awhile he tarried 
beside the gate of comfortable and prosperous mediocrity, bat 
the Hound of Heaven was at his heels. The Anglican leaven 
of compromise, this adaptable faith " by law established," dis- 
quieted and dismayed him. For how asked the wistful pil- 
grim should that tremendous question of the Real Presence be 
one for Parliament or the Privy Council to decide ? Dreams 
of an authoritative Church, the Bride and mystical Body of 
Christ, beckoned through the twilight. But still there was 
hesitancy ; the old, old scandals, the ever new difficulties I And 
in the end, it was neither intellectual resolve nor spiritual rap- 
ture which brought Viator to his knees. It was the sting of 
a human sorrow calling out for divine, personal solace, a hunger 
for the sacraments. 

There is no pretense at exbaustiveness in this little anony- 
mous volume. It is scarcely an apologetic or an apologia. It 
is the story, briefly, wittily, very temperamentally told, of the 
magnet and the steel. So much the better 1 To many a Catho- 
lic, and to many a non-Catholic, by happy fortune, will it serve 
as a candle lighting up one of the many roads which lead to 
Rome. 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 385 

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1860. By Emerson File, 
Ph.D. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2. 

Why the Civil War was so bitter and why it was so long 
continued, especially, on the part of the South, is to be 
learned from a study of ante-bellum passions. A recent publi- 
cation offers the material for such a study. It treats of what 
is in every way the most interesting era of our country's 
history since that of the beginnings of the American revolu- 
tion. The author gives fair treatment to all sections, opinions, 
leaders. He has, and herein is, perhaps, his best praise as it 
must have been his heaviest labor, patiently examined and 
quoted from a large part of the contemporary press of the fateful 
political upheaval that preceded the outbreak of hostilities, and 
the warlike campaigns that followed. He brings us close up 
to the exchange of war ultimatums between the sections. And 
he has added a full index. 

More interesting reading can hardly be imagined than the 
inspection Professor Fite makes of the motives of candidates 
and other party leaders, typical of popular motives, especially 
during the convention period. At frequent intervals are found 
luminous character-sketches. Speeches that he deems best ex- 
planatory of sectional attitude or of party principle and policy 
are given in full. The break-up of the Democratic party, the 
sudden and marvelous rise of the Constitutional Union or Bell- 
Everett party, the portentious cohesion of the far Southern 
States on the one side and the exclusively Northern States on 
the other side, are here chronicled in their causes by a compe- 
tent and trustworthy student. Trustworthy; and yet, we feel 
that his estimate of Douglas is somewhat tinged with irrita- 
tion arising from that statesman's awful blunder in procuring 
the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, thereby opening 
territories to slaveholders which had been traditionally allotted 
to free state settlers. 

Painful reading, and yet highly interesting, is found in the 
author's discussion of the Dred Scott decision. This judicial 
fiat split the Democratic Party, the mainstay of all conserva- 
tive hopes, in twain. Chief Justice Taney may be said to have 
written by that decision the platform of the pro- slavery and 
disunion organization that placed John C. Breckenridge in 
nomination for the presidency. 
VOL. xciv. 25 



386 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

Which was the wisest course for a thoughtful union man 
to pursue in the election of 1860? Looking backward, we can 
ask agreement to three propositions. First: It was wisest to 
have voted to avoid war, or to postpone it. At any rate if 
war there must be, to choose such men with such party affili- 
ations as would enlist on the side of coercion all but the cot- 
ton states. Second: since slavery was then plainly entering on 
its era of extinction, it was wisest to vote for men and parties 
who would prevent sudden abolition, which would be the thrust- 
ing of freedom upon four millions of negroes ignorant to the 
verge of brutishness; so that the change might gradually be 
made, and might be facilitated by equitable compensation 
to slave owners. Third : It was wisest to vote for men and 
parties who would be content to postpone the full decision of 
the exceedingly critical question of negro suffrage for even a 
good many years, and then to leave its settlement where the 
ante-bellum constitution left all such questions, namely, to the 
several states. 

We are persuaded of the agreement of a large majority of 
even Northern citizens of our own day on these three propo- 
sitions looking backwards. It was undoubtedly the mind of 
a majority of the voters of all the states above the cotton belt 
in 1860 looking forward. These voters numbered: Douglas 
Democrats, 1,365,967; Bell and Everett men, 509,631; total 
1,875,598. If these had all been compactly joined in one party, 
possessed of the full apparatus of making the canvass and get- 
ting out the votes, a party not in despair as facing sure defeat 
but fighting with excellent prospects of success, they would 
have elected their candidate. In spite of tens of thousands of 
stay-at-home voters, sick with despondency, in spite of the 
hurt suffered from being represented by speakers scanty both 
in number and in ability, the Douglas Democrats and Bell- 
Everett men outnumbered the Lincoln voters, Lincoln receiving 
1,857,610, the other two tickets, as we have seen, making a 
total of 1,875,598. 

And so it happened that Lincoln was chosen President of 
the United States by the electoral college, with a majority 
(adding to the above figures the vote for Breckenridge, 847,- 
953) of nearly 900,000 American voters against him! Calamity 
must have resulted from such a condition under any circum- 
stances. An awful civil war immediately broke out, closing 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 387 

with the President's assassination. The negro race was flung 
headlong into besotted freedom, which was made frenzied by 
the abominations of Reconstruction. Now, at the end of nearly 
fifty years of use of the suffrage, under the influence of the 
criminal folly of the friends of the negro and of the fraud and 
violence of his ex-masters, his voting is almost universally 
throughout the South suppressed. It is hardly too much to 
say that our black people would not only be free to-day, 
but far better off in their civil as well as in their social status, 
had Stephen A. Douglas, rather than Abraham Lincoln, been 
elected President, November 6, 1860. 

MOTHER : A STORY. By Kathleen Norris. New York : The 
Macmillan Company. $1.20. 

Such was our enthusiasm after reading this book, that we 
longed to place it in the hands of all the mothers and the 
grown daughters of our land. We might speak in high praise 
.of its literary merit, for it is skilfully and artistically done, 
with that confidence and finesse that distinguish the trained 
writer. But beyond assuring our readers that they will enjoy 
a story of singular merit, we wish to say that they will receive 
something that will do their hearts and souls good. One 
might preach till he was exhausted, the truth that the unseen 
spiritual values of life alone give value to everything else; but 
to the woman who is of the world and who must at all ex- 
pense keep her place therein; to the girl who is flattered, 
guided, moulded by the things of sight and appearance, he 
would preach in vain. " Why make a slave of oneself early 
in life; why abandon one's freedom and abdicate one's per- 
sonality, even if one does marry? The world changes; old 
ideas give place to new; and are we not ringing in the day 
of emancipation ; do not respectable authorities even the 
eminently respectable Dr. Jacob! tell us that large families are 
an evil?" 

It is useless to deny that many are affected by these self- 
ish and satanic notions. If one who has been at a loss to 
answer them effectively, who has been bewildered by the per- 
sistency of their presentation or the statistics that accompany 
them, let him read Mother, by Kathleen Norris ; let him open 
his heart to it; and he will see straight, and be prepared to 
do what is clean and honest and right. 



388 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

A DIPLOMATIST'S WIFE IN MANY LANDS. By Mrs. Hugh 
Fraser. 2 vols. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. $6. 

To behold a panorama of the world's history from the For- 
ties to the Eighties of the last century, that has been painted 
by one who witnessed what she depicts, means to the thought- 
ful observer valuable instruction and uncommon delight. We 
know no better way than this to describe what we have found 
a most fascinating work A Diplomatist's Wife in Many Lands 
by Mrs. Hugh Fraser. Mrs. Fraser has much of that literary 
gift bestowed so plentifully upon her brother, Marion Craw- 
ford. To have enjoyed the cultured and notable society which 
was hers from the beginning; to have been an eye witness to 
the events that made the nineteenth century, and that we 
must know if we are to judge the twentieth, meant unique 
opportunities. 

We are grateful to Mrs. Fraser, not only for the delight 
that her intimate and sympathetic narrative gives, but also for 
her valuable contribution to history. She has not written his- 
tory, yet, she has given us a more accurate and exact insight 
into personages and movements than we could otherwise ob- 
tain. To give the reader some idea of the ground covered it is 
but necessary to say that here we have a picture of Rome in 
the early Forties ; reminiscences of our own country that recall 
Julia Ward Howe and Charles Sumner; the Mexican Tragedy; 
the Last Days of the Temporal Power and the changed con- 
ditions in the Eternal city ; then we are taken to China 
through chapters that are doubly interesting at the present 
time; then to Austria and at the end is told the murder of 
the Russian Emperor, Alexander II. in whose blood the Con- 
stitution for Russia was literally blotted out, for the Emperor 
had the draught of it in his pocket when he was murdered. 

The two volumes of A Diplomatist's Wife furnish unusu- 
ally interesting reading. 

FRANZ LISZT. By James Huneker. New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons, $2. 

The life of the great Hungarian musician, Franz Liszt, born 
October 22, 1811, is exceptionally interesting because to his 
overwhelming authority of genius was added a beautiful and 
fascinating personality, a powerful intellect and a warm and 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 389 

generous heart. Exposed, for more than half a lifetime to the 
limelight of publicity, to all the temptations which beset one who 
had the civilized world at his feet and who had within the fiery 
spirit of a great artist, he, nevertheless, did an amount of ser- 
ious work simply enormous. From the age of twelve he gave 
incessant concerts in all the great cities of Europe, played 
thousands of dollars into charitable coffers, brought out and 
conducted the works of young and obscure composers, helped, 
advised and befriended unknown artists his generous, untiring 
and indispensable assistance to Wagner is the best known 
instance taught hundreds of pupils, though he would not call 
himself a piano teacher, nor take money for his lessons, which, 
of course, were given only to musicians; wrote thousands of 
letters which are really literature, besides literary articles on 
various musical topics ; gave " by his essential nobility of soul 
and his flaming genius, a prestige and social standing to mu- 
sicians which they had not heretofore enjoyed," as Mr. Hune- 
ker happily phrases it, and left about 1,300 compositions. 

In 1865 at fifty-four years of age, born a Catholic and 
always interested in religious questions and theology, he took 
minor orders in Rome and became an Abbe, henceforth, living 
in great retirement from the public and much occupied in the 
composition of church and sacred music. The remainder of 
his life was passed at Rome and Weimar. He survived Rich- 
ard Wagner three years and died at Bayreuth where he had 
gone to the Wagner Festival in 1886 at the age of seventy- 
five. 

Since that time, the filling-in of these outlines has been 
eagerly hoped for, but though many books have been written 
about Liszt, few have much value as biography. Therefore, 
when it was announced that Mr. Huneker, a well-qualified 
musician and critic, who had been gathering material for more 
than twenty years, would publish a Life of Liszt, as his share 
of the celebration of the centenary of the master, interest was 
kindled and expectation aroused. 

The present volume of 442 pages, dedicated to Henry T. 
Finck, well and attractively printed, with a very complete in- 
dex, in its spirit and contents not only fails to meet that ex- 
pectation but scarcely does the honor to Liszt which is its 
chief excuse, at this time, for being. 

Mr. Huneker in his postscript "instead of a preface," says, 



390 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

that when he attacked his enormous amount of material he 
had not the time or the patience to write the "ideal life of 
Liszt," so he " preferred to study certain aspects of his art 
and character," and "to summon to his aid many competent 
witnesses." He adds: "I hope I have provided sufficient an- 
ecdotes to satisfy the most inveterate of scandal-mongers." 
This noble aim he has accomplished. 

With a pitiable lack of taste "that conscience of the 
mind" he has loosed a strain of trivial gossip and cynical 
scandal quite unworthy of a serious writer supposedly honor- 
ing a great artist, and he has lowered the tone of his whole 
book. 

In view of the twenty years' preparation it seems absurd to 
be obliged to accuse Mr. Huneker of haste as well as of bad 
taste, but the disconnected contents made up of previously 
published magazine papers of somewhat journalistic style, an- 
alyses of the Symphonic poems of the concert-programme 
type, contributions from Liszt pupils, fragmentary quotations 
from musicians, artists and writers and not a little of the 
author's own, which have no relation to his subject, all these 
put together in a not very orderly way, certainly give to the 
book the air of hurry. 

But Mr. Huneker's chief disqualification is his inability to 
see in Liszt a simple and honest man. To him all is pose or 
self-advertisement. That one should weary of the world and 
choose quiet and religious retirement, that one to whom reli- 
gion was a reality should finally come to make it his chief 
care, that he should wish to " live down and forget his 
Glanzperiode" these things are to him unsolvable puzzles. 
Despite Liszt's own assurance that it was "his innermost wish 
which led him to the Church he desired to serve," that "but 
for music he would have become a Franciscan ; " Mr. Huneker 
thinks it is not clear whether Liszt's interest in religious 
matters abated, whether the Church was not after all a disap- 
pointment," etc. He cannot see development of character or 
recognize loftiness of soul, nor credit the assertions of those 
who best knew Liszt at this period. 

No; the ideal life of Liszt must be written by one who 
does not mistake flippancy for vivacity, who has a sense of 
values instead of an ambition to gratify the scandal-mongers, 
one who can comprehend the attraction of spiritual things 



i 9 ii.] NEW BOOKS 391 

and who understands that the world sometimes becomes but 
vanity to a great soul. 

Mr. Huneker quotes Nietzsche as saying: "Great men are 
to be distrusted when they write of themselves;" we might 
add, and small men when they write of great ones. 

THE MARRIAGE PORTION. By H. A. Mitchell Keays. Bos- 
ton: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.35. 

This novel may be summed up as a disagreeable story, with 
patches of cleverness. The characters are the members of 
the faculty and their wives, of a New England university, 
generally supposed to be Harvard, and the background and 
atmosphere are very skilfully managed. Mrs. Keays has un- 
doubted talent, and it is regrettable that she directs it so un- 
wisely. In this book she has chosen to give us men and 
women who act, to borrow a phrase of her own, like " sophis- 
ticated beasts," and situations which probably were intended 
to be powerful, but which succeed in being unspeakably 
coarse. 

WIT AND WISDOM OF CHESTERTON. New York : Dodd, Mead 
& Co. $i. 

To lead us to the rediscovery of the obvious has been, 
and, happily still is, the mission of G. K. Chesterton. He sur- 
prises, irritates us by paradox, but it is only clever strategy. 
While he has our attention he drives home his truth. Critics 
have said that he deals in nothing but paradox ; they only 
prove their inefficiency as critics. Chesterton employs para- 
dox, and, perhaps, he has at times allowed it to assume the 
power of a mannerism, but there is a true, solid, common- 
sense philosophy in all that he has written. He is endeavor- 
ing to bring back common sense to a " mad " world. That 
man has a soul; that he is responsible; that love is a sacred 
thing ; that the home is to be respected ; that truth is at- 
tainable by the human mind; that history is not without its 
lessons; that a theory is not true because it is simply thought 
to be true; that we ought to be moral in our literature and 
our art, all these are obvious, but the world has either forgot- 
ten or disregarded them. And the writings of Chesterton might 
well be recommended as a useful primer to many a scientist 
and "religious" thinker of worldly note. 



392 NEW BOOKS L Dec -i 

We have at hand now a small volume of selections from 
his writings entitled : Wit and Wisdom of Chesterton. The pub- 
lication indicates the author's high position in the world of 
letters. The volume includes selections from all his works 
even his very recent one The Innocence of Father Brown. They 
are made with good judgment and give the reader an excel- 
lent idea of Mr. Chesterton's versatility and brilliancy and 
above all else of his sane philosophy. Selections are made 
also, from his verses, and Chesterton is a poet of no mean 
ability. 

SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. By William James. New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25. 

If the pragmatic philosophy had not been William James* 
own, we can fancy, very willing as he was to adapt himself to 
the understanding of " the man in the street," that he might 
have named it, the go-as you-please philosophy; and stripped 
of scientific dress, to the same ordinary intelligence, it bears 
no small affinity to Christian Science and to some others of 
those old notions in new clothes, so numerous at present. 
They all strive to be scientific and philosophic and at the same 
time to build up some sort of a " faith," attenuated and diluted, 
to be sure, but yet opposed to the scientific materialism hither- 
to so much in vogue. In this they are, no doubt, useful. 

Yet, it is pathetic to find those who have scattered to the 
wind the treasures of real wisdom, putting together small, 
scanty, and ill-fitting bits of their own, in the name of philoso- 
phy building a raft after having scuttled the ship, to teach a 
new generation that a living faith can be founded on each 
man's desires and intuitions. 

Dr. James' candor, sincerity and vigor remained undimin- 
ished to the last. The fact that this is his last book, the 
chapters having been edited since his death by his brother, 
Henry James, gives a more than ordinary interest to it. In a 
memorandum, Dr. James had said: "Say it is fragmentary 
and unrevised," also, " call it a beginning of an introduction 
to philosophy." It is, however, unnecessary to think of the 
"Problems" as incomplete, inasmuch as in other volumes he 
has given very full explanations of pragmatism as held by him- 
self and others. This book may be looked upon as one that 
maintains the pragmatic attitude, and be criticized accordingly. 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 393 

The excellent paper in the November number of THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD, by Dr. William Turner, on " Pragmatism," 
is so clear an exposition and criticism of this would-be phi- 
losophy, that it is here recommended as better than any that 
could be given in this short notice. Interesting criticism is 
also to be found, in Psychology by Michael Maher, S J., new 
edition, pp. 475-6, 485-6; 491-2, 512-13, bearing upon em- 
piricist theories. 

The chapter of Dr. James' book which appeals most to 
one who can see in this philosophy only the extreme logical 
position of Protestantism, scientifically expressed, is the paper 
in the appendix, entitled : " Faith and the Right to Believe." 
There is something human and touching about the obvious 
longing for some certainty. It is interesting to note the in- 
sistence upon the right (with never a word of the duty) to 
believe; interesting, also, is the ingenious "Faith- Ladder"; 
the " How we act on probabilities," and the conclusion that 
" the faith-circle is so congruous with human nature that the 
only explanation of the veto that intellectuals pass upon it 
must be sought in the offensive character to them of the faiths 
of certain concrete persons." 

Yet all is unsatisfying, because it rests merely on one man's 
opinion, and even with William James' best efforts, and they 
are very good indeed, futility seems to be the outcome, and 
the real gain to the world's thought unsubstantial. It comes 
to mind that as some one has said: "Pragmatism is not so 
much a philosophy as an excuse for not having one." The 
book is well-printed, well-indexed, dignified and attractive. 
It is dedicated " to the memory of Charles Renouvier," the 
exponent of pluralism. 

SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Alice Meynell and G. K. Chesterton. 

London: Herbert and Daniel. 50 cents. 

WORDSWORTH. By E. Hallam Moorhouse. London: Her- 
bert and Daniel. 50 cents. 

This excellent series of selections from the great English 
writers is justified. No ordinary being, for instance, has time 
or perseverance to wade through the whole of Johnson's 
writings his methods of criticism, his solemn and weighty 
sentences, his distance from the time and manner of our own 
critical perceptions close much of his work to our sympathies. 



394 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

But, in this little volume, Mrs. Meynell gives us everything 
that is pertinent and nothing that is superfluous to a sound 
judgment of his work, a judgment that must be made quite 
independently of the life which Boswell has made our living 
possession. This is another side of him. 

As Boswell links his name with that of genial sociability, 
so does Mrs. Meynell link it with loneliness, composure and 
deep solemnity. But, either way, he is English of the English. 
"Every language imposes a quality, teaches a temper, pro. 
poses a way, bestows a tradition;" the quality, the temper, 
the way and the tradition of Johnson's language have deeply 
impressed themselves upon the language of his country. " I 
found our speech copious without order, and energetic with- 
out rule," he tells us in the preface to his Dictionary, and 
he gave to it what it then lacked. As Mr. Chesterton points 
out Johnson was a very lonely and a very religious man, 
almost saintly in his real detachment from the small things of 
human life and in his perpetual meditation on the great last 
things. "Write to me no more about dying with grace" he 
said to a flippant correspondent, " when you feel what I have 
felt in approaching eternity, in fear of soon hearing the sen- 
tence of which there is no revocation, you will know the 
folly." Take his letter to Dr. Lawrence, whose wife had late- 
ly died. "The loss, dear Sir, which you have lately suffered, 
I ielt many years ago, and know, therefore, how much has 
been taken from you. . . . He that outlives a wife whom 
he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind 
that has the same hopes, and fears, and interests ; from the 
only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil ; 
and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace 
the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is 
lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; 
and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by 
external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense 
is dreadful." This little book is so finely put together that it 
will surely stand through the coming time as the best selection 
from Johnson that has ever been made. Mr. G. K. Chesterton's 
Introduction, of course, enhances its value. 

The companion volume of selections from Wordsworth con- 
tains about a hundred more poems than Matthew Arnold's 
well-known selection in the Golden Treasury series and in- 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 395 

eludes passages from the Prelude, The Excursion and The 
Recluse, together with various prose passages. It may by ques- 
tioned whether the longer poems are suitable for extracts, at 
any rate, their unity seems spoilt in this way. Matthew Arnold 
contends that all Wordsworth's best work is to be found in the 
short poems. Coventry Patmore, however, ranks the Excur- 
sion as the greatest poem in our language, if not in any, not 
excepting that of the Divine Comedy. But the two critics had 
different ends in view. Matthew Arnold looked for poetry, 
what we may call formal vitality and he found it in the 
shorter poems ; Patmore was looking for philosophy expressed 
in poetical form and this he found in the longer ones. But 
Matthew Arnold has told us the secret of Wordsworth power: 
"He felt the joy offered to us in nature; he showed us this 
joy, and rendered it so as to make us share it." 

ONE THOUSAND HOMELESS MEN. A STUDY OF ORIGINAL 

RECORDS. By Alice Willard Solenberger. 

THE ALMSHOUSE ; CONSTRUCTION AND MANAGEMENT. By 
Alexander Johnson. New York : Charities Publication Com- 
mittee. $1.25 each. 

The two books before us are recent additions to that rap- 
idly growing body of valuable literature called into being by 
the Russel Sage endowment. Mrs. Solenberger's study is a 
noteworthy contribution to the study of that significant class 
of society, the lodging-house population. Her material was gath- 
ered during the four years when the writer was connected with 
the Chicago Bureau of Charities, and in official contact with 
the class in question. A thousand cases were taken as the 
material for the intensive study, the results of which are pub- 
lished in the present volume. Her method of observation and 
presentation and her soundness of inference manifest her 
work as conscientious, accurate, scientific. Her book is a use- 
ful guide to the student who would get at the causes or the 
remedies of this phenomenon so important in the social pa- 
thology of our day. 

Mr. Johnson, who is the General Secretary of the National 
Conferences of Charities and Correction, bases his work largely 
upon personal experience as inspector of altos- houses and 
superintendent of an institution for defectives. There can 
be no question about the author's success in the attainment 



39 6 NEW BOOIfS [Dec., 

of his purpose which is "to [indicate in a plain and simple 
manner a few of those things which are often overlooked, 
but which, if carefully attended to, make for comfort and econ- 
omy." One unusual item is the account of the tramp who 
was forced to take a bath for the first time and died within 
three days. 

THE NOW-A-DAYS FAIRY BOOK. By Anna Alice Chapin. Pic- 
tures by Jessie Willcox Smith. New York : Dodd, Mead 

& Co. $2. 

. One wishes that he were a child when he gets a glance at 
The Now-a-Days Fairy Book. It is quite the handsomest and 
most inviting of holiday books for children that we have re- 
ceived. Anna Alice Chapin has caught the fairy spirit and 
presented the old tales in a modern way; and Jessie Wilcox 
Smith does her name need any word of praise to those who 
have seen her children has illustrated it in a way well, in a 
way that only Jessie Willcox Smith knows. Child-trust and 
sweetness, child- wonder and seriousness are all there in beau- 
tiful coloring. The text and the colored plates make what 
the children will call "just a beautiful book." 

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM. By Sidney and Beatrice 
Webb. New York: Longman's, Green & Co. $2.60. 

None of our readers need information as to the importance 
of this classic on Trade Unionism. Sixteen years of uninter- 
rupted demand for the volume have enabled the publishers to 
bring out this new edition and have provided the authors with 
an opportunity to add some fifty pages in the form of an in- 
troductory chapter. They here express the conviction that the 
year 1911 finds Trade Unionism once more at a crisis of its 
fate. They point out the intolerable situation produced by the 
Osborne judgment, destroying the old legal status of Trade 
Unions, and the application of the principle of ultra vires to 
Trade Unions conceived of as corporations and strictly limited 
in activity in accord with the definition contained in the Act 
of 1876. 

" We ought," says the authors, " to speak with proper re- 
spect of the judges, though sometimes, by their curious ignor- 
ance of life outside the Law Courts, and especially of ' what 
everybody knows,' they try us hard." "A judicial decision of 



19".] NEW BOOKS 397 

the House of Lords cannot, of course, be 'reversed.' What 
Parliament can do, and ought clearly to do without delay, is 
once more to attempt to express what position it means Trade 
Unions (and with them must equally be included Employers' 
Associations hold to)." 

Tables show the recent growth of Trade Unionism in the 
United Kingdom from 1,502.358 in 1892 to 2,406,746 in 1907. 

THE CONTESSA'S SISTER. By Gardner Teall. New York: 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 75 cents. 

A simple and refreshing little romance is this, fragrant 
with the odor of Italy and glowing with the colors of Capri, 
told by an American writer who settled down to be worshipped 
by his admiring peasant friends, and to fall in love with the 
fair lady whom he saw first at the palace window with her 
arms billowed in oceans of delicious Sowers. 

THE LOG OF THE "EASY WAY." By John L. Matthews. 
Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.50. 

Mr. John L. Matthews, the author of The Conservation of 
Water and Re-Making the Mississippi, has written a new book 
called The Log of the " Easy Way" The volume is an account 
of a honeymoon trip in a houseboat, the " Easy Way," down 
the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Mr. Matthews and his 
bride felt the lure of the river and started out like "water 
gypsies in a floating van." There adventures began with the 
tragedy of the bride's first bread-baking, included encounters 
with traveling photographers, medicine men, and junk thieves, 
and once even compelled the poor author to qualify as a coal- 
shoveler on a barge near Vicksburg. The narrative is pleasant 
and leisurely and full of the queer, inexplicable charm of the 
Mississippi, the river of vagabonds, dear already to lovers of 
Mark Twain. There are, moreover, some very good illustra- 
tions from photographs taken by the author. 

THE INCORRIGIBLE DUKANE. By George C. Shedd. Boston : 
Small, Maynard & Co. $1.25. 

A book that is very likable is The Incorrigible Dukane, by 
George C. Shedd. It is a straightforward story in a hearty, 
boyish style and with plenty of humor. The Incorrigible Du- 
kane, more familiarly known as Jimmy, has been leading the 



39 g NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

gay life of a millionaire's son, Dukane, Senior, being the 
wealthy owner of a concrete construction company; but his 
gayety has finally drawn down the paternal wrath and ended 
the paternal allowance. So our first glimpse of Jimmy shows 
him "dumped in a puddle at eleven o'clock at night" some- 
where in the desert of Nevada. After this pleasing start in 
life, Jimmy next proceeds to be robbed of his cash and clothes \ 
then, after indulging in two very realistic fights he lands, witk 
ragged clothes and a black eye, in Silver Peak, where a gang of 
men under one of Dukane, Senior's engineers are rebuilding a 
dam. Here he gets a job shoveling stone at two dollars a day. 
The surprises and adventures that await him, and his success 
in showing up the private "graft" of the engineer who is 
cheating his father's company, make a lively and very enjoy- 
able story. 

THE GLITTERING FESTIVAL. By Edith Ogden Harrison. 
Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. $1.25. 

The Glittering Festival was a great World's Fair gotten up 
by the Earth Queen, Enola, in order that all living things in 
her realm might tell what they had done for the world. The 
one who had done most was to get a splendid prize. The 
Sun- King and the Moon- Queen sat with Enola as judges, 
while before them animals and plants told their stories each 
one arguing cleverly and eloquently for the prize. The au- 
thor has recorded their speeches and given much more in- 
formation about them in a charming way. Every lover of a 
fairy tale will take delight in the pleasant love stories of the 
sky folk with which the festival is intertwined. 

A SEARCH FOR THE APEX OF AMERICA. By Annie S. Peck, 
M.A. New York. Dodd, Mead & Co. $3.50. 

This record of attempts to find and to climb the highest 
mountain in America is a splendid story of womanly grit in fac- 
ing great risks and of winning success in overcoming the tre- 
mendous difficulties involved in the enterprise. It gives an ac- 
count of four trips from New York to South America, of two 
efforts to reach the top of Sorata in Bolivia neither quite 
successful of five vain, and a sixth triumphant, attempt to 
reach the summit of the higher and more difficult Huarascan 
in Peru, as well as of other minor climbs in that region, and a 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 399 

visit to the headwaters of the Amazon. Naturally, the book 
deals chiefly with the delays, difficulties, dangers and varying 
fortunes of these expeditions, but, at the same time, it gives 
the reader detailed and varied information about a wide range 
of other subjects; the climate, appearance, mineral and other 
resources of those countries, the dwellings, customs, dress, 
tastes, virtues and defects of their inhabitants. The volume 
will surely tend to promote the kindly relations which the 
author wishes to see established between ourselves and the 
South American peoples. A map which shows the route 
traversed by Miss Feck, and numerous illustrations, especially 
views of scenes which she and her companions alone have be- 
held, add greatly to the interest of the text. 

CHINESE PLAYMATES. By Norman H. Pitman. Boston: 
L. C. Page & Co. $i. 

The simple and life-like expedient of allowing his two small 
heroes to get lost in a great wheat field, gives the author of 
this book a chance to impart considerable information about 
Chinese farming methods, thieving beggars, wheelbarrow ped- 
dlers, and divers other curiosities in the life and customs of 
China. The slender plot will easily hold the youthful read- 
er's delighted attention, while the quaint illustrations by Sen 
Fah Shang, will amuse as well as instruct him. 

JESUS CHRIST ET L'fiTUDE COMPARE'S DES RELIGIONS. 

Par Albert Valensin. Paris: J. Gabalda et Cie. 
The author of these studies is a member of the faculty of 
theology at Lyon. He delivered a series of lectures there in 
the winter of the present year and he now gives us in book 
form the substance of those lectures. His studies centre about 
the life and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. The main pur- 
pose is apologetic refutation of those writers on the subject 
of comparative religion who have not hesitated to lay sacri- 
legious hands upon the Person of our Savior. Against these 
men our author stoutly maintains the unique and Divine char- 
acter of Jesus Christ. The same rank cannot possibly be given 
to Buddha or Marduk. The problem of syncretism is not 
shunned. The author's familiarity with the facts is quite evi- 
dent from the copious references to works of opponents. 
Making all due allowance for analogies, Valensin points out 



400 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

the unique and transcendant character of Christ. In a conclu- 
ding conference the author takes up the writings of St. Paul 
in evidence of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth actually realized 
the old Messianic hope of Israel. All who are interested in 
the study of the true religion will find in this book a correct 
estimate of our Savior's Life and influence on the world. 

MOTHERS will be delighted with the series of Read Out 
Loud Books written by the well-known John Martin. 
He has taken the old nursery rhymes and retold them with a 
novelty and adaptability to the child-mind that leave nothing 
to be desired. He has cleverly illustrated the tales, and pre- 
sented them in a form that will attract the little ones. As 
they are to be read by the grown-ups, Mr. Martin at times 
makes them the vehicle of a serious purpose so that they will 
interest the reader as well as hold the attention of the little 
ones for whom primarily they are written. The five dainty 
volumes with the " Happy Puppy " that carries them will 
make a charming Christmas gift. (New York: Dodd, Mead 
& Co. $3). 

A NDREW LANG has given us many interesting story- 
** books. The present one, The All Sorts of Stories Book, Is, 
we believe, his twenty-third. But Mr. Lang writes only the 
preface. It is Mrs. Lang who has made the selections and 
who tells the stories. The volume strikes a new vein which to 
us seems not only entertaining but inexhaustible, and we hope 
Mrs. Lang will continue her work of resurrecting for us old 
tales from books and periodicals now forgotten. Of the pres- 
ent volume some are simple folk-tales and classical myths; 
others are real historical incidents and personages, and all will 
make interesting and instructive reading for older children and 
be the means of introducing them in later life to many of the 
classical pieces of English literature. (New York: Longmans, 
Green & Co. $1.60.) 

A NYONE who is not acquainted with that classic of English 
a *- literature: The Dream oj Gerontius should make its ac- 
quaintance at once. To any such, as well as to those who 
know and love the poem well, an edition of it just published 
by B Herder of St. Louis will be most welcome. (The price 
of the booklet is 25 cents.) 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 401 

F)R. VAN DYKE'S latest Christmas story, Ike Mansion, r- 
L' calls the scriptural truth that it is harder for a rich man 
to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass 
through the eye of a needle. John Weightman is a modern 
millionaire philanthropist, whose charities and behests are given 
for ends that further his desire to appear great before men. 
Mercifully, however, the opportunity is given to him, in a 
dream, to enter the heavenly city. Here he finds that the 
least ones of earth have mansions most beautiful, while he 
himself has nothing for his own but a poor little hut. The 
outcome of the story and the lessons which it brings home 
are in happy keeping with the spirit of Christmas. It is a 
small volume of sixty pages, and is attractively illustrated by 
Elizabeth Shippen Green. (The publishers are Harper and- 
Brothers, New York: 50 cents.) 

TVf Y RAGPICKER, by Mary E. Waller (Boston : Little, 
Brown & Co. 75 cents), is, a charming, if somewhat fan- 
ciful, little story of a young French girl, whose purity of soul 
was preserved through bitter poverty and many temptations, 
by her devotion to "Our Lady of Paris." It is a singularly 
beautiful tribute to the Blessed Virgin from one not of our 
Faith. 

TJOW ST. FRANCIS KEPT CHRISTMAS, is the second 
edition of an attractive little booklet written by Ruth 
Egerton. A frontispiece appropriate to the title adorns the 
nine pages of text. (St. Louis: B. Herder). 

'"THREE generations of old and young have been charmed 
by the magic of that classical sea-tale: Two Years Before 
the Mast, by H. Dana, Jr. The Macmillan Company have just 
re-issued the volume in a special edition handsomely illustrated. 
Steam and the Panama Canal have done away with such voy- 
ages as "Two Years Before the Mast," but neither of these, 
nor time itself will be able to rob it of its enduring charm. 

TN Dr. David, by Marjorie Benton Cooke (Chicago: A. C. 

McClurg & Co. $1.35), the central figure is a young 

oculist of force and ideals. The theme lies in his influence in 

the life of Nanette Brandon, a typical blase society woman. 

VOL. xciv. 26 



4 02 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

One rather unusual development is. that Nanette's husband 
sits by the fireside and waits patiently for her to be won 
back to wifely duty by the very culpable method of love for 
another man. The story is well-meaning, but prosy, and 
of an obvious Sunday afternoon morality. The most inter- 
esting chapters deal with the child-labor question in the fac- 
tories of New York City. 

A RUSTIC couple, irrevocably addicted to slang, give the 
title to a book of journeyings called: Abroad With the 
Fletchers (Boston: L. C. Page & Co. $1.75). The volume is 
one of the " Little Pilgrimage Series." It seeks to conduct 
the reader pleasantly and with no burden of thought on a 
sight-seeing tour through Naples, Rome, Florence, Paris, and 
the English Lake Region. It is generously illustrated with 
photographs. 

'THE FAITH OF CATHOLICS, is a work that through 
long years of service has proved its worth. It shows 
how the teachings of our holy religion are confirmed by the 
Scripture and by the Fathers of the first five Christian centuries. 
We trust that the latest edition published by Frederick Pustet 
& Co., New York (3 vols. $6.), and edited by Mgr. Capel, will 
meet with the cordial welcome that it deserves. 

A BOOK that tells us pleasantly of the people, customs, 
** institutions etc., of the great and growing republic of the 
Argentina, comes to us from L. C. Page & Co., of Boston. 
It is entitled Argentina and is written by Nevin O. Winter 
who in a similar way has covered Mexico and Brazil. The 
publishers have presented the book and its many illustrations 
in an excellent and attractive way. $3. 

A TRUE HIDALGO, by Louis Coloma. Translated from 
P- the Spanish by Harold Binns. (St. Louis: B. Herder. 
$1.35). The son of a Spanish grandee is driven from home 
by the machinations of a spiteful stepmother. He is heavily 
in debt, and the usurer from whom he had obtained a large 
amount of money is found murdered one mornirg. In the 
popular mind the young nobleman is held guilty of the 
crime, and a cry goes up for his arrest. The working-out of 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 403 

this part oi the story towards the end is done with a clumsy 
touch, and is extremely dull. From the prolixity and the 
general tone of dullness which pervade the book, we rather 
marvel why so much value has been attached to the original 
in Spanish. 

CTRANGE SIBERIA, by Marcus L. Taft. (New York; 
SJ Eaton & Mains. $i), is an illustrated account of a 
journey from Pekin to New York by the Trans-Siberian Rail- 
way and it gives details that would be useful to one follow- 
ing the same route. 

FjEVOTION TO THE NINE CHOIRS OF HOLY ANGELS, 
*-' from the French of the Archdeacon of Evremy, Henri- 
Marie- Boudon, by Edward Healy Thompson, M.A. (New 
York: Benziger Brothers. 75 cents). This volume is quite an 
elaborate treatise upon devotion to the Holy Angels, too fre- 
quently neglected those servants of the Holiest, of whom 
Newman tells us that " every breath of air, every ray of light 
and heat is, as it were, the waving of the robes of those whose 
faces see God in heaven." 

'THE REUNION OF CHRISTENDOM, by Francis Good- 
man (New York: Broadway Publishing Company. $i .50). 
A clever and amusingly satirical picture of life in a nameless 
New England village. The ministers of various denominations 
try to induce the Catholic priest to join their federation to 
promote the reunion of Christendom, with the result, that 
through his forcible arguments they are all received into the 
Church. 

TTtSTORICAL religious romances are among the most diffi- 
cult of literary undertakings. Those of the English writer, 
Sophie Maude, however, have met with unusual and deserved 
success, especially John and Joan, her story of the Northern 
Rising under King Henry VIII. To this book now appears a 
sequel, which is called Right and Might, and which deals with 
the religious persecutions under Elizabeth. It is carefully and 
ably done, and will be found a valuable study of the Eliza- 
bethan reign. We note that the book is dedicated, appropri- 
ately and gracefully to Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson. (New 
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.10.) 



404 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

THE French Revolution is always fertile soil for the ro- 
mancers. The latest story on the subject is The Loser 
Pays, by Mary Openshaw, and takes for its hero Rouget de 
Lisle, the author of the Marseillaise. It is well told and suc- 
ceeds in vividness, but as a serious study of the Revolution it 
does not compare with Canon Sheehan's new book, The Queen's 
Fillet. (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.25.) 

FR. PUSTET, New York, has published a collection of 
Ecclesiastical Chants for clerics (price 35 cents), gathered 
and annotated by Dom Dominick Johner, O.S.B. This small, 
rather too finely printed hand-book contains the Ordinary of 
the Mass and the Holy Week services, with some chants now 
used only by monastic orders. In many cases modern notation 
is added. The same firm has issued the fifth edition of a Pro- 
cessional (price 55 cents) and the Office and Mass for the 
Dead, attractive manuals of Gregorian music according to the 
Vatican edition. 

J. JOS. FRANKEN has published through J. Fischer & 
Brothers, "Six Cantica " for Benediction, arranged for 
soprano, tenor and bass, with organ accompaniment. They are 
pleasing in harmony and devotional in tone. 

OTORIES OF USEFUL INVENTIONS, by S. E. Forman 
^ gives in pleasant narrative the history of inventions which 
are most useful to man in his daily life. The stories, there- 
fore, are stories of human progress chapters in the history 
of civilization which will both surprise and instruct the boy or 
girl or even grown readers. Helpful illustrations are given on 
almost every page and add to the attractiveness of an in- 
tensely interesting book. (New York: Century Company. $i). 

A PRETTY Christmas gift- book Is Their Heart's Desire, by 
** Frances Foster Perry, the story of a small boy who want- 
ed a real live mother for a Christmas present. The book is 
daintily bound and is illustrated by Harrison Fisher. (New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $i.) 

A LIVELY, healthy story for boys is The Young Timler- 
**> Cruisers, or Fighting the Spruce Pirates, by Hugh Pen- 
dexter. A city boy gets his first job sawing pine in a lumber- 



igii.] NEW BOOKS 405 

men's camp, and many are the experiences and adventures to 
which it leads. The story has a safe and sane excitement, and 
may be recommended for boys. (Boston : Small, May nard & 
Co. $1.20). 

THE JUNIORS OF ST. BEDE'S, by Rev. T. H. Bryson. 
(New York: Benziger Brothers. 85 cents). A new story 
for Catholic boys is always welcome, but we fear very much 
that a friendly greeting cannot be given to this one. It is 
supposed to be a tale of school life in a Jesuit college, yet, 
as we read it we felt at times a suspicion that we were being 
treated to an inside view of a reformatory. We had to 
balk at the abnormal rascality of three boys in the college. 
All we sincerely hope is, that the author had not in his mind's 
eye any particular Catholic institution, for we should be sorry 
that such unusual meanness, baseness, and criminal propen- 
sities should be found within the walls of any of our schools. 
On the whole we cannot recommend the book as a healthy 
one for young boys. 

"DOOKS for boys are becoming as plentiful as telephone calls 
^ on a busy day. Among the newest is The Auto Boyt* 
Camp by James A. Braden (The Saalfield Publishing Co., 
Akron, Ohio. $i), an account ot four chums who enjoy 
a long automobile trip and a camp in the woods. We note it 
as a lively story, and good of its kind. 

T ES FEMMES DU MONDE, by Joseph Tissier, (Paris: 
*-* Pierre Te'qui). These admirable conferences of Doctor 
Tissier are practical studies that will help women in the world 
who aspire to some measure of spiritual betterment. The 
titles of the conferences sufficiently indicate the scope of the 
work. They deal sympathetically with those who suffer, with 
those who devote themselves to good works and with those 
who are growing old. 

JEANNE D'ARC ET LA FRANCE, by L'Abbe Stephen 
Coube. (Paris: P. Lethielleux). This volume is a collec- 
tion of patriotic discourses in honor of the Maid, delivered in 
many places and always fired by 1'Abbe Coube's enthusiastic 
eloquence. 



^foreign periobicate* 

The Tablet (14 Oct.): "The Hague and the War." Italy and 
Turkey were both parties to the Hague Convention of 
1907. "They knew that there was a Court ready and 
eager to determine the equities of the quarrel and yet 
they have preferred to settle their difference by an ap- 
peal to arms." "Franz Liszt, 1811-1911." "In the 

whole history of music," writes William Vowles, "there 
is no name which calls up an impression of versatility, 
brilliance, magic genius, as that of Franz Liszt. His eru- 
dition and culture place him in an unique place among 
the musical litterateurs of his day." 
(21 Oct.): "Continental Freemasonry and Politics." 
Those who smile at Catholics for attributing most of the 
trouble with which the Church in Europe is afflicted to 
the influence of Freemasonry, now have the assurance 
of a well-informed correspondent of the Morning Post, 
that Continental Freemasonry is "almost entirely polit- 
ical," tending to promote "Republicanism" and "irre- 

ligion." Father W. H. Kent, O.S.C. replies to the 

criticisms of his notes on the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
and defends his position as to the legality and morality 
of the attack made on it. 

(28 Oct.) : " Monte Cassino," a soldier's appreciation of 
the great Benedictine mother-house and of the religious 
and historical associations connected with it. "Paro- 
chial Work in France." One of the effects of the Law 
of Separation and the suppression of the Concordat is 
the ever-increasing union of the Catholics of France. 
Diocesan and parish associations and the provision of 
numbers of new churches, supported directly by the 
people, are a few signs of the new and hopeful order 
of things. 

(4 Nov.) : The Province of Westminster has been di- 
vided into three provinces, Westminster, Birmingham 
and Liverpool. The Archbishop of Westminster shall 
have precedence over the other Archbishops and Bishops, 



.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 407 

with the right to convoke and preside at all meetings 
of the Hierarchy. "The Fourth Cardinal of West- 
minster." an historical sketch of Archbishop Bourne. 
Among forthcoming Pontifical Acts "one will con- 
tain the reform of the Roman Breviary in the sense, 
it is believed, of a return in large measure to the Ferial 
offices." 

The Month (Nov.): "The Ideas of a Chief Inspector of 
Schools," by the Rev. Sydney F. Smith, is a review of 
the book What h and What Might Be, by Mr. E. G. 
Holmes, Chief Inspector of the London Board of Edu- 
cation. Father Smith severely criticised the work, the 
thesis of which seems to be that the docttine of Orig- 
inal Sin is a canker at the root of all educational effort 
which must be removed before a healthy education of 

children can be hoped for. An anonymous writer, 

under the caption " Anglicanism and the Supernatural," 
maintains that the difficulties which confront the An- 
glican churchmen to-day, are the natural sequence of 
Naturalism. " The Spiritual Testament of John Shake- 
speare," by Rev. Herbert Thurston, considers an inter- 
esting document, which purports to be the spiritual 
document of the father of the poet. If the document 
is genuine it proves conclusively that he was a staunch 
Catholic. 

The National (Nov.): "Tripoli" by Tobruck is a strong de- 
fense of Italy's action in declaring war on Tripoli.- 
Prof. Stephen Leacock writes of the defeat of the 

Liberal Party in Canada. Sir Arthur Griffith-Bos- 

cawen, M. P. discusses "The Crying Need of Housing 
Reform " and suggests that the Unionist Party demand 
from the state a million pounds a year to remedy ex- 
isting conditions in the slums. "Our Sentimentalists 

and Our Sea Power," by Ignotus, predicts that England 
will be engaged in a naval battle Jn the near future. 
W. Roberts contributes a study of "The Old Mas- 
ters at the Graf ton Galleries." Canada's new Prtmier, 
Mr. R. L. Borden, is the subject of an article by Max- 
well H. H. Macartney. 

The Church Quarterly (Oct.): "The Value of the Establish- 
ment of the Church," by Rev. Arthur C. Headlam a 



4 o8 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec., 

discussion of the general question of Church Establish- 
ment and its value to the country. "The Present 

Position of New Testament Studies," by H. St. John 
Thackeray, an estimate of the general trend of recent 
critical opinion with regard to the New Testament as a 
whole, particular attention being given to the problem 

presented by the Synoptic Gospels. "The Mystical 

Element of Religion," by Right Rev. Charles Gore, D. D., 
a criticism of Baron Von Hiigel's work "The Mystical 
Element of Religion," as studied in St. Catherine of 
Genoa and her Friends. " Winchester Cathedral Li- 
brary from the Reformation to the Commonwealth," by 
Rev. John Vaughn, is a resume of the history of the 
Manuscripts of St. Swithun's Priory. The treasures still 
in existence, are, indeed, but a sorry remnant of what was 
once a fine library, but such as they are, their preser- 
vation is due in no small degree, to the zeal and intel- 
ligence of " Syr Thomas Dackcombe and John Chase." 
Le Correspondant (10 Oct.): "Italy and Tripoli," an unsigned 
article deals with the important question of the claims 

of the Italian Government concerning Tripoli. "The 

Sale of Ecclesiastical Property under the Revolution," 
by Abbe Sicard, relates the injustices suffered by the 

Church from the French Government since 1790. 

" Woman under Islamism," by G. Reynaud, describes 
the position and condition of women under the religion 

of Mahomet. "The Cure of Elancourt," by Maurice 

Talmeyr, is a short story, the sixth under the series 
entitled: "The New Golden Legend." 
(25 Oct.): "Free Secondary Education, To-day and 
Yesterday," by Henry Joli, " contrasts the work done 
to-day in the secular schools with that of the sup- 
pressed schools of the Religious Orders for the educa- 
tion of the youth of France." "The French Revolu- 
tion and Italy," by Henry Cochin, deals with the Reign 
of Terror which started in France and swept into Italy 

making a prisoner of Pius VI. "Bossuet," by Pierre 

Didier, is an article dealing with three periods of Bos- 
suet's genius "The Vendes in Portugal," by Francis 

Rousseau, relates the troublesome days for the Church 
in Portugal from 1834-1886. This article has been sug- 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 409 

gested by a similar state of affairs existing in Portugal 

to .day. "The Autumn Salon," by Andrew Perate, 

describes the works of art on exhibition for 1911. 
Revue du Clerge Franfais (5 Oct.): E. Vacandaid brings to 
a close his study entitled : "The Origins cf the Vene- 
ration of the Saints; are the Saints the Successors of 

the Gods?" Ch. Calippe treats of "The Social For- 

mation of Seminarists" discussing among other things, 
the tole of the Church and of the clergy from the 
social point of view, the necessity and insufficiency 
of the initiation to " Works," the absolute necessity of 

a doctrinal teaching for the social formation. "The 

Social Theatre"" is an article by F. Veuillot on the so- 
cial influence of the theatre and the need of directing it. 
(i Nov.): E. Vacandard begins a historical study of 
"The Latin Church from the Fourth to the Fifteenth 
Century," treating of the Church and the Empire, the 
Church and the Barbarians, the Christianity of the 

Middle Ages: Its Grandeur and Decline. F. Martin 

contributes an article entitled: "The Fourteen Brothers 
and Sisters of la Joconde," these being the most famous 
old paintings in the Louvre, works of the old mas- 
ters, Raphael, Titian, Holbein, Velasquez, and others. 
Leon Defers contributes a " Chronicle of Pastor- 
al Theology " E. Lenoble gives an account of the 

Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at 
Bologna in April. He also reviews a book " Con- 
temporary Thought ; the Great Problems," by Paul Gaultier. 

Mgr. du Vauroux, Bishop of Agen writes of "The 

'Confessionality ' of Works" a plea for frank and open 
profession of Catholicity in the religious undertakings 
of Catholics for moral and social betterment. 
Reiue Pratique D'Apologetique (15 Oct.): "Preaching," by H. 
Lesetre. M. Lesetre presents dogma as the object 
around which preaching should centre. "The Apolo- 
getic Solidarity of the Motives of Credibility," by A. 
de Poulpiquet. The following are the topics considered: 
(a) Motives of credibility arise from two sources, viz., 
the Old and New Testaments, and the history of the 
Church, as found in its holiness, sanctity, the witness of 
the martyrs. (b) The connection of facts with the mo- 



4 io FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec., 

tives of credibility. (c) Apologetic services that the 
facts of the Church render to motives of credibility, 
(i Nov.): "The Eucharist in St. Paul," by E. Maugenot 
treats (i) the Jewish sacrifices. (2) The dissimilarity 
between Christian Communion and the repast of Pagan 
sacrifices. (3) The disorders at Corinth ; Institution of 
the Eucharist; Conditions necessary to receive it. 

Etudes (5 Oct.): Now that the physical concept of matter, en- 
dowed with mass and weight, is giving way to a philo- 
sophical concept and stress is being laid on energy, 
Pierre de Vregille judges it timely to review the old 
chemical and physical theories as to what is the support 

of natural phenomena. Madame Therese Kleiter, a 

German Catholic poet and novelist, receives a sympa- 
thetic interpretation to French readers from Louis Cher- 
voillot. Picturesque details, profound convictions, deli- 
cacy of expression, and a brave faith are said to char- 
acterize her work. Paul Dudon praises M. Goyau's 

two volumes on Bismarck and the Church, for their 
abundant information, freedom of manner, and critical 
yet Christian spirit. M. Imbart de la Tour has at- 
tacked the view that the Church has the right to appeal 
to the secular arm as a temporal means of coercion. 
Yves de la Briere calls this opinion " a condemned 
error," and enumerates pronouncements from the Third 
Lateran Council down to Leo XIII. in defence of the 
Church's right to do so in a Catholic state. He also 
denies that this right is of pagan origin and was opposed 
by St. Martin, St. Ambrose, and St. John Chrysostom. 
(20 Oct.): Joseph de Ghellinck shows the intimate rela- 
tions which existed between ' Theology and Canon Law 

in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." "The Turin 

Exposition of Labor and Industry," is described as to 
its material side and its significance as affirming the pol- 
icy of Cavour. Henri Caye reviews the conclusions 

on secondary education reached by two congresses held 
at Vannes and at Bonne- Esperance. The pronunciation 
of Latin, philosophy, foreign study, physical training, 
and school hygiene were considered. 

La Civilta Cattolica (7 Oct.): The opening article discusses 
the " Venti Settembre Masonic Festival " held this year 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 411 

in Rome. "The ' New Learning ' of Luther " is con- 
sidered in the first of a series of articles which takes up 
the various factors that ultimately issued in the doc- 
trinal innovation of the heresiarch. The present article 
merely concerns itself with the psychology of Luther 

himself. The series on "Benedetto Croce and the 

Moral Theology of the Jesuits," is continued, as is also 
that on " The Conflict between Morality and Sociology." 
(21 Oct.): "Modern Industrialism and the Family," 
describes the horrible conditions in which so many 

working families are compelled fto live. "Prohibited 

Literature" concludes the series on good reading, with 
a sketch of the restrictions that the Church places upon 

her children's reading. The series on Benedetto Croce 

is brought to a close. " Gottschalc and the Predesti- 
nation Controversy," is an interesting historical study 
of an enigmatic figure of the early ninth century. 

Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (Oct.) : " Philosophy in the 
College," is a lecture found among the notes of the late 
L. Olle-Laprune, according to which philosophy, as 
taught in the secondary schools, should have as its pur- 
pose, not the making of philosophers, disputants, or 
skeptics, but should assist in the formation of character. 

-Louis Canet writes on " Paschal and His Theology," 

to reconcile apparently conflicting ideas found in his 
works, upon the question of nature and grace. He 
concludes that Paschal writes now of nature, now of 
grace, while recognizing their co- existence in fact. To 
the worldly-minded, revelation comes as a servitude; 
to the spiritually minded, as a deliverance. 

Revue Benedictine (]u\y-Qct.): Dom H. Quentin writes on "Frag- 
mentary Manuscripts." He treats chiefly those in the 
National and Vatican Libraries. Dom Chapman re- 
plies to J. M. Heer's criticism of some of his statements 
regarding Cassiodorus, in his book "Notes on the Early 
History of the Vulgate Gospels." The article is in Eng- 
lish. There are two articles by Dom Morin; (i)" Lit- 
urgy and Basilicas of Rome in the Middle of the Seventh 
Century, according to the Gospel Lists of Wiirzburg," 
in which the author gives a reprint of one of these MSS. 
which contains the [Gospel indications for almost the 



412 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec. 

entire year. (2) An examination of Pseudo-Bede on the 

Psalms. "The Age and Order of the Masses of 

Mone" by Dom Wilmart, is an examination of eleven 
Latin Masses published in 1850, by Franz Mone. 

Chronique Sociale de France (Oct.) : " The Gospel and Labor," 
by A. Lugan, maintains that Christ teaches the right 
of labor to a proper compensation. Max Turmann 
analyzes the provisions of the new Swiss law for volun- 
tary and compulsory sick and accident compensation by 
employers. This law will be voted upon by the people 
early next year. 

Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (Oct.): "The Way to Free Man- 
hood," says P. Lippert, S.J., is through humble sub- 
mission to Christ and His Church. H. Pesch, S.J., 
under the Caption, " Transformations in Economic Or- 
ganization," criticises the theories of evolutionary So- 
cialists. "Out of the South- German Art Metropolis," 

by J. Kreitmaier, S.J., points out the demoralizing in- 
fluence of the "free-for-all" exhibitions in Munich. 

Razon y Fe (Oct.): The opening article "Some Thoughts 
about the New Book," "The Evolution of Christian 
Dogma," written by L. Murillo, presents a lucid and 
interesting analysis of that philosophical question and 
claims that the doctrine there set forth is an over- 
throwing of the traditional concept of dogma. " So- 
cial Spanish Institutions" is the third article by Mr. 
N. Noguera, maintaining the need of a more rational 
method of constructing houses (in Bilbas) to improve 
the whole social and moral condition of the working 

people. "Singing with Grace in Your Hearts." The 

author, Mr. J. M. Bover, is a sincere admirer of the 
sacred music as recommended by Pope Pius X. in his 

motu proprio. Mr. F. Marxuch writes about the old and 

always new question, " Do the Colors Exist where we See 
Them ? " It is an investigation into the experimental 
studies of certain ancient and recent works dealing with 
this matter and concludes affirming that the colors ex- 
ist. The first International Congress of Paidology 

("The Science which Studies the Psychology of the 
Child ") is a very serious study and appreciation of the 
Congress held in Bruselles in August last. 



IRecent Events. 

Crimes and scandals with commis- 

France. sions for inquiring into their causes 

and discovering fitting remedies 

form the principal feature of the interior life of France at the 
present time. The Commission appointed to inquire into the 
loss of the Liberte has published its report, in which it de- 
clares that it finds no trace of foul play. All the regulations 
relative to the keeping of powder had been duly observed, and 
the service for the policing of the ship was irreproachable. 
No responsibility attached to anyone on board. This report 
leaves the cause of the accident as mysterious as before. 
Spontaneous combustion of the gunpowder is hinted at, and it 
was asserted by witnesses that it was older than the marks on 
the cases alleged. 

On four other warships accidents have occurred. On the 
Waldeck-Rousseau, the Suffren, the Justice, and the Diderot fires 
have broken out. Into their causes inquiry has not yet been 
made. But that there should be so many such incidents seems 
to show that something must be wrong either in the man- 
agement or the spirit of the naval service. 

Acts of sabotage still continue, but do not seem to have 
been so numerous as they were. Certain proceedings of the 
General Confederation of Labor have been brought to light 
on the occasion of the trial of certain revolutionary anarchists. 
It was discovered that these anarchists acted as a kind of 
secret police for the Confederation, and constituted at the 
same time a sort of Revolutionary tribunal before whom were 
tried members of the Confederation who were suspected of 
treachery. The actual charge against the prisoners was that 
they arrested with violence three persons whom they believed 
to be in the pay of the police, and proceeded to lock them 
up, and to force them with threats of further violence to con- 
fess their double-dealing. It looks as if liberty-loving France 
under the Third Republic was suffering from the same evils 
of secret judgments and punishments as those by which Rus- 
sia is afflicted. The anarchists were acquitted, but the acquit- 
tal itself makes the state of things to appear worse than a 
conviction would have done. For it was due not to the con- 
viction of the innocence of the accused, but to the abhorrence 



RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

felt by the jury for the methods of the government spies. 
These had acted, it is alleged, as agents provocateurs. 

Morocco has been the scene of the wrong-doings of high 
French officials; three of whom have been arrested by the 
Military High Commissioner of the Ujda district. Those offi- 
cials are accused of certain irregularities in land speculations 
in Morocco, as well as of misappropriation of a large amount 
of public money. The relations between the Civil and Military 
Administration are also involved in the question. A Commis- 
sion has been appointed and sent out to Morocco to investi- 
gate the matter. 

Yet another scandal connected with the officials of the 
government has to be mentioned. The new Director of a 
Government Powder Factory has made serious allegations 
against his predecessor in that position. A Special Commis- 
sion has been appointed in this case as well. 

The increase in the cost of living which gave rise to the 
agitation in France, to which reference was made last month, 
has been made the subject of investigation by the Cabinet. 
These investigations have resulted in the determination of the 
government to introduce a Bill during the approaching sessions 
of Parliament. This Bill will enable municipalities to statt 
municipal or co-operative butchers' ;'and bakers' shops. Its 
details have just been published. The proposal to fix the price 
of certain necessaries of life has been rejected in favor of the 
plan for encouraging co-operation. Municipalities are to be 
authorized (i) to lend money for the establishment of local 
co-operative butchers' and bakers' shops; (2) to establish such 
shops under municipal regie, with an administrator or tenant 
to whom funds are to be advanced. We have no space to go 
further into the details of the large step which it is thus pro- 
posed to take on the road to State Socialism. There will, it 
need not be said, be strong opposition offered on the part of 
the owners of the private shops thus exposed to state com- 
petition. Not only the cost of living is increasing in France, 
but also the cost of government. In 1903 the cost per head 
was about $22; in 1907 it had reached nearly $27; and its 
increase since 1907 has been still more striking. One reason 
for this is the increase of officials, of whom there are nearly 
one million, exclusive of those employed in the state railways 
and industrial enterprises. It would seem, from what we have 



I 9 H.] RECENT EVENTS <M5 

had to say, that things are not as they should be in modern 
and secular France. 

Let us conclude with a more satisfactory item. The parents 
of the French children are showing their appreciation of the 
evils of a purely secular education, by withdrawing their chil- 
dren, in aa ever-increasing degree, from the government schools, 
and sending them to the Catholic private schools. The figures 
given by the Ministry of Public Instruction show that last year 
the pupils in the public secular schools increased in number 
at the rate of 17.26 per 1,000, while those in the Catholic pri- 
vate schools increased by 28 per 1,000. Thus, notwithstanding 
all the influence exercised by the government and the many 
millions of public money expended annually on education, the 
Catholic schools, supported by voluntary contributions, are 
progressing more rapidly than are the State primary estab- 
lishments. 

After long and weary negotiations, 

Franca, Germiny and Morocco, during which many thought that 

war was imminent, France and 

Germany have at length come to a settlement of the Morocco 
question. The agreement as at last made, gives to France, so 
far as Germany is concerned, a free hand, politically, in Moroc- 
co ; it safeguards the economic interests that Germany, in 
common with the other Powers, possesses in that country; 
and it increases the value and the extent of the German 
Cameroons by cessions of territory in the French Congo, so 
arranged as to diminish as little as possible the value of the 
French Colony. It is generally felt that France has come out 
well, and that her position is strengthened. A large part of 
the credit is given to M. Jules Cambon, the French Ambas- 
sador in Berlin. 

The settlement of the Morocco 
Germany. question has caused extreme dis- 

satisfaction in Germany, where it 

is felt by large numbers that the terms of the agreement 
are greatly to the advantage of France. The Minister of the 
Colonies has resigned as a mark of displeasure, and an agita- 
tion has arisen to secure a revision of the Constitution, which 
will render it necessary in the future to submit to the Reich- 
stag all treaties before they are ratified. On the Imperial 
Chancellor vehement attacks have been made: while upon 



4 i6 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

Great Britain the vials of wrath are being poured forth. A 
tribute is due to the peace-loving character of the Kaiser, who 
has to bear the brunt of the storm, for it is doubtless due 
to him that the question was settled. Political exigencies have, 
however, put him in a difficult position. To a Catholic Bishop 
he is said to have expressed the hope that the spread of Mo- 
hammedanism in East Africa might be checked. The Moslems 
thereupon made such an outcry that the German government 
felt compelled to give an explanation of the Kaiser's words. 
All that he did, according to this explanation, was to com' 
mend the zeal of the Catholic missionaries, and to express the 
hope that they would be as diligent as the missionaries of 
Islam. The foreign policy of the German Empire for years 
has included a systematic endeavor to cultivate Turkish friend- 
ship, and to establish a dominant German interest throughout 
Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia. The war between Italy 
and Turkey had already put the German government into sore 
straits. It wished to be friendly to both, to Italy as its ally, 
and to Turkey as the field into which it had so long striven 
to extend its influence. Out of the latter dilemma it has not 
yet found a way of escape. 

If Italy expected to have a walk- 
Italy and Tripoli. over in Tripoli, that she had only 

to speak the word and the thing 

was done, she has been grievously disappointed. An altogether 
unexpected resistance has been offered on the part of the small 
Turkish force which had retreated into the desert. The Arabs 
whom Italy claimed to have come to deliver from Turkish domi- 
nation have, to a large extent, allied themselves to their for- 
mer overlords. The Italian soldiers have distinguished them- 
selves by bravery shown under the most trying circumstances, 
and by the strict discipline to which they have adhered. In 
another respect, too, they have deserved praise in their re- 
spect for women for no outrages on them have been reported. 
Here praise must end. The conduct of the war has brought 
grave disgrace on the name of Christian. The very discipline 
of the troops and their willingness to obey, have contributed 
to this. The accounts which have been given of the outrages 
perpetrated have been denied by those most interested in their 
not being believed, but they have been confirmed by the re- 
ports of those who are willing enough to be friendly to Italy. 



19 1 1.] RECENT EVENTS 417 

"Orders were given by the authorities to exterminate all 
Arabs found in the oasis in which is the town of Tripoli. 
For three days parties of soldiers were shooting indiscrimi- 
aately all whom they met, without trial, without appeal. 
Neither youth nor sex was spared. Many of those killed 
were quite young, many women perished in the confusion." 
"Certain districts in the town were turned into human abat- 
toirs." " The innocent suffered with the guilty." Such are 
the reports from the spot, given by eye-witnesses of proceed- 
ings which have no parallel in modern history for wantonness 
and cruelty. The worst the Germans did in France was to 
burn the French villages from which they had been attacked, 
and this was considered a harsh application of the laws of 
military war. The justification offered by the Italians is that 
some Arabs who had pretended to submit, had afterwards 
fired on Italians in the back who were being attacked in the 
front by open assailants. But the warmest friends of Italy, 
such as Mr. George Trevelyan, the historian of Italian unity, 
have felt it their duty openly to protest against these proceed- 
ings, which have made it possible one never expected to see 
that day for Turks to make a justified appeal to the civilized 
world to execrate and condemn actions of such barbarity per- 
petrated by Christians. The fact is, Italy is showing to the 
world the true character of the nation at its present stage of 
development, which in defiance of all right stripped the Pope 
of the possessions to which he was entitled by every human 
right to say nothing of divine. She has embarked on a war 
unjustifiable by any claim except that the desire to have a 
thing justifies the forcible taking possession of it, if the might 
exists, and this in defiance of an Arbitration Treaty signed 
by herself, by which she was bound to submit such a question 
as had arisen between herself and Turkey to arbitration. 
Moreover, Italy was a party to the Treaty of Paris, by which 
the integrity of the dominion of the Ottoman Government is 
guaranteed. At these proceedings European governments stand 
looking on, unable or unwilling either to intervene or even to 
protest, thereby manifesting once more the weak hold which the 
principles of international law have upon the powers that be, 
when a real emergency arises. Perhaps, however, when the 
matter comes up for settlement, the course of Italy may not 
prove so smooth as she expected. The recognition which she 
VOL. xciv. 27 



4I 8 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

will be called upon to seek may not be easily obtained. In 
any case her conduct has put her so much out of court that 
anything she has done or may do will not weigh in opposition 
to that movement for peace and arbitration, which is the hope 
of the civilized world. And if, as is said by some military 
experts, the exigencies of war give an apparent excuse for 
these proceedings, the ardor of all the advocates of arbitra- 
tion ought to be the greater and the more energetic, in order 
to put an end as soon as possible to the lawfulness of resort- 
ing to such a means of settling disputes as a resort to arms. 
It seems not improbable that, on account of the un- 
expected resistance offered to the seizure of Tripoli, the 
war may be extended to other Turkish possessions, at least 
to those in the Archipelago. Out of deference to the Powers, 
and for fear of the complications that might ensue, it seems 
unlikely that any attempt will be made on Constantinople, 
or upon the Adriatic coasts of the Balkan territories. In 
fact, a pledge has been given not to molest these coasts, 
in view of the susceptibilities of Austria. How far the rela- 
tions of Italy with the two other Powers of the Triple Alli- 
ance have been changed is not yet clear. The governments of 
Germany and Austria, especially the latter, appear to have 
adopted a sympathetic attitude towards that of Italy. The 
Press, however, is filled with denunciations of Italy, and 
with the most outspoken delight at the reports of Turkish 
victories which have been circulated from Constantinople. 
It is alleged, however, that it is not the pure love of Turkey 
that has inspired this Press. It is said to be in the hands 
of Jews who have invested large sums in Turkish bonds- 
The motive of its action has been the desire to make a mar- 
ket for these bonds. This forms one more instance of the 
general demoralization which seems to have set in throughout 
a great part of Europe, affecting both its governments and 
peoples. There has been some talk of mediation between Italy 
and Turkey, on the part of certain Powers, but the time for 
this does not seem to have come. While Turkey was willing to 
accept such an intervention, and, in fact, made an appeal 
for it, Italy was obdurate, refusing to accept anything less 
than complete and absolute sovereignty over Tripoli. At the 
beginning she might have consented to pay a sum of money 
in compensation to Turkey for the loss of the Province, in the 
same way that Austria did when Bosnia and Herzegovina were 



191 1.] RECENT EVENTS 419 

annexed. But as the war has been prolonged, with the con- 
sequent increase of expense, it is less likely that this will be 
done. Possibly, indeed, a claim may even be made upon 
Turkey for the reimbursement of the expense to which Italy 
has been put in stripping her of her possessions. What view 
is taken in France of the war seems somewhat obscure, but 
both the press and the government seem less opposed to 
Italy's proceedings than the rest of the Powers. 

Some little hesitation took place 
Turkey. upon the announcement of Italy's 

expedition to Tripoli as to whether 

opposition should be offered to it or not. The Committee of 
Union and Progress advocated a strenuous resistance, and suc- 
ceeded in carrying the day. The success of the Turkish ef- 
forts has been greater in reality than was anticipated, but it 
by no means equals the reports which were spread abroad 
from Constantinople and widely believed in Vienna. Accord- 
ing to these reports the town of Tripoli had fallen, or was on 
the point of falling, and the whole Italian army had either 
been slaughtered, captured, or driven into the sea. The strict- 
ness of the Italian censorship puts a premium on false intelli- 
gence, making it easy to believe that there are good reasons 
for the strong desire that is thereby manifested to withhold 
the news. But why the Turks should expect to profit by the 
wholesale dissemination of falsehoods which have been prac- 
ticed it is hard to see. 

The most important element in the present situation is the 
attitude of the Balkan States. They are at all times straining 
at the leash in order to release themselves, and all their na- 
tionals still under Turkish domination, from the control of 
Turkey. The present would seem to be a favorable oppor- 
tunity, were it not that the Turkish army is stronger than it 
has been for many years, and it has always proved itself 
formidable. The large sums of money which Turkey has been 
able to borrow since the deposition of Abdul Hamid have 
been almost entirely spent upon it. For this reason, and on 
account of their mutual jealousies, the Powers, it is believed, 
have made strong representations to these States, urging upon 
them the wisdom of keeping the peace. Bulgaria, in particu- 
lar, has been assured by the Powers of the good will of 
Turkey: and even in Greece the anxiety which was felt seems 



420 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

to have been relieved. There have been reports of a renewal 
of outrages here and there in Macedonia, but they do not 
seem to have been upon a large scale. It is impossible, bow- 
ever, to see far ahead, and should the war be long continued, 
it seems almost impossible to expect that complete quiet should 
be raiintained throughout the Peninsula. So far the threat of 
the Turks to expel from Ottoman dominions the 70,000 or so of 
Italian laborers has not been carried out. A hundred per cent 
duty, however, has been placed upon all imports from Italy. 
Trade is almost at a standstill, and there are fears of a famine 
at Constantinople. 

When the war broke out a contest was going on between 
the supporters of the Committee of Union and Progress and 
its opponents ; the latter were growing stronger every day. 
Naturally, gratitude had been felt for the part this Committee 
had taken in freeing Turkey from the yoke of Abdul Hamid. 
But this Committee has abused its own Powers to such an ex- 
tent that there were some who were beginning to regret the 
deposition of the former Sultan. A secret section sitting at 
Salonika had taken to itself the real power over the whole 
country, and had compelled the Cabinet, and the ostensible 
holders of power, to carry out its behests. Events have shown 
the maleficent character of its rule, so maleficent that all Eu- 
rope was losing the friendship felt for the Young Turks at the 
beginning of the movement. A Congress was htld last year 
at Salonika, the proceedings of which have only seen the light 
a month or two ago. These proceedings reveal the real char- 
acter and aims of the promoters of the revolution, and if they 
had been known would certainly have prevented the mani- 
festations of sympathy then manifested. It has always been 
known that the strengthening of Turkey was the aim of the 
Young Turks, and no one could reasonably object to such an 
end. Ostensibly it was to be brought about by the just and equal 
treat nent of all nationalities of the Christians as well as of 
the Mussulmans. The proceedings referred to reveal in avowed 
intention what has been partially revealed by acts during the 
past year. They show that the Committee aimed at crushing 
the propaganda of all the Christian nationalities. The dis- 
armament which was carried out, and the boycott of Greek 
commerce, had this end deliberately in view. Another means 
to be adopted was the bringing into Macedonia of the Mus- 
sulmans who had left Bosnia. Further importations of the 



191 1.] RECENT EVENTS 421 

same element from Persia. Russia and Turkestan were contem- 
plated. Bulgarian and Greek aspirations were to be finally 
crushed. Armed force, if necessary for this purpose, was to 
be employed. All important offices were to be filled by Mus- 
sulmans, only the most insignificant were to be given to 
Christians. Liberal ideas were to be opposed. Turkey was 
declared to be essentially a Moslem country. All other reli- 
gious propaganda was to be suppressed. Ottomanization of 
all .Turkish subjects must be effected, and as it was becoming 
clear that this could not be done by persuasion, recourse must 
be had to force of arms. Autonomy of the various national- 
ities was declared to be treachery to the Turkish Empire. 
Moslem predominance was to be assured, and any means 
suitable to secure this was to be adopted. It is difficult to 
imagine a wider difference between the open professions and 
the secret aims of the young Turks, so far as they are rep- 
resented by the Committee of Union and Progress, than the 
report of the proceedings of the meeting held at Salonika 
last year discloses. 

Some twenty years ago it was 
China. widely believed that China was a 

great power, so great that Europe 

and America stood in danger of being overwhelmed by the 
vast hordes that peopled her territory. Under the influence of 
this idea, Great Britain, when she took possession of Upper 
Burma, was not ashamed to pay to Pekin the tribute that had 
hitherto been sent there in acknowledgment of the Chinese 
Emperor's suzerainty over the newly acquired Province. The 
summary way in which the Russians had been expelled from 
Kuldja contributed to the strengthening of this impression 
an impression which lasted until the war between China and 
Japan made it clear to the world how impotent this vast Em- 
pire was in reality. In fact China is one of the best exam- 
ples of the truth of the saying that a bad thing never dies, 
for it would be hard to describe in words the utter corruption 
that exists, from the Court, with its horde of eunuchs and 
women, to the peasants in the field, who have become so used 
to being robbed and oppressed as to have lost all hope of 
ever rising to any better state. 

There are, however, those who think that a new era is 
dawning. The suppression of the Boxers seemed to have 
brought it home to the authorities that China was unable 



RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

to cope with the West, unless it should do as Japan had 
done, and adopt Western methods. And so in 1905 the 
old system of examinations which had hitherto been the 
only avenue to service in the state was abandoned by gov- 
ernmental decree and the methods of education of the West 
were adopted. A new Party grew up the watchword of which 
was "China for the Chinese." This Party, while ready to 
adopt the new ideas, meant to use them for the strengthening 
of China and the elimination of foreign influences. The move- 
ment for the adoption of a Constitution attained such strength, 
that the government was forced to anticipate the time fixed 
for its introduction. Nine years had been allowed, it is now 
to be introduced within three. In the proposed reform a 
Cabinet responsible to the new Parliament was included. The 
reformation of morals was provided for by the suppression of 
the consumption of opium. Such was, in brief, the state of 
things when the recent revolt began. The immediate occasion 
of the first rising which took place at Chengtu in Szechuen 
was dislike of the Imperial Government's policy of keeping 
the construction and control of all main railways in the hands 
of the Central Government. The Provinces wanted the work 
to be done by local syndicates, with the hope, doubtless, of 
securing to themselves no small share of the profits. This up- 
rising seems to have been somewhat easily suppressed. But 
hardly had this been done before the far more serious insur- 
rection broke out at Wuchang in the province of Hupeh, the 
special cause of which is not yet clearly ascertained. In all 
probability it was owing to the widespread spirit of dissatis- 
faction which has been growing ever greater and greater 
throughout the whole of the Empire ever since the suppres- 
sion of the Boxer movement. The Revolutionist movement 
at Wuchang and the adjoining cities at once took a political 
aspect, and proceeded to the declaration of a Republic. It 
was not long before in various other parts uprisings took 
place, with a similar end in view. Whether these were spon- 
taneous, or by propagation from the original seat of the move- 
ment, is not known. Efforts were made by the Imperial Gov- 
ernment to suppress these insurrections by force of arms, but 
matters were brought to a crisis by the refusal of one of the 
armies which was being sent from the North to proceed fur- 
ther, unless certain demands were granted. These demands, 
which were addressed to the Throne were, that a Constitution 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 423 

should be framed, and this only after consultation with the 
National Assembly; that from the Cabinet all the members of 
the Imperial Family should be excluded; that a capable and 
virtuous person should be appointed to organize a responsible 
Cabinet; and lastly that a general amnesty should be given to 
all political offenders. To these demands the Throne within 
four and twenty hours yielded its consent, and issued a decree 
the like of which, scholars say, has not been seen since the 
last days of the Roman Empire in the West, and but seldom 
in the East. It is worth quoting in full, seeing that it gives 
the government's view of the situation. The five-year old 
baby, who is the ruler of 400,000,000 of the inhabitants of 
the earth, is in this Edict made to say: 

" I have reigned for three years and have always acted 
conscientiously in the interest of the people, but I have not 
employed men properly, not having political skill. I have 
employed too many nobles in political positions, which contra- 
venes Constitutionalism. On railway matters some one whom 
I trusted fooled me, and thus public opinion was opposed, 
When I urge reform the officials and gentry seize the oppor- 
tunity to embezzle. When old laws are abolished, high offi- 
cials serve their own ends. Much of the people's money has 
been taken, but nothing to benefit the people has been 
achieved. On several occasions Edicts have promulgated laws, 
but none of them have been obeyed. People are grumbling, 
yet I do not know : disasters loom ahead, but I do not see. 

" The Szecbuan trouble first occurred ; the Wuchang rebel- 
lion followed ; now alarming reports come from Shensi and 
Honan. In Canton and Kiangsi riots appear. The whole Em- 
pire is bubbling. The minds of the people are perturbed. The 
spirits of our nine late Emperors are unable properly to offer 
sacrifices, while it is to be feared the people will suffer 
grievously. 

" All these are my own fault, and, hereby, I announce to the 
world that I swear to reform, and, with our soldiers and peo- 
ple, to carry out the Constitution faithfully, modifying legisla- 
tion, developing the interests of the people, and abolishing 
their hardships all in accordance with the wishes and inter- 
ests of the people. Old laws that are unsuitable will be abol- 
ished. The union of Manchus and Chinese, mentioned by the 
late Emperor, I shall carry out. The Hupeh and Hunan griev- 



424 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

ances, though precipitated by the soldiers, were caused by 
lui-chang. I only blame myself because I mistakenly appre- 
ciated and trusted him. 

" However, now, finances and diplomacy have reached bed- 
rock. Even if all unite, I still fear falling. But if the Em- 
pire's subjects do not regard and do not honor Fate, and are 
easily misled by outlaws, then the future of China is unthink- 
able. I am most anxious day and night. My only hope is 
that my subjects will thoroughly understand." 

In a second Edict, issued a few days afterwards, the Throne 
declares that thereafter anything the people may suggest, if 
it is in accordance with public opinion, will be openly adopted. 
"Heaven owns the people and provides rulers for them. The 
people's ears and eyes are Heaven's ears and eyes." Then 
after describing the transition from Monarchical to Constitu- 
tional Government, the Edict proceeds: "All countries must 
pass through this stage. The revolutionaries of China are 
different from the wicked rebels of former dynasties, who 
sought to destroy the Throne and to injure the people." 

The first result of the first Edict was the appointment of a 
"capable and virtuous person" as Prime Minister with extra- 
ordinary powers. The choice fell upon Yuan Shih-kai who 
has for a long time been looked upon as the strongest and most 
enlightened statesman at present to be found ; he had, how- 
ever, been disgraced in 1908, and sent to his home to undergo, 
as the Edict said, " treatment for an affection of his foot." 
The National Assembly which had just opened its session then 
proceeded to elaborate a Constitution. This they did in forty- 
eight hours, modeling it upon that of Great Britain, this be- 
ing, as its Memorial states, the mother of all Constitutions. 
The new Constitution guarantees the security of the dynasty, 
the person of the Emperor is declared to be sacrosanct, but 
in the place of the barbaric despotism hitherto existing, there 
will be a Constitutional Monarchy, Parliamentary Government, 
a responsible Cabinet, an appointed Prime Minister, and Par- 
liamentary control of the Budget, including the allowances to 
the Imperial Household. The Parliament is, in fact, made the 
source of power, limiting that of the Emperor by the Consti- 
tution which it has drawn up of its own authority, regulating 
the right of succession, amending the Constitution when it 
thinks fit, electing the Premier, and in fact placing the Em- 



i9 1 1.] RECENT EVENTS 425 

peror more completely under its control than it is theoreti- 
cally done in Great Britain. Whether it will ever be carried 
into effect remains to be seen. In fact, the revolutionary 
forces which had declared a Republic are still adhering to their 
purpose. Isolated cities, too, have made themselves into sepa- 
rate Republics on their own account. The fate of the Em- 
pire as a whole may, therefore, be for a long time in sus- 
pence, as the advocates of the opposed systems seem deter- 
mined. It is not unreasonable to hope that in any case a 
better form of government for four hundred million of people 
may be found than that nominally of a child, a child too of 
a race of foreigners, but in reality that of a capricious weak- 
ling, for such the Prince Regent has proved himself to be, un- 
der the influence of palace women and degraded eunuchs. 

The present occurrences in China are declared, by those 
who have made a special study of that Empire, to indicate 
the loss of faith on the part of the Chinese of their hitherto 
strong belief in the philosophy of Confucius. One of his fun- 
damental teachings, events have shown to be false. He laid it 
down that a country could be established without any depend, 
ence on armed force. Recent events have proved, so large 
numbers of Chinese have come to think, that such is not the 
case. Reverence for the Emperor is another cardinal principle 
f Confucianism. The fact that there are now so many advo- 
cates of a Republic is yet another departure from old beliefs. 
The minds of many Chinese, it is clear, are opening and are 
becoming ready to receive the truth, even though new. It it 
satisfactory to be able to record the fact, which is acknowl- 
edged even by those who are not glad of it, that every ad- 
vantage of this new movement is being taken by the Church, 
and that she is the body which is the most wide awake. Her 
missions are far-reaching, and there are enormous churches. 
Her converts are as many as those of all of the various Prot- 
estant sects put together. There never was so good an oppor- 
tunity perhaps we may say even prospect of the conversion 
of China as exists at the present time, when the minds of so 
many have become wide open to the reception of Western 
ideas. It ought to be mentioned that the recent revolutionary 
movement started without any direct hostility to foreigners. 



With Our Readers 

THE great honor which the Holy See has conferred on three Ameri- 
can prelates, our recent Apostolic Delegate, Monsignor Dio- 
mede Falconio, and the Archbishops of New York and Boston is an 
honor also for the entire Church in America. To the new Cardinals 
were extended the congratulations of the nation of the religious and 
Secular press alike. The honor which they have received is a recog- 
nition of the growth of the Church here in the past and a promise of 
still greater efficiency and fruitfulness in the future. 



THE laymen's League for Retreats and Social Studies opened oa 
November 6th at the rooms of the Fordham Law School, 140 
Nassau Street, N. Y., its School of Social Studies, announcement of 
which was made last Spring. 

This school is designed to train a number of Catholic men as 
lecturers upon the great social questions of the day. The first year's 
work (1911-12) is to be devoted exclusively to the question of " So- 
cialism " and a course of twenty-four lectures will be given on this 
topic in three departments. The first department will be conducted 
by the Rev. Terence J. Shealy, S.J., Spiritual Director of the Lay- 
men's League, who will give twelve lectures under the head " So- 
cialism in its Principles is Irreligious and Immoral " ; the second by 
Professor John A. Ryan, whose subject will be " Socialism's Appeal 
to the Workingman is Delusive and Dangerous " (six lectures) and 
the third by Thomas F. Woodlock, six lectures on " Socialism in its 
Proposals is Impracticable and Impossible. ' ' Preparation of lectures 
by students of the class will be a feature of the year's work. 
* * 

IN addition to the regular curriculum as above described, there will 
be given at Cathedral College, under the auspices of the School 
of Social Studies, and the patronage of the Cardinal Archbishop of 
New York, a series of popular lectures to which, admission will be 
free for both men and women. The first series of these lectures will 
be given by the Rev. John Corbett, S.J., under the general title of 
the " Church and the Age," four lectures in all. He will be followed 
by Conde" B. Fallen, Ph.D., managing editor of the Catholic Encyclo- 
pedia; Dr. James J. Walsh, MD., Ph.D., and Mr. Andrew J. Ship- 
man, dates and subjects to be announced later. 



i.] WITH OUR READERS 427 

THE School of Social Studies has collected a library of books bear- 
ing upon the question of socialism, which may be consulted at 
its rooms by students. Publication of pamphlets and special studies 
on this and other social subjects is a part of the plan of the school. 



THE death of Professor William C. Robinson deprives the Catholic 
University of a most capable professor, and the Catholic Church 
ot our country of a most worthy layman. Professor Robinson's in- 
tellectual attainments were of the highest order. But above and be- 
yond these the sterling character of the man ; his religious devotion 
to duty ; his unostentatious yet abiding determination to employ all 
his powers in the service of Catholic truth, made an appeal to all 
those who knew him that was irresistible. Learned ; scientific ; 
thorough in all his intellectual labors, he had always sought for that 
spiritual truth, that spiritual perfection, which is beyond all human 
knowledge and all human power, and is to be found only in the re- 
vealed teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church. He accepted 
those truths joyfully. He moulded his life upon them. The strong 
faith within him showed itself in his thoroughly Catholic life ; in 
his unselfish service ; in his missionary spirit ; in his general kind- 
ness ; his readiness to advise and to help everyone who came to 

him. 

* * 

GOD gave him a long life and it was a life full of labor. He was 
born in 1834. He studied for the ministry of the Protestant 
Kpiscopal Church, and was ordained in that Church in 1857. He 
became a Catholic in 1863 and took up the practice of law. Always 
a student, a seeker after truth, his words contributed to THK CATHO- 
LIC WORLD in 1895 speak, no doubt, of his own experience : 

But however rich may be the harvest garnered from a study of these sys- 
tems, old or new, far more productive is the investigation of that system 
which the Catholic Church propounds for the observance and belief of mam. 
If out of all the religions of the earth were collected every doctrine and precept 
which makes for wisdom, righteousness and joy, and these woven into one 
golden book of truth, it would contain nothing which the Catholic Churck 
does not already believe and teach. The theologies of Asia and Africa and 
Europe and America have nothing to offer her by which she could enlarge 
the boundaries of her science or multiply the aids and consolations which she 
gives to men. Embracing and proclaiming every truth which they profess, 
she reaches out beyond them into regions which to them are only regions of 
conjecture, and as for every question of the human intellect she has an 
answer, so is her answer always welcome to the human heart. Whether she 
describes the nature and attributes of God or His relations to His creatures, 
or the position of man in the universe and his duties and destiny, or the 



428 WITH OUR READERS [Dec., 

rarious instrumentalities by which he is assisted to attain his end, or de- 
scending into lower truths (which, nevertheless, awake sometimes a keener 
interest) she reveals to us the attitude in which we stand toward each other 
both while we walk together on the earth and after one and all have passed 
within the veil as from our eager eyes she withholds no light, so is the light 
she sheds radiant with warmth and tenderness and peace. To those who 
dwell within this light it is no wonder that the Catholic is satisfied with his 
religion, whether he be the prelate at the altar or the pauper lying at tke 
gate ; nor that the seeker after truth, having drunk deep from the rivers of 
divine wisdom and delight which flow in so many channels throughout all the 
world, should taste at last her living fountains, and thenceforth thirst no more. 


AND although Dr. Robinson's name as an authority on law be- 
came famous throughout the world, and his work, Elementary 
Law, was adopted as a text-book in all the law schools of the coun- 
try, yet his appreciation of the gift of Catholic Faith with which 
God had blessed him was so keen, that he constantly, by sympa- 
thetic study, by speech, by pen, by personal conversation, and, 
above all, by example, sought to lead after him those who had not 
been blessed as he had been. The conversion of America was ever 
dear to his heart. May his prayers continue to effect what he so 
ardently hoped for, and may his soul rest in peace. 



IN years to come the work of the late Martin I. J. Griffin, of Phila- 
delphia, will receive the recognition which is its due and which 
it never received during his lifetime. Throughout his long life he 
was a zealous, tireless worker in the Catholic cause, and his re- 
searches and records have secured for us invaluable data with regard 
to the history of the Church in America. He was Editor of the 
Catholic Historical Records, and the author of various histories of 
local churches and of prominent Catholics ; of a Life of Commodore 
Barry and of Catholics in the Revolution. He worked till the very 
end, leaving unpublished a Life of Right Rev. Henry Con-well, sec- 
ond bishop of Philadelphia. May he know the reward of his labors 

in the peace of God. 



A COMPARISON of some of the best of our modern verse with 
that of centuries ago, is both interesting and instructive. It 
brings out in a striking way how our modern poets are often indebted 
for their best thought to early Christian sources which, all unknow- 
ingly, perhaps, and yet effectively, have lived and borne fruit through 
the centuries. Many of our readers are, no doubt, familiar with the 
beautiful lines of St. Gregory Nazianzen given by Cardinal Newman 
in his Historical Essays : 



19 1 1.] WITH OUR READERS 4*9 

MORNING. 

I RISE, and raise my clas'ped hands to Thee. 
Henceforth the darkness hath no part in me, 

Thy sacrifice this day ; 
Abiding firm, and with a freeman's might 
Stemming the waves of passion in the fight. 

Ah ! should I from Thee stray, 
My hoary head, Thy table where I bow, 
Will be my shame, which are mine honor now. 
Thus I set out ; Lord, lead me on my way ! 
EVENING. 

Holiest Truth, how have I lied to Thee ! 

1 vowed this day Thy festival should be ; 

Yet I am dim ere night. 
Surely I made my prayer, and I did deem 
That I could keep in me Thy morning beam 

Immaculate and bright, 
But my foot slipped and, as I lay, he came, 
My gloomy foe, and robbed me of heaven's flame. 
Help Thou, my darkness, Lord, till I am light. 


WE were reminded forcibly of these lines when we read in a recent 
number of 7 he Century the following poem by Alfred Noyes : 

THE OLD NIGHTS VIGIL. 

ONCB, In this chapel, Lord, Keep Thou my broken sword, 

Young and undaunted, All the long night through, 

Over my virgin sword, While I keep watch and ward ! 

Lightly I chaunted, Then, the red fight through, 

" Dawn ends my watch, I go Bless the wrenched haft for me, 
Shining to meet the foe." Christ, King of Chivalry. 

" Swift with Thy dawn," I said, Take, in Thy pierced hands, 
"Set the lists ringing! Still, the bruised helmet: 

Soon shall Thy foe be sped Let not their hostile bands 
And the world singing! Wholly o'erwhelm it! 

Bless my bright plume for me, Bless my poor shield for me, 
Christ, King of Chivalry." Christ, King of Chivalry. 

Warworn I kneel to-night, Keep Thou the sullied mail, 
Lord, by Thine altar I Lord, that I tender 

Oh, in to-morrow's fight Here, at Thine altar rail! 
Let me not falter! Then, let Thy splendor 

Bless my dark arms for me, Touch it once . . . and I go 
Christ, King of Chivalry. Stainless to meet the foe. 



430 



WITH OUR READERS [Dec. 



THAT conventions are at least, sometimes worth while, is proved 
by the announcement of the publication of a complete Directory 
of our Catholic Charities which comes as a result of the National 
Conference of Catholic Charities held in Washington, September, 
1910. The Directory will not only serve as a much-needed guide for 
all Catholics interested in charity work, but it will be a revelation to 
many of the extent and variety, of the tremendous amount of charity 
work inspired by the Church. All charity societies or agencies are 
requested to communicate with the National Conference of Catholic 
Charities, Catholic University, Washington, D. C. 



235 BEACON STREET, BOSTON. 4 November, 1911 
7o the Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD : 

DEAR SIR : May I ask you to print a little correction to Dr. 
Walsh's article concerning my father? Dr. Walsh says : " He was 
so situated as to have the leisure and the inclination for special stud- 
ies in both science and religion. His favorite author was St. Thomas 
Aquinas. He is thought to have been as well read in St. Thomas as 
any layman of his generation." This gives the impression that Dr. 
D wight spent a good deal of his leisure happily poring over St. 
Thomas. He certainly had for St. Thomas a particular love and 
veneration, and the greatest respect for his teachings, and he had 
studied logic and some philosophy. He also had philosophical works 
including some by St. Thomas. But I think it is an exaggera- 
tion to call St. Thomas his favorite author. I should have said 
Thackeray. And among religious writers, perhaps, Father Faber. I 
don't wish to be captious, but I consider this a real correction. 

Yours respectfully, JOSEPH DWIGHT. 



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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCIV. JANUARY, 1912. No. 562. 

THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

FORMER article contained an endeavor to show 
that the Catholic religion is not merely the best 
among many Christian denominations, but the 
one true religion, the "one faith;" that the 
Catholic Church is on one side, and all other 
religious bodies, united only in regarding her as the common 
enemy, are on the other; and that while they are but local 
and dependent, while they continually subdivide, and make 
way for new sects, she remains always as a " kingdom at unity 
with itself" in possession of the orbis terrarum, independent of 
the world's governments and of both its favor and frown, prov- 
ing by her survival of man's efforts to dominate and destroy 
her that she comes not of earth, but is from above. 

And since she is from above her first note is necessarily 
in all things unity, her unity being assured by the unity of 
God Himself from Whom she came, Who founded and ever 
rules her by His visible representatives, with whom He has 
promised to remain "all days, even to the consummation of 
the world." 

And her unity is emphasized and brought the more clearly 
into prominence by reason of the contrast exhibited by the 
manifold divisions of the camp over against her. National 
Churches possess no common bond of legislative union; the 
Anglican and Anglo-American Churches are representative of 
contradictory beliefs, opinions, and modes of worship; and the 
Protestant principle of "the Bible and the Bible only" has 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY or ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL, XCIV. 28 



434 THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH [Jan., 

resulted in "the babel of the sects." "God is not the God 
of dissension." If we would know His truth we must be per- 
suaded that its first note is unity ; that He has not left us to 
individual efforts to detach truth for ourselves from out a mul- 
titude of conflicting beliefs, opinions, and modes of worship. 

Of Eastern Christendom and the Anglican and Anglo- 
American Churches more will presently appear. Of the Pro- 
testant principle of " the Bible and the Bible only " it may be 
here observed that not only is it condemned by its fecundity 
in producing and multiplying divisions; it should also be re- 
membered that Christ did not tell His disciples to write books, 
did not promise them His help if they did so ; that the Apos- 
tles left no list of inspired writings; nor were the Fathers of 
the Church agreed as to which and how many were the Bib- 
lical books until the Church decided; that the so-called Re- 
formers were themselves at variance on the subject. Nor would 
such a rule of faith have been at all adequate in view of the 
many centuries that were to elapse prior to the introduction 
of printing centuries in which but comparatively few people 
could so much as have seen even fragmentary manuscripts of 
Scripture, or have been able to read them if seen. But apart 
from such considerations, and more convincing, perhaps, than 
them all, is the undeniable fact that the principle in question 
has proved by far the most fruitful source of divisions that the 
world has seen. "By their fruits you shall know them." 

" The Creed says there is ' One Catholic Church.' There 
is one it cannot be two, cannot be three, cannot be twenty." 
So wrote Cardinal Newman to the writer of the present arti- 
cle at a time when the latter was in doubt concerning the 
Anglican position; and then he proceeded to show how un- 
meaning is the notion that the Roman, Greek, and Anglican 
communions make up this One Church. In a second letter, he 
wrote: "You have clearly before you the critical question in 
the great controversy. Is the Visibility of the Church a doc- 
trine of Revelation? Is the 'Holy, Apostolic, One Church' 
a visible or invisible body ? " The inference to be drawn from 
these words is that Christ's Church on earth is a Visible Church, 
and that her Unity is a visible attribute, not merely an invisi- 
ble reality. And in agreement with this is St. Cyprian's ex- 
planation that the Catholic Church has an external visible un- 
ity of her bishops, not because they, themselves, are visible, 
but because they are visibly united. 



19 1 2.] THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH 435 

The Church has, indeed, an invisible side inasmuch as her 
divine Head is for a while invisible to us, and because she is 
united to the faithful departed and to "The Church of the 
first-born who are written in heaven." She works, also, in 
great measure invisibly, though by visible sacraments, the ef- 
fects of the sacraments on individuals being known for the 
most part to God alone. Moreover, she is compared in Scrip- 
ture, not only to a spreading tree in which the birds of the 
air lodge, but to the hidden leaven also. She is, in truth, 
governed and quickened by the Holy Spirit, even as man's 
body is quickened and ruled by his soul. But she is not sim- 
ply invisible, consisting merely of pious believers who are 
known, and can be known as such, to God alone. Such a 
Church would obviously be incapable of acting as an oracle cf 
truth. We have been told to " hear the Church." The Apos- 
tle speaks of her as "the Church of the living God, the 
pillar and ground of the truth." She must, then, be visible 
as a city seated on a mountain," as "a candle put upon a 
candlestick." Moreover, our Lord warned us that His Church 
on earth would consist, not simply of pious souls known to 
God alone, but of good and bad ; He likens her to a field in 
which good grain and weeds grow together, to a net which 
gathers of fish good and bad ; and He tells us that not until 
the great day of account will His angels make the separa- 
tion. He has promised, however, that, whatever the evils by 
which His Church is afflicted, the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against her; and certainly bad Catholics are by far her 
worst enemies. 

The difference between the Catholic conception and the 
Protestant is that, whereas the former teaches that the visible 
Church precedes the invisible, is of divine institution and 
therefore one, the latter contends that the invisible precedes 
the visible, that visible Churches are but voluntary associa- 
tions and may, therefore, lawfully be many. 

The Visible Church differs from all other religious bodies, 
whether singly or in combination, more especially in this, that, 
while they have not, she has a regularly appointed government 
co-extensive with the world which Christ came to save, and 
independent, therefore, of nationalities. His commission to His 
Apostles was to " teach all nations," and the Gospel they were 
to preach is "the Gospel of the Kingdom." 

The Catholic Church by her very constitution is visibly one, 



436 THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH [Jan., 

as truly as, nay more truly than, any nation is, or can be, 
one. Much has been said about the unity of Germany. Ger- 
mans had much in common the same blood, the same lan- 
guage, the same literature, a common past ; in some measure 
common aspirations; but the German States were not one, 
for the simple reason that they were not under one govern- 
ment. The unity of the German Empire was not secured until 
Germans were placed under one single rule. In like manner, 
Catholics, the world over, independent of nationality and 
race, form one visible kingdom, because they are under the 
rule of Christ's Vicar and Vicegerent, who governs as the suc- 
cessor of St. Peter to whom Christ committed "the keys of 
the kingdom," with the promise that the gates of hell should 
not prevail, that it should stand, therefore, one and indivisible 
until the end. 

Identity of institutions, doctrines, observances; relationship, 
sameness of structure these do not suffice to make two 
Churches one. " Do you call England and Prussia one visible 
body politic, because both are monarchies, both have aristoc- 
racies, both have courts of justice, both have universities, both 
have churches, and both profess the Protestant Religion?" 
wrote Cardinal Newman in a third letter. The Eastern and 
Anglican Churches (waiving for argument's sake the question 
of Anglican Orders) will not, cannot, be of one and the same 
visible Church with the Catholic until they are under her 
jurisdiction and government. If unity lies in the Episcopal 
form or in the Episcopal Ordination, why should not Donatists 
and others, who undoubtedly were possessed of valid Orders, 
be included in the Anglican conception of the visible Church ? 
It is no answer to say that they formulated, while the Angli- 
can Church has not formulated, heresy. Every one knows 
that the Anglican Church is incapable of formulating, is pow- 
erless to settle the vexed questions that rend it, and is more 
than tolerant of every kind of heresy. Moreover: 

If unity lies in the Apostolical succession, an act of schism 
is from the nature of the case impossible ; for as no one can 
reverse his parentage, so no Church can undo the fact that 
its clergy have come by lineal descent from the Apostles. 
Either there is no such sin as schism, or unity does not lie in 
the Episcopal form or in the Episcopal ordination. And this 
is felt by the controversialists of this day ; who in conse- 
quence are obliged to invent a sin, and to consider, not divi- 



1 9 12.] THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH 437 

sion of Church from Church, but the interference of Church 
with Church to be the sin of schism, as if local dioceses and 
bishops with restraint were more than ecclesiastical arrange- 
ments and by-laws of the Church, however sacred, while 
schism is a sin against her essence.* 

The Church is the kingdom of Christ, and as a kingdom 
admits of the possibility of rebels, so does the Church involve 
sectaries and schismatics, but not independent portions. Her 
unity is not of mere origin or of Apostolical succession, but 
of government. She is spread through the world, but is every- 
where in all things one and the same, because everywhere 
governed from one common centre. She takes no account of 
national frontiers, and, on the contrary, condemns the proud 
spirit of nationalism in matters religious, since by the will of 
her divine Founder, and by her constitution, she is every- 
where Catholic. National Churches, on the other hand, are 
compelled to make much of their nationality since, in asserting 
the principle of national independence, they have cut them- 
selves adrift from Catholic jurisdiction. 

Many earnest minds are at the present time, perhaps more 
than ever hitherto, impressed by a sense of regard for the 
great doctrine and principle of unity. They are distressed by 
the scandal, loss of faith, obstacle to heathen conversion?, tri- 
umph amongst infidels, excuse for indifference, and other evils 
attendant upon the divisions of Christendom. They are mind- 
ful of the prayer of Christ just before His Passion that, in 
accordance with the first note of the religion He bequeathed, 
Christians might be one. They cast about for some solution 
of the difficulties occasioned by the terrible reversal of His 
will and intention by professing Christians; and many of them, 
despairing of a better solvent, adopt at length the strange 
expedient of ignoring all creeds and forms of worship whatso- 
ever, and of making unity consist in a mere union of hearts, 
in agreement to differ, or what is termed union in diversity, 
in interchange of pulpits and intercommunion between the 
various denominations, regarding intercourse of sentiment and 
work as of greater importance than doctrine and modes of 
worship. They would place, not truth before peace, but peace 
before truth. And, as has already been inferred, there are 
sections of the Anglican and Anglo-American Churches which 

Newman's Development, Ch. VI., Sect. II. 13. 



438 THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH [Jan., 

advance what is called the "Branch Theory," viz., that the 
one visible, indivisible Church is made up of three commun- 
ions the Roman, Eastern and Anglican a view which, though, 
" as paradoxical," as Newman observes, " when regarded as a 
fact, as it is heterodox when regarded as a doctrine," yet be- 
tokens "a good will towards Catholics, a Christian spirit, and 
a religious earnestness, which Catholics ought to be the last 
to treat with slight or unkindness." Such persons thick it a 
duty to remain where they are, but 

they cannot be easy at their own separation from the orbis 
terrarum, and from the Apostolic See, which is the conse- 
quence of it ; and the pain it causes them, and the expedient 
they take to get relieved of it, should interest us in their favor, 
since these are the measures of the real hold, which, in spite 
of their still shrinking from the Church, Catholic principles 
and ideas have upon their intellects and affections.* 

The Church of Christ cannot be likened, as some Angl;- 
cans liken her, to a family in which three sons have quar- 
relled and separated without prevailing to make the family 
three families instead of one. A truer figure would be that 
of one only son who cannot be divided. "Is Christ divided?" 
asks St. Paul by way of warning against "schisms." The 
Church is the extension of the Incarnation of the Only-be- 
gotten Son of God. Mankind in Him can form but one so- 
ciety, one kingdom, indissoluble, as in faith and worship, so, 
likewise, in government and organization. " For as the body 
is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the 
body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is 
Christ." For "in one Spirit were we all baptized into oce 
Body. . . . Now you are the body cf Christ, and mem- 
bers of member" "One Body and one Spirit; as you are 
called in one hope of your calling." And the Apostle gives 
thanks to the Father Who "hath translated us into the king- 
dom of the Son of His love," Whom He has set on His right 
hand " above all principality, and power, and virtue, and do- 
minion, and every name that is named ... in this world," 
as well as "in that which is to come. And He hath sub- 
jected all things under His feet, and hath made Him head 
over all the Church, which is His Body, and the fulness of 

* Essays Crit. and Hist., Note on Essay V. 



THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH 439 

Him Who is filled all in all." "He is the Head of the Body, 
the Church, Who is the beginning, the first-born from the 
dead; that in all things He may hold the primacy." The 
Church is thus spoken of as being, not a family continually 
dividing into independent branches and sects, but as being 
the Body of the Only- begotten Son of the Father, the king- 
dom of the Son of the Father's love, and, therefore, both visi- 
ble and indivisible visibly as well as invisibly One. 

Thus are we once again bidden to look out of ourselves upon 
the arena of Christendom and to contemplate on the one side 
the great Catholic Kingdom ecclesiastical over which Christ's 
Vicar and Vicegerent rules, and, on the other, the manifcld 
divisions of those who conceive of Christ's Church on earth 
as being but a visible family divided, or as being but an in- 
visible body. The Catholic Church over which the Pope rules 
manifests a divine unity, since nothing short of divine power 
could so unite the multitudes of nations and races so many 
and so various, possessed the while of no other common bond 
of union whatsoever to account for so supernatural a union. 
National Churches and Protestant sects, on the contrary, do 
but manifest human division, the principle of the independ- 
ence of the former, and the Protestant principle of private 
judgment being alike necessarily principles of division. It is a 
simple fact, patent, surely, to everyone, that apart from the 
papal jurisdiction there is no principle of Catholic unity any- 
where to be found. In vain do we look elsewhere for that 
first note of Christ's visible Church, for the maintenance of 
which, as we may be sure, He was careful to provide an ec- 
clesiastical government that never shall fail. Earthly govern- 
ments cease to be, and nations may be divided; but not so 
can it be with that kingdom which transcends the kingdoms 
of the world, and is to last until the world's end. 

And the unity of the Church is not only a unity of gov- 
ernment, but likewise of faith and worship. In relation to 
worship the case is too obvious to need comment ; one and 
the same form of worship in Holy Mass and Sacraments is to 
be found throughout that Christendom which we have con- 
templated as a kingdom at unity with itself. The case is 
luminously the same in relation to faith, despite, nay, by very 
reason of, the quarrels of Catholics urged against them by 
Anglicans and Protestants, who, when brought to bay, retort 



440 THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH [Jan,, 

upon them the argument available only against themselves, 
For, as Newman observes in relation to this objection: 

Who would not suppose it to mean that there was within 
the Communion of Rome a difference of creed and of dogmatic 
teaching; whereas the state of the case is just the reverse ? 
No one can pretend that the quarrels in the Catholic Church 
are questions of faith, or have tended in any way to obscure 
or impair what she declares to be such, and what is acknowl- 
edged to be such by the very parties in those quarrels. That 
Dominicans and Franciscans have been zealous respectively 
lor certain doctrinal views, which they declare at the same 
time to be beyond and in advance of the promulgated faith of 
the Church, throws no doubt upon that faith itself ; how does 
it follow that they differ in questions of faith, because they 
differ in questions not of faith ? * 

In truth, it does not so much as occur to them to differ 
in questions of faith, since they regard the Church, from whose 
mouth they receive the doctrines of the faith, as a Teacher 
endowed from on high with the gift of Infallibility in relation 
to all matters of faith. Belief in the divine gift of Infallibil- 
ity vouchsafed to the Church is in its own nature a principle 
of unity. When a Catholic yields to a temptation to doubt a 
doctrine of faith he straightway ceases to be a Catholic and 
becomes an apostate from the Church ; he knows that he is 
cut off from the communion of the faithful; he goes his own 
way, usually from bad to worse; and only by repentance and 
reconciliation can be restored to the fold from which he has 
separated himself. 

That a divine gift of infallibility has been bestowed upon 
the Church necessarily follows from the fact of a revelation. 
Christianity is based upon the fact of a revelation "a revel- 
ation which comes to us as a revelation, as a whole, object- 
ively, and with a promise of infallibility." Christianity, in 
other words, is an objective religion, or a revelation with 
credentials. It is true, because it comes from God; and since 
it is true, and is to be known to be true, it is accredited as 
true. Faith would otherwise, from the nature of the case, be 
impossible, since faith admits of no shadow of doubt, it being 
obviously impossible at the same time both to believe and to 
doubt, both to be sure and not to be sure. And since faith 
as all are agreed is a divine gift, it follows that the 

* Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. I. p. 311. 



i9i 2.] THE UNITY OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH 441 

grounds of faith are equally divine; and, if divine, then in. 
fallible. But this implies a divinely appointed authority to 
decide infallibly in all matters of faith. "A revelation is not 
given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is 
given." The very idea of revelation implies an infallible ex- 
pounder. Hence Scripture speaks of the Church as being 
"the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the 
Truth" in accordance with the divine covenant: "My Spirit 
that is in thee, and My words that I have put in thy mouth, 
shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of 
thy seed, nor out of the mouths of thy seed's seed, saith 
the Lord, from henceforth and forever." Moreover, the promise 
of infallibility accompanied the commission to the Apostles 
aad their successors to " teach all nations," since Christ, 
Who is "the Truth," by Whom also "grace and truth came," 
assured them that He, Himself, would be with them" all days, 
even to the consummation of the world," and that " the 
Spirit of truth" would teach them all truth. 

St. Hilary observes of the heretics of his day : " They all 
speak Scripture without the sense of Scripture, and profess a 
faith without faith." Why "a faith without faith," but for 
the plain reason that faith there cannot be without an in- 
fallible guide. For no one can be sure of that which rests 
only upon the authority of a sect, or of his own private 
judgment in the interpretation of Scripture. 

That the Protestant principle of private judgment has 
proved a prolific principle of disunion and division, is evidence, 
if evidence were needed, that no promise of infallibility has 
been vouchsafed to it. That the Anglican high-church theory 
of infallibility by what is termed "Catholic consent" by 
which is meant the agreement of the Roman, Eastern, and 
Anglican communions is unknown alike to Rome, Constanti- 
nople, Canterbury, and the Russian Holy Synod, should suf- 
fice, surely, to set it aside. That the Catholic Church, on the 
other hand, is everywhere and always supernaturally united in 
faith, worship, and organization, is evidence of her possession 
of the divine gift of infallibility and the principle of unity. 

Unity then depends upon infallibility, being unity in the 
Truth; and of unity there is none outside the kingdom of the 
Catholic Church. Nor does any other Church so much as 
claim to be infallible. 




SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN. 

BY L. MARCH PHILLIPPS. 

JR. RUDYARD KIPLING, in .one of his Indian 
tales, describes a native village overwhelmed and 
blotted out by the irresistible onsweep of tropi- 
cal vegetation; but it has always seemed to me 
that there is something far more deadly in the 
stealthy invasion of desert sand. Those who live far from sandy 
countries can with difficulty, perhaps, appreciate the gravity 
of the danger. I remember pointing out, in a former article 
in this Review, how every little Saharan oasis stands a per- 
petual siege from the desert around it; how surreptitiously 
but perseveringly, the sand makes its attack, stealing in tiny 
rivulets in among the cultivated crops. It is this continual 
leakage that has to be guarded against. The villagers bail out 
their oasis as a crew bails out its boat. In ways we never 
dream of, each one of these tiny, isolated communities is fight- 
ing the common enemy and lives always under the shadow cf 
its menace. So, too, all up the banks of the Nile the same 
conflict may be watched; the sand, where it has an opportunity, 
encroaching a little and pouring its soft cascades through 
stems of fruit trees and in among vegetables, and the peasants 
thrusting back and staving off its advance. Yet these are but 
local and petty examples of a conflict waged through centuries 
of time and which has changed the face of continents. 

Let the reader glance along the desert-belt from the con- 
fines of India, through Persia and Syria and across the north 
of Africa to the Atlantic. How many old civilizations have 
found a sandy grave in that waterless ocean ! The contests 
we watch to-day on the Nile's ;banks or round the desert 
oases are but the scattered shots and desultory snippirg of a 
campaign that extends to the dawn of history. It has been 
for long a losing battle on man's side. Along the margin of 
the sandy tract are still to be found in many places the rude 
remains of Roman or other ruins standing now in solitudes of 
sand. Syria is rich in such vestiges and across Africa they 



1912.] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN f 443 

occur and reoccur. Once cities stood here and these plains 
were fertile. Now a few broken columns are all that is left of 
the architecture, and the stony acanthus leaves of their capi- 
tals are the sole surviving traces of vegetation. 

Yet this decline has not been absolute and universal. 
Throughout the greater part of its extent the sand-belt has 
gained ground, but at one or two points the reverse has hap- 
pened. Along the north of the Sahara and extending far into 
its interior, the wells of many of the oases have been renewed 
and many fresh ones bored by means of a scientific process 
unknown to the Arabs, so that these spots of fertility are now 
more extensive and more numerous than they have been proba- 
bly for centuries, and a great many of them, which, but a few 
years ago were drying up and being obliterated steadily by 
the desert, are now nourishing a larger stock of date palms 
than ever before. Again, further East, the opportunities of ir- 
rigation offered by the Nile have in the last few years been 
taken a quite new advantage of. Vast works have been erected, 
quite beyond the scope of Turk or Arab, and now instead of 
the desert encroaching on the cultivated strips by the river, 
as was lately the case, it has been in turn pushed resolutely 
back and hundreds of thousands of acres have been annexed 
to the fertile area. These counterbuffs given to the desert, 
elsewhere so triumphant, naturally attract our curiosity. Both, 
we notice at once, have been dealt by European powers. Both 
are backed by certain qualities which Europe has in the last 
four centuries steadily developed, and which, it so happens, 
are the very qualities which, in fighting the desert, are the 
most essential. These are scientific knowledge and steadfast- 
ness of purpose. Under French or English rule not only are 
the resources of science rendered available, but schemes planned 
this year are carried out next year and throughout the follow- 
ing years. The policy adopted is not only efficient in itself, 
but it is continuous. If, on the other hand, we observe care- 
fully the kind of administrations under which the desert has 
so prospered, we shall find that ignorance and instability are 
their unfailing characteristics. For this reason the Arab ar.d 
the Turk have always been the desert's most faithful allies, 
because their rule, if rule it can be called, aims at no order or 
settled state of being, and is equally distinguished by its in- 
difference to all knowledge and its inability to carry on any 



444 SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN f [Jan., 

policy with steady perseverance. In short, the ups and downs 
of the struggle going on between cultivation and the desert 
all along the sandy area testify emphatically to the value of 
European aid, and seem, indeed, to indicate that that aid is a 
matter of absolute necessity. 

I have spoken of two examples of European interference 
which have already occurred, and Italy's intervention in Trip- 
oli is another such example still in its initial stage. But I 
would now go on to deal with yet another which, though it 
has not yet taken effect, is being patiently planned, and which, 
when it is brought off, is likely to have quite as important 
consequence as either of the others. Perhaps, if we look upon 
this case, too, as the .advance of Europe's scientific knowledge 
and steadfastness of purpose to the help of the invincible 
Asiatic ignorance and instability, we shall recognize what it 
has in common with other western enterprises of the kind and 
its title to our sympathy. 

The traveler in ancient Mesopotamia passes to-day through 
a country the most desolate imaginable. Everywhere the desert 
has encroached upon the once existing fertility and has either 
entirely wiped it out or is in the process of doing so. From 
a hundred miles south of Baghdad to the Gulf there occurs a 
succession of stagnant fens and jungles of reeds in which the 
prowling Arab lurks to shoot at Messrs. Lynch's steamboats 
on their way up or down the river. But throughout the greater 
part of its extent the whole country has reverted to sand. It 
is with difficulty we can conceive so utter an effacement of all 
the vestiges of a wealthy and splendid civilization. Towns 
the most magnificent of the pagan era are shapeless mounds 
of dust in which archaeologists probe and burrow. The very 
position of most of them are forgotten. The site of Babylon 
is " a naked and hideous waste." (Layard.) And all around 
these dusty sepulchres of ancient cities the country, once 
loaded with perennial crops and whose fertility was the wonder 
and envy of the world, is idle desert. Golden sand sleeps 
where the golden grain grew. The wind rustles the dry grains 
as it passes. All else is stillness and vacancy except for oc- 
casional troops of Bedouin Arabs that flit like shadows across 
the waste. Ceaselessly wandering they remind one of those 
adventurous little sea-birds called " Mother Carey's Chickens," 
which, according to the yarn of sailors, never set foot on land, 



1913.] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? 445 

but pass their lives in perpetual flight and even hatch cut 
their eggs in the hollow of their wings. Yet I believe the 
Bedouin surveys these scenes of desolation with something of 
complacency. Perhaps he recognizes the only environment 
which suits his own nature or in which he is able to thrive 
and maintain himself. The work of obliteration is, indeed, 
complete. Of the old prodigal abundance, the accounts of 
which sound like a fairy-tale, of the palm-groves that grew 
so dark and tall, of the lovely, interminable gardens glowing 
with fruits and scented with blossoms, where rivulets murmured 
on all sides and nightingales sang, no more remains than of 
the gorgeous temples and palaces and the proud battlements 
that rose out of their midst. Cities and land alike are dead. 
This passing of an old civilization is one of the curiosities 
of history, but still more curious and interesting must be the 
means and processes, if such be possible, of restoration. They 
would seem to be available. The conditions which led to its 
development still exist and can be again utilized. The Tigris 
and Euphrates are the father and mother of the Babylonian 
Kingdoms. For some reason or other the estuaries of rivers 
have always been the seats of man's earliest experiments in 
progress, the cause being, perhaps, that nature in such cir- 
cumstances comes to meet man and adapts her methods more 
exactly than usual to his needs. The preparation of the rich 
deposit of soil, its frequent renewal by successive layers of 
sediment, and the saturation of the land by regular inunda- 
tions are processes amounting almost to the routine of a con- 
scious husbandry. If man learned farming from Nature, it 
was here that the rudiments of the art would be most obvi- 
ously displayed. Moreover, such spots must early have in- 
duced a settled and stable order of society, the first condition 
after all of any kind of progressive movement. Wandering 
tribes that had hit upon one of these hot-beds of the earth, 
must needs cease to wander. How could they exchange such 
abundance for the wilderness? The quick-coming, spontane- 
ous harvests of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian valleys were 
an irresistible bait held out to charm a vagrant population. 
Here were the ease and plenty which had always eluded them. 

"Rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more." 
It was in such spots that agriculture first established its solid 



446 SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? [Jan., 

claims, as against the more obvious but more superficial ad- 
vantages of the nomad's vagrant existence. Here the tent 
and the caravan were first exchanged for walled houses and 
cities. In the African desert, between two rows of absolutely 
sterile mountains that hem it closely in, the Nile has laid 
down one of these strips of fertile territory, and through the 
vistas of history, while all around is flitting, uncertain motion, 
that narrow strip is black with a fixed population and en- 
dowed with all the attributes belonging to social stability. 

Among the almost desolate wastes of Eastern Syria, be- 
twixt the highlands of Persia and the Syrian desert, the Tigris 
and the Euphrates maintained an alluvial tract equal in rich- 
ness to the Nile valley, and the home of an equally enduring 
social order and an equally ancient civilization. It is true 
there was a difference. The Nile gives with absolute sponta- 
neity. The Tigris and Euphrates discriminate a little. Any 
simple churl may profit by the Nile's orderly arrangements, 
but it takes a populace and a government of some sagacity 
aid intelligence to utilize the resources of the great Mesopo- 
tamian rivers. The difference has not been without its effect 
on the history of the two countries. 

Mesopotamia is about equally divided into two sections, 
the northernmost one of which, the ancient Assyria, consists of 
stony plains and pasture lands ; while the southern portion, 
which constituted the still more ancient and parent kingdom 
of Babylonia, was composed of a black, alluvial soil of amaz- 
ing fertility, thence called by the Arabs As-Saivdd t or "The 
Black Ground" and from its fruitfulness fabled to be the site 
of the Garden of Eden. It is with the latter section that we 
are more immediately concerned. 

The reader who will consult Mr. Le Strange's excellent 
work on The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, with the maps 
and plans which it contains, will discover that a gigantic sys- 
tem of irrigation was here carried on from time immemorial. 
The courses of the two rivers favored such a design. From 
Hadithah and Takrit, on the Euphrates and Tigris respec- 
tively, which are at the northern extremity of the fertile re- 
gion, the great streams flow southward for four hundred miles, 
sometimes but ten or twenty, and rarely so much as eighty 
miles apart. Their neighborhood at a very early date sug- 
gested the idea of a succession of canals, " like the bars of a 



i9i 2.] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? 447 

gridiron," as Mr. Le Strange describes them, draining east- 
ward from the Euphrates into the Tigris, while down the 
course of the Tigris were built long "loop" canals, the chief 
of which known as the Nahrawan Canal was near two hun- 
dred miles in length, which diverging from the main river 
effected a long circuit through the neighboring country and 
rejoined the parent stream lower down. 

These canals seem to have been very solidly constructed 
and on a huge scale. They were built upon the surface of 
the earth rather than dug out of it, and to this day travelers 
describe the fragments that remain of their long ridges as re- 
sembling long mountain chains rising above the level plain in 
strange uniformity of outline. They were, indeed, ample 
streams in themselves and the fruitful parents of many lesser 
ones; for from them proceeded numbers of lesser canals and 
from these again yet smaller ones; and so the whole water 
system was spun out like a spider's web over the land in long 
connecting lines and tiny intersecting meshes, until every field 
and garden could boast its share of the parent current, doled 
out at last in a rivulet of a few inches span and depth. 

Naturally it was in the immediate neighborhood of towns 
that irrigation was fully developed and Ibn Hawkal, the Arab 
historian, has estimated that as late as the tenth century the 
canals of Basrah numbered a hundred thousand, of which 
twenty thousand were navigable for boats. 

Tne two facts to be born in mind in connection with this 
vast and complicated system of waterways are first, that al- 
most the whole country was dependent on a process of arti- 
ficial irrigation and second, that this process was on such a 
scale and its operations controlled by such important works, 
and such huge dams, barrages, locks, weirs, and embankments, 
that the maintenance of the whole system could only be car- 
ried on by a stable and powerful government having at its 
disposal ample material resources as well as a due supply of 
experienced engineers and armies of trained workmen. The 
very indispensability of so much skill and expert knowledge 
was a peiil. It has been suggested that some day "modern 
civilization " will attain to such a degree of complexity as 
will prove its own undoing. Invention will, perhaps, outrun 
execution, and we shall gradually evolve a system of such in- 
finite and ingenious complication as sooner or later will ex- 



448 SHALL THE EAST BE RE- BORN? [Jan., 

ceed our strength or skill to manipulate. We shall have made 
more than we can manage; and that day when our works 
prove too many for us will be our day of doom. When we 
can no longer wind up our watches they will stop. It was so 
in the region between the two rivers. A machinery had been 
invented on which the life of the whole community depended. 
It was very effective but very complicated and it required 
most careful winding-up. The day came when this could no 
longer be done and then it stopped and of course everything 
else stopped too. 

Yet while it went, it went to some purpose. Inscriptions 
found at Sirpurra referring to the earliest- known periods of 
Babylonian history, from 4,000 to 5,000 B. c. as is conjectured, 
already describe the canals which everywhere intersected the 
country and which kings made it their highest title to honor 
to have constructed, together with the fertility of the corn 
lands they nourished. E-anna-du was not more proud of his 
victories than that he had built a canal "from the great river 
to the Guedin." Mr. Boscawen points out (see The First of 
Empires by W. St. Chad Boscawen p. 126 et seq.) that in ad- 
dition to the comparatively brief records of wars which these 
inscriptions contain, "they afford much information as to the 
great public works which those rulers undertook," and as re- 
gards the nature of these works he adds: "The construction 
of canals was vigorously pushed on, and we find that at this 
time a regular network was established throughout Southern 
Babylonia. These canals were most perfectly constructed, in 
many cases being lined with brick-work, and some of them 
continue in use until the present day." 

Our information is still more complete of the life of Kbam- 
murabi the Great, extending from about B. c. 2285 to B. c. 
2231. The conquests and successful campaigns of the mon- 
arch are, of course, recorded with all the flamboyant exagger- 
ation of Oriental rhetoric, but with at least equal emphasis 
are narrated his achievements in irrigation. " When Ilu and 
Bel gave me the land of Sumer and Akkad to rule, and their 
authority entrusted to my hands, I dug out the river (canal) 
of Khamtnurabi (called 'the abundance of the people') which 
bringeth abundance to the land of Sumer and Akkad." The 
inscription goes on to describe how the great king extended 
the fertilized country and turned it into a corn granary by 



igi2.] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN* 449 

introducing, by means of his canals, " perennial waters for the 
land of Sumer and Akkad." 

It is plain to whoever studies the fragments of history of 
the Babylonian empire which have been preserved to us, net 
only that from the earliest days of which record exists, there 
was already in working order a great artificial system of irri- 
gation, but that, as the kingdom gained in wealth and power, 
its increased consequence declared itself in an extension of 
irrigation works and fresh additions cf fertility to that already 
in cultivation. It is not too much to say that the prosperity 
and even the existence of the state depended upon, and are 
to be gauged by, the maintenance of its network of canals. 
Evidently the anxiety of the situation was realized for we 
have frequent mention of fortifications erected at points of 
vantage at the heads of canals, where, no doubt, the main 
locks and sluices were situated, to protect these vulnerable 
points from molestation. Khammurabi himself built such a 
fortification, " a great tower, of which the summit, like a 
mountain, reaches on high," at the head of the canal called 
" the abundance of the people." 

It is easy to understand the importance of these junctions. 
The canals which here tapped the river, and were themselves 
large and for the most part navigable currents, were not only, 
perhaps, several hundred miles in length, but, by means of 
their innumerable lateral conduits acted on wide tracts of 
country which were entirely dependent on thtm for their 
necessary water supply. Such a system may be likened to 
the veins of a leaf which, from the stiff, central rib, extend in 
lesser side ribs and then into lighter, finer meshes which cover 
all the extent of the leaf. The point of junction with the 
leaf stalk is evidently the crucial point of the whole system. 
Any injury dealt here extends to the whole. In the same 
way let a catastrophe overtake the great water works which, 
at the junction of each canal with the river, controlled the 
outflow and the effects would extend to remote regions and 
be felt in farms and gardens hundreds of miles away. 

As the result of such a catastrophe a district as big as an 
English county might pass swiftly and inevitably out of culti- 
vation, and recur to the dominion of the desert. No wonder 
the vulnerable points in so all-important a scheme should be 
carefully guarded and secured, or that in all other respects 
VOL. xciv. 29 



450 SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? [Jan., 

the efficient upkeep of the machinery of irrigation should be 
reckoned the first and highest duty of the state. The task 
required supplies of workmen, ready in any numbers and at 
any emergency, such as could only be insured by a compul- 
sory labor system and accordingly "the employment of the 
dullu, or " corvee," Mr. Boscawen writes, " was very system- 
atic in Babylonia. Each district had to find its own corvee 
for its own public works, but at the same time large corvees 
were raised for works of national importance." From various 
messages and scraps of correspondence oi King Khammurabi 
to his workpeople and overseers it would seem that while each 
district, answering to our English parish, was immediately re- 
sponsible for the maintenance of its own portion of the irri- 
gation system, the main conduits and large connecting canals, 
which brought the water from afar and carried it on to other 
parts of the country, were maintained by the state. Thus, in 
one of his letters, Khammurabi bids his agent "summon the 
men who hold lands on the banks of the Damanum Canal and 
clear the canal within the present mouth," while in another 
tablet he mentions that he is sending three hundred and sixty 
government workmen for operations that were being conducted 
at Larsa and Lakhab. As evidence of the toil and vigilance 
necessary to keep the canals going, we find certain privileged 
subjects carefully and explicitly exempted from the onerous 
task: "They shall not labor on the lock of the royal river," 
" they shall not be called upon to excavate or close the channel 
of the royal river " and so on. 

Nevertheless, the results obtained were such as amply 
justified all the pains they involved. " Of all countries that 
we know, there is," writes Herodotus, " none which is so 
fruitful in grain." He asserts that "the blade of the wheat 
and barley is often four fingers in breadth," and adds that 
" as for millet and sesame, I shall not say to what height 
they grow, for I am not ignorant that what I have already 
written concerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia must seem 
incredible to those who have never visited the country." 
Though palm trees grew "in vast numbers over the whole 
of the flat country," yet, it was in the ample wheat crops 
with which the land was burdened that its unparalleled wealth 
really consisted. More even than Egypt, perhaps, it was the 
land of grain. " Babylonia was certainly the birthplace of agri- 



] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? 451 

culture," is the conclusion Mr. Boscawen arrives at; and the 
foundation of agriculture in all ages has been corn. The 
agricultural character of Babylonian life generally is curiously 
illustrated in the names of the months, such names as the 
month of "sowing," "of corn-cutting," "of opening of dams," 
"of copious fertility" and the like, bearing emphatic witness 
to the main preoccupation of the Babylonian people. But, 
indeed, from all sources the same testimony is proffered and 
the evidence of historians, of innumerable inscriptions, but, 
most of all, perhaps, the silent witness of the ruins of magnifi- 
cent cities, now buried in desert sand that once stood among 
palms and flowers and fields of grain watered by the thou- 
sand rivulets of the national irrigation system, all attest be- 
yond doubt the incomparable fertility of a land which, to-day 
a waste, was once " the Garden of the Orient." 

Let me repeat the two conclusions to be drawn from this 
brief survey. The first is, that the whole edifice of Babylonian 
civilization was sustained by an extensive and elaborate scheme 
of artificial irrigation. The second is, that this scheme was 
planned on so large a scale that it required the authority and 
resources of a strong, central government in skill, money, and 
labor to keep it in working order. 

From these two conditions proceeded the ruin, as there 
had proceeded the prosperity of the country. The Arab in- 
vasions of the eighth century were followed a few centuries 
later by successive inundations of Mongols and Turks. The 
Arab had enjoyed the resources of the civilizations he had 
conquered in his own peculiar way; that is to say, much as 
a child enjoys a new box of toys. For a season the enthu- 
siasm with which he cultivated the ground, cut fresh canals, 
laid out gardens, and built mosques and palaces was full of 
promise. But no Arab has ever had in him the capacity to 
govern steadfastly and carry out large designs in a method- 
ical spirit, and long before he was ousted by worse anarchists 
than himself, the country had felt the instability of his rule 
and much of the land and many of the cities had fallen to 
waste and ruins. Under the no-rule of the following cen- 
turies the process of dissolution was frightfully rapid, and the 
reader who follows with attention Mr. Le Strange's careful 
narrative will find that very soon after the fall of the Abbasid 
Caliphate in 1258, and in. many individual cases long before 



452 SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? [Jan., 

that, the ancient cities of these fertile plains had dwindled to 
inconsiderable and dirty villages, or very frequently had en- 
tirely disappeared. Their very sites are now largely a matter 
of conjecture so completely have they been blotted out. Of 
city after city, by the dozen and the score, we read how 
great was their wealth, how stately their buildings, how popu- 
lous their streets, how extensive their cool and fragrant gar- 
dens. One historian praises the grapes of Ukbara; another 
the pomegranates of Harba; but all these cities to-day are 
heaps of rubbish or shapeless mounds of blown sand standing 
in a land so dry and desolate that it seems to mock the very 
idea of fertility. 

The Arab and the Turk have done their work well. We 
have pointed out how necessary to the upkeep of the irriga- 
tion works of Mesopotamia was a strong government, a gov- 
ernment able to supply the funds and trained laborers needed, 
not for the building of the canals only but for their main- 
tenance. But a strong government is precisely what neither 
the Arabs, Turks, nor Mongols could ever supply ; indeed, 
those races attached to the word government none of the 
meaning belonging to it among western states. It signified to 
them, not a permanent and durable method of control handed 
down from generation to generation but the momentary tyr- 
anny of a chief or a tribe exerted locally and for a little space 
of time. A bird's-eye-view of the history of the Mesopota- 
mian region during the last seven or eight centuries reveals 
a prolonged condition of social anarchy amid which, like some 
great vessel beaten down by the waves, the structure of a 
more ancient and stable civilization may be discerned sinking 
out of sight. Where amid the chaos of fleeting whims and 
savage impulses does a power exist capable of manipulating 
the immense system of colonization on which the prosperity 
of the country depends ? Century by century, as the govern- 
ing power was relaxed and the state's authority diminished, 
the difficulty of winding up and keeping in repair the mechan- 
ism of irrigation increased and became evermore insurmount- 
able. There ensued the consequences which the Babylonian 
and Sassanian rulers had foreseen when they built their great 
towers at. the canal heads and organized trained labor parties 
under the orders of skilled engineers to patrol the main canals. 
Now here, now there, the system cracked and broke down. 



19 1 2.] SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN f 453 

Tract by tract the cultivated area shrank as the great dams 
and sluices failed to work, or the enclosing embankments yielded 
and gave way. In many places, especially along the lower 
portion of its course, the waters of the Euphrates, bursting 
the river bank, have inundated the neighboring country, creat- 
ing vast, stagnant marshes overgrown with jungles of reeds. 
But throughout the length and breadth of the country gene- 
rally, what has happened has been simply that the breaking 
down in one place or another of the main canals has turned 
off the tap of water which fertilized whole districts at a time 
and these districts have consequently reverted to entire bar- 
renness and sterility. What must have been the tragedies 
which attended that wholesale extinction of life as the villagers 
watched their rill of water falter and give out and their vines 
and palms wither, we can but conjecture. Only the result we 
know. Swift, as usual, to mark its opportunity the soft- footed 
sand has crept in to occupy the undefended districts. It has 
always been the emblem of instability. Much sand came with 
the Arab and more with the Turk. Fts victory is now com- 
plete. It and its only human comrade, the ever-wandering 
Bedouin, are sole heirs and possessors of nine-tenths of this 
site of ancient splendor and opulence. The glory has departed; 
the tragedy is over; the curtain can be rung down. 

So it would seem ; but at this very moment of deepest de- 
pression, what some people are saying, and, in particular, what 
the Germans are saying, is that an irrigation scheme which a 
strong hand created and maintained may by a strong hand be 
revived and reconstructed. The country is still there ; the great 
twin rivers still flow and supply in the same abundance the 
same stores of water. Many of the ancient aqueducts and 
brick-built canals still exist and offer themselves for repair. 
All the conditions which led of old to success are in being 
to-day with the one exception of a government possessing the 
requisite skill and knowledge and capable of evolving a com- 
prehensive and consistent policy. Can this want be supplied ? 
Is it possible that a great European power in coalition with 
Turkey can infuse into her government and political leaders 
the insight and the strength of purpose they have long stood 
in need of? If it be possible, then the revival of the Tigris- 
Euphrates Valley is a probable contingency. That Germany, 
at any rate, thinks it possible is certain. The Baghdad railway 



454 SHALL THE EAST BE RE-BORN? [Jan. 

is the pledge of hef conviction and that conviction is further 
supported by the evidence of some of the most distinguished 
engineers in Europe. 

I trust the reader will dwell a little on this aspect of the 
scheme. Of all the beneficent acts of administration possible, 
I know of none that strikes one as so purely beneficent as the 
reclaiming and cultivation, made possible wherever water is 
forthcoming, of the arid wastes of the desert. The charge, 
under the influence of moisture and the hot sun, from death 
to life, from a waste wilderness to the most fertile of gardens, 
is so striking that it must needs affect even a dull imagina- 
tion, while at the same time it seems to be one of those rare, 
human actions which do great good without doing any harm. 
We shall all of us, no doubt, hear a good deal in the future 
as we have heard in the past, of the financial side of the 
Baghdad enterprise; and the various deals and jobs that will 
ensue, combined with stock exchange fluctuations and the en- 
terprises of the speculators, will be apt to lend to the whole 
transaction the sordid air which is often said to be character- 
istic of most modern undertakings. When that occurs let us 
remember that another view is possible. A country of infin- 
ite possibilities lies waste and desolate which the very quali- 
ties which Europe has developed, qualities of steadfast control 
and scientific knowledge, can restore without doubt to its an- 
cient luxuriance. To do this, to supply these elements of se- 
curity and knowledge, has been and will no doubt continue 
to be Europe's mission among many Eastern races. It will, 
no doubt, at some date or other take effect in the Mesopota- 
mian Valley and much more than its financial aspect it is 
what is essentially characteristic of the Baghdad scheme. Of 
the two oldest civilizations of the world, both suckled by riv- 
ers, England has undertaken the revival of one. It is Ger- 
many's ambition, surely not an ignoble one, to undertake the 
revival of the other. 




THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST. 

( TA LES OF FA THER LA COMBE. ) 

BY {CATHERINE HUGHES. 
II. 

[Y the summer of 1864, the colony of St. Albert 
had taken full shape in the forest by the Stur- 
geon. Father Lacombe could look out from bis 
log-eerie on the hill, and say to himself: "It 
is good." 

It was very good. The comfortable cabins of the rre'tis 
and freemen dotted the hillside where the mission rose. The 
crops on the newly-cleared meadows were flourishing. Word 
came in from the hunters on the prairie that the buffalo were 
feeding in thousands. Everything promised a fat winter. 

Father Lacombe's eagle-eyes darted lightnings at the thought 
that there was nothing now to hinder him from coursing the 
plains in search of other pagan tribes to bring into the Chrir- 
tian fold. First he would go among the Blackfeet. 

Four years before Bishop Tache had agreed to thepetiticn 
of a Blackfoot chief that Father Lacombe should minister to 
his people. They wanted him, their Arsous-kitsi-rarpi (the 
Man-of-the-Good- Heart), who had nursed them through the 
great, scarlet sickness. They were doubtful of the merits cf 
his prayer, but the man himself, they said, was good medicine. 

Now, at last, Father Lacombe was free to go to them. He 
set his house in order at St. Albert, ordered his fameux 
Alexis to make the pony- train ready for the trail, and chofe 
for his interpreter a young hunter named Frarcois, the off- 
spring of a Blackfoot warrior and a Kootenai maiden. 

One evening they heard of a Ufge camp of Crees in the 
neighborhood, whose warriors were as wild and warlike as the 
Blackfeet, and completely dominated by the sorcerer and 
medicine man, Wabishtikwan. The prowess of the warriors, 
the fame of the sorcerer, the antagonism of all to the Black- 
robe these tales were music to the ear of Father Lacombe. 

To him obstacles have never been anythirg more than 



45 6 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan-i 

incentives to effort. The next morning be took his departure, 
and traveled on in the exhilarating prairie airs toward the 
camp of the pagan Crees. At nightfall they camped beside a 
small pond, and Alexis, going out to chase a nearby herd of 
buffalo, soon returned with the choicest parts of a young 
buffalo-cow. Their trail next day led out over a high knoll 
from which they could survey miles of country and, tiens ! 
there lay the camp spread out before them. 

At two o'clock they reached it. It consisted of sixty 
tepees pitched in a ring around a small lake, to which the 
prairie sloped gently down. The tents were of buffalo- hide, 
some of them decorated with pictures of the chase atd war in 
vivid coloring. Stages on which strips of buffalo meat hung 
to dry rose here and there among the tents. Dusky little 
ones, naked as cupids, played on the prairie outside the 
cimp, and bands of horses grazed near with guards on lookout 
from the higher knolls. Within the ring of tents were groups 
of old men smoking, breaking their silence with occasional 
slow speech, young men gambling and women scraping buffalo- 
skins and pounding meat. 

As the party rode in 

But the story of this encounter is better told* in Father 
Lacombe's own words, stripped though they be in print of 
his delicious accent. 

" At that time, you must know, I had learned my Cree so 
well I could say anything in that tongue. I could make a 
harangue as well as their old men. This is what I relied upon 
to gain me the favor of these people. So I rode right into 
the ring of tepees with my two men right down to the lake 
and we jumped off there and hobbled our ponies. We had 
five ponies, two of them carrying our supplies. 

"In the camp none of the Crees moved or spoke. The 
little children wanted to come over to look at us, but the old 
men called out to them: 'Stay back!' So presently I said 
to my Alexis: 

* As Father Lacombe has always considered this the most picturesque incident of his 
life, his friends, who had repeatedly heard the story, once persuaded him to compose a 
Western idyl based on the actual happenings. He complied with their desire, but this manu- 
script was sent to some Eastern house of the Oblates, and 1 have been unable to locate it. 
Father Lacombe has, however, repeated the story for me much as it was written. It is repro- 
duced here in this way, which slightly enlarges upon the details not the main facts of his 
actual encounter with the Cree medicine-man and the conversion of his band. 



i9i2.] THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST 457 

"'Stay here, you and Francois. I will go and talk to the 
old men.' 

"I went. I said: 'I have come a long way to visit yon, 
but you give me no welcome.' They made no answer; they 
smoked on. 

" ' May I put up my tent and stay in your camp ? ' I say 
then. 

" ' As you please/ the oldest one told me, but the tone 
of his voice ha, that was not friendly. 

'"I come here to pay you a visit,' then I say. 'I will 
not force my religion on you if you do not want it. But I 
came a great distance through many Cree camps.' And I 
name this band, and that. . . . 'These are your people!' 

" I was hope to excite their curiosity, but they pay no at- 
tention to me. I was not a welcome visitor. 

"Then I talk with my men and they encourage me, and 
we eat the food Alexis prepare. So afterward I read my bre- 
viary, and I thought, and thought. ... I must do some- 
thing. . . . Hahl I know I 

"I call to Francois: 'Bring my horse.' 

"Now I ride out of the camp and outside the circle of 
tepees. I raise my crucifix in one hand and my red cross 
flag (that I have made according to promise for the Blackfoot 
mission) in the other. And I ride about the camp crying: 

" ' Ho-ho-ha-ho! . . . he-ya-ha! . . . ho- hoi 
. . .' That is the Indian chant. 

"'Where am I now?' I cry. 'Am I among my fellow- 
men that I sit for two hours and no one addresses a word 
to me. No one comes with a piece of meat and a kettle of 
water. It is what you would give your most greatest enemy 
if he visited you. Am I to believe you mean this conduct ? 
. . . Where am I BOW ? ' 

" I go back then to my tent and got out my big calumet. 

Then ' huh ! huh 1 ' I hear some of the old men say : 

' Let us go and hear what he has to say.' 

" So they rise slowly, and they pull their blankets tight 
around them as if they want to show this is a state visit and 
not a friendly one. One after another they come, until bime- 
by almost the whole camp of men and women formed a cre- 
scent around my tent. 

"The sun was setting, red on the prairies fine quiet 



4s 8 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan., 

weather. Ab, it was poetique ! I assure you, to see all those 
people sit peaceably there before me waiting for me to talk. 
They had accept my invitation; they were now my guests, 
and Indian politeness would not have them refuse my peace- 
pipe my calumet. 

"I went with it first to the old chief. 

"'My grandfather," I say, holding the stem to him. 'You 
will smoke a little with me.' 

" He took it, but not very gladly took a few puffs. Then 
the pipe was passed around from man to man until all the old 
men had smoked, and it came back to me. Then I said after 
their fashion: 

'"My mouth is open.' 

"So I had my chance to speak and no one could inter- 
rupt me. That is the Indian etiquette: when you speak you 
can say the most hard or sarcastic things you know, but no 
one will break in until you stop. Then they take their turn 
and you must keep silence. 

" First I said much to entertain them. Then I make a 
little recollection within myself. 

"'Now,' I said, 'my God, Holy Spirit of Light, I invoke 
You. That is the time now to help me. You said to Your 
apostles that when they did not know what to say You would 
put the words in their mouth. And now I say to You. . . . 
That's the time! . .' 

"And my God He help me!" 

Here Father Lacombe paused and the leonine old head 
sunk on his breast in silence. . . . Was it a moment of 
thanksgiving ? I felt it was. 

He roused himself again. 

"Hah! I turned to those people with new confidence, and 
suddenly I say: 

'"My friends, do you think you are the only people in 
the world who have a right to hold back and say 'We will 
not take this religion of the one God' One by one bands of 
your people have come to us to be taught. You turn away 
and say ' this religion you come to preach is not for us ' 

"'But I say instead of that for you now the Sun is 
rising. I have come to bring you the Light, and if you will 



1912.] THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST 459 

not see, then you will be guilty before the Great Spirit of 
Light.' 

" For long I talk to them of God, the Father, of the 
Savior, of His apostles and their successors of my own mis- 
sion and my love for them. I tell them I do not come for 
any of their goods as the traders do, but for their souls that 
endure forever when those bodies of theirs and mine had 
passed away. I told them of the great Father-of-Al), and the 
Paradise where all would enjoy His love and happiness forever. 

" It seemed then two hours I had talked to them, and it 
was late. The moon was traveling far up to the west and the 
little children had fallen asleep in their mothers' arms. 

" I said to them all ' Now you can go. It is late, and 
to-morrow I will be here. If anyone wants to hear more from 
me he can come to my tent.' 

" The squaws began to pick up their children and move to 
their tepees when all at once the old sorcerer Wabishtik- 
wan (Whitehead) cried out: 

" ' Stop, you band of foolish people ! ' 

"They stop surprised. He turned to me with rage and 
ask me : 

" ' Do you think you are alone to speak here ? Do you 
not know that you are not on your own ground, and others 
have a right to be heard?' 

' I bowed my head. 

'"Speak, old man I ' I said this calmly, for I knew I had 
finished my turn. 

" The Crees had all waited to listen to their old medicine- 
man He cried to them : 

'"You people, who listen to this man with pleasure and 
give an ear of belief to what he says you are stupid ! ' 

" Then he turned to me : 

" ' You Blackrobe, you say the Great Spirit sent you. 
How do we know? What proof have you? Who comes with 
you to prove it? We have only the word of your mouth, and 
we have often heard that white people are great liars!' 

"Eh-eh, but the Crees is the language to abuse people 
with. So flex-ible, so sar-casticl And he abuse me then, 
I assure you. Ah-h-h 1 

" To make the ceremony of opening his speech he picked 
up a calumet, smoked it alone, then threw it from him in a 



460 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan., 

temper. He leaped to his feet with bis back turned to me, 
and spoke to his people: 

" ' Hear me t You know I have travel much in my life. 
You know that three years ago I visit to the other side of 
the mountains to make friendship and peace with the Kootc- 
nais. You have heard of their Chief, White Eagle. 

'"When I was at their camp I passed into the tent of 
White Eagle and I learned many things from him, and I will 
tell yon these. You have heard that the Kootenais took this 
new religion of the Christ. Now, I tell you, for I know, that 
they have thrown it all aside. They are again turned to the 
ways and the religion of our fathers.' 

"This Whitehead said. 

" Now I knew this was a lie ; but it was not Indian eti- 
quette to speak. I knew that Fere de Smet and the other 
Jesuits had christianized the Kootenais, and that they were 
still most faithful to Christ. But again Whitehead speaks: 

" ' Here is the story of White Eagle, telling how the Koote- 
nais came to abandon this God of the white man and his 
teachings.' 

"'These Kootenais,' he say, 'have Blackrobes with them 
like the man who came to us to-day, and White Eagle was a 
strong follower of that religion. But White Eagle got sick 
sick, and the Blackrobe came but he could do nothing to save 
him.' 

" Then in a manner all ridi-culing, Whitehead described the 
sacrament of anointing the dying, and he gave a picture of 
the prayers and the funeral service of the Church that was 
still more absurd. Oh, this was very ridi-culous and satirical, 
I assure you very. 

'"Well, it was all finish for White Eagle,' this lying sor- 
cerer say. ' His soul arrive now in the other world, and there 
he came to a crossway two trails. One led to the heaven 
of the whites, and one to the hunting grounds of the Indi- 
ans. . . . White Eagle tried to go to the Indians 'but the 
spirits forced him to take the other road, because on his fore- 
head he had the mark of the Christian by baptism.' 

" Then Whitehead turn fiercely to me and say : ' What do 
you do with us, you Blackrobes? You mark us, and deceive 
us. When our people die they do not know where to go.' 

"Then again to the people, all listening with open ears, 



i9i 2.] THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST 461 

he described ab, very skil-fully the white man's heaven. 
There was dancing there and drinking and fine food; music, 
and women in fine clothing. It was the heaven of a volup- 
tuary he describe. And at the end of this great place he say 
there was a white light like the Sun that was the white 
man's God ! 

"White Eagle entered there very shy-ly, and soon he 
found thousands of cold eyes turned to him. ' 0, quen I who 
is this? What does the stranger want?' they asked. 

"White Eagle pushed past them, timid and disturbed, feel- 
ing awkward, and he made his way to the Great White Light. 
Then he kneel there and kiss the feet and hands of the Great 
Spirit, and said he was White Eagle, chief of the Kootenais 
and His son who loved Him, and now was come to live for- 
ever with Him. 

" But again White Eagle was met with cold eyes and 
looks of annoyance, and the Great Father said: ' Why are you 
here? You are not one of us. This is the heaven of the 
white man. Go from here to your own people. Look at your 
skin!' Then he pushed back the skin-tunic and bared White 
Eagle's arm, saying: 'You are not white like these people!' 

"White Eagle went out sadly and at the cross-ways again 
he turned to the paradise where he could see the Indians en- 
joying themselves. This time the spirits did not turn him 
back and he entered. But he found his entrance was not no- 
ticed. He saw old friends there and his own grandmother, 
young again. But no one spoke to him. 

" It was a place of wide meadows and streams and woods 
all sunshine and pleasant, with Indian men and women 
strong and happy playing and hunting there. The buffalo 
there were so tame they came to your hands, and White 
Eagle saw some Indians eating meat that melted in their 
mouths as they sliced it off the buffalo. 

'"Huh! huh!' he called, to catch their attention. 'Huh! 
huh!' 

"They peered at him. . . . 'Who is this stranger?' 
they ask. 

'"I am White Eagle, first chief of the Kootenais.' He 
said this proudly and sadly, for his people should have known 
his name without asking. 

'"No, you are not one of us look at the beads and cross 



462 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan., 

that hangs around your neck. You are a white man ; go to 
the heaven of the white men ! ' Then they drove him out. 

" He was now very, very sad, and again he sought the 
heaven of the whites. There the people drinking, dancirg, 
playing tried to prevent his entrance, and called out that he 
had no right there. . . . But now his heart was hot with 
anger, and he thrust them from him and made a path through 
them clear again to the shining throne at the end where the 
great Spirit sat. 

" When he arrived there the Kootenais' proud chief fell at 
the feet of that Presence and prayed : 

"'O, Father of men, have pity on me! You tell me this 
is not heaven for men of my blood, and down the other trail 
where the Indians are hunting on the Eternal Hunting- 
Grounds they put me out. They say I am not one of them. 
My religion makes me white. ... I am here because I 
love you. Father of Men, have pity Give me a place by 
You. I am weary and can find no place to rest, and on earth 
I have no home, for You have taken life from me.' 

" The Great Master of Life then bent over him and said : 

'"White Eagle, I pity you. You have been deceived. You 
cannot have a place here, but. . . .' He put a hand to 
His bosom, and drawing out shafts of light, he said: 'I give 
you life again. Return to earth and to the Kootenais.' 

"This White Eagle did, and when he told his story to his 
people they abandoned the teachings of the Elackrobes.' 

" This is the story Whitehead told that night to the Crees 
and when he had finished he turned to me: 

"'Now, what will you say?' he asked me. 'Will you tell 
my people you lied ? ' 

" What was I to do ? I could feel that the whole camp 
had turned from me and Christ. . . . My word against 
that clever story was not enough. 

" ' No, I will say nothing now,' I said very sadly, ' but an- 
other time I will speak. It is not our way when lies are told 
of us to trouble to deny them. But a day always comes when 
the truth is known.' 

"'You,' I said to the people, 'will judge of the truth be- 
tween us some day. And now go to your tents, for it is al- 
ready late.' 



i9i2.] THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST 463 



"Taey went, laughing and ridiculing me. 

" I turned to my own tent then, all in a sad puzzle over 
the evening. My faithful friends put something befote me to eat. 

'"No, I cannot eat,' I say to them. 'Leave me to think,' 
and they left me. 

" And again I think me think and pray. Something 
must be done. I cannot sleep till something is done. 

" Ha! it was terrible. There I was a priest, a civilized 
man, a man of some learning and they were what you call 
savages. But I knew I was fronting a brave, clever people 
full in their hearts of old superstitions; and they were strong 
in them. 

" It's all fine, you may think, to go to people and say : 
' There is another religion better than yours. You must 
change ! ' 

"That is easy to say, but how hard it is to do it with 
success. I felt myself weak very weak, and discourag-ed. 
. . . But while I think and pray I remember that my God 
is very strong, if I am weak. And He is their God too and 
He loves them in His most blessed way. . . . 

" Hah 1 ... He gives me a thought. That's what I 
have hope and wait for His direction. 

" At once I call Francois from his bed and say to him : 

'"Your mother was a Kootenai, Francois?' 

" ' Yes.' 

"'And you love the Church and our religion?' 

" ' Yes.' 

" ' And you love me ? ' 

'"I do! Why else should I have come so far with you 
into the Blackfeet's country ? ' 

" ' Will you go for me then to-night to the country of 
the Kootenais, far over the mountains, and bring White Eagle 
here as soon as your horse can bring you ? ' 

"Fran9ois had said he loved me, but he was not very glad 
to do what I ask. He told me that it will be a journey of 
ten days or more hard traveling through a country where 
the Blackfeet sometimes roamed. To go aloae on that trip ! 
what would happen his wife and little ones at St. Albert if 
he died ? 

"'Go, Francois,' I said to him. 'Don't be afraid. I'll 
pray for your return. You will come safe.' 



> i 



464 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan., 

Father Lacombe's command was imperious, yet with a 
sweet appeal in it. ... In very fact, the sweet compul- 
sion he exercised was a gift of the man's unusual personality, 
and one that would move much stronger men than Francois 
before many years had passed. 

"'Go, Frangois and I promise you, before God, Frar?ois, 
that if you are killed the Church will take care of your wife 
and children all their lives.' 

" Francois consented, took his horse and gun, and in the 
quiet sleeping camp he slipped away past two o'clock with 
the message. . . . That message I gave him was this a 
piece of tobacco tied in the best piece of linen I could find 
in my chapel-case and bound about with sinew. ' Give this,' 
I said, 'to White Eagle, and say it is from the Blackrobe of 
the Crees. Tell him my name then tell him this tobacco 
says the Blackrobe wants you very badly. If he cannot come 
for any reason, then ask him to send a brother or some one 
of his family. 

" ' And remember, Francois, the camp will not be here 
when you come back. They will surely change before ten 
days but follow our trail, for I will stay with them, and I 
will leave marks along the trail. . . . When you come 
back, come to us only after dark not by day. I will make 
a surprise for them.' 

" So Alexis and I were alone. No one came to speak to 
us or remark the absence of one of my men. We were in 
the camp, but as they say, we 'were not of it* . . . Heh ! 
Those were lonesome days, but I always watched with hope 
for Francois. 

"The camp was moved; ten days passed no Francois. 
On the eleventh evening we were camped by a fine pleasant 
creek, where I could see in the distance the great mountains 
and the foothills before them. About sunset I went out from 
my tent to read my breviary by the side of the creek. 

" ' Ah, je dis, he must be coming now; this must be the 
time.' And I always keep a watch on the hills as I turn from 
my book. 

"The prairies and hills kept growing more and more beau- 
tiful in the sunset veiled in a mirage of light. . . . Ah, 
that's magique when the sun sets on the Rockies! It made 
me very quiet and content, and I sat watching it when my 



i9i2.] THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST 465 

breviary was finished. . . . And while I looked I saw 
three men Hah 1 this was no magic, but three men riding 
down a hill many miles away. 

"I watched till they went into a valley, and I could see 
them no more. It was growing dusk when I go back to 
Alexis in the tent and say: 

'"Sure he is coming, and with Kootenais. We will not 
sleep; he will come by night.' 

"So in my tent I wait-ed and by-and bye I heard men 
walking near my tent. I wait until Francois pull back the 
curtain of my tent and say gladly Men Pire I 

" Ah me, I was crazy so glad I was. ... I embracd 
Francois, and the two strangers came and knelt before me for 
a blessing. 

"'This is the answer to your message,' Francois said joy- 
fully. Ah, he was proud that night. 

'"White Eagle?' I ask-ed. 'No, the brother of White 
Eagle and his son,' Frar^ois told me. 

"Then we eat and smoked with no more questions, for it 
is not politeness to ask questions before doirg this. Then I 
asked Francois what kind of a trip he had. 

"'A good trip and a clear trail from the camp to the 
land of the Kootenais/ he told me. ' White Eagle he wanted 
very much to know why you wanted him to come; but he 
could not. Then he said he would send his brother and his 
son.' 

" ' Bien, I will tell them why I want them, and I will now 
tell you all of my plan.' 

" There was not much sleep in my tent that night, and at 
daylight I sent Francois out to get my horse, while the two 
Kootenais stayed hid in my tent. Then again, as the sun 
was rising I mounted my Indian pony and rode outside the 
sleeping camp. I lift my crucifix high in one hand and my 
Red Cross flag in the other and raising the Indian chant of 
Ho'ye-hi! I called 

"'Arise! Arise I Wake up, my friends; the news has 
come. . . . Now I will talk to you again.' 

"The Indians ran out of their tents. I stopped before my 
own tent. . . . All the time the Crees were watching me 
to see what new thing would be done by that strange Black- 
robe who had stayed so long in their camp without welcome. 
VOL. xciv. 30 



466 THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST [Jan. 

"Just then the two Kootenais rushed out of my tent. I 
look surprise, and cried out so that every man in camp might 
hear 

'"Who are these men?' 

" ' The Kootenais ! The Kootenais ! ' the Crees shouted, 
for they knew the men of this tribe by their dress and the 
manner of wearing their hair, which was peculiar to them. 

"'Fran9ois,' I called again in Cree. 'You speak the 
Kootenai ask these men from where they 'have come.' 

" ' I know. They are the brother of White Eagle and his 
son.' 

" ' Bon Bon* I say in delight. ' Now, my friends,' I say 
to the Kootenais with Francois for interpreter, ' we must have 
news of that land of paradise. Have you heard the story of 
Whitehead about your Chief, the White Eagle: that he died 
and found no place for him in the Kootenais' heaven nor in 
the white man's ?' 

'"It is false! It is false!' the two strangers cried with 
indig-nation. ' Is it possible that your tribes are such chil- 
dren to believe such a story ? . . . White Eagle is strong 
and alive: he was never dead. He is a Christian and so are 
all his people. We have been so for years, and we will never 
abandon it. It gives us much happiness and if our Cree 
friends have wisdom they, too, will take it.' 

" Whitehead now he was furious. He leap from his place, 
and walked out of the camp in one stubborn fury of anger. 
I could see that. 

" Then I looked about me and said : ' Now I can speak, 
my friends. I have proof for my words. When Whitehead 
spoke twelve days ago I knew he spoke falsely, but I had 
no proof, and you would not believe my word alone. But 
now I can talk 1 1 ! . . .' 

"Then again I talked to them, and they listen to me with 
more pleasure than before. Again their sun was rising for 
them, and they turned at once from their medicine-man and 
his lies and darkness. 

" When I had finish to speak the old men of the tribe 
came and asked me to teach their people the ways of Christ. 

"So all my trouble with this band was finish; and that 
time in my life I always call 'the Triumph of Christ.'" 




MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. 

BY THOMAS J. GERRARD. 

NE way of being able to write originally on a 
given subject, is to know nothing whatever about 
it. That is why George Bernard Shaw scintil- 
lates so brilliantly on marriage. And by mar- 
riage in this case I mean marriage according to 
the Catholic ideal. Shaw is, as Chesterton has shown, a Puri- 
tan through and through. He is the Puritan who has the 
fearlessness to push his Protestant principles to their ultimate 
absurdities. There are said to be only two men who under- 
stand the plays of Shaw, namely, himself and Chesterton. In- 
deed, just as Tolstoi had to write an afterword to tell us 
what Ike Krcutzer Sonata was all about, so Shaw has had to 
write a foreword to tell us what his marriage plays are all 
about. Whilst not being unmindful, therefore, of the various 
works ranging from The Irrational Knot to Fanny's First Play, 
I shall chiefly confine my attention to the preface of Getting 
Married. The key to the whole of Shaw's views on the sub- 
ject, seems to me to be found in the last lines of that essay. 
" We also have to bring ourselves " he says " into line with 
the rest of Protestant civilization by providing means for dis- 
solving all unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages." 

Of course, everybody sees that Shaw wants divorce as a 
panacea for all the ills of marriage as it is in its present con- 
dition. But not everybody sees that his purpose is the mere 
working out of the logic of facts. Start with false premises 
and then the closer you stick to logic the further will ycu go 
from truth. Misunderstand the Catholic ideal; and then you 
will ignore the Church's practical helps; and eventually you 
will arrive at the state of anarchy proposed by George Bernard 
Shaw. Shaw, the Puritan, gives you the premises, an entirely 
perverted notion of the sacramental nature of marriage. Shaw, 
the Irishman, gives you the spirit of righteous fight against 
oppressive evil, real or apparent. Shaw, the Progressive, gives 
you that disregard of all convention which was so needful if 



468 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW I Jan., 

Shaw the Puritan were to work out his natural evolution. 
He proves that the tampering with the sacraments at the 
Reformation, has fructified in the widespread unbappiness which 
is so evident to-day. He proposes a short cut to get out of 
the difficulty, but it is like the man who would get out of 
his debts by cutting his throat. 

Shaw sees that marriage is embedded in the law of nature. 
He quotes the plays of Brieux to prove what every man, who 
knows anything about men, knows, namely, that an avowedly 
illicit union is often as tyrannical, and as hard to escape from, 
as the worst legal one. The pair quarrel and fight and hate 
each other. Yet they have forged bonds, economical, psycho- 
logical and social which they cannot break. This solid fact 
must be faced if the work of destroying the marriage bond is 
to be effectual. No account whatever is taken of that other 
tremendous fact which looms so large in the Catholic system, 
the fact of divine grace. The sacramental character of mar- 
riage having been obscured, the true safeguard and remedy 
against illicit unions is not applied. The one force which is 
able to transmute human nature without destroying it is neg- 
lected. Catholic experience all over the world declares this. 
With the belief in, and use of, sacramental grace the Catholic 
can disentangle his difficulties without having recourse to vio- 
lence against the laws of nature and of God. Hence, Sir John 
Bigham, in evidence before the English Divorce Commission, 
could bear witness as President of the Divorce Court. " My 
experience shows me " he said " that members of the Roman 
Catholic Church seldom come to our court, and I attribute that 
fact to the great influence of their priesthood, and to the re- 
spect which is inculcated amongst Roman Catholics for the 
marriage vow " 

But what does "marriage" mean? Having shown that it 
is a fixed part of nature, Shaw proceeds to show that it is 
not. The assumption that it is, is a universal and constant error. 
What is believed always, everywhere and by everybody ex- 
cept George Bernard Shaw is untrue. Besides, the word may 
mean anything, civil marriage, sacramental marriage, Scotch 
marriage, Irish, French, German, Turkish, South Dakotan, 
monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability, morality, Chris- 
tianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things that have no 
connection with marriage. In other words, if one is as grossly 



i9i 2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 469 

ignorant of the subject as Mr. Shaw is, it is absolutely hope- 
less for him to attempt to discern between the substance of 
marriage and its accidental properties. However, in the midst 
of all his confusion of thought, Shaw feels that there is some- 
thing solid and lasting in the institution somewhere, some- 
thing which has come to stay. We may hope to improve its 
conditions; and the proposed improvements may all be summed 
up in easy and cheap divorce. 

Shaw feels instinctively that the greatest obstacle in the 
world to this improvement is the Roman Catholic Church. 
So he begins with the well-known Shavian trick of assuming 
that the reform he wants is really part and parcel of the wishes 
of his opponent. He declares that the Catholic Church actu- 
a'!y does grant divorce, and that all sensible people do ap- 
prove of it. 

I have never met anybody [he writes], really In favor of 
maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A 
Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally 
to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth 
counting believes directly, frankly and instinctively that when 
a person commits murder and is put into prison for twenty 
years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that 
murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it 
briefly, a contract for better, for worse is a contract that should 
not be tolerated. As a matter of fact it Is not tolerated fully 
even by the Roman Catholic Church ; for Roman Catholic 
marriages can be dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by 
the Pope. 

The writer of such a statement betrays such an amazing 
ignorance of the Catholic mind and instinct that one is tempted 
to acquit him of gross ignorance and to suspect him of affected 
ignorance. Nevertheless, amazing ignorance it is. Can he 
name any single representative Roman Catholic who would 
say that the husband or wife of a murderer should be free to 
marry again whilst the murderer is alive ? And if he says 
that the assent of the Roman Catholic to indissoluble mar- 
riage is merely verbal and not an assent of mind and heart, 
I ask: How does he know? He does not know. He judges 
from his own Puritan feelings and from the tendencies of that 
Protestant civilization to which he appeals. Against his 
gratuitous statement we may set the evidence of the Divorce 



470 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

Commission. First there is the testimony of Sir John Big- 
ham already quoted. Then there is the testimony of Dr. 
Glynn Whittle. The latter, although he speaks as a non- 
Catholic and as one in favor of divorce, shows plainly what 
is the direct, frank and instinctive belief of the Catholic poor. 
He said he had questioned countless poor women, victims of 
habitual cruelty, as to whether they would avail themselves 
of divorce if they could get it. The answers had been most 
impressive. Protestants said "Yes;" Roman Catholics said 
" No." He could not recall a single Protestant exception. 

There are, indeed, certain cases in which the Pope can 
sanction a dissolution of the marriage bond. It is well that 
these should be made clear, else the words of Mr. Shaw, un- 
less contradicted, might convey the impression that the Pope 
claims power to dissolve any Roman Catholic marriage. 

First then, there are two cases in which the sacramental 
bond can be dissolved. In both the marriage must be ratified 
but not consummated; that is, the pair must have been joined 
by the marriage rite but they must not have become two in 
one flesh. Such a union can be dissolved either by the solemn 
profession of one of the parties in a religious order, or by a 
dispensation of the Pope for a grave reason. In the one case 
the Pope approves, in the other he effects the dissolution. 

Secondly, there is a special case, somewhat analogous to 
these, known as the Pauline privilege. It is that of a mar- 
riage between a non-baptized pair, and it may be a fully 
consummated one. If one of the parties becomes converted to 
the Christian faith, and the other refuses to live peacefully, or 
insists on showing contempt for God and the Christian religion, 
or tries to pervert the Christian party, then the bond can be 
dissolved. The case is based on I. Cor. vii., 15. From the 
very nature of these exceptions they must be extremely rare. 
Outside them, the Pope has no power either to dissolve a 
marriage bond or to sanction a dissolution. Nor can it be 
shown that he has ever attempted to exercise such a power. 

The reason of this indissolubility is to be found in the 
nature and purpose of marriage as understood by the Catholic 
Church. The protection and happiness of marriage are to be 
found in the rules and counsels laid down by the Catholic 
Church. But George Bernard Shaw does not seem to be ac- 
quainted with any of these things. 



1912.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 47* 

First, he considers the supposition that the object of mar- 
riage is bliss. In that case either party ought to be able to 
dissolve the union as soon as it should become disagreeable. 
Then he takes the supposition that the end of marriage is the 
production and rearing of children. In that case childlessness 
should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. But, as a 
matter of fact, so he says, these are not the actual motives 
for indissolubility. The real thing which underlies the con- 
science of the crowd is the tenth commandment, the law which 
makes the wife the property of her husband, classing her with 
his house and his ox and his ass and everything that is his. 
This is the real, though secret, reason why public opinion in- 
sists on the perpetuity of marriage. But only the unthinking 
multitude clings to this convention. There is something in 
marriage now which makes all thoughtful people uncomfort- 
able. That something is the fall of the birth-rate. The licen- 
tiousness of marriage is no longer recruiting the race but de- 
stroying it. Shaw quotes a conference of respectable men, 
which he attended, organized by the eminent Methodist divine, 
the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. All these regarded the marriage 
ceremony, so Shaw reports, as a rite which absolved them from 
the laws of health and temperance. And the result is that En- 
glish home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous, wholesome, 
sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively English. 

Once again, the affinity between Shavianism and Puritan- 
ism is evident. Depart from the Catholic ideal at the start, 
and you very soon arrive at the irksoir.eness of the marriage 
state, and then the way is straight and easy to the anarchy 
involved in easy and cheap divorce. In the face of such loose- 
ness we must assert the Catholic ideal. In our system the 
end of marriage is not merely bliss; nor merely the pro- 
creation and rearing of children; nor yet merely the observ- 
ance of the tenth commandment. It does include these things, 
and more besides. In our system marriage is a sacrament de- 
signed to promote the highest well-being of the race. The 
salvation of man to the glory of his Creator is its final aim. 
Subordinate to this there are three proximate ends, namely, 
the procreation and education of children, the avoiding of 
concupiscence, and the fostering of mutual love. Each of 
these ends has a racial as well as an individualist value. Each 
acts and reacts upon the other strengthening both for the 



472 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

good of the individual and of the race. Thus, a given union 
may fail in the attainment of one of its ends and yet succeed 
in the other two. A union may be childless, and yet, never- 
theless, a bond promoting bliss between the two and pre- 
venting them from being attracted to other households. Thus, 
the perpetuity of the childless union is seen to act as a pro- 
tection to the fruitful union. Doubtless all marriages are, in 
one respect or another, burdensome. But that is no reason 
for dissolving all marriages. The burden is love's opportunity. 
Each individual accepts his own burden as his share of the bur- 
den of the race. He pays in order that he may gain. What he 
loses as an individual he gains as an organic member of the race. 

The burden, however, is rendered bearable by observance 
of the Church's rules and counsels. The falling birth-rate and 
all the racial evils which follow upon a licentious use of the 
marriage state are provided against in the Catholic system. 
All tampering with nature in the way of artificial restriction 
is forbidden under pain of mortal sin. Sensual pleasure is 
never allowed to be an end in itself. It is a gift of God which 
is to be subordinated to the three proximate ends of matri- 
mony, whilst these in turn are subordinated to the final end. 
If only the counsels of the Church in this matter were ob- 
served, they would be found to minister to health and temper- 
ance. Nay more, they would be found to be the means of 
building up strong character, that restrained manliness in men 
and delicate modesty in women, the characteristics which are 
of the highest eugenic worth and which are the pride of the 
free races. Marriage means all this to the Catholic, and, in- 
deed, much more. It means not only a contract adapted in 
every way to the promotion of the natural good of the race, 
but also a sacrament adapted in every way to the promotion 
of the higher spirit life and the attainment of perfect happi- 
ness. It is thus one of the principal instruments for the ac- 
complishment of the highest eugenic ideals. 

The Catholic system, moreover, repudiates that notion of 
marriage which makes of it a one-sided slavery in which the 
woman is regarded as the mere property of the man. Perhaps 
the surface value of the tenth commandment does indicate an 
unworthy lot for the woman. Certainly the Shavian interpre- 
tation of that commandment does. And certainly Protestant- 
ism declares the right of George Bernard Shaw to his private 



i9i2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 473 

judgment on the tenth commandment. But the Catholic Church 
allows carte blanche to none of her children. And her inter- 
pretation of the tenth commandment in its application to the 
sacrament of marriage is that the man is just as much the 
property of the woman as the woman is of the man. The very 
essence of the sacrament consists in a contract by which the 
parties hand themselves over to each other to be kept until 
death. If, for the purposes of justice, a man's wife is named 
together with his horse and his ass and his chattels, so, like- 
wise, in the Catholic system a woman's husband is, for the 
same purpose, numbered with her motor-cars and her hats 
and her bicycles. A sin committed with either of a married 
couple is a double sin, a sin of impurity in itself and a sin of 
injustice against the innocent party. 

Shaw is observant enough to see that the prevalence of 
small families tends towards degeneration. There is not that 
opportunity in them for the exercise of self-control and the 
practice of consideration for others. Healthy love turns into 
maudlin sentimentality. "Ten children," he says, "with the 
necessary adults, makes a community in which an excess of 
sentimentality is impossible. Two children make a doll's house, 
in which both parents and children become morbid if they 
keep to themselves." The softness of life consequent upon 
the smallness of the family has now become so insipid as to 
constitute another argument against the perpetuity of the mar- 
riage bond. Nay, this particular reason for getting unmarried 
is even stronger than the revolt against the sordidness of sex- 
slavery. That, indeed, were, at least, bearable. What is quite 
impossible is the sentimentality, the romance, the amorism and 
the enervating happiness, such as it is. Once again Shaw 
tries to set a premium on weakness and evil. Because, for- 
sooth, a married pair have been soft enough to shirk half the 
burden of their life, they must mend matters by shirking the 
other half, too. Surely it would strike the most casual ob- 
server, that if the large family is the environment which has 
proved suitable for developing strong characters, it were sheer 
madness to do anything tending towards the disintegration of 
the old ideal. But the old ideal happens to be the Catholic 
ideal, and Shaw wants to bring us into line with the rest of 
Protestant civilization. 

For the purpose of carrying out the wholesale slaughter 



474 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

of the old ideas there is wanted an Immoral Statesman. Shaw 
is reluctant to acknowledge Nietzsche as his master. He is 
like Whistler, who was dumbfounded that any one should drag 
in Velasquez. Without wishing to hurt anybody's feelings, 
however, we must drag in Nietzsche. He is the avowed Great 
Immoralist. His object was to produce a state of life which 
should be absolutely lawless. Shaw wants a statesman who 
can ride over what is left of Catholic influence after the havoc 
of three hundred years of Protestant influence. For, after all, 
the unthinking multitude "accept social changes to-day as 
tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under 
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and after 
Mary's death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded 
from both doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of 
England." This Immoral Statesman must clearly understand 
that he is to prefer one healthy illegitimate child to ten rick- 
ety legitimate ones, and one energetic and capable unmarried 
couple to a dozen inferior apathetic husbands and wives. 

But what if it happens that children born in wedlock are 
more likely to be healthy, whilst those born illegitimate are 
more likely to be rickety ? A much more pressing evil than 
rickets is feeble-mindedness. And here it has been proved 
beyond all doubt that feeble-minded children are largely re- 
cruited from illegitimate unions, and that the only hope of 
reducing the number of feeble-minded is by a judicious selec- 
tion for marriage and a segregation of the unfit. On this 
point, however, Mr. Shaw has been sufficiently answered by 
Dr. Saleeby. If babies are to be healthy and well-nurtured 
they must be the object of a mother's tender love and care. 
And the mother's contribution to the baby's life and well-being 
must not be merely physical, but also psychic and spiritual : 
she must be a mother in the highest sense of the word. For 
motherhood, however, there is needed the support and protec- 
tion of fatherhood. 

Do you realize [says Saleeby to Shaw] that marriage is 
invaluable because it makes for the enthronement of mother- 
hood as nothing else ever did or can ; do you realize that, 
metaphors about state maternity notwithstanding, the state 
has neither womb nor breasts, these most reverend and divine 
of all vital organs being the appanage of the individual mother 
alone ? 



i9i2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 475 

We are in the presence of one of the first instincts of 
nature, one common both to the thoughtful and to the thought, 
less members of the community. Still the birth-rate goes 
down. The very latest for England is the lowest. What is 
the Immoral Statesman to do? Dare he look human nature 
in the face and strike it? What are the points which he will 
have to consider? First, he will have to decide how many 
people he wants. If he wants less than at present and chooses 
to allow the fall to continue by present methods, he will have 
to find a way of stopping it when it has gone far enough. If 
he wants it to remain as it is or to increase, he will have to 
find a way of inducing people to have more children. This 
cannot be done merely by any economic adjustment, for if 
every family had .10,000 a year, there would still be found 
those who would shirk the burden of child-bearing. He can- 
not introduce the system of bees, for on the other hand the 
instinct for child-bearing is too strong and too widespread. 
Farther, he cannot have recourse to polygamy, for there would 
be too many men against him, afraid of being left wifeless. 
Nor can he have recourse to polyandry, for then he would 
have too many women against him, afraid of being left hus- 
bandless. The solid fact remains that the numbers of the 
sexes are about equally balanced. The proportion is about 
I 11 women to i man. Shaw suggests that the only way out 
of the difficulty is by legitimizing illegitimacy. 

We must protest, by the way, against Shaw's perversion 
of St. Paul. He says that the Pauline view regards sexual 
experience as something sinful in itself. Now St. Thomas 
Aquinas, basing his doctrine on the famous seventh chapter of 
the first epistle to the Corinthians, teaches that the marriage 
act, under proper conditions, is meritorious. So there will be 
no need for the Immoral Statesman to counteract the Catholic 
interpretation of St. Paul, although he may have something to 
say against the interpretation made by Shaw the Puritan. 

A less excusable mistake is that made by Shaw the Pro- 
gressive. With all his boasted familiarity with statistics he 
ought to know that the excess of women over men is not due 
to any want of balance in nature, but to the higher rate of 
mortality amongst male infants. Of the children actually born, 
the sexes are about equal in number. But somehow the males 
require a superior kind of nursing which they do not get. 



476 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

The question, therefore, harks back to the supreme importance 
of motherhood, to the indispensable support of fatherhood, to 
the indissolubility of the marriage bond. 

If there are people who, through temperament, taste and 
disposition, judge themselves unfitted for the married life, the 
Catholic system provides an alternative. It is the ideal of St. 
Paul. Marriage is good and meritorious, and is, moreover, 
the state of life best suited to the majority of mankind. Sin- 
gle life in the world is better, but suited only for the few. 
Single life in the cloister is best of all, but requires such ex- 
ceptional dispositions as to be accessible only to a still smaller 
number. Accept the full Catholic ideal, and the sexual prob- 
lem is solved. We can easily understand how the Protestant 
revolt against the celibate life of the cloister has told against 
the celibate life in the world. The argument used was that 
nature could not stand it. And if nature could not stand it 
in the protection of the cloister, much less could it stand it in 
the openness of the world. The propagation of such a disin- 
tegrating idea was sure to fructify in conduct. Again we have 
to insist on the tremendous fact of grace working in the world. 
Grace can where nature cannot. The present movement for 
the emancipation of women and their economic independence 
only shows the need felt for the Church's ideal. George Ber- 
nard Shaw is vaguely voicing that need ; he is like a child 
shrieking for a present which Mother Church is only trying to 
give him. 

When Shaw begins to work out in detail plans for legiti- 
mizing children born out of wedlock he begins to see that 
society is one organic whole; and that individuals tend to act 
in sympathy with the laws of the total organism. If freedom 
is granted to one it must also be granted to another. Ibsen's 
similitude of the chain stitch applies to marriage. If a single 
stitch is cut, the first pull unravels the whole seam. But, he 
asks, do we not see the fabric already coming to pieces under 
stress of circumstances? We must agree with him that we do. 
Marriage as a fact is certainly far removed from marriage as 
an ideal. Shaw laughs at the marriage ceremony because it 
does not act as a magic spell and immediately produce the 
ideal husband and wife. But that is precisely where he hits 
the Protestant doctrine and misses the Catholic. According to 
the Protestant doctrine the ceremony merely binds the couple 



i9i2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 477 

by a natural contract, whereas, according to the Catholic doc- 
trine, such contract is a sacrament. The sacrament received 
on the wedding day gives a permanent right, all through life, 
to such graces necessary for the well-being of the marriage 
state. The wedding ceremony, therefore, is no vague religious 
rite or superstitious magic spell which is supposed to revolu- 
tionize human nature on the wedding day. But it is the in- 
strumental cause of graces which, if corresponded with, will 
enable the couple to cope with their daily trials and cares, and 
in this way approximate ever nearer and nearer to the idea). 
The ideal may never be reached. It is not, therefore, uselesf, 
for the very striving for it is the weft and woof of the strorg 
character so needful for parenthood and thus so needful for 
racial well-being. 

In a chapter on the Impersonality of Sex, Shaw proves con- 
clusively that the specific relation which marriage authorizes 
between the parties does not of itself include all the higher 
human relationships. It does not necessarily imply affection, 
congeniality of tastes, similarity of habits, suitability of class. 
The most disastrous marriages are those founded exclusively 
on it. The most successful, so Shaw thinks, are those in 
which it has been least considered. Moreover, it is beset with 
the wildest illusions for those who have had no experience of 
it. Nevertheless, the number of marriages in which this has 
been the chief, and perhaps only, consideration must be enor- 
mous. It is the one thing which is offered as a bait to attract 
men who have money. Not, therefore, by any reform in the 
marriage laws will this be altered, but by economic changes. 
The present movement for the prevention of destitution will, 
it is argued, take away the horror of the dependence of wo- 
men on men. Then selection for marriage will be decided only 
out of the highest motives. 

If this were so the economic movement would be well 
served by the blood of martyrs. But unfortunately, yet obvi- 
ously, wealth in money is not the only factor which competes 
for the sex- relationship. There are scores of mothers and 
scores of daughters who, endowed with abundance of gold, 
want something else in the husbands which they seek. Fame, 
for instance, in its many forms, is a motive which would 
readily assume an even more dominant place than it has at 
present, if the economic motive were abolished. 



478 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

The problem of sex attraction is much too complicated to 
be settled by a Poor Law Commission. Its ramifications ex- 
tend into so many branches of life, that, if its laws must be 
altered, the whole of human life must be disturbed. Human 
nature must be changed into something else. This is no way 
out of the difficulty. We are touching only the surface of the 
problem. We need to go to the foundation and see that man 
has a spiritual nature. The appetites which have sex and gold 
and fame for their objects can be controlled and made to har- 
monize with each other for man's welfare, only when they are 
subordinated to the claims of the spirit. Sex, gold and fame 
certainly ought to be taken into consideration in selection for 
marriage, but they ought to be kept subordinate to these 
higher factors which make for real happiness, namely intelli- 
gence and love; whilst these faculties, in turn, will make for 
still more happiness if kept subordinate to grace and revela- 
tion. The Church has a collective experience of human na- 
ture such as is possessed by no individual, nor yet by any 
other corporation. It has a collective judgment by which it 
is able to appraise the claims of appetites, of the volitional 
and intellectual faculties, and of the higher spiritual forces 
which act upon these. 

Man is not merely a sexual animal, but he is nevertheless 
a sexual animal. This specific relationship is not the highest, 
but neither is it the lowest. The fact that the survival of the 
race depends upon it adds an enormous dignity to its strength. 
Being what it is it simply must enter largely into considera- 
tion in selection for marriage. Shaw proposes that we should 
deal with the sex relationship as impersonal. He asks us to 
regard it, and 'feel about it, and legislate on it, only as if the 
question were an impersonal one. This would make a domes- 
tic change of air easier. 

Here Shaw enters into competition with Don Quixote and 
figures as an easy first, for the blatant reason that a wind- 
mill is merely a windmill whereas human nature is human na- 
ture. The fact of sex has to be faced as a personal problem 
by every man and woman alive. It is so peremptory that it 
must of necessity enter into the development or deteriora- 
tion of each one's personality. The question is one either of 
fruition or of renunciation. There can be no question of in- 
difference. Under the power of grace a large amount of 



i9i2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 479 

peace may be secured, but even then there is ever the obli- 
gation of a man taking heed lest he fall. In all cases, then, 
of admiration, friendship, sympathy and so forth outside the 
marriage bond, watchfulness is needed and certain barriers are 
necessary. The most powerful of all protections is the indis- 
solubility of the marriage bond and all the numerous graces 
of which the sacrament is the channel. It may be true, as 
Shaw alleges in support cf his proposal, that no man ever 
yet fell in love with the entire female sex, nor any woman 
with the entire male sex. That is not the point. The point 
is that if divorce is made easy the inviolability of marriage is 
no longer sacred. The whole of the female sex becomes a 
possible sphere of choice for the man with loose ideas, and 
similarly the whole of the male sex for a woman with loose 
ideas. The sophism here perpetrated by Shaw is labeled in 
the school of logic Jallacy of composition. 

Mr. Shaw is very fastidious about manners. He does not 
eat meat, for instance, because it is such bad taste to eat 
something which has once been alive, but he does eat vege- 
tables as though they had not been alive. With a similar fas- 
tidiousness he advocates domestic change of air because when 
people continue to live in the same family they become too 
familiar with each other and lose their good manners. What 
he fails to see is that really good manners have their well- 
spring in reverence, not in novelty of acquaintance. Now this 
reverence can only be cultivated where there is a frank ac- 
knowledgment of the Fatherhood of God from Whom all 
earthly fatherhood is derived. The Fatherhood of God is the 
revelation of God's all-pervading tenderness and consideration. 
It involves as a primary concept His complete transcendence. 
But the transcendence of God is the truth which modern 
Protestantism cannot tolerate. Where the new theology has 
not yet made headway it may be admitted as a philosophical 
concept, but even there not as a practical rule of life. 
It is the privilege of Catholicism to insist both on the fact 
value and the pragmatic value of God's transcendence. That 
is vizualized for us in the analogies of Fatherhood and Son- 
ship. It is made practical for us in a system of morality, the 
key to which is filial obedience to divine laws. When parents 
have cultivated this habit of mind and thought then ate they 
capable of training their children in the same way. Part of 



480 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan., 

that system of divine laws is that there shall be no artificial 
tampering with the birth-rate. The observance of such laws, 
therefore, results in large families as a rule. Even in the natu- 
ral order the large family is, as Shaw perfectly demonstrates, 
the best training school for a social being. The upper-classes 
move more in society and thus get some social training. The 
lower-classes live practically in the streets and there get their 
social training. But "in the middle-classes, where the segre- 
gation of the artificially limited family in its little brick box 
is horribly complete, bad manners, ugly dresses, awkwardness, 
cowardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of unsociabil- 
ity flourish like mushrooms in a cellar." 

Once again Shaw is tinkering with the symptoms of the 
disease instead of attending to its cause. If these petty vices 
are the result of artificially limited families the obvious cure 
is not to limit families artificially. To do so, and then try to 
alleviate the consequent evils by supplanting mothers with 
step-mothers, and fathers with step-fathers, is simply to pro- 
long the agony. 

Shaw professedly exaggerates his case with the purpose of 
shaking up thoughtlessly conventional people. He loves to 
tilt against that which is. Therefore, because infidelity to the 
sex relationship is the usual reason allowed for divorce, it 
ought never to be considered a valid reason. Just as on the 
one hand sex is impersonal, so on the other hand the basis 
of monogamy is personal sentiment. This personal sentiment 
is quite capable of keeping the marriage monogamous as long 
as it is present; and when it is not present, then is the time 
to seek for divorce. The most sensible ground for divorce is, 
so it is asserted, that both parties want it. After that, it 
will be sufficient if one of the parties can prove that the other 
is a liar, a borrower, a mischief-maker, a teaser, or tormentor 
of children, or even simply a bore 1 

In his effort to sparkle Shaw has forgotten the Ibstn chain 
stitch. When a single stitch is ripped, the first pull unravels 
the whole seam. When once the ordinary failings, to which 
human nature is liable, are allowed to be sufficient reasons 
for divorce, then the first stitch has been ripped. When 
people know that the bond is loose, every little quarrel will 
tend towards the dissolution of the marriage state; and con- 
sequently, since society depends upon marriage, will terd 



i9i2.] MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 481 

towards the dissolution of society. On the other hand, when 
they know that the bond is eternal, they will make an effort 
to avoid quarrels, or having made them, to make them up. 
And it is precisely this self-restraint and mutual forbearance 
which builds up the character of the individual, of the pair, 
of the family, of the state. 

At this point Shaw the Puritan comes forward. The self- 
restraint consequent upon the indissolubility of marriage " is 
the penalty we pay for having borrowed our religion from the 
East, instead of building up a religion of our own out of our 
western inspiration and western sentiment." Certainly he points 
with unerring finger the true orientation of the Protestant 
movement. It is an orientation towards pure subjectivism. 
The objective authority, which was embodied in a teaching 
Pope, having been rejected, the next logical step is to reject 
the authority that came from the East, and to supplant it 
with an authority grown in the West. And when we seek 
for the origin of this authority of the West, we find that, 
Topsy-like, it "growed." Anything transcending its little 
dusky self is incomprehensible. It grew from within, was not 
conferred from above. Each man is to be a law unto him- 
self. Such a one is Shaw's Superman. He may take a wife 
or fling her away just when he chooses. 

The next trick is pure Shavian sleight-of-hand. 

Divorce [he says] is favorable to marriage. A thousand 
indissoluble marriages mean a thousand marriages and no 
more. A thousand divorces may mean two thousand mar- 
riages ; for the couples may marry again. Divorce only re- 
assorts the couples ; a very desirable thing when they are 
ill-assorted. Also, it makes people much more willing to 
marry. 

And there's the rub. Make divorce easy and people will 
rush into marriage regardless of the law of reason, guided 
only by emotion. Shaw quotes figures, but his figures only 
prove that in those places where divorce is more prevalent 
unhappy marriages are more frequent ; for people would not 
seek divorce if they were happily married. 

Oar last point concerns the question of children. One of 
the most cogent reasons for the indissolubility of the mar- 
riage bond is that it is necessary for the good of the children. 
VOL. XCIT. 31 



482 MARRIAGE AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [Jan. 

Shaw has no difficulty in citing cases where the domestic in- 
terior has been for the children a little private hell. Poverty, 
moreover, is only too frequently the cause of parental neglect. 
Moreover, the artificial parenthood provided by the state is 
often no better than the natural parenthood which it super- 
sedes. 

Until we abolish poverty it is impossible to push rational 
measures of any kind very far ; the wolf at the door will com- 
pel us to live in a state of siege and to do everything by a 
bureaucratic martial law that would be quite unnecessary and, 
indeed, intolerable in a prosperous community. 

We grant once more, and even insist with Shaw, that the 
living wage is a great factor in the solution of the problem. 
But because some parents are unwilling and some unable to 
perform the duties of parenthood, it does not follow that all 
parents are to be exonerated from parental duties. Laws are 
made for the community not for individuals. Every law in- 
deed, from the fact that it is made to suit the community as 
a whole, must press more heavily on some individuals than 
upon others. Hence we may admit that the indissolubility of 
the marriage bond does tell against the good of the offspring 
in some few cases. But the loss thus suffered is far less than 
would be suffered if there were no law. Quamvis ergo matri- 
monii inseparabilitas impediat bonum prolis in aliquo homine, tamen 
est conveniens ad bonum prolis simpliciter. The Shavian sophism 
consists in picking out a few accidental defects and treating 
them as if they were essential constituents of the institution. 
In the school of logic we call it the fallacy of accident. 




"TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE." 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. 

ACCORDING to Fenelon, the validity of our spir- 
itual state depends on our answers to the fol- 
lowing questions: Do I love to think of God? 
Am I willing to suffer for God ? Does my de- 
sire to be with Him destroy my fear of death ? 
There is no variance in the teaching of spiritual writers, 
that holiness of life and willingness to die are inseparable 
dispositions, forming that character that " shall not be con- 
founded when he shall speak to his enemies in the gate" of 
death (Ps. cxxvi. 5). 

I. 

Of the death of a just man it has been said, that it is a 
door which is iron on one side and gold on the other side 
that heavenly side, where Christ and His angels attend the 
entrance of those who die happy. Well may we honor death, 
for it emancipates our love of divine things from the deceits 
of transitory things: death is freedom final and perfect from 
all delusions It is a token of love; it is a witness of final 
perseverance in love; it pays love's debt, being the one per- 
fect atonement for the injury love has suffered by sin. 

As our years go onward the fruit of life ripens whilst the 
leaves decay, and death strips the tree of mortal things and 
garners our eternal merits into the bosom of God. 

Thus death has a joyous aspect, nay, it is the all-joyous 
entrance to eternal joy. St. Paul cried out: "For me to live 
is Christ, and to die is gain" (Phil. i. 21); and again when suf- 
fering from the plots of enemies: "From henceforth let no 
man be troublesome to me ; for I bear the marks of the Lord 
Jesus in my body" [(Gal. vi. 17), meaning that the Lord's 
death wounds were shown forth by the apostle's mortified 
bodily frame, just as the death of Jesus was the constant 
theme of his discourses. With many good Christians the whole 



484 " TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE" [Jan., 

fear of God is fear of death, a sentiment corrected by St. 
Francis de Sales thus: "I beseech you for the honor of God, 
my child, not to be " afraid " of God, for He does not wish to do 
you any harm" (Letters to Persons in the World, Mackey, p. 295). 
Meanwhile deep-seated fear of God is quite consistent with 
not being afraid of death. If death has its terrors, they are 
not for a soldier of Jesus Crucified. The noblest courage of 
life is shown in facing death unflinchingly. 

What is the Christian Church ? An institution founded by 
God to show forth a death. What death? The death that 
goes before life eternal, that of God at Jerusalem. To show 
forth that death for how long ? Till all men each in turn 
shall have died. To show it forth to whom ? To all man- 
kind, in every corner of the world, in every death- chamber in 
the world, so that, as the apostle teaches, being dead with 
Christ we may " live also together with Christ" in heaven for 
all eternity (Rom. vi. 8). Hence the dearest wisdom of the 
Catholic Church is the lesson of n happy death, a wisdom 
never out of season. For if there is the greatest need of 
hope in the closing period of a Christian's life despondency 
is in the very air of those twilight hours yet most aged 
Christians face death without flinching. And there are some 
temperaments which even in the buoyant years of youth tremble 
at the thought of death. To young and old the practice of 
Catholic virtue brings courage to face our inevitable foe, come 
he early or late, sudden or with timely warnings. 

We are men of Christ's divine death. We are enrolled 
among the living by the death of Christ. It cannot be that 
we shall tremble at death, since God forbid that we should 
glory in anything save in the cross, the death-gibbet of our 
Lord Jesus Christ (Gal. vi. 14). Therefore, St. Philip Neri 
says that "The true servants of God take life patiently and 
death eagerly." 

St. Cyprian, discoursing of true Christian learning, points 
to the martyrs as holding its highest diploma, saying that 
" They knew not how to dispute, but they knew how to die." 
Every Christian may win the premium of a happy death, even 
though the little catechism is the limit of his learning. Better 
still is the thought that love, the easiest of virtues because the 
sweetest, challenges all the terrors of the last passage, " For 
strong as death is love " (Cant. viii. 6). 



i9i2.] "TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE" 485 

II. 

We know that each of us has ever at his side a close com- 
panion of the heavenly kind, our angel guardian. But how 
vivid a contrast between his life and mine. He drinks of the 
waters of life at the very fountain-head and in overflow- 
ing abundance; I only in little sips, and with a hand that 
tremblingly spills those precious drops of divine inspiration. 
He lives upon Godlike food, nay, he is forever eating and 
drinking of the celestial food that veritably is God Himself; 
I only occasionally partake of God in Holy Communion, and 
then with taste already sated with carnal banquets, my usual 
food being the dust of the earth, sauced with sin's ugly, glut- 
tonous hunger. He lives unchangeably alive with divine vi- 
tality, and I live a life slowly rotting away, doomed finally 
to be changed into the earth that I live by and that I so 
fondly love. To my life the light of the sun is all my light, 
and I sftall be deprived of even that, and my eyes shall one 
day gaze at the noon-day sun and see only black darkness. 
How different from me art thou, and how much more happy 
thy lot, O my good angel. And yet I have one privilege 
which thou hast not: I can die. In that privilege I am closer 
to thy divine King than thou art. I can say what thou canst 
not: "With Christ I am nailed to the cross" (Gal. ii. 19). 
He is thy King, indeed, and yet thou canst not say as I 
can : " Let us also go, that we may die with Him " (John xi. 
16). I had rather be a man whose lot is with Jesus dead and 
buried, than an angel who cannot taste death nor the grave. 

III. 

St. Teresa says that " Life is to live in such a way as not 
to be afraid to die " (Foundations, xxvii. 10). Nor does readi- 
ness to die here and now undervalue the self-distrust about 
future temptations, which has the effect of concentrating one's 
efforts on the present religious opportunities. This day at 
least is mine. Humbly and confidently I pass its hours, per- 
form its duties, offer up its sufferings. To do this and to do 
it fairly well for one day is not difficult, but it is enough to 
comfort my mind concerning the day of death, be it near or 
far. If I do well to-day I have no mental energies to waste 
on misgivings about to-morrow. What is now to-day, was 
to-morrow a few hours ago. And that day of my life whose 



486 " TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE " [Jan., 

morrow shall be eternity, shall be controlled by the mo- 
mentum of an interior habit of resting in thoughts of God. 
Therefore does the apostle boast: "We had in ourselves the 
answer of death, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in 
God, Who raiseth the dead" (II. Cor. i. 9). 

He that is at ease in the interior ways of God, steps forth 
gladly into the way of death. He that loves no person or 
thing save only in the order of reason and of grace, soon 
learns thus to go on and ever on until death. "Thy testi- 
monies have become exceedingly credible; holiness becometh 
Thy house, O Lord, unto length of days " (Ps. xxii. 6). 

St. Thomas Aquinas was asked on his death-bed how to 
become perfect. He answered : " Walk faithfully in God's 
presence, always be ready to give Him an account of thy 
actions as at the point of death." God and death are the 
names of the teacher and the lesson in the school of life. It 
is related in the Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, 
that there was a little boy in her orphan asylum who was 
very pious, praying fervently and intelligently at the age of 
even four years. Before he reached five he died, and as he 
was judged too young to receive Holy Communion, the sisters 
requested the bishop to give him confirmation. He was told 
he could take another name on receiving the sacrament, that 
of some Saint whom he especially loved. " Then," said he, 
"let me take God for my new name, for there is nobody I 
love like Him." And if he could not have that incom- 
municable name in life, yet his innocent soul received it after 
death, for the holy chrism placed him among those who 
" shall see His face, and His name shall be on their fore- 
heads " (Apoc. xxii. 4). 

IV. 

Among the last words of St. Teresa were these : " I am 
a child of the Church." She offered her death as witness of 
her fidelity to the Catholic Church, the Spouse of Christ. 
Our Lord's words to Pilate show how He valued His death 
as a token of faithfulness to truth: "For this was I born, 
and for this came I into the world, that I should give testi- 
mony to the truth " (John xviii. 37) this in answer to the 
Jews' clamors for His crucifixion ; and of the Eucharist, His 
death's universal and perpetual memorial He says: "This is 
the New Testament in My blood " (Luke xxii. 20). 



1912.] " TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE" 487 

God exacts this evidence of allegiance from all for all must 
die, and without this we should fall short of a perfect quit- 
tance of our obligation to manifest our loyalty. Suppose that 
you could be exempted from death. You would be not only 
separated from the lot of Jesus Christ and His saints, but 
you would appear before Him empty of the best credentials 
for paradise. Without presenting this crucial test you would 
be ashamed to enter heaven, which is the abode of men and 
women who know Christ in His glory, because they have been 
" made conformable to His death " (Phil. iii. 10). Love, whose 
last word is spoken in death, is most truly eloquent when its 
pulpit is fixed at the eternal parting of the ways. The golden 
age of our religion was when men and women, quitting pagan- 
ism, must prepare for martyrdom, an era of death witnessing 
Christ and His truth as the usual Christian condition. 

V. 

The Psalmists saying, "Precious in the sight of God is the 
death of His saints" (Ps. cxv. 15) is a revelation of the be- 
nignant Father receiving into His bosom the heroic soul of 
His beloved child. But, in a sense, the death of a penitent 
sinner, even one but newly changed from foe to friend, is di- 
vinely precious. Whatever else was lacking the Good Thief, 
he had his death to offer to the Father in union with that of 
the Only Begotten. Whosoever can present to God the su- 
preme atonement of death is not to be disheartened by the 
remembrance of a whole lifetime crowded with foulest iniqui- 
ties. Even if his death be the consequence, nay the very 
penalty of his crimes, if he be but truly contrite his death 
chamber shall resound with the eternal promise of Calvary: 
"This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise " (Luke xxiii. 43). 

All this helps to answer a palpable difficulty: How can I 
offer my death to God as a ransom since I must perforce pay 
it as a debt? The solution is this: By my death I give in 
love what I might give in hate. Take an illustration of each 
sort of death, one of hate and one of love. Julian, the Apos- 
tate, having spent his whole reign endeavoring to destroy the 
worship of Christ in the Roman Empire, came to his death 
from a Parthian arrow. Sinking upon the ground, he saw his 
life-blood leaping forth from the wound, and with his remain- 
ing strength he cast it in handfuls into the air exclaiming to 



488 " TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE " [Jan., 

Christ in despair and defiance, " O Galilean, Thou bast con- 
quered." Francisco Pizarro was one of the crudest of man- 
kind, a murderer by system, consummating a career of human 
slaughter by putting the Inca to death against his plighted 
word. Broken at last in health, and touched by divine grace, 
surrounded by traitors whom he had enriched by his blood- 
stained booty, he was suddenly set upon by his treacherous 
followers and assassinated. He fought hard for his life, but 
at last he sank down. Then, knowing his end had come, he 
dabbled his hand in his blood and with it made a large cross 
on the ground, and murmuring a prayer to God for pardon 
he fell over upon that cross of his own blood and expired. 

VI. 

A wife gives her husband a birthday present. She bought 
it with his money, for is not all that she has, given her by 
him ? Yet it is really a gift to him and a most welcome one. 
Though wholly his property by original ownership, yet now 
she has made it infinitely more so by making it a token of 
her affection. Such is the relation of a Christian to God in 
saying to his heavenly Father with Jesus Crucified: "Father 
into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke xxiii. 46). 

Thus the sadness of my last hours is cheered by my power 
to make my death agony a token of immortal love. I can 
unite it to that of Jesus Christ by a prerogative granted me 
at my first presentation to Him by my mother, the Catholic 
Church : " Know you not that all we, who are baptized in 
Christ Jesus, are baptized in His death?" (Rom. vi. 3). As 
our Savior was compelled to death by the will of His Father, 
and yet offered Himself on the cross because He willed it and 
not otherwise (Isaias liii. 7), so likewise am I free to die, and 
yet powerless to escape death. Christ is my fellowman, my 
fellow ransomer, my partner in the barter of mortality for 
immortality; and from His superabundance of liberty and of 
obedience unto death I will freely draw. I desire to die the 
kind of death the Lord wills rather than any other, His time 
rather than earlier or later, accepting all the pains cheerfully 
in stated preference to their absence.* I thus give my death 
its moral quality ; it is all I can give, but it is much. 

* The present Sovereign Pontiff has indulgenced the following prayer: " O Lord my God, 
whatsoever manner of death is pleasing to Thee, with all its anguish, pains and sorrows, I 
now accept from Thy hand with a resigned and willing spirit." 



i9i3.] " TILL THE SHADOWS RETIRE" 489 

VII. 

In no way can the clamor of divine justice within us be 
hushed so quickly as by the offer to die. I am a sinner, and 
"the wages of sin is death" (Rom. vi. 23). I must accept 
my deserts. An honest man gladly parts with hard- won 
money to pay a just debt, because it settles his conscience, 
on which he depends for his happiness. So do we look for- 
ward to pay the " debt of nature," corrupt nature. All life is 
a debtor's prison, not without solace, but never without the 
chafe of the body upon the soul. Our bodily frame is our 
prison-cell. The dust placed on our heads by Holy Church 
on Ash Wednesday, is gathered from the withered forms of 
the countless sinners who have gone before us, as ours shall 
be gathered in turn and sprinkled upon our successors. Such 
thoughts give a gloomy view of life, but only for a time, for 
they indicate unerringly the actual relation of life to death in 
a sin-stricken race; and once they become familiar, they lead 
us habitually to reckon exclusively' with the immortal things 
of our destiny. The vast bulk of Christians are penitents, and 
their only really great gift to God is their death. And it ap- 
proaches nearest to an adequate gift, for the sinner of longest 
years, whose foulness has smirched his whole life from his 
infantile furies till his gray- haired lust. Repenting at the 
eleventh hour, he is wholly comforted to be able to say : I can 
yet die for my outraged Redeemer, with Him, and on account 
of Him. This is infinitely better than the millionaire's legacy 
to charity, paid to God after its owner can no longer enjoy 
it. Life is greater than money. Death is an offering of su- 
preme greatness. We cannot pay God money any more than 
we can feed Him with bread. Says the Lord to faithless Is- 
rael: "If I should be hungry I would not tell thee, for the 
world is Mine and the fulness thereof " (Ps. xlix. 12). And 
yet alms given to God's poor are for the remission of sins 
(Tob. xii. 9). How much rather the whole substance of our 
life's house in the offering up of death. 

An illustration of this is shown by the custom of devout 
souls secretly offering themselves up to immediate death an 
oblation not seldom accepted by heaven for the conversion 
of some well-loved friend whose career points to an evil end. 
And, indeed, with what other intention than this, made uni- 
versal, did Jesus Christ die on Calvary ? 




THE CONSUMMATION. 

BY DAGNEY MAJOR. 

]HE great cathedral was practically empty. There 
were few to notice the forlorn figure of the lit- 
tle fellow as he stood looking with rapt awe and 
devotion at the beautiful face of the sculptured 
Madonna. 

His clothes were in rags. His brown, sturdy legs were 
mud-stained and his feet bore evidence of gutter-dirt. His 
shirt was torn at the shoulders and two bright red patches 
gave it the appearance of having been mended with more dis- 
patch than loving care. The very short knickers, torn and 
draggled at the edges, completed a costume that can only be 
described as nondescript. 

Across his back a mandolin was slung by a bit of old rag. 

"And to think that that's me and mother," he said, half to 
himself, as a smile of pride and joy stole over his bright, ani- 
mated face. 

His mother had told him how she had sat to a great ar- 
tist a short time after her little bambino was born. The artist 
had yearned to sculpture her and the baby as the Madonna and 
Child, and now little Beppo was gazing at the fruits of the 
sculptor's labor. 

Yes; the figure who looked down at him now was really 
just like his beautiful mother's, but Beppo wondered whether 
he had ever really been quite so tiny as that little carved, 
stone infant that gazed up into his mother's face. 

It seemed such a long, long time since he had seen his 
other; and he was very, very poor. The only warmth he 
knew was the bright sun that flooded the streets of Rome in 
the hot months. In the winter, when the cold winds swept 
over the Seven Hills and along the Appian way, he thought 
he would die. The only heat he got then, was obtained by 
the sounding thumps and blows showered on him by Barrino, 
the cruel, old woman who beat him and starved him and at- 
tempted almost to rob him of the life which had yet claimed 



i9i i.] THE CONSUMMATION 491 

him for only nine years, if he did not bring her money by 
playing his mandolin. 

Little Beppo was a born musician; he did not know this, 
but he was aware that he loved music better than anything 
in the world, and that he had often sobbed his little heart 
out when he had been ruthlessly turned out of church or 
cathedral when listening to an organ. 

Many times he had stolen into the very cathedral where 
he now stood, crouching behind a big pillar in the darkened 
corner, listeniag to the organ's soft, liquid notes as they stole 
down the aisle and lost themselves in the walls and in the 
great vaulted roof. 

And he found a very wonderful corner a corner which 
echoed every note in a most beautiful way. That was a great 
secret. He felt sure that no one else knew of it. He was 
aware that if he once told anyone, his secret hiding-place 
would become public; that rich, vulgar people who scurried 
through the building would flock to his niche and depose him. 

Oh 1 it was a marvelous corner, and he wondered if he 
dared tell the Madonna about it the beautiful Madonna who 
was the image of his mother whom he had not seen for three 
years. 

He remembered her quite well her dear, beautiful face and 
her tender love for him would be sweet remembrances until 
he saw her in the great, blue vault that was big enough to 
cover the whole of Italy and beyond some people told him; 
but he could not quite believe that. 

The whisper had reached him that his mother was dead 
but somehow or other, there lodged in his childish brain a 
stubborn obstinacy that refused to believe it. 

His mother dead ! And God and the Holy Mary still calm 
and serene in the great blue vault 1 

He remembered going to the studios of rich artists with 
his mother and sitting for hours while they painted. 

But they had always been poor. One day his mother was 
taken very ill and after buying her some milk and making her 
take some he had gone to earn pennies by playing his man- 
dolin. When he came back his mother had gone 1 

It was old Barrino who told him his mother was dead, and 
accompanied the news by a few vicious blows. Barrino de- 
termined to keep Beppo, and live on the money he made by 



492 THE CONSUMMATION [Jan., 

playing. He remembered well how, in his childish grief and 
rage, he had struck at her with all his puny strength. The 
only result was a rain of blows on his poor little back and a 
kick and a thump that sent him reeling into the road where 
he had lain for hours. 

When he recovered the stars were all twinkling. The 
streets were very still. No one passing by had seen the small 
form shaking with sobs or had heard the sound of bitter 
weeping. 

When the gray, pale light of dawn crept over the Eternal 
City, he had sought the shelter of the "echo" cathedral as he 
called it, and as soon as it was opened had stolen to the 
shrine of the lovely Madonna before whom he had offered his 
prayers for forgiveness for having been so wicked as to strike 
Barrino. 

As he stood before that shrine now, he wondered if God 
had forgiven him; he hoped his mother had his dear mother 
whom he would, perhaps, never see again, and who had taught 
him to pray and to be good. 

"Whatever happens," she had said that last, happy time 
when she and he were together, " whatever happens my little 
Beppo, be good and honest and always pray to God and the 
Holy Mother; and if you can honestly obtain it, buy a candle 
on the anniversary of my death if I am taken away from you; 
offer it to our Lady and pray for me. Try to give something 
no matter what if it can be done honestly." 

And now the anniversary of his mother's death was com- 
ing, and how could he afford a candle ? Wicked old Barrino 
forced him to give up every penny. She rifled his pockets 
and beat him and twisted his arms to get the money. Poor 
ill-clad, half-starved little Beppo was too honest to hide the 
pennies. He always, in the end, produced what he earned. 
He had frequently been sorely tempted to bury a penny or 
two, but how could he face the beautiful Madonna again if he 
did that? 

His eyes were full of tears as he knelt down before the 
shrine and begged our Lady to send him just one candle, 
even if it were only a little, tiny one, to give to her in re- 
membrance of his mother. 

The great church was very quiet; the organ had ceased. 

Little Beppo on his knees was so intent, that be did no 



i9i i.] THE CONSUMMATION 493 

hear the great, heavy tread of the fat, door-keeper coming up 
the aisle. He knew nothing until a stick descended with a 
mighty whack across his shoulders that made him leap to his 
feet with a cry of pain. 

"Now then, you dirty little gutter-brat," said a great, thick 
voice; "we can't have rags and bones inhere. Off with you!" 

He looked so threatening that poor little Beppo, scared out 
of his life, ran from God's house with terror instead of peace 
at his heart, and wondered if God really minded beggars 
coming to speak to Him. 

Two puny fists screwed themselves into two shining eyes 
as he ran into the street; he did his best to stop the tears, 
for he was really very brave this child who was not allowed 
to kneel before a shrine into which the rich poured their 
gold and from whom the fat door-keeper got so many tips. 

From the cathedral where one of God's little ones had not 
been allowed to remain, Beppo quickly made his way to the 
bright, sunlit banks of the Tiber where the great tide of hu- 
manity flowed in the brilliant sunshine that flooded the quay* 
side, and made the river scintillate as it glided towards the 
sea. 

Little Beppo, with that sensitiveness so peculiar to chil- 
dren, and still smarting under the rough bearing of the brutal 
door-keeper, kept in the shadows so that, if he were pursued, 
he would not BO easily be perceived. Extraordinarily quick 
at grasping an opportunity of making pennies partly born, 
no doubt, of a keen desire not to have his arms twisted by 
Barrino should his gains dissatisfy her cupidity, he presently 
espied a small, sun-bathed crowd of gay, laughing girls and 
women. He ran towards them and then, standing opposite 
the little group, he slung his mandolin in front, threw back 
his head with a gay laugh and gave them of his best. 

Funicoli Funicola, he sang. He paused before the chorus 
and nodded at the women, then, beginning softly, and gradu- 
ally growing louder, with that perfect sympathy for and 
understanding of, his art, he sang: 

Lesti I Lesti I Via montiam sula 
Lesti! Lesti! Via montiam sula 
Funicoli Funicola, Funicoli Funicola! 
Via montiam sula, Funicoli Funicola. 



494 THE CONSUMMATION [Jan., 

What a fine, manly little fellow he looked 1 With what 
absolute joy and abandon did he troll out that superb, light- 
hearted song which can only be sung to perfection by South- 
erners. 

He broke out into another verse encouraged by the 
applause. This time he began to dance, and his little wrist 
flew across the mandolin strings. The words he sang were 
not those really written for the ballad, but be had picked them 
up at a low quarter of the town and their double-meaning 
and suggestiveness were far beyond his pure little mind to 
understand, but he knew they always produced a laugh and 
were immensely appreciated, so he gave them with the keen- 
est zest. He had never tried that dubious verse before and 
it was received with such acclamation and so great a shower 
of pennies that he determined to include it always in his 
repertoire. 

He thanked the pretty signorinas for the pennies, gathered 
them up, and went on his way rejoicing, for he knew that 
even avaricious old Barrino would be satisfied with his gains 
that day, and perhaps she would give him a coin to buy a 
candle for his beloved shrine. Even if he had to have his 
arm twisted till it broke, it might be worth while if he could 
buy a candle. He thought seriously over this. He began to 
wonder how much pain he could stand without giving in. He 
wondered if it would hurt very much to have his arm broken. 
More than once, had he known it, old Barrino in drunken fury 
had very nearly performed this feat of surgery, but a dull 
sense of what a calamity it would be if Beppo could not play 
on the mandolin had prevented her from going too far. 

He was so tempted to hide a few of the coins 1 More than 
once on his way home he was on the point of concealing 
them under a marked stone on the quay-side, but the calm, 
steadfast gaze of our Lady at his favorite shrine seemed to 
come before him, and the words of his dear mother: "always 
be honest," rang in his ears. So he ran as hard as he could 
all the way so as not to be tempted and, for once, old Barrino 
was satisfied. She took all the money, and gave him a dish 
of macaroni. 

Several days had passed with nothing but bad luck for 
poor, little Beppo. He had sung and had given of his best ; 
but the rich English and American visitors seemed to have no 



ig i2.] THE CONSUMMATION 495 

thought for the small songster, and scarcely a penny had come 
his way. 

He was terribly hungry. Barrino had given him no food 
for two days. All he had had were a few scraps from the 
gutter and a drink at one of the public fountains. 

It was the anniversary of his mother's disappearance, and 
there was no candle. 

He stood before his beloved shrine once more and looked 
upon that beautiful figure of our Lady. The great cathedral 
was very quiet. There was a Jete in the city and all Rome 
was apparently taking part in it. 

Little Beppo was not crying now but he had been crying 
very hard. For a whole hour he had knelt watching the image 
and the steady, bright flames of the big and little candles that 
stood in great numbers before the shrine. 

How wonderful to buy candles like that, he thought! 
The liquid notes of the organ as they stole down the 
aisles were a joy to him. More than once he had risen from 
his knees to put his ear to his wonderful echo-corner, and had 
been in almost a transport of delight. 

But now the organist had gone. The great cathedral was quiet. 
Why was he waiting ? 

He had no candle in remembrance of his mother. Was 
there nothing he could give to express his gratitude for the 
love that his mother had given him. He began to sob softly 
thinking what his mother had said; "try and give some- 
thing even if it is only once a year in my memory." 

And then was it an inspiration ? there was one thing he 
could do. He could play his mandolin and sing Funicoli 
Funicola give the best that was in him, sing as he had never 
sang before. Surely God would count it as a gift. The Blessed 
Virgin would surely deem it as good as a candle. He jumped 
to his knees. Swinging the mandolin round, he stood .erect 
with a proud smile on his lovely, little face, threw back his 
head, and began to play. 

The next instant the cathedral rang with the sweet notes 
of the childish voice. 
Funicoli Funicola I 

How he did shout it shouted it from sheer joy and glory- 
ing in the thought that it was the very, very best he could 
do. 



496 I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE [Jan. 

The cruel looking face of a figure which lurked in the 
shadows watched him with suppressed passion. But it did not 
move. 

Silence a moment, then the little voice rose again : 

Via montiam sula 
Funicoli Funico 

Whack ! Swish went Barrino's thick cane across the bare 
shoulders. As the small figure swayed and fell, the cathedral 
rang with cries of pain. The harsh words came interrupted by 
repeated blows: 

" Profaning . . . God's house . . . with a ribald 
song. That's how you waste your precious time, you brat." 
Then a very low moan of pain. 

With fury in her eyes Barrino caught up the inanimate 
figure of Beppo, and stumbled out of the door. 



I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE. 

BY ANNA BUNSTON. 

CI.OTHBD in the warm simplicities of prayer, 

Divine philosophy may safely bless 

A mortal maid and cradle in her arms ; 

But if she bid him doff that homely dress, 

And come in frigid reason's dignity, 

She nothing fosters but a wintry wraith 

Chilling his sad- eyed votary to death. 







PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM. 

BY JOHN A. RYAN, S.T.D. 

JHE object of this book* is to defend the system 
of private ownership, and to explain the con- 
ditions on which alone that system can be de- 
fended in theory or much longer maintained in 
practice." 

Thus writes Father Kelleher, who is Professor in St. John's 
Seminary, Waterford, at the beginning of the Preface to his 
little volume on Private Ownership. As the latter part of the 
quotation suggests, he has decided views on certain defects of 
the existing system, and the necessity of removing them. It 
is these views which give to the book its distinctive spirit 
and its chief value. While his account and refutation of the 
different forms of Socialism are unusually good, he never per- 
mits the reader to forget that the main question has to do 
with the abolition of existing abuses. In the Preface, be in- 
sists that these abuses are facts which can neither be reasoned 
away nor complacently tolerated. " Our present social con- 
ditions are not only utterly unsatisfactory, but so completely 
discredited that they cannot possibly continue, nor should 
anyone possessed of a particle of human feeling desire their 
continuance, even if it were possible. The conditions must 
go" (ix). If they are not removed through social reform, the 
system itself of which they are an excrescence will be sup- 
planted by Socialism. " If there must be a choice between 
actually existing conditions and Socialism we can have little 
doubt what the choice will be. Socialism must come. Of 
course, it cannot remain, but it is bound to have a trial, and 
a trial that will cost society dearly " (xiii). Not less definite 
and frank is his characterization of the "misguided zeal" of 
the extreme defenders of private ownership. "Every attempt 
to check existing abuses which seems to interfere with pres- 
ent methods is denounced as an attack upon the principle of 

* Private Ownership. Its Basis and Equitable Conditions. By Rev. J. Kelleher. Dublin : 
M. H. Gill & Son, 1911. New York : Benziger Bros. $1.35. 
VOL. XCIV. 32 



498 PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM [Jan., 

private ownership" (xiii). Nevertheless, "the institution of 
private ownership is perfectly in accordance with natural 
justice, ... is admirably suited to the needs of man both 
as an independent individual and as a member of society, 
. . . and owners actually enjoy true, inviolable rights in 
their property" (xii). 

Naturally, the three main topics treated are, the right of 
private ownership, the opposing theories of Socialism and 
Anarchistic Communism, and the alternative to these, or 
Social Reform. Under the first head he emphasizes the fact 
that private property is a moral entity involving moral rights, 
and that the moral issues find adequate recognition and ex- 
pression only in the ethical teaching of Christianity. Accord- 
ing to this teaching, the human individual is related to God 
as a subject obliged to attain the end which God has placed 
before him; in relation to his fellowmen he is an independent 
and equal entity, an " end in himself." With respect to his 
fellows, therefore, he is endowed with certain immunities 
called rights. Essentially these are moral claims to that 
amount of freedom and opportunity which are necessary for 
reasonable life. One of the most primary of them is the 
right to live from the common bounty of the earth. While 
this right exists for the individual, not for society, it needs to 
be controlled and regulated by society or the state, in order 
that it may not be unduly extended by some individuals to 
the detriment of other individuals. Hence, no communistic 
scheme of unlimited freedom of contract and association is 
capable of adjusting and protecting these several rights. The 
opposite extreme of Socialism or Collectivism would likewise 
fail, since it could neither ascertain the amounts and kinds of 
goods that ought to be produced; nor turn them out so as 
to satisfy the freedom of individual demand; nor organize 
labor and production consistently with the liberty of the 
worker and the highest economic efficiency ; nor manage all 
the industries of the nation as well as it manages a few; nor 
permit reasonable freedom of printing and publication. Whence 
it follows that man's right of deriving a livelihood from the 
bounty of nature cannot generally be realized under any other 
system than private ownership, that is, private ownership and 
control of the means of production. Therefore, the right of 
private ownership exists for the simple reason that it is a 



i9i2.] PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM 499 

necessary condition of individual and social welfare. And the 
state is bound not only to protect this right but to regulate 
its exercise in such a way that all persons shall have the 
means of reasonable living. 

An example will make clear the meaning of the social as- 
pect of property, and the power of the state to interfere on its 
behalf by legislation. Let us suppose that a community is 
practically dependent on the produce of its coal mines. These 
mines, the land and the plants, belong to six capitalists ; 
5,000 men are employed In various ways in the working of 
them. For some reason the capitalists are displeased with 
the conduct of the majority of their men, because 3,000 of 
them, let us suppose, support a Liberal at the previous elec- 
tion, and, as a result, determine to reduce their business to 
less than half its former dimensions, to throw these 3,000 men 
out of employment, and deprive the community of more than 
half the proceeds of the most important ot its resources. 
What would be the duty of the state in such a situation ? 
Should it allow the 3,000 workmen and their families to starve 
quietly If we could imagine that they would themselves sub- 
mit quietly to such a simple solution of the difficulty or 
afford them a pauper's provision from the general resources 
already seriously impaired ? Would it not rather be obliged 
to compel the capitalists to forego their cherished revenge, 
and either force them to work the mines themselves or take 
some means of transferring them to others who would ? (p. 
1 66). 

The foregoing outline of the basis and necessity of private 
ownership can be found in many other books written by Catho- 
lics. What is distinctive about Father Kelleher's exposition is 
the emphasis that he puts upon the limits and abuses of pri- 
vate ownership. He is not content to establish the right of 
private property, refute the opposing systems, and drop the 
matter. Where such a course is followed, the reader who is 
acquainted with the facts of private ownership as we have it, 
feels that something has been left out. While he may admit 
the moral basis of the existing system in the abstract, and the 
impossibility of Socialism in the concrete, he is conscious that 
the limitations and abuses of the present organization have not 
received adequate recognition. Full emphasis has been placed 
upon the defects of Socialism, while those of private owner- 



Soo PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM [Jan., 

ship have been passed over lightly. The latter system, taken 
at its best and in the abstract, has been compared with the 
former at its worst and in the concrete. But Father Kelleher 
keeps the discussion in touch with all the existing facts of 
ownership, and evaluates the system of private property as it 
works in the world about us, not as it might conceivably work 
in a world made to order. 

Indeed, this quality of actuality pervades the book gener- 
ally. Another example of it occurs in the author's statement 
of the reasons why private ownership is a natural right. He 
brings out clearly the fact that this right is derived from em- 
pirical, not metaphysical, considerations ; from consequences; 
from the good consequences of private ownership, and the bad 
consequences of any alternative system. He does not use lan- 
guage which would suggest that the institution of private 
property is somehow an end in itself, like the right to life, or 
that the right to property, like the right to life, is justified 
for its own sake, and independently of its effects upon human 
welfare. Nor does he intimate that the institution of private 
ownership is founded upon the immutable and primary princi- 
ples of the natural law, nor that it is universally a necessary 
institution like marriage. His position is far removed from 
that reductio ad absurdum which maintains that no possible 
form of common ownership "could exist for a moment with- 
out trampling under foot the most legitimate inborn sacred 
rights of human personality " (See the American Catholic Quar- 
terly, Vol. XIII., p. 303). Possibly he recalls the fact that 
his ancestors for many centuries maintained a form of common 
ownership under the clan system of land tenure, and that this 
system safeguarded the " sacred rights of human personality," 
at least as well as the mode of private ownership by which it 
was supplanted, namely, Irish landlordism (See Joyce's Smaller 
Social History of Ancient Ireland, pp. 81-86). Hence, he ad- 
mits that in certain conditions the state might legitimately 
establish "some form of collectivist organization," without 
violating man's natural rights; but he rightly concludes that 
such an arrangement would be only a " passing phase," and 
" could not be permitted to remain " (p. 148). 

One of the best chapters in the book is the fourth, which 
deals with a system that is not always adequately noticed, 
that of Anarchistic Communism. In his refutation cf Marxian 



i9i 2.] PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM 501 

Socialism, he is always fair, and generally effective. Peibaps 
he lays too much stress on the difficulty of determining before- 
hand the amount and kind of goods to be produced in a So- 
cialist society. In the opinion of the reviewer, this would be 
one of the least of Socialism's troubles; for the task in ques- 
tion is, to a great extent, accomplished now in monopolized 
industries, like those controlled by the United States Steel 
Corporation and the Standard Oil Company. His criticism of 
municipal or sectional Socialism is not so successful, since it 
seems to ignore the fact that all the present incentives to 
labor and enterprise might be provided by a system of vary- 
ing and generous salaries, determined as now by results. To 
be sure this would produce a large measure of that very in- 
equality which Socialism seeks to abolish, yet it is not incon- 
sistent with this particular form of Socialism which the author 
calls municipal. On the other hand, he does not seem to 
make sufficiently strong the menace to freedom of publication 
which would result from state ownership of the printing 
presses, and of the means of diffusing written opinion. No 
civil administration or government could safely be entrusted 
with this tremendous power. 

The last three chapters treat of social refotm. In various 
ways the author repeats the thought that the abuses of the 
present system are manifold and grave, and that reform is an 
imperative necessity. The "let alone" policy must give way 
to effective state regulation of private ownership and of in- 
dustry in the interests of all individuals, particularly those for 
whom the right of private ownership is at present only a 
mocking phrase. "What is the net advantage of increased 
wealth if the multitude be poor?" (p. 178). The doctrine laid 
down by Pope Leo XIII. that every person has a right to a 
living wage, is "a strict claim on the entire property of the 
community, and . . . it is the duty of the state to see that 
this claim is respected" (p. 180). Nevertheless, state control 
must not follow the lines of even Evolutionary, or moderate 
and step-by-step, Socialism. It must be carried out on prin- 
ciples essentially Individualist. While the Individualist and the 
Evolutionary Socialist may agree upon many particular meas- 
ures of reform, the latter always subordinates such projects to 
the ultimate end, Collectivism, and continually strives to ex- 
tend the sphere of common ownership and to restrict that of 



PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM [Jan., 

private ownership. Social reform on Individualist lines pro- 
ceeds always on the principle that private ownership is the 
normal condition, and, so far as we can see, will and should 
endure permanently. What is wanted is not a reorganization 
of industry according to either the letter or the spirit of So- 
cialism, but such a reform in distribution as will " secure to 
every individual without exception such an effective right to 
the goods of the country as will afford him, on reasonable 
conditions, a means of providing a decent livelihood " (pp. 
205, 206). This is the minimum, the "starting point for re- 
storing to the propertyless their natural rights in material 
goods" (p. 206). Moreover, compulsory insurance, if possible 
through trade unions and benevolent societies, should make 
provision for sickness, unemployment, and old age. Whether 
or not this programme be immediately feasible, something 
must be done at once for the housing of the poor, even 
though it involve compulsory sale (in return for compensation) 
of land, or a special tax on the increase of land values. 

The author seems to have firmly grasped the fundamental 
and essential facts of the industrial situation with reference to 
the question of social reform. St. Thomas declared that the 
possession of wealth was not wrong if it were honestly ac- 
quired and properly used. Father Kelleher realizes very 
clearly that neither of these conditions can be adequately 
obtained or maintained without a considerable amount of in- 
tervention by the state. Even if the majority of actual and 
would-be owners could be induced by moral suasion to com- 
ply with the rules, particularly the second, laid down by St. 
Thomas, they would be unable to do so in the face of unfair 
competition by the dissenting minority. For example, many 
well disposed employers cannot pay a living wage and remain 
in business. Only the state is capable of enforcing a decent 
minimum limit to competition. 

Father Kelleher is likewise right in declaring that state 
control must not be exercised along the lines or in the spirit 
of moderate Socialism. However they may agree in the 
recommendation of specific projects, such as, public ownership 
of public utilities, compulsory insurance, a legal minimum 
wage, and others, the Individualist and the moderate Social- 
ist differ in principle and in end. And the difference is sooner 
or later bound to have practical results. The Individualist 



i9i2.] PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND SOCIALISM 503 

adopts only those measures of state action which are clearly 
preferable to individual control, organizes them in such a way 
as to conserve private ownership wherever the latter is as ef- 
fective as state control, and expects that private ownership 
will be the predominant system even in the distant future, 
On all these points the moderate Socialist takes the contrary 
position. The former believes in private ownership tempered 
by social control, the latter in collective ownership tempered 
by private property. In practice they must disagree at least 
on two points: first, with regard to the adoption of a social 
means to attain an immediate end which both believe could 
be as well attained by private control; and, second, as to the 
relative value of the two courses in many particular situa- 
tions. Dr. McDonald seems to overlook this aspect of the 
problem when he suggests, in his review of the book, that the 
difference between the two views is not very practical. It is 
not merely a matter of prophesying differently about final 
ends, but of interpreting, choosing, and organizing differently 
the present processes of reform. Nevertheless, these differ- 
ences, theoretical and practical, constitute no valid reason for 
refusing to adopt, or to co-operate with other agencies in 
adopting, any project of reform that commends itself to the 
judgment of the Individualist. And the practice of discourag- 
ing such measures by calling them " Socialistic " is not only 
unfair but illogical and stupid. 

Probably most readers will regard the author's enumera- 
tion of particular reforms as the least satisfactory part of the 
book. It is true that his purpose did not include nor require 
"a complete detailed plan of social reformation," but rather 
an indication of the general spirit and method which particu- 
lar improvements should follow. Nevertheless, his argument 
would have presented a more inished and systematic appear- 
ance had he attempted to set down a scheme of reform as 
complete as the systems that he rejects. Here is where pres- 
ent day Socialism has a tremendous practical advantage. It 
puts forward a minute, definite, concrete programme, while the 
alternative proposals of Individualists are frequently either 
partial and inadequate, or indefinite and platitudinous. 

However, the particular measures which he does recom- 
mend are fundamental and far-reaching. The housing problem 
and the land question rightly receive a place only second to 



504 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION [Jan. 

the wage and the insurance question. Taken altogether, his 
proposals would solve the more acute phases of the labor ques- 
tion, even though they would leave untouched the question 
of monopolistic exploitation. But the latter is not so pressing 
as the livelihood of the laborer. 

Despite certain defects of form, as prolixity and apparent 
carelessness of expression, Father Kelleher's book is on many 
'accounts the best work yet written in English on the neces- 
sity, moral basis, and limitations of private ownership. 



THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 

BY EMILY HICKEY. 

TO-DAY within God's Eden-garth is sown 
Seed that shall be a plant for Him alone. 

To-day doth time the fair foundation see 
Of God's high fane of gold and ivory. 

That perfect plant shall bloom with Flower of God; 
That hallowed temple by His feet be trod. 

Oh, many a lily soul of God's delight ; 
But none like Mary's soul, effulgent white. 

Oh, many a soul rose-red in love's true glow; 
But none like hers that fire and light shall know. 

And many a virgin hears the Bridegroom's call; 
But His own spotless one excels them all. 

Bear it aloft , the word that cannot fail ; 
Hail, O thou full of grace, hail, Mary, hail ! 

Mother most pure, Maiden most glorious, 
Mary Immaculate, oh, pray for us. 




LADY HERBERT OF LEA. 

BY SEBASTIAN MEYNELL. 

Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse. 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
Death, ere thou hast slain another. 
Fair and learn'd and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. 

HE English statesman who bore the name Sid- 
ney Herbert, in witness of the matrimonial al- 
liance of his house here immortalized by the 
Elizabethan poet, found a fit successor to the 
"great lady" of that long-past day in Eliza- 
beth A'Court, who, in 1846, became his wife to be another 
" Pembroke's mother." A great many years ago, a popular 
writer, William Howitt (whose wife and daughter, by the way, 
were to become devout Catholics) wrote of the late Baroness 
Burdett Coutts as a " nursing-mother of the Church of Eng- 
land." Similarly, there passes with Lady Herbert the last of 
a group which centres round the name of Lady Georgiana 
Fullerton a group of convert Englishwomen, once the flower 
of Anglican womanhood, who may be said to rank as the 
"Matriarchs" of the modern revival of Catholicism in Eng- 
land. "The Matriarch" was the name by which it became 
quite the custom to speak of Lady Herbert of Lea in both 
London and Rome, and whatever smile accompanied it was a 
kindly one, for the name was felt to have a real justification 
in the assiduity with which the bearer of it followed every 
phase of ecclesiastical politics. 

With English society, and the best sort of English society 
that of statesmen, soldiers, literary men, artists, churchmen, 
and all other thinkers and movers of her generation, Lady 
Herbert, by her birth, her inclination, and her marriage, was 
intimately associated throughout her long life. But it is less 
as the lady of the salon, and less, too, as the writer of books 
though those books were charged with a special mission to 
the English Protestant reading-world of her day than as a 



506 LADY HERBERT OF LEA [Jan., 

representative convert of the nineteenth century that Lady 
Herbert of Lea had the respect and good-will of a multitude 
of Catholics, both at home and abroad, who are her mourners 
to day whether they knew her personally or not. 

The only daughter of General Charles Ashe A'Court, Eliza- 
beth was born in 1822 into a family favorable to the develop- 
ment of a girl who had the double dower of beauty and in- 
telligence. Her father was a soldier who sat in Parliament, 
and her uncle, the first Lord Heytesbury, was an Indian 
Governor- General, an Irish Viceroy, and an Ambassador to 
Russia. Her mother, Elizabeth Gibbs, was the daughter of a 
West India planter which connects her with slave- owning in 
a manner shared by the Gladstones, and, for the matter of 
that, by other convert families such as those of Thompson and 
Allies. The scene of her childhood was Heytesbury House, 
the Wiltshire home of her uncle, tenanted by General A'Court 
while his diplomatist brother did duty abroad. Elizabeth was 
reared in the strict tenets of the Church of England, her 
nursery being ruled by a governess (Miss Hildyard) who later 
passed into the service of Queen Victoria and trained the royal 
princesses. Sidney Herbert was asked by the Queen shortly 
after his marriage, by whom had his wife been educated, since 
the Qaeen would like to entrust the upbringing of her own 
daughters to similar hands. The religious atmosphere of that 
pre- Victorian nursery at Heytesbury was just such as surrounded 
the rnij>rity of the carefully brought-up English girls of the 
period. It is now out of date, and fortunately so, at least in its 
firm belief in the Bible as a forbidden book to Catholics. That 
belief had been the foundation of Father dement and a-half a- 
dozen other popular story-books which it was the thing for 
the young ladies of that day to read, and the influence of which 
Lady Herbert's own pen, in the sequel, did something to cor- 
rect. Of the religious rigors which found favor with the 
educators of those days, she was to write in after years: 

I was eager, energetic, and enthusiastic. I found myself 
surrounded by cold and formal services, high pews, long 
Puritanical hymns, and intolerably dry sermons. My Sun- 
days were a perfect terror to me. I was made to learn long 
portions of The Christian Year by heart (some oi which even 
now I cannot understand) in addition to the Epistle and the 
Collect for the day. The rest of the time was to be spent in 



I9 I2 ] LADY HERBERT OF LEA 5O7 

reading sermons, or in church, where kneeling bolt upright 
always made me faint. Even now, [wrote the mature wo- 
man] , I sometimes have the recollection of what I felt on wak- 
ing in the morning when I remembered it was Sunday. 

A brother to whom she was devoted, and an uncle a 
naval captain who also lived at Heytesbury, allowed Eliza- 
beth to say in later years, " I was brought up entirely amongst 
men." Moreover, with an invalid mother, and no sisters, she 
was the constant companion and helper of her father, and, 
while hardly out of her childhood, became "fonder of work 
than of play." When, a little later, her father made their 
home in Staffordshire, he had as neighbor at Drayton Manor 
and constant visitor, Sir Robert Peel, whom the young girl 
helped now and again in his correspondence. Thus, before 
she became the helper of her husband in public life, she had 
fine training as the auxiliatrix of a great Victorian statesman, 
recalled by Sir Robert's remark to Sidney Herbert on his 
marriage, " You gain a wife while I lose a secretary." It was 
in the Staffordshire home that the girl began her activity in 
the service of religion in a neglected village without church or 
school. She provided both; and, finding on the property the 
gable-end of a ruined chapelry dedicated to St. Edith close 
to the wall of which the rector of a parish three or four miles 
distant used to read morning prayers four times a year, so as 
to be entitled to the tithe she restored it to the maimed rites 
of Anglicanism. "Through painting and selling my sketches, 
and the kindness of friends," she tells us, "I raised enough 
money to build on a chancel to that neglected gable end ; 
and never shall I forget the joy of seeing the first commun- 
nions and baptisms in that little place " A little later she 
was to note as a coincidence that Wilton, the home of her 
married life, had once been St. Edith's Priory: "It seemed 
as if St. Edith were to follow and form part of my life. 
Probably her prayers (in return for the imperfect service I 
had ignorantly paid her by restoring her ruined temple) helped 
me in my coming struggle." 

But that struggle had, in fact, already really begun with 
the Oxford Movement; stray impulses of which, penetrating 
the seclusion of her country home, had brought to the girl 
in her teens her " first view of real religion." Looking back 



5o8 LADY HERBERT OF LEA [Jan., 

upon that wonderful revival she declares : " I found in that 
new school all that my heart and mind had longed for and 
hungered after for years. I found life, warmth and practice. 
But what really attracted me, although I knew it not, was 
their Catholicity." That was yet a far-off discovery. The 
planting and the watering, and the final fruition and harvest- 
ing were the long processes of years. 

Outside the immediate family circle, Elizabeth A' Court 
soon made for herself brilliant friends, Mrs. Norton and her 
sisters of the number; and, acquainted as she was from girl- 
hood with her future husband, her marriage but fulfilled her 
earliest romance. Sidney Herbert, the second son of the 
eleventh Earl of Pembroke, living at Wilton, not far frcm 
Heytesbury, saw much of the General and his daughter; arid 
she, a child of ten years, having noticed him once riding with 
her father, had cried impulsively, " That is the man I shall 
marry when I grow up." She became his bride when she was 
twenty-four years of age, and at once she became a woman 
keenly interested in Peelite politics. Henceforth, she shared 
and lightened the burdens, public as well as private, of a 
Minister of War under Peel, Aberdeen, and Palmerston suc- 
cessively, and a great friend and ally of Gladstone. One of 
the formative friendships of Lady Herbert's early married life 
was with Archdeacon Manning. 

I had been married about four months, [to tell the story as 
she has told it to others], when my husband one day brought 
to introduce to me one whom he called his oldest school and 
college friend, adding : " He is the holiest man I have ever 
met." It was quite true. There was something about Arch- 
deacon Manning which made one ashamed of an unworthy 
thought or a careless word ; and yet he was always loving and 
tender as a woman. 

A little later the young wife, who was able to look back 
upon her married life at the close of it as " from first to last 
heaven upon earth," had scruples that she was not clever and 
witty enough to be Sidney Herbert's fit companion. Then it 
was Manning's comforting voice which assured her " Your 
business is not to make your husband's home brilliant but 
blessed." That was very well said if the alternative was a 
necessity. One wonders. Anyhow, if during her married life 



i9i2.] LADY HERBERT OF LEA 509 

Lady Herbert did not acquire all the political importance due 
to the talented wife of a Minister marked out for high pro- 
motion, she herself felt that she was in some way choosing 
a better part. Then Manning, though Archdeacon still, gave 
his friend's wife a little statue of the Blessed Virgin, treasured 
to the end, through all the chops and changes and tergiver- 
sations from which, in a world of misunderstandings, even 
great friendships are not immune. At last the Archdeacon 
" went over." " It was not a parting, it was a death," said 
Gladstone of that going; and the convett himself realized 
the wrench sufficiently to write to his dear Sidney Herbert to 
say that they had been too nearly drawn together to meet as 
ordinary friends, and that he would never seek either of them 
unless they first sought him. This separation the wife felt as 
"a sort of religious shipwreck." 

So the years passed, years when domestic and public 
duties occupied the time and postponed all that might be done 
till the morrow and again the morrow. The anxious time of 
the Crimean War arrived, and with it the opportunity to take 
part in the more human side of her husband's work as head 
of the War Office. To her, in fact, scarcely less than to Sidney 
Herbert, was due the momentous invitation to Florence Night- 
ingale to take charge of the nursing of England's stricken 
soldiers It was the War Secretary's wife who organized the 
despatch of nurses English and Irish Sisters of Mercy among 
the number. To Sidney Herbert's labors at this time Glad- 
stone paid tribute when he wished that "some of the thou- 
sands who justly celebrate Miss Nightingale would say a 
single word for the man of routine who devised and projected 
her going Sidney Herbert." 

An errand of public business happened to bring Manning 
and the Secretary's wife together during the war time: "I 
recollect nervously confining myself to the matter in hand," 
she writes of the encounter, "but at the end I could not help 
kneeling to ask for his old blessing. He gave it me without 
comment, kindly, but sadly." 

From the labors of his office during the Crimean War, 
Sidney Herbert's health never recovered. In January, 1861, 
he was made a peer (as Lord Herbert of Lea) to relieve the 
official strain. But it was too late; and in the following Au- 
gust he was brought home from Spa to Wilton to die among 



5io LADY HERBERT OF LEA [Jan., 

the scenes he loved best on earth. The goal was safely 
reached, but too late for him to profit by it it was found 
that he had gone blind; and, three days later, he died. In 
keeping with that pathetic home-coming is the pensive figure 
which commemorates Lord Herbert for Londoners the statue 
which till lately stood musing in the courtyard of the old 
War Office in Pall Mall. Besides his intimate political associa- 
tion with two great Victorian Prime Ministers, Peel and Glad- 
stone, Sidney Herbert was also marked out by Disraeli for 
the distinction of a portrait very openly labeled "Sidney 
Wilton " in the pages of Endymion. In the Disraelian gal- 
lery, his widow likewise has her niche, that of the "Lady St. 
Jerome " of many philanthropies in Lethair. 

It was in that moment of loss that, as she says, " I fully 
realized what it was to be in a Church in which I did not 
believe, and which did not recognize prayers for the dead." 
For the time was now coming when Lady Herbert, in spite 
of such ties and affinities as were those of the Englishwoman 
of her station and tradition, was to hear and heed the far, 
clear call to Catholic unity. The early years of widowhood, 
devoted to her children, she spent mostly abroad. During 
the winter of 1862, she again heard Manning preach in 
Rome; and, though they met once or twice, "he did not en- 
courage me in any way, and I felt that if I wanted his advice 
I must seek it directly." She continues: 

At last I wearied with the struggle that had been going on 
for so many months in my own mind ; and intensely anxious 
for explanations which would clear away my doubts and diffi- 
culties, I wrote to him and asked him to see me. Even then 
he hesitated. I think he was afraid of his personal influence 
over me from old associations, and wished me to be thoroughly 
persuaded without any human motive. Even later, what I 
have learned has been principally from books to which he re- 
ferred me. 

Then came an experience in the Jesuit Church during a Sol- 
emn Exposition on the eve of the New Year: 

I had gone with some Protestant friends, who wanted to see 
it as a sight ; but I slipped away from them and on to the floor 
among the poor, and then what happened to me I do not know. 
It seemed to me as it all the people and the lights had disap- 



i9i2.] LADY HERBERT OF LEA 511 

peared, and that I was alone before our Lord in the monstrance, 
and that He spoke to me directly, and oh ! so lovingly, asking 
me " Why I waited? " and " Why I did not come to Him at 
once? " And that then a sudden illumination fell upon me, 
and I felt such a joy that all human considerations, even my 
children, were forgotten. ... At last I looked up and saw 
that everyone was gone and the lights were put out, and I had 
missed the moment of Benediction (which gave me a pang for 
a moment, but I was too happy to mind much) ; and that the 
sacristan was standing by me, saying he was going to shut up 
the church. I recollected nothing but that somehow I had 
made a promise to our Lord which I must not break, and that 
I must do what I had to do at once. 

A few days later, on the Eve of the Epiphany, she was 
received into the Church by a " holy old Canon " of the 
cathedral in his private chapel, for present secrecy had to be 
observed. That afternoon she stood in Palermo Cathedral, ex- 
claiming "All this is mine, now and for evermore!" 

Reception into the Catholic Church was, in Lady Herbert's 
case, complicated by family and social ties. Her husband's 
will had left her the sole guardian of a young family of seven 
children; and Lady Herbert had been warned that the step 
she contemplated would impose on that guardianship certain 
restrictions. Indeed, at one time it seemed to her apprehen- 
sions that she would have to face the prospect of their re- 
moval from her care, or that they would at least be made 
wards in Chancery. But her sense of duty reconciled the con- 
flicting claims. The children were brought up, as the law di- 
rected, in the religion of their dead father, though one daugh- 
ter (Lady Mary von Hugel) long afterwards followed her 
mother into the Catholic Church. Of these children, the two 
elder sons were to hold in succession their uncle's Earldom of 
Pembroke one of them, perhaps, the handsomest man of his 
generation. The third went down in the Captain in 1870, a 
young " middy " of sixteen ; while the fourth was the late Sir 
Michael Herbert, for a time British Ambassador at Washing- 
ton. Her eldest daughter married Baron von Hugel, as already 
noted; the second is Lady Elizabeth Parry, wife of musical Sir 
Hubert, and the third, having married the son of another fa- 
mous convert, is now Lady Ripon. 

From that saintly woman, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Lady 



512 LADY HERBERT OF LEA [Jan., 

Herbert received the following letter on her conversion. It is 
dated May, 1865 : 

MY DEAR LADY HEEBKRT: 

As you sent me a kind message by Lady Londonderry, I 
venture to write and tell you with what sincere joy and grati- 
tude to God I heard of your being actually received into His 
Church, to which you have long been in heart devoted. I 
have now been just nineteen years a Catholic, and never 
ceased to wonder with an adoring heart at the infinite mercy 
of God in bestowing on one so unworthy as myself that 
blessed gift of Faith, not vouchsafed to many who would make 
a better use of it. You have a great part in life before you, 
and He Who has called you into His Church will, I trust, 
give you many years to work for Him and to bring many 
others to the Faith. It gave me great pleasure to hear that 
you were affiliated to the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. So 
have I been for the last three years, and I am happy to think 
we shall have a common object of interest. I suppose you 
have to look to many trials and many heartaches, as a conse- 
quence of your conversion, but I doubt not that strength and 
courage will be given to you to bear whatever crosses it may 
please our Blessed Lord to lay upon you. May such crosses 
be lightened and sweetened by heavenly consolations. Be- 
lieve me I may venture to say so now when, although we 
have not very often met, we are linked by the same Faith 
Yours affectionately, 

GEORGIANA FULLERTON. 

In the service of the London poor, done in the name of 
St. Vincent, Lady Herbert now had for her allies, besides 
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Lady Lothian and Lady London- 
derry both, also, Christian matrons of high example. At 
Dr. Manning's suggestion, they mapped out London's poverty- 
stricken areas among them, Poplar falling to the charge of 
Lady Herbert. 

In Manning's successor, Cardinal Vaughan, while he was 
still at Salford, Lady Herbert found a helper and director 
after her heart. His great Missionary College at Mill Hill 
became an instant care to her, she herself visiting America 
on its behalf. Its precincts are now his and her last resting 
place. Her long life came to an end on October 30, 1911, at 
Herbert House the London mansion which her tenancy made 



i9i2.] LADY HERBERT OF LEA 513 

familiar to Catholic Londoners as the centre of many good 
works. 

Little has been said, except incidentally, of Lady Hetbert's 
work in literature, for its popularity leaves it in no need of 
praise and its beautiful simplicity calls for no interpretation. 
She did not write her books because she had any special gifts 
of literary expression, but mainly because she wanted to tell 
her experiences where she thought those experiences would 
be helpful to others. No sooner had she become a Catholic 
than she published a booklet on Anglican Prejudices Against 
the Catholic Church. And from this we may add one or two 
more typical confidences to those already gathered from her 
account of her conversion. She tells, for instance, of the little 
incidents which early enlarged and clarified her vision as to 
the attitude of the Church on the Scriptures. One day the 
English Bible, which she always took with her in traveling, was 
lost. She went into the foreign bookseller's and found a Douay 
Version, prefixed by Pope Pius VI. 's letter, dated 1778, with 
its declaration that the Scriptures are " the abundant sources 
which ought to be left open to every one, to draw from them 
purity of doctrine and of morals and to eradicate error," fol- 
lowed by a commendation of the diffusion of the sacred writ- 
ings "in the language of your country, suitable to everyone's 
capacity." In practical life Lady Herbert found illustrations 
of the Pontiff's words. On her return from a visit to the East 
she shared her cabin with a Catholic girl, who probably little 
guessed what scandal or what edification it was in her power 
to give. Lady Herbert asked her companion if her confessor 
was very severe with her. "Oh, no!" was the reply; "he 
only insists on one thing that I should read a passage of 
Scripture daily." Then the cultus of the Blessed Virgin, seen 
from without (Newman's "great crux as regards Catholicism," 
it will be remembered) was also one of Lady Herbert's early 
difficulties. 

There is no doubt [she wrote in reference to it] much in 
the devotions towards our Lady, especially in southern 
countries, which grate upon one and appear excessive. 
" They are," as Dr. Newman says, " suitable for Italy, and 
not for England." But [she adds] what I did not under- 
stand at first was that these devotions are not enjoined upon 
any one. They are not matters of Faith. 
VOL. xciv. 33 



514 LADY HERBERT OF LEA [Jan. 

In the same way Lady Herbert felt a reluctance to read 
At the Foot of the Cross, by Faber, 

knowing it to be on what Catholics call the " Glories of 
Mary." But I found the book might rather be called the 
"Glories of Jesus," for every argument, every description, 
led one up from the Mother to the Son, thus helping me for 
the first time to understand what an old priest once said to me 
in the East : " You will never really love Jesus till you have 
learned the devotion to His Mother." 

As for the so-called " worship of images," that question 
required nothing for settlement in the mind of Lady Herbert 
but her own womanly sense. 

It is no more worship, In the divine sense of the word [she 
touchingly writes] , than my feeling for my husband is wor- 
ship. I have his picture in my room ; I wear it on my breast ; 
I love to keep up the remembrance of his presence in every 
way. And in the same manner, and with the same feeling, I 
wear a crucifix hidden from all eyes, like his picture. 

Her many biographies of saints or saintly persons those 
of St. John Baptist de Rossi, St. Cajetan, Geronimo, Fere 
Eymard, Dupanloup, and General de Sonis among the number, 
as well as Thekla, and other fiction, much of it personal with 
her own spiritual autobiography, together with graphic ac- 
counts of her travels in Palestine, Egypt, Algiers, and Spain, 
combined to make Lady Herbert one of the most prolific 
Catholic writers of her day. She did not write primarily as 
an artist, but as an earnest woman with an eye to the main 
chance the chance of doing good. And she was never hap- 
pier than when celebrating and commending, as in her Wives, 
Mothers, and Sistets of the Olden Time, those graces which re- 
main among the glories of the womanly character graces of 
which she, living, had in singular measure discovered the 
secret. 




THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION. 

/. MATERIAL. 
BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 

}O far we have followed the adventures of Euro- 
pean civilization (coincident with, and inspired 
by, the animation of the Catholic Church) from 
the conclusion of the Roman Empire, which 
accepted the Faith in its maturity, to the 
sixteenth century. 

We have seen that in the sixteenth century the outer parts 
which had been laboriously, slowly, and in places imperfectly 
acquired to civilization by the slow expansion of order and 
right living, were weakened in their allegiance to the general 
unity by the shock which the Renaissance and a hundred di- 
vergent expansions of human knowledge had given to the old 
settlement of human affairs. 

We have observed that this revolt and weakening of the 
bond between the ancient fixed provinces of civilization and 
the outer fringe of barbarism, might have proved a thing of 
but passing moment, and that the Germanics might still have 
been recovered for the Faith and for civilized order had it 
not been for that exceptional and fatal phenomenon, the loss 
of one of the ancient provinces of the Roman system, to wit, 
Britain. 

We have seen that the defection of Britain was the capi- 
tal turning point of the whole affair, and made of what might 
have been a passing schism, or at the worst the loss of the 
less important ex-centric regions of Europe, a permanent and 
general schism cutting civilization in two, since Britain with 
its established and profound civilization, Roman in origin and 
tradition, formed henceforward a rallying point and a fortress 
upon which the forces inimical to tradition could rely. 

In a word, through the defection of Britain, the Reforma- 
tion became the chief event in the history of Europe and of the 
Faith since Arianism had died out a thousand years before. 



5i6 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Jan., 

So vast and so profound was the shock of the Reforma- 
tion that its effects have taken three hundred years to mature. 
It is only to-day that those effects have taken a final form 
and that the quarrel between our ancient civilization, inspired 
by its creed and the coalition of forces opposed to it, have 
come clearly to an issue. Or, to put it in other terms, it is 
only to-day that a plain question crying for a solution, and 
needing an immediate one, has at last been developed from the 
great revolt. 

There are two main aspects of the final effect of the Re- 
formation: that final effect with which modern Europe has to 
deal and which modern Europe must master or she will perish. 

Though the terms are not strictly accurate these two as- 
pscts may be called the Moral and the Material Aspect. 

In the first we see the Catholic Church, now definitely 
ranged against a spirit essentially Atheist, though tinged with 
Pantheism, and involving the destruction of all our fundamen- 
tal principles. The moral creed of the Reformation is to-day 
mature, and there are drawn up in two lines of increasing 
clarity and division, the Catholic Church upon the one side, 
upon the other side a spirit which every day becomes more 
and more vocal and individual, which regards man as sufficient 
to himself, existence as an evolution ftom some primal sim- 
plicity, God as non-existant or impersonal, and every human 
institution to be judged in the light of such a philosophy ; 
marriage, property, the family, the authority of nations, their 
just defence in arms, the conceptions of humility, of charity 
and even of humor, certainly of faith, are by this spirit sub- 
jected to experiment and denial which will end in destruction. 

With this moral effect and its chance cf victory I shall deal 
next month. For the moment I tutn to the second or material 
aspect of the Reformation's fruit, which is the climax of its 
economic consequences, and the tragedy and riddle of what is 
called Industrial Capitalistic Society. 

For it was the Reformation, and no mere physical cause, 
which produced, stage by stage, that detestable arrangement 
of temporal affairs under which the mass of free Christian men 
are disinherited of capital and of land, the means of produc- 
tion concentrated in the hands of a few, and human life upon 
its material side degraded to a limit which antiquity never 
knew and which mankind to-day will certainly not long tolerate. 



.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 517 

That increasing number of men inspired by an ardent sense 
of justice, but suffering from a defective historical training, 
who call themselves "Socialists" explain the advent of the 
industrial or capitalistic system of society in a fashion which 
must be described at the outset of our remarks. For though 
their explanation is erroneous it is based upon a partial his- 
torical truth, and it is so universally spread and accepted 
throughout the modern world that until one has dealt with it 
one cannot begin the restatement of the problem in the light 
of true history. 

The Socialists, then, observing that for many centuries the 
means of production were widely distributed among the free 
citizens of the state, assert that this was so because during all 
that long period oj time the instruments oj production and the 
methods of production -were simple and cheap. 

This happy state of affairs might (the Socialists will tell 
you) have continued indefinitely had not there fallen upon 
mankind, like a sort of blight, the historical phenomenon 
known as the "Industrial Revolution. This was the discovery 
of certain new instruments and methods of production which 
permitted wealth to be created with far less effort than under 
the old and primitive state of affairs, but only permitted it to 
be so practiced on condition that great bodies of men should 
cooperate closely in its production, that instruments of huge 
extent and expensive character be used in the process, and in 
general the whole economic scheme be centralized and con- 
gested in a comparatively few preponderating ntuclei to the 
destruction of the old, simple and widely distributed methods 
of the past. Therefore \ beg my readers to note that word 
"therefore" the old-fashioned small proprietor and small 
capitalist, the man free economically as well as politically, 
tended (say the Socialists) to disappear and to be absorbed 
by large capitalists. In plain words, the large man in such a 
system inevitably ate up the small man and when the Indus- 
trial Revolution had worked itself out, it left a few thousand 
capitalists, rapidly lessening in number and incieasicg in 
wealth, face to face with a great proletarian mass of millions 
upon millions possessed of nothing and dependent for their 
existence upon a weekly wage wholly controlled by the few 
owners of production. 

This account of the cause and rise of our intolerable mod- 



5i8 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Jan., 

ern economic conditions is separated as the reader will observe 
into two limbs: and those limbs are divided one from the 
other by the word " therefore " to which I have called partic- 
ular attention. 

Now the first limb is true. It is the statement of an his- 
torical reality. And the second limb is also true and is also 
the statement of a contemporary reality. But the conjunctive 
"therefore" is false, and on its falsity depends the whole fal- 
sity and the enormous spiritual and social peril of the Social- 
ist claim and method. 

Let me give a homely parallel. 

Mr. Smith went to live in the suburbs. Therefore Mr. 
Smith fell a prey to rheumatism, and is now near his death 
from that disease. That "therefore" might be a true or might 
be a false conjunctive. The rheumatism might be the product 
directly traceable from cause to effect of the climate of the 
suburb in which this gentleman lived. It might perfectly well 
be due to any one of a million other causes. It might be proved 
that he had the seeds of rheumatism in him deeply sown be- 
fore he started. It might even turn out that he would have 
died of it long ago if they had not gone to that particular 
suburb! At any rate upon the conjunctive "therefore" de- 
pends the whole moral value of the general statement and its 
whole meaning. 

Now when we pin the Socialist down to that " therefore " 
he is never able to give us the connection between cause and 
effect. Because one steamer now does more cheaply the work 
that one hundred schooners did before, it does not follow that 
the steamer might not be owned by many men. Because a 
scoundrel can cheat more effectively and over a larger area in 
the days of the telephone and the telegraph than he could in 
the days of the stage coach, it does not follow that society is 
compelled to permit, still less to worship, the successful cheat. 

Pressed for an answer to this capital point in his argu- 
ment, the Socialist will usually reverse the logical process, 
point out the moral condition of capitalist society, presuppose 
it of the old society in which wealth was well distributed, and 
then prove to you that given the moral enormities upon which 
capitalism is based, it was bound to grow when once the in- 
dustrial revolution gave it its chance. 

When it is proved to him by documents, and by the con- 



i9i2.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 519 

vergence of a million facts by art, by songs, and by the lives 
of men that these moral enormities which are the necessary 
conditions of capitalism were not permitted or were repressed 
in Catholic times, the Socialist (to whom such an attack is 
new) invariably falls back upon the defensive and says: 

"Well then, if I may not argue from the prior to the later 
historical phenomenon as from cause to effect, how can you 
explain it?" Met by such a defensive argument the opponent 
is commonly embarrassed. He need not be if he will follow 
the lines of plain history. 

The chain of cause and effect which would have modern 
capitalism to be the product of the industrial revolution is 
historically false. Capitalism was established before the indus- 
trial revolution. It was only because the industrial revolution 
fell upon a society already capitalistic that the industrial revo- 
lution, the discovery of modern methods of production, instead 
of bearing good fruit have borne the execrably poisonous 
fruit of our great cities. 

Capitalism preceded in historical sequence the advent of 
the new great corporate methods of industry and of the new 
great expensive implements thereof; and the force which estab- 
lished capitalism in Europe before the advent of the new indus- 
trial methods was the Reformation. 

The Reformation it was which accentuated and increased 
the power of the rich in the heart of civilization; which pat 
into their hands in an ever-increasing proportion, the means 
of production and which left in fewer and fewer hands those 
accumulated stores of wealth which were necessary for the capi- 
talization of the new industrial scheme. 

The matter is not one of conjecture; it is one of historical 
record. 

The modern industrial system arose in Britain. Britain 
was its forcing ground. The expansion of total wealth which 
accompanied it was first apparent in Britain. All its great 
discoveries, or nearly all, were originally British discoveries, 
and were first applied to production for the most part within 
the realm of Britain. And the Britain upon which this trans- 
formation in the methods of the creation of wealth fell, was a 
Britain which had passed finally as to the making of its laws, 
as to the possession of its soil and of the major part of its 
instruments, into the hands of a small, wealthy class. That 



520 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Jan., 

power of the small, wealthy class in Britain bad been created 
by the Reformation, and established by a host of statutes, ad- 
ministrative measures, legal decisions and acts of state, which 
are directly traceable to the great sixteenth century change. 

We have already remarked that one of the pre-dispossessing 
causes of the Reformation in Britain was the dangerous extent 
to which the British people had permitted their wealthier men 
to occupy the common wealth. Perhaps a quarter of the land 
of England was, upon the eve of the Reformation, in the hands 
of the squires. The administration of local justice, that is, the 
ordering of the domestic and personal affairs of the mass of 
the people, had most unfortunately also slipped into the hands 
of the squires and the great merchants under the system of 
"Justices of the Peace," and, side by side with the Crown, an 
oligarchic and large plutocratic organ of government Parlia- 
ment had been permitted to arise. 

This state of affairs which characterized the eve of the 
Reformation in Britain, though perilous, would not, as we have 
pointed out, have necessarily been enduring. Sooner or later 
the Catholic spirit would have broken it, had not Henry VIII., 
to the ultimate destruction of his own office and for a per- 
sonal motive, opened the flood-gate, and sided with the entry 
of disruptive forces; and had not the complication, after 
Henry's death, of the Spanish quarrel, coupled with the de- 
termination of the squires to keep the monastic lands, decided 
England for Protestantism. 

As things were, the plutocratic character of society pres- 
ent in England was fatally, rapidly and enormously empha- 
sized by the Reformation. 

First, the squires became by the spoils of the Church double 
and more than double as rich as they had been before. From 
being the possessors of say one-quarter they became the pos- 
sessors of more than one-half of the land of England. 

Next, in company with the great merchants, they picked a 
quarrel with the popular Crown, asserted their right to govern 
in its stead, destroyed that Crown in the Civil Wars of the 
seventeenth century, and upon the close of the Civil Wars 
turned it into a salaried executive post of which they were 
henceforward the masters. Law after law (made by the new 
rich class in its own interest) placed more and more effectu- 
ally into their hands the means of production and the monopoly 



i9i2.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 521 

of making and interpreting the laws of property. They con- 
fiscated to their use the public schools, the universities, the 
judicial bench, the whole machinery of local and central ad- 
ministration, and by a series of definite and frankly plutocratic 
statutes they absorbed the whole legislative power of the 
country. Such was the position of British society, in the early 
eighteenth century as Protestantism had made it. 

The first discoveries which brought in the industrial revo- 
lution appeared in a society already formed upon this model. 

The Industrial Revolution may be put, roughly speaking, 
as a phenomenon covering the sixty years between 1720 and 
1 780. Whenever during that period a new invention or process 
had to be capitalized, the inventor could find no one to furnish the 
capital save within that already monopolist class which domi- 
nated every organ of the commonwealth, 

That is why Capitalism and Industrialism grew to be twin 
giants of evil in Britain during the eighteenth century. That 
is why all the spirit and tradition of modern industry came to 
be capitalist, and it was the existence of this monopolist and 
frankly plutocratic caste which, in Britain especially, framed 
every law, and from the bench interpreted every case in such 
a fashion that the more wealth grew under the new industtial 
system the more it should be concentrated in the hands of 
the rich, and the more the population grew the more that 
population should be bred hopelessly proletarian. The thing 
was launched in Britain, and received its direction and spirit 
under British conditions. Wherever it has since struck root 
throughout the world it has carried with it and developed the 
mark and spirit of its origin. 

In order to appreciate how true this is let us conceive of 
the inventor or supporter of one of the new systems of pro- 
duction attempting what is called its capitalization ; let us 
understand what that word capitalization means, and let us ap- 
preciate how, under the conditions which the Reformation, 
and the Reformation alone, had permitted to arise, the process 
of capitalization necessarily made for the dreadful results which 
we can now hardly any longer endure. 

What is capitalization ? 

When the inventor or promoter of an idea seeks to "capi- 
talize" it, what is the real economic meaning of his action? 

It means that during the period of time required to pro- 



522 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION I Jan., 

duce such and such wealth by the new process, a certain 
amount of food, clothing, housing material, etc., must be con- 
sumed by the labor employed in producing that wealth. The 
people who are to make it known as well as the people who 
are actually to produce it, the people who are to manage it, 
and all the rest, during that period of production must live, 
and they can only live upon the accumulated results of past 
production. Unless, therefore, some person or persons con- 
trolling these accumulated results of past production are willing 
to put them at the service of the new process, the new process 
cannot take place at all. 

Now the accumulated results of past production are nothing 
more or less than the wealth of the community: its houses, 
tools, stores of food and drink, and so on. 

If all these things belonged to one man you could not 
"capitalize" any new process except by going to that one 
man and giving him the control of it. 

If it, the wealth of the whole country, were divided up 
among all the families, you would have to go to a great num- 
ber of those families, or to some group of them, to get capital 
when you needed it in any large amount. 

That is precisely what took place in the Middle Ages when 
land and capital were properly divided among the great mass 
of the families of the community, and when the means of pro- 
duction and the accumulated stores of wealth necessary to 
any great enterprise were largely controlled by corporations 
and by Guilds. The undertaking of any great work meant 
that you had to approach corporations of small capitalists and 
work through them. The bigness of an economic enterprise 
does not mean that you have to go to a big capitalist to get 
it started; it only means that you have to get big capital 
together which is quite a different thing. A cathedral like 
Acniens needed enormous capitalization ; but it was not built 
by going to a contractor and letting him exploit a proletarian 
working class. It was built by approaching a number of Guilds. 
And the cranes and pulleys and saws and all the rest of it 
the accumulated wealth without which that cathedral could 
not have been built was brought together for the work by 
the co-operation of a great number of free people and not by 
the action of one or two rich men. 

But when the means of production, the land and wealth of 



1 9 u.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 523 

the country, had already got into the hands of a few rich men 
(which, as a result of the Reformation, was the social con- 
dition of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolu- 
tion) it was necessary to have the new industry capitalized and 
run after the fashion of this rich class with its avarice, its 
secrecy, its uncontrolled competition and its determination to 
keep the majority of the community dependent upon itself. 

There is no economic necessity whatsoever which, from the 
mere increase in the cost of the means of production will pro- 
duce a proletariat. There is no economic necessity which, from 
the mere fact of combining great numbers in production will 
produce a proletariat. A proletariat and all the awful things 
connoted by that economic term comes, as every man-made evil 
comes, from the mind of man. Moral not material causes made 
capitalism ; and capitalism was, I repeat, already in existence be- 
ore the Industrial Revolution came to increase it so vastly in 
power and to develop so thoroughly all its vices of cruelty, 
avarice and hazard. 

If the Industrial Revolution, that is the new discoveries, had 
fallen in a time and place of well divided capital and land, and 
of a sane social philosophy, we should have to-day stable co- 
operative industry in the place of the horrors we know. 

Every evil, if it is of a fundamental and moral sort, may 
be observed (when it has produced its fruit) to attempt to 
remedy itself by yet another evil. So it is with the Capitalist 
scheme of production which has its roots in the Reformation. 
It takes its moral vices for granted, thinks of them as normal 
to human nature and necessary to any condition of society, 
and then proposes to remedy their intolerable effects by the 
inhuman scheme of Collectivism. 

Well, in this matter as in every other important social 
affair, the Catholic Church is on one side and its enemies 
upon the other; and the spirit of the Catholic Church where 
it prevails in the future will not permit industrialism as we now 
know it, and will certainly have nothing to say to Collectiv- 
ism, but will restore the normal and fundamental institution of 
property, widely distributed among free men, which distribution 
with its accompanying freedom was, purely of temporal effects, 
the chief effect the Faith had upon European civilization. 

Now where the Faith does not conquer in the battle, what 
we shall have will not be a Collectivist State. That is im- 



524 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Jan. 

possible; you might as well expect men to walk on their 
hands. What you will get in the loss of the Faith will be the 
Servile State: that condition of society which the Catholic 
Church discovered in Europe when first she came, and into 
which Europeans will sink again wherever they permanently 
abandon her. 

The absence of the Faith will produce a society in which 
the mass shall be guaranteed in sufficiency and security but 
shall not be put into possession of the means of production, 
while to a minority who will still be the possessors of the 
means of production, there will be guaranteed security in their 
privileged position. Institutions which thus permanently divide 
the state into possessors and non-possessors are whatever you 
cill them essentially institutions of slavery. 

Compulsory labor has already been suggested in modern 
England, and widely has the suggestion been supported. Every 
so-called "Social Reformer" is moving in that non-Catholic 
industrial society not towards Collectivism at all but towards 
the Servile State. The same is true of Protestant North Ger- 
many ; and perhaps men now alive will survive to see a divi- 
sion in Western civilization between societies which, like the 
Irish, have not lost the tradition of civilization, and will, there- 
fore, establish well-divided property; and, side by side with 
them, industrial societies based upon the ancient institution of 
slavery. 

So much for the material product, or at least the economic 
product, of the Reformation ; but beneath it all there is of 
course the moral product, for which the best and also the 
most contemptuous name I know is " Modern Thought." There 
is that frame of mind set up against the Catholic Church, 
upon whose victory or defeat the future fortunes of Europe 
must turn. 

To describe that state of mind and to estimate the chances 
of the coming battle between it and the Faith, will be my task 
in the next and last of this series of articles. 



Hew Boohs* 

THE LIFE AND LABORS OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE. 
By Francis Thompson. London : Burns and Oatts. 50 
cents. 

We naturally look forward with the keenest interest to any 
posthumous work of Francis Thompson's. The famous essay 
on Shelley, which was given to the public shortly after his 
death, made us wonder whether that was to be the estab- 
lished masterpiece among his prose writings: certainly up to 
the present it is far and above anything of his that his liter- 
ary executor has put into print. St. Ignatius of Loyola, let us 
confess it, in spite of Dr. Barry's warm phrases in the Dublin 
Review, disappointed us ; it was written to order, and Thomp- 
son found it drudgery: that is its severest condemnation. 

The Lije and Labors of St. John Baptist de la Salle shares 
qualities of both of the above-mentioned works: the first five 
chapters are matter of fact narrative, dealing with the life 
of the founder of the Christian Brothers, and it is only in a 
concluding chapter that we really recognize the pen of the 
author of the magic Sheiley. 

In the greater part of this little work, Thompson appears 
to be handling a cold piece of iron (and as iron it is not un- 
interesting), but at the end it becomes a polished and flash- 
ing spear-head, which the wielder thrusts into the very heart 
of Individualism. For de la Salle was the pioneer of Free 
Education, and this is part of a common tendency which in- 
volves the very negation of Individualism. Call that tendency 
socialistic, if you will; rather it is Christian and Catholic, and 
it knew the red cassock before it was crowned with the red 
cap. 

Red has come to be a color feared ; it ought rather to be a 
color loved. For it is ours. The color is ours, and what it 
symbolizes is ours. The sectaries came in the night, as we 
lay asleep, and stole it from us. Many of our garments have 
they masked in ; never in one more distinctively our own than 
this. Red in all its grades from the scarlet of the Sacred 
College to that imperial color we call purple, the tinge of 
clotted blood, which we have fitly made the symbol of the dead 
Christ it is ours. Hue of the Princes of the Church ; hue of 
Martyrs; hue of sway and love, and Passion-tide; ours by 



526 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

divinest heritage ; vesture in which the Proto-Martyr of Free- 
dom hung upon Calvary. To that garb of liberty a Cardinal 
is proudly lineal ; a Prince of the Blood indeed ! 

We Catholics have nothing to fear ultimately from the 
Secularist, nothing from the Socialist ; whatever good there is 
in their systems will fall to our reaping; the evil will pass 
with the passing of their lives. " Good steel wins in the hands 
that can wield it longest; and those hands are ours." 

It is to a free education and to a true education that 
Thompson looks for half the solution of the social problem. 
We may, indeed, strive to relieve the tottering adult misery 
that shames the world, but our hopes must rest upon the 
child a potential soil that will respond to good husbandry. 
"Think of it. If Christ stood amidst your London slums, He 
could not say: 'Except ye become as these little children/ 
Far better your children were cast from the bridges of Lon- 
don, than they should become as those little ones." And the 
poet who wrote A Child's Kiss knew much about those "lit- 
tle ones " flowers fallen from the coronal of Spring. 

As a "life" of de la Salle, the book is interesting: to 
many it will be invaluable inasmuch as it contains some few 
pages of brilliant composition which they always wish to as- 
sociate with the name of Francis Thompson. 

MEMORIES AND STUDIES. By William James. New York : 
Longmans, Green & Co. $i ,75. 

This volume contains the hitherto scattered addresses and 
essays of the late Professor James, now collected and pub- 
lished by his son. A new book by William James is always 
welcome. One only regrets that this must be the last. Few 
men have possessed his gift of making philosophy interesting. 
He will not rank amongst the great philosophers of the world. 
His attempts at constructive-work on a large scale are gener- 
ally half-hearted and incomplete. The system of Pragmatism, 
which is his boldest effort in metaphysics, will not withstand 
the tooth of time. But he was a searching and ruthless critic 
of pretentious systems of philosophy. And in the description 
of mental states he has hardly a peer. He was most at home 
in the field where psychology and ethics come into touch with 
the practical side of existence types of character, ideals of 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 527 

life, ends in education, etc. His work is a contribution to lit- 
erature not less than to philosophy, often to literature more 
than to philosophy. His style, vivid, direct, personal, often 
humorous, with a distinct American tang to it, is a model for 
those who have to discuss difficult problems from the lecture 
platform. 

The present volume is sufficiently diverse to illustrate the 
various elements in the foregoing criticism. The "Memories'* 
are delightful pictures of old friends, and show the fine human 
side of the Professor himself. The best of these is the article 
on Thomas Davidson, whom James styles "A Knight-Errant 
of the Intellectual Life." There are several addresses on edu- 
cational topics. A very interesting psychological study is 
"The Energies of Men," a study on getting one's "second 
wind." A good specimen of James as a critic is the chapter 
on "Herbert Spencer's Autobiography. His estimate of Spen- 
cer's personality is worth quoting at least in part: 

His erudition was prodigious. His civic conscience and his 
social courage both were admirable. His life was pure. He 
was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character was 
wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt). 
Surely, any one hearing this veracious enumeration would 
think that Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant hu- 
man being. . . . Yet when we turn to the autobiography, 
the self-confession which we find is this : An old-maidish 
personage, inhabiting boarding-houses, equable and lukewarm 
in all his tastes and passions, having no desultory curiosity, 
showing little interest in either books or people. A petty 
fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth ol any wide 
designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of 
things, yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession 
of a world formula which by dint of his extraordinary perti- 
nacity he proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it 
made him a philosopher in spite of himself. 

James also criticises Spencer's work in philosophy. He 
has not changed the view he expressed years ago when he re- 
ferred to it as "this sort of chromo-philosophy." 

One turns with eagerness to the chapter entitled, "Final 
Impressions of a Psychic Researcher." The final impressions 
are indefinite enough, but that only shows James' good sense. 



528 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

He says there are facts of psychic research not explained by 
normal laws. But "I personally am as yet neither a con- 
vinced believer in parasitic demons, nor a spiritist, nor a sci- 
entist, but still remain a psychical researcher waiting for more 
facts before concluding." 

PLAIN TOWNS OF ITALY: THE CITIES OF OLD VENETIA. 
By Egerton R. Williams, Jr. New York : Houghton Mif- 
flm Company. $4. 

After an interval of some eight years, Mr. Williams adds 
a companion volume to his Hill-Towns of Italy, Four years 
of residence and work in Italy have enabled him to give to 
the present work that greater care and wider relationship which 
old Venetia demands for the proper exposition of its varied 
treasures. Both well-known cities and little visited towns tax 
the resourcefulness and the patience of the writer who aims 
"to enable the fireside reader to see the whole of the lovely 
Veneto." As an elaborate and scholarly supplement to 
Baedeker for those who wish to go thoroughly into what is 
in some respects the most interesting section of Upper Italy, 
the volume is a satisfactory piece of work, giving us little to 
criticise or to desiderate. To travelers endowed with more fer- 
vor than discrimination we commend the author's comment on 
the suburbs of Treviso. "These brand-new villas were so ex- 
traordinary in design and ornamentation, so exemplary of the 
awfully misguided taste of the modern Italians, that they were 
worth walking miles to see; such a nameless patchwork of 
walls, pavilions, recesses, chimneys, flat-roofs, pent-roofs, arch- 
ways, mansards, in no style nor method ever known to man, 
with brick here and stone there, plain stucco here and rough 
stucco there, glaring each in half-a-dozen frightful, discord- 
ant colors, daubed from eaves to basement with every sort of 
discordant ornament (forgive the name!), they were an abomi- 
nable concatenation that would shake the nerves." 

CATHEDRAL CITIES OF ITALY. By W. W. Collins, R. I. Il- 
lustrated by the author. New York : Dodd, Mead and 
Co. $3.50. 

Mr. Collins* book is one to be read with satisfaction and 
recommended with enthusiasm. He is as skilful and dis- 
creet in describing historical background with his pen as he 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 529 

is original and alluring in painting great monuments with his 
brush. Just enough is said, just enough pictured, to make the 
reader understand and to make the observer desire. The 
volume is about what the layman would need in order to 
visit with profit and delight the chiei Cathedrals of Italy. It 
is not, of course, a history of art, neither is it a guide-book; 
but it is a beautiful and practical key to knowledge that the 
average, well-educated American will, as a rule, reasonably but 
in vain, seek to acquire in a single volume. 

SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT. By Scott Nearing, Ph.D. New York: 
The Macmillan Company. $1.50. 

Social Adjustment contains chapters on Education, Standards of Living, 
Congestion, Working Women, The Family, The American Home, Overwork, 
Dangerous Trades, Child Labor, Unemployment, Legislation. 

Of course a person of Professor Nearing's intelligence and 
experience cannot discuss the problems set before us here 
without saying much that is useful and much that is interest- 
ing. Yet persons who possess the powers of discrimination 
which, we hope, are characteristic of his readers, will hardly 
turn a page of this volume without something like mental 
irritation. The sweeping generalization, the hasty final ver- 
dict, the lofty scorn of what has been, the serene satisfac- 
tion with what now is, the prophetic description of what is 
about to be these and a dozen other forms of gratuitous 
blundering have made the judicial-minded and scientific- tem- 
pered writer on social reform a rare specimen nowadays. 
Professor Nearing is of the many. In the social sciences, as 
in the book before us, there are great and wonderful lessons 
to be learned. By what right are the facts of the case so 
commonly confused with a superficial philosophy and brought 
into discredit by a dogmatic tone? 

Professor Nearing has chosen for discussion a vital topic 
and with regard to a thousand things that bear upon it he is 
undoubtedly well-informed. His discussion of maladjustment 
and possible remedies will be of no little value to the reader 
who can disentangle truth from prepossessions and, for the 
sake of an author's real merits, overlook his blattering inepti- 
tude. 

VOL. xciv. 34 



53 o NW BOOKS [Jan., 

THE EDUCATION OF CATHOLIC GIRLS. By Janet Erskine 
Stuart. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25. 

No subject is fraught with greater interest for society and 
the Church than the education of Catholic womanhood, for it is 
to woman that the future must look so largely for the persistence 
of the religious ideal in life. The Church, ever desiring the best 
for her children, has ever denied that education to be best 
which ignores or impugns God's right to be known, and the 
soul's right to be led into His knowledge. She not only pro- 
claims this two- fold right, but places before the world for its 
realization a definite content of spiritual teaching. The sacred 
duty of so using this treasure as to obtain the highest result 
in character and will, is the inspiring motive of Janet Erskine 
Stuart's Education of Catholic Girls. 

The opening Chapter on "Religion" merits the careful 
study of all within whose province it comes to speak to chil- 
dren of the things of God. The far-reaching effects of first 
impressions are pointed out, "the grievous wrong done to 
children by well-meaning but misguided efforts to ' make them 
good' by dwelling on the vengeance of God." "God has a 
right to be set before them as worthily as our capacity allows, 
as beautifully as human language can convey the mysteries of 
faith. . . . The child has a right to learn the best it can 
know of God since the happiness of its life not only in etern- 
ity but even in time is bound up in that knowledge." The 
teacher must "live the life as well as know the truth, and 
love both truth and life in order to make them loved," for 
truly "only one who is constantly growing in grace and love 
and knowledge can give the true appreciation of what that 
grace and love and knowledge are in their bearing on human 
life." To be grounded in right and clear thinking on the great 
truths of religion is essential to leading others to right thought 
and practice and the noble friendship of God and of His 
Saints. We must rear a race virile and intelligent in faith, 
fearless and independent in practice, for " now, as in the ear- 
liest ages, the faithful stand in small assemblies or as indi- 
viduals amid cold and hostile surroundings, and individual 
faith and sanctity are the chief means of extending the King- 
dom of God on earth." The time has gone by when the faith 
of childhood might be carried through life unassailed by ques- 
tionings from without. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 531 

Scarcely less important are the two chapters on " Char- 
acter." In her diagnosis of temperament and prognosis of 
development under given influences Madame Stuart shows 
keen and unerring spiritual science. She follows, in the main, 
the familiar classifications of temperaments but her personal 
division into "yes and no," "Catholic and Nonconformist" 
children throws new light upon many an unsolved child, 
problem. 

The power of habits, acquired by training, to engrave upon 
the temperament the stamp of character is shown, but tem- 
perament is still reckoned with, as the underlying basis, con- 
stantly reasserting itself and only yielding fully to the mastery 
and transforming grace of the sacramental life. 

The educational value of Catholic philosophy and the funda- 
mental influence of Art and Manners are carefully presented. 
In the Chapter on " Mathematics and Natural Science," 
we seem to detect a lack of sympathy with these studies 
because they do not bear so directly upon character issues. But, 
while the taste of the few is somewhat disregarded, the proper 
scientific attitude of humble, patient waiting for proven results 
is inculcated. 

The author is at her best when unfolding the lessons of his- 
tory with the synthetic power of the Catholic view-point. To 
English, as their natural medium of absorption and exhalation, 
is given the "central place" in the education of English- 
speaking girls; and Modern Languages have a more than sur- 
face value, for the "particular educational gift to be found 
there is width of sympathy and understanding." Since "it is 
almost uncouth for us to grow up without any knowledge of 
the language of Holy Church," Latin becomes a sine quA non 
in the Catholic girl's curriculum. 

To manual training is given great importance. Nature study 
also has its appeal, it is of " greater value to a child to have 
grown one perfect flower than to have pulled many to pieces 
to examine their structure." 

The far-seeing eye. which makes Madame Stuart's work 
generally so admirable would seem to be an exaggerated ap- 
prehension in the chapter on " Lessons and Play." Her pro- 
test against the purposeless Golliwog and the omnipresent 
Teddy Bear are not to be wondered at, but we doubt whether 
the Golliwog will ever become an exemplar, or the Teddy 



532 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

Bear be responsible for anything more bearish in the nursery 
than the hugging of himself. We would also suggest in de- 
fense of the mechanical toy its stimulating effect on the in- 
ventive mind, and its service in familiarizing the child with 
mechanisms common in daily use. Food for thought is to be 
found in the author's suggestion that, however valuable, 
organized play is questionable as a relaxation from organized 
work. 

The child's love of "real people" sounds the key-note of 
"the highest quality for a teacher of girls, great sincerity," for 
"to be honestly one's self is more impressive for good than to 
be a very superior person by imitation." Professional manner- 
isms are to be avoided. Sincerity begets sincerity. 

We can but regret that, despite these great principles, 
Madame Stuart begs the question so vital to-day of "antici- 
pated instruction in the duties and dangers of grown-up life." 
Why, if to arm faith " we must be able to speak truth with- 
out being afraid of its consequences," should we not protect 
morals with a like sincerity ? Cowardice of parents and 
teachers has too long exposed girls to the dire results of ig- 
norance, or left them to iearn the great secrets of life from cor- 
rupting companions, or from the distorted views flaunted abroad 
in the press and on the stage. Mary, the " Lily of Purity," 
fresh from the Temple, was not thus ignorant of life's duties 
or its dangers. Morbid interest hangs arourd the unknown, 
and is blown away by the knowledge which co-relates life's 
duties and dangers with the " tbou shalt" and "tbou shalt 
not" of God's law. To extend the teachers' sincerity into this 
field would efface morbid curiosity, and even " girls of a school- 
room age " might be trusted to show personal conscience in 
their selection and rejection of reading, and so live up to the 
rules of the Archbishop of Westminster." 

To parents considering higher education for their girls, we 
would invite attention to Madame Stuart's rule of fitness : 
" To be fit for higher education calls for much acquired self- 
restraint, and, unfortunately, it is on the contrary, sometimes 
sought as an opening for speedier emancipation from control. 
Those who seek it in this spirit are of all others least fitted 
to receive it, for the aim is false, and it gives a false move- 
ment to the whole being . . . the higher education of 
women has flowered under Catholic influence, it has had a strong 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 533 

basis of moral worth, of discipline, and control to sustain the 
expansion of intellectual life." Outside the Church it "has 
tended to one-sidedness, to non-conformity of manners, of 
character, and of mind, to extremes, to want of balance, and 
to loss of equilibrium in the social order, by straining after 
uniformity of rights and aims and occupations." 

Madame Stuart's whole book witnesses to her love of 
knowledge and of children so essential in a teacher. She lays 
no claim to having solved the problem, but she has pointed 
the way towards solutions and lifted the ideal heavenward for 
both teacher and pupil. 

"Life tries the work of education 'of what sort it is.'" 
The woman who stands the test shows a quiet of mind " re- 
moved from stagnation, unswayed by excitement"; and a 
"firmness of will" manifested in reserve and self-devotion. 

Such a book as this should yield us more abundantly the 
perfect product of Catholic education, "that particular orien- 
tation of mind which is independent of this world, knowing 
the account which it must give to God." 

INDUSTRIAL CAUSES OF CONGESTION OF POPULATION IN 
NEW YORK CITY. By Edward Ewing Pratt, Ph.D. New 
York : Longmans, Green & Co. $2. 

Vol. XLHI of Studies in History, Economics and Public Law. Edited 
by the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University. 

Dr. Pratt's monograph is a patient, discriminating, con- 
scientious piece of research, creditable alike to his character 
and his intellect. Conceived in a thoroughly scientific spirit, 
the study examines, with most laborious and careful method, 
such data as could be brought to bear on the relation between 
the location of New York manufacturing plants and the distri- 
bution of population. Five chapters present valuable statistical 
material largely original and the final thirteen pages discuss 
conclusions and remedies. The interesting and extremely use- 
ful account of the author's gradual elaboration of his method 
of investigation will be especially profitable to students doing 
research work in related fields. 

Briefly, the chief remedy for congestion is city planning, 
which will both segregate factories and forestall improper sub- 
urban tenements. Dr. Pratt's deductions from his carefully 



534 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

sought data are modest and reasonable a good object lesson 
to the type of student that investigates little and suggests 
much. 

THE SPIRIT OF SOCIAL WORK. Addresses by Edward T. 
Devine. New York : Charities Publication Committee. $i. 

If the printers had not substituted a " decorated " for a 
plain, ordinary type, this volume might have been a very 
good specimen of their work, for otherwise it is a well- 
made book. It presents nine addresses on topics connected 
with the movements of modern philanthropy, by the Editor 
of The Survey. Mr. Devine says truly : " we are all culpa- 
bly, incredibly ignorant of the very things which it would 
be most to our advantage and most to our credit to know." 
Now, when philanthropic practice of some sort is supposed 
to engage everybody's attention, it is more than ever neces- 
sary that benevolent intentions should be rightly guided ; 
so if these addresses are theoretical rather than practical, 
they are none the less timely and useful. Mr. Devine's ap- 
peal is for greater interest in the hindrance of crime and 
misery, for more decision in dealing with those whose greed 
begets them, for more stringent laws in relation to housing, 
to women's and children's labor, and for " a determination to 
seek out and strike effectively at those organized forces of 
evil, the particular causes of dependence and intolerable living- 
conditions which are beyond the control of the individuals 
whom they injure and destroy." 

"The Problems of the Police" "The Dominant Note of 
Modern Philanthropy," and "The Religious Treatment of 
Poverty," are the most important of these papers. In the 
last named, Mr. Devine touches upon a consideration too 
frequently ignored by modern philanthropists, namely : the 
moral, spiritual and religious education and preparation ne- 
cessary for those who would rightly do good works and the 
advantage to those endeavors of a religious basis. In " The 
Conservation of Human Life," Mr. Devine urges for it the 
same claims which have been applied to the duty of conserv- 
ing our natural resources. "The Tenement Homes in Modern 
Cities," is somewhat unsatisfactory since it only deals with 
what might be called " the decent flat," which is bad etougb, 
to be sure, but worse remains behind. 



i 9 i2.] NEW BOOKS 535 

In " The Substantial Value of Woman's Vote," Mr. Devine 
though professing himself a convinced suffragist, in summing 
up what woman's vote would do, makes the queer mistake of 
attending to scarcely anything that woman couldn't do with- 
out it. 

" The Next Quarter Century " is a hopeful view of possi- 
bilities. Nevertheless Mr. Devine recognizes as we all must, 
that there are tremendous rocks ahead, political, industrial 
and anti-social, and that by far the most difficult as well as 
the most vital reform to persuade mankind to make, is that 
which as Thoreau says, "begins before I unlock my door in 
the morning." 

UNDER WESTERN EYES. By Joseph Conrad. New York: 
Harper Brothers. $1.25. 

We have here a minute study of Russian character, par- 
ticularly in relation to political and national aspirations. Mr. 
Conrad was born in Russian dominions and passed his early 
childhood in Siberia, and he seems to have imbibed an inti- 
mate knowledge of not only the manners and customs but of 
that indefinable atmosphere which characterizes and differen- 
tiates the various races of the world. This, with his great 
ability for synthetic writing, helps to bring him through a 
work which would prove an impossibility for most contempor- 
ary writers. He bases a well-proportioned book on the frail 
incident of one student's visit to another. 

The one, Haldin, a revolutionist and successful bomb- 
thrower, drops in unexpectedly to the room of Razumov, a 
quiet, hard-working student. Haldin confesses that he is the 
slayer of the high state official whose death, the same morning, 
has caused terror in Russian society. He asks Razumov to 
obtain his escape by visiting a drunken car-driver whose usual 
fares are thieves and revolutionists. On finding the driver 
drunk to insensibility Razumov thrashes him unmercifully* 
While going homewards he decides to betray Haldin to the 
police. This done, the story begins to move onwards. 

As in all his other books, Mr. Conrad rejects the conven- 
tional construction adopted by novelists. He plans and erects 
after his own genius which leaves a stamp of originality on 
every page, His character-sketching is done with a mas- 
terly hand. Razumov is one of those creations of imagination 



536 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

which live with a living, palpitating heart. Mr. Conrad is to 
'be congratulated on this fine study of human nature, a study 
that will rank near that of Lord Jim. The peculiar thing 
about Under Western Eyes is the vein of anticipation which 
runs through it, and which draws on the reader page by page, 
holding his attention through many a long paragraph of psy- 
chological speculation. This sense of anticipation is not ob- 
tained by any mere trickery of a literary craftsman, but by 
the slow, logical development of the story. From whatever 
standpoint the book may be viewed it must be described as 
a remarkable piece of work. 

THE SUPERSTITION CALLED SOCIALISM. By G. W. de Tun- 
zelmann, B.Sc. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott $1.50. 

The author of this volume, who has published several vol- 
umes on Electricity, has the advantage of writing from the 
standpoint of personal contact with Socialists and of debate 
among them. He frankly states that he offers us a book 
"written primarily to meet the requirements of the anti social- 
ist speaker." He shows much familiarity with socialist litera- 
ture and tactics, and consequently writes with much confidence 
in his positions. Since the economic and political features of 
the author's views are, on the whole, similar to those found in 
anti-socialist literature, they require no particular mention in 
this notice. The volume will be of value to those and may 
their number grow who feel called upon to enter actively 
into the campaign against Socialism. The color of English 
politics and social conditions found throughout the volume, 
adds somewhat to its interest. The author works in associa- 
tion with the English anti-Socialist Union. 

It may be doubted whether or not this treatise will help 
us very far on the way toward social peace. Many social stu- 
dents feel that Conservative leadership is not measuring up 
to the demands made on it. We are moving ahead in spots. 
We are moving too slowly in those spots. We are moving 
ahead at too great cost of time and effort. Such is the con- 
stitution of things that separately and unrelated, statesmen, 
judges, legislators, scholars and clergymen, as well as labor 
leaders, admit abuses, decry them, admit the shame of them, 
and yet they cannot or will not get together in proportion 
to their indignation and remedy them. Meantime, babies die, 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 537 

children are robbed of childhood and innocence ; women and 
girls slave for wages that shame us, and industry sends disease 
and death among our laborers, because prevention of them 
would reduce profits. We are moving ahead, but too slowly. 
The author's chapter on "Social Progress," tells us what ought 
to be done. Who is to blame that these things are not done ? 
Our share of blame for the rise of Socialism Should receive 
attention. 

MONA: A DRAMA. By Brian Hooker. New York: Dodd, 
Mead & Co. $1.25. 

Some two years ago the Board of Directors of the Metro- 
politan Opera Company, New York, offered a prize of $10,000. 
for the best Grand Opera written by an American. The work 
now before us has gained this prize, the libretto being by Mr. 
Brian Hooker, the music by Professor Horatio Parker. So 
very many unkind things have been said about operatic libret- 
ti that we fear Mona cannot escape adverse criticism. In 
theory a high standard is set for this kind of writing, but in 
practice the lowest grade of literary work is accepted. Mona 
is not a striking work, either from the point of view of origi- 
nality or of literary skill. As one reads one cannot help think- 
ing that the same ideas have been expressed before. The 
story is commonplace, and the manner of working it out equally 
so. The author sometimes does not appear to perceive that 
his words are capable of more than one meaning; while the 
selection of good vowel sounds singable words is very poor 
indeed. 

The story is set in Britain in the first century of the 
Christian era. A young girl, Mona, a direct lineal descendant 
of Boadicea, is in love with Gwynne (Quintus) the son of the 
Roman Governor. Gwynne has become a Bard of Britain. 
He leaves nothing undone to bring about peace between the 
British and the Romans. On this hinges the plot of the book. 
A thirst for revenge and national independence seizes upon 
the British. Caradoc, the Chief Bard of Britain, discovers to 
Mona her relationship to Boadicea. She is urged to take her 
lawful place in the nation, to lead her subjects. Fired with 
enthusiasm she goes from place to place, stirring up the Brit- 
ish to revolt against the Romans. Gwynne follows her every- 
where, endeavoring to have peace kept and protecting her 



538 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

(without her knowledge) from death at the hands of the Roman 
soldiers. The attempt of the British to surprise the Roman 
camp fails so signally that Mona brands Gwynne as a be- 
trayer of the British plans ; he having known them previously 
but having sworn the secrecy of a Bard. He protests his in- 
nocence and his good intentions. In reply Mona treacherously 
murders him, only to learn that all he said was true. 

THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 

Messrs. Williams & Norgate of London (represented in 
this country by Messrs. Henry Holt & Company) have pro- 
jected a series of books which to all appearances, if we may 
judge by the volumes now on our table, will be of consider- 
able value for the promotion of knowledge. While we say 
this off-hand it may come to pass that we may have to find 
fault from a Catholic standpoint with the treatment of certain 
questions. So far, however, we have found nothicg but what 
is liberal and free from anything antagonistic to what Catho- 
lics cherish. The series is called The Home University Library 
tf Modern Knowledge. Each volume is bound in dark brown 
cloth and well -printed, and costs 75 cents. 

In Evolution, by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson 
we have a book written in a very moderate tone and devoid 
of those wild assertions based on the researches and theories 
of Darwin so frequently found in literature. The two dis- 
tinguished Professors who have written the work bring for- 
ward an amount of interesting material, but no one can peruse 
their pages without seeing that at times they are hard pres- 
sed to fit in existing evidence with theories of what was in 
being in past ages. And we cannot help saying that occa- 
sionally a touch of absurdity enters into their arguments. 
This, however, is to be expected when so much theory and 
so very little evidence is presented. On p. 66 we find an honest 
confession which many a flippant popularizer of science should 
take to heart. 

" In this case (the writers are speaking of Mendelian ex- 
periments) and throughout all consideration of ' evidences,' 
it must be remembered that the evolution idea cannot be 
logically demonstrated. It is not a simple induction from 
particulars, thoroughly as particulars support it. It is a way 
of looking at the becoming of things; and it is the only 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 539 

scientific model interpretation that has been suggested. It is 
a formula that fits the facts, and all the facts it fits are its 
' evidences.' " 

The Animal World, by F. W. Gamble is full of interesting 
matter on the structure and distribution of animals, their 
quest for food, their color, senses, association and mode of 
living. Professor Gamble's references to insect life are the 
most attractive portions of the book. It is not often that an 
Introduction to a small book deserves special mention. That 
of Sir Oliver Lodge prefixed to this one is a mixture of science 
and philosophy. He makes some references to life which are 
of a pitiable, childlike simplicity. If he is waiting for a biol- 
ogist to teach him what the meaning of life is, he will be a 
sad maa on his death-bed. "Every year," he writes, "no 
doubt, brings them (biologists) nearer the solution, but to all 
appearance that solution is still far away." Yes, indeed, for 
biologists as such, but a Catholic priest will enlighten the 
learned scientist if reason be listened to. 

Dukinfield Henry Scott, in The Evolution of Plants, first 
states the problem of evolution and then proceeds to heap 
fact upon fact without any apparent great relevancy to the 
problem required to be solved. In the course of the chapters 
there is much information that is welcome, having the addi- 
tional commendation that it is stated generally in clear lan- 
guage. In his last chapter he sums up the results of science 
and their bearing upon the evolution of plants. Just as in 
the Geddes-Thompson volume, here also we find evidences 
of the helpless condition to which scientists are led by evolu- 
tionary theories. A few citations will be illuminative: 

" When we get back to the Devonian period, a veil falls, 
and all the earlier course of evolution (immensely the greater 
part of the whole history), remains hidden. Scientific men, 
however, are not always deterred from theory by the absence 
of facts, ..." (p. 221). "Within the period from the 
Devonian age to our own time organization is not shown to 
have ' largely advanced,' though there may have been changes " 
(p. 229) . . . "It appears that there has been very little 
change in European plants since glacial or even pre-glacial 
times" (p. 232) . . . "The whole problem of Descent is 
in fact extraordinarily complex, and we are now only at the 
beginning of the investigation" (p. 237). 



540 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

THE MASS AND VESTMENTS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 

By the Rt. Rev. Monsignor John Walsh. Troy, New 

York: Troy Times Art Press. 

It is the aim of the author to present a volume on the 
Mass and vestments which will be of some service to Catho- 
lics. To ensure this end he has adopted in opposition to the 
advice of friends a catechetical method. Throughout the five 
hundred pages of the book questions are asked on the various 
matters presented for consideration, and are answered some- 
times with extreme brevity, at other times with a touch of 
prolixity. We are of the same opinion as the author's friendly 
advisers: we would desiderate the older but better form of 
book-making, one from which greater unity could be obtained. 
The answers are, as a rule accurate, and the book presents in 
a form that will no doubt appeal to many, much practical in- 
formation. In a few places the style is so loose that the 
meaning is capable of being twisted out of shape. 

Altogether there are over forty chapters dealing with the 
Mass, its ceremonies, and the vestments used. The general 
scheme is, first, a consideration of the Liturgy in general, then 
the different kinds and forms of the Liturgy, the Sacrifice of 
the Mass, its efficacy, fruits and their application; the struc- 
ture of the Mass; the altar and its adornments; the sacred 
vessels; the vestments and articles used in conjunction with the 
Mass; and a supplitnentary chapter on various other vestments. 
Is there such a term as Solemn High Mass? Journalists have 
coined one, but that is no reason why it should creep into a 
technical treatise on the Mass. To us the term Simple High 
Mass is also new; we have always heard it called Missa 
Cantata. 

The publishers are to be congratulated on their share in 
the work. They have produced a splendidly printed volume, 
easily read and accurately printed. 

ADRIAN SAVAGE. By Lucas Malet. New York: Harper 
Brothers. $1.35. 

Lucas Malet, the author of Sir Richard Calmady, and, 
since her conversion to the Church, of that more admirable 
novel, The Far Horizon, has recently published her latest book, 
Adrian Savage. It is surely worthy of serious praise. The 
author has written thoughtfully and carefully, yet not without 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 541 

an attractive, light grace of manner. Her treatment of mod- 
ern social questions is thoroughly sound. 

Adrian Savage, the son of an English father and a French 
mother, is of a temperament which blends happily the romantic 
and the practical. His experience, like his heredity, is cut in 
two by the English Channel. In Paris there is the Literary 
Review, of which he is successfully the editor, and there is 
Gabrielle St. Leger, the young widow of whom he is, not so 
successfully, the lover. Gabrielle, essentially a child of the 
age, " with the strange, unrestful wind, the wind of modern- 
ity, blowing upon her face," has a decided inclination to femin- 
ism, and an accompanying disinclination to marriage. Both 
perversities Adrian sets out to conquer, and his love scenes 
with Gabrielle are of a dainty formality that makes a relieving 
and pleasant contrast to the strainingly erotic fiction of the hour* 

In England Adrian's experience is more painful. Sum- 
moned thither to settle the estate of a relative, Montagu 
Smyrthwaite, he meets as co-executor the elder daughter, Jo- 
anna. This woman, with her straight, yellowish hair, pasty 
complexion, and pale, anxious eyes, with her morbid habit of 
introspection and her narrow conscientiousness without reli- 
gion, misinterprets Adrian's cousinly courtesy, and falls pas- 
sionately in love with him. After years of repression she 
fastens on him her starved hopes for life and happiness. 
When she learns of her self-deception, of Adrian's love for 
Gabrielle, and of their approaching marriage, she kills herself. 
The extracts from the diary in which poor Joanna tears apart 
the emotions of her tortured soul are remarkable, not only 
as showing the author's almost painful character- realism, but 
also as affording a tacit, inevitably deducted proof of the 
social value of the convent. Women of Joanna's type, who 
cannot fulfill themselves as wives and mothers, are forming a 
distinct social problem ; without faith," denied by man, denying 
God," what are they to do? 

For the characters of the provincial English in the story 
the author has taken a quietly ironical pen, and its short, 
pointed strokes make sketches of exceptional cleverness. All 
the character- drawing, in fact, is good, and the construction 
of the story is remarkably correct. The only adverse criti- 
cism would counsel the omission of the lengthily unpleasant 
scene between Challoner and Mrs. Spencer. 



542 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

IRISH NATIONALITY. By Alice Stopford Green. New York: 
Henry Holt and Company. 75 cents. 

Irishmen and their descendants have to express thanks to 
Mrs. Green for this book which does so much justice to the 
Old Land. In recent years there has not been, perhaps, any 
book published capable of producing so much good as this 
one. And this simply because it will reach a class of readers 
notoriously ignorant of everything appertaining to Ireland, and 
equally remarkable for their narrow prejudice against the coun- 
try and its people. Belonging to the Home University Li- 
brary, a series that is attracting the attention 'of the literary 
world, Mrs. Green's book, will on this account, find its way into 
many homes there to uproot prejudice and create a sympathy 
for the land of sorrows. For this reason the Editors are worthy 
of the highest praise for obtaining the aid of Mrs. Green, and 
for inserting her book among some of the first of the series. 

Irish Nationality is a small book, yet full of good things. 
It is well-written, impartial, and just. Unlike some other 
modern writers on the same subject, the author is in sympathy 
with the people. This is neither a mere pose, nor a touch of 
feminine sentimentality, but a true expression of human kind- 
ness begotten from an intimate knowledge of what the Irish 
have suffered during the past centuries. She shows in her first 
chapters the general condition of culture in ancient Ireland, 
the remarkable system for the preservation of law and order, 
and the general trend of the Irish idea of nationality. By 
contrasting the tribal system of the country with that in vogue 
in England and on the continent, the author depicts also the 
wonderful strength for defensive purposes which lay in the 
national system of the Irish. While all Europe and England 
and Scotland lay squirming under the heel of the Roman. 
Ireland remained free and unconquered. 

In discussing the various phases of Irish society, Mrs. 
Green is rather unsatisfsctory when there is question of the 
Church. There is a want of clearness in her language which 
may and we feel will leave a mistaken idea with some persons 
that Rome played no part in the religious life of the nation 
during the centuries immediately succeeding St. Patrick's time. 
We do not dream, for an instant, of imputing to the author a 
desire to rank herself with those dilettantes in Irish matters 
who for purposes of theological controversy make every en- 



I9I2-] NEW BOOKS 543 

deavor to eliminate the Pope and Rome from the history of 
Ireland. To be specific, we find fault with pages 84 and 94, 
where so much insistence is placed upon a national and in- 
dependent Church, but where no mention is made that Rcme 
was first and uppermost in the thoughts of the Irish, as is 
instanced in the Council of Rate-Breasil (of which Mrs. Green 
makes no mention) presided over by Gilbert, Bishop of Lim- 
erick, and Papal Legate in Ireland; neither is there any refer- 
ence to the national Council of Holmpatrick in 1148 when the 
Holy See was petitioned for the palliums, which were after- 
wards brought in 1151 by a Cardinal specially sent by the 
Pope to confer the insignia on the Archbishops of Armagh, 
Dublin, Cashel and Tuam. The slightest notice of these facts 
would have removed the misunderstanding which the author's 
words now make possible. Practically the same objection may 
be taken to pages 49 and 50 where those hoary, immortal 
difficulties about the tonsure and Paschal celebrations are 
lightly sketched. The author has also, we think, missed a 
point in her insistence that the love of the Irish for St. John 
the Evangelist came from the tradition that Christianity in 
Ireland was obtained in the first place from the saint. The 
history of virtue in Ireland shows why the virgin Apostle was 
beloved by the Irish, and the idea of the eastern origin of 
the Irish Church is not seriously considered by scholars, nor 
was such an idea even entertained by the peasantry. It is 
one of those theories thought to be of value in discounting 
the authority of Rome in the country. 

These are all the faults we have to find in this remarka- 
ble little book. It would be an injustice to the author to 
gloss them over. All the other pages we read with great 
pleasure. And it is with pleasure that we commend the book, 
wishing it Godspeed, and hoping that it will have a wide 
circulation. 

MEMOIRS OF THEODORE THOMAS. By Rose Fay Thomas. 
New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $3. 

The impression left by this memoir is less that of having 
read a book than of having had a vision of a full, useful and 
noble life. Mrs. Thomas has done her work with clearness, 
simplicity and taste. 

This life shows how foolishly mistaken it the popular idea 



544 NEW BOOKS [Jan. 

that there is a necessary connection between artistic power 
and loose-living. It shows that health of body and mind and 
purity of spirit eminently assist artistic growth and excellence. 
"A musician," Thomas says, "must keep his heart pure and 
his mind clean if he would elevate instead of debasing his art. 
. . . Those old giants said their prayers when they would 
write an immortal work." Even as a young man he was care- 
ful not only of words and actions but of his thoughts, and 
Mrs. Thomas says "that he prepared himself for a performance 
of the ninth symphony, with such seriousness and reverence, 
that it resembled some high religious festival." 

It is, perhaps, as a contribution to the history of music in 
this country that Mrs. Thomas's book is most valuable, for 
Thomas was our earliest missionary of serious music and was 
identified with all the efforts for its cultivation from Maine to 
California. He was the pioneer who made all our present 
richness of opportunity possible, and with painful toil and loss 
he blazed the trail which is now so easy to follow that we 
forget how much we owe him. All who read this record of 
his work will have a new sense of gratitude to Theodore 
Thomas. 

The book is well-printed and interestingly illustrated. The 
contents of chapters are fully given but there is no index. 

STUORE. By Michael Earls, SJ. New York: Benziger Broth- 
ers. $i. 

Michael Earls, S.J., the author of Melchior of Boston, has 
published a volume of short stories under the title of Stuore. 
" Stuore," it appears, is the old Italian word for mats; three 
centuries ago a learned Italian Jesuit, Padre Menochio, who 
employed his scant leisure in writing, just as the early Basil- 
ian monks employed theirs in weaving mats, gave that name 
to his literary productions, and it is now similarly used by 
the author. The seven stories which the book contains are 
well worth reading; originality and realism give them inter- 
est. In particular, the story called "Dasey," which tells of 
the miraculous return to sanity of a dying lunatic, by the 
efficacy of his sister's prayers, is unusual and memorable. 
Under other authorship the book might be dismissed with 
such praise of its undoubted worth, but from Father Earls we 
admit we had expected better things. These stories, above 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 545 

the ordinary though they are, do not at all fulfill the promise 
of his earlier work, Melchior of Boston. They have its defects, 
with but few of its merits. Father Earls has not yet realized 
that he can avoid the pedantic and the too obviously didactic 
in his work without impairing the serious and the spiritual. 
He has not yet attained the ease and grace of style by the 
addition of which Melchior oj Boston could have been a really 
great book. Nor can he hope for literary completion as long 
as his work remains unleavened by humor. It is very possi- 
ble, however, that the stories in this volume are casual writ- 
ings, casually collected, and that the author has in prepara- 
tion a more representative book, one which will justify our 
belief in his talent. 

THE FOOL IN CHRIST, by Gerhart Hauptmann. (New 
York: B. W. Huebsch. $1.50). This is announced by the 
publisher as "a weighty, almost monumental study in the re- 
ligious emotions of Protestant Christianity," but it is hard to 
see that any purpose is served by this tedious, painful, mor- 
bid and uninteresting story of a poor visionary who ccrr.es to 
believe himself, and to be accepted by his " disciples " as Christ 
come on earth again. It is another of those many futile at- 
tempts which only a perverse misunderstanding of the Divine 
Life makes possible, an attempt to construct a character which 
shall re-enact the life of the Son of Man, and then show the 
hard and unchristian behavior of Church and State in not ac- 
cepting the fanatic at his own valuation. It is difficult to 
guess to what class such a book appeals. It is too exclu- 
sively occupied with religious monotony and too dull to please 
a novel-reader, it contains nothing for intelligent or intellec- 
tual persons, nothing for any who are really interested in 
religion. The translation from the German seems to be care- 
lessly done. 

PSSENTIALS OF SPANISH GRAMMAR, by Samuel Gar- 
*-' ner, Ph.D. (New York: American Book Company. $i). 
Dr. Garner's small volume, containing mere rudiments of Span- 
ish, will be appreciated by that unduly large class who desire 
a hastily acquired and permanently superficial knowledge of 
the grammar. " Unduly large" and yet not despicable is that 
group which is impatient of grammatical refinements and philo- 
TOL. xciv. 35 



546 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

logical researches. It also very often puts its knowledge to 
good practical use. And if such pupils study this book under 
a strenuous teacher they will make considerable progress in 
a little time. 

THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN IN RELIGION, by 
George Hodges. (New York : D. Appleton & Co. $1.50). 
Dean Hodges' contribution to the literature of religious edu- 
cation consists of fifteen chapters devoted to suggestions that 
may enable fathers and mothers and teachers to perform their 
duty with a clear mind and good results. It is a reverent and 
sensible book, although not needed by the well-instructed 
and loyal Catholic parent. 

NORA'S MISSION, by Mary Agnes Finn. (New York: 
Benziger Brothers. 75 cents), is a mediocre story of 
Irish life. The author's purpose is without doubt sincere and 
lofty, but her execution is not praiseworthy. Though Nora's 
mission in life was a noble one nothing less than the con- 
version to Catholicity of an entire family it is a pity it were 
not told to us in a better and more convincing way. 

'THE LITTLE COUNT OF NORMANDY, by Evaleen Stein. 
(Boston: L. C. Page & Co. $1.25). In the story of 
Raoul we have a fair enough account of the life of a well- 
born boy in feudal times. The boy flies the falcon, serves as 
page, falls into the clutches of a robber-baron just exactly as 
a boy should do in any orthodox tale of thirteenth century 
Normandy. The story is smoothly told, but the author has not 
been fortunate in the choice of her illustrator. 

OUR DAILY BREAD, by Walter Dwight, SJ. (New York: 
The Apostleship of Prayer. 50 cents.) To the readers 
of The Messenger of the Sacred Heart and to numerous others 
the writings of Father Dwight are well-known and always 
welcome. Simple and unaffected, at times brusque and busi- 
ness-like, they always carry conviction. In his new book, 
Our Daily Bread, (new in the sense that these discourses 
appear for the first time in book form) his message is the 
practice of frequent, and, if possible, daily Communion. The au- 
thor looks at the question from all sides and from every point 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 547 

of view. The chapter, "The Senior Partner," will appeal to 
the business man. The children's needs are treated in the 
paper entitled "The Magic Bread." It is to be regretted that 
there is no index and that no titles are given to the excellent 
illustrations. 

CTUDIES IN INVALID OCCUPATION: A Manual for 
^ Nurses and Attendants. By Susan E. Tracy. (Boston: 
Whitcomb & Barrows. $1.50). This interesting book is the 
outcome of actual experiments in the Training School for 
Nurses of the Adams Nervine Asylum, Jamaica Plain, Mass. 
The Superintendent of that Institution, Dr. Fuller, contributes 
a convincing introduction on the need of teaching nurses the 
art of providing employment for the idle hours of patients. 
Nurses and physicians who are not as naturally ingenious and 
resourceful as would be desirable, will find this volume worthy 
of careful attention. Typical patients are considered in separ- 
ate chapters and the resources of clothespins, paper, cloth, 
cardboard, wood, raffia, pine-needles, eggshells, and the like, 
are suggestively demonstrated. 

CIVIC BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR GREATER NEW YORK. 
Edited by James Bronson Reynolds for the New York 
Research Council. (New York : Charities Publication Com- 
mittee). Mr. Reynolds has edited a book helpful to students 
of social conditions in New York. It will serve to start them 
on the road, but it can hardly be said to attain its rather am 
bitious aim "to give them access to all important material in 
print in their several lines of work or investigation." Its fif- 
teen sections comprehend Population, Economic Condition*, 
Transportation, Housing, Correction, Charities and Education. 
The references include eleven libraries. The oversight which 
left " A " as an abbreviation unexplained has been repaired 
by the preparation of a printed slip which may be obtained 
on application to the publishers and inserted as a corrigendum. 

AN unambitious, but clever story is Alias Kitty Casey, by 
Mary Gertrude Williams, (New York: P. J. Kenedy & 
Sons. 85 cents). A girl of position and refinement decides, 
under peculiar circumstances, to go as chambermaid to a sum- 
mer hotel. Comical situations naturally follow, but pathos 



548 NEW BOOKS [Jan.. 

creeps in, too, and once even stumbles to the verge of trag- 
edy. The author writes with skill and humor. 

THE MARLIER PUBLISHING COMPANY of Boston has 
just brought out a new edition of the Tales oj Mt. St. 
Bernard by the Rev. W. H. Anderdon, S.J., to which has been 
added a short story by Lady Georgiana Fullerton The Hand- 
kerchief at the Window. The " Tales" by Father Anderdon are 
supposed to be told by the travelers snow-bound in the hos- 
pice of an Alpine monastery. Like Longfellow's Tales of a 
Wayside Inn, which they of course recall, these stories gain 
in interest by their diversified theme and style, and they make 
a very pleasing volume. The story by Lady Georgiana Ful- 
lerton, which completes the volume, needs beyond its author's 
name no further surety of originality and worth. (Price 75 
cents). 

DENZIGER BROTHERS, publish The Old Home, a book 
*-* of short stories simple, graceful tales, written by Dr. 
Chatelain, and translated from the French by Susan Gavan 
Duffy. (75 cents). 

'THROUGH THE BREAK IN THE WEB, by Stevens Dane, 
A (New York: Benziger Brothers. 45 cents), is a story of 
a London solicitor and his stenographer a rather weak story, 
but pretty and pathetic. 

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH, by A. Borini, 
(New York : Benziger Brothers. 30 cents), is a well- 
meaning story, but its boring qualities cannot be overstated. 

THE clever stories of Marion Ames Taggart have won her a 
sure place on the list of Catholic writers for children. 
Under the title, Nancy, the Doctor's Little Partner, (Boston : 
L. C. Page & Co. $1.50), Miss Taggart has published the 
third story in "The Doctor's Little Girl" Series. All three 
books make pleasant and recommendable reading for chil- 
dren. 

HONEY-SWEET, a new story for little girls, by Edna Tur- 
pin, (New York: The Macmillan Company $1.25), is 
pleasant and wholesome; also more sensible than the title would 
indicate. 



foreign iperiobicals, 

The Tablet (u Nov.): "Cardinal Gibbons." "The Titles of 

the Hierarchy." "The creation of two new Archbishops 
has not occasioned any alarm in the minds of the general 
public. Nobody regards the action of the Pope in the 
light of a menace to the Church of England, as by law 
established; a sufficiently significant indication that 
times have changed, and changed in our favor." The 
Benedictine Abbot of Ealing recently exposed the latest 
" Escaped Nun " myth, together with the names of those 
persons who abetted the fraudulent lecturer. 
(18 Nov.): One of the latest official acts of the French 
Government is the eviction of the Little Sisters of the 
Assumption from their houses in Lyons and Paris. The 
Sisters nurse the sick poor in their own homes, yet with 
no greater crime to their charge than this, these few 
remaining religious must go. An International Catho- 
lic Institute is to be founded in Rome, to serve as a 
centre of union for Catholics from all parts of the world. 

A Canadian correspondent attributes Sir W. Laur- 

ier's defeat in the constituencies of Ontario to the prej- 
udices excited by the publication of the " Ne Temere" 
decree. 

(25 Nov.) : University College, Dublin, has just entered 
on its second academic year as a member of the new 
National University. Its progress in the past year was 

so satisfactory that its success seems assured. 

The Russian Minister of the Interior, in a circular to 
the Roman Catholic Bishops in the Empire, forbids 
all teaching of prayers and doctrine outside of the au- 
thorized schools and churches. As most of the parishes 
are very large" more than forty miles across "the 
"children are allowed to grow up forced to grow up 
absolutely like heathens." 

The Month (Dec.): "The Ne Temere Decree," by the Rev. 
Sydney F. Smith, describes the agitation caused by this 
decree in Protestant circles. The author then defends 
and justifies its legislations on the question of marriage. 

Virginia M. Crawford in the article, "The Ethics 

of Shopping," strives to awaken the social conscience of 



550 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

her readers in determining the conditions of labor. 

Under the caption "The Sign of the Cross," the Rev. 
Hubert Thurston, with numerous quotations from the 
Fathers, some as remote as the second century, traces the 
history and development of the practice of making the 

sign of the cross. "The Word of God: Pagan and 

Jewish Background," by Rev. C. C. Martindale, is a study 
of the word Logos, and shows that the original lan- 
guages which enshrine divine revelation, can convey 
meanings which elude the most accurate of translations. 

The National (Dec.) : " Episodes of the Month." In writing 
of "Welsh Disestablishment," the Right Hon. F. E. 
Smith urges Welsh Nonconformists to unite with the 
strongest religious institution in their country the Es- 
tablished Church in Wales in order to resist the ad- 
vancing forces of indifference. " Italy's Friendship," 

by E. Capel Cure. Italy asks of England "the calm 
weighing of cause and effect, of motive and of action, 
the serene application of praise or of blame, sympathy 
if sympathy is due, and, above all, justice."- " Ger- 
mans versus Scandinavians," by a Wayfarer, shows that 
Germans are unwelcome visitors in Scandinavia. 
Paul England in " A Plea for English Song," offers 
some suggestions to those who wish to forward the 

cause of opera in English. "The Little River," by 

Edgar Syers, presents the author's reminiscences of the 
Thames above Oxford. " It is appreciated by such only 
as study to be quiet its peaceful beauty is too good 
for any but 'anglers or very honest men." 

Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Nov.) : Rev. James MacCaffrey de- 
scribes the origin and aims of the recently-organized 
"Catholic Record Society of Ireland." At present its 
efforts are to be directed mainly to the publication of 
hitherto unpublished original records. A journal is to 

be established for that purpose. "Concerning Hugh 

Peters in Ireland," by J. B. Williams, sets forth the 
" true history " of this Cromwellian Colonel prominent 
in the Drogheda and Wexford massacres. The paper is 
partly based upon the publications of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society. 

Le Correspondant (10 Nov.): "The Fleet Victim Powder 'B' 



i9i2.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 551 

and the Catastrophes of the Sea, is an unsigned article 
dealing with the causes of the catastrophe to the French 
battleship Liberty , off Toulon, September 26, 1911. 
The article contains five cross-section cuts and deck 
plans of the Liberty, with one cut of the different kinds 

of powder in use to-day. "Count de Chambord, 

William I. and Bismarck," by Francis Laurentie, is an 
article concerning the troublesome days of 1870, based 
on hitherto unpublished letters which passed between 

these important personages. "The Investigation of 

Life," by George Blondell, deals with the economic 
question of the high costs of living, and its causes in 

France and other countries. " Our Deputies," by Elie 

Geneste, gives the reasons advanced by the different 
candidates for their election and the promises they in- 
tend to fulfill on their election. "The Chinese Revo- 
lution and Its Causes," is an unsigned article dealing 
with the history of the agitation for reform raised by 
Reformist Parties of China, and tracing the most serious 
uprisings to the numerous secret societies which abound 

in that country. "The Thefts in the Museums," by 

De Lisle, describes the thefts committed during the 
past ten years. The article contains a detailed list of 
the robberies from the different museums of France, 
of paintings, jewels, statues, money and rare manuscripts. 
(23 Nov.): "The Elections in Alsace-Lorraine," by E. 
Wetterle describes the results of the last election in 

this Franco-German province. "The Budget of 1912," 

by Louis Cadot discusses the gradual increase of the 
national debt of France from 1870 to the enormous 
debt published in the present budget, describing two 

methods of liquidating the debt. " Our Churches in 

Danger," by Max Doucnic, describes the lamentable con- 
dition of the churches of the district of Jura. "A 

Minister of the Navy Under Napoleon," by Victor Mar- 
tel, describes Admiral Duke Decres, as a model Minister 
of War. His most important letters are published in 

this article. "The Historical Authority of Renan," 

by Michael Salomon, describes the chief points in Renan's 
character as advanced by his principal biographers and 
critics. "The Lesson from the Italian State Rail- 



552 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

way," by Daniel Bellet, is a note of warning to the 
French Government which is anticipating a national 

ownership of railways. "The Clergy of Paris During 

the Revolution," by de Lanzac de Laborie, describes 
the conditions of the Parisian clergy from 1789-1802. 
" Feminine Mutuality," by Louise Zeys, describes the 
societies formed by wealthy women of Paris for reliev- 
ing the distress of their indigent countrywomen. 

Revue du Clerge Franfais (15 Nov.): E. Vacandard brings to 
a close his sketch of " The Latin Church from the 
Fourth to the Fifteenth Century." L. Cl. Pillion con- 
tributes a study A Gospel Romance t a new novel by M. 
Gerhart Hauptmann. The story tells of a low-born 
peasant who imagines himself to be Christ and goes 
through all the developments which, according to the 
most advanced hostile critics, Christ went through in 
His life. Words and scenes from the Gospel are intro- 
duced into His life in such a way as to insinuate a 
purely natural and pathological explanation of the 

Gospel narrative, J. C. Broussolle writes " On the 

Discovery of the Primitive Germans," viz., the earlier 
German artists. 

(i Dec.): J. Bricout gives a historical sketch of " Chris- 
tianity from the Reformation to Our Day. "Some 

Thoughts of Mgr. Darboy," by H. Lesetre is a selection 
from the famous martyr-bishop, of passages on the needs 
of the Church and people of his time, of the evils threat- 
ening, of the false relations between science and religion, 
of the social obligations of Christians, and other matters. 

L, Venard reviews among other works on Biblical 

subjects, the following: "A Commentary on the Pro- 
verbs," by J. Knabenbauer.SJ.; "Commentary on the 
Book of Genesis," by M. Hetzenauer, O.C.; "Essays 

in Pentateuchal Criticism," by H. M. Wiener. "The 

Social Value of Christianity" is a discourse by Mgr. 
Sobbedey, Bishop of Arras, to a recent Congress of 
Catholic lawyers. 

tudes (5 Nov.): Alexander Brou relates the difficulties which 
Christians meet with in their schools in China. The 
favor of the government is uncertain ; Catholic teachers 
are scarce and money also. Joseph Boubee explains 



i9i2.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 553 

the Church's attitude towards war and tells the story 

of the late General Baron de Charette. Though M. de 

Lantivy advocates the distinct legal unity of Brittany, 
Joseph de Tonque"dec fears that the territorial divisions 
have not ties of history, customs and manners, close 
enough to cause them to fuse naturally. 

(20 Nov.): Jules Grivet expounds and criticizes Bergson's 
" Theory of Personality." Bergson holds personality to 
be only a condensation of one's history, a purely psy- 
chical clan like memory, which is its principal constitu- 
ent. He reviews cases of double personality and ex- 
plains the amnesia as a weakening in the subject's power 
to make his memories real. Joseph de Ghellinck con- 
cludes his study on the mutual borrowings of " Theology 
and Canon Law in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries," 
treating especially Gratian, Peter Lombard, and the in- 
fluence of Abelard's method on the former. In canon 
law, notably as regards the Sacraments, he sees a fruit- 
ful field for theological research. On the elevation 

of Father Billot to the Cardinalate, Jules Lebreton re- 
grets his loss as a teacher of Theology. His intellect- 
ual temper is said to be that of the thirteenth century 
rather than the keen controversial spirit of the six- 
teenth. In contrast with his predecessor, Franzelin, he 
cares less for positive theology than for speculative. 
A chapter from a forthcoming novel by Henry Bor- 
deaux, glorifying the ideal of a French Catholic wife. 

X. M. Le Bachelet, S.J., has published Bellarmine's 

correspondence, previous to his becoming a cardinal, and 
also an original brochure defending Bellarmine's part in 
the edition of the Sistine- Clementine Bible. 

Revue Pratique D' Apologetique (15 Nov.): The initial article is 
a discourse given by Mgr. Baudrillart in the chapel of 
the Catholic Institute, at the Mass of the Holy Ghost. 
Nov. 3, 1911. "Piety" is the subject of a discourse. 
Piety should be threefold. It should be the principle 
of our action. It should be intellectual, neither cold 
nor proud, nor superstitious. It should be filled with 

love. " The Eucharist in St. Paul," by E. Mangenot. 

The following are the points considered : (a) The tradi- 
tional account of the institution of the Lord's Supper 



554 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

in the Epistle to the Corinthians, (b) The origin of 
the account, (c) The content .and signification of the 

account. The article, entitled : " The Apologetic 

Method of Immanence," by H. Getitot, points out the 
good of this method of apology, its restrictions, and 
wherein Immanence in its proper sense differs from the 
use made of it by Modernists. The second half of the 
articles analyzes the method of orthodox Immanence 
(i) that necessities of our will demand and reveal 
necessity of the Supernatural; (2) the discovery of a 
truth is work of intellect and will. 

La Civilta Cattolica (iSNov.): " Oppression of Catholicism in 
Russia " recites the conditions still existing several 
years after the so-called "ukase of toleration," and is 
depressing reading. The present outlook is, humanly 

speaking, very dark. A first article on " A National 

Agitation for Liberty of Education " describes the 
dangers threatening Catholic education in Italy at the 
present time and the chaotic condition of the law 

with respect to schools. The decisions of the Biblical 

Commission are given with regard to the Gospel of St. 
Matthew with an interesting commentary thereon. 
. " Letters of Giome Carducci " are reviewed ; the re- 
viewer likens him to Dante's Capaneo.^^ Other books 
noticed are Bellarmine Before His Cardinalate (Le Ba- 
chelet, S.J.) Poems of the Virgin (Barbieri) and Mont 

St. Michel, by Paul Gont. The Holy Father's letter 

to Cardinal Rampolla, Protector of the St. Cecilia So- 
ciety, cordially blesses the Higher School of Music 
opened in 1911 by the Society in Rome. 
(2 Dec.): The leading article by A. Vaccari, S.J., dis- 
cusses the " Odes of Solomon " in the light of the lit- 
erature provoked by Kendel Harris's work on this sub- 
ject. Very interesting extracts are given from a num- 
ber of the odes taken from Harris's Syriac text. The 

series on the " Genesis of Luther's ' new learning ' " is 
continued. It is made clear that Luther did not at all fore- 
see the consequences of the principles that he preached 
and that Melancthon and Lutherans generally have 

abandoned these teachings. "A National Agitation 

for Liberty of Education," in conclusion preaches the 



I9 , 2 .] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 555 

necessity for united action on the part of Italian Catho- 
lics to protect the parental rights and break the chains 

that the state seeks to rivet on the schools. Henri 

Joly's book L'ltalie Contemporaine, is reviewed at 
length. It is an interesting study of social conditions 
in Italy which shows a marked increase in crime, sui- 
cide and bad conditions of family life. Other books 

reviewed are Miscellanea Ctriani a volume prepared in 
honor of Antonio Ceriani, fifty years connected with 
the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and Conferences of Professor 
Fedeli of the University of Pisa. 

Annales de Philowphie Chretienne (Nov.): "A Painter Eugene 
Carriere," by L. Canet, is at once an appreciation of 
the painter and his biographer, Gabriel Seailles. Canet, 
feeling that the latter has shown unusual delicacy of 
analysis and understanding of art, synopsizes some of 
his pages, wherein is lauded Carriere's fidelity to the 
natural in art. 

Stimmen aus Maria- Laach (10 Nov.): J. Overmans, S.J., writes 
on "German Literature and the Jews." He shows how 
Jewish wealth is exerting a tremendous influence upon 
the theatre and the press. Many authors are of Jewish 
extraction and the fact that Jews are so numerous in 
the legal, medical and teaching professions, from which 
the great mass of the cultured reading class comes, 
gives them a dangerous power over all literary produc- 
tions. "An Historical Find in the Library of the 

Imperial University at Tokio," by J. Dahlmann, S.J., 
describes the discovery of a catechism partly in Chinese 
and partly in Japanese, printed in 1610 by the Jesuit 
press in that city. Von Dunin-Borkowski, S.J., con- 
tends that belief in a supernatural order can be scien- 
tifically demonstrated. Physical science can prove that 
such phenomena as miracles transcend the natural order. 
Biblischt Zeitschrift (4 Nov.): Professor Max Meinertz re-ex- 
amines the various arguments for and against the pres- 
ence of Judas at the institution of the Blessed Sacrament 
and concludes against it on the strength of the Gospel 

narratives. Joseph Sickenberger treats the decree of 

the Biblical Commission on the Gospel of St. Matthew. 



IRecent Bvents* 

The Franco-German Agreement 

France. as to Morocco has met with a more 

favorable reception from the French 

people, than it received from the German, although there are 
not a few who dislike the cession of territory in the Congo. 
There are those, too, who think that in Morocco itself France 
has not secured so free a hand as at first sight appeared. 
The general opinion, however, seems to be that France has 
reason to congratulate herself upon the result as being dis- 
tinctly if not completely advantageous to her. The Premier 
declares that the agreement secures to France a country 
more vast, more fertile, more populous, than Algeria and Tunis 
added together, a country destined to become the fairest 
jewel in their Colonial crown. A not inconsiderable result of 
the negotiations has been to strengthen the entente with Great 
Britain. This is due to the support given to France by that 
Power. 

Considerable time has been devoted to the further investi- 
gation of the scandals in the administration which had been 
previously brought to light. A new commission has bad to 
be formed to inquire into certain charges made against the 
Chief Official of the Foreign Office. This inquiry has resulted 
in the complete vindication of the accused. Duels still con- 
tinue to be fought ; and there has been another railway acci- 
dent. But acts of sabotage do not seem to be so frequent. 
Promises of further social legislation to remedy existent evils 
were made by the government at the opening of Parliament. 

In addition to the bill for opening shops for the sale of 
meat and bread, as a means of counteracting the high prices 
which have caused so much distress, the government pro- 
poses to prevent another abuse of private enterprise. A Bill 
is to be introduced to combat "corners" in provisions and 
every kind of merchandise. Any individual, or association of 
individuals who even without employing fraudulent methods, 
but with the intention of illicit speculation shall have brought 
about the rise or fall of the price of provisions or merchan- 
dise above or below the price which would have been deter- 
mined by the natural and free competition of commerce, is to 
be punished by imprisonment and fine. Illicit speculation is 



19 1 2.] RECENT EVENTS 557 

defined as speculation which is not justified by the require- 
ments of the speculator's stores, by the covering of his oper- 
ations as a merchant, or by the exercise of legitimate indus- 
trial or commercial foresight. 

It may be well to state more pre- 
France, Germany and Morocco, cisely than was done last month, 

the terms of the settlement of the 

Moroccan question which, after the long protracted conversa- 
tions was at last made. France is left free, so far as Germany 
is concerned, to give its assistance to the Moroccan Govern- 
ment for the introduction of all the reforms which may be 
deemed necessary. The complete liberty of action of France 
for the future in this respect is recognized, nor will Germany 
impose any obstacles. Complete liberty is accorded to the 
action of the police forces of France in Moroccan territory 
and in Moroccan waters. The foreign relations of the Sheree- 
fian Government will be left entirely to the control of France, 
and no objection will be offered to France's taking over the 
representation of the interests of Moroccan subjects abroad. 
In military matters the French right of occupying the country 
after coming to an agreement with the Shereefian Government 
is recognized. When a judicial system has been established, 
it will take the place of the existent Consular tribunals. The 
lists of proteges is to be revised. In matters of trade and com- 
merce and concessions for unions Germany is to have the 
same rights as are given to other nations. In return for these 
concessions on the part of Germany, France has ceded terri- 
tory in the French Congo comprising from 180,000 to 250,000 
square kilometres, with a black population estimated at from 
1,000,000 to 1,200,000. Germany cedes to France a district 
of some importance amounting in extent to about 14,000 
square kilometres. Mutual concessions are made for the fa- 
cilitation of free transit over the territories of the two Powers. 
The new Agreement has freed the whole of Morocco from every 
encumbrance which rested upon it in the shape of German 
claims, demands or ambitions. At a time when the movement 
to settle disputes by arbitration has just received so disheart- 
ening a set-back, through the action of Italy, it is satisfactory 
to find, that the Agreement between France and Germany 
makes recourse to arbitration obligatory in case of disputes 
arising as to the application of any of its provisions. All 



558 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

such questions are to be submitted to the Hague Tribunal. 
This is the first time that Germany has shown herself so willing 
to have recourse to this means of settlement a means generally 
considered to be repugnant to German sentiment. It is of 
special importance, also, in this case; for it shuts the door to 
any attempt to reopen the question, on the ground of differ- 
ences as to the meaning of the Agreement, and thus gives, so 
far as such a thing is possible, finality to the settlement. 

The path of France, in dealing 
France, Spain and Morocco, with Morocco, is not yet quite 

clear. Spain for centuries has had 

possessions in Morocco, has long had ambitious designs to 
extend her control over the country, and within the last few 
years these claims have to a certain extent been recognized by 
a Treaty concluded with France. Even if no Treaty existed 
the spirit of the Spanish people has been so thoroughly roused, 
that any attempt on the part of France to set aside her 
claims would have been resisted by force of arms. In fact, 
before the conclusion of the Franco-German Agreement, Spain 
had occupied two towns in Morocco which were looked upon 
by the French people who were then ignorant of the secret 
Treaty of 1904 as outside of the region rightfully under her 
influence. France's agreement with Germany included provi- 
sions that she should be left free to negotiate with Spain for 
the settlement of all questions between the two countries, 
Germany also to be left free to obtain of Spain, if the latter 
consents, the cession to Germany of Spanish Guiana and two 
small adjacent islands. 

The secret Treaty between France and Spain which was 
made in 1904, laid down with precision the extent of the rights 
of France in Morocco by reason of her Algerian possessions, 
and of Spain by virtue of her possessions on the coast. A 
somewhat larger extent of territory was assigned to Spain 
under this Treaty than the public opinion of France had ever 
recognized. In particular a Spanish zone was made to inter- 
vene between Fez the capital and Tangier the chief sea- 
port. The question which has now arisen between France and 
Spain is, whether Spain's sphere should be increased, or dimin- 
ished; France's claim is that it should be diminished, because 
by freeing Morocco from German influence, and this by means 
of concessions in the Congo, a service has been rendered to 



i9i*.] RECENT EVENTS 559 

Spain and at a considerable sacrifice on the part of France, 
inasmuch as Spain's share was rendered more valuable, and 
also because she would now receive absolute control of the 
part allotted to her. The negotiations are still going on, and 
there is every prospect of an amicable and reasonable settle- 
ment. Most of the Powers less interested than Spain in 
Morocco, but parties to the Algeciras Act, have given their 
assent to the new arrangements. There is reason to believe 
that the condonation of Italy's aggressive action in Tripoli, 
which seems to be characteristic of French public opinion, is 
due to the desire to secure the sanction of its government to 
the Moroccan Protectorate. There has been less criticism of 
Italy in France than in any other country. 

The end of the " conversations " 

Germany. with France, and the Agreement 

in which they resulted, led to a 

series of incidents in Germany. No small dissatisfaction was 
manifested, and the way in which it was shown was somewhat 
surprising for a country which is looked upon as so well dis- 
ciplined. The resignation of the Colonial Minister, because cf 
his dissatisfaction with the settlement that had been made, 
was denounced as a departure from the established tradition 
that the Secretaries of State are mere subordinates, whose 
business it is to carry out the policy dictated by the one and 
only responsible Minister the Imperial Chancellor. Horror 
was expressed in Conservative circles at the display of inde 
pendent responsibility on the part of an irresponsible Minister. 
Their opponents, the Radicals, argued from the fact that so 
worthless an Agreement had been made, that the present sys- 
tem of government, especially as regards the management of 
foreign affairs, clearly stood condemned. Hence, they main- 
tained it was necessary that the consent of the Reichstag 
should be made a necessary condition of future territorial 
changes. Perhaps the most remarkable of the manifestations 
of discontent with the Agreement, was that of the Crown 
Prince, whose feelings of disgust were so much beyond con- 
trol, that he had to make them manifest in public during the 
speech of the Chancellor in the Reichstag. Never before, it is 
said, was a speech by an Imperial Chancellor so coldly re- 
ceived. There was dead silence when he began, and dead 
silence when he sat down. The only interruptions were the 



560 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

laughter of the Social Democrats, and the prolonged applause 
which greeted the allusion to the recalcitrant Colonial Secre- 
tary. Herr von Bethmann Hollweg declared that the sending 
of a warship to Agadir had for its object solely the protec- 
tion of the life and property of German subjects, and was in 
no way meant as a provocation or a menace. The negotia- 
tions were initiated in France before the ship was sent, and 
had been entered upon because France had become, owing 
to the expedition to Fez, practically master in the land. The 
chief point of interest in the speech was the part taken by 
Great Britain. Writers in Germany have been asserting that 
it was the English Government that had compelled Germany 
to abate her pretensions. In the Reichstag itself the leader 
of the Conservatives refused to accept the Chancellor's ac- 
count of Mr. Lloyd George's speech as accurate, which was 
to the effect that there was nothing in the speech that could 
not have been said by any German statesman, and that the 
importance it had acquired was due to its having been wil- 
fully misinterpreted by a Conservative press. The German 
spokesman ridiculed this account, and expressed the view that 
it was the duty of German people to give a German answer 
to their real enemy Great Britain. "The German people 
now know who it is that wants to hold universal sway, 
when Germany desires to expand in the world. I have here 
to declare that we Germans are ready to make the necessary 
sacrifices." This clear intimation of the desire to make war 
upon Great Britain, naturally made the world eager to hear 
that country's account of the matter, and to learn what was 
the attitude it would assume. The British Foreign Secretary's 
explanation was anxiously awaited, for upon it depended the 
relations which the two countries are to hold in the future 
one to the other. It may be well, on account of this, to give 
a summary of Sir Edward Grey's statement, especially as it 
contains a succinct history of the whole affair. 

First he gave an account of the recent misunderstandings. 
When Germany sent the Panther to Agadir, notice was duly 
given to the British Government. On July 3 Sir E. Grey 
saw the German Ambassador, and told him that the situa- 
tion must be discussed at a meeting of the Cabinet. On 
July 4 he again saw the Ambassador, and told him that the 
government was of opinion that a new situation had been 
created, and that Great Britain must take a part in any settle- 



1 9i2.] RECENT EVENTS . 561 

mcnt. This was followed by a long silence on the part of the 
Germans, The government then learned that the German Gov- 
ernment had made inadmissible demands with regard to the 
French Congo demands that France was bound to refuse. 
Sir E. Grey, on July 21, intimated to the German Ambassa- 
dor that he was anxious about the situation, and that British 
interests might be endangered. No satisfactory reply was 
given; and then Mr. Lloyd George, after consulting the Prime 
Minister and the Foreign Secretary, made his famous announce- 
ment at the Mansion House. Three days after, the German 
Ambassador came to see the Foreign Secretary, and told him 
that Germany had never thought of creating a naval port in 
Morocco, and never would think of it. On July 25 a very 
stiff communication was received from the German Government. 
In Sir E. Grey's words: "The German Government had said 
that it was not consistent with their dignity, after the speech 
of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to give explanations of 
what was taking place at Agadir. I said to the Ambassador 
that I felt the tone of their communication made it inconsist- 
ent with our dignity to give explanations of the speech of the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer." Then the German Ambassador 
came on July 27 and made a pacific statement. He said that 
British interests were not to be touched, and that it would be 
better if there were no criticism or interference from England. 
Then Mr. Asquith made a statement in the House. After that 
there was no further difficulty about the Morocco negotiations. 

Such is the most authentic account that has yet appeared 
of a series of events which almost brought the two countries 
to war last summer. What will be the effect on the future 
course of events ? The British Minister anticipates that the 
clouds will pass away; the German Chancellor's tone is peace- 
ful and pacific. He has denounced the German Conservatives 
and won the approval of the Socialists. But among a large 
section of the German people there is a fierce feeling towards 
Great Britain. In view of this the determination of Great 
Britain is to keep France on her side, and to maintain the 
entente with Russia, a course which has, unfortunately, neces- 
sitated the support of the unjust action towards Persia. Above 
all, the demands for the maintenance of an ever stronger 
Navy are to be granted. 

The new First Lord of the Admiralty recognizes that Brit- 
TOL. xciv. 36 



562 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

ish naval supremacy is the whole foundation, not only of the 
Empire and, of its commercial prosperity, but also of the free- 
dom of the country; he is, therefore, ready to compete with 
any naval programme that Germany may propose. Whether 
he will go so far as to build two battleships for every German 
battleship, and three cruisers for every German cruiser, as is 
asserted in Germany, remains to be seen. 

The effect produced in Germany by Sir E. Grey's speech 
was of so mixed a character that the prospect of any im- 
provement of the relations between Great Britain and Germany 
are by no means bright. But one thing is certain the ex- 
pectation, or at least the desire, of some Germans and of 
not a few English Radicals, that the British Foreign Min- 
ister might be forced to resign, and that Germany may sup- 
plant France in an entente cordiah, Germany agreeing to re- 
duce her armaments, and Great Britain conceding to Germany 
one of the colonies with which she is said to be saturated 
this expectation or hope stands no chance of being realized. 
The policy of Great Britain remains fixed the entente with 
France, and the understanding with Russia; peace with Ger- 
many, if Germany so wills ; readiness for war should such be 
Germany's decision. 

Early in December the Reichstag was dissolved; a new 
House is to be elected at the beginning of the incoming year. 
An opportunity will then be offered to the electors to pass 
judgment not only on the recent Agreement, but on the pro- 
jected increase of the Navy. The situation is at present in a 
state of extreme confusion. The normal supporters of the 
government the Conservatives are now its bitter opponents, 
while the Radicals and Socialists give to it a more or less 
warm approbation. The Centre the Catholic party seems 
on the whole to be on the side of the government. The re- 
sult of the election will be awaited with interest. 

Little can be said about the pro- 
Italy and Tripoli. gress of the war in Tripoli, be- 
cause small progress has been 

made, and the news that is allowed to be circulated is so 
strictly censored as to be unreliable. But it would appear 
that the Italian troops have really succeeded, after two months, 
in doing what they thought they had done within the first 
two days after their landing; they have secured full pos- 



1912.] RECENT EVENTS 563 

session of the oasis of Tripoli. It is worthy of note that 
aeroplanes have proved practically useful in order to observe 
the movement of the enemy. Tripoli has been formally an- 
nexed, so far as this can be done by a paper proclamation. 
There is at present little prospect of mediation on the part 
of any Power, there being no common point of agreement be- 
tween the combatants. 

When a Republic was proclaimed 
Spain. in Portugal, expectations were 

formed that it would not be long 

before an attempt, at least, would be made to overthrow the 
Spanish Monarchy. In fact, there are not a few who think 
themselves wise enough to predict that the advent of a Re- 
public is inevitable, and give for this prophecy of theirs rea- 
sons more or less cogent. More than a year, however, has 
passed, and the Spanish Monarchy still stands. The munici- 
pal elections which have recently taken place seem to show 
that it is more firmly established than was thought. These 
elections are said to be a better criterion of the trend of pub- 
lic opinion, than are the Parliamentary elections, for they are 
not " made " after the usual Spanish fashion by the party 
in power. They resulted in a sweeping victory for the 
Monarchical parties; 2,567 Monarchist Councillors having been 
chosen, as compared with 414 Republican. In every part of 
the country the Monarchists gained, although not, of course, 
to the same extent in all. But even in Barcelona, Stfior 
Lerroux will no longer have a majority over the Conserva- 
tives and Regionalists. 

The reason for this victory is, in the first place, the fact 
that the Monarchist parties are now united, while the Repub- 
licans are divided. In the second place the question of Mo- 
rocco, and the necessity of presenting a united front to the 
foreigner, in support of the patriotic action of the present 
government, affected the feelings of large numbers. The re- 
sult will be an immense accession of strength to the ministry 
of Senor Canalejas. Nor were the recent labor disorders with- 
out effect upon the minds of the people, the firm action of 
the government in this crisis having met with general ap- 
proval. The conflict with the Moors in the region of Melilla, 
which seemed likely to involve Spain in serious difficulties, 
appears to be on the point of settlement. The chief outstand- 
ing question, therefore, is that of Morocco as a whole, in view 



564 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

of the new position which France has secured. To this fuller 
reference will be made elsewhere. 

The Republic still survives, al- 
Portugal. though it has had to contend with 

many foes both internal and ex- 
ternal. The ministry of Senhor Chagas lasted only a few weeks. 
Although the hopes of united action on the part of all Repub- 
licans had to be abandoned almost from the first, the Premier 
in taking office as the representative of the more moderate 
section, declared that if he did not meet with the support of 
the deputies as a whole, he would no longer continue in office. 
The crucial question between his government and its Radical 
opponents, was the Separation Law which had been passed 
by the Provisional Government during the interval which 
elapsed between the declaration of the Republic and the 
adoption of the Constitution. This law was so harsh and un- 
just in its treatment of the Church and its property, that even 
Protestant governments took the strong step of intervening in 
behalf of their citizens who were affected by its provisions. 
Many supporters of the change from a Monarchy to a Republic, 
soon came to recognize that a great political mistake had been 
made in the way in which the decree had been passed. 
For the Bishops, very soon after the proclamation of the Re- 
public, declared that they would not interfere in the political 
affairs of -the country ; they accepted the fait tccomfli, and 
expected that the new regime would respect the rights and 
interests of the Church. Instead of fulfilling this expectation, 
the Provisional Government deprived it of all its property, 
and reduced it to a state of servitude, even subjecting it to 
such an insult as to offer to the clergy pecuniary inducements 
to marry. This rendered it necessary for the Bishops to offer 
active opposition to the law, and although in the large cities 
they met with but little support, the rural population through- 
out the country was as a body on their side. It was this 
dislike of the Separation Law which gave to the Royalists 
their chief reason to hope for success. 

The late Ministry, recognizing as well the injustice of this 
law, and its political inexpediency, resolved to urge upon 
parliament, when it should meet, the repeal of some of its 
worst features. This, as well as other questions, led to divi- 
sion in the ranks of the supporters of the Ministry and Dr. 



1 9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 565 

Costa, the leader of the Radicals, was able to deprive the 
Cabinet of one group of its supporters for already have the 
Republicans split into several groups. The Cabinet at once 
resigned before the opening of the Session. 

The new Cabinet while it numbers among the eight mem- 
bers, of which it consists, five who were supporters of Senhor 
Chagas, includes three followers of the Radical leader. It is 
thus a Coalition Cabinet, but its constitution is looked upon as 
a victory for Dr. Costa, and its policy will have to be made 
acceptable to the extremists, the Socialists and Radicals. In 
consequence the proposed alterations in the Separation Law 
have been abandoned. In fact the speech of the Premier at 
the opening of Parliament promised the pursuance of an 
Anti- Clerical policy, and the expulsion from his diocese for 
two years of the Bishop of Guarda, and from his palace of the 
Bishop of Portalegre, shows that, what it has promised in 
word, it means to carry out in deed. The other chief point 
of the new government's proposals was the reform of the edu- 
cation system of the country. The Budget shows a deficit, 
although an effort has been made to effect economies. 

The attempts of the Royalists to overturn the Republic 
have so far signally failed. The mass of the people seem to 
be indifferent to everything political, and only wish to be left 
alone that they may earn an honest living. Large sums of 
money, it is said, had been placed at the disposal of the 
assailants of the now-existing institutions; nor is it quite cer- 
tain that the success of the Royalist attempt would have 
led to the restoration of King Manoel. There is another 
claimant to the throne. The attitude of Spain towards these 
attempts was not quite satisfactory to the Portuguese Govern- 
ment. The Royalists could not have made an assault upon 
the frontier of Portugal, had there not been something like 
connivance on the part of the Spanish Government. It is an 
open secret that the King of Spain is not in favor of the Re- 
public. 

The trial of the imprisoned Royalists is on the point of 
taking place. In order that prompt punishment may be meted 
out to them it has been felt necessary to suspend the so re- 
cently made Constitution. A special session of Parliament was 
called for this purpose. There are some 2,oco prisoners to 
be tried. The way in which these trials are conducted will 
show the spirit by which the new Republic is actuated. 



566 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

Among the many interesting move- 
Persia, ments that are now taking place 

for a better form of government, 

that which has been going on in Persia holds a high place. 
This movement is of a special interest for this country, in- 
asmuch as an American has been called upon to take a lead- 
ing part in its promotion. To many it seems impossible that 
the old countries of the East, the inhabitants of which have 
suffered themselves for so many centuries to be dominated by 
vicious and greedy despots, should have enough of manhood 
left to shake off the degrading shackles by which they have so 
long been bound ; and if the desire to effect this deliverance 
should arise, it is not to be expected, so it is thought, that 
effectual means will be found to accomplish the desire. 

To Persians the desire has come, but it is still doubtful 
whether it will be realized. Since the adoption of the Con- 
stitution, and the expulsion of the Shah who, having dis- 
regarded his oath, tried to destroy it, the Mejliss, as the 
Parliament is called, has shown very little constructive ability. 
Trying to do too much, it has done scarcely anything. Even the 
ordinary security necessary for trade and commerce has not been 
maintained, especially in Southern Persia. Here robbers have 
rendered all the roads unsafe. One reason for this want of 
success has been the excessive vanity of the Persians. Like 
the Greeks and the Italians and several of the small States 
in the Balkans, the fact that they have had a past more or 
less glorious prevents them from being satisfied with moderate 
achievements in the present. The Greeks aspire to re-establish 
the Byzantine Empire ; one of the reasons given for the ag- 
gressive action of Italy in Tripoli is that this district once 
belonged to the Roman Empire. In Persia this vanity took 
the form of a desire to be self-sufficing; so they tried to adopt 
tit constitutional method of establishing law and order, by 
means exclusively of men who had been accustomed to the 
old methods of personal rule, under which the caprice of the 
autocrat was the dominating factor. The ill success, however, 
which attended this effort had begun to show the necessity of 
seeking the help of experienced guides. This led to the ap- 
pointment of Mr. Morgan Shuster, a countryman of ours, who 
has had experience in the Philippines, and was recommended 
by the President. To him was given the complete control of 
the most important department in the government that of 



i9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 567 

Finance and under him there Was to be placed an armed 
force, for the collection of the revenue. Mr. Shuster pro- 
ceeded to carry out his duties without fear or favor a thing 
unheard of before in the annals of the Persians. Rich men 
and nobles had been quite unaccustomed to pay their taxes 
or to obey any laws which did not suit them; the Premier 
himself refused point-blank to submit to taxation. But no 
obstacle deterred the new Treasurer-General. Every one with- 
out exception was made to pay, and hopes were beginning to 
be entertained that at length a solid basis for further reforms 
had been found. Here a new complication arose. In the 
course of his duties Mr. Shuster had to seize the property of 
the brother of the ex-Shah. This brother had aided and 
abetted the efforts which Mohammed Ali has been making to 
regain the throne, and had in consequence been judged guilty of 
rebellion, and his property was to be confiscated. Russia, how- 
ever, stepped in, and under the pretense of a lien on the prop- 
erty, claimed a right to have it protected from seizure by Mr. 
Shuster's agents. Different accounts, indeed, are given of this in- 
cident. It does not much matter which is the true one, for even 
if the Russian is accepted, it is clear that what occurred was 
only a pretext for Russian interference. This action made the 
Treasurer-General so indignant that he accused Russia, and 
Great Britain as well, of systematic efforts to prevent Persia's 
attaining to a strong position, the ultimate object of the two 
Powers to keep her weak and ultimately to partition the coun- 
try between themselves. He supported this charge in a letter 
written to the Times, in which he gave a number of instances, 
of which no other explanation, he maintained, could be given. 
How far this accusation is justified or what will be the out- 
come it is not easy to say. It cannot be doubted that there 
is a large number of Russians who would be glad to take at 
least a part of Persia, and to force the hand of their govern- 
ment in order to secure this object. How far in this direction 
the Tsar, and his immediate advisers, are prepared to go, is 
doubtful. 

The agreement between Great Britain and Russia, defining 
their respective spheres of influence, affirms the desire of both 
Powers that the independence of Persia should be maintained. 
But the Russian Minister who made this agreement is no 
longer in control of foreign affairs ; and in other respects 
circumstances have changed. Recent events seem to render 



568 RECENT EVENTS [Jan. 

it at least probable, that Russia has purposes in view that 
bode no good to Persia. As to Great Britain, her policy 
is at the present time, in view of the supposed danger from 
Germany, so bound up with the entente with Russia, that no 
effectual resistance can be expected on her part. More than 
that, if Russia should act in the north, corresponding action 
in the south of Persia would be taken by the British Govern- 
ment. In fact, notwithstanding the protests of the Persian 
Government, troops have been sent from India to protect, as is 
alleged, the consulates in several towns in the south of Persia. 
The unwarrantable demands of Russia for an apology for 
the conduct of the Persian officials were at first resisted by 
the Cabinet. Rather than submit to so unjust a claim it re- 
signed. The new Prime Minister, however, felt it the less of 
two evils to yield to greater force, Russia having intimated its 
intention to send four thousand troops into the north of Persia 
and to charge to Persia the expense of maintaining them. No 
sooner, however, had this concession been made, when a fur- 
ther claim was made by Russia, which cannot be called any- 
thing less than insolent. This was the instant dismissal of Mr. 
Shuster. Coupled with this was a second demand that, for 
the future, Persia should consult and be guided by the advice 
of Russia and Great Britain in her choice of foreign advisers. 
Thirdly, there must be paid an indemnity for the expenses of 
the Russian troops in Persia. Forty- eight hours were given 
for compliance. These have long past, and Mr. Shuster still 
remains at his post, although it does not seem likely that he 
will be able to maintain it long. It had been hoped that our 
government would have intervened to protect an American 
unjustly treated, and, as a consequence, to prevent a people 
from being oppressed by violence. It is time that these high 
and mighty Powers should be taught that the weak have some 
rights, and that they are not altogether without defenders. 
But it is to be feared that our government has no locus standi 
in this matter. These occurrences, however, will make the 
people of this country the more determined to defend the 
rights of their own fellow-citizens dwelling in Russia, and to 
teach its government that although it may triumph over the 
weakness of Persia, it must learn to show respect to the only 
thing to which it seems willing to listen power greater than 
itself. 



T 



With Our Readers 

HE following poem by Father Robert Southwell, S.J., Is well 
worth reprinting in honor of the Feast of Our Lady's Espousals 
which occurs next month, January 23. 

OUR LADY'S ESPOUSALS. 

Wife did she live, yet virgin did she die, 
Untouched of man, yet mother of a son;- 

To save herself and Child from fatal lie, 
To end the web whereof the thread was spun, 

In marriage knots to Joseph she was tied, 

Unwonted works with wonted veils to hide. 

God lent His paradise to Joseph's care, 
Wherein He was to plant the tree of life ; 

His Son, of Joseph's Child the title bare, 

Just cause to make the mother Joseph's wife. 

O blessed man ! betrothed to such a spouse, 

More blessed to live with such a Child in house. 

No carnal love this sacred league procured, 
All vain delights were far from their assent ; 

Though both in wedlock bands themselves assured, 
Yet straight by vow they sealed their chaste intent : 

Thus had she virgins', wives' and widows' crown, 

And by chaste childbirth doubled her renown. 



CARDINAL MANNING AT PLAY. 
(WRITTEN IN 1893 BY I.IONBI, JOHNSON.) 

IT is probable that this little book, Cardinal Manning's Fastime 
Papers,, came as a surprise to many. Those who had not the 
honor and joy of intimacy with the late Cardinal have been wont to 
see in him, his life and his work and his writings, something stiff 
and stern, a dogmatic severity, a lack of generous ease and sympa- 
thy and lightness. He stands in their memories, vested with the 
robes and ornaments of sacerdotal and episcopal authority : gaunt, 
austere, commanding, not quite human ; priest and prelate, and 
prince, infinitely dignified, but aloof from the world in his asceti- 
cism. They knew him to be cultured, a true son of academic Ox- 



570 WITH OUR READERS [Jan., 

ford, courtly and urbane, yet lie had an air of exclusiveness and re- 
serve, which only his piety saved from seeming proud: a combination 
of St. Thomas a Becket and St. Charles Borromeo. It is an impres- 
sion which Mr. Hutton's careful biography does not do much to 
modify. Throughout that work Manning is a dictatorial dogmatist, 
delighting in rule and discipline, law and order, sentence and de- 
cree : not pleasantly pliant and malleable, not graciously flexible 
and versatile, but rigid and hard and grim. Compare, they will say, 
Manning's Petri Privile^ium with Newman's Letter to the Duke of 
Norfolk : see how magisterial is the one, how persuasive the other. 
This imagined Manning never unbends, never relaxes; a man to re- 
vere rather than to love. 

But turn to Manning's friends: study the Manning of the Meta- 
physical Society, as drawn in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Life of Dr. Ward, 
or the Manning of this book. He was far from worldly, in the most 
innocent sense of the word; far less so than the secluded Newman. 
No man was ever wittier than Manning's brother-in-law, Bishop 
Wilberforce; no man less humorous. Manning had no wit, but a 
vast deal oi humor. And it was his peculiar genius that, while he 
noted the way of the world with ready observation and dexterous 
look, marking its amusements, follies, sins, together with all that is 
great and good in it, he never laid aside his religious character, be- 
cause in that was his life. Upon various sides of his nature he re- 
sembled both his friends, Iord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone; he 
was both subtile and sincere. Of late years he became more widely 
understood, through his attitude towards social questions. It was 
seen that, like the reigning Pope, his ascetic detachment from the 
world did not imply either lack of knowledge or lack of heart. Yet 
even so, the epigrammatic summaries of Manning's character pro- 
nounced him a man of imperious will and rigid temper: the " proud 
prelate," dear to melodramatic historians, just softened and subdued 
by the "sweet saint," dear to gushing hagiologists. He puzzled 
people: they knew his patriotism, his love for imperial England: they 
saw in him strong traces of the typical English cleric; but they did 
not get a complete and satisfactory view of him. There have been 
those who lauded Newman to the utmost, but who dared whisper 
rather loudly that there was a streak of the actor, the charlatan, 
about Manning: they never accused him of hypocrisy, but they spoke 
of something in his temperament not quite frank and open and in- 
genuous. His sincerity, piety, uprightness, were not called in ques- 
tion; but Roman officialism, Vatican policy, ultramontane excess, so 
we were told, found a congenial nature in Manning upon which to 
work. All the old foolish traditions about cunning Jesuitry, about 
the pious credulity and holy imbecility so pleasing to heaven, about 



ig 1 2.] WITH OUR READERS 571 

Roman arrogance and Italian ignorance, about the bigotry of the 
seminaries, about modern Tridentine Catholicism, about modern 
hysterical piety and agitated devotion, about the delusions or impos- 
tures of modern miracles : all these dreadful things were too much, 
men said, for the good Archdeacon of Chichester. Exulting with the 
fervor of a convert, he threw himself blindly into this unwholesome 
atmosphere, this Roman fever, and his mind was infected, his taste 
corrupted. For most men, behind Cardinal Newman lay a long, pa- 
thetic history, the struggles of a great soul: he represented the Ox- 
ford of days that have now the enchantment of romance. Behind 
Cardinal Manning most men saw no pathetic history, no glamor of 
romance : nothing but the wiles of Rome and the diplomacy of the 
Vatican. If controversialists thought that they detected historical 
error in Newman they pointed it out with half- regret; if in Manning, 
they talked confidently about unscrupulousness and the desperate 
straits of Roman theologians. 

These parodies and travesties of the truth are now but little 
heard ; but it is profitable to consider them again. Primarily, they 
were the result of honest bewilderment, due to ignorance, Newman, 
by the compulsion of circumstances, took the world into his confi- 
dence ; in prose and in verse, he told the secrets of his soul. As the 
leader of a great movement, he became the fair prey or property of 
the public : the state of his mind in 1830 or in 1840 was a thing for 
literary discussion in 1860; no one could write upon the history of 
religious thought in the century without investigating his daily life, 
his early training, his Oxford career. Living away from the public 
view to extreme old age, he became a classic in his lifetime : men 
wrote of him, as they might have written of Shelley and Byron ; they 
never saw him ; he took no part in public affairs ; London knew him 
not; editors did not ask for his opinions on strikes, or temperance, 
or imperial federation ; he did not belong to the Metaphysical Society, 
nor attend Royal Academy dinners, nor was he a member of the 
Athenaeum. But scholars, historians, theologians, critics knew the 
story of his spiritual travels and adventures. All this was reversed 
in Manning's case ; the world saw him and heard him. He was the 
Indefatigable official, the untiring ruler of a great diocese, the unfail- 
ing friend of all philanthropic and national movements : he had rela- 
tions with the world upon all sides, and was well in touch with his 
contemporaries. But the man himself remained unknown, save to 
his immediate friends ; no one could anywhere read the story of his 
soul. No poems, no sermons, no personal revelations, full of yearn- 
ing and affection, and sorrow and faith, gave him a place in the 
hearts of strangers ; instead, they only knew a few hard, external 
facts, nothing intimate, nothing spiritual, nothing "psychological." 



572 WITH OUR READERS [Jan., 

And so, Manning was the energetic organizer, the man of practical 
policy, the ecclesiastic of administrative genius ; the world almost 
forgot the man in the archbishop. The world wrote and spoke of 
"John Henry " Newman with a tone of half- familiar admiration and 
love ; " Henry Edward " was but an official signature, not the name 
of a friend. Manning deliberately suppressed himself: he disliked 
and distrusted many things in modern life and thought, but nothing 
more than self-display, even of the harmless sort untainted by vanity. 
He relied absolutely upon the objective strength of the Faith, as 
guarded and taught by the living authority ot the Church : he was 
careful to present the Faith, not as it was to himself in the recesses 
of his soul, but in the clear, strong, definite outlines common to all 
the faithful of all the ages. Secretum meum mihi : he never wore his 
heart upon his sleeve. Now and again, so great was his horror of 
any approach to egoism, he seemed, in outward manner, to repress 
his emotions, lest his words of counsel or of warning should be valued 
rather for his own sake than for that of his high office. And apart 
from all religious motives, he was by nature of an austere habit : he 
impressed his hearer as the greatest of great nobles, the finest of fine 
gentlemen, according to all the highest traditions of courts and 
salons. I,ord Chesterfield would have honored a man so perfectly 
gracious, courteous, with that absolutely unforced distinction which 
is a fine art. But this refined bearing is always marked by a certain 
reticence and reserve : it is never profuse and lavish of itself. New- 
man, Hurrell Froude, Ward, one and all, were men of less natural 
and inevitable dignity : dignified, each in his own way, they were ; 
but their natures were more expansive and less discreet. Mr. Pater 
writes of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai : 

Certainly it was worth while to have come so far only to see him and 
hear him give his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweet- 
ness, and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A verit- 
able grand seigneur ! His refined old age, the impress of genius and honors, 
even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem too 
distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia Vanitas/be 
seems to say, yet with a profound resignation which makes the things we are 
most of us so fondly occupied with seem petty enough. 

There is a touch of sentimental unction, in a good sense, about 
that : a not uncommon mark of the French hierarchy and priest- 
hood. But though Manning had greater strength than appears in 
Mr. Pater's portrait of Fenelon, it well suggests that singular 
hieratic dignity, added as a last grace to a nature always dignified, 
which distinguished the late Cardinal. 

Such a man is easily misinterpreted. His friends, his col- 



i9i2.] WITH OUR READERS 573 

leagues, his associates understood him : he was not careful to make 
the world understand. His public actions he would, if called upon, 
defend in the interests of the Church ; otherwise, with a kind of 
noble pride and humility in one, he let the insinuations, the miscon- 
structions, the malice, and the gossip, go by. His writings, almost 
the whole of them, express this character : he had other things to 
think of than himself. He would write of "the Infallible Magis- 
terium of the Supreme Pontiff," in a way that exasperated many. 
Newman, preaching and teaching the same doctrine, clothed It in 
all manner of persuasive graces ; showed, in most winning manner, 
what it meant to him, his own apprehension of it ; explained how 
he had considered it at different periods of his life. The result was 
not always conviction on the part of his readers, but always a fresh 
submission to the golden words, the magical charm of Newman. 
Cor ad cor loquitur, heart to heart speaketh, was Newman's motto 
and Newman's method : Manning, by an instinct equally gracious, 
hid himself away from his readers, and did but lend his voice to the 
living Church. " I am of Paul, I of Apollos," was hateful to him, 
and he refused to run the risk. At the same time, a man and his 
style are inseparable : and Manning wrote always with a certain 
stately beauty, a grave and chastened simplicity, measured and 
academic, But he had no modern ingenuities. In these days, Ad- 
dison and the great Augustan writers seem deplorably uningenuous ; 
they never tortured a thought into contortions ; they were simple 
and unashamed. Manning was no more afraid of a truism than 
Sophocles or Horace : truisms are probably the truest truths, the 
best attested In the world. But the word indicates our longing for 
some new thing ; and he who will invert a truism into a paradox 
passes for the happiest and most refreshing of wits. A magazine 
article by Manning, with the latest cleverness on either side of It, 
had an old-world air : he wrote not as the scribes. 

Now, by the devotion of a loyal editor, we have a little volume 
of essays. Had they been published ten years ago, the public would 
have understood Manning somewhat better. For they are not con- 
troversial, nor dogmatic, nor theological, nor historical ; they are 
moral, social, ironical, secular. Thackeray might have written 
them, using the precision of Aristotle and the brevity of Bacon* 
They deal with such matters as Honor, Consistency, Courage, Pride, 
Vanity, Popularity, Selfishness, Gossip ; they touch upon Journal- 
ism and Criticism ; they conclude with a dissertation upon the 
Daemon of Socrates. They show the writer treating of these things 
with a light hand, a shrewd head, and a full heart. For the most 
part he is examining society, social standards and ideals, with equal 
' humor and seriousness, according as folly and merriment, or wicked- 



574 WITH OUR READERS [Jan., 

ness and sorrow, are the dominant topics. They are at least master- 
pieces of the lucidus ordo : each little sketch is complete, methodical, 
systematic. Bacon tells us that revenge is " a wild kind of justice " ; 
it is much in that manner that the Cardinal searches out the origin, 
nature, moral affinity of each social fault or characteristic. It is 
done with no heavy scholastic implements, yet in the scholastic 
spirit ; the logic of moral theologians underlies the satire, and the 
irony, and the scorn. The reader cannot but see that Manning had 
a supreme satisfaction and delight in the whole teaching of his 
Church, in its Aristotelian inheritance, in all its traditional ways 
and aspects. Usually, upon taking up a modern book or article, I 
find my author begin by saying white, proceed to say black, and 
end in saying grey. There is a generous air of seeing all sides of 
the case in this bewildering style ; but it only means that my author 
has not seen his subject steadily, nor seen it whole. Scepticism, so 
spelled, may be a most sacred thing ; but it sometimes produces a 
most maddening and mystifying style. My author may preach to 
me the doctrines in religion, philosophy, politics, art, that I most 
abhor ; but if he will do it methodically and coherently, I will be 
grateful. Aristotle and his ethics are not the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth ; but their manner is magnificent and im- 
mortal. Manning allowed nothing to lie outside the reach and 
range of his principles ; the smallest silly fashion, the most trifling 
social pretence, is traced by him to its radical home in the conscience 
and will. You may resent and dislike his principles, but you con- 
fess he has a view of life, intelligible if unacceptable. Dante, per- 
haps Manning's favorite poet, wrote so; Aquinas wrote so, as Mr. 
Patmore has reminded us ; the Mystics, whose very name stands, 
with some, for confused obscurity, wrote so. " Grandeur of ideas," 
said Blake, " is founded upon precision of ideas " ; it was the con- 
stant principle of his life and work. A vast and vague sublimity is 
possible to the dreamer, but never to the artist : and it is profitable 
to remember the influence of numbers and ideas of numerical rela- 
tion upon Greek thought, metaphysical and aesthetic. 

Dissimilar in so many things, the two Cardinals were alike in 
this, that neither of them wrote for pleasure. Newman, in a letter 
to Ward, describes the physical pain of writing, which he felt to 
such a degree, that " I have hardly written anything unless I was 
called to do so." Almost the whole of their volumes, some seventy 
in number, were undertaken as a duty. The present volume is, in- 
deed, the fruit of Manning's rare leisure ; and even these Pastime 
Papers " drive at practice," and have a moral bearing. In the ex- 
cellent introduction by "J. O.", Manning is happily portrayed in 
just those touches which make portraits live. I have quoted neither 



i9i 2.] WITH OUR READERS 575 

from this, nor from the essays. The whole book is too delightful, 
too much of a single piece, to allow of very effective or fair quota- 
tion. I have preferred to dwell upon its writer ; it is as useful, as it 
is uncommon, to be able to dwell upon a man thus at unity with 
himself : 

" Whose faith and work were bells of full accord." 



THE result of the recent elections in Los Angeles, California, the 
first elections at which women were allowed to vote, gave un- 
deniable proof that the women used the franchise intelligently and 
capably. Socialism had determined to make a strong fight at 
this election. Its party was well organized and it carried on a cam- 
paign worthy of a better cause. Money was poured into the city 
from many sources to defray its expenses. Speakers came from all 
parts of the States to preach " the cause." 

* 

IT is to the women of the city that the credit of an intelligent 
counter-campaign must be given. With a systematic thorough- 
ness that surprised many of the doubting men, they organized Po- 
litical Leagues ; opened headquarters ; urged privately and pub- 
licly a campaign of education ; established schools of instruction 
where the uninitiated were taught how to vote ; urged all the women 
to register and, later, to vote, making use of every means that would 
promote their cause. 

* * 

THE victory against the Socialists is due to the women of Los 
Angeles. And one of the most effective agents in moving them 
to action and in guiding intelligently the action of the people, was 
the Catholic journal of Los Angeles The Tidings. 

* * * 

ON the day of election the women worked energetically, side by 
side with the men ; and their presence lent dignity to the 
work and the place. Although it was a campaign in which feelings 
ran high, not one instance of the slightest indignity or lack of con- 
sideration was offered to any woman. Indeed, many of the old-time 
objectionable features of the polling-places were eliminated. It is 
remarkable, also, that when the final count was made, it was ascer- 
tained that the women had voted ninety-five per cent of their regis- 
tration. 

* 

IT was a noteworthy election, and we cannot but hope, in the 
words of a correspondent, " that the dawn of a better industrial 
day is at hand, in which this election in Los Angeles will have 
played no small part." 



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THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XCIV. FEBRUARY, 1912. No. 563. 

SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME. 

BY W. E. CAMPBELL. 
I. 

!O thoroughly English character has been more 
beloved or more misunderstood than that of Sir 
Thomas More. He is beloved, because no one 
who has studied his life can refuse him affec- 
tion ; he is misunderstood because people in 
our own day find it so difficult to understand the times before 
the Reformation and the principles which guided them. Ma- 
caulay points to him as one of the choice specimens of human 
virtue and wisdom, but marvels at his belief in transubstantia- 
tion: a faith, he tells us, which will stand that test will stand 
any test. Others cannot reconcile the Sir Thomas More who 
wrote the Utopia with the Sir Thomas who wrote the Con- 
futation of Tyndale and resisted heretics to the death. " He 
set forth on life in the vanguard of the advancing army 
of contemporary progress," writes Sir Sydney Lee, "but des- 
tiny decreed that death should find him at the head of the 
opposing forces of reaction. Sir Thomas More's career pro- 
pounds a riddle which it is easier to enunciate than solve." 

I think a great deal of this misunderstanding comes from 
the fact that his character is judged as if he had been born, 

Copyright. 1912. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. xciv. 37 




Sfx THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb., 

educated and trained after the Reformation instead of before 
it. His biographers, for the most part, are far more anxious 
to set before us the new incidents and opinions which were 
so rapidly arising both at home and abroad, than to give us a 
clear understanding of the old principles and convictions wkich 
must necessarily have guided his moral and mental life. The 
new order of things was not as yet assimilated into the na- 
tional life and character; the old order had not been over- 
thrown. It is false as well as unjust to represent that the 
learning and principles of Catholicism were the outworn tissue 
of his early manhood and were giving place to something 
newer, better and more progressive. Sir Thomas More was 
always a Catholic ; his whole organic life was that, and it was 
never so vigorously Catholic as in those last sad years when 
he laid it down in heroic sacrifice. Biographies of More writ- 
ten by non-Catholics, however excellent in parts, are neces- 
sarily deficient in that main part which 'should set forth his 
essentially Catholic nature. It will be the main effort of this 
paper to give in its national setting the great Catholic tradi- 
tion into which he was born, under which he grew up, and 
to the defense of which he consecrated his best energies. 

At the end of the fifteenth century there were, and there 
had long been, two great powers in England and, indeed, in 
every country of Europe the Temporal and the Spiritual. 
These two powers, though in constant intercourse, were obvi- 
ous and distinct. The temporal was national and at the time 
of which we speak tending more and more in the direction 
of absolute monarchy; the spiritual was Catholic and universal 
in its manifestations. There had been, through the centuries, 
many differences between them, but each in its usual course 
had recognized the rights of the other and its necessity to the 
stability of society. Each had its sphere of work and influ- 
ence, and as long as these were mutually recognized all went 
well. The claims of the Church were extraordinary, but they 
were accepted by all. It was a divinely-established institution, 
though operating through human, and, therefore, imperfect, 
agents; its teaching was infallible and it was a channel of 
sufficient grace for the salvation of men. God, indeed, was 
everywhere and His power infinite, but He chose to localize 
His operations and to use, as His instruments, priests conse- 
crated for the purpose of preaching the truths of the spiritual 



.] SSK THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 579 

life and administering the sacraments. There were churches 
up and down the land, and every church was a radiating cen- 
tre from which went forth the same spiritual truth and the 
same divine assistance. 

It is by no means easy [writes Abbot Gasquet] to realize 
(in our own days of religious doubt and dissension) the influ- 
ence of a state of affairs when all men from the highest to the 
lowest, in every village and hamlet throughout the length 
and breadth of the land, had but one creed, worshipped their 
Maker in but one way, and were bound together with what 
most certainly were to them the real and practical ties of 
Christian brotherhood. It is hardly possible to overestimate 
the effect of surroundings upon individual opinion, or the 
influence of a congenial atmosphere, both on the growth and 
development of a spirit of religion and on the preservation of 
Christian morals and religious practices generally. When 
all, so far as religious faith is concerned, thought the same, 
and when all, so far as religious observance is concerned, did 
the same, the very atmosphere of unity was productive of that 
spirit of common brotherhood, which appears so plainly in 
the records of the period preceding the revolt of the sixteenth 
century. 

There is every reason to believe that the English parish 
was thoroughly and actively religious right up to the eve of 
the Reformation. The evidence of a foreign visitor and of 
Cranmer himself (who objected to the practice) is that attend- 
ance at daily Mass was the habitual rather than the occasional 
custom of the people. 

At the close of the fifteenth century, church-work was in 
every sense of the word a popular work, and the wills, inven- 
tories and church-wardens' accounts are the best proof of this. 
By gifts of money and valuables, by bequests, by collections 
and by the proceeds of parish- plays and parish-feasts, money 
was generously and habitually raised up and down the 
country for the purposes of church-building and adornment. 
The inventories of English parish churches show that they 
were far better furnished than those of Italy. The Venetian 
traveler, quoted before, seems astonished at the benefits be- 
stowed upon the churches by Englishmen of all ranks. Such 
parish accounts as remain, all tell the same story of keen and 



58o Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb., 

intelligent interest. The parish church was the centre of vil- 
lage life, and it was the business of all to look after it. Meet- 
ings of the whole parish were often called to decide upon 
some matter of church repair or improvement: a peal of bells 
was required, or the organ needed renovation, or new altar- 
plate was wanted, or vestments were thought necessary. And 
all this keenness and piety were as characteristic of an upland 
parish on lonely Dartmoor as it was of town parishes pos- 
sessing such magnificent churches as St. Peter Mancroft, at 
Norwich, or St. Mary's, at Taunton. 

The immense treasures in the churches [writes Dr. Jessop] 
were the joy and boast of every man and woman and child in 
England, who, day by day and week by week, assembled to 
worship in the old houses of God, which they and their families 
had built, and whose every vestment and chalice and candle- 
stick and banner, organs and bells and picture and image and 
altar and shrine, they looked upon as their own and part of 
their birthright. 

The village church was the centre of social as well as of 
religious life. Here all disputes and offenses were dealt with 
such as now are matters for local magistrates or petty ses- 
sions or even judges at assize. The pulpit of the church was 
not only used for Sunday preaching, but for the publication 
of all notices of public interest. It was here that witnesses 
were cited, and accused persons warned of approaching just- 
ice; wills were declared, debtors admonished and thieves called 
to make restitution ; those guilty of calumny or detraction were 
ordered to restore the good name of those they had defamed; 
scandals between married people were settled and reconcilia- 
tions effected. " God's house was a practical reality and God's 
law a practical code in the ordinary affairs of life, and gave 
religion a living importance in the daily lives of every mem- 
ber of every parish throughout the country."* There was no 
call to end such a state of things as this; and the wisest, as 
well as the most spiritual, laymen of the time may well have 
been at pains to defend it. 

We come now to another manifestation of the spiritual 

* For further information on Medieval Parish Life, see Abbot Gasquet's Parish Life in 
Mcdiaval England, his Eve of the Reformation and Dr. Jessop's Before the Great Pillage. 



19 1 a.] Sw THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 581 

power the monasteries. It is well that we should recall to 
our minds the intentions of St. Benedict, the founder of west- 
ern rnonasticism. His Rule was drawn up for laymen who 
aspired to the highest type of life as set forth by our Lord 
in the Gispel, and although in later times a clerical charac- 
ter was super-imposed upon them, the Benedictines, and espe- 
cially the Benedictines in England, always retained the im- 
press which St. Benedict himself had put upon them.* Mr. 
Brewer goes so far as to say that it is as laymen and not as 
clerics that we should judge them, "as laymen who had set 
up for themselves a grand ideal attainable by a few, and de- 
manding a sustained degree of religious fervor and self-devo- 
tion which few men reach, and still fewer are able to main- 
tain." He pertinently remarks that whatever their spiritual 
shortcomings they not only reached but also sustained an ideal 
very far above that of the times in which they lived. If we 
compare their work and its effect with that of their contempo- 
raries in every other walk of life, we shall better perceive its 
unique, religious and social quality. When they came to Eng- 
land they found an Anglo-Saxon race which, during the hun- 
dred and fifty years of its occupation, had made no progress 
whatever. " Their paganism had grown coarser, deeper, darker; 
their political confusions and convulsions more hopeless; their 
tendencies more savage and restless; their culture an absolute 
blank." But the monks changed all this. They taught the 
English race a life of co-operation and free labor, a life of 
obedience, order, regularity and economy, a life which was 
nothing other than an unconscious imitation of monasticism 
itself: how to farm and drain the land, how to build colleges 
and maintain them, how to regulate their domestic and politi- 
cal affairs, how to practice punctuality and despatch. They 
impressed upon our rough and hardy ancestors a gentler man- 
ner and breeding, new duties of respect to themselves and 
others. They taught them the meaning of justice and charity. 
The discipline of life as set forth by the monks 

reached from the highest to the lowliest duties of man, as if 
all were bound together in one indissoluble union. It allowed 
no fervor of devotion to be pleaded as an excuse for neglect, 
or waste or untidiness ; no urgency of labor as a set-off for 

* See Catholic Encyclopedia : St. Benedict, by Abbot Ford. 



582 Sm THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb., 

want of punctuality ; no genius or skill of rank as an exemp- 
tion from the tribute of respect, consideration and kindliness 
that is due to others. The broken fragments of their frugal 
meal were as carefully gathered up to be given to the poor, 
their clothes washed, mended, and put away, their kitchen 
utensils and linen, their spades and implements of husbandry 
kept in as trim order and ready for use, as if their spiritual 
advancement depended upon these things. We recognize the 
value of such habits now . . . but the lesson familiar to us all 
was new to our forefathers. . . . The Court, the great lord and 
landowner, the universities, the city company, the merchant 
with his ledger, the farmer, the architect, the artist, the mu- 
sician and author, owe just so much to the monk as is the 
difference between the rude untutored efforts of the savage 
and the disciplined and developed powers of cultivated genius, 
energy, taste and imagination. 

Nor were all forms of manual labor, in a lower degree, with- 
out their obligation to monasticism. The stone-mason, the 
jeweler, the worker in brass and iron, the carver of wood, the 
joiner, the glass-maker, the weaver and embroiderer, the 
malster, the brewer and the baker, even the hedger, the 
ditcher and the gardener, learned each the lesson of his pe- 
culiar craft from these societies of well-bred and educated 
men, who took their turn at the trowel or the dungcart, and 
were deft and skilful alike in the kitchen, the brewhouse, and 
the bakehouse, in the workshop and in the field, as they were 
in illuminating manuscripts, in choral music, in staining a 
glass window, or erecting a campanile. Talk, indeed, of the 
aristocracy of labor ! Why the very notion of such a thing 
was inconceivable to the old world, as it would have been to 
us, but for the disciples of St. Benedict. 

Monasticism was not only the practical teacher of the arts 
and crafts of civilized life: it was the familiar friend of rich 
and poor alike, and it bridged all class-differences. To its 
earnest, serious, spiritual side there was a cheerful, a healthy, 
a natural reaction. It had its sociable, its humorous, aye, its 
convivial aspect. Its hospitable welcome was extended to as 
many and as merry types of men as we find among Chaucer's 
pilgrims. These guests did not invade or destroy the monas- 
tic regularity and discipline, but there were places and times 
for joy and merriment ; there were comfort and kindness and 
assistance for all who came in spiritual or temporal need. 



i9i2.] SIR THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 583 

The myth of the " fine old English gentleman " who had a 
large estate and provided every day for the poor at his gate, 
was a reality in their case, and in their case only. The baker, 
the cordwainer, the tailor, the carpenter, the porter, the stable- 
man, the cowherd, the cooper, and the laundry-woman with 
many others, had their bread and beer in the great hall of the 
abbey, with a snack from the larder as occasion required ; and 
offerings besides at Christmas and Easter. . . . The sole de- 
positories of news, the only places of entertainment, when kings 
and nobles visited their estates ; without the monasteries a 
country life would have presented to men, especially to the 
laborer (very much what it does now), one dreary round of 
unalloyed and hopeless drudgery ; of fasting days without 
festivals, of work without mirth or holidays.* 

It is strange that such an account of monastic life as this, 
given us by a non-Catholic historian, is not to be found in our 
school books or even in more dignified works of history that 
are easily accessible. 

As an example of the feelings and convictions of those 
who lived under monasticism and loved to recall its memories 
after it had been swept away, one may point to the evidence 
of what is known as the Cole manuscript which was written 
in 1591 and agrees entirely with the statement of Robert 
Aske written fifty years before' and also with those of other 
contemporary writers. 

The monks [he says] , taught and preached the Faith, and 
practiced the same both in word and deed . . . they made 
such provision daily for the people that stood in need thereof, 
as sick, sore, lame or otherwise impotent, that none or very 
few lacked relief in one place or another. Yea, many of them, 
whose revenues were sufficient thereto, made hospitals and 
lodgings within their own houses, wherein they kept a num- 
ber of Impotent persons with all the necessaries for them, with 
persons to attend upon them ; besides the great alms they gave 
daily at their gates to every one that came for it. Yea, no 
wayfaring person could depart without a night's lodging, 
meat, drink and money ; it not being demanded from whence 
he or she came and whither he would go. 

* Giraldi Cambrtniis Of era. Vol. iv. edited by J. S. Brewer, pp. xxxiii. sqq. 



584 Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb., 

They taught the unlearned that was put to them to be 
taught ; yea the poor as well as the rich, without demanding 
anything lor their labor, other than what rich parents were 
willing to give them of mere devotion. 

In confirmation of the monastic services to education we may 
note the weighty conclusion of Mr. Thorold Rogers that the 
extraordinary number of foundation schools established after 
the Reformation "was not a new zeal for learning, but the 
fresh and very inadequate supply of that which had been so 
suddenly and disastrously extinguished." 
The Cole manuscript then proceeds: 

There was no person that came to them heavy or sad for 
any cause that went away comfortless. They never revenged 
them of any injury, but were content to forgive it freely on 
submission. And if the price of corn had begun to start up 
in the markets, they made thereunto with wainloads of corn 
and sold it under the market price to poor people, to the end 
to bring down the price thereof. If the highways, bridges, or 
causeways were tedious to passengers that sought their living 
by travel, their great help lacked not towards the repair and 
amending thereof; yea they amended them on their own 
proper charges. . . . 

They never raised any rent, or took any incomes or gare- 
somes of their tenants ; nor ever took in or improved any com- 
mons ; although the most part and the greatest was ground 
belonging to their professions. . . . Yea, happy was that 
person who was tenant to an abbey. . . . And thus they 
fulfilled all the works of charity[round about them to the good 
example of all lay persons that now have taken forth far other 
lessons, that is nunc tempus alias postulat mores. 

It is not without historical justice that the Reformation 
has been called a rising of rich against the poor, a rising 
which made the rich richer still and the poor still poorer. I 
do not say that the relief of poverty and distress at the end 
of the fifteenth century was all that it might have been, but 
it was something far better than the relief which succeeded it. 
It prevented that widespread destitution which is the scandal 
of our modern days, while its ministrations to poverty were 
informed by that deep, religious conviction which recognizes 



i9i2.] Sin THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 585 

all men as belonging to a human brotherhood. In the old 
Christian system of relief there were elements of mercy, of 
kindness, of compassion, of delicate human respect which no 
later state organization has succeeded in re-capturing to any 
extent. The Protestant doctrine which decried the value of 
human efforts towards virtue, had terrible consequences for the 
poor, for it taught men to forget the practical and social ne- 
cessity of charity; the springs of unselfishness were dried up; 
the lust for accumulation took its place. The modern doc- 
trines of selfish commercial immorality are the practical out- 
come of the doctrine which denied the necessity of good 
works. 

One last word about the monasteries and that from Abbot 
Gasquet, a statement which sums up a ripe and judicial ex- 
perience gathered from long and patient research, a statement 
which has yet to be refuted : 

The religious of the sixteenth century had passed through 
many difficulties dangerous to their spiritual no less than to 
their temporal welfare. Yet while their moral tone had prob- 
ably been lowered by the influence of the spirit of the times, 
the graver falls were certainly confined to individual cases. 
Anything like general immorality was altogether unknown among 
the religious of England. This much is clearly proved by the 
testimony of the acts of episcopal visitations, as well as by the 
absence of any such sweeping change, till it became necessary 
for Henry and his agents to blast the fair fame of the monastic 
houses in order the more easily to gain [possession of their 
property.* 

At this time the spiritual power was weak and the tem- 
poral power strong, at their most vital point of contact. 
Henry VIII. and the bishops of England were unequally 
matched; with the exception of Fisher, the Bishop of Roch- 
ester there was no man among them of the lineage of St. 
Dunstan, St. Anselm or St. Thomas of Canterbury. How 
came this Tudor monarch to have and to exercise such great 
power ? 

Henry VII. having finally established himself on the throne, 
did all in his power to make his position secure. He kept 
out of any serious foreign entanglements in order to attend to 

Henry VIII. and tht English Monasteries,'popu\ar edition, p. II. 



586 SIK THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb., 

domestic policy. After a long period of civil strife the coun- 
try was naturally in a state of disorder and insubordination. 
The royal hand must needs be firm and into that hand must 
needs be gathered all the reins of power. He distrusted the 
great barons and had no favorites; his chief ministers were 
Archbishop Morton, the early patron of Sir Thomas More, 
Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, and Sir Reginald Bray, with those 
much maligned lawyers, Empson and Dudley, to do the dis- 
agreeable work. With the institution of the Star Chamber, the 
royal tyranny, however necessary at the time, became supreme. 
On the other hand, Parliament grew more and more subser- 
vient and was hardly necessary to the royal purposes. Its old 
power of the purse was flouted by a monarch who had other 
and sufficient ways of getting money. People, seeing how 
powerless it was, became indifferent to it a great change 
from the ceaseless vigilance for its rights and privileges which 
had marked the days of Plantagenets and Lancastrians. Henry 
VII. succeeded in accumulating enormous resources both of 
money and despotic power, and these he handed on to his son 
Henry VIII. who had all his father's brains, and all his 
grandfather's (Edward IV.) passions. Henry VIII. was 

capable of going to almost any length in pursuit of the grati- 
fication of his ambition, his passions, his resentment or his 
simple love of sell-assertion. Yet, however far he might go 
on the road to tyranny, he had sufficient cunning, versatility 
and power of cool reflection, to know precisely when he had 
reached the edge of the impossible. ... It was the most 
marvelous proof of his ability that he died on the throne after 
nearly forty years of autocratic rule, during which he had 
roused more enmities and done more to change the face of the 
realm than any of the kings that were before him. 

Bishop Stubbs, indeed, holds that the break-up of the old 
feudal form of society was the moving force of the Reforma- 
tion both at home and abroad. 

Neither religious disaffection and the disintegration of the 
weak church organization by the growing strength of abso- 
lutism, nor the ideas of the new learning, nor the rivalries of 
political rulers fostering abroad forms of discontent which they 
persecuted at home, nor the lust of enlarged territory, nor the 



i9i2.] Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 587 

coveting of ecclesiastical wealth, nor the envy of the unprivi- 
leged classes, nor the new power of the press, would alone 
have sufficed to do the work that was done. Who could have 
reckoned on the coincidence of the Indulgence agitation in 
Germany, the divorce agitation in England, the growth ol 
Huguenotism in France, the rising up of men like Luther, 
Zwingli, Calvin and Knox in such rapid succession, and with 
such marked differences, and such diverse contributions to 
such a complex result ? There was unquestionably, in con- 
junction with the yearnings for spiritual change, a deep and 
strong impulse for the breaking with the past ; breaking with 
national traditions and with religious traditions.* 

The English Episcopacy of that time was hardly in a con- 
dition to resist br even oppose such a man as Henry VIII. 
with such forces in unconscious conspiracy to help him. Be- 
fore Luther had nailed his theses to the church door at Witten- 
berg, the old attacks on the clerical rights of jurisdiction had 
been resumed in England ; but with the exception of Fisher 
and More no single-minded champions were forthcoming to 
resist the attack. The Court had captured the bishops; the 
higher clergy had become, in Wycliffe's phrase, " Csesarean." 
Pluralism, nepotism, simony and other abuses were unchecked. 
Spiritual offices were held by royal favor or temporal influence 
and in moments of crisis the men who held them did not hesi- 
tate to support the king against the Pope; bishoprics were 
awarded for political services; to foreigners were given Eng- 
lish sees as the price of supporting royal schemes at Rome. 
Bishops preferred political occupation at Court to residence in 
their own dioceses, and the newer nobility were rightly jeal- 
ous of them. When the great assault was made upon the 
Church and made by the autocratic fiat of the king there was 
no resolute, organized opposition. The two figures that stand 
out in heroic isolation among the eminent of their time, as the 
defenders of the spiritual power in its first hour of need, are 
Fisher and More. What they were fighting for has been well 
expressed in quite unecclesiastical language by a non-Catho- 
lic writer. The issue is defined in such a large and simple 
way that I venture to recommend it to the serious attention 
of my readers. 

* Stubbs, Ltcturtt on Mtdi&val and Modern History. P. 233. 



588 Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Feb. 

The great historic drama of the Middle Ages turns on the 
long struggle of the universal Catholic Church to rescue the 
appointment of pastors and teachers from emperors, kings, 
nobles, and politicians (z. e., the Temporal Powers), and 
maintain it in the hands of one representative, European 
authority resting not on force but on moral influence. In this, 
the most momentous of historic endeavors to liberate the 
Spiritual from the Temporal power (z. e,, to try to make the 
thinker, the preacher, the artist, the woman, independent of 
the man-at-arms and the man-with-the-money-bags), far- 
sighted and public-spirited citizens were naturally on the 
side of the Papacy. If the king or the nobles appointed their 
bishops, what was to prevent such patrons from appointing 
puppets of their own ? Sir Thomas More is one of the central 
figures in this world-drama of the moral, against the material, 
order. In sacrificing his life for Papal Supremacy, he gave 
up place and power, fortune, friends and family, for the moral 
ideal of citizenship. His execution by Henry VIII., though 
It did not seem to delay the victory of the Temporal Power in 
England (with its lasting train of evil consequences), yet se- 
cured the sanctification of the martyr, and thus More by his 
supreme act of sacrifice becomes one of the most potent sym- 
bols in European history for the transmission of the civic 
ideal of spiritual freedom.* 

* I owe this paragraph to my friend Mr. V. V. Branford. 




A SCHOLAR'S DEATH. 

BY WILLIAM P. H. KITCHIN, Ph.D. 

IHE parish of St. Thomas in the southwestern 
corner of Newfoundland, follows a straggling 
coast line of seventy-five miles. It stretches 
across broad bays and harbors, and makes its 
way into the tiniest coves and indraughts, where 
the fearless fisher-folks wrest from the bosom of the deep a 
scanty and precarious livelihood. Inland it does not extend 
at all for there is the wilderness primeval unchatted reaches 
of forest and marsh and moor tenanted only by partridge, 
deer and half-wild cattle. The sea is the principal highway 
of communication between each little fishing village. Should 
that prove impracticable owing to fog, ice or storm each 
one must blaze a path for himself through the brushwood. 
It requires an iron constitution to stand a pastor's life in 
the cruel cheerlessness of a Newfoundland wilderness where 
sick-calls of fifty and sixty miles are of constant occurrence, 
and where a single call may mean a week's, and even a fort- 
night's, absence from home. No small degree of fortitude is 
required to put up with the hardships and privations such a 
life entails; the long hours spent in open boats with the 
spray and the waves dashing over them, the exasperating de- 
lays at the mouths of harbors, the unwholesome food, the poor 
quarters which are still the best the fishers have to offer all 
these things are very trying indeed. And yet, there are men 
but they do not wield a pen who have lived that life for 
close on half a century, and who are almost as buoyant and 
jaunty to-day as the first day they entered on the mission. 
Over and over again they have taken their lives in their bands 
to visit the sick and give the sacraments to the dying; every 
recurring winter they face hardships that are severe enough 
to produce fatal results; but still they continue doing their 
work in a business-like, matter-of-fact way, and in the wildest 
flights of their imagination never dream there is anything 
heroic in their actions. 



590 A SCHOLAR'S DEATH [Feb., 

Dr. James O'Connell had been appointed to the paiish of 
St. Thomas immediately on his return from college. He reached 
the village in the teeth of a hammering November gale, pale 
and thin from hard study, and with a miniature library among 
his otherwise scanty impedimenta. He got drenched to the skin 
while landing, and one of his precious cases, freighted with the 
lore of Europe, nearly went to the bottom. Finally, however, 
he reached the little presbytery safely, and for a few days he 
lost interest in everything but the joy and wonder of first 
housekeeping. He entered into possession of his domicile 
under the protection of "Aunt Teresa," who was admitted by 
all to be a prudent and "knowledgeable" woman, whose tact 
and "management" were invaluable in embarrassing situations. 

Far back in the dreamy, shadowy past she had ministered 
unto a certain venerable Dean, long since called to his re- 
ward, and for more than twenty years she had kept house for 
the successive pastors of St. Thomas.' The new incumbent 
gave her carte blanche to do as she pleased about the house, 
but stated that he himself would fix up the study, and that 
he did not want any books or papers disturbed no matter 
how much their chaotic disorder might offend the ethics of 
correct housekeeping. The pastor's study was a pleasant little 
room, low-ceilinged and cozy, with a bay-window that looked 
out on the turbulent Atlantic, and rattled to the thunder of 
its surf. In this lightsome recess he placed his writing-table; 
a revolving bookstand by its side contained the volumes he re- 
quired for immediate use. The remainder of his books he dis- 
posed on shelves around the walls of the room. 

There they were a goodly array gathered in the book stores 
of half a dozen European cities theology, philosophy, scrip- 
ture, canon law, liturgy, general literature, with an odd volume 
of lighter vein for moments of weariness or leisure. The pastor 
intended, God willing, to make some original contributions to 
Catholic philosophy, and had already begun to gather material 
for a lengthy paper on " The Neo- Platonic Elements in the 
Thomistic Philosophy." He recognized, very soon, however, 
that such a study might be almost indefinitely prolonged. 
but it was a goal to look forward to, a spur and incentive to 
work, an intellectual pursuit to keep his mind from rusting, and 
losing the painfully acquired knowledge of years. 

In the meantime, more immediate and pressing matters 



i 9 n.] A SCHOLAR'S DEATH 59> 

claimed his attention. The preparation of his weekly sermons 
made considerable inroads on his time. Again, his parish 
needed a new church, and the question of ways and means had 
to be thought of and provided for. So, though nearly every 
mail brought him some books to aid in the production of his 
Magnum Opus, many of them remained unread. The pastor 
of a poor and struggling parish on the bleak coasts of Terra 
Nova can scarcely be a scholar, though certainly it is well to 
aim at such a desirable ideal. 

For many weeks Dr. O'Connell had been counting the mails 
and had been on the watch for the coming of a long-expected 
German Monograph on Plotinus. At last the precious volume 
arrived, and the pastor sat down to devour its arid pages with 
all the zest of a hungry school boy for a feast. 

He was deeply absorbed in trying to disentangle the 
ideas of the Enneadcs which were not made clearer from 
being seen through Teuton glasses when he received a sick- 
call from a distant part of the parish. The person was old, 
and there was need of haste. He and his guides left for their 
destination in a small boat during the early afternoon. The 
weather was fine, the wind favorable, and in a well-manned boat 
they ought to reach their objective point in seven or eight 
hours. But the wind fell suddenly, a thick curtain of gray 
fog closed down like a pall over the waters, and twenty-four 
hours later they crept into port utterly exhausted. It was a 
hard experience for the young priest. He had often heard 
of such things; he knew these were the difficulties to be en- 
countered, but with youthful inconsequence he never thought 
seriously of them before, of the suffering, the danger, and the 
hardship. When he reached the sick person's bed-side he had 
just energy enough, to administer the sacraments before he fell 
fainting by the patient's side. 

It took him three days to recuperate. A week later he 
was back in his little presbytery, physically a wreck, mentally 
indomitable, spiritually rejoicing that he, too, had been called 
upon to suffer something for the sake of Christ. 

An Easter fair realized five hundred dollars with which Dr. 
O'Connell intended to start his new church, and in spite of many 
interruptions and setbacks his treasured manuscript was slowly 
growing. By this time the little study was more than gorged 
with books. They hid the walls, filled the chairs and win- 



592 A SCHOLAR'S DEATH [Feb., 

dow ledges, struggled for uncertain foothold on the table and 
lay around the floor in disorderly heaps. Such atrocious mis- 
placement of matter scandalized the decorous taste of Aunt 
Teresa. But on this point her easy-going master was stern 
and inexorable; he would not permit his beloved volumes to 
be touched by any profane hand. These dog-eared tattered 
volumes, these stained and withered. looking folios were dear 
and precious to him. Yet in spite of his studious habits and 
the intellectual resources within his reach, he did sometimes 
feel desperately, over-poweringly lonely. There were days 
and days when no one came near the presbytery, and when 
a sick-call would be in one sense a boon to break the dull, 
stupifying monotony. Sometimes, in rebellious mood, he used 
to ask himself what was the good of bis superabundant edu- 
cation ? What use the languages, the knowledge, the book 
and world- lore he had acquired? No one in St. Thomas' 
knew or cared anything about these things; their horizon 
was limited to the crops, the fisheries and local chit chat- 
He hungered for someone that he could talk to on a foot- 
ing of equality. He longed to discuss the books he read, 
the thoughts he thought, the dreams and hopes he indulged 
in, with someone capable of understanding and appreciating 
them. And then, in penitent mood, he shook himself free 
from these murmuring melancholy imaginings ; he recalled 
how much he had to be thankful for, how his lines had fallen 
in pleasant places far above his deserts, that the love and 
affection of his people far outweighed whatever difficulties he 
had to encounter. No dcubt he had troubles in his present 
post but he should meet them everywhere, and if his Lord 
wished him to tarry there until He came, it was well. After 
all he was a soldier ; he had freely chosen a soldier's part, 
and it was not for him to repine at his service nor murmur 
against the yoke. 

Dr. O'Connell's second Christmas at St. Thomas' was to be 
a gala occasion. For weeks before he had been training the 
choir and making ready for a grand celebration of the festival. 
No trouble was spared by anyone to make the event as joy- 
ous and historic as possible. The men had gone as far as 
fifteen miles into the country to secure the finest boughs and 
evergreens for the decoration of the altar and the crib. The 
pastor spent nearly all of Christmas Eve in the church over- 



IQII.] A SCHOLAR'S DEATH 593 

seeing his co-workers, and putting the final touches to things 
with his own hand. Late in the evening he went home to 
rest before the midnight Mass. He was half dozing before 
the fire and looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to 
the next day when he received a telegram to go quickly to 
one of his outlying stations a parishioner was dying. It was 
a deep disappointment to have to leave the greater number of 
his people without Mass on such a feast, and also to have 
all the trouble of preparation thus go for nothing. But a 
priest does not permit personal feelings, or thoughts of con- 
venience or expediency to stand in the way when a dying 
person calls for his ministration. The night was too windy to 
venture on the water, and so the priest with two companions, 
a pony and a rough sleigh locally known as a "catamaran" 
set out on their journey through the pathless country. The 
land was deep under a mantle of snow. The most familiar 
landmarks had vanished under the white pall. Even the high 
hill-tops assumed the most bewildering and fantastic shapes and 
seemed to mock at the tiny mites who toiled along under their 
crests. 

After traveling for some hours they came to a large, open 
expanse of country as level as a table; it might be the al- 
luvial meadows called " the flats," or it might be one of a 
chain of lakes that bisected the country in that direction. In 
this latter case they had deflected six or seven miles to the 
south of their proper course. The guides differed in opinion, 
the elder holding they were on a lake, the younger on a 
meadow, and, indeed, it was well-nigh impossible to tell what 
lay under that deceitful carpet of snow. The priest took no 
part in the discussion, being too weary and dazed to open 
his lips. But while the guides argued, there was an ominous 
crack; the ice, for ice it was, gave away under them and they 
were plunged into the freezing water. Under the first sheet 
of ice there was a layer of water and then a second stratum 
of ice, a " double deck," so nothing worse than a very un- 
pleasant wetting resulted. They got off the treacherous 
lake as quickly as possible, and took what they presumed 
was the right direction. They had still, so they calculated, 
some twenty miles to go, and they hoped with good luck to 
do it in five hours. With the dawn the wind died away 
rapidly and tiny snow-flakes began to fall. They looked at 
VOL. xciv. 38 



594 A SCHOLAR'S DEATH [Feb., 

one another meaningly but spoke no word. If a bad snow 
storm overtook them in that shelterless wilderness it meant 
death. The snow continued to fall gently at first then more 
thickly until at last, seated on the catamaran, they could not 
see the horse's head. The priest's face was ashen gray and 
he swayed helplessly to and fro to the side- swing of the 
sleigh like a drunken man. 

"Jack "said the elder guide to his companion, "if we don't 
soon get shelter somewhere the doctor will die on us. Make 
him take a drop of that French brandy you have." They be- 
sought him to take a mouthful or even a taste of the liquor 
but without avail. If God wanted him, he said, he was not 
afraid to die, but he would go before his Maker with his 
pledge unbroken. To rouse him from his increasing lethargy, 
the elder man took him by the arm and walked him after the 
sleigh while the younger led the horse's head. But he could 
not keep up the pace at all, and fell helplessly at every third 
step. Then the brave fellows, not thinking at all of them- 
selves, took off their coats and covering him tenderly with 
these, tied him on the sleigh, and while he lay unresisting, 
unconscious in their hands, they forced some of the brandy 
through his tightly-closed lips. 

Late in the afternoon when the guides themselves were 
almost exhausted, they thought they saw through the growing 
dusk the gleam of lights and heard faint shouts far away to 
the right. It was a party of searchers from the little village, 
who had come to meet the priest and his companions on 
the way. 

Willing hands lifted him from the sleigh and carried him 
quickly to the house, where, under the influence of heat and 
restoratives, he revived. His first thought was for the sick 
person he came to attend and he insisted on administering 
the sacraments immediately. But the effort used up whatever 
little strength he had left and as he finished the ceremony 
he collapsed completely. He was undressed and put to 
bed and one of the men watched through the night at his bed- 
side. The people of the house did not think their pastor was 
seriously ill, but they wished to do all in their power for 
his comfort. Towards morning he awoke and looked around 
in a dazed kind of way not seeming to recognize the strange 
room and surroundings. 



1912.] THE SECOND PRESENTATION 595 

"Where am I," he gasped feebly. Then catching sight of 
his guide of yesterday, everything came back to him. " That 
was a hard day we had yesterday Jack, but my work is done." 

"We'll have many a day together yet, doctor, please God 
you'll be all right to-morrow." 

" There's no to. morrow for me Jack, I'm near eternity 
now. Lift me up. How dark 'tis getting I I can't see you 
now. . . . Jesus, Mary, Joseph. ..." A gray shadow 
passed over his face he was gone. 

The sun rose in glory out of a cloudless sky as blue as 
purest indigo, and it shone into a poor little room where a 
dead priest lay a martyr to his duty. His face was wreathed 
with a smile and about him was that peace which passeth 
all understanding. 



THE SECOND PRESENTATION, 

BY THOMAS E. BURKE. 

SHB treads the way like Abraham of old 
Up the steep hill to Immolate her Son. 

Around her silent heart deep shadows fold 
The sacrifice ol ages is begun. 

Like Abraham but lo ! In all the land 

None but her Son can save our fallen race ; 

No white-robed angel stays her upraised hand, 
No victim waits to take her Infant's place. 




THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

IrlE sanctity of the Church depends not upon the 
moral character oi her members; nor does the 
validity of her means of grace depend, as the 
Donatists contended, upon the worthiness of her 
ministers. The full benefits and privileges of 
the Church are, of course, for the pure of heart, and for them 
only; and a priest who administers the sacraments while in a 
state of grievous sin adds sin to sin. But neither can evil 
members deprive the Church of her sanctity, nor can unworthy 
priests deprive the sacraments of their virtue and grace and 
their sanctifying effects upon the worthy recipient. 

The sanctity of the Church is derived, not from her mem- 
bers, even though they be saints, but from her Divine Head 
and Founder, since by Him she was established and is sus- 
tained. From Him likewise, Who is the source of all grace, 
and not from the worthiness of the priest who ministers 
them, is derived the grace of the sacraments, which, as in 
the case of the Church, have been instituted by Him, and 
not by man. 

At the same time, it is true, of course, that, though the action 
and effects of grace are for the most part secret and hidden, 
the sanctity of the Church shines forth and is everywhere 
manifested by virtue of the holy lives and good works of mul- 
titudes of her members, both priests and people. By means 
of the sacraments they show forth the life of union with the 
Author and Giver of all grace. In the lives and writings 
of the canonized saints martyrs, confessors, doctors, virgins, 
and, above all, in the life His holy Mother the unique 
sanctity of His Church is pre-eminently manifest. Moreoven 
He Himself in His Risen Body ever abides on the altars of 
His Church, the centre and meaning of her worship, sanctify- 
ing her sanctuaries, and communicating Himself from thence 
to her members. And furthermore, in accordance with His 



ig i2.] THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH 597 

promise, the Holy Spirit dwells in her, as truly as does man's 
soul in his body, teaching her and proclaiming by her all truth, 
and maintaining her in being; "for in one Spirit were we all 
baptized into one Body," and chosen " unto salvation, in sanc- 
tification of the spirit, and faith of the truth." 

The Church is holy. But that does not mean "not having 
spot or wrinkle or any such thing," or " without blemish " 
in her visible portion on earth. Under the law of probation 
here below she necessarily consists of good and bad. and, in- 
deed, is likened to a field in which good grain and weeds 
grow together until the harvest; to a net which gathers of fuh 
good and bad; to a vine cumbered with fruitless branches; to 
a wedding-feast in which not all the guests are clothed in the 
wedding-garment of charity. It is her very office to carry on 
her Divine Founder's work of salvation, to reclaim sinners, to 
effect and to renew the purity of heart which, for His sake, 
she requires of her children. Like Him she teaches, indeed, 
hatred of sin, but mercy, love, patience, towards the sinner. 
She watches and waits for the sinner's repentance ; rebukes, 
warns, exhorts. When he turns from evil and repents, she 
receives and reinstates him by means of the divine mysteries 
of which He has appointed her the steward. And herein, 
again, does she manifest the note of sanctity. If she received 
sinners without repentance on their part, if she administered 
absolution to the impenitent on the mere confession of their 
sins, as her enemies aver that she does, then, indeed, would 
she sin against this note. But, on the contrary, she makes 
repentance, which necessarily includes a firm purpose of 
amendment, the very condition of a valid absolution. She 
teaches that to approach the altar without such repentance is 
an act of sacrilege. She insists that to have part in her sanctity 
the sinner must forsake sin and be made holy. It is ever her 
endeavor by all her means ot grace to reclaim and restore, 
to save and heal, to cleanse, sanctify and clothe with " the first 
robe." She aims at nothing short of the sinner's sanctifica- 
tion, since for this, and nothing short of it, was she commis- 
sioned and empowered by her Divine Founder in His Name 
and by His merits and grace. She is holy, therefore, because 
she teaches the doctrine which He delivered, and administers 
His means of grace in accordance with the purpose for which 
He bestowed them, namely, that we may forsake sin, be cleansed 



598 THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH [Feb., 

from its stain, fulfill His commandment, and persevere in His 
grace to the end. 

When we look out upon the world of men we see, indeed, 
"a vision to dazzle and appall" a vision which "inflicts 
upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is ab- 
solutely beyond human solution," and we are perforce driven 
to the conclusion that "the human race is implicated in some 
terrible aboriginal calamity" and "is out of joint with the 
purposes of its Creator." The mutual alienations and con- 
flicts of men, their jealousies, cruel wars, atrocities, persecu- 
tion?, spoliations; the defeat of good, the success of evil; 
physical pain, disease, mental anguish ; the shortness of life, 
the anticipation of death; the prevalence, intensity and horrors 
of sin; the many idolatries, the babel of sects; the dreary, 
widespread, hopeless irreligion, as of individuals so likewise of 
nations; the incessant and virulent attacks of civil govern- 
ments upon the Church of God, because, forsooth, she reminds 
them that there is an Authority higher than theirs an Al- 
mighty Being above them, to Whom they are subject and will 
have to render an account. Such are the considerations which 
force upon us the remembrance that we live in a sinful world, 
that man has fallen from his original estate and is enduring 
the consequences of his rebellion against his Maker. 

So evident, indeed, is the sinful and, humanly speaking, 
hopeless condition of the human race, so overwhelming and 
bewildering the contemplation of it, that scarcely need we be 
surprised that in the era known as the Protestant Reformation, 
men who denied that the Catholic Church is of God, and that 
her sacraments are divinely given means of effecting man's 
renovation, regarded human nature as a mere mass of hopeless 
evil, utterly depraved, irreclaimable, and incapable of any good 
thing. Nay, it may even be said, they dispossessed part of 
human nature itself, since they denied to it free-will, which 
surely is as much of the essence of human nature as is the 
human reason. Luther, for instance, who denied that the grace 
of justification means sanctification, compared man, under the 
action of what he understood by grace, to "a trunk or a 
stone." The Calvinists, certainly, on the other hand, admitted 
that man was active as well as passive under the influence of 
what they called grace, but, as they held such grace to be ir- 
resistible, they denied that man is free to accept or reject it. 



i9i2.] THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH 599 

The grace of justification in the Protestant view speaking 
generally means no more than the imputation of Christ's 
righteousness to one who remains still guilty, still in his sins, 
these being but covered, not removed, and Christ's righteous- 
ness in no way imparted, but only imputed. There is obvi- 
ously no place for repentance, as Catholics understand the 
word, in such a system of doctrine ; and anything in the na- 
ture of sanctification is likewise obviously excluded. More- 
over, if man has not free-will, not only is repentance, which 
depends upon the exercise of free will, impossible, but like- 
wise all power, either of supernatural goodness by divine 
grace, or of natural goodness. The denial of capabilities of 
natural goodness is necessarily involved also in the notion 
that human nature has become a mere mass of hopeless cor- 
ruption. 

The results of such teaching have been, and are, but too 
painfully evident in every country in which Protestantism has 
sway. If human nature cannot be rescued from its sin, can- 
not be renovated, made pure, chaste, sanctified, why believe in 
any such thing as the provision of means to such an end; why 
believe in the efficacy of the sacraments as the instruments of 
such supernatural grace, or that any grant of any kind what- 
soever has been vouchsafed for the purpose? And thus it 
has come to pass that Protestantism unites with the world, 
not only in denying the grant and power of sanctifying grace, 
but, as a consequence, in making little of the sinfulness of sin, 
For if nature cannot rise above nature, if its tendencies and 
inclinations have not been subjected to a law which both 
requires and enables us to live a life above its fallen level, 
why should the indulgence of such impulses and propensities 
be, after all, so very sinful, provided it be but private and 
personal, and does no harm to others, or to one's own mental, 
bodily and temporal well-being ? So argues the world, and 
Protestantism is at one with it in its disbelief in sanctity, and 
in regarding those who enter upon the narrow way as pre- 
tenders and hypocrites, and their aspirations as but romance 
and fanaticism ; in scoffing at the special creations of God's 
grace, slandering the profession of celibacy, and libelling 
those who are dedicated to Him in the religious life. 

The social virtues and interests such as temperance, hon- 
esty in human affairs, popular contentment, order, tranquility, 



6oo THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH [Feb., 

progress, plenty, prosperity these are the things that Protes- 
tant efforts have, to a large extent, principally in view; and 
that country which abounds most in material prosperity is 
esteemed the highest in God's favor, and as possessed of His 
chiefest blessings as, for instance, England under Elizabeth's 
reign of temporal prosperity, despite its irreligion, the corrup- 
tions of her court, and the cruel persecutions and barbarous 
slaughter of Catholics! As to faith, that, in the Protestant 
view, is but a subjective and personal apprehension of the 
Savior. There are no special doctrines necessary to be be- 
lieved in order to be saved; each man has a right to his own 
religious opinions, to his own rule of faith, his own worship; 
and if a number unite to form a church, this is but for the 
sake of brotherhood and convenience. In an American Pro- 
testant attempt to discover "The Coming Creed" as though, 
forsooth, no revelation of Divine Truth has as yet been vouch- 
safed to man the author gives what his reviewer describes 
as "a study that may prove helpful to those who are engaged 
in shaping a creed for their church." The reviewer then 
quotes: 

One of the most significant features of the present religious 
situation is the growing discontent with the dogmatic ideal of 
church life. The feeling is widespread that the creeds, which 
in the historic orthodox churches stand for Christianity, are in 
their present form the survival of a thought world which has 
been outgrown, and that they are consequently a hindrance to 
faith rather than its bulwark. The writer profoundly sympa- 
thises with this feeling. 

The reviewer then proceeds: "So says the author, and in 
his interesting discussion ... he leads up to 'A Sug- 
gested Creed.' " This reviewer then takes up another book, 
which he describes as: 

A pragmatic book, in which religion is brought to people 
not in dogmatic form, but in pragmatic ; not as a dogma to be 
accepted, but as a reality to be tried, experienced and ex- 
plained, if ever explained, after experienced. . . . Here 
again is not belief, but practice ; not talk about life, but ex- 
perience of life ; not dogmatic assertion, but test that brings 
demonstration in the actual working out of life in the making 
of life, so that religion is wrought into character. 



19 1 2.] THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH 60 1 

But as to the nature of this life, its growth and its fruits, no 
reference is made to the influence of a sanctifying grace from 
on high ; all is subjective " a mass of thought and sugges- 
tion, developing through the twelve chapers " concerning it, 
and we are assured that " no one can follow this array of 
scientific fact and careful reasoning without feeling an exalta- 
tion and a power worth all that it has cost." " Philosophic 
Protestantism " the late Professor James' term is the best 
term for it. Dr. Schiller names it " Humanism," a term 
equally applicable, since it substitutes for truth revealed by 
God and taught by His Church, and for God's sanctifying grace, 
fancied truths of man's own making, and the experiences of 
his fervid imagination and elated feelings. Truth under such 
a system is regarded as purely subjective and personal; each 
man makes it for himself; that is true to each, which each be- 
lieves to be true, and what is true to one need not be true to 
his neighbor. Therefore, there is no such thing as a true re- 
ligion or a false. And if man is thus sufficient for himself in 
relation to belief, why not also in relation to moral conduct? 
If his reason, which is the eyesight of his mind, needs not a 
light from without to discern truth, why should his moral 
nature be dependent upon supernatural grace? Thus do men 
deify and worship human nature, make themselves the measure 
of all things, and deny the necessity and grant of a sanctify- 
ing grace from on high. And since without such divine grace 
sin cannot be removed, and without its aid is unavoidable, 
its guilt therefore is disregarded, overlooked, and even some- 
times denied. 

How strange are the inconsistencies and contradictions of 
Protestantism ! Human nature, in its view, is a mere mass of 
corruption, incapable of good, incapable of sanctification; and 
yet, forsooth, each individual of the race is considered capa- 
ble of shaping for himself a religion out of the pages of a 
book by means of his private judgment, or by virtue of his 
ideas, sentiments, feelings, emotions; as also of ordering his 
life to his own and his neighbor's satisfaction in relation to 
moral and social conduct. 

Very different from all this is the teaching of the Catholic 
Church. She recognizes, indeed, that man has fallen from his 
first estate, and, by reason of his rebellion against his Maker, 
has forfeited the grace that was bestowed for the supernatural 



602 THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH [Feb., 

end for which he was created : that, with the loss of divine 
grace, he lost his adoption as the child of God, forfeited the 
right to heaven, and with the guilt of sin incurred its pun- 
ishment also both in body and soul; that, with the loss of 
grace he lost, indeed, the integrity of his nature and thus in- 
curred, with a memory clouded, an understanding darkened, 
and a will weakened, ignorance, and the concupiscence of the 
flesh. But while she thus recognizes that by his fall from 
grace man lost, together with all else that depended on grace, 
the integrity of his nature, she maintains that he lost nothing 
of that which pertains to the essence of human nature ; that 
as he lost not reason, so neither did he lose free-will, nor 
capabilities of natural goodness, nor yet the power to respond 
to the grace of repentance. 

She denounces sin as rebellion against God, and, therejore, 
as of all possible evils the greatest, and her initial doctrine in 
consequence is an emphatic protest against the existing state 
of mankind. But she will not allow, in fact, she denies, that 
human nature is a mere mass of hopeless evil, and irreclaim- 
able. She maintains that it has upon it the promise of great 
things, and that she is sent for the very purpose of reno- 
vating it. 

But she does not imagine that man's restoration can be 
brought about simply through certain outward provisions 
of preaching and teaching, even though these be her own ; 
still less by his reading and private interpretation of a book, 
even though it be the Bible. She maintains that it can be 
brought about only from an inward spiritual power or grace 
imparted directly from above, and of which she is the channel ; 
and hence her insistence upon the necessity of the sacraments 
as being the divinely-appointed means of that renovating grace 
which she has been commissioned to dispense to those who 
sincerely desire to be saved from sin and to be sanctified. 

She holds, indeed, that the unaided reason of man does, 
when correctly exercised, lead to a belief in God, in the im- 
mortality of the soul, and in a future retribution. But she in- 
sists that reason is but the eyesight of the mind, and that 
just as in the physical order we need, besides eyesight, a light 
from without to see since not the keenest eyesight will avail 
us in the dark, so in like manner do we need, besides the 
exercise of reason, a gift from above the light of faith to 



1 9i 2.] THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH 603 

discern divine truths. Moreover, so puffed up with pride is 
man in his fallen condition and it was in consequence of the 
sin of pride that he fell and so perverse is his will, that his 
reason tends ever towards misbelief and unbelief in matters 
religious. Of this we have abundant actual and historical 
proof. It is significant that, when our Lord came on earth, 
it was precisely in those portions of the pagan world in which 
the intellect had been active and had had a career, that the 
last traces of the religious knowledge of former times were all 
but disappearing; and history is but repeating itself now 
wherever the intellect is active. Freedom of thought, though 
in itself one of man's greatest natural gifts, needs, in truth, a 
divine provision "to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses." 

It needs the provision of a power invested with the pre- 
rogative of infallibility to preserve in the world a knowledge 
of its Creator, to declare the truths which He has revealed, 
and to obtain for them that assent of faith which transcends 
reason and is more than opinion. For faith admits not of the 
least shadow of doubt concerning revealed truth, since such 
truth is not of man, but of God, and therefore, is as abso- 
lutely true for all time as God Himself is true. We cannot 
at the same time both doubt and believe, be sure and yet not 
be sure; faith makes us certain for good and for all certain 
of divine truth, because it is divine and is vouched for as such 
by an Authority divinely provided; and as the truth thus be- 
lieved in is a divine gift, so, likewise, is the faith by which 
we believe it. Hence, the Church is holy as being the author- 
ity divinely invested with the prerogative of infallibility to 
declare truths which are holy because divine, and as being 
the means by which we obtain the divine gift of faith and 
manifest it in the life of obedience to its requirements. For 
faith requires of us not only to believe divine truth, but to 
seek also deliverance from sin, sanctification in body and soul, 
and perseverance in the life of obedience to the divine com- 
mands ; to seek such grace by means of the sacraments, since 
these are the divinely- appointed channels of the supernatural 
grace which imparts, not merely imputes, to us the righteous- 
ness of Christ. And thus the Church is holy for the further 
reason that she possesses and ministers the means of effecting 
in us real holiness of life. 

Naught but return to " the old paths," to the divinely- 



604 THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH [Feb., 

appointed Teacher and Guide, can avail to unite men in reli- 
gious belief; naught but the divinely- appointed means of grace 
(where they may be had) can effect that "holiness without 
which no man shall see God." No human expedient can 
effect so divine a work no " World Conference on Faith and 
Order" among the hundred and fifty denominations of Chris- 
tians; no mere insistance upon "the great things, God and 
character and service;" still less "new statements of faith 
and duty, revision of the creeds of other generations," or any 
"coming creed." All such human shifts to say only this con- 
cerning them are but calculated to make confusion worse con- 
founded, as experience has again and again conclusively shown. 

Let us pass over the early and later heresies into the his- 
tory of which we have not space here to enter, and consider 
fora moment what has come of the Protestant appeal to "the 
Bible and the Bible only," interpreted by man's private judg- 
ment in place of the divinely- appointed Teacher. The hun- 
dred and fifty denominations testify to the fact that, thus 
handled in a way which never was intended, the Bible, though 
divine, does not serve to unite Christians against a common 
foe; far from it, it becomes in their hands, on the contrary, 
a weapon of attack upon one another ; and now at length we 
see the attack directed even upon Holy Scripture itself, upon 
its very structure, contents, and text, until in the hands of its 
critics there is little or no Bible left ! Again, in the countries 
which separated from the Catholic Church at the time of the 
Protestant reformation, the necessity of some form of religion 
for the interests of humanity being still generally acknowledged, 
the expedient adopted was the establishment of religion, ma- 
terial, legal and social. But nationalism in matters religious 
has, apart from the fact of establishment, signally failed as a 
bond of religious union; has robbed the nations of Europe of 
a centre of Christian unity ; and has provoked resistance to 
state domination in a sphere which Catholics and many 
Protestants alike feel belongs to a higher jurisdiction. 

If, then, Christians would be united in religion, if human 
nature is to be lifted on to a higher than its fallen level, and 
sanctified, such unity and sanctification must be sought for 
where they have all along been divinely provided; they must 
be sought for in the Catholic Church, which has seen the rise 
of all the heresies and schisms that ever were, and is destined 



19 1 a.] THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH 605 

to outlast all that now are, or may in future time arise. 
"Stand ye on the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, 
which is the good way, and walk ye in it: and you shall find 
refreshment for your souls." 

The Church contemplates, not society in the first place, but 
in the second place, and in the first place individuals. She 
looks beyond the world and " detects and moves against the 
devil who is sitting in ambush behird it." She has a foe in 
view, and a battle-field, to which the world is blind. Her bat- 
tle-field is the heart of the individual, ard her foe is Satan, 
She has it in charge to rescue those who are " alienated from 
the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because 
of the blindness of their hearts," to enlighten and sanctify 
them, that they may enjoy the blessings of " faith and a good 
conscience." She would "war in them a good watfare," that 
they may vanquish the world, the flesh and Satan, and having 
" put on the new man, who according to God is created in 
justice and holiness of truth," may attain to the " full re- 
ward" of "the sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints." 

And, at the last, when death stares us in the face, then 
especially, are the results of the divine gift of faith, on the 
one hand, and of private judgment, on the other, observable. 
The Catholic is possessed of a gift of which not even sin de- 
prives him. He may, alas, have cast himself out of God's 
favor and for a long time forsaken the means of grace and 
practice of religion ; but he has within him an instrument of 
recovery; seldom, or never, or only after a miserable effort, 
does he lose his faith. In the Divine mercy, faith comes to 
his aid in the hour when most he needs it. It reminds him of 
the way of repentance, forgiveness and restoration to his former 
estate, upon which his salvation depends, and he knows ex- 
actly how to obtain from his Savior all that he so sorely 
needs. With the Protestant the case is different ; he has but 
his private judgment, which creates only human opinion, and 
when he is faced by a sense of his guilt he is afraid and be- 
wildered, or he presumes, having at best but his view of justi- 
fication, and that a false one, to fall back upon ; and, as an 
expression of his fear, or of his presumption, he asks, perhaps, 
for a portion of Scripture to be read to him, without knowl- 
edge of what Scripture contains concerning repentance, for- 
giveness and sanctification unto salvation. 



606 THE SANCTITY OF THE CHURCH [Feb. 

So far as I have observed persons Hearing the end of life, 
[writes a Protestant], the Roman Catholics understand the 
business of dying better than Protestants. They have an ex- 
pert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they, 
both patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust Con- 
fession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction. . . . If Cowperhad 
been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience 
handled by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not 
have died despairing, looking upon himself as a castaway. I 
have seen a good many Roman Catholics on their deathbeds, 
and it has always appeared to me that they accepted the in- 
evitable with a composure which showed that their belief, 
whether or not the best to live by, was a better one to die by, 
than most of the harder creeds which have replaced it.* 

The faith which justifies is more than the personal trust 
which precedes it; it is "the faith of the Gospel" "the 
faith that cometh by hearing," the faith for which St. Paul 
gives thanks on behalf of those who are " chosen unto salva- 
tion, in sanctification of the spirit, and faith of the truth." 
It is the faith of " the Gospel of the Kingdom," of which our 
Lord Himself declared: "This Gospel of the Kingdom shall 
be preached in the whole world for a testimony to all na- 
tions" the gospel of his visible kingdom therefore, since it 
is for a testimony, or witness, to all nations, f Such is the 
true nature of justifying faith. "The prayer of him that hum- 
bleth himself shall pierce the clouds," and obtain it. 

The Catholic Church, then, is holy, because she is of God, 
having for her head Christ our Lord, Who abides ever upon 
her altars, pleading His Sacrifice, and nourishing His members 
unto everlasting life; because she is indwelt by the Holy 
Spirit, the Life-giver, Sanctifier, Teacher and Guide; because 
she teaches a doctrine unto sanctification of life, and by minis- 
tration of the sacraments, which have been placed in her hands 
as the means to this end, is ever engaged in the saving work 
of man's renovation ; because, as the result of her labors, she 
manifests the life of sanctity in so many of her members 
particularly in such as are dedicated to God in the life of re- 
ligion, and pre-eminently in the saints of her calendar. 

Dr. O. W. Holmes, Over the Teacups, p. 250. Ed. 1894, 
t Cf. Thess. ii. 10-14 ; S. Matt. xxiv. 14. 




CONSEQUENCES. 

BY ESTHER W. NEIIL. 

CHAPTER I. 

JHE regulation hospital-bed seemed too short to 
accommodate its present occupant, for bis knees 
were bent, making a miniature mountain-slide 
of the snow-white counterpane, while his ner- 
vous fingers built little ridges in the steep de- 
scent as if he were preparing a safe track for a venturesome 
toboggan. 

The hands that busied themselves thus were transparent, soft, 
tapering eloquent hands of a scholar, an artist or an idler. 
The man's face was lean and ascetic- looking, in spite of the 
unkempt growth of beard, a necessary result of a long, deliri- 
ous illness, but a positive disfigurement. 

The room possessed none of the ornate luxuriousness with 
which some of the hospitals surround their private patients. 
The floor was bare, the white walls held but one picture, a 
cheap engraving of one oi the famous Madonnas ; the two 
high windows, with their long, green shades, boasted no dra- 
pery, but in an ill-shapen, china pitcher on the enameled 
bureau, a great bunch of American beauties doubled their 
number in the blue mirror against which they leaned for 
support. 

Seated in a chair by the invalid's bed, was a handsome 
woman of middle-age viewing, with some show of complacency, 
the flowers she had just arranged. 

" They are a spot of color in this whited sepulchre," she 
said. " I foraged this small town over for those roses. I was 
determined to get red ones and nothing else. Of course, I 
know that people are trying to prove that colors have a direct 
effect upon our dispositions, and red wall-paper is supposed 
to make us irritable, but crimson crimson roses ought to have 
a cheering effect, aud you must get well, dear, as soon as you 
can, for I must take you home with me." 



6o8 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

"Home!" he repeated vaguely. 

" Home, of course where else ? You've been such a wan- 
derer all your life, you don't know the meaning of the word. 
To be sick in this little muddy town is terrible." 

" I like it," he said, with a wan smile, " I wish you would 
go without me." 

" Like it ! " she repeated in amazement. " My dear George, 
that's the most characteristic thing you have said since my 
arrival. You like anything anything that's different you 
would enjoy a grass hut in the tropics or an igloo on an ice- 
cake temporarily." 

He settled himself more comfortably on his pillows. " I 
believe I prefer this to either of them just now, but it's hard 
on you. I wish you would go home." 

" Never," she said, with great determination, throwing back 
her long coat as an added proof of her fixity of purpose. "We 
have drifted apart too long. Do you realize that we are all 
that are left of the family the only ones left to save the name 
of Bainbridge from extinction." 

His eyes twinkled faintly in their sunken sockets. " It 
seems to me you extinguished the feminine Bainbridge some 
time ago." 

" Oh, well, of course, I married. You know you wouldn't 
care for an old-maid sister. Widows are always preferable. 
They know men and don't expect much of any of them." 

"Don't they?" he said hopefully, the amusement in his 
face still visible. 

" Marriage teaches most women that," said his sister re- 
flectively, "though I confess I never started life with many 
illusions. When Cedric Dandrey proposed to me I knew he 
had been in love with half a hundred girls before me. I never 
knew my poor, dear mother-in-law, for she died when Cedric 
was a baby, but I've always believed she was a foolish woman. 
No boy could be called Cedric and escape being a sentiment- 
alist. I knew if I refused him he would fall in love with half 
a hundred more." 

" And you were quite sure that marriage " 

"Oil, my dear George 1 " she interrupted him, "no one 
can say that Cedric was an unfaithful husband. I will ac- 
knowledge that at times his temper was unbearable and he 
drank dreadfully for some years before be died, but I tried 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 609 

to be patient. The rapidity with which people get divorces 
nowadays has always seemed vulgar and rather disreputable." 

" I suppose virtue is more respectable," be agreed drily, 
"but I've been lying here for weeks thinking of the different 
gradations of goodness, and I've come to the conclusion that 
I hare never done anything good in my life." 

" Now, dear, don't be humble," she protested, her face 
showing real alarm. " No Bainbridge was ever known to suf- 
fer from that fault before. Remember you've been delirious. 
I do believe your mind has begun to wander again." 

"Not this time. I'm quite normal; but I've been lying 
here for days thinking that I was going to die. I tried to 
get over the notion of immortality and I couldn't. Every 
now and then I would ask one of these Sisters of Charity, 
who have charge of this place, something about the hereafter 
fool-questions I suppose but my fever made me dreamy 
and speculative, and she would answer me with such surety, 
as if dying was the beginning of all things the real life the 
life that mattered you know. Then I began to think what 
sort of a chance I should have in a spirit-world when there 
had never been anything spiritual about me. I tell you I've 
been altogether selfish, I never did anything good in my life." 

" Oh, I'm sure sure when we used to have church fairs 
you used to contribute most generously." 

He laughed aloud. " Because some pretty girl held me up 
like a highwayman. I tell you I couldn't look back on any- 
thing that could be credited on the other side." 

"Don't, don't say that," said his sister in some dismay. 
"Think dear, I'm sure there must be something something 
good." 

"Well, perhaps," he said, meditatively, "one thing, but 
it's a most troublesome thought, and I put it out of my mind 
because it seemed to worry me more than my sins. If I had 
died I should have been free from the responsibility, but now 
that I am getting strong, it's a question that has to be reck- 
oned with." 

"Oh, dear," she said, with sisterly solicitude, tucking the 
covers a little closer. "Do you really think you ought to 
talk about your worries ? " 

" I must. You are the only person on earth who can help 
me." 

VOL. XCIV. 39 



6io CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

"Then let's hear it by all means," she said cheerily. "I 
came to help you and I have been of little use so far." 

"It's a long story," he began, "but I'll try to abbreviate 
as much as possible. There may be some way out, and you'll 
have to bring your woman's wisdom to bear on the situation 
for it's the story of a woman." 

"Now George," she protested weakly, "I hate entangle- 
ments." 

"My dear sister, be patient a moment. This is really the 
story of a child. It happened this way. It was during one 
of my many trips to Paris I think about thirteen years ago. 
I met an American by the name of James Tully. I think he 
came originally from California, but he was singularly silent 
about his own affairs, and, of course, I never questioned him. 
He told me once that he was married, but he never made any 
further allusion to it, so I fancied his domestic relations were 
not happy, for he never invited me to his home, he never 
took me into his confidence, which puzzled me because we 
grew to be fast friends. Then some one hinted to me that 
his matrimonial experience had been most bitter wife deserted 
him, I believe ; this seemed to explain his silence. You re- 
member I was playing at painting pictures that winter, and 
had a studio. He used to spend a good deal of his time with 
me. He worked spasmodically, only when he had to, I fancy. 
He was a brilliant fellow, a journalist by profession, and the 
papers were always glad to give him space. I believe he was 
on the editorial staff of one of them, but I'm wandering far 
away from my point. One day I was sitting reading at the 
club when he sent for me to come upstairs. I found him in 
one of the club-bedrooms. His face was the color of ashes and 
he was shaking in every limb. 

"'I tried to dress to go down stairs,' he said, 'but it was 
no use I'm dying and I know it.' There was the dread of 
the unknown in his eyes. 

" I helped him back to bed and started for the telephone 
to ring up a doctor. 

"'Don't,' he said, 'the doctor has just been here. He has 
told me the truth I am dying.' 

"I asked him a number of questions. He then told me 
that he had Bright's disease for years and endured agonies in 
silence. This was the end that he had been expecting so long. 



1 9 1 2 . ] CONSEQUENCES 6 1 1 

"'I would have spared you the recital,' he said, with a 
pitiful attempt at his old gayety, ' but I couldn't. I believe 
you are the only genuine friend I have on earth. I am dying 
a pauper hardly enough money left to bury me. I make you 
my executor. I want you to take my child.' 

" I had never known that he had a child. ' But her 
mother,' I suggested, hesitatingly, for I could see that every 
word he uttered was an effort. 

'"She is dead,' he said. 

"Then a paroxysm of pain seized him and he never spoke 
again. I stayed with him all night; he died towards morning. 
Well, I believe it was two days after the funeral that the child 
appeared. I had not been able to get any trace of her. A 
fat, French woman brought her to my rooms one morning and 
demanded a month's board for the orphan. ' And I will not 
keep her another day ' she declared. ' I tell you, monsieur, she 
is too terrible ; there is bad blood in her veins, that I know. 
Her mother was an actress.' 

"I confess the child was not prepossessing: small, anaemic- 
looking, very plain, with a lot of straight, black hair falling 
about her shoulders. 

"'She lies' said the child stamping her foot. 'Because 
my father has no money to pay you that is no reason why 
you should say such things about my mother who is an angel 
in heaven.' 

"For a moment my sympathy supplanted my judgment. 
I paid the woman what she demanded and, without asking 
her name, I told her to go at once, that the child was my 
ward and that I would look after her. Now can you imagine 
anything more asinine ? You see, I cut myself off from any 
possible information that this woman might have had as to 
the child's relatives. As soon as I comprehended what I 
had done I tried to call her back, but it was too late, she 
had disappeared, and then I realized that I should never be 
able to identify her even if I should meet her on the street. 
To me she was but a type of the more prosperous peasant. 
I had not individualized her. 

" Now you can laugh if you want to. Here I was a help- 
less bachelor, facing the terrible child. My first idea was to 
amuse her temporarily, while I planned some way of disposing 
of her. I called a cab and, driving to a toy shop, I purchased 



6 12 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

everything she fancied. Then I had a brilliant idea. I decided 
to put her in a convent, feeling sure that her father would 
want her educated. 

" The interview with the mother superior was embarrassing. 
Here I was with a ward, absolutely ignorant of everything 
concerning her. I did not even know the child's name. I did 
not know her birthplace. I knew nothing of her past training. 
My manner, I am sure, was suspicious my attitude that of a 
kidnapper. I was not surprised when the mother told me, 
politely but firmly, that they could not accommodate my charge. 
I left the place in a state of indignation, but I had learned 
something. I put the child back in the corner of the car- 
riage and I catechized her until I found out all that she knew. 

" Her name was Jane. She had always lived in Paris but 
she spoke English perfectly. She had never known her mother 
but she had a picture of her standing dressed in beautiful 
clothes, where there were hundreds of lights which seemed to 
shine out of the floor. She adored her father and asked me 
when he would come back. 

'"I want to tell him that I have not been happy with that 
last tiurse he got for me. I would rather have some one who 
could teach me things.' Then I found that she had never 
been to school. She was not very strong and the doctor had 
advised fresh air and she had been sent away to the country 
place not far from the city. She was very vague as to names 
and distances. But after half an hour of questioning, I felt 
that I might venture into another convent; they seemed so 
much more comprehensive for my need than any other school. 
This time I talked quite glibly until the superior asked me 
to what religion the child belonged. 

"'I have no definite religion myself,' I had to admit, 'but 
I think women are happier with it. Bring her up in your 
belief and give her all the accomplishments you can.' 

" That nun or abbess I'm not quite sure as to her proper 
title had some sense of humor, for I remember she smiled 
and said : 

" ' Would you call religion an accomplishment ? ' 

"' Most certainly.' 

" ' And yon also want her taught art, needlework, music, 
vocal and instrumental ? ' she asked. 

"'Everything' I said. 



i.] CONSEQUENCES 613 

"Now that's the end or, perhaps, it is just the beginning. 
The child was six, I believe, when I left her in that convent. 

That was thirteen years ago. I have never seen her since, 
I have occasionally had a stiff little note from her announc- 
ing her progress in her studies, but that is all. I have paid 
her bills and now she has finished graduated, and the mother 
superior writes that she is now ready to take her place in 
the world." 

"Oh my dear George," said Mrs. Dandrey, who had been 
listening with breathless interest, " it all sounds very roman- 
tic, but the child has no place." 

" Then it's my mission to make her one," he said grimly. 
"Her father was my best friend. I thought you might be will- 
ing to share the responsibility. Wouldn't you be interested 
in a daughter?" 

"My dear boy," she exclaimed in some dismay, "if she 
were beautiful or aristocratic or a genius I might agree to it, 
but an anaemic person by the name of Jane would tax all my 
powers as a match- maker. She would never find anyone to 
marry her. She would be on our hands forever. Don't, don't 
you think we could make her into a nun ? " 

"A nun," he repeated, grasping at the idea, " how do you 
make a person a nun ? " 

" I'm sure I don't know," she answered, " but women do 
become nuns." 

" Very handsome ones sometimes," he said reflectively, 
" but there is no hope in this case. I suppose the superior 
thought I might have some such thought, for she wrote me 
that the child had no vocation. I believe that is what you 
call it. Here is the letter. It seems to me the last paragraph 
is put in by way of mild reproof." He fumbled among his 
pillows and brought forth a closely-written sheet of note-paper. 
"Listen to this," he said: 

"Jane longs for all the beauty and luxury of the outside 
world. Perhaps, in past years, if you had given her a glimpse 
of them she would have realized their emptiness and remained 
with us. I fear you will think she is a strange product for a 
convent. She is self-willed, impulsive, quick-tempered and 
possesses a dangerous talent, but, in spite of her faults, we 
have found her very lovable and we part with her with great 
regret." 



614 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

Mrs. Dandrey fell back in her chair. 

" What do you suppose is a dangerous talent ? Positively, 
if I were not afraid of the child I should be interested." 

"I knew you would/' he said, replacing the letter under 
his pillow with a quiet smile. " And if you are interested the 
rest will naturally follow. We will send for Jane and take 
her home." 

CHAPTER II. 

No one exactly understood how the Bainbridge family re- 
tained their ancestral home through the generations and kept 
it in repair. The mere fact of possession was not so marvel- 
ous a few of the old families still remained in the county 
but that the Bainbridges should have money enough to up- 
build crumbling walls and fallen chimneys, and paint shutters 
every two years seemed nothing short of miraculous in this 
disintegrating neighborhood which had never been able to ad- 
just itself since the Emancipation was proclaimed. 

People said that the Bainbridges were manager?, for even 
their severest critics could not accuse them of miserly in- 
stincts. They had loyally offered their sons and their money 
in times of war, and they had contributed generously to church- 
building and road-making in times of peace. Some hinted that 
when the family exchequer was exhausted, a son went obedi- 
ently forth to hunt an heiress. But all this is ancient history; 
only two of the family now remained, Mrs. Cedric Dandrey, 
a tall, well-preserved woman of fifty- five, who bad once been 
known as the beautiful Marian Bainbridge; and George, her 
younger brother, who had lived most of his life abroad, study- 
ing art, and accomplishing nothing definite in output. 

To-day he lay white and emaciated in a cushioned chair, 
which had been rolled out on the wide portico, for his greater 
comfort. A steamer rug was wrapped carefully about him, and 
a number of magazines covered the wicker-table at his side. 

But the brilliant sunlight brought out the print with dazzling 
distinctness, and the invalid had no desire to seek the shadow. 

He sat there idle, looking dreamily across the changing 
autumn fields. 

The house was built on a hill and commanded a wide view 
of the Potomac River. Through the trailing smoke of the 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 615 

brush-fires he could faintly distinguish the glittering dome of 
the Capitol Library, and the rigid height of the Washing- 
ton Monument, but they were very far away, and the white 
government-buildings and the steeples of the city looked like 
a jagged cloud-line against the brilliant blue of the sky. 

Bainbridge had always reveled in this view, the varied 
greens of the sun- riddled woods, the yellowing meadows, the 
deep crimson of the oaks and the steely glimmer of the river. 
But this morning his mind was distracted from the beauty of 
it all. He was waiting for Jane. 

The carriage had been sent to the station an hour ago. 
He looked again at his watch and wondered what was keep- 
ing her. 

To his own surprise he felt a certain anxiety to see the 
child of his friend, his own neglected inheritance; or perhaps, 
his impatience was only due to the fact that he dreaded the 
first interview and preferred to regard it in retrospect. He 
was not accustomed to facing unpleasant responsibilities. His 
great wealth and the fact that he was almost alone in the 
world, had freed him from the bondage that other men bear 
unshrinkingly. In his effort to adjust himself to his present 
unwilling position he tried to force his mind back to the girls 
of nineteen that he had known, so that he might have some 
faint comprehension of the needs that age demanded. She 
would have outgrown dolls and toys, that he realized pro- 
viding material things had seemed such a simple way of per- 
forming the duties of a guardian. But now all these primitive 
methods were left behind ; she was a woman with all the sub- 
tleties of her sex. Truly it was a difficult task for any man. 
He wished he did not quite know what he wished. Af- 
fection and loyalty to her father, struggled with the natural 
regrets that he felt he could not exhibit even to his sister 
now that she had consented to harbor Jane under her roof. 

At last the carriage came. He heard the wheels crunching 
the gravel even while the trees hid the horses from his sight, 
and then the negro driver drew up before the old hitching- 
post; the door of the brougham opened, and Jane stepped 
out. 

She was dressed in a long cloak that concealed her figure 
completely. Her small shoes were square and flat-heeled. Her 
hat was a strange shape heavily veiled. It was not until 



616 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

she slipped off her enveloping cloak, which was too warm for 
the Indian summer-day, that he noticed her dress was ex- 
treme a full overskirt plaited in at the waist, a tight basque 
with low shoulders and a bit of lace fastened at the neck with 
a cameo brooch. He rose and went forward to help her with 
her small valise, but her movements were quicker than his. 
She ran up the three stone steps and then, seeing him, 
stopped and said hesitatingly 

" Where can I find Mr. Bainbridge ? " 

He held out his hand and smiled down on her with a 
compelling charm that had been one of his chief assets in his 
manner towards women. 

" Have you forgotten me ? " he asked. 

A puzzled look came into her large gray eyes, "I I 
thought you were an old man." 

He sank weakly down in the chair he had just vacated. 
"Perhaps I am just at present, if feeling has anything to 
do with age." 

"You have been very ill " her voice was extraordinary. 
There was a peculiar resonant quality about it, that attracted 
his critical admiration. " The nuns told me that you had been 
dangerously ill, but now that I am here I can take care of 
you, and you will soon be better." 

His eyes held a humorous gleam, as he thought of the 
prompt way in which she had reversed their attitudes. 

" I need to be taken care of," he said gratefully. 

" Then why didn't you send for me ? " 

Like most direct questions in this circuitous world, it was 
difficult to answer. 

" Wouldn't that have been demanding a great deal ? For 
after all you are not my daughter." 

" But my father was your best friend. I do not know 
anyone else who knew him. I want to talk to you about 
him. I want you to tell me everything about him and about 
my mother." 

" I never knew her." 

" That is too bad," she said wistfully. " Her picture is 
very beautiful." 

"No doubt. Your father was a critic whose judgment I 
could depend upon." 

" He was too critical to be happy," she said. 



1 9i 2.] CONSEQUENCES 617 

"How do you know that?" 

"Ah, children are keen-sighted," she answered. "I know 
many things. I'm an erudite person. I have had ten days to 
think." 

Her laugh gave him an uncanny feeling. It had all the 
joyous spontaneity of that of his dead friend. 

"Why didn't you have a pleasant passage? Was there 
nothing to do but think?" 

Her face grew grave. " In some ways it was delightful, 
but I am glad to get to shore. The sea is so black, so ter- 
rible, so overpowering. I can't get the booming sound of the 
waves out of my ears. You see I felt so alone. I had the 
fancy that I might die and be buried at sea. In the day- 
time there were so many people, so much talking and laugh- 
ing and music that I forgot and was happy. Then some 
women were unkind to me; they criticized my clothes I over- 
heard them. Do you do you think I look very strange ? " 
She moved a little away from his chair, so that he could get 
a better view. He noticed that her dress was of rich brocade 
and that her collar was made of rose-point. He had never 
been indifferent to clothes, and he knew more about textures 
than most men. 

" It is very becoming," he said. 

"But I don't look like other people," she persisted. "I'm 
sure I don't look like other people." 

" Then it is my fault," he said, with a real sense of remorse. 
" I should have sent you a larger allowance." 

"No, no; I had more than I needed. I have three hun- 
dred dollars in my purse now. These clothes were my mother's. 
My old nurse found out where I was, and sent two trunks to 
the convent ; and I have been waiting all these years to wear 
them. We dressed in black uniforms at school, and I am so 
tired of gloomy things. My mother had some stage costumes; 
I think, perhaps, they would look more modern." 

Bainbridge looked a trifle dismayed at this announcement. 
" My sister will help you," he said, detaching himself from 
this unlooked-for complication. " You have had a long journey. 
Sit down here on this bench beside me. I have been claim- 
ing the privileges of an invalid so long, that I had almost 
forgotten my doctor told me that I could go to the din- 
ner-table to-night. That means the high road to recovery. 



618 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

Here comes the wagon now with your trunks. John will tell 
my sister that you have arrived. I hope you will like your 
rooms. I chose the color scheme myself. It is the only use- 
ful thing I have done in weeks." 

"You are very good," she said, and to his amazement he 
saw that her eyes were full of tears. " It is so sweet to be 
considered." 

Her gratitude hurt him. In his invalidism he had wel- 
comed any kind of distraction from his bodily ills. Directing 
a decorater as to wall-paper and furnishings for two small, 
long-unused rooms, had been a sort of artistic amusement in 
which the future occupant had played little part. 

"Perhaps not being a real father, I have no comprehen- 
sion of what you like," he suggested. " The colors may be 
too dull we can change them." 

In the momentary silence she had studied his face intently. 
" My real father would have been much older than you," she 
said at last. 

"There was ten years difference between us," he admitted. 

She turned her eyes full upon him. " I am sure the rooms 
are beautiful I fancy you know what women like." 

Again he did not know how to meet her candor. " Women ? 
yes," he said reflectively. " But half-grown girls ! " 

She stood up as if to measure herself against the pillar of 
the portico. The trailing vines of one of the swinging baskets 
supplied a temporary trimming for the plain, round hat she 
wore. "I'm five feet four and twenty years old. You didn't 
think I desired a doll-baby ? " 

" Not exactly," he laughed, " but I did buy a canary 
bird." 

She clapped her hands with childish joy. " How good of 
you," she cried ; " How I shall love him ! How I shall re- 
joice to hear him sing!" 

He leaned back against the gay- patterned rug, wondering 
a little that he should find so much pleasure in her enthusi- 
asm, and then he looked up to find his sister in the doorway. 

Mrs. Cedric Dandrey was a kind-hearted woman, but her 
expression at that moment was a strange mingling of curios- 
ity, disapproval and dread, as she viewed her visitor. George 
Bainbridge was amused. He had often told himself that the 
chief interests in life lay in the undercurrents that most of us 



1 9i 2.] CONSEQUENCES gig 

teel subtly, but only the initiated can comprehend. His sister's 
creed of conventionalities was as real and important to her as 
the faith of any other zealot ; and though she made a point 
of cultivating a few people who were doing things and whose 
social traditions were not her own, she secretly judged them 
and drew her own distinctions. Her love of the small pro- 
prieties of life was as unreasonable as her prejudices. She 
glanced from the girl's dress to the impossible little hat. 

" I can't and won't undertake to adopt such a fright," she 
said to herself. But her inborn sense of hospitality conquered 
momentarily. She held out both hands and said aloud : 

"Is no one going to introduce us?" 

Bainbridge struggled weakly to his feet. " My sister, Mrs. 
Dandrey, Miss Tully," he said. 

The girl impulsively put her arms about her stately hostess. 

"I am Jane. Miss Tully sounds so formal. Oh, I hope you 
will like me love me. Do you know you are the only friends 
I have in the world ? " 

Mrs. Dandrey tried to conceal her dislike of this affection- 
ate greeting. " Poor child," she said, with some show oi 
sympathy. " Weren't the nuns kind to you ? " 

" Oh yes ; but the nuns are not in the world ; they are in 
the convent." She added smiling: "We don't call the con- 
vent the world, you know." 

" They seem to be excellent places to stay in," said Mrs. 
Dandrey, unintentionally voicing her thoughts. 

"Yes, if one has a vocation." 

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand." 

" I'm afraid a vocation isn't so easy to explain," said Jane. 
Mrs. Dandrey evidently did not want it explained. She said 
irrelevantly : " I thought you would speak French." 

" Why, yes, if you prefer it." 

" Oh no," interrupted her hostess hastily, " my French is 
very imperfect. It is such a relief to find that you talk 
English. My brother would otherwise have had to act as in- 
terpreter, I fear." 

"My father was an American," said Jane, " and there were 
many English girls in the convent so that I did not have a 
chance to forget." 

Bainbridge looked displeased. His sister had not met his 
ward as cordially as he had wished. He waited a few minutes 



620 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

and then suggested that Jane would no doubt like to go to 
her rooms and rest. 

Ten minutes later Mrs. Dandrey appeared alone on the 
wide, old portico. " George, dear, I know that I am the most 
long-suffering sister that ever lived. Do you know that I have 
guests for dinner to-night, and now " 

" And now you have one more." 

"My dear, she is impossible; did you notice her clothes. 
Where where did she get them ? " 

" They were her mother's." 

" But what will she wear to-night?" 

"I'm sure I don't know." Then he added teasingly as 
an after-thought. " I believe she has some stage costumes ; 
her mother was an actress." 

Mrs. Dandrey looked distracted. "Stage costumes," she 
gasped. " I don't believe the girl is quite right in her mind. 
Nothing will surprise me now. If she appears in the habit of 
a mendicant- friar, or as a premier danseuse, the responsibility 
is yours; I wash my hands of her." 

"So soon," he said, the teasing light still in his eyes. "I 
think she is going to improve on acquaintance. Would you 
suspend your judgment a day or two ? Oh the mighty psy- 
chology of clothes I " 

"They mean everything," she said with conviction. 

"Everything?" he repeated, smiling broadly. 

"Nearly everything. I'm sure even the church has taken 
them into account. You can't have ritualism without clothes." 

" I suppose not," he said drily. 

"You won't be serious." 

"Is one's appearance so vital?" 

" It is to me." 

" Then tell her to wear white white is always a safe color." 

" Color has nothing to do with it." 

"Then I give it up," he said resignedly. "To-morrow 
you can buy her an outfit." 

"But to-night?" 

"We will have to take chances." 



19 1 2.] CONSEQUENCES 6ai 

CHAPTER III. 

With the help of a negro boy, trained to perfection by the 
late irascible Cedric Dandrey, George Bainbridge dressed for 
dinner that night for the first time in many months. The 
familiar clothes seemed to give him an added sense of return- 
ing health and vigor. After days recorded only on fever 
charts, when events filtered down to cold baths at unseemly 
hours, and unwelcome nourishment; after monotonous weeks 
of convalescence which lacked even the excitement of delirious 
fancy, it was delightful to feel again some interest in life, 
some definite connection with the world around him. 

This morning he had not remembered to question his sister 
as to the guests she had invited to celebrate his recovery, 
but now he was anxious to know. What effect would Jane's 
advent have among them ? Perhaps, after all, his new-found 
energy was due to the fact that his ward seemed to stand in 
need of a champion. Her child-like faith in him, and that 
merry laugh, so like her father's, had roused in him a latent 
sense of loyalty that he did not know he possessed. 

Leaning heavily on the balustrade, he descended to the 
library, and rested in a deep-seated chair by the fire, facing 
the door so that he might view the guests as they entered. 

The room was his favorite one in all the large house. 
Rare books lined the four walls, seeming to begrudge even 
the window-space ; above the mahogany shelves hung flint 
locks, muskets, swords that had seen actual service. Mrs. Dan- 
drey's taste for modernity had not invaded itself here ; the 
room was almost austere in its ancient elegance. The founder 
of the American branch of the family, a satin-coated colonial 
gallant was set in a niche above the carved stone mantel. 
The eyes of the portrait seemed to be gazing curiously down 
upon his one descendant left to pass the honorable name down 
to posterity. 

George Bainbridge was something of an enigma even to a 
present-day critic. If the daring cavalier above the mantel 
could have found his agile tongue, he would have pronounced 
him a monstrosity. The Bainbridge men had been reckless, 
ardent, virile ; they had hacked their way through blood-pud- 
dled battlefields, sailed across chartless seas and gone undis- 
mayed to find a home in a pathless wilderness. They had 



622 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

been knighted for their bravery, persecuted for their loyalty, 
banished for their zeal. Another generation found them up- 
holding the cause of the struggling colonies, defying the House 
of Burgesses, making fiery speeches to rouse the faint-hearted, 
exulting over the Declaration of Independence, and fitting out 
a regiment to join Washington at Cambridge. 

In after years in pulpit, in politics, in war, the old fight- 
ing instinct and energy had been reproduced. But now 
here was one confessing himself to be a mere onlooker in a 
busy world. Half the time people seemed mere puppets who 
amused him or bored him, as the case might be. He was like 
a man living perpetually at a play; he watched with apparent 
indifference the curtains rise and fall, the acts humorous or 
tragic; the actors needed neither his praise cor blame, his love 
nor hate. The events of life left him calm, dispassionate. He 
told no one that he was a keen disappointment to himself ; he 
had expected so much ; he had accomplished nothing. He had 
written poems far above the average, but after repeated ef- 
forts to gain the notice of the best publishers, they had found 
lodgment in the corner of some obscure magazine. He had 
composed a Greek drama which might have been acted in the 
time of Pericles it was so unfit for modern stagecraft. He 
had painted one or two pictures far better than most amateurs, 
but failed to receive anything but favorable mention when he 
succeeded in squeezing them into an exhibit. He was not 
willing to acknowledge his limitations; but he was too willing 
to acknowledge defeat. Now, he told himself, he had put all 
ambition behind him ; but his attitude was one of superiority 
towards those who had not ceased the struggle. 

Mrs. Dandrey came hurrying in from the hall, dressed in a 
gownt of black velvet, embroidered in gold. She looked very 
handsome but her face was flushed with excitement and her 
hands trembled awkwardly as she tried to draw on her gloves- 

"I know I am the most amiable sister that ever lived, and 
there are times when I feel that amiability is nothing short 
of mental weakness. Have you seen her, George have you 
seen her ? " 

"Seen what?" The few wrinkles around his deep-set eyes 
were humorous lines. He had always been able to appreciate 
comedy, and to-night he was unusually interested in the hap- 
penings around him. 



i9 1 2.] CONSEQUENCES 623 

"Your ward Jane. Do you know who else is here?" 

"Haven't the faintest idea, but I confess I should like to 
be enlightened. I didn't know I could take so much interest 
in a dinner-party. Tell me all about it." As he spoke he 
rose, and seating his sister in the chair he bad just vacated, 
he knelt beside her and began smoothing on her refractory 
gloves. 

She watched him for a few moments in silence. "You 
have a way with women, George there's no denying that. I 
can't exactly analyze it, but it's a sort of individualizing so- 
licitude that makes a woman believe she's the object of your 
special brand of affection, when in reality you are as indiffer- 
ent as a caterpillar 1" 

" Now come," he said good-naturedly. " Can't you think 
of some other comparison less creepy less fuzzy ? " 

She gave no heed to the interruption. "It's no wonder 
that Madge Warden invited herself to-night," she went on. 
" Of course I've always given her a general invitation to come 
whenever she felt like it, her mother and I are such old 
friends; but I notice Madge hasn't availed herself of the op- 
portunity until she heard you were here. I'll do her the jus- 
tice to say that she's been in the Philippines for the last two 
years with her father, but then " 

" You could hardly expect her to travel from the Philip- 
pines even to stay a week-end with you," he suggested. 

She tapped him lightly with the sticks of her spangled 
fan. " Now, George dear, don't be ridiculous. Madge Warden 
would make a fine wife for you. She's had so much social ex- 
perience and, though her father is poor like every other army 
man, her mother has money." 

The tired look came back into his face. "I'll have a re* 
lapse. I'll threaten you with a relapse if you try to marry me 
off this season," he said, fastening the last button of her glove. 
"Tell me some of your invited guests." 

" Mrs. Van Doran." 

" What ! that delightful old gossip still alive ? " 

"Lord Alan Hurst." 

He smiled hopefully. " Marry him to Madge," he said. 

" He would want more money," she said, with reflective 
seriousness. " He's only a second son." 

"Jove! What a mecca Washington is for second sons. 



624 CONSEQUENCES [Feb., 

It's a Paradise for all young men who want the social thing 
without paying for it. Who else?" 

"Well, when Madge decided to come," sighed his sister, 
" I had to send a note to the rector. He's dreadfully intense 
but he always looks well at a dinner-party. He's so handsome 
and dignified. You remember him I'm sure, Paul Hartford. 
Why they sent such a brilliant man to this out-of-the-way 
country parish, is quite beyond me I can't understand it." 
"Don't try," he advised lazily. "Who else?" 
"Well, I have puzzled over it a great deal," she acknowl- 
edged. " He lives here alone with his sister. I believe she's 
queer. I always invite her but she never accepts invitations." 

"If refusing dinner-invitations is a sign of insanity," he 
began. 

"Now don't tease," implored his sister. "I did not say 
she was crazy. I believe she has some sort of a past history." 
"Most of us have. Who else?" 
" Senator Wurtemberg." 
"Jove! what a name brewer or baker?" 
"Now don't be absurd George. Of course he's German, 
and I've no doubt he's common, but he's in the senate and 
that covers a multitude of sins." 

"I don't know whether it does or not," he said. "Every- 
one gets investigated nowadays. We seem to live in a per- 
petual day of judgment. I've no doubt the dinner will be in- 
teresting; and Jane, you forget Jane " 

"Jane? Who is Jane? I did not mean to play eaves- 
dropper but you people were so intent upon each other " 

"My dear Madge," said Mrs. Dandrey, rising in some con- 
fusion as she mentally rehearsed the conversation to find if the 
newcomer could have heard herself discussed, " I am so glad 
you came how long have I kept you ? " 

"At the door?" the girl interrupted. "Only a moment. 
If George had been saying unpleasant things about me" she 
laughed, " I didn't hear them. I only heard the word Jane." 
As she came into the circle of the firelight she looked as 
if she had extended its flame, for her dress of yellow satin 
shimmered in the glow and her golden hair seemed full of 
dancing light. The two years of absence had added greatly 
to her beauty. Her slender figure was perfectly proportioned ; 
her eyes had lost their baby stare; her debutante exuberance 



1 9 i2.] CONSEQUENCES 615 

had vanished. She had all the poise and self-possession of a 
woman who has been greatly admired and who knows how to 
value her power over men. 

"You arrived too late," said Bainbridge humorously. "I 
am delighted to see you. You are much better looking than 
when you went away." 

"Is that a compliment?" 

"I thought it was." 

"Then it's very meagre. Please tell me who is Jane?" 

He felt that the battle for Jane's place in life had begun. 
"She is my ward," he said calmly. 

The girl's hazel eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Your ward? 
Since when and where?" 

"Her father was a great friend of mine," he answered, 
striving to hide his irritation roused by her half-laughing 
tone. "James Tully he was a brilliant dramatic critic. I met 
him in Paris. This child has been at school there, and now 
my sister has promised to look after her." 

" She's a child then." He did not notice the strange 
expression of relief that crossed her face. " I'm devoted to 
children ; I'll try to entertain her. I have never quite out- 
grown my passion for paper dolls." 

" I am afraid she has," he said regretfully, and he turned 
from her to greet old Mrs. Van Doran who came breathlessly 
into the room, leaning on the arm of Lord Alan Hurst. The 
old lady was billowy in outline, and accentuated the spindly, 
rosy youthfulness of her escort. The rector followed talking 
earnestly to Senator Wurtemberg. 

The Senator's appearance always attracted attention. He 
was very tall and he would have been called unusually ugly 
if it had not been for the kindliness of his face ; his mouth 
was large and firm-set, and his hair and beard were of that 
ashen hue peculiar to blondes when they are turning gray. 
His evening clothes hung loosely from his stooped shoulders. 
His gaunt frame had been the despair of his tailor until that 
astute man had learned that his distinguished customer cared 
nothing for fit or style. The rector was as trig as a fashion 
plate; his high-cut vest and Roman collar seemed to add to 
the asceticism of his thin, finely-featured face. 

With so many in the room, the conversation drifted to 
platitudinai generalities the weather, the journey over in au- 
VOL. xciv 40 



626 CONSEQUENCES [Feb. 

tomobiles or carriages, the height of the river, the congestion 
of vehicles on the bridge. 

Lord Alan Hurst looked bored because he was hungry. He 
silently counted the number of people, and wondered why 
they waited when he had been invited for eight o'clock. Then 
there was a faint rustle in the doorway, and all turned to see 
the belated guest. 

Jane stood there, bewildered by the number of strangers. 
She was dressed in a white tissue threaded with silver. The 
flowing sleeves were laced to the elbow and then fell away, dis- 
playing her thin arms. Her black hair was parted in the mid- 
dle and coiled low on her neck. She was undoubtedly dressed 
in one of her mother's stage costumes but, she had shown 
great taste in the selection. Her eager, girlish face possessed 
a charm apart from beauty, as she stood there waiting for 
recognition. 

Bainbridge started loyally forward, but Mrs. Dandrey for- 
stalled him. She rose to the emergency with the grace and 
tact which had been her birthright. Taking Jane's hand, she 
led her first to Mrs. Van Doran. The old lady had made and 
marred many a reputation. 

"You must know Jane Tully, Mrs. Van Doran," she said, 
" our ward. She has been at school in Paris but now she has 
come home to us." 

"What's that," said the old lady adjusting her lorgnette. 
" Tully Tully. I once knew a James Tully in Paris." 

" He was my father," said Jane. 

" Dear me," said the old lady, " how small the world is 
after all. What a pretty child you are eyes like your father's. 
I wonder if you have inherited his wit." 

Bainbridge breathed a sigh of relief. Mrs. Van Doran had 
relieved the situation of every embarrassment, and Mrs. Dan- 
drey's plural pronoun, when she introduced Jane, had filled 
him with a sense of lasting gratitude. 

TO BE CONTINUED. 




CANTERBURY PILGRIMS. 

.BY A. B. PURDIE. 

|ROM the seacoast inland, over hill and through 
valley, through shady woods, past hops and 
glowing corn, one gains at length the encircling 
heights that hold the ancient city of Canterbury 
low in their midst. If Kent be the Garden of 
England, then Canterbury is the Palace in that Garden, and 
its Sleeping Beauty is the great Cathedral with its lofty towers, 
the Sleeping Beauty yet heavy in slumber, sleeping not dead, 
and awaiting the hour when the Prince of the true Faith, 
shall at last come to his own and free her from the spell under 
which Protestantism so long has cast her. 

I wish to take the reader with me into the lovely atmos- 
phere of Canterbury's past, when men believed in religion and 
were not light half-believers of casual creeds. 

The fame of Canterbury rests, of course, on the great Ca- 
thedral where St. Thomas was martyred on December 29, 
1170. That tragedy gave the city a premier position among 
the great places of Christendom. A triumph more enduring 
than the petty mastery of kings was achieved by the prostrate, 
blood-stained body that lay in the still Cathedral in the De- 
cember dusk. For God rewarded the patience of His servant, 
and the power which was denied him when living he wielded 
from the tomb, so that King Henry sought him barefooted 
and penitent, and the threatened rights of the Church were 
left intact. It was not many days after the martyrdom that 
miracles were performed by the dead archbishop and sealed 
him a saint three years before the Church gave her official 
recognition. Canterbury took her place among such centres of 
devotion as Compostella, Rome and Jerusalem. Becket's fame 
spread far and wide; in England his name became a house- 
hold word; in Europe every city heard of him, and there was 
hardly a town in the West that did not show some tribute 
to his memory. 

It is the Canterbury of 1370 that will be the object of our 



628 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb., 

visit; let the years do their work and suffer persons and events 
to pay their contribution to history, while we betake ourselves 
in spirit to the city of the year 1370. Two hundred years 
have wrought much change ; little or nothing remains of the 
fabric of the earlier cathedral, and a nobler pile has arisen on 
the old foundation. It is now the third jubilee year of the 
" Feast of the Translation of St. Thomas," which took place 
in 1220, and was the occasion of that long succession of pil- 
grimages that continued for more than three centuries and 
that inspired the song of Chaucer. 

We will travel part of our Canterbury Pilgrimage in this 
year 1370 in company with Geoffrey Chaucer; we will conjure 
up the gray past, and take a place among his twenty-nine 
pilgrims. A wallet apiece will contain our necessary equip- 
ment and food sufficient for two days; a little home-made 
salve compounded of goose-grease, resin and tar must also 
find a place, to provide against sore ieet ; two lanyards round 
the neck secure a large sheath knife and the indispensable 
pilgrim's earthenware battle, and armed with staves of six-foot 
length or so, we are ready to start on our emprise. But as 
good Catholics we will first seek the blessing of the Church. 
So, we present ourselves to the good priest after the early 
Mass, and there he pronounces the customary benedictions. 
After a petition that God might deign to look kindly on our 
journey, our scrips and staffs are taken and blessed with holy 
water; the scrip is then hung round the neck, with the in- 
junction: "Take this scrip to be worn as the badge and 
habit of thy pilgrimage," and the staff is placed in our right 
hand with the words: "And this staff to be thy strength 
and stay in the toil and travail of thy pilgrimage, that thou 
mayest be able to overcome all the hosts of the evil one, and 
to reach in safety the shrine of the Blessed St. Thomas of 
Canterbury, and the shrines of other saints whither thou de- 
sirest to go ; and having dutifully completed thy course may- 
est come again to thine own people with thanksgiving." 

After many a godspeed from friend and neighbor, we set 
out briskly on our way, which lies south to London, a distance 
of some twenty miles. The journey goes pleasantly ; our hearts 
are light and spirits buoyant. All too soon the grassy slopes 
of Highgate are before us, and an hour later we are in the 
picturesque streets of London town, where one-storied hovels 



i9i i.] CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 629 

of wattle and clay lean against palaces. Our route at first 
lies down narrow and filthy lanes, foul and noisome; but be- 
fore long we are walking in the main thoroughfares. And here 
is London life, indeed 1 Bells of a hundred churches are ting- 
ing on all sides (whether for birth, marriage or death, tu ne 
qucesieris) ; yonder passes the alderman with his officers, and 
their appearance argues a victim for the pillory; pack-horses 
plod along uneven streets ; the brawling trumpet accompanies 
the march of soldiers; the friar hobnobs with the parish, priest 
(and bless them! Wyclii's heresy was scarcely broached), and 
on the other side of the unglazed window the housewife is 
busy with her proper cares. And what a revelry of finery 
meets us here, for the England of the Plantagenets was fond 
of splendor. We cross the full and broad Thames by the old 
London Bridge, and ere long arrive at a large and rambling 
inn the famous Tabard Inn, and we had chosen it long since 
as the house of our first night's rest. We timidly enter the 
well-proportioned archway, but our incipient nervousness is 
soon dissipated by the easy manner of our worthy host. 

As we sit at our repast to which we bring a healthy appe- 
tite, we are struck at the variety of the company present: 

. . . by aventure y-fall 
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all 
That toward Canterbury woulden ride. 

And being young, we are observant almost unto rudeness. 
What a strange medley 1 What diversity of character 1 What 
a mixture of sobriety, pleasantry and vulgarity ! The virtues 
and vices have joined company for the nonce, and have met 
to pay a common homage at the shrine of St. Thomas. With 
the true instinct whereby the shady people of the world find 
one another out and settle down together in the shady spots 
of the earth, a little group has segregated itself from the rest 
of the company a red-bearded Miller of gross proportions, 
rough and rude, a Reve (or bailiff to some great landowner), 
as errant a knave as the Miller, though not his equal in physique, 
and a cook who is perhaps as expert with the ale-pot as with 
his culinary utensils; his appearance is hardly added to by a 
gangrenous sore which affects his left shin. To these are 
added the lax Friar of "dalliance and fair language," the be- 



630 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb., 

pimpled Summoner with swelled face and hectic flush, who, 
appointed to deal with licentiousness was himself amongst 
the worst offenders; and the hypocritical Pardoner; a down- 
right blackguard who played on the faith and piety of the 
good simple folk by foisting off on them false relics and 
forged pardons : 

He said he had a gobbet* of the sail 
That Sainte Peter had when that he went 
Upon the sea . . . 

As we look upon these men, we may, perhaps, wonder 
how the abuse will end, little dreaming of the awful reform- 
ation which even now they are dragging in their train. Near 
them but not of them is a handsome but shameless woman, 
who in the course of her talk, which is spasmodic but de- 
liberate, has betrayed a good deal of her own history. 

Among the elite of the party we find the " very per- 
fect, gentle Knight," who reminds us that chivalry is not yet 
dead ; his son, the Squire, romantic and gay, and solicitous, 
too, "standen in his lady's grace"; the dapper Merchant; the 
Doctor of Physic, who " knew the cause of every maladye," 
but whose "study was but little on the Bible;" the wise, 
homely Sergeant at Law, " full of rich excellence " and dis- 
creet; and the Franklin, a fair representative of the gentry of 
the day " for he was Epicurus' owene* sone." Our party is, 
indeed, one of contrasts, and we turn with interest to five 
craftsmen who represent a great power in the land the power 
of the guild which regulated labor and saw that the workman 
had his due the Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer and 
Tapiser.f all worthy folk and in comfortable circumstances. 
But there is one who has continually held our attention. 
He has an elvish look, but is modest withal and small and 
fair of face. He is unobtrusive but has had a word with all. 
He is none other than Chaucer, whose greatness the after 
years were to mellow. The Manciple who is sitting close by, 
is probably the steward of some large religious house, and we 
may read business acumen in every line of his face. Mother 
Church is well represented, and we see the good side in the 
gentle smiling Prioress, neat and proper and mindful of the 

* Cutting. t Tapestry-worker. 



i9i2.] CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 631 

dignity of her great order. In attendance on her is a nun, 
quiet and reserved, who has her chaplain, Dan Piers, a " swete 
preest that goodly man." The poorer element of the assembly, 
but doubtless the more estimable, comprises the simple Clerk 
of Oxenforde, more learned in the lore of books than in the 
ways of the world, and the Poor Parson, who is the ideal 
parish priest, an ornament of his religion : 

A better priest I trow that nowhere none is ; 
He waited after no pomp and reverence 
Nor maked him a spiced conscience 
But Christes lore, and His Apostles twelve, 
He taught, but first he followed it himselve. 

His brother is a humble Plowman sweet, honest and pure : 

Good was he 

Living in peace and perfect charity 
God loved he best with all his whole heart. 

He is talking with the last subject of our company, the Yeo- 
man servant of the Knight, clad in coat and hood of green 
with close-cropped hair, and face embrowned by a healthy 
out-door life. 

The shadows have set in fast, and the fire is blazing rud- 
dily for the nights blow chill, and we are thinking of bed. 

The pilgrims at length disperse to secure what repose they 
may. We go to a wide chamber on the first story, and, our 
couches having been alloted to us, we make our devotions and 
settle down at length, tired and sleepy. 

We are up with the rising sun, and the inn is a scene of 
bustle and hurry, for an early start has been agreed upon. We 
breakfast well, then each gathers his few belongings and we 
are all ready for the road. But alack I of one thing we two 
have not minded us; we are on ioot whereas the rest of the 
party are to travel on horseback. It were a pity to be cheated 
of such promised entertainment and the host, seeing our 
trouble, solves the problem with true courtliness by offering 
us a rouncy apiece rough farm- horses, it is true, but the 
pilgrim cavalcade moves slowly and they will serve us well. 

A start is made ere long, and what gayer company ever 

* Pampered. 



632 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb., 

set out from the Tabard Inn? The morning air is fresh and 
exhilarating, and merrily goes the way, The pleasant rivalry 
of story- telling is opened, and we listen to tales as varied as 
the characters of this motley gathering. 

The close of the first day sees us at Dartford (fifteen miles 
from London) ; the next day we press forward till we break 
into the beautiful valley of the Medway, and settle down for 
the night in the shadow of Rochester Cathedral. Thence a 
journey of seventeen miles through rich country brings us to 
Ospringe, a village of little historic importance but famous as 
a resting place for travelers. Here our last night on the road 
is spent, and on the morrow morn we are progressing over an 
undulating way till we reach Boughton Hill, from the summit 
of which we gain an extensive view of the surrounding coun- 
try, broken to the north by the silver line of the sea. Before 
we enter the dense forest of Blean, we are joined by two 
pilgrims who had been riding hard to overtake us; these are 
the Canon Alchemist and his servant. 

We approach the little hamlet of Harbledown by a steep as- 
cent, and leave it by an equally steep descent, at the bottom 
of which the towers of Canterbury Cathedral in all their 
grandeur burst upon our view, and the great, golden angel 
which crowns the uncompleted central spire is resplendent 
with the glory of the westering sun. 

Our party takes on a more reverent tone, and the Poor 
Parson is appropriately called upon to tell his tale, which is 
in the nature of a homily concerned chiefly with the seven 
deadly sins and the means of curing them. As he concludes 
with a pious epilogue, we are at the Church of St. Dunstan, 
whence a couple of centuries earlier Henry II. cast aside his 
royal apparel to walk barefooted in sackcloth and ashes 
through the city's streets. We turn abruptly to the right 
and though we have yet a half-mile of suburb to traverse, 
there is ample indication that the city is thronged with pil- 
grim-folk. 

We move forward through the main street, which is 
flanked on either side with irregular groups of houses 
thrown carelessly together with gable against gable and, at 
times, eaves almost touching eaves. Churches are numerous 
and there are inns in abundance. We halt at the corner of a 
busy lane, where most of the traffic seems to converge and 



i9i2.] CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 633 

where above the roofs we catch a glimpse of the Cathedral 
towers. The day is too advanced for sight-seeing, and so we 
seek lodging in the very old inn on the left corner of the 
lane : 

" At Chekers of the Hope that every man doth know." 

After a hearty supper we cross the open court, and ascend 
by outside stairs to a capacious dormitory. 

A heary wagon jolting over the cobblestones in the adja- 
cent lane calls us from our slumber, and the high eastern 
window of our chamber is crimson against the dawn. 

This day is to see the consummation of our pilgrimage, 
and a suppressed thrill of excitement runs through the rem- 
nant of our party. We hear Mass at the little church of St. 
Margaret opposite our hostel, and return to breakfast. The 
pilgrim who lodges at the " Chekers " enjoys the special priv- 
ilege of a private approach to the Cathedral precincts, and so 
we are conducted by an underground passage which emerges 
into the close. The place is crowded with folk of every de- 
scription. We move slowly and in a more or less compact 
group towards the southwestern porch of the Cathedral which 
rises before us in its simple and sweet glory. 

A monk of the order of St. Benedict receives us at the entry 
and offers us the " sprengel " or hyssop dipped in holy water, 
and, to avoid a crush, lets us through in groups of thirty. 
Each group in turn is placed under the direction of another 
monk, who acts as guide and points out the features of inter- 
est. The nave had not yet assumed the graceful proportions 
known so well to later pilgrims, but what it lacked in archi- 
tectural beauty, it gained in the glorious adornment with 
which pious hands had arrayed the House of the Lord. Vete 
hate est domus Domini/ The roof is a blaze of color; bright 
hangings are suspended from every arch, and from the ridge 
of the nave hang richly. worked banners that flash and shim- 
mer ia the many-colored light; for the nave is illumined by 
stained windows of rare design, and purple, red and gold min- 
gle with ever-varying effect on the stone paving. Chantries, 
statues and frescoes lend to the general impression, and be- 
yond the stone steps at the eastern end lies the holy place, 
indeed the High Altar, the Saint's Shrine, and in the vault 
beneath, his first sepulchre. 



634 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb., 

We proceed up the northern aisle as far as the Lady 
Altar, which is adorned with a statue of the Virgin, snowy 
white and bedecked with valuable pearls. It stands some few 
feet above the altar against a column, and it was here, the 
Prioress assures us, that St. Thomas held converse with the 
Mother of God. Behind the altar lies the chapel of St. Bene- 
dict. Over the doorway is a Latin inscription which Master 
Chaucer renders into English for our better understanding : 

Lo! here the hallowed place all blest and great 
Where Sainte Thomas met a martyr's fate. 

We gather round a small wooden altar, immediately in front 
of which is a square insertion in the pavement, marking the 
spot where the martyr fell. On the altar is an array of relics, 
the most treasured being a rusted portion of the sword-blade 
wielded by De Brito with such force and fury that when it had 
done its deadly work, the weapon shivered and broke on the 
stone floor. Kneeling down together we kiss in turn the sacred 
relics, the Knight betraying more than a devotional interest 
in the fragment of the sword. Our respects paid, we descend 
in single file some stone steps on the right of the altar, and 
find ourselves in the semi-twilight of a large crypt. Here we 
pass into new custody, and a stalwart monk (for there are 
great riches hereabout) conducts us by massive Norman pillars 
to a central space, where, between two slender vaulting shafts 
is a plain sarcophagus or tumba. Here was placed the body 
of the murdered prelate the evening of the tragedy to protect 
it from any further outrage that Henry's knights might con- 
template. It was, perhaps, in this half gloom that the trem- 
bling monks unrobed the martyr and discovered the asceticism 
which those who were accustomed to his almost regal bearing 
had scarcely suspected the shirt and drawers of rough hair- 
cloth, and other instruments of self- mortification. These are 
shown to us, and more important than all, a handsome silver 
reliquary containing portions of the martyr's skull. 

We retire, following the southern aisle till we ascend into 
the nave immediately in front of the choir-steps and richly- 
worked screen set up by Prior Henry d'Estria six decades 
earlier. Mounting these, we pass through a small doorway into 
the north aisle of the choir, and now we are in the vicinity 



1912.] CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 635 

of the great shrine. We are first taken to a very large table 
which is heavy with a wealth of general relics, all beautifully 
mounted, and contained in ivory, gilt or silver coffers. The 
mere list of their names, says the Clerk of Oxenforde, covers 
eight folio pages, including some four hundred items. 

"The holy relics each man with his mouth 
Kissed, as a goodly monk their names told and taught." 

In the sacristy, a little beyond, we are shown more relics 
which are directly associated with our Saint his crozier of 
pear- wood, his rude cloak, and handkerchief and linen cloths 
besmeared with blood. All these having been seen and admired 
with due reverence, we proceed a few paces up the choir aisle 
till we are brought to a standstill at the base of another flight of 
steps. Here we are placed in order, and wait for a further 
party to join us. We are now near the left of the High Altar, 
of which a good view is obscured. The atmosphere is misty 
with incense ; here and there is a red glow where lamp and 
candle burn before image or tomb. Yonder the blue haze 
is broken by a fitful glare, which rises upward to the groined 
roof and reflects on a golden crescent, which marks the site 
of the shrine beneath. We are impatient to view the hidden 
glory, but there is a ceremonial to be observed by all pil- 
grims at this stage, and all willingly conform to it. Our party 
is joined by fresh contingents, and now numbers close to a 
hundred. We are made to form a procession five or six 
abreast, and after short instructions from one of the monks, 
the silken cord at the bottom of the steps is drawn aside, and 
we fall on our knees. Then the popular hymn to St. Thomas 
is intoned and at once taken up by all of us who, still on 
bended knees, proceed up the stone steps to the rich strains, 
suggestive in their very setting and wording of ascending 
movement: 

Tu, per Thomas sanguinem 

Quern pro te impendit, 

Fac nos Christo scandeie 

Quo Thomas ascendit. 
Gloria et honore coronasti eum, Domine, 
Et constituisti eum supra opera manuum tuarum 
Ut ejus tneritis et precibus a Gehennae incendiis liberemur. 



636 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb., 

When we have gained the top we are on the highest level 
of the Cathedral, twenty feet above the nave floor, and it is 
in this elevated place this throne of the building that the 
holy remains of our Saint abide. But a sight of the Shrine 
is not yet vouchsafed us; it is reserved as the climax of a 
series of increasing wonders the piece de resistance, the last to 
be seen and the greatest, the sum of all, the central picture 
in the memory of the home- going pilgrim and his most treas- 
ured recollection. 

We advance by richly curtained arches to the easternmost 
end of this shrine-chapel (properly Trinity Chapel) to see tbe 
last of what we may call the minor relics. It is part of the 
head of St. Thomas, the scalp or crown in which he received 
the death-wound, and it is contained in a life-size bust of the 
Saint, made of gold and magnificently bejeweled. This is 
housed in a little apse, known as the Corona beati Thomce, and 
in surroundings of great grandeur. The place has its special 
custos or guardian, who is responsible for its good order and 
upkeep. 

And now the great moment has come; we have arrived at 
the crowning scene the end of our pilgrimage. The thick, 
red curtains are drawn aside, and we are ushered into the 
holy place, into the presence of the dead Saint. There is a 
quiet and solemnity here that we had hardly anticipated. We 
had pictured it as a centre of bustle and animation, of wild, 
excited enthusiasm and loud clamoring for heavenly favors. 
But there is none of this, and the atmosphere breathes restful 
repose. And so it has always been, and for two centuries 
Catholics from every quarter of the globe have come hither 
in petition and thanksgiving to God through His great serv- 
ant. They have sought with grim earnestness and irrefrag- 
able faith, and few have departed unrewarded. Not that there 
have never been outward manifestations of any kind; for that 
would be unnatural. But imagination never abandoned the 
rule of reason, and all fervor that has been displayed has 
been properly religious and adequately motived. This was told 
us by a good monk of St. Augustine's, who attached no small 
importance to the fact, calling this apparent paralysis of the 
imagination in the presence of the Shrine an abiding mira- 
cle. " St. Thomas was a supremely practical man," he said, 
" etodivit iniquitatem" And to us as we stand before this won- 



i9i2.] CANTERBURY PILGRIMS 637 

derful monument, the predominant feeling is one of soul-rest. 
The Shrine is not merely an appeal to the senses; it speaks 
to the very heart, and lays hold of the fastnesses of our in- 
nermost being. Even among the cruder characters that set 
forth with us from the Tabard Inn, we may already detect a 
softening influence at work, a pulling at the heart- strings, 
the weakening, and very likely surrender, of vicious habits. 

Such are the swift impressions as we take our stand by the 
dazzling feretory. It is enclosed by iron railings, which mark 
the limit of the pilgrims' approach, and at the head is a small 
" Altar of St. Thomas." In front of this is a very rich mosaic 
set in the pavement and bordered with curiously incised circu- 
lar stones, and in the space occupied by these we are all 
assembled. 

The Shrine itself rests on arches of richly veined marble, 
and these give rise on either side to three recesses which are 
backed with white alabaster. Silver lamps with containers of 
red glass hang from the apex of each arch and unite in a won- 
derful effect, as their flickering lights reflect on the precious 
stones inset in the spandrels. The arches support a slab of 
gray stone, heavily moulded, and on this rests the body of 
the Saint, inclosed in a strong iron chest. But for the mo- 
ment this upper part is under cover and hidden from view by 
a gabled canopy of wood, with decorated panels picturing 
miraculous incidents from the New Testament, and surmounted 
by three finials, two of silver and the central and largest one of 
gold; to these are fastened silver chains, suspended from the 
roof for the purpose of raising the canopy. 

There are not as many votive offerings hereabout as one 
might expect, considering the thousands who annually visit 
the spot, but that is because the vow of the average sup- 
pliant is not to the effect that he will render gifts in kind, 
but that he will make the pilgrimage on foot, or otherwise, in 
the course of the following year. It is to be noticed, how- 
ever, that a favorite offering to the Saint in cases of recovery 
from illness and disease is a large wax candle equal in height 
and weight to the person in whom the cure has been effected. 
Several of these are blazing fitfully away some ten or twelve 
yards distant from the Shrine and present a rather peculiar 
appearance. 

When perfect order and quiet are established and our initial 



638 CANTERBURY PILGRIMS [Feb. 

cariosity satisfied, a Benedictine, whose distinctive dress marks 
him to be the Prior, enters the chapel from the south side, 
attended by a small retinue of monks. He takes his stand 
before the altar at the head of the Shrine, and after reciting 
a psalm and some prayers, gives a signal with a white wand. 
The canopy slowly rises, and the Shrine proper stands re- 
vealed in its famed magnificence. Instinctively we drop on 
our knees, overwhelmed by the sensible glory, and still more 
by the memory of that of which this is but the garmenture. 

The wooden sides which form the outer covering of the 
iron coffin are plated with beautifully damaskeened gold, which 
is practically hidden by the mass of jewels, pearls, rings and 
other precious ornaments cramped together on its surface; and 
here: 

"The far-fetch'd diamond finds its home 
Flashing and smouldering." 

The Prior with his white wand points to the jewels of special 
interest, telling us the name of the donor, the occasion of the 
gift, its value and other interesting details. But amid this 
splendid array of gems there is one far excelling its brothers 
in splendor : deep red in color and yet so brilliant that it 
dazzles the eyes by day and at night gleams like fire. It is 
very large for its kind, and reputed to be the finest diamond 
in Europe. It once belonged to Louis VII. of France. 

The body of the Saint, we have said, lies in an iron chest 
within, and is only visible by mounting a ladder and peering 
over the top, a privilege very seldom granted. 

When we have feasted our eyes on the material splendor, 
a few minutes are allowed us for quiet prayer. Then the in- 
tense stillness is broken by tinkling bells, the canopy slowly 
descends and our pilgrimage is consummated. 

The winter evening is closing in, and I, a twentieth-century 
pilgrim, am sitting in the darkening nave of the great Cathe- 
dral, dreaming back the past. There is perfect quiet here 
the quiet of death; but the cold gray shadows that steal from 
pillar to pillar are to me the ghosts of other days, the shad- 
ows of forgotten things that haunt this beautiful waste. Sicn 
deserta facta est; Jerusalem desolata est ; domus sanctificationis 
tuae et gloriae tuae, ubi laudaverunt te palres nostri. 



I9i2.] To AN OAK IN WINTER 639 

The Shrine is no more; the pilgrim has abandoned the 
wayside; altar and statue are thrown to the ground. But as 
I peer through the dusk, I behold a grand resurrection 
Augustine preaching again to the men of Kent, and Thomas 
once more stricken to the ground and slain. Birth and Death, 
Glory and Downfall, Bethlehem and Calvary. Is not that the 
sum of all things? 

And now as the gloom enshrouds the whole Cathedral, I 
am moved from my station, and pass into the outer darkness ; 
but my thoughts are ever of the Dawn. 



TO AN OAK IN WINTER. 

BY MICHAEL EARLS, S.J. 

GRBAT hearts endure : and thou pre-eminent 
Above the dreary hills dost bravely wear 
Gray desolation. Vain the wolfish air 
With famine shrieks ; thy peace remains content : 
Nay, bravlier still, in storm's full armament, 
Thy heart lifts up, while hands in meekness bear 
Brown nests of June, attesting as in prayer, 
One kindly service done ere summer went. 

Here in thy look I kneel. O, take my arms 

Outstretched in earnest love : deep in my breast 

Intrepid set thy heart; endurance bring 

My later years in desolate alarms, 

And teach my hands to hold some service blest, 

To prove my life when God comes in the spring. 




SIR WALTER. 

BY JOHN AYSCOUGH.* 

fEARLY thirty years ago I had an opportunity 
of visiting Abbotsford, and for the next ten 
years I never had any doubt of my deep regret 
that I had not clutched greedily at the chance 
and forced it into a fact, to remember ever after ; 
during the rest of the intervening time I have not been so 
sure. Of course it matters much less being disappointed in a 
great man's things than finding the great man himself an anti- 
climax, as has happened to some literary pilgrims who have 
found in his shrine the object of their worship, still alive and 
speechless. Certainly there would have been no disappoint- 
ment if one had lived long enough ago to find one's self face 
to face with Sir Walter Scott : none who did were ever dis- 
appointed. And it is likely that most of those who go to 
Abbotsford now so fortify themselves with the determination 
to be more than satisfied that wild horses (so proverbially per- 
suasive) would not draw from them any admission that there 
has been anything lacking. But so much good resolution is a 
supererogation when we are pretty sure we shall not need it 
for practical purposes. 

I permit myself to believe that Abbotsford would disap- 
point me. As a lady devoted to Newman observed, after 
reading Mozley's Book of Reminiscences of the Oxford Move- 
ment: "I knew it would be disappointing, and it is." 

Abbotsford became baronial at a bad moment ; at least 
half a century too soon, or four centuries too late. No self- 
respecting architect of fifty or sixty years later would have 
sanctioned the architecture of the armory, or even that of the 
study ; and pretty as the whole affectation is, it was an affec- 
tation all the same. 

Of the hundreds of thousands who take the place in, in 
their round of Scottish sights, only a few, perhaps, really care 
enough about Scott to mind. I care so much that I would 
mind. 

Author of San Ctlestino, etc. 



i9i2.] Sfx WALTER 641 

Some time ago there was a correspondence in the Saturday 
Westminster Gazette, with as many columns in it as there are 
in the Parthenon dealing with the question: "Do boys 
read Walter Scott?" The only thing it established was that 
if they don't they ought to; which several of us guessed be- 
fore. If it had proved, as it certainly did not, that the author 
of the Waverlys has passed out of fashion with youthful readers, 
that would only be showing that schoolboys have not a first- 
rate taste in fiction. To Sir Walter's position in literature, it 
could make no difference whatever. Boys are often very clever, 
sometimes nearly as clever as they imagine themselves, but 
they are not to be our judges as to the best sort of fiction, 
for their own judgment is not final. Nor was Sir Walter 
Scott's works intended for them. So kindly a man would re- 
joice that any book of his should give pleasure to any one, 
however youthful, but he certainly did not imagine he was 
producing a series of boys' books. 

Among the letters above alluded to, there were several 
which picked out The Talisman and Ivanhoe as being indeed 
excellent, very much to the exclusion of the author's other 
works. Such a judgment would suffice to show the value of 
the criticism. No true lover of Scott is likely to remember 
that he ever wrote them; and no true lover of Scott ever 
reads them after the first time. Of course they contain fine 
passages, or Scott could not have written them; nevertheless, 
they are showy, wordy, tedious, stagy. 

The true Scott reader goes on reading him continually ; 
nobody who loves reading could read 7 he Talisman or Ivanhoe 
often. He would say Ivanhoe is tolerable, The Talisman in- 
tolerable. Kenilworth is ever so much better than Ivanhoe t 
but ever so much worse than Woodstock, and nearly as bad as 
Anne of Geierstein. Woodstock, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Peveril 
f the Peak are much on a level, and that a very high one. 
The Abbot and The Monastery stand lower, but do not stand 
low compared with any novels other than Scott's. 

And then we come to the long list of those glorious books 
of which the true lover of Scott thinks when he thinks of 
Scott. Let us greet them at first, higgledy-piggledy, then sort 
them: Wa-verly, Rob Roy, Redgauntlet, The Antiquary, Guy 
Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian, The Pirate, The Bride 
of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Old Mortality, The 

TOL. XCIV. 41 



642 SIR WALTER [Feb., 

Surgeon's Daughter, The Black Dwarf, The Fair Maid of 
Perth. 

The more truly you love Scott the more certain will you 
be that these are his real books, and that for a very simple 
reason. In these he treats of what he knew, as no one else 
before or since has known Scotland ; and those which treat 
of times nearest to his own are by far the best. For that lat- 
ter reason, having put it in, let us now leave out The Fair 
Maid of Perth. Scott was in love with medievalism, and es- 
pecially with its trappings; but with the exception of its trap- 
pings it may be questioned whether he knew as much as he 
thought. Feudalism dominated his retrospect of the Middle 
Ages, and of feudalism he knew the terms, and perhaps the 
costumes. But side by side with feudalism in the Middle 
Ages, and much above it, stood the Catholic Church, and of 
the Catholic Church Scott, with all his genius and his knowl- 
edge, was extremely, almost entirely, ignorant. For his in- 
terest in the Church was never more than antiquarian. 

However clever a writer may be, if he can regard Mediaeval 
Christianity only from outside, and only from a Georgian 
standpoint, he is bound to blunder. The outside view of the 
Catholic Church Scott had, and he had a keen eye for the 
picturesque, so he could describe vividly ; but even in descrip- 
tion he came appalling "croppers" as we shall instance pres- 
ently. Blunders apart, those descriptions were not always 
fine; melodramatic, stagy, verbose when intended to be grand- 
iose, they lacked the one thing description imperatively de- 
mands, truth and reality. 

The real influence of the Church in the Middle Ages was 
never revealed to this man of genius, for revelation is ac- 
corded not to talent but to sincerity ; and in this matter Scott 
was not sincere but opportunistic. He did not grasp the heart 
of the Middle Age ; for its heart was its faith ; he had merely 
read of its behavior, which was sometimes queer and some- 
times scandalous, as was the behavior of the admired Primi- 
tive Age, as has been that of the age enlightened by all the 
pure beams of Scott's beloved Reformation. Of its slang he 
reproduced, or excogitated fearsome quantities, which make 
his paladins in The Talisman talk as no man ever could talk 
and be permitted to live; of its costumes he had whole ward- 
robes at disposal, what it ate with, and what weapons it slew 



i9i2.] Sut WALTER 643 

its adversaries or brethren in arms he knew as well or better 
than his purpose required ; but how it thought he had not the 
least idea. 

Thus The Fair Maid of Perth lives in as much as it is Scott's : 
and is woodenish in so far as it is particularly mediaeval. 

Incomparably better than any other mediaeval romance of 
his is Quentin Durward; and half its charm is due to the 
Scots element in it: the other half to the excellence of the 
tale, the rapidity and freshness of the action. 

But now let us joyfully turn from his half- successes, which 
would have been splendid successes for any one else, to the 
realm where he reigns alone. He is known as the author of 
Waverly, and had he written nothing else he would have de- 
served all his fame, and perhaps have kept it, though it is 
not certain that all deserved fame becomes immortality. Never- 
theless, Waverly is not by any means equal to the others in 
its group, as we have taken leave to arrange our group. It 
was altogether novel when it appeared: its theme was roman- 
tic and yet real, its inhabitants were alive and interesting; 
but it has nothing approaching the interest and vitality of 
Rob Roy, which in turn has to yield even to The Pirate. 
There are characters in Rob Roy better, perhaps, than any in 
The Pirate ; there are less convincing characters in The Pirate, 
it may be, than some of those in Rob Roy, but as a tale The 
Pirate is more of a book. One great personage in it, Norna 
of the Fitful Head, I confess strikes me as a preliminary 
study for Meg Merrilies in Guy Manner ing, and nothing like 
so fine; only Scott could have prevented her from being a 
bore, and it took him all his time. She was too "Mumbo- 
jumbo," and her lunacy was really not called for. If she was 
determined to go mad she should have done something horri- 
ble on purpose ; her father's death was so entirely accidental 
that so clever a woman must have been aware of it. Mor- 
daunt's father was sharp enough to know that he was a bore, 
out and out, and that was why be shut himself up in Sum- 
burgh Castle. But the Yellowleys are delightful, especially 
the lady, and the Pirate himself was interesting in spite of 
his goodness. Scott does not insist on his teaching Sunday- 
School in the final chapters as Ballantyne did with a far 
naughtier pirate in the days of our own youth, when nobody 
asked us in the newspapers whether we could read Scott or no. 



64 \ SIR WALTER [Feb., 

Redgauntlet is so excellent that we wonder it is not com- 
monly mentioned as one of Scott's best books; but, perhaps, 
that is because it begins in a series of letters (which in those 
days of heavy postage must have missed the recipients). Scott, 
however, repents quite early in life and the story tells itself 
presently in plain narrative. 

In this most interesting story Scott's hankering after the 
Royal Stuarts betrays itself again, a hankering, we permit 
ourselves to fancy, more sincere, as it was certainly more 
natural, than his rather fulsome laudations of their Hanoverian 
heir. Perhaps he would have urged that the Stuarts appealed 
to him merely as romantic properties, on account of their 
picturesqueness ; and Charles Edward was undoubtedly more 
picturesque than the Prince Regent or his dismally perverse 
fattier. But I suspect there was an attraction for Scott in the 
Royal Stuarts deeper-lying than the mere obvious fact of their 
romantic value, though to no one was such a romantic value 
more appealing than to him ; they represented not only the 
exiled dynasty of England but theirs was the ancient, royal 
house of Scotland, and that mattered much more to the great 
Scots romanticist. Scotland was mainly the theatre of their 
final tragedy, and if the throne of Scotland alone could 
have contented them for a while, it might well have hap- 
pened that the thrones of England and Ireland would have 
been added in due time. The hurried advance to Derby was, 
perhaps, only less ill-advised than the hasty retreat thence. 
The position of the Regent, Charles Edward, in Scotland was 
strong enough to have become far stronger; if the Prince of 
Wales had, after publishing his father's manifesto, sat firm in 
Edinburgh, and awaited its results, thousands of those who 
were hesitating would have made up their minds to give in 
their adhesion to the cause which they knew was that of 
loyalty and patriotism; and time would have been given to 
the loyalists of Wales, England and Ireland to gather their 
wits together, and to organize their aid with some mutual 
understanding and confidence. 

It is no matter of conjecture, but historical fact that large 
and important forces were at work for the Stuart cause, and 
were actually ready when their readiness was too late ; that 
they were late was not entirely their fault, there had been too 
much hurry, not only in the disastrous resolution to retreat 



i9i2.] S/x WALTER 645 

from England, but also in the precipitate though chivalrous 
resolve to push into it. 

Scott, as I imagine, thought of Charles Edward as of one 
who might very easily have been his king de Jaclo, who barely 
missed it, and missed it so gloriously that he could not help 
dwelling on it ; whether he cared that Charles was undoubtedly 
king de jure I cannot tell. But it seems to me plain that Scott 
was at all events Scot enough to prefer th*. idea of a Scots 
monarch in Scotland to that of a Hanoverian sovereign in 
London. 

In the group we have ventured to make of his greatest 
novels there is an inner group of the very greatest: The 
Antiquary, Guy Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian and The 
Bride of Lammermoor. In these four all his best qualities are 
at their best; no real Scott-reader is ever tired of reading 
them, and every reading makes them more dear and more 
admired. They are the four walls of Scott's monument in the 
hearts of his lovers all the world over. Familiarity does not 
lessen their charm, or weaken their hold, but strengthens it. 
For my own part I could read through to the last page of any 
one of them and turn back to the first and read on again with 
undiminished delight. I do not think the fascination cf ary 
of them depends much on the hero, Lovel is not the attrac- 
tion in The Antiquary, nor the Master of Ravenswood in Ihe 
Bride of Lammermoor; in The Heart of Midlothian there is no 
hero at all and in Guy Mannering the office is put into com- 
mission. In The Heart of Midlothian is the finest of all Scott's 
heroines; but in the other three the heroines could be left 
out and the books lose nothing. Lucy, in The Btide of Lam- 
mermoor is as anaemic as Amelia in Vanity Fair, and neither 
so interesting nor so pathetic. One may want to box Amelia's 
ears but she had ears, if she hadn't eyes; Lucy had nothing 
but good looks miraculously existing in space without any 
particular human identity to support them. 

Miss Wardour in 7 he Antiquary is better, because she does 
exist, though her existence does not matter much to anybody 
bat Mr. Lovel ; she was quite a proper young woman for him 
to marry, but he might have married her in the Morning Post 
just as well as in The Antiquary. Julia Mannerirg is far 
better; she can be pert, and her father required more pert- 
ness than he often got from her; she can be lively, and her 



646 Six WALTER [Feb., 

good looks are not a mere assertion of the author's; the 
reader can picture her, and the picture is natural, pleasant 
and animated. But the interest oi Guy Mannering does not 
depend on her lover, and she and her young man, who is a 
nice young man and very prettily-behaved, might have arranged 
their affairs elsewhere and the book have been as fascinating 
without them. 

Jeanie Deans has a different position altogether; she and 
Diana are Scott's best heroines, and The Heart of Midlothian 
could not get on without her; the real story in the book is 
the story of her journey to London. There are characters in 
The Heart of Midlothian as impossible to do without as any 
in the other books of this group, but the book does not de- 
pend on them as the others do really depend on their " minor 
characters." Nor is the interest we feel in Jeanie Deans the 
interest we may have in her own rather mature love story, 
but rather in spite of it. Mr. Butler was, no doubt, an ex- 
cellent minister; as a lover he is not engrossing. It would, 
no doubt, be esteemed a heresy to say that these four best 
books of Scott's would have got on very well if there had 
been no loves of heroes and heroines at all. It is my own 
opinion, but ordinary readers will probably not share it. 

When Bingley, in Pride and Prejudice, talked of giving a 
ball, his sister perceived that Darcy was reading a book, and 
did not fancy he cared much for the idea of dancing. 

" I should like balls much better," she cried, " if they were 
carried on in a different manner ; but there is something in- 
sufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It 
would surely be more rational if conversation instead of dan- 
cing made the order of the day." 

" Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say," her 
brother objected, " but it would not be near so much like a 
ball." 

Perhaps the public will maintain that if Sir Walter had 
left the love affairs of his heroes and heroines out of these 
four novels, they might have been just as good, but not nearly 
so much like novels. 

There remain after these four greatest books other four, as 
Scott himself would have said: A Legend of Montrose, Old 
Mortality, The Black Dwarf and The Surgeon's Daughter, which 
we also included in our own group of favorites. They are 



I9i2.] Ssx WALTEX 647 

much shorter than any of the novels we have mentioned above, 
and for that reason, chiefly, they are not commonly classed 
among the author's " important " works. Their brevity is all 
I can urge against them. They are otherwise quite worthy 
of ranking with more admired books of Scott's. Personally I 
would say that they are equal in bulk of interest to the in- 
teresting part of some of their more favored brethren ; for not 
all of Rob Roy is particularly interesting, nor all of Red- 
gauntlet, and even The Heart of Midlothian need not be begun 
at the first chapter nor continued to the last. No true Scott 
reader can dispense with them ; and The Black Dwarf has a 
sombre power that is sometimes missed in other places where 
Scott showed more apparent intention to achieve it. 

As we mentioned Diana Vernon parenthetically above, as 
being in our opinion one of his two finest heroines let us say 
one word more about Rob Roy ; the family at Osbaldistone 
Hall was, we take leave to feel assured, far nicer than Scott 
chooses to allow that was just his " whiggery." As for Helen 
MacGregor, whose pedigree is not given, we are confident that 
the blood of Noraa of the Fitful Head ran in her veins; in 
their Ossianic moments the family resemblance is ponderously 
close. 

We also mentioned above that Scott, whose interest in the 
Catholic Church being merely that of an antiquary, lacking 
sympathy and sincerity, left him without the true key to the 
spirit of the Middle Ages, fell occasionally into queer blun- 
ders even when attempting nothing more than description. 
An instance of this occurs in one of the four books which 
we believe all great admirers of his admire most. 

In the second volume of The Antiquary there is a flagrantly 
picturesque account of the midnight obsequies of the Catholic 
Countess of Glenallan. The priest, dressed in "cope and 
stole held open the service-book" (the breviary as we are in- 
formed on the next page) "another churchman in his vest- 
ments bore a holy- water sprinkler and two boys in white 
surplices held censers with incense " and the dirge goes on 
" until a loud Alleluia, pealing through the deserted arches of 
St. Ruth, closed the singular ceremony." Singular, indeed. 
Sir Walter Scott was undoubtedly the only human being who 
ever heard an Alleluia, however loud, in the funeral offices of 
the Catholic Church. 




THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER.* 

BY ANDREW J. SHIPMAN. 

|HIS book professes to be, according to the pub- 
lishers' announcement, "the first authentic and 
impartial account of the life, trial and death of 
this famous radical and thinker," and the an- 
nouncement further asserts, that Mr. Archer "in- 
vestigated the case with praiseworthy industry and absolute 
impartiality." Still, the author's preface and his method of 
presenting the results of his investigations, if not the investi- 
gations themselves, do not show " absolute impartiality." For 
instance, in chapter IV., speaking of education in Spain, he 
gives no accurate information whatsoever as to the diffusion 
of education there (although one may readily read it in so 
accessible a volume as the International Encyclopedia (XVIII.), 
and the Estadistica Escolar de Espana must have been available 
to him) but repeats second-hand, ill-natured things about 
Spanish education, such as : 

The deficiencies of the actual system are but faintly indi- 
cated in the fact that 10,000,000 men and women, out of a 
total population of less than 20,000,000, cannot read and write, 
and the children pass half their school-hours in prayers and 
recitations of the catechism and sacred history. Very few 
learn to write ; some learn to read, by reason of the extreme 
ease with which the Spanish lets Itself be learned. 

Statements like this, which the slightest investigation would 
disprove especially in Barcelona constitute but slight evi- 
dence of absolute impartiality. Mr. Archer could have learned 
even from his Badcker (Edition 1901) that as far back as 
1897 the Spanish illiterates were 6,104,470, and that these 
were chiefly in the country districts. He might also have ap- 
plied to La Asociacion Barcelonesa, or even to the chancery 

* The Life, Trial and Death / Francisco Ferrer. By William Archer. New York : 
Moffatt, Yard & Co. 



1912.] TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER 649 

office of the diocese of Barcelona, for information, and be 
would have discovered that in 1909 there were in Barcelona, 
the following: public schools, 860; private church schools, 
268; private lay schools, 564; Protestant schools, 22; making 
in all 1,714 schools, as against the schools Ferrer and his as- 
sociates established. If he had gone further he would have 
found that the school buildings were, nearly every one of 
them, superior to any Ferrer maintained; while, as to text- 
books, the Ferrer schools were not up to the general stand- 
ard. He might also have looked in La Gula Escolar de Es- 
paila for 1909, and have found that the following subjects are 
taught in the various grades of the primary schools: (i) 
Christian Doctrine and rudiments of Sacred History. (2) Span- 
ish language; reading, writing and grammar. (3) Arithmetic. 
(4) Geography and History. (5) Rudiments of Legal Relations. 
(6) Elements of Geometry. (7) Elements of Physical Science 
and Chemistry. (8) Hygiene and Physiology. (9) Drawing. 
(10) Singing, (u) Manual Training. (12) Bodily exercises 
and movement drill. Exact information upon the real state 
of education in Barcelona, as the prime example, would have 
served to illustrate the "absolute impartiality " of the author's 
investigation better than anything else; for it was upon the 
crying need for education there that Ferrer's activities are 
alleged to have been based ; and it was, according to Mr. 
Archer and others, his educational activities in trying to lift 
the veil of ignorance in Barcelona which brought him to his 
end. Yet with upwards of a thousand schools in Barcelona, it 
does not appear that Mr. Archer ever entered one of them 
and investigated for himself. It is apparent that he contented 
himself with mere denunciations taken from the lips of others. 
Although Mr. Archer fails to mention the ultra teachings 
of the Ferrer schools, he has to admit, after minimizing and 
glossing over their rather too "strong meat for babes" that 

there is not the least doubt that his teaching was not merely 
anti- clerical, but anti- religious. And even deeper than the 
rebellion against supernaturalism lay the rebellion against 
class- domination and exploitation. State education was, in 
Ferrer's eyes, at least, as noxious as church education. 

It is perfectly true then and we ought not in fairness to 
lose sight of the fact that the Escuela Moderna was unmis- 



6so TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER [Feb., 

takably and avowedly a nursery of rebellious citizens. . : . 
Ferrer was from the first to the last an ardent Revolutionist. 
He had come to think that Spain was not yet ripe for revolu- 
tion ; but the whole object of his work was to correct her un- 
ripeness by educating revolutionists. . . . There was 
much in Ferrer's teaching that in any country in the -world 
could not but strain toleration to its utmost limit. 

Ferrer never actually wrote a book or taught a school. 
Once, when he was giving lessons in Spanish during his 
sojourn in Paris, he wrote a small Methode Espagnol Pratique, 
and when in jail in Madrid he composed some mediocre verses. 
These and his correspondence make up the extent of his liter- 
ary labors. He was rather the director of a system of grouped 
teachers of anarchist doctrines to immature minds. 

The products of these schools were the recruits fashioned 
for rebellion and anarchy. Yet the author of this book, with 
a view to absolute impartiality, merely observes concerning 
the text-books used in the Ferrer schools: 

I have found nothing that can reasonably be construed as 
incitement to violence or immorality. The teaching is frankly 
acratist, frankly inspired by the principle, ni Dieu, ni mattre; 
but there is no forecast, no suggestion of any resort to arms, 
and much less any recommendation or palliation of terrorism. 
I do not even find in passages treating of religion, that there 
is any unseemly scoffing or vulgar scurrility. 

That is to say, the powder is laid, the explosives are ready, 
but the author failed to find any recommendation to strike a 
match. Ferrer's text-books give the major and the minor 
premise, but Mr. Archer thinks, in order to provide an " in- 
citement to violence or immorality," one would need to find 
the conclusion broadly drawn. If Mr. Archer will read over 
again El Compendia de Historia Universal, by Mile. Jacquinet, 
in which Christ and Christianity are mocked and reviled, and 
also Patriotismo y Colonizacion, where both violence and im- 
morality are taught, he may change his opinion. The form 
of the printed page and the collocation of the words easily 
add to the force of scoffing and scurrility. 

To appreciate the impartiality of a book, heralded as is Mr. 
Archer's volume, it is well to learn what equipment the author 



i9i2.] TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER 651 

had for his observations, especially as he is judging the out- 
come of a foreign tribunal. He tells us : 

It may, perhaps, be said indeed, It has been said by one 
critic that I apply to Spanish procedure the test of English 
principles and rules of evidence. This is not really so. The 
little I ever learned of English rules of evidence has long 
since vanished from my mind. The tests I sought to apply 
are those of common-sense and fair-play. 

With this equipment he proceeds to try over again the 
law and the facts, to tell Spanish military lawyers that they 
do not know the principles of their own law and rules of pro- 
cedure and evidence, and to instruct them what witnesses to 
believe or disbelieve, and whether the case should go on or 
not, according to a theory he has formulated a year after the 
matter was fresh before them. And to this equipment we 
must add the fact that he is an Anglo-Saxon not very con- 
versant with his own law and totally unacquainted even with 
Spanish technical law terms, or he would never translate and 
print in small capitals throughout the whole of his book that 
jtft y autor was "chief and author," instead of the fact that 
it is the technical law term in Spanish for " principal " in a 
crime, as distinguished from an "accessory." One cannot be- 
lieve that Mr. Archer did this with malice, and must, there- 
fore, credit it to ignorance; but one might as well translate 
the Spanish law word reo (defendant or prisoner) by the Eng- 
lish word "guilty," simply because that is its general mean- 
ing, yet Mr. Archer has all through the "process" in the ap- 
pendix translated the word reo correctly. 

As bearing further on the impartiality of the anther's 
views, we may take his declaration in the preface: "Certainly 
I was not a Roman Catholic; but I was in no way committed 
to hostility to Catholicism." Notwithstanding this, he seldom 
omits an opportunity to assail Catholics and Catholic com- 
munities. Such a course was not at all necessary for the pur- 
pose of his book, For instance, where he gives the translation 
of the Process or judgment-roll, in speaking of the testimony 
of a witness, he goes out of his way to call him " the Catholic 
journalist," although nothing whatsoever requires such a state- 
ment. Again, when speaking incidentally of the "Committee 



652 TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRAKCISCO FERREK [Ftb , 

of Social Defense" in Barcelona, he adds a foot-note: "An 
ultra Catholic association, which was largely instrumental in 
hounding Ferrer to his doom;" and when he speaks of the 
suspicions "to an Anglo-Saxon mind" of the lives led in the 
convents, he certainly does not show any remarkable evidence 
of impartiality, or of an absence of hostility to Catholicism. 
As his book throughout contains only references to Ferrerist 
and Anarchist sources (not one anti-Ferrer or governmental 
authority being quoted throughout) he explains this by saying: 

It may be asked whether I have gone to Catholic authori- 
ties for their side of the case ? Certainly I have done so. I 
have not only waded through files of the Catholic press and 
read Catholic books and pamphlets (here he names several 
books), but I have been at some pains to seek out persons 
who, I was told, could throw light on the case from a Catholic 
point of view. These inquiries, however, were absolutely 
fruitless. They merely convinced me that the so-called au- 
thorities neither knew nor wanted to know anything about 
the case. 

Now why should there be a Catholic point of view, or why 
should the Catholic authorities have had aught to do with the 
case? That is precisely the point about which Catholics have 
had to complain in the various accounts of the Ferrer case. 
Two charges have been made : one that the Catholic Church 
railroaded Ferrer to his death, and the other that it also saw 
to it that he was condemned without proofs or witnesses. Mr. 
Archer strives to inject much of this view through inuendo, 
and the above quotation is a sample. We are well content to 
let the Spanish military and judicial authorities defend their 
acts upon purely legal and political grounds, leaving out all 
question of Church or Church interference. The author also 
seems dimly aware that this would be the correct point of view, 
for he states: "I knew that Ferrer had been the victim, if not 
of a judicial crime, at any rate of an enormous judicial stupid- 
ity." If that text had been preached during the whole Ferrer 
controversy, there would have been no need of bringing in 
any allusions to the Church whatever. A truly impartial book 
would have viewed the matter, irrespective of whether the par- 
ticipants were or were not Catholics, and have let the uncol- 
ored facts speak for themselves. 



19 1 2.] TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER 653 

The volume, itself, is quite extensive and gives a consider- 
able biography of Ferrer. Yet for all its bulk it contains 
324 pages there is much that it omits. For instance, the au- 
thor is not yet ready to tell how Ferrer got away from Mas 
Germinal, or where he remained in hiding for over three weeks 
before he was caught. He says, however, that Soledad Villa- 
franca had been careful to make a great clearance af papers 
before Ferrer left, so that the police could not get them. It 
will be remembered that he disappeared after the third day 
of the uprising. Because the fifty files of letters, telegrams* 
etc., which were produced in court did not explicitly show 
that Ferrer was at the head of the outbreak of 1909, therefore, 
it is said, Ferrer had nothing to do with it. The same is main- 
tained because of the fact that no witnesses were produced for 
Ferrer. At a time when they could be produced, neither 
Ferrer nor his defender asked for their evidence, for they 
would have been examined on this very point of missing docu- 
ments, the escape and hiding of Ferrer and the names and 
actions of everyone who assisted him. When it was seen that 
the evidence was all against him, and the time for their ex- 
amination had expired, they became apparently indignant that 
their testimony had not been called for. Yet the letters which 
passed from Ferrer to his friends in Paris and England, writ- 
ten from the Caret/ Celular in which he was confined, show 
as much latitude as is allowed in England and America to 
prisoners. One thing we may be grateful for. Mr. Archer's 
book leaves out entirely the legend of important documents 
sent in the mail from England which would have exculpated 
Ferrer, but which were stolen from the mails and never reached 
him. 

The author in his book makes no mention of the thirty 
volumes of all the testimony and proceedings in each of Fer- 
rer's trials published early in 1911 by the Spanish Govern- 
ment. Neither does he notice the charges and logical demon- 
stration by Senor La Cierva and others on the floor of the 
Cortes that the letters of Ferrer, quoted by the author at pages 
no, in, and 143 are cipher letters indicating the progress of 
the revolutionary programme and the need for Ferrer's pres- 
ence in Barcelona. It is a curious coincidence that he was 
nearly always present when there was any anarchist outbreak 
in Spain, as witness the dynamite explosion in Madrid in 1906 



654 TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER [Feb., 

and some previous abortive occurrences. Senor La Cierva said 
that no one died at the Ferrer homestead in June 1909, and 
that no one was ill, and that even if his sister-in-law and lit- 
tle niece had been ill there, such a circumstance was not suf- 
ficient to make Ferrer turn away from London where he ex- 
pected to spend the entire summer. Yet he found time to 
spend nearly two days in Paris with his anarchist friends while 
apparently hurrying to the sick-room. When he writes to 
Moreno to come out from Barcelona to see him, just four days 
before the uprising, he has to add " we have recently lost a 
niece eight years old," although Moreno was an old friend and 
resident of Barcelona, who would probably have known all 
about it. The Spanish analysts of the letters make them mere 
references to plans to be formulated as to uprisings, and give 
a key to the meaning of the various words. 

In regard to the evidence offered at the trial there is a 
constant running comment to show that what the witnesses 
said of Ferrer could not be true. Taking the specific case of 
the testimony of the witness Colldeforns, who testified that 
between 7:30 and 8:30 in the evening of July 27, 1909, he 
saw a man, whom he recognized from photographs as Ferrer, 
" captaining a group " near the Lyceum Theatre on the Ram- 
Ha, Mr. Archer explains this evidence away by simply say- 
ing that at 7:30 it was too dark to recognize a man's features, 
aad, besides, the witness only knew him from a photograph. 
But we must remember that as Ferrer was implicated in the 
bomb-throwing at King Alfonso and Queen Victoria in 1906, 
his portrait and pictures of him in many attitudes had been 
published dozens of times in the Spanish and French illus- 
trated papers, and he was as well known as a political celebrity 
here. One might very well recognize President Taft or Colo- 
nel Roosevelt merely from their photographs. On July 27 
the sun sets at Barcelona about 7:20 o'clock, and twilight lasts 
there for nearly an hour longer. Its latitude is about the 
same as that of Providence and anyone may test the fact. 

But even the author cannot get away from the evidence 
given by Domenech, Llarch and Domingo Casas, the Mayor of 
Premia, to the effect that Ferrer proposed to proclaim a re- 
public; of how he incited the people to burn convents and 
churches; of how they met a group of men who told Ferrer 
what was being done in Barcelona and of how Ferrer said : 



ig 1 2.] TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER 655 

"Good, goodl Courage 1 It must all be destroyed!" and 
finally, of the peremptory order by Ferrer to the Mayor to 
proclaim the republic in the town of Premid. All that Mr. 
Archer brings against this is a letter from Ferrer to Malato 
published three months after his execution; whereas Ferrer 
never testified or made any attempt to testify to those things 
at the actual time of the trial. He adds also some gossip as 
tending to overthrow this evidence, although Ferrer was con- 
fronted with the Mayor and Llarch who stoutly maintained 
the truth of their testimony to his face. He also comments 
on other facts which tend to corroborate Ferrer's participation 
in the events of the Bloody Week of Barcelona, but he finally 
winds up in this lame fashion : 

Their story, if we accept every syllable of it, would show 
Ferrer liable to whatever punishment the law assigns to an 
utterly abortive attempt to stir up a local sedition. 

It is precisely here where the author fails to carry the 
matter to a conclusion. It is a firmly grounded principle in 
English and American law, as well as in Spanish law, that 
where a person is engaged in the commission of a crime which, 
of itself, would be of minor importance, but which results in 
the destruction of life and property of great moment, he is 
deemed guilty of the greater crime. Thus where a burglar 
breaks into a house, merely intending to rob, but in doing so 
lights a match which eventually and accidentally sets fire to 
the house and burns it, so that the inmates and contents are 
destroyed, he is guilty of murder or arson ; just as though 
he had intended that originally. Mr. Archer would divest 
Ferrer's acts, as proven by the witnesses, from any and all of 
the events which took place in Barcelona, and have him ad- 
judged for his acts, solely and alone, as if nothing whatsoever 
had resulted. This is the fallacy running through the entire 
book, and we may add to it, the author's special pleading in 
the mistranslation of Spanish law words and his printing them 
in small capitals throughout the work, thereby emphasizing 
the mistranslation for no motive that is apparent save that of 
misleading the reader. But after the special pleas are in, after 
the evidence against Ferrer has been belittled and apparently 



656 TRIAL AND DEATH OF FRANCISCO FERRER [Feb. 

explained away, and the entire case brought down to the 
"irreducible minimum," the author has to admit: 

I am not at all sure that, had Ferrer been fairly tried under 
reasonable rules of evidence, he would have got ofl scot-free. 
He was certainly not the "author and chief of the rebel- 
lion ; " that accusation was a monstrous absurdity ; but it is 
not quite clear that his irrepressible sympathy with every form 
of revolt may not have betrayed him into one or two indiscre- 
tions. 

We may add that the legend that Ferrer's trial was wholly 
private and secret is also demolished by the picture given on 
page 190 of the book, showing a large, airy court- room filled 
with spectators, who are seemingly following the proceedings 
with great interest. The author also admits that the plenario 
or taking of evidence was also public, quoting the statute to 
that effect, and saying that in the plenario of the case against 
Emiliano Iglesias the statement of a witness caused "great 
laughter among the public." The book is really a great im- 
provement over the previous recitals of the trial and execu- 
tion of Ferrer; one by one the myths of the secrecy, the 
railroading and the lack of evidence in the case are being 
dropped; and we may hope for some future chronicler to take 
up the matter in a purely hisioric spirit, leave out the mistrans- 
lations, inuendo and unnecessary comments and rhetoric of the 
present volume, and give us the facts without undue partisan 
comment. 




JEANNE D'ARC. 

BY KATHERINE BREGY. 

NT January 6, 1412 just five centuries ago last 
Twelfth Night Jeanne d'Arc was born in the 
little Lorraine village of Domremy. All the 
world knows her history. The German poet, 
the American humorist, the ultra-modern French 
philosopher have each contributed to her compelling immor- 
tality. The just and the unjust have fought above her faith- 
ful ashes. There have been centuries of reparation : and 
now the Soldier-Maid looks down from the walls of the 
Pantheon, with those typically Parisian patrons, St. Denis 
and St. Genevieve ; and ironically enough, not far from 
the empty tomb of Voltaire. All this is as it should be, 
for never a cult more sane or more salutary than the cult 
of la Pufdle. And never a beatification more timely in our 
own professedly feminist age 1 Only, it does seem super- 
ficially a little curious that Jeanne should not be even more 
confidently, more universally exploited by -women, both within 
and without the Church. There is scarcely a figure in all his- 
tory who embodies, in so exceptional and quintessential a de- 
gree, the ideals toward which modern womanhood is striving. 
For the modern ideal, so far as it is sound, so far as it is in 
anywise sane, is fain not to destroy but to fulfill. It would 
leave to woman all the hereditary virtues of her mother 
adding, so far as might be, the latent but not less hereditary 
virtues of her father. We all remember the Westminster epi- 
taph of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, of whose family it 
was proudly claimed that "all the brothers were valiant and 
all the sisters virtuous:" but there is a higher ideal by which 
sisters shall be valiant as well as virtuous, and brothers vir- 
tuous as well as valiant. 

And this is precisely the ideal which Jeanne d'Arc so sim- 
ply and whole-heartedly fulfilled. In the records of her trial 
VOL. xciv. 42 



658 JEANNE D'ARC [Feb., 

and rehabilitation* a thousand intimate personal characteristics 
flame out like golden banners. There is the story of the 
verger at Domremy, whom Jeanne bribed by little presents of 
wool to work more diligently in his belfry: he had known her 
all her brief life in the village, and deposed upon her devo- 
tion to the offices of the Church, her goodness to the poor, 
her grave and gentle modesty, and her industry, whether at 
the loom, the plough or the pasture. Then come the artless 
depositions of the peasant women of Domremy, who used to 
walk to and from Mass with "Jeanette"; who remembered her 
kneeling in the fields when the church bells rang, or dancing 
betimes with the other village maidens, or bringing nuts and 
provisions for the annual picnic at the Ladies' Tree on Latare 
Sunday. "I did not know of Jeanne's departure," cried one of 
these women tristfully, after the lapse of a quarter of a century : 
"I wept much I loved her dearly for her goodness and be- 
cause she was my friend." 

From quite another angle comes the testimony of those 
who knew the Maid during her fifteen months of militant 
service. The Sieur de Metz saw Jeanne first when she trav- 
eled up to Vaucouleur in her shabby frock of red serge, 
pleading with Robert de Baudricourt for the third time for 
soldiers to lead her to the king. She had been refused twice, 
and she never argued the subject ; she simply returned to the 
attack. But the fire of indomitable purpose was burning be- 
neath this maidenly calm, and it blazed up when the knight 
inquired with mild curiosity when she wished to start. "Bet- 
ter at once than to-morrow," came the splendid retort, "and 
better to-morrow than later ! " That was at the very begin- 
ning of her public career she scarcely knew as yet how to 
balance a lance on horseback. But when her poor, dazed 
young sovereign was celebrating the mighty victory she had 
won for him at Orleans, and making the peasant maid grande 
chere, the identical spirit answered him : " Noble Dauphin, hold 
not such long and so many councils, but start at once for 
Rheiras and there receive your crown I" 

Jeanne's swiftness of thought and action was a constant 
marvel to the men about her men who too well remembered 

* Jeanne d' Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer f France ; being the story of her life, her 
achievements, and her death, as attested on oath and set forth In the original documents, 
Edited by T. Douglas Murray. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. London: (Heinemann). 



i9i 2.] JEANNE &ARC 659 

Agtncourt, and had ceased even to hope aggressively. One 
little incident before the attack upon Jargeau reveals the win- 
someness as well as the force of the mighty Maid. "Forward, 
gentle Duke, to the assault!" she cried, bursting in upon his 
Grace of Alencon about nine o'clock one morning. He pro- 
tested that the assault was premature, and argued for delay; 
whereupon, with that high queenliness of hers, Jeanne gave 
the immortal answer: "It is the right time when it pleases 
God, we must work when it is His will: Travaillcz, et Dieu 
travaillera!" Yet never a prophet more tender to the weak- 
ness of the flesh. " Ah, gentle Duke," she said, turning back 
to him when she saw that her point was gained, " dost thou 
not know I promised thy wife to bring thee back whole and 
sound?"* 

No one seems to have studied Jeanne more intelligently or 
more sympathetically during all this time than her bean Due, 
as she was wont to call him. D'Aleocon was a prince of the 
blood royal, commander-in-chief (until the Maid's coming) of 
the French armies, and his testimony is full of significance. 
He was hunting quails at St. Florent when news was brought 
of the little peasant girl who had come to the Dauphin at 
Chinon with the amazing message that God had sent her to 
raise the siege of Orleans and drive the English out of 
France. Not unnaturally, the Duke made his own way right 
speedily to Chinon and his capitulation seems to have been 
immediate. Seeing, he believed; or indeed, it may be that 
believing he saw. Side by side they followed the weary 
marches, the daring, glorious engagements of her campaign 
of the Loire. It is not certain where d'Alenfon was when 
the Maid was captured by the Burgundians and later sold to 
the English, or while the grim tragedy of her trial was being 
played to its end. But twenty-five years later, when by order 
of Pope Calixtus III. the doctors assembled in Notre Dame to 
inquire into the validity of the Rouen sentence, the Duke 
came up to Paris to tell all he knew. The memory of Jeanne's 
white fire of purity, her hatred of blasphemy and of the evil 
women who followed the camp, her tact in dealing with the 
various generals, her reverent piety, came upon him then in a 
wave of impassioned memory. " I think truly, it was God 

The Duke d'Alenjon was but just returned from a five years' imprisonment by th 
English, and Jeanne had, in fact, made this promise to his young wife. 



66o JEANNE D'ARC [Feb., 

who led us," he declared of her brief generalship; and the 
sum of his testimony fell into these momentous words: 

I always held her for an excellent Catholic and a modest 
woman ; she communicated often, and at sight of the Body of 
Christ, shed many tears. In all she did, except in affairs of 
war, she was a very simple young girl ; but in warlike things 
bearing the lance, assembling an army, ordering military 
operations . . . she was most skilful. Everyone won- 
dered that she could act with as much wisdom and foresight 
as a captain who had fought for twenty or thirty years. It 
was above all in making use of artillery that she was so won- 
derful . 

Of course, d'Alenfon erred in this last sentence. The won- 
der of Jeanne d'Arc was never more preeminent than when 
she faced her court of accusers (it cannot be said that the 
tribunal boasted any judges !) in the Castle of Rouen. To 
martyrdom she marched valiantly enough in all truth, but 
each step of the way was fought soldier-wise. Every power 
on earth was marshalled against the girl: learning and treach- 
ery and might and brutality and hardest of all to bear the 
appearance of righteous authority. For these men, whom 
Jeanne knew to be fighting God, fought ostensibly in God's 
name! That was the consummate irony of it all. Bedford, 
the English regent, and his colleague of Winchester, were not 
content merely to imprison or to kill the Maid: they deter- 
mined to impugn her entire work. They wished to place the 
ban of sacrilege and illegitimacy upon her king's coronation 
at Rheims. Hence it was decreed to try Jeanne for heresy 
and witchcraft, before a tribunal of English sympathizers care- 
fully suborned for the end in view. She seems to have taken 
no great trouble to conceal her scorn of them, and answered 
with so high a spirit that one of Henry's own soldiets was 
heard to exclaim: "This is a brave woman: would she were 
English ! " Without legal counsel, day after day and week 
after week, she faced her inquisitors with the same patient 
fire. From the first she had refused to take oath save upon 
matters directly bearing upon her case ; and when urged to 
violate this "precept of silence" in matters concerning her 
king or her Voices, the only answer was a determined passez- 
oulre! Again and yet again Jeanne's simplicity triumphed 
over the most abstruse and subtly framed interrogations; ard 



i9 1 2.] JEANNE D'ARC 66 1 

finally, at a hint from the friendly Brother Isambard, she 
shattered the validity of the whole trial by appealing her cause 
directly to the Pope and the Council of Bale. It was a mas- 
ter-stroke, had Cauchon retained decency enough to adhere to 
any appearance of justice. But the stakes were too high. He 
drowned her voice with a cry of "Hold your tongue in the 
devil's name!" and ordered the appeal stricken off the min- 
utes of the notary. 

Jeanne's largeness of vision (another side, after all, to her 
simplicity), might well have shamed the triviality of her hunt- 
ers. " My Lord has a book in which no clerk has ever read, 
how perfect soever he be in clerkship," she had answered 
sagely when the populace cried out that never bad deeds like 
hers been read of anywhere. And now she made brief work 
of the questions about St. Michael's hair, or the clothing worn 
by St. Catherine or St. Margaret. When taunted with ne- 
glecting the work proper to womankind, in order to save 
France from English invasion, she replied with beautiful and 
unanswerable logic: "There are plenty of other women to do 
that\ " So, too, with the interminable questions about her 
male attire. It would seem fairly obvious that, having a 
man's work to do, and living amongst men in the rough camp 
and rougher prison, Jeanne's chosen dress was the only safe 
or sensible one for her to assume. But the Rouen judges af- 
fected to find in it one of their chiefest scandals, and it held 
conspicuous place in the formal bill of accusation eventually 
brought against the hapless Maid. She dented repeatedly that 
any other human being should be held responsible for this 
"dissolute" attire, and explained as best tbe could that she 
believed it, under the circumstances, not only indifferent but 
even positively pleasing to Almighty God. Then, when her 
explanations were met by added obliquity of qucstionii g, she 
dismissed the subject with one perfect sentence: "What con- 
cerns this dress is a small thing less than nothing." One 
would give much to have seen Jeanne's eyes when she spoke 
those words 1 

To be sure, they broke her spirit in the end. After the 
trial had lasted five months, and when his prisoner's mind and 
body were manifestly forespent by the long days of inquisition 
and the nights of abuse and insult, it occurred to Pierre 
Cauchon to have the girl publicly exhorted in the cemetery 



662 JEANNE D'ARC [Feb , 

of St. Ouen. In the presence of her lordly accusers and of 
the "good people" of Rouen, she was led out upon a scaf- 
fold or gallery to be harangued with many accusations by one 
Maitre Guillaume Erard. The executioner, and a stake already 
prepared with faggots, were facing her. And then did Jeanne 
d'Arc commit the one great crime, the one great frailty of 
her stainless life ; for a frenzied moment she ceased to believe 
in herself! It was true all that they witnessed against her 
she had been deluded; but the guilt was upon her own 
shoulders, not her king's ! And then she begged the judges 
to take her away from the fire (of which she had peculiar 
dread), and place her in the prisons of the Church, with 
women to care for her. There is not, in all the tear-stained 
records of human tragedy, an incident of more poignant 
pathos than this recantation of the Maid of Orleans. It 
occurred just one year and a day after her capture outside 
the drawbridge of Compiegne, and when the girl was some four 
months past her nineteenth birthday. 

That was the first and last surrender. Four days later 
came the glorious " relapse " which brought Jeanne so quickly 
to the stake. Cauchon hastened to the castle prison (where, 
against his sworn word, he had returned the prisoner after 
her submission) and found the Maid clothed again in her right 
mind and in her male attire. There was no wavering in her 
Credo this time. " If I said that God had not sent me, I 
should damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me," she 
told the Bishop vehemently. " All that I said and revoked, I 
said for fear of the fire ... I did not intend so to do or 
say. I did not intend to deny my visions." It was the Jeanne 
of Orleans, of Patay, of Rheims, speaking then: the Jeanette 
of Domremy, too, as with sweet and firm na'ivete she recounted 
how her saints had told of the great sorrow they felt for the 
treason to which she had been led, to deny and abjure her 
deeds in order to save her life. Two days later came the 
Deliverance which these Voices had so often yet so mysteri- 
ously prophesied, and which the Martyr- Maid had, for a little 
while, but ill understood. 

The question of Jeanne's Voices cannot any longer be 
begged, since in her " Voices " or " Counsel " lay the secret of 
her amazing self-belief. She had come out of Domremy to 
lead the armies of France as later, she went to death rather 



i9i2.] JEANNE D'ARC 663 

than abjure her mission for the single reason that she be- 
lieved herself a sword chosen and wielded by the hand of 
God. And this she believed because, as she declared, she had 
been so told, so commanded by " her brothers in Paradise." 
There is little strangeness, to the Catholic mind, in this more 
personal and intimate manifestation of the great Communion 
of Saints. The vessel of election in every age has been wrought 
for service or it may be, merely guided toward the way of 
service by hands other than material. And although Jeanne 
was rather a silent woman (always given to deeds rather than 
words), her testimony about the Voices first during the 
Dauphin's inquiry at Chinon, and later during the hostile in- 
terrogations of the trial was full enough to be quite intelligible. 
The first Voice spoke to her at Domremy when she was but 
thirteen (suitably enough, it was the heavenly warrior, Michael), 
saying simply : " Be good go often to Church." After a 
little while came the apparitions of St. Catherine and St. 
Margaret, while the messages became more definite; she must 
go into France she must relieve the siege of Orleans she 
must lead her Dauphin to the anointing and coronation of his 
kingship. During Jeanne's military leadership, she seems to 
have been confirmed almost constantly by these visions. " You 
have been to your counsel," she cried to the dissenting gen- 
erals when they were fain to hold her back from action, " and 
I have been to mine, and the Counsel of God shall be accom- 
plished." After the coronation at Rheims, Jeanne acted more 
or less on her own responsibility; her divine commission was 
fulfilled. And then it was that she met, together with splendid 
successes, her first real defeats. She had prophesied within 
some three weeks the date of her capture and betrayal ; and 
in prison she was not abandoned. On one occasion the Voice 
woke her as she "slept for sorrow" in her cell at Rouen. 

"Was it by touching you on the arm?" demanded her in- 
quisitors somewhat fatuously. 

"It awoke me without touching," Jeanne answered; and 
then, with heart-reaching simplicity, she rehearsed the ex- 
quisite little drama of consolation. No she did not go upon 
her knees but she thanked the Vision for coming. "I was 
sitting on the bed; I joined my hands; I implored its help. 
The Voice said to me, ' Answer them boldly, God will help 
thee 1 ' " 



664 JEANNE D'ARC [Feb., 

So now we come near to the greatest point of all: the 
source of Jeanne's visions. The Rouen judges declared that 
these apparitions proceeded from the devil, and they dealt 
with her accordingly. M. Anatole France and his school 
opine that they came from her own noble but unsound im- 
agination, and they have dealt with her accordingly. But 
the Maid herself said they came from God ; and after her 
momentary weakness of denial, she turned back and sealed 
her faith with blood and with fire. So the Mind of the Church, 
believing Jeanne, judging her inspiration by its fruits, has dealt 
with her accordingly. Now it does not appear that the Soldier- 
Maid was particularly introspective or at all analytical. She 
did not question (as we are wont to question) the how and 
the why of Almighty God. But she listened, as few have lis- 
tened in this garrulous world. Then, with an Ecce Ancill* Do- 
mini, she threw herself unreservedly into the work of His will. 
And just this " one rapture of an inspiration " was the basic 
need of her disheartened people. Only a miracle could have 
raised fifteenth century France to any belief in its own des- 
perate cause, and the miracle was Jeanette ! By the dynamic 
force of her own divine and vivid certainty, she lifted up the 
hearts ef men. It was not simply her genius which undid 
the Hundred Years' War and saved the nationhood of France ; 
it was not even her sanctity; it was the supreme, miraculous, 
God-given belief in her own mission. 

But her methods were all rational enough. Jeanne's an- 
gelic accolade brought no immunity from the common lot of 
toil and pain. Like many another mystic, she was enormously 
militant: and she fought with armies of men, not of angelsl She 
was the practical idealist ; and that is why she is so intimately 
significant to the woman of to-day, rather than because she 
raised the siege of Orleans or baffled the University of Paris. 
Obviously, Jeanne was a specialist in all her public career. 
The thing which, for particular national reasons, she was called 
to do was distinctly outside the normal province of womanhood 
the way she did it, as distinctly within. There is nothing 
in life or faith or art, nothing great or humble, which would 
not become more beautiful and more effectual if done in the 
spirit she made flesh. It was a spirit of largeness and of 
singleness, a spirit of high-hearted love and magnificent self- 
consecration. Almost unique in history was this peasant girl's 



912.] JEANNE D'AXC 665 

balance of action and vision, of pride and humility, of strength 
and tenderness. She loved, indeed, to help bridge a moat or 
build a rampart; but she loved better to kneel beside some 
dying French or English soldier; and best of all did she 
love to receive Holy Communion on the days when the little 
children were allowed to bear her company. For Jeanne 
walked not alone by faith, but by that which Coventry Pat- 
more has pregnantly named the "corollaries of faith." She 
believed largely she gave all. And oftener than not, these 
corollaries are very human in expression. Love, as we know 
upon the highest authority, is translated by deed and by truth 
into obedience; and the whole Counsels of Perfection may un- 
derlie so simple a matter as walking up instead of down the 
street. It is all a question of motive, of " intention." The 
hero does great things ; he may apparently do more than the 
saint ; the difference is, that the saint does great things for 
God 1 This is the primal lesson of Jeanne's life as of every 
other holy and potent life the height and the holiness of its 
aim. So much for the universals! But Everywoman may well 
inquire more minutely into this Maiden's story to learn, per- 
adventure, by what personal, practical means the trail was 
blazed, the aim achieved. It is conspicuous in the first place 
that Jeanne d'Arc had an immense capacity for good work; 
she left much to God, but nothing to chance. Above this, 
she possessed three of the noblest virtues known to manhood 
or womanhood ; the virtues of courage, simplicity and the love 
of truth. They are very rare (rarer than most of us dare to 
confess) but in them lies the hope of the race. And without 
them heroic sanctity at least is inconceivable. For courage 
is the belief in self and in God, a free and large virtue, the 
daughter of hope and the mother of action. And simplicity 
is the grace of shooting straight, without detour or distraction 
or excitement; in one sense it may be called "divine concen- 
tration." While to love truth and to serve truth with a 
passion absorbing life and death alike, is not far from the king- 
dom of heaven. 

It may be that Jeanne has even greater things than these 
to teach : it is certain that she has other things; but Every- 
woman must discover them for herself 1 



Hew Books. 

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN UTAH. By the Very Rev. W. R. 
Harris, D.D., LL.D. Salt Lake City : Intermountain Cath- 
olic Press. 

The story of the introduction of Catholicism into Utah is 
full of romance and interest. It is, indeed, wonderful what 
the pioneers of our Faith did for the Church ; what sufferings 
they endured; what marvelous gentleness and tact they dis- 
played in dealing with the Indians. They had but one thought 
at heart the spread of the Gospel and truth. We can glean 
out of the present volume what enormous difficulties had to 
be overcome in bringing the light of the Faith to Utah. These 
difficulties came first from the natural antipathy of the Red 
man for the White man, and not far behind were the obstacles 
which nature set up against the intruder iato virgin forests, 
impassible rivers, formidable canyons, gorges, mountains. But 
all were overcome by the intrepid band of Spaniards who, 
leaving Santa Fe, made a circuit of the four adjacent states ; 
proceeding north to near the uttermost bounds of Colorado, 
thence west to Utah Lake, then slightly southwest to Arizona 
(the Grand Canyon), from where, by an east-southeast journey, 
they crossed the Rio Grande del Norte, and then by a short 
coarse arrived back at Santa Fe. 

This memorable journey of a party under the direction of 
the Franciscan Fathers, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre 
Velez de Escalante ten persons in all set out on July 29, 
1776, and arrived back at the point of departure on January 
2, 1777. For the Diario of the Fathers, now printed for the 
first time in English, the thanks of all students of history 
should be given to Dr. Harris. It is one of those human 
documents which will always live ; so full of that naive sim- 
plicity of soul and earnestness of purpose is it, that it takes 
possession of the reader. Without detracting from the value 
of Dr. Harris* work we would wish that this Diario were 
reprinted separately in convenient form for the use of all in- 
terested in the early history of the United States. 

From 1776 to 1841 no Catholic priest put foot on the soil 
of Utah. In the latter year Father De Smet, the famous 
Jesuit, seems to have passed through there on his way to his 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 667 

Northwest -Mission. In 1846 he met the Mormons who, to 
the number of about 10,000, were camped on the Territory of 
Omaha, and became friendly with Brigham Young to whom he 
gave such glowing accounts of the country around Utah, that 
it seems probable that Young decided to make the place his 
land of promise. Father De Smet does not claim that his ad- 
vice was the means of lending the Mormons there; all he says 
in his letter, which the author quotes, is: "They asked me a 
thousand questions about the regions I had explored, and the 
valley which I have just described to you pleased them greatly 
from the account I gave of it. Was that what determined 
them? I would not dare assert it. They are there!" But 
if after events prove anything it does look as if the Mormons 
were grateful to the Jesuit for his information. Later on in 
the history of Catholicism in Utah the Mormon tabernacle 
of St. George was placed at the disposal of Father Scanlan 
(now Bishop), and not only that, but the tabernacle choir 
learned how to sing the choir parts of a High Mass, and sang 
at Father Scanlan's Mass after a fortnight's practice. 

The growth of the Church in Utah was constant if some- 
what slow, which of course may be easily understood. In 
1886 it was erected into a separate diocese with Father Scan- 
Ian as Bishop. Since then the progress has been marked. 
There are about 10,000 Catholics spread over an area of 
r 53i78 miles, with twenty priests, ninety-eight sisters, twenty 
churches, schools and a well- equipped hospital. So far as 
one may judge from the buildings erected by the present 
Bishop, the Catholics of the state are full of enthusiasm for 
the advance of religion. Everything augurs well for a great 
future for the Church in the Mormon State. 

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA. By E. L. S. Horsburgh, M.A. 
London: Methuen & Co. 60 cents. 

A fourth edition of Mr. Horsburgh's Life of Savonarola has 
just been sent us for review. It is not only a revised but an 
enlarged edition of the original book. This study of one of 
the greatest of Florentines is of engrossing interest. The fifty 
years of his extraordinary career coincide with the period of 
the Renaissance " the most brilliant, diversified and momen- 
tous epoch in the history of the world." Moulded almost un- 
consciously by it Savonarola was the incarnation of that 



668 NEW BOOKS [Feb , 

period. Calm and storm alternating from the quiet, cloistered 
life led in St. Domenico at Bologna, he passes into the wild 
whirlpool of the world without, torn and distraught with party- 
factions and political intriguings, until at last he plunges into 
the eddying, shifting public life of Florence and the whole 
city, falling under the magic sway of the Ferrarese Friar, is 
subdivided into parties of "followers" or "adversaries" of 
Girolamo Savonarola. In truth a wonderful man in a wonder- 
ful age. 

With calm exactitude free from any perceptible bias, the 
author proceeds to weigh in the balance, the two principal 
figures of the ensuing drama those of Pope Alexander VI. 
and " Frate Hieronimo." Alexander Borgia that name at 
which the world in general, ignorant as is the average mob of 
facts, has hurled for centuries the rotten eggs of its vitupera- 
tion emerges, in so far as concerns the Papal power, with 
hands clean of the stain of Savonarola's blood ; and the author 
does not hesitate to assert, that the famous Professor Villari's 
contention " that the Pope secretly aided and abetted the test" 
of the fiery ordeal, in hopes of its failure and the conse- 
quent downfall and possible death of the Friar, " rests on no 
extant evidence, and is, indeed, contrary to what evidence is avail- 
mble." In fact it is now proved by recent research, that the 
much-abused Pope behaved with great leniency and self re- 
straint, even under the fiercest rhetorical denunciations of 
Savonarola's preachings. When the last terrible scene was 
closing in, he appointed as Chief of the three Papal Commis- 
sioners who (at the request of the Signoria of Florence) were 
to make inquiry into the case of the rebellious Friar, Torriani, 
Master General of the Dominican Order. He was a man of the 
highest reputation, who had "shown himself zealous in forward- 
ing Savonarola's schemes of Conventual reform," and had him- 
self appointed Savonarola Vicar of the Tuscan Congregation, 
when the St. Marco Community was practically, at Savona- 
rola's petition, rendered independent by Pope Alexander. Of 
the three trials he had to undergo, two were purely civil and 
at the hands of the Signoria of Florence, and it was only after 
long delay and after these two civil trials that Alexander 
would appoint the Papal Court of Inquiry and would agree 
finally to the death sentence passed by the Civil Courts being 
carried out in Florence. That the torturing of the prisoners 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 669 

was the hideous outcome of the general practice of those days 
there is now no doubt, and Savonarola and his two compan- 
ions were not the first, nor the last political prisoners who, 
400 years ago, were tortured in order to obtain evidence. 

How, and why it was, that all Florence suddenly turned 
upon the man on whom but a few weeks previously her hopes 
had rested, and whose inspired words and " prophesyings " 
from the Duomo pulpit were law this and much more Mr. 
Horsburgh tells with brilliant, diamond-cut clearness. No 
book about Savonarola, neither that of Villari, nor Pastor, nor 
Lucas, nor Luotti, nor Mandell Creighton, is to our mind, so 
thoroughly in touch as is this " study " with the times and 
the marvelous man of whom it treats, that extraordinary char- 
acter hailed at once by admirers as "Saint" and by enemies 
as "heretic"; whose allegiance to Catholic doctrine and the 
Roman supremacy cannot be challenged, and yet whose per- 
sonal revolt against the personal authority and character of 
Alexander VI. has been exploited as a party-cry by Luther 
and the Lutherans ! 

THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. New York : Henry Holt 
& Co. 75 cents each. 

An Introduction to Mathematics, by A. N. Whitchead, con- 
tains a number of chapters on various departments of mathe- 
matics, such as variables, imaginary numbers, conic sections, 
trigonometry. In a few instances a brief, historical explana- 
tion is prefaced to the chapters. Lovers of the exact science 
will study this book with considerable interest. 

No book would be of greater service to the average per- 
son of moderate means wno may be tempted to speculate or 
invest, than The Stock Exchange, by Francis W. Hirst. Al- 
though written principally for Great Britain, there are pages 
upon pages which cannot but be of use to readers in this 
country ; besides, the author devotes one chapter to Wall 
Street, first giving its history, then its present life, and the 
modes of operation there. The last chapter, containing advice 
to investors, is of vast importance and value to all those who 
are not in "the inner ring." 

Written by a clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Cour- 
tenay Ilbert, Parliament : Its History, Constitution and Practice, 
cannot fail to contain matter both trustworthy and useful. 



670 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

The author gives, in the first place, an interesting, historical 
resume of the origin and development of parliaments. It is 
curious to note that the word "parliament" came from what 
was apparently a breach of monastic rule a talk after dinner 
in the cloisters. Then follow some half-dozen chapters de- 
scribing the House of Commons and its various modes of pro- 
cedure. In the last chapter some attention is given to our 
own electoral houses, as well as those of France and the 
British Colonies. 

In matter and form A Short History of War and Peace, by 
G. H. Ferris, is an exception to those volumes of this series 
which we have already noticed. In other volumes we saw 
none of that petty partisanship which disgraces this one. The 
author seems not to have learned that epithets such as 
" Papist," " Romanism," and " Popery " have ceased to be 
used by scholars and gentlemen, and are now confined to that 
rapidly-disappearing class of authors whose ignorance of the 
Catholic Church is only equaled by their vulgar insolence. 
It is time now that Catholics should teach a lesson to such 
individuals refusing to either buy or to read their productions. 
All we are surprised at is that the revising editors of the series 
did not attempt to give the author of this book a lesson in 
the etiquette of modern and liberal authorship. 

Tht Science of Wealth, by J. A. Hobson, contains some 
useful material for those who devote any time to economic 
questions, particularly those connected with the living ques- 
tion of labor and wages. In a dozen chapters the author 
covers the ground fairly well, the chapter on the labor-move- 
ment being especially worthy of attention. 

Those who will expect to find in Modern Geography, by 
Marion I. Newbigin, a dry list of bays, mountains, and so 
forth, will be agreeably surprised on opening it to discover 
that those bogies of youth have given place to a number of 
chapters on such questions as ice and its work, plant geog- 
raphy, the distribution of animal life, and the localization of 
minerals. 

Polar Exploration, by William S. Bruce, is written from a 
scientific point of view. The astronomical features of the 
polar regions are briefly stated, after which chapters are de- 
voted to such subjects as plant and animal life, meteorology, 
physics of the polar seas. In the chapter on " Plant Life," 



i9i 2.] NEW BOOKS 671 

the important question of scurvy is dealt with. The old sup- 
posed remedy and preventative, lime juice, does not appear, 
from the experience of explorers who compare results, to be so 
efficacious as was formerly thought. Mr. Bruce's doctrine is : 
whatever locality you are in, feed on the animal and plant life 
of that locality, and scurvy will not appear. 

There is not much of value for American readers in 
Liberalism, by L. T. Hobhouse, M.A. In places he lays down 
some acceptable laws for liberal government of peoples, but 
in other places he fails to push his arguments to their cor- 
rect conclusions. Among his bibliography he cites works by 
Locke, Paine, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Mazzini. 

AMERICA OF TO-MORROW. By Abbe" Felix Klein. Chicago: 
A. C. McClurg & Co. $1.75. 

In his new book, called America of To-morrow, Abbe Felix 
Klein, author of In the Land of the Strenuous Life and An 
American Student in France, has given us a series of interesting 
papers, the results of his recent travels in the United States 
and Western Canada. Originally written in French, the book 
has been translated by E. H. Wilkins, and is published with 
an introductory note by Professor Charles R. Henderson of 
the University of Chicago. The Abbe writes gently and, per- 
haps, too uncritically, but that is, at least, a relief from .our 
muck-raking journalism and literature. He describes the at- 
mosphere and the characteristics of several of our large cities, 
notably, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Seattle and San Fran- 
cisco, and gives a particularly interesting view of Western 
Canada. But most interesting of all, probably, to Americans, 
and most timely, is the long chapter devoted to Archbishop 
Ireland. The Abbe* gives a vivid and sympathetic picture 
of the venerable Archbishop who is held in such honor by 
so many thousand Catholic citizens, West and East. He em- 
phasizes the remarkable personality of the Archbishop, his 
wide-ranging activities, and the magnitude of the work he has 
done for the Church and for the country. The golden jubilee 
of the Archbishop, although by his wish not to be celebrated, 
lends an especial significance to this short but able biography. 
Nor can the book be dismissed without a word of praise for 
the concluding chapter, which deals in a scholarly and broad- 
minded way with the Japanese question, and the possible or 
impossible solutions of the problem of yellow immigration. 



672 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE, ROME. By Right 
Rev. Henry A. Brann, D.D. New York: Benziger 

Brothers. $2. 

It was at the request of the late Archbishop Corrigan that 
the author wrote this history. Himself the oldest living stu- 
dent of the college (entering it in 1860 and graduating in '62) 
he can look back over a long vista of years and note the 
gradual growth of the institution. To have a national college 
in Rome was one of the great desires of Archbishops Kenrick 
and Hughes. When the proposal came from Pius IX., in 
1855, that the United States should have a representative 
college in the Eternal City, Archbishop Hughes promptly took 
up the ^matter. A few months later when the Eighth Pro- 
vincial Council of Baltimore was held it was resolved to ap- 
point a committee of bishops to inquire into the question. 
From this arose a correspondence between the ecclesiastical 
authorities in the states, and those in Rome, which caused to 
be brought rapidly forward plans to open a college. In 1857 
Pius IX, bought a convent which had formerly belonged to 
the Dominican and Visitation Nuns, but which was at that 
moment occupied by the French officers of the Roman garri- 
son. The conditions stipulated by Propaganda were that 
when the use of the building should be handed over to the 
American bishops they should obtain the necessary funds for 
its maintenance. For this purpose $50,000 was contributed 
by the American people during the next year. On December 
7 1 r 859. the college was opened informally, the solemn open- 
ing taking place next day when Cardinal Barnabo presided. 
Twelve students were present and with them was Dr. McGlynn 
who (according to the author) was not properly a student. 

As the years rolled by, the college progressed under the 
capable direction of the six rectors who have guided its des- 
tinies. But like most new institutions it had its financial 
troubles in the beginning. These were, it is to be hoped, set 
at rest forever in 1869, when $150,000 was collected. All one 
can regret is that the legal title could not have been secured 
to the American Bishops to prevent the trouble which shortly 
afterwards came in the shape of a threat from the Italian 
Government to sell the college; a trouble which may easily 
come to the front again some day. American Catholics are 
grateful to President Arthur aad his Secretary of State, Mr. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 673 

Frelinghuysen, for their energy and promptness in saving the 
property. Since then the college has been enlarged and a beau- 
tiful summer residence, the Villa di Santa Caterina, has been 
secured. 

With 6 archbishops (at the time of the book going to press) 
coming from its halls, 18 bishops, 523 priests, the Catholics of 
the United States may have legitimate pride in their college, 
which seems now to have got clear of the rocks and to be out 
into an open sea with a fair breeze to send it along. Mgr. 
Brann's volume will be read eagerly by past students to whcm 
it will bring back old, fond memories. 

A LIKELY STORY. By William De Morgan. New York : The 
Henry Holt Company. $1.35. 

It is a well known fact that when Mr. William De Morgan 
sat down at his desk last year to begin another of bis Vic- 
torian and suburban novels, he could not find his fountain- 
pen. Thinking it had hidden in a fit of petulance at being 
overworked to the extent of a quarter of a million words 
every effort, Mr. De Morgan abandoned the search, and sent 
out to a second-hand shop for another pen. This one was 
quite rusty, but with some scratching and spluttering it wrote 
An Afiair of Dishonor. Then (let us hope I ) it was thrown 
on the ash-heap. At any rate, Mr. De Morgan's own private 
fountain-pen has now been recovered. Both its disappearance 
and its restoration are shrouded in mystery, and we only hope 
that "it never can happen again." The best literary circles, 
however, (as it is surely no longer indiscreet to mention) have 
secretly suspected that it was borrowed by the happily 
roaming ghost of Charles Dickens, to write an account of a 
Christmas dinner in heaven. Be that as it may, the pleasant 
fact remains that this new book is written by the same su- 
burban and early Victorian pen to which we owe Joseph Vance, 
Somehow Good, and Alice -for-Skort. A Likely Story centres 
around a talking picture, which relates at length its own 
Italian cinquecento history, straightens out a marital tangle in 
Chelsea, and encourages a love affair in Worcestershire. The 
plot is, as you see, rambling and leisurely, and has the dis- 
tinctly novel charm that it does not ask to be taken seriously. 
The characters you will like to meet, especially Mr. Reginald 
Aiken, artist and Cockney, and Miss Priscilla Bax, of whom 
TOL. xciv. 43 



674 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

the author says that she is "the earliest Victorian aunt that 
his pen is responsible for." At the end of the story there 
are a dozen personal pages, in which the author gives a 
whimsical, half-absurd, and wholly delectable apologia pro vita 
sua, and which alone, if you like Mr. De Morgan, are worth 
the price of the volume. If you do not like him, well, he is 
exactly like olives altogether a matter of individual taste. 

MAURICE MAETERLINCK. By Edward Thomas. New York: 
Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.60. 

The Belgian poet, mystic, symbolist and play-writer who 
has just received the Nobel prize for literature, and who in- 
tends shortly to visit this country, is said by his admirers to 
be "the most brilliant and commanding figure in the literary 
world to-day." It was in the hope of discovering the founda- 
tion of this claim that we took up Mr. Thomas' book which 
offers, besides a short biographical sketch, "critical and de- 
scriptive notices," of his work. 

His first poems and first play, Mr. Thomas says, are 

of the hot-house type, the vapors and bad blood of youth 
more unconventional than sincere, . . . they represent with 
a numbed and melancholy intensity the littleness of men, lost, 
ignorant and powerless amidst the forces of nature. 

Six or eight plays are then given with quasi-mediaeval 
scenario gloomy, black towers, Plutonian waters, interminable 
stone passages, cold and dark, moaning seas, haunted forests, 
barren wastes and frenzied kings and queens wandering with 
dotards, innocent maidens and bewildered children. Never is 
there a ray of sunlight nor a sane word. Maeterlinck seems 
to be saying with the fat boy in Pickwick, " I wants to make 
your flesh creep ; " but it can't be felt as half real. It is too 
overloaded even for nightmares. We are told that all these 
things are symbols. Of what ? M. Maeterlinck will not reveal, 
and it is questionable whether he knows. 

The Philosophic Studies, comprising a translation from the 
Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck, interpretations of Novalis, Carlyle 
and Emerson that follow are such a medley of false mysti- 
cism, such a mixture of platitudes that no definite opinion of 
them seems possible or necessary. Even Mr. Thomas says : 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 675 

" I find in these two books a certain appearance of facility 
and unreality . . . the voice of one coming out of a li- 
brary, not a wilderness." 

In his essay on "The Life of the Bees," Maeterlinck says 
that the bees have developed a civilization superior to ours, 
an altruism so much more perfect, living only for the race, 
not for the individual. 

As to flowers: he loves the chrysanthemum "because of 
its singular submissiveness to the perverse multiplication of 
its forms," and he says that, " if plants are to reveal one of 
the worlds we are awaiting, the chrysanthemum will do it," 
and the dog "probably" another. The two plays Monna 
Vonna and Mary Magdalen, have been refused licences in Eng- 
land, and belong to a type which should be impossible on any 
stage. 

As to M. Maeterlinck's philosophy if such it may be 
called let us quote a few sentences that will illustrate it. 

Mr. Thomas says that "since man is such a pigmy, the 
various benevolent, insolent or indifferent powers which have 
been called God, seem to Maeterlinck inadequate as creator 
and ruler of such beings," " Maeterlinck only appeals strongly 
to those who have shaken off the old religious beliefs." Ma- 
eterlinck himself says : " We are now emerging from a great 
religious period and that threatening background of human 
life is disappearing." Again he writes : " If God there be " 
. . . And again: "Jesus Christ and Marcus Aurelius are 
not open to misfortunes of the same complexion as Hamlet 
and CEdipus." His people "do what they must." The jealous 
lover dragging the princess by the hair says: "she could give 
lessons in innocence to God." In another vein : " It is idle 
to think that by means of words any real communication can 
ever pass from one man to another." He writes of "coming 
out of the thick air of experience into the crystal inane." 

May we not justly ask : Is there any character or purpose 
in all this? Is it "brilliant and commanding?"' 

Mr. Thomas says: "Maeterlinck's writings are certain to 
be treated as sacramental by coteries and to be brusquely 
ridiculed by the no-nonsense school." Let us be thankful 
that there is a " no-nonsense school," and that it has re- 
tained what these sentimentalists lack a saving sense of 
humor. 



676 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

THE WARGRAVE TRUST. By Christian Reid. New York: 
Benziger Brothers. $1.25. 

One who appreciates the courage to do right, and takes 
pleasure in seeing men and women climb to high levels of 
conduct amid trying circumstances, will find this an inspiring 
story. There is nothing bizarre in the make-up of the char- 
acters who here play their parts. They are entirely normal. 
There is nothing of subtlety in the problems they have to 
solve ; they are substantially such as confront thousands every 
day. The reader who likes to occupy his mind with the do- 
ings of whimsical people, or with the behavior of better-bal- 
anced folk in odd and unexpected circumstances, and has no 
taste for what is really worth while, will call this a dull tale. 
To the thoughtful it will prove thoroughly interesting, for it 
is a well-thought-out and well-written story of fine conduct 
in the face of heavy odds. 

THE STORY OF CECILIA. By Katharine Tynan Hinkson. New 
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25. 

An unusual marriage, involving a rather difficult, moral 
question, gives rise to this story, and permeates it to the end. 
The report that her lover had met a dreadful death in Africa, 
drove Cecily Shannon, an Irish girl of the aristocratic class, 
out of her mind and to the point of death. Brought back to 
partial health and reason by a young plebian physician who 
slightly resembled her betrothed, she thought him her loven 
and as there seemed to be no other way to save her from a 
wretched fate, she was given to him in marriage. A daugh- 
ter, the Cecilia of our story, was born to them. Out of this 
fruitful root sprang many problems. The physician's anxiety 
as to what would happen when the cloud on his wife's mind 
lifted and her memory caught up the broken thread ; his 
mother's instinctive, deep-seated and unrelenting antipathy 
towards the gentry; the varied feelings roused by Cecilia's in- 
troduction to her mother's people and by the rivalry for her 
hand between one of that class and a distant relative of her 
father's, all these things and many more like them are thor- 
oughly understood and vividly set forth in the story. It is a 
healthy, charming tale. 



I 9 1 2.] NEW BOOKS 677 

EXPLANATION OF THE RULE OF ST. AUGUSTINE. By Hugh 
of St. Victor. Translated by Dom Aloysius Smith, C.R.L. 
St. Louis: B. Herder. 75 cents. 

It is with the idea of helping those who, live under the 
rule of St. Augustine, but are not familiar with Latin, that Dom 
Smith has translated this treatise. But every religious, male 
or female, will find within its covers much matter of great 
import for advancement in the spiritual life, while those of the 
laity who desire to get an idea of the perfection aimed at in 
community life, will do well to read it. Chapters are devoted 
to love of God, humility, prayer, obedience, and several points 
in connection with the temporal necessaries of life. 

CHILDREN OF TO-MORROW. By Clara E. Laughlin. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.30. 

The main portion of this novel is based on an episode 
which had occurred fifteen years previously. Lyman Icnes, a 
State Governor, had been holding office during a critical period 
in the history of labor in the United States. A great strike 
had been declared with no prospect of any agreement being 
arrived at by the men and their employers. His office became 
so deluged with correspondence from both factions of strikers 
that he found it necessary to enlarge his staff of clerks. With 
a number of incapable persons he could not make any head- 
way. At this point one of his clerks discovered a Mrs. Bar- 
deen, who turned out to be specially adapted for the work the 
Governor had in hand. But her husband objected. Ostensi- 
bly submitting, she secretly kept on at the work. The husband 
discovering this, shoots the Governor and then commits suicide. 
The Governor is thenceforth hailed as a martyr to the cause 
of labor. 

Fifteen years pass, and the children of Lyman Innes meet 
Mrs. Bardeen and her daughter, both of whom have changed 
their names. On this meeting the plot rests. It works smooth- 
ly, though at times the author fails to keep a tight grip on 
it; but she writes well, her particular strength lyir.g in de- 
scription of city life. There is that atmosphere of close living 
all through the book. She seems to know her city New 
York well. 



678 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. By J. Ramsay MacDonald, 
M.P. New York: The Henry Holt Company. 75 cents. 

As Mr. MacDonald rightly points out, it is to be expected 
that in a series like The Home University Library, when other 
volumes have been written by experts in their individual lines, 
that the editors would turn to one identified with and presum- 
ably an authority on Socialism. The author being connected, 
with the Independent Labor Party of Great Britain, and a 
known exponent of the movement, was accordingly sought to 
write the present volume. To meet the obvious demands of the 
uninitiated the author divides his work into four principal 
parts ; the first being an account of socialistic evolution, the 
next a criticism of existing abuses in the world, then an ex* 
position of what Socialism is: its dreams, its work both now 
and in the future, and lastly a brief historical resume of the 
Socialist movement. 

In his Introduction Mr. MacDonald defines Socialism as 

the creed of those who, recognizing that the community ex- 
ists for the improvement of the individual and for the main- 
tenance of liberty, and that the control of the economic 
circumstances of life means the control of life itself, seek to 
build up a social organization which will include in its activi- 
ties the management of those economic instruments, such as 
land and industrial capital, that cannot be left safely in the 
hands of individuals. 

Later on he explains in extended form what underlies this 
definition ; sometimes satisfactorily, sometimes rather vaguely. 
There is certainly much to be accepted and commended in 
what he says concerning several abuses of modern life, but 
the proposed remedy of it what shall we say ? 

This is all: that the theoretical solution given is not in 
conformity with the teaching of other Socialists; indeed, if we 
mistake not, of some of Mr. MacDonald's own associates, if 
we may take the lurid language of Mr. Keir Hardie, a few 
years ago, at its face value. Undoubtedly Mr. MacDonald is 
serious and sincere, and if he had his way many abuses would 
.be crushed out of modern life. Yet at times we are tempted 
to think that he is suppressing something unpleasant, that he 
is not stating the tenets of up-to-date Socialists in all their 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 679 

nakedness; indeed, to be candid, we think that there is too 
much open opposition on his part to those devotees of Social- 
ism, whose advanced views have made cautious people tremble 
at the thought of what would happen if Socialism materialized 
into something concrete in life. 

That the Socialist theory is a failure is writ large on many 
a page of this book. The author never dreamt of this, for in 
the one open failure of Socialism the French national work- 
shops he takes considerable care to explain how the movement 
was bound from the very start to be a fiasco. This is not 
what we refer to, but to the utter lack of cohesion, the diver- 
sity of view, the anarchic, communistic, revolutionary (Mr. 
MacDonald insists that "evolutionary" is the proper word) theo- 
ries and desires of a large percentage of Socialists; theories 
which have been put into active service whenever an oppor- 
tunity has occurred. 

One thing we note in the book: a definite expression re- 
garding perfect liberty in matters of religion is wanting. The 
author leaves on the Catholic mind the unpleasant feeling that 
he is thoroughly antagonistic to the Catholic Church. His 
references to it are by no means accurate. We do not wish 
to be unkind, but we cannot help pointing out that the author 
is only half educated in his own subject. It is evident that 
he has failed to grasp the historical fact that the Reformation 
was primarily an economic revolution, and that dogma played 
only a secondary place at first; and, again, that Capitalism, 
which he wishes to annihilate, began with Protestantism. The 
nonsense he writes about individual reason challenging eccle- 
siastical bondage (p. 22), and the absurdity of quoting Luther 
a toady to tyrannical and titled libertines, and a man wholly 
out of sympathy with the people (the Proletariat) should not 
find a place in a book written by a Socialist, particularly one 
who can pen the following words: 

There are some events in history about which popular 
opinion comes to a conclusion, wrong as wrong can be, but 
the opinion Is circulated, is reiterated, is persisted in until it 
becomes an unquestioned assumption, and it can be removed 
after that only by the most patient and laborious campaign of 
telling the truth (p. 164). 

That is all Catholics ask truth, justice, fair-play, and, 



680 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

above all, that shibboleth of Socialism, Liberty. If we may 
be permitted to read between the lines of this book, which is 
certainly the mildest exposition of Socialism we have read, we 
can only come to the conclusion that Socialists are not pre- 
pared to give us any of them. 

DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL SO- 
CIETY. Vols. V.-X. Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. 
Clarke Company. 

We wish again to emphasize the singular value of these 
volumes to all students of Industrialism. The title of the 
work sufficiently indicates its scope. The matter which the 
volumes present, and which has been secured only after long- 
continued and painstaking research cannot be found elsewhere. 
It is a rescript of the daily thought of the day ; of how move- 
ments actually started and progressed. The contemporaneous 
history here presented is a most important contribution to the 
history of the origins and growth of the problems, contests, 
aims and successes of the labor movement from frontier days 
to the year 1880. In view of present social conditions and 
the vast problems that face us few studies are more useful 
and beneficial just now than that of the question of Labor. 

ITALIAN CITIES AND COUNTRY SEATS. By Tryphosa Bates 
Batcheller. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. $5. 

The volume before us gives proof that Mrs. Bates Batcheller 
enjoyed a very unusual opportunity of becoming familiar with 
the homes of the Italian nobility, and pen and camera have 
been freely used in presenting us with detailed descriptions 
of the places where this gifted young American woman was 
cordially entertained. Naturally she is brimming over with 
enthusiasm at the graciousness extended her by exalted and 
even by royal persons, and this volume of her letters is undis- 
guised and undiluted in its admiration. Chapters of history 
that cling about some noble name, bloody or romantic episodes 
that long ago were staged in a castle or villa which she has 
visited and photographed these combine with vivid sketches 
of newly-made friends, to give the book a rather unique place 
in the literature descriptive of contemporary Italy. 

Two notes we make in criticism : First, that here again, is 
displayed that lofty unconcern of blunders in Italian which 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 681 

has come to be characteristic of American publishers ; and 
secondly, that Mrs. Batchellcr, is sometimes as unfortunate ia 
her allusions to the Catholic religion as she is in the writing 
of English. 

THE INCOME TAX. A study of the History, Theory and Prac- 
tice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad. By Ed- 
win R. A. Seligman. New York: The Macmillan Com- 
pany. $3.50. 

Professor Seligman's book is the one we should recom- 
mend to a reader desiring to secure a clear and authoritative 
exposition of the main outlines of the very urgent issues 
involved in the question of an income tax. Also to the stu- 
dent aiming at a thorough examination of the details of the 
problem, this volume is indispensable. Few questions just 
no* are of more urgent or fundamental interest than those 
involved in the agitation for a federal income tax, and upon 
these questions few men can speak with such authority as Pro- 
fessor Seligman. In this book we have the gathered harvest 
of his many years of patient and wide-ranging study, and it 
must be carefully weighed by any who henceforth speak, or 
write, or attempt to legislate upon the topic here discussed. 

The Introduction recalls some of the fundamental questions 
connected with methods of taxation ; the body of the book 
reviews the history of the Income Tax, dividing 600 pages 
about equally between Europe and the United States; and 
the conclusion discusses the practical points involved in the 
legislative programmes that are daily being submitted to the 
consideration of the American citizen. 

If it be not unfair to the author, it will at least interest 
the reader to have a mere indication of the conclusions of this 
long and laborious study. They are chiefly these : 

First, in the United States the income tax is surely com- 
ing. 

Secondly, experience has always shown that under ordinary 
conditions an income tax always works better from year to 
year or from decade to decade. 

Thirdly, the success of an income tax depends, perhaps 
more than almost any other modern institution upon adminis- 
trative machinery. Not even an ideally perfect scheme will 
work unless we select the correct machinery. 



682 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

A^CONVERT'S REASON WHY. By A. J. Hayes. Cambridge: 
The Riverside Press. $i. 

The author, who is a convert, gathered together the material 
of this book as he was gaining knowledge, alone and unaided, 
of the Catholic Church. Having derived great help from it 
he has now thrown it together in book form, and given it to 
the world, being satisfied that his reward will be considerable 
if it lights the way for even one soul. 

The plan of the work is catechetical. Fndeed, the simple 
Catechism is more or less repeated question and answer. But 
the difference between the two books lies in the addition, in 
the book under review, of copious and long extracts illustrating 
the question in hand. These extracts are from a wide variety 
of sources, from the Holy Scriptures down to the Boston 
Transcript (two extracts from which, by the way, we cannot 
see a reason for having included) ; poetry, essays, novels have 
been all commandeered. The last few pages of the book are 
occupied with brief biographies of those whose words have 
been quoted. 

The author uses the word Revelation instead of the word 
Apocalypse to which Catholics are accustomed. And we should 
like to point out to the publishers that there is no reason why 
a book sent for review, should have its title page disfigured 
by the smear of an ugly rubber stamp. 

FAIR NOREEN. By Rosa Mulholland. New York: Benziger 

Brothers. $1.50. 

This is an entertaining and wholesome story, which gives 
us glimpses of Irish hospitality, resignation to the will of God, 
and faith in His over- ruling Providence, so characteristic of 
the people of whom the story tells. The heroine is the only 
child of an impoverished Earl, who comes unto her own through 
much tribulation. All the characters in the book are well 
drawn, especially the vain, middle-aged, designing mother, 
who stands ready to trim her sails to every breeze. We fear 
that the size of the book will mitigate against its popularity. 

THE GOLDEN SPEARS. By Edmund Leamy. New York: 
Desmond Fitzgerald. $i. 

Under the title, The Golden Spears, and with a short pre- 
face by Mr. J. E. Redmond, is published a special American 



1913.] NEW BOOKS 683 

edition of fairy tales for children by the distinguished Irish 
patriot, the late Edmund Leamy. Woven from the weirdly 
sweet Gaelic traditions and legends, these tales have a beauty, 
a tenderness, and an exquisite imagery not to be described. 
And withal their simplicity ensures their appeal to childish 
hearts. In praise of their author it may not be amiss to quote 
the words of Katharine Tynan : 

As in the case of many Irishmen, public life claimed him, 
to the irreparable loss of other and, perhaps, finer things. He 
had the temperament of the poet and artist, something, too, of 
the knight-errant, and that brought him out into the busy 
arena of politics, to fight many dragons for his liege lady, 
Ireland. Else literature generally would have been the richer. 
As it is, he has left us two or three exquisite books of fairy 
stories, shot through and through with that light and shade, 
that glory of atmosphere which is about me as I write amid 
the hills of Wicklow near " the Golden Spears," which some 
Englishman named prosaically " The Sugar Loaves." Only 
Ireland could have produced Edmund Leamy. He was her 
true son. He responded to every touch of the mother who 
plays on the heart-strings of her children. . . . The harp 
of Ireland, says the old legend, had three strings. The first 
sang of youth and love and laughter ; the second sang of weep- 
ing and sadness ; the third was the song of sleeping, the 
sweetest of all, with which the mother rocks her children to 
sleep. Edmund Leamy knew how to sound all three. 

WOMAN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT WHETHER SHE VOTES OR 
NOT. By William H. Allen. New York : Dodd, Mead & 
Co. $1.50. 

A book that can be of great service to thoughtful Amer- 
can women is Woman's Part in Government, Whether She Votes 
or Not. It is written by William H. Allen, who is the director 
of the Bureau of Municipal Research and Training School for 
Public Service, and the author of Efficient Democracy, Civics 
and Health and other books. Mr. Allen is a believer in equal 
suffrage, but evidently not a promoter of it. He believes that 
women will vote in the future, and that it will be no hard 
task to them. 

Any woman, [he observes] who can run a charity organiza- 
tion, a suburban home, a typewriter, a boarding-house, a 



684 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

sales-counter, a loom with one hundred spindles or a class- 
room with sixty children, will find voting so easy and so 
' simple, and so transient in its satisiaction, that she will won- 
der at woman's anxiety to do it. 

But in this book he suggests, and to a certain extent plans 
out, the surprisingly many civic activities possible to women 
without the use of the ballot. He shows how women may 
work between election times for social reform and progress. 
He has written, in short, a hand-book of practical economics 
for American women, not in a cut and dried fashion, but sug- 
gestively and inspiringly. As he says, the book 

aims not to settle but to raise questions, to encourage self- 
analysis and study of local conditions, to stimulate interest in 
methods and next steps of getting done what we all agree 
should be done to make democracy efficient. 

THE QUEST OF THE SILVER FLEECE. By W. E. Burghardt 
Du Bois. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. $1.35. 

The number of novels attempting to solve the negro prob- 
lem is rather surprisingly small. There should therefore be 
some interest in a new one by the author of The Souls of 
Black Folk, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, himself a negro, and 
an ardent defender and champion of his people. The story is 
called The Quest of the Silver Fleece and is worth reading, if 
simply for its unusual literary merit. The silver fleece is, of 
course, the cotton, and the scene is laid for the most part in 
Alabama. The education of the negroes, the ownership and 
renting of land, and the management of white and black labor 
are among the questions dealt with, and in the last third of 
the book we are given an interesting picture of the social life 
of the educated negroes in the city of Washington, and of 
their political position and influence. The book is not at all 
prosy, however, but remains forcefully and even dramatically 
a story. It may easily be contended that the author's account 
of the abuses practiced by Southern land- owners is exagger- 
ated by prejudice, and that a much fairer view of the ques- 
tion may be found in Octave Thanet's novel, By Inheritance. 
At any rate Mr. Du Bois' book will repay a reading and a 
serious consideration. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 685 

LATTER-DAY CONVERTS. Translated from the French of Rev. 
Alexis Crosnier by Katherine A. Hennessy. Philadelphia: 
John Joseph McVey. 

Personal example has always been the most effective of 
arguments. Hence it is that the story of men who have earn- 
estly sought and found the true Faith will be a most effective 
apologetic with those who are still searching. And the story 
will also have its unique value for those of us who have had 
the gift of Faith since early Baptism. It will teach us how 
we ought to value this divine treasure and make our lives 
conform to its teachings. 

We know of few books likely to prove so useful to inquir- 
ing non- Catholics, nor so stimulating to Catholics, considering 
the dangers of our day, than this small volume entitled: Lat- 
ter-Day Converts, No matter in what school a man may have 
been trained, no matter how deeply he may have drunk of 
human wisdom, no matter how far he may have fallen in the 
moral scale if he but seek sincerely and pray earnestly, he will 
find that there is but one royal road of truth, and that road leads 
to the portals of the Catholic Church. When his soul hungers, 
as all souls must at times hunger, for satisfying food, he will 
find that she alone has the food of eternal life. If one doubts 
this, let him " come and see " the story written in this volume. 
Five men, all of them intellectually strong, one of them a 
giant in intellect, after searching and seeking, find peace and 
rest in the Catholic Church. To her did all their different 
roads lead. Brunetiere found science absolutely unsatisfactory, 
and turned to the Catholic Church as the sole teacher of 
truth. Huysmans found art empty until Catholic truth gave 
it meaning. Rettc tried sensuality, and was saved from despair 
by the Catholic truth of redemption. Francois Coppee was led 
by suffering to the Church of his childhood. Paul Bourget 
sounded modern sociological doctrines that knew not God, 
and then realized that the individual, the family and the state 
demand the truth of the Catholic Church. 

The book is a vindication, and a " triumph " a triumph 
most Christian for it shows how the love and grace of God 
work still in wondrous ways to lead souls to her who is ever 
ancient, and yet ever new. Miss Hennessy is to be congratu- 
lated for bringing it within the reach of English readers and 
for the excellence of her translation. 



686 NEW BOOKS [Feb. 

TENNYSON. Par Firman Roz. Paris : Bloud et Cie. 2 fr. 50. 
LA JEUNESSE DE SHELLEY. P ar A. Koszul. Paris : Bloud 
et Cie. 4 fr. 

M. Brunetiere was quite right : the French nation is still 
" the most inquisitive about foreign literatures," the most 
keenly receptive and appreciative of all that is meant by 
comparative criticism. Here, within a few months, and in 
those admirably printed yet inexpensive editions which Amer- 
ican publishers have yet to achieve, one finds the house of 
Bloud et Cie. issuing critical biographies of Tennyson, the 
typical English laureate, and of the romantic and revolution- 
ary Shelley. It is always interesting and often illuminating to 
study the appreciation of British poets among critics of other 
race, since commonly this appreciation either anticipates or 
survives the home verdict. Byron's vogue upon the Continent 
long outlived the vivid but stormy glory of his English reign, 
and still to a great extent, endures; while apparently, the 
waning of the Tennysonian planet is not yet apparent upon 
Continental horizons. 

M. Firman Roz' study of this latter poet is a pleasant and 
sufficiently exhaustive apotheosis of one whom the author 
rightly designates the official poet, the national poet, of Victor- 
ian England. In the volume of M. Koszul, we have a most 
enthusiastic history of the life and work of Shelley up to his 
twenty-sixth year, with interesting fragments from his own 
letters and the journal of Mary Godwin. English readers, 
perhaps, will quarrel with one or two of the French critic's 
conclusions; they will question the assertion that Tennyson 
possessed "more sympathy and emotion" than Browning, for 
instance and they will suggest to M. Koszul the futility of 
looking for any real maturing of Shelley's genius. It was all 
along, the glory, the uncertainty of la jeunesse. As a brother 
poet has put it: "Both as poet and man he was essentially 
a child." But when all is said, sympathy illumines more than 
it obscures and these two biographies are certain to foster a 
better understanding between book-lovers on both sides of the 
Channel. 

The verse translations are carefully and accurately ren- 
dered, so far as the genius of language permit. Obviously, to 
transpose the lyrics of "The Princess" or the rapturous 
melodies of "Queen Mab," is at best a tour de force ; for the 



i9i2.] NEW BOOA.S 687 

" richness and looseness " of English poetic diction (which 

Shelley's biographer so much admires) may scarcely be re- 
tained in the cadences of Racine and de Mussel. 



w 



riTH GOD, is the inviting title of a new prayer book by 
the Rev. F. X. Lasance. It contains a wealth of prayers, 
devotional reading and instruction, and will recommend itself 
particularly to all lovers of the Eucbaristic Christ. The au- 
thor has, on various occasions, done a great deal to meet the 
needs of the faithful with regard to books of devotion, and his 
latest contribution in this field is certain to prove useful and 
helpful. (New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25.) 

CERMONS AND LECTURES, by Monsignor Grosch (New 
^ York: Benziger Brothers. $1.35). The first five sermons 
in this volume are on the absorbing question of education. 
They are sure to be read with considerable attention. A most 
useful discourse is that on Catholic Intolerance. We find the 
author's style rather florid in places and replete with the 
marks of the rhetorician. This enables us to understand a 
slight straying from historical facts in the sermon on Ireland's 
Apostle. 

A WOMAN'S WORLD TOUR IN A MOTOR, by Harriet 
White Fisher. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. 
$2.) Fortunately a camera was taken along on this remarka- 
ble trip, and we have seventy splendid illustrations as an ac- 
companiment to the very clear text. Mrs. Fisher, the widow 
of a United States navy man, a woman of wealth and social 
position, and a friend to all the celebrities at home and abroad, 
is not averse to publicity, and many pages in her book are de- 
voted to newspaper encomiums of her own original personality 
and the novelty of her mode of taking a vacation. 

A VIKING'S LOVE, by Ottilie A. Liljencrantz. (Chicago : 
** A. C. McClurg & Co. $i.) These four short stories of 
Scandinavian heroes keep close to tradition in picturing their 
subjects as rough, violent men, with passions as simple and 
unrestrained as spring-freshets and mountain-storms; vehement 
in love, fiery in pride, furious in vengeance, terrible in expia- 
tion. Here and there a gleam of the gentler qualities trust- 
fulness, constancy, self-sacrifice, redeems their character and 
softens the story of their deeds. 



688 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

ALYS-ALL-ALONE, by Una Macdonald. (Boston: L. C. 
Page & Co. $1.50.) The craving of a little child for 
the tender and ever-demonstrative love of a mother is the 
theme of this story, written by one who evidently knows little 
folks well. Alys, though dearly loved by all around her, must 
needs be left often to her own devices. In many ways, espe- 
cially through the resourcefulness of a young musician, and 
the vividness of her make-believe life, she manages to keep 
cheerful and to spread sunshine, until at last the heavy trial 
that had clouded her life is unexpectedly lifted, and the fairest 
of her day-dreams comes true. 

'THE MONEY MOON, by Jeffrey Farnol. (New York: 
* Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.25) "Original and quaint," 
are the words used by the author to describe the principal 
character's idea of a walking tour. They may be applied with 
equal correctness to practically all of his own ideas and policies 
and those of the other amiable individuals who come before 
us in the story. The disagreeable people alone strike us as 
thoroughly real. As a study of foibles, some harmless, some 
dangerous, but not actually disastrous, the book is quite in- 
teresting and, in a way, instructive. Besides it is delightfully 
written. 

WHEN "TODDLES" WAS SEVEN. BIBLE STORIES, 
'" by Mrs. Hermann Bosch. (New York: Longmans, Green 
& Co. $i.) These are stories recounted to " Toddles" by 
her mother at bedtime. In writing down to a seven- year- 
old standard, it is difficult to preserve anything of the 
strength and simplicity of the texts of the Testament, and 
though these stories as they stand are praiseworthy, we think 
it better that a child should become familiar with the cvact 
words of the Bible. If the book inspires other mothers to 
make their children familiar with Scripture, however, it will 
fulfill a most worthy mission. 

nODNEY THE RANGER, by John V. Lane. (Boston: L. 
^ C. Page & Co. $1.50.) Rodney, the Ranger, with Daniel 
Morgan on trail and battlefield, is primarily a book for boys, 
but it will be enjoyed by every one who likes a stirring tale 
well told. Complete in itself it should nevertheless be under- 
stood that this story is a continuation of the author's March- 



I9I2.J NEW BOOKS 689 

ing With Morgan, " the patriotic and gallant Morgan, who 
was conspicuously successful in inspiriting and directing many 
of the Revolution's most venturesome spirits." 

T OUISE AUGUSTA LECHMERE, by Rev. Henry D'Arras, 
" S.J. (New York: Benziger Brothers. 90 cents.) This is 
a biography of an English convert to Catholicism, written by 
her son, a Jesuit. It is from the French by Mrs. Frederick 
Raymond Barker. To the comparatively small number of the 
subject's friends this biography will be valuable, but for the 
public at large it does not hold a great deal that will interest. 



M 1 



'ISS BILLY, by Eleanor H. Porter. (Boston: L. C. Page 
& Co. $i 50). In the short space of some three hun- 
dred pages, and in the lapse of three or four years, Miss Billy, 
the heroine of this novel, changes from an impulsive, almost 
ridiculously ignorant sort of young person, into a thoughtful, 
serious, charming woman. Altogether it is not a story of great 
interest or importance. 

'THE QUEEN'S PROMISE, by Mary T. Waggaman. (New 
* York: Benziger Brothers. 60 cents), is a very pretty 
story, and though it tells of a little girl, it will be enjoyed by 
readers of any age. 

DATHOLOGY should learn to confine itself to the medical 
* journals. It is too fond of sticking its ugly face into 
fiction, as witness a new book by Robert Ames Bennet. 
Out of the Primitive, is the story of a man's fight against an 
inherited taint of alcoholism. It is an unnecessary story, and 
rather disagreeable in parts. The chapter in which the man 
takes the communion wine at an Episcopalian service, and so 
rouses his craving for drink, is, without punning, in particu- 
larly bad taste. 

C. PAGE & CO , of Boston, have produced a volume by 
*' Helen W. Henderson on The Pennsylvania Academy of 
the Fine Arts and Other Collections of Philadelphia. The book 
can best be described by quoting from the author's preface : 
"The scope of the present volume is limited to the more im- 
portant of the public collections of Philadelphia, with particu- 
VOL. xciv. 44 



NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

lar stress upon the historic portraits, in which they are ex- 
tremely rich. It aims to give some idea of the artistic ma- 
terial in the city, produced by that galaxy of resident artists, 
whose presence, fostered by the court of Washington, caused 
Philadelphia, in her early days, to be looked upon as the 
Athens of America." The eighty-two fine illustrations make 
the book a valuable addition to libraries of art. It sells 
for $3. 

A NNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON, best known as the author 
** of the Little Colonel series for girls, has published 
a book called Travelers Five Along Life's Highway (Boston : L. 
C. Page & Co. $1.25). The book, which presents a foreword 
by Bliss Carman, consists of five short stories told with sweet- 
ness and humor. 

TT is a pleasure to welcome yearly, the handy little publication 
* known as The Catholic Diary. The edition for 1912 marks 
the fourth year of its publication. Many useful changes have 
been made, and instead of the daily thoughts culled from the 
writings of the Saints, quotations from the Holy Bible are used. 
The Diary is so arranged as to be useful in all parts of the 
world. It may be purchased from Benztger Brothers at a cost 
of 40 cents. 

/CONFESSION MADE EASY, by the Rev. Fr. Hockenmaier, 
y O.F.M., is a manual of instructions and devotions for the 
Catholic laity translated into English by the Rev. L. A. 
Reudter. This manual has already been translated into nine 
languages. The subject is clearly and exhaustively treated. 
75 cents is the cost of the book in cloth binding. It is pub- 
lished by the Society of the Divine Word, Techney, 111. 

/^ANTATE, is the title given to a collection of English and 
^ Latin hymns with music, compiled by Prof. John Singen- 
berger. It should prove an efficient help towards furthering 
congregational singing in churches. (New York: Fr. Pustet. 
35 cents). 



DE SANTA TERESA DE JESUS. For el P. Fran- 
cisco de Ribera. (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili). Father 
Ribera is first among Spanish authorities on St. Teresa, not 



1912.] NEW BOOKS 691 

only because he was first in order of time, but because be was 
also a good historian. His biography of the saint was written 
within five years after her death. The introduction to the 
present edition is by Father J. Pons, S.J. 

T EX IN CORDE, by W. Emery Barnes, D.D. (New York : 
L/ Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25). Lex in Corde consists 
of eighteen studies in the Psalms by the Huldean Professor of 
Divinity of the University of Cambridge. For Catholics there 
is nothing of value or utility in the book. It is written in a 
loose, scrappy manner, and is devoid of that security of opin- 
ion which Catholics expect. The treatment of the authorship 
of the Psalms is slight and unsatisfactory, neither can the cita- 
tions of other authors be considered happy or commendable. 

'THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES. Philological and Exe- 
* getical Commentary, by P. Joiion. (Paris: Gabriel Beau- 
chesne et Cie). The author of this volume is convinced that 
the ancient exegetical tradition represents, in a large measure, 
the thought of the inspired author. The conclusion of his 
study is that the Canticle, in its literal sense, chants the mu- 
tual love of Jehovah and Israel, and traces in broad outlines 
the religious history of the chosen nation. 

T E NOUVEAU DOCTEUR, par Jules Pravieux. (Paris: 
*"* Plon Nourrit et Cie). In Le Nouveau Docteur, the well- 
known novelist, M. Pravieux, adds another to his series of 
already popular provencial studies. The contest between the 
old doctor, who has for almost a lifetime held undisputed 
sway over a wide-spread clientele, and the young one whose 
unwelcome arrival excites a storm of opposition, is very amus- 
ing. The pictures of the cure and his vicaire are dignified, 
lifelike and free from the tendency to the fantastic that dis- 
figures many novels of the day. The feud is closed by an at- 
tending and inevitable love story. 

'THE following are the latest numbers of the excellent series 
-I published by Bloud et Cie of Paris: Lettres Choisies de 
Saint Vincent de Paul ; Bible et Science, par Ch. de Kir wan; 
Berkeley, par Jean Didier; L'Ouvriere, par Mile. Jules Simon; 
Malebranche, par J. Martin; La Paix dans la Verite, par Ber- 
nard Allo; Le Missal Remain, par Dom J. Baudot. 



jForeign periobicals. 

The Tablet (16 Dec.): "Nonconformity and the 'Ne Temcre.' " 
"The latest protest against the ' Ne Temere' decree 
comes from the Wesleyan Methodists." The promulga- 
tion of the decree is regarded as constituting a " serious 
danger to the public welfare." But it is shown that the 
only instance where the decree might effect a hardship 
is in the case of a " mixed marriage." And here ample 
means exist for guarding the rights of the non-Catholic 
party. At any rate, the decree does not affect the ob- 
ligations of natural justice resting on a Catholic who 
marries a non-Catholic against the provisions of the 

"Ne Temere." Abbot Gasquet, O.S.B., considers 

the charges brought against 'Ike Encyclopedia Britannica, 
and finds them "undeserved and consequently unjust." 
"The Crusade Against Evil Literature." An im- 
portant and influential deputation, representing church- 
men and laymen of the highest rank, has waited on the 
Home Secretary to ask for legal control of books, pict- 
ures and entertainments of a demoralizing character. 
IB Ireland a similar determined movement has been 
afoot for some time. 

(23 Dec.): "After a short passage through the House 
of Lords, the Insurance Bill is now part of the law of 

the land." "Prisoner's Aid." Sometimes the great 

thing, if not the one thing, needful after the punishment 
of prison is a fair opportunity. It is for Prisoner's Aid 
to acquaint itself with individual cases, "to seek them 
out, to stand by them until they have had their fair 

opportunity" "An extraordinary marriage case is 

engaging the attention of Mr. Justice Kenny in Dublin." 
Anxious that his marriage should be kept secret, a cer- 
tain party had the ceremony pei formed at 10:30 at 
night by a Catholic priest, but in the presence of only 
one witness. "The petitioner now contends that as the 
Council of Trent requires two witnesses for a valid mar- 
riage, he is entitled to a decree of nullity." 
(30 Dec.) : A preliminary to the reform of the Breviary : 
an Apostolic Constitution abolishes the present order 



1 9 12.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 693 

of the Psalter in the Breviary from January i, 1913, 
and prescribes the use of a new arrangement, which 
will bring about the recitation of the entire Psalter 
within the week. In the meantime any one is at liberty 
to use the new order of the Psalter immediately after 
its publication. Other reforms in the Breviary and in 
the Roman Missal as well, may be looked for within 

the next few years. "A Pax Britannica," a summing 

up of the results of the correspondence on the new 
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

The Month (Jan.) : In " The Cardinal's Hat and Its History," 
Rev. Herbert Thurston traces this head-dress to Inno- 
cent IV. Several illustrations of various styles are given. 

Montgomery Carmichael thinks that "The Virgin 

of the Rocks " in both the Louvre and the National 

Gallery are by Leonardo da Vinci. The Editor, in an 

article entitled, "Dr. Lingard," reminds Catholics of the 
debt they owe Dr. Lingard, and points out the many serv- 
ices he rendered the Church at a critical period of her his- 
tory in England. Henri Bordeaux, Mme. J. Reynes- 

Monlaur, Bourget, Bazin and others, are noticed by 
Lilian M. Leggatt as representatives of a new school in 
French fiction clean, serious, influential and thoroughly 
Catholic. Those of His Own Household, the first in- 
stallment of a novel by Rene Bazin, appears in this 
number. 

The National (Jan.): "The 'National Review' and Italy," is 
a brief paper contributed by the Editor to a leading 
Italian journal assuring Italy that the "attacks of 
journalists with regard to the war in Tripoli have left no 

impression whatsoever on British public opinion." 

L. Cope Cornford has an article on " Home Rule," in 
which falsehood and ignorance are about evenly matched. 

Claude Grahame White writes on "The Aeroplane 

of the future." " Nothing else on land or sea will com- 
pare with it." "The Railway Unrest A Socialist 

View," by Philip Snowden, M.P. Ella Sykes in " Home- 
Help in Canada," recounts her experience in a domestic 
situation for the benefit of English girls thinking of set- 
tling in the Dominion. Alexander Haig discusses 

some important questions in "The Relation of Cancer to 



694 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

Gout and Rheumatism." The Rev. R. L. Gales writes 

a paper, entitled, "Christianity and Clericalism." His 
sense of clericalism is a most perverted one. 

Irish Theological Quarterly (Jan.): "The Morality of Strikes." 
The author views the question of strikes from the vista 
of justice. He summarizes the rights of the employer 
and his men. He explains and applies to strikes the 
right of freedom of contract. He says the justice of a 
strike cannot be determined without knowing the wages 
and conditions of the workman. Strikes and their abuses 
could be greatly diminished by Federation of Labor. 
Although laying down no regulations for this great 
question, the author nevertheless does not allow us to 

err concerning his attitude. " Theodore of Kurrhos." 

The author briefly sketches the career of the Bishop 
of Kurrhos and his attachment to Nestorius and op- 
position to St. Cyril of Alexandria. He takes up the 
anathemas hurled at Theodoret by St. Cyril together 
with the replies of Theodoret and supplementary com- 
ments by the saint. 

Le Cotrespondant (toDec.): "Russian Expansion in Asia," an 
unsigned article, relates the history of Russian Con- 
quests in the Far East and recalls the terms of the Pots- 
dam Conference, and the Franco-Russian Alliance. 

" Lacordaire at the French Academy," by Tony Dubois, 
is an account of the brief career of Lacotdaire as a mem- 
ber of the Academy with hitherto unpublished letters 
dealing with that period of his life. " General de 
Charette," by Louis de Meutville, is a study of a noble 
character and a brave soldier, the leader of the French 

members of the Papal Zouaves. "A Vice-Queen of 

India," by Countess De Courson, describes the work ac- 
complished by Lady Canning during the mutiny of fifty 
years ago. " A Minister of the Navy under Napo- 
leon," by Victor Martel, is the second and final article 
on the administration of Admiral Duke Decies. 
(25 Dec) "The German or Italian Attack through Swit- 
zerland," by General Maitrot, describes the respective 
positions of Italy, Russia and Switzerland in a possible 
war between France and Germany. The methods of 
attack by Germany and Italy are illustrated by maps. 



19 1 a.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 695 

" Unpublished Letters to Count de Chambord," by 

Francis Laurentie, publishes the letters written by ChcU 
teaubriand after the revolution of 1830, together with 
letters from Henry V. to Chateaubriand. "An Ex- 
position oi Modern Christian Art," by Andrew Perate, 
describes the work of the Society of St. John for Cath- 
olic artists and sculptors founded in 1840 by Pere La- 

cordaire and Pere Besson at Rome. " France, Spain 

and England Towards Morocco," an unsigned article, 
describes the attitude of each of these nations towards 
Morocco, making a special study of the Spanish- Moroc- 
can question. "Tuberculosis at Lourdes," by Dr. de 

Bruno is an account of each cure of tuberculosis tak- 
ing place at Lourdes. 

Revue du Clerge Fratifais (15 Dec.): J. Bricout gives a resume 
of the long series of articles entitled: " Is There a His- 
tory of Religion ? " He divides his subject into five 
chapters, dealing respectively with our knowledge of 
the history of religions, the "balance sheet" of non- 
Christian religions, the transcendence of Judaism and 
Christianity, laws of religious phenomena, the future of 

religions and religion. T. Desers gives a sketch 

on the life of the Abbe Allemand who labored cease- 
lessly to organize the youth of France into societies for 
the promotion of their moral and spiritual welfare, 
(i Jan.): A. Villien presents a history of the adminis- 
tration of Holy Communion according to the Roman 
Ritual. He recounts in an interesting way various cus- 
toms and ceremonies that are decided exceptions to 
the practices of our own day; and in many cases, 
gives a history of development. The traditional cere- 
monies of solemn First Communion may go back to St. 
Vincent de Paul who wanted them for the close of 

missions. "Present- Day Catholic Social Activity in 

Italy," is exercised mainly by five societies, growing in 
numbers but not rich in money, nor as yet in results. 
J. M. Vidal begins a series of articles by describing the 

work of the Popular Union. E. Vacandard praises 

"The Christian Church in Gaul," by T. Scott Holmes; 
" Lamennais and the Holy See," by Paul Dudon; and 
the second volume of Bismarck and the Church, by 



696 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

George Goyan. Charles Calippe reviews the moral, 

religious, and economic conditions prevailing among 
farm employees, and describes their recent association 

aiming at reform. Panegyric on Joan of Arc, by J. 

Bricout. 

Etudes (20 Dec.): The Odes of Solomon, discovered in 1906 
among other Syriac manuscripts, by Mr. Kendel Harris, 
of Cambridge University, have been published in a 
French translation by Abbe" Labourt, with an introduc- 
tion and commentary by Mgr. Batiffol. They are of an 
integrally Christian character and were composed prob- 
ably in Greek. Batiffol places their origin in Syria 
about 100-120 A. D. but Aadhemar d'Ales, who writes 
this article, thinks Egypt the more probable source. 
M. Lemozin discusses the causes of the low birth- 
rate both in France and abroad, its social dangers, and 

the attempts to counteract it. A former non-Uniate 

Armenian patriarch of Constantinople, has endeavored 
to show that the Armenian Church was founded by the 
Apostle Thaddeus, and that consequently it was always 
independent of the See of Rome. Franfois Tournebize 

attacks both positions. Joseph Bournichon presents 

letters from college deans, to prove that supplanting 
the classics by modern languages and mathematics has 

worked havoc in secondary education. P. Luiz Cabral, 

Provincial of the Jesuits in Portugal before their ex- 
pulsion, gives extracts from a forthcoming book in de- 
fence of the Society, portraying the sufferings undergone 
by them. This loss has been balanced by a double 
foundation at Bahia, Brazil. Yves de la Briere eulo- 
gizes a critique on Pascal's Apologetic, by R. P. Petitot, 
O.P. He concludes that in all probability Pascal freed 
himself from the errors of Jansenism. As for the Pro. 
vincial Letters, he did not realize that he was compos- 
ing a calumny and, therefore, never repented of having 

written them. Henri Lammens reviews an extensive 

series of studies of Islamism ; and Lucien Roure a series 
on neurasthenia, hysteria and the present crisis in ex- 
perimental psychology. ^Joseph Boubee describes the 
recent elections in Belgium and urges the Catholics to 
strengthen their union. 



i9i2.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 697 

Chronique Sociale de France (Dec.) : " The Social Lesson of the 
Kultur Katnpf," according to Max Turmann, is the power 
of organization. French Catholics should learn courage 

and union from their German brethren. H. Cetty 

says that "The Catholic Circles of Alsace now num- 
ber 126 with a membership of 20,000 " Mgr. Lavalle 

declares that France will never be saved by priests who 
hide themselves in the sanctuary because they are afraid 
of the turbulent popular apostolate. There were fifty- 
six less strikes in France in September 1911 than in 
September 1910. 

Revue D" Apologetique (i Dae.): George Goyan writes en- 
couragingly of the evangelization of Paris since the 
separation. Many new churches have been built and 
an organized effort made to reach all classes by special 
services for sailors, printers, etc. This article has already 
appeared in English in Ihe Oxford and Cambridge Re- 
view. " Religions and the Scientific Mysteries," by 

M. Gossard, points out that the constitution of matter, 

the nature of force, etc., are still real and unsolvable 

mysteries. 

(15 Dec.): The initial article, "Bismarck and the 

Church " is a short appreciation by Mgr. Herscher of 

George Goyan's work with the same title. "The 

Church in Advance of the Church," by A. D. Sertil- 
langes. A three- fold aspect is taken of the Church. 
The Church's antecedents; the birth of the Church; the 
development of the Church. "The Church's Anteced- 
ents" makes up the body of the article. The other 

aspects are merely touched upon. Dr. R. Van Der 

Elst, tries to show that " Stigmatizations " cannot be 
explained on purely natural grounds. "Preaching," by 
H. Lesetre, insists that a sermon on a moral subject 
should enforce the imperative authority of the divine 
law. 

(i Jan.): "Vladimir Soloviev and the Religious Future 
of Russia," by G. A. Malvy, outlines the work of the 
Russian philosopher and mystic for union with Rome. 
It is hoped that he has sown seed that will one day 

bear fruit. F. Cimitier maintains that "The Euchar- 

istic Epeklesis" adds nothing to the consecrating force 



698 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

of the words of institution. R. Dubosg contends that 
epistemology is becoming more and more the principal 
role of philosophy. 

La Civilta Catolica (16 Dec.): The Allocution delivered by 
the Holy Father in the Consistory of November 28 
last, is given with an Italian translation. The series 
on "The Conflict Between Morality and Sociology " is 
concluded. In summary it appears that the new soci- 
ology contains nothing true that is not already con- 
tained in the ethical teachings of St. Thomas, and that 
what is new is mainly not true, being contradicted by 

reason and experience. " The Source of the Divina 

Commedia" is a review of a book by Professor Ama- 
ducci under the title mentioned. The reviewer rejects 
the hypothesis advanced by the Professor as to the 
sources of the poem and says: "The true source of the 
poem is none other than the genius of Dante." The 
series on the " Gospel of St. Matthew," in the light of 
the Biblical Commission's decisions is continued. 
" Bellarmine Before His Cardinalate" is the principal 
review in the book department. 

La Scuola Cattolica (Nov.): G. Perin writes on "A. Pauline 

Doxology." The series on " The Messianic Plan of 

Jesus," begins its second part, concerned mainly with 

the Samaritans. G. Ferrari's book New Horizons in 

Life and Religious Thought elicits a scathing criticism 
from Rev. Pietro Borelli. " The School of Lamen- 

nais " is continued by Guiseppe Piovano. " De Li- 

ceitate Vasectomise " is discussed by Dr. Augustinus 
Gemelli and the Rev. Arthurus Stucchi from a moral 
theological point of view. 

Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (Dec.) : Charles Dunan in 
" The Variability of Physical Essences and Moral Laws," 
discusses that thesis with regard to both the physical 
and moral orders. It reviews the different opinions 
held since Aristotle's day, and then states the author's 
own conclusions. " Will Knowledge at the Limit of 
its Perfection do away with Consciousness ? "-^ J. Pali- 
ard begins a series of articles on this question. The 
mystic obtains an approach to this abolition of consci- 
ousness in absolving himself on the one thought of the 



Igl2 .] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 699 

Divinity. Paliard aska whether change be essential to, 

or only a note of, infirmity in our actual consciousness. 

Revue Thomitte (Nov.-Dec.): "The Necessity of Speculation 

or Scholastic Theology," is the subject of an article by 

Pere Hedde, O.P. C. Huit writes on ' The Platonic 

Elements in the Doctrine of St. Thomas," including, 
the influence of Aristotle upon his philosophy, e. ., m 
psychology, cosmology and theodicy. R. P. Cages, O.P., 
continues his treatment of "Modernist Philosophy," 
dealing with the general idea of evolution and its ap- 
plication to religion. The reply of R. P. Melizan, O.P., 
to M. Le Chanoine Bouyssonie is concluded. The ar- 
ticle is entitled : " The Hypothesis of Spontaneous Gen- 
eration." 
Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (Jan): O. Pfulf, S.J., gives : 

selections from Windhorst's correspondence with Onno 

Klopp from 1858 to 1865. "Our Lyrics and the 

Age," by J. Overmans, S.J., discusses the relation of 

Catholic poetry and the Zeitgeist. A first paper by 

M. Meschler, SJ., under the caption, "Jesuit Asceticism 
and the Mystics," defends the Jesuits from the charge 
of rationalizing prayer to such an extent as to stil 

mysticism. "Sources of the History of Missions," 

by A. Huondes, S.J., is an extensive notice of the Rerum 
Mthiopicarum Scriptores Occidentals Inedite, by Carlo 
Beccari, S.J. Eleven quarto volumes totaling 6.coo 
pages have been published, and five more are to follow. 



IRecent Events. 

In many parts of the world the 

The General Unrest. new year began under conditions 

of a most extraordinary kind, with 

problems oi the greatest complexity and gravity calling for 
solution, and apparently calling in vain. The war which is 
being waged between Italy and Turkey, although few doubt 
the eventual success of Italy, cannot but leave Turkey in a 
weaker position, and thereby increase the discontent of the 
Balkan States, and their hopes of emancipating themselves 
from the degrading thraldom under which they have been 
groaning for centuries. The breakdown of the efforts to estab- 
lish a constitutional regime in Turkey, if ever efforts were 
seriously made, has been complete. Things are so bad in Mace- 
donia that there are those who regret the days of Abdul 
Hamid. The unsettlement in Turkey naturally leads to unrest 
in the neighboring countries. Austria and Russia, too, have 
their own difficulties, although not of so urgent a character. 
New Year's Day found the German Empire on the eve of a 
General Election for the Reichstag, and in dread of the success 
of the Social Democrats at the polls a dread that has proved 
well-founded. Discontent among what is called the proletariat 
in France, seems to be ever growing in that country, and the 
increasing instability of the governments give a widespread 
feeling of uncertainty. 

There are those who think that Spain is on the brink of a 
revolution, and no one can tell what may happen in Portugal. 
Even Great Britain, which has for so long been considered 
the standard of progress joined with stability, is suffering in 
no slight degree from the general unrest. We may quote as 
an indication of this the words of a well-known public man, 
not that they are not somewhat exaggerated, but they show what 
is thought by many : "The Liberal Party has become the revo- 
lutionary party; the Sovereign has been misadvised and co- 
erced; the Constitution has been destroyed; the Sovereignty 
of Parliament has been abolished ; the House of Lords maimed ; 
the House of Commons debased. The national finances are 
brought to confusion; the national credit is gravely impaired; 
the nation itself has been brought to the very brink of war; 



igia.] RECENT EVENTS 701 

while the sea power of the country, secretly bartered away to 
the foreigner, has only been rescued at the last moment by 
the House of Lords. Throughout the state confusion reigns 
to- day; revolution and chaos are promised for to morrow." 
Such are the utterances of one recently a Liberal who has 
become a Conservative. 

Not long ago a Catholic Peer stated in public, that if the 
people of the country had been as fully conscious as they 
ought of the evil work which is being done by the present 
government, they would have risen in arms in defence of their 
rights. The thing which excites such strong feeling is that 
the end and aim of the present government is to legislate for 
the benefit of what is now the most powerful class in the 
country the wage-earners. This constitutes the main bulk of 
the electors, and it is just beginning to realize its power. 
Hence it is that heavy taxes have been placed chiefly upon 
land for the purpose of the social amelioration of the masses 
old-age pensions, insurance against invalidity, sickness and un- 
employment, and measures of a like nature. The working 
classes, in their turn, are making extravagant demands. 

Nor is the unrest that prevails confined to Europe. China 
affords the most striking example of the increasing desire 
for self-government, and the effect of this desire upon the 
most ancient of despotisms. It is still quite doubtful what 
will be the outcome. A like uncertainty is felt about Persia. 
India for long has been agitated by the same spirit, but for 
some time resignation to present conditions seems to have 
supervened a resignation which the visit of the King- Emperor 
is said to have changed into complete satisfaction. 

The one thing which may be looked upon as a solid 
achievement is the settlement of the question of Morocco nor 
is it quite certain that it is so fully settled as it was at first 
thought to be. 

Socialists have made the accusa- 

France. tion that the Republican Govern- 

ment of France, in dealing with 

crime, acts in the same way as the absolutist government of 
Russia, that is, makes use of agents provocateurs. The question 
was brought up for discussion lately in the Chamber. The 
Prime Minister was accused of having admitted such to be 
the case. This, however, he denied, as did also M. Briand 
on behalf of his own Cabinet, as well as that of M. Clemen- 



702 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

ceau, in which he was Minister of Justice. He admitted that 
informers were made use of by the police, but even this was 
done with the greatest circumspection, for such men were, in 
general, merely the renegades of Socialism and Labor. There 
was no such thing in the French 'service, he asserted, as an 
agent provocateur. 

The somewhat numerous scandals in the civil, naval, and 
colonial administrations have not proved so serious as at first 
seemed likely. The attack made upon the chief permanent 
official of the Foreign Office, proved to be without foundation; 
future conflicts between the Civil and Military authorities at 
Ujda have been obviated by a new adjustment of duties. The 
disaster which befell the Liberte revealed no misdoing on the 
part of its officers. The makers of the gunpowder, however, 
the explosion of which caused the accident, have been found 
guilty of fraudulent practices, and have been duly punished. 
And in the highest circles of all, in the Cabinet itself, pro- 
ceedings have been brought to light which have led to its fall. 

In fact, if reports widely circulated are worthy of credit, 
individual ministers are accustomed to arrogate to themselves 
powers to which they are not entitled. They have acted as 
if they were the absolute lords and masters, instead of the 
servants of the country. M. Delcasse, for example, then 
Foreign Minister, is said to have negotiated a Treaty with 
Spain, of which not only the rest of the Cabinet, but even 
the President of the Republic was kept in complete ignor- 
ance. Whether or not this assertion is true, it has been 
brought to light that prior to the recent negotiations with 
Germany about Morocco, and during their course, secret nego- 
tiations of which the Foreign Minister had not been informed 
were conducted independently of him. The Prime Minister, 
M. Caillaux, was found guilty along with two other Ministers, 
although he denied on his word of honor, that any political 
or financial transactions, outside of the official diplomatic 
negotiations, had taken place. The Foreign Minister had to 
choose between telling the truth, and preserving the soli- 
darity of the Cabinet by telling a lie. He preferred to tell the 
truth, and resigned. M. Caillaux made an attempt to recon- 
struct his Ministry. M. Delcasse" was willing to become Foreign 
Minister, but no one could be found to succeed him as Min- 
ister of Marine. Accordingly, the Premier resigned, and now 
things are coming to light which indicate the bad faith of M. 



i9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 703 

Caillaux, perhaps even his corruption. The secret negotiations 
were in the furtherance of certain financial interests, and in- 
cluded even the prospect of an understanding with Germany 
detrimental to present arrangements. To M. Clemenceau is 
due the credit of bringing to light what may be called a con- 
spiracy. A new government has been formed of which M. 
Raymond Poincare is the head, and in which he is the Min- 
ister of Foreign Affairs. In view of what is looked upon as 
a great emergency, politicians have laid aside their wonted 
jealousies, and men who have themselves been Prime Ministers 
have been willing to become coadjutors of one who has never 
held that position. M. Briand becomes Minister of Justice, 
and M. Bourgeois, Minister of Labor; M. Delcasse, Minister of 
Marine. The Gaulois says that it is the greatest Cabinet 
formed since the foundation of the Third Republic. 

One of the results of the tension 
Germany. which developed last summer be- 

tween Great Britain and Germany 

when, as is now known, the two countries were upon the verge 
of war, is the growth in Germany of a movement in favor of 
a world agreement with Great Britain designed to associate 
German with British interests throughout the world. Its pro- 
moters in Germany require as a condition, however, that the 
Entente Cordiale of Great Britain with France should be dis- 
solved, and that a cession to Germany should be made of 
one or more of the British colonies, in order that the latter 
country may find a "place in the sun" commensurate with 
her population and military strength. On the fulfillment of 
these conditions Germany would be willing to enter into an 
engagement to make no additions to her navy beyond a cer- 
tain fixed limit. The advocates of this plan have adopted 
tactics towards the British Foreign Minister similar to those 
which were adopted in 1905 towards M. Delcasse*. They have 
tried to bring influences to bear upon English public opinion 
in order to drive Sir Edward Grey from office, looking upon 
him as their chief opponent. The success which followed the 
efforts in France against M. Delcasse, has not been met with 
in England, Sir Edward Grey and his policy having met with the 
full endorsement of Parliament and the nation; nor is it likely 
that the Entente between Great Britain and France, will be in 
the least weakened; it has, in fact, rather gained in strength. 



704 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

Opinion is greatly divided as to the character of future 
relations between Great Britain and Germany. The settle- 
ment of the Morocco question has removed the last colonial 
matter at issue between Germany and France. But Great 
Britain's action in the course of the "conversations" which 
led to the settlement has enraged a large number of Germans, 
and has made them assert that war between the two countries 
is inevitable. It is the Conservative Party that takes this view 
of the situation, a view shared in a less degree by the 
Catholic Centre. The government is more conciliatory. While 
blaming Great Britain for any danger of war that may have 
existed last summer, it promises to welcome any manifestation 
of a desire for a peaceful outcome from the present position, 
that is if Great Britain should give any positive expression in 
its policy that peace is what it wants. But the Geiman Govern- 
ment's determination is to make the full strength and capa- 
bility of Germany prevail in the world. " The strength of 
Germany is to be the guarantee that no other State will seek 
a quarrel with her." This does not seem to indicate any 
prospect of the government's adopting the disarmament pro- 
posal to which reference has been made. Rather it shows that 
Germany is still to remain, what the leader of the Czechs, 
Dr. Kramarsh, recently declared she had so long been "the 
centre of danger in the affairs of the world." 

The approaching elections made it necessary to adopt in 
the discussions in the Reichstag, what is looked upon as the 
proper patriotic tone, which, in the present stage of the 
world's progress, consists in assuming towards foreigners 
an attitude of unbending defiance. The main preoccupation 
of the government in view of the election was the desire to 
defeat the Social Democrats at any cost. This party is by 
far the largest of any single party. At the last election it 
polled 3,250,000 votes, and since then it has been gaining at 
all by-elections. It is, moreover, a peace-party, and, therefore, 
in the eyes of the fire-eaters one lacking in a proper spirit of 
patriotism. This must be said, however: strong as was the 
desire of the government to exercise influence against the 
Social Democrats, the common practice among several of the 
Latin nations of "making elections" was not adopted. Over 
officials it claims the right of dictating : but the ordinary citi- 
zen is in no way coerced in the exercise of his right to vote. 
Notwithstanding all efforts, the result of the recent election 



i9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 705 

has so far been a very large gain for the Social Democrats, 
at the expense of the Liberals and Radicals. However, un- 
til the second ballots are taken, precise figures need not be 
given; for the exact result cannot be ascertained. 

The financial position of Germany has of late been im- 
proving. Loans to pay current expenses were, until a few 
years ago, a normal feature of each Budget, but the taxes re- 
cently imposed have been productive enough for the past two 
years to render this course unnecessary. It is said, however, 
that these taxes have produced Social Democrats in great 
abundance, as well as increase of income. This year (1912) 
receipts and expenditure have failed to balance, and it will be 
necessary to resume the old practice, but not on so large a 
scale as before the deficit being only a little over $10,000,- 
ooo. An anxious subject of thought at the present moment 
is what increase is to be made in the amounts demanded by 
the government for the army and navy. That there will be 
an increase is assumed to be certain. 

So little has occurred in the Dual 

Austria-Hungary. Monarchy of late, that no refer- 

ence has been made to its affairs. 

Interest is, however, reviving. In the dispute between Germany 
and France as to Morocco, so far from proving itself a " bril- 
liant second " of its ally, as on the former occasion, it steadi- 
ly withheld every kind of support. The friendly attitude 
towards Italy is thought to be in view of the extension of 
Austro-Huagarian political and economic influence in the Bal- 
kans, in the hope of buying off Italian opposition in the west 
of the Balkan peninsula. 

The ministry of Baron Gautsch did not last for more than 
a few months. Having found itself unable to secure a majority 
of the warring factions, of which the Reichsrath is made up, 
it gave in its resignation. At the bead of the new Cabinet 
is Count Stiirgkh, the Minister of Public Instruction in the 
former Cabinet. The new Cabinet is ,made up of permanent 
officials, it being hoped by this arrangement to secure some- 
thing like peace by warding off the opposition of the keen 
politicians of the various parties. 

The war between Italy and Turkey has led to a great deal 
of dissension in Austria. While the government, under the 
VOL. xciv. 45 



706 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

guidance oi Count Aehrenthal is friendly to Italy, almost the 
whole of the Press has shown itself bitterly hostile. This has 
had its effect upon public opinion in Italy, and the assertion 
has been made in Vienna that the Italian Government is lending 
a favorable ear to proposals which have been made by France, 
that the latter country should enter into an alliance with Italy, 
the Triple Alliance, so far as Italy is concerned, being thereby 
destroyed. Not much credit, however is, attached to this 
statement. The retirement of the Chief of the General Staff 
of the Army, one of its most efficient officers is, another sub- 
ject that has caused much discussion. This retirement was 
due, it is said, to his desire to enter upon "a preventive war" 
with Italy, justifying this course by the belief which he and 
many entertain, that after the conquest of Tripoli the inten- 
tion of the Italians is to attack Austria. As these views did 
not find acceptance in the highest quarters, the Chief of the 
Staff has had to retire. 

The question has been raised whether the Foreign Minister 
will himself have to follow the Chief of the Staff. Count 
Aehrenthal has not a few opponents in his own country; the 
army officers as a body are against him, and even, it is thought, 
the Minister of War; foreign critics look upon him as chiefly 
responsible for the demoralization which has recently come up- 
on international relations. But so many questions have been 
raised by recent events, that it is felt to be desirable that the 
foreign affairs of Austria should be left in the hands of a 
man of experience. The opening of the Dardanelles, the un- 
certain outlook in the Balkans, the future of the Triple Alli- 
ance, as well as the position in Persia, and the results of the 
Franco-German Agreement as to Morocco, all call for the 
most careful management. 

If it is true that the German Emperor is not at all satis- 
fied with the conduct of the Foreign Minister during the 
course of the recent negotiations about Morocco, and has 
plainly manifested this dissatisfaction, the tenure of office by 
Count Aehrenthal must be soon drawing to its close, for the 
influence of the Kaiser is all-powerful in the present conjunc- 
ture. The prospect of an agreement being made between Rus- 
sia and Austria for the settlement, of the Macedonian question, 
would also render the departure of the Count almost a neces- 
sity; for Russia looks upon him with so much disfavor that 



I9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 707 

it would refuse to carry on negotiations through him as an 
intermediary. 

At the recent meeting of the Delegations, the Delegates 
representing Hungary gave to Count Aehrenthal an unquali- 
fied expression of confidence, but those representing Austria 
were more divided in opinion. The Catholic members, espe- 
cially, were outspoken in their distrust of his policy. He 
has, however, a strong supporter in the Emperor Francis 
Joseph. As to the Triple Alliance, it is still, the Hungarian 
Delegates declare, the unshakable foundation of the pacific 
policy of Austria and Hungary. 

In Hungary Count Khuen Hederv.iry remains at the head 
of the government, but the peaceful tenure which he enjoyed 
at the beginning has come to an end. The old practice of 
obstruction which for so many years paralyzed the Hungarian 
Chamber, has been resumed by the opposition with the sup- 
port of the Kossuthist Independents. For several months the 
Army Bills have been held up, in order to extort a pledge 
that the Universal Suffrage Bill, promised for so many years, 
would be proceeded with pari passu. This pledge the govern- 
ment has refused to give, and has proposed to meet obstruction 
by doing violence to the Standing Orders of the Chamber 
a proceeding to which Count Tisza, who lost power in 1904 
by a similar attempt, was ready to give his support. The 
President of the Chamber gave in his resignation, rather than 
become a party to such an attempt, and in the end a conflict 
was avoided by a compromise. 

The Lower House of the Austrian Parliament has had the 
peace of its proceedings diversified by a series of unseemly 
occurrences. On one occasion a minister was shot at by a 
stranger in the gallery a Social Democrat who was not sat- 
isfied with the measures which the government had taken in 
punishing the recent rioters ; on a second a Pan-German dep- 
uty, disapproving of the tepidity of another member of the 
same party, attempted to chastise the delinquent with a dog- 
whip which he had brought with him for the purpose. On a 
third occasion certain Czech Deputies being dissatisfied with 
the explanation a Minister was giving, made a rush at the 
Ministerial Bench. The sitting was suspended amid scenes of in- 
describable tumult. Those repeated occurrences seem to show 
that the Parliament of Austria does not inspire great reverence. 



;c8 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

Outside Parliament certain Germans, whose sympathies are 
more with the German Empire than with Austria, and who 
some years ago were very demonstrative of their desire to be 
brought within the German Empire, have resumed their agita- 
tion to secure this end. At a public meeting of the German 
Union of Lower Austria, sundry Austrian-German Deputies 
called for cheers for the Hohenzollens; while one speaker ven- 
tured to disparage the German character of the Hapsburgs. 
The meeting ended with the singing of the Wacht am Rhein. 

Meanwhile in common with so many other countries in 
Europe, Austria-Hungary is sinking ever deeper and deeper 
into debt, due chiefly to the increase of military armaments, 
which have for their only object, so it is alleged, the mainte- 
nance of peace. For the last decade the national debt of Aus- 
tria has grown at the rate of $200,000 a day, and a new debt 
is to be incurred within the next few months of some $90,- 
000,000 for canal construction, $100,000,000 more have just 
been sanctioned by the Chamber and yet further demands are 
said to be imperative. There seems to be on the part of 
those in authority an irrepressible desire to fleece their flocks. 

Hungarian politicians have been giving yet another proof 
of their insincerity and double-mindedness. In relation to 
Austria they pose as the advocates of liberty; .while towards 
the races over whom they wish to dominate, they practice un- 
blushing tyranny. In the recent elections for the Croatian 
Diet, the present Ban has made use of unrestrained violence 
to secure members ready to support the government measures. 

Since the death of M. Stolypin, 
Russia. under the guidance of whom an 

advance towards something like 

constitutional government was being made, there appears to 
be a revival of the old system of personal arbitrary rule. 
Dark hints have been in circulation that his death was due to 
the remissness of the police in guarding his person, and that 
this in its turn was not unconnected with the desire for his 
removal which existed among the bureaucrats, the power of 
whom he had limited. But of this there is no proof. The 
professions of M. Stolypin's successor are all, indeed, in favor 
of a continuance of his predecessor's policy. The abuses 
of the secret police department are to be eradicated ; greater 



i 9 i2.] RECENT EVENTS 79 

tolerance is to be shown to the Universities, and more freedom 
in teaching allowed ; the interests of agriculture are to receive 
increased attention; the system of individual farm-holdings is 
to be developed; co-operative societies are to be encouraged; 
and, in general, greater stimulus ia to be given to public and 
private initiative and enterprise. The education of the people, 
which is so much needed, is to be fostered as [the condition 
and support of all these measures. It is even said that greater 
moderation will be shown in the treatment of the Finns and 
of the Poles. This is the programme. But the actions of the 
government seem to be of quite a different character. In ex- 
ecution of the law passed last session giving the Duma power 
to pass laws for Finland in matters which concern the whole 
Empire, a law has been made for gradually increasing Finland's 
annual military contribution, and for equalizing the rights of 
Russians and Finns in the Grand Duchy. This is looked upon 
by the Finns as a practical exercise of that violation of the 
autonomy secured to them on their union with Russia, a viola- 
tion which the Law made last year authorized. The Russian 
Government, however, is thought by many not to be without 
justification and, from its own point of view, to have a fairly 
strong case. 

Another instance of what looks like a harsh and unsympa- 
thetic method of action, is that all medical and charitable so- 
cieties are forbidden to relieve those who are suffering from 
the famine which is raging in some twenty of the govern- 
ments of the Empire. In these the horrors of the famine of 
1891 are being repeated. The yield of crops in some places 
has been eighty- six per cent below the average. Famine- 
stricken people are flocking into the towns and villages, ask- 
ing for special services and the administration of the last Com- 
munion, so that they may be prepared for death. The govern- 
ment, it is true, allows the Red Cross Society and the Zemtvoes 
to give help, and has taken special measures of relief on its 
own initiative ; but it is hard to see a good reason for dis- 
couraging those who are willing to give further assistance to 
people in such a state of misery. It is a question whether 
Russian action towards this country in refusing to recognize 
the passports granted by the United States Government, there- 
by claiming a right to limit the power of the United States 
to admit to full citizenship certain immigrants from Russia, is 



7 io RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

another instance of the arbitrary spirit which pervades the 
government of that country. Some may think that it is the 
government of this country which has in this case made an 
arbitrary claim. A full discussion of the matter would involve 
the whole question of the way in which Russia treats her own 
Jewish population. 

Whatever may be thought about 
Russia and Persia. Russia and its dealing with the 

Passport question, there will be 

few who will fail to see in its conduct towards Persia, and the 
demand for the dismissal of Mr. Shuster, a clear manifestation 
of high-handed dictation. After many efforts for reform, all 
of which had failed, Persia seemed to have found the right 
way, and to have secured in Mr. Shuster the right man, to 
carry into effect real practical reforms. Upon a mere pretext, 
Russia demanded the dismissal of the Treasurer-General. He 
had ventured to express an opinion of her proceedings, which 
was all the more unpalatable for being true. Russia, he said, 
showed by her actions in Persia, that she wished to keep the 
country weak, in order to have an opportunity and an excuse 
for aggression when a suitable occasion should arise. The de- 
mand made by Russia, the Mejliss bravely re ected. To have 
yielded, it held, would have been equivalent to signing away 
the independence of the country, and this no Persian would 
do. Thereupon Russian troops advanced into Persia, making, 
of course, the usual assurances that they intended to remain 
no longer than was necessary in order to secure the acceptance 
of Russia's demands an assurance which some, indeed, affect 
to believe, but which the world in general knows how to ap- 
praise at its real value. Although there was no hope of suc- 
cessful resistance, the love of the independence which they 
looked upon as in danger moved many bands of Persians to 
take up arms. This effort proved useless, being ruthlessly 
crushed by the Russian forces. Even after the Cabinet had 
accepted Russia's demands the Press of St. Petersburg called 
for the extermination of the bands that had assaulted the troops, 
declaring that true humanity requires cruelty, and that the 
whole population must be punished for the fault of a part. 
Even an official in the Foreign Office declared that no mercy 
would be shown. 



i9i*.] RECENT EVENTS in 

As the Mejlisi persisted in its refusal to accept the Russian 
demands, the Cabinet decreed its dissolution, thus by a coup 
d'etat bringing the outward form of constitutional government 
to an end. New elections, however, are promised for the near 
future. By the terms of submission to Russia Mr. Shuster 
was to be dismissed, no appointments are to be given to for- 
eigners, before an exchange of views is made with the Russian 
and British legations, and Russia is to be paid an indemnity 
for the expense incurred in interfering with Persian progress. 
Upon the dissolution of the Mejliss, which had been his sole 
supporter, Mr. Shuster resigned, and in this way the only suc- 
cessful attempt to effect real reform has been brought to an 
end. When he assumed charge of the Treasury and the re\- 
enues, he found banking deficits amounting to half a million; 
there was not a penny of cash belonging to the government; 
an unknown amount of debt in various forms was due. Within 
five months he had paid off this deficit, bad furnished the ex- 
penses of running the government, had met promptly all for- 
eign obligations, and had in the Treasury nearly a million of 
assets, and [this notwithstanding the fact that the civil war 
had increased the expenses by a million and a half, and had 
diminished revenues. Within two years Mr. Shuster pledged 
his financial experience that the finances of Persia would have 
been placed on a stable basis. It is a melancholy example of 
the vanity of human progress, that so ancient a state as Persia 
should be going to ruin merely for lack of common honesty, 
and that when an honest man has been imported, his work 
should be destroyed because, forsooth, he was destitute of 
tact. 

The conduct of Great Britain in according support to Rus- 
sia and lending her assistance in this attack of the strong 
upon the weak, has been criticized severely. Whatever may 
be said in its defence, although it may explain, cannot justify 
the action adopted. The Agreement between Russia and Great 
Britain made the northern part of Persia the sphere of in- 
fluence of Russia, within which Great Britain would not seek 
to act in any way. But the appointment by Mr. Shuster of 
certain English subjects as his assistants, can only by an un- 
warrantable stretch of the meaning of the Agreement be looked 
upon as a violation, either of its letter or spirit. The real 
reason for English action was the fact that co operation with 



712 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

Russia is rendered almost necessary by the state of affairs in 
Europe, and this co-operation has to be paid for by rendering 
support to Russia in the Middle East. The action which Great 
Britain itself has taken in Southern Persia is, it is yet possible 
to believe, merely in defence of its commercial interests. In 
the event, however, of Russia proceeding to absorb the northern 
part of Persia, a project which she disclaims, little doubt can 
be felt but that a similar process would be effected by Great 
Britain in the south. 

The efforts made by the Rulers 
China. of China, as well the real as the 

nominal, to preserve by humble 

confession of their shortcomings, a shadow at least of their 
former power, have failed to have any effect upon those of their 
subjects who had declared for a Republic. Even the abdica- 
tion of the Regent, who in his appeal to be allowed to take 
this step, blamed himself as the cause of the present upheaval, 
did not propitiate the opponents of the present Dynasty ; the 
edict in which the Empress-Dowager accepts the Prince Re- 
gent's abdication, and seeks to lay down the future form of 
government, begins by affirming her own ignorance. She has 
therefore entrusted all responsibility for political affairs to the 
Premier and a Cabinet of Ministers. The promulgation of 
Edicts, however, will require the Imperial Seal, and this would 
render the assent of the Throne still necessary. This was un- 
satisfactory to the Revolutionary Party; the country had suf- 
fered too long from the misdeeds of the Manchu dynasty 
to render them willing to give it any longer even a mere 
nominal authority. An armistice, however, was made in 
order that a Conference might be held between representatives 
of the government, and the leaders of the revolution, in the 
hopes of effecting a compromise. It is the younger men who 
are in favor of a Republic, the older and more experienced 
fearing that the population of China is not prepared for so 
radical a change. The opposite view, however, is held by the 
recent Minister of China to this country, who is taking an 
active part in the Revolution. Doubtless it is upon bis ex- 
perience while here that his appreciation of the Republican 
form of government is based. During 267 years the Manchus, 
he declares, had shown their incapacity, and it was time that 



RECENT EVENTS 713 

the nation should entrust its affairs to competent management, 
in the same way as would be done in business. The Peace 
Conference did not produce agreement between the govern- 
ment and the revolutionists, except in so far as it led to the 
decision to summon a National Convention for the settlement 
of the future form of government. The mode of election to 
this Convention and the place and conditions of its meeting 
were left to be decided by discussions between the two par- 
ties. Public opinion in general looks to the Premier Yuan 
Shi-kai as the one best fitted to be the first President. He, 
however, is opposed to the Republican form of government, 
being in favor of a constitutional monarchy in which the 
sovereign reigns, but does not govern. In the meantime, a 
provisional Convention held at Nanking, in which only twelve 
provinces are represented, has elected Dr. Sun Yat-sen Presi- 
dent. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was brought up as a Christian, and 
educated in missionary schools. For many years he has been 
active in favor of reform, and has had to flee from China to 
escape arrest. The Cabinet formed to work with him com- 
prises some of the ablest men in China; the Foreign Minister 
is a graduate of Yale. 

Ever since the outbreak of the revolution, fears have been 
felt that under one pretext or another, one or more Foreign 
Powers would intervene. It was positively asserted that Japan 
and Great Britain had agreed to prevent the establishment of 
a Republican form of government. This report was, however* 
without any foundation. Russia, however, has seized the op- 
portunity. She has notified China, that the independence of 
Outer Mongolia must be recognized so far as regards in- 
ternal affairs, and has even indicated the dignitary to whom 
autocratic control is to be given. To the Mongolians thus 
freed from China's control, Russian assistance will graciously 
be granted so that order may be maintained. China is not to 
be allowed to have any military forces in Outer Mongolia, nor 
to send colonists there, but she is permitted to retain control 
of the external affairs of the territory, for Russia does not 
desire the separation of Mongolia from China. A railway is 
to be made from Kiakhta to Urgu. The justification of this 
action is sought in the aggressive policy recently pursued by 
China towards the Mongolians. They have consequently taken 
advantage of the present circumstances to revolt. 



With Our Readers 

AN ONLOOKER AT THE CONSISTORY. 

BY R. E. 

'THE latest Consistory has been held in the huge hall of the Beati- 
A fication, which runs crossways over the portico of St. Peter's, 
and which is large enough to accommodate between nine or ten 
thousand persons. We were fortunate to have a ticket for the best 
place in the tribuna next to that of the Corps Diplomatique, so that 
only when a portly ambassador stood up in his place was there 
anything to intercept our view of the whole ceremony. 

Thanks to the tribune ticket, we were able to leave the hotel 
at a fairly reasonable hour next morning to get to St. Peter's, 
where the ceremony was supposed to begin at 9:30 A. M.; whereas, 
the holders of only ordinary tickets were obliged to start off at 7 
A. M., in order to get desirable places. Wonderiul were the uni- 
forms worn by the officers of all nationalities, gathered together to 
see the "scarlet hat " bestowed on their various compatriots, as the 
highest representatives of the Catholic Church in their respective 
countries ; and the ambassadors and their 'suites, and the babel of 
voices in all languages, strengthened the impression of the Catholic- 
ityCatholicity in its literal sense of the great assembly. A large 
contingent of English and Americans emphasized the fact that 
among the new Cardinals were, Archbishop Bourne of Westminster, 
Archbishop Farley and Archbishop O'Connell ; America also claim- 
ing as her own, Cardinal Falconio, who, though born in Italy, is a 
naturalized citizen of the United States. 

* 

There was the customary rush up the great staircase from the 
Porto Bronzo as soon as the door was opened, but by half-past nine 
comparatively good order reigned. Wonderfully arrayed Camerieri 
del Papa, in black velvet and silk stockings and Elizabethan ruffs, 
skilfully piloted tribune ticket-holders into their right places, and 
prevented agitated ladies from going into the seats reserved for 
ecclesiastics only, and vice versa ; all the representatives of the dif- 
ferent religious orders, the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, 
and the head of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre marched up, the 
Knights of Malta dressed in their superb, historic scarlet mantles ; 
one by one the College of Cardinals took their seats in long rows, 
reaching down on each side from the Papal Throne ; Papal Guards 



19 1 2.] WITH OUR READERS 715 

and Swiss Guards, the Captain of the Castello di St. Angelo and 
his men (something like the Yeomen of the Guard in London) 
manceuvered about and then at last the word Silenzio ! was heard. 
The enormous crowd stopped dead in its speaking the Sistine 
Choir, under Perosi's direction, burst out into 7u es Petrus and the 
Pentifex Maximus, Pius X., preceded by his guards, was carried 
slowly in on the sedia gestatoria, blessing us as he passed up the 
hall to his throne. 

* * 

When the Pope was at length seated upon his throne, the cere- 
monial of the final proclamation and creation of the new Cardinals 
began. A procession was formed and went out to find and receive 
the new Cardinals, returning with them after about five minutes. 
Then, one by one, these newly-elected Princes of the Church with 
attendant train-bearer, went up towards their head, making three 
obeisances at difterent distances, until they finally received the Papal 
embrace and kiss on both cheeks. Then they returned to their 
places. After a short interval, during which an ecclesiastic in black 
gown read the process for some future beatification, they went forward 
again, one by one, and then took place the ceremony which all had 
come to see. The great scarlet hat for each Cardinal was brought 
forth by two attendants, and placed and held by the Pope for the 
space of about a minute over the kneeling Cardinal's head, while 
the ancient charge was given, to the effect that the scarlet dignity 
bestowed was a token that they would defend the Faith even to the 
shedding of their blood. The hat was removed by another attend- 
ant, and again each Cardinal went back to his place. Once more 
they rose, and, in order, passed slowly between the benches where 
their brother- Cardinals were standing, and from each one they re- 
ceived and returned the kiss of brotherhood. Amongst all the 
splendors of the Cardinal's robes, scarlet and purple and ermine, 
stood out in its ashen grayness the great, gray train of the Francis- 
can Cardinal Falconio, and when the scarlet hat was about to be 
bestowed on him by the Pope, there was first drawn up the familiar 
brown hood which marks the son of Francis of Assisi. The Friar's 
brown hood and the Cardinal's scarlet splendor a Catholic contrast, 

indeed. 

* * * 

The choir again sang, and then again dead silence fell on the 
crowd. The Pope stood up, and from his throne, Christ's Vicar on 
earth blessed and Catholic Christendom knelt. The ceremony was 
over, and by degrees, in its old order, the procession reformed. Cardi- 
nals old and new with attendants passed out, the Pope stepped into 
the Sedia Gestatoria, and then something stopped the procession, and 



716 WITH OUR READERS [Feb., 

the Pope and his bearers were halted. This occurred just in front 
of our tribune. We were so close to the Holy Father, that we could 
plainly see the effects which his last serious illness in the summer 
had had on him ; how still far from recovered he seemed, and how his 
face when in repose wore a look of tired suffering and very great sad- 
ness. But of a sudden the Pope's face lit up. He smiled, and from 
smiling looked almost amused, and we saw that some one (we like to 
imagine It some old friend from Riesie !) was cheerfully greeting His 
Holiness and waving to him ! and the kindliness so characteristic of 
Pius X. showed Itself in his at once noting and responding to the 
"old friend." 



After the Pope had left the hall, the Cardinals proceeded to the 
Sistine Chapel for some final ceremony, and while they were inside, 
youthful America outside was overheard growing more and more en- 
thusiastic over its new Cardinals. 

Very slowly and very gradually, beginning with the tribune in 
which sat the Pope's sisters, the great hall emptied itself. Down, 
through lines of the Papal Camerieri and guards, we went, and out 
at the Porto Bronzo, again into the Piazza di St. Pietro, where the 
customary collection of carriages, motors and taxi-cabs took up their 
occupants and hustled them away. 

Another chapter of the Church's history had been written, and 
yet another page, glowing in burning gold and colors, of her Illu- 
minated Missal had been turned over before the wondering eyes of 
her children. 



N' 



[OT long since a student sent in a request at the Congressional 
Library for forty-one books, all on matters dealing with So- 
cialism. He was informed that all of the forty-one were in use by 
readers. After frequent inquiries during a period of two weeks, he 
succeeded in getting ten of the books which he wanted. The inci- 
dent will serve to show the widespread attention which Social- 
ism is receiving and also arouse us to a sense of how intelligently 
and zealously its propaganda must be met. That we are not meet- 
ing it as we should ; that we have been backward in refuting its 
claims and exposing its pretenses, cannot be denied. We have slept, 
and the enemy has been active, sowing cockle. We should be ag- 
gressively alive and active in advance. We should be preaching 
from the housetops the true fundamental doctrines of society ; we 
should be foremost in needed reforms ; we should be unselfishly 
active in the cure of abuses. Our Holy Father, Pius X., has urged 
us time and again to a personal interest and study of social ques- 
tions. 



19 1 2 J WITH OUR READERS 717 

AND if we followed the Holy Father's safe guidance, and distrib- 
uted helpful literature among our people, the pretense of So- 
cialism would be easily visible. Socialism is economically and 
politically unsound ; it absolutely denies Christian morality ; it is 
the enemy of religion. Yet because of its specious claims of reform 
and itSjjUtopian promises, it is making headway. 

* 

T^HROUGH our Catholic press there has been a sustained effort 
1 to educate our people. The numerous articles contributed by 
eminent scholars to THE CATHOLIC WORLD during the past few 
years would, in themselves, acquaint one quite thoroughly with the 
false aims and theories of Socialism, and with the most effective 
means of combating it. To every agency that will help in the 
work we extend a hearty greeting, and we welcome, therefore, a 
new magazine, The Common Cause, founded for the express purpose 
of fighting the common enemy Socialism. Its editors are a dis- 
tinguished body of men. Its first number is one of merit and much 
promise, and we extend it every good wish for a long and successful 

life. 



CORK, IRELAND, 30 December, 1911. 
To the Editor of the CATHOLIC WORLD : 

DBAR SIR : In his article, " What was the Reformation ? " in 
the current issue of your journal, Mr. Belloc, when referring to Ire- 
land's fidelity to the Faith, at that period, says : " I do not believe 
it capable ot an historic explanation." " It seems to me a phenome- 
non essentially miraculous in character." 

There is at least one broad historical tact, which may serve, in 
some measure, to explain it, and that is, that, at the time, Ireland 
being as yet an unconquered country, was a solely Irish-speaking 
country (except that small portion which constituted the Pale). 

If the Reformation were to reach Ireland at all, it could only 
come from England, and through the medium of the English lan- 
guage, a language which the native Irish of the time, did not under- 
stand. 

A reformed bishop, writing from Ireland at the time, to a friend 
of his says : "Of preaching we have none, and without preaching it 
is impossible to instruct the ignorant." One may interpret that to 
mean that the Reformers who understood and spoke only English, 
recognized that it was useless to p'reach to a people who understood 
and spoke only Irish. 

The Government of the time, seeing the set-back the Irish lan- 
guage was giving to the introduction'ol the Reformation into Ireland, 
promised to translate the reformed Catechism into Irish, but the 
promise was for some reason not kept. 



718 WITH OUR READERS [Feb., 

I do not claim that the Irish language saved the Faith of Ire. 
land at the Reformation, but at least it saved Ireland from a possible 
temptation. 

As Mr. Belloc gives three human reasons for the loss of Britain 
to the Faith at the Reformation, may it not be humanly possible 
that Ireland's distinctive nationality through her language acted 
under God's Providence, as a safeguard to the Faith of the Irish? 

Yours faithfully, 

AN IRISH CATHOLIC. 



reception given to His Eminence Cardinal Farley on his re- 
I turn to New York was extraordinary in its enthusiasm and in 
the sympathetic words of welcome given by the press of the entire 
city. Cardinal Farley gave the following message of the Holy 
Father to American Catholics just after reaching his Cathedral : 

' ' His message to the American Cardinals rang so true that I 
must render it to you every word as it came from his heart. 
Speaking to the Cardinals of England and Holland, and expressing 
the hope that those outside the fold in their respective nations would 
by God's grace return to the mother that still loved and longed for 
them, he turned to us, saying : 

And this hope smiles upon me most sweetly in the presence of you who 
come from distant America. The enthusiasm with which the intelligence 
of your elevation to the Sacred College was received, the demonstrations 
which were made for you by all the classes of citizens, the acclamation ac- 
companied with blessings, wishes and affectionate greetings on your depart- 
ure from New York and Boston, and finally your triumphant passage across 
the ocean protected by the Papal flag, afford me not only hope but certainty 
that the Lord on your return will multiply the fruits of your apostolate and 
over that hospitable land which receives all the peoples of the world and 
with well-ordered liberty provides for the universal well-being, the Lord will 
reign and His glory will shine therein suptr te orielur Dominus et gloria 
Ejus in te -videbitur. 

" And therefore, beloved friends, do I feel encouraged beyond the 
power of telling as I resume my duties in my diocese by these pro- 
phetic words of the Vicar of Christ. Encouraged am I, indeed, in 
holding to the hope that the fruits of my apostolate and that of my 
zealous and devoted clergy will be blessed and bring forth fruit a 
hundredfold in the years that are to come. 

" This royal reception, so wholehearted, and so unexpected, 
which you have given in the fulness of your fervent Catholic Faith, 
gives an added element of confidence to me that your devotion and 
loyalty to the successor of St. Peter, will grow apace, and if plenti- 
tude can admit of increase, that more than ever shall you be worthy 
of the proud name of American Catholics, who yield to none others 



i9i2.] WITH OUR READERS Tig 

in the world in combining loyalty to God and country In the highest 
degree of fullest measure. 

" The words of warm welcome spoken so gracefully and so elo- 
quently conceived by your honorable representative, the demonstra- 
tions of affection made with such unstinted measure, shall ever be 
treasured by me as a memory most dear. The record of it all will 
be forwarded to the Sovereign Pontiff and will add another joy to the 
heart of the venerable prisoner of the Vatican to cheer him as a 
sequel to the happiness which the news of the manner of your 
godspeed to me did on my departure two months ago." 



THE following verses contributed by Alice Meynell to the London 
Tablet, not only bring home to us the spiritual havoc wrought 
by the anti-Christian Government of Portugal, but with beautiful 
poetic mastery they reveal to us through the light of revelation the 
wondrous integrity and harmony of God's entire universe. In this 
they recall the criticism of G. K. Chesterton: "Poets will tend 
towards Christian orthodoxy for a perfectly plain reason, because it 
Is the simplest and freest thing now left in the world." 

CHRIST IN PORTUGAL. 

And will they cast the altars down, 
Scatter the chalice, crush the bread? 

In field, in village, and in town, 
He hides an unregarded head ; 

Waits in the corn-lands far and near, 
Bright in His sun, dark in His frost, 
Sweet in the vine, ripe in the ear 
Lonely unconsecrated Host. 

In ambush at the merry board 

The Victim lurks unsacrificed ; 
The mill conceals the harvest's Lord, 

The wine-press hides the unbidden Christ. 



THE CATHOLIC WORLD, now approaching its fiftieth year of 
life, is ever grateful to the long list of subscribers who have 
been its supporters for many, many years. One of these a sub- 
scriber for over thirty years Mr. Patrick D. Gallagher, died at 
South Bend, Ind., on January 10. Mr. Gallagher was born In 
Ireland eighty years ago. During his lifetime he was active in 
all Catholic works and was noted for his many charitable gifts. 
R. I. P. 



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DOYLE & Co., New York ; 

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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCIV. MARCH, 1912. No. 564. 

ST. CLARE OF ASSISI. 

BY FATHER CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C. 
I. 

|O appreciate truthfully and sympathetically the 
story of a saint is not easy to the ordinary run 
of men. Some have said that it takes a saint 
to understand a saint, since no lesser mortal 
can feel the urgency of sanctity, and follow 
faithfully its devious paths through the deep valleys and up 
the mountainous ascents of the life divinely spiritual. But it 
is not merely the strange heights of spirituality which baffle 
the experience of more common men brought face to face 
with a saint, but it is also the more intense humanity. Saints 
are more than commonly human in elemental human experi- 
ence. They retain or recover what most people lose and 
never regain, the capacity to live in close companionship with 
their own hearts. Children have that companionship until 
they take refuge from its mystery or judgment in an outer 
world social, material or intellectual. The difference between 
the child and the saint, in this respect, is the difference between 
a budding consciousness and knowledge full-grown. 

Some people there are who are not saints, who keep through 
life this child-like quality; they are never commonplace, and 
when they are possessed of a strong mind or will, or when 

NOTB : These articles on St. Clare are written in view of the seventh centenary of St. 
Clare's "conversion" to the religious life, from which originated the Second Franciscan 
Order of the Poor Clares. The saint left her home and took her vows on the night of the 
18-19 March, 1213. 

Copyright. 1912. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY or ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
TOL. XCIV. 46 



722 ST. CLARE Of ASSISI [Mar., 

roused by some strong emotion, they have a godlike strength 
before which the dogmatisms of the less vitally human break 
in helpless confusion. The same scattering power accom- 
panies the saints in their incursions into the world's life. 
They, too, bring the world to judgment; and the equity of 
their judgment is due as well to the full human quality of their 
experience as to the ineffable life-truth which they have 
gazed upon in the mountain retreats of the soul where they 
have met and seen God, Not otherwise could they qualify as 
judges of men. For the saints are judges of the world whether 
men acknowledge the fact or whether they do not. They 
show us what human nature is capable of spiritually ; they 
are an exhibition of the power of the Gospel working in flesh 
and blood. Let us not forget the flesh and blood in the 
spirit when we look to the saints; not at least if we seek in 
'them some companionship, and are not content merely to wave 
our censors ; which surely is the more profitable way. 

Of one thing, however, no true Catholic will ever be guilty, 
and that is to peer into the soul of a saint from mere intel- 
lectual curiosity. To look upon the soul of any man from 
that motive is always an impertinence; when the man is a 
saint it becomes almost a blasphemy, because of the intimate 
dealings of God with such a soul. In regard to the souls of 
men only one sort of knowledge is universally lawful, the 
knowledge which is akin to reverence or love. 

It is, indeed, not without a certain hesitation that one en- 
ters into the inner sanctuary of a life such as that of St. Clare 
of Assisi, where, one instinctively feels, after reading her 
Legend, no common earthliness ever found place, but all was 
consecrated by a purity which was staid with the constant 
vision and love of the heavenly life. For from her earliest 
days Clare kept herself a temple of the living God ; she was 
at all times "beautiful in the light of holiness." 

There is in her story no deviation from the spiritual law 
to remind us of her kinship with the common life of mankind ; 
her gaze was ever upward and she walked consistently in the 
company of God. That much is at once evident in the pages 
of her biography. 

One would not say that she was a stranger to temptation 
or that she knew nothing of the weakness of the flesh in 
her flight towards the heavens; but it is clear that evil of 



i 9 i2.] ST. CLARE OF ASSISI 723 

any sort never had any masterful hold of her. On the day 
that she vowed herself to the entire service of Jesus Christ, 
she brought to her consecration a virginal worship that she 
kept unsullied to the end. Such a soul wholly fragrant with 
an unceasing communion with its God, is encircled with a 
peculiar reverence which is the witness of a reserve which 
God holds to Himself in His creature, and which may not be 
rudely gazed upon by other eyes. It is a reverence like to 
that which shields the inviolate soul of a child against the 
coarse impertinence of the world and invests every good 
woman with a queenly aloofness in the thoughts of honest 
men. In the presence of such reserves idle curiosity is near 
to a sin; nor may we lawfully ask for more than God chooses 
to reveal. 

A few saints there are who have left written records of the 
intimate dealings of God with them; St. Augustine wrote his 
Confessions; St. Margaret of Cortona has left us an autobiog- 
raphy; St. Gertrude wrote her Insinuations of Divine Love, 
all under an impelling obedience to a Divine command. But 
most of the saints reveal themselves only in their deeds and 
in the words of counsel which neighborly charity has urged 
them to give to their fellowmen, and of this sort is the self- 
revelation of St. Clare. But in whatever fashion the revelation 
is made to us, we shall apprehend its truth and beauty only 
as we are willing to receive it through the sheltering rever- 
ence with which God guards the sanctity of His creatures 
against the earthy impurities of the world's judgments. 

Nor is this warning unnecessary when we recall to mind 
the liberties which are sometimes taken with the stories of the 
saints by people who can read into a saint's life nothing 
higher or more real than their own earthly experience.* It 
is the more necessary because the new interest in the lives of 
the saints which is beginning to show itself takes account not 
merely, nay, if the truth is told, not chiefly, of the things in 
which a saint stands apart from the common life of men, but 
rather in those intimations of common kinship which prove 
the saint a fellowman ; nor is this special interest without 
teal value to our knowledge of the Christian life, if it leads 

* As e.g. the instance quoted by C. F. O. Mastennan in his book, In Peril of Change, 
p. 189, where the " heroine visiting Assisi only expresses regret that St. Francis and St. 
Clare never married." This is but a crude example of the inability to understand the saints, 
which is not uncommon amongst modern writers, as Mr. Masterman himself points out. 



724 S T - CLARE OF Assist [Mar., 

us to confess the true relationship between the earthly hurran 
and the divinely human, between the world and the Gospel, 
and to acknowledge a more perfect humanity in a life in which 
the world is too apt to assume a mere negation oi its human 
birthright. 

No one can read the story of St. Clare without confess- 
ing to a vivid human interest. It would be possible with a 
semblance of historical truth to construct out of her Legend 
a purely earthly romance with an immediate and compelling 
appeal to the human emotions. The story would be funda- 
mentally false, but with a falsehood garbed in the vesture of 
truth; yet the possibility proves that in St. Clare we have no 
figure "of theological lathe and plaster" but a true woman, 
of human quality confessed. And yet one must deliberately 
avert one's mental vision not to recognize that in this woman's 
life we have the fulfillment of something which is unknown to, 
or but vaguely felt in, the common experience of the world, 
a something which puts her story upon a higher plane of 
spiritual thought and desire than the world is accustomed to. 
What that something higher is, only the Catholic faith can 
realize; to those who have not this faith it must necessarily 
remain a confusing mystery. 

The human lineaments of St. Clare's character are revealed 
in the very opening of her history. As she then appears we 
recognize at once the heroic lines upon which her life is to 
be moulded; the soaring idealism of her temperament, the 
capacity for utter self-sacrifice, the need to worship and yet 
the impossibility of her worshipping at any common shrine. 
She is fearless in loyalty; she might have been imperious but 
for the gentle humility which was born of her worshipping love 
of Jesus Christ. 

She was of noble birth ; her family was amongst the most 
illustrious in the territory of Assisi, and her father was lord 
of extensive lands:* a fact which tells us much of the early 
up-bringing of Clare. 

For the house of an Assisian lord at that period was no 
quiet retreat removed from the stress of social and political 
life. Whether he was on the side of the Commune or against 
It, he was incessantly engaged either in the civic struggles 
which divided the city into two armed parties, or in the fair- 

Leg. St. Claras. 



i9i2.] Sr. CLARE OF Assist 715 

ily feuds which set one feudal castle against another. The 
Umbrian Communes were then in the first flush of a proud 
independence; the restraining power of the German overlord- 
ship was withdrawn,* and individual as well as class ambitions 
were let loose. The independent Commune was in fact nur- 
tured in war and feud, in conspiracy and battle. As the feu- 
dal lord of large lands the father of Clare must have been no 
idle observerf f the time ; and his house within the city, but 
a stone's throw from the bishop's palace, must have echoed 
with the full tide of life outside. 

For one of healthy physical constitution and inherent 
strength of character, the strenuousness and constant readi- 
ness for emergencies which entered into the atmosphere of a 
noble's household, would not be without an advantage; it 
would foster strength and initiative in the strong, though it 
might overpower the weak ; and Clare was of the race of 
strong women a daughter who would not shame her fighting 
progenitors. 

But it were a vast mistake to regard those troublous days 
of the new-barn Italian Communes merely as days of political 
turbulence and war. Men sang the new songs brought from 
the singing countries beyond the Alps, listened to the re- 
cently-imported tales of chivalry, argued earnestly about Church 
and State, were curious for the latest news from distant parts; 
already, too, they were taking pride in the new architecture 
which was to adorn their cities and be an evidence of an in- 
creasing wealth.) 

Italy was, in fact, enjoying the intoxicating sense of a new 
freedom mental, social and political ; even in their religious 
views this new freedom was strongly felt, leading both to re- 
bellion against the Church, and to a restless quickening of life 
within the Church. It was a time of surgent ideals, when the 
Christian world was renewing its youth, and in the Italian 
Communes the new order found, perhaps, its intensest ex- 
pression. The very narrowness of the territorial confines of 

Conrad of Lutzen, appointed by the Emperor Duke of Spoleto and Count of Assisi, had 
been ignominiously expelled in 1199. 

t Tradition says he was Lord of Sasso Rosso, a strong castle on the slope of Monte 
Subasio ; and Sasso Rosso was one of the fortress-towers concerning which Perugia declared 
war on Assisi in 1202, Perugia acting as the friend of the fugitive Assisian nobles. But at this 
time Sasso Rosso was in the hands of the turbulent family of the Ghislieri. Yet it may be, as 
some assert, that the Ghislieri had driven the rightful lord out of the castle some years before 
the birth of Clare. Cf. A. Cristofani, Storit di Assist, p. 58-63. Tom. Locatelli. 

} The Assisians had but lately built the cathedral which still stands to-day. 



726 ST. CLARE OF ASSIST [Mar., 

an Italian Commune tended to intensify its interests, while its 
close relationships with the rest of Europe, due at once to 
the Church and Empire, to the new commercial enterprise and 
the crusades, lifted those interests out of a mere provincial- 
ism into a world-wide preoccupation. 

No one with a soul alive could have escaped the quicken- 
ing influence of such an atmosphere. Certainly Clare did not. 
The large, eager spirit of the time finds its reflection in her 
life-story; so, too, does its daring idealism, and that spiritual 
freedom of mind and heart for which the time was hungry, 
but of which it was too frequently balked by its lack of 
spiritual discipline. 

It is here that we find what is most interesting and in- 
structive in the life of Clare, and what marks her off as a 
true exponent of the Franciscan spirit. The political and 
social unrest was but a symptom of a general straining of the 
human spirit after a health-giving freedom. The people of 
the earlier Middle Ages had been a people in pupilage, learn- 
ing by formula and rote the elements of religion and civiliza- 
tion. The schoolmastering had achieved its purpose and 
made a Christian people out of the invading northern hordes; 
but the old formulas whereby society had been trained, had 
hardened and lost their suppleness ; the time-spirit which 
gave them life had vanished, giving place to the new, and 
men were beating about for new formulas wherein to embody 
the new spirit and make it a real possession. Thus had been 
born the new minstrelsy and the new dialects and the new 
Italian Commune; so, too, in the religious world had sprung 
into life the new mysticism and the Franciscan Order. All 
these developments had elements in common, proclaiming a 
common kinship amidst their differences. In one way or an- 
other they manifest the larger and freer humanity which had 
been asserting itself with increasing insistency throughout the 
twelfth century. 

The Franciscan Order in its jubilant devotion to the 
Sacred Humanity of our Lord, was directly related to the new 
piety, laden with a tender and joyous emotion, which was 
renovating the religious life of the cloister at this period; it 
had a less apparent, yet quite as real a kinship with the hu- 
manist fervor of the new minstrelsy. St. Francis' song of the 
creatures, known as the Canticle of the Sun, has its place 



i 9 i2.] ST. CLARE OF ASSISI 7 2 7 

in the new minstrelsy, and not with the older muse of the 
cloisters which gave us St. Peter Damien's Urbs Beata. And 
though in his ardent worship of poverty and humility the 
Franciscan spirit threw itself into immediate contradiction 
with the ambition and pride of the new political Commune, 
yet its relationship with the Commune is apparent in its own 
legal organization, in which it holds to the democratic, and 
not to the feudal, ideal. 

Not so immediately evident was its cousinship with the 
new dialectical schools; but that was, perhaps, due to special 
circumstances. Even more than the Commune, the new dia- 
lectics most largely strutted into the open world on the stilts 
of self-conceit and a destructive arrogance. If Franciscan hu- 
mility must pit itself against the love of wealth and place 
which entered into the life of the Commune, it must be still 
more alert against the more subtle arrogance and lack of spir- 
itual simplicity which was frequently found in the disciples of 
the new philosophy. Moreover, there was a yet more inher- 
ent opposition between the Franciscan spirit and the dialecti- 
cal. The one lived essentially by the experience of the heart 
which the other was apt to ignore. Yet the same breath of 
freedom which had sent Francis on his quest of poverty, had 
driven the logical mind on its quest of reasoned knowledge ; 
and it was not by purely arbitrary choice that the Francis- 
cans afterwards entered the arena of the new scholastic 
theology. 

One must remember these things in order to understand 
the character of St. Clare. She belonged to her time not 
merely by date of birth but by kinship of spirit. Its insistent 
need for soul-freedom was in her, the need for that realiza- 
tion of the individual self which was the general ideal and 
inspiration of the early thirteenth century. To set forth how 
Clare achieved this realization in her own case is the purpose 
of this paper. But we may at once remark that it was the 
eminent attainment of this sought-for freedom in the life of 
evangelical poverty which made St. Clare together with St. 
Francis, so true an embodiment of the pure Franciscan spirit 
and gave her a place amongst the supremely great women of 
Christendom. 

From her earliest years Clare seems to have been possessed 
in a rare degree by the instinct for religion. The indications 



728 Sr. CLARE OF Assist [Mar., 

given in her Legend, prove this conclusively. Unlike St. Fran- 
cis she did not pass through a period when her heart was 
held by the illusion of finding her supreme desire in any secu- 
lar achievement. This may have been due in part to the 
greater seclusion in which a girl was educated; in part, too, 
undoubtedly, it was owing to her mother's influence. For Or- 
tolana, her mother, was a woman of unusual piety combined, 
it would seem, with an adventurous and fearless character, 
such as one finds in many of the feudal chatelaines of the 
period. She had gone on toilsome pilgrimages to the Holy 
Land and other distant parts, perhaps, in the wake of the cru- 
sading armies. When Clare was about to be born, the Lady 
Ortolana was praying in a church for a safe delivery, when 
she heard a voice saying in answer to her prayer: "Fear not, 
woman, for thou shalt in safety bring forth a light which shall 
clearly illumine the world." And because of that word, when 
the child was born she was named Clare, the "clear-shining." 
Such prenatal promises are not always realized; but Ortolana 
was a careful mother and wise; the Legend says she was 
worthy of her name, and educated her daughter in the knowl- 
edge and practises of the Faith.* 

Clare began early to take thought for the poor; nor would 
she give to them merely from the common store. Her alms 
were consecrated by self-sacrifice ; she sent secretly to orphaned 
children delicacies meant for herself. Also she early acquired 
a habit of prayer and would withdraw herself into secluded 
places to pray; and not having yet a chaplet of beads upon 
which to count her Paters the chaplet may have been a gift 
in reserve for grown-up days she collected little heaps of 
pebbles to serve the purpose. By observant relatives these 
acts of piety were probably not taken too seriously; they 
would be the tokens of that religious idealism which makes 
sweet the childhood of many Catholic children, but which in 
after-life is not found a barrier to secular developments. Or- 
tolana, the mother, not unlikely had a keener insight; perhaps, 
too, she knew what others were ignorant of, how the thought 
of religion was gripping the heart's desire of her girl and hold- 
ing it aloof from the curious imaginirgs about the world's 

* Leg. St. Claras. The mediaeval biographer could not resist the temptation to play 
upon the word Ortolana, which he takes in a Latin meaning, hortulana, a gardener. In like 
manner Alexander IV., in the bull of Clare's canonization, says: "The good Ortolana who 
in the garden of the Lord produced such a plant." (C/. Sbaralea, Bullar. Franc,, II., p. 82.) 



ST. CLARE OF ASSISI 729 

life through which a girl ordinarily passes into the world's 
actual life. 

To Clare on the border-line of womanhood, religion was 
the serious preoccupation of mind and heart. Already she 
was disciplining herself into constant loyalty to the spiritual 
life she had come to gaze upon with true desire. Under her 
soft garments she wore a coarse hair-shirt, a constant ally 
against the world. When she came to a marriageable age, she 
was expected by her family to enter into an alliance which 
would help on the family fortunes. Clare warily pleaded delay. 
She had not yet found her vocation ; but she had felt its in- 
timations and meant to keep her freedom for the day when 
the call should come to her to which she knew she would give 
an unhesitating glad response. Meanwhile her sweet purity 
and devotion to the poor and the spiritual aloofness with which 
she passed through the world, made people look upon her with 
unwonted reverence; it was felt that Clare was a woman apart. 
Doubtless this did much to reconcile her family and convince 
them, when the day came, that she had defied the world's 
prudence and prejudice. 

She grew up, therefore, in purity and in innocence of the 
world, but it was the positive innocence of pure, soul-forming 
affections ; the innocence of a heart alive with quickened de- 
sire and alert to discern its own mystery. Clare had her dream 
of the future stimulating her to formative action and calling 
forth the instinctive loyalties of her nature and transmuting 
the ore of the earth into spiritual gold. She probably knew 
the romances of chivalry which were told by the minstrels 
who were visitors welcomed by the feudal household. The 
romantic temperament was her own, and the tales of high ad- 
venture and deathless loyalty would be sweet to her ears, but 
they would also be to her parables of the religious life in which 
her thoughts were set. Even if the romance literature was 
unknown to her, her heart would fashion its dreams upon the 
lines of the tales of chivalry, just because her temperament 
was as that of the authors of the tales, and actual life as she 
knew it was in the fashion of chivalry. Her own pure noble- 
ness would supply the purifying idealism. But as we have 
said, it is probable that she knew by ear the romance tales.* 

We know that in the case of St. Francis and his first friars 

The minstrels of Provence at this period were overrunning Italy, traveling from castle 
o castle and from city to city, always sure of an eager welcome. See Fauriel. 



730 ST. CLARE OP Assist [Mar., 

the new romance literature was a directly formative influence 
in their spiritual life. The seraphic founder was accustomed 
to clothe his ideas in the language of chivalry because his 
thoughts were fashioned in that mould. His friars were his 
Knights of the Round Table; poverty was the Lady Poverty, 
the mistress of his vision; his missionary journeys were ad- 
ventures conceived and carried out in true chivalric style, by 
fearless trust in the strength of a just cause and blind devo- 
tion to his Liege-Lord, Christ. His poverty was the poverty 
of the knight-errant, going forth on the quest with no encum- 
brance save his arms, and relying on the good-will of others 
for food and lodging, ready, if need be, to suffer hunger and 
lodge on the open road, so that the quest was achieved. He 
wished his friars to be men of action and not mere reading 
men, because, as he said, " Charles the Emperor, Roland and 
Oliver, and all the paladins and puissant men, who were strong 
in battle, fought with the infidels with much sweat and labor, 
and so gained a memorable victory"; he scorned to receive 
honor merely because he had read their history ; he would be 
up and doing after their example.* 

The influence of the chivalric literature i& the formation of 
the Franciscan life has hardly received the attention it deserves. 
One may say with truth that the Franciscans carried not only 
the spirit of chivalry, but its code of laws and mental environ- 
ment into the realm of religion far more intimately than did 
the religious orders of chivalry, such as the Templars. The 
spirit of romantic chivalry was in the very soul of the Fran- 
ciscan ; and while in secular life it was apt to degenerate into 
license and a selfish disregard of the established conventions 
and moral laws, in the Franciscan life it attained under the 
guidance and sanction of religion to an exalted freedom of 
soul and a renewed sanctity of human emotion and affection. 
Moreover, it was the romantic conception of life which sepa- 
rated the Franciscan Order mentally and in its spirit and dis- 
cipline from the older monastic orders which were formed 
upon a more static idea of human society. 

Now it was just this same romantic temperament wedded 
to a heart wholly dominated by religious Faith, which gave 
to the innocence of Clare its peculiar quality. It might be 
said of her speaking with entire reverence that had she re- 

* Cf. Speculum Perftcti/jnii, ed. Sabatier, Cap. 4. 



1 9i2.] ST. CLARE OF Assist 731 

mained in the world she would have made a more perfect 
wife than a perfect mother. Her most urgent need was to 
worship, and with her it was a compelling emotion ; in her 
worship she found her joy and life. But with this was com- 
bined a searching gaze for spiritual excellence and high achieve- 
ment. She would never have held her lord back from the 
battle of life; her high spirit would have bidden him go forth 
and fulfill the whole promise of his manhood. And yet in his 
effort and achievement he would have been comforted by that 
noble love which is twin-sister to the purest worship, the love 
which is without thought of self, because self-consciousness is 
realized only in the vision of that which is worshipped. 

All these emotions entered into Clare's interior life; but 
they were wings upon which her spirit soared beyond the 
heaven of ordinary mortal's desire. Not at any lesser altar 
but at the high-altar of God Himself, her worship must needs 
expend itself in virginal adoration. With that instinctive as- 
surance her womanhood came to her. And yet it was an as- 
surance which was a troublous mystery. For to be free in 
our worship of God, we must realize the Divine Being as the 
satisfaction of our own need ; He must come to us in some 
sort as ourselves, but as the infinite sublimation of ourselves; 
only so can we lose ourselves in Him with the happy con- 
sciousness of finding ourselves. This, indeed, is the problem 
all religious souls have to solve before they gain tbeir spiritual 
freedom. 

It was this unsolved problem which kept Clare from an 
ultimate decision until she met St. Francis. Then the mystery 
was solved in the twofold conviction that in the evangelical 
poverty he set forth she would find her soul's freedom, and 
that he himself was its true teacher both in his words and 
deeds. From that moment Francis was " under God, the Mas- 
ter of all her seeing,"' and evangelical poverty, her world of 
delight. And in that world over which Francis stood sentinel, 
Gad revealed Himself to her in a quickened understanding of 
the Christ-life of the Gospel. Then all her being was caught 
up into a threefold loyalty which was really one: loyalty to 
Francis, Poverty, and the Incarnate Word, Who came to the 
world in poverty. And in that threefold loyalty Clare attained 
to the perfect life. 

* Cf. Fr. Paschal Robinson : The Lift of SI. Clart. 




SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME. 

BY W. E. CAMPBELL. 
II. 

|HE first paper attempted a summary of the spir- 
itual forces which were, and had long been at 
work in the England of Sir Thomas More 
among the parochial, the monastic and the 
episcopal clergy; how far and under what in- 
fluences these forces had suffered, how they had come into 
contact or opposition with the royal power and to what ex- 
tent that power, both unconsciously and intentionally, had 
succeeded in weakening or oppressing them. We shall now 
pass on to examine the more particular and personal relations 
which existed between Sir Thomas More and his own times. 

He was born in London in 1478. His first school was 
that of St. Anthony in Threadneedle Street, kept by Nicholas 
Holt who had already numbered among his pupils William 
Latimer and Colet, the future Dean. Affectionate parents 
were as anxious then as they are now to send their children 
away from home at an early age. When only eleven, More, 
" by his father's procurement was received into the house of 
the right reverend, wise and learned prelate, Cardinal Morton," 
at that time Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor 
ot England. His unusual talent combined with a very win- 
ning disposition soon made him a great favorite in that great 
household, for Roper tells us that though so young in years 
yet "would he at Christmastide suddenly step in among the 
players, and never studying the matter, make a part of his 
own there presently among them, which made the lookers OR 
more sport than all the players beside. In whose wit and 
towardness the Cardinal much delighting, would often say of 
him unto the nobles that divers times dined with him, 'that 
child here waiting at table, whosoever shall live to see it, will 
prove a marvelous man.' " 

The child seems to have returned the great Prelate's affec- 



1 9i 2.] Sin THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 733 

tion, and never to have lost it for he speaks in very sincere 
praise of Morton both in his History of Richard IIL and in 
the Utopia. In the latter he describes him as " fine in speech, 
eloquent and pithy. In the law he had profound knowledge, 
in wit he was incomparable, and in memory excellent." Mr. 
Hutton, writing as an Anglican, remarks that it was probably 
from Morton that More learned his unalterable devotion to 
Papal Supremacy, who following the example of Chichele and 
Beaufort, "forgot the claim of the English primate to be 
alferius or bis papa" 

By the Cardinal's persuasion he was sent to Oxford in 
1492, but his stern parent kept him very short of money, 
there being scarcely enough to pay for the mending of his 
clothes. The collegiate discipline, too, was very severe with 
its early rising, meagre diet, long hours of study and no 
means of keeping warm in winter time. More afterwards con- 
fessed this hard faring to have been an excellent thing, for 
it kept him from extravagance or dissipation and increased 
rather than disencouraged his zeal for study. He was soon 
brought into touch with that brilliant group of men who were 
bent on spreading the new learning, among them Grccyn, 
Linacre who taught him Greek, and Colet, whose influence 
over him proved most lasting and profound. A great friend- 
ship sprung up between them which continued until Colet's 
death in 1519. Mr. Seebohm thus describes it. 

More's ready wit added to great natural powers and versatility 
of mind, which enabled him to master with ease all branches 
of University teaching to which he applied himself, made such 
an impression upon Colet that he came to regard him as the 
one genius amongst his English friends. Moreover, along 
with these intellectual gifts was combined a gentle and loving 
disposition, which threw itself into the bosom of a friend with 
so guileless and pure an affection, that when men came under 
the power of -its unconscious enchantment they literally fell 
in love with More. This Colet did in spite of thirteen years' 
disparity of age. He iound in his young acquaintance the 
germs of a character somewhat akin to his own. Along with 
so much ot life and generous loveliness, he found a natural 
independence of mind which formed convictions for itself, and 
a strength and promptness of will whereby action was made 
as a matter of course to follow conviction.* 

The Oxford Rtformtrs of 1498. London : 1867.- p. 38. 



734 -S 1 /* THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Mar., 

Some account of the nature of Colet's influence is neces- 
sary to a right understanding of More's own life. 

Colet came of a large and wealthy family. His father bad 
been twice Lord Mayor of London, and through his powerful 
interest his son was early in possession of several wealthy 
livings which he afterwards resigned. His own tastes were 
very simple, deeply religious and passionately devoted to 
study. At Oxford he soon took the enthusiasm prevalent for 
the new learning, and imitating Grocyn and Linacre he un- 
dertook a continental tour in order to improve his scholar- 
ship and get in active touch with the places and personalities 
of the renaissance. His foreign studies embraced all patristic 
literature and he appears to have preferred Dionysius, the so- 
called Areopagite, Origen, Saints Ambrose and Jerome to St. 
Augustine and the great scholastics, Aquinas and Duns Scotus. 
He also devoted himself to canon and civil law and may pos- 
sibly have made his first acquaintance with Greek. In Italy 
he seems to have been most impressed by the writings of 
Savonarola, of Marsilio Ficino (whose translation of Plato did 
so much to revive the study of that author) and of Pico della 
Mirandola, by whom More himself was so much influenced. 
It is not known whether he came into personal touch with 
these three notable men, but the presumption that he did so 
is strong. 

After Colet's return he was ordained priest and taking up 
his residence in Oxford, there delivered a remarkable course of 
lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (c. 1497). These 
lectures were the subject of much notoriety on account of 
their novel method of exegesis. It was a new thing for a 
lecturer on Sacred Scripture to confine his attention to the 
literal meaning of the text as a whole with especial reference 
to the time and circumstances and personality of the inspired 
writer and to illustrate, for instance, an Epistle of St. Paul 
by quoting Suetonius as to the state of contemporary Roman 
society. These lectures were also remarkable for their sim- 
plicity and deep spiritual feeling, but they were always strictly 
correct in their teaching and in obvious contrast to the one- 
sided and unorthodox commentaries of continental enemies of 
the Church. The lectures on Romans were followed by a 
series on Corinthians, and these by other courses during the 
next five years. They were attended by many eminent mem- 



19 1 2.] SIX THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 735 

bers of the clergy as well as by the younger members ol the 
university who vied with each other in their genuine enthusiasm 
and in their eagerness to take notes of what most impressed 
them. One of Erasmus' letters to Colet throws interesting 
light on the aim and success of these lectures. 

In our day, Theology, which ought to be at the head of all 
literature, is mainly studied by persons who from their dull- 
ness and lack of sense are scarcely fit foi any literature at all. 
This I say, not of learned and honest professors of Theology, 
to whom I look up with the greatest respect, but of that sor- 
did and supercilious crowd of divines, who think nothing of 
any learning but their own. In offering to do battle, my dear 
Colet, with this indomitable race of men for the restoration of 
genuine theology to its former brightness and dignity, you 
have undertaken a pious work as regards theologj' itself, and 
a most wholesome one in the interest of all studies, and espe- 
cially of this flourishing University of Oxford. But, to say 
truth, it is a work involving much difficulty and much Ill-will. 
The difficulty your learning and energy will surmount, the 
ill-will your magnanimity will overlook. Among the divines, 
themselves, there are not a few who are willing and able to 
help your noble endeavors. Every one, indeed, will give you 
his hand, since there are not any of the doctors in this famous 
School, who have not listened attentively to the lectures on 
the " Pauline Epistles " which you have delivered during these 
last three years. And in this I do not know which most de- 
serves praise, the modesty of those who being themselves 
authorized teachers, do not shrink from appearing as hearers 
of one much their junior and not furnished with a doctor's 
degree, or the singular erudition, eloquence, and integrity of 
the man they have thought worthy of this honor.* 

In 1504, Colet was made Dean of St. Paul's, and be there 
continued to a larger and more representative congregation the 
great work he had begun at Oxford. Of his intimacy with 
More just at this time we have evidence in one cf More's own 
letters to him, written between 1504 and 1505. He regrets 
that Colet is not to return to London for some time. 

What can be more distressing to me than to be deprived of 
your most dear society, after being guided by your wise coun- 

*Tke Epistles of Emmm. Trans. F. M. Nichols. London: 1901. Ep. 108, p. 220. 



736 SJK THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Mar., 

sels, cheered by your charming familiarity, assured by your 
earnest sermons, and helped forward by your example, so that 
I used to obey your very look and nod ? 

He proceeds to complain of certain preachers at St. Paul's 
whose lives seem ill-matched with their pulpit eloquence. 

But if, [he continues], as naturalists affirm, the physician 
in whom the patient has perfect confidence is the one likely to 
cure, there is no doubt that there is no one more fit than your- 
self to undertake the cuie of this whole city. How ready all 
are to put themselves in your hands to trust and obey you 
you have already found by experience, and at the present time 
their longing and eager desire proves. 

Come, then, my dear Colet, even for the sake of your Step- 
ney (Colet's vicarage) . . . Lastly, though this is but a 
feeble motive, let your regard for me move you, since I have 
given myself entirely to you, and am awaiting your return 
full of solicitude. Meanwhile, I shall pass my time with 
Grocyn, Linacre and our friend Lilly : the first of whom is, as 
you know, the only director of my life in your absence ; the 
second the master of my studies ; the third my most dear 
companion.* 

Colet, like More and Erasmus has been claimed as a herald 
of the Reformation, but that this claim is untrue the fairness 
of non-Catholic historians has substantially admitted. Mr. 
Sidney Lee points out that " his practical efforts of church 
reform were confined to the reissue of old rules of discipline 
to prevent the clergy from neglecting their duties." To sum 
up, Colet's scholarship, after all, was not great but he was 
among the greatest of his time in moral and personal force. 
He inspired and encouraged Erasmus, he was at once More's 
hero and director ; as Dean of St. Paul's he was a severe 
critic of ecclesiastical shortcomings and he fearlessly and 
openly reproved the king for his warlike propensities. As for 
the Reformation, " he did not foresee it " and had he done 
so "it would have altogether exceeded his sense of the situ- 
ation's needs ; had he lived he would almost certainly have 
been found at the side ol More and Fisher." f 

* Father Bridgett's trans, from the Latin. 
t Sidney Lee, Diet. Nat. Biog. vol. xi. p. 327. 



Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 737 

More's career at Oxford did not last to the end of his 
second year. His father thought classical learning of little 
use for a legal training, and in 1494 had his son entered at 
New Inn, and two years later at Lincoln's Ir n In 1498 he 
first made the acquaintance of Erasmus but until after his 
call to the Bar in 1500, the exacting nature of his work, the 
soaallness of his allowance, and the severity of parental discip- 
line -nude anything like relaxation impossible. The fact that 
later on he was made Reader at Furnivai's Inn, " so remain- 
ing by the space of three years and more," shows that his 
legal studies were carried to an unusually high standard, but 
there is no doubt that as soon as he had been " made and 
was accounted a worthy utter barrister" his mind and heart 
turned with happy spontaneity to religious interests and 
studies. " After this," writes Roper, " he read for a good 
space a public lecture of St. Augustine de Civitate Dei in the 
Church of St. Laurence in the old Jewry, whereunto there re- 
sorted Doctor Grocyn, an excellent, cunning man, and all tbe 
chief learned of the city of London." 

These lectures have not come down to us; but we know 
that they dealt rather with the historical and philosophical 
than with the theological, matter of St. Augustine's treatise. 
The preparation of them must have suggested to More's mind 
the great contrast between the old mediaeval theory of Chris- 
tian government, of which de Civitate Dei is the classic ex- 
position, and the new transitional theories of government by 
expediency which Machiavelli was to sum up a little later in 
// Principe. 

According to St. Augustine there is a divine purpose 
working through all the history of our race, a purpose which 
is revealed in the Incarnation and which is applied in the 
fouadation, the growth and the extension of the Church, "that 
most glorious society and celestial city of God's faithful, which 
is partly seated in the course of these declining times ; and 
partly in the solid estate of eternity." The Incarnation is the 
pattern of all God's dealing with men, for just as He was 
made Man, in order that He might draw all men to Himself, 
so, also, by the power of tbe Holy Spirit, has the Church 
taken temporal shape and organization that she might reveal 
to the kingdoms of this world the eternal principles of justice 
and charity, and exercise the spiritual means by which these 
VOL. xcrv. 47 



Six THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Mar., 

principles are to be planted and sustained in the minds and 
hearts of men. The Church is not merely an imperceptible 
influence leavening, as it were by magic, the temporal powers 
of this present world, it is an actual polity, comparable to that 
of the Roman Empire, and visible to the human eye; insti- 
tuted in time, localized in place, having a recognized consti- 
tution, "closely inter-connected with earthly rule, with a definite 
guidance to give, and a definite part to take, in all the affairs 
of actual life," with its own officers and agents, its own law, 
ritual and property. Man, according to his nature, had founded 
institutions, societies, cities, states, kingdoms and empires for 
his own civil welfare, and God had placed in the midst of all 
these a great universal organization, a Church which, by 
speaking the eternal Truth and practising the eternal life, 
should give to man the best rule, even for the things of time. 
Just as our Lord came to His own and was not received 
because faith was lacking, so, too, might men still see that 
the Church was in the world and yet fail to see that she was 
not of it. 

Such studies as these must necessarily have deepened 
More's spiritual understanding of life. He was destined to 
stand at one of the great parting ways of history when the 
temporal foundations of the earth are shaken and rooted up 
and taken away. At such times neither those who pull down 
nor those who build up are in a position to know what they 
really do, but the man of priceless worth is he who can look 
both forward and back, who can distinguish and appraise the 
changeless and changeable elements which go to the sum of 
human life, and who, while bravely dismissing what has lost 
its use, stands out immovably for the institutions and ideals 
which no society can afford to lose. He values these things 
not because they are old but because they are spiritual and 
of perpetual necessity to human nature in its unending struggle 
against actual and original weakness. He knows that in mo- 
ments of material pride and moral despair, man is only too 
likely to throw over ideals which tire his perseverance. More 
was a man of this type. Mark Pattisoti sneers at his spiritual 
preoccupations and his tepid adherence to the cause of prog- 
ress, but More took his stand upon spiritual heights unknown 
to his critic, and from this high position learnt more wisely 
of the past and judged better of what was to come. The 



i9i2.] Sfx TMOMAS MORE AND His TIME 739 

Renaissance and the Reformation mark a great reaction against 
organized association in every form, a great outburst of un- 
fettered individualism for which we are still paying temporal 
penalty. More set his face against such a form of progress 
and he gave his life for the Church because he thought that 
she was the only power capable of restraining it. 

More at this time was himself going through a difficult and 
trying experience, the question of his "vocation" was yet to 
be decided. This very crucial incident of his life has been so 
utterly misunderstood and misrepresented by Protestant writers j 
that Father Bridgett was obliged to devote a great deal of 
space to an explanation which would be obvious to any Catho- 
lic. Was it or was it not God's will that he should leave the 
world and attempt that high state of religious perfection to 
which our Lord referred in the words : Qui potest captre capiat 
He that can take it, let him take it? The presumption of 
some writers that his final decision not to enter religion was 
due to his disgust with monastic abuses is easily disproved. 
In the first place a call to "religion" is not a call to monas- 
ticism, in general, but a strong yearning towards some particu- 
lar monastic house. Now the London Charterhouse was evi- 
dently one of those upon which his desire was set, for as Roper 
tells us, he lived there (that is to say, attended their religious 
exercises) for about tour years without vow, previous to making 
his final decision, "and gave himself to devotion and prayer." 
His vocation, had he had one, would surely have been to this 
house or to one equally observant. This house which later 
was to give so many martyrs to the Faith, was a pattern of 
religious observance. 

According to Maurice Chauncey, one of the few religious 
of the convent who purchased their lives by compliance with 
the king's (Henry VIII.) wishes, all were leading the most 
holy lives. In the language of his penitence, he alone " the 
spotted and diseased sheep of the flock, deserved to be cast 
out of the fold," and to lose the crown of martyrdom. Twenty 
of the community were not yet thirty-eight years of age, and 
they vied with one another in the fervor of their observance. 
Even the lay brethren were remarkable for their perfect lives, 
and were true conversi from the world and its ways. Two of 

* As an alternative to the London Charterhouse More seemed also inclined to the Fran- 
ciscans at Greenwich, who held an equally high reputation for holiness. 



740 Ssx THOMAS MORE AND His TIME [Mar., 

their number, Brothers John and Roger, had often been seen 
by Chauncey raised in ecstasy from the ground while pray- 
ing.* 

Colet certainly did use his influence to dissuade More from 
entering religion, but not on account of prevalent monastic 
relaxation, but because, as More's spiritual director, he judged 
his penitent to be unfitted for it. Colet himself when harassed 
by the garrulous interference of the aged Bishop of London, 
speaks of the Charterhouse as being his " retreat and hiding 
place." Men are not wont to go for spiritual help and con- 
solation to the religious houses they hold in light esteem. 

More, then, having, as Erasmus tells us, done all in his 
power to ascertain God's will in the matter of his " vocation " 
and having with all humility received his confessor's advice as 
final, at once turned all the powers of his splendidly disci- 
plined nature to the worldly duties which lay so obviously in 
front of him. Though not called to the cloister, he was called 
to a life of holiness in the world; his was to be not merely a 
highly trained, but also a nobly devoted life. 

The question has often been asked as to how the life of a 
saint differs from that of other great men who have influenced 
the world in which they lived. In one sense, a saint is so 
natural a man that in him the highest human and social vir- 
tues have their actual fulfillment. It matters not whether we 
are looking for the ideal youth, man, husband, father, citizen 
or patriot, we shall find him realized in the saint. But, in 
another sense, the saint is very different from the naturally 
great man. He regards himself and the world in which he 
lives, from an entirely different point of view: his hopes are 
higher and his fears are deeper; his hopes are higher because 
of his absolute trust in God, and his fears are deeper because 
of his absolute distrust of self. He does not despise life nor 
does he cease to live it humanly, but he lives it with a differ- 
ent end in view and in the strength of a different and super- 
human power. The end is God and the power is God's super- 
natural grace. The man without supernatural faith has one 
tingling centre of personal reality, and that is himself ; he 
may speak of God and think of God and dream of God, but 
for all that, he is more real and personal to himself than God 

* Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, p. 60. 



i9i2.] S/tf THOMAS MORE AND His TIME 741 

is to him. With the saint, and indeed in a less measure with 
all who persevere in the habit of supernatural grace, exactly 
the opposite is the case. He has two centres of personal 
reality himself and God and of these two God is to him the 
more real. God is more intimately and personally present to 
the saint than he is personally real and present to himself 
he has become, as the apostle said, a new creature. 

But the saint, this " new creature," however excellent in 
his sanctity, belongs to another world, and it has been urged 
that this other- worldliness of his makes him necessarily anti- 
social or, at least, indifferent to this world's betterment. If 
other-worldliness means selfishness the contention is true 
enough, but if it means unselfishness I fail to see its force. 
In my last paper, I dwelt on the social and economic value of 
monasticism ; there we had a very striking and concrete in- 
stance of the worldly value of true unworldliness : monasticism 
at its very best did more than any other contemporary insti- 
tution to intellectualize, to civilize and to socialize Western 
Europe; the driving power of monasticism was its power of 
distributing to its immediate environment the spiritual and 
material benefits it had been able to accumulate; in a very 
true sense the spirit of our Lord filled the whole earth, giving 
gifts to the poor so that they were filled to satisfaction. The 
monasteries of the Middle Ages were the clearing-houses of 
the Western World, and what went out of them was well dis- 
tributed. But my real point is not the quality or the quantity 
of the goods distributed, but the fewer of unselfish distribution 
which belongs to all highly spiritual communities or individuals. 
We sadly need it just now. Socialism sees the need of it, but 
it lacks the spiritual vision to perceive from whence it comes 
or how it can be maintained. 

There may be plenty of water and the house may be full 
of water-pipes, but without a steady and continual fire there 
will be no circulation of warmth. Unworldliness is one of the 
secrets of saintliness which the world, if only for its own sake, 
would do well to learn and put into practice. 




KATIE. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

|HE lady from the Department of Agriculture, 
who lectured in the villages on Domestic 
Economy and the keeping of fowls, bees and 
such things, drove on an outside car along the 
flank of Sleive Beg. Below thundered the 
ocean, making a hollow, resounding roar as it broke against 
the great wall of perpendicular cliff. 

It was autumn weather, and a day of gray colorlessness. 
Autumn hung no banners out in those parts, because there 
were no trees, but only the bogs and the mountains. Culti- 
vation went some way up the side of the mountain, sparse 
cultivation in little nooks sheltered by the rocks. In tiny arti- 
ficial fields formed by painful carrying of clay from the lower 
levels. High up, like a seafowl's nest in the cranny of the 
rock, there was a little dwelling, a few scraws on a heap of 
stones; it seemed at this distance as though the wind might 
blow it away. 

"Yon'll be the Widow Dougherty's 1 " said the taciturn 
driver, indicating the remote little dwelling by a motion of 
his whip. 

" My goodness me ! how am I ever to get up there ? " 
asked the lady, whose proper name was Miss Elsa Fanning. 

" Deed then an' I'm thinkin' you'll have to climb it. 
There's a bit of a path that winds round and round an' you 
can't miss it. It'll just lave you at the dacent woman's door." 
They had turned a corner now and the cabin was no 
longer visible. Miss Fanning's side oi the car faced the steep 
wall of rock. She was glad not to be on the seaward side* 
although the sunset was magnificent beyond Tory Island and 
the ocean rolled, a great heaving mass of gold with no land 
beyond Tory nearer than America. She was not yet inured 
to the giddiness of looking down the sheer cliff from the un- 
protected road, where the feet of the passenger swung above 
space and there were about six inches of sandy road between 
him and eternity. 



19 12.] KATIE 743 

It was magnificent, but at the moment she would have 
given the superb view of sea and sky, which would have been 
hers for looking over her shoulder, for a lit Dublin street, the 
gay shop-fronts and the cheerful, friendly faces. She had had 
some weeks of these lonely wastes of land and sea, and she 
was beginning to desire the society of her fellow-creatures. 
The car-drivers were taciturn ; apparently they had their 
melancholy faces set against any exploitation on the part of 
visitors. The accommodation at the hotels, so-called, was not 
good. The friendly and kindly priests had alone redeemed the 
situation, their rosy and cheerful faces making so many bright 
milestones along the bleak roads over which she had passed. 

The car stopped abruptly at the foot of a narrow path, so 
precipitous that Miss Fanning looked at it in some dismay. 

"Don't be afraid of it, Miss," said the car-driver, coming 
out of his taciturnity. "You're as safe as in your own bed 
unless you was to meet the Widow Dougherty's ould puckawn 
goat comin' down it and that he was to scatter you. Any- 
how meself an' the mare '11 be here so that if ye kep* to the 
path ye needn't fall ia the say. 'Tis worse comin' down nor 
goin' up, but maybe you're sure-footed." 

"Maybe I'm not," Miss Fanning replied, taking a few ten- 
tative steps and hoping devoutly that the Widow Dougherty's 
goat would not take it into his head to come down the path 
just as she was ascending it. 

She climbed up without mishap, although she had now 
and again an inclination to go on all fours and cling to the 
face of the cliff path. Presently, the track turned and grew 
wider. There were a few boulders on one side of it which 
made for security. Wishing that the return journey were 
safely accomplished, Miss Fanning found herself in front of 
the little cabin. 

A woman stood in the doorway, her hand shading her 
eyes. She was too tall for the low door and her shoulders 
had taken an habitual stoop. The flooding sun, dropping 
lower and lower towards the west, revealed fine, aquiline fea- 
tures and a darkness of skin which suggested a far-back 
Spanish origin. Her lips had a patient droop. That was 
something Miss Fanning had grown accustomed to in women's 
faces in these lonely regions, where it was so hard to wring 
a bare livelihood from the rocks and the sea. 



744 KATIE [Mar., 

" You'll be ? " she said. 

Miss Fanning had a curious idea that the dullness of the 
face was newly fallen upon it. The voice was lifeless, trailing 
off into a profound melancholy. 

"I've come from the Department to talk to you about 
poultry. I'm told you are a proper person to receive some 
of the improved breeds." 

Without speaking the woman stood aside and indicated to 
her that she should enter the cabin. She did so, stooping 
her head, although she was not very tall, below the lintel as 
she catered. Within, despite the glorious sunset, the place was 
dark, darker, perhaps, because of the flood of splendor outside. 

The Widow Dougherty closed the door and went over 
to the hearth. She stooped and did something to the turf- 
embers. A trail of sparks shot over the darkness. Miss Fan- 
ning, standing in the middle of the room, if it could be called 
a room, the wing in her toque touching the thatch, felt some- 
what affronted at the woman's attitude. It was as though she 
took no interest in the things Miss Fanning bad to tell her, 
nor in the new breed of fowl which was to replace the old, 
unthrifty breed. 

The woman mechanically pushed towards her a chair. Be- 
fore she sat down Miss Fanning opened the door and let in a 
flood of gold, which but intensified the darkness of the spaces 
it did not reach. She was now ready to discuss the practical 
matters on which she had come to speak. 

The Department was very anxious to foster and im- 
prove the cottage industries. It might even build a shed for 
a goat if Mrs. Dougherty seemed a fit and proper person to 
receive its bounties; a hen-house, too, was not beyond its 
possibilities. And bees! Did Mrs. Dougherty think she'd like 
to keep bees ? The cottage with a gable facing south, and 
sheltered by the mountain, provided a most suitable place for 
bees by the white wall under the overhanging eaves of thatch. 
The Department was most anxious to foster industries that 
would keep the people alive on their little holdings, and pre- 
vent their going to America. It had become a serious matter 
about the depopulation of these glens and mountains. The 
Department wanted to employ the young people, so to keep 
the life in Ireland from dying out. 

At this point, a windy sigh broke from the Widow Dough- 



i9i2.] KATIE 745 

erty's lips, which, by its depth and intensity of mournfulness, 
fairly startled Miss Fanning for the moment. It was as though 
the banshee had cried. She paused for a second, but the long 
back of the Widow Dougherty there was melancholy even in 
that back glimmered in the darkness where she leant by the 
wall above the turf embers, motionless. The sigh was the 
woman's only comment. 

After that momentary pause Miss Fanning went on. She 
had got her subject pretty well by heart and she was an en* 
thusiast, although her enthusiasm had been somewhat damped 
by her experiences of the last month, and the fatigue of the 
long journeys on outside cars, with very indifferent hotels to 
house one at the close of the day. 

She returned to the question of the poultry. Father Phil 
Kelly of Annalough had recommended Mrs. Dougherty as a 
person likely to profit by the Department's bounties. The 
Department would be willing, on Miss Fanning's report, to 
supply Mrs. Dougherty with a White Wyandotte Cockerel 
and some hens. The old, unthrifty broods must be got rid of. 

All of a sudden she was aware that Mrs. Dougherty was 
not listening. Was the woman densely stupid or was she ill? 
There had been nothing in the face to suggest stupidity, yet 
those soft, mournful eyes, those dignified and tragic features; 
she had known them to be misleading before ; she had found 
the possessors of such beauties to be as their own cattle in 
point of intelligence. Miss Fanning's observations bad led her 
to believe that the retrousse features went more often with 
quickness of perception. 

Then, something of a deadly fatigue in the long back and 
the leaning figure he was by this time inured to the gloom 
of the cabin beyond the sunlight struck her sharply. Her 
irritation changed to concern. This was surely a sick woman 
before her. 

She was about to speak when the Widow Dougherty drew 
herself up wearily and came forward. 

" You'd be likin' a cup o' lay, may be ? " she said, in ac- 
cents softly persuasive. 

A cup of tea I Suddenly, it was borne in on Miss Fanning 
that a cup of tea was precisely the thing she needed. She 
had been existing since breakfast- time on an arid paper of 
sandwiches, and she had driven some forty or more miles. 



746 KATIE [Mar., 

" Sure I'll make you a cup in a minit. The little black 
kettle's just bilin'. Would ye like an egg, too, Miss ? Polly's 
a terrible good little bin, though she's only common. She lays 
a nice little brown egg." 

Miss Fanning hesitated to accept the hospitality where, 
plainly, there was so little to give. But she knew the people 
and how it pleased them to give hospitality, as though any 
stranger in need might be heavenly-folk in disguise, and she 
was hungry as well as thirsty and aching for a cup of tea. 

Mrs. Dougherty moved about with a sort of lifeless bustle, 
set a clean, coarse cloth on the table, a flowery cup and saucer; 
brought a little basin of brown sugar and a jug of milk ; flanked 
them by a griddle cake; "wet" the tea in a little, brown tea- 
pot and put on the egg to boil. 

As she sat watching these preparations for her entertain- 
ment, Miss Fanning reproached herself. She noticed the lag- 
ging step, the weary movements. Of course the woman was 
ill, not stupid, not careless, only ill. There was a deal of ill- 
ness in these glens, among these steep precipitous places, bred 
as often as not by the loneliness and the brooding quiet. And 
to be sure the young were gone or going. If the drain could 
not be arrested there would presently be none left bat the old 
and the diseased and children born of the diseased and the 
incapable. Her knowledge of what the emigration was doing 
had made Elsa Fanning's labors as an instructress for the 
Department something of a Holy War. There was a deal of 
fiery energy and enthusiasm in the pale-faced, little woman, 
no longer in her first youth. 

She accepted the cup of tea gratefully. How good it was 1 
Despite the brown sugar, and the thick cup and saucer, it was 
delicious. The egg, too, was very good. Miss Fanning conceded 
to herself that the White Wyandottes could hardly have done 
better. 

"You wor thinkin' I was stupid," said the Widow Dough- 
erty, watching her guest eat with a melancholy air of satis- 
faction. 

"I thought you were ill," Miss Fanning returned, feeling 
rather shocked at herself. There was no stupidity in that face. 
An efficient woman, too, after her way. Now that she could 
see she was aware of the dresser filled with gaily-colored 
crockery, of the pictures of saints and patriots on the wall, 



i9i2.] KATIE 747 

of the bed in the corner covered with its clean patchwork 
quilt. Despite the smoke and the turf-ash the place was 
clean. With the reek of the smoke in her nostrils Miss Fan- 
ning acknowledged to herself that so much cleanliness was 
only arrived at by incessant toil. 

"I'll tell ye now, Miss. Are ye marr'ed?" 

Miss Fanning blushed. She was very well content with 
her spinster state. Nevertheless, she blushed at the abrupt 
question. 

" No, I'm not married," she said. 

"The Lord is good to some," the Widow Dougherty com- 
mented, with a bitter gentleness. "Ye'll never have to see 
the husband and the three sons of ye carr'ed out by a big 
wave that swallyed them up from ye, not even a grave left 
to ye, but only the big, bitther, cruel say where they're tossin' 
about till the day o' judgmint. An' then the wan, little girl 
that was the light o' yer eyes to go out of it to America ! 
Sure if I had Katie back I could be joyful, even wid them 
drownded on me. I know I was happy enough before she 
wint." 

" She should not have gone," said Miss Fanning in a sharp 
voice. " It is a shame for them to go, so it is." 

"Whisht, ma'am," returned the widow, with an air of dig- 
nity that somehow quenched the seething indignation in the 
other woman's heart. " She didn't go light-hearted not Katie. 
There's some that goes light-hearted. It wouldn't be Katie's 
way at all. It wasn't for divarsion she wint, but because we 
couldn't keep body an' sowl in us in the winter, an' the eyes 
of her wor givin' out over the lace-makin'. Beautiful eyes 
they are, Miss. Ye'd never think to be lookin* at Katie's blue 
eyes that there was so little houldin* out in them, for the 
mists began to gather an' sometimes a big blob o' water 'ud 
fall on the work, drivin' poor Katie to distraction; an' Dr. 
O'Donoghue below, he met her on the road one day an' he 
tuk a look at her eyes an' says he : ' My girl, ye'll be blind 
before ye're thirty if ye don't give up the lace.' So she wint, 
God help her, an' she the sorrowfullest thing alive. ' Listen 
now, mother,' she says, whin we was waitin' for the long car 
to Derry. ' Listen now. Any day at all after two years is 
out ye'll look from the door, ma'am, an' ye'll see a car com- 
in* round the road below an' a trunk on it. Aye, indeed,' she 



748 KATIE [Mar., 

says, the crathur, 'an* the money in the trunk to buy you an' 
me the little farm out o' sight o' the lonesome say.' There 
is a little place beyond Fanad, ma'am, where I was born, an' 
it 'ud be paradise if me an' Katie was to be in it together. 
Maybe I'd forget thin the say an' Pat an' the little boys 
tossin' about in it till the day of judgmint. Well she knew it, 
did Katie, that maybe I could be thinkin' o' thim in heaven 
if I wasn't always lookin' at the say." 

Something came in the widow's throat, and she went back 
to the fireplace and leant her handsome head by the wall with 
the air of tragic resignation which she had worn while Miss 
Fanning talked of the White Wyandottes. 

" She'll come back," Miss Fanning said in a low voice. 
Inwardly she raged out of sheer stress of feeling. Doubtless 
the creature was forgetting her mother far away in New York- 
She was tired of hearing it said that they went because the 
life was dull. Shameful ! If it was dull could they not make 
it otherwise themselves and not be flying away over the sea, 
leaving the country full of empty nests, of the desolation of 
love. 

" She was gone two years in May," went on the widow in 
a voice resigned and passionless: "an' I haven't bed a sound 
from her these three months back." 

"Oh, the wretch 1 the wretch 1 " Miss Fanning fumed in 
her heart. Outwardly she tried to show no sign, remarking 
in a voice she made as smooth as possible that doubtless Katie 
found it difficult to write. 

" I do be trampin' down to Fanad times an' agin to look 
for a lettber, an' Miss Bennett at the post-office she does be 
sayin': 'Nothing for you, Mrs. Dougherty, but sure there'll be 
another mail in no time at all 1 "' 

"Ye thought me stupid or sick," the widow went on after 
the pause. " I was. I do be goin" to the door an' lookin' 
out, an' if I see a car below on the road me heart gives a 
lep in me, an* I say to meself: ' Tis Katie.' An' then agin I 
say: 'Whisht, an' don't have the great foolishness in ye. It 
couldn't be Katie yet.' I was sayin' it before she was gone a 
month. There used to be ould Pinch, the dog, to push him- 
self out beside me an' look too, but he gev up the first winter 
an' died. There's hardly a day in it that wan car at laste 
wad go the road." 



1912.] KATIE 749 

She turned her mournful glance on Miss Fanning. 

"There was a trunk on your car," she said. " An" I could 
see 'twas a girl sittin' on the side o' the car. But I said to 
myself: ' It can't be Katie yet ' ! An' I wint in an' shut the door. 
I couldn't hear much for the heart lappin' in me head; but I 
heard the little gate shut an' your foot come to the door. 
Yet I kep* sayin' to myself ' It couldn't be Katie yet. She'd 
never come as soon as all that.' Then you come in." 

" Oh, you poor soul ! " said Miss Fanning, and her eyes 
were filled with tears. " No wonder you were sick and stupid." 

" I don't seem to get accustomed to it," said the widow. 

"She's quite sure to come one of these days." 

The assurance of Miss Fanning's words were belied by an 
angry doubt at her heart. Why would they go away so cruel- 
ly! How could they forget the broken hearts left behind 
them ? To be sure they sent money. She was not in and out 
the cottages without knowing they sent money. And some- 
times they came back, after many years, parched and yellowed, 
with dollars at their back, but their youth gone, and those 
gone who had hungered for their faces and their footsteps and 
their voices. 

"Katie wouldn't be forgettin'," said the mother; and started 
at the sound of a foot outside, with a hungry hope in her 
gaze that was dead before it was born. 

It was only Miss Fanning's carman who had climbed the 
steep path to procure a light for his pipe. He raked in the 
turf embers with a bit of stick till he had got it alight, applied 
it to his pipe and went off again with no more words than 
the "God save all here!" with which he had entered the 
cabin. 

Miss Fanning followed him shortly. Despite her being 
accustomed to a certain routine, she simply could not bring 
herself to talk of fowls and bees and goats at this moment. 
The widow had promised to attend some of the poultry lectures 
in Fanad, if she could get a lift on a cart for part of the way. 

Miss Fanning found her thoughts much possessed by the 
Widow Dougherty and her daughter during those days at Fanad 
during which she had the coffee-room of McElhatton's Hotel 
to herself when she chose to occupy it. Few people came to 
Fanad except it might be an occasional commercial traveler, 
a National School Inspector, an official from the Department, 



75o KATIE [Mar., 

and very, very rarely a tourist. She was accustomed to staying 
in these out-of-the-way places where her only visitor, perhaps, 
would be the priest. 

The week came on very wet. Day after day it rained 
hopelessly. It was such weather as washed away the mountain 
roads and made communication with the mountains difficult, 
if not impossible. Miss Fanning's lectures had been sparsely 
attended. The Widow Dougherty had not been of her audi- 
ence. In this weather she had not expected it. 

The sun was shining on the side of Slieve Beg his first 
appearance for a week the day she left the district. She 
had to drive twenty miles to the light railway by which 
she would reach the nearest town. As she passed below the 
slope of the mountain she looked up. She saw, or thought 
she saw, the Widow Dougherty in the doorway oi her cabin, 
shading her eyes from the sun and peering down into the 
many-colored mists that were swirling about the valley and 
the road. It hurt her heart to think of the woman saying: 
" It'll be Katie ! " and then : " It couldn't be Katie yet. Sure, 
'tis too soon." 

She had Katie's latest address in her pocket. She was go- 
ing to write to a friend of hers in New York to look for Katie, 
if she was not dead or gone under. But such thoughts were 
intolerable. Surely in- the mercy of God the joy would come 
back to the lonely cabin up there overlooking the golden and 
cruel sea. 

Five miles from her starting-point she came upon a wrecked 
car by the side of the road. The horse had been taken out 
of the shafts and was standing, placidly feeding, while his late 
driver seated on a boulder offered what was doubtless philo- 
sophic comfort to the girl who confronted him, with im- 
patience in the whole aspect of her little body, as she stood 
by a trunk, stamping her foot. 

" It couldn't, it couldn't be Katie," Miss Fanning said, un- 
consciously echoing the Widow Dougherty, as she assured 
herself that her wild surmise could not possibly be true, that 
things did not happen like that outside of story books; that 
Katie, not having written for three months, was probably dead 
or gone under. 

Her own car had to slacken its pace; because the other 



1912.] KATIE 751 

car lying on its side against the ditch gave them barely room 
to pass. 

" I tell you I must get on," said the girl, with tears in her 
voice. " What's the good o' tellin' me that the mother's not 
goin' to run away. How do I know whin anybody'll come 
by to take up the trunk. I'll just step out an' be walkin' it." 

She turned about and Miss Fanning saw her face, an oval 
face of regular features, beautiful despite a certain yellowness 
as from a torrid climate which had overspread its delicate 
tints. The eyes were the deepest blue; and the copper- colored 
hair in a great twist at the back of the small head shone ia 
burnished splendor. 

Could it be Katie ? 

The driver of her own car answered the wild surmise. 

"You're welcome home, Katie Dougherty," he said. "Sure, 
'tis yourself is a girl of your word. There'll be terrible great 
joy above on the hill to-night." 

" My mother's well, Phelim ? " 

" Glory be to God, she only wants yourself to be the well- 
est woman betune the four seas." 

Waves of joy were breaking over Katie's face, shadowed 
by a little doubt and perplexity. 

"Isn't it annoyin', Phelim, that I can't get on? "she said, 
softly complaining. "The linch-pin's out of the ould car, an' 
goodness knows how long we'll be sittin' here by the roadside 
before anythin* comes to take me along. You'll maybe be 
comin' back this way ? " 

She turned her charming, exhausted face on Miss Fanning. 

" If the lady had only been goin' the other way by the 
greatest o' good luck," she said softly. "I'd ha' been askin' 
her on my bended knees for a lift, so I would. I promised 
mother I'd come wid a trunk; an* I can't lave all I've got 
in the world lyin' out here be the side of the bog, for all that 
the people is honest." 

Miss Fanning decided rapidly. She simply must see that 
meeting. And McElhatton's at Fanad would be no great 
hardship for another night. 

"I think I'll drive you back, Katie," she said. "I know 
your mother. She's heart-broken because you didn't write." 

"Sure I was sick in hospital. I wore meself out try in' to 
make a bit for her; an* I'd never ha' done it if an ould gen- 



752 MY LAND [Mar. 

tleman I worked for hadn't left me a fortune. The girls is 
terrible impident in America. I hadn't time to get impident 
like the rest, an' the ould gentleman thought too well of me 
for it. I've the price of a little farm in me trunk." 

Katie was chattering as though she had known Miss Fan- 
ning all her days. The trunk was lifted up on the well of 
the car, and the two passengers took their seats. 

Miss Fanning waited long enough to see the aching ex- 
pectation of disappointment in the widow's face change to an 
incredulous rapture. She heard the thanksgiving cry raised 
to heaven. She saw Katie in her mother's arms. 

" Sure I was a great, sinful fool to be lavin' me mother 
at all," said Katie. " Tis the last time we'll part." 

Miss Fanning turned about and retraced her way to the 
car, where the horse was picking a bit of grass on the edge 
of the precipice. On the way down she had to step behind 
the boulder out of the way of Phelim Goligher coming up 
with Katie's trunk on his shoulder. 



MY LAND. 

BY ALICE M. CASHEL. 

OH land, oh land of sunshine and shade, 
Where the lark trills Its joy from your hills, 

Where the sun laughs down on the fields and the glades, 
Where the rains make a thousand glad rills. 

Oh land, oh land of shadow and rain, 
Where the cold mists blow In from the sea, 

Where the storm and the thunder clash loud in the plains, 
Where the world hides shrinking from me. 

Oh land, oh land of mountain and glen, 

Where the wild fowl stealthily hide, 
I<et me rest far off, from the world of men 

It's here that my heart would abide. 




THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

|N the second chapter of his epistle to the Ephes- 
ians, St. Paul enlarges upon the call of the 
Gentiles into the Church of Christ, and speaks 
of the "enmities of the flesh," by which he 
means the national and racial antipathies which 
dominated the ancient world and separated Jews and Gentiles; 
and he shows that to break down this domination Christ pur- 
chased by His Blood a Church capable of uniting all races 
and nations "in one Body," so that they who before were 
hated foreigners might become "in Himself" fellow-citizens 
with the saints in a kingdom which transcends all such hu- 
man divisions. 

In this, then, lies the special characteristic of the Catholic 
Church, that she triumphs over the " enmities of the flesh " 
and unites nations and races most various in one world-wide, 
visible communion; while, on the other hand, all other com- 
munions, yielding to the "enmities of the flesh," to the jeal- 
ousies and antipathies of the world, whether national, racial, 
or social, form organizations imposed by human divisions. 

" Thou art worthy, O Lord . . . because Thou wast 
slain, and hast redeemed us to God in Thy Blood, out of 
every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and hast 
made us to our God a Kingdom and priests, and we shall 
reign on the earth." And hence St. Paul when addressing 
the clergy of Ephesus bids them remember that they have 
been ordained "to rule the Church of God, which He hath 
purchased with His own Blood"; while in addressing St. 
Timothy, their bishop, he speaks of the things which ate 
pleasing to " God our Savior, Who will have all men to be 
saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth," since 
truth is of God and therefore is everywhere and always and 
for all men one and the same. He was mindful of the com- 
mission of our Lord to His apostles : " teach ye all nations 
. . . to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded 
VOL. xciv. 48 



754 THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH [Mar., 

you : and behold I am with you all days, even to the con- 
summation of the world" words which explain the Catho- 
licity of the Church as having reference to her extension to 
all nations, her teaching of all the truth, and her duration 
throughout all time, in accordance with what He had before 
declared: "This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached 
in the whole world for a testimony to all nations, and then 
shall the consummation come ; " a visible kingdom, therefore, 
and indivisible, because for a testimony, or witness, to all na- 
tions until the world's end. 

Thus, the Gospel of Christ is no mere philosophy, quality 
of mind and thought, sentiment or subjective opinion ; it is a 
substantive message from above, one and the same for all 
men, guarded and preserved for all time in a world-wide visi- 
ble polity or kingdom ; a kingdom not of this world, though 
in this world ; a kingdom independent of the kingdoms of the 
world in the domain of religion; a kingdom superior to the 
kingdoms of the world, not only as being divine, but as trans- 
cending, also, all national frontiers and all the vicissitudes of 
time; a kingdom which, in the event, has seen the rise of 
every kingdom that has been since the Christian era began, 
and is destined to outlast all that now are all that ever shall 
be " not with an army, not by might, but by My Spirit, 
saith the Lord of hosts." 

The term "Catholic" was applied to the Church by the 
early Christians to distinguish her from the sects that lay 
each in its own place over against her. As "heresy," ex- 
plains St. Clement of Alexandria, denotes separation, so the 
words " Catholic Church " imply unity subsisting among many 
members; and St. Pacian explains the title as meaning that 
the Church is everywhere one, while the sects are nowhere 
one, but everywhere divided. St. Ambrose, with reference to 
the Church as the visible Kingdom of Christ, advised St. 
Augustine in view of the latter's conversion to study the 
book of Isaiah, who is the prophet, as of the Messiah, so also 
of the calling of the Gentiles and of the Imperial power of the 
Church. St. Augustine, in turn, in his controversy with the 
Donatists, appealed to the traditional name "Catholic Church," 
which is given, and rightly, to that one body only, which, un- 
like the Donatist schism, is diffused throughout the world; 
and again : " In the Catholic Church ... I am held by 



19 1 1.] THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH 755 

the consent of peoples and nations ... by the very title 
f Catholic, which, not without cause, hath this Church alone, 
amid so many heresies, obtained ; " and elsewhere, comparing 
the secti with the Church he says: "For they are not found 
in many nations where she is; but she, who is everywhere, is 
found where they are."* 

Sects and schisms abounded in those early times even as 
they do now. " How," asks Newman with reference to those 
former times, " was an individual inquirer to find the Truth 
amid so many teachers?" and be supplies the answer an 
answer as applicable to present-day conditions as to those of 
that past age: 

The rule was simple. . . . The Church is everywhere, 
but it is one ; sects are everywhere, but they are many, inde- 
pendent, and discordant. Catholicity Is the attribute of the 
Church, independency of sectaries. . . . The Church is 
a kingdom ; a heresy is a family rather than a kingdom ; and 
as a family continually divides and sends out branches, found- 
ing new houses, and propagating itself in colonies, each of 
them as independent as its original head, so was it with heresy. 

The Fathers of those early centuries did not consider that 
the Church's note of unity in universality lay simply in the 
fact that she was everywhere governed by bishops, priests, 
and deacons; and that, provided these apostolic orders, to- 
gether with the creeds and sacraments, were retained, she 
might be parcelled out in pieces among the nations in accord- 
ance with the requirements of nationalism. She was governed, 
indeed, by bishops, and those bishops came from the Apos- 
tles, but she was a kingdom besides; "and as a kingdom ad- 
mits of the possibility of rebels, so does such a Church involve 
sectaries and schismatics, but not independent portions." The 
Fathers regarded the Church as being an organized body cov- 
ering the orbit terratum, with everywhere one and the same 
jurisdiction and government as a kingdom "at unity with 
itself;" and, so far from recognizing any ecclesiastical relation 
as existing between the sectarian bishops and priests and 
their people, they "address the latter immediately, as if those 
bishops did not exist, and call on them to come over to the 
Church individually without respect to any one besides; and 

* De Unit. Eccles. 6. 



756 THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH [Mar., 

that because it is a matter of life and death." It was noth- 
ing to the purpose that the Donatists, for instance, had four 
hundred episcopal sees; "the very fact that they were sepa- 
rated from the orbis terrarum was a public, a manifest, a sim- 
ple, a sufficient argument against them."* 

A political body requires government, and the larger it is 
the more concentrated is its government. Hence the Catholic 
Church has a centre of unity; and it is undeniable that her 
unity has from the first been centred in the Roman See. She 
therefore in no way remits her claim to Catholicity when she 
speaks of herself as "Roman." Her adversaries, who make 
use of the term by way of denying her catholicity, do but 
bear witness to the fact that she is that same universal Church 
whose unity in primitive times was centred in the Roman See. 
It was the distinctive mark of Catholics then, as now, to be 
in communion with this See. Of the Catholics of the period 
of the Arian Goths, Newman says they "were denoted by 
the additional title of 'Romans.' Of this there are many 
proofs in the histories of St. Gregory of Tours, Victor of 
Vite, and the Spanish Councils." The intercommunion of the 
Spanish and African Churches of that time with the Roman 
See was the visible ecclesiastical distinction between them and 
their Arian rivals. "The chief ground of the Vandal Hun- 
neric's persecution of the African Catholics seems to have 
been their connection with their brethren beyond the sea, 
which he looked at with jealousy, as introducing a foreign 
power into his territory." The African bishops in their ban- 
ishment, to the number of sixty, with St. Fulgentius at their 
head, quote with approbation words of Pope Hormisdas which 
declare that they hold " what the Roman, that is, the Catho- 
lic, Church follows and preserves'" St. Jerome says of the 
See of Peter: "on that rock the Church is built, I know. 
Whoso shall eat the Lamb outside that House is profane." 
And again: "If any be joined to Peter's chair he is mine." 
And in relation to the Donatist controversy, Newman ob- 
serves: 

Four hundred bishops, though but in one region, were a 
fifth part of the whole episcopate of Christendom, and might 
seem too many for a schism, and in themselves too large a 
body to be cut off from God's inheritance by a mere majority, 

* Newman's Development. Ch.VL, Sect. II. 



I9I2.J THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH 757 

even had it been overwhelming. St. Augustlue, then, who 
so often appeals to the orbis tertarum, sometimes adopts a 
more prompt criterion. He tells certain Donatists to whom 
he writes, that the Catholic bishop of Carthage " was able to 
make light of the thronging multitude ol his enemies, when 
he found himself by letters of credence joined both to the 
Roman Church, in which ever had flourished the principality 
of the Apostolical See, and to the other lands whence the 
Gospel came to Africa itself." * 

At the present day, as in those early ages of Christianity, 
schisms and sects abound, each in its own territory, or con- 
fined to race and nationality; and wherever they are found, 
as likewise where they are not, there, as formerly and in every 
subsequent age, is to be found that one only body which all 
along has occupied the orbis terrarum, and always has had for 
the centre of its worldwide circle the Roman See. Here is a 
Church, Catholic both as to extension and duration, absolutely 
without a rival in any age. She unites, and has ever united, 
as no other communion and no combination of other com- 
munions have ever united or could unite, nations and multitudes 
of every nation and race in one visibly organized body as a 
kingdom " at unity with itself," independently of the king- 
doms of the world, despite their incessant and persecuting 
jealousy and opposition. No approach to a parallel to such 
Catholic unity can be found in human affairs; it transcends 
human nature, and cannot be accounted for otherwise than as 
being divine. 

If the writer of this article may be permitted, by way of 
illustration, to speak of a personal experience, he would say 
that since his reception into the Church, to supply for the 
sacrifice of an Anglican benefice, he has received, here in Eng- 
land, foreigners desirous of learning English ; the supply has 
been small and intermittent, nevertheless he has bad pupils of 
more than twenty nationalities. Why have they come to him ? 
They have come because they, each and all of them, are 
Catholics" Romans," as the high-church folk at the Anglican 
church nearby would call them, though there does not happen 
to be an Italian amongst them. They never have heard of a 
Catholic who was not in communion with the Pope; the high 

"/</., Ch. VI., Sect. III. 



758 THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH [Mar., 

Anglican pretence to Catholicity is quite unintelligible to them. 
Here, then, is a little object lesson in the meaning of Catho- 
licity, and a small testimony to the fact of the Catholicity of 
that 'Church which is centred in the Roman See. 

There is no Catholicity, there never has been any, to com- 
pare with hers on the face of this earth. Mohammedanism 
professes the propagation of a religion through the world, but 
while Catholicism has, as her enemies complain, been a prose- 
lytizing power for nineteen centuries, Mohammedanism has 
long since tired of its uodertakirg and has lapsed into a sort 
of conservative, local, national religion. The Oriental Churches 
are but local and national bodies, and do not pretend a wider 
occupation. The Anglican communion, though much smaller 
than the Eastern, is found in many parts of the world in the 
British Isles, in Canada, Malta, Jerusalem, India, China, Japan, 
Australia, South Africa; but who will venture to call it Catho- 
lic ? It is the religion, not even of a race, but of the ruling 
portion of a race ; and its extension has been for the most 
part passive, by state policy and immigration ; though several 
nationalities are doubtless represented in the membership of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. 

And so conscious are High-Church Anglicans oi the insuf- 
ficiency of the Anglican and Eastern communions, whether 
separately, or in imaginary combination, that they do not pre- 
tend to claim for them the Catholic note except as being in 
their own imagination, for none but themselves imagine it- 
parts of the same Church with the Roman. 

With reference to the Anglican contention that the Roman, 
Eastern, and Anglican communions form one visible Church, 
it surely need but be observed that to assert that three religious 
bodies, separate each from the other in administrative authority, 
government, organization, communion, doctrine, nevertheless 
form but one visible body politic, is to proclaim of all para- 
doxes the most impossible 1 The contention, at any rate, is 
peculiar to High Church Anglicanism, being unknown to the 
East, and without meaning to the mind of the Catholic. 

Bat while the Eastern and Anglican communions depend, 
as Anglicans tell us, upon Rome for the Catholic note, Rome 
obviously does not depend upon them. 

The Roman communion [If I may quote from what I have 



i9i2.] THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH 759 

elsewhere written] is sufficient in itself to be the whole visi- 
ble Church Catholic ; the difference between the catholicity 
it at present manifests, and that which it would manifest did 
it embrace a larger proportion of the human race is a differ- 
ence, not of kind, but of degree only ; it has reference, not to 
a mere majority in numbers over other communions, and a 
wider representation amongst the nations and races of the 
earth, but to its organic unity and power to maintain that 
unity indissolubly throughout the world. Unity in universal- 
ity of jurisdiction and organization is emphatically the char- 
acteristic which it alone of all communions possesses. The 
Oriental and Anglican communions, on the other hand, 
whether severally or combined, would be insufficient to form 
a Catholic Church, not merely because they are deficient in 
numbers and racial representation, but more especially be- 
cause they possess no jurisdiction independent of national 
frontiers, and, consequently, no means of holding the nations 
or any proportions of their populations in unity of religion. 

But the Anglican objects that to exclude the Greek Church 
by which he means the sixteen national Churches of the 
East, of whose numbers the Russian Church comprises nine- 
tenthsis to exclude a fourth of Christendom (leaving out of 
this calculation the Protestant sects). The Greek Church, he 
contends, is coeval with the Apostles, and for more than eight 
hundred years has survived its separation from Rome ; to ex- 
clude it would be suicidal. Nevertheless, he excludes the Nes- 
torian communion, whose history is still more remarkable. 
Nestorianism came from Antioch, the original Apostolic See. 
It had its Apostolical succession, a formed hierarchy, and was 
administered by as many as twenty- five archbishoprics. Its 
ecclesiastical dominion lasted for more than eight hundred 
years, and was far more extensive than that of the so-called 
Greek Church. And if it be objected that Nestorianism was 
a heresy, this does but strengthen the force of the argument, 
viz., that large and imposing communions, administered by 
bishops, priests and deacons, and which, therefore, look like 
necessary portions of the Church, may, notwithstanding, be, 
by reason of schism or heresy, outside the Catholic fold. If, 
then, the Nestorian communion, enormous, widespread and 
lasting as it was, was nevertheless external to the Catholic 

* The Fortnightly Revitw, August, 1906, p. 282. 



760 THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH [Mar., 

Church, by reason of heresy, why may not the Greek com- 
munion be likewise external, by reason of schism ? * The 
Church is governed, indeed, by bishops, and bishops come 
from the Apostles; but she authenticates herself to be the 
Church, not by her orders, but by her notes, and chiefly by 
"the great note of an ever-enduring ccetus fidelium, with a 
fixed organization, a unity of jurisdiction, a political greatness, 
a continuity of existence in all places and times, a suitableness 
to all classes, ranks, and callings, an ever-energizing life, an 
untiring, ever-evolving history."f She is not a federation of 
independent dioceses or national churches; she is a Catholic 
kingdom; and as a kingdom admits of the possibility of rebels, 
so does her jurisdiction involve schismatics and sectaries, but 
not independent portions. She is a kingdom manifesting a 
visible unity the world over, not of mere origin or of Apos- 
tolical succession, but 'of government; and nowhere will you 
find, in any age, such a kingdom other than that over which 
the Pope as Christ's vicar and vicegerent reigns in every age. 

Nor should the phenomena of such schismatical and heretical 
communions as the Donatist, Arian, Nestorian, and Greek, sur- 
prise us. " The law entered in, that sin might abound." A law 
is both the test of obedience and the occasion of transgression ; 
and in this fallen, rebellious world we should expect to find 
transgression on as large a scale as obedience. Fn relation to 
the Church, moreover, we should expect to find transgression 
taking the form not only of human creations independent of 
her from the first, but also of schisms from her fold. " Of 
your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things to 
draw away disciples after them," was the warning of St. Paul. 
And St. John explains : " They went out from us, but they 
were not of us; for, if they had been of us, they would no 
doubt have remained with us." Such was the perversity, ap- 
parent from the first, which, from small beginnings, developed 
later into large schisms and national apostasies. 

The other Protestant sects taken together are greater in 
numbers than those of the Eastern and Anglican communions, 
yet Anglicans experience no difficulty in relation to these 
sects, and do but see in them the fulfillment of St. Paul's 
warnings : 

* cfr. Newman's Diff, of Aug., Vol. I., Lect. XI. 5. 
t Essays Crit. and Hist., Vol. II., p. 76. 



igi2.] THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH 761 

In the last days shall come dangerous times ; men shall be 
lovers of themselves . , . proud . . . having an appearance, 
indeed, of godliness, but denying the power thereof . . . err- 
ing, and driving into error. . . . There shall be a time, 
when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to 
their own desires they will heap to themselves teachers, hav- 
ing itching ears, and will, indeed, turn away their hearing 
from the truth, and will be turned unto fables. 

By the words " appearance of godliness," or piety, New- 
man understands St. Paul to mean an appearance of ortho- 
doxy; and, indeed, he quotes the text in connection with a 
reference to the Greek schism, and observes " that were such 
imposing phenomena as the Greek Church taken out of the 
way, it would be difficult to say how the actual state of 
Christendom corresponded to the apostolic anticipations of it."* 
St. Peter, however, as by prophecy, provides an especial warn- 
ing to Protestants, who usually extract their Scripture scraps 
and chips from St. Paul's epistles ; he says that in these 
epistles "are certain things hard to be understood, which the 
unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scrip- 
tures, to their own destruction." St. Jude provides a warning 
against schismatics and sectaries in general: "I was under a 
necessity to write unto you to beseech you to contend earn- 
estly for the faith once delivered to the saints," against those 
who " despise dominion," and " blaspheme whatever things they 
know not . . . walking according to their own desires, 
and their mouth speaketh proud things;" and he bids us be 
" mindful of the words which have been spoken before by the 
apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who told you that in the 
last times there should come mockers, walking according to 
their own desires in ungodliness. These are they who separ- 
ate themselves, sensual men, having not the spirit." And St. 
Augustine tells us that what they separate themselves from 
is that Catholic Church, which in its unity in universality 
covers the orbis terrarum. Schisms and sects all are separa- 
tions from the Catholic Church. They lie separate from her, 
and from one another, each in its own period and region, 
being dependent on time and place for their existence. And 
meanwhile the Church remains visibly one throughout the 

Diff. of Ang., Vol. I., Lect, XI, 3. 



762 THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH [Mar. 

world in every age the visible and indivisible kingdom of 
Christ, secured by His endowment, in accordance with His 
promise, against all the disintegrating forces of the world 
and Satan. 

The state of Christendom is not dissimilar in the present 
day to what it was in the first age and has ever since been. 
It is likely, moreover, so to remain despite the present day 
human expedients to unite Christians, in preference to that 
divinely-appointed unity which has all along existed, and now, 
as ever, is visible to all men, and may now, as always, every- 
where be found. The revolt from this divinely-ordained unity 
is likely to continue in a world which fell through pride and 
disobedience, and which, ever since, has been proud of its 
pride and characterized by the spirit of rebellion and conflict. 
Nor can a mere natural love of brotherhood avail against 
" the enmities of the flesh " against national, racial, and social 
antipathies and jealousies. To love, besides those who are of 
our family, nation, or race, " strangers or foreigners " and those 
who are " afar off," and to desire association with such as 
"fellow-citizens" in a higher than a mere earthly kingdom, 
requires a supernatural love. It needs " the charity of God 
poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost," Who under 
the Gospel dispensation has expanded the operation of brotherly 
love, and " for a testimony to all nations " has made its em- 
bodiment a Catholic Church. 

And the Catholic Church, opposed in every age by schisms 
and sects, has everywhere ever been manifest and marked off 
from among them by reason of the fact that she has as no 
other communion ever has had a government transcending all 
human divisions, administered from an extra-national centre, 
uniting her visibly throughout the world in Catholic com- 
munion. Harnack tells us that the conception of Catholicity 
arose in the first ages from the consciousness of organic unity 
centred in Rome. And, indeed, it is the simple and undeni- 
able fact that there is but one communion that has thus mani- 
fested the Note of Catholicity the one which now, as ever, 
occupies the orbis terrarum and is centred in the Roman See. 




CONSEQUENCES. 

BY ESTHER W. NEILL. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Senator stooped as he offered his arm to 
Jane. 

"We seem to belong to each other," he 
said, as he pocketed the small card that bore 
Miss Tally's name. " You are a stranger and 
so am I. We will take care of each other." 

She rested her hand timidly upon his coat sleeve. It was 
plain that she had never been asked to accept the courtesy of 
a man's arm before. At first she had felt half-afraid of this 
tall, ugly man, but his voice reassured her. She had read 
about dinner-parties in books, so when she saw the others 
trailing off through the long, wainscoted hallway, she fell in- 
stinctively into line. 

Mrs. Dandrey's dinners were famous throughout Washing- 
ton. She always announced that all the food on her table 
was home-grown, home-made. This fact seemed to differen- 
tiate her dishes from the catered creations of her friends. An 
old, ante-bellum mammy ruled despotically in the big, brick 
kitchen, where she worked a sort of witchery with herbs and 
spices, and concocted wonderful sauces, salads and pastries 
that would have tickled the most jaded of epicures. And when 
these delicacies were served on royal Worcester, inherited 
from a remote ancestor, while the table blazed with ancient 
silver, elaborated with the family crest, a dinner proved to be 
a function that one did not soon forget. 

Jane regarded everything with interest. It all seemed so 
wonderful, so different from accustomed conventual simplicity. 
The flowers, the soft, wax lights, the low-cut gowns of the 
women, the number of courses, the confusing array of spoons 
and forks at her place. 

" Which do I use first " ? she asked, turning frankly to the 
Senator. 



764 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

"The Lord knows," he answered smiling. "I always pick 
up the wrong one, bat I don't suppose it matters since the 
end is accomplished." 

" But there must be a difference," she persisted. 
"I suppose there is," he admitted resignedly, "but it's a 
gamble. Now you pick up that crooked one and I'll take 
tais straight one and let's see who'll finish first." 

She laughed aloud. " What manners for a dinner-party," 
she exclaimed. 

The laugh was so spontaneous that the other diners paused. 
Mrs. Dandrey hoped to give the conversation at the other 
end of the table fresh impetus. 

"What are you both having such a good time about?" 
she asked. 

"We are wondering about forks and spoons," said the 
Senator promptly. "You see, we are both new at dinner- 
parties, and it's rather difficult for a man who has lived all 
his life on the Western plains to get used to such a number 
of things. I remember once we were snowed up in a cabin 
in the mountains, with one tin spoon and a gimlet in the way 
of cutlery. I chose the gimlet; it wasn't in great demand and 
the spoon seemed a little too popular. Unfortunately, I had 
read about germs." 

Jane was blushing at this confession. It was all very well 
for a man who was a United States Senator to acknowledge 
his ignorance of trivialities, but it did not seem to save the 
situation for her. The Senator, glancing from beneath his 
shaggy eyebrows, realized, with an intuition rare in men, that 
he had embarrassed her. 

"Men are natural blunderers," he said, addressing no one 
in particular. " I'm getting slowly used to the fact and re- 
signed. I blundered into the Senate and I suppose I'll blun- 
der out again." So saying the Senator turned to his neglected 
plate. 

The dinner proved to be a very gay one. Bainbridge was 
extremely affable in his position as host. Madge always chat- 
tered volubly. Mrs. Dandrey understood how to fill in threat- 
ened pauses. Jane, alone, said nothing. She had caught a 
glance from Madge Warden's eyes when she had made her 
first confession, that had robbed her of all joyousness. She 
was suddenly conscious that her dress was absurdly out of 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 765 

date, that her hair was arranged in a most unfashionable way, 
that her arms were thin, her manners awkward, her ignorance 
grotesque. It was a relief to leave the dining-room to put 
those mocking eyes behind her, to join old Mrs. Van Doran 
who had a word of praise for her in the beginning. 

"Don't let the men stay in here and smoke," said the old 
lady, stopping on the threshold of the door. "Women get so 
deadly dull after dinner, when there are no men around, that 
I always go to sleep." 

The men followed the old lady obediently ; she bad been 
a personage in Washington so long, that everyone accepted 
her blunt speeches as part of her delightful eccentricity. Her 
husband, long since dead, had represented his government in 
important diplomatic positions abroad. His widow explained 
that her feelings and opinions had been so suppressed riuiirg 
her long career as the wife of a diplomatist, that she had 
been talking too much ever since. 

When the party fell into groups again in the drawing- 
room, Jane, much to her own discomfiture, found herself near 
the piano with Madge, Lord Alan Hurst and the Senator. 
Mrs. Van Doran had sought a place by the fire and gathered 
the others around her just as a dowager duchess might have 
insisted on a number of respectful retainers. 

" I have wanted to see you for a long time," she said to 
the young clergyman, and she sank down in a brocade cov- 
ered chair. "Why on earth did your Bishop send you to 
this God-forsaken, little country parish?" 

Mrs. Dandrey rushed frantically to her minister's assist- 
ance. "I think it was out of consideration for us," she said, 
smiling. " We have had a most dreadful lot of boors to pre- 
side over our parish." 

" Hm," sniffed the old lady. " I don't know that Chester- 
field would have adorned a pulpit. I know I'm plain-spoken, 
and I suppose all plain-spoken people ought to be avoided, 
but I have known you all my life and I am very much inter- 
ested in religion since I left your church." 

"Left the church," repeated the young man in some dis- 
may. 

"Yes." The old lady's sunken eyes gleamed with mis- 
chief. "And I must confess that you are directly responsible 
for my becoming a Romanist." 



766 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

Paul Hartford looked much annoyed. Mrs. Dandrey was 
vexed. There were times when this favored dowager pre- 
sumed too much upon the tolerance of her friends. Bain* 
bridge was too much amused at the outcome to interfere, 
though he knew it was his place to prevent a religious dis- 
cussion. 

" I'll not tease you any longer, Paul," said the old lady, 
growing serious, "but since we are all such good friends I 
want to tell you that I have followed your career with vary- 
ing emotions. When you wanted to keep the sacrament in 
your church for adoration, I knew your Bishop wouldn't per- 
mit it. That monogram of yours was a strong plea for auricu- 
lar confession but none of your congregation wanted to con- 
fess their fashionable sins, and the Bishop did not want to try 
and make them. I was angry with the Bishop, Paul, and 
because I was angry well the Lord works in devious ways 
I came to the conclusion that I had to have some definitely 
defined truths (to cling to. You and your crowd of high 
churchmen were believing in the Real Presence, and a service 
close akin to the Mass, and the rest of your church was call- 
ing it ' Popish idolatry.' You were refusing to perform the 
marriage ceremony for divorcees, and the Bishop was lugging 
them all to his church festivals, and hugging them to his 
expansive bosom." 

"I protest in the name of the Bishop," said Bainbridge 
laughing. 

"Oh well," agreed Mrs. Van Doran easily. "Paul's Bishop 
lives in the West you know, and his manner is proper but 
effusive, and he pounced upon Paul in a way I cannot for- 
give. I suppose it's all very well for you young people to be 
wandering around in the dark, but when one is as old as I 
am, I don't want to enter a supernatural world as blind as a 
bat and as ignorant as the rest of you." 

"Dear met" gasped Mrs. Dandrey. "Do you really mean 
to say that you have been to confess?" 

" Certainly," replied the old lady," and a hard time I bad 
of it. The way I have talked these fifty or a hundred years 
about everybody living and dead, seemed to make a confes- 
sion one endless chain of enormities I couldn't calculate by 
the year or the month. I had to come down to days and 
hours. The Lord knows I am trying to be charitable, but 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 767 

people are absurd and I suppose I am a confirmed scandal- 
monger. But please let us discuss something pleasanter than 
the state of my soul. You've turned the tables on me in a 
very clever way, Paul, sitting there as silent as a sphinx. I'm 
coming to see you some day and convince you that if you 
want ritualism ready-made, you've got to come to Rome for 
it." 

The young man rose slowly from his chair. He wanted to 
escape from this terrible old woman. 

"You would have some difficulty in turning me Rome- 
wards," he said. " You forget that I am a Puritan." 

" I wish I had been one," she sighed good-naturedly. 
" They only half live and have so few regrets to plague them. 
I know you have always been a dear, good boy, and I am 
very proud of you, but when I thought of you as a beetle 
impaled on a pin the pin being the Bishop, I was glad in 
my heart that your dear mother hadn't lived to see it. Now 
go ask Madge Warden to sing ; I know you want to get rid of 
me. Some one was telling me that her voice had improved 
greatly. I am sure there was room for it." 

He murmured some commonplace, and moved slowly away. 
As he joined the younger group, Lord Alan Hurst held out 
his gold cigarette case. " We have permission to smoke," he 
said. 

The young minister shook his head. "No, thank you, I 
am afraid I never learned how." 

" I would like to teach you," said Madge gaily, as she 
selected a cigarette and lighted it. "They are most soothing 
when one is tired or worried or bored." 

"Has Lord Alan Hurst bored you, or worried you, or 
made you tired ? " questioned the Senator jovially. 

Lord Alan Hurst smiled wanly at this blunt, American 
humor, and passed his cigarette case on to Jane. 

" I don't know how either'" she said, half apologetically. 

The Senator looked relieved. I'm glad of it," he said, IB 
an undertone," and yet I don't exactly know why. Some- 
times our prejudices are stronger than our principles." 

But Jane did not hear. She had no desire to smoke or to 
learn how, but again she felt the older girl's attitude towards 
her was one of pitying disdain for prudery and provincialism. 



768 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

CHAPTER V. 

After some polite persuasion, Madge sang one or two little 
love ballads. Lord Alan Hurst played her accompaniments. 
Her voice was thin and weak and barely filled the big draw- 
ing-room. She was wise enough to know that she had no 
great talent, but she felt that her music was effective. It 
proved a willingness to contribute something towards the en- 
tertainment of the guests, and for the time it made her the 
centre of observation, a position which she always strove to 
occupy. 

When every one had praised her, Madge turned to Jane: 
"Perhaps you will sing for us," she said, with conventional 
politeness, feeling that she had ignored her host's ward too 
long. 

" No," .answered Jane. " I was not taught." 

"Then you play," insisted the older girl. 

"No I am not musical; I only act." 

"Act!" exclaimed Madge in some bewilderment. "Oh 
yes, I see. You mean elocution. How delightful. Won't you 
speak for us ? " As she made the request she turned to look 
at .Lord Alan Hurst. She felt that the young Englishman 
was enjoying the situation as much as she, for Madge was 
clever enough and spiteful enough to urge Jane on to any 
childish performance that would make her appear ludicrous in 
the eyes of George Bainbridge. She did not like to think of 
this girl being domiciled in the house. She had been inter- 
ested in its master ever since her debut and it piqued her to 
think that she could not command his allegiance. 

"Would you really like it would you all really like it?" 
asked Jane eagerly. 

" Of course we would," answered the Senator, blissfully 
oblivious of any feminine plot. 

" Then I'll do the sleep-walking scene from Macbeth," she 
said, "if you will all come out into the hall." 

" We will come anywhere you say," agreed the Senator. 
" Lead on and the audience will follow." 

Madge lingered for a moment in the doorway, and whis- 
pered to Lord Alan Hurst. "The sleep-walking scenel Fancy! 
I wonder she didn't recite 'The Boy Stood on the Burning 
Deck.' " 



i9 12.] CONSEQUENCES 769 

Paul Hartford overheard the remark. "She is nothing but 
a child," ha said, tolerantly. 

"She's twenty." 

"Age is counted by experience and feeling," be said. 

"Then you must be a septuagenarian." Like most South- 
ern girls she could not resist talking personalities with young, 
attractive men. 

Paul Hartford made no reply. He had little knowledge of 
women, and he did not know how to meet their raillery or 
sympathy. He was still wincing from his experience with old 
Mrs. Van Doran. He felt unequal to further discussion of 
any sort. He was seeking some plausible excuse to go home; 
he only lingered because he did not want Mrs. Dandrey to 
believe that he had been offended by the onslaught on his re- 
ligion, but when he reached the hallway he became interested 
in spite of himself. 

Jane was transformed. She had been so quiet, so self- 
effacing during the evening, that no man, ignorant of the ways 
of women, could understand the change that had come over 
her. She was giving orders and dictating to those around 
her with the assurance of a theatrical star arranging a proper 
stage-setting. Her eyes were bright with excitement, her 
cheeks burned. She had forgotten her strange environment- 
Madge's critical gaze. Her artistic temperament was roused. 
Nothing mattered except the part she was to play. 

" Please place your chairs against the door facing the stairs. 
Now put out the lights. Give me a candle. Someone raise 
that shade on the landing so the moonlight can filter in. Will 
someone hold my hairpins ? I must have my hands free." 
And she ran lightly up the stairs while her audience waited 
in the dark for the scene to begin. 

Old Mrs. Van Doran, always curious to know what was 
going on about her, said with her usual candor : " I must find 
out where those young people have disappeared. I'll wager 
something pretty that Madge Warden is making Jane uncom- 
fortable." 

" How ? " asked Mrs. Dandrey vaguely. 

"Don't ask how, Marian," said the fat old lady, rising with 

some difficulty from her chair, "women have been trying to 

make their own sex uncomfortable ever since the world began. 

Madge has been out several seasons and looks a bit tired and 

VOL. xciv. 49 



770 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

jjded. Jane is a fresh, young thing with possibilities of beauty 
and brains that will overshadow Madge completely. I would 
like to know how you came to inherit James Tully's daughter ? " 

Bainbridge was a little afraid of his sister. He knew that 
if she expressed regret over her charge that Mrs. Van Doran 
would publish it, and the old lady's remarks had a vast circu- 
lation in Washington, so he made haste to answer. 

" Her father was my best friend. My sister is an angel of 
mercy." 

" And where have you kept her all these years ? " 

" At school in a convent." 

"Good," said the old lady. "I like convents. I don't 
knosr much about them, but they seem to instill some obedi- 
ence, some sense of reverence in their girls. When my poor, 
dear husband was Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, I could al- 
ways tell the convent girls; they knew how to courtesy, they 
were never officious and they all had a good, French accent. 
And what became of the child's mother?" 

" I never knew her." 

" And neither did I. I fancy she was some awful creature 
that James Tully was ashamed of. I believe she died, or she 
would have held on to the child like a wildcat." 

They had reached the darkened hall. A suppressed laugh 
from Madge was the only sound that came from the shadows. 

"I told you so," said the old lady, pressing Bainbridge's 
arm, " I told you so. Where is Jane ? " she asked aloud. 

"She is going to act for us," said the Senator innocently. 
" Here is a chair Mrs. Van Doran. Mrs. Dandrey take my 
place. Here comes Lady Macbeth now." 

"We are going to have the sleep-walking scene." Madge's 
tone was unmistakable now. 

Bainbridge started to turn on the lights ; he wanted to 
stop the unkind performance, but Paul Hartford restrained 
him. " Lst her go on; she is so happy in doing it." 

la the faint moonlight Jane moved slowly down the stairs, 
her dark hair falling about her shoulders almost to her knees ; 
the trailing gown with its flowing sleeves seemed made for the 
part. Her eyes were staring and apparently sightless, the 
candle she held high above her head cast a big, black shadow 
on the wall that contrasted strangely with the small, spectral 
figure by its side. The old hall hung with ancient tapestries, 



i9i 2.] CONSEQUENCES 771 

the wonderful effect oi a real moon shining through the diamond- 
paaed window, the creaking steps, the tense expression of suf- 
fering on the young actress's white face as she came neater 
and nearer, roused in her audience, satiated with much theatre- 
going, a sense of the unusual. 

She put her candle upon the newel post, and then, sitting 
down upon the lowest step, she began with the words, made 
hackneyed, almost ridiculous by much school-room declaiming : 
" Yet here's a spot." 

Her voice with its strange, musical cadences arrested atten- 
tion at once. She began sleepily at first like one too weary 
to realize her own misery, and then, with marvelous skill, she 
depicted a primitive soul striving to regain some of its past 
evil bravado and then becoming a victim to its own woman- 
hood a woman who had known protecting tenderness for her 
offspring, passionate love for her mate. 

Holding up her frail hands, forever stained, she seemed to 
crave forgetfulness, peace, pity; all power was impotent, all 
life remorseful agony. When, with a last, sobbing sound, she 
turned to go up the stairs, her audience was breathless with 
amazement. It was not until she reached the landing, that 
the applause began, then Bainbridge realized that this was the 
dangerous talent of which the nuns had written. Where had 
the child learned to comprehend and interpret such a complex 
character as this mediaeval queen ? 

Mrs. Van Doran, as usual, was the first to recover herself. 

"What a wonder the child is," she said, fanning herself 
energetically. "She gave me the creeps with her acting. 
What a responsibility for you, George Bainbridge." 

"Where did she come from?" whispered Madge. 

" A professional no doubt," said Lord Alan Hurst. 

" It's all very mysterious," added Madge. 

"For God's sake keep her off the stage," implored the 
Senator. 

Paul Hartford made no comment. He had been shut away 
from the world so long in theological seminaries that he knew 
nothing of actors or stage settings. He had forgotten Jane. 
The old, familiar tragedy had merely accentuated the suffer- 
ing of the world in which he seemed to stand with futile 
hands, craving to bring the supernatural into lives made hor- 
rible by sin. 



772 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

Mrs. Dandrey was smiling with genuine delight. Jane's 
advent no longer seemed an affliction since she had made the 
evening memorable. 

" It is so difficult to create any entertainment out of the 
ordinary at dinner-parties," she said. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The audience fell into little groups, and bored one another 
discussing theatres in general, and great actresses they had 
seen. Jane did not reappear. 

" I suppose she has gone to her room to do up her hair," 
said Mrs. Dandrey to the Senator, who first noticed her ab- 
sence. 

"Bashful, no doubt," said Mrs. Van Doran. "Thank 
God there are some girls who still cling to the traditions of 
their grandmothers." 

"And what are those traditions?" asked Bainbridge smiling. 

" Blushing and fainting and staying at home and not know- 
ing how to spell." 

" To spell ? " 

"It's no disgrace, my dear George," she said convincingly. 
" I mention spelling as merely indicative that they were ignor- 
ant of many things that are now considered essential. Now 
my own grandmother's letters were atrocious, but she managed 
a plantation with three hundred slaves, kept them clothed and 
fed, taught them their Bible, and their duty to God and each 
other, kept families together and never permitted my grand- 
father, who seems to have been an unpleasant person, to sell 
any husband away from his wife." 

" And if she had lived to-day-," suggested Bainbridge 
teasingly, " she would have taken to the suffrage platform and 
traveled all over the world." 

"Perhaps," admitted the old lady, "but that does not dis- 
prove that there are traditions to cling to. Of course, I realize 
that I almost antedate the flood and that railroads were cer- 
tainly curiosities in my grandmother's day, and that traveling 
in stage-coaches was most uncomfortable, but she was con- 
tented and capable and kept her place." 

Bainbridge was laughing now. " Her place, Mrs. Van Doran. 
Would you expound a woman's place ? " 



19 1 2.] CONSEQUENCES 773 

The old lady was on the defensive at once. She snorted 
like a war-horse. " I'll do no such thing," she said. " I never 
cared for my own sex collectively, but I'll not abuse them to 
a mere man ; they have entered the business-world and have 
become money-getters, money-makers ; they are pushing into 
all the professions; if they get to the polls they will also claim 
the privilege of proposing, and then there will be few eligible 
bachelors to plague inveterate match-makers like me. Why 
haven't you married in all these years?" 

" I am waiting for the millenium of which you speak," he 
said. " No one has asked me as yet." 

They were interrupted here by Paul Hartford. He wanted 
to say good-night and, though he dreaded a further attack 
from his old friend, he was too punctilious to leave with- 
out speaking to her. Fortunately she was too busy with 
Bainbridge to give him much attention. She pressed his hand 
and said with unexpected softness: 

" If I have been a rude, old woman, Paul, pray forgive me. 
Don't harbor malice over night. I'm coming to see you when, 
no doubt, I'll make myself more disagreeable, if possible, than 
I have to-night." 

He made some conventional reply, and shaking hands with 
Bainbridge he moved slowly up the stairs to get his hat and 
light-weight overcoat that he had worn as a precaution against 
this changeable, autumnal weather. 

Jane had turned out the lamp in the upper hallway when 
she was arranging her scenic effects, but the moon was very 
bright and the white woodwork of the many doors on either 
side of the long corridor, seemed to reflect the spectral light. 
The way was not unfamiliar to Hartford. Mrs. Dandrey always 
reserved the west-wing for her bachelor guests ; the rooms 
were large and exceedingly comfortable, and he had often en- 
joyed their hospitality. But to-night, as he had explained to 
his hostess, he could not stay; he was to have early service 
in the morning, and he must see his sexton about opening 
the church. 

Half-way down the hall, a sobbing sound attracted his 
attention ; a few more steps and he saw a white figure move 
from a window that jutted out over the front door. It was a 
deep recess and made a cozy nook just large enough to hold 
a writing desk, a chair, and a pot or two of trailing ferns. 



774 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

Hartford knew the place well ; he had often sat there to send 
a hasty note or to enjoy the widened view of the river, but 
to-night it all seemed strange to him and he stopped breath- 
less for the moment with an inherent awe of the supernatural. 
Absurd stories of the haunts of this old house rushed vividly 
to his mind to be dispelled the next moment when Jane 
spoke. 

" Are you not going to stay ? " she said regretfully. 

He went up to her in the deep embrasure of the window. 
Her long hair still fell about her shoulders, her eyes were 
heavy with tears. He felt vaguely that she had turned to him 
for some sort of assistance and he waited awkwardly for her 
to explain. 

" Are you not going to stay ? " she repeated. 

" No, I am going now. I was startled for a moment. I 
thought you were a ghost." 

" I wish I were," she said fervently. 

Because he knew little of women he was always literal 
with them. 

" What for ? " he asked. 

" They are but wandering souls," she said, " suffering their 
purgatory, perhaps, while I " she tapped nervously upon the 
window-pane "while I am so tempestuous that I often doubt 
if I shall save my soul at all." 

He looked sympathetically down upon her, feeling that the 
evening had not been all in vain if it had brought him in 
touch with a soul in need of spiritual comfort, but he had 
lived so apart from people all his life that when a longed-for 
opportunity presented itself, a sensation of helplessness came 
over him. He had no self-confidence to balance his eagerness, 
no spontaneity to meet emergencies. His sermons which were 
deeply spiritual were always carefully prepared weeks before 
he delivered them. In the dim peace of his study he could 
write brilliantly, sometimes, very rarely, he could forget him- 
self and talk with equal eloquence, but to-night he was con- 
fused, afraid. 

"You are very young to be so despairing," he said. 

" Perhaps it is not quite despair," she smiled. " Where is 
your church ? I'll come in the morning." 

"It is only a mile from here, a pleasant walk. I'll be so 
pleased to have you a member of my congregation." 



1912.] CONSEQUENCES 775 

"And I am so glad that the church is so near. Please, 
can't you hear my confession before ycu leave? I am a 
stranger in a strange land. I tried to find the church this 
afternoon but I could not. I must have taken the wrong road." 

He had never met such a request before, and for the mo- 
ment he did not know how to answer. Whole paragraphs of 
his maligned pamphlet defining auricular confession seemed 
to stand out like writing on the wall, convincing him that he 
had the right the sacramental right to forgive sin and then 
the tirade of his Bishop filled him with doubt. The old struggle 
that had worn him out body and soul seemed to begin anew. 
He had sought peace in passiveness; this young girl bad made 
him suddenly conscious that his quiescence had been mere 
cowardice. 

Jane was on her knees before him. The situation and the 
request did not seem strange to her. As a child she had often 
knelt and made her confession to the infirm, old chaplain in 
the convent parlor; this recessed window picrristd privacy. 
Her appeal was made to her parish priest, her soul was troubled 
with passion. 

" Bless me, father, for I have sinned," she began. " I be- 
lieve I have committed murder in my heart to-night. I have 
been so full of rage and my vanity must be great, because I 
was so hurt when they when she assumed that I did not 
know that I was to be made a laughing-stock." Tears cfeckcd 
her voice ; the words came incoherently. 

Paul Hartford leaned weakly against the window-sill. 

"Don't don't go on," he protested. "I think I think 
you have made a mistake." 

She looked up at him wonderingly in the moonlight. "A 
mistake, what do you mean ? " she said. 

He seemed to gather himself for a supreme effort. " I I 
am not sure that I have the right." 

"But you are a priest?" 

A sudden illumination came to him. " Not your sort I'm 
afraid." 

"You are not a Catholic?" 

" Not a Romanist." 

She sank into a quivering, little heap on the floor. " Why 
didn't you tell rae ? Mrs. Dandrey called you 'father.' You 
wore the Roman collar. It was not fair to me not fair." 



776 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

He stooped to lift her to her feet ; her hands were very 
cold. " Forgive me, forgive me," he cried, moved by the fact 
that she felt he had injured her. "You cannot guess what all 
this means to me. I have believed in confession believed in 
its sacramental force I was off my guard I did not know 
I could not think until I realized that you had been trained 
to it and I had not. The evening has been a hard one on 
us both." 

She stood up beside him. The intonations of his voice had 
roused her sympathy, his apology was so complete, so abject. 
With quick intuition she realized that he referred to some 
hard, religious struggle the end of which he could not see. 

" I suppose it was my fault," she said. " I am so impetu- 
ous, and I have no knowledge of the world except from 
books. I have read that Catholics were not very numerous in 
some parts of Virginia and that priests, when they visited 
country houses, heard the confessions of the family and said 
Mass for them next day. So I started to make my con- 
fession to you, and now that you know the worst about me 
please don't tell anyone. I hope Miss Warden is not a special 
friend of yours for I hated her to-night. Of course, I'll have 
to get over the feeling and forgive her, but I am afraid I 
won't forget." 

"I'm afraid you won't have an opportunity to forget her," 
he said smiling. " Mrs. Dandrey seems very devoted to her." 

"Then she will not be devoted to me. I do not believe she 
wants me here. Does does Mr. Bainbridge live here always?" 

" He has lived for the last ten years in Europe." 

" Oh, I hope he will take me back. I don't believe I shall 
like it here." 

Paul Hartford was bewildered. " You do not know them," 
he ventured. 

" No," she said, seeming very small and pitiful in her lone- 
liness. " I know no one. It may seem a strange thing to say, 
but I suppose you know me better than any one in the house 
to-night." 

" I ? " he questioned. " I hope we shall know each other 
far better, for as yet I don't believe I know your name. I 
did not hear it clearly when we were introduced." 

" My name is Jane Jane Tully," she said simply. 

" Tully 1 " he repeated, and the name seemed to hold some 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 777 

unpleasant association, for his kind face looked white and stern. 
" I suppose the name is not an uncommon one I once knew 
someone by the name of Tully, but it was so long ago 
years ago." 

" I may have relatives in this country, but I don't where 
or who they are. Mr. Bainbridge was my father's friend. I 
am his ward. I never saw him except once until to-day." 

" Do you mean that he never came to see you all the time 
you were at school ? " 

" I was in Paris, he was traveling. He could not know 
how alone I have felt in all these years how friendless." 

"But you will make friends now. Here is one that you 
can count on," he said, with a stiffness that had grown with 
his seclusion. " Let me serve you in any way I can. Let 
me make some amends for to-night." 

She did not have time to reply, for footsteps sounded on 
the stairs, and as she moved a little away from him he saw 
her take a bottle from the desk and deliberately pour its con- 
tents over her dress. 

"It is red ink," she said quietly. "I was going to put 
blood stains on Lady Macbeth's hands, for I wanted to do that 
other great scene, the one after Duncan's murder, you know, 
but I couldn't act any more before Miss Warden. I did 
not want to go downstairs again because my eyes were swollen 
from crying. I must have some excuse for not reappearing," 

The footsteps reached the landing. Jane went forward to 
meet Mrs. Van Doran, who came puffing up the remaining 
stairs. 

" Mercy child 1 " exclaimed the old lady. " Are you hurt ? " 

"No, no," answered Jane, and her laugh sounded mirth- 
lessly through the still hall. " It is only ink red ink. I 
spilled it on my dress." 

Paul Hartford moved unseen into the spare room, his brain 
awhirl. 

CHAPTER VII. 

The next day was Sunday. Breakfast was always an un- 
satisfactory meal. The merciless sunlight, shining through the 
long casement windows, showed tired eyes, encroaching wrinkles 
and powder not carefully applied. Madge's morning dress was 



778 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

not altogether fresh, the lace in the neck was a trifle soiled, 
and the frill of her silk underskirt was frayed at the edges. 

" Breakfasting is a barbarous custom," she announced open- 
ly to Mrs. Dandrey. " Only the memory of your hot waffles 
lured me from my bed. In my next incarnation I trust I shall 
be a bat or bird that begins to move only at nightfall." 

" How unpleasantly dismal," said Lord Alan Hurst, busy 
with his plate. " Would you foreswear your taste for waffles ? " 

" Well, perhaps not," she answered, smiling. " If they were 
served with maple syrup I might be content to rise at noon- 
day." 

Jane came into the room at this moment dressed in the 
black uniform she had worn at the convent. The gown was 
perfectly plain, but it had been made in Paris by a little woman 
that understood the art of " lines." She had also compre- 
hended the possibilities of grace and style in Jane's slender 
figure. The dress was a triumph of simplicity, but Jane, crav- 
ing brightness and color after her austere monastic years, did 
not realize that Madge's critical eyes were at last bent upon 
her with begrudged admiration. 

Bainbridge rose from the foot of the table and pulled out 
her chair, which he had had placed near his own. 

"Good morning, Lady Macbeth," he said, kindly. "Why 
did you desert us all last night ? " 

" Such a sight as she was," said Mrs. Van Doran, raising 
her lorgnette to view the girl approvingly. "She met me at 
the stairs, her dress covered with red ink. She had been put- 
ting blood stains on her hands to harrow up our feelings fur- 
ther, and she spilled the bottle." 

" I am glad it did not spill over the carpet," Jane said 
easily. " I'm sorry I startled you. I suppose I looked like a 
real murderess in the moonlight." 

"You did, indeed," agreed the old lady, "and that beauti- 
ful dress ! Why, child, you can't buy that white, silvery tissue 
now for love or money 1 " 

" It was an old dress," said Jane. " It was one of my 
mother's stage costumes." 

Madge looked at Lord Alan Hurst. Mrs. Dandrey stiffened 
perceptibly. She had hoped to keep Jane's family history in 
the background; there was no use in exploiting it. Unknown 
Parisian actresses never sounded quite respectable. The Sen- 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 779 

ator was conscious of a certain frigidity of atmosphere, but he 
was not subtle enough to realize what had produced it. Bain- 
bridge hastened to relieve the situation by saying: 

"Your mother had great talent." 

Jane turned wonderingly to him. " Why I thought you 
never knew her," she said. 

Mrs. Van Doran, secretly enjoying the whole situation, 
plunged in at this point, determined to champion this girl who 
had taken her whimsical fancy. 

"I knew your dear father well, child, and he could not 
stand anything mediocre. He was the most critical person I 
ever met ! Toleration is the secret of much happiness. I once 
said to him : ' No perfectionist gets much satisfaction out of 
life.' I remember he laughed and said: ' Who is insane enough 
to look for satisfaction or happiness?' I could never persuade 
him to talk about himself. Perhaps for that reason he was 
the most entertaining man I ever met. Now, please tell me 
who is going to church this morning?" 

She changed the subject with such startling suddenness 
that they all looked up quickly from their plates. 

"I'm very sorry," began Mrs. Dandrey, "but I must con- 
fess that I forgot all about church. I left my automobile at 
the garage yesterday. It really is a most unsatisfactory car; 
it seems to be always in need of repair; and my brougham, 
that I always depend upon, met with some sort of an accident 
coming from the station. There's my riding-horse, and Lord 
Alan Hurst and the Senator both rode over last evening, so 
their horses are in the stable, but there is no vehicle except 
the hay wagon, and your church is three miles away." 

"Then I'll have to stay at home," said Mrs. Van Doran 
promptly. " I can't ride, that's certain." And she looked 
down upon her " roly poly " figure with a mild sort of for- 
bearance. "The Lord knows my spirit is willing, but He's 
given me a body that would burden any horse." 

"Do you care to go?" asked Bainbridge, turning to Jane. 
" I am afraid that I am not strong enough to ride myself, but 
I am sure " 

" That I will go with her," interrupted the Senator. " I 
am a Catholic, even though I wasn't brought up in a convent. 
I suppose it is safe to assume that Mass is at eleven." 

"I'll lend you the skirt of my riding-habit," said Mrs. 



;8o CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

Dandrey, anxious to get this difficult young person out of the 
house even for a short time. She wanted to take Bainbridge 
aside and tell him that he must warn Jane to keep silent as 
to her antecedents if she wished to remain under his shelter- 
ing roof. 

"Thank you," said Jane, after a moment's hesitation. "I 
should like to go very much." 

As she passed through the doorway to get ready for her 
ride, she turned and courtesied to the guests. 

Mrs. Dandrey looked aghast. "She has no notion of the 
conventionalities," she said apologetically, when Jane was safely 
out of hearing. 

"I fancy it's a conventual custom," said Madge, wishing to 
appear generous. 

" I think it's charming," commented old Mrs. Van Doran, 
"a young girl showing such respect for her elders." And she 
lingered spitefully on the last word, and looked at Madge. 
"God knows we lack reverence everywhere. There is some- 
thing wrong with an education that does not inculcate it. I 
don't expect you to agree with me, George Bainbridge. You 
were born a cynic, bur don't spoil Jane, I implore you, by 
trying to get her to share any of your savage ideas." 

While the old lady continued to thunder good-naturedly at 
her host, the Senator escaped to the stables to superintend the 
saddling of his own horse and to help Jane to mount, but it 
was not until they were fairly started on their way that the 
girl confessed to him that she had never ridden in her life. 

" I'm afraid we shall have to walk our horses all the way," 
she said. " If they begin to trot I'll never be able to stay 
on, I know." 

"Well, I like your courage," he said laughing. "Why 
didn't you tell me before?" 

" Because " she stopped, remembering his frankness of the 
evening before, "I would tell you but but you publish my 
revelations, and I'm proud and vain and small-minded and 
self conscious and all the other things that one's friends are 
supposed to forget." 

"Jove I " he exclaimed, his small eyes twinkling with amuse- 
ment. " I'll promise to enter into any plot you please. Just 
go ahead ; you seem to need a safety-valve, or it looks to me 
as if you'd burst." 



i9i2.] CONSEQUENCES 781 

"As bad as that," she said gaily. "First show me how 
to hold these reins. I haven't an idea about a horse. Now 
I couldn't confess to anything before Miss Warden. She thinks 
I'm atrocious already." 

"And exactly what do you mean by atrocious?" 

"Impossible, socially." She made a wry face. "I'm not 
used to smart people, fashionable living, dinner-parties. They 
doubt whether I'm quite respectable, and from their point of 
view I don't know whether I am or not. Did you see how 
they all looked when I said my mother was an actress ?" 

" Good Lord ! What rot I " 

She turned her head quickly. Her movements had all the 
alertness of a bird's. 

"What what's rot?" she asked. 

"It's slang," he said. "I wanted to swear I wonder I 
really never stopped to consider the matter before but I won- 
der what these blue-blooded aristocrats think of me?" 

" You ? " 

"Yes, my father was a cowboy in the true sense of the 
word lived among them. Cold nights, when there wasn't any 
other place to sleep, he would huddle down among the cattle 
just for the warmth of their bodies. I don't care who knows 
it. My mother did the washing and cooking and helped build 
the house we lived in I'm proud of ,it. They belonged to 
the pioneers who made the West what it is to-day God's 
country. They had no traditions to weigh them down. Wash- 
ington is full of people too proud to accept charity too gen- 
teel to work. No doubt if they starve they will do it grace- 
fully, but they will do it without witnesses, and even their 
emotions will be lost to society. I suppose you will agree 
that real emotions let loose would be a great aid to you in 
your profession." 

" My profession ! " she repeated. 

He did not answer her question. His eyes looked sternly 
ahead of him. He seemed oblivious to the wonders of the 
woods around them. It was an ideal Indian summer day. The 
maples had long ago offered their golden holocaust to the brown 
earth, and they stood etched against the sky, full of graceful 
beauty in their barrenness. The oaks flamed scarlet, the honey- 
suckle, still hardy and green in the sheltered places, had run 
rampant over rotting stumps and leaning fences, the far-stretch- 



782 CONSEQUENCES [Mar., 

ing fields of golden-rod had grown gray and feathery in the 
frost, a blue mist marked the river. 

" Some day, I suppose, you will go on the stage," said the 
big man slowly, "but before you make up your mind, I would 
like you to promise me of course I realize that I am a stranger 
but I'd like you to promise me that you will tell me tell 
me before you go." 

She gave the promise lightly enough, thinking nothing of her 
future. Her troubled mood had changed, the witchery of the 
woods claimed her whole attention. She wanted to stop and 
swing in the grape vines. She insisted on gathering an arm- 
load of oak branches for the church. She seemed to have found 
a new sense of liberty in this enchanted forest, and as she 
rode on under the great gnarled trees, she wove together old 
fairy stories and legends and pretended that they were true. 

The Senator knew nothing of fairies, gnomes or goblins. He 
had never had time in his work-a-day boyhood for the childish 
joys of make-believe, but he followed her fancy with rare sym- 
pathy, adding the reality of the woodland knowledge he had 
learned as a hunter, to make her dream-world more complete. 

"Suppose, oh, let us suppose we are lost in this beautiful 
wood ! " 

" Then we shall have to study the mosses on the trees to 
find our way out." 

" But we don't want to find our way out yet," she pro- 
tested. " Oh 1 look at that beautiful, bright green space. I 
believe the fairies dance there at night; they ride on grass- 
hoppers and daddy-long-legs, and the fairy knights carry grass- 
blades for spears and they fight for their lady-loves when the 
moon is bright and full. Oh, suppose we stay here until even- 
ing I Look at that great hollow in that tree. Wouldn't it be 
charming to build a fire there if we were really lost children, 
and had anything to cook ? " 

" I reckon we wouldn't be carrying provisions if we were 
lost children, but I tell you what we could do. We could stop 
at this little stream and I could tear my cravat into strips, 
and we could fish here with a bent pin and a wriggling worm 
until we had something for dinner." 

" Oh, let us do it now. Nobody cares whether we come 
back or not. Let us stop and have dinner in the woods." 

" I thought we were going to Mass." 



i9i 2.] CONSEQUENCES 783 

" Oh, I forgot for the moment 1 I actually forgot," she 
added remorsefully. " Let us hurry. I'm afraid we shall be 
late. Here is the open road. The sisters at the convent used 
to tell me that I was the most forgetful girl they ever knew; 
and to-day my first Sunday in America I forgot for the 
moment that we were going to church. I never saw a wood 
like that before." 

And once more in the open the Senator had to continue 
his riding-lessons to his young charge. A short distance 
brought them to the church, the doors were closed; a card 
nailed against the pillar of the entrance proclaimed the fact 
that Mass was said every other Sunday. The priest who served 
this mission had to divide his time among several churches 
many miles apart. 

"We have done our best," said the Senator. "Now, I 
suppose, we must go home. Hold your reins a little tighter. 
Don't touch him with your whip. He's more anxious to get 
back than we are, and we don't want him to go galloping." 

The girl acted intelligently upon all his suggestions, and, 
becoming braver as she grew more accustomed to the saddle, 
she let her horse fall into an easy pace a little in advance of 
the Senator's. Exhilarated by the exercise and proud of her 
first attempt at horsemanship, she turned her head to see how 
close the Senator was following. The wooded roadway was very 
quiet and peaceful. Behind some screening trees she could 
get a glimpse of another small church and a cottage close by; 
the path leading up to this tiny rectory was bordered with 
late blooming roses. These cultivated flower-beds seemed so 
incongruous in this wilderness of growing things, that Jane 
stopped to examine them. As she attempted to pull up her 
horse he shied at a bit of old newspaper that had been caught 
in the brambles of a blackberry bush, and pitching Jane from 
him, he galloped on without her. 

The Senator was beside her in a moment. She lay white 
and inert in the heavy dust of the roadway. He bent over 
her anxiously, his fingers on her pulse. "Thank God she was 
not dragged," he said, prayerfully grateful. Then picking her 
p he carried her along the rose-bordered path, cursing himself 
for his carelessness, his heart full of tender pity for the girl 
in his arms. 

(TO BE CONTINUED.) 




THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY. 

BY CHARLTON BENEDICT WALKER. 

JHE latest Revision of the "Psalter" of the Ro- 
man Breviary calls for some notice by those 
who are interested in liturgical matters. It is 
not often in the history of the Church that a 
reform so profound and far-reaching in its effects 
has been brought about with so little of the dispute and dis- 
cussion which has attended previous attempts at reconstruction. 
It is necessary to carry our minds back to the last Ecu- 
menical Council of the Vatican, opened by Pius IX. over forty 
years ago, and never formerly closed, and to recall certain 
important demands there made by prelates from all parts of 
the Catholic world. The commission appointed by Pius IX. 
in 1856, had reported that the Breviary required revision, that 
the time was ripe for such revision, and that the Rubrics 
needed special attention. From a negative point of view the 
commission reported, that the time was not opportune for a 
revision of the legends, homilies and antiphons. From all 
parts of the world opinions were, later on at the Vatican 
Council, gathered upon the question and submitted to the 
assembly in order to draw attention to the matter. Following 
Dora Baiimer and Dom Baudot, we may group these opinions 
according to the nationality of those who presented them. 

The French scheme desired the expurgation of the lessons 
(of the Sanctorale] from apocryphal matter, the correction of 
the " Hymnal," a re-distribution of the "Psalter," a limitation 
of the power to transfer feasts, the recasting of the Calendar 
in order to give less prominence to purely Roman saints, and 
an abridgement of the office as a whole. 

The German scheme, characteristically, devoted itself to the 
question of the expurgation of doubtful matter, and required 
further, permission to anticipate Matins of the following day 
at any hour after 2 P. M. 

The Canadian scheme placed chief stress upon the need 
for a re -distribution of the "Psalter," in order that as far as 
possible the whole " Psalter " should be recited weekly, and 



I9i2.] THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY 785 

that the office should be shortened with a view to relieving 
priests whose time was largely occupied with the cure of souls. 

The Italians desired correction of those parts of the 
Breviary which did not concur with the results of modern 
criticism, that more appropriate homilies should be chosen for 
certain days, and that some arrangement should be made by 
which the whole "Psalter" might be recited at least several 
times a year. 

For our present purpose it is enough to note that in three 
out of these four schemes a desire is expressed for a better 
recitation of the " Psalter." 

The present distribution of the Psalms amongst the hours 
of the day and week dates back, at any rate in its main fea- 
tures, to the beginning of the ninth century. Previous to that 
date we know that St. Gregory the Great, at the close of the 
sixth century, had given certain directions as to the distribu- 
tion, and that either he or one of his successors had laid the 
foundation of the recitation which became universal in all 
churches of the Empire after 802. In Rome itself it seems 
almost certain that the adoption of this scheme was later, for 
Amalarius records that the length of Matins depended upon 
the hour of dawn, and that Lauds invariably began at that 
hour whether Matins were finished or no. It is usual to speak 
of this distribution of the "Psalter" as "Gregorian," and 
though no argument as to authorship is intended to be con- 
veyed, it is convenient to retain the term here. At this period 
it seems quite certain that a weekly recitation of the "Psalter" 
was regarded as the rule. 

No doubt this rule was largely an imitation of the monas- 
tic custom defined by St. Benedict (c 529). The distribution 
was, it is true, widely different when adopted by those who 
lived outside the cloister, and adapted in various ways to their 
particular requirements. But it was weekly, and so it has re- 
mained to the present day. 

The only other distribution of ancient date which need be 
noticed here is the Ambrosian. This is spread over two 
weeks; but it is rash, with our limited knowledge of the his- 
tory of the Milanese rite to hazard any suggestion as to the 
period at which it was ordered. It is a hope which I am 
sure is shared by all liturgical scholars, that more time will 
be devoted in the near future to its study. 
VOL. xciv. 50 



786 THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY [Mar., 

So the question remained settled until the time of the 
Council of Trent, when the revision of the Breviary, which 
was, indeed, long overdue, was again set on foot. In 1535 
Cardinal Francis Quignonez had published a Breviary for pri- 
vate recitation by ecclesiastics, out of choir. He arranged 
the "Psalter "to be said weekly; limited the lessons to three, 
confining them for the greater part to Holy Scripture alone; 
in his first edition abolished even antiphons, and omitted all 
the short chapters and the responds at Matins and the Hours. 
His underlying ideas, true in the main, that the Breviary is 
made for man and not man for the Breviary, and that the 
essential matter is that God should receive His due meed of 
praise from a willing, and not from an overburdened heart, was 
shared by others, amongst whom was Blessed Joseph Maria 
Tommasi, himself one of the greatest liturgical scholars of that 
or any time, who had obtained a personal privilege from the 
Holy See to recite only the Office of the Season, and who 
projected a reform of the Breviary for private use. Paul III. 
countenanced the Quignonian Breviary so far as to allow secu- 
lars, who obtained leave, to substitute it for the Roman Office 
in private. But the reform which it advocated went too far out- 
side the limits of tradition, and overthrew too much which was 
rightly regarded as essential, and it never attained anything like 
popularity. In 1558 the Pope refused to authorize a reprint. 

The revision of the Breviary by the Council of Trent under 
St. Pious V. aimed at providing one Breviary for the whole 
church, in which local necessities could find their full lawful 
expression without interfering with the idea of unity, so 
greatly desired in the troubled state of the times. And it is 
important only to note here that the tenacity with which 
the Church has clung to the Pian reform has been largely 
due to the paramount necessity of preserving this idea, and 
that the suppression of local uses, such as those of the dio- 
ceses of France, was undertaken, not so much because they, 
themselves, contained what was harmful to faith and sound 
doctrine, but because they struck across that unity in prayer 
which goes hand in hand with unity in doctrine. It is true 
that the Jansenist heretics made free use of the Breviary in 
later times to promote their designs, and that in her warfare 
with heresy the Church, taught by bitter experience, uses no 
half-measures. But no one can close his eyes to the excellence 



i9i2.] THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY 787 

and beauty of many of these local uses, or do else than wel- 
come the day when it may become possible for the Church to 
adopt them as her own. That day has dawned by God's good 
providence, and " we may rejoice and be glad in it." 

When our Holy Father ascended the Pontifical throne, 
the note which he struck was "the restoration of all things 
in Christ," a solemn note and one which has been destined to 
arouse harmonies throughout the whole Catholic Church. It 
is not my duty, nor am I in any degree capable, to express 
the extraordinary personal affection which attaches to Pius X., 
in the heart of every sincere and humble Catholic. But one 
cannot escape the conviction that the triumphs of his reign, 
already many and deeply significant, are due to his ability to 
go hand in hand with the poorest and meanest of bis subjects 
to the throne of Christ our Lord, to his marvelous capacity 
for understanding the needs and desires of his children, and 
for removing bravely and unhesitatingly whatsoever causes 
"one of these little ones to stumble." 

We have noticed that one demand stands out in nearly all 
the projects for the reform of the Breviary the redistribution 
of the " Psalter " in order that it may, in accordance with 
ancient custom, be frequently, and in the Roman Church, 
weekly, recited by all those bound to the Office. Every writer 
upon the Breviary has expressed the opinion that the " Psalter " 
is that part of the Divine Service which is absolutely essential. 

Everyone with a knowledge of the history of worship de- 
plores that with regard to the psalms "of late time few of 
them have been daily said, and the rest utterly omitted." 
But most happily this defect has nothing whatever to do with 
those whose duty is to recite the " Psalter." No obligation 
in any department of life, ecclesiastical or civil, is discharged 
more faithfully. I say this with the utmost confidence. The 
real difficulty has been hitherto that the arrangement of the 
"Psalter" in the Common of Saints has not been proportion- 
ate to that of the Ferial Office. This probably arose from the 
custom of adding the Office of the Saint to that of the Feria, 
(much in the same way as at the present time, the Little Office 
of our Lady is said in addition to the Canonical Office), and 
so producing a double office. When the burden of so lengthy 
a form of prayer became impossible to ecclesiastics who were 
engaged in other forms of spiritual activity, the lengthier 



788 THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY [Mar., 

Ferial office was discarded and that of the Saint retained. In 
course of time we " even find that one of the reasons for 
canonization was that the Saint might be honored in the Office. 
St. Antoninus writes : 

Canonization adds nothing to the merit or essential reward 
ot sanctity, but earthly veneration and glory ; in order that 
after this solemn process the Saint's office may be solemnly 
celebrated with gladness and rejoicing, which otherwise could 
in no way be observed . (Martinez, VitaB.M. Teresa . . . 
audore R. P. Francisco Ribera 469.) 

We can only be thankful that this prominence given to the 
friends of God has been preserved inviolate to our own time. 

When reform became an absolute necessity, the Gregorian 
distribution was felt to be of such venerable antiquity that to 
touch it would open the way to changes of a less desirable 
nature, and up to the present time liturgists have loyally ac- 
cepted this position and sought in other directions for some 
way out of the difficulty. The compilers of the local uses 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did redistribute, 
and had they not vitiated the whole of their work by an atti- 
tude of disregard, and in too many cases of open contempt, 
for the ruling of the Holy See, their efforts might long ago 
have succeeded in bringing about reform. It was only by 
bringing back unity of prayer that the seal could be set upon 
the work of restoring the unity of faith, and the Church, with 
the Gregorian distribution intact, dared not cast it on one side. 

But in these days when she has found peace within her 
walls, it is possible to consider the domestic needs of her own 
household, " to restore all things in Christ." And so we are 
given the new " Psalter," and may briefly consider its main 
features. I give herewith a table of the distribution which 
may be compared with that of the present Breviary, (See 
opposite page.) 

Matins, you will observe, on Sundays and week-days alike, 
has nine psalms. The present Breviary has eighteen on Sun- 
days and twelve on week-days. Further, you will note that 
long psalms, e.g., the ninth and the seventy-seventh, are di- 
vided into portions, each portion being treated as a separate 
psalm. The Gregorian precedent for this is the well known 
treatment of Psalm 118. Lauds has five psalms, the groupirg 
of Psalms 148-150 being dropped, and a larger selection of 



1912.] THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY 789 

Psalterium Breviarii Romani cum ordinario divini officii jussu SS. D. 
N. Pii PP. X novo ordine per hebdomadam dispositum et editum. Editio 
typica. Roma. 1911. 



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3. 







790 THE REVISED PSALTER OF THE BREVIARY [Mar., 

Canticles, many of which will be familiar to those bound to 
the Monastic Office, is provided for week-days. Prime and 
Hours have three constantly varying psalms, the Quicumque 
being retained on Sunday as in the present Office. Vespers 
has five psalms, as now; Compline three psalms, varying 
from day to day. 

In order to make this arrangement one of practice, new 
rubrics have been put forth which make wide changes in the 
relation between the Ferial and Festal Office. Except on cer- 
tain feasts roughly speaking, all doubles of the first and second 
classes and within their octaves the Psalms as in the " Psal- 
ter " are to be said daily. On these feasts Matins and Vespers 
are said as in the Proper or Common. Lauds and the Hours 
have their Antiphons and Psalms from the "Psalter." and the 
rest (Chapter, Hymns, etc.) from the Common or Proper. On 
all other feasts, unless a proper Office be already existing, the 
Antiphons and Psalms are from the "Psalter" and the Les- 
sons of the First Nocturn at Matins are from the Scripture 
occurring. 

Side by side with these changes, and, again, laid down in 
order to render them effective, come the Rubrics concerning 
the translation and occurrence of feasts. Briefly, the Sunday 
Office is given an importance which will enable it to take its 
rightful place throughout the year. Now that its' length has 
been rendered more reasonable, no one will regret this, and 
benefactors of churches will please note that suits of green 
vestments will probably prove acceptable presents for next 
Christmas. Doubles of the First and Second Classes, when 
transferred, are to go to the first day not already filled by a 
feast of the same class. Other festivals are not to be trans- 
ferred at all, but either commemorated or entirely omitted 
pro hac vice. 

The Office is further shortened by the concentration of the 
Suffrages of the Saints into one memorial; all the week-day 
Votive Offices of 1883 are suppressed and the obligation of 
the Office of the Dead on certain days is removed. All Souls' 
Day has a new Office (to be used this year) and this super- 
sedes that of the Octave of All Saints, which formerly gave a 
Double Office to this day. This is a return to a pre- reforma- 
tion use which was a feature of the Sarum Breviaty. 

The new "Psalter" comes into use at the end of this 



i9i2.j ST. JOSEPH 791 

year, and the subject is one of such interest and importance 
that I may with confidence ask pardon for this somewhat long 
notice of it. To those who find their strength increased from 
day to day by the constant intercourse with God through the 
official prayer of His Church, the opportunity afforded by the 
revision for a greater familiarity with the "Psalter" will be 
welcome; to some of those to whom the length of the old 
Office has hitherto presented insuperable difficulties I speak 
of course of the laity this shorter Office, which loses nothing 
of the beauty of the old, may serve, as I pray it may, as an 
introduction to that marvelous storehouse of the prayers and 
wisdom of men of old time the Breviary of the Catholic 
Church. 



ST. JOSEPH. 

BY HILDEGARDE. 

WHAT guidance lacked I from thy counsel wise, 
There in those dear, dim days of long ago, 
Where myriad pathways met in lines obscure, 
And self-alluring scenes perplexed me so ? 
Thou, who didst guide o'er Egypt's trackless sea 
Thine own Creator's steps didst beckon me. 

What lacks me now, of comradeship divine, 
Now that the road is gained, the pathway clear? 
Shall aught intimidate me, aught dismay, 
Clasping thy hand, shall I have aught to fear? 
Thou who hast always in thy blessed sight, 
Him, Whom the stars obey dost guide aright. 

And what of thy dear ministry to me 

When matched against the foe, with strength unmeet? 

If then, God's dear ambassador I see, 

Is not my fondest death-bed dream complete? 

Thy summons found thee, wrapped in His embrace. 

1 be my pledge that I shall see His Face ! 




'APPROVING THE BETTER THINGS." 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT. C.S.P. 

CHRISTIAN and religious perfection is a word 
that is easily open to much misunderstanding. 
One thinks that if he fasted on bread and water 
he would be perfect. But St. Francis de Sales 
says that one may do that and yet " drink 
deep of his neighbor's blood by detraction and calumny." 
Prayer is a necessary means of perfection. But one may say 
a great many prayers and even go often to the sacraments, 
and be only a great annoyance among his fellows; nor will he 
forgive injuries. Charity to the poor is a sign of perfection, 
but not an infallible one; for there are those who are generous 
to the poor, and yet so imperfect as not to pay their debts. 

What, then, is perfection? St. Bernard tells us that it is 
a sincere purpose to go forward and increase in virtue, that 
is to say, in loving God and our neighbor. So does St. Paul 
teach the same doctrine: "That your charity may more and 
more abound in knowledge and in all understanding, that you 
may approve the better things " (Phil. i. 10). 

One sees an admirable spirit of progress in this. How- 
ever little virtue we may have, let us strive in God's name to 
get a little more. The moment a sinner is absolved in a good 
confession and then receives Holy Communion, the test of his 
incerity is his purpose to do "better things"; courageously 
to cut out the roots of evil habits, manfully to despise and 
avoid bad company, firmly to keep faith with God and his 
father confessor about his prayers and his return to the 
sacraments. The way of perfection is just a strenuous en- 
deavor to get further and further away from sin, and become 
more and more sincere in love of virtue. 

What is a bright sign of the beginnings of perfection ? 
That with sincere humility one makes up his mind immedi- 
ately to begin with the lowest works of the Christian life. 
Listen to the Psalmist: "And I said: Now have I begun; 
this is the change of the right hand of the most High" (Ps. 
Ixxvi. n). 



191 2. J "APPROVING THE BETTER THINGS" 793 

I. 

St. Bernard expressed his doctrine in the motto be gave 
the Knights Templars in their Rule, A. D., 1128, describing a 
life and death earnestness: "Alive or dead we are God's." 
Not merely the desire but the resolute desire to advance in 
virtue for God's sake is the root of perfection. 

The ordinary Christian says in his prayers: O my God! I 
love Thee; and this he repeats with the monotonous ebb and 
flow of a placid sea. The more aspiring soul does the same 
with a deeper consciousness of the divine deservings; but es- 
pecially with no monotony but rather a ceaseless variety of 
reasons and intuitions, and an occasional onflowing of a tidal 
wave of joyous purpose. Of all the incidents of such a life 
none equals the absorbing self-gratulation of discovering the 
littleness of self and the greatness of God. The spiritual ela- 
tion of fervent souls may be thus interpreted : How glad I 
am of my love for Jesus Christ! And, on the other hand, 
the real sadness of their life is the chagrin at some sudden 
slip of the tongue, or some unbecoming greediness at table 
a sadness not unwelcome because it measures the most need- 
ful of all virtues, humility, a feeling peculiar only to those 
whose " sole object is real perfection, which is the fervent 
resolve to please God in all things and themselves in nothing" 
(St. John of the Cross, Obscure Night, Book I. ch. iii). 

It is of the state of aspiring love named Christian perfec- 
tion, that the spouse speaks in the Canticles: "If a man 
should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall 
despise it as nothing " (Cant. viii. 7). The good of anything 
and everything is really known only by one who knows the 
good of close union with God. The worth of any joy is its 
rate of exchange for the love of God. There is no living 
without loving. The only loving is in loving God the infix 
nitely loveworthy ; all other love is of something wholly His, 
or comes from loving Him, or flows towards loving Him. How 
this drawing towards heaven should be cultivated by sanctify- 
ing our affections is thus stated by St. Teresa: "Let your 
desire be to see God ; your fear be lest you lose Him ; your 
grief that you do not enjoy Him ; and let your Joy be for 
what may lead you to Him " (Maxim 69 Dalton). 

Promptness, heartiness, eagerness be possessed of these 



794 "APPROVING THE BETTER THINGS" [Mar., 

qualities about religion, and you need only be broken into 
the harness of holy discipline to achieve perfection.* 

II. 

We see, then, that perfection is not exactly the practise of 
virtues for their own sake, such as poverty, chastity and 
obedience, mortification and humility no, nor even for God's 
sake, but rather it is the spirit which inspires this practise. 
The perfection to which all are called, to which some are 
specially called, is a holy ambition for a closer and closer 
union with God "an interior binding to God," says Tauler, 
"joined to a great longing for eternity:" not saintliness 
ready made, but gladness and eagerness to become a saint by 
longings and strivings, labors and sufferings for the things of 
eternity. 

" Whatsoever thy hand is able to do, do it earnestly " 
(Eccles. ix. 10). Make this energetic maxim a rule for spir- 
itual exercises as well as for outward good works, and you 
have the plan of advance. Perfection as a condition is earnest- 
ness in praying and suffering and laboring. St. Francis de 
Sales interprets the inspired definition just given, when he says 
that perfection "presupposes not a partial but a thorough love 
of God. As divine love adorns the soul, it is called grace, 
making us pleasing to the divine majesty ; as it gives us 
strength to do good, it is called charity ; but when it is ar- 
rived at that degree of perfection, by which it not only makes 
us do well, but also work diligently, frequently and readily, 
then it is called devotion [perfection] " {Devout Life, Part I., 
Ch. I). But one must realize that neither in spirit nor prac- 
tise is this condition motived by human reason, but by the 
instinets and inspirations of divine grace. Under this progress- 
ive influence the worship of mediocrity is impossible. The 
motto is no longer, " Be safe," but, " Be noble." Nor need one 
be scared by the task, for the easy safety of such a soul is in 
the choice of humble works rather than of showy ones. 
" There are no short ways to perfection, but there are sure 
ones," says Newman namely, to do the ordinary work of each 
day thoroughly well, only regretting it were not done better. 

* " Devotio nihil aliud esse videtur, quam voluntas quaedam prompte tradendi se ad ea 
quae pertinent ad Dei famulatum." " It would seem that devotion [perfection] is only a cer- 
tain kind of good will promptly to deliver oneself up to those things which pertain to the ser- 
vice of God." (Summa, 2a. sae. qu. 82, a. i). 



1912.] "APPROVING THE BETTER THINGS" 795 

III. 

We must not insist that obedience to the call to perfection 
is a condition of salvation. Yet not seldom it is so plain, so 
imperative, that neglect of it is extremely dangerous. " If thou 
sayest: It is enough! thou hast perished," exclaims St. Augus- 
tine, referring to such a case. This has a closer, practical 
bearing than may at first sight appear. For if one says : It is 
enough for me to keep out of mortal sin this self-bestowed 
license to commit venial sins quickly demoralizes his reckon- 
ings about mortal sins. After losing the eager outlook for in- 
crease in virtue, one soon begins to degenerate. Growth is 
a law of life, of the spiritual life above all others. " The path 
of the just man as a shining light, goeth forward and in- 
creaseth, even unto perfect day" (Prov. iv. 18). Desire is the 
inner source of holiness, but practise is necessary, for that 
alone gives development, and its neglect is attended with 
penalties, the chief of which is that form of spiritual sloth 
known as " low views." Purpose is the sap of the tree, prac- 
tise the branches. Lop off a few lower branches to concen- 
trate growth in the higher ones and you do well. But excess 
in this process of pruning stagnates the sap of holy desire 
and the whole tree soon rots and dies. 

IV. 

The supreme law is love; and fortunately the love of 
God has many ways of drawing us. Of all of these the imi- 
tation of Jesus Christ is the compendium. He has abundantly 
emphasized three forms, which are the triple cord of union: 
imitating His poverty, by making little of the good things of 
this life; His chastity, by bridling, according to one's state 
of life, the concupiscence of the flesh ; and His obedience, by 
subjecting self will to God's will, as God lives and acts among 
us by our lawful superiors. These form, we say, the triple 
bond of union when inspired by love, the one virtue sanctify- 
ing them all: "Above all these things have charity, which is 
the bond of perfection" (Col. iii. 14). Done for the sake of 
imitating Him who is all in all to us, these three Gospel 
virtues, as they are called, perfect the love of God in a Chris- 
tian soul. By them does God make us "conformable to the 
image of His Son" (Rom. viii. 29). 



796 "APPROVING THE BETTER THINGS" [Mar., 

We are supposing, meanwhile, the atmosphere of devotion, 
consisting of a regimen of prayer, spiritual reading, occasional 
intervals of recollection, all established upon a sufficiently fre- 
quent reception of the sacraments. Let him who desires to 
be a true Christian say to God incessantly : O God ! teach me 
to love to say my prayers, give me joy in reading good 
books, make attractive to me a quiet half hour in hearing 
Mass, deepen my sorrow in confession and my joy in Com- 
munion. Thus to petition heaven earnestly is to be nigh to 
the company of the saints. The frequent advice, and now and 
then the authority of a spiritual director who is wise and calm 
and experienced, is, of course, taken for granted. 

V. 

Much, indeed nearly the whole of our visible striving, con- 
sists in curbing tendencies to evil, for when evil goes, holiness 
comes. Hence the Apostle's admonition: "Purge out the old 
leaven, that you may become a new paste" (I Cor. v. n). 
Perfection, as a course of conduct, is mainly a vigilant watch 
over venial weaknesses, resulting in due time in freedom from 
deliberate venial sins. To this process of purification is joined 
a constant elevation of motives, an unceasing recurrence to 
the original purpose; for, says St. Teresa, " God will not show 
Himself openly, or reveal His glories, or bestow His treasures, 
save on souls who prove that they ardently desire Him, for 
these are His real friends" (Way of Perfection, Stanbrook, 
xxxiv. n). It must never be forgotten that it is rather in 
the motive than in the act that one increases in spiritual 
stature. Action may be now and then wisely limited, but 
there should be no limit to our purpose. The one indispensa- 
ble quality of a seeker for God's perfect will is interior energy. 
" Paradise is not for sluggards," says St. Philip Neri ; " nor for 
sleepy heads," says St. Teresa. 

To this fervent and therefore sure adhesion to God all 
men are remotely called, and many specially and directly 
bidden. Too often they forfeit, or at least but partially use 
their glorious privilege. The principles of religion which in- 
volve grave obligation and are armed with eternal penalties, 
we hold in practical mind and we sternly observe them. But 
it is different with God's counsels the free invitations of our 
Master to the nobler ways of love. And yet, are the principles 



1912.] "APPROVING THE BETTER THIKCS" 797 

which concern not the salvation but the perfection of the 
soul less true that we should hold them only speculatively ? 
How great a difference does the threat of penalties make in 
our acceptance of God's truth as a rule of life. 

VI. 

Here is a question both curious and critical. How much 
is one's progress hindered by persistence in some single un- 
mortified practise, such as by full indulgence of appetite at 
table, by waste of time and of mental force in newspaper read- 
ing, or by long talks with favorites. What effect has any one 
of these practises (for a congestion of them all means a hope- 
less spiritual malady), on such essential conditions as purity 
of intention, or lore of prayer, or zeal for souls? According 
to spiritual writers such unmortification, if of frequent occur- 
rence, blocks advance all along the line and threatens retro- 
gression. 

Holy living is seldom achieved per saltum by one bright, 
quick leap from the earthly into the heavenly character. This 
or that virtue may rise of a sudden into maturity, but 
even this is rarely the case. The habit of responsiveness to 
God's instincts within us is of gradual growth; often, nay 
usually, almost imperceptibly gradual. Allowing for excep- 
tional cases of prodigies of grace in those destined for canon- 
ization, the Psalmist's teaching is of universal application: "In 
his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps in the vale of 
tears, in the place which he hath chosen. For the lawgiver 
shall give a blessing; they shall go from virtue to virtue" 
(Ps. Ixxxiii. 6, 7). Through the vale of tearful penance, along 
roads of the Lawgiver's, often mysterious, selection, now by 
the beaten track of common practice, again by the secluded by 
path of peculiar guidance, one spends his days and his years 
in this career, seldom pleasing to flesh and blood; never with- 
out joy to the spirit, because it is always an upward way and 
the touch of the divine hand is never absent. 

The dignity of character generated by this search for God, 
is shown by the content of the soul with divine things alone. 
No one in the world is so independent of the frenzies of our 
fallen nature; no one so clearly reckons the true values of 
existence ; no one has the divine standpoint so easy of access. 
They who strive after the better things are the real leaders of 



798 THE DISCIPLE [Mar., 

mankind, stout-hearted champions of peace and of mutual 
affection and of the sorrows of the Crucified. 

For this class of souls, as valiant for God as they are 
patient with men, do all things exist; they are God's favor- 
ites, and through them does He lavish his gifts upon the 
more faint-hearted masses. " And I will give them a heart to 
know Me, that I am the Lord ; and they shall be My people 
and I shall be their Gad ; because they shall return to Me 
with their whole heart" (Jer. xxiv. 7). 



THE DISCIPLE. 

BY ANNA BUNSTON. 

" How far to Calvary ? 

And when shall I be there 
To hang my bruis6d body 
On the heavy tree I bear?" 

" Not far to Calvary 

Thy pilgrimage not long 
For close to holy cities 
Are the hills of human wrong." 

' ' How long on Calvary ? 

For God hath turned away 
And what if iaith should fail me 
Whom all things else betray?" 

" Not long on Calvary 

With daylight dies the sword 
And thou shalt keep in slumber 
The sabbath of the Lord." 




THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION. 

CONCLUSION. 
BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 

||HE shipwreck of the old united civilization of 
Europe in the sixteenth century has produced 
in the long process of three hundred years the 
intolerable thing which we call " Industrial Civ- 
ilization." Such is the chief material effect of 
the catastrophe, and that effect being very visible and closely 
affecting the lives of not quite half of the modern European 
world, is the most prominent phenomenon connecting us to- 
day with the disaster of three hundred years ago. 

This terrible modern and final effect of the Reformation 
the Industrial System is the more prominent and better rec- 
ognized because of its intensity: the intensity of the suffering 
it causes, the intensity of the peril which all modern society 
is incurring through its evil influence. The segregation of the 
means of production into few hands, proceeds, as we have 
seen, from the Reformation; and particularly from the Refor- 
mation in Britain. The false philosophy which bred that piece 
of social injustice tended also as time flowed on to emphasize 
it in every way. By insisting upon individual effort and in- 
dividual competition as opposed to the old corporate life of 
Catholic Europe, that false philosophy vastly increased the 
activities of the individual speculator and the inventor, yet in 
the result obtained no advantage but rather further evils for 
mankind as a whole. In a society already consisting of a 
privileged minority holding in its power a dispossessed ma- 
jority, in other words, in a society already capitalist, the new 
processes of industry which were developed in the eighteenth 
century produced what in a juster society they could not have 
produced, to wit, the vile fruit of industrialism. 

From Britain as a centre the plague spread. It achieved 
fantastic, incredible proportions as the nineteenth century drew 
to a close, and those unhappy sections of our race now suf- 



8oo THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Mar., 

fering from that disease are divided into a millioned prole- 
tariat serving without hope, without tradition, without even 
the memory of true citizenship some few thousands that con- 
trol the means of production. 

Against this abominable state of affairs a remedy has been 
proposed as evil as the thing itself; a remedy utterly inhu- 
man, mechanical, and patently carrying in itself the seeds of 
a future general decay. This remedy is called Collectivism or 
Socialism: the putting of the means of production into the 
hands of politicians, who shall thus order the lives of all, 
guaranteeing, indeed, sufficiency and security, but destroying 
the dignity, because destroying the liberty of men. So ar- 
ranging that all men shall live, but that no family can through 
property react upon the state or its fellows. 

This consummation will not be achieved. The propaganda 
carried on in its favor, wide-spread and enormously successful 
upon the intellectual side, will not result in the realization of 
a Collectivist State. Under the influences of that propaganda 
the Capitalist is in no way menaced in his possessions, the prol- 
etariat are not relieved, by one tittle, of their servile disabili- 
ties. What happens under that propaganda what is happen- 
ing under our very eyes to-day is an accumulation of laws 
in the Protestant countries of Europe, which laws are forming 
a whole social code of servitude imposed upon the poor by 
the rich. These laws and that code are designed to secure 
the unearned enjoyment of the few, and to organize at their 
service (with guaranteed security and sufficiency, but with no 
property or grip upon the means of production), the millions 
who labor for their profit. The poor are to be compelled to 
work for the rich. If they will so work, they shall have a 
certain minimum of comfort, a certain inspected security of 
material things when they are disabled or old. It is designed 
to enregiment the proletariat under the officials of a Capitalist 
State. All this is the tendency of the time in Protestant So- 
ciety. There is no tendency towards Collectivism at all. The 
ultimate social effect of the Reformation, then, if it were left 
unchecked by the reaction of Catholic countries, would be 
the reestablishment in Europe of that which was its basis 
before the advent of the Church slavery. Of modern coun- 
tries it is difficult to say whether Protestant Britain or Protes- 
tant Prussia has advanced furthest along this road. 



1912.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 8OI 

Such (to recapitulate what was said in my last article) are 
the principal results of the Reformation in their tangible and 
material aspect. 

But these in turn must repose upon a certain philosophy. 
All the material, external characters of a state, its economic 
organization, that is, its provision (or lack of provision) for the 
food, clothing, housing and corporal needs oi its citizens, and 
the form its whole arrangement takes, proceed from its phi- 
losophy or religion. No change in material circumstance will 
greatly modify the social mind. All modifications of the social 
mind modify at once, and in responsive degree, the material 
conditions of society. For in things corporate as in things in- 
dividual the mind is the cause. 

What, then, to conclude, shall we say is the mental atti- 
tude which we may observe as the last phase of the disruption 
of Europe? To what philosophy or state of thought or re- 
ligion has non-Catholic society tended as the end of its long 
development since the last strong anarchy of the sixteenth 
century began to attack the unity of Christian men and the 
binding power of the Universal Church ? 

Though this last spiritual product of the schism is not de- 
monstrable as is the material thing we have just described, 
yet certain characters in it may be noted with exactitude ; and 
our perception of them will be of practical importance, for 
their discovery will enable us to judge the future perils which 
our civilization may have to undergo. 

The first and most salient character discoverable in con- 
Catholic thought to-day is the undue extension of authority. 
I know well that this statement will seem to many extrav- 
agantly paradoxical. I do not on that account hesitate to 
make it. For though deliberate paradox is, in controversy or 
in statement, a hateful and despicable trick, yet a truth must 
not be shirked merely because it is so unusual as to strike 
the reader with a note of extravagance when first he meets it. 
All those who have closely concerned themselves with the 
nature of the human mind agree that it displays a certain 
appetite for authority. The human mind is limited, and, at 
the same time, conscious of its own limitations. It possesses 
avenues of approach towards many a truth, the possession of 
which is serviceable to its happiness, conducive to its satisfac- 
tion, or necessary to its operation, and yet not attairable by 
TOL. xciv. 51 



802 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Mar., 

its unaided powers. This craving and necessity of the mind 
for something not obtainable by the mind unaided, is observa- 
ble in every attempt the mind makes towards the attainment 
of knowledge and in all its instinctive actions for the satisfac- 
tion of its primal appetite which primal appetite is the ap- 
petite to repose in reality and in a secure possession of the 
truth. So simple a case as the trust which men give to the 
evidence of others upon foreign countries, and, indeed, upon 
all matters which extend knowledge beyond the narrow circle 
of individual observation, is a proof of this. Equally a proof 
of it is the trust reposed in transcendental statements, false 
and true, provided for men by the traditions of their religion. 

It is to be observed that this appetite for authority does 
not vary in proportion to test and proof. Though a man be 
filled with knowledge of the widest sort, which he has person- 
ally been able to submit to experiment and has not found 
wanting, yet will the overwhelming majority of his actions and 
his opinions still depend upon the faith which gives evidence 
of affirmations presented to him under conditions which forbid 
the application of experiment and test. The learned man who 
might seem to need it least is full of this hunger. The most 
ignorant is as full. For it is infinite in relation to all men 
and concerns min's immortal destiny. 

Now it is remarkable that where an exact training in the 
nature of knowledge and of its criteria is absent, this appetite 
for authority grows astonishingly uncritical in its exercise. 
There never was, will be, nor can be, so admirable an instru- 
ment for assuring the mind both of its own powers and cf 
their limitations, as is the developed theology of the Catholic 
Church. It might be imagined by the superficial (indeed most 
young men so imagine) that, the most obvious and respecta- 
ble of the reactions against the Faith being the Rationalist 
Reaction, Rationalism would proceed from one emancipation 
to another, until that society which suffered or enjoyed its 
influences would end by an exact appreciation of the differ- 
ences between those things which can, and those things which 
cannot be subjected to positive proof. The first would be ac- 
cepted in a society which had done with the Faith, the latter 
would be rejected. 

As a plain matter of history the exact opposite is the case. 
Rationalism enjoys, in any human society, a dignified and not 
unadmirable, but a very brief, career. There succeeds it, and 



.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 803 

there springs from it, a condition of the public mind in which, 
so far from its reposing in the known and the obvious, and 
so far from stifling the " great curiosity " upon the nature and 
destiny of man, all that necessary quest of the mind receives 
an added fire. What may or what may not be true of things 
not provable is first fiercely debated, then at last some one, 
or miny unprovable schemes are eagerly accepted by society. 
And when we come to think of it, it must be so. It could 
not be otherwise. For the things demonstrable to ordinary 
experience are not certain in proportion to their importance. 
The nature and the needs of man are not first and best satis- 
fied by knowledge which he easily and universally acquires. 
The pain of loss occasioned in the mind of man by death is 
more serious than the pain of loss occasioned by the destruc- 
tion of some inorganic possession. A chair or table is burnt 
all men agree. But a man dies what is that? The sense 
of justice is more permanent, more real and more vivid by far 
even than the very obvious lack of any provision for its satis- 
faction upon this earth. Do me a wrong, and I know you 
have done me a wrong. I know it more certainly than I 
know that you will suffer. 

In a word, men deprived of religion because religion does 
not, or cannot universally prove its thesis, do not upon that 
account neglect the problems which religion professes to solve. 
They rather reapply themselves to those problems with a sort 
of fever when the rule of religion is no longer present to aid 
and yet to restrain them. Hence you may perceive, as a 
note running through the modern world wherever the effects 
of the Reformation are most prominent in it, a simple unques- 
tioning faith in mere statement, which the simplest Catholic 
peasant could discover to have no true intellectual authority 
whatever. First you will notice the almost childish repetition 
of known names in proof of doubtful or quite unprovable asser- 
tion. There is a sort of consensus in such societies that a 
name, if it has been sufficiently repeated is not only that of a 
great, but of an authoritative, man. Thus, Charles Darwin 
was possessed of certain qualities which are of the simplest 
kind, and, one may add, of the most honorable. He loved 
truth, he was enormously industrious, and wherever we meet 
them we do well to respect the love of truth and industry. 
But his name carries weight in non-Catholic society for reasons 
that have nothing whatever to do with either oi these excel- 




8o 4 THE RESUL^, OF THE REFORMATION [Mar., 



, 

lent virtues, and he is set<. iousl V Proposed by thousands of 
educated men as the originator of : M methin g he never origin- 
ated, as the demonstrator of something which he never even 
attempted to demonstrate, and finally, as*" man who though 
you may not know what the process of his '>work may have 
been, you must accept with more humility than rfi\r n ever ac- 
cepted any religious document or transcendental doctrine 
vouched for by the sanctified experience of chosen \& en an( * 
of an institution particularly designed for authority iiP such 
things. Men will tell you in a wild extravagance or ric't * 
faith that Charles Darwin originated the theory of evolutio 4 ri 
which is as though a Catholic were to say that St. Phili'P 
Neri had originated the idea of daily Mass. They will nex 1 * 
inform you that the same Charles Darwin proved by bis<- 
enormous labors, by that patient accumulation of evidence 
which was his claim to fame, that Transformism had taken 
place in a particular fashion. They will conclude by assuring 
you that this matter is now part of the " Established Scien- 
tific Truth" upon which "modern life reposes." That Charles 
Darwin did nothing but add one particular hypothesis to the 
imtnemorially old theory of Transformism; that this hypothesis 
was hardly tenable by a thinking man (for it was Materialist); 
that this hypothesis proposed a perpetual flux of living organ- 
isms ever differentiating from year to year by infinitesimal 
degrees; nay, (and much more) that this hypothesis is now 
admitted to be false of all this I say, not one in ten thou- 
sand of the men who accept in the full spirit of an exagger- 
ated religious faith, the name and authority of Darwin, has 
the faintest idea. Such men must believe something and they 
believe that. Why they believe it they cannot tell. 

You may further note an acceptation in this spirit of one 
hypothesis as the consequence of another, without apparently 
any check being afforded to the process by the increasing im- 
probability of each new guess which is advanced to protect 
the authority of the last. Thus energy (whatever that may 
mean) must by a first hypothesis (utterly unproved) be 
propagated in tri-dimensional waves. Next, therefore, some 
substance susceptible to impact must be imagined in order to 
distribute energy through the interplanetary space. There- 
fore a third step you must accept and not deny an "ether" 
more rigid than steel by far, and (what is odd for a material 
thing), offering no resistance to the passage of great bodies 



19 1 2.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 805 

through its substance! Thence may you be led at any mo- 
ment to the necessity for affirming some newer fourth, and if 
possible, much wilder thing, because this hypothetical ether 
chances some day no longer to work and because its hypo- 
thetical nature at fourth hand would break down unless you 
predicated that newer and still wilder proposition. Men have 
already been found under the influence of this spirit of au- 
thority to deny the continuity of space or to affirm of time 
that it has "a cellular structure." With each new expansion 
of actual knowledge some further monstrosity of the sort is 
given to us as the true faith. Precisely the same process 
may be observed in the history of Chemistry, which, when it 
had formulated its hypothesis of atomic structure, was com- 
pelled to defend it (in the light of new discoveries) by further 
hypotheses more difficult to believe, and may at any moment 
be compelled to fall back upon a third line of defence, which 
shall involve quite palpable absurdities. 

To any one growing suspicious of this extension of au- 
thority into spheres where its action is not legitimate, the 
reply given, the tone of it, and the immediate citation of 
name instead )of proof, is evidence of just that same quality 
in the mind (though diseased) as (in its right use) strengthens, 
receives or develops the Faith. 

I have taken examples from physical science alone. It 
would be easy to complete them with hundreds of examples 
taken from every branch of human discovery. In Economics, 
quite unprovable things (as for instance the necessary coal- 
esence of capital into large bodies, a thing only " necessary " 
because the mind of society so wills it) are presented as 
though they were demonstrable truths like the Ricardian 
Laws of Rent; and the present writer has frequently heard 
the particular and highly controversial doctrine known as 
Monometallism expounded at Oxford with just that sort of 
pitying contempt that should attach to the exposition of 
demonstrable physical truths to an ignoramus who might 
doubt them. 

Now this phenomenon, whose general name is the im- 
proper extension of authority, has a vast practical signifi- 
cance, and chiefly in this : that it has laid open the modern 
world to the influence of suggestion as never perhaps was 
mankind laid open to it before. It has coincidently laid it 
open to management and wire-pulling by a few sharpers, as 



8c6 THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION [Mar., 

never was human society before. And I will personally as- 
cribe the lack of self-government in any true sense, our decay 
in democratic power, the doubt of such elementaty dogmas as 
the equality of man (in those unhappy societies which are so 
affected), to the absence or weakness of the Catholic Church. 

But this is a small matter, you will say, compared with 
the general and fundamental philosophy which underlies the 
whole. To what is modern non-Catholic society (if it shall 
manage to survive) drifting? In what, if it ever reposes, will 
it repose as a general doctrine ? Here opinion only, lather 
than observation, can avail me; but I will hazard the opinion 
that it will soon repose in a vague form of Pantheism, which 
will very quickly develop in its turn, as Pantheism must, into 
a Polytheism, perhaps not unlovely, probably tolerable, and 
certainly untrue. To-day that statement sounds absurd. No 
man can challenge posterity. Yet am I not at all certain that 
what were called " the gods " will not return if, or when, 
what was once a Christian Europe shall in places sink back 
to its originals. But I will let this caveat at least be entered. 
Paganism rediscovered will not rediscover beauty. Paganism 
did things and thought things which our modern aesthetes 
could not bear to look on or to think. It is a goal not lightly 
to be approached, and the Fathers were not fools when they 
spoke of the worship of demons. 

For the rest we all know that in non-Catholic society 
and notably in modern Prussia and modern Britain men must 
pass through the doubt, and perhaps the destruction, of the 
fundamental institutions upon which Christendom reposed. 
That most in peril is the institution of marriage. Perhaps the 
word "peril" is hardly to be applied. Perhaps it would be 
truer to say that the meaning and sanctity of marriage have 
already disappeared in the directing minds of those Protestant 
societies. 

So stated, this picture is but a picture of the tragic erd 
of what was once our civilization. 

I have called these papers as a whole, "Europe and the 
Faith." Certainly without the Faith all that we know as 
Europe would be gone. To that tragic phase of dissolution 
which I have just recounted, would succeed age after age of 
continual decline. For after the lesion of power in abstract 
thinking would come the corresponding lesion of power in 



1912.] THE RESULTS OF THE REFORMATION 807 

manual construction, in the application of scientific knowledge, 
and then we would witness a general return to old and evil, 
though simple, things. 

So point the Protestant societies, but I confess that the pic- 
ture I have in my mind of Europe as a whole is of another kind. 

Europe was wounded in the sixteenth century indeed the 
crisis of that disaster is now upon us. But Europe was not 
killed. At the door of every society sinking through the lack 
of the Faith lies some other society now rising through the 
consistent preservation of it. The arena of central contest is, 
of course, Gaul. Gaul has always been the Arena. And upon 
the fate of the Church in France will, in my opinion at least, 
depend the final issue. 

Well, observation leads me to conclude at last and after 
many years, that the battle in France is inclining towards the 
ancient philosophy of civilization; the truth without which we 
would not be ourselves. Now the mind of France so moulds 
and dominates that of all Europe, that I can easily believe the 
Catholic reaction (for I am not ashamed to use that word) 
will spread from that centre outwards some little time after 
the generation in which we who now live are watching the 
development of this tremendous drama. I can believe that 
the assault upon the Church will develop elsewhere and later, 
as it has developed in France, but it will be the less fierce 
elsewhere on account of the French experience and victory. 
Already the Masonic organization, which was the very centre 
and core, or (to use a military metaphor) the staff of the at- 
tack, has broken down through ridicule. But it is not by such 
external tests that the great issue is best known. Rather is 
it to be judged by the spirit in which the younger generation 
is beginning to envisage the mortal facts, the bearing of chil- 
dren, the dissolution of the human being in death, man's dig- 
nity, his questionings, his agonies and his indomitable soul. 

The French are essentially a military people, the Church a 
military thing. I expect developing alliances between the 
existing national temper, and the ancient traditions of the race. 
I am not certain that they will not come through war. 

Bat, after all, of the future we know nothing. It has been 
my business in these few papers to present Europe past, and 
to show it living and one, by its one great Institution, which 
is the Catholic Church. Videat Deus. 




SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF HENRY IGNATIUS 

DUDLEY RYDER. 

BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, LL.D. 

||HE advantages or disadvantages of being the able 
son of a distinguished father form the kind of 
topic which might offer pabulum for an even- 
ing's discussion at any debating society. But 
apart from, and beyond, any such ephemeral 
consideration, there is really deep ground for reflecting upon 
the alternatives in the case. Does the kind of start which the 
father's position gives to the son compensate for the manner 
in which his personality and his reputation, already gained, are 
bound to overshadow, at least for a time, the growing fame 
of the younger generation ? To be the son of one's father 
presents, under favorable circumstances, advantages solid 
enough, no doubt, but like most other things in this imper- 
fect world, it has the defect of its quality and presents also 
its very solid and very real disadvantages. 

Father Ryder everybody always called him so, even after 
he had been made a Doctor of Divinity by the Sovereign 
Pontiff was somewhat in this position with regard to his 
spiritual father, the first Superior of the Birmingham Oratory, 
Cardinal Newman. That great man claimed and secured 
from his spiritual children the affection and respect which 
are due to an ordinary parent, and he secured them in a 
measure by no means vouchsafed always and to all ordinary 
parents, even when well deserving of it. And when one re- 
flects that he possessed a great mind and was undoubtedly a 
master of English literature, one hardly wonders if those who 
grew up under him were daunted by the almost unapproach- 
able greatness of his work and his literary style. Whether 
this be so or not, and I put forward the hypothesis as one 
worthy of consideration, there can be no question that the 
fame of Newman's successor in the Provostship of the Bir- 
mingham Oratory has never stood as high in the estimation 
of the general public, I think not even in that of the reading 



1912.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER 809 

public, as it ought to do. Here was a man of whom W. G. 
Ward, no mean judge on such a point, spoke in 1881 as "by 
far the best theologian in England." So Mr. Wilfrid Ward 
tells us in the delightful essay on Father Ryder which he 
published in the Dublin Review in 1908, the year after the 
death of the subject of his discourse. Any one who reads 
that essay will have an opportunity of discovering that Father 
Ryder was also a poet and a genuine poet. And those who 
give themselves the pleasure, and a most intense pleasure it 
is, of reading the volume of essays from Father Ryder's pen, 
gathered together by the filial piety of one of his spiritual 
sons, Father Joseph Bacchus of the Birmingham Oratory, and 
recently reviewed in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, will have little 
difficulty in recognizing the fact that he was a master of 
English style worthy of comparison even with his great pre- 
decessor in the superiorship of the House to which they both 
belonged. 

The recent publication of these essays has caused me to 
live over again in my memory a time when Father Ryder and 
myself were on terms of very intimate friendship a recollec- 
tion never very far from my mind and to set down for the 
readers of this review a few personal recollections of one to 
whom I personally owe more than I can say, and for whom 
and to whom my affection and gratitude can scarce be ex- 
pressed in words. 

What I have to say will be poor and inadequate enough, 
and, as it is mainly of a personal character, I must plead, 
with Thackeray, to be allowed to adopt " the simple upright 
perpendicular" letter "I," and to intrude myself upon the 
scene far more than I should desire. 

I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps, as in other things, 
it may be as well to begin with the beginning and to tell how 
I made acquaintance with Father Ryder by name long before 
I ever met him; and became even then his debtor for as long 
as I live and, as I hope and believe, for all eternity as well. 

It was at a time when I was considering the grave step of 
becoming a Catholic. After the first impetus in that direction, 
most of my Romeward path was trodden amongst books, and 
I had read myself at least on to the threshold of the Church 
before I ever spoke to a priest or even to any Catholic on 
the subject. Amongst the books which were put into my 



8io PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER [Mar., 

hands by those who, most justifiably from their own point of 
view, desired that I should not take the step which I was 
meditating, was a once famous manual of controversy, Little- 
dale's Plain Reasons Against Joining the Church of Rome. I 
read it with great care; and the conclusion, after reading it, 
seemed to be that it was impossible for a rational not 
to say an honest man to be a Catholic. Whilst in this 
state of mind I happened to see in the window of a Cath- 
olic book-shop, into which I was looking, a volume on the 
cover of which was printed Catholic Controversy A Reply to 
Littledale's " Plain Reasons." Littledale and Ryder were to 
me names and nothing more at that time but I was anxious 
to give both sides a chance and I went in at once and bought 
a copy of the book. 

I have just been looking it over again, it and Littledale's 
work which stands beside it on my book shelves. I doubt if 
I have ever looked inside either of them during the nearly 
thirty years which have elapsed since I became a Catholic, 
but I see from the markings and references that I must have 
read both of them closely and, indeed, I well remember that 
when I had finished Ryder's book I said to myself " One of 
them is a liar and I will find out which." I also remember 
marking a dozen passages and going off to a library where I 
could consult the Fathers and see for myself which writer 
had misrepresented them. I need not say that I soon dis- 
covered where the truth lay and so, in a way, Littledale made 
a Catholic of me. I hope it will be counted to him for right- 
eousness. 

Now in this very remarkable book Father Ryder really 
achieved a most extraordinary, one would almost say an im- 
possible, result, for he produced a reply which was almost 
exactly the same size as the attack. A fool can put more 
questions in five minutes than a wise man can answer in a 
year, and to reply to all Littledale's misrepresentations (and 
perhaps even worse) in the same compass as they occupied is a 
task which few would have attempted and very few indeed have 
accomplished. No one could have done it but a man with an 
absolute mastery of his subject and of the English language 
and an unerring judgment as to what to choose and what to 
reject. Point by point he takes up Littledale and answers 
him and, so it seems to me, not only answers him but abso- 



i9i2.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER 811 

lutely pulverizes him. It is undoubted and it is unfortunate 
that Ryder's reputation rests so largely on this book ; unfor- 
tunate, because, like other manuals of controversy it seems 
bound to sink into oblivion. Who reads Pope and Maguire 
now ? Who even knows the name of that once famous con- 
troversy save those who delight in Curiosa Literaria? The 
centre of gravity of controversy had shifted since Pope and 
Maguire's time to the Littledalc and Ryder period. It is 
shifting rapidly away from that now to a dispute about the 
fundamentals of religion where the Church is even now the 
chief champion of religious truth, even of the truths nomin- 
ally held by all Christian Churches, and soon, so it seems to 
some of us, will be the sole antagonist of agnosticism and un- 
belief. When that moment comes, and it may come much 
quicker than some imagine, Littledale and Ryder will both 
become Curiosa Literaria as it is the lot of such things to be- 
come as opinion grows and shifts. 

Father Ryder was a man of scrupulous fairness and spared no 
pains to get at the exact facts in connection with any point on 
which he was working. I remember the time when he was en- 
gaged in writing the Essay On Certain Ecclesiastical Miracles for 
the Nineteenth Century, republished in the volume previously 
alluded to. This was a reply to an attack by Dr. Abbott on 
some views put forward by Cardinal Newman. Amongst other 
things there was question of the sixty African Catholics whose 
tongues were cut out by King Hunneric, an Arian, and who 
yet were able to speak perfectly after this terrible treatment. 
It is not necessary to re-discuss the question here. All that 
I desire to say is that I spent a very long afternoon at his 
request, with Father Ryder in a Medical Library exploring 
every possible book on the subject of removal of the tongue. 
The results of our explorations are summed up in less than a 
dozen lines and might seem to be scarce worth the trouble 
that they cost. But they show how anxious he was to get at 
the exact facts in any subject with which he was dealing. 

In his controversy, as elsewhere, he resembled his great 
Superior in possessing a lambent humor, a humor which, when 
he chose, could scorch. Everybody has read Newman's Pres- 
ent Position of Catholics, and everyone, therefore, knows the 
delightful passages in which the Cardinal's humor plays round 
the subject matter of his pages. Far fewer know the humor 



8i2 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER [Mar., 

of Ryder, different in character but no whit inferior in qual- 
ity. Newman dealt with the lion as pictured by the man ; 
here is how Ryder dealt with the Catholic and the Anglican 
bodies in England as certain modern Anglicans would have 
us picture them. The passage is from The Pope and the An- 
glican Archbishops : 

Our [i. e. the Catholic] sole representatives in pre-EHza- 
bethan history written up to date are, unfortunately, just those 
whom we could best afford to dispense with the leaders, to 
wit, of the fierce Papist reaction under Mary, who kindled the 
fires of Smithfield and threw away a noble opportunity. Here 
we are distinctly wanted, and we appear upon the stage for 
the first time to burn a few blasphemers of the Mass, not An- 
licans certainly, neither are Anglicans as yet anywhere dis- 
tinctly visible. In the next reign we appear again, and a 
goodly number of us are disembowelled at the hands of very 
emphatic Protestants, Anglicanism the while "mewing its 
mighty youth" in the safety of some "green retreat," and 
leaving such rough companions to fight it out for themselves. 
An invisible Church, heir at once to the memories of the past 
and the hopes of the future, I see her slowly materializing 
beneath the royal smile, a kneeling figure conscious of having 
chosen the better part, whilst Papists and Protestants busy 
themselves in various ways, mainly at each others throats. 

But he could be se\ere towards the same baseless preten- 
sions, when those who made them were guilty of false accusa- 
tions against the Catholic Church. In the article on " Ritual- 
ism, Romanism, etc." which is a reply to Doctor Littledale 
for whom, since they are both dead, it is now no harm to say 
that he had a most hearty and wholesome contempt he re- 
plies to certain baseless accusations against the Church : 

Truly a most repulsive 'picture, to which we hardly know 
where to find a parallel, unless it be in the Ritualist concep- 
tion of the Church of England in the sixteenth century, firmly 
holding the integral Catholic faith whilst coquetting with 
every fiercest devastator of God's vineyard which those un- 
happy times produced ; tenderly preserving her belief in the 
Mass and confession, and the Madonna, whilst cheerfully as- 
sisting in the person of her ministers, for the most part of the 
second order, at the infliction of protracted torments upon 
Mass-priest after Mass-priest (against the most of whom no 
charge could with any plausibility lie, except that they said 



i9i2.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER 813 

Mass and strove to preserve or restore the Catholic faith in 
the hearts oi their countrymen) ; instead of whispering the 
consolations of a common faith, assailing the martyrs' defence- 
less ears with studiously articulated blasphemy. 

I said just now that Father Ryder had a hearty contempt 
for that most unscrupulous person, Doctor Littledale; it peeps 
out in a passage in the same article. . Littledale, unable to 
deny the flow of converts into the Catholic Church, tries to 
belittle them and urges absurdly enough, for the very oppo- 
site is usually charged against them that they sink into cold- 
ness and indifference. Further, one convert had become "a 
house decorator" surely a harmless and even honorable oc- 
cupation if properly carried out another "a low- comedy re- 
citer and author" this was, I believe, Mr. Arthur Sketchley 
whose "Mrs. Brown" books were the delight of mankind 
when I was young a third "a billiard-room loafer." After 
mentioning the real facts about the two former cases Father 
Ryder continues and when I read the words I can hear the 
tones of his voice as he would have said it: "As to the bil- 
liard-room loafer and Doctor Littledale's other acquaintance, 
who got drunk and assaulted the police, I abandon them re- 
gretfully, feeling sure, from the mere fact of their appearance 
in the excellent company of Doctor Littledale's black list, that 
there must be a world to say in their behalf." 

So far for Father Ryder in the capacity in which the gen- 
eral public knew him best, and that in which he most often 
came in contact with them, that of a controversialist. I will turn 
to a more intimate side of his character, that which he revealed 
to those friends to whom he gave his confidence. He was 
not a good conversationalist in general companies. Whether 
it was due to reserve or shyness or indifference I know not, 
but I never knew him to shine on such occasions. But when 
he liked his company, and was in the vein, he could and did 
converse as few other men whom I have met could converse. 
When I lived near the Birmingham Oratory, as I did for 
several years, it was my good fortune that he chose to come 
to see me nearly every Sunday afternoon. He would sit him- 
self down by my study fire in an arm-chair, light a large 
pipe and proceed to talk about whatever had specially inter- 
ested him during the week. 



8 14 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER [Mar., 

Sometimes indeed very often his conversation would be 
about the books which he had been reading, and he was an 
omnivorous reader. He delighted in good novels and many a 
protracted discussion we have held over the meaning of some 
of George Meredith's more difficult passages and phrases. 
Sometimes he would come in, full of some new line of study 
on which he had entered and radiating his enthusiasm for the 
finer passages which he had discovered. No man ever bad a 
surer eye for a really fine bit of literature. I particularly re- 
call his embarking on the reading of the French chroniclers, 
Villehardouin and de Joinville, not then so easy to secure as they 
have become since they were republished in the Everyman 
Library. He asked me whether I knew anything about them 
and I was obliged to admit that I did not. Then he began 
to quote from them, and amongst other things which he quoted 
was what he declared to be one of the finest things which he 
had ever read. I have never forgotten it; and I am going to 
quote it myself now because I find by experience that very 
few people have ever seen it; it is, in my opinion at least, 
a passage which everybody should know and which all must 
admire and last of all, because it is an excellent instance of 
the kind of passage which never failed to kindle the flame of 
enthusiasm and admiration in Father Ryder's heart. I shall 
not attempt to put it into his words, though after a lapse of 
fifteen years or so I think I could almost do so, but will con- 
tent myself by a paraphrase and an extract from the original. 

The narrative deals with a certain theologian, who con- 
fessed, with bitter tears, to William, Bishop of Paris, that he 
could not in his heart feel for the Blessed Sacrament "like as 
Holy Church teaches," yet knew well that this was a tempta- 
tion of the enemy. The Bishop asked him whether the temp- 
tation gave him pleasure, to which he replied that it troubled 
him more than aught else could ; and to a further question 
he replied, that he would rather be torn limb from limb than 
say anything against this holy sacrament. Then comes the 
passage which Father Ryder so much admired : 

" Now I will say something more," said the Bishop. "You 
know that the King of France is at war with the King of 
England, and you know too that the castle that lies most ex- 
posed in the borderland between the two is the castle of I/a 
Rochelle in Poitou. Now I will ask you a question: If the 



i9i2.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER 815 

king had set you to guard La Rochelle, which is in the dan- 
gerous borderland, and had set me to guard the castle of 
Montlhe'ri, which is in the heart of France, where the land is 
at peace, to whom, think you, would the king owe most at 
the end of the war to you who had guarded the castle of La 
Rochelle without loss, or to me who had guarded the castle 
of Montlhdri without loss ? ' ' 

" In God's name, sir," said the master, " to me who had 
guarded La Rochelle without losing it." 

" Master," said the Bishop, " my heart is like the castle of 
Montlhe'ri ; for I have neither temptation nor doubt as to the 
sacrament of the altar. For which thing I tell you that lor . 
the grace that God owes me because I hold this firmly, and in 
peace, He owes to you fourfold, because you have guarded 
your heart in the war of tribulation, and have such good-will 
towards Him, that lor no earthly good, nor for any harm done 
to the body, would you relinquish that Faith. Therefore, I 
tell you, be of good comfort, for in this your state is better 
pleasing to our Lord than mine." 

He was very fond of epigrams and apt comparisons, and 
made many himself. Both of the following were favorites of 
his: "I marvel at the courage of those who undertake matri- 
mony. It is like putting your hand into a bag full of adders 
to extract the one eel which it contains." I have been told 
this was originally said by Blessed Thomas More. And " There 
never yet was a sermon from which I did not learn something, 
if it was only patience," the author of which I do not know. 
George Herbert wrote something very like it. 

On many occasions Father Ryder's conversation would turn 
on art. He had a really great knowledge of such subjects as 
ceramics, glass and water colors, and when he was out for a walk 
would often turn into a second-hand shop, and have long talks 
over things of this kind with the proprietor. He had a few 
a very few bits of china and glass in his always pathetically 
untidy room, which he used to look at with great internal con- 
tentment and joy. It was wholly characteristic of him that 
above all the pre-Raphaellte and other pictures in the Birming- 
ham Art Gallery he preferred a picture of Norland's certainly 
a masterpiece representing some pigs lying in a straw yard, 
if I remember aright, but certainly some pigs. There is real 
humor in this picture, and it appealed to him not in vain. 

This is not the place, nor am I the person to speak of 



8i6 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER RYDER [Mar., 

Father Ryder in the discharge of his priestly duties. I could 
not, if I would, tell what he was to me and, I doubt not, to 
many others, in hours of deep trouble, nor can I do more 
than admit my gratitude for the advice and assistance which 
he gave me during the years that he was my confessor. These 
things are too sacred to be discussed, but that aspect of the 
man must not go unmentioned, lest it appear that the points 
upon which I have dwelt at greater length were those which 
made up the whole of his character. There is, however, one 
remarkable thing connected with his priestly functions, which 
he told me not once but several times, and I think it may be 
interesting to set it down here, as I believe it never has been 
printed : 

At one time Father Ryder was Catholic chaplain to the 
Children's Hospital at Birmingham. He was visiting there one 
day when he was shown a Catholic child in an unconscious 
condition and obviously dying of a disease known to medical 
men as " noma." I say obviously dying because, as medical 
men well know, a child whose case was so advanced as was 
that of this child, from the very vivid description which he 
gave me of it, and a child which had sunk into the coma of 
rapidly approaching death, may correctly be described as dying. 
It was a tiny child, and there was nothing to be done for it 
but say a prayer for its painless issue out of this world. 
Father Ryder had in his pocket, encased in a leather box, a 
relic of St. Philip Neri, which he had been taking to some 
other sick person who had expressed a desire to venerate it. 
Acting on a sudden impulse he took this from his pocket and 
touched the diseased cheek with it and then went away. He 
did not return to the hospital for a week or so, and then said 
to the ward sister not a Catholic: "When did that poor 
child die?" "There is the child," said the nurse, pointing 
to one which was sitting near the fire. " What," said he, "do 
you mean to say it didn't die ? " " No," was the answer, " it 
began to get well from the moment that you touched it with 
that box which you had in your hand." Father Ryder, the 
most cautious of men, never, of course, claimed this as a mira- 
cle, but those who know the nature and usual results of this 
disease at the stage which it had then reached, will, at least, 
not deny that it was a very remarkable incident and a very 
remarkable grace, if it be put no higher. 



flew Boohs* 

PELERINAGES FRANCISCAINS. By Joannes Joergensen. Trans- 
lated from the Danish by Teodor de Wyzewa. Paris: Perrin 
et Cie. 

This account of the pilgrim journeys of the Danish con- 
vert, Joergensen, breathes in every page the poetic charm and 
religious fervor of Franciscan Italy. Few writers have grasped 
so completely the spirit of the thirteenth century; few men 
have written so eloquently and so beautifully of St. Francis 
and his sons. 

He visits in turn Greccio, the home of the first Christmas 
crib; Forte Colombo, the origin of the Franciscan rule; La 
Foresta, the scene of the miracle of the grapes; L'Ereno, the 
hermitage of St. Francis ; Foligno, the home of the Blessed 
Angela; Cortona, the home of St. Margaret; Assisi, the 
home of St. Clare ; Mount Alverna, the Franciscan Calvary, 
where the Saint received the stigmata as a proof of bis burn- 
ing love of Jesus Crucified. 

He points out to us en route all the relics of St. Francis 
in the various churches and convents, tells us of the chanting 
of the Office in choir or some procession in honor of a Saint, 
gives us an insight into the Christian character of a true 
Italian home, and a charming portrait of a perfect Franciscan 
friar all the while quoting the beautiful legends of the old 
mediaeval annals, and describing the beautiful landscape and 
mountains of his beloved Umbria. 

Listen to Father Samuel of Mt. Alverna describing his 
Mass upon the holy mount : 

I had the great happiness of saying Mass here, [said 
Father Samuel, as if answering my unspoken question]. It 
was on a summer morning, just as the sun was rising, while I 
was making the sign of the Cross at the beginning of Mass, 
the crimson rays of the sun shone out resplendent over 
Mt. Casella. And when I turned to the people to say Dominus 
Vobiscum, what a glorious sight the whole landscape pre- 
sented, with the sun's rays darting forth to drive away the 
morning mist ! I was so overcome with the sense of God's 
greatness that I could scarcely pronounce His Name ; and 

VOL. XCIV. S3 



8:8 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

every time I had to repeat the words Dominus or Deus, I hes- 
itated and trembled with fear, like the children of Israel at 
the foot of Sinai. I did my utmost to banish every earthly 
thought from my soul, as Moses took off his shoes before 
the burning bush. In very truth, this is the place to say, 
Sursum Corda I I^ift up your hearts ! (p. 298). 

Or listen to the kindly old Franciscan of Assist: 

Yes, [he said to me] nature is always beautiful, and the 
best of temples wherein to praise and worship the Creator of 
all things, the most loving Father of all living creatures ! 
How blessed, indeed, is the warmth of this glowing sunshine ; 
how easily the lungs inhale this pure and fresh morning air ! 
See how the very drops of dew on the grass glitter, while they 
reflect the red, and green and blue oi nature ! Hear how joy- 
ously the birds are singing ; look yonder at the delicate blue 
outlines of those distant mountains, while around us the 
smoke of many a farmhouse mounts up in the clear air like 
incense towards the throne of the Most High 1 ... How 
many men alas ! even among Christians believe that our holy 
religion consists in hostility towards life and nature. Oh ! 
that was never the thought of our Holy Father Francis ! He 
was not a hater of humanity ; he was not a modern misan- 
thrope or pessimist. Schopenhauer who declared the will to 
live an evil, borrowed his philosophy from Buddhism not 
from Christianity. We are not Manicheans ; the same God 
who created the world redeemed it. The same God who 
said in the beginning: "Increase and multiply" said, in 
the fulness of time : " He who does not take up his cross 
and follow me, cannot be my disciple "(Pp. 210-212). 

There are many allusions throughout the volume to beau- 
tiful Italian customs, and traits of character. The ignorant 
and prejudiced tourist from England or America frequently 
comes back from Italy with a mind fully convinced of the 
superstition and externalism of the poor benighted Italian 
Catholics. With an abundance of money and a modicum of 
culture he goes about with eyes that cannot see; and often 
his prejudices are intensified by some anti clerical guide, or 
by a Methodist preacher of Rome who is most anxious to 
offer hospitality to a body of anti-Romanists. What an in- 
sight into Italy of to-day, what a grasp of the Catholic spirit 
this convert's book would afford them ! 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 819 

Our pilgrim is treated with the greatest kindness by the 
friars in their convents and the people in their homes. The 
son of the Mayor of Poggio Bustone is only too glad to carry 
the luggage of " one who comes to Italy for the love of St. 
Francis." The pilgrim is touched by the piety of the novices 
who kiss the piece of bread they are about to eat, and the simple 
devotion of the monks who with all their austerity are full of 
the joyful spirit of their founder. He wonders at the people's 
" Grdzie, Grdsie, San Felice" and discovers that they are 
thanking the saint beforehand for the miracle they are pray- 
ing for with all their hearts. His temptation, doubts and de- 
pression disappear before the kindly admonitions of a saintly 
old friar, while his heart is touched by the tears of another 
at receiving a message from the dear folks at home. 

Sabatier is called to task occasionally for some minor in- 
accuracies, and especially for his false picture of St. Francis 
as independent of church authority. But still the author 
praises him for his great work in arousing general interest in 
Franciscan studies. 

Let me close with one of his many beautiful descriptions 
of Italian scenery: 

While I was sleeping, a beautiful and bright spring morning 
had dawned, flooding Mount Alverna with its golden sunlight. 
From the tiny piazza in front of the chapel and convent I could 
see outspread before me a vast panorama of wild, picturesque 
scenery. Leaning over the edge of the parapet, I could look 
down Into an abyss of dripping wet rocks. Far below them 
stretched the verdant fields, with huge bowlders here and 
there, and bare poplars erect like sentlnals on guard. I could 
clearly trace the road by which I had climbed Mount Alverna 
the previous evening in the pelting rain. 

But when I looked upward, I saw nothing but mountains 
a V inftni I Those nearest me were of a yellowish brown color ; 
those more distant were purple, flecked with brown, black and 
green. The chain of mountains, peak after peak clearly 
marked In the beautiful blue horizon, resembled a petrified 
sea, with waves of many colors. BIbbiena lay far below me; 
the mountains I had climbed yesterday seemed mere ant-hills. 
It was a boundless sea of mountain peaks, as vast as the 
heavens above me. (p. 293). 

The translator in his preface informs us that Joergensen in 



820 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

the first period of his literary career was one of the most en- 
thusiastic followers of the school of Georges Brandes; that 
most of his lyrical spirit may be traced to his early devotion 
to Heinrich Heine; that his frankness, his naturalness, his 
accuracy in the use of words and his exquisite delicacy of ex- 
pression are due to the influence of Karl Huysmans. The 
volume before us is a welcome addition to the author's Livrc 
du Route, which tells of his conversion, and his charming Lije 
of St. Francis of Assist. 

THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST. By Rev. Henry C. Schuyler, 
S.T.L. Philadelphia: Peter Reilly, 50 cents, net. Lon- 
don: George Keener & Co. 

Tkere can hardly be any doubt that the virtue of obedi- 
ence is seriously undervalued and neglected at the present 
time, not merely in a negative way and through thoughtless- 
ness, but positively and of set purpose. The spirit of indi- 
vidualism a splendid, wholesome thing when rightly under- 
stood and handled has had at times the disturbing effect of 
new wine in many heads. The ideas of some who would dis- 
cuss it become confused. Authority takes on the ugly shape 
of tyranny ; obedience wears the mien of slavery. Most of 
them, it is true, admit on pressure that authority and its cor- 
relative, obedience, are as yet somewhat necessary in the family 
and the state, if the human race is to avoid destruction, but 
they give these things little play in their own lives and aim 
at rooting them out of society. They speak of obedience as 
degrading. It may, indeed, be required of the criminal, for 
he has proved himself unfit to enjoy the boon of freedom. It 
may even be expected of children, for a little while and within 
narrow limits, for they are as yet unable to appreciate the 
blessings of liberty. The hand of authority, however, should 
rest lightly on their shoulders ; it should suggest, not compel; 
guide, not restrain; encourage, not repress. Authority if it 
goes beyond these limits is to be guilty of a crime against the 
child and against society against the child, because it destroys 
his initiative, robs him of spontaneity, and dwarfs his develop- 
ment against society, because its interests are bound up in 
those of its various members, especially the young, and because 
its future depends on the freedom of individuals to work out 
their destiny according to their own bent. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 821 

Ideas of this sort have been proclaimed so often and under 
so many guises that they have influenced mankind more than 
is generally thought. It is good, therefore, to let men know 
clearly and unmistakably, before it begins to be too late, that 
obedience to parents, to legally constituted civil authority, 
and to God's representatives in the Church, is now, as of old, 
a virtue; that it is in no wise a degradation to obey superiors, 
even when they are neither so wise nor so good as one's self ; 
that, on the contrary, it is a most acceptable proof of our al- 
legiance to God, by Whom " kings reign and lawgivers decree 
just things." The absolutely convincing proof for Christians, 
that obedience is not a flaw but a perfection, is to be found 
in the words and above all in the example of Him Who not 
only went down to Nazareth and was subject to Mary and 
Joseph, but also, when He might have been an earthly king, 
became obedient, even unto the death of the Cross. In bis 
Virtues of Christ Series, of which the first two volumes have 
already been reviewed in this magazine, Father Schuyler takes 
up this phase of our Lord's conduct. His work is well and 
delightfully done. The book sets forth the obedience of Christ 
in such wise, that no one who reads it can fail to derive in- 
struction and inspiratioa from His example. 

THE TRUE DANIEL WEBSTER. By Sydney George Fisher. 
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. $2 net. 

This latest addition to the True Biography Series, which is 
being brought out by Lippincott, is a complete and formal 
biography, more compact than the Life of Webster, by Curtis, 
his literary executor, and more sympathetic (rightly or wrongly) 
than the shorter biography, written by Senator Henry Cabot 
Lodge. The author, in his exhaustive accounts of Webster's 
political dealings and in his criticisms of Webster's literary 
claims, gives an admirable, intelligent tribute to the man's 
undoubted genius; in his descriptions of Webster's personality, 
he offers an earnest, if at times slightly inconsistent, defence 
against the charges of drunkenness, dishonesty and immorality, 
so widely repeated against the character of the statesman. 
These, he believes, were for the most part scandal, having 
origin solely in the hatred of the New England abolitionists. 

The book has more than twenty good and well-selected 
illustrations. 



822 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CLASSICAL TEACHING. Irish 
and Continental. 1500-1700. By Rev. T. Corcoran, SJ. 
New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.75 net. 
The first part of this scholarly work deals with the life and 
labors of Father William Bathe, S.J., and his method of lan- 
guage teaching (pp. 1-130); the second part with the practice 
of classical teaching in the Post-Renaissance period (pp. 133- 

247). 

"The preparation of the first part of the volume was ren- 
dered possible by the discovery at Madrid in 1907 of a com- 
plete copy of the Janua Linguarum, issued in 1611, at Sala- 
manca, by the Irish Jesuits, who then directed the college of 
their nation in the University " (III.). 

Father Corcoran, Professor of Education at the National 
University of Ireland, has given us a most interesting sketch 
of the personal history of Father Bathe and his collaborators 
(pp. 1-34). Father Bathe was ordained in 1602 at the Jesuit 
College in Padua; in 1605 we find him on the staff of the Irish 
College at Salamanca, where he died in 1614. 

The object of the Janua Linguarum was to provide a new 
plan, whereby missionaries, confessors, teachers, travelers, en- 
voys and all students of "the nobler modern languages," might 
acquire them accurately and quickly. " The elaborated gram- 
mar and exercises of our day were unknown in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. Learners of spoken languages at 
that time invariably used the natural or direct method ; the 
notion that this plan is of recent discovery is, of course, utterly 
baseless" (p. 62). Father Bathe's idea was to combine the 
accuracy of the grammar process and the facility of the direct 
method. 

Of course Bathe admitted that his via media would not 
give the knowledge, required by school practice in his time, 
of grammar as a self-contained art or science; and so he 
hinted that a scheme for the use of his sentences in a formal 
grammar process would be forthcoming later. It is interesting 
to read of Melanchthon styling the direct method, or the de- 
parture from "rules," as a basis for learning languages, an ir- 
religious idea, which should be punished as a criminal offence. 

Father Corcoran follows the Janua in its travels through 
England, Germany, Italy and Portugal. He notes how English 
prejudices failed to give due credit to its author, while fully 



i9i2.] NEW SOOAS 823 

acknowledging its merits as a text-book. Even to this day, 
in the British Museum Catalogue and in the new Catalogue 
of Early Printed Books at Cambridge, the Irish Jesuits' text- 
book is inaccurately ascribed to Comenius (Komensky), whose 
Janua Linguarum Restrain is a later and much inferior work 
(pp. 104-105). 

In the second part of his work, Father Corcoran shows in 
detail how differently the main subject of language-study in 
the Post-Renaissance period was organized as an instrument 
of education (p. 135). 

A final chapter gives us a copy of John Dory's " Descrip- 
tion of a Transmarine School" (Brussels?), published in Lon- 
don in 1645. It is the account by an eyewitness of the 
working of a class in a Jesuit college, although, true to the 
Protestant tradition of the time, he is careful not to give any 
direct indication of the college he visited, or of the special 
character it had as conducted by a religious order (p. 232). 

The appendices give us the preface and some representa- 
tive sentences of the Janua Linguamm of both Father Bathe 
and Comenius, together with a life of Father Bathe, published 
at Prague in 1694. We advise the students of our colleges to 
attempt the translations of some of these sentences ; it will be 
a good test of their scholarship. We notice that on the last 
lines of pages 212 and 213 some words are omitted, which 
make these sentences unintelligible. We trust this will be 
amended in the next edition. 

MARRIAGE, TOTEMISM AND RELIGION: AN ANSWER TO 
CRITICS. By the Right Hon. Lord Avebury. London: 
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25. 

In 1870 Lord Avebury published Ike Origins of Civiliza- 
tion and the Primitive Conditions of Man, which was not re- 
ceived with unanimous approbation by anthropologists. It 
met with much adverse criticism from eminent scientists who 
differed from the author on several important points. To 
review his position and answer his critics after a lapse of 
thirty years is the raison d'etre of the book which now lies 
before us. 

The basic principle on which Lord Avebury differs from 
his critics is that he holds marriage in the strict sense not to 
have been present among primitive mankind; that instead of 



824 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

it there was what he calls "communal marriage," a term 
which suggests the borderline of a condition incompatible 
with rational man, the work of God. But Lord Avebury is 
an evolutionist, if he is anything. His theory is that the idea 
of marriage evolved by degrees ; that at first, during maraud- 
ing expeditions, the chiefs of tribes took prisoners who after- 
wards bacame the wives of the victors. From this, he main- 
tains, arose the well-known fact of exogamy which is prac- 
ticed the world over by the aborigines of various countries. 
Ten different theories which are given to account for exogamy 
are examined by the author and disposed of to his own evi- 
dent satisfaction. The peculiarities associated with the prohi- 
bition for the men of a tribe to marry women of the same 
tribe are discussed in detail with considerable clearness, as is 
also another strange custom, the segmentation of a tribe. 

Lord Avebury's theory that totemism and nature-worship 
were identical was also attacked. He re- asserts this theory 
and examines those of his critics. There is a distinction, he 
maintains, between a fetich, a totem, and an idol: the first is 
a single object the possession of which is a possible power 
over some demon ; the second forms a class of objects which 
a savage regards as something having a peculiar relationship 
to himself, from which he derives his origin and to which he 
gives a great respect ; the idol is in some sense or other the 
seat or emblem of a god. He is of a firm opinion that to- 
temism led to religion; indeed, at one period, was religion 
itself. This, of course, is contradicted flatly by other writers. 
Several strange beliefs among savage tribes are given in con- 
nection with the use of totems; that concerning the naming 
and birth of a child among certain Australians being perhaps 
the strangest of all. Following upon the consideration of 
totems comes a chapter on witchcraft and magic which is re- 
plete with examples of how savages deal in the "black art"; 
two citations from Graah and Williams will cause the Catholic 
reader to stop and make a comparison between the extraor- 
dinary occurrences these writers chronicle and certain phe- 
nomena sometimes asserted to have been witnessed among 
Spiritualists. From magic to religion seems an easy step for 
Lord Avebury. His last chapters, accordingly, are devoted to 
this question. 

Dr. Westermarck, M. Roskoff, and others have given the 



i9i3.] NEW BOOKS 825 

greatest attention to the above theories and have put forward 
others not in agreement with them. 

While there is evidently much among the savages of the 
globe to uphold various views of marriage among prehistoric 
mankind, it seems to us that undue value has been put upon 
the observations of travelers and scientific explorers, some of 
whom, already prejudiced by pet theories, sought every title 
of evidence to strengthen such theories, and missed we do 
not wish to insinuate intentionally many valuable points 
which would render their views worthless. Besides, much of 
the evidence in this book has been gathered too recently to 
bear weight with independent thinkers. In connection with 
the aboriginal tribes of North America, this is especially no- 
ticeable. Indeed, it appears to us that Lord Avebury ne- 
glected more valuable sources of information than those of 
which he has made use. 

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. New York : Henry Holt & 
Co. 75 cents a volume. William Shakespeare, by John 
Masefield. Crime and Insanity, by Charles Mercier, M.D. 
Medieval Europe, by H. W. C. Davis, M.D. Tht Opening 
Up of Africa, by H. H. Johnston. 

William Shakespeare. By John Masefield. No matter how 
brief may be the treatment of Shakespeare's works by 
Mr. Masefield it cannot help being of considerable inter- 
est were it only to satisfy a natural curiosity of seeing 
how a modern dramatist looks upon his sixteenth century 
fellow craftsman. A large section of the modern school of 
writers (those of ability and those without it) are so prone 
to " brush aside " the writers of another day that it is a 
cause for genuine pleasure to read Mr. Masefield's glowing 
tribute to the dramatic workmanship of Shakespeare. He is 
particularly decisive on this point in those pages which he 
allots to Julius Ccesar, where he contrasts Shakespeare's treat- 
ment with that which would be probable at the hands of 
others. " Little more," he writes, " can be said of it at this 
time than that it is supreme." 

Perhaps at times, not often, Mr. Masefield is not as care- 
ful about his statements as one would desire. Apart from 
this the book, which contains first a short life of Shakespeare, 
and then an almost equally brief analysis of each play, will 



826 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

form a suitable companion volume to one of Shakespeare's 
works for any student of the great poet-dramatist. At one 
point we cannot help expressing dissatisfaction: the bibli- 
ography is far from good. In no department of English liter- 
ature can so much valuable time be lost as in reading the 
fantastic effusions of almost countless writers on Shakespeare 
and his works. To steer the student clear of these should 
have been (in our opinion) the prime object of the writer. 

From the very first page of Crime and Insanity by Charles 
Mercier, M.D., we found an interest quite unusual in scientific 
writings of the sort. Chapter by chapter he deals with par- 
ticular phases of crime which may and are usually associated 
with insanity, and also those crimes which are never the out- 
come of mental derangement. Where so much is good, and 
of the greatest utility to students of sociology, it is a pity 
not to be able to recommend the book on account of two 
pages which come towards the very end. But in these pages 
Malthusianism is openly taught. Coming from a medical man 
who has just dealt with two crimes against the human race, 
to have a third not only condoned but encouraged is deadly; 
especially so because of the medical explanation of results to 
individuals. It is with regret that we cannot feel at liberty 
to recommend this book which otherwise contains so much of 
real value. 

We had not far to go in Medieval Europe, by H. W. C. 
Davis, M.A., before we discovered its tone, which is a com- 
bination of flippancy and sarcasm when any question of the 
Catholic Church turns up. The book will appeal to ultra- 
Protestants and to those who profess what is known as free 
thought. But to Catholics it will appear to be nothing more 
than an invidious attempt at tract-making under the guise of 
history; that kind of tract such as is manufactured in Eng- 
land to be slipped under the doors of the poor Irish Catho- 
lics to bring them out of the darkness of Popery. 

In The Opening Up of Africa we have a rapid sketch of the 
whole history of that country. The author is well known for 
his knowledge of Africa, since he has been used by England 
in the civilizing process. There are some things we like in 
his book, but there are many others that we cannot approve. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 827 

He is certainly a better historian when dealing with far-away 
periods, but his evolutionary theories are wholly unsuitable 
for a history such as he proposes to write. When he comes 
down to the more modern period of the exploitation of Africa 
for commercial purposes by European nations, there is just 
the suspicion that partiality is creeping into his pages. He 
is liberal in the use of his adjectives when Protestantism ap- 
pears in the field, but merely states facts rather curtly when 
the services of Catholics come up for review. 

Bat, taken on the whole, Sir Harry Johnston has provided 
us with a useful work for those who desire to gain a close 
political knowledge of Africa both ancient and modern. Two 
maps, though badly printed, add to the value of the book. 

NEW SERIES OF HOMILIES FOR THE WHOLE YEAR. Vols. 
V. and VI. CHRISTIAN MYSTERIES. Vols. I., II., III., IV. 
By the Right Rev. Jeremias Boromelli, D.D., Bishop of 
Cremona, translated by Right Rev. T. S. Byrne, D.D., 
Bishop of Nashville. New York: Benziger Bros. $2.50. 

" One of the purposes, and not the least," writes Bishop 
Boromelli in his preface to the fifth volume of his homilies, 
"I had in view in writing my series of homilies was, and is, 
to bring back this kind of preaching to the ancient pattern, 
such as we find it in the Fathers. The homilies of St. John 
Chrysostom, of St. Augustine, and St. Bernard ... are 
commentaries on the sacred books, in which dogma and mor- 
als are woven together with admirable art, and the errors of 
their age touched upon and refuted as the occasion arose. 
. . . In as far as my poor abilities permitted I endeavored 
to imitate them, taking always for my secure groundwork the 
sacred text." Even in his four volumes on the Christian 
Mysteries, he sometimes adopts the homily form, as in his 
sermon on the birth of Christ, his commentary on the epistle 
and gospel of the Ascension, the gospel of Pentecost, Trinity, 
etc. (Vol. I., p. 93, Vol. II., pp. 203, 231, Vol. III., p. 43, 
Vol. IV., p. 9). 

The Bishop of Cremona in advocating a return to the homily 
of the early Church.is very severe in his denunciation of some 
tactless and inaccurate Italian preachers. The translator adds : 
(p. 5, footnote), " What is said here of Conferences may be 
applied to much of the pulpit oratory of this country." 



828 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

In his homilies the Bishop, by simplicity of speech, direct- 
ness and frequent use of the word of God, reaches down into 
the hearts of his hearers. 

The four volumes of the Christian Mysteries are grouped 
under the headings of the Incarnation, the Epiphany, the 
Resurrection, the Ascension, the Trinity, Pentecost, the Eu- 
charist, and All Saints. Many different themes are treated 
such as Baptism, Confirmation, the Holy Name, Faith, the 
Church, Church and State, Salvation outside the Church, the 
Communion of Saints, External Worship, Indifferentism, etc., 
etc. 

The Bishop of Cremona is most honest in quoting his au- 
thorities whether they are St. Ambrose or St. Augustine, St. 
Anselm or St. Thomas, Monsabrc or Mgr. Freppel. Some 
sermons are based entirely on St. Tkomas, as his "Why did 
Christ rise from the dead?" (Vol., II. p. 89 seq.) There are 
many repetitions both of ideas and illustrations (1.331, 2.192, 
2.131, 3.161, 3.183, 2.24, 2.73, 2.209, 3-285, 4.20, 3.72, 2.285, 
1.331, 2.192, 1.344, 3.106, 3.168, etc., etc.), but it is naturally 
difficult to avoid this, when so many discourses are given on 
the same subject. While for the most part kindly in tone, the 
Bishop can be sarcastic at times. 

He insists frequently on the fact that the Church "does 
not forcibly thrust her faith and her laws upon any one; on 
the contrary, she proclaims openly that she detests physical 
force and advocates only persuasion "; although in a footnote 
he grants that "some poorly instructed individuals did at 
times use force to constrain others to receive Catholic doc- 
trine " (3.106, 3.168, 1.344). While praising England and the 
United States for the liberty the Catholic Church enjoys to- 
day in both these countries, in a footnote he has a mild criti- 
cism of our beloved Cardinal Gibbons which we think uncalled 
for (1.345, 2.194, 3.316, 3.324). 

We thank Bishop Byrne for his excellent translation. He 
will pardon us if we call attention to a few minor faults, viz.: 
the use of " don't " and "does'nt" (1.262, 1.410), of "Good 
God," and "Great God" (1.415, 3.217), and an occasional 
faulty sentence. 

The dialogue on the Separation of Church and State is 
poorly connected, and the repetition of so many various verbs 
rather palls on the reader or auditor. 



i9i 2.] NEW BOOKS 829 

We notice that, owing to a mistake of the binder, a num- 
ber of pages have been omitted, viz. : pp. 338-9, 342-3-6-7, 
350-1-2. 

PIONEER PRIESTS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1642-1710. Vol. III. 
By Rev. T. J. Campbell, S.J. New York: The America 
Press. 

Father Campbell deals in this volume chiefly with the evan- 
gelization of the Algonquins. The careers of Paul Le Jcune, 
James Buteux, Gabriel Druillettes, Charles Albanel, Claude 
Allouez, James Marquette, Francis de Crespieul, Anthony Syl- 
vie, Anthony Dalmas, Gabriel Maret, Peter Laure, John Aul- 
neau and Sebastian Rale are dealt with. It is difficult to say 
what part of the volume is the most interesting, for a thread 
of excitement and adventure is woven throughout. It is, in- 
deed, a wonderful history the endeavor of these priests to 
carry the Faith to the Indians. No labor, no hardship, no 
suffering was thought too much; revolting surroundings, filth, 
disease, hunger, were accepted with a light heart. The most 
marvellous of all is the courage of the missioners in facing 
the red men, and the respect which they instilled into all 
among whom they labored. Without any exaggeration we 
may say that it was with great regret that we cane to the 
last page of this book; its three hundred and odd pages were 
all too short for our craving for more knowledge of such heroic 
virtue as these Jesuit Fathers exhibited. 

Father Campbell points out in his Introduction that the 
Algonquins were not a whit better than the other tribes of 
America. The subsequent pages of his history prove this as- 
sertion. Throughout, we have evidence from the missicners 
of the degradation to which these Indians had fallen. It was 
hard work teaching them the truths of Christianity, but some- 
how or other these French priests had a wonderful knack for 
teaching religion. Some of them began without a knowledge 
of the language of those whom they desired to convert. The 
picture the author draws of Father Le Jeune making an at- 
tempt to harangue the Indians at a banquet and his reception 
with shouts of laughter, owing to the mistakes he made, will 
surely draw a smile. But the Father was not beaten. "Wait," 
said he, " till I can speak and I shall tell you plenty of things 
that will make you listen." 



830 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

The manner in which some of the converts applied the 
teaching they received is curious. In one instance Father 
Buteux found a number of pots of meat hung up in the grave- 
yard. The Indians assured him that they had not done this 
from superstition, but as a mode of attracting the poor who 
when going to get the meat would pray for the souls of 
the departed. In another case they rebuke the priest for 
showing a disinclination to partake of certain food. They tell 
him that he must conquer himself. And their devotion, their 
fervor, their desire for prayer, remind one of the ascetics of 
the East. Still, in the twinkling of an eye, the savage reappears 
as strongly as ever. They loved and hated in equal degree. 
The ferocity of their hatred causes a shiver as we read of the 
atrocities they perpetrated on their enemies; then there was 
no mercy; the priest had to keep in the background and hold 
his tongue. 

American readers will perhaps turn first to the life of 
Marquette. The account of his journey with Joliet to dis- 
cover the Mississippi is very well done. That splendid 
achievement in the face of overwhelming difficulties reads like 
a romance. Still we think that most readers will prefer what 
is to our mind even more wonderful the life of Gabriel 
Druillettes. Here we have the story of one of the world's 
heroes ; an indomitable man, nearly blind, pushing on in 
the wilderness to save souls, submitting to the barbarous 
operation of a squaw, who rasped his eyes with a rusty piece 
of iron to bring back the sight, and only succeeded in making 
them worse. 

Several illustrations and maps add to the value of the vol- 
ume, which for those who take an interest in Church history 
cannot be left unread. Father Campbell uses the caution of 
a true historian; in one place only does he become apologetic, 
and then he has every right to defend the fame of a good 
man. 

PRIMITIVE CATHOLICISM. By Pierre Batiffol, Litt.D. New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. 1911. $3.50. 

Liberal Protestantism in Germany has been discussing for 
the past seventy years "the formation of Catholicism." His- 
torical critics like Neander, Baur, Kitsch!, Harnack and Sofcm 
have gone deeply into the study of Christian origins, editing 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 831 

and classifying with painstaking energy, text after text of the 
New Testament and the Fathers, to show that the dogmatic 
and authoritative religion known as Catholicism began some- 
where about the middle of the third century. " In its essence 
it has little in common with primitive Christianity " (Har- 
nack). 

Sabatier has popularized the current views of these German 
rationalists in his book : The Religions of Authority. 

The theories advanced by 'these modern opponents of 
Catholicism, are generally presented with a great show of 
erudition and pretense of objective treatment. Their viewpoint 
is biased throughout by an a priori subjectivism, which can- 
not grasp the possibility of the Catholic synthesis of a divine 
external authoritative society existing solely for the develop- 
ment of personal spirituality. 

Mgr. Batiffol, in his L'Eglite Naissante et le Catholicismt, 
which has been so ably translated by Father Brianceau of St. 
Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, meets these critics on their own 
ground and with their own weapons. Harnack wrote of this 
book over two years ago : " The author has rendered his church 
a most signal service, for one could not undertake with 
greater special knowledge of the subject to establish the 
original identity of Christianity, Catholicism and the Roman 
primacy. He does not seek to prove his thesis by means of 
metahistoric speculation which does not concern itself with 
the chronology of events, but confines itself to territory of 
facts and their consequences, and seeks to furnish a truly his- 
torical demonstration " (VIII.). 

Some conservative Catholics have a sort of horror of the 
historical method, as if, forsooth, it implied a compromising of 
our dogmatic position. In Mgr. Batiffol's inquiry into the 
evidences of Catholicism for the first three centuries, they 
will see it employed in so thorough and scholarly a fashion, 
that their prejudices must needs disappear. 

The author proves that Christianity was not organized in 
imitation of the Jewish diaspora, but a society divinely orig- 
inal and authoritative, "a religious revelation, a rule of con- 
duct, a covenant of hope " (p. 36). For our Lord's teaching in 
detail he refers us to his own work " L* Enseignement de Jesus " 
(p. 76), although his excursus on the value of Matt. XVI. 18- 
19 is one of his best chapters. 



832 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

The Epistle of Clement " from beginning to end proclaims 
the unity of the Church through authority" (p. 123). In per- 
fect accord with the Pastoral Epistles, the Didache, St. Ig- 
natius of Antiocb, etc., it insists on the authoritative char- 
acter of faith, the recognition of a settled hierarchy as an 
institution of divine right to safeguard the divine teaching 
and to command obedience in the name of Christ, the rejec- 
tion of heresy, the traditions of men and unauthorized observ- 
ances. (Pp. 114, 115, 117, 127, 132, 134, 143, etc.) Both St. 
Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch tell us that 
Rome "already seems conscious of possessing a supreme 
and exceptional authority" (p. 130). 

The secpnd century also in the person of Polycarp, Papias, 
Hegisippus, Abercius, Pantcenus, Dionysius, Hermas, Justin, 
and Irenaeus witnesses throughout to the Catholic thesis. 

The witness of the third century is to be found in the 
writings of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and St. 
Cyprian. Perhaps the ablest chapters of Mgr. Batiffol's work 
are the two in which he defends the great Alexandrians, 
Clement and Origen, against the false theorizing of Harnack. 

St. Cyprian decidedly cannot be claimed as the originator 
of the hierarchical idea. In accord with St. Ignatius he pro- 
claims the law of the unity of the Church in each city ; he 
asserts the authority of the bishops, and denounces most 
strongly the evil of heresy and schism. 

We consider this work of Mgr. Batiffol one of the best 
contributions to our apologetic literature that has appeared in 
years. His researches are carried on partly in the form of a 
dialogue with Harnack, the ablest non-Catholic historian in 
the world to-day. Reviewing the period which Harnack has 
made especially his own, Mgr. Batiffol disputes at every turn 
his opponent's faulty hypotheses, insinuations, and inferences 
and at the same time brings out clearly his candid admissions 
that make for the Catholic position. He proves, finally, from 
the witness of the first three centuries that: "the true essence 
of Christianity, its divine originality, manifested itself from its 
very beginning, in that it was neither a philosophy, nor a 
people, but a revelation and a church. Christianity was the 
preaching by Jesus of a kingdom of God, not an apocalyptic 
kingdom, but a kingdom that was at once interior, and trans- 
cendent, a kingdom revealed by Jesus, and thrown open by 



igi2.] NEW BOOKS 833 

Him" (p. 404). "It was not mediocrity which in Christianity 
founded authority ; it was the Gospel which founded authori- 
ty" (p. 406). 

We commend this book highly to all students of early 
Church history. It will help, as no other work has, to destroy 
that deep-rooted prejudice of the rationalistic critic oi to-day 
who believes that Catholic scholarship is absolutely distrustful 
of the historic method; it will be an inspiration for many a 
humbler apologist of the Catholic claim. We anxiously await 
the author's promised volume that will carry on the present 
thesis to the days of St. Augustine and St. Leo. 

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. By 
George R. Clarke, William O. Stevens, Carroll S. Alden, 
Hermann F. Krafft. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Com 
pany. $3 net. 

The authors state ia their Introduction that this work 
originated in the necessity of providing midshipmen in the 
United States Naval Academy with a text-book suitable both 
in scope and treatment; added to this is the hope that the 
book may be useful to others who desire to gain a knowledge 
of the subject. The authors claim that what they have written 
is devoid of any regard for personal, sectional, or national 
prejudice. We are of opinion that they have substantiated 
this claim in a very remarkable manner. 

On May n, 1775, the United States Navy began with a 
lumber sloop manned by woodsmen of Maine and led by one, 
O'Brien, who having beaten a British schooner, seized the 
cannon and ammunition to arm his own vessel. In the same 
year Washington fitted out a few small vessels which he manned 
with soldiers. These caused considerable damage to British 
shipping, and captured thirty-five vessels. On the first of No- 
vember (same year), Congress voted $100,000 to buy ships for 
a naval armament, which was organized on December 22, with 
Esek Hopkins as cotntnander-in-chief. The noteworthy name 
of John Paul Jones was the first on a list of lieutenants com- 
missioned for the fleet, which consisted of four ships aug- 
mented .later by two sloops and two schooners, carrying all 
told no guns. This fleet was expected to fight the British 
fleet (in American waters) of 78 ships with 2,078 guns. No 
VOL. xciv. 53 






5 .-.-;.-- 




= *- 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 835 

ticipators in various engagements. Some of the accounts are 
most fascinating. We cannot recall at present any piece of 
action which has more dash and vigor than the story related 
by Cashing of his successful attempt to destroy the Albtrmarle ; 
in it is all the strength of troth and realism, and an absence 
of literary straining after effect; it is captivating even to 
the reader who may not perhaps have sympathy with the deed. 
To those of oar readers who may wish to learn something 
of oar sea force, and of the status its work has given the 
United States among the Powers, we heartily recommend this 
volume, whose value is enhanced by a large number of well- 
executed illustrations. 

THE LIFE OF VENERABLE FRANCIS LIBERMANH. By G. Lee, 
C.S.Sp. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25. 

"Then it was, that, remembering the God of my fathers, 
I cast myself on my knees and implored Him to enlighten ice 
on the true religion. I conjured Him to make known to me 
that the belief of Christians was true, if it was so; bat if it 
was false, to remove me instantly far from it" So opens the 
account of the Life of Venerable Francis Liberrcann. 

Born the son of an orthodox Jewish rabbin, he was named 
Jacob, and grew up in an atmosphere of the most conservative 
Judaism. Most remarkable then, is the story of his yearnings 
toward the Christian Faith. He was twenty-two, poor, alone 
and far from home when he sent up the prayer with which the 
book opens. His conflict did not last long. In one great flash 
of understanding the truth is revealed, and be enters the Cath- 
olic Church and takes up his cross and follows on to victory 
with Christ. 

OUR PRIESTHOOD. By Rev. J. Bruneau, S.S. St. Louis: 
B. Herder & Co. 90 cents. 

The conferences that make up this little book were origi- 
nally prepared for the benefit of students at Saint Mary's 
Seminary in Baltimore. They are now set forth in print, 
partly to comply with the wishes of many who beard them, 
partly to offer a token of affection to Cardinal Gibbons en 
the occasion of his Golden Jubilee. They are a spiritual 
commentary on the words and ceremonies used in conferring 
Holy Orders. Separate chapters are devoted to Tonsure, to 



836 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

Minor Orders, and to each of the three Major Orders. At 
the head of each chapter stands in Latin the full form of 
ordination to the office under discussion. Then comes a 
study of the order itself: its meaning, the honor it confers, 
the obligations it imposes, the symbolism of the rites em- 
ployed, the virtues demanded for its faithful discharge. The 
words and acts of the ordaining prelate are carefully analyzed, 
and the wealth of inspiring suggestion they contain is zeal- 
ously brought to light. At the end of the volume we have 
in English the letter on the Priesthood which our Holy 
Father gave out on the occasion of his sacerdotal Golden 
Jubilee. The long-standing, richly-merited reputation of the 
Sulpicians as capable teachers of those who aspire to serve 
the altar is well borne out by this little book. It is a prac- 
tical volume both for the young man on his way to the altar, 
and for the priest who has already served it many years. 

UNDER THE ROSE. By Felicia Curtis. St. Louis: B. Herder. 

$1.60. 

An unusually good specimen of the historical novel is 
Under the Rose, by Felicia Curtis. The figure of Queen 
Elizabeth, her character and statescraft, and the fashions of 
her court, have paid the bills of so many novelists since 
Kenilworth first appeared, that the subject would seem thread- 
bare. But the present author succeeds very well with it; she 
writes accurately, vividly, and knows how to brighten with 
fresh colors her somewhat tarnished stage setting. The plot 
of her story winds about the religious persecutions inaugurated 
and ruthlessly carried out by Elizabeth, and concerns itself 
also with the intrigues and follies of the court. 

ST. PATRICK, APOSTLE OF IRELAND. Notre Dame Series. 
St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25. 

This little volume is one of unusual merit and interest. 
While the author does not ignore the traditions and miracles 
that cluster around the name of St. Patrick, his strong per- 
sonality is made a vivid reality. The appendix, giving St. 
Patrick's sublime Prayer Before Tara, and his wonderful Con 
fession, put into faultless English verse by the poet Aubrey 
de Vere, opens genuine treasures to the reading public. 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 837 

Af EDITATIONS FOR EVERY DAY IN THE MONTH. 
75 cents net. The Life of Union With Our Divine Lord. 
60 cents net. (New York: Benziger Bros.) Both these books 
are translations from the French. The first named is a selec- 
tion from Father Nepven's Christian Reflections for Every Day 
in the Year. The thirty meditations are particularly suitable 
for people living in the world, and desiring to spend a short 
time daily in meditation. The fundamental truths are simply 
set forth; the conclusions are practical and well-fitted to aid 
in the leading of a good Christian life. An appendix contains 
morning and evening prayers, devotions for Mass, and for the 
reception of the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist. 
Addressed to souls who have attained some degree of pro- 
ficiency in the practice of mental prayer, the second named 
book treats of that union with our Divine Lord which is to 
be attained by living continually in His presence. It contains 
exercises or meditations for one month whose aim is to teach 
the soul to sanctify and permeate all the ordinary actions of 
the day with the spirit of Jesus. Abundant quotations from 
Holy Scripture and from those saints who have been eminent 
masters in the ways of God, set forth most persuasively the 
sweetness of the yoke, the lightness of the burden, whose 
bearing is to result in so rich a reward. The work is trans- 
lated from the French of the Abbe* F. Maucourant. 

N THE TEMPEST OF THE HEART, (New York : Benziger 
Brothers, $1.25), Mary Agatha Gray, author of The Turn 
J the Tide, takes as hero a young monk who leaves his 
Abbey for a musical career ; who finds that career " stale, 
flat, and unprofitable;" and who is finally permitted to re- 
turn to the order. It is a well-meaning story, but pretentious 
beyond its powers. 

GOD: HIS KNOWABILITY, ESSENCE, AND ATTRI- 
BUTES, by the Rev. Joseph Pohle, Ph.D. Translated 
by Arthur Preuss. (St. Louis: B. Herder. $2 net.) In the 
general introduction to this treatise, Dogmatic Theology is 
dealt with in its various aspects. Following a definition of its 
natural divisions comes the author's special work on God. This 
he divides into three main parts, comprising chapters and 
theses relating to the Knowability of God, the Divine Essence, 



838 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

the Divine Attributes. The book is a welcome addition to 
theological treatises in the English language, though we im- 
agine that it will be found less easy reading than some other 
similar works that have come to our table. 



QUESTION OF THE HOUR, by Joseph P. Conway. 
(New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 35 cents.) We are 
at a loss to review this book. Its sub-title " A Survey of the 
Position and Influence of the Catholic Church in the United 
States," caused us naturally to pay particular attention to its 
pages; but it was like seeking a needle in a bundle of straw 
to discover where the question of the hour enters. The author 
moves along like a whirlwind, scattering piecemeal knowl- 
edge of the Catholic Church in North America and Europe. 
With a grandiose literary style he strikes and slays, capping 
his climaxes at times with a fine poetic couplet. Still the 
whole thing is unconvincing. He had a good theme but has 
failed to handle it satisfactorily. Here and there we obtain 
some useful statistics as in the chapter on "The Church in 
the Nation," or the details on education on another page 
but these hardly suffice to make the author's effort a success- 
ful one. Moreover, accuracy is not always maintained. 

BARBARA, OUR LITTLE BOHEMIAN COUSIN, by Clara 
*J Vostrovsky Winslow. (Boston : L. C. Page & Co. 60 
cents.) Barbara might be used advantageously as supple- 
mentary reading in the geography course, either at home or 
at school. It is one of the Little Cousin Series, and Bar- 
bara is the forty- fourth. 

THE CHRIST CHILD, by M. C. Olivia Keiley, sold by 
Benziger Brothers, is a well- illustrated book which if read 
to very young children, will acquaint them with the funda- 
mental truths of Christianity. Cardinal Gibbon's gracious 
preface says, " It is intended for the youngest children capa- 
ble of learning the simplest lessons of our Lord's life." 

GOOD WOMEN OF ERIN, by Alice Dease (Benziger Bros. 
60 cents), is a collection of short stories founded on 
Iris^h legends of the days of St. Patrick and St. Brigid. They 



i9i2.] NEW BOOKS 839 

are well-written little tales colored with the Irish reverence 
for the tenderness, strength and purity of womanhood. 

TTNDER THE SANCTUARY LAMP: THE HILLS THAT 
JESUS LOVED, by the Rev. John H. O'Rourke, S.J., 
published by the Apostleship of Prayer (801 West iSist Street, 
N. Y. City. 50 cents). All readers of the Messenger of the 
Sacred Heart turn eagerly to that portion of the periodical 
where appears "Under the Sanctuary Lamp: The Hills that 
Jesus Loved." A number of these touching chapters on our 
Lord's Life and Passion are gathered here in book form. 
They are beautifully illustrated, and will serve admirably as 
reflections for the Holy Hour. 

TTEROES OF EVERY-DAY LIFE, by Fannie E. Coe, pub- 
** lished by Ginn & Co. (Boston and New York. 40 cents), 
is described as a reader for the upper grades, but the tales 
which it holds, should not be limited to the enjoyment of 
school-children. An older, wiser circle of readers would find 
profit and pleasure in them. Extracts are given from the 
works of such men as F. Hopkinson Smith, Gustave Kobbc, 
Jacob Riis, and others, who have written worth-while chroni- 
cles of men in the every-day walks of life. 

T AMENNAIS. Introduction by Paul Agnius. (Tourcoing, 
" France : J. Duvivier. 3 fr. 50). We have in this volume 
a selection of the best writings of Lamennais. With the well- 
written introduction of M. Agnius, in which there is a good 
biographical sketch of Lamennais, and a couple of indexes, 
this volume will prove of service to anybody anxious to see 
in the original how and about what the unhappy priest wrote. 
We may add that the volume has passed through the hands 
of a censor and has received an Imprimatur. 

LA LOI D'EXIL, par Edmond Thiriet. (Paris: Pierre 
Tequi). La Loi d'Exil gives a touching and graphic 
picture of the personal results of the tyranny of the French 
Government to the religious orders. Isabelle de Valois and 
her noble father offer their lives in reparation for the crimes 
of their countrymen against religion. Isabelle joins the exiled 
Carmelites in England and her father seeks a home in a Trap- 



840 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

pist monastery. The characters of Paul Maillet, the rabid polit- 
ician and persecutor of the Church, and the General, Robert 
de Valois, are well drawn. The rapid sale of La Loi a'Exil, 
sufficiently indicates the demand for books on the present 
religious conditions in France. 

T 'ACTION CATHOLIQUE, par le R. P. Janvier. (Paris: 
" P. Lethielleux). Anything from Pere Janvier is always 
an intellectual as well as a spiritual treasure. Language with 
him is the polished instrument by whose use the exquisitely 
chiseled thought is embodied in its ultimate perfection. These 
discourses were delivered before various Eucharistic and other 
congresses, and are all upon subjects of vital interest to every 
Catholic. Where all is admirable, it is impossible to select 
any portion for special praise. The author's incisive logic of 
thought is as remarkable as his burning, impassioned eloquence 
which never fails to hold thousands spellbound. 

T A DOCTRINE MORALE DE DEVOLUTION, par 
Emile Bruneteau. (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne et Cie). 
This present volume is a valuable addition to the Bibliothcque 
Apologetique and M. Bruneteau writes with a conviction and 
logic that cannot fail to reach the minds of his readers. He 
systematically refutes the sophisms of those who are known 
as the great evolutionists Spencer, Guyon, Haeckel and others. 



foreign iperiobicals. 

The Tablet (27 Jan.): The Cardinal Archbishop of Westmin- 
ster has returned, for the first time as a Cardinal, to 
his diocese. The public welcome and reception in the 
Cathedral was attended by the Lord Mayor of London 
and " many representative non-Catholics who had ex- 
pressed a desire to be present on this great occasion." 

Sir George Askwith has obtained a settlement of 

the strike among the cotton-weavers in the Manchester 

mills. The appearance of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Life 

of Cardinal Newman was greeted by the press as an 
event of unusual importance. "Column after column 
gave itself up to Cardinal Newman, even the leading 

column in Printing House Square." "Twice within 

two months important deputations have waited upon and 
won the active sympathy of the Home Secretary on be- 
half of a strengthening of the law for the repression of 
pernicious literature." The second deputation consisted 
of editors, publishers and news agents, and was intro- 
duced by the Editor of the Spectator. Appeal was made 
for a greater clearness in the laws on the subject, thus 
enabling the police to seize and prosecute with more 
freedom and security. 

(3 Feb.): "Priests and the Income Tax," by R. H. G. 
Marquis. The secular clergy have a just cause for com- 
plaint in the over-assessment of income tax. That por- 
tion of their income which is devoted to charity is not 
exempt from the tax. " The priest gives to the members 
of his Sock, and what he gives he must pay taxes upon, 
because the Inland Revenue authorities do not recognize 
charity. This disallowance for charities in the case of 
any priest or minister of religion is absolutely unjust." 

An official of the Sacred Congregation of Rites has 

given the following information concerning the use of 
existing editions of the Breviary: "For the present, 
and for a long time to come, the clergy may rest as- 
sured that the Breviaries they have will not be useless, 
and that they will remain perfectly serviceable if the 

new Psalter be added to them." Lisbon is once 

more in a state of siege. The prisons are crowded 



842 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

with thousands whose crime is their "suspected attach- 
ment to the monarchy and their known fidelity to the 
Catholic Faith." A committee of prominent British 
residents, formed to investigate the conditions of the 
thousands of prisoners awaiting trial, reported that: 
"The prisoners have to submit to the worst insults; 
they are not allowed to hear Mass on Sundays; there 
is no permanent medical attendance ; and in each prison, 
a single infirmary has to suffice for all the prisoners and 
every kind of disease." 

(10 Feb.): "The Portuguese Horrors" gives the full 
text of the report of the English Committee of inquiry 
into the condition of the political prisoners now waiting 

trial. Lord Braye emphatically condemns a play 

"The Miracle" now being staged in London, as does 
Colonel Vaughan ; while Sir Francis Fleming contributes 

a letter in its favor. In a little more than a week 

the household of the Vatican has lost by death three 
chief officials. 

The Month (Feb.) : Rev. Sydney Smith reviews Wilfrid Ward's 
Lije of Cardinal Newman. A definite judgment is not 
expressed; but the author is praised for his thorough- 
ness, his objectiveness and his caution in expressing an 
opinion regarding motives. George Thomason's col- 
lection of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, etc., begun in 
1642 and continuing for eighteen years, has been cata- 
logued by Dr. G. K. Fortescue. While in the main ex- 
cellent, J. B. Williams thinks it too largely disregards 
Thomason's dates and notes. Rev. Herbert Thurston 
writes on the magnificent production in mediaeval form 
of "The Miracle" the legend on which Maeterlinck's 
"Sister Beatrice" (produced at the New Theatre, N. Y.) 
is based. He traces it back to the thirteenth century. 

The National (Feb.): "Is Eton Up-to-Date?" The question 
is answered in the affirmative by " One Who Knows." 
Work for the Navy War-Staff by "Navalis" out- 
lines the war needs of Great Britain, and urges imme- 
diate action on the part of the War-Staff. Earl 

Percy, in writing of " Russia's Role in a European War," 
says that " it is time England recognized the value of 
Russia, for without her support the future domination 



i9i2.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 843 

of Europe by Germany is a foregone conclusion." 

Copious examples are given in the article entitled " Kent 
and the Poets " by Bernard Holland to show that the 
county of Kent may properly be called the home of Eng- 
lish poetry. Aubrey F. G. Bell describes a "Winter 

Walk in Andalusia." "One of the biggest fights ahead 

in 1912," writes the author of "Feminine versus Femin- 
ist," "is that of Anti-Suffrage versus Suffrage." The 
writer makes a strong plea in defense of anti- suffrage. 

Arthur Page writing on the same subject says: 

"Surely the greatest national need tc-day is not that 
women should be encouraged to develop upon masculine 
lines, but that men should be found more manly and wo- 
men more womanly." " The Unification of Italy," by 

Richard Bagot discusses the period through which Italy 
is now passing. 

Church Quarterly Review (Jan.) : " Religious Instruction in 
Girls' Schools," is the outline of a curriculum in "Di- 
vinity." It is suggested that a teacher of "Divinity" 

should have a definite faith. " Richard Crashaw and 

Mary Collet," by E. Cruwys Sharland. A recent dis- 
covery of a letter ascribed to Richard Crashaw, is im- 
portant, viewed in connection with the fresh light which 
it throws upon the intimacy that existed between Richard 
Crashaw and the Gidding household and the influence 
which their friendship must have had in the develop, 
ment of his character during twelve of the most impres- 
sionable years of his life. 

Dublin Review (Jan.) : Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson in his article 
"Phantasms of the Dead" affirms that personal knowledge 
firmly convinces him of the existence of such phantasms, 
especially where crime has been committed. Examin- 
ing various plausible explanations for this, he concludes 
that the most satisfactory to him at present is: that 
an extraordinarily intense emotional storm involving 
two persons takes place, and that material objects 
of the room receive impressions which at times are 

given off to those of a receptive disposition. "The 

Fortunes of Civilization," is a review of Prof. Flin- 
ders Petrie's " Revolutions of Civilization " by Canon 
William Barry. Archsejlogical researches in Egypt in- 



844 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

dicate that in "periods" of about 1350 years civiliza- 
tion would ascend, reach the " Golden Age," maintain 
this about half a century, then fall into gradual decay 
the process to be repeated in each period. He com- 
ments on Professor Petrie's deduction that maximum 
wealth will eventually lead to downfall, saying that 
religious influence is overlooked by Professor Petrie and 
that, since decline is arrested to greater extent in the 
late periods, sound religion alone seems to preserve 
cirilized order, arrest its decay and give it permanence. 

Discussing the "Anti-Clerical Policy in Portugal" 

Father Camillo Torrend, SJ. analyzes the state of pop- 
ular feeling against the present government due to its 
attempts to erase all religion and especially the Catholic, 
from Portugal. The inevitable result must be either a 
return to the Royalist government or the establishment 
of another Republic of a different kind. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Feb.) : " Repetition of Extreme 
Unction and the Last Blessing," by Rev. T. Dunne, 
C.C. After examining legislation and authorities on the 
subject, the Reverend author, sets down the following 
conclusions as safe practice: ist. The mere lapse of 
time, -viz., a month, does not in itself justify re-anoint- 
ing in a long illness. Some inquiry should be made as to 
any change in the illness. If there is a reasonable doubt 
against recovery and a relapse has taken place, Extreme 
Unction may be administered after about a month. If it 
is morally certain that the patient has escaped the danger 
and relapsed, he may be re-anointed even after a shorter 
interval, viz., a week. In neither case is there an obli- 
gation to do so. If there is no substantial change in 
the illness even after the lapse of a month or more, it is 

not lawful to re-anoint. "Mr. Well's Scepticism," by 

C. Harrison. An examination and criticism of Mr. H. G. 
Well's first principles, in matters scientific and theo- 
logical, as stated in his work, First and Last Things. 

"The 'Catholicism' of St. Augustine," by Rev. 

W. B. O'Dowd. The author charges the editor of A 
Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (Lon- 
don: John Murray, 1911), with having failed to carry 
out in the work, the unbiased and objective treatment 



i9i2.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 845 

of debatable questions, that the Preface would lead one 
to expect. He takes exception particularly to the con- 
tribution on " St. Augustine." 

Revue du Clerge Fratifais (15 Jan.): A. Boudinhon writes of 
" The New Arrangement of the Psalter in the Roman 

Breviary." E. B. Allo contributes " Some Words on 

' Scientific Liberty ' and the Study of the Beginning of 
Christianity." G. G. Lapeyne chronicles "The Re- 
ligious Movement in the German speaking Countries." 
He considers the Catholic Congress of Mainz, the Anti- 
modernist oath, also the growth of Pantheistic belief 

among the liberal Protestants. "Literature in the 

Making," by E. Evrard, is concerned chiefly with the 
drama, in particular the late works of Bernstein, Mae- 
terlinck, and others. A. Bouyssonie writes "Apropos 

of the Philosophic Conditions of Evolution." 

Etudes (5 Jan.): A selection from the second volume of Fer- 
dinand Prat's "Theology of St. Paul." It deals with 
the pre-existence of Christ, the titles Lord and Son of 
God, the applying to Him of strict doxologies offered 
only to God, and the relation of the two natures. 
Jean Rimaud praises the attempt of de Vogue to inter- 
pret Russian literature to the French. His style and 

critical powers are said to be of the highest order. 

Charles Auzias-Turenne describes the work of The In- 
ternational Catholic Association for the Protection of 
Young Girls. In 1909 almost 300,000 were cared for 
and 34,000 assisted at railroad stations. The Associa- 
tion joins in neutral and mixed congresses where relig- 
ion is not excluded and its own Catholic character is 
recognized. Thus far the faithful have not generally 
awoke to the importance of this preventive work. 

Gabriel Huvelin expresses dissatisfaction at the ease 

with which Dr. A. Allgeier overthrows the hypothesis 

of double narratives in the book of Genesis. The 

strained financial and dogmatic conditions of French 
Protestantism are described by Paul Dudon. Candi- 
dates for the ministry are becoming fewer; the synod 
of Montauban leaves the eligibility of women to the 
discretion of each church. The conviction of M. Jatho 
at Cologne last year has renewed the controversy as to 



846 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

what authority in the Protestant Church can convict a 
pastor of heresy and depose him. 

Le Correspondent (10 Jan.): "To Joan of Arc," is a poem by 
George Rollin, commemorating the fifth centenary of 

her birth, January 6, 1912 "Berryer and Lammen- 

ais," by Augustus Boucher, presents the correspondence 
of Berryer with Lammenais, affording a character study 

of the former. " A Great English Novelist," by M. 

De Teincey treats of the works of Robert Hugh Benson 

and his conversion to Catholicity. "The Belgian 

Army," by General Maitrot describes the Belgian Army 
as it is, and what it is capable of becoming, if certain 
conditions are remedied. "The Reform of the Gram- 
mar," by Noel Aymes describes the movement under 

way for simplifying the French Grammar. " The 

Popular Song in Alsace," by J. F. Regamey describes 
the character of songs which appeal to the popular 
fancy, giving their text in full. 

(25 Jan.): George Blondel writes on "The Reichstag 
Elections." "Many of those who are not Socialists," 

he says, "seem to prefer ' red ' to 'black.'" "The 

Triumph of Dickens" is a sympathetic appreciation by 
Head Bremond. "His great charm was that he makes 

us laugh with, not at, his characters." Edouard Cha- 

puisat publishes for the first time some letters that 
passed between Mme. Necker and Gibbon. They show 
how much in earnest Gibbon was in desiring to marry her. 

Revue Benedictine (Jan.): Dom Morin gives an unpublished 
treatise of St. Pacian, Bishop of Barcelona. The doc- 
ument is entitled, " De Similitudine Carnis Peccati," and 
dates from the fourth century; it was used by the au- 
thors of the Adoptionist heresy, who attributed it to 

St. Jerome. "A Greek Formulary of the Epiphany," 

by Dom P. de Puniet. This formulary is used in all 
the Oriental Churches on the Epiphany or on its vigil. 

"The Auxiliary Bishops of Liege" is the title of a 

paper by Dom Berliere. It was not till the eighteenth 
century that auxiliary bishops, in the true sense, origi- 
nated. However, as early as the tenth century, there 
were prelates exercising the functions of coadjutors, but 
it was usually a case of personal service, for a short 
time, to the regular diocesan bishop. 



.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 847 

Revue Pratique D ' Apolog'etique (15 Jan.): "The Old and the 
New Testaments," by H. Lesetre. The article is a con- 
sideration of the two Testaments from three points of 
view: viz., dogma, moral and their spirit. The New 
Testament is a completion and perfection of the truths 
contained in the Old Law. As to the moral teaching 
of the Old Testament, it always commanded the obedi- 
ence, respect, worship and love of Jehovah. But it 
tolerated slavery, polygamy, divorce. Jesus Christ, 
condemned not only exaggerations of the doctors, but 
annulled certain concessions of the Old Law and led 
back morality to its primitive purity. " Some Theol- 
ogy Upon the Passion of Our Savior," by J. Riviere. 
Three questions are considered : What were the suffer- 
ings of Christ ? What was their purpose ? What is 
the secret of their redemptive ralue ? 
(i Feb.): "The Principle of the Neutral School," by 
Vique, is a chapter of a volume, soon to appear, with 
the title: "Natural Rights and Christian Rights in 
Education." The neutral school is presented by the 
author as atheistic, because it is practically directed on 

the supposition that God does not exist. "Apology 

for Christianity by the Law of Division of Moral Cus- 
toms," by J. Ferchat. This article too, is an extract 
from a study (soon to be published) of the work of 
Henry Bordeaux. Bordeaux, in " Pelerinages Litte- 
raires," gives the life of M. Paul Bourget. Ferchat 
thinks Bordeaux inaccurate in his reference to Bour- 
get's attitude to Christianity. A private letter is the 

basis of Ferchat's correction. X. Moisant contrasts 

"Scholastic and Modern Psychology." While opposed 
to each other on several grounds, the opposition need 
not endure. There is hope of an ultimate union. 

Biblische Zeitsckrift (Feb.): "The Old Canaanitic Sanctuary in 
Gezer," by Dr. Evaristus Mader, discusses the results 

of the English Excavations in Gezer. "The Divine 

Name Jehova in Cuneiform Inscriptions," by Dr. Lan- 
dersdorfer, O.S.B. The writer says there can be no 
doubt that the Divine Name in question was used 
among the Semites long before the time of Moses. 



IRecent Events* 

The recent crisis through which 

France. France has passed is one of the 

most remarkable of the many 

which she has experienced. The last government in its negotia- 
tion with Germany was found not to have safeguarded the best 
interests of the nation, and in consequence the nation speedily 
visited it with condign punishment. M. Caillaux, the late 
Premier, while he was acting as Minister of Finance in the 
Cabinet of M. Monis had sent secret emissaries to Berlin and 
had even suggested the cession to Germany of a large piece 
of the French Congo. He had also mooted the question of 
admitting German stock to quotation on the Paris Bourse a 
thing for which Germany has been longing for many years. 
These proceedings were unknown to most of the colleagues of 
M. Caillaux, both in the Cabinet of M. Monis, and in his 
own, and, of course, to the nation at large. He had assumed 
to himself the rights of a monarch, without either bis powers 
or his duties. And yet when questioned on the subject be- 
fore the Senate Committee, M. Caillaux gave his word of 
honor that there had been no secret negotiations. Convicted 
of falsehood, he could not but resign, although not without 
hesitation. But that France should have been placed in the 
hands of a man of this stamp, affords matter for serious re- 
flection. The firm attitude of the nation as a whole was in 
marked contrast with the vacillation and weakness, and, it 
must be added, treachery of the ex-Premier; for he was con- 
trolled or influenced by certain financial interests. It is even 
said that in the scope of the secret negotiations carried on 
by the Prime Minister, was the conclusion of a general under- 
standing with Germany, an understanding which would have 
involved as its price the acquiesence of France in the loss of 
Alsace and Lorraine, and the break-up of the Triple Entente. 
M. Caillaux, although full of denials, did not dare to face the 
Assembly, and resigned in disgrace. 

The new Cabinet that has been formed, with M. Raymond 
Poincare as Prime Minister, is one of remarkable strength. 
With one exception all its members have held office before, 
and two have been Prime Ministers. They belong to every 
section of the Republican Party : the Prime Minister and an- 



i9i a.] RECENT EVENTS 849 

other are members of the Republican Union, which represents 
moderate Republicanism in the Senate : the Democratic Left, 
the Socialist- Radicals, and the Radical Left, are all represented, 
while there are three Independent Socialists. Whether the 
very strength of the Cabinet may not prove a source of weak- 
ness, time alone will prove. Its programme of measures in- 
cludes, after the ratification of the Agreement with Germany 
and the Budget for 1912, the long-talked-cf return to the 
scrutin de liste and the adoption of proportional representa- 
tion ; the measure for regulating the status of officials; and 
the personal income tax. The secular fchcol (I'ecole laiqve) 
is to be maintained and defended against the attacks that 
have been directed against it. At the same time liberty of 
conscience is to be maintained. This is understood to mean 
that no secular or religious proselytism will be allowed. The 
army and the navy are to be the object of attentive solici- 
tude as they are the sacred (so it is said) bulwarks of the 
Republic and the country. The alliances and friendships al- 
ready existing are to be faithfully maintained. 

The first act of M. Briand, on his return to the Ministry 
of Justice, was to give a free pardon to the Camclot du Rti 
who had been sentenced to three years' imprisonment for the 
assault upon M. Briand in November, 1910. 

The organization of the new acquisition of France for 
such it may be termed has been taken in hand. A Commis- 
sion has been formed to settle the details of the Protectorate 
over Morocco, which the Agreement with Germany renders 
feasible. Difficult negotiations, however, have to be conducted 
with Spain, which sees in the new Agreement the end of am- 
bitions cherished for many years to secure to herself the re- 
version of the country. The secret Treaty between France and 
Spain, made in 1904, gives to the latter a larger zone and 
greater rights than was agreeable to many in France. But 
there seems now to be a general desire to deal fairly in the 
matter; and consequently there is every prospect of a satis- 
factory settlement of the question. 

The first difficulty which confronted the new government 
was the action of Italy in seizing three ships for carrying 
what was alleged to be contraband of war. The Prime Min- 
ister, M. Poincare", who is also Minister for Foreign Affairs, 
dealt with the matter in a way at once firm and conciliatory, 
vox,, xciv. 54 



RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

and consequently a question, which for a few days caused 
some anxiety, was satisfactorily settled. This settlement was 
reached through having recourse to the Hague Tribunal, and 
thus forms a new example of the usefulness of that Court. 
It also affords a proof that recent events however disap- 
pointing they may have been have not altogether put an end 
to the movement in favor of the settlement of disputes by 
arbitration. Now that the agreement with Germany has been 
ratified, although on the part of many with resignation rather 
than satisfaction, far less, if any, apprehension exists with 
refereace to foreign relations. More attention therefore can 
be given to internal affairs. Among these the increase of 
crime holds a prominent place. Every rank seems to show 
signs of deterioration. The higher political circles, as shown 
in the recent underhand dealings of the chief minister, and in 
the making of secret treaties and the appending of secret 
articles to public treaties, have gone far to undermine confi- 
dence in those who are placed in power. A recent trial in 
which the wife of one of the nobles confessed that she had 
induced her son to shoot her husband and his own father, had 
supervised his training for the purpose, shows how far in these 
ranks the progress of evil has gone. While, if we go lower, 
so great a number of crimes has been committed that the 
mind of the public is becoming seriously alarmed. A special 
reference had to be made to this matter in the programme of 
the new ministry. 

The chief reason for the change in the method of election 
which is to be one of the first works of the new Ministry, is 
the desire to find a remedy for the growing corruption of the 
members of the Assembly. Larger constituencies, it is hoped, 
will offer fewer opportunities for unworthy practices. On the 
other hand, less is heard of sabotage and the outrages which 
were recently so common. It is to be hoped that the prem- 
ised bill to regulate the status of civil officials, will altogether 
prevent the occurrence of such outrages. 

In January the elections took place for the Senate. This 
body is renewed by thirds, one election taking place in every 
three years. The outgoing Senators were 96 in number, and 
included 6 Conservatives, 23 Progressives, 13 Members of the 
Democratic Left, 20 Radicals, 32 Socialist- Radicals and 2 
Socialists. No issues of first-rate importance were raised. 



1912.] RECENT EVENTS 851 

The appeal is not made directly to the people, but indirectly 
to the Departmental Electoral Colleges. The result showed 
no material change. The Conservatives returned, numbered 5 ; 
the Progressives, 23 ; Democrats, 20 ; Radicals and Socialist- 
Radicals, 48; and Socialists, 4. Among those re-elected, but 
with a reduced majority, was M. Combes. The Radicals lost 
4 seats, and in a large number of places, the candidates of this 
party were defeated. Those who succeeded did so by virtue 
of the greater moderation of their views. If anything can be 
inferred from the results, it is a slight tendency to strengthen 
the moderate Republicanism which is characteristic of the 
Senate. The sanguine expectation of victory entertained by 
the Socialists was not fulfilled. 

The General Election for the 
Germany. Reichstag, which has just taken 

place, is of course, the most im- 
portant of recent occurrences in Germany, although as the 
government is not directly under the control of Parliament, 
its effect, while real, will be rather negative than positive; that 
is to say, the majority can prevent the proposal of the gov- 
ernment from becoming law, but cannot make any laws to 
which the government is opposed, or even turn out the Min- 
istry or any member of it. The most striking result of the 
election is the enormous increase in cumber of the Social 
Democrats. One in every three of the electors in the Empire 
belongs to that party, or at least, is willing to vote in sup- 
port of it. The following table gives the strength of the 
numerous parties in the new Reichstag, the figures in brackets 
showing their respective strength at the date of dissolution: 

Socialists no [53] 

National Liberals 44 [51] 

Radicals 46 [49] 

Centre 93 [103] 

Conservatives ....... 43 [58] 

Free Conservatives 13 [25] 

Poles .19 [20] 

Anti-Semites 14 [20] 

Alsatians, Guelphs, Danes and Independents . 15 [17] 

It will be seen that the Socialist Democrats have more than 



RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

doubled ia number; that the Catholic Centre, which has up 
to the present been the largest single party, is now in the 
second place, and has lost ten seats; while the Conservatives 
have lost 27. What was called the Blue-Black Bloc, from which 
the government found support in the last Reichstag, is now 
almost exactly balanced by the parties of the Left. 

Many causes are given for the amazing triumph of the 
Socialists. Perhaps the most influential was the fact that, when 
fresh taxation was imposed a few years ago, the Conservatives, 
aided and abetted to a certain extent by the Centre, defeated 
the proposal of the government to place a fair share of the 
burden upon the landed proprietors. This led to the imposi- 
tion upon the working-classes of a burden that was unjust, 
even in the judgment of a Conservative Ministry. Keen 
resentment has been felt ever since, and the recent election 
has given an opportunity for its manifestation. 

One good feature of the victory of the Social Democrats 
is the fact that as a body they are strongly in favor of peace. 
All the weight of their influence will be thrown on that side; 
and, even in Germany, a third of the electorate cannot be 
totally ignored by those in power. 

The career ef Count Aehrenthal 

Austria-Hungary. has closed in the midst of an ex- 

cited controversy and of strong 

opposition to his recent policy. Intense hostility exists in 
Austria to Italy, especially in the army. In these circle?, for 
many years past Italy has been publicly designated as the 
enemy. Since the war in Tripoli began, earnest efforts have 
been made to bring on a war, on the pretext that Italy in- 
tended to attack Austria as soon as she had secured her 
possession of Tripoli. Count Aehrenthal, supported by the 
Emperor, set his face resolutely against this agitation, and 
thereby incurred the enmity of all who wished for war. It is 
somewhat strange that having begun his official career by 
taking a step which all but led to a European war, he should 
have ended it as a supporter of peace. 

The successor of Count Aehrenthal at the Foreign Office, 
Count von Berchthold, is generally considered to be tbe man 
best fitted for the post. He has had a long diplomatic career, 
and is thought to have strong leanings to Russia. If this is 



RECENT EVENTS 853 

so, it may well happen that better relations between the two 
countries may be established. Whether this will be to the 
advantage of their neighbors there are some who will have 
grave doubts. 

After more than three months of 
Italy. warfare in Tripoli, the Italians 

find themselves in the occupation 

of a number of places upon the sea-coast; but not in the 
peaceful possession of any one of them. Behind the oasis of 
Tripoli, an advanced post, it is true, has been secured some 
fifteen or twenty miles inland; but this has not prevented 
the Turks and Arabs from making quite recently an attack 
upon Tripoli itself. There are at least 92,000 Italian soldiers, 
and yet they are for the most part on the defensive. With 
the smallest of means, cut off, too, from Turkey and the sea- 
coast, the 8,000 or so Turks with the allied Arabs have sur- 
prised the world by the activity which they have displayed 
and their success in resisting the Italian attack. They, too, 
in their turn have horrified the world by the barbarity of the 
treatment meted out to the Italian soldiers who fell into their 
hands. Mutilation is only a minor atrocity ; for in some cases 
the prisoners have been crucified with the accompaniment of 
unmentionable barbarities. It is in this way that reprisals have 
been taken for the wholesale massacres of which the Italian 
troops in the beginning were guilty. The rest of the world 
has a right to express its condemnation of both a right 
which Italians are precluded by their own bad conduct from 
exercising. What they did was by the order of the com- 
manding officer, and he has not been removed. The common 
soldiers may, therefore, be acquitted of responsibility. This 
falls in its full weight upon the government. 

How retrograde this government has proved itself, all the 
circumstances of this war have made clear. A large number 
of the leading jurists of the world have issued a public pro- 
test against the attack upon Tripoli, based upon purely jurid- 
ical and legal grounds. In this protest the signers declare 
their conviction that the attack was inconsistent with national 
good faith, and calculated to throw discredit on treaties, and 
on the beneficent progress of arrangements for the peaceful 
settlement of disputes. Many Italians, as individuals, have dis- 
tinguished themselves as supporters of this movement. It is 



854 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

the present government that has counteracted these efforts. 
This protest is signed by men of great distinction belonging 
to nearly every country of Europe, as well as to our own 
country, Egypt, Canada, and Australia. They may be laughed 
at now, when, whatever may be said to the contrary, the 
worship of might is so strong, but in the long run the method 
they advocate will prove successful. 

As the war has gone on the expenses have grown, and the 
$12,000,000 a month which were thought at the beginning to 
be sufficient, when there were only 30,000 men in Tripoli, will 
not suffice for the 92,000 men that are there now. It would 
not be an unjust punishment if Italy, for moral delirquency, 
were to be landed in financial bankruptcy. A certain tension 
of mind seems to be indicated by the seizure of three French 
vessels by the Italian. In the first an aeroplane was seized on 
the ground, which proved to be quite unjustified, that it was 
going to be used by the Turks. In the second, twenty- nine 
members of the Turkish Red Crescent were taken from a 
French vessel, which had sailed from a French port and was 
on the way to another French port. For the third case, there 
was even less excuse, for the vessel was a coasting steamer 
sailing within French waters. Strong feelings of resentment 
were manifested throughout the length and breadth of France 
by all its various political parties, including even the Socialists. 
This is all the more remarkable, for of all the principal coun- 
tries, France has been the one in which the conduct of Italy 
in declaring the war met with the least unfavorable criticism. 
But when her own honor, as was thought, was involved, no 
quarter was shown to the offender. There was, of course, no 
question of war, bat so strong were the representations that 
were made that Italy gave up to France the twenty-nine pris- 
oners, and consented to refer certain questions of international 
law to The Hague Tribunal for adjudication. 

Italy's attempt to take possession 

Turkey. of Tripoli, rendered it necessaiy 

for the Committee of Union and 

Progress, the power of which had been waning, to put forth 
redoubled efforts to retain its influence. The usual effect of 
an external foe, is to bring about an alliance between contend- 
ing factions at home. By this the Committee strove to profit, 



I9i2.] RECENT EVENTS 855 

and to a certain extent it has succeeded. The new Ministry 
is said to be more under its domination than was the one 
which has just fallen. A strong opposition has however de- 
veloped. A new party has been formed, which aims at really 
effecting the reforms which were promised when the Constitu- 
tional regime was inaugurated promises, which the government 
has hitherto so grossly violated. This party has taken to itself 
the name of Union and Liberty. While repudiating any pro- 
ject to grant autonomy to the various nationalities subject to 
the rule of the Ottomans, its action will be in the direction 
of decentralization. It proposes to give more extensive powers 
to the provincial councils. Instead of aiming at Ottomanizicg 
the various races, in the way that the government has recently 
been attempting, the new party professes its readiness to 
guarantee to the non-Moslem communities all the privileges 
which they have enjoyed under Imperial irades, firmans and 
Berats. Although still in a minority the new Party is large 
enough to have an influence upon the course of events, num- 
bering as it does, some sixty members who are Turks, and 
having as allies the Greek members as well as most of the 
Albanians the Armenians being doubtful. 

The methods of governing adopted by the Committee of 
Union and Progress have led to the revival of all the evils 
which have for so many years made the Balkans a perennial 
centre of danger. The necessity of protecting themselves frr m 
massacre and robbery has led to the re-organization of the 
armed bands of Bulgarians. These bands live by brigand- 
age, and perpetrate outrages almost as bad as those of the 
Turkish soldiers, and of the Moslem bands which have been 
in existence ever since the inauguration of the new regime. 
These bands have been guilty of the murder of large cumbers 
of Greek and Bulgarian notables, and in no instance have the 
perpetrators of these crimes been brought to justice. The 
Young Turks, of set purpose, sent to destruction any per- 
son who might be fitted to be a leader of the Christian com- 
munities. Their fate was shared by some Moslems who were 
opposed to the Committee. In consequence, the state of in- 
security in Macedonia is so great that in many parts the 
peasants fear to leave their homes, and seldom venture to 
visit the market towns except in caravans of 20 or 30 persons. 

In Northern Albania, and in other parts of Albania, mur- 



856 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

der and pillage are universal. Macedonia is in a state of an- 
archy, old inhabitants declaring that the existing conditions 
are without parallel, even in the worst days of the Hamidian 
regime. Yet the Powers, both those near-by and those at a 
distance, look calmly on, and do not make even a verbal pro- 
test. They are active enough to protect their merely material 
interests, or to seek an extension of territory ; but the cry of 
the oppressed falls upon ears that are deaf. It may, however, 
well be that their hands will be forced. The whole of Mace- 
donia, from the ^Egean to the Adriatic, is ripe for rebellion. 
If the war with Italy is not brought to an end before the win- 
ter is over, it is not thought to be possible that an outbreak 
will be averted. In this event, no one can tell what will be 
the consequences. Italy has so far refrained from taking any 
action against the Turks in the Balkans, but the poor success 
of her attack upon Tripoli may lead her to assail Turkey in 
a more vulnerable part. This will not be agreeable either to 
Austria or to Russia. Hence every effort is being made to 
bring the war to a close by diplomacy; so far, however, little 
success has attended these efforts. 

The first Parliament elected under the revived Constitution 
has been dissolved, and elections for a new Parliament are 
imminent. The premature dissolution was due to the desire 
of the Committee of Union and Progress to have the power 
to make the elections in the way so common upon the Conti- 
nent among the Latin races. It is curious to note that the 
Senate was induced to consent to the dissolution in order to 
avoid the creation by the Sultan of a sufficient number of 
Senators, for the purpose of securing that consent almost the 
youngest of the Upper Houses of Parliament being subjected 
to the same kind of coercion as that to which the British 
House of Lords has had to submit. Young Turks and British 
Ridicals have shown themselves willing to adopt similar meas 
ures to secure their respective ends. 

During the four years of its existence the Parliament, al- 
though it has by no means realized the hopes which were 
at first entertained, has done a certain amount of useful legis- 
lative work; it has manifested a desire to secure the economical 
administration of the finances. In a country whers formerly 
no voice of criticism was tolerated, the representatives of the 
subject races have been allowed to ventilate their grievances, 



I 9 I1.] RECENT EVENTS 857 

although, indeed, to very little effect. The Committee of 
Union and Progress the "irresponsible junta," which has 
for the past three years controlled the destinies of the Otto- 
man Empire has been able to frustrate every real improve- 
ment. Bat Rome was not built in one day, and, although 
pessimism in regard to the future is predominant, the hope 
that good will spring from the possession of even a small de- 
gree of liberty may still be cherished. In one respect, but 
that a sordid oe, the Young Turks have done good work. 
The present condition of financial affairs is more promising 
than it was under Abdul Hamid. The interests of the bond- 
holders have been safeguarded, and that is more important 
in the eyes of modern Europe than the interests of morality, 
religion, or humanity. Trade has slowly but surely developed, 
the Customs receipts have increased, the general resources 
of the Empire have been materially strengthened by improved 
administration. On the other hand, the amount spent upon 
the army in consequence of the attempts to suppress local 
privileges and the various uprisings that have followed upon 
these attempts, has greatly increased. In fact, more than one- 
third of the expenditure is for the army, while almost another 
third is devoted to the service of the debt. The war with 
Italy, so far, has cost very little. Still further reforms are 
necessary, such is the affirmation of financial experts, and upon 
those reforms, they say, depends the future of the Empire. 

All efforts to save Mr. Shuster 
Persia. were unsuccessful ; the opposition 

of Russia was too strong. As his 

successor, it is proposed to appoint a Belgian who had been 
one of his most active opponents. This appointment, if made 
permanent, would be looked upon as a triumph of the elements 
that are opposed to real financial reform. It is said that M. 
Mornard received the support of the British Government as 
well as that of the Russian. This shows how difficult in poli- 
tics as well as in morals is the pursuit of the right course. 
In some cases there seems nothing to do but choose the 
lesser of two evils. If Great Britain had simply in view the 
well-being of Persia, she would doubtless have given full sup- 
port to Mr. Shuster. But the common action with Russia in 
Europe was felt to be more important, and the interests of 
Persia had to be sacrificed. 



858 RECENT EVENTS [Mar. 

It is right, however, to say that Russia disclaims all pur- 
pose to annex Northern Persia. Her troops have not ad- 
vanced to Teheran; nor do those of her troops in Persia number 
more than 8,coo too few to seize upon the country as a 
whole ; too many, however, to be there at all, if the Persians 
are to be fully reassured. The accounts of the conduct of 
the Russian troops at Tabriz are said to have been much ex- 
aggerated. They acted in self-defense, and for the punish- 
ment of the treacherous conduct of a tribe. 

Mr. Shuster has not abandoned the cause of Persia, al- 
though he has been forced to give up his office and to leave 
the country. He has addressed a large and influential meeting 
in London where there are many supporters of Persia's cause. 
A public opinion may be formed which will force upon the 
government a change of attitude. 

The project of a railway to connect Russia and India 
through Persian territory, which was mooted some time ago, 
seems likely to be realized. The raising of the capital has 
been practically arranged. A Socie'te' d'fitudes is on the point 
of being formed to make a detailed survey for the line and to 
obtain from Persia the necessary concession. 

The United States have all at once 
China. ceased to be the largest Republic 

in the world. The oldest of ab- 
solutist monarchies, at the close of the 48th year of the 
76th cycle of the Chinese era (each cycle comprising 60 
years) has discovered that the republican is the best form of 
government. In order that the 400,000,000 of their subjects 
may be put into the possession of the best, with great self- 
sacrifice (although not without certain compensations), and after 
considerable hesitation (not altogether proprio tnotu), the Manchu 
dynasty has given in its abdication. Yuan Shih-kai has been 
made the first President with the duty of organizing a Re- 
public on certain definite lines. The space at our disposal 
does not permit a satisfactory exposition either of what led 
up to this momentous change or of its precise character. But 
the fact that it is largely due to the influence of this country, 
in the universities of which so many Chinese have been edu- 
cated made it necessary to make this very brief reference. 



With Our Readers 

"THE WEARIN' O' THE GREEN."" 

(WRITTBN BY LIONEL JOHNSON, JULY 30, IQOO). 

IRELAND was discovered by Mr. Alfred Austin In the spring of 
1 1894 ; In the autumn of the following year he went back to verify 
his discovery. He found nothing to modify his first experiences and 
impressions and conclusions ; in this little work he proclaims urbi et 
orbi, from the summit of Parnassus (orbis, of course, means the Brit- 
ish Empire, to the exclusion of all such " verminous nations," as 
Dickens has it, as may exist elsewhere) that Ireland is beautiful, 
that the Irish are charming, and that the Poet laureate of England 
has said so. A great day for Ireland 1 

At the close of his book, Mr. Austin drops into verse; and it 
conjures up before our Imagination the beautiful spectacle of the 
Poet laureate, with his arm round Ireland's waist, murmuring into 
her enamoured ear an imperialist Song of England. He writes with 
excellent Intentions ; and he would doubtless be surprised to know 
that his pretty, sympathetic, prattling pages must seem to the ma- 
jority of Irishmen but the last example of English literary condescen- 
sion towards Ireland. It Is an example, all unconsciously, of that 
English frame of mind which exasperates Ireland by Us superior 
patronage. Mr. Austin's predecessor, in ' ' the wearing of the green ' ' 
laurel, Edmund Spenser, wrote in his famous-infamous Irish treat- 
ise his frank conviction of Irish savagery ; to the Elizabethan Eng- 
lishman the " wild Irish " were as "niggers." And the tradition 
of Irish Inherent Inferiority has prevailed, and is, even where un- 
favored or repudiated, in force to-day. 

" Kindness " to Ireland is indeed the present shibboleth both of 
Liberal and Conservative, but it Is a kindness bred of pity, or fear, 
or weariness of importunity, rather than that courtesy of recognition 
which one country should accord to another. Ireland has a natural 
objection to the fire and sword, starvation and eviction and depopula- 
tion, by which the neighboring Island has so often and so long ex- 
pressed its sentiments towards her ; but the fashionable latter-day 
English smiles and pretty speeches and blarney are vastly irritating 
also. Boswell, in his Corsican Journal, relates a story of an Irish 
officer In the Neapolitan service : 

It is with pleasure that I record an anecdote so much to the honor of a 
gentleman ot that nation, on which illiberal reflections are too often thrown, 
by those of whom it little deserves them. Whatever may be the rough jokes 
Spring and Autumn in Ireland." By Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate. (London : Black- 
wood, y. 6rf.) 



86o WITH OUR READERS [Mar., 

of wealthy insolence, or the envious sarcasms of needy jealousy, the Irish 
have ever been, and will continue to be, highly regarded upon the Continent. 

Needless to say, we get from Mr. Austin neither " rough jokes" 
nor " envious sarcasms " ; but his air of adventure, his ever latent, 
often patent, sense of having done something remarkable in unearth- 
ing really fine qualities in these strange " natives " and their coun- 
try, will amuse or anger the Irish reader, according to his tempera- 
ment. There are certain words written by an Englishman, a Tory 
of Tories, which the English visitor to Ireland would do well to bear 
in mind ; they are the words of Cardinal Newman : 

He does not at first recollect, as he ought to recollect, that he comes 
among the Irish people as the representative of persons, and actions, and 
catastrophes, which is not pleasant to any one to think about; that he is re- 
sponsible for the deeds of his forefathers, and of his contemporary Parlia 
ments and Executive; that he is one of a strong, unscrupulous, tyrannous 
race, standing upon the soil of the injured. He does not bear in mind that 
it is as easy to forget injuring as it is difficult to forget being injured. He 
does not admit, even in his imagination, the judgment and the sentence 
which the past history of Erin sternly pronounces upon him. He has to be 
recalled to himself, and to be taught by what he hears around him, that an 
Englishman has no right to open his heart, and indulge his honest affection 
towards the Irish race, as if nothing had happened between him and them. 

Mr. Austin has glimpses of the truth in Newman's stern words ; 
but light, airy, vague glimpses. " Really, you know, we English 
must not judge these queer people by ourselves. For one thing, 
they have not had our advantages ; and then, we have not always 
treated them very well. Let us take them under our wing, and be a 
motherly elder sister to them, and give them a few sweetmeats, and 
all will go right." These are not Mr. Austin's words, but they 
express his feelings. And in one delightful sentence, he surpasses 
himself : 

Irish ideas are not always the same as English ideas. But in so far as 
they do not conflict with the moral law, or with the fundamental Consti- 
tution of the Realm, they surely are deserving of consideration in Ireland. 

Every word of this is priceless; the " moral law," the kindly 
pleading "surely," the culminating " in Ireland." Could an 
Irishman upon the scaffold help laughing ? Does not this go far to 
justify the foreign critic of John Bull and his endearing ways? 
Not all Mr. Austin's happiest pages, and they are many, upon the 
natural beauty of Ireland and the various charm of Irish character, 
can make that anything but a ludicrous and appalling new revela- 
tion to Irishmen, of the English temperament upon its least admir- 
able side. And, obviously, the worst of it is that the writer so evi- 
dently wrote with a kind intention. We are reminded of a passage 



19 1 2.] WITH OUR READERS 86 1 

in Mr. Stevenson's Wrecker, An Englishman mistakes an Ameri- 
can for an Englishman. Upon learning his mistake, 

He seemed the least bit taken aback, but recovered himself; and with 
the ready tact of his betters paid me the usual British compliment on the 
riposte. "You don't say so," he exclaimed; "well, I give you my word of 
honor I'd never have guessed it. Nobody could tell it on you," said he, as 
though it were some form of liquor. I thanked him, as I always do, at this 
particular stage, with his compatriots; not so much, perhaps, for the com- 
pliment to myself and my poor country, as for the revelation (which is ever 
fresh to me) of Britannic self-sufficiency and taste. 

But at least Mr. Austin's praises of Irish scenery, are unstinted 
and cordial. His prose and his verse are alike at their best when 
he treats of nature, and though he modestly declares that " to por- 
tray scenery by language is not possible," he here goes some way 
towards disproving his declaration. Here is part of his tribute to 
Killarney, which Shelley ranked with Como : 

The tender grace of wood and water is set in a framework of hills, now 
stern, now ineffably gentle, now dimpling with smiles, now frowning and 
rugged with impending storm, now muffled and mysterious with mist, only 
to gaze out at you again with clear and candid sunshine. Here the trout 
leaps, there the eagle soars, and there beyond, the wild deer dash through 
the arbutus coverts, through which they had come to the margin of the lake 
to drink, and scared by your footstep or your ar, are away back to cro- 
siered bracken or heather-covered moor-land. But the first, the final, the 
deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney, is that of beauty un- 
speakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of graudeur and a look f 
awe only in order to heighten, by passing contrast, the sense of soft insinu- 
ating loveliness. How the missel-thrushes sing, as well they may! How 
the streams and runnels gurgle and leap and laugh ! For the sound of jour- 
neying water is never out of your ears, the feeling of the moist, the fresh, 
the vernal, never out of your heart. 

Ah, Mr. Austin ! that is worth a thousand insinuations about 
the liability of " Irish ideas " to flout " the moral law ! " Did not 
Sir John Davies, Attorney- General of Ireland to the Scottish Solo- 
mon, conclude his memorable " Discoverie of the True Causes why 
Ireland was never entirely Subdued, nor brought under Obedience 
of the Crowne of England until the Beginning of His Maiesties 
happie Raigne," in these words ? 

There is no Nation of people under the sunne, that doth love equal and 
indifferent Justice better than the Irish ; or will rest better satisfied with the 
execution thereof, although it bee against themselves; so as they may have 
the benefit and protection of the Law, when uppon just cause they may 
desire it. Finis. 

Mr. Austin would have given us a better book, if he had alto- 



862 WITH OUR READERS [Mar., 

gather merged the partisan politician in the nature-loving poet, and 
dwelled wholly upon the one fact about the " disthressful coun- 
thry," which no one denies, that she is beautiful. Like Filicaia's 
Italy, Ireland has the dono infelice di bellezza, and therefore she has 
also had the funesta dote d'infiniii %uai. It is something, that the 
Poet laureate of England acknowledges the bellezza in terms so 
felicitous and enthusiastic. The " brave and gifted Irish people," 
to whom he "tenders" his volume, will accept with pleasure a 

goodly part of it. 

9 

OUR readers will learn with regret of the sudden death, at Pouch 
Cove, Newfoundland, on January 27, of the Rev. Edward 
F. Curran. Father Curran was a contributor to THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD. His able study of the work of Joseph Conrad met with 
the highest praise from those best able to judge. His versatility 
and critical acumen were plainly shown by the book reviews which 
he contributed to THE CATHOLIC WORLD. Many of the pages of 
that department for the last three years were from his pen. 

Father Curran was educated at St. Bonaventure's College, St. 
John's, Newfoundland ; Holy Cross College, Dublin, and at the 
Canadian College in Rome. He was a man who never lost his first 
zeal, and who always remembered that success should never mean 
any lowering of the standard of perfect work. Christian cheerful- 
ness characterized him. A rare humility aided and guided him. 
Death cut short a career that would have contributed much, not only 
to the welfare of the souls among whom he labored directly, but 
also to the welfare of the Church throughout the English-speaking 
world. 

In zeal for the Catholic faith, for the apostolate of the Catholic 
press, for the spread of healthy, upright, literary standards, Father 
Curran was indefatigable. A faithful, tireless worker ; a writer of 
manifold gifts ; a sincere friend and a willing co-operator he has left 
to us the inspiration of his example and the memory of a friendship 
that will endure. We would ask our readers, who have so often 
been indebted to him, to pray for his soul that he may be at rest 

with God. 



WE have frequently spoken of the encouraging manner in which 
the Catholic University at Washington is extending its work 
and influence. The recent letter sent by Pius X. to Cardinal Gib- 
bons is an additional proof that it is reaching that place which Our 
Holy Father desires it to occupy. The letter says in part : 

"By no means surprising or unexpected is the steady and 
vigorous growth of the Catholic University which, located at Wash- 
ington, the capital city of the American Republic, built up by the 
offerings of the Catholic people, and invested by the Apostolic See 



I9i2.] WITH OUR READERS 863 

with full academic authority, Is now become the fruitful parent of 
knowledge in all the sciences both human and divine. 

We have, therefore, good reason to congratulate, first of all, 
you, Beloved Son, to whose solicitous and provident care We ascribe 
the prosperous condition of the University, then also the other 
Bishops of the United States who so ably assist you in the adminis- 
tration of the University, and finally the Rector and Professors whose 
teaching and devotion to their work have produced such splendid 
results. 

But, as you yourself acknowledge, the University is still hamp- 
ered and its full development retarded through lack of resources. 
Hence the necessity of appealing to the loyal generosity of the faith- 
ful, of which you have already received striking proof and which you 
would again call to the aid of this highly useful institution during a 
further period of ten years. 

We take this occasion to renew the exhortation given by Our 
Predecessor of happy memory, I^eo XIII., who, in writing to you on 
June 12, 1901, urged the Bishops of North America to send to the 
University from each diocese some specially chosen clerical students 
whose ability and eagerness for learning would give more than ordin- 
ary promise of success in their studies. We are quite certain, Be- 
loved Son, that the Bishops will readily comply with Our express 
wish in this matter from which each diocese will derive beyond 
doubt the greatest benefit. 

In this connection also, We bestow deserved praise upon the 
superiors of the Religious Orders whose houses of study are estab- 
lished at the University, forming as it were a circle of devoted chil- 
dren around their cherished mother. We regard these Colleges 
with special favor and we exhort the Superiors of other religious 
orders, while preserving intact their regular discipline, to establish 
similar institutes. 

It was furthermore a pleasure to learn from you that the Bishops 
who are directors of the University had, with prudent foresight, de- 
vised a plan whereby the teaching Sisters also, without in any way 
slackening the observance of their religious rules, might more easily 
enjoy the advantages of university study and thus attain greater 
efficiency in their work of educating girls. 

What We have thus far set forth makes it plain that We are 
fully determined on developing the Catholic University. For We 
clearly understand how much a Catholic university of high repute and 
influence can do towards spreading and upholding Catholic doctrine 
and furthering the cause of civilization. To prevent it, therefore, 
and to quicken its growth, is, in our judgment, equivalent to render- 
ing the most valuable service to religion and to country alike." 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

BBNZIGES BROTHERS, New York : 

Poverina. By Evelyn Mary Buckenham. 85 cents. Through the Desert. By Henryk 
Sienkiewicz. $1.33 net. The Little Apostle on Crutches. By Henriette Eugenie Dela- 
mare. 45 cents net. St. Patrick. By Abbd Riguet. 75 cents. With Christ, My 
Friend. By Rev. Patrick J. Sloan. 75 cents net. Spiritual Perfection Thrsugh 
Charity. By Father H. Reginald Buckler, O. P. $1.50 net. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York : 

Other Shetp I Have. By Theodore Christian. $2 net. 
P. J: KENEDY'S SONS, New York: 

Jesus, All Holy, By Alexander Gallerani, S.J. Translated from the Italian by F. 
Loughnan. 5 cents. 

LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York: 

The Eve of Catholic Emancipation. By Right Rev. Mgr. Bernard Ward, F.R. Hist: S. 
Vols. I. and II. $6 net. The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. By Wilfrid 
Ward. Vols. I. and II. $9 net. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, New York : 

The Tudor Shakespeare. Edited by William Allan Neilson and Ashley Horace Thorn- 
dike. 85 cents. 

FK. PUSTET & Co., New York: 

Lenten Sermons. From the German of Rev. B. Sauter. By Rev. J. F. Timmins. 25 
cents net. 

DODD, MEAD & Co., New York: 

The Forged Coupon. By Leo Tolstoy. $1.25 net. Hadyi Murdd. By Leo Tolstoy 
$1.20 net. 

CHRISTIAN PRESS ASSOCIATION, New YORK: 

Waiting for God. By Right Rev. Alexander MacDonald, D.D, 25 cents net. 
THE RUMFORD PRESS, Concord, N. H. : 

Poems. By Rev. Hugh F. Blunt. $i. 
HOUGHTON, MlFFLIN COMPANY, Boston : 

A Little Pilgrimage in Italy. By Olave M. Potter. Illustrated by Yoshio Markino. $4 
net. Nietzsche. By Paul Elmer More. $i net. 

THB ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY, Cleveland: 

American Colonial Government, idgd-i-jft;. By Oliver Morton Dickerson, Ph.D. $4 net, 
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston : 

In Desert and Wilderness. By Henyrk Sienkiewicz. Translated by Max A. Drezmal. 
$1.25 net. 

B. HERDER, St. Louis : 

The Life of Cardinal Vaughan. By J. G. Snead-Cox. Vols I. and II. $3.50. Suffer 
Little Children to Come Unto Me. By a Religious. 15 cents. The Duty of Haptiness. 
By Rev. J. M. Lelen. With a Foreword by Rev. Francis Finn, S.J. 15 cents. Sacrid 
Dramas. By Augusta Theodosia Drane. go cents. 

HERBERT & DANIEL, London: 

Ctoss-in-Hand Farm. By Viola Meynell, 6s. The Porch tf Paradise. Poems by Anna 
Bunston. 3i.6rf.net. The Wild Orchard Poems, by Elinor Sweetman. 3J.6rf.net. 

CHAPMAN & HALL, London : 

Tasso and Eleonora. A Drama with Historical Note. By Gertrude Leigh. 51. 
P. LBTHELLIEUX, Paris: 

Les Semeurs de Vent. Par Francisque Parn. 
A. TRALIN, Paris: 

(Euvres Completes de Jean Tauler. Traduction de P. Noel, O.P. Part V. 
DBSCLIE ET CIE, Rome: 

Innocent XI. Parts I. and II. By F. De Bojani. 



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